‘Allergies playing up. Rosemary’s house is always so dusty.’ Annette was hunched over the sink, rinsing one of Rosemary’s fancy glass dishes that wasn’t to be put in the dishwasher. She reached for a tea towel and dried her hands. ‘Let me just get my nasal spray,’ she said, moving to the counter where her handbag stood open. Annette always favoured oversized handbags that resembled doctors’ cases. Dorothea could never understand what Annette had in there. She watched, bemused, as Annette rummaged around inside the bag and pulled out her spray and some eye drops. ‘Excuse me a moment, Dot, I’ll do this in the bathroom.’ As she hurried out of the kitchen, Dorothea noticed something that must have fallen out of Annette’s bag when she pulled out her medication. Dorothea bent down to pick it up. It was asmall Christmas card with a robin on the front. She was about to put it back into Annette’s cavernous bag when the name inside caught her eye.Surely that can’t be right, she thought as she opened the card fully. But yes, there it was. No full name. Just a ‘Bobby’ as a sign-off. And the card wasn’t addressed to Annette like she’d assumed, but to Rosemary.
She read it again with a growing sense of unease.
Hope you’re keeping well. Bobby
No, she thought, shaking her head.It could be anyone. Bobby isn’t exactly an unusual name.Was that what happened with age, the past and present converged? It was being here in this house. It always made her imagination shoot into overdrive. And it was this time of year which made her reflect on her life, and her past mistakes.
She stood for a few moments with the card in her hand. Perhaps it hadn’t come from Annette’s bag after all, but from a shelf above the microwave where Rosemary had placed a few of her cards. Dorothea found a space for it there. Annette must have knocked past it by accident and sent it flying to the floor. See. She was being ridiculous.
20
Imogen
DI Erica Shirley is staring at me steadily as I hand her the lighter. I can’t tell if she thinks I’m over-reacting or if she’s pleased I brought it in to the police station. She drops it into a plastic bag and carefully seals it. She has this way of making me feel nervous. Her gaze is too forthright, too unblinking, and she always takes a beat too long to speak, which inevitably means I begin gabbling to fill the silence.
‘Whoever took this lighter has been in the woods. I don’t know if they dropped it or left it for me to find, but you’ll see the initials on it. RF. It could … it could mean something.’
‘You’ve done the right thing bringing it in,’ she says. She hesitates, as though she’s contemplating saying something else. I wait, willing myself not to rush in and speak. It’s a tactic I employ when I’m interviewing someone about a sensitive subject. ‘You know, I interviewed Dorothea once, after your mother’s death.’
I sit up straighter, waiting to see where she is heading with this.
‘The initials on the lighter are RF. Did you ever meet a woman called Rosemary Farrington when you stayed with Dorothea that summer?’ she asks. ‘She was a friend of Dorothea’s.’
We both stare down at the plastic bag. ‘Yes, once that I can remember,’ I say. ‘Do you think that’s who this belongs to?’
She remains predictably non-committal and I realize she’s not going to answer. ‘I know it was Rosemary’s house that my mum was walking home from on the night my dad …’ I trail off.
That Halloween I’d arranged to go trick or treating and then have a sleepover with my school friends. While I was packing a bag I could hear my parents arguing downstairs – something I had to later testify to in court. My father was kicking off because he didn’t want to go to the Halloween party at Rosemary’s house and he expected Mum to stay at home with him. Mum, dressed in her vampire costume (we’d watched a lot ofBuffythat autumn) had dropped me off at Ava’s and I’d noticed how unsure she’d looked, which made me hesitate as I was getting out of the car.
‘Mum? Is everything okay?’ I knew it wasn’t.
‘I don’t know,’ she’d sighed. ‘Maybe I should stay home with Dad. Things have been good between us lately. He’s not been drinking …’
And I’d cast my eyes over my beautiful mother in her figure-hugging velvet costume – one of the reasons, I’d later realized, why my dad hadn’t wanted her to go – andfelt a surge of defiance against my father for always trying to ruin her fun. So I convinced her to go. I told her that it sounded like it was going to be a brilliant party and how I wished kids were allowed. I’d only met Rosemary once, but I’d been impressed by her Gothic mansion and knew it would be the perfect venue. It wasn’t until the next day when, instead of Mum coming to pick me up, it was a grey-faced Dorothea, that I learned what had happened: Mum had gone to the party in the end, but Dad had followed her there. He’d slipped in, unnoticed in his skeleton costume, and had tried to force her to come home. Witnesses at the party said that he was grabbing her arm and calling her names. In the end Dorothea and Rosemary were forced to kick him out, and Mum walked home later. Dad’s car was seen on CCTV not far from where Mum was found the next morning on the towpath with a fatal head injury and my father’s skin under her fingernails. Police later found the fabric mask of my father’s Halloween costume tossed into the river.
DI Shirley continues to assess me in that quiet, studious way of hers. The way she’s looking at me is almost maternal, like she’s picturing me as the fourteen-year-old I was during my dad’s trial. ‘I liked Dorothea,’ she says, running the ribbon on her lanyard through her fingers. ‘It was obvious to me that she really cared about you and your mum.’ And then her face darkens. ‘I really want to catch the bastard who killed her.’
‘Me too,’ I admit. ‘You don’t think … you don’t think it could be Rosemary, do you?’
She pulls at her lanyard, her expression grim. ‘I don’t know. But I would like to speak to her regarding this lighter and to see if it could be hers.’
I would like to do that too, but I don’t say as much to DI Shirley.
‘I’m glad you’ve got more security around the house, but please still be vigilant,’ she says, her features softening.
‘Did forensics find anything at the house when they came yesterday?’
‘The report isn’t ready yet,’ she says in that same non-committal tone as earlier and I can already tell this conversation is over, that she’s said as much as she’s going to on the subject of Dorothea’s murder. She stands up and I follow suit. ‘If anything else happens, please don’t hesitate to call me. Let me show you out.’
As I walk back to Josh’s car it starts to rain lightly and I quicken my pace. I don’t know if I’ve done the right thing not mentioning the sculpture to DI Shirley. I’d asked her about Dennis when I’d first arrived at the station and she said he was still in intensive care. If he was attacked, I’m worried it’s all linked to the bunker and that sculpture, and by keeping it from the police I could be making matters worse.
Last night I re-read Maria Hensley’s article about Dorothea, hoping that I might have missed something. The piece had been accompanied by some lovely photographs: a recent one of Dorothea sitting in her wing-backed kitchen chair, looking wistfully out ontothe garden with Solly at her feet. Another of Dorothea when she was very young, in her twenties with three other women, sitting around a Formica-topped table in a kitchen. By the clothes the women are wearing, it looks like it was taken sometime in the 1970s. Dorothea is leaning forward, elbow on the table and looking serious, her gaze slightly off camera. The piece had the names of the other women under the photograph: Annette Baker-Hume, Maisie Hill and Rosemary Farrington. I’d met Annette and Rosemary that summer, but never Maisie. I peered at the photo of the sweet-faced young woman. She had been crocheting what looked like a bird, or a butterfly. Something with wings anyway. I had to read it furtively, under the sheets when Josh had fallen asleep.
I cross the road towards the car park when I notice a man in padded biker clothes barrelling towards me. The visor on his helmet obscures his face. Unease crawls across my skin. There’s something sinister in the way he’s striding towards me. Why is he wearing a helmet if he’s not on his bike? I move aside to make way for him. He instantly moves as well so that he knocks right into me, roughly shouldering me as he storms past so that I have to stop myself stumbling into the road. My heart is thumping with anger and fear. I glance about me in shock. A woman on the other side of the road is hunched under an umbrella but doesn’t seem to have noticed, and nobody else is around.
‘What the actual fuck, arsehole,’ I mutter under my breath when he’s far enough away not to hear me. I watchhim as he continues down the street. He doesn’t look back.
I don’t know if I imagined it, but I’m sure he said my name as he pushed past me.
