A Place to Lie

by Rebecca Griffiths

  ‘Dean Fry?’ The policeman echoed the name. ‘Just to confirm, we’re talking about Ellie’s stepbrother here, are we?’

  Dora nodded.

  ‘And if I could double check why you suspect him, again?’ He dipped his head, scribbled whatever he might need to refer to later.

  ‘Because he mows my lawn. Because he keeps an eye on the place for me when I’m in London.’

  ‘And how long have you been letting him look after your holiday cottage?’

  ‘About two years … since his family took over the pub.’

  ‘And have you ever had reason to suspect him of stealing from you before?’

  Dora took a moment. ‘No,’ she said simply. ‘I don’t think I have.’

  ‘Doesn’t that strike you as odd?’ The other policeman. ‘Why abuse your trust after all this time?’

  ‘Surely that’s obvious.’ A haughty tip of the chin.

  ‘Obvious, Miss Muller? How so?’

  ‘He’s got this wretched drug habit to feed, hasn’t he?’

  ‘A drug habit ? Miss Muller, could you explain?’ A shifting of boots. ‘What kinds of drugs?’

  ‘How would I know?’ She flapped a hand like she did when drying her nail varnish. ‘Cannabis, marijuana … he smokes stuff all the time. You can smell it a mile off.’

  ‘Okay.’ The policeman looked interested. ‘If you’re able to provide a list of what’s been taken, we could start by searching his home.’

  ‘But he’d have sold them on by now, don’t you think?’

  ‘Not necessarily.’

  ‘Look, there’s something else I must tell you.’ Dora, seemingly on the verge of some kind of confession, shuffled to the sideboard for a fortifying glug of wine. ‘Even though I’m probably going to be in trouble for having the damn thing in the first place.’ She pressed her lips together. ‘It’s my late father’s dagger. It’s vanished too. Rather more serious than trinkets, I fear. I know I should’ve reported it immediately.’

  ‘What kind is it? Can you give us a description?’ one of police officers asked.

  ‘From the war. Silver. With a long, sharp blade.’ Dora’s eyes narrowed to slits.

  The pair of officers swapped furtive looks. ‘Yes, madam, that just about describes most daggers. What make is it? Does it have any distinguishing features?’

  ‘It’s an SA Honor Dagger. German. Ornate silver cross-guards, brown leather grip, scabbard. Oh yes,’ she looked uneasy, ‘there’s an eagle on it, and a swastika logo … and Alles Fur Deutschland embossed along its blade. My father was horribly proud of it.’ She dabbed her brow with her handkerchief again, the heat evidently getting to her. ‘To be brutally honest, I didn’t know what to do with it after he died.’

  ‘Was your father a member of the German Army, then?’

  ‘No, of course he wasn’t.’ Dora baulked, but Caroline knew that what remained of her aunt’s Dutch accent could be mistaken for German, and wasn’t surprised the policeman asked the question. ‘He was Jewish. My parents were Jewish.’

  A band of light jogged across the wallpaper and Dora stretched out to touch it. From the way she shivered, Caroline could tell it sparked unhappy memories, not that she knew what those memories were. All she and Joanna had been told was that these rolls of William Morris pattern were precious to Dora’s father, and that they were just one of the countless possessions they escaped to England with.

  ‘Me, m-my family,’ Dora stammered the explanation she seemed keen to provide. ‘We were from the Netherlands. My parents owned a hardware shop in the northeast town of Meppel.’

  ‘So, how did he come by the dagger?’

  ‘He used it to get us out of Nazi-occupied territory.’ Dora, blunt; but something in her aunt’s expression informed Caroline that although this wasn’t a lie, it wasn’t the whole truth either.

  ‘Where d’you usually keep it?’

  ‘Sorry, what did you say?’ Dora didn’t appear to have heard.

  ‘I asked where you keep it – was it somewhere safe?’ The questions kept coming.

  ‘Hidden away at the bottom of my wardrobe. It was a shock to find it gone.’

  ‘And you think Dean took this too?’

  ‘Yes, of course he did. Who else could it be? As I said, he comes to do the garden, and I don’t always lock the cottage if I go out.’

  The police officers traded further glances, and it pleased Caroline to see they thought her aunt was as doolally as she did.

  ‘You say you’ve a property in London, Miss Muller?’ the senior of the duo asked, a mocking smirk tickling the edges of his mouth.

  ‘That’s right. In Bayswater.’

  ‘And you leave that unlocked when you go out, do you?’

  ‘Of course not,’ Dora snapped. ‘I’m not an idiot.’

  ‘But you leave this cottage unlocked?’

  ‘It’s different here, this is the countryside; this is,’ she cooed, ‘my little idyll.’

  ‘That’s as may be, madam, but crime does go on here too. We’ve been receiving numerous complaints of petty theft in the village recently. If you’ve a mind, it’s easy pickings in these parts, people thinking it safe to leave their premises unlocked. D’you think you’d be able to identify this dagger if we found it?’

  ‘Of course,’ Dora confirmed.

  Fearful their conversation may be drawing to a close, and Dora was about to lead the policemen out, Caroline abandoned her eavesdropping to race back to the kitchen.

  ‘Who’s Dora talking to?’ Joanna swallowed the last of her drink and wiped her mouth on the sleeve of her sweatshirt.

  ‘The police.’

  ‘Have they found Ellie?’

  ‘I couldn’t hear much,’ Caroline lied, her mind racing to where she’d dumped Dora’s knife, and the possibility the police were going to find it. ‘You didn’t hear anything, did you?’

  ‘No. I’ve been in here.’

  ‘Good.’ Caroline, as relieved with this as she was to hear Dora blaming Dean Fry for nicking her stuff, grabbed her sister and tugged her into the hall. ‘Shhh .’ She pressed a finger to her lips. ‘Quick, come on; upstairs.’

  And watching from the landing, feeling the vibrations of heavy boots along the hall, the sisters heard a brief exchange between the police and their aunt, before the kitchen door slammed shut.

  The following morning, Joanna spied Gordon’s car parked up beyond the trees. She knew something was different about this Monday even before she came downstairs. Dora smelled different. Like the honeysuckle around Pillowell’s front door, except artificial. The horses felt it too: reluctant to come to her as they usually would on their feeding trip to the bottom of the garden.

  Dora hadn’t been so bothered about Joanna and Caroline eating every last scrap of their breakfast either, her eyes too busy working herself out in the little cracked vanity mirror that, excavated from the odds-and-sods drawer in the sitting room, now balanced in a nook above the sink. Gordon smelled funny too, of tobacco and the spice of his aftershave; it was something she had come to expect whenever she sat in his lap. In the same way she’d come to expect his impromptu visits. Afternoons spent sitting with his elbows on the arms of Dora’s leather armchair, drinking coffee and blowing smoke rings. He reminded Joanna of the colourful birds of paradise in a book of photographs her mother used to show her before she was old enough to look at them for herself. Flamboyant and dramatic, he lit up her mind, and was the only person, apart from her mother and Mrs Hooper, she was happy to let cuddle her close and stroke her hair.

  ‘Oh, Jo, there you are.’ Dora skimmed her eyes to her. ‘Gordon’s here – he’s taking us to Cinderglade for the day. We’re going to get Carrie’s hair smartened up.’

  ‘But what about Ellie? She’s still missing.’ Joanna buckled her brow. ‘Shouldn’t you be helping to look for her? Me and Carrie wanted to help, but they wouldn’t let us.’

  ‘Oh, don’t worry, the police are on to it – they’re combing the area, it said on th
e news.’

  ‘What ? With a giant comb?’

  ‘No, silly.’ Dora gave her niece an awkward squeeze. ‘It means they’re doing a thorough search; that she’s going to turn up safe and sound.’

  Safe and sound . How many times had Joanna heard people say that since Saturday afternoon? The hollow words were enough to turn her stomach, especially when she thought of those white-beamed torches searching late into the night. Where are you, Ellie? Why would you disappear on your birthday, when there was cake and candles, and all those presents to open? Asking her silent questions, she tried to imagine where her friend might be as she sent something of herself out across the breeze to find her.

  ‘And besides,’ Dora continued, ‘Gordon’s taking us, and you don’t want to disappoint him, do you?’

  Joanna watched her aunt blot her shocking red mouth with a tissue. An action that made her want to scream. Didn’t she care what had happened to Ellie? Dora’s selfishness was shameful, she was as nuts about Gordon as Caroline was about Dean. They should be out there with the rest of the village, looking for her missing friend, but it was like trying to talk to a madwoman – look at her; her brain was all warped. Love made you dangerous, it brought out the worst in you, and Joanna swore she was never going to let a man do this to her. She would apply herself to her music, be the best she could be – the piano was a far safer addiction than some silly man, and she was getting good at it, Mrs Hooper said so.

  Trapped inside Gordon’s BMW, they glided past the Boar’s Head. Saw a large poster of Ellie taped to a window. Another nailed to a telegraph pole. Their friend’s brown hair and dimpled smile overseeing her search. The word missing heaved in the breeze. The sisters also saw the blue flashing lights of patrol cars, the spill of journalists, cameramen, as well as a white Luton van emblazoned with GLOUCESTERSHIRE NEWS . Further away, marching into the woods, a cavalcade of villagers armed with walking sticks and binoculars led by the Reverend Mortmain, his dog-collar visible beneath his walking clothes. They identified Ian as the car grazed alongside his face: grey, unshaven; close enough to touch. But there was no sign of Liz. No Dean.

  ‘They must be off looking for Ellie,’ Joanna said, her nose rubbing the glass.

  ‘We should be too.’ Caroline bounced her frustrated fists in her lap.

  ‘It’s not fair. I don’t wanna go shopping.’ Joanna drew a heart shape into the condensation she’d made.

  ‘I don’t want a bloody haircut,’ Caroline said, and sunk into one of her sulks.

  Hot in the back of the car, the sisters felt every bend in the windy road. They unstuck their legs from the leather upholstery and craned their necks to the last of the action through the rear windscreen, until all had dissolved into the enveloping frondescence.

  ‘Out all night again, they were,’ Dora informed a staunchly silent Gordon. ‘It’s been almost two days; they should’ve found her by now, surely. Tilly said they questioned Ian, Dean too, more than once – have they talked to you?’

  ‘Of course they have,’ Gordon snapped. ‘I should think they’ve been talking to everyone.’

  ‘I suppose.’ Dora fidgeted in her seat. ‘They’ve certainly been on to all the parents of Ellie’s friends. Liz has apparently called everyone they know round here, and where they used to live. But there’s no sign of her.’

  Gordon didn’t respond. Gripping the gearstick, his knuckles white as a snow-capped mountain range through the tautness of skin. Registering the unreadable pale of his gaze caught in the driving mirror, Caroline did her best to remove herself from his eyeline by squeezing against the passenger door.

  ‘What’s the matter with him?’ she murmured.

  ‘He’s worried about Ellie.’ Joanna dragged her mouth down in sympathy.

  ‘He’s worried about something.’ Caroline knitted her dark brows together.

  *

  Despite the perceived urgency of Caroline’s hair appointment, Gordon, although permitted to drive his sleek, black BMW at the national speed limit of sixty miles per hour, chose, as usual, to meander along at forty. The road, a relentless tunnel of green broken only by the periodic peppering of red pillar boxes, added to his despondency. The only evidence of the diamond-bright day going on beyond Witchwood was the sunshine that now and again splintered the car windscreen, making him blink. Needing to slow for a convoy of horses, he swung wide to avoid the mounds of droppings and their clip-clopping hooves and thought how his mother would have been out with a shovel if they’d ridden past Pludd Cottage. She was fanatical about her garden. He frowned, flexing his arm muscles that were still aching from the annual trim he gave her perimeter hedge on Friday.

  Relieved to get away from the suffocating feel of the village for a few hours, he seized the opportunity to ferry Dora and her nieces into town. But as the road opened out to the spread of the Cotswold countryside under meringue-whipped clouds, he wondered if he should have stayed behind to help search for Ellie. It would have looked better if he had. Perhaps, had his mother not shared what she overheard Ian Fry calling him in the shop the other day – insults about what sort of man he thought Gordon was, and why he was still single with no family of his own – he might have felt able to.

  Reflected in the wing mirror, Dora saw a backlog of cars and imagined the frustrated stream of drivers who had no opportunity to overtake along this twenty-mile stretch of zigzagging A-road. The truck behind them administered a long drone of its horn. Dora pulled down the visor to check her lipstick, saw the driver slap his forehead and make a series of obscene hand gestures in the vanity mirror.

  ‘People are so aggressive.’ Gordon, his onyx ring glinting in the sunshine.

  About the exasperated lorry driver, or what might have happened to Ellie Fry? Dora didn’t ask. Reluctant to spoil the rare opportunity of a day with him, she stared out through the passenger window at silver rivers cutting through ripening farmland, the layered rise of hills jostling the horizon.

  Itching to be out there helping to find their friend, the girls mulled over the trouble they’d left behind in Witchwood and scratched the exposed stretch of shin between ankle sock and hem. Sensing their agitation – the sound of nails on skin grating her nerves – Dora reached behind her seat to smack their legs still.

  ‘We’re going to enjoy today if it kills us,’ she announced, then asked Gordon: ‘D’you mind if I put the radio on?’

  The tail end of Betty Boo asking Where are you, baby ? before Radio Two cut to the news, and the measured tone of the announcer plugged the space between them like foam. Gloucestershire Police, continuing to search for missing ten-year-old Ellie Fry, are to deploy a specialist team of officers and sniffer dogs in what will be the second full day of searching the large area of woodland around her home … Gordon switched it off.

  No one talked again for a while. The underbelly of a buzzard diving for carrion between verge and tarmac. Its angel spread, wheeling away, made them gasp. Dora, mouth stale from her recent breakfast, hunted Gordon’s glove box in the hope of finding a mint.

  ‘What’s this?’ she quizzed. ‘I didn’t know you played the guitar.’ And she tugged free a shiny-covered volume of A Tune a Day , squinting at the music she couldn’t read.

  ‘It was for Ellie,’ Gordon said, snatching it back and stuffing it into the side pocket of the driver’s door. ‘Liz was teaching her to play.’ Dora, alarmed by his use of the past tense, heard him swallow – a dry, wretched sound strangled in the back of his throat. ‘I thought she might’ve liked it … ’ He ran out of steam as the missing Ellie Fry sat between them like another passenger.

  ‘What d’you think’s happened to her?’ Dora watched a bumblebee bash itself repeatedly against the dashboard. She dropped her window and guided it to freedom. The amplified rush of wind carrying the smell of recently mown hay engulfed them. She closed it again, sealing them off from the outside, and felt Gordon’s eyes leave the road for a split second and turn on her. The look was cold as he changed down a gear to accommodate t
he sharp bend into Cinderglade. Dora was relieved he didn’t reply. Saved from further awkwardness by the sirens on the level crossing, they squeezed to a stop as the gates came down. Seconds later, the scream of metal on metal as the 10.23 from London whizzed through, as panic bounced like a rubber ball against the wall of Dora’s stomach. Did Gordon know something – something about Ellie? Did it have something to do with the police finding one of her roller skates in the woods? These were questions Dora would return to time and again, but fearing Gordon’s answer, she never dared ask him outright.

  Present Day

  ‘I took the day off to mark these.’ Joanna points to a pile of essays. ‘But I was kidding myself. I can’t concentrate.’

  Pauline Baxter – attractive, thirty something, a single mum since her husband of seventeen years ran off with their dentist – says nothing. When Pauline pops round for coffee, as she does from time to time, Joanna makes it obvious she has things she wants to get off her chest.

  ‘All this with Carrie,’ Joanna continues. ‘It’s making it impossible for me to put the necessary piano practice in too. I’m frighteningly behind. So much so, it’s looking like I’m going to have to postpone the recitals I agreed to give in Germany this autumn.’

  ‘That’s a shame,’ Pauline answers. ‘But if it helps take the pressure off. Mike said things had been full-on – you went to sort out your sister’s flat, didn’t you?’

  ‘That was more of a fact-finding mission. I needed to piece together what happened. To find out why she managed to kill herself while trying to stab that bloke.’

  ‘And did you find out much?’ Pauline sips her coffee.

  ‘A bit. But it’s all so complicated – and the more I unravel, the more confused I get.’

  ‘Two heads, and all that,’ her neighbour offers.

  ‘I wouldn’t know where to start.’ Joanna plonks down on a chair beside Pauline. ‘But it’s colouring my life. Whatever I think I uncover just creates new questions I don’t have the answers to.’