Girl Number One: A Gripping Psychological Thriller

by Jane Holland

  ‘Hannah, oh my God.’

  She snaps off the torch, and draws me comfortably inside the cottage. ‘Good grief, Ellie. What the hell did that poor hedge ever do to you? Are you on drugs?’

  I laugh wildly, then kick off my heels. ‘No.’

  ‘Pity.’ She puts the torch back on the hall table. ‘I could do with a pick-me-up.’

  I lean unsteadily against the wall in the hallway, rubbing my right foot. ‘I didn’t know you were in. I thought you were working tonight.’

  ‘Not Saturday night. I was trying to catch up on my beauty sleep, but hey, what do you know? It turns out my body thinks it’s daytime, so I decided I might as well get up and watch a film until dawn.’ She smiles ironically. ‘Then maybe I’ll be able to fall asleep.’

  ‘Can I sit up with you for a bit?’

  ‘Sure, that would be great.’ Hannah pauses, looking thoughtful. ‘By the way, I heard what sounded like a mouse in the walls earlier.’

  ‘Ugh.’

  ‘It was upstairs near your bedroom. I hate the idea of putting down traps or poison. Do you think we should get a cat instead? It might scare the mice away.’

  ‘Absolutely.’

  ‘Good.’ Hannah smiles, and her whole face changes, becoming almost beatific. ‘One of the women I work with at the hospital, Sally, has a tabby cat who’s just had a litter of kittens. I hope you don’t think this was high-handed of me, but I spoke to Sally on the phone earlier, and she says we can have one of the kittens for free once they’re six weeks old.’

  ‘That sounds perfect.’

  ‘Great. I’m going to make some cocoa. You interested?’

  ‘Sure, if you’re making some. Thanks.’

  Hannah shuffles into the kitchen to make cocoa, looking like Mrs Tiggywinkle in her fluffy dressing-gown and slippers.

  The door to the cottage safely locked and bolted, I stand with my back flat to the frame, then peer round out of the glass. I stare at the lane and turning area for several minutes but can see nothing in the darkness. Not even the hedge.

  I remember Denzil outside the club, burning the note. It’s only evidence there’s some bastard out there who gets his kicks out of frightening women.

  It’s working.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  I decide to drop by my dad’s place on my way out to meet Tris.

  It’s a little after one o’clock in the afternoon, and I’m dressed for running. I hesitated over what to wear, but in the end picked out exactly what I was wearing last time I was in the woods. Black Lycra shorts, white tee-shirt with red Nike logo, my Mizuno trainers. That may be a mistake; I don’t know. I’m acting purely on instinct now.

  I tried to do the ‘right thing’ last time. And look where it got me. Now I’m under suspicion from the police, and back in hypnotherapy. I even had a brisk letter yesterday from the head teacher, reiterating what had been agreed about my taking more time off, and mentioning that Paul Cannell’s parents had been in touch about an ‘incident’ during our lesson on self-defence.

  I jog slowly down through the yard to the caravan where my dad lives. Plastic sheeting flaps uneasily over the ruined walls and roof of the farm. I remember the night of the fire, my father’s drunken confusion, the fast blue-and-white strobing of the fire engines and ambulances that had packed into this yard.

  One cigarette. Such a small thing to have caused such long-lasting devastation. Though of course much more than one cigarette lay behind the wreck of our lives.

  Dad opens up after my third knock, still in the crumpled shirt and jeans he had worn last night, I suspect. When my mother was still alive, he had always been impeccably dressed. Suit and tie, his shirts ironed, leather shoes polished. He has bare feet today, and badly needs a shower.

  ‘Ellie,’ he says, frowning at me through the half-open door. He’s growing a beard and moustache again. I suppose it’s easier than shaving. ‘What are you doing here?’

  ‘Checking how you are. I’m worried about you, Dad.’

  ‘I’m your father. I can take care of myself.’

  Churchill appears behind him, wagging his tail at the sound of my voice. ‘He needs to go out,’ my dad says, and opens the door wider to let the dog jump down. Churchill stays for a quick fuss from me, then trots away across the farmyard to do his business.

  ‘Can we chat for a minute?’ I come up the steps into the caravan, and my dad hesitates, then reluctantly moves aside to let me in.

  The place is a mess, and stinks of stale smoke and alcohol. The bin has spilled over and there’s rubbish on the floor beside it, mostly crushed beer cans and empty whisky bottles. The beige carpet itself is filthy and needs to be shampooed; my trainers stick to its tacky surface. The sink is stacked high with dirty plates and pans, and there are flies crawling on them. As I approach the sink, the flies lift and slowly circle.

  ‘Christ,’ I say.

  He watches me angrily. ‘You never change, do you? Don’t think I don’t know why you’re renting that cottage, Ellie. To keep an eye on me. When you’re the one who needs to be locked up.’

  ‘Thanks,’ I say drily.

  ‘We lost your mother, but you weren’t content with that.’ He looks almost sick, his cheeks hollow, dark bruises under his eyes from lack of sleep. ‘Years of that nonsense about shadow men, and people watching you through the windows, so we had to keep the curtains closed as soon as it got dark. And the tricks you pulled at school. Do you have any idea what I went through, especially when it looked like I would lose you too? The months of therapy, and never knowing if you’d be brought home in the back of a police car … ’

  ‘I’m sorry about that, I really am.’

  My father shakes his head, leaning back against the plate-stacked sink, his arms folded. ‘What’s the point in apologising? I thought you’d sorted your head out at last. But now it’s starting all over again.’

  ‘I was just a kid then,’ I say, struggling to hold onto my temper, ‘and yes, I needed therapy for a while, and probably made your life hell. But this new thing is real, I didn’t make it up. I saw a dead woman in the woods, exactly where Mum was killed, maybe even deliberately posed to look like her. And I need to convince the police that I’m not crazy or lying to get attention.’

  He makes a disbelieving noise. Like a snort.

  I hesitate. ‘Will you help me or not?’

  ‘I can’t help you, Ellie. You’re beyond help.’ He indicates the mess around us. ‘See all this? You and your obsessions have reduced me to this. If I hadn’t been using all my strength to keep you out of care, I might have kept my job. I might never have started drinking. The house fire wouldn’t have happened.’

  I hate the accusation in his voice.

  ‘Now you want my help convincing the police you’re not crazy. Well, I’m sorry to be blunt, but I think you are.’ He straightens up, pointing to the caravan door. ‘You threw me out the other day, remember? Now it’s my turn to throw you out.’

  ‘There was a note,’ I say, not moving.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  I tell him about the note on Denzil’s windscreen, and for a few minutes he seems to calm down and listen.

  ‘Where is this note?’ he asks, frowning.

  ‘Denzil burnt it.’

  My dad sneers. ‘How very convenient.’

  ‘The note was real, we both saw it. You can ask Denzil if you don’t believe me, I’ll give you his number. The note proves I’m not making any of this up.’

  ‘All it proves is that you are a manipulative little bitch,’ he tells me coldly. ‘You probably wrote that note yourself, and planted it on his windscreen to get attention.’

  I stare at him, shocked. Not simply by what he said, but the way he said it. I don’t recall my father ever swearing at me before now.

  ‘That’s not true, and you know it. Why are you being such a bastard? Is it because you’re drunk?’

  He slaps me round the face. I do not see the blow coming and stagger backwards in sur
prise.

  My hand whips up though and I slap him in return. Pure instinctive response. When I lower my arm, there’s the livid imprint of my hand on his cheek, and a thin bleeding cut under one eye where one of my fingernails must have caught him.

  He stares at me, his mouth open, breathing hard. ‘Get out,’ he manages to say. ‘Get out and don’t come back.’

  I stumble out of the caravan, my palm aching from where I slapped him, only to falter at the bottom of the steps. ‘Wait,’ I say, looking back at him.

  He is closing the door. ‘Goodbye, Eleanor.’

  ‘There’s more,’ I say quickly through the door crack. I can see my father staring back at me, one bloodshot eye rolled in my direction, his mouth trembling. ‘I think someone might be watching me and Hannah. Up at the cottage.’

  ‘For God’s sake, this business is driving me out of my mind. Don’t you see that? Can’t you, of all people, understand that?’

  He shuts the door. I hear a key turn in the lock, then the sound of him stumbling back to the crumpled sheets of his bunk.

  ‘Dad, are you okay?’ I wait a minute, listening. ‘I’m sorry I hit you. But you hit me first.’

  There is no reply.

  Churchill appears, still wagging his tail. I stare at him blindly. The dog whines, then lies down at the base of the caravan steps in the shade.

  My father has never hit me before. Angrily, I put a hand to my cheek. It feels tender and slightly swollen.

  He’s right though. It’s not beyond the realm of possibility that I slipped out of the club while Denzil was deejaying, wrote that note myself, stuck it on his windscreen, and am simply too far gone in my psychosis to remember a single minute of it.

  The sun dips momentarily behind a cloud. I look around the yard. There are weeds sprouting from the cracked concrete, dandelions with bright yellow heads, dusty nettles and tufts of grass. Beyond the caravan, the fields stretch away into the distance, climbing inexorably towards the steep, brown-grey outcrops of rock that mark the start of Bodmin Moor.

  I remember long summer days here as a child, my mother stretching up to hang washing on the line, the chickens pecking at the dirt as they wandered freely about the yard.

  Then came the day that changed our lives.

  ‘Hello, Eleanor,’ the lady says, getting up from behind her big wooden desk. She speaks softly and slowly, as though I’m a little kid, which I’m not. ‘How very nice to meet you at last. I’ve heard so much about you from your Daddy.’

  The lady comes round to stand in front of me. She is wearing a flowery blue skirt down to her knees and a white shirt with flounces on her collar. Her shoes are plain black and shiny. I think she looks very smart and a little bit stern, like our head teacher.

  ‘I am a doctor,’ she tells me, ‘and my name is Isabel Quick. Do you know why your Daddy has brought you to visit me?’

  I raise my eyebrows. Everyone knows what a doctor does. ‘Because I keep getting into trouble, and the police think there must be something wrong with me.’

  The doctor smiles as though I’ve said something funny. She shakes her head, then looks up at my dad. ‘Not quite, Eleanor. Do you mind if I call you Eleanor?’

  ‘Most people call me Ellie.’

  ‘Then I shall too.’

  She’s got a nice enough smile, I decide, but I don’t much like her office. It reminds me of hospital rooms, the walls white and clean, important-looking notices on the board behind her desk. The doctor has a glass vase of flowers on her desk: pink and yellow flowers, very pretty. I can smell them even from my seat on the other side of her desk.

  Dr Quick sees me looking at the vase. She slips one pink flower out from the rest and hands it to me. ‘They’re called freesias. My favourite flowers. Smell nice, don’t they?’

  The smell is strong but very sweet. And I do like flowers. My mum used to keep flowers like this in a round blue vase on the kitchen table. I don’t remember much about my mum but what I do remember makes my tummy ache. The smell of her perfume, and the flowers she kept on the pine dresser; the pretty clothes she wore; her smile, that was for me alone.

  Dad never brings flowers into the house.

  I say nothing but grip the flower stalk tightly, breathing in its sweet perfume as the pink petals tickle my nose.

  I feel tears pricking behind my eyes and fight them, embarrassed. I don’t like crying. I try never to cry in front of other people.

  ‘I’m not the kind of doctor who looks after you when you have a physical sickness, Ellie. I’m a very special kind of doctor. A doctor of the mind.’ She crouches in front of me so her eyes can look directly into mine. It’s not a very comfortable thing, but I try not to look away. ‘I’m a hypnotist. Do you know what that means?’

  I shake my head.

  ‘It means I’m going to ask you to look inside your head. Deep inside your oldest memories. But it may take some time. You might have to visit me quite a few times before it starts to work.’ She smiles. ‘It’s not always easy to remember things, is it?’

  I’m in trouble with the police for what I did, that’s the truth, or we would not be here. I don’t remember everything I did wrong, those days are all confused in my head. But I know the police insisted on this visit. They think it will keep me out of trouble in the future.

  That doesn’t mean I have to take it seriously though. I’ll play along with the doctor, that’s all. Maybe Dad will not be so angry with me then.

  The doctor checks her watch. ‘Right, I think we should start. First I’m going to let you get nice and comfy on this couch, so you can fall asleep. Then I’m going to ask you some questions.’

  ‘How can I answer questions if I’m asleep?’

  My tone is rude, deliberately so. But the doctor keeps smiling. She puts a hand on my shoulder. ‘You let me worry about that. Lie down now and get comfortable.’

  She helps me lie back on the long seat. There’s a cushion for my head; it’s softer than the scratchy grey material of the seat. I stare up at the white ceiling, wondering what’s coming next. She slips off my outdoor shoes, tucking them beneath the seat.

  I’m a little bit worried now, but I’m not going to let her see that. I look round at Dad, who winks.

  ‘Do what the doctor tells you, angel,’ he whispers, then bends and kisses me on the forehead. ‘I’ll be right here if you need me. Everything’s going to be okay.’

  The doctor sits beside me on the seat. ‘Look at me, Ellie,’ she says firmly. ‘I want you to listen very carefully to my voice.’

  Great, I think, another lecture. I prepare myself to be bored.

  She talks to me for a while in her soft voice, then starts to move her finger back and forth a little distance from my eyes, asking me to watch it very carefully as it goes back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, swinging like a pendulum on one of those old Victorian clocks. I try not to watch her finger, or to listen to what the doctor is saying, but it’s impossible not to. Something about my eyelids starts feeling heavy. Dr Quick tells me this is going to happen, and I wonder how she knows.

  Her finger keeps moving back and forth, growing pink and blurry. Her words become a vague murmuring in the background as I drift away into some shadowy place.

  They want me to fall asleep.

  So I struggle to stay awake, to defy them, to keep watching and listening, but I can’t. I can’t.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  I meet Tris at Eastlyn Church a few minutes after two o’clock. It’s clear from his expression that he’s been there a while, waiting. But I wanted to take a run round the village before we met up, make sure there are people about, people who could hear me if I scream. Ridiculous, perhaps. But I’m very much aware that I’m on my own now. Hannah is still fast asleep, my dad is having his own private breakdown in the caravan, and Connor is probably out with the sheep on the edge of the moor. Nobody will be coming to rescue me if all this goes wrong.

  The weekly church service is at eleven-thirty on a Sund
ay morning, so not many people are about in the churchyard. There’s an old woman in a black hat, laying flowers on an overgrown gravestone that looks almost as old as her. A man in overalls is sweeping out the church porch; another is in the Victorian portion of the graveyard, cutting the grass between graves with a strimmer. The whine of the strimmer bounces off stone as I walk up to the church door from the kissing-gate.

  The man with the broom glances at me oddly, then shuffles inside the church and half-closes the door.

  Tris is waiting for me in the shade of an old yew hedge. He comes towards me, staring. ‘What happened to your face?’

  I put a hand to my cheek, embarrassed. I haven’t had a chance to look in a mirror. ‘Is it so bad?’

  ‘Did Denzil do that?’

  It’s my turn to stare. ‘Of course not.’

  ‘I wouldn’t put anything past Tremain.’ He touches my cheek with long, cool fingers. ‘So who hit you?’

  ‘I told you, nobody.’

  I don’t like having to lie to him. But then I have no idea if he’s been lying to me. However angry I may feel about my father raising a hand to me, it’s family business. Nothing to do with Tris. Besides, I hit him straight back. So as far as I’m concerned, it’s finished.

  ‘Liar,’ he says softly.

  I start to walk away, uncomfortable now. ‘I slipped in the bath this morning. Banged my face on the wall.’

  He shrugs, giving up and turns to follow me. We take the twisting path that leads behind the church, past the vicarage, and eventually into the woods. ‘Okay, so why did you ask me to meet you here? What are we doing?’

  ‘Going for a run in the woods.’

  He stops, sounding shocked. ‘What?’

  ‘It’s time I went back to where I saw the body. I need to figure out what happened. How she disappeared.’

  Tris is shaking his head. He grabs at my arm when I keep walking. ‘No, no, that’s a really bad idea. Seriously, Ellie, you don’t want to do that.’