The Girls in the Woods (2 page)
‘That’s it. Thank you for your patience, girls. You can leave now.’
Flora scurried away from the girl that she had no doubt shared a bedroom with for the last twelve years; they had possibly even shared the same bed. How sad that two such close sisters should now be so torn apart by death. Still it wasn’t his place to say anything; his job was done here. He would pack his equipment away and go back to his house so he could develop the films. He would of course keep a copy for his own records; he was getting quite a collection in his brown leather book. People were dying of all sorts of diseases, and more and more families wanted their loved ones photographed before they were buried. When he’d taken up photography as a hobby he’d never envisaged that memento mori photography would prove to be such a lucrative business move. He packed up his stuff and carried it out to the waiting horse and carriage; he lived too far away to carry his equipment around town. The grandmother walked him out to the front door, leaving her sobbing daughter alone with her dead granddaughter. The other two girls had run from the room as fast as they could once they had been dismissed; it was indeed sad to watch such grief day in day out, but it was also providing his family with a way of life they could only ever have dreamed of.
‘How long will it be before you can bring the pictures?’
‘As soon as they are ready I will personally hand deliver them; it should only take two days but it depends how busy I am tomorrow.’
‘Thank you for your time, Mr Tyson. It is very much appreciated.’
He nodded his head then turned and ran down the last few steps and climbed into the waiting carriage. As it pulled away from the side he looked up to see the two girls watching him from the upstairs window. Flora’s face was damp, no doubt with the tears she had finally been able to shed, but Mabel looked as if she was weighing him up. Embarrassed they had been caught staring, Mabel stepped back, pulling her sister with her, and he looked straight ahead, pretending he hadn’t noticed either of them.
1995
‘Beautiful, really beautiful – that’s it, hold that position.’ The camera flashed several times. ‘Gorgeous, you look stunning. So demure yet so damn sexy. I love it.’ Heath Tyson walked towards her and pushed her head to the left, just a touch. ‘That’s it, don’t move, we’re almost done. You’re going to love these pictures; I swear you’ve never looked so good.’ He snapped a few more shots then let his camera drop around his neck and clapped his hands.
‘Bravo, bravo. You have been the best model I’ve ever had. Thank you so much for your patience.’
He walked away towards his dark room, eager to develop his films and add these very special photographs to his secret album. Left lying on the chaise longue, she didn’t move to get up and change out of the long, cool, linen nightgown he’d dressed her in. She would stay there until he came and lifted her onto the makeshift trolley he used to push her to and from the freezer in his garage. When he was happy with his photographs he would undress her and put her back inside the cold blackness of the large freezer he’d bought when the village butcher had been closing down. Slamming the metal door, he would lock her in until he had no further use for her or until her body started to decompose too much, whichever came first. Probably the decomposition because he didn’t think he would ever get tired of staring at her. There was something so beautiful about death that was never present in the living. Her hands had already begun to turn black despite the freezing temperatures. He wondered why it was they did that – in his collection of Victorian mourning photographs you could always tell the deceased family member by the discoloration of their hands.
It had fascinated him the first time he’d seen a photograph of three sisters, all no older than fifteen – he had been eight years old when he found that photograph album. Heath had been sent to bed but he could hear his father whispering on the phone; he knew he shouldn’t be listening in because he shouldn’t be out of bed, but he couldn’t sleep. He loved his granddad but today’s visit had been playing heavily on his mind; his normally fun-filled granddad had been lying in a bed in the front room of his terraced house in the busy town centre street. The smell had been pretty bad; he didn’t know what it was but as soon as he’d walked in he’d had to screw his nose up and try not to breathe through it. His mother, who refused to come into the house because she was ‘not going to be there when he croaked’, was back at home and for once he wished his father had left him at home with her. His older brother didn’t care; he had gone straight into the converted front room which was now a bedroom and stood by the frail old man who was asleep. Heath watched the shallow rise and fall of his chest underneath the covers; the rattling sound of the breaths he was struggling to take would stay with him for ever. They could hear their father in the kitchen banging around; he turned away for a split second and when he turned back his brother, who had just celebrated his eleventh birthday, was stroking the old man’s hair. Heath shuddered; this wasn’t the happy, funny man he remembered and he wanted it all to stop. Their dad came in, his tear-stained face a mask of grief.
‘Right you two, go in the kitchen and get yourselves something to eat. I need to sort your granddad out.’
His brother leant down and kissed the man’s forehead and Heath tried to force himself to move towards him to do the same but he couldn’t. His legs wouldn’t move. As his brother walked past he whispered in his ear ‘
Scaredy cat
’. His dad came over and placed his hands on his shoulders, then pushed Heath out of the room and shut the door behind him. Finally finding his feet, he went into the kitchen where his brother was sitting eating a packet of crisps.
‘He’s going to pop his clogs any minute.’
‘How do you know that?’
‘I just do. You wait and see.’
Sometimes he hated how his brother was such a know-it-all. It made him feel stupid and like a big baby. He got himself a packet of crisps out of the cupboard and they both sat on the high stools near the breakfast bar waiting for their dad to come back in. After what seemed like forever he finally did; his eyes were red and he’d been crying. Heath had never seen his dad cry. He walked over and hugged them close to him.
‘Your granddad’s gone to heaven now; you can both go in and say goodbye.’
This time it was Heath who wanted to go in first – he desperately wanted to see what you looked like when you were dead – and it was his brother who lingered behind. He jumped off his stool and went to the room where the door was ajar. The first thing he noticed was how peaceful it was now that horrible sound his granddad had been making had stopped. He stepped inside. The sheets were no longer moving and he walked closer to look at the man on the bed. The second thing he noticed was how different he looked; his skin looked yellow but it was no longer scrunched up and wrinkled in pain. It was smooth, his mouth was open and his false teeth had slipped down. He’d expected his eyes to be closed but they were open slightly, staring straight ahead. Heath marvelled at how wonderful his granddad looked now he was dead – how much younger. It was amazing. Did everyone who died look like this? His foot kicked something soft and he looked down to see one of the pillows from the bed there. It puzzled him how it had got there; it wasn’t there before when they’d been in the room and his granddad hadn’t moved at all. His dad must have taken it from under the old man’s head but he didn’t understand why. He picked it up and felt a warm patch in the middle; placing it on the chair next to the bed he thought nothing of it. It wasn’t until some years later when he replayed that last scene in his head that he realised that the pillow was warm in the middle because that was where his granddad’s last breaths had gone. He had known all along that the grief his dad had shown had been filled with guilt – but he hadn’t known why until his dad’s own dying confession had confirmed the sneaking suspicion he’d always held. His dad had been the one to end his granddad’s life that morning all those years ago; he could have gone to prison but he’d decided it was worth the risk. The only regret that Heath had was that he’d had no means to photograph how wonderful his granddad looked, more wonderful than he ever did when he was alive. It was as if his true inner beauty had been revealed and it was something Heath never forgot; in fact he thought about it an awful lot. When most kids his age had been playing with action men or cap guns, he had spent all his time locked in his bedroom wondering how he could see more dead people.
There was a certain beauty in death which could not be achieved at any cost in life, even with the amount of plastic surgeons and cosmetic surgery available. When he was ten years old he knew that he wanted to be a photographer but he did have a backup plan. He would probably one day become a funeral director if his photography didn’t take off but his one passion in life was photography. What he really wanted to do was photograph the dead. He didn’t really want to have to deal with the grieving families; he just wanted to photograph their loved ones like his great, great grandfather had back in the Victorian days. It had been quite normal back then, but if you told anyone now that you liked photographing the dead they’d lock you up and throw away the key. There were some things you didn’t admit to and getting your rocks off over corpses was almost certainly one. He spent hours locked in his room studying the photos in the album they’d found when clearing their granddad’s house out. Luckily for him, he’d been on his own in the bedroom when he found the dusty album at the back of the wardrobe, wrapped in faded yellow newspapers. His brother had gone to the tip with his dad and a car boot full of their granddad’s belongings. At first he hadn’t realised just what it was he was looking at but he knew there was something strange about the pictures in the album. It had
Memento Mori
in gold letters engraved into the soft brown leather cover. He’d had no idea what that meant, but would try and find out. There was no one in the pictures that he knew and they looked as if they were very old. Not wanting his dad to throw it out on his next visit to the local tip, Heath ran downstairs and stuffed it into his backpack. It was his secret, and he wouldn’t tell anyone about it – not even his brother. Well, not unless he was going to help him somehow find dead people to take pictures of. That photograph album had started this obsession with death, be it in male or female form – although he much preferred females; they were so much more elegant and prettier than men. His warped obsession with death had now resulted in the dead girl in front of him.
She was his first and quite possibly his last; it was too risky. He’d briefly considered the implications before it all happened but he hadn’t realised just how seriously a missing teenager would be taken. He thought they’d assume she’d run away and that would be that – the reality had been far different. The police had been crawling all over the village, surrounding fields and woods looking for the missing girl who had been on her way to visit her friend who lived at the opposite side of the village. It had scared him, seeing the crowds of villagers that had gathered with their dogs and the many police officers who’d been drafted in to search for her. He’d known her since he had moved back to the village he’d lived in as a child and set up his business, taking her first photographs when she had been seven. Then every year since until she was seventeen. Sharon Sale had come to him alone this time, asking him to take some photos she could send off to a modelling agency, only he wasn’t to tell her parents because they would freak. She had told him she would pay him but he had shook his head, telling her that he would do it for her if she would do a big favour for him and she’d agreed. Perhaps if she’d known what it was he’d wanted she would have run away as fast as she could and never come back. He knew her by her name, just like he knew all the local children that the parents brought to him for their portraits to be taken.
It had been two weeks now and he deemed it safe enough to take her to the woods behind the cottage and bury her. He had already dug a deep grave in the early hours this morning; it had taken him hours but it had been worth it because the woods had been searched three times now, by police, the villagers (including himself) and then searched again with sniffer dogs. Yesterday they had publicly declared that they thought the girl had left the area. He wished he could keep her for ever but if they did come looking, how would he explain to them that he had a dead girl in the freezer in his garage? It was far too risky; he was a patient man and was happy enough to wait until the fuss died down, even if took a couple of years, before he tried it again. At least now he had started his own collection of photographs of the dead, and it was a work in progress – the best works of art weren’t achieved in a day. He would wait until the opportunity arose and it was the right time to do it all over again. He had no doubt that soon enough another girl with big ambitions of becoming a model would turn up at his doorstep and when they did he would be ready.
Annie Ashworth let out a sigh and turned on her side. The heat from the late afternoon sun was warming her skin and even though she’d tried her best to keep out of the direct sunlight she still had a warm, golden glow. Her husband, Will, had a deep, bronze tan, his normally clean-shaven chin was covered in dark stubble and his dark blond hair had lightened considerably with the sun. He looked the picture of complete health and happiness but she knew different. He was lying on his side with his back to her and her eyes fell on the angry, red scar which ran across his right kidney. It would take a long time for it to fade into oblivion and when it did she hoped the memories would go with it. She was so lucky he was still alive, that they both were.
She shivered at the thought of that man, Henry Smith, and his accomplice, Megan. What she would have given to have watched their bodies being brought up from the cellar of Beckett House in black body bags and wheeled out to the waiting private ambulances. But she’d had to go with Will; he had been so badly injured and she had needed to be by his side. Jake, her best friend and colleague, had stayed along with Cathy and Kav, their inspector and sergeant when they were both stationed back in Barrow, to watch on their behalf. They had brought Megan up first because her body had been the most straightforward to bag up. She’d fallen down the cellar steps from top to bottom at Beckett House and instantly broken her neck. Henry, though, had got what he deserved. That strange man/monster thing had sliced his throat open with its long sharp claws but not before Annie had watched the terror on Henry’s face as he had stuck his knife into its strange, grey body. Jake had told her when he came to see her in the hospital that even Matt the pathologist had been horrified to see the mess of blood and limbs. No one had ever seen anything like the strange creature that lived in the drains below Beckett House, and it had been badly injured by Henry because there had been a trail of blood which led to the huge drain in the corner of the cellar – but then it had disappeared. Search teams had been brought in with special infra red and thermal imaging cameras and apart from a trail of blood that stopped suddenly in the sewers there had been no trace of it. Annie suspected that it had gone deep underground to another lair and either died or gone into hibernation. She hoped for Martha Beckett’s sake that it had curled up and died. The last time she had spoken with the elderly woman she had arranged to have the drain filled in with concrete and the cellar door permanently sealed shut. She had told Annie about the long letter she had written detailing the history of the house and everything that had happened there. She had given it to her solicitor with strict instructions that when the day came that someone was eager enough to buy Beckett House they would be given a copy of the letter so they were fully aware of the circumstances. It had made Martha feel much better but Annie knew that the house would be snapped up by some property developer who wouldn’t be remotely interested in the letter or the history of Beckett House. They would turn it into luxury apartments and move on to the next project. Annie just hoped that history wouldn’t repeat itself and no one with small children moved in there. All of this had been kept hush, hush and out of the media for the sake of Martha who had kept the terrible secret of the thing hidden for years. One day they could make a film about what happened at Beckett House; it was that horrific no one would ever believe it was all true.
