True Murder Read online

  Contents

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Dedication

  Title Page

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Acknowledgements

  Copyright

  About the Book

  Eleven year old Ajuba has been abandoned at a Devon boarding school by her Ghanaian father. Haunted by the circumstances of her mother’s breakdown, Ajuba falls under the spell of new girl Polly Venus, and her chaotic, glamorous family. As the passionate bond between the two girls deepens, they discover what they think are the bones of dead kittens, hidden in the attic of the Venus home; but the bones are human.

  The girls set out to unravel the mystery but as the summer draws to a close, three tragedies conflate, with catastrophic results.

  About the Author

  Yaba Badoe is a Ghanian-British documentary film-maker and journalist. A graduate of King’s College, Cambridge, she worked as a civil servant in Ghana before becoming a general trainee with the BBC. She has taught in Spain and Jamaica and is, at present, Visiting Scholar at the Institute of African Studies at the University of Ghana, where she is completing a documentary film – The Witches of Gambaga. Her short stories have been published in Critical Quarterly and in African Love Stories, an anthology edited by Ama Ata Aidoo.

  To my mother, ‘Ago’ Fadoa:

  True Murder

  Yaba Badoe

  1

  EVEN NOW, AFTER all these years, I can hardly bear to look in a mirror. If I had my way, I would shatter every mirror in the house rather than glimpse my reflection unawares. Yet it’s not my looks that bother me. I have been told I am like my mother, beautiful some might say, with eyes as bright as a cat’s, skin the colour of midnight. I have a long face, generous lips and folds around my neck, which suggest I was born gasping, adorned with the coiled necklaces of an African fertility doll.

  I used to think that if I could only trust my instincts I would be able to catch the glint in my eyes and smile. But ever since Polly, I haven’t been able to trust myself again. After all, if I’d behaved appropriately, saying the right words at the right time, keeping silent when necessary, the past would have turned out differently. I would never have gone to that school, I wouldn’t have met Polly; I wouldn’t have gone home with her; the trunks in the attic of the manor house where she lived might have remained sealed for ever, and the chain of events we unleashed by opening them might have been avoided. Perhaps if we had never met, Polly would still be alive.

  I would like to believe I’ve recovered from the anger that almost engulfed me when she died; but until I can contain my rage it’s safer for everyone if I live on my own in a room without mirrors. When I look into them, I am bruised by memories of Polly. She didn’t see what I see, the ghosts eyeing my reflection. She didn’t tap the hidden secrets of mirrors to contemplate the horror they reveal.

  I’d like to put her behind me, once and for all, instead of dwelling on her day after day by hiding from my image. Perhaps if I can appease her by remembering the past, recounting the detail of what happened between us, I’ll be able to look at myself. Then, instead of seeing Polly glaring at me, I’ll see my own face again. If it were simply an effort of will, I might have done this years ago and the spell would have long been broken. As it is, those events I lived through have captured a part of me; to free myself I can no longer avoid them. Perhaps if I set them out in an orderly fashion I can begin to understand what happened and how events conspired to make me what I am. Perhaps then I will be able to relinquish this fear I carry with me everywhere. And through making this offering, like a libation, and asking my precursors to listen sympathetically as I piece together the past, perhaps I shall reclaim myself and be at ease once again.

  2

  UNTIL RECENTLY, WHENEVER I thought of Polly, I remembered the last time I saw her alive. She was leaning out of an upstairs window of Graylings, wearing a scarlet dressing-gown that set her unruly curls alight. Beside her, with a hand on her shoulder, was her mother, Isobel. It was Christmas Eve and I was with a group of carol singers from Sunday School. We were singing carols in aid of the World Wildlife Fund and when we had sung the final chorus of ‘The Holly and the Ivy’ I shook the box of donations I was carrying. Polly waved at me, shouting my name, inviting me in. Then she ran downstairs with her mother and opened the front door.

  She led me into her house, the other singers trampling in behind. She took my arms and pulled me close. Her blanket of golden hair fell against my face; I felt the pulse of her breath as she warmed my body with hers. Even now, years later, whenever I am out in the cold over Christmas, my cheeks numb, my feet frozen; whenever I hear the melody of half-pagan English songs, I glimpse a flash of gold and scarlet waving at a window and, catching my breath, holding it as I remember how tightly she drew me to her, I try to grasp Polly once again.

  We were not always good friends: ‘Best friends. Friends for ever,’ as she put it. We weren’t always blood sisters, our lives flowing through each other’s veins. To begin with I was wary of her, sniffing her out as a cat might an unfamiliar species.

  Polly Venus arrived at school nine months after me. When I first met her she exuded the arrogance of a bird of prey and the seductive gaze of a gazelle. I didn’t much like her and if Major Derby hadn’t asked me to look after her, I would have avoided Polly, sticking by Beth, who was my closest friend at the time. But Major Derby, who with his wife owned and ran the prep school we attended, asked me to take care of Polly. He thought I should come out of myself more and get involved with my surroundings. To begin with, Beth had looked out for me, and knowing how strange it is being a new girl – like a snail that, having lost its shell, spends all its time looking for it, leaving a trail of tears everywhere – I didn’t have much choice but to be civil to Polly.

  The Derbys were my legal guardians. ‘We’re in loco parentis,’ they used to say when they looked after me over the school holidays. I didn’t mind for the most part, but I hated the start of a new term when I saw other children with their parents and was forced to bear witness to tender gestures of farewell. I avoided them by hiding in the school playroom: a long room with a radiator running down one side and a Victorian rocking-horse in the corner. I was sitting against the radiator, an open book on my lap, when Major Derby put his head round the door. He was a bear of a man with the long, loping stride of an Irish wolfhound. He smiled at me: ‘The new girl’s arrived, Ajuba.’

  The expression on my face must have betrayed my reluctance to do what was required of me, for he added: ‘She’ll be needing you soon, and you remember what it was like, don’t you, sweetie?’

  I did. I slammed the book shut, aware that he was appealing to the part of me that struggled to overcome an ingrained shyness and attempted to laugh at other people’s jokes.

  Major Derby and his wife were ardent conservationists and often told us that they wanted to leave the world a better place for having passed through it. Nothing pleased them more, they said, than knowing that the children in their care shared the values they believed in: a respect for nature and all living things. I didn’t muc
h care for their love of what they termed ‘outdoor activities’, which entailed trudging through the countryside in inclement weather, but I knew instinctively that the Derbys’ mission was also to conserve the good qualities they saw in each of us, nurturing us until we flourished at their school. His appeal to my better nature made me not want to let Major Derby down.

  I ran upstairs to Exe, the dormitory where I slept with the other girls in Seniors. I rushed in, throwing the book on my bed, and saw Polly Venus for the first time.

  She was standing beside her father, a tall, tousle-haired man who was deep in conversation with Maria Richardson’s mother. According to Maria, another inmate of Exe, her mother was a famous journalist who campaigned on behalf of downtrodden people everywhere. From starving children in Africa to homeless vagrants in London, Emily Richardson waved a flag on their behalf, trumpeting good causes. From the way she wrapped herself in conversation with Polly’s father, I couldn’t help wondering if Emily Richardson had much time for anything other than herself.

  Both adults seemed oblivious to Maria’s clumsy attempt at befriending the new girl by offering her a Mars bar. From the look on Polly’s face, she was either bored or filled with such disdain for Maria that she could barely bring herself to glance at her. Evidently, Polly Venus didn’t like chocolate.

  ‘Hi,’ I said. I told her my name, adding gloomily, ‘I’m meant to look after you.’

  The new girl was dazzling, with a sleek veneer of self-assurance that made it apparent that she was conscious of her long-limbed beauty and knew how to use it. Her eyes were a flash of kingfisher-blue and when she looked at me, sizing me up, it was as if a blaze of colour had woken me for the first time at school. Polly gazed at me, remarking in a dry, American accent: ‘What makes you think I need looking after?’

  New girls weren’t supposed to be cocky. They were supposed to be downcast and despondent, as I had been.

  ‘I don’t have to look after you if you don’t want me to but Major Derby says I should because you’re new. Maria can do it if you’d rather.’

  I hoped she would prefer Maria to show her around; but Polly sighed deeply and said: ‘No, thanks. I guess you’ll do.’

  Her lack of enthusiasm reflected my own, yet I was determined to make an effort. ‘Is that your dad?’ I asked.

  ‘Yeah. He’s a foreign correspondent.’

  ‘Are you foreign as well?’

  ‘Kind of. We’ve been living in Washington for ever. I didn’t want to come here. I don’t think I’m the kind of kid that suits boarding school. But, hey, adults, huh? They have no idea how to handle pre-teenagers.’

  I didn’t have a clue what a pre-teenager was. But the fact that Polly saw herself as foreign, and didn’t want to be at boarding school in England, helped me empathise: ‘I know what you mean,’ I mumbled.

  Maria didn’t, for she said very loudly, ‘Don’t take any notice of Ajuba, Polly. You’re going to have a wonderful time. Josh and I simply love it here. That’s why Mummy told Peter and Isobel about the school. Mummy knew we’d be the best of friends. Mummy, isn’t that true?’

  Josh was Maria’s older brother. Vaguely aware of her daughter’s intervention, Emily Richardson grunted in Maria’s direction. Her eyes remained fixed on Peter Venus. They both had their diaries open and were jotting down numbers, suggesting possible dates to meet. The crackle of electricity between them, the intensity of her absorption in him, reminded me of the honey-eyed rabbits we sometimes watched on the top lawn at school: a doe thrusting her tail in a buck’s face until she got his full attention. It was what Aunt Rose, my mother’s sister, called Hanky-Panky: the activity my father indulged in with his girlfriends. ‘Men are helpless creatures when it comes to women,’ Aunt Rose said. ‘A woman has to be her own watchdog, Ajuba. Never forget it.’

  I hadn’t forgotten. I recognised, even then, that the frequency with which Emily Richardson tossed back her hair, teasing the silver stud in her ear with nicotine-stained finger, was because she had allowed her watchdog to fall asleep.

  Perhaps mindful of her father’s charm, Polly responded with rigid indifference when it wasn’t directed at her; she appeared contemptuous of her surroundings, staring blankly into space to avoid my eyes, but I sensed that she was listening to his every word.

  Intrigued, I asked: ‘What does a foreign correspondent do?’

  Polly sniffed, ‘He writes for a newspaper, silly.’

  ‘Oh, like Maria’s mother. Is he fond of victims as well?’

  ‘No way! Politics is his thing. He gets to talk to powerful people.’

  ‘Like who?’

  She didn’t have a chance to enlighten me, because the adults were preparing to leave. They promised to meet up in London and a hint of panic unsettled Polly’s face as she clasped her father’s hand, rubbing a cheek against his jacket. He stroked her hair and kissed her, reassuring her that all would be well; if she needed to talk she had his London numbers and Isobel was only a few miles away. For a moment Polly clung to her father, her arms draped around his waist. I thought she was going to cry and that when he had gone I would have to console a new girl who thought so little of me she’d dismissed me as silly. I needn’t have worried. Polly didn’t shrink into herself as I had done to keep body and soul together when my father left me with the Derbys in Devon. Instead, gathering strength from her father’s caresses, his mention of his best friend Barnaby whom he’d met at school, Polly inhaled deeply and appeared to expand. She straightened her back and stepped away from her father, before escorting him out of Exe with as much dignity as Mrs Derby had had when seeing my own father off. When she returned with no trace of redness in her eyes, I was impressed. So much so, that I set aside my reservations and offered to help her unpack her trunk.

  I soon realised that Polly Venus, meticulous in the ordering of her possessions, the placing of colour-coordinated knickers and clothes in the appropriate drawers and wardrobes, was much more organised than I ever would be. Moreover, she possessed a treasure trove of comics, which she stashed in the locker by her bed. I was flipping through one of them, beguiled and bewildered by its lurid contents, its glossy depiction of a subterranean world of which I had no knowledge, when Beth Bradshaw ran in with her dogs.

  No animals were allowed in dormitories, not even Maria’s hamster, which was kept in the school stables. But the Bradshaws went everywhere with Whiskey and Soda, their black labradors, and whenever Beth returned to school, for the first half-hour Bradshaw rules, which encouraged mayhem and excessive high spirits, prevailed. There was vigorous barking and the thumping of tails followed by imperious, futile commands of: ‘Down, dog! Silly dog! Oh, how I love you!’ Beth was passionate about animals. She seemed more distressed saying goodbye to her dogs than to her mother, a fat, rumbustious woman I rather liked.

  ‘You’ll come and see us again soon, won’t you, Ajuba?’ Mrs Bradshaw rarely spoke in a normal voice; she bellowed as if everyone around her was hard of hearing. They were a noisy family and I had learned how to shout and laugh very loudly when I stayed on their farm in the holidays.

  Falling into the Bradshaw groove, chameleon-like, I yelled in my best British accent: ‘Yes, please!’

  ‘That’s my girl!’ Mrs Bradshaw waved goodbye, while Beth kneeled to kiss her dogs, their tongues washing her lips with saliva. Polly glanced at me, raising an eyebrow in disgust, a sentiment I shared.

  As I was the only girl in Seniors not to have joined the Wildlife Rangers, it was well known among my peers that my feelings for animals were disengaged at best: a fatal aberration of character that occasionally led to discord with Beth. Dark-haired and green-eyed, she was wholeheartedly English in her capacity to be moved by the plight of animals. Her features constantly changed; she would be laughing one moment and then in despair the next over some injustice or other involving seals or whales. Indeed, she had once told me that if God existed she was convinced he was a whale. The raising of the Venus eyebrow, a drawbridge retreating into a castle,
warned me that a skirmish lay ahead.

  Beth launched the opening salvo simply by being herself. Instead of family photographs on her locker, she arranged portraits of her pets: her ponies, Brillo and Flash, her dogs and her cat, Spider.

  Polly remarked wryly: ‘I see you like animals.’

  We were sitting on Beth’s bed with Maria sampling chunks of homemade fudge that Mrs Bradshaw had prepared for the start of the new term.

  ‘Don’t you like animals?’ Beth retorted.

  ‘I guess they are kind of cute.’

  ‘Cute? Cute? Ajuba, she said animals are cute! Animals are magnificent!’ Beth exclaimed. ‘They’re wonderful! They’re much better than we are. They’re superior to humans in every way imaginable.’

  ‘Oh, yes, cockroaches and rattlesnakes and rats are much better,’ Maria interjected.

  ‘They’re not animals,’ retorted Beth.

  ‘Rats are too,’ said Maria.

  ‘Rats are vermin. Like hamsters.’

  ‘Godfrey isn’t vermin. He’s mine,’ Maria wailed.

  ‘Makes no difference. Vermin is vermin and that’s that!’

  Polly raised her eyebrow again. It was a facial tic I would see often in the coming weeks as, observing Beth’s natural exuberance and then catching my eye, she would smile in gentle derision of my first friend at school. The inference was that Beth was childish.

  Being party to the twitching eyebrow made me uncomfortable. In a way that I didn’t then comprehend, my diffidence and sensibility as an outsider made me a useful ally in Polly’s ascendancy in Exe and, once Exe had been conquered, its inmates subjugated, Seniors, our class. While Maria’s eagerness to become the new girl’s ‘best friend’ rendered her peripheral to Polly’s campaign, Beth, through no fault of her own other than feeling more at home at school than the rest of us, became the target of Polly’s opprobrium.

  In those early days a glance from Polly, followed by scarcely audible put-downs such as ‘Jeez’, ‘What a loser!’, ‘Is that girl totally insane?’ underlined by the raised eyebrow, punctured Beth’s enthusiasm, leaving a flicker of surprise on her face. She seemed unaware that the lightness of spirit and good humour which made her a force to be reckoned with in Seniors were the very qualities that Polly resented.