Fruit Cake and Fear

by Agatha Frost

  Julia reached her café and was relieved to see it was still standing. She rode down the alley between the café and the post office, the firm wheels bouncing against the wet cobbles. She dismounted the bike and walked towards the back of the café, her relief disappearing when she saw a fallen tree draped across the lane, its trunk having smashed through the wall surrounding the yard behind her business. She opened the back gate and pushed her bike inside, the leaves of the tree casting a shadow across the back of the café. Sighing heavily to herself, Julia beat her fist down on the metal door.

  Jessie yanked on the heavy door, her brows arching when she saw Julia with the bike.

  “Birthday present from Barker,” Julia explained. “Have you seen this?”

  Jessie stepped out of the café, her jaw dropping wide when she saw the giant tree resting against the wall, which had dispersed most of its bricks across the tiny yard.

  “That’s not all,” Jessie said as she looked up at the leaves. “The power is out. I’ve been trying to steam milk and boil water on the gas, but it’s taking ages.”

  Julia rested her bike against the wall before pulling out her phone. She dialled ‘999’ and asked for the fire service. After explaining that she needed a fallen tree moved, she hung up and told Jessie to close the empty café.

  With the front door locked, they set to work clearing the grey bricks out of the yard before the fire engine arrived, which the operator had explained might take a while because of the damage across the village.

  “The fallen bricks have broken the slabs,” Jessie said as she crouched down to run her fingers across a definite crack in one of the stones. “They’re all loose.”

  “Those have always been a little loose,” Julia said as she heaved a heavy chunk of brick out to the lane. “I’ve been meaning to have them fixed.”

  Jessie dragged the broken stone out of place, and it came away surprisingly easily. Julia was about to tell her to leave it where it was, but something underneath the stone caught her attention.

  “Is that wood?” Jessie mumbled as she flipped the slab over. “How is that wood?”

  Julia crouched down and ran her fingers along what looked like a wooden floorboard. They shared a confused look for a moment before Jessie pulled out the rest of the slab, which came out even easier than the first.

  It exposed what appeared to be a brass hinge connecting the wood to the concrete ground that lay behind the paved yard. Julia abandoned clearing away the rest of the fallen stone bricks and helped Jessie remove all of the heavy slabs. It became obvious very quickly that the wood formed a large door.

  “I never knew your café had a basement,” Jessie said as she wiped the sweat from her forehead after removing the last slab.

  “Neither did I.” Julia crouched and ran her fingers along a rusty padlock. “This explains why the slabs always felt loose.”

  Jessie moved Julia’s fingers out of the way and smashed a broken piece of stone against the padlock. It popped open with a satisfying click, the tension in the wood suddenly relaxing a little.

  “I was going to suggest we check the building plans first,” Julia said as she stood up. “There might be a reason it was sealed up.”

  Jessie shrugged before heaving back the heavy wood door. She rested it against the café wall and stepped back to inspect her handiwork. Julia immediately clamped her hand over her nose and mouth as stale and musty air drifted up from the dark hole.

  “Bloody hell,” Jessie mumbled through her sleeve. “Smells like something died down there.”

  Julia pulled her phone from her pocket and turned on the flashlight. She shone it down into the hole and illuminated a set of stone steps.

  “Maybe we shouldn’t,” Julia said. “It might not be safe.”

  “Wimp,” Jessie said, snatching the light from Julia’s hand. “It might be full of pirate treasure.”

  Jessie hurried down the stone steps, ducking under the café and disappearing into the dark. Julia looked back at the fallen tree before sighing and following her young apprentice into the unknown.

  The air was so thick and stale that Julia pulled her wool jumper over her mouth to breath. She hurried through the dark to Jessie, who was standing at the edge of the room looking down at something on a table.

  “It looks like a workshop,” Jessie said as she shone the light over dust covered tools and chunks of old wood. “Must have been locked up for years.”

  “It was a toy shop when I was a kid,” Julia remembered aloud as she looked around the basement, which stretched out the length of her café and kitchen. “I could have used this as storage.”

  Jessie walked across the room and shone the light across a wall of shelves filled with hand-carved wooden children’s toys. She paused the light on a dust-covered clown, its white face and red lips smiling eerily out at them.

  “This place is so cool,” Jessie mumbled through a grin as she moved along the rows of toys. “I can’t believe we’ve been working above it all of this time.”

  “Neither can I,” Julia said, glancing back at the slither of light through the opening. “Maybe we should get out of here. There might be rats, or worse.”

  Jessie walked away from the shelves and shone the light around the vast space. She paused on something in the corner and walked slowly across the room.

  “Julia,” Jessie said, her voice shaking. “I think I’ve found worse.”

  Julia joined Jessie and followed the white beam of light to the corner of the room. She grabbed Jessie at once and turned her away, holding her head against her chest.

  “Is it real?” Jessie mumbled through Julia’s jumper.

  Julia took the light from Jessie’s hand and shone it into the corner where a skeleton was propped up against the wall. The hollow eyes of the skull stared back at her, the bone completely clean. A metal ‘Head Girl’ badge glittered from the mess of rotten green and black fabric draped across the old bones, turning Julia’s throat to sand.

  “It’s real,” Julia croaked, moving the light before turning away. “And I think I know who it is.”

  3

  “Here it is.” Dot pulled a newspaper clipping from the shoebox she had been rummaging through for the past five minutes. “Astrid Wood. Sixteen-years-old. Has been missing since the 29th of July, 1997.”

  Julia looked across Dot’s dining room table and met the eyes of her old school friends, Roxy Carter and Johnny Watson. None of them needed an old clipping to remember the disappearance of Astrid Wood.

  “Has it really been that long?” Roxy asked as she reached across the table to accept the article. “Twenty whole years?”

  “I haven’t thought about Astrid in so long,” Johnny said after he accepted the clipping from Roxy. “I wrote a couple of articles about it in my early days at The Peridale Post, but there hasn’t been any interest in ages. How do you still have this?”

  “I cut out the important things from the papers and keep them,” Dot said with a shrug as she flicked through the pile of clippings in the old shoebox. “Most of the recent ones involve murder cases Julia has solved. Want to see?”

  “No thanks, Gran,” Julia said quickly after a sip of peppermint and liquorice tea. “I think we can all remember the things that have happened in this village recently.”

  Johnny passed the article across the table after skimming over it. Julia accepted it, a lump growing in her throat when she looked down at the faded picture of the pretty, pale girl with the black hair. Just like in the basement, her Head Girl badge glittered from her blazer.

  “She went missing the night of her Year Eleven prom,” Roxy said as she stared down into her coffee. “She was supposed to be going with Aiden Black, but she just never showed up. People thought she’d got cold feet and decided not to go, but she was never seen again.”

  “Until today,” Jessie said as she picked furiously at the skin next to her fingernails. “She was just bones.”

  Dot reached across the table and squeezed Jessie’s ha
nd reassuringly, but the young girl appeared to be in a world of her own.

  “Wasn’t Aiden the Head Boy too?” Johnny asked as he scratched at his dark curly hair. “I know they were two years below us at school, but I’m sure they were a couple even when we were still there.”

  “Everyone accused him of killing her,” Roxy added. “He was never charged, but people talked.”

  “Isn’t he the one married to Doctor Black?” Dot asked as she continued to root through her box. “She’s the only doctor at the surgery who doesn’t talk to me like I’m a simpleton. I like her.”

  “Grace Black,” Roxy said with a nod. “Although she was Grace Gambaccini back then.”

  “They live in a nice cottage over in Burford with their kids,” Johnny said, his eyes glazing over as he fiddled with his thick-rimmed glasses. “I think they have three kids. I wonder how he’s going to take the news. It’s been so long, but I doubt he ever forgot her. I remember seeing them so in love in the canteen. I used to be so jealous.”

  Johnny looked awkwardly at Julia for a moment before blushing and looking down at his drink. Even back then she had known Johnny had had a crush on her, but she never saw him as anything other than a friend, something that was confirmed when they had gone on a coffee date over two years ago when Julia first returned to Peridale after twelve years away. Roxy would swear Johnny was in love with Julia to this day, but Julia did not like to think that about her friend.

  Silence fell on Dot’s dining room as they all stared blankly into the centre of the table. Guilt consumed Julia; she had not thought about Astrid in years. Just like everyone else in the village, she had been part of the searches in the immediate days after her disappearance. She had trawled through the countryside with Johnny and Roxy, calling out Astrid’s name. The days turned to weeks, and the weeks to months, but the searches became less frequent until they stopped entirely.

  “What was she like?” Jessie asked, staring blankly at her fingers as she continued to pick at the skin next to her nails.

  “She was clever,” Roxy said after sucking the air through her teeth. “Top of her class in most things.”

  “She was nice too,” Johnny added. “She wasn’t very popular, but she was nice. I think people used to bully her because of who her mother was.”

  “Are you surprised?” Roxy cried. “I wonder who’s going to tell Evelyn they’ve found her.”

  “Wacky Evelyn from the B&B?” Jessie exclaimed, frowning around the table. “She had a daughter? Nobody ever mentioned it.”

  “The village moved on,” Dot said, almost defensively. “It’s been two decades. People used to ask how she was, but she’d just babble incoherently about spirits and energies. Nobody could get through to her. She dealt with it so strangely. Nobody knew what to say without setting her off, so we just left her to it.”

  “Poor Evelyn,” Julia whispered as she looked down at the sapphire crystal in her palm. “We don’t know for certain that it was Astrid yet.”

  “But it is,” Dot said firmly as she pulled another clipping out of the box. “You said yourself she was wearing the Head Girl badge. This clipping is from the first-year anniversary of Astrid’s disappearance. Evelyn pleaded in the the press for information, but nothing came of it. I don’t think they bothered with her again after that.”

  Dot passed the clipping around the room. When it eventually reached Julia, she looked down at the considerably younger Evelyn, barely recognising the woman she had come to know as the eccentric B&B owner. Her hair was black instead of grey, and it hung freely down her face without a turban, only stopping when it reached her waist. Instead of a kaftan, she was wearing a brown poncho with flared jeans, and a dozen different coloured crystals on strings around her neck. She was clinging to a large photo of her daughter as she looked down the camera with pleading eyes. The headline read ‘ONE YEAR ON – SCHOOL GIRL STILL MISSING’. Unable to stare at Evelyn’s pain anymore, Julia passed it back.

  “Don’t you think Astrid looks like Jessie?” Dot remarked out of the blue, breaking the sombre silence. “Quite a lot, actually.”

  Dot held the clipping up to Jessie’s face. Julia opened her mouth to tell her gran not to be so insensitive, but when she saw the picture next to her lodger’s face, the resemblance was so striking it silenced her.

  “They have the same hair,” Roxy said with a nod.

  “And the same dark eyes,” Johnny added.

  Jessie squirmed in her seat as she frowned around the table. She snatched the clipping from Dot and looked down at Astrid’s school portrait.

  “Looks nothing like me,” Jessie mumbled as she cast the paper aside. “What happens to the café now, Julia?”

  “The cold case team is crawling all over it looking for an explanation.” Julia leaned back in her chair and rubbed between her eyes. “We might be closed for a while. I can’t believe she was down there all that time. It feels so wrong.”

  “You couldn’t have known,” Johnny said with a sympathetic shrug. “The real question is how did she get down there?”

  “Murder, of course!” Dot exclaimed, bolting up in her chair. “It has got to be.”

  “We don’t know that, Gran.”

  “Yes, we do!” she insisted through pursed lips. “Who goes to the trouble of padlocking and hiding a trap door if they want it to be found? It’s not like the stones put themselves there.”

  They all knew she was right, but it seemed none of them wanted to admit it, including Julia. It was one thing to have a teenage girl under her café for all of those years, but it was another thing entirely to know that girl had been murdered.

  “Didn’t you buy the shop from Alistair Black, Julia?” Dot asked as she adjusted the brooch holding her stiff collar in place. “He used to have it as a toy shop donkey’s years ago.”

  “That explains the workshop,” Jessie mumbled.

  “I did, Gran,” Julia said with a nod. “Although he hadn’t run the shop for years when I bought it. He used to rent it out, but he wanted to get rid of it. He said it was because he didn’t want to burden people with it when he died. The only reason I could afford to start again was because he gave me a good price for a quick sale.”

  “Alistair Black?” Johnny said, frowning over his glasses. “Is he Aiden Black’s father?”

  “Uncle,” Dot said. “Lives up at Oakwood Nursing Home now. He’s my age. I went to school with the ol’ chap.”

  “There’s your first lead, Julia,” Jessie said, suddenly sitting up in her seat. “The poor girl’s boyfriend’s uncle owned the shop. If he didn’t do it, he must know something.”

  Julia laughed stiffly as she looked around the room, but the group was not laughing with her; they were looking at her with the same serious expression as Jessie.

  “What makes you think I’m investigating this?” Julia said, squirming in her seat. “This is one for the cold case team.”

  “If you say so, love,” Dot said with a shake of her head as she stood up and collected their empty cups. “If you say so.”

  Roxy and Johnny caught each other’s eyes for a moment before looking awkwardly back at Julia.

  “What?” she protested.

  “Well, your gran is right,” Roxy mumbled, standing up and grabbing her coat from the back of the chair. “You’re like a dog with a bone. You’ve always been the same way.”

  “Remember when Sammie Carlton stole my bike in Year Eight?” Johnny asked as he joined Roxy in standing. “You didn’t stop until you found it. You interviewed everybody who was around the bike shed until somebody gave you a lead, and then you stood on the corner of Sammie’s street and waited until you saw him with a bike so you could take a picture on your gran’s camera. You spent your pocket money having the roll developed, just so you could go to the head master with proof to get my bike back. You’ve been the same ever since. I can’t even count how many articles I’ve written recently where I’ve had to decide if I’m going to mention that you outwitted the police on
ce again. If anyone can solve this, it’s you, Julia.”

  “I’d rather not have that pressure,” Julia said uncomfortably, her thoughts turning to Evelyn. “It happened twenty years ago.”

  Roxy and Johnny exchanged the same sceptical look again as they pulled on their coats. Dot appeared from the kitchen with a tin of biscuits, but rolled her eyes and retreated when she saw her guests were leaving.

  “I’m not investigating this,” Julia said with an awkward laugh as she caught Jessie’s disbelieving gaze. “I mean it.”

  Jessie rolled her eyes and shrugged as she reached out for one of the clippings to look down at Astrid’s face.

  “It’s cute that she thinks that, isn’t it?” Roxy asked, slapping Johnny on the shoulder. “I give it a day.”

  “I give it an hour,” Johnny replied with a wink. “I better get back to the office. This is the biggest story we’ve had in a while, and I want to make sure the team understands the sensitivities of it.”

  “I should get back to school,” Roxy said as she checked her watch. “My lunch break is nearly over, and I’m behind on the syllabus after we shut early yesterday.”

  Her two friends left, leaving Julia alone with Jessie while Dot washed the cups in the kitchen. Julia read over the article of Evelyn pleading for information about her daughter’s disappearance. She tried to put herself in the woman’s shoes, but she could not even begin to understand her pain.

  “Let’s go,” Julia said, already standing up. “I want to make sure somebody is there for Evelyn.”

  Jessie nodded her agreement, and they slipped out of Dot’s cottage before she could force them to stay for another cup of tea. Julia had hoped she would be able to slip across the village without being seen, but as she looked across the village green towards her café, she knew that was going to be impossible. Word of the discovery had spread quickly around Peridale, and it seemed that every resident in the village had come out to see with their own eyes if it was true.