by Will Maclean
‘Where are we going, Tim?’
‘I’ve told you,’ I said. ‘We’re going to look at a place for you. It came highly recommended.’
‘I don’t mean that,’ said Dad. ‘I mean, how are we getting there?’ His hand was thin and cold, and its grip was very strong.
‘I don’t—We’re in the car? You remember?’
‘I don’t want to go through Cambridgeshire,’ he said plainly.
‘What? We’re not anywhere near there, Dad.’
‘I don’t want to go there.’
‘We’re in Essex, on the A12. We’re nowhere near the M11, which would be—’
Dad wasn’t listening. ‘Never going there,’ he said carefully. His eyes were wet. ‘Not since … you know.’
‘Dad—’
‘Not since they found her there.’
I looked down at the table.
‘Never,’ said Dad.
The car’s bonnet devoured the dull grey miles. Dad maintained a brooding silence. I thought he might sleep again, but I was wrong. The weather brightened a little, and the sun warmed the black trees and brambles that lined the road.
‘We still don’t know,’ said Dad, eventually.
‘Don’t know what?’
‘We don’t know who found her.’
‘Dad—’
‘The police get an anonymous call telling them where she is. That’s all we know. Somebody calls up and tells them exactly where she is, and that person knows exactly who she is.’
‘Dad,’ I said. This was the rarest of his few conversational topics, but the one he was most dogged in refusing to let go of.
‘It must have been him,’ he said. ‘It must have been whoever killed her.’
‘We can’t know that,’ I said. ‘It might just have been someone who … stumbled across her. Who didn’t want to get involved.’
‘Pff,’ said Dad, as he always did. ‘Not where she was. Not hidden like that. You’d have to know. Or be told about it. Or shown. Too much of a coincidence.’
‘I don’t think we’ll ever know, Dad.’
‘Do you think the police traced the call? If it’s a local number, it might belong to whoever—’
‘Dad!’ I snapped. ‘Can we not talk about this, please? It’s – I find it too upsetting.’
He sighed and nodded. Waze told us to come off at the next junction. There were traffic lights at the empty roundabout, and we dutifully waited for them to change. The wind outside stirred last year’s dead yellow grass; heads of teasel and thistle bobbed. A short way away, a sparrowhawk kept itself aloft with rapid, silent wingbeats, its attention fixed on something below.
I became aware that Dad was crying.
‘My girl,’ he said, sobbing gently. ‘My little girl.’
He turned his face away.
Of course, the village had changed.
The tiny shop where I had once bought five bottles of red wine was still a supermarket, but a brightly lit one now, with the branding of one of the larger chains. It had a cashpoint built into the front of it; a revolving plastic sign for the Lotto turned slowly in the faint breeze. And there, just beyond, was the row of small shops where Hattie Wells’s bookshop had been. I slowed the car. All of the shopfronts had been refitted; the sagging latticework of the Victorian frontage was long gone. The refurbished units were uniform; it was impossible to say for certain which one had been Hattie’s. One shop sold designer soaps and fragrances, two of the others were now small art galleries. In the window of the nearest one, a sculpture of an elongated hare, cast in bronze, sprinted forever along a long piece of driftwood.
And there, at long last, was the B-road lined with trees, and there, at the end of it, was a sign:
HAZELWOOD ELDERCARE
PRIVATE PREMIUM NURSING HOME
Under these words were various badges and medals of accreditation, which Dad peered at suspiciously as we turned the corner.
And there was the house. The dark woods that partially surrounded it had been cleared some way back, so that the house seemed much less cramped, less hemmed in. Similarly, the front lawn was well looked after and recently mowed; flower beds bordered the house, where hydrangeas and rose bushes grew. The basic mismatched shape of the place was unchanged, but the Victorian wing had been augmented and – incredibly – made even uglier, by the addition of a large first-floor extension, with enormous windows, overlooking the neat lawn. The surviving Victorian brickwork had also been professionally cleaned at some point, the bricks glowing a dull, vulgar red, jarring still further with the original features. The seventeenth-century wing, however, was exactly as it was the last time I had seen it, and I stared at it for a long time after we got out of the car.
I helped Dad along the gravel path towards the main entrance.
‘I still don’t see why we’re here,’ he said.
The wooden front doors of Yarlings – I could only ever think of it as Yarlings – had been replaced with clear glass ones, onto which a line drawing of the building and the logo of the parent company had been sandblasted. The area immediately inside the doors – where once had been a long, dark wood-panelled corridor, and a large central stairway – had been reconfigured in a way so dramatic and complete that it was, to me, an entirely new space. The walls were painted daffodil yellow and sky blue. Behind a desk sat a woman in her mid-twenties, wearing a white blouse with a green nylon skirt. A gold name-badge pinned to her blouse said KERI, and when she smiled up at me I saw she had a nasal piercing.
‘Can I help you?’
‘Yes, it’s Mr Smith. I called earlier?’
‘Smith, Smith – Smith!’ she said, clicking a wireless mouse. ‘Ah, yes, here you are. And it’s … Frank?’
‘Hello,’ said Dad cheerfully. ‘I can’t live here.’
‘Dad! You haven’t even seen it yet!’
‘I’ve seen enough, thanks.’
‘I’m sorry!’ I smiled a watery smile at the young woman. ‘It’s been a long journey.’
‘No, it hasn’t,’ said Dad. ‘Not especially.’
‘Well, one of my colleagues will be along shortly to show you the facilities. Maybe you’ll change your mind when you see what else we have here.’
A few minutes later, a young man dressed in an outfit that made him look like a futuristic medical orderly came and greeted us. His name-badge said ADAM. He walked us through a fire-door and down a corridor that had presumably once been the main one I remembered, that ran through the ground floor.
‘I don’t know how much you know about the facility?’ Adam said cheerily.
‘Quite enough, thanks,’ said Dad. ‘Having seen it.’
‘Dad. Please.’
Dad sighed, but was quiet.
‘All right then!’ said Adam, as if the last few seconds hadn’t happened. ‘We’ve twenty-four private rooms here, all offering complete comfort, and the very best in end-of-life care. Most of the rooms have excellent views, especially now that the landscaping has finally been completed on the new gardens at the rear of the house.’
‘There are gardens?’ said Dad. ‘Can I see them? I love a garden.’
‘Of course,’ said Adam. ‘They were designed by an award-wining architect.’
‘Fancy that,’ said Dad caustically.
We reached the end of the corridor. Adam pushed open a pair of double doors, and we were in the Great Hall.
Smaller, of course, than I remembered, with all the dark wooden panelling now painted a lustrous white. Eight dining tables, with four chairs each, floated on a vast green carpet. The enormous fireplace, alone among everything else around it, was entirely unchanged.
I approached it, almost reverently, and ran my fingertips along the grooves of the circular design etched into it. I felt in that moment that the carving, the incomprehensible sigil, was the only fixed point in the whole universe, and if I focused on it long enough, Hazelwood House would fall away and there would be Yarlings, and everything it represented, and had come to represe
nt, in my mind.
At a nearby table sat the only diner; a very old woman with one severely cataracted eye, quietly slurping soup.
‘Impressive, isn’t it?’ said Adam. ‘Good afternoon, Miss Wells.’
I stared at her in wonder. I hadn’t recognised her. Old age had mummified her into something smaller and more cramped, hunched over so that her long hair threatened to dip into her soup. She gazed at me for a second with her good eye, then looked away with distaste.
‘My books have been stolen,’ she said. Her cataracted eye glowed with captive sunlight.
‘We’ll send someone to look for them, Miss Wells,’ Adam said breezily. ‘Don’t you worry.’
‘All my words in them,’ muttered Hattie Wells, returning to her soup. ‘My word-hoard. It’s not right.’
‘What do you think?’ Adam asked us.
‘Somebody took them,’ said Hattie Wells. ‘Somebody knows.’
‘I hate it,’ said Dad, cheerily.
Adam smiled as if he hadn’t heard. ‘Well, come through to the lounge. You can talk about it a bit more there.’
Through another corridor, which I was certain was a new addition, and then through a doorway, and we were in the lounge. Although it was now filled with comfortable sofas and armchairs, and a coffee table with a fan of magazines spread out upon it, I knew exactly where we were. The lounge was Tobias Salt’s room. There, by the mullioned windows, was where Graham’s equipment had stood, and there, above a different fireplace, was where Sally’s portrait of Salt had been pinned. Now, there was a nondescript painting in acrylics of a bland Suffolk landscape, under a grey sky. Dad ignored the room entirely and wandered over to the window, to gaze out longingly at the lawn.
‘Give it a chance, Dad,’ I found myself saying.
‘I don’t think so, Tim.’
‘But you haven’t seen all of it yet. You said you wanted to see the gardens.’
‘And so I will, Tim. And then we’ll go.’
‘Dad—’
‘Tim,’ he said, turning around to look at me. ‘I can’t die here.’
Dad asked to see the gardens. Adam offered to accompany him, but Dad insisted that directions would be enough.
After Dad left, Adam was clearly keen to leave, but I knew I would never get the chance to ask again. And so, after a few well-placed banalities about the house, I went for the jugular.
‘Any ghosts? You’d expect a place this size and age to be haunted.’
He looked at me and smiled. ‘You’ve looked up this place online?’
Of course I had. There wasn’t much, but a couple of dedicated paranormal researchers and bloggers had succeeded in digging up fragments of the story of Yarlings, and what had taken place there, although their accounts were sketchy and the stories contradictory.
‘No,’ I said. ‘Why, what does it say?’
Adam smiled. ‘Apparently, some kind of ghost-hunt took place here, in the seventies, when it was empty. Bunch of people stayed here and summoned up a demon or something. So the story goes! Apparently, it all got out of hand and they fled. The north wing caught fire the night they left. The fire destroyed the front parts of the Victorian bit, which is why the extension with the spa is there today.’
I had not heard this last part before. The front parts of the Victorian bit. Graham’s office.
‘Personally,’ Adam continued, ‘I think it’s a load of rubbish. I’ve been here since we opened, eighteen months ago, and you couldn’t imagine anywhere less spooky if you tried. I think the ghost hunters – if they were even real – probably just scared themselves stupid and started believing any old thing.’
‘Probably,’ I said.
‘Come on,’ said Adam. ‘I’ll take you back to the dining hall. You can keep an eye on your dad from there.’
The new gardens, at the rear of the house, were impressive. A large area had been reclaimed from the woods, and around a central circular lawn of fresh turf ran a path of orange gravel, bordered by radial beds of cottage-garden shrubs and plants; purple and green sage, rosemary and lavender. From the windows of the Great Hall, I watched Dad walk the entire circle. Two tired-looking men sat, immobile as statues, on one of the benches.
Dad stopped to talk to them, and after a couple of seconds, I saw them all shake with unmistakeable mirth. Dad had made a joke, and they had all laughed. It was bewildering. What did dead men have to laugh about?
I thought of everything that had happened here, in the space that had been Yarlings. And I thought of everything that had happened since. Mum had clung on for another year or so, a whimpering shadow, prone to fits of shuddering and howling. It had been almost a relief when she finally died. I had eventually gone to university, been married, and divorced, and married, and divorced again. I had no children, but my first wife and I had endured two miscarriages. I had had several careers, in which I had failed entirely to make any kind of mark. I had been in and out of therapy, and, after the collapse of my first marriage, had briefly been sectioned. I lived in a house I disliked, somewhere I didn’t care for. I was too much of an intellectual snob, too quick to judge someone for a malapropism or a misused word, to form any meaningful friendships, so I was mostly alone. If I had to characterise my life, the image that always sprang to mind was a slow descent, a narrowing of horizons and potential, missed chances and bad luck, funnelling downwards, always downwards, to the dissatisfactions of the present. It had been forty-two years since I was last in this house, when, despite the stain of tragedy, everything had seemed possible, and the world, and I, had seemed limitless.
To say I never saw anyone from Yarlings again would not be quite true; once, whilst channel-surfing late at night, I saw Polly. Her hair was streaked with silver and she wore glasses, but her bright, questioning eyes and sardonic smile were unchanged. The onscreen caption identified her as ‘Dr Polly Kendrick, professor of psychology’. The documentary she was part of was about the abuse of children and young adults.
‘You,’ said Hattie Wells brusquely, as I crossed the room. Something in her voice made me stop dead by her table. I wondered if she had been a headmistress, once.
‘Who’s your friend?’
‘He’s not my friend,’ I said. ‘He’s my dad.’
‘What? Oh no, not him. He went out to the garden. I meant the other—’ She looked unsure. ‘Sorry, when you came in earlier, you had someone else with you.’
‘Adam? The orderly?’
‘No. Not Adam.’
‘Someone else?’
‘Yes. A man.’
I said nothing.
‘Tall. Thin.’
I said nothing.
Hattie Wells looked puzzled. ‘Where did he go?’
‘Not far,’ I said. ‘He never goes far.’
Acknowledgements
All books are written over many different times and places, and with the help of many, many people. This book is no different.
I’d like to thank the following people, who made sure, in various places and times, that this book got written. Joel Morris, Jason Hazeley and Marc Haynes for unquestioning support. Zoë Tomalin for friendship and critical reading. Jess Williams for endless help and cheerleading, Simon Skevington for music choices. Alice Shaell and Eileen Peters for coffee and feedback. Rebecca Asher for support. Louisa Heinrich for reading and clarifying. Bob Fischer, whose landmark June 2017 article in issue 354 of The Fortean Times convinced me there was life in the twitching corpse of ‘70s Hauntology yet. Tim Worthington for help with some of the stickier period details. Jim Sangster, Mark Evans, Carrie Quinlan, Neil Edmond, Alex Young, Tora Young, Si, Annie Bryson and Shaun McTernan, Justine Jordan, Jo Unwin, Ed Wilson, Carrie Plitt, Dan Bunyard, Arabella McGuigan, Gareth Tunley, Alice Lowe, Debbie Easton, Dr. Carol Meale, and Barbara and Howard Moss. Carla, and Mum.
To Alexander Cochran at Conville and Walsh for agreeing to take this on, and to Jason Arthur at Heinemann for taking it on and not letting go. Also Kate McQuaid at Heinemann, and Sarah Bance wh
o diligently proofed and Henry Petrides who designed the striking cover.
And an endless, endless debt of thanks to my amazing wife, Victoria Moss, and our baffling, deafening, brilliant daughter, Sophia Raie.
This book is respectfully dedicated to the memory of the one and only Paul Condon. Happy trails, fella.
THIS IS JUST THE BEGINNING
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First published by William Heinemann in 2020
Copyright © Will Maclean 2020
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
The moral right of the author has been asserted
Jacket credit: Jacket design by Henry Petrides
House © Simon Marsden / Bridgeman
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ISBN: 978-1-473-57589-9
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