Skilled as the Fishers’ barrister was, however, the trial’s outcome was a foregone conclusion. The jury returned with a unanimous verdict of ‘guilty’. Less than ten minutes later, the judge pronounced sentence. Due to the diminished responsibility of Rebecca’s age, she was being tried for manslaughter rather than murder, and life imprisonment was out of the question. Instead, she was ordered to be detained indefinitely in a home for young offenders, from which she would be transferred to an adult prison at the age of sixteen.
In the January of 1970, Rebecca Fisher was sent to the Southfield Unit on the outskirts of Birmingham. Only her adoptive father would be alive to visit her there. Devastated by the court’s verdict on the child she loved, Rita Fisher had committed suicide two days after the trial ended. Faced with the double loss of his wife and daughter, Dennis Fisher sold his business and started another in a far-distant area, where he could be sure that his neighbours had no personal grievance against him. But while he prospered as he had done in Teasford, he was a deeply unhappy man. The events of 1969 had cast a long shadow, and Eleanor Corbett’s was not the only life which had been effectively ended that summer.
Rebecca was finally released in the early 1980s, under a secret and closely guarded new identity. To the public, it remains unknown whether she ever confessed in full to Eleanor’s murder, or explained what her true motivation had been on that fateful day. Nonetheless, it was officially decided that the enigmatic ten-year-old killer posed no further threat to the public, and could be freed without fear. Today, Rebecca Fisher could be anywhere.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
I FINISHED READING the chapter with a deep sense of confusion. Some parts of it neatly dovetailed with what I knew already, while others seemed to directly contradict it. The references to Rebecca’s relationship with her adoptive parents particularly frustrated me. I’d longed to discover more about it but, however hard I tried to believe Linda Piercy’s account of it, it felt all wrong. Rita and Dennis blinded by parental love, fighting to protect her even when self-preservation must have urged them to distance themselves; Rebecca missing them desperately from her police-station cell, regarding them as she would have done her own mother and father…
I wasn’t quite sure why it rang so false to me, but it did. Shadowy and blurred as my mental image of the Fishers was, they still looked altogether more complex and three-dimensional than that couple in the book—that cliché of happy coupledom, perfect in every way. Other elements of the chapter told me quite clearly that Linda Piercy wasn’t averse to bending the truth almost double for the sake of a more dramatic story—her physical description of Rita Fisher spoke volumes. I sensed she’d prettified Rita’s marriage as she had done Rita herself; I remembered what Melanie had told me back in Teasford, the conversation she’d overheard between her mother and her friend. They said she’d been the one with the money to start with, and that was the only reason he’d married her, Melanie had said. They called him a cold fish…
Suddenly, it seemed that there was too much information in my mind, making it almost impossible to organise. I saw truths and half-truths and outright lies twined round one another like a writhing knot of worms; I couldn’t tell where one ended and another began. There was no way of knowing whether Melanie’s mother and her friend had been any more honest and reliable than Linda Piercy herself, whether their gossip had been rooted in fact or simply hearsay, guesswork and personal dislike. Somewhere, I thought, there had to be a definitive source of information, objective and unimpeachably right as an examiner’s answer booklet.
However, I had no idea what that could be. It seemed that my only possible next step lay with the young offenders’ home the book mentioned, the Southfield Unit on the outskirts of Birmingham. There had to be some way I could find out if it still existed, and, if it did, to get in touch with someone who’d known Rebecca there. I put the book down at last, laying it face-up on the table; she watched me from the photograph on the cover, half-smiling as if at my bewilderment.
It was then that the phone started ringing in the living room; recently, the shrill, unmusical noise had started to affect me like Pavlov’s bell, and I jumped up from my seat salivating at the prospect of another Lucy Fielder. I hurried towards it through a room whose bareness was beginning to look mundane and unthreatening; clean-cut squares of sunlight fell across the carpet from the windows, and the air was warm and still, scented slightly with air-freshener and potpourri. Reaching the telephone table, I lifted the receiver. ‘Hello?’
No answer. Just breathing down the line, for maybe four or five seconds—ragged, sexless breathing very close to the receiver, slightly distorted like the sound of the sea in an open shell.
Then, there was nothing but the flat, dead buzz of a severed connection.
Genuine fear could very easily drift out of focus. It was impossible for a threat to stay in the sharply detailed foreground for any length of time when it wasn’t growing, or moving, or apparently changing in any way. It was like being alone in a room with a huge, vicious-looking dog fast asleep in one corner. You could only be terrified of its waking up for so long, watching paranoically for the merest hint of movement; after a while, it just became an inert shape on the furthest outskirts of vision, and you’d be able to concentrate on reading or knitting or watching TV as if it wasn’t there.
Now terror leapt back into life with heart-stoppingly unexpected speed, a snarl that came out of nowhere. I couldn’t take in the enormity of its return all at once. I stood for long seconds, staring at the receiver in my hand—as if I’d never seen one in my life before, and the sight fascinated me—but I wasn’t aware of looking at it at all. In my mind, the world held nothing but blank, dull surprise fading too quickly, my heartbeat picking up speed like a train leaving the station and heading out into open countryside. A minute passed in slow motion, beginning with shell shock, ending with raw terror.
Breaking free of hypnosis with a great effort, I hung up, then lifted the receiver again, dialling 1471 with fingers that felt oddly nerveless. A recorded voice came instantly down the line, cool, sweet, reasonable tones somewhere between a sixties BBC announcer and a Stepford wife. ‘You were called today at 12.07, the caller withheld their number.’ I hung up again. While I guessed you could probably withhold your number from 1471 checks as easily as you could go ex-directory, my inability to trace it unnerved me even more—I’d been phoned by someone who knew exactly what they were doing. I had a chilling suspicion that they could see every detail of my life, while I could see nothing at all of theirs.
Walking aimlessly into the kitchen, I sat down and lit a cigarette. I inhaled deeply, the book on the table suddenly forgotten. It could have been a wrong number, I tried to tell myself, but the idea looked every bit as genuine as an eight-pound note: wrong numbers didn’t stay breathing down the receiver for seconds on end, even the rudest would just hang up when they heard an unfamiliar voice. Someone had called me on purpose, and I found myself wishing I couldn’t put a name or face to them. Rebecca might have found it terrifying to have an unknown enemy, but I thought this was somehow worse; having a good idea of who and why, with every other question left uncompromisingly unanswered.
A picture of Mr Wheeler filled my mind, blocking out everything else. Even if he had wounded and ultimately killed Socks, I’d believed that had been the end of it. He’d had what he must think of as his justified revenge. With the memory of that ragged breathing echoing in my ears, however, I realised there was no way I could know that—he was a stranger to me, and I had no idea what he thought, how his mind worked. I remembered what Liz had said, that he could have known Rebecca for a long time before she’d arrived here. As I sat and worried, my imagination began sketching out an intricate Gothic labyrinth of possible links between them. They could be long-term best friends as well as lovers, blindly devoted to one another—the bond between then could exist on the level of Wuthering Heights or Othello, those ancient tales of unrestrained passion that, these day
s, looked disturbingly close to insanity. If he’d loved Rebecca that much, he could well have decided that an eye for an eye wasn’t justice enough, that he’d have to go further, do more…
I was being melodramatic, I told myself sharply. The parallels with what had happened to Rebecca here were nowhere near that close. Still, the sunshine and peace around me felt unbearable. Going back into the living room, I looked out of the window for Liz’s car and saw it wasn’t there. The telephone’s silence had become appallingly heavy and fragile, dominating the entire house with an unspoken threat; it could be broken at any second. I could lift the receiver and hear that breathing again.
How intimate it had sounded. As if the mouth in question had been a fraction of an inch away from my ear. I should have been able to feel that breath, even to smell it. And at the same time, its source had been entirely invisible, untraceable, in another world.
Inevitably, the rest of that day felt tense and strange; the moment in which I’d answered the phone kept replaying itself in my mind. Several times, I found myself longing to call Petra and tell her what had happened, but I knew perfectly well that I couldn’t. She’d be at work and busy, I thought, this new event couldn’t possibly be discussed in a five-minute catch-up. And there was something else stopping me from dialling her mobile number—a memory of her concerned voice in the spare room, the day before last.
If anything else does happen—not that I think it will—you’ll tell him then, won’t you?
Of course, she’d expect me to share this turn of events with Carl as soon as he came home from work, she’d advise and even urge me to; it would seem appallingly unnatural to her that I could even think about hiding it from him. But while I couldn’t remember ever wanting to tell him about anything so badly, I simply couldn’t. I was beginning to realise that the more tangible the threat became, the more culpable I became for not telling him about it sooner; the more I had to fear and longed to share with him, the worse our argument would be if I did.
That night, over dinner, I kept drifting towards the edge of confession, then backing away from it as quickly as I could. I tried my very best to speak and behave as if nothing was wrong, but was painfully aware that I wasn’t anywhere near that good an actress. Even I could hear the brittle tension in my voice, could feel preoccupation in every line of my face. Reaching for the glass by my plate, my hand felt clumsy and I knocked it to the floor, where it shattered in a small puddle of white wine. ‘Damn,’ I said, rising quickly from my seat.
Carl frowned. ‘Annie, are you all right?’
‘I’m fine—not cut or anything. I’ll just get the dustpan and brush.’
‘I don’t mean the glass. You’ve been tense as hell all evening. What’s happened?’
Again, the urge to tell him everything. I forced it back down hard, reminding myself how much else I’d have to explain. I bent to get the dustpan and brush from under the sink. ‘Nothing,’ I said quickly, glad he couldn’t see my expression, ‘it’s nothing.’
‘It doesn’t look like nothing to me. Come on, Annie, you can tell me, you know. Did something go wrong today, while I was at work?’
I was suddenly reminded of the chapter I’d read that morning—Rebecca’s blank, monotonous, increasingly perfunctory replies to the court—and I thought I could understand how she must have felt. Denying everything looked completely unconvincing, and I knew it, but it had become my only option. ‘Really, I’m fine,’ I said decisively, standing up. ‘I just feel a bit on edge today. I’m not sure why.’
He looked at me for several seconds. I could see that he knew perfectly well I was lying, and also that he wasn’t going to press the subject any further. ‘Well,’ he said at last, ‘if you say so…’ And his eyes said, You’re obviously not going to tell me about it tonight, it’s your decision. But I know you will, when you’re ready…
The rest of the evening was full of a strained pretence at normality, as we tried our best to ignore a tension as unmissable as a tree in the living room; neither of us referred to it again, but the pauses in our conversation were far longer and harder to break than usual. When he’d finished in the bathroom and joined me in bed that night, his hand moved to my breast and he kissed me. At first, I tried to respond as if I meant it, longing for anything that could temporarily distract me. But nothing could—all the time, fear was hanging over me like a lead weight from a too-thin rope. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said, pulling awkwardly away. ‘I’m just not in the mood tonight. I’m sure I’ll feel better soon.’
His sigh expressed something far deeper than the frustration of an unsatisfied lover—the bewilderment and worry of having no idea what was wrong. ‘I wish you’d tell me,’ he said quietly. ‘What’s the matter, I mean. It’s so obvious, Annie.’
‘There’s nothing to tell. It’s just a funny mood. Really.’
We didn’t say anything else, just lay together in silence. He went to sleep shortly afterwards. I didn’t. Listening to his gentle snoring beside me, I sensed him lost in some placid dream. His unawareness that there was anything in our surroundings to fear suddenly disturbed me. I kept wondering whether he needed to know, whether I owed him absolute honesty in this matter—whether I could be in personal danger, whether my silence could jeopardise his safety as well.
Part of me longed for the right answers, but at the same time, if I could have consulted some omniscient oracle, I was far from sure that I would have done. I’d be too afraid of what I might hear. I thought of a mournful, bloodhoundish face above a buttoned-up white vet’s coat, a tone that had changed from affability to fury in the blink of an eye. Much later, as I finally began to doze, my mind showed me a grotesque parody of a sentimental greetings card—with loopy italic lettering, cartoon animal staring perkily out: someone, somewhere is thinking of you now.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
THE FOLLOWING MORNING, I felt appallingly tired. After Carl had left for work I tried to get some sleep, to top up the three or four hours’ oblivion I’d drifted into at some point during the small hours. But it proved impossible with the morning light filtering thinly through the drawn curtains, and the phone on the dressing table reminding me all over again why I hadn’t been able to sleep in the first place. Briefly, I toyed with the idea of taking it off the hook, but a second’s thought told me I couldn’t—Carl might try to call, or Petra, and I’d have no way of explaining to them why I’d done it. Besides, something altogether more practical prevented me from disabling the phone; another acquaintance of Melanie’s might try to get in touch with key information on Rebecca, their impulse to share it fading minutes after they’d heard the dead tone and hung up.
Finally acknowledging that sleep wasn’t going to come, I got up lead limbed, showered and dressed quickly before going downstairs and making myself a much-needed coffee. As I sat down at the table, my eye was caught again by A Mind to Murder, still lying next to the fruit bowl.
Odd that it should look so obscurely reassuring, so divorced from my more immediate, personal concerns. Everything that scared me most had begun with research and Rebecca, but, far from my coming to fear them, they were becoming more important to me than ever; while I couldn’t do anything about the disturbing turn that events had taken, research was something I could understand, could control. Picking up the book, I studied the cover again. Rebecca’s photograph looked darkly fascinating rather than threatening; no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t associate that enigmatic little girl with a cry in the night, a limp bundle of fur on the garden path, ragged breathing down the telephone’s receiver yesterday. I turned to the prospect of discovery like a temporary refuge.
Taking my coffee into the living room, I sat down and reached for the phone. Directory enquiries told me that no such place as the Southfield Unit currently existed on the outskirts of Birmingham; a call to Staffordshire County Council reassured me that it was still in business, under the more user-friendly name of Orchard Lodge. I found the change irresistibly reminiscent of A-level Sociolo
gy, evolving attitudes and the rise of political correctness summarised in a few short words; Orchard Lodge sounded so ostentatiously cosy, the Southfield Unit bleak, institutional, archaic.
It took a matter of minutes to track the number down. Once dialled, the ringing tone went on for some time before a man answered. I launched into a lead-in speech that had begun to feel as mechanical and vaguely embarrassing as a cold-calling telesales script. ‘So I was just wondering if any of your current staff might have worked there in the early 1970s,’ I finished, ‘if they’d be able to spare ten minutes or so to talk to me. Of course, I understand that you can’t give out addresses or phone numbers but, if you do know of anyone, I’d very much appreciate if you’d pass my number on to them.’
‘Come to think of it—’ The sound of the receiver being laid down on a nearby surface, a loud, jarring clunk. The distant sound of him calling, ‘Martin?’
There was no switch to tinkly music while my credentials and credibility were discussed—muffled, indecipherable sounds said I was being blocked out by the time-honoured method of a hand over the receiver. It stayed that way for a few minutes, before the man’s voice came back on the line. ‘I’ll put you through to Martin Easton. He might be able to help.’
Another ringing tone began as I was transferred, and I could clearly envision Martin Easton hurrying from a central room into a private office. The number of rings implied some distance to travel.
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