Swimming in the Shadows Page 3

  Yet here was the dichotomy. He was my lover, my future husband, my best friend – but when it came to the biggest single issue in my life I could neither confide in him nor solicit his advice. There was no one I could talk to. No one else knew that I was really Jennifer. Not even my alter-ego, Susan … Not unless the dead can watch the living. I shut that silly thought straight back in its box. When you live alone in a cottage on the edge of the moors, there are some ideas which need to be banished before you can finish articulating them. I quickly put some bread in the toaster, just to have something to do.

  I took my toast and coffee into the sitting room, then rifled through my small collection of music until I located the Carpenters Greatest Hits. Sitting cross-legged in the window seat, I could look out beyond my reflection to where the folds of the dale faded into one another in the dusk. Secure familiarity wrapped itself around me. The lyrics were comforting, not because they reminded me of happier times, but because I knew every word. Yesterday Once More was a soothing mantra, but not a wish.

  When I had finished my toast, I began to look through the bundle of Sunday newspapers picked up at the service station where we broke our journey. In the car I had merely glanced at the headlines before tossing them on to the back seat, but now I worked my way through the royal family gossip and the latest political scandals, skimming a lot of the so-called ‘news’ until an item on the inside pages caught my eye. A couple of lads out fishing had discovered a woman’s body, half submerged in their local lake. There was no firm identification and the police were saying very little, but the spot was well frequented by anglers so it was considered unlikely that the body could have stayed undiscovered there for long. The lake itself was not far from the A456. I found myself automatically calculating how far it was from Nicholsfield. Old habits die hard.

  With a shiver I turned over the pages until I reached the TV guide for the coming week. I had never been an avid TV viewer and the poor reception in the dale had not exactly encouraged me to increase my consumption, but I glanced through the forthcoming programmes to see whether anything took my fancy. Alongside the listings for each day, three or four programmes were picked out for more detailed description in a column at the side. As I read the recommended programmes for Thursday evening, my whole body went icy cold.

  BBC1, 9.30 p.m. DISAPPEARED!

  In 1968 Deidre Lazenby went out to the corner shop but never returned. Shirley Wallingforth has not been seen since she waved goodbye to her children three years ago, as she set off for a night out with friends. Jennifer Reynolds vanished from her home in Nicholsfield in 1983. What happened to these and others like them? Martin Bullock investigates Britain’s legions of missing persons.

  I sat as if frozen, half expecting an immediate knock at the door or the shrill demand of the telephone. I must have stayed like that for several minutes while the Carpenters carried on with their greatest hits as if nothing had happened. Then, like a sleepwalker, I crossed the room to silence them. It was suddenly very still.

  I returned to the window seat and read it again. Why me? There were thousands of missing persons – ‘legions’ was the word used in the paper. Why did bloody Martin bloody, bloody Bullock have to pick on me? I felt persecuted and angry. He had no right. Absurdly I found myself thinking that the BBC ought to have obtained my permission in advance, before remembering that this was hardly an option in the circumstances.

  Then – oh God, another stab of fear – had the sensation-seeking Mr Bullock actually tracked me down? Had he secretly filmed me operating under my new identity, ready to expose my duplicity to the world? In spite of telling myself that this was a ridiculous idea, I took the precaution of drawing the curtains against any inquisitive cameramen who might be lurking unseen behind the dry-stone wall. I couldn’t bear the thought of disclosure. I couldn’t stand the curiosity, the sideways glances, the questions. I did not want to provide explanations – I was not even sure that I could.

  When I finally went upstairs I took a last look out through the bedroom window. There was a pale moon, enough to make out the shadowy edges of hills and trees – a series of darker outlines against the night sky. The silvery pinpricks of all the stars lined up in their usual places were strangely reassuring, like an astral Carpenters Greatest Hits. For some reason they reminded me of the nights I had spent in the beach hut. The stars had not seemed so sharp there, where they had to compete with the promenade string of coloured lights swaying in the evening breeze as if dancing to the continual song of the waves, whispering or roaring dependent on their mood, a constant advance and retreat, that incessant routine of time and tide. In and out. In and out. Boring and predictable, like the tables I had served at the Seaspray Hotel.

  ‘Cornflakes for three, please. Then two full breakfasts and a lightly boiled egg for Mother. Have you got that, dear?’ Kindly, middle-aged guests giving me their orders slowly, repeating things unnecessarily because my pad and apron marked me down as a waitress, and therefore by definition not very bright. Waitresses are not suspected of brains or qualifications.

  At the Seaspray I had been a waitress and safe from suspicion, holidaying car workers from Coventry and store supervisors from Cambridge never suspecting for a moment that I was Jennifer, health centre manager, headmaster’s daughter and one-time school swot. For them I was Louise, the waitress who was better than the girl they had last year, who had been forever getting the order wrong and was a sullen little madam to boot.

  At the end of their stay they used to slip me a fiver or a tenner, and sometimes, when they thought I was out of earshot, they told each other that I was a nice girl.

  Here in the dale, I thought, they don’t know about Louise or Jennifer. Here I am Susan … until Martin Bullock tells them otherwise.

  FIVE

  In that dim no man’s land somewhere between sleep and wakefulness, I dreamed that Martin Bullock was approaching the end of his programme, drawing in the loose threads ready to astound the rapt viewing public with a rabbit out of a hat: he was a smart-ass in an expensive overcoat, his serious expression not quite concealing the smugness of a presenter about to reveal that BBC researchers had succeeded where the police and others had failed.

  ‘… and against all odds, we have tracked down Jennifer Reynolds …’

  My lungs wouldn’t work and I had to fight for breath. Then she appeared on the screen, this Jennifer Reynolds – not me at all but a woman who had stolen my identity, someone pretending to be the real Jennifer Reynolds. The picture faded and I realized that I was awake, struggling for breath, clammy with sweat. I lay still for a few minutes, trying to make sense of what was real and what had been a dream, but the frail hope that Thursday night’s television schedule was no more than a figment of my imagination didn’t have time to gain a foothold before reality set in.

  The familiar morning routine helped to reassert some sanity. I reminded myself that no one had any suspicions. Only I knew about the telltale notebook in the drawer of the dresser. No one up here in Yorkshire would have taken much interest in some woman who had disappeared from Nicholsfield six years ago. No one but me would have seen anything in the television guide which could be remotely connected to Susan McCarthy, the woman who was the manager of the health centre. As for Disappeared! – well, hopefully there would be very little about Jennifer Reynolds and with a bit of luck the programme would arrive at some ludicrous conclusion – abduction by aliens, for example – thereby forfeiting the interest of anyone intelligent enough to put two and two together.

  Dark clouds scudded across the sky as I left for work that morning. The wind had risen during the night and when I went outside it whipped at the edges of my jacket and threatened to slam the car door before I was safely inside. A stray twig ricocheted across my bonnet as I drove down the lane. I knew every inch of the road as it descended into Lasthwaite. I knew just where to expect the tanker driver and where I would see Mr Henderson, on his way home with the morning paper, his little terrier Jeff strainin
g ahead on his lead. This morning, in spite of the weather it all seemed doubly precious – my treasured new life which was about to be snatched away.

  Heb’s Cottage had been my home for almost a year by then. It stood on a single track lane, so little frequented that some days I saw no passing traffic at all. The nearest building was several hundred yards down the lane – a working farm called Rosecroft. A pretty name somewhat belied by the reality: an austere house, half hidden by the semi-ruined outbuildings which surrounded it, most of them roofed in rusting corrugated iron, with hardboard stopping up the numerous broken window panes.

  Rosecroft’s inhabitants, Jim and Bob Fox, were gruff local men: brothers of indeterminate age, who despite the squalor of their farmhouse always appeared well scrubbed and neatly attired in collars and ties for their evening pint down at the village pub. Jim and Bob were not talkative. Communication with me seldom extended beyond friendly nodding, although during the heavy snows of my first winter at the cottage they had unexpectedly appeared at my front door with firewood and fresh milk, talking around me rather than to me, in a curious, half-embarrassed double act.

  ‘Mek sure t’lass is areet for coal, our Bob.’

  ‘Aye and if t’lass wants a lift down t’village on’t Land Rover, she’ve ownee t’ask.’

  Jim and Bob never directly alluded to the woeful inadequacies of a Ford Fiesta in the Yorkshire Dales, probably assuming that being a foreigner (from outside Yorkshire), I had failed to realize that my vehicle would be useless when the lane was snowbound, a not infrequent occurrence.

  It was said by some that the Fox brothers were ‘not quite right’. Older residents added, for good measure, the claim that their mother had been ‘a bit strange, like’ and that an uncle had been ‘put away’, but as a newcomer who was not conversant with the ins and outs of whose cousin had been slighted by whom in a dispute over the seating arrangements for the last Coronation party, I was inclined to dismiss these intimations of the Fox family’s alleged deficiencies as no more than old tabbies’ gossip.

  Besides which, what family did not have its secrets, its quirks and abnormalities? What appears to one family as entirely normal may to another be the height of eccentricity. Children accept their parents’ foibles because they have no yardstick to measure them by. Thus I had assumed throughout my childhood that affection and approval were carefully rationed commodities, and that children who received the unqualified affection of their parents were ‘spoiled’. In their joint determination not to ‘spoil’ me, my parents had maintained an emotional distance, raising a lonely only child who found it difficult to form relationships with others and was intimidated by those of my peers who pushed themselves forward and stuck up for their own opinions – confident that if they got knocked down, their fall would always by cushioned by the certainty of family love. In our house ‘love’ was something you wrote on a gift tag at Christmas, the word seldom otherwise mentioned.

  There was of course that other kind of love – the romantic love which filled so many of the books I devoured in my teenage years. I coveted this more than anything, while at the same time wondering if it genuinely existed outside the covers of fiction. Did people really fall wildly, madly in love – or was it like so many things in books, the imaginative licence of poets and writers? None of the occasional teenage boyfriends with whom I exchanged gropes and kisses in darkened cinemas evoked anything close to the engulfing tidal wave of fictional love. Alan had been different, of course. The mature, analytical Susan could see at once the impact that a man like Alan would have had within the emotional vacuum that was inexperienced young Jenny’s life.

  There had been no tidal wave with Alan, but he was older, smarter, and had the ability to flatter. I mistook age and experience for sophistication and wisdom, affection for attraction, and a passport out of my parents’ house as a passport to freedom. Everything happened so fast. Alan not only won the daughter but swiftly gained the approval of my parents too. To them he had appeared safe and sensible – and since I was never going to be the blue stocking academic that my father might once have hoped for, my parents enthusiastically propelled me towards their only other approved alternative – the good little wife. An outcome which may have secretly been my father’s preferred option, since it maintained his own intellectual supremacy within our household.

  From my earliest schooldays, my father had also been my headmaster: an imposing figure on the platform taking assembly, or else closeted in the Headmaster’s Study, a place of mystery and fear with which naughty children were threatened. At home my father also spent time behind the closed door of a room known as his study, where he retired to engage in suitably learned activities and probably also to get away from his wife and daughter.

  It was an era when head teachers still inspired the respect of staff and pupils alike. The idea of my father joining in any activity which involved entering the school premises without the safe uniform of his dark suit, complete with collar and tie, was unthinkable. At home he might go so far as to roll up his shirt sleeves in the garden, but for the most part he disliked what he termed ‘sloppiness’ in dress.

  My father had a narrow, uncompromising outlook on life: academically he was a snob, who despised popular music (and by association me for listening to it), condemned as worthless most modern writers, and deplored almost everything conveyed into our home via the television set. My mother’s addiction to trashy romances, light musical comedies and The Archers provided him with a source of persistent aggravation, but this was mitigated by their shared petty snobbery: an obsession with table manners, the niceties of pronunciation and an overriding concern about what the neighbours would think gave them a lot of common ground.

  This kind of quiet domestic tyranny has been the breeding ground for many a Wild Child, but I was as colourless as they were. A dull, biddable child, who always hoped (in vain) to please. In marrying Alan, I for once achieved a modest success. The traditional white wedding was my mother’s finest hour.

  I could never have explained to them my slowly dawning realization of how unhappy I was. True happiness was not a concept they understood.

  SIX

  There was a little plaque on the door of my office: S. McCarthy – Centre Manager. A comforting daily confirmation of my identity. Lasthwaite Health Centre, also known as Belsay House, was a substantial Victorian property to which a modern extension had been added, but my room was in the oldest part of the building, and retained the original high ceiling and lancet windows reminiscent of a church.

  Dales folk had been seeking advice and treatment at Belsay House for generations and the premises were still universally known as ‘The Doctor’s’ – the term ‘Health Centre’ having yet to gain popular currency. Many of our patients had been registered there all their lives. There were some who could still remember Dr Bagshaw, a man who, uniquely among medical practitioners, had legible handwriting. The notes of some older patients still bore witness to his precise longhand, although he had been dead for half a century. Dr Bagshaw had been pre-World War II, pre-National Health Service, pre-free prescriptions. He had lived in the upper rooms of Belsay House, as had doctors before and after him, for not until 1968 had the last vestiges of domesticity finally been expunged from the building. That was the year when the elegant drawing room had been partitioned into extra consulting rooms – and several long-dead doctors’ wives had probably spun in their graves.

  These days telephones and bleepers summoned doctors where once a lion’s head doorknocker had sufficed. Yet in spite of the computers and the modern office furniture, there was a pleasing sense of continuity about the health centre and I had become quietly absorbed into it.

  Any initial nervousness on my part had soon worn off. I knew my job and enough about the way GP practices worked to proceed carefully until I had the measure of my colleagues. The senior partner was Dr McLeary and I quickly decided that he was a real sweetheart; a tall man, with a mane of white hair, and shrewd blue eyes which s
hone behind steel-rimmed spectacles. Dr Mac really cared about his patients and they seemed to return his affection in equal measure. Then there was Dr Hindmarsh, whose slightly abrupt manner belied a good heart, and whose only weakness was the need to believe that any changes were his own idea before he could accept them. The youngest partner was dashing Dr Woods, beloved of all the female patients but horribly disorganised behind the scenes.

  Our regular trio of doctors had recently been augmented by a GP trainee, Terry Millington, who was still something of an unknown quantity, though from the outset of his placement I observed that he belonged to the Dr Woods School when it came to systems and paperwork. More troubling whispers had reached me regarding the amount of time he appeared to spend propping up the bar in The Bull, but there had been nothing tangible enough to pass on to the doctors, and essentially Dr Millington was their responsibility.

  The reception team were a good crowd, and I soon gained a rapport with the health visitors and district nurses, but the most difficult nuts to crack were the trio who provided clerical support, Kathy, Maureen and Hilda, who in a particularly exasperated moment I had privately christened the Three Ts: the Trollop, the Tragedy Queen and the Trainspotter respectively. All longstanding members of staff, they worked to an entrenched, but not particularly efficient agenda, opposing all change on principle, though lately I felt I had begun to make headway in getting them onside.