In Her Shadow

by Mark Edwards

  ‘So that,’ Jessica said, ‘is why I’m looking into Izzy’s death.’

  He pulled his dressing gown tighter around his body. ‘Are you serious about all this?’

  ‘Yes, I—’

  ‘But Jessica, it’s mad! Ghosts and spirits and seances . . . I can’t believe that you could think any of this is real.’

  ‘I know, that’s what I thought at first, that there had to be a rational explanation. But there’s so much that seems impossible. The song, the necklace . . . Things Olivia knows . . .’

  Darpak let out a short, harsh laugh. ‘I’m sorry. It’s not funny. But Jess, ghosts don’t exist. People do not get trapped in this realm, unable to move on to the afterlife until justice is done. There has to be a logical explanation for everything. Maybe . . . I don’t know . . . maybe you gave Olivia the necklace back but forgot. Maybe she heard you humming that song. I mean, I sing to myself all the time without realising it. You must have told her about the name of your old car but forgotten. Maybe your mum told her. Olivia’s behavioural issues . . . well, there could be multiple reasons for them.’

  ‘So you think I’m crazy.’

  ‘No.’ His face said otherwise. ‘But you’ve clearly been under a lot of stress.’

  ‘But this photo. It shows that someone was watching Izzy. And she’s been trying to reach out to me, to tell me . . .’

  ‘No, Jess. It doesn’t prove anything. The person in the photo could be a fan of modern architecture, for all we know, taking a picture of this house. And this ghost thing – it’s crazy and, forgive me, but it’s stupid. You need to forget the whole thing, Jess, and for God’s sake don’t tell anyone else.’

  ‘But . . .’

  ‘But what, Jess?’

  ‘It’s not the first time it’s happened in my life, is it?’

  ‘Oh, Jess,’ Darpak said. ‘Are you talking about Larry? Your poltergeist?’ He tried to suppress a smile but failed, and anger flared hot in Jessica’s belly.

  ‘Why are you grinning like that? It’s not funny.’

  ‘I know. I’m sorry. But . . . Izzy told me something.’

  ‘What?’

  His face twisted with regret. ‘I can’t tell you. She made me promise never to say anything to you or your mum.’

  ‘Darpak!’ She stood up. ‘You can’t do that. Come on, you broke your vows to her while she was still alive.’

  He winced. ‘That’s a low blow.’

  ‘Not as low as what you did to her. Now, come on, tell me.’

  He exhaled. ‘Okay. But you’re not going to like it.’

  Chapter 32

  ‘It was a hoax, Jess. Larry wasn’t real. Izzy did it all.’

  Jessica opened her mouth but nothing came out.

  ‘The broken picture frame. The cups that had fallen from their place on the shelf. All the objects that apparently moved on their own – Izzy did it, either during the night or when you and your mum were out of the room. She told me that on a couple of occasions she positioned things on the edge of the mantelpiece so they would fall down when you and your mum were watching.’

  Jessica closed her eyes for a moment, picturing it. The Toby jug Mum loved, suddenly dropping from its spot above the fireplace, smashing to pieces in front of them.

  ‘All the noises you heard in the night, the banging and scraping sounds. That was Izzy. She didn’t explain exactly how she did it, but the way she said it . . . I believed her. She made a tape recording too, she said, which she played down the phone. It was her putting on a voice – she said she managed to distort it so it sounded evil.’

  Jessica would never forget Mum’s face the day she’d answered the phone and a high-pitched, ‘demonic’ voice had spoken to her, telling her to get out of the house, swearing and cursing and making threats. Mum had begged the demon to stop.

  ‘I will never leave you, and you three ugly bitches will never stop me,’ the voice had said, before unleashing a volley of words that Mum wouldn’t repeat.

  ‘She did it from the phone box on the corner of your street,’ Darpak said.

  Jessica sank on to the sofa, remembering. Izzy had run into the room shortly after the call ended, asking what was wrong, allowing Mum to sob against her shoulder. Jessica had been crying too, convinced they really had been phoned by a demon.

  ‘Izzy knew old songs,’ Jessica said, her voice shaky. ‘She told us she’d heard them at night – someone singing them to her.’

  ‘Yes. She mentioned that too. She’d just gone through your mum’s old vinyl collection.’ He shrugged. ‘Nothing very mysterious there.’ Darpak sat down beside her, his expression sympathetic, but tinged with guilt. ‘I didn’t think you ever really believed in it. Even when Izzy told me and made me promise to keep quiet, I thought she was being silly, that you must have suspected it was her.’

  ‘No. I never did. I mean, of course I tried to come up with a rational explanation. But I was never sure. I was torn. And Izzy . . . I never thought it was her, even later, when she insisted Larry hadn’t been real. I guess . . . I guess I never thought she would lie to me like that.’

  Jessica had been ten years old. She had been easy to fool, even though she shared a room with Izzy. She wondered if Izzy had ever considered letting her in on it. They had spent so much time together, been so close. But she must have thought Jessica would tell Mum – and, to be fair, she probably would have.

  And Mum – she had still been recovering from her husband walking out. She was vulnerable, credulous, and she had always been superstitious anyway. She kept a lucky rabbit’s foot; wouldn’t walk under ladders; believed in the afterlife.

  Jessica narrowed her eyes at Darpak. Could he be lying about this? She studied his face, but though she wanted to believe he was making it up, she couldn’t.

  Maybe, deep down, she had always known.

  ‘Why did she do it?’ Jessica asked. ‘Did she tell you?’

  ‘Yes. I mean, she was quite drunk when she told me, but she was embarrassed about it. She said it started as a game. She’d seen that old film, Poltergeist, at a friend’s house and got the idea from that, plus she said something about a kids’ book you both used to read. It all happened just after your dad left, didn’t it?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  Dad walking out had hit Izzy harder than Jessica, who had always been more of a mummy’s girl. To her, their dad was almost a stranger, a man who got up early to go to work and came home after dark. On Saturday he went to football and he spent Sunday in the pub with his mates. When he left, it barely made a difference to Jessica. Izzy, though, had been distraught. Jessica would hear her crying from the top bunk. A memory came hurtling out of the past: Izzy shouting at Mum, blaming her for driving him away.

  ‘I’m going to run away and live with him!’ Izzy had yelled.

  ‘Go on, then,’ Mum had snapped back. ‘See if he and that tart want you in their love nest. He never loved you, Izzy. He never loved any of us.’

  That had led to slamming doors, hurled objects, sobbing. It hit Jessica in the chest now, a memory so raw it could have happened yesterday.

  ‘Did she think he’d come back if he heard our house was haunted?’ she asked Darpak.

  ‘I don’t know. I don’t think Izzy knew herself. The way she told it, it started out as a “laugh”. She thought it would be funny. But when she saw the reaction it provoked, she kept going. Maybe she wanted to punish your mum, initially at least. And then your mum got the newspaper and those investigators involved and it was too late to confess, even when she was bullied at school over it. And then, when the social workers turned up to check your welfare, she realised she needed to stop. It had all got out of hand. But she was too scared to confess. She said she hoped everyone would just forget about it.’

  Jessica rubbed at her eyes, where tears were threatening to form. She should have been angry at her sister, but she couldn’t find it inside herself. All she could see was a desperate little girl who felt abandoned by her dad.
/>   ‘She was worried you’d never forgive her if you found out,’ Darpak said.

  ‘Oh, Izzy. Of course I would have forgiven her. I’d have forgiven her almost anything.’ She raised her eyes to the ceiling, sighing deeply. ‘I wish you had told me this before. Because if I’d known . . .’

  If she’d known, she wouldn’t have been so open to believing in Isabel’s ghost.

  Jessica drove across town, fizzing with an energy she hadn’t felt in weeks. At the traffic lights she thumped the steering wheel with both hands.

  ‘You fucking stupid idiot,’ she said, cursing herself. ‘You grade-A idiot.’

  For most of her life, since leaving school, she had tried to convince herself there must be a logical explanation for everything that had happened at home. But she had never fully let go of the belief that ghosts might exist, and when Olivia first started doing strange things she had allowed doubt to creep in, to creep in so far she had lost the ability to think rationally. Everything that had happened over the last week seemed like madness. Allowing Simon Parker into her home. Conducting that seance. Yes, madness.

  None of it would have happened if she’d known Izzy had hoaxed them; if the little girl inside her hadn’t still clung to the belief that Larry had been real.

  But now she could see clearly. At last.

  ‘A hoax,’ she said to herself. ‘Another hoax.’

  Somebody had set it all up. Somebody had been feeding information to Olivia. It was the only explanation, and she would have seen it earlier if she hadn’t been so desperate to believe.

  And the person who did it must have known about her childhood ‘poltergeist’. They must have known that, because of her experiences, she was susceptible to that kind of thing; that it wouldn’t be too hard to make her believe her house was, once again, being visited by a spirit. Somebody had exploited her weakness.

  Somebody who had never believed Izzy had killed herself or died because of an accident. Somebody who knew that Izzy had a cat called Oscar and a car called Fred. Somebody who knew Olivia.

  There was only one person it could be.

  She hammered on the door, heard a voice from inside saying, ‘All right, keep your hair on.’

  Mum opened the door. ‘Jessica! Is everything—’

  Jessica stormed past her, checking the living room then the kitchen. ‘Are you on your own?’

  Mum followed her into the kitchen. The room smelled of freshly baked cakes and there was a tray of cooling buns on the side. Jessica’s stomach growled. She hadn’t eaten anything yet today. She was thrown back in time to when she was a kid and Mum would make cakes, and she and Izzy would fight over who could scrape the mixture out of the bowl. The memory tempered her anger, which frustrated her. She wanted to feel it, to use it.

  ‘Yes, Pete’s gone Christmas shopping. What’s going on, Jess?’

  ‘I know what you did,’ she said.

  ‘Come again?’

  ‘There’s no point denying it. I know.’

  Jessica had worked it all through in her head on the way over. Mum had never believed the police had done a thorough job investigating Izzy’s death. She had believed for years that Darpak had something to do with it, which was why she always refused to go to his house or have anything to do with him. So she had set about trying to make Jessica believe it too. She knew Mum found it hugely frustrating that Jessica wouldn’t listen to her, so she must have decided to use Olivia to deliver a message.

  Why had she waited until now? Perhaps it was that magazine story about the woman whose husband killed her that had set Mum off, awakened her need to do something. Mum was a firm believer in the afterlife. Perhaps she wanted to think she’d be able to look Izzy in the eye when they were reunited in heaven, tell her she’d done everything she could to persuade the world that Izzy had been murdered.

  ‘I have no idea what you’re talking about,’ Mum said. ‘Do you want a cup of tea?’

  ‘No, I don’t want a fucking cup of tea!’

  Mum’s mouth opened in shock. Jessica never swore in front of her. She had an automatic filter that meant the strongest words she ever used in her mother’s company were bloody and damn.

  Mum recovered quickly. She folded her arms. ‘Do you want to tell me what’s got you all riled up? What I’m supposed to have done?’

  ‘You know. Come on, I want to hear you say it. To admit it. All the ideas you planted in Olivia’s head . . . Do you know what you’ve done? How disturbed she’s been? She bit a child at school. She’s been having nightmares, waking up in the night and throwing things around. She got a pair of scissors and cut her teddies’ eyes out. She could be messed up forever. How could you do that to your own granddaughter?’

  Mum was flustered, open-mouthed. Finally she said, ‘Jess, I still don’t know what you’re talking about.’

  Jessica didn’t hear her. ‘I should have seen it before. You must have taught Olivia that Nirvana song. You know how to use YouTube – it’s probably on there. Everything else Livvy knew – it all came from you. The stuff about how she had a secret. You wanted me to think Izzy was visiting her, telling her things, all this stuff that Livvy couldn’t possibly know. And all along you were planting the seed in her head, the whole point of what you were doing.’

  Mum was silent, watching Jessica from across the kitchen.

  ‘It didn’t work,’ Jessica said, ‘but you wanted Olivia to tell me that Darpak killed Isabel. Because that’s what you’ve always believed, isn’t it? That he pushed her.’

  ‘That is what I believe, yes. That bastard should swing for what he did to our Izzy.’

  ‘But he had an alibi, Mum! We’ve always known that.’

  ‘Like I’ve always said, he could have got his mates to lie—’

  Jessica cut her off. ‘I don’t get it. Why are you so convinced it was Darpak?’

  ‘Because that bastard cheated on her.’

  Jessica reeled. ‘You knew about that? How?’

  ‘Izzy told me. I went round there, found her drunk in the middle of the day and forced her to tell me what the hell was going on. I wanted to stay, to give him a piece of my mind, but Izzy insisted it was over, that it was a one-off. I tried to set her straight. Once a cheater, always a cheater.’

  ‘Like Dad?’

  ‘Exactly. I told her she should leave him. Get a good lawyer and clean the bastard out. But Izzy was never as strong as you and me, despite appearances. Two weeks after that, she was dead.’

  ‘But why didn’t you tell me?’

  ‘She made me promise not to, and I don’t break promises I make to my daughters.’ Mum pulled out a kitchen chair and almost fell into it. ‘I promise you this, Jess. I haven’t done anything. None of the things you’re accusing me of, anyway. I hadn’t heard that bloody song for years until Olivia started singing it. It was Izzy who taught it to her. Izzy’s back – you know that. Simon said . . .’

  ‘Simon’s full of shit. He recorded all sorts of activity when we were kids, and guess what? Izzy did it. She hoaxed us.’

  Mum stared at her.

  ‘Izzy hoaxed us, Mum. She told Darpak.’

  ‘What?’ Mum looked like she’d been punched. ‘No, that can’t be right. You can’t trust anything he says.’

  ‘Mum, listen to me. Izzy tricked us. Uncle Larry didn’t come back and haunt us, and Izzy is not haunting Olivia now. There’s no such thing as spirits or poltergeists or any of that. Maybe you knew all along, but you’re still trying to hide behind those lies, still trying to make me believe in your bullshit. You made me believe Olivia was communicating with Izzy. And your plan didn’t even work. Olivia didn’t tell me Darpak killed Izzy. She said Will did it!’

  ‘Will? That’s ridiculous.’

  ‘I know.’ She felt her cheeks colour and hoped Mum didn’t notice.

  For a few seconds all Jessica could hear was the rush of blood in her ears. That and the slow ticking of the kitchen clock.

  ‘I swear I had nothing to do with this,’ Mu
m said. ‘I swear on Olivia’s life.’

  ‘Take that back.’

  ‘No. I won’t. Do you want me to fetch a Bible and swear on that too? I promise you, it wasn’t me. Izzy really is back.’

  Jessica let out a howl of rage. ‘Mum! Stop! Let me spell it out to you. Ghosts. Don’t. Exist. Izzy is not back.’

  She felt herself deflate; all the anger rushing out of her. Mum would never swear on Olivia’s life if she was lying. She was too superstitious.

  The kitchen clock ticked.

  ‘If Izzy isn’t back, how do you explain all the stuff Olivia knows?’ Mum asked after a minute.

  Jessica raked her hands through her hair, unable to answer. She had a headache now, a vein throbbing in her temple. She tried to pull her thoughts together, everything she’d learned that day. She knew that someone had been feeding information to Olivia.

  ‘If it wasn’t you,’ Jessica said to her mother, ‘who the hell was it?’

  Chapter 33

  January 2013

  ‘What? You went back to see that creep?’ Isabel was astounded. If they had not been in Beckenham’s swankiest wine bar, surrounded by potential clients, she might have shouted at Nina, asked her what the hell she was thinking.

  ‘Yes,’ Nina replied evenly. ‘I went back to see Gavin.’

  ‘So, what? He called you?’

  ‘Yeah.’ Nina couldn’t suppress a grin. ‘He asked for my number. That’s what we were talking about when you burst in and told me we had to leave.’

  Isabel took a big gulp of wine. She had already drunk two-thirds of a bottle and was beginning to feel the buzz.

  ‘Let me guess,’ she said. ‘Actually, I don’t need to guess. I heard him say you should be a model. My God, Nina, it’s the oldest line in the book.’

  ‘I know. Believe me, I know what men are like.’

  ‘Do you?’ Isabel interrupted. ‘You’re only twenty-one. You don’t really—’

  But the look on Nina’s face told Isabel to ease off. She was well and truly pissing on her parade.

  ‘He called me three times,’ Nina said. ‘I told him I wasn’t interested, because I was sure it was just a line. But then his assistant Martin called and said Gavin was serious. He really thought I had something. He said Gavin wasn’t going to beg and would give up soon if I didn’t go along to talk to them.’