The Body at Auercliff Read online

  “I found a body in the other wing of the house,” I tell her, as she turns to look at me again. “Aunt Emily, no-one's suggesting that you've done anything wrong, but the police do need to work out who the body is, and how she ended up in one of your spare rooms. She'd clearly been there for quite some time.”

  “Why would there be a body in the house?” she asks, seemingly at a loss. “You must be mistaken.”

  “The body would appear to be that of a female,” Johnson says, flicking back to an earlier page in his notebook. “We don't have a good estimate on her age yet, but we're thinking somewhere between early twenties and maybe mid-thirties. I'm waiting to hear back from the medical examiner to see whether there are any distinguishing marks.”

  “Average weight, average height,” I add. “Aunt Emily, does that sound like anyone you know?”

  “Of course it bloody doesn't,” she spits back at me. “I don't even know what you're talking about!”

  “There was no sign of any clothing or other personal items in the room with the body,” Johnson continues. “We're going to have to take a look around and see if we can find something in one of the other rooms.”

  “Some of the doors are locked,” I tell him. “I can probably find the keys for you.”

  “Rot!” Emily snaps. “Absolute rot! There's no reason for anyone to go barging around in my home! I refuse to give you permission! You will not -” Gasping, she seems for a moment to be in pain.

  “It's okay,” I tell her, “Aunt Emily, there's no need to -”

  “Don't tell me what I don't need to do in my own home,” she hisses, “when there are strange men bashing about the place!” She points at Detective Johnson, as if she's trying to jab him with a finger. “Do you know how many antiques there are in my house? Do you know how much damage you could cause, even if you just chip a tile or scratch a floorboard?”

  “I can assure you -”

  “Vandals!” she shouts. “That's what you are, all of you! A bunch of vandals, ransacking my house under false pretenses.”

  “Aunt Emily, they're just here about the body.” Placing a hand on her shoulder, I try to hold her back in case she tries to physically attack the detective, which seems possible right now. In fact, she seems almost frantic. “They just want to ask you a few questions, that's all. They want to know who that woman was, and how her body ended up in one of your rooms.”

  Emily turns, staring straight at me even though I know her milky white eyes are barely able to see anything at all.

  “What?” she stammers, with a hint of shock in her voice. “What body? What are you talking about?”

  Realizing she seems to have drifted into another cloud of dementia, and that we're going round and round in circles, I decide to try again. “Aunt Emily, a woman has been found dead in one of your rooms. Nobody's accusing you of anything, but the police really need to figure out who she is. Can you think of anyone at all who might have thought they were allowed to come and stay in your home? Have you invited anyone, or maybe heard someone breaking in?”

  “In my...”

  She stares at me for a moment longer, before slowly sinking back against her pillows as if she's in shock.

  “A girl in my...”

  Her eyes dart about the room for a moment, as if she's searching for something, and I swear the color has drained from her face. After a few seconds, a tear starts running down her cheek, although she quickly wipes it away.

  “We really just need to find out who the girl is,” Detective Johnson says calmly, “so we can let her family know what happened to her. At this stage, there's nothing to indicate foul play. She might have had a medical condition, there were certainly no signs of a struggle or an injury, although we can't rule those out entirely.” He pauses for a moment. “M'am, I'm going to need to take a DNA sample from you. For obvious reasons. It'll just be a mouth swab, nothing invasive.”

  Waiting for Emily to respond, I watch as another tear trickles down her face. Staring straight ahead, she seems momentarily too shocked to say a word, although finally she wipes the second tear away and turns to me.

  “Aunt Emily?” I ask, feeling as if she's more lucid than before. “Do you know who the girl is?”

  Her mouth opens slightly, as if she's about to say something, but then she turns to look over at the window as more footsteps can be heard on the gravel driveway.

  “What girl?” she whispers, before turning to Detective Johnson. “Who are you?” she snaps, sitting up again. “Why are there people in my house? Why is there a strange man in my bedroom?” She turns to me. “And who are you?” she stammers breathlessly. “What's going on? Why is my house being invaded?”

  “Aunt Emily, it's about the body -”

  “What body?” she shouts, interrupting me. “What in the name of all that's holy are you talking about?”

  Chapter Seven

  “And another one that's unlocked,” Detective Johnson points out, opening the door at the rear of the kitchenette, before pulling it shut again. “That makes at least five entrances to the house that appear to have been left unsecured. Anyone could have walked in at any time.”

  “Is that what you think happened?” I ask, horrified by the idea that my aunt might have unwittingly shared the house with a stranger. “Some random person just wandered in and made themselves at home, and then died in one of the bedrooms?”

  “It's certainly possible,” he replies, heading over to the other side of the kitchenette and looking through the empty cupboards. “There's no other sign of life, but some homeless woman could have twigged that the place was mostly unguarded. Your aunt's eyesight is bad and she seems to be mostly bedridden.” He turns to me. “What about her hearing?”

  “I haven't noticed any problems,” I tell him.

  “Still, it's a big house, if the intruder was quiet and kept mostly to this wing...” His voice trails off for a moment. “The postmortem'll tell us if there's any sign of foul play, but I'm not expecting anything. Are you sure that there's no-one else in your aunt's immediate family who might have been here?”

  “I'm sure. She's basically all alone.”

  “Well someone was here,” he points out, “at least for a while. Even if your aunt had no idea.”

  “She goes through phases of lucidity,” I reply. “It's entirely possible that she'll remember something at some point, but I can't predict when.”

  “How long are you staying here with her?”

  I pause, not really knowing what to tell him. “I've been trying to get her into hospital,” I explain finally, “but so far she's refused. I wasn't even supposed to be here at all, but there's no way I can leave her alone. She's barely able to get out of bed. I don't know if you noticed, but she has some cuts on her legs from where she fell some time last week. I could never forgive myself if I left and then something happened to her.”

  “There's one other thing I need you to do for me before we take the body away,” he replies. “I'm afraid it won't be very pleasant.”

  ***

  “I've honestly never seen her before in my life,” I say after a moment, staring down at the face of the dead woman. “At least, I don't think so. It's a little hard to...”

  My voice trails off as I see the way her flesh seems to be clinging to the contours of her skull, while her mouth is wide open in a kind of perpetual dead scream.

  “Do you still not know her name?” I ask, turning to Johnson.

  “We haven't had much luck so far,” he continues, as an officer pulls a sheet back over the body to hide its face. “We haven't been able to find any of the woman's belongings. I mean, she can't have walked into the house naked and without at least some possessions. She's too badly decomposed for fingerprints to be any use. We'll try DNA next, but I'm not exactly holding out hope. Something tells me this woman didn't leave many clues behind.”

  “One, two, lift,” says one of the officers, as he and some colleagues lift the stretcher and carry the woman out of the room
.

  Looking back at the bed, I see a faint brown stain on the white sheets, left behind by the woman's rotting body.

  “Exactly how far gone is your aunt?” Johnson asks.

  I turn to him.

  “Maybe that came out wrong,” he continues, “but... I'm wondering whether the problem is that she wasn't aware of the woman being here, or whether she simply doesn't remember right now. Maybe later, when she's feeling a little better, she might realize... I don't know, maybe she'll realize she agreed to let someone kip here for a while.”

  “Are you abandoning your theory about someone wandering in from outside?” I ask, stepping around the bed and heading to the wardrobe, figuring I might as well take a look.

  “I'm just trying to cover all the bases.”

  Opening the wardrobe door, I'm surprised to see some kids' toys at the bottom. Reaching down, I pick up a wooden dog on wheels, complete with a string around its neck.

  “I doubt those are hers, somehow,” Johnson suggests.

  “I came here a couple of times when I was younger,” I tell him. “This side of the house was always so empty, even back then. Every time we visited, a little more of the house seemed to have been closed off, like it was dying one room at a time. And my aunt... Even back then, there were early signs that something wasn't quite right in her head.”

  He looks down at the stained bed for a moment. “It's hard to think someone just lay there rotting all this time, and your aunt was getting on with things and didn't have a clue. I mean, when you think about it like that, the whole situation's a little creepy.” Heading over to the window, he peers out at the lawn for a moment. “Then again, I guess having the window open meant there wasn't too much of a smell. The flies just came in and out here, and never spread to the rest of the house.” He turns to me. “I couldn't live by myself in a big place like this. All those empty rooms and -”

  “Do you need anything else?” I ask suddenly. “Sorry, I don't mean to be rude, but I'd like to get back to my aunt. She seemed quite distressed earlier, and I don't think she should be alone.”

  “Sure.” Sighing, he wanders back over to the door. “I might need to talk to her again, though, depending on how our inquiries go. As things stand, she's the only potential witness to whatever happened here.”

  “She's blind and she suffers from dementia,” I point out. “I'm not sure she can be much of a witness for anything.”

  Chapter Eight

  “Yes, they've gone,” I tell her again, hoping to calm her fears as I sit on the edge of the bed and hand her a cup of tea. “I promise. They left about twenty minutes ago.”

  “This is my house,” she stammers, clearly still close to panic, as she looks over toward the window. “I won't have strange men wandering around my house. It's not right!”

  “But you understand why they were here, don't you?”

  I wait for a reply, but her attention seems entirely consumed by the sight of the window, and after a moment I take the wobbling cup of tea from her hands and set it on the bedside table, in case it spills. She doesn't even seem to notice.

  “Aunt Emily,” I continue cautiously, “did you honestly never see or hear anything that made you think there might be someone else in the house with you? Maybe as far back as a year or two ago?”

  She turns to me, and I can see the fear in her eyes.

  “I know Auercliff's a big place,” I add with a smile, trying to make her feel more at ease. “Still, it's hard to believe that someone else could have been at the other end, and you never noticed at all.”

  “Who are you?” she asks cautiously.

  Sighing, I realize that her dementia seems to have hit a particularly tough spot. Dealing with Aunt Emily right now is like dealing with a particularly capricious weather system that has formed in her mind. Clouds of confusion and forgetfulness are regularly interrupting her ability to remember anything that's happening around her, but at the same time I know there's no point getting frustrated. At some point, she'll have another moment of clarity and she'll be better able to answer questions. I just have to push through the storm first.

  “I'm Rebecca,” I tell her calmly. “Your niece, remember? Barbara's daughter.”

  She stares at me for a moment, before looking down at her swollen arthritic hands.

  “Do you have medication for your arthritis?” I ask. “I haven't seen you taking any pills.”

  “I don't need pills.”

  “If you're in pain, there are -”

  “I don't need pills!” she says again, sounding irritated. “They make it worse.”

  “The pain?”

  “No, in here!” Reaching up, she jabs the side of her head with a trembling finger. “They make it harder to concentrate,” she adds.

  Watching as her hand drops back into her lap, I can't help thinking that those swollen joints must be excruciatingly painful, but at the same time I know better than to argue with her. I'm going to need a really calm bedside manner if I'm going to persuade her to go to hospital.

  “When was the last time you had contact with anyone from the village?” I ask.

  She doesn't reply. She doesn't even look at me, instead preferring to look down at her hands.

  “You have a lot of tinned food in the pantry,” I continue. “Probably enough to last another six months. Did you arrange for that at some point? Did you plan ahead and get someone to deliver it?”

  I wait for her to say something, but she seems lost in thought.

  “Haven't you seen her?” she asks finally.

  “Seen who?”

  “Do you never sit at the piano?”

  “I... Sure. Sometimes. It's a little out of tune, but -”

  “It's not out of tune!” she snaps.

  “Okay, sorry, I didn't mean that.”

  “If you sit there,” she continues, “you must have seen her. She runs past the window sometimes. She laughs.”

  “I've never...” My voice trails off as I realize that she's absolutely serious.

  “Please,” she stammers, “you must have seen her. The girl, she runs past the window...”

  I wait for her to continue, but once again she seems lost in her own thoughts. “How old is this girl?” I ask finally.

  She turns and looks toward the window, and for a moment I feel as if she's already drifting away again.

  “No more than thirteen or fourteen,” she says finally.

  “Okay,” I reply, having briefly considered the possibility that the girl might have been the dead woman from the room. Still, as I hear another distant creak from far off in the house, I start to understand how Emily might have never realized there was someone else living in the house. “You hear a lot of noises, don't you?” I ask cautiously. “Auercliff is never entirely silent, is it?”

  She turns back to me.

  “Bumps, things like that,” I continue. “It's been a long time since I talked to my mother, but I remember her telling me that you always thought Auercliff was haunted.”

  “It's not about thinking,” she replies, reaching up and pointing with a trembling finger at her milky eyes. “It's about seeing. And knowing.” She taps her chest. “In here.”

  “I was told you even used a Ouija board once, trying to talk to the spirits.”

  “Nobody else took it seriously,” she replies. “I realized that later. You can't expect the spirits to respond if you're with people who don't believe, or who mock! Their negative energy repels the forces that you need...” She pauses for a moment, sounding a little breathless. “The environment was all wrong for it to work. Your parents and my poor dear Martin... Their skepticism repelled the very forces I was trying to contact.”

  We sit in silence for a moment.

  “You don't believe me, do you?” she asks finally.

  I open my mouth to tell her that I like to keep my mind open, but the truth is... No matter how much I'd like to believe that ghosts are real, I can't quite bring myself to make that leap. Not anymore. When
I was younger, I felt certain that ghosts existed, but I guess I lost that belief at some point while I was growing up. Maybe after the time I was trapped in the mausoleum, I just didn't dare entertain the possibility.

  “Do you remember what happened to my brother here?” I ask. “Do you remember what happened to me?”

  She frowns at me, and it's clear she has no recollection at all.

  “I don't believe in ghosts anymore,” I tell her finally. “I think if I did, I'd have lost my mind a long time ago. Do you really not remember the incident with the mausoleum?”

  “The mausoleum?”

  I can't help smiling. It took me so long to come to terms with that terrifying day, and yet Emily has clearly forgotten. In a way, the mausoleum came to dominate my memories of Auercliff, and it's the main reason I stayed away for so long, even after I stopped talking to my mother.

  “Maybe you've got the right idea,” I tell her after a moment. “Maybe it's best to just forget things.”

  Chapter Nine

  “Are you sure you feel okay to be up and about?” I ask a short while later, stirring chicken pieces around the pan as I turn and look back across the kitchen. “I was going to bring this up to you.”

  “Oh, I'm fine,” Emily replies with a smile, limping toward the table by the window. “Just because I'm getting on in years, you don't have to fuss over me. Do you think I'm going to bump into something and collapse?”

  “Of course not,” I tell her, surprised to find that she seems so perky and pulled-together now. The storm has parted in her mind and another lucid moment has arrived.

  “It'll be good to eat something that isn't tinned soup,” she continues, wincing a little as she eases herself onto one of the chairs. “I must admit, my diet was getting a little samey. You won't believe this, Rebecca, but there was a time when Martin and I used to host big dinner parties here at Auercliff. Your mother used to come to them sometimes, and your father too. They even brought you and your brother, when you were just babies.”