The Death and Life of Eleanor Parker_An absolutely gripping mystery novel

by Kerry Wilkinson

  ‘It’s been a long day,’ she says.

  ‘Yes.’

  We’re dreadful at small talk.

  ‘I’m glad you’re home safe.’

  ‘Jim dropped me off.’

  ‘Oh.’

  See? Woeful at small talk.

  Mum hasn’t finished, adding: ‘Has he…?’

  ‘He’s gone back to work.’

  ‘Oh. Do you know where your brother is?’

  ‘He was on the search but I’ve not seen him since. I think one of the Langham police were talking to him.’

  Mum sits again, leaving me standing. It’s silent and awkward, which sums up large parts of our relationship.

  ‘I kinda have something to tell you,’ I say.

  She looks up expectantly, perhaps thinking I have a clue as to where Helen’s gone. Her eyes are wide and I know I’m twisting awkwardly on one leg, suddenly self-conscious. I think about telling her of waking in the river. I really want to. I was close to telling Jim but something stopped me. It’s a secret I must keep. Every time I come close, my stomach knots as a reminder to shut up.

  ‘What?’ she asks.

  ‘It’s um…’

  I can’t tell her.

  ‘… I saw Helen on the night she disappeared. I don’t know what happened afterwards, though.’

  Her face falls. ‘Oh… did you tell Jim?’

  ‘Yes.’

  She seems puzzled, expecting more.

  I tell her I’m going upstairs and then mooch my way to my room. Mum says it’s been a long day and she’s not wrong. I woke up in the early hours of Sunday morning, it’s now Wednesday night and I haven’t slept in between.

  I have one hand on the door handle when I stop, turning to see Ollie’s closed bedroom door. He’s not home and Mum has settled in downstairs for the next few hours at least. I stand next to the stairs, peering over the banister to the hallway below, where there is no movement and only the dimmed sound of a television.

  With a couple of sidesteps, I’m back to his door and knock quietly, just in case he is home and Mum has somehow missed him. We do come and go somewhat.

  ‘Ollie,’ I hiss.

  No answer.

  I ease the handle down carefully and push his bedroom door open. I’ve been in before, sometimes to do things like drop off washing, or ask him to borrow something. It’s rare, though. Not even Mum crosses the sanctity of our bedroom doors without knocking and asking. We’ve argued over many things through the years but personal space isn’t one of them – even if she does bang on a bit about keeping my room tidy.

  My sense of smell may be damaged but I still get hints of deodorant as I enter Ollie’s room. If I can sense it, then it must really be strong for other people. I’ve never understood why boys spray so much of the damned stuff. It all smells the same, too – like a frozen chicken that’s been left in the windowsill to defrost and has partially cooked in the sun, attracting a flock of ants.

  For the record, that was an accident.

  The rest of Ollie’s room is testament to the fact that he still hasn’t quite grown up. There’s a massive poster opposite the window of a tanned model perching on the bonnet of a flame-red sports car. Her blonde hair is billowing in the breeze and she’s wearing heels so high that she could stilt walk in her spare time.

  How did he ever get a girlfriend?

  The rest of the walls are covered with more posters – a football team who play in red, a couple of movie sheets, plus a black and white one with Muhammad Ali standing over another boxer who is flat on his back. Ollie’s duvet is strewn messily across his bed, with one pillow on the floor, another crooked across the bed. There is a small chest next to the bed, with all three drawers hanging open, and socks, underwear and goodness only knows what else piled on the carpet nearby. I’m not sure I want to get too close. It’s actually hard to see the carpet, largely because there are so many clothes scattered around. His room is a giant tumble dryer that has thrown his stuff in all directions.

  The curtains are nearly drawn, with only a slim gap in the middle. It is silhouetted from the doorway but, as I tiptoe across the floor, the framed photo sitting in the centre of the windowsill becomes clear. It holds a picture of Sarah and Ollie, arms around one another, dressed in sports gear for something I don’t remember. It looks like a charity fun run as they each have numbers pinned to their chests. They are both sweaty and dirty but Sarah still manages to stun. Her hair is in a greasy ponytail but it’s her smile that envelops the rest of the picture. Ollie is looking ever-so-slightly sideways, towards her rather than the camera. He looked different when he was with her – happier, perhaps. It’s hard to tell as, in the time that has passed since last summer, he’s changed. He’s become more athletic and leaner but it isn’t simply physical, it’s the sparkle in his eyes. ‘Love’, as Mrs Lipski said. They were in love.

  If Ollie had killed Sarah – and I don’t know what I believe any more – why would he have kept this photo and left it in a place where it would be one of the first things he’d see every day?

  The picture has thrown me off the reason I’m here, which is to look for anything that could show Ollie was the person who drowned me. Actually, it’s more because I don’t want to find anything, which makes me all the more confused because I’m going through his personal things in an effort to not find something. It’s also hard to know why he might have wanted to hurt me. We squabble in the way brothers and sisters do, but that’s it. The only reason would be if he’s a genuine psycho – but he’s simply not. I know he’s not. He has feelings and compassion.

  Everything I’m doing is a contradiction but I continue anyway. With my foot, I nudge a few of his clothes to the side and then crouch to look under the bed. The dark makes it hard to see much other than shoes, which have been flung underneath. Under his mattress is something I’d far rather forget, so I move quickly on to the wardrobe. It is about the only part of the room that’s actually organised, with tops hanging across the rail and half a dozen pairs of seemingly identical jeans folded on the shelf at the top. At the bottom, there is a pair of football boots, plus a shoebox containing ticket stubs from gigs, sporting events and movies.

  Realising I’m not going to be able to go through everything, nor would I really want to, I stand by the slightly open door and take in the room as a whole. If I wanted to hide something so nobody else would find it, where would I conceal it?

  As I look around the room, the answer is obvious: I’d hide it with something in which nobody else is interested. If Mum searched Ollie’s room for any reason, under the bed and in the wardrobe are the obvious places. He’d have to be stupid to leave something there – and he’s definitely not that.

  I’m distracted by a low bang from downstairs. I slide around the door until I have one foot in the hallway and strain to listen. At first I think it’s a door closing but then I hear one of the kitchen cupboards clinking closed. It’s hard to make out the exact noises but the likelihood is that Mum’s making another cup of tea for herself. I wait another minute or so, listening for the hint of a stair creak and, when it doesn’t come, head back into Ollie’s room.

  This time I know where I’m going. In the corner is a small television hooked up to a PlayStation. There is a stack of two-dozen games next to the screen, none of which would interest either Mum or myself. The first has a picture of some troll-like dwarf on the front clutching an axe larger than he is. Inside the case is nothing but a disc and instruction manual. The next game is a football one – but that houses only the disc and manual, too. Each of the top ten cases contains nothing but discs and manuals. How very dull.

  Then I open the eleventh.

  The disc is there, the manual is there – and so is a leather bracelet that has interwoven strands plaited together, with a series of knots along the length.

  I drop the game case to the desk, twisting the bracelet in my hand. I want to compare it to the one I found in the river but already know they’re identical. My mind
swims with possibilities and conspiracies. How?

  Perhaps it’s because of the muffled shuffling of feet, perhaps it’s nothing at all – but I suddenly glance up, unable to contain my gasp. Ollie is standing in the bedroom doorway, eyes boggling as he stares at the bracelet in my hand.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  ‘What are you doing?’ Ollie asks.

  It is one of those moments in which I wish I had time to come up with something good, something remotely convincing, but my feet are clamped in wet tar and my mouth bobs open uselessly.

  Ollie takes a step into the room, blocking my way out. He’s wearing shorts and a vest, with a baseball cap. Casual as you like. I think about shouting for Mum, telling her everything – the river, the bracelet, Ollie.

  ‘Ell, what are you doing in my room?’ He is angrier this time.

  I look at the open game case on his desk. ‘I was thinking about playing a game to take my mind off everything.’

  Ollie turns to take in his desk and then looks back to me. ‘When have you ever played PlayStation?’

  ‘Exactly. I thought I’d try something new.’

  He picks up the case and turns it over. The cover shows a man in an army uniform holding an enormous gun as a tank rolls by behind him.

  ‘I was looking for something I might enjoy that wasn’t too hard. I’d read a couple of the instruction books inside to see what the games were like.’

  Ollie takes another step towards me and I’m almost trapped in the corner furthest from his door. Should I scream? Call for help? If I do, there’s no going back. It occurs to me that, given the way my finger popped back into place and how I can apparently feel no pain, perhaps I’m invulnerable. If so, what could he do to me anyway?

  He leans forward and plucks the bracelet from my hand, holding it front of his face and eyeing it closely.

  ‘I thought I’d lost this,’ he says, more softly. He flicks one of the curtains open with his free hand to allow more light into the room and then slumps onto his bed, staring at the bracelet and running his thumb across the material.

  ‘Where was it?’ he asks, not looking up.

  ‘In the game case.’

  He glances at the desk and then back to the bracelet.

  ‘Whose is it?’ I ask.

  If I wanted to rush for the door I could, but the tension has gone.

  ‘It’s mine,’ he whispers.

  ‘Yours?’

  I’ve never seen him wearing it and, aside from his misguided spell of wearing beads a few years back, it doesn’t seem like his thing.

  He nods and wraps the bracelet around his wrist, tying it underneath and then spinning it around. ‘We had one each.’

  ‘You and… Sarah?’

  He nods towards the photo in the window and then removes his cap, placing it on the bed next to him. His head needs re-shaving – there’s a fluffy stubble of hair on the very top.

  ‘It was the day before she disappeared,’ he says. ‘We did this fun run in the morning – her idea. It was a 10k, but you had to raise money to enter.’

  ‘I remember you wanting me to sponsor you.’

  He shrugs. ‘Right – but you didn’t because you didn’t have any money. Sarah set us up to run for an animal shelter in Langham. She’d taken me out there a week or so before and there were all these abandoned cats and dogs. She sat for about an hour, moving from enclosure to enclosure and talking to them – but the centre relies entirely on donations.’

  ‘How much did you raise?’

  ‘I only managed a couple of hundred quid – but she’d been out knocking on doors and had somehow got two grand out of people.’

  ‘Two thousand?’

  He runs a hand over his head and nods. ‘You know what she was like when she wanted something.’ He pauses. ‘Well, maybe you didn’t – but there wasn’t much she didn’t get when she set her mind on it.’

  Ollie sighs once more and stares at the photo. ‘We did the 10k that morning and she was in this incredible mood because it meant we’d raised so much money for the shelter. We got changed and then went to the Deck to celebrate.’

  My mind pictures Ash but I say nothing.

  ‘We ate like you wouldn’t believe. I had a triple burger, fries and thickshake. She had the same. Then we ordered more fries. After that, it was still only half one or so, and Sarah was saying she wanted to go on an adventure.’

  I shiver. It’s unrelated but that was Naomi’s word when she wanted me to go to the party in the woods.

  ‘Where did you end up?’ I ask.

  ‘We went to Purton, with the cobbled beach.’ He looks up and we say in unison: ‘… which isn’t a real beach.’

  He grins wider and I smile too. ‘Right,’ he adds, ‘not a real beach – but Sarah liked it anyway. I think because it’s so quaint. She enjoyed all that quirky, weird Englishness. Vintage teashops, sticks of rock. She kept going on about visiting a car boot sale on a Sunday morning.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because she’d never been to one – her mum and dad had never gone to one either. I told her, “Look, it’s just a load of people selling junk they don’t want, plus some maniac selling meat from a van” – but she wasn’t having it.’

  ‘Did you ever go?’

  He shakes his head, while continuing to stroke the bracelet. ‘We were in Purton and it was an amazing day. Sun, blue skies, everything that’s amazing about summer. It was just the two of us and we walked along the seafront, then we bought ice cream from a van and had fish and chips.’

  ‘Dessert before main?’

  He laughs. ‘Sarah always had a thing about dessert before main. Her thinking was that if you got full by eating too much for a main meal, you wouldn’t want pudding.’

  ‘Disaster,’ I say.

  ‘Disaster! Dessert first and then eat what you can.’

  He laughs again and it leaves me with a deep feeling that I wish I’d got to know her better. Lover of animals, dessert-scoffer, thickshake-slurper… what’s not to like? She’d have liked Naomi, too.

  ‘So you ate ice cream, then fish and chips…’

  ‘Right, and we walked. We carried on for ages – most of the way to the next town and back again. We passed this lay-by on the way back and there was this woman who’d set up a table-top stall, selling bits and pieces. It was mainly leather goods – wallets, bookmarks, purses, all that. We stopped to look and the woman was laying it on thick, saying how everything was handmade and that we wouldn’t find better quality anywhere. That sort of thing. We bought two of these.’ He holds up his wrist, showing off the bracelet. ‘I say “we” – but it was Sarah. I don’t really wear jewellery, not since…’

  He tails off.

  ‘The year of the beads,’ I say.

  There is another hint of a smile as he raises his eyes towards me. ‘Right,’ he says. ‘The year of the beads. Let’s never call it that again. Anyway, when we got back to Purton, we were sitting on the seawall and Sarah tied one around her wrist, then put the other on mine. She said they could be eternity bracelets – so that we’d always be with one another.’ Ollie squirms on the bed, shifting his backside but looking at the floor.

  ‘Yeah, I know…’ he adds.

  ‘It sounds nice,’ I assure him.

  He shrugs. ‘It felt good at the time. I don’t know… like being a proper adult. When you’re young and in a relationship, all adults assume it’s a first-love thing. Older people can be really patronising, right?’

  I think of Robbie and the tainted way I feel about him. Anything we had before has been marred by my confusion over what happened the night of Helen’s party. Even with that, I don’t think I’ve ever been in love with him – not in the way that Ollie talks about Sarah. It’s hard to know.

  ‘Right,’ I reply – wanting Ollie to keep going.

  ‘They think first love, teenage love, whatever you want to call it, they think it’s childish and something that won’t last. Maybe they’re right? Perhaps true love isn�
��t first love? I don’t know – but I do know the feelings between Sarah and me were real, whatever people think.’

  He stops to breathe in deeply and slowly and I’m not sure how to reply. We’ve never had a conversation like this. It feels like he’s finally saying something he’s been bottling up for a long time. A minute or two passes and he still doesn’t speak, simply looking at the floor instead.

  ‘What happened to her bracelet?’ I ask.

  ‘Huh?’

  He peers up and I nod at the one on his wrist. ‘If that’s yours, then where’s hers?’

  It’s a disingenuous question, because I know I have it.

  Ollie unties the one on his wrist and holds it in his hand. ‘On the night it happened, I dropped her off at the gates to her house and she was wearing it then. It was something that I didn’t even think about until later. When the police were questioning me, they showed me pictures of her in the river.’ He gulps, glances at the photo in the windowsill. ‘You know?’

  I know all too well.

  ‘She was already… gone. By then, I knew I was a suspect. The solicitor they gave me was telling me not to say anything but I figured I couldn’t get in trouble if I told the truth. I was at the station for a whole day – but it was only later, when I was trying to sleep, that I realised she wasn’t wearing her bracelet in the photos they showed.’

  ‘The ones of her in the river?’

  He nods.

  ‘So you dropped her off and she was wearing it, then when they found her in the river, she wasn’t?’

  He nods again.

  ‘Did you tell someone?’

  Ollie stands, crosses to the dresser and drops the bracelet back into the game case, which he seals and re-stacks in the pile. He twists so that he’s resting on the counter, half standing, half sitting.

  ‘By the time I realised, it was too late. I thought I’d end up in more trouble if I said something. There are photos of her wearing that bracelet, so if they found mine, they could easily assume it was hers. They’re exactly the same. Nobody ever asked me about it, so I never mentioned it. I hid mine away and forgot about it until now.’