The Secret by the Lake (34 page)

Julia and I went into the doctor’s bedroom. I had a feeling of excited dread in my stomach, like a child who knows it is doing something forbidden. Julia shut the door behind us.

‘Well,’ she said, ‘here we are.’

It was a large, pleasant room, with predominantly dark wood and deep-coloured fabrics; a bed, a wardrobe, a commode, a bathroom to one side, emergency help buttons, handrails, hoists. There were a few antique pieces that had clearly been brought from Dr Croucher’s home; a polished oak grandmother clock, an ornate plant-stand, a fancy coat-rack and a folding card-table with a green baize top. The curtains had not been drawn across French windows that opened out over the lake, and although, in darkness, we could not see the water through the fog, in daylight Dr Croucher must have had a wonderful view of the water, and the birds, the changing colours. I supposed in the summer months he could open the windows and sit outside.

Julia wandered around the room, touching the objects. There were decanters on the chest of drawers, a heavy ashtray, a cigarette-lighter mounted on to a brass stand, a television set.

‘He doesn’t want for any home comforts, does he?’ she asked.

I crossed to the window and gazed through the glass at the blank whiteness beyond. My leg grazed something tucked behind the base of the curtain; the doctor’s bag. I pulled it free, held it up. It was old, it had obviously seen good service – a black leather bag with two sturdy handles. I put it on the bed.

‘It’s the same bag,’ Julia said.

‘Hmm?’

‘It’s the same bag he always had. The one he emptied once on our kitchen table to prove he had not stolen Father’s pocket-watch. Open it, Amy. Look inside.’

‘I don’t know if I should.’

‘I’ll open it then. What does he need his old bag for these days?’ Julia came across to the bed and opened the clasp. The two halves of the top of the bag separated slowly. Inside was a silky lining, the fabric worn and faded from purple to a dull grey. Julia pulled out a stethoscope and tossed it on to the bed; an otoscope, a magnifying glass, a pair of surgical scissors, spatulae. ‘What does he keep all this stuff for?’ she asked. ‘To relive his glory days? To remember how he used to be the most important man in the village, the one everyone turned to with their problems and their worries, the one who saw them into the world and out of it?’

‘Julia, perhaps you shouldn’t …’

Julia grabbed the bag and tipped it upside down. A clatter of pill boxes emptied on to the bed. Small bottles of God-knows-what. A bundle of photographs tied up with an elastic band.

‘What are those?’

Julia picked up the bundle, picked at the band. The sensation of dread inside me had grown now so that it was hard inside me, pressing against my ribcage and my spine as if I had somehow swallowed a bowling ball.

‘Don’t look,’ I said.

‘I have to,’ Julia said, and her voice was cold now and hard. She broke the band and discarded it. She looked at the first picture, dropped it, looked at the second, looked at the third … and then threw the whole bundle of photographs on to the floor. They scattered like leaves, or playing cards, covering the carpet, the bed, the seat of the chair. I picked up the image nearest to me. It was a photograph of a young boy, eight or nine years old. He was naked. He was holding the erect penis of an adult man. I dropped the picture, stepped away from it and wiped the fingers that had touched it on my skirt.

‘Oh!’ I cried. ‘Oh God!’

Now Julia came to me. She put her arms around me. ‘Shhh,’ she whispered, and she held her cool hand against my cheek. ‘It’s all right, Amy. It’s all right. It ends tonight.’

‘The pictures, Julia …’

‘Those were what Caroline wanted the police officer to find! That’s why she went to so much trouble to make him look in the bag!’

Of course they were! The photograph I had seen danced before my eyes; the boy’s awkward averted gaze, a scab on his knee, his pudding-basin haircut, the same as every other boy that age in Britain, the freckles on his nose. He looked like a perfectly ordinary boy, but what he was being made to do … Oh, I would never, now, be able to get the picture out of my mind. And there were so many photographs. So many of them.

And suddenly all Caroline’s actions made sense. All those things she’d done that nobody understood, all of it became clear.

‘If she knew of the pictures, Dr Croucher must have shown them to her,’ Julia said.

‘The shed. He took her into the shed and she counted the times off on the wall.’
Something something something smudge smudge smudge. Dr Croucher made me do it.
Did Dr Croucher make a game of it at first? Did Caroline have to pick a card and then copy the action it depicted, like a new twist on a game of charades? Was it something like that? Did she go willingly the first time, play along, and after that was she trapped? Did he take photographs of
her
?

If you don’t do as I ask, then I’ll tell your mother what you did. I’ll tell her what you saw, what you touched, what a bad, unlovable, dreadful girl you are. There’ll be no point denying it, I will show her the photographs.

‘Frank Leeson and Gerard Croucher both with the same predilection for children,’ Julia said quietly. ‘Both of them acted out their fantasies on my sister. That’s half of the village club committee.’ She walked away from me and poked at the doctor’s bed with her stick. ‘Bloody Dr Croucher with his bloody brass plaque on the door, his bloody OBE for bloody services to the community.’ She raised the stick and slammed it down hard on the doctor’s pillow, making a massive dent. The photographs on the bed lifted into the air, and settled again. Julia stood and breathed deeply. She trembled on the exhale. She said, ‘He must think he’s untouchable. He must think he’s unanswerable to anyone. Come on! Let’s go and find him.’

WE WALKED BACK
along the corridor, out of the bedroom wing, towards the main hallway that would take us back towards the communal rooms of Sunnyvale. However, the geography of the place worked against us. The concert had just finished and when we reached the hallway, it was busy with traffic coming the other way – old women who were unsteady on their legs being helped by nurses, old men with sticks shuffling along the carpet, the group of schoolchildren hurrying out towards the exit. I looked for Viviane, but did not see her. There was a niggling anxiety inside me but I ignored it. I’d heard Vivi singing a few minutes earlier; I knew she was safe. Some of the elderly people were humming or singing; they all seemed happy. I heard murmurings, snatches of conversations:
beautiful voices, sang like angels, took me back, made me remember, made me forget.

It took Julia and me a while to excuse our way through the old people and get ourselves into the day room, and when we reached it, the place was empty save for Susan Pettigrew, who was stacking up the chairs that had been arranged in a semi-circle around the central area, where a microphone stood on a stand attached to a plug in the wall by a snaking cable. The lid of the piano was still open, sheet music still held in place on the stand above the keys. Empty sherry glasses were scattered about the surfaces of the room, and ashtrays; little bowls of crisps and nuts. Through the window, I saw the last child climb on board the Hailswood School minibus. Its engine was already running, smoke puffing out of the exhaust. I watched as it reversed, turned around, and then headed off into the fog.

I thought Viviane must be on the bus. There was nobody at home to meet her and we hadn’t left a note, but the front door to the cottage was unlocked. The lights were on. She would be worried but she would be safe on her own for a short while.

I didn’t have time to worry about Vivi now.

Susan was clearly alarmed to see me again. She put down the chair she was holding and stood with her arms at her side, a worn green cardigan stretched tight at the buttons over an ugly brown dress patterned with tiny sprigs of heather. She was wearing plastic house-shoes on her feet, thick tan stockings. Her feet were swollen and her ankles bulged over the tops of the shoes.

‘Hello,’ she said, her eyes flickering anxiously from me to Julia and back again.

‘Hello, dear,’ I said, and I went to Susan and embraced her. Susan felt warm and soft. She smelled of the harsh detergent I’d smelled in the vicarage kitchen and she stood tense in my arms as if she did not know how to respond to an affectionate touch. I stepped back and smiled, saying, ‘It’s nice to see you again.’

Susan would not look me in the eye.

I turned to Julia. ‘Julia, this is Susan Pettigrew.’

‘I remember you,’ Julia said. ‘You used to come to our house sometimes to play with Caroline. I was her younger sister, do you remember? I used to tag along after you. Caroline used to call me Goody Two Shoes.’

Susan nodded carefully, as if unsure whether this was the answer she was supposed to give. She twisted her fingers together anxiously. ‘She only said that to tease,’ she said, barely a whisper.

‘What’s that, dear?’

‘She only called you Goody Two Shoes to tease. She was proud of you. She looked after you.’

‘I didn’t know, back then, that I needed looking after. I didn’t know there were bad people in the village.’

Susan looked embarrassed. Her fingers wound together and then she remembered what she had been doing and returned to the stacking of the chairs.

Julia laid a hand on her arm. She tried again, gently: ‘We know Frank Leeson was a bad man, Susan, and we know he wasn’t the only one. We know about the pictures in the doctor’s bag.’

Now Susan paled with fear. There was panic in her eyes. The feet of the chair she was holding hovered inches above the carpet.

‘It’s a secret,’ she breathed.

Julia took the chair from Susan and slotted it on to the stack. Then she clasped Susan’s hands in her own. ‘Sit down with me for a moment, please,’ she said.

‘I have to finish clearing up.’

‘This won’t take long, dear.’

‘I must clear up properly or I’ll be in trouble.’

‘You won’t be in any trouble, Susan, I promise. Just sit with me for a moment. Sit here, beside me.’

Susan’s eyes flicked backwards and forwards, to the door that opened out to the corridor, to the closed door that went into the dining room, but she sat, heavily, in the chair beside Julia and waited obediently for the questions, still twisting her fingers together on her lap, the smell of fear oozing from beneath her clothes.

‘Are there any more secrets that we should know about?’ Julia asked.

‘Secrets aren’t for telling,’ Susan said. ‘“Whoever goes about slandering reveals secrets, but he who is trustworthy in spirit keeps a thing covered.”’

‘Someone told me that secrets make a person lonely,’ I said. ‘Anyone who makes you keep a secret doesn’t want you to be happy. They don’t really care for you.’

‘But the Bible says …’

‘What the Bible says is sometimes taken out of context.’

Susan continued to twist her fingers, making patterns with her hands. The clock on the mantel ticked. A long way away, a door clicked shut and she jumped.

‘Susan, dear,’ Julia said, ‘you used to share your secrets with Caroline, didn’t you? I remember how the two of you used to shut yourselves up in Caroline’s bedroom. I could hear you inside, whispering, and I always wished I had a friend like you – someone I could talk to about anything.’

‘I was going to live with Caroline,’ Susan said suddenly. ‘In Scotland.’

‘Were you, dear?’

‘She was going to run away with Robert Aldridge and live in a little house at the side of the loch and he was going to work as the gamekeeper and I was going to go and live with them. Caroline said as I could help with the baby. We were going to have to change our names and everything because Mrs Aldridge’s father was very powerful. He could have had us all put in prison.’

‘Was that the dream?’

‘It was the plan. We had it all worked out. Robert had took some jewellery from his wife. Caroline was looking after it. They were going to sell it in Scotland.’

The truth, finally, was almost within reach; it was hovering on the periphery of the three of us, the three women sitting in the empty day room, the fire burning low in the grate. The truth was like a moth hovering around the flame of a candle. I knew it was there but I could not quite catch it.

‘Caroline told you she was going to live with Mr Aldridge?’ Julia asked.

‘Yes. They would say they were married and nobody in Scotland would know any different.’

‘But he already had a wife.’

‘One he didn’t love.’

‘Are you sure he didn’t love her, Susan? Or is that just what he told Caroline?’

‘No, no, I’m sure!’ Susan said, wide-eyed, anxious now to be believed. ‘Mr Aldridge loved Caroline. He did! He had it all planned out. He had a friend, a lawyer who was going to help him sort things out. He had found somewhere for us all to live and he’d gone to Scotland to settle the arrangements. He was going to come back and collect Caroline and me the following week. But then the baby came early. It wasn’t supposed to be born until September. It wasn’t supposed to be like that.’

She paused, looked at Julia for approval.

‘You’re doing very well to remember all this, Susan,’ Julia said.

‘It’s all I think about, all the time,’ Susan said. ‘Sometimes I pretend that everything went to plan, and that me and Caroline and Mr Aldridge and the child are all living in Scotland. I imagine that we are having a lovely time and that we are all happy.’ Her face lit up as, for a moment, she imagined herself in this alternative life. Julia glanced at me and I could see, from her face, that the story was almost breaking her heart.

‘But it didn’t happen like that, did it?’ she said gently.

‘No.’ Susan shook her head. ‘The baby came early.’

‘And then what?’

‘I went to visit Caroline,’ Susan said. ‘She was in bed. She was very poorly. Her mum – sorry, miss, I know she was your mum too, and she was a nice lady – but she told me I must tell Caroline to forget about the baby. She said the baby was stillborn and that was the end of it. But Caroline had heard the baby crying. She knew the doctor had taken him away and she wanted him back.’