‘Where did you find her?’ she asks my rescuers.
Beano Man points back towards the street. ‘Over there, on the pavement, on all fours.’
‘Was she screaming again? She’s been doing that a lot …’
Weakly, I let the bag drop. ‘Mustard. My dog. Have you seen him? I left the front door open, he’ll have got out …’
‘I’ll go and look for him,’ says the tallest of the three women. She is wearing an anorak and for a moment I am reminded of Anne and I want to cry. I would give anything for her to be here now.
The older man steps forward. ‘Are you able to stand, Ms Belling?’
It’s only as I shakily get to my feet with his and the girl-in-black’s assistance that it dawns on me what name he called me. I stare at the man, dismayed. ‘Who are you?’ I croak.
He glances at the others, who nod at him encouragingly. Then he turns back to me with a full-wattage smile stretched across his face.
‘I, Ms Belling, am your greatest admirer. Allow me to introduce myself. I am Timothy Pitt, Heldean’s leading paranormal investigator. You may know my blog––’
‘Oh God, no, not you! Get away from me!’
They are spooktators come to gawp at me, led by the man who has forged a career off the back of my family’s misery and grief.
Pitt was clearly anticipating a warmer welcome and is ruffled by my obvious rancour.
‘Ah, well, our timing is indelicate, I can see. However—’
‘I want you to leave,’ I snap. ‘And take the other parasites with you.’
Beano Man steps forward. ‘We just want to talk to you about Limey Stan, Cara.’
‘Seamus, please, let me deal with this,’ says Pitt sharply.
‘I don’t want to talk to you,’ I yell at him. ‘Leave me alone!’
None of them move. They all stare at me, dead-eyed.
Then the girl-in-black steps forward. ‘I have a message for you from your mother,’ she says.
‘You what?’
‘Jenny is a medium,’ says Pitt quickly. ‘You should listen to her.’
‘Are you serious?’ I admonish him. ‘You should be ashamed – exploiting a kid to be a part of this.’
‘Please listen to me, Cara,’ says Jenny urgently.
I shake my head at her, horrified. Between this ambush, Anne’s revelation about why I ended up in Morecambe and Limey Stan’s message on the mirror, I am done. I need to get away from here before I go insane. I start backing away from the group, my mind already picturing the place where I can find temporary refuge.
Jenny, a wisp of a thing with skinny limbs and long straggly blonde hair, takes a step towards me, then another.
‘Cara, your mum says you mustn’t ignore what is precious from the very beginning,’ she tells me in an unsteady voice.
I roar at her to stop talking, but she carries on, becoming more flustered by the second. I start walking away from her.
‘Don’t ignore what is precious from the very beginning,’ she incants, raising her voice so it follows me down the street. ‘Because that’s the road you should take to put things right. Your mum wanted you to know that.’
Chapter Forty
Cara
By the time I reach the cemetery gates, my bare feet are bloodied and bruised, but I am too agitated to think about stopping or even slowing my pace. I limp through the gates and head for the far corner where my family lies. I have come here because it was the first wide, open space that came to mind when I was escaping Pitt and his followers. I need to be outdoors, away from people, away from that house.
I come to a standstill at my family’s graveside, which is shrouded in shadow beneath the spreading branches of the giant oak that stands next to it. It looks the same as it did the last time I was here a couple of weeks ago, but the flowers from Mum’s funeral have been removed and a fresh spray of yellow roses has been left in their place, presumably Karen’s doing.
I flop down onto the grass next to the headstone and give in to the tears that have been building on my journey here. The last time I felt this helpless and frightened was the day my social worker told me I would be going into foster care and in the same breath said there was nothing I could do about it. My wishes counted for nothing and I was impotent to stop it happening. And that’s how I feel now, impotent, with no control over what’s happening to me.
But it’s not just me I’m crying for. Knowing Matty is buried just metres beneath where I’m sitting fills me with remorse. Right now, I would give anything to go back to the night he died and, instead of forcing him out of bed, I would tuck him back in and whisper that it was okay, he should go back to sleep, that I would tell him all about it in the morning. I will never forgive myself for not doing that.
Eventually, my tears dry and I start to shiver as the cold begins to penetrate, starting at my exposed feet and working its way up my body. The jumper I am wearing is no shield against the plunging temperature, so I pull my knees up and wrap my arms around my legs for comfort. I sit there for a while, until I sense someone watching me. I look up, expecting to see Jim or another worker from the cemetery, but instead I see a woman in a green-and-purple checked overcoat, with red hair too vivid to be natural, standing a few metres away. The frames of her chrome wire-rimmed glasses are so large they make her eyes appear owl-like.
‘You’ll catch your death sitting out here with no coat or shoes on, Cara. Although, I suppose you’re in the right place for it,’ she says with a wry grin.
Her face is achingly familiar. My mind swirls like shifting sand until it lands on the image of a teenage girl with mud-coloured hair and a semi-permanent frown.
‘Lisa?’ I gasp.
The woman flashes me a tearful smile and swallows hard as she nods.
‘Long time no see, little cousin.’
I clamber to my feet and launch myself at her with a sob. I hug her fiercely, not wanting to let go, as years of grief flow out of me in a torrent. Lisa turning up now, with everything that’s been going on, cracks a fault line through my heart.
Eventually, I loosen my grip and she stands back and holds my shoulders at arm’s-length.
‘Christ. What have they done to you?’ she asks, her own cheeks wet with tears.
Close up, she, of course, looks the age I know her to be, not the age I remember her as. There are tapering cracks around her eyes and lines between her nose and mouth, but she still looks glorious to me, my darling, brilliant cousin.
‘I look a mess, I know,’ I half-laugh, half-sob. ‘It’s a long story.’
‘I want to hear it. But let’s get you indoors first.’
I shake my head. ‘I don’t want to go back to the house. Not yet.’
‘No problem, we can go for a coffee first.’
I look down at my bare feet and she follows my gaze. We both laugh.
‘What size are you?’ she asks.
‘Six.’
‘Snap.’ Lisa links her arm companionably through mine. ‘My car’s parked outside the gates. I’ve got some shoes in my suitcase you can borrow.’
‘And socks?’
She grins. ‘Socks too.’
At my request, Lisa drives us to the next town, twenty minutes away. I want to be somewhere I can feel anonymous. I do feel a bit guilty asking her – she’s already been on the road for eight hours, after setting off from Edinburgh at six a.m. – but Lisa says she doesn’t mind. We don’t chat much beyond small talk about her journey and the weather; it’s as though we’re both storing up what we need to say for when we are sitting face to face again. On the way, Tishk texts to say Mustard is with him and asking if I’m okay. I reply I’ll be back soon and thank him for taking care of my dog while I’m gone.
Lisa’s satnav guides us to a retail park with a coffee chain. I find a table tucked away at the back, while Lisa pays for two lattes and a sandwich for her, because she hasn’t eaten since stopping in Doncaster at eleven and now it’s gone three. Beneath the table, my toes are pi
nching in a pair of bright purple suede pixie boots and I smile to myself. It’s an eye-opener to see how vivacious adult Lisa is, because child Lisa was far more conservative, in both appearance and manner. Already I like this version more, and that’s saying something, because I adored the previous one.
This Lisa looks nervous as she puts the tray down on the table and takes the seat opposite me. I reach over to squeeze her hand, wanting to reassure her that she does not need to be apprehensive around me and that she’s the only person in the world I care about right now.
‘How did you know I’d be at the cemetery?’ I ask.
‘I didn’t. I went to leave some flowers, then I was going to meet with a friend who I’d arranged to stay with tonight. My plan was to come to yours tomorrow.’ My disappointment is crushing and must be written all over my face, because she adds empathically, ‘But seeing as we’ve run into each other like this, I’ll call my friend in a bit and let him know I’m staying with you instead. I’m so glad I ran into you, but why the hell were you in the cemetery with no shoes on?’
I grimace as I rake my fingers through my mussed-up hair. ‘I had to leave the house in a rush.’
‘Why?’
I hesitate. How will she react if I tell her about the message on the mirror? Will she think I’m crazy? I decide it is worth the risk.
‘There’s been some stuff going on since I’ve been staying at the house. Weird stuff.’
‘Limey Stan weird?’
She says it so casually, I almost spill my coffee. Then I take a deep breath and tell her everything that has occurred so far, right up to the words on the mirror that made me flee the house in my bare feet, and Pitt and his merry band of followers waiting outside to exploit me. Lisa doesn’t interrupt, but listens intently, nodding occasionally.
‘I’ve been wracking my brain for rational explanations for what’s been going on,’ I say. ‘I actually thought your mum and dad might be behind it, or even Ryan, because they’re furious I’ve been left the house when Mum had promised it to them. But they’d have had to force entry to get in, so it doesn’t stack up.’ I let out a groan and rub my temples with my fingers. ‘I feel like I’m losing my mind again.’
‘You never lost it the first time,’ says Lisa, so quietly she’s almost inaudible.
‘I think the psychiatrists at the Peachick would disagree with you there.’
‘They got it wrong. Everyone did.’ Lisa’s eyes begin to gloss with unshed tears. ‘I’m so sorry, Cara, I truly am.’
‘What have you got to be sorry about?’
‘I could’ve stopped you being sent to the Peachick. I mean, I tried to, but they wouldn’t listen to me––’
I interrupt her, baffled. ‘What do you mean?’
She exhales shakily. ‘I knew all along you weren’t guilty, Cara. You should never have been sent away and it’s my fault that you were.’
Chapter Forty-One
Cara
Lisa dissolves into tears and as I reach across the table to take her hand again to comfort her, my mind races. What does she mean it’s her fault I was admitted to the Peachick? Who wouldn’t listen to her?
Her sobs catch the attention of the baristas behind the counter and one comes over and asks if she is okay. I thank him for his concern and say she’ll be fine. A couple of minutes later, he returns and slides two fresh coffees and a few serviettes onto our table.
‘On the house,’ he mouths.
Lisa continues to cry and I start to get impatient. ‘I’m confused,’ I say edgily. ‘Why is it your fault I was sent away?’
She snivels into a serviette, then blows her nose.
‘That night, do you remember? I promised I’d come to the house and hide with you and Matty––’
I cut her off. ‘I know, but you didn’t. Christ, I’m not angry with you about that, Lisa, if that’s what you’re worried about,’ I exclaim. ‘I know you were only humouring me when you said it.’
The day I decided we should hide behind the curtains in the bay window to catch Limey Stan once and for all, Lisa had taken Matty and me to the Rec after school. Until that point, I didn’t think she believed what I was saying about Limey Stan, so I was thrilled when, upon hearing my plan, she agreed to sneak round to ours when everyone else was asleep and join mine and Matty’s stakeout. But she never turned up and much later on, when I was at the Peachick and my psychiatrist was helping me clarify my recollection from that night, I realised Lisa had been joking about coming round.
‘That’s the thing, Cara – I was there.’
Everything around us seems to freeze: the baristas, the other customers, the gurgle of coffee machines, the loud hiss of the milk-heating element – it’s as though they’ve ground to a halt and it’s only me and Lisa who are still in motion.
I withdraw my hand from hers.
‘You made it to the house?’ My voice is strangled with surprise.
She exhales shakily. ‘I did. Do you remember how heavily it was raining that night? It was chucking it down – like, thunderstorm-heavy. So I waited for it to ease a bit before I set off to yours, because I was worried that if I got soaked Mum and Gary would know I’d snuck out and would go mad.’ She pauses for a moment, then plucks one of the serviettes from the table and pats dry her cheeks and the delicate skin beneath her eyes. ‘It was gone two in the morning by the time I got there.’
I start to tremble.
‘I came through the back way like we agreed,’ she goes on.
A flashback: I left the back gate unlocked for her, her secret passage in.
‘I used the key you’d left under the flowerpot in the porch to let myself into the kitchen and that’s when I heard noises coming from the front room. I was so scared,’ she says, her voice lowering.
‘What exactly did you hear?’ I ask.
My heart is hammering nineteen to the dozen as I wait for Lisa to answer me. She can barely get the words out, but she does, to my horror.
‘Cara, I heard everything … I heard Matty being killed.’
Part Two
June 1994
Chapter Forty-Two
Anita
The staircase up to Dr Stephens’ surgery was so narrow that had another person been coming down at the time she was going up, Anita Belling would have had to reverse all the way to the bottom to allow them to pass. As it was, she managed to get to the top without any bother, although her path was tracked by drips of water from the hem of her rain-soaked dress, the unpredictable weather of the past week catching her out on the walk there.
She gave her name and the time of her appointment to the reception clerk, then tried to hide her annoyance behind a nod when the woman said Dr Stephens was running at least half an hour behind on his consultations. No apology was forthcoming, only an instruction to take a seat in the waiting room next door and a slow look up and down at the bedraggled state of her.
There were three other occupants already in the waiting room: an elderly gentleman with a walking stick, coughing politely into a cotton handkerchief, and a young woman with a toddler asleep across her lap, the boy’s cheeks rosy with a fever from the look of him.
Sweeping her sodden fringe off her forehead, Anita took a seat across the room, next to a table laden with magazines and leaflets. Putting her handbag on the floor beside her feet, she twisted round in her chair to tidy the magazines, a force of habit instilled during her last job housekeeping for a woman who liked everything kept neat and straightened and threatened to dock her pay when they weren’t.
The magazine on top was a three-year-old issue of Family Circle and Anita’s eye was drawn to a small headline in the bottom left corner.
Mending A Marriage
When he seems weak and she seems cold
Anita grimaced. Had the writer been spying on her and Paul? She picked up the magazine and flicked to the start of the feature, then immediately dropped it back on the pile as though the pages had pricked her fingers, a quick scan of the intro confirmi
ng she didn’t want to read on.
If your marriage is in a rut, don’t despair. Here are 10 foolproof ways to pull you out of it.
What if there was no way to pull you out? What if the rot had always been there? What if the doubts you had on your wedding day, which you dismissed as jitters, had solidified into absolute certainty that you married the wrong person? Anita shifted in her seat again so her body was angled away from the table and the magazine no longer in her eyeline.
Paul wasn’t a bad man. A decent earner in a profession that, touch wood – and she did, reaching down to touch the leg of her chair – had emerged relatively unscathed from the recession, she knew she could count on him to keep a roof over their heads. His wage covered their sizeable mortgage, the remaining bills and their outgoings for the children, which meant she was able to keep whatever wage she earned to spend on herself, and when she wasn’t earning, like now, Paul would slip her extra in the housekeeping.
His commitment to being the main breadwinner didn’t make him a good match for her, though. He was undemonstrative and insular and in the course of their marriage had lapsed into treating Anita not as a person in her own right but simply as an extension of himself. He behaved as though her sole purpose in life was to make his easier, that she should put up with his endless work trips and minimal contribution to their home life because he brought in the most money. In the early days, she would’ve happily forgone luxuries for some genuine affection from him, but not now. The rot was too entrenched.
Anita shivered, as much from apprehension as from feeling chilly sitting there in a damp dress. She was concerned Dr Stephens would refuse her request, even though she had a compelling reason to make it and had been rehearsing for days the speech she planned to deliver to him. Paul knew nothing about the appointment and had he known he would be devastated, which is why she didn’t tell him. Fortunately, he was away again for work, flogging pens, stationery and other office supplies to firms in Yorkshire over a five-night stretch. If she was careful enough, he might never find out.
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