by Chris Simms
And last thing, Laura, I don’t think you should stay in the house. It’s plain to me this noise is coming from inside it. Why risk upsetting yourself more by being there? Have you a good friend nearby? Someone who has a spare bed you can use? PLEASE let me know what you decide. Be strong, Laura. You’re a special person. You’ll beat this, Tamsin.
Laura stared at the screen. There were no neighbours. It couldn’t be the previous occupants – Mrs Hall was dead, Mr Hall was confined to a hospital somewhere and William...he was just a child. Which meant...which meant that it could only be...
She reached for the keyboard and began to type.
The only person who could be doing this to me is my husband.
She hit send and checked over her shoulder, almost expecting him to be there. The room was empty. She thought about her husband. Could it be him? Was he pretending not to hear the canary song just now? Why would he do that? Why torture her?
The ring of the phone made her shoulders flinch. She couldn’t face answering it. She didn’t want to speak to anyone. Not now. The answerphone message clicked in and she cocked her head.
‘Hi Laura, it’s Martin Flowers. I’m en route to Chester. Church business I won’t bore you with. I wanted to speak to you – I don’t suppose you’re there?’ He waited for a second. ‘No. I asked a member of my congregation about the Halls, who lived in Lantern Cottage before you.’ He coughed in a needless sort of way. ‘I wanted you to hear this from me, Laura. They weren’t quite as old as I thought. In fact, Mrs Hall was only fifty-three when she died. Laura, I’m afraid she committed suicide. Not in the cottage, in the canal. Weighed her pockets down with stones and stepped into the water. It’s generally believed the stress of caring for William drove her to it. Sadly, all that pressure was then transferred to the husband, Roger. He wasn’t able to manage – that and losing his wife, I suppose.’ He sighed. ‘Unfortunately, he was admitted to hospital where he’s still receiving psychiatric care. That’s why William is being looked after out at the Skylark Trust. I hope you got all that. Please call me if you’d like to talk further. Otherwise, I’ll see you soon. OK, bye.’
The phone clicked and silence returned. Laura didn’t move. Suicide. And the husband in psychiatric care. The bloody estate agent hadn’t said a thing about Mrs Hall killing herself. No one said a thing about that. Did Owen know, too?
She felt dirty and sly as she analysed how things were between them. Searching for signs of deceit. Picking over his behaviour. The move up here, she thought: that was all him. He wanted to spend the end of his career working in the place where it originally started. Who, she thought, do I know here? No one.
Her mind was now whirring. This focus on his career, she thought, it was always something I just accepted. Part of being married to someone at the very top of their profession. We’ve had to move all over the place for his career. Stints in Germany, France, Austria. A year in New York. No wonder my friends melted away over the years. All I’ve ever done is trail after Owen. Things could have been so different, if only we’d had a family. But that was another thing decided by him. First through his physical failings, then through his mental ones. Hiding from the issue, refusing to even discuss seeing a doctor. But he’s happy to involve one if it’s about me. Oh yes. Then he’s only too bloody keen to call in medical help. And now it’s all too late for me. My chance has slipped by and I’m too old. Not physically able. Infertile.
The voice in her head started to join in, shrill words speeding up. He’s a selfish, useless man. He’s always been selfish. He’s never really cared about you, never, he doesn’t love you, if he loved you, he’d have let you have a baby, children, they’re the most precious thing of all, they’re the point of everything and he couldn’t even give you a child!
Rather than shut the thoughts out, she let them continue. There was truth in them. The voice was speaking the truth. She climbed woodenly off the stool and left the kitchen. The door to Owen’s study was shut, as usual. So rare that she went in his study, wherever it was they’d lived. Searching for dirty cups; that was the main reason. There may as well be a sign saying ‘Keep Out’.
Feeling like a trespasser, she turned the handle and looked inside. Framed posters lined the walls. Posters advertising his performances. Other people had photos of their children in frames. He had his performances. They were his children.
She considered the one and only ballet-related picture in the entire house. Tucked away in my studio, she thought. Of the hundreds of images I could have selected of me on stage, I chose that particular one. And Owen, in all these years, has never understood its true significance. He thinks it’s something I look on with pride! A fond memento of when I used to dance. That’s how bloody clueless he is.
Dotted among the hundreds of CDs lining the shelves were his collection of miniature instruments. Gourds the size of grapefruits topped by goatskin. A gnarled bit of wood with a few strings stretched between the curved ends. A row of metal fingers that lifted just clear of a dark brown base. A harmonica. A penny whistle. His guitar propped in the corner. Toys, she thought. The only toys he’s ever allowed were for himself. It’s all been about himself.
When did I become an embarrassment to him? An encumbrance to his career? Something he has to factor in before deciding his next move. He really does despise me.
She screwed her eyes shut. It didn’t make sense. We had plans, the two of us had plans. Owen is obsessed, yes. But his is a world of music. He deals in beauty. There isn’t a spiteful bone in his body.
She began to examine the words running down the spines of his CDs. His collection of classical music was so huge it was ridiculous. But he also liked music from far-flung places. Music from other eras; sea shanties, tribal songs, monks chanting. He liked more ambient noises, too. Sounds from nature; recordings of thunder, lions roaring, surf breaking. Birds singing?
Rows and rows of CDs were simply marked with letters. WP – 18”. OP (South Africa). GH – HL. ASI (1997). There were dozens of them. Hundreds. Did any contain canary song? It would take days to go through them all.
A piece of paper was half-hanging over the edge of his bin. She picked it out and unfolded it. Something he’d printed from the internet. It looked technical. A graph, the axis marked with dB and Hz. A subheading read: ‘Range of Human Hearing’.
Hz was cycles per second. He’d underlined a bit about 8000 Hz being at the upper range of human hearing. Noises above that included the whine from cathode-ray TVs, dog whistles, bats and some types of birdsong. He’d placed a question mark by the word birdsong. Why? Why had he done that?
Thinking of how the canary song was always so faint, she refolded the piece of paper and put it back exactly where it had been. The room felt leached of all warmth. She crossed her arms and looked out of the window. The sky was a pale grey. The wind moaned and she remembered Scaredy-mouse was out there somewhere. Tamsin was right, the cottage wasn’t a good place to be.
She looked at the expanse of wall visible between Owen’s framed posters. She ran her eyes across the ceiling. There was a hairline crack in the plaster and she pictured the structure of the building beneath its outer layer. The bricks and beams, joists and joints. Its skeleton. There was something about it. Something brooding. As if it was listening and waiting, biding its time. The urge became overwhelming: she had to get out.
Chapter 31
Standing on the front step was a lot chillier, but she didn’t mind. Once the zip of her coat was done up, she tucked the bottoms of her jeans into the thick wool of her socks and then slid her gloves on.
The cold breeze swept through her hair and she thought about going back inside to find a hat. But the burglar alarm was on and the prospect of those silent rooms made her shudder.
Tentatively, she stepped down on to the lane, easing her weight onto her injured foot. It felt fine, to her surprise. Her walking boots fitted snugly and she’d laced them extra tightly to stop her foot from sliding about. It seemed to have worked.
She skirted round the cottage, pausing to look at the shed extension with its shoulder-high hatch. She could imagine the little cages being handed through it to a queue of miners, waiting where she now stood. Wouldn’t Owen have known what it was for? He’d lived in the nearby village all his life.
As she rounded the next corner a couple of blue tits fled towards the fields. The bird table had been picked clean, as had the bowl of cat biscuits on the back lawn. She took the packet of fish shapes from her pocket and shook them. ‘Mouse! Where are you, Mouse!’
The only noise was wind blowing across her ears. She made her way along the back fence looking for any sign of the kitten. The chicken wire Owen had tacked onto the lowermost struts of the fence were bent up in one place. The grass below had been worn into a smooth channel that led out into the field. The badgers.
She continued to the end of the garden where a row of stumps stuck out of bare earth. The vegetable patch, annihilated by the creatures. Like a famine had fallen on the land. Next to it, Owen had placed the big plastic compost bin. To its left was a gate leading back to the lane. She trudged out, eyes on the grass verge and ditch as she shook the packet of treats. ‘Mouse!’ Some sections had become overgrown with brambles and she used a stick to try and part the thorny tangle.
Behind it was the dry-stone wall. Edith Hall had used stones like those to kill herself. Laura wondered how long it was before her body was discovered. Did it bob up, eventually? Or did they drag the brown water, snagging her corpse with a hook?
After about fifty metres there was a gap in wall. Mouse could have got through that, she thought. She climbed over the collapsed stones and followed the edge of the field to where it fell away into the next valley. The canal was down there; the one they used for transporting limestone; the one Edith Hall had drowned herself in. She made her way down and stared into the brackish, still water. Dead leaves lay on its surface and, in places, the bank had started to crumble. She stepped closer to the edge, wondering what Edith Hall had felt as she’d stepped into the water. Had it been cold against her skin? Made her shudder? Or was she beyond feeling by then? Beyond tasting the silty water as it flooded into her nose and mouth and eyes?
If Mouse had fallen in here, her body would never be found. She followed the towpath for a while, calling for the kitten every now and again, before giving up and following it the other way until it connected with another branch of canal. The sign at the junction pointed in three directions. Oldknow two miles to the right, New Mills five miles to the left and Whaley Bridge six miles in the direction she’d come.
She retraced her steps once more. As she walked slowly along, she thought about the sheet of paper in Owen’s study. Now, clear of the confines of the cottage, she didn’t think it could have been him. How could it be? It wasn’t possible. It meant hiding a loudspeaker somewhere in the house. Setting off the song somehow on a timer or something – since she’d often heard it when Owen was out.
No, she concluded, it wasn’t my husband. Why would he do such a terrible thing? Now she felt a keen sense of shame for even allowing such suspicions to take hold. Is it the house, she wondered, planting these dark thoughts in my head? She thought about all the times she’d stood rooted to the spot, waiting for the silence to be broken by birdsong. All the time, she realised, it was as if the cottage was also listening. To me. The two of us, straining to hear what the other one was up to.
She reached the point where she’d joined the towpath and started climbing the grassy incline. Halfway up, she spotted a shallow mound and altered direction towards it. A large circular stone had been laid flat at the top of the faint slope. It was covered in dried sheep droppings. There was something almost sacrificial about it. Perhaps the farmer used it as a platform at shearing time. She called again, ‘Mouse!’
Standing there, she realised the tip of Lantern Cottage’s chimney was peeping over the brow. Watching. She stuck two fingers up at it. Something tiny and cold made contact with her cheek. She turned into the wind and spotted a couple of flakes drifting towards her. The layer of white cloud above was utterly motionless. An upside-down landscape, she thought, spotlessly clean and pure. Not like here. She climbed the remainder of the slope, refusing to look at the looming chimney as she made her way to the garden fence. At the bit where the chicken wire had been forced up she stopped. From this angle, she could see a faint furrow leading off right across the field. The comings and goings of the badgers. This, she realised, could have been where Scaredy-mouse got out. The furrow led straight toward a copse of trees.
She got to them a couple of minutes later and studied the ground. The grass was patchy beneath the trees, becoming practically non-existent round the trunks themselves. Where the badgers lived was obvious; the holes they’d dug into the slope were massive. One or two looked almost large enough to crawl inside. Would I fit, she wondered? Like Alice, heading down, down into another world?
The thought of the bristly, stump-legged creatures lurking within put a swift halt to her daydream. How many of them lived down in the tunnels? What if Scaredy-mouse had followed the trail like she’d done? The dark holes looked menacing. But to a young cat – cold and frightened – they might have represented shelter. Somewhere out of the wind. The poor thing wouldn’t have known what lurked inside. Oh God, it would have been attacked, surely. She thought about the deep gouges on the base of the bird table. Claws like six-inch nails.
‘Mouse,’ she called in a muted voice from the edge of the copse. She shook her bag of treats again. ‘Mouse, Mouse, Mouse.’
The burrows stared back. Spiders’ eyes, clustered and close. Nothing moved. Feeling like she was creeping into an enemy encampment, she trod stealthily between the trees and knelt at the entrance of the largest one. Weak daylight shining in revealed the sides of a remarkably smooth tunnel, just a few strands of tree roots sticking down from the roof. There was a musky, feral smell as she leaned her face in, shook the packet and called out softly. ‘Mouse, are you in there?’
For some reason she almost expected an echo to come bouncing back. But the dense earth simply absorbed her voice like a sponge. The only sound was the church bell ringing from across the valley. The initial chimes finished and she readied herself to count the ones that marked the hour. She was expecting twelve of them, but they stopped after just two. She sat back. Two? That couldn’t be right. She checked her watch and saw that it was. Two o’clock? How long, she wondered, had I followed the canal for? A couple of hours had vanished without trace.
With a last look into the burrow, she stood and peered through the trees. The church was visible. She was able to make out the hands on the clock tower. The big one pointed straight up, so it was something o’clock. The little one pointed to the two. Dots of colour were in the field. They were digging about again.
She turned her back on the badger’s entrance and looked at the cottage. She could see the extension housing the snug and, above it, her studio. The chimney jutted up above the main roof and, yet again, she was struck by how like a figure it was. The window to her studio was also visible and she contemplated how the canary song was always so loud in there. Who’d built the extension? When had it been tacked onto the original cottage? Were they responsible for hiding the cage in the wall?
She stared across at Oldknow church. Adrian Moore, the excavation leader, would know. He knew all about the canary breeder, after all. She recalled his previous reluctance to engage with her. What else might he have been keeping quiet about?
Chapter 32
Once in the car, she’d realised how cold she’d become. She turned the temperature gauge up and sat there for a while with the engine running. Warm air began to permeate the inside of the vehicle. It would be nice to just put some music on, she thought. Ease the seat back and sit here for a while.
But she couldn’t do that. She needed to speak with Adrian Moore.
Oldknow High Street was quiet, as usual. Waiting at the lights to change on the deserted junction
, she looked idly off to the left, where the smattering of shops led up to the GP’s practice.
She flinched. A black Audi was emerging slowly from the car park. The man at the wheel had a shock of white hair. Owen. His car turned left, heading towards High Lane and the A6. He wasn’t at rehearsals at all. He wasn’t in Manchester, he’d been right here visiting Dr Ford.
The traffic lights were still on red as she snapped her indicator down and turned onto the High Street. Owen’s Audi was powering up the hill and she tried to follow him. But his car was moving too fast. She pulled over, deciding to ring his mobile instead. The thing wasn’t in her coat. Damn it! She could see it by the laptop in the kitchen, where she’d left it. His brake lights shone for a brief instant as he reached a bend in the road. The car disappeared.
It had been about her, that much was obvious. Secret discussions, behind her back. They were making plans, working out what options were available to them. The sense of betrayal was so acute she had to lean forward and clutch her stomach. Forehead resting against the wheel, she sat there breathing through her mouth, waiting for the pain to subside. How could he lie like that? Everything he’d said earlier about being right as rain, about clearing things up properly. All of it false.
She climbed out of the car, closed her eyes, put her feet shoulder width apart and took several slow, deep breaths. In through the nose, out through the mouth. How she calmed herself before stepping out onto the empty stage, that spotlight glaring down like the eye of God. The old trick still worked. Her heart rate steadied and the waves of dizziness cleared. Now she felt anger.