Lost Summer

by Stuart Harrison

But there had to be more to it than that, Adam knew. ‘You saw something else that night. And whatever it was you kept quiet about it, but you didn’t feel good about doing that, did you? That’s why you started drinking. It was something you couldn’t even tell Angela about, wasn’t it?’

  He saw that he was right.

  ‘It was Nick wasn’t it?’ he guessed. ‘You saw Nick.’ There was a kind of symmetry to it all, Adam thought. A grim sense of poetic justice.

  David nodded heavily. ‘I saw his car heading back towards town.’

  ‘And after you discovered the accident you suspected he’d killed them?’

  ‘No!’ David said quickly.

  ‘But you knew he stood to make a lot of money from the development by selling the cottages. You must have suspected something. Why else the guilt?’

  David shook his head and a trace of anger returned to his voice. ‘You never understood Nick. You always thought the worst of him, but he wasn’t like that. Alright, I admit I thought something had happened. An accident. I don’t know. The boy who was driving was drunk, remember.’

  And maybe, Adam acknowledged, as he had done when Meg had vanished, it wasn’t so hard to understand that David would believe, or would want to believe, that there was an innocent explanation. Or at least one less damning. Had David thought this was something else that had gotten out of hand, like the attack on the camp, only more so? Maybe David had tried to convince himself that Nick had just tried to scare them, or maybe he was trying to stop them. He hadn’t meant to run them off the road. But that wasn’t what had happened, as even David could now see. If it had been an accident, how come Jane Hanson had ended up buried a few feet away from where they stood?

  ‘Ben wasn’t drunk,’ Adam said. Just as his sister had maintained, only he hadn’t listened properly. Something else he’d put aside, chosen to ignore even though it should have bothered him more. ‘And he wasn’t driving. He didn’t know how. Jane was driving.’

  Adam explained what he thought had really happened that night. ‘Jane found out that Councillor Hunt had been blackmailed to vote for the development.’ Pieces clicked together in David’s eyes. ‘You must have wondered about that? My guess is that some time back in August Nick told you Hunt would come around, am I right?’

  ‘Something like that.’

  ‘But he didn’t explain why, or how he knew?’

  ‘No. I’d talked to Hunt, tried to persuade him but he wouldn’t listen.’

  ‘You didn’t offer him anything to change his mind?’

  ‘There was no point. He wouldn’t have accepted.’

  ‘But somehow Nick had managed to get him to change his vote,’ Adam said. ‘You must have wondered how he managed that.’

  David didn’t answer. Perhaps he hadn’t wanted to know.

  ‘Jane came back from Durham the night of the accident. She knew Hunt had been blackmailed and she told Ben everything when he called her on her mobile, and she probably told him to phone you and get you to go up to the lodge. One of the others probably picked her up at the station and my guess is that Jane saw somebody following them. Perhaps she recognized him. By the time you got to the lodge they’d left because they were scared. Somebody chased them and ran them off the road.’

  This was always how Adam had envisaged what had happened. He saw now that David had thought much the same thing, believing it was Nick who’d chased them, while Adam had thought it was David. But then he hadn’t known Jane was driving.

  ‘Whoever chased them climbed down to the wreck,’ Adam went on. ‘The two boys who were thrown out were already dead but I think Ben was alive, albeit bleeding badly. Jane probably managed to get out and make a run for it. My guess is that when her body is examined the pathologist will find she was murdered. Somebody caught up with her and either bashed her head in or strangled her and then buried her here along with her belongings from the car. Nobody knew she was even in the area. She didn’t register at the lodge with the others. As far as anybody was aware she had left a week earlier to go back to London. Whoever killed her knew that. He tipped whisky down Ben’s throat and strapped him into the driver’s seat and then left him. By the time you came along he was dead.’

  He thought about the photograph of Jane and the boys he had left in his room. It was another photograph that had made him see how the past and present were linked, and made him realize who the killer really was.

  He recalled a spring day long ago when it had been unseasonably warm. A gypsy girl on horseback, her thin cotton dress stretched against her full breasts.

  ‘You’re wrong, Adam.’

  He came to, realizing what David had said. ‘Wrong about what?’

  ‘You think Nick did this, but you’re wrong. If Nick did it, then who killed him? I suppose you think that was me.’

  ‘Nick?’ he said. ‘Who said anything about Nick?’

  His phone rang, shattering the stunned silence. David’s incomprehension turned first to surprise and then alarm as Adam answered and held it out to him.

  ‘It’s Kate. Angela’s missing.’

  CHAPTER FORTY

  Mary heard the scream and the sound that followed it, of something heavy tumbling down the narrow stairs. And then silence. She lay paralysed by terror. Beyond the door she thought she heard the sound of breathing, a laboured sound that wheezed and rattled.

  It’s coming for you, Mary. This time you won’t get away.

  Shut up! Shut the fuck up! She screamed the words inside her head and clasped her hands over her ears. She couldn’t tear her eyes from the door as it slowly opened and a figure appeared. Please. Please leave me alone. She dared not make a sound. She could taste blood on her lips from clamping her mouth so tightly closed to try to stop her teeth chattering. She was cold, shaking uncontrollably all over.

  The figure came towards the bed and a whimper of fear escaped her. She looked up and saw the Shapeshifter. For a moment she thought it was Nick, but it was trying to fool her. It was changing its shape but something was wrong. It was like it had got stuck halfway between one shape and another.

  Now it’s going to get you, Mary. Now you’re going to be sorry, you little bitch.

  The voice in her head mocked her. It knew there was nothing she could do. She watched in fascinated terror as the Shapeshifter emptied some pills onto the table. They were white, not blue like the ones she was supposed to take. She tried to say something. Please don’t hurt me. Please. But she knew she hadn’t made a sound. She had only formed the words inside her head.

  It won’t do you any good, Mary.

  The voice laughed at her. It liked her to be frightened.

  The Shapeshifter bent down, and lifted her head. She couldn’t take her eyes from its face. It was shiny and smooth on one side. Not real. Like plastic. She wanted to struggle but she couldn’t. She was rigid with fear. It forced her mouth open and shoved a handful of pills inside, then clamped her mouth shut.

  She couldn’t breathe. The pills were bitter-tasting, medicinal.

  Eat them up, Mary. There’s nothing you can do. Just swallow them.

  The voice in her head chortled merrily. It knew she was going to die now. It wanted her to die. She spluttered and choked on something that caught in her throat. Please, she wanted to say. I don’t want to die. Please don’t hurt me. But she couldn’t speak. Tears clouded her eyes. The Shapeshifter held her mouth clamped closed. It was strong. Its eyes were pitiless. She was nothing to it.

  She couldn’t help it, she had to swallow or choke to death.

  CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

  When they reached the road again they left Adam’s Porsche and took David’s Land Rover instead. The snow was still falling heavily and progress was frustratingly slow. Adam drove so that David could call Kate again. He talked to her reassuringly. Though he still looked a mess the crazy light that had been in his eyes earlier had gone.

  ‘Did you call the police? And you spoke to Graham?’ David questioned. ‘Don’t worry, it’ll be alright.�
�� He broke off, listening to Kate, then said to Adam, ‘They’ve just arrived at the house. They can’t see any tracks but Kate thinks Angela followed Mary along the lane away from town.’

  Ahead of them the bridge over the river appeared through the swirling snow and Adam slowed to take the turn. ‘The cottages, tell them to go to the cottages,’ he said, though he knew they would arrive first.

  David relayed the message and then after a few more reassuring words to his daughter hung up the phone. He turned to Adam. ‘You think Mary would have gone back there?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘There’s something else,’ David said. ‘What is it?’

  Adam glanced over at him. ‘I’m worried. I think Mary’s in danger. And if Angela went after her then she is too.’

  ‘What kind of danger? What are you talking about?’

  ‘Think about it. If Nick didn’t kill Jane and those boys, then somebody else did.’

  David was bewildered, and Adam didn’t know how to begin to explain, except by starting at the beginning. ‘This goes back a long time. Back to when you knew Meg Coucesco. You did know her, didn’t you?’

  ‘Meg? What the hell does she have to do with any of this?’

  ‘Everything. She has everything to do with it.’ They had reached the top of Back Lane. The snow was still falling heavily.

  ‘The other day at the lake, you knew it was her they’d found, didn’t you?’ He looked across at David when he didn’t answer. ‘For Christ’s sake!’

  ‘Alright, yes, I thought it was her,’ David admitted. ‘Look, I knew her, I’m not denying it. We used to meet near the sawmill. That doesn’t mean I killed her. I didn’t even know she was dead.’

  Adam didn’t know how that could be true. ‘You met her the day she vanished though. I saw you.’ Though I never told anyone you bastard, he silently added.

  ‘Meg wanted to run away,’ David said heavily. ‘She’d been talking about it ever since I met her. She asked me to help her, so I did. I put her on the bus that day on the road to Alston up on the fells, and I gave her some money. I never saw or heard from her again.’

  ‘Why did she want to run away?’

  ‘Her family treated her badly. She was unhappy I suppose.’

  But there was more to it than that, Adam knew. ‘You’re saying that even after her disappearance was in the papers and on TV you never heard from her? Not even a phone call?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘If what you’re saying is true, why did you and Nick put that bracelet in his dad’s van?’

  David couldn’t hide his shock. ‘You knew?’

  ‘I followed you that day.’ Adam held his gaze. And I didn’t say anything then either, he thought, knowing he didn’t need to say it out loud. ‘You tipped off the police, didn’t you?’

  ‘Yes,’ David admitted.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Meg gave me the bracelet. Sort of a memento. We, Nick and I, thought if we made it look as if his dad knew something about what happened to her, he’d have to leave. Everybody knew he used to go to the camp, and Meg hated him.’

  ‘So, you framed him for a murder he didn’t commit.’

  ‘There wasn’t any murder. We knew the police would have to let him go without proper evidence and there wasn’t any because Meg wasn’t dead. But nobody else knew that. It was just a way of getting rid of him. If he’d stayed around the gypsies would have had their own revenge. He was a bastard, Adam, so don’t waste any sympathy on him.’

  ‘But if all this is true how did you know it was Meg they found in the lake? You said you didn’t know she was dead. And why did you accuse Nick of killing her? That is what you fought about, isn’t it?’

  ‘How did you know?’

  ‘A guess,’ Adam said, though, in fact, he’d only just made the connection.

  ‘A few weeks after it had all died down, after Nick’s dad was killed I saw Nick with a bracelet. We were up at the tarn. It was like the one she had given me. She had four of them, all the same, that she wore on one wrist. When I asked him where he got it he said that she had come back. She wanted more money. It was the day after his dad was questioned by the police. He said he gave her some more money and persuaded her to leave because he was afraid that if she didn’t his dad would find out about what we did.’

  ‘And you believed him?’ Adam said sceptically.

  ‘Yes. Why wouldn’t I?’

  But Adam remembered the day he’d seen David contemplating throwing that same bracelet into the lake. Was it coincidence that it was the very place where she had been found, or had David even then suspected something that he hadn’t been willing to face?

  ‘So, when she was found that was when you attacked Nick in the pub? Because you thought after all these years he had lied?’

  ‘Yes. But after I left the pub that night, I talked to him. He was waiting for me down the road. He told me what happened, he admitted that he’d killed her but he said it was an accident. When she came back he tried to persuade her to leave and she got hysterical. He didn’t mean to hurt her. And afterwards he panicked and dumped her body in the lake.’

  But Adam didn’t believe that was true either. He thought the truth was Nick had killed her because he was afraid of what would happen if his father found out what he had done. But he didn’t believe Meg had come back for money.

  ‘George Hunt was being blackmailed because his wife had a breakdown when she miscarried her baby. She was treated at Carisbrook,’ Adam said. ‘The director there, a man called Webster, swapped the dead child for a baby girl a young woman had given birth to. It was 1985.’

  David looked bewildered.

  ‘It was Meg’s child,’ Adam said.

  He should have seen the resemblance the day that he’d first gone to Hunt’s house. Judith Hunt, aged seventeen, pictured on holiday in Spain with her parents. She looked like her mother. The same dark hair and eyes. It could have been Meg looking back at him from the photograph, but he hadn’t seen it for the same reason he hadn’t realized that Jane couldn’t have gone back to London. He was blind to everything but his own agenda.

  He remembered the day he’d first seen Meg. He’d been struck, as any adolescent boy would be, by the glimpse of her full breasts delineated against the fabric of her dress. He hadn’t realized it but he knew now she must have been heavily pregnant then.

  But there was no time to talk any more. The Land Rover crossed the snow-covered bridge over the river and came around the bend in view of the cottages. They were ominously quiet, though a light was on in one of the upstairs windows.

  CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

  Mary got up from the bed. She spat out the residue of the pills she had swallowed. She remembered hearing a moan from the stairs, and then the Shapeshifter had left her. The rest of the pills lay in a pile on the table. She knew it would be back and then she would be forced to swallow those too.

  She rose unsteadily to her feet and switched on the lamp beside the bed. The bulb cast a dim yellow light, enough to see her reflection in the mirror. She was shocked at her own appearance. Her skin was pale and bluish so that she looked like a corpse. For an instant she had wondered if she was dead. Her feet when she looked at them now were the same colour and she could barely feel them any more.

  Not dead yet, Mary. Not yet.

  She heard a sound from outside the door and she flinched in terror before she realized it was coming from down the stairs.

  Mary went closer to the door. She heard another sound, something muffled. A kind of dragging noise. She thought about the scream she’d heard earlier. Somebody had been hurt, she thought. And frightened. She wondered who it was, and she remembered the woman who had taken her away from here before. She remembered her voice. It had been soft and soothing. Listening to her had made the voice in her head go away. She remembered being in a warm room in a soft bed, being given something to eat. Somebody stroking her brow the way her mother had done when she was child, before she had become ill.

 
; Mary knew that the woman who had helped her was the one who had screamed. Tears sprang to her eyes and ran unchecked down her cheeks.

  You can’t do anything, Mary. Mad Mary. It’ll be your turn next.

  The voice in her head was happy. A crooning, happy voice. It wanted her to die. Her breath came in clouds in front of her and outside the window she could see that it was still snowing. A violent spasm of trembling racked her body. She was so cold. Freezing. Her blood was thickening in her veins, slowing down, her heartbeat thumping like a slow drum beat, getting fainter.

  What are you doing, Mary? Don’t go. Stay here. There’s nothing you can do now.

  Shut up! I’m not listening to you. She went down on her knees and felt for the gun. It was still there and she dragged it out. When she stood up she felt shaky and thought she would fall down. After a moment it passed and she started to move towards the door. She couldn’t stop her teeth chattering now. They rattled like clacking dice in her head, and her hands and arms shook as she shivered.

  When she opened the door it was dark in the passage outside. She paused, listening again, and from below she heard the dragging sound again. She went to the top of the stairs and down the first three steps to the corner, holding the gun in front of her. The dragging sound ceased and she heard laboured breathing, then it began again and she knew the Shapeshifter was somewhere near the kitchen door.

  Go back, Mary. Go back, you little bitch!

  The voice sounded desperate. It wasn’t happy now. Somehow that made her feel better. She reached out for the banisters and felt her way down. She felt light-headed, and halfway had to stop. She was turning to ice, slowly freezing. She could hardly think any more. She thought about the woman’s soothing voice, the touch of her hand on her skin. Perhaps she would take her back there to that warm room and make her safe again.

  She moved along the passage towards the kitchen. She couldn’t feel her feet or even her legs moving. Perhaps she was floating. A breeze was blowing in through the open back door, sending flurries of snowflakes into the house. The nightdress she was wearing fluttered around her body. Beyond the kitchen door the Shapeshifter was bent over, dragging the body of a woman backwards so that her heels made furrows in the snow. The Shapeshifter didn’t see her. When she reached the open door she could hear his breathing. It came in ragged gasps. Like an animal labouring under a heavy load. Suddenly he stopped and straightened. It was dark and snow swirled about him so that Mary couldn’t see him properly. He hadn’t seen her yet. He reached for something that was stuck in the snow. Mary stopped, uncertain what she should do. Perhaps the figure wasn’t a Shapeshifter after all. It seemed like a man. He was looking towards the corner of the cottage as if he was listening to something, and at the same time Mary realized that she had heard something too, like the sound of an engine, but she couldn’t hear it any more.