Chapter One
Two months earlier
Iris Grey set down her brush and blew on the tips of her frozen fingers.
It was a bitterly cold morning in Hazelford, leaden and drear, with a stinging October wind that presaged the end of autumn and the onset of winter in earnest. But despite the cold, there was something about the heavy darkness of the morning sky, with its clouds purple and swollen like bruises, that made Iris want to get outside and paint. That and the fact that she’d been awake since four, staring at the ceiling in Mill Cottage, fighting back her own dark clouds of depression, running over everything in her mind until she could stand it no longer. She had to do something.
Picking up her brush again, she dipped the tip into the bright white oil paint she used to re-create the tiny, glancing flashes of light reflected off the river. At least I’m here and not in London, she thought. Not stuck in that miserable flat with Ian.
Ian McBride, Iris’s husband of almost eighteen years, was back at their place in Clapham, no doubt still fast asleep. Nothing stopped Ian from sleeping. Not earthquakes or hurricanes or bombs, and certainly not the trivial matter of a disintegrating marriage. He’s my estranged husband now, Iris thought. Then she laughed, because ‘estranged’ was a stupid word that nobody except newspaper columnists ever used, the same way that railway announcers said ‘alight’ when they meant ‘get off the train’ or ‘beverage’ instead of drink.
Still, ‘estranged’ was what Iris and Ian were, given that Iris had rented Mill Cottage on her own and often spent weeks here at a time without so much as a phone call home. Then again, whenever she did go home, she and Ian barely spoke to one another, making it hard to know what the point of a phone call might be.
Five foot two and naturally slim, people generally considered Iris to be pretty in a petite, elfin, slightly bird-like way. At forty-one, she could easily have passed for five years younger, with her dark hair, shiny like a raven’s feathers, pale, clear skin and sad chocolate-brown eyes that were too big for her face and lent her an almost cartoonish look. On the other hand, she was not a woman who ‘took care of herself’, as the women’s magazines liked to say. She rarely wore make-up, and had never in her life indulged in a pedicure or a facial or any of the other countless rituals that most of her girlfriends seemed to devote so much time to. And although she did like clothes, her art agent had once defined Iris’s style as ‘deranged jackdaw’ – picking out the brightest, shiniest, most colourful garments available and throwing them onto her body in as random and thoughtless a manner as possible. From time to time, for special occasions, Iris would tone it down and, when elegantly dressed, was a strikingly beautiful woman. But today she was wearing a more typical ensemble of oversized dungarees tucked into wellington boots, a rainbow-striped polo-neck sweater, fingerless gloves made to look like sheep, a charity-shop duffel coat two sizes too big for her and a knitted Peruvian hat.
Staring intently at the swirling waters of the Itchen, Iris considered her next brush stroke, pushing thoughts of her husband out of her mind. God, it was hard to paint water. An accomplished portrait painter, Iris was an expert at capturing human expression and emotion, boiling her subjects down to their essence and recording that essence on canvas. Stupidly, she’d always imagined landscape painting as being more static. Less challenging, perhaps, because it was less alive. How wrong could you be?
If nothing else, standing on a cold Hampshire riverbank since the crack of arse had taught Iris that everything was alive. Everything was moving, evolving, changing constantly. The river swirled and danced and rushed; the clouds drifted and morphed their way across the sky; the spindly tree branches swayed and shivered pathetically in the wind like the starved limbs of concentration-camp prisoners, pleading for escape. Even the mellow gold stone of the Mill itself seemed to have a life of its own, glowing with light and warmth at one moment and retreating into gloomy shadow the next.
It really was a beautiful house. The perfect size – large enough to feel stately and grand, yet small enough to remain romantic and charming – the Mill at Hazelford was Iris’s idea of the quintessential English country idyll. Both the house and Iris’s rented cottage in the grounds belonged to Dom Wetherby, author of the wildly popular Grimshaw books, a series of crime novels featuring an ageing, cantankerous detective of the same name. Iris had started reading one of the books a few years ago, but then lost it halfway through and never got around to finishing it. It was some story involving a Swiss bank and Nazi gold. There might have been a Russian prostitute in it. In all honesty, Iris wasn’t really a fan. In her view, the real world was already more than sufficiently populated with grumpy middle-aged men without the need to add to their number in fiction. But she admired Dom Wetherby’s larger-than-life personality and had always coveted his stunning house, which she’d driven past numerous times, en route to various repertory theatres with Ian.
Iris’s husband was a playwright, at one time very successful, although these days a medium run in provincial rep, otherwise known as crumbling, half-empty small-town theatres, was the best Ian McBride could realistically hope for. One dreary weekend at the end of the summer, Iris had just happened to see an advertisement in the Sunday Times ‘Property’ section that felt like fate.
It was headed: ‘The Mill at Hazelford’.
I know that house, Iris thought. That’s my dream house.
‘Two-bedroom cottage to let,’ ran the copy, ‘on idyllic private Hampshire estate. Would suit artist or writer.’
Before she had time to talk herself out of it, Iris rang the number on the ad and rented Mill Cottage for six months. It will be my artistic escape, she lied to herself. A place to go and paint in peace.
She waited for the inevitable explosion from Ian – they couldn’t afford it, not after all the money they’d blown on IVF. It was an indulgence. How dare Iris commit to something like that without discussing it with him first, et cetera, et cetera … But in the event, he merely shrugged and went back upstairs to write. Iris tried not to admit to herself how bad a sign this was for the state of their marriage.
Originally the idea was that she would go to the cottage to paint at weekends, but weekends soon became weeks. Fast-forward a month and a half and here Iris was, effectively living in Hazelford full-time. Alone. Like a mad cat lady, only without the cats.
In their place Iris had her doll’s house, a beautifully made antique Dutch model, hand-turned in elm and complete with working sash windows and miniature louvred shutters. It had been Iris’s most prized possession since childhood, a gift from her grandmother Violet, and she had always treasured it. Obviously she knew a forty-one-year-old woman ‘playing’ with doll’s houses had more than a touch of the pathetic about it. No doubt she should have grown out of it years ago. But admiring and rearranging the miniature rooms, adding over the decades to her collection of tiny, perfectly formed objects, had brought Iris immense pleasure and peace, and it was such a harmless hobby, in the end, she couldn’t bring herself to give it up.
Pulling her thick duffel coat more tightly around her against the cold, she glanced up and smiled broadly. A swan had unexpectedly appeared round the river bend, followed by four cygnets. Pristine white and regal, the mother bird extended her elegant neck and dramatically spread her wings just for a moment, shaking them out like a Brazilian carnival dancer showing off her bejewelled costume. Then she re-folded them neatly onto her back, all the while gliding towards Iris. Behind her, her four adorable brown chicks bobbed along awkwardly, as ungainly as their mother was graceful.
‘Oh, how lovely!’ Iris said aloud, watching the little family pass. But as soon as they’d disappeared from sight, the sadness hit her like a bowling ball in the stomach.
You’re being ridiculous, Iris told herself firmly. You’re an educated, rational woman. You will not feel envious of a bloody bird!
Time for a cup of tea. Putting down her brushes, cold to the bone, Iris held the still-wet canvas at arm’s length and was heading towards the cottage when raised voices made her turn round.
‘Stop! What are you doing?’
Ariadne Wetherby, Dom’s wife and Iris’s landlady, sounded frightened. Iris had barely met the family since she took the cottage. The Wetherbys kept themselves to themselves. But on the rare occasions their paths had crossed, Dom Wetherby’s wife had always come across as a gentle, floaty, hippyish, softly spoken sort of person. It made the alarm in her voice now doubly disconcerting.
‘What? D’you think I’m going to drown you?’
The other voice was a man’s, a young man’s. Also loud, but there was no fear in his tone. Only malice.
‘Push you in and hold you down? Like the witch that you are?’ He laughed, a horrible, throaty sound that broke into a smoker’s cough at the end. ‘God knows you deserve it.’
‘Stop it! Billy … no!’
A scream, loud and shrill, made Iris drop her brushes and canvas and scramble up the bank. Slipping on the wet ground, mud splattering onto coat and face, she saw them within seconds, just a few yards further along the bank. A slim, dark-haired young man had grabbed hold of Ariadne Wetherby’s outstretched arms and was forcing her backwards towards the rushing river. From where she was, Iris could only see Ariadne’s back, but the man’s face was clearly visible: handsome, yet made ugly by the contorted, sadistic expression, the narrowed eyes and the cruel, mocking curve of his lips.
‘Is everything all right?’ Iris shouted over the roar of the river. Clearly everything wasn’t, but this seemed the best way to get their attention, to make the man realise he’d been seen at least.
It worked. He looked up, startled, and instantly released Ariadne.
‘Everything’s fine,’ he shouted back coolly.
Ignoring him, Iris moved closer to where they were, addressing herself solely to Ariadne. ‘Mrs Wetherby? Are you OK? Do you need help?’
‘No, no, thank you. I’m fine.’ Ariadne straightened her windswept hair, the imprint of her earlier panic still visible in her strained expression. But then she smiled, relieved, and the tension evaporated. Slipping her hand around the young man’s waist, she leaned into him, as if the two of them were the best of friends. ‘And please, you must call me Ariadne. Sorry if we disturbed you. This is my middle son, Billy. He’ll be living with us at the Mill for a while.’
The young man raised an unenthusiastic hand in greeting. ‘Hello.’
Iris didn’t wave back, or move any closer. She’d seen the cruelty in Billy’s smile and eyes earlier, the way he’d revelled in his mother’s terror until Iris came along and surprised them.
‘Billy, this is Iris Grey, our tenant at the cottage,’ Ariadne Wetherby continued briskly, doing her best to normalise the situation. ‘Iris is an artist.’
‘So I see,’ said Billy, taking in Iris’s eclectic outfit with a sardonic, disdainful look. ‘I took an art class last year,’ he added, more convivially, mirroring his mother’s cheerful manner.
Ariadne looked pained. ‘Iris doesn’t need to hear about that, darling.’
Billy shrugged. ‘Doesn’t she? Oh well. If you say so, Mother dear. Doesn’t matter, anyway. Turns out I was shit at it.’ He winked at Iris.
An awkward silence descended. How exactly was Iris supposed to respond to a comment like that? Had she warmed to Billy at all, she might have offered some words of encouragement. As it was, she couldn’t remember the last time that she’d taken such an instant dislike to a person.
‘You’re sure you’re all right?’ she asked Ariadne, pointedly ignoring Billy.
‘Quite sure, thank you.’
Iris turned away. Making her way back down the slippery bank towards her cottage, one thought played and replayed in her head.
I wonder what would have happened if I hadn’t interrupted them? Would he really have hurt her? Pushed her in?
* * *
After a disappointing morning’s sketching, and still haunted by her earlier encounter on the riverbank, at three o’clock Iris decided to walk into the village for a restorative brew at Hambly’s Tea Shop and to buy some food for supper. Ian had once described her as being as skilled in the kitchen as an octopus on a mountain bike. Unkind, perhaps, but undeniably true. Iris couldn’t make toast without setting off the smoke alarm, and sometimes had fantasies about the horrible deaths she would like to inflict on Deliciously Ella. Thankfully, Hazelford was posh enough to have a village shop that stocked excellent organic ready meals (not Ella’s) and homemade deli salads, so she was in no immediate danger of starvation.
Hazelford Stores was at the very top of the High Street, a charming, steeply cobbled lane leading from Jessop’s Rise at the top of the village all the way down to St Anne’s Church and the river at the bottom. Widely regarded as the prettiest village in Hampshire, Hazelford had been used as the setting for numerous Jane Austen adaptations and ITV period dramas, and since taking the cottage, Iris couldn’t shake the feeling that she was living on a film set. Not that that made her love the place any less. On a clear day, standing outside Hazelford Stores, you could make out the spires of Winchester Cathedral in the distance, although today’s miserable weather made it hard even to see across the road to Tannenheim’s bookshop, another of Iris’s favourite haunts.
A little bell rang as she opened the shop door, but nobody heard it. They were all too busy arguing.
‘It’s a bloody disgrace is what it is. Skipping the meeting is one thing, but not to send apologies? It’s so rude, Jean. It’s insulting. He’s supposed to be the sodding chairman!’
Harry Masters, a retired piano teacher in his early seventies and a devoted, life-long Hazelford resident, had worked himself up into a fury. The usually mild-mannered old man was red in the face, with strands of grey hair sticking up at oddly wild angles from where he’d run his hands through them. The artist in Iris would have loved to sketch him.
‘All Dom Wetherby cared about was stopping the planners from developing those fields. Now his beloved view is safe, he can’t even be bothered to pretend to do his job. He’s probably sat at home, sending out invitations to his precious Christmas Eve party. Wondering which D-list celebrities he’s forgotten to ask this year.’
‘Come on, Harry,’ Jean Chivers, Hazelford Stores’ proprietress said reasonably. ‘We’re all happy enough to go to the Christmas Eve party and drink his champagne, you included. And we all voted against the development. Nobody liked that smarmy Russian. It wasn’t just Wetherby.’
‘Yes, but why, Jean? Why were we against the development?’
‘Because it was bad for the village.’
‘Exactly!’ The piano teacher warmed to his theme. ‘We cared about the village. But do you honestly think Wetherby gives a rat’s arse about Hazelford? Course he doesn’t. All Dom Wetherby cares about is Dom Wetherby. He only asks us to his party every year so he can look like the lord of the manor, throwing a few scraps to the village peasants.’ Harry Masters folded his arms with furious finality.
‘Look, Harry, we all know you was upset when Wetherby got elected chairman,’ Alan Chivers, Jean’s husband, observed good-naturedly, loading the old man’s groceries into an eco-friendly paper bag. ‘But at the end of the day, he was elected. He put his name in the hat and people voted for him. Lots of people.’
‘Blinded by celebrity,’ Harry muttered darkly, handing over a twenty-pound note and pocketing his change. ‘More fool them. Well, now they’re reaping what they sow, aren’t they? They’ve got a chairman who’s too important, too famous, to turn up to meetings. I call it bloody outrageous.’
Grabbing his groceries, he stormed out, brushing past Iris and a couple of other customers in his blind anger.
Jean Chivers looked up and rolled her eyes at Iris. ‘Don’t mind Harry. He’s got his knickers in a twist about Dom Wetherby again.’
‘Oh,’ said Iris, still feeling shaken from her earlier run-in with Dom Wetherby’s wife and son, and not quite sure what she could add to the conversation.
She came into Hazelford Stores most days for something or other, but had never spoken to Jean or her husband, or to any of the locals really, barring the usual ‘good morning’s and ‘thank you’s. She couldn’t say why that was, exactly, as she’d never considered herself shy. As a younger woman, she’d been very sociable, happy to talk to strangers or to meet new people. But in the past few years, as things became worse and worse with Ian, and no baby arrived to miraculously fix everything, Iris had retreated. She’d continued working, trying to laugh off her dying marriage and failed fertility treatments, pretending to herself that nothing had changed. But the reality was, her world had shrunk, imperceptibly at first, and then irrevocably, until one day she woke up to find the only things left in it were a husband she no longer loved, a pair of clapped-out ovaries and her painting.
‘Harry used to be chairman, you see,’ Jean Chivers prattled on. ‘Before Wetherby. He ran this village for a long time.’
‘Nine years,’ another customer piped up, a young woman pushing a snotty, whining toddler in a buggy. ‘Nine years, was it?’ Jean nodded sagely, turning back to Iris. ‘But then last year, out of the blue, Dom Wetherby stood against him. Turned up to a meeting one night in the hall and gave a speech about stopping the developers, some Russian group, and how important it was to have a “strong voice” for the village, someone people would really listen to. And of course everybody voted for him, because we all love them Grimshaw books, and Dom Wetherby’s famous and you know…’
‘Influential!’ her husband shouted helpfully from the stockroom.
‘Exactly,’ said Jean. ‘Influential. But poor old Harry took it personal. He lived for that job, you see.’
‘Yes, I can see that,’ said Iris uselessly. She was woefully out of the habit of making small talk.
‘Of course, it won’t stop him turning up to the Mill on Christmas Eve and stuffing his face at Wetherby’s expense. Eyeballing all the famous people, like the rest of us do,’ said Alan Chivers, emerging from the stockroom and cracking his knuckles as he put forth his opinion. ‘Personally, I reckon he’s got a bit of a thing for Wetherby’s wife.’
Iris rallied, slightly. This sort of gossip was much more her forte. She enjoyed a good love-triangle scandal, and hadn’t spent years of her life glued to Coronation Street and EastEnders for nothing.
‘I can see why, too,’ the shopkeeper continued, getting into his stride. ‘Harry’s lonely. Never been married. And Mrs Wetherby’s a wonderful woman. Great-looking, too. For an older lady, obviously,’ he added, glancing nervously at his wife. ‘She’s not a patch on my Jean. But for someone like Harry…’
‘Oh, Mrs Wetherby’s lovely,’ Jean Chivers agreed magnanimously. ‘She really is. The way she cares for that poor boy.’
Iris took ‘that poor boy’ to be Lorcan, Dom and Ariadne’s fifteen-year-old son. Lorcan had been born with Down syndrome and had the mental capacity of a five-year-old. He also had a relentlessly sunny, happy nature, no doubt thanks in part to having a mother who doted on him.
‘And then that awful business with the other son.’ Shaking her head ruefully, Jean dropped her voice to a stage whisper. ‘Going to prison.’
‘Do you mean Billy?’ Iris piped up. Nothing could have surprised her less than learning that the bullying, spiteful young man she’d witnessed terrorising his mother at the riverbank this morning had been in trouble with the law.
‘That’s right.’ Jean peered at Iris more closely. ‘Do you know him, then?’
‘Me? Oh no,’ Iris explained hastily. ‘I ran into him with his mother this morning, that’s all.’
Jean’s eyes widened. ‘He’s never back home already! So soon? You ran into him, you say?’ The shopkeeper suddenly pointed at Iris, as if she’d just remembered something. ‘You live down there, don’t you? Aren’t you that artist who rented Mill Cottage?’
Iris’s heart sank again. Now she was going to get the third degree from these well-meaning people. She should have just bought her sodding ready meal and run. ‘That’s right,’ she said briskly, hoping to end the conversation there. Fumbling in her handbag for her purse, she plonked her chicken risotto and cheap bottle of Rioja down on the counter with an air of finality.
‘What’s your name again?’ Jean asked.
‘Iris. Iris Grey.’ She sighed, wondering how long it would be before she could escape back to her sofa and box set of The Affair and get quietly drunk on her own.
‘And you actually met Billy Wetherby? Today?’ Apparently Jean wasn’t giving up.
‘When’d he get out?’ asked Alan.
‘I didn’t meet him, exactly,’ Iris explained. Clearly the only way out of this conversation was going to be through it. ‘I saw him and his mother down by the river when I was painting.’
‘What’s he like?’ the young mother asked. She’d been waiting to pay, and listening all this time, glued to the drama.
He’s creepy, thought Iris. Creepy and cruel and vile and unsettling.
‘I really don’t know. It was freezing and wet. We said hello and then I went back inside.’
‘You must know them a bit, though? The family? Living there and all…’
‘I really don’t.’
Jean and Alan exchanged glances. Clearly Iris was disappointing her audience. She was the ‘Belgium’ of village gossip, having scored the proverbial nul points. Stuffing her shopping into a bag, she blurted out an awkward ‘goodbye’ and bolted out of the door.
Outside on the cobbled street, Iris actually ran down the hill all the way to the churchyard and the entrance to Mill Lane, desperate suddenly to be alone. Rounding the corner, she stopped at last, doubling over against the flint wall to catch her breath. Setting her groceries down on the pavement, she felt a complete fool.
What on earth is wrong me? Since when can’t I handle a little village gossip?
Perhaps the threat of violence that had hung around Billy Wetherby at the river earlier had unnerved her more than she’d realised. Whatever the reason, she found herself reluctant to talk about him, or any of the Wetherbys for that matter.
Iris trudged home, depressed. But as she approached Mill Cottage, her spirits suddenly lifted. Someone had left something on her doorstep, a beautifully wrapped package in classic striped red-and-green paper, with a large red silk bow on the top. How adorable! Things like that never happened in London.
Setting her shopping on the ground, Iris picked it up and unlocked the door.
Carrying the present inside, she placed it on the table, taking off her coat and putting her food to one side before turning her attention back to its gaudy loveliness. The ribbon was so shiny and thick it seemed wrong to cut it, so instead she carefully untied the bow, peeling off all the tiny strips of sticky tape gently and one by one, so as to keep the paper intact while she unwrapped the box. Inside, carefully nestled on a soft bed of cotton wool, was a tiny Victorian lamp for her doll’s house. Rare and perfect, just looking at it made Iris feel instantly happy. She searched around in the box for a card or note, but there was nothing.
How extraordinary.
Pottering around the kitchen, Iris pondered the mystery of her secret gift. Only her family and very closest friends knew about her doll’s-house fetish. But the lamp had clearly been hand-delivered, by someone local. None of Iris’s friends or family lived near Hazelford. There was Ian, of course, but he was in London and, as far as Iris knew, not in a gift-giving frame of mind, at least not where she was concerned.
Baffled, and suddenly exhausted after her eventful day, Iris put the lamp aside and went upstairs for a bath. Afterwards she changed into an old, stretched man’s T-shirt she wore as a nightie and settled down to ogle Dominic West’s naked bum while eating her chicken supper, washed down with almost an entire bottle of Rioja. Bliss. Since living alone, Iris had noticed she’d started drinking more. It was on her list of ‘things I need to deal with’, just not terribly close to the top. Once the episode was over, she finally returned her attention to the lamp, taking it with her as she climbed up the rickety attic stairs to the room under the eaves where her doll’s house had been stored since she moved in.
Lovingly blowing dust off the tiny dining-room table, and placing the lamp inside, Iris realised Freud would have had a field day with her ‘hobby’: she was holding on to her inner child. Acting out an impulse to control. All those little flights of stairs probably meant something wildly sexual and depraved. In recent years Ian, who’d once considered her love of doll’s houses an endearing quirk, had begun mocking her mercilessly for her ‘obsession’, more or less implying the tiny wooden dolls were substitute children.
Perhaps they are, thought Iris, still woozy from the Rioja. But who cares?
Increasingly, since turning forty, Iris found that she didn’t.
Gazing into the small, glowingly lit dining room, its table laid with a miniature, unchanging feast of fruit and cheese, and tiny loaves of bread, she felt herself calm at once. A familiar, warm feeling of contentment flooded through her, better and deeper than the one from the wine.
This was a perfect house, a perfect world, ordered and beautiful. So what if it wasn’t real? In Iris’s view, reality was seriously overrated.
Later, in bed, Iris pushed aside her usual dark thoughts about Ian and her own future, and instead focused on Billy Wetherby. When she closed her eyes, she could still hear the fear in his mother’s voice on the riverbank this morning. ‘Stop it! Billy … no!’
Would Billy have stopped if Iris hadn’t come along? Would he really have hurt Ariadne, as he threatened, or was he all talk and bluster, like so many of the bullies Iris had known, even before her husband? More importantly, where did his hatred of his mother spring from? And why was Ariadne at such pains to conceal it?
What was Billy sent to prison for? Iris wondered, cursing herself for fleeing the village store like a lunatic earlier, before she’d established this vital piece of information.
She must find out. Just as she must find out who had sent her the thoughtful, exquisitely wrapped present.
Coming to Hazelford to paint and hide and lick her wounds was all very well, but Iris’s natural curiosity would not be so easily silenced, or subdued. Something was amiss in the house of Wetherby. Iris couldn’t rest, not properly, until she knew what it was.
Lying in her creaky cottage bed, unanswered questions pirouetted through her brain in a manic ballet, denying her the sleep that the wine had promised. And so her day ended as it began, staring up at the ceiling.
Copyright © 2017 by M. B. Shaw
