One Night (3 page)

I often wondered why Brent left
things like this. It didn’t match the image of the arts and antique dealer he
professed to be. He had said to me on one occasion when my questioning began to
irritate him, ‘Not necessarily
art
as in arty-
farty
, Casey. Old things
have value in all sorts of ways.’

He’d emphasized the word
farty
,
hoping I would be offended. But what lay here in the yard could be easily
labeled as junk. Brent was an ironmonger, a scrap dealer. A second-hand
merchant.

Art and antiques. It was a
laugh.

To be fair, what was in the yard might
just be the belongings of previous tenants he hadn’t bothered to clear out.
Brent had never struck me as someone who would engage in any kind of activity
unless he was paid. I felt sorry for Mona. She was a fastidious person who
obeyed the call of duty. She was the one who did her homework (I copied it);
who played sports and played by the rules (I cheated all the time). She did
courses from home and found a job before anyone else. She didn’t like pop music
or high fashion. She had aspirations of doing accountancy and working as a
partner in a financial institution. I couldn’t think of anything worse than
adding up other people’s money. But the real difference between Mona and the
other girls of our year, was that she never had a boyfriend. Not one that I
remembered at any rate. She was always too quiet, too nerdy. Somewhat
disapproving.

And yet here she was with Brent
Sedgeworth.

Horrible combination.

All he had to do was throw her a
look from those wide blue eyes, offer that slack-lipped grin, and she fell to
putty.

It annoyed me but it wasn’t my
business. Enough had passed between me and Brent to know we didn’t care for
each other: dead-eye looks that lasted a moment too long, cut and parry remarks
through derisive smiles. I avoided Brent but continued conversation with Mona. Despite
her professed happiness, she was noticeably more relaxed when Brent wasn’t
around. She
said
she was happy but testimony in itself is sometimes not
enough. Often I caught a tone in her voice, a look in her eye that made me
wonder.

It was my mother who pinpointed the problem with one of her
no other
explanation
conclusions: ‘It’s because of the Patterson murder, Casey. She
changed after that. No doubt in my mind.’

The Patterson murder had taken
place five years earlier. A girl living two doors away from Mona had been strangled
with a length of electrical cord. Julia Patterson, just seventeen, had lived
with her parents who both worked. On that fateful day she had been home sick
instead of attending her posh school where everybody wore ties and regulation-length
uniforms.

Mona, twenty-one, had taken to
dog-walking to supplement her study fees. On a particularly misty morning in
April when the light is always tenuous, one of her charges – a half-grown Great
Dane by the name of Hannibal – had charged into the Patterson garden after a
cat, dragging Mona behind him. There was some shouting and a refuse bin was overturned.

Two things happened: Mona became
aware there was some other disconnected screaming coming from the house. Thinking
Mrs Patterson must be home and may have taken offence to the noisy intrusion, she
had glanced up and seen a man’s face appear momentarily at an upper window.

The face had stuck in her mind
simply because it shouldn’t have been there. As far as Mona was concerned, the
house at that time in the morning should have been empty. Distracted by Hannibal,
she had continued her walk – and forgotten about the face at the window until the
awful facts leaked out on the next morning’s news. Julia’s mother had come home
in the evening and found her daughter dead on her bed, a length of cord coiled
deeply into her pale young neck.

The facts slowly emerged. It seemed
Julia Patterson had let the man into the house soon after her parents had left
for work. Nobody could say why she had done this except that perhaps he was a friend
about whom her parents knew nothing. Mona realized she’d seen Julia with an
older man on two occasions: once at the bus stop (had only seen the back of
him) and once in the Patterson garden where Julia, still in her school uniform,
had been engaged in animated conversation. For reasons that made sense to nerdy
and unromantic Mona, she had assumed he was a contractor of sorts. She could
confirm (well, ninety percent) that the man in the garden and the face at the
window were the same. The police put together a picture of a young girl’s
truancy and infatuation with an older man, and Mona helped the ID team put
together a picture of the man’s face – a reconstruction that ended with dark hair,
a nose, a mouth and two eyes. And very little else. Fingerprints had been wiped
with professional care even from the cord around the girl’s neck.

The trail went cold and they never
found him.

After that the quiet street became
unsettled and watchful, neighbours more polite, deliveries checked, strangers
noted, doors bolted.

But my mother was right. Mona had
changed. She became nervy, introspective and irritable. Her mother, Elva
Spears, related in worried tones that Mona had begun to suffer nightmares,
waking in the night shouting, ‘
I know him. I’ve seen him!
’ Mona couldn’t
articulate her fear that the killer might return to silence her. The where and
when she might see him and point an accusatory finger was of no doubt powerful
concern to both her and the perpetrator.

As the months passed by and this
probability became less likely, the nightmares diminished, and while she would
never speak about it, Mona recovered some of her equilibrium. But then, the
other change: she became distinctly keen to go on a date. I introduced her to
several people but her skittishness frightened them off. I thought she was just
shy but it was more than that. Mona was looking for security of companionship
not a love affair. She was keen to become one of a pair. She wanted stability,
a presence, someone who would see her home; a man who would dispel her fears of
a darkened alley, a shadowy doorway. It was probably Brent Sedgeworth’s sudden
interest in her and not his soft good looks that attracted her. Looking back, I
realized they each had an agenda – those secret goal-tick lists that make us
moody, vital, anxious and anticipatory without making any sense to anybody
else. Agendas which only became clear after the night in Witch’s Wood.

6 PM

I picked up Sticky and tottered through the backyard. He weighed me down
like a small sack of potatoes. There was a gloomy light in the woods, an early
evening stillness compounded by a heavy seal of cloud overhead. The trees
looked surreal, black cutouts against the strange light.

It was creepy. There was the odd
creak and plop as something fell from the branches or shifted under the waxy
foliage. I put Sticky down and edged behind him as he hopped around sniffing at
leaves and the soggy black soil. There was no point in trying to hurry him. Hopefully,
we might not have to do this again in the dark.

Sticky understood his limitations
and made no attempt to wander. Our progress was slow and when I looked back at
the cottage, I could still see the light over the open back door. Somehow this
made me think of Stephen’s last words as he left,
‘You need to learn patience,
Casey. You want everything at once. I don’t think I can meet that expectation.’

And that was that. I realized, at
last, that we had never shared the same pictures in our heads. I missed his
lanky length on my couch, his narrow green eyes squeezed up in amusement at
some daft thing I’d said. I missed his cooking which was innovative to say the
least and way better than mine, his jerky, peculiar way of dancing, his quirky
views on politics. The way he would stop in mid-sentence and say,
‘God, you
have a face like a pixie!’

To which my stock reply was
,
‘Are you saying God has a face like a pixie?’

But the worst thing – after all the
discussion and unsatisfactory compromises – was his assumption that I would
change, beg forgiveness and make amends. Somehow this had been the real sharp-edge
challenge. Testing myself against it became a matter of pig-headed
determination. My mother always said I was the most stubborn person she knew.
‘You
kick against everything, Casey. A real little fighter. Sometimes I wish there
was more purpose to it. You’re twenty-six. Time to grow up.’

I looked back at the cottage light winking faintly between the trees. The
purple light had deepened to a silver glow. Sticky had gone far enough.

‘Let’s take it slowly back, boy.’

My voice rang in the stillness. I
felt I had broken some quiet forest lore. Leaves rustled in the gathering
gloom. Perhaps it was that, I don’t know, but in an instant, I was nervous. The
urge to turn and run for the safety of the cottage was almost overwhelming –
which was daft. By daylight I knew these paths well. Mona and I had walked here
often. I knew if I continued on the path it would descend a muddy bank to a
stream. Some way upstream was an abandoned house composed of a rotting puzzle
of old bricks, rooms broken open to the elements, a fireplace deep in mud, one
room still intact.

‘Spooky house,’ Mona told me.
‘Brent and I sometimes come up here in the summer and have breakfast.’

She had pointed out an old iron
bedstead under drifts of leaves, weeds winding up the rusting posts – and the
splintered remains of a wooden cupboard trapped in mud like a rotten tooth in
soggy gums.

‘Brent says he doesn’t think
anybody’s been here for a hundred years.’

‘Doesn’t it belong to anybody?’

She shrugged. ‘Not that we know of.
Although, I suppose as soon as somebody wants to live in it or pull it down,
there’ll be some long lost relation claiming ownership.’

I stepped gingerly through rooms
without ceilings. Places of old habitation gave me strange feelings of
connectivity – as though the people who had once lived here were aware of your
intrusion, and were coming forward to meet you; a rustling of spirits. It
always made me shiver.

‘And look here,’ Mona pointed. She
lifted something from the floor. A tide of mulched leaves fell away. I saw it
was a hatch-like long door. A ladder led into an oblong darkness. I peered
down. A huddle of covered shapes were barely visible.

‘What’s down there?’

‘Brent says it’s old farming
equipment.’

I frowned. ‘Valuable?’

‘For a museum, I suppose.’

‘Shall we take a look?’

‘Are you crazy? I don’t creep around
in the dark, thank you very much. Never know who you’re going to meet.’

I called Sticky in deliberately loud, overly cheerful tones, ‘C’mon, boy!
There’s a good boy. C’mon Sticks.’

Sticky, staggering determinedly, had
christened just about every leaf and twig he could reach. The dark of a late
autumn evening was threading towards us. Worried that he might wander into the
undergrowth and disappear, I bent down and heaved him into my arms.

I’m not a big person but gymnastics
had strengthened me. Double bar, the horse, floor exercises. All that. Sticky
was a weight and I couldn’t see properly. I fixed my eyes on the cottage lights
and steadily planted one foot after the other.

There was a sound.

Direction was difficult to gauge but
Sticky heard it because he stiffened. His low growl rumbled in my arms. I looked
back into the black belly of the forest. There was nothing to see. The faint
throw of light from the cottage filtered to deep shadow against the trees.
Something rustled. The dark crept skyward like a stain.

‘Hello? Is someone there?’

I felt a complete fool. The line of
that old song came into my head,
I talk to the trees
… There was a
scuffing sound, a gentle crack and a small branch tumbled to the ground. It
landed with hardly a sound in the undergrowth, ruffling some leaves.

The tension in my back eased. It
was just the forest contracting naturally as night came on. I swung round and
headed for the cottage yard, my footsteps deliberately loud, Sticky bouncing in
my arms, his face turned to me in alarm.

We stumbled inside. I dumped Sticky
on the couch and went to lock the back door. Then, despite my own scoffing, I
made sure I locked the front door. I saw a stout bolt and shot that home as
well. I left the outside lights on, both back and front. I stood in the middle
of the rug as though it was a small, sinking island. Alice Petting’s warnings
rattled in the room. I went upstairs, found my phone, copied her number in. Sometimes
a good memory is not so good.

I recalled that particular day in the woods with Mona. A bright sky and a huge
sail of brilliant white cloud pressing cool light between the trees. We’d just
consumed a hefty lunch of roast chicken which Mona had cooked to perfection.

‘I don’t eat for three days before
I come up here,’ I said.

‘Don’t exaggerate.’

‘I swear. You are the best cook
this side of the Atlantic.’

She laughed, a lovely trilling
sound that always reminded me of an Edwardian garden party – silvery,
delicately delivered. I laughed like a dockyard worker – throaty and
conspiratorial as though I’d just been told a dirty joke. I envied Mona her
style, her intelligence and education. In odd moments like this, I thought she
would be a better match for Stephen than me.

In the midst of mentally pairing my
two best friends, I slipped on a stone and fell on all fours in a swathe of
leaves. The green, acrid scent of them made me dizzy. In a second, intensely, I
wanted to leave my old life and live here forever.

Mona was giggling. ‘Are you all
right?’

Something flew over my head, hit a
nearby tree with a resounding thwack and fell to earth.

‘Jeez!’ said Mona. ‘That was
close!’