The Secrets of the Lake

by Liz Trenow

  ‘Have you any idea what this red material could be, Ms Goddard?’

  She shrugs, trying to feign nonchalance. ‘Could be anything, I suppose. Something blown in off the field, an old plastic fertiliser bag? Litter gets everywhere these days, doesn’t it?’

  But she knows immediately what it could be. She would recognise that particular shade of red anywhere: Jimmy’s red mac, the one he was wearing when he disappeared. Or Kit’s canvas boat, the one they christened Robin with a bottle of champagne.

  Over the buzzing in her ears she can hear Bella saying, ‘I think it might be time to give my mother a rest, if that is all?’ Soon enough the police are on their feet, looming over her once more, saying their goodbyes, promising to be in touch as soon as they have any results – probably by the end of the week, depending on how busy the lab is – and thanking them for their time.

  Molly wants to shout at them, Oh, just shut up and go away, will you? Instead she closes her eyes. In the blessed silence, once they are gone, Bella returns to her seat and takes her mother’s hand.

  ‘Do you want to talk about this, Mum?’

  She shakes her head. ‘Not now, love. Not now.’

  The next thing Molly knows is the knock of the evening carer bringing her supper. She must have been asleep here in her chair for several hours. The plate of sandwiches Bella made is still beside her, their edges already curling in the dry heat. The cup of tea is stone-cold.

  For a moment she has forgotten what happened this afternoon and feels content. It’s not a bad life for someone of my age, she tells herself. Eighty-five next March, for heaven’s sake. However did she manage to hang on for so long? She’s a bit creaky in the leg department and can no longer shop for herself, but she still has all her marbles, which counts for a lot.

  Although she rarely sees them, there is comfort in knowing that all around her, in the other nineteen bungalows, there are people like herself. Not that they socialise much; most of them are too immobile, or too demented. She doesn’t feel lonely, though. She loves listening to audio books, and the best of the readers seem to become her friends so that, by the end, she’s sorry to bid them goodbye.

  Bella comes at the weekends, sometimes with Molly’s grandson Lewis, who appears to have grown into a fully-fledged adult without notice. There are twice-daily visits from carers, and the warden drops by every evening. She counts herself fortunate.

  This evening’s carer enters with a waft of sweet fresh air. ‘Hello, my dear,’ she says breezily. ‘You look as though you could do with a bite of something hot. How does shepherd’s pie sound?’

  Mention of shepherds reminds Molly of Eli and his hut. ‘In them old days the shepherds’d drag it from field to field, so’s the sheep could get the best grass,’ he’d say, settling himself on the steps, clay pipe in hand. She’d never seen anyone else before or since smoking one of these, except in old photographs. ‘Them old wheels ’on’t turn no more but just here suit me fine, my little ’uns.’ His eyes would twinkle as he took a long draw, exhaling clouds of aromatic smoke that he claimed kept away the midges. ‘Cos from here I can keep an eye on that dratted dragon.’

  And they would peer down through the trees to the bottom of the valley, to where the lake glimmered silently in the last of the daylight, half-longing and half-fearing what they might see.

  2

  All night she tosses and turns, dreaming vividly again, only this time her dreams are populated with red boats, black waters, white bones.

  Waking with a start, Molly knows what she must do. She must go back to the village.

  She has never returned, not once. Not since they took her father off in an ambulance, and the police gave up their search and she’d gone to live far away with an aunt she barely knew. Even though it is only an hour’s drive, she has actively avoided the area as much as possible. It holds too many memories.

  But after what the police have told them, she knows she can’t bury the memories forever. Unless she sees the place for herself one more time before she dies, she will never rest easy. The prospect of the lake half-drained of its water feels terrifying but she feels compelled to witness it, just in case.

  In case of what? She refuses to let her imagination wander any further. Not yet. Not till they get the results of the tests. But she must visit anyway, to honour the memory of Jimmy.

  ‘Hello, love,’ she chirps cheerfully when Bella answers. It’s so quick to phone, now her grandson Lewis has added something he calls speed-dial. ‘I want to ask a favour.’

  ‘What time is it?’ her daughter groans. ‘Oh. For heaven’s sake, Mum, it’s six-thirty in the morning. Sunday morning.’

  ‘Is it? I’m so sorry, darling. It’s already light and the birds are singing their little hearts out. I thought it was at least nine. But while I’ve got you . . .’

  ‘Go on.’ She can hear Bella yawning.

  ‘I need to go there, one last time. To Wormley. Can you take me? Today?’

  ‘Today? It’s Lewis’s football, Mum.’

  ‘Can’t Andy take him?’ Bella’s ex is a fireman. Molly was sad when they split, because she now sees so little of him. They’d been together so long – since Bella’s schooldays – that she’d come to think of him as a son.

  ‘Possibly. Depends on his shifts. I’ll have to ask.’ A pause. ‘You’ve never wanted to go back before, Mum.’

  ‘Everything is different now,’ she says.

  A few hours later Molly is being trundled down the path in her wheelchair, helped into her daughter’s scruffy old car and trying to find a place for her feet in a footwell deep with the detritus of empty crisp packets and fizzy-drink cans.

  The sun is shining and Bella seems to have recovered her good humour.

  The traffic is light this Sunday morning, and they are soon skimming along the rolling switchback road through the county she has long considered her own. It is May, and the verges are laced with cow parsley, the hedgerows so white with blossom that they look like banks of snow. The long-forgotten memory of a sad poem she learned at school rises to the surface of her mind and she tells Bella about it: ‘Lie long, high snowdrifts in the hedge, that will not shower on me. It’s a dying soldier longing to see his home country one more time.’

  ‘That’s a bit gloomy for a lovely spring day,’ her daughter replies, accelerating past a tractor the size of a two-storey house. They make them enormous, these days, Molly thinks. Not like the little machines that trundled back and forth along the village street, past the vicarage, several times a day.

  How curious she’d been, when they first arrived in Suffolk, to see all that agricultural machinery on the roads and in the fields. Having only ever known London, she was completely unaware of the rhythms of the seasons, the wild flowers that came and went with the passing months, or the focus of the community on growing livestock and cultivating the deep, fertile fields. She remembers being told about the harvest festival – the day when the village thanked the earth for its bounties and decorated the church with sheaves of real wheat and barley, piles of red apples and enormous green marrows. But she never got the chance to celebrate it.

  Molly is so absorbed in her thoughts that almost before she has noticed, they have passed Sudbury. A gracious town, she recalls, with Georgian houses lining wide streets, a large church dominating the square, and the bronze statue of an artist flourishing his paintbrush and palette. She remembers going on a market day when, after the livestock sales were done, grizzled farmers would gather in the pub on the Market Hill, putting the world to rights. Around lunch-time they would be joined by their wives, who were laden with the spoils of a morning’s haggling: the best cuts of meat, the greenest greens and whitest potatoes.

  But they see none of this today, following a bypass punctuated with roundabouts, past unlovely industrial buildings in varied states of prosperity or decline. They make a short detour through a council estate, and soon enough they are on a road that seems to writhe like a snake as it follows the contours
of the river.

  Ah, the river, just a gentle meandering stream these days that has somehow, through the ages, carved out the wide valley along which they are now passing, a landscape that inspired great artists like Constable and Gainsborough, its floodplain creating lush pastures that fed the medieval wool trade and the prosperity that helped to build many of its mighty churches.

  Now they are over the humpback bridge at Bures, past the pub on the corner, and The Pines looms ahead. It was such an iconic landmark in those days, that grove of ancient evergreens high on top of the hill, but the storm did for it that night and it has never recovered. Many of the trees have gone, and even those that remain look ragged and forlorn.

  As the countryside becomes increasingly familiar and the stone weighs increasingly heavy in Molly’s gut, her earlier resolve seems to leach away. Whatever is she thinking, going back there, she chides herself? But it’s too late to change her mind now. The die is cast.

  The road climbs through a deep cutting in the hillside, carved before the days of tarmac by centuries of countless carts and carriages. On either side, steep banks are covered in bluebells that, when they catch the sunshine, are of such an intense cobalt-blue that it almost hurts her eyes.

  A painful memory punches through her consciousness: her father seated in a deckchair on the back porch of the vicarage, newspaper in hand, teacup close by, enjoying the spring sunshine. She sits down on the step beside him and they rest there for several minutes: a rare moment of calm and quiet time together, just the two of them. And then there’s a shout, and Jimmy is running towards them across the lawn with tears streaming down his face, waving a bunch of wilted bluebells.

  ‘What’s up, Jim?’ Pa asks.

  ‘For . . . you . . . they . . .’ His speech was never clear at the best of the times, but he found the word at last. ‘Dead,’ he shouts, tossing them violently to the ground before running into the house. They listen to his clumsy footsteps clomping through the hallway and up the stairs. Neither of them moves.

  ‘Had I better go after him?’

  ‘He’ll be all right,’ Molly murmurs, reluctant to break the spell.

  ‘He picked them for me – I’d better go.’ Pa heaves himself up from the deckchair. The moment is lost. How she’d hated her brother in that moment, ruining everything, as usual.

  ‘Nearly there,’ Bella says, slowing the car. ‘Here’s the turning.’

  ‘How did you know?’ Molly says, as they start down the narrow lane.

  ‘I’ve been here before, Mum.’

  ‘You’ve been here? Without me?’

  ‘I wanted to see where you lived with Grandpa.’

  ‘I didn’t know you knew so much about it.’

  ‘I don’t, Mum. But remember that photo? The one they took when you first arrived?’ Molly remembers it well: Miss Calver, editor of the Village News, produced a camera and made them stand outside the church.

  ‘But I never knew about the lake,’ Bella says.

  ‘The Mere.’

  ‘Mere, then. So where is it?’

  ‘Past the church, down the hill.’

  The church tower is visible before any other building, flintwork gleaming in the sunshine, and the sight of it makes Molly’s heart contract. An unwelcome vision: her father high above them, standing precariously on the parapet, arms outstretched, shouting, ‘Take me, God, I’m coming.’

  She takes a few deep breaths, trying to calm her thoughts.

  As they approach the church gate, the lane is almost blocked with cars parked carelessly on either side. ‘Whatever’s going on?’ Bella asks, manoeuvring past.

  ‘Sunday-morning service. Looks like there’s still a healthy congregation. Let’s go on down to the lake. We can come back afterwards.’

  She is expecting to see the vicarage at any moment, but her view is obscured by a new wall of bright-red brick. Bella stops by gateposts topped with a pair of badly modelled concrete lions, comic-book renderings of those noble creatures. A slate sign with sharply laser-carved lettering reads: VICARAGE CLOSE.

  ‘Oh my Lord,’ Molly gasps, peering through the curlicues of wrought-iron gates. The old vicarage has gone, and in its place are four mock-Georgian executive-style houses set in perfectly manicured green lawns surrounded by newly planted box hedges. Like dolls’ houses in a toy town, she thinks.

  ‘The poor old place was looking a bit derelict last time I was here,’ Bella says. ‘But there was scaffolding up the chimney, so I assumed they were restoring it.’

  After her initial surprise, Molly feels strangely unmoved. She never loved that vicarage, it never really felt like home. A plain four-square building of no great historical importance, cheaply constructed in the interwar period, its rooms were voluminous, the plumbing basic, the windows ill-fitting, with no insulation and certainly no central heating. The fireplaces were greedy for coal and far too small to keep the place warm in winter.

  The best thing about it was the garden – those spreading acres on which these new houses now stand. It had seemed, to her young city-bound eyes, to stretch away to infinity, merging without fence or hedge into the woodland and fields beyond. This was her childhood, or a part of it at least. And now it is gone. ‘Good riddance,’ she mutters under her breath.

  ‘Where now?’ Bella asks.

  ‘Down to the Mere. It’s at the bottom of the hill.’

  ‘You’re sure about this, Mum?’

  ‘Never been more sure,’ she says, although her heart quails at the thought.

  They pass the Old Crown pub, offering ‘local ales and fresh cooked food’, and agree to return for a sandwich later, before the drive home. The houses thin out as they leave the village, with the woods to their left, down to the bottom of the hill where the road levels onto the river’s floodplain. The Tudor brick chimneys of Wormley Hall are just visible, peeping over the tops of the trees.

  The first sign they see is hand-painted in uneven capital letters, nailed roughly onto an unsteady-looking post: SAVE WORMLEY MERE. Next is a larger official notice:

  EASTERN WATER STOUR VALLEY PROJECT.

  STRICTLY AUTHORISED VEHICLES ONLY.

  DANGER, HEAVY PLANT TURNING.

  NO ENTRY.

  ‘Heavy plants don’t sound too dangerous.’ Molly’s attempt at a joke is met with a sigh.

  ‘So where is this lake, anyway?’ Bella says, pulling up beside a gate leading to a rough farm track.

  ‘Just over there. The only way by car is along this track.’ Molly opens her window and the twittering song of invisible meadowlarks floods her ears from high above. She takes a deep breath, inhaling the smells of warm grass and spring blossom, with a hint of cow manure.

  ‘That’s that, then,’ Bella says. ‘There’s no way I’m pushing your wheelchair along there. It’s far too rough.’ She gets out of the car, goes to the metal gate, gives it a push and rattles the chain fixing it to the gatepost. ‘Anyway, it’s locked,’ she says, with a hint of triumph.

  But something has become dislodged. The jaws of the heavy padlock have parted, and the chain now hangs free. The gate starts to swing open of its own accord. As it gains momentum, Bella lurches forward to close it, but Molly shouts, ‘Hold on, love. Now we can drive down.’

  ‘“No entry,” it says. Can’t you read the sign?’ Bella climbs back into the car.

  ‘If we don’t go now, I may never see it again,’ Molly says. ‘It’s Sunday, love. No one is here to stop us.’

  Bella rests her forehead on the steering wheel. ‘That just about tops it. My eighty-four-year-old mother is telling me to break the law.’

  ‘It’s not the law, love, only a company notice. Please. It’ll only take a few seconds.’

  It is my last chance, she thinks. My last chance to . . . She cannot actually bring herself to say it, even to herself. But she knows her daughter too well: there is no point in pleading, so she sits quietly and waits.

  After a few moments Bella sighs and starts the car, puts it into gear and caut
iously drives through the now-open gateway and down the track. The gravel is surprisingly smooth and in no time at all the lake, or at least the area where it used to be, comes into view. But it is nothing like Molly remembers. Where water once glittered there is a deep, muddy crater, its edges churned into chaos by wheel tracks and footprints. Red-and-white plastic tape is strung from posts and trees, and more signs – ironic now: DEEP WATER, DANGER OF DROWNING. At the bottom of the crater is a puddle of tea-coloured water.

  All around one end the trees have been felled and the boggy area where the stream used to feed into the lake, where the marsh marigolds bloomed every summer in such profusion, has been pulverised by the tracks of heavy vehicles. Two of them, a lurid orange, lurk in the far corner of the field like giant insects with their long arms folded, ready to pounce.

  Molly puts her face in her hands. ‘And to think that’s where Jimmy’s been, all these years.’

  ‘We don’t know that.’

  ‘I know it. In my heart.’ She hammers her chest with a fist. Molly accepts Bella’s tissue and wipes her eyes.

  In the end, everyone said Jimmy must have drowned, but no one had ever explained why his body was never found. At fifteen, she’d read enough crime stories to know that bodies always surfaced somewhere, possibly months later, unless they were weighted down, in which case it had obviously not been an accident. But who would do such a thing to a small, harmless boy? And even if he’d just got caught somewhere, in branches or tree roots, why had the police divers never discovered him?

  ‘Let’s go,’ she says, suddenly. ‘I’ve seen enough.’

  Back up the hill, outside the church, the cars have mostly disappeared.

  ‘Nearly time for lunch,’ Bella says.

  ‘Good idea. Shall we take a look inside first, now the service has finished?’

  Bella pulls up the car. ‘That path looks reasonable for your chair. Let’s try it. Then lunch?’