In Her Shadow

by Douglas, Louise

  I smiled at her. ‘Don’t you think John would mind me tagging along?’

  ‘He said he’d love to take you. Charlotte can’t go because of the girls.’

  ‘So you’ve talked about this already?’

  ‘We’re concerned about you.’

  ‘Of course you are. If you started seeing dead people in the museum I’d be concerned about you too!’

  Rina opened her mouth and closed it again.

  ‘I know you’ve been talking about me,’ I said. ‘Everyone’s walking on eggshells. Everyone’s treating me like I’m losing my mind.’

  Rina winced.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said at once. ‘Sorry, Rina, that was rude and unkind.’ I covered my face with my hands. ‘I’m so sorry.’

  Rina stood quietly for a moment and then she said, ‘Hannah, we’re your friends. We aren’t judging you, we’re not interfering – we’re trying to help.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘You don’t have to cope with this thing, whatever it is you’re going through, on your own.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘Oh, don’t be grateful. We’re being selfish. There will come a time when we’ll need you to look after us.’

  I thought of John. I thought of Charlotte.

  Rina realized she was making progress. ‘And, Hannah, dear, it’s not as if we’re asking you to do something … objectionable.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I’m sure you mentioned that you’d always wanted to go to Berlin.’

  I smiled up at Rina. ‘You’re right.’

  ‘I’m always right,’ she said.

  CHAPTER FORTY

  ADAM TREMLETT NEEDED five pints of blood and was in intensive care for three days.

  Trethene was buzzing with rumour and speculation. To start with, everybody believed the version of the story that my mother had told my father: that Mr Brecht had found Adam Tremlett inside his house, pocketing Mrs Brecht’s jewellery. For Mr Brecht to react as he did, in such circumstances, was understandable.

  But then a second version of events began to do the rounds. Someone in the Smuggler’s Rest had spoken to Adam Tremlett when Adam was in his cups one evening – as happened quite regularly before he was attacked. Adam said he’d been invited to Thornfield House to quote for some landscaping work on the garden. Mr Brecht wanted to turn a small piece of land into a memorial to his wife. He’d asked Adam not to mention this to anyone, as it was to be a surprise for his daughter, but Adam had been so enthusiastic about the project that, after he’d had more than a few, he’d talked. If this was true, then Pieter Brecht had planned the whole thing. He’d lured Adam into the house, planning to kill him and make it look as if he’d been acting in self-defence. If Ellen hadn’t intervened, it would have been cold-blooded murder.

  The village was divided in opinion. Sympathies were mixed. At school, people kept asking me what was true and what was lies. I didn’t enjoy this kind of attention, and I knew no more than anyone else. All I could do was insist, always, that Mr Brecht was a good man at heart, that he would never do anything terrible unless he had been provoked beyond reason, but I wondered.

  If he was capable of plotting to kill Adam, and if he had been prepared to wait so long to take his revenge, what might he still be planning to do to Jago?

  I was relieved that Mr Brecht had gone away.

  The police went to the hospital every day, and when Adam Tremlett was well enough to be interviewed, he said he didn’t remember anything about what had happened in Thornfield House or how he came to be injured. When this news filtered through to our family it promoted a heated discussion. Jago said Mum should go to the police and tell them what she knew, but Mum pointed out that it was all hearsay. She never saw Adam Tremlett, Mr Brecht or Ellen. By the time she arrived at Thornfield House, Adam had been taken away in an ambulance and Ellen and her father were not present. All Mum knew was what Mrs Todd told her as the two women cleaned the front room – which was that Adam Tremlett had broken in and Pieter Brecht had hit him with the poker. She didn’t know if Tremlett had threatened Mr Brecht, or lashed out at him. She didn’t know if what Mr Brecht had done had been an act of justifiable self-defence. There were plenty of regulars in the Smuggler’s Rest willing to testify that Mr Brecht was worried about intruders, and there was a surprising amount of sympathy for him. People were fed up with rising crime rates. They thought it was about time somebody made a stand to protect their own property. Adam was a drunk and a hothead. He wasn’t saying anything to defend himself, and now the Brechts and Mrs Todd were gone, there was nobody to corroborate the story one way or the other.

  Mum didn’t want to be involved any more than she already was.

  ‘It’s not our business, Malcolm,’ she said to Dad. ‘It’s water under the bridge now, best let it be.’ And Dad nodded and told Jago to stop mithering his mum.

  Nobody knew where the Brechts and Mrs Todd had gone. It was as if they’d vanished off the face of the earth. Jago was almost out of his mind with worry for Ellen and frustration at not knowing where she was. I spent hours sitting with him, listening to his conjecture, reassuring him, but I was sick with anxiety too. I couldn’t eat and I couldn’t sleep.

  ‘Ellen’s tougher than you think,’ I told Jago. ‘She’ll be all right.’

  ‘But what if her psycho-dad has really flipped this time?’ he asked. ‘What if he’s murdered Ellen and Mrs Todd and killed himself?’

  ‘He wouldn’t do that,’ I said. ‘He loves Ellen! And he’s not mad. She makes most of it up.’

  Jago looked at me as if I were an idiot. ‘Hannah, he nearly killed a man.’

  ‘Not just any old man, Jago. Someone who had broken into his house to steal his dead wife’s things!’

  Once the thought that Mr Brecht might have killed himself was in my head, though, I could not get rid of it. It was a worm of worry that niggled away in my mind until I was as uneasy as Jago about the whole disappearance. We decided to go to Thornfield House ourselves to see if we could find any clue as to where they might have gone, or what Mr Brecht might have done.

  We chose a quiet evening, when both our parents were out. We walked up the lane together, and although I was afraid of returning to that big, looming house, I was happy to be doing something with Jago, just him and me, as it used to be. The house, when we reached it, was in complete darkness. There was no sound from inside, no movement. Still we were careful. I stood guard at the gate, while Jago climbed up to Ellen’s bedroom window as he had done so many times before. The window was closed, but not locked. Jago managed to work the lower sash open. He climbed inside, came downstairs, opened the front door and let me in. We pushed the door to, but did not lock it.

  ‘Remember the very first time we came here?’ Jago asked in a whisper.

  ‘With the witch?’

  ‘No, not then. The first time we came into the house, when the Brechts were moving in.’

  I nodded.

  ‘I think I fell in love with Ellen then,’ he said.

  ‘You did not! We were just kids. You didn’t even like Ellen at first!’

  ‘I did. I thought about her all the time.’

  ‘Shhh …’ I said. ‘What was that?’

  ‘Nothing. Don’t be such a baby.’

  ‘There’s someone upstairs!’

  ‘No, there isn’t. There can’t be.’

  I felt sick with nerves.

  ‘Come on,’ whispered Jago. He stepped forward and put his hand on the door to the front room.

  ‘No,’ I said, remembering what Mum had said about the blood. ‘Don’t go in there, please, Jago.’

  Jago dropped his hand, saying, ‘If we look separately, we’ll be twice as fast.’

  ‘I’m not going anywhere on my own.’

  ‘All right,’ Jago said. ‘We’ll stay together.’

  We were hoping we would find a piece of paper lying around with a forwarding address on it, or a luggage label or something. We went into all the downst
airs rooms except the front room, looked on all the tables and counters, and opened the drawers that weren’t locked, but we didn’t find anything. The rooms were spotlessly neat, just as they always had been. Only there was something cold and nasty about Thornfield House, something that had not been there before. It did not feel right. The atmosphere crawled under my skin and unsettled me. I could not wait to be out of the place.

  Still I followed Jago up the stairs, exactly as I had done the first time. We didn’t switch on any lights even though dusk was falling outside. The landing was in near-darkness. I wrapped my arms around myself.

  ‘Let’s just go, Jago,’ I whispered.

  ‘I need to know where Ellen is,’ he whispered back. ‘I need to know she’s OK.’

  He went up the narrow stairs to the attic, where Mrs Todd’s room used to be. I used the first-floor bathroom, not daring to lock, or even close the door, flushing the lavatory and washing my hands under the basin tap – noticing, with horror, that a clump of bloodied hair was still stuck in the plughole in the bath. I dried my hands on the lemon-coloured towel hung over the rail. The towel was damp.

  I dropped it and jumped back.

  My instinct was to shut the bathroom door, lock myself inside and scream. But the bathroom was at the back of the house; only woodland lay behind, so nobody would hear me. And I couldn’t leave Jago in the house on his own, not when he didn’t even know someone else was there.

  I opened the door a fraction and looked around. I couldn’t see anyone but the landing was dark. I tiptoed forward, one tiny step at a time, my feet sinking into the thick carpet. I could smell fear on myself. At the bottom of the attic steps I paused and looked up.

  ‘Jago!’ I called as softly as I could. ‘Jago!’

  When I felt the hand on my shoulder, I jumped and gasped.

  ‘Jago!’

  ‘Shhh.’ He held a finger to his lips.

  ‘Someone’s here!’ I whispered.

  He nodded and pointed to the door to the room next to Ellen’s, the room where Mrs Brecht had died.

  In the darkness, we could see a lighter strip beneath the door. The light was faint and flickering, candlelight. As I listened I heard, above the pounding of my heart, the faintest sound of sobbing.

  We crept towards the door. We had already walked right past it. Whoever was in that room must surely have heard us coming in. They must have heard the toilet flush. They may even have seen us outside, in the garden, looking up. They might have been following us around the house, hiding in the dark shadows, waiting their opportunity …

  Jago and I looked at one another.

  ‘What if it’s Mr Brecht?’ I mouthed.

  Jago shook his head. He reached out to the door handle.

  ‘No!’ I cried. ‘Jago, don’t!’ But Jago had already turned the handle. He pushed open the door.

  The man sitting on the bed was wearing a donkey jacket. He had his back to us. His shoulders were hunched, and his posture was of defeat and despair. His head was wrapped in bandages. As Jago and I stood and stared at him in horror, Adam Tremlett slowly turned. The side of his face that we could see was swollen and bruised; the skin was mottled black and yellow, and ugly black stitches train-tracked across his forehead, disappearing beneath a bandage that crossed his face diagonally, covering his right eye. He slowly raised himself up from the bed to his full height.

  ‘Come on!’ said Jago. He grabbed me by the hand and pulled me towards the stairs. We galloped down, not caring how much noise we made, not caring about anything but escaping. At the bottom, Jago threw open the front door and we ran out of the house, out into the lane, and although my lungs felt like they were bursting in the cold night air, we didn’t stop running until we were home.

  A few days later, we received a postcard showing a picturesque Saxony town. It had a German postmark and was covered with Ellen’s trademark small, neat handwriting.

  We are with Mrs Todd in Magdeburg staying with my grandparents, she wrote. They are looking after us very well. My aunt is going to bring us back to Cornwall as soon as Papa is better. I’ll see you soon, love Ellen.

  ‘Is Mr Brecht ill?’ I asked my mother.

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said.

  Two more postcards arrived in quick succession, together with a letter from Mrs Todd to my mother. Inside was a cheque, made out to my parents. Mum passed it to Dad. He looked at the cheque, whistled, folded it and put it into his wallet.

  ‘What’s that for?’ I asked.

  ‘It’s my payment for helping Mrs Todd clean up,’ said Mum.

  ‘Blood money,’ muttered Jago.

  ‘Enough to treat us all,’ said Dad. ‘We can get that car of yours on the road at last, son!’

  Mum said Mrs Todd’s letter was reassuring. The Brecht family were rallying round Ellen and her father. They had employed a physician to help Mr Brecht deal with his demons. They had sent a ‘generous’ sum to Adam Tremlett as compensation and Adam Tremlett had agreed to drop all charges against Mr Brecht. Ellen was recovered from her ordeal. She was ‘quiet, but calm’.

  ‘What do you think that actually means?’ I asked.

  ‘Never mind Ellen Brecht, you worry about yourself,’ Dad said, with a nod towards the kitchen table where my books and papers were laid out. ‘You’ve got the rest of your life to worry about other people.’

  Soon enough the A-level exams started. They were an ordeal to me. I felt out of my depth, and helpless. It dawned on me that maybe I was not, after all, clever enough to go to university and become an explorer. But if I didn’t do that, what else could I do? Natural History was the only subject that had ever interested me.

  The other students congregated at the bus stop and in the cafeteria for post mortems after each exam. I stood at the fringes of the groups, feeling isolated and wishing Ellen were with me so we could, together, laugh at the false agonizing. Ellen had never been able to tolerate any form of hypocrisy.

  Now she was no longer in Cornwall, I missed her desperately. Several times I became Ellen in my dreams. I saw her father through her eyes. I walked into the front room and saw him raising the iron poker above his head. I saw Adam Tremlett’s blood, black and wet on the floorboards, and I imagined running to get between Mr Brecht and Mr Tremlett and slipping on the blood – and the stickiness of it on my hands, how it would not wipe away.

  The nightmares woke me and I lay on my bed, staring at the patterns of the Artex on the ceiling and thinking of Mr Brecht. I told myself he had only been defending what was his. He had a right to defend his property. Anyone would have done the same.

  I walked up to Thornfield House once or twice a week with the dog, in the evenings, but nobody was ever there. The front door that Jago and I had left wide open the night we broke in had been padlocked, and the ground-floor windows boarded over. The garden was reverting to wilderness but at least some of the flowers had returned, the self-seeding varieties of stocks and poppies and verbena. The lavender bushes that were amongst Mrs Brecht’s favourites had grown new heads, along with one or two of the roses.

  ‘What if they decide to stay in Germany?’ Jago asked over and over again. ‘What if they’ve left for good and I never see Ellen again?’

  We were sitting at the kitchen table, close together, Jago and I. I had one more exam to go and was trying to revise. Jago was tapping his fingers on the table and chewing his lip, both habits irritating me. Trixie lay solid on my feet. I could feel her heartbeat through my socks.

  ‘Jago, can you stop doing that?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Drumming with your fingers. It’s annoying.’

  Mum looked over from the sink where she was peeling potatoes.

  ‘Let Hannah get on with her revision, Jago.’

  ‘I don’t know how any of you can get on with anything while Ellen’s in Germany with the Psycho,’ said Jago.

  Mum sighed. ‘They’ll be back at the end of the month,’ she said, without looking up. ‘Mr Brecht’s better now, by a
ll accounts. His sister’s coming back with them, to keep an eye on things.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘Mrs Todd sent another letter,’ said Mum. ‘She asked me to open up the house.’

  CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

  IT WAS RINA’S birthday so we all went to the Hope and Anchor after work, as was the tradition. Most of us were crowded round a couple of tables in the small, steeply terraced garden, standing close together drinking cider and dipping into communal packets of crisps that had been torn open and left on the tables. I had been cornered by Betty Tralisk, an earnest young historian who was writing a history of the Raja Ram Mohun Roy, the so-called Father of Modern India who, due to an incongruous twist of fate and an ill-timed bout of meningitis, had died in Bristol and was buried in the city’s Arnos Vale Cemetery. Betty wanted to stage an exhibition at the museum in honour of the Raja, and suggested it could be financed via the education budget. She wanted my opinion on this. I was finding it hard to concentrate. I sipped my cider and nodded in the appropriate places but my mind was elsewhere. I noticed Betty staring at me in a way which suggested she was waiting for a response.

  ‘Yes,’ I ventured tentatively. ‘I absolutely agree.’

  ‘Thank you,’ said Betty. ‘So you’ll raise the matter with the trustees?’

  I nodded, and apropos of nothing, John caught my eye across the garden and smiled. Charlotte was standing close to him, laughing at something someone had said to her. Her head was tipped back so I could see her face in profile, the line of her throat silhouetted against the bright sky behind her.

  So she hadn’t said anything to John yet. She hadn’t told the truth. She hadn’t left him. She was chronically unfaithful – she didn’t have a kind word to say about her husband, she was planning to leave him – and yet she was happy to stand behind him in the pub garden and act the part of the good wife. John still had no idea what she was really like.

  I couldn’t look at Charlotte. I had to turn away.

  Somebody tapped my shoulder. I turned. It was Rina.

  ‘Cheers!’ she said, raising her glass.