The Secret by the Lake (28 page)

I was joined to Caroline and Caroline was dead.

I tried to scream, but I could not scream. I tried to run away, but I could not run. I was paralysed, turned to stone, and I was panicking, subsumed by panic like a mouse caught by its tail in a trap, like a moth in an upturned jar. I was helpless, melded to the dead murderess with her cold, dead eyes, her black nails, the awful soft rottenness of her.

Caroline held a finger to her lips. ‘Shhh,’ she said. ‘Watch the children.’

The girls were oblivious; they stood clapping, water running down their bodies and darkening the dry paving beneath their bare feet. The blue mosaic tiles that lined the swimming pool sparkled bright in the sunlight and there was the usual jumble of coloured towels heaped at the end of the sunbeds, the orange bottle of Ambre Solaire oil tipped on its side; the red airbed bobbing on the water. Everything was as it should be. Everything was exactly as it always was, except that Caroline was there too.

I looked at her again and I saw that she had no eyes, that there were dark holes in her skull where her eyes should have been; her lips were dust, blown away by her breath, and her teeth were loose, falling from her mouth and bouncing on the paving like tiny white pearls, like beads from a broken necklace.

‘Why are you here?’ I asked her.

‘Because of Viviane.’ Caroline tightened her cold fingers over mine and her hair drifted away on the breeze like dandelion seeds. The skin was falling like ashes from her body; bone, glossy as paint, was exposed in her wrist, at her shoulder; the muscle of her heart was dry beneath the cage of her ribs. ‘They’re watching. They never went away.’

I woke in a cold sweat, a stillborn scream in my throat.

There was no chance of sleep after that. I turned on the light and tried to read but the nightmare was still too fresh in my mind. I slipped out of bed and pulled out the satchel from under it. I took out the matchbox, and the pendant. The pendant sat in the palm of my hand, the ruby dark red, like blood.

I wanted rid of the thing that Caroline, the murderess, had stolen. It was like a bad omen, a cursed talisman; she was the last person to have touched it before me and it was my secret under my bed. I didn’t want it anywhere near me.

I decided I would throw it into the lake. I would drown it just as Caroline had drowned Mrs Aldridge. It would sink through that green water, down to the darkness at the bottom, and it would lie there, in the silt, with the silvery trout weaving above it, the light shining dimly in the deep. It would be one more secret, and when I was gone, even that secret would be forgotten.

VIVIANE DRESSED HERSELF
and came down for breakfast on time the next morning. She ate her porridge and drank her milk politely and neatly. She sat very still, with the heels of her shoes hooked over the wooden bar between the two front legs of her chair. I brushed her hair for her, and fastened it with a grip to keep the fringe out of her eyes.

‘How are you feeling, sweetheart?’ Julia asked.

‘All right.’

‘Are you nervous about the concert?’

She shook her head.

‘You’re going to be fine,’ her mother promised. ‘You’re going to be the best of them all.’

Later, after Viviane had left for school, I went back to work alone on the wallpaper. I found more writing beneath the window – neat, unhurried letters decorated with tiny drawings of birds and flowers and floating musical notes.

‘Bye bye, blackbird,’ I whispered and I remembered how I knew that song. My mother used to sing it to me as we sat together in the bomb shelter in the back yard of the house in Sheffield, two inches of water on the ground and the candlelight flickering. It must have been cold and uncomfortable, frightening even, but I only remembered my mother’s voice, and the song, the feeling of being safe and warm and loved, in her arms.

I blew my hair off my face, sat back on my heels and considered Caroline’s transcription of the song lyrics. The words were so different, so gently written, in comparison to the hatred that had been scratched into the adjoining walls. I chipped away at another piece of paper and I found a drawing of a heart, a heart enclosed by two clasped hands. Inside the heart were two names:
Caroline and Robert.
Beneath was written, in very tiny letters:
Mrs Caroline Aldridge.

‘Oh Caroline,’ I breathed. I leaned back against the wall.

And suddenly everything made complete sense; in fact, it all seemed quite simple to me. Caroline wasn’t mad or evil or out of control; she was simply a teenager in love.

She had gone to work as Jean Aldridge’s housemaid. While she was there at Fairlawn, she had fallen for Robert, a good-looking, charismatic man who would have been closer in age to Caroline than to Jean. Perhaps the Aldridge marriage had seemed wrong to Caroline. Perhaps Jean had seemed, to young Caroline, not enough for Robert. Either way, the girl was jealous and Jean was the obstacle in the way of her perceived happiness. Did Caroline steal the pendant, to make herself feel closer to Robert? Did Jean suspect her of the theft? Did Jean confront Caroline when the two women met, that sunny August day as Jean pushed her son along the dam in his pram? Did they fight? Jean had had a baby a few days earlier. She would have been weak. She wouldn’t have stood a chance.

‘But did you have to kill her, Caroline?’ I asked quietly. ‘Just because she was in your way?’

I carried on working and the room seemed to be vindicating my version of events. The vile yellow wallpaper was coming away from the walls more easily than before. It was as if the room was relieved now that the secrets were being exposed.

That morning, I cleared the rest of the window wall; now the only wallpaper that remained was a small patch on the chimney breast that had been so thoroughly glued on, it was impossible to remove. I had found one more message from Caroline: a single line of writing about twelve inches from the bottom of the wall. Smaller letters now, the writing very faint and shaky.

They are watching Julia.

I sat down and leaned my back against the wall, resting my elbows on my knees. I looked about the room. If Caroline’s bed had been placed at right angles to the wall facing the door, then she could have written these words while she was in the bed. She might have written them in her last hours, as she lay dying. But that didn’t help me. I didn’t know what they meant, or why they had been written. I didn’t know who was watching Julia, or why Caroline had felt it so important to write the words down.

Was it a warning?

Did she know she was dying?

The pattering of rain on the windowpane reminded me that time was passing. I stood, and went downstairs to find Julia. A draught was blowing in from the back door. I looked outside and saw her in the garden, leaning over a large object: the trunk. Somehow or other she had dragged it out of the shed, on her own.

I PUT ON
my boots and ran out through the rain. ‘What are you doing, Julia? It’s pelting down. Aren’t you frozen?’

Julia wiped the rain from her nose with her wrist, leaning on her thigh, resting her hip.

‘This trunk used to be in my parents’ bedroom. It was where they kept all their special things. My father’s war mementoes were in there, his medals, and Mother’s best linen, my silver christening mug. Why did they put the trunk in the shed, Amy?’

‘I don’t know, but leave it now and come inside. You’re soaked through, you’ll catch your death.’

‘I can’t leave it here. Help me get it up to the house.’

‘We’ll never move it. It weighs a ton.’

‘If you help me we’ll move it together.’

‘Julia!’

‘Oh, come on. Don’t give up before you’ve even tried.’

Julia leaned over the trunk and heaved at it. The rain fell on her back and shoulders, dripping from the ends of her hair, and her shirt was so wet that I could see her skin through it – the ridges of her spine, her shoulder-blades, even her ribs.

I puffed out my breath and took hold of the other handle.

It took the two of us working together to manhandle the trunk up the slope to the level part of the garden, me doing most of the donkey work. After that we dragged it to the back door. Its weight and bulkiness alarmed me. I was afraid of what might be inside.

We manoeuvred the trunk up the step and into the kitchen. By now we were both soaked to the skin and my back and arms were aching.

‘Right!’ Julia said. ‘Now all we have to do is get it open,’ and she set to hacking at the leather straps with a pair of upholstery scissors.

‘It’ll take you forever with those,’ I panted.

Julia ignored me. She drove the point of the scissors into the old leather strap and twisted it, trying to make a hole. The trunk groaned and she grunted with the exertion.

‘Julia, please, I’m afraid the scissors will slip. Let me call Daniel. He’ll have the tools to open it in a jiffy.’

‘I can’t wait. I need to know what’s inside.’

‘Why is it so important that you open the trunk at once?’ I asked. ‘Why can’t it wait?’ Although I knew the answer to that question. I had felt the same compulsion the day before, when I was in the shed. I watched Julia helplessly for a few moments, and then my eyes were drawn to the clock on the wall.

‘Did you remember to call the school?’ I asked.

‘Yes. I spoke to Mr Leeson. He said it’s best that Vivi sings at the concert.’

‘Oh.’

‘He said he understands that she’s feeling apprehensive but if she doesn’t face up to her fears now, she’ll only find it harder next time she faces a challenge.’

‘That makes sense.’

‘Anyway, he’s going to arrange for her to have tea at the school, so she doesn’t have to come home in between. That way, she can go straight to the concert with her friends and she won’t have time to start worrying.’

‘That’s a good idea.’

Julia pushed the wet hair from her face. ‘Yes, I thought so too. He’s a good man, Eric Leeson. Did I tell you I used to be at school with him?’

‘Yes, you mentioned it.’

‘He was a bright boy. He had all these big ideas about becoming a scientist and going to work for the Space Agency in America, but all that went out of the window when his father died. He had to stay in Blackwater and look after his mother. Teaching was the most academic career he could pursue around here. And I suppose it was nice that he followed in his father’s footsteps.’

‘Eric’s father was the old schoolteacher?’

‘Yes, that’s right. Frank, he was called.’

‘And Frank was the one who was on the village committee?’

‘Yes.’

‘What was he like? As a teacher, I mean.’

‘I owe a great deal to him. Without his help and encouragement, I never would have got the scholarship into dance school.’

Julia laid down the scissors and sat back on her heels. ‘He wasn’t nice to everyone, though.’

‘No?’

‘Once he’d taken against someone, he used to humiliate them awfully.’

‘Someone like Caroline?’

‘Yes. Exactly.’

‘What did he do?’ I asked.

‘Oh … He used to compare the two of us, always in ways that were disparaging to her. He did it in front of other people, in front of her too so she had to listen while he was running her down.’

‘What kind of things did he say?’

‘That I had inherited the looks
and
the brains in our family. That he had always known I would go a long way and that she would never amount to anything. That it was remarkable how different two sisters could be, one so precious and one so …’ She trailed off for a moment as she remembered ‘… worthless.’ Julia looked towards the window, at the rain running down the glass. I followed her eyes. The raindrops were like tears, endless tears, millions of them falling over the valley.

‘That’s so cruel,’ I said.

‘Yes, but that was all we knew at the time. School was a meritocracy. Diligent, well-behaved children like me and Eric were rewarded. And those who didn’t behave were punished.’

‘Beaten with the slipper?’

‘The slipper … yes. I had forgotten. Mr Leeson made them bend over a chair in his office.’ The tiny shadows of the raindrops running down the windowpane dappled Julia’s face so it seemed as if she were crying shadowy tears of light, echoing those outside. ‘Some children were beaten every Friday.’

‘Caroline?’

Julia nodded.

‘Didn’t she ever complain to your parents?’

‘No, she would never have done that. She wouldn’t have received any sympathy! They’d have told her that she must have done something to deserve the punishment, that it was for her own good. She was terribly proud, you know, Amy. When she came out of Mr Leeson’s office she would hold her head up and she wouldn’t cry. She always said that she didn’t care that he beat her; she said he could hit her every day if he wanted, she would never care.’

The wind blew the rainclouds along the valley. For a moment a ray of sunshine beamed through and lit up the rain on the window, illuminated Julia’s face. She smiled. Then the smile faded.

‘When I was in London, I once met somebody who went to Blackwater village school,’ she said. ‘It was an old friend, Martha Clarke. We went for coffee together and we talked about the school. She was one of those Mr Leeson didn’t rate, but she had become a lawyer. She told me that he used to make the children take down their underwear when he was punishing them, boys and girls. None of them ever said anything, of course, because they knew they’d be accused of lying, of being rude and vulgar.’

‘Good God. Do you think it was true?’

‘I don’t know. At the time I thought it was a ridiculous accusation to make but later I wondered about it. What reason did she have to lie?’

Julia stood up. She went across to the window and rested her forehead against the glass.

‘I couldn’t ask Caroline, she was long dead and so was Frank Leeson. There was nothing I could do about it. I put it from my mind.’

She traced the progress of a raindrop down the windowpane with her finger.

‘No, of course it wasn’t true,’ she said. ‘How could it have been? It’s unthinkable that a person of authority would really do something like that. Mr Leeson was the headmaster, for goodness’ sake! He was on the village committee. He was a member of the local education board. He used to give inspirational talks to the Women’s Institute. He was treasurer of the Church of England Headmasters’ Association. He wouldn’t … he would never … oh dear God, Amy, a person like him simply would not conceive such a thing!’