Touched Read online

  Contents

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Also by Joanna Briscoe

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  Now

  Then: 1963

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Now

  Afterword

  Copyright

  About the Book

  A chilling, deeply creepy Hammer novella by Joanna Briscoe, author of the acclaimed, bestselling novel, Sleep With Me.

  Rowena Crale and her family have moved from London.

  They now live in a small English village in a cottage which seems to be resisting all attempts at renovation.

  Walls ooze damp, stains come through layers of wallpaper, celings sag.

  And strange noises – voices – emanate from empty rooms.

  As Rowena struggles with the upheaval of builders while trying to be a dutiful wife and a good mother to her young children, her life starts to disintegrate.

  And then, one by one, her daughters go missing ...

  About the Author

  Joanna Briscoe is the author of Mothers and Other Lovers, Skin and the highly acclaimed Sleep With Me which was published in ten countries and adapted for ITV drama by Andrew Davies.

  She spent her very early years in ‘the village of the damned’, Letchmore Heath in Hertfordshire, the location for the celebrated 1960 film based on John Wyndham’s novel The Midwich Cuckoos – and the inspiration, too, for this Hammer novella.

  Also by Joanna Briscoe

  Mothers & Other Lovers

  Skin

  Sleep With Me

  You

  Touched

  Joanna Briscoe

  For Theodore

  with appreciation and much love

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  With many thanks to Laura Astin, Jennifer Bates, Tim Bates, Laura Bishop, Carol Briscoe, Michele Camarda, Mary Chamberlain, Gabrielle Dalton, Helen Healy, Catherine Heaney, Charlotte Mendelson, Clementine Mendelson, Elaine O’Dwyer, Kate Saunders, Louisa Saunders, Joseph Schwartz, Richard Skinner, Gillian Stern and Alison Wilkinson; and especially to Jonny Geller, Selina Walker and all at Curtis Brown and Arrow.

  NOW

  I HAVE SEEN Pollard again. I’m sure I have; or was it an illusion?

  I am certain it was Pollard’s face, on a man slowly turning his head in a cul-de-sac six streets away. That face many years on, ballooned and pouched as an ageing radish, but with the blue-grey eyes that gazed at our childhoods. How can a face be recognised in a moment after the passing of so many decades?

  I have never stopped thinking about all that Crowsley Beck brought on us, all that my sweet mother went through after we had moved there. Arthur Pollard was a big part of that. I have been looking for him all this time, even while I was scared he would find me. I think it was Pollard. I vomited shortly after I arrived home.

  THEN

  1963

  1

  THE VILLAGE GREEN of Crowsley Beck: you never did see such a sparkling run of grass. Only the flagpole socket where the children laid traps of twigs for strolling adults interrupted the green with a slot of air.

  There they were, village children marching together, boys with shorts and shining hair, girls in kilts, plaits and pleats, crossing the grass past the ducks towards the war memorial, the elm leaves laughing light. The brother and sister from the big house at the end of the village; the boys from next to the post office; and four of the Crale children.

  The Crale children: Rosemary and Jennifer Crale the twins, the boy Bob, and baby Caroline. They walked over the green on this their first Sunday in the village, bright bright against the grass. The twins: ruddy Rosemary with her hair band and red cable knit; Jennifer the angel face with her yellow plaits, her blue eyes in a bed of lashes; and their little brother in his shirt and Sunday tie. The baby slept in her perambulator like a good girl. A low-flying plane darkened the green, birds chorused, and this was surely the prettiest village in all of England. It was so exactly how a village should be that crews from the studios at Elstree came to film there.

  The other Crale child straggled behind. This was Evangeline, who was dressed as a Victorian and had rain for hair. She loitered, then dipped into the river, her lacy petticoats muddied, her pinafore greyed; she guttered in the others’ shining, blanked out by their shadows. Where the other Crales were clean with health and Jennifer was doll-beautiful, Evangeline was a grubby, transparent girl, dragging her feet and slipping away. Her face was scrawny, with eyes set too far apart. On her head bristled a dirty nylon ribbon of daisies.

  The checked frocks and short skirts stamped across the green, pushing the baby, ignoring Evangeline, and sometimes she was hardly there, though villagers stared and stared at her that first weekend. Then she appeared among the swans, drab and pale in the gnat-shade. She seemed to be talking to someone, but it was uncertain who.

  ‘Well, hello,’ said Gregory Dangerfield to the children’s mother, Rowena Crale, who stood outside her new house, number 3 The Farings, looking up at the roof with her hand on her brow like a visor, as she had seen models do.

  Her legs were on display as she stood balanced in high heels on the rubble while her builder weighed into the walls, despite the objections of the South Herts Historical Association and the Crowsley Beck Preservation Society.

  She turned, slowly, the glare making the man prickle in front of her eyes. She was nervous about meeting the villagers, wondering whether she looked too urban, too smart.

  ‘Hello?’ she said with slight enquiry. She had a neatly cut profile, her hair twisted into a high bun.

  ‘Gregory Dangerfield,’ he said, extending his hand. He was dressed in a suit for church, but his tie was loose in the heat. ‘I live over there.’

  ‘Pleased to meet you,’ she said, taking his hand after a moment’s hesitation, then blushing.

  ‘And you’re knocking the two houses together?’

  ‘Oh. Yes. Growing family.’ She smiled, appeasingly, and glanced up at the house, its many-paned windows framed by pleasant arches, its faded red brick faintly undulating with age.

  The builder, who was behind schedule and working at the weekends, carried a hod out of the front door, and Gregory nodded at him. ‘Terrible noise,’ he said.

  ‘Apologies, Mr Dangerfield,’ said the builder.

  ‘No, no, I’m not complaining. Something doesn’t want to give in there.’

  The builder said nothing, sweat beading over his face.

  ‘It doesn’t,’ he said.

  ‘Can I take a look?’ said Gregory, peering into the gloom through the open door that made the dust-swirling cottage appear like a carcass, steaming in the sun.

  ‘Oh. Yes,’ said Rowena, and she pressed her hands, which felt damp, to her skirt.

  ‘My word, this must be a stubborn blighter,’ said Gregory, tipping his head in the direction of the builder. ‘I’ve heard you working on it all week.’

  ‘You’s telling me,’ said the builder, and in the shade, his sweat rose. A hole was knocked into the plaster and brick of the wall between the two cottages, with another attempt abandoned higher up. ‘It doesn’t want to come.’

  ‘Let me have a go,’ said Gregory Dangerfield, and he folded his jacket on a chair, rol
led up his shirtsleeves, and swung a mallet at the plaster. The wall protested, groaning like a heifer. ‘I’ve barely made a mark!’ he said. ‘Come on, man. Put some back into it.’

  He picked up a chisel, swung his arms, muscles honed on two dozen summers of gully fielding, and sank the chisel into the dividing wall. It screamed, and a chunk of plaster fell off.

  A new smell met the sweat, like cat urine, or tomcat spray, seeping from stains.

  ‘Good Lord,’ said Gregory. There was a settling groaning of plaster. More damp oozed, a metallic smell overlaying the cat odour.

  ‘It can’t be done,’ said the builder, shaking his head.

  ‘I’ve never heard you say such a thing, Pollard,’ said Gregory, and took another swing. ‘Of course it can.’

  The mallet bounced with a ring off the wall, which groaned in a higher pitch. Clumps of horsehair and strands of longer tail or mane clung to rusty stains, a glimpse of brick.

  ‘Gosh,’ said Rowena, standing a few feet back in the shade and feeling faint suddenly. ‘That wall is bulging now.’

  It seemed to have become subtly swollen and shiny, as though pregnant. Like her own stomach, she thought, which had still not settled to its former shape after yet another baby. It was a trick of the light. It receded.

  ‘No, Mrs Crale. It’s not shifting,’ said Pollard the builder.

  ‘It’s an illusion caused by the heat,’ said Gregory, turning to her, and she caught his gaze. His dark brown eyes seemed to wander momentarily over her body. His hair, of the same brown, was clean-cut, soldier-short at the neck, yet there was something boyish, almost playful, to its slight spring over his brow. ‘And you’ve moved in already?’

  ‘We’ve had to,’ said Rowena, her voice a little unsteady. ‘In here and into the other cottage. It’s round the corner. It’ll be an L-shaped house I suppose, eventually. Is that what’s making this so difficult? The corner?’

  ‘No,’ said Pollard.

  ‘Let me have a look,’ said Gregory at the same time.

  He walked out of the front door that gave on to the lane beside the green and let himself in through the gate to number 2 The Farings, where a series of lodgers had lived until recently, and turned to the walls and roof. A tiny path led through a choke of shrubbery to a glimpse of a small vegetable garden and fields beyond. Behind the shrubbery, running the length of the cottages and their gardens, was his own property, the lawn leading to what was known locally as ‘the Big House’.

  The builder went to his tool bag, and Rowena stood alone. The dusty air seemed unsettled in the contrast between glare and shade, and she instinctively wanted the men to come back, or to go outside herself. There was an impression she couldn’t pin down, that the house was already inhabited. Moving in there didn’t feel like a fresh beginning; but she knew the house was overlaid with memories of all the years her mother-in-law had lived there.

  ‘The cottages are similar but not identical – they may have been built at different times. It may have been an external wall originally,’ said Gregory, with a vague show of authority that Rowena sensed was designed to calm a flustered woman. ‘Pollard will get through it.’

  ‘I do hope so. We’re all squashed in. I’m not sure it’s going to be – very big even when this is finished. My husband imagined this would have all been completed a fortnight ago.’

  ‘The old woman who lived on this side—’

  ‘My mother-in-law,’ murmured Rowena.

  ‘Ah. Makes sense now. And I’m glad to be rid of those lodgers on the other side. Did your mother-in-law keep pets?’

  ‘Not for a long time.’

  The damp in the wall seemed to be spreading now it was released. Gregory pressed his finger to it, smelled it. ‘Cat,’ he said. ‘Distinctively.’

  ‘But how?’

  ‘Who knows? A herd of kittens nesting in some boarded-up fireplace there? There’s certainly a stable’s worth of horsehair. Your wall perhaps doubles as a livestock pen. Mrs . . .?’

  ‘Oh, I’m sorry. Crale. Rowena Crale. My husband is Douglas. He will be here after church.’

  Two of Pollard’s men had arrived for a renewed battering at the wall.

  ‘It almost seems almost as though it were rotting,’ said Rowena. ‘It needs to come down.’

  Builders’ grunts followed, and the crash of three hammers chipped a piece of brick. The wall groaned, resisted, shuddered.

  ‘Dynamite,’ said Gregory, accompanying Rowena out into the sunshine. ‘Why did you use Arthur Pollard, by the way?’

  ‘Oh, my husband found him. Through a recommendation, I think. It was harder, from London. You know him. His work?’

  ‘I’m sure he’s fine. He lives in the village, but people round here tend to use other builders. Most of his employment is in Radlett, and even as far as St Albans, I understand.’

  ‘Oh. Oh dear.’

  ‘No, I’m sure his work’s fine. Villagers are lemmings. As you’ll see. Several of them do use Mrs Pollard’s kindergarten, though. You’ve been living in London?’

  ‘Yes.’ She nodded, in an abstracted fashion.

  ‘Welcome to Crowsley Beck. Twenty miles from Piccadilly Circus, but a different world entirely. There, look, the bells are drowning out old Pollard. You and your husband must come round for drinks.’

  The bells paused. The wall screamed, protested, cried.

  ‘You’ll have an interesting-shaped room there,’ said Gregory, and Rowena nodded, a line of anxiety on her forehead smoothed by her smile.

  It was only after he had left and the dust had settled that she smelled another smell, barely there over the affronting odours. She turned, and her nose caught the faintest drift of women’s perfume. She recognised it, but she couldn’t think what it was.

  The children wheeled, breathless, into church as the bells bowled over the green, the vicar almost bowing in his greeting as this large new family swelled his congregation, and Evangeline slipped off among the reeds.

  The hymns sounded through the village.

  There across the green from the church was the post office and shop with its large Wall’s freezer, then the duck pond, the war memorial, the pub, the copse; on the other side of the post office, the winding back lanes with their cottages. Pansies grew in baskets and the rooks cawed black across the green. The whistling roads of south Hertfordshire led outside the village past flat ploughed fields of crow and flint, bone-shaped knobbles of puddingstone among the crops, to the stables where village children rode. Then to the private schools, boys’ and girls’, and then to the aerodrome where the men flew on Saturdays, and beyond that, the nuclear power station with its spherical reactor partly concealed in a dip. The school for retarded, handicapped or unmanageable children was in the other direction: Evangeline Crale’s new school from September.

  Pollard and his men carried on working while the Crales were at church. With no one to watch it, the wall began to spew its guts, hair and lime putty with foul brown dust and eructations of damp. It moaned like a tree falling.

  ‘Where is Eva?’ said Rowena, scanning the green after church. In her heart, she always feared that one day Evangeline, who roamed, might simply fail to return. The country, she thought, with a new realisation, would afford her more opportunities to wander. ‘Where is Eva?’

  Evangeline, known as Eva to her family, was hiding in the stream. Its flow had fallen to a trickle, but its banks were still putty cool, and she lay her head against them and found their mosses as her pillow. The sky above was a brilliant blue through leaves. Her invisible friend Freddie had arrived just after her in the village, and she hugged him in the stream, for he was younger than her, and she chatted reassuringly to him. She sidled near the new house before the others had crossed the green from church, and Pollard saw her, and smiled. Other villagers loitered at gates for gossip after church, and stared and whispered in consternation or amusement. They had never seen a girl like this. Was she in fancy dress? Was she something from one of the film companies? But
there were inconsistencies: her hair ribbon was synthetic, her mud-streaked petticoats revealed sandals.

  Rowena crossed the green, becoming too hot inside her blouse and worrying about the lamb that was roasting in the old gas oven. There was a splash of light on a window in the roof of her new house that made her look up, then close her eyes against its glare. She felt conspicuous: she was watched. She didn’t know how to behave, somehow, within a small village, and she felt awkwardly certain that she was incongruous, and that Evangeline would be bringing shame to the family already. Three of her children walked in a neat line beside her, while she pushed the youngest in the pram that had seen her through five babies, even the twins lying head to toe.

  Evangeline was kneeling near the fence of number 3 and picking daisies from the verge. Her hair and hands were brown with mud. Her small sharp teeth were showing in her feral face as she sang a nursery rhyme to herself. She looked up and glanced at the others, then looked back down. ‘I will get my revenge,’ she muttered to Freddie, whom no one else could see.

  ‘Evangeline, go inside. How dare you, really how dare you? There isn’t sufficient hot water for so very much washing,’ said Rowena, tutting at her third daughter with an impatience that met terrible sympathy, and Evangeline merely hung her head before going up to the bathroom under the eaves, where the ceiling sloped sharply and only the loofah was unpacked. In the bath, which she ran cold on the hot day, she skimmed her hands over her body. Then she let herself cry.

  Downstairs, the roasting lamb was making the kitchen explosive with heat, and the wall still screamed like a sow. Pollard and his men had taken to it again after a short break. Rowena put her hands to her ears, feeling heat and noise crowding in on her with a plunge of panic about how she would manage to cook for seven in this ancient kitchen, and told her children to go upstairs to play. Jennifer, the beauty, lingered and gazed at her mother, running her corn-fat plaits through circled thumbs and fingers, up and down, as she often did, and said, ‘It’s all right, Mummy. It’s all all right.’