Why Don’t You Come for Me (24 page)

‘There won’t be anything else. This was just spontaneous – positive. I thought you’d approve.’

‘Well I don’t. I don’t like the idea of people goggling over the wall into our garden. Next thing you know, some joker will join in with a message of their own and you’ll wake up to find graffiti sprayed on to a tree, or some tacky home-made banner tied on the gates.’

‘That’s ridiculous,’ Jo said, although she knew that it probably wasn’t because there were some people who looked on the Lakes as a great big holiday camp, where stag and hen parties could wander around in fancy dress doing all kinds of stupid things – although that sort of crowd seldom found their way out as far as places like Easter Bridge.

‘Can I suggest you move it, darling? I’m totally on board with the spirit of the thing; being positive, embracing all life has to offer and that sort of stuff, but I’m sure you can express it in other ways – and if it has to be a sculpture, then please let’s put it somewhere a little less prominent.’

‘No. I can’t move it. It took me all day.’

‘Perhaps I could help you.’ Marcus was employing his painfully patient voice. ‘If we moved the letters one at a time, I’m sure it would be far –’

‘No! It has to be here. It won’t work otherwise. There’s no point having it round the back.’

‘Jo – what is going on? This isn’t a sculpture, is it? This is a message.’ When she would not meet his eye he continued: ‘Is this anything to do with that woman at The Old Forge? You’ve had a thing about her ever since she moved in.’

‘No, it’s not her.’ She hesitated. If she couldn’t trust Marcus, who could she trust? Reluctantly she said, ‘Wait here and I’ll show you something.’

Marcus waited for her in the garden, standing well away from the disputed word. He took another sip of coffee and noticed that it was getting cold. When he saw her returning with a postcard in her hand, his heart sank.

‘You see,’ she said, thrusting it at him. ‘It’s a new message. I have to answer it.’

‘How can you possibly do that? You don’t know who is sending these things, or where they come from.’

‘The person who sent this is the same person who left the shells in the garden. It’s someone who knows exactly where we are – someone who comes to look at the house.’

In spite of himself, Marcus had to suppress a shudder at the thought of someone watching them. He took the postcard and read it, before turning it over several times, scrutinizing it front and back.

‘How long have you had this? Why didn’t you take it to the police?’

‘What’s the point? They always say there isn’t anything they can do.’

‘There’s no postmark.’

‘So? It must have missed the franking machine.’

‘How did it get here?’

‘The postman delivered it. He handed it to me with the other letters. I was out here when he came.’

‘OK.’ Marcus was silent, remembering the voice of that rather noxious young policeman.
Has it ever occurred to you that your wife might be sending the cards to herself?
Aloud he said, ‘Why didn’t you tell me about the card?’

‘I was going to.’

‘No, you weren’t. You only told me when I threatened to remove your so-called sculpture.’

When Jo said nothing, he balanced his half-empty cup on the arm of the garden bench, before placing his hands one on each of her shoulders. ‘We’ll leave the stones where they are, for now – but only on condition that you get some help. I want you to have some counselling, at the very least.’

‘No.’ She ducked away, stepping back to be out of his reach. ‘I don’t need that sort of help. I’m not mad, Marcus. I’m not my mother.’

‘I never said you were, but—’

‘No, no, no!’ She put her hands over her ears and turned away. ‘I’m not going down that road, and you can’t make me.’

He tried to approach her again, arms outstretched, expression conciliatory, but she ran into the house, collapsing into the chair nearest the sitting-room door. To her relief, he did not follow her. For one awful moment she thought he might have set about dismantling her stones there and then, but when she slipped across to look out of the window she saw that he was sitting on the garden bench with his back to the house. It had been a mistake, she thought, to show him the postcard. What had an old boss of hers been fond of asking people? ‘Are you part of the problem, or part of the solution?’ Where he had once bolstered her confidence, Marcus now undermined her: he had deprived her of meaningful activity and left her stranded. You can be lost so easily, once you don’t know who you are, or where you are going. ‘And what about you?’ asked the devil who rode on her shoulder. ‘Are you part of the solution?’ ‘I can be … I won’t sink under it all … I will survive.’

She went out to find Marcus in the garden.

‘I was thinking perhaps we could all go out somewhere,’ she said. ‘The three of us. Take advantage of the day. Have a walk round Tarn Hows, then maybe have lunch at The Outgate. We haven’t done anything like that for ages.’ She did not particularly relish the prospect of a day spent playing Happy Families with Sean, but if this was what it took to get Marcus’s mind away from moving the stones, then she was prepared to muster a smile and feign enthusiasm.

Marcus agreed with surprising alacrity. He went straight upstairs to rouse Sean, and although it was evident from the snatches of conversation which filtered down the stairs that Sean, who thought walking anywhere ‘a waste of time’, was not greatly enamoured of the plan, by eleven o’clock the three of them were climbing into the car in readiness for their outing. As they drove past The Old Forge, Gilda Iceton was also getting into her car. Marcus raised a hand in acknowledgement, but Gilda gave no indication that she had observed the gesture, and a moment later they had rounded the bend and were out of sight.

Jo was driving, and before long she began to catch sight of Gilda’s car, travelling at a discreet distance behind them. The hairs began to rise on the back of her neck. Was Gilda following them on purpose, or did she just coincidentally happen to be going the same way? Each time they turned off towards Hawkshead, then Coniston, when the road straightened out Gilda’s car duly appeared in the mirror. As soon as they got out of the car at Tarn Hows, she saw Gilda’s blue Volvo nosing around the car park, looking for a space to park among the trees.

‘Don’t look now,’ she hissed at Marcus, ‘but Gilda – the woman from The Old Forge – has followed us.’

A shadow of anxiety swept over Marcus’s expression. ‘It’s probably just someone with a similar car,’ he said. ‘It’s dry underfoot and there’s a made path all the way round, so it won’t be muddy. I’m not going to bother with boots. What about you, Sean?’

‘Whatever.’ Sean lolled against the rear passenger door for all the world as if standing upright was too much effort, let alone walking round the tarn.

‘It
is
her,’ Jo said in a low, urgent voice. ‘Look, she’s just getting out of her car.’

‘For heaven’s sake, so what? It’s a beautiful day. The woman’s decided to go for a walk.’

‘I think she’s following us.’

‘
I
think you’re being silly. You see? She’s getting a pair of walking boots out of the car. If she had been following us, how could she have anticipated where we were going and known to bring her boots?’

‘Maybe she leaves them in the car, the same as we often do.’

‘Really, Jo, this is like having a conversation with an eight-year-old. Let’s go, shall we?’

Jo was already fervently wishing that she had chosen somewhere other than Tarn Hows, which happened to be the first place that had come into her head. During the season its tranquillity was marred by a rash of picnics, metal folding chairs, giant cool boxes and the inevitable family who cannot see an expanse of grass without feeling the need to hoof a football across it – all of which she knew Marcus would hate. The place was at its best in the winter, when the trees were reflected in the water as faithfully as a photograph and everywhere was silent and still. On days like that you might glimpse a red squirrel in the trees, or hear the mew of a buzzard: today it would be noisy families with double buggies all the way round.

In fact, Marcus had been happy enough to accept the choice of venue, but now they were here he found that all his efforts to lighten the mood fell on stony ground. Attempts at conversation foundered because Sean – who had not really wanted to accompany them at all – was particularly monosyllabic, while Jo became increasingly distracted, continually looking over her shoulder to keep an eye on the woman from across the road. Inwardly Marcus cursed his neighbour for choosing this particular place and time, because while she clearly wasn’t following them, and indeed showed not the slightest awareness of them, Jo in her present state was capable of imagining anything. (‘Why would she want to follow us?’ Marcus asked at one point. ‘To make me feel uncomfortable, of course,’ his wife retorted, as if it should have been obvious.) Unfortunately the woman appeared to walk at the same pace as they did, so she neither overtook them nor ever dropped too far behind. Lunch at The Outgate was not a success either. By then Marcus had run out of pleasantries with which he hoped to start a conversation, so they awaited their food in silence. At least there was no question of anyone following them there, but he could tell that Jo would not be dissuaded from the reality of the morning’s pursuit.

Unbeknown to his wife, he too had recently been to see Dr Hillier, but it was a complicated situation. Patient confidentiality precluded them from having any real discussion about Jo, who until officially declared otherwise was deemed competent to make her own decisions. Thus, Dr Hillier had explained, it was entirely her choice whether or not she consulted a doctor. The best he could advise was that Marcus continue in his attempts to persuade her to make another appointment. ‘If she is happy for you to come along with her, so much the better. And of course, if she is exhibiting signs which give you real cause for concern, you can always call the out-of-hours service.’

‘What sort of signs?’

‘Well, I think it would be fairly obvious. If she claims to hear voices, for example, or starts talking to people you cannot see, or behaving violently towards other people or self-harming.’

‘It’s not like that,’ Marcus said. ‘She doesn’t – I mean, she isn’t crazy, but she does need help.’

‘Crazy isn’t a word we really use.’

‘No – of course not.’

Their conversation had ended soon afterwards, leaving Marcus feeling, if anything, more perturbed than before.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

The ‘barbecue summer’ was short-lived. Within a fortnight the rain had returned and Jo reverted back to jeans and long sleeves again.
Lucky you
, she typed, in response to Nerys’s latest message saying how wonderful the weather was (she had now reached California),
it has rained here every single day this week
. She told Nerys about the film she and Marcus had been to see at the cinema, and their overnight trip to Alton Towers with Sean, where she had won brownie points by accompanying him on the scarier rides eschewed by Marcus. She made the whole thing sound so upbeat that Nerys wrote in reply:
I said you would win him over in the end.

In the meantime, Jo watched and waited anxiously for a response to her message on the lawn. Her hopes were raised one morning at the sight of a small hooded figure in waterproofs, hurrying up the drive with an envelope in its hand, but it was only Maisie Perry coming to drop off an invitation for her garden party, an event to be held the following Saturday in aid of Marie Curie Nurses, complete with strawberries-and-cream teas, the obligatory raffle and plants for sale. The missive ended on the rather down-to-earth note: ‘to be held indoors if wet’.

Jo did not want to attend Maisie’s fund-raiser, whether it was inside or out. All the permanent residents were sure to have been invited, which obviously included Brian, to whom she had made such a fool of herself, and Shelley, whose Pre-Raphaelite reference books she had yet to return, having steered clear of the gallery since her overly emphatic rejection of Brian’s art classes. Then there was Gilda, with whom she had had no direct contact since the episode in the lane. She had seen Gilda a few times from a distance, once narrowly avoiding her by taking evasive action, when Gilda happened to be walking up from the bridge. Jo had ducked into the house and waited for the other woman to pass, covertly observing Gilda as she went by, singing to herself and carrying what appeared to be a bunch of weeds, which Jo presumed to be of artistic or botanical interest.

Marcus had accused her of being obsessed with Gilda, but that was a gross exaggeration. Had she really mentioned Gilda to Marcus all that often? Surely not. It was true that there was still a small part of her which wondered whether Gilda could be behind the shells and the postcards: she had even ruminated on the possibility that Gilda’s daughter was Lauren, but a more realistic, sensible voice told her that was fantastical. Apart from anything else, the girl was too old to be Lauren. Thirteen or fourteen, Maisie Perry said, and you could count on Maisie to have all the gen. Gilda’s outside light had been on, the night of the third shell’s appearance, but outside lights got left on all the time, and surely a guilty person would have made sure that it was off, rather than drawing attention to themselves. Even her certainty that Gilda had been following them round Tarn Hows that day now seemed ridiculous. Marcus had insisted all along that it was no more than a coincidence. She stopped short of speculating that Gilda’s regular forays into the wood might be undertaken in order to spy on the occupants of The Hideaway. Plenty of people used the footpath to explore the woods, and there was no reason why Gilda should not go there to watch birds, gather wild grasses, or whatever else it was that took her fancy.

If only Gilda had given her a chance to explain about what had happened in the lane that morning. Not that explanations were particularly easy. Would a third party be able to understand how, after Lauren’s disappearance, she had constructed something akin to a steel shutter in her mind – brought down a barrier to avoid confronting her darkest imaginings – those ideas which were just too much to bear? Or, that although the barrier worked well inasmuch that she could never be sure what her thoughts were getting up to behind it, at the same time it seemed to be mounted on a freewheeling roller mechanism which did not have a brake, so that unless she was vigilant it was liable to slide up an inch or two when she wasn’t looking – which was when the dangerous ideas slipped out and the trouble began?