Scarlet Wakefield 03 - Kiss In The Dark

by Lauren Henderson

  I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe. I’m seeing dots before my eyes and my vision’s blurring. I think I’m going to throw up or pass out or both.

  “Head down,” Taylor says, shoving my head in between my knees and holding me steady, one hand on my head, the other on my shoulders, making sure I don’t fall. “Breathe with me, okay? In … out … slower … in … out …”

  I’ve never felt this dizzy in my life. Thank God I was already close to the ground. If I’d been standing, I’m sure my knees would have buckled under me.

  “Take it easy…. In … out … in … out …”

  Taylor’s voice and clasp are incredibly reassuring. There’s no one I’d rather have with me in a crisis, not even Jase. Taylor has the coolest head on her shoulders of anyone I know. She’s rock steady, one of the rare people who get even more calm and focused in an emergency.

  And I should know. Last year, Taylor and I had to deal with someone trying to kill us both, someone who nearly got away with it.

  Ugh. Dead bodies. All the dead bodies I’ve seen in my short life. Three in the space of a year. What’s wrong with me? I swear, I thought I’d never have to see a corpse ever again, and Mr. Barnes’s was particularly bad. Though my eyes are closed, I can see the color and texture of his skin, grayish, spongy, and bloodless, and another surge of vomit threatens to burst up at the back of my throat. I can taste it, sour and burning and acid.

  Tears form in my eyes and start flowing down my cheeks. It actually feels as if my body’s trying to cleanse me of the unbearable pain and shock I’m feeling.

  I start to sob, quietly, but Taylor hears it and murmurs, “Good, Scarlett … let it out,” rubbing my shoulders with one palm, still holding me steady.

  I’m crying louder now, bawling, really, my face dripping with liquid. And that’s another reason I’d rather have Taylor with me in a crisis than anyone else. We’ve been through so much together already that I couldn’t care less if she sees me like this, snotty, wet, my eyes swollen from crying.

  Eventually, I can’t weep any more. My sobs turn to deep, heaving gulps as I draw in air, and Taylor guides me to sit back, my legs folding in front of me. I grasp my knees, managing to hold myself up, and wipe my face with the sleeve of my sweatshirt, which quickly gets sodden and sloppy with tears and snot.

  “It’s Jase’s dad, isn’t it?” Taylor says from her kneeling position next to me.

  I manage a nod.

  “Oh, shit.”

  I nod again. Taylor gets up, leans over the low balustrade beside her, and scoops up some water in her cupped hands, patting it over my face. It’s cold and refreshing and it helps to calm me down. She goes back for another handful, and this time she dabs it on the back of my neck and my wrists. Weirdly, this helps even more. I hear my breathing slowing, becoming more regular.

  “Scarlett, I’m not going to ask if you’re okay,” Taylor says, her voice softer than I’ve ever heard it. “Because there’s no way you could possibly be okay. But someone needs to go and tell your grandmother so she can call the cops, and you’re in no state to do anything like that. So whenever you’re ready, I’m going to go off and leave you here, just till I can get to your grandmother, and then I’ll come right back. I’m going to close the gate behind me, so I doubt anyone’ll try to come in, but someone should stay here, just to be on the safe side.”

  I draw in a deep gulp of air.

  “It’s okay. You should go,” I say. “I’ll be …”

  She’s right. I can’t say I’m fine.

  “I can wait till you get back,” I finish instead.

  Taylor stands up, staring down at the body.

  “Look at that.” She points to something half concealed beneath Mr. Barnes, under a flap of his open jacket. “You think he came out here for a drink and tripped over?”

  It’s an empty whisky bottle. I don’t know anything about whisky. None of the girls I know drinks anything but vodka, or champagne and white wine. Clear, girlie drinks. Whisky seems really hard-core to me. But as far as I can remember, it’s the same brand I saw Mr. Barnes drinking from last night. The bright yellow label looks very familiar.

  “More than likely,” I say to her, but I have my doubts.

  “You sure you’re okay waiting?” she asks.

  I nod once more.

  Taylor doesn’t ask me again, she just goes, sprinting away as fast as if the hounds of hell are after her. And I turn my head to stare down at Jase’s father’s body, finally feeling ready to survey it.

  It looks as if he tripped and fell and hit his head on the stone balustrade. There’s a long bruise across his face, a horrible dark purple stripe, and when I look at the hand that’s stretched out on the grass, I notice that it’s at a weird angle, as if it got broken when he fell over and tried to catch himself. I lift some branches off the lower part of his body, and see that it looks like there’s blood on his trouser leg, seeped through. Although it’s disgusting, I grit my teeth and hook up the dirty old fabric of the trousers, driven by a need to investigate that I don’t even fully understand.

  There are two long welts about halfway up Mr. Barnes’s calf. The welts bled, because the hairs on his skin are coated in dried blood, matted down, and I wonder if he hit himself on the balustrade, staggering around, before he fell.

  I speculate about how long he’s been lying out here. I can’t see him leaving the cozy warm house last night, the comfort of his saggy armchair and TV, to unlock the gate to the lake and roam around in the dark with a bottle of whisky. It doesn’t make sense.

  So he must have come here—what, this morning? Still drinking? But why didn’t he lock the gate behind him? And has anyone missed him yet?

  An awful thought dawns on me. I’m amazed it didn’t hit me before. Shock is a really strange phenomenon. It can drive all the normal reactions you’d think you’d have straight out of your head for much longer than you’d expect.

  Jase. I’m going to have to tell Jase that his dad is dead.

  And that’s immediately followed by an even worse thought.

  Maybe he’ll actually be grateful.

  “Did you touch the body at all?” the police officer is asking me.

  “Just to see if he was alive,” I say.

  Great, Scarlett. The first thing you say to the police, and it’s a lie. Nice way to start.

  But I don’t think they’d be that keen on the fact that I checked to see where that blood came from on Mr. Barnes’s leg.

  “He was definitely dead,” Taylor chimes in.

  Detective Sergeant Landon’s eyebrows shoot up as she looks at Taylor.

  “You sound very sure,” she comments.

  “He was stone cold,” Taylor says simply.

  DS Landon glances over at my grandmother, who’s as poised as ever, sitting on a straight-backed armchair, her hands folded in her lap. She meets DS Landon’s eyes with not an iota of change in her calm expression, her blue eyes clear. I’ve never seen anything faze my grandmother, and I can’t imagine what would. Her white hair is drawn into a bob, the ends tucked neatly behind her ears. The cardigan of her pale peach twinset is neatly buttoned and turned back at the neck to display her pearl necklace; her tweed skirt is smoothed over her knees; her back is poker straight.

  Wherever my grandmother is, she’s always the still, calm focus. Her authority is so impressive that she never even needs to raise her voice to silence everyone else.

  “Taylor,” my grandmother pronounces, “is a singularly level-headed girl.”

  Taylor looks simultaneously flattered and amazed.

  “And you didn’t see anything unusual about the body?” DS Landon asks me.

  “He had a big mark on his face, like he’d fallen and hit it,” I reply. “And there was the whisky bottle under him. Taylor and I both saw it.”

  “Whisky bottle?” my grandmother says in a tone so icy that we all shiver.

  I nod.

  “Empty,” I add.

  I’m trying to keep
calm. My leg wants to jiggle nervously, and in my heightened emotional state, I watch my kneecap bouncing up and down and actually reach out a hand as surreptitiously as I can, holding it so it can’t move.

  Only then, the other leg starts to jiggle. I can’t hold that one too. It would look crazy, and even if I tried, something else would probably start to jerk around next and then I really would look like I have a motor neuron disorder.

  I try to lock my legs into place, heels clamped on the ground, quads holding them down. Okay, everyone will expect me to be a bit worked up; I just found a dead body, after all. But Taylor is as calm and poised as ever, so if I look like a neurotic mess beside her that’ll be suspicious, and might direct the police’s attention to me. The last thing I want in my life is any more police attention, especially with Jase so closely involved in all of this.

  Besides, my grandmother is giving me a very cool, disapproving look. Wakefields remain composed and controlled under all circumstances. Wakefields do not show an excess of emotion. Wakefields behave better than anyone around them, to set the best example possible.

  I think of the “Wakefield Hall Etiquette Guide for Students” and have to stifle a laugh as it suddenly occurs to me that Lady Wakefield omitted to have me pose for a photograph in it demonstrating how to react when your boyfriend’s father is dead under mysterious circumstances and you find the body. The laugh keeps rising; oh God, I’m getting hysterical. I pinch myself so hard I nearly draw blood, but at least it kills any impulse I have to burst into a giggling fit.

  My grandmother tuts her tongue very loudly indeed, but whether it’s at the whisky bottle revelation or my inability to control my physical reflexes, I have no idea. Probably both.

  “Has anyone informed his poor son, Detective?” she asks DS Landon.

  “That’s Jason Barnes, correct?” DS Landon flicks through her notepad. “His grandmother’s informed us that he went out after breakfast and hasn’t come back yet, Lady Wakefield.”

  “Someone should ring him,” my grandmother says firmly.

  “We don’t seem to have a mobile number for him,” DS Landon says. “His grandmother says he has one, but she doesn’t know the number.”

  “Scarlett has it,” Taylor blurts out.

  Everyone looks at me. We’re sitting round an inlaid marquetry coffee table, on chairs upholstered in a pale green silk and caught with tiny covered buttons, which are incredibly uncomfortable to sit on; I shift as a button cuts into my leg, and my grandmother shoots me a swift icy glance of reproach for not sitting up straight.

  The chairs are arranged in a semicircle. It’s the meet-and-greet-the-parents area of my grandmother’s study, by the bow window that looks over the wide expanse of paved terraces below, where most girls gather to play games and hang out in school breaks. I’m sure my grandmother has carefully chosen this room as her headquarters because of the unrivaled surveillance opportunities it offers.

  I never know how far her surveillance skills extend, or whether it’s simply that she has so much self-control she never looks surprised, but she doesn’t seem remotely taken aback at the revelation that I am close enough to Jase to have his mobile phone number.

  “They’re friends,” Taylor adds, her voice bland, but she ducks her head and directs a hard stare at me. I think she’s telling me to say something, to look natural, but that’s so far beyond my capabilities at this precise moment that all I can do is nod in agreement.

  “They’ve known each other for years,” my grandmother adds in a deliberately careless tone to Sergeant Landon. “After all, they’re the only two children who live at Wakefield Hall all year round.”

  This isn’t true. I never met Jase till last year, and I suspect she knows that. I clear my throat and manage to say:

  “My phone’s in my locker. I could go and get it now, if you’d like.”

  I’m addressing Sergeant Landon, but I’m looking at my grandmother, into her bright blue eyes, trying to work out how much she knows. It’s always a mistake to underestimate her.

  “That’s a school rule,” my grandmother informs the sergeant. “The girls are not allowed to carry mobiles on their persons, even switched off.”

  “Very sensible,” Sergeant Langdon agrees, even as I think:

  And you’ve been with me the whole time since Taylor brought the police back to Mr. Barnes’s body. I haven’t had a chance to get to my locker and ring Jase. If I hadn’t been so much of an idiot, I would have told Taylor to bring my phone, but I wasn’t thinking straight.

  “Sergeant Landon, why don’t you take Scarlett to her locker and locate her telephone?” my grandmother suggests.

  Her expression is completely unreadable, her smile bland and polite, a facade behind which all her thoughts are concealed. If she’s cross with Taylor and me for trespassing by going into the lake enclosure, if she knows more than she’s saying about how close I am to Jase, I can’t read any of it on her face.

  “And then, Scarlett, take Taylor and go to your aunt’s,” my grandmother instructs. “You certainly won’t be fit for classes for the rest of the day, either of you. I think the police should be given a chance to locate poor Jason Barnes before the story of his unfortunate father spreads all around school.” She fixes us with a basilisk stare. “You will of course not mention a word of this to any of your fellow students until you are told by me that you are allowed to do so.”

  We stand up and DS Landon shakes my grandmother’s hand.

  “Thank you for your help, Lady Wakefield,” she says deferentially.

  “Please tell poor Mrs. Barnes that I will visit her later today,” my grandmother says, and instead of telling her that the police aren’t a message delivery service, DS Landon nods politely and turns to leave the room.

  Wow. My grandmother could probably shoot someone in the face with a shotgun in the middle of Wakefield village and all the police would do is make her a cup of tea, tell her they’re sure she had a very good reason for doing it, and send her back to Wakefield Hall again.

  I can’t help admiring Lady Wakefield’s perfect composure. But sometimes it’s so cold that it’s positively glacial. I know that’s what she wants me to aspire to, that same level of supreme poise, where the most you allow yourself is a raise of the eyebrow or a tut of the lips on hearing the worst news imaginable.

  The thing is, I don’t think that’s me. No, I know that’s not me. And I don’t want her to try to turn me into a clone of her. I don’t want to end up the kind of person who doesn’t even give her granddaughter a hug and ask how she is after she’s seen a second corpse in under a year.

  As we walk down the corridor, still in the old part of the Hall, the polished boards smelling lightly of wax, I have a flash of memory: being carried down here by my mother. She held me close to her chest, looking over her shoulder at the receding door to my grandmother’s rooms. Winter sunlight on the glass of the oil paintings hanging on the paneled walls, faded Turkish carpet runners on the floor, my mother’s scent all around me, her arms holding me tight.

  I so wish my parents were still alive.

  We cross over into the new wing, concrete and white-painted walls, the contrast stark and immediate. The school corridors are empty and echoing. Everyone else is back in afternoon classes, and I doubt any of the girls have the faintest idea what’s just happened.

  We clatter downstairs to the changing rooms and locker area, which always reeks of smelly trainers and gym clothes, a lingering odor of underarms and feet so ingrained into the walls and floor that even in the school holidays, it never completely fades. I fish my phone out of my locker and pull up Jase’s number for DS Landon to copy onto hers.

  “Anything else you can think of, here’s my card,” she says, handing it to me as she dials Jase’s number.

  I take ages slipping it into my pocket, my heart pounding. His phone must have gone to voice mail, because DS Landon is leaving a message telling him to ring her as a matter of urgency. My fingers are already dancing a
cross my phone keys as I turn away, texting him to ring me ASAP.

  “If you see Jase, tell him to ring me soonest, okay, Scarlett?” DS Landon calls over her shoulder as she walks away, and I nod virtuously and probably unconvincingly.

  “Are you all right?” Taylor asks.

  “I don’t know,” I say. I’ve just rung Jase’s number, but he isn’t answering. I hang up as it goes to voice mail, unsure about what to say to him in a message. All I want is to be able to break the news to Jase, and to make sure he’s okay before he goes to the police.

  “Hey,” Taylor says, trying to lighten the mood, “at least we get to watch crappy afternoon TV, right?”

  But when we get to Aunt Gwen’s, turning on the TV is the last thing on Taylor’s mind. She wanders round the living room, eyes wide, picking up every single china object one by one in awe and wonder.

  “Wow,” she says eventually. “I didn’t know there were this many penguins in the world.”

  “You haven’t even looked at the ones on the sofa yet,” I say, sinking down among them.

  I’m not officially banned from using Aunt Gwen’s living room, it’s just that she’s usually in it, not having much of a life, and the last thing either of us wants is to spend any social time together. So apart from when I’m showering or grabbing a soft drink from the fridge, I’m pretty much always in my bedroom. I have a TV in there and I watch a lot of stuff on the computer, but I must admit that actually sitting on a proper sofa is very nice.

  I too am gobsmacked by the sheer extent of the penguin collection; I haven’t been in here for quite a while and it’s as if they’ve been breeding since then. The china ones are now covering every available surface, and the sofa is so clustered with stuffed penguins that I’m sitting on at least four of them, with a further penguin head sticking over my shoulder as if it’s trying to watch TV with me.

  Taylor turns to look at me and executes such a perfect double-take that I crack up laughing, and keep on much longer than her expression warrants. But I’m so grateful for something to laugh at that I actually can’t stop for quite a while.

  “I feel like we’re on Antarctica,” she says, plopping down next to me, dislodging several more penguins as she does so. “We just need a polar bear for the finishing touch.”