A Place to Lie Read online

  ‘That’s Mrs Hooper playing, isn’t it?’ she asked Dora’s glistening top lip as the organ wheezed its way through ‘I Heard a Voice From Heaven’. Poor Dora. Sweltering inside her big, black corduroy smock, smelling of mothballs.

  ‘Well,’ Dora began, and the sisters, trapped within their humble box pew, felt a story coming on. ‘Lillian was a pupil of the great Herbert Howells, you know, and she said she summoned her husband, Derek, by tinkling the ivories. So now, I suppose –’ Dora wrinkled her powdered nose against the stench of pollen, fearful of sneezing ‘– she’s tinkling them to send him on his way.’

  Mrs Hooper was like the Pied Piper of Witchwood and had been summoning the village children with her piano playing for years. Caroline and Joanna were no exception: breezing past Pludd Cottage on their first afternoon, they were instantly captivated. With her back to the congregation, Lillian Hooper, refined and upright, rotated her gaze to the Reverend Timothy Mortmain as if in anticipation of some celestial deliverance. Her hair, the sisters decided early on, was the same colour and as shiny as the new copper boiler their landlord had recently fitted in their Camden flat.

  ‘That’s nice.’ It was Joanna who answered Dora, her fingers travelling an imaginary keyboard on her plump thighs in the way Mrs Hooper was teaching her. She kept time by swinging her nine-year-old feet in their Daz-white socks that wouldn’t even reach the pedals in her mind. Unlike the effortless grace of Mrs Hooper who, bathed in a halo of light, easily manipulated the organ’s complicated pedals in her pretty shoes.

  ‘It is romantic, isn’t it?’ Dora flapped her handkerchief in front of her face. ‘But then, what would I know of such things?’ She tipped her head to the eaves and pressed her varnished nails to a brooch belonging to her late mother, which was fastened at her neck.

  Joanna and Caroline tilted forward over the mass of their great-aunt and exchanged an eye roll, before dropping into a soulful silence designed to convince their guardian of their good intentions.

  Dora dipped her head. ‘You’re such darling girls,’ she cooed, and abandoned her brooch to clasp their little hands in each of hers. ‘You wait –’ she jiggled them up and down ‘– us three, we’re going to have the best time ever.’

  Joanna, smiling up at the double chin that belied her daintily featured great-aunt, listened to the promise as the congregation rose to its feet to greet the pallbearers, swaying and sweating under the weight of Derek Hooper’s conker-shiny coffin as it made its slow procession up the aisle.

  The Boar’s Head wasn’t the best place to host a wake. Poky and smoke-filled, the main bar, dubbed saloon by its regulars, was shabby and sad. But Derek Hooper, in the days he was still able to hobble over here, had loved it, and Liz and Ian Fry, joint licensees for the past two years, were doing their utmost to accommodate the mourners dribbling along the cathedral-like nave of horse chestnuts into the pub.

  Fizzing with enthusiasm, Liz Fry’s bottle-blonde head bobbed in and out of the kitchen at the side of the bar, encouraging people into the pleasant beer garden. She was right – with tables and benches set under trees spilling in from the woods, there were plenty of shady places to sit.

  ‘We’re still in the process of refurbishing,’ Caroline heard Liz explain to Dora, who wouldn’t ordinarily be seen dead in a pub. ‘We’ve big plans for the place.’

  Dora and her nieces did as they were told and helped themselves from the buffet. Holding paper plates with deltas of green serviette, they made their selection from the mini pizzas and chicken drumsticks sprinkled with parsley, and carried their choices outside into the prickling heat. They found a spot under a broad parasol where, beyond the various trunks of trees, the wide bake of yellow wheat fields shimmered under a relentless sun. Dora, her dress stretched taut across her fat knees, pecked at a portion of coronation chicken, her head darting like the sparrows in Mrs Hooper’s garden, reluctant to miss a thing.

  The prawn cocktail vol-au-vent tasted stale. Taking a bite and deciding she didn’t like it, Caroline got up to hide it under a yellow ashtray advertising Double Diamond on a nearby table.

  ‘I saw you.’

  A voice close to her ear. She twisted to receive it.

  Wow . Cool, laid-back, nicer-looking than any of the sixth-form boys at school in his Levi 501s and Guns N’ Roses T-shirt. I love him, she decided in an instant, blushing pink as a heart.

  ‘Who are you then?’ the boy quizzed while she stared, troubled by the image of herself – the long, pale face, the high slope of forehead – reflected in the curved mirror-lenses of his sunglasses.

  ‘I-I’m C-C-Caroline … Carrie.’ She eventually tipped her name out of her mouth.

  ‘Carrie . Yeah – like it, sweet. ’ He shook out his dishevelled light brown hair that was curling beyond his collar. ‘Seen you about, ain’t I?’

  ‘Have you?’ Boys didn’t usually notice Caroline, not boys like this one, anyway, unless it was to bully and taunt.

  ‘Yeah, playing in the woods and that.’ His accent dispatched him back to the Surrey town of Weybridge where he’d been born. ‘On your hols then, are ya?’

  ‘S-sort of,’ she stammered, worrying the velvet trim at her neckline. ‘Our mum … she’s not very well, so me and Jo … we’re staying at Pillowell Cottage with our great-aunt for the summer.’

  ‘I know her. I do her garden. Right barrel-load of fun, ain’t she?’

  It was difficult for Caroline to know if this was a question or statement. She shifted uneasily from one sock and sandaled foot to the other.

  ‘Don’t suppose you fancy earnin’ a bit of pocket money while you’re here?’ he asked. ‘Course, I’ll have to square it with me stepmum first, but this time o’ year, reckon we could do with an extra pair of hands.’

  ‘Doing what?’ Caroline squinted into the green sting of chlorophyll trembling through the trees.

  ‘You’re too young to pull pints.’ A burst of laughter; not mocking, but not flattering either. ‘So, collecting glasses, washing up, that kinda thing.’

  ‘De-an … De-an … ’ someone yelled.

  ‘That’s me.’ He whipped his head to the call. ‘Wanna come with me now? Could ask Liz what she thinks about you working here, then.’

  ‘Now ? Y-you want me to come now? Y-yeah, all right.’ Caroline gawped at Dean’s long-legged leanness, the muscled bronze of his suntanned arms, his invitation taking a moment to filter through.

  Joanna, a plate of gala pie and quartered sandwiches in her lap, watched her sister and the older boy disappear through a rainbow-coloured fly screen at the rear of the pub. Keen to follow, to find out what her sister was up to, she was about to abandon her lunch and go after them when she spotted Frank Petley standing close by. Joanna froze under his gaze. Familiar with him from her visits with Caroline to Witchwood’s only shop, she didn’t like Mr Petley’s creepy-eyed stare or the smile that always seemed to loiter at the edge of his mouth. Girdled by hollyhocks bent under the weight of the weather, he was so still, so quiet, Joanna hadn’t realised he was there. Frightened by his presence, she changed her mind about following her sister and was about to alert Dora to him, when a squeal from her great-aunt stopped her in her tracks.

  ‘Oh, Gordon. There you are! I’ve been looking for you.’ Dora, forgetting the solemnity of the occasion, inadvertently made Joanna forget Caroline and the boy.

  A man in his late twenties sashayed towards them. Reedily tall like the bulrushes growing down by the clear stretch of water the sisters had learnt to call Drake’s Pike, he had a puff of blue-black hair and was clean-shaven inside a dark Armani suit. Joanna watched him swap his gold-tipped cocktail cigarette into his sherry-holding hand and plant a kiss on Dora’s cheek, exhaling smoke into her wedge of hair.

  ‘How fine you look.’ Dora, insouciant to the disapproval of mourners slinking like black cats into the beer garden, called loudly, over-the-top, ‘Girls, girls ! Come and meet Gordon.’ And with further squeals of delight she grabbed Joanna’s arms and offered
her up to him. ‘Where’s your sister gone?’ she queried, but not with any zeal; Gordon Hooper held far greater interest. ‘My, you look wonderful. Wonderful . Italy certainly agrees with you.’ Dora continued to flirt. ‘This is Joanna. Imogen’s youngest.’

  ‘So, you’re Joanna, are you?’ Gordon spoke slowly. ‘Goodness me, how frighteningly like your mother you are.’

  ‘Like my mother?’ Joanna beamed up at him. He had a kind face and she liked how his eyes were as pale as the liquid in his glass.

  ‘Oh, yes,’ he said, and sipped his Tio Pepe. ‘Your mother and me … well, we were great friends once. Not that I’ve seen her for, oh … ’ He hesitated. ‘At least a decade.’

  Gordon’s interest was then stolen by a little girl around Joanna’s age in an acid-yellow dress who glided with considerable proficiency across the parched ground on roller skates. Turning from Dora and Joanna, he abandoned his cigarette and sherry to greet her.

  ‘Ellie!’ he cried, throwing his arms in the air. ‘How tall you’re growing.’ And he dived to gather the child in a ball of giggles. ‘I won’t be able to call you my little babe in the woods for much longer, will I?’

  Home from the Continent, where he crafted violins for a living, Gordon Hooper had chosen to keep a low profile during his father’s funeral and rejected the vicar’s suggestion to read a eulogy. But swirling Ellie Fry around on her wheels, making her brown pigtails swing, her cheeks bloom cherry-pink, he obviously had no qualms about drawing attention to himself now. As lithe and strong as a trapeze artist, Gordon hoisted the child on to his shoulders and, spurred on by Ellie’s shrieks of delight, the two of them played as if no one was watching.

  To hide her embarrassment at Gordon’s flagrant snub, Dora drained her second gin and tonic to the sinister accompaniment of tinkling ice cubes, and left behind a smear of lipstick: a stamp of protest against the glass. Others by now had tuned into the strange spectacle. Inching in from the shadows, they formed a ring around this loose-limbed man and pretty child. Dora watched too, frowning heavily as Ellie’s skater dress lifted up for everyone to see the playground scuffs on her dimpled knees, the nasty set of bruises on the insides of her thighs.

  The pub’s landlord, Ian Fry, was also watching. Keeping guard from a dish of dappled shade, he gripped a tray of empties in his yellow smoker’s fingers and focused hard on Ellie and Gordon Hooper – a man, it was clear from his expression, he neither trusted nor liked. Ian’s bald, suntanned scalp gleamed like polished pine as he stepped forward into the high, bright sunshine. Joanna saw the muscles ripple in his bullish neck and the trace of a smile quivering on his lips. A smile she wasn’t equipped to read.

  ‘Is no one going to stop him?’ Dora, tipsy from one too many. ‘Love him as I do, this isn’t appropriate – today of all days,’ she voiced to no one in particular.

  But it was Ellie herself who brought the shenanigans to a close, screaming and laughing, tugging at Gordon’s dark mop of hair, threatening to be sick.

  Present Day

  Joanna stares at the shape beneath the white shroud.

  ‘Yes,’ she croaks to the hand folding back the sheet in the cream-walled room and revealing the waxy quality of Caroline’s face, her naked shoulders. ‘Yes,’ she sobs, breaking down completely. ‘This is my sister. This is Carrie.’

  Caroline Jameson lies stretched out under the starched sheet. Joanna studies the peculiar emptiness that has invaded her sister’s face. It is as if the horror of her death has been nullified and erased. Caroline’s skin, radiant and wrinkle-free, is flushed with a delicate tint of rosiness that softens her in a way life never did. Death, it seems, has transformed the forty-one-year-old Caroline into the girl she once was – the girl she was when she and Joanna had still been friends.

  It is as if Joanna’s flood defences have crumbled, unleashing years of pent-up sadness and loss. Weeping uncontrollably, she holds Mike so fiercely he must prise her fingers, one by one, away from his arm. Then, helped to a chair and forced to sit, Joanna waits until she is able to walk out into the corridor.

  Afterwards, seated alongside her husband in a barren interview room at the police station, she fires off question after question.

  ‘So, you’ve released this Kyle Norris without charge?’

  ‘That’s right, Mrs Peters. The CCTV the shop provided was pretty conclusive,’ Detective Sergeant Pike, a man sporting a set of teeth to match his namesake, does his best to clarify.

  ‘Conclusive ? How so?’ Joanna frowns.

  ‘In that it distinctly shows your sister pulling a knife from her bag and attacking him .’ He elaborates, ‘We’ve several witnesses who corroborate this too. Their statements are clear: Caroline tried to stab him, he grabbed the knife to save himself, but in the struggle between them – and it was quite a struggle – it seems your sister inadvertently stabbed herself.’ A pause. ‘She was very unlucky.’ He takes his time. ‘The single stab wound severed an artery. It meant she died before the paramedics could reach her.’

  ‘But – but this is … is … ’ Joanna can’t find the words. ‘Madness .’ She twists to Mike, then DS Pike. ‘Pulled a knife from her bag, you say – but why would she be carrying a knife?’

  ‘We were hoping you might be able to shed some light on that for us.’ The detective picks at a spray of tomato pips on his tie.

  Joanna tugs out her bottom lip. ‘I’m sorry, but I don’t know. Carrie and I fell out. Well, what I mean is, she fell out with me. At Dora’s funeral.’

  ‘And Dora was?’ the detective wants to know.

  ‘Our great-aunt. On our mother’s side. It was the last time Carrie and I saw one another. Ten years ago … ’ God, is it really that long ? she says to herself. ‘And apart from a couple of failed telephone conversations when our mum died two years ago, we’ve barely spoken.’

  ‘Right, I see. You say your sister fell out with you – can I ask why?’

  Joanna swallows. Fiddles with the frayed hem of her scarf.

  ‘Look—’ Mike inhales through his nostrils. ‘To say Carrie wasn’t the easiest of people would be putting it mildly.’ Ever protective of his wife, he picks up Joanna’s hand and holds it against his chest.

  ‘It’s all right, Mike,’ Joanna says softly. ‘I’ll tell him.’ And taking back her hand, addresses the detective: ‘Things between me and Carrie were never all that good. We had a tricky home life,’ she says, as if this explains everything. ‘It was okay when we were kids, I suppose. Although,’ a quick glance at her husband, ‘we weren’t ever right after that summer with Dora.’ Joanna slides her gaze to the policeman again. ‘Some people would say what we experienced in that place should have brought us closer together, but it didn’t, it pushed us apart – not that I want to go into all that now.’ She pauses. ‘I’m surmising, of course I am, because I could never get my sister to talk about it, so I don’t even know if it was based on anything rational – but I think Carrie’s underlying problem with me was that I reminded her of that summer. But anyway, whatever it was, it just got worse when she hit puberty and then persisted right through her twenties … Carrie was thirty-one when I last saw her – I’m younger, four years younger,’ she tells him. ‘Our mum’s mental state was always pretty fragile, Carrie’s was the same. But I don’t want you thinking I was the one who gave up on her, I wanted to be there for her, we both did.’ Another look at her husband. ‘But she didn’t want me around. Simple as that.’

  ‘I see.’ A sober nod from the detective.

  ‘But what she did, it was so violent.’ Joanna has questions of her own. ‘Volatile, she might have been, but not violent. This is so unlike her.’

  ‘But a person could change drastically over a decade, don’t you think?’

  ‘I suppose,’ Joanna says, thoughtful. ‘But it still doesn’t make sense. Did this Kyle bloke and Carrie know each other?’

  ‘He says not,’ Pike replies mildly.

  ‘Poor guy. Was he all right?’ Joanna shrinks from her inquiry, fe
aring the answer. ‘He didn’t have to go to hospital or anything, did he?’

  ‘He needed medical attention at the scene for a cut to his arm, but no, he didn’t require hospital treatment.’

  ‘Poor bugger. He must’ve been pretty shaken up.’ Mike rakes a hand through his thick sandy hair.

  ‘He was rather traumatised, yes.’

  ‘I can imagine.’ Mike raises his eyebrows.

  ‘You say Kyle lives in Bayswater?’ Joanna asks DS Pike. ‘That he moved to the area six months ago.’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Could I see him, d’you think? Talk to him?’ She wrings her hands in her lap.

  ‘I’m afraid not, Mrs Peters.’ The detective shuffles his papers together. ‘As terrible as this is for you and your family, the man did nothing wrong.’

  ‘Oh, no. No . Of course he didn’t. I wasn’t for a minute suggesting he had,’ Joanna, backpedalling. ‘But he might know something, something that’d help me to understand why Carrie did what she did.’

  ‘Leave it, love,’ Mike advises. ‘We’re the last people he’d want to see. We should think ourselves lucky he’s not pressing for damages.’

  ‘But how am I going to find out what happened? I’ve got to find out why she armed herself with a knife – haven’t I?’

  Joanna gives way to further tears. Sitting on her hands, she half expects someone to dig her in the ribs, to tell her to pull herself together, but no one does.

  A door creaks open behind them. ‘Sarge?’ The brown head of a uniformed officer beckons to his superior.

  ‘Won’t be a moment,’ Joanna and Mike are informed as Pike rises from his chair and leaves the room.

  ‘Why don’t they know anything, want to know anything? Don’t they want to find out what happened?’ Joanna keeps her voice low.

  ‘It’s not that they’re not interested, Jo-Go.’ Mike yawns: jet-lagged after his unexpected need to fly home; he hasn’t even had the chance to change out of his suit. ‘It’s probably got more to do with limited manpower, resources, that kind of thing. Because I’m telling you, if your sister had survived this, well –’ he loosens his tie ‘– she’d be in pretty hot water, wouldn’t she?’