I walked up the garden path to the Old Rectory as the taxi pulled away. I knocked hard on the door and waited for someone to answer. Nobody came.
I turned the front door handle and it opened beneath my fingertips. Gently, I pushed the creaking door open and walked into the house. ‘Hello?’ I called out, shutting the front door behind me.
There was no answer. The house, as always, smelt of wood smoke and candles. But as I walked through the small hallway and into the lounge I noticed that there were no candles burning, and no fire blazing away in the grate. ‘Hello?’ I called out again.
Once again there was no reply. The house was empty. I hadn’t planned on coming to an empty house, and couldn’t believe my luck that I’d managed to turn up at a time when Fiona, Nell and Nate were all out. I walked through the lounge towards the old bureau I’d seen Fiona open the day before. With the house empty I wouldn’t have to lie to anyone about why I was there; I wouldn’t have to distract someone whilst I stole what I needed from Fiona’s secret shoe box hidden away in the bureau drawer.
‘Suzy?’ came Fiona’s voice behind me, just as my hand touched the bureau drawer handle. ‘What are you doing here?’
My heart leapt into my throat. The house wasn’t empty at all. I spun around to see her standing in the doorway, watching me like a hawk. Her hair was dripping wet and she had an old, worn dressing gown wrapped around her skinny body.
‘I’m looking for Nate,’ I said quickly.
‘He’s gone out for a ride on his bike,’ Fiona said, moving towards me. Her eyes flittered towards the bureau drawer that I stood in front of. ‘He said he needed to get away for a few hours. I don’t suppose he’ll be back any time soon. Do you want me to tell him that you dropped by?’
‘No, don’t worry,’ I said, my voice catching in my throat. ‘I’ll catch up with him later.’
‘Well, if there was nothing else …’ Fiona stood back and opened her arm, gesturing towards the front door, implying I should leave.
‘Right,’ I mumbled, silently cursing to myself as I moved away from the bureau, away from the drawer and away from the box that I so desperately needed to see inside.
I walked past Fiona, trying to ignore the suspicion in her eyes, and headed for the front door. I turned around as I opened it, finding her watching me from the lounge door. I gave her a weak smile before slipping outside. I closed the door behind me and sank my back against it, shutting my eyes to the waning afternoon sun. My mind raced, trying to figure out what I should do next. There was a window next to the front door which looked into the hallway. Ivy crept over the glass and practically obscured the view into the house. Very carefully, I pulled back a strand of ivy and peered through the window and into the hallway. I watched as Fiona walked away from the lounge and back up the stairs.
With Fiona back upstairs this was the only chance I would have to sneak inside and take what I needed.
I didn’t dare go back through the creaking front door, it made far too much noise. Instead, I crept around the side of the house, almost crawling along the ground like I’d done with Frankie the time we’d spied on Fiona. When I came to the lounge window I slowly rose up and peeped in, careful that no one from the village was watching me through the hedgerows. The lounge was empty, as I knew it would be.
Very gently, I pushed at the top of the slat window, silently praying that it wasn’t locked. My prayers were answered. The window slid smoothly upwards. I managed to raise it just enough to climb through into the house.
One leg at a time, I climbed into the lounge, careful not to rattle the window or make any noise. My heart leaping about inside me, I crept over to the old bureau, my eyes never straying from the lounge door, expecting Fiona to burst in on me at any moment.
With great care I delicately pulled on the bureau drawer handle, and the drawer slid open, as silently as the grave.
I pulled the drawer fully open.
It was empty.
Nothing but a few blank greeting cards and a metre or two of yellow ribbon. I frantically lifted up the greeting cards, half expecting to see the box hidden beneath them in the shallow drawer. The box wasn’t there. It was the only drawer to the bureau, and definitely the same drawer that I’d seen Fiona take the box from the other day. I opened the bureau’s desk, hoping to see the box in there, but there was nothing.
Panicked, I slid the drawer shut and looked around the room in desperation.
The box had to be in there somewhere. From where I stood in the corner of the room my eyes scanned over every surface, every pile of magazines and every scrunched-up jumper in the corner of a chair.
I heard the creaking of Fiona’s footsteps on the stairs as I saw the box. It was sat on a side table beneath a lamp.
I only had moments before Fiona came back into the lounge and discovered me in there once again. Without a second thought I dived towards the box, grasped it in both hands and then lunged for the window. I jumped through it like some kind of acrobat, landing on the grass below with an awkward thud. There wasn’t time to close the window behind me, I couldn’t risk the sound of the slat scraping down the woodwork, or the look on Fiona’s face as she caught me shutting it when she walked into the lounge.
Instead, I sprang to my feet and ran as fast as I could.
I ran up the garden path, out of the garden and into the village. The church loomed down at me, its sprawling graveyard an inviting place to hide away and take refuge. I sprinted for the cast-iron gate and it swung open as I hurled my full weight at it. I ran between the graves, not stopping to catch my breath or look behind me to see if I was being chased. I ran towards the bench I’d sat on with Nate that one time, the bench by his grandmother’s grave.
I sat down on the bench and caught my breath, my eyes glued to the graveyard entrance, just waiting for Fiona to follow me in there.
The box felt hot and heavy between my hands. I looked down at it eagerly.
I pulled off the cardboard lid and peered in.
It was full of black and white photographs.
The photograph on the top of the pile was of four girls smiling and holding hockey sticks. They were standing in front of a building I recognised straight away – Dudley Hall. One of the girls must have been Nate’s grandmother, and the photograph must have been taken when she was a schoolgirl at Dudley Hall. I turned the photo over in my hands. Four names were handwritten in faded ink on the back of the photograph: Annabel, Lavinia, Margot and Sybil.
I lifted up the photo and looked underneath. The next picture was of just two of the girls who’d appeared in the first photograph. A girl with dark hair and a girl with blonde hair. The blonde-haired girl had her arm wrapped possessively around the other girl’s neck. They both smiled at the camera. Something around the blonde’s neck caught my eye. It was a necklace shaped like a pentagram. I knew what a pentagram represented – witchcraft. It was the same symbol I’d seen carved into the weeping willow by the stream in the Dudley Hall grounds. The carving that had letters etched besides each of the pentagram’s five points.
I lifted the photo of the two girls up and looked beneath. There were more of the two of them. They were wearing thick, heavy cloaks, and my heart beat faster as I recognised the cloaks as the same kind that I saw the grey girl wearing every time I watched her try to run away from my bedroom window.
The photograph below was of the four girls again – this time they were sitting around a bed in what must have once been their old dormitory. A room that looked unbearably like the bedroom I now slept in. I continued to rifle through the pictures, only finding more of the same girls.
As my fingers reached the picture at the bottom of the shoe box I felt a painful jolt of adrenalin beat through my body. With shaking hands I picked up the picture and held it to the light.
It was of two girls. They were each holding shadow puppets, one the woman, the other the man. One girl had dark hair – the girl who had been in the picture with the blonde wearing the pentagram. The other girl hadn’t been in the other pictures, but I recognised her straight away.
The grey girl.
Tilly is dead. I killed her.