Rachel Bennett - Little Girls Tell Tales

One More Chapter

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First published in Great Britain by HarperCollins Publishers 2020

Copyright © Rachel Bennett 2020

Cover design by HarperCollins Publishers Ltd 2020

Cover images © Shutterstock.com

Rachel Bennett asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

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Source ISBN: 9780008333300

Ebook Edition © May 2020 ISBN: 9780008333294

Version: 2020-02-03

This ebook meets all accessibility requirements and standards.

Please be advised this book features the following content warnings: bereavement, homophobia, missing persons, child abuse, murder.

Table of Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

About This Book

Dedication

Chapter 1: August 2004

Chapter 2: Fifteen Years Later

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Also by Rachel Bennett

About the Publisher

For Jacob and Elliott

If the weather had been better that summer I wouldn’t have found the body in the wetlands. We were only outside that day because, after four solid days of rain, our mum chased me and Dallin out of the house as soon as the clouds broke.

We were allowed to play in the curraghs, the sprawling acres of boggy marshland that began almost on Mum’s back doorstep, so long as we kept to the main paths. Mum had told plenty of stories about how easy it was to get lost, or worse. Some of the boggy ponds were so deep, she said, that if a girl stepped into one it would swallow her forever. I was mostly convinced the stories weren’t real.

My brother Dallin was twelve; two years older than me. He’d spent countless hours playing in the curraghs and reckoned the bog-land held no secrets from him. He never missed an opportunity to lord it over me, this advantage he’d gained by living full-time here with Mum, while I was stuck in Douglas with our dad.

So it was only natural we should follow him without question. Dallin went racing ahead down the main path. His was all legs and arms, like a disjointed puppet. Right behind him was Beth, who’d been in the same class as Dallin since they were at playschool. Her parents had dropped her off at Mum’s house earlier that day. Beth was a quiet soul, as if she’d long ago decided Dallin would be the brash, noisy one. Her brown hair hated being confined to a ponytail and was always escaping in wisps and tufts. Beth and Dallin would never call each other best friends, but only because they never needed to voice such things. When Beth was with us, I felt superfluous.

‘This way!’

Dallin ducked off the main path, vaulted a water-filled ditch, and set off into the trees on the other side, without checking to see if we were following. The trees were spindly and twisted, as if there wasn’t enough substance to the ground to anchor them, and one grew above fifteen feet tall. But that was tall enough. Once we were amongst them, I could no longer see the mountains to the south, my only point of reference on that flat stretch of land.

‘This is more muddy than last week,’ Dallin said over his shoulder. ‘But you’d expect that, right? After all that rain, it’s gonna be like a proper swamp in here, we better not take a single step off the path—’

He chattered away as we walked. Dallin was always talking, always making noise, always restless. Sometimes it was exhilarating to be caught in his slipstream. Other times it was exhausting.

Today I didn’t have much tolerance for him. Maybe it was because we’d been cooped up in the house, or maybe it was the calm press of the trees, but I found I didn’t want to listen. I walked slowly, putting a little distance between us. Beth glanced back once and smiled at me. One of those understanding smiles she was so good at. She was beautiful, I realised in surprise, with golden sunlight caught in wayward strands of her hair. It was the first time I’d noticed.

The path we were following ran along the top of an old dry-stone wall. A hundred years ago, this whole area had been drained for farmland, and these flat-topped walkways had stood waist-high along the boundaries of the fields. But the farmers left, the waters returned, and the trees reclaimed every inch of land. Tree roots climbed up and over the broken stone of the walls to bind them tight. I picked my way over a gnarled surface made of a dozen warring roots.

‘Look, Rosalie,’ Beth said, pointing. ‘Wallaby.’

I hadn’t believed Dallin when he’d told me there were wallabies living wild up here in the north of the island. According to him, they’d escaped from the wildlife park on the other side of the curraghs about fifty years ago, and had been living here ever since. It sounded like one of Dallin’s stories, but Mum had backed him up, for once.

‘They’ve been here longer than any of us,’ she’d said with good-natured annoyance, ‘so I suppose they have the right to go wherever they want. But I could do without them getting into my garden and chewing the bark off my fruit trees.’

It’d been a few years since Mum had snapped our family in two by moving out of our Douglas home and buying the farmhouse up here in the middle of nowhere. The summer holidays, when I was parcelled out to her for up to three weeks, were marked by my sullen silences and unshed tears. At age ten, I blamed her for everything wrong with my life.

Over the last two summers, I’d spotted several wallabies while we were out in the curraghs. They were always at a distance, sitting so still they could be mistaken for broken tree stumps. There was something vaguely sinister, I thought, about the way they watched us. Like sentinels of the swamp.

I followed Beth’s pointing finger and saw the wallaby. It looked bigger than the ones in the wildlife park. Obviously it had spotted us, because it was staring straight at us both, keeping a cool eye on what we were doing.