Shadow of a Doubt

by Michelle Davies

Genres: Crime Fiction

Synopsis

'Pure suspense, where past and present collide with chilling results' Erin Kelly

'A hugely entertaining, fast-paced thriller' Caz Frear

'It's a pitch-perfect blend of ghostly terror and pacey thriller' Catherine Ryan Howard

'Dark, spooky and brilliantly plotted, the perfect read for dark winter nights' Harriet Tyce

Twenty-six years ago my brother was murdered in my family home.

I was sent to a psychiatric unit for killing him.

The truth is, I didn't do it.

The whole world believed eight-year-old Cara killed her younger brother on that fateful night. But she blamed it on a paranormal entity she swears was haunting her house.

No one believed her and after two years of treatment in a psychiatric unit for delusional disorder, Cara was shunned by her remaining family and put into foster care.

Now she's being forced to return to the family home for the first time since her brother's death, but what if she's about to re-discover the evil that was lurking inside its walls?

Release date: November 12, 2020

Publisher: Orion Publishing Group

Print pages: 368

Sample

Cara must’ve fallen asleep at some point, but she can’t remember closing her eyes. She rolls over and peers at the luminous dial of her alarm clock. Telling the time is a relatively new skill and it takes a few seconds of concentration before she is sure the hands are pointing to half past midnight. Time to get up and catch Limey Stan, she grins to herself, her mind buzzing with her plan of how they are going to do it.

The early-hours temperature is mild, so she doesn’t bother to pull her robe over her nightie, nor stuff her bare feet into slippers. Yet outside it is raining. Heavily, she guesses, judging by the noise it makes pelting against her bedroom window.

Her bravado begins to wane as she creeps along the landing towards Matty’s room. Her parents’ bedroom door is firmly shut and the house is pitch-black, just the way Limey Stan likes it. Is he already downstairs, crouching in the shadows in the hallway, waiting to pounce? Shuddering from tip to toe, Cara wishes she’d included using a torch in her plan.

Matty is in such a deep sleep, it takes three attempts to rouse him. When he finally does wake, he takes one look at Cara, flips onto his front and buries his face in his pillow.

‘I know you’re scared,’ she tells him, ‘but that’s why we need to get rid of Limey Stan. So we can stop being scared.’ When he shakes his head, face still hidden, she pokes him hard in the back with her finger. ‘Come on, it’ll be an adventure. Isn’t that what the Power Rangers do? Fight the nasty men and have adventures?’

Referencing her little brother’s favourite TV show does the trick and a few minutes later, after a heart-pounding dash downstairs and along the hallway where Limey Stan usually prowls, the children have hidden themselves behind the full-length curtains in the front room.

‘Did you see him?’ Matty asks her breathlessly as they assume their places. He’s not heard Limey Stan speak yet, let alone caught a glimpse of him. Cara wakes him up whenever Limey Stan wakes her, but by the time Matty gets to the top of the stairs, to her frustration, he’s always gone.

‘No, he’s not here yet.’

But he will be, soon, and when Matty sees him too, everyone will know she is telling the truth about what’s been disturbing her night-times for the past few months.

Boredom quickly sets in while they wait for him to materialise, however. Then Matty, who is only six, gets the giggles and his entire body begins to shake, making the curtain ripple. Cara tries to be annoyed that he’s not taking it seriously, but secretly she welcomes the break in tension and soon she’s giggling uncontrollably too and the two of them are shaking so much, they wind themselves in the folds in the curtain. Plunged into even deeper darkness, Matty stops laughing and begins to panic.

‘I’m stuck.’

Cara blindly reaches forward until she makes contact with her little brother’s familiar form. She pulls at the fabric that’s now wrapped tightly around him, but as she does, she hears a creak in the hallway next door, quickly followed by another.

She yelps. ‘I can hear him, he’s coming!’

Frantic now, Cara pulls at the curtain again, but her hands are sweaty and Matty’s writhing too much.

‘Stay still,’ she implores him. ‘I can’t get it off if you don’t stop moving.’

But as he finally obeys, she senses they are not alone in the room. She swears she hears breathing and it’s getting louder.

‘It’s Limey Stan,’ she wails. ‘He’s going to get us!’

Matty screams, but the curtain muffles the sound. Cara tries to make another grab for her brother, but it’s too late.

Limey Stan has beaten her to it.

The Brimsdown Arms isn’t the closest pub to our office, but it holds the distinction of being the nicest in the vicinity. Fashionably muted grey walls, an array of absurdly named craft beers and scrubbed wooden tables large enough to seat all eleven of us. Towards the end of the evening, if they’ve been vacated in time, we’ll migrate to the two leather sofas at the back of the room, grateful to lower our wearied selves into their bowed cushions.

Invariably, someone will doze off, alcohol limit breached, and phones will be whipped out to enshrine their slack-mouthed inebriation on social media. For this reason, I make sure it’s never me who drinks too much, sticking to vodka tonic and alternating with fizzy water whenever it’s my turn to go to the bar.

Tonight, the sofas are still taken and I’m sandwiched at a table between Donna, one pay grade above me and hardwired to never let me forget it, and Jeannie, head of our department and one of the most generous people I know. She buys the first round without fail every Friday after work and never minds when the same three people peel off home immediately after their free glass of whatever is drained.

She’s telling me about her plans for the weekend, but I’m struggling to hear what she’s saying over the music blasting from the speaker above our table. Earlier, we’d asked the manager to lower the volume, but he claimed it was designed to rise and fall with the pitch of customers’ voices and turning it off would mean shutting down the pub’s entire music system. We decided to test his theory and lower it ourselves by whispering for five minutes, but then Leo, the office junior, began to snigger and the spread of laughter around the table sent the decibel level soaring again and that’s where it’s remained.

As I strain to hear Jeannie, someone reaches between us to grab the empty glasses littering the table and I jolt as they lean a little too heavily against my shoulder for it to be accidental. My colleagues’ faces break into sly, knowing grins and immediately I know it’s him, the new bartender I went home with last week and whose name doesn’t easily spring to mind.

Donna theatrically digs me in the ribs. ‘Aren’t you going to say hello?’ she hollers above the music.

I shrug non-committally but do steal a glance up at him, then wish I hadn’t. He’s younger than I recall, his skin gloriously unmarked by any signs of creeping age, and I’ll admit I’m taken aback: how could I not have noticed how boyish he was? He’s really not my type. Then my memory crudely reminds me that our interaction was too urgent to allow for lingering looks, and my face reddens.

He stares down at me, waiting, a hank of messy blond hair flopping over his forehead. Acutely aware everyone’s watching us, I flash him a smile, which he returns, then I beckon him closer. His eyes light up, until I speak.

‘You’ve missed one.’

‘What?’

‘That one over there.’

I point across the table to the empty pint glass next to Leo, who has reached the swaying-in-his-seat stage of drunkenness.

My one-night stand snatches the glass up, his cheeks now a vivid shade of crimson to match mine, and he disappears into the crowd in the direction of the bar.

A couple of the others laugh at his retreating back, but Donna clicks her tongue disapprovingly. ‘You could’ve been nicer to him, Cara.’ Her voice is still raised to counter the music.

Jeannie catches the comment and leans across me to respond, forcing me to sit back in my seat. ‘Why should she?’

‘Yes, why should I?’ I mirror.

‘Because you went home with him last week,’ Donna bristles.

‘So?’ Jeannie shrugs. ‘This is 2019, not 1950. Not every sexual encounter has to lead to something. No need to get your knickers in a twist if Cara’s not bothered.’

It’s a paper cut of a remark, designed to sting. We both know Donna is unhealthily invested in my private life, regularly making it the focus of office chat, and I’ve complained to Jeannie about it more than once. Why should it matter to Donna, or anyone else, that I’m thirty-four and still single and content to be so? Jeannie gets it, and has cautioned Donna to stop prying, but it hasn’t deterred her. Then again, it hasn’t deterred me either, hence last week’s liaison after closing time.

‘But sleeping around is so dangerous. She might catch something.’ Donna is discussing me as though I’m not here. ‘Not that I’m saying you’ve got an STD,’ she adds, finally addressing me. ‘But you know what I mean.’

I bite back a retort. She makes it sound as though I’m with a different man every night, when the bartender is the first person I’ve slept with in three months. I would never share these simple truths with Donna, or even Jeannie, but I’m usually more discerning about whose bed I get into – the bartender is definitely the lower end of my age limit. I also have a rule, which Jeannie is aware of, never to have sex with anyone who might want to see me again afterwards. This is not the act of self-preservation people may assume – be the dumper, not the dumpee – I just struggle to entertain what a serious relationship entails and I’ve got so used to being on my own that I can’t imagine committing to someone long-term. Being loved unstintingly for years on end is a concept I am unfamiliar with.

‘I’m sure Cara is being sensible,’ says Jeannie, catching my eye and smiling. ‘We’ve talked about this before, Donna. Marriage isn’t for everyone.’

Donna scowls. She finds it impossible to believe I don’t want to settle down and that no relationship is worth relinquishing the privacy and lack of intrusion that being on my own gives me. She and ‘my Martin’ met at school, were married at twenty-two and had three children by the time she was my age. The way she talks about her husband though, I’m not sure she even likes him any more, let alone loves him. But broach the idea of them separating and you’ll get short shrift and a lecture on marriage vows being unbreakable.

‘Maybe if you seriously changed the way you look you’d attract a better standard of man,’ Donna sighs, washing down the insult with the dregs in her glass.

‘You think I should have plastic surgery?’ I laugh.

She eye-rolls as she reaches across the table for the bottle of wine in the ice bucket, then grimaces when she realises it’s empty. She plonks it back in the bucket neck-first, then hollers across the table at the others that it’s someone else’s round.

‘I doubt you could afford it on your wage, but that’s not what I meant,’ she says. ‘Your face is fine, but I think you should grow your hair long and wear more make-up. A pixie crop might be trendy, but it isn’t very feminine.’

She’s so drunk now it comes out as ‘femininny’. Reflexively, I fold my right hand over the nape of my neck, where the shortest hairs taper to a velveteen point.

‘I like my hair this length and, besides, you were telling me only three –’ I release my hand to check my watch to be sure, and am surprised to see it’s nearly ten ‘– actually, four hours ago as we left the office that you like the way I do my eyeliner. You even asked me to show you how I flick it up at the ends.’

I’m baiting Donna into continuing our quarrel because it’s a variation of the same one we have every Friday night and not to have it would be weird. However irritating she might be, and however much she crosses the line with my personal life, I do find a strange comfort in the repetition of how we are with each other and the way we bicker. I suppose it’s because routine is something I cleave to and have done for years. Having your life turned upside down as a child can do that to a person.

Jeannie leans across me again.

‘Give it a rest, Donna. If I had my time again, I wouldn’t rush to settle down either. I’d have kept my options open too.’ She looks over at the bartender, who’s now serving someone. ‘Are you sure you don’t want a repeat performance with that one though? He’s lovely-looking.’

‘He’s way too young; don’t encourage her!’ Donna drunkenly shouts.

I don’t respond to either of them. I can’t. Their physical proximity is starting to make me feel hemmed in: their arms are pressed solidly against mine and I don’t like it. It’s overbearing, too intimate. I tense my body to prevent myself elbowing them off me, because I don’t want to cause a scene. The stark physicality of one-night stands I can cope with, affectionate embraces and touching I can’t.

They continue chatting, seemingly unaware of my discomfort, and I’ve just reached the point where I’m about to jump to my feet to escape their confinement when I receive an unexpected text. Unexpected because the people who usually text me are all seated at the table. I feel the message before I see it, in the vibration of my mobile in my handbag rammed between my feet beneath the table.

Grateful for the excuse to move, I reach down and rummage blindly in my bag, lifting out the phone just as the screen goes dark again, but not before I see what the text says. The words are succinct, the tone brisk – yet the emotional impact of them combined is so colossal it punches the breath from my lungs.

I scrabble to activate the screen again, my heart thudding so frantically it’s a wonder Donna and Jeannie can’t hear it. I read the text again and the clamour of the pub recedes to a low muffle as I try to take in the news that I am unutterably shocked to receive.

My mother is dead.

The text isn’t from anyone in my contacts. Then again, it wouldn’t be. The people I count as friends and associates these days don’t know my mum. But this person does, right down to the last minute of her life.

CARA, YOUR MUM DIED AT 12.33 TODAY. WE THOUGHT YOU SHOULD KNOW. KAREN.

I grip the phone tightly, a necessary anchor as my thoughts clamber over themselves to be heard. Mum’s dead? How? Was it expected, sudden … even planned?

Did she die at the house?

Jeannie and Donna have turned away to talk to the others and I am grateful to be ignored. Light-headed, I check the text again, lifting the phone up to my face for a better view, but the wording hasn’t changed. My mum is dead and has been for almost ten hours.

Illuminated against the backdrop of the dimly lit pub, the text glares back at me, challenging me to disbelieve it. And I do. I just don’t get how she can be dead: she is – was – no age at all. Mentally, I calculate exactly how old. If I’m thirty-four now and she had me at twenty-seven, that would make her sixty-one. That’s relatively young still, isn’t it?

Jeannie nudges me. ‘You okay?’ she asks, eyeing my phone. I flip it over in my hand so she can’t see the screen. ‘You’ve gone really pale.’

‘I’m fine.’ I do a passable impression of smiling, then rise to my feet. ‘I need the loo. I’ll be back in a minute.’

I take my phone with me and push through the throng towards the toilets. There is a queue outside the ladies’ and I recognise the woman at its rear as someone from our firm’s marketing team, but she doesn’t acknowledge me as I slot in behind her. I don’t merit her attention because I’m ‘only’ in accounts, but for once I don’t mind being snubbed. I can’t make small talk now, not when my mind is racing at a million miles an hour and my pulse is matching it step for step.

Mum died and I wasn’t there.

I should’ve guessed Karen would be the one to tell me. My father aside, she was the person Mum was closest to. Sisters born only eighteen months apart, they bought houses in the next street from one another and had their children around the same time so they could raise them together. Unless Mum had remarried, I expect Auntie Karen was with her at the end, holding her hand until the last … unless, it hits me, her death really was sudden and no one was. The thought of Mum being alone like that makes my knees buckle and I stumble into the marketing woman, who shoots me a look over her shoulder. I mumble an apology, blaming it on the heeled boots I’m wearing. She probably thinks I’m drunk and I’m happy to let her.

A few minutes later, it’s my turn for an empty cubicle. I shut the door with a bang and rest my forehead against the sign on the back of it advertising the pub’s Christmas menu, even though it’s still only mid-October. I let out a sob, then another, but my eyes remain dry. I’ve shed so many tears for my mum over the past two decades that now, when she’s finally deserving of them, there are none to give.

Our estrangement was her doing. She made the decision, along with my dad, to pretend I didn’t exist. I read somewhere once that on a person’s deathbed his or her overriding regret isn’t failing to land their dream job, own their own house or earn enough money, it’s losing contact with loved ones. Did Mum, in her dying moments, wish we’d reconciled? My heart steels a fraction as I count up the years I’ve been on my own and I wonder if it’s too much to hope she was bereft that we hadn’t.

I peel myself away from the door, lower the toilet lid and gingerly sit down. Cradling my phone in both hands, I wonder how to answer my aunt’s messages. Does she even expect me to? The lack of warmth suggests she might not, nor are there any ‘hope you’re well’ or ‘take care’ platitudes I can boomerang back. Then again, I silently scold myself, she’s hardly going to be concerned about niceties after her sister’s died and I won’t have been the only relative she’d have had to break the news to, which in itself gives me pause. I wonder where I ranked on her list of people to contact. It’s probably too much to hope that I might’ve been first, and the time lapse would suggest not.

I try to formulate a response, my fingers hovering over the keypad, but I keep coming up blank. Calling my aunt is out of the question, I decide – because what do you say to someone you haven’t seen or spoken to in twenty-five years?

The last memory I have of Auntie Karen is standing on the front doorstep of our house with her arm around Mum’s shoulders as she sobbed, convincing her that my departure was for the best. That left Dad to walk beside me as they rolled me away; I can still hear his voice breaking as he asked the doctor whether the restraints pinning me to the stretcher were really necessary. I shall also never forget how his face sagged with despair when they lifted me into the back of the ambulance and his fingers were wrenched from mine. It was the last time we ever held hands.

Suddenly I’m angry. Screw Auntie Karen and what she said that day. If she hadn’t stuck her oar in, filling my parents’ ears with poison, my life would’ve turned out differently. I wouldn’t be hiding in a pub toilet in Colchester, slightly tipsy and devastated to find out my mum is dead – I would be at home in Heldean with my cousins, raising a glass to her memory and choosing which songs to play at her funeral.

There’s a bang on the cubicle door.

‘What are you doing in there?’ a woman shouts, an edge to her voice. ‘People are waiting out here and you’ve been in there ages.’

I look at the time on my phone and I’m startled to see half an hour has passed since I received the first text.

I hear another voice, this one familiar.

‘Cara? Are you in here?’ Jeannie calls out.

‘Is that your friend in there? Tell her to get a bloody move on.’

Knuckles rap softly on the cubicle door. ‘Cara? Are you okay?’

Rising to my feet, I slip my phone into my trouser pocket and open the door. One look at Jeannie’s concerned expression and I fall helplessly into her arms. Still the tears won’t come, but I howl as though my heart is breaking – which I think it might be.

Jeannie’s voice rings in my ear. ‘Christ, what’s happened?’

I can’t find the words.

‘Cara, tell me what’s wrong.’

Eventually, I lift my head from my boss’s shoulder. The women waiting in line have melted back to a respectable distance.

‘It’s my mum,’ I stutter. ‘She died today. I just found out.’

Jeannie’s mouth falls opens in shock and a rumble of sympathy reverberates among the women watching us.

‘Oh, Cara, I’m so sorry.’ Jeannie’s eyes brim easily with the tears that mine can’t produce. ‘Was it sudden?’

I don’t want to admit I haven’t a clue, so I lie and say yes.

‘Let’s get you out of here. With a bit of luck, we can get you on a train to Morecambe tonight.’

That pulls me up short. ‘Morecambe?’

‘To be with your dad.’

Her comment baffles me, because Dad’s been dead for almost two decades. He was killed in a car accident not long before my sixteenth birthday.

Then the penny drops.

‘I don’t mean Anne,’ I say quietly.

Now Jeannie is confused. ‘I thought that was her name?’

She’s heard me mention Anne and has assumed she’s my mum. I’ve never told anyone at work what I tell Jeannie next.

‘Anne’s my foster mum. It’s my real mum who’s died.’

Jeannie stares at me, palpably stunned. One of the women in the queue has reached bursting point and squeezes past us apologetically to use my vacated cubicle. This propels Jeannie into taking my hand and leading me outside into the corridor separating the toilets from the rest of the pub. It’s busy, with people going back and forth, but there’s a quiet spot at the end, by the fire exit. As we stand there, I feel a draught sneaking under the door and it’s a reminder that while the pub is warm enough for us to shed our layers down to our shirtsleeves, outside autumn’s making its mark.

I can see Jeannie is brimming with questions for me, but she’s astute enough to realise I’m in no state to be forthcoming right now, so she sticks to the practicalities a situation like this requires.

‘Where does – did – your mum live?’ she asks.

‘Heldean, on the Herts–Essex border.’

She frowns. ‘That’s about an hour away, if I’m thinking of the right place. Maybe we could get you a taxi there. It’ll cost, but it’ll be quicker than going by train at this hour.’

I shake my head. ‘I’m not going back there.’

‘Oh, Cara, I know this must be a huge shock, but are you sure? Who let you know that she died?’

‘My aunt, but she won’t want me turning up.’

‘It’s not up to her – she was your mum,’ she says fiercely. ‘If you want to go back to pay your respects, she can’t stop you.’

I feel a surge of affection for Jeannie for saying that. She doesn’t have children of her own – never could, she’ll cheerfully tell anyone impertinent enough to ask – and instead she helms our office like the mother hen she never had the chance to be. She cheers on our triumphs, counsels our failures, disciplines us when we step out of line and never for a second do we doubt she cares. I’ve often thought she’d make a great foster carer, but I fear the boards which approve them might not be enlightened enough to look past the sheath-like blouses, skyscraper stilettos and eighties-era make-up to see what a remarkable person she is.

‘I honestly don’t think I could face it,’ I say, which is an understatement and a half.

Jeannie looks pained on my behalf. ‘When was the last time you saw your mum?’

I hesitate. If I’m honest with her, it means risking her finding out my real identity.

It was decided early on, while I was still in the Peachick, that I should keep my first name because the distress of adopting a new one might impede my recovery. It’s perhaps the only thing I am grateful to the Peachick for. Actually, that’s not entirely true. Two years locked up in that hospital taught me the art of being still – when everything around you is chaotic and frightening and loud, when the adults around you are strangers you can’t trust, learning how to quiet yourself so you go unnoticed is quite the skill and one I still use to great effect.

But while I stayed as Cara, I changed my surname from ­Belling to Marshall, which I plucked from a book. The day I left foster care, I vowed never to reveal to another living soul who I used to be – why should I go through life being judged for what people thought was the truth about me, and if they looked me up online, they would only assume the worst. Cara Belling and the events of July 1994 have their own Wikipedia entry.

Yet this news about my mum has broken me in a way I could never have predicted. I feel alone and lost again in the same way I did coming round my first morning in the Peachick and wondering why my parents had put me there. A dedicated psychiatric unit for children and adolescents, it is a place I remember mostly for its outward cheeriness – every wall was covered in artwork and murals, as though that might be enough to distract us from where we were. It didn’t work.

‘Cara?’

Jeannie startles me from my reverie. She’s only a few years younger than Mum was and is gazing at me with such tenderness that suddenly I decide I should tell her at least some of the truth. I need to tell someone.

‘The last time I saw my mum I was nine years old. Once I was in foster care, I never saw or spoke to her again.’

The kettle is almost at boiling point, the sound of gurgling water reaching its crescendo. Karen stares at it groggily. She can’t remember coming into the kitchen to switch it on or why she has – the time for soothing cups of tea has long passed and everyone in the living room is on either red wine or neat spirits now. None of them has requested another hot drink and neither does she want one. She reaches over and switches the kettle off and as it is silenced, she hears her husband, Gary, let out a peal of laughter in the next room, which sets them all off.

The sound of their merriment rakes at her insides like a fork scraping a plate and she wishes they would leave. She’d been happy to see them when she arrived back from the hospice and was grateful for the fierce embraces and salving words and the tears of solidarity for her loss, but already she can sense their veils of sadness beginning to lift. Only by a fraction, and abetted by the alcohol, but enough to make her feel as though she i. . .