Swimming in the Shadows

by Diane Janes

  After a night of insomnia I spent most of Saturday feeling like a zombie, but a solid night’s rest put me right and when I rose the next day it was to a familiar lazy Sunday morning: the coffee pot, the toast, newspapers spread across the sitting room, jeans and bare feet, a happy disarray. Daylight, normality, routine. Rob seemed relaxed, his usual self, and my improved mood matched itself to his. Outside it was a typical Dales day, rain whispering against the window panes, everything beyond the glass blurred and uncertain. They had never filmed All Creatures Great and Small on days like this.

  Rob was sitting in his favourite chair in front of the window and I was in the act of collecting up our plates, being careful not to tip any toast crumbs on to the floor. I had got as far as the kitchen doorway when he spoke unexpectedly.

  ‘Jennifer.’

  I swung round involuntarily. He was smiling, a funny, triumphant kind of smile. I stood absolutely still, conscious of the colour draining from my face. My fingers were pinching the plates so hard that they might have left a permanent imprint.

  ‘Jennifer,’ he repeated. ‘I knew it would come to me.’

  ‘What? What are you talking about?’ I could barely force the words out.

  ‘Jennifer Dunwood. A girl who used to be at the comp a few years ago. Her brother was the speedway rider. We were trying to remember her name in the staffroom on Friday afternoon, and none of us could.’

  I continued to stare at him.

  ‘Sorry, love,’ he said. ‘Did I startle you? You know how it is when you can’t for the life of you remember something, then it comes into your head out of the blue, just when you’re thinking about something completely different.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said weakly.

  I retreated into the kitchen as quickly as my trembling legs would take me. My hands were shaking as I put the plates down on the draining board. I took several deep breaths, running some water into the sink to buy time. It had been a horrible shock. The automatic reaction of years which had surfaced right on cue. Somehow I had to go back into the sitting room and pretend that nothing had happened, which it hadn’t – not for him. I had to keep on reminding myself of that. It had been a horrible jolt, but he hadn’t noticed. Well, hardly noticed. He hadn’t followed me out into the kitchen, so he couldn’t have realized how upset I was.

  Then I heard him going into the bathroom. I went back into the sitting room and took The Sunday Times Magazine into the window seat, ready to be suitably immersed in something when he returned. Minutes passed. Out of curiosity, I glanced across at the page he had been reading, which was folded open on the arm of his chair. I could read the headline without moving: Clairvoyant Gives Police New Lead in Jennifer Reynolds Case.

  There was a muffled sound of plumbing in action, followed by the bathroom door opening. I sprang back behind my magazine.

  ‘Tell you what,’ said Rob from the doorway, ‘I’ll wash these bits and pieces up and we’ll go down to the pub for our lunch. You haven’t got anything special in, have you?’

  ‘No – lovely – great … I’ll get some shoes on.’

  From the kitchen came the sound of water splashing into the sink and a burst of pop music as he turned on the radio. Aretha Franklin. Why that particular song, at that particular instant? Of course those weren’t really the words, but it always sounded as though she was singing, ‘Who’s fooling who?’

  SIXTEEN

  If Rob noticed that I was quieter than usual over lunch, he gave no sign. We had both ordered the traditional Sunday roast, but while Rob tucked in with gusto, I regretted my folly the moment I saw the size of the portions. There seemed to be a lot of strangers eating in the pub that day, and I wondered if the macabre attraction of driving past the murder site was bumping up the number of visitors.

  I had managed to slip into a corner seat at a table where I could be inconspicuous, penned in on two sides by walls and on the third by a high-backed settle, which hid me from the adjacent diners. At the table immediately behind us, a newly arrived group were discussing their order. Though invisible, their voices carried. ‘So you’re the sausage.’ It was a woman’s voice, overloud, perhaps to compensate for the deafness of a companion. She had the kind of flat northern accent and elongated vowels which are a gift to comedians. ‘Aileen is the cottage pie? No – wait … Oh, sorry – Aileen is a steak and mushroom pie, you’re a sausage and I’m a jacket potato.’

  Rob caught my eye, conveying in a look the vision of a jacket potato, complete with handbag and plastic mac.

  ‘Stop it,’ I hissed, half convulsed. ‘Behave, or when you grow up you’ll turn into a sausage too.’

  ‘I’d rather be a steak,’ he said. ‘Mean and lean and medium rare.’

  I glanced down at my plate, where the gravy was beginning to congeal. ‘To the French we’re all les rosbifs,’ I said.

  ‘Didn’t you say that you’ve never been to France?’ he asked. ‘Why don’t we go this summer? We could drive over and tour around Normandy.’

  ‘Mmm,’ I said, feeling my new-found relaxation ebbing away. ‘Sounds lovely.’

  ‘You don’t sound very enthusiastic. Had you got something else in mind?’

  ‘No, nothing at all.’ The unexpected mention of driving in France had thrown me completely off balance, conjuring an instant vision of the open-topped car and the doomed lovers, bringing a flapping mass of black crow worries straight back into my head.

  ‘It was just a thought,’ he said. ‘It would be nice to get away this summer, but maybe we’d do better to hold out for a last-minute bargain instead. Josie at school got a package to Crete last year, absolutely knock-down price, and when they got there it was a villa with a private pool. They had a great time. Walked the Samaria Gorge, went to Knossos …’

  I nodded while trying to think of something to say which didn’t include the words ‘don’t have a passport’.

  ‘Trouble is,’ he continued, ‘I suppose you could just as easily end up on top of the local disco.’

  ‘Probably better not to risk it,’ I said. How did passport records work? Did they keep a list of distinguishing features, such as mole on left cheek?

  ‘You’re not in a very optimistic mood. Where’s your sense of adventure – your gambler’s streak?’

  ‘It would be just my luck to end up on top of the local disco.’

  ‘So what would your dream destination be?’ he asked.

  ‘I’m not sure.’ Photographs. They must keep your last photograph. By no stretch of the imagination could I ever pass as the original Susan McCarthy.

  ‘Go on. Everyone has somewhere. Suppose money was no object: where would you really like to go?’

  I forked in another lump of cold roast potato, playing for time while I pretended to consider this. A sudden panicky thought advanced from the back of my mind. Suppose Rob had a nest egg and having ascertained my dream destination, secretly bought the tickets and presented me with them as a wonderful surprise? I had never thought about getting a passport. Passports usually lasted for ten years. Would hers even have expired yet? I attempted some frantic mental calculations.

  ‘Come on,’ he coaxed, cutting in on my thoughts and making me lose count. ‘There must be somewhere you’ve always wanted to go.’

  ‘Australia,’ I said. It came to me in a flash that being the other side of the world, Australia would be the most logistically difficult, to say nothing of expensive, surprises to spring.

  His smile broadened. ‘That’s amazing. I’ve always wanted to go to Australia. You knew, didn’t you? That’s why you said it.’

  ‘No, honestly.’ I affected to be as immensely pleased as he was over this newly discovered mutual interest in all things Antipodean. ‘I had no idea you wanted to go. You’ve never mentioned it before.’ And if you had, I certainly wouldn’t have done.

  ‘What do you want to see most?’

  Now I was in trouble. Fancy even trying to bluff to a geography teacher. What had I been thinking?

  ‘Ev
erything,’ I said, airily. ‘All the usual tourist stuff, of course: Ayers Rock, the Opera House … kangaroos …’ I gestured vaguely, as if to encompass such a breadth of common ground that there was no need to enunciate it.

  ‘Do you think we might be able to afford it,’ he asked, ‘when we pool our resources?’ He looked so keen. His face always lit up when an idea grabbed him. It made him look younger, and as vulnerable to disappointment as a kid about to learn that his birthday treat has been cancelled.

  ‘We could get rid of all our duplicate saucepans and toasters and stuff like that at a car boot sale,’ I said, faking enthusiasm. ‘That ought to raise a bit of extra cash.’

  ‘If only our numbers would come up on the pools,’ he said. ‘I could whisk you away tomorrow.’

  ‘But there’s about twenty of you in the syndicate.’ I tried not to sound too pleased about it.

  ‘It would have to be a very big win.’

  ‘Very big.’

  ‘If only I’d been a stockbroker instead of a teacher.’

  ‘But you can’t add up.’

  ‘Probably not such a handicap in these days of calculators,’ he said.

  ‘And anyway, you’d hate being a stockbroker. You like being a teacher.’

  ‘Not on a Sunday afternoon, when I’ve still got books to mark and lessons to prepare and I’d much rather take you back to bed – which, sadly, does remind me …’

  ‘I know.’ I smiled. ‘Come on, we’d better make a move. I can’t eat any more of this and anyway, it’s gone cold.’

  I didn’t trust myself to so much as glance in the direction of the newspapers until Rob had collected his things and gone home. Jennifer Dunwood – an ex-pupil? It was plausible. Everyone has those lapses of memory when they simply can’t remember a name, followed by the triumphant recall of the missing information often hours or even days later – inspiration provided by some unrelated reminder.

  Or had it been a test? Had he called out the name Jennifer to see how I would react? To see whether I would automatically answer to this unexpected, yet compelling appellation? I kept remembering the expression on his face when I spun round. Delight that his ruse had worked? Or merely pleased that he had solved a niggling query? The newspaper headline could easily have provided the prompt – the name Jennifer leaping up at him from the page, giving his memory the jog it needed to remember the name of the speedway rider’s sister.

  Had Rob seen that wretched programme on the television? I had assumed not, but I didn’t dare ask him, because if I did he would be sure to ask why I was interested, and there was no point drawing his attention to it unnecessarily. Until recently he had never shown any sign of being suspicious. The doppelgänger episode at his mother’s had gone completely unremarked. The business about the music lessons had been unfortunate, but I was pretty confident his interest in that topic had waned. It was one of our jokes that he couldn’t add up. How many clues did it take to arrive at an equation where Susan equals Jennifer?

  Once he had gone home I was finally able to investigate the headline which had been fizzing in the back of my mind for the previous two hours. The item disturbed me profoundly. The accompanying photograph was a rather grainy reproduction of the same old wedding picture. The text made a reasonable stab at relating the known facts about my disappearance, although it got my age wrong and erroneously stated that Alan worked in a museum. There was nothing much there which could obviously be linked to me, but coming hard on the heels of Disappeared! it provided another unwelcome bit of publicity for what had, until now, been a largely forgotten case – and as I read on, I realized that I had Martin Bullock and his team to thank because, immediately after watching the programme, a ‘well-known West Country Psychic’ claimed to have been on the receiving end of some sort of vision concerning Jennifer Reynolds’s whereabouts and had contacted the police to tell them all about it. The police would only say, rather cagily, that the clairvoyant had been in touch with them. ‘Any new information we receive will be followed up,’ a police spokesperson was quoted as saying.

  The clairvoyant, one Stan Butters of Glastonbury, had given a long interview to the newspaper, explaining that he had a record of helping the police, particularly in the matter of locating missing bodies. According to Mr Butters, he had seen my body taken from the boot of a car and dumped in a lake, and he thought that if he were allowed to hold an item which had once belonged to me – something of a ‘personal nature’ – he would be able to pinpoint the precise stretch of water on a map, enabling the police to go off and search in exactly the right spot.

  ‘Dream on, Stan,’ I said, aloud, but I shuddered in spite of myself.

  I went to bed early again that night and soon fell into a deep sleep, but the clairvoyant’s pronouncements must have stayed with me, for I had a strange, vivid dream. I was swimming beneath the surface of a dark green pool and everywhere I looked there were girls’ faces staring back at me: Marie Glover, pale and smiling, just like the picture outside the police station; Antonia Bridgeman with her music still clutched in one hand; and other girls, girls in Victorian frocks with enormous hair ribbons, girls who had stepped out of their frames on the walls of the staircase and come to bathe in the depths of this huge viridescent pond, all of them circling, closing in on me.

  Frightened now, I tried to swim away. The surface shimmered above me. Sun and air. I forged upwards, but my hair had grown long again, the way it used to be, and it was spreading out in the water, becoming entangled with the long hair streaming out from all the other girls who crowded around me, like pale strands of water weed, skeins and skeins of it, knotting with mine, trapping me and holding me down. My breath was running out. I was suffocating, drowning down there in the shadowy depths.

  I awoke with a little cry. It echoed around the silent bedroom, before vanishing into the dark. The sky was overcast and there was no moon.

  SEVENTEEN

  Monday brought a deviation from the usual routine. Moira, one of our longest-serving receptionists, was celebrating her sixtieth birthday, so as well as the usual cards and cakes there was a small retirement presentation after work. The entire staff packed into the common room for a short speech from Dr McLeary, followed by Dr Woods flamboyantly popping some bottles of indifferent sparkling wine. Afterwards there was a meal at The Bull, where two big tables had been laid for us, complete with party poppers and unseasonal Christmas crackers, which created some forced laughter amid jokes about the imminent appearance of Father Christmas.

  My role within the practice compelled me to participate in events such as these, but I didn’t really enjoy them, because they always reminded me that my sense of belonging was a chimera. All the other women had long-standing connections with the dale: ties of blood, marriage or a shared schooling. No name thrown up in conversation was liable to be unfamiliar to any of them. They were not unkind or obvious about it, but it was there all the same, so I was glad when Terry Millington, fellow incomer and usurper of the practice newbie role, took the seat opposite mine. However, as the meal progressed I realized that he was talking relatively little and drinking rather a lot. I found myself hoping that he wasn’t on the rota to pick up out of hours calls that night.

  On occasions such as these we all did our best not to talk shop, but with the biggest item of local gossip firmly off the table (murder and birthdays don’t mix), the conversation at our end of the table had begun to flag by the time we were eating our desserts.

  Suddenly, as if gripped by a bright idea, the Trollop turned to me and said: ‘I were reading about that practice manager who disappeared in the Midlands, Susan, and I wondered if you ever came across her, you know, at a meeting or a conference or owt?’

  I momentarily considered pretending not to know who she was talking about, and decided against. ‘Not knowingly,’ I said. ‘I mean, she might have been to some of the big area meetings. I was at a practice in Coventry at one time and Nicholsfield – that’s where she used to live, isn’t it? – is only
about thirty miles away.’

  ‘She’s one of those people with a very ordinary sort of face,’ the Trollop mused. ‘Not especially memorable.’

  I toyed with the last spoonful of my sticky toffee pudding, before realizing that shoving it into my mouth would provide a perfect excuse not to reply.

  ‘Did you see that programme about it the other night?’ asked the Trainspotter. ‘I recognized that actress in the reconstruction. She’s been in Coronation Street … and Casualty.’

  I masticated steadily as the pudding turned to pap in my mouth. This was it. The conversation I had always dreaded, happening right here, right now. The excessive sweetness of the pudding began to tickle the back of my throat. In a minute I was going to have a coughing fit and spray a mush of semi-digested sticky toffee slush all over the table.

  ‘I didn’t watch all of it,’ the Trollop said. ‘It was on the same night that Julie …’ she glanced down the table, but Moira and everyone else at that end were completely immersed in some other topic, ‘… you know … our Keith had been out searching, and I went into the kitchen to get him some supper when he came back in.’

  I managed to swallow the sweet, pulpy stuff remnants without incident and took a gulp of water.

  ‘I think she’s been on Emmerdale as well,’ the Trainspotter continued to muse. ‘Tell you what, Susan, you look a bit like her.’

  I attempted nonchalance. ‘Like who?’ Was it a trap? Were the two of them testing me out? I didn’t think they were subtle enough to have bided their time then concocted a two-pronged attack like this, but who knew what they got up to in Medical Records when they were supposed to be working?