The Death and Life of Eleanor Parker_An absolutely gripping mystery novel

by Kerry Wilkinson

  ‘I know.’

  She frowns, doubling the wrinkles around her mouth, and presses a hand to my forehead. ‘You’re properly cold. I hope you’re not coming down with something.’

  ‘I feel all right, except for being a bit chilly.’

  Mum stares at me for a few moments and then steps away, taken over by another yawn. Now she knows someone’s watching, she covers her mouth. It’s only when she moves backwards that I realise I’ve felt nothing of what just happened. Her hair didn’t tickle my nose. Her hand was on my forehead and yet I felt… nothing. It was as if she wasn’t there. I barely have time to consider that before she continues talking.

  ‘What did you get up to last night?’ she asks. ‘I went to bed, so you must’ve been late back…?’

  She asks casually but the fish for details couldn’t be more obvious. There was a time when I had strict curfews and every minor infraction would be punished as harshly as if I was someone who’d escaped from prison.

  Those were the days when we didn’t get on.

  Now, there’s an uneasy truce in which I generally do as she asks but, every once in a while, she allows me the odd night off to be a teenager.

  ‘This and that,’ I reply. I’d probably not tell the entire truth even if I could remember. Parents have to be kept on their toes. If adults think their kids are angels, it’ll only be a bigger disappointment when it turns out they’re not. Better to set the bar somewhere in the middle and then surpass expectations.

  ‘How did you get home?’ she asks. ‘Did Robbie give you a lift back?’

  ‘Yep.’

  ‘Good – you know I don’t like you walking home in the dark, especially with everything that’s going on around here.’

  ‘I know, Mum. We’ve had this conversation.’

  I give her my best huffed annoyance stare and she nods. ‘I’m putting the kettle on. Do you want some tea?’

  ‘Please.’

  ‘Anything to eat?’

  I have no appetite but it must’ve been hours since I last ate, so I nod and mutter something about toast. Mum offers a weak, consoling smile and then disappears into the kitchen. I’m still envious of the dressing gown.

  When she’s gone, I try pinching myself – first my neck and then my wrist. I can definitely feel something, although the skin on my wrist takes a second or two to slide back into position. There’s no springiness, like there would usually be.

  Hmmm…

  Google offers little help. I try searching for ‘cold skin’ and ‘feeling chilly’ but it turns out I could have anything from a minor cold to full-on cancer. ‘Unspringy skin’ throws up the name of a grunge metal band, plus a bunch of adverts for menopausal women. Not much help. Considering the entire wealth of human knowledge is online, the Internet really can be incredibly unhelpful.

  I delete the search history, wipe any cookies from the past ninety minutes, and then turn the laptop off. It’s probably overkill but the last thing I want is my brother asking why I’m looking up stuff about life after death.

  I walk through the kitchen and tell Mum I’ll be right back, then head up to my room. My phone is on the dressing table but still won’t do anything other than glare back at me with a blank, unforgiving screen. When I jab the sharp end of a hair clip into the SIM card slot, a sliver of water dribbles out and when I shake the phone, there’s a gentle sloshing sound.

  Our relationship has been fractious at best, peppered by over-zealous autocorrects (the phone), unfortunate incidents of being dropped (me), frequent instances of a dead battery (the phone), a broken camera flash (I’m blaming the phone), out of focus pictures (also the phone), and that time I swear I sent a message to Naomi, only to discover it was actually directed to my brother. Thankfully, there was nothing incriminating, but it was definitely, one hundred per cent, the phone’s fault.

  Despite our differences, I almost feel sad that our relationship has run its course. In all fairness, it was always likely to end in an instance of human-on-phone violence, but I never thought it’d be quite like this.

  My wardrobe is something of a shrine to everything I’ve ever owned. Mum calls it hoarding but that’s because she’s always watching those TV channels packed with real-life documentaries with people who are super-skinny or super-fat. She saw one about this guy who has never thrown anything out and suddenly she’s convinced I’m a hoarder just because I like keeping the boxes that go with things I’ve bought.

  At the bottom of my wardrobe there are rows of pretty shoeboxes, each with their own memory of what I bought and where I bought it. Behind that are more boxes, including – luckily – the one from my old mobile phone. Inside is a charging cable, plug, manual and, thankfully, the phone itself. The screen is scraped and battered, plus there’s a chip of plastic missing from the top left corner but, as soon as I insert the SIM card from my other phone and turn it on, the device pings to life.

  Hoarding 1. Mother 0.

  As the welcome message swirls, I remember why I hated the damned thing. It’s slow to do anything and trying to type on the minuscule screen always left me feeling as if I had bloated whale thumbs.

  Hoarding 1. Mother 1.

  While the phone continues to do whatever it is it’s doing, I head back downstairs. Mum’s on her way up, still yawning as she tells me she’s off to get ready for work but that there’s tea and toast on the table.

  If this is what being up for seven in the morning means, I could really get used to it.

  By the time I get to the table, the old phone has finally woken up. It’s bleating about not having much battery but then that was another of the reasons why it has spent the last year and a half in the bottom of my wardrobe instead of my pocket. It was always low on battery. It craved an electrical hook-up like a YouTuber craves attention.

  I’m hoping for a flurry of messages that might help clear the haze of the previous evening but there’s nothing. Literally nothing. My old conversations are lost to the river water and I’m left staring at a blank page as if I’m a friendless loser.

  Hoping to cheer myself up, I bite into the toast – but the moment it touches my tongue, bile begins to build at the back of my throat. My stomach lurches, sending a noxious taste into my mouth that makes me want to be sick. I rush to the kitchen sink but the contractions give way to nothing but a pair of syrupy, rancid burps.

  Back in the living room, I examine the toast, looking for flecks of mould, but it seems perfectly fine. When I smell the bread, it’s as if there’s nothing there. That’s when I realise that the living room usually has an undercurrent to it. In the plug socket next to the kitchen door sits an air freshener, with a pool of yellow liquid in a glass bulb. The power is on but when I sit next to it, I can still smell nothing. It is only when I lie on my front and press my nose against the device that I can sense the merest hint of lemon.

  I sit up again, resting my back against the wall, and peer back towards the table. I have no sense of taste and almost no sense of smell. When my mother touched my forehead, I felt nothing. I can hear and I can see – but only having two of five senses is a worry to say the least. Landslide elections can be won with forty per cent of the vote, yet my politics teacher claims forty per cent on an exam is a bad mark. Talk about a hypocrite. Other than that, forty per cent of anything is not a good result.

  Anyway, the fact I’m calm about all this is almost more of a concern than my missing three senses. I should be freaking out, going crazy, panicking about what’s wrong with me – and yet I’m not.

  Instead, I have the steady, calm realisation that I died a few hours ago.

  It’s hard to explain how I’m so sure of this. It’s like when a person is hungry. It isn’t a conscious thought, it’s a feeling. Nobody needs to be taught what it’s like to be thirsty, they simply know.

  That’s how I’m aware of what’s happened to me. Knowing that as a fact gives me a calmness I should not have.

  When that’s the morning you’ve had, anything after that
has to be a bonus.

  Chapter Three

  If there was any question about the state of my hearing then it is immediately dispelled as my phone erupts into a symphony of beeps and vibrations. It’s a message from Naomi, but nothing that could help decipher my confusion over what happened last night.

  Dont 4get linner @ the deck. Pick u up @ 3

  The time on the message reads a few minutes after midnight and, after reading it through twice, memories begin to stir. Linner is our word for a mixture of lunch and dinner. Brunch is a word, after all, so why not linner? Mum was right: often I sleep in until after lunch at the weekends and then, if we’re organised and we can scrounge a lift, Naomi and I will head off somewhere for linner. I remember asking her to send me the message so that when I woke up in the morning – this morning – I’d remember our plans.

  From nowhere, a handful of yesterday’s memories splurge into my mind… primarily, shopping with Naomi.

  Westby is a small village, in which a little old lady named Mrs Patchett runs the only clothes shop. Her fashion sense lies somewhere between going-to-church chic and lying in a casket for the rest of eternity. The shortest skirt she’s ever stocked is something that looks like a tattered old curtain and tickles the ankles. Unsurprisingly, it’s still unsold and in stock. Langham is the closest town, the place where we go to college, so there are at least a few places where people under the age of retirement are catered for.

  Yesterday, Naomi and I caught the bus to Langham and then mooched from shop to shop, trying things on and generally not buying anything. It’s basically free training for the salespeople to help a potential customer find stuff that fits, give an opinion on how it looks, and then watch that non-customer walk out the door. As I’ve said many times before, Naomi and I should be paid for our staff-training service.

  That was late Saturday morning and early afternoon but after that, everything remains blurry.

  Mum reappears in the living room, battling with the button on her jacket and rushing around. She brushes her hair quickly in the mirror next to the kitchen door and talks at me over her shoulder.

  ‘Don’t forget your Uncle Jim’s coming over later to look at the ceiling fan,’ she says.

  ‘You really can stop calling him “Uncle” now. We know he’s not our real uncle. It was kinda cute when we were kids but I’m seventeen now.’

  She stops and turns to face me properly. I think she winks but she might have a blob of make-up in her eye. ‘You’ll always be my babies. Anyway, I’ll call him and say you’re up and about. He might come over earlier.’

  ‘Okay.’

  She looks at the toast on my plate. ‘Are you eating that?’

  The very thought brings the taste of bile to the back of my throat again. ‘In a bit.’

  ‘Good – make sure you look after yourself.’

  ‘I will, Mum.’

  ‘And don’t let your brother sleep too late. Tell him he’s got revision to get on with if he wants to go to university. You, too. Don’t think I’ve forgotten that you’ve got exams as well…’

  She’s facing the mirror, so I roll my eyes without getting a huff in return.

  ‘… Don’t spend all day outside, especially if you’re coming down with something. If you do go out, make sure you’re either with someone, or you get a lift home. I don’t want you out by yourself. Don’t forget that Hitcher fellow people have seen around the village…’

  Another eye-roll. There’s always something.

  ‘… And be nice to your brother.’ Mum turns to face me this time, widening her eyes, letting me know she’s serious. ‘It’s a year since… Sarah.’ She lowers her voice at the name. ‘Do some work, keep warm and…’ She sighs and takes a breath, tugging at a strand of hair she’s just straightened. ‘Ellie…’

  ‘What?’

  ‘It’s just… with me and Jim. You know you and your brother will always be my number one, don’t you?’

  She tilts her head and it’s difficult to know what to say. I could be awkward, could roll my eyes again, but I’m not a complete cow. Deep down, I know what I should do. I smile gently and nod. ‘I know, Mum. I love you, too.’

  It’s what she wanted to hear and she grins, holding my stare for a second, before it’s all go again. She wrenches the brush through her hair a couple more times and then fumbles around in the kitchen for her keys, muttering under her breath. She can’t find some form or another she needs for work and then hunts around the cabinet at the back of the living room, all the while talking to herself. After re-losing the keys and then finding them once more, she pokes her head around the door to say goodbye. She hustles along the hall, accidentally bashing her bag into the door, and then opens the catch with her teeth because both hands are full. Then she’s finally gone.

  Sarah.

  How did I forget?

  What happened to Sarah has been a shadow over our village for the past year. There hasn’t been a day where I’ve not thought of her and yet, for some reason, she had completely slipped from my mind this morning until Mum mentioned her. Some of the things that happened before I awoke in the river are clear memories, others have disappeared and are only stirred when I get a jolt of a name or action.

  I know the story but I’m not sure if I trust my memory completely. Google is again my friend and a search for ‘Sarah Lipski’ throws that iconic picture of her onto my screen. Her hair is long butter-blonde, with a gentle curl that loops over her shoulders. She’s smiling for the picture-taker, her blue eyes bright and youthful, even though she’s squinting slightly into the sun. Behind her, there’s a blur of grass. To anyone else, it’s an anonymous garden or a park but to those of us who knew her, it’s the green at the front of Westby Church.

  This image is the one that ended up all over the television news, the newspapers and the Internet. When most local people hear Sarah’s name, this is the image they have of her.

  In two days, it will be exactly a year since Sarah Lipski drowned in the River Westby. Her body was discovered a hundred metres or so along the bank from where I pulled myself out a few hours ago. She was a year older than me, the same age as my brother.

  She was also his girlfriend.

  As well as the photo of her smiling on the green, there are others of her with my brother. As soon as Sarah’s body was found, people had gone trawling their social media trails, with the photographs splashed all over the papers and TV. Once they’re out there, that’s that. Suddenly these pictures that were only taken to amuse a handful of friends are now being pored over by strangers.

  Ollie and Ellie. Ellie and Ollie.

  There are only thirteen months in age between my brother and me. Much as I hate to admit it, we look ridiculously alike at times. Ollie’s dark hair grew long through last year, curling around his ears and jutting out to the side. It worked for him but I thought about cutting mine short so that we didn’t look so similar. In the end, after everything that happened with Sarah, he shaved his head anyway.

  That’s how I picture him now but these photos are reminders of a different time. I scroll through the ones of Sarah, stopping on those that include my brother. There is one of them at a Halloween party – him dressed as a vampire, her as a long-nosed, green-skinned witch. There is another of them on the beach – Ollie with his pasty white chest and thin covering of dark hairs, Sarah slim and tanned in a tied brown bikini. One more has them at some festival. They’re both covered in mud, Sarah giving the V sign for peace, Ollie wearing a straw hat.

  They’re grinning in every photo, enjoying being young and in love.

  After Sarah’s body was found, the police looked to Ollie. It’s always the husband or boyfriend, isn’t it? They must’ve been arguing about something and he snapped. Did she want to break up with him? Had he caught her with someone else? Did they fight? Did he have a secret girlfriend on the side? Was it about money? Did they do drugs? Did he get angry if he’d been drinking?

  Why did you do it, Oliver? Why? Why? Why?<
br />
  The police questioned him for days, largely because he didn’t have an alibi. They had been out in his car, barely two weeks after he’d passed his test. He’d dropped her off at her home and then, for a reason he could never explain, gone off for a drive. I mean, people go for drives all the time, don’t they? I don’t get it myself but then I can’t drive. Anyway, the next thing anyone knows, Sarah’s in the river.

  There was no proof Ollie did anything, yet no proof he didn’t do it. Being arrested is guilt enough in some people’s eyes. Who needs a trial, a judge or a jury when someone looks like they might have done it?

  In the end, he was released because the police had no evidence to keep him in. They never formally arrested anyone else, though, and because her killer is still unknown – still out there – Ollie has spent the past year living with those sideways glances and muttered under-the-breath remarks.

  There goes the girlfriend-killer.

  It’s taken twelve months but people have gradually moved on. My brother went back to college and immersed himself in work and football.

  As I stare at the image of Ollie and Sarah, what should have been obvious suddenly hits me. Sarah was drowned in the River Westby a year ago. Last night, it happened to me as well. If the same person was responsible for both attacks, then who is there that connects Sarah to me?

  Who, except for Ollie?

  Chapter Four

  I continue staring at the photo because I’m not sure what else to do. Ollie and I were close when we were younger. With a little over a year between us, it was easier to play games with each other than it was to go out and find new friends. We’d run around and invent competitions in the garden, or on the yard at the back of my father’s newsagent in the village. For a while, we were inseparable.