Girl Number One: A Gripping Psychological Thriller (2 page)

I’m running again.
Only this time it’s for my life.

Tree
branches slash my cheek, brambles tear at my legs with their sharp green thorns.
Stumbling over uneven ground, I plunge to my knees, deep in a patch of tall,
deep-green plants, their soft heads bowed around me. For a moment all I can
hear is the loud rasp of my breath, the erratic thud of my heart.

I
register pain. There’s a smell of damp, musty leaves in my nostrils now. Something
fresh with something rotting.

I
clamber back up with stinging hands and legs. Fumble for a trunk to lean on
while I catch my breath. Then I keep running.

Reaching
the village of Eastlyn, the first person I see is the vicar. He’s smoking a
cigarette with a hunched air, his Jack Russell running about his feet near the
back of the church.

Reverend
Mortimer Clemo is in his early fifties, tall and loose-limbed. Innocuous enough,
but I’ve never warmed to him, perhaps because I don’t like churches. His once-dark
hair is part silver now, razored round the nape of his neck. He’s wearing black
jeans today and the obligatory short-sleeved black shirt-front with white dog
collar, plus a pair of muddied wellington boots. His last name, Clemo, is
pronounced ‘Kleemo’ in one of those quirks of Cornish pronunciation. It’s a
common name in these parts.

Across the path from the church, I notice the
back door to the vicarage has been wedged open with a garden gnome. One of the
red-cheeked sort with a fishing rod and a plastic grin.

The vicar looks startled when I explode out of
the undergrowth and come stumbling towards him across the grass verge as though
straining for a finish line. I must look a mess, sweat trickling down my face,
my eyes wide.

‘Eleanor.’ He glances past me as though
expecting to see a pursuer. Or perhaps a running companion. ‘On your own?’

Everyone knows everyone else in our village.
Apart from the second-homers, that is, who are only there a few months in the
summer anyway, and the few people who drift in and out of rented accommodation
without wanting to get involved in village life. It was Reverend Clemo who officiated
at my mother’s funeral. Her quiet plot is a short distance up the hill in the cemetery
– that’s where they bury everyone now the old churchyard is full.

‘Eleanor?’ he repeats, looking me up and down,
beginning to frown. ‘Is something wrong?’

I can see what he’s thinking. My flyaway brown
hair, never inclined to do what I tell it, has come loose from its ponytail. My
trainers are wet from running through the stream. One of my laces has come undone
and is flapping behind me. I’m breathless and making a squelching sound with
every step.

‘I’m fine,’ I lie, panting.

His Jack Russell trots over on stubby legs to
sniff at my ankles. I bend to pat his head, and he dances around me with sharp
staccato barks, eager and excited, perhaps sensing that something out of the
ordinary has happened.

I push the hair back from my face with a
shaking hand. That’s when I notice the cuts. A crisscross of thin bleeding cuts
on my hands and bare forearms, probably on my face too. I can feel my right
cheek stinging.

Brambles.

I look down and my legs are red-raw with tiny white
bumps. As soon as I see them, I’m aware of the pain. It feels as though I’ve
been stung by hundreds of furious wasps.

Reverend Clemo has noticed the marks too. He studies
my legs, then his dark narrowed gaze rises to my face, slowly enough to make me
uncomfortable.

‘Are you sure you’re all right? Perhaps you
should come into the vicarage and sit down for a while, catch your breath.’ His
frown deepens. ‘It looks like you’ve had a nasty fall in the woods. Stung
yourself. We have a first aid kit in the house. Let me call my wife.’

My mind flashes back to what I saw on the path.

‘No,’ I mumble through lips that feel oddly
swollen. Did I sting my face too? ‘Thanks, Rev, but I have to go. Sorry.’

I break into another ungainly run, heading past
him and away from the church. I am making instinctively for Jenny Crofter’s
house, though I’m not sure why. Too far to get home quickly, I suppose. And her
place has always felt like a safe house.

The vicar calls after me, ‘Please, Eleanor, at
least let me call someone to come and pick you up. You’re not yourself.’

You’re
not yourself.
That makes me smile. I keep running and don’t look back.

I haven’t been myself for years.

I thud past the black-timbered
kissing-gate that opens onto the path to the church door, then swing left onto
the main road through the village. Nobody in view. But it’s still early. Not
even the school kids are out, waiting for the lumbering bus that will take them
through half a dozen sleeping villages before it reaches the school. I remember
the route well; I took the bus often enough as a girl.

My trainers sound loud on the tarmac.

Jenny
Crofter’s house is at the end of the row. She’s about thirty but still lives
with her parents in this whitewashed bungalow with its small unfenced garden and
seven wooden steps up from the roadside.

I stumble up the steps and along the garden
path, past an untidy bank of hutches, some standing on top of each other,
filled with fat, lop-eared rabbits. Jenny’s father breeds rabbits. He keeps a
mating pair of ferrets too, apart from the rest; one silver-bellied sable
ferret is standing against the wire on its hind legs, probably the male. The
animal watches with narrowed eyes as I pant up to the front door and lean on
the bell.

Jenny opens the door, a piece of half-eaten
toast in her hand. She’s a little shorter than me, about five foot six or seven,
with dark-brown hair cut radically short and a lean, athletic figure. Typical
PE teacher build, in other words. Her tracksuit is navy with a white stripe,
functional-looking, not leisure wear in disguise, with a dark blue tee-shirt
underneath.

She’s
wearing blue and white trainers, bog-standard Nike. There are traces of dried
mud on both. The heavy industrial mud you get outdoors in this part of Cornwall,
thick and cruddy; a hazard of running anywhere around the village. I expect my
own Mizuno pair look even worse after today’s little adventure in the woods.

Jenny is surprised to see me. She takes in my
expression, then her eyes widen. Exactly the same way the vicar’s did when he
saw me. ‘Eleanor? What’s the matter, what’s happened?’

‘Going to be sick.’ I clamp a hand over my
mouth, and Jenny stands aside.

‘Upstairs,’
she orders me.

There’s no time to look grateful. I run past
her and straight up the stairs, where I nearly collide with her mother on the
landing. Sue Crofter. She’s just come out of one of the bedrooms, belting her
worn dressing gown with a distracted air. Her thin dark hair hasn’t been
brushed yet and is still matted at the back from her pillow.

I can see past her shoulder into the bedroom. Inside,
she’s drawn back the curtains and daylight is streaming in across the double
bed, crumpled and empty. Presumably her husband is already out at work.

‘Sorry, Sue,’ I mutter, darting past her into
the bathroom.

I’m in such a hurry I don’t even shut the bathroom
door, just toss up the pale avocado toilet lid and drop to my knees.

Afterwards, I lean
on the cold toilet rim for a few minutes, gasping and trying not to heave
anymore.

‘Eleanor?’

I open my eyes and see the wet wipe being held
out to me. ‘Thanks, Jenny.’

‘That’s okay.’ She sounds sympathetic but wary
too. ‘Take your time. There’s a bin next to the loo. For the wipe.’

I clean my face quickly and surreptitiously,
then chuck the wet wipe in the designated bin. It’s green, presumably to
coordinate with the rest of the fittings. There’s something wonderfully
ordinary and a bit shabby about everything in Jenny’s house. It’s a narrow,
old-fashioned bathroom with an avocado bath and toilet suite, and plain white
tiles on the walls. The tired-looking bath mat is fern-green, matching the
towels draped over the side of the bath and arranged neatly in a metal display
unit under the window.

Everything is green, in fact, except for the
shower curtain which is see-through plastic decorated with rows of yellow
ducks. Waiting to be shot, I always think.

When I straighten up, Jenny is still there,
blocking the doorway. ‘I’ll ring the school,’ she announces, ‘let Patricia know
you’re not well enough to work today.’

‘Thanks.’

‘And
you can’t walk home in that state. I’ll run you back to the farm on my way to
the school.’

‘I’m happy to walk.’

‘Nonsense.’ Her mother is peering in. Jenny
shuts the bathroom door and stands with her back against it, arms folded. ‘What
the hell’s going on, Eleanor? This isn’t a stomach bug, is it?’

‘No.’

I bend over the sink to splash my face with
cold water. I’m desperate to brush my teeth too but can’t until I get home. I’d
have to ask if I could borrow Jenny’s toothbrush, and that would be too grim
for words. I swill my mouth out with cold water instead, and try to tidy my
hair in the mirror.

‘Fuck, have you seen your legs?’

I look down. ‘Yes.’

‘Nettle stings?’

‘Looks like it,’ I agree.

‘I’ll get you some antiseptic cream.’ She rummages
in the cupboard and produces an old tube of antiseptic cream, not quite squeezed
out. I apply it gingerly to both legs, hissing with pain. Jenny fusses about
me, trying to help. ‘Christ, you’re covered in the bloody things. You must have
fallen in a massive nettle patch.’

‘I don’t really remember.’

‘Your
wrists too. And your hands. Are these cuts?’

‘Bramble
thorns, I think.’

I wipe the excess cream off my sore palms, then
wash them, and swill out my mouth again. The smell of the antiseptic cream is
making me feel sick again.

‘So?’ Jenny hands me a thick green towel,
staring at me. ‘Come on, I want the truth. What in God’s name has happened?’

I dry my face and hands meticulously, not
looking at her. ‘I went into the woods before breakfast.’

‘Running?’

I nod. ‘The usual path was closed. There was a
sign up, with a diversion. So I had to take the lower path. You know, the
overgrown one that goes down towards the stream?’

‘Oh shit.’

She understands at once.

I bury my face in the soft green towel, though
my skin is dry now. I listen to my breathing in the darkness, the judder of my
heart. This would be a bad moment to go wrong. I run through it all again, like
a checklist, make sure of my facts before I say anything more. What I saw, what
I thought, what I did.

When I emerge from the towel, Jenny is still staring
at me, her expression sympathetic.

I
know that look. She thinks I’ve had an episode. A flashback or a nervous
breakdown or something. And it does feel like that. Except for the details, the
reality of it all. But how to tell my story without sounding crazy?

‘There was a woman lying near the stream. Right
across the path. She was … ’

I
have to finish but I’m afraid of the word. Afraid of what it means.

She interrupts, frowning. ‘Look – ’

‘Jenny, she was
dead
.’

After I finally
ring the police, then endure a fraught three-minute phone conversation with a
sleepy and disorientated Hannah, Jenny insists on driving me home.

‘Come
on,’ she says, flinging open the passenger door for me. ‘I know I’m running
late now, but it’s barely five minutes out of my way. And the school will
understand.’

I
don’t argue. I want to get back to the cottage quickly so I can grab some
breakfast and try to make myself comfortable. There may even be time for a quick
shower before the police arrive, if it’s not too callous to be thinking about
bodily hygiene at a time like this. Besides, I want to explain to Hannah exactly
what happened in the woods, not just give her the gruesome highlights, which was
all I could manage with Sue hanging round the kitchen during my phone call,
earwigging like mad.

Then
there’s my dad to consider. He too will have to be told, though I don’t relish
the thought. Not today.

As
Jenny pulls sharply away from the kerb, I tighten my seat belt and hang onto
the door as a precaution. Her driving has never been good. Jenny Crofter came
to work at the secondary school when I was still there as a sixth former. When I
came back to Cornwall and landed my first job as a newly qualified teacher at
my old school, she offered me a daily lift into work in exchange for the
occasional tankful of fuel. It did make sense, both of us living in the same
village. But I value my life too much, so said, ‘No thanks,’ then bought a
scooter to tide me over until I can afford my own car.

I
do occasionally accept a lift from Jenny though, when it’s unavoidable.

Like
today.

Her
driving seems more aggressive than ever. No doubt the news of a dead woman in
the woods where Jenny likes to go running has not improved her mood. She
accelerates when the road looks clear, then brakes wildly at every corner,
throwing us either forward or sideways, or both at the same time. It’s true
though that visibility is never good here, especially in spring and summer when
the steep banks are crowded with grasses and wild flowers, the Cornish
hedgerows abundant with delicate pink campion, bluebells and the purple spikes
of foxgloves. I never really noticed the hedgerows until I got interested in
botany at university; now I can name most of the wild flowers along the verges.

Jenny glances at me sideways, which worries me.
I wish she would keep her eyes on the road. ‘How’s Hannah?’

‘She
sounded a bit shaken on the phone, but I’m sure she’ll get over it. Hannah’s
bombproof.’

‘I
mean, is she well? I haven’t seen her in a while. Is she still working nights
at the hospital?’

‘Yes.’
I study the road ahead. ‘I don’t know how she does it.’

‘Discipline.’

I
grin, knowing Hannah rather better than Jenny does. But then, I was at school
with Hannah, and discipline has never been her strong point.

We live at East
Cottage, in a tiny hamlet called Little Well, just over half a mile from the
village of Eastlyn. It’s a small, cream-coloured cottage at the end of a single
track lane, surrounded by fields. There are only five houses in the hamlet, including
Eastlyn Farm where I used to live with my mother and father, though it’s barely
habitable now.

Behind
our cottage, through the trees and up a rough slope, less than a mile as the
crow flies, is Hill Farm where Tris and Connor live. We were never farmers ourselves,
though while my mother was still alive, we kept a noisy rooster and a harem of
chickens in the farmyard. Now there are only hundreds of rabbits popping their
heads up in the back field every spring. But Tris and Connor are proper farmers.
They jointly inherited the farm three months ago when their father died, and
both decided to continue farming the land as he had always done. They keep
sheep and goats, and somehow scrape a living from the poor, hilly moorland.

There’s been a small settlement at Little Well
since medieval times. I have no idea where the original ‘well’ is, but there’s
a stream that runs busily through the lower fields here, then curves round the
valley bottom into the back of the woods. My father used to say that Cornish
folk have always lived here because it’s the first good grazing land west of
Bodmin Moor. Standing high on Rough Tor, looking down across vast empty acres
of moorland, you could be forgiven for believing those really are the ghosts of
long-dead travellers you can hear among the crags, as local legend suggests,
not the sound of wind whistling over hollows and through narrow crevices in the
rock.

But
the moor can be beautiful too, in the right mood. I’m not unnerved by its
bleakness; I love that I live close enough to touch the wilderness.

Our farmhouse originally belonged to my
mother’s Great-Aunt Teresa, who left it to my mother. My mother was pure
Cornish, not like my father, who was born on the edge of Wolverhampton in the
Midlands. But when Mum died, she left everything to Dad, so we stayed on at
Eastlyn despite the memories. It was hard on him though, after Mum died. He
would drive past the woods every day when he took me to school, and glance
across at the dark shroud of trees, his hands clenched on the wheel. Maybe he
was thinking about the violent way she died, or remembering how the police
carried her out of the woods in a body bag.

I did not see that part myself. But Hannah did,
and described it to me in a whisper, both of us sitting in my bedroom at the
farm.

It
sounds gruesome, but for a long time I needed to know everything about my
mother’s murder. Every last detail. Knowing more about her death is a
compulsion that still haunts me, like a jigsaw puzzle you know you can never
finish because the last piece is missing. In those days, I kept newspaper
cuttings in a book hidden under my mattress and used to study them for hours,
going through that day in my mind.

My father said little in the months after she
died, hunched like a sick hawk, staring at Mum’s photograph, holding her
clothes against his cheek. Every night he would cry himself to sleep or drink
heavily until he fell asleep in front of the television. He was sick in those
days, no good to me as a father. Though I don’t blame him for that. I
understood, and still share his pain. Then one night, a few years back, I woke
to find the air thick with smoke and my father unconscious in the living room. It
took all my strength to drag him out of there. By the time the fire brigade
arrived, the place was well alight. An accident, they said; my father had been
drinking while watching television, and had fallen asleep with a cigarette in
his hand.

The
firemen saved the farm from complete destruction, but much of the ground floor
was gutted and had to be rebuilt. Is still being rebuilt, in fact. Brick by
brick. Slate by slate. And my father lives alone in a caravan on the property
now, keeping himself warm at nights with a bottle of whisky.

When
I came back from university and found East Cottage for rent, further up the
lane, it seemed like the ideal situation; I could keep an eye on my father there
without having to live with him.

We hurtle past the
ruins of my family home and approach the turn to the cottage. Lush green
hedgerow on either side of the narrow lane whips at the wing mirrors.

Jenny suddenly brakes violently. ‘Bloody hell.’

A man has come stumbling out of the unseen
fields next to the lane, muddy and unkempt. He skids down the overgrown bank of
weeds and grasses, landing awkwardly on the tarmac a few feet from the bonnet
of the Renault.

I recognise the man before he scrambles to his
feet. Wide-eyed, grass in his hair, staring at us like a fugitive on the run.

‘It’s your dad,’ Jenny says blankly.