Why Don't You Come For Me? Part 10

Mum's other aunt, Beryl, could not have Jo either, because she already had her own daughters, Monica and Verity, in bunk beds and her mother-in-law sleeping in the little back bedroom. So in the end Jo had gone to live with Grandma Molesly, who had taken her out of duty because no one else would or could: and because, as she said to her sisters, what would people think, if you let your granddaughter go into care? Jo had barely kept in touch with the rest of the family since Grandma Molesly died, but now she asked Monica for the funeral arrangements and jotted them down, promising to be there if she could.

'My Aunt Joan has died,' she told Marcus when she came off the phone. He had risen from the table, quietly tidying up in the background, while she talked to Monica. 'Her funeral's on Wednesday. I think I should go.'

'Come and sit down.' Marcus was already moving into the hall. 'I've got your gla.s.s. Remind me again how Aunt Joan fits in.'

'Aunt Joan and Aunt Beryl were my grandmother's sisters, so really they're my great-aunts, but because they were a lot younger than my grandmother not much older than my mum they seemed more like my aunts. Joan was the one who never got married Monica is one of Beryl's daughters. Beryl was the younger of the two and she's still alive.' She paused for breath.

'OK, Joan and Beryl were actually your mother's aunts so was the grandmother you went to live with their sister?'

'Yes that was Grandma Molesly. She was their much older sister.'

'Your mother's mother.'

'If she was my mother's mother.'

'What do you mean?'

'I must have told you. She used to say that she didn't think my mother was her daughter at all, and that maybe she had been given the wrong baby in the nursing home. I'm not sure if she said it because she wanted to distance herself from Mum and the way she turned out, or whether she really believed it. But whenever she was really annoyed over something I'd done, she would say, "But then you're not really my granddaughter," because of course if there had been a mix-up and my mother was swapped at birth, then I wouldn't be her blood relative either.'

'That's an awful thing to say to a child.'

'But think what it must have felt like for her, too. All the horror of the murder, those years of embarra.s.sment, having a daughter who wasn't quite right, then having me there like a great cuckoo in the nest, a constant reminder. She was too old to cope with a teenager in the best of circ.u.mstances, and those circ.u.mstances certainly weren't the best.'

'It's still inexcusable. She shouldn't have taken it out on you her grandchild.'

'But she wasn't sure if I was her grandchild. That's the point. These days she would probably have asked for a DNA test. Anyway, let's not talk about it any more.'

Marcus put on some music and began to tell her how the latest tour had gone. There was no more talk of Grandma Molesly, but when they retired to bed and Marcus had switched out the light, Jo was free to remember her again. Except that she found she could not her grandmother had become no more than a series of faded snapshots in her mind. Grandma in her chair behind the evening paper, Grandma calling sharply from the kitchen, 'Tea's ready', or 'Wipe your feet'. Grandma with her back to the kitchen, stirring something on the stove. Aunty Joan's face was clearer, her eye shadow an overly bright blue, her lips s.h.i.+ny pink with lipstick and her nails always done in a matching shade; even then the makings of a double chin. If only they had let her stay with Aunty Joan. She wouldn't have ended up at St Catherine's if she had lived with Aunty Joan, whose house in Accrington was served by an entirely different set of schools. She would have been thrown into completely different company and never become involved in baiting Gilda Stafford. In fact, she would never have heard of Gilda until she moved in across the road. With no history between them, the situation in the lane the other day could have been easily resolved.

Not only might her school life have been different, but it followed that the rest of her life would have been different too. Lots of things might or might not have happened. Just one decision on the part of some case worker or committee her entire future had hung on that moment and they had gone the wrong way. Or maybe not. Perhaps the path had been set in stone much earlier than that.

She thought about her own mother's childhood. Could you take it back that far? What was it that had made her turn out the way she did? There had never been anything odd about the other members of the family. Beryl's and Joan's lives were steeped in ordinariness. Had Grandma Molesly been right about the nursing home? Perhaps she had been given the wrong baby a child who brought a taint of bad blood into the family. Perhaps the mother of this other child had deliberately exchanged her baby for Grandma Molesly's. Maybe this woman had stood over the cots in the hospital nursery, looking down on the sleeping mite who would one day become Jo's mother, guessed at what was to come and taken her chance on a better outcome, a child forged from a safer set of genes. Bad blood that was what they used to call it, when Grandma Molesly was still a girl. These days people pretended to know better, to embrace more modern ideas about the nature of mental illness, but deep down the old ideas were still strong. 'Like mother, like daughter', that's what people said not when Grandma Molesly had been a girl, but when she herself had been, barely thirty years ago. Once something really bad happened, no one ever looked at a family in quite the same way. We might pay public lip service to the theories of psychiatrists and their ilk, but our old instinctive senses kick in, once suspicions are aroused.

And even when things did not go so catastrophically wrong as they had in her own mother's case, it did you no good to have eccentric-looking parents. That had been halfway to explaining Gilda's problems. Her parents had been old enough to be her grandparents, and their ideas were rooted in the 1950s and early 1960s. They had dressed her in hand-knitted berets and cardigans, cut her hair clumsily at home, kitted her out in pleated skirts and knee socks when everyone else wore trousers. They encouraged her to keep apart, to despise modern music, to be ignorant of any kind of popular culture to the point where, like an elderly judge or university don, she thought dubbing was something with which to treat football boots, if she thought of it at all.

Jo understood how important it was not to be different: she had battled against it all through childhood, endeavouring to look and behave like everyone else, even in the face of Mum's persistent oddities; trying to keep her mother as invisible as possible at school events, never inviting the other children back home. But some things you can't conceal. The familiar wooden doors loomed ahead of her. The paint was peeling in places, and one of the doors caught at the bottom. It needed to be taken off, sanded down and rehung, but somehow it never got done so it always sc.r.a.ped across the ground when it was opened.

Her mother used to annoy her father by calling it the lean-to. 'You can't call it a garage,' she said, 'because you don't keep a car in it.'

He almost never argued with her, certainly not about household terminology: he just kept on calling it the garage, while she continued to call it the lean-to. Jo trod a narrow line, depending on who she was talking to, trying not to antagonize either of them. It was not that her father would have become annoyed if she had said 'lean-to', in the way that her mother might have done if she had said 'garage'; he might not even have corrected her, but his eyes would have implied betrayal.

In a way, of course, her mother had been right. The car was always parked on the drive, or more often on the remnants of the worn gra.s.s verge between the road and the pavement, because it was a nuisance having to squeeze between the car and the line of rose bushes which separated their narrow drive from the small front lawn. The garage itself was too full of other things to fit a car inside. The lawnmower lived in there, standing next to her father's seldom-used workbench, which had forks, spades, a big old crowbar and an axe propped up against it; the was.h.i.+ng machine stood against one wall, where it was convenient for the side door which opened directly into their small square kitchen.

Dad's car had been parked on the verge that day, when she came home from school. She would have seen it as she walked up the road. She must have known then that there was something wrong because it should not have been there. It was a Thursday, so Dad should have been at work.

She always entered the house through the garage. She didn't have a front-door key, but the garage doors were left unlocked in the daytime. She had never really liked going through the garage. It was always dark in there, and the light switch was right inside, next to the kitchen door, so on a winter afternoon you had to run the gauntlet blindfold. Once, she tripped over a broom handle which had fallen across the part where you walked, coming down hard, sc.r.a.ping her hands and knees on the concrete floor. Even in summer the light which came through the lone pane of gla.s.s in the door to the back garden was barely enough to penetrate the shadows. Apart from a narrow s.p.a.ce on one side which was left clear to walk through, the interior was a jumble of cardboard boxes, with here a pile of discarded light fittings draped with an old curtain, and there a clumsily reeled stack of garden hose, which tilted crazily atop a broken kitchen chair waiting to startle the unwary by overbalancing and slithering to the floor like an outsize green python. If the kitchen door happened to be open that would let in a bit more light, but otherwise the garage was a place to traverse as quickly as possible, lest some bogey man grabbed at you from out of the gloom.

But not that day not when she had stood outside the garage door for what must have been the last time. That day it had all happened in slow motion, starting with the age it took her to pluck up enough courage to put her hand on the door. In her mind's eye the garage door stood just ajar. That must have been a warning signal, too. The doors were always kept shut, in case the wind blew them back on their hinges and they slammed. Mum screamed if that happened. Sudden loud noises alarmed her, and she must not be alarmed.

Reach up for the door handle she had just turned twelve, but she could not have been very tall, not if the handle seemed high up. It was cool to her touch; the sun had gone from the front of the house by late afternoon, leaving the garage doors in shadow.

Pull the door towards you ... nothing to see at first. It was September, a bright day outside, your eyes have to get accustomed. But then you see. You see his feet first. His feet are nearest to you, and for a split second you think he's lying down to do something, maybe trying to fix the was.h.i.+ng machine, which must have broken down again. But it isn't the was.h.i.+ng machine. It isn't the was.h.i.+ng machine which has leaked all over the floor; it's your father's blood, and there is the axe which spilled it lying on the concrete floor beside his head, showing you how it was done and although you've never seen a dead body before, you know without a shadow of a doubt that you're looking at one now.

The kitchen door is open a crack, and Mum must be inside. You have to find Mum. You don't know how this terrible thing has happened in the garage, or why your father came to be lying on the floor with his blood splattered from the pile of old newspapers stacked on the redundant television stand, to the front of the was.h.i.+ng machine beside the kitchen door, where it has trickled down in pale, uneven stripes. What you do know is that it is around 4.30 p.m. on a Thursday afternoon, and that means Mum will be somewhere in the house.

So you step around him, very carefully, not touching anything, not treading in anything, almost having to jump over him, in order to reach the kitchen step because he takes up most of the s.p.a.ce much more lying down than he used to standing up. This will be a feature of the coming days: the way until he died Dad took up so little s.p.a.ce that people had almost stopped noticing him, whereas Mum, of course, had always managed to be noticeable.

It's so quiet in the kitchen that you can only hear two things: the tick of the clock and a fly, buzzing against the window, frantically bas.h.i.+ng against the gla.s.s until more by luck than judgement it finds the open top light and is abruptly gone. You don't want to break the silence, so you don't call out. Mum doesn't like it when you shout; although, of course, she doesn't like it if you take her by surprise either, which she calls creeping up on her, even though you didn't mean to.

The door between the kitchen and the hall is half closed, but the door handle has dried blood on it. Hook your fingers around the side of the door and open it that way. Mum isn't in the living room, although there's evidence of her presence, a puzzle book open at an incomplete Word Search, a pencil with a very frayed piece of string tied around one end, a plate on the coffee table containing a half-eaten sandwich and surrounded by toast crumbs from some earlier snack. There's also a mug with some tea left in the bottom. The remaining liquid looks pale against the tannin-stained interior. The door to the front room is open, but there's too much junk in there for anyone to be inside, unless they are hiding and Mum hasn't done that for ages.

Then you turn the corner and see her sitting on the stairs. She's got the pills and the sherry bottle beside her, but she hasn't managed to kill herself because the stupid, stupid, stupid woman never managed to get anything right.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN.

Aunty Joan's funeral took place at the local crematorium. It was a standard one-size-fits-all Church of England service taken by a priest who had never met the deceased, but managed to get all the names right by referring to his notes. The singing of 'The Lord is my Shepherd' was greatly enhanced by the presence of several ladies with whom Aunty Joan had once upon a time sung in a choir, and the coffin went out to the strains of 'Que Sera Sera', which had apparently been her favourite song. There was little obvious emotion: Aunty Beryl was seen to wipe her eyes a couple of times, but the general ambience was one of calm acceptance. Joan had been unwell for some time; it wasn't a shock. There was no grieving partner or children, and everyone said it was a blessing that she hadn't suffered.

Jo had approached the occasion with some trepidation, but the cl.u.s.ter of black-clad figures, standing on the pavement outside cousin Monica's house (chosen for its convenient proximity to both Aunt Joan's sheltered-housing complex and the crem), had greeted her warmly, Aunt Beryl enveloping her in a warm hug and Monica planting a kiss on her cheek before saying that they had saved her a place in one of the funeral limousines.

During her journey south down the motorway, Jo had built herself up to expect a much cooler reception. Was she not the daughter of the evil changeling who had brought so much shame and distress to the family all those years ago? Of course, if Grandma Molesly had been right, then she was not really their relative at all. She didn't look much like them, although family resemblances between cousins were not always strong. And if she was not of their blood, then neither was Lauren. She wondered if her mother had been aware of the doubts cast upon her parentage when she was growing up. Lauren too must be growing up in alien soil. Jo had generally taken the repeated message I still have her as a taunt, but just occasionally she wondered whether the abductor's motive in sending it was a misguided attempt at rea.s.surance, letting her know that her daughter was still alive and well and safe. The seash.e.l.ls might simply be more of the same, a secret code meant only for her except that she could not decipher it.

It was possible that Lauren never even suspected she did not belong with these people. Suppose she was happy where she was, and did not want to leave. The idea of Lauren loving her captors more than herself was heartbreaking. In her oft-replayed vision of Lauren's eventual homecoming, the scene always ended with the child running into her arms, but lately this version of events was sometimes rudely interrupted by another, in which a girl who looked very much like Gilda's daughter s.h.i.+ed away from her, as from a stranger. So many years had gone by. Lauren would recall nothing now of the monkey mobile which once hung above her cot, the musical box with the dancing bears, the home-baked biscuits in the kitchen ... and her mother's face.

Suppose she was better off with this other family. At least with them, she would never have to know about the mad grandmother, the tainted blood she carried in her veins. Were there circ.u.mstances in which it would be to Lauren's advantage, if she Jo were to give her up? Although not religious, Jo had prayed many times after Lauren disappeared. Sometimes she had promised G.o.d that providing He made sure no harm came to Lauren, He could if He wished take Jo instead, by whatever terrible means He chose to devise. In the long silences which followed, Jo had been forced to conclude that G.o.d was not up for trade-offs. What was it she had once read? G.o.d always answers prayers, but sometimes the answer is no.

Maybe this was the deal. She would have to give Lauren up in exchange for the knowledge that she was safe and happy. Lauren might very well benefit, said the treacherous devil's advocate in her head, from not growing up in the shadow of her dubious genetic inheritance.

'No!' Jo startled herself by speaking aloud. How could any child-stealer be a better parent than she was? How could anyone who would kidnap a child possibly be suitable to raise one? A person capable of such a dreadful act must be unbalanced, dangerous. She noticed that she was getting too near to the car in front, eased back a little and tried to concentrate on the road.

'It's always better for a child to be with its own mother,' she said as she steered the car into the centre lane, to overtake a slow-moving motorhome.

'Always?' asked the devil's advocate, slyly tossing snapshots of her own mother on to the table like a louche poker dealer.

And now she was in Accrington, back in the bosom of what was left of her mother's family. She could not recognize any of Aunt Beryl's grandchildren, all of them in their late teens and early twenties, who raided the buffet table in Monica's dining room then stuck together in a corner, the boys with their borrowed black ties loosened, the girls who must surely have compared wardrobe notes beforehand pretty much uniform, right down to their carefully applied eyeliner.

'We haven't seen you for ages,' Monica was saying. 'You and your husband run a travel agency now, don't you?'

'A tour company,' Jo corrected. 'We run specialist coach tours, themed to famous people and historical events.'

'That must be interesting. Do you get to go on these tours yourself?'

I used to, Jo thought sadly. Aloud she said, 'I'm one of the guides.'

'That must be great. Do you hear that, Mum? Joanne gets to travel round on these tours they run. Mind, I don't suppose it's much of a holiday for you,'

Jo confirmed that it was not.

'Excuse me,' Monica said. 'I think the choir ladies are on their way. I must just say goodbye and thank them for coming.'

Jo found herself temporarily alone with Beryl. An adjacent armchair had just become vacant, and Jo sank down beside her aunt. It was now or never.

'Aunty Beryl, you remember what Grandma Molesly used to say, about Mum not really being her daughter?'

Her aunt did not appear to be taken aback by Jo's abrupt enquiry. 'Of course I do she said it often enough.' There was something comforting about Beryl's no-nonsense, Lancas.h.i.+re voice, with its matter-of-fact conveyance of information.

'Do you think she really believed it?'

Beryl pursed her lips in momentary consideration. It made the wrinkles around her mouth more p.r.o.nounced. 'Do you know, in the end I think she did. It started off as a bit of a joke, because your mother had these hazel eyes well, not hazel exactly more of a flecky grey really, although your grandmother always had it that they were hazel. Anyway, there was no one else in the family with eyes quite like them. Mind you, we never knew much about Dad's family, with him coming from such a long way off. There were a lot of his side we never met at all, and he was dead by the time your mother was born, so we never got to hear his opinion. Then, of course, me and your Aunty Joan were blondes whereas your mother's hair was a browny colour, and she was always skinny whereas we were on the plump side even as little 'uns.' She paused to glance down at her ample bosom, before continuing: 'Your grandma would look at your mother and say she wasn't one of us at all, you know, joking like. I'm sure that's how it started, but later on, after your mother began having her problems, well, your grandmother couldn't seem to understand that it was an illness that it might happen to anybody. Perhaps she worried that people would blame her I blame those doctors myself saying these things are all to do with what happened to people in their childhoods. We went all through the war as children, and it didn't do us any harm. Anyway, after ... it happened, I think your grandmother just wanted to believe it was as she had said all along that your mother wasn't really hers. I used to get annoyed with her. "How can you deny your own flesh and blood?" I'd say, but your grandma was a hard woman, G.o.d rest her and once she'd made her mind up, there was no s.h.i.+fting her.'

'I think I can understand where she was coming from at least, a little bit,' Jo said. 'Everyone always drums it into you that you have to love your family, even when they're not doing very lovable things. Children are supposed to love their parents, and parents are supposed to love their children, but suppose you just can't? When I was little, I sometimes used to wish I could have someone different for my mother, someone who was more like the other mothers, I suppose. But then I used to feel that even thinking something like that was very wicked and that I must be a very bad person. Other times, I used to just wonder why it was so unfair you know, what had I done to deserve a mother who was so different from all the others?'

'In your case, pet, it wasn't a wicked thought, it was an understandable one.'

The kindness in Beryl's voice encouraged Jo to go much further than she would normally have done. 'After she killed my dad, I really began to hate her. I felt bad about it sometimes, but how are you supposed to go on loving one parent when they have murdered the other parent?'

Beryl brought her bent fingers down to rest on top of Jo's slim ones. The sympathetic pressure stimulated Jo to continue. 'I was thinking about it the other night. I mean, how can anyone expect a child to get over that? Walking into the garage one day after school, and finding your father dead on the floor?'

'But luvvie, you didn't find him.' For the first time in their conversation, Beryl registered surprise. 'It was a neighbour what found him.'

'It was me. I came home from school and found him on the garage floor.'

'No, love. I know for sure that isn't right, because it was me and your Uncle Geoff who came to fetch you out of school.'

'I thought that was the other time when I was very little and I waited and waited outside the school, because Mum had been taken to hospital after she cut her wrists.'

'We came that time as well. No, it was definitely a neighbour, a man who lived a few doors down, who found your father. This chap hadn't gone to work that day because he couldn't get his car to start and he was standing outside his house, waiting for the AA to turn up, when he heard a commotion shouting and screaming and what not. He thought there must be something up, so he went to your house and knocked the front door. When no one answered, he noticed the garage door was ajar, so he opened it. I think he just meant to shout through and ask if everything was all right, but of course as soon as he opened that door he saw your father.'

'What happened then?'

'Well, so far as I remember we had to sit through it all at the inquest, of course this neighbour, Radcliffe or Ratcliffe his name was, he ran back home and phoned the police.'

'And what about Mum?'

'She was in the house the whole time. I think the police must have found her. She'd taken some tablets, but they got her to the hospital in time and pumped her stomach.'

'So I wasn't there at all?'

'No and to my knowledge you never went back there. We went and got all your things, your Aunty Joan and I, once the police would let us in to take stuff.'

'I thought I found him. That's how I've remembered it for years and years.'

'You must have heard people talking about it.' Aunt Beryl did not appear to think there was anything extraordinary in writing yourself into scenes in which you had taken no part. 'Folk will talk in front of children, even when they shouldn't. And your Grandma Molesly would have been no help. I wanted to take you in myself, but we didn't have the room, with Geoff's mother needing nursing and us in that little house in Longfellow Road. Your Aunty Joan would have had you, but they wouldn't let her, her being a maiden lady and having to be out at work full-time.'

Monica rejoined them. 'Have you had much rain up in the Lakes?' she asked. 'It always seems to rain when we go up there.'

'The weather hasn't been very good so far this year,' Jo said, but while she indulged in inconsequential chit-chat with Monica, her mind was already racing elsewhere.

False Memory Syndrome. Construction. Confabulation. She found them all on Google when she got home.

False Memory Syndrome: a condition in which a person's ident.i.ty and interpersonal relations.h.i.+ps are centred on a memory of a traumatic experience which is objectively false, but which the person strongly believes to be true.

Construction: when an event is mistakenly recalled which only accords with the gist of what happened, because a person has acquired memories from a combination of internally and externally derived sources, subconsciously adapting or adding to the story, to make it more consistent.

Confabulation: the spontaneous narrative reporting of events that never happened. A falsification of memory occurring from organically derived amnesia.

None of the definitions seemed to be an exact fit, although all of them were close. At first she had wondered if her aunt was the one who had got it all wrong, because her own memory had always seemed so solid but the more she went over it, the more sense Beryl's version seemed to make. Beryl placed the episode in the morning, which was far more logical because that would mean the attack had taken place between her leaving for school and her father leaving for work a few minutes later; so that unlike her own version, there was no mystery about her father's being unexpectedly home in the afternoon. Then there was what she now recognized as the dreamlike quality of her memory; the way she had hopped almost flown over her father's body to gain entry to the kitchen. Would she really have gone into the house without a word or a second thought? Wouldn't she have shouted, or screamed, or run for help, instinctively shying away from such a horrible sight, rather than skipping over it? In her version she approached the garage doors with trepidation, as if in her heart of hearts she already knew what she was about to find. Similarly, during the search for her mother and her eventual discovery on the stairs, she was like a cold, dispa.s.sionate onlooker, not a hysterical child who has just seen her father's butchered body. Moreover, she had no recollection of phoning the police or fetching a neighbour, which was strange when the rest of it had always seemed so crystal-clear. The memory finished with her standing over her mother, as if it was the final frame at the end of a reel of film and, try as she might, she could not locate the next reel.

No. She was as confident as she could be that Aunty Beryl's version was the right one. Although her own memory of the event still seemed as solid as ever, she knew that it was not real. Not, she told herself, that there was anything abnormal about the tricks her mind had played. The information about False Memory Syndrome and Confabulation might be full of references to psychologists, but it was clear that you did not have to be ill to fabricate a few memories. Perfectly normal people did it all the time. One control group after another, asked to relate a story they had been told a short time before, invariably adapted it with omissions and embellishments. There was even something called the 'Lost in the Mall' technique, in which a group of adult volunteers were told a purportedly true story by another family member, of their being lost in a shopping mall at the age of five or six years old. At least a quarter of the people fed this story not only claimed to be able to remember this entirely fictional event, but many provided additional details which they had not been told in the first place. Everyone or at least a high proportion of people was suggestible.

Yet at the same time it was frightening. How many of her acc.u.mulated memories were real, and how many fantasy? If you could not rely on one memory, what did it say about all the others? It was like going into an exam on your life, but discovering on the way in that you had been revising from the wrong textbook.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN.

Another postcard arrived in June. After weeks of dull, chilly weather punctuated by regular downpours, the 'barbecue summer' predicted by the Met Office had finally arrived with a vengeance. Jo was taking advantage of the unaccustomed suns.h.i.+ne to cut the gra.s.s and drag some weeds out of the flower beds, so she happened to be in the garden when the postman arrived. She saw the van draw up in the gateway and went to meet him.

'Another nice day,' he said, as he handed her the little pile of letters.

She carried them over to the wooden bench beside the sundial, which had been her gift to Marcus on his fortieth birthday. The postcard was the second item down the pile, a standard plain white card with the address printed directly onto it in Times New Roman, and Jo recognized it immediately for what it was. The postman's demeanour on handing it over had not conveyed the slightest suggestion that he was aware of bringing anything out of the ordinary, but then she a.s.sumed that he did not understand the significance of the card or notice anything exceptional about it. She turned it over, expecting to find the same old picture of Lauren printed on the other side and so it was but this time it was not the same old words. Jo stood up without realizing that she had done so, then sat down hard again on the garden bench, staring at the card in disbelief. For almost eleven years she had been reading the words I still have her. This time the statement had been replaced with a question. Do you still want her?

She continued to stare at the card for a long time. The taunt of a cruel hoaxer? Or was this something else? Of course she still wanted Lauren, of course she did! But how was she supposed to reply?

In the past, she had always taken the cards straight to the police, but not this time, she thought. It was not as if they had ever managed to obtain a single clue from any of the cards and anyway, this one was special. The message marked a new turn in her relations.h.i.+p with Lauren's captors, the words potent with the suggestion that things were moving forward, that something was going to happen. She was being asked a question, and there had to be some way of responding, but in the meantime she would tell no one about the card.

She stood up again, steadying herself with a hand on the sundial. What about Marcus? She knew that deceiving him was wrong, but if she told him about the card, he might insist she hand it over to the police. He was not due home for hours, but all the same she took the card straight upstairs and hid it in the drawer where she kept the sh.e.l.ls. Didn't this latest development vindicate her faith in the sh.e.l.ls, which she had always interpreted as the precursor to something else? Moreover, when she opened the drawer and saw the sh.e.l.ls sitting inside, she was suddenly seized with a solution. She could not send a message using sh.e.l.ls, but the garden was full of stones, and they would make a perfectly good subst.i.tute. After positioning the postcard so that Lauren's picture would look up at her whenever she opened the drawer, Jo went down to the garden and began to gather stones, which she spread across the newly cut lawn, sorting them into different sizes, shapes and colours as she went.

She gradually realized that it would take a lot more stones than she had initially envisaged. As the day wore on her collection extended to include everything from modestly sized pebbles to large lumps of brick and slate. Once or twice she made a foray out into the lane, so that she could look back into the garden and view her handiwork work from a distance. Neither the heat nor the fact that she had skipped lunch distracted her from her objective. When Sean came home from school she was still working with a kind of frantic energy, filling in the gaps with smaller stones, adding and removing others in a bid to neaten the edges and make the letters clearer.

She had seen him coming up the lane and called across from the lawn: 'Sean can you see what it says?'

Sean was sufficiently nonplussed that for a moment he couldn't say anything at all. Eventually, he said, 'It says "YES".'

He continued to stand out in the road for a moment or two, as if waiting for permission to move on, but when Jo said nothing further, he turned in at the gate and walked up the drive. As he drew level with her, Jo smiled at him. 'It's a modern sculpture, giving a positive message,' she said.

'OK.' Sean's tone mimicked the asylum keeper, humouring an inmate who has just hoisted a chair above his head. 'Whatever.' He continued on his way into the house.

The modern sculpture explanation was less readily acceptable to Marcus. It was dark when he got back from the hospital visit he had tacked on to the end of Tennyson Trails, but he saw the stones next morning, when he strolled into the garden with his mug of coffee after breakfast.