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

so that she could act quickly. Timing would be everything. Otherwise she would lose the element of surprise.

At just before eight o’clock the flickering street light gave up altogether, immediately plunging the end of the drive into shadow. Wendy gasped. That wasn’t in the script at all … but as she stared towards the gate, she realized that the section of the drive nearest the road was not in complete darkness. Once you let your eyes get used to it, there was still enough illumination from the next closest street lights to make out the open gateway. She would still be able to see anyone as soon as they came onto her property.

But of course Frances would not come. Wendy’s earlier certainty had been extinguished as surely as the street light. It seemed childish now, this plan of hers, to lure her husband’s mistress more than 150 miles north. She might as well give up her vigil, close the window and get warm by the sitting room fire.

She decided to give it until nine. Surely Frances wouldn’t time her arrival any later than that? Not that she was likely to come at all. It had been a stupid idea, stupid, stupid.

Then she saw her. It was all she could do not to cry out as the figure, unmistakably female, hesitated for a fraction of a second before heading smartly up the drive. She was carrying a bag of some sort. That was as much as Wendy could make out before the figure was lost completely in deeper shadows.

‘Come down to the back door,’ she called out, before racing out of the kitchen and into the courtyard. She knew she had no more than seconds to be ready. Any hesitation would be fatal. She reached the corner of the courtyard as the figure turned round the side of the house. Drove the knife in hard, with a strength she had scarcely known she possessed, and as the woman collapsed forward against her she was already withdrawing the knife and striking again, driving in a second blow before her victim had time to speak. Before that single, desperate gasp of ‘Mam.’

‘Tara. Oh my God! Tara! What are you doing here? Oh my darling, my sweetheart …’ The words tumbled out as Wendy sank to her knees, dragged to the ground as she attempted to support the weight of her dying daughter.

Tara did not answer.

NOVEMBER 2011

She died in my arms. I didn’t know what to do. I would never get my children back if anyone found out that I had killed one of them. So I carried part of my original plan through. I washed the knife and replaced it in the kitchen drawer. I made a bonfire of the clothing. I began to dig the grave in the corner of the back garden, close to the wall of the outbuildings, but I barely got down a foot before I hit something hard. Scraping away the earth, I easily identified what I had found. I didn’t explore any further. From the day I saw the spokes of that bicycle, I had understood why it was that Elaine Duncan couldn’t leave. Dora had last been seen heading homewards … In one way or another, the house always claimed its victim. Two victims sometimes – the one who was buried and the one who stayed to guard the place. The one whose continuing ownership precluded any accidental discoveries.

I laid one daughter of the house above another then planted the tree, leaving the sacking loosely wrapped around the roots as the man in the garden centre had suggested. It has grown tall now. Much taller than me.

The university alerted me to Tara’s disappearance. She had said something to a friend about going home for the weekend, but no one was sure which home she meant. When Robert called me to ask about her, I cut him off short. ‘You wouldn’t speak to me for nearly twenty years,’ I said. ‘Why should I speak to you now?’

She was listed as a missing person, but there was some doubt about whether or not she had actually come to any harm. As one policeman said, in a voice no doubt designed to reassure, ‘Just because a person has chosen not to communicate, it does not necessarily mean they are missing in the accepted sense, it’s just that not everyone knows where they are.’ One girlfriend thought Tara had not been altogether happy on her course. Another said she’d been having boyfriend trouble. Someone else thought there had been a plan to run off with some unidentified boyfriend. Yet another fellow student said that things between Tara and John had become more intense. None of them had known her above a matter of weeks. She’d had no time to develop any special confidantes at university, but had seemingly already drifted apart from her old friends in the north. The police had that John boy in for questioning but it got them nowhere. He didn’t know where she’d gone.

I know where she is. She is here, with me, every day and every night. I have tried putting a padlock on the bedroom door – not my bedroom, but the one that belonged to her and to that other victim, Alice. But padlocks cannot hold that kind. She watches me. Always.

Frances never answered my summons. It was never mentioned by anyone again. Presumably it was dismissed as another of my eccentricities. I gave Bruce his divorce and he married Frances. Katie sent me a photograph, which I burned on the sitting room fire. I was allowed to keep The Ashes and much of what remained of my legacy. Bruce took the proceeds of the house in Jasmine Close and everything else I had ever held dear. Now they are grown up, the children come to visit me from time to time, Jamie less frequently than his sister. Katie does her best to make conversation, but there is always something strained about