To Tell You the Truth, page 23
I couldn’t help peeking out through the shutters. It was as if I had unfinished business in the woods. I was curious about where exactly the bunker was in relation to my home. I had the feeling it was closer than I’d ever imagined but my tired brain could not figure it out. My sense of direction was wholly unreliable. My memory, well, you know. I stared out. It was almost completely black out there now.
The bunker cannot move, I told myself. It cannot close in on me. Thinking otherwise was fantastical. I should not be seeing and feeling things that were not there.
“You should not,” Eliza confirmed. But still, I could not chase away the feeling that it was close.
I secured the shutters and took refuge in a lit screen.
I input Dan’s name and added “article” and “Lucy Bewley” to the search. I wanted to see if I could find the piece that Noah had referred to. A result came up immediately. It was a tweet by a journalist.
Coming soon: Teddy Bewley disappearance (look it up if you haven’t heard of it). Dramatic new evidence. You won’t believe it.
#lucybewley #lucyharper #teddybewley #disappeared #coldcase #watchthisspace #solvethecase #elizagrey
I clicked on the journalist’s head shot and recognized the white-blond hair. This was the man Dan had described to me as a structural engineer, who had come to our house the night my husband disappeared. The police had wasted time looking for him. I copied a link to the tweet and emailed it to DS Bright. This is the engineer, I wrote. Except that apparently he’s actually a journalist. I would leave it to her to pursue him. I didn’t expect she’d think he was involved with Dan’s death. I didn’t think he was. But I liked the idea of him being paid a visit by the police. It would be some payback for the article about me that he and Dan had been working on.
I considered replying to his tweet, asking how he felt about exposing my story to the world, but before I could type this, I started to cry. I had no fight left in me. What did this man care about me anyhow? He wouldn’t have been writing the article if he had a shred of decency.
I visited the Eliza Grey fan page. MrElizaGrey was not online. I added another comment to our previous communication: Sasha, is this you? I thought she was more likely to be doing this sort of stuff online than Vi was. I’d only noticed a dated desktop computer at Vi’s house. No smartphones, no laptops.
I thought about James taking over as Sasha stood at the door when I visited them and I remembered how he’d looked as he’d lied about what had happened in the writing shed. Was he really controlling her? Or she him? There were twists in that relationship that I could only guess at, but which left me feeling alarmed for myself and for one of them, I just didn’t know which one.
I researched James online. The results, only a few of them, brought up nothing more than some links full of corporate speak about projects he’d been involved with and two glossy head shots of him in a suit and tie. It was very anodyne, and he didn’t appear to have any social media presence.
I searched for Barry next. He wasn’t on social media, either, but there were pages of links to publications he’d been involved in and university positions he’d occupied. I wanted to know where he’d gone right after Teddy disappeared. And why.
It wasn’t difficult to find out. He’d taken up a post at the University of Melbourne just a little over a month later. I found a mention of him on an old alumni forum.
Anyone know why Barry Kaplan lost his job? one of his former students had asked some years ago.
Had a nervous breakdown right after he arrived, another wrote.
No way! Bored himself to death? I know I slept through most of his lectures.
Ha! No one knows why. My academic mentor said she heard it happened like the moment he got off the plane. He never really functioned properly so he taught on a reduced schedule and left soon afterward. Basically, threw away the biggest opportunity of his career. Weird.
I scrolled down looking for more, but the chat ended there. I typed “Barry Kaplan nervous breakdown” into the search engine, but nothing more came up. Why would he break down as soon as he arrived to take up a prestigious position? Was it the result of something that had happened just before he moved?
Could he have discovered a little boy in one of his traps, a fatally wounded little boy? The idea was horrific, but it was impossible for me to unthink it. And it was possible to believe it. If Barry knew what had happened to Teddy, it could explain why he’d been so unhappy to have me in his house. If he was at all human, he would be feeling unbearably guilty. And he would also be feeling under pressure. If he knew what my husband and Sasha had discovered about the traps, perhaps it had worried him enough to take action against Dan.
I thought about all the hours the detective had spent grilling me about Teddy’s disappearance. Had he ever talked to Barry?
“Don’t you dare,” Eliza said.
“I need to ask him.”
“You have more than enough to worry about already.”
She leaned over me and typed my name into the search engine.
Recent photographs of me filled the screen side by side. To the left was the latest shot of me, just emerging from the woods, looking crazed, like a vagrant. In the middle was a still from the TV interview, looking relatively groomed and self-possessed. On the right-hand side was the old photograph of me as a child that had horrified my mother, the one where I was staring out of our landing window, my hand on the glass pane, as creepy-looking as any character you’ve ever seen in a horror film.
THE MANY SIDES OF LUCY HARPER? screamed the headline. one woman. two identities. two loved ones lost ran beneath it.
It was bad. But I wasn’t going to be distracted from contacting Charlie Cartwright, the detective who had investigated Teddy’s case.
“Don’t,” Eliza said.
“I have to.”
I clicked the little X that closed the photographs and typed in “Retired Detective Inspector Charles Cartwright.”
47.
I looked through the spyhole. Retired Detective Inspector Charlie Cartwright was smaller than I remembered.
“Come in,” I said. I’d made contact with him by email. It had been surprisingly easy. It turned out he was the secretary of a local golf club. I was surprised that he’d responded immediately and had suggested he meet me the following day at my home, but grateful, too. The media will be all over you, of course, he’d written, so I’m sure you won’t want to come out. And I’m not comfortable answering queries via email.
I showed him into the kitchen, where I’d rigged up a sheet over the windows, and I made tea. He’d brought milk, as requested.
Every time our eyes met, decades disappeared and we were a much younger man and a young girl. I gave him his tea. He still took it with milk and two sugars. When I stirred the sugar in, it was my childish hand I saw, momentarily, and my mother’s cup.
“Thank you for seeing me,” I said.
“Of course.” His hands were liver-spotted. One clasped the other, as if disguising a tremor. I wished it were as easy to disguise the hatred I felt for him. I needed to, if I wanted information.
“I’m sorry I can’t offer you some Battenberg cake,” I said. It had been his favorite. For a while, before she started to lose hope, my mother had kept some stocked for him.
“You remembered.”
I nodded.
“Congratulations on your writing success.”
“Thank you.”
“I’ve read all your books.”
I was disconcerted by this. The idea that he’d followed my progress from afar, that he’d still been watching me when I thought he’d given up long ago.
“Thank you,” I said.
“Spotted one or two typos.” He winked.
“You and all the other pedants.” I summoned up the smile I use in publishing meetings when my editor has asked me to do something that I’m going to decline.
“I saw in the acknowledgments that you talk to Tim Partridge for research,” he said.
“Do you know him?”
“We were partners for a while.”
“Tim never mentioned it.”
“I expect he doesn’t want to put you off.”
I almost laughed.
“He enjoys talking to you.”
“I enjoy talking to him.” Or I thought I had, when I’d assumed that he didn’t know who I was. It was an intensely creepy feeling, realizing that he might have been reporting on me to Charlie.
“I wanted to ask you about the old investigation,” I said. “Did you speak to any of the people who lived in the houses here on the lane at the time?”
“We did.”
“Do you remember a couple called Barry and Veronica Kaplan? They live two doors down. Actually, it was one door down back then. The Lodge hadn’t been built.”
“The investigation into your brother’s disappearance is still open, technically, so there’s not a great deal I can tell you, but if I remember correctly, I think we spoke to them briefly, immediately after Teddy went missing, but they left the country very soon afterward, just a few weeks later, as I remember it. Their trip was prearranged, so there was nothing suspicious about it, if that’s what you’re asking.”
“I heard that Barry set traps in the woods that night. To deter the summer solstice partygoers.”
“Uh-huh,” Charlie said slowly. I couldn’t tell if he knew already or not. But he didn’t seem to consider it important. He changed the subject.
“It was interesting to see Eliza in the books, transformed into a detective no less.”
It almost sounded as if he wanted to take some credit for that and I was incredulous.
“Do you still talk to her?” he asked, and I didn’t like the way his eyes had narrowed. I’d seen that look before. It was the expression his face had settled into over the weeks he spent talking to me after Teddy disappeared, as hope collapsed and undisguised suspicion grew in its place.
“What did Barry Kaplan tell you about the night Teddy disappeared?” I asked. “Because I think he’s been lying. I think he knows something. He had a breakdown right after he left Bristol.”
Charlie slurped his tea. “We ruled him out.”
“How? Did he have an alibi?”
“I can’t discuss details like that.”
“But you discussed me and the case with my husband! I know you did. I’ve read what he wrote about it. There’s stuff in his book he could only have gotten from you.”
“I didn’t tell Daniel anything that I wasn’t allowed to. How’s the investigation into his death going, by the way? Are you being helpful to the police?”
The glint in his eye was nasty. I realized I had been stupid to think he might feel any impulse to help me. He was here because he still hated me; because he wanted to turn up the pressure on me; because he, like DS Bright, thought me a murderer, twice over. I had been so stupid. But I was also angry with him.
“Did you think I was going to confess to you if you came here today? Is that what you were expecting? How exciting that must have been.” I laughed. “Or, and I don’t know which is worse, did you just come here to gloat because my husband is dead? Could you stoop any lower?”
“One day, you’ll tell the truth and then everyone will know what you did.”
“The truth is that you were an incompetent detective.”
He got to his feet. I recognized the twitch in his jaw. I’d seen it plenty of times before. He took two paces toward the door but turned back suddenly and in one swift movement swept his arm across the table, sending my mug and his crashing to the floor.
I scrambled up from my chair and backed away.
He stared at me; his fists clenched, and his face twisted. The scale of his anger was terrifying, and unexpected.
“That little boy,” he said. “My whole career . . . my whole life, I haven’t been able to forget him.” He choked up before composing himself. “How could you? How do you sleep at night?”
He slammed the door shut after him and I slid to the floor among the broken mugs and the slick of spilled liquid, and felt myself unraveling. I don’t know how long it was until I found the words to answer his question.
“I don’t,” I said.
48.
DS Bright arrived I didn’t know how much later. I had to get up off the floor to answer the door. I was so very tired. I offered her some fudge, because it was all I had, and she declined. Her colleague followed in her wake again.
“You’ve blocked the window,” she said.
“There was a drone.”
“Has something happened here?” She pointed to the broken mugs on the floor.
“I dropped some tea.”
“Don’t wring your hands,” Eliza said. I stopped.
“I think we need to clear that up,” DS Bright said.
I looked at the mess. I didn’t care about it. I didn’t have the energy. Her colleague stepped in. “Two mugs,” he said as he retrieved the shards. He put the pieces in separate piles beside my kitchen sink. “Be careful. They’re sharp.”
“Did you have an altercation with someone?” DS Bright asked.
“I dropped them,” I said, but wondered if she already knew what had happened. I had no way of knowing how far Charlie Cartwright’s reach was.
“We have a couple of quick questions, if you don’t mind.”
“Do I need my solicitor?” I felt exhausted by the thought of even calling Tamsin. I just wanted them to go away.
“Of course, you’re welcome to get in touch with her, and we can wait for her to join us. Otherwise we could just do this quickly and leave you in peace.”
“Have you talked to James and Sasha?” I asked. “There’s something bad going on there. Really bad. And I think my husband found out something about my little brother’s disappearance that might have put him in danger. Have you talked to Barry and Vi Kaplan?”
“We’ve talked to all your neighbors,” she said. “And we went to the building you described as a writing shed. What we found was a yoga studio.”
Her tone was flat, but one of her eyebrows arched, and I remembered James and Sasha had told her that Dan considered me unstable and now she had proof. “Don’t reply,” Eliza said.
“Actually, we’re here because of something one of your neighbors told us,” DS Bright said. “We wanted to have a quick chat about a report we received from one of them that you were seen being dropped off by a vehicle at the end of the lane in the early hours of the morning on the night your husband disappeared. What do you say to that?”
“Say nothing,” Eliza said. “Not a word.”
“Which neighbor?” I asked.
“I’m not at liberty to tell you.”
Her voice echoed in my head. My hands shook. I looked DS Bright straight in the eye.
“No comment,” I said.
“You don’t want to comment?”
“No.”
“Are you sure you can’t clear that up for us?”
“No comment.”
As they left, she said, “By the way, tomorrow we should be getting back the results of the tests on the blood we found on your hall floor. So, we’ll be in touch then.”
49.
I tried to call Tamsin, but she was in court. I didn’t want to leave a message.
The kitchen was a mess. I could see it now. Broken crockery beside the sink, the floor sticky from the spilled tea, packaging from the hamper spread out over all the surfaces, the shopping list so crammed with words that it was illegible. The sheet I’d hung up to block the window was drooping. I found packing tape and secured it better.
I didn’t know what else to do except gather together all the papers I could. I retrieved from my bed the ones out of Sasha’s shed, lugged in the boxes I’d gotten from Patricia, and opened the folder containing bunker research from the history man.
I was hungry for anything new. Beneath the clinical blaze of the halogens I began to sift through the papers, but found nothing at first.
Eventually, only Rupert’s folder was left. Dan had never seen this but it still seemed worth revisiting.
The plan of the bunker lay on top of the other papers.
The first time I’d looked at this diagram, I had been transported back by it so vividly that I hadn’t paid much attention to the annotations, but now I saw they were possibly by another hand, and extensive, written in cramped lettering that was hard to read, so I used my phone to magnify them.
At the far end of the bunker, opposite the place where Teddy and I had made our way into it, there had been another door, smaller, and so jammed that you could neither close it nor widen it more than the centimeter or two it already stood open. This was shown on the diagram. I had peered through that slender gap more than once, raking my dad’s torch beam over what lay beyond it, but all I had seen was earth and rubble. Whatever had been behind there had collapsed at some point, filling in the space completely.
On the plan, that space was shown as a small, separate room and labeled “ammunitions storeroom.” At the far end of it, there had apparently been another door. I found this unsettling to see. On the diagram, a hand-drawn arrow, confidently parabolic, pointed to this door. Beside it were the words: Escape tunnel access. It is believed that the tunnel extends southwest. It is of unknown length, but typically escape tunnels in similar bunkers range in length between 30–100 m.
I sat back, shocked that I had never known about this.
I studied the annotations once again, looking for a way to orient the bunker so I could understand where the escape tunnel might have led to. Arrows pointed both to the Iron Age fort and, in the other direction, to a line marked “private boundary.”
The air stilled. I felt goose bumps. There were only two private boundaries I knew of that bordered Stoke Woods: the gardens of Charlotte Close and the gardens of the houses on this lane.
