A Kind of Vanishing (32 page)

As she chewed and swallowed, chewed and swallowed, Chris issued a silent warning: when she had finished with them, there would be nothing but bones.

If she gave in and reached out to her Mum, maybe accepted a drink, or asked for more potato, Eleanor would have her back. Sometimes Chris considered it might be worth it if only to prove she was the grand puppeteer nimbly twitching her mother’s strings. But she resisted, knowing it would only make her misery worse.

Now she knew what she had to do.

The Ramsays did not extend their brand of affection to ‘Jon-the-Footrest’. Chris felt oblique sympathy for Gina’s husband, despite the incredibly stupid things he came out with. She winced at his ponderous explanations of boring subjects (load bearing beams, hi-fi speakers, or his earnest and sonorously dull deeds for the Rotary Club). She perceived that despite his ever-busy efforts, Jon would stay an outsider. He talked and laughed as loudly as the Ramsays, but in the wrong places. He fussed around his wife, when it was obvious Gina hated fuss of any kind. He shadowed her with outstretched coats, or staggered after her in garish weekend jackets, weighed down with huge new gifts for the kitchen, when Chris knew Gina hated cooking. He drove too fast up the drive with
horn-tooting
panache in a churn of gravel, the chrome on his Lexus gleaming. As he whistled his train-signal arrival, the family sighed and braced themselves.

The Ramsays guffawed at jokes that flitted as invisible moths around the room, every word brushed by fluttering wings of private meaning. As Chris spied on Jon over a skyline of wine bottles and candles at the dinner table, she divined with a wash of sadness from the way he sat forward humming ‘Always Look On The Bright Side Of Life’ under his breath, that he too knew the family would never accept him. She felt his anguish, as she knew full well the Ramsays couldn’t be dismissed as irrelevant.

She worked out that the Ramsays dealt with the big things by devoting themselves to the small things. In this way they had dealt with Mark Ramsay, who although dead was not gone. His presence was more pervasive than that of the Judge. Mark Ramsay wasn’t just in the dining room, he was everywhere. Chris guessed that everything they did was done in the way Mark Ramsay would have approved.

She sat with her knees under her chin on the windowsill in the playroom. It was deep enough to curl up in with a cushion and a book, but solid vertical bars clamped to the outside wall rudely extinguished this idea. She gazed out into the darkness. A thick swirling fog had enveloped the house earlier that evening, turning the newly arrived guests into spectres gliding out of the inky darkness with freezing wispy trails clinging to their clothes. Now she could see nothing except her own ghostly reflection. She remembered watching scary films with her Mum at home. They would be cuddled up on the sofa and protest in fake terror when someone excused themselves from the brightly lit room and went off alone with a candle down a corridor lined with suits of armour and wood panelling. No wonder they ended up strangled in a cupboard or sprawled over a roll top desk with a knife in their back. Her Mum joked that the music always gave it away and the change in tempo should have warned them. Now Chris had done the same. Here she was alone, in a cold dark room at the top of a creaky old mansion. She could have stayed at the party with her Kathleen and her Mum. Perhaps by now she had been missed, perhaps downstairs her Mum was asking where she was.

Beneath her feet a Turkish carpet, ruckled and shredding, was spread over black painted floorboards. Wallpaper, probably once chosen with excitement and optimism, drooped limp and peeling, and was patterned with brown stains edged with lines like the gradient marks on a map. The design of flowers intertwining in vertical rows had all but gone, the original colour was impossible to tell. Between the skirting board and the floor was a gap wide enough for a child to slip its hand in. Chris fleetingly thought it a good place to secrete a diary, letters, private thoughts. She should check it. Puffing out a wistful sigh, she breathed in a smell of damp, and shivered.

She smacked her hands together and marched with ‘
coming-to
-get-you’ purpose over to the doll’s house.

Getting warm…

She hurled away the bicycle wheel and kicked the space hopper; it flumped on to the rug and with a hiss resumed its exhausted pose. Shoving up her sleeves, she heaved aside crates and boxes, clearing a space on each side of the house. She insinuated herself between the wall and the house, easing the house further out into the room. It snagged on the carpet and there was a ripping sound. She had torn some threads on the Turkish rug. Who would mind?

She grudgingly admired fine detail on the model house, the tiny lion above the porch, and unable to resist, crouched down to peep through the windows into rooms with doorways offering a partial view of dim passages. Cutting through the centre of the house like a spinal cord was a replica of the intricately constructed staircase that wound up to the top of the real house, complete with the banister snaking atop spindly balustrades. Minute gold stair rods gripped thick carpet. Leaning in closer, unwilling to open the front and lose the illusion, Chris saw that the pile on the stair carpet had been flattened by a heavy or constant tread. Eleanor had been right, people really had lived here.

The house was nailed to a sheet of hardboard streaked at the front with scraps of felt that speared between islands of dried glue. This was all that was left of the lawn that Mark Ramsay had accidentally destroyed. A detective verifying personal statements as fact, Chris also noted the missing dining room windowsill. It was all exactly as her Mum had described. Chris had never seriously believed such a house could exist. It was a toy within a toy, reducing her to a doll.

Finger-sized dolls dressed in clumps of velvet and cotton – the material stiffened with globules of glue – lay strewn in the rooms like victims of a gassing. There was one in the dining room and three on a bed in the room that had once been Gina’s. Only the lady doll had ‘died naturally’ and was covered with a blanket in the master bedroom that in real life overlooked the lawn with the willow tree.

Chris went through the house with forensic care. The miniature playroom had the same wallpaper as its life-size counterpart, which turned out to be eggshell blue with pink flowers clustered around dark leaves. This version of the playroom was furnished with only a cradle, three marbles – giant glass spheres – next to the fireplace and a set of crudely made books, each on a different alcove shelf. There was the same number of shelves as in real life. Chris was daunted by the acute replication; she almost expected to see a tiny version of herself. Then it came to her. There was no doll’s house in the tiny playroom. This Judge, who was meant to be so clever, had missed an opportunity.

Eleanor had said the doll’s house was a friend, tucked away at the top of the White House, far from her family. She had hated to leave it behind when she went back to London. Chris frowned as a gust of anger swept up her lost chances, the hours she might have spent here, the games she might have played in this room as a little girl herself. She despaired of ever losing the stomach-fizzing fury at Alice’s deception (she could not consistently think of her as Eleanor).

She didn’t notice swelling and fading of the noise as a door opened and closed two flights below and she jumped as a shadowy figure appeared in the doorway.

‘Kathleen was wondering where you were. She said to come and find you.’

Chris got up from the window seat and brushed herself down. ‘You found me.’

Her mother strode over to the other window and, cupping her hands to cut out the electric light, peered down into the night. She thumped on the bars:

‘These were put in by the Judge’s father in the nineteenth century, well over a hundred years ago.’ She gave the bars a sharp tug as if she might loosen them. ‘His eldest son fell out of this window and crashed down on to those flags when he was only seven.’

‘Did he die?’

‘Oh yes.’ She spoke with the satisfaction of someone who can’t be faulted on their facts, and added: ‘Not immediately.’

Chris went across to her. ‘Listen.’ She shook her arm. ‘I know you didn’t kill her.’

‘The swimming pool wasn’t there then, of course. That’s new.’

‘Did you hear me?’

‘You’re hurting me!’ Eleanor shrugged her off. ‘Just leave it, Chris.’

‘Why? Is that what you’d prefer?’

‘It’s too long ago.’

‘You don’t think you killed her and then forgot. There’s no way you’d be normal, well, quite normal. You’d be mad with guilt and unable to live with yourself or to face Kathleen. Or me.’

‘And you think I’m not.’

The fog thinned for a moment and Chris could just see the flagstones on the broad path along the edge of the lawn. It was a dizzying drop. She thought of the little boy pitching out and somersaulting to his death. ‘So you wanted to kill her. You’ve got imagination and reality mixed up.’

‘I hated her.’

‘Kathleen said there was a tramp. They found him drowned up the road from here…’

‘Stop it.’ Eleanor unscrewed the latch on the window and with all her strength pushed it up about six inches. They were shocked by freezing air and coughed as ribbons of fog drifted into the room, catching their throats. Eleanor squatted down and stuck her nose through the gap, holding on to the bars. The ground floor rooms cast a pale light over the grass. She could just make out Uncle Jack’s willow in the middle of the lawn where they used to have tea. It had grown to the size of a giant umbrella. She had never been clear as a child whether Uncle Jack was actually buried under it. She had not wanted to ask, because she would have been upset if he wasn’t. It had been fantastic to have tea on top of a real live corpse. Gina had remarked that they never sat under Uncle Jack’s tree after Eleanor stopped coming. She had said this to Eleanor like an acquaintance, polite and friendly, not as an admission of affection, it was just how it was once they built the pool.

‘There are no bars on the windows of the playroom in the doll’s house.’

‘What?’ Her mother was like a kid going off in all directions; this happened all the time now she was Eleanor and not Alice.

‘The Judge was anal about making an exact copy of the house. He got hold of the architect’s plans to get dimensions right, and took loads of photos. He drew quite good sketches. He made one mistake. He forgot the bars.’

‘Maybe they weren’t there then.’

‘I told you, they were put in after the Judge’s brother was killed, when he – the Judge – would have been about six. They were close in age. The bars were there.’

Knowing her mother was changing the subject, yet unable to resist verifying the accuracy of what she had said, Chris trooped obediently over to the doll’s house. There were no bars on any of the windows.

‘Dad pointed it out to the Judge; he thought it was the test. There was always a test to pass; everything had to be earned. Instead his father was furious and nearly hit him, Mum told us.’

‘He got cross over some stupid bars?’

‘They were evidence that the Judge wasn’t perfect. Strangely the Judge had made the same mistake as his parents when they turned this room into a playroom. He forgot the bars. Mum always said the missing bars in the doll’s house windows revealed that the Judge wanted his brother dead. He inherited everything including the house. When she wanted to wind Dad up, Mum only had to bring up the playroom bars. She’d say the Judge left them out as his confession of murder.’

‘That’s far fetched.’

‘Most murders are.’

Neither of them spoke.

‘I know who you’re protecting.’

Eleanor gave a hoarse laugh. ‘I don’t give a toss about the Judge.’

‘I’m going to find Alice.’

‘If Scotland Yard couldn’t, how can you?’

‘They didn’t know what to look for.’

Chris snatched a random paperback from one of the shelves and tapped it. ‘The clues are in here, or here, or here.’ She waved at the shelves. ‘Messages and answers are staring us in the face. We know about obvious clues like using plants, chemicals and insects to determine time of death and all that. But what about the other stuff that’s going on in people’s lives, that policemen with rigid ideas and closed minds would never think of? The questions they never asked and the places they never looked in because of their assumptions. Your Mum was right, the bars tell us a story all right. They are absent in the doll’s house for a reason.’

Eleanor took the book from Chris, handling it delicately. She turned it over. She knew what it was:
The Young Detectives
by R.J. McGregor. She didn’t remember the author although she had read and re-read the book many times. The story was a memory more vivid than life, as for Eleanor most stories had always been.

‘This was brilliant,’ she breathed. ‘Mrs Skoda read it to our class when I was seven, but the summer term finished before she got to the end. I bought it in the holidays with my birthday money and read it tucked up in that chair one rainy afternoon.’ She went over and, as if in illustration of her eight-year-old self, settled down in a dirty brown armchair by the fireplace that Chris hadn’t noticed before.

As she flicked through the dusty yellowed pages it all became clear.

‘There was a secret passage in a window seat, just like those ones under the windows. You had to open and shut the window in a certain way to release the catch on the seat.’ Chris was staring at the doll’s house and didn’t appear to be listening. Eleanor continued to herself:

‘I tried it with these seats, but the lids are stuck fast.’

Eleanor dropped the book on to the floor. The story had got mixed up in her mind with real life.

‘What’s the matter?’

‘I’m tired, that’s all.’ Someone was standing close to Eleanor’s chair but Chris would only repeat that she’d gone mad if she told her. ‘Let’s go, or they’ll be coming to get us. It’s eleven-fifteen already.’

‘Why did he leave me this?’ Chris waved a hand at the doll’s house.

‘I imagine he wanted a child to have it. Even a grownup one.’