“What about Peter?
“We should go.” Alex nodded towards the window; outside the rain had finally stopped and a glorious morning was dawning. I felt sick, thinking of Harriet, somewhere on these grounds alone. I had been so sure she was in the house, so sure that Peter had her, was using her to get me. But now I didn’t know.
“Do you know where Harriet is, Alex?”
“Come with me.”
And I did. Somehow I was still glad that I wasn’t alone, that no matter what he had done to Alex I wouldn’t have to face Peter by myself. That Alex was alive, that he was mine.
Whatever they had made of him, Alex was still my brother.
THIRTY SEVEN
Harriet
I CONTEMPLATED MY OPTIONS. The woods, or the house.
I didn’t know whether to run, whether to try to get to a road and call for help. But… it was still dark. The sun hadn’t even started to rise yet. The ground was uneven, and I didn’t have a torch. I glanced around, at the grass and the trees, the woods stretching beyond the greyish-black line of water that might be a lake, and I doubted that I’d make it. My head was pounding, I felt woozy. Faintly, I thought I must be concussed.
I glanced again, back and forth. The woods or the house.
I thought of Erin’s face. The way she wrinkled her nose, the way she’d kissed me. Would I even see her again? If I was a sacrifice – just a way for Peter to get to her – what then? If Erin was here, would I even know? How would I find her?
Then a thought struck me. It came so fast I almost laughed. If Erin was here, I knew, there was only one place she’d be. Remember last night when I said I’d never take the woods again, even over certain death? Next time hold me to that.
Woods or house? House.
And maybe, if there was a God, the house still had electricity and it might have a phone.
I started walking. I ignored the fear that the man who had knocked me out, brought me here and tied me up might be inside. That he might already have Erin. That I was wasting valuable time. That I was walking into a trap.
I ignored everything except the thought of Erin’s face.
I suspected that this was the house where Dana had brought the children. The place where Jenny Bowles had cleaned and where Dana’s younger son had died. It had that sort of feel to it. Empty, abandoned. The bushes and plants in the garden around the shed were wild, overgrown and tangled. The house loomed out of the foliage like a monster.
And yet towards it I went.
I tried to move silently. It was hard. My legs and arms were aching from scrambling to get out of the shed. I caught my foot in a tuft of grass, felt my knee go weak as I fought to right myself.
The door to the house was down a flight of stone steps that I could hardly see in the dark. I stumbled again, flinging my arm out. The door was ajar.
I took one last look at the garden, at the shed, at the sky that was still prickled with stars, and then I stepped inside.
The whole place felt empty, haunted. I stumbled through the darkness, passing the odd window that limned abandoned rooms in moonlight. Everything was dark and grey and shadowed, old and creaking. I reached a foyer. Some stairs. There was a small table at the bottom, polished wood shining through the dust, but no telephone.
I avoided catching my eye in the mirror that hung on the wall. I didn’t want to see what he had done to me. The pain in my head was blinding.
I tried the stairs. They creaked a little under my weight, but were quieter than I feared they might be. I poked my head into room after bare room. Windows were broken in some of them, graffiti sprayed on walls, empty beer cans and cigarette butts on the floors.
I found nothing new. No clothes, no electronics. I was desperate for a phone. There must be one somewhere; I just wasn’t looking in the right place.
I reached the end of a corridor. The walls boxed me in. My body contracted. But there was one final room here. I don’t know why I hesitated, but something slowed me. The door was closed tight, unlike most of the others, but more than that it just felt different.
I made myself open it. There might be somebody in there, but there might be a phone. I needed a phone.
The room was huge. It had a window that looked out over the blue-tinged grass in the garden, the curtains open to let in the weak moonlight. I stepped inside, closing the door quietly behind me. This had been somebody’s bedroom.
A four-poster bed dominated the space, its old sheets moth-eaten but beautiful. Silken flowers, birds, butterflies. A large vanity took up one wall, a cluster of framed photographs sat on the left corner, their glass free from dust. Two boys, one blond and one dark. In the first photograph they were younger, holding hands solemnly. In the second they had grown. This one looked like a newer addition, its frame plastic instead of wood. I picked it up to get a better look.
At least, I thought it was the same boys in the second photo, but in the dim light it was hard to tell. The brown-haired boy was the same. He went from solemn to cheerful, a small smile on his lips in the second picture, the shape of his mouth changing his whole face. The other boy seemed to get older very quickly. In the first he seemed cherubic, perhaps four years old and smiling. The second photograph had been taken in a park or a garden, both boys looking away from the camera and towards each other. The blond boy was now haunted by dark hollows in his cheeks and eyes.
Something tugged at me, something about that second photograph, but I wasn’t sure what it was. Perhaps the blond boy wasn’t the same one in that second picture at all.
My eyes strayed to the other wall, where there was an old television mounted in a wooden cabinet. The shelves below were filled with VHS tapes. More tapes than I could count, neatly piled and lined up in rows, uniform in size and shape.
I tiptoed closer. Each of the tapes was labelled carefully in a cursive, looping hand. The white labels had yellowed, the black ink long-faded to brown. Some of them were impossible to read, but others I could make out.
DANA HARPER IN THE SWEETEST DARK
DANA HARPER IN THE FOLLY OF YOUTH
The television was the kind I’d had growing up, small with an inbuilt VCR. Without thinking, my fingers chose a tape at random. Kiss Her Goodbye. I started to pop it into the machine.
I knew it was foolish, but I couldn’t help myself. Curiosity overwhelmed all of my senses, and after locating the mute button I tried to push it in.
Nothing happened.
Of course it didn’t. There was no electricity. No power. I cursed myself inwardly, wanting nothing more than to find out what, exactly, these tapes contained. It was clear the woman was Dana Wood. Perhaps she’d been an actress before she got married. Maybe Harper was her maiden name, and that’s why we’d never found her before. I pictured the life she might have had, once.
What would make a woman go from actress to carer? I wondered if it was her marriage. Her children. Whether it had been her choice or whether she’d been forced. What had made her take the next step to killer?
It didn’t matter. It confirmed my foolishness. Even if there was a phone here, there was no electricity and it wouldn’t work. I wanted to kick myself. If I’d left the grounds half an hour ago I could have been a mile away by now. I wasn’t thinking. My head…
But as I was beating myself up, I noticed something else. It was a small floral journal. It sat on the vanity as though it had been placed there temporarily, right on the edge. As though it was waiting for somebody to come back to it.
I steadied myself against the TV stand and then stumbled over to it. It was damp, but clean, its covers soft and well-thumbed. My fingers recoiled from its tepid pages, but I forced myself to pick it up. It was about the size of my hand. I opened the cover and saw that the first page might have once been filled with the same cursive hand as on the tapes, but water had smeared the ink, leaving it mostly illegible.
Godfrey had said she had found a journal containing poetry and diary entries in the little house. I wondered if it mig
ht have been like this one. If Dana had kept more than one. Perhaps… The thought made me squirm, but perhaps Peter had brought it back here after he’d killed his mother. Like a trophy.
I flipped through the pages, my brain stuttering over odd phrases that made any sort of sense. Mouse is home again. The doctor says he needs rest. He wasn’t very happy with either of us. I think we need a new doctor. And then, a few pages later: Mouse is different without Bear. Withdrawn. He won’t talk to me except to yell. Yesterday he bit me. I think I’m going to homeschool him. Jack wouldn’t have let this go on, but Jack isn’t here and I am and I know I can figure this out. I have to find a way to make this better.
I could see no dates on the entries, no thread that connected them together either. Sometimes the pen was different – darker, its point pressed harder into the paper – and sometimes the words were so faint I couldn’t read them at all. Sometimes the pen changed halfway through a page, as though a thought had been left half-completed until maybe days or weeks later.
I felt my mouth go dry. These were the ramblings of a mad woman, surely? I saw names, but they weren’t names I understood: Mouse, Bear, Chicken, Duck. The new one is an Otter. Like people were animals. Were these – the children?
I continued to flick through, finding paragraph after unintelligible paragraph. Mouse likes Otter. She’s more confident now that Squirrel is gone. She’s smart too. Maybe she’s the one we’ve been looking for. She can keep Mouse occupied for hours. He just stares and stares at her. We’re even going to let her sleep in the bedroom upstairs. She already spends hours in the library – I don’t think she’ll run, not since she thinks Squirrel is buried by the lake. Mouse was right about that.
As the entries progressed the writing got sloppier. Like the writer was drunk, or not paying full attention. There were crossings out, underlined passages. Whole sections gone over and over so much that the letters merged into one another.
Right at the back there was a single page where the writing was legible. The water stains had smeared some, but not all, of the words. Can’t be too careful. Of course I care. But Mouse comes first. And we’d never bury them near the house anyway. Too risky.
Gecko – allenton, near new car park on may st
Lamb – favourite playground, mulberry chase
Chicken – back alley near church, edmonton lane BG ** found
Monkey – foremark, by the water at east edge, near tree that looks like lightning ** found
Sparrow – river derwent, near statue that looks like a horse **found
And then, nearer the bottom:
Squirrel – ridge near carsington water, ½ mile from first car park
Otter – abbey park, river near the grove of trees ** found
My whole body convulsed and I nearly dropped the book. Monkey. Chicken. Michael and Jem. Their bodies were found near a church and a reservoir. I tried to breathe but my chest hurt. I wanted to cry.
I forced myself to look again.
Sparrow. Was that George? He’d been found near the Derwent… I gripped the journal as I noticed another location further down the list.
Otter. Abbey Park. That must be Morgan. Her body had been found, not even well-hidden, on a bank of the river near a cluster of oak trees in a park in Leicester. I’d asked her mother about it during an interview, and Vera had just repeated Why there, why then? as though I might know the answer. It had been as though Dana wanted her to be found.
I swallowed hard. There were other names, other animals, locations I didn’t understand. My eyes grazed over them again and again, drawing the words out as though they might begin to make sense.
It was a list of where the children had been buried. Did she want some of these children to be found? Was she pleased when they were? I found myself looking at the little asterisks next to some names. They’d been added in different pens, different colours, probably at different times. Like a journal of her success.
Did she want to be caught? Or was it gloating? I couldn’t tell.
I was so trapped in my thoughts, the disgust roiling inside of my stomach, that I didn’t hear the footsteps until it was too late. I shoved the journal down the back of my trousers just as the door swung open.
There was nowhere to hide. It was him. The boy from the photograph, but he was a man now. He was the one who had hurt me. I felt my skin prickle as realisation swept through me like electricity.
“I thought I might find you here. Though I did hope you’d wait until we had company. Have you had your fill of my mother’s shrine? I made it myself.” He had a small smile on his face. When I didn’t answer he added, “Didn’t anybody tell you that it’s rude to touch other people’s things?”
THIRTY EIGHT
Erin
“FASTER, ALEX.”
We reached the ground floor of the house. Tension made my movements clumsy, but so far I had seen no evidence of Peter. I fought the panic that was clinging to my spine, keeping my back ramrod straight. I needed to stay calm.
“Alex, I need to find her and get out of here. Now.” I was a broken record, I knew, but Alex didn’t seem to understand.
I walked half a step behind him, still amazed at the quiet strength housed inside his skinny body. This was the big brother I had cuddled and argued with – and yet he was a complete stranger. I didn’t recognise anything in his mannerisms, the little head toss as he turned to check on me, the shrug of his shoulder that was neither Mum nor Dad.
“This way.” His voice was hoarse, full of emotion.
He wasn’t one for words. That much was still the Alex I had once known.
We came to what must have been the conservatory. I flinched, not wanting to see the room that I remembered from my dreams.
“We don’t have to go in there, Alex. I don’t need to see it—”
“How come you don’t remember anything, Jilly?”
Alex had stopped dead in front of the doors that led into the conservatory. I could see the bars of pale light through the strip of glass, could imagine the early morning cold before the sun had a chance to warm it. I didn’t need to see it. I didn’t want to.
“I hit my head…”
“Didn’t you ever think about me?” he asked.
“All the time.”
“Why didn’t you come back? Why didn’t you… bring people sooner?”
“I…” I felt shame burn my cheeks pink. “I tried. But the hospital – the dogs, my head… I couldn’t find you.”
Alex shook his head, as though that was the end of that conversation, but as he opened the door to the conservatory and ignored my plea for us to go another way, he spoke again.
“I just want to show you one more thing,” he said.
“Okay…” This was Alex and I would do anything for him. I would. It was just hard to remember what it was like to have a brother, to think of what he needed, like he had always done for me. And what if Peter came back before we found Harriet?
But he was my brother.
The conservatory was different from in my dream. Sparse, a few small chairs and a table. I located the corner, though, where the two of us had sat.
“It was good, sitting here,” Alex said. “Then – she came. She told us what had happened and that she’d look after us. About Mum and Dad. Do you remember?”
“I…”
I remembered the cake. But Alex was so desperate. I could see the gleam in his eyes.
“Jilly, do you remember?”
If this was the price I had to pay for my brother…
“Yes,” I lied. “I remember.”
Alex slumped in relief, a long breath shooting out of him.
“And you remember what happened afterwards? Outside? When we ran and ran after the other boy helped us?”
The other boy.
“I…”
I did remember. A stolen key, cold and heavy in the palm of my hand. That was why Alex had brought me here. To the conservatory. I scanned the wall of glass until I saw the panel that was
actually a door, the handle brass and solid…
“Randeep gave us a key,” I said. I recalled long limbs, trembling fingers, and a boy who had already lost everything and was willing to lose more to help us.
“Go now,” he’d whispered. “Go and I’ll keep them busy. Tell somebody about Jas.”
And then Alex had grabbed my hand and dragged me out across the lawn and we ran as the sky darkened and the sun began to set. It was so cold, our bare feet frozen and sore, our new nightclothes soon caked in mud from the torrential rain. The dark swollen clouds overhead, the rushing sound of water…
“Oh, Alex…”
“You do remember,” he whispered.
“Come with me again, Alex,” I said. “We can go home. Mum – oh my God, Mum will be so happy to see you. Dad – Dad’s gone.”
I’d never allowed myself to acknowledge it before, how Alex had always borne Dad’s drunken moods, how he’d let himself be needled and put down because it took the pressure off me. How he’d always spirited me away to a different world. But now I saw it – and it was too late.
Alex’s throat bobbed as he swallowed his tears. I reached for him but he yanked his arm back.
“Why won’t you stay here with me?” he said. “It’s not so bad. It’s… it’s a bit cold now. Not like before. But we can stay here. We still have some money; it’s hers but nobody needs to know. It’s not perfect but it’s good.”
“Alex, you’re not making sense. He’ll come back,” I said. “Then what?”
I didn’t want to tell Alex about the threats, about the break-ins and Monica and Jenny. I didn’t want to scare him. Somewhere along the way he had stopped being my older brother and now I felt like I needed to look after him. I wanted to protect Alex from Peter because I couldn’t do it before. Alex was playing right into the psycho’s hands.
“Alex, I don’t understand why you feel safe here. Children died. Dana and her son killed them.”
“No. They didn’t. It wasn’t like—”
“They did, Alex. Jaswinder. The girl who died right before we got here? Don’t you remember her?” I saw her hollow, slack face swimming before my eyes. Red candles around her like a shrine, one snuffed out.
The Final Child Page 28
