The Mercer's House (Northern Gothic Book 1) (18 page)

‘What, like invent imaginary phone calls, you mean?’

He said nothing, but looked at her.

‘What do you want?’ she said. ‘I’m as sure as I can be that I got a voicemail from someone claiming to be Helen. I don’t know why there’s no call log.’

‘As sure as you can be?’ he said. ‘And what about the emails? They’ve disappeared too.’

‘You saw the second one yourself.’

He looked down at his hands.

‘You know, people do sometimes send emails to themselves,’ he said reluctantly.

‘But why would I do that?’ said Zanna. She was starting to get a sinking feeling. Was that what this was about? Did Garrett think she was imagining all this, or doing it herself?

‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘It’s just—well, you remember what we were saying the other day about your antidepressants, and about coming off them too quickly.’

‘This has nothing to do with my antidepressants,’ she said.

‘Are you sure?’ he said. ‘When did you last take one?’

Now he had her. She chewed her lip.

‘I can’t remember,’ she said. ‘But it wasn’t long ago,’ she went on hurriedly as she saw his look. ‘Only a few days.’

‘But you said you were supposed to take one every two days. Don’t you think you should take one today?’

‘I can’t,’ she admitted. ‘I don’t know where they are. I think I might have left them at home.’

The look of dismay was back on his face.

‘Zanna,’ he said reproachfully.

‘But I’ve been fine,’ she said. ‘Really, I have.’

‘Are you sure about that?’

‘Yes!’ she said.

He was silent for a minute, looking at his hands again.

‘You would tell me if you thought you were having hallucinations, wouldn’t you?’ he said at last.

‘I’m not having hallucinations!’ she exclaimed. ‘That bloody seagull wasn’t a hallucination, was it? You saw it yourself. It was real enough.’

‘I know,’ he said. ‘But why would anybody do that?’

‘I have no idea,’ she said.

Again he said nothing, and Zanna felt a dawning realization.

‘You think I did it, don’t you?’ she said in amazement. ‘You think I picked that horrible thing up off the beach and put it on my own bed.’

‘No-o,’ he said unconvincingly. ‘I mean, I know you wouldn’t do it deliberately.’

‘Well, I could hardly do it accidentally, could I?’ she said. She stood up and moved away from him. ‘I can’t believe you think I’d do something like that.’

‘But Zanna, what if you don’t know you’re doing it?’ He looked genuinely distressed. ‘You said you heard voices, and you’re getting these weird messages that keep disappearing. What if you’re having blackouts and doing stuff and you don’t know it?’

‘But I’m not,’ she said desperately. ‘I’m fine, really I am. I don’t know what’s going on, and it’s starting to frighten me, but don’t say it’s all in my mind, because it isn’t, I know it isn’t. Look at me, Garrett.’ He was not looking at her, but she forced him to meet her eye. ‘You don’t really believe it, do you?’

He stood up and took her hands gently.

‘Honestly, I don’t know,’ he said at last. ‘All I know is that you’ve been acting a bit strangely since I got here.’

‘Strangely?’

‘Well, you’ve been kind of withdrawn. Not all the time, but sometimes you have these spells where you seem a bit distant and apathetic. And then these things happen—like now, where you thought you heard voices and said someone was chasing you on the beach, even though it was far too dark to see anything. That sounds a bit—well—a bit psychotic, to be honest.’

‘I am
not
psychotic,’ she said. ‘I had depression. That’s all it was. I went through a bad time with Adam, and I needed a bit of help for a while, but I didn’t go mad, and I’m much better now anyway. I’ve never had hallucinations or delusions, or anything like that.’

This was not strictly true, but she didn’t think it was necessary to mention the strange visions her first course of medication had given her, because they’d been quickly cured by a change of drug.

‘But Helen did, didn’t she?’ said Garrett.

‘What?’ said Zanna.

‘She heard voices and saw things that weren’t there.’

Zanna stared at him suspiciously, then pulled her hands away.

‘I don’t remember telling you about Helen,’ she said.

‘You didn’t,’ he said. ‘I did a bit of digging before I came up here. She was in an institution for a few years, wasn’t she?’

‘How did you find that out? I thought medical records were supposed to be private. Oh, but of course, you’re a journalist,’ she said, as he gave her a pitying look. ‘And they say the press has been cleaned up.’

‘She was diagnosed with schizophrenia when she was in her late teens,’ said Garrett, ignoring the last remark. ‘They kept the symptoms under control for a while with drugs, but then she stopped taking them and had to be sectioned, because she was having paranoid delusions and kept accusing her parents and her brother of beating her. I assume that wasn’t true.’

‘Of course it wasn’t true,’ said Zanna. ‘My dad never beat anyone, and I’m pretty sure my grandparents didn’t either. Helen wasn’t rational, and she kept harming herself, so she went into hospital for a while. Then she got better and they let her out, but she never forgave her family for locking her up, so she went away and cut off all contact, and they never saw her again or found out where she’d gone. As it turns out, she had a baby by some unknown man, then came up here and married Alexander Devereux.’

‘I see,’ said Garrett. ‘She got better, you say. But these things run in families, don’t they?’

‘Not exactly,’ she said. ‘You don’t just inherit it from your aunt, which is what I assume you’re getting at. That’s it, isn’t it? You think I’ve got some kind of psychotic illness that causes me to run away from imaginary attackers and dump dead birds all over the place. Don’t be ridiculous, Garrett. I’m perfectly sane.’

‘Well when you put it like that, it does sound ridiculous,’ he said. ‘But I’m worried about these tablets of yours. Are you sure you left them at home?’

‘I thought I’d packed them in my washbag, but I couldn’t find them yesterday when I looked,’ she said.

‘I’m not surprised. This place is a tip.’ He began opening drawers and searching in the pockets of her suitcase. ‘Nothing here. What about the bathroom?’

‘I’ve already looked,’ she said, but he had disappeared. He emerged from the bathroom two minutes later holding a familiar-looking blister pack, which he waggled at her.

‘Where did you find it?’ she said in surprise. ‘I looked everywhere.’

‘Behind the pedestal of the washbasin,’ he said. ‘Now, if you want me to stop accusing you of being mental you’d better take one.’

She did as he said without too much reluctance, since his words had affected her more deeply than she was willing to admit, and she was starting to feel tears stinging at her eyes, although she was determined not to cry.

‘Happy now?’ she said.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Listen, I didn’t mean to upset you, but the last few days have been a bit weird to say the least, and I don’t know what’s going on either, but if it’s not you and it’s not me—which it isn’t, just in case you were still wondering—then it must be someone else doing these things.’

‘Well, yes. Obviously.’

‘But aren’t you curious as to who? And why?’

‘I suppose so,’ she said. Now they were getting onto dangerous ground.

He shook his head at her mutinous expression.

‘I know you don’t want to say it, but it has to be said. You know who’s doing it as well as I do,’ he said. ‘It’s got to be the Devereuxes. One of them, at least, is playing nasty tricks on you, and it doesn’t take too much brainpower to figure out which one.’ He gestured towards the door. ‘Your chum who was here just now. Unless his dad’s joined the twenty-first century long enough to work out how to operate a mobile phone.’

No, Zanna wanted to say. Not Will. Please not Will. But she remained silent, for fear of admitting too much and making things worse.

‘Why does it have to be one of the Devereuxes?’ she said at last. ‘Why would they do something like that?’

‘Because, sweetheart, presumably there’s something they don’t want you to find out,’ he said.

She stared at him as this sank in.

‘You mean they know where Helen went?’ she said.

‘Where she went—or what happened to her,’ he said significantly.

‘Are you still talking about that?’ she said. ‘Do you seriously think it’s true? People don’t just go around killing each other.’

‘Of course they do. Don’t you read the newspapers? People do it all the time. And they get away with it for years. Sometimes they never get caught at all. Do you know how many people disappear every year? Hundreds, if not thousands. And how many of them do you think are ever found again?’

‘Most of them?’

‘Yes, most of them. Or many, anyway. But some never turn up. What happened to them, do you think? Chances are they’ve been brained with a shovel by a loving husband or wife and then buried somewhere they’ll never be found.’

‘But you’ve met Alexander,’ said Zanna. ‘He wouldn’t hurt a fly. I can’t believe he’d kill his own wife and son.’

‘Rowan wasn’t his son, though, was he? He was someone else’s. That makes all the difference. A lot of men don’t like stepkids—they don’t like the reminder that someone else had a go at their wife first. And don’t wrinkle your nose like that. It’s true.’

Zanna put her bandaged hands over her face. She didn’t want to hear it, but she couldn’t help listening in a sort of horrified fascination.

‘I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but nobody seems particularly interested in finding them,’ said Garrett. ‘That’s presumably because they know perfectly well where they are.’

‘But what about Will?’ Zanna couldn’t help asking. ‘Not that I believe a word of it, but even if I did, you can’t tell me he knows anything about it. He was seven when they went missing.’

‘And what if he saw what happened but kept quiet? Didn’t you say he hated Rowan? Kids can be very secretive when they like. I wouldn’t be surprised if he was glad they were dead. Think about it: his mum and dad get divorced and his dad immediately replaces his mum with a younger model, who brings a baby with her that gets all the attention. Wouldn’t you be jealous?’

‘I don’t know,’ whispered Zanna. Her heart had begun to beat fast as she remembered something. Will had said he was at his mother’s when Helen and Rowan went away, but she was almost sure Alexander had said he was at the Mercer’s House at the time. Yes, she remembered it clearly now. It had been the summer holidays, and Will had been here in Elsbury, according to his father. Why, then, had Will claimed to have been somewhere else? Which one of them was right? And was the other one mistaken or lying?

‘I think he knows what happened,’ said Garrett. ‘He was old enough at the time to be aware of something like that. Or maybe he didn’t realize until he was older. Either way, I think he’s covering up for his dad. They’d probably been congratulating themselves all these years about having got away with it when you came along and threw a spanner in the works. You must have scared the life out of them, so they’ve been trying to get rid of you by making you think you’re going mad.’

Zanna cringed and shook her head, as if trying to shake his words away. All this was so unlike everything she had seen of Alexander and Will. And yet
someone
had been responsible for the messages and the dead seagull, and her scare on the beach earlier. At that she had a sudden memory of bumping into Will in the dark as she ran in mindless fear up the path to the town. He had come to look for her, he said, and had even thought to fetch a torch. Surely he didn’t want to harm her?

‘It’s not true,’ was all she could say.

‘Does Will know about your breakdown?’ said Garrett.

‘No,’ she replied, then remembered that he did.

‘You don’t seem sure.’

‘All right, I happened to mention it at lunch today in passing, but for all they know I was just joking.’

‘Still,’ said Garrett.

Suddenly it was all too much. The thing on the bed, and the phone call, and her panic on the beach, and those few charged minutes with Will afterwards, and now Garrett’s awful, dreadful accusations, all crowded, clamouring, into her mind at once, and she wanted to shut herself away from everything, hide somewhere calm and quiet until the noise in her head died down and she could think clearly. She sank into the chair and curled up into a ball, pulling her feet up and hiding her head in her arms, and now the tears came. It had been a mistake to come here in the first place. All she’d wanted to do was to test her strength a little, strike out on her own, try and fulfil the promise she’d made to her father to find Helen. But it had all gone wrong. She’d fallen stupidly for a man who couldn’t possibly do her any good, and someone—perhaps that same man—was trying to do her harm or drive her mad, or who knew what? Helen and Rowan would never be found. That much seemed certain. Why had she come here at all? It was a wasted effort and might even have put her recovery back months, just when she’d thought she was beginning to emerge from the tunnel and could begin looking to the future.

‘Hey,’ said Garrett, and she looked up to find him hunkered down next to her chair, looking at her with concern. ‘There’s no need for that. I didn’t mean to make you cry.’

‘It’s all right,’ she said, wiping her eyes with her fingers. ‘It’s just been a long day, that’s all.’

‘Here,’ he said, and handed her a tissue. She pulled herself up and blew her nose. ‘Look, it’s late and you need your beauty sleep. We’ve got a long drive tomorrow, and it’ll all look better in the morning. We’ll get away from this place and you can go home and have a long, hot bath and forget everything. By Monday it’ll be like it never happened.’

‘I wish I could believe that,’ she said. ‘I don’t know what to think, now.’

‘Don’t think anything. Try and get some sleep.’

‘I don’t know if I can.’

‘I could stay, if you think it might help. I won’t try it on, I promise.’

‘No thanks, I’ll be all right,’ she said, and stood up.

‘You know I care about you, don’t you?’ he said.