The Devil`s Feather (5 page)

I don’t know what I expected—to be part of a small community where I could close the door when I felt like it, perhaps—but that wasn’t the reality. All the arrangements had been made by email and telephone until my collection of the key from the agent’s office in Dorchester half an hour earlier. The photograph of Barton House on the website had shown climbing plants across a stone façade, with the roof of another building to the side (a garage as I discovered later). I had assumed, since the address was Winterbourne Barton, that this meant it was within the village boundaries.

Instead, it stood behind high hedges, well away from the nearest house, and with most of it invisible from the road. An absence of crowds was exactly what it promised—even isolation—and I halted my newly acquired Mini at the entrance and stared through the windscreen with anxiety fluttering at my heart. The human maelstrom of London had been a nightmare during the three weeks I’d spent with my parents because I’d never known who was behind me. But surely this was worse? To be alone, and hidden from view, with no protection and no one within calling distance?

The hedges cast long shadows and the garden was so wild and unkempt that an army could have been lurking there without my seeing them. Since the moment I’d landed at Heathrow, I’d been trying to conquer my fears by reaffirming what I knew to be true—
I was no longer in danger because I’d done what I was told
—but there’s no reasoning with anxiety. It’s an intense internal emotion that isn’t susceptible to logic. All you can do is experience the terror that your brain has told your body to feel.

I drove in eventually because I had nowhere else to go. The house was pretty enough—a low rectangular eighteenth-century construction—but, close up, its tattiness showed. The sun and salt winds had taken their toll of the doors and window frames, and so many of the tiles had slipped that I wondered if the roof was even waterproof, despite the agent’s assurances on his website that the property was sound. It didn’t worry me—I’d seen far worse, most recently in Baghdad, where bomb damage left whole buildings in ruins—but I began to understand why Barton House compared favourably with three-bedroomed cottages.

Does any of us know our breaking point? Mine was when the large iron key to the front door jammed in the lock and five mastiffs appeared out of nowhere as I tried to find a signal on my mobile. I was pointing it towards the horizon and only realized the dogs were there when one of them started growling. They took up guard around me with their muzzles inches from my skirt, and I felt the familiar adrenaline rush as my autonomic fear response kicked into action.

Half a second’s thought would have told me there was an owner around, but I was so petrified I couldn’t think at all. It didn’t even register when I dropped my phone. You can reinforce your confidence as many times as you like, but it’s a futile exercise when your fear is so real that a single growl can reawaken nightmares. I’d never seen the dogs in the Baghdad cellar but I could still hear and feel them, and they inhabited my dreams.

I didn’t notice the owner until she was standing in front of me, and I mistook her gender until she spoke. I certainly didn’t take her for an adult. She was wearing denims and a man’s shirt that was too big for her slight body, and her curiously flat features and slicked-back dark hair made me think she was an adolescent boy who was still growing. If she weighed a hundred pounds I’d have been surprised. Any one of the mastiffs could have crushed the life out of her just by lying on her.

“Keep your hands still,” she said curtly. “Birdlike movements excite them.”

She gave a flick of her fingers and the dogs ranged themselves in front of her, heads lowered.

“You look like Madeleine,” she said. “Are you related?”

I had no idea what she was talking about, and didn’t care anyway because I couldn’t breathe. I dropped into a squat, head back, sucking for oxygen, but all I achieved was to set her dogs growling again. At that point I gave up and scrabbled on all fours towards the open door of the Mini. I dived in and pulled it to, clicking the lock behind me, before leaning back in a desperate attempt to get some air into my lungs. I think one of the dogs must have charged the car because I felt it lurch, followed by a sharp command from the girl, but I’d closed my eyes and wasn’t watching.

I knew what was happening. I knew it wouldn’t last and that all I had to do was stop the rapid, shallow breathing, but this time the pains in my chest were so bad that I wondered if I was having a heart attack. I groped for my stash of paper bags in the door pocket and clamped one over my nose and mouth, trying to ease the symptoms. I’ve no idea how long it took. Time didn’t exist. But when I opened my eyes, the girl and her dogs had gone.

Extracts from notes, filed as “CB16–19/05/04”

…I used to be afraid of the dark, but now I sit for hours with the lights off. It felt as if red-hot pokers were burning through my lids when Dan ripped the duct tape away. He was upset when I refused to open my eyes and look at him but I didn’t know who it was. He could have been anyone. The voice didn’t sound like Dan’s. He didn’t smell like Dan either.

…I do find it frightening that I can’t bear anyone to come too close. My invadable space has grown to house-size proportions. Is that how the mind works? I shut myself in little spaces but need a palace around them to give me room to breathe. I can manage to sit in a room with my parents, but no one else. I freak if I’m in the street and a passer-by brushes against me. I don’t go out now unless I’m in my car.

…I told my parents I was going for counselling, and it’s odd how much better it’s made them feel. I must be OK if I’m in the hands of “experts.” Despite my mother’s endless questions, I think she’s secretly relieved that I’ve rejected Reuters’ help. The quid pro quo for official support would have been an obligation to deliver my “story.” But she and Dad are private people. It was hard for them when I was all over the newspapers and the phone never stopped ringing…

…Instead of counselling, I go to a church in Hampstead for a couple of hours every other day. It’s cool and quiet and has its own car park. No one troubles me much. They seem to feel it’s bad form to question why anyone would want to sit there. Perhaps they think I’m talking to God…

4

I
N ORDINARY CIRCUMSTANCES
I wouldn’t have met Jess Derbyshire. She was so reclusive that only a handful of people in Winterbourne Barton had seen inside her house; and the rest were happy to spread the rumour that the local policeman went in once a month to check she was still alive. He didn’t, of course. He was as scared of her dogs as everyone else, and he took the view that the postman would notice if she wasn’t collecting her mail from the American-style box at her gate. She owned and managed Barton Farm, which lay to the south-west of the village, and her house was even more detached from the community than mine.

I discovered very quickly that Jess was both the most invisible resident of Winterbourne Valley, and the most talked-about. The first thing any newcomer learnt was that her immediate family had been killed in a car crash in 1992. She’d had a younger brother and sister, and two thoroughly nice parents, until a drunk in a Range-Rover ploughed into her father’s ancient Peugeot at seventy miles an hour on the Dorchester bypass. The second, that she was twenty when it happened, making her older than she looked; and the third, that she’d turned her family home into a shrine to the dead.

There’s no question she had an uncongenial personality, something she was happy to foster with her pack of thirty-inch high, hundred-and-eighty-pound mastiffs. It showed itself most obviously in her unfriendly stares and curt way of speaking, but it was the close relationship between her immature looks—“arrested development”—and her morbid interest in her dead family—“refusal to move forward”—that most people felt explained her peculiarity. Her “loner” status made them wary, even though few seemed to know her.

My own first impression was no different—I thought her very strange—and when I opened my eyes I was relieved to find she’d gone. I do remember wondering if she’d set her dogs on me deliberately, and what kind of person would abandon another who was so obviously distressed, but it reawakened too many memories of Iraq and I pushed her from my mind. It meant I wasn’t prepared for her return. When she drove her Land Rover through Barton House gates fifteen minutes later and deliberately blocked my exit, alarm immediately coursed through my system again.

In my rear-view mirror I watched her climb out with a metal toolbox in her hand. She walked to the front of the Mini and examined me through the windscreen, apparently to satisfy herself that I was still alive. Her flat, narrow face was so impassive, and the intrusive stare so unwelcome, that I closed my eyes to blot her out. I could cope with anything as long as I couldn’t see it. Like an ostrich with its head in the sand.

“I’m Jess Derbyshire,” she said, loud enough for me to hear. “I’ve called Dr. Coleman. He’s with a patient but he’s promised to come straight on when he’s finished.” There was a hint of a Dorset burr in her voice, but it was the deepness of her register that struck me the most. She seemed to want to sound like a man as well as dress like one.

I thought if I didn’t reply she might go away.

“Shutting your eyes won’t help,” she said. “You need to open your window. It’s too hot in there.” I heard something tap against the glass. “I’ve brought a bottle of water for you.”

Desperate for something to drink, I opened my eyes a crack and met her unwelcome stare again. The sun was beating relentlessly down on the roof and my hair was plastered to my scalp with sweat. She waited while I lowered the window four inches, then passed the bottle through before nodding towards the door of the house. She twisted her hand as if to indicate that she was going to unlock it, then moved away to kneel on the doorstep. I watched her take a can of WD-40 from her toolbox and spray a fine mist into the lock before sitting back on her heels.

In a funny sort of way she reminded me of Adelina, small and neat and competent, but without the Italian’s expressiveness. Jess’s movements were economical and spare, as if the method of releasing a key was something she’d practised for years. And perhaps she had.

“It always sticks,” she said, stooping to talk through the window. “Lily never used it…she bolted the door inside and came in and out through the scullery. The oil takes about ten minutes to work. Were you given any other keys? There should be a mortise and a Yale for the back door.”

I glanced at an envelope on the passenger seat.

She followed my gaze. “May I have them?” she asked, holding out her hand.

I shook my head.

“Try counting birds,” she said abruptly. “It always worked for me. By the time I got to twenty, I’d usually forgotten why I’d started.” Her dark eyes searched my face for a moment before, with a shrug, she went back to the doorstep and squatted on her haunches in front of it. After a while she took a pair of pliers from her toolbox and used them to tease the key back and forth. When she finally managed to turn it, she twisted the handle and disappeared inside. A few seconds later, a light came on in the hall. After that, she moved along the ground floor, opening windows to let in the fresh air.

I wanted to get out and shout at her. Stop interfering. Who’s going to close the place up again after I’ve left? But I’d become so comfortable with doing nothing that that’s what I continued to do. I did watch the birds, however. I couldn’t avoid it. The garden was alive with them. Flocks of house-sparrows, endangered in the cities, chattered and darted about the trees, while swallows and house-martins flashed in and out of nests beneath the eaves.

When Jess reappeared, she hunkered down beside my door to put herself on the same level as me. “The Aga needs lighting. Do you want me to show you how to do it?”

I might have gone on ignoring her if I’d cared less about seeming rude or looking foolish, so perhaps counting birds did work. I ran my tongue around my mouth to produce some saliva. “No, thank you.”

She tipped her chin towards the envelope. “Are there any instructions in there?”

“I don’t know.”

“If Madeleine wrote them, you won’t be able to light the Aga yourself. She doesn’t even know how to spark the ignition, let alone prime the burner.”

It was on the tip of my tongue to ask who Madeleine was, or even Lily, the name she’d mentioned earlier, but there was no point. “I’m not staying,” I told her.