Friday 8th December 2023
Georgie
‘I have to go,’ Alice says again, her voice strangled. ‘I can’t … can’t think straight.’
Her eyes are huge and something has happened to her posture, as if her shoulders want to collapse but her spine won’t let them. Georgie wonders if she should say something more, push a little harder. But maybe Alice has been pushed far enough for one day. Stepping back, Georgie lets her go.
Alice throws one last glance towards the corner and then rushes off, slamming the front door behind her. The whole pub shudders, plummeting into silence. Georgie leans on the bar and lets out a breath, still catching whiffs of vomit in the air.
Slowly, she turns and looks towards the door of the flat. Boarded up is something of an overstatement. There is just one large piece of wood nailed diagonally across the entrance – and yet it’s been enough to signal ‘out of bounds’ all this time, even to her.
Why are they not using it for storage, or even renting it out? The business part of her brain starts running through all the possibilities, wondering why she’s never raised these questions, but the core of her is pulled towards the flat with a sudden, visceral need to see it.
She walks behind the bar and opens the cupboard where Jack’s tools are stored. Scattered nails, blunt pencils, sticky pots of varnish. She pauses a moment, wondering what she needs – admittedly, this isn’t her area of expertise – then she grabs a hammer and strides over to the flat door.
It’s time to see it for herself. And it’s easier, actually, than she expected. She hooks the claw of the hammer around a nail, imagining Lola watching her, wincing and bemused. After one last check over her shoulder she pulls hard, levering the nail out of the splintering wood. She does the same with the nail below it and the plank swings towards her. She prays the door behind it won’t be locked. The handle is stiff but it opens, revealing the staircase, dark and dusty, rising towards another half-open door above.
Georgie hesitates, then slips quietly inside. The stairs creak beneath her boots and the wall feels gravelly, her left fingertips trailing along it. She’s still gripping the hammer in her other hand. This is where they lived. Opening the upper door, she steps into an empty room: stale, musty, and cold as a fridge. She shivers as she looks around, unsure what she’s expecting to find. If she didn’t know better, she’d think nobody had lived up here in decades.
In the next room, she’s surprised to see a green armchair, sitting like an abandoned island in the middle of the worn grey carpet. She brushes its fabric and pokes her hands down the sides of the cushions, recoiling at the tickle of old crumbs. Going to the window, she nudges back a curtain and peeks out at the pub garden and the rooftops beyond. The tall spire of the church, the little school sandwiched between its icy playground and empty football pitch.
All places she knew, felt like she knew, before she even got here. She remembers the image of Cromley she once had in her mind: chocolate-box cottages, blooming gardens, lilac wisteria framing unlocked front doors.
The reality, as she gazes at it now, is so much bleaker. The village seems to hunker in the shadow of tragedy – unsurprising, of course, but still it shocked her how visible it was, when she first came, how tangible. A draught chills her neck and she whips around, pulse flying.
Is this the room Ethan died in?
Right above the spot where Leo killed Robbie.
Leo who is now missing.
For a moment, these facts snatch her breath away. She averts her eyes from a dark stain on the carpet and hurries on through the flat, peering into the mouldering bathroom and the two empty rooms at the very rear. One is smaller, with a sloped ceiling where the roof sweeps down: Leo’s former bedroom, perhaps? There are remnants of Blu-Tack on the walls and she finds herself wondering what posters he had, what he was into before everything went wrong. Jittery now, she’s about to leave when she notices a cardboard box in the corner of the larger bedroom.
Was this Chrissy and Ethan’s room? She inches towards the box, coughing in a cloud of dust as she opens its flaps. Faces peer up at her. Flat, frozen smiles. Tentatively, she draws out one of the framed photos, puzzled as to why they were left behind, why nobody has cleared them since. Ethan and Chrissy stand in front of the pub, a young Leo wedged like a buffer between them. A banner in the background reads: ‘TEN YEARS OF OWNERSHIP! COME CELEBRATE WITH US!’ But there’s nothing celebratory about the picture. Tears spike Georgie’s eyes and she lets her fingertips patter across the glass.
They never deserved you.
A thud from below makes her jolt. She stops dead, holding her breath, and hears a faint jangle of keys. Shit. Dropping the photo back into the box, she scrambles for a plausible excuse for being here. Considering possible uses for the space? Thought she heard rats? She hurries back to the armchair room and stands still, listening. A door creaks. There are footsteps. But they no longer sound as if they’re directly underneath her.
Instinct draws her to the window, and she’s right; there is someone in the pub garden. A broad-shouldered man wearing a woollen hat and a bulky coat. He pauses just inside the gate and looks around, unmistakably furtive. Georgie notices he’s holding something against his chest. A small package, wrapped in a dark plastic bag. As he creeps further into the garden, she catches a glimpse of his profile in the morning light.
Peter Lowe.
He turns her way and she dives out of sight, knees hitting the dusty floor. It’s a few moments before she dares peer out again. He’s leaning into the skip in the corner of the garden, the heels of his heavy-duty boots lifting off the ground. After a while he draws back, looks left and right, and walks quickly away. The package and the plastic bag are gone. He leaves through the gate and she hears him locking it behind him.
Clambering to her feet, Georgie dusts off her knees. What has she just seen? Her heart revs again and she sprints down the stairs and out the back door. It’s even colder outside than it was in the flat. She breathes on her frozen fingers, striding towards the skip. The old pub sign rests, discarded, on the top, and the raven’s eyes bore into her as she pushes it to one side. No sign of a plastic bag. She leans in further, clearing chunks of plaster and peelings of wallpaper until she sees it, right at the bottom, and strains until her fingertips grasp it.
The package is square, hard, with a ridge along one side, like a coil or a spring. Opening the bag, she draws out a plain black scrapbook, spiral-bound and fattened by whatever’s inside. She glances around, then gingerly opens the book.
She almost drops it at the first double-page spread. Then the next, and the next, as confusion drives deep into her bones.
The scrapbook is full of cuttings about Leo Dean. Reviews of his gigs and an interview with him in a local music magazine. A flyer for a Hallowe’en ‘Spookfest’ at the Raven, featuring Leo in a black feathered cape and thick eyeliner. And several about his arrest, his conviction, his sentencing, his release …
Georgie shivers violently, drinking in the obsession that seems to fill each page. Familiar, in a way she doesn’t like to admit. She considers throwing the book back into the skip and abandoning it there, but she knows she won’t. It could be another piece of the jigsaw, unexpected but important.
Never trust a Lowe, the man had said to her less than a month ago, that stranger outside the pub, who mistook her at first for Alice. Georgie still has no idea who he was, what he meant. But his words come back to her often, strengthening her conviction that there’s something very wrong with this village.
A bird squawks above her head, like a klaxon telling her she’s running out of time. Clutching the scrapbook, she stumbles back inside. She retrieves the hammer from where she abandoned it on the floor of the flat and shuts the place up, nailing the plank back in place, disturbed dust settling in her wake.