Caroline was sticking to her story and didn’t care who she told. Not the cliché of a man with scribbling hand and greasy raincoat who came to write a feature for the Cinderglade Echo, or the nice lady family liaison officer and the young male police constable that have called round to go over her initial statement.
‘I saw him. In his motorbike shed. He was being really nasty to her,’ she said, enjoying the sound of her own voice as she worked at the hole in the sleeve of her cardigan. ‘And so angry, I’d never seen him that angry. He really hated Ellie, you know.’
Thrilled by the attention, the nods of interest from her audience, she happily spiced them with details about how aggressive Dean would get with drinkers at the pub, how scary it was when he hid in the woods puffing on his wacky baccy.
‘I told you not to go in there.’ Dora, unable to contain herself. Cross with Caroline on so many levels, she blamed Gordon’s rapid vanishing act on her niece’s behaviour, and now, having to contend with yet another interruption to her afternoon indulgences; it was too much. ‘I told you it was dangerous.’ Dora meant both the pub and the woods, although she knew the truth of it was that she didn’t warn anything of the sort – glad to be shot of her charges, she couldn’t have cared less what Joanna and Caroline got up to. Only since Ellie’s murder had she started questioning their safety, but not rigorously enough to stop them wandering off to play wherever they liked.
The sharpness of Dora’s rebuke did nothing to alter the course Caroline was determined to travel.
‘They were always fighting. But the morning of Ellie’s birthday was the worst.’ Caroline, eyes glinting, adjusted her Alice band and combed out her fringe with her spoiled finger-ends. Unperturbed by Dora’s noises from the sidelines, she was showing off to the rather good-looking police officer in the same way she did with the stone-faced hack. She would deal with her aunt later; ensuring he wrote everything down was far more important.
‘Dean is such a bully. He hit Ellie when she wouldn’t get off his motorbike, yelling, “You scratch my bike with those skates, you little bitch, and I’ll kill you”.’ Caroline screwed her face up. ‘And when Ellie went off on her new roller skates, crying, he got on his motorbike and went after her.’
Dora didn’t recognise her niece: self-confident and brazen; where was the shy, woebegone child she collected from Gloucester train station six weeks ago? Was the trauma of finding Ellie’s body having this awful effect on her – and was her need to invent things perhaps her way of blocking out the reality? There was talk of counselling, Dora remembered, but they seemed to have dropped that idea now. She wished Imogen was here to sort her child out. Dora didn’t know what to do; all she could think was how out of her depth she was – how little she knew about bringing up children.
‘Come, come, child – that’s enough now.’ Dora tossed the officials a look of despair. ‘She does have the most vivid imagination – don’t you, Carrie, dear?’
Putting these accusations of Caroline’s aside, it didn’t sound as if things were going too well for Dean. The rumour was that the police already had him in their sights, and had questioned him several times already. Reading only this morning in the Echo how Ellie had been raped and suffered a fatal knife attack before her body was pushed into the lake, and now detectives were engaged in a fingertip search of the area for the murder weapon. Dora’s mind spun again to her father’s dagger, still missing from its hidey hole at the bottom of her wardrobe … the traces of dried blood embedded in the silver cross-guards … the fact she’d reported it stolen. She hoped the police weren’t about to find the wretched thing in Dean’s possession.
‘Shut up,’ Caroline said to Dora fiercely, pirouetting on her toes. ‘This has nothing to do with you. You weren’t there.’
‘But Carrie, dear … please ,’ Dora said feebly. ‘Whatever would your mother say?’
‘She’d want me to tell the truth, so I am.’
Dora disliked doubting her niece, she wanted to trust her own flesh and blood over the say-so of some long-haired dreamer, but the child didn’t make it easy – look at her, the little madam, there was more of Imogen in her than Dora first appreciated. All she could hope was that the police investigated this crime thoroughly; that they didn’t leap to conclusions by putting too much emphasis on what Caroline said she saw. She cheered a little when the liaison officer sneaked a look at her watch, and the uniformed constable stifled a yawn; they didn’t seem to totally believe her either. Dora just had to trust the rest of the village had the brains to follow suit, but suspected they’d only taken Caroline’s assertions this far because Timothy Mortmain had got behind it.
Dora envisaged the vicar rubbing his hands together in delight. Timothy hated his daughter hanging out with Dean, and if Caroline’s story could be proven, then it could be the answer to his prayers – as what jury wouldn’t find Dean guilty of murdering Ellie if there was a witness claiming he’d been mistreating her shortly before she disappeared? And besides, Dean was just their sort of man: a history of drug abuse, a whiff of petty theft – it would be easy to pin the blame on him, and a way to be rid of him once and for all.
God help the boy, Dora sighed, hoping that, along with the dagger, Dean had the sense to sell the trifling baubles she reported missing; things she wished she’d kept her mouth shut about now. Because stealing a few baubles from a silly old spinster who had too much stuff to begin with, didn’t mean he had it in him to kill a child. Dean wasn’t a bad lad; why people were so quick to hate, to presume the worst, she didn’t know.
‘You have to lock him up.’ Dora had tuned into her niece again. ‘He’s dangerous to little girls.’ Confident in her assumption, Caroline threw the recently acquired vocabulary into the room. ‘You have to lock him up before he hurts someone else.’
Dora dragged a hand across the striations on her forehead; grooves she swore weren’t there a month ago. Yes, she accepted Caroline may well have heard Dean shouting at Ellie now and again – her brother, Lion, used to shout at her all the time – but the rest of her allegation about Dean hitting Ellie and making her cry, then almost running her down on his motorbike … Dora decided, in the tapering moments of this conversation, was preposterous.
Dora needed to set the police straight, Liz too – hearing how she’d swallowed Caroline’s story hook line and sinker. Enlighten them on the warped personality they were dealing with. But she knew it was going to take rather a lot more. Even if the police didn’t pursue this, what future was there for Dean in Witchwood now? The lad was undoubtedly as ruined at home as he was in the village – true or false, Caroline had probably blackened his reputation forever. The only chance he had to fully clear his name was if they got on and caught the murderer, but even then, now Caroline had planted the seed, there would still be no way for him to prove he hadn’t been maltreating his stepsister.
Cecilia used to be so industrious, now she had all the time in the world. And living within the smallness of things, confined by her illness on days she couldn’t go out, she had come to realise just how precious her memories were, how precious life was. Reduced to the essence of herself, an essence that was unconnected to her failing body, helped to process the pain – a word she never understood the meaning of until seven years ago. A pain so severe, it transcended everything, so that only the extremities of her existence were identifiable to her any more. It was why Amy was so important. Amy was her legacy – she was what she was leaving behind.
She watched her daughter in the reflection of her mirror and heeded the pulsating rain. Amy was brushing Cecilia’s hair. Cecilia hadn’t the strength to lift her arms today and was enjoying the ritual, the way her hair crackled with static, its fine flyaway strands rising up to follow the brush.
Amy, oddly unforthcoming, looked, now Cecilia had noticed her properly, as if she’d been crying.
‘What’s the matter, love?’ she asked eventually.
‘They’ve arrested Dean for Ellie’s murder.’ Amy dropped the brush to her side. ‘They found a dagger that belongs to Dora Muller in his motorbike shed. It’s got traces of blood on it, so they’ve sent it away for forensic examination … They’re saying Dean stole it, that he used it to kill Ellie.’ Cecilia saw the awful turn of events was almost too much for her daughter, and that she needed to sit down. ‘But he can’t have, anyone could have put it in there,’ Amy continued from a dainty balloon-backed chair, ‘and, anyway, Dean’s fingerprints aren’t on it, they tested it, said it’s been wiped clean.’
Cecilia didn’t respond right away. She let the horror of it settle over them as she looked beyond her reflection at the room behind her. A lovely space her daughter had helped to fill with beautiful things, all of which held special meaning; when life was still a country for her to explore, and she was able to use her limbs and her nervous system wasn’t shot through with painful spasms, these were things she’d taken for granted.
‘Wiped clean , you say?’ Cecilia spoke at last. ‘But why would it be wiped clean if whoever’d been handling it wasn’t guilty of something?’
‘I don’t know.’ Amy wrenched her eyes wide.
‘I’d say that was more incriminating.’ Cecilia knew she must tread carefully, but she also knew her daughter needed to hear the truth. ‘Your father says the older Jameson girl saw Dean being pretty aggressive with Ellie the morning of her birthday.’
‘Well, that’s just rubbish, that is.’
‘Is it?’ Cecilia turned her head to the window, watched veins of lightning zigzag between the clouds.
‘Course it is, it’s a pack of lies,’ Amy asserted from her chair. ‘She also said she saw him go after Ellie on his bike, but he didn’t.’ Then, dropping her voice and sounding less confident, ‘You didn’t see him, did you, Mum?’
‘I don’t see everything, love. I saw Ellie, but then I went for a lie-down.’
‘Yes, you did, didn’t you?’ Amy picked at the hairs on the brush. ‘But anyway, there wouldn’t have been time – I only left him for ten minutes max.’
‘I don’t know, sweetheart. All I know is that the police are taking the girl’s claims very seriously. She’s the only witness they’ve got.’
‘Yeah, but you can’t believe what she’s saying.’ Amy, on her feet.
‘But it’s not about what I believe, is it?’ Cecilia sighed. ‘You just want to hope the police don’t go finding Ellie’s blood on that knife he stole.’
Her daughter staggered backwards, threw her arms in the air. ‘He didn’t steal that knife! And you know Dean wouldn’t hurt a fly – how can you even say that?’
‘It didn’t magic itself there, did it, love? And you don’t know that about Dean, not absolutely.’ Cecilia looked uneasy. ‘I’m not sure any of us know the harm our men are capable of.’
Amy placed the brush on the dressing table. ‘I found this in Dad’s room.’ She tugged the Polaroid of Ellie Fry in pink legwarmers from the back pocket of her jeans. ‘In his desk … I wasn’t snooping, I was looking for stamps,’ she explained hurriedly. ‘What the hell’s he doing with that?’
Cecilia knew her husband was a man in crisis, but she didn’t think for a moment it was this kind of crisis. What was Timothy doing with a photograph of Ellie Fry? Was this the photograph she saw him looking at the afternoon the children ran out of the church in such obvious distress?
Cecilia turned it around in her ineffectual hands, corner to stiffened corner, the sharpness almost puncturing her flesh … She saw him, didn’t she? She saw Timothy go into the woods not long before Ellie that Saturday morning. Is that why they didn’t go to the party? Not because Timothy was too late back, but because he knew there wasn’t going to be one? And she found she preferred the pain of the physical to the dark thought that was crawling into her head uninvited. The thought her husband could be a child killer.