The Secret by the Lake

by Louise Douglas

  ‘Singing coaching?’

  ‘Maths. To make up for the lessons I missed.’

  ‘That’s good of him to help you.’

  ‘I don’t want to do the coaching.’

  ‘But darling, you need to catch up with everyone else.’

  ‘I hate maths.’

  ‘You’ll like it better when you understand it more.’

  ‘I’m no good at it.’

  ‘I’m sure that’s not true but even if it is, it doesn’t matter. You can’t be good at everything. And I bet you’re way ahead of everyone else in French.’

  Vivi kicked a pebble. ‘Also I don’t want to be in the choir any more.’

  ‘Why ever not?’

  ‘I just don’t. I’ve got to do the extra coaching and it’s not fair that I have to do choir as well.’

  ‘I thought you liked the choir. And it’s your concert at Sunnyvale tomorrow. Oh, that’s what it is! You’re nervous about performing in public. But you mustn’t be, darling, really you mustn’t; I heard you singing during your practice in the church and you were wonderful. You sounded like an angel. Honestly, you’ll be the star of the show.’

  ‘I don’t want to do it,’ Vivi said. There was a tremble in her voice. ‘Please don’t say I have to.’

  ‘Let’s see what Mummy says.’ I pulled Viviane close, tipped back her hat and kissed her forehead. ‘Remember that you are very loved,’ I said. ‘Always remember that.’

  I put Viviane’s mood down to tiredness. Back at the cottage, she went upstairs to change, and when I checked on her a few moments later, she was asleep, sprawled across the bed. I went back downstairs and recounted the conversation about the concert to Julia while I prepared supper.

  ‘She’s adamant she doesn’t want to sing for the old people.’

  ‘Well, I shan’t make her do it if she really doesn’t want to,’ Julia said. ‘But I feel that she ought to do it, not least because that school has been so accommodating with her.’

  ‘It might be good for her confidence too. She has such a lovely voice, and she doesn’t realize how talented she is.’

  ‘I’ll telephone the school in the morning and have a word with Mr Leeson,’ Julia decided. ‘I’ll see what he says about it. In his time he must have dealt with a thousand cases of first-night nerves.’

  CHAPTER FORTY-NINE

  DANIEL WAS AS good as his word. He came to the cottage later, just after dusk. Julia came out to say hello and they shook hands. It seemed enough to start with. After that I took the torch and led him down to the shed, past the old swing and the winter-dead shrubs, past the old washing-line. Daniel looked at the bolt, and the padlock securing the shed door. ‘It’s like Fort Knox,’ he said. ‘Someone wanted to make sure nobody got in there.’

  He lifted the chain, felt its weight, dropped it and then he took out his cutters.

  ‘Turn your face away, Amy,’ he said, ‘in case it splinters.’ And then he squinted to protect his own eyes and held the two blades of the cutters over the thick chain.

  It took a while but eventually I heard the grating sound as the cutter blades finally made contact with one another and then the clank and slither as the chain slipped through its housing and clattered to the ground. I turned to see Daniel leaning on the bolt, putting all his weight on to it. It would not budge.

  ‘It’s stuck solid,’ he said. ‘I need a hammer.’

  He took the torch and disappeared back up the garden and I stood there, on my own, by the shed watching the swing of the beam of light from his torch until I lost sight of it behind the house. I looked up, sensing that someone was watching me. Viviane’s face was at her bedroom window. I waved, but although she seemed to be looking directly at me, she did not wave back. Her light was on and I must have been invisible. Her chin was in her hands, her elbows resting on the window ledge. She tilted her head as if she were listening to something, and then her lips moved. Julia was in the back room; Viviane was not talking to her mother, she was talking to Caroline.

  When Daniel returned, he asked me to hold the torch and I took it in both hands, directing the beam of light at the rusted bolt while he banged at it with the hammer. The noise was terrible, a tremendous reverberation through the quiet night air, so loud I imagined it making ripples on the surface of the lake. He hit the bolt a dozen times then pushed it with the flat of his hand, rocking it from side to side … and finally it slid open.

  It took both of us, using all our strength, to pull the door open wide enough to look inside. The old hinges protested and did their best to hold the door back, but we persisted. A puff of air, slightly warmer than the outside air and smelling foul, of smoke and age, came from inside. Daniel picked up the torch and shone the beam into the shed. I was almost sick with anticipation. I told myself to buck up. What was the worst that could be in there? Mice, perhaps? Spiders?

  I made myself look. In the beam of light I saw there was a small concrete step down into the shed, old, water-stained lino on the floor, a square of carpet wet and foul-smelling and almost completely disintegrated. The inside walls were black, sooted. The shed was full of junk. There was furniture, the criss-cross metal springs of the base of a single bed, an old mattress, horribly stained, boxes made of wood, a suitcase, a dressing-table mirror, a small stool and a table, a watercolour paintbox, splayed open. Cardboard boxes left on the floor had disintegrated, their contents ruined, but there were other things; clothes had been bundled together and thrown inside, and there were books, and toys. I picked up a small bottle from the floor. Ashes of Roses was inscribed on the glass. It looked as if Dr Croucher and Mr Cummings had simply gathered all of Caroline’s possessions and thrown them into the shed before they sealed it shut.

  I took a step forward.

  ‘Don’t let the door close on me, Daniel,’ I said.

  The beam of the torch swayed madly from the floor to the roof and back again.

  ‘There’s something written on the wall – there,’ Daniel said. He pointed to scratches on the wall, four short vertical lines struck through with a single horizontal one. The scratches disappeared back into the darkness behind the clutter. ‘Someone was counting something.’

  ‘Julia used to play house in here. Maybe it was her.’

  ‘And there’s writing.’

  ‘What does it say?’

  ‘I can’t tell. The brickwork is scorched.’

  I pulled the metal bedframe away from the rest of the clutter and tried to make sense of what Daniel was showing me, but I could not. Behind me on the floor was a large trunk, secured by heavy-duty leather straps. I tugged at the straps but I could not move the trunk. Daniel tried to help me, but it was wedged solid. He put his hand on my shoulder.

  ‘There’s too much weight on top,’ he said. ‘We can try again in daylight. There’s no hurry, is there?’

  There was not, but I felt compelled to move the trunk.

  ‘I just want to get all this stuff out, get it out into the open and sort it out and then get rid of it. I won’t be happy until that’s done,’ I said.

  ‘It must have been like this for decades, Amy. A few more hours won’t make any difference. We’ll come back to it tomorrow, in the daylight.’

  ‘Can’t we just move the trunk?’

  ‘Tomorrow,’ Daniel said. ‘I’ll come and help you tomorrow.’

  CHAPTER FIFTY

  VIVIANE AND HER friend Anaïs were standing in the sunshine by the pool at the back of Les Aubépines; they were in their swimsuits, their wet hair making rats’ tails down their skinny little backs, playing a clapping game. Julia and Alain were sitting together at the table, beneath the shade of the umbrella. A half-empty bottle of wine was on the table between them. Alain was smoking, he was reading the newspaper, one hand on Julia’s knee. I felt a rush of love and relief. Alain! I called and Alain looked towards me and smiled; he raised his other hand, the cigarette between the second and third fingers.

  ‘I thought you were dead!’ I called.

&
nbsp; Alain looked down at himself, gave his stomach a poke, raised his eyebrows and shook his head.

  ‘No, it seems I’m perfectly alive.’

  ‘Oh, thank goodness!’

  Julia pushed her sunglasses up on to the top of her head and smiled. ‘Oh Amy, you are funny,’ she said. ‘You must have dreamed it and believed it was true!’ She tipped back her head and laughed and Alain laughed too. The relief made me giddy and now I was closer to the edge of the pool. I was watching the girls and I was holding somebody else’s hand and the hand I was holding was merging with mine, the skin between our fingers fusing, the nerves and capillaries weaving together, the bones splicing. The hand that was holding mine was like marble and my fingers were calcifying too. I tried to pull my hand away but I couldn’t, it had become part of the other hand. My eyes travelled from the marble hand to a marble wrist, an elbow, a shoulder, a face; grape-coloured lips, dark hair. And all the beauty of the place turned ugly; the warmth turned cold. My relief turned to horror.

  I was joined to Caroline and Caroline was dead.

  I tried to scream, but I could not scream. I tried to run away, but I could not run. I was paralysed, turned to stone, and I was panicking, subsumed by panic like a mouse caught by its tail in a trap, like a moth in an upturned jar. I was helpless, melded to the dead murderess with her cold, dead eyes, her black nails, the awful soft rottenness of her.

  Caroline held a finger to her lips. ‘Shhh,’ she said. ‘Watch the children.’

  The girls were oblivious; they stood clapping, water running down their bodies and darkening the dry paving beneath their bare feet. The blue mosaic tiles that lined the swimming pool sparkled bright in the sunlight and there was the usual jumble of coloured towels heaped at the end of the sunbeds, the orange bottle of Ambre Solaire oil tipped on its side; the red airbed bobbing on the water. Everything was as it should be. Everything was exactly as it always was, except that Caroline was there too.

  I looked at her again and I saw that she had no eyes, that there were dark holes in her skull where her eyes should have been; her lips were dust, blown away by her breath, and her teeth were loose, falling from her mouth and bouncing on the paving like tiny white pearls, like beads from a broken necklace.

  ‘Why are you here?’ I asked her.

  ‘Because of Viviane.’ Caroline tightened her cold fingers over mine and her hair drifted away on the breeze like dandelion seeds. The skin was falling like ashes from her body; bone, glossy as paint, was exposed in her wrist, at her shoulder; the muscle of her heart was dry beneath the cage of her ribs. ‘They’re watching. They never went away.’

  I woke in a cold sweat, a stillborn scream in my throat.

  There was no chance of sleep after that. I turned on the light and tried to read but the nightmare was still too fresh in my mind. I slipped out of bed and pulled out the satchel from under it. I took out the matchbox, and the pendant. The pendant sat in the palm of my hand, the ruby dark red, like blood.

  I wanted rid of the thing that Caroline, the murderess, had stolen. It was like a bad omen, a cursed talisman; she was the last person to have touched it before me and it was my secret under my bed. I didn’t want it anywhere near me.

  I decided I would throw it into the lake. I would drown it just as Caroline had drowned Mrs Aldridge. It would sink through that green water, down to the darkness at the bottom, and it would lie there, in the silt, with the silvery trout weaving above it, the light shining dimly in the deep. It would be one more secret, and when I was gone, even that secret would be forgotten.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE

  VIVIANE DRESSED HERSELF and came down for breakfast on time the next morning. She ate her porridge and drank her milk politely and neatly. She sat very still, with the heels of her shoes hooked over the wooden bar between the two front legs of her chair. I brushed her hair for her, and fastened it with a grip to keep the fringe out of her eyes.

  ‘How are you feeling, sweetheart?’ Julia asked.

  ‘All right.’

  ‘Are you nervous about the concert?’

  She shook her head.

  ‘You’re going to be fine,’ her mother promised. ‘You’re going to be the best of them all.’

  Later, after Viviane had left for school, I went back to work alone on the wallpaper. I found more writing beneath the window – neat, unhurried letters decorated with tiny drawings of birds and flowers and floating musical notes.

  ‘Bye bye, blackbird,’ I whispered and I remembered how I knew that song. My mother used to sing it to me as we sat together in the bomb shelter in the back yard of the house in Sheffield, two inches of water on the ground and the candlelight flickering. It must have been cold and uncomfortable, frightening even, but I only remembered my mother’s voice, and the song, the feeling of being safe and warm and loved, in her arms.

  I blew my hair off my face, sat back on my heels and considered Caroline’s transcription of the song lyrics. The words were so different, so gently written, in comparison to the hatred that had been scratched into the adjoining walls. I chipped away at another piece of paper and I found a drawing of a heart, a heart enclosed by two clasped hands. Inside the heart were two names: Caroline and Robert. Beneath was written, in very tiny letters: Mrs Caroline Aldridge.

  ‘Oh Caroline,’ I breathed. I leaned back against the wall.

  And suddenly everything made complete sense; in fact, it all seemed quite simple to me. Caroline wasn’t mad or evil or out of control; she was simply a teenager in love.

  She had gone to work as Jean Aldridge’s housemaid. While she was there at Fairlawn, she had fallen for Robert, a good-looking, charismatic man who would have been closer in age to Caroline than to Jean. Perhaps the Aldridge marriage had seemed wrong to Caroline. Perhaps Jean had seemed, to young Caroline, not enough for Robert. Either way, the girl was jealous and Jean was the obstacle in the way of her perceived happiness. Did Caroline steal the pendant, to make herself feel closer to Robert? Did Jean suspect her of the theft? Did Jean confront Caroline when the two women met, that sunny August day as Jean pushed her son along the dam in his pram? Did they fight? Jean had had a baby a few days earlier. She would have been weak. She wouldn’t have stood a chance.

  ‘But did you have to kill her, Caroline?’ I asked quietly. ‘Just because she was in your way?’

  I carried on working and the room seemed to be vindicating my version of events. The vile yellow wallpaper was coming away from the walls more easily than before. It was as if the room was relieved now that the secrets were being exposed.

  That morning, I cleared the rest of the window wall; now the only wallpaper that remained was a small patch on the chimney breast that had been so thoroughly glued on, it was impossible to remove. I had found one more message from Caroline: a single line of writing about twelve inches from the bottom of the wall. Smaller letters now, the writing very faint and shaky.

  They are watching Julia.

  I sat down and leaned my back against the wall, resting my elbows on my knees. I looked about the room. If Caroline’s bed had been placed at right angles to the wall facing the door, then she could have written these words while she was in the bed. She might have written them in her last hours, as she lay dying. But that didn’t help me. I didn’t know what they meant, or why they had been written. I didn’t know who was watching Julia, or why Caroline had felt it so important to write the words down.

  Was it a warning?

  Did she know she was dying?

  The pattering of rain on the windowpane reminded me that time was passing. I stood, and went downstairs to find Julia. A draught was blowing in from the back door. I looked outside and saw her in the garden, leaning over a large object: the trunk. Somehow or other she had dragged it out of the shed, on her own.

  CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO

  I PUT ON my boots and ran out through the rain. ‘What are you doing, Julia? It’s pelting down. Aren’t you frozen?’

  Julia wiped the rain from her nose with
her wrist, leaning on her thigh, resting her hip.

  ‘This trunk used to be in my parents’ bedroom. It was where they kept all their special things. My father’s war mementoes were in there, his medals, and Mother’s best linen, my silver christening mug. Why did they put the trunk in the shed, Amy?’

  ‘I don’t know, but leave it now and come inside. You’re soaked through, you’ll catch your death.’

  ‘I can’t leave it here. Help me get it up to the house.’

  ‘We’ll never move it. It weighs a ton.’

  ‘If you help me we’ll move it together.’

  ‘Julia!’

  ‘Oh, come on. Don’t give up before you’ve even tried.’

  Julia leaned over the trunk and heaved at it. The rain fell on her back and shoulders, dripping from the ends of her hair, and her shirt was so wet that I could see her skin through it – the ridges of her spine, her shoulder-blades, even her ribs.

  I puffed out my breath and took hold of the other handle.

  It took the two of us working together to manhandle the trunk up the slope to the level part of the garden, me doing most of the donkey work. After that we dragged it to the back door. Its weight and bulkiness alarmed me. I was afraid of what might be inside.

  We manoeuvred the trunk up the step and into the kitchen. By now we were both soaked to the skin and my back and arms were aching.

  ‘Right!’ Julia said. ‘Now all we have to do is get it open,’ and she set to hacking at the leather straps with a pair of upholstery scissors.

  ‘It’ll take you forever with those,’ I panted.

  Julia ignored me. She drove the point of the scissors into the old leather strap and twisted it, trying to make a hole. The trunk groaned and she grunted with the exertion.

  ‘Julia, please, I’m afraid the scissors will slip. Let me call Daniel. He’ll have the tools to open it in a jiffy.’