We spent a long time in that pose, as if this had to be atoned for. I like to think we settled the old woman’s spirit in those moments and laid her to rest. If we could not bury her, then in those silent minutes I felt we committed her body to whatever world awaited her.
Then the real world collapsed in on us.
What could we do in the middle of a snowstorm with a dead body? For some reason, I took out my phone and photographed it as if it was the scene of a car accident for some petty insurance claim. There was so little we could do that doing anything at all seemed helpful. She’d been wedged deep underneath the tree. We all bent down and peered closer, looking for a sign of how she might have died. Her wig hung lifeless from the side of her head revealing the dark, congealed mess of her skull against the pure white snow. She had been bludgeoned to death with a huge degree of force and purpose. The intent was without question. The murderer, and that was the first time this frightening word had sprung into my mind with all the black force of it, had not deviated from their purpose of destroying this old woman as efficiently and convincingly as possible. It was a definitive, unswayable need to kill her, obliterate this woman’s life completely, that had led the hand to take up some weapon and beat out this woman’s brain until there was no possibility of life remaining. The weapon? We scoured the area as much as we could in the snowstorm, but there was no trace of it. This killer did not leave murder weapons to be discovered. This killer was far more efficient than that.
No one needed to ask the obvious. No one said, ‘What do we do now?’ There was nothing we could do. The snowstorm was thickening by the minute, and her body was heavy with death. To touch her, to drag her out seemed wrong and against nature and every detective story we’d ever read. And yet, we couldn’t just leave her. I reached forward to touch her neck.
‘What are you doing, Ursula?’ Mother grabbed my arm.
‘What if she’s still alive?’
Mother let out a steady sigh. ‘Of course she’s not alive. Look at her!’
I waited a moment with Mother’s hand on my arm. ‘I need to see her face,’ I said decidedly, as if I was convincing myself.
We all paused. They knew what I meant. She had been so completely shrouded by scarves and shadows in the house that none of us had seen her properly. Now, our curiosity and our human need to see her face was overwhelming. She was not a real person until I’d seen her face. I had to give her that respect at least. I could not walk away and just leave her as a dead, faceless body.
‘We have to,’ Aunt Charlotte said solemnly and nodded. We looked at Mother. She waited and then she nodded too.
I lowered myself to my knees, the cold seeping through my jeans almost as soon as I touched the snow. My hand was shaking as I reached towards the mess of black fibres. The wig had a plastic, synthetic feel that had begun to freeze until it was crisp. I parted the black threads, trying to avoid the streaks of sticky blood. One of the silvery scarves rippled across my arm and touched me. I flinched and looked back at Mother and Aunt Charlotte. Both stood wide eyed, staring at me in anticipation. My quick breath clouded the air. Mother nodded and I pulled back the curtain of hair.
I froze.
‘Ursula?’ Mother said softly. Aunt Charlotte and Mother leaned forward. Before both swiftly recoiled at what they saw.
‘Doreen Dellamer,’ Mother whispered.
Doreen Dellamer. The unceremoniously sacked bookshop assistant Dad moved into the spare room. The lodger Mother had moved out after Dad’s death. She polluted our mourning until finally she had drifted on to leech somewhere else. What was she doing here?
She gazed up at us mutely, battered and abandoned in the snow. She had been nothing more than a woman going about her life. How or why she had ended up in these side-show clothes masquerading as a spiritualist, I didn’t know. But her presence seemed far from a coincidence.
Whatever the reason, there was no option but to leave her alone in that frozen grave until some kind of help arrived, although it was hard to imagine what that could be right then.
‘We can’t just leave her here!’ Aunt Charlotte protested. ‘What about all the animals? They’ll . . . they’ll rip her to pieces. She’ll be buried by the snow.’ She was almost pleading with us, her face anguished as if we were in some way consigning this poor woman to a fate worse than her death.
‘Charlotte,’ Mother said, as close to compassionate as I have heard her, ‘we have to leave her now.’
‘What?’
‘Listen to me carefully, Charlotte. You cannot help her now. There’s nothing you can do. She’s gone. We can’t move her. Look at the snow. We shouldn’t move her. The police will want her left how we found her.’
Aunt Charlotte began shaking her head. ‘Then we have to get help. We have to do something.’
‘How?’ I was shouting at her now. ‘We can’t go on any further in this.’
‘But we can’t go back there! There’s nothing back there. There’s no phones, our mobiles don’t work. We can’t get any help. We can’t call the police. We can’t . . .’ Aunt Charlotte was frantic. ‘What if the killer’s still out here?’
Our eyes flicked to the trees and back round the lawns. The snow was coming faster now, thicker.
‘We have to get back,’ I shouted at Aunt Charlotte. ‘Please.’
She looked at me and then back at the body.
‘Charlotte, we have to go now,’ Mother said, firmly, and began pulling her arm.
We started slowly walking away and I watched Aunt Charlotte look back sorrowfully, as though we were in some way forsaking this woman. But I looked towards the outline of the snow-covered house and the closer we got the more it began to feel like it was us who had been forsaken.
The snow had already begun to form thick callipers round our legs, making anything more than the merest shuffle impossible.
With each laboured step, the reality began to grow clearer in my mind. No one was coming, no matter how loudly we might scream at the sky. We were heading towards a house, which quite possibly harboured a killer — a killer who had brutally battered an old woman to death and without ceremony, shoved her lifeless body under a tree trunk to rot with the ageing wood. We had nowhere else to go. We were stuck with the murderer, isolated from the outside world, with no escape.
Rule 9: Nothing brings out a person’s true character more than the fear of imminent death. Watch everyone very carefully.
FEAR
Death and extreme grief bring out a new liberated attitude to life. Nothing is worth anything anymore so why worry? My shoes had holes and Mother sent me to boarding school wearing them on a bleak day of rain — I couldn’t even feel the soaking socks. I couldn’t feel anything. I didn’t feel sad to be sent away, or lonely or abandoned. I felt dead. I don’t think I’ve felt much more in the decade or so since. I was the ghost, the mute that lay in the corner bunk, eyes open all night, barely living, my head emptied out to make room for all the grief.
Discovering a murdered woman and being trapped in a house with her killer was just one more thing happening to me. I know why it is called ‘loss’. Not because that person has gone, abandoned you, but because you lose pieces of yourself. I’ve lost so much of myself and had to replace so many pieces that I don’t even remember what the original me should look like. That person has been swept away on black dreams.