It was 3 April 2009. Rosie came home after being missing for several hours. She had cuts and bruises all over her and the seam on her jodhpurs had ripped somehow. One of her boots was missing, but we found that later in the woods. She told Dad that Samuel had hurt her. That he’d tried to force himself on her and that she’d eventually managed to push him off. She was sobbing, blood, mud and tears running down her face. I stood there transfixed, my stomach churning and churning until I finally ran upstairs and vomited into the toilet.
On 5 April, the Tumblr account appeared claiming that Samuel had sexually assaulted Emily and Rhona (though they didn’t reveal their identities until later on) while using satanic imagery and language.
Then, on 7 April, another girl at school, Becky, claimed he’d done the same to her.
And then the floodgates opened.
Someone had seen him cutting himself on the football pitch after school and smearing the blood on the goalposts.
Someone else had seen him wearing reptile contact lenses while walking around Buckthorpe.
Someone else claimed to have seen him kill a cat.
Someone had seen him chucking a bucket of sheep’s blood at his mother and laughing.
Someone had seen him dancing naked in the woods with Buckthorpe Jack.
The Murrays’ farm was vandalised too. The road-facing wall was spray-painted with the words SATAN WEIRDO. A sheep had a pentagram painted on it.
On 8 April, a reporter called our house claiming that the story was about to make the nationwide news and we should get a statement out. In the end, a young girl went missing in Devon and all the rumours stayed local.
But it didn’t stop the hysteria. We were the satanist village now. Backward weirdos that people from Ingledown made fun of.
Reading the details makes all the pain come flooding back. I close the book and press my fingers into my eye sockets, willing it all to go away. Maybe it’s time to admit to myself that I want justice for what happened to Samuel. He didn’t dance naked with Jack in the woods or hurt a cat or do anything with sheep’s blood. Yes, he was an outsider, but he wasn’t any of those other things. I knew him. I knew him better than anyone, didn’t I?
Which comes back to the part about Rosie. What do I believe? Do I believe that my boyfriend assaulted my sister? Or do I believe that my sister falsely accused my boyfriend of assault? If Samuel never attacked Rosie, could she have killed him to keep the secret from coming out? If he did attack her, did she kill him as revenge? And if he did die, who helped Rosie murder a tall sixteen-year-old boy and hide his body? Because she could never have done it on her own.
On the other hand, what if Lynn Murray is right and her son didn’t die that night? What if he’s out there somewhere, living a new life with a wife and children? Or drug-addled and cold-hearted? If he is alive, why hasn’t he contacted me?
It could have been suicide. If Samuel did attack Rosie, and then the other girls at school piled on with their accusations, it could have tipped him over the edge. There’s a part of me that can imagine him running away to drown himself in a river and no one ever finding his body. But the chances of his body never being found, even in a river, seem slim to me. He didn’t take a car, and there are no deep rivers near our village. If he’d cut his wrists or jumped from a high place, then surely someone would have found him, unless he went so deep into the woods that even the missing-person search failed to find him.
My phone vibrates before I can think of any more answers. Emily suggests that we should meet.
* * *
By the time I’m on my way to the Prince of Wales, Rhona has also been in touch and suggested that she comes to meet us too. The idea of dealing with both women at the same time fills me with some trepidation, but it’s a good way to get this over and done with. All the way there, my stomach swirls.
The pub will no doubt be full of villagers, and it’s possible that one or more of them wrote us the threatening note to try and frighten us. I don’t think it could be Rhona or Emily, because they’re still friendly with Rosie. At least they’ll be allies while I’m there.
There’s another reason why my stomach flips over. What I didn’t tell Rosie while we were arguing was that Samuel wasn’t just my boyfriend; he was the boy I loved deeply. The only person I’ve ever loved in that way. To Rosie, my lack of a love life is due to my primness. She blames my doomed relationships on my stand-offishness, but the reality is that true heartbreak takes a long time to heal.
I’ve allowed my other boyfriends to drift away because they don’t mean even a tenth of what Samuel meant to me. Not the guy I dated on and off throughout university, not Simon, not the boss I slept with intermittently – none of them. My replies to their texts or voicemail messages would become less and less frequent until they gave up. Simon, a man so dull that Mum constantly called him Steven and on other occasions forgot he even existed, clung on a little longer than most men might in that situation, going as far as to once suggest we move in together, but everyone has a limit. I would push and push until I found that limit.
It wasn’t my intention to distance myself from them; it was more of a subconscious thing, I think. After the first few weeks, or the first few months, my stomach would drop when I heard my phone buzz and saw the name on the screen. I’d clam up with tension at the thought of any sort of commitment. I threw myself into university work or my job as a distraction. And then, later, I threw myself into caring for Mum.
But if I can never love anyone in the same way I loved Samuel, does that mean I’ll forever be lonely? Forever be a little bit sad? And what does it say about me that I still love the person my sister accused of sexual assault? What’s wrong with me?
Reg glances up when I walk in, and then turns away. A line from The League of Gentlemen pops into my mind: A local pub for local people. I’m local, of course, but I’m as unwelcome as any outsider. And is it any surprise? It was Rosie’s accusation that changed this village for the worse. Perhaps it’s my family that’s the rotten core everyone is trying to dig out. Or it could be the Murrays. Or Ian Dixon. I’m not sure I can think straight any more.
The two bleach-blonde women sitting on the corner couch stand to greet me.
‘Oh my God, Heather!’ Emily kisses me on the cheek. ‘You look great. No mud on your face today?’
The reference to the nickname she gave me at school makes me grit my teeth with annoyance. ‘Well, funnily enough, I do actually shower.’
She laughs, and it’s the same boisterous cackle I remember. It dawns on me then that I’m here in part in the hope that they’ve somehow received some karma over the years. What a petty and bitter thought.
‘Good to see you, Hev,’ Rhona says, before sucking her drink through her straw. I can’t help but focus on the fine lines around her puckered mouth. Smoker’s wrinkles. ‘It’s been a long time.’
I take a seat on the opposite side of the table. ‘Yeah, ten years, probably.’
‘Well, I’ve seen you around a few times,’ Emily says. Which is true, but I always crossed the street and pretended I didn’t see her.
After I’ve ordered a Coke from the bar, we settle down to chat. I can’t help but notice that both women appear to be drinking cocktails, despite it being early afternoon. That doesn’t bother me. If they’re drunk, they’ll say more.
‘So what have you been up to for the last ten years?’ Rhona asks.
‘Oh, you know. Uni. Job. I’m an accountant now.’
She grins. ‘I’ll send you my taxes then.’
I laugh, even though that joke makes me die a little inside every time. ‘Actually, it’s for a large firm. I wouldn’t have a clue about individual taxes.’
Rhona nods, and the conversation lulls until Emily starts it again.
‘We have kids now,’ she says. ‘Two each. I have a boy and a girl, and Rhona has two boys.’
‘Oh wow, that’s fantastic,’ I say.
There’s another break in conversation while they show
me several photos of their children – Noah, Amelia-May, Jackson and Asher – and by the time I’ve scrolled through them, both Emily and Rhona have finished their drinks. I politely order more, seeing as I’m the one wanting information.
‘So what’s the deal, Hev?’ Rhona’s habit of using my nickname makes my toes curl, and I think she knows that. ‘No offence, but you’ve been coming back to Buckthorpe pretty much every week for months, and you’ve never reached out. In fact, we weren’t really ever friends. It was your sister we knew better – not that we didn’t like you.’
I want to say: You didn’t like me and I certainly didn’t like you, but I hold my tongue.
‘I wanted to talk about Samuel Murray.’
I expected more of a reaction to that statement, such as a sharp intake of breath, or an uncomfortable shuffling in their seats, but neither Rhona nor Emily even blink.
‘What do you want to know?’ Emily sips her cocktail.
‘It’s been ten years since he went missing, and I guess I just wanted to think about it some more. And, I don’t know, find out about the Tumblr blog you set up.’
Rhona shrugs. ‘What is there to say? It’s all on the site.’
‘And it’s all true?’
They both change their body language almost immediately. Rhona crosses her arms over her chest, while Emily juts out her chin.
‘Yes, it’s all true. What the fuck, Heather? Aren’t you a feminist?’ Emily says, her voice uncomfortably loud in the quiet pub.
‘Of course,’ I say, slightly taken aback by the sudden change in direction.
‘Doesn’t sound like it.’ Rhona rolls her eyes.
‘You don’t blame the victim. Ever.’ Emily flicks the top of her glass with her fingernail.
‘I wouldn’t,’ I say, struggling to find the words to get things back on track. ‘I would never do that. But we were young and the whole village went apeshit. There was such an abundance of weird accusations about Samuel that it’s hard to remember what was true and what wasn’t.’
Emily narrows her eyes. ‘Were you and him fucking?’ She takes another sip of her cocktail and breaks out into a grin.
‘What?’ I reply. ‘No!’
‘Oh my God,’ Rhona says in delight, brushing back a lock of platinum-blonde hair. ‘You were going out with the freak.’
‘It makes sense,’ Emily says, both of them ignoring me and speaking to each other. ‘She was a freak too.’
A flush of hot anger spreads through my veins. ‘You’re both liars. Samuel didn’t speak in tongues or harm animals. You made it all up to get attention. You gave interviews and walked around with tears in your eyes playing the victim when in fact it was all a complete fabrication.’
‘That’s why you wanted to meet. You think he’s innocent of everything. Well, sorry, Hev, but you’re wrong. He tried to rape your sister, and you’re still defending him.’ Emily leans forward, tapping a manicured nail on the tabletop, still with the same grin on her face, fascinated by me. ‘Wow, what a mess that is.’
I get up. ‘None of that is true.’
But Emily won’t let it go. ‘What isn’t true? That strange little loner Samuel Murray attacked your sister? Or that you’re still in love with him?’
I walk away without responding to her question, my hands shaking. Her words ring in my ears, echoing my own thoughts too closely.
Nineteen
Heather
Now
It broke my heart when Rosie accused Samuel of attempted rape. And it shattered me into pieces when he disappeared and I found Rosie’s bracelet in the woods. For a decade I’ve been dealing with that grief. I know how deeply I loved Samuel. What I don’t know is whether I still love him, and whether I can love him and believe Rosie at the same time. Is that even possible? Is there something fundamentally wrong with me?
There have been moments when I’ve hoped he might come back and explain everything and tell me that all my suspicions are false: that no one killed him, that Rosie misunderstood what happened between them, that we can still be together. But my mind feeds on logic, and logic always takes me back to Samuel being dead.
After meeting Emily and Rhona, I’ve no doubt that they made up their ridiculous claims in order to get more attention. They might even have convinced themselves that they’d been hurt by him, but they aren’t traumatised by whatever happened in their imaginations. There’s no sense of shame or guilt. My sister is the one who felt those things. Rosie went through an event that turned her inside out and made her lose herself.
Rosie suffered. They didn’t.
Is it possible for me to believe that the boy I loved hurt my sister? In one sense, no, it isn’t. The boy I loved would never do that. But what if he was never the boy I loved? What if he hid a dark side from me? When we first started working at the farm, I saw the way he regarded my sister. She was always the more beautiful one – a curvy figure, skin the colour of cream, long hair, bags of self-confidence. I paled in comparison. I was mousy and plain. But what I had that Rosie didn’t was a long friendship built on common ground. Samuel and I were both odd little introverts who preferred books and music to adventure. We were best friends who loved to talk to each other until the day we kissed and became more than friends.
But what if he always wanted my sister and couldn’t get her out of his head? What if there was a darkness inside him that he hid from everyone until the day he couldn’t hide it any longer? Just like Rosie … She wears her darkness in the scars on her arms, the dark circles beneath her eyes, the tired expression that clouds her features when she thinks that no one sees. What does she keep hidden away in her mind?
If I’m going to uncover the truth, I need to consider all the options. If Samuel didn’t hurt Rosie, then it’s possible that someone else did. I have always believed that she went through a traumatic event the night she came home injured and muddied. That part has never been in question. But if not Samuel, then who? And are they here in Buckthorpe?
I’m still sitting in my car, staring at the Prince of Wales, with its mock-Tudor exterior and faded sign. I can’t seem to make myself start the engine and drive away. Rosie is probably at home, and I don’t want to face her. Whenever I look at her, she sees the part of me still in love with Samuel, and I see the part of her that may have killed him, and neither of us can see anything else.
No, I don’t want to go home and face that.
Ten minutes later, Emily and Rhona come stumbling out of the exit and make their way along the pavement into the village. With them gone, I can safely go back inside without getting into a shouting match with two former school bullies. Alcohol is a bad idea right now, but it’s also an excellent way to block out all the nonsense in my mind; to numb myself from all the pain. And God, there has been so much pain, and now there’s not even Mum’s shoulder to cry on.
Reg does a double-take when I return.
This time I sit at the bar. ‘I know you don’t want me here, but I want a double vodka and Coke, please.’
He doesn’t disagree, just nods. ‘All right.’
I’ve never been the person who drinks alone at the bar before. That spot is usually reserved for people escaping either their family or their loneliness. Right now, I’m escaping both.
There’s no music in the pub and the glass scratches loudly against the top of the bar as he slides the drink towards me. I take it greedily, glad that the Coke masks the sharp, peppery taste of the vodka.
Reg leans back away from the bar, but his eyes travel towards me every now and then, even though he’s pretending to watch the television.
‘Sounds like you were asking a lot of questions while you were here with those two,’ he says eventually.
A defensive retort rests on the tip of my tongue, but I don’t have the courage to utter it out loud.
‘Not really,’ I say instead.
‘The past is the past,’ Reg replies. Whatever football match he was watching seems to have concluded, and he drags a wet rag al
ong the bar.
Half of my vodka is already drained, and I’m beginning to feel a pleasant buzz. ‘Sometimes the past interferes with the present.’
He nods almost approvingly. ‘I can’t deny that.’
We’re silent for a while, me staring at my drink, going over the conversation with Rhona and Emily in my mind; him wiping down the bar, rearranging the glasses. At times I wonder whether Reg was involved with the note we received. Perhaps it was him and Ian Dixon and the Murrays, and maybe Joan and Bob Campbell too, all out to get us. I finish my vodka and order the same again. An alcohol-infused warmth spreads over my skin, daring me to stay put, even though the village hates me and my sister.
‘You’re going to get drunk,’ Reg warns.
‘Maybe that’s my intention.’
He frowns. ‘Take it from someone who knows, being pissed beyond all hope isn’t a good place to be.’
I ignore his warning and pick up my phone, intending to avoid idle conversation by browsing the internet. But there’s a text message from Rosie that I don’t want to deal with. Where are you? Good question, big sis. I have no idea.
Avoiding conversation might be the wrong thing to do. I place my phone back down on the bar and lift my gaze to Reg, thinking about how much he has aged. Those fuzzy black eyebrows I remember as a teenager are almost completely grey now. When Dad was in a good mood, we used to come to the Prince of Wales for Sunday lunch.
‘You must’ve overheard a lot of drunken things in this place,’ I say, the alcohol beginning to loosen the tongue I usually keep so expertly in check.
‘Aye.’
‘Do you remember the night my dad got in a fight here?’ It was after Rosie’s accusation. Dad had been the target of some of the nastiness between us and the Murrays. Lines were drawn in the sand and sides were taken. Not everyone sided with us, especially after what happened with Emily and Rhona. Their over-the-top accusations cast some doubt on Rosie’s story, which led to her being as much of a target as Samuel.
The Liar's Sister (ARC) Page 13