(2011) What Lies Beneath Read online

  WHAT LIES BENEATH

  Also by Sarah Rayne

  House of the Lost

  Ghost Song

  The Death Chamber

  Spider Light

  Roots of Evil

  A Dark Dividing

  Tower of Silence

  Visit www.sarahrayne.co.uk

  First published in the UK by Simon & Schuster UK Ltd, 2011

  A CBS Company

  Copyright © Sarah Rayne, 2011

  This book is copyright under the Berne Convention.

  No reproduction without permission.

  ® and © 1997 Simon & Schuster Inc. All rights reserved.

  The right of Sarah Rayne to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

  Simon & Schuster UK Ltd

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  Simon & Schuster Australia

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  A CIP catalogue record for this book is

  available from the British Library

  Hardback ISBN: 978-1-84737-334-2

  Trade Paperback ISBN: 978-1-84737-335-9

  eBook ISBN: 978-0-85720-060-0

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Any resemblance to actual people, living or dead, events or locales, is entirely coincidental.

  Typeset by Hewer Text UK Ltd, Edinburgh

  Printed and bound in Great Britain by

  CPI Mackays, Chatham ME5 8TD

  For my brother, Tony Duggan, who provided the concept of ‘The Poisoned Village’ for this book.

  Acknowledgements

  Grateful thanks are due to Philip and Keith Cartwright, Organ Builders and Tuners of Slindon, Staffordshire, for their excellent help and practical demonstrations of the mechanics of church organs in the beautiful St Andrew’s Church, Weston; also to Rob Robinson who supplied invaluable technical details about light aircraft and their capabilities.

  Chapter 1

  Ella Haywood was in the delicatessen counter queue at the supermarket when she heard the news that ripped open her life and brought her childhood nightmares gibbering back.

  She had not been expecting those particular ghosts to come boiling out of the past while she was waiting for her farmhouse Cheddar to be cut and weighed, but a gossipy shopper just ahead of her was telling anyone who cared to listen that Priors Bramley was to be reopened – imagine that, after all these years they were going to let people back into the Poisoned Village.

  The Poisoned Village. The words fell on Ella’s mind like hammer-blows and for several minutes everything else was blotted out. Priors Bramley, the tiny village abandoned fifty years earlier when a government department had planned to route a motorway through it, and had peremptorily rehoused all the residents elsewhere. The motorway had never been built, though, because another department had seized on the deserted village for an experimental site. Priors Bramley had been drenched in an ill-judged and macabre cocktail of chemicals, which meant the village had had to be sealed off. And no one had been there since.

  The gossipy shopper knew all the facts. That long-planned motorway was finally going to be built, she said, very self-important, and in a few days, Priors Bramley would be decontaminated. People would be able to walk down the village street again, right up to the gates of Cadence Manor, if they wanted.

  ‘Always providing they aren’t worried about breathing in whatever’s still lingering on the air,’ said a sepulchral voice from the end of the queue.

  ‘Oh, nothing’s lingered there for years,’ said the gossipy one cheerfully. ‘The authorities simply forgot to take down the barbed wire and the notices, that’s all. It’s a piece of the past being reclaimed,’ she added romantically.

  ‘Reclaimed and then bulldozed and covered with concrete,’ said the pragmatist, to which the shopper tossed her head, said some people had no soul, and went off with her veal and ham pie.

  Back at home, panic clutched at Ella’s stomach. She pictured in her mind’s eye Cadence Manor – huge rusting iron gates, the sunshine glinting on them . . . Ivy-covered walls, crumbling brickwork and an air of brooding desolation . . . The images rose up sharply, and with them came the memory of her mother declaring the Cadence family had been a bunch of villains, never mind they were supposed to be respected city bankers, rich and influential. ‘Not to be trusted,’ she always said. ‘Not a one of them.’

  Still, what had lain behind those festoons of barbed wire all this time surely could not damage Ella – not now. There was nothing she need do about it. Derek would certainly have agreed with that if he knew what was beyond those spiky defences, which he did not. But one of Derek’s philosophies was that you never troubled trouble until trouble troubled you.

  Amy, their granddaughter, had once asked Ella how she had put up with Gramps’s little sayings for so long, but Amy’s generation did not understand about marriage – not the permanent kind, such as Ella had entered into. Amy thought that because Gran was young in the 1960s she must have had a permissive, flower-power time, but flower power and the permissive society had never actually reached Bramley, and Derek was then, as now, an auditor at the County Council, and a rising star in the local Operatic Society as well, so flower power and permissiveness had never really been an option.

  Amy was coming to stay in a couple of weeks’ time, at the start of the Easter holidays. It would be nice to see her and hear about her life at university; Ella always listened round-eyed to Amy’s tales. None of the things Amy described would have been remotely thinkable in Ella’s own life. But then some of the things in Ella’s life would not be remotely thinkable to Amy – it was important to remember that.

  By that evening, Ella felt better. Probably all that talk about opening up the village and finally building the motorway was just a rumour, or an item on a vague council agenda and unlikely actually to happen. There could be protest groups at the destruction of green belt – all kinds of things that would prevent the whole thing.

  But the next morning a council leaflet slapped through the letterbox, horridly explicit. Government approval had been given for the revival of the 1950s motorway scheme, said the leaflet, and added firmly that this was very good news for everyone. The motorway would not actually go through Priors Bramley, but a link road would, which meant the demolition of the major part of the village. Preliminary plans could be inspected at the council’s offices between 9 a.m. and 5 p.m. any weekday. Local residents could be assured there was no longer any danger from the chemical trials carried out in the 1950s, but to be on the safe side a team of decontamination experts would go in on the tenth of this month. The information about there being no danger was repeated so many times Ella thought most people reading it would keep their windows and doors closed for the next six months.

  She did not take in much of the scientific information about decontamination or the original chemical experiment – she had never been very good at science at school. A boys’ subject, her mother used to say. Concentrate on the cookery classes: that’s what will get you a husband. In those days getting a husband had been the prime goal for girls. Ella sometimes wondered what her mother would have thought of Amy, currently rioting through three years at Durham University, studying archaeology and anthropology.

  She threw the council’s leaflet in the bin, but when even Derek began to talk about the Poisoned Village being opened for the new motorway, Ella knew the past was surging forward, and it was a dark and dangerous past. She would have to do something.


  Entries From an Undated Journal

  The time has come when I will have to do something . . .

  Because in seven days I’m going to die.

  There! I’ve written it at last. I am going to die. And now I see it set down on the page, it’s suddenly and dreadfully real.

  I’m afraid of dying but I’m equally afraid of going mad while waiting for death – and by mad I don’t mean those spells of darkness that sometimes close down over me like a stifling curtain . . . They never lasted long, those darknesses – no, I’ll amend that – they never seemed to last long, and in any case it’s important to remember I always managed to fight my way back up into the light.

  By going mad, I mean the real thing. The tumble all the way down into an endless, unforgiving blackness – the blackness you see staring out of the empty eyes of the poor creatures locked away in Bedlam: drained, husked-out fragments of humanity who were once people. So let’s make it very clear at the outset that I was never mad in that way.

  I’m hoping that writing everything down will stop me speculating what’s ahead. (Will it be quick? Will I struggle?) And although I don’t suppose anyone will ever read this journal, you never know, so I’ll write it as well as possible. I used to have the way of turning a good phrase at one time – it’s vanity to say it, but I don’t care – although I never had any romantic dreams about writing books. But I’ve had my romantic moments, that’s something else I’d like understood.

  I’ll count the seven days ahead of me, of course, although I’ll try not to count the hours. But there’s a clock in here and I can hear it ticking the seconds away. I suspect I might have to find a way to muffle that clock before the end.

  I don’t think it will be a very comfortable death and if I had any courage I’d find a way of putting a swift and clean end to myself beforehand. But there are no sharp knives here, no cut-throat razors, no pills that could be downed in huge quantities. No gas ovens to turn on or lengths of rope to fashion into a noose. And there’s just a chance I’ll escape, and although I was never a gambler in the accepted sense, I’m certainly going to gamble on that tiny chance.

  I’ll think I’ll be reasonably comfortable in the time that’s left. It’s knowing what’s ahead that might tip me over the edge. That and the ticking clock. I could simply not wind it, but then I might lose all track of the days and I don’t think I can do that.

  Perhaps I can pretend the ticking is something else – something small and unthreatening and friendly? A small mouse behind the wall, or an energetic house martin building its new home under the eaves somewhere. Yes, I’ll create a pretence that it’s a house martin, flying to and fro.

  Actually, when I look back I can see I was always very clever at pretence. I certainly fooled all the Cadences – the entire smug, self-satisfied clan. Or did I? I’d have to say there were times when I wondered if Crispian sensed what I was thinking. He had a way of looking at people, a sort of speculative appraisal.

  I knew from quite an early age I was going to kill Crispian Cadence, and I suppose if you’re intent on killing someone, it’s possible your victim might sense danger, even without realizing the exact nature of the danger.

  Danger. It was remarkable how anything I ever had to do with Crispian always spelled danger.

  The Present

  Ella’s mother used to say anything to do with the Cadences, no matter how remote, always spelled danger.

  Faced with the unsealing of Priors Bramley, Ella was forced to admit her mother had been right. This was a danger she wanted to ignore, but other people were involved – two other people to be exact, and both were still here living in Upper Bramley. She invited them to her house that evening, confident they would accept; they had always looked to her for guidance and leadership, right from childhood. Derek would be safely out of the way because he had a rehearsal with the Operatic Society. They were doing The Mikado this year, and Derek was playing Nanki-Poo, the hero. He was a bit stout for the part, but Ella would make sure he slimmed down in time. Some people said he was a bit old as well, but there was nothing anyone could do about his age.

  She tidied and polished her sitting room, which Derek still called ‘the lounge’ despite all her reminders, opened a bottle of wine, and set out a few canapés. They were actually bought frozen from the supermarket, but no one would know that. Arranged on good china plates they looked home-made and quite classy.

  Clement Poulter was the first to arrive, and although he was not exactly nervous, he was certainly not very comfortable. Ella noticed a faint sheen of sweat on his forehead and the top of his head where the hair was thinning.

  ‘I suppose this is about the reopening of Priors Bramley,’ he said.

  ‘It is,’ said Ella, firmly. ‘I thought we should have a little meeting about it. Just the three of us. In case of any . . . awkwardness that might be ahead. They really are going to bring it out of quarantine, aren’t they?’ She had tried out several acceptable phrases before lighting on this one, which seemed to reduce the whole thing to nothing worse than a dose of chickenpox.

  ‘They are,’ said Clem, nodding. ‘They’re going to fumigate it, sterilize it, disinfect it – however you want to word it. But I’m seeing it as the village being brought out of purdah.’

  ‘Whatever you call it, it’s being done on the tenth,’ said Ella, before Clem could become carried away with one of his annoying fantasies.

  ‘I know. We were sent a poster to display in the library. I’m going to arrange one of my little exhibitions – the village before they poisoned it.’ Clem liked arranging little exhibitions at his library; he always had one for the Operatic Society’s productions, with photographs of the cast and notes about the plot. ‘I shan’t call it that, of course,’ he said. ‘Just “Old Bramley”, or something like that. And it’d be a shame not to make some kind of written record of Priors Bramley before they demolish it. There’s masses of material lying around. Remember that local ghost story about people hearing organ music from within the old church on some nights? I do love that tale, don’t you?’

  ‘That’s just people’s imagination,’ said Ella. It was typical of Clem to miss the threat in all this – to focus on unimportant details: the stupid ghost tales that had grown up about the village, and his diaries, which he was always telling people about.

  ‘Yes, but people like a ghost story,’ Clem was saying. ‘Specially something about a really old church like St Anselm’s.’

  St Anselm’s church. Despite the warm April evening, Ella shivered.

  ‘If you walk to the highest point of Mordwich Bank you can see the sun glinting on the stained-glass windows,’ said Clem. ‘It looks sort of remote and unreal. The lost church in the Poisoned Village.’ He contemplated this phrase approvingly for a moment. ‘It’s absolutely classic English ghost stuff.’

  ‘Derek says the only people who hear anything are the ones walking home from the Red Lion late at night,’ said Ella tartly. She had never told Derek or anyone else that she sometimes dreamed she could hear the organ chords, menacing and achingly lonely.

  ‘Yes, but it’s still a good story,’ said Clem. ‘Is Veronica coming?’

  ‘Yes, of course. She should be here by now.’

  ‘Oh, she’ll be late. She always is – she likes to make an entrance.’

  But Veronica was not particularly late, although Ella was sorry to see that as usual she was overdressed for the occasion.

  ‘I see you’ve got some of those frozen canapés,’ said Veronica, having ostentatiously arranged her unsuitably short skirt over her thighs. ‘They’re good, aren’t they? I bought some last week for a – a friend who was coming to supper.’

  There was no call for Veronica to bat her eyelashes in that simpering fashion: it was clear she meant a man. Nor was there any need for Veronica to say the canapés had been on special offer. ‘Two for the price of one; they’re very cheap, aren’t they?’

  Ella handed Veronica a glass of wine, and said, ‘We need to t
alk about Priors Bramley.’

  ‘I thought that was why you phoned,’ said Veronica. ‘It’s a bit worrying, I suppose. It’s good about the motorway, but opening up the village made me feel quite shivery. Didn’t you feel shivery, Clem?’

  ‘Well, personally I seldom shiver over anything these days.’

  ‘Did either of you ever tell anyone what happened that morning?’ said Ella.

  ‘Oh God, no.’ But Clem poured himself another glass of wine with a hand that shook.

  Without even being asked, thought Ella, annoyed, but she only said, ‘Veronica?’

  ‘I’ve never told a soul,’ said Veronica at once. ‘Not a soul. We said we’d take it to the grave with us, and I shall do so. We made a pact, don’t you remember? We swore on all we held sacred never to tell.’

  ‘I don’t think we did that exactly,’ said Ella. ‘There’s no need to be so dramatic. What we did was to promise each other we would never tell anyone.’

  The promise had been made over fifty years earlier, when the three of them were children. It had started with a dare, although afterwards none of them could remember whose idea that had been.

  A plane was going to fly over Priors Bramley that Saturday in order to drop a small explosive device. But it was not a bomb, people said firmly. It was the planned and precise dispersing of chemical substances; a geological and botanical experiment. Whatever it was called, it was quite a big event for the area; people talked about it avidly. It helped balance the shock the Priors Bramley residents had received when they were told they had to leave their homes.

  Clem’s Great-aunt Rose had lived in a cottage in Priors Bramley all her life. ‘She had to move out, though,’ he said, as they walked out of Upper Bramley that Saturday morning. ‘She said she doesn’t mind giving way to progress, but she doesn’t hold with folk careering along roads at fifty miles an hour. And the money they gave her wouldn’t buy a dog kennel, never mind a decent house for folk who had to put up with six years of fighting Hitler.’ He put on a voice like a cross old lady when he said this, and Veronica giggled nervously.