by Diane Janes
When the younger children had gone to bed, Wendy lounged on the sofa, still failing to engage with the paperback which had looked so promising when she’d bought it in WHSmith. The usual comfortable, familiar stillness had fallen over the house. Muffled birdsong, occasional traffic; Elaine Duncan must have heard this same soundtrack on innumerable nights down the years, she thought. In her mind Wendy replayed all the stories Joan Webb had told her. There had been no opportunity to tell anyone about any of it yet. Bruce had indicated that he didn’t want to know. Tara would certainly be interested, but she must be warned not to breathe a word in front of Katie, who was such a sensitive child and probably close to the age when poor little Dora Duncan had imagined that she’d seen a ghost.
What on earth could have happened to Dora Duncan? Fifteen, Joan had said. Fifteen was older then, almost an adult. Before the war there had been lots of people who left school and started work at fourteen. Perhaps Dora had run away? Poor Elaine Duncan, losing her children, one after another. So much sadness … but even so, she had refused to leave The Ashes – the house she had loved, the house she had wanted enough to fall out with her in-laws.
Bruce and Tara arrived home almost simultaneously, Tara entering through the front door just as Bruce’s car nosed between the gateposts. Wendy offered coffee, which was accepted by both of them. They appeared to have arrived at some kind of unspoken agreement to remain civil, neither of them making any reference to the argument of the night before. At least they weren’t yelling at one another, Wendy thought, but she longed for them to drop the polite facades and return to their usual teasing, Bruce feigning ignorance over Tara’s music, while Tara stood behind his chair, rumpling his blond hair and pretending to find bald spots.
When she carried the tray bearing three mugs into the sitting room, Wendy found Tara explaining that her friend Helen’s father had been tracing his family tree.
‘He found the whole lot of them, still living in the same house in 1861,’ she was saying. ‘He’s a member of the local history society.’
‘He would be,’ said Bruce. ‘He’s into everything.’
It was no secret within the family that Bruce had no time for John Newbould, father of Tara’s friend Helen, ever since the two men had once served together on a committee which had been formed in response to proposals to resite a rubbish tip.
As she deposited the tray on the table and handed round the mugs, Wendy suddenly grasped the potential significance of what Tara had been saying.
‘Do you mean that you can look up addresses of old houses and see who was living in them?’
‘I think it’s only in certain years.’ Tara thought for a moment. ‘Census years, I think he said.’
‘There’s a census taken every ten years,’ said Bruce. ‘But I think it’s meant to be confidential. I don’t think it’s made available to the general public.’
‘I think Helen’s dad said you can see the ones that are over a hundred years old. I could ask him if you like, next time I’m round at their house.’
‘That would be brilliant,’ Wendy said. ‘We could look up The Ashes and see who lived here.’
‘I thought you were getting that information from the bank,’ said Bruce.
‘I’ve written to ask, but the deeds will only tell us who owned the house. According to what Tara’s just said, the census would tell us the names of everyone who lived here.’
‘What on earth do you want to know that for?’
‘Because it would be so interesting,’ Tara chimed in in support of her mother. ‘Think of all the people who must have lived here before us …’
‘No thanks,’ said Bruce. ‘The here and now is exciting enough for me. Anyway, Wendy, I thought you said that woman who came here yesterday told you everything about the house since the year dot.’
‘What woman?’ asked Tara.
‘Joan. You were out when she came. She turned up on the doorstep yesterday. It was a lovely surprise.’
‘Infernal cheek, more like,’ Bruce said. He picked up his coffee mug and headed off somewhere, but Tara listened eagerly while Wendy summarized what she had gleaned from Joan’s visit.
‘I wonder what happened to Dora Duncan,’ mused Tara. ‘I suppose she might still be alive somewhere.’
‘It’s possible, but not very likely. It wouldn’t have been hard for her to get a job, I don’t think, but as it was the wartime she would have needed ration cards, things like that.’
‘Could she have been killed by a bomb?’
‘I think people might have noticed if a bomb had dropped on the farm track that day.’
‘Mmm. But suppose she wasn’t on the farm track? Suppose she’d gone a bit further afield and been killed? Maybe they wouldn’t have been able to identify her.’
‘It’s an ingenious theory. There were a lot of bombing raids around here in the war,’ Wendy said thoughtfully. ‘Your Granny Burton used to talk about it. Teesside was the real target: the docks and all the heavy industry and ICI at Billingham, but some of the towns and villages were definitely hit. Thing is, though, I think that mostly went on at night, not on a summer day in broad daylight.’
‘But maybe it wasn’t anywhere near here. You can get a long way on a bike, especially if you have a whole day. I wonder if they knew where she was planning to go?’
‘Apparently no one did. Though I don’t think Joan knows that many details herself. She was only young, and don’t forget it was over thirty-five years ago.’
‘I bet there would be some stuff about it in old newspapers,’ said Tara. ‘They keep microfilm of newspapers going way back at the main library. Mrs Hillyer brought some printouts of stuff into school when we were doing our history project in third form. We could easily go and have a look.’
‘Turning detective?’ Wendy laughed.
‘Why not? I mean, poor old Dora’s almost one of the family, right?’
People don’t just vanish into thin air. Everyone knows that. But a thousand searchers won’t find them if they’re not looking in the right place.
SIX
September 1980
The letter from the bank arrived one Saturday morning while Bruce and Wendy were eating breakfast at the kitchen table. Tara had only just joined them, yawning and still in her dressing gown. Jamie and Katie had already finished eating and gone off to play. The letter opened with a preamble about consulting the title deeds and ended by billing for the time taken, but Wendy was only interested in the meat of the sandwich and skimmed over the rest. The little history began with the transfer of a parcel of land comprising five acres from Mr Joseph Heaviside Esquire to Mr James Coates in 1848, and ended with a conveyance to Mr Bruce Geoffrey Thornton and Mrs Wendy Ann Thornton in 1980.
‘James Coates must have built the house once he’d bought the land,’ Wendy said. ‘Because when it was transferred to his son, George Frederick Coates, in 1876, it’s described as the house known as The Ashes and all that piece and parcel of land adjoining Green Lane …’
‘What a funny way to describe it,’ said Tara. ‘Imagine all that soil spilling out of the string and paper …’
‘George Coates must have been dead by 1919 because it’s described as the estate of the late George Frederick Coates when it was acquired by the Duncans. Less land, too. Most of it must have been sold in the Coates’s time, because the plot the Duncans got was the same dimensions as it is now.’
‘So the Duncans lived here the longest,’ said Tara.
‘That depends what you mean,’ said Bruce. ‘The house was owned by the Coates family for over seventy years. Of course, they might not have lived here at all. They may have rented it out.’
‘There you are, Mam, you’ve got seventy years to beat.’ Tara helped herself to the last piece of toast from the toast rack, examined it and, deciding it was still edible, reached for some butter.
‘I don’t think there’s much chance of that.’ Bruce laughed. ‘Your mother would need to live to be over a hundred.’
‘Oh, I don’t know … if you’re counting continuous occupation by one family and we left the house to Jamie, he could easily live to be in his eighties,’ Wendy said, cheerful and unthinking.
‘Thorntons living here eighty years from now.’ There was an odd inflection in Tara’s voice as she laid the emphasis on Thornton. On Wendy’s remarriage, Tara’s surname had never been changed to match.
‘He’ll need to have a jolly good job then,’ said Bruce. ‘Have you any idea how much the electricity bill is?’ He tossed the offending item (which he had just opened) across the table. It slid to a halt against a used knife, acquiring a smear of marmalade at one corner.
‘I’ll have to ring Joan and tell her about this,’ Wendy said.
‘What on earth has it got to do with her?’ asked Bruce.
‘She said she’d be interested. I promised to let her know whatever information we got back from the bank.’
‘She’s probably not interested at all. Just wanted to come gozzing around to see what we’ve done to the place.’
When she telephoned Joan later that morning, however, Wendy took a small, private degree of satisfaction from the fact that Bruce was completely wrong. Joan’s response was highly enthusiastic and she reissued her invitation for Wendy to visit her for the purpose of viewing some old family photographs.
Wendy chose lunchtime to announce that Joan had invited her over. ‘I’m going a week on Tuesday evening. You won’t need the car, will you?’
‘What?’ Bruce’s attention was divided between his sandwich and the weekend paper, which he had folded to a suitable size so that it fitted between the edge of the table and his plate. ‘The car? No, I don’t need it on Tuesdays. Though goodness knows what you want to be going off to see that woman for.’
‘You know I said I was going to make the invitations for my eighteenth?’ Tara said. ‘Well, I’m starting to think we’ll need to buy them after all.’
‘I knew you’d never get round to doing them,’ Wendy said. ‘You’ll have to go into town and choose something.’
‘That means they’ll be really ordinary. Couldn’t we get something printed up specially?’
‘You should have done them in the holidays,’ Katie said. ‘I told you I would help you with the colouring in.’
Tara pulled a face at her sister before saying, ‘Please, Mam, I bet we could get something much nicer if we had them made up specially.’
‘I daresay we could … at a price. But when we costed everything out at the start, you said you were going to make them yourself. We haven’t budgeted for a lot of bespoke invitations. What do you think, Bruce?’
‘It’s nothing to do with me. I see the paper’s full of this Lady Diana Spencer again.’
Wendy turned back to Tara. ‘I suggest you have a look at what’s available, while you’re in town this afternoon. You might see something really nice.’
Bruce had finished with one section of paper and was making heavy weather of refolding it in readiness to read something else. He was about to flatten the pages into their next configuration on the table when he made a wordless exclamation.
‘What’s the matter, Daddy?’ asked Katie.
‘It’s nothing,’ Bruce said. He folded the paper in half, enclosing whatever it was he had just seen, put it down beside him and leaned his elbow on it, which prevented anyone else from picking it up to investigate. ‘So, what’s everyone planning for this afternoon? I don’t suppose anyone wants to come with me to watch Billingham Synthonia in the cup?’
‘Yawnfest,’ said Tara. ‘Anyway, I’m going into town.’
‘I’m going to stick my stamps in,’ said Katie.
‘Have you tidied all that other stuff off your bedroom floor, like I asked you to? You’ve to do that before you go getting anything else out,’ Wendy cautioned.
‘I’d like to come,’ Jamie assured his father solemnly. ‘But I have to ride my bike.’
Seeing that Wendy had finished her lunch, Bruce caught her eye and left the kitchen, the newspaper stuffed artlessly under his arm. She followed him to the sitting room, where he closed the door behind them and thrust the paper at her, opening it out as he did, so that she could read what he had seen.
‘Peter Grayling,’ he hissed. ‘Isn’t that the big bloke who worked for Broughton?’
Wendy was reading as she spoke. ‘Goodness,’ she said. ‘Peter’s been arrested. Mrs Parsons was right after all.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘When they were doing the house up, Mrs Parsons – she lives on the opposite side of Green Lane – told me that the police had questioned him about this Leanne Finnegan’s disappearance when it first happened. She’s sure that he killed her.’
Bruce was incredulous. ‘And you didn’t see fit to mention this?’
‘It was just gossip.’
‘Pretty accurate gossip, by the sound of it. You mean to tell me that you knew this man was a suspected murderer and you never so much as breathed a word? You just let Tara and Katie wander freely around here? You didn’t even have much to say when Tara started going out with one of these men. I mean, what is wrong with you?’
Tara chose that moment to bob her head around the door. ‘Having a not-in-front-of-the-children moment, are we? What’s the big news? I saw you being all secretive with the paper.’ Though she and Bruce had never officially made up their spat, their relationship had to all intents and purposes slipped back into its former groove.
Bruce took the paper from Wendy and thrust it at Tara. ‘It’s that bit, there. See the headline? Man held in connection with Hartlepool murder. You see what type of person Mr Broughton employs?’
‘That’s very unfair.’ Tara was obviously shocked by the news, but Bruce’s words brought colour to her cheeks. ‘It’s not fair to judge other people by something someone else has done. Has it occurred to you how horrible this must be for John? Having worked with someone who’s done a thing like that?’
‘Are you still seeing John?’ Wendy asked.
‘From time to time.’ Tara sounded cagey.
‘Well, you know what I think. But you’re eighteen in a few weeks and I’m not your father anyway …’
‘Oh, Bruce, don’t say that,’ Wendy protested.
‘I’m not your father,’ he continued, ‘so you don’t need to take any notice of me, but if you end up dead in a ditch somewhere, it won’t be anything to do with me either.’ He stomped out without affording a right of reply.
‘I wish you’d never spoken to your dad the way you did,’ Wendy said. ‘It’s never been properly sorted out and now there’s always this … this edginess between the pair of you. Things were all right before you went and upset him like that.’
‘For you, maybe.’ Tara spat the words out before taking her leave in equally dramatic fashion.
Wendy noticed that Tara had taken the paper with her. She would probably show it to her girlfriends later and they would all enjoy the frisson of excitement that came from a brush with a newsworthy story. And really, she reflected, there was nothing for Bruce to get upset about. Peter Grayling was in custody. Any danger he might have represented was nullified now. She thrust away the thought of his voice echoing through the house, singing those odd, mournful songs, the times he might have watched herself, or Tara, or Katie from a window. On second thoughts, she supposed that Bruce was right. She should have told him what Mrs Parsons had said. Lies and deliberate omissions always came back to bite you, if you got found out.
She wondered how often Tara was still seeing John. He hadn’t been mentioned since the original argument, but that didn’t really mean anything. Tara came and went pretty much as she pleased. When she said she was going into town with Joanne or round to Helen Newbould’s house, they had no way of knowing if it was true, and until now Wendy had carefully avoided mentioning John or asking Tara directly if they were dating, because there was no point in needlessly provoking a row. Besides which, forbidden fruit was always the sweetes
t. Rule number one with teenage daughters: parental disapproval inevitably renders any undesirable boyfriend ten times more attractive.
Wendy returned to the kitchen and cleared away the lunch things. Bruce called from the hall to say that he was heading for the match and Tara called a goodbye in turn as she was going into town. The younger children had gone off to play, leaving Wendy to deal with their leftover crusts and contemplate whether or not to run the mop over the kitchen floor. Bruce had been right about the amount of maintenance involved in taking on The Ashes, she thought. The floor area must be at least treble that of the house in Jasmine Close, if not more.
There had been no opportunity to smooth things over with Bruce before he went off to watch his football match. Wendy had decided to apologize. She had been wrong to say nothing, she recognized that now. She would make it right with him when he came in, she thought, as she stacked the dishwasher and turned it on.
There was an old Tyrone Power movie on BBC2 and, after checking on the children (Katie had seated herself at the dining table, where she was gravely sorting out her stamp collection, while Jamie was riding his bike up and down the drive, emitting sounds in imitation of a Harley Davidson at full throttle), she settled down in the sitting room to watch. The performances were stagey and the plot creaked, but it was pleasantly reminiscent of wet Sunday afternoons spent with Mam and Dad, everyone cosy in front of the glowing coal fire, and she stuck with it until the credits rolled. As she stood up, she noticed Tara and her friend, Joanne, coming up the drive. She met them as they entered the kitchen. ‘You’re back sooner than I expected.’
‘It’s these shoes,’ Tara said, pointing down at the offending items. ‘They’re rubbing me. I couldn’t stand it any longer. Jo’s mother’s just got a microwave oven. We should get one, they’re amazing.’
Wendy ignored the abrupt change of subject, introducing one of her own. ‘Did you see any suitable invitations?’
‘Oh, no. Sorry, I completely forgot to look. We went into Topshop though and I got this amazing T-shirt.’ Tara fumbled with her bag and dragged out a skimpy-looking vest which she held up for inspection.
