In Her Shadow (25 page)

‘What about Ellen?’

I stamped my foot in distress. Trixie whimpered and hid as far as she could under the kitchen table.

‘Is she all right?’ cried Jago. ‘Is Ellen OK? Oh fucking hell, what’s happened?’

He opened the back door. I grabbed onto his arm, held onto him. ‘No! No, Jago!’ I screamed. ‘Don’t go there, stay here!’ But he shook me off and went back out into the night.

My father, hearing the commotion and finding me crying in the kitchen, went off after him. They returned soon enough, both of them. Thornfield House was already empty. Mrs Todd, Ellen and her father were gone.

CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

AT THE MUSEUM
, Rina helped me back up on to the chair.

‘Take your time,’ she said. ‘Take it easy.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘It’s all right. No harm done. I bet you didn’t eat any lunch.’

‘There wasn’t time …’

‘So you fainted. Is low blood sugar the only problem?’

I shook my head. ‘I had a sleeping tablet last night. I think it must still be in my system.’

‘Was this prescribed medication?’

I felt ashamed of myself. Worse, I felt dreadfully sick. ‘No, it was an old pill from when I had a bad patch before.’

‘Oh Hannah!’ Rina said. ‘What’s got into you? You’re worrying me.’

‘Sorry,’ I said again.

She pushed a packet of biscuits towards me and I took them, unwound the packaging and nibbled at the edge of a digestive. My mouth was dry, but the sugar helped with the nausea.

‘What happened before?’ Rina asked.

‘What do you mean?’

‘You said the sleeping pill was from a bad patch before.’

‘Oh, nothing. Stress.’

‘Is that all?’

I nodded.

‘It’s nothing to be ashamed of,’ said Rina. ‘Do you know, I’m almost relieved to find out that you’re not perfect, Hannah. You seem to sail so smoothly through life.’

I almost laughed. Rina, you do not know the half of it, I thought.

Rina clasped both of my hands in hers and rubbed them. After a few moments, she took a deep breath – which was a signal that she was about to embark on a speech she had prepared earlier.

‘I think, Hannah, you should get away from here. Not just a night with your parents – I mean proper getting away. Out of the country.’

‘I know. I think you’re right.’

‘And,’ Rina said, her voice rising to denote that this was positive news, ‘as luck would have it, an opportunity has arisen which would be absolutely perfect.’

‘Oh yes?’

‘John is going to Berlin for the Trans-European curatorial conference on Wednesday. I was going to go with him but I’ve so much on my plate at the moment that I’ve been looking for a way out. And you’re it!’

‘Me?’

‘Yes. You could take my place. It would be perfect for all three of us. I can get on with my research. You’d be in a different place, away from all this. You’d meet people from the international museum community, and you need to network, Hannah, if you’re going to further your career. John will be in his element. You know what he’s like, he’ll get carried away with enthusiasm for various projects we can’t afford and he’ll need someone there to point out the impracticalities, the financial implications, the impossibility of
staging anything progressive in our poor old building. Dear Hannah, if I can’t be there, Bristol
needs
you to go with him and be the big black cloud of rationality raining on his parade.’

She didn’t say it but I knew she was also thinking that a foreign excursion would conveniently keep me out of the way while the councillor’s complaint was investigated too.

I smiled at her. ‘Don’t you think John would mind me tagging along?’

‘He said he’d love to take you. Charlotte can’t go because of the girls.’

‘So you’ve talked about this already?’

‘We’re concerned about you.’

‘Of course you are. If
you
started seeing dead people in the museum I’d be concerned about you too!’

Rina opened her mouth and closed it again.

‘I know you’ve been talking about me,’ I said. ‘Everyone’s walking on eggshells. Everyone’s treating me like I’m losing my mind.’

Rina winced.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said at once. ‘Sorry, Rina, that was rude and unkind.’ I covered my face with my hands. ‘I’m so sorry.’

Rina stood quietly for a moment and then she said, ‘Hannah, we’re your friends. We aren’t judging you, we’re not interfering – we’re trying to help.’

‘I know.’

‘You don’t have to cope with this thing, whatever it is you’re going through, on your own.’

‘Thank you.’

‘Oh, don’t be grateful. We’re being selfish. There will come a time when we’ll need you to look after us.’

I thought of John. I thought of Charlotte.

Rina realized she was making progress. ‘And, Hannah,
dear, it’s not as if we’re asking you to do something … objectionable.’

‘No.’

‘I’m sure you mentioned that you’d always wanted to go to Berlin.’

I smiled up at Rina. ‘You’re right.’

‘I’m always right,’ she said.

CHAPTER FORTY

ADAM TREMLETT NEEDED
five pints of blood and was in intensive care for three days.

Trethene was buzzing with rumour and speculation. To start with, everybody believed the version of the story that my mother had told my father: that Mr Brecht had found Adam Tremlett inside his house, pocketing Mrs Brecht’s jewellery. For Mr Brecht to react as he did, in such circumstances, was understandable.

But then a second version of events began to do the rounds. Someone in the Smuggler’s Rest had spoken to Adam Tremlett when Adam was in his cups one evening – as happened quite regularly before he was attacked. Adam said he’d been invited to Thornfield House to quote for some landscaping work on the garden. Mr Brecht wanted to turn a small piece of land into a memorial to his wife. He’d asked Adam not to mention this to anyone, as it was to be a surprise for his daughter, but Adam had been so enthusiastic about the project that, after he’d had more than a few, he’d talked. If this was true, then Pieter Brecht had planned the whole thing. He’d lured Adam into the house, planning to kill him and make it look as if he’d been acting in self-defence. If Ellen hadn’t
intervened, it would have been cold-blooded murder.

The village was divided in opinion. Sympathies were mixed. At school, people kept asking me what was true and what was lies. I didn’t enjoy this kind of attention, and I knew no more than anyone else. All I could do was insist, always, that Mr Brecht was a good man at heart, that he would never do anything terrible unless he had been provoked beyond reason, but I wondered.

If he was capable of plotting to kill Adam, and if he had been prepared to wait so long to take his revenge, what might he still be planning to do to Jago?

I was relieved that Mr Brecht had gone away.

The police went to the hospital every day, and when Adam Tremlett was well enough to be interviewed, he said he didn’t remember anything about what had happened in Thornfield House or how he came to be injured. When this news filtered through to our family it promoted a heated discussion. Jago said Mum should go to the police and tell them what she knew, but Mum pointed out that it was all hearsay. She never saw Adam Tremlett, Mr Brecht or Ellen. By the time she arrived at Thornfield House, Adam had been taken away in an ambulance and Ellen and her father were not present. All Mum knew was what Mrs Todd told her as the two women cleaned the front room – which was that Adam Tremlett had broken in and Pieter Brecht had hit him with the poker. She didn’t know if Tremlett had threatened Mr Brecht, or lashed out at him. She didn’t know if what Mr Brecht had done had been an act of justifiable self-defence. There were plenty of regulars in the Smuggler’s Rest willing to testify that Mr Brecht was worried about intruders, and there was a surprising amount of sympathy for him. People were fed up with rising crime rates. They thought it was about time somebody made a stand to protect their own property. Adam was a drunk and a hothead. He wasn’t saying anything to defend
himself, and now the Brechts and Mrs Todd were gone, there was nobody to corroborate the story one way or the other.

Mum didn’t want to be involved any more than she already was.

‘It’s not our business, Malcolm,’ she said to Dad. ‘It’s water under the bridge now, best let it be.’ And Dad nodded and told Jago to stop mithering his mum.

Nobody knew where the Brechts and Mrs Todd had gone. It was as if they’d vanished off the face of the earth. Jago was almost out of his mind with worry for Ellen and frustration at not knowing where she was. I spent hours sitting with him, listening to his conjecture, reassuring him, but I was sick with anxiety too. I couldn’t eat and I couldn’t sleep.

‘Ellen’s tougher than you think,’ I told Jago. ‘She’ll be all right.’

‘But what if her psycho-dad has really flipped this time?’ he asked. ‘What if he’s murdered Ellen and Mrs Todd and killed himself?’

‘He wouldn’t do that,’ I said. ‘He
loves
Ellen! And he’s not mad. She makes most of it up.’

Jago looked at me as if I were an idiot. ‘Hannah, he nearly killed a man.’

‘Not just any old man, Jago. Someone who had broken into his house to steal his dead wife’s things!’

Once the thought that Mr Brecht might have killed himself was in my head, though, I could not get rid of it. It was a worm of worry that niggled away in my mind until I was as uneasy as Jago about the whole disappearance. We decided to go to Thornfield House ourselves to see if we could find any clue as to where they might have gone, or what Mr Brecht might have done.

We chose a quiet evening, when both our parents were out. We walked up the lane together, and although I was afraid of returning to that big, looming house, I was happy
to be doing something with Jago, just him and me, as it used to be. The house, when we reached it, was in complete darkness. There was no sound from inside, no movement. Still we were careful. I stood guard at the gate, while Jago climbed up to Ellen’s bedroom window as he had done so many times before. The window was closed, but not locked. Jago managed to work the lower sash open. He climbed inside, came downstairs, opened the front door and let me in. We pushed the door to, but did not lock it.

‘Remember the very first time we came here?’ Jago asked in a whisper.

‘With the witch?’

‘No, not then. The first time we came into the house, when the Brechts were moving in.’

I nodded.

‘I think I fell in love with Ellen then,’ he said.

‘You did not! We were just kids. You didn’t even like Ellen at first!’

‘I did. I thought about her all the time.’

‘Shhh …’ I said. ‘What was that?’

‘Nothing. Don’t be such a baby.’

‘There’s someone upstairs!’

‘No, there isn’t. There can’t be.’

I felt sick with nerves.

‘Come on,’ whispered Jago. He stepped forward and put his hand on the door to the front room.

‘No,’ I said, remembering what Mum had said about the blood. ‘Don’t go in there, please, Jago.’

Jago dropped his hand, saying, ‘If we look separately, we’ll be twice as fast.’

‘I’m not going anywhere on my own.’

‘All right,’ Jago said. ‘We’ll stay together.’

We were hoping we would find a piece of paper lying around with a forwarding address on it, or a luggage label or
something. We went into all the downstairs rooms except the front room, looked on all the tables and counters, and opened the drawers that weren’t locked, but we didn’t find anything. The rooms were spotlessly neat, just as they always had been. Only there was something cold and nasty about Thornfield House, something that had not been there before. It did not feel right. The atmosphere crawled under my skin and unsettled me. I could not wait to be out of the place.

Still I followed Jago up the stairs, exactly as I had done the first time. We didn’t switch on any lights even though dusk was falling outside. The landing was in near-darkness. I wrapped my arms around myself.

‘Let’s just go, Jago,’ I whispered.

‘I need to know where Ellen is,’ he whispered back. ‘I need to know she’s OK.’

He went up the narrow stairs to the attic, where Mrs Todd’s room used to be. I used the first-floor bathroom, not daring to lock, or even close the door, flushing the lavatory and washing my hands under the basin tap – noticing, with horror, that a clump of bloodied hair was still stuck in the plughole in the bath. I dried my hands on the lemon-coloured towel hung over the rail. The towel was damp.

I dropped it and jumped back.

My instinct was to shut the bathroom door, lock myself inside and scream. But the bathroom was at the back of the house; only woodland lay behind, so nobody would hear me. And I couldn’t leave Jago in the house on his own, not when he didn’t even know someone else was there.

I opened the door a fraction and looked around. I couldn’t see anyone but the landing was dark. I tiptoed forward, one tiny step at a time, my feet sinking into the thick carpet. I could smell fear on myself. At the bottom of the attic steps I paused and looked up.

‘Jago!’ I called as softly as I could. ‘
Jago!
’

When I felt the hand on my shoulder, I jumped and gasped.

‘Jago!’

‘Shhh.’ He held a finger to his lips.

‘Someone’s here!’ I whispered.

He nodded and pointed to the door to the room next to Ellen’s, the room where Mrs Brecht had died.

In the darkness, we could see a lighter strip beneath the door. The light was faint and flickering, candlelight. As I listened I heard, above the pounding of my heart, the faintest sound of sobbing.

We crept towards the door. We had already walked right past it. Whoever was in that room must surely have heard us coming in. They must have heard the toilet flush. They may even have seen us outside, in the garden, looking up. They might have been following us around the house, hiding in the dark shadows, waiting their opportunity …

Jago and I looked at one another.

‘What if it’s Mr Brecht?’ I mouthed.

Jago shook his head. He reached out to the door handle.