The Skeleton Tree

by Diane Janes

  Wendy declined to be amazed. ‘Oh, Tara! The one thing you should have been focussed on and you forgot all about it. The clock is ticking, you know. The party is only six weeks away. If you don’t give people proper notice, they won’t be able to make it.’

  ‘Relax. People can always make a good party. I’m starving. Do you fancy some toast, Jo? We’ve got strawberry jam, marmite or peanut butter. Oh … and also a scrape of lemon curd in the bottom of the jar.’ Tara held up the jar in question, assessing the quantity that remained.

  ‘I’ll make a pot of tea,’ Wendy said. ‘And it’s about time the children had a drink. Slip out and ask Jamie if he wants tea or juice, will you?’

  ‘Where is he?’ asked Tara.

  ‘He’s riding his bike. Didn’t you pass him as you came in?’

  ‘We passed his bike. It was lying on the drive. Jamie wasn’t there. He’s probably in the back garden.’ Tara headed outside and across the courtyard. Wendy heard her calling her brother’s name as she disappeared round the corner of the outbuildings. She was back a moment later. ‘Not there,’ she said, as she crossed the hall. ‘He must have gone up to play in his bedroom.’ A second later her voice sounded loudly from the foot of the stairs: ‘Jamie … JAMIEEEE.’

  A heaviness was growing in Wendy’s chest. It seemed to press against her lungs, making her conscious of each breath.

  ‘Oh, bugger!’ exclaimed Tara as she re-entered the kitchen. ‘Now I’ve gone and burned the toast. Ouch, that’s hot.’ She extracted the blackened slices from the grill and dumped them in the pedal bin. ‘We ought to get a proper toaster. We must be the only family in the world not to own one. And one of those toasted sandwich-makers. Helen’s Mum …’

  Wendy wasn’t listening. She hurried outside, but Jamie was not in the back garden. His bike had been abandoned, just as his sister had said, lying on its side in the middle of the drive. She automatically picked it up and placed it on the grass, so that Bruce’s return in the car would not be impeded, glancing up at Jamie’s window as she did so. There was nothing to be seen apart from the stickers he had put there on first moving in. She entered the house by the front door. The obstruction in her chest was getting bigger. From the kitchen came a burst of laughter. At that moment Katie drifted out of the dining room.

  ‘Is it teatime?’ she asked.

  ‘No, not yet. I’m making a drink in the kitchen. Do you know where Jamie is?’

  ‘No. Are there any biscuits?’

  ‘Yes … no.’ Wendy almost pushed Katie out of the way, ignoring her puzzled expression. She took the stairs two at a time, gained the top landing and entered the rooms, each in turn, then ran down to the lower landing, checking the bathroom, then Tara’s little suite. No Jamie. The attic? Surely not. All the same, she returned to the upper landing and checked, but one glance from the top of the attic stairs was sufficient. She descended to the ground floor in a helter-skelter of panic, her breath coming in ragged gasps. Katie had joined the other girls in the kitchen. ‘Oh my God.’ Tara laughed. ‘I’ve burned the flipping toast again. What’s wrong with me today?’

  ‘You’re not concentrating on what you’re doing,’ Katie said reprovingly.

  ‘Tara,’ Wendy gasped. ‘Jamie’s gone. He’s disappeared.’

  ‘He’s probably just hiding somewhere. Pass me the bread, Jo, third time lucky …’

  ‘He’s not hiding! He’s gone!’

  ‘Don’t fret, Mother. We’ll soon find him. Come on, Jo.’ Tara abandoned the loaf on the kitchen worktop. ‘Katie,’ she instructed, ‘you double check the garden, make sure he isn’t hiding in the bushes or something.’

  ‘He’s not out there,’ Wendy said, her voice rising. ‘I’ve already looked.’ She knew he wasn’t in the garden. None of their shrubs had achieved the maturity necessary to conceal a six-year-old boy. She stood helplessly in the centre of the kitchen while Tara and Joanne took the same fruitless trip from room to room which she had taken moments earlier. Katie had evidently taken her mission seriously, leaving no stone unturned, but she arrived back simultaneously with the older girls, reporting a negative.

  ‘He’s lost,’ Wendy said. Tears started up in her eyes. ‘We have to ring the police.’ She sank on to one of the benches beside the kitchen table.

  Tara took charge. ‘Of course he isn’t lost,’ she said briskly. ‘Now think,’ she addressed her mother. ‘Think. When did you last see him?’

  ‘It was hours ago.’ Wendy looked down at her hands and saw that they were shaking. ‘He was out on the drive, riding his bike. It was just after your dad went to the football.’

  ‘That was hours ago. You must have seen him since then?’

  Wendy stared stupidly at her trembling hands and shook her head.

  Tara turned to Katie. ‘What about you?’

  ‘I don’t remember,’ said Katie, in her most absentminded voice.

  For a moment Wendy thought Tara was going to shake her little sister. ‘Yes, you do. Come on, you must remember. Think, think. Where have you been this afternoon? What were you doing?’

  ‘Sticking in my stamps.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘In the dining room.’

  ‘All the time? The whole afternoon?’

  ‘Yes.’ Katie’s voice contained a suspicious note of hesitation.

  ‘Tell me the truth, Katie. Did you go outside? Did Jamie come in to talk to you?’

  ‘Ye-es.’ Katie spoke reluctantly.

  ‘Which? When? What time?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Oh, come on, Katie. You must know.’

  ‘I don’t know. It was ages ago. I didn’t look at the clock when he came into the room.’

  ‘All right. What did he say? Where did he go?’

  ‘He didn’t say where he was going.’

  ‘Well what did he say then? Come on, Katie, this is important. He must have said something.’

  ‘He said he was going to hide.’

  ‘Hide where?’ Tara and Joanne chorused.

  Katie shook her head.

  ‘Was he running away from home?’ asked Joanne.

  ‘Why did he say he was going to hide?’ demanded Tara.

  Katie fidgeted her hands and looked down at her feet. ‘He kept bothering me to play with him. I didn’t want to, because I was sticking my stamps in, so in the end I said, “All right then, hide-and-seek. You go and hide first.”’

  ‘This is wasting time,’ Wendy said. ‘We should call the police. He’s been taken. I know he’s been taken.’

  ‘Do calm down, Mam,’ said Tara. She turned back to Katie. ‘But you didn’t go and look for him?’

  Katie shook her head again.

  ‘Why not? Look, don’t you start crying as well. You’re not in trouble, we just need to find out what’s happened. Why didn’t you go to look for him?’

  ‘I didn’t really want to play. I was sticking my stamps in and he was bothering me, so I said—’

  ‘Yes, yes, we know what you said.’ Tara was becoming increasingly impatient. ‘So what you’re saying is that Jamie went off to hide on purpose. You don’t know exactly when and you’ve no idea where. Did you see which way he went?’

  ‘No … but he said he was going to hide in a really good place where no one would ever find him.’

  Wendy emitted a low wail of distress.

  ‘Don’t worry, Mam, we’ll soon find him. Has anyone checked in the outhouses or the garage? I expect he thinks he’s being clever, keeping hidden for so long.’

  Wendy waited for them in the kitchen. She felt paralysed, unable to do anything. It was every mother’s fear. This identical sense of hopelessness must have gripped Elaine Duncan when Dora had failed to come home all those years ago. Perhaps she had even been in this very room when the realization hit. As if in the midst of some terrible nightmare, Wendy watched the two older girls moving swiftly about the yard, with Katie trailing in their wake. As they returned, she overheard Joanne saying, ‘already looked under
all the beds,’ and Tara saying, ‘we’d better look again, just to be sure.’

  ‘It’s not in Jamie’s nature to stay hidden,’ Wendy said. ‘He’s never still for five minutes.’

  ‘Could he have gone to a friend’s house?’ asked Joanne. ‘Someone who lives nearby?’

  ‘Jamie never goes anywhere on his own.’

  ‘Maybe we should try at Andrew Webster’s house, just in case,’ Tara said.

  Joanne was dispatched to enquire, with Katie to show her the way.

  ‘We have to call the police,’ Wendy repeated. ‘We mustn’t waste any more time.’

  Tara capitulated. ‘Shall I do it?’

  Her mother nodded, head in hands. It was like one of those dreams where you urgently need to move but cannot. A nightmare, in fact, where you become an onlooker, trapped in the path of whatever horror is approaching. She heard Tara asking for the police, providing names, addresses: ‘Yes … yes … six years old … missing for several hours … no, nothing like that. No … never been missing before … Not allowed out on his own, no …’ Then Tara reappeared in the kitchen doorway. ‘They’re sending someone,’ she said.

  Bruce’s arrival almost coincided with the police. Tara had only just admitted two uniformed officers when his car turned into the drive. Noting the presence of the police car in Green Lane, he leapt out and sprinted the few yards required to join everyone in the increasingly crowded kitchen, where one of the two police officers, after a glance encompassing the teenage girl who’d let them in, another teenager who was in the process of making a pot of tea, and a much younger girl who appeared to be white-faced and frightened, was just suggesting that it might be better if they spoke with Wendy somewhere more private.

  Jamie chose this moment to emerge from the cellar. He stared at the assembled company and was clearly startled by his mother’s abrupt rush in his direction and the way she started to sob all over him.

  ‘I went to hide in my den,’ he said, in response to questions fired from all sides.

  ‘But you must have heard us calling you?’

  ‘No. I was hiding from Katie. I got under my covers and I waited for ages and then I fell asleep.’ He looked from one face to another. ‘In my den,’ he repeated, as if this clarified things.

  ‘What den?’

  ‘I built it myself. It’s a secret den. In the cellar. I knew Katie wouldn’t look for me down there, because she’s frightened of the cellar, but I’m all right, because I can leave the light switched off and have my torch.’

  ‘And apparently no one else thought to look down there either.’ Bruce’s disparaging glance was mainly directed at his wife.

  ‘But how could you possibly have gone to sleep in the cellar?’ Wendy asked. ‘It’s so cold down there.’

  ‘I’ve got blankets.’ Jamie glanced up at the policemen. ‘I took them from the airing cupboard when no one was looking. That’s not really stealing, is it? Not when they’re things from my own house?’

  ‘It’s true, look at this.’ Tara had gone to the cellar door, switched on the light and descended a couple of stairs.

  Some of the others followed her. Jamie’s secret den was admirably elaborate. He had utilized an old clothes horse and some abandoned boxes and packing cases, over which he had draped a couple of redundant curtains from Jasmine Close, which had found their way into the ‘to keep’ pile by mistake during the move. This had created a tent-like structure which Jamie had furnished with a bed made from a variety of pillows, cushions and blankets purloined from the family stock. There was also a child-size plastic chair and play table, which Katie had outgrown and donated to her brother some time before. Part of a child’s plastic tea set was on the table, alongside a part-eaten packet of Maryland cookies.

  Bruce managed to contain his fury until the police had departed.

  ‘Have you gone completely mad? What on earth possessed you to get Tara ringing the police before you’d even searched the house properly?’

  ‘We did search. All of us.’

  ‘Not thoroughly. The child was found inside the house, for God’s sake! The police probably think you’re deranged, calling them out and saying your child is missing when he’s hidden in the house all along. They’ll think you’re an attention-seeker. If we ever call them out in a genuine emergency, they probably won’t attend.’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous. Once Jamie had explained everything, they understood perfectly how it had happened.’

  ‘Oh, they did, did they? Because I can’t understand how it happened.’

  ‘Please, Bruce, do stop shouting. No one thought of the cellar, that’s all. Not just me, we none of us did.’

  ‘Never mind the others. They’re just children. You are supposed to be the adult. You’re supposed to be the one in charge and you didn’t even know Jamie had a den down there.’

  ‘Well, did you?’

  ‘I am at work all day.’

  ‘I don’t think you understand what I’ve just been through. I was terrified, Bruce. I imagined all sorts.’ For a moment she considered raising the spectre of Dora – that previous disappearance involving a child and a bicycle – but she knew it wouldn’t help. It would probably make things worse.

  ‘And you don’t seem to understand that you are entirely responsible for this whole charade. Did you see poor Katie’s face? It can’t do a child’s confidence much good to see her mother go to pieces like that.’

  ‘I didn’t mean to. I was so scared that something had happened to Jamie.’

  ‘Do you know what scares me, Wendy? The increasing sense that my wife is losing her mind. You need to get a grip.’

  Digging is not a good thing. Digging about in the past. Digging up a corner of the garden. I’m not in favour of any of it.

  SEVEN

  October 1980

  Joan had been looking out for Wendy and met her at the front door of her bungalow. ‘Come in, come in,’ she said, waving her visitor into a small sitting room, into which had been crammed a pair of overlarge armchairs, an enormous, old-fashioned sideboard and what seemed like innumerable side tables, two of which were positioned adjacent to the armchairs, each already endowed with a glass of sherry, positioned on matching silver coasters. ‘How are you keeping? Family all well, I hope?’

  Space was at such a premium that Wendy had to sidestep into the chair which Joan indicated she should take, and when Joan seated herself in the other armchair, their knees all but met across the intervening gap.

  ‘Chin, chin.’ Joan raised her glass and took a sip of sherry before saying, ‘Now you mentioned on the phone that you wondered why George Frederick Coates didn’t leave the house to anyone in his family, and that set me thinking. I have a feeling that he did have a son who was killed in the First World War. I’m not absolutely sure where I got that idea from, but I suppose Aunt Elaine may have said something about it at one time or another. I don’t believe she and Uncle Herb actually knew these Coates people themselves, but of course there are always people living round and about who do remember things.’

  Wendy was abruptly reminded of the nosey parker who lived across the road and had been so eager to tell her things about one of her builders. Joan was right. There were always people who knew – or thought they knew – things. Aloud, she said, ‘That would be a strange coincidence – a casualty of the First World War and then one from the Second, both growing up in the same house.’

  ‘Not really,’ Joan said sadly. ‘When I was a child there didn’t seem to be many families who hadn’t lost someone in the first war, and plenty lost a son or a sweetheart in the next war too. A terrible lot of men from these parts were killed. You only have to look at the war memorials in the villages.’

  ‘Of course!’ Wendy exclaimed. ‘The Bishop Barnard war memorial is in the churchyard. I can easily go down there and check if there’s anyone called Coates on it.’

  ‘Wendy.’ Joan raised her glass in salutation. ‘You have a first-class detective mind.’

  �
�My daughter Tara has given me some ideas too. Her friend’s father is a bit of a family history fan and he’s found out a lot by looking at old census records and that sort of thing.’

  ‘Oh, how interesting! And you are going to do that for The Ashes, are you …? Well, when you get round to doing all this, would you mind awfully if I tagged along?’

  ‘Not at all. It would be more fun with two of us. Though it might be a few weeks yet. We’ve got my daughter’s eighteenth birthday coming up and one or two other things going on.’

  ‘My time’s my own, dear. Whatever suits you. Unless of course you have already arranged to take your daughter. I wouldn’t want to intrude.’

  ‘Tara tends to blow hot and cold. She enjoys hearing about the history of the house, but I’m not sure she would actually want to go and do any research. In any case she’s at college through the week and it’s her A-level year, so that keeps her pretty busy.’

  ‘In that case I am happy to offer myself as Doctor Watson to your Sherlock Holmes. Now … to the photographs.’ She reached to one side of the chair as she spoke and lifted an old, black, leather-bound album from the top of a disparate pile. ‘These belonged to my mother. They were all in storage while we were living abroad, but I must say they have survived remarkably well. I’ve got them in chronological order, to make things easier.’

  The earliest images in the album were of Joan’s grandparents, a pair of formal Victorians, sometimes pictured with infants and toddlers who were hopelessly overdressed in layers of petticoats, their heads invariably covered by hats, caps or frilly bonnets. Their identities had been neatly inscribed on the page by Joan’s mother, Dorothy, in ink which had faded to a bluish mauve. There were not many pictures of Dorothy and her sister Elaine until they were aged about ten or eleven, at which time the frequency of the photographs increased, proclaiming as clearly as a written memo the point at which the family had acquired a camera. A vanished world of Edwardian picnics unfolded before Wendy’s eyes, where families clad in their best, from the tips of their polished boots to the beribboned hats on their heads, sat laughing on a series of rugs spread anywhere from Whitby Sands to the ruins of Rieuvaulx Abbey. Dodo’s birthday, an older and wiser Dodo had written underneath one particular shot.