In the Spider's House

by Sarah Diamond

  ‘My God, Anna. Don’t even think that. Don’t even think about it.’ Her words came out in a sudden rush—she laid the note down flat on the table, and I saw her hand was shaking. ‘You’ve seen this, you’ve read this. You mustn’t call the police—it would be insane.’

  I looked at the note again, the jagged and brutal disharmony of sizes and fonts and upper and lower case. In the stark, overhead light, the words became more terrible than ever. It was a huge effort to speak with composure. ‘You’re right,’ I said quietly. ‘Of course you’re right. But I’ve got to tell Carl. He needs to know what’s happened.’

  ‘Do you know his parents’ number?’

  ‘I know his mobile number. I’ll try him on that.’ Even at such a time, I felt compelled to continue hastily, ‘it’s all right, I don’t need to use your phone. I’ve got my mobile here.’

  I took it out of my handbag as Liz murmured anxious assent and returned to the kettle. I pressed out buttons that seemed far smaller and fiddlier than the ones I was used to. Finding his number was like unlocking a door after eight pints, but at last I managed. I heard the tiny, anonymous ringing tone begin in my ear, urgent entreaties hammering along with my heartbeat. Please be there, Carl. Please don’t have left the mobile downstairs while you sleep in your old bedroom…please…please…

  ‘Hello?’

  His voice was distinctly sleepy, and I could tell I’d just woken him up—still, the relief of hearing him answer left me speechless for a second. ‘Hello?’ he said again slightly irritably, then, obviously checking the display on his handset, ‘Annie? Is that you?’

  ‘It’s me,’ I said. ‘Look, Carl—something terrible’s happened. I’m around at Liz’s right now. I can’t stand to be in that house on my own tonight—’

  His voice was suddenly alert. ‘What is it? What’s wrong?’

  Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Liz going into the living room, diplomatically leaving us alone to talk. I felt intensely grateful for that; everything about this conversation demanded privacy. ‘Someone threw a stone through our living room window about twenty minutes ago,’ I said quietly. ‘It set off the burglar alarm. There was a note tied round it—I’ve shown it to Liz. When I’d read it, I rang the police up and told them I’d set the alarm off myself by accident. I didn’t have much choice, really. They threatened to kill me if I told the police, and—’

  ‘Who threatened to kill you?’ Carl demanded, then, ‘what did the note say?’

  I read it out to him, and as I finished speaking, there was silence. ‘Ask Liz, if you don’t believe me,’ I said furiously. ‘Even you can’t argue with this. That note’s as real as I am, it’s right here in front of me, in black and white.’

  ‘Annie.’ His voice was urgent and horrified and soothing all at once. ‘Jesus Christ, of course I believe you…I don’t know what to say, I feel so guilty. All the time, I thought you were imagining it, that it was all in your mind…my God, I’m sorry. I’ve been such a moron, it just didn’t seem likely to me…’

  It was everything I’d wanted to hear from him this week, and last week, and the week before that, but I felt no impulse towards self-righteous told-you-sos. His words inspired nothing but melting relief. ‘Do you think I did the right thing?’ I asked quietly. ‘Not telling the police?’

  ‘Of course. For Christ’s sake, Annie, don’t say a word to them. Whoever this maniac is, it sounds like they really mean business…if only I’d believed you before…’

  He fell silent again. When he spoke it was with a reasonable semblance of his old, straightforward practicality. ‘You’ll be all right at Liz’s, won’t you? Overnight?’

  ‘I’ll be fine,’ I said. ‘Really.’

  ‘Well, I’ll come home first thing tomorrow. I’ll explain it all to Mum. I’ll be back before lunchtime, if I leave early.’

  A long pause, heavy with things neither of us were in any emotional state to put into words—guilt on his side of the conversation, forgiveness on mine, our shared understanding of both. A sense of reconciliation. ‘I’ll see you then,’ I said.

  ‘See you soon. Whatever you do, Annie, take care—and don’t call the police.’

  Liz came back into the kitchen as I was hanging up. ‘I’ll make us that tea now,’ she said, going over to the kettle. ‘What did he say, if you don’t mind me asking?’

  ‘He’s coming home first thing tomorrow. He said just what you did—that I’d be mad to call the police.’ I spoke again quickly, with new panic. ‘Liz, you don’t mind if I sleep in your spare room, do you? I can’t stand going back to that house tonight.’

  ‘Well, of course, dear. I’m afraid the sheets haven’t been aired, but it’s clean and ready.’ She brought a steaming cup of tea over to me, setting it down on the table. ‘Have you locked up next door?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes, everything. The living room window’s broken quite high up—nobody could get in through that, not unless they smashed the whole thing again.’ The idea that my unknown enemy or enemies might still be outside brought a fresh wave of fear. ‘I am sorry, Liz, but do you mind if I smoke? My nerves are all over the place.’

  ‘Oh, goodness, feel free. You can use the saucer for an ashtray.’ I thanked her, fumbled in my bag for fags and matches, lit up with shaking hands. ‘I’m not surprised you’re in a bit of a state, dear. What a terrible shock to have.’

  I took a long, deep, indescribably grateful drag. The silence lasted some time before she spoke again. ‘Promise me that you’re not going back to that research of yours, Anna. You’ve seen that letter—it’s far too dangerous.’

  An icy and appalling helplessness drifted over me and I couldn’t stop myself from speaking. ‘Look, Liz—I wanted to tell you before, but it was all too confusing. What’s been happening—it’s not Mr Wheeler trying to stop me writing about Rebecca; it’s got nothing to do with him. I went to talk to him earlier this week, and that conversation changed everything. He’s innocent. And Geraldine, the woman who sold us the house—she wasn’t Rebecca. She didn’t have anything to do with Rebecca, apart from—’

  The cigarette in my hand froze en route to my mouth. Liz’s voice filtered in to me distantly. ‘Anna, are you all right?’

  ‘Helen,’ I said quietly.

  Liz sat down across the table. I saw her looking at me closely, without really seeing her at all. ‘What are you talking about, dear?’

  ‘It all makes sense. Every last bit of it. Christ, I’ve been so stupid—it’s been there all along, just staring me in the face.’ Knowledge had come pouring in, like an avalanche in my mind, and preconceptions and guesswork crumbled under the only possible truth. ‘Geraldine Hughes wasn’t driven out because she was Rebecca. She was driven out because she knew Rebecca—they’d been at primary school together. She’d seen Rebecca in the flesh.’

  ‘I don’t understand. Why would that matter to anyone?’

  ‘It would matter to Rebecca. She’s got a whole new identity these days, and it’s all-important to her that she isn’t recognized. Geraldine might not have recognized her, but she might have done, given enough time. Even though Rebecca looks so different these days. Even though she’s calling herself Helen.’

  I saw Liz’s absolute amazement. She stared at me, huge-eyed. ‘Anna, you can’t think—’

  ‘It all makes sense.’ The words came out almost fiercely, and I made a conscious effort to calm down. ‘Rebecca Fisher built a whole new life for herself as Helen. She’s safe here, she’s accepted here. Then, out of the blue, Geraldine moved in. Maybe Helen recognized her immediately, maybe they got talking and Geraldine mentioned that she used to live in Teasford—I don’t know exactly how it happened. But it did. Suddenly, Helen knew she’d have to get rid of her somehow, before Geraldine recognized her too.

  ‘And she found the best way to do it. Killing two birds with one stone, you could say. If anyone ever linked her with Rebecca Fisher, they’d look hysterical, ridiculous, as if they’d heard about Geraldine being driven ou
t, and it had got their imagination working overtime. She’d be safe here for life, when Geraldine had gone…

  ‘Only it didn’t quite work like that. Because I moved in, and started researching the case. And when she found out what I was doing, she knew she’d have to stop me before I came across something she didn’t want me to. Before I could find out what really happened here—’

  Across the table, Liz looked ashen, deeply shaken—but, searching her expression for true disbelief, I found none. ‘My God, Anna,’ she said quietly. ‘It makes sense. You’re right, it makes perfect sense. But Helen…’

  The pause between us deepened to become an abyss, and the buzz of the overhead strip light seemed far louder than it had been up to now. I could see Liz desperately trying to reestablish normality in her own mind, a world in which acquaintances were always safe and friends concealed no dark secrets. ‘We should get to bed, dear,’ she said at last. ‘It’s almost one o’clock in the morning.’

  Beside the single bed in Liz’s spare room, an elderly clock radio blinked digital red numbers that looked much too bright in the dark. 02:45. I’d been glancing at it intermittently in between my restless turning, assuming various positions in the distant hope of getting some sleep tonight—sometimes seeing that a handful of minutes had passed since I’d last looked, sometimes seeing that a quarter of an hour or more had gone by. The sheets were chilly and slightly musty, and there was an unplaceably stale, stuffy edge to the air; it was the way my own spare room had smelt before I’d aired it out for Petra’s stay. It was less terrifying than my own bedroom would have been tonight, and I knew it. Still, I was completely unable to get to sleep.

  I lay and felt my nerves thrumming and jumping inside me, kept thinking I could hear movements outside. Knew that the window faced out onto Liz’s back garden, and Socks’ makeshift grave, and the woods. There’s nobody there, I told myself fiercely, just try and get some rest. More than anything, I longed for bright lights and companionship, but the idea of waking Liz up again was out of the question. She’d seen twelve forty-five as the middle of the night, would see quarter to three as some strange, parallel universe ghost hour, alien as outer space.

  I couldn’t bring myself to lie still for another minute—suddenly, I didn’t just want a cigarette and a glass of water, I needed them. Remembering I’d left my fags on the kitchen table, I got out of bed as quietly as I could, tiptoed across the landing and down the stairs. The kitchen light switch illuminated a scene of welcoming domesticity made alien by solitude and silence, and the shelves of spices and cookery books looked odd in the sterile whiteness. I got a glass of water from the tap and gulped at it gratefully before sitting down at the table, reaching for my cigarettes and matches.

  The box of matches felt ominously light, and, opening it, I saw I only had two left. The first guttered out in my shaking hand. The second stayed alight just long enough to singe the tip of my cigarette; I sucked frantically, but by no stretch of the imagination could it be considered alight. Damn, damn, damn. Liz must have some more, I thought, even non-smokers kept them around. There’d be a big box of Swan Vestas somewhere in a cupboard. I looked in a few, trying to make as little noise as humanly possible, but I couldn’t find any. At last, I went to the cupboard below the shelves of cookery books. The door stuck, but gave just enough to reassure me that it wasn’t locked. I gave it a hard tug, and it flew open with a noise like a champagne cork popping out. I found myself praying that Liz was a heavy sleeper. If she wasn’t, it would have woken her up for certain.

  I couldn’t see exactly what was and what wasn’t inside. A folded lace tablecloth was draped over the top of everything, hinting at vague shapes. Taking it out, I stared, puzzled. There was a Tiffany lamp there. Of course, it wasn’t a real one—Liz would never keep a real one hidden like this—but it certainly looked convincing. It was almost identical to the one we’d had stolen.

  I knelt, and lifted it out carefully. It was identical. The patterns of colored glass were the same, blood-red and jade-green and midnight-blue, and so was the shape of the shade, the slender wrought-iron stem of the base. I could clearly see it in our living room two weeks ago, on the shelf by the door, by the books.

  Rising to my feet and barely aware that I did so, I stared at the lamp in blank confusion. It was then that the voices began to speak in my mind. First a solo, then a duet. Building voice by voice to a deafening chorus, each person saying their separate phrase at once till the distinct words were lost in an overlapping, discordant babble, the volume turning up a little louder as each new participant joined in.

  Extremely sweet, in many ways.

  A hamster called Toffee.

  A proper little housewife in the making.

  A cat called Socks.

  She seemed far more comfortable in the listener’s role. I have to say, she made a very good one—

  ‘Anna, dear? What are you doing?’

  The voice came from the open kitchen doorway. I whirled round. Liz was framed in front of the shadowed hallway, wearing a pink dressing gown with a rabbit on the pocket. I saw her seeing the lamp in my arms.

  ‘It’s you,’ I said slowly. ‘You’re her. You’re Rebecca.’

  CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

  ‘WHATEVER DO YOU MEAN, dear?’

  Under the bleak white light, her reaction was entirely unconvincing—eyes opening a little too wide, subtle elements of fear in the lines of her face—and I could see that part of her knew she was only playing for time. I hadn’t spoken with suspicion, but with flat, incontrovertible knowledge; it was like a blinding flashbulb going off behind my eyes. In that single moment of looking at her, everything changed out of all recognition, and old conversations unwound on dizzying fast-forward: her anxiety about my research, how she’d urged me to put an end to it for the sake of my own safety. I set the lamp down on the table, and watched her, and was aware of no emotion at all.

  ‘I was right before,’ I said. ‘I was right about everything except who you became. You got rid of Geraldine because you thought one day she might suspect—’

  ‘No—it wasn’t like that! I’d never have done it, anything like it, if I hadn’t been forced. You have to understand, I didn’t have any choice.’ The words burst out on their own, and I watched her face as she realized what she’d said, that there could be no going back now. ‘Anna, she almost knew. Would have known, given more time. When she first moved in and came round for a cup of tea, we were talking and I asked her where she was from. And when she said Teasford, I suddenly realized I knew her. I recognized her from primary school. If I could remember her, she must be able to remember me. I’d changed to look at, but nobody changes that much—’

  The sweet, unlined, regular-featured face, the grey-blue eyes, the small hands and delicate wrists—I saw it all as if for the first time. It was only as she finished talking that I noticed her manner had changed in some immense but indefinable way; it was in her whole expression, the set of her face, the way she stood. While an anxious and conscientious echo of the Liz I knew still lingered in her voice, she’d taken off the cozy middle-aged façade as easily and instantly as a hat. So much of it had been created by her choice of words, her use of language, the unthinking banalities of contented middle age.

  ‘I didn’t want to kill her dog. I didn’t want that at all,’ she went on quietly. ‘But I had to make her go away. If she’d taken the letter and phone calls and break-in seriously enough…but she didn’t, she didn’t leave me with any choice. I’ve built a whole new life for myself here, it’s where I belong. It took me so long to find a place I could feel safe in, and I’m a part of things here. I couldn’t bear to think that could all change, that I could be driven out myself…this is home for me, Anna, it’s the first real home I’ve ever had. It’s my whole life…’

  She came further into the kitchen and sat down at the table. Everything around me felt somehow staged. As I watched, her gaze strayed to the silver-framed photograph by the fruit bowl and the longing
in her eyes was naked, suddenly helpless to conceal itself. Two little brown-haired girls smiled out side by side, dimpled, pink-cheeked, ebullient.

  ‘They’re not your daughters, are they?’ I said. ‘They’re not anything to do with you.’

  She shook her head without looking at me. Her eyes remained fixed on the picture. ‘The manager of my old young offenders’ home sent me all the photographs. They’re his granddaughters, really. I always wanted a family of my own, but I had far too much to hide. How could I keep it a secret from a husband and children, who I really was? It’s the next best thing to that, though. Imagining. I can almost believe they’re my own daughters, sometimes. It’s almost enough…

  ‘Katie and Alice. I chose those names myself; it doesn’t matter what they’re really called. I felt so contented here, before Geraldine moved in. I really had the life I’d always wanted. I wouldn’t have hurt anything or anyone, not then…’

  It was like a conversation in a dream. An overwhelming sense of sympathy gripped me, but I forced it back as hard as I could. ‘What about Socks? You weren’t afraid of discovery then, not at all—and you injured him, you killed him—’

  ‘I didn’t mean any of that!’ Her voice was suddenly passionate with regret—it seemed to emerge from that blank face by ventriloquism. ‘I never wanted to hurt him. If he hadn’t gone round to your house, if he hadn’t kept going there when I was at home…he didn’t seem to want me any more. He jumped into my bed late one night when I was thinking about that, and I—I just lashed out. I couldn’t help myself. And, soon after that, I saw him sitting at his food bowl in the evening. Looking at me. I could have been a stranger who’d just come in to feed him, I could have been anyone. I just picked him up and—’

  How well I understood. In my mind, I was back in Annette Watson’s flat, listening to her account of Toffee’s murder. ‘When he was dead, I just—panicked,’ she went on haltingly. ‘I was terrified you might suspect me, terrified of what I’d done. I don’t know what I was thinking, to be honest. So I left him on your back path. That way, you’d be the one to find him, you’d come and tell me. I could try and tell myself it was true, that he’d just died of old age, that he’d gone out one night the same as usual, and—’