Naomi's Room

by Jonathan Aycliffe

  ‘By and by, most of the others gave up and went back to London. They’d other stories to cover, and you weren’t giving them much of what we like to call a photo opportunity. But I’m more persistent than some, so I thought I’d stay on a day or two longer, see what I might get if you thought we’d all gone.’

  He paused.

  ‘If you don’t mind, sir, I think I’d like that drink you offered after all. I’ll have a drop of what you’re having, if that’s not any trouble.’

  I poured him a glass of the gin, a rich tawny shade in his hand, its surface reflecting the light of my desk lamp. It was growing dark outside. The garden was full of shadows and very silent.

  ‘I did get a few photographs,’ he said. ‘You and Mrs Hillenbrand went in and out a few times. You never saw me, I have a small van I use for these outings, where I can lie up for hours at a time without being noticed. I’ve got the shots of you. I’ll show you them in a moment. Over the few days I was here, I took quite a lot of pictures of the house and the garden. I found a way round the back, so I took a lot of photos there as well.’

  He sipped his sweet gin. It was very rich, full of sloes and sugar.

  ‘It’s like port, this stuff,’ he observed.

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘A little.’

  A cat crept through the garden, intent on something we could not see, moving like a shadow into the darkness. Suddenly it looked round, caught sight of me, and darted away into some bushes.

  ‘Here,’ Lewis said. ‘These are some I took on the first day. I kept a close record of the numbers, with the dates.’

  He laid a sequence of photographs on the desk-top, grainy shots, taken mainly through a telephoto lens, all showing our house from different angles. There was snow on the ground. In most of them, the curtains were closed. It seemed like a deserted house. Or perhaps not that, not deserted. It was more as if the soul had departed from it. I had thought it a happy house when I bought it. Now, looking at Lewis’s photographs, I wondered how I could have been so mistaken.

  ‘Now look at this,’ he said. He cleared a space and laid another photograph down. It had been taken from the front of the house, along the drive. Judging by the light, it must have been taken in late afternoon. It showed the upper two storeys and part of the overhanging eave. At first I could see nothing out of the ordinary. Then Lewis pointed with a stubby finger at something just below the eave. Barely visible in the attic window was a face, a pale face framed by dark hair. I felt a shiver run through me. And I thought of the movement I had seen on my return.

  ‘I wanted to know who this was,’ he said, ‘so I blew it up as much as I thought it would take, just in case it would be somebody I recognized. This is what I got.’

  He brought out another print and laid it on top of the first. It showed a detail from the previous photograph, much enlarged, part of the window-frame and the face inside it. The resolution was poor, but it was enough to show very clearly that it was a woman’s face. One thing was certain, the woman was not Laura. Nor did it seem to be anyone else I knew.

  ‘Do you recognize her?’ Lewis asked.

  I shook my head.

  ‘I thought not,’ he said, and drank from his glass.

  ‘Is that it?’ I asked.

  He shook his head.

  ‘Here,’ he said. ‘This was taken the next morning.’

  The next photograph showed one of the downstairs windows, that of the dining room, to the right of the front door. The curtains had been pulled back. There was a face in the window, much sharper this time. On top of this, Lewis dropped a blow-up.

  ‘I thought it might be your wife or a relative,’ he said. ‘But I knew I hadn’t seen this woman going in or out before. What’s worse . . .’ He paused and drained his glass. ‘She wasn’t at the window when I took that shot. I’d swear to that in any court.’

  I looked at the blown-up face. A hard, pale countenance, hair drawn back severely, revealing a taut forehead. A woman in her late thirties perhaps, or early forties. Thin lips, a pinched expression to the mouth, no make-up. Pale, very pale. I had never seen her before.

  ‘What sort of trick is this?’ I demanded. I had started to rise from my seat.

  ‘It’s not a trick, Dr Hillenbrand. Please, I want you to believe me. I have more to show you. You’d be as well to let me. The photographs concern you. And I can’t sleep at night thinking about them.’

  I sat down again. Lewis reached inside his folder and drew out another batch of photographs.

  ‘I took this in the front garden on my last day. I wanted a shot of the swing.’

  Our garden? Yes. Part of the house was just visible: the porch with its small stone lions, the three steps, a portion of the front door. In the garden itself was the swing I had erected for Naomi a year before. There was the large elm Naomi had grazed her shin on . . . how long ago? In October or November. But none of this drew my attention, they were details I noticed only later, as a means of confirming that this was indeed our front garden.

  In the foreground stood two little girls, one aged about nine, the other six or seven. They were dressed curiously, in long wide skirts with boots showing underneath, and their hair was done in ringlets. They held hands, facing the camera. It was as though they had stepped out of a fancy-dress party, where they had gone as early Victorian children. Like the woman in the earlier photograph, their faces were pale. There was something about their eyes that made me look away. A look of pain or grief or anger or disillusion . . . it was impossible to say.

  ‘They were not there,’ Lewis said in a voice that was little more than a whisper. ‘There was no one there.’

  ‘You’re lying.’

  A look of anger crossed the man’s face.

  ‘For God’s sake, man, can’t you see I’m frightened? I wouldn’t have come to you with this if I was making it up. What would be the point of that?’

  ‘Is this all?’

  He shook his head again.

  ‘When I got home,’ he said, ‘I developed every photograph I’d taken at your house. Every single shot. Some were quite normal, as they should have been. Some had the two little girls in, always together, always the small one to the left, the older one to the right. And here’s another one.’

  This photograph showed a scene in the rear garden, near the fishpond. The two little girls were there. And with them, dressed also in Victorian clothes, was the woman from the other photographs, the woman at the window. She was very tall. Her clothes were grey, and at her neck was a plain jet brooch.

  ‘But this is the one I want particularly for you to see.’ Lewis was sweating. I poured him another glass and a second for myself. I was beginning to believe his story. There was something about the man that carried conviction. Later, of course, I would not need proof.

  He laid down the last photograph from his folder. Very slowly, anticipating its effect.

  It showed Laura and myself walking away from the house. We were perhaps ten yards from the front door. I was wearing my tweed overcoat, Laura a green hat and green coat. We were two or three feet apart, Laura a little behind me. Between us, wearing her yellow coat and red scarf, was Naomi.

  7

  Everything is quiet now. I have the biscuit tin in front of me. Inside are the photographs, the other photographs, the ones we looked at after Lewis’s visit.

  I could do nothing to reassure him. He could tell by my face that I was as shaken as he.

  ‘I’m not superstitious,’ he repeated, as though his probity of mind made things any better. Had he been, had I myself been prone to a belief in the supernatural, it might have allowed us a niche of sorts in which to take refuge. We might have tendered explanations, nodded agreement, made some cryptic sense of what the pictures showed. But such a route was not available to us, we had no way out but stark admission of what was before our eyes.

  ‘You say you never saw them?’ I asked.

  ‘Never. Save in the photographs. I thought you might have done. Living here. Be
ing in the house.’

  ‘You think they’re connected to the house?’

  ‘They have to be. It’s all that makes sense.’

  And I thought he was right, but how right I did not then know or guess.

  When Laura came home from Town, Lewis had gone. I thought it best not to tell her anything.

  ‘Did that man come?’ she asked. ‘The photographer.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘He came.’

  ‘What did he want?’

  ‘Oh, just a back way into our affections. He had photographs of the house, thought I might like them, agree to be photographed with you.’

  ‘I should have thought it had gone stale by now. Public interest.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Until they make an arrest.’

  ‘Do you think they ever will?’

  ‘Of course,’ I said, not really thinking it. ‘Why shouldn’t they?’

  ‘It was so random, Charles. Most murders are committed by someone close to the victim. A relative mostly, or a friend. There’s nothing like that to go on.’

  ‘Ruthven said the forensic lab had come up with a few things. Fibres left on Naomi’s clothes. Traces of some sort of resin.’ I had not told her this before, not wanting to upset her.

  ‘Did he say that?’

  I nodded.

  ‘Perhaps they’ll find her coat,’ she said. ‘Her scarf.’

  ‘Perhaps,’ I said. Sometimes we could not stop talking about it, about the murder. It was always on our minds, pulling us away from all other topics. People were visiting us less frequently. We were so heavy, it was such hard work to be with us.

  That night, the first of the troubles happened. We called them ‘troubles’, but they were more than that. A spiritualist would have called them manifestations, I think. They started in a small way, as though the house were slowly waking up. By the end . . . No, that isn’t right. There has never been an end.

  We had gone to bed. The nights were times of great stress to us. The doctor had given us both sleeping tablets, but tranquillizers quickly become ineffective and, if anything, exacerbate sleeplessness. I had given mine up and managed periods of deep sleep interspersed with long episodes of wakefulness. During these spells, I would go over in my mind everything that had happened during that day in London and the days following. It was like a tape that played itself over and over, that could not be stopped, however hard I tried.

  Laura would lie awake beside me, never achieving more than a light doze. Sometimes, she tossed and turned in a half-sleep, dreaming dreams that she refused to talk about on waking. She was losing weight.

  I had a small battery-operated reading lamp that allowed me some respite. Sometimes I read long into the night, falling asleep at four or five o’clock, sometimes not at all. We never made love. Desire had left us both, even the desire to touch, the will to take comfort from another’s physical presence.

  It was almost three o’clock when the sound came. According to the post mortem, that must have been around the time Naomi was finally killed. What we heard was a single, high-pitched scream, a child’s scream, loud, frantic, full of an indescribable fear. It was suddenly cut off. I sat up and switched on the bedside lamp. Laura was sitting up beside me, her eyes wide open, a look of terror on her face. Instinctively, we both knew where the scream had come from. The nursery.

  I stumbled out of bed, shivering in the cold of early morning. At the door, I hesitated. Lewis’s visit had unsettled me, and in bed my darkness had already been haunted by images of pale, staring children and a tall woman in a grey dress.

  The landing was pitch-dark. There was a switch just to my left. I remember reaching out with a trembling hand, terrified at what I thought I might see. But there was nothing. The scream had been followed by a thick, hazy silence, the sort of silence in which you can imagine there is someone sitting facing you, mouthing words you cannot hear or understand.

  I made my way along the short corridor to Naomi’s bedroom. Her name was on the door, white painted letters on a blue tile. She had chosen the tile in Primavera on King’s Parade earlier that year. For a long time, I stood at the door listening. Reason told me not to be afraid. But I had seen the photographs, I had seen Naomi where she should not have been.

  I opened the door. For a moment, I expected to see the nightlight burning, as it had always burned when I went in to check on Naomi at night. But the room was dark. Dark and still and very, very cold. Colder than anywhere else in the house. I shivered and reached a fumbling hand for the lightswitch.

  As soon as I looked, I knew she had been there. Her presents lay on the floor, the wrappings torn and tossed aside. I recognized the crying doll, the doll’s cradle, the doll’s pram. On the bed was the box of Lego I had promised her. It had been opened, and the pieces scattered over the counterpane. A box of crayons had been opened and its contents spilled across the floor. Someone had taken a few of them and drawn on a large sheet of paper on the little desk.

  I bent down and looked at the drawing. She had used several colours. On the paper, in a child’s hand, she had drawn three figures. Underneath them, in her imperfect block letters, she had written their names: Mummy, Daddy, and Naomi. The figures were very crude, but one thing was certain: she had never drawn Laura or me like that before. The Daddy figure was drawn all in black and wore on his head something that might have been meant as a stovepipe hat. Naomi was dressed in yellow and had red scribbles at her throat, doubtless to indicate her scarf. But the mother figure struck the greatest dread in me: it depicted a tall woman in a long dress. A long grey dress.

  There was a sound behind me. I turned and saw Laura standing outside the nursery door, her hair dishevelled, her eyes red and staring.

  ‘It’s nothing,’ I started to say. ‘A cat or something . . .’ But my voice trailed away as I looked at her. She had not come after me to investigate the sounds from the nursery.

  ‘Charles,’ she said. Her voice was trembling. ‘There’s someone walking about upstairs. I heard footsteps. Above our bedroom.’

  ‘But there’s nothing . . .’

  ‘In the attic, Charles. There’s someone walking about in the attic.’

  8

  We spent the rest of that night downstairs, I in an armchair, Laura on the sofa. I switched the lights on, every light I could find, and left them burning brightly. Looking back, I am grateful for the fear or circumspection or simple instinct that prevented me going up to the attic that night. What I might have found – what I know I would have found – I would not then have been ready to face. Even now I shake to think of it.

  We passed a dreadful night, most of all in the literal sense. Sleeplessness had given way to outright fear. That terrible scream had chilled our blood. And the steady, pacing feet in the attic, the attic that had been shut up long before we came to live in the house, that had always been empty, had further shaken Laura’s already frayed nerves. She asked me what I had found in Laura’s bedroom. I told her about the presents, but kept to myself the business of the drawing and my understanding of what the three figures represented.

  In the morning, when it was fully light, we took courage from the fading of darkness and made our way upstairs again. There had been no further sounds during the night, no screams, no dark footsteps, not even a creaking floorboard. In the cool morning light, our fears seemed foolish. Warmth was creeping through the house as the central heating took effect.

  The light on the bedroom landing was still lit. On the right, the door of the nursery lay open as I had left it. A faint shaft of light came through the doorway. Up here, where the natural light was less evident, I felt uneasy again.

  We entered the nursery together. Everything was as I had seen it the night before: torn paper, scattered presents, the drawing on the desk. I bent down and started picking up the fragments of paper, thinking, perhaps, that by behaving normally I might inject some sense of ordinariness into the situation. A voice snapped out behind me.

  ‘Leave it! Leave it as
it is. Don’t touch a thing!’

  I turned. Laura was standing in the doorway, her eyes blazing, quivering with anger. I laid the paper down. For the first time, a tiny thought flickered across my mind. I could not yet explain the scream, but had the rest too been Laura’s work? The opened presents, the spilled crayons, even the drawing? It would explain a lot, it would explain everything, even the tale of phantom footsteps above our bedroom. It was Laura who had said she had heard them. I had not.

  ‘It’s all right, dear. I’ll leave everything just as it is. You don’t have to worry.’

  I came out and shut the door behind me. Laura took my hand.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘It’s just . . .’

  ‘Take it easy, darling. I’m going to go up to the attic. I’m sure there’s nothing there. We’ve both been overwrought. It may have been rats, or a bird.’

  She said nothing, but looked at me steadily instead. The thought that Laura might be behind everything had emboldened me. I put Lewis and his photographs out of my mind. It was easy to fake photographs, easy to prey on the bereaved. What would happen next? Would the Welshman turn up with a medium in tow, a friend who happened to know how to get in touch with Naomi? For a fee?

  I found a large torch in the cupboard where we kept the cleaning things. The entrance to the attic was a small doorway at the top of a flight of five or six stairs. The door was locked, had been locked as far back as I could remember. I had been shown inside when we looked the house over, but apart from putting a few trunks and boxes and unwanted pieces of furniture into store, had found no further use for the attic space. It was cold, awkwardly shaped, and poorly lit.

  It took me almost an hour to find the key. I had put it away in a drawer and forgotten it was there. A rusty old key it was, and no doubt the lock was rusty too, I thought. And indeed, when I came to try the key in it, it would not turn. It took a long time and the application of liberal doses of WD40 before the mechanism yielded to my entreaties. The door moved reluctantly. Beyond it lay darkness. Implacable darkness. But I did not then understand how dark or how implacable.