Wakenhyrst Read online

  PRAISE FOR MICHELLE PAVER

  ‘Paver is the mistress of suspense.’

  The Times

  ‘Terror on a grander scale.’

  The Guardian

  ‘Just fantastic.’

  The Daily Mail

  ‘A heart-freezing masterpiece.’

  The Observer

  ‘A tale of terror and beauty and wonder.’

  The Financial Times

  ‘A chilling period piece.’

  The Independent

  ‘This vivid ghost story reads like a classic.’

  The Sunday Mirror

  ‘A tense and strangely beautiful narrative.’

  Metro

  ‘Spellbindingly creepy.’

  The Sunday Express

  ‘Chilling in every sense.’

  The Mail on Sunday

  ‘Paver’s genuinely terrifying tale will have you shaking under the covers.’

  Psychologies

  ‘Dark Matter and Thin Air are frightening masterpieces.’

  Starburst

  ‘An elegantly told tale with a vivid sense of place – and it’s deeply scary.’

  The Sydney Herald

  ‘Holds you in a vice-like grip… an edge-of-the seat experience.’

  Scifi Now

  ‘The ultimate test of a good ghost story is, surely, whether you feel panicked reading it in bed at midnight; two-thirds of the way through, I found myself suddenly afraid to look out of the window at night, so I’ll call it a success.’

  The Observer

  MICHELLE PAVER

  www.headofzeus.com

  First published in the UK by Head of Zeus in 2019

  Copyright © Michelle Paver, 2019

  The moral right of Michelle Paver to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  This is a work of fiction. All characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  ISBN (HB): 9781788549561

  ISBN (XTPB): 9781789540604

  ISBN (E): 9781788549554

  Jacket art and illustrations © Stephen McNally

  Author photo © Anthony Upton

  Head of Zeus Ltd

  First Floor East

  5–8 Hardwick Street

  London EC1R 4RG

  WWW.HEADOFZEUS.COM

  Contents

  Praise For Michelle Paver

  Title Page

  Copyright

  1966

  The Mystery of Edmund Stearne

  60 Years Earlier

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-one

  Twenty-two

  Twenty-three

  Twenty-four

  Twenty-five

  Twenty-six

  Twenty-seven

  Twenty-eight

  Twenty-nine

  Thirty

  Thirty-one

  Thirty-two

  Thirty-three

  Thirty-four

  Thirty-five

  Thirty-six

  Thirty-seven

  Thirty-eight

  Thirty-nine

  Forty

  Forty-one

  Forty-two

  Forty-three

  Forty-four

  Forty-five

  Forty-six

  Forty-seven

  1967

  Forty-eight

  Forty-nine

  Author’s Note

  About the Author

  An Invitation from the Publisher

  1966

  The Mystery of Edmund Stearne

  by Patrick Rippon

  Only in The Sunday Explorer Magazine

  Like a witch’s lair in a fairytale the ancient manor house crouches in its tangled garden. I can’t take my eyes off the ivy-choked window above the front door. It was from that window in 1913 that 16-year-old Maud Stearne watched her father set off down the steps with an ice-pick, a geological hammer – and murder in his heart.

  We’ve all heard of Edmund Stearne. We’ve marvelled at his works and shuddered at his crime. Why did he do it? Did he confide his secrets to a notebook? Why won’t his daughter reveal the truth?

  For more than 50 years Maud Stearne has lived the life of a recluse. I’m the first outsider who’s met her and been inside Wake’s End. What I’ve learned blows her father’s case wide open.

  Maud was the only witness

  Strange to think that until last year Edmund Stearne was unknown except in the sleepy Suffolk hamlet of Wakenhyrst. Locals remember him as a rich landowner and respected historian, a man of spotless reputation – until one summer’s day when he slaughtered the first person he came across in the most bizarre and horrible way.

  Maud was the only witness. She spoke briefly at his trial, then never again. Maud, Maud. It always comes back to Maud.

  Her father spent the rest of his life in an asylum, where he devoted every waking moment to creating three astonishing paintings which have taken the world by storm. These days they’re everywhere. Athena sells more of his posters than all the Impressionists put together. Yet on his death they were sold for a song to the Stanhope Institute of Psychiatric History.

  For years they languished in obscurity until last year a lady academic stumbled on a dusty tea chest in a storeroom. ‘My hair stood on end,’ shrills Dr Robin Hunter, 36, a mini-skirted redhead in white vinyl boots. ‘I knew I was onto something big.’

  The rest is history. The paintings went on show and they caused a sensation. Edmund Stearne was an Edwardian gentleman but his work is strangely modern: it fits our era of beatniks, hippies and LSD. But what really caught the public’s imagination is the mystery.

  That’s what I went to Wake’s End to solve.

  Rendezvous in the Fen

  ‘Wake’s End bain’t on the road to nowhere,’ warned the barmaid at the Eel Grigg in Wakenhyrst. ‘You only goes there if you’re going there.’

  I was. I’d been invited by Maud Stearne herself.

  From the village I drove across the Common and past the church. Wake’s End is less than a mile from St Guthlaf’s but it stands alone. Nestling in a bend of a willow-fringed stream, it’s cut off at the front by a 10 foot hedge which bristles with hand-painted signs: PRIVATE PROPERTY! NO SHOOTING, EEL-BABBING OR TRESPASSING! KEEP OUT!

  But it’s not just the hedge that makes Wake’s End a place out of time. It’s Guthlaf’s Fen.

  These days what we call ‘the fens’ are windswept fields criss-crossed by drainage dykes. But the watery wilderness that guards Wake’s End is the real fen: the last stretch of the ancient marshes that once drowned the whole of East Anglia. It’s said to be the oldest, deepest, rottenest fen ever. Here lived the dreaded ‘fen tigers’: savage folk who doctored their ‘ague’ with home-brewed opium and feared nothing but the spirits that haunt the meres.

  On a previous recce I’d ventured in. In 10 paces I was lost
. The reeds stood tall and dead: I had the oddest feeling they wanted me gone. The light was failing. I caught a swampy smell of decay. Behind me something rustled and I saw the reeds part for some unseen creature. I thought: No wonder Maud’s mad. All her life in a place like this?

  But is she mad? Everyone describes a different Maud.

  ‘Typical spinster, unhealthily devoted to her father,’ opines her sister-in-law Tabitha Stearne, 66.

  ‘Miss Maud hated her dad,’ mutters a yokel in the pub.

  ‘She walks the fen by night,’ says another. ‘Thass summat we nivver does.’

  Tabby Stearne again: ‘I’m afraid the poor old dear’s quite batty. I gather that small dead animals have been found hanging from trees.’

  So who is the real Maud Stearne?

  A historic meeting

  Maud Stearne is 69 and spare, with a tall woman’s stoop. Dressed in shabby jersey and slacks, ancient gumboots and mac, she has her father’s strong bones but not his staggering good looks. As she stands in the doorway of Wake’s End her eyes avoid mine, moving restlessly as if she’s watching something only she can see.

  She won’t shake hands, I’m just a grubby little hack who should have used the tradesman’s entrance. ‘I’m orff,’ she barks in a cut-glass accent. ‘Cook will show you raynd.’ Before I know it she’s striding towards the back of the house, over a rickety foot-bridge and into the fen.

  ‘What do the paintings mean?’ I shout after her.

  ‘Never seen ’em!’

  She’s never seen the paintings? If my theory’s right, she’s at the heart of them.

  No one ever forgets the paintings of Edmund Stearne. Your first impression is an explosion of colour like shattered stained glass. Leaning closer, you become aware of tiny malevolent faces leering at you. You want to pull back but you can’t. Against your will you’re drawn deeper into the murderer’s twisted world.

  All three are untitled and share the same mysterious design. At the dark heart stands a woman in a long black dress. You only see her back and her rippling fair hair, while around her swarms a vortex of otherworldly creatures. They’re the stuff of nightmares, painted in such obsessive detail they could be alive. Grotesque, bewitching, even evil… No wonder Stearne is compared to that medieval master of the macabre, Hieronymus Bosch.

  But what are his creatures? Elves? Imps? Fairies? Do they hold the key to the murder? Who is the unknown woman?

  Inside Wake’s End

  ‘Cook’ is a mountainous woman in overalls who exudes power and violence like a jailor. She could be anything from 50 to 75 – marcelled hair, pinched scarlet mouth – and the look she gives me is arctic. In these parts if you weren’t born in Suffolk you’re from ‘up the Sheres’. In other words, you’re a Martian.

  She’s no talker but as she shows me round I gather that she and ‘Miss Maud’ hate each other with the kind of loathing it takes decades to perfect. My ‘tour’ feels oddly stage-managed: I’m being shown only what Maud wants me to see. I wonder if that will include the fabled notebook.

  There’s no money at Wake’s End, that’s for sure. Thick medieval walls are blistered with damp; mouldy furnishings are pre-World War I. Time stopped in 1913.

  ‘The Master’s study’ feels weirdly as if Edmund only just left. On a washstand two silver-backed brushes are tangled with strands of fair hair. On his desk lies a stack of yellowed typescript: The Book of Alice Pyett (1451–1517), Mystic. Translation & Exegesis by E.A.M. Stearne, D.Phil. Cantab. He was working on that before the murder.

  But still no notebook.

  Maud’s desk is in the library across the hall. It overlooks a shaggy lawn with trees and what resembles a wishing-well: round stone wall, bucket on a rope. That’s the well where they found Edmund after the murder. That’s the orchard where he did it. This is what Maud looks at year after year.

  On her desk lies a blue china wing (yes, a wing) and a large red book stamped with gilt initials: E.A.M.S. Edmund Algernon Montague Stearne. My mouth goes dry. That’s it. That’s his notebook. Maud has always refused even to confirm its existence, yet now she’s left it here for me to see. What’s she playing at? More to the point, can I take a look?

  ‘Five minutes,’ growls Cook. ‘Thass all you got.’

  I’m too excited to argue. His writing shouts at me from the page: ‘Edmund Stearne – Private, 1906.’ Seven years before the murder.

  At first it’s just jottings, then nothing for five years. From 1911 every page is crammed. His writing is small and illegible but here and there the odd phrase leaps out. And some are very odd indeed.

  … a long, narrow passage tiled in oxblood ceramics; hot to my touch, and repellently glossy…

  … the fleshy mound on her upper lip…

  There are angels, but not as many.

  She was brought in horribly changed.

  Deft little sketches appear: grotesque medieval faces, a bat, a toad, a magpie. Each is disturbingly life-like and oddly threatening.

  I know what you did.

  It is only a picture. It can’t do me any harm…

  … a high thin cry on the fen…

  I shall find the answer in Pyett.

  The last page is blank except for a single scrawled sentence underlined twice: ‘Dear God, I hope I’m wrong.’

  Murder in the orchard

  Why didn’t Maud give the notebook to the police? What is she hiding?

  At the trial she said that on the day of the murder she was upstairs and when she glanced through the round window at the end of the passage she saw her father heading down the front steps with an ice-pick and a hammer.

  She shouted at the boot-boy: ‘Fetch help! The Master’s gone mad!’ Then she raced to the orchard. Too late. Edmund was already kneeling over a corpse.

  The coroner said the first blow was lethal, the ice-pick piercing the eyeball and brain. Let’s hope so, because Edmund chiselled back the scalp, hacked out a chunk of skull and dug around in the grey matter as if he was looking for something. And Maud saw the whole thing.

  What followed next is one of the great mysteries of the case. Somehow Edmund ended up down the well, screaming in terror as he fought off a squirming mass of live eels.

  Maud said she didn’t see it happen as she was staring at the corpse. Next thing she knew, the housemaid burst onto the scene. The maid didn’t see the body in the long grass but she heard her master screaming and ran to help.

  ‘Leave him!’ shouted Maud, damning herself in the eyes of the public. The Press dubbed her ‘callous and unfeminine’. It didn’t help that she was plain.

  But her father’s guilt was beyond doubt. When the police hauled him out he calmed down and confessed: ‘I did it. But I did nothing wrong.’

  He never said why he did it and there was no ill-will between him and the victim, he’d simply slaughtered the first person he met. In his pockets the police found shards of green glass matching the ones embedded in the victim’s eyeballs, ears and tongue, as well as four leaves from a plant named Solomon’s Seal. Three more were crammed down the victim’s throat.

  All this proved his guilt – but to me it means far more. Because for centuries, Solomon’s Seal has been used in witchcraft.

  He didn’t do it

  What have witches got to do with Edmund Stearne? Everything. Because I think he was innocent.

  He didn’t scream down that well because he was mad. He’d had a horror of eels since he was a boy. His doctor in Broadmoor wrote: ‘His behaviour is perfectly rational. His sole indication of mania is that he is terrified of the tiny beings he feels compelled to paint, and yet he seems quite unable to desist.’

  His sole indication of madness! Edmund wasn’t mad on the day of the killing, he went mad afterwards in the asylum.

  As for the murder, we only have Maud’s word that he did it! And her evidence is full of holes.

  Why did she shout ‘The Master’s gone mad’ when all he’d done was leave the house with an ice-pick and a hammer? />
  Why send the boot-boy away? He was a strapping lad of 16, he could have stopped Edmund himself.

  How did Edmund end up down the well? Did someone else push him – before the murder, to get him out of the way? Did someone else plant those items in his pockets, then toss in the weapons and eels?

  But what’s all this got to do with witches?

  It’s not just the Solomon’s Seal, it’s that glass. I found it in Wakenhyrst’s tiny museum. Experts say it’s medieval and bears traces of urine and deadly nightshade, both common ingredients in a ‘witch-bottle’. That’s an ancient charm against the evil eye.

  And it can’t be coincidence that one of Edmund’s ancestors was a ‘witch-pricker’, someone who inspects the accused for tell-tale warts. Or that John Stearne was in cahoots with the notorious Witchfinder-General, who in 1645 hanged 40 people at Bury St Edmunds. (Another judge ended up in Salem, Massachusetts, the most famous witch trial of them all. Film people call that ‘an American angle’ and it’s got Hollywood panting for Maud’s story.)

  Finally the clincher: Wakenhyrst sources claim that Maud Stearne thinks she’s a witch.

  I’m not saying she is, mind. But back in 1913, believing she was, did she commit the murder and frame her father – who, to protect her, nobly took the blame?

  Why did she do it? All is revealed in my book. But everything fits and it solves the mystery of Edmund Stearne.

  His paintings are coded messages pointing to Maud’s guilt. The woman at the heart of each one is a witch. The creatures swarming around her are her evil familiars.

  And the witch is Maud.

  Murder in the Orchard by Patrick Rippon,

  published by Titan.

  For reader discount see p 48.

  Letter from Maud Stearne to Dr Robin Hunter,

  14th November 1966

  Dear Dr Hunter,

  An anonymous ‘well-wisher’ sent me Mr Rippon’s preposterous article and since I decline further contact with that dreadful little man I am writing to you. Am I to be libelled as a madwoman and a murderess? Of course Mr Rippon knows that I can’t afford to sue.