Living in the Shadows (27 page)

‘I saw another girl there. I thought she was one of them.’

‘Stop it.’ Mary pressed her fingers over her eyes, cupping the sides of her face. ‘Just stop it, Jean.’

‘I’m just saying—’

‘Well, don’t. She’s staying with Jacqueline and Nicki for a reason. She had to leave home. When her stepfather discovered she was going out with Richard he got violent. She was scared and ran away. You lovely daughter took her in without question.’

Jean gave a dismissive little shrug. ‘So what’s that got to do with me?’

‘Jean,’ Mary took hold of her hands. ‘Karen’s stepfather is George Shuttleworth.’

Chapter 53: Victoria Schormann

Ashford: Saturday, October 11th

Victoria was nervous. She stopped pulling at the roots of the stubborn dandelion in the ground in front of her but kept her head down, afraid to look up in case one of the others were watching her. The atmosphere over the past four days had been tense; everyone was waiting to see what decision Melody would make, what the reaction of the Elders, of the Master, would be.

Without lifting her head she let her eyes slide over the figures surrounding her. There were five of them, including her. They’d been struggling for the past two hours to make the large plot of land into something that would grow vegetables. It was hopeless; the more they dug, hoed and weeded the more evident it was that there was no real soil there, only rubble from the foundations of some old building.

It was a stupid time of the year to be doing this, anyway, Victoria thought, sure that her father would have laughed at them if he could see what they were trying to do. for a minute, she pictured the garden in Llamroth … at home.

She settled back on her haunches and wiped her forehead with her arm.

‘Are you here because you couldn’t recite the mantra, like me?’ One of the girls sidled closer to her.

‘No,’ Victoria was surprised. ‘I thought they’d just allocated the jobs as usual.’ She moved forward on her knees to tackle another patch of weeds.

‘No. Ask the others; we’re all here because of stuff we’ve done wrong. I forgot the mantra – third time this week. When the Elder came this morning it went straight out of my head, even though I’d tried so hard in the night to memorise it. So here I am.’

The Elders giving them mantras to learn was one of the things Victoria resented but, after three weeks in the commune, she was learning to pick her fights. Or was she? she thought. Was she doing this – she looked around at the other three, silently and hopelessly slogging away at the ground – because of something she’d done? And Seth was letting it happen?

She’d quickly come to see that the stupid mantra-thing had a purpose: it was to stop the girls talking between themselves at night, having any time to question anything that had happened during the day. It stopped them thinking. Or it was supposed to. Victoria had her own way of getting around that: she wrote the words down after the Elder had gone and memorised the long repetitive refrains in the morning as she washed and dressed. She often wondered how many of the others did as she did: how many were like her.

Something had taken her by surprise; she was homesick. She’d mocked herself when she’d first admitted it to herself. She spent the nights wondering what her parents were doing, if Richard had got the job at the hospital in Manchester. If Gelert missed her. She often thought back to the early morning walks she took with the large Alsatian before she went to college, remembering the way he barked and chased the waves.

Remembering the freedom. Now she froze, her hand resting on the soil next to a clump of dandelions. She’d had freedom in Llamroth.

‘Summer?’ The girl touched Victoria’s arm.

‘Oh, sorry,’ She jumped. ‘I don’t know what I’m supposed to have done. I can’t think…’ And then it hit her; they thought she was sympathising with Melody: that she was better kept away from her. She knew she was being watched, as they all were, but she thought she’d kept her increasing resentment of the control Seth and his followers had over her to herself. Obviously not.

For the first time in her life, Victoria saw how understanding her parents were of her. How often they’d given in to her.

She missed them. As the days passed she’d become more and more homesick. Once she came to, with a start, and realised she’d been dreaming of her mother’s apple pie, made of the fruit from the tree in the garden – the one planted by her mum’s brother, the unknown Uncle Tom, when they first went to live in Llamroth.

And, with another moment of awareness, she realised she didn’t even know why her parents had gone to Wales to live in the first place. There was so much not spoken of in the family. Or that she hadn’t listened to – that was probably more like it, she thought. In the past she’d presumed all the talk of the past was about her father and the war, and she’d thought all that old stuff boring.

‘So could you remind me?’ The girl was talking to her, her face anxious.

‘Sorry, what?’

‘I said, could you remind me of the mantra? Please. The others won’t talk to me; they think we’re being watched.’ She looked anxiously back towards the main building

‘We probably are.’ Victoria lifted her shoulders. ‘But I’m sick of it.’

The girl gave an inward gasp. ‘Oh, don’t—’

‘Do you want to know or not?’ Victoria snapped.

‘Sorry. Yes. He, the Elder, said he’d be back to ask me again later. I’m so scared—’

‘Well, don’t be – that’s daft. What on earth do you think they can do to you?’

‘What they’re doing to Melody – make everyone ignore her. I couldn’t stand that.’ The girl chopped uselessly at the ground with her hoe. ‘Or worse, they could make me leave and I’ve nowhere to go. So, please.’

‘It’s: “Cultivate the habit of being grateful. There is always something to be thankful for. If these key points are not understood, you will neglect clear visualisation and hold on to self-pride,”’ Victoria chanted. ‘So there you go. Just remember the mantra is always worded to make sure you know which side your bread’s buttered.’ Without even thinking about it she’d just repeated one of her mother’s stock phrases. The groundswell of homesickness made her hands shake as she reached out for another dandelion. ‘Just remember you’re in their control.’

And, with that thought, the trepidation that had followed her around since Tuesday was swept away by a torrent of resentment.

Chapter 54: Linda Booth

Ashford: Saturday, October 11th

‘You need to listen to them, Mum.’

Harriet Worth was on the seat of the large bay window changing the baby’s nappy. She didn’t look up. ‘No, I don’t. Coming in here telling me my husband’s some sort of gangster. It’s ridiculous.’ She wrung a cloth out from a small bowl and wiped it over the little boy’s skin. ‘You’ve always hated your … George from the minute he came into the house. So, no, I don’t need to listen to this rubbish.’

‘It’s not rubbish. And this proves I was right to hate him,’ Karen said. ‘Tell her, Linda.’

‘I don’t want to hear it.’ Her mother spoke through two large nappy-pins held between her lips while drying the baby and lathering cream on him. She took a long time to wrap the towelling nappy around him, before fastening it. Eventually, she sat back, her hands resting on her thighs.

‘It’s true, Harriet,’ Linda said.

‘Mrs Worth to you, missy. You’re not in charge here, this isn’t the hospital.’

‘Sorry. Mrs Worth. And I’m sorry, but it’s true.’ Linda exchanged glances with Richard, sharing the woman’s distress. ‘It did happen.’

‘Okay, then.’ Harriet pulled a white cellular blanket off the back of the settee and wrapped the baby in it before picking him up. ‘Tell me again. I’m not going to believe it the second time around, but I can see you’re not going to leave until you do.’ She gazed out of the window at the garden as though disinterested in anything they had to say, but Linda saw how she shook as she held the baby to her shoulder.

‘You tell her this time, Linda. It’s your story after all,’ Karen said.

‘And that’s what it is, a cock-and-bull story.’ Harriet gave them a sideways look. ‘Oh, for goodness sake sit down, you look like judge and jury standing there.’

They perched on the edge of the settee. Linda wished she was anywhere but in the house that was contaminated by George Shuttleworth. She couldn’t think of him now as anything but Shuttleworth.

‘Well, go on.’ Harriet swung round, glaring at Linda but there was a tremor of apprehension in her voice.

Linda clasped her hands between her knees and spoke slowly. ‘I was about seven,’ she said. ‘From what I can remember of before … of before it happened, I’d gone off on my own. It was Whit Sunday. The band contest was on so it must have been after six o’clock.’

Harriet made an impatient noise. She rocked the little boy, looking back out of the window.

‘I think I’d fallen out with my cousin. I suppose I was sulking about something because I ran off.’ She stopped, all at once there in that moment: feeling the warm cone of chips in her hand, the noise of the crowded pub, seeing her cousin skipping with two other girls, remembering how cross she’d been that Jacqueline had so quickly forgotten her.

She shivered: images of the deserted prison camp clear in her mind – the old mill with its black and empty windows, the big gates. ‘There was new barbed wire all around the fence,’ she said. ‘I’d forgotten that.’

‘What?’ Harriet swung round. ‘Where?’

Linda hadn’t realised she’d spoken out loud. She didn’t answer. ‘Anyway, I must have fallen asleep. When I woke up he was there; it was as though he’d been watching me.’ She couldn’t help the shudder.

Richard squeezed her arm. ‘You’re doing great, Lin.’

Karen held Linda’s other hand. ‘Go on. Please.’

Linda looked squarely at Harriet. ‘He said Mum was looking for me and I should go with him.’ It felt as though the words were stuck in her throat and she’d have to push them out. The sun, pouring light across the room in a wide line, divided it into light and shadow.

Swallowing, forcing herself to carry on she said, ‘He didn’t take me to my mother … he took me into the old mill. I kicked and screamed but he hit me. Hard. Here.’ She touched the back of her head. ‘Until then I don’t think anyone had ever hit me. He kept me there for days. I was shut away. It was so dark.’ She ran her tongue around her mouth but it didn’t help the dryness. ‘I found out later it was some sort of a boiler-room in the basement of what used to be a hospital. Part of the camp.’ For a moment Linda was back there listening to the scuffles of rats.

Harriet frowned. ‘I thought you said it was an old mill.’

‘It was the one in Ashford; the one turned into a POW camp in the war.’

Harriet didn’t acknowledge Linda’s explanation.

‘He tied me up. Part of the time he put something over my mouth because I couldn’t stop screaming.’ She heard the sharp intake of breath from the woman sitting opposite her, holding the baby close and rocking faster. ‘I don’t remember much more. I knew I tried to escape, I remember that much. The next thing I knew my uncle, Uncle Peter, Richard’s father,’ she nodded towards him, ‘was holding me in his arms and shouting. I remember the words. He was shouting “She is here.”

‘I promise you, the man who took me, who kidnapped me, was your husband. His real name is George Shuttleworth, not Worth.’

She waited, the three of them waited, watching Harriet struggling to keep control.

‘But why? Why would he do that? You were just a child.’

Linda felt something give inside her: a release of the tension that had held her rigid from the moment she’d walked into that house. ‘He hated my family. There is so much history between them. Too much to explain right now.’

‘I have a right to know,’ Harriet whispered. ‘You’re accusing my husband of this dreadful thing. You say he hated your family but you don’t tell me why.’ Now she was still, tears trickling down her cheeks.

‘Richard’s told Karen. Let her tell you.’ Linda let go of their hands and stood; she needed to leave, to get away. ‘But you do believe me, don’t you?’

‘No. I don’t know. I have to think. George will be back any moment. You need to go.’

‘I’ll come back on Monday, Mum,’ Karen said.

‘You’re not staying?’ Harriet clutched the baby tighter. He began to cry.

Karen stroked his cheek. ‘No. I’ll be back on Monday, when
he’s
gone to work. I’ll ring first.’

Harriet didn’t answer her. ‘You should go,’ she said again to Linda.

‘Yes,’ Linda said. She held her hand out to Harriet. It was ignored. But the horror in the woman’s eyes told Linda she believed what she was saying.

Chapter 55: William Booth

Ashford: Sunday, October 12th

‘Well, well, what have we ’ere, then?’ The man in uniform filled the doorway. He slung his backpack on the kitchen floor. ‘So this is the fancy man, eh?’

William swung round, the tea-towel and the plate he was drying still in his hands. At the sink Susan slowly lifted her hands from the soapy water. ‘Charlie.’ Her voice shook.

‘Proper cosy little scene, eh?’ The man swaggered in. ‘In
my
house.’ He stood close to William. The sourness of his breath, the tiny blur of red veins in the corners of his eyes was testament to a session of heavy drinking. ‘Nice. I’m off to Northern Ireland, not knowing if I’ll be coming back in one piece, if at all. And you, you bastard, are here having it away with
my
wife. Playing daddy to
my
son.’

‘I’m not. But there again, neither are you.’ William put the plate and towel on the worktop. The two men were the same height and William met the other’s challenge with a still and steady gaze.

‘This has nothing to do with William.’ Susan moved next to him, drying her hands. He could feel her trembling.

‘This has everything to do with him. I’ve caught you out at last.’ The man’s eyes slid sideways to Susan. His top lip curled into a sneer. ‘This is who you chucked me out for?’

‘I didn’t. We were finished long before I met William,’ Susan said.