A Place to Lie

by Rebecca Griffiths

  Chin in her hands at the kitchen table, the dog at her feet, Joanna watches the world turn through the large casement windows of her beautiful Wheathampstead home.

  ‘Death’s so horribly final, isn’t it?’ she says, her voice flat. ‘I know to even say that sounds stupid, but I think it’s taken me till now to understand it fully.’

  ‘You’ve lost enough loved ones to know, and you’ve had your own health troubles, you poor thing,’ Pauline consoles. ‘I’m lucky, the only person I’ve lost is my grandfather, and he was well into his nineties.’

  Clouds bubble like sand castles behind the panes of glass. They lead Joanna back to that long ago, happy seaside holiday in Caswell Bay, and bring unexpected thoughts of her father bobbing beyond the collapsing breakers. He was blind without his specs but on the rare occasion he removed them, his face took on a vulnerability that still makes her anxious to know how he manages to see anything of heaven without them.

  ‘Dad’s been dead for nearly thirty-three years, but d’you know,’ a weighted pause, ‘it still feels like pressing a bruise to think of him. Then Mum, now Carrie.’

  ‘You poor thing.’ Pauline squeezes Joanna’s arm.

  ‘My problem is I feel so guilty.’

  ‘Guilty?’

  ‘Yes. Even before I saw Carrie’s mental health nurse … and she said some pretty alarming things.’

  ‘Really?’ Pauline wrinkles her nose. ‘Like what?’

  ‘About me lying to Carrie. When we were kids. Apparently she was still going on about it – couldn’t forgive me, the nurse said.’

  ‘Bit extreme, isn’t it? D’you remember what you lied about?’

  ‘Dean.’

  ‘Isn’t that the bloke whose name she shouted in the supermarket?’

  ‘Yep.’ Joanna sighs. ‘She was nuts about him … well, obsessed more like. And I told her he liked her. That he’d told me he was going to ask her out.’

  ‘And that was a lie?’

  ‘Yes. But this was real playground stuff. I was only nine, for God’s sake – I didn’t think she was going to take me seriously.’

  Pauline gives Joanna a look.

  ‘I said it to cheer her up. I was sick of her moping around. She was so grumpy, it was spoiling everything.’ Joanna defends herself. ‘But, the thing was, Dean already had a girlfriend, didn’t he? And even if he hadn’t, he was way too old for Carrie.’

  ‘How old was he?’

  ‘Eighteen. Carrie was thirteen.’

  ‘And this is what your sister couldn’t forgive you for?’ Pauline asks.

  Joanna nods. ‘And get this – and this is more alarming – according to Carrie’s nurse, me duping her into thinking Dean loved her when he didn’t – yes, she actually used the word duping –’ she slumps further into her chair – ‘well, it drove her to do something terrible, apparently. Something she couldn’t forgive herself for.’

  ‘Really? D’you know what?’

  A shake of the head. ‘I knew Carrie could get fixated on things – I could give you loads of examples of that. And she had a memory like a bloody elephant, could be very unforgiving. I’ve never known anyone bear a grudge like her. But I didn’t think for a minute this was her problem with me – I’d forgotten all about what I said.’

  ‘I can see why you think so, it is rather over the top.’ Pauline fiddles with her long dark hair. ‘But remembering what I was like at that age, I can sort of identify a bit with your sister.’

  Joanna looks surprised.

  ‘There was this older boy I had a huge crush on,’ Pauline confides. ‘It lasted right through school, and beyond. Pathetic, I know, but it’s powerful stuff, first love – it can really screw you up. Look at what happened to Romeo and Juliet.’

  ‘Romeo and Juliet ?’

  A sharp laugh from Pauline. ‘Perhaps not the best example.’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘I still dream about him, my schoolgirl crush – even though he never wanted anything to do with me. Or ,’ Pauline pulls a face, ‘perhaps because he wanted nothing to do with me. So, while I can understand where you’re coming from, I can sort of understand your sister’s predicament too.’

  ‘Can you?’ Joanna’s eyebrows shoot up.

  ‘Weren’t you ever infatuated with someone as a teenager? Someone who didn’t fancy you.’

  ‘Not really. Too focused on the piano.’ A fleeting smile. ‘Mike was the first guy I was ever interested in. And then we got married.’

  ‘Lucky you. You’ve never had your heart broken.’ Pauline stares out through the windows at the bare cherry trees lining the bottom fence. ‘Because I don’t think you ever find that intensity of feeling again.’

  ‘Oh, come on.’ Joanna is disbelieving. ‘Course you can – if Carrie’d gone on to have relationships when she was older, she’d have forgotten about Dean straight away. That was only puppy-love, all she needed was to experience the real thing, and she’d have seen that for herself.’

  ‘It didn’t work for me.’

  ‘No ?’

  ‘No. If I’m honest, the memory of him has never really gone away – in fact, I’d go so far as to say that I’ve built him up into something more since Tony left me. He’s like this fantasy man who would’ve given me this fantasy life. Mad, I know, but maybe that’s what your sister did with this Dean too.’

  Joanna isn’t sure how to respond, so says nothing.

  ‘Didn’t she go on to have any relationships, then?’ Pauline asks.

  ‘Not as far as I know.’

  ‘That’s sad.’

  ‘It is, isn’t it. If only she’d told me what was bothering her, we might have been able to sort it out. I wasn’t even aware she knew I’d made that up about Dean. I certainly didn’t tell her, it never came up,’ Joanna rambles. ‘Although, I should have guessed it had nothing to do with the money Dora left her – accusing me of being resentful was just another excuse for her to have a go. Because we were never the same after we came home from Witchwood.’ She picks at the tapestry of her thoughts. ‘But then, what is odd –’ she turns to Pauline – ‘is the scrapbook I found in her flat. Full of photos of me, cut from the papers, brochures, you name it … She’d been following my career from the off. Why would she go to all that trouble, if she hated me?’

  ‘Because she was mixed up? She sounded mixed up.’ Pauline suggests. ‘Or maybe her mental health nurse got it wrong?’

  ‘D’you see what I mean?’ Joanna flung her head to the string of halogen ceiling bulbs. ‘The more I find out, the more questions there are.’

  ‘I do.’ Pauline nods sympathetically. ‘What did Mike say when you told him what the nurse said?’

  ‘I didn’t.’ Joanna looks uneasy. ‘You can see why – it takes some swallowing, and I’m not sure he’s the stomach for it.’

  Pauline rolls her well made-up eyes.

  ‘But supposing I was the root of her problems, I shouldn’t have dismissed her as a hopeless cause, should I? Because she wasn’t hopeless, was she?’ She looks at Pauline. ‘She was just troubled and … and lost, really. And what sort of person does that make me?’

  ‘I think you’re being too hard on yourself. You were only a child.’

  ‘I know, but—’

  ‘And Mike says she was a handful.’ Pauline tries to be helpful.

  ‘Yes, maybe, but I still think Carrie deserved better, that’s all I’m saying. I’m wondering whether I was right to listen to Mike.’

  ‘Oh, Jo.’ Pauline drains her coffee. ‘Course you were. He was looking out for you. He thinks the world of you, you know that.’

  Rootling her handbag for the postcard Caroline wrote but never sent, Joanna passes it to Pauline. Watches her neighbour’s expression as she reads the frantic: He’s here. He’s hunted me down. He wants to kill me. You’ve got to stop him. You’ve got to help me.

  ‘I shared that with Mike as soon as I came home, but he wasn’t at all bothered by it.’

  ‘Wasn’t he?’ Pauline certainl
y looks bothered.

  ‘He dismissed it as a symptom of a deranged mind. He said, if things were that bad, then why didn’t she just pick up the phone and tell me straight.’

  ‘Yes, but he’s not saying it to be unkind, Jo.’ Pauline returns the card. ‘It’s because he’s got family problems of his own. What with his mum on her own now, she’s his priority, along with you and the boys – not your sister, who from what I can gather did nothing but push you two away.’

  ‘I suppose.’ Joanna stares into the whorls of wood of the tabletop. ‘And it’s not like he didn’t try; he was far more patient than me, if I’m honest.’

  ‘There you go then,’ Pauline affirms. ‘You can’t blame him if he was sick of her moods, frustrated she never returned your messages, ignored the cards you sent for Christmas and birthdays.’

  ‘You’re right. Carrie never showed any interest in Freddie or Ethan either.’

  ‘How about we stop all this introspection and blame, eh?’ Pauline gets up to rinse her mug under the tap. ‘It’s not getting you anywhere. Now –’ she twists to face her – ‘you seem to think your sister was still hung up on Dean, so much so she hadn’t forgiven you for what you said about him when you were kids.’

  ‘Yes,’ Joanna agrees.

  ‘And,’ Pauline pushes her logic into Joanna’s eyes, ‘the last thing she called out before she died was his name. I don’t know about you, but, maybe … What’s this Dean bloke doing with himself these days, then. You thought about that?’

  ‘Yes, I was a bit curious. I did a quick search for him on the internet coming home on the train. But there didn’t seem to be anything and I’ve not had the chance since.’

  ‘Why not have a proper look now? You said yourself you’re in no fit state to get any work done.’

  Somewhat reluctantly, Joanna opens the lid of her laptop, activates the internet and keys Dean Fry into the search engine. She doesn’t know what she expects to have changed, but again there’s nothing much: a LinkedIn profile, and 192.com telling her it’s found thirty-eight people in the UK with his name.

  ‘He could be any one of them or none of them.’ She points at the screen. ‘There has to be an easier way of finding him.’

  ‘Have you tried Facebook?’ Pauline suggests. ‘Everyone’s on there nowadays, I’ve found loads of my old friends.’

  ‘He’s hardly a friend ,’ Joanna says bluntly. ‘But, yes, I did, as it happens, it’s the first place I looked. There were a few with that name, but none of them were him.’

  ‘Oh, okay, shame that – you can usually find anyone on there.’

  ‘Hang on, I’ve just thought of something.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘That poor bloke, the one Caroline tried to stab. Perhaps I could have a look for him on Facebook, because I’ve been thinking … and I know the police didn’t want me talking to him, but it’s been niggling me, I feel I need to say something … apologise on Carrie’s behalf … I don’t know, what d’you think?’

  ‘Yes, why not. If it’d make you feel better.’ Pauline heads for the stairs. ‘D’you mind if I nip to the bathroom?’

  ‘Sure. You know where it is.’ Joanna, only half listening, is already typing the name Kyle Norris into the search box. It brings up twelve people and she spools through their faces carefully, reading their potted histories, their places of residence: a New Zealander, a black guy from New York, a man in his mid-fifties surrounded by his family, a Chinese guy living in Prague, a teenager in a hoodie from Newcastle-upon-Tyne … Totally absorbed, she misses the chirruping of the telephone in the background and keeps scrolling through, until the head and shoulders photograph of a man in his late-twenties stops her dead.

  No way. A hand flies to her mouth in disbelief. Doubting what her eyes are telling her, she hunches closer, double-clicking the image to make it fill the screen. Staring back is a face she knows. A face as it looked to her that summer with Dora in Witchwood.

  The ringing of the telephone eventually stops. And spinning to the here and now she mouths ‘Dean? ’ into the swaying silence. Her shock, loud enough to wake the snoozing Buttons.

  ‘Are you all right? Didn’t you hear the phone?’ Pauline is by her side, leaning into the screen. ‘God, Jo. You look like you’ve seen a ghost.’

  Summer 1990

  Caroline yawned. A big indulgent yawn that ordinarily would not be tolerated at Pillowell Cottage. It came as the floorboards in Dora’s room creaked under her weight. ‘Uch .’ She squirmed, stretching towards the sunlight bleeding in from the east. A furtive check to make sure Joanna was still asleep had her reaching under the bed for Mrs Hooper’s snow globe. She held it up to peer into the frozen wonderland beyond its perfect glass dome. A shake, and the swirl of snow settled over the storybook-perfect cottage with its family safely entombed in an everlasting winter.

  She got out of bed to make room for the snow globe in her underwear drawer. Too big an object for the hole she’d dug in the bank, she was going to have to risk keeping it here. But she must hide the gold ring she pinched from the pub, and the brooch with the wine-red stone she took from the vestry at St Oswald’s. She must do it today. And as she was awake early, she could slip out now and be back before either Dora or Joanna noticed she was missing. She was feeling particularly anxious since eavesdropping on her aunt’s conversation with the police on Sunday; the net was closing in, and she needed to be careful – if anyone discovered it was her doing the stealing, it would let Dean Fry clean off the hook.

  Reluctant as always to expose her bare body, even to her sister, Caroline whipped off her nightie and tugged on her dungarees, T-shirt and cardigan in two swift movements. Avoiding the mirror and the haircut she’d been given in town yesterday, she positioned the Alice band she didn’t strictly need any more and pushed her feet into her jelly sandals, the ring and the brooch safely stowed away in a pocket.

  Stars were dropping out now. A couple of lights had come on in the village, and Lillian told herself there was little point going to bed. She’d never drift off without taking one of her late husband’s sleeping pills, and she was trying to wean herself off them. Anyway, Gordon would be getting up in less than an hour, expecting his breakfast, and the idea of going and lying down only to hear him wake up and steal his first sigh of the day, she didn’t think she could bear it.

  In the same way Gordon never needed sleeping tablets, he never needed an alarm clock either. Wired to be early, from having it beaten into him at his boarding school, he was up and out for his ramble through the woods or along the footpath to Slinghill every morning. Not that he ever took Laika, calling her an embarrassment because of her truncated legs, and moaning she couldn’t keep up with him. What was an embarrassment, Lillian brought the slightly absurd image to mind, was him going about in his suit trousers fastened with a pair of his father’s old cycle clips.

  The clock on her mantelpiece – insistent, oppressive – she could envisage burying it, and the thing ticking away for years below ground. Lillian looked at a blur of wood pigeons through the window, or was it her reflection in the glass? Grey and tired, she judged, always harsh. She should sort herself out before Gordon came down, otherwise there would be questions. Questions he already knew the answers to but asked anyway, in the hope things had changed. She switched on TV-am, wanting the company of Anne Diamond and her co-host Nick Owen, and to forget for a moment or two the dire financial situation she was in; as reluctant to discuss it with her son as she was to think about it. Barely audible – she couldn’t risk waking Gordon – the breakfast television presenters were refereeing a debate about new working-time directives between a woman economist and one of Thatcher’s cabinet.

  ‘We’re trying to help small businesses,’ Lillian imitated the woman’s whine before the news cut in and showed a repeat of the police appeal made by Liz and Ian Fry the previous day. Grim and drawn, the trauma of their missing child had aged them overnight, and it was upsetting to see. ‘Bring her home safe,’ Liz’s voice was
breaking under the pressure of the insurmountable anguish. ‘I need Ellie home.’

  Lillian switched it off; the distressing images these news bulletins supplied were another reason she couldn’t sleep. Poor Liz, she sighed, leaning down to stroke her dachshund’s cinnamon-brown eyebrows. Supposing Ellie had come to harm, whoever did it was still out there. The thought was a terrifying one, and further soured her opinion of the place.

  Gordon’s up . The floorboards above her head groaned in protest. She yawned. Wasn’t it always the way? Lillian wriggled in her chair and reckoned if she were to go to bed she’d sleep like a baby. Yawning again, she picked over Gordon’s sudden decision to return to Italy tomorrow. Booking a flight for Wednesday when he was out in Cinderglade with Dora and the girls. She asked him what the rush was – he wasn’t scheduled to go back until September. But he wouldn’t answer. He’d been in a foul temper since Saturday, complaining he’d overdone it trimming the hedge the day before, but Lillian knew it had more to do with him not being invited to Ellie’s party. Not that she said this, it didn’t pay to push Gordon when he was in one of his moods. In her experience, it was better to stand well back, let whatever troubled him blow over.

  Up on her feet, Lillian took the few necessary paces to her study to look at her favourite photograph of Ursula – the one she could now see so much of Joanna in. Along with Lillian’s lover – a man whose darker side that others spoke of was never shown to her – Joanna was making life worth living too. A special child with such a gift for the piano, she was a joy to teach. Although, she wished Gordon wasn’t quite so taken with her – worrying, the occasions she’d come home from organ practice, to find them so intimate. Of course, it was all perfectly innocent, Joanna was such a dear; who could resist? Not that people around here would see it like that. Gordon’s fondness for Ellie got enough tongues wagging.

  She stared into the photographed face of little Ursula, captured on the last family holiday before she died and Derek sent Gordon away to school. The memory was almost too much for Lillian as she looked at the merest circle of dust on her desk where the little snow globe used to be. The last thing Ursula gave her; it was her most treasured possession. Along with the garnet brooch her mother bequeathed to her that, pinned to the lapel of her best jacket, disappeared when she left it in the vestry with the discarded cassocks. She thought of Dora complaining of knickknacks disappearing from Pillowell, and the more serious issue of Dora’s father’s missing dagger. The idea there could be a thief in the village was deeply unsettling. This sort of thing didn’t happen around here and, coupled with Lillian’s fears of what the police might be about to discover in nearby woodland, had her heart jumping beneath her blouse.