Swimming in the Shadows

by Diane Janes

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Recent Titles by Diane Janes

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Recent Titles by Diane Janes

  Fiction

  THE PULL OF THE MOON

  WHY DON’T YOU COME FOR ME?

  SWIMMING IN THE SHADOWS *

  Non-fiction

  EDWARDIAN MURDER: IGHTHAM & THE MORPETH TRAIN ROBBERY

  POISONOUS LIES: THE CROYDON ARSENIC MYSTERY

  THE CASE OF THE POISONED PARTRIDGE

  * available from Severn House

  SWIMMING IN THE SHADOWS

  Diane Janes

  This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  This first world edition published 2014

  in Great Britain and in the USA by

  SEVERN HOUSE PUBLISHERS LTD of

  19 Cedar Road, Sutton, Surrey, England, SM2 5DA.

  Trade paperback edition first published

  in Great Britain and the USA 2015 by

  SEVERN HOUSE PUBLISHERS LTD

  eBook edition first published in 2014 by Severn House Digital

  an imprint of Severn House Publishers Limited

  Copyright © 2014 by Diane Janes

  The right of Diane Janes to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs & Patents Act 1988.

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

  Janes, Diane author.

  Swimming in the shadows.

  1. Murder–Investigation–England–Yorkshire Dales–

  Fiction. 2. Anonyms and pseudonyms–Fiction. 3. Romantic

  suspense novels.

  I. Title

  823.9’2-dc23

  ISBN-13: 978-0-7278-8431-2 (cased)

  ISBN-13: 978-1-84751-536-0 (trade paper)

  ISBN-13: 978-1-78010-581-9 (ebook)

  Except where actual historical events and characters are being described for the storyline of this novel, all situations in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to living persons is purely coincidental.

  This ebook produced by

  Palimpsest Book Production Limited, Falkirk,

  Stirlingshire, Scotland.

  ONE

  Susan McCarthy gave me life.

  She was not an anonymous donor, for I had known Susan McCarthy, with her long dark hair, her ready smile and the mole on her left cheek, round and dark like a beauty spot. I knew something of her family, parents, brothers and sisters; a warm, close-knit circle, for whom her early death must have been a heavy blow. I never rejoiced that Susan had died, consigned to oblivion on a road in southern France, but I suppose somewhere, deep down, like the recipient of an organ donation, I couldn’t help but be grateful that she had died at such a convenient time and place for me.

  I don’t know if Susan carried a donor card, but even if she had, there was no question of her giving advance consent for my posthumous operation – nor had approval been sought from her relatives, for when I took Susan McCarthy’s name and the precious paraphernalia of her identity, I worked alone and secretly; not at all like the messy transplant of organs, attended by an orchestra of operating theatre staff, cutting and snipping around warm, blood-bathed heart and lungs, with perhaps the addition of liver and kidneys, carrying their uneasy butcher’s shop connotations or even more squeamishly, bits of eyes. Eyes, the mirrors of men’s souls, sliced away with shiny scalpels that chink on silver trays: the very thought of it jarring, as hideous as the screech of nails on a blackboard.

  Once or twice I caught myself wondering whether Susan’s organs might have been transplanted. Whether there was, somewhere, a physical part of the real Susan living on as part of someone else? It was a dangerous avenue of speculation to follow. I didn’t like to think of Susan McCarthy or even a part of her suddenly confronting me, Jennifer Reynolds, the thief of her identity. At moments like these I forced myself to remember that it was just a name – a label of convenience. Like those other names, Louise Mason, Jane Smith, Elizabeth Wilson, which had each served for a time, though they were different somehow because they were made-up names. With Susan McCarthy I had entered different territory, taking a real person (albeit a dead one) and using the bits of her I fancied, discarding any useless, cumbersome pieces that did not suit my purpose as callously as any transplant surgeon had ever done.

  I tried to reassure myself that none of this could hurt the real Susan’s family. So long as I was careful, they would never find out, and as for Susan herself, I didn’t really believe in ghosts. And anyway, if Susan’s restless spirit lurked anywhere, surely it would be in France? I had pictured the scene many times, Susan and her fiancé driving in an open-top car along some dusty sunlit road, surrounded by the fragrance of spring blossoms like a snippet from a travel show. Her long dark hair would be streaming out, her sun-bronzed arm resting on the windowsill, and on the back seat there would be a basket from which a baguette protruded alongside a bottle of blood-red wine, with an edge of cheese peeping from beneath the folds of a checked tablecloth. Their last cliché-ridden moments preserved forever, oblivious to the impending disaster around the next bend. In my mind’s eye I saw it all: the sporty car with its roof down, the sunshine, the picnic basket – other people’s lives, events of which I had only scant knowledge. The reality may well have been completely different: it did not matter.

  It was easy to believe in these imagined details of Susan McCarthy’s final journey, because with the passage of time they had merged into the genesis of that other Susan McCarthy – the self-invented Susan, resurrected back in 1986, whose life was carefully recorded in an exercise book in the drawer of my kitchen dresser – the life which I had by then been living for more than three years, with its fictitious past that I had half come to believe in.

  If this new Susan were to marry Rob, that exercise book would have to go. No one could offer their spouse a rational explanation for keeping a book which carefully set out their autobiographical details in the way my exercise book did. I had almost persuaded myself that I didn’t need the book any more. I was word perfect in Susan McCarthy. Those notes had served a vital purpose in the beginning, providing me with a script from which to learn my part. I had never been much of an actor in my previous life, but maybe I was good at th
is role because all I had to do was be my new self – a part I had been waiting to play my whole life.

  In posing as the unmarried only child of two deceased only children, I had managed to deflect any awkward questions about my lack of visible family. Yet this complete dearth of relations, friends, ex-colleagues – nay, any person who belonged to the period of my life before I came to live in Lasthwaite, until now a minor problem which I had bluffed through successfully – was destined to become a paramount difficulty if I married Rob.

  Every bride has someone to give her away; someone to sit on her side of the church. No woman can reach thirty-four without accumulating a few wedding guests along the way. Worse still, I had already made a critical mistake – the direct result of trying to be too clever. Thinking to defuse any suspicions which might be aroused by the complete absence of past acquaintances, I had foolishly augmented the cards I received at Christmas from current friends and workmates with several fraudulent missives from distant theoretical friends. Rob had seen these cards on my mantelshelf, and while he had obviously not committed their senders to memory, he was nonetheless under the impression that I was on Christmas card sending terms with several persons from my fictitious past, including an old friend called Maggie, who supposedly lived in London and with whom I allegedly corresponded on an occasional basis. Excuses would need to be invented against inviting Maggie to the wedding. Lies would need to be told and I hated myself for lying to him.

  Time after time I had come within a breath of telling him the truth – but where to begin? And once he knew the truth how could he ever trust me again? How could he marry someone whose whole existence was based on an enormous lie? In my heart I knew that honesty could only be self-defeating, because if I abandoned Susan McCarthy, I would effectively be abandoning my chances of marrying Rob. The fact was that I could only marry Rob as Susan McCarthy – my other self being inconveniently married to someone else.

  I wasn’t entirely sure how the assumption of a false identity stood in the eyes of the law. At the very least it must constitute some kind of fraud. I did know that to remarry, albeit under a new identity, was most definitely illegal. It was bigamy – an ugly word, suggestive of a large, noisy crime. My choices appeared clear cut: to carry on as Susan McCarthy, maintaining the deception to the bitter end, or to lose Rob.

  It was not as if I had originally set out to trap or deceive him. I hadn’t intended to fall in love with him, or dedicated myself to making him fall in love with me, but the thing had happened, just the same. Before I had time to think about the consequences or even realize what was happening, he was there in my life – an unplanned diversion from the anticipated route. Up until that moment I had mapped my way so carefully, painstakingly building a good solid road from which it seemed impossible to falter. Only now I had faltered. I had blundered off the secure causeway and out on to the marshes. In no time at all I had lost sight of the safe path and didn’t know how to return to it. All around me lay the fatal stinking mire of my own deception. Lately I had been no more than hopping desperately from one uncertain piece of ground to another, never quite sure which lie might be the one to give way beneath my weight and draw me down. Dark oily waters, little pools of uncertainty, swirled and eddied at my feet. Every new lie seemed to undermine my footing a little more.

  I knew that it was wrong to marry Rob. Not just in the eyes of the law, though the legal technicalities did not trouble me overmuch – what’s one more document, fraudulently obtained? No, it was my own conscience that argued against it. Marrying Rob meant entangling him even further in my net of deception – and yet not marrying him represented a cruel rejection which would hurt him deeply. He would not understand why I had changed my mind when we were so happy together, so … right. He would want an explanation, but if I told him, if I explained the truth, what then? I had painted myself into a corner, stitched myself inside a straitjacket of my own manufacture. All I knew was that I wanted Rob. I wanted to bear his children. Was that so terribly bad? Isn’t everyone entitled to a shot at happiness?

  TWO

  Some people would argue that there is such a thing as a good lie, but where to set the dividing line? How about the deceits in which I had engaged with my mother as she endured the living death of her final year?

  ‘I have a daughter, you know,’ she told me one day, leaning forward, patting my hand in the attitude of one sharing a confidence. ‘Her name is Jennifer.’ She had articulated it carefully – ‘Jenn-if-er’ – as if it was an exotic name of complicated pronunciation.

  ‘Mum, I am Jennifer,’ I had replied as gently as I could, stupidly expecting cognisance to dawn.

  ‘No you’re not.’ Her thin, high-pitched voice was embarrassingly loud in a room full of mumbles. She repeated the words more loudly, over and over again, rising to a shriek which reverberated against the window panes, bounced around the pelmets. ‘You’re not Jennifer!’ Then she had begun to wail, a terrible keening sound, occasionally repeating it: ‘You’re not Jennifer. You’re not Jennifer.’

  The old woman in the chair next to my mother’s had begun to wail in sympathy, and when a couple of the others joined in, the staff arrived in force, suggesting with as much tact as possible that the visit be cut short.

  ‘You’re not Jennifer,’ my mother had said. Well, curiously enough, she had had her way in the end. I was not Jennifer any more.

  I had been careful never to repeat my error. From then on I was prepared to go along with whatever my mother said. Mostly she was convinced that I was called Julia. I never found out who Julia was. A childhood friend? Some long-forgotten relative? I was equally unenlightened about Aunt Cicely, but tentatively played along whenever Mother stated that it was her intention to go to Aunt Cicely’s for tea.

  ‘Shall we go together?’ she would ask.

  ‘Oh, yes,’ I would say, with all the enthusiasm I could muster.

  This train of thought quite often kept her cheerful for several minutes at a time, musing greedily about the possibilities of crumpets and angel cake. I tried hard to believe that my mother derived some pleasure from the days when I assumed the part of Julia, endeavouring to keep her chatting happily and well away from the subject of bridge.

  She would spring it on me suddenly, the arrival of the thought as random as the cherries and bells falling into line on a seaside slot machine. ‘Do you play bridge?’ I knew it would end in tears whichever way I answered. Sometimes she would repeat the question, asking again and again like a record stuck in a groove, her hands fluttering for possession of imaginary cards, or else she would begin to rant nonsensically about tricks and bids, her hysteria increasing as I, her partner, failed to come up with an appropriate response.

  At other times she would ramble from one idea to another, often stopping abruptly and fixing me with a stare. In her youth it would have been cool and piercing, wilting in its path any social upstart who had presumed upon her acquaintance, but now it was merely pathetic, her mouth trembling and her watery eyes struggling to focus. ‘Do I know you?’

  No surprises then that Rob’s announcing it was time I met his mother not only awoke these uncomfortable memories but also provoked an inner panic. Up until then the fact that his mother lived in a retirement flat in Devon had ensured sufficient distance to render any casual social calls impractical. Now, however, Rob wanted to break the news that we were getting married: ‘And obviously she’s going to want to meet you.’ Not just meet me, I thought, but find out all about me. Subject me to the kind of quizzing about my family background and antecedents which my own mother would certainly have indulged in had she been in the role of prospective mother-in-law. Worse still, we were ‘making a weekend of it’ – something of a given when travelling down from Yorkshire. Rather than being able to limit ourselves to a quick get-together over tea and cake, we were going to be in his mother’s company for an entire day and a half – more than enough time for her to pose all kinds of searching enquiries.

  By the time Ro
b collected me for the long drive south, I was already sick with nerves. On top of this it was not an auspicious night for travelling. Light drizzle during the afternoon had turned to lashing rain, and the Friday evening traffic was heavy. Rob was quieter than usual, concentrating on the road, and I matched his silence, preoccupied with concerns of my own.

  Under normal circumstances I would have enjoyed the journey. Rob handled the car well, instilling me with confidence in spite of the testing conditions, and our love was still new enough for me to thrill at being alongside him in the dark, close intimacy of the car. I loved the sense of his large, comforting presence only inches away, but all this was spoiled because I couldn’t forget that every passing mile brought his mother a little closer. With a hundred miles still to go, I began to lay the ground for an early night: yawning theatrically and mentioning several times how tired I was, since I reasoned that the best way to avoid an interrogation was by being tucked up in bed.

  The traffic gradually dissipated and the weather improved, so that by the time we were south of Bristol, the clouds had rolled away and stars peppered the sky. Weariness remained my trump card. ‘You must be shattered,’ I said. ‘I wish we’d done something about the insurance so I could have shared the driving.’

  ‘I can’t say I shall be sorry to get into bed.’ His left hand strayed from the steering wheel to squeeze my thigh.

  ‘Your mother must be a good deal more broadminded than mine,’ I said. ‘Do you know, I’m sure she would never have let us share a bed, however old I was and whatever our ultimate marital intentions.’