Forgotten Voices

by Jane A. Adams

  Mac nodded. ‘It demonstrates a certain determination,’ he commented.

  ‘It demonstrates character,’ Trent said flatly. ‘And Ellen had that in spades.’

  Rina was finding life back in Frantham very quiet. For the past three months or so she had been on set from about eight and worked through with only brief breaks until early evening. It had been a gruelling schedule and she was secretly rather impressed with how she’d handled it. She had been looking forward to the long rest and lazy mornings that a return home would offer, but the truth was, she was now at a bit of a loose end.

  The arrival of Joy mid-morning was, therefore, a very welcome relief.

  ‘I thought you might want to come and look at the cottage,’ Joy said. ‘Then I thought we might have some lunch and then find ourselves a nice antique shop to rummage in this afternoon.’

  ‘I’ll get my bag,’ Rina said.

  They took Joy’s little red car. She had passed her test that spring and was, as Matthew had once remarked, ‘a good little driver’. The cottage was out on the coast road, with a bit of a sea view from the upstairs windows but mostly looked out on to the garden, an overgrown orchard and surrounding farmland. The front door opened straight on to the kitchen and a door led through to the living room at the back. The stairs had been concealed by what looked like a cupboard and were very steep and a nightmare, she imagined, for getting furniture up them. They reminded Rina of the Victorian terraced house she had grown up in, with the two small rooms and a kitchen downstairs and stairs leading from behind a door in the middle living room.

  ‘It’s really looking homely,’ Rina said, surveying the rather large kitchen table, the small dresser decked out with an assortment of blue and white china. The small living room had a comfortable looking sofa and an armchair and a modest flat-screen television perched atop what Rina thought of as an aspidistra stand. Shelves ran all round the room at picture frame level and a bookcase had been tucked in beside the window.

  ‘It’s small,’ Joy said. ‘But I really love it, Rina.’

  ‘And so you should. It’s a sweet little place. You and Tim will be really happy.’

  Joy beamed at her. ‘Come and see the orchard,’ she said. ‘There’s so much fruit it’s broken one of the apple trees. Do you know of a good gardener? I mean, not to do the work but to come and show me how to do it? I’ll pay the going rate for their time, of course, but I want it to be my garden, you know? Oh, and I’ve enrolled at college two days a week, starting next week.’

  ‘Oh, good for you. Doing what?’ Joy had taken a beauty therapy and massage course but Rina knew she was keen to do something else now that was finished. Something that actually challenged her.

  ‘Um … I’ve enrolled on a silversmithing course,’ she said and then blushed as though this was a somehow shameful revelation.

  ‘Sounds wonderful,’ Rina approved and saw Joy relax a little. ‘That’s a real departure, isn’t it?’

  ‘Well, yes. But I wanted to do something like that before, only no one … I mean, Rina, you know my family and how much I love them and I know they love me, but to my dad and I think to my mum too, I was always a bit of an airhead, you know? Mum suggested I enrol on the beauty course because she knew I wasn’t academic or anything and I went along, but I’m not stupid, Rina, I managed the work standing on my head and I knew I wanted to do something else. And I’m good with my hands and I’ve got an eye for design and I went and did this taster day thing while you were away. In fact I did three, all different things. And I just loved the jewellery design day. So I enrolled. It’s only a fairly basic course, but if I get on all right—’

  ‘Joy, you will succeed at anything you set your mind to. We all know that.’ Rina hugged her tightly. ‘Your dad would be very proud of you,’ she said quietly.

  Joy laughed. ‘Dad would have been proud whatever I did,’ she said. ‘But I don’t think he’d set his expectations of me very high, bless him. I need to carve out something just for me, you know? Something new.’

  Rina nodded.

  ‘Especially now Tim is getting established. His career is getting off the ground … well, both of them really. The performance side and all the other stuff he’s involved with and I’m not going to be one of those women who just defines herself by what her husband does, you know.’

  Rina nodded again, but she was a little puzzled by Joy’s sudden vehemence. ‘Who’s upset you, Joy? It’s not like you to be so—’

  ‘Angry?’ Joy laughed suddenly. ‘I’m not. Not really. Rina, it’s just that everyone seems to have a purpose, a direction, and suddenly it feels important that I have one too, you know. I think it’s getting this little house and moving down here and it suddenly just hit me like, wow, I’m not playing at this. This is real life. It’s not like when I was still studying and travelling down to see Tim and he was coming up to see me and it was all kind of easy. This is for real.’

  ‘Cold feet?’ Rina asked gently.

  ‘Oh, not about Tim! Never about Tim. About everything else, yes, bloody freezing.’

  Rina hugged Joy close and kissed the soft strawberry blonde hair. ‘You know how much you and Tim mean to me,’ she said. ‘I promise not to intrude, but I’ll always be there for you both. You know that, don’t you? I know your family must seem like they’re a very long way away.’

  Joy shook her head. She pulled away a little and looked Rina in the eye. ‘I miss my mum and my brothers,’ she said. ‘But I have a family here too. Tim and you and all those mad people who live in your house and I’m going to be fine. It just hit me the other day that I’d moved into a situation where everyone already had their lives and their routines and their jobs and everything already set out and that I’d better do the same, carve out my own piece of turf as my dad used to say.’

  Rina laughed. ‘I’m guessing your dad had other things in mind when he said that,’ she said.

  ‘Oh, probably.’ Joy smiled a little sadly. ‘My dad was a right crook, we all know that. But he wanted the best for all of us and he was a great dad and I miss him a hell of a lot and coming to live close to where he died … it’s a strange feeling, Rina. We drive past the spot all the time. Rina, does it ever stop hurting?’

  ‘It gets better,’ Rina said quietly. ‘But if someone you love is gone, I don’t know that you ever stop missing them, not completely. I still tell my Fred everything, talk to him as if he’s still around and he’s been gone for more years than I really want to count.’

  ‘I talk to my dad,’ Joy confessed. ‘And sometimes, it feels like I get a reply. It feels like he’s happy for us, Tim and me.’

  Rina nodded. She wasn’t an especially religious person, but where her beloved husband was concerned, Rina needed no convincing about survival. Fred had never really gone away. She could sense, though, that Joy was in need of a change of mood. ‘Are you going to show me this orchard, then? I know a bit about pruning and I could give you a hand when the trees have gone dormant.’

  ‘Oh, yes. Come and see and there’s something else too. If it hadn’t been for the way Tim likes to ferret about, I don’t think we’d even have known it was there. It wasn’t even on the house details.’

  Intrigued, Rina followed Joy into the back garden and through a little gate into what, to Rina’s eye, looked like a very old orchard. Gnarled trees, some finished cropping for the year, some still loaded down with fruit, stood in semi-straight rows circled by a low fence. What looked as though it might have been a good-sized kitchen garden lay beyond. ‘Joy, this is lovely. But what are you going to do with all this fruit?’

  ‘Gorgeous,’ Joy agreed. ‘But really, really daunting, you know. Mum’s garden is all bedding plants and patio. I’ve no experience of anything like this. I just don’t want to get it wrong.’

  Rina laughed. ‘You’ll be fine, sweetheart. We’ll all pitch in and help out.’

  Joy reached out and squeezed Rina’s hand. ‘This is what I wanted to show you,’ she said, leading the way t
o the very back of the orchard. ‘Tim found it, we’re hoping to clear it out and use it as storage if we can make it safe.’

  A few bricks sticking out of the ground were the only initial clue but the long grass had been cut back and a bush hauled from the bit of all supporting wall that kept the garden at bay. Steps led down to a rotting wooden door.

  ‘Oh, my goodness,’ Rina said. ‘It looks like an old air raid shelter.’

  Joy nodded. ‘That’s what we thought. But would they really need one out here?’ She tugged on the door and dragged it aside so Rina could look inside. The walls seemed to be a construction of brick and corrugated iron and a scent of rotting wood and leaf mould rose up to greet Rina as she prodded a toe into the damp earth just inside.

  ‘Earth and turf on the roof,’ she said. ‘Must be quite a weight. I’m amazed it’s not fallen in on itself. Be very careful when you start poking around, won’t you?’

  ‘Tim’s found a local builder who’s going to come and take a look, see if we can do anything with it. I’d hate to have to demolish. It’s been here for so long. But we were really surprised, I mean, what is there round here to bomb?’

  ‘Oh, a great many things,’ Rina said. ‘The airfield up the road, the harbours and bays all along the coast. There are memories of the war everywhere if you know where and how to look.’

  Joy nodded. ‘I suppose there are. Sobering, isn’t it?’

  Rina made her way back up the steps and took a proper look around. Now she knew it was there, it was possible to see the arch of the roof, the difference in the plants growing close to the shelter. Nettles, probably poppies too in their season, she guessed. Plants of disturbance, following closely wherever people built and dug.

  ‘Have you been helping out at the airfield?’ Rina asked. ‘I thought I’d go and see if Lydia needs an extra pair of hands.’

  ‘Oh, I think she can use all she can get,’ Joy said. ‘I’ve been going over a couple of times a week. It’s fascinating, all the different stuff that’s coming in. Funny, though, not everyone is pleased about what she’s doing?’

  ‘Oh?’

  Joy laughed. ‘Rina, I know that look! No, most people are really happy to help out and loan stuff or even give it to Lydia. People want their families to get credit for what they did and a lot of the older people especially think it’s really important that the younger generation finds out what they all went through. Some people though, they’ve really been against it.’

  ‘In what way?’

  Joy thought about it. ‘Well you get the “she’s no right to do this because she’s not local” brigade. Lydia’s pretty good at winning them round, though. She usually just puts them in charge of something and gently reminds them of how many jobs Iconograph has brought to the area. Then there’s those people who think some things in the past should stay … well not buried, exactly, but undisturbed, I suppose. One old woman came in and yelled at Lydia, accused her of muckraking, but I really don’t know what that was about. I suppose people are bound to feel sensitive, if it’s their relatives, their family history, you know? Even the old lady who came with Ellen Tailor, the woman who was killed? Well even she had her doubts about some things. And she’d been helping Ellen with the collections, too.’

  They were back in the cottage now, Joy collecting her jacket and preparing to lock up and leave for their lunch date. ‘You got everything, Rina?’

  ‘Yes, all set. You met Ellen Tailor, then?’

  Joy nodded. ‘And the kids. They were a really close, really nice family. I liked her. It’s a horrible thing to have happened.’

  ‘It is indeed. Especially terrible that the children found her. And this Vera, what was she so bothered about?’

  ‘Hard to say.’ Joy shrugged. ‘She was really enthusiastic about putting all the everyday stuff on display. She thought it was a great educational opportunity, I think, but Ellen mentioned some journals or personal papers from Vera’s father and Vera got really upset. She said they were far too personal and … and this was a bit off, Rina … that there were still things that shouldn’t be talked about.’

  Rina nodded thoughtfully. ‘There are still a great many people who stay silent about what they or their families did in the last war,’ she said. ‘We knew nothing about the code breakers at Bletchley Park until the mid-seventies and even then information was scanty. It’s only been in the past decade or so that everything has started to come out. People can be surprisingly good at keeping secrets when they believe in the cause strongly enough.’

  ‘I suppose so,’ Joy agreed. ‘But what can possibly matter after all this time?’

  Rina had no clear response to that one. ‘When do you plan to go over again? I’ll meet you there.’

  Tomorrow, Joy told her. In the morning. Conversation turned to other things then but Rina’s mind kept drifting back to the old orchard and the shelter at the end of Joy’s garden and she understood, too, Joy’s feeling that she didn’t want to get things wrong. Whoever had planted those trees, cared for that garden, had loved it. Intensely. You could feel that, Rina thought and, without being too fanciful, could feel that someone almost holding their breath to see what the new owner would think and do with their beloved trees.

  It’s all right, Rina found herself thinking. It’s in the right hands now.

  So I killed him.

  And I’m not sorry.

  And I’m not going to give myself up.

  I bent down and used my sleeve to wipe the blade of the knife and then I walked away. Just like that. I was amazed, if I’m honest, at just how good it felt to know that he was no longer in the world. Could no longer torment and persecute and malign. If I’m honest I was almost proud of myself – though I didn’t expect that feeling to last long. I’m a realist after all and I know that euphoria is the least real, least permanent of all emotions.

  But, boy, did it feel good at the time.

  What did I do then? Oh, I came back to the dance and bought a round of drinks. My own private little celebration. And then I danced what was left of the night away.

  I wondered if that was what psychopaths felt like all of the time. That feeling of power, of lack of control and yet being in control all at the same time. If it is, then I can understand it totally, why they do what they do and yes, I do know how that sounds.

  And how do I feel now?

  Well, of course the emotion has cooled a little and I’m terribly conscious that there may be consequences, but I can’t bring myself to worry about that at the moment, I have to behave normally, keep my life as it was before I did this momentous thing.

  TWELVE

  ‘I didn’t sleep a wink last night.’

  ‘Sorry, love. I know I was tossing and turning. I couldn’t get myself comfortable.’

  Hilly shook her head. ‘It wasn’t you, love. I just couldn’t stop thinking about—’

  ‘Hilly, there’s nothing we could have done.’

  ‘How can you be so sure of that? Toby love, she was in a right state the last time we saw her. She was scared, Toby.’

  ‘Of nothing. Look, Ellen was a lovely girl but she wasn’t from round here. She wasn’t used to being alone in that barn of a place. She imagined it.’

  ‘Did she? What about the letters. What about the phone calls?’

  ‘We get strange phone calls all the time. You pick it up, there’s no one on the end, then when we look the number up it’s some company trying to sell us compensation or a PPI refund or some such. That’s all it was.’

  ‘Ellen wasn’t stupid. She’d not mistake a cold caller for a threat.’

  ‘And do you honestly believe that anyone in her own family, or in Jeb’s own family, would do something like that? Shoot her in the head with both barrels and then leave her for the kids to find. Do you really think they’d be as callous as all that?’

  Hilly, reluctantly, shook her head. ‘I just know the girl was scared,’ she said. ‘And we should have said so. Oh, not in front of the kids, maybe, but
we could have called that inspector, told him about the time she came here. White as a sheet she was.’

  ‘Hilly, it was late at night, she was on her own. The kids were across at their grandma’s and she wasn’t used to being alone. It was probably the first time she’d spent a night alone there in that old house, at least since her husband died. You know how an old house can make strange noises. How the night can crowd in on you.’

  Hilly gnawed at her lower lip, clearly far from convinced. ‘Look, even Ellen said that was probably all it was the next morning.’ Involuntarily, he glanced over at the sofa where Ellen Tailor had spent that night, huddled under a spare quilt, the television on because she couldn’t bear to be left in silence. ‘Look,’ he said finally, ‘if it bothers you, then phone the bloody policeman. Or call Frank Baker. Better than talking to some stranger. He’ll tell you it was nothing. Just a case of too much imagination. She was still grieving, after all, wasn’t she?’

  ‘I suppose so.’ Hilly drew a deep breath and her husband knew she was close to tears. Though she’d seemed to be on the verge of tears most of the time since his accident. He reached out and patted her hand. ‘Give Frank a ring later, if it’ll make you feel better, eh?’

  She nodded and, as so often, retreated to the kitchen. He could hear the clatter of pots and pans as she sorted and tidied and washed up their breakfast things and he wondered if she would actually call Frank Baker or if, now she had his permission, in a manner of speaking, she’d let it drop.

  Toby wheeled himself over to the front window and stared out at the garden and the hedge and the road beyond that led down towards Ellen’s farm. Hilly was right, of course, she had been terrified and at the time he had believed that something or someone really had come with the intention of scaring her witless. Afterwards it had been easier to just accept Ellen’s assurances that she had been mistaken. That she had woken with a start and not been able to get over the shock and had scared herself half to death imagining things that weren’t there. But he recalled watching her eyes as she had made her explanations and her excuses that morning before she left them and Toby had known that her protestations of stupidity and her apologies and forced laughter had all been a front. There’d still been the residue of fear in her eyes but there’d been determination too and Toby had gained the impression that during that long night on their living room couch, Ellen had come to realize something. That maybe she had realized who it was that had come to frighten and threaten her.