Underneath

Underneath

by

Ian D. Hall

Beaten Track

www.beatentrackpublishing.com

Underneath

First published 2022 by Beaten Track Publishing

Copyright © 2022 Ian D. Hall

All rights reserved.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent publisher.

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

Paperback ISBN: 978 1 78645 538 3

eBook ISBN: 978 1 78645 539 0

Beaten Track Publishing,

Burscough, Lancashire.

www.beatentrackpublishing.com

Underneath, not on the surface. That’s where the truth of our existence lies, sometimes buried under years of punishment, suffocating, choking on the dirt we have carried with us so deep in our soul where no one will ever find it. Sometimes it scratches, clawing at the thin veneer of the respectable face we present to the world, hoping to pierce, to pop the bloated façade of all we refuse to acknowledge we have done.

Underneath the skin lies the dirt we have on ourselves. We hide it from the investigations of others while knowing that if we were to slice the surface and let the dirt run free, we would be liberated from this human prison in which we are securely kept…

Underneath.

Contents

Before

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Before (1940)

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Before (1963)

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

Chapter Twenty-Six

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Before (1966)

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Chapter Thirty

Chapter Thirty-One

Chapter Thirty-Two

Chapter Thirty-Three

Chapter Thirty-Four

Chapter Thirty-Five

Chapter Thirty-Six

Chapter Thirty-Seven

Before (1975)

Chapter Thirty-Eight

Chapter Thirty-Nine

Chapter Forty

Chapter Forty-One

Underneath…

Before (1986: February)

Epilogue

Acknowledgements

About the Author

By the Author

Beaten Track Publishing

Before

The remains of the body had lain undiscovered for some time when Sarah Calster crept through the house in the hope of finding something worth stealing and disturbed the settled layers of dust on the windowpane.

The owner hadn’t been seen for months, but as he’d been a virtual recluse for the best part of a decade, nobody thought it was strange; nobody really cared. The word was he’d gone back to South Africa to receive an award and take up his previous teaching post, so his house was left to become its own mausoleum. The back garden was so overgrown it merged seamlessly into the forest, itself clotted with tightly bound trees that the sunlight struggled to penetrate to the ground below.

The grass verge at the front of the house had been religiously cut by a well-meaning neighbour who had known the owner since childhood, when they had both been evacuated to the area during the war and had suffered the same fate when a German bomb fell on the British Small Arms Factory in Birmingham one November night, one losing a father, the other both parents. Sometime after, the one whose father had perished came home one night, having seen the wreckage of a German aircraft at the edge of the woods, to find their mother, in a fit of anguish and depression at the senseless waste of life, had hanged herself from a wooden beam in the kitchen.

The teenage burglar sniffed the air. The atmosphere was thick with musty dampness with an undercurrent of something pungent; the flashlight flared on the scaled bodies of a couple of silverfish that scurried across the floor and under the stove. Suppressing the urge to vomit, Sarah consoled herself that at least they weren’t cockroaches or she’d have screamed loud enough to attract the attention of someone in the village. Cockroaches were never found in this part of the New Forest, but in the same way that spiders were supposed to suddenly spin themselves into existence if you were scared of them, she wondered if her fear could think the vermin into being. She dismissed the notion with a shudder. It was that or climb straight out that window, scramble over the wall and race back to her friends waiting by the crossroads sign. She could tell them the rumours of hidden wealth were just that—village gossip spread by those who wanted to see the owner spooked.

Sarah barely knew the man; she didn’t know anyone who did, certainly not in her age group. Her mother had told her he’d once travelled to Africa as part of his scientific studies and published several journal pieces on his experiences, but when he turned forty, he cut himself off from society, his visits to the local pub dwindling to once a month, then one in three, then not being seen at all except by a few close friends, one of whom was his well-intentioned neighbour. The last time anyone recalled seeing him was the day Jimmy Carter was sworn in as America’s bright young hope.

Sarah’s father had chimed in wheezily at that point, pushing his glasses up his nose as he tilted his head to look at his wife. I saw him after that, perhaps July, maybe August—yes, August. It was the day after Elvis died. He was out at the front of his house arguing with Mr. Bennett who used to run the post office. I was cycling past on that old five-speed thing I had before it got run over by that van on the road to Bramwell. Well, anyway, it was pretty heated, the argument that is, and Bennett told him he would have to pay something towards the petrol costs if he wanted him to bring groceries to his house as well as his letters.

Sarah’s father had turned his attention away from his wife and daughter and started mumbling to himself, fully aware of the despairing look his wife had shot him, the one that told him he was being tedious and hogging the conversation.

Sarah smiled wistfully at the memory. She missed her father greatly, and as she silently moved through the rambling house, she thought, had he still been alive, she might not have fallen into bad company and even worse habits.

She stopped at the doorway of one room and looked inside, the flashlight providing a partial explanation for the smell she encountered when she climbed through the broken window. The room was spacious, and in another time it would have probably been a grand dining room. She imagined a family all seated in formal attire around a table, the father at the head carving generous portions of lamb and beef as his wife looked on with love in her eyes, proud that their children had all turned out polite, happy and respectful. Shaking off the illusion, Sarah cast the flashlight over the upright glass tanks that lined the walls from floor to ceiling. In the middle of the room was another glass tank, a fifteen-foot-tall monument that held enough soil to grow potatoes to feed that imagined proud Victorian family.

Sarah stepped closer to one of the smaller glass tanks. She suspected they were aquariums like the one at Carl’s place. His mother spent a fortune on the upkeep of her beloved exotic pets, but unlike her aquarium, these tanks contained no water, no fish, no plastic coral or castles. There just seemed to be a kind of sawdust on the bottom, yellowing and mouldy.

Sarah tapped the glass gently. Nothing moved.

Stepping back, she counted how many tanks there were: not including the giant one in the middle of the room, she counted two hundred and forty; surely they couldn’t have all been empty. She walked around the room, peering into those at eye level, but she saw no movement, no signs of life. Attached to the ceiling, she noticed a set of solid metal runners that ran the length of the room with a spur across to the centre, and as she swept the light around, she spotted some metal steps, hidden behind the open door.

Gripping the steps, she tried to shift them, to pull them around so she could look into some of the higher-up tanks, but they were stiff and too heavy, so she gave it up as a bad job and returned to investigating what she could see. Drawn back to the central tank, she shone the flashlight up along its length to the ceiling. It was one vast, uninterrupted piece, no joints, just a flawless, square pipe that, as far as she could tell, went up through the ceiling and down through the wooden floor. The entire contraption was filled with soil, and when she looked closely, she saw a network of small tunnels. Again, she tapped the glass; again, nothing stirred within.

Returning to the smaller cases along the wall, Sarah noticed a circular indentation in the left-hand side of the front-facing glass. She poked her finger in it, and the glass slid across easily, presumably so the tanks could be cleaned. With the front now open, she scooped up a handful of sawdust, scraping through it in case it concealed anything of value. As she did, a mound fell to the floor, and she jumped back in surprise when she saw what looked like the ravaged remains of a tarantula. Luckily, she wasn’t as scared of spiders as she was of cockroaches, although she’d never been this close to one of these fearsome creatures. She kicked it lightly, and it shifted across the floor with the motion, but that was all. Any life that had resided in those half-eaten remains was long gone.

By now, the room had lost its charm, and Sarah decided to get on with the job at hand and continue her search for anything valuable that she could sell, so she and Carl could buy pot for the weekend and the party at Bramwell. She closed the door and carried on through the rest of the house. If she had stayed, she would have noticed what remained of the spider’s carcass move seemingly of its own volition as what was eating it from the inside came out to investigate the motion it had sensed.

As Sarah ascended the stairs, the smell became more pungent, and it was more than the mustiness of a house that hadn’t been aired for a while. Reaching the closed door to what she presumed was a bedroom, she turned the handle and pushed the door open, discovering why the man of the house hadn’t been seen for months, for there he was, surrounded by cobwebs and decay.

Sarah placed her hand over her mouth, stifling her scream, and admonished herself for falling into the trap she mocked others for. The dead were no threat. However, the man’s body, like that of the tarantula, looked as if it had been partly eaten, loose, rotting skin overlaying sinew and ragged flesh and in places bare bone. While his fingerprints had been lost to time, the base of his left thumb still bore some muscle, while the right thumb was riddled with holes as if it had woodworm. Sarah was not a girl to shy away from looking where fifteen-year-old girls shouldn’t be looking, and besides, the man had clearly died in his sleep, naked and alone, so she couldn’t help but notice that his privates also seemed to have been eaten away. Indeed, there was nothing to suggest he had ever been male.

It was when she looked at his head that Sarah decided she had seen enough. Where the nose and mouth should have been, there was a wide hole, his lower jaw hung as if he’d died from laughing, and his ears were little more than flaps of skin. The eyes, those observers of life, were gone.

Sarah no longer cared who saw her or how loud her escape was. She bolted down the stairs, back through the kitchen and over the crumbling back wall without breaking a sweat. She ran up the hill towards the crossroads and didn’t stop even when she saw Carl and his mate, who looked at her oddly as she sprinted past, all the way to the Sander’s Arms.

Call the police! she instructed the bemused bartender, too out of breath to explain that the old man who for so many years had played on the pub’s crib team, famously scoring a maximum 29 hand to lift the country trophy, was dead.

Chapter One

I think you may have been right when you said turn left a couple of miles back, Robert Romsleigh admitted, pulling into a layby and meeting the gaze of his teenage daughter in the rear-view mirror. She scowled at him over the folded map, which she held the same way she would a menu from the family’s favourite restaurant—a decently run curry house in Moss Side.

The restaurant had closed now, and the three would miss their weekly Saturday ritual, which had begun as a means for Robert to pull both his children away from their mother and the fear she had instilled in them through years of harsh treatment, drama and suspicion. The day the divorce came through, Robert begged for his children’s forgiveness and promised they would eventually be okay, perhaps better than okay.

His son seemed to have made the transition more easily than his sister, perhaps because he was younger, more resilient, less troubled. Bela had taken time and patience, and who could blame her for not always being on the same page as her father? He’d moved her away from Manchester, away from her friends and a few close calls with adolescent first crushes. It was the only way he could protect her at the time, but that was before the police had become involved when, on Bela’s thirteenth birthday, her mother stalked and then verbally abused her at a restaurant in the Arndale Centre where she was having a birthday meal with friends. According to witnesses, her mother had called her awful names, and when Bela refused to acknowledge her, she slapped her daughter around the face and shook her before trying to pour lighter fluid over her. Only the quick actions of the waiter stopped the attack from ending in tragedy.

Casting all thoughts of the near-miss from his mind, Robert restarted the car, preparing to do a U-turn. The New Forest roads were oddly quiet, certainly compared to the ones he was used to driving around his former hometown. These days, he only went there to watch football with his children or when he was forced to travel to Styal Prison to endure the latest ravings of the woman he had once loved but who now sickened him.

The last time had followed a request from her solicitor, who felt his client deserved to know the reasons Robert had uprooted the children from their schools and friends. Despite the lawyer’s threatening undertones, Robert had thought he might take some destructive thrill from seeing the hurt in his ex-wife’s eyes, believing it could never be as awful as the damage she had wreaked on him, Bela and Stuart. He was wrong. Hearing her cries of desperation when he informed her that her children didn’t want to see her anymore—even if they had wanted to, the judge had decreed the abuse too severe—broke Robert’s heart. Indeed, had it not been for his mother capturing the abuse via hidden camera, Robert may well have backed down. It was hard to believe that the woman he had loved had beaten their children, scarred their arms and legs with cigarette burns and their minds with visions of the men whose company she kept while Robert worked night and day to keep the family afloat.

That was before Kaleen’s tears turned to a guttural, maniacal laughter and she gouged his face with her nails, one coming dangerously close to tearing out his eye. He didn’t care how long she stayed in jail; his only concern was ensuring his children were never put in harm’s way again, and leaving Manchester had seemed the best option, although it came with its own set of problems, not least Bela’s rumblings of discontent.

What are you doing, Dad?

Going back to that turning.

No. Keep going. There’s another way into the village. I didn’t see it before, but if you take the next left—

The village?

Well… Bela fidgeted. I just thought it might be better to…get an idea what’s in store with the locals before we meet Auntie Stella.

Robert nodded and smiled at her in the mirror, relieved when she smiled back. For once, there was no pain there, her red curls framing her open expression rather than shielding it from a world that had wronged her.

Right then, he said.

No, left.

Such innocence in that joke. It may have been forced, it was hard to tell with Bela, but it sounded natural enough to Robert’s ears, and for that he was grateful. He signalled and pulled out of the layby, following her directions.

Can you wake up your brother?

Bela sighed but must have done as he asked, as he heard a yawn and caught the motion of a stretched arm and then noise of a kerfuffle—just the ordinary fighting back of a younger sibling rudely torn from the pleasantries of a dream.

Stifling a laugh, Robert glanced over his shoulder. Are you all right, Little Nemo?

Dad, watch out!

Instinctively, Robert slammed on the brakes, and it was as well he did, as he stopped just short of careering into a gang of motorbikes that took the corner at speed, almost all of their riders clad in leather and denim, their steel horses screaming as they whooshed past the car. A few flipped the finger at them, and one shouted something obscene and largely indecipherable, although Robert caught the gist.

Great. Just what we need—the local chapter of Junior Hell’s Angels making our lives a misery. I’m sorry, kids. Are you both all right?

Bela waved away his concern, unclipped her seat belt and dropped out of sight, emerging a moment later with the dishevelled map in her hand. The car ticked over, giving Robert a chance to re-establish his composure and make sure his son was all right while Bella studied the map, her nose crinkling as she did so.

What’s up, Bela?

This road. It shouldn’t be here. The map says it’s a bridleway.

It is an old map, Robert reasoned.

It was printed last year, Dad. There’s no way they built a massive road like this in that time.

Knowing she would obsess over the incongruence for weeks and that nothing he said would change that, he let it go and moved off once more, this time keeping his eyes firmly on the road ahead and turning left when Bela instructed him to do so.

As they passed the mile marker for Bramwell, he noticed a crudely written sign, a board hanging from the crossroads point which declared that Emmets were not welcome. He glanced at his backseat passengers, relieved to see they were looking out the side window at the first houses and signs of village life. They hadn’t noticed the red-painted warning.

Look, there’s the pub. I bet they have real ale—not that plastic muck they serve at the ground.

Keeping to a low speed, he drove on through the village, the occasional stare from the locals they passed making a lie of Robert’s promise of acceptance and a fresh start.

They’re not looking at you, Bela. They can’t see you, Stuart. They’re just trying to figure out who the stranger is in the foreign car.

Bela nodded in agreement and kept her eyes on the rows of cottages, the little shops. He’d warned her there would be stares and whispers, but none of these people knew her history. She could reinvent herself, be a mystery that lit up their uneventful lives.

He had told her that with truth in his heart; he had seen her cringe when people she had known for years reacted in distress and alarm when they saw her face. And, thanks to her mother, Bela knew he had bribed other children and their parents to play with her. In time, some had become real friends, but others had continued to openly taunt her.

Take a next left, Dad, or we’ll end up back on the road to Bramwell.

Yes, Sir, Captain Bela, Sir. Permission to beep the car horn when I see my sister, Captain Bela, Sir.

Bela and Stuart laughed, belying all they’d endured while their father wasn’t there to protect them, but he was now. That was all that mattered.

There she is, look. Waving.

Robert beeped the horn like he was urging Ian Brightwell to bare down on goal and set up the mighty Quinn to score, all the while knowing that, like his team that season, it offered more than it could deliver. He stopped outside the house—their new home, made possible by a sizeable donation from his sister and the passing of their mother—and got out of the car. As he hugged his sister, he felt the sorrow of the past drift out of sight for a while. All was going to be well in Downmere.

Chapter Two

No more than two miles away from this touching scene of a family starting their lives anew away from the prying eyes of journalists and true-crime voyeurs, Harry Collins sighed as he looked upon his troop of lads struggling to erect their canvas tents and prepare the ground for their weeklong orienteering course.

Takes me back, one of his assistants called cheerfully from where she was securing the last of the guy ropes for her tent. The woman had turned up at the Scout hut a year ago and enthusiastically volunteered her services. Harry had worried about her roughing it up with a group of lads more used to the comforts of home, but it was clearly not her first time under the stars.

Woodstock in sixty-nine, she continued. Twenty years of age, arrived last minute—didn’t find out about it till I was almost ready to come home from a year of travelling. Great times. Did you do anything wild like that, Harr…I mean, Scoutmaster?

Harry shook his head. He’d been born at the start of that decade and very much doubted that his staunchly conservative, unfalteringly Methodist parents had even heard of Woodstock. He grinned to himself as he imagined how his parents would react if he told them his newest assistant lived with a woman she’d met at a Simon and Garfunkel gig in 1968. If his mother could hear Millicent now, waxing lyrical about free love as if it were a suitable substitute for piety and prayer, she’d have turned deep scarlet and started talking about the fine weather they’d had of late.

Catching Harry’s grin, Millicent beamed back at him and continued talking about her travels, telling of how she once tripped on LSD as the crowd around her swayed to the music wafting across the fields near Bethel, and how, after Woodstock, she had come home to resume her studies, finally graduating from the Open University in the mid-1970s and taking up a position at a local comprehensive school where she doubled as the matron’s deputy.

Millicent paused her monologue to help the two boys closest to her, whose tent was sagging like a line of wet washing. When she’d joined their troop, she’d told him she’d been raised in the Jewish faith but had no truck with organised religion, instead preferring to engage in activism, although she was not what Harry would consider a ‘typical’ feminist. Here was a woman in command of her own life, and no man was going to tell her otherwise, yet she was happy and vibrant and full of soul.

One of their young charges howled with laughter at some quiet joke that had passed around the camp but stopped when he caught the glare of his Scoutmaster. Harry’s tightly pursed lips stood firm against the tide of youthful anarchy, and the boy returned meekly to following the example shown him over the course of the last few weeks in how to raise a tent.

This was Harry’s first