It seemed I’d strayed into deep and treacherous waters while drifting with the current of my thoughts, and I floundered clumsily back in the direction of safety. ‘But that’s all in the past, now,’ I said quickly. ‘I don’t suppose anything like that happened to you, growing up?’
‘Well, I’m afraid not, dear—if you can say afraid, it sounds awfully ungrateful. No, I had a lovely childhood…a perfect childhood, if there ever is such a thing. My parents were very close, and I was their only child. I loved them both dearly; I was devastated when they died.’ I caught a sudden glint of tears in her eyes, gone almost as soon as I’d noticed it, and when she spoke again, it was with practical resignation. ‘Still, I was well into my thirties then, and I dare say it happens to all of us. It doesn’t do to think too much about these things.’
An odd silence began, intensified. I sensed we were both feeling exactly the same way, amazed that an initially straightforward conversation could have taken such an unexpected turn. I’d told her far more about myself than I’d ever anticipated telling her, and seemed to have learned far more about her, too.
‘So how’s your research going, dear?’ she asked at last. ‘Come across anything interesting?’
It was ironic, I thought, that Rebecca could be seen as a polite retreat, a diplomatic change of subject. ‘Quite a few things, actually,’ I said. ‘I was working on it earlier, come to think of it, just going over some bits and pieces I’ve tracked down about the case.’
‘What sort of things?’
‘Oh, printouts from the internet, photocopies, God knows what—all kinds of things, really.’ I’d got so used to claustrophobic secrecy surrounding my research, it was refreshing to encounter genuine, non-judgemental interest, and I had an irresistible urge to share my private treasure trove with her. ‘I’ll show you, if you like.’
‘Well, if you don’t mind—I’d be fascinated to see them.’ Going over to the cupboard, I retrieved the overflowing folder, carried it back to the table. ‘My goodness,’ she said as I opened it, ‘you have got a lot.’
‘It seems to mount up.’ I took out the photograph that protruded a good six inches from the folder’s top and bottom, set it down in front of her with a kind of wary, proprietorial pride. ‘Rebecca’s school photograph in 1969,’ I said quietly. ‘I got it from her old teacher. It’s not the original, I just had it copied.’
Watching Liz’s face closely, I saw an echo of my own fascination, the mundane glimpse behind the scenes of horror provoking a deep-rooted chill. It was gone almost at once, and she was interested as she would have been in some TV crime drama. ‘All those years ago,’ she said. ‘It does seem strange, looking at it now. Which one’s Rebecca? Do you know?’
‘Oh, yes. I’ll find her for you.’ My finger navigated the maze of faces as Annette Watson’s had done in Bournemouth, finding the all-important one almost at once. ‘That’s her, there. And…let me see, now…there’s Eleanor Corbett. The girl she murdered.’
Liz looked, taking in the sunny smile, the curly hair, the diminutive stature. ‘The poor little mite,’ she said at last. ‘What a terrible thing to happen.’
‘It was terrible.’ But I couldn’t quite forget what Lucy Fielder had told me last Friday, the details that changed the picture out of all recognition. ‘I don’t know, though. I’ve found a few things out about Eleanor, too…let’s just say, she didn’t sound quite as nice as she did in the papers.’
‘That does sound mysterious.’ Liz smiled; her gaze moved away from the photo, and I could feel her attention going with it. ‘I just hope it doesn’t start frightening you, finding out about all this…it’s quite a disturbing subject, I’d have thought.’
For a second, I was very close to telling her about my sighting of Mr Wheeler and that silent phone call. But I didn’t want to see her vicarious horror; it would terrify me all over again.
The knock at the front door came as a relief as well as a surprise, breaking the mood of imminent confessions. ‘Wonder who that is?’ I said, then, rising from my seat, ‘back in a minute.’
As I walked down the hallway, the frosted-glass panel framed a blurred shape that could have been anyone and, opening the door, I only just managed to stop myself taking a sharp breath. It was Helen. Her smile was perfunctory.
‘Hello, Anna. I saw Liz’s car parked outside, but she’s not answering her doorbell—do you know where she is?’
No matter what Liz had told me about this woman, her glacial inscrutability still unnerved me. It didn’t seem at all like shyness, although I knew that shyness could manifest itself in any number of ways. I found it ridiculously difficult to reply confidently, fearlessly. ‘She’s in the kitchen—come on through. Would you like a cup of tea?’
‘No, thank you. I can’t stay.’
I hurried back through the hallway, very aware of her silent presence immediately behind me. In these familiar surroundings, she seemed more alien and intimidating than ever. ‘Liz,’ I called as we approached the kitchen, ‘you’ve got a visitor.’
We came into the room and Liz looked round, smiling. ‘Oh, hello, Helen. Were you looking for me next door?’
Helen nodded. ‘I was just passing, and thought I’d check if you were coming to the WI meeting tonight. I spoke to Muriel this morning. She can’t make it, and…’
Her words blurred around me as my attention focused on the table. The contents of my Rebecca Fisher file were still spread out on it, the school photograph staring up at us. Somehow, I didn’t want Helen to see it there; it seemed private. ‘Well, I’m certainly going,’ Liz was saying amiably. ‘I’ll have to call round on poor Muriel tomorrow morning. I do hope she feels better soon.’
‘It’s just a summer cold. Nothing to worry about.’ With dismay, I saw Helen’s gaze moving to the cluttered table. She took a step closer towards it, and looked at the photograph directly. ‘That looks very old. Is it yours, Anna?’
I nodded, dreading Liz explaining its history and its significance, but she showed no sign of doing so. Helen’s scrutiny left the picture and returned to me. ‘How’s your book going?’
‘Oh, I—I’m still researching it,’ I said quickly. ‘I’ve got a lot more to find out before I make a start.’
She nodded, without apparent interest, and I couldn’t help but be relieved to see her take a step back towards the door. ‘I’ll be off, then,’ she said. ‘See you tonight, Liz.’
Helen seemed perfectly happy to show herself out, but I followed her to the front door all the same. Returning to the kitchen, I reminded myself that I had nothing to fear from her direction. And I tried to persuade myself that the phone call itself had been nothing to lose sleep over, either—a dirty old man trawling the directory at random, some kids doing the same thing in the name of primary school humour. Nothing to do with the random coincidence of Socks’ death. Nothing to do with me.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
OVER THE NEXT couple of days, more and more of my conscious mind defected to join that pragmatic nothing-to-worry-about faction; still, the other side seemed to have all the real power. While the raw terror of Monday night had faded, I was still decidedly edgy in the evenings, and had considerable trouble getting to sleep before the small hours. And the tension got far worse when Carl wasn’t there; days when the only car outside was my own, and it was too hot to close the windows, and there was nothing beyond them but miles of deserted summer.
On Friday morning, I was vacuuming the hallway when the phone rang. I turned the Hoover off, and its thin whine died abruptly round the insistent trilling, punctuated by long seconds of silence. It was the most everyday sound imaginable, but had taken on an ominous significance; I stood stock-still and listened to it ring, and it seemed to get a little louder every time it did.
I couldn’t just ignore it, I told myself sharply—it could be Petra or Carl or anyone. I hurried into the living room, racing to lift the receiver before I could think better of it.
‘Hello?’
&nbs
p; In the microsecond’s pause that followed, I clearly heard an unknown enemy breathing in before breathing out. Then the voice came down the line. ‘Hello, is that Miss Anna Jeffreys?’
‘Speaking,’ I said cautiously.
‘Oh, good morning. My name’s Tom Hartley. Martin Easton from Orchard Lodge passed on your number to me yesterday, and told me you were researching a book based on Rebecca Fisher. So I thought I’d get in touch. I’m retired now, as Martin probably told you, and I’d be happy to help you with your enquiries.’
The elderly male voice was well-spoken, but not ostentatiously plummy—kindly, level, unemotional. I remembered the first impression I’d got of this man from Martin: a rather naive trendy-vicar type, all hand-knitted jumpers and trusting smiles. I’d known I’d misinterpreted him, but not how badly. He sounded anything but unworldly or impressionable; I could imagine him being nakedly contemptuous of politically correct bandwagons, of anything at odds with old-fashioned common sense. ‘I knew Rebecca fairly well,’ he went on. ‘I was the manager of the Southfield Unit for all the years she was there, so I dare say that was inevitable. It was very strange, meeting her for the first time. I can still remember that quite clearly.’
The question kept coming back, in various contexts and tones, seeming to echo down the last three weeks of my life: ‘What did you think of her?’
‘It’s difficult to say, exactly.’ He hesitated. ‘I’d been working with young offenders long enough to know that they weren’t demons—quite often, they’d simply had a bad beginning in life—so I didn’t have the same preconceptions of her as many people might have done. Still, even by the unit’s standards, she was a very exceptional case. I couldn’t help expecting someone a little more obviously troubled.’
‘In what way?’
‘Oh, any number of ways. Very withdrawn, or actively hostile, or unusually nervous. But when Rebecca first arrived and one of the counsellors showed her into my office, she seemed remarkably well-balanced for a child of ten, especially one who’d recently been through such a high-profile court case. Very polite, very attentive, very self-possessed. I couldn’t help thinking that was a little unnatural in itself; she seemed ten years old going on thirty. You had to keep reminding yourself what she’d done, when you met her…it was very easy to forget it completely.
‘At the time, I couldn’t help suspecting that she was simply a very precocious little actress, keen to make the right first impression. I thought she could well turn out to be the worst kind of troublemaker, the secretive, devious kind. But, as she settled in, I began to realise that I’d been wrong. None of the counsellors could find a bad word to say about her; they talked about her as if she was a little saint rather than a murderess. More than one of them used to say in private, “If only they could all be like Rebecca.”’
‘How did she get on with the other children there,’ I asked, ‘when she first arrived?’
‘Surprisingly well from the start, as a matter of fact. I must say, we’d all been prepared for some trouble, at least for the first few months—bullying was severely punished in the unit, but when you live in the real world you know you can never stamp it out completely. Rebecca seemed a natural target for that kind of thing, partly because she was the only girl, but mainly because she was the kind of child that she was. I believe there’s good in most people, if you look deeply enough, but with some of our young offenders, you had to look very deeply indeed. Tough little hooligans, a few of them were, almost uncontrollable before they arrived. And, as I’ve said, Rebecca could have been a school prefect.
‘But she seemed to blend in immediately, in a funny sort of way. Not as if she was trying, either. If she’d tried to take on the more deprived children’s mannerisms and street slang, she’d have stuck out like a sore thumb…but she didn’t do any of that, just kept herself to herself, talked and behaved as she had done to begin with. She found a place for herself in the day-to-day life of the place very quickly. Not part of the general rough-and-tumble—as the only girl, she could never have been that even if she’d been as tough as old boots—just accepted as someone who was supposed to be there. Always slightly removed from it all, but very far from a pariah.’
It was odd, I thought, that she seemed to have blended in far better there than she’d done at St Anthony’s. In an odd sort of way, I could imagine her status as the unit’s sole female and killer making her more confident, legitimising loneliness in her mind. It wasn’t personal any more; nobody in her circumstances would have been treated any differently. ‘It sounds as if she did pretty well there,’ I said.
‘She certainly did. In the five years she spent at the unit, I can only remember her getting into trouble once—fighting with one of the boys, apparently, some silly argument in the common room. God alone knows what he must have done to provoke her. She always seemed the most even-tempered of people. In terms of her school lessons, she always did well enough, but nothing out of the ordinary—she was a very old-fashioned sort of girl in that respect, much more interested in home economics than any of her other subjects. A proper little housewife in the making. I heard that she kept the tidiest room in the place…it was better decorated than the others, too. Her adoptive father was always sending her little bits and pieces for it when she first arrived, and there was no earthly reason not to let her keep them.’
‘I heard he visited her whenever he could,’ I said. ‘She must have looked forward to him coming.’
A few seconds’ dubious silence before he spoke again. ‘Well, she certainly seemed to on the surface. She talked about him a great deal, how close they were and how much she missed him. She seemed to have been devoted to her adoptive mother as well; whenever she mentioned her, you could see how upset she was about her death. But I’m not sure she actually enjoyed her father’s visits all that much… I think she preferred the anticipation to the reality of him turning up.’
‘What makes you say that?’ I asked curiously.
‘Seeing them together at visiting times, I suppose. All the visits took place in a specific room with four or five tables, slightly less formal than in a prison, but much the same kind of thing. Sometimes one of the counsellors supervised it, sometimes I did. We didn’t interfere, just kept our distance, made sure nothing was being handed over that shouldn’t have been.
‘I didn’t watch Rebecca and her adoptive father, but I couldn’t help noticing how different they looked from the groups at the other tables. Most of them sat chatting nineteen-to-the-dozen, as if they couldn’t possibly stay long enough, but there was never anything like that at their table; it always looked very uncomfortable. As if they didn’t really have much to say to each other, but had to say something for the sake of politeness. You certainly wouldn’t have thought you were looking at a father and daughter who loved each other dearly…if anything, you’d have guessed they were distant relatives. Ones who didn’t like each other a great deal, at that.
‘She always seemed in rather a strange mood for a few days after he’d been. Slightly more jumpy than usual, unsettled. It was hard to tell, really it was almost impossible to know what she was thinking at any given time. But I got the impression that his visits put her on edge.’
‘Did you ever talk to him yourself?’ He murmured brief assent. ‘What did you make of him?’
‘I can’t say I took to him. He seemed a very joyless and unemotional sort of man, no sense of humour at all, as far as I could tell. I don’t mean that he wasn’t some laugh-a-minute joker, although he certainly wasn’t—he just didn’t seem to have any natural cheerfulness or any real warmth. He was an extremely successful businessman and, when you talked to him, you could tell he was highly intelligent…but I don’t think he took any pleasure in his wealth or brains, either. Not depressive or melancholic, just blank, in a way that’s hard to define. I couldn’t imagine him truly bonding with any child in the world, or vice versa.
‘Perhaps that’s unfair. He obviously cared about Rebecca very deeply—a lot o
f natural fathers would have distanced themselves from a convicted murderess, and he went out of his way to see her as often as he could. Still, Rebecca always seemed very much more at ease with my own family than she ever did with him.’
I frowned. ‘How did she know your family?’
‘My job certainly wasn’t the kind you could leave at the door when the day ended—my wife and eldest daughter tended to get involved in the unit as well, even though they weren’t officially staff members. Occasionally, we’d arrange small group outings for a few of the children, on weekends and bank holidays and the like, quite informal. The outings were something of a reward for good behaviour, although that was never explicit. It was simply a matter of who we could trust to behave themselves.
‘After Rebecca had been with us for a few months, it was quite clear that we could trust her, and she nearly always came along. Sometimes she’d go on her own with my wife and daughter. My daughter was in her early twenties at the time, and we all felt it would be good for Rebecca to spend more time with women. They’d take her to the cinema, or for lunch in a café, or something like that. Of course, they kept a close eye on her, but it was obvious that she wouldn’t try to escape. And she certainly didn’t pose any danger to the public.
‘My wife and daughter liked her very much. It was so easy to forget what she’d done when you got to know her, and they couldn’t quite believe she was the same girl they’d read about in the newspapers. She was at the unit far longer than most of the children, so they built up quite a friendship over the years. We had her for dinner in our own home several times, before she moved on to prison at the age of sixteen. Even after that, we stayed in contact. We still send her Christmas cards, letters and family photographs once or twice a year—through a P.O. box, naturally, her new identity’s a secret to everyone, including ourselves. She always writes back. Of course, I can’t discuss her letters, but she seems to have built a happy life for herself.’
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