Where Monsters Lie Read online

  ‘As you know, your mum’s body wasn’t found in the loch.’ His voice sounded strained; strangled almost. He took a deep breath. ‘The undertaker suggested that we choose some things to put into the coffin to bury. What do you think?’

  I felt like I had swallowed a stone; it was lodged in my throat and I found it difficult to breathe.

  ‘But what if she’s not dead?’ I said to Dad. It came out in a splutter. I couldn’t believe it; I wouldn’t believe it.

  Immediately I regretted saying it. Dad’s face suddenly went grey and set, and he looked away. I felt like grabbing his face and kneading it like clay, sculpting it back to normal.

  ‘All right,’ I said quickly. ‘I’ll have a think.’

  ‘That’s my girl,’ Dad said, and ruffled my hair before turning away again.

  I felt numb as I looked through Mum’s things. Her hairbrush and make-up bag were still by the bathroom basin, and I wondered if they had been moved since she had gone. I had been careful not to touch them, but now I reached out for them as though I might find a fragment of Mum that stuck to them. But they were just things, not like a person, and in the end I tidied them away into the bathroom cupboard.

  I felt anxious about the funeral; anxious that I wouldn’t be able to behave in the right way, even though Finn said that everyone felt like that and it was normal. It took me a long time to find things to go into the coffin. Dad had to ask me again and again, and in the end I only had an hour before he had to give everything to the undertakers.

  I lingered over Mum’s binoculars, which her dad had given her when she was a girl, but in the end I couldn’t bear to put something that Mum loved so much into a box that would be buried in the ground. Instead, I chose the flowered dress that she’d worn when she was pregnant with me – the one in the photograph of her and Kathleen standing hand in hand – and also the bottle of perfume she used because its sweet, comforting smell reminded me of her more than anything else in the world.

  ‘Are you sure, Effie?’ said Dad when he saw the perfume and the folds of the delicate, flowery fabric.

  ‘Yes,’ I said, although I was reluctant to let go of the dress and the perfume bottle. ‘She would want them with her,’ I insisted, finally relinquishing them.

  At the bottom of the box there was a large photograph from my parents’ wedding: Mum’s looking down so the confetti won’t get in her eyes, but smiling widely, and Dad’s squinting because he’s already got confetti in his. I hadn’t seen the photo before.

  ‘Best day of my life,’ Dad said when he saw me examining it.

  ‘Where’d you get married, Dad?’ I said, not recognizing the background as Mivtown, which I knew so well.

  ‘Abiemore.’

  ‘Why not Mivtown?’ I asked.

  Although there were only a few houses, we did have a small weatherbeaten church that was usually locked but was sometimes used for christenings and things. A pastor came from Abiemore, and Rosemary Tanner kept the keys.

  ‘We weren’t living here then,’ Dad said.

  My eyes widened. I didn’t know they had lived anywhere other than Mivtown. I thought they’d grown up here just like I had.

  ‘Why?’ I gasped.

  ‘Well, we were both born in Abiemore. That was where we met. At school. After we got married, we lived with my parents for a spell, and then we wanted a place of our own, but Abiemore was too expensive. So we moved out to Mivtown. It was before you were born. You’ve only ever lived here.’

  ‘What about the oldies?’ I said. ‘Did they move here too?’

  Dad smiled – the first smile I’d seen since Mum disappeared.

  ‘No, they’ve always been here. That’s why they run everything. They are all related to one another.’

  ‘No! Rosemary Tanner and Old Bill? And Mr and Mrs Daniels?’

  ‘Yes,’ Dad explained. ‘Rosemary and Bill are cousins, and Deidre Daniels is Rosemary’s sister.’

  ‘So Old Bill is Mrs Daniels’s cousin too?’

  ‘Well, yes, I suppose he is.’

  ‘And what about Mr Daniels?’

  ‘Well, he’s just married to Deidre, so he’s not related by blood, just by marriage.’

  ‘You know, it’s weird to think of the blood that’s running through their veins, linking them all together. Apart from Mr Daniels, of course. He’s got different blood. Maybe that’s why he’s much quieter than the others.’

  ‘Well, lots of them are connected by blood. You know that young Finn’s related by blood to the Wells family?’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Rob is Peter Wells’s second cousin. And the MacGail family is related to the Lambs as well. I think they’re first cousins . . . Lou and Alice. We’re all linked up.’

  ‘What about us, Dad? Are we related to anyone? Like Finn? Are we related by blood?’

  ‘No, Effie. We’re on our own.’

  We sat in silence for a moment or two and I wondered how I’d thought for a moment that we could have been related to anyone else. Mum and Dad didn’t have any brothers or sisters, and three of my grandparents had died before I was even born. I only ever met one: Granny, who had died when I was two, which meant I was too small to remember her – although I think I have a fuzzy picture of her in my head. Just a blurry pink face with a halo of grey hair around it.

  ‘So, are you glad you moved to Mivtown, Dad?’ I asked.

  ‘Erm . . .’ he said. ‘Yes and no, I suppose.’

  ‘Why yes?’

  ‘Well, I’m glad you and Tommi can grow up with the green all around you. It’s beautiful here. Unspoiled. And we all look after each other. And your mum – she liked the countryside too. And she could work from home so she didn’t need to leave the village if she didn’t want to.’

  ‘And why no?’

  ‘Well, I have to travel quite a long way to get to the distillery, and sometimes I worry we are a bit cut off here. What if I couldn’t get home from work one day? That wouldn’t be good. Sometimes I think we’d have been better off waiting until we could afford somewhere closer to the distillery. In Abiemore.’

  ‘That’s not too bad, though. You always manage to get home,’ I said.

  ‘Yes, I guess so, but maybe it was too much. Too isolated. Maybe for your mum . . .’ Dad looked as though he were gazing through an imaginary window in the wall, which showed all of Mivtown. He wrung his hands together uncomfortably.

  For a moment I thought I should tell him what I had said to Mum. That maybe Mum’s disappearance had nothing to do with Mivtown and everything to do with what I had said to her in our last moments together.

  But then Tommi started crying.

  ‘See to her, will you, Effie,’ Dad said. ‘I’d better get this lot to the undertaker before he closes.’

  Dad picked up the box with its bits and pieces of Mum: the thin, cotton flower-printed dress, the glossy folded wedding photograph and the amber-coloured bottle of perfume.

  Only after he left did I let myself cry.

  Later I wondered if I had used up all my tears that day because when it came to the morning of Mum’s funeral, I found that I couldn’t cry.

  Not when, hand in hand with Tommi, I walked into the little church behind the coffin that Dad, Rob, Old Bill and Mr Daniels carried awkwardly upon their shoulders.

  Not when Dad started crying when he stood up and talked about how much Mum loved Tommi and me.

  Not when the first of the dirt scattered across the top of the coffin and Finn reached out and squeezed my hand.

  I just couldn’t cry at all.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Everyone thought that Mum had jumped into the loch that day . . . and had never climbed back out again.

  Everyone but Finn.

  ‘She wouldn’t have left you,’ he said. We were tucked away amidst the trees, not far from the loch, in a spot we had found one day when out exploring. The branches grew thickly all around a small, almost circular clearing; within it, you felt as if you were in a cave with
green leaves, undergrowth and bushes for walls. We liked to think that the trees around us masked our voices. It was the perfect place for talking – and for raft-building.

  You could only reach it by climbing round a particularly prickly gorse bush. There aren’t many places in Mivtown where no one can find you, and I added it to the map I’d made of the village, calling it Tree Cave in small, cramped writing, with drawings of the spiky undergrowth and curved branches that grew around it.

  ‘What if she thought I didn’t need her? What if that really upset her?’ I stopped hammering nails into the wooden raft that Finn and I were building. Finn was the only person I’d told about what I had said to Mum.

  ‘People say things they don’t mean all the time,’ he said. ‘She would have known you didn’t really mean it. She knew that you loved her. And she loved you.’

  I felt tears well up in my eyes, blurring Finn’s face before me.

  ‘She wouldn’t have left you,’ he said again.

  We’d had the same conversation a few times now. When we first discovered that Mum was gone, I couldn’t talk about it. I didn’t want to say aloud that Mum might have left because of what I’d said to her. It was just too painful.

  But Finn didn’t think it was because of our last conversation, and that gave me courage: courage to find out the truth.

  ‘There’s only one way of knowing,’ I acknowledged. ‘We need to find out what happened to her.’

  ‘We can do it,’ Finn said simply. ‘We can do it together.’

  ‘If she didn’t go into the loch, she must have left Mivtown, right? Otherwise we would have found her. People don’t just vanish.’

  But there were a few problems with that theory. She couldn’t have left without a car. The only way out of Mivtown is by road. There are no buses, apart from the school bus, and it was a Saturday when she disappeared. Mum’s old red Volvo, which was so rusty that you could see the road through a hole in the floor, was still sitting in the garage, untouched, next to Dad’s car.

  ‘Maybe she walked out of here,’ I said to Finn.

  ‘She’d have had to walk a long way,’ he said, and stopped sanding the ragged bit of wood we were going to use as a paddle.

  ‘How long do you think it would take you to walk to Abiemore?’ I asked.

  Finn scratched his head. ‘About three days, I reckon; maybe two.’

  ‘She could have done it. If she had some camping gear.’

  ‘Rosemary Tanner said she wasn’t carrying anything,’ Finn said, scrunching up his nose as he did when he was thinking hard about something. ‘But I suppose she might have hidden it somewhere. In the bushes or something . . . ?’

  ‘Yes, exactly,’ I said. ‘She could have done that.’

  ‘But it was January,’ Finn pointed out before I could get too excited. He was always more logical than I was, grounding us both before I became too wrapped up in an idea.

  There was no way that Mum would have camped. Our winters are cold and harsh. You wouldn’t want to be caught outside even for a short time, let alone camp out on the hills all night.

  ‘So I guess that means she’s still here . . . But where?’

  Finn looked over at me. ‘I miss her,’ he said simply.

  I didn’t respond. Finn had spoken the words that I couldn’t bring myself to say.

  ‘I just don’t believe it,’ I said firmly. ‘I know we didn’t always . . . but . . .’

  ‘I know what we should do,’ he said decisively. ‘We’ll retrace her steps that morning. Maybe the police missed something . . .’

  I had my map of Mivtown in my pocket, and I unfolded it carefully on my lap. I pointed to my house and, using my finger, traced the path Mum might have taken. Because of the way the vegetation grew around there and how the paths were laid out, whichever way she went she would have passed one of the houses. My finger stopped on Rosemary Tanner’s cottage.

  ‘We should speak to Rosemary Tanner. She was the last person to see Mum.’

  Finn nodded in agreement.

  ‘Will you come with me?’ I didn’t want to see her by myself. She had a way of looking at you that made you feel odd, uncomfortable. As Finn had once put it, she was a little like a bird that has just spotted a worm. Inquisitive; hungry.

  ‘Course.’

  I got to my feet, dropping my hammer on the ground.

  ‘Now?’ Finn asked.

  ‘It’s only round the corner from here. Let’s go.’

  Soon we were standing outside Rosemary Tanner’s cottage, knocking on the arched wooden door with its wonky lattice of frosted glass. I had never been inside, and I went up on tiptoe and arched my neck to peer through one of the little windows.

  I could see a coat stand, and upon it the billowing black cape that Rosemary Tanner always wore; it reminded me of an eagle, hunched upon a perch before it takes flight.

  ‘I don’t think she’s in there.’

  ‘Maybe she’s at the village hall,’ Finn suggested.

  He was right. We found her polishing one of the old, worn benches in the entrance hall.

  ‘I wondered how long it would take you to come,’ she said, without looking up, continuing to polish the wood, which looked almost black. Her hair was held back in its usual iron-grey bun, and her black book lay open on the pew beside her, a pen sitting on it as if she had just written something that had occurred to her.

  Neither Finn nor I spoke.

  ‘You want to ask me about your mother, don’t you?’ As she said the word ‘mother’, she looked right at me, and I felt myself go cold and sick at the thought of her being gone.

  I took a step forward, though, and nodded. Suddenly Rosemary Tanner shut the black notebook with a thump and moved it away from us.

  ‘There’s not much to say, of course. Nothing that you don’t already know. She walked past my cottage at about seven o’clock that morning, heading for the loch as if she couldn’t get there fast enough.’

  ‘Did you . . . speak to her?’

  ‘No. It would have been quite impossible. I was inside the cottage; she was hurrying past. We didn’t see each other on the path or anything like that.’

  ‘And she definitely wasn’t carrying anything?’ Finn asked.

  ‘Not that I could see,’ Rosemary Tanner said.

  ‘So she could have been? And you weren’t able to see?’ I quickly interjected.

  ‘I don’t think so. Nothing big, anyway. Maybe something small in her hand. Why?’ Rosemary Tanner looked at us with narrowed eyes. In one quick movement, she dropped her cloth on the bench and stood up. ‘You don’t think she went into the loch, do you? You think she escaped. Left Mivtown. Packed her bags and left you.’

  I felt myself go blank and weak. Mrs Tanner spoke as if what we were thinking was utterly absurd.

  ‘You poor lamb,’ she said, ever so softly, and came towards me. She held my gaze, and her eyes seemed fiercely bright, making me think of a hungry flame and the rigid stare of a hawk, all at once.

  ‘You know, I lost my mother when I was just a girl too. But I still had my da, like you do. He was the most marvellous man – he taught me how to be . . . strong. That’s what you have to do now, Effie; you have to learn how to be strong. You have to let her go.’ Rosemary Tanner reached out a thin, papery hand. I thought she was about to touch my face, but she suddenly withdrew it, as though burned by something in the air.

  ‘Well, thank you, Rosemary Tanner,’ Finn said quickly. ‘We’ve got to go.’

  I was glad that he had spoken; I was immobile, voiceless. There was something about the way Rosemary Tanner stared at me that made me unable to look away.

  ‘Come on, Effie,’ Finn said, and tugged at my hand. We started towards the door, and Mrs Tanner went back to her polishing.

  ‘There’s just one more thing . . .’ Her voice rang out to us. ‘About your mother.’

  ‘What is it?’ I asked. My voice sounded small, not like my own.

  ‘Your mother – she had the most te
rrible fear of our little legend. I know she wanted to hide it from you young ones . . . perhaps it’s not my place to say. But she feared it. She feared it would come to pass.’

  Chapter Fifteen

  ‘Aaackygshgah,’ Tommi screamed out. ‘Squishy, ’Fie,’ she said.

  ‘Is it a slug?’ I asked.

  Tommi had already trod on two that morning. She’d lifted her little white foot and, sure enough, underneath was a squished black slug that had curled itself up into the shape of a C.

  It was a small one – a ‘bay-bee’, Tommi had pronounced – but even though it was so little and so young, it didn’t generate any sweet or loving feeling in me. Or in Tommi, and she loved baby things. Puppies, lambs, snails, seedlings, stones.

  ‘Off y’ go,’ Tommi was saying to her slug. ‘Off y’ go.’ But the slug remained stuck to her foot as if glued on, and in the end I had to scrape it off with a spoon. The biting air rushed into the house as I opened the back door; the slug writhed when it hit the hard, cold ground.

  ‘Bad suggy,’ Tommi shouted out into the garden, wagging her finger and looking for a moment uncannily like Dad when he is trying to tell us off.

  ‘You tell ’em, Tommi!’ I said. ‘Dad? I think we need to put down some pell—’

  I stopped myself, seeing that Dad was not listening. He was looking at the cup of tea in front of him as though trying to decide whether to drink it or not.

  ‘Dad? Dad?’

  He looked up from his tea.

  ‘I was saying I think we need to put down some pellets or something. To stop the slugs getting in.’

  ‘Oh yeah, sure. I’ll pick some up today.’

  Dad and Tommi were going into Abiemore to buy me a birthday present. It wasn’t that Dad had forgotten, but in the past it had always been Mum who organized stuff like presents. I had tried not to remember Mum giving me Buster the year before, and the way my bedroom floor had been scattered with presents when I woke up.

  It was my first birthday without Mum. I’d told no one but Finn that I was sure Mum would come back that morning, the morning of my birthday. She would walk through the front door and sit down with us for breakfast, exclaiming, ‘Happy birthday, Effie!’ as though nothing had happened.