The Family Shadow: A historical mystery with long-buried secrets and dual timeline suspense Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Epigraph

  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

  To the reader

  Author’s Note

  About the author

  List of characters in The Family Shadow

  Copyright

  The

  Family

  Shadow

  SUZANNE WINTERLY

  “And the shadow flits and fleets

  And will not let me be.”

  Maud - Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1855)

  Chapter One

  County Wexford, 3rd September, 1891

  The wheels of the trap rattled over stones as they passed the gates of Ardlackan House and the dark windows of the lodge stared back at the three figures huddled together for warmth. The pony in the shafts pricked her ears and shied at leaves whirling on the gravel sweep.

  The girl pressed closer to her aunt and pulled the hood of her cloak over her head. It wasn’t much of a carriage, a real boneshaker. Her uncle used it to ferry older locals to Mass on Sundays, or his wife on her visits as a midwife. She gripped her aunt’s hand and leaned against the warmth of her ample bulk.

  A crescent moon cast a cool light over nearby lanes and fields; on the right, a stand of evergreen oak trees stood dark against the inky sky. It was a cold night for the beginning of September and an autumnal chill hung in the air.

  The pony trotted on and her driver helped himself to a few sips of whiskey from a battered hip flask. He gave a yank on the left rein and the carriage headed into the darkness of the wood, its lamps glowing like huge cat’s eyes.

  “Why are we going through the wood?” her aunt enquired. “Is that a good idea at this late hour?”

  Her uncle snorted. “What, woman, are you afraid of ghosts and ghouls? Look at the pony! She knows this is the shortest way home.”

  A shiver pricked the back of the girl’s neck. She’d heard stories of these woods; tales about gangs of robbers jumping out from behind trees and demanding money at knifepoint.

  Her eldest brother had been only too happy to tell her about the ghost that haunted Ardlackan woods. A phantom who rode a white horse and was headless. Locals claimed he was the dispossessed owner of the dwelling that once stood where Ardlackan House was now, thrown out by one of Oliver Cromwell’s captains who forced it from him. He hadn’t gone quietly and had been decapitated in the struggle.

  The girl bit her lip and glanced at her aunt, who slid her arm round her waist, giving her a comforting squeeze.

  They’d reached a clearing in the trees when the carriage jolted to a halt and the old man let out a long whistle. “Would ye look at that?” He pulled the reins and barked at the pony to stand still.

  “What, you fool? What have your drunken eyes seen now?” Her aunt’s voice cracked with fatigue after her strenuous night delivering a baby boy.

  The pony pawed at the ground and tossed her head, impatient to move on and she received a quick reprimand. The man pointed to their right where a deep ditch ran along the side of the laneway, moss-covered banks where ferns wrestled with brambles. The tinkle of running water rose from below.

  They craned their necks to peer down into the dyke. Something lay under the fronds and tangled briars, a dark shape with a glimmer of white.

  “What is it?” The girl’s breathing quickened. The headless phantom? Had they stumbled upon his resting place? Her heart thumped faster and she looked behind, as if expecting to see a white steed tethered to a branch.

  “We’d better find out. Stay here, child,” her aunt said, “and you, come with me.” This last command she tossed at her husband.

  The old couple made their way down into the stream, kicking the brambles and ferns aside, trampling them with their leather boots, while her uncle cursed under his breath. The girl shivered and cast another look over her shoulder. Were there shapes hiding behind the tree trunks? Was that the shadow of a robber falling across the dead leaves? She peered again into the bushes. Nobody there, only her imagination; her brother’s stories unnerving her.

  Her uncle and aunt reached the stream and bent to examine the creature, or whatever it was, their heads close together. They exchanged urgent but inaudible words. A series of mumbled sentences that the girl strained to hear. Several minutes passed before they climbed back up to the lane.

  “Don’t say anything to the child.” Her aunt’s face was pale, the hue of skimmed milk.

  The girl gripped her arm. “What is it? Please tell me. Is it… is it the ghost?”

  Her uncle tilted his head back and helped himself to a long gulp from his hip flask. “Ghost, is it? No ghost, indeed. It’s a man and he’s stone cold.”

  “Drunk?” The girl stared at his face, grey above his whiskers in the moonlight.

  Ignoring a sharp look and reprimand from his wife, he hoisted himself back onto the driver’s seat and shook his head. “Not drunk… dead. A man lying cold and dead in the stream, God rest his soul. There’s nothing we can do for him now except drive on to the doctor’s house. We’ll let him take charge of the rest.”

  “Perhaps we should tell the constabulary?”

  He frowned at his wife. “No, we want nothing to do with them. There’ll be hell to pay when they see who it is.”

  Chapter Two

  The present - 16th June, 2019

  “I think you should consider this, Fiona. Remember the months we spent at Ardlackan?”

  Jessica and I often reminisced about long summer holidays in County Wexford, swimming as fearless teenagers in the icy sea and running back through the woods to dinner in the former farmhouse where her uncle and aunt lived.

  Ardlackan conjured up memories of light and shade; fingers of sun sliding up the stone house nestled into the hillside, with its cloak of Virginia creeper and protected on two sides by arms of evergreen trees that held the sea winds at bay.

  Jessica and I stood by the wall running along Strand Road in Sandymount, gazing at mud flats where wading birds dug for lugworms under coiled castings.

  “Aunt Daphne needs your help,” she said. “She needs you to save her from a journalist and her far-fetched claims.”

  “Hmm.”

  “You’d be just the right person to do the research and find out the truth, I know you would.”

  I smiled.

  “You’re so…”

  “Organized?” I asked. Jessica always insisted that was my strength although far more successful than me with her modern, spotless apartment and career in the bank.

  My eyes lingered on the Poolbeg chimneys, those faded red and white striped stacks that rose against a bank of dark clouds. Perched together since the late 1970s, they had become iconic landmarks of Dublin on the south bank of the port, visible from above the airport as we flew in; beacons that welcomed me home when I caught my first glimpse of the sprawling city and drew me to my father’s house on the edge of Sandymount village.

  My poor father’s house, soon to be sold to another family and stripped of his possessions.

  The dog. Where was the dog? I’d forgotten all about him, lost in my thoughts. I glanced around.

  An oystercatcher hopped and tipped forward to probe with its orange-red bill. And there was the dog racing towards the black and white bird, his tongue lolling and his ears pricked. My father’s dog. Mine now, at least for the present until I decided what to do with the little fellow.

  “I know it’s been difficult for you, Fiona.” Jessica’s dark brown eyes looked into mine. “You’ve had two very stressful events. Your father’s death… and now a divorce looming. A change would do you good. Get you away from here for a while.”

  Dear Jessica, always so forthright and certain. The thought seeped
into my mind that the incoming tide was like time passing; relentlessly sweeping everything away; an empty cola can, that crushed cigarette packet tossed by a careless person already sucked up and borne away on the last wave.

  Further along Strand Road I watched a flicker of sunlight on the Martello tower, one of fifty built by the British in the early nineteenth century when they feared Napoleon would invade.

  There was something calming about history, events safely stored in the past and no longer able to hurt us. I found history reassuring.

  It was the middle of June. A warm breeze tossed Jessica’s dark, shiny hair across her even features and her eyes, always kind and somehow earnest, gazed into mine as she placed a hand on my arm.

  “You have to move on now, Fi. No point dwelling on… you’ve got the whole summer ahead… your whole life ahead of you.”

  I spun round and my voice rose. “To do what? To forget and to forgive? Is that what you expect me to do? How can I forget about it? How can I forgive the man who has nearly ruined me?”

  Her fingers squeezed my elbow. “I don’t mean you should forgive him, not yet, but if you had something to do for the summer, something to take your mind off things.” She tugged at my sleeve. “How did your Leaving Cert pupils cope this year?”

  “Quite well, I think. I had the usual mix of genius and indifference in my history class, but they seem to have got through the exams without a crisis.”

  Always a poignant time when I had to say goodbye to my sixth-year students, even the troublesome ones pretending they would miss me. Now two and a half months of holidays stretched ahead. Too much time. Too many hours to brood on what had happened so unexpectedly.

  “Let’s walk to the restaurant,” Jessica suggested. “It’s nearly time for lunch. We’ll get coffee and lunch. I’ll tell you more about what’s happened to poor Aunt Daphne.”

  I whistled for Archie the terrier and slipped on his lead when he came bounding towards me, short tail wagging with excitement.

  Jessica linked her arm in mine and we strolled along Strand Road, walking towards the centre of Sandymount village.

  She was my dearest friend and the one who always listened.

  The restaurant on the Green was filling up with customers, but we found a table on the pavement. Jessica sat down on a chair with an exaggerated sigh, tossing her long hair over her shoulder.

  I attached Archie’s lead to a wrought-iron leg and told him to lie down and be good. Perhaps all the running along the sand had exhausted him because he flopped beside my feet, resting his head across my shoe.

  A tall, Italian-looking waiter brought us our coffees and we ordered lunch. He returned with two plates of salad piled high with goat’s cheese, beetroot and mixed seeds. What my father would have called rabbit food. I blinked away sudden tears.

  I raised my mug. “To the future,” I said. “Here’s to the summer holidays.”

  Jessica tapped hers against mine. “That’s the spirit. Onwards and upwards, my friend. Now, wait till you see this.” She rummaged in her large leather handbag.

  I watched with a feeling of unease. My husband gone, my father’s house placed in the hands of an estate agent that morning and an overdrawn bank account. Things could only get better.

  Jessica shook out a folded newspaper and placed it on the table. She pushed it towards me. “See that headline? You can imagine what Daphne felt when she saw that. A bolt out of the blue. None of us knew what the woman was up to.” The woman was obviously not Daphne because the word shot with contempt from my friend’s lips.

  I sipped my coffee and looked at the newspaper. Murder haunts trainer’s family.

  “My father’s brother,” Jessica pointed out. “The racehorse trainer.”

  “The racehorse trainer,” I emphasized, for he’d been a household name among the racing fraternity and one of my husband’s idols. Dominic won over one thousand euro once at Leopardstown on a treble of winning horses trained by Charles Thornton and boasted about his victory for weeks afterwards. It paid for our Christmas holiday in Lisbon where my mother lived with her latest boyfriend.

  People often thought my mother and I looked alike with our blue eyes and wavy dark blonde hair, but she assured them that was where any similarity ended. She claimed I was too serious and bossy, which came from being a teacher and from taking on too much responsibility when I was in my early twenties, marrying Dominic and settling down when I could have gone off to travel the world. My mother was always adept at shirking responsibility.

  Jessica continued, “Poor Daphne has been besieged by the press since this headline. You’d think no one would be interested in a murder that happened more than a century ago… over one hundred and thirty years ago, but no, they love it… can’t wait to read about it. The locals haven’t been so excited for years and everyone is claiming to have known about it. Daphne knew nothing until the journalist phoned her a few days ago.”

  “I’ve never heard of this murder. Where did it take place?”

  “In the woods between the house and the village. The victim was a Thornton man apparently, and also a racehorse trainer. Why didn’t Uncle Charles say something about it before he died?”

  “Perhaps he didn’t want to.” Charles had been a quiet man; a man who would have turned the key and kept family skeletons securely locked in the cupboard.

  Jessica added, “If you go to stay with Daphne, I could come down at weekends. We could relive our youth.”

  “Summer holidays after my mother decamped for Portugal? I expect Dad was pleased to get a break from minding my brother and me.”

  “It was fun. Remember Daphne’s cooking, though? I once suspected she mixed turpentine in the gravy instead of stock.” She frowned at the newspaper. “Daphne still paints, more than ever when she’s upset. So, this journalist is doing research for a British television producer. Daphne wants nothing to do with it. There’s a ghoulish longing for details about true life murders these days. Why can’t people leave the past alone?”

  Why indeed? But if we all ignored the past and abandoned our history books, I would be out of a job.

  Our days at Ardlackan had always seemed baked in sunshine. The only cloud in that blue sky was the bad-tempered glower on Uncle Charles’s face. He wasn’t a blood relation of mine, but I’d always called him that because Jessica did. Truth be told, I was afraid of him and felt sorry for Daphne. Later she confided that he suffered from depression and an uncharacteristic string of losing horses sent him into depths of despair. It wasn’t his fault, she explained, he was a hero and a brilliant trainer. Under a lot of pressure. Most of the journalists agreed and were prepared to indulge him the occasional outburst in the parade ring after a race, when he let out a roar of exasperation and sent them scattering like sheep.

  “What’s the name of the writer?”

  “Doesn’t say.”

  “Poor Daphne,” I murmured. “She had a lot to put up with, didn’t she? The difficult owners and Uncle Charles’s moods…”

  “Hmm, I suppose so, but he secretly adored her.”

  Perhaps Jessica was right. Daphne had once tried to persuade me to eat a boiled egg for breakfast. I remembered shaking my head and refusing. Uncle Charles lowered his racing newspaper and glared at me, demanding to know what was wrong with the child.

  But Daphne had just smiled and assured me that it was a special egg, laid by Rosie her most intelligent hen, and she added that Rosie told her I was the only special girl in the house who was allowed to eat it. Uncle Charles raised his eyebrows, snorted and laughed out loud before returning to his paper.

  “And so…” Jessica paused and frowned slightly, lines wrinkling her brow.

  “So?”

  “I thought you might like to help her. Help Daphne deal with this persistent woman. I thought you’d be the ideal person to sort it all out.” She put down her fork and opened her hands with the palms upwards, as if waiting for me to applaud her wonderful idea.

  “Why?”

  “She’d really appreciate it.”

  “What exactly am I expected to do?”

  “Defend her. Find out what really happened. It couldn’t possibly be a relation of ours who did that. A murder, for goodness sake. It has to be nonsense. Look, Fiona, wouldn’t it be a distraction?”

  “Sounds like it might take up a lot of time.”

  “Maybe, but I think that would be an advantage. Tell Dominic you can’t possibly talk to him about the separation agreement until you get back. It would give you time to think.”