Sarah Rayne - What Lies Beneath

Even after the doctor said she was better, she did not bother about keeping the cottage clean or tidy. Dust and grime collected on surfaces and mould grew around the windowpanes in the scullery. Ella, hating the sour, wet smell of the mould, tried to clean things herself while her mother sat bonelessly in the chair, taking surreptitious swigs from the brandy bottle, telling Ella there was no point, everything would get dirty again, and anyway, nobody ever came to the house.

Nobody came to the house because Ella never asked anyone. She had never been ashamed of her home or of her mother, but she began to be now. Several times at school she heard whispers about her mother, and once one of the older girls asked her outright if it was true that her mother had caught a disease from going to bed with men.

Ella had no idea what the girl meant but she was still being very careful not to let anyone know about being in Priors Bramley that day to find her watch. So she tossed her head and said it was a lie, and people who told lies ended in being punished.

After a while she stopped trying to get her mother to go out. If there were school concerts or prize-givings, she no longer brought the details or the dates home. She could not bear anyone to see the unkempt wreck her mother had become, and as well as that she was frightened her mother would talk about that afternoon inside Cadence Manor.

She had no idea what she would do if Priors Bramley were to be opened up again and the body found, nor whether the man’s death could be traced back to her. But as the weeks and then the months went by, the village stayed behind the black barbed wire and the thing that lay inside Cadence Manor remained in its secret tomb. From time to time Ella thought about the cobwebby music that had drifted so eerily across the gardens, but she never heard it again and after a time she managed to push the memory of it into the deepest recesses of her mind. It was part of a nightmare, and as the years passed the nightmare gradually faded.

The Present

The man’s body had not been found. Ella knew that for sure, because news of such a discovery would have caused a considerable stir in Upper Bramley. But the body would certainly be found when the decontamination teams went into Priors Bramley. Would the police be able to identify it after so long? Probably they would; you only needed to watch a television crime programme to know about DNA and dental records. But even if the man’s identity were discovered it would not matter, although it would feel strange to know his name. What would matter was if Clem or Veronica lost their nerve and talked about what had happened all those years ago. How likely was that?

Ella could easily imagine Clem spinning one of his stupid stories, telling everyone how the three of them had walked through Priors Bramley on its last day. He would probably not refer to the man’s death because he was not that stupid, but he might get carried away and embroider his story with ridiculous little fantasies, never seeing the harm he was doing. He was exactly like his name: he was like a clucking old hen in a poultry coop, strutting round the little local library where he had worked almost his entire life, exchanging tittle-tattle with everyone who came in.

Derek, who had Scottish grandparents, said Clem was a bletherskite, but Derek had never liked Clem since he saw him smoking scented cigarettes. Affected, that was Derek’s opinion. He never refused an invitation to one of Clem’s elaborate little dinner parties, though, because Clem was a very good cook and Derek enjoyed his food. What he did refuse were invitations to evenings Clem called ‘musical soirées’, but everyone else called listening to records at Clem’s house. Derek had once gone with Ella to one of these, but said afterwards she was never to drag him out to listen to such a load of boring rubbish again because he would rather watch television. This had surprised Ella, what with Derek being a member of the Operatic Society; music was music, surely. But Derek said there was a difference between Gilbert and Sullivan and the pretentious bilge Clem played. Ella had said, oh yes, of course , she had not seen it like that.

It was starting to seem as if Clem would have to be watched. He often sent articles to local magazines and county newspapers about events in this area. None of them was ever published, but the point was that he wrote about things that happened in Bramley – things that might provide clues to the past.

When Ella thought about it a bit more, she saw Veronica would have to be watched as well. She had been married twice, and had had a number of gentlemen friends since, although Ella did not ask questions and tried not to listen when Veronica talked about that side of her life. Bragging, that was all it was. But Veronica had been hinting that there was a new man in her life, and Ella thought she might spill the entire story to him while they were in bed. Pillow talk, they called that, although Ella had never really understood how it worked, because Derek had always fallen instantly asleep after that kind of activity.

The decontamination of Priors Bramley took place on schedule. A shocking disruption it would be, said people, torn between annoyance at having huge vehicles rumbling through the lanes, and subdued excitement at the reopening of the village. There was not a great deal of excitement in the town as a rule; the last time anything of any real note had happened was when a soldier, deserting from the Royal Fusiliers during the war, attacked a couple of village girls, and everyone thought he was a German spy.

People who liked to appear knowledgeable talked about neutralization and oxidation, which would be used in the spraying of all the buildings, and the Bramley Advertiser printed an article about a decontamination solution called DS2, which hardly anybody understood and which the senior science master at one of the schools said was full of inaccuracies.

Both the local schools took the opportunity to step up chemistry lessons, introducing sessions on the early pioneer chemists and formulae for organic compounds. The sixth formers were subjected to the complexities of synthesis, while one of the more progressive teachers tried to instil some recent history into his classes by drawing a parallel between the opening of the village and the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, although as somebody caustically pointed out, unwinding a few yards of barbed wire was not on the same scale as demolishing the Iron Curtain, and Sparrowfeld Lane was hardly Checkpoint Charlie.

No one was allowed into the village itself, but most of Upper Bramley went along to watch the start of things, and the mayor cut the barbed wire with special cutters and made a speech. The decontamination team walked clumpily along the lane into Priors Bramley, clad in white disposable suits and boots, carrying huge pressure jets and followed by a chugging generator on the back of a lorry.

There were parties of students from both the local schools, because it was a piece of local history and the teachers supposed a school project might as well be set up. The students were agreeable to the outing. It gave the girls chance to wear jeans and high heels, neither of which were allowed in the classroom. Watching a bit of barbed wire being torn down and listening to some droning old fart make a long-winded speech was pretty boring, but it was better than sitting at a desk. Some of the older ones sneaked off to Mordwich Copse for various forbidden activities ranging from smoking to snogging, and were resignedly hauled back by their teachers.

The Red Lion, never slow to seize its own opportunity, made up batches of sandwiches and baguettes, and went along to sell them to the watchers, with bottles of cider and Coke.