Swimming in the Shadows

by Diane Janes

  ‘Yes. It’s been awful. Kids upset – some in tears. Staff breaking down. The police in and out all day, reporters hanging round the gates. An absolute nightmare.’

  I handed him a drink while squeezing his shoulder with my spare hand. Julie Peacock. He was only upset about Julie Peacock. He hadn’t seen it. No one had. ‘Let’s sit down,’ I said. ‘I won’t start the dinner just yet.’

  Like everyone else, Rob seemed unable to talk or think of anything but the murder. He too was thrown off balance by the shockwaves of something so terrible happening in our little corner of the world.

  I told him about my meeting with Jim and Bob.

  ‘It’s a good idea to keep their number handy,’ he declared with surprising vehemence. ‘As they say, they can get up here in minutes – they’re a lot closer than I am – and it would take the police twenty minutes or more to get out here if you dialled 999.’

  ‘But I don’t think there’s any real likelihood of me needing to ring them, or the police,’ I said, feeling brave and logical in the well-lit comfort of the sitting room. ‘I don’t suppose the man who did it is a local at all. And if it is someone Julie knew, then it was probably an isolated thing – you know, a quarrel that went wrong or something, in which case it won’t happen again. There’s absolutely no reason to believe we’ve got a killer stalking up and down the valley, looking for his next victim.’

  Rob turned to look at me, his brow furrowed with worry. ‘Don’t be complacent, darling, please,’ he said. ‘You’re too precious to lose.’

  A warm feeling surged through me. I reached over to squeeze his hand.

  ‘Poor old Jim and Bob,’ I said. ‘I don’t think they can believe something like this has happened. This is the sort of thing they hear about happening to other people, not something that happens here, on their own doorstep, where they’ve lived all their lives.’

  ‘I can hardly believe it myself,’ Rob said. ‘All day I’ve been thinking that I was in the middle of some horrible nightmare. I taught the kid last year, although I didn’t get to know her very well – and to be honest, I didn’t particularly take to her, which almost makes it worse. I suppose I’m no different to Jim and Bob – I just can’t believe it could happen here. I’ve never known anyone who ended up murdered before.’

  ‘I did once,’ I said. ‘Not very well. She was a girl who used to go to Aunt Millicent for piano lessons.’

  ‘Who was Aunt Millicent?’

  I tried not to register the horror I felt. I had spoken so casually, so completely without forethought.

  ‘Who was Aunt Millicent?’ he repeated.

  ‘She wasn’t a real aunt,’ I blurted out. I was reacting like someone who has been accused of something, speaking far too defensively. I attempted a lighter tone. ‘She was a sort of family friend and I just called her Auntie. I went to her for piano lessons too, but I was never very good. I gave up playing ages ago.’

  ‘You never mentioned this before.’

  ‘Why should I have done?’ I tried to sound casual. Cast around desperately for a way of diverting him on to some other topic, but nothing sprang immediately to mind.

  ‘No reason,’ he said. ‘So who was she, then?’

  ‘Aunt Millicent?’

  ‘No, the girl you knew through having piano lessons with Aunt Millicent.’

  I was conscious of my heartbeat growing louder and faster, like the approach of a faraway cavalry troop. It would be dangerous to invent things, because I was completely unprepared. There had been no time to construct something plausible and commit it to the exercise book in case I needed it again in future. Then I remembered that I hadn’t got the exercise book any more and this only increased the sense of being up there alone on the high wire with the safety net gone. The remnants of ice cubes clinked softly in my glass. I didn’t want to look down in case I found that my hand was shaking. I would just have to stick as near to the truth as I dared and try not to trip myself up.

  ‘It wasn’t while I was having piano lessons,’ I said, trying to sound natural and comfortable, rather than cagey and careful. ‘It was years afterwards, when I was grown up. Millicent was an old friend of my mother’s, and I only bumped into this girl because I called in at Millicent’s to drop something off for Mum – some magazines or a knitting pattern, or something like that. I was going into the house as this girl was coming out at the end of her lesson. Then of course when it happened – when she was killed, Millicent was very upset and she reminded me that I had actually met the girl. Although, of course, I’d hardly met her really, just – you know – passed her in the hallway.’

  ‘What was her name?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The girl.’ His voice was non-committal, but I knew instinctively that for some reason the question was important to him.

  ‘It was Antonia,’ I said. ‘I’m afraid I don’t remember her second name. But she was fifteen, like this other girl – I do remember that.’ I endeavoured to adopt a tone which suggested that I was trying to be helpful. ‘They never caught the man who did it.’

  ‘Antonia,’ he said thoughtfully. ‘Not the sort of name you would easily forget.’

  ‘Which is probably why I haven’t.’

  ‘What year was this?’

  ‘Oh, good grief, Rob – I really don’t remember.’

  ‘Well, roughly. You must remember roughly.’

  What does it matter? I wanted to shout. How can it possibly matter? Aloud I said, ‘About 1981 or ’82, I suppose. I can’t remember exactly. It was before my mother died.’

  ‘Are you still in touch with this Auntie Millicent?’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘I lost touch with her after Mum died … of course, the contact had always been through Mum … and I expect she’s dead herself by now. She was quite a bit older than Mum, I think.’

  He was looking at me oddly, almost as if he was trying to read my mind. He turned away abruptly and began to stare at the dark reproduction of the sitting room which was reflected in the window panes where I hadn’t bothered to draw the curtains. Suddenly I was so afraid – so immensely afraid. I clutched his hand and raised it to my lips. His skin was warm and smooth. ‘Don’t let’s talk about people dying any more,’ I pleaded. ‘Let’s try to talk about something happy.’

  He turned back and took me in his arms. ‘Let’s go to bed.’

  There was no work to get up for the next day. No need for Rob to return home. I lay awake that night, long after he was sleeping. I knew that I had slipped up badly. I’d relaxed and let down my guard. In the end Julie Peacock had not proved such a useful distraction, because if we hadn’t been talking about her, I thought, the subject of murdered schoolgirls would never have entered my head. Now I had foolishly referred to Aunt Millicent and Antonia Bridgeman in front of Rob, and the uneasy memory of the expression on his face kept coming back to me. He had not looked suspicious exactly, but somehow there had been more than mere ordinary curiosity writ there. Then again what could I expect? I had represented myself as the only child of only children, so it was small wonder that the casual production of an aunt had set him back.

  For of course, Millicent was my aunt – my mother’s sister. She had given piano lessons too, that much was true enough. ‘Poor Millicent,’ as my mother sometimes referred to her, Millicent being the only one of my mother’s sisters who had been burdened with the tiresome necessity of earning a living.

  Far from being an only child, my mother had been the youngest of three girls, whose stories of growing up between the wars, of tennis parties, dances, and tea carried out into the garden by a uniformed maid were cloaked in wistful grandeur. The eldest sister, Felicity, had married a clergyman and moved with him to the north of England, where they had three children, all so much older than me that I never felt they counted as proper cousins, in spite of my being called upon to serve as one of the gaggle of bridesmaids at each of their weddings. Aunt Millicent, the middle sister, never had children. Her husband, Uncle George, had b
een badly shot up in the Second World War and couldn’t work so money was tight, and Aunt Millicent augmented his pension by giving music lessons at the upright piano in her front room.

  I had thought to leave all of my past life behind, but it was always there, lurking beneath the surface like a sleeping volcano, the danger of an unexpected eruption ever present. As I snuggled closer to Rob’s sleeping body, enjoying the steady rhythm of his breathing, I had an awful premonition that I had not heard the last of Antonia and Aunt Millicent. It was another time bomb ticking away – another lighted fuse to worry about.

  TWELVE

  Next morning I woke to the sound of drizzle whispering against the window panes, and when I peeked between the curtains the cloud was so low that I couldn’t see beyond the dry-stone wall on the opposite side of the lane. Rob was still asleep, so I slipped into my dressing gown, collected my clothes and tiptoed downstairs to the bathroom: a modern addition to a building whose original structure had not allowed for indoor plumbing.

  I had showered and dressed, and was sipping a mug of tea at the kitchen table when the doorbell rang. I saw the police car through the front window as soon as I entered the sitting room and came to an abrupt halt alongside the sofa. Someone had seen the programme after all. I thought of the back door, but it led into an enclosed yard whose only gate led back out into the lane. I doubted if I could climb the wall at the back of the yard, and if I did I would be seen from the lane as soon as I attempted to cross the open fields. Maybe if I lay low and didn’t answer the door they would go away. Then I heard a movement above my head. Rob must have heard the doorbell too, and was heading down to answer the door …

  I forced my legs to propel me across the room and knelt cautiously on the window seat, which brought the two police officers – a man and a woman – into my line of sight. They were standing at the front door, patiently awaiting a response to their summons. I shrank back into the room, praying that they hadn’t seen me. Then I remembered that someone had said there would be house-to-house enquiries about Julie Peacock.

  I took a deep breath to compose myself, stepped into the small square hall at the bottom of the stairs and opened the front door just as the policeman was reaching for the doorknocker to reinforce his original summons. When the female officer launched into a preamble about the murder enquiry I almost sank against the doorframe in relief. There was no porch to provide shelter and I could see that the paper on their clipboard was going to get wet, so I invited them to step inside. They didn’t need a second prompt. In spite of travelling around by car they looked cold and their dark uniforms were already beaded with tiny raindrops, turning them into pale renditions of a Pearly King and Queen. When I offered to make them a cup of coffee, they accepted gratefully. They both looked very young, I thought, the chap even more so than the WPC.

  I was about to go into the kitchen when Rob appeared, wearing just his jeans. The WPC allowed her appraisal of his torso to go on just a little too long as he said, ‘I saw the police car out of the window. Is there anything wrong?’

  ‘It’s just routine enquiries, sir, about the Julie Peacock murder.’

  Rob took over the coffee making operation while I, as the householder, explained who we both were, gave them the address where Rob normally resided and went through the preliminaries of having known Julie very slightly, which was probably the response they were getting in varying degrees, from every household in the area. How far did routine enquiries go? I wondered. How likely were they to check on the identities of the people they were calling on?

  By the time Rob rejoined us with four mugs of coffee on a tray, the questions had become more specific. Would I mind saying where I had been on Thursday, at around the time the girl left school? I told them about leaving work early and driving home. Since my route had not taken me anywhere near the vicinity of Julie Peacock’s last known movements and I had not left the house again that evening, nor seen anything or anyone unusual, I had nothing much to tell them. It was easy, I thought, just like sitting a very simple test at school. I tried to relax. There was no reason why the police would not take me at face value. Then I looked across at Rob and realized that something was troubling him. He was leaning forward in his chair, frowning, waiting for the spotlight to turn on him. I couldn’t understand it. He was normally so laidback.

  When the WPC asked him about Julie Peacock, he at once admitted to having taught her, though not during the current school year. Asked when he had last seen her, he seemed uncharacte‌ristically irritable, saying that he couldn’t possibly remember. ‘I see hundreds of kids around the school every working day of the week and I quite often bump into the ones who live locally outside school as well. How can I possibly say whether I saw the girl last week or the week before?’

  It may have been his tone, or perhaps they did not like receiving such a vague response, but for whatever reason I could tell this was not going down very well. I tried to see what the WPC was writing, but the angle of her clipboard made it impossible, and then she caught me looking, which was awkward. I tried to engage her with a smile, but it didn’t work.

  Now they wanted to know what Rob had been doing between four p.m. and six p.m. on Thursday afternoon. He began by explaining how he had tidied up in his classroom as usual, before ringing first the medical centre and then my cottage just before he left the school. As I had been feeling unwell and didn’t want him to come round, he had driven straight home and not left the house again until next morning.

  ‘You say you drove straight home, sir?’

  Rob, tight-lipped, nodded an affirmative.

  ‘Which way did you go?’ asked the young policeman. There was a spark of interest in his voice. He must have worked out that in order to get home, Rob would have driven along the same route the school bus had taken, must have passed the place where Julie got off it that afternoon to walk up the lane towards her parents’ house. A spot only yards from the place where she had been murdered and dumped on the nearby bridle path.

  ‘My usual way.’ Rob was well aware that his audience had made the connection. ‘Along the main road, turning off at The Horseshoes pub, down Mill Lane. Then Higher Bank Road, Upper Lasthwaite Lane, then there’s that little three-way turn off – my place is down the middle one.’

  ‘Did you see the school bus?’ asked the WPC. ‘Overtake it, perhaps?’

  ‘No, I didn’t.’

  ‘Did you see Julie Peacock at all?’

  ‘No,’ Rob said sharply. ‘Don’t you think I’d have told you if I had?’

  Please, I thought, please don’t use that tone. However daft the question, don’t whatever you do say anything to antagonise them or make them more suspicious.

  The WPC tried again. ‘Can you be exactly sure of the time you set off from the school, Mr Dugdale? You may be a very important witness.’

  Rob spoke very slowly and carefully, like a bad actor delivering well-rehearsed lines. ‘I can’t be sure of the exact time because I didn’t look at my watch. Last lesson had finished. I’d collected up my books and papers and sorted out a few things in my classroom. Then I went down into the bottom corridor. There’s a payphone there, which I used to make my phone calls. First I tried the medical centre, but when I found out that Sue wasn’t at work, I tried the number here and spoke with her for a few minutes. After that I went straight home. I didn’t see the school bus. I didn’t see Julie Peacock. I didn’t see anything out of the ordinary at all – and I didn’t notice what time it was when I got home.’

  ‘Did anyone see you leave the school, sir?’ The young policeman took a turn. ‘Anyone who might be able to help us with the timing? A colleague say, or a cleaner, or the caretaker.’

  Rob thought for a moment before saying, ‘There may have been someone. I don’t specifically remember there being anyone about, but it’s a big building. I suppose someone might have been looking out of a window or something. There were still a few cars in the car park when I left.’

  ‘Now when y
ou reached the point where Julie Peacock got off the bus – you know where that is?’

  Rob nodded.

  ‘Was there anyone there at all?’

  ‘No one.’

  ‘You do know, sir, that Julie’s body was found only a few yards away from where she got off the bus?’

  I wanted to go to Rob and put my hand in his, but I stayed where I was. He finished his coffee and put his mug down on the edge of the hearth with elaborate care, as though positioning it in one precise location was immensely important. Lives might have depended upon it. Then he placed his hands palms down on the arms of the chair, fingers spread out. It was a peculiar posture, uncomfortable and unnatural. He had gone very pale, like someone about to be sick.

  ‘I know,’ he said. ‘I saw it on TV last night and I recognized the place. I mean, obviously I recognized it, because I drive past it every day. I do realize that on Thursday I must have driven past not long after it happened. I know that’s where Julie used to get off, because once or twice I’ve actually caught the bus up there and overtaken it while it was standing there. Another kid, Luke Robinson, used to get off at that stop as well, but he left school at the end of last year.’

  ‘When was the last time you saw Julie getting off the bus there, Mr Dugdale?’ The WPC’s head was bent, ready to note down the reply. I couldn’t see her face and her voice was carefully neutral.

  ‘I honestly don’t know. A week or so? Probably longer … I mean, it’s not the sort of thing you make a note of. Certainly not on the day she was killed. I really want you to catch the person who did this,’ he added, the words tumbling out abruptly. ‘I want you to catch this person and I wish I could help you, but I can’t. I didn’t see anything at all.’