He crossed a field, after which the concrete walkway narrowed and gave way to a dirt track. Definitely still a path, though. Simon followed it through a cluster of small trees and into another field. When he started to feel wetness at his ankles, he looked down and saw that he’d been walking on grass. Where was the dirt track? Had it run out or had he strayed off it? He saw dark shapes ahead and made his way towards them. The stable block. He’d assumed, when he’d read the sign, that this would be a conversion: a languages or science laboratory, or living space for the pupils, but as he approached he both heard and smelled evidence of the presence of horses. There was no Garstead Cottage, not here.
He was about to turn back when he heard what sounded like a stifled scream coming from behind the stables. He ran round the squat cluster of buildings, looked in all directions and saw nothing. ‘Hello?’ he called out. ‘Anyone there?’ This time he heard a giggle, and walked in the direction it had come from. He’d taken only a few paces forward when something that felt like hard netting pushed him back. A fence, as high as his waist. ‘Fuck,’ he muttered. More giggles followed. Then he spotted something that stood out because, unlike everything else around him, it wasn’t dark: three small orange dots that seemed to be attached to a mass of trees nearby. The glowing ends of cigarettes.
Keeping his eye on them, Simon made his way over to the trees. When he was still too far away to see faces, he heard a voice. ‘Oh, man, sir, we’re really, really sorry. We totally know there’s no way we’re not going to be in, like, pure trouble . . .’
‘I think you should punish us?’ another girl said, making the statement sound like a question. ‘That way we won’t make the same mistake again?’ A fit of giggles followed this unlikely sounding assertion.
‘I’m not a teacher,’ Simon told the disembodied voices. ‘I’m police. Smoke yourselves stupid for all I care.’
‘No way! Oh, man! What’s, like, a policeman doing creeping round Villy in the dead of night?’
‘This is outrageous,’ said the third girl.
Now Simon was closer and could see their faces. They looked about sixteen, and were wearing pyjamas with nothing over them, no coats or anything. They shivered in between fits of hysterical laughter. ‘I’m looking for Garstead Cottage,’ he told them.
‘What are you doing over here, then?’ one of the girls said scornfully.
‘He’s better off over here. You don’t want to go to Scary Mary’s, Mister Policey-man.’
‘Tasha!’
‘What? He doesn’t. She’s, like, a pure nightmare.’
‘You’re talking about Mary Trelease,’ said Simon.
‘Oh my God, she’s probably his girlfriend or something!’
‘Maybe he’s come to, like, arrest her?’
‘Where’s the cottage?’ he tried again. ‘Can one of you show me?’
A peal of scandalised giggles greeted this suggestion. ‘Yeah, right! Like we wouldn’t be so dead if our house master caught us wandering round at night in our jarmies.’
‘She’s frightened of Scary Mary. I’ll take you, soon as I’ve finished my ciggie.’
‘Flavia, you’re such a liar! Like you wouldn’t be totally too scared.’
‘Right back at you, babes.’
‘What’s there to be scared of?’ Simon asked, hoping Neil Dunning wouldn’t choose now to arrive with his warrant and find Simon lurking amid the trees with three scantily clad teenage girls.
‘Oh my God—he doesn’t know!’
‘You, like, so won’t believe us if we tell you?’
‘She cuts Villy girls’ throats and drinks their blood.’ This prompted more giggles.
‘I don’t believe she exists? I’ve never seen her, and I’ve been here since I was thirteen?’
‘No, seriously, though, she doesn’t—drink blood or anything like that. But she does only come out at night.’
‘That’s totally understandable? I’d be too ashamed to come out in daylight if my face looked like that.’
‘She starved herself, right, and once all the fat had gone from under her skin, her face collapsed and she was left with the face of, like, an eighty-year-old hag. That’s pure truth, man.’
‘She’s a Villy legend.’
‘The oral storytelling tradition,’ one of the girls said in a mock deep voice, and they all screamed with laughter. Simon guessed they were aping one of their teachers.
‘Shut up, poo-brain! If I lose my exeat privs thanks to you, it’ll be pure tragedy.’
‘No way are we getting curfed for helping a policeman.’
‘Shut up and let me tell him. He hasn’t got time to waste listening to you two infants. We don’t know for sure . . .’
‘We so do. I heard Miss Westaway and Mrs Dean talking about it.’
‘It might all be scurlyest rumours.’
‘You mean scurrilous. Scurlyest isn’t a word. I apologise on behalf of my intoxicated housemate,’ said the girl nearest to Simon. ‘It’s so not a rumour—it’s the scandalous truth. Scary Mary had a boyfriend who dumped her, right, and she was so miz she tried to kill herself. Hanged herself in Garstead Cottage.’
‘And he was there too, the boyfriend,’ one of the other girls chipped in.
‘Oh, yeah, I forgot that bit. Yeah, she made him go round for the whole closure thing.’ The girl Simon thought was called Flavia—unless he’d got mixed up, and she was Tasha—drew invisible quote marks in the air. ‘And when he got there, she was standing on the dining table, with a rope round her neck, attached to the light or something . . .’
‘A chandelier! It was a chandelier!’
‘Yeah, right. In a cottage?’
‘I heard it was a chandelier.’
‘Whatever. So, like, he called an ambulance and she was rushed to hospital, but on the way there in the ambulance, she died—like, majorly died. And she had no heartbeat or oxygen going to her brain for three whole minutes . . .’
‘It was ten minutes . . .’
‘No one comes back to life after ten minutes, babes. I’ve seen Scary Mary—she’s odd, but she’s not a veg. What was I saying? Oh, yeah: the ambulance people brought her back from, like, beyond death, and she was supposed to be brain damaged, but she wasn’t. She was, like, totally fine. Except she wasn’t, because that was when she turned into Scary Mary. She changed her name.’
‘Stop,’ said Simon. ‘What do you mean? Changed it to what?’
‘Mary Trelease.’
‘Scary Martha would have sounded rubbish—it doesn’t rhyme.’
‘Martha?’ If the girls’ confidence and state of undress hadn’t made him feel so uncomfortable, he’d have asked more forcefully.
‘Martha Wyers—that’s what she used to be called. But after she died and came back to life, she wouldn’t let anyone call her that any more, because, like, Martha Wyers had died?’
‘Gross! This story’s a pure freak-out, every time,’ one of the girls said, wrapping her arms round herself.
‘She lashed anyone who called her Martha. Even her mum and dad had to start calling her Mary.’
‘Lashed?’ Simon interrupted. He had to ask.
‘What? Oh, it’s, like, an expression?’
‘Translation for Villy outsider: she got really angry with anyone who called her Martha.’
‘And she lost weight when she turned into Mary. She was a pure tubber before.’
‘She was pining, wasn’t she, for her one true love?’
Simon couldn’t think clearly with the girls chattering at him. ‘Do you know why she chose the name Mary Trelease?’
They looked at one another, silent for the first time. ‘No,’ said one shirtily after a few seconds, annoyed to have been caught out. ‘What does that matter? A name’s just a name, isn’t it?’
‘Yes it is, Flavia Edna Seawright.’ More giggles erupted.
‘Her name’s not the only thing she changed after her resurrection , I know that,’ said Flavia, in an attempt to divert attention.
‘Oh, yeah—how weird is this?’
‘She used to be a writer—she had a book published.’
‘Yeah, there’s a copy in our house library.’
‘She must have been in Heathcote, then.’
‘No, Margerison.’
Simon understood the signs he’d seen. Boarding houses.
‘What house she was in is so, like, trivial? She was a writer, but after she hanged herself and it didn’t work, she never wrote another word—she took up painting instead. Not me personally, but loads of Villy girls have seen her wandering around at night, smoking, covered in paint . . .’
‘Didn’t Damaris Clay-Hoffman stop her and ask her if she had a spare ciggy?’
‘Damaris Clay-Hoffman’s such a rank liar!’
‘Where’s her cottage?’ asked Simon. ‘Don’t come with me, just tell me where,’ he said to the girls. He wanted to approach quietly, not with a screeching chorus around him.
As Flavia Edna Seawright pointed to her left, a loud noise, like a small explosion, burst out of the night. ‘Oh, my God!’ she said, grabbing Simon’s arm. ‘I’m not even joking any more, man. That sounded like a gun.’
27
Wednesday 5 March 2008
‘A stupid mistake,’ says Mary. ‘You said “Go to your parents’ house”. You meant Cecily’s house, didn’t you? I could see from your face that you knew. You’re a bad liar.’
Pain burns all the way through me. There’s a bullet inside me, metal in my body. I saw it coming towards me, too fast for me to move. I’m lying on the floor. I reach out for Aidan’s hand, but he’s too far away.
‘You’re a . . . good liar,’ I manage to say. ‘You’re Martha.’
‘No. Martha died. Her heart stopped. Her mind stopped. You can’t die and be the same person afterwards. I’m one of the few people alive who knows that’s not possible.’
‘Abberton . . . the names . . .’ I try to raise my head, to look down at my body, but it hurts too much. I can’t move and think at the same time, and I have to think.
‘What about them? What about the names?’
‘Aidan didn’t destroy your . . . paintings. You did it to him. You bought . . .’ I can’t go on.
She looks down at me. I feel light; not a person any more but a weightless flow of pain. My mind starts to hum; it would be easy to fall into that comforting sound, allow it to roll me away. ‘He did it,’ Mary insists. ‘He took all my pictures and he cut them to pieces.’
‘No.’ I gasp for air. ‘The names . . . boarding houses . . .’
‘No!’ Mary raises her voice. ‘I’d never do that. He did it. He did it to me.’
‘You bought his pictures using those names.’ Each breath is a struggle, but without the struggle there would be nothing, no energy to stay alive. ‘You . . . made him come here . . .’ My mind fills with words that would take too much effort to say. He didn’t want to see you again, but you bribed him: fifty grand for a commission. ‘He stopped painting because of what you did.’
Scenes from the story Mary told me drift back into my mind. One half true, the other half lies. The cottage door left open, as she said. Aidan walking in, looking for her. Finding her standing on the dining table with a rope round her neck, his ruined paintings on the floor in front of her. Did she tell him what she’d done and then jump? Two shocks for him, locked together in one moment for devastating impact. That’s why he couldn’t move at first, why he didn’t rush to save her life. He was traumatised, paralysed.
‘My gardens.’ Every word wrings sweat from me. ‘Not Aidan. You did it. One last summer, to punish me for . . . Saul’s gallery. I frightened you. You hate not . . . being in control.’ The second after Charlie Zailer spoke to you on Monday and told you I was Aidan’s girlfriend. You’d given me Abberton as a gift, without knowing: another loss of control. Another punishment.
‘What about your dead boyfriend?’ says Mary impatiently, leaning over me. ‘What about what he did?’
I close my eyes. I know what he didn’t do. He didn’t lie to me. Not until later. Even then, he didn’t lie outright. To the police, yes, but never to me. ‘He killed Mary Trelease,’ I breathe. ‘Years ago.’ He was telling the truth when he told me that, at the Drummond Hotel. It was before I mentioned Abberton, before his confession had made me freeze, when he trusted me without reservation.
The woman I can only think of as Mary bends over me, using the gun to push her hair away from her face. ‘What Mary Trelease are you talking about?’ she asks. ‘Who do you mean?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Exactly. None of this involves you. You should have gone away. I sent you away.’ I hear this as an accusation of ingratitude. She’s appalled by me. ‘Whatever you think you know, you’re wrong.’
Anger kicks in, as intense as the pain. ‘I know everything but who she was. She lived at 15 Megson Crescent. Aidan killed her there.’ In the front bedroom. Her naked, in the centre of the bed, Aidan’s hands round her throat . . .
‘He killed her, and let his stepfather take the blame,’ says Mary patiently, putting her face in front of mine so that I can see her telling me. ‘His stepfather’s been in prison for twenty-six years, and Aidan’s left him there to rot, never visited him or written to him, not once. How do you feel about him now, now that you know that?’ Her words drift past me without taking root.
‘The house,’ I say, my lungs aching with the effort. ‘That’s why you bought it. Why you changed your name to hers.’
Mary points the gun at my face. I close my eyes, wait for her to shoot, but nothing happens. When I open them, she hasn’t moved. Neither has the gun. ‘Why?’ she says.
I can’t answer. I don’t know how much blood I’ve lost, though the sensation of losing it is constant. I feel transparent. Hollow.
‘It’s up to you. You can talk or you can die.’
‘No! Please, don’t . . .’ I try to turn my head away from the gun.
‘Did you think that was a threat?’ She laughs. ‘I meant that if you talk, if you start to tell a story, you won’t let go until you get to the end. For your mind to keep working, your heart has to keep working. You have to stay alive.’
She’s right. Not everything she says is a lie. The story of Aidan and Martha, right up until the point where she hanged herself, that was all true. Except . . . yes, even the part about Mary writing to Aidan, berating him for treating Martha badly. Not literally true, but symbolically accurate, as accurate as she could be without revealing her true identity. There are divisions within every person. Especially those who are forced to bear unbearable pain. The Mary who wrote angry, accusatory letters to Aidan—though she wasn’t called Mary then—was the intelligent part of Martha Wyers, the part that could see the truth: that the relationship was going nowhere, that Aidan didn’t love Martha the way she loved him.
No surprise that he didn’t. Hard to love a woman who proclaims undying love one minute then savages you the next.
‘Tell me the story you think you know about me,’ says Mary. She sits down beside me and draws her legs up to her chest, balancing the gun on her knees. If I could move my right arm, I could grab it.
I worked it out, put it all together in the taxi on the way back here. I have to do it again now, force my brain to keep going. ‘Phone an ambulance,’ I say. ‘You can’t let us die.’
‘Aidan’s been dead for a while,’ she says matter-of-factly.
‘No,’ I moan. ‘Please. It might not be too late.’ Martha came back to life. Aidan can’t be dead. I won’t believe it.
‘Look at us. One bleeding body, one corpse, and a husk who’s been half dead for years. No one who took an objective look at this room could think it was anything but too late, Ruth. For all of us.’ She twists her hair into a spiral.
‘Private detective,’ I whisper. ‘Told you . . . Aidan’s stepfather . . . in prison for killing Mary Trelease. You’d seen the painting . . .’ No. Can’t get it wrong, can’t waste words or bre
ath. ‘You’d bought it—The Murder of Mary Trelease. Bought it and . . . destroyed it, like you did all of them.’
‘No.’ Mary’s voice is firm. ‘I’m an artist. I don’t destroy art.’
In my head, I see a picture of a man and a woman in a bed. Naked, or the woman is. The man’s hands round the woman’s neck. The man recognisable as Aidan, so that Mary—Martha—knew Len Smith wasn’t the killer.
‘Why did he kill her?’ I mouth the words, not sure if I’m making any sound at all. I feel deathly cold all over my body. Like ice.
‘He’d have told you if he wanted you to know.’ Mary smiles.
‘Martha. Wasn’t. Alone. Any. More,’ I exhale one word at a time. I can do it. I can get to the end. ‘An ally . . . another woman Aidan had . . . hurt. Mary Trelease.’
Mary puts the gun down behind her and leans back on her hands. ‘Show me anyone who’s survived an ordeal and I’ll show you a shrink in the making,’ she says. ‘Ally is a good word. What about you, Ruth? Aidan’s hurt you too, hasn’t he? Playing games with you, messing with your head. And Stephen Elton hurt you.’ She pulls a packet of Marlboro Reds and a lighter out of her pocket, lights one. ‘All women whose lives have been ruined by men are my allies. All of them. If we organised ourselves, we could be the world’s most powerful army.’
‘You called yourself Mary Trelease. You bought . . . house . . .’ I have to talk, to stop myself thinking about my own helplessness.
‘Shall we speed this up?’ says Mary impatiently. ‘I moved to Spilling when I found out Aidan lived there. What sort of man moves back to the town where he spent his miserable childhood? You might want to think about that.’ I turn my face away from her cigarette, breathing is hard enough without the smoke. ‘Fifteen Megson Crescent is the house he grew up in. I had to have it, obviously, so I bribed the owners out.’
‘You called yourself Mary Trelease.’
‘I changed my name legally. I am Mary Trelease.’
‘You started painting because painting . . . was his,’ I murmur, pulling my mind back as it starts to drift. Get to the end. ‘Wasn’t . . . enough that you’d destroyed his work. Everything that . . . had been his . . .’
The Dead Lie Down: A Novel Page 45