Only Love Can Hurt Like This

Episode 5

When the phone went dead Clara did not move The cottage around her held its small noises the rain ticking from her coat onto the flagstones the upstairs window thunking against its frame the wind carrying salt through the battered hedges and she stood with the handset to her cheek as if the voice might resume Elliot watched her from the base of the stairs steady as a lighthouse Call him back he said She shook her head He blocked the number Elliot reached for the phone The call log simply read Unknown Number duration eleven seconds Eleven seconds to say her name to warn her away from the cottage Eleven seconds that had felt like a verdict It wasn’t Daniel she said You thought it was he corrected I thought because of the voice Because of the note Her throat tightened The memory the voice had touched belonged to a child her mother’s hand on her shoulder an adult’s admonition to forget more command than explanation My mother told me not to remember it Elliot’s face changed curiosity sharpened into something closer to concern What did your mother say She said to forget The circularity of it left both of them unsatisfied There’s no reception inside Elliot said after a beat Out in the garden They went out The wind along the lane felt like a lashing and for a moment Clara thought the world had narrowed to the white strip of sky over the hedges Elliot turned his phone until the bars climbed into view One bar That’s enough Before he could dial Clara’s own phone buzzed A message from Martin Are you safe The question landed awkwardly as if safety could be summoned by sentiment She typed back Who is Daniel Ashford and watched the little bubble of dots blink You need to leave the cottage he replied Clara’s thumb hovered over the screen Answer me she typed Three dots Daniel was my brother then he wrote Is he alive she asked I don’t know came back When Martin finally called it was sharp and thin with the strain of someone holding back more than he would give Where are you he demanded At Rose Cottage You need to leave Who was on the phone Clara asked I don’t know Was it Daniel I don’t know Then with a weary exhale Clara you said you recognised him I didn’t recognise him I recognised a sound because my mother told me not to You don’t get to tell me to run until you tell me what you know There was a brittle unbelieving tone that had always sat under Martin’s sentences I saw a figure in the photograph I thought maybe Then answer me was he at Rose Cottage the night my grandmother fell Silence When Martin finally spoke it was with that particular certainty of someone who has made peace with not knowing I don’t know The admission felt like a dismissal You told me not to come because the records were dangerous not because you feared Daniel’s return Did you ever search for him Yes everywhere I could I asked people checked addresses read old papers Nothing Did you ask my father No You should have He was there that night Her voice rose He may know what happened Your father is not someone you should trust Martin said low and urgent And neither are you Clara shot back Don’t tell me to run from the truth She ended the call Elliot watched with a slow contained alarm He sounded frightened he said Of Daniel Of what Daniel knows Clara answered Maybe both He held up his phone Call your mother on mine If yours is being monitored You think it is I don’t know But use mine He handed the device over Her mother answered on the second ring voice brittle When she heard Ella’s name Elliot’s she stumbled then found Clara’s The conversation was careful and small as if every word might carry listening ears Her mother told her to leave the cottage She did not know if Daniel was alive When Clara said someone had been here that day her mother’s breath hitched and she said at once that she couldn’t speak if anyone might be listening Then the call ended Father is missing Clara said when she handed the phone back Elliot’s eyebrows rose Missing She couldn’t say where he was She sounded like someone who had learned to silence themselves Clara’s voice steadied around the facts she could hold She thinks the same people watched us before Elliot made a face that summed up their options limited unsafe and urgent You weren’t scared off by a message you don’t understand he said You want to find whatever they hoped you'd leave buried Clara looked at the cottage the attic window like an eye The attic she said Inside the house the light seemed rented The boards sighed with old cold Elliot locked the front door and propped the windows while Clara climbed the photograph and note folded inside her jacket Rain hammered the sloping roof like a coaxing hand In the attic the floor had been patched one patch moved under Elliot’s touch He used the brass key he’d carried since they’d met and with a practiced patience levered away a strip of plaster Behind it in a hollow lay a canvas bag smelling of salt and old cloth Clara sat back on her heels and watched Elliot empty its contents onto the floor a child’s silver compass a railway ticket Newcastle to London 14 October 1999 bearing the printed name D Ashford and a clear plastic cassette case with a pencilled label D A October 1999 He was alive in October Clara whispered Maybe Elliot said He was as careful with possibility as he was with the fragile things We should play it But not here He fetched a battered cassette player from the boot of his Volvo an old reliable thing replaced batteries fed the tape in and pressed play Static filled the car then a child’s voice I don’t want to go A woman answered You have to trust me The wind or sea breathed in the background Then a man’s voice deeper controlled Eleanor he said A woman’s gasp then a child screamed Static Elliot hit the button When the voices came back they carried that peculiar clarity of recorded things alive but fixed The man sounded on edge the voice Clara had heard on the phone You cannot take him he said I’m not taking him another voice answered I’m getting him away from you You’ll destroy all of us A child cried Daniel Then closer intimate Elliot if you hear this I need you to remember one thing Your mother did not abandon you She was trying to come back Trust Elsie Do not trust Thomas And if anything happens to me find the Bennett girl She will know where the door is The tape ended leaving a line of cold silence Clara’s knees felt suddenly thin The name Bennett reverberated like a bell He said find the Bennett girl she murmured Elliot’s gaze found hers He meant you But why would Daniel think I knew where a door was she asked What door Elliot looked toward the attic eaves There might be a hidden door Back in the cottage they worked fast Under a strip of wallpaper behind a hairline of cracked paint Elliot found a small brass button and pressed A panel pivoted inward to reveal a narrow steep stair Cold old air breathed up from below They descended into a low passage the light of the attic swallowed Dust sat like sleep across shelves A wooden chair faced the wall as if someone had been keeping watch A child’s drawing pinned to a board showed a red door by a blue sea three stick figures stood under a sun one crossed out On the chair was a neat envelope addressed to C BENNETT Inside lay a brass key on a tag stamped 17B and NCL beneath it NCL Newcastle Elliot said softly 17B could be a flat They had just begun to name possibilities when the attic door above them slammed Footsteps crossed the floor slow deliberate A man’s voice called smooth and controlled Clara The voice landed like a stone It was the same clipped timbre that had whispered through her recent hours the same that had been caught on tape Daniel Elliot’s hand tightened at her sleeve Stay No She pushed For a fraction of a second she saw something she had never seen in him before he asked instead of ordered Please he said and his voice broke open The man called again Clara I know you found the key How does he know she mouthed I don’t Elliot breathed They climbed The attic was empty The hidden panel gaped open The cottage front door stood wide below From the garden wall a dark figure moved a car idled at the lane an old Volvo with its engine keeping time A man sat in the driver’s seat older than Martin thin a scar down one cheek that leaned toward his mouth but did not smile His hair was threaded with silver He watched Clara as if the sight of her had been the closing of a loop For an instant Clara knew him from somewhere more intimate than a photograph an angle from the corridor of her childhood home a face remembered and then smoothed away by her mother He looked at her with a polite cruelty Your mother should have told you he said Who are you Clara asked He flicked his answers to the man beside him and smiled without warmth Ask him The car moved off gravel throwing and with it went the figure who had just claimed her name Elliot exhaled like someone who had run a race in his skull The key in his hand felt suddenly heavier when Clara took it the metal warmed as if in recognition Was that Daniel she asked He looked down the lane where the Volvo had dissolved into distance Yes I know his face Why was he here Why leave a key The flat my mother kept in Newcastle after she left Ashford Hall Elliot said He had been holding that piece of private history close I thought she had died abroad She did but she kept a flat here for a while Daniel must have left a key to it Clara turned the brass tag over in her palm The day’s facts braided into thread Daniel alive in October 1999 train to London a key tucked into her grandmother’s house a recorded plea calling out her

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until you know who is waiting on the other side Clara read it twice the words plain and small as a warning Before she could answer a second message arrived Your father is not missing He is hiding Then a third Ask him what he did to Daniel The brass key burned where she held it Somewhere in Newcastle a flat numbered 17B an address a door sat mute and expectant The messages widened the circle of questions until it felt like a trap or a compass She could turn away She could hand the key to someone who would possess the facts and the power to choose what to disclose She slid the key into her pocket and curled her fingers around it as if closing a loop The sea was at the edge of thought the wind the tapes the voice telling Elliot to trust Elsie and not Thomas the man who had driven away and said what her mother had not The thread pulled taut and the only movement was forward Whatever waits behind 17B she said feeling the certainty settle in her chest like a small hot stone I’m not walking away from it this.