‘It’s only Mrs Cairns having a nose at the state of the garden.’
‘I thought the girl said she’d gone away for Christmas.’
Shit
, Peg thought. But, surprised at how easily she could brazen it out, she turned back to Jean with her face level. ‘Oh no. She’s definitely out there.’
‘Interfering old cow,’ Jean said, taking a moment to decide from the box of Fox’s chocolate biscuits Peg offered her, then finally plumping for a chocolate-coated strawberry wafer. ‘I’m worried about you, Meggy. What we need is a quiet life. If you start telling people all this—’
‘All what, Aunty Jean?’
‘If you start telling people any of this, then we’ll all be dragged down. It’ll be the end of the family, all that Mummy fought so hard to keep together.’ As she spoke, she sprayed pink wafer on the bedspread.
Peg shook her head and took Jean’s hand, even though it now made her flesh crawl to touch her. A change of tactic was needed if she was going to get any concrete answers.
‘Oh, I was never going to tell anyone. I mean, there’s no point in raking up the past. Not after so long. You see, Aunty Jean, I just need to know the truth. If you’ll only tell me the truth, I’ll not tell a soul.’
‘You won’t?’ Jean said, that smile again working its way into the flesh of her mouth.
Peg took a deep breath and dived in. ‘I promise. I’ve been thinking about what you said. You’ve been like a sister to me. You know me better than I know myself, and you were absolutely right about that Loz. She’s no good. She was leading me astray, when of course, where I really belong is here. She wasn’t at the flat when I went back, so I left her a note saying I never want to see her again. I’m staying here now and I’m coming with you to Spain to look after you in that lovely house that Dad’s going to build for you.’
Peg didn’t think she sounded all that convincing. But it looked like it was working on Jean, who, drunk both on sugar and Doll’s wine, had taken on a misty look, all disbelief well and truly suspended.
‘I’m so glad, Meggy. So glad,’ she said at last, shaking her head to bring herself back to earth. ‘People don’t understand this family, you see. Mummy only did what was best for us. For your daddy, for me. For you.’
‘I know that.’
‘Mummy was a saint. I’d hate to think of what she’d feel if she looked down and saw you dragging our family name through the dirt.’
Unable to cross her fingers against her lie – she was still holding Jean’s clammy hand – Peg folded her toes over each other inside her boots. ‘Oh, no chance of that. I’d never tell on family. But I want to know about what you did, Aunty Jean.’
‘Me? I didn’t do nothing.’
‘Nothing?’
‘Nope.’
Jean was so slippery. Peg had to fight the urge to slap her. Instead, she pulled her hands away and faced her aunt.
‘So why did Raymond kidnap Loz, then?’
‘What?’ Jean jolted and stared at Peg, a mess of chocolate and biscuit falling out of her open mouth.
‘Why did he kidnap Loz and leave her in the garage for some thugs to come and finish her off?’
‘He what?’
‘He left her in the garage. At Heyworth Court. With the body of poor Anna Thurlow for company.’
‘How do you know—?’ Jean’s face turned red, her eyes bulged, and her lips pursed like a pincushion.
‘I was there. I saw. And yes, I would also like to know about what happened to Anna, but right now, I mostly want to know why he did what he did to Loz.’
‘How? What? Oh, THE STUPID LITTLE BERK!’ Jean exploded. Like a hurricane making landfall, Jean’s anger forced her words from her mouth. ‘He wasn’t supposed to
leave her
anywhere.’
‘What? Are you saying you told my father to kill Loz?’
‘SHE WAS GETTING IN OUR WAY!’ Jean lurched herself up and roared, spitting biscuit over her duvet. ‘SHE HAD TO BE DEALT WITH.’
Then she collapsed back onto the pillows, her chest heaving. She scrabbled behind her for her oxygen mask, and Peg made no move to help her.
‘Thanks, Aunty Jean,’ she said, holding up her voice recorder, which she had turned on and hidden in her pocket the moment she stepped into the bedroom. ‘You and Raymond: you’re both as bad as each other, aren’t you? That’s what I need. I’ve got all of that on here. For the record.’
‘Give that to me!’ Wheezing, Jean tried to haul herself up to grab the recorder, but she missed.
‘I’ve got Loz next door,’ Peg said. ‘She’s been listening in too.’
Jean gasped and put her hand over her mouth.
‘Yes. She’s all right, no thanks to you. And in a short while, because of what I’ve got on here –’ again she waved the voice recorder in front of Jean, who again tried to swipe at it – ‘we’ll be calling in expert help to uncover the rest of the truth about what you and Dad have got up to.’
‘Expert help?’ Jean said, her nostrils flaring. ‘What does that mean?’
‘Police, Aunty Jean. It really is time to go to the police.’
Turning her back on her bloated, outraged aunt, Peg left the bedroom and went out of the extension, shutting the back door behind her and firmly turning the key in the lock.
She had Jean. There was no going back from her admission, and, trapped by her own flesh, she couldn’t go anywhere until the police came for her.
But Peg was all too aware that she didn’t yet know the whole story.
Perhaps, though, she was going to have to leave that to the professionals.
Forty-Five
But back on the other side, Doll’s settee was bare, the crocheted blanket thrown to one side.
Loz had disappeared.
Panicked, Peg scrambled up the ladder to her bedroom, but she wasn’t up there.
The front door was still bolted, so there was no way she could have gone out that way. Peg fell out of the back door.
‘Parker!’ she called, panic raising her voice a full octave.
‘What?’ Parker said, appearing at the gate to the back garden.
‘They’ve got Loz again . . .’
‘No love, look.’ Parker pointed at the shed behind her. Peg turned. The door was open wide and Loz was staggering out with an armful of Doll’s Commonplace Books. The burned ones with charred edges and blackened covers.
The burned books.
‘Loz, what is it?’ Peg said, seeing the tears that rolled down her cheeks. Loz never cried, not ever.
Then, at last, the words spilled hoarsely from her.
‘He said it wasn’t him. He explained and I didn’t believe him. He begged with me. He said I needed to find the burned ones. That there was proof there. Frank had tried to burn them. He said they’d be here somewhere. I knew where they were. I had to see . . . Sorry, Peg,’ Loz said, stumbling as she handed the books over to Peg. ‘Sorry.’
‘You need to get back inside, girl,’ Parker said, and he scooped Loz up. Clutching Loz’s find to her chest, Peg followed them back into the lounge, ripping the intercom out of the wall before she sat down in Doll’s rocking chair.
She hesitated before opening the first book. She had only ever looked at Doll’s Commonplace Books before with her permission. To do so unprompted seemed like a violation of some law of nature.
Even now, with Doll in her grave.
But, as she flicked through the pages, the assault was all on Peg.
The words were bad enough. Rendered in Doll’s meticulous pre-senile handwriting and tucked in among recipes, patterns and shopping lists, the poisonous denouncements squatted like ugly beasts.
There was a litany of Tony’s wrongdoings and lists outlining what kind of conniving, unfaithful, thieving, ungrateful BASTARD he was. Mary Perkins was a WHORE, a FLOOZY, a JEZEBEL who had set a trap to bring the family down. Anna Thurlow – and here Peg wavered, unable to breathe – was a VILE CUNT who had MADE POOR MEGGY’S LIFE A LIVING HELL.
But it was the images that accompanied each burst of text that really churned her nausea.
In everything but subject matter, they were like the diagrams and drawings Doll had taught Peg to make whenever she learned a new skill.
But instead of crochet patterns, or the labelled parts of a flower, these were detailed drawings of human bodies. They reminded Peg of experiments she had done at school with frogs and ox’s eyeballs; the kind of experiments where at least one girl – usually Philippa – would faint, or throw up. But these were dissections – no, dismemberments – of human bodies. No detail was spared, and the rendering of the facial features was uncannily accurate.
Doll had quite a skill, it had to be said.
Frank had been right: she could have been an artist.
But instead, she had been something quite different.
There was no mistaking Jean’s fiancé or Mary Perkins, and the depiction, in the final book, of Anna Thurlow’s cut throat was detailed and accurate. There were several blank pages after that drawing, as if put aside for future use.
And like a rude, slapped awakening, the unspeakable nugget of worm-truth revealed itself to Peg.
Then
How old am I here?
I’m ten.
I’m waiting.
Waiting in a car. Not a posh car, but it’s got leather seats. I know it because I know the smell of the pine air freshener. It’s Nan’s car. The special car big enough for the trolley.
It’s parked right up against a fence in a place I don’t recognise.
I’ve been sleeping all laid out on the back seat and I’ve just woken up, my sniffy blanket over my face.
I really need a wee.
But I’m all on my own.
I didn’t used to be on my own in this car. There were other people here.
Where had we been? Some sort of park. It was a playground. Out in the countryside. They’d been mowing the grass and it had made me sneeze and I had got out to meet the girl, who was on a swing, in her flowery dress.
I was scared, but Nan said it was going to be all right.
She said the girl would be surprised to see me, because I wasn’t at school and I was to bring her back to the car to say hello to Nan and Aunty Jean.
And then . . .
And then Nan looked at the photograph with a gold sticker with Happy Days Photography on the back of the cardboard frame, then at the girl. And then she said to Aunty Jean, ‘That’s the one,’ and she turned to the girl and said, ‘Hello, Anna Thurlow. Look. We’ve got your photograph here. Look.’
And Anna leaned into the car to take a look at her school photograph and then . . .
I don’t know.
It’s dark outside the car and I don’t like it.
I’m shivering, even though I’ve got my pink and lime jumper on and it’s summer.
I’m confused. Everything’s woozy.
There’s no one else around: no cars, no people, and the only light is coming from some sort of shed nearby.
It’s at the end of a row of other sheds.
They’re not sheds. They’re garages.
The garages.
‘Nan?’ I go.
‘Nan? I need a wee,’ I say in the empty car. But no one comes.
I try to open the car door, but I can’t. There’s a child lock on to keep me safe. So I climb over to the front seat, sort of diving, sort of enjoying it, sliding over the leather seats, and I pull on the handle to open the front door.
I slide out on the fence side and catch my jumper on a sticking-out nail, snagging it and pulling a big hole in it.
I’m very upset, because Nan knitted this jumper for me, even with her sore knuckles.
But I’m desperate now, bursting for a wee.
I only just make it out onto the road when I wet myself, the wee running down warm inside my tights, steaming up the night air.
I start to cry. Ashamed, because I’m too old to wet myself.
‘Nan!’ I wail. ‘I’ve had an accident!’
There’s a clatter from inside the garage and the door opens. Aunty Jean’s in her trolley and her big shape almost fills the doorway, but I can see light round her edges like a halo.
‘Oh no,’ she says.
She steers the trolley towards me.
‘Meggy, you should’ve stayed in the car,’ she goes, the bulk of her getting bigger, so that it’s everything I can see.
‘I needed a wee. I didn’t know where you were. Where’s Nan?’ I say, in great gulps of air between sobs.
‘Nan’s busy in there. She’ll be done in a bit. Now let’s get you back in the car and I’ll cuddle you to sleep.’
Aunty Jean lifts me up onto her trolley and I wipe my eyes on her big, cosy shoulder. As she drives the trolley back to the car, I look up and see behind her, inside the garage.
I see Nan, and she’s got her nurse’s uniform on.
And there’s blood, and the girl.
I see . . .
I see . . .
And Aunty Jean puts something over my face that smells like my sniffy blanket but it isn’t my sniffy blanket.
And then it’s all a blank and I don’t know what I see.
Forty-Six
Peg sat in Doll’s rocker and put her head in her hands, trying to hold her reeling thoughts in place, trying to reconcile her little, sparky nan with the monster who had created these books.
As far as Peg was concerned, Doll had given her nothing but love. But perhaps that’s what it was all about, because she was family. She remembered Jean’s words:
Mummy would have done anything to protect this family.
Peg sighed, trawling up nothing but blackness. Then she turned to face Parker and Loz, who had been watching her all the while.
‘It was Nan,’ she said.
Loz closed her eyes and nodded.
‘Nan killed them all, didn’t she?’
Parker looked at the two of them, his mouth hanging open.
‘He tried to tell me,’ Loz said, her voice so hoarse and low that both Peg and Parker had to strain to hear what she was saying. ‘I didn’t believe him.’
‘Raymond?’
Loz nodded again. ‘He said Jean had told him to kill me. He was going to deal with her, he said. I just had to wait till then. Not go to the police. I didn’t believe him. He said . . . it was in the books somewhere. Burned books. I knew – I put them in the shed when we were clearing up. Piles of books.
‘But I didn’t believe him . . . I still thought it was him. How could he blame it on his own mother? I said I was going to the police. So he had to shut me up. He was crying, and still I didn’t believe him. I’m sorry, Peg. Sorry, sorry, sorry.’ Loz fell back onto the settee cushions, tears streaming down her face.