Skeleton Tree, The

By Diane Janes

Is Wendy's dream house about to turn into her worst nightmare?

From the moment Wendy Thornton first laid eyes on number 37, The Ashes, she knew she had to have it. It may seem neglected on the outside, but Wendy is convinced it's her perfect family home. It just needs to be loved. It needs her.

When Wendy receives an unexpected sum of money from her aunt's will, her dream of buying The Ashes becomes a reality. But as Wendy moves in with her young family and starts uncovering its past, she soon learns that The Ashes is hiding a number of dark secrets.

Is Wendy's dream house about to become her worst nightmare? As she is drawn further into The Ashes' dark history, Wendy's own life starts to unravel in the most spectacular and devastating way . . .

• Language: English
• Publisher: Severn House
• Release date: May 1, 2021
• ISBN: 9781448305179

Book preview

People talk about getting away with murder, but I don’t believe there’s any such thing as getting away with it. You certainly can’t get away from it. It’s always there, gnawing at you. Killing isn’t an end, it’s a beginning.

ONE

January 1980

One school of thought has to be that the trouble began with the money. The root of all evil and all that jazz. There can be no doubt that the money changed all of their lives irrevocably.

When Wendy walked out of the front door that cold January morning, the prospect of moving house had been in the air for a while. They had been living in Jasmine Close for six years by then. Jasmine Close, with its neat pairs of identical semis, had been the best they could afford back in 1974 and was adequate to their needs, with Tara still in primary school, Katie not much more than a toddler and Jamie yet to arrive. People described it as ‘a nice little estate’, a small development on the edge of Bishop Barnard, handy for the school and only a ten-minute stroll to the High Street, which in those days still boasted every shop the inhabitants of the village might need. All the roads on the estate were named after flowers: Laburnum Croft, Cyclamen Drive, Honeysuckle Grove and Magnolia Road. It was the sort of place where the younger children were out riding their bikes at the weekends, under the half-hearted supervision of car-cleaning dads, while the older kids headed off carrying riding hats or tennis rackets. The bay windows gleamed with Windolene and self-satisfaction. The wives, who had mostly become mothers before maternity leave and returning to work became the norm, held regular Tupperware parties and coffee mornings in aid of the NSPCC.

Every household had at least one car to carry goods home from the out-of-town supermarkets, and it was easy to pop into the village for odds and ends. Wendy liked the walk, turning left out of Jasmine Close into Cyclamen Drive, then right into Magnolia Road, often pausing to exchange a word or a wave with someone who was busily shaving their lawn with the compulsory hover mower, or rehanging their net curtains, fresh from the sweaty labour of the ironing board; faces recognized from PTA meetings, or the night classes in cake decorating or Spanish for Beginners.

The point where Magnolia Road formed a T-junction with Green Lane marked the end of the estate, and from there it was a left turn on to Green Lane, which ran in an almost straight line until it met the High Street. Unlike the estate, Green Lane had existed for centuries, its direction determined long before the existence of motorized traffic, when the quickest way to anywhere was also the slowest way and did not involve a bypass. Midway between Magnolia Road and the High Street, a gentle kink in Green Lane indicated the existence of some long-forgotten obstacle, a giant tree perhaps or a patch of boggy ground, long since felled, or drained, or otherwise eliminated. For many years it must have been lined by hedgerows, flanked to either side by open fields, but by the time the Thorntons moved into the village, Green Lane was lined with houses and bungalows. Unlike the neat little estate on the edge of the village, there was no uniformity to the dwellings in Green Lane, which had sprung up piecemeal as Bishop Barnard expanded southwards and represented a whole variety of twentieth-century fashions. Wendy liked to look at the different houses. There was one row of six rather dull semis, where a builder had evidently managed to acquire a substantial stretch of land, but most had been individually designed: mock-Tudor monstrosities which looked down on their neighbours in every sense, here a wrought-iron balcony serving a central upstairs French window, there a mini-mansion with art-deco curves and stained glass top lights.

It would have been easy to overlook number thirty-seven altogether, because it stood much further back from the road than all its fellows and was mostly hidden by the overgrown hawthorn hedge which separated the front garden from the pavement. Apart from the brief interval it took anyone to pass the front gate, you couldn’t see the house from the road at all. Even the gate itself was different to every other garden gate in Green Lane, having the appearance of a farm gate, sturdy, rectangular and always closed. A rectangle of wood had been fixed to the gate at some point in the past, with the name of the house burned into it. It had been there so long that the wood had weathered until the whole piece was almost as dark as the name itself, but it was still just possible to make it out: The Ashes. At some stage the house number had been added to one of the gateposts. A three and a seven, barely noticeable; the sort of small wooden numbers that could be obtained cheaply from a hardware shop. The numbers had once been black, but had long since acquired a greenish tint like the gatepost itself, and the screws or nails which secured the numbers had gone rusty. Everything was in need of a good clean-up and a lick of paint.

Wendy knew next to nothing about architecture, but even she could tell that the house was old, probably the oldest building on Green Lane. It was built of brown brick – smaller bricks than its modern neighbours, bricks which belonged to an earlier age – and it had a grey slate roof. She guessed that it must once have stood alone, probably the only dwelling on what would then have been a quiet country lane. In fact, it seemed to her that the house had remained a little bit aloof, as if it had never quite come to terms with having neighbours.

From the very first time she saw it, the house had intrigued her. Its front aspect looked like a house in a child’s drawing, with a central front door, flanked by two downstairs windows, taller than they were wide, with a pair of matching windows on the first floor. She had probably walked past it a hundred times, holding Katie by the hand, pushing Jamie in his pram, then holding his hand, and eventually walking on her own once he had started school. But whenever she passed, she invariably glanced over the gate and down the drive, which ran along one side of the plot and presumably continued along the side of the house, though the view was obstructed by a pair of head-high wooden gates which stretched from the side of the house to the perimeter fence. Above the gates, she could see that the side wall of the house continued for some distance, suggesting that the building went back quite a long way. The front garden clearly needed more attention than it ever received, and as the years went by the whole place achieved an increasingly neglected air.

The occupant or occupants were a complete mystery. She had never seen any signs of life, though whenever she glanced down the drive after dark she could see the glow of an electric light behind the closed curtains of one downstairs window – always the one to the right of the front door. It was the sole indication that anyone lived there at all.

Much later she would remember how she had drawn the children’s attention to The Ashes on a couple of occasions when they were all walking down to the village together. On the first of these she had declared that she would love to see inside the house.

‘It looks pretty decrepit,’ Tara had commented. ‘Helen at school says some old relic lives there, all by herself.’

On the second occasion, Wendy had asked Katie if she wouldn’t like to live in a house like that.

‘Oh no,’ Katie said. ‘There might be ghosts.’

‘Nonsense,’ Wendy said. ‘It looks to me like the sort of house where you might have an adventure.’

Katie wasn’t having it. ‘It just looks spooky to me.’

By the summer of 1979, the area behind the hawthorn hedge bore little resemblance to a garden. The grass, which had not been cut at all that year, had grown knee-high and run to seed, while the stone sundial which had once been clearly visible in the centre of the lawn was so overgrown with brambles that it might not have been there at all. A coterie of nettles had risen beside the wooden gateposts, impudently poking their heads out and leaning across the pavement, while bindweed snaked its way all over the cracked concrete of the drive. The onset of autumn and winter only increased the sense of dereliction. Plants and weeds turned brown, drooped, rotted, then frosted. The house maintained its expressionless air.

The arrival of the ‘For Sale’ board that bitter January day stopped Wendy dead in her tracks. The wind was stinging her face, so she had her head down and was level with the gate of number thirty-seven before she saw the board, but its presence had the most extraordinary effect on her. It was almost as if someone had delivered a blow to her chest, leaving her gasping for breath. All her impotent longing to see over the house surfaced in a rush.

Viewing by appointment only, the board said. Well, why shouldn’t she make an appointment? It wasn’t really right, said a voice in her head. She would only be wasting someone’s time. It was true that they were planning to look for another house – a bigger house – but not one like this. This was a detached, double-fronted property, sitting on a large plot of land. She knew perfectly well they weren’t in that league.

The board belonged to a local firm of estate agents who had an office in the High Street. She searched their window display in vain for the house, but it was not on show. As she stood there, she could hear Bruce’s voice in her head. Her husband shared most people’s healthy scepticism when it came to estate agents. ‘Quaint means old and poky, spacious means draughty and impossible to heat, deceptively spacious, on the other hand, means it looks small and it is, while would suit first-time buyer translates as no one who isn’t blind with love, or green as grass, is going to touch this with a barge pole.’

Since the house was not among those advertised in the window, she decided to go inside and enquire. There couldn’t be any harm in it. Half the people who go to view houses are just timewasters, satisfying their idle curiosity, she told herself.

The receptionist greeted her with a smile straight out of a toothpaste advert.

‘Good morning,’ Wendy said. ‘I want to enquire about viewing a house called The Ashes.’

The young woman smiled. ‘Of course,’ she said. She rose from her desk and crossed to the rear of the office, opening one of the filing cabinets and clicking through the dividers until she reached the section she wanted, then produced a single printed sheet, which she handed to Wendy.

A mature detached property set in a large garden in need of extensive renovation but offering a rare opportunity to provide a house of character.

‘We’re asking for offers in the region of twenty thousand pounds,’ the young woman said, as if twenty thousand pounds was well within anyone’s budget. ‘But prospective buyers need to bear in mind that the property will require at least another ten thousand spent on it, depending upon what is required.’

Some sort of reaction was evidently expected, so Wendy nodded and said, ‘Yes, of course,’ in a knowing sort of way, as if she had a sock full of fifty pound notes at home, which would make such a proposition even remotely possible. ‘What are the major things that require attention?’ It was surprisingly easy to keep up the pretence, she thought, once you’d embarked on this fantasy persona of a woman who could afford to acquire a mature detached house of character in need of extensive renovation. ‘Is it possible to make an appointment to see round the house?’

The woman smiled again. ‘The property has generated considerable interest, so we have decided to open it up for two general viewings this week, firstly on Thursday afternoon between one until four and then on Saturday morning from ten until twelve.’

‘So anyone can just turn up between those times?’

‘That’s right.’

For a woman who was only going to have a nose around a house she didn’t have a cat in hell’s chance of buying, Wendy felt ridiculously excited.

She waited until they were all sitting down to tea that evening before she announced, ‘You’ll never guess! That old house on Green Lane – you know, the one I’ve always liked – is up for sale. They’re holding some open viewings and there’s one on Saturday morning. Why don’t we all go and have a look?’

‘Whatever for?’ asked Bruce. ‘We couldn’t possibly afford to buy it.’

‘Just out of interest,’ Wendy said. ‘I’ve always wanted to see inside.’

‘What for?’ Bruce asked again. ‘Jamie, don’t reach across like that. Ask your sister to pass the sauce, if you want it.’

‘Didn’t some scary old woman used to live there?’ queried Tara.

‘What happened to the scary old woman?’ Katie wanted to know.

This stymied Wendy completely. She had taken it for granted that the elderly occupant had died. That was the usual reason for a long-neglected house suddenly appearing on the market, but she was reluctant to introduce that idea – she seemed to recall that Katie had already raised the possibility of ghosts and she badly wanted them all to like the house, even if there was no realistic prospect of it ever actually becoming theirs.

‘We don’t know anything about who lived there before,’ she said. ‘And anyway, that doesn’t matter. The great thing is that it’s a good chance to see inside the house. Once it’s sold there may never be another opportunity.’

‘I still don’t see the point,’ said Bruce. ‘It sounds like a complete waste of time to me.’

Wendy turned to Tara, hoping for some support but receiving none. ‘Yawnsville,’ her eldest said, theatrically patting her hand against her mouth.

‘Well, all right.’ Wendy laughed off their indifference. ‘I’ll go up there myself, on Thursday afternoon.’

Wendy spent Thursday morning busying herself with what Bruce jokingly referred to as her housewifely chores. At lunchtime she sat at the dining table for a solo lunch of crispbread and cottage cheese, and after that she went upstairs to exchange her jeans for a smart skirt, selecting a bag that matched her shoes. Somehow it felt important to dress the part of someone who could actually afford to buy The Ashes.

She was relieved to find Jasmine Close and Magnolia Road deserted. Friendly neighbours might ask where she was going, all dressed up on a weekday afternoon, and now that she was actually on her way it suddenly felt silly to have smartened herself up merely in order to go nosing around someone else’s house. Her own family clearly thought so. When she had mentioned the viewing to Bruce that morning as he left for work, he’d just laughed and warned her to look out for dodgy floorboards. ‘Otherwise, you might find yourself having an unexpected look around the cellar.’ Afterwards she’d wondered whether it was a roundabout way of letting her know that she was putting on weight, hence the cottage cheese lunch.

As soon as she turned into Green Lane, she could see what the woman in the estate agents’ office had meant by ‘considerable interest’: there were far more parked cars than was usual for the time of day, and before Wendy had reached the gate herself, three lots of viewers had entered ahead of her. She arrived simultaneously with a couple who’d approached from the opposite direction. The woman was slim and pretty, huddled in a coat with a fake fur collar. Her companion was an older man in a heavy, dark overcoat. He held the gate open for both women, but once they were on the drive Wendy paused politely, allowing them to go ahead of her; she wanted to savour the moment.

Now that she was finally standing on the drive, she could see things she had never noticed before. There was a holly bush planted next to the path which ran between the drive and the front door. No need to buy holly at the greengrocers each Christmas, she thought, and there were some laurels – badly in need of attention – at the further side of the garden. More Christmas evergreens.

The front door was wide open, allowing all-comers to walk straight into the narrow, panelled hall, which was dark after the brightness of the winter afternoon. The man who’d entered ahead of her flicked a light switch up and down a couple of times, but the electricity had evidently been disconnected. Wendy was forced to pause and allow her eyes to adjust, while she tasted the stale air and listened to the sounds of other people’s footsteps and voices as they echoed against the uncarpeted floors and bounced off the high ceilings. Along with these tastes and sounds came the unmistakable smells of damp and neglect, but finally, most strongly of all, came the strange and overwhelming sensation that the house wanted her.

‘It wants to be loved.’

Oh, for goodness’ sake, had she spoken out loud? Fortunately, everyone else had already moved on from the hall and her own entrance seemed to mark a lull in arrivals.

Three or four steps took her to the point where the panelling ended and the hall broadened out to double its initial width, with doors opening to the right and left, a staircase ascending immediately ahead of her, and to the right of the staircase a passage continued towards the rear of the house. As she hesitated, deciding where to begin, she noticed that the open door to her right had a paler patch of wallpaper alongside it, suggesting the ghost of a low, narrow doorway, suitable for a slender child. It was the outline of a clock. Wendy pictured it standing there, marking the minutes, hours, days, years. She smiled, satisfied by her powers of observation. It was like finding a clue.

She chose the doorway on her left, noticing as she entered the room and walked across the bare floorboards that her feet seemed to be making less noise than anyone else’s, as if hers was not such a great intrusion. The room was empty. The wallpaper had faded to an indistinct pattern of yellows and browns and someone had pulled off a strip, revealing that the back of the paper was grey with mould. The plaster behind it had crumbled to expose the brickwork. Aged wiring hung from a central point in the ceiling, where a light fitting should have been, and the fireplace was filled with crumpled newspapers and lumps of dirt. In spite of this, she could see that the room had once been beautiful. It felt light and spacious, and around the perimeter of the ceiling there was a plaster border of intertwined leaves and flowers. Her reverie was interrupted by a trio of viewers who entered the room, talking loudly.

‘It’s difficult to say,’ said one of the women.

They walked past Wendy as if she was not there. It’s as if I’m part of it, she thought. As if I belong here and they don’t.

She left the newcomers without acknowledgement and crossed the hall to look inside the other front room. This was a slightly larger room than the first and in a marginally better state. It was still possible to discern a pattern of roses on the wallpaper. Wendy remembered that this was the room from which she had sometimes seen a light shining: the room which had still been in use, when the rest of the house had perhaps been all but abandoned. There was nothing left to provide clues of its former occupant now, except that a fire was laid in the grate. A little layer of coal, a few pieces of kindling, neatly placed, only waiting for a match. Someone had laid the fire, expecting to light it, but fate had intervened. It was like the previous owner leaving a small gift for the new occupants. Welcome to your new home …

It was very easy to mentally kindle that fire, furnish the room with comfy chairs and a fireside rug, see the younger kids lying around in their pyjamas, staying up to watch Saturday night telly, their older sister, Tara, affecting teenage sophistication but enjoying The Generation Game as much as anyone, and herself with Bruce’s arm draped around her shoulders as they sat, side by side, on the sofa. Just visualising it all took the winter chill from the room.

Returning to the hall, she noticed that the passage leading to the back of the house had a slate floor. It was illuminated by a window at its furthest end, but the daylight was being obstructed by a plump woman who was standing in front of the window, addressing an unseen third party. ‘You’re surely not going down there, are you, Jack?’

Jack was evidently standing out of sight, where the passage made a right angle turn to run along the back of the house. ‘I certainly am.’

‘There’ll be nothing to see down there.’ Even as she protested, the woman sounded resigned. Wendy didn’t catch the unseen Jack’s reply.

‘Honest to God.’ The woman turned her attention to Wendy. ‘Men. They’re nowt but little kids, the lot of them.’ She adopted an expression of shared conspiracy. ‘Fancy going down the cellar!’

Wendy smiled, uncertain how to respond.

‘It’s in a right state, isn’t it?’ the woman added, making a movement with her head to encompass the property as a whole. ‘It’ll take a mint of money to put it right.’

Wendy nodded.

‘He loves anything like this, our Jack does. Old houses, traction engines, the lot.’

‘It’s a beautiful old house.’

The woman gave Wendy an odd look. ‘All right if you like that sort of thing, I suppose. Did you want to come by, pet, or are you going in there?’

‘In there’ was a door at the end of the passage on the right-hand side. It led to what had once been a big, old-fashioned kitchen. Wendy entered to find the room already occupied. A small boy was looking out of the window into a cobbled back yard. Following his gaze, Wendy saw the back garden was screened from the kitchen by a range of single-storey outbuildings, whose roofs had mostly fallen in.

‘There’d be room to stable Femo,’ the little boy said in a high, piping voice.

‘I hardly think that Daddy will buy it on the strength of that, darling.’ The boy’s mother was sizing up the ancient cooking range which occupied part of the wall opposite the window.

She doesn’t like it, Wendy thought. Why did no one else seem to get it? Couldn’t anyone else sense its yearning? All The Ashes needed was someone to love it properly.

Two more women entered the room, obviously curiousity viewers like herself.

‘Eee, will you look at that!’ exclaimed the younger of the pair, pointing at the range.

Two men arrived immediately after them and began poking about in a big built-in cupboard. ‘It’s a wonder it’s never burned down with the state of this wiring,’ one of them said.

‘You’d have thought she’d have had that seen to, if it were dangerous,’ the older woman said. Wendy wasn’t sure if the two pairs were together, but the situation made for conversations between strangers.

‘Dangerous?’ This from the same man as before. ‘It’s bloody lethal!’

‘You know these old ones,’ the younger woman put in. ‘They don’t realize. They think things last forever.’

‘Still,’ her companion said. ‘I’m surprised at Mrs Duncan. It’s not as if she were short of a penny or two. I mean, just look at the place. It’s not what I was expecting.’

‘Did you know her then?’ asked the man, who had not yet spoken.

‘Well … by sight, you know. Not really to speak to. I’ve lived in Green Lane since 1938 and she’s been here all that time.’

The other woman glanced at her watch, as if sensing the possibility of a delay. ‘We’d better get going,’ she said. ‘We haven’t seen upstairs yet and I need to be back home for our Gary.’

‘Our mam used to say she was never right after …’

Wendy did not hear the rest, for the women were gone, their places taken by the couple who had arrived at the gate when she did. She tried to ignore the other viewers and concentrate on taking in the room, committing it to memory, because she would probably never see it again. There were windows on three elevations in the kitchen. One faced across the courtyard towards the outbuildings, which even the estate agents’ handout had described, in a rare rush of