Four British Mysteries Read online

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  The howling of the figures in the trees showed no signs of stopping. Freya fell against the inside of her front door, silencing the wind and the screams. In the hallway, all was still. Lamplight shone from the kitchen and a soft ticking reached her ears, of the grandfather clock to her right. She realised she still held Eaton’s leash in one hand. Her fingers were white, where they clasped it tightly. Slowly she placed it where it belonged, on the coat-pegs with her Parka.

  “George,” she called. The word was followed by movement upstairs, as he stepped onto the landing. The stairs creaked three times beneath as he began to descend.

  “Hello?” he said. His face appeared over the banister.

  She realised she didn’t know why she had called him. There was nothing she could say to explain what had happened. “Nothing, darling. Just... Nothing.”

  He stared at her a second longer, then started to withdraw from the stairs.

  “George, wait.”

  “Yes?” he said, reappearing.

  “Have you seen your sister?”

  “She’s in her room,” he said.

  “Thank you.”

  She didn’t ask him what he was doing upstairs in his room. Nor did she mention Eaton. Alone she moved through the cottage, inspecting every room, as though viewing them for the first or last time. In the sitting room, her eyes lingered over the case of butterflies. She stared at their delicately preserved wings, their withered bodies and fading colours. They were beauty and revulsion, change and growth and colour, captured in the glittering scales of their wings, and she had hung them from her wall, as though to remind herself of these things, to celebrate them. In the kitchen the black mass of the AGA held her attention, a testimony to man’s appetite for containment. He bound his hunger to the flames of the cooker in an attempt to manage it, just as he displayed decaying remnants of the wild in cases on his walls.

  In the bathroom, she studied herself in the antique mirror, as her mother had done so often before her. She wondered if they saw the same things now, if that was why Harriet had spent so long diligently masking herself beneath make-up and blusher each morning.

  The cottage sounded with movement as she exited the bathroom and crossed the landing. She might have been walking through a dream; the haze of outside having followed into her home. George had fallen asleep on his bedroom floor, beside the window. She left him where he lay, curled up like an animal in its den.

  She knocked at Lizzie’s door. When there was no answer she knocked again. Still there was no response, so she pushed the door open and stepped inside.

  The room was dark with night. Strange silhouettes leapt out at her; sculptures, illuminated in moonlight. She looked past the twisted fey figures, the screaming face casts, the abstract shapes that she realised with growing concern might have been mouths; papier mâché versions of the lost brooch –

  Her daughter lay on the floor. Where George was curled comfortably into his chest; however, she was sprawled against the wood. Freya saw for the first time how pale Lizzie looked beneath the light of the moon, how thin her arms had become; like sticks of bone, her face gaunt, as though stripped of flesh and life.

  She rushed to her daughter and gathered her in her arms. She was cold and hard to touch, and proved horribly light when she lifted her to the bed. A thin line of blood emerged from her nose, where she must have knocked herself. It was brown in the dark and crusty when she tried to wipe it away. How long her daughter had been lying there she couldn’t tell. All she knew was the terrible state of the girl, who, it seemed, had denied her simple hunger at every turn, where everyone else had indulged it.

  * * *

  When Lizzie woke some hours later, she shared her private hell with Freya. It was a story of denial, driven to extremes by the growing hunger inside. There was no escaping the cycle of eating and purging. It was, in itself, all devouring; sapping Lizzie’s strength, her health, her life. Only her will remained, and what an iron will it was, to maintain such strictures, to uphold her monstrous habits even as they ate her up, pound by pound! If she wouldn’t feed the hunger then it would feed on her, until there was nothing left. Mother and daughter wept together, and hugged, and Lizzie unburdened herself further.

  At first, she said, she hid the changes easily. They were slow and she was resourceful. She wore loose clothing and blamed tiredness on late nights, or too much pressure at school. Still, her friends looked slimmer than her. The boys at school followed Rachel as dogs to a scent. It seemed demeaning and yet she craved those base attentions, their lingering eyes on her body, their noses sniffing her scents. If only they would look! She couldn’t remember a time before A-levels, before reflections in the mirror, before complex carbohydrates and glossy magazines. Reduced to these things, she was not a person. She might as well not have existed.

  Food, she said, began to lose its appeal. She noted the way spots of grease swam on the surface of gravy. Meat revolted her. This was no moral choice, no personal preference, as Freya’s vegetarianism had once been – how long ago that seemed now. Lizzie spoke of plucked chicken like drowned men’s flesh; bare and white and bloated. Sausages glistened with fat. Bacon shrivelled and grew hard. Even as Freya celebrated her new-found hunger with cooked breakfasts each morning these sickened her daughter, so that she barely touched them, and in private regurgitated what little had passed her lips.

  “How could you do this to yourself?” Freya said, when her daughter had finished speaking. “Boys don’t want this. Nobody wants this!”

  “It wasn’t about the boys,” she said, shrinking into her covers. “That was just how it started. But then it became more. I started getting hungrier. It felt like I was losing control and the worse that got, the more I wanted to fight it. And when I couldn’t, when I couldn’t cut out food altogether, I had to throw it up to get it out of me.”

  They continued to argue, her daughter’s expression so much like the hares’, caught in the headlights on the road through the village.

  “I don’t understand,” said Freya. “This isn’t normal, darling. Your body needs food to grow, to live. You know this!”

  “It’s under control!” she said.

  “It isn’t, Lizzie! Let me get you something to eat.”

  “No.”

  “Please,” she said, “Lizzie. You’re starving yourself.”

  “I can’t lose control! Look at the rest of the village! Look at what they’re turning into, at what they’ve become!”

  “It’s normal,” said Freya, and even as she spoke she realised that she was right. Lynnwood had always taken pride in its rich array of produce. Temptation had always been near. Breads, cheeses, wines and preserves; the village expressed itself through the unique brand of its New Forest flavours, as all places do, unconsciously or otherwise. There were the Allwood’s jams, Catherine’s wines, McCready’s meats, never mind Lynnwood’s wilder appetites, which said more about the village than words ever could. The revelation seemed to rise through her, dizzy and distancing. “It’s normal to feel hungry. It’s normal to want boys, to feel confused and scared, but that’s what I’m here for. To talk to you, to help you, to be your mother. The only thing that isn’t normal is this.” She reached out to touch her daughter’s arm. For a second she graced the skin, cold and hard again, before it vanished into the bedcovers.

  “It’s normal,” Freya said, and the last vestiges of doubt faded from her own mind. “You must be starving.”

  Her daughter’s sallow eyes rose to meet hers, and in the darkness of her bedroom, swaddled in her sheets, she nodded.

  * * *

  Freya stayed with Lizzie all night while she slept. At some point she also fell asleep, her daughter wrapped in her arms. It felt good to hold her close, impossibly good, as though holding her somehow made up for the weeks of disregard. She felt stronger, more whole, completed by the closeness of her offspring.

  They woke before dawn to shouting. At first she was confused, still
deep in her dream by the brook. Then she realised the shouting was real. Lizzie was recoiled into the bedsheets and the sound coming from outside. Moving to the window, she stared down at the street and the man crouched in the middle of the road. Stripped of clothes and humanity he could have been anyone. It was the mask that betrayed him. He continued to shout; wordless noises, wild and unchallenged.

  Then a second voice reached her ears, not from the street or the village but the room next door. It was a small voice, high and raw, like a feral cat screaming into the light blue of dawn. Each scream resonated inside her. Time seemed to slow, everything else fading into the background. All that mattered were those screams, which she realised then came from George’s bedroom. She rushed from the window and Lizzie’s room, across the landing and into her son’s room. George was nowhere in sight. She raced to the open window, tearing back the curtains in time to see him vanishing with Mr. Shepherd into the village.

  She stood at the window, watching him as he raced from view. She wasn’t especially upset, as she thought she should have been. Nor was she happy. Instead she felt a surge of relief that she couldn’t hope to explain. Her son, at least, was free now.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  “A thin, delicate figure, with wings like glass and wide black eyes, Gluttony is the youngest of the Seven Sins. Her Court and she drift languidly through the forests of the world, accompanied by mellifluous music and the intoxicating scent of spring. Yet they are not to be underestimated, for when night falls, a feverish hunger descends on the Sin and they erupt, irresistible as the tide, through the undergrowth with their bows and spears and bloody, nail-bitten claws. They slash and maul, searching out the beasts of the forest to devour, with bare hands gorging themselves, sating their yearning hunger with raw flesh and slurping down still-warm blood.”

  Description of ‘The Forest’ by Elizabeth Rankin, on display at Hollybush Manor.

  * * *

  Freya woke again beside her daughter. For one moment of uncertainty, she wondered whether she had dreamt her son’s escape. Then she saw the shining white of winter outside, felt her daughter trembling beside her, the clammy heat that prickled her skin, and she knew it had been real.

  They left the house together. Lizzie followed obediently and Freya wondered whether the girl was as drained as she. They moved quickly through the morning snow, Lizzie’s shoes making compact sounds with each tread. Freya had forgone footwear. Her feet were cold, then painful, then numb enough that she couldn’t feel them. She moved soundlessly beside her daughter.

  Smoke continued to pour from behind McCready’s barn, as it had done now for over a week. The smoke tickled her nose almost as soon as they reached the high street, and she picked up her pace through the village. It smelled of ash and burned flesh, luring her towards the farmhouse, as though she needed encouragement.

  When they reached McCready’s cottage, they found the door open. She didn’t enter to inspect the inside but headed around the back towards the Old Barn.

  The structure towered over the farmhouse and she knew from old photographs that it had stood for many years, long before John McCready had come to Lynnwood. To the best of her knowledge he housed his pigs in there, along with various pieces of equipment. Today it was silent.

  They spoke of nothing as they approached the place behind the barn. The place where the village children had used to play safely, away from the village but not so far that they intruded on the trees. Her vision blurred as she lost herself to smells and sounds and the growing pressure inside. She took her daughter’s hand as they walked.

  Rounding the barn, they encountered a field of charred pigs. They stopped where they stood and regarded the sight. Freya’s stomach clenched even as her daughter’s grasp on her hand did the same. The shapes that dotted the field were black and twisted, their bones buckled from heat, and all of them were grinning where they lay in the withered grass. At the other end of the field they spied McCready. They watched as, bent low, he set light to another of the animals. She could just make out his spidery figure, the can of lighter fluid and the fierce fire that followed. A gust of wind brought the acrid smell and with it the sound of spitting fat. He seemed to be screaming: “Mary! Mary!”

  They converged on the old man and his pigs. Those nearest had not yet been burned, their porcine skin pale with cold, with death. Even before they reached him, Freya’s mouth began to moisten, her eyes narrow with eagerness. Her daughter shared a similar sharp expression.

  This close, the fires were intense. They crackled with ravenous glee enough to match that inside her. Still McCready screamed. The heat pressed against her face, blasting her skin, as mother and daughter fell upon the nearest animal. At first they were tentative, pressing their hands to the pig’s swollen belly. Though it hadn’t been burned, its skin was warm and dry from the nearby fires. Much of the hair had been singed from its back and sides, so that only a few crisp strands remained. She began to press harder, her fingers sinking into the flesh as though massaging it.

  Seemingly satisfied, they gorged themselves on the pig. The field around them faded into nothingness. Freya knew only heat from the fires, the rubbery feel of the flesh in her mouth, tough and slippery between her teeth. Sometimes her daughter’s hand met hers, sometimes another pair, as McCready crouched to join them. Her eyes watered, where smoke blew into their faces, but she didn’t care. There was no stopping this revelry. She felt free at last; of Lynnwood, of Robert, of artifice and of conscious thought. All she knew was the wild abandon of feasting and the deep gratification that every mouthful brought.

  * * *

  One by one they broke off from the pig, momentarily sated, and sank into the snow. Much of it had melted from the constant heat, leaving sodden slush across this part of the field. Slowly she returned to herself, her sides aching, mouth stained with worse than blood. Though she remembered herself in these moments, she also knew that she had changed; that she wasn’t the same woman she had been before, or her daughter, or the man beside them. They were something less now, or more. She was filled, completed by the flesh of the animal in their midst.

  Only once the fires died, and the cold became too much, did she rise to her feet with her daughter. McCready remained on the ground, thin but bloated. He seemed to have stopped screaming, reduced to rasping breaths. The wind took her hair and cooled the stains against her face. She moved sluggishly back through the village with her daughter, to the place that had been their home.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  Freya couldn’t say what drove her back to the Vicarage in those last days. It felt important to see the place one more time, so that she could leave it fully behind her. As with her own cottage the day before, she moved through the lifeless building, seeing and remembering. Ghosts assumed themselves in the shadows; two women enjoying scones and brandy and civil conversation. Whispered words carried on the dusty air. She found that she felt strangely at home in the darkness, in a building where she had always previously felt stifled.

  The last diary she read was her own, “Freya Harriet Heart” written in small letters across the cover. She hadn’t been surprised when she found it in the bookcase. She thought that she remembered it, from years gone; the escape of a schoolgirl with a sick father and a mother who both loved and hated herself.

  The diary was small, and irregularly kept, as anything required of a child was. She flicked through it, reluctant to read too deeply. She didn’t recognise this girl anymore. This was someone else’s life, someone else’s memories. Still, she couldn’t leave without looking inside. She owed herself that much.

  There were the accounts of horror that each Midwinter brought. She had expected these, given what she already knew. She read of the figure at their sitting room window, the year Harriet had first taught her to bake. The year after, she noted four children missing from her class. Her parents said their families had left the village but she had found bones and scraps of school uniform, when playing with the dogs on one of
their walks through the Forest. She read of the night her bed-ridden father had vanished, and how he had fled from the cottage, Harriet close behind him, howling as he staggered for the trees.

  It was not these accounts that struck her but the human details she found most affecting, as though seeing them from the other side and remembering their tenderness.

  She recalled the day Catherine and she had followed Marcus Gillingham home from school. His parents had owned one of the bigger houses near to the church, and it was quite a walk from the Manor.

  Catherine and she had lusted for him in the way young girls are both intrigued and repulsed by boys. He must have known they were following him but he never turned around. That seemed only to have incited their intrigue further. Why wouldn’t he look at them? Why couldn’t he see them? She heard her own voice, so much like her daughter’s the night before, saw her eyes filled with that same frenetic fear. It didn’t matter that the other boys were interested, or that not a week later Robert Rankin, from Mrs. Lovejoy’s class, would ask to walk her home, offering his jacket when it started to rain.

  She read and remembered the time she had mixed up the salt with the sugar when baking cakes with her mother for the village market. They hadn’t realised their mistake until Joan – Ms. Andrews to her, then – had taken a generous bite out of a cherry scone. Freya’s laughter, she was told, had been heard as far as the Old Barn.

  She had written of the day their Cocker Spaniels, Ralph and Jack, had attacked another dog. After that they had been put down. They were “unsafe,” her father had insisted, “what if that had been your dog, Freya? What if they’d gone for you?” She hadn’t thought that fair. They were only doing what came naturally. It had made no difference in the end. She was allowed to say goodbye, to stroke them both one last time, their tails wagging, blissfully oblivious to the fate that awaited them at the veterinary centre in Lyndhurst. She thought she had grown up a little that day. She had written as much in the diary.