I WOKE UP late the next morning. Mrs Derby was sitting beside me still holding my hand. I shut my eyes. I didn’t want to wake up. Yet I didn’t want to sleep either, because I saw them in my dreams. All of them: my mother and Isobel and standing between them, Polly. In front of them was the vixen we’d seen in November. Polly was stroking it and she was calling me. It was all a game, she said. True Murder was easy. And now that we were blood sisters we were inseparable; best friends.
I tried to reach her, but I couldn’t. My feet were stuck to the ground. Later on, in another dream, my fingers stretching to brush hers, I almost touched her before she disappeared. They all kept disappearing: my mother, Isobel and Polly. Running after them I tried desperately to catch up.
Such were my days and nights. Waking or sleeping, my world was peopled by shadows. It was as if, walking indoors on a bright summer’s day, I could see no one around me. At night, blinking in the radiance of my dreams, the pain in my eyes rendered forms indistinguishable. They shimmied, they blurred. Everyone around me whispered in low voices and I heard my father speaking. As soon as he had heard what had happened, he travelled from Rome to see me. I recognised his shoes, but when I looked to where his voice was coming from, I failed to register his face. He held my hand while I clung to Mrs Derby, unable to decipher words. I was dislocated; adrift.
As the days followed, one after the other, my vision gradually cleared. Waking with each morning, I began to realise that the sounds, the murmurs I thought I heard, and the stares that made me turn around, only for them to disappear again, were not imagined. People did look at me strangely; they did whisper.
Little by little, I began to comprehend what was happening. It dawned on me that when people looked at me, they saw Polly: I was her best friend and for as long as I lived, she would live as well. Seeing me, people were reminded of what had happened; what Isobel had done to her daughter. This was as it should be, I reasoned, for Polly and I were blood sisters.
While I grappled with my new place at school, and yearned for Polly to revive me by flowing through my veins once again, the adult world was trying to piece together what had happened. Three weeks after the Christmas break, there was an inquest into the Venus tragedy at which a coroner, giving his verdict, reflected the opinion of the local community. He said that the dreadful events that had taken place would never be forgotten. At the time of her death, the alcohol level in Isobel’s blood had been dangerously high. She had died through a combination of alcohol and an overdose of painkillers. Traces of semen were found in her body, indicating that she’d had ‘relations’ with Peter Venus, a fact he confirmed. Then, after an argument – during which she forced him to leave the house – while the balance of her mind was disturbed, Isobel Venus had murdered her daughter before taking her own life.
Everyone was horrified by what she had done. Yet at the same time they pitied rather than condemned her. They said that for a mother to commit such an atrocity, despair must have driven her mad. As far as I am aware, no one but Belinda Bradshaw said a word about Peter’s role in the affair. No matter what anyone thought at the time, they didn’t dare implicate Peter. It was clear from the phone records that after evicting Peter at midnight on Christmas Eve, Isobel was lucid enough to try to contact Belinda. Unfortunately, the Bradshaws were on their knees at midnight mass and Robert, Isobel’s therapist, was with a friend in Morocco.
Mrs Derby told me that after the inquest, Peter Venus had tried to see me at school. He was distraught, incapable of conversing coherently with a child. Thinking that I was not in a fit state to see him, and that his grief would exacerbate my own, the Derbys encouraged Peter to talk to them.
‘He was devastated, Ajuba. He was all over the place, talking about Polly one moment and in the next breath berating Isobel and himself. He said things he wouldn’t normally have said. He desperately needed someone to talk to, my dear, so Philip and I spent an evening drinking with him.’
Straightening her metal-rimmed glasses, which she still wears to this day, Sarah Derby filled in the gaps of what I’d failed to understand as a child, providing me with information that even Theo doesn’t know.
‘As I anticipated, Peter wanted to talk about the last time he was with Isobel. It turned out that she’d wanted more from him than he was prepared to give, so she chucked him out of the house. He reproached himself for everything that happened. He felt so guilty that I had to speak out. I told him I shared some of the blame. You’d warned me that Isobel was unwell and might harm Polly. I stupidly misconstrued what you said, my dear. I let you and Polly down terribly.’
In the circumstances, I imagine everyone remembered when they had last seen Isobel and what, if anything, they might have done to alleviate her pain. At school I heard teachers saying how well she had looked before the end of term, and how elegant she’d always been. People remembered the clothes they had last seen her wearing; I heard them talk of her beauty, her kindness. I suspect that each of them, remembering, remarked privately how well she had deceived them. They had no inkling of the depth of her anguish; no suspicion of it at all. And though they absolved themselves of responsibility, I’m sure they couldn’t help wondering what they could have done to help.
A general feeling of helplessness pervaded all our sensibilities, and I’m told that people were, for the most part, sympathetic towards Theo and Peter Venus. Having survived the tragedy, they had to brave the curse of living with it for the rest of their lives.
I cut out the report of the inquest from the local newspaper, pasting it in our True Murder scrapbook. Beth, Maria and I, the remaining Crimebusters, had decided that sticking the article in place would be a fitting memorial to Polly. We had also preserved a portrait of the Venuses from the front page of the newspaper.
We closed the book together, promising never to forget Polly. We promised despite knowing that, had we been able to, we would have tried to forget. Her death was so traumatic that, privately, I think each of us wanted to destroy the book, to bury it in a deep hole where it would never be found again: as I had wanted to do with the remains we found in Miss Fielding’s trunk. Collectively, however, we swore to remember.
After Polly’s murder, Beth hardly spoke to any of us. When, occasionally, she did talk to me, she prefaced her sentences with shrill neighing sounds. Animals, she said, were better than humans; until the human race improved, she was going to be a horse. She kept it up for six months. Grief affects people in different ways.
Beth told me later that her parents’ quarrelling aggravated her distress, and that her escape into a world peopled by four-legged creatures had as much to do with that as the Venus tragedy. That’s how everyone eventually described what Isobel had done: the Venus tragedy.
According to Beth, her mother’s reaction to the news was violent. Belinda Bradshaw had considered herself a close friend of Isobel, and after her initial disbelief and tears, her anger was incandescent. ‘Bloody, bloody men!’ Belinda had cursed, glaring at Beth’s father. ‘It was his fault. That bloody man was to blame.’
‘Hell hath no fury . . .’ Charlie Bradshaw began, then, seeing the rage on his wife’s face, he got up and slipped out of the room.
‘Mummy says Isobel flipped because of Peter,’ Beth relayed to us in Exe. We were preparing for Polly’s funeral the next day. The whole school was going. Afterwards my father and Nina were taking me to London for a short break. I wasn’t looking forward to any of it.
‘You can’t blame Peter for what Isobel did,’ I replied, instantly protective of Polly’s father. I still have the silver bangle he gave me; and once in a while I meet up with him in a disreputable after-hours Soho drinking club he belongs to.
Maria agreed with me; Peter wasn’t to blame. But because it was Maria who had made us aware of problems in the Venus marriage by her revelation that her mother was having an affair with Peter, Beth let rip at her.
‘I suppose your mother wants him back in her bed,’ she said sarcastically.
‘Get yourself a brain, Bradshaw,’ Maria sneered. ‘If everyone went about murdering because their husbands left them, there’d hardly be any children left in the world. We’d all be dead, wouldn’t we?’
Maria was polishing her outdoor shoes for the church service, and as she exhaled on them before rubbing them vigorously, I saw tears in her eyes.
The logic of her argument was an unsettling one. And even though Beth, who until then had always been optimistic, interjected that grown-ups didn’t usually go around murdering children, the knowledge remained that we were acutely vulnerable in a world controlled by adults.
‘Do you think dying hurts?’ For some reason, Maria addressed her question to me.
‘I don’t think so,’ I replied, though of course I was ignorant of the truth. But the thought that Polly might have died painfully, fighting for breath, was too horrifying to contemplate.
I found myself wondering what would have happened if I had spent the night at Graylings, as Polly had asked me to. Would Isobel have murdered me too? Or would she have allowed Polly to live, killing only herself? I wouldn’t have minded that. I wanted Polly alive again. I hadn’t been completely at ease with Isobel for a long time. She was too like my mother.
For the hundredth time, Maria exclaimed, ‘How could she do it? How could she kill Polly?’
It was the question on everyone’s lips. But for Beth and me, perhaps hardened by our exposure to True Murder and a summer spent puzzling over the contents of Miss Fielding’s trunk, the Venus tragedy, although shocking, was not extraordinary. It was as if our discovery of the babies in the attic had been a warning of a greater calamity to follow; as if Polly, with her obsession with death, had spent her months at school preparing for a murder, not knowing it was to be her own.
I said as much to Beth after Lights Out. Maria had moved into Polly’s bed, and at night Beth and I slept together.
‘We asked the wrong questions,’ I whispered to her. ‘You see, the babies were a warning, Beth. But we were too close to see. We didn’t hear what they were telling us.’
She whinnied and then said: ‘Dead babies don’t talk.’
‘They do if you listen hard enough. They were trying to tell us that what happened to them was going to happen to one of us . . . to Polly.’
‘As if.’ Beth lay trembling beside me.
I was no longer frightened of what had happened. My discovery of Polly’s body had pushed me beyond fear into a knowledge of darkness that had permeated the marrow of my bones. I thought nothing could ever frighten me again. I had reached a stage of acute sensitivity in which other people’s thoughts and emotions merged with mine, and Malone and Leboeuf were with me constantly, ensuring my safety. I thought nothing could touch me again. I had forgotten about the faces in my mother’s mirror.
At last, Beth asked a question that I realised she’d wanted to ask for ages. When her trembling ceased, she said: ‘What did she look like dead, Aj?’
I closed my eyes and thought for a moment, and as Polly’s dead face surfaced behind my eyelids, I described it. ‘She looked as if she’d seen something horrible and was furious that she couldn’t tell us about it.’
I would never forget that face, or the pressure of Beth’s hand on mine as she asked me a final question.
‘Aj, do you think Polly’s trying to tell us what she saw?’
I told her that I thought she was. After all, Polly and I were blood sisters. We were inseparable, even in death.