Why Don’t You Come for Me (16 page)

The security light faded, leaving her staring into the darkness at that single point of flickering light at the far side of the lane. So far as she knew, Gilda had done no work on The Old Forge prior to moving in. It still looked dingy and depressing from the outside, and its windows continued to stare aggressively as passers-by, with more than a suggestion that unseen watchers stood just out of sight, screened behind the grubby panes. With so much property available at the moment it was hard to fathom why anyone would choose that house, but presumably Gilda saw some sort of potential in it. Maisie’s fears of a massive building project might yet come to fruition because, now she came to think about it, Gilda’s parents had been fairly well off – enough money, anyway, to take their daughter out of a state school and pay for private education. And it looked as though Gilda must be pretty comfortable financially: it wasn’t every widow approaching forty who could afford boarding school and a house in the Lakes, and yet had no obvious regular day job. It could be that Gilda had big ideas for The Old Forge, and the wherewithal to put them into effect.

Even so, the idea of living in The Old Forge made Jo shudder. She remembered Sean’s story of the ghostly former occupant of Gilda’s new abode. The blacksmith, who had perished there in an agony of fire – some saying he had fallen drunk into the blaze, others that his bitter-tongued wife had pushed him from behind. Did violent death really leave an invisible footprint in the air? She became aware of a familiar set of wooden double doors taking shape in her mind. Shivering, she let the curtain fall back into place and turned smartly towards the kitchen, thinking that she might as well make herself a cup of tea, now that she was downstairs.

Without the security light, it was very dark in the kitchen. Her fingers found the switch by the door and a bar of spotlights sprang to life. The sensation of some watchful presence outside persisted, so she approached the window to pull down the blind. The interior lights were reflected back at her, rendering almost everything outside blacker than black, but as she reached for the blind cord Jo drew back with an audible gasp. Just visible on the other side of the pane, balanced on the sloping white window sill, was another seashell.

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 shell there must have set it off.’

‘Jo, what are you talking about? Did you actually see anyone?’

‘No … but the shell –’

‘A shell?’

‘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 Shell 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 seashell 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 shells 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 shell on the doorstep means see you at mine, a shell on the window sill …’

‘But I asked Sean about the shell 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 shell 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 shells, and eventually refused to indulge in any further speculation about their arrival. Even Jo had to admit that they were not the sort of shells found on sale in The Shell Shop, where all the stock had been polished specimens suitable for display. The shells left outside The Hideaway were just ordinary shells, collected straight from a beach. The one which had appeared on the window sill was a cockle shell – she had looked it up – whereas the one she picked up on the doorstep was a carpet shell. The original shell seen by the gatepost had vanished by now, perhaps purloined by a passer-by, or accidentally knocked into the long grass which grew at the side of the road. After Marcus had lost interest, she hid the remaining shells 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 shell’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. Passing bats or owls could set it off too; but you could not get away from the fact that whenever the shells 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 shells 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 shell on the window sill, she had to admit that it was not a very likely scenario.

‘Think about it, Jo. It’s the fag 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 space 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 seashell 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 Shelley 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 grass. 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?’