by Sue Wallman
“Someone stopped their car to take a photo of the house when we arrived,” I say. “Did something happen here?”
Evan screws his face up. “It’s nothing.”
“Come on!” says Tatum. “Tell us!”
The hubbub in the kitchen fades as everyone tunes in to potentially interesting information.
“Uh-oh,” says Marc, leaning back against the table to rest his knee. “Don’t tell me this place was used for sex parties.”
“Marc!” hisses Elaine.
Clive clears his throat. “Nothing like that. Local stuff, really.”
“You can’t leave us hanging,” says Tatum.
“Some bones were found in the garden,” says Evan slowly. He pulls his hand over his nose, embarrassed now. The rest of us move closer to hear more easily.
Mum says, “Oh, how awful.”
Clive takes a deep breath. “The person – the lady – who lived here before we took the place on,” he begins. He places his toolbox on the floor again. “She, er … she told the matron of her nursing home to look for a body in the garden.”
“Did she murder someone?” asks Tatum.
“Erm, well, we’re not sure yet,” says Clive.
“Who was it? The body, I mean,” asks Poppy from her place at the table, her voice spinning through the stillness.
Clive grimaces. “Her sister.”
“How old was she?” asks Elaine.
“Ah,” says Clive. He looks uncomfortable, and I realize Elaine’s asked a key question. “It was way back in the fifties, but I believe she was sixteen. It may have been natural causes.” We hear the doubt in his voice, as he says natural causes.
“Sixteen,” echoes Ivy. “There was a sixteen-year-old buried in this garden and no one knew?”
“We noticed the garden had been dug up by the garage as we drove in,” says Elaine. “Didn’t we, Marc? We thought you were embarking on some landscaping, Clive. But, oh – that’s where the body was buried.” Her voice has become a whisper.
Clive nods. “Yes, I’m so sorry. I assumed you’d have seen it in the news. But don’t let that spoil your visit; it all happened a long time ago.”
“I thought you said it happened a few weeks ago,” says Marc.
“I meant the death,” says Clive. “Once the media interest dies down, we’ll be back to business as normal.”
“Right,” says Marc. “Still, a bit of a shock though, mate.”
“Yes,” says Clive. “Of course. I understand.”
“I think we should get some sort of refund. The price has shot up a lot in recent years,” says Mum. A blush starts on her neck and works its way up to her cheeks. “But I know now’s not the time to discuss it.”
“I’m, uh, sure we can work something out. Let’s chat another time. Your food will be getting cold,” says Clive. “I’ll bring some wood over for the log-burning stove tomorrow. Give me a shout if there’s anything else.” He picks up the toolbox and the two of them leave.
Auntie Gabs puts her finger to her lips to stop us exploding into conversation until we hear Clive and Evan get into a vehicle. As soon as we hear car doors thudding shut, it begins:
A body in the garden?
She must have been murdered. Why else would you bury a body?
Why didn’t anyone notice she was missing?
God, how unpleasant. No wonder business isn’t booming.
I wonder if anyone was staying here at the time – can you imagine?
Who’s got a phone signal?
We don’t want to upset Poppy.
But it was sixty years ago.
Ah, look. It made the BBC news. How did we miss it?
Imagine keeping a secret like that all your adult life.
Yes, the best signal is always by the fridge.
I’ve never got a signal there.
It’s taking ages to load.
Did you ask Clive if he’s got plans to have Wi-Fi here?
I think it’s nice that the children have a break from social media.
Yeah, right, you want Wi-Fi just as much as we do.
Jakob, d’you have to wear that hat for this meal?
We watch a short clip, crowding round Elaine’s phone, groaning when it buffers every few seconds. There’s a sweeping shot of Roeshot House with a police car parked on the drive and the area around the garage taped off. The reporter, a man in a suit, says there was a deathbed confession from an elderly woman at a nursing home in the village.
She was called Alice Billings. It seems such an ordinary name for someone with a secret that big. She allegedly told staff at the nursing home where they would find the body of her sister, who died as a teenager.
A black-and-white, face-and-shoulders photo of Alice around the time of her sister’s death flashes up. She has a stiff, fifties, house-wifely hairstyle and wears a dress with a collar. She could be any age between eighteen and forty. The reporter says Alice was twenty-four, married and living in Roeshot House at the time. There’s another photo, not such a clear one, of her sister, Rose. She’s standing – oh my God, she’s standing outside the front door of Roeshot House, in a thick coat, holding a suitcase, and smiling happily. She looks young. Is she supposed to be sixteen in this photo, or was it taken when she was younger? I’d like to study those photos, but Elaine says the food is getting cold and it’s time for dinner.
We eat and talk about nothing but the logistics of how you could keep the death of your sixteen-year-old sister secret. Marc says it would be pretty much impossible these days with thermal-imaging cameras, forensic techniques, and CCTV in stations, airports and pretty much round every corner.
Auntie Gabs says that’s not true. There was a case not long ago where a woman had gone into a police station to say she’d killed her father several years before, and buried him in the garden. It depended on whether anyone noticed or cared whether the person had gone missing.
Tatum says she doesn’t understand why the police didn’t check through the records to see if Rose had ever booked a plane ticket for Switzerland, and Mum says in those days you would probably have taken the ferry and then a train, and Tatum says same difference, they should have checked the ferry records.
Elaine says, “Why would anyone have checked if they believed Alice Billings’s story?”
Steve asks if anyone’s watched the TV programme Hunted, but no one has.
Ivy says there must have been a whole lot more unsolved crimes before people had digital footprints.
Eventually Auntie Gabs brings the wine bottle down on the table and says she’s had enough. She doesn’t want to dwell on this Rose or anything to do with crime any more, and we’re upsetting Poppy.
We look at Poppy who says, “I don’t mind,” but her wobbly voice doesn’t match her words.
Ivy, next to her, places her arm round Poppy’s shoulder. “Sorry. We’ll stop,” she says.
“I’m looking forward to doing a spot of birdwatching tomorrow,” says Steve.
Nobody knows how to answer that apart from Mum, who says, “Sounds great!” despite having a phobia of birds ever since one accidentally flew into our kitchen and became trapped.
After we’ve eaten, everyone pitches in clearing the table, stacking the dishwasher and washing up the pans. Elaine takes a tea towel and stands near Mum, who’s wiping down the counters, and says in a fake-whisper, “Kate, if there’s ever an issue with affording your share of this place you must just say. Marc and I will help out.”
Mum stops wiping and straightens up. “You thought that because I said to Clive… No, I was making a general point.” She tacks on “thank you, though” and returns to the marble counter, attacking a splodge of spilled slow-cooked beef.
I turn to pour the water from the glass jug down the sink, imagining it sloshing over Elaine instead, and it’s followed by a prickling of guilt. Does Mum keep coming here even though we can’t really afford it because she knows I like it so much?
Auntie Gabs insists on “family time” in the lounge
before anyone disperses, which means games. The room still has Christmas decorations up: tinsel above the paintings of dogs and muscly horses, paper chains scalloped along one wall, and holly on the mantelpiece. Steve builds up the fire, going outside in the cold to fill the log basket, like the suck-up he is, while the rest of us fight over who gets to cuddle Baz, and what game we’re going to play. For some reason I didn’t quite catch, Jakob is demonstrating Irish dancing to Tatum, and the rest of us whoop and clap until he drops in a melodramatic heap on the carpet, saying he shouldn’t have danced after eating so much.
Ivy comes to sit next to me and says, “Tatum was looking at Evan, did you see? I think she likes him.”
“Really? You think so?” I sigh. That’s not what I needed to hear. I was planning to tell Ivy we should try and see him again. I thought she’d seen that I maybe liked him too.
Eventually everyone agrees on the drawing game, our own version of Pictionary, mainly because it’s Poppy’s favourite. We make two teams of five by drawing names from Jakob’s hat, while he uses the reflection from the glass in a painting to rearrange his hair.
We move to the other end of the lounge and sit at the dining table in two teams. I’m with Jakob’s parents, Ivy and Steve. Elaine has amassed a tin full of words and phrases that initially started as her trying to expand Jakob’s vocabulary. She adds new ones each year, and claims she can’t remember the phrases because there are so many.
Poppy goes first on the other team, taking a folded-up piece of paper from the tin, then refolding it so no one can see it and placing it in a bowl to prevent it from being picked again. The rest of her team crowd round her as she waits for Elaine to press the timer on her phone and shout Go. Poppy draws decisively with a pencil on the blank piece of paper in front of her: a person holding a stick.
“Conductor?” suggests Auntie Gabs.
Poppy shakes her head.
“Wizard,” whispers Steve, and I glare at him because he’s on our team, not theirs.
Tatum repeats it more loudly, and Poppy shakes her head. She draws little rectangles with hearts, clubs, spades and diamonds coming out of the person’s other hand.
“Poker player with a cattle prod,” murmurs Jakob.
“Magician!” calls Mum, and Poppy yays. Elaine checks the timer, and says, “One point.”
For our team, Ivy draws a trophy followed by a jacket, drawing an arrow to the inside of the jacket. It takes me a few seconds but I guess correctly that it’s the phrase “silver lining”. It’s a new one this year, but I guess we think in similar ways.
Tatum says she’ll draw next. “Hmm,” she says, as she reads her piece of paper from the tin. “This is really hard.”
“It’s easier for us because we’ve done some of these words before,” says Mum.
“But we try to do them in different ways,” says Auntie Gabs. “It makes it more fun when we’re creative.”
Mum nods. Gabs is the creative sister. She used to be a graphic designer. Mum works in admin with spreadsheets and numbers that have to match up.
Tatum draws a geometric shape. It looks like a coffin. Next to me, Ivy draws in her breath. I think of the words in the tin. We’ve never had “murder” or “death” or anything like that.
“Um, funeral,” says Jakob. The room is so still, I can hear the scratch of the pencil on the paper.
Now she’s drawn a figure of a person inside the coffin-shape. I look at Ivy and she winces. This is so inappropriate, considering what her family has gone through.
“Corpse?” asks Mum quietly.
“No,” says Tatum. “Keep going.”
She adds a skirt to the figure.
They try burial, dead, graveyard, Rest in Peace, coffin, grief, secret and mourning, and then they give up. “What was it?” asks Auntie Gabs as soon as the timer goes.
“Surprise,” says Tatum.
“What do you mean, surprise?” asks Jakob.
“That was the word,” says Tatum.
“How is that related to what you drew?” asks Mum. She doesn’t want to mention the word coffin again.
Tatum says, “Finding out about the body being in the garden was a surprise, wasn’t it?”
Nobody knows what to say apart from Poppy, who says, “I’d have drawn a person jumping out of a big birthday cake.”
“That would have been far better,” says Marc. “Much more in the spirit of the game.”
“It was fun seeing you guess, though,” says Tatum. “I added the coffin to help. I don’t suppose there was a coffin, though. They probably wrapped the body in a sheet or something.”
I inspect my fingernails, willing her to shut up.
“Tatum, drop the subject, please,” says Auntie Gabs sharply.
“Our turn now,” says Elaine. “I’ll draw.” She leans across the other team to take the pencil from Tatum.
FIVE
My bed is freezing. Our side of the house never properly heats up even when the boiler’s working. Tatum has changed into a T-shirt and leggings and is arranging her fluffy turquoise coat over her duvet. The duvet covers are new this year, white and stiff.
“You’ll need socks,” I say. “Just until your feet warm up the bed and then you can chuck them out.”
There’s a knock at the door. Ivy pops her head round. “Can I come in? It’s lonely in my room without Poppy.”
“Course,” I say. “Tell Jakob to join us.”
“I want to discuss the dead girl,” says Tatum, pulling her duvet up to her chin. “I don’t know why the adults are so squeamish about it.”
“They don’t want Poppy getting upset, and … it’s not a very nice subject,” I say. I wish she’d realize how thoughtless she’s being around Ivy.
“I’m sorry, but it’s hands down the most interesting thing about this house,” says Tatum. “Come on, Leah. You must be fascinated.”
“I’d like to know why,” I admit.
Ivy comes back with Jakob and we Amigos sit in my bed, under the duvet, squished up against my two pillows and the wall. Jakob points to the picture on the wall of Mowgli and Baloo from the film The Jungle Book and the three of us burst into a rendition of “The Bare Necessities”, and Ivy adds in some harmony. When Tatum starts to film us, we add exaggerated expressions and arm movements.
“Love it,” says Tatum when we warble the last note.
“We should so go busking with that,” says Jakob.
Tatum plays us back some footage, and Ivy says, “I’m not sure we’re ready for busking yet.”
We wriggle around and get comfortable. “So,” says Tatum. “Let’s talk about the dead girl. Rose.”
The vibe changes immediately, but this conversation is inevitable now that we’re away from the adults and Poppy.
“Why do we think Rose died? Do we think it was natural causes, an accident, suicide or murder?”
“I vote murder,” says Jakob. “Her death was covered up. Something bad must have gone down.”
I look at Ivy. “I vote murder too,” she says. She doesn’t seem to mind talking about this.
“I don’t know,” I say.
Tatum says, “It’s got to be murder, hasn’t it? The old lady must have done it.” She sits up, takes the fluffy coat from on top of her duvet and puts it on. “I’m so cold I might have to sleep in this.”
“Why would she kill her sister?” asks Ivy.
“An argument gone wrong?” I suggest. “Jealousy? Something financial? Her husband might have been involved.”
“It could be anything,” says Tatum. “I know!” She kicks her duvet away with her feet and leaps out of bed. “I’ve got a brilliant idea! This is the perfect topic for a documentary. It’s exactly the kind of thing I’ve been looking for, for my showreel. The camera on my new phone is amazing. Who’s in?”
The three of us look at each other. “We won’t be able to find out much,” says Ivy doubtfully.
Tatum shakes her head. She sits on the edge of her bed and leans towards us. �
�’Course not, but it will be fun documenting bits and pieces. It’ll be the journey of our time here – and when I’m home I’ll keep an eye on what the police discover, and I can add stuff.”
“Hmm,” says Jakob. “Who decides what gets filmed? Who’s going to be presenting the documentary? Just you?”
“OK,” says Tatum, spreading out her hands. “How about we make this an organic process?”
I wince at the pretentiousness of it.
“Everyone can suggest ideas and have a turn speaking to camera,” continues Tatum. “I shoot some stuff, edit it, and if there’s anything you’re really unhappy about, you can say and we can have a discussion about it.”
We look at each other.
“It’ll be a really cool project,” says Tatum, “and let’s face it, there’s not a whole heap else to do here, is there?”
“I’m in,” says Jakob.
“So am I,” says Ivy.
“And me,” I say. We’ve not done anything like that before. Tatum needs to self-filter more, but it is a cool project.
“It’s irritating we can’t get Wi-Fi,” says Tatum. “That’s the first thing I’m going to do tomorrow – find Wi-Fi in the village and research Alice.” She opens up her phone, starts typing, then stops. “Nope. Number one on the list is to film the burial site. Hey” – she lowers her phone – “we could go out now? In the dark?”
I can’t think of anything worse. “Eugh.”
“No way,” says Jakob. “It’ll be cold and horrible out there, but don’t let me stop you.”
“Ditto,” says Ivy.
“You three are such wimps,” says Tatum. I don’t like the annoyed look she’s giving us.
“The light’s too bad to see anything properly,” I say.
“I’m not after perfect,” says Tatum. “I’m after atmosphere.”
Jakob breathes out noisily. “In that case, lean out of the window.”
We look towards the window between the two beds, at the thick curtains I had drawn as quickly as I could when I’d come into the bedroom earlier.
“Of course!” says Tatum. “This room looks out at the front garden.”
We climb out of bed to see. Tatum opens the window and we gasp as the freezing, shocking air gusts in. It takes our breath for a second or two. We shiver as we peer into the darkness, even Tatum in that big coat of hers. Our eyes adjust, making out the shadows of the three cars and the garage, and the trees. I strain my eyes, but I can’t tell where the grass of the front lawn changes to earth, where the body was dug up.