The Drowning Ground (25 page)

‘That's good stuff,' I said. ‘So Rebecca was the one who told. She must have been fairly young.'

‘Fifteen or sixteen,' Graves said.

‘Do we know who this fellow was?' I said, trying to remember. ‘It was a local, I think. A builder or something.'

‘Yes, we got a name for him,' said Graves, pleased. ‘A fella called Brad Hooper. He's on a job over in Woodstock. Hurst gave him a good kicking when he found out about the affair, like you said. Some of the locals are still talking about it even now. Happened in a pub in a nearby village. Hooper had to be taken to hospital.'

‘Yes, I remember,' I said. ‘Hurst got the pool done up for Sarah after they were married, and had some other things fixed, and Hooper was in the house for a while working. That's how they met. He was a stone mason back then. Big old thing, it was. The pool, I mean. Hurst let the house go after his first wife passed away. Not sure how serious it all was, though. More of a fling.'

I stared out of the car window. ‘All right. Leave Irwin and Douglas in the village. Hooper can be quite tricky, so push him if you have to. It won't take you long to get to Woodstock and then as soon as you've talked to him call me back.'

34

The court order from Cheltenham Magistrates' Court came through just after 5.00. I picked it up from the station and drove straight to Dr Lang's house. He lived in one of the many smaller villages tucked away deep in the Cotswold hills. His cottage was set off from the road at the back of a long straight front garden, and his was the last house before the road curved and dipped farther into the snow-covered fields. I left my car in the driveway, behind a very old Volvo estate, and rang the bell.

The door opened after what seemed like ages, and a big brown dog appeared from nowhere and bounded outside. It barked and ran around in circles and then, losing interest, it raced off and started furiously digging a hole in the snow.

‘Bloody dog,' Dr Lang said without much enthusiasm. He looked over my shoulder at the dog with a kind of resigned despair, while the dog looked quizzically at him and then went back to digging with renewed vigour.

‘Jeeeesus,' Dr Lang said, drawing the word out. ‘You'd think it was doing it on purpose.'

Lang was in his mid-fifties, shabby and overweight. He was wearing an old grey cardigan and faded jeans. But, while his grey hair was thinning, there was a hard evenness of features beneath the flesh. He was holding a pair of smeared black spectacles in his right hand, and he looked ever so slightly dazed and sleepy, as if I had just woken him from a nap.

Lang ushered me inside and shut the door, and I followed him past the kitchen and into his study, which was set away in a far corner of the house and looked out on to a small wild patch of garden at the side.

‘Don't mind all those books. Take a seat,' he said and yawned.

I weaved my way through the piles of books on the floor, removed a few magazines from a chair and sat down, while Lang sat behind his desk.

I showed him the court order. He read it carefully and handed it back.

‘I thought Rebecca was in London.'

I explained.

‘So you think it's her. You think she's been … dead all these years?' he said after I had finished.

‘No,' I said. ‘Not for sure. All we think is that it might be her. There's been no sign of her for some time. That's all we know for now. We're just trying to find out where she might be or get an idea of what she's like. We need to talk to her or at least find her, and we need to know more about her.'

Lang still looked shocked. He swivelled his chair around and stared out of the window. I could hear the dog scratching and pawing at the front door. Lang ignored it. Still staring outside, he said softly, ‘You'll have to forgive me. But I did know her for quite a while, if it is her you've found out there. And it was someone at her school, then, who gave you this address?'

‘Yes,' I said. ‘You went to see Rebecca at the school, they tell me. Hurst's orders.'

Lang nodded and placed his glasses neatly near a picture frame on the desk. He rubbed his eyes.

‘Yes. But I'd started to see her before she was sent to school. Frank asked me to continue after she started there.'

‘But what happened?'

‘She'd had a bit of a scare.' Lang smiled grimly. ‘That's how Frank described it. A bit of a scare,' he repeated. ‘That was classic Frank, by the way.'

‘So you knew him? You two were friends?'

Lang paused while he considered the question. ‘Not really. We got on well enough, I suppose, and we got to know each other pretty well later. We used to play county cricket together back in the day, and we had a good run of it. But we hadn't seen each other for years, and to be honest when he did call it took me a while to remember who he was. He needed some help with Rebecca.'

‘What kind of help?'

‘I'm a psychologist. Though back then I didn't really advertise it all that much. Kind of viewed with suspicion round here, or was then. Just told everyone I was a medical consultant. Things haven't really picked up all that much.' Lang gestured sheepishly at his office. ‘He wanted me to go over straightaway. So off I went to that big house in Quinton. First time I'd ever been there. He said she'd been playing up a bit. He wouldn't say much else.'

‘Something was wrong with her?'

Lang nodded. ‘Nothing major. But she needed help. When I got there, Frank told me that Rebecca had been having trouble sleeping at night. She'd been having bad dreams. And when she woke up she couldn't remember what they were about. She was keeping them both up at night. Him and Sarah. His new wife.'

‘And how old would she have been then? Just a girl, wasn't she?'

‘Fourteen, I think. Maybe fifteen.'

‘They'd always been pretty close,' I said. ‘That's what I heard. He seems to have spoilt her a bit.'

‘Oh, he did. Especially after her mother died. Rebecca was very young when she died. Cancer.'

‘How old?'

‘Around five.'

‘And how did she get on with her new stepmother? Did she take to her when he remarried?'

‘They got on very well. But she could act out when she felt like it. But that wasn't the problem. It was something else, and actually it was Nancy, the housekeeper, who told me what it was.'

‘Nancy told you?' I said.

‘Yes. Well, she pointed me in the right direction anyway. Soon after I started to see Rebecca … oh, I don't know, around six months later … Nancy spotted Rebecca's bike in the village, out on the green. Rebecca hadn't really been making all that much progress, to be perfectly honest. She was still having these bad dreams and she was very unwilling to talk to me about them. But when Nancy went to the pond she saw Rebecca. Somehow she'd managed to get through the fence they'd put round it. She was just staring at the pond. And that's when Frank told me all about it. About Rebecca's accident. He thought it was irrelevant. He thought she'd put it behind her.'

‘What exactly happened?'

‘She very nearly drowned,' Lang said. ‘One day, just after school broke up for Christmas, it started snowing. And it was even colder then than it is now. So three of them – her and her two friends – had the great idea of going ice skating on the village pond in Quinton, near that awful pub they have over there. They were really young – only twelve or thirteen, I think, so I suppose they didn't know any better. It was just a silly game. They waited till dark, and sneaked out when their parents were asleep. They met on the village green.

‘Afterwards, she said she had told them not to. That she had changed her mind. That's why she didn't go out too far – it looked dangerous. But they just kept on daring her, and as soon as she stepped on the ice she felt it shift beneath her feet. Then the whole thing just cracked. The boys drowned. She went in too.'

‘They were brothers, weren't they?' I said.

‘Yes,' Lang said. ‘She said she could see them both down there … You know, struggling. She wouldn't say anything else about it, though.'

My eyes strayed momentarily outside. It was already getting dark and the drive back to the station was going to be a long one in the snow.

‘So what you're saying is that the memory had come back to … to haunt her?' I said.

Lang grimaced at the expression. ‘Well, I suppose you could say that. It'll do for now anyway. But what really happened was that the trauma had finally begun to manifest itself. The experience had been lying dormant, because when the traumatic event occurred she had been too young to fully take on board what she'd seen out there.'

‘So the nightmares were all part of it?'

‘Yes. And when she woke up she could never really remember what the dreams were about.'

Someone had let the dog in. From outside the study door the dog let out a low whimper. ‘Bloody dog,' Lang said again with a deep sigh.

‘She was grieving too, I suppose,' I said. ‘They were her best friends after all.'

Lang nodded. ‘And so I treated her.'

‘At her home?'

‘Yes, and then later at the school.'

‘But it didn't seem to be working,' I said. ‘It seems like she was still a handful at school. Got expelled in the end. Stole some money.'

‘Yes, and I never saw her again. She refused to see me, and Frank blamed me. It had been my idea to send her to the school. Away from the village.'

‘She kept a diary,' I said. ‘Spent a lot of time writing in it; that's what one of her friends told me. We didn't find it. Any idea where it could be?'

‘That was my idea,' Lang said.

‘She seemed quite attached to it.'

Lang shrugged. The phone rang from deep inside the house, and a female voice answered it. Lang looked furtively at his watch.

‘This won't take much longer,' I said. ‘But do you know of anyone? Someone she might have gone to meet? Or might have planned to run away with to London? A boyfriend or a man in the village? She was a very pretty girl, that's what I'm hearing. We know she wanted to leave home. She'd talked about it openly.'

‘I imagine she was going to go alone. But she never mentioned it to me. And there were no boyfriends, or at least none that she ever told me about. It was Frank who phoned and told me she'd finally gone. Wanted to know if I had some idea of her whereabouts, but I hadn't the faintest. He told me that she'd packed all her stuff and taken off.'

‘And I don't suppose you know why she wanted to go? I mean, the pond and how it affected her,' I said as tactfully as I could manage, ‘well … it's helpful to a degree. It gives me a sense of who she was. But I'm really after something much more concrete than that. After all, she must have confided in you. Did you ever get the impression that there might have been something else? Something other than her accident by the pond that might have been giving her these nightmares? Were there any signs that she had been in contact with an older man when she was younger? That an older man had befriended her? That someone perhaps had got to … got to her sexually at an early age?'

‘Oh, no,' Lang said quickly. ‘I didn't see anything like that. There was nothing like that at all. I would have known,' Lang said.

‘All right,' I said. ‘And nothing. Nothing like that happening at home?'

‘Oh, no, definitely not,' Lang said. ‘And Frank was absolutely devastated when she left.'

35

Graves sat gazing at the chubby, sullen-looking man standing beneath the scaffolding. Brad Hooper had been described to him by the owner of the building company in less than glowing terms on the telephone. He had a puffy face and beady eyes. There was a sly watchfulness to him. A drinker's face, Graves thought. Hooper hawked and spat loudly into the bushes. He must have let himself go since his affair with Sarah Hurst, Graves thought, because Sarah Hurst had been a looker. Hooper was out of shape and seemed incredibly bored. Graves stepped out of the car and stared across the tree-lined road. Apart from the sounds of the workmen the street was very quiet. Hooper wiped his hands on his shirt and looked at Graves as he crossed the road. He did not seem nervous or afraid.

‘I suppose you've been expecting me,' Graves said.

Hooper stared at him boldly. ‘Yes,' he said. ‘I heard someone was looking for me.'

‘Anywhere we can talk?'

‘We can talk right here if you like,' Hooper said, motioning to the low wall that surrounded the property. ‘If you go any further in, you'll have to wear a silly hat just like this one and we ain't got any spare.'

Hooper paused and stared upwards at the wooden walkways at the top. ‘It's about Frank Hurst, isn't it?' he said.

‘So you know what happened?'

‘I heard.' Hooper shrugged. ‘Stabbed, I think. Someone said he'd been stabbed.'

‘Actually, someone drove a pitchfork into his throat,' Graves said. ‘While he was working in one of his fields. Where were you Monday afternoon?'

‘Why?'

‘Monday afternoon,' Graves said. ‘Where were you?'

‘What time?'

‘From 4.00 until late.'

‘I was here. We all finished up here at around 5.00 and then I went home. One of the boys dropped me off.'

‘And after that?'

‘I stayed at home.'

‘You married, Brad?' Graves asked.

He grinned. ‘No,' he said. ‘I'm not married.'

‘Shacked up with anyone?'

‘No.'

‘So after 6.00 you've got no one who can say where you were. Is that what you're saying?'

‘I think I might have gone to the pub. What day did you say it was again?'

‘Monday.'

‘I can't remember. Though I probably went to the pub.'

‘When's the last time you saw him?' Graves said.