Sophie Hannah - The Other Half Lives aka The Dead Lie Down

As far as Simon knew, these names belonged to people who’d bought Aidan Seed’s paintings. Who lived at addresses that didn’t exist. For a few seconds, standing alone in the darkness and the silence in front of this strange object that looked a bit like a white tree, its branches at right angles to its trunk, Simon felt like an idiot who didn’t know what to do, or what to think.

There were five paths to choose between. He strained to see as far as he could along each in turn, which wasn’t far at all. Each one disappeared into blackness. There was no sign of the prefabricated huts he’d seen from Bedell’s window. In the end he decided to follow the sign that said, ‘Stable Block’, on the off-chance that Garstead Cottage might once have housed whoever looked after the horses. It was as good a guess as any.

He crossed a field, after which the concrete walkway narrowed and gave way to a dirt track. Definitely still a path, though. Simon followed it through a cluster of small trees and into another field. When he started to feel wetness at his ankles, he looked down and saw that he’d been walking on grass. Where was the dirt track? Had it run out or had he strayed off it? He saw dark shapes ahead and made his way towards them. The stable block. He’d assumed, when he’d read the sign, that this would be a conversion: a languages or science laboratory, or living space for the pupils, but as he approached he both heard and smelled evidence of the presence of horses. There was no Garstead Cottage, not here.

He was about to turn back when he heard what sounded like a stifled scream coming from behind the stables. He ran round the squat cluster of buildings, looked in all directions and saw nothing. ‘Hello?’ he called out. ‘Anyone there?’ This time he heard a giggle, and walked in the direction it had come from. He’d taken only a few paces forward when something that felt like hard netting pushed him back. A fence, as high as his waist. ‘Fuck,’ he muttered. More giggles followed. Then he spotted something that stood out because, unlike everything else around him, it wasn’t dark: three small orange dots that seemed to be attached to a mass of trees nearby. The glowing ends of cigarettes.

Keeping his eye on them, Simon made his way over to the trees. When he was still too far away to see faces, he heard a voice. ‘Oh, man, sir, we’re really , really sorry. We totally know there’s no way we’re not going to be in, like, pure trouble…’

‘I think you should punish us?’ another girl said, making the statement sound like a question. ‘That way we won’t make the same mistake again?’ A fit of giggles followed this unlikely sounding assertion.

‘I’m not a teacher,’ Simon told the disembodied voices. ‘I’m police. Smoke yourselves stupid for all I care.’

‘No way! Oh, man! What’s, like, a policeman doing creeping round Villy in the dead of night?’

‘This is outrageous,’ said the third girl.

Now Simon was closer and could see their faces. They looked about sixteen, and were wearing pyjamas with nothing over them, no coats or anything. They shivered in between fits of hysterical laughter. ‘I’m looking for Garstead Cottage,’ he told them.

‘What are you doing over here, then?’ one of the girls said scornfully.

‘He’s better off over here. You don’t want to go to Scary Mary’s, Mister Policey-man.’

‘Tasha!’

‘What? He doesn’t. She’s, like, a pure nightmare.’

‘You’re talking about Mary Trelease,’ said Simon.

‘Oh my God, she’s probably his girlfriend or something!’

‘Maybe he’s come to, like, arrest her?’

‘Where’s the cottage?’ he tried again. ‘Can one of you show me?’

A peal of scandalised giggles greeted this suggestion. ‘Yeah, right ! Like we wouldn’t be so dead if our house master caught us wandering round at night in our jarmies.’

‘She’s frightened of Scary Mary. I’ll take you, soon as I’ve finished my ciggie.’

‘Flavia, you’re such a liar! Like you wouldn’t be totally too scared.’

‘Right back at you, babes.’

‘What’s there to be scared of?’ Simon asked, hoping Neil Dunning wouldn’t choose now to arrive with his warrant and find Simon lurking amid the trees with three scantily clad teenage girls.

‘Oh my God-he doesn’t know!’

‘You, like, so won’t believe us if we tell you?’

‘She cuts Villy girls’ throats and drinks their blood.’ This prompted more giggles.

‘I don’t believe she exists? I’ve never seen her, and I’ve been here since I was thirteen?’

‘No, seriously, though, she doesn’t -drink blood or anything like that. But she does only come out at night.’

‘That’s totally understandable? I’d be too ashamed to come out in daylight if my face looked like that.’

‘She starved herself, right, and once all the fat had gone from under her skin, her face collapsed and she was left with the face of, like, an eighty-year-old hag. That’s pure truth, man.’

‘She’s a Villy legend .’

‘The oral storytelling tradition,’ one of the girls said in a mock deep voice, and they all screamed with laughter. Simon guessed they were aping one of their teachers.

‘Shut up , poo-brain! If I lose my exeat privs thanks to you, it’ll be pure tragedy.’

‘No way are we getting curfed for helping a policeman.’

‘Shut up and let me tell him. He hasn’t got time to waste listening to you two infants. We don’t know for sure…’

‘We so do. I heard Miss Westaway and Mrs Dean talking about it.’

‘It might all be scurlyest rumours.’

‘You mean scurrilous. Scurlyest isn’t a word. I apologise on behalf of my intoxicated housemate,’ said the girl nearest to Simon. ‘It’s so not a rumour-it’s the scandalous truth. Scary Mary had a boyfriend who dumped her, right, and she was so miz she tried to kill herself. Hanged herself in Garstead Cottage.’

‘And he was there too, the boyfriend,’ one of the other girls chipped in.

‘Oh, yeah, I forgot that bit. Yeah, she made him go round for the whole closure thing.’ The girl Simon thought was called Flavia-unless he’d got mixed up, and she was Tasha-drew invisible quote marks in the air. ‘And when he got there, she was standing on the dining table, with a rope round her neck, attached to the light or something…’

‘A chandelier! It was a chandelier!’

‘Yeah, right. In a cottage?’

‘I heard it was a chandelier.’

‘What ever . So, like, he called an ambulance and she was rushed to hospital, but on the way there in the ambulance, she died -like, majorly died . And she had no heartbeat or oxygen going to her brain for three whole minutes…’

‘It was ten minutes…’

‘No one comes back to life after ten minutes , babes. I’ve seen Scary Mary-she’s odd, but she’s not a veg. What was I saying? Oh, yeah: the ambulance people brought her back from, like, beyond death, and she was supposed to be brain damaged, but she wasn’t. She was, like, totally fine. Except she wasn’t, because that was when she turned into Scary Mary. She changed her name.’

‘Stop,’ said Simon. ‘What do you mean? Changed it to what?’

‘Mary Trelease.’

‘Scary Martha would have sounded rubbish-it doesn’t rhyme.’

‘Martha?’ If the girls’ confidence and state of undress hadn’t made him feel so uncomfortable, he’d have asked more forcefully.

‘Martha Wyers-that’s what she used to be called. But after she died and came back to life, she wouldn’t let anyone call her that any more, because, like, Martha Wyers had died?’