The Diary Of Pamela D. Read online

  When they reached the old Austin, Tessa burst out, ‘Where did you get that beautiful old car? Is it yours? Where on earth did you find it?’

  ‘Here, let’s get your stuff into the boot. Isn’t it great? Theo bought it for me. The dealer was just going to give it to the wreckers but I went and rescued it. We got it for next to nothing!’

  For the moment unnoticed and forgotten, Ellie and Fred exchanged a meaning look. To them the car looked old-fashioned and ugly and was probably suspect, though it performed in a manner that was unmistakably sound and reliable.

  As the two girls chattered incessantly all the way to Dewhurst Mansion, Pamela found that she was elated not only by Tessa’s presence but by the way the two were so easily able to mesh once more, as they had when they had first met. Pamela had never in her entire life had a friend like Tessa, someone her own age who was apparently unscarred by the sort of marginalizing forces that had shaped Pamela’s own life. For Pamela, being in Tessa’s presence was like being reborn to a new and hopeful world, a world where she was accepted, where she belonged, a world filled with people she cared about and who cared about her.

  They were just getting Tessa settled into Pamela’s old room when Pamela suddenly burst into tears and sat down on the side of the bed.

  ‘Pamela? What’s wrong? Why are you crying?’ Tessa said in sudden concern.

  ‘Oh, it’s nothing bad,’ Pamela said, wiping at her eyes and laughing at the same time. ‘It’s just that I’ve never been so happy in all my life. I never knew that it was possible to feel like this. I’m sorry- it’s just a bit much for me, that’s all.’

  ‘Well,’ Tessa said, smiling crookedly and sitting beside her, ‘if that’s all, then I sha’n’t waste any time feeling sorry for you.’ She said this with mock-disdain, which had its intended effect.

  ‘You don’t find me abjectly pitiable, then?’

  ‘Not in the least.’

  ‘Not even if I made big puppy eyes?’

  Rolling her own, Tessa said, ‘That may well work on Theo, but the female of the species is not so easily taken in. Speaking of Theo, you never did tell me how he got down to proposing to you.’

  Her mood fading somewhat, Pamela told her friend the entire story, leaving nothing out.

  ‘What are you looking so depressed about? He’s a wonderful man, and it’s obvious, whatever you may think, that he’s very much in love with you.’

  Pamela gave her a baffled look. ‘Why does everyone keep saying that, when I’m the one who’s getting married to him and I can’t see it?’

  ‘Oh, dear,’ Tessa said, her expression sympathetic, ‘It seems that you’ve just added an entirely new dimension to the old saying, “Love is blind.” Not only is your love blind, but it seems that you’re blind to love, all at the same time.’

  Pamela gave her such a comically disparaging look as sent the two into peals of uncontrollable laughter.

  ‘Do that again! No please, don’t! No, not again! Ow, I can’t laugh any more . . . my face hurts. My sides hurt . . . If I pee myself, I’m going to slug you . . . ’

  ‘Don’t either of you dare wet my nice clean linen!’ Doris interrupted, her expression carefully neutral. ‘Supper will be served in about five minutes, so you’ve just nice time to wash up. And do stop blushing,’ she added with a smile, ‘or you’ll have me going. And we can’t have that, now can we?’

  When they sat down to eat, Pamela found herself feeling eternally grateful that between Ellie, Doris and Norrie she had been trained in “proper” table manners and was now accustomed to them. This was her first experience sitting at the table in the dining room, being served instead of serving, and she knew this would be the moment of truth where her relationship with the household staff, of whom she was no longer a member, was concerned. But to her relief, when she looked up apprehensively and apologetically at Ellie, the woman gave Pamela a surreptitious wink just to put her at ease.

  Yet sitting next to Theo made her feel tense and awkward all the same. She didn’t know whether to continue gabbing with Tessa who was sitting on her right, or pay attention to Theo who was sitting quietly on her left. To her complete surprise, however, Theo suddenly pushed back his chair, got to his feet, leaned over and kissed Pamela- neither a lingering kiss nor a chaste peck, but a proper and affectionate one, straightened up once more and said to all and sundry, ‘I’ll be back in a moment. In the meantime, I suggest that you leave your wine glasses empty.’ He returned from the cellar a few minutes later with a pair of dusty old bottles, uncorked them, and served everyone himself. As supper resumed, he said to Pamela with a small, kind, sardonic smile, ‘If this doesn’t relax you, nothing will.’ Pamela stared at him for some time, trying to fathom this apparent change in him. She was still feeling giddy from his kiss, and was blissfully unaware of the covert smiles and meaning looks the others exchanged with one another.

  Chief Inspector Robert Matthews, who had become something of a fixture in recent weeks, sat at one end of the table opposite Mrs. Dewhurst. Across from Pamela sat Fred Pascoe to her left, Jennie in a highchair and Anne. Jennie stole the show, of course, and would eventually have succeeded in breaking the ice were they trapped in the high Arctic in mid-winter. The Inspector was a calm, sociable man, and entertained them with stories of life at CID. His stories were rivetting, having an almost philosophical aspect that was at once humane, understanding and humorous in a unique, quirky sort of way.

  ‘Robert, why don’t you write some of your stories down, just as you tell them, in your own voice,’ Mrs. Dewhurst said amidst a chorus of assent. Her familiar usage of his first name didn’t go unnoticed, either.

  He gave a self-deprecating shrug. ‘You’d think that’s all there was to it, wouldn’t you. But it doesn’t seem to work that way. The moment I make a conscious effort to capture something on paper it just seems to melt away, right through my fingers. Unless,’ he added with a menacing leer, ‘the paperwork involves trying to nick someone. Then it’s a different sort of story altogether.’ This, of course, got the intended laugh.

  But at these words Pamela felt suddenly separate, apart, as though she were turned into something almost supernatural, watching the room they were sitting in and the house from the outside, as though oak beams and stone walls were as insubstantial as vapour. Albert Askrigg, she had come to believe, was not a man at all, but was rather a force of nature- evil, dark and dangerous. You couldn’t capture or subdue a force of nature. One never truly overcame nature’s fury- one merely lived through it any way one could. She spent the rest of the meal wrestling with the intangibles she would need to overcome if she wished to survive.

  The final wall, as Pamela soon discovered, that lay between herself and Theo seemed to remain standing, as solid and unbreachable as ever. No sooner was supper over than he turned back into his old unreachable self. Miffed, she was all the more glad for Tessa’s presence. When they were ostensibly alone together, sitting in the back garden where Fred Pascoe and his wife and child also were, she confided, ‘Why does he always do that? For a moment there I thought everything was going to be just fine . . . then, he just shut it off again: it’s like he’s able to simply flick a switch, and poof! no more Theo. At least, not the Theo I want in my life.’

  ‘Don’t be silly!’ Tessa told her. ‘He’s just waiting until you’re married. You watch, he’ll turn into Mr. Casanova Hot-Lips the moment he carries you over the threshold.’

  This depiction of Theo evoked a scandalized laugh from Pamela.

  ‘Casanova Hot-Lips? Where on earth do you get such ideas from?’

  ‘From watching you at the supper-table,’ she replied, watching Pamela’s blush with unrepentant gratification. ‘It took almost half an hour for that pucker to leave your face-’

  ‘You-!’ Pamela, beet red, gave her a swat. ‘I wasn’t puckering-’

  ‘Were too, were too.’

  The two were silent for a while after that, looking out upon the tarn, the stone-wall-latticed roll
ing green hills dotted with sheep, cattle and a few horses, and the wood beyond which surrounded the estate.

  ‘It’s so beautiful here,’ Tessa breathed at last. ‘To think that you get to spend your whole entire life here, having children and raising them, having all this space for them to play and grow up in. You’ve got to be the luckiest person I know.’

  There was an underlying sadness to what she was saying that caught Pamela’s attention, and she remembered little hints dropped by Ellie, Doris and Theo, that Tessa wasn’t happy with her own life.

  ‘What?’ Pamela said quietly, nudging shoulders to get her attention. ‘Out with it. By the way, aren’t we supposed to be calling each other Tess and Pam?’

  Tessa smiled, but there was little humour in it. Keeping her gaze fixed into the distance, she said, ‘I’d rather we kept things just as they are between us- I feel as though we have something special, you know? No one else besides you and Auntie Ellie and Auntie Doris calls me Tessa.’ She sighed, seemed to come to some sort of decision, and began speaking.

  ‘All right. You’re going to notice something sooner or later anyway, so I might as well tell you now. I got sent here by my parents because I’m pregnant.’

  Pamela could tell at once that Tessa was anything but happy about it, so she said nothing, waiting for her friend to continue when she was ready.

  ‘David- David Priestly, that’s the father’s name- he wanted me to go straight out and get an abortion. He accused me of trying to trap him, and he hit me-’ she wiped at her angry tears which betrayed the depth of her hurt even if her voice didn’t. ‘We were so careful- I mean, we were using almost every form of birth-control known to Man and I still got pregnant. But he and I had talked about it before, like what would I do if I got caught. He knew before we started going out together how I felt about abortion, but that never stopped him. Then when I finally told him, he called me an opportunist and a slut. We were out for a drive when I told him, and he just stopped the car and told me to get out. I was so stunned that I just sat there. That’s when he hit me. Not a slap, not with the flat of his hand, but with his fist. Then, he leaned across, opened the car door, and shoved me out with his foot.’ She took a deep breath that was all but a sob. ‘God, I was such a mess! I was staggering around, half out of it with shock, covered with blood, and I was alone in the middle of nowhere . . . and nobody would stop and pick me up except the police.’ She huffed. ‘The only reason they did was because at first they thought I was drunk or something, and they were going to arrest me.

  ‘I never saw David again after that, but Daddy did, after I told Mum what happened, and she called Daddy at work and told him. Daddy wouldn’t believe my account until he talked with David himself.’ She gave a little laugh through her tears. ‘When Daddy finally got the full picture, he nutted David a good one. Pow!’ She screwed up her face and slammed her fist into her hand. ‘Ow.’ She shook her hand, wincing before continuing. ‘David’s Dad came over to talk to my parents after that. When Dad was done talking to him, he left, telling Dad, “You should have told me, first. I’d have broken his head, not his nose.”

  ‘So that’s what’s going on in the wonderful life of Tessa,’ she concluded, shrugging, unable to look in Pamela’s direction. ‘So, what do you think now? Am I a tramp who doesn’t deserve to be given the time of day?’

  ‘I think you’re being very brave,’ Pamela told her truthfully. ‘As for your David . . . ’ She paused to consider her words, carefully. At last, she said slowly, ‘People don’t always say or do what they mean. It could be he was just scared-’

  ‘David?’ Tessa said, raising an eyebrow in tired contemplation. ‘He used me, right from the start. I knew it too. But I loved him so much . . . I couldn’t seem to help myself. I knew he was bad news, but I talked myself into believing that he’d change one day. Would you believe that even his parents tried to warn me off him? Well, they did. I’m such an idiot! What more warning could I possibly have wanted, if his own parents thought he was a bad gamble?’

  Instead of talking further, Pamela instinctively put her arm around her friend. The dam burst then, and Tessa put her head on Pamela’s shoulder and began weeping uncontrollably.

  ‘Will you . . . are you still going to be my friend?’ Tessa sobbed.

  Putting her arms around her best friend, Pamela said with a confidence that was entirely new to her, ‘Always. Always and forever. If any man ever tries to hurt you again, he’ll have to go through me, first.’ Her gaze straying to the wood beyond, Pamela thought to herself, ‘No matter who he is.’

  It was a perfect day, with a light breeze and white billowing clouds in a crystalline pure blue sky. Pamela was far from the mansion, sitting cross-legged in the tall grass, watching over little Jennie who chased anything that hopped, crawled or flew, thankfully without any success. Pamela glanced once or twice towards the mansion to see Theo on his balcony, sitting in his chair and keeping an eye on the pair. She gave him a wave and he waved back. Even at this distance she knew he smiled.

  Something, a sound or movement from the direction of the forest, got her attention and her wave faltered. But there was nothing. Breathing a sigh of relief, she turned her attention back to the little girl. ‘I sure wish you were mine,’ she told the child, because she was secure in the knowledge that Jennie was too young to understand. ‘One day I’m going to have a little girl of my own. Or a little boy. Then you can have someone to play with. And then there will be Tessa’s little . . . something. Before me, of course. Doesn’t that sound nice?’

  Jennie smiled and said, ‘Ba-ba.’ Abruptly, the child’s smile faltered and she turned her head to look apprehensively towards the forest.

  With a worm of fear gnawing in her chest, Pamela got to her feet and picked up the child. ‘That’s twice now. Twice too many. Let’s go back in, just to be on the safe side.’

  The moment she began moving toward the mansion, however, another sound, this time unmistakable and clear, caused her to turn-

  -and make an incoherent noise that was pure terror. Albert Askrigg had come bursting out of the wood and was running straight towards her, his eyes filled with naked, savage murder, a long knife flashing in his hand.

  ‘Run! Run!’ For a moment she had to coax her unwilling feet to move. And then, all at once, she was flying, running for all she was worth. But she could feel Albert Askrigg’s heavy footfalls growing closer with each thud of her hammering heart.

  Where were the police? Where was Theo? He was no longer on the balcony watching her. The day which had been clear, sunny and bright, was suddenly overcast- she felt a drop of moisture strike her face, causing her to flinch involuntarily. But no . . . the water hadn’t come from the sky . . . For some reason she found that she had stopped running, and now stood beside the tarn. Jennie was no longer in her arms, or anywhere to be seen. And Albert Askrigg?

  There was no sign of him. But still her chest felt constricted with terror. She was standing at the edge of the tarn looking into the water. Strange . . . something seemed to be moving down there. She knelt at the edge for a closer look, extended her hand towards its own mirrored image-

  At once her wrist was seized by a hand that shot from the water, enclosing it in an unbreakable grip of iron! She tried to break free . . .

  . . . but the hand that clutched her was not Albert Askrigg’s. It was a young woman’s hand, pale and deathly cold. At once, the young woman’s face became visible, her eyes dead and staring. Pamela began screaming in horror-

  ‘Pamela! Pamela! Wake up! Please, stop screaming! You’ll soon have the whole house in an uproar!’

  The light had been turned on, and she was in Theo’s arms. He was holding her close, stroking her gently. ‘Shush, shush. It’s all right, my love. Everything’s fine.’ She felt him nod towards whoever had opened the door.

  ‘They’re dead!’ she sobbed unconsolably. ‘Oh, God, Theo! I saw them! They were all dead in the water, where he buried them!’

  ‘What? W
hat on earth are you talking about?’

  ‘The missing women,’ she told him. ‘He tied rocks to their bodies and threw them into the water.’

  ‘What? How do you know this? Did you actually see something, or are you just talking about your dream?’

  ‘It was something he said, just before I got away from him,’ she said. ‘He told me that when he was done, he’d toss me in with all the rest of them-’ She began sobbing hysterically. ‘Oh God! Oh God! He hurt me! He-’

  Theo took a shuddering breath and buried his cheek against the nape of her neck. ‘I’ll protect you from that monster. He’ll never hurt you again- on that you have my solemn promise.’

  To someone she couldn’t see, he added, ‘For this, he’d better pray that I don’t get to him first. He’ll get no mercy from me.’

  ‘I’ll call the station,’ came the Chief Inspector’s voice. ‘If there really are any bodies in the tarn, I want them out of there during the night, if at all possible. The less everyone here sees, the better.’

  They found the first body in the exact spot Pamela had dreamt about. By the time morning had come, however, the police were still dragging the tarn for bodies.

  In the kitchen, Theo, with his arm protectively around Pamela, said quietly, ‘How many, Robert?’

  The Chief Inspector had just come in the back door and was removing his wellies. Heaving a sigh, he said, ‘Five so far. Possibly six. Maybe more. They’ve been in there for some time, so there’s not much left, I’m afraid.’

  Mrs. Dewhurst, who looked dishevelled and tired, as though she had been up all night wrestling demons, said, ‘Come in and have something to eat, man! You look nearly as bad as I do this morning. You’re not as young as you used to be.’

  Giving her a private sort of smile, he said, ‘Nay, lass. But we’re both a lot wiser, eh?’

  As they went to breakfast, Pamela noted with relief that Tessa had been taken under Ellie’s and Doris’ protective wings, and seemed to find a semblance of order and comfort by helping out in the kitchen.