The Skeleton Tree by Diane Janes (reading women TXT) 📕

‘What a peculiar woman. Must be off her head.’

Grandma Elaine. Wendy continued to stand alongside the telephone table in the hall. Grandma Elaine, so very much loved by her family, but who had – according to Joan – occasionally shown terrible bursts of temper. The photograph of Johnny, the local boy, which Dora had chosen to hide in the attic and never retrieved. Dora going out alone for a bike ride, not telling anyone where she was going. Her own words returned to her: to think that she was almost home and never made it.

An unlucky house, Peggy’s grandfather had said, because it had been associated with two murders. Her own mother had always adhered to the superstition that deaths came in threes, and so, it seemed, did murders, because Peter’s made three. She shuddered as she remembered him looming up behind her in the outhouse, waiting to show her the photograph he had found, not accidentally as he had suggested, but more likely because he had been hunting around for a place to hide something himself. There had been another occasion when he had startled her. In the cellar. Where he had drawn her attention to the wine rack …

Her hands were shaking as she collected the torch again, and she was afraid her legs would give way as she descended the cellar stairs. The light in the cellar was better than that in the attic, so she did not need the torch in order to check the state of the nails which held the panel installed to make the wine rack appear to fit the wall, but they were all reassuringly rusty. Nothing had been interfered with recently, but the more she looked at it, the odder it seemed to be. Why go to the trouble of moving a purpose-built fixture in the first place, and why install a false back to it? She tried to picture the layout of the floor above. If the wine rack had been repositioned to create a secret cavity, it couldn’t be more than two or three feet deep at most. A closer investigation, this time employing the torch to illuminate the recesses of the racking, suggested that the false back was little more than hardboard – something easily confirmed when she fetched the tool basket and attacked it with a screwdriver, punching her implement of choice repeatedly into the back of one of the wooden compartments. Then it occurred to her that making an obvious hole at head height might be spotted if a particularly nosey prospective purchaser chose to peer too closely into the empty rack. It would be more sensible to commence her investigation in one of the floor-level compartments, where the rest of the structure would hide the damage from anyone who wasn’t crawling about on the cellar floor.

She dragged a flattened cardboard box over and used it to kneel on. (Jamie’s den had long since been dismantled and its soft furnishings relocated upstairs.) Using a long chisel and belting it with a hammer while taking great care not to hit any of the surrounding framework, Wendy gradually managed to create a hole at the back of one section. The noise of the hammer, greatly magnified by the enclosed nature of the cellar, made her head ring. She longed to stop, but the need for knowledge forced her to continue. When the hole was the size of a tennis ball, she exchanged the tools for her torch and shone a light into the dark void: a space created by someone with something to hide.

Peering at a tiny section of a largely hidden object reminded her of a regular feature in the old quiz show ‘Ask the Family’, when the screen would be filled with a close-up of some mystery object and the contestants vied to guess its identity as the camera gradually panned out. Wendy had never been good at guessing the mystery objects, but then – unlike now – she’d had no advance warning as to what the object might be. On this occasion she knew at once that she was looking at the spokes of a bicycle wheel, rusted with age, but unmistakable. A bicycle which had been hidden even longer than the necklace.

A millstone of knowledge pressed down upon her as she carried the torch and the tool basket back up the cellar stairs. The bicycle, the necklace, the photograph of Johnny … burdens she must carry alone, for none of these things could be shared. The house had revealed its secrets to her, and now she fervently wished that it had not.

I have learned not to expect good things. After all that has happened, I still don’t know how much is pure bad luck, how much is natural evil and what is pre-ordained.

THIRTEEN

29 July 1981

Wendy could not help feeling that in common with a good proportion of British citizens, Katie had become somewhat obsessed with the royal wedding. ‘Suppose it rains …’ she said anxiously the night before.

‘It won’t,’ Wendy said. ‘The forecast is for sunshine. Now you just get off to sleep and stop your worrying. It’s not you who’s getting married, you know.’

It struck Wendy, as she opened the fridge the next morning and took a last look at the stacked Tupperware boxes and washed-out margarine tubs, the contents of which represented hours of threading cubes of cheese and pineapple onto cocktail sticks the night before, that today would be one of those defining moments in people’s lives. In decades to come, people would recall how they spent the day of the royal wedding. It would be to one generation what the Kennedy assassination or the outbreak of the Second World War had been for others. And it was going to be a happy day for everyone, a day of celebration. A day to forget the bicycle, standing in the darkness, mere feet away from where Jamie had constructed his den, the necklace