Girl Number One: A Gripping Psychological Thriller Read online

  Across the path from the church, I notice the back door to the vicarage has been wedged open with a garden gnome. One of the red-cheeked sort with a fishing rod and a plastic grin.

  The vicar looks startled when I explode out of the undergrowth and come stumbling towards him across the grass verge as though straining for a finish line. I must look a mess, sweat trickling down my face, my eyes wide.

  ‘Eleanor.’ He glances past me as though expecting to see a pursuer. Or perhaps a running companion. ‘On your own?’

  Everyone knows everyone else in our village. Apart from the second-homers, that is, who are only there a few months in the summer anyway, and the few people who drift in and out of rented accommodation without wanting to get involved in village life. It was Reverend Clemo who officiated at my mother’s funeral. Her quiet plot is a short distance up the hill in the cemetery – that’s where they bury everyone now the old churchyard is full.

  ‘Eleanor?’ he repeats, looking me up and down, beginning to frown. ‘Is something wrong?’

  I can see what he’s thinking. My flyaway brown hair, never inclined to do what I tell it, has come loose from its ponytail. My trainers are wet from running through the stream. One of my laces has come undone and is flapping behind me. I’m breathless and making a squelching sound with every step.

  ‘I’m fine,’ I lie, panting.

  His Jack Russell trots over on stubby legs to sniff at my ankles. I bend to pat his head, and he dances around me with sharp staccato barks, eager and excited, perhaps sensing that something out of the ordinary has happened.

  I push the hair back from my face with a shaking hand. That’s when I notice the cuts. A crisscross of thin bleeding cuts on my hands and bare forearms, probably on my face too. I can feel my right cheek stinging.

  Brambles.

  I look down and my legs are red-raw with tiny white bumps. As soon as I see them, I’m aware of the pain. It feels as though I’ve been stung by hundreds of furious wasps.

  Reverend Clemo has noticed the marks too. He studies my legs, then his dark narrowed gaze rises to my face, slowly enough to make me uncomfortable.

  ‘Are you sure you’re all right? Perhaps you should come into the vicarage and sit down for a while, catch your breath.’ His frown deepens. ‘It looks like you’ve had a nasty fall in the woods. Stung yourself. We have a first aid kit in the house. Let me call my wife.’

  My mind flashes back to what I saw on the path.

  ‘No,’ I mumble through lips that feel oddly swollen. Did I sting my face too? ‘Thanks, Rev, but I have to go. Sorry.’

  I break into another ungainly run, heading past him and away from the church. I am making instinctively for Jenny Crofter’s house, though I’m not sure why. Too far to get home quickly, I suppose. And her place has always felt like a safe house.

  The vicar calls after me, ‘Please, Eleanor, at least let me call someone to come and pick you up. You’re not yourself.’

  You’re not yourself. That makes me smile. I keep running and don’t look back.

  I haven’t been myself for years.

  I thud past the black-timbered kissing-gate that opens onto the path to the church door, then swing left onto the main road through the village. Nobody in view. But it’s still early. Not even the school kids are out, waiting for the lumbering bus that will take them through half a dozen sleeping villages before it reaches the school. I remember the route well; I took the bus often enough as a girl.

  My trainers sound loud on the tarmac.

  Jenny Crofter’s house is at the end of the row. She’s about thirty but still lives with her parents in this whitewashed bungalow with its small unfenced garden and seven wooden steps up from the roadside.

  I stumble up the steps and along the garden path, past an untidy bank of hutches, some standing on top of each other, filled with fat, lop-eared rabbits. Jenny’s father breeds rabbits. He keeps a mating pair of ferrets too, apart from the rest; one silver-bellied sable ferret is standing against the wire on its hind legs, probably the male. The animal watches with narrowed eyes as I pant up to the front door and lean on the bell.

  Jenny opens the door, a piece of half-eaten toast in her hand. She’s a little shorter than me, about five foot six or seven, with dark-brown hair cut radically short and a lean, athletic figure. Typical PE teacher build, in other words. Her tracksuit is navy with a white stripe, functional-looking, not leisure wear in disguise, with a dark blue tee-shirt underneath.

  She’s wearing blue and white trainers, bog-standard Nike. There are traces of dried mud on both. The heavy industrial mud you get outdoors in this part of Cornwall, thick and cruddy; a hazard of running anywhere around the village. I expect my own Mizuno pair look even worse after today’s little adventure in the woods.

  Jenny is surprised to see me. She takes in my expression, then her eyes widen. Exactly the same way the vicar’s did when he saw me. ‘Eleanor? What’s the matter, what’s happened?’

  ‘Going to be sick.’ I clamp a hand over my mouth, and Jenny stands aside.

  ‘Upstairs,’ she orders me.

  There’s no time to look grateful. I run past her and straight up the stairs, where I nearly collide with her mother on the landing. Sue Crofter. She’s just come out of one of the bedrooms, belting her worn dressing gown with a distracted air. Her thin dark hair hasn’t been brushed yet and is still matted at the back from her pillow.

  I can see past her shoulder into the bedroom. Inside, she’s drawn back the curtains and daylight is streaming in across the double bed, crumpled and empty. Presumably her husband is already out at work.

  ‘Sorry, Sue,’ I mutter, darting past her into the bathroom.

  I’m in such a hurry I don’t even shut the bathroom door, just toss up the pale avocado toilet lid and drop to my knees.

  Afterwards, I lean on the cold toilet rim for a few minutes, gasping and trying not to heave anymore.

  ‘Eleanor?’

  I open my eyes and see the wet wipe being held out to me. ‘Thanks, Jenny.’

  ‘That’s okay.’ She sounds sympathetic but wary too. ‘Take your time. There’s a bin next to the loo. For the wipe.’

  I clean my face quickly and surreptitiously, then chuck the wet wipe in the designated bin. It’s green, presumably to coordinate with the rest of the fittings. There’s something wonderfully ordinary and a bit shabby about everything in Jenny’s house. It’s a narrow, old-fashioned bathroom with an avocado bath and toilet suite, and plain white tiles on the walls. The tired-looking bath mat is fern-green, matching the towels draped over the side of the bath and arranged neatly in a metal display unit under the window.

  Everything is green, in fact, except for the shower curtain which is see-through plastic decorated with rows of yellow ducks. Waiting to be shot, I always think.

  When I straighten up, Jenny is still there, blocking the doorway. ‘I’ll ring the school,’ she announces, ‘let Patricia know you’re not well enough to work today.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘And you can’t walk home in that state. I’ll run you back to the farm on my way to the school.’

  ‘I’m happy to walk.’

  ‘Nonsense.’ Her mother is peering in. Jenny shuts the bathroom door and stands with her back against it, arms folded. ‘What the hell’s going on, Eleanor? This isn’t a stomach bug, is it?’

  ‘No.’

  I bend over the sink to splash my face with cold water. I’m desperate to brush my teeth too but can’t until I get home. I’d have to ask if I could borrow Jenny’s toothbrush, and that would be too grim for words. I swill my mouth out with cold water instead, and try to tidy my hair in the mirror.

  ‘Fuck, have you seen your legs?’

  I look down. ‘Yes.’

  ‘Nettle stings?’

  ‘Looks like it,’ I agree.

  ‘I’ll get you some antiseptic cream.’ She rummages in the cupboard and produces an old tube of antiseptic cream, not quite squeezed out. I apply
it gingerly to both legs, hissing with pain. Jenny fusses about me, trying to help. ‘Christ, you’re covered in the bloody things. You must have fallen in a massive nettle patch.’

  ‘I don’t really remember.’

  ‘Your wrists too. And your hands. Are these cuts?’

  ‘Bramble thorns, I think.’

  I wipe the excess cream off my sore palms, then wash them, and swill out my mouth again. The smell of the antiseptic cream is making me feel sick again.

  ‘So?’ Jenny hands me a thick green towel, staring at me. ‘Come on, I want the truth. What in God’s name has happened?’

  I dry my face and hands meticulously, not looking at her. ‘I went into the woods before breakfast.’

  ‘Running?’

  I nod. ‘The usual path was closed. There was a sign up, with a diversion. So I had to take the lower path. You know, the overgrown one that goes down towards the stream?’

  ‘Oh shit.’

  She understands at once.

  I bury my face in the soft green towel, though my skin is dry now. I listen to my breathing in the darkness, the judder of my heart. This would be a bad moment to go wrong. I run through it all again, like a checklist, make sure of my facts before I say anything more. What I saw, what I thought, what I did.

  When I emerge from the towel, Jenny is still staring at me, her expression sympathetic.

  I know that look. She thinks I’ve had an episode. A flashback or a nervous breakdown or something. And it does feel like that. Except for the details, the reality of it all. But how to tell my story without sounding crazy?

  ‘There was a woman lying near the stream. Right across the path. She was … ’

  I have to finish but I’m afraid of the word. Afraid of what it means.

  She interrupts, frowning. ‘Look – ’

  ‘Jenny, she was dead.’

  CHAPTER THREE

  After I finally ring the police, then endure a fraught three-minute phone conversation with a sleepy and disorientated Hannah, Jenny insists on driving me home.

  ‘Come on,’ she says, flinging open the passenger door for me. ‘I know I’m running late now, but it’s barely five minutes out of my way. And the school will understand.’

  I don’t argue. I want to get back to the cottage quickly so I can grab some breakfast and try to make myself comfortable. There may even be time for a quick shower before the police arrive, if it’s not too callous to be thinking about bodily hygiene at a time like this. Besides, I want to explain to Hannah exactly what happened in the woods, not just give her the gruesome highlights, which was all I could manage with Sue hanging round the kitchen during my phone call, earwigging like mad.

  Then there’s my dad to consider. He too will have to be told, though I don’t relish the thought. Not today.

  As Jenny pulls sharply away from the kerb, I tighten my seat belt and hang onto the door as a precaution. Her driving has never been good. Jenny Crofter came to work at the secondary school when I was still there as a sixth former. When I came back to Cornwall and landed my first job as a newly qualified teacher at my old school, she offered me a daily lift into work in exchange for the occasional tankful of fuel. It did make sense, both of us living in the same village. But I value my life too much, so said, ‘No thanks,’ then bought a scooter to tide me over until I can afford my own car.

  I do occasionally accept a lift from Jenny though, when it’s unavoidable.

  Like today.

  Her driving seems more aggressive than ever. No doubt the news of a dead woman in the woods where Jenny likes to go running has not improved her mood. She accelerates when the road looks clear, then brakes wildly at every corner, throwing us either forward or sideways, or both at the same time. It’s true though that visibility is never good here, especially in spring and summer when the steep banks are crowded with grasses and wild flowers, the Cornish hedgerows abundant with delicate pink campion, bluebells and the purple spikes of foxgloves. I never really noticed the hedgerows until I got interested in botany at university; now I can name most of the wild flowers along the verges.

  Jenny glances at me sideways, which worries me. I wish she would keep her eyes on the road. ‘How’s Hannah?’

  ‘She sounded a bit shaken on the phone, but I’m sure she’ll get over it. Hannah’s bombproof.’

  ‘I mean, is she well? I haven’t seen her in a while. Is she still working nights at the hospital?’

  ‘Yes.’ I study the road ahead. ‘I don’t know how she does it.’

  ‘Discipline.’

  I grin, knowing Hannah rather better than Jenny does. But then, I was at school with Hannah, and discipline has never been her strong point.

  We live at East Cottage, in a tiny hamlet called Little Well, just over half a mile from the village of Eastlyn. It’s a small, cream-coloured cottage at the end of a single track lane, surrounded by fields. There are only five houses in the hamlet, including Eastlyn Farm where I used to live with my mother and father, though it’s barely habitable now.

  Behind our cottage, through the trees and up a rough slope, less than a mile as the crow flies, is Hill Farm where Tris and Connor live. We were never farmers ourselves, though while my mother was still alive, we kept a noisy rooster and a harem of chickens in the farmyard. Now there are only hundreds of rabbits popping their heads up in the back field every spring. But Tris and Connor are proper farmers. They jointly inherited the farm three months ago when their father died, and both decided to continue farming the land as he had always done. They keep sheep and goats, and somehow scrape a living from the poor, hilly moorland.

  There’s been a small settlement at Little Well since medieval times. I have no idea where the original ‘well’ is, but there’s a stream that runs busily through the lower fields here, then curves round the valley bottom into the back of the woods. My father used to say that Cornish folk have always lived here because it’s the first good grazing land west of Bodmin Moor. Standing high on Rough Tor, looking down across vast empty acres of moorland, you could be forgiven for believing those really are the ghosts of long-dead travellers you can hear among the crags, as local legend suggests, not the sound of wind whistling over hollows and through narrow crevices in the rock.

  But the moor can be beautiful too, in the right mood. I’m not unnerved by its bleakness; I love that I live close enough to touch the wilderness.

  Our farmhouse originally belonged to my mother’s Great-Aunt Teresa, who left it to my mother. My mother was pure Cornish, not like my father, who was born on the edge of Wolverhampton in the Midlands. But when Mum died, she left everything to Dad, so we stayed on at Eastlyn despite the memories. It was hard on him though, after Mum died. He would drive past the woods every day when he took me to school, and glance across at the dark shroud of trees, his hands clenched on the wheel. Maybe he was thinking about the violent way she died, or remembering how the police carried her out of the woods in a body bag.

  I did not see that part myself. But Hannah did, and described it to me in a whisper, both of us sitting in my bedroom at the farm.

  It sounds gruesome, but for a long time I needed to know everything about my mother’s murder. Every last detail. Knowing more about her death is a compulsion that still haunts me, like a jigsaw puzzle you know you can never finish because the last piece is missing. In those days, I kept newspaper cuttings in a book hidden under my mattress and used to study them for hours, going through that day in my mind.

  My father said little in the months after she died, hunched like a sick hawk, staring at Mum’s photograph, holding her clothes against his cheek. Every night he would cry himself to sleep or drink heavily until he fell asleep in front of the television. He was sick in those days, no good to me as a father. Though I don’t blame him for that. I understood, and still share his pain. Then one night, a few years back, I woke to find the air thick with smoke and my father unconscious in the living room. It took all my strength to drag him out of there. By the time the fi
re brigade arrived, the place was well alight. An accident, they said; my father had been drinking while watching television, and had fallen asleep with a cigarette in his hand.

  The firemen saved the farm from complete destruction, but much of the ground floor was gutted and had to be rebuilt. Is still being rebuilt, in fact. Brick by brick. Slate by slate. And my father lives alone in a caravan on the property now, keeping himself warm at nights with a bottle of whisky.

  When I came back from university and found East Cottage for rent, further up the lane, it seemed like the ideal situation; I could keep an eye on my father there without having to live with him.

  We hurtle past the ruins of my family home and approach the turn to the cottage. Lush green hedgerow on either side of the narrow lane whips at the wing mirrors.

  Jenny suddenly brakes violently. ‘Bloody hell.’

  A man has come stumbling out of the unseen fields next to the lane, muddy and unkempt. He skids down the overgrown bank of weeds and grasses, landing awkwardly on the tarmac a few feet from the bonnet of the Renault.

  I recognise the man before he scrambles to his feet. Wide-eyed, grass in his hair, staring at us like a fugitive on the run.

  ‘It’s your dad,’ Jenny says blankly.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  My father tries to smooth down his hair, unsuccessfully, and kicks a few strands of cow parsley off his boot before limping towards us. There’s still grass poking out of his hair, and what looks like sticky weed caught on the shoulder of his jacket. Mud scuffs on his faded jeans and wellies make him look like a farmer come from herding cattle. But it’s been a long time since he did a full day’s work; he’s lucky now if he gets offered work at all. His speciality used to be website design, and living out of a caravan with only mobile coverage is not ideal for that kind of job. The insurance money from the fire is long since spent, so I have no idea how he’s managing to survive.