33 Women

by Isabel Ashdown

Genres: Mystery

Synopsis

When sisters Celine and Pip get a call telling them their reclusive mother has died, the women are reunited at her riverside home in Arundel to pick up the pieces. But someone is missing—their middle sister, Vanessa, brutally murdered years ago and the victim of an unsolved case. As the sisters confront ghosts from the past, the discovery of another body in similar circumstances throws new light on Vanessa's death. Could there be more to her case than the police first thought? And what do the mysterious residents of Two Cross Farm, the neighboring women's commune, have to do with it? What secrets are lurking behind their locked gates? And what is the significance of the number 33?

Release date: November 26, 2020

Publisher: Orion Publishing Group

Print pages: 352

Sample

There is a moment in which pain and fear slips into acceptance.

I am there now, and all around me is still, a midnight hush of shock and awe. No more can I feel the weight of fists slamming into my jaw, or the snap of my ribs, or even the gasping pressure of fingers closing around my throat. In fact, I barely feel a thing, just the frost-damp grass beneath my palms and the cool white whisper of my breath as it slips through my broken lips. Above me, the stars are out, the indigo sky quite lit up by them, and, as white wings soar by, it occurs to me that they are silent witnesses to my passing. I wonder if I should feel afraid.

But then I am sixteen again; I see Celine and Pip shrouded in sunlight at the kitchen table, laying out bread for cheese on toast, and Celine is cutting the crusts off Pip’s because she won’t eat them, and drizzling Worcester sauce on mine because that’s how I like it. And I’m standing there in the doorway in my school uniform, biting down on my lip because I love these two so much – I’m feeling too much – and it’s chaos inside my head; and now we’re sitting on the back steps, arranged like pot plants, one-two-three, eating our toast and looking out across the courtyard, naïvely planning summer day trips and meal rotas, and Celine is saying ‘Delilah who?’ and the light is radiating through Pip’s scruffy blonde hair and she’s sticking two fingers in the air, blowing raspberries and we’re laughing, all three of us through tears, and we have each other and we’ll cling to that, and we’ll never walk away …

A sound, a thud like iron against hard earth, brings me back to this starry night, and even through my inertia fresh panic grips me. How will they know how to find me? How will my sisters know where to look?

The night sky is obscured as women gather over me, their faces lined with age, eyes moving closer, closer, closer still, testing me for life. Whether they see it or not, I wish them only love in this final breath, before their eyes, like the stars, fade to nothing.

From behind dark shades, Celine’s eyes skate over the shimmering harbour as she hurtles along the motorway, briefly glimpsing the jaunty sway of yachts and dinghies on the water. It’s a fleeting scene that appears entirely unreal to her, like a frame from a movie. She takes a deep, conscious breath and tries to anchor herself in the present, all the while sensing herself as though viewed from afar: glossy-curled, thirty-something, crisp white sleeves rolled back, her businesslike appearance strangely at odds with the 1970s camper van she drives.

As the harbour gives way to industrial units, Celine feels time both slowing and speeding up, but the sensation is not unpleasant and there is no real panic attached, just a sort of low-level sadness or regret. Derealisation, a therapist once described it to her, this feeling of detachment, but Celine’s not convinced. She doesn’t go in for labels, and her time with the therapist came to an end after just two or three sessions, the experience leaving her feeling worse than when she’d started. She prefers to think of herself as just very slightly fucked-up, a diagnosis which is far less complicated, being one which requires no particular treatment. It isn’t that she doesn’t feel things, more that she doesn’t always allow herself to react to them or let her feelings be seen. She’s found life to be easier that way, and it’s not a big deal.

Now, she squints against the sunlight and concentrates on the fast-moving traffic ahead. She’s on her way to her mother Delilah’s place in Arundel, and she swallows the reality of it like a stone, masochistically forcing herself to recall the last time they met, in a café in Tarrant Street ten years earlier, on a warm May day not unlike this one. On that day, despite a two-year gap since they’d last seen each other, Delilah had skirted around difficult topics like her abrupt departure from Celine’s life, or Vanessa’s death, instead making polite conversation across artfully mismatched teacups and a pretty tower of scones. At one point Celine had tried to broach the subject of the police investigation, to find out if her mother had heard anything more about her sister’s now cold case, but Delilah had waved the unpleasant subject away, her fixed poise never once giving any clue to the inner workings of her mind. If anyone looked through the window and saw us now, Celine had thought at the time, they would view us unmistakably as mother and daughter, so alike with our dark eyes and curls; and they would think, how lovely. Just as that thought had landed, there’d been a rap on the glass beside them and there really had been someone looking in at them – a man in a smart coat and hat – and it was as though Celine had conjured him up by her thoughts alone. ‘Oh, darling, time to go,’ her mother had sighed, breathlessly grazing Celine’s cheek with hers, the mere scent of her Shalimar perfume flattening any objection Celine might have made. ‘Let’s do this again, shall we?’ she’d said, and, just like that, she’d vanished. But for the twenty-pound note lying crumpled on the lace tablecloth, she might never have been there at all.

Desperate to get out of that café, Celine had left without waiting for her change and navigated her way down to the river, where she’d sat on a bench overlooking the pleasure boats and wept. These would be the last tears she ever shed for Delilah, she had sworn, the woman she’d once called Mum.

At some point along this interminable stretch of road, a sign welcomes Celine from Hampshire into West Sussex, and a glance at her phone’s satnav confirms she has just thirty-four minutes until she arrives – just half an hour to get her emotions in line and work out what she’s meant to feel. It’s at times like these that she wishes she were more like her younger sister, Pip. Pip, who will be waiting for her at the end of this journey, neither judging nor feeling judged, just being who she really is, feeling what she really feels. Right now, Celine feels close to nothing, and yet, physically, she is acutely aware of every sensation: the sharp, blinding glare of the sun’s rays; the stretch of her jeans over aching knees; the irritable prickle of rosacea across her cheekbones as her skin responds to the unseasonal heat of the van. More than anything, there’s the thud of her heart, which seems to grow in volume and momentum as the miles tick away.

She skirts past the market town of Chichester, rumbling along the A27 in her van, passing signs for Sussex hamlets and villages with mouthful names like Crockerhill and Walberton. Where the roads begin to narrow, the signposts become more local in theme – the arboretum, the trout farm, the castle and lido – and when the satnav directs her off the main road, down a secluded country lane, she knows she must be close. She knew the place was out of town, but she hadn’t anticipated this. The lane quickly becomes an unmade track, and she finds herself driving at a snail’s pace to protect the camper van’s suspension, her stomach clenching at every pothole, lurching at every bump. When she reaches a large gated property, she lets the engine idle a while, wondering if this is the place, as she takes in the impressive façade of the red brick building, its carved wooden bargeboards painted a deep forest green, the door to match. Spotting activity beyond the house and front gardens, she lifts her sunglasses as her gaze lands on a group of women tending the flower borders at the rear. One of them turns in her direction. Pale, scarf-headed and tall, the woman strikes an imposing figure as she plants her hands on her hips like a challenge, and Celine feels immediately caught out, a voyeur. She quickly turns away, and drives on, another mile down the lane, until she finally arrives at the tree-shrouded entrance to another grand property that can only be her mother’s. Yes, the name plate on the gatepost confirms it: ‘Belle France’. Only Delilah would name a house so ostentatiously, a reference to her French grandparents, the fragrance tycoons responsible for her comfortable lifestyle. Celine wonders how those hard-working pioneers would have viewed Delilah’s choices: the houses, the holidays, the jewellery, the endless stream of men. The desertion. And then, with shame, she wonders what those same ancestors would make of her, if they could hear her harsh thoughts now, at a time like this.

Turning in through lion-and-unicorn-topped pillars, Celine takes the long tree-lined drive towards the house, knowing her mother will hate the fact that she hasn’t upgraded her vehicle from this ‘abominable monstrosity’ in all these years. Would, she corrects herself with a shake of her head. She would have hated it. As she skirts the final tree, a large house comes into clear view, a red-brick statement standing tall against the riverside backdrop and manicured gardens. Celine doesn’t know what she was expecting, and the scene is so entirely unfamiliar to her that it seems impossible to imagine that Delilah, the woman who was never without a man on her arm, had been living here all alone.

That she died here all alone.

It was late, a still, muggy full-mooned night, and in my forty years on this planet I’d never felt more alive.

In the living room at the back of the house, all the ground-floor windows were flung wide, and in the absence of furniture Fern had covered the parquet floor with throws and scarves and cushions, on which we now sat in a circle so that all five of us might view each other and connect.

‘The eyes are everything,’ Fern explained, her soft American accent lingering over the last word. Drawing her dark hair into a long rope coil, she dropped it carelessly over one shoulder and opened up her hands. She was wearing a tiny crocheted bikini top and bell-bottomed flares that hugged her lean thighs and frayed around her bare, conker-brown feet. ‘I once took a series of photographs of a blind man I met in Calcutta. He had the most generous of hearts, the deepest wisdom, and yet I never got over the profound sadness I felt at not being able to look inside him, to see through his eyes.’ She studied us each in turn now, intensely, and I could swear I felt the shudder of my spirit as she did so, as though it knew it was being scrutinised and decoded. ‘The eyes are everything,’ she repeated. ‘Do you understand what I mean by this? Susan?’

Alert, young Susan sat a little more upright, leaned a fraction further forward over her crossed legs. ‘You mean like how, if you look into someone’s eyes, you can see what they’re feeling? What they really mean?’

‘Yes!’ Fern clapped her hands together. ‘Yes! You see, we live in a warped kinda society where we’re taught to not always say what we feel – but the eyes can’t lie, can they? They don’t know how to – not like our lying mouths and minds and hands and bodies! Because the eyes are connected to the soul.’

‘Like your photographs,’ Kathy said, earnestly pushing her glasses up her nose. At thirty-five she was only a few years older than Fern, but she had a frazzled quality about her, her hair a greying blonde frizz, her brow already deeply lined. ‘33 Women. That’s what I really felt your exhibition was about. Truth.’

She was talking about Fern’s show in London, where we’d met for the first time on that night when I’d been invited to join in this most marvellous of ventures. Where, for the first time in my life, with no one to direct me otherwise, I’d allowed myself to be reckless and abandoned, and simply said yes.

‘We were looking at thirty-three naked women,’ Kathy continued, ‘stripped back to their true form. But it wasn’t the bodies I was drawn to, it was the eyes. How do you do that? Whenever my husband takes a picture of me, my eyes aren’t my own.’ She frowned a little, gazing off beyond the group into the darkness outside. ‘It’s like I’m not even there.’

Fern placed a hand over her own heart, and was silent for a while. It had been this stillness and certainty that had drawn me to stay back and talk with her at the gallery that day, and, when she’d invited me to join her and the others for after-show drinks, I’d been captivated by their talk of equality and patriarchy and emancipation and release. I was the oldest in the group by a good few years, but somehow it didn’t matter. I had something to offer, and, like the rest of them, I had something to escape. My tormentor was now dead, but I couldn’t go on living the way I was, holed up in the prison of my family home, alone and decaying. I was certain this chance meeting had great significance; after all, I’d only stepped inside the gallery for a few minutes’ respite from the scorching afternoon sun, and there she had been to welcome me – Fern, offering up a glass of cool wine and a smile. It had to be fate at work.

‘I make a commitment to you all now,’ Fern said. ‘This place will be a shelter from oppression, a place women can enter, free of their chains of enslavement, where they may never fear the raised hand of violence again. I will photograph every sister who passes through our home, so that, wherever they go next, they’ll know a real image of them exists in the world – a true representation of themselves, one which cannot be altered by the will of others. Others – partners, children, parents, siblings, so-called friends – they reduce us, whether they mean to or not. Essentially, they are limpets, clinging to us, covering our truth, obscuring our eyes. This is what you’re seeing in those old photographs of yourself, Kathy: it’s the lesser-you, the half-you. But the other half is still there, you understand; it’s just drowning beneath the surface, crying to break free.’

All focus was on Fern, so it wasn’t until she stopped talking that we realised Kathy was silently weeping, nodding almost imperceptibly, her gaze firm on our new leader. Fern gestured to Regine and Susan on either side of Kathy, and they each took a hand; when I joined, the circle was complete, and there wasn’t a dry eye in the room.

After several long minutes of conscious contemplation, Fern broke away to fetch paper and a pen, and returned to her place with a rolled joint and a half-empty bottle of American whiskey. ‘We will never forget tonight,’ she told us, as she passed the joint one way, the bottle the other. ‘But we need to have our wits about us, so this will be our last night of indulgence, of intoxication. We have a job to do, and stimulants will only dull our resolve. Enjoy this last taste, sisters.’

We each took a swig, and a drag – my first and last ever experience of marijuana – and waited for Fern’s instruction.

Setting the empty bottle aside and extinguishing the stub on the floor between us, she spoke. ‘This will be a place of sanctuary, for thirty-three women. All in this room will be considered Founding Sisters, but it is my aim that we will be six in number. Do you know the significance of the number six?’ She waited for a response, but none came. ‘Six,’ she said, with great ceremony, ‘is a multiple of three. Three is the Holy Trinity, a divine perfection.’

I felt a pang of validation; perhaps all my years of half-hearted church attendance with Father had not been wasted, for was not the Bible itself littered with references to trinity and divinity?

‘I’ve been studying numerology for some time now,’ Fern continued. ‘And you would not believe the power of it, my friends. The more I’ve looked into it, the more enlightened I’ve become, and, sisters, it has blown my mind. Why d’you think my exhibition was called 33 Women? Thirty-three is the highest of the master numbers; whether you follow organised religion or not, it shows up in all of them throughout history – it was the age of Jesus at his death, the number of prayer beads commonly strung. It appears in Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity, the Occult.’

‘Call to me and I will answer you and tell you great and unsearchable things you do not know,’ I said, the line coming to me without thought. ‘Jeremiah 33:3.’

Fern brought her hands together beneath her chin, and I felt the full force of her approval wash over me like heat.

‘Those women-deniers the Freemasons hold it in reverence,’ she continued. ‘Thirty-three is a dominant number of goodness and of chaos, of life-giving and destruction. I myself was born in Solano Beach, California, directly in the path of the circle of latitude known as the 33rd parallel. This is the same latitudinal path on which the Kennedy boys were assassinated in Texas and LA, the very same path where those UFOs landed in Roswell.’ Fern’s voice was rising, her hands dancing expressively as she grew ever more animated. ‘You women each have thirty-three vertebrae making up your spines. Thirty-three is the point at which water boils on the Newton Scale of measure. And 33rpm is the number of turns your record player makes each minute when you turn on and tune into your favourite album.’

There was laughter, a moment of lightness in our dawning understanding of this woman’s great vision.

‘Sisters, thirty-three is associated with love and harmony and creativity – everything we women have striven for since the dawning of time; and yet, somehow, this “master” number has been appropriated by the patriarchy of every society, every religion, every mythology, and so often used in the disservice of women.’

We were rapt.

‘Tonight, my beloveds, if you are with me, we five will write a Code of Conduct for a new community of women, a sanctuary for thirty-three sisters, a new way of life. And when that is written, in the name of balance, the search for our sixth Founding Sister will begin. Are you with me?’

I looked around, at these brave women, my past flashing before me like a great grey disappointment of oppression and abuse, and I knew I had found my place. ‘Yes,’ I said, with true conviction, my voice falling in with the chant of assent. ‘Yes!’

Eyes gleaming, Fern slapped her flat palms against her knees. ‘So! I will kick off with an important code: Every woman must first shed her limpets.’

None of us really knew what Fern meant by this, we just knew we wanted to be part of it. Never before had I smoked cannabis; never before had I taken liquor straight from the bottle. Never before had I mixed with women of different ages and colours and cultures and religions. Never before had I believed I truly possessed power.

‘Limpets?’ Susan asked, and it was natural that it should be she who raised it. Looking back, I realise how grateful I was for Susan and her youth. At sixteen she was forgiven for her endless questions – questions which, if we were honest, were on the tips of our own tongues. ‘How do we shed our “limpets”?’

‘A limpet is a passenger who weighs us down,’ Fern replied. ‘Some of us are free of limpets; others have one or two; some poor creatures carry many, many limpets, and they don’t even know it. Kathy, from what you tell me, your husband is a limpet. Does he weigh you down?’

‘He does,’ Kathy replied with strength.

‘And your patients? You’re a doctor. You must feel the burden of your patients?’

Kathy nodded, perhaps a little less firmly.

Fern leaned in, her expression intensifying. ‘And your children? You have three.’

At this, Kathy, still maintaining eye contact, merely blinked. From where I was sitting, I could see the slow rise and fall of her throat as she swallowed, the long, controlled exhalation of breath.

Fern reached out to lay a hand on her ankle. ‘Of course, every woman who comes here must not only shed those things, she must also bring something of value. In Kathy here we have a distinguished medic. You have plans for a medicine garden, am I right?’

Kathy’s face brightened again, and I think it was then that I knew exactly what Fern’s gift was: she understood people. She knew how to make them believe in their own worth.

‘I hope we can,’ Kathy said, falteringly, ‘as much as is humanly possible, be pharmaceutical-free. We can grow most of what we need right here in the gardens! Garlic, valerian, sage – there are so many real alternatives to conventional medicine. Our bodies don’t need all those chemicals. We can heal ourselves.’

Fern nodded, then turned to Regine, her fellow American. ‘Meditation is part of that process, isn’t it, Regine?’

Regine mirrored Fern’s earlier gesture, laying a hand over her heart. She idolised Fern, it was clear in the way she even aped her code of dress, albeit less elegantly, and despite their obvious differences in colour and background they were cut from a similar cloth. They had history, having travelled together via India, and from the outset Regine never missed an opportunity to bring attention to this special bond. I wondered if she was attempting to use their previous connection to position herself as a close aide. ‘As you know, Fern,’ she said, ‘from our experiences together in the East, my teachings in the arts of yoga and meditation are what I have to bring. The healing benefits of these practices can be transformational. And as for limpets,’ she continued, in an accent somewhat coarser than Fern’s, ‘I left them all behind in Long Island.’

Fern pressed her palms together again, a symbol of her approval. ‘Susan?’ she said, moving along. I felt my hands begin to sweat, knowing that soon the question would fall to me.

Susan’s expression was momentarily crestfallen, but then she spoke quickly and eloquently, as though she feared getting it wrong would see her ejected from the chosen few. ‘My limpets are my bourgeois parents and their expectations of me. My limpets are the husband they have imagined for me, and the grandchildren they would have me birth for them. But I don’t have any skills—’ she starts to say, her face crumpling.

Still cross-legged, Fern reached out to embrace her. ‘You are young,’ Fern said, ‘and for these first two years you’ll be our apprentice. You’ll shadow us in our work. And you’ll welcome new sisters and show them the way.’

Susan’s relief poured from her, and I thought she looked as charming as a woodland nymph, with her long unbrushed hair and hippy robe, free of make-up or artifice.

‘Brenda?’ Fern asked finally, and I flinched at the sound of my own name, the conventional consonants of it, its internal rhyme with tend and fend and end and penned. Had I been predestined to minister to the needs of others my entire life, by the poetics of my name alone?

‘I have no one,’ I replied, and for the first time since my father had died the year before I felt no pain in the truth of it. ‘I am limpet-free.’

Fern laughed with warmth, and rewarded me with her pressed-together palms. ‘Tell me,’ she said now, addressing us all, ‘what rules, or codes, would you have me write on this piece of paper?’

‘May we change our names?’ I asked, though I knew it wasn’t what she was asking.

She glanced around the group. ‘If a woman is prepared to shed her limpets, I don’t see why she shouldn’t shed her name too.’ Her pen hovered over the paper. ‘What would you call yourself, Brenda?’

Without conscious thought, my mind’s eye conjured up a moment of almost perfect contentedness, of skipping Sunday School to pick blackberries from the churchyard hedgerow with ‘that gypsy girl’ Annie Jessop. The late autumn sun was warm on the backs of our hands as we reached for the high fruit on tiptoes, pricking our fingers on brambles and rolling our eyes at the divine sweetness of the fruit. I had liked Annie, with her gaudy gold earrings and scuffed patent shoes, but I hadn’t been allowed to keep her as my friend.

‘Bramble,’ I replied. ‘I’d like to be called Bramble.’

Fern nodded sagely and bent over her legs to write on the sheet. ‘Bramble, you have inspired our first condition. Number one: Come as yourself, whoever that may be.’ She looked up from the list, and fixed her hard gaze on me. ‘And what do you bring, Bramble?’

The intense heat of the night weighed down on me, and for a moment I was light-headed, out of myself as I allowed my gaze to drift over my fellow sisters. They all had so much to offer, and I had … what? My parents had restricted and constricted me my entire life, and now they were both dead, and I was forty years old, all alone in the world, with no real talents, with nothing to offer …

‘I have money …’ I said, and in the pause which followed I feared this was the wrong thing to say.

‘How much?’ Fern asked, her expression unchanged.

I looked around the high-ceilinged room, with its grand French doors, rotten and peeling, its walls soft with damp, and my confidence soared. ‘Enough to do up this place,’ I replied. ‘Enough to make it fit for thirty-three women.’

Something flickered across Fern’s face, and she lowered her eyes, appearing to study the backs of her hands. When she looked up again, she was smiling, her straight white teeth gleaming in the candlelight. ‘That is a fine gift, Bramble,’ she said.

And, with that smile, my life, as I know it now, began.

For a few moments Celine doesn’t move from the driver’s seat, unable to avert her gaze from the front door of this house she’s never visited – never been invited to.

That awful word plays at the back of her throat, and she realises she hasn’t yet managed to say it aloud. Dead. Delilah is dead. Still, despite all these years without seeing her mother, it seems barely possible to imagine that she is no longer alive, somewhere in the world.

Una appears in the ivy-draped doorway and on seeing Celine her face breaks wide and warm. Something in that wholehearted smile, in the abnormal scenario – the strange house, the early heat, the sweet scent of jasmine on the breeze – quite knocks the air out of Celine, and emotions rush in. She feels her face collapse as she steps out of the van, hating herself for it as Una sweeps her up in her tough little arms, just as she did when Celine was still that gawky kid who lived in the terraced house next door.

‘Hey, baby,’ Una says, pulling back to appraise her, running her hand down the contours of her cheek, her touch solid and affectionate. It’s not hard to see why Una had made such a successful police officer: she had an ease about her, a manner which suggested that all people were equal, that all would be treated even-handedly. ‘Nice to see the old rust-bucket’s still on the road,’ she say. . .