The inheritance, p.12
The Inheritance, page 12
‘Then where is it?’
‘That is the question,’ he admitted, but he didn’t offer her an answer.
When she had finished speaking with Dickie, Sarah went to hang up her raincoat in the hallway. Before she managed that, the phone started ringing again. Dickie must have forgotten to tell her something.
‘Hello?’ She failed to hide her impatience.
The reply came from a deep, synthesized, male but robotic voice, which distorted the speaker’s words till they were barely recognizable.
‘Sarah Hollis?’
Was this a prank or was there something wrong with the line? ‘Yes,’ she managed.
She expected the voice to speak again but it did not. There was silence on the end of the line. ‘Hello? … Hello?’ At first, she wondered if he had been cut off but something told her he was still on the line, listening.
‘What are you doing at Cragsmoor?’ the voice boomed at her. Whatever he was using to disguise his own voice was turning his words into a deep and threatening growl.
‘Who is this?’ Sarah was scared but also annoyed by the intrusion. ‘Why is it any of your business?’
‘What’s your real agenda?’
‘I don’t have an agenda. What’s yours?’ Silence on the end of the line. ‘Why do you care about any of this?’
‘Why do you?’ the robotic voice demanded.
Some of Sarah’s fear turned to anger then. ‘Because a woman disappeared and she was probably murdered, and she was a great friend of my aunt, who recently died, but something tells me you know all of this already. I don’t have an agenda. I’m just interested in the truth.’
‘Truth is entirely subjective.’
‘What are you talking about?’ she demanded.
There was a long pause before he spoke again. ‘Tread carefully.’
‘Are you threatening me?’ She was almost as outraged as she was frightened, but not quite. Sarah was not used to being threatened and there was something cold and sociopathic about the computerized voice. She could feel her heart pumping with adrenalin.
‘Well, obviously,’ he said, as if this was entirely reasonable behaviour. She was so shocked by this admission that she could not think of a response at first.
‘I’m not frightened of you,’ she said eventually, hoping that she sounded more convincing than she felt.
‘You should be,’ he said. ‘Oh, and I wouldn’t wear that blue coat again. It doesn’t suit you.’
The line went dead then, leaving Sarah standing in the empty house holding the phone, her other hand instinctively moving to touch the collar of the dark blue coat she had been wearing. The one he had just described. Knowing he had seen her that same day, probably even moments earlier as she stepped from her car, made his anonymous threat far more chilling. Was he still watching the house, even now? In that moment, Sarah felt very alone.
Unsurprisingly, dialling 1471 did not give Sarah the number of the anonymous caller. He was not that stupid. The phone company weren’t much help either, offering Sarah advice on how to block future calls, while pointing out the difficulty of tracking down the caller if they used a disposable burner phone, which seemed most likely as no one was going to be foolish enough to threaten someone on the phone from their own home. The number of a burner could still be traced, but that wouldn’t give you the caller’s identity if they purchased the phone anonymously. They recommended she contact the police, but when Sarah called them, they suggested contacting her phone company, so now she was going round in circles. The police did say they took her threatening phone call seriously but left Sarah under no illusions. They lacked the time and resources to investigate it further.
The anonymous call had two contrasting effects on Sarah, leaving her frightened and angry at the same time. Living in this creepy old manor house was bad enough without the additional worry of someone threatening to do her harm, when moving out wasn’t an option. If she didn’t see this through until the end she wouldn’t even get to keep the twenty grand, leaving her in a dire financial state. That thought made her even more determined, and she told herself that they wouldn’t be trying to scare her if they weren’t worried about what she might find.
Sarah had always despised bullies. Her aunt was the same. Standing up to them was draining but necessary if you wanted to live a life free from other people’s control. Of course, in the normal world, most bullies were cowards and less likely to resort to physical assault or even murder to get their way, but this time she could be dealing with an actual killer, or people who had a lot to lose if the future PM was damaged by some embarrassing revelations about his family. Even so, she didn’t contemplate leaving. Where the hell would she go? She was in this till the end, like it or not, and she would not give in.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
July
The plot of Sarah’s book had changed. The missing guy wasn’t missing at all, just lying low. He had contacted his former lover and together they were now trying to prove his innocence, but could she really trust him, and how would she convince the detective that her man wasn’t lying? Sarah had no idea, and if she didn’t know then this new book of hers was going nowhere. She had spent days writing and re-writing then scrapping those rewrites and going down a different path altogether. This mystery, which had originated entirely in her own head, was as frustratingly elusive to resolve as the real-life one she was meant to be investigating. Sarah had reached the stage where she felt bad when she was writing instead of trying to solve the disappearance of Lucy Woodfell, and guilty when she was investigating that cold case and not focusing more fully on her book. They were both incredibly important to her future and each of them had a deadline that was fast approaching.
Somehow, a month had passed since her arrival at Cragsmoor and she was still far from used to the place. During the day, it felt too large to live in. At night, when Mrs Jenkins and Patrick had finished for the day and gone home, she was left there on her own, which meant hours to think about the warning she had received from her anonymous caller. Every sound outside the house made her go to the window and peer out nervously in case someone was prowling around. Once in bed, she slept fitfully, her rest filled with nightmares, as every creak and groan from the timbers of the ancient house and its decrepit plumbing system caused her to picture someone breaking in downstairs and coming up to silence her forever. Then there was that whispering sound. Some nights she would hear it and convince herself someone was in the house, while trying not to think about the possibility that it was the tormented spirit of Lady Alice, trying to communicate from beyond the grave with her lament. Some nights Sarah didn’t hear it at all but still found herself lying awake, half expecting it to begin at any moment. Often, she woke feeling more tired than when she had gone to bed and this affected her ability to concentrate on her writing, which suffered as a result.
Though Sarah had expended considerable time and energy looking into Lucy Woodfell’s disappearance, she had not made the progress she had hoped for, mainly because she couldn’t get anyone to talk to her. None of her letters to the Woodfell siblings received a reply. Evelyn had been right about them and Sarah wrong not to listen to her. Now she had clumsily announced her presence at Cragsmoor Manor and been brutally ignored by them all. If she was going to speak to the Woodfell family at all, Sarah was going to have to be far more forceful.
As expected, Toby Ramsay was confirmed as the new leader of his party and prime minister of the country, and his face was all over the television. The coverage often focused on the tragedies he had experienced, including his aunt’s disappearance, the loss of his father in a car crash and the accidental death of a university girlfriend, in a fall from a balcony that could have been an accident or suicide. Toby Ramsay’s ability to bounce back from tragedies that would have felled lesser men was considered to be one of his strengths.
‘He’s a populist with no political principles or particular world view, so he is basically a blank canvas,’ said one political reporter. ‘His gift is to be all things to all men without being one particular thing to anyone. As a youth he was quite the scholar and is fluent in both Latin and Greek. The party faithful describe him as better looking than Boris and cleverer than Cameron, which makes him electoral gold, and he is tipped to win the next general election by a landslide as long as he can avoid any major controversy.’
So, the last thing Toby Ramsay would want to do now would be to speak to someone investigating the mysterious disappearance of his aunt. Even if she could get a message to him somehow, she knew his PR people would never allow it.
That afternoon, Sarah received an email from Kirsten, the new intern at Dickie’s firm. The young woman had been working diligently through the many smaller files on the company laptop, opening them all, and was now starting to send the relevant ones on to Sarah. They didn’t always reveal all that much and often didn’t feel as if they had been worth the effort or the wait. Annoyingly, they weren’t in chronological order either, so they tended to dart around between the sixties, seventies and eighties too. The handwritten manuscript had still not been found, which left Sarah reliant on Kirsten’s emails for new information, and her frustration increased along with her impatience.
Sarah read the latest extracts without much enthusiasm, until she eventually reached one that harked back to Evie’s first visit to Cragsmoor, which had ended badly.
My stay at the Woodfell family home was not without its difficulties. I did not always feel comfortable there, especially when Lucy’s father was in residence. There were enormous rows in his study whenever anyone questioned his judgement. ‘You’ll do as I say!’ and ‘That’s the end of the matter!’ were two of his favourite ways of signalling an argument was over, his voice carrying across the house.
Lucy was less often the victim of his tirades than her half-siblings, but one day I found her in tears in her bedroom. Her father had told her he wouldn’t be paying for a university education, as this would be wasted on a woman. A husband was acceptable, or a job if she simply must have one, but not college. When I ventured the possibility of her defying her father, she told me that no one ever did, and I pursued it no further.
Near the end of my stay, everything went very wrong very quickly, and this time Lucy’s father had nothing to do with it. It was all because of Oliver, Freddie and Sephy.
Taking advantage of her father’s latest absence, Sephy had a boyfriend to stay. The pretence was that James was actually Freddie’s friend. We were told they were all out on the lake, so Lucy and I headed down there, expecting to see them pottering about in a rowing boat or picnicking by the water. Lucy appeared as shocked as I was by the spectacle that greeted us. It had been a while since my first introduction to Freddie, when he had calmly towelled his naked body dry in front of me after a swim, and the memory had begun to fade. Now here he was again, lying on his back, stretched out on a towel, shamelessly letting the sun’s rays touch every part of his body. Next to him lay Oliver who wasn’t wearing a stitch either. If that were not shocking enough, Sephy was lying not far from them both, with her boyfriend James by her side, both as naked as her brothers.
‘Sephy!’ Lucy exclaimed in shock and, when her half-sister didn’t respond, Lucy’s embarrassment at their exhibitionism spilled over. ‘I might have expected it from Olly and Freddie, but not you!’
‘Don’t be so bloody bourgeois, Lucy,’ Sephy said. ‘No one can see us from here.’
‘What if one of the servants came down, or a villager?’
‘Well then,’ said Olly, ‘they’d get an eyeful.’ And he made no effort to cover himself.
‘And you don’t care?’ Lucy was apoplectic, her face beetroot red.
‘Thousands of people do it,’ said Freddie. ‘You can read all about it in Health and Efficiency magazine. It might even broaden your very narrow mind.’
‘It’s disgusting.’
‘And yet, you’re still here,’ smirked James.
Sephy got to her feet then, the better to address Lucy. I tried not to look but couldn’t help myself. She was so womanly and curvaceous, with the kind of body you might find on a classical sculpture. Her breasts were full but firm and she didn’t even bother to hide her pubic hair. She just didn’t care. I recalled the girls in the dormitory at St Hilda’s, who would undress furtively, removing garments from beneath outer layers or disappearing off to bathrooms to get into nightgowns, so no one saw an inch of flesh. Here was Sephy not giving a damn and there was something shocking but a bit wonderful about it too.
‘You used to come down here naked with us all the time,’ Sephy retorted and I thought Lucy was going to explode with anger and embarrassment.
‘I was five then and knew no better. It’s not the same.’
‘Why isn’t it the same?’ asked Sephy, placing her hands defiantly on her hips.
Lucy couldn’t find the words. ‘Because …’ she began, ‘… it just isn’t.’
Freddie stood up then and moved next to Sephy.
‘Why isn’t it?’ he asked, as if genuinely curious. Then he glanced down at himself. ‘It’s just a bit of hair.’ And with that he wiggled his hips and set his penis moving from side to side like the pendulum of a clock and I couldn’t help myself.
I giggled.
Then I glanced at Lucy and saw how furious and embarrassed she was, but I still couldn’t help myself.
I giggled again.
It was a nervous reaction and not meant in any way to undermine my friend, but Lucy didn’t see it that way. Before she could react, Sephy told her, in a bored tone, ‘Stop being a little bastard.’
‘Don’t call me that!’ Lucy hissed.
‘No one cares if you were born on the wrong side of the blanket,’ said Oliver. ‘You’re hardly going to inherit.’
‘Doesn’t look a bit like any of us though, does she?’ interjected Freddie, ‘I wonder why?’ It was clear what he meant. Lucy wasn’t their mother’s child but he was implying she wasn’t even their father’s.
Lucy turned and stormed off, and I was left standing there, mouth agape, not knowing what to do for the best. Freddie looked bored now that the object of his torments had run off. James walked up behind his girlfriend’s brother and placed a hand on his bare shoulder and kneaded it. ‘You’re starting to burn there,’ he said in a low voice.
‘Better go after her,’ Oliver told me. ‘Now that you’ve had a good look.’
It was my turn to be embarrassed and I looked to Sephy, hoping for support, but she just laughed, as if Oliver had said the funniest thing. I turned and ran too.
I arrived in the hallway in time to hear Lucy’s feet thumping up the staircase as she ran to the very top of the house. I knew where she was going and followed slowly, not wanting to get there too soon. She’d have time to calm down, before I offered her some solace.
The hatch was open and I bent low to peer in. I found Lucy crouching there with smudged panda eyes and fresh tears on her cheeks. Before I could think of anything consoling to say, she rounded on me.
‘For God’s sake, Evie!’ she shouted. ‘Do you have to follow me absolutely everywhere? Can’t you go off on your own, just this once?’
Her words were as shocking and painful as a hard slap across the face. Devastated, I turned and ran down the stairs and out through the back door. I didn’t stop running until I was across the lawns and had reached a welcoming shield of trees. I didn’t want anyone else to see how hurt I was.
I spent ages wandering glumly around the estate, wondering if I should return to the house, pack my bag and ask if one of the servants could drop me at the railway station so I could go home. Instead, I doubled back on to the path that led down to the empty beach and sat there for the rest of the day, feeling a wretched sense of injustice, because Lucy had turned her full ire on me and not other, more deserving parties, like her older sister and brothers.
Was I not a loyal friend? Why did I always experience this constant state of exclusion? By now, I almost wanted to feel hard done by, so I could renounce other people entirely and resign myself to a solitary life.
I returned to the house in the evening and went in through the kitchen, where I was informed by the cook that I had missed dinner. She must have sensed something was wrong, because she guided me towards some bread, fetched some butter and jam and left me to help myself. I ate it silently until I’d had my fill then went up to my room. It struck me as I climbed into my bed that no one had bothered to come and look for me and, for all the family knew, I could have been lying dead in a ditch somewhere.
At breakfast the next morning, I expected either an apology or an inquest. Where had I been? What on earth was I playing at, worrying everyone like that? A normal family’s reaction, in other words, though my own family was far from normal.
Instead, not a word was said. I’m not sure whether I felt even more crushed by this or relieved by the lack of an interrogation. Both at once, I think.
When everyone was gone, Lucy did approach me but all she said was, ‘Oliver’s in hospital,’ then she told me, ‘and Father’s back. He said you’ve to go.’
I hoped we would put the incident with Oliver, Freddie and Sephy behind us and be firm friends again once we were back at St Hilda’s, but I never got to speak to Lucy on her own. I tried too hard, in fact, and that made her lash out.
‘Still following me around like a lost puppy?’ Lucy said it loudly enough for the other members of the set to hear and all eyes turned gleefully towards me, then she walked out of the room I had just entered. The rest followed her. I was heartbroken. Having been in the set for a while, I was out of it again. It was a cold, brutal exclusion and all the more upsetting because I had spent half the summer with Lucy at Cragsmoor. I judged myself more harshly for this than Lucy. I had ruined everything.
From then on, I kept almost entirely to myself, speaking only when spoken to. My unhappiness had reached its zenith. I wasn’t content at home and never fit in at St Hilda’s, except, it seemed, for a brief and glorious period, before and during the trip to Cragsmoor, when I actually began to think I might be normal.
