Read The Pull of the Moon Online
Authors: Diane Janes
After a break for cheese sandwiches and beer, the boys continued their efforts while Trudie set to work in the kitchen, peeling potatoes for our evening meal. Not wishing to be perceived a
slacker, I took a duster from the cupboard in the pantry and headed for the room at the front of the house which we had christened the library. I started with the objects on the desk, then the desk
itself, gathering a ridge of pale fluff on my duster, which I flicked on to the carpet, being unsure what else to do with it. After this I turned my attention to a small bookshelf which stood under
the window. The books had faded spines, rusty browns and blue blacks, with titles printed in gold. I picked one out at random and opened it – tiny black print on stiff paper which had faded
to a delicate shade resembling milky coffee; splotched here and there with spots of darker brown, as if some of the coffee granules had not quite dissolved. Someone had written on the flyleaf in
black ink:
For my god-daughter Emily from Aunt Grace.
I replaced it next to
Travels in Persia and Kurdistan
, working my way down, vaguely flicking my duster across the contents of the
upper two shelves, then kneeling on the red and black carpet to better reach the bottom one.
On the bottom shelf there was a pile of magazines, marginally less ancient than their hardback companions, the top one of which had been left folded open, as if someone had been reading it and
not quite managed to finish the item of interest before it got tidied away. The uppermost article was headed
An Intriguing Local Mystery
, and when I pulled it out for a better look I saw
that the accompanying picture was captioned
Local beauty spot Bettis Wood.
I settled down to read, the duster in my hand forgotten.
Ludlow Castle has its White Lady and Hergest Hall is said to be haunted by the shade of Black Vaughn, but how many people know that Bettis Wood has a ghost of its own?
Ever since Agnes Payne was murdered in the woods on a hot summer’s night in 1912, strange sights and sounds have been regularly reported there and local folk avoid the woods after
dark.
Agnes Payne lived in a cottage about a mile from the woods with her husband Tom and their three small children. Tom was the local carpenter and had a reputation as something of a
ladies’ man. All that summer he had been doing work for a wealthy widow called Martha Stokesby and, if local gossip was to be believed, he and Mrs Stokesby had become more than mere
friends.
On the evening of 13th August, Tom finished work at Mrs Stokesby’s house rather later than usual and called at the inn for a glass of beer on his way home. Later that evening, a
neighbour observed Agnes setting out from her cottage alone. It was not the first time she had been seen setting out alone for a late-evening stroll, but it would be the last.
According to Tom Payne, when he arrived home he found his children safely asleep, but his wife was unaccountably absent. He walked a little way along the road, but returned to the cottage
when unable to find her. At first light he roused his nearest neighbours and a search was undertaken. Agnes was discovered in Bettis Wood, where she had been strangled with a silk scarf. Payne
said the scarf did not belong to his wife and its origin was never identified.
Tom Payne was the chief suspect and had no alibi – but then a new witness came forward, a pedlar called Joel Rimey, who had been camping on the edge of the wood on the night of the
murder. Rimey said he had seen a woman very like Agnes, in company with a man whom he could also describe. They had been walking along a footpath heading into the woods, at a spot not very far
from where Agnes’ body was found. His description of the woman exactly fitted Agnes, right down to her paisley-patterned shawl; but the man he described – a bearded man with a dark
coat and hat – was nothing like Tom Payne, who was clean shaven.
No arrest was ever made and the mystery remains unsolved to this day, but sometimes, late at night –
‘What have you got there?’ asked Trudie.
I gave a little squeak of alarm. ‘God, you startled me. I’m just reading this magazine I found. It’s about the wood down below. There’s a ghost story.’
‘Wow,’ said Trudie. ‘Let me see.’
I scanned the final sentence before handing it over; then waited in silence while she read it in her turn. When she had finished, she looked up at me with wide eyes. ‘So that’s
it,’ she said.
‘What?’
‘Ever since I got here, I’ve had these funny feelings about the wood. I’ve been looking at it out of my bedroom window and something has been kind of drawing me to it. It must
be her – Agnes.’
‘Oh, come off it,’ I said. ‘You never said anything about it until now.’
Trudie shrugged, as if to indicate she didn’t much care whether I believed her or not. ‘I told you, I’ve got a gift.’ She swept out of the room before I could say
anything else.
Abandoned to my dusting, I made a few more random swipes around the picture frames, before it struck me that perhaps I should have cautioned Trudie about mentioning the murder of Agnes Payne in
front of Danny. I returned to the kitchen but the peeled potatoes were already in their pan of water and Trudie had decamped.
By the time I caught up with her in the garden, I realized I was too late. After leaving me she had evidently gone straight back to the kitchen to make a pot of tea for the workers, which she
had already taken outside. Simon’s uncle’s house was so old-fashioned that there weren’t any mugs, just cups and saucers: some plain everyday green and white ones and a bone china
service decorated in a pattern of pink roses. The latter looked scarily fragile to me, but of course this was the set which Trudie had selected to carry into the garden for an afternoon tea
break.
As I approached, I could hear her saying, ‘. . . and now her ghost haunts the woods. I suppose she’ll never rest until she gets justice.’
‘That doesn’t seem very likely now,’ said Simon. ‘When did you say it was – 1912? That’s sixty years ago. The guy’ll be dead by now.’
‘If it was a guy,’ said Trudie. ‘There’s the Other Woman, too.’
‘I thought you said she was seen going into the wood with a man.’
‘Well, yes – but it could have been a woman, disguised as a man.’
‘It could have been her husband, wearing a false beard,’ I said, flopping on to the grass next to Danny, who leant across to greet me with a peck on the cheek.
‘I doubt it,’ said Trudie. ‘I mean, surely she would have recognized her own husband.’
‘All the more reason for her to go into the woods with him.’
‘But why the false beard?’
‘Hang on,’ said Simon. ‘I’ve got it. What about the poacher bloke? Maybe he did it, then said he’d seen her with someone else, to throw everyone off the
scent.’
‘Pedlar,’ I said. ‘He was a pedlar.’
Secretly I was just relieved at the half-jokey level of interest the story had provoked – because, until then, I had been doing the avoidance-of-certain-topics thing. I hadn’t quite
been down the track of the Special Voice, but I had been careful not to mention either sudden death or the Timmins Prize. I was probably being oversensitive, but the circumstances of Danny’s
winning the prize had been marred by tragedy and I sensed that he felt awkward about it. The prize was awarded by the faculty every year, to the geography student who gained the highest mark in the
exams which marked the mid-point of the degree course. In the run-up to the exams it had been generally accepted that only two students were in serious contention that year – Danny Ivanisovic
and a girl called Rachel Hewitt.
Rachel Hewitt was a real golden girl: that rare combination of academic and socialite – popular, lively, clever. When she failed to show up for lectures one Monday morning, everyone was
surprised but not overly concerned. Rachel had mentioned that she was thinking about going home for the weekend, so when friends knocked on her door in Halls and got no reply, they assumed she had
decided to go at the last minute, then missed her train back on Sunday evening. When she still failed to appear on Monday afternoon this theory started to falter, and by Tuesday evening someone got
anxious enough to phone her family – who said they hadn’t seen her at all. At this point Security were alerted. When they opened Rachel’s door with the pass key, they found her
lying on the bed wearing the same clothes in which she had last been seen the previous Friday. She had been strangled.
The window of her room was open and only one floor up. It was in a part of the building immediately above a flat-roof extension – an easy enough entry and escape route for her killer;
although he could equally have let himself out into the corridor to make his getaway. The doors had Yale locks which sprang shut if you didn’t wedge them.
There had previously been reports of a prowler on the campus. One girl claimed to have seen a shadowy face at the window when she was taking a shower; someone else had startled a guy mooching
around the parked cars late at night. For the rest of the year, male students set up night-time patrols of the grounds, but nothing further was seen. The police interviewed dozens of possible
suspects and witnesses, but the investigation appeared to get nowhere. The whole faculty was agog with it; and of course Danny became the recipient of the wretched Timmins Prize – which, as
Simon pointed out, he would probably have won anyway – but Rachel Hewitt’s death had turned the whole thing sour, making any kind of celebration inappropriate. For my own parents, the
whole episode was confirmation of their wisdom in insisting on my staying at home in Birmingham to study. To the danger of lax morals in halls of residence could now be added the dangers of lax
security. They had always been worried that, if not kept a strict eye on, Katy would get into some sort of trouble.
The boys soon lost interest in the story of Agnes Payne and neither of them mentioned Rachel Hewitt – there was really no reason why they should. Once their tea was finished they went back
to digging, neither willing to be the first to admit that they’d had enough for the day, or that the work was much harder than originally envisaged. However, when I went out later that
afternoon to tell them our food was almost ready, Simon was holding out his blistered hands for Danny’s inspection, turning them over and forlornly displaying broken nails.
‘Jeez,’ said Danny. ‘Don’t be such a girl.’
They were both laughing, but I could see that underneath it Simon really hated the way his hands were getting messed up.
‘Come on,’ I said. ‘Stop messing about. The meal’s nearly ready.’ The word ‘meal’ was a cop-out, because I knew that Simon called it dinner whereas I
was used to calling it tea.
‘We’re coming right now,’ Danny said. ‘You look good enough to eat yourself.’ He picked me up bodily and gave me a hug while he pretended to gnaw at my neck,
tickling me while I shrieked and made futile attempts to get away.
That evening we sat in the garden until it was too dark to see. Danny played his guitar and we sang: sometimes all together, sometimes just him.
‘You’ve got a smashing voice,’ Trudie told him. ‘And you’re nice-looking as well. You could make it as a pop star, I bet. Simon, don’t you think Danny would
look great on
Top of the Pops
?’
Simon didn’t answer because he was discouraging a spider who had taken an interest in his can of beer.
‘Go on,’ urged Trudie. ‘Sing something else.’
‘Shall we give them ‘‘Bridge over Troubled Water’’, Si?’ Danny suggested.
Whether doing Simon and Garfunkel or Morecambe and Wise, they were a polished double act. They went back a long way – an enduring friendship with its own private jokes, which inevitably
meant that they often referred to people and events I had never heard of. I desperately tried not to mind that Simon knew so much more about Danny than I did, recalling that without Simon there
would be no rich uncle’s house, and without the house no chance of spending the whole summer with Danny. But whenever Simon was around I couldn’t entirely escape the feeling that I was
the newcomer in our trio. No wonder it irritated me like hell that by the end of our first full day as a quartet Trudie was behaving as if she had known the others for years.
SEVEN
After Trudie’s arrival our days fell into more of a pattern: while the lads worked on the big garden project, Trudie and I would engage in our housekeeping duties for a
while, then lie in the sun, reading the books and magazines we found in the house. When the boys tired of digging – which was not infrequently – we played hand tennis or rounders, using
a bat improvised from a piece of old chair leg discovered in the shed. Then Simon found an ancient croquet set and we played with that too – using rules of our own devising. In the evenings
we talked and sang and played cards – mostly daft games like Cheat and Crazy Eights – forced to manufacture our own entertainment because the house had no television set.
‘Weird,’ said Trudie. ‘Fancy having no phone and no telly.’
‘He doesn’t live here most of the time,’ said Simon. ‘It used to be my grandmother’s house until she died, and she always preferred the wireless.’
‘Weird,’ repeated Trudie.
There was an old radiogram in one of the downstairs rooms, but we could not coax anything from it, beyond a few snatches of foreign babbling and a lot of static. We relied instead on a
battery-operated transistor radio, permanently tuned to Radio 1. We caught occasional news bulletins, but everything seemed to be happening a world or two away.
Trudie had only been with us for a couple of days when the teapot with the pink roses on it disappeared. It was Trudie herself who drew our attention to the loss, which indeed the rest of us
might never have spotted at all, because she was the only one who ever used the best tea service. Soon afterwards we missed an ugly vase which had previously languished on the kitchen window sill
– a hideous yellow object, from which a cluster of purple pansies stood out in relief; then the washing-up liquid vanished, followed by a pair of nail scissors which Simon had left on the
kitchen table. The two latter items reappeared within a matter of hours, both in exactly the same place from whence they had vanished, but the vase and teapot were not returned. During the next
couple of weeks a whole variety of objects went walkabout – most of them being found again, hours or sometimes days after they were missed.