He looks troubled. ‘Maybe. She had the opportunity.’
‘And what a perfect way to disappear if someone was trying to find her.’
The more she thinks about it the more convinced she is.
Sheila Watts and Daphne Hartall are one and the same.
24
Rose
February 1980
As the days wore on I became even more intrigued by Daphne. She was so strong in some ways, and in others there was a vulnerability about her that brought out my maternal side, even though we were around the same age. I wanted to protect her, just like I wanted to protect you. This slim, attractive woman who, I was now certain, had been terrorized by a man, just like I had.
After our night out at the Stag and Pheasant the previous week, and her Joel revelation, I felt even more certain that we should stick together. Men, it seemed, couldn’t be trusted. Even Joel – a man I thought was kind and dependable – was really a predator waiting for the right time to pounce. We sat up late most evenings discussing women’s rights. ‘Why do men think it’s okay to pat your arse and call you “darling”？’ she said, hugging her knees, the sleeves of her chunky jumper pulled over her hands. ‘It’s 1980 not 1950.’
She was so right-on. So modern. So different from me: I had lived there, in the back of beyond, for the last three years.
And she was so easy to live with. She seemed to sense when I wanted it to be just you and me, tactfully staying in her room or going for a walk to the village. She’d managed to procure a second-hand sewing-machine – a bulky old Singer with a foot pedal – which she set up in the little room across the hall. I’d often hear its whirr as she ran up patterns, or mended her jeans with patches. She wanted to make you a pretty summer dress and came home one day with a roll of printed yellow fabric. You were delighted at the prospect. She was capable and self-sufficient, with all these useful practical skills, and I admired her for that.
It was a cold winter, February even worse than January. Ice crusted the grass and fog rolled over the woods so that they were barely visible from your bedroom window. It unnerved me, made me concerned about who could be watching the house. Daphne must have felt the same: one evening when you were in bed and we were standing in the kitchen, smoking and huddled against the range for warmth, she said, ‘It’s strange.’ Her gaze went to the window as she exhaled a plume of smoke. She’d been at work that day – she refused to give up her cleaning job just because Joel had made a move on her. ‘To think this place could be our sanctuary or our undoing.’
Her words chilled me. ‘What do you mean?’
She turned her gaze on me, intense and unnerving. ‘We think we’re safe hiding here, away from the world, away from danger, but the danger could be here anyway. Trapped in this place, with us.’
I’d never told her I was hiding but it was like she knew. That she could sense it. Perhaps because she was doing the same.
‘In this house?’ I asked, puzzled and a little freaked out. What was she trying to say?
‘No, in this village. We can’t escape it, Rose. Don’t you see?’
I stubbed out my cigarette and wrapped my arms around myself. ‘Don’t say that,’ I said, in a small, frightened voice.
‘Those woods,’ she said, in the same strange tone. ‘Are they keeping others out or trapping us in?’ Her eyes flashed and I could see that she was scared.
‘We’re safe here,’ I said firmly, to convince her or myself, I couldn’t tell.
She turned to me, her lips puckering round the cigarette as she took a drag, her eyes fixed on me but not saying anything for a few seconds. Then, ‘I know we haven’t talked about our pasts. And that’s good. We shouldn’t have to. Our future starts here.’