Cath Staincliffe - Stone Cold Red Hot

“I’m intrigued. Fire away.”

I thought back to Frances’s account of her last time with Jennifer. That moment when Jennifer had become so distressed. “OK. From your garden you can see a fair bit of the house behind and vice-versa.”

She bobbed up to refresh her memory. “Yes.”

“If you were out in the garden you’d have a clear view of the upstairs but not of the ground floor, because of the wall?”

“That’s right. If you wanted to see into their garden or their kitchen or whatever you’d have to be upstairs here.”

“Or on the wall.”

“Erm…yes.” She smiled enjoying the game we were playing.

“Now, suppose someone was on the wall at the bottom of the Pickerings garden. They’d have a good view across here but they wouldn’t see much of the Pickering’s or of the house on the other side.”

“The Kennedy’s,” she said.

“Yes, with the trees along the bottom and the big hedge down the side.”

“Hedge!” she snorted. “They’re a liability, those things, grow like Triffids. I said to Mr Kennedy when they planted them that they’d be up and down ladders trimming them every five minutes.”

My neck prickled. “They weren’t there when the Shuttles had the house?”

“Oh, no. They just had an ordinary fence and the sycamores at the end so they weren’t overlooked from the back anyway, not like I am.”

I walked over to the French windows and looked out.

She carried on talking. “Those things must be eight foot high. You could have seen over before.”

Bingo! I pictured Jennifer astride the wall, her father and Mrs Shuttle seen from her vantage point. “But the shed would have blocked the view.”

“Well, that wasn’t always there either. Frank put that up.”

I looked at her. “When?” My mouth was dry.

She screwed up her face. “Let’s see. It must have been before he got ill, he did it all himself. Yes, it was. I remember they thought that had brought on the angina, too much for him. So that must have been…” she calculated.

I knew what was coming.

“…in the autumn, 1976. The ground was like concrete.”

The blood in my veins stopped moving.

“He’d had a bed there, perennials, a lovely show but that heat killed them. I think he gave up. Decided to call it quits. It’s a merciless spot there, there’s never any shade. He might have got away with roses,” she shrugged, returned from her reverie. “That any help?”

“Yes.” Now I could explain how Jennifer, atop the dividing wall, had discovered her father’s adultery. What she glimpsed sent her scrambling in the other direction, appalled and inarticulate. What she saw had triggered the confrontation that followed.

And now I knew where Jennifer was. I tried to swallow, my throat was tight and a twist of panic played in my stomach.

“I know it’s a long time ago,” I said, “but can you remember any disturbances from next door, early autumn 1976, just before Jennifer left home? Any rows, raised voices, that sort of thing?”

“No. I’ve not got that sort of recall. I know I’m good on names but dates, when things happen…” she shook her head.

“You said before that you heard raised voices sometimes?”

“Yes, but I couldn’t say when, exactly. And it wasn’t that often. The walls here are quite thick, and I was out and about a lot with the business. I mean, they did have words now and then, I’d hear it if I was in the garden and they’d left the window open but there’s no particular time I recall.”

“And you would hear Mr Pickering shouting or Jennifer?”

“Yes. He had a temper and Jennifer, well at that age they are prone to flare up, aren’t they?”

“Thanks,” I finished the interview.

“I’ll be awake all night wondering what’s behind these questions,” her eyes twinkled.

Me too. I tried to act normally while I bade farewell to Mrs Clerkenwell and not to let my eyes ricochet wildly about like my thoughts were.

My hands were trembling as I unlocked my bike. I had an overwhelming urge to run away, as though I was the guilty one. Knowing what I did made me feel dirty. What was I going to do about it? The police? They’d show me the door straightaway, surely. Everything I had was circumstantial. There were no eye-witnesses to any wrong doing. There was no shred of evidence that anything untoward had befallen Jennifer Pickering – I didn’t think an abandoned troll would count for much. She was missing, that’s all. A statistic.

I was sure though, gut sure, that Jennifer had never left home. Her body lay in the garden, under the shed that her father had built around her, a mausoleum for a murder. Soon his breaking heart and guilty conscience had made him sick and driven him to despair and death. She had lain there and festered, a macabre secret that would never have been uncovered had Roger not longed to see his sister again.

What would I tell him? I reeled away from the prospect and the bike lurched unsteadily. Before I told anything to a soul I had to talk to Mrs Pickering again and confront her with the lies she had told. She must have known, she must have done. It was she who said Jennifer had gone to Keele and later dropped out. She must have helped him hide the body, hide the truth from Roger. No wonder the garden had gone to rack and ruin. Could either of them have stepped outside without recalling what was buried there? Had any of them ever used the shed? Had Roger played in it as a den? I had a wave of revulsion. How could she sleep at night?

My concentration was shot when I got home. I went to make a cup of tea but forgot to switch the kettle on; it helps the water to boil if you include electricity in the equation. When I got that sorted I found myself making two cups one after the other.

I tried to piece together the correct sequence of events. Jennifer had seen her father and Mrs Shuttle from the wall. She’d run off. Later she had spoken to Lisa and called her father a hypocrite. Had she told her mother? Or maybe she had threatened her father with her knowledge first or tried to make a trade-off; I’ll keep quiet if you support me and my baby; I’m pregnant you see. There was no deal made. Jennifer was silenced. Jennifer disappeared.

I checked the number and dialled the Bradford number.

“Hello, can I speak to Mrs Shuttle please? It’s Mrs Kenny from Italian.”

She came on the line her voice taut with suspicion. “What is it?”

“Just one question, when Frank Pickering told you it was over, that Jennifer had found out, did he say whether Jennifer had told Barbara or whether he had to?”

“I don’t know.”

“It’s important.”

“I think,” she lowered her voice, “I think he just said that Barbara knew and when I asked him how, he said Jennifer had found out.”

“But not that Jennifer had told her?”

“It’s a long time ago.”

“So after he broke it off how did you feel when you next saw Jennifer?”

“I didn’t see her again, she’d gone off to university”

Thank you.

I drank my tea too quickly, scalding my throat. I was late for school. I couldn’t find my keys anywhere. I checked my pockets, the table, the shelf, the worktops. They’d gone. In the end I decided I would have to leave the door on the latch, I set the snib, went out and pulled it to behind me. My keys were there, dangling from the lock.

Ray mistook my preoccupation with work for an extended sulk. He’s the sulky one usually, I’m more apt to lay the cards on the table or just lose my temper. He matched my silence with his own but I barely registered until Tom piped up. “Why’s everybody all grumpy?”

“I’m not,” Maddie said.

“Just tired,” Ray lied.

“I’m thinking about work,” I said, “and that’s making me grumpy.”