In the Spider's House
Page 18
‘Just under a year. From the time she first got taken into care, up until the time she was adopted. I paid occasional visits to her and her new family, of course, but it was all very much less formal.’ His manner was paternal, amiable, rather rambling. ‘Thirty years ago—my goodness, that does take me back. I would have been twenty-five years old at the time. It was the first proper case I ever handled.’
‘What did you think of her adoptive parents? Rita and Dennis Fisher?’
‘They were a very nice couple. It goes without saying that I saw a great deal of them before they adopted Rebecca; I visited them at their home a number of times. They were extremely happy together, very respectable, very settled. Ideal adoptive parents in every way.’ I remembered my visit to Teasford, what Melanie had told me about Rita Fisher. ‘Also, they were specifically looking to adopt a child of Rebecca’s age. That was very unusual, and still is today. At the time, Rebecca was five years old, and ninety-nine percent of people want babies.’
‘What made them want an older child?’
‘Because they knew that other families wouldn’t. They were very kind people—they wanted a child they could make a real difference to. They were on the adoptive parents register for some time before they found the perfect child for them. They definitely wanted a little girl. The mother was quite adamant about that.’
‘Any particular reason?’
‘Oh, she simply wanted a daughter. There was nothing mysterious about it.’
There was something too cosy about his voice, somehow false—I had an inexplicable conviction that he was hiding things, and asked something I already knew the answer to, just to see what he’d say. ‘Why did Rebecca go into care? What happened to her parents?’
‘They both died in a car accident. Rebecca was at her playgroup when it happened. She was their only child—it was extremely sad.’
‘How did she react to their bereavement at the time?’
‘Oh, as well as could be expected. It’s a terrible blow for any child, of course. When she was adopted by the Fishers, that was all sorted out—she was as right as rain, after that.’
‘Until she killed Eleanor Corbett.’
I hadn’t intended any malice, but the short silence down the line was like a verbal flinch. When he spoke again, there was an almost fearful note that didn’t belong in those avuncular tones at all. ‘Well, that really couldn’t have been foretold, Anna. Who knows what started happening in Rebecca’s mind?’
‘So she had no history of disturbed behaviour before that? She never received any kind of psychiatric treatment between the ages of five and ten?’
‘Very briefly. It wasn’t considered necessary to continue it after her adoption.’
‘It was never advised that she should?’
His voice was sorrowful, soothing. ‘Never, I’m afraid.’
If I hadn’t known it was a direct lie, I’d never have recognised it as such in a million years—suddenly, his easy manner reminded me of a politician who was far too slick to seem it. I desperately wanted to mention the psychologist’s report I’d read, but sheer social embarrassment stopped me.
‘Looking back without hindsight, the Fishers were the best adoptive parents she could have gone to,’ he went on. ‘Eleanor’s murder was a terrible tragedy, but it couldn’t possibly have been prevented. Nobody could have seen it coming.’
I felt a surge of hatred for his cosy banalities, his papering over of the truth, and struggled to keep my voice polite and neutral. ‘Well, thank you very much for your time, Mr Mills.’
‘I hope it’ll come in useful for your book,’ he said. ‘Goodbye, Anna.’
Off the phone, frustration gnawed and raged inside me. Talking to him had told me nothing whatsoever while intensifying my conviction that, somewhere down the line, something had gone very wrong indeed. I pieced together what I knew as hard facts and what I was one hundred percent convinced of: following Rebecca’s bereavement, she’d shown clear signs of disturbance, a psychologist had found them glaringly obvious and his report had been ignored. Whether it had been deliberately overlooked or just lost in a forest of official documents and red tape, I didn’t know, and didn’t care. What mattered was what had happened next. How the Fishers had reacted to the withdrawn and troubled little girl they’d adopted; whether, in forced initial getting-to-know-you sessions, they’d had any idea what they were about to take on.
They must have done, I told myself—from what I’d read in the psychologist’s report, Rebecca’s symptoms had been as impossible to ignore as a wooden leg—it wouldn’t have taken an expert to notice. At the same time, however, I was ninety per cent convinced that Rita and Dennis Fisher hadn’t. Robert Mills’ description of them was like two hastily sketched stick figures, while Melanie Cook’s had been pure Lucien Freud. I couldn’t imagine the snobbish, artificial woman Melanie had described knowingly giving house-room to anything damaged, whether the object in question was a vase or a child. And I found it equally difficult to imagine her approaching the adoption process with a philanthropist’s selflessness; deliberately selecting the child nobody else wanted, delighted by the chance to make a difference…
Questions everywhere I looked, and not an answer in sight. Try as I might, I could think of no further paths into discovery, and was appalled to face a dead end. I found myself hopefully anticipating A Mind to Murder, the book I’d bought online which should arrive any day now. Even if it wasn’t particularly revealing in its own right, I reassured myself, there was every chance that it would throw up names and places and leads for me to follow. The roadblock ahead of me was essentially temporary. Soon, I’d be able to start again.
On Friday morning I went up to the spare room and set about preparing it for Petra’s arrival. The air had a stale, unused smell that I quickly opened the window to get rid of. Even now, in the height of summer, it seemed inexplicably colder than it should have been. With some determination, I struggled to make it look cheerful and welcoming; hoovering, cleaning up hidden corners I’d never touched before, which had grown a thin grey fur of dust since we’d moved in. Making the bed with fresh pastel-coloured linen, I put a bowl of potpourri on the bedside table beside a portable radio we didn’t use any more, and a copy of Captain Corelli’s Mandolin. Perhaps there was more of my mother in me than I cared to recognise; it was exactly the way she’d have prepared for a weekend guest herself.
By the time I’d finished, there was a definite improvement in the general look of the place. Only the side of the room by the window looked badly out of place, a sparsely equipped office in a country bedroom. There was nothing I could do about the computer and printer and fax machine, Petra would just have to live with them; but the bulging folder on the desk’s bottom shelf disrupted the look of everything, and demanded to be taken away. I thought about putting it downstairs somewhere, but nowhere seemed quite private enough. While Carl never came in here, there was no drawer in the kitchen or living room he wasn’t likely to open, and seeing Rebecca’s old school photograph would make him wary all over again. Where did you get this? he’d ask doubtfully. How come you never told me? And, most damningly of all, what did you want it for, anyway? I thought you were interested in facts, not her…
While I’d always been vaguely aware of the built-in cupboard on one side of the spare bed, I’d never really noticed it as I did now. Thank God, I thought, there was somewhere safe to put the folder, after all. The door stuck badly, and finally gave with a groaning squeak. I was picking up the folder from the carpet when I put it down again, frowning, reaching in. There was something on the top shelf already.
I saw that it was nothing newsworthy, just a pad of Basildon Bond writing paper, thick enough to seem virtually unused. I was lifting it out of the cupboard when a neatly folded sheet fell out and seesawed lazily to the floor. Picking it up and unfolding it, I saw it was the beginning of a letter—a few scrawled lines of wildly erratic handwriting stared up at me. I read through them, cold inside with amaz
ement, and intrigue, and a kind of fear.
4, Ploughman’s Lane
Abbots Newton
Dorset DT5 6RJ
27 February 2002
Dear Penny,
Don’t expect you thought I’d write again after what happened, but I thought I’d have to let you know what’s going on. Strange things have started happening here, I don’t know how else I can say it. Someone’s threatening me. I have no idea who they are or what they want from me, but I’ve been receiving these anonymous letters and today
Nothing more. Just silence, as if I’d heard Rebecca Fisher talking quickly and the sound had abruptly gone dead. I stared at it unblinking for endless minutes, as though looking at an object randomly preserved in time, a fossil, a fragment of pottery unearthed at an archaeological dig. It told me nothing I hadn’t known already, but its significance felt overwhelming. To think that it had been here all along, hidden by nothing but an unlocked cupboard door half-an-inch thick. Studying it more closely, I was struck by the way the words veered off at different angles, and the sheer pressure the black biro had exerted—in places, the paper was almost scratched straight through. And I felt the full weight of her terror and confusion at the moment of writing; the indescribable horror of having an unknown enemy, facing an unknown threat.
Silence had become cathedral-like, multi-layered, as if I could hear a tiny ghost of her voice filtering in on its furthest outskirts. It was then that the phone rang unexpectedly in the main bedroom, a mundane noise from another world, abrupt, insistent, jarring.
I hurried into the bigger, warmer, sunnier room, making an effort to calm down. Sitting on the bed, I lifted the receiver. ‘Hello?’
‘Hello, is that Anna Jeffreys?’
I didn’t recognise the female voice at all, and my thoughts turned suspiciously to telesales, before I realised that she’d used my writing name. ‘It is,’ I said, ‘can I help you?’
‘Well, I’m not sure, really. My name’s Lucy Fielder. I got your number from Melanie Cook—she’s a neighbour of mine, lives just a few doors down. She told me you were researching the Rebecca Fisher case, and you’d be interested in anything new you could find out about it. I wondered if you’d finished all that now, or if you were still interviewing people.’
The voice was precise, unemotional but pleasant. My imagination showed me another conscientious, middle-aged housewife absolutely in keeping with the estate where she lived. ‘Oh, I’m still at the research stage,’ I reassured her quickly. ‘Anything you could tell me would be very helpful.’
‘I’m afraid I won’t be any help if you just want to know about Rebecca—I didn’t really know her from Adam. But I certainly knew Eleanor Corbett. Would that have any relevance to your book?’
‘Totally. I’m researching the whole case.’ Wonderful as this turn of events felt, I hadn’t been prepared for it at all, and struggled to kick-start my thoughts. ‘Did you know Eleanor well?’
‘Quite well, as it happens. We were in the same class at St Anthony’s. After, you know, they found her body, I remember reading about her in the papers, just sad little mentions of how sweet she’d been, how much everyone had liked her. I’d have given a good deal to set the record straight then, and I think a lot of other people felt the same way, but, at the time, it seemed heartless even to think of that. After all, she’d been murdered, and she’d only been nine years old…it seemed horrible, wanting to drag out nasty facts about her.’
‘What kind of nasty facts?’
‘She wasn’t anything like the innocent little angel the papers mentioned, I can tell you that for sure.’ Lucy’s voice was matter-of-fact, very slightly awkward. ‘In all honesty, I couldn’t stand the girl.’
I sat up, jolted—while I’d anticipated unearthing fresh truths about Rebecca and her adoptive parents, I’d taken the murdered girl almost entirely at face value.
‘We moved to Teasford when I was eight years old,’ Lucy went on. ‘I joined St Anthony’s then, and the teacher put me at the desk next to Eleanor’s. None of the other children would have wanted to swap with me, even if the teacher had let them. They all seemed to put up with Eleanor; they were used to her, in the same way you can get used to having asthma or a limp. She’d tag around with them, and none of them ever told her to go away. But she didn’t have any actual friends, anyone who’d miss her if she wasn’t there. Children know about a personality like hers, even if they don’t know the right words for it.’
‘What sort of personality?’ I asked.
‘Oh, spiteful, manipulative, devious. You’d normally associate that sort of thing with cleverness, but Eleanor wasn’t clever at all—she was like one of those idiot savants, but she didn’t have an instinctive feel for maths or art, just petty nastiness. Sitting next to her, you really got to feel that on a day-to-day basis—all sugary sweet one minute when the teacher was nearby, then hissing at me to let her copy my homework. Then, when I wouldn’t, accidently-on-purpose knocking her ink all over my exercise book so it ruined everything, and being so sugary sweet again when the teacher hurried over to see what had happened. Lots of little things like that, irrelevant in their own right. But they really got to you after a while. It was like having a bad smell next to you all day, and knowing you’d just have to live with it.
‘God, she was a loathsome child. I remember her stealing things from my desk and swearing blind she hadn’t touched them, even when it was obvious nobody else could have done. Mostly they were just little things like pencils and colouring crayons, but once she took a brand-new fountain pen I’d got for my birthday—it was quite expensive, and my mother was furious when I told her it had gone missing. Eleanor never had anything like that herself; even compared to most of the children there, her family was penniless. A few of the girls made fun of the Corbetts sometimes, calling them fleabags and things like that. Maybe that was partly why she was so unpleasant. She seemed to resent anyone who had more than her, and that meant practically everyone.
‘She wasn’t a bully, or even close to one—she was too isolated for that. She was just insidious, vicious. As far as I could tell, she saw the whole world as divided into two groups. There were people she wanted to give the right impression to, when it came to them, she was so sycophantic. And there were people whose opinions didn’t matter; she was more than happy to show her true colours with us. As I said, children in her own year could see that quite clearly. It was only older ones and adults who took her at face value—nearly all of them thought she was the sweetest little thing, much as she was described in the papers.’
‘I heard she tended to gravitate towards older friends,’ I said cautiously. ‘Even before Rebecca.’
‘You’ve certainly got the right information there. She had very clear ideas about who she wanted to be friends with, and just bulldozed her way in, offering to do this and that for them till they accepted her. I remember her sucking up to my eldest cousin and her friends—they were two years older, known as the tough girls in their year, although these days, I dare say they’d look less threatening than Just William. She followed them around constantly, till they started thinking of her as a friend.’
Lucy sighed. ‘Well, she ended up getting them into no end of trouble. They were in a sweet shop together one weekend, and Eleanor stole all sorts of little things when they weren’t looking. The manageress saw her, and was ready to blame them all. But Eleanor said the others had told her to, and she’d been scared not to do what they said. Of course, I wasn’t there, but I can imagine her injured-innocent expression perfectly well. If you’d known my cousin and her friends, you’d know what an obvious lie that was—they could be rowdy, but they’d never make a little kid do something like that. Still, everyone believed Eleanor, and they got into far more trouble than they would have done just for stealing sweets. They were furious with her, you can imagine, but there was nothing whatsoever they could do. They’d have been in a hundred times more trouble if they’d tried to get her back for it.’
‘Oh, I saw the way her sisters behaved around her. But in a few highly specialised ways, Eleanor was a lot sharper than any of them. She really encouraged them to think of her that way, always played up to their image of her. It paid off, as far as she was concerned. All the other Corbett girls had to stay at home doing chores on Saturdays, but Eleanor was always free to go out and play—she couldn’t possibly be trusted with housework, so someone else would have to do her share for her. I suppose, the way she saw it, the end justified the means. They could patronise her all they liked; she was the one who could go out whenever she wanted.’
I thought back to Agnes Og’s living room, suddenly seeing the past she’d described through new eyes; Eleanor deliberately singeing shirts and breaking crockery, smirking inside at the inevitable reactions. ‘She sounds so calculating,’ I said, ‘I’m surprised you say she wasn’t clever.’
‘She wasn’t always as rational as that. A lot of things she did were just pure malice; there was nothing in it for her at all. I remember once, she somehow found out that one of our classmates had a father in prison—of course it had been kept a secret—everyone prized respectability above all else back then, and there was a huge stigma attached to that. Anyway, Eleanor spread it all over the school. She seemed to thrive on it. I can still see her, joining in with the catcalls in the playground. That little face. Delighted. Like a sweet little girl on Christmas Day.’ I could almost feel Lucy’s shudder. ‘That girl was nothing to Eleanor, nothing at all—she started playing truant soon afterwards, and her mother took her out of school. Eleanor was so disappointed, you could feel it. I wouldn’t go as far as to say evil, but there was real malice in that child. It was frightening.’