A Place to Lie

by Rebecca Griffiths

  ‘I think you’re going to have to accept that whatever was going on in your sister’s mind, be it through illness or guilt, you’re not going to solve it – I’d just let it go. I’ve had a bad feeling from the moment you told me you were going to do some digging around,’ Mrs Hooper warns. ‘I know what happened to Carrie was an accident, but it still came from her fixation with Dean and the trauma of Ellie’s death. So please leave it alone, Jo – nothing good will come of it, trust me.’

  Present Day

  Out in the wet lane, the lullaby coo of a woodpigeon drops into the torpid afternoon. Calling to her dog, Joanna chews over her conversation with Mrs Hooper as she follows the bow in the tarmac on the final approach to Pillowell Cottage. Despite the fervent warning she’s been given, she decides to stick to her original plan and go to Weybridge on Monday to find Dean. She’s got to talk to him, it’s the only way she’ll ever have any peace. Perhaps it will help him too. Because if Caroline did tell lies about him, however Mrs Hooper would like to dampen them down, they probably ruined his life.

  Hang on a minute. What are those? Her concentration shifts to a set of muddy grooves on Pillowell’s boggy grass verge. Tyre marks. Fresh. They weren’t there when she left the cottage this morning.

  Mike ? Her first thought, and indomitably her only thought.

  Is he here already – did he manage to slip away from work early? But where are the boys? Why can’t she hear them playing?

  Her heart soaring, then plummeting. She scans the lane, the driveway. The only vehicle is her Audi and no sign of Mike’s SUV. So why is the gate swinging? She swears she didn’t leave it like that.

  Brisk along the garden path, fishing for keys but there’s no need – the kitchen door is already open. Testing the handle and feeling its rattle, the lock, when she examines it, is slack to the door frame. Has it always been like this? Maybe she did it when she went out earlier, the thing’s flimsy enough. She prods the rotten wood, the exposed screws, tells herself how little it would take to dislodge it.

  ‘Mike?’ she calls through her escalating anxiety, pressing the heel of her hand to the metal casing in an attempt to reconnect the lock to the door frame. But with nothing to fix it against, it wobbles loose again.

  ‘Freddie, love? Ethan?’ she pleads with the perpetual gloaming of the hallway, up the stairs.

  But nobody’s here. The cottage is empty. Buttons is going barmy: nose to the floor, sniffing, tail wagging; he’s not imagining things. And neither is she. She follows her dog into the drab front room and watches a surge of spring sunshine slap the walls papered dark with rambling strawberries and thieving thrushes. Flaking at the corners and faded into gridlines where paintings used to hang. Her eyes are drawn upwards, to the dish of damp where rainwater collects under the missing tiles.

  Someone’s been in here. Minutes ago. She can smell their cigarette smoke. What did they want? There’s precious little to steal. Apart from essential pieces of furniture, there’s nothing of value in the cottage any more. Her mind scurries to the spent fag butts she saw by the gate last night, and panic flaps inside her: a butterfly caught in a jar.

  Her thoughts are chasing themselves like snapping dogs. Is she in danger … should she phone the police? She would if there was something to call them on. She supposes she could run back to Mrs Hooper’s and telephone from there. But that would mean worrying Mrs Hooper. And anyway, whoever they were – village kids, most probably, using it as a den, the place has been empty for years – they’ve gone now, and Mike will be here in a few hours. It would be silly to make a fuss.

  With a sudden need to rid the cottage of its musty atmosphere and dank root smell, Joanna casts the French doors wide on their corroded hinges, breathes in the ramshackle garden. The chandelier tinkles overhead and she watches the wind nudge a bank of beech trees, making the brown of their leaves rustle like paper. Fortifying the doors again, she returns to the kitchen to pour herself a large glass of Chablis from the fridge. She’ll have the white wine as it’s lunchtime, deciding to save the red for when Mike arrives. She swallows a large mouthful to steady her nerves. I’ve been requiring rather a lot of ameliorating since arriving in Witchwood , she thinks, downing more.

  First things first, she must fix the door. A quick hunt, and she locates a screwdriver in a box of rusted tools in the cupboard in the hall. It’s fiddly and takes her a while, but it’s not a bad job; it will hold until Mike comes and can take a look. The wine takes the edge off her anxieties a little, but she knows she must plug the unnerving silence if she’s to keep her imagination in check. With no radio or television, Joanna decides one of Dora’s old LPs will have to do. Dusting off the record player, she raises the lid and drops the stylus into the first groove of Beethoven’s ‘Violin Concerto’ waiting ready on the turntable. A memory of Dora heaves into view. Not of here, but a time they met for lunch in Bayswater, a year or so before she died. Their conversation unusually candid and emotional. Her great-aunt’s hand in its soft leather glove, gripping Joanna’s sleeve as she openly evaluated the lives she might have lived, mourned the men she might have married, the houses she might have inhabited, the children she might have filled them with, that for reasons unknown never materialised. It was a sadness, Joanna thought, not unsympathetically, that Dora had especially honed. Her lack of family provided her with a legitimate excuse to compensate for her loss by pandering to her every whim.

  The sweet surge of strings along with another gulp of Chablis allows Joanna to forget how acutely alone she is. Increasing the volume, she is suddenly hungry, and sets a pan of water to boil on the cooker. Turning the hob down, she drops in two eggs and watches them knock together in the bubbling water. Slicing a couple of rounds from a loaf with a rust-speckled bread knife, she is buttering them and feeding half to the dog when a goldfinch flies down at the glass to peck at its reflection. She stands up to eat, in a way she would never allow her boys to do, and it doesn’t take long to finish her soft-boiled eggs. Wiping their innards clean with the last of the crust, she turns the empty shells upside down in their egg cups. A trick she learnt when little that’s become a habit now she is all grown up. Anxiously checking her wristwatch, guessing how far away Mike and her boys might be, Joanna tries not to dwell on the chilling fact she is completely cut off from civilisation, without mobile or landline, and busies herself with preparing what will be, after precisely three hours in a medium-hot oven, a tasty meal for her family. But a squeeze of apprehension as the tail of afternoon light gutters into a second night has her returning to the fridge every now and again to top up her wine glass.

  She lights the fire and is pleased with how it instantly improves the feel of the place. Homely and snug, she relaxes a little. But before getting too comfortable, and while there is still a sliver of light in the sky, she nips to the car for the Bonios she promised Buttons. Unlocking the Audi and opening the boot, she reaches inside and sees the suitcase Liz gave her to pass on to Dean. Curiosity gets the better of her, and she brings it, and the dog biscuits, inside the cottage.

  After securing the lock on the kitchen door as best she can, she carries the aroma of simmering casserole back into the living room along with her wine and the old-fashioned suitcase. Opting for the elegant chaise longue – an object of fascination to her as a child – she kicks off her boots and snuggles down on the raspberry-pink upholstery that, although a tad faded, is otherwise in mint condition.

  Against the backdrop of Beethoven and a somniferous fire, wine at her elbow, Joanna drags the suitcase into her lap and releases the antiquated spring clips. The lid bounces open, emitting a puff of sweet mustiness and revealing a treasure trove of someone else’s memories. The first things she uncovers are a pair of cute little Staffordshire china dogs, then a mother-of-pearl hairbrush and mirror set – not unlike the ones that once adorned her own mother’s dressing table in Camden. A pocket-sized Bible bound in soft white leather, a tapestry-cased manicure set, and a parcel of tissue paper, yellowed and brittle
with age. It crackles in her hands, and unfurling it reveals a beautiful green silk blouse with little half-moon sweat marks under the arms. Sifting through the remaining items, Joanna lands on something bulky and buried deep in the lining. She pushes a hand inside and tugs out an old red-and-white striped Kwik Save carrier bag. Interesting, she thinks, taking a sip of wine before unravelling the hefty stack of photographs it contains. The first section is the Polaroids from the Wall of Shame at the pub. The misbehaving punters Caroline said Dean liked to photograph. A small smile of remembrance curves her lips as she skims through drunken antics frozen in time, until it is she who freezes.

  A Polaroid of Ellie.

  Almost identical to the one she remembers them finding in the Book of the Dead .

  Laced into roller skates, in bright pink legwarmers, absorbed in her own little world, Ellie is clearly unaware she’s being photographed. Another of her summertime friend slides under Joanna’s fingers, then another, and another, until she reaches the last of the Polaroids and moves on to a seemingly random bundle of regular five-by-seven prints. Again, of Ellie, mostly taken from within heavy foliage, they are over-intimate, intrusive and have a disturbing voyeuristic feel. Joanna can tell Ellie is totally oblivious of the camera in all of them, and that her private space has been violated. Several photographs slip to the floor. Among them, another two Polaroids. Reaching sideways to retrieve them, Joanna finds she is looking at a picture of Caroline aged thirteen. Snapped only days before the two of them were despatched back to London, going by the wet weather gear and her sister’s newly cut fringe. In it, Caroline appears to be as ignorant of the photographer as Ellie was in hers.

  She thinks again of the Polaroid they found of Ellie days before she was killed. Are these photographs linked? Both are of little girls, both – albeit years apart – suffered violent deaths?

  The next few are of Joanna: podgy, pretty, taken throughout her two-month stay with Dora that summer; pictures she knows she didn’t pose for. There are others of Joanna, Caroline and Ellie together. Knapsacks strapped to their backs, journeying through the woods and playing by the water. The stretch of lake where Ellie’s body was found.

  This is a sinister collection. She shudders. A collection of little girls. Innocent in their singularity, and why they would have raised no alarm in whoever was paid to develop the regular prints. But together they project quite a different mood. Something about them reminds her of a collection of butterflies she saw as a little girl on a school trip to the Natural History Museum. An experience that was deeply affecting. Those beautiful creatures, taken against their will, and pinned to board, put under glass. She thought then, what kind of mind would want to steal such innocence and keep it for their own private pleasure? Sickened, she feels the same way now about these.

  The photographs that follow upset her further. Pretty little girls in thin summer clothes, visitors to Witchwood with their families, snapped without their consent. Stolen. Joanna speeds through, half-recognising children from the village, all little girls, and again unaware of the prying camera lens.

  A chill settles over her. What do they mean? Did Dean take them? There’s another of Caroline in her yellow cagoule and rubber boots, this time being spied on from above. Then finally, four or five Polaroids of a child who is curiously familiar, not that Joanna can immediately recall where from. Pigtails of light brown hair, her eyes clear as a swimming pool, playing with a skipping rope. Then she remembers. Gasps. Caroline’s scrapbook. The headlines and articles her sister had, for whatever reason, cut from the tabloids. Police appeals for a missing eight-year-old girl believed to have been abducted from her home in Cinderglade. Freya. Freya what? Joanna can’t remember. But she can remember Liz telling her about it when they fed the chickens in her garden. She hadn’t made the connection at the time, but she’s making it now. With a grave sense of foreboding as Yehudi Menuhin brings things to a close, Joanna folds the Polaroids and photographs away in their carrier bag. She notices a tremble in her hands and, tainted by what she’s seen, places the open suitcase on the floor beside her.

  Time passes. No sound other than the faint ticking of flames in the hearth, the odd whimper from the dreaming Buttons, his head heavy on her feet. She loses herself completely in the mystery of who killed Ellie Fry. Something that up to now has been an amorphous shape floating on the edge of her vision; a permanent reminder of the injustices in life, as her killer was never caught. But finding these photographs, the shape is becoming a tangible thing, and her fear that she may just have solved the mystery is picking up speed as she hands herself over to the tug of sleep.

  Blackness. Joanna wakes with a jolt to it. Opening her eyes, she blinks, blind and disorientated, conscious of her breath bouncing back to her against the fabric of night. Her mouth is stale from sleep and she can’t move; her limbs beneath her fleece and jeans too stiff with cold. She must have been asleep for hours, as the room is chilly and the fire’s gone out. But Buttons is busy, gnawing on his toy bone; the hard yellow rubber glowing in the dark is easily as long as a man’s humerus and just as heavy.

  She is struggling to orientate herself when the dark is abruptly exchanged for the glare of car headlamps. Bursting in on her: startling, dazzling; saturating the room from floor to ceiling. Then the unmistakable thud of a car door.

  Mike. At last. Joanna hurriedly gathers herself, switches on a lamp, and casts Pillowell in a warm pink glow.

  A quick check of her face in Dora’s oval mirror in the hall, and she skips through to the kitchen in her socks, Buttons trotting alongside with his jolly yellow bone.

  ‘Hang on, love – I’m coming,’ she calls.

  The back door crashes open: violent, splitting the silence.

  ‘Boys!’ She flings her arms wide to embrace her family, but her joy is throttled in her throat.

  This isn’t Mike. Or Freddie. Or Ethan. The person blocking her way is someone else entirely. She gapes in shocked disbelief at his round, bare face; the flat of his eye, unreadable beneath the rainbow-coloured beany hat. Older and decidedly heavier, but she recognises him – and seeing him through adult eyes, his malevolence, his menace, she knows she’s in trouble.

  ‘I think you’ve got something that belongs to me.’ He barges inside, slamming the door with such force it makes the glass rattle. ‘And I want it back.’ His demand, as he leans his weight against the only means of escape, trapping her inside.

  Summer 1990

  The village woke to the tolling of church bells through the perpetual drizzle. On and on, the noise was enough for Liz – who’d begun biting her nails after the police called with news that Ellie had been found by the Jameson sisters – to clamp her hands to her ears. And in the bleakness of dawn – a time when most will die and most are born – she sat amid shadows as indelible as ink stains, looked truth in the eye and squinted. These bells were for her child, her child who got up on her birthday, full of life and love and light, but never went to bed again.

  Liz twisted round to look at her own bed, a place that, however exhausted, she couldn’t return to either. Despite the copious amount of alcohol she needed to get her through the day, to lie down alongside her husband was out of the question. The vast white cotton sheet was a barren wasteland over which she hadn’t the strength to traverse. If she did sleep, it was only for snatched half hours, upright in her wingback armchair. Swaddled in its padded embrace, it was a place where less than a decade ago, she had nursed her precious daughter through the slow turn of night-time hours.

  Liz watched the involuntary rise and fall of her husband’s body beneath the duvet. How was it that he could sleep when her mind wouldn’t leave her alone? As persistent as the rain, it offered up a dizzying array of alternatives: if she hadn’t done this or hadn’t done that, then her child would still be here and in less than three hours Ellie’s coffin wouldn’t be lowered into the hole made ready for it in St Oswald’s sheep-scattered churchyard.

  Later, perched on the unmade bed, Liz touche
d the various black items she’d fished from her wardrobe, unable to decide what to wear. Then she began to cry. ‘What does it matter?’ she wailed, loud enough for Ian to step out of the shower to check on her. ‘What would Ellie care?’

  Frightened of his wife’s grief, Ian dipped back inside the en-suite and waited for her to calm down. At a loss to know what to do, shaky and jumpy, he nicked himself shaving, once, then several times more. He swore as he blotted his cheeks with toilet paper and unsteady hands, and thought, staring into his face, if this was what a man going to his execution would look like, and supposed it was. He thought of his beautiful wife, drastically altered in the space of a few short weeks and, although only yards away in the adjacent bedroom, felt as removed from her as he did from the dark side of the moon.

  Liz’s drinking was gathering pace. He noticed the new four-litre bottle of Smirnoff he replaced on the optic the day before yesterday was already a quarter empty, and not because they’d been busy. Apart from the hordes of journalists, who ordered bugger all, people were staying away; it was another thing he worried about – they would lose the pub if things didn’t pick up soon. Not that he could get Liz to take an interest – her world had stopped turning, and his inability to pull her back was a drastic failure.

  ‘How’s Liz?’ someone asked as they paid for the only round of drinks he served all night. ‘Not good,’ he said, his already grooved forehead furrowing deeper. Wandering round in a daze himself since it happened, with nothing to look forward to and profits sliding, Ian knew things would never be right again.

  Joanna and Caroline dressed in silence. They were remembering the day of their father’s funeral. Their parents’ bed, heaped with coats, and them refusing to go downstairs to show their faces.