by Unknown
Pheely swept her corkscrew curls from one shoulder to the other and raised her glass, peering into the black liquid. ‘His soul is this colour, Ellen.’
Ellen stared at the Guinness. It was Richard’s favourite tipple. She found it hard to think of it as akin to a black soul. It reminded her of the Treglin Arms, late-night lock-ins and doorstep sandwiches.
‘My father liked Spurs.’ Pheely looked at her over the white foam. ‘Daddy was one of the few to keep believing in him when he turned bad. He said he was a bird of prey trapped in a gilded cage, that he was misunderstood and unloved. He encouraged Spurs to paint. He’s a talented bastard, Spurs, but of course he wasted it on forgeries later on. And he so abused my father’s trust. He stole from him – hundreds of pounds went missing, as well as things from around the house, but Daddy refused to make an issue of it. I’m a few years older than Spurs – I was perhaps nineteen or twenty at the time, with a toddler to look after – and I don’t think I did enough to protect Daddy from him. He had always seemed so invincible and was pigheadedly independent, but I didn’t know about the cancer then. He didn’t tell me until the last few weeks, when he knew he had little time left to share with me.’
The dark curls drew their heavy curtains across her face as she dipped her head and kneaded her forehead with her fingertips, grappling for self-control. It was obviously something she found hard to talk about without an outpouring of raw emotion, harder still in a noisy pub. But Ellen sensed that the setting had been intentional. Pheely had deliberately sought out a backdrop where she knew she couldn’t rant, rage and cry.
When the green eyes reappeared through the curtain, her voice was controlled as she finished the story quickly, in a quiet monotone. ‘In those last few weeks of Daddy’s life, Spurs dominated my father. He was the son he’d never had – my mother died in childbirth, you see. And Spurs spent those precious weeks stealing from him, watching shoot-’em-up films on television while Daddy fought for breath, drinking his whisky, smoking the strong French cigarettes that had given Daddy his death sentence, having loud parties in our house.
‘When Daddy died, Spurs vandalised all the sculptures in our garden. I came back from the funeral to find all the stone statues beheaded – the beautiful birds, horses and dogs truncated and mutilated, limbs everywhere. The bronzes were harder to damage, but he’d had a damn good go, gouging out eyes with a screwdriver and breaking anything he could from its plinth. It’s as though Spurs wasn’t satisfied by hurrying my father to his grave. He wanted to jump on it too, brutalise all the beautiful legacies Daddy had left behind.’
Ellen pressed her fingers to her lips, looking across at Pheely, hardly able to bear the hurt and anger that twisted the innocent-little-girl face into a bitter mask.
‘I wasn’t quite telling the truth when I told you that I couldn’t bring myself to sell Daddy’s sculptures.’ Pheely’s mouth wobbled, and she looked away, blinking at a rebellious tear, her voice barely more than a whisper. ‘You can’t see the scars so well under all the ivy and lichen that have grown over them now, but they’re damaged beyond repair. Daddy left the house to Daffodil and the sculptures to me, but of course they’re worth nothing broken. When Spurs went on his demolition course, he turned me into a prisoner at the Lodge. I couldn’t afford to get out even if I wanted to.’
Ellen stared into the black Guinness, as dark as tar beneath its snow-white cap. ‘And it was definitely Spurs who vandalised the sculptures?’
‘Oh, yes, he left his calling card.’ Pheely whisked away the tear with a finger and tutted angrily at herself. ‘He always left a horseshoe behind when he wrecked somebody’s world – hanging upside down for bad luck. I found it on one of the headless dancers, dangling from her outstretched arm with a daisy chain wrapped round it. I suppose he thought it was his funeral wreath. Nice touch, huh?’
Ellen reached out and took her hand, feeling the sharp edges of the bright rings digging into her palm as she squeezed it.
‘I don’t know what you’d wish,’ Pheely stared at their hands, ‘but if those wishes were mine, I’d wish Spurs Belling had never met my father, and that he could know what it’s like to be trapped without the gilded fucking cage. Most of all, I wish that he hadn’t come back here.’
The spoilt thatched princess was in darkness when Ellen let herself through the gates, her grubby moonlit windows still wide open like sleepy moths airing their wings. She almost screamed as a ghostly figure leaped out of one, cannoning into her and scrabbling at her legs.
‘Snork!’ She laughed. ‘Are you okay, baby?’
Snorkel sank on to her back and offered her freckled belly to the night, letting out excited whimpers. She smelt foul so had clearly been enjoying some late-night perfuming by the garden pond as she bided her time between the cottage and her big meadow playpen.
Without the porch light on and shadowed from the bright moon, Ellen had to grope around to find the keyhole. She supposed this was nothing compared to Pheely, currently reeling her way through the labyrinth maze to the Lodge cottage. Two pints of beer drunk in quick succession and no food for hours made her feel light-headed. When she heard something metal clatter to the flags beneath her feet, she at first thought it was her mobile phone until she remembered that Pheely still had it stashed in her handbag. She groped around underfoot and picked up something heavy and rough hewn with bent nails or screws poking out, guessing that she’d managed to dislodge the door knocker.
At last she found the keyhole and fell inside with Snorkel underfoot, giggling as she reached for the lights. Then she looked at the ‘knocker’.
But it wasn’t a piece of black ironmongery. It was an old horseshoe from which three nails still poked like twisted teeth.
‘Oh, shit.’ Ellen shivered, reaching for the door frame for support.
That’s when she smelt a great waft of roses, overpowering the sweet rocket and lavender in the milk bottles and the stale cigarettes lingering in the air.
She closed the door behind her, but the smell remained, even more intense now.
Ellen followed it to the sitting room and switched on the lights.
The PlayStation console had gone. In its place, on the floor, somebody had picked out a word in rose petals. It simply said, THANKS.
The next morning, the rose petals on the flagstone floor were already turning brown when Ellen walked into the sitting room, their subtle scent mobbed by the pungent lavender. The deeply set, leaded windows of Goose Cottage let in the rising sun at curious angles so that the pale golden squares of light seemed to melt over the arms of sofas and around the frames of doorways with Daliesque abandon.
Ellen clutched her mug of tea in both hands and cocked her head as she watched the dust and pollen dance in the square spotlights, disturbed by the swish of her dressing-gown as she moved around the house.
It wasn’t yet six, but she’d woken as suddenly as she’d fallen asleep, the tight mousetrap lids that had snapped shut six hours earlier instantly pulled back and pegged open, her eyes taking in the unfamiliar room before her mind had registered that she was awake.
She’d slept in the big attic room under the eaves, among the boxes of Jamieson possessions already packed ready to ship to Spain. She preferred it to her parents’ old room, with its surfeit of Victoriana and candle smoke, and the official spare room reminded her too vividly of Richard and their rare but difficult visits to Goose Cottage.
Her short but deep sleep had been mugged by dreams of bad witches and good fairies, black-souled forests, stampeding horses and silver-eyed men. She was grateful to be awake and wandering around, enjoying the peace of early-morning birdsong, misty sunshine and warm tea.
Fins certainly appreciated her lengthy visit to his barracks, mewing around her ankles and scraping his teeth and whiskers on her toes as she refreshed his food and water and mucked out his litter tray. He sprang on to the work surface by the long, low windows that looked over the drive towards the thatched barn, watching jealously as Snorkel tr
otted past on boundary patrol, then cocking his head and gazing at the birds on the telephone wire, little purring growls coming from his throat.
‘You can go out soon, I promise,’ Ellen soothed him, running her hand along his back and tickling the tip of his tail, which twitched cantankerously.
She looked at all the cleaning cloths and rubber gloves abandoned in the utility sink after her quick blitz the day before. She guessed they’d need to be put to use again, and soon, if the house was going to look in a fit state to show to buyers. The thought of confronting Dot and Reg was not appealing, and she doubted that tackling them on a Sunday would be wise, but she wanted to get on. The day stretched ahead with the promise of sunshine and . . . cleaning. Then, as she stared out of the window, she remembered she had overlooked another potential Shagger den. What sort of state was the bunkhouse in?
With Fins glaring at her from the opposite side of the window, Ellen picked her way across the gravel from the bootroom door, wishing that she had had the sense to put on some shoes. She pulled her dressing-gown tighter around her. It was surprisingly cold in the early-morning mist: the sun had yet to work up strength to share its warmth.
She made her way cautiously up the stone staircase at the side of the barn to the door, looking across to the thatched roof of the cottage and, beyond, to the village, which still slept under its silk sheet of mist.
The bunkhouse had a decked wooden balcony in front of big paned-glass doors, upon which two green plastic chairs leaned on a small table, all covered with dust and fallen catkins. Somebody had certainly been up here to admire the view, Ellen thought, as she counted the cigarette butts underfoot.
When she let herself into the flat, however, it was neat and orderly with no sign of recent occupation. She put down her bunch of keys on the little peninsula unit that separated the kitchen area from the main living room and padded across the rush mats, letting their scratchy softness ease away the indentations on her soles made by the drive’s gravel.
Snorkel had followed her up and bounded around, gazing in fascination out of the low windows, which were far better suited for a dog to admire the views than a human. Theo had always referred to the paying guests that stayed in the bunkhouse as ‘Legs’, asking how many Legs were booked in for Easter, or whether the Legs were taking breakfast that day. This was because from the outside all that could be seen through dormers that poked from the black thatch, like eyes beneath a pudding basin, were the occupants’ calves and feet.
The french windows, which took up most of the balcony end, made the little open-plan room bright, but its steep, beamed ceiling reminded Ellen of a sagging tent canvas drooping between a framework of poles. This illusion was even more marked in the bedroom, which smelt musty and damp after months of neglect, its dark corners strung with spiders’ webs.
She opened the curtains above the bed and looked out towards the Lodge and its overrun garden, unable to spot a single stone tile of Pheely’s cottage roof among the tangled greenery. In the foreground, she could see the lane bathed in early-morning sunlight, in the centre of which one of Hunter Gardner’s precious pedigree fowl had decided to go walkabout and was pecking at a discarded crisp packet. A moment later, the little bantam let out a piercing shriek and scarpered as a familiar-looking fat black and white cat sprang out from Goose Cottage’s thick hornbeam hedge.
‘Fins!’ Ellen scrambled off the bed and charged towards the door. ‘Fins!’
By the time she reached the lane, there was no sign of him, just a few black feathers.
Ellen called out his name and did a lap of the lime tree, looking along Lodge Farm’s driveway, Goose End and North Street, but she knew him well enough to accept that he had no intention whatsoever of showing himself now that he had escaped his confinement. He would come back, she hoped, when he was hungry – which was often, given his lion-like appetite. In the meantime, she guessed it would make more sense to search for him when fully clothed and wearing shoes.
Heading back through the gates, she cut through the open carport space on the ground floor of the barn, which was cold underfoot and smelt of creosote and old tarpaulins, the workshop at one end goading her with its promise of strimmer, mower and weed-killer.
‘Snorkel!’ she called, as she climbed the bunkhouse steps again, hoping she hadn’t lost her too. ‘Snork!’ She heard a plaintive bark in reply.
Then she saw the blue-eyed clown’s face gazing at her rapturously through the french windows, which had clearly closed on Snorkel when she’d scrabbled against them trying to follow Ellen outside. The Yale lock had clicked shut, trapping dog and keys inside.
‘Oops!’ Ellen crouched down and tapped at the window, persuading the collie to sit. ‘It’s okay, Snork – I’m sure there are spares inside. I’ll go and look. Hang on in there, baby.’
She hopped back over the gravel towards the bootroom door, and found it closed as she’d left it.
‘Eh?’ Ellen stepped back curiously, wondering how Fins had escaped. Then she spotted that the catflap had been chewed and clawed, its plastic catch broken where Fins had forced his way out.
She tried the door handle, but the latch had dropped into place when she’d pulled it closed earlier. The key was now in the bunkhouse, along with all the rest.
Ellen rubbed her sore feet and went to investigate the outside of Goose Cottage, certain that she’d left a window open. But all of the princess’s sparkling eyes were closed and bolted, her doors latched and mortise-locked. With a groan, Ellen recalled that, disturbed by the rose-petal message and the sinister horseshoe, she had been extra-vigilant in her security check the night before.
By the end of her second circuit, she knew that she was well and truly locked out, the only open window being one of the tiny peephole dormers high in the thatch, itself no bigger than a shoebox.
‘Bugger.’ She sat on one of the garden benches and rubbed her face, laughing despite herself. ‘Bugger.’
She wasn’t wearing a watch, but she knew that it was probably only about seven o’clock. She had the Wycks’ set of keys and the only others that she knew of, apart from those in a drawer in a finca on the Costa Verde, were with the estate agent. She wasn’t sure that Seaton’s office opened on a Sunday.
Snorkel was barking at each of the low windows of the bunkhouse in turn, gazing at Ellen in confusion as she begged to be let out.
Ellen guessed that the easiest solution was to smash the glass in one of the french windows and retrieve the keys.
She went on a quick recce, but the quarter-inch safety glass, which ran the length of the doors, would take more than a woman in a dressing-gown to break – and she risked hurting herself and Snorkel in the process, not to mention infuriating her mother. She couldn’t hope to reach round to the low dormers from the balcony, and the hatch that led up from the carport was now blocked off by flooring that had been laid above it.
Ellen needed a locksmith. She also needed a telephone. Then she remembered that her mobile was not locked inside Goose Cottage with her clothes.
Still keeping half an eye peeled for Fins, she nipped across the lane and headed into Goose End, letting herself through the heavy arched doorway to the magical garden. It was even more dreamlike first thing in the morning, swathed in mist and dappled sunlight, the sculptures looming out of dark shadows. As she passed them, Ellen could now distinguish the damage beneath their green boas of ivy, bindweed and lichen. Limbs and heads were missing, noses chipped off and expressions distorted by vandalism.
She tried to remember the way through the twisting foliage labyrinth, but she was soon hopelessly lost, pushing her way through the same gap in a hedge and ducking under the same rails continually as she wound her way round in ever-decreasing circles. Her bare feet meant that she had to look down rather than around her, careful not to step on brambles, nettles or root clumps. The same sculptures jumped out at her again and again. Eventually she stopped in her tracks, retied her dressing-gown belt and pulled back her hair from her fa
ce in defeat. She didn’t even know how to get back out on to Goose End. If she’d had Snorkel with her, she was certain the dog would have found her way through to her giant new friend.
Now that she’d stopped, she could hear the wind chimes that hung from the eaves of Pheely’s cottage, but it was impossible to determine which direction the noise was coming from. Then she had an idea.
‘Meeeoooooow!’ she called. ‘Mew, mew, meeooooow!’
Nothing.
‘Woof,’ she tried another tack. ‘Woof! Woof!’
‘WOOF!’ came the bass reply, terrifyingly loud even at this distance.
Hamlet had answered.
Keeping up the conversation, Ellen hopped over the tangled undergrowth. Within minutes, the cottage was in view, misted in a cool, dark shadow, a thin plume of smoke puffing from the Rayburn’s chimney. At one of the big windows, Hamlet’s huge face stared at her in wonder; he had been conversing with a funny-looking dog.
As she approached the door, Ellen guessed that at least she’d find out where Pheely slept.
It took ten minutes to rouse her. Accustomed to Hamlet’s window-rattling call, Pheely ignored the resounding barks, and was deaf to the door-knocking and cries from Ellen that accompanied them. Making her way round the outside of the cottage with trepidation – there was a surprising amount of broken glass – Ellen peered in through the windows and saw that the huge open room was unoccupied. Then, at the far gable end of the cottage she spotted a narrow window and peered inside to see a small bedroom tucked behind the chimney breast. The bed was piled high with more clutter and paperwork, but it, too, was empty.
‘Who is it?’ called a sleepy voice above her.
Ellen tipped her head back and saw a lot of dark curls spilling out of an even tinier window, one that made the Goose Cottage attic shoeboxes look like office windows in Milton Keynes. Pheely could barely fit her face through it to peer out.
‘Pheely – it’s Ellen. I’m really sorry! I’ve locked myself out and need my phone.’