She raced back upstairs. "Marcus, Marcus!" She shook him awake. "Come down, quickly. There"s been someone in the garden."
"What? What the an intruder, do you mean?"
He followed her downstairs, shovelling his arms into his paisley dressing gown and tying it as he went, relying on the night light as she had done, rather than bothering to switch on anything else. "Are they still out there?"
"I don"t know." Jo had run ahead, into the kitchen. "But look at this." She pointed to the window as Marcus appeared in the doorway.
"I can"t see a thing out there," he said. "You"ll have to turn these lights off."
"No, no! You won"t see it if you do. Look here it"s on the window sill."
Marcus stood in silence for a moment, taking it in.
"As I came into the kitchen, the security light came on. Whoever put the sh.e.l.l there must have set it off."
"Jo, what are you talking about? Did you actually see anyone?"
"No ... but the sh.e.l.l "
"A sh.e.l.l?"
"It"s the third time. The first one was down by the gate; then I found one on the doorstep about a week ago. It"s a sign."
"What on earth are you talking about?"
"Lauren was taken from outside The Sh.e.l.l Shop. That"s what this is all about I didn"t realize before, but now I"m sure of it."
"Did you actually see or hear anyone?"
"No."
"But if this person had tripped the security light, then you would have seen them come up to the kitchen window, wouldn"t you?"
"No. You see, after the light came on I went into the sitting room, because I thought the person watching the house might be at the front."
"What person watching the house?"
"It ... it was this feeling I had. That was really why I came down in the first place."
"Because you had a feeling?"
"Yes. And then there was a light on at The Old Forge. Maybe Gilda had heard something, too."
"But you said you didn"t hear anything."
"Not exactly, no."
"Jo, I think you need to go back to bed and get some sleep. We can talk about this in the morning."
"You don"t believe me, do you?"
"About what? I certainly believe that there"s a seash.e.l.l on the kitchen window sill, and that you think someone just crept up to the house and put it there."
"But you don"t believe anyone was here."
"I don"t know what to believe. Please will you come back to bed?" He reached out and placed a protective hand on her shoulder.
There had been times in her life when such a gesture from Marcus had the power to put a great deal right, but at that precise moment it just seemed to symbolize everything that was wrong and she had to resist the urge to shrug it off.
CHAPTER ELEVEN.
The only real point of agreement between Marcus and Jo concerning the sh.e.l.ls was that it would be pointless taking them to the police. Marcus was convinced that they had arrived courtesy of Sean and Harry. "It will be some sort of game," he said. "A sh.e.l.l on the doorstep means see you at mine, a sh.e.l.l on the window sill ..."
"But I asked Sean about the sh.e.l.l on the doorstep and he said he didn"t know anything about it."
"Well, of course he did. No point in having a secret sign if you don"t keep it a secret."
"Harry wouldn"t have come round here in the early hours."
"Couldn"t it have been there for a while?"
"No, it wasn"t. It was in plain view of anyone using the sink. I washed some mugs out just before I came to bed, and I didn"t see it then."
"You might not have noticed it."
"I"m sure I would. And what about my feeling that someone was prowling around? Something made the security light go on."
"It was very windy last night. That sometimes sets it off when something gets blown across the sensor. Maybe the wind blew the sh.e.l.l there."
"Where on earth from? We"re miles from the coast."
But Marcus would not concede that there was any particular significance in the appearance of the sh.e.l.ls, and eventually refused to indulge in any further speculation about their arrival. Even Jo had to admit that they were not the sort of sh.e.l.ls found on sale in The Sh.e.l.l Shop, where all the stock had been polished specimens suitable for display. The sh.e.l.ls left outside The Hideaway were just ordinary sh.e.l.ls, collected straight from a beach. The one which had appeared on the window sill was a c.o.c.kle sh.e.l.l she had looked it up whereas the one she picked up on the doorstep was a carpet sh.e.l.l. The original sh.e.l.l seen by the gatepost had vanished by now, perhaps purloined by a pa.s.ser-by, or accidentally knocked into the long gra.s.s which grew at the side of the road. After Marcus had lost interest, she hid the remaining sh.e.l.ls in one of her bedroom drawers, where they sat like a couple of tiny conspirators, sharing the secret of Lauren"s whereabouts. For surely their arrival must be a sign of some kind a message from the person who had Lauren.
In the following days, in her mind she went over and over the episode of the third sh.e.l.l"s arrival. She was sure she would have seen it if it had been there any earlier. It was true that the security light might have been triggered by the natural disturbances of a windy night. Pa.s.sing bats or owls could set it off too; but you could not get away from the fact that whenever the sh.e.l.ls had arrived, they could not have got there by accident. Someone had put them there, someone who had come on foot, almost certainly after dark, probably having left a car parked well out of sight, in some gateway much further down the lane. Or maybe the sh.e.l.ls had been put there by someone much closer to hand. The light above the door of The Old Forge was suggestive; although when Marcus asked her if she could honestly imagine their new neighbour creeping along the side of the house at dead of night and carefully depositing a sh.e.l.l on the window sill, she had to admit that it was not a very likely scenario.
"Think about it, Jo. It"s the f.a.g end of the holidays and the kids are getting bored, so they"ve come up with some sort of signalling game. It"s the kind of thing kids do. You remember how when we first discussed Sean"s coming here, and you said you wanted to make a loving home for him, well, this is what having kids around is all about. Letting them have their own s.p.a.ce and not getting uptight if they have one or two secrets."
Jo thought that if Sean had any secrets, they might be rather less innocent than a seash.e.l.l code with Harry, but decided it was not the moment to say so. It was all very well, Marcus prodding her about how she had set out to build a good relationship with Sean: there had been nothing wrong with her intentions, but somehow things always went awry. It seemed to her, as she sat alone in the kitchen, that lately everything was going wrong: her ongoing problems with Sean, the disappearance of Sh.e.l.ley and her awkward encounters with Brian, to say nothing of the uneasy knowledge that the one person from her schooldays well, no ... if she was honest, one of several people from her schooldays that she would rather not ever have set eyes on again, was now living just across the road.
Gilda"s knowledge made her vulnerable to the very gossip and scrutiny she had come here to avoid. Rather than anaesthetizing her against curiosity, past exposure had scoured her raw. People staring, whispering, photographers shouting, "Joanne! Joanne! Look this way." Her solicitor telling her after Dominic"s death, "Don"t hide your face people think it"s a sign of a guilty conscience." The same solicitor reading a statement on her behalf, things she couldn"t remember whether she had said or not. Reporters camped outside the house. Dominic"s family not sitting with her at the inquest, not even looking at her, freezing her out.
It wasn"t my fault. How could I have done anything to make it different?
Then the bleak, dark loneliness of life without him. The desire to follow him only tempered by the thought of Lauren. Someone had to be there for Lauren when she came home. Part of the trouble was that Dom had not been able to believe in Lauren"s coming home, not in the same way she had done. He went through the motions with her, the public appeals and the trips back to Devon, asking people, showing photographs, a desperate dispiriting quest for answers, not welcomed by the locals, who said these constant reminders about what had happened to Lauren were bad for tourism because families with young children were staying away. Surely people ought to have understood that they had to do something? They had to keep on looking. What did it matter about a few less cream teas being sold, or a few empty beds in B and Bs, compared with finding out what had happened to their daughter?
Things might have been different if she could have had another child. They began to try about six months after Lauren disappeared, not to replace her, but to keep their family going. They spent a long time agonizing before Jo stopped taking the pill. She had been less keen than Dom; surely if Lauren came home to find a new baby, that would make her adjustment back to family life all the harder. But Dominic had wanted to go ahead, and their GP said he thought it would be "a positive thing". But it never was. The tests were always negative, and mostly there was evidence of her failure to conceive before they got as far as needing a test. Dom found this particularly hard to cope with. They never spoke about whose fault it was, but as every month brought fresh disappointment, the uncertainty about why she did not conceive formed up with all the other miseries and circled them like a group of angry seagulls, screaming and dive-bombing their prey.
When the inquest was over, Dominic"s sister made a statement to the press. "My brother could not bear the loss of his daughter. Our family will never get over this terrible tragedy." They had not invited Jo to stand alongside them. They blamed me, she thought. Perhaps they even believed what others had suggested that she had pushed Dom over the edge, figuratively or literally.
She had to give evidence at the inquest. Fortunately she had it all clear in her head at the time. It only became confused later. Now when she thought of his death, she remembered rain pelting down on the roof of the caravan, a clap of thunder making the van shake while forked lightning tore across the sky, turning the white caps of the waves in the bay to silver, while she sat alone wondering why he didn"t come back. The trouble was, she knew it had not been like that. It was dry and sunny when they set out for their walk. They would not have gone if it had been pouring with rain, and it had still been dry when those people found his body on the beach.
Memory wasn"t always reliable, particularly when it was something you didn"t really want to remember but were forced to go over again and again or maybe something you wanted to believe had happened differently to the way it actually did.
She realized that the coffee mug she had been cradling was empty and grown cold in her hands. As she stood up and carried it across to the sink, she automatically glanced out of the kitchen window and stopped dead. The edge of the wood between their garden and the beck was carpeted with wild garlic, but the shadow she might or might not have seen was further away than that, deeper into the trees where the line of sight was obscured by low branches and undergrowth. For a moment or two she thought she must have been mistaken, but then she made out the dark silhouette of a figure, watching and waiting. A public footpath ran through the woodland, but it was lower down the slope, out of sight of the garden, nearer to the beck. Anyone standing in that position could only have got there by straying well off the path.
She watched for a moment longer, then ran to the kitchen door and out across the gra.s.s. There was no fence to formalize the boundary of their plot, nothing to prevent her from plunging headlong into the trees, heedless of the wet bracken which saturated her jeans before she had gone ten yards. She tried to keep her eyes on the figure, but she had to keep glancing down to check her footing and within seconds of entering the wood she had lost sight of her quarry. "Hey," she shouted. "Wait. Who are you? What do you want?"
The rain had painted the tree trunks black. Everything was damp and dripping, the wet canopy of leaves creating an unnatural gloom under the leaden sky. "Come out," she shouted. "Come out and let me see who you are."
She stopped running and stood still. She must be within a few feet of where the figure had been, and anyone trying to escape must surely make some kind of noise and give themselves away. She waited and listened, her breath coming in quick short gasps, but the wood was alive with nothing but the sound of water. A branch directly above her head chose that moment to deposit a shower of raindrops on her head. Great damp splotches appeared on her shirt. She looked around for some sign that this had been the place any indication that someone had been standing there just a moment before, but there was nothing.
Looking back, she could see the kitchen window surrounded by a frame of pale green leaves. It looked a long way away, and panic rose abruptly within her. There was no one inside the house, and even if there had been, they would not hear her if she shouted. She turned back the way she had come, tripping over bramble cables and catching her hand on a stinging nettle in her hurry. Whatever had possessed her to come racing out here, without so much as her mobile phone to summon help? It came to her that she was making so much noise in her headlong flight that it would mask any sound of pursuit if there was one, but stopping to listen was the last thing she intended to do. This is bad, she thought. I"m within sight of my own home and I"m afraid.
She regained the kitchen door and all but fell inside, locking it behind her. She considered calling the police, but reason intercepted her. There was no one to be seen now, and the prowler had been within twenty-five yards of a right of way. She returned to the kitchen window, standing well back into the room, where she thought she could not be seen from any distance, but then she saw that it had begun to rain again, falling in hard straight lines, blanking out everything beyond the edge of the garden. She transferred her attention inside: her hands, hair, shoes and clothing were all wet to some degree.
As she climbed the stairs to change, it occurred to her for the first time how vulnerable she was when Marcus was away. In the past she had never been afraid of staying by herself at The Hideaway, but that was before she had acquired an intermittent feeling of being watched. She could hardly count on Sean to defend her, even when he was here. Apart from the fact that he was only a kid, by the time he had finished arguing with her about whether or not he intended to come out of his room, she would probably be dead already.
She knew it would be useless to try telling Marcus about the figure in the wood. He would only say that she had imagined it. Now that she was upstairs, she decided to pack for the trip she was due to lead in Yorkshire. Focusing on her packing would give her something else to think about.
Jo was two days into the From Herriot to Heartbeat tour when she picked up a text to say that Melissa was unwell, so could she take charge of Mary Queen of Scots in the Lowlands after all. When she called Marcus later, he explained that Melissa had a nasty cold, and that since Jo had previously been keen to conduct the tours back to back, they a.s.sumed she would be willing to cover.
Jo had never liked the Herriot to Heartbeat tour. It was an itinerary they had inherited from Flights of Fantasy, and although it was theoretically themed to books and authors, in reality it was just a trip around the various television locations which had been used in the two long-running series a distinctly lowbrow excursion, which attracted a very different kind of customer to their regular clientele. She always did her best to raise the level, but it was hard to see this turn of duty as much more than babysitting a group of gossipy old ladies. As a result, Jo was not in the best of spirits when she took the call from Marcus, and felt sorely tempted to remind him that it was one thing to do back-to-back tours when you had prepared for them in advance, and quite another to be washing your underwear in the hotel handbasin as you went along. She half wondered if Melissa was behind the suggestion that she take over, hoping to make it look as if she made a fuss when she was taken off the tour, then another fuss when she was reinstated. Well, if that was the game, it would not work. She would rise above it. Far worse things had happened: clients with suspected heart attacks; getting stuck in a motorway jam for three hours; a mismatched hotel booking which temporarily left a party with nowhere to lay their heads. Coping with the unexpected was all part of the job.
At least the group bound for Scotland were likely to be an improvement on the current lot, who chattered and fidgeted and fussed about loo stops like a group of schoolkids. The Mary Queen of Scots tour invariably attracted knowledgeable enthusiasts, the kind of people who listened attentively when called to order, not just a bunch of old ladies looking for a convivial coach trip. Moreover, she always looked forward to staying at Borthwick Castle, which was their first overnight stop. The candlelit dinners at Borthwick were superb, and afterwards the group would be taken on a guided tour of the building, before hearing the usual ghost stories over a wee dram in front of the roaring fire. It always made for a great start, and the prospect cheered her.
There was an inauspicious beginning at Newcastle Airport, where some of the luggage went temporarily astray, and it took all Jo"s charm and tact to keep everyone reasonably happy while the problem was sorted out. The subsequent journey north was marred by rain, but this had eased away by the time they reached Crichton and left the coach to undertake the short walk to the castle. Jo had already memorized names and matched them with faces it was always important to make clients feel that you recognized each of them personally from the outset. Mr Radley fell into step with her and began to explain in detail why his wife had wanted them to come on the tour. He himself was not interested in "the Scottish queen", being an aficionado of model railways, but "the wife comes with me, and I go with her ... you see, the thing about being married ..." Jo recognized a familiar type in Mr Radley: someone not interested in the subject matter, who would none the less enjoy monopolizing the guide given half a chance. She managed to extricate herself with one of her brightest smiles, on the pretext of making sure that Mrs Van Halsen, who had begun to lag behind, was doing OK. Mrs Van Halsen greeted her with a complaint. Had she realized walking was involved on this first day, she would have travelled in different shoes. Jo coupled sympathy with an a.s.surance that it was not much further. No matter that the full itinerary had been provided, together with advice about suitable footwear in bold, there was always someone who had not read it properly.
A first glimpse of Borthwick from the coach windows drew the usual appreciative gasps, but when the party gathered for pre-dinner drinks in the great hall, it soon became clear that not everyone was happy. Mrs Van Halsen grumbled that there were too many stairs to get to and from her room. Jo tried to lighten the mood with a quip about medieval architects not providing elevators, but another member of the party joined in to say that they regretted not asking for a room on a lower floor. Discontent spreads quickly. Someone else noted that it had begun to rain again, and Jo had to come up with something quickly before the entire party fell into moaning mode. Dinner should have cheered them up, but just as it seemed that even Mrs Van Halsen was thawing, Mrs Barber, who had earlier jumped on the too-many-stairs bandwagon, now sent back her beef, claiming that it was inedible. Since the food at Borthwick Castle was inevitably wonderful, Jo strongly suspected that it was simply a case of the meat not being cooked to Mrs Barber"s liking, but Mrs Barber"s prolonged dissatisfaction about the "inedible beef" cast a pall over the entire meal. When the post-dinner tour of the castle was offered, there were uncharacteristic numbers of queries about how many stairs would be involved.
Once the party had broken up just after eleven, Jo slipped outside the main door, switched on her mobile, managed to get a signal and phoned home. She was surprised when Sean answered.
"Dad"s not here."
"Well, where is he?" She expected Sean to say, "in the bath", "out in the garage", or something of that sort, so "Manchester" took her aback.
"You"re not there on your own, are you?"
"Yes, but he said he won"t be late."
"It"s eleven o"clock."
"So?" asked Sean, insolently.
"We don"t normally leave you alone overnight."
"He won"t be gone overnight."
"Is your grandmother very poorly?"
"She"s always poorly."
"I mean, is she worse?"
"I don"t know."
They had reached an impa.s.se. After a moment"s silence, Sean said, "Can I go now?"
"Yes OK. Tell him I rang."
She wasn"t sure if Sean had heard the last bit or not. The phone went dead while she was still speaking; possibly they had lost the signal, or maybe Sean had rung off.
She felt exhausted as she began the long climb back to her bedroom in the north tower, which seemed double the distance she remembered from previous visits. For once she found herself in sympathy with the claims that there were too many stairs. She knew that she should have ended her conversation with Sean on a better note, perhaps with some expression of affection; at the very least a little gesture in the direction of the motherly: "Take care of yourself," or "Don"t answer the door to anyone." Not that there ever were any unexpected callers after dark. Easter Bridge was too far off the beaten track for door-to-door salesmen or even carol singers at Christmas although someone had come to leave the sh.e.l.l. It was never far from her thoughts, that sh.e.l.l all three of them, in fact at least two too many to have blown there by accident.
She had not expected Marcus to be in Manchester. Perhaps his mother was finally dying and his sister had made the "come now" phone call. It was strange, though, that he had not said something to Sean about it, even if only in preparation for the news he might be bringing home. She managed to get an intermittent signal beside the window in her bedroom, but when she tried Marcus"s mobile he did not answer which he wouldn"t, not if he was driving. She left her own phone switched on, periodically climbing out of bed and holding it up to the window, but by midnight Marcus had not returned her call. She was torn between ringing home again which might wake him up, if he had fallen straight into bed after a long journey and not ringing, which made it look as if she did not care how his mother was. She sat with the tartan bedcover huddled up to her chin, her mind a whirlpool of uncertainty. He might have tried to ring her, but the phone reception was uncertain because of the thickness of the walls, and she didn"t like leaving her room at night to locate a better signal. The spiral staircases and cavernous rooms, although well lit, were unwelcoming at this hour. It took stout nerves to ramble around the castle on your own.
She fought against it, but another idea, darker than his mother"s death, was growing. Suppose Marcus had not gone to Manchester after all? How would Sean know where his father was headed, once the car had turned out of the drive and sped south across the bridge? She pictured Melissa"s sitting room with its soft lighting, a fire in the hearth and Melissa reclining among the scatter cushions. Red wine poured into a pair of lantern-sized goblets, Marcus offering her a tissue, making a joke about her so-called "cold". It made her feel sick to think of it, but she couldn"t get rid of the thought. Marcus did not need to stay all night in Kirkby Lonsdale, so Sean need never suspect a thing. He knew that Borthwick was usually a late night, so he would not have expected her to phone.
When she finally fell asleep, it was to a dream of Melissa and Marcus, grappling naked on a huge bed, which was for some reason covered in red shiny plastic. Melissa kept scoring her painted nails into Marcus"s back, so hard that they left a pattern like Chinese characters scratched into his flesh. It must be hurting him, Jo thought, but he gave no sign of it; did not flinch or cry out. It was then that she noticed the tableau was silent, like watching television with the mute on. That"s because it"s only a dream, said a voice in her head. It isn"t real you only have to wake up and it will be all over. But somehow she could not rouse herself. The two of them went on thrashing about, Marcus thrusting and thrusting and Melissa covering his back in hieroglyphics, while the plastic melted from the heat of their bodies and turned into a huge bath of scarlet emulsion paint, on which the pair of them floated effortlessly, unaware of anything except the act in which they were engaged. You see, said the voice, it"s ridiculous; no one could float like that. It"s just a dream. If it was real they would be drowning in the paint by now. That was it: of course. That was the other way of stopping it. If she couldn"t wake up, then maybe she could cross the room and push them under. Hold them down in the paint; that would do it.
One minute she was watching from a few feet away, and the next she was leaning right over them. She wasn"t entirely sure how she got there, but now that she was standing above them it was easy to press down on Marcus"s back so that they both disappeared into the paint. There was no more resistance than when she pushed her undies into a basin of water. Her hands and arms went in up to the elbow, but they didn"t feel cold or wet. Marcus and Melissa must have sunk to the bottom, because she couldn"t feel them either. The momentary relief at having stopped them was overtaken by the horror at what she had done. And in the bath of paint a face was reflected back at her not her own, but her mother"s.
Her scream woke her. She lay there in a panic, wondering if she had really cried out, and if so, whether it had been loud enough for anyone to have heard her. The rooms were well spread around the building and the walls thick, and maybe the sound, which had been so loud in her own mind, had only been part of the dream. She was afraid to relax straight back into sleep lest the dream returned, and when she felt that it was safe to settle down again, sleep eluded her. She eventually fell into a fitful doze from which she awoke feeling jaded at around seven. Before breakfast, she took her phone out into the grounds to maximize the signal and managed to get through to Marcus. Her first question naturally concerned his mother.
"She"s much the same."
"Then why on earth did Sandra phone for you?"
"She didn"t."
"But if Sandra didn"t phone for you, why did you go down specially, leaving Sean by himself?"
"I didn"t go specially. I told you I was going ages ago, and Sean wouldn"t have been on his own if you hadn"t taken this extra trip. I didn"t want to ring Sandra and cry off you know what she"s like, forever complaining that I don"t do my share when it comes to visiting."
"How is Melissa"s cold?" She switched tack, half hoping, half fearing to catch him off guard.
"She was a lot better yesterday."
"So you saw her yesterday."
"When I called in to the office there were some papers for her, so I dropped them off."
For a split second she almost asked him: are you having an affair with Melissa? Instead she let him ask if the tour was going well, to which she answered in the affirmative the only safe response when there was even a remote possibility of a client suddenly appearing from behind a b.u.t.tress. She might have been a colleague reporting back, she thought. Why didn"t they talk properly any more?