Don't Look Back Read online

  Henry was staring blankly at the ceiling from the single bed that had replaced the bunk beds he’d shared with Jacob. He sat up as Adam entered. Suppressing an impulse to look away from the sadness in his son’s eyes, Adam asked, “What are you doing?”

  Henry shrugged.

  “Do you want to watch a film?”

  “No thanks.”

  “Are you sure? We can watch whatever you want.”

  “There’s nothing I want to watch.”

  Adam hid his own sadness with a pitiful attempt at a smile. Henry and Jacob had liked nothing better than to slob out in front a movie with him. “I’ll be downstairs if you change your mind.” He left quickly. The bedroom made him uncomfortable. It wasn’t the things he saw in there that hurt him the most. It was the things he didn’t see – the blank wall spaces that had been occupied by Jacob’s Star Wars posters, the empty drawers that had been filled with Jacob’s clothes.

  The bottom of the stairs was doused in gloom. The glass door had been replaced by a solid wooden one. The workman who fitted it had warned that the hallway would be like the black hole of Calcutta if they put in a windowless door, but Adam would rather have had no door at all than one with even a square inch of glass in it.

  Ella was chopping vegetables in the cramped dining kitchen at the rear of the house. She looked at Adam as he entered. His expression prompted her to pick up a glass and swallow the last of the wine in it. “Do you want a glass?” she asked, pouring herself another.

  Adam nodded. He sipped his drink, staring out of the window at a little walled yard that had lost all but a tiny triangle of early evening sun. “I’m starting to wonder if I’ll ever be able to write another word.”

  “Of course you will. You just need to–”

  “To what?” interrupted Adam. “To stop thinking about what happened? That’s all I ever think about. Every second of every day it’s the same question – what if I hadn’t gone back upstairs? Would Jacob still–”

  Ella’s voice sharpened with weariness. “Stop it, Adam. Just stop it.” A chasm of silence opened up between them. Eventually she sighed and said, “What if the accident had happened while we were fooling around in the study? What if I hadn’t gone out? What if we’d replaced that fucking door years ago? We can carry on asking ourselves questions forever, but we’ll never find the answers because there’s no one to blame. It was just something that happened.”

  “Just something that happened,” Adam echoed. He shook his head as if he couldn’t accept that.

  Ella laid a hand on his back, but he moved away from her into the living room. He slumped into an armchair and mindlessly channel-surfed. After a while, Ella called him and Henry into the kitchen to eat. They sat around the table, not looking at each other or the empty chair where Jacob had always sat.

  “I was thinking we could go to the Natural History Museum tomorrow,” said Ella. “There’s a new dinosaur exhibition.”

  Adam and Henry were silent. The Natural History Museum had been one of Jacob’s favourite places.

  “I really think it would be good for us,” persisted Ella.

  “I’ve got homework,” said Henry.

  Ella looked at him sceptically. “It’s the summer holidays.”

  He avoided her gaze. “Can I leave the table, please?”

  “No you–”

  “Yes,” broke in Adam.

  Henry pushed back his chair and headed for the stairs. Ella frowned at Adam, her expression more upset than angry.

  “He’s not ready,” said Adam. “Neither am I.”

  He returned to the living room and blanked his mind with the TV again. Ella stretched out on the sofa. She stared at Adam as if trying to make her mind up about something. Sighing softly, she picked up a newspaper.

  After skimming over the headlines, she said, “Hey, listen to this. Haunted house seeks new occupants. Fenton House is a stunning Gothic mansion on the Cornish Lizard Peninsula. It stands in several acres of gardens commanding breath-taking views of The English Channel. Nestling in a nearby valley is the fishing village of Treworder which barely appears to have changed since the days of pirates and smugglers. Think this sounds like a romantic idyll beyond the reach of all but the rich and famous? Well think again because it can all be yours for the princely sum of absolutely nothing! The house’s owner, Rozen Trehearne, 79, has placed an advertisement in a national newspaper inviting potential tenants to apply through an online questionnaire. A shortlist will be drawn up, from which one lucky applicant will be chosen to live rent-free in Fenton House. Sounds too good to be true, right? Well it is! According to Miss Trehearne the winner will have to share Fenton House with some otherworldly residents. The identities of these residents are unknown, but the tragic history of Fenton House has long been a source of spooky stories. In 1920 the house’s original owner, reclusive industrialist Walter Lewarne, hanged himself from its highest turret. His body dangled there for days until villagers spotted crows and gulls feasting on it. In 1996, the house’s then inhabitants, George Trehearne, his wife Sofia and their young daughter Heloise disappeared without a trace. The mystery was a national sensation. There were months of speculation in the newspapers about what happened to the family, but the mystery remains unsolved to this day.” Ella looked over the paper at Adam. “How bonkers is that?”

  “It’s got to be some sort of joke.”

  “I don’t think so. There’s a web address here.” A little twinkle came into Ella’s eyes. “Do you think we should apply?”

  Adam was assaulted by an image of Jacob grinning at him with that same twinkle in his eyes. Jacob’s voice seemed to echo in his ears, Will you wrestle with us, Dad? Adam rose abruptly from the armchair. “I’m going for a walk.”

  He hurried from the room, shoved his feet into trainers and half-ran through the porch. He could hardly bring himself to breathe the air in that small space. They’d had the tiled floor torn up and replaced, but still a bitter tang of blood seemed to linger like a smell nothing could get rid of. He pounded the streets of Walthamstow, head down, not feeling the warmth of the sun or noticing the sounds of life going on around him. The city that had once made him feel so alive seemed as cold and dead as his house.

  Chapter 3

  It was dark when Adam returned home. He padded upstairs, hoping Ella was asleep. He didn’t want to talk, he just wanted to lie down and sleep. Not that sleep provided much respite. Rarely a night went by when he didn’t wake reeling from a dream of Jacob. A sound caught his ear – a low sobbing. He quietly opened Henry’s bedroom door. Henry’s slim body was twisted into his duvet. He was clutching something to himself. Adam didn’t need to look closer to know it was a stuffed bunny that had used to live in Jacob’s bed. Just as he didn’t need to look closer to know Henry was crying in his sleep. It had started after the funeral. Sometimes it went on for an hour or so. Others it continued all night. They’d taken Henry to a grief counsellor, but it made no difference. At first the heart-breaking sound had kept Adam and Ella awake. After a while, Ella had developed the capacity to zone out of it. But not Adam. Night after night, he lay awake listening to it. He’d tried wearing earplugs, but they didn’t keep out the pain of knowing his son was in distress. The only thing that allowed him to blank his mind to that was physical exhaustion. So now every evening he would walk until he reached the point where sheer fatigue carried him off to sleep.

  The house was quiet when it should be noisy and noisy when it should be quiet. Nothing there made sense anymore. Adam stripped off his sweaty clothes, dumped them in the dirty-washing basket and headed for bed. As he crept under the duvet, Ella switched on her bedside lamp.

  “Sorry, I tried not to wake you,” said Adam.

  “I wasn’t asleep. We need to talk.”

  “I’m tired.”

  “So am I, but there’s something I have to say this to you.”

  Henry’s sobs filtered through the wall, each one knotting Adam’s stomach tighter. If he didn’t go to sleep
now, he knew he would move past exhaustion into a hinterland of gritty-eyed sleepless misery. But he knew too from the tone of Ella’s voice that she wouldn’t take no for an answer. He folded his arms and waited for her to continue.

  “I think we should put the house on the market,” she said.

  “We’ve already talked about this, Ella. We can’t afford to.”

  “Why not? We could move into rented accommodation.”

  “And how would we pay the rent?”

  “We can use the equity.”

  Adam hissed through his nostrils. “Why don’t I just chuck our money down a drain?”

  “If you don’t start writing again, we won’t be able to pay the mortgage and we’ll end up losing the house anyway.”

  Adam winced. “I will start writing again.”

  “That’s not what you said earlier. You said you were starting to wonder whether you’d ever be able to write another word.”

  “And you replied, Of course you will.”

  “Yes, but maybe it will take a change to make it happen.”

  Adam considered these words momentarily. “Do you remember why we bought this place? You wanted to bring up the boys in a proper home. If we sell it, we’ll probably never get back on the ladder. Not in London.”

  “Perhaps you’re right. I don’t know. I do know something has to change.” Ella glanced towards Henry’s room. “For all of our sakes.”

  They lay silent, side-by-side but not touching, as they did every night now.

  “Do you know what I think about every day?” Ella said suddenly. “A millimetre to the left and we would have lost both our sons.”

  She turned off the light and rolled her back to Adam. He thought about reaching for her, but it was like he’d forgotten how to. He stared at the darkness, listening and trying not to listen to Henry. The sound was as relentless as tinnitus. Giving up on sleep, he slid out of bed and went into the study. He booted up his computer and plugged in headphones. He exhaled in relief as music drowned out the sobs. With a familiar sense of dread, he opened the manuscript’s Word file. His eyes played back and forth over the hated sentence in smaller and smaller movements until they were locked on one word – blood. In a dance he’d gone through countless times, he stabbed a finger at the ‘backspace’ button, but stopped before the sentence was fully deleted and rapidly retyped the words. They existed fixed in a moment when Jacob was still alive. Sometimes during the hours of staring at them, Adam pretended he still existed in that moment too. He imagined Jacob and Henry charging into the study. He pictured himself gathering them up in his arms, attacking their faces with kisses and feigning agony as they wrestled him to the carpet.

  Tiredness and grief stung Adam’s eyes. He closed the manuscript and removed the headphones. The sobs had stopped, but there was no point returning to bed. He was way beyond sleep. He headed downstairs and reached for the TV remote, but hesitated as his gaze came to rest on the newspaper. He picked it up and read the article about Fenton House. After a thoughtful pause, he returned to the study and typed the web address provided into the browser. It took him to a page that instructed him to ‘Please answer the questions below in as much detail as possible.’, then warned him that ‘If you provide false information, you will be disqualified from the selection process.’ The brusque paragraph was signed ‘Niall Mabyn, Chief Executive, Personal Legal Services, Mabyn & Moon LLP.’

  A bemused look came over Adam as he read the first question.

  1: What is your favourite colour?

  What sort of infantile question was that? ‘I don’t have one.’ he typed. His bemusement intensified at the next question.

  2: Do you bathe/shower every day?

  ‘If possible.’ he answered curtly, but as he worked his way down the list he found himself enjoying the distraction and responding in more detail.

  3: Do you cover your mouth when you cough?

  Answer: Yes. I’m a bit of a germaphobe.

  4: Do you consider yourself a day or night person?

  Answer: Neither. I like/dislike both equally depending on my mood and what’s going on.

  5: Do you own a mobile phone?

  Answer: I must be one of the last people in the world not to own a mobile phone.

  6: Do you own a microwave oven?

  Answer: We did, but it broke and we haven’t found the need to replace it.

  7: Do you eat with your mouth open?

  Answer: I try not to – my parents taught me it was bad manners.

  8: Do you eat ethnic food?

  Answer: If by ‘ethnic’ you mean Indian, Chinese etc, then yes I do. I love a really hot curry.

  9: Do you like cake?

  Answer: Doesn’t everyone? My favourite is Victoria sponge.

  10: How often do you vacuum and dust your home?

  Answer: Whenever necessary. Usually once or twice a week.

  11: Do you feed the birds in your garden/yard/local park?

  Answer: My wife Ella and I put food out on a bird table. Our son Henry enjoys feeding the ducks in the park.

  12: Do you prefer cats or dogs?

  Answer: I like them both the same, except for the cat that kills birds in our yard.

  13: Do you think it’s possible for someone to disappear without a trace?

  Adam frowned at the final question. It was the only one that had any obvious bearing on the newspaper article and it struck him as being a little sinister. He mulled it over before answering ‘In today’s world of forensic science and practically limitless forms of communication I don’t think so.’ As a tongue-in-cheek afterthought, he added ‘More’s the pity. I sometimes feel as if I would like to do just that.’

  At the end of the questionnaire there was a separate section for personal particulars – name, age, gender, ethnicity, nationality, marital status, children, education, occupation, address etc. Adam provided the required information and read through his answers before hitting the submit button. The mostly nonsensical content of the questionnaire had strengthened his initial suspicion that this was an elaborate hoax – perhaps some sort of reality TV set-up.

  He Googled Mabyn and Moon. A link took him to a website offering ‘...a full range of services in family, personal and business law’. There was a telephone number and an address in Helston, Cornwall.

  An email alert flashed up. He navigated to his inbox. The email was from Mabyn and Moon – ‘RE: Fenton House questionnaire’. His eyebrows lifted. Wow, that was quick. Was someone sitting up all night responding to applications? He doubted it. More likely it was an automated response.

  ‘Dear Mr Piper,’ began the email. ‘I’m pleased to inform you that you have made the shortlist of potential tenants. You and your wife and child are invited to attend an interview at Boscarne Cottage, Treworder on Friday 29thJuly at 11:00 AM. Should you fail to attend, your application will be rendered null and void. Please print out this letter and present it upon arrival. Miss Trehearne and I look forward to meeting you. Yours sincerely, Niall Mabyn.’

  The email looked believable enough, but Adam still wasn’t convinced. No one effectively gave away a house of any kind, let alone one worth millions. There had to be a catch other than the supposed ghostly residents. Didn’t there?

  He printed off the letter, took it to the bedroom and tapped Ella awake.

  “What is it?” she asked groggily, squinting at the alarm clock. “I’ve got to be up for work in a few hours.”

  “I applied for that house.”

  “What house?”

  “The one in the newspaper. We’re on the shortlist. Here, read this.”

  Adam proffered the printout to Ella. She switched on her bedside lamp. “I’ve been thinking about what you said,” he told her as she read the letter. “Maybe you’re right, perhaps we need a change of scenery.”

  “A haunted house wasn’t quite what I had in mind.”

  “Don’t tell me you believe in ghosts.”

  “Well no, not really, but I’m not sure
I like the idea of living in a house where a family vanished.”

  “That was over twenty years ago. Other people must have lived in Fenton House since then and no one else has vanished.”

  “As far as you know.”

  “This could be perfect for us, Ella. If it’s for real that is.”

  “What makes you think it’s not?”

  Adam told her about the questionnaire. “I mean, what a load of nonsense. It makes me wonder whether someone’s having a laugh.”

  “Actually they kind of make sense to me,” disagreed Ella. “It sounds like they’re based on someone’s likes and dislikes. Most probably Rozen Trehearne’s. Apart from the last one. That one creeps me out.”

  “Perhaps it’s meant to. They might not want anyone who’s easily spooked to apply.”

  “In that case I should steer well clear.”

  “Oh come on, you’re as tough as an old boot.”

  Ella smiled and frowned at the same time. “Is that supposed to be a compliment?”

  “No. Just the truth. You’re the only one who’s kept it together these past few months.”

  “Only because I’ve had to. Believe me I feel like breaking down every day.”

  Adam tenderly took Ella’s hand. “That’s why we need to get away. We could book a cottage for the weekend.”

  “Just the two of us?”

  Silence greeted the tentative suggestion. At first, after the accident, Adam could barely bring himself to let Henry out of his sight. Schooldays had been a torment of worry. His anxiety had eased as the months crawled by, but he still baulked at the thought of leaving Henry for so long. Looking into Ella’s eyes, though, he saw an almost desperate appeal, a fear that if they drifted much further apart they would never find their way back to each other. “Just the two of us,” he echoed. “Henry can stay with your parents. It’ll do him good. It’ll do us all good.” He tapped the letter. “Even if nothing comes of this.”

  “OK, let’s do it.”