Bedell closed his eyes. Left them closed for a good few seconds. ‘No, he didn’t. This is a disaster, a complete disaster.’
‘I take it you mean for the murder victim,’ said Simon. ‘Gemma Crowther, her name was. She was shot in her home on Monday night. The killer then knocked her teeth out and hammered picture hooks into her gums.’
Bedell winced and rubbed the bridge of his nose. He stood up. ‘Listen, I’d appreciate it if you’d take my word on one thing. Mary has her problems, I won’t deny that. Genius has its price. But she certainly hasn’t killed anybody. That’s taking it too far, to accuse her of that.’
‘I’m not accusing her of anything,’ Simon pointed out. ‘We want to ask her a few questions, that’s all—her and several other people. We’re a long way off charging any of them.’
Genius has its price.
A despicable motto, if ever Simon had heard one. Was the price payable in human teeth, for fuck’s sake?
‘Why don’t I ring DC Dunning, see how long he’s going to be?’ Bedell suggested, picking up one of the phones on his desk with a heavy sigh. ‘I knew something like this would happen one day.’
‘You knew Mary Trelease would become involved in a murder investigation?’
‘No, of course not. That’s a rather crass thing to say, isn’t it? I knew there’d be trouble—that’s all I meant. I inherited the situation: Mary and the cottage. If I’d been around at the time, I’d have spoken up strongly against it. Some money’s simply not worth the price. As it is, we could find work for a full-time member of staff dealing with parents’ complaints. There’ll be a shit-storm—pardon my French—if this latest piece of news gets out.’
Bedell’s words made little sense to Simon, who knew only that he didn’t like the picture that was building up. Bedell looked down at his desk, half-heartedly moving a few pieces of paper around. ‘What’s Dunning’s number?’ he asked irritably.
‘I left my phone in the car,’ Simon lied, patting his pockets. He’d had no reception since he arrived at Villiers. It made him nervous, as if his being uncontactable might be causally linked to catastrophe for those he cared about. He imagined his mother’s anguished voice: ‘We tried to telephone, but you didn’t answer . . .’
‘I know where I put it,’ said Bedell. ‘Wait a second.’ He left the room, pulling the door to. Simon heard his shoes squeak as he walked down the corridor, then the sound of a door opening and closing. As soon as Bedell spoke to Dunning, Simon would lose any chance he had of getting into Garstead Cottage. He couldn’t afford to wait.
He went out into the corridor and down the stairs opposite Bedell’s office door, then down two more flights. He unbolted the door he and Bedell had come in through, went outside and pulled it shut behind him. A long path stretched ahead into the distance, with lantern-style lamp posts and a row of large square brick buildings on either side. How hard could it be to find a cottage? There was nothing that fitted that description in front of him for as far as he could see.
Bedell had left his curtains open when he’d taken Simon into his office. Through the window, Simon had seen a lit courtyard surrounded by long, single-storey prefabricated huts with dark wooden sides that had looked almost oriental. Perhaps Garstead Cottage was one of those.
He walked round to the back of the building, where he found another path that led to what looked like a signpost about 200 metres away. It was much darker here, almost too dark for Simon to read the signs when he reached them. Several rigid rectangles of painted wood with arrow-shaped ends protruded from a pole. One said, ‘Cecily Wyers Theatre’. Another said, ‘Main Building’, but it was the third one Simon read that made him grab the pole and trace the letters with his fingers: ‘Darville’. Beneath it, pointing in the same direction, was a sign that said, ‘Winduss’.
As far as Simon knew, these names belonged to people who’d bought Aidan Seed’s paintings.
Who lived at addresses that didn’t exist.
For a few seconds, standing alone in the darkness and the silence in front of this strange object that looked a bit like a white tree, its branches at right angles to its trunk, Simon felt like an idiot who didn’t know what to do, or what to think.
There were five paths to choose between. He strained to see as far as he could along each in turn, which wasn’t far at all. Each one disappeared into blackness. There was no sign of the prefabricated huts he’d seen from Bedell’s window. In the end he decided to follow the sign that said, ‘Stable Block’, on the off-chance that Garstead Cottage might once have housed whoever looked after the horses. It was as good a guess as any.
He crossed a field, after which the concrete walkway narrowed and gave way to a dirt track. Definitely still a path, though. Simon followed it through a cluster of small trees and into another field. When he started to feel wetness at his ankles, he looked down and saw that he’d been walking on grass. Where was the dirt track? Had it run out or had he strayed off it? He saw dark shapes ahead and made his way towards them. The stable block. He’d assumed, when he’d read the sign, that this would be a conversion: a languages or science laboratory, or living space for the pupils, but as he approached he both heard and smelled evidence of the presence of horses. There was no Garstead Cottage, not here.
He was about to turn back when he heard what sounded like a stifled scream coming from behind the stables. He ran round the squat cluster of buildings, looked in all directions and saw nothing. ‘Hello?’ he called out. ‘Anyone there?’ This time he heard a giggle, and walked in the direction it had come from. He’d taken only a few paces forward when something that felt like hard netting pushed him back. A fence, as high as his waist. ‘Fuck,’ he muttered. More giggles followed. Then he spotted something that stood out because, unlike everything else around him, it wasn’t dark: three small orange dots that seemed to be attached to a mass of trees nearby. The glowing ends of cigarettes.
Keeping his eye on them, Simon made his way over to the trees. When he was still too far away to see faces, he heard a voice. ‘Oh, man, sir, we’re
really
,
really
sorry. We totally know there’s no
way
we’re not going to be in, like, pure trouble . . .’
‘I think you should punish us?’ another girl said, making the statement sound like a question. ‘That way we won’t make the same mistake again?’ A fit of giggles followed this unlikely sounding assertion.
‘I’m not a teacher,’ Simon told the disembodied voices. ‘I’m police. Smoke yourselves stupid for all I care.’
‘No way! Oh, man! What’s, like, a policeman doing creeping round Villy in the dead of night?’
‘This is outrageous,’ said the third girl.
Now Simon was closer and could see their faces. They looked about sixteen, and were wearing pyjamas with nothing over them, no coats or anything. They shivered in between fits of hysterical laughter. ‘I’m looking for Garstead Cottage,’ he told them.
‘What are you doing over here, then?’ one of the girls said scornfully.
‘He’s better off over here. You don’t want to go to Scary Mary’s, Mister Policey-man.’
‘Tasha!’
‘What? He doesn’t. She’s, like, a pure nightmare.’
‘You’re talking about Mary Trelease,’ said Simon.
‘Oh my God, she’s probably his girlfriend or something!’
‘Maybe he’s come to, like, arrest her?’
‘Where’s the cottage?’ he tried again. ‘Can one of you show me?’
A peal of scandalised giggles greeted this suggestion. ‘Yeah,
right
! Like we wouldn’t be so dead if our house master caught us wandering round at night in our jarmies.’
‘She’s frightened of Scary Mary. I’ll take you, soon as I’ve finished my ciggie.’
‘Flavia, you’re
such
a liar! Like you wouldn’t be totally too scared.’
‘Right back at you, babes.’
‘What’s there to be scared of?’ Simon asked, hoping Neil Dunning wouldn’t choose now to arrive with his warrant and find Simon lurking amid the trees with three scantily clad teenage girls.
‘Oh my God—he doesn’t know!’
‘You, like,
so
won’t believe us if we tell you?’
‘She cuts Villy girls’ throats and drinks their blood.’ This prompted more giggles.
‘I don’t believe she exists? I’ve never seen her, and I’ve been here since I was thirteen?’
‘No, seriously, though, she
doesn’t
—drink blood or anything like that. But she
does
only come out at night.’
‘That’s totally understandable? I’d be too ashamed to come out in daylight if my face looked like that.’
‘She starved herself, right, and once all the fat had gone from under her skin, her face collapsed and she was left with the face of, like, an eighty-year-old hag. That’s pure truth, man.’
‘She’s a Villy
legend
.’
‘The oral storytelling tradition,’ one of the girls said in a mock deep voice, and they all screamed with laughter. Simon guessed they were aping one of their teachers.
‘Shut
up
, poo-brain! If I lose my exeat privs thanks to you, it’ll be pure tragedy.’
‘No way are we getting curfed for helping a policeman.’
‘Shut up and let me tell him. He hasn’t got time to waste listening to you two infants. We don’t know for sure . . .’
‘We so do. I heard Miss Westaway and Mrs Dean talking about it.’
‘It might all be scurlyest rumours.’
‘You mean scurrilous. Scurlyest isn’t a word. I apologise on behalf of my intoxicated housemate,’ said the girl nearest to Simon. ‘It’s so not a rumour—it’s the scandalous truth. Scary Mary had a boyfriend who dumped her, right, and she was so miz she tried to kill herself. Hanged herself in Garstead Cottage.’
‘And he was there too, the boyfriend,’ one of the other girls chipped in.
‘Oh, yeah, I forgot that bit. Yeah, she made him go round for the whole
closure
thing.’ The girl Simon thought was called Flavia—unless he’d got mixed up, and she was Tasha—drew invisible quote marks in the air. ‘And when he got there, she was standing on the dining table, with a rope round her neck, attached to the light or something . . .’
‘A chandelier! It was a chandelier!’
‘Yeah, right. In a cottage?’
‘I heard it was a chandelier.’
‘What
ever
. So, like, he called an ambulance and she was rushed to hospital, but on the way there in the ambulance, she
died
—like, majorly
died
. And she had no heartbeat or oxygen going to her brain for three whole minutes . . .’
‘It was ten minutes . . .’
‘No one comes back to life after
ten minutes
, babes. I’ve seen Scary Mary—she’s odd, but she’s not a veg. What was I saying? Oh, yeah: the ambulance people brought her back from, like, beyond death, and she was supposed to be brain damaged, but she wasn’t. She was, like, totally fine. Except she wasn’t, because that was when she turned into Scary Mary. She changed her name.’
‘Stop,’ said Simon. ‘What do you mean? Changed it to what?’
‘Mary Trelease.’
‘Scary Martha would have sounded rubbish—it doesn’t rhyme.’
‘Martha?’ If the girls’ confidence and state of undress hadn’t made him feel so uncomfortable, he’d have asked more forcefully.
‘Martha Wyers—that’s what she used to be called. But after she died and came back to life, she wouldn’t let anyone call her that any more, because, like, Martha Wyers had died?’
‘Gross! This story’s a pure freak-out, every time,’ one of the girls said, wrapping her arms round herself.
‘She lashed anyone who called her Martha. Even her mum and dad had to start calling her Mary.’
‘Lashed?’ Simon interrupted. He had to ask.
‘What? Oh, it’s, like, an expression?’
‘Translation for Villy outsider: she got really angry with anyone who called her Martha.’
‘And she lost weight when she turned into Mary. She was a pure tubber before.’
‘She was pining, wasn’t she, for her one true love?’
Simon couldn’t think clearly with the girls chattering at him. ‘Do you know why she chose the name Mary Trelease?’
They looked at one another, silent for the first time. ‘No,’ said one shirtily after a few seconds, annoyed to have been caught out. ‘What does that matter? A name’s just a name, isn’t it?’
‘Yes it is, Flavia
Edna
Seawright.’ More giggles erupted.
‘Her name’s not the only thing she changed after her
resurrection
, I know that,’ said Flavia, in an attempt to divert attention.
‘Oh, yeah—how weird is this?’
‘She used to be a writer—she had a book published.’
‘Yeah, there’s a copy in our house library.’
‘She must have been in Heathcote, then.’
‘No, Margerison.’
Simon understood the signs he’d seen.
Boarding houses
.
‘What house she was in is so, like, trivial? She was a writer, but after she hanged herself and it didn’t work, she never wrote another word—she took up painting instead. Not me personally, but loads of Villy girls have seen her wandering around at night, smoking, covered in paint . . .’
‘Didn’t Damaris Clay-Hoffman stop her and ask her if she had a spare ciggy?’
‘Damaris Clay-Hoffman’s such a rank liar!’
‘Where’s her cottage?’ asked Simon. ‘Don’t come with me, just tell me where,’ he said to the girls. He wanted to approach quietly, not with a screeching chorus around him.
As Flavia Edna Seawright pointed to her left, a loud noise, like a small explosion, burst out of the night. ‘Oh, my God!’ she said, grabbing Simon’s arm. ‘I’m not even joking any more, man. That sounded like a gun.’
27
Wednesday 5 March 2008
‘A stupid mistake,’ says Mary. ‘You said “Go to your parents’ house”. You meant Cecily’s house, didn’t you? I could see from your face that you knew. You’re a bad liar.’