Girl Number One: A Gripping Psychological Thriller

by Jane Holland

  But there is something about the garage door that makes me curious.

  I walk all the way round the garage around, picking a path gingerly through patches of young nettles, and stare at the padlock.

  It’s brand-new. A shiny new padlock on an ancient door. With nothing of much value inside, from what I can see. And thieves are hardly queuing up to break into isolated rundown farmhouses out here on the edge of the moor. So why would Connor and Tris suddenly decide the place needs to be locked up?

  The house stands silent behind me. Nobody at home. No one to answer my suddenly urgent questions.

  I climb up the earth bank at the back of the house again and stand there, listening.

  Nothing.

  I balance along the earth bank until I am standing directly below the part of the kitchen that juts out – the old fireplace, I expect – and use the window ledge to lever myself up. Standing on tiptoe, I reach up and grab the bathroom window ledge above, then swing myself onto the flat roof to the right of the kitchen. After months of demonstrating techniques on the bars in the school gym, it’s the work of a moment.

  The flat roof is made of corrugated plastic, filthy and covered in patches of moss where the guttering above leaks. It judders as I begin to crawl forwards, creaking violently under my weight. I freeze on hands and knees, holding my breath. The laundry room is directly below me, and for a terrifying moment I imagine myself crashing through onto the concrete below.

  I close my eyes and tell myself not to be so stupid. Tris’s bedroom window is almost within reach, just a few more feet to crawl.

  Slowly, I crawl across the creaking and protesting corrugated roof until I reach the window ledge to Tris’s bedroom. To my relief, the old sash window is not locked and opens easily enough when I pull down. I struggle over the top and into his bedroom, knocking something off the window ledge inside and landing on the floor with a painful thump.

  I clamber to my feet and hurry to the door. I open it slightly, listening. But the interior of the house is dark and silent.

  No one is at home.

  If anyone deserves to be arrested, it’s me. For breaking and entering. Well, not breaking. But certainly entering. It’s Tris’s house though, and I’m not here to steal anything. Except secrets.

  Despite their constant jokes about the state of our cottage, I discover that Tris and Connor are not great housekeepers either. Tris’s room is an horrendous mess. I came up here quite a few times as a teenager, to hang out and play board games with him and Connor, but it was far tidier then. He’s totally let it go since those days. The bed’s unmade, his crumpled sheet half pulled away from the mattress, duvet unbuttoned and slipping out of its plain black cover. One of his pillows is lying on the stained carpet, as are most of his clothes. A lone sock dangles from a dusty bookshelf. There are some old posters on the wall, peeling off: hardcore rock groups from when we were kids, most now disbanded. The wardrobe door is open and there’s nothing inside but an old pair of black trousers. Everything else has been hung up on the floor.

  I look around, vaguely disappointed. What was I hoping to find? Some kind of clue that would tell me if he’s guilty or not? There’s nothing here but dirty clothes and old socks.

  I should not be here. And yet I am.

  I catch a reflection of myself in the rectangular mirror set into the back of the wardrobe door. Shoulder-length brown hair hanging loose about my face – I released my ponytail when I got home from work – and big eyes. A determined expression.

  Did I really come all this way, climb into my friend’s bedroom, tiptoe through his empty house, to go home meekly without any answers?

  I cross to the door again. It creaks as I go through it. The landing is unlit, the stairs gloomy.

  I creep along the landing and peer into the next bedroom along. It’s Connor’s room. I have never been in there but it’s obvious. There’s his olive-green, waterproof jacket draped over the back of a chair, and I recognise the shoes kicked off in a corner. His room is neater than his brother’s, but only marginally. A question of degree. No rock posters, but some old maps of Eastlyn on the wall, and one Ordinance Survey map of Bodmin Moor, with campsites circled. He and Tris used to go camping alone on the moor when they were younger, sometimes for several days. I suppose their father must have trusted Connor to take care of Tris, because they could both only have been teenagers at the time.

  I try the third door, but it’s a room full of junk. A bed pushed against the wall and piled with bags and boxes. Their parents’ bedroom. Though their mother walked out when they were both quite young, and their father was gone now too. So this is just dead space. A store room for things they don’t want but can’t bring themselves to throw away.

  There’s a photograph on the wall. Framed, the glass dusty. It’s of a man and woman, arms around each other, smiling at the camera, sitting on a car bonnet outside a handsome building in sunny weather. Their parents in happier days, clearly. I don’t recognise the place. But I feel uneasy.

  I look at their father, then move on to study the woman’s smile. Is it my imagination or does she look unhappy behind that fixed smile?

  It feels a little unnerving to be standing in a dead man’s room looking at his personal items, so I go out again and close the door with a quiet click. The only other room on this floor is the bathroom, so I head downstairs.

  The stairs creak.

  Again, this proves unnerving in an otherwise silent house.

  The hall and living room are not immaculate, stacks of newspapers and junk mail lying about, unfinished meals congealed on plates, beer cans on the floor, but they are still tidier than upstairs. I wonder if I ought to offer to come round with cleaning wipes and a bin bag.

  The kitchen is grim. I back out with my lip curling.

  There’s a door under the stairs.

  A cellar?

  I try the handle tentatively. It’s locked. I bend to check the make. I look about nearby for a matching key, but there isn’t one, so I head back into the kitchen and force myself to open the drawers. I find a few old car keys, and a vast, black, wrought-iron key that looks like it would open the Addam’s family vault. But nothing that would fit a Yale lock.

  I give up and head back into the living room. That’s when I notice the door. It looked like a simple wood panel before, half hidden behind a tall, wooden room divider. I slip behind the screen and try the door. It opens easily enough into a small office of some kind: there’s a tired-looking desk with an old-fashioned table lamp, and a four shelf bookcase, and a gun cabinet.

  I cross the room and check the gun cabinet. But it’s locked, and through the glass front I can see the lone shotgun inside is secured with a chain in the approved manner. I know they have a valid licence for it too. Nothing suspect there.

  When I turn, I’m faced with a row of square, glass-covered box frames hung at precise intervals on the wall opposite. Each frame contains a selection of butterflies, pinned to the felt backing, their tiny labels meticulously written out in black ink and placed inside next to each butterfly.

  I step closer to read one of the labels. Vanessa Atalanta, or Red Admiral.

  The frames are dusty, like the glass-covered photograph upstairs, and look like they’ve been there for decades. I’m guessing their father was the butterfly enthusiast. On the narrow table below the frames are three dead creatures, stuffed and preserved. A fox with glass eyes, a magpie, and a weasel with bared teeth, mounted on metal stands. Taxidermy. I have a dim and unpleasant memory of my dad taking me to a museum of stuffed animals at Jamaica Inn. I found it horrific, though Dad seemed to enjoy it, and even visited it again several times before the museum closed down.

  I eye their rigid forms with misgiving, then stiffen at the unmistakeable sound of a vehicle approaching the farmhouse.

  Time to get out.

  I head straight for the window in the living room. But it’s painted shut and I can’t loosen it. The front door is too risky. And the back door is p
robably the way they will come in. I stand in the gloomy hallway like a ghost, thinking and listening hard. Two car doors slam, one slightly after the other. Then I hear familiar male voices in the yard.

  The Taylor brothers are back.

  I take the stairs two at a time, not caring how much noise I am making this time, and dive into Tris’s untidy bedroom.

  The back door is being unlocked. I can hear barking now. Connor must have taken the dog with him to pick up Tris.

  I pick my way to his bedroom window over discarded socks and underwear. I need to climb out and get myself home as fast as possible. There will be no easy way to explain my presence if they find me here. And I could end up being the one in trouble with the police.

  I overbalance on something hidden under the clothes on the floor, and lurch sideways, grabbing onto the bed frame. There’s a bag under the clothes. An old blue rucksack that I recognise as belonging to Tris. With something poking out of it.

  It’s a photograph.

  Crouching, I draw it out of the rucksack and stare down in disbelief at one of our own family snapshots. A holiday photo of me and my parents on a sandy beach, taken while my mum was still alive. Only a short while before she was murdered, in fact, so I would have been six at the time. My face is beaming, my hand tucked in my mum’s, my little red bucket and spade lying on the sand beside us. It’s a photo I know intimately, one of the old family snaps in the keepsake box under my bed.

  How the hell did Tris get an extra print of it?

  I turn the photo over, and feel like someone has just thumped me hard in the chest, almost stopping my heart.

  Angela, Ellie and me. Polzeath.

  My dad’s handwriting.

  This is not an extra print.

  It’s exactly the same photo I have at home. Or rather, had at home. Because it’s been stolen from me.

  Abruptly I remember one night not long ago when I woke up and thought someone was in my bedroom, standing over my bed. When I got up and groped along the wall for the light switch, I found the room empty, but my keepsake box out in the middle of the floor, the lid off.

  The shadow man.

  I stare at the photo, my heart plunging into the pit of my stomach. I have always assumed it was my disturbed imagination, that man-shaped shadow standing by the window. But perhaps it is a real person, climbing in through my unlocked window at night and watching me while I sleep.

  Tris?

  I can’t bear the thought, yet here’s the evidence of this stolen photograph. He’s the right build too, for my shadow man. And I did see him at the night club in Newquay. Maybe he often goes there at the weekends to dance and hang out. Maybe he met the dead woman there, lured her away, and …

  I slip the photograph into my bra, rather than risk a crease by folding it into the tight rear pocket of my denim shorts.

  Then I freeze, listening. There are voices in the kitchen below, raised in anger. The two brothers are arguing.

  ‘You’re not Dad, Connor. You can’t tell me what to do.’

  ‘Dad’s dead, remember? And he left me in charge. So stop arguing the toss and do what I bloody well tell you.’

  ‘Why should I? You’re not even my real brother.’

  ‘You ungrateful little shit.’ Connor sounds furious, and I’m not surprised. ‘I’m telling you to be careful with Eleanor. No, don’t you walk away from me, I mean it.’ His voice deepens. ‘She’s not right in the head. Never has been. A woman like her can only land you in trouble. And I mean serious trouble.’

  ‘Don’t talk rubbish.’

  ‘Oh right, I see. So you didn’t just spend a night in the police cells because of Eleanor Blackwood?’

  Tris raises his voice. He sounds like he’s ready to thump his brother. ‘You are bang out of order. You know my arrest was total bullshit. It was just for the tourists, to make the area look safe again for walkers and ramblers. Why do you think they let me go so quickly? Because that lawyer showed them up as idiots.’

  There’s a long silence below. Then Connor says in a hoarse voice, ‘Have you forgotten what Dad told me before he died?’

  ‘I haven’t forgotten.’

  ‘Dad didn’t think you knew how much he loved you, Tris. He made me promise to take care of you. And that’s what I’m going to do.’

  I climb onto the window ledge as quietly as possible and ease first one leg, then the other, over the top of the sash window, standing on the narrow window ledge below. At least with all the noise they’re making, they are less likely to hear someone sneaking out of an upstairs window.

  I hear Connor swearing below, his voice muffled, then a thud of feet on the stairs. Tris, heading for his bedroom in a rage.

  ‘Shit,’ I mutter.

  Tris is about to find his window open. And the mad girl outside, hanging onto his window frame by her fingertips.

  There’s no time to worry about breaking the corrugated roof below. I let go and drop the last few feet, landing in an unsteady crouch. It cracks ominously under my weight but I can’t take it slow this time. I balance hurriedly to the edge, making one hell of a noise, then swing down, this time straight into brambles at the back of the house.

  Landing awkwardly, a white-hot bolt of pain shoots up my ankle. I stifle a cry of pain and lean against the house wall, eyes closed, waiting for my racing heart to settle. For all I know, Tris is looking out of his window above me, wondering why it’s open. But that’s a risk I’ll have to take.

  I count backwards from ten, then test my ankle. It hurts, but not so badly that I can’t walk. Not too much damage done, thankfully. I can’t afford yet more time off work.

  I limp up the hill at the back of the farmhouse, hoping I’m out of sight of the windows. Nearing the top of the steep field, I look back, sweaty and panting in the late afternoon sun. There’s no one following me. No sign of anyone, in fact. The valley lies beneath me like a patchwork quilt, a higgledy-piggledy network of fields and sprawling hedgerows and farm buildings, the untidy cluster of houses that make up the village invisible from here, nestled in a dip beside the woods.

  I wriggle the old photograph out of my bra, turn it over and study the handwriting again.

  Eleanor, Angela and me. Polzeath.

  It does look like my dad’s untidy, slanted handwriting. Especially the big loop of the P on Polzeath. But to be absolutely sure it’s my own copy of the photograph, I’ll have to check in my keepsake box at home.

  She’s not right in the head. Never has been.

  Is that what he wanted to talk to me about? To warn me off his brother?

  Climbing the stile at the top of the field, the back of my neck prickles like someone is watching me.

  I look round, narrowing my eyes. High above I can hear the skylark again, a distant dot enjoying the last of the day’s sunshine. The shadows stretch long and stark all the way back to the farmhouse. But there’s no one moving in them.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  I scramble through an old deer gap in the hedge a few hundred yards from home, and find a car marked with a familiar stripe and the words in blue, Devon Cornwall Police, parked outside the cottage. There’s a young officer leaning against the bonnet, checking his smartphone. I remember him from the woods, He’s got a faintly stubbly chin and looks about the same age as Connor.

  As I approach, he straightens up and nods. He’s wearing a black earpiece linked by a curly wire to his radio, and even at this distance I can hear a thin crackle of voices.

  ‘Miss Blackwood? DI Powell would like a word.’

  ‘Where is he?’

  The officer looks embarrassed.

  ‘Here I am, Eleanor.’

  I turn, surprised, at a rustling from the sunlit field behind me where the hedgerow was damaged by my violent attack with the stick. Suddenly, the hedge shakes, and DI Powell emerges through a gap. He has a few petals of white hawthorn blossom caught in his hair, and a long, drooping grass stalk between his lips. He’s in wellington boots again, and looks like
a country yokel from a previous century.

  ‘Sorry,’ DI Powell says, striding off the grassy verge to greet me, ‘I was just … investigating.’

  ‘Investigating in a field?’

  He smiles vaguely and shakes his head. The hawthorn petals drift to earth. ‘Looking around, getting a feel for the place. I’m glad I caught you though. Shall we go inside?’

  ‘I’m really bushed. I’m back at work now, and it’s been a long day. If you’ve got something to say, perhaps you could just tell me out here?’

  He looks at me thoughtfully, then shrugs. ‘Eleanor, I need you to do something for me.’

  ‘Do what?’

  ‘I need you to look at the body again.’

  I recoil instinctively, remembering at once. Her dead face flashes up at me as though from the end of a tunnel, her skin pale, faintly green in the gloom. ‘Oh, no. Sorry. I couldn’t possibly.’

  ‘I thought that would be your reaction. And obviously I can’t force you to do this. But it is important or I wouldn’t ask.’

  ‘But why? I told you everything I know at the station.’

  He nods. ‘And I’m very grateful for that. But we need to be one hundred percent certain she’s not the woman you saw the first time.’

  Temper flares inside me. ‘You think I’m lying, don’t you?’

  ‘Not lying, no,’ DI Powell says, and clasps his hands behind his back. He cocks his head to one side, regarding me steadily. I get the impression he’s itching to strangle me. ‘It can be a traumatic experience, coming across a dead body like that. We need to be sure you didn’t muddle it in your head. Which would be perfectly natural for someone in your situation.’

  ‘Someone in my situation?’

  He means, unbalanced.

  ‘I need to be sure, before I authorise a full-scale search of the area, that a second body exists. These searches can be very expensive. Hours of manpower, whole communities involved, dogs, helicopters … ’