Shell House (18 page)

       
“But she asked for you?”

       
“Kind of. She said my name but I didn’t think she’d comprehended who I was. There was a part of me that wanted to see her. An odd kind of curiosity.”

       
“Did she know who you were when you got there?”

       
Jonathan gulped his drink down. “Dad, she told me Gabrielle hadn’t really killed her children.”

       
Harry placed his cup back on the table the colour draining from his face. “Go on,” he whispered.

       
“She said she’d killed them because she was sick. I looked through her notes and she has a history of mental illness dating back to before she had her first child.”

       
Something else drained from Harry at that moment and at first he thought it was his life until he realised he was still breathing and it was shock coursing through his body.

CHAPTER TEN

        The rusty, half painted old gate appeared to be hanging off one of its hinges, causing the bottom leg to be resting on the concrete path. Gabrielle had already decided she wasn’t going in via that entrance anyway. It would draw attention to her immediately and she could see John Tailby through the window of his living room. The movement of someone outside had already distracted him; she could see from the tree she was peering round that he kept looking up from his newspaper and the television. Her first plan had been to knock on the Tailby’s door. She’d reasoned with herself that it had all been such a long time ago, having been a child when it happened and that surely they could sort it all out in a civilized manner.

       
Luckily she came to the realisation this scenario was impossible. She remembered clearly John Tailby’s angry, distorted face all those years ago at the trial. How he’d mouthed expletives at her just as she was being sentenced. She doubted there’d be any chance of reconciliation. In fact she knew there couldn’t possibly be when she thought about it from a rational point of view. Rosa had told her how John had recently sold his story to the newspapers and his words were filled with as much venom now as they had been then. After all, she reasoned with herself, she’d taken away his twins, his only children.

       
So she had come to the house to talk to Ellen. Whatever reception she got from her she was prepared to take it, but felt she needed to receive it from her rather than her husband. There was a huge part of her that was frightened of John Tailby because she knew he would register who she was at first glance and probably try to harm her. But the other part of her, the real reason for wanting to see Ellen alone was, she felt that it had all been between Ellen and herself and no one else. The days she’d spent thinking in the new house had enabled her to visit the past. She felt safe for the first time in her life to do that. No one apart from Rosa and a few other officials knew where she was and there was something strangely comforting about it. Even though no one had known her where she used to live she’d become lost in a new life, a new identity and it had somehow blocked her revisiting the past. As though she was playing a part in a never ending play and couldn’t get out of character because someone might find out whom she really was. Someone might see what was going on in her head and it scared her.

       
As horrible as it was, having her identity uncovered, it brought with it an odd kind of liberation. She’d been released from the play, so to speak, and she could revisit the past properly. It had been a tiny bit of self discovery. Once she’d dared to look back on what had happened in her life, it had brought with it a clearer picture of the run up to the awful events. The memories of that terrible day, which had been so blurred, were becoming clearer, and she had questions she needed answers to. Part of this emergence for her had been the overwhelming urge to visit the Tailbys.

       
And here she was standing in the half-light on a rainy Saturday afternoon, the hood of her waterproof jacket pulled over her head for fear of anyone recognising her. She doubted they would; not with her hair cut short, so short that she barely recognised herself. Her eyes were the giveaway to anyone who knew her well; starkly pale blue but bright and flecked with grey.

       
She moved away from the tree and tried to walk casually past the Tailby’s semi-detached house. She was waiting for John Tailby to go out. She was hoping he hadn’t changed his routine of going to the pub at 5 o’ clock. It was a slim chance after all these years, but she remembered him being a creature of habit and didn’t see why he’d have changed anything; her father had told her he still worked for the same firm as he had done then and spent a lot of his spare time in the local pubs.

       
There was a track down the side of the Tailby’s house leading to more cottages and she knew she could access their garden from that direction without too much trouble. She was guessing she’d hear him leave from the back way because the track was also a shortcut to their nearest pub. She crept around to the gate, looking up to check no one was watching her from the upstairs windows, but the curtains had already been pulled shut. She let herself in as quietly as possible without looking too suspicious and prayed their shed was unlocked. Trying to look inconspicuous made her feel bigger and more obvious than she really was. Luckily for her the shed was unlocked, so she let herself in as carefully as possible and waited patiently to hear John Tailby leave.

       
She tucked herself away at the back of the shed as best she could in case John stopped by for something on his way out. She hoped because of the bad light that he wouldn’t be able to see her. If he did catch her in there, she hoped he would think she was just another reporter. At least that’s how she’d planned to play it. She could hide enough of her face with her hood and her scarf; Gabrielle was the last person he would be expecting to see.

       
She sat underneath a shelf between what she thought were boxes of newspapers; they were swollen and cold from the damp, making it hard to tell.

       
The time ticked by as she went over in her head what she would say when she finally came face to face with Ellen. She knew there’d be a confrontation so she’d prepared herself. Every time she tried to think beyond this scenario it replayed in her head as though it were a scratched record from her father’s old collection.

       
After an hour had passed she began to think he wasn’t going out at all and she’d misjudged the situation.

       
She was stiff from sitting on the cold, hard floor and needed to get up and perch herself on one of the boxes. Her limbs throbbed with pins and needles as she slowly pulled herself up from the floor, and she realised she was too old for all this. Once she had the feeling back in her legs she decided to stay another half an hour before she gave up on the whole thing. She was cold and tired but had come such a long way, the bus route doing a detour around so many villages and towns, but she didn’t want to give up just yet. But the time passing and the ever lowering temperature was making her think what a bad idea the whole plan had been.

       
She suddenly realised she was sat on a box in a shed belonging to the parents of the children she’d killed, as though she’d been transported there in her sleep. In a matter of moments the whole thing seemed utterly ridiculous and she became angry with herself for even thinking it was a good idea.

       
She had, in a rash manner, decided to expose herself because she didn’t care anymore. It had suddenly dawned on her that Ellen and John Tailby probably didn’t want to see or speak to her. She felt despicable thinking it would be the easier option talking to Ellen rather than John when he’d lost just as much as his wife. It left her now feeling guilty and selfish and not unlike she had felt when she was ten years old. She wondered now if that was how it had all happened. That she’d done something without thinking or really being aware of the consequences.

       
Memories flitted across her vision in the darkness as though she was projecting them from her mind, but she just couldn’t grasp any of them. The string of events seemed to be jumbled and unclear; she couldn’t recall what was real and what she’d made up in her head.

       
She remembered being in a bit of a temper that day, something and nothing over a scolding from her father most probably. Ellen had stopped her in the street and asked her if she’d sit with the twins, that they’d been sick in the night and weren’t up to much. She’d been surprised at the request because she’d let their dog loose some weeks previously and he’d run off and not come back. They had been terribly angry with her at the time.

       
Doctors and nurses flashed now in her mind, so she was fairly sure she’d played this game with them. But she couldn’t remember much after that, it just all seemed a blur of faces and a mixture of dark, serious voices and whispers. Then the guilt flooded in as her mind quickly recalled putting the twins in the cupboard under the stairs, still wrapped in their eiderdowns. Tying the rope around them. They had been tiny little scraps for three year olds but she still remembered what a struggle it had been to get them in there; guilt reached her stomach, making her feel sick. She felt like she was reliving the panic of knowing she’d done something so devastating and nothing would be the same ever again.

       
Someone humming a tune brought her back to the present until she realised it was coming from herself. Something she’d always done when she was nervous or frightened and it had been accentuated after she was sent away. Throughout the trial she’d hummed; it made her feel like she was somewhere else, somewhere safe and away from strangers.

       
She stopped the noise immediately for fear of being heard and began to move her limbs, ready to clamber from the shed and walk to the bus stop to travel back to the safe house.

       
Just as she was about to turn the handle on the door she heard a noise from what she thought was the Tailby’s house. She launched herself, quite literally to the back of the shed and tried to curl up as small as possible; she held her breath as she listened intently to the noises outside. Footsteps could be heard coming down the path and to her sheer horror they stopped outside the shed door. She pulled her hood further around her face and squished her body as far back against the shed wall as she possibly could, hoping the boxes of newspapers were hiding her.

       
Then she heard the unmistakeable click of a gas lighter being flipped and she prayed he’d just stopped for a cigarette. She held her breath and waited and eventually the footsteps continued and the latch on the back gate was lifted. Once she heard the slam of the gate she allowed herself to breathe again, her heartbeat pounding in her ears.

       
She sat for a few minutes trying to calm herself down, her ridiculous idea seeming even more absurd, and so she decided to make her way to the bus stop.

       
The noise she made getting up off the floor stopped her hearing the second set of footsteps coming down the path and the opening of the shed door. It wasn’t until the torchlight hit her that she realised someone was standing in the doorway, making her yelp with fright. She immediately held her hands up as though whoever it was might be armed. She couldn’t see who it was because the light of the torch was glaring in her face; she tried to speak but nothing would come out of her mouth.

       
“I’ve been waiting for you. Come into the house,” was all she heard. It was Ellen Tailby.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

       
The tapping on the glass disorientated Harry and Jonathan to begin with. They listened as best they could over Bruce’s barking and then put it down to a branch hitting one of the windows around the back of the house; it occurred to neither of them that it might be a person. They were both so engrossed in their conversation that it wasn’t until they heard banging that they got up to investigate.

       
“Bloody reporters again, I shouldn’t wonder!”