The Things You Didn't See(22)
‘Really?’ I can see this interests her and she takes a seat beside me. ‘What has she suggested?’
‘She said we should play her favourite music, but Mum never listens to any. Then she said I should bring in her favourite perfume, but I can’t go to the farm. I’ve been holding her hand, for touch. I want to do more. I just can’t think of what else to do.’ I can feel tears rising inside again.
‘What about reading to her, from her favourite book?’ Holly suggests.
‘She always hated it when I read to her, even when I was a child and she was supposed to listen to me. Mum loses herself in a book, but she wouldn’t want someone else’s voice to ruin it for her.’
‘Okay, something else.’ Holly probes, ‘What does she love to do?’
I think about what gave you pleasure, and remember you seated at the kitchen table, enjoying your afternoon break before going back up to your study to resume work. ‘Janet’s cakes – she has one every day with a cup of tea. God, I can smell them now.’
‘Janet’s your housekeeper, isn’t she? Ash’s mother. Didn’t she make the 999 call?’
‘That’s right. She found Mum when she arrived that morning, ran home to make the call.’
‘And your mum loves her baking?’
I’m confused as to where this questioning is taking us. ‘Yes, but what good is that? She can’t eat anything. The only nutrition she’s getting is through that tube.’
I’m no longer crying, I’m watching Holly. I can practically hear her brain working.
‘Do you really think your mother was shot by someone?’
I look at her, certain there’s a bond of understanding between us. She was there that morning too, she saw you.
‘I’m sure she didn’t shoot herself. I don’t even think she could. But no one else believes me.’
‘I do,’ Holly says. ‘And I’ve got an idea.’
DAY 3
MONDAY 3 NOVEMBER
11
Holly
Holly’s Fiat was still splattered with mud from when she’d travelled this road on Saturday morning, but this time she didn’t turn into the farm, she continued further on down Innocence Lane to the house where Janet Cley lived with Ash.
Sooner than expected she saw it, a low-slung thatched cottage in Suffolk pink, the traditional shade resulting from stirring pigs’ blood into paint. It looked older than the building the Hawkes lived in, and might even have been the original farmhouse. Ash and Janet had lived here back when she was a girl living on the airbase nearby. He was the grubby boy who never had the right shoes, whose shirt was always frayed at the neck. Kids are cruel, and Holly remembered how Jamie and his mates, with their smarter uniforms and stylist-cut fringes, would push him around. He never seemed to mind though, as if he knew his place wasn’t to be with them. He belonged to the animals and the land, and when she saw him yesterday, she saw he was now settled in his skin.
He was ribbed by the boys from the base for having no dad, too. On the airbase, people lived singly or in families. If a marriage failed, the non-military spouse would return to America, so the idea of a parent and a child living alone together seemed unusual enough to attract bullying. Or maybe Ash, being as he was, was simply vulnerable to any taunts and this was just a convenient way to get a reaction. There must have been other kids at the school with an absent parent, but if so, she wasn’t aware that they got picked on because of it. Only Ash seemed to suffer. She felt ashamed for her bullying brother, and also for herself, because she had witnessed the bullying and said nothing. She remembered how Janet would sometimes come at lunch and wait by the red-brick wall to sit with her son as he ate his sandwich, since he wasn’t supposed to leave the school grounds and no one was playing with him.
Feeling desperately sad, she pulled up beside an old banger, its tyres deep in mud and as flat as the fields opposite, useless to all but the opportunistic magpie who had made a nest on the steering wheel. There was an abandoned tractor on the scrubland around the cottage, and some discarded Calor Gas cylinders.
She closed her car door and walked away without locking it, thinking There’s no one here, not for miles. That must have been what Maya thought, when she left her home unlocked last Friday night. If Cassandra was right, and someone else shot Maya, danger was close by.
The outside of the cottage was in better shape than the tractor, but only just. The thatch was spiky and dark in places, a bedraggled hat above its raddled face, its eyes unlit. The ground in the yard was uneven, stones and muck rolling freely with no defined border to stop them. There was no grass, just patches of white chalky earth and shingle.
Holly pressed the cracked plastic doorbell but no one came. Noticing a wire dangling loose beneath the casing, she rapped her knuckles on the glass panel and peered through. A small figure was curled in the corner of the sofa, knees drawn up to her chin like a child. When she stood up and came to open the door, Holly recognised Janet Cley, the woman who had sat outside the playground to comfort her son. That was twenty years ago, yet her mousey-brown hair was still pulled back into its usual braid, incongruously youthful against her lined, worried face. Thin legs stuck out from beneath her ugly beige housedress, and she wore tattered slippers.
‘Miss Cley?’
‘Yes, can I help you?’ She spoke in a small, nervous voice.