The Secrets of the Lake

by Liz Trenow

  Dawn crept in and Jimmy was still missing. And that morning something else had gone, too, although at first I wasn’t able to figure out what. It was just a feeling, as though a malign, unseen presence had slipped into our lives, sucking from us all the comfort and strength that our depleted little family had somehow managed to create in that unfamiliar house, this new place, these new circumstances. The ground beneath my feet felt no longer solid but shifting, uncertain, unpredictable. Normally I would have turned to Pa, finding solace in at least being able to talk through my feelings. But how could we look to each other for strength, when both of us were so weak and powerless to bring Jimmy back?

  Mrs D went home to change and get her husband his breakfast, and at around ten o’clock Weasel Face and Stubby returned, telling us about their plans for the day’s renewed search. They also brought back my book.

  Shortly after they left, Mrs D arrived with a face as long as a barn door. Her normally healthy complexion was deadly pale and her voice trembled. ‘Oh, my poor dears. I’m sorry to bring you more sad news.’

  We immediately assumed the worst. ‘Spit it out, woman,’ Pa snapped. I shushed him gently. He was on a knife edge.

  ‘Poor, poor Eli.’ She began to weep, trying to stem the flow with a totally inadequate lacy handkerchief. Pa produced a man-sized linen version and I put an arm round her.

  ‘Come and sit down,’ I said. ‘We’ll put the kettle on.’

  It turned out I wasn’t the only one worrying about Eli. At Mrs D’s insistence, her husband had walked up to the council houses first thing in the morning to see if he was all right. When there was no answer he’d checked around the building, looking in through windows to see whether he could detect any signs of habitation, but he could find nothing. So he went back down and into the woods to see whether Eli had tried to return to his hut.

  What he’d discovered there Mrs D found difficult to put into words.

  ‘Oh, my dears,’ she said, lifting her cup with a trembling hand. ‘Such a shock. Who’d have thought he’d . . .’

  ‘He would what?’ Pa snapped. He didn’t sound like my father any more. His tone was brusque and impatient, because really the only news we could cope with was whether Jimmy had been found, safe and unharmed.

  ‘I mean, wherever did he get that rope?’

  A chill went down my spine, and everything in front of my eyes seemed to shimmer and swim.

  Mrs D turned to me. ‘My poor dear Molly. You were so fond of him, weren’t you?’

  ‘Was it Jimmy?’ I almost shouted.

  ‘Your brother? Oh no, darling. Not Jimmy. It was Eli. He’s only gone and hanged himself. From a tree. Right by his hut, or where it used to be.’

  ‘Was he . . .?’ My father faltered, unable to say the word.

  ‘I’m afraid so.’ Mrs D shook her head. ‘He’d used a ladder, you see, and kicked it away. George climbed up and cut him down, but he was long gone, poor old boy. There was no saving him. We called the police, of course, and a doctor. He pronounced him dead at the scene.’

  Neither Pa nor I could find anything to say. We were already in shock, and this just doubled it. I found myself shaking uncontrollably and had to sit down. Eli must have been distressed at being moved out of his hut and then finding it burned down, but I never realised that he would give up hope so completely.

  And then an even darker thought arrived, dizzying in its obvious clarity. We knew that the police had been to see Eli the previous day and interviewed him about Jimmy. Knowing from my own experience how their questioning could make you feel guilty for no reason at all, it was reasonable to assume that poor Eli would have felt they suspected him of having something to do with Jimmy’s disappearance. He might even have thought they were going to arrest him.

  I felt utterly certain that Eli was entirely innocent. He would never have harmed anyone, let alone the boy he seemed to have developed a great affection for. But was I being too naive? A further terrifying thought crashed into my head: why would Eli have done something so drastic if he was completely innocent and knew nothing? Did this mean that he had actually harmed Jimmy, or was somehow responsible for his disappearance? Or were there darker forces at play here, adult things I had no experience of? Now that Eli had done what he had done, would the police – and everyone else – simply assume that he was guilty?

  It was all too much to take in. ‘Why, why, why, why?’ I found myself banging the table with my fist, till Pa reached over and held it. ‘It’s okay, darling. We’ll get to the bottom of this, don’t you worry.’

  ‘Did he leave any sign? A note?’ I asked.

  Her face darkened. ‘There was something, yes. Hubby gave it to the police.’

  ‘Did he read it? What did it say?’

  ‘You shouldn’t be asking, Molly,’ Pa said, taking my arm.

  ‘I want to know. Was it anything to do with my brother?’

  Mrs D shook her head vehemently. ‘Good heavens, no. Not about the little laddie. Some garbled stuff about the hut and the land, I think. Nothing we need to worry ourselves with.’ She shrugged. ‘It’s all in the hands of the police now, my dear. As if you didn’t have enough to worry about, you poor dears.’

  The scene played itself in my head, over and over. How Eli had returned to gather up some of his possessions and discovered that his beloved hut had burned to the ground. How would he have reacted? Did he light one last pipe and smoke it? Did he say anything? Did he cry? And where was Sarge? I felt sure Eli could not, even in his most distressed state, have been able to kill the dog, too.

  He would have had to throw the rope over a branch, knot a loop, climb the ladder, put the loop over his head and then . . . Once he’d jumped, did he struggle, try to get back to the ladder and regain his footing? How did you die when you hanged yourself? Do you break your neck or slowly suffocate from the pressure on your windpipe? It was all so unthinkable, and yet my mind could not stop itself thinking.

  And all the while the terrible dread: that we might never see my brother again.

  It was that day they brought in the divers. We didn’t see them ourselves, but Mr Blackman reported on every step of the police search, so we had little choice but to hear about ‘black-clad men with breathing apparatus’ rowing around the lake and then jumping in at various points to search underwater. I found myself imagining how one of the divers might later report about coming face-to-face with an angry crocodile or dragon. My distracted brain was threatening to lose its grip on reality.

  The hours dragged by. I had never known time move so slowly. The police came to give an update: they had conducted a thorough search of the lake, the islands and the woodland around, but had found no sign of Jimmy. This was good news, they suggested, although I could hardly see why.

  Pa pressed them about what they would do next. They had two theories. The first, and most likely, they seemed to think, was that Eli Chadwick had something to do with it. I protested that I felt sure he would never have lifted a finger to harm Jimmy, but they looked at me as though I was a fool.

  The second theory they were working on was that Jimmy had taken Robin, ‘that red canvas craft’ as they called her, to retrieve the toy parrot. To me, it seemed completely implausible that Jimmy would have gone out in a boat on his own at night, however anxious he was to get the parrot back. But I refrained from saying so.

  ‘We have to explore every possibility. But that doesn’t mean we have given up hope of finding your boy safe and well,’ Weasel Face told us. His intention was to reassure, of course, but each time he said that, it felt like another blow. What if Jimmy wasn’t ‘safe and well’? The alternative was too horrific to contemplate.

  By mid-afternoon that second day Pa and I seemed unable even to summon the strength to comfort each other. Our optimism was fading fast. Nearly thirty hours had passed since we’d found Jimmy gone, and he had never been away from us for more than an hour at a time, apart from attending school. The police returned to the vicarage, questioning us aga
in and again. In the absence of any sign of Jimmy at the lake, they seemed to be more and more certain that Eli’s suicide was linked to Jimmy’s disappearance, although their theories were vague.

  According to Mrs D, this was also the main topic of gossip in the village. ‘They’re saying he topped himself out of guilt,’ she hinted darkly.

  I knew all too well the kind of assumptions people were making. Jimmy liked Eli and was often seen in his company. Soon after Jimmy disappeared, Eli had hanged himself. The conclusion was obvious, except that I was still convinced Eli would never have hurt a single hair on Jimmy’s head.

  ‘But there was nothing about that in his note, you said,’ I snapped back.

  ‘There wouldn’t be, would there?’

  At dusk the police told us they were calling off the search until the morning. Again Mrs D cooked, but we couldn’t eat a thing.

  Dr Mortimer came from Bures in his old Austin Seven. It seemed that he’d been summoned by Mrs D. Pa appeared to be fading more and more, both physically and mentally, with every passing hour. He was increasingly distracted, and the things he said sometimes didn’t make any sense. He seemed glued to the chair in his study, but when he did leave it, he was as unsteady on his legs as a man twice his age. His hands trembled so much that he could barely lift a teacup.

  The doctor offered pills. ‘To help you sleep, so you can stay strong,’ he said. He had such a kindly face that I felt like asking for a hug instead. Pa said we should take the pills, but I wasn’t so certain. What if they left us so comatose that we couldn’t wake up when Jimmy arrived back, or we received news that he needed our help? I pretended to agree to take them, just to reassure Pa and Mrs D.

  Pa retired early and his bedroom door remained shut – he must have taken the pills. But I stayed awake, slipping silently downstairs from time to time making more cups of tea or, sometimes, cocoa, and eating nearly a whole tin of biscuits. I wandered listlessly around the house and even went out into the garden. Wading through the cold, wet grass in bare feet offered a temporary distraction.

  A fox screeched somewhere in the woods beyond, sounding so much like a child in distress that it was all I could do to stop myself calling out Jimmy’s name. An owl flew past me at the height of my face, just a few yards away: a silent, ghostly white shape that disappeared into the darkness as fast as it had appeared.

  After that I went back to bed, my mind churning, ranging through every eventuality, from the perfectly probable through to the completely unimaginable. If Jimmy had been hiding somewhere, he would have come home when he got hungry. He was always hungry. Or perhaps he’d been locked in a shed by mistake? But they’d searched all the sheds in the village. Twice. Perhaps he was hurt and unable to move? But they’d searched the woods and fields in a three-mile radius, they told us.

  What if he had, as the police thought, gone out in the boat? It was very unlikely, but still a possibility. He couldn’t swim, so if he capsized and panicked, he might have drowned. I couldn’t help thinking about Melissa Blackman’s crocodile and those disappearing legs. But in my saner moments I reminded myself that dragons are only found in fairy stories, and crocodiles exist only in zoos and in Africa.

  Thinking about the river terrified me. I’d seen what the storm had done, turning a placid, friendly stream into a hungry, raging torrent that crashed through the meadows, bursting its banks and uprooting ancient trees. But Jimmy and I had never visited the river. It was a good quarter of a mile beyond the lake, or over the grassy hill. I couldn’t imagine why he might have gone there on his own, on such a fiercely stormy night. If he’d fallen in, he would have been washed away in an instant.

  The more I tried to reason, the muddier everything became. There was only one remaining possibility. Perhaps he had got into someone’s car? He was a sociable soul, after all, and assumed everyone was a friend. But he’d never done that before. So why now? And what would that someone want, with a boy who could barely speak? Or perhaps someone had taken him against his will.

  The notion of him being held captive, being frightened, confused and alone, was too painful to imagine.

  I must have slept eventually, for I became aware of light streaming through the curtains. Outside the weather was bright and sunny once more, with little white clouds scudding across a perfectly blue sky. The terrible, oppressive heat of the summer had given way to autumn, all in the space of a few days. Nature’s heartless beauty seemed to mock the nightmare that we had found ourselves locked into. It was Day Three, and still no sign of Jimmy.

  There was activity in the kitchen, so I went down in my pyjamas. Mrs D was cooking bacon and scrambled egg, but the smells that would normally make my mouth water just made me feel nauseous.

  ‘Morning,’ she said. ‘I hope those pills helped you get a little sleep, my darling.’

  I nodded, to save lying.

  ‘Thought we’d have a proper cooked breakfast today – build up your strength. Why don’t you see if your pa’s ready to eat something?’

  I doubted it, but went upstairs to please her and knocked on Pa’s bedroom door. There was no answer. Those pills were strong; he was probably still sound asleep. I knocked again, louder this time. There was still no answer; his bed was empty.

  I ran downstairs to his study. He was not there, either, but the piles of books on his desk and the side tables had been dashed about, as though a hurricane had blown through the room; some lay on the floor, their spines broken, and papers had flown everywhere. A sudden ray of hope slipped into my head: had Jimmy returned in the night and, for some inexplicable reason, been hunting for something among Pa’s papers?

  Mrs D was behind me, in the doorway.

  ‘Great heavens above,’ she exclaimed. ‘Whatever’s been going on in here? Have we been burgled?’

  I shrugged. ‘The windows are locked. There’s no sign . . .’

  ‘He must have gone out for a walk, poor man,’ she said. ‘He’ll be back soon, no doubt. I’ll put his breakfast in the warming oven. Now, why don’t you come and eat yours while it’s still fresh.’

  And then I saw it, lying on the study floor. It was a copy of the local newspaper, always delivered early on a Friday morning. On the front page was this headline and story:

  MISSING CHURCH FUNDS DENIAL

  A vicar has denied any knowledge of nearly £5,000 missing from church funds in Wormley, near Colchester.

  Rev. John Goddard, who took over in the parish of All Saints nine months ago, said: ‘We are aware that the money is missing and are working with the bank to try to discover what has happened to it.’

  Villagers claim that when they enquired about the money, they were ‘fobbed off’.

  ‘We feel very angry about this,’ said a parishioner who did not wish to be named. ‘It is a substantial amount of money badly needed for church repairs, and nothing seems to have been done to find out what has happened to it.’

  We understand that the matter has been referred for investigation by the diocese, but no one at the diocesan office was prepared to comment.

  I sat down heavily on a chair. Mrs D took the paper from me, muttering, ‘The poor, poor man. Whoever would accuse him of something like this?’

  A sharp knock on the door made us both jump.

  ‘Miss Calver, what . . .?

  She was panting and looking more dishevelled than usual, and she glanced at the newspaper in my hand. ‘Oh, Molly. You’ve seen it already. I’m so sorry.’

  ‘It was you who spoke to the newspaper?’

  ‘Of course not, silly. Can I come in?’ She closed the door behind her and lowered her voice, although I felt sure Mrs D, who had disappeared into the kitchen, would hear every word. ‘I know who it was, Molly. Who leaked the story.’

  It was just her tone of voice. My heart fell into my boots. I knew what she was going to say.

  ‘The Blackness?’ She nodded. ‘But why . . .?’

  ‘Think about it. He’s the only other person whose name is in the frame. It�
��s a pre-emptive strike, so to speak. A friend of mine, a reporter who knows I live in the village, rang me to ask if I could throw any more light on the story. He didn’t name his informant – a reporter always protects his sources – but from what he said, I knew immediately. No one else would have had access to the information.’

  ‘Except Mr Abbott. He pressed pretty hard at the last committee meeting – the one you missed.’

  ‘Ah. Well, I suppose it could have been him. But he’s not an educated man, and the language the informant used was absolutely the sort of thing Blackman might say: divesting assets, illegal encampment, serious financial difficulties. You know the sort of thing.’

  ‘Did you tell them anything?’ I asked.

  She scoffed. ‘Of course not. I’m on your side, Molly, for goodness’ sake. I didn’t say a word.’

  My head was spinning. Blackman might be evil, but was he seriously capable of doing such a terrible thing to another human being? ‘What do you mean, a pre-emptive strike?’ I asked.

  ‘He must have thought someone would go to the newspapers. So he was trying to silence them by getting his side of the story in quick.’

  And then I remembered my parting threat to Blackman the day the diocesan men came to the house: The newspapers are going to hear about this.

  ‘Now, where is your father?’ Miss Calver asked. ‘I realise this is a terrible time, but we do need to make some kind of response.’

  A sudden terrible fear gripped my heart. Pa was in such a fragile state of mind that if he’d seen this article, it could easily have tipped him over the edge. ‘We have to find him,’ I said, rushing to pull on my boots and throwing a jacket over my pyjamas. As we opened the door, George Diamond was crossing the road towards us. ‘Come quickly, Miss Goddard. Over to the church.’