Avoiding puddles and pedestrians pulling suitcases behind them like recalcitrant children, Joanna picks over her recent conversation with Sue Fisher as she weaves her way along Queensway. Hyde Park, now the rain has stopped, gleams under the bleached look of winter. A rush of runners in obscenely tight Lycra dodge dog walkers and buggy-pushers. An attractive-looking couple, arm in arm, remind her of Mike and her boys, and the gnawing anxiety that she spends too much time away from home rears its head again. A flash of a laughing mouth close to hers. The teeth, like Caroline’s, spin Joanna back to her sister and how she had loved this time of year, with its low-hanging sun and the need for scarves and gloves and woollen layers. Joanna wonders, gazing up through a canopy of filigreed branches and inhaling January’s melancholy breath, if her sister used to follow the same webbing of paths through the park to the rescue centre she’s now taking. The idea Caroline could have been fretting about something Joanna said to her when she was nine is difficult to get her head around. Why didn’t she talk to her, clear the air, instead of letting her resentment fester?
‘You must have known I only said that about Dean to cheer you up, I didn’t mean anything by it. I don’t know why you’d hold something so small against me all these years? And that thing your nurse said,’ Joanna mumbles to the dead Caroline, ‘about it driving you to do something terrible, something you could ultimately never forgive yourself for – what the hell was that about?’
A squirrel from within the darkened undergrowth catches her eye, and she forgets her troubled sister for a moment or two. Vaulting from grass to blackened bough, to grass again, the flick of its tail amuses her. She wishes Freddie and Ethan, with their eternal What? Why? How? could be here to enjoy the experience. But before there is the chance to dwell on her sons, the slow slop of the Serpentine, when it finds the concrete bank, brings thoughts of Drake’s Pike. She stops to watch the bob of moor hens and swans on the water, the geese clustering the path. It makes her jump, the whizzing of plastic wheels on tarmac. Wrenching her head to it, she sees a girl on quad skates: hair pulled back from her face like party streamers, arms akimbo. The sight of her flings Joanna back to Ellie Fry … her bunches the colour of demerara sugar … the pink birthday cake … the ten silver candles …
What’s this girl doing out on her own? Joanna’s mind rolls her into the present, to the urgent concern for this unknown and seemingly unaccompanied child. Where are her parents? They should be with her, don’t they know it’s not safe? You’re not safe , she wants to shout, to warn, but barely a whimper betrays her.
St James’s Animal Shelter, when at last Joanna pushes open the wide glass doors, reeks of damp dog and disinfectant. The reception area is littered with ‘cleaning in process’ hazard signs and, clutching the directions she was given over the phone, Joanna tiptoes across the wet concrete to the empty registration desk. Looking through to high, mesh-walled kennels spreading off into the distance, she hears the frenzied barking of dogs throwing their weight against the wire, frantic for attention.
Rotating this way and that, looking for someone, anyone, she spots a wall of full-length photographs under the banner of Our Volunteers . Stepping closer, Joanna instantly identifies the forty-one-year-old Caroline. It’s easy to distinguish the mixed-up, solemn-eyed little girl she once was from this overweight figure with straggly salt and pepper hair. Her sister, trapped in childhood – a childhood which ended that summer in Witchwood. Caroline’s inability or unwillingness to grow up is displayed for all to see: the velvet Alice band, the sandals and ankle socks, the baggy dungarees. It’s enough to break her heart.
The clunk of a tin bucket and Joanna turns to a teenage girl wearing regulation overalls, the slop of her zigzagging mop perilously close to her feet.
‘Hi,’ Joanna calls, raising an arm in greeting. ‘Is Jeffrey about?’
‘Coo-ee , Mrs Peters.’ Jeffrey appears from nowhere, crisp in striped shirt and what looks suspiciously like a lady’s cardigan. ‘You found us okay then.’ His voice rings, staccato sharp, above the incessant barking. ‘Amber.’ He waves at mop-girl, who up close is tattooed to her neck and smells of patchouli oil. ‘This is Caroline’s sister. You remember Caroline?’
A shrug. ‘Spose,’ is all she’s prepared to give, and the three of them stand in awkward silence.
‘Okay then, you carry on, Amber.’ Jeffrey nods at the saturnine teenager, who slinks away, towing her bucket. ‘Something I’ve come to realise over the years,’ he whispers conspiratorially, ‘is people who do volunteering work usually have a need to atone. Yes, it’s surprisingly common.’ He claps his hands theatrically. ‘Take Amber, for instance.’ Jeffrey steers Joanna through to the office. ‘She stabbed her stepfather to death. Yes ,’ he reiterates, sensing her shock. ‘Sexually abusing her, he was – admittedly, her volunteering here is part of the conditions of her parole and enforced by the court, but you catch my drift?’
Joanna pretends she does and follows him into a tiny office piled floor to ceiling with cardboard files.
‘Not that anyone here asks questions, you understand.’ He winks. ‘And it must be a relief not to have to share intimacies, don’t you think? Wonderful, for the mutual love of animals to be enough of a foundation for friendships. After all, who needs the burden of other people’s sins? Each of us has areas uncharted by our imaginations, areas too dark to penetrate, don’t we?’ He pauses, the ominous weight of his hand on her arm. ‘And I suspect your sister was only just learning to close the doors on such places in her past, don’t you? The last thing she’d have wanted is any of us opening up old wounds.’
The tatty canvas rucksack Jeffrey Morris said he found in Caroline’s abandoned locker appears to contain very little. Hardly worth yomping all the way over here for, Joanna thinks, opting for an empty bench along Birdcage Walk: a setting as deprived of birds as it is a cage. Beneath an arch comprising of the shrivelled heads of dangling roses, she pulls the rucksack into her lap, cuddles it in a way she wishes she could have done to Caroline when she was alive, but rarely did. Unbuckling the rusted fastenings, she pulls out various bottles of antidepressants, a tutti-frutti lip balm, an old Nokia mobile that wouldn’t look out of place on Antiques Roadshow , and a couple of notebooks she stops to flick through.
Stuffing the things back inside, her fingers collide with a hardback library book on the Pre-Raphaelite brotherhood and, posing as a bookmark, a piece of stiffened card. A postcard: expensive, dog-eared, miles from its intended destination. Lifting it free, the image is one Caroline had been fixated on, believing it echoed her own life story. But refreshing herself with its descriptive forms, Joanna finds it conjures up painful memories of her own.
… it drove her mad, Hamlet murdering her father … her sister’s voice, maybe Dora’s too, find her out of nowhere … then one day, out picking flowers by the river, she fell in and drowned, slowly, singing all the while .
It was this particular painting and the allegorical message it contains, a framed reproduction of which hung on the landing at Pillowell Cottage, that Dora – along with her classical records and exotic foodstuffs – took great trouble to explain to them as children. Caroline took it all to heart, believing the weeping willow leaning over Ophelia’s body signified forsaken love; the floating fritillary, sorrow; the pansies, what it is to love in vain. But it was the garland of violets looped around Ophelia’s neck – indicating faithfulness, chastity and death of the young – she had the deepest affiliation with.
I am the true Ophelia … Her sister’s voice again, talking in a way that would repel and frighten. And Joanna sees Caroline as she was, twirling her hair around her finger, making it greasy where it met her neck, a faraway look in her eye … that should’ve been me, I should’ve been the one to die .
She turns the postcard over. Sees the date it was written: 11 November, a first-class stamp pressed to its top right-hand corner. Joanna’s full married name and Hertfordshire address is written in neat block capitals, safe within the designated lines. But it’s the five truncated sentences that make her suck back her breath: He’s here. He’s hunted me down. He wants to kill me. You’ve got to stop him. You’ve got to help me.