In the Spider's House

by Sarah Diamond

  I heard her engine starting. It was as if amazement and sympathy had hypnotised me for the past hour or so, and the sound snapped me out of a trance. It all came rushing back to me in the silence of the living room: the frozen image of Socks lying dead, the moment of stark realisation. And I had exactly the same sensation that I’d had then—as if I’d been alone and daydreaming in a Muzak-tinkling lift, before the lights shorted out in a split-second’s explosive pop, and the floor plummeted down under my feet.

  They’d killed Rebecca’s dog to make her leave, Mr Wheeler had told me. And, in that moment, I’d seen the version of myself that he saw—the living embodiment of callous, prurient gossip, a convenient focus for all his suppressed rage. A village was too faceless to hate in that way. Too impossible to retaliate against.

  I stood in the living room and looked out, aware of nothing beyond my own mounting terror. An eye for an eye, I thought. I’d been looking after Socks on an almost daily basis; in a way he’d been my pet as well as Liz’s. I remembered Mr Wheeler standing by his parked car on Saturday, looking up at the house. It dawned on me that he could have done that on any number of occasions without my being aware of it—that he could have watched the back door as well, camouflaged in the woods beyond the garden. Could have seen Socks, coming in and out…

  He could have injured and killed Socks himself. He could have seen it as a kind of twisted justice: a cat’s wounded eye and execution in exchange for a dog’s untimely demise…

  I told myself that I was being ridiculously paranoid—he was a vet, the very last person who’d harm an animal. But I couldn’t help thinking that his anger against me might run deep enough to obliterate kindness, or ethics, or perspective. That he could have been indifferent to Socks’ life, simply because he’d seen the cat as mine.

  It was, to say the least, a coincidence. Two dead pets at number four Ploughman’s Lane in less than six months. And it wasn’t as if Liz and I had conducted an expert post-mortem on Socks’ corpse. If he’d been poisoned, or strangled, or suffocated—

  I tried to stem the flow of new fear, forcing cold practicalities down on it as hard as I could. Too coincidental as Socks’ death seemed, coincidences did happen—old cats did die, and their hearts could suddenly give out on someone’s garden path as easily as anywhere else. But for all my deliberate attempts to reassure myself, my worries only intensified as the minutes passed. The empty rooms pressed in around me, there were too many shadows, the faint chill on the air was too pronounced. And I had an infinitely disturbing feeling that I wasn’t alone here at all, a fleeting sensation that I was being watched.

  If there was one good thing about this disquiet, it made any activity at all look more attractive than idle, solitary reflection, and at last, it did what very little else could have compelled me to do. It drove me towards the piece of A4 with Agnes Og’s number written on it. Sitting down on the sofa, I picked up the phone and dialled. Suddenly, it had become actively reassuring to have something else to worry about, something straightforward and understandable—maybe she’d scream at me down the line, maybe she’d hang up on me, maybe she wouldn’t even be there. Whatever the immediate future held, it was certainly the lesser of two evils.

  The phone rang for some time before a woman answered it abruptly. ‘Yeah?’

  ‘Excuse me, I was wondering if I could speak to Mrs Agnes Og?’

  ‘You’re speaking to her. What do you want?’

  In her voice, there were none of the affectations you got used to hearing over the phone, the deliberate theatrical rises and falls implying curiosity, or goodwill, or pleasure. It could have been because she didn’t know who I was, but something about her tone said she’d have spoken in the same way to a close relative. While I couldn’t warm to it at all, it reassured me; it was dour, practical and emotionless, and I couldn’t imagine its owner dissolving into tears or hysterics when she found out what I wanted. ‘Oh, good morning, Mrs Og,’ I said. ‘My name’s Anna Jeffreys, and I’m a writer.’

  Silence, betraying nothing. I saw the huge obstacle looming ahead, tensed myself to jump over it. ‘I’m very sorry to bother you, but I wondered if you could help me,’ I went on quickly. ‘I’m researching a novel—a thriller—that’s loosely based on the Rebecca Fisher case. I’m going to be in Teasford this coming Saturday, and I was hoping you could spare half an hour or so to answer a few questions.’

  ‘Where’d you get this number from?’

  Instantly, she sounded narrow-eyed and suspicious. With a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach, I explained as best I could about Miss Watson, and what she’d told me. ‘I honestly don’t mean to intrude,’ I finished, ‘and I don’t mean to exploit your sister’s memory. But I’d be very grateful for anything you could tell me.’

  ‘Well, suppose there’s no harm in it. Don’t know what you want to hear, mind.’ Amazement and relief overcame me as she spoke—her tone had become indifferent again, unsurprised and impersonal. ‘Wasn’t like I was friends with the little cow at school. All I knew of her was what I knew from poor Eleanor.’

  The last two words came out without emotion or emphasis, as a single name, the way you’d say Mary Anne, Sarah Jane. She sounded entirely untroubled by it, and I couldn’t help wondering how much of her sister’s memory still remained to her.

  ‘Thanks very much,’ I said. ‘Listen, I don’t know the area at all well. I don’t suppose you know anywhere we could meet up to talk?’

  She’d been so instantly defensive of her phone number, I automatically assumed she’d name a café or a pub, but she didn’t even hesitate. ‘Come round my house, I suppose. We’re number forty-three Harris Road, me and my husband.’

  I took down the address, and she gave directions parsimoniously, as if I should know already. ‘Well,’ I said at last, ‘I’ll see you at one o’clock, on Saturday.’

  ‘All right. Bye.’

  She hung up. Frowning at the receiver in my hand, I followed suit. I found myself thinking back to the Daily Mail article I’d read in the newspaper library, and the picture it had given of Eileen Corbett—the kindly Northern matriarch, a lovable figure straight out of a Catherine Cookson mini-series. Irrationally, I’d imagined that her eldest daughter would resemble her intensely. Then it dawned on me that perhaps she did; there’d been absolutely no doubt where the journalist’s sympathies lay, and the more charming the bereaved mother appeared, the more indefensible the angel-faced psychopath would be. I found myself wondering what else could have been exaggerated, and underplayed, and even ignored completely.

  I walked into the kitchen aimlessly. A large bluebottle had somehow got trapped in here, battering itself against the window and swooping erratically round the room. Its frantic buzz was deafening, and I opened the window to let it out. It flew away almost at once, dwindling to a tiny speck and then vanishing. As it did, its background suddenly became the sole focal point of my attention—those dense, dark-green woods extending into the hazy distance; woods that, at night, could conceal anyone, anything.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  WHILE I DESPERATELY wanted to tell Carl about the events of that morning, I couldn’t explain their full importance. Taken out of context, Socks’ death was nothing out of the ordinary—its ominous undercurrents came directly from Mr Wheeler’s anger and the cry I’d heard in the night. The two things he knew nothing about. It had started out as such a straightforward decision, my unwillingness to let him know about my trip to the vet’s, but suddenly, I could feel secrets and fears tangling up into the kind of knot that even the nimblest of fingers couldn’t undo.

  I couldn’t go back now—God knew how he’d interpret this backlog of unnerving truths. If nothing else convinced him that this research was affecting my state of mind, that certainly would. Still, when he got in from work that night, I knew I couldn’t just ignore the subject either, and, as we sat together in the living room before dinner, I broached it carefully.

  ‘Something sad happened today, you know�
��Liz’s cat died. I found him on our back path this morning.’ I watched him carefully, trying to see if it struck him as odd in any way. Apparently it didn’t—he just looked startled and politely concerned. ‘She was really upset,’ I went on. ‘I helped her bury him in her back garden.’

  ‘That’s a shame. Poor old Liz.’ Carl spoke in the tone most people reserved for near-strangers’ sorrows, at once sympathetic and essentially untroubled. ‘What happened? Did a fox or something get it?’

  ‘Him,’ I corrected automatically, then, ‘no, nothing like that. He just…died. Liz said he was getting on a bit, mind you—apparently, he was thirteen.’

  ‘That’s ancient for a cat, isn’t it?’

  ‘Pretty old.’ A brief pause fell, heavy with one-sided anxiety. I couldn’t quite stop myself speaking again. ‘It seems…horrible, somehow. That he died on our back path. I know it sounds silly, but I can’t help wishing I’d found him somewhere else.’

  Carl looked frankly bewildered. ‘Why?’

  ‘Oh…I don’t know,’ I said unwillingly. ‘It just seems like bad luck, in a way.’

  ‘Jesus, Annie. You’re not normally that superstitious.’ He smiled. ‘You know, you’re supposed to worry about black cats crossing your path, not ginger ones dying on it.’

  After that, there was nothing more I could say without saying far too much. The subject drifted rapidly away, and we didn’t refer to it again. But not being able to share my concerns seemed to make them worse than ever. Over the next few days, they lingered like unwelcome houseguests who showed no signs of ever going home—sometimes I could almost forget they existed, but at other times, I’d enter a room to find them confronting me. Whether they were visible or not, they were always there, and I could find no possible way of driving them out.

  Occasionally, during the daytime, I thought about calling Petra and telling her all about it, but a few minutes’ thought was always enough to stop me. Everything about the subject demanded privacy and time, and she had neither. I’d confide in her, I told myself, the weekend after next. She’d be coming down soon; I wouldn’t be alone with these worries much longer.

  It was a very quiet week for me, and a very strange one. Socks’ absence seemed far more glaringly obvious than his presence had ever done, and several times I found myself longing for his discreet self-absorption in a sunny corner of the kitchen. Liz was out almost constantly, and I guessed she was taking on extra hours to distract her from bereavement. On the rare occasions we saw each other, we exchanged smiling, perfunctory greetings and goodbyes that tactfully denied any knowledge of her sadness. She seemed to have reverted to her old self at once, the self I couldn’t really empathise with, or relate to, or confide in. I observed her bustling briskly through a world devoid of darkness, a hundred miles away.

  And I found myself turning to Rebecca Fisher with a kind of desperation, as if she and she alone could distract me from everything else. The school photograph pulled at me too often, drawing me up to the spare room where I’d put the copy I’d collected from Supasnaps in a folder with my internet print-outs. At the desk, I saw her face leap out from a sea of others, as if some advanced computer trickery made it the only pin-sharp detail in an amorphous grey-white blur. Who were you? I’d think. Who are you now? And, as I thought about them, they seemed to become the only questions that really mattered. I kept thinking about Teasford, longing for Saturday to arrive.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  THE TEASFORD OF my imagination was an oddly unreal and cartoonish sort of place, drawn and coloured in by the article I’d read about it online. From the sudden sea change it had described—a transformation from cloth-capped purgatory to yuppie Utopia—I’d envisioned a scaled-up Ideal Home exhibition, all newness and offices and upmarket pubs, with nothing in evidence that predated 1985. During my train journey from Bournemouth, I became convinced that I’d step off into a state-of-the-art little station, all gleaming glass and plastic; the past would have been scrubbed away with meticulous care, and there’d be no hint of the place it had been long ago.

  So when I finally emerged at Teasford station, I was oddly relieved to find that wasn’t the case at all. It was a dingy old three-platformed affair with dank brick walls the colour of old blood, that looked as if it could have been built at any time in the past hundred years. The closed-in waiting-room I passed on the platform was heavily scarred with graffiti, and looked as wholesome and enticing as an abandoned mattress in a skip. Out of the station, I emerged into fresh sunlight, checked my watch and extracted the directions Agnes Og had given me.

  She lived too near the station to necessitate a taxi, and I started walking in what I hoped was the right direction. For some time, I was convinced I’d never find her house; rows and rows of identical-looking terraces extended endlessly, mazelike, confusing. Each row faced another as if in a mirror, across a narrow strip of road—dark red-brick houses with green-painted front doors, one ground-floor window and two first-floor windows each. The streets were very quiet. At last, to my relief, I saw Harris Road, and crossed the street towards it.

  Finding her house number quickly, I knocked at the door and waited for some time. I’d started to wonder whether she’d forgotten about me and gone out, when the door opened at last.

  ‘You must be Anna Jeffreys.’ It was the same flat, uninflected voice I’d heard on the phone. A large, pallid woman with lank red hair faced me, without apparent interest. ‘Suppose you’d best come in.’

  Through the front door, I stepped directly into a sweltering living room—a battered leatherette three-piece suite, intricate ornaments arranged above an electric fire, a recent-looking wedding photo framed in the centre of them. The TV that dominated the room was showing a garish daytime quiz show, at roughly the same volume as a normal conversation. Agnes made no move to turn it off, or even down. She sat. I sat across from her.

  ‘Well, it’s nice to meet you at last.’ She didn’t say anything and I began to feel intensely awkward. ‘If I could just start off by asking—did you and Eleanor grow up round here?’

  The clumsiness of that question made my cheeks burn—of course, Eleanor Corbett had never grown up—but Agnes didn’t seem to notice. ‘Yeah. Just round the corner, in Churchill Street. I stayed there with Mum up till two years ago. She was ill, you know. I couldn’t get married to my boyfriend Dave till she died.’

  It was hard to know what, if any, reaction she wanted. My expression flickered uneasily between sympathy and congratulations. ‘What about your other sisters?’ I asked. ‘Did they all move out?’

  ‘Yeah. Soon as they could, really. Even after poor Eleanor died, the house was too crowded. It was just the same size as this one, we was always getting in each other’s way. You wouldn’t believe what it was like when we was kids. When there was five of us.’

  Despite myself, I was jolted by the ease with which she alluded to her sister’s death. There was no sentimentality in her voice, just a matter-of-fact nod to the reality of murder. There seemed no way I could move the conversation directly to Rebecca. ‘Have you got any photos of her?’ I asked. ‘Eleanor?’

  ‘Yeah. Got photos of all of us.’ I thought I was going to have to ask if I could see them, but then she rose from her chair. ‘I always keep photos. Got a whole album of me and Dave’s wedding snaps.’

  She went over to a nearby drawer, got out an album bound in padded pink plastic. Peeling gold letters on the front spelt out My Family in flowing, sentimental script. She sat down beside me on the sofa, opening the album in her lap. ‘We’re all in this,’ she said, and began showing me through the photographs.

  It was the kind of slow, pedantically detailed guided tour of strangers’ faces that normally crawled by, but to me Agnes couldn’t linger long enough on each picture. ‘That’s Mary and Pat going to their friend’s birthday party,’ she said. ‘That’s Bernadette when she was a baby.’ The children looked uniformly nondescript, and it was hard to imagine there had ever been a clever one or a pretty
one or a rebel—in the pictures, they were interchangeable as a litter of puppies, with Eleanor as the distinctive, oddly appealing runt. ‘That’s poor Eleanor when she was six,’ said Agnes, ‘her first school photo.’

  An individual picture, the kind you posed for in a primary school assembly hall like a criminal in a mugshot—far more detailed than Annette’s photo, or any of the others in this album. The murdered girl had been cute rather than pretty, the kind of cuteness that owed everything to extreme youth and small stature—the pronounced gap between her tiny front teeth intensified her resemblance to some small, appealing animal that Disney would make even more lovable on drawing boards.

  ‘She was a lovely little girl,’ I said quietly.

  ‘Yeah.’ I had a strong sense that it had never occurred to her before. Far from seizing on it now, she let it drift away with an expression of vague incomprehension. ‘Weren’t that bright, mind. Reckon she was a bit backward, to be honest.’

  ‘In what way?’

  ‘In every way, really. Just slow. Couldn’t hardly read or write, never mind do housework. All the rest of us was helping Mum out by the time we was seven or eight; poor Eleanor was almost ten when she died, and she still couldn’t iron a shirt without burning a hole in it.’