Sara Foster - Beneath the Shadows

Grace froze. Ben got up again from the chair and came to stand next to her. ‘Mum, get on with whatever it is you want to say.’ There was a warning note in his voice.

Meredith held his gaze. ‘I don’t even understand it all myself… but I will tell you what I know.’

She waited for a moment, eyes turned fixedly towards the window as though steeling her nerves, and then she began.

‘The first I knew that Adam existed was when he came here after Rachel died. I had my suspicions about his true paternity as soon as I realised how old he was. However, Bill and Connie thought that Jonny was his father – the timely move to Australia had made him a convenient scapegoat. I’ve always been unsure why Rachel kept up the pretence when she knew she was dying. I’m surprised she let them bring Adam back here.’

‘I don’t think he was meant to live with his grand parents,’ Grace said. ‘Rachel asked her boyfriend to take care of Adam financially – but when Adam found out the man had a second family, he wouldn’t take his money. He chose to come and stay with Bill and Connie instead.’

Meredith grimaced. ‘Well, in that case I understand now.’ She glanced at them, and Grace finally saw flashes of anxiety in her eyes. ‘I had confronted Rachel about her affair with Ted before she left – but the last I’d heard from her was a letter containing a brief apology, and an assurance that she was gone for good, which was passed on to me by her father. I’m not sure whether Ted knew of Adam either until he arrived…’ The corner of Meredith’s lip had begun to twitch, and she brushed at it absent-mindedly. ‘However, I only had to tell Ted that his youngest daughter was in love with Adam to be sure my fears were well-founded.

‘When Ted felt threatened, his first response was always attack. I know he warned Adam to stay away from Jenny. I wasn’t privy to the conversation, so I don’t know what was said. However, Adam left for university soon afterwards, and he never contacted the girls again. We were both hugely relieved.’

‘So tell me what happened last year?’ Grace insisted.

Meredith closed her eyes, but her eyelids quivered as though wild activity were going on beneath the surface. Her hand came up as if she might hide behind it, but instead she rubbed repeatedly at her face.

‘We didn’t foresee what would happen to Jenny after Adam left. Her heart was broken. She had always been Ted’s baby, and I think it destroyed him to see her like that and know it was his fault. She became a wraith, little more than skin and bone; she didn’t care about anything, and nothing we did could rouse her spirits. We were very worried for a long time, we truly thought she might never recover. And even though, in the end, slowly, she came back to life… she was never the same carefree girl we’d known before. And she’s had such rotten luck with men since. I think perhaps she made Adam into a god, and no one else could measure up. And then a couple of years ago she had an operation – went in thinking they were removing a growth, but things got more complicated, and as a result she had to have a hysterectomy.’

Grace had no intention of cultivating compassion for the Blakeneys. ‘I don’t need to hear all this, Meredith. Just tell me about last year.’

Meredith met Grace’s frosty stare. ‘Again, I had no idea you had even moved here until Ted rushed through our kitchen door. He was out of his mind. He told me that he had met Adam walking on the Leap. Ted just kept repeating, “He’s gone over, he’s gone over…” It took a while to get him coherent enough to talk to me. He never admitted any part in Adam falling, just said they’d had words and Adam had fallen over the edge. And he’d left her there,’ Meredith said, indicating Millie, who was now asleep in Grace’s arms. ‘At the Leap – in her pram, all by herself. When he told me, I ran to find her, and there she was, crying her eyes out. I wheeled the pram back, unsure what to do, and in the meantime she wore herself out and fell asleep. So I kept on going, up here.’ She gestured outside. ‘I opened the gate, half-expecting you to come out and find us, and I had no idea what I was going to say. I was still in shock myself. When you didn’t come outside, it occurred to me that I could leave her and you could discover her that way, without me needing to be involved. She was wrapped up nice and warm, and I could come back later and check that you had taken her inside. So I walked away. And we didn’t have to wait long till we knew she’d been found, as we saw the police cars go by.

‘Meanwhile, I started running through everything in my head. Ted wasn’t admitting to anything but an accident, and all I could think of was what it would do to our girls – to Jenny in particular – if he was accused of anything more sinister. I had an idea, and I talked it through with him. Gradually, as he saw that there might be a way out, he began to come round…’

Horror flooded through Grace. Less than two hours ago, she’d stood in roughly the same spot that Adam had fallen. She had been so close to going over the edge herself, into the abyss. She stumbled over to a chair and sank down in it, cuddling Millie close, trying not to think about her baby all alone on the wild, empty moor top, next to the Leap.

‘What happened next, Mum?’ Ben persisted.

Meredith looked towards the window. ‘While the police were out searching, we didn’t dare return to the Leap. We were expecting them to discover Adam down there and rule it as a suicide. We thought if we moved him it would look more suspicious.’

Grace frowned. ‘Why didn’t they find him?’

Meredith couldn’t meet their eyes. ‘Well, they didn’t go to the bottom of the Leap. It’s difficult to get back up, so they relied on the helicopter… but they should have seen him… However, later we discovered that Adam must have moved, after he’d fallen… When Ted went back, he was under a ledge – hard to see from the air.’

‘You mean you left him down there and he wasn’t even dead?’ Ben cried, horrified.

Meredith looked at him. ‘I didn’t leave him anywhere,’ she snapped, her tone sliding closer to panic. ‘I didn’t even look over when I went and got the baby – I couldn’t bear to – and I didn’t hear anything while I was there. It was your father who did the rest. He tagged on to the search party that went to the top of the Leap, tramping his boots through the mud so that when they found Adam it wouldn’t look odd that he’d been there. Then after the search was called off, Ted went back to find out what had happened. Two things had changed when he came home that day. First, he was clearly heartbroken – so perhaps Adam really did fall by accident, as Ted never once said he pushed him -’

‘Stop… stop …’ Grace jumped up, Millie startling in her arms. She fought the urge to run from the room, wanting to hear everything that Meredith had to say, however terrible. After so long, she needed the truth. A sob rose up and threatened to engulf her. ‘How can you talk about his heart breaking…?’ Her voice cracked on the words.

‘What else had changed, Mum?’ Ben asked. ‘You said there were two things.’

‘His face was haunted for the rest of his days.’ Meredith spoke in a soft, shivering whisper. ‘Whatever he saw down there, it never left him. Even after the stroke had robbed him of his faculties, right to the end, he still had that same terrible look in his eyes.’

Ben came over and put his arm around Grace. ‘So where is Adam now?’

‘Ted buried him where he found him. We stayed up all night deciding what to do for the best. He was talking about going to the police, but I persuaded him not to. What would be the point of more lives falling apart? I kept reminding him of what it would do to the girls. So at dawn the next morning he took everything he needed and drove the car towards Skeldale, parked up on the roadside and walked over the moors to the Leap. You can get to the bottom of it that way, but it’s a long hike. He didn’t come home till after dark. And the next morning we carried on as normal. Neither of us ever spoke about it again.’