In Her Shadow Read online

  About the Book

  One ordinary morning at work Hannah Brown glimpses a young woman with dark hair, wearing a green coat spattered with rain. The woman is identical to her childhood best friend, Ellen Brecht. But Hannah believes Ellen is dead. Could it really be her?

  For a moment it is a though the past twenty years have never happened: life becomes dazzling and exciting again and Hannah remembers how it felt to be young and strong, and without regret. Then she thinks about what happened to Ellen and to her all those years ago and she’s filled with a terrible fear. Because the seemingly idyllic Cornish childhood she and Ellen shared ended in obsession and betrayal. Has Ellen returned to forgive her, or to punish her?

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  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

  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

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-One

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Chapter Forty-Three

  Chapter Forty-Four

  Chapter Forty-Five

  Chapter Forty-Six

  Chapter Forty-Seven

  Chapter Forty-Eight

  Chapter Forty-Nine

  Chapter Fifty

  Chapter Fifty-One

  Chapter Fifty-Two

  Chapter Fifty-Three

  Chapter Fifty-Four

  Chapter Fifty-Five

  Chapter Fifty-Six

  Chapter Fifty-Seven

  Chapter Fifty-Eight

  Chapter Fifty-Nine

  Chapter Sixty

  Chapter Sixty-One

  Chapter Sixty-Two

  Chapter Sixty-Three

  Chapter Sixty-Four

  Chapter Sixty-Five

  Chapter Sixty-Six

  Chapter Sixty-Seven

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Also by Louise Douglas

  Copyright

  In Her Shadow

  Louise Douglas

  For Kevin, with love

  CHAPTER ONE

  I LOOKED UP and she was there. Ellen Brecht was standing just a few feet away from me, so close that if we had both reached out our arms, our fingertips would have touched.

  ‘Ellen?’ I whispered, and it was as if the past twenty years had never happened. For a moment, life became dazzling and exciting again, and I remembered how it felt to be young and strong and healthy, and without loneliness or regret. My desiccated, useless heart came back to life, pumping relief through me like some sublime narcotic. For the first time in two decades, I felt truly alive.

  ‘Ellen!’

  I wanted to touch her, I wanted to reach out and take hold of her hand and never let it go. I wanted to ask her why she had gone away like that, why she had left me alone for so long, why she had let me believe she was lost – but before I could move, the lights began to fade and she had melted away into the darkness. Then I knew it was too late. I had lost her again. She was gone.

  The day I saw Ellen had begun much like any other. I had woken at the usual time and gone to work in the Brunel Memorial Museum in Bristol. The morning had passed quickly and without drama. I’d eaten a tomato and mozzarella panini for lunch and then John Lansdown, the Curator of Antiquities, had asked me to assemble some materials for an illustrated lecture. One of the objects he needed was a jade amulet that was kept in the Egyptian Gallery on the mezzanine floor. Normally I would have asked our intern, Misty, to fetch it, but she was off that day and in any case I felt like stretching my legs. I picked up my keys and left the cramped backstage rooms where the academic staff worked, crossed the museum’s cathedral-like main hall and trotted up the sweeping marble staircase, its wide steps patterned with lozenges of coloured light reflected beneath the grand glass dome.

  On the mezzanine, I wove through the tourists and visitors crowded around a visceral display on the science of embalming, and stooped to go through the low doorway designed to resemble a pyramid entrance. A narrow tunnel led into the gallery, which was a recreation of the interior of a tomb. It was dark inside, a deep and heavy darkness, black as pitch. This was broken by muted spotlights which were on timers; so as one faded, another would come in, and the jackal face of an eight-foot-high statue of Anubis would disappear as a rag-skinned mummy emerged grinning from the gloom. A soundtrack of a mournful wind played low in the background. The visitors spoke in hushed voices, and although I was used to the gallery, its claustrophobic atmosphere never failed to unnerve me.

  I moved slowly amongst the displays while my eyes adjusted to the gloom, and when I found the relevant cabinet, I crouched to unlock it and disable the alarm. The glass door swung open, I reached inside to pick up the ancient amulet, closed my fingers around it and cupped it carefully in my palm. I shut the door and relocked it, stood up and straightened my back, squinting as the spotlights grew brighter – and that was when I saw her.

  Ellen Brecht was there, in the chamber.

  Ellen Brecht. My best friend. My nemesis.

  She was wearing a green raincoat with the collar turned up, the red lipstick she had favoured when she was trying to look sophisticated, and her eyes were dark in her pale face. Her hair was damp. She was wearing her mother’s necklace, the treble clef charm lying in the hollow beneath her throat.

  ‘Ellen,’ I whispered, but before I could say anything more, the lights faded again. As the artificial darkness fell, I remembered what had happened to Ellen and me all those years ago, and my joy was replaced by fear. Panic crept up behind me and grabbed me by the shoulders. It shocked me back to my senses.

  I took a few steps away, and then the lights came up again and I cried out in alarm because she was closer to me now, standing beside a display of canopic jars. Now I could see what I had missed before: Ellen’s gaze was fierce – her eyes bored into me and I was afraid of her, and of what she wanted from me. She hadn’t come to forgive me, she had come to punish me. She wanted to hurt me as I had hurt her. She had been waiting, all these years, to claim her revenge – and now the moment had arrived, it was almost as if I had been expecting it. I had known it was not over between us.

  Cold fingers of dread tightened around my throat.

  ‘Go away!’ I pleaded. ‘Go away! Leave me alone!’ But she didn’t move; she stood and stared, and her eyes burned into mine, as if they could see into my soul and read its awful secrets.

  I tried to back away but my legs were useless, like newborn legs. I tripped, bumping into a sarcophagus in the dark, and it seemed to me that the body inside in its ancient brown
bandages was looming towards me. The floor was tilting, the chamber spinning. The lights faded again and I didn’t know where Ellen was. I turned and pushed into the tunnel entrance, scrambling and blinking back into the light. I ran along the edge of the mezzanine, holding onto the balcony rail, then I clattered down the sweeping staircase and into the main hall. A crowd was gathered in the shadows beneath the suspended Tyrannosaurus skeleton. My elbows knocked against adults with toddlers on their hips pointing up at the remains of the huge creature and I tripped over children flapping their educational quiz-sheets.

  ‘Excuse me!’ I cried. ‘Please, please let me through!’

  At the far side of the hall, I stumbled into a dimly lit corridor leading out of the atrium. The passageway was low-ceilinged, and narrowed by lines of Victorian glass display cabinets containing threadbare stuffed animals. At the far end was a door labelled: Staff Only.

  I looked again, over my shoulder, and made out a figure at the entrance to the passageway moving slowly towards me. The light was bright behind, turning it into a faceless silhouette. With a sob, I fell against the locked door and fumbled over the security code. After three attempts, drunk with panic and weak with fear, I felt a hand on my shoulder. I cried out, my heart pounding, and slid to my knees, covering my face with my hands, and then a kindly voice said, ‘Hannah, dear, what on earth is the matter?’ And I looked through the cage made by my fingers and saw the concerned face of my colleague and friend Rina Mirza.

  Rina helped me to my feet and took me through the door and into her office. It was tiny and overcrowded, a professorial burrow. I sat on a rickety chair squeezed in between filing cabinets piled high with bundles of paper and shivered while Rina made tea in the staff kitchenette. She returned and passed a mug to me. It was only half-full, even so my hands were trembling so badly that the liquid slopped around. I tried to contain it, holding the mug cupped tight in the palms of both my hands, steam curling from its surface. I felt icy cold inside.

  Rina rubbed my back.

  ‘What happened?’ she asked, peering at me over her half-moon glasses. ‘Has somebody hurt you? Were you assaulted?’

  ‘No,’ I said so quietly that Rina had to lean forward.

  ‘What was it then? Something’s given you a shock.’

  I looked up at the older woman, her kind face, her anxious eyes, black hair wisping out of its bun.

  ‘I saw somebody who used to be my friend,’ I said.

  ‘And that’s a bad thing?’ Rina asked.

  I dropped my head forward, so that my hair fell over my face. The years since I had recovered from my breakdown, years that had formed a protective carapace of new memories and experiences around me, were crumbling to dust. I felt vulnerable as a newborn mouse, blind and squirmy and naked.

  ‘Hannah?’ Rina asked again. ‘Why did it upset you so much to see your friend?’

  ‘Because Ellen Brecht is dead,’ I said. ‘She died almost twenty years ago.’

  CHAPTER TWO

  THE STORY OF Ellen and me began in the 1980s in the Lizard Peninsula, a windblown, storm-tossed, rocky Cornish outcrop. That was where I was born and where I grew up and where I knew Ellen. As far as I am concerned, she was only ever there. It has always been difficult for me to imagine her anywhere else, out of that context.

  There was a time before Ellen, when it was just me, of course. That time is further away and harder to conceive, but it’s possible; I can still go back, in my mind, to my early childhood in all its Hipstamatic brightness. Most of my memories pre-Ellen are a muddle, like snapshots jumbled in a drawer, but there’s one September afternoon when I was eight years old that I recall with perfect clarity. It was the only time I ever spoke to Ellen’s grandmother, and if I hadn’t, there would have been nothing to connect Ellen and me later. Perhaps, if that afternoon had played out another way, we would never have become friends and, that being so, I would have had a different and, most likely, a happier life. Before Ellen, things were easier and less complicated. They were either good or bad, right or wrong, black or white, and I understood the difference. Since Ellen, everything has been coloured in shades of grey.

  This is how it was that afternoon. The school bus had dropped off its last passengers – the Williams twins, Jago Cardell who lived in the cottage next door to mine, and me – at the stop in the lay-by on the Goonhilly Road. It was cold; the shadows were lengthening. A promise of fireworks and frost and spiderwebs hung in the air, and swallows sat like small dark sentinels on the telephone wires waiting to go somewhere warmer. The Williams boys ran off down the lane that led to their farm, and Jago and I went across to the stately horse-chestnut tree that overhung the boundary wall of Thornfield House. There were hundreds of conkers up amongst the big papery leaves just out of our reach. Jago dropped his rucksack on the grass, found a stick and jumped up and down, hitting the branches. I watched for a moment, then I had an idea. I picked up the rucksack, swung it by its straps and threw it into the air. It hit a branch and several prickly green cases fell, splitting as they bounced on the lane and releasing their glossy brown nuts. Jago whooped with delight and pounced on them. Made confident, I threw the rucksack again, but this time it fell the wrong way, over the wall and into the garden of Thornfield House, which we had always called ‘Haunted House’.

  Jago turned to look at me. ‘Fuckin’ hell, Spanner,’ he said. ‘You’ve been and gone and done it now!’

  I remember the feeling of dread in my stomach. It was more than a quarter of a century ago, but I feel it now so clearly. I feel it in my bones. At the time, I was afraid of the old lady, Mrs Withiel, who lived alone in the house. We half-believed she was a witch, and we were scared of getting into trouble, but with hindsight it seems obvious that this premonition was of something far worse than a childhood scolding. I knew something terrible was going to happen inside that house. I knew it even then.

  Thornfield House was like no other house in our part of the world. It sat square at the top of the hill, surrounded by a wall, its upper windows overlooking the fields that led to the coast on one side, and the flat, marshy lands spreading out towards the satellite station at Goonhilly Down on the other. It was not the sort of place where normal people would want to live. It was too big, too severe, not hunkered down, white and wind-worn like most Cornish houses, but standing tall with its big proud windows and grand door, its steeply sloping roof topped by a weathervane shaped like a schooner riding a billowing wave.

  That afternoon, I crept along by the wall to the gap where the huge, wrought-iron gates stood ajar, rusting on their hinges. I looked around the edge of the wall and I saw the old lady standing at the door looking out. I was the one who had thrown the rucksack, so it was up to me to go and ask for it back, but I didn’t move. I looked across to Jago. I knew he would help me because he always did. He didn’t hesitate. He stepped forward into the garden, he went right up to the witch, and he talked to her.

  Jago was two years older than me, a scruffy, skinny boy. From behind, his ears stuck out and so did the dark flame-coloured hair his aunt hacked with her kitchen scissors. His neck was long and thin with the hair tapering down on one side, his shirt was too small and his trousers were worn and scuffed at the hems. His hands, which seemed too big for his arms, hung at his sides.

  I crept forward and stopped a few paces behind him.

  The witch, Mrs Withiel, was stooped and trembly. She wore a long grey cardigan over a powder-blue dress with the buttons at the front done up all wrong, and grubby old tennis shoes. Her hair was thin and white.

  ‘Why do you children always run away from me?’ she asked. ‘Whenever I try to talk to you, you run away.’

  Jago looked at his feet. He couldn’t tell the old lady we ran away because we thought she might put the evil eye on us.

  ‘I like children. I have a daughter, and a granddaughter,’ said Mrs Withiel. She looked at me. ‘She’d be about the same age as you, dear.’

  ‘That’s nice,’ said Jago politely. ‘
Do they live in Trethene?’

  ‘Oh no. No, no, no.’ She wrung her hands. ‘They’re long gone. The devil came and took my daughter away. He stole her away from me, her and the child. I don’t know where they are. I don’t get a card at Christmas. Nothing. He’s evil, you know, evil through and through.’

  The old lady’s voice rose as she spoke until it was so high and reedy it almost faded away. I felt sick. I thought perhaps Mrs Withiel was soft in the head with her talk of the devil and evil. Or maybe she really was a witch.

  Jago glanced at me. I tried to convey, with my eyes, that we needed to get away.

  ‘That’s a shame you don’t see your family,’ said Jago. He toed the weeds that were growing through the gravel on the drive. Then he asked: ‘Is it OK if I get my rucksack now?’

  ‘Yes, yes,’ said the old lady. She waved him towards the bag with the back of her hand, then she looked at me. ‘You’ll come back and see me, won’t you?’ she asked me. ‘Come back and talk to me. I’m so fond of children, especially little girls. Next time I’ll have some biscuits ready for you, dear.’