by Unknown
‘HELP!’ Ellen tried again. ‘Can anybody HEAR me? HELP!’
The hissing cockroaches gave up and shambled away to eat some rotting fruit.
She cast her eyes along the rows of tanks, totally failing to understand the appeal of such a hair-raising array of pets. A praying mantis cocked its skull-like head as it watched her from its illuminated cube. In the glass case beside it, several vast shiny beetles with great armoured horns on their heads formed an excited rugby scrum, kicking up sand. She was grateful for Snorkel’s simple ball-catching pleasures.
Groping around on the floor, she located the socket strip and plugged it back into the wall, lighting up the small lamp in one corner and inadvertently cueing in the screaming once more.
‘Waaaaaaaaaaa!’ wailed the voice on the stereo.
She hurriedly crossed the room to silence it, too deafened by the racket to hear the feet marching up the stairs and a key being inserted into the lock.
‘What have I told you about playing that—’ Ely Gates’ silhouette towered in the light pouring in from the landing, the crosses on the walls behind him dancing as Ellen blinked at the sudden brightness. ‘May I ask what you are doing in my daughter’s insectarium?’
Ellen could make out the arctic blue eyes gleaming in the dark face and quailed. ‘I came to give her a message, and I got locked in by mistake.’
He rubbed his beard as he considered this.
‘Pheely asked me to let her know that she’s going to be late for their sitting.’
He said nothing.
‘Is Godspell – er – here?’
He nodded towards the door that led to the pitch-black, wing-flapping room.
‘In there?’
‘You’ll find her through the lepidoptery, yes.’ He nodded. ‘I shall ask my wife to make coffee. You may join us downstairs.’
Ellen was still staring nervously at the door. Lepidopterists collected moths and butterflies, as far as she remembered. ‘Really, there’s no need to –’
‘Five minutes. No longer. Bring my daughter with you.’ As he turned away, Ellen registered that this was an order.
Bracing herself, she walked into the blackened room, feeling like Clarice Starling without the gun.
Now partly illuminated by the light that was spilling through the insectarium from the landing, the wing-flapping moths turned out to be safely contained in huge floor-to-ceiling tanks on two sides and mostly immobile, taking their daily naps. One or two big hawk-wings flew into action at the sight of daylight, thumping dustily against the glass as Ellen rushed past and knocked on yet another door in Godspell’s creepy labyrinth. There was no answer.
‘Christ,’ she gasped as she let herself in. ‘This just gets better.’
The secret room, decorated entirely in splattered gore red and widow black, was wallpapered with macabre posters for bands boasting names like The Parricide Parasites, Blood in my Vomit, Sisters of Myra Hindley and – most charmingly – Abba’s Abattoir Abortion. A real gravestone was propped up against one wall, its pale stone face without inscription. Ellen looked around for a matching coffin, but saw only pointy gothic chairs covered with piles of black clothes topped with spilling ashtrays. The dusty black floor was littered with CD, video and PlayStation cases, and the room reeked of stale tobacco.
If the nun’s cell was Godspell’s bedroom and the rooms of tanks her pet sanctuary, then this appeared to be her playpen. It was mercifully devoid of live arachnids, mantids and cockroaches. But it was also apparently devoid of Godspell.
Scratching her head, Ellen wandered up to a long bench draped in dark red velvet, cluttered with spiky jewellery, photographs, Hooch bottles with black lipstick smudges around the necks, and notepads covered with scrawling handwritten verse – Roadkill’s lyrics, she presumed, although she couldn’t make out a legible word. Yet the manic black handwriting was strangely familiar.
Standing out among the gothic paraphernalia was a brightly coloured glass snowstorm – the sort peddled at tatty gift shops and souvenir stalls. Ellen picked it up and shook it, watching the gaudy glitter disperse and dance around a prancing plastic unicorn.
‘Put that down!’ ordered a husky little voice, and she spun around to see Godspell peeling a pair of headphones from her ears and casting a PlayStation controller to one side. Hunched amid the folds of a vast black velvet sag bag in the corner and dressed in her customary black, she’d been perfectly camouflaged as she silently fought blood-sucking zombies on a small portable television.
‘What are you doing here?’ She stood up, reaching across to turn off the set.
‘I brought a message from Pheely . . .’ Ellen hastily explained her mission.
Despite the gloominess of her lair, Godspell was wearing dark glasses. Her pale, pointed face didn’t move as she listened and, afterwards, she said nothing. She had her father’s gift for silence, it seemed.
‘Ely asked that you come downstairs with me,’ Ellen muttered awkwardly, studying what appeared to be a ghoulish shrine that formed a vast cross on one wall, where shelves of insects were entombed in Perspex.
Godspell appeared at her shoulder and reached for a dusty cube containing a stick insect. ‘My first baby.’
‘What was he called?’
‘She,’ Godspell corrected, ‘was called Sticky.’
Ellen tried not to laugh. With the dark glasses in front of her eyes, it was hard to tell whether Godspell was looking at her or not.
‘You really love them, don’t you?’ she asked.
Sticky’s little plastic tomb was rolled between two pale, bony palms like a die about to be cast, the heavy gothic rings clinking. Godspell Gates – who had few friends and rarely spoke a great deal – was about to confide her great passion.
‘They are my life.’ She turned Sticky the right way up and held her up to the light. ‘They really are very beautiful when you get to know them. Like angry men.’ She pressed her dark lips to the cube and closed her eyes in silent prayer before placing it carefully back onto the shelf. ‘We had better go.’
Ellen nodded, heading for the door, grateful to be leaving.
‘This way.’ Godspell indicated a huge black hanging cloth painted with a giant red spider on the opposite wall. ‘I don’t want you to disturb my pets again. They were listening to my music.’ She held back the cloth to reveal an archway that led through to a tiny, neat study complete with iMac and shelves of reference books – mostly about insects.
‘This is an amazing part of the house.’ Ellen followed her through another archway to yet more stairs. ‘You’d never know it existed from outside.’
‘Dad calls it the Moth Wing,’ Godspell muttered, neatening a framed set of exotic butterflies on the stairwell. ‘It’s not that big – we had to move the snakes to a garage.’
‘Reptiles too, huh?’ Ellen tried to sound chatty.
‘It’s a sideline – I prefer bugs.’ Godspell opened a door that led out onto a formal landing, with button-backed ticking chairs and framed oils of flower arrangements. They were back in the main house. Again, there was a Yale lock on the door.
‘The farmhouse is even more complicated than the manor house.’ Ellen looked around, trying to work out how the Moth Wing fitted – a mathematical puzzle that she had to solve to satisfy her curiosity.
‘I heard you liked it there.’
Ellen stopped dead. ‘Liked it where?’
‘At the manor.’ Godspell stopped too. Then she swung around, dark glasses reflecting Ellen’s questioning face. ‘Do you know why he’s nick-named Spurs?’
‘Jasper – sper – Spurs?’ Ellen suggested, wondering what she was driving at. ‘And he rides horses.’
‘Football,’ Godspell informed her, running her tiny hand around the wooden turning post at the top of the stairs. ‘Tottenham Hotspurs.’
‘Oh.’
‘I support Arsenal.’
‘Really?’ Ellen wasn’t quite sure where this was going. Was Godspell’s village nick-name Ars
e?
‘Dad doesn’t approve.’
‘More of a rugby man?’
She shook her head. ‘Arsenal is the Wycks’ team.’
Ellen remembered that the last time she’d seen Saul Wyck, he’d been wearing a Gunners shirt. Pheely had mentioned that several Wycks were in Roadkill too. Ely was bound to disapprove.
‘People round here say Jasper Belling only played at the football hooligan thing when he was a kid to wind the family up,’ Godspell was saying. ‘He used to graffiti cocks on the barns at Wyck’s Farm.’
‘Cocks?’ Ellen had no idea that Spurs had been such a childish rebel.
‘A cockerel is the Tottenham emblem.’
‘Of course it is.’ She coloured, still wondering why Godspell was telling her all this.
‘The Wycks hate him for that – and other stuff he did back then.’ She pushed her dark glasses higher up her nose. ‘That’s why . . . the thing is, they didn’t realise someone else got hit by a bottle. Pheely says it knocked you out.’
Ellen crossed her arms angrily, torn between cursing Pheely’s indiscretion and intrigue at what it had thrown up – or rather thrown over the garden wall. ‘So you know who was behind the bottle that hit me?’
‘A friend.’ Her voice was deadpan.
‘One of the Wycks.’ Ellen knew not to push it. ‘Were you there?’
She nodded.
‘Was that why your father –’
‘Dad doesn’t know,’ she muttered, glancing down the stairs. ‘He’s just mad at me for staying out late. Still thinks I’m a kid.’ Her mouth twitched. ‘Sorry you got hurt. You had enough grief with the badger that night.’
‘Pheely told you about that too?’
She looked away. ‘Yeah. That’s right. Pheely told me.’
‘Well, thanks for apologising. It wasn’t your fault.’
‘It was my bottle.’
Ellen thought about the Hooch bottles that lined Godspell’s lair – along with the PlayStation games and brimming ashtrays. The same things had been amongst the mess that had greeted her arrival at Goose Cottage. Was Godspell Gates one of the Shaggers?
Before she could think of a suitably subtle way of finding out, Ely bellowed Godspell’s name from below and the little Goth skittered downstairs.
In the Gates’ sombre drawing room, Felicity – now minus blood-stained apron – was pouring coffee from a smart porcelain pot and glancing fretfully at the clock on the mantel. ‘I really must leave for the manor, Elijah. You know how Lady Belling loathes to be kept waiting.’
Ely looked up as his daughter entered the room, his arctic gaze melting a little. ‘Why not take Godspell, pudding? She is not required to sit for Ophelia until later today.’
Felicity looked flustered at the thought. ‘Well, Lady Belling didn’t actually –’
‘Young Jasper will be there.’ Ely stood up and removed his daughter’s dark glasses, smoothing a few of the spiky black hairs that sprang from her crown. ‘It’s about time they got to know one another better. Go with your mother, Godspell. I shall have coffee with Miss Jamieson.’
Godspell let out a low noise that sounded remarkably like one of her hissing cockroaches, but Ely had complete control over daughter and wife, both of whom melted obediently away to apply black and pink lipsticks respectively, ready to transfer to the Belling Royal Doulton.
Ellen swallowed rising bile, not at all comfortable with the thought of hanging around as Ely indicated for her to sit and placed a cup of weak coffee on a walnut table in front of her, pinning her in. She glanced at her watch. ‘I really must get back soon – I have people looking around the house. This is very kind, but I only popped by to let God –’
‘You have not reconsidered my offer for the cottage?’
‘My parents haven’t, I’m afraid, no.’ Ellen tried to be tactful, wishing her cup and saucer wouldn’t rattle so much when she picked them up.
‘They will.’ Ely smiled confidently, settling in a leather wing chair nearby.
‘I rather think not.’ She cleared her throat. ‘They’re aware that you paid Lloyd to keep potential buyers away, you see.’
One grey eyebrow lifted like a seagull’s wing above his choppy blue gaze and there was a long pause as he stirred a lump of sugar into his coffee.
Ellen studied a huge, dark oil painting of a dying stag that hung above the fireplace. Something about its wild, angry eyes, still fighting for every second of life as dogs tore at its neck, reminded her of Spurs.
‘I do hope that you will be able to join in the garden party that Felicity and I are holding.’ Ely broke the silence. ‘It is always a very jubilant village occasion. Lloyd will be attending. I’m sure he would like to speak with you again.’
‘I doubt I’ll still be in Oddlode,’ Ellen muttered, hardly able to believe his gall. ‘Lots of people are interested in the cottage. It should be under offer within days.’
‘What a shame,’ he gave her a chilly smile, leaving her uncertain whether he was referring to the cottage’s sale, or her likely pre-party departure.
There was another awkward pause and Ellen glared at a photograph of Ely shaking hands with Thatcher.
‘You are a brave girl, are you not, Miss Jamieson?’
‘Call me Ellen,’ she muttered, her cup and saucer clattering like mad now that she returned his gaze. ‘And I’m not brave. I just like to be honest about things.’
‘You are brave,’ he assured her, blue eyes freezing into hers. ‘And foolhardy.’
‘To expose your underhand tactics?’
He shook his head and smiled, looking into his own very steady cup. ‘To befriend Jasper Belling.’
Ellen balked. ‘I don’t see that our friendship – and it hardly counts as that – can be any business of –’
‘Leave him alone, Miss Jamieson.’ He looked up, his glare crashing against her face like a tidal wave. ‘He’s evil.’
‘It’s Ellen. And I am leaving him alone, believe me. I want nothing more to do with him.’
‘Good.’ He adjusted his spoon on the saucer. ‘I hope that, being such an honest person, I can take your word in this matter.’
She stared at him, cup rattling as she matched his formal tone. ‘May I ask why you are encouraging your daughter to get to know this evil person better?’
He didn’t blink. ‘As you will no doubt have gathered, Godspell is rather fond of evil things.’
‘I’m sure she loves her father very much.’ She spoke tersely.
He took a sip of coffee, watching her over the rim, his gaze blood-chillingly steady.
Ellen put her cup down with a splash, knowing she had gone too far. ‘I’m sorry. I must go.’
Without another word, Ely saw her to the door and she burst gratefully out into the sunshine.
Gathering Snorkel from her tether, she called Pheely from her mobile as she jogged home. ‘I am never going to that house again,’ she gasped. ‘They are mad.’
‘I did warn you that the girl is disturbed.’
‘No wonder, with a father like that.’
‘He’s just old fashioned,’ Pheely said cheerfully, market traders still calling out for custom in the background. ‘Do you think Dilly would prefer treacle tart or lemon meringue pie for pudding? There’s a stall here that does the most amazing cakes.’
‘Shouldn’t you be on the bus?’ Ellen looked at her watch, wondering how on earth Pheely could still be grocery shopping.
‘Damn! I knew I shouldn’t have popped into the solicitors after I bought the fish.’
‘Solicitors?’
‘I was making my will abundantly clear.’ Pheely giggled mellifluously. ‘I’ll have to catch the next bus. Could you possibly –’
‘Godspell has gone – er – somewhere with her mother,’ Ellen fluffed hastily. ‘You have loads of time.’
‘Goodie. Oh, I’ll get both puddings. And I have time to buy vodka. Tonight is going to be so special!’
Pheely’s A-level signature di
sh didn’t quite work out. Dilly had already agreed to go clubbing with her schoolmates to celebrate the end of an era, leaving her mother glaring furiously into the dull eyes of the salmon and murderously lowering her vodka bottle’s level below the A for Absolut. The following morning Dilly finally poled up at the same time as Godspell Gates. The former crashed into bed to sleep like the dead; the latter perched on a chair to pose for her sculptor, looking like the living dead.
To her consternation, Pheely found herself too busy with Godspell’s bust to spare her daughter much time over the coming days, and Dilly got increasingly bored, seeking entertainment by venturing across the road to see what Ellen was up to.
‘Bloody Ely came over the morning after I got back,’ she complained, taking Ellen’s laptop into the garden to play with it. ‘I couldn’t possibly have a lie-in with the racket he and Mum made, arguing about that bloody bust. He says she’s not pulling her finger out, and she started yelling that his fucking daughter was the one to blame. When I charged in to tell them to lay off, you should have seen their faces! Adults are so funny. Then Ely did his big, formal churchwarden act, asking after my exams and my “future plans”. I told him I wanted to train to be a vicar just to wind him up – he’s completely anti female clergy. Mum got terrible giggles. I wish she didn’t have to do this bloody sculpture. I wanted this summer to be special.’
‘There’ll be lots of time after the garden party.’
‘I suppose so.’ Dilly lay back to sunbathe. ‘But I might be in traction from the Devil’s Marsh Cup by then. Spurs says Otto’s seriously fast.’
Ellen picked up the discarded laptop and closed it. ‘You’ve seen him, then?’
‘Yes, I take him a bunch of carrots every morning. I haven’t ridden him yet, though.’
‘I meant Spurs.’
‘So did I.’ Dilly snorted, getting the giggles as she rolled on to her belly and looked up at the glossy new for-sale sign. ‘How’s it going? Please tell me Jamie Oliver is going to buy it after a messy divorce.’
