A Place to Lie

by Rebecca Griffiths

  A rattling from outside, startling, unexpected. Lillian jolted upright in her chair, fully alert.

  What the hell was that?

  Laika was on to it, springing from her bed and yapping wildly to be let outside. Ferreting the key from its vase and turning the lock, Lillian stepped on to her dew-wet lawn in time to see a darkened shape tearing away under the rose arch. Her lover wouldn’t risk calling round while Gordon was here, would he? Surely he could wait, her son would be out of the country tomorrow.

  The violent thwop , thwop of a police helicopter scooped low over the trees. Looking up to see the warming sun had swapped places with the moon, she appealed to the heavens for the safe return of little Ellie, before scurrying back inside her cottage, wanting the reassuring creak of floorboards as her son moved around upstairs.

  ‘Where d’you get that?’ Joanna’s voice from the shadows, and Caroline jerked her head to it.

  ‘It’s Dora’s.’

  ‘She know you’ve got it?’ Joanna sat up in bed and pushed back the covers.

  ‘No.’

  ‘You nicked it, then?’ Joanna, at her elbow, extended a finger to touch the sparkly diamante hair clasp before Caroline could tuck it away. ‘I’ll tell.’

  ‘No, you won’t.’

  ‘Yes, I will.’ Joanna jutted out her chin, determined to have her say for once. ‘Unless you show me what else you’ve taken.’

  ‘I’ve not taken nothing.’ Caroline touched the snow globe hidden in the drawer, its unyielding spherical shape hard under her cotton knickers. ‘I’m going to put it back.’

  ‘What? Like you’re going to put that brooch back.’

  Caroline glared at her.

  ‘Don’t look at me like that – it’s red and about this big.’ Joanna made a circle between finger and thumb.

  ‘How d’you know about that?’ Feeling around inside the pocket of her dungarees, Caroline satisfied herself the gold ring and brooch were still safe.

  ‘Seen you.’

  ‘Seen me what?’

  ‘Playing with it.’

  ‘You’re naughty, you are.’

  ‘You’re the naughty one.’ Joanna rubbed sleep from her eyes. ‘But I might not tell if you show me what else you’ve got.’

  Caroline said nothing and shut the drawer.

  ‘What you hiding in there?’ Joanna pointed.

  ‘Nuffin.’

  ‘Show me.’ Joanna, her palm as flat as when she fed the horses.

  Caroline handed her the snow globe.

  ‘Cor, that’s pretty. Look at the little family inside.’

  ‘Lovely, isn’t it?’ Caroline said, unable to share how the little quartet reminded her of what life was like before the coastguard fished their father from the sea, turning four into three. And with the memory came a blaze of what she’d been that day – the sun on her face, the chime of an ice-cream van in her ears, running along the sand in her polka-dot swimsuit – and her mother, carefree and sandy-kneed, sculpting horses from the soft Welsh sand, eyes brimming with love … There was no love in her mother’s eyes now, she thought, gulping back tears, except perhaps for Joanna.

  ‘Where d’you get it?’ her sister wanted to know.

  ‘Mrs Hooper’s,’ Caroline answered quickly.

  ‘Mrs Hooper’s ?’ Joanna’s grin vanished. ‘Oh, no, Carrie, you can’t. Nicking from Dora’s one thing, but Mrs Hooper? She’s got nothing; you know that. You’ve got to give it back.’ And she dropped the snow globe inside the drawer as if it burnt her fingers.

  ‘Why do I? She’s done loads for you, but nuffin for me. I’m keeping it, she won’t notice.’

  ‘She will, you’ve got to give it back.’ Joanna, insistent, collected her towel and wash-ups. ‘It’s not right.’

  ‘Will you shut up if I show you the other things I’ve taken?’

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘Right then, after breakfast. I’ll show you after breakfast.’

  ‘No. I want to see them now.’

  ‘They’re not here, stupid. I’ve got a special place for them – down by the lake.’

  ‘Promise?’ Joanna creased her soft little brow.

  ‘Promise.’

  Present Day

  Kyle Norris .

  The hairs on the back of Joanna’s neck prickle against the collar of her shirt. K-y-l-e. Seated at the kitchen table, she hunts the letters for booby traps and warnings. Nothing; it sounds perfectly innocuous. But the similarities between Dean Fry and this man her sister attacked without provocation are startling. Even down to the wave in his light brown hair. This twenty-seven-year-old Kyle could be his twin – his twin nearly three decades ago, because Joanna knows Dean would be near fifty now.

  Poor Caroline. This must have been what she thought that night in the mini-mart, and why she shouted out Dean’s name – too irrational to understand he wouldn’t look like this any more. Could it be that Caroline saw Kyle around and about in Bayswater before that night, and mistaken him for Dean? It’s possible – the police said he’d moved to the area six months previously. And if so, could Dean be the threat her sister was going on about in the postcard she didn’t send? But why on earth would she be scared of him, so scared she needed to carry a knife to protect herself?

  Joanna would have liked to run it by Pauline, had she not needed to rush off to work. Weighing up what she does and doesn’t know, Joanna shakes dog biscuits into a bowl for the ever-wagging Buttons. She thinks about the stuff her sister recorded in her notebooks – dreams, nightmares – that Joanna’s been unscrambling. Dreams of Dean mutating from someone loving, into someone wanting to destroy her. It proves she never forgot him, but it wasn’t her pining after her first love, as Joanna originally thought; it seems more likely now that she was terrified of him – terrified he’d come after her. Joanna’s theory that Caroline couldn’t let herself fall in love with anyone else because she was stuck aged thirteen and nurturing a crush on an older boy, wasn’t what was going on in her sister’s head at all. Caroline’s life was on hold because of her fear of him, not a love for him. It makes perfect sense now. But what doesn’t make sense is why she was frightened of him.

  She double-clicks on Dean Fry’s doppelgänger again. Studies the enlarged image. The similarities are breathtaking. In Caroline’s unbalanced mind, this bloke just happened, unfortunately, to look exactly like someone she was afraid of for whatever reason. And to think she could have killed him. Joanna has got to explain to Kyle, it might make him feel better. It will certainly make her feel better.

  With hours to go before she needs to fetch the boys from school, Joanna makes a fresh coffee and sits back down at the table. She gazes into the good-looking record producer’s face – the accused, then swiftly acquitted Kyle Norris – then clicks on the icon to compose him a message. Happy with it, she presses send and hopes she hears something from him soon. Little point pretending she’s marking – these papers on the significance of Benjamin Britten’s chamber pieces will have to wait – her need to find Dean Fry is far more pressing as she now fully believes the mystery of her sister’s state of mind and subsequent death are connected to him.

  Despite her earlier trawl of the internet throwing up nothing new on Dean’s whereabouts, she wants to have another look. But aside from a series of unsettling images of Drake’s Pike and the hundred-acre section of dense and ancient woodland – which, as lush and green as it is in her memory, looks rather claustrophobic and sinister in the photographs the websites provide – there is little else. The village of Witchwood looks relatively unchanged, but she can’t find anything about the Boar’s Head. According to her searches, Witchwood’s only pub is the Royal Oak, and the name of the landlord isn’t one she knows.

  Sipping her coffee, it dawns on her the only chance she has of finding Dean – which she must do if she wants answers – is through his parents. She scribbles down the number of the pub, taps the biro against her teeth. The brewery probably renamed it in an effort to stamp out its past, but the
new owners might know where Liz and Ian moved to. It’s a start, what else has she got?

  ‘Erm, hello,’ she begins, unsure what to say next. ‘I don’t know whether you’ll be able to help, but I’m looking for a pub – the Boar’s Head,’ she says tentatively, her mobile pressed against her ear. ‘It used to be in Witchwood.’

  ‘Yeah, this used to be the Boar,’ the man on the other end of the line clarifies. ‘Changed it for some reason; donkey’s years before we took it on.’

  ‘Right.’ Joanna, hopeful. ‘You wouldn’t happen to know Liz and Ian Fry, would you?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Liz and Ian Fry?’ Joanna repeats. ‘They used to run it when it was the Boar.’

  ‘Liz and Ian Fry ? Nah, sorry, love, never heard of ’em.’

  ‘Really? Oh, well, it was a bit of a long shot.’

  ‘Hang on a min – can you hang on?’ the man asks.

  ‘Course.’ She nods frantically, hears the handset knock against the buttons on his shirt, a muffled muddle of voices in the background.

  ‘Me wife’s sayin’ she knows someone you could try. That he might know where they’ve gone.’ The man, re-joining her. ‘He’s been here for years.’

  ‘Brilliant.’ Joanna perks up. ‘You don’t happen to have his number, d’you?’

  ‘Yep, just a tick.’ More scrabbling, jumbled voices. Joanna holds her breath. ‘Here you go … got a pen?’

  ‘Yes,’ she says, jotting it down. ‘And the name?’

  ‘Petley. Frank Petley.’

  Summer 1990

  You’d hardly call it a path, just a scrape in the hip-high bracken and bramble, and a route through the woods the police and villagers obviously missed. Hot, the sisters slipped around inside their PVC sandals and barely exchanged a word. The pernicious breeze fidgeted with their hair as it gathered speed through the spooky, sun-starved interior that fell between the lofty trunks of trees. The police in DayGlo and dogs they had been anticipating were nowhere.

  ‘I told you, no one comes this way.’ Caroline was the first to speak. ‘It’s why I knew it was safe to hide the stuff.’

  A dead deer stopped them in their tracks. Caught midleap on a snag of barbed wire. They clapped their hands near its ears to see if they twitched, but the smell should have told them, buffeting them sideways when they moved up close. Holding their noses, they were fascinated and repelled in equal measure. Portions of dead flesh moved as if still alive, and they couldn’t tear their eyes away from the pulsating shroud of fat, white maggots. Death. This was what it looked like, they told themselves, as the buzz of bluebottles took off and landed around them. Disgust at the idea one could accidentally touch them was enough to have them sprinting away.

  ‘Stop, stop,’ Joanna yelled, out of puff. Slowing to a walk and replacing the stench of dead deer with the smell of the heat-packed ground, they tipped their heads to the ragged crowns of trees that were already rusted with autumn. Veering off to the left, weaving through slender birch saplings and more bracken, they were thrust into an unexpected clearing on their approach to the lake. Into the unnerving silence dropped the cold rippling song of a curlew, its ghostliness curling over them like smoke.

  ‘Ellie brought us this way,’ Joanna chirruped. ‘We found that abandoned picnic over there, remember?’ And she pointed beyond the reeds and scrub rustling in the wind, to the log under its canopy of weeping willow.

  ‘I already knew about this place.’ Caroline, excessively proud.

  ‘When? You never told me.’

  ‘You don’t know everything I do.’ A sly smile. ‘I’ve got lots of secrets.’

  Sudden squelching, the ground beneath them waterlogged, they ripped through rare marshmallow growing in secret pockets of warm, the sodden stretch of shoreline steaming through the gaps in their sandals. This was another country entirely: enigmatic, weather-beaten and eerie; a place that nosed out into Drake’s Pike and its low-lying watery flatness. The girls loved it here, not that either voiced it – it seemed wrong to be enjoying themselves without Ellie chattering alongside.

  Batting away midges, they reached the edge of the lake and smelled its slightly stagnant breath. Their eyes grazed the opposite shore, the distant rise of ripe green pastures dotted with sheep.

  ‘What’s that?’ Joanna pointed at something in the rushes. ‘C-Carrie! Carrie! ’ she shrieked, darting away – and with pigtails swinging, held her find above her head.

  Recognising it, Caroline was beside her in an instant, and they stared, bewildered, at the muddy pink leather roller skate oscillating from its multi-coloured lace.

  ‘It’s Ellie’s, isn’t it?’ Joanna’s eyes like two blue pools.

  ‘The police found the other one in the woods on Sunday.’ Caroline was crying too. ‘I heard them telling Dora about it.’

  ‘What ?’ Joanna squawked, scrubbing away tears; whatever doubts she had dying in her mouth.

  ‘I didn’t want to frighten you,’ Caroline replied to her sister’s unasked question. ‘I knew it looked bad – we both know there’s no way she’d have left them behind. But I just kept hoping she’d turn up.’

  A robin redbreast balanced on a rotten stump of fence post, an anguished song in its throat, seized Caroline’s attention. She pointed it out to Joanna, and they waited until the bird wheeled away, their gazes trailing its flight across the winking, blinking sheet of sun-kissed water.

  Then they saw her.

  A dark shape out on the lake, beyond the spread of grasses and reeds.

  Ellie Fry.

  Floating on her back. Her half-submerged body bobbing stiff as driftwood, her eyes staring blindly at a ruinous sky. Her hands, balanced on the skin of the lake, looked as tender as the upturned heads of chrysanthemums. Saved from the greedy current by the noose of weeds snared about her neck – gilded in sunlight and transformed into silky blue-green threads – they had speared her to something below the waterline. Edging closer, to the lip of the shore, they leant out, saw between her legs, under her arms, the upsetting brown froth where dead water had gathered.

  Ellie’s pink roller skate: a pendulum between them in the swaying seconds neither could move. Equally reluctant to accept what their eyes showed them, the calmness held in the jaws of the unfolding horror made it difficult to breathe. Without speaking, they dropped the roller skate and lunged forward, ignoring the razor-sharp spines of rushes, to break through the lake’s glassy sheen, the vividly cold water cutting their denim-clad legs off from the world at the knees. Shaking with shock, their limbs wouldn’t work, and they cursed their arms for not being long enough. Quickly realising they were out of their depth, that Ellie was too far out and they couldn’t reach her, Caroline, mind spinning, had a moment of clarity. She stepped free of the lake and dragged the longest stick she could find to the shore’s edge. Working together, sloshing through chest-high water, they risked everything to reach their friend.

  ‘We’ve got to do something.’ Caroline, her eyes yanked wide in desperation. ‘We’re going to lose her to the current otherwise.’ She gripped what little remained of Ellie’s pink-and-white striped skater dress.

  ‘Into the boat.’ Joanna, teeth chattering wildly. ‘Get her into the boat.’

  Neither stopped to consider whether they had the strength to lift her. Wading through the secret peace below their waists – a dark green world knitted with the skeins of weeds – they hauled Ellie’s surprisingly heavy body over the sides of the boat and rolled her over. She lay with her wet hair fallen back and her lips parted as if for a kiss, and the sight of her reminded them of Millais’ pale, floating Ophelia on Dora’s landing. The marbling on Ellie’s skin was shocking, and with all suntan washed from her face, her only colour was a smattering of freckles across her nose.

  Caroline closed the purplish lids over the eyes, but there was nothing she could do about the distressing way Ellie’s lips were parted so trustingly. Both of them set about arranging her weed-slippery hair, tidying it with wet fingers, positio
ning what remained of her party dress to cover the worst of her cut and broken body. Wanting, without the need to communicate why, to make her as neat as they could; concerned how she would look when the others came to find her.

  ‘Why’s she so cold?’ Joanna, exchanging fretful glances with her sister, didn’t understand. ‘Take your cardigan off, Carrie – we’ll give it to her to make her warm.’

  Caroline did. And the two of them covered Ellie with it. Tucking her in carefully, softly; worried about disturbing her while at the same time half expecting her to wake up, to laugh, and tell them it was all a silly joke.

  Staring again at the shocking sight of that cold blue marbling on Ellie’s legs and arms, they waited a moment, hands clasped behind their backs in a way that suggested they couldn’t trust themselves not to keep touching her. Watched by the swans that knew to stay away: creatures who understood more than anyone what had gone on here, they drifted unperturbed as white-sailed galleons on the horizon. And shifting their attention to them for a moment, the girls felt their heart rates slow. Caroline told herself she wasn’t crying, that it was only the breeze, always the breeze, and tilted her nose to the heavens that in the last few minutes had darkened into a weight of purple cloud. If the world turned, neither was aware of it; their breathing, muffled as a ghost’s, seemed to test the emptiness. Kicking free of the water, Caroline turned to help Joanna out. Together they stood amid the occasional birdsong and the summer slap where lake met bank, the air brittle with thunder.