Shadow of a Doubt

by Michelle Davies

  I leave the aisle and head to the checkout. Standing still as I wait to be served makes me nervous and my eyes dart from side to side to check whether anyone has noticed me. But, again, everyone is engrossed in their own actions and the till operator barely looks at me as she scans my shopping and takes my payment.

  Outside, I breathe a sigh of relief and my mood lifts as I push my laden trolley in the direction of where I left my car. As I draw closer, however, I notice there is a cluster of people standing next to the vehicle and, from their expressions, they are not happy.

  Heart hammering in my chest, I pick up my pace and when I am a few metres away, one woman turns on her heel and points at me.

  ‘Oi! Is this your car? You should be ashamed of yourself!’

  The crowd parts and I see Mustard lying on the ground, panting heavily. A man is kneeling beside him and is slowly pouring water from a plastic bottle onto his tongue and into his mouth and Mustard is gratefully lapping it up.

  I let go of my trolley and roughly push through the bystanders, my trainers crunching on glass fragments from where the front passenger window of my car has been smashed in.

  ‘Is he okay?’ I ask frantically, crouching down. Mustard is pleased to see me and wags his tail.

  ‘No thanks to you,’ the man snaps. ‘I heard him barking – he was in distress because there were no windows open.’

  Stunned, I stare at my car. Aside from the window that is broken, the others are firmly shut. But I always leave one of the back ones open a crack to let air in, even when the temperature outside is cold, and I did today … didn’t I? ‘I swear I left the window open,’ I tell my accuser.

  ‘You should never leave a dog unattended in a car full stop,’ snaps another man standing behind us. ‘The poor thing was gasping for air.’

  The thought of Mustard suffering makes me feel wretched and I bury my face in the furry cuff of his neck and whisper how sorry I am. After a few moments, I raise my head and see a couple of people in the crowd are holding phones up and appear to be recording me.

  ‘Please don’t film us,’ I plead. ‘I know I left the window open before I went into the store. I would never hurt my dog.’

  Not one of them looks like they believe me, nor do they lower their phones.

  ‘People like you shouldn’t be able to keep pets,’ an elderly woman says loudly. ‘Bloody irresponsible.’

  ‘You need to take him to the vet’s, and get him checked out,’ says the man knelt beside me. His tone has softened a fraction and I thank him for coming to Mustard’s aid. ‘It’s okay,’ he says gruffly. ‘Just be more careful next time.’

  ‘Don’t let her off the hook,’ crows the pensioner. ‘Report her to the RSPB.’

  ‘That’s for birds, love,’ says someone else and the crowd bursts into laughter. Phones are lowered and they begin to disperse, the drama at an end.

  With the help of his rescuer, I guide Mustard onto the back seat again. ‘I really did leave a window open.’

  ‘No, you didn’t,’ he replies peevishly. ‘They were all shut.’

  I open my mouth to protest, then close it again. I want to convince him, but I don’t know if I can even convince myself.

  As he walks away, I climb into the driver’s seat and close my eyes for a moment. I replay driving into the car park, getting out, making sure Mustard is settled in the back seat … and pressing the key fob to lock the door as I walk off. The man was right: I didn’t lower the window before I left Mustard in the car.

  I burst into tears, horrified. My poor dog could’ve died if the man hadn’t spotted him. I’ve allowed myself to become so distracted by the voice of my nine-year-old self crowing in my head about Limey Stan that it is drowning out all rational thought. But I mustn’t lose my grip on what is real and what is not. If I do, I will be readmitted to hospital and this time I’ll end up staying there.

  I cancel the gardener coming round before I leave the car park. He’s understandably annoyed because it’s last-minute, but I appease him when I tell him the job is his regardless of the quote and ask him to start first thing tomorrow. Foolish, perhaps, but I am too frazzled to consider the implications, plus I’ve got a pile of money coming to me from Mum’s will, so it’s not like I can’t afford it.

  Mustard rallies by the time we get home and bounds out of the car and into the house. I fret about whether to take him to a vet to be looked over – the thought of leaving the house again fills me with trepidation – but judging by the way he troughs his dinner and the treats I keep offering by way of apology, I don’t think he’s in any way injured by his ordeal. I’ll keep a close eye on him for now and will take him in tomorrow if I think he needs it.

  Seeing him happily bound around the kitchen does not negate my guilt though. More tears flow as I contemplate what might’ve happened if that man had not spotted him barking inside the car and broken the window to release him. Losing Mustard would destroy me.

  Wiping my tears away, I head upstairs to my bedroom, resolute: I need my pills. There’s no shame in it. I am struggling, obviously brought on by my coming back here, and for my own sake as much as Mustard’s, I need to get myself back on an even keel. I don’t think I am bad enough to need the trifluoperazine, but a couple of days on diazepam should settle me down.

  As I open my bedroom door, my brain takes a second to register the scene before me. Then I gasp. Laid out on my bed, ranked in order of size, are the toys from Matty’s bedside.

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  MEMORANDUM

  To: Dr Patrick Malloy, head of clinical services

  From: Dr Stacey Ardern, consultant child and adolescent psychiatrist

  Date: Tuesday 23 May 1995

  Subject: Cara Belling

  I have an urgent matter we need to discuss – are you available at 3 p.m. today for a case conference? Cara Belling’s progress has stalled and I am deeply concerned she is slipping back into the catatonic state she was in at the time of her admission, thus undoing all we have achieved so far. The issue is her parents and their decision to cease all contact, bar her father’s weekly phone call to me to update on her welfare, of which Cara remains unaware, at his request.

  While I do have the utmost sympathy for what the parents have been through, I feel it is imperative that we again implore them to be involved in the process of her recovery and I was hoping that entreaty could come from you this time. Much of Cara’s reluctance to engage has stemmed, in my view, from her immeasurable confusion and hurt over the absence of family visits. She wants to see her parents and asks repeatedly why they are staying away.

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Cara

  I close my eyes, convinced I am seeing things. Yet when I open them again, the scene before me remains unchanged. Displayed neatly across my bed in a straight line are my dead brother’s favourite toys.

  I back out of the room, hands clutched to my chest, legs turned to jelly. My breath comes in gasps and when I try to gulp down more air, nothing happens – my lungs have seized in panic. I put out my right hand to grab the balustrade at the top of the stairs to steady myself, but I miss and fall to the carpet. I am choking now, my body desperate for oxygen but getting none, and the last thing I think I hear as I slip into unconsciousness is the slow creak of footsteps in the hallway down below.

  What feels like only moments later, Mustard brings me round by licking my face repeatedly until the roughness of his tongue and the drench of his slobber rouses me enough to push him away. My chest hurts like hell from heaving to catch my breath when the panic attack struck, but other than that, I am okay. As I gingerly get to my feet, I wonder how long I was unconscious for, but there is no way of telling; I did not check the time when we arrived back from Morrisons.

  The first thing I notice when I’m back on my feet is that the door to my bedroom is shut now. Fear ripples through me again: I know I left it open after seeing the toys on the bed. I am tempted to flee downstairs and call Tishk to come round, but I fea
r he will tire of me contacting him so often, and should an occasion arise when I really need him, he may not come. I need to deal with this on my own, however terrified I am.

  Slowly, I move forwards and open the door. I look across the room, expecting to see Matty’s toys on the bed, but they are no longer there and the duvet has been smoothed flat.

  I am stunned. ‘What the hell?’

  Mustard looks up at me enquiringly.

  ‘Did you see anything?’ I ask, but, of course, he has no answer for me.

  I stumble across the landing to Matty’s bedroom and a quick look inside confirms the toys are back in their rightful places on his beside chest.

  Mustard nudges my leg with his snout.

  ‘I know. They were on my bed,’ I say to him. ‘Laid out in a row in order of size. I did not imagine that, I know I didn’t.’

  Mustard woofs supportively.

  I return to my bedroom and retrieve my bag of pills from the top drawer. My hands are shaking so violently, it takes me three attempts to pop the diazepam tablet from its blister packet. I swallow it down dry, almost gagging as it drags against the inside of my throat, but immediately I start to relax. It will be at least half an hour before my senses actually begin to dull and my body unclenches, but the placebo effect is instant.

  Emboldened, I go back to Matty’s bedroom and carefully examine each of the toys, but I find nothing to indicate how they came to be somewhere else. As I place the green-suited Power Ranger back down, I remember I thought I heard creaking footsteps in the hallway in the seconds before I blacked out and so I head downstairs. I cannot see any marks on the floorboards to suggest someone trod on them and all the windows and doors remain locked, so it can’t have been someone breaking in … as much as I would love it to have been.

  More than anything, I want it to be an intruder. I want word to have spread that Cara Belling is staying at the house where her brother died and someone’s said, let’s break in and teach her a lesson so she’ll freak out and leave Heldean again. Nothing would make me happier than discovering that and I wouldn’t even press charges, because the alternative explanation for what’s happening fills me with a horror I cannot even begin to process – that the voice in my head is right and Limey Stan has returned because I am here again and he’s no longer waiting until the small hours to torment me.

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Cara

  As my medication kicks in, however, so too does the analytical part of my brain, the side that makes me good at accountancy and a reasonable thinker. The side that reminds me Limey Stan only ever visited in the middle of the night, so moving the toys in the daytime had to be an actual person’s doing. I also need the culprit to be human for the sake of my mental state, because the idea that Limey Stan has re-emerged since I moved back in terrifies me, and I can’t live through that again, no matter how much I want to prove what killed Matty and to clear my name. No, it has to be a person who wants to see me gone from this house and is mimicking my past experience to do it … and it’s far more likely to be someone I already know.

  I go downstairs and settle on the sofa with my phone. Using a notebook app, I make a list of all the people who I think might hate me enough to risk breaking into the house to scare me in the hope I’ll leave. It’s not a particularly long list, admittedly, because I don’t know many people in Heldean now, but compiling it makes me feel like I’m taking back control.

  Karen heads the list, followed by Gary, Ryan, the girlfriend with the red hair, Heather from over the road, Heather’s husband and Jim from the cemetery. Then, after a moment’s hesitation, I add Tishk’s name. He’s shown me nothing but kindness since I arrived, but he’s also a friend of the people who want me gone the most. How can I be sure he’s not helping them? He also lied to me about discussing me with my mum; he said it was because he didn’t want to upset me, but I have no way of knowing if he’s being genuine. Until I can be certain, Tishk stays on the list.

  There’s another name I’m debating whether to add to it: Timothy Pitt, the man behind the Heldean Haunting blog. Pitt of all people would benefit most from Limey Stan returning to haunt me – he’s made a career out of writing about him, after all. But would he really risk lingering downstairs while I discovered the toys? Whoever did it had no inkling I would have a panic attack and faint, it was pure luck they were able to come back upstairs while I was passed out and put the toys back in Matty’s room. The others, even Tishk, I can imagine doing that, but Pitt? Reluctantly, I dismiss his name.

  Although familiar with his earlier blog posts, I haven’t looked at his site for a couple of years and for the next hour my right thumb is continually scrolling as I read his take on the event that took away everything I held dear as a child. Pitt remains utterly convinced that a ghost called Limey Stan possessed our house and took Matty’s life. He even now claims to know the identity of Limey Stan before he died.

  Americans called British servicemen ‘Limeys’ during World War II, perhaps in retaliation for being labelled ‘Yanks’ by us. Although it has been around a lot longer than that – limey is shortened from the phrase lime-juicer, a nickname ascribed after the British navy began watering down their sailors’ daily rum ration with lemon juice to counter outbreaks of scurvy during the nineteenth century.

  I have looked into the background of Parsons Close and have discovered that an RAF serviceman called Wilfred S. Smith lived there and it is my belief he was given the nickname Limey Stan during his service in the war and that Stanley could be the ‘S’ of his middle name.

  I sit back, surprised. It has never occurred to me to dig into the provenance of Limey Stan. To nine-year-old me, he was simply the ghost who would not leave me alone, not the ghost of someone who had previously lived. It is such a strange name that to learn it might be based in reality is eye-opening. I was only three months old when we moved into the house, so I have no recollection of my parents ever discussing who owned it before us. They can’t have known though – my first mention of Limey Stan surely would have triggered a connection in their minds?

  Pitt’s most recent posts are a rehash of information I have already digested over many years of reading books and other online essays on the subject of hauntings. I click on ‘About’ to learn more of Timothy Pitt, but his bio is still disappointingly brief: he’s Heldean born and bred and became a paranormal investigator in the late 1980s. What prompted it, he doesn’t say.

  Below his bio, however, there is a contact form. My thumb hovers over the screen, ready to scroll on, but I stop myself, thinking. There is one glaring omission in his blog, a thorny question he hasn’t tackled yet or is deliberately dodging. Or perhaps he simply hasn’t been asked the question yet.

  I fill in the required details using my own email address, which is obscure enough for me to hide behind: pixie426@gmail.com. The 426 relates to my patient number at the Peachick, a salutary reminder of what I survived. Then I begin to type.

  Dear Mr Pitt,

  I have read your blog with interest and you throw up some interesting theories about Limey Stan, i.e. who he was and how he came to haunt the Belling family’s house. But one thing you haven’t addressed, and what I would love to hear your take on, is how can a ghost kill when it’s not of actual physical substance?

  I don’t know what name to use to sign off, so I leave it blank. Whether he answers me privately or via his blog, I don’t mind – I just want to know what he thinks happened all those years ago.

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Karen

  Friday night for Karen and Gary means a fish-and-chips takeaway and a few drinks each in front of the telly, their former habit of going to the pub scuppered by the closure of their local a few years back. Normally, Gary fetches the food on his way home, but just after six, Karen pulls on her coat and sends him a text saying she is going to pick it up herself to save him the trip. He’ll be back by six forty-five at the latest, so that gives her enough time to take a quick stroll past Anita’s hous
e on her way to the fish bar. She’s heard nothing from Tishk since he dashed off to see Cara two days previously and she is desperate to know what’s going on with her niece. The idea that Cara is still blaming Limey Stan for things going wrong has incensed her.

  It is a two-minute walk between her house and Anita’s, if that, and as she turns into Parsons Close, Karen is assailed by a wave of grief. How many millions of footsteps has she trodden between her house and here over the years? With her sister gone, it suddenly feels like nowhere near enough.

  The first thing she notices as she nears number 16 is that it is ablaze with light. The porch light has been left on and through the glass panels in the front door, she can see the hallway is also illuminated, while the lounge and the two bedrooms at the front of the house are lit up, with the curtains still wide open. Slowing her pace, she stares up at the windows but can’t see Cara anywhere. She must be in the back of the house, perhaps in the kitchen …

  Then it hits her.

  The lights.

  Turning on every light in the house is what Cara did in the weeks before she killed Matty, even when it was daylight outside. Anita would shout at her to turn them off, but the child would run round flicking them back on again, insisting they had to stay on so there were no shadows anywhere in the house. The pattern of behaviour continued in the days after Matty’s death as well, before the police investigation had yet to categorically conclude her guilt. Only then, Cara had confined herself to her bedroom, where she lay on the bed, catatonic, with her bedside lamp and the overhead light on. She would not sleep; she just lay there, eyes wide open, but every now and then would shout ‘You can come out now, Limey Stan’ at the top of her voice. The doctors at the Peachick told Paul and Anita the obsessive behaviour with the lights was a symptom of her being unwell.