Why Don’t You Come for Me (15 page)

‘I saw your car go past, so I’ve brought Charlotte home. I didn’t want you to be worried, but –’ she looked from face to face. ‘I fear I may have been a little tardy.’

As his wife grabbed Charlotte to her, John stared at the stranger in confusion. ‘Who are you?’ he asked.

‘I’m sorry, I should have explained better. I’m Gilda Iceton.’ She extended a hand, which he took automatically, finding it soft and cold in his momentary grasp. ‘From The Old Forge. I happened to be looking out this afternoon when I saw your daughter passing my house, looking rather distressed. Apparently she was nervous waiting here by herself, so she followed the boys up to The Hideaway, but when they didn’t answer the doorbell she ran back here. Unfortunately, she had forgotten to put the door on the catch and found herself locked out. She was on her way back along the lane again, not knowing what to do next, when I saw her. I could see there was something wrong – I have a little girl of my own – so I went out to see if I could help, and we decided the best thing would be for Charlotte to come in and wait with me until we saw your car coming back. She said you had driven into Ulverston, so I knew you would have to pass my house on your way home. I hadn’t realized that the boys were back here; I didn’t see them go past.’

‘Thank you.’ John Wheaton was recovering fast. ‘Of course you did exactly the right thing in not leaving Charlotte to wander up and down the lane on her own.’

‘Although we were very frightened when we got back and couldn’t find her,’ Suzanne added with a hint of reproof, all the time holding Charlotte to her tightly, as if she thought someone might attempt to steal her away.

‘I was going to pop a note through the door to let you know where she was, but I’m afraid you beat me to it because I stopped to give Charlotte a drink and a biscuit first.’

‘She’s got a funny stone cat called Timmy, who sits by the fire,’ Charlotte piped up, somewhat reassured to find that she did not appear to be in any trouble. ‘It’s life-size, and it’s got eyes made out of a different kind of stone, so it seems like it’s really looking at you.’

John Wheaton was wondering whether they ought to ask their new neighbour inside. Although she had tried to do the right thing by Charlotte, there was something about her which didn’t incline him to further their acquaintance.

‘When her daughter, Becky, comes home, I’m going to be invited round to play,’ Charlotte announced.

‘My daughter is staying with relatives over in Yorkshire,’ Gilda explained. ‘She boards at St Aelfric’s, but when she’s next here I’m sure she would like to meet Charlotte.’

A daughter at boarding school. Well, that gave out a rather different signal to the jumble-sale wardrobe, Suzanne thought. People in the country were so funny, of course, and sometimes had quite different standards to people in town. Maybe they should invite this Gilda Iceton and her husband – assuming she had one – over for a drink one evening. At the moment, however, there were pressing matters to be raised with Harry, so she was relieved when Gilda declined her half-hearted invitation to come in.

The front door was hardly closed before everyone’s full attention returned to Sean and Harry, who were standing sheepishly at the foot of the stairs. ‘You’, said John Wheaton, glowering at his son, ‘have got a lot of explaining to do. And as for you, Sean, you had better go home. You can assume that Harry is grounded, and not receiving visitors until you hear otherwise.’

CHAPTER TEN

Jo felt vaguely uneasy as she made her way round Booths supermarket. She was convinced that Harry and Sean were up to something, and was still wondering whether she ought to have dealt more firmly with the issue of Harry’s sister being left at home on her own. Distracted by these thoughts, she almost collided with Brian when she turned her trolley into the chiller aisle. He had a basket over his arm, into which he was just placing a tub of coleslaw. When he appeared to ignore her, she said, ‘Good afternoon, Brian,’ in a pointed way.

‘Oh – sorry. Didn’t see it was you for a minute. I was miles away.’ He would have walked away, but Jo had allowed her trolley to drift sideways as if by accident, so that he could not move on without walking right round it.

‘How are you?’ she asked, in a voice which was far too brittle.

‘About the same as usual. Yourself?’

‘I’m fine. How’s the gallery?’

‘Still standing. Busy, in fact, so I must crack on.’

‘Of course.’ She still did not move out of his way. He was a big man, intimidating face to face, and his irritation was palpable, but they were in the middle of a supermarket – what could he possibly do to her? ‘I want to get in touch with Shelley,’ she said. ‘Is there a phone number where I can contact her?’

‘I really can’t help you – but if you’re such mates, then I’m surprised she hasn’t been in touch with you already, telling you the same sob-story she’s been telling all her other friends.’ Brian’s sarcastic smile wilted her. ‘And by the way, the Tunnocks don’t like people trespassing up at High Gilpin, particularly when there isn’t a tenant in res.’ He gave the end of her trolley an impatient shove in order to extricate himself, then stalked away without another word.

Jo’s face burned. She lingered in the dairy section for what she hoped was long enough to avoid bumping into Brian at the checkouts. He must have seen her hiding behind the water butt. Somewhere in the back of her mind a laughing policeman mocked her mercilessly.

Back at home, she discovered Sean watching TV in his bedroom, but there was no sign of Harry. She wondered if they had fallen out, but decided it was better not to enquire. When Marcus arrived home in time for them to eat together, Sean joined them at the table, taciturn as usual, but more subdued than surly. He withdrew upstairs again as soon as the meal was over, leaving herself and Marcus to spend the rest of the evening listening to the concert on Classic FM.

Marcus seemed to have forgotten his previous annoyance with her, but they found little to say to one another, and when they made love that night, the act was accompanied by a curious air of detachment. She knew that some men fantasized about being with other women, and that this supposedly did not mean they loved their wives any less; but all the same, the thought that he might be imagining himself with Melissa was unbearable. Afterwards, as they lay side by side in bed, she asked: ‘Do you think men find Melissa very attractive?’

‘Do you actually mean, do
I
find Melissa attractive?’

‘I meant men in general, but as you’re the only man here, I suppose it’s got to be your opinion on behalf of the rest.’

She had spoken lightly, and he answered in similar vein. ‘Speaking for the entire, red-blooded, macho bunch of us, I’d guess the answer is yes – although not half so attractive as we’d all find you, of course.’

‘Be serious – I wasn’t fishing.’

‘I am being serious. Why do you ask, anyway?’

‘Oh, I was just thinking about the differences between what women might think men find attractive and what they actually do find attractive.’

‘I see what you mean. Well, I would say that Melissa is glamorous in an obvious way, but you are beautiful. Glamour is carefully acquired, but beauty is the genuine article and can’t be faked.’

‘Sometimes you say the loveliest things.’

When he reached out and drew her closer, she nestled securely into the crook of his arm.

Down at The Hollies, Harry lay miserably awake long after everyone else’s lights were out. From somewhere nearby a tawny owl was annoying him with its persistent
ke-wick, ke-wick
. He would like to wring the neck of that owl – to say nothing of the neck of his little sister, whose fault everything was. The latter half of his day had been dominated by interrogation after interrogation, and telling-off after telling-off, but none of it was his fault, he thought bitterly. If Charlie had only done as she was told and waited in the house, then she would still have been here when he and Sean got back. They could have whipped that DVD out of the machine and replaced it with some childish Disney rubbish as soon as they heard the car; his parents would never have been any the wiser.

And that whole business about Sean’s stepmother – he had certainly been dragged over the coals for that! He half wished that Sean had never told him anything about his stepmother, although that was Charles’s fault too, because if only she had arrived home a couple of minutes sooner, none of that stuff about the stepmother would ever have come out. Once Sean had been sent home, the parents had wanted to know all about it, so that bit by bit Harry had been forced to reveal what he knew and how he knew it.

Much to his surprise, he discovered that his parents already knew a lot about the case, although not that baby Lauren’s mother was living just along the road. They remembered seeing it on the news, although their take on the situation was very different to most of the internet bloggers. According to his mother, saying that Joanne Handley had harmed her own child was ‘an extremely cruel and very silly thing to say. And I don’t suppose Sean really believes any of it,’ she went on. ‘I expect he was just feeling cross with her about something and said it to be spiteful, and to make the whole thing into an exciting game for you.’

‘Except that this is something very serious and not a game at all.’ His father took up the role of prosecutor-in-chief. ‘It is very wrong to snoop about on the internet, downloading material about someone you know.’

‘Imagine how that poor woman would feel, if she knew what you were saying about her. Don’t you think she has suffered enough?’ You could always count on his mother to play up the emotional angle.

His father majored on different aspects of the matter. ‘You ought to know by now that you can’t believe half of what you see on the internet. As for repeating allegations like that, well, perhaps you don’t realize that this is a very serious matter. It’s slander, Harry. Do you know what that means?’

Harry did know. He had to repeat for them, again and again, that he had never discussed anything about Sean’s stepmother with anyone other than Sean. All manner of promises had been exacted from him regarding what kind of material he would and would not be accessing on the net, or for that matter watching on TV or via any other medium in the future. In the meantime, he was grounded for the rest of the holidays, and likely to be under far too close surveillance to get his own back on Charles for quite a while – although he had already managed to shoot her a couple of looks on the sly, to let her know she had it coming.

In the end, his parents had gone on at him for so long he hardly knew what he did or didn’t believe about Sean’s stepmother, although on one point at least he was sure they were wrong. For some reason they were both adamant that Sean could not possibly believe her guilty of harming anyone. Well, they had not seen the intensity of Sean’s expression when he talked about how dangerous she was, nor did they know about the weird stuff she had drawn in her book. Harry had not breathed a word about that – his parents might think they knew everything, but they didn’t – a point from which he derived a curious satisfaction.

The wind had risen during the evening, so that long after Marcus had fallen asleep, Jo was aware of it buffeting through the trees, occasionally picking up small objects and tossing them against something more solid. Sometimes there would be a bigger gust, a sound like a giant intake of breath which rattled the plastic air vent on the bathroom wall, making the slats scrape one against another like fingernails against a window pane. A sensation that something was not right began to grow in Jo’s mind. It was akin to the prickly feeling of being watched, like knowing that there was someone standing just behind you, except that this seemed to encompass the whole house. It was as if someone was outside among the trees, watching the house as it slept.

Taking great care not to disturb Marcus, Jo slid sideways until she reached the edge of the bed and could twist herself into a sitting position while barely moving the duvet. The bedroom was dark, but three steps took her across to the door where she could reach out to locate her dressing gown on its hook and feel for the door handle. Out on the landing where a plug-in night light glowed, she paused to push her arms into the sleeves of her dressing gown and knot the cord around her. Without the night light, the stairs would have been inky black.

She crept downstairs to the kitchen. Just as she entered the room, the security light at that side of the house illuminated the garden like a prolonged lightning strike, revealing a world of startled pot plants, with the winter jasmine clinging panic-stricken to the wall, the whole picture criss-crossed by a black gyrating mesh of shadows formed by the wind-blown shrubs and trees. The security lights were not infrequently set off by the roe deer which regularly ambled through, but there was no sign of them or any other likely trigger.

She slipped across the hall to look through the sitting-room window. Here the curtains had been drawn, and she had to twitch one aside to look out. The front of their plot was partially illuminated by the security light at the side of the house. The line between light and dark ran along a perfect diagonal, starting at the right-hand corner of the house and extending towards the gate, here and there interrupted by shadows marking the position of the larger shrubs, huge shadowy shape-shifters which swayed uncertainly in the wind. Beyond this patch of light everything was blackness except for a single yellow bulb, which Jo identified at once with the one over the front door of The Old Forge. It appeared to be flickering, but she knew that was just an illusion caused by the constant movement of the intervening trees.

She wondered what Gilda Iceton was doing up at this hour. Then it occurred to her that since there appeared to be no other lights on, Gilda might have left it on by mistake; it was easily done when going out to fetch some logs for the fire. She knew that there was still an open fire at The Old Forge, because she had seen smoke rising from the chimney.

Although there had been no direct contact between herself and her new neighbour since the night of the concert, Jo was uneasily aware of her: the arrivals and departures of Gilda’s old blue Volvo, the occasional presence of washing hung out to dry all served to remind her that Gilda was living just across the lane, and that although she might prefer never to set eyes on her again, another encounter was all but inevitable. She had pretty much succeeded in forgetting all about certain episodes in her adolescence, until confronted by the sight of Gilda at the Coronation Hall. Nor was her problem with Gilda confined to the awkwardness and embarrassment of some long past foolishness catching up with her. Gilda almost certainly knew not just about her childhood, but probably about Lauren too. Easter Bridge had seemed the perfect place in which to escape the past, but it did not matter where she went – it was never long before that echoing cry of ‘Coming, ready or not’ rang out.