The Mistress: A gripping and emotional page turner with a killer twist Page 19

  ‘Just about.’

  Anna trailed behind, hanging round the doorframe. ‘Can’t she stay a bit longer, Mum? Please.’

  I looked at Bea. ‘If you want. Another five minutes. Okay with you, Clara?’

  ‘Yaaaaay!’ They turned round and went tearing back to the sitting room together.

  Bea waited until they’d gone, then turned back to me. ‘You don’t seem very excited.’

  I put the grill pan upside down on the drainer and reached for a greasy oven tray.

  ‘I am.’ I couldn’t look at her. ‘It’s just, you know, a big change. For both of us.’

  ‘You can always come back, if it doesn’t work out. You know that, right? You’ve always got a place with us, if you need it.’

  I thought of Bea’s cramped flat, already overcrowded with three of them.

  ‘That’s kind.’ It was too late for regrets. Too late for second thoughts. This was it.

  Something in my tone must have alerted her. She took hold of my arm and pulled me round.

  ‘Hey, what is it?’ She looked me hard in the eye. ‘Don’t go all sad on me. It’s not the big goodbye. We’ll still be friends, right? Wherever you are. Even Bristol.’ She smiled. ‘You can’t get rid of us that easily. We’ll come and visit whenever we can.’

  I smiled but my heart wasn’t in it. All I could think was how very wrong she was.

  Where Anna and I were going, she’d never find us again.

  Forty-Seven

  Six weeks later

  For weeks, I’d worked flat out, emptying drawers and cupboards, filling sack after sack for the charity shop, then driving just as many more to the dump.

  I got rid of all Ralph’s clothes, the bohemian jackets and trousers, the suits, the Noël Coward dressing-gown, his shoes, his books, his old bags and suitcases and the sports equipment in the loft.

  Even without him, Anna and I had so much stuff of our own. I filled a whole room with boxes of old toys and almost all our clothes, pre-school children’s books and my recipe books, towels and bed linen. I sent it all to the charity shop. Once we were on the brink of leaving, a team of men came round with a truck and cleared first the kitchen, then the furniture from the rest of the house. What they couldn’t sell or donate, they’d send for disposal, they said.

  It was the start of August, and our street – dusty and sticky underfoot with melting tarmac – seemed unnaturally quiet. Everyone was away on holiday. Even Clara was going away, staying with her grandma, Bea’s mum, in Wales for two weeks.

  Bea was at work. I wondered how long it would take her to realise that the Bristol address I’d dutifully written out for her was a false one. That my usual mobile number would soon no longer be in service.

  Anna, restless and bereft, had hung around as the adults cleared the house. She’d watched the activity with a gloomy expression and tearful eyes.

  The previous night, our very last in the house, she’d screamed herself to sleep, her angular body curled into a ball, tight and resolute, even as I lay beside her and tried to relax her with rhythmical strokes and soothing words.

  ‘It’ll be okay, Anna. It will. It’s always hard leaving a home. I know that. But wait till you see the new one. You’ll love it!’

  ‘I won’t!’ Her face was swollen with crying. ‘I’m not going. I’m not, Mummy. You can’t make me!’

  Now, the charity team had closed up the truck and left and everything was suddenly quiet again. Anna looked exhausted, her small frame hunched as we held hands and walked together on a final tour through the empty rooms to say goodbye.

  The house looked alien, the rooms shrunken and without personality now the furniture had gone. Without carpet, our feet echoed on the wooden floors.

  I remembered the first time we’d viewed the house, Ralph and I. I was so in love with him and full of optimism about the future. Upstairs, we’d walked into the spare bedroom and he’d snaked his arm round me to give my waist a squeeze.

  ‘Children’s bedroom,’ he’d said in a low voice. ‘The twins can share this one. Bunk beds, maybe. And the triplets can go in the big bedroom at the top.’

  I’d laughed, sharing the joke, hopeful that bearing five children fathered by Ralph was a happy possibility. I always knew he was a charmer, of course I did. I just thought the charm was reserved for me.

  Now, clunking across the bare boards, conscious of the dirty streaks across the painted walls, the cracks in the brickwork, life seemed impossibly different. Without us, the terraced house seemed narrow and poky.

  ‘Have you left him a note?’ Anna turned large, anxious eyes on me as we headed back to the hall. ‘How will he find us?’

  ‘Oh, Anna!’ I crouched down and kissed the tip of her nose, then took her in my arms and held her close. ‘Is that why you’re so sad about leaving? In case Daddy comes back and can’t find us? Oh, sweetheart!’

  Outside, I settled her in the back seat of the hire car, hemmed in beside the bags of possessions we were keeping, including her soft toys, then went to lock the front door for the last time and post the key through the letterbox for the estate agent to find.

  As we pulled out, I glimpsed a movement in the rear-view mirror, from a car which was parked a little further down the street.

  I turned to look more closely. A battered saloon car with scraped paintwork. Its driver, Mike Ridge, was leaning out of the window, his hand raised in salute, his eyes on mine and a knowing smile on his lips.

  Forty-Eight

  Deep in the country, the roads narrowed and I scanned the horizon for oncoming traffic, hoping to catch sight of cars before they disappeared into hollows and behind tight corners, then appeared in front of me too late, forcing me hard against the verge.

  The visibility wasn’t helped by the drystone walls which edged the road. They bordered undulating fields dotted with sheep and, above, rising fells, richly coloured in the dying light by bracken and heather, nippled with stone cairns.

  Anna, exhausted after the emotions of the last few days and lulled by the drive, was asleep in the back. Her head drooped sideways, bouncing lightly against the hard shell of her child seat. Her lips were parted. Her hair, newly short and spiky – like mine – still surprised me.

  I whispered, ‘Nearly there,’ into the empty hum of the car.

  A lay-by loomed ahead, an entrance to a farmer’s field. If I’d been alone, I might have pulled in, just for the chance of surveying the valley. The hump-back bridge over the river which was streaked gold, touched with pink, in the gathering sunset. The clusters of stone cottages set along the main street. They climbed the opposite hill and forked, here and there, into more modern housing, grouped into crescents.

  The long, lean pub and hotel on the riverbank with its stone arch, offering an entrance to the hidden car park behind. The church with its reaching spire, also made from the same grey Yorkshire stone as the pub, the bridge, the older houses. There were visitors too, for August. One of the farmer’s fields, close to the riverbank, had been turned over to a row of caravans and tents. Barbecues and camping stoves sent up wisps of smoke which dispersed rapidly in the light breeze from the river.

  I smiled to myself. Space. Clean air. I’d been a child, not much older than Anna, when I first came to this village for a one-week holiday. We’d stayed in a bed and breakfast on the main street, with cold, dingy bedrooms and heavy quilts. Most days, I’d taken a fishing net and splashed at the edges of the river, my trousers rolled up to my knees, heaving rocks to build dams and fishing for tiddlers. There’d been picnics – wads of ham sandwiches and crisps and pop – on Dad’s tartan blanket which, however long it lay stretched in the sun, never lost the smell of his car. In the evenings, fish and chips and pies in the pub garden.

  As I manoeuvred the car over the hump-back bridge and through the arch to the pub hotel car park, the sun gleamed round and red as it sank from view, as if it had seen us safely home and considered its work done. At once, as I switched off the engine and sat, rubbing
my neck, rolling the knots out of my shoulders, the landscape became dark and brooding, the wind chill.

  I turned to the back seat. ‘Anna! We’re here!’

  She stirred, heavy with sleep, and groaned. She struggled to see out of narrowed eyes into the darkness.

  ‘I’m cold, Mummy.’

  ‘That’s okay. We’ll soon get cosy in bed.’ I climbed out and went around the back of the car to help her. She was slow to move. I had to reach in to unbuckle her, then prise her from the seat.

  In the car park, she stood uncertainly, lost. She looked at the hotel. ‘Is this our house?’

  ‘We’re just staying here tonight. We’ll explore the house tomorrow, as soon as it’s light.’

  I grabbed our overnight bag, then took her hand and led her across the cobbles to the main entrance. A lion was carved in the stone above the door. The air was fresh and sharp and carried the smell of sheep, of peat, of the moors.

  I rang the bell on the deserted reception desk until a young man came running through from the bar. His hair stood up in clumps, raked through by his fingers.

  ‘Mrs Mack,’ I said. ‘I’ve booked a room for tonight. Twin beds.’

  I winked at Anna. She stared at me, still unsure. We were starting a wonderful game, I’d told her when we’d stopped at the motorway service station on the way up the M1. Like pretending to be foxes or puppies or princesses or any of the other games we played together.

  ‘We’re new people now,’ I told her. ‘With new names. Anna Mack. What do you think of that?’

  She’d hesitated, her lip wobbling. ‘I want to be Anna Wilson,’ she said. ‘Or Princess Celestia.’

  I’d considered. ‘We’ll call you Anna Celestia Mack, then.’

  Now, the young man opened up a ledger and ran his finger down the columns, then plucked a printed form from a drawer and handed me a pen. I filled in the details I’d learned. The new address, here in the village. The new name. The phone number of the cheap pay-as-you-go mobile I’d swapped for my old, easily traceable one.

  I left the credit card details blank. ‘Okay if I pay cash?’

  ‘Sure.’ He peered at the form. ‘I’d need you to pay now though, for tonight.’

  ‘No problem.’ I rummaged in my handbag and counted off notes from the large wad there.

  He handed over the room key, attached to a heavy leather fob.

  ‘I see you’re not going far. Craven Barn. You booked in there for the week, Mrs Mack?’

  ‘Longer than that.’ I tried not to let Anna see how anxious I felt. ‘It’s our new home.’

  Once the pub closed, the hotel fell silent.

  Anna was curled tightly in her bed, duvet and spare blankets piled on top of her. The thick iron radiator was dusty. The room carried the dank chill of old stone walls.

  I sat on the window seat in the darkness, with my coat wrapped around my knees and the curtain drawn back, keeping watch. The trees along the riverbank shuffled their branches in the wind. When I pressed my face against the window, the glass was cold and solid. I breathed a circle of condensation and wrote ‘Anna’, then enclosed her with a heart. The night outside was intense. The only relief were the microscopic threads of moonlight that flashed on the fast-moving surface of the river.

  The smells here stirred memories for me. I thought back to the sense of strangeness I’d felt on holiday here as a young child. The small differences. The soggy cornflakes at breakfast, in a shallow china bowl. The thick creaminess of the milk. Farm eggs and greasy sausages. Being urged to try black pudding and feeling revolted by it. It’s blood, I’d remembered. Pig’s blood.

  A crunch of gravel, down in the car park. Someone was there. I stiffened and drew back a little from the window, still looking but better concealed. I waited, straining to see and hear.

  Silence. Then it came again. Not animal but human. Footsteps. Stealthy and slow.

  I narrowed my eyes in the gloom, trying to see. A dark figure eased its way around the car park, keeping to the shadows. It crept along the ragged row of vehicles as if it were sniffing them out, then stopped at mine. I held my breath.

  A man. Crouching to look at my car. His shape shifted and I had the sense that he’d turned to look up, his eyes scanning the darkened windows of the hotel, searching for someone. Searching for me.

  I shrank further back and closed my eyes, blood pounding in my ears.

  When I looked again, he’d gone, slipping as quickly and stealthily out of the car park as he had come.

  Forty-Nine

  Anna woke early the next morning and padded across the cold floor to join me in bed. She seemed lost and a little frightened. She put icy feet on my warm legs and I wrapped my arms around her.

  ‘Are you okay?’

  She didn’t answer, just pressed her forehead into the soft flesh of my arm.

  ‘Does it feel very strange, waking up here?’

  She gave a jerky nod.

  I kissed the top of her head. ‘I know, sweetheart. It’s different, isn’t it? We’ll get used to it.’

  I thought of all the times in the last two months that I’d woken in the night to the sound of her screaming. The nightmares spoke for themselves. She’d suffered, without really understanding why, as she struggled to come to terms with losing Ralph. It wasn’t something she knew how to talk about.

  I held her safe in the circle of my arms.

  ‘Listen. What can you hear?’

  We lay very still and listened.

  ‘Clanging,’ she said. ‘A man talking in a funny voice. Footsteps.’

  Downstairs, doors slammed as people moved to and fro. Someone was preparing breakfast.

  ‘What else?’

  She shrugged.

  ‘Listen harder. What do they have here, in the countryside, that we don’t have at home?’

  She frowned with concentration, then broke into a smile as she fixed on the distant sounds of animals in the farms around us. ‘Cows! Doggies!’

  ‘Dogs,’ I corrected. ‘Farm dogs, probably. Working dogs. And did you hear that rooster?’

  She jumped out of bed and we hurried to get dressed.

  ‘What animal do you want to be?’ I asked. ‘A sheepdog?’

  ‘Yes!’ She considered. ‘No! Pretend you’re a farmer and I’m a little lamb and you’ve just found me, asleep on your bed and you’re going to take me home. Say, what’s this? A lamb! How cute! And pretend I could talk.’

  After breakfast, Anna played in the hotel garden until the estate agent opened and I could take possession of the keys. More thick wads of cash. We took the car the short distance up the hill, turned off at the top of the high street and bounced down a rutted farm track. It skirted the hillside, fringed by dry stone walls and fields, then dipped and brought us down to the barn itself, set in a natural hollow.

  Anna strained forward, peering out. ‘Is that it?’

  ‘Looks like it.’

  I skidded to a halt on the rough ground in front of the barn, scattering loose stones, then we headed inside.

  The photographs online had exaggerated the size, but the style was exactly what I’d expected. The barn was basic but cleverly converted, making the most of its thick stone walls, its position and its cavernous scale. The vast interior was divided into two levels with a wooden spiral staircase joining the upper and lower floors.

  Apart from a cloakroom with a toilet, near the front door, the downstairs area was open plan. The designer had created a dining area with table and chairs and a low pendulum light. I walked past to the kitchenette, set across from the spiral staircase. It was modern, with slate worktops and a ceiling crossed by salvaged wooden beams.

  Anna clattered upstairs to explore. I opened kitchen cupboards and drawers. They were well-stocked with cutlery and crockery, mixing bowls and electronic scales. It was like moving into the home of a complete stranger and taking on their identity. We could simply unpack the few clothes and toys we’d brought and become new people.

  Beyond th
e kitchen, the downstairs floor opened into a sitting room, with vast windows which looked out across the valley on the far side of the property. It didn’t yet have curtains and the sunlight streamed in, setting the house alight.

  ‘Mummy! Come and look!’ Anna, halfway down the stairs, hung over the bannister to call me.

  I headed up the wooden stairs to join her, taking note of the open slats.

  ‘You need to be careful on these stairs, Anna. Okay? Mind you don’t fall.’

  She wasn’t listening. She grabbed my hand and pulled me after her into a small bedroom across the upstairs landing. There was no doubting it was meant for her. The white walls were decorated with colourful animal stencils, brand new children’s paperbacks sat on the shelves. On the bed, where the pillow might be, sat a large, furry sheepdog, its pink tongue lolling.

  ‘Look, Mummy! A doggie!’ She bounced onto the mattress and pulled the stuffed dog onto her lap, buried her face in its fur. ‘Can I keep her?’

  I hesitated, taken aback. ‘I suppose so.’

  ‘I’m going to call her Buddy.’ She looked up at me, expectantly. ‘Good idea?’

  ‘Great idea…’

  I left her there, whispering to Buddy, and crossed the landing to find the master bedroom at the front of the house. Like the sitting room directly below, it was well-proportioned and sunny. The same broad picture windows, arched here, looked out across the valley. Another, more modest window was set in a side wall, giving onto a copse of trees.

  A king-sized bed dominated the space, with narrow bedside tables on each side. Fitted wardrobes ran along the length of one wall. I opened a wardrobe door to find drawers hidden inside as well. Plenty of storage. An armchair, a little fussy for my taste, had been placed near the picture windows, looking out, as if it were inviting me to sit and admire the view. I thought of Miss Dixon, slumped in her armchair, day after day, looking out at the streets below, waiting for someone who never came.