Sally Bayley - Girl With Dove

One day, Mum took me upstairs to say hello to Di, the woman with black bullet eyes.

‘She’s your aunt, darling, your Aunt Diane. She’s come to live with us. She’s had a baby. We’re going to look after her. Now say hello nicely.’

What was an aunt, I wondered. I had never heard of an aunt before. What did aunts come from?

‘From Lancing on Sea,’ Mum said. ‘From Lancing on Sea.’

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A few days later, my brother Peter and I found a body in the front room. We came home from school and there was a man lying on the floor. He was thin with a black moustache and black hair and his mouth hung wide open. My brother opened the door and tripped over him.

‘He’s dead! He’s dead! Peter, Peter, it’s a dead body! We’ve found a dead body! Call the police!’

The dead man looked like a large black ant. I felt sorry for him. We could easily squash him and no one would ever know. Here was a poor dead ant, stuck to our hard floor. A giant spider or fly must have come from behind the curtains and strangled him.

Mummy came in and told us off for making such a fuss. The man on the floor was a friend of Aunt Di . Think of him as your uncle, she said. Uncle David. Uncle David is sleeping now, so shhhhh! Now close the door quietly behind you! There’s a baby upstairs!

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When you start a murder investigation you have to have clear plans of the place where the murder happened. Detectives call this the ‘crime scene’. If the crime scene is in a house they draw up careful room plans. Everything that might have happened has to be kept inside closed lines. Nothing must straggle over the edges. Detectives don’t like mess.

But a detective would have found our house difficult to plan. In fact, Inspector Craddock would have hated our house. (Miss Marple thinks Inspector Craddock is hopeless, but she’s too polite to say so.) Still, the inspector has a point: you can’t be a good detective among muddle and mess.

‘Where is my nice pair of scissors?’ Mum yelled down the hallway. ‘Which of you little swines has got my sewing scissors? Can’t I leave anything out without you getting your filthy hands on it!’

Fortunately, Miss Marple has an excellent memory so she doesn’t need to draw up plans. She can draw her own lines around things. Miss Marple can remember what lamp was on when the gun went off. She can recall which door was open and which was closed. She can remember exactly who was there and who wasn’t, precisely how the curtains sat on the carpet, who sneezed just before the light went out.

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Everything I know comes from reading. Everything I’ve found out comes because of Miss Marple and then Jane Eyre.

After I found Jane Eyre nothing was the same again. She was always there, always looking and hearing the things no one else dared. Let me show you what I mean.

One night, in her small room at Thornfield Hall, Jane Eyre hears a strange gurgling sound coming from the room above her. She stirs and opens her eyes, but she can’t see anything in front of her except smoke! Smoke is filling the hallway outside her room, smoke is pushing its way beneath her door, smoke is filling up her lungs.

Jane leaps out of bed and races down the hall; she flies towards Mr Rochester’s room and shouts through the door. ‘Master, Master, wake up! Wake up! Your room is on fire!’

Lucky for Mr Rochester, Jane is a quick thinker. Quick as a flash, says Maze, fast on her feet, that one. Doesn’t miss a trick. And Jane is practical, too. She drags Mr Rochester out of bed and takes him to safety, to the hallway (the gallery , the Victorians call it, where pictures of dead ancestors hang) outside her room. Mr Rochester knows that, without Jane, he would be dead.

‘Dead as a dormouse,’ Maze says about the brown furry thing the cat has brought in. Mr Rochester might not be dead as a dormouse exactly, but he’d be dead as something without Jane. That night he takes her into his confidence forever; that night Jane becomes his fairy-friend.

The next morning Jane starts asking some serious questions on behalf of her new friend.

‘I am certain I heard a laugh, and a strange one,’ she announces to Mr Rochester’s servant Grace Poole the following morning. ‘It can’t have been Pilot, because Pilot can’t laugh.’ Pilot is a dog.

Grace lifts her needle, takes a new ball of thread, waxes it, pokes the end through and carries on sewing. Her face doesn’t flinch, not even a bit. Jane is furious. Last night Mr Rochester told her that the strange laugh was Grace Poole. Grace Poole must have tried to burn Mr Rochester in bed. Jane is sure of it! She saw his bed: the curtains around it were burnt to a cinder. Mr Rochester is lucky to be alive! Grace Poole is a monster! She should be locked up!

‘I am certain I heard a laugh.’

‘Have you told Master that you heard a laugh?’ asks Grace quietly. ‘You did not think of opening your door and looking out into the gallery?’

‘On the contrary,’ says Jane Eyre, who is beginning to get huffy. ‘I bolted my door!’

‘And you are not in the habit of bolting your door every night?’

‘I have often omitted to fasten my door. I was not aware any danger or annoyance was to be dreaded at Thornfield Hall?’

‘I always think it is best to err on the safe side; a door is soon fastened, and it is as well to have a drawn bolt between one and any mischief that may be about. A deal of people, Miss, are for trusting all to Providence.’

Jane looks at the placid face of the woman in front of her. A Quaker woman couldn’t produce more serenity than this woman with her needle. Why has she not been taken into police custody for her criminal behaviour? Mr Rochester was nearly burned alive in his bed last night by this fiend with her uncanny laugh!

Jane pauses for a moment. Grace is hiding something. It was a woman’s laugh she heard, she is certain, the laugh of an angry witch. A woman burying bones at nightfall.

6

Some houses have no chance in hell of becoming homes. Thornfield Hall is one of these. It is home neither to Jane Eyre nor Mr Rochester; both come and go from it like fairies.

‘In what order you keep these rooms, Mrs. Fairfax!’ says Jane Eyre to the housekeeper soon after she arrives.

‘Why Miss Eyre, though Mr. Rochester’s visits here are rare, they are always sudden and unexpected; and as I observed that it put him out to find everything swathed up, and to have a bustle of arrangement on his arrival, I thought it best to keep the rooms in readiness.’

In our house, rooms were never ready. We didn’t have a Mrs Fairfax to dust and pull back the curtains, to hoover up the filth or scrub down the surfaces. We didn’t have a Mrs Fairfax to let in the light.

Mr Robinson was the only person we could ever imagine visiting. Mr Robinson who lived on the third floor, right at the top, with his wife, Mrs Robinson, who we never saw. Mr Robinson was the only person who would poke his head through our door if we left it open; Mr Robinson suddenly standing in our front room with boxes of farm eggs in his arms; Mr Robinson suddenly at the window with his long scraggy dark hair and cracked-tooth smile.

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But anyone can barge into your dreams.

One night, Jane sees a woman in her room, a woman with long dark hair. Birds circle around her head; wings cover her lips and eyes, her nose and mouth, her face.

Suddenly Jane sees a garish red face and startling black eyes bearing down on her. A dark cavern opens up, and at the back of the cavern is a red serpent lifting its head and hissing. The woman begins to scream. She drops to the floor and begins to writhe. She writhes and she writhes and then she opens her mouth wide.