Karen knew that her parents had lived in Laurel House ever since their marriage three years before she was born. Yet there was still not enough furniture to half-fill the place and all the rooms were shabby. There was no central heating and in winter the house was freezing. Karen always assumed that her father, who did something or other he never talked about in local government and dressed in the same grey suit for work every day until it wore out when he bought another identical one, just never made enough money to run the house properly. And her mother never worked at all, of course. Margaret Meadows, with her charm and looks, would probably have obtained a job quickly enough had it ever occurred to her to do so. But she was possibly as aware as anybody else that she would never have been capable of holding one down.
One bitter cold winter’s evening when the three of them had been huddled shivering around an inadequate fire in the vast loftily-ceilinged front room with damp stretching in ever-increasing patches on either side of the chimney breast, Karen had asked her parents why they didn’t sell the big old house and buy something smaller which would be easier and cheaper to maintain. Typically, her father, who always had an air of terminal weariness about him, had simply got up from his broken-springed armchair, which twanged every time he shifted himself in futile attempts to find a comfortable position, and walked out of the room. He didn’t glance at either his wife or daughter. With the resilience of the young to all that is inevitable and unalterable Karen had long before accepted that her father had for whatever reason given up caring about anything much, including her and her mother. Colin Meadows, in his mid-forties then, was not an old man, but he gave the impression of being so, and a beaten one at that.
She also accepted that all too often she had to be the strong one in this family. So, squaring her shoulders, she rose to her feet, retrieved a mug from one of the orange Formica cupboards, returned to the table and poured herself a cup of tea out of the teapot. She took one mouthful and instantly spat it back into the mug. It was disgusting. Even the tea from the pot which had been encased in its cosy was stone-cold.
Obliquely Karen wondered then just how long her mother had been sitting at the table like that, emptying her bottle of whisky. And she wanted very much to ask her if this latest attack of bad nerves had in any way been brought on by the goings-on next door at Parkview. But she was afraid to mention anything that might make her mother worse.
“Shall I make a fresh pot?” she enquired instead. “It would do you the world of good, I reckon. Nothing like a nice hot cup of tea to perk you up, is there, Mum?”
At last Margaret Meadows looked up from the table. Her face was pale and pinched beneath the make-up smudges which her inveterate scrubbing with the paper tissue had done little to remove. Her eyes flicked pink and nervous in her daughter’s direction, her lips trembled. Her voice, when she eventually spoke, was flat and low but the words came out clear and unhesitant. She did not sound at all drunk. But then, she never did.
“They’ve taken Richard,” she said. “The police have taken Richard.”
Karen’s heart jumped. She knew who her mother was talking about at once. Their neighbour Richard Marshall, the proprietor of Parkview. Karen did not speak. Instead she sat staring at her mother, taking in the shocked expression in Margaret Meadows’ red-rimmed eyes. Her mother had obviously been knocked sideways by the police action. There were so many questions Karen wanted to ask her, but again she didn’t dare.
For a few seconds Margaret Meadows stared bleakly back at her daughter, then she suddenly threw her upper body forward on to the table, knocking over her mug of cold tea, and began to weep noisily and copiously. Her body shook with great heaving sobs. Meanwhile, in that curiously objective way she had developed, her highly observant daughter noticed that her mother’s tears were flowing so abundantly that they were running on to the tabletop and diluting the brown puddle of tea into which Margaret Meadows had lain her head.
Karen knew that there was nothing she could do for the moment. Eventually her mother would stop crying and then Karen would help her back to bed. It was an all-too-familiar routine.
Meanwhile all she could do was carry on as normal. Squaring her small shoulders she stood up, trotted upstairs to her parents’ bedroom, and picked up the various items of clothing, lying around on the bed and floor which obviously needed washing. She then went into her own bedroom and changed out of her school uniform into the jeans and T-shirt she wore around the house, after which she took her soiled school blouse into the big bathroom where the washing machine was plumbed in and loaded it and the dirty washing from her parents’ room into it. It was what she did every evening.
By the time she returned downstairs to the kitchen her mother was no longer sobbing so dramatically. Instead she was sitting upright in her chair again and was once more dabbing ineffectively at her tear-stained face with a tissue. Karen took a cloth from the sink and began to mop up the spilt tea from the table.
It was not the first time she had seen her mother in this kind of state, not by a long chalk. And neither, she knew only too well, would it be last. Often nobody had any idea what brought on her mother’s attacks of bad nerves. On this occasion Karen had little doubt that it had been, as she had suspected from the beginning, the goings-on next door at Parkview.
There was so much Karen did not understand, and yet there were muddled half-formed memories inside her head, like pictures torn haphazardly from an album, which made her feel very frightened and would not go away. As she wiped up the spilt tea Karen stared at her mother. Margaret Meadows did not even seem to notice. Karen wished her mother would talk to her, explain things. But she never ever did. Karen would just have to sort her troubled thoughts out the best way she could, just like always. But sometimes, as she struggled to make sense of the crazy adult world around her, that was very hard to do. All she knew for certain was that she mustn’t tell anyone about her fears. The Meadowses were very private people. And if nothing else, Karen had been brought up to understand and respect privacy. Appearances were all. You didn’t talk about what went on behind your own locked front door. Not to anyone.
Not even when the police were digging up the garden next door. Not even when you had a fair idea what they might be looking for — not even when you were battling with thoughts and images too crazy and terrible even to think about.
Chapter Two
The young man in the green suit, of which he was somewhat misguidedly extremely proud, had watched idly as the tall gangly schoolgirl disappeared inside Laurel House. With one hand he brushed his hair from his eyes. It was 1976, and he sported a thick head of dark hair which, in accordance with the fashion of the time, hung over his collar at the back and flopped over his forehead at the front. He was also misguidedly proud of his hairdo.
The young man’s name was John Kelly. He was a reporter in the last year of his indenture with the local weekly paper, the Torquay Times, and as he surveyed the scene, he reflected that maybe he should be talking to more of the neighbours, but he somehow didn’t want to yet. Charles Peabody, whom Kelly knew because the older man compiled crossword puzzles for his newspaper, had already given him the benefit of his view on the goings-on of the day which had been predictably opinionated and based on little more than pure speculation.
John Kelly preferred to focus all of his energy on Parkview, going over and over in his head what may have happened there.
He removed a cigarette packet from the pocket of his jacket, which he carefully smoothed down as he did so, lit up and then passed the packet to the photographer accompanying him. It looked as though he might be on the biggest story Torquay had ever known, and thanks to a tip from a police contact Kelly was on the scene first, before the national boys or the local evening and morning papers.