The Things You Didn't See_An emotional psychological suspense novel where nothing is as it seems

by Ruth Dugdall

  DAY 11

  TUESDAY 11 NOVEMBER

  34

  Cassandra

  Stepping from my shower, I catch my reflection in the mirror, the dark bruises under my eyes. Oh, Mum, what’s happened to me?

  Thank God for the Prozac, for that medicinal veil that covers all my emotions. Despite it, every feeling I’ve had since that Friday, the betrayal and anger and confusion, it’s all there in lines around my mouth and the deep shadows under my eyes. I look tired and faded, the events of the past week etched on my skin like worry and not wisdom. I try to fix it: rub in concealer, blush my cheeks bronze, paint my lips pink, and tell my smoothed reflection that from now on things will be different.

  Yawning, exhausted to my bones even though I’ve just woken, I go downstairs to the kitchen. There, on the table, all along the kitchen tops, are trays and plates of cakes, cool to the touch and ready to be iced. Oh God, not again. I wrack my brains, and locate a dull memory of coming downstairs in the night with a furious need to do something.

  You taught me to cook, Mum, and muscle memory must have kicked in as I sleepwalked, because here are cakes of my childhood: buns, flapjacks, scones. I’d forgotten I even had the ingredients – the flour and sugar have been at the back of the larder for months.

  The dream comes back in a fuller form. I dreamt I was a girl again: you were here too, flouring the kitchen top, rubbing butter between my fingers, the warm smell of sugar and fat. You let me lick the spoon afterwards, the floury prints on the bosom of your apron from where you’d lifted me down from the stool. How impatient I’d been to open the oven, to taste the too-hot cakes, but you warned me I’d only get burned. Just a dream, but here are the cakes as if to prove it was real.

  ‘Tori!’ Daniel calls, as he comes down the stairs. ‘Time you got up! It’s not healthy to get more than seven hours’ sleep.’

  He brings a masculine, woody smell into the kitchen, hair damp from the shower, buttoning his designer polo shirt, but not all the way. He kisses me on the lips, then notices the baking. An intake of breath, then he forces a smile.

  ‘Wow, Cass. Are you opening a cake shop?’

  ‘I couldn’t sleep so I cooked all Victoria’s favourites. I thought I’d take some to the hospital, as a thank you for what they did for Mum . . .’

  He rubs my shoulder and I lean into him, his delicious smell, and want to weep. How could he have betrayed me, when I love him so much? It isn’t fair . . .

  ‘The cakes look delicious. I’m sure we can give some to the neighbours.’

  I know that concerned look, that careful tone, and it chills my blood: he thinks I need treatment. Last time I felt this unstable, I ended up being sectioned. Last time I became suspicious about all the calls he had been taking, all the money missing from our bank account, and I became convinced that he had a lover. He said that the calls were clients, that the money was spent on the gym. He convinced me that I was paranoid; that I was sick, not seeing straight. Now, the same thing is happening again: frequent calls, unexplained absences. But this time I’m certain I’m right: I even know her name. Monica.

  I hear light steps on the stairs, then Victoria is in the room, wide-eyed at the cakes. ‘Oh yum!’ She reaches for a bun, saying with a mouthful, ‘This is so good.’

  Daniel’s eyes turn stony. ‘Not very healthy though, so just have one, please. Why don’t you go and get dressed, Cass? And take off some of that make-up. You look like a clown.’

  After I’ve sorted myself out, the day gets moving, as it will do. Daniel goes to work, and Victoria promises to do schoolwork and not spend the entire morning watching Netflix. Dad wants to go to the farm. He was only away from the land a few days, but that’s still more than ever before, though I understand that he wants to be at home to grieve. He’s desperate to be back in a place he belongs after being in a hospital, a prison – places where he’s a fish out of water – though he could wind up in either after the trial. I agree to drive him as his medication means he can’t operate machinery. I also want to go to the farm, maybe there’s evidence there, something that will directly implicate Ash.

  Dad is silent the entire journey. There’s discomfort between us as if words can’t bridge the gap caused by your death, so the eight-minute trip seems much longer. When I’m parked, we both stare up at the farmhouse, as if it might have something to say about all that’s happened. But the farm keeps its own counsel: it knows it will outlast us all, in some form or another.

  Dad leaves the car without a word, striding off to the pig field where I can see Ash is working, a dark solitary shape in the distance.

  I’m about to go inside the farmhouse when something stops me – a memory I can barely grasp forces my feet towards the barn.

  Pushing open the black wooden door, I see the chickens are roaming free, pecking in hard earth or roosting in triangle houses of mesh and wood. It’s true what Ash told the police: we did play here when we were kids, hiding in stacked straw bales, pretending it was a den or another world. The earth dips where it’s been trodden down by Dad’s heavy boots.

  Last time I was in the barn was that terrible Friday, around six, with the shooting party. That evening, the floor lay littered with a pile of dead birds, the spoils of their sport; now only a rusty bloodstain remains. I notice a left-over wine glass, half-hidden behind a bale of straw. Next to it are Dad’s black rubber gloves, the ones he uses to finish off any birds only half-dead.

  One of the gloves moves on the straw, fingers flapping in the wind like crows’ wings. I kneel down closer to look at them. What do I expect to see? Blood? But the stains aren’t red, they’re black, the colour of oil or fertiliser. The glove is large and open-mouthed, long-necked and waiting to swallow a hand, an arm, whole. I touch it, and the rough slipperiness curls between my fingers. I slide my hand inside the loose rubber. It swallows my forearm, but still the glove almost fits. My fingers find the grooves worn by his; the moulded shape of regular use as comfortable to me as my own. Could he have pulled the trigger, like he says he did, without the glove to strengthen his right hand?

  No, I don’t think so.

  I enter the farmhouse, needing to be away from that place of death. But here, the atmosphere is even darker because you aren’t here in the kitchen, nursing a cup of green tea, talking to Janet as she stands at the sink, hands wet with soap. I can see her apron strings in a knot behind her, flat shoes solid on the brick floor. I can hear your voice, Mum, low and confident as you tell her about something you read in the paper that morning; you always had an opinion on everything, didn’t you? The scene is so real I can smell the Harrods soap you asked for each Christmas, the scent of winter walks and fresh snow, as if you were here with me.

  I hear something, noises overhead. I stand and listen.

  It’s a scraping sound – mice? No, too big for that. Rats? Could be. I gingerly go to the bottom of the stairs: I hate rats. Outside, in the distance, the rumble of the tractor tells me I’m the only one who’s going to fix this. I climb the backstairs, and reach the landing, your study to the left, your bedroom to the right. The scratching is coming from your room.

  Mum?

  Your bedroom door creaks on its weary hinge, just enough to let me in. The bedspread is pulled tight over the pillows, coral-pink washed to blush, the scent of winter faded here but lingering still. It draws me in, to you, a place I could never normally go. I perch on the edge of the bed, run a hand over the place you last lay. Tiredness falls over me like a blanket, weighs down my back and shoulders. I can’t fight it, I have to lie down. I breathe the familiar scents and imagine you’re in a better place. I close my eyes.

  Scratching wakes me, claws on wood. I jump up, braced to see a rat run over my leg, across the pink sea of covers. The sound comes again, louder, from inside the wardrobe. Walnut wood, handles smooth with wear. I open the door, careful and slow, even as the scratching becomes moaning and I smell pine trees, thick like a forest.

  Mum, are you here?

&
nbsp; I step inside, knowing it’s no rat, not any more.

  Then I see you, curled like a dormouse at the bottom of the wardrobe. The only perfect thing is your red silk nightdress, but your face – oh, Mum, your poor face! The bruises, the blood broken in the whites of your eyes . . . I scream and try to shut the door, but it won’t budge because of your body. I push, and you push back to be free, you look at me with your intense brown eyes and say my name, ‘Cassandra!’

  Someone is shaking me, touching me, and I’m so frightened I put my hands to my face and scream.

  ‘Cassandra!’

  35

  Holly

  Holly arrived at the house in Greater Kenley to find the only person home was Victoria, who answered the door with earphones in her ears, wired to her phone.

  ‘Mum and Grandad have gone to the farm,’ she said, lifting just one pod from her ear so Holly could hear the thudding bass of music. ‘They left an hour ago.’

  It was a short drive to the farm, and Holly found Hector in the barn, mucking out the old straw as the chickens pecked at his feet. ‘Morning, Hector. I wanted to drop by to see how you’re getting on.’

  Hector was pulling a straw bale apart with his pitchfork, his right hand serving as a wedge to stop the bale from slipping. ‘I’ve got work to do.’

  ‘Are you sure you should be exerting yourself so much?’

  ‘I may as well work. I can’t see much point in anything else.’ He spat on the ground.

  The chickens scrabbled around Holly’s feet and she stepped back into something wet. Her trousers gathered dirt at the hems. ‘You’re on strong sedatives and you’re grieving. Be kind to yourself.’

  ‘Work’s the best cure for grief.’

  Hector turned his attention to raking the mucky straw into a steaming pile and Holly noticed how he was avoiding her gaze, just as he had always avoided her questions.

  ‘I can imagine the farm is very demanding.’ She thought of the case studies Clive had told her about, how the stress Scott Falater was under had caused his sleep to be disturbed, though the jury didn’t believe him. ‘Were you experiencing any pressure, something that caused you to sleepwalk?’

  ‘No more than usual,’ he said defensively. ‘The Waitrose order for the chickens hasn’t been so good – seems people have got it in their heads that they shouldn’t eat chooks on account of this bird flu nonsense. I told ’em, my birds ain’t sick. See?’

  He pointed at a rooster, high in the rafters, its plumage an obscene red, orange feathers ruffling, orange claws clinging to the beam. It was watching the clutch of nervous hens, who scrabbled in the straw below. He was boss here.

  ‘Were you worried about orders being down?’

  ‘Nah – we’d bounce back. People worry about factory birds, but they sure suck up organic, which, being a small farm, we can provide. Allus have been, though they didn’t have a fancy name for it afore.’

  Free-roaming chickens were something Holly was discovering first-hand, as they pecked around her feet, watched by the vigilant rooster. ‘What about your financial worries?’

  ‘My solicitor keeps bangin’ on about that, but we get by. We’re not rich, course.’ Hector shooed the chickens away, and threw his rake onto a pile of straw. ‘We have food in the larder and fire in the grate, so it’s not so bad. Any cross words we had over the farm didn’t make any difference how I felt about Maya. So, don’t go tryin’ to make out I was angry with her, ’cos I wasn’t.’

  His eyes looked moist and his breath plumed in the cold air like a feather, then he looked at Holly with such steely force in his eyes that she felt herself jolted in the gut. The weary man shook his head. He was on the verge of tears.

  ‘You should go on inside to see Cassandra. You’re supposed to be her friend, ain’t you? Happen she needs you more an me.’

  Holly turned to leave. Hector needed a moment, and she was glad to be getting out of the barn. The acrid smell of chicken mess was making her nostrils itch.

  Holly knocked at the farmhouse door, but couldn’t make Cassandra hear. Tentatively, she opened the door and called her name. As soon as she stepped within the farmhouse walls, she could hear panicky sobs echoing down the hallway. Hesitating no longer, she followed the sound up the stairs and into the main bedroom.

  Cassandra lay in a foetal position inside the wardrobe, weeping hysterically.

  ‘Cass!’

  Holly tried to reach for her, but she didn’t seem to hear. Cass had a confused look, as though she was drunk, and she was wobbling too.

  ‘Cass, what’s wrong?’

  She shook her head, but her eyes began to focus as if she was becoming aware of her surroundings again. She rubbed her eyes, confusion replaced by fear, then she pulled her top down, exposing her collarbone. ‘I was shot!’ she said, as though it had just happened.

  It was an old scar, white where the skin had been stitched. Holly shivered. ‘Did you see who shot you, Cass?’

  ‘No,’ she said, groggily. ‘I was asleep. But Ash admitted it was him.’

  Once she’d settled Cass on the sofa in the front room with a glass of water and a blanket over her legs, Holly sat beside her. She wanted to help this woman, who was so distressed that she sensed it as utter black despair.

  ‘How did you end up falling asleep in the wardrobe?’

  ‘The rats . . .’ Cass tailed off, looking around in confusion.

  ‘Were you having a nightmare?’

  ‘Mm,’ she said, which Holly took as a yes. ‘It’s being here, thinking about Mum, I suppose. Then I fell asleep and woke up here.’

  Holly took her shaking hand, and they sat together like that for some time. Holly thought of the ghostly figure who had approached them in the barn that Halloween, the white gauzy image that could have been a child in a nightdress.

  ‘You’re a sleepwalker, aren’t you, Cass?’

  ‘No.’ She looked down at her fingernails, which Holly could see were torn and bleeding. ‘I sleep like a baby.’

  36

  Holly

  Holly should have driven straight to the hospital to start her shift at 7 p.m., but instead she drove home. After seeing Cassandra at the farm, and the scar on her chest, she simply couldn’t bring herself to go in. She called Jon, and said she was sick. ‘Food poisoning,’ she said. ‘I’m so sorry.’ And she was sick – sick with guilt.

  She lay on her bed and curled around herself, moaning gently as the forgotten memory returned.

  Twenty years too late, she realised that what she, Jamie and Carl had seen that night wasn’t a ghost at all, but a sleepwalking girl. She’d wondered what had happened after Jamie fired his gun, and now she knew: Jamie had shot Cass, and Ash had taken the blame.

  It couldn’t go on: Jamie had to take responsibility. She opened up her laptop, determined to reach her brother one way or another.

  After that Halloween, other than when he was at school, Jamie mostly stayed in his room. Their dad was worried about him, he kept telling him to go out and get some fresh air, but to no avail. Holly too had hung around the house, waiting for Jamie to appear, yet whenever he did actually make it to the kitchen, he’d grab a sandwich or a drink and then disappear again. It was the start of a pattern that didn’t end until the family relocated to California. As if the distance from Suffolk absolved Jamie of his guilt.

  With Jamie avoiding her, Holly had looked for Carl, but he too was elusive, and she was scared of him. The only other person she could seek out was Ash.

  Though she knew where Ash lived, and also that he spent most of his time at the farm, this was a problem for her, as it meant returning to the scene of the crime. Even though it was daylight, and a watery sun yellowed the sky, she still felt nervous when she stepped under the shaded cloak of the copse. Branches broke under her trainers, and she kept swinging round, sure someone was following her, and then equally frightened to discover that she was alone.

  Ash wasn’t in the copse, or in the fields. She found him in the barn, perched
on a bale, tossing handfuls of grain at a bevy of disinterested chickens. He looked up through his fringe, saw her, and tossed the grain at her feet.

  ‘What you doin’ here?’

  She pushed her hands into her pockets and jutted out her chin, desperate not to seem afraid. ‘Came to see you.’

  ‘Me?’ He stood, wiped his hands on the front of his jeans, and stepped towards her. He was tall, although not as tall as he’d seemed on Halloween night. Then she saw he had a black bruise circling his left eye.

  ‘Who did that?’

  ‘My dad,’ he said.

  This surprised her; Ash was bullied at school for not having one. Then she whispered, ‘Because of what we did?’

  His face twitched, and he looked at her as if she were a piece of grain he’d like to toss to the birds. ‘What you did, you mean. I didn’t do nothin’.’

  ‘You showed us the ghost! You brought us here.’

  He kicked the ground, sending a balloon of dust into the air.

  ‘Did we kill someone?’ she asked, still whispering. Afraid of the answer, but needing to know anyway.

  ‘She didn’t feel it,’ he said. ‘’Cos she was asleep.’

  Holly had known the truth all along, but had somehow misunderstood and pushed it away. She’d carried on telling herself she didn’t really know what had happened that night. But her senses had protested, raining down their reactions, making her feel everything threefold.

  Denial, deeply rooted. But not for any longer. She got up, and went to find her laptop.

  ‘Jamie?’

  His face came into view on the screen. He was chewing – she could see she’d interrupted his lunch but she didn’t care.

  ‘You’re persistent, know that, sis?’

  So he had been avoiding her. ‘Did you do what I asked, and google Innocence Farm?’