The village woke to the tolling of church bells through the perpetual drizzle. On and on, the noise was enough for Liz – who’d begun biting her nails after the police called with news that Ellie had been found by the Jameson sisters – to clamp her hands to her ears. And in the bleakness of dawn – a time when most will die and most are born – she sat amid shadows as indelible as ink stains, looked truth in the eye and squinted. These bells were for her child, her child who got up on her birthday, full of life and love and light, but never went to bed again.
Liz twisted round to look at her own bed, a place that, however exhausted, she couldn’t return to either. Despite the copious amount of alcohol she needed to get her through the day, to lie down alongside her husband was out of the question. The vast white cotton sheet was a barren wasteland over which she hadn’t the strength to traverse. If she did sleep, it was only for snatched half hours, upright in her wingback armchair. Swaddled in its padded embrace, it was a place where less than a decade ago, she had nursed her precious daughter through the slow turn of night-time hours.
Liz watched the involuntary rise and fall of her husband’s body beneath the duvet. How was it that he could sleep when her mind wouldn’t leave her alone? As persistent as the rain, it offered up a dizzying array of alternatives: if she hadn’t done this or hadn’t done that, then her child would still be here and in less than three hours Ellie’s coffin wouldn’t be lowered into the hole made ready for it in St Oswald’s sheep-scattered churchyard.
Later, perched on the unmade bed, Liz touched the various black items she’d fished from her wardrobe, unable to decide what to wear. Then she began to cry. ‘What does it matter?’ she wailed, loud enough for Ian to step out of the shower to check on her. ‘What would Ellie care?’
Frightened of his wife’s grief, Ian dipped back inside the en-suite and waited for her to calm down. At a loss to know what to do, shaky and jumpy, he nicked himself shaving, once, then several times more. He swore as he blotted his cheeks with toilet paper and unsteady hands, and thought, staring into his face, if this was what a man going to his execution would look like, and supposed it was. He thought of his beautiful wife, drastically altered in the space of a few short weeks and, although only yards away in the adjacent bedroom, felt as removed from her as he did from the dark side of the moon.
Liz’s drinking was gathering pace. He noticed the new four-litre bottle of Smirnoff he replaced on the optic the day before yesterday was already a quarter empty, and not because they’d been busy. Apart from the hordes of journalists, who ordered bugger all, people were staying away; it was another thing he worried about – they would lose the pub if things didn’t pick up soon. Not that he could get Liz to take an interest – her world had stopped turning, and his inability to pull her back was a drastic failure.
‘How’s Liz?’ someone asked as they paid for the only round of drinks he served all night. ‘Not good,’ he said, his already grooved forehead furrowing deeper. Wandering round in a daze himself since it happened, with nothing to look forward to and profits sliding, Ian knew things would never be right again.
Joanna and Caroline dressed in silence. They were remembering the day of their father’s funeral. Their parents’ bed, heaped with coats, and them refusing to go downstairs to show their faces.
So many flowers, such blazing sunshine – it was all wrong. It should have been a day like today, they thought, peering out through the skylight at the rain. A day like this would have been far more fitting.
The vicar, deliberately averting his gaze from Dora and her nieces, talked of the abrupt slide from summer to autumn as a metaphor for Ian and Liz’s lives. No mention was made of Dean who, released without charge and driven back to Witchwood in a patrol car less than twenty minutes ago, floated restless in the wings, his guitar a wreath slung around his neck. Caroline pictured the dagger that had since been returned to Dora on condition she got it registered and kept it somewhere safe. The police had dismissed it as the murder weapon, because although the blood on it had been identified as human, it was more than fifty years old, and therefore wasn’t a match to Ellie Fry’s.
‘ … their life with Ellie –’ Reverend Mortmain projected his poetry to the rear of the crowded church – ‘was a sap-filled wood in spring, and now,’ he paused to roll his eyes over the funeral-goers, accusing beneath his thick black brows, ‘to have her taken from them in such a violent, evil way, has become as withered and friable as an autumn leaf … ’
‘Quite the poet, isn’t he?’ Dora whispered almost admiringly, looking at the sisters, rigid as stones either side of her soft circumference.
Identifying the veneration in the voice emanating from under that high wedge of black hair made the tearful Caroline want to give her aunt a Chinese burn. Was she going after the vicar now Gordon was out of the way? She was an old woman, for God’s sake, it was disgusting. And she wasn’t even upset: look at her, make-up still intact – all that made her cry was Beethoven and her soppy Richard Clayderman records. The contempt Caroline had for her aunt’s fickleness hardened around her heart like the rind of a cheese. There was no way she would forget Dean, or ever let another man touch her. It didn’t matter that he’d been horrible and broken his promise by choosing Amy over her; if she couldn’t have him, she wouldn’t have anyone. What would be the point? She’d never find a man like him as long as she lived.
Caroline made her silent vow as she rootled the shadowy pockets of the church for the object of her obsession. She knew Dean was in here somewhere, she’d seen him skulk inside: careful, not letting his family see him, tugging down his cuffs, nervous as a bridegroom. Her bridegroom. She sighed, the sound loud enough for Joanna to lean forward in her seat and feed her a look that made her snap back her neck.
*
The Reverend Mortmain, apostolic behind his spectacles, invited the congregation to drop their heads in prayer. Dora closed her eyes obediently, aware of her nieces shifting beside her, their eyes red from crying while hers remained strangely dry. If she concentrated on her sadness for Gordon she might be able to summon tears; might, if the reality hadn’t been that he was nothing more than a stupid fantasy. Misreading the frequency of his visits as a sign he was interested in her, when they weren’t about her at all. But then Gordon was a hard man to fathom, a hard man to touch. She thought it was because he was hiding something precious, like a pearl in a shell, but now she knows there was nothing. He was empty. An empty shell.
In Loving Memory , Dora read the Order of Service, the black on white under the banner of a simple gold cross. She supposed it was because she hardly knew Ellie that she couldn’t rally the necessary emotion. But what was the matter with her? It didn’t get worse than the death of a child. Responsive to the darkening mood echoed in the weather, she tried to let the occasion move her – Lillian’s organ-playing was stirring enough.
These supposed cold, unfeeling traits of hers were what Caroline accused her of during the argument that unravelled after the policeman and the family liaison officer left. Remembering this made Dora think of the Cinderglade incident too: the reason, she assumed, for Gordon’s sudden departure to Italy. Dora won’t ever forgive her niece for that, any more than she would for tramping lipstick all through the cottage. The little sod, blaming Joanna – Dora wasn’t stupid. She could envisage Caroline’s sour-faced temper just because she didn’t invite her to feed the horses. But she’d better watch it. Dora adjusted herself. The little minx might start making up stories about her next.
She listened to the rain buffeting St Oswald’s roof, spilling along the guttering, down the drainpipes, enclosing her further into the hush. Would it ever stop? On many levels, this was the worst summer she’d experienced here. But it wasn’t only the weather that had ultimately made her decide. She made the call before coming out; she was going to pay to have Pillowell refurbished, rent it out as a holiday let. Tilly and Frank Petley were talking about setting up a cleaning company – let them do it, the Saturday changeover, clean linen, that kind of thing. Dora couldn’t imagine she’d want to visit the place again. All she hoped was that possible holidaymakers wouldn’t be put off by recent events; that the journalists camped out on the village green wouldn’t be littering the place for too much longer, and this little nook in the woods would be allowed to return to its sleepy self.
‘I never got to hold her, they just took her away,’ Liz cried out from her position beside the tiny white coffin.
The congregation responded as one and lurched upright in their pews as Dean – perhaps taking advantage of eyes being elsewhere – stepped out of the shadows. Unshaven and sporting a nasty set of purple half-moons beneath his eyes, he looked oddly unfamiliar in an ill-fitting black suit that obviously didn’t belong to him. At the sight of him, a gasp went up from the churchgoers, and he hovered on the edges of the transept, catching no one’s eye except his father’s. With a reproachful look from beneath his dripping curls, he began to pluck the opening chords to ‘Yellow Bird’ into the confused silence.
A burst of action and Ian Fry leapt to his feet. A muted scuffle ensued, and Dean shot off down the aisle, guitar sighing as it banged against his thighs. Ian hesitated before re-joining his wife, wanting to ensure his son had gone. But without her husband’s big, brawny torso to shield her from the unwelcome scrutiny of the congregation, Liz was exposed to the murmuring and muttering of those who’d come to pay tribute to her dead child.
‘I pity them,’ Caroline heard people whispering behind her.
‘Look at her, poor thing – such a devoted mother.’
‘She’s aged terribly.’
‘And Ian, such a happy-go-lucky chap – he loved Ellie to bits.’
Gradually, now the rain had eased, the flock of mourners tiptoed into the murky daylight. Edging forwards, necks extended, they emerged one by one from the gloom. Careful to keep their high heels and polished leather uppers on the gravelled path, no one dared venture on to the sodden grass where the stone-faced angels outnumbered their congregation.
At the sound of raised voices, Caroline turned to see it was Ellie’s grief-weary parents who now blocked the arch of the church doorway.
‘You – you’re still here?’ Liz flew at Dean: a wild animal, flailing and clawing and screaming. ‘You bastard. You bastard. The cops might not think you did it, but I know … I know you killed my baby. You were abusing her all along, weren’t you? I know you were, and Carrie saw you, and I saw the bruises … the bruises you gave her … Clear off, go on, clear the hell outta here … I swear, if I ever lay eyes on you again, I’ll kill you.’
It was someone else who eventually prised Liz off her stepson. Ian didn’t move, didn’t speak; he simply turned from his boy to put an arm around his wife’s juddering shoulders. Calming, soothing, the gesture required no words, and Dean read it perfectly. His father’s loyalty displayed in the tenderness of his act, as the sky, serious now, dropped solemn rain. Umbrellas bounced open. One. Two. The third, a huge black dome, was ceremoniously held up to shield the blighted couple.
The mourners, no doubt with their own warm-skinned children to go home to, whispered Dean’s assumed guilt behind their black cotton gloves. It mattered little that the eighteen-year-old had been released without charge after a two-night stint in police custody, or that the supposed murder weapon he’d been accused of stealing from Dora Muller was nothing of the sort. The fact remained that Caroline Jameson said she’d seen him bullying Ellie the morning she went missing, and then him charging off after her on his motorbike. It was all the proof they needed.
Shunned by everyone, Dean shrugged and walked away. Intending to pack what he could carry in the panniers on his motorbike and leave before his father and stepmother came home. But Amy Mortmain – her hair lifted by the ululation of the wind and flapping like a big, black sail – ripped through the congregation after him, a tide of tutting disapproval in her wake.
‘Please ,’ she begged when at last Dean turned to her. ‘Please don’t leave me here.’
‘I have to,’ he said gently.
Amy, up on tiptoes, touched the tender-looking skin beneath his eyes. ‘Take me with you,’ she pleaded, close to his lips. Then taking his hand, she pressed his palm against her tummy. ‘Don’t leave me alone with this.’ Her voice breaking. ‘Please, not in this place.’ She flung her head around in desperation, aware of her father’s black shape on her periphery. ‘When they get whoever did it, they’ll know it wasn’t you … Don’t go, please don’t go.’
It was all too much for Dean, now unsteady on his feet and fighting back tears. An upsurge of dread rippled through the onlookers – was he about to change his mind? No, they exhaled their relief, what followed extinguished any fear of that.
‘Your mother needs you.’ Dean broke off, then kissed and returned Amy’s hand, obviously understanding nothing of what his girlfriend had tried to communicate. ‘She needs you here. If I take you with me, you’ll only end up hating me too.’ He looked around, addressed the mill of mourners: ‘Just like this lot do … every single one of them … Happy to believe the vicious lies of a spiteful thirteen-year-old kid. I never stood a chance.’