I think I’m doing a very good job of keeping this terrible situation under control, given the circumstances.
Melissa looks rather wild. I’ve never seen her like this before. She keeps speaking really fast and then staring into space. She doesn’t seem to be able to focus on anything.
Luckily I am feeling sharper than I have for a long time.
I don’t think it is too fanciful to say that this was maybe meant to be. All those years that we have known each other, perhaps they were all building up to this strange day when Melissa really needed me? After all, what would she do if I wasn’t here right now?
Together we work to lay out the large dust sheets that she has found in my absence. We work in silence and all I can hear is her rather heavy breathing. I keep flicking glances at her to make sure she isn’t going to become hysterical again, but she seems quieter now, as though the reality of this situation is finally sinking in. It’s a relief.
But once the sheets are neatly laid out, we both stare down at the body. Neither of us wants to touch the thing really.
Then, to my relief, she hands me a pair of disposable gloves. They feel slippery and unpleasant in my hands. She is already wearing some, I notice with surprise. A little late for that, I think, but I say nothing.
‘Right,’ she says, with only the slightest quiver in her voice, ‘let’s move him onto the plastic sheets.’
That’s my girl.
She lifts the arms, with only a small moue of distaste, and I take hold of the feet.
We both haul with all our might, but goodness, it is heavy. He was quite a short man, but strongly built. It seems death has now added its own burden – do bodies become heavier post-mortem? I have no idea – but he is almost impossible to move.
Melissa’s face is quite pink and I can feel sweat breaking out all over my body. She releases the arms to the ground with a strange gentleness. I feel like pointing out that he is hardly going to bother about being manhandled now, but sense this wouldn’t be well received.
We exchange dispirited looks. All we have managed to do is cause the dust sheet to bunch up unhelpfully.
‘We’ll have to roll him,’ I say, getting down on my knees, despite the discomfort from my arthritic joints. ‘Come on, Melissa, I can’t do this alone!’
Melissa hurriedly gets down to the floor at the other end of the man. We straighten the limbs in an attempt to get the body into the right shape to be rolled. His shoulders seem to be in the way now.
Sweat pools unpleasantly at my armpits as we push and pull, push and pull, both grunting with exertion. We make progress inch by inch.
It feels like forever but somehow, eventually, we have managed to get the body onto the dust sheet. But just as one problem is solved, another presents itself.
How are we, two women, going to transport it to the van, let alone to Dorset and down a well?
It’s funny, but despite all this, there is still no question of abandoning her. I am in this for the duration now, as they say.
‘Wait!’ she says suddenly. ‘What are we meant to do with these ice packs?’
I regard her with a sense of satisfaction. Now she sees the wisdom of my plan, despite being quite rude about it when it was suggested.
I believe there is no point pretending that certain realities don’t exist. At some point, that body is going to go ‘off’. But I’m never one to crow so I simply ask her to pass the cool packs. I place the smaller ones underneath the small of the back and knees; the larger, I lay on top of the body. Without speaking, Melissa goes to her own freezer and finds some more, which we arrange in a similar fashion. This is going to add considerable weight but I think this is unavoidable.
We manage to roll the sheeting around the bulky shape until we have something rather like a large plastic mummy lying before us.
It reminds me too of a chrysalis. But there will be no rebirth here.
Then it strikes me that maybe there will. Maybe it is the dawning of a new level of friendship between Melissa and myself. I like this thought.
But we still need to find a way to move this huge thing.
My mind’s eye roams around the garage, where Terry kept all sorts of things from his decorating business. And then, bingo, I have an idea. There’s a sort of metal trolley there, under some boxes, I think. He used it to move heavy paint cans and whatnot. I’m sure it’s just about big enough to fit this onto.
I’m about to tell Melissa when the doorbell shrieks, unnaturally loud.
We stare at each other, mouths fish-like, gaping. Who is it now?
It rings again and again, insistent and bossy. The letterbox rattles. Why can’t the world leave us alone?
‘Lissa? Honey, please talk to me,’ says a familiar husky voice. ‘I know you’re in because all your windows are open.’
Saskia. That damned woman, again.
We have to get rid of her. I start to rise and Melissa’s hand shoots out, grabbing my arm in a painful grasp. Her eyes are wide as she mimes a shushing motion.
‘Look, I’m not going away,’ says the nightmare creature on the doorstep. ‘It’s just me. And I’m staying here until you talk to me.’
I don’t know where the image comes from but for a moment I picture her wrapped in plastic too. Silent for once. Compliant. The image brings a thrill of satisfaction. But no, there are too many people who would miss her, not least that alarming man-child she drags around the place.
Melissa gets decisively to her feet, ripping off the gloves and throwing them onto the table. For a second, I think she’s gone quite mad, because she suddenly ruffles her hair with both hands and rubs her eyes fiercely. She stalks out of the room without giving me a second glance. I confess my heart is in my mouth as I hear her open the front door. What is she doing?
‘Honey!’ The voice seems to fill the hallway. ‘Did I wake you?’
‘Yeah,’ says Melissa in a very weak voice that I can only just make out. ‘I’m sick, Tams. I ate some prawns late last night that had been out in the heat all day. I’m not ignoring you. I’m just … not well.’
‘Let me come in and look after you,’ says Saskia.
Melissa’s acting performance slips slightly for a second as she squeaks, ‘No! I mean there’s really no need!’ Then, more calmly. ‘I just want to sleep, honey. We can catch up later, yeah? And don’t worry about Nathan and the Hester thing. I’m sure she’ll see the funny side. Eventually.’
This hurts me, I don’t mind saying. I know she is only acting but it still rankles.
‘Okay darling,’ says Saskia at last, reluctantly. ‘You go back to bed. I’m so sorry about Nathan’s idea of a joke. I’ve told him he’s in the fucking doghouse for a year.’ She gives one of her trademark deep laughs and I hear Melissa laughing too. She really is a very good actress. It’s not half an hour ago that she was virtually hysterical.
I think it’s only now that I understand this could all work out okay. Between my common sense and her ability to put on a front, well, we really are quite a team.
There’s a flurry of ‘love you, babe’s’ and other nonsense, before the door closes and Melissa comes back into the room.
She straightens her hair and regards me coolly.
‘Right, so you need to get your van into my garage. I’m going to move my car out the front. We’ll get … him’, she nods at the plastic chrysalis on the floor and I see her swallow deeply before continuing, ‘into the van. Then we’ll look up that place you talked about.’
An hour later we’ve made real progress.
The trolley proved to be a godsend in terms of transporting it from the kitchen. But getting the body and then the trolley into the van itself was a lot more difficult, and with all the pushing and shoving I think I may have pulled a muscle in my back. Between us, though, we managed it.
Thankfully, most of the decorating stuff in the van had been cleared out and there is a decent space. Terry mainly used it for his fishing gear after he retired, but once he was gone from my life, I did a proper tidy.
When the doors are nicely closed up again, a sort of euphoric relief takes hold of both of us. I think it’s because we don’t have that horrible sight in front of us anymore. Truly, anything seems possible now.
We go to work in silence with a bleach-based detergent and cloths, scrubbing the floor tiles, arms pumping back and forth in unison. I really do feel a sense of camaraderie as we scrub and scrub. From television I know all about Luminol and how the police can find the tiniest splash of blood; but they would need a reason to look in the first place, wouldn’t they? People may have seen Jamie here, but he clearly had no settled lifestyle and there would be no reason to suspect Melissa’s part in any perceived disappearance. Who would suspect a woman like her of murder?
After we’ve finished, Melissa gets on the phone to Tilly and tells her she is going away for a night to visit an old friend whose mother has just died of cancer.
Unfortunately, I can hear from this one-sided conversation that Melissa is having problems convincing her daughter of this story.
‘Why would you have heard of her before now?’ she says and, after a pause, ‘You don’t necessarily know all my old friends, do you?’ and, ‘Of course I have old friends, don’t be cheeky.’
When she finally comes off the phone she looks pale. I persuade her to eat the sandwiches I have been making during her conversation. She gives me a very strange look as I offer the plate, and it’s only when I say, ‘If you go fainting on us, it really could draw the wrong sort of attention,’ that she eventually reaches for one and takes a couple of small bites, chewing as though her mouth is filled with sand.
I have quite an appetite. I eat three sandwiches and feel much the better for it.
And I think it’s because my blood sugar has risen again that I suddenly have a jolt of real brainpower.
‘Scarrow Hall!’ I say.
‘What?’ says Melissa blankly.
‘That’s the name of the place where Terry used to go fishing! Let’s look it up! Do you have a computer?’
She gives me another of her rather impenetrable looks and goes to one of the cupboards, from which she removes an impossibly thin silver laptop computer. Flipping the lid open, she taps away for a moment until a screen with Google on it appears.
‘Scarrow Hall,’ I say again, slowly but she is already typing.
A page opens and we both bend a little closer to read. ‘Forgotten Dorset’ says the banner across the top. We read on:
A few miles from the thundering A303 lies a pocket of England in which time has stood still. Scarrow Hall was, in its day, the home of the Parkstone family, who were major landowners in the North Dorset area.
But in the latter half of the twentieth century the house fell into a state of disrepair and when the final member of the Parkstone family, Emily, died in 2009 at the age of 91, a complicated probate situation has meant the old house is now derelict and unloved.
Take a pictorial trip with us as we explore this once grande dame of local architecture.
She deftly clicks and enlarges picture after picture of the house, including one of the well.
‘Well I think it looks as though it’s much the same,’ I say triumphantly but Melissa is doing something complicated on a map page and doesn’t appear to be listening to me.
‘Hmm,’ she murmurs after a while. ‘There’s no Street View in that area at all so there can’t be any major housing developments there.’
I don’t really know what she’s talking about but it doesn’t matter, because she slaps down the lid of the laptop and half smiles at me for the first time in … well, I don’t know how long.
Then her shoulders slump again. ‘But how would we find the well? There’s no guarantee that it’s still there, is there?’
I muse on this, wanting so much to bring that hopefulness back into her face, and a wonderful thought comes to me. I can see it very clearly in my mind’s eye.
That photograph: Terry beaming into the camera, holding aloft some manner of fish or other as though it were the crown jewels. And then bringing it home and expecting me to gut, clean, and cook it. I refused, of course. But he insisted on having that picture up until he died. I’m sure it’s in a drawer somewhere, and I could swear the well can be seen in the background.
‘Hester!’
Melissa has slapped her hand on the table and the sound shocks me deeply, as though I, myself, have been struck.
‘Can you fucking concentrate! What are we going to do?’
I’m conscious of my spine stiffening and my cheeks glow with an unwelcome warmth. When my words come out, they are clipped but I keep my cool and speak quietly.
‘I am very happy to help you in any way I can, Melissa,’ I say. ‘But I will not be sworn at. Are we clear on this?’
Her bottom lip gapes a little before she closes her mouth and runs her hand across her face. Her eyes look dull and tired.
‘I’m so sorry, Hester,’ she says quietly. ‘But I am very, very upset and frightened. I have …’ she gulps, visibly, ‘killed a man in my kitchen and I don’t know what I’m going to do.’
Her voice skids away into a choked sort of sob and I feel compassion flood my heart. I would like to hold her again and let her cry it all out but I sense too much contact might not be welcome. Instead I stretch my hand across the table and pat hers.
‘Please don’t worry,’ I say in a soothing voice. ‘I was just remembering that I have something which will help us. I’ll go get it right now and then we can plan our route.’
She’s watching me, blinking hard to dispel the threatening tears, and she nods. I know how much she wants to believe me.
And how much she needs me right now.