You’d hardly call it a path, just a scrape in the hip-high bracken and bramble, and a route through the woods the police and villagers obviously missed. Hot, the sisters slipped around inside their PVC sandals and barely exchanged a word. The pernicious breeze fidgeted with their hair as it gathered speed through the spooky, sun-starved interior that fell between the lofty trunks of trees. The police in DayGlo and dogs they had been anticipating were nowhere.
‘I told you, no one comes this way.’ Caroline was the first to speak. ‘It’s why I knew it was safe to hide the stuff.’
A dead deer stopped them in their tracks. Caught midleap on a snag of barbed wire. They clapped their hands near its ears to see if they twitched, but the smell should have told them, buffeting them sideways when they moved up close. Holding their noses, they were fascinated and repelled in equal measure. Portions of dead flesh moved as if still alive, and they couldn’t tear their eyes away from the pulsating shroud of fat, white maggots. Death. This was what it looked like, they told themselves, as the buzz of bluebottles took off and landed around them. Disgust at the idea one could accidentally touch them was enough to have them sprinting away.
‘Stop, stop,’ Joanna yelled, out of puff. Slowing to a walk and replacing the stench of dead deer with the smell of the heat-packed ground, they tipped their heads to the ragged crowns of trees that were already rusted with autumn. Veering off to the left, weaving through slender birch saplings and more bracken, they were thrust into an unexpected clearing on their approach to the lake. Into the unnerving silence dropped the cold rippling song of a curlew, its ghostliness curling over them like smoke.
‘Ellie brought us this way,’ Joanna chirruped. ‘We found that abandoned picnic over there, remember?’ And she pointed beyond the reeds and scrub rustling in the wind, to the log under its canopy of weeping willow.
‘I already knew about this place.’ Caroline, excessively proud.
‘When? You never told me.’
‘You don’t know everything I do.’ A sly smile. ‘I’ve got lots of secrets.’
Sudden squelching, the ground beneath them waterlogged, they ripped through rare marshmallow growing in secret pockets of warm, the sodden stretch of shoreline steaming through the gaps in their sandals. This was another country entirely: enigmatic, weather-beaten and eerie; a place that nosed out into Drake’s Pike and its low-lying watery flatness. The girls loved it here, not that either voiced it – it seemed wrong to be enjoying themselves without Ellie chattering alongside.
Batting away midges, they reached the edge of the lake and smelled its slightly stagnant breath. Their eyes grazed the opposite shore, the distant rise of ripe green pastures dotted with sheep.
‘What’s that?’ Joanna pointed at something in the rushes. ‘C-Carrie! Carrie! ’ she shrieked, darting away – and with pigtails swinging, held her find above her head.
Recognising it, Caroline was beside her in an instant, and they stared, bewildered, at the muddy pink leather roller skate oscillating from its multi-coloured lace.
‘It’s Ellie’s, isn’t it?’ Joanna’s eyes like two blue pools.
‘The police found the other one in the woods on Sunday.’ Caroline was crying too. ‘I heard them telling Dora about it.’
‘What ?’ Joanna squawked, scrubbing away tears; whatever doubts she had dying in her mouth.
‘I didn’t want to frighten you,’ Caroline replied to her sister’s unasked question. ‘I knew it looked bad – we both know there’s no way she’d have left them behind. But I just kept hoping she’d turn up.’
A robin redbreast balanced on a rotten stump of fence post, an anguished song in its throat, seized Caroline’s attention. She pointed it out to Joanna, and they waited until the bird wheeled away, their gazes trailing its flight across the winking, blinking sheet of sun-kissed water.
Then they saw her.
A dark shape out on the lake, beyond the spread of grasses and reeds.
Ellie Fry.
Floating on her back. Her half-submerged body bobbing stiff as driftwood, her eyes staring blindly at a ruinous sky. Her hands, balanced on the skin of the lake, looked as tender as the upturned heads of chrysanthemums. Saved from the greedy current by the noose of weeds snared about her neck – gilded in sunlight and transformed into silky blue-green threads – they had speared her to something below the waterline. Edging closer, to the lip of the shore, they leant out, saw between her legs, under her arms, the upsetting brown froth where dead water had gathered.
Ellie’s pink roller skate: a pendulum between them in the swaying seconds neither could move. Equally reluctant to accept what their eyes showed them, the calmness held in the jaws of the unfolding horror made it difficult to breathe. Without speaking, they dropped the roller skate and lunged forward, ignoring the razor-sharp spines of rushes, to break through the lake’s glassy sheen, the vividly cold water cutting their denim-clad legs off from the world at the knees. Shaking with shock, their limbs wouldn’t work, and they cursed their arms for not being long enough. Quickly realising they were out of their depth, that Ellie was too far out and they couldn’t reach her, Caroline, mind spinning, had a moment of clarity. She stepped free of the lake and dragged the longest stick she could find to the shore’s edge. Working together, sloshing through chest-high water, they risked everything to reach their friend.
‘We’ve got to do something.’ Caroline, her eyes yanked wide in desperation. ‘We’re going to lose her to the current otherwise.’ She gripped what little remained of Ellie’s pink-and-white striped skater dress.
‘Into the boat.’ Joanna, teeth chattering wildly. ‘Get her into the boat.’
Neither stopped to consider whether they had the strength to lift her. Wading through the secret peace below their waists – a dark green world knitted with the skeins of weeds – they hauled Ellie’s surprisingly heavy body over the sides of the boat and rolled her over. She lay with her wet hair fallen back and her lips parted as if for a kiss, and the sight of her reminded them of Millais’ pale, floating Ophelia on Dora’s landing. The marbling on Ellie’s skin was shocking, and with all suntan washed from her face, her only colour was a smattering of freckles across her nose.
Caroline closed the purplish lids over the eyes, but there was nothing she could do about the distressing way Ellie’s lips were parted so trustingly. Both of them set about arranging her weed-slippery hair, tidying it with wet fingers, positioning what remained of her party dress to cover the worst of her cut and broken body. Wanting, without the need to communicate why, to make her as neat as they could; concerned how she would look when the others came to find her.
‘Why’s she so cold?’ Joanna, exchanging fretful glances with her sister, didn’t understand. ‘Take your cardigan off, Carrie – we’ll give it to her to make her warm.’
Caroline did. And the two of them covered Ellie with it. Tucking her in carefully, softly; worried about disturbing her while at the same time half expecting her to wake up, to laugh, and tell them it was all a silly joke.
Staring again at the shocking sight of that cold blue marbling on Ellie’s legs and arms, they waited a moment, hands clasped behind their backs in a way that suggested they couldn’t trust themselves not to keep touching her. Watched by the swans that knew to stay away: creatures who understood more than anyone what had gone on here, they drifted unperturbed as white-sailed galleons on the horizon. And shifting their attention to them for a moment, the girls felt their heart rates slow. Caroline told herself she wasn’t crying, that it was only the breeze, always the breeze, and tilted her nose to the heavens that in the last few minutes had darkened into a weight of purple cloud. If the world turned, neither was aware of it; their breathing, muffled as a ghost’s, seemed to test the emptiness. Kicking free of the water, Caroline turned to help Joanna out. Together they stood amid the occasional birdsong and the summer slap where lake met bank, the air brittle with thunder.
Did Ellie drown like their father drowned? Was it an accident? How did she get that horrible gash on her neck? Why did she take her skates off? Ellie never took her skates off. But more puzzling was the idea she could have come all the way down here to swim in her best party dress when she had presents and birthday cake waiting at home.
The silence that hovered between the sisters was worse than if they had cried. Nothing made sense. All they could be sure of was their sopping clothes and squelch of mud inside their sandals. A wood pigeon took flight; frightening as gunfire, and into the silent aftershock Joanna reached for Caroline’s icy hand. This time she didn’t shrug it off; both needed the warmth of the other. The stolen treasures forgotten, all that preoccupied them through the amplified dripping of their clothes and violent chattering of teeth was a shared recollection of Ellie from only days ago: full-stretch on roller skates, hair at half-mast, her arms and legs dusted with fine gold hairs that glinted in the sun, and the tinkle of her impulsive, joy-filled laugh – a sound that wouldn’t play out again anywhere but inside their heads. Abandoning Ellie to this lonely stretch of marshland, the balls of mist clenching like fists over the water, it was a relief to return to the woods with its melancholy boughs, and the village they were familiar with.