Falling into Crime

by Penny Grubb

  ‘As you like, Annie. It’s too hot for me out there.’

  ‘I’ll take Charlotte’s tapes and have a listen.’

  ‘Should you? I don’t know that she’d want you to.’

  ‘She’s hardly going to object. You have an old Walkman, don’t you?’

  ‘Yes dear, your father gave me one when I went into hospital with my arm. I’ll go and get it.’

  Annie looked back to the cinder track. The crowds thinned as she climbed higher. She followed Lorraine’s path through the undergrowth on to a higher, ill-defined track. Ahead, she kept to the tree-line, her hand on the Walkman in her pocket.

  ‘… and then I saw someone up ahead, coming towards me …’

  Lorraine’s voice slurred and Annie smothered a curse. The batteries were running down. She clicked it off. Should have checked. Aunt Marian’s hospital stay had been almost a year ago. This someone up ahead would be the friend, the one Lorraine hallucinated. Julia Lee maybe. So far, no name had been mentioned.

  She stepped on to a wide swathe of green. The mass of trees stood to one side, in ranks ready for inspection, a thick cloak of greenery over the top. Under the cloak, a forest of bare poles, a crop of prison bars ready for harvest, grew from a spongy carpet of brittle twigs and leaf mould.

  To the other side the land fell away, the slope gentle. Up higher, it steepened. Somewhere along here, Lorraine had taken off at a tangent to the tree-line and sprinted down the hill. Plenty of scope to fall wherever she did it. The later interview suggested she’d lied about how far up she’d travelled. Annie thought she might have chanced a sprint herself down the gentler slope, if she had a good reason to risk her neck. To try it further along where the land broke away would be suicide.

  The green she walked on was a broad highway between the tree-line and the slope. It twisted away cutting down the forward view. It matched Lorraine’s words. She’d come round this curve and seen someone walking towards her. She switched on the tape.

  ‘… a woman walking down the hill. It took me by surprise. I hadn’t seen her in years. It seemed so strange to run into her in a place like that …’ The voice began to slow and whine. Annie cursed, and stopped. The voice picked up. ‘… didn’t say anything until …’ but as she set off it slowed again. The machine couldn’t cope with movement as she walked. She took it out of her pocket and sat at the edge of the trees. This was near enough to listen to the rest.

  ‘“Julia Lee,” I said, and she looked up, surprised.’

  So Aunt Marian was right.

  She listened to Lorraine describe a meeting between two friends who hadn’t seen each other in years. The patchy sound from the tape made it hard to judge nuances of tone, but she felt a distrust of Lorraine’s account. If the meeting had happened, it had not been by chance.

  With the stop-start way she’d listened, she began to imagine she recognized Lorraine’s voice. The scratchy sound quality made it sound old, as though it was speaking to her from decades ago.

  She stopped the tape again and took herself through the version she’d had from Charlotte. Lorraine had eventually dragged herself to an isolated cottage and been taken to the local hospital where first Charlotte had found and talked to her and then her brother had come to take her away.

  Using her finger, she wound the tape on to get beyond the latest bout of sobbing hysterics.

  Lorraine seemed at the edge of hyperventilating, but there was no holding back the words.

  ‘We talked … just hello, how are you. Not for long. She didn’t want to stop … we said goodbye and that was it …’

  Annie wasn’t convinced. There’d been more to it. Something in Lorraine’s account was a lie. But not the fear. The fear was real.

  Something made me turn … I don’t know what …

  She’d gone. She wasn’t there … It wasn’t possible … There’s nowhere to go. We’d only just walked on …

  I don’t know what made me turn. Maybe I heard something. I don’t know.

  I went back. I thought she must have fallen. I couldn’t see her.

  There was this stuff, branches and leaves and stuff, all tangled, at the edge of the trees. It was pushed apart.

  I wouldn’t have gone right into the trees. But she was there. Just there. Just two steps from the path.

  She was on her back, her arms flung out above her head. And red! This stain on the front of her jacket. Bright red … on her back … arms thrown out … like she’d been pitched backwards into the trees. And this stain. I’ve never seen red so bright. It spread from the middle of her chest.

  I thought … she’s been shot. Deer hunters. She’s been shot from miles off. By mistake. It went through my mind in a second. I saw her lying there and I rushed out of the trees. I was desperate to get help, to stop them shooting again. I froze. I didn’t know what to do.

  There was no one there. I was on my own. She was dying in the trees a stride away from me. I went back. I had to try to save her.

  There was something different. It didn’t register. I went forward, down to feel for a pulse at her neck. That awful red. Like I saw it again the first time. That spreading stain.

  And a knife.

  A knife in her chest. Right at the heart of that blood.

  It hadn’t registered, but as I bent over her, I knew I’d seen it. There’d been a knife in her chest. I saw my hand reach towards her neck. I saw the blood pulsing out of her. But the knife was gone!

  I’d turned my back for a second … The knife was gone. Whoever’d done it was right there with me.

  I don’t know if I saw anyone. I just threw myself forward to the ground. I twisted over her, and I grabbed at the branches and the leaves. The dust was in my eyes, I couldn’t see. I ripped the creepers out of the way, to get back into the open. I don’t even know if I trod on her. And I ran. Straight. Right off the edge. There was no one to help. No one to shout for. If I could just keep my feet I could get away.

  And I ran. I just ran and ran. It was so hard. I couldn’t stop. I ran.

  Chapter 12

  Lorraine’s rising hysteria grated against the slowing tape. The sun was hot but Annie shivered as she clicked it off. She’d heard enough. But what had she heard? Fantasy, hallucination, or a witness to murder? But her father knew about Lorraine. There couldn’t have been a murder. She’d have heard. A body at the edge of the forest couldn’t lie undiscovered for long.

  Annie got up and brushed herself down. If anything had happened recently, there’d be traces. She remembered Charlotte’s words. There was something odd. But Charlotte hadn’t found the spot. Not much further on round this outcropping of trees and then she would be able to see … But damn, there were people up ahead. She’d expected to have the hill to herself in the heat of the day, and didn’t want to draw attention by poking about at the trees’ edge. If there was anything there, the evidence mustn’t be disturbed.

  She decided to wait until they carried on up or came down past her, but they didn’t seem to be going anywhere. Squinting against the glare, she saw the figures through a heat haze, one set swaying in a huddled group, others moving without apparent purpose, back and forth, round and round. Was it some sort of orienteering exercise she’d walked into?

  It was too hot to wait about for hours, but Lorraine’s story had her guts churning. She’d heard the original telling of it, full of lies for sure, but with an uncomfortable nugget of reality.

  She thought of Charlotte’s so-called friend-of-a-friend, of someone’s sister planning to fake her own death, and wondered if that was what she’d been listening to.

  Every theory had a jagged edge, a shard that didn’t fit. Maybe it was all a series of unrelated coincidences. She cast an occasional glance up to the stand of trees that hid the group of orienteers, but took care to keep out of sight. The heat haze lay over everything, a phantom shimmer that lent pseudo clarity to the landscape, but lay like a mirage where her thoughts should be. A headache threatened. Too much wine last night, or maybe
, not enough. She backed off under the trees where it was cooler.

  She was going to have to contact Margot about Aunt Marian having been in touch, and Margot had known Charlotte. Maybe now was a good time. She retreated further into the shade of the forest, and sat against a scratchy tree trunk. The musty aroma of the forest floor rose around her. Her phone came to life with a beep. She hadn’t been sure it would find a network up here.

  Margot’s PA, Janice, answered with a smooth professionalism that brought to mind plush carpets and luxury offices bustling with people and the trappings of success. After a burst of classical music she couldn’t identify, Margot’s voice was in her ear. ‘Annie! What a surprise. I hope you haven’t rung to harangue me about your dear old aunt.’ The tone was mocking and Annie’s hackles rose.

  ‘Of course not. It’s Charlotte Grainger I’m ringing about.’

  ‘Yes, she’s the one your aunt rang about. Look Annie, I can’t do anything about the sodding guesthouse. I’m not responsible for people on holiday. She was only a temp anyway.’

  ‘It’s not that. She won’t be back. She’s dead. She died in a car crash.’

  ‘Oh, I’m sorry.’ Margot sounded indifferent. ‘Drop in if you want to, Annie. If you need more on your mysterious Mrs Grainger. I’ll look out her personnel file.’

  After the call, Annie stood up and stretched her cramped limbs. Charlotte with her stories of a friend-of-a-friend, had had her own agendas, and they’d led to her death, thrown from a car that exploded in flames as it hit the bottom of the glen. A rain-lashed pass across the mountain; a sudden explosion of headlights; the screech of metal on the crash barrier.

  Out on the green of the track, she hesitated. Time to return to Aunt Marian’s to let Mrs Watson know her options for recovering her money. Then she must hotfoot it to her father’s to tell him about Lorraine and about her own experience on the high pass.

  She looked again at the tapes before slipping them into her pocket, and fought an urge to hurl them deep into the forest. The idea of listening to Lorraine’s voice again repelled her. She didn’t want her father to hear it either.

  As she turned towards the slope, a bright flash caught her eye; a momentary burst of light and scurry of movement from the lower track. She stared hard but there was nothing there.

  Lorraine’s voice played in her mind. Telescopic sights … Shot from miles off …

  The path to Mrs Watson’s crossed that track. It was no more than a faint stirring of unease, but there were a multitude of ways out for those who knew these hills.

  She slipped back under the trees, wading her way through the debris of the forest floor. It was a longer route across forbidden territory from her childhood, the Doll-Makers’ patch.

  The air was heavy. The scorching sun, visible only in bright shafts that pierced the canopy over the tracks and small clearings, crept into the forest as a heavy malaise with no warmth. In only a light T-shirt, Annie became uncomfortably cool as the woods became darker the further she descended.

  She knew when she crossed the invisible boundary from forestry land to Torran Hill, the domain of what had once been a bustling, if eccentric, community. The layered remains beneath her feet were deeper, spongier, the forest older, and shabby like a mansion now in the custody of people too old to care for it. The smell that rose up from her incursions into the thick carpet was at the edge of rancid. As children, they’d stepped over these boundaries for the thrill of facing hidden menace. Even now, her skin prickled, a ghost of the delicious taste of terror from years ago.

  Threading her way through the trees, she had to steady herself on the roots and branches as she slithered down the steeper stretches. Her shoes felt gritty from the leaf mould and dust. Sweat dried on her clothes giving the gentle breeze a frozen edge.

  The landmark bulk of a stone wall defined itself below her as she approached the road. This was the building-with-eyes, the source of the gnarled hand of Margot-generated legend that would reach out from the ancient stones and grab outsiders to drag them in. What surprised Annie was the shiver that surged through her. She even felt a flutter of apprehension about what Aunt Marian would say if she found out.

  She skirted the building, keeping to the slope instead of the easier track just below. The facing wall showed the same blank face she remembered, its tiny eyes too near the roof to serve any useful purpose as windows. And yet she felt them follow her through the trees, like the eyes of a portrait. For now, we’re only watching, they seemed to say, but one day …

  It was hard to reconcile the empty face of the edifice with the memory of a packed hall, people chanting, a choir singing. Faulty memory again. There was no image other than the blank wall to go with the remembered pageantry, but the feel of the pulsing noise came back to her as she scuttled past.

  Slithering down the last stretch she reached the road. Childhood caught-on-their-land dread wasn’t eased even with the right to roam enshrined in statute. The anxiety ebbed only once her feet were on a public highway.

  With the building-with-eyes behind her, she headed for the main road, but she paused again at a point where the track branched. One route would take her to her aunt’s. The other twisted into the trees and led to the Doll-Makers’ house. She stopped to take a breath, then turned to face the house. She wasn’t a kid any more, and this wasn’t private land.

  It was as she remembered, a square plain-Jane of a house that sat some fifty yards up the track to one side. It should have nestled cosily under the trees, but didn’t. Somehow the house and surrounding forest had weathered and aged on different scales and looked out of place side by side. An elderly couple with nothing in common, but too old to part company. The front door was open and Annie could see the small figure of Beth sitting at a table, a purple cloud round her neck, back to the door as she bent over some task.

  Annie hesitated. Aunt Marian had made a point of asking, and the girl might be more forthcoming on her own territory.

  She jogged towards the house, not realizing the breeze was strong enough to cover the sound of her footsteps until Beth, either too engrossed in her work, or made slightly deaf by the voluminous scarf at her neck, spun in shock to face her.

  Annie saw a doll on the table, half-dismembered or half-made. The detritus of doll-making was spread out on the wooden surface amongst bits of straw and scraps of material. After her first shocked intake of breath, Beth whipped the doll out of sight behind her back, then crammed it into a basket.

  It was her nightmare! For a fraction of a second it was her mother. The dream. Trapped in a maze; the doll just out of reach. The face that changed from gracious to furious as it turned to look at her. She battled an irrational urge to fly at Beth, screaming, ‘It’s my doll! It’s mine!’

  She gripped her fists tight as her heart pounded. Some of the anger that had tried to explode from her must have leaked out. Beth looked terrified, cowering against the table.

  ‘I … I’m sorry…’ She tried to keep her voice low, unthreatening, and heard it come out too high and dripping with anxiety. Another deep breath to steady the beat of her heart. ‘I’m sorry, Beth. I didn’t mean to frighten you.’

  ‘I shoulda kept the door shut. It’s hot, see.’

  Annie nodded. It didn’t seem hot, not with the trees towering around keeping the house in constant shade. She glanced at a door the other side of the big room and wondered if Beth was alone.

  ‘Uh … my aunt gave me one of your dolls.’ She hoped for pleasure or at least surprise, but Beth said nothing, as though the revelation wasn’t worthy of comment. ‘My mother bought it just before she died. I only just heard about it. No one knows why.’

  ‘I don’t know why,’ Beth said, as though Annie had asked. ‘I was minus seven years old when your mother went.’

  Minus seven? If true, that made Beth thirteen, which seemed about right, but why would a 13-year-old have her mother’s age at her fingertips?

  Annie couldn’t frame a question. It would have to be; what
do you know about my mother? And she couldn’t ask in any way that wouldn’t sound hostile, because she didn’t want to hear that Beth, minus seven, knew things she didn’t know or couldn’t remember herself.

  She looked round the room. It felt cavernous, but was no bigger than the sitting-room at her father’s. The similarities went no further than the dimensions. Where her father’s room was bright, and crowded with the knick-knacks Mrs Latimer laboured over, this one was bare and faded as if the sun passed through a long time ago, leached out the colour and never came back. Rationally, Annie knew it was because the trees were too close and tall to let the light in, but she felt she’d stepped into another world.

  The girl looked small and vulnerable in this empty cavern. Annie reached into her pocket for her wallet, and plucked out a business card. ‘Here.’ She held it out. Beth looked, but didn’t reach for it, so Annie stepped closer and put it on the table. ‘Call me if you ever need to. Any time.’ She wasn’t even confident Beth could use a phone.

  Beth gasped, her gaze suddenly riveted to something behind Annie’s shoulder. ‘Someone comin.’’ She sprang forward, pushing Annie to one side. ‘Go out the back.’

  Annie needed no persuasion. Childhood fear of the Doll Makers had kept her senses tingling the whole time she stood there. As Beth threw herself at the front door and pulled it shut, Annie went the way Beth had pushed her, out through the other door. She found herself in the open air at the side of the house, where a steep path wound down to the lower road, cutting off the corner. A nifty shortcut they’d never discovered as young trespassers.

  Before sliding down to the road and heading back, she crept to the edge of the house, used a thick creeper for cover and peered round. She was curious to see another of the elusive Doll Makers.

  But it wasn’t, and Annie was so surprised, she almost stepped out into view. It was the man Aunt Marian had pointed out. Charlotte’s young man. He wandered up the road towards the house, looking round, up into the forest, as though not sure he was in the right place. He headed for the house. Maybe visitors weren’t such a rarity, but Annie had an idea that two in one day wasn’t the norm.