The Forgotten Village

by Lorna Cook

  ‘Why him?’ she asked. She was angry suddenly. ‘Albert killed him.’

  Guy sat down next to her. ‘You don’t know that,’ he sighed. She leaned in towards him and he put his arm around her.

  ‘He must have done. He knew about Freddie and Veronica. He knew they’d been together in the beach hut. He was a violent monster. If he didn’t kill him then who did? And why?’ Melissa started crying again, angry with herself for reacting like this. She was emotionally overwrought. She was in pain and she had just stumbled across a dead body. ‘I wanted to find Veronica. I wanted to find Freddie. But not like this,’ she said between sobs.

  ‘I know,’ Guy placated. He stroked her hair while she cried and Melissa was grateful he was letting her cry it out without trying to encourage her to stop.

  When she managed to pull herself together, she looked up at Guy, who stroked the remaining tears from her face with his thumb. She wasn’t sure if she was in a position to think clearly or not.

  ‘I don’t want to be here anymore,’ she said, handing Freddie’s cigarette case and lighter back to Guy. He put them in his pocket.

  ‘Neither do I.’ Guy helped Melissa up from the floor. She looked back at Freddie’s body and closed her eyes. She felt helpless. She was over seventy years too late to do anything and now they were just going to leave him there. She couldn’t work out what else to do.

  With a great deal of effort on both their parts, Guy managed to get Melissa up to the floor above. Guy was breathless with the exertion as he followed her up into the kitchen.

  Melissa leaned against the Aga and tried to ignore the pain in her ribs.

  ‘I don’t want to leave him there.’ Tears threatened to fall again. ‘Not like that.’

  ‘I know,’ Guy soothed.

  ‘But I think we have to. For now,’ Melissa reasoned after a few minutes’ silence. ‘We can’t even go to the police.’

  Guy’s head snapped up as he looked directly at her. ‘Why on earth not?’

  ‘Guy,’ she tried to be gentle. ‘We need to find out why your grandmother has kept the key this whole time.’

  Guy looked as if he was in a daze. He didn’t speak for a minute or two.

  ‘Guy?’ Melissa prompted.

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘I don’t want to be a drama queen. But I think I should probably see a doctor. And we need to think about all of this quietly, together, before we do anything rash.’

  ‘Of course,’ Guy said, snapping to his senses. ‘You need to go to the hospital. Come on,’ he agreed.

  The increasing pain in Melissa’s ribs was starting to overshadow the daze of having found poor Freddie.

  ‘It’s all just so desperately sad,’ Melissa said. ‘And none of it makes any sense.’

  Guy stood by the entrance from the kitchen to the hallway and looked back over his shoulder at the doorway to the cellar. They had closed it but not relocked it. Unspoken between them, they knew they both felt that locking Freddie back inside the cellar was the wrong thing to do. Neither of them wanted to leave him down there now that he’d finally been found after all these years.

  Melissa reached out and took Guy’s hand as they walked through the dusty corridors and back through the main entrance hall. Guy held the window board out for her and helped her back through the way they’d come. The pain in her chest seared, but it was nothing compared to the way she felt about Guy. He was in the middle of a divorce to a woman who’d played him for a complete fool, his name had been ruined in the newspapers and now there was this – his grandmother had been keeping secrets from him and a man had died.

  Even though Guy had apologised profusely about the confusion in the newspaper, and for not telling her about his divorce, she hadn’t been entirely sure if she could trust him not to hurt her. He’d told her he was falling for her and she thought it was true. But she hadn’t been sure if she felt the same way. Or rather she was trying to talk herself out of feeling the same way. Up until now. She’d almost fallen to her death and Guy had come after her. He’d have moved heaven and earth to have saved her. She looked at him as they walked towards the car. Now wasn’t the right time to say it back.

  CHAPTER 40

  After the euphoria of realising she was falling in love with Guy eventually gave way to the pain ricocheting through her chest, Melissa felt drained. She couldn’t stop thinking about that dreadful cellar. Had Freddie died down there, having been locked in? Or was he already dead and had been moved there with the intention of hiding his remains? The arrangement of the trunks and the wine racks suggested the latter.

  In the car journey to the hospital, Melissa stared out of the window but took in nothing of the beautiful Dorset coastline as it merged into rolling green fields. Her mind was on Freddie. The brother that died. And Veronica. Veronica who had fled the house, or had been forced to flee – leaving Freddie to his fate. How could Veronica do that to Freddie? How could she leave him to die? But what if she knew nothing about it and had left, oblivious to Freddie’s fate and his final resting place in the cellar? But then where had she gone afterwards? Melissa wanted to scream. She wanted to know that Veronica had achieved the happy ending she deserved. She wanted to know that she’d had the confidence to leave and to start a new life for herself, just like Melissa’s mother had tried to do. She felt like she had all the answers to a crossword puzzle, but no idea where to put them. She must be having a nightmare; from which she’d wake any second now.

  As they turned on to the road that approached the hospital, Melissa asked, ‘How has he been down there, undiscovered, all this time? How are we the first to find him? I know the room was locked but … still.’

  Guy didn’t reply immediately. He shook his head by way of an answer and it was only a while later when he finally found a parking space in the busy hospital car park and switched the engine off that he spoke. ‘The army never moved into the house. Or the village for that matter. They just wanted to clear the way for the gunnery range to fire shells safely. Even now there are no plans to open the house to the public. It’s been deemed too expensive and difficult to make it usable.’

  Melissa thought of the crumbling porch and the collapsed staircase and agreed. ‘So it’s perfectly feasible that if we hadn’t found him …’ She trailed off.

  ‘He might never have been found,’ Guy finished. ‘Well, not anytime soon.’

  Melissa shivered. It was cold now and she was in shorts and a T-shirt. They were filthy and dust-covered. And Guy looked how she felt.

  ‘Let’s get you in,’ he said as he noted her pained face.

  Melissa was triaged, during which an uncomfortable question was asked enquiring how she had sustained her head and rib injuries. Neither Guy nor Melissa had considered getting their story straight and they looked so entirely shifty when asked that the nurse was under the distinct impression that Guy had contributed heavily to Melissa’s injuries.

  Melissa’s small head wound was attended to and after being assessed for concussion or something more serious she was given some pain relief and a time to attend the X-ray clinic to have her ribs looked at. As the nurse handed her the card for the X-ray department, she also gave Melissa a leaflet about recognising domestic abuse. Shocked, she took it and wondered if Veronica’s life might have turned out differently if someone had ever done the same for her; or if Melissa’s own mother’s marriage might have come to an end far earlier than it had done if a leaflet had been thrust at her.

  Weary beyond belief, Melissa rested her head on Guy’s shoulder in the X-ray department, waiting for her time slot to roll around.

  ‘I can’t tell you how happy I am that they don’t think it’s too serious,’ Guy said, shifting on his plastic chair.

  Melissa just nodded. She was in no mood for conversation. She thought of Anna in one of the wards upstairs. It was only early evening. Visiting hours were soon, although Guy’s celebrity status seemed to have gained him the equivalent of an access-all-areas pass to the geriatric ward regardle
ss of the time of day.

  As if reading her thoughts, Guy’s eyes flicked to his watch. He sighed, then hunched forwards, putting his head in his hands. ‘What do I say to her?’

  ‘Tell her the truth,’ Melissa said. ‘Tell her what we found.’

  Guy nodded, his expression set.

  ‘Or you don’t have to say anything at all,’ she said softly as she thought of Anna, looking frailer at their last visit than she had the one before. This sort of information would be too much, surely?

  ‘Pardon?’ Guy asked, looking confused.

  ‘Whatever happened to Freddie, it was a long time ago. A lifetime ago. You don’t have to do anything. You can just leave it. It doesn’t matter,’ Melissa said, but she wasn’t sure she meant it. It mattered a lot to her. And they’d come this far. Freddie was dead. Veronica had disappeared. Why? Why had all of this happened?

  Guy stood up suddenly, dropping his phone and attracting the attention of the other patients in the sterile-looking waiting room. Aware of this, he knelt down to pick it up and came face to face with Melissa.

  ‘It does matter,’ he whispered. His face was agonised as he placed his hands on her knees. ‘It matters because my gran has kept this key for over seventy years. And I want to know why.’ Guy turned and left the waiting room, leaving Melissa behind with other patients who were now taking a keen interest in the both of them.

  Melissa fidgeted, looked at her watch, and at the appointment time on the X-ray card. She had an hour. She couldn’t let Guy do this alone.

  He was strides ahead of her, walking purposefully through the hospital corridors. With the painkillers kicking in she was coping better with the cracked ribs, but breaking in to a run was well beyond her. ‘Guy,’ she called. ‘Wait.’

  He stopped in front of the lift and pushed the button to hail it. He clenched his jaw and his eyes had taken on a steely expression that frightened her.

  ‘Go easy on her,’ Melissa said.

  ‘Why are you here?’ He sounded worn out as he turned towards her.

  ‘What do you mean?’ Melissa stepped back, startled.

  ‘I mean now. Here, with me. Melissa –’ he looked exasperated ‘– every fibre of your being should be telling you to run. Every bone in your body should be shouting to get the hell away from me.’

  Melissa’s mouth fell open. Guy got in the lift and Melissa darted in after him.

  ‘Did I blow it by telling you I’m falling in love with you? Actually don’t answer that.’ He put his head in his hands. ‘I’m sorry, Melissa. We shouldn’t be together. I’m going to do you a favour and let you get on with your life. You shouldn’t be with a fuck-up like me. I didn’t tell you I was getting divorced and then your picture ends up in the papers, where you are wrongly accused of being the other woman in what the papers thought was a happy marriage. And then, I almost got you killed by letting you convince me you should go down the stairs instead of me. You could have died. Because of me.’

  Melissa started to speak, but Guy continued, so she closed her mouth.

  ‘I’m sorry, Melissa.’

  As the lift came to a stop and they exited, Guy fumbled in his wallet. Melissa raised an eyebrow as he held a handful of banknotes out for her.

  ‘Get a taxi back after you’ve been given the once-over here. I’ve really enjoyed getting to know you this past week. These past few days with you – I don’t know when I was last this happy. Until the cellar. I’m sorry I couldn’t make things work between us.’

  Melissa’s confusion grew and when she didn’t speak or reach out to take the money, he lowered his arm.

  ‘Bye Melissa.’ He touched her face and their eyes locked. Her stomach plummeted. ‘Look after yourself.’ He turned and walked down the corridor towards the geriatric unit.

  Was he serious?

  ‘Don’t I get a say in any of this?’ Melissa asked.

  He turned around. A row of plastic chairs was fixed to the wall and Melissa sat. She was drained both mentally and physically. Guy stood a few feet away.

  ‘I know we haven’t known each other very long,’ she said. ‘But I like you. Rather a lot, actually. You’re kind and funny. You’re lovely. You make me laugh and you make me smile. And I’ve not done anything with you that I wouldn’t do again. In a heartbeat.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’ He shrugged again. He made those two words sound so final.

  ‘You told me you were falling for me,’ she said. ‘I take it you were lying.’

  He sat down next to her and closed his eyes.

  ‘I meant it,’ he said.

  ‘But you don’t mean it now?’

  ‘Of course I do.’ He sounded pained.

  ‘Then don’t push me away. Not now. Not like this.’

  They sat in silence for a few moments. Guy’s head was in his hands and Melissa watched him. She realised she was holding her breath.

  She took a deep breath and touched his hand. He pulled his hands from his face and looked at her.

  ‘I love you,’ she said and then smiled. It was a lovely feeling. She bit her lip to halt her wide smile and then said it again.

  Guy looked up. ‘You don’t have to say it just because—’

  Melissa cut him off. ‘I’m not. Trust me.’ She laughed. She couldn’t believe how this day had turned out.

  He touched her face and a wide smile spread across his face. Her stomach flipped. He was far too handsome for his own good.

  ‘I love you,’ she repeated, loving the way it sounded, the way it felt. ‘It’s probably the wrong time to tell you that.’ She glanced up and down the hospital corridor.

  ‘It’s not.’ He shook his head. There was laughter in his eyes. ‘It’s the perfect time.’ He leaned towards her and kissed her. Something inside her melted and she knew she didn’t want to be without him.

  When they reached her room, Anna was sitting up in bed. She had an oxygen mask over her face, but Melissa could see her warm smile behind it. Still, Anna was looking more and more frail. She had a stack of unopened magazines in front of her and a cup of tea was going cold.

  ‘Hello, my darling,’ Anna mumbled, holding her hand out for Guy. Guy took it and held it tightly, a thin smile on his lips. It looked like an effort of will for Anna to raise her hand from the bed and Melissa noticed how thin her skin looked, almost translucent.

  Anna gestured that she’d like help removing the oxygen mask and Melissa delicately unhooked the strings and placed the mask on Anna’s lap.

  ‘It’s lovely to see you.’ Anna clutched Guy’s hand and squeezed it lightly.

  Guy just nodded and Melissa looked at him to see tears slowly filling his eyes.

  ‘My darling grandson, I’m not dead yet,’ Anna smiled.

  Guy laughed and wiped his eyes as a nurse appeared.

  ‘Just a few quick checks,’ the nurse said as she held Anna’s wrist and took her pulse before preparing the blood pressure monitor.’

  Melissa stood. ‘We’ll get you a fresh cup of tea.’ She looked at Guy pointedly who rose and followed her.

  Something had struck Guy as they stood in the queue at the hospital coffee shop. ‘Why do you think Sir Albert stood down as an MP a few weeks after the requisition?’

  Melissa shrugged as she ordered two lattes and a tea. ‘Because he was an erratic, murdering piece of shit? No idea. I can’t make head nor tail of any of this.’

  ‘Guilt, probably,’ Guy mused. ‘Took himself out the limelight so he could bury himself away and pretend it had never happened.’

  ‘None of this feels real,’ Melissa said as she handed Guy his coffee. ‘Or it feels too real. I can’t work out which. We said we were on the trail of something, but neither of us knew what, and we knew that when we found out, we might not like it.’

  ‘We certainly got that right.’ Guy made a disgusted face as he sipped his coffee and then went off to find sugar on the condiments stand.

  Melissa looked at Guy as she wondered how it was they had got to this point. If she
hadn’t seen Veronica’s stricken face in the image, if she hadn’t noticed Sir Albert’s menacing glint and tight hand around his wife’s, Melissa wouldn’t have cared less about Veronica Standish. She’d never have gone into the cellar. And they’d never have found Freddie Standish’s body.

  ‘What a mess,’ she said. ‘I just wish none of this had ever happened, that we could leave poor Freddie down there – as much as I hate that idea – never tell anyone and pretend we were never there.’

  Guy looked into his coffee. ‘So do I. But you know we can’t.’ He reached over and touched her hand. ‘We found a dead body, Melissa. We’ve bought ourselves a bit of time, but we are going to have to tell someone eventually. The state that place is in, someone’s going to go in there at some point to survey the building to either refurbish it or knock it down. They’ll know people have been down there recently. And also’ – he looked even more worried – ‘your phone’s in there somewhere. They’ll know that you, specifically, were there.’

  His phone vibrated in his pocket and he pulled it out and read the text message.

  ‘It’s Philippa. She’s emailed over the birth certificates.’ He closed the text message window. ‘It’s all academic now anyway, isn’t it? Going back in time to try to move forward. We’ve found Freddie now.’ Guy sighed. ‘Poor bastard. And birth certificates will hardly help us discover what happened to the other two.’

  All the same, he clicked open his email as they walked towards the door of the ward. He started swearing about the poor signal in the hospital building and Melissa could see he’d had enough today. He just wanted to talk to Anna.

  ‘Here, let me,’ Melissa suggested.

  Guy willingly gave Melissa the phone. The first attachment opened painfully slowly. A copy of a birth certificate loaded up bit by bit. It was Albert’s. Among other details in columns, including father’s name and occupation, Albert Standish was listed as having been born at the family’s London house on 20 August in the year 1911. The time of birth was listed as 2.15 a.m.