‘What if we get there,’ she panted, ‘and the doctor refuses to say anything?’
‘He’ll tell us.’
‘How can you be so sure?’
‘Because if he won’t tell us, then we will make a commotion at Sunnyvale, in front of all his peers, all those respectable old men and women. He will tell us the truth to keep us quiet. His reputation is all that is left to him now.’
‘Amy, you have become positively Machiavellian! Whatever happened to the meek little thing you used to be?’
‘Caroline happened,’ I said.
The fog became thicker the closer we descended towards the lake. We walked slowly, holding on to one another. I could feel Julia’s heart pumping through the damp fabric of her coat. I could feel her fear and her determination and I thought: We will get to the truth this time, we will get to the bottom of this.
We reached the bottom of the hill and the walking became easier but Julia was becoming more tired with every footfall. It was so long since she’d taken any real exercise. We had to stop every few paces so she could catch her breath. I wanted to run – to hurry and confront the doctor, but Julia was really slowing me now. I was somehow afraid that he might know we were coming, and avoid the confrontation. I was afraid that if he slipped away from us now, we would never know the truth.
As we passed the entrance to Fairlawn, a man rode past on a motorbike, going in the opposite direction. He seemed familiar to me, although I couldn’t place him. I paid him little attention, although he was the only person we saw out that evening, and the noise of the bike engine going up the hill rang out over the foggy valley.
We crossed the dam without meeting anyone else or seeing a single vehicle. When we reached the spot above where Jean had drowned, my blood ran cold and I felt the hairs stand up on my neck. Our feet were walking over the exact place where Caroline had stood holding her baby. She had tried to take him back home but she had collapsed. Was that when the fatal haemorrhage started? Here, on the dam?
I imagined her lying on the ground, her face pressed against the earth, the baby still in her arms. She must have held him in such a way as to protect him as she fell. Did she know she was dying? Did she look out over the water and see the reflection of the summer sky and know that she only had a little time left?
The night was quiet and still; unearthly. The fog opened up only a few yards in front of us, and closed again behind us. It would be easy enough to fall into the reservoir on a night like this. Easy enough for anyone to go the same way as Jean Aldridge.
‘Oh Amy,’ Julia gasped, leaning heavily on me, ‘this is so hard.’
‘It’s just a little further,’ I replied. ‘We’re almost there.’
‘I’m slowing you down.’
‘Not really. Only another few yards, then you can rest.’
‘You’re very good to me,’ Julia said.
‘It’s mutual.’
We turned right beneath the illuminated archway and the sign that said: Sunnyvale: First-class Residential Nursing Care for Gentlefolk, although the sign was blurred by the fog, the light smudged into the air. We walked along the drive, past the Hailswood School minibus, past a handful of parked cars. By now I was half-carrying Julia; she was wheezing and heaving at her breath. She was not difficult to carry, she was so thin and frail in my arms, little more than a bag of bones, yet I could feel her resilience. I could feel her old energy and fight returning. She was looking forward to this meeting. She was hungry for the truth.
Before we went into the reception I smoothed Julia’s damp hair around her face and passed her her stick, so she could walk independently. ‘Will you be OK?’ I asked.
‘I’ll be fine.’
We went inside. The air was dry and very warm. A middle-aged nurse was sitting behind the desk transcribing figures into a ledger. From beyond, the sound of children singing came along the corridor – a pure, clear sound. I picked out Viviane’s voice and was reassured.
The nurse’s smile faded when she saw Julia, wheezing and white, with her wild hair, her mismatched clothes. The woman touched her earlobe nervously and her eyes swung from left to right, looking for support, but nobody else was around. Everyone was in the day room, listening to the choir.
‘Can I help you?’ she asked. She looked pointedly at the clock, so that we would realize it was an inconvenient time to visit.
‘We’ve come to see Dr Croucher,’ Julia said.
‘He’s busy at the moment. We have a children’s choir in to entertain the residents.’
‘We’ll wait in his room then.’
‘Are you family?’
‘Yes,’ Julia said. ‘We’ve come to surprise him.’
The nurse hesitated. ‘I’m not sure …’
‘We won’t stay long,’ Julia said. ‘Come on, Amy.’ And she walked down the corridor with her head held high, and although she was wearing shabby boots, although she looked like a bag lady and was relying heavily on her stick, she had regained her old elegance, her old charisma, her old confidence. I smiled at the nurse, and trotted after her.
We found the doctor’s room easily enough at the far end of a carpeted hallway. His name was inscribed on a brass plaque, Dr Gerard Croucher OBE. I turned the handle, expecting the door to be locked, but it was not and I pushed it open. In the day room, distantly, the singing reached a crescendo and there was the sound of genteel applause.
Julia and I went into the doctor’s bedroom. I had a feeling of excited dread in my stomach, like a child who knows it is doing something forbidden. Julia shut the door behind us.
‘Well,’ she said, ‘here we are.’
It was a large, pleasant room, with predominantly dark wood and deep-coloured fabrics; a bed, a wardrobe, a commode, a bathroom to one side, emergency help buttons, handrails, hoists. There were a few antique pieces that had clearly been brought from Dr Croucher’s home; a polished oak grandmother clock, an ornate plant-stand, a fancy coat-rack and a folding card-table with a green baize top. The curtains had not been drawn across French windows that opened out over the lake, and although, in darkness, we could not see the water through the fog, in daylight Dr Croucher must have had a wonderful view of the water, and the birds, the changing colours. I supposed in the summer months he could open the windows and sit outside.
Julia wandered around the room, touching the objects. There were decanters on the chest of drawers, a heavy ashtray, a cigarette-lighter mounted on to a brass stand, a television set.
‘He doesn’t want for any home comforts, does he?’ she asked.
I crossed to the window and gazed through the glass at the blank whiteness beyond. My leg grazed something tucked behind the base of the curtain; the doctor’s bag. I pulled it free, held it up. It was old, it had obviously seen good service – a black leather bag with two sturdy handles. I put it on the bed.
‘It’s the same bag,’ Julia said.
‘Hmm?’
‘It’s the same bag he always had. The one he emptied once on our kitchen table to prove he had not stolen Father’s pocket-watch. Open it, Amy. Look inside.’
‘I don’t know if I should.’
‘I’ll open it then. What does he need his old bag for these days?’ Julia came across to the bed and opened the clasp. The two halves of the top of the bag separated slowly. Inside was a silky lining, the fabric worn and faded from purple to a dull grey. Julia pulled out a stethoscope and tossed it on to the bed; an otoscope, a magnifying glass, a pair of surgical scissors, spatulae. ‘What does he keep all this stuff for?’ she asked. ‘To relive his glory days? To remember how he used to be the most important man in the village, the one everyone turned to with their problems and their worries, the one who saw them into the world and out of it?’
‘Julia, perhaps you shouldn’t …’
Julia grabbed the bag and tipped it upside down. A clatter of pill boxes emptied on to the bed. Small bottles of God-knows-what. A bundle of photographs tied up with an elastic band.
�
��What are those?’
Julia picked up the bundle, picked at the band. The sensation of dread inside me had grown now so that it was hard inside me, pressing against my ribcage and my spine as if I had somehow swallowed a bowling ball.
‘Don’t look,’ I said.
‘I have to,’ Julia said, and her voice was cold now and hard. She broke the band and discarded it. She looked at the first picture, dropped it, looked at the second, looked at the third … and then threw the whole bundle of photographs on to the floor. They scattered like leaves, or playing cards, covering the carpet, the bed, the seat of the chair. I picked up the image nearest to me. It was a photograph of a young boy, eight or nine years old. He was naked. He was holding the erect penis of an adult man. I dropped the picture, stepped away from it and wiped the fingers that had touched it on my skirt.
‘Oh!’ I cried. ‘Oh God!’
Now Julia came to me. She put her arms around me. ‘Shhh,’ she whispered, and she held her cool hand against my cheek. ‘It’s all right, Amy. It’s all right. It ends tonight.’
‘The pictures, Julia …’
‘Those were what Caroline wanted the police officer to find! That’s why she went to so much trouble to make him look in the bag!’
Of course they were! The photograph I had seen danced before my eyes; the boy’s awkward averted gaze, a scab on his knee, his pudding-basin haircut, the same as every other boy that age in Britain, the freckles on his nose. He looked like a perfectly ordinary boy, but what he was being made to do … Oh, I would never, now, be able to get the picture out of my mind. And there were so many photographs. So many of them.
And suddenly all Caroline’s actions made sense. All those things she’d done that nobody understood, all of it became clear.
‘If she knew of the pictures, Dr Croucher must have shown them to her,’ Julia said.
‘The shed. He took her into the shed and she counted the times off on the wall.’ Something something something smudge smudge smudge. Dr Croucher made me do it. Did Dr Croucher make a game of it at first? Did Caroline have to pick a card and then copy the action it depicted, like a new twist on a game of charades? Was it something like that? Did she go willingly the first time, play along, and after that was she trapped? Did he take photographs of her?
If you don’t do as I ask, then I’ll tell your mother what you did. I’ll tell her what you saw, what you touched, what a bad, unlovable, dreadful girl you are. There’ll be no point denying it, I will show her the photographs.
‘Frank Leeson and Gerard Croucher both with the same predilection for children,’ Julia said quietly. ‘Both of them acted out their fantasies on my sister. That’s half of the village club committee.’ She walked away from me and poked at the doctor’s bed with her stick. ‘Bloody Dr Croucher with his bloody brass plaque on the door, his bloody OBE for bloody services to the community.’ She raised the stick and slammed it down hard on the doctor’s pillow, making a massive dent. The photographs on the bed lifted into the air, and settled again. Julia stood and breathed deeply. She trembled on the exhale. She said, ‘He must think he’s untouchable. He must think he’s unanswerable to anyone. Come on! Let’s go and find him.’
CHAPTER SIXTY
WE WALKED BACK along the corridor, out of the bedroom wing, towards the main hallway that would take us back towards the communal rooms of Sunnyvale. However, the geography of the place worked against us. The concert had just finished and when we reached the hallway, it was busy with traffic coming the other way – old women who were unsteady on their legs being helped by nurses, old men with sticks shuffling along the carpet, the group of schoolchildren hurrying out towards the exit. I looked for Viviane, but did not see her. There was a niggling anxiety inside me but I ignored it. I’d heard Vivi singing a few minutes earlier; I knew she was safe. Some of the elderly people were humming or singing; they all seemed happy. I heard murmurings, snatches of conversations: beautiful voices, sang like angels, took me back, made me remember, made me forget.
It took Julia and me a while to excuse our way through the old people and get ourselves into the day room, and when we reached it, the place was empty save for Susan Pettigrew, who was stacking up the chairs that had been arranged in a semi-circle around the central area, where a microphone stood on a stand attached to a plug in the wall by a snaking cable. The lid of the piano was still open, sheet music still held in place on the stand above the keys. Empty sherry glasses were scattered about the surfaces of the room, and ashtrays; little bowls of crisps and nuts. Through the window, I saw the last child climb on board the Hailswood School minibus. Its engine was already running, smoke puffing out of the exhaust. I watched as it reversed, turned around, and then headed off into the fog.
I thought Viviane must be on the bus. There was nobody at home to meet her and we hadn’t left a note, but the front door to the cottage was unlocked. The lights were on. She would be worried but she would be safe on her own for a short while.
I didn’t have time to worry about Vivi now.
Susan was clearly alarmed to see me again. She put down the chair she was holding and stood with her arms at her side, a worn green cardigan stretched tight at the buttons over an ugly brown dress patterned with tiny sprigs of heather. She was wearing plastic house-shoes on her feet, thick tan stockings. Her feet were swollen and her ankles bulged over the tops of the shoes.
‘Hello,’ she said, her eyes flickering anxiously from me to Julia and back again.
‘Hello, dear,’ I said, and I went to Susan and embraced her. Susan felt warm and soft. She smelled of the harsh detergent I’d smelled in the vicarage kitchen and she stood tense in my arms as if she did not know how to respond to an affectionate touch. I stepped back and smiled, saying, ‘It’s nice to see you again.’
Susan would not look me in the eye.
I turned to Julia. ‘Julia, this is Susan Pettigrew.’
‘I remember you,’ Julia said. ‘You used to come to our house sometimes to play with Caroline. I was her younger sister, do you remember? I used to tag along after you. Caroline used to call me Goody Two Shoes.’
Susan nodded carefully, as if unsure whether this was the answer she was supposed to give. She twisted her fingers together anxiously. ‘She only said that to tease,’ she said, barely a whisper.
‘What’s that, dear?’
‘She only called you Goody Two Shoes to tease. She was proud of you. She looked after you.’
‘I didn’t know, back then, that I needed looking after. I didn’t know there were bad people in the village.’
Susan looked embarrassed. Her fingers wound together and then she remembered what she had been doing and returned to the stacking of the chairs.
Julia laid a hand on her arm. She tried again, gently: ‘We know Frank Leeson was a bad man, Susan, and we know he wasn’t the only one. We know about the pictures in the doctor’s bag.’
Now Susan paled with fear. There was panic in her eyes. The feet of the chair she was holding hovered inches above the carpet.
‘It’s a secret,’ she breathed.
Julia took the chair from Susan and slotted it on to the stack. Then she clasped Susan’s hands in her own. ‘Sit down with me for a moment, please,’ she said.
‘I have to finish clearing up.’
‘This won’t take long, dear.’
‘I must clear up properly or I’ll be in trouble.’
‘You won’t be in any trouble, Susan, I promise. Just sit with me for a moment. Sit here, beside me.’
Susan’s eyes flicked backwards and forwards, to the door that opened out to the corridor, to the closed door that went into the dining room, but she sat, heavily, in the chair beside Julia and waited obediently for the questions, still twisting her fingers together on her lap, the smell of fear oozing from beneath her clothes.
‘Are there any more secrets that we should know about?’ Julia asked.
‘Secrets aren’t for telling,’ Susan said. ‘“Whoever goes about
slandering reveals secrets, but he who is trustworthy in spirit keeps a thing covered.”’
‘Someone told me that secrets make a person lonely,’ I said. ‘Anyone who makes you keep a secret doesn’t want you to be happy. They don’t really care for you.’
‘But the Bible says …’
‘What the Bible says is sometimes taken out of context.’
Susan continued to twist her fingers, making patterns with her hands. The clock on the mantel ticked. A long way away, a door clicked shut and she jumped.
‘Susan, dear,’ Julia said, ‘you used to share your secrets with Caroline, didn’t you? I remember how the two of you used to shut yourselves up in Caroline’s bedroom. I could hear you inside, whispering, and I always wished I had a friend like you – someone I could talk to about anything.’
‘I was going to live with Caroline,’ Susan said suddenly. ‘In Scotland.’
‘Were you, dear?’
‘She was going to run away with Robert Aldridge and live in a little house at the side of the loch and he was going to work as the gamekeeper and I was going to go and live with them. Caroline said as I could help with the baby. We were going to have to change our names and everything because Mrs Aldridge’s father was very powerful. He could have had us all put in prison.’
‘Was that the dream?’
‘It was the plan. We had it all worked out. Robert had took some jewellery from his wife. Caroline was looking after it. They were going to sell it in Scotland.’
The truth, finally, was almost within reach; it was hovering on the periphery of the three of us, the three women sitting in the empty day room, the fire burning low in the grate. The truth was like a moth hovering around the flame of a candle. I knew it was there but I could not quite catch it.
‘Caroline told you she was going to live with Mr Aldridge?’ Julia asked.
‘Yes. They would say they were married and nobody in Scotland would know any different.’
‘But he already had a wife.’
The Secret by the Lake Page 27