The Wayward Girls Read online

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  1976

  1. Now

  2. Now

  3. Then

  4. Now

  5. Then

  6. Then

  7. Now

  8. Now

  9. Then

  10. Now

  11. Then

  12. Now

  13. Then

  14. Now

  15. Now

  16. Then

  17. Now

  18. Then

  19. Now

  20. Then

  21. Now

  22. Then

  23. Now

  24. Then

  25. Now

  26. Then

  27. Now

  28. Then

  29. Now

  30. Then

  31. Now/Then

  32. Then

  33. Now

  34. Then

  35. Now

  36. Now/Then

  37. Now/Then

  38. Now

  39. Now

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Copyright

  For Jim Mayer

  07.10.46 – 16.08.16

  1976

  ‘Stand still.’ Bee tugged at Loo’s petticoat, trying to straighten it.

  ‘I don’t like it,’ said Loo. The cotton was soft and cool but it smelt funny, as if it had been left out in the rain. It made her skin crawl.

  ‘Oh, shut up.’ Bee stood back, concentrating. Her own petticoat had a frill around the skirt and the top she wore – the camisole – had lace edging at the neck; she looked different, not pretty exactly, but more grown-up. She stood with her hands on her hips, her head tilted to one side, scowling, her long dark hair flopping into her eyes.

  ‘It’s too long.’ Loo kicked at the skirt. ‘I can’t walk in it.’

  ‘Well, we’ll pin it up, then,’ Bee said, as if her sister was either very small or very stupid. ‘God, Loo, it’s not – stay here, and don’t let Cathy see you.’ She opened the door, then turned back, her expression stern. ‘Don’t move a muscle,’ she said, before ducking out of the room and running lightly across the landing, disappearing into their parents’ bedroom.

  They had found the box in the pantry, shoved out of sight under the shelves, and had brought it up to their room while their mother, Cathy, was busy in the garden with everyone else. The cardboard was speckled with damp and there was bold blue print running along one side: GOLDEN WONDER. It was old, but not as old as the clothes they’d found inside.

  Cathy wouldn’t be pleased. She might even take it away; it wasn’t really theirs, after all. She might want the clothes – for that was all the box held, petticoats and nightgowns and camisoles, a lot of them, too much for one person, surely – she might insist they hand them over to their rightful owner, whoever that might be.

  Bee was taking ages. Loo ran her hands across the fabric, trying to smooth out the deep creases that criss-crossed the skirt, some of them a faint brown. The fabric was paper-thin and she wondered if it might tear if she pulled it hard enough. What Bee would say if she did.

  It was stuffy in their bedroom. She went to the window and, pushing it as far open as she could, she leant out.

  They were still there, all the grown-ups and Flor and the baby, sitting on the grass under the apple tree at the far end of the garden, not doing much, any of them; it was too hot.

  Simon was sitting next to Issy, and they were talking to each other. Loo wondered what they might be saying. Issy raised her hand to her face to shade her eyes whenever she spoke and Simon leant in close, as if he was whispering secrets in her ear.

  Odd words drifted up to the open window, but nothing that made much sense. Issy laughed once or twice and Loo suddenly wished they would look up, one of them, see her, smile. She leant further out, bracing her hands on the window ledge, on the warm, blistered paint, letting the sun bake her arms.

  There was a shift in the air as the door swung open. She felt Bee cross the room and stand behind her, looking at the same view, at Simon. She leant in closer. Her breath was stale, her hip nudged Loo, one arm draping around her shoulders and her weight settling on her, skin on skin, edging Loo off balance. It was too much, too hot; besides, they never hugged. Loo tried to pull away and felt an answering pressure across her shoulders as her sister refused to budge, her fingers digging into the soft skin at the top of Loo’s arm.

  ‘I told you not to move.’ Loo jumped back from the window, startled. Bee was standing by the door, well out of reach, her mother’s pin cushion in one hand, needle, thread and scissors in the other. Loo felt dizzy, the room seemed to shimmer briefly, then everything came back into focus, sharp, solid. Bee was giving her a funny look.

  ‘You’re bloody useless, you are.’ Bee dragged her in front of the mirror again. She grabbed the waistband of the skirt and pinched it, pulling it tight, pinning it into place before she knelt and began to work on the hem. ‘You can sew it yourself, though,’ she said. ‘You needn’t think I’m going to do it.’ She worked quickly, so quickly Loo was sure the hem would turn out lopsided.

  ‘Bee?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Will Joe come back soon?’

  Joe, not Dad. Cathy, not Mum. Loo wasn’t sure when they’d started using their parents’ proper names, or even whose idea it had been in the first place, but they all did it now, except for Anto, who was too little to say anything.

  Bee stopped what she was doing and looked up. She didn’t look angry, exactly, but still Loo wished she hadn’t said anything. ‘Suppose so,’ she said, turning her attention back to the hem. She sounded as if she didn’t care at all, but it was hard to tell. Bee was such a bloody liar, that’s what Joe used to say whenever he caught her out. He thought it was funny, most of the time, and Loo had often wondered if she did it for that exact reason, to make him laugh.

  ‘Bee—’

  ‘Shut up, Loo.’

  There was no point in asking anything else.

  ‘There,’ Bee said as she got to her feet. ‘That’s better.’

  Bee’s outfit didn’t need altering. Her skirt didn’t sag down onto the floor, and the camisole she wore was a little bit too tight, if anything. As if the girl they once belonged to fitted between the two of them, between Bee and Loo.

  She should say something, about the window, about the …

  ‘It looks stupid with this.’ Loo plucked at her T-shirt, which had once been bright blue, and she could see that Bee was torn. ‘I don’t mind,’ she said, ‘you can have it all.’

  And she didn’t mind – the clothes in the box, she didn’t like them. She tugged at the skirt again. It felt – wrong.

  ‘Well, that won’t work, will it?’ said Bee. ‘We have to match.’ She rifled through the clothes on her bed, pulling out a little vest, greyish white and studded with tiny bone buttons. ‘Here. Try this.’

  Loo didn’t move.

  ‘Bloody hell, Loo. You’re not shy, are you?’ Bee chucked the vest at her. ‘I won’t look,’ she said, turning back to her bed and making a show of sorting through the remaining clothes.

  Loo turned her back on her sister and the mirror too, peeling off the T-shirt and letting it fall to the floor, shaking out the camisole and pulling it over her head as quickly as she could, her skin puckering despite the heat as the musty cloth settled into place.

  It was too big. She didn’t need to look in the mirror to see that, but she looked anyway. It was almost comical, the way the top sort of slithered off her shoulder, as if she had begun to shrink, leaving the clothes behind. She might have laughed, if it hadn’t felt so …

  Bee grabbed her and swung her round. ‘We’ll have to fix this too,’ sh
e said, pulling the camisole back into place and digging the pins through the double layers of cotton.

  ‘Ow.’ Loo flinched as Bee scraped a pin across her collar bone.

  ‘Oh, give over. I didn’t hurt you.’ Bee swung her around again and began to gather the fabric at Loo’s back. ‘Now, stay still.’

  Loo did as she was told. It was always easier to do as she’d been told, in the end. Anyway, the sooner Bee finished, the sooner she could have her own clothes back.

  ‘Right.’ Bee stood back. ‘That should do.’

  Loo looked in the mirror, straightening the camisole, trying to get used to herself. Bee stood next to her, admiring the effect, how alike they looked now. She posed with one hand on her hip. ‘Say thank you, Lucia,’ she said. She’d been in a funny mood ever since they’d found the box: loud, giddy, frantic.

  Loo didn’t say anything; she went back to the window.

  The scene in the garden had changed. Michael was helping Cathy to her feet, and Flor was jigging around next to her, Simon and Issy were drifting towards the house. No one seemed to be missing them, the girls, at all. They were saying their goodbyes, getting ready to go. One day, soon, Michael and Simon would be gone for good. And then perhaps Joe would come back.

  Loo placed her hands on the window ledge again and leant as far forward as she dared. As she watched everyone, it seemed to her that she could feel something underneath the paint, inside the wood, a sort of humming, and the more she concentrated on that, the clearer it became. Just like it had before. There was something scratching, something trying – she thought – to get in. Then she felt it, a sharp pinch, sharp enough to make her catch her breath.

  She stretched out her arm, but all she could see was a little brown smudge. She licked her thumb, and rubbed at it, then watched as more marks appeared, not much more than shadows at first. They darkened, blooming under her skin, resolving gradually into a series of purplish bruises, each one the size of a thumb print.

  1

  Now

  The haunting began quietly once the Corvino family had settled into their new home; the girls heard it first, the knocking inside the walls.

  A Haunting at Iron Sike Farm by Simon Leigh

  ‘There.’ Nina spots it first. ‘That’s it.’

  The solitary redbrick house is set back from the grass verge. There’s an overgrown path between two patches of lawn and the front door, a dull dark blue, is secured with a heavy padlock.

  ‘Are you sure?’ says Lewis. ‘Shouldn’t it be further along?’

  ‘Of course I’m sure,’ she says. ‘And it’s exactly where it should be.’

  Hal parks high up on the grass verge in front of the gate and underneath the rusting metal sign; the name of the house has almost been lost, reduced to a faint tangle of letters, barely discernible, but this is the place all right. Nina is first out of the car. ‘Can you make a start?’ she says, before striding up the path and disappearing round the back of the building.

  ‘Sure,’ says Lewis.

  They get everything stacked on the front step, Hal’s cameras in their scuffed black holdalls, the boxes of AnSoc stuff on loan from the university, sleeping bags and rucksacks, laptops, spare bulbs, cables, fuses, carrier bags stuffed with food. When they’re done there’s still no sign of Nina.

  ‘Do you want to go and look for her, or shall I?’ says Hal.

  ‘You can if you like,’ says Lewis, who is not inclined to go wandering around the overgrown garden. He’s heard that there are snakes in this part of the world, adders, and besides, he’d rather keep an eye on their stuff; he doesn’t know Hal all that well.

  ‘Fine.’

  She’s standing in the back garden, underneath a tree, gazing up at the house.

  ‘Nina, have you got the keys?’

  ‘Sorry,’ she says, rummaging in her bag, a large leather satchel crammed with notebooks and folders. ‘I just wanted to get a sense of it, you know?’

  Hal doesn’t know. The house, Victorian from the front, but with a large and rickety-looking lean-to kitchen added at the back, looks distinctly unappealing to him: cramped, grubby and sad. ‘Yeah,’ he says.

  ‘Here.’ Nina leads the way to the kitchen door and once she’s found the right key – the lock is relatively new, he notices – she lets them in.

  ‘Hang on,’ she says and he stands back by the doorway as she steps into the darkened kitchen – most of the windows at the back of the house have been replaced by hardboard – and flicks the light switch. There’s a split second where Hal hopes it won’t come on. No electricity, no field investigation, he thinks; but it does.

  Most of the fixtures and fittings have been ripped out; only a small and greasy electric oven remains. The floor is a patchwork of faded outlines: here a dresser stood, there the fridge, and the walls bear the ghostly shadows of shelves and cupboards long dismantled. In a corner there’s a cheap pine table and a couple of chairs and over the sink one of the taps drips steadily.

  ‘Nice,’ Hal says.

  ‘Yeah. Sorry. It was a holiday cottage for a while, then it was on the market for two or three years, and the new owner hasn’t got around to renovating yet.’

  ‘Someone’s going to move in? Actually live here?’

  ‘I suppose so.’

  ‘And they’re not, you know …’

  Worried.

  ‘We didn’t really talk about that,’ says Nina.

  ‘What did you talk about?’

  ‘Practical stuff, picking up keys and—’

  The knocking makes them both jump. It’s heavy and insistent. The sound shudders through the house, echoing through the empty rooms.

  ‘The knocking inside the walls,’ says Nina in a mock-serious voice, and she sounds as though she might be quoting from a book, probably the book she and Lewis keep going on about.

  ‘Once for yes …’ Hal says.

  ‘Don’t,’ Nina says as the knocking continues. ‘I shouldn’t have – we shouldn’t joke about it, you know? It’s not – respectful.’

  She opens the kitchen door, revealing an uncarpeted hallway that runs through the centre of the house. At the other end the front door rattles on its hinges.

  Once for yes. Twice for—

  Lewis’s voice is muffled, but they can still hear him.

  ‘Let. Me. In.’

  Hal follows Nina down the hall. She squats and pulls the letter box open.

  ‘Lew? Lewis? I don’t have a key for the padlock. Sorry. You’ll have to bring the stuff round the back.’ She smiles as Lewis swears under his breath. ‘We’ll be right out,’ she says.

  ‘It was a proper farm, then?’ says Hal, once they’ve got everything in and he’s standing on the kitchen step looking at the scrubby and neglected garden. Beyond the dry stone wall, fields stretch up to meet the moors, muddy grey and brown, and a little way off there’s a solid-looking barn.

  ‘Once upon a time, yes,’ says Lewis.

  ‘The original house was pulled down in the late 1800s. This one was built slightly nearer the road,’ Nina says.

  ‘We’re not sure why, possibly it was an attempt to gentrify the place a bit, put some distance between the house and the barn,’ adds Lewis.

  It must have cost money, to tear down one perfectly good house and replace it with this. Hal is still staring at the garden, trying to picture what the vanished building might have looked like, when Nina taps his hand lightly.

  ‘Come on,’ she says, ‘I’ll give you the tour.’ He follows her inside. ‘The kitchen was added in the sixties. There’s a room here that’s a sort of scullery.’ She pulls at a white painted door, set in the corner of the kitchen; it leads into a small dark room with a sink in a far corner. Cheap wooden shelves set on metal brackets run down both walls. ‘This might have been the original kitchen,’ she says.

  ‘Right,’ says Hal.

  ‘But we won’t be running any obs there.’ She closes the door and squeezes past him. She smells of lemon and something sweet, ho
neysuckle, perhaps, and he’s reminded of the first time they met, her fingers brushing over the back of his hand as she explained why she thought he might be able to help her out with a problem she had. It had been noisy in the bar and she’d had to lean in close, her breath warm on his skin.

  She leads the way down the hall, past the staircase, and stops between two doors, one the mirror image of the other and both firmly closed. ‘The dining room and the living room,’ she says.

  ‘Right. I give in. Which is which?’ says Hal.

  Nina smiles. ‘Here,’ she says, opening the door to her left, ‘the living room.’

  There’s actually a sofa. And a chair. There’s carpet too, faded green, spotted, thinning and stained in parts. But there are no curtains, and the exposed window looks out over the front garden, the valley, and the inky October sky. The fireplace, not original, but another 1960s improvement, is tiled and coated with dust. The grate is blackened and empty. It’s cold.

  ‘But we’re going to set up in here,’ says Lewis, opening the other door. The dining room is smaller, presumably to accommodate the scullery behind it. There’s an empty bookcase pushed up against the wall and a dining table, the kind with leaves that fold down, underneath the window. Several wooden chairs, mismatched and one lacking a seat, are stacked in the corner. The floorboards are bare and the fireplace in this room has been boarded up.

  ‘It’s perfect,’ says Nina.

  Once they’ve got everything into the dining room – the various monitors for logging temperature changes and carbon monoxide readings, the voice recorders, and the stacks of spare batteries and chargers, and the cables, the metres of cables all this gear seems to need – then they need to think about sleeping arrangements. It’s Lewis who’s considerate enough to offer Nina the option of a little privacy.

  ‘You could always sleep upstairs, you know,’ he says. ‘Or we could.’

  ‘There’s no need,’ says Nina. ‘Not if we’re going to sleep in shifts anyway.’

  ‘You want to work all night?’ No one had mentioned this to Hal, not Lewis with his endless forms and questionnaires, not Nina when she’d first approached him in the pub with her open smile, her problem, and her proposition.