That Still andWhispering Place

by Kathy Shuker

  ‘I saw you jogging once, a while ago.’ He studied the choice of dessert. ‘The blueberry cheesecake,’ he said promptly. ‘No competition.’ He folded the menu flat and put it on the table. ‘Impressive - jogging, I mean. Do you do it often?’

  Claire put her menu down too. ‘I’ll have the ice-cream sundae.’ She picked up her wine glass. ‘I jog most days. Sometimes it’s a struggle to make myself go but I nearly always feel better for it.’

  ‘I should do more exercise. Maybe when spring comes.’

  ‘Ah, a fine weather exerciser.’ She wagged an admonishing finger at him. ‘You’ll never get fit if you don’t do it regularly. Though, I didn’t do much till the last couple of years. When I was young I was skinny with sticks for legs. Then when Gilly disappeared I comfort ate and ended up with a spare tyre. I started jogging in Kent because a friend did and I found it helped somehow, kept me sane. So I kept doing it.’ She produced a smile. ‘Burns off my angst, I guess.’

  ‘Really? You mean you’d be even more touchy if you didn’t jog? Imagine.’

  She withered him with a look. ‘Be grateful that you probably won’t find out.’

  They finished dessert and had coffee. Adam pressed her to stay for another drink. Not keen to return to her empty house, she agreed, but insisted on buying the round herself.

  Standing, watching Dave pour the drinks, Claire saw Phil walk into the public bar, saw him notice her and nod a greeting, then watched his gaze slide sideways to see who she was with.

  She took her change and returned with the drinks to the table, handing Adam his whisky.

  ‘Was that Phil Borlase I just heard in the bar?’ he muttered.

  ‘Yes. Do you know him?’

  ‘Not really. What’s he like?’

  ‘He’s OK.’ She looked back up to the bar. There was no sign of him but from that angle she couldn’t be sure. She dropped her voice. ‘We sometimes used to compare notes on how overpowering the Pennymans can be. We were the outsiders. But he seems to have integrated pretty well these days.’

  ‘A little bird told me that you and Phil were once childhood sweethearts.’

  ‘Sweethearts?’ She laughed. ‘Hardly. Who told you that?’

  ‘They also said that Neil was with Jane back then. Isn’t it true?’

  ‘Yes. Sort of. I did go out with Phil but not for long. We weren’t sweethearts,’ she added, indignant. ‘We were just kids. Why do you care?’

  He swirled the whisky round in his glass, watching the colour flicker and change in the yellow artificial light. ‘You and Jane don’t see much of each other, do you, considering you were friends as children? I saw you go across to her unit a couple of weeks ago and that’s it. The bird suggested that the teenage love-switch had caused a serious rift. I was curious.’

  ‘How do you get any work done if you’re constantly watching to see who goes where,’ she said tartly.

  ‘I just look out of the window now and then, waiting for inspiration to strike. You must know what it’s like. But I suppose illustrators are more sophisticated than that?’

  ‘Sophisticated? You must be joking. I used to work in a cheap lean-to conservatory built on the back of the house. And I was always playing catch up to deadlines. It focussed my mind.’

  ‘Interesting, but you’re avoiding the point. Was there a big blow-up with Jane?’

  Instead of the teenage row, Claire’s thoughts skipped to the painful evening spent at Jane’s house, trapped in that sterile front room. She felt Adam’s expectant gaze on her.

  ‘Jane and I did fall out,’ she said. ‘She was upset when Neil ditched her for me. And she blamed me for stealing him - but I didn’t lure him away or anything. Phil and I had already drifted apart and we all used to hang out together anyway. I thought it was unfair and I was upset too. We argued. Badly. She didn’t speak to me. Soon after she went off to university and I stayed here, drawing my pictures and then marrying Neil. That’s all there was to it.’

  ‘So she did build a bonfire with your things then?’

  ‘Can we drop this?’

  ‘But these things might be important, Claire.’ He glanced round again. There was no-one at the bar. ‘Who else did you hang out with back then?’

  ‘Julia…Tim…Fiona. Sometimes other kids from the village but not regularly. There weren’t many others.’

  ‘Who’s Fiona?’

  ‘Jane’s cousin. She was younger and wasn’t there all the time.’

  ‘Where did you meet?’

  ‘All over. On the riverbanks, on the green sometimes.’

  She stopped. These were personal memories, some tender, some funny, some poignant. She kept them carefully packaged up, preferring to feel in control of how she thought about them - and of how much of them she was prepared to share.

  ‘We often met in the clearing,’ she added slowly, ‘and round the boathouse. It’s on Pennyman land, set back from the river in the woods. You can get to it from the house or the river. Explain why this is important?’

  ‘I’ve been trying to think through all the connections. They say a child is most likely to be taken by someone they know. Which would probably mean someone you know.’ He shrugged apologetically. ‘I know it’s none of my business. I’m not trying to interfere, only help.’

  ‘I can’t see how our childish schoolyard infatuations could have any bearing on Gilly. And I don’t get your logic: Gilly didn’t know Jane. She had moved away.’

  ‘But she’d come back. Before she came to the Yard, Jane worked for a couple of years in Bodmin, before that five years at a place on the edge of Fowey. She told me. You’re saying you never saw her?’

  ‘No.’ Claire frowned, thinking back to that first catch-up conversation. Jane hadn’t told her a lie about where she had been but she had neatly evaded the issue.

  ‘I’m not suggesting that Jane’s involved,’ he added. ‘I don’t see it and it seems unlikely, especially if she didn’t know Gilly and she wasn’t living in the village, but you see the point I’m making?’ Adam drank the last of his whisky. ‘Everyone assumed it was a tourist, an outsider. But it’s much more likely that it was someone that Gilly would trust. Possibly someone you didn’t know; more likely someone you did. Someone close. That’s what I’ve gathered from newspapers anyway - the high profile stories.’

  ‘Someone close?’ She stared into his face. ‘I don’t see that.’

  He held her gaze. ‘Maybe because you don’t want to.’

  Her frown deepened. Her thoughts settled back on Jane, niggling at her. ‘I did take something of Gilly’s to show Jane, you know – just in case she could read it.’ She shrugged.

  ‘And?’

  ‘It was a waste of time. Gilly was content, she said. Content. And that was supposed to make me happy.’ Claire blew out her lips in disgust. ‘She went into a sort of trance, said she saw trees waving in the wind - and water, except that it came and went.’

  ‘What did you give her?’

  ‘A hair slide. She sat and held it while we conjured up Gilly’s energy. It was…it was…’ She failed to find a suitable word and gave up.

  They sat in silence but Jane’s behaviour and her economy with the truth lingered in Claire’s mind.

  She finished her wine and stood up, slipping her coat back on. ‘Thanks for the meal, Adam. I enjoyed it.’ She smiled. ‘Now you have more than repaid my hospitality.’

  Adam slung his jacket on and walked with her to the door. Outside it was dark but there was a clear sky and stars twinkled brightly.

  ‘I could walk you home, if you like,’ he offered.

  ‘Thank you, but it’s not even ten minutes’ walk. And I have my torch.’

  She pulled the torch out of her pocket and waved it in front of him triumphantly, then set off walking - a little unsteadily - the dark roads back towards her house. Reaching the junction near the bridge, she thought she heard a noise and turned round but saw no-one and carried on walking. Adam’s words still rang in her ears: Some
one you know. Someone close.

  And her mind flipped back to an early spring evening twenty-four years previously and the red and flickering glow of a fire on the further bank of the river, its flames caught and attenuated by their watery reflections. And a dark figure standing by the side of the fire, faceless in the half-light and yet clearly looking her way defiantly across the water.

  Chapter 11

  Claire slept in the following morning. When she came to she was heavy in head and limb, unused to drinking so much, and it was nine-thirty when she finally pushed the curtains back and stood looking out over her back garden to the trees beyond. From this window she could see most of Eddie’s patch too, his neatly tilled vegetable plots and the little hen house and run at the bottom of his garden.

  And she saw Eddie himself. He was walking in that stiff-legged, rolling gait of his down the path towards the hen house and then the next minute he was falling forwards to land face downward on the ground. Claire watched him anxiously. He didn’t move. She grabbed her dressing-gown, throwing it on over her pyjamas, and forced her legs into activity. Automatically snatching up her phone, she slipped on an old pair of deck shoes by the back door and a couple of minutes later she was in Eddie’s garden, running down the stone path to reach him.

  ‘Eddie,’ she called softly, getting close, worried what she might find. He was lying half on the path, half over a flowerbed to one side, and he lay slightly twisted with one arm beneath him.

  ‘Eddie, are you all right?’ She reached out a hand and touched him on the shoulder.

  He lifted his head and began struggling to turn over but he was caught up in a bushy hydrangea, wedged between its dry, chunky stems and dead, brown flower heads.

  ‘I’m stuck,’ he grunted. ‘Give me a hand.’

  ‘Here.’

  She grabbed his free hand and he pulled, stiffly swinging himself free, enough to allow his trapped arm to move and he eased himself out of the bush onto the path where he sat, legs stretched out awkwardly in front of him. He rubbed at his knees, glancing back at the broken stems of the hydrangea, and produced a strange, plaintive grunt.

  ‘I’ve ruined it.’

  ‘It’ll grow again,’ said Claire. ‘You gave me a fright. Are you all right? Can you stand?’

  ‘I’ll just sit here a minute.’

  He looked at her sidelong in that way he had. She saw his eyes running over her dressing-gown which had opened to reveal her pyjamas, saw him examining her hair which was wild and tumbled and hadn’t yet seen a brush.

  ‘What happened?’ She pulled the gown tighter.

  ‘Caught my toe on the brick edgin’.’ He pointed to the sides of the path where raised bricks separated it from the flower bed. ‘One of them’s loose; the devil’d moved. I’ll have to fix it.’

  She had heard him talking to the hens in the garden, mumbling and making odd clicking noises but she had never had a proper conversation with him before. His voice when he spoke to her now was harsh and flat, with a broad Cornish burr.

  ‘Do you want me to call a doctor?’ She brandished the phone from her pocket.

  ‘God, no. Nothin’ wrong with me. Not havin’ a doctor fussin’. Here.’

  He held out both his hands and she heaved him up, bracing her feet against his. For a small man, he felt surprisingly heavy. She looked at him uncertainly.

  ‘Are you sure you’re all right? Did you hit your head?’

  ‘I’ll be fine dreckly. Don’t want no fussin’, y’hear?’

  ‘OK, OK.

  She watched him shrug and ease his joints out and the next minute he was tottering away from her towards the hen house as if she didn’t exist. She smiled ruefully and turned away.

  *

  Later that day, having done all the jobs around the house and grabbed a sandwich for her lunch, Claire sat down with a mug of tea and a notepad. As if it might help her think, she put the hair slide on the arm of the chair: a focal point, a talisman perhaps. After the disillusionment of her meeting with Jane, she had felt helpless, dejected that there was no way forward, nothing left to do. But Adam’s comments had started her thinking again and she stared at the pad, a pen poised to write down anything or anyone that came into her mind, any tiny detail which might prove significant.

  Someone that Gilly would trust. Someone close. It was easy for Adam to say, but Claire struggled to process the thought. Since finding the slide she had accepted that someone in the village had taken Gilly but she had unconsciously assumed that it was someone on the periphery of their world, a relative stranger. If it was someone close… It was unbearably difficult to imagine. It also seemed unlikely. Even so, she had to think it through.

  She started by considering the unlikeliest people of all: her own family. Her father had been devastated when Gilly disappeared; he had been a kind and gentle man and he had adored her. The idea that he had had anything to do with his granddaughter’s disappearance was unthinkable. In any case, he had died two years since and the slide had only just surfaced. And her brother, Jon, had been living in Canada for nearly twenty years already. He rarely returned to Britain. She mentally ticked them both off with a feeling of relief.

  So what about the Pennymans? She was surprised to find that she thought more highly of them than she would have expected, or at least, not as badly, and she failed to see how any of them could be involved. She’d told Adam that they were ‘straightforward’ and she was convinced it was true. They were arrogant sometimes, high-handed maybe; they were self-involved perhaps and obsessed with their wine and their business; they were insensitive occasionally and clannish. But did any of that make them likely to kidnap a child? And one of their own at that? No. So where did that leave her?

  Jane? She had no real reason to suspect Jane. It was difficult to imagine her childhood friend taking Gilly because of a failed teenage romance twenty-four odd years ago. Did petty grudges last that long? She frowned. Maybe. But, as she had told Adam, Gilly had never met the woman as far as Claire knew so she wouldn’t have been someone the girl would have trusted. While Claire realised now there was no future in their friendship, while she distrusted the woman’s supposed gifts and her authenticity as a healer or psychic, she struggled to see Jane as a kidnapper. She paused though, pen in hand, and the image of that fire loomed into her mind again. She wrote Jane’s name down.

  So who else? A family friend maybe. There hadn’t been that many friends once Jane had left. Claire’s time had mostly been taken up with work and raising a young family. There had been other friends at school but her contact with them over the years had been scant and, since most had moved away, restricted to hastily scribbled news on Christmas cards each year. Though there had been a young couple who’d lived over the road on the estate. She and Neil had gone out with them for a meal a couple of times, years ago. The man had been an accountant and the vineyard had employed him for a while. But Neil had seriously fallen out with him because of something to do with the vineyard accounts and the Pennymans had employed a new accountant after that. She’d forgotten about that until now, so maybe here was somebody else with a grudge. She felt a buzz of excitement; she was getting somewhere. Except that she couldn’t remember his name - or his wife’s. Damn. But she could check if they still lived there.

  She drank her now lukewarm coffee and looked at the pad in disgust. One name and a question mark. That wasn’t going to get her very far. But she was being stupid, wasn’t she, because she had forgotten Beattie, their erstwhile neighbour. Patty Miller who’d run the bric-a-brac stall had said Beattie donated something to the stall on the day of the fête but that she had also left goods in the pub garages beforehand. Beattie herself was a sweet and ingenuous soul who wouldn’t hurt a fly but she might have seen someone else leaving something there. She also knew everybody and she’d be able to tell Claire if that couple still lived over the road and what their names were. Claire immediately grabbed her coat and went out.

  *

  The small estate Claire a
nd Neil had once lived on had changed little in the intervening five and a half years since they had left. For the first years of their marriage they had rented, then bought their first house here when Gilly was a toddler. Built in the seventies, the estate was a broad sweeping loop of semi-detached dwellings, the houses brick and breeze block, rendered and painted, with neatly tiled roofs. One or two, she noted now, had extended either into the garage or above it; someone had Japanese-themed their front garden with stones, bamboo, and a decorative water feature. Beattie and George’s, though, was as it had always been: a small, immaculately kept lawn surrounded by weed-free beds of carefully pruned roses. George liked his roses.

  But it was a strange feeling to walk up Beattie’s front drive and look back across the wire-mesh fence at the house where she and Neil had once been so happy. Claire turned away and briskly rang Beattie’s bell. This was a little odd too. Only once had she been inside their neighbour’s house. Though helpful and charming in many ways, Beattie had also been distant and George could be bad-tempered. Claire had sometimes heard him shouting at Beattie in the garden, complaining about something she had either done or not done, though they had both been good with the girls, giving them sweets over the fence, or fruit from the garden, even returning the occasional errant ball.

  The house was silent but there was a car on the drive. She rang the bell a second time.

  This time she heard footsteps, the sound of bolts being pulled back, and Beattie opened the door just wide enough to allow her to stand in the gap. Her face crinkled into a smile.

  ‘Claire. How nice to see you. It’s been so long since you were here. What can I do for you?’

  ‘Hello Beattie. I wondered if you might have a minute to talk? I’m sorry, I should have rung first.’

  ‘Not at all. What is it?’ Beattie glanced behind her into the hallway and pulled the door even tighter.