by Agatha Frost
Julia and Alfie looked at each other, and then at Sandra. She continued to trace her finger in the water, but they kept quiet and waited for her to speak.
“That was the night I stopped drinking,” Sandra said with a bitter laugh. “The night of the 2008 spring fête. I never thought I was an alcoholic until that night, but when I woke up in the morning and saw the bullet marks, I knew I had to stop.”
Sandra stood up and walked into the dark sitting room. Julia picked up the candle and followed her into the messy room, which was so cluttered with junk, it looked like it had been abandoned. Sandra tripped over several bags before reaching a framed picture on the wall. She looked at it for a moment before reaching out as though to take it down. The heavy looking picture came free of its hook, but it slid down the wall and landed on the floor with a crack. Sandra stumbled backwards, but Julia caught her. She held the candle up to the wall, and to her surprise, there were two bullets embedded in the plaster.
“I made a show of myself at the fête,” she said. “I’d been drinking all day. They kicked me out. Keith brought me home, but I just carried on drinking. It was all I knew. I started after the accident as a way to cope, and then it became a way of life. I’d tried to stop, but nothing before that night seemed to shake me enough.”
“The accident?” Julia asked as she stared at the metal bullets in the wall. “Is that when you lost your arm?”
“I lost more than my arm,” Sandra said, resting her hand on her stomach. “I was twenty-six when I met Keith. He was a handsome soldier, and I was an illiterate farm girl. I was naïve, but we loved each other. We still do. I grew up around men who treated me awful, and he was the first one to treat me nice. I never thought I’d be that girl who got married, but I snuck out to the village hall because I’d heard there was a dance. The second I walked in, Keith’s eyes went to me. I was prettier back then, not that I saw it. You never know what you’ve got until it’s gone.” Sandra paused and glanced down at her missing right arm. “I’d never had a woman treat me bad, so I liked Mabel even though she was horrible to me. I thought that was her way. Keith said she’d warm to me, but she never did. She used to mock me for not being able to read or write. We got married, and then she started demanding grandchildren. We wanted to start trying anyway, but it wasn’t easy with Keith being in the army. He was called away to fight in the Falkland’s War in 1982. The war only lasted ten weeks, but it killed over two hundred of our men. Keith came home, but sometimes I wish he hadn’t, just so I didn’t have to see his face when he saw what had happened to me.”
Sandra paused and looked at the bullet holes as more tears streamed down her face.
“When Keith was away, Mabel took over everything,” Sandra continued. “She said she was going to teach me to read. It wasn’t because she wanted to help me, it was because she was embarrassed that her son had married someone like me. Keith never liked her, but Mabel cared about what people thought too much. One morning I was in my garden working on my flowerbeds when Mabel drove up. Oh, I was so good at gardening. I might not have been able to read or write, but I was a good homemaker, and I was proud of that. This place used to look like something out of a fairy-tale.”
Sandra walked around the mess in the middle of the room to a side unit. She picked up a framed picture and passed it to Julia. Even through the layer of dust and with the candlelight, Julia could tell it was a picture of the outside of the cottage she was in, but instead of looking rundown, it looked perfect and pristine. Sandra and Keith were standing in front of the gate, hugging each other and smiling at the camera. Julia noticed that Sandra had both arms in the picture.
“Mabel used to drive this old rickety Morris car from the 1940s,” Sandra said as she took the photograph back from Julia. “Keith always used to say it was a death trap, but Mabel never listened. Peter paid a lot of money for it when it was new, but by 1982, it was ready for the scrapheap. She called from her car for me to get in because she was taking me to the library for a lesson. I used to dread them. She would turn up unannounced and drag me away from what I was doing, and then she’d make me sit with a huge Shakespeare book in the library, and she’d read it over my shoulder. None of it sunk in. I think she thought I wasn’t trying, but I just didn’t understand it. We didn’t make it to the library that day. We were driving down the lane, and she was having a go at me for having mud on my knees. I was trying to tell her it was from gardening, but she just kept going on. She kept saying ‘what will people think?’, but I didn’t care. I kept to myself in my little cottage. I started crying, and she just got angrier and angrier. She was more bothered about the dirt on my clothes than focussing on the road. We got to the junction at the bottom of the lane, and a milk float smashed into my side of the car. It was like a tin can. It didn’t have any protection, or even seatbelts. We smashed through the wall at the side of the road, and we just rolled and rolled. I remember thinking ‘this is never going to end’, and that was the last thing I remembered before I woke up in hospital. I didn’t even notice I was missing an arm until the nurse mentioned it. I could live with that, but when she told me the metal door had ripped open and stabbed me in the stomach, I would rather have died. I always wanted children so desperately. I made a pact with Keith that we would start a family when he got back, but it was too late. Mabel only broke her leg. She didn’t even apologise to me. She just acted like it was ‘one of those things’ and that I was lucky to be alive. She didn’t bother with me much after that. Keith got back, and we tried to go on as normal. When Donna had her girls, it was a glimmer of light in my life. Donna wasn’t so bad then. She was play-acting at being the perfect wife and mother, but Keith always said it was an act. It’s like she knew she wasn’t a good person and really wanted to be better, but she showed her true colours when she hatched that plan to leave. Kylie was always staying with us at the weekends. She loved hearing about Keith’s army stories when she was little. He could talk to her for hours about it, and she’d never get bored. You’d think they were father and daughter, and that made me happy. I couldn’t give Keith children, but we had a taste of it with Kylie. When she asked to stay with us instead of moving, we didn’t think twice about it.”
Sandra drifted back into the dining area and sat down. The memories seemed to have sobered her up a little, but they also seemed to have drained her energy stores. They followed her and Julia placed the candle back on the table.
“I always hid my drinking from Kylie,” Sandra said with a heavy sigh, her hand shaking as she brushed a piece of hair from her face. “She must have known, but she never mentioned it. I was what they called a ‘functioning alcoholic’. I never showed it, but it was my way to cope with what happened to me. I’d had so much taken away, and yet I just had to keep going, and that’s hard. People expected me to accept it because I couldn’t change it, but you never accept something like that.”
“The day of the fête?” Julia pushed, wanting Sandra to refocus her thoughts. “What happened that night to make you stop drinking?”
“Oh, yes,” Sandra said, nodding as she thought back again. “Keith brought me back here, and I remember sitting right where we are now. I usually drank enough to numb the pain, but I was so ashamed of myself, I drank everything we had. I woke up in the morning, face down on the couch. The first things I saw were those bullets in the wall. I knew I must have found the gun and done something stupid. I didn’t know what I’d done, so I just hid it and tried to forget about it. I vowed not to touch a single drink again because I was scared of what I was capable of. If I’d fired a gun at a wall, what else would I do? Shoot Kylie? Shoot Keith? I couldn’t cope with that, so I stopped cold turkey. It was the hardest thing I’d ever done, but I didn’t touch anything until the police told us about Mabel being shot. They gathered us together the day you two came for dinner. They’d heard the newspaper had found out, so they wanted to tell us before it went to print. I think that’s why Keith and Kylie were so on edge and stormed off. I should have cance
lled the dinner, but I wanted to carry on as normal. It didn’t take me long to connect the dots between the night of the fête and Mabel’s murder. I knew I must have done it, so I dug out the gun. I’d wrapped it in a plastic bag and hid it in the toilet cistern, and it was still there ten years later. That’s when the drinking started again. Just like that, I ran back to my old coping mechanism. I convinced myself it was just to get through the dinner, but I couldn’t stop.”
Julia felt sorry for Sandra, and not just because she had fallen back into alcoholism, but because she had convinced herself she had killed Mabel without looking at the alternative.
“Where did you bury Mabel?” Julia asked. “In the garden?”
“What?”
“Mabel was buried for a short period of time before making her way to the library ceiling,” Julia said. “Did the police not tell you that part? It was in the newspaper article, but you couldn’t read that.”
“Oh,” Sandra mumbled, biting her lip. “I don’t know.”
“But you stopped drinking, didn’t you?” Julia reminded her. “If you’d buried Mabel, dug her up, and stuffed her in the library ceiling, you’d remember? Did you just assume you’d somehow got Mabel to the library on your own even though you were so drunk you couldn’t remember a thing? What I think happened is you blacked out after the fête and you didn’t do any of those things. I think you’d worried yourself into such a state that you’ve drunk so much you aren’t letting your brain think logically.”
Sandra appeared to consider Julia’s words, but a creak in the floorboards above made them all look up.
“Is someone here?” Julia asked quietly.
“Not that I know of,” Sandra whispered back with a gulp. “Unless Kylie’s home.”
“She’s on a double shift,” Alfie said as he slowly rose to his feet. “I’ll check it out.”
Instead of trying to convince him to stay where he was, Julia picked up the candle and followed him along the hallway and up the creaky staircase. They reached the landing. All the room doors were open apart from one. A sign with ‘Kylie’ written on it in faded glitter was stuck on the closed door. Alfie reached out and pushed open the door, and Julia was surprised by two things. The first was how spotlessly clean and neat Kylie’s room was, and the other was that Donna was sat on the edge of the bed, a cigarette hanging from her lips.
“Busted,” Donna said as she puffed smoke out the corner of her mouth. “But I’ve had my ear to the ground, and it seems old Sandra has more explaining to do than I have.”
“I think it’s time we got the Crump clan together,” Julia said, walking forward to grab Donna’s arm. “Fancy a little trip to the pub, Donna?”
“Get your hands off me, Julia!” she snapped back. “Or do you want me to stick you under the stairs again like the good old days? You’ve always been a stuck-up little swat.”
Donna blew her cigarette smoke in Julia’s face, but Julia was no longer scared of her.
“I’ve already taken down a publicist beast this week,” Julia said as she dragged Donna to the landing. “You’ll be a piece of cake. Alfie, text Kylie and tell her to meet you at the pub after she’s finished with her shift. I think she’ll want to know about her mother snooping around her room.”
“What if she doesn’t want to come?”
“Say ‘we need to talk’,” Julia said as she dragged Donna to the top of the stairs. “I don’t know a woman who wouldn’t show up for that line. C’mon, Donna, time to face the music.”
14
With them unable to all fit on Alfie’s motorbike, they rode to The Plough in a taxi. Alfie sat in the front, while Julia sat in the back between Donna and Sandra. Sandra cried silently for the whole journey, while Donna hurled empty threats. Julia suspected the only reason both women even got into the taxi was out of sheer curiosity to see what Julia knew.
By the time they arrived at the pub, it was close to kicking out time, which was perfect timing for what Julia needed. After paying for the taxi, the four of them walked towards the entrance. Donna pulled a cigarette from her bra, but Julia yanked it out of her mouth and tossed it into the bushes.
“You’re pushing your luck,” Donna said as she walked into the pub, her wrinkled eyes staring down at Julia from under her heavy, wiry fringe. “That’s your last warning, you hear me?”
“Loud and clear,” Julia said as she helped Sandra up the step. “Alfie, wait out here for Kylie and bring her in when she gets here.”
Julia followed Donna into the pub. Just as expected, Keith was sitting in the corner with a group of similarly aged men, one of them Julia’s father. Shannon was alone behind the bar, her face turning white when she noticed her mother.
“Sandra?” Keith called out, slurring his words. “What are you doing here?”
“Oops,” Brian, Julia’s father, exclaimed, also slurring his words. “I think we should go, boys. The missus is here. I think we’ve got him in trouble.”
Brian kissed Julia on the cheek as he passed, his breath as strong as Sandra’s. She wished him goodnight, but she was glad when he walked out of the pub without asking any questions. The rest of the men followed, leaving Keith alone. He drained his pint, his eyes trained on Julia.
“What’s going on?” Shannon called out. “If you’ve come for a lock-in, I’m not risking my job for you.”
“Ask the goody two shoes here,” Donna said, jerking her head at Julia as she pulled down her leather skirt, which had ridden up from the taxi ride. “She’s dragged us here without so much as an explanation.”
Shannon looked nervously at Julia and then at the clock on the wall.
“Well, we’re closing in five minutes,” Shannon said. “So, whatever it is, make it quick.”
Julia heard another car pull up outside and was glad when Alfie walked in with Kylie. Kylie let out a yawn, her make-up looking worse for wear after a long day at the nursing home.
“What do you want to talk about?” Kylie asked, looking around the pub and noticing it only contained her family members. “Has something happened to Grandad?”
“Not that I’ve heard,” Shannon said, shrugging at her sister. “What is it, Julia? It’s been a long day.”
“And it’s almost over,” Julia said, stepping around Alfie and Kylie to reach up and slip the lock into place. “I think you should all sit down.”
“Is there any chance of a pint for your old mother?” Donna asked, leaning across the bar. “I’m parched.”
Shannon reluctantly filled a glass to the brim for her mother. She slammed the glass on the bar, not caring that it spilt all over Donna’s hands.
Kylie and Alfie sat on the opposite side of the bar, and Sandra sat next to her husband, not that she seemed able to bring herself to look at him.
“What’s going on here?” Keith called out. “You can’t just lock us in here without an explanation.”
“Then I guess I should start at the beginning,” Julia said, standing in front of the door so that she could see everyone. “Ten years ago, Mabel Crump, a mother and grandmother to many of you in this room, was murdered. Until tonight, I didn’t know who did it, or where the murder took place, but Sandra was kind enough to show me the bullet holes from the shots that missed.”
“Bullet holes?” Donna scoffed. “You’ve lost the plot, but at least I’ve got a free pint out of it.”
“I wouldn’t be so smug because if I were to believe your daughter, Shannon, you’d be my prime suspect for your mother’s murder,” Julia said, revelling in watching Donna spit her mouthful of beer back into her pint. “As it happens, Sandra was kind enough to tell me a different version of Shannon’s story this afternoon, not that I realised it at the time, but seeds need planting before they can grow. Where would you get a gun from, Donna?”
“A gun?” Donna cried as she wiped her lips with the back of her hand. “Hell if I should know! Do I look like someone who carries a gun?”
“Not particularly,” Julia said, looking at Donna
’s shiny skirt and leopard print. “But at the same time, the story Shannon told was believable enough, but I suspect that’s because she borrowed the majority of it from reality. All the best lies are grounded in truth.”
Shannon appeared frozen behind the bar, her eyes on Julia. Donna looked between them, her confusion obvious.
“What did you tell her?” Donna snapped. “Have you been telling lies about me?”
“She told me that when you moved to Wales, you met a man who collected weapons, and she was very specific about him having a gun.”
“Are you talking about One Eye Wilson?” Donna choked out, barely able to contain her laughter. “He collected BB guns! They fired rubber balls, not bullets.”
“Grounded in truth,” Julia reminded them as she began to pace on the spot, while still maintaining her position in front of the exit. “That’s why I believed it. So many elements of her story were true, but now I know she was telling me what I wanted to hear. She made up a version of the day of the spring fête where you had a gun and you vanished for hours, and she theorised that you’d come back to Peridale to meet your mother about the money you borrowed off her.”
“I didn’t borrow a penny from my mother!” Donna cried. “I couldn’t stand the old codger!”
“I believe you,” Julia said. “But you did borrow Keith’s army savings, and I doubt he ever saw a penny of that back. I believe you truly did come back to Peridale to get your things, and it was just a coincidence that Mabel had also come back to the village on that very day. Sandra told me you visited her on the day of the fête to ask for money, but I suppose you were just chancing your luck like you were tonight when you were hiding in Kylie’s room.”
“She was doing what?” Kylie cried.
“I’m desperate!” Donna shouted, sloshing her pint down her front. “I don’t have a penny to my name, and Julia just threw my last ciggie in the bushes. I thought you had to have money. Look at you! All that’s expensive, and you’re always working.”
