Kate Kombothekra had the car keys ready when she opened her front door. ‘Here you go,’ she said, thrusting them at Charlie.
‘You sure this is okay? I don’t know when I’ll be able to bring it back.’
‘It’s fine. The boys and I’ll walk to school tomorrow. It’ll do us good, though don’t tell Sam I said that. When he said it to me I nearly throttled him. One thing: if you could avoid smoking in it…’
‘Do my best,’ Charlie shouted over her shoulder.
As she slammed the driver door, she heard Kate yell, ‘Or at least open the…’ Charlie beeped the horn. Steering with one hand, she pulled her phone out of her handbag on the passenger seat and pressed redial. ‘Villiers,’ said the voice that answered after three rings. ‘Claire Draisey speaking.’
‘Hello, it’s me again, Charlie Zailer. Any luck?’
‘I’m afraid not. There’s been some kind of emergency here, and the deputy head’s in a meeting. I’ve rung round everyone I can think of, and no one’s seen hair nor hide of a Simon Waterhouse. Are you sure he’s here?’
‘Not absolutely. It’s where he said he was going, that’s all I know.’ Charlie had rung the school when she couldn’t reach Simon on his mobile, and got a recorded message, tacked on to the end of which was an emergency out-of-hours number-Claire Draisey’s, as it turned out. Draisey had told her few mobile phones could get reception in Villiers’ grounds, which made Charlie all the more inclined to think that was where Simon was.
‘Look, I’m going to have to free up this line,’ said Draisey, sighing. ‘You’re from the Culver Valley, did you say?’
‘That’s right. So’s DC Waterhouse.’
‘Right. Then you’re nothing to do with the London police.’
‘London police?’ A burst of adrenalin set off Charlie’s internal antennae.
‘Yes. A colleague said they’re on their way here. Look, I don’t know much more than you do at this stage. A group of our girls went on a trip to the Globe Theatre tonight to see Julius Caesar. I’ve just checked the car park, and the minibus isn’t back yet, which it certainly ought to be, and we’re all rather anxious in case…’
‘I wouldn’t waste your time if this wasn’t important,’ said Charlie. ‘Are you sure you’ve checked everywhere?’
‘No, I haven’t,’ said Draisey bluntly. ‘I didn’t say I had. I’ve spoken to those members of house staff that I could get hold of, and that’s all I can do, I’m afraid. I’m not traipsing round the grounds at this time of night looking for your missing colleague. Do you have any idea of the size of our empire?’ The last word was loaded with sarcasm. ‘It’d take me most of the night.’
‘What about Garstead Cottage?’ Charlie asked.
‘What about it?’ Draisey said curtly. ‘It’s rented to a private tenant who I’m not about to disturb. Now, if you’ll-’
‘Wait,’ said Charlie. ‘I got a message to ring somebody-someone I think might be in trouble. When I rang her back on the number she gave me, I got through to a taxi-driver: Michael Durtnell, his name is. He works for a firm called N & E Cars.’
‘Newsham and Earle,’ said Draisey. ‘That’s our taxi firm-the one the school uses.’
‘Right.’ Charlie let out the breath she’d been holding. Progress. ‘He said he’d left Garstead Cottage twice today, each time with a different woman passenger. Both women then decided they didn’t want to go anywhere, and asked him to take them back to Garstead Cottage. He said both were behaving strangely. I think one of those women is the person who phoned me. DC Waterhouse might already be-’
‘Sergeant Zailer, if I could stop you for a moment?’ Draisey sounded exhausted, her voice fainter than it had been previously. ‘I should have realised when you said you were from Culver Valley Police. I don’t suppose I’m thinking straight, with the minibus missing and rumours of London coppers beating a path to our door. I know for a fact that the current resident of Garstead Cottage has a friend staying with her at the moment-a female friend.’
It had to be Ruth Bussey.
‘I also know, as perhaps you don’t, that she’s in the habit of pestering the local police, summoning them when there’s absolutely no need and generally making their lives a misery. Sounds like tonight she’s decided it’s your turn. She has another house in your neck of the woods, I believe.’
‘What’s her name?’ asked Charlie, driving too fast in her excitement.
‘If you don’t know, I don’t think it would be appropriate for me to-’
‘Mary Trelease?’
A heavy sigh. ‘If you know, why are you asking me?’
‘I’m on my way to you now,’ Charlie told Draisey. ‘When I get there, I’ll need you to-’
‘I’ll either be too busy to help you, or I’ll be asleep,’ came the firm reply. ‘I’d strongly advise you to save yourself the trip. You’re not the first police officer I’ve said this to, and you won’t be the first to wish you’d listened to me when you’ve wasted a good night’s sleep for absolutely no reason. Good night, sergeant. ’
‘Mary Trelease died in 1982,’ Charlie shouted into her phone, but Claire Draisey was gone.
Charlie drove at twice the speed limit all the way to the motorway. Once she was on it, she rang the number Coral Milward had left on her voicemail. When the DS answered, she said, ‘It’s Charlie Zailer.’
‘Where the fuck are you? Where’s Waterhouse? Anyone’d think we weren’t all on the same side here. Who the fuck do you both think you are, treating me like I don’t exist?’
‘I think Simon’s at Villiers,’ Charlie told her. ‘I’m on my way there now.’
‘You’re on your way to my office is where you’re on your way to.’
‘’Fraid not,’ said Charlie.
‘They should have got rid of you two years ago-I would have done, if you’d been one of mine. They’re sure as hell going to wish they did once they’ve heard what I’ve got to say about you. Once a fuck-up, always a fuck-up. I’m going to take your career and your future and every fucking thing you’ve got and stick it up my big fat arse before shitting it out again. You’d better-’
Charlie switched her phone off. On the same side? Funny, that was never the impression Milward gave. She’d said nothing about having dispatched anyone to Villiers. Despite what Claire Draisey had told her, Charlie had no way of knowing if anyone from the Met was on their way to the school. She decided to stick with her original plan and head for Garstead Cottage, even if it meant losing her job. Ruth Bussey and Mary Trelease were there-hadn’t Draisey said so?
She turned on Kate’s car stereo and heard what sounded like a live gig-raucous applause and cheering, electronic music almost drowned out by hands and voices. When the clapping died down, a man started to speak. He didn’t say who he was, but Charlie guessed he was Kate’s sons’ headmaster, or one of their teachers. This was a school concert on CD. He was thanking something called the Wednesday Club Ensemble for its synthesised rendition of ‘Ten Green Bottles’.
Hearing the title jolted something at the back of Charlie’s brain. She breathed in sharply and turned off the stereo. Six Green Bottles-that was the name of a painting in Aidan’s TiqTaq exhibition. Surely… no. If it was true, it would be crazy. She forgot to steer, and drifted halfway into the next lane as, suddenly, several other things clicked in her mind, then swerved to get herself back on track, ignoring irate beeps from other drivers. It was crazy, no doubt about that, but she was right. She had to be.
She’d seen several unframed paintings on the walls at Mary’s house. One was of a man, woman and boy sitting round a table covered with empty wine bottles. Green bottles. Charlie hadn’t counted, but she was willing to bet there were six of them. She’d also seen a picture of a woman looking in a mirror, the same woman from the bottles picture. And from the photographs in Kerry Gatti’s file. That’s why Charlie had recognised the face-she’d seen it before, on Mary’s walls. The first Mary Trelease, the one who died in 1982. A woman looking in a mirror… Another of the titles Charlie had seen on Aidan’s TiqTaq sales list was Who’s the Fairest? Mirror, mirror, on the wall, who’s the fairest of them all?
And the picture Ruth Bussey had described to her that had been in one of the downstairs rooms at 15 Megson Crescent, of a boy writing ‘Joy Division’ on a wall-that had to be Routine Bites Hard, another of Aidan’s titles. The first line of Joy Divison’s best known song, ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’, a song Charlie had heard thousands of times, contained those words, that phrase. She sang it under her breath, trying to assemble the bizarre chain of events in her mind.
In 1982, Len Smith had killed his partner, Mary Trelease, according to the official version of events. In 2000, Aidan’s first exhibition at TiqTaq had been a huge success, after which, unusually, he’d decided to give up painting. Charlie thought of the photograph Jan Garner had shown her of his Supply and Demand, the picture that had been reproduced in the exhibition catalogue: a woman at the top of the stairs, looking down at a boy. Charlie hadn’t focused on their faces, but she knew they were the same woman and boy she’d seen in the unframed pictures on Mary’s walls: the first Mary Trelease and… it had to be the young Aidan. And the older man-Aidan’s stepfather, Len Smith? Smith had two other stepchildren, Aidan’s brother and sister-could it be them in the painting Charlie had seen upstairs at Megson Crescent, the fat, dark pair with eyebrows that dominated their faces? Yes-had to be. Thinking about it, there was a resemblance between them and Aidan.
Mary had copied the pictures from Aidan’s exhibition. No, they’re not mine. That’s what she’d said. Then, only moments later, she’d admitted to painting them. Now Charlie understood. Mary had repainted Aidan’s pictures herself, the exact same scenes, though the paintings couldn’t have been more different from Aidan’s muted, painstakingly realistic ones. Charlie smacked the steering wheel in triumph as she realised she had the answer to another question: the copies, Mary’s versions of Aidan’s pictures, were unframed because they had to be. The people who framed for Mary-Saul Hansard and, later, Jan Garner-had seen Aidan’s exhibition; they’d have spotted what Mary was doing if she took her copies in to be framed, and she didn’t want them to know.
Why? Why paint someone else’s pictures?
Charlie lit a cigarette, her brain on overdrive. The nine buyers: Abberton, Blandford, Darville, Elstow, Goundry, Heathcote, Margerison, Rodwell and Winduss. Their addresses didn’t exist and neither did they. Ruth Margerison of Garstead Cottage didn’t exist. Garstead Cottage belonged to Villiers, Mary’s old school.
And Martha’s. Martha Wyers had also been a Villiers girl.
An unpleasant sensation, like the brush of cold fingers, crept up Charlie’s spine. What sort of person was she dealing with here? What sort of mind? Could it be that Mary had bought all the pictures from Aidan’s exhibition, using false names? Apart from the three paintings bought by Saul Hansard, Cecily Wyers and Kerry Gatti, and Charlie knew that at least two of those had been sold on to Maurice Blandford shortly afterwards.
The story, when Charlie told it to herself, seemed too outlandish to be possible. Mary Trelease was killed at 15 Megson Crescent in 1982. In 2008, another woman, also called Mary Trelease, lives in the very same house. That alone was chilling enough. Not everyone, thought Charlie, would be capable of first dreaming that up and then putting it into practice. Everybody enjoyed a good scary story; hardly anyone knew how to bring one to life.
And in between 1982 and 2008? How did the story bridge a gap of twenty-six years? A job interview, at which a woman falls in love with a man she doesn’t know. She writes a book about him. Later, she meets him again when they both have their photographs taken for a feature in The Times. It must seem to her as if fate has reunited them. A little later still, she attends the private view of his first art exhibition. She studies his work carefully, being obsessed with him. She sees a painting called The Murder of Mary Trelease. She thinks nothing of it, not until some time has elapsed, time during which her obsession has intensified. She hires a private detective who tells her the man’s father is in prison for killing a woman called Mary Trelease, and, of course, she remembers the picture. But the picture says something different about who committed the murder. Not in an obvious way-there’s no graphic depiction of violence-but subtly, so that the woman, our heroine, thinks she’s the only one who knows the truth.
Anyone who cared about stories would know that only the most important character gets to be in that position: knowing everything while everyone else knows nothing. That would be good for the ego, thought Charlie, though ultimately not good enough to restore an irretrievably contaminated specimen to health. This was a woman who, after a failed suicide attempt, painted herself dead, with a noose round her neck. As she wished she could be, or as she thought she deserved to look?
Charlie thought about Ruth Bussey and her self-esteem exercise, her failure to put up flattering photographs of herself alongside the pictures of Charlie, in spite of the book’s orders. For the past two years, Charlie had avoided looking at images of herself; she’d avoided being photographed as far as possible. How much more must you have to hate everything you are, were and might ever be to pour all your energy into painting yourself contorted and defeated by death?
Was that the story in her head? Charlie wondered. A woman who loathes herself, in spite of having all the money in the world to buy art, the services of private investigators, whatever she wants? In spite of her immense talent, and everything she could achieve if she looked forward instead of back? She can’t, though, that’s her tragedy. Her only story’s an old one, yet she’s terrified of it ending. That’s why she plays games, withholds the truth in a way that lets you know she’s keeping something from you, forcing you to play hide and seek with her. She has to make it last, because once the game’s over, there’s nothing left for her.
He seems to have got hold of the idea that he killed you.
Not me.
A woman who knows about leaving you wanting more, about making up people and names that don’t exist. Someone who, no matter what she calls herself, no matter what she does with her time, will always be first and foremost an inventor of stories.
Martha Wyers.
‘My understanding was that DC Dunning would be coming in person, and bringing a warrant with him,’ said Richard Bedell, Villiers’ deputy headteacher.
‘He will, on both counts,’ said Simon, who had been less than frank and done nothing to correct Bedell’s assumption that he and Dunning worked together. Bedell was younger than him, and wore faded jeans, a cream fleece and loafers. Simon had to keep reminding himself that he wasn’t talking to an unusually confident sixth-former who’d been left in charge of his father’s office. The room was the size of most schools’ assembly halls. Simon was trying to sit comfortably on a lumpy plum-coloured chaise longue, and found he kept needing to raise his voice to make himself heard across an expanse of beige carpet that was set into a border of hardwood flooring, perfectly even on all sides.
Bedell’s oversized desk was covered with piles of exercise books at one end-red and dark green, some thin, some fat with paper inserts, all bedraggled-and telephones and mugs at the other. He had three phones, none of which was a mobile, and twice as many mugs, two of them navy blue and yellow, bearing the school’s logo. On the carpet beneath his desk was a coil of black wires from the telephones and his computer, printer and fax machine that looked as if it would take many years to untangle.
‘All I’m asking is to be pointed in the direction of Garstead Cottage,’ said Simon. ‘If Ms Trelease doesn’t want to talk to me, she doesn’t have to. We’ll wait for Neil Dunning to arrive with his warrant. I’d like to try, though. As I explained before, I’m concerned about her safety.’
‘And as I explained before, DC Waterhouse, I’ve already established that Mary doesn’t want to see or speak to you or any of your colleagues, or have you in her home. She became quite hysterical at the prospect, and I can’t afford…’ Bedell broke off. His chin puckered as he swallowed a yawn. ‘Let me spell it out for you,’ he said, as if granting Simon a special favour. ‘Egan and Cecily Wyers have been extremely generous to us over the years. Villiers isn’t like Eton or Marlborough, or most of the public schools you might have heard of-we haven’t got vast reserves of capital to fall back on when times are hard. If our numbers fall, as they have recently, and there’s less coming in from fees, we’re in trouble. Frankly, we need the support of parents like the Wyerses-it’s thanks to them alone that we’ve got a brand spanking new theatre building.’ He threw up his hands, a gesture that invited Simon to contemplate the narrowly avoided catastrophe of the school’s having to go without this particular asset. ‘Our part of the bargain is the cottage, providing a safe haven for Mary where she can get on with her work in peace. In view of which, I’d like to ask you what I asked DC Dunning: is a warrant and all it entails strictly necessary? Because, I won’t lie to you, it’s not going to go down well with Egan and Cecily.’
‘Do Mr and Mrs Wyers have a particular interest in Mary Trelease?’ asked Simon.
Bedell’s face dropped, losing all its expression. ‘Pardon?’ he said.
Simon repeated his question.
‘Don’t you detectives communicate with one another? I explained the situation to DC Dunning in all its irregularity.’
Simon was considering how best to respond to this when Bedell said, ‘I’m going to give him a quick call, if that’s all right. He said nothing about you turning up, and…’
‘You’ve seen my ID,’ said Simon. He was getting into that cottage, even if he had to tie Bedell up with telephone wire. ‘Did Dunning tell you he wants to speak to Mary Trelease in connection with a murder?’
Bedell closed his eyes. Left them closed for a good few seconds. ‘No, he didn’t. This is a disaster, a complete disaster.’
‘I take it you mean for the murder victim,’ said Simon. ‘Gemma Crowther, her name was. She was shot in her home on Monday night. The killer then knocked her teeth out and hammered picture hooks into her gums.’
Bedell winced and rubbed the bridge of his nose. He stood up. ‘Listen, I’d appreciate it if you’d take my word on one thing. Mary has her problems, I won’t deny that. Genius has its price. But she certainly hasn’t killed anybody. That’s taking it too far, to accuse her of that.’
‘I’m not accusing her of anything,’ Simon pointed out. ‘We want to ask her a few questions, that’s all-her and several other people. We’re a long way off charging any of them.’ Genius has its price. A despicable motto, if ever Simon had heard one. Was the price payable in human teeth, for fuck’s sake?
‘Why don’t I ring DC Dunning, see how long he’s going to be?’ Bedell suggested, picking up one of the phones on his desk with a heavy sigh. ‘I knew something like this would happen one day.’
‘You knew Mary Trelease would become involved in a murder investigation?’
‘No, of course not. That’s a rather crass thing to say, isn’t it? I knew there’d be trouble-that’s all I meant. I inherited the situation: Mary and the cottage. If I’d been around at the time, I’d have spoken up strongly against it. Some money’s simply not worth the price. As it is, we could find work for a full-time member of staff dealing with parents’ complaints. There’ll be a shit-storm-pardon my French-if this latest piece of news gets out.’
Bedell’s words made little sense to Simon, who knew only that he didn’t like the picture that was building up. Bedell looked down at his desk, half-heartedly moving a few pieces of paper around. ‘What’s Dunning’s number?’ he asked irritably.
‘I left my phone in the car,’ Simon lied, patting his pockets. He’d had no reception since he arrived at Villiers. It made him nervous, as if his being uncontactable might be causally linked to catastrophe for those he cared about. He imagined his mother’s anguished voice: ‘We tried to telephone, but you didn’t answer…’
‘I know where I put it,’ said Bedell. ‘Wait a second.’ He left the room, pulling the door to. Simon heard his shoes squeak as he walked down the corridor, then the sound of a door opening and closing. As soon as Bedell spoke to Dunning, Simon would lose any chance he had of getting into Garstead Cottage. He couldn’t afford to wait.
He went out into the corridor and down the stairs opposite Bedell’s office door, then down two more flights. He unbolted the door he and Bedell had come in through, went outside and pulled it shut behind him. A long path stretched ahead into the distance, with lantern-style lamp posts and a row of large square brick buildings on either side. How hard could it be to find a cottage? There was nothing that fitted that description in front of him for as far as he could see.
Bedell had left his curtains open when he’d taken Simon into his office. Through the window, Simon had seen a lit courtyard surrounded by long, single-storey prefabricated huts with dark wooden sides that had looked almost oriental. Perhaps Garstead Cottage was one of those.
He walked round to the back of the building, where he found another path that led to what looked like a signpost about 200 metres away. It was much darker here, almost too dark for Simon to read the signs when he reached them. Several rigid rectangles of painted wood with arrow-shaped ends protruded from a pole. One said, ‘Cecily Wyers Theatre’. Another said, ‘Main Building’, but it was the third one Simon read that made him grab the pole and trace the letters with his fingers: ‘Darville’. Beneath it, pointing in the same direction, was a sign that said, ‘Winduss’.
As far as Simon knew, these names belonged to people who’d bought Aidan Seed’s paintings. Who lived at addresses that didn’t exist. For a few seconds, standing alone in the darkness and the silence in front of this strange object that looked a bit like a white tree, its branches at right angles to its trunk, Simon felt like an idiot who didn’t know what to do, or what to think.
There were five paths to choose between. He strained to see as far as he could along each in turn, which wasn’t far at all. Each one disappeared into blackness. There was no sign of the prefabricated huts he’d seen from Bedell’s window. In the end he decided to follow the sign that said, ‘Stable Block’, on the off-chance that Garstead Cottage might once have housed whoever looked after the horses. It was as good a guess as any.
He crossed a field, after which the concrete walkway narrowed and gave way to a dirt track. Definitely still a path, though. Simon followed it through a cluster of small trees and into another field. When he started to feel wetness at his ankles, he looked down and saw that he’d been walking on grass. Where was the dirt track? Had it run out or had he strayed off it? He saw dark shapes ahead and made his way towards them. The stable block. He’d assumed, when he’d read the sign, that this would be a conversion: a languages or science laboratory, or living space for the pupils, but as he approached he both heard and smelled evidence of the presence of horses. There was no Garstead Cottage, not here.
He was about to turn back when he heard what sounded like a stifled scream coming from behind the stables. He ran round the squat cluster of buildings, looked in all directions and saw nothing. ‘Hello?’ he called out. ‘Anyone there?’ This time he heard a giggle, and walked in the direction it had come from. He’d taken only a few paces forward when something that felt like hard netting pushed him back. A fence, as high as his waist. ‘Fuck,’ he muttered. More giggles followed. Then he spotted something that stood out because, unlike everything else around him, it wasn’t dark: three small orange dots that seemed to be attached to a mass of trees nearby. The glowing ends of cigarettes.
Keeping his eye on them, Simon made his way over to the trees. When he was still too far away to see faces, he heard a voice. ‘Oh, man, sir, we’re really, really sorry. We totally know there’s no way we’re not going to be in, like, pure trouble…’
‘I think you should punish us?’ another girl said, making the statement sound like a question. ‘That way we won’t make the same mistake again?’ A fit of giggles followed this unlikely sounding assertion.
‘I’m not a teacher,’ Simon told the disembodied voices. ‘I’m police. Smoke yourselves stupid for all I care.’
‘No way! Oh, man! What’s, like, a policeman doing creeping round Villy in the dead of night?’
‘This is outrageous,’ said the third girl.
Now Simon was closer and could see their faces. They looked about sixteen, and were wearing pyjamas with nothing over them, no coats or anything. They shivered in between fits of hysterical laughter. ‘I’m looking for Garstead Cottage,’ he told them.
‘What are you doing over here, then?’ one of the girls said scornfully.
‘He’s better off over here. You don’t want to go to Scary Mary’s, Mister Policey-man.’
‘Tasha!’
‘What? He doesn’t. She’s, like, a pure nightmare.’
‘You’re talking about Mary Trelease,’ said Simon.
‘Oh my God, she’s probably his girlfriend or something!’
‘Maybe he’s come to, like, arrest her?’
‘Where’s the cottage?’ he tried again. ‘Can one of you show me?’
A peal of scandalised giggles greeted this suggestion. ‘Yeah, right! Like we wouldn’t be so dead if our house master caught us wandering round at night in our jarmies.’
‘She’s frightened of Scary Mary. I’ll take you, soon as I’ve finished my ciggie.’
‘Flavia, you’re such a liar! Like you wouldn’t be totally too scared.’
‘Right back at you, babes.’
‘What’s there to be scared of?’ Simon asked, hoping Neil Dunning wouldn’t choose now to arrive with his warrant and find Simon lurking amid the trees with three scantily clad teenage girls.
‘Oh my God-he doesn’t know!’
‘You, like, so won’t believe us if we tell you?’
‘She cuts Villy girls’ throats and drinks their blood.’ This prompted more giggles.
‘I don’t believe she exists? I’ve never seen her, and I’ve been here since I was thirteen?’
‘No, seriously, though, she doesn’t-drink blood or anything like that. But she does only come out at night.’
‘That’s totally understandable? I’d be too ashamed to come out in daylight if my face looked like that.’
‘She starved herself, right, and once all the fat had gone from under her skin, her face collapsed and she was left with the face of, like, an eighty-year-old hag. That’s pure truth, man.’
‘She’s a Villy legend.’
‘The oral storytelling tradition,’ one of the girls said in a mock deep voice, and they all screamed with laughter. Simon guessed they were aping one of their teachers.
‘Shut up, poo-brain! If I lose my exeat privs thanks to you, it’ll be pure tragedy.’
‘No way are we getting curfed for helping a policeman.’
‘Shut up and let me tell him. He hasn’t got time to waste listening to you two infants. We don’t know for sure…’
‘We so do. I heard Miss Westaway and Mrs Dean talking about it.’
‘It might all be scurlyest rumours.’
‘You mean scurrilous. Scurlyest isn’t a word. I apologise on behalf of my intoxicated housemate,’ said the girl nearest to Simon. ‘It’s so not a rumour-it’s the scandalous truth. Scary Mary had a boyfriend who dumped her, right, and she was so miz she tried to kill herself. Hanged herself in Garstead Cottage.’
‘And he was there too, the boyfriend,’ one of the other girls chipped in.
‘Oh, yeah, I forgot that bit. Yeah, she made him go round for the whole closure thing.’ The girl Simon thought was called Flavia-unless he’d got mixed up, and she was Tasha-drew invisible quote marks in the air. ‘And when he got there, she was standing on the dining table, with a rope round her neck, attached to the light or something…’
‘A chandelier! It was a chandelier!’
‘Yeah, right. In a cottage?’
‘I heard it was a chandelier.’
‘Whatever. So, like, he called an ambulance and she was rushed to hospital, but on the way there in the ambulance, she died-like, majorly died. And she had no heartbeat or oxygen going to her brain for three whole minutes…’
‘It was ten minutes…’
‘No one comes back to life after ten minutes, babes. I’ve seen Scary Mary-she’s odd, but she’s not a veg. What was I saying? Oh, yeah: the ambulance people brought her back from, like, beyond death, and she was supposed to be brain damaged, but she wasn’t. She was, like, totally fine. Except she wasn’t, because that was when she turned into Scary Mary. She changed her name.’
‘Stop,’ said Simon. ‘What do you mean? Changed it to what?’
‘Mary Trelease.’
‘Scary Martha would have sounded rubbish-it doesn’t rhyme.’
‘Martha?’ If the girls’ confidence and state of undress hadn’t made him feel so uncomfortable, he’d have asked more forcefully.
‘Martha Wyers-that’s what she used to be called. But after she died and came back to life, she wouldn’t let anyone call her that any more, because, like, Martha Wyers had died?’
‘Gross! This story’s a pure freak-out, every time,’ one of the girls said, wrapping her arms round herself.
‘She lashed anyone who called her Martha. Even her mum and dad had to start calling her Mary.’
‘Lashed?’ Simon interrupted. He had to ask.
‘What? Oh, it’s, like, an expression?’
‘Translation for Villy outsider: she got really angry with anyone who called her Martha.’
‘And she lost weight when she turned into Mary. She was a pure tubber before.’
‘She was pining, wasn’t she, for her one true love?’
Simon couldn’t think clearly with the girls chattering at him. ‘Do you know why she chose the name Mary Trelease?’
They looked at one another, silent for the first time. ‘No,’ said one shirtily after a few seconds, annoyed to have been caught out. ‘What does that matter? A name’s just a name, isn’t it?’
‘Yes it is, Flavia Edna Seawright.’ More giggles erupted.
‘Her name’s not the only thing she changed after her resurrection, I know that,’ said Flavia, in an attempt to divert attention.
‘Oh, yeah-how weird is this?’
‘She used to be a writer-she had a book published.’
‘Yeah, there’s a copy in our house library.’
‘She must have been in Heathcote, then.’
‘No, Margerison.’
Simon understood the signs he’d seen. Boarding houses.
‘What house she was in is so, like, trivial? She was a writer, but after she hanged herself and it didn’t work, she never wrote another word-she took up painting instead. Not me personally, but loads of Villy girls have seen her wandering around at night, smoking, covered in paint…’
‘Didn’t Damaris Clay-Hoffman stop her and ask her if she had a spare ciggy?’
‘Damaris Clay-Hoffman’s such a rank liar!’
‘Where’s her cottage?’ asked Simon. ‘Don’t come with me, just tell me where,’ he said to the girls. He wanted to approach quietly, not with a screeching chorus around him.
As Flavia Edna Seawright pointed to her left, a loud noise, like a small explosion, burst out of the night. ‘Oh, my God!’ she said, grabbing Simon’s arm. ‘I’m not even joking any more, man. That sounded like a gun.’