The next day I heard from Mandy that Carter had been released without charge.
* * * *
I lived in a strange state of limbo for a week, pretending to Paul that I was looking forward to the harvest supper ... and all the time making plans to avoid it at all costs. The most worrying thing was that Paul seemed to have reached some understanding with Carter. He had taken to visiting the Wagon and Horses some evenings and one night when he returned, he said that he had been talking to Carter and he seemed all right, really: You couldn’t always judge by first impressions.
The change in Paul shocked me: He claimed that the slow pace of country life was lowering his blood pressure and making him feel calmer. Why run around like a headless chicken in London when you could enjoy the simple pleasures of a small community and open spaces? Paul seemed hooked and, like converts the world over, he began to enter into his new enthusiasm with a gusto lacking in the born-and-bred countryman. He talked of learning to ride, maybe joining the local hunt. To my horror, he even suggested inviting Carter round for lunch one Sunday as he was on his own, an idea which sent me straight to the bathroom to throw up.
Paul was going native and with every new development I became more and more certain that I had to get back to the city ... any city ... anywhere away from Manton Worthy. I had to get out before it was too late.
On the night of the harvest supper I developed a headache as planned and told Paul to go on his own. He looked disappointed, like a kicked puppy, but I had no choice. After some persuasion he went, and once I was alone I locked all the doors and settled down to an evening by the telly with some interior design magazines—I wanted to do something with the en suite bathroom so I found myself a pair of scissors to cut out any pictures that might provide me with some inspiration. I opened a bottle of Chardonnay, too—I needed something to steady my nerves.
At half-past nine it was pitch dark outside. Darkness in the countryside is nothing like darkness in the city and I could see nothing outside the windows, as though someone had hung black velvet drapes on the other side of the glass. But with the curtains drawn and the telly on I felt cosy and safe. Until I heard the noise of our polished brass doorknocker being raised and lowered three times.
I froze. The telly still babbled on, oblivious to the crisis, as three more knocks came. Then another three. I went through all the possibilities in my mind. Could Paul have forgotten his key? Could Mandy be calling to see how I was? I crept along the hall in the darkness, making for the front door. There were no windows in the door but the TV executive had installed a spyhole and security lights. I stood on tiptoe to look through the spyhole, but although the front step was flooded with halogen light, there seemed to be nobody there.
I was about to return to the safe warmth of the lounge when the knocking began again. My body started to shake and I tried to peer out of the spyhole but again there seemed to be nobody there.
I know now that I shouldn’t have opened the door, but it was an automatic reaction—and I suppose I assumed that I could just close it against any danger if the worst happened. But things are rarely that straightforward. As soon as I had turned the latch, the door burst open and I fell backwards. I think I screamed. I think I tried to lash out. But it was useless. It was dark in the hallway and I could see very little, but I felt strong arms dragging me towards the lounge. I tried to kick, but it was as though I was caught in a web like a fly ... at the mercy of some monstrous, unseen spider. I screamed again, but then I realised that this was the countryside. There was nobody there to hear me.
We were in the lounge now and Carter was bundling me onto the sofa. I could smell his waxed jacket as he held me ... the same smell I remembered from all those years ago. And I could see his face ... full of hatred.
“I saw you.” He spat the words like venom. “I saw you run her over.”
I tried to wriggle free, but he held me tight.
“But you were too late. She’d told me already that you were back.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” The words came out as a squeak, unconvincing even to myself.
“Miss Downey, that’s what I’m talking about. I got talking to that husband of yours. Funny how you didn’t tell him much about yourself. He’s no idea, has he?”
I felt his breath on my face and I tried to push him away. But it was no use. He was stronger than me.
“Why, Karen?” he hissed, putting his face close to mine. “Just tell me why. What had she ever done to you?”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“My Jenny ... why?”
“Luke Fisher killed Jenny. Everyone knew that.”
His hands began to tighten around my neck. “Once you’d gone, Luke told the police what he saw. They didn’t believe him—just because he wasn’t all there they thought he was making it up. But I knew he was telling the truth. You were always a sly little bitch ... a bully. You made my Jenny’s life a misery. No wonder your mam and dad moved away so bloody quick after she died. Did they know, eh? Always looked so bloody innocent, didn’t you ... face like one of them angels in the church. Did they know what you were really like? Did they know what you’d done?”
With an almighty effort I pushed him off and sprang up. I don’t remember much about what happened next. Only that there was a lot of blood and I felt that same strange detachment I’d felt after I had killed Jenny Carter ... when I looked down and saw her dead, bulging eyes staring up at me.
The memory returned like a tidal wave, everything that had happened that day all those years ago. The bell ropes in the church had been replaced and the old ones had been left lying in the back pew, perfect for the game I’d made up ... the game of dare. I dared Jenny Carter to go to the old gallows and put the rope around her neck. Luke followed us: He was hard to get rid of ... older than us, big and soft and too simple to know when he wasn’t wanted. But I hadn’t known he was watching when I tightened the rope around Jenny’s neck, just to see what it would be like to kill somebody ... to have the power of life and death. Once I’d started pulling on that rope I couldn’t stop. I’d watched, fascinated, as her face began to contort and her eyes started to bulge. I was all-powerful, the angel of death; just like the angels on the screen in the church ... only different. As I stood over the body of Jenny’s father, I felt the same elation ... the same thrill. But when I heard a voice calling in the hall the feeling disappeared and my brain began to work quickly.
I began to sob and I sank to the floor. The scissors I’d grabbed from the coffee table were in my hand and I threw them to one side. I was shaking and crying hysterically by the time Paul entered the room. And when he took me in his arms I slumped against him in a dead faint.
I pretended to be unconscious when the doctor and the police arrived. I thought it was best. And when I came round, in my own good time, I told my story in a weak voice. Carter had arrived and pushed his way in, then he had tried to ... I hesitated at this point for maximum effect, but the policewoman with the sympathetic eyes knew just what I meant. Women alone in the countryside were so vulnerable and hard-drinking men like Carter, sensing weakness, knowing a woman would be alone ... She was the sort of woman who believes all men are potential rapists and she believed every word I said. I was the victim, she said, and I mustn’t feel guilty. I never liked to tell her that I didn’t.
We left Manton Worthy soon after, of course, and made a tidy profit on the Old Rectory, which we sold to a city broker who wanted it for a weekend retreat. I told Paul that I couldn’t bear to stay there after what had happened and he was very sympathetic: He even blamed himself for getting too pally with Carter. The day before we left I wandered into the church and I looked at the angel on the screen, the one with the sword, and I couldn’t help smiling. I was Manton Worthy’s angel of death ... and nobody would ever know.
Once we were back in London I resumed my old life. I was Petra, Paul’s wife; a lady who lunched and did very little else. Karen was dead.
It was six months later when Paul was found dead at the foot of the stairs in his office. He’d been working late and I’d been at the gym, working out with Karl, my personal trainer. Of course, when I say working out, I use the term loosely: What we were doing had very little to do with exercise bikes and weights. Karl had a girlfriend, but I wasn’t worried about that: He was just a bit of fun, a way of passing the time ... and Paul would never get to know.
The policeman who came to tell me about Paul’s death wasn’t very sympathetic. He questioned me for hours about where I’d been and about my relationship with Paul. I said nothing about Karl, of course. And when he asked me how much I stood to inherit on Paul’s death, I told him the truth. Five and a half million, give or take a few quid. Of course I’d assumed that Paul’s death was an accident, cut and dried. But it just shows you how wrong you can be.
The police said that Paul hadn’t fallen; there were signs of a struggle and fibres from my coat were found under one of his fingernails. I told the police that he’d caught his nail on my coat that morning. And I told them he had some pretty dodgy business associates ... he’d even moved to Devon once to get away from them. But they wouldn’t listen, and when they charged me with Paul’s murder even Karl turned his back on me and refused to give me an alibi because he was scared of his cow of a girlfriend.
I was convinced it would never come to trial. After all, I hadn’t done anything. But every time I tried to convince the police of my innocence, they wouldn’t listen. My defence barrister told the court how six months ago I’d been the victim of an attempted rape, but even that didn’t seem to earn me much sympathy. The jury was full of brain-dead idiots who found me guilty by a majority of ten to two, and as the police bundled me past the crowds waiting outside the Old Bailey, someone flung a coat over my head and pushed me into a van that smelled of unwashed bodies and urine.
Even when they took the coat off my head the windows in the van were too high to see out of and I couldn’t tell where we were or what direction we were driving in. We seemed to drive for hours on a fast, straight road, then we slowed down and the roads started to wind.
I asked the sour-faced woman I was handcuffed to where we were going and she turned to me and smiled, as though she was enjoying some private joke.
“Oh, you’re going to Gampton Prison. You’ll like it there. It’s in the country ... right in the middle of nowhere.”
When she started to laugh I screamed and banged on the side of the prison van until my hands were sore.
<
* * * *
GOING BACK
Ann Cleeves
Susan had thought she would recognise the place immediately. The pictures in her head were solid and precise. She revisited them regularly, saw them like photos. The grey line of houses surrounded by grey hills. The school playground only separated from fields by a low stone wall, so the wind blowing across it chapped their lips and turned their fingers blue. The tubular steel climbing frame where she’d hung from her knees, her skirt falling over her upper body and the three girls in the corner of the yard sniggering and pointing, shouting at the boys to look. We can see your knickers! We can see your knickers! The chimney-shaped stove in the junior classroom, which the caretaker filled with coke and which belched out sulphur-tasting fumes. Her mother’s mouth crimped in disapproval.
But everything was different. The village had become a fashionable place to live, within easy commuting distance of Leeds. You could tell that rich people lived here. The school had been converted into a picture from a glossy magazine. Through plate-glass windows you could see a pale wood mezzanine floor and exposed beams. Susan wondered if there was any chance of seeing inside, of smelling the wood and touching the heavy fabric of the curtains. Changes to the School House, where she’d lived, were more modest, but the lines of the severe square box had been softened by a conservatory and hanging baskets. In her memory she saw the house through drizzle and fog. Her mother’s resentment at being forced to live there had imposed its own microclimate. Today there was the pale, lemon sunshine of early spring.
And she was back. A fiftieth birthday present to herself. What did they call it? Exorcising ghosts.
So she stood for a moment trying to find her bearings. She sensed Tom’s impatience, but this was her time. Let him wait. She stared fiercely down the road, then closed her eyes and laid the pattern of houses over the landscape of her memory.
“They’ve widened the lane,” she said. “The verge was deeper then.”
He kept quiet. He knew it was important not to say the wrong thing.
When they’d moved here from Leeds, her mother had called it a cultural desert. It had been her father’s first headship and he’d had no real choice in the matter. He hadn’t fitted in at his previous school and had been told by the director of education to apply. He had no vocation for teaching. In the war he’d been happy, had hoped the fighting would go on forever. Afterwards, what could he do? The government needed teachers and would pay him to train.
Her mother had met him when he was a mature student and had rather liked the idea of marrying a teacher. It was a respectable profession. Perhaps she pictured him in a gown taking assembly in an oak-panelled hall. Susan thought she couldn’t have been aware then of the reality—the poor pay, the grubby children who wet their pants and carried nits. Her father didn’t have the academic qualification to teach in a grammar school. He was reduced to drilling the times tables into the heads of bored seven-year-olds, to supervising the half-dressed prancing to Music and Movement on the wireless. It was no job, he said, for a grown man.
And this, he had to admit, was no real headship. There were only thirty children, fifteen infants and fifteen juniors. He took the juniors in one classroom and Miss Pritchard took the infants in the other. Susan’s mother never liked Miss Pritchard, who was plump, comfortable, and vacuous. She liked nothing about the village at all. All she could think of was moving back to the city.
The house was always cold. Even in summer the damp in the walls and the floor seeped into your bones. The wind blew over the Pennines and under the doors. Susan remembered the building in black and white, like the fuzzy pictures on the television in the corner of the front room. Her parents sat every evening in silence watching television, surrounded by their utility furniture, the few good pieces of china her mother had inherited from a well-off aunt, an inscribed tankard which had been given to her father when he left his last school. And always, sometimes even drowning out the voices on the TV, there was the sound of the sheep on the hill. Like a baby crying in the distance.
Susan had escaped outside, to ride her bike down the lane and play on the climbing frame in the schoolyard. Always on her own. Nobody wanted to be friends with the teacher’s lass. They were frightened she’d tell on them. She saw them sometimes, the other girls, Heather and Diane and Marilyn, sitting on the pavement outside the council houses down the hill, their heads together over some game. She never went to join them. She knew she wouldn’t be welcome and besides, her mother didn’t like her mixing. But she watched them. She always knew what they were up to.
She had been so strong then, so easy in her body. She’d walked miles across the hills. There’d been handstands against the wall, reckless slides across ice on the playground, cartwheels. Her mother hadn’t approved. If she saw her daughter on the climbing frame she’d rap on the kitchen window to call her into the house.
“What’s the matter?” Susan knew how to play the innocent. She’d had to learn.
“Behaving like that. Showing your underwear to that boy.” The boy was Eddie Black, a slow, gentle fifteen-year-old who lived in the cottage next to the school. He spent much of his time in the garden, in a wire mesh aviary, caring for his birds.
Susan wondered why that was so wrong. Why was that different from doing Music and Movement in front of her father? Or his coming into her bedroom when she was dressing? But she said nothing. She knew it was impossible to argue with her
mother when her mouth was stretched in that thin-lipped way. When the sherry bottle was uncorked on the kitchen table and the first glass was already empty.
One evening stuck in her memory. It had been just before Easter and her mother had gone into Leeds to a concert. The Messiah. She’d driven herself in the black Morris Minor. An adventure, but an ordeal. She’d never enjoyed driving. When she returned she was a different woman. Susan thought, if she’d bumped into her in the street, she wouldn’t have recognised her, the colour in her cheeks, the way she stood. It was like coming back to the village today and not recognising it. Susan had sat on the stairs wrapped up in the candlewick dressing gown listening to her mother’s voice.
“Let’s move, Philip. Please can we move back? A fresh start.”
She hadn’t heard her father’s answer, but the next day nothing had changed and the move was never mentioned again. She couldn’t tell if anything was different between them.
Best British Crime 6 - [Anthology] Page 17