The Boy Who Wasn't There

by K. M. Peyton

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  About the Author

  Also by K. M. Peyton

  Copyright

  About the Book

  Arnold lifted his head off the pillow. There came a gentle creaking, as of the heavy door moving, and a squeaking of a floorboard. No more.

  Arnold lay back, clammy with fright. He could hear his heart hammering, as if it was in his head, not his chest.

  He lay still, holding his breath to try and catch the smallest sound. His first panic had been overtaken by a rather familiar determination in the face of danger. He would have to rely on his wits now, if this was a man intending to kill him.

  The ancient wooden floor sighed to the footsteps passing. A faint creak . . . there was no doubt someone was in the room. A ray of torchlight flickered momentarily on a row of white skulls and faded. Now Arnold could hear the footsteps approaching. He held his breath. If the torch came looking under the staging, he would be lost.

  He pulled the blanket right over him and held up a corner to see through. In the dim light – his eyes becoming accustomed – he saw a pair of legs walking past, very slowly . . .

  To Graham

  CHAPTER ONE

  WHEN ARNOLD BRACEGIRDLE ran away from the delinquents’ home for the fourth time he made for his Great Aunt Margaret’s in the forlorn hope that no-one would find him there. Unsurprised, she said she would hand him in, but later, because she was too busy at the moment to wait in for ‘those people’. First he could help her with the garden party at Bosky Hollow, where she was doing the catering. He could carry the food in from the van and help her lay it out on the trestle tables on the lawn.

  Bosky Hollow’s lawns ran down to a lake. This was a mile or two away from where Aunt Margaret lived, in East Anglia, the most boring place in the world, Arnold thought, but useful if ‘they’ were looking for you in Barking, where he lived with his mum when she was there, and his grandma when she wasn’t. Bosky Hollow was a sumptuous bungalow in a lane with a lot of trees and exotic shrubs; the houses were almost hidden, with drives winding up to olde oake front doors with huge glass porches full of potted plants. Arnold slaved diligently for a couple of hours to-ing and fro-ing for Aunt Margaret, the only person in the world he quite liked, and then, as the guests started to arrive, she told him to keep out of the way, so he went down to look at the lake.

  He actually felt rather woozy, having sampled Aunt Margaret’s punch – liking it, he had drunk more than a sample. It was now living up to its name. He sat down on the water’s edge, nicely sheltered by some banks of rhododendrons, and started to consider his present situation. Not bad really. Arnold only thought of the immediate present, never of the past nor the future, and he liked the lake and its warm evening smell, and the party lights twinkling in the trees round the house, and the hum of conversation as the guests started to crowd the manicured lawns behind him. He had a pocketful of sausage rolls and assorted ‘bites’ to keep starvation at bay and enough punch inside him to rose-tint the situation.

  It was at this happy moment in his life that he saw the dead body float into view.

  He thought at first it was a deck-chair, but deck-chairs didn’t wear evening dress. He then assumed he was drunk. He shut his eyes and sobered his thoughts, and looked again. It was a very dead body, drifting past. The lake seemed to have a current on it and the body gave a sort of roll as it came near and Arnold saw a blueish face with open, dark eyes and a handsome hookish nose with green weed trailing, caught, and fanned-out black hair like trailing fishnet. There was a white hand with fat white fingers and a diamond ring, a white cuff, all very ethereal. Very dead. Arnold stopped eating his sausage roll and felt rather queer. He stood up. The people far away up the lawn, behind the shrubs, seemed to go round in circles. He wished someone was nearer.

  Behind the shrubs, two gardens along, a girl about his own age was playing the violin. She had a music stand facing the lake, and was playing, very earnestly, tuneless sort of stuff with a lot of twiddles. The body was going her way. Arnold shoved his way through the shrubs to try and alert her.

  ‘I say – er—’

  ‘What are you doing in my garden?’

  ‘There’s a body—’

  ‘A what?’ She was thin and wiry and blonde and had very fierce blue eyes.

  ‘There. Look!’ He pointed.

  The current had taken it out quite a bit and it was hard to make out in the dusk.

  ‘It’s a deck-chair,’ she said.

  ‘No. Honestly. It’s a dead body. I saw it quite close.’

  ‘Who are you?’

  ‘It doesn’t matter, does it?’ What a berk she was! ‘Can’t you see it’s a body?’

  To give her her due, she tried, staring out over the water. But even Arnold could see it was hopeless to make out now, like a waterlogged mattress, drifting. It was too dark.

  ‘I’m at that party,’ he said. ‘I saw it. That’s all.’ He felt stupid now.

  ‘Well, if you think I’m going to get involved—I haven’t got time. I’ve got to get my practice in.’

  ‘You can do that later.’

  ‘It’s already later. We’re going on tour tomorrow. I’m in an orchestra,’ she added.

  He thought she looked too young.

  ‘A schools orchestra,’ she added. ‘We’re going to Scotland.’

  He stood dithering and she then said, rather nastily, ‘Now run off and tell the police, but leave me out of it. They’ll be awfully pleased.’

  Ring the police was exactly what he could not do. They’d ask for his name. He pushed his way back through the bushes, smarting slightly from his acerbic encounter. Who did she think she was, so sarky and stuck-up? Not interested in dead bodies . . . such cool was rather impressive. He made for his Aunt Margaret, who was handing a plateful of things on sticks to a small group of foreign-looking gentlemen.

  ‘There’s a dead body in the lake. I saw it. A man with black hair and a diamond ring.’

  Afterwards he supposed if he hadn’t been drinking the punch and his intelligence hadn’t been impaired he would have kept mum. His announcement was not taken with much joy. His aunt gave him a look that made his blood run cold and the foreign gentlemen stared at him as if he was something nasty they had trodden in.

  ‘Excuse me.’ Aunt Margaret smiled at the group, turned and propelled Arnold sharply out of earshot with scratchy fingers round the back of his neck.

  ‘Are you mad?’ she hissed.

  ‘No. There is. I saw it.’

  ‘This is neither the time nor the place to find dead bodies. You are here on sufferance and I am only the caterer. You’ve been drinking the punch, haven’t you?’

  She gave him a shake.

  ‘Yes, but—’

  ‘Even if it’s true, which I very much doubt, it will be found without your assistance – this lake is surrounded by houses. Now just stop making an exhibition of yourself. Take this plate round and when you’ve done that you’d better go home. There’s a path back to the village across the fields – you’ll see a stile and a sign just down the lane, turn left out of the front gate. I’ll be here till late and you ought to be in bed.’

  She gave him a doorkey.

  ‘It’s my spare. Now don’t lose it.’

  She shoved the plate of titbits at him and gave him a push. He wandered off into the cr
owd and found himself back with the foreign gentlemen. He proffered his plate. They smiled genially.

  ‘You go to the police station about this body you see?’

  ‘Yes,’ he lied. ‘I’m going on the way home.’

  He didn’t want to seem a complete prat. One had to have the courage of one’s convictions when it came to dead bodies. Of course there was no way he could go to the police, but he would have if he could.

  They smiled at him indulgently. He scowled back and passed on to another group. The bits went quite quickly; he ate the last ten or so and put the plate back with the empties. He was now a free agent.

  The party was getting loud and crowded and it was now pitch dark. He decided to have one last look at the lake before he departed, in case with any luck the body was there for all to see at the bottom of the garden. He went down between the bushes and stood peering along the shore. Nothing to be seen.

  But somewhere along a bit, the opposite way from the violin girl (who seemed to have given up) he heard the noise of a boat being pushed into the water and oars being fixed in rowlocks. There was a subdued murmuring of male voices, urgent, and then the faint splash of oars. Arnold backed away and crouched in the rhododendrons. It was too dark to see much but he thought he could make out a rowing boat with two men in it. The men seemed to gleam white at the throat, as if they too wore evening dress, but by now Arnold no longer trusted his senses. He decided it was time to go home and sleep it off.

  He skirted the party and went out into the lane to look for the stile and the track across the field. He had been this way before in times past – happier times when he was still a good boy and his mother loved him and hadn’t run off with Carl the bus-driver – so, although it was very dark, he knew the general direction. The beaten line of the path could be made out across the grass, leading towards the dark blotch of the woods beyond and the few lights of the village.

  Arnold, at home with night-time business, nevertheless found country dark a good deal more uneasy than town dark. He was an urban creature born and bred, streetwise, up to all the tricks. The present wide spaces, the powerful silence, the earthy, dewdripping coldness in his nostrils, made him nervous. This was not his scene. There seemed to be some animals in the field – cows? – whose white shapes glimmered ghostlike in the distance against the deeper darkness of hedge and lowering tree . . . how uncivilized it was! Arnold recalled, with a wrench of nostalgia, the smell of traffic and hot tarmac, hotdogs and festering dustbins. He was dead scared of cows.

  He hurried, head down, and had an unaccountable feeling that someone was following him. He glanced behind several times. There seemed to be a white shape like evening dress again . . . impossible . . . too slender for a cow. Certainly there were cows, or worse. He could hear the tearing of grass and sensed the gleam of animal eyes. He broke into a jog, feeling the sweat rising. The animals drew closer. He thought he attracted them, running; they were curious. He could smell their breath, he thought, their warm, fetid cow smell. He glanced behind again, and the figure that wasn’t a cow was still there, closer. Panic flared. He ran for the line of trees and now heard footsteps – undeniably footsteps – coming up behind. He was so scared he shouted out.

  He could run when anyone was after him but this time the figure was larger than life and evil, and caught him from behind by the throat. Arnold came up short, throttled, his head wrenched backwards. He felt he was caught by claws. Putting up his hands to pull the claws away, he encountered fur. The claws dug into his Adam’s apple. He tried to scream and could only gargle, so frightened he could almost feel himself passing out with pure funk. Whatever it was that held him, it had deadly intentions. It smelled of whisky, yet had the hands of a gorilla.

  Arnold could feel his breath denied, his eyes bulging in his head. His ears roared. It was like going under deep water, fighting upwards, choking, drowning. Yet above him were stars in a serene sky. He flung himself backwards against his attacker, the only movement open to him, held as he was by the throat and unable to turn. All his remaining strength went into a wild heave and the next moment his throat was free and he was turning a backward somersault over something large and warm and hairy that seemed to come out of the very ground itself.

  Arnold filled his lungs with air and screamed. He now had his face hard in wet grass, soil on his lips, rolling over and over. Something very painful trod on the small of his back, pinning him momentarily, and the dark shadow of his adversary let forth an inhuman bellow. Arnold froze into a ball. Above him the disturbed animal charged, clipping him a parting kick; the gorilla ran and Arnold, seeing his chance, got to his feet and belted for the dark sanctuary of the woods. There was a stile which he vaulted over, a path of leafmould and mud which muffled his flying footsteps. He was choking and crying and gulping with fright, terrified the gorilla was coming after him, but after a bit he lost the path in a sea of brambles and came to a halt. He was shaking so much he thought his knees would give way.

  All was silence around him. He held his breath and listened, and heard only the soft soughing of a breeze in the branches above him and, far far away, borne by the same breeze, the murmur and laughter from the party he had left. He could not believe what had happened. Was he dreaming it? He put his hand up to his burning throat, and felt sticky blood on his fingers. It appeared to be oozing from long scratches down his neck and his throat felt as if the hangman had been practising on it. This was no figment of his imagination. But what had attacked him? He had no idea and the memory of it set his teeth chattering again.

  He ran the rest of the way through the wood and came out thankfully on to the street which ran into the village. His aunt’s modest cottage was one of the first he came to. He let himself in, locked the door behind him and switched all the lights on.

  His adventure had knocked all the stuffing out of him. He looked at his face in the mirror and frightened himself: drawn white cheeks, staring dark eyes, deep puncture marks on his throat still oozing blood, and the beginnings of raw bruises below his ears. He mopped the blood away with his aunt’s dishcloth. He then felt so shaky he went to bed.

  He must have slept for, a long time later, his aunt put her head round the door. Arnold woke and pulled the sheet tight up round his ears, quick reactions having been learned the hard way.

  ‘I forgot to tell you, dear, but there were bullocks in that field. I hope they didn’t frighten you?’

  He did not reply. First time he knew bullocks had claws.

  ‘Goodnight, dear. We’ll talk about everything tomorrow.’

  CHAPTER TWO

  ARNOLD FOUND A red woollen scarf of his aunt’s and wrapped it round his neck before he went down to breakfast.

  ‘What on earth are you wearing that for?’ she asked.

  ‘I’ve got a sore throat.’

  ‘Let’s see. Open your mouth.’

  He obliged and she peered into his healthy tonsils.

  ‘Hmm.’

  She gave him her usual wary, nervous look. Unmarried Aunt Margaret couldn’t fathom Arnold, but had a nice, tolerant nature and wished – in vain – that she could do something to help him. She thought he would thrive in the country, away from Bad Influences, but Arnold rudely said he would die of boredom within the week. He only came to her as a last resort, for sanctuary. He was an under-nourished, white-faced, townie rat to her way of thinking, small for his thirteen years, perky, stubborn and dangerous. He had bright inquisitive eyes and dark hair that stood up like a lavatory brush. Margaret’s niece Maudie had had him by mistake during one of her sporadic marriages – a feckless girl and a useless mother in her aunt’s opinion. How could one expect the lad to be a good boy with the example he was set?

  ‘What are we going to do with you?’ she sighed.

  Usually Arnold just stayed until he got so bored he went off home and got into trouble again.

  ‘I’ll just lie low for a bit,’ he said.

  ‘I’ve got to go to the cash and carry this morning. You’ll just
have to amuse yourself.’

  ‘Can I come?’

  ‘Certainly not.’

  She had taken him once and been shocked to find what he had managed to steal and hide in his pockets during the outing.

  ‘You can keep the key then, in case I’m held up. Go for a nice walk. Some fresh air would do you good by the look of you.’ She peered at him closely and shook her head. ‘You look terrible.’

  Arnold decided against showing her his vampireridden neck. In daylight the claw-marks scared him rigid. The attack in the field had definitely been no figment of his imagination.

  ‘You didn’t really see a body in the lake last night? I could have murdered you, blurting it out—’

  But it hadn’t been Aunt Margaret who had tried to murder him.

  He shrugged.

  ‘It was very naughty of you, in front of those guests. Now just you behave yourself while I’m out.’

  This was a very boring prospect. After watching television for a couple of hours Arnold decided to go back to the lake and see if he could see the body again. It had a morbid fascination for him; after all, one did not see a dead body every day of the week. He also thought it would be quite fun to get down to the lake via the gardens of the smart houses, dodging through the shrubberies like a private detective, and creeping along the shore without being seen. It was the country equivalent of crawling over warehouse roofs and dropping through skylights.

  So he went out into the cold country air, amazed afresh by the utter dreariness of all that grass and silence. There was nobody about save a muffled figure on a motorbike looking at some malfunction of the works on the side of the road, and a woman about two hundred years old pulling a trolley towards the village shop. Arnold decided to forego the short cut with the bulls – and worse – and take the long way round the lane. He rather thought it was a bull that had saved his life the night before, by frightening off the gorilla, but the incident was all a bit hazy now and, if it hadn’t been for the marks round his neck, he would have put it down to being intoxicated and scared of the dark.