So many flowers, such blazing sunshine – it was all wrong. It should have been a day like today, they thought, peering out through the skylight at the rain. A day like this would have been far more fitting.
The vicar, deliberately averting his gaze from Dora and her nieces, talked of the abrupt slide from summer to autumn as a metaphor for Ian and Liz’s lives. No mention was made of Dean who, released without charge and driven back to Witchwood in a patrol car less than twenty minutes ago, floated restless in the wings, his guitar a wreath slung around his neck. Caroline pictured the dagger that had since been returned to Dora on condition she got it registered and kept it somewhere safe. The police had dismissed it as the murder weapon, because although the blood on it had been identified as human, it was more than fifty years old, and therefore wasn’t a match to Ellie Fry’s.
‘ … their life with Ellie –’ Reverend Mortmain projected his poetry to the rear of the crowded church – ‘was a sap-filled wood in spring, and now,’ he paused to roll his eyes over the funeral-goers, accusing beneath his thick black brows, ‘to have her taken from them in such a violent, evil way, has become as withered and friable as an autumn leaf … ’
‘Quite the poet, isn’t he?’ Dora whispered almost admiringly, looking at the sisters, rigid as stones either side of her soft circumference.
Identifying the veneration in the voice emanating from under that high wedge of black hair made the tearful Caroline want to give her aunt a Chinese burn. Was she going after the vicar now Gordon was out of the way? She was an old woman, for God’s sake, it was disgusting. And she wasn’t even upset: look at her, make-up still intact – all that made her cry was Beethoven and her soppy Richard Clayderman records. The contempt Caroline had for her aunt’s fickleness hardened around her heart like the rind of a cheese. There was no way she would forget Dean, or ever let another man touch her. It didn’t matter that he’d been horrible and broken his promise by choosing Amy over her; if she couldn’t have him, she wouldn’t have anyone. What would be the point? She’d never find a man like him as long as she lived.
Caroline made her silent vow as she rootled the shadowy pockets of the church for the object of her obsession. She knew Dean was in here somewhere, she’d seen him skulk inside: careful, not letting his family see him, tugging down his cuffs, nervous as a bridegroom. Her bridegroom. She sighed, the sound loud enough for Joanna to lean forward in her seat and feed her a look that made her snap back her neck.
*
The Reverend Mortmain, apostolic behind his spectacles, invited the congregation to drop their heads in prayer. Dora closed her eyes obediently, aware of her nieces shifting beside her, their eyes red from crying while hers remained strangely dry. If she concentrated on her sadness for Gordon she might be able to summon tears; might, if the reality hadn’t been that he was nothing more than a stupid fantasy. Misreading the frequency of his visits as a sign he was interested in her, when they weren’t about her at all. But then Gordon was a hard man to fathom, a hard man to touch. She thought it was because he was hiding something precious, like a pearl in a shell, but now she knows there was nothing. He was empty. An empty shell.
In Loving Memory , Dora read the Order of Service, the black on white under the banner of a simple gold cross. She supposed it was because she hardly knew Ellie that she couldn’t rally the necessary emotion. But what was the matter with her? It didn’t get worse than the death of a child. Responsive to the darkening mood echoed in the weather, she tried to let the occasion move her – Lillian’s organ-playing was stirring enough.
These supposed cold, unfeeling traits of hers were what Caroline accused her of during the argument that unravelled after the policeman and the family liaison officer left. Remembering this made Dora think of the Cinderglade incident too: the reason, she assumed, for Gordon’s sudden departure to Italy. Dora won’t ever forgive her niece for that, any more than she would for tramping lipstick all through the cottage. The little sod, blaming Joanna – Dora wasn’t stupid. She could envisage Caroline’s sour-faced temper just because she didn’t invite her to feed the horses. But she’d better watch it. Dora adjusted herself. The little minx might start making up stories about her next.
She listened to the rain buffeting St Oswald’s roof, spilling along the guttering, down the drainpipes, enclosing her further into the hush. Would it ever stop? On many levels, this was the worst summer she’d experienced here. But it wasn’t only the weather that had ultimately made her decide. She made the call before coming out; she was going to pay to have Pillowell refurbished, rent it out as a holiday let. Tilly and Frank Petley were talking about setting up a cleaning company – let them do it, the Saturday changeover, clean linen, that kind of thing. Dora couldn’t imagine she’d want to visit the place again. All she hoped was that possible holidaymakers wouldn’t be put off by recent events; that the journalists camped out on the village green wouldn’t be littering the place for too much longer, and this little nook in the woods would be allowed to return to its sleepy self.
‘I never got to hold her, they just took her away,’ Liz cried out from her position beside the tiny white coffin.
The congregation responded as one and lurched upright in their pews as Dean – perhaps taking advantage of eyes being elsewhere – stepped out of the shadows. Unshaven and sporting a nasty set of purple half-moons beneath his eyes, he looked oddly unfamiliar in an ill-fitting black suit that obviously didn’t belong to him. At the sight of him, a gasp went up from the churchgoers, and he hovered on the edges of the transept, catching no one’s eye except his father’s. With a reproachful look from beneath his dripping curls, he began to pluck the opening chords to ‘Yellow Bird’ into the confused silence.
A burst of action and Ian Fry leapt to his feet. A muted scuffle ensued, and Dean shot off down the aisle, guitar sighing as it banged against his thighs. Ian hesitated before re-joining his wife, wanting to ensure his son had gone. But without her husband’s big, brawny torso to shield her from the unwelcome scrutiny of the congregation, Liz was exposed to the murmuring and muttering of those who’d come to pay tribute to her dead child.
‘I pity them,’ Caroline heard people whispering behind her.
‘Look at her, poor thing – such a devoted mother.’
‘She’s aged terribly.’
‘And Ian, such a happy-go-lucky chap – he loved Ellie to bits.’
Gradually, now the rain had eased, the flock of mourners tiptoed into the murky daylight. Edging forwards, necks extended, they emerged one by one from the gloom. Careful to keep their high heels and polished leather uppers on the gravelled path, no one dared venture on to the sodden grass where the stone-faced angels outnumbered their congregation.
At the sound of raised voices, Caroline turned to see it was Ellie’s grief-weary parents who now blocked the arch of the church doorway.
‘You – you’re still here?’ Liz flew at Dean: a wild animal, flailing and clawing and screaming. ‘You bastard. You bastard. The cops might not think you did it, but I know … I know you killed my baby. You were abusing her all along, weren’t you? I know you were, and Carrie saw you, and I saw the bruises … the bruises you gave her … Clear off, go on, clear the hell outta here … I swear, if I ever lay eyes on you again, I’ll kill you.’
It was someone else who eventually prised Liz off her stepson. Ian didn’t move, didn’t speak; he simply turned from his boy to put an arm around his wife’s juddering shoulders. Calming, soothing, the gesture required no words, and Dean read it perfectly. His father’s loyalty displayed in the tenderness of his act, as the sky, serious now, dropped solemn rain. Umbrellas bounced open. One. Two. The third, a huge black dome, was ceremoniously held up to shield the blighted couple.
The mourners, no doubt with their own warm-skinned children to go home to, whispered Dean’s assumed guilt behind their black cotton gloves. It mattered little that the eighteen-year-old had been released without charge after a two-night stint in police cust
ody, or that the supposed murder weapon he’d been accused of stealing from Dora Muller was nothing of the sort. The fact remained that Caroline Jameson said she’d seen him bullying Ellie the morning she went missing, and then him charging off after her on his motorbike. It was all the proof they needed.
Shunned by everyone, Dean shrugged and walked away. Intending to pack what he could carry in the panniers on his motorbike and leave before his father and stepmother came home. But Amy Mortmain – her hair lifted by the ululation of the wind and flapping like a big, black sail – ripped through the congregation after him, a tide of tutting disapproval in her wake.
‘Please ,’ she begged when at last Dean turned to her. ‘Please don’t leave me here.’
‘I have to,’ he said gently.
Amy, up on tiptoes, touched the tender-looking skin beneath his eyes. ‘Take me with you,’ she pleaded, close to his lips. Then taking his hand, she pressed his palm against her tummy. ‘Don’t leave me alone with this.’ Her voice breaking. ‘Please, not in this place.’ She flung her head around in desperation, aware of her father’s black shape on her periphery. ‘When they get whoever did it, they’ll know it wasn’t you … Don’t go, please don’t go.’
It was all too much for Dean, now unsteady on his feet and fighting back tears. An upsurge of dread rippled through the onlookers – was he about to change his mind? No, they exhaled their relief, what followed extinguished any fear of that.
‘Your mother needs you.’ Dean broke off, then kissed and returned Amy’s hand, obviously understanding nothing of what his girlfriend had tried to communicate. ‘She needs you here. If I take you with me, you’ll only end up hating me too.’ He looked around, addressed the mill of mourners: ‘Just like this lot do … every single one of them … Happy to believe the vicious lies of a spiteful thirteen-year-old kid. I never stood a chance.’
Present Day
‘What the hell d’you think you’re doing? You can’t just barge in here. Get out.’ Joanna, blunted by sleep, tries to reason with her intruder; tries harder to keep the terror hammering in her chest out of her demand.
‘Oh, you’d like me to leave, would you?’ a face she remembers from childhood mocks: a face scored with crows’ feet and a lifetime of cigarettes and booze. ‘Well, first off, I’d like my suitcase.’
‘Look, my husband’s going to be back any minute, and he’s not going to take—’ She stops talking, watches a stomach-churning smile curve his mouth.
‘Liar,’ he growls from beneath a set of eyebrows wet with sweat. ‘You’re here on your own. I’ve been watching you.’
Stepping closer: invidious, intimidating; the sheer brutality held in his eyes is enough to force her back down the gloomy passageway, into the sitting room.
‘Now, where is it?’ he asks through the frantic barking of Buttons, without raising his voice.
Joanna shakes her head. The gesture is futile; he’s already seen the suitcase lying open on the floor.
‘Been having a good old nose, have you?’ Rustling inside his bulky blue anorak, his stony sarcasm makes her flinch. ‘Find anything interesting?’
She can’t speak, the room is suddenly too small to stand up in, too small to think.
‘A little bird told me you’d been sniffing around.’ His cadence – calm, controlled – makes his presence all the more lethal. ‘You really shouldn’t go poking around in other people’s lives. You really shouldn’t.’ He peels back his lips, forms another noxious smile that is as menacing as the increasing wind hustling the walls of the cottage. ‘If you knew what was good for you, you’d have stayed outta this. Sticking your oar in – you don’t know what you’ve done, do you?’ He cocks his head, ugly in the pinkish lamplight.
‘You took those photos, didn’t you?’
‘Just give them to me, please.’
His composure makes her shrink away, but doesn’t stop her asking, ‘Why did you take them, let alone keep them?’
‘’Cos I couldn’t bear to throw them away,’ he laughs.
‘Your trophies, are they?’ Her repulsion emboldening her. ‘They’re little girls … What sort of person takes photos of little girls?’ The challenge comes in spite of herself; in spite of pushing her spine to the flaking wallpaper to stop herself from shaking.
‘I like little girls,’ he leers, close to her.
‘You’ve got some of me in there, why have you kept them?’ She flaps a frightened arm at his suitcase; the stuff he wants back.
His eyes narrowed, angled at the floor, measuring what he’s going to do next.
‘You wanna watch your mouth.’ His breath, rancid, crawling, condensing to a cloud. Joanna ducks away, but too quick, too strong, he seizes her wrists.
‘It was you, wasn’t it?’ She winces under his grip. Seeing it clearly – the savagery made identifiable by truth. And yet still the words keep coming. She really shouldn’t rile him, it wouldn’t take much to push him over the edge.
‘You did it. You killed her … you killed Ellie.’ Joanna’s heart: a bouncing jackrabbit. And she sees the black bruises, curved as finger ends, on her friend’s arms as plainly as if she’d been standing beside her now.
‘Shut your mouth.’ He shakes her. Fierce. His stubble dangerously close to her face. The spurt of movement releases a waft of stale cigarettes, the reek of unwashed armpits. The smell grapples for room alongside their tall shadows that have bent in half against the wall.
‘She was only a little girl – what did she ever do to you?’ Stupid to challenge him, but she can’t stem the flow, she wants answers. ‘Why hurt Ellie?’
‘Because she was gonna tell her mother.’
‘Tell her mother what? What were you doing to her?’
The look he gives answers her question.
‘But why her?’ Nausea rising. ‘Why Ellie?’
‘Because she was there. It was easy.’
‘What about that Freya girl, you’ve got pictures of her – did you kill her too?’ Joanna, remembering the contents of her sister’s scrapbook, the conversation with Liz.
‘You know nothing about it. Meddling … you stupid bitch.’ He steps closer, the sourness on his breath buffeting her cheek. ‘You and your fucking sister … It had to be you two who found her, didn’t it.’
It isn’t a question, and Joanna doesn’t answer.
Mike – where the hell are you ? Hardly daring to breathe, Joanna makes her voiceless and desperate plea to a god she has never totally believed in.
‘You haven’t got a clue what it’s been like for me, have you?’ he accuses. ‘Living your perfect little life. Well, just so you know, mine’s been in ruins ever since.’ He loosens his grip a fraction but pinned to the wall by his broad body, there’s no escaping him, nowhere to go. ‘But it would’ve been a whole lot worse for me if she’d opened her fucking gob and told everyone. Oh, yeah, poor little Ellie – poor little slut, more like. Coming on to me all the time . And when I took her up on it, threatening to tell.’
The monster wants me to feel sorry for him ; look at him – he actually believes his twisted, pathetic reasons justify the evilness of his crime . Joanna keeps her thoughts to herself and tries not to make any sudden moves. Her chest tightening, her mouth dry, a portion of her brain constricts in panic. There is something terrifyingly calculating about him, something calm and deadly – he’s insane, and she knows he is going to strike, she sees the brutality building behind his eyes.
‘Yeah, it was me. I killed Ellie.’ He spits his confession. A confession Joanna wasn’t ready for. ‘I don’t think I even meant to kill her, but, well … ’ Another smile that makes the blood slow in her veins, ‘once I’d done it … ’ He tapers off.
What’s he saying ? Snatching back her arm, Joanna gawps at him, wishing she could close the lid over the truth she doesn’t believe she consciously sought.
‘Happy now?’ A callous laugh. His spittle on her ear, in her hair. ‘’Cos you know I can’t let you go now, don’t you?’ A grave
lly whisper. ‘Not now you know. That would be beyond stupid, wouldn’t it?’
He strikes her hard across the face, and she folds to the floor. He’s going to kill me , her thoughts in the ringing aftershock, catching his satisfied, almost gleeful look. Blood trickles down her face as she gropes for something, anything, to use as a weapon when he lunges for her again. This time she’s ready for it and grabs his ankle. Stumbling forward, fumbling for the bevelled sideboard to save his fall, the lamp crashes to the floor, extinguishing their shadows. With blood in her mouth, she uses the seconds he needs to correct himself to crawl towards the light haemorrhaging from the hall.
‘Come here, you bitch.’
Close on her heels, he dives for her, dragging her towards him by her socked feet. She thrashes to get free, but his arms are strong, practised in the art of pinning and confining. And in the struggle, things are knocked over and crash to the lumpy rugs, splintering against the wooden boards beneath. Clumsy, messy, he wrestles her to the ground, holds her wrists above her head with one hand and straddles her. A drop of sweat lands on her neck. Then her lip. Tasting salt, along with her blood, the world spins and stops. She cowers, primed for him to strike again. Buttons is barking. Weaving between them: the pink patina of his gums, his puppy-white teeth circling their heads; ineffectual as a toddler. On her periphery, his foot swings out to boot her dog aside. A sickening crack and Buttons yelps and falls away. She rams her knees into her attacker’s crotch – for Buttons, for her – and as he scrabbles to his feet, leaning down to strike her again, she smashes her heel into his head and a dart of pain shoots from foot to groin.
Vulnerable without her boots, her thoughts solidifying with a bizarre regret for removing them as she tears away on all fours. The elastic of her ponytail has worked down to within a smidge of her hair’s end, but she crashes on through her confusion, aiming for the searing white light of the kitchen. His booming voice inches away, as strands of hair float about her face, stinging her eyes, and she scrambles the length of the hall before he catches her. Stretched out, he snatches hold of her damaged foot and squeezes. She screams in agony and in her effort to get upright, loses her sock and the floor slips beneath her. With an almighty thud, she’s down. Down on the slippery linoleum with him mad-eyed and close to her face.
A Place to Lie Page 29