A Place to Lie

by Rebecca Griffiths

  She was aware Gordon gave a statement to the police, that he said he’d been with her all day Saturday, the two of them trimming the beech hedge around her garden. And what choice was there, but to give him an alibi? She could hardly admit to not coming home until mid-afternoon herself, and finding his car missing from the drive. It would have meant disclosing where she’d been all morning, and, more importantly, who it was she’d been with. It wasn’t Gordon’s fault he’d mixed up the days, and Lillian couldn’t imagine it would matter either way if in actual fact it had been the previous day, the Friday, when he’d been wielding his father’s electric shears.

  Head down in her piano stool, rummaging through years’ worth of sheet music, nothing suited her mood. And what was her mood? Now life, with Gordon gone, and her husband buried, could go back to normal. What was normal? She prodded the word. How could things ever be normal, with the stain of that poor, defenceless child’s murder polluting the landscape?

  Closing the lid over her music, she stood looking out through the windows at her precious garden, pressed her organist’s fingers against her lips for the earthy smell that wasn’t there. Her vegetable patch – the rows of lettuces in their loamy beds, the blush of tomatoes in their pots against the south-facing wall – was rotten from the rain. Even the sprays of beautiful yellow roses she spent the season nurturing into a perfect arch were tinged with brown and decaying on their thorny stems.

  ‘I don’t know how you can bear it.’ Caroline took a sidelong snipe at her roller-skating sister. ‘It’s like wearing a dead man’s shoes.’

  ‘Leave me alone.’ Joanna, reddening, saw Frank Petley in his washed-to-beige shop coat, watching them. ‘Just shove off – you’re always being horrible to me.’

  Frank didn’t speak, didn’t move; but his eyes, sharp as daggers, were busy from the shadows. And, finished gobbling down Caroline, he turned his attention to Joanna.

  ‘Be like that then, see if I care,’ Caroline shouted before running ahead. Disregarding Dora’s instruction to stay together , she dipped inside the shop in time to catch the whiplash of conversation going on at the till.

  Liz tipped the mug of tea and round of buttered toast Ian made her into the sink and sat down on a hard kitchen chair. With heavy thoughts and no radio to distract her, she poured a generous shot of Smirnoff from the litre bottle she’d taken from the bar. Her fourth this morning and because she was no longer bothering with ice and lemon, it was as easy as running the tap. Gulping it down in one, she stared at a crack in the glaze of the mug and, thinking it was a hair, dropped her fingers inside to try and tease it out. She gave up, her gaze drifting out through the open kitchen door with its shabby fly screen and into the soggy garden beyond. There was an unexpected beauty in the coloured plastic strands that, made to dance by the wind, frolicked in a way her daughter’s hair used to do when free of its bunches.

  It seemed to Liz as if the roof of the world had been bolted down over the tops of the trees. Lost to the overhanging mist, everything waterlogged, the wooden half-barrels of pansies she planted with Ellie in the spring were ruined. She picked up her guitar, strummed a few chords into the light leaking into the kitchen. Automatically, absentmindedly, forgetting for a moment her child had gone, Liz sang the song she’d been teaching her ‘ … yellow bird, up high in banana tree … ’ and caught Ellie’s sweet little voice from somewhere behind her. Jerking her head to it, expecting to find her daughter standing there, it was Ian she saw. His bald head, shiny with rainwater, bobbing in through the fly screen.

  ‘You seen the damage?’ he complained, dripping water on to the tiles. Seeing the half-empty vodka bottle on the draining board, there was no need to ask if Liz had eaten the breakfast he’d made her.

  She saw his expression slide. At his wits’ end, and Liz could tell he was blaming himself for not being able to help her; that the ripe, new grief she was dragging around had aged her beyond recognition.

  ‘I’ve never seen anything like it,’ he told her, but she wasn’t really listening. ‘Feathers, blood – you know the fucking thing’s nearly killed the lot?’

  Already forgotten, the news she’d been given first thing: her precious poultry massacred in the night by Mr Fox. With a limp shake of her head, Liz propped the guitar against the fridge.

  ‘I’m glad Ellie’s not here to see it.’ A scrape of her chair, and she stood up. Unsteady on her feet, she knew Ian had seen it, in the same way she knew that the change in her was frightening him. But with nothing beyond the life of her now dead daughter, she couldn’t help it, she didn’t have the will to care. Engulfed in memories: of Ellie learning to swap her baby sounds for the vocabulary she gave her, until they too became her words; how she began walking, falling, bumping against the world she had stared into shape from her cradle. And to survive all that, only to be taken before her journey had properly begun – it surpassed cruelty. It was as if Ellie’s whole life, small as it was, had been nothing more than a countdown to now – her fate poised like a dagger over her from the moment of her birth.

  Without looking at her husband, Liz shuffled to where she kept her rubber boots by the door, stuffed her bare feet down inside them. A brief look at Ellie’s little red ones, lined up perfectly neat next to hers in a way she’d been taught. Liz bit down hard on her knuckles.

  ‘It took them all, then, did it?’ she asked, welling up with hot, painful tears.

  ‘Oh, love, I’m so sorry.’ Ian gathered her in his arms, pressed his heartbeat to hers. Liz resisted the urge to pull away; hating to be touched, hating everything that forced her to acknowledge she was alive and her daughter wasn’t. She gritted her teeth, aware of little more than the wind bubbling like a pan of hot water over his shoulder.

  ‘It left a few chickens, most of the geese; didn’t touch the cockerel.’ Ian stroked her hair in a way he’d once done to Ellie’s. ‘Don’t concern yourself, love. Me and Dean will see to it.’

  ‘Dean? ’ she screeched and tried to pull away. ‘You keep that bastard away from me, d’you hear?’

  Ian, close to tears himself, held on to her; forced her to listen to what he had to say. ‘He didn’t do anything, Lizzy … Come on, darling; you know he loved Ellie as much as we did.’

  ‘Do I?’

  Ripping away from him, she charged into the dripping garden with no idea which direction to go in. Aiming automatically for her chicken coops, vodka fogging her senses, she stopped in time, realising she couldn’t cope with the carnage, and so veered off in the opposite direction: drawn by the whoosh, whoosh sound of plastic wheels on wet tarmac coming from the front of the pub.

  A sound that made her insides flip over.

  Her child was back.

  ‘Ellie?’ she croaked, as Ellie was always her first thought. ‘Ellie, is that you, sweetheart?’ A swell of hope as cold rain slid down inside her collar. She rushed into the road without looking. Only to find this wasn’t her Ellie. This was Joanna Jameson on a pair of her daughter’s old skates.

  ‘Wow,’ Liz mouthed, trying to appear normal, loath to frighten the child. ‘You’re getting good on those.’ Her grief, a knot of thorns beneath her breastbone, made it hard to breathe.

  Joanna skated towards her and, without a word, slipped her soft little hand into Liz’s and saw both her newly bitten nails and how the pearly buttons on her pea-green cardigan – a needle-defying creation of bobbles and loops – had been done up all wrong.

  Neither spoke. Until eventually Liz dipped her head to smell Joanna’s hair. Eyes closed, breathing deeply, befuddled by sorrow.

  ‘Like new-baked bread,’ she whispered, her heart breaking. ‘Ever since you were a baby.’

  Unaware of the villagers that stepped out of their houses to mill about the waterlogged green; villagers who watched the spectacle from afar, afraid to come too close, fearing this woman’s heartache could be contagious.

  ‘Dreadful weather, isn’t it?’

  ‘Awful.’ A well-muscled woman who was a regular of Fra
nk and Tilly Petley’s rubbed her arms through crinkly waterproofs.

  ‘It’s not let up since they found Ellie,’ another said.

  ‘They’re dredging Drake’s Pike, you know.’

  ‘Are they? Whatever for?’

  ‘The murder weapon. Apparently it’s a knife of some kind.’

  ‘Dear me, that’s horrendous,’ one of them gasped, shoulder-deep in the freezer wrestling with a leg of lamb. ‘Poor Liz and Ian.’

  ‘Investigations are getting nowhere fast.’ A sigh. ‘I heard they had Ian in for questioning again, poor bugger. As if he weren’t suffering enough.’

  ‘It’s what they do with family, though, isn’t it? They always suspect them closest to home.’

  ‘But they can’t think it’s him, surely? The man doted on her.’

  ‘Course they don’t, they’re just doing their job.’

  ‘A job that’s being made near on impossible. You know they’re saying the pathologist can’t confirm when Ellie died?’

  ‘Why not? She went missing on her birthday, didn’t she?’

  ‘Yes, but with her not being found until Tuesday, they can’t be sure.’

  ‘Aren’t there tests they can do?’

  ‘Yes, but they’re being hampered by the fact she’d been submerged in cold water.’

  ‘A right Miss Marple, you are. How come you know so much about it?’

  ‘She reads them crime novels, don’t she?’ The woman in the crinkly waterproofs threw her theory into the ring.

  ‘I do, as a matter of fact, and yes, I’ve learnt a lot.’ The voice indignant. ‘And I know the lake would have cooled her body down … preserved her, I suppose. So, what I’m saying is there’s no way of telling if she was killed hours before she went into the water or immediately.’

  ‘This is terrible.’

  ‘Not for the murderer,’ someone said gloomily. ‘I’d say it’s pretty lucky for them.’

  ‘How d’you mean?’

  ‘Think about it – the murderer … well, everyone … they’ve all got alibis now, haven’t they?’

  ‘You’re right. What’s the point of asking people where they were, if they can’t pinpoint a time?’

  ‘Didn’t stop them questioning my Jim – they made him account for every minute between Saturday morning and Tuesday.’ A groan from her listeners. ‘Which as you can imagine was near-on impossible.’

  ‘They had Frank in, too,’ Tilly volunteered. ‘Course, I could vouch for him when he was in the shop, but he went off with his camera sometime Saturday morning, taking pictures of the woods like he does.’ A shrug.

  ‘Is Frank a suspect then?’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous.’ Tilly, outraged.

  ‘Took Dean down the station too.’

  ‘Yeah? Well, he’s a different kettle of fish altogether.’

  ‘Big trouble, him,’ someone else piped up.

  ‘Bound to’ve had something to do with it.’

  ‘Didn’t Liz say that Dora’s niece – you know, the older one – saw Ellie and Dean fighting?’

  ‘Yes, the morning of her birthday. They’re saying he was the last person to see Ellie alive.’

  Another unified groan.

  ‘Says in the books I read, the last person to see them alive is the murderer.’

  ‘It doesn’t bear thinking about … a monster like him living among us.’

  ‘I admit it doesn’t look good for the lad, but you can’t act like judge and jury.’ A single voice of reason. ‘Dean might not have done anything wrong.’

  ‘Anything wrong? He’s been trouble since he got here. Drugs … riding around on his bike all hours. And don’t forget what the girl said she saw,’ Tilly is keen to remind them. ‘She said Dean was being really violent with Ellie, and that he made her cry.’

  ‘She said she saw him go off after Ellie on his motorbike too, I heard,’ another added.

  ‘Down to Drake’s Pike.’

  A united shiver.

  ‘Yes, all right, but I’m just saying, we shouldn’t jump to conclusions. The police should get on to that Gordon Hooper, too. I always thought how weird he was with Ellie.’

  ‘You’re right – playing with her like that at his father’s funeral?’

  ‘Shocking.’

  ‘And he scarpered back to Italy pretty sharpish, didn’t he? Why would you do that if you weren’t guilty of something?’

  ‘Lillian told me he’s a bit screwed up – that Derek refused to let Gordon grieve for his little sister, then sent him away to that horrible school.’

  ‘They’ve got excuses for everything nowadays.’ Another, her eyes sour as apple pips.

  ‘Gordon was getting rather attached to Dora’s niece too, I heard.’

  ‘Which one?’

  ‘The younger one.’

  ‘Oooh, I don’t like the sound of that. Such a sweet little thing.’

  At the ring of the shop bell, they sprang apart and swivelled on their heels to receive it.

  ‘Oh, hello, poppet.’ Tilly Petley was the one to greet her, and Caroline could see even she’d been forced to cover up on account of the unexpected chill. ‘How’re you feeling? It must have been the most terrible shock finding Ellie like that.’

  ‘I’m okay, I suppose.’ Caroline rustled inside her cagoule, reluctant to move away from the shelf of women’s magazines.

  ‘You’re such a brave girl. Your sister too, is she all right? She was with you, wasn’t she?’ another asked tentatively.

  ‘Yes, she’s okay. We’re both doing as well as can be expected.’ Caroline doled out the platitudes she’d heard Dora giving their mother, Imogen, on the telephone the night before.

  ‘Your auntie’s not still letting you out on your own, is she?’ A tweed-bottomed pensioner juddered for dramatic effect. ‘I’ve told my Shirley she’s not to let her two out unaccompanied.’

  ‘You’re right, Phyllis,’ another nodded. ‘There’s a child killer on the loose, it’s not safe for you littluns. I’m not letting mine out of my sight.’

  ‘You told the police about those dreadful things you saw Dean doing to Ellie?’ Tilly asked, brimming with gentle concern.

  Caroline shook her head and chewed on a fingernail; she’d been hoping the claims she made about Dean out of anger and spite would have been forgotten by now. ‘They’ve been too busy looking for Ellie.’

  ‘I think you should make a proper statement, tell them exactly what you saw. It might help with the investigation.’ Tilly pushed a little more.

  ‘What does your auntie say?’ someone else asked.

  ‘I haven’t told her yet.’ Finding herself the focus of attention in the same way she’d been in the pub when she first dropped the bombshell about Dean, buoyed Caroline along. She liked being listened to and taken seriously; it made the dwindling idea Dean needed punishing for the hurt he caused her grow a fresh set of wings.

  ‘I think Tilly’s right,’ another chirruped. ‘You’ve got to tell the police, love. Even if Liz and Ian have told them what you saw, they’re going to need to hear it direct from you, rather than second-hand. And the sooner the better.’

  ‘Look,’ Tilly proposed, sensing Caroline’s reluctance, ‘if you don’t want to talk to the police – and I can understand it would be daunting talking to strangers – the vicar’s a kind man, and you like him, don’t you? Why not tell him what happened? He could talk to the police on your behalf, then.’

  ‘Good idea. He’ll know what to do,’ someone else agreed.

  ‘Oh, he’s marvellous, isn’t he? Involved from the off – he’s led all the police searches.’ The voice was venerating. ‘He’s definitely got the ear of the police, they’ll be sure to listen to him.’

  ‘You’ll tell him what you told Liz and Ian about what Dean did to Ellie, won’t you, love?’ Tilly, seemingly the keenest of them all to push Caroline in this particular direction.

  ‘Yes, if you think I should?’ Being made to feel this important gave Caroline all the impetus
she needed.

  ‘Eh-up.’ Frank Petley, unexpectedly among them, fiddled with the protruding snout of his Canon zoom-lens that hung from a strap around his neck. ‘What’s goin’ on ’ere, then?’ he demanded in his pungent East Riding accent.

  At the sight of the shopkeeper slipping between such words as police and vicar , Caroline broke through the surface of her thoughts. This man, she realised, was going to want to know what she saw Dean doing too, but she had a more pressing engagement and couldn’t waste any more time. It was what these women wanted, she had their permission; Dora would have to go without her chocolate fix. And in her dash to get away, nearly toppling a stack of three-for-two toilet tissue, she stepped outside just as Liz Fry’s cockerel crowed its warning.

  Then it was Liz she was looking at. Sitting beside Joanna on the kerb in the rain. The change in her was frightening; she used to look like the women in films, but now she was shrinking inside her clothes, her pretty face ravaged by grief.

  ‘Liz, Liz … come on, love, you can’t sit there.’ Tilly, following on behind. ‘This one’s been such a brave girl, haven’t you, love?’ she said, and pressed a Curly Wurly as some kind of incentive into Caroline’s damp hand. ‘You get your sister safely back to Pillowell, then go and tell the vicar everything you saw Dean doing to Ellie – okay ?’ she murmured into Caroline’s hair. ‘Say we sent you, and that he’s got to go to the police.’ Then, returning her attention to Liz, ‘Come on, pet,’ she fussed, gathering her in her arms. ‘Let’s get you in the dry, shall we?’

  ‘That Caroline kid’s here to see you.’ Amy, pivoting in socked feet on the threshold of the rectory’s spacious living room, waited for her father to look up from his Telegraph . He didn’t, and she needed to tell him again. ‘Dad?’ A grunt from behind the photographed face of Margaret Thatcher, strangled in a noose of pearls. ‘That Caroline girl’s here.’