Number 11

1

The round tower soared up, black and glistening, against the slate grey of a late-October sky. As Rachel and her brother walked towards it across the moor, from the east, it was framed by two leafless, skeletal ash trees. It was the hour before dusk on a windless afternoon. When they reached the trees, they would be able to rest on the bench that stood between them, and look back towards Beverley in the near distance, the neat clusters of houses and, rising up in the midst of them, the monumental, answering greyish-cream towers of the Minster.

Nicholas flopped down on the bench. Rachel — then only six years old, eight years his junior — did not join him: she was impatient to run up towards the black tower, to get close to it. She left her brother to his rest and scurried onwards, squelching her way through the cow-trodden mud that surrounded the foot of the tower until she was right up against it, and could lay her hands upon the gleaming black brickwork. The flat of both hands upon the tower, she looked upwards and could not comprehend the size and scale of it, the perfect, lucid curve as it arched itself, like a sway back, against a threatening sky through which a pair of rooks were now skimming, cawing and circling endlessly.

‘What did it use to be?’ she asked.

Nicholas had joined her now. He shrugged.

‘Dunno. Some kind of windmill, maybe.’

‘Do you think we could get inside?’

‘It’s all bricked up.’

There was a circular wooden bench running all around the base of the tower, and when Nicholas sat there, Rachel sat beside him and stared up into his pale, unresponsive blue eyes, which for all their coldness only made her feel how lucky she was, how blessed, to have an older brother like this, so handsome and confident. She hoped that one day her hair would be as blonde as his, her mouth as shapely, her skin as downy and clear. She nestled against his shoulder, as close as she dared. She didn’t want to be a drag upon him, didn’t want him to become too aware that, in this strange and unfamiliar town, he was the only thing that made her feel safe.

‘You cold or something?’ he asked, looking down at her.

‘A bit.’ She inched away slightly. ‘Will it be warm where they are, d’you think?’

‘’Course it will. There’d be no point going on holiday somewhere where it’s cold, would there?’

‘I wish they’d taken us with them,’ said Rachel feelingly.

‘Well, they didn’t. So that’s that.’

They sat for a few moments in silence: each of them, once again, trying to wrestle as best they could with the conundrum of why their parents should have chosen to go away for half-term without them. Then, as soon as the cold started to bite, Nicholas jumped to his feet.

‘Come on,’ he said. ‘Are we going to look at this cathedral before it gets dark?’

‘It’s a minster, not a cathedral,’ said Rachel.

‘Same difference. It’ll just be a big old church, whatever you call it.’

He set off quickly, with Rachel running up behind him in an effort to keep pace, but before they had got very far along the path back to the main road, they were halted in their tracks by the sight of two people approaching them in the distance. One of them was in a wheelchair: it appeared to be an old, old woman, swaddled against the afternoon chill by layer upon layer of thick woollen blankets. Her features were scarcely visible: her head was bowed, drooping tiredly, and she was wearing a silk headscarf which screened most of her face from view. In fact, the longer the children looked at her, the more likely it appeared that she was fast asleep. Her chair was being trundled roughly along the path, meanwhile, by a young-looking man wearing motorcycle leathers and balancing something on his left forearm as he pushed. The something could not, at first, be identified: but as the figures came closer, it looked as though it might — however implausible this seemed — be some sort of bird; a suspicion which was then suddenly and dramatically confirmed when the creature spread its wings to an amazing width, and flapped them languidly, in black silhouette against the grey sky — looking, at that moment, more like some fantastical hybrid creature from mythology than any real bird Rachel could remember having seen before.

Nicholas did not move, and as Rachel stood beside him she clasped his hand, relishing his weak responsive grip, sensing the coldness of his bare hand even through the prickly thickness of her woollen mittens. Unsure what to do next, they watched as the man in leathers settled the wheelchair in place and then spoke a few words to the bird, which reacted by hopping obediently from his arm to one of the chair’s handles. With both arms free now, the man busied himself making sure the old lady in his charge was warm and comfortable, adjusting her blankets and tucking them in around her ever more snugly. Then he turned his attention to the bird.

Rachel inched forward, trying to pull her brother with her.

‘What are you doing?’

‘I thought you wanted to get on.’

‘I do. But I’m not sure that it’s safe.’

The man had taken out a length of twine with something attached to the far end, and had begun to swing it around his head in long, slow, circling movements. There was no traffic on the main road at the moment, and the afternoon was so still that the two children could clearly hear the regular heavy SWUSH of the twine as it swept through the air. They could even hear the beating of the kestrel’s wings (it was clear that it was a kestrel now) as she took off in pursuit of the lure, training herself on the lump of meat at the end of the twine with lethal accuracy, and yet always just missing it, as the man swung it out of her reach in glorious, repeated feats of strength and timing. Every time the bird missed the meat she would dip, swoop lower and then climb steeply again, pushing swiftly up into the sky until she reached the limit of her parabola, hung suspended there for the briefest of moments, whirled and then dived again, rushing down towards the coveted lump of meat with preternatural speed and precision, only to have it snatched from her questing beak at the last possible instant.

After this exhilarating ritual had been performed two or three times, Nicholas and Rachel began to move forward cautiously. The man was standing slap in the centre of the path as he swung the lure about his head, so that they found it necessary to deviate from the track a little — at least far enough to stay out of the way of the circling twine. But this was not good enough for the falconer, who, without taking his eyes off the bird for a second, shouted at them in a voice filled with fury:

‘Keep out of the way, can’t you? Keep out the bloody way!’

But it wasn’t the note of anger that surprised the children. It was the pitch of the voice: high, shrill and unmistakably feminine. And now that they were only a few yards from the taut, concentrated figure in motorcycle leathers, their mistake was obvious. It was a woman: a woman of around thirty-five, perhaps, although neither of them was very good at guessing the age of grown-ups. Her face was pale, her cheeks pinched and sunken, her hair shaved down to a severe and uncompromising crew cut. Her ears and nose were pierced and decorated with multiple silver rings and studs. A livid, dark blue-green tattoo of some indeterminate shape seemed to cover most of her neck and throat. She was the most terrifying woman, without a doubt, that Rachel had ever seen. Even Nicholas seemed taken aback. And if her appearance was not startling enough, there was the rising note of rage in her voice at the temerity, the insolence of these children for encroaching upon what she must have felt to be her own and the bird’s territory. ‘Go on! Piss off!’ she shouted. ‘Keep out the way! Use some bloody sense!’

Nicholas tightened his grip on his sister’s hand and turned a sharp left, so that they were heading directly away from the danger zone. They sped up until they had practically broken into a run. Only when they were at twenty yards’ safe distance from the scene did they stop and turn to take one last look. It was a tableau, a moment in time, that would remain forever stamped on Rachel’s memory: the Mad Bird Woman (as she would always be called from now on) twirling the lure around her head with ferocious energy and concentration; the unimaginable swiftness and sureness of the bird as she plunged towards her prey and then soared upwards again, thwarted but dauntless; in the background, the black tower, tall, implacable and lowering; and in the foreground, the old lady in her wheelchair, fully alert now, her eyes bright and shining as they followed the movements of the bird, her vividly rouged lips parted in a rapturous smile as she called out to the plunging kestrel: ‘Come on, Tabitha! Come and get it! Dive for the meat! Dive, Tabitha, dive!’

*

Rachel did not like the look of the Minster at all. As they approached the main entrance from Minster Yard North, it was almost a quarter past four and dusk was already beginning to settle on the town. The thin shreds of mist which had been creeping along the streets and between the houses all day were turning bluish in the fading light, coiling and twining around the streetlamps with their blurry yellow coronas. And now a darker, more muted, blue-black light was starting to descend and spread itself, so that the walls of the Minster, as Rachel dragged her reluctant feet towards them, became hard to make out: no more than a whisper, an intimation, of the church’s looming and ominous bulk. The cold which had first begun to grip her out on Westwood pasture, as she sat at the foot of the black tower, had now entered her bones, and taken such a pitiless hold that it felt as if these very bones were themselves made of ice. However tightly she pulled her duffel coat around her shivering body, however deep she plunged her hands into those sweet-wrapper-filled pockets, nothing could protect her from that cold. Soon the mixture of cold and apprehension had slowed her footsteps to a halt, only a few yards from the Minster doorway.

‘Now what’s the matter?’ said Nicholas, crossly.

‘Do we have to go inside?’

‘Why not? We’ve come all this way.’

Still Rachel held back. Inexplicably, her unease at the prospect of stepping through the Minster doorway was intensifying, mutating into something like dread. Nicholas took her by the hand again but there was nothing comforting about the gesture this time; he was pulling her towards the door.

In a moment they had passed through, into the darkness. Or at least, they were through the doorway, and into a small vestibule, but before they could get any further a startling thing happened. They had assumed they were alone in this narrow space but suddenly, quite silently and without warning, a figure stepped out from somewhere: from one of the pools of shadow, presumably, in its furthest corners. He appeared before them so unexpectedly, his footsteps so absolutely noiseless on the flagstones, that Rachel could not help but let out a scream.

‘Sorry,’ he said, to the little girl. ‘Did I frighten you?’

He was a small man of somewhat striking appearance: his hair was albino white, his complexion so fair that his skin was almost transparent, and he had no eyebrows that Rachel could see. He wore a shabby fawn mackintosh over a light-grey suit, with a very wide brown tie of the sort that might have been fashionable about twenty-five years ago, back in the 1970s.

‘Can I help you?’ he asked. His tone was friendly but somehow intimidating. He spoke with a slight lisp which made Rachel think he sounded like a snake.

‘We just wanted to go inside and have a look round,’ said Nicholas.

‘Minster’s closed now,’ said the man. ‘It closes at four o’clock.’

The warmth of relief flooded through Rachel’s body. They would not have to go inside. They could turn, and go home; back to the relative sanctuary of her grandparents’ house anyway. She would be spared the nightmare.

‘Oh. OK then,’ said Nicholas, disappointed.

The man hesitated a moment or two.

‘Go on, then,’ he said, with a smile and a sinister wink. ‘You can have a wander around for a few minutes. They won’t be shutting up just yet.’

‘Are you sure? That’s ever so kind of you.’

‘No problem, son. If anyone asks, just say Teddy told you it’d be all right.’

‘Teddy?’

‘Teddy Henderson. The assistant warden. Everybody knows me here.’ He watched as the children continued to hesitate. ‘Go on, then. What you waiting for?’

‘All right. Thanks!’

Nicholas was off through the main door in no time, leaving Rachel with two options: to follow him, or to remain in the vestibule with the smiling figure of Mr Henderson. It was no choice at all, in fact. Without glancing once at the discomfiting stranger, she took a deep breath and followed her brother.

It had seemed quiet outside the Minster, and inside the vestibule; but once Rachel had stepped inside the church’s actual, vast interior, she found herself enveloped by quiet of an entirely different order. The silence was overpowering. She paused for a while, listening to it, absorbing it, holding her breath. Then she took a few steps forward towards the central aisle, and even those gentle, tentative footsteps sounded intrusive in that vaulted and silent space. She looked around for Nicholas but couldn’t see him. The cold and the dark pressed down upon her. Dim electric bulbs threw feeble light over some of the walls, and there were a few candles flickering in the candelabra up towards the pulpit. But nothing could really palliate the sense of overwhelming gloom and unearthly silence. Where had Nicholas gone? Rachel walked quickly up the aisle now, looking anxiously to her left and right. He couldn’t have gone far: she would see him in a second or two, surely. She had walked almost as far as the choir stalls when a sound suddenly made her freeze: a crashing sound, long and reverberant and horribly loud. The sound of a door being closed. She wheeled around. Was that the main door? Was that Mr Henderson, locking up and going home? This was one of her keenest, most primal fears — the fear of getting locked in somewhere, after dark, and having to spend the night in a strange and lonely place. Was that what was happening now? She wanted to run towards the door to see, but stayed rooted to the spot. Indecision paralysed her. Tears sprang to her eyes and her body began to contract, turning in upon itself, seizing up with terror.

She sensed a movement behind her; she heard voices, murmuring. Turning round sharply, she thought she could make out two figures, talking in the shadows beyond the choir stalls. She took a breath and, in an act of desperate courage, called out: ‘Who’s that?’

After a couple of seconds the voices stopped and one of the figures stepped forward. It was Nicholas. It was all Rachel could do to stop herself from letting out a yelp of happiness. She ran towards him and threw her arms around him. He embraced her, too, but there was something cold, preoccupied about the gesture. He did not look down at her, barely seemed to notice that she was clinging to him. Soon he eased himself away — pushing her from him — and then he glanced back towards the spot where he had been talking, a frown upon his face, as if something he had been told there was still puzzling him.

‘Where have you been?’ said Rachel, her voice loving, accusing. And, when he didn’t answer: ‘And who was that? Who were you talking to just now?’

‘She’s one of the wardens here.’ Nicholas continued to stare back towards the rear of the church. Then he shook his head, and in a tone both brisk and nervous said: ‘Come on, I think we should go. This wasn’t a good idea.’

He hurried on towards the main door, Rachel padding along behind him, struggling yet again to keep up.

‘Nick, wait! Slow down, can’t you?’

The door of the vestibule was still open, but the main door, the door leading to the outside world, was now locked.

‘It’s shut!’ Nicholas said, unnecessarily, after twisting the handle a few times.

‘I know. I heard him close it. That man with the funny hair.’

‘Come on.’

He strode off again, back in the direction of the choir stalls, and she scurried after him.

‘Where are we going now? How are we going to get out?’

‘There’s another way. A little door down a passageway here. The lady told me.’

Even for Rachel, now, there was no mistaking the note of panic in her brother’s voice; and this was what scared her more than anything. She knew that if Nicholas was frightened, something must be very wrong.

‘Can’t you find her again? She could show us the way.’

‘I don’t know where she is.’

The candles had been snuffed out, and now with a click which itself echoed around the Minster walls, stretched and amplified a hundredfold, most of the lights were abruptly switched off. Darkness engulfed them. There was just one pinpoint, glimmering faintly, on the northern side of the nave.

‘Come on,’ said Nicholas. ‘That must be it.’

She tried to grab his hand again but he was already on his way. This time she broke into a sprint in order to catch up. In a matter of seconds they had reached a little arched doorway that led into a narrow, low-ceilinged corridor, at the end of which was a door marked ‘Exit only in emergency’.

‘Phew — this is it,’ said Nicholas. ‘We’re going to be OK.’

She followed him as he entered the tiny corridor, but instead of opening the door he leaned against the wall for a moment or two, breathing heavily to calm himself down.

‘What’s wrong?’ Rachel asked. Her brother didn’t answer and so, following a hunch, she made the question more specific. ‘It was something that lady said, wasn’t it? What did she say to you?’

Nicholas turned to her, and his voice sank to a conspiratorial whisper. ‘She asked me what I was doing here, and I told her Mr Henderson had let us in and said it was OK for us to have a look around. But she said that wasn’t possible. She said …’

He tailed off. Rachel herself was too petrified to speak, but her eyes, fixed unmovingly upon her brother, demanded that he finish the explanation.

At last Nicholas swallowed hard and concluded, in a whisper that was softer but more urgent than ever: ‘She said, “It can’t have been him. Teddy Henderson died more than ten years ago.”’

He looked down at her, waiting for her reaction. She returned his gaze, her eyes steady and without expression. It was clear that she did not, at first, understand the full meaning of what he had just told her. It was too terrible for her to absorb. But slowly it began to happen. Her eyes widened and she put her hands to her mouth in horror.

‘You mean … You mean he …?’

Nicholas nodded slowly and then, without another word, he grabbed the handle of the exit door, pulled it open and was off: away, out into the freezing October air, down the path which led towards Minster Yard North and then back to the shops and safety. He outpaced Rachel easily and it wasn’t until he stopped to recover his breath in a sweetshop doorway that she was able to catch up with him. Her own sprint through the streets had been, up until that point, a thing of panic, confusion and heedlessness; already she could remember nothing about it. Now she stood and watched as Nicholas doubled over in the doorway, his shoulders heaving. As usual she wanted to hug him, to cling on to him, but this time something held her back. Some creeping element of suspicion. She looked at him more carefully. Her capacity for rational thought started to return as the pounding of her heart relaxed into something more measured and regular. And then the realization hit her. It wasn’t the fear, it wasn’t the exertion that was causing his shoulders to heave like this: it was laughter. Nicholas was laughing — silently, helplessly, unstoppably. Even then, she could not think what was making him laugh like this. It seemed an inexplicable reaction to the experience they had just been through.

‘What is it?’ she asked him. ‘What’s so funny?’

Nicholas straightened himself up and looked down at her. He was laughing so much that his eyes were running with tears, and coherent speech was almost impossible.

‘Your … Your face,’ he spluttered finally. ‘Your face when I told you that story.’

‘What story?’

‘Oh my God. God, that was priceless.’ His laughter subsided, and he became aware that his little sister was still staring at him in bewilderment. ‘The story,’ he repeated. ‘About that guy who let us into the church.’

‘You mean the ghost?’

At which Nicholas burst into laughter again. ‘No, you dumbo,’ he said. ‘He wasn’t a ghost. I made that up.’

‘But that lady you spoke to said —’

‘She didn’t tell me anything except how to get out.’

‘So what about …?’

And then, finally, she understood. She understood, and she saw the full cruelty of the joke he had played on her. The boy she had trusted, the one person from whom she had thought she could seek comfort, had only wanted to upset and torment her. Of all today’s horrors, this was the worst.

She did not scream, though, or burst into tears or shout at him. Instead, a sudden numbness overcame her, and all she said was:

‘You’re horrible and I hate you.’

She turned and walked away, not having a clue where she was heading. To this day, she has never been entirely sure how she found her way back to her grandparents’ house.

2

The paradox is this: I have to assume, for the sake of my sanity, that I am going mad.

Because what’s the alternative? The alternative is to believe that the thing I saw the other night was real. And if I allowed myself to believe that, surely the horror of it would also make me lose my mind. In other words, I’m trapped. Trapped between two choices, two paths, both of which lead to insanity.

It’s the quiet. The silence, and the emptiness. That’s what has brought me to this point. I never would have imagined that, in the very midst of a city as big as this, there could be a house enfolded in such silence. For weeks, of course, I’ve been having to put up with the sound of the men working outside, underground, digging, digging, digging. But that has almost finished now, and at night, after they have gone home, the silence descends. And that’s when my imagination takes over (it is only my imagination, I have to cling to that thought), and in the darkness and the silence, I’m starting to think that I can hear things: other noises. Scratches, rustles. Movements in the bowels of the earth. As for what I saw the other night, it was a fleeting apparition, just a few seconds, some disturbance of the deep shadows at the very back of the garden, and then a clearer vision of the thing itself, the creature, but it cannot have been real. This vision cannot have been anything but a memory, come back to haunt me, and that’s why I’ve decided to revisit that memory now, to see what I can learn from it, to understand the message that it holds.

Also, I’m taking up my pen for another good reason, quite an ordinary reason, and that’s because I’m bored, and it is this boredom — surely, this boredom and nothing else — that has been driving me crazy, provoking these silly delusions. I need a task, an occupation (of course, I thought I would find that by working for this family, but it has been a strange job so far, quite different from my expectations). And I’ve decided that this task will be to write something. I’ve not tried to write anything serious since my first year at Oxford, even though Laura, just before she left, told me that I should carry on with my writing, that she liked it, that she thought I had talent. Which meant so much, coming from her. It meant everything.

Laura told me, as well, that it was very important to be organized when you write. That you should start at the beginning and tell everything in sequence. Just as she did, I suppose, when she told me the story of her husband and the Crystal Garden. But so far, I don’t seem to be following her advice very well.

All right, then. I shall put an end to this rambling, and attempt to set down the story of another visit to Beverley to stay with my grandparents, in the summer of 2003. A visit I made not with my brother this time but with Alison, my dear friend Alison, who at last after so many years’ mysterious distance I have found again, picking up the threads of our precious friendship. This is our story, really, the story of how we first became close, before strange — not to say ridiculous — forces intervened and drove us apart. And it’s also the story of –

But no, I mustn’t say too much just yet. Let’s go back to the very beginning.

3

The body of Dr David Kelly, the United Nations weapons inspector, was discovered by Oxfordshire police at 8.30 on the morning of Friday 18 July 2003. The body was found in the woodland on Harrowdown Hill, less than a mile north of the village of Longworth, in a spot accessible only on foot, where Dr Kelly had sometimes been known to take his afternoon walks. A verdict of death by suicide was quickly announced by the authorities.

His death was a matter of huge public interest. In preparation for Britain’s supporting role in the US invasion of Iraq, Tony Blair had been trying to persuade the British people that Saddam Hussein’s regime presented a significant threat to British security. A government dossier had been prepared which included the claim that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction, and that these could be targeted at the UK within a timeframe of forty-five minutes. After an interview with Dr Kelly, a BBC journalist had broadcast a report suggesting that this claim was unrealistic, and that the dossier itself had been ‘sexed up’ in order to bolster the case for war. The widespread belief that the source of this report was Britain’s leading international weapons inspector suddenly made Dr Kelly a controversial and politically inconvenient figure.

I don’t really know why I think so often about David Kelly’s death. I can only suppose it’s because, at the age of ten, it was the first national news story that made any impression on me at all. Maybe, too, because it evoked such a strong and chilling image: the loneliness of his death, the body discovered so many hours later in that remote woodland, silent and unvisited. Or maybe because of the way Gran and Grandad reacted: the way they made it clear that this was not an ordinary death, that it would have consequences, send ripples of unease and mistrust throughout the country. That Britain would be a different place from now on: unquiet, haunted.

The first I heard of it was on the six o’clock news, the day that Alison and I arrived in Beverley. We’d not been there long. Grandad had driven over to pick us up from Leeds and we’d both said rather teary-eyed, apprehensive farewells to our mothers, who would be heading off to catch a plane together that evening. On arriving back at my grandparents’ house, Alison and I had gone upstairs to the bedroom in which I’d stayed so many times before, sometimes alone, sometimes with my brother. Unpacking took only about two minutes; then Alison went out into the garden, and soon afterwards I went downstairs to follow her but I must have looked into the living room first to ask Gran and Grandad something, and that was when I got waylaid by the news. They were both totally absorbed by the television, and normally when I saw grown-ups like that I would just have left them to it, but this time there was something about the news item they were watching that drew me in. I stepped further into the living room and sat down on the sofa next to Gran, who barely seemed to notice that I was there. On television the reporter was talking in a portentous voice over helicopter shots of a verdant and wooded patch of English countryside. On the screen and in the room, there was an atmosphere I had never encountered (or at least noticed) before: charged, expectant, filled with shock and apprehension. I sat in silence and watched, not really understanding any of it except for the fact that a man had died, a doctor who had lived in Oxfordshire and had something to do with Iraq and weapons and everyone was very upset and worried about it.

When the report was over, Grandad turned to Gran and said: ‘Well, that’s that, then, isn’t it? He’s got blood on his hands now.’

Gran didn’t comment. She rose to her feet — quite a slow, effortful process — and shuffled into the kitchen. I got up and followed her.

‘What does that mean?’ I asked.

She was reaching up into the cupboard, looking for tins of something.

‘What, lovey?’ she said, turning.

‘What Grandad said. Who was he talking about?’

She tutted and went back to her task. ‘Oh, you don’t want to take any notice of him. He’s always getting on his high horse.’

This was not exactly a satisfactory answer, but before I could ask her to be a bit clearer Grandad came hurrying into the kitchen, muttering words of reproach: ‘Now why didn’t you tell me you were getting tea ready? You know I’m supposed to be the one who does that. You’re not to let these girls tire you out.’

She rounded on him and said: ‘How many times do I have to tell you? I’m not feeling tired.’

‘I don’t care,’ said Grandad. ‘You should be taking things easy. Let me do it.’

I left them to their squabble and went to call Alison in from the garden, and then the four of us sat around the kitchen table eating sardines and tomatoes on toast. Grandad seemed moody and didn’t talk much. I was still thinking about the story on the news, the dead doctor who had been found sitting up against a tree in Oxfordshire, wherever that was. And Grandad’s remark about the other unknown man, the one who had got blood all over his hands. It was all very disturbing and mysterious. So that just left Gran and Alison talking together. Gran asked her what she wanted to do for the next week and Alison said she hadn’t really thought about it and she didn’t especially mind. ‘I hope you don’t find it too quiet here, that’s all,’ Gran said. ‘You’re not in the big city now, you know.’ By ‘the big city’ she meant Leeds, which she always seemed to imagine as a teeming metropolis, even though the part Alison and I lived in was not like that at all.

A few minutes later, when we were out in the garden together, Alison asked me, ‘So what are we going to do here for a week? No offence to your grandparents, but they seem a bit … old?’

‘I don’t know,’ I said, shrugging my shoulders. ‘We’ll find stuff. There’s a big moorland near here with woods and trees and stuff.’ Alison did not look impressed. ‘Ooh — and there’s a library.’

‘A library? Great. A week reading books.’

‘I bet they have CDs and stuff as well.’

Alison was making me cross. We were doing her a favour by inviting her here, after all. It wasn’t even as if she was one of my best schoolfriends.

‘What’s in that shed?’ she asked.

‘Let’s go and look.’

We spent a few minutes rummaging through the contents of Grandad’s little lean-to shed, but our pickings were slim. We found a cricket bat and a couple of very old tennis balls, and I was on the point of retrieving what we thought must be a skipping rope from one of the furthest corners when I saw something and gave a little scream and ran back out on to the lawn.

‘What’s the matter?’ she asked, joining me.

‘It’s full of spiders back there. I can’t stand them.’

‘Really? What’s so scary about spiders?’

‘Haven’t you heard of arachnophobia?’ I asked.

I don’t think Alison had. She just said: ‘You’re as bad as my mum. She goes bonkers if she sees a spider, especially a big one. Once she actually fainted. Really.’

Clearly she regarded this as pathetic behaviour, although I was very much in sympathy with her mother, as it happened. Not caring to think about it any more, I looked around and said: ‘Do you think we could climb that tree?’

We walked to the back of the garden to take a look at it. I realized, as we did so, that although my grandparents’ house did not look very impressive from the front, the back garden was actually quite large. The lawn was in two tiers, each with a slight incline, so the patch of soil from which the tree grew was itself quite high up, almost on a level with the first floor of the house.

I don’t know why I had suggested climbing it. At home, I liked to borrow quite old-fashioned children’s books from the library, the sort of stories in which middle-class kids ran wild in the countryside, having picnics, building dens and apprehending local criminals while they were at it. Trees, in this universe, were there for climbing. So Alison and I might as well climb this one. It was a plum tree (Gran told me this later) and there were plenty of sturdy-looking branches close to the ground, but even so, for two townies like me and Alison, who both lived in places with no gardens to speak of, it was a daunting prospect.

Alison went first, and seemed to make pretty short work of shimmying up to a branch about three-quarters of the way to the top of the tree. After a few seconds’ hesitation I clambered after her.

‘This is cool,’ she said, as we sat on the branch together and surveyed our new domain.

From here we had a good view of the adjoining gardens and indeed the whole neighbourhood. Neatly kept gardens similar to my grandparents’ were spread out on every side: trimmed lawns, lily ponds, patio furniture — all speaking of the same modest, comfortable, unadventurous life. Next door, a couple about the same age as Gran and Grandad were sitting at a white plastic garden table, drinking glasses of white wine and nibbling from a Tupperware bowl filled with Pringles. They looked up at us and Alison waved back cheerily, calling out, ‘Hi there!’ The man just stared back but the woman raised her hand in cautious reciprocation.

I don’t know how long we sat there. It was fun. It was a long, warm, mellow July evening and we could have stayed in the tree for the whole of it. After a while Alison looked at her watch.

‘Our mums’ll be taking off in a minute,’ she said.

‘Do you two girls want some cake?’

It was Gran, calling from the back door of the house. I climbed down from the tree first, taking it fairly slowly and warily. Alison, though, attempted to jump from about five feet above the ground, and she landed heavily on her left leg.

‘Ow! Fuck! God dammit!’

I stared at her in amazement, blushing. Never in a million years would I have dared to use the F-word, even with no grown-ups around. But it wasn’t the time to dwell on niceties of speech. She seemed to be in real pain. She couldn’t even get up, at first.

‘I’ll get Gran.’

I ran indoors and came back with both my grandparents. Between us we helped Alison to her feet, and then she limped down towards the house, resting on our shoulders.

‘Off with those jeans,’ Gran said, as Alison sank down, wincing, into one of the kitchen chairs. ‘Let’s have a look at you.’ Grandad was hovering in the background, but she glanced at him and made a ‘Get out!’ gesture with her eyes. When he still didn’t take the hint, she said: ‘Go on, Jim — make yourself scarce.’

Seeing Alison peel off her jeans, Grandad finally understood. ‘I’ll go and … take some air, I think,’ he muttered.

Gran took a good look at Alison’s leg but couldn’t see very much wrong with it. ‘Well, there’s no bruise,’ she said. ‘And I can’t see any scratches either. Bit of a swelling here, though.’ She laid a finger on Alison’s leg just above the knee and applied some gentle pressure.

Alison winced again. ‘That’s been there for a while,’ she said. ‘I don’t think it’s anything much.’

Gran rubbed some cream on the swelling and after that Alison decided she’d had enough of the great outdoors and stayed inside to watch TV. I wandered out to the garden again and found Grandad talking over the fence to his next-door neighbour: the one whose wife had waved at us.

‘Hello,’ said this red-faced, white-haired man, beaming down at me. ‘It’s Rachel, isn’t it?’

‘Yes.’

‘I remember you from the last time you came. Goodness, but you’ve grown up a lot since then.’

‘Thank you,’ I said, since it seemed to be intended as a compliment.

‘And this time,’ said the man, ‘you’ve brought a little black friend with you, I see.’

Now this really flummoxed me. It would never have occurred to me to describe Alison in this way, and in fact I’d never heard anyone mention the colour of her skin before. All I could do, rather stupidly, was to say ‘Thank you’ again, and wonder why this peculiar man was smiling at me so kindly.

4

Death is final. I know that’s a banal observation but what I’m trying to say, I suppose, is that this week in Beverley was the first time I had really understood it. And yes, that must be the real reason I’ve never forgotten the death of David Kelly. It was the first time the reality of death had been brought home to me. It was, if you like, the first death in our family.

Up until that point I’d known almost nothing about the war with Iraq but now I could tell that something had changed; a line had been crossed. A good man had died, and could not be brought back. And our Prime Minister (I realized now that this was who Grandad had been talking about) had blood on his hands.

‘Whatever else you say about her,’ he told me, ‘Mrs Thatcher would never have allowed anything like that to happen. She was a great lady.’

‘Has he been going on about that woman again?’ Gran said, as we did the washing-up together. ‘I wish he’d change the record.’

She was always criticizing Grandad for something or other, I noticed, and yet they seemed far more devoted to each other than my own mother and father had been. (Mum and Dad had split up by now. That holiday they’d taken without me — the time my brother and I had been sent to Beverley together — had been a last-ditch attempt to patch things up, I think. Needless to say, it hadn’t worked, and they’d gone their separate ways soon afterwards.) It struck me that Grandad would rarely let Gran out of his sight and did not like her to carry out any tasks that were remotely strenuous.

‘Has Gran been ill or something?’ I asked him, one day near the beginning of our visit.

‘What makes you ask that?’ he asked, not looking up from his Telegraph crossword.

‘I don’t know. You never let her do anything. Mum was the same with me after I had chicken pox last year.’

He glanced up at me now. ‘A few weeks ago, she had a bit of a … funny turn. So the doctor asked me to keep an eye on her, that’s all.’

I realize now that this way of speaking was completely typical of Grandad. What he referred to as a ‘funny turn’ had in fact been an epileptic fit, following which Gran had been sent to hospital (after a wait of four weeks) for a brain scan. Now they were waiting for the results, but both were aware that the news could be bad. A brain tumour was the most likely explanation for the fit, and many patients die within a few months from cancerous gliomas.

Of course, I didn’t understand any of this at the time. I did not know that the shadow of death, in all its terrible finality, had arrived so suddenly, without invitation, and was hanging over the two of them. But I noticed something, at least: I noticed that Gran and Grandad seemed closer to each other than any grown-ups I had ever seen before, and this closeness manifested itself, not only as a constant need to be in physical proximity, a refusal to let each other out of their sight, but also as a perpetual state of — for want of a better phrase — loving irritation. Almost every word that the one spoke to the other would touch some nerve, provoke some petulant spasm in response; but this was testament only to the state of near-unbearable anxiety in which they were both living, to the renewed awareness of love that had been kindled by the prospect of losing each other.

As I said, I didn’t understand any of this; but I was aware of its outward manifestations. What really annoyed me about Alison, over the first few days of our visit, was how insensitive she seemed to be to what was happening around her. Seeing my grandparents sitting in the garden one afternoon, sipping from their mugs of tea and holding hands lightly across the space between their plastic chairs, she said, ‘Look at those two. Let’s hope we never get to be like that, eh?’, and she never missed an opportunity to remark on how old and decrepit they appeared to her.

We had little in common, I soon realized: the significant friendship was between our mothers, not between Alison and me. At school we were not together often enough to irritate one another; here, sharing a house and indeed a bedroom, our relationship was already under strain. Another thing that had started to annoy me was the way she picked up on everything I was feeling and tried to make it her own. The death of David Kelly was a typical example.

‘What are you doing?’ she’d asked me on Saturday morning, when she found me in the living room after breakfast trying to make head or tail of Grandad’s Daily Telegraph.

It was pretty obvious what I was doing. ‘I’m reading the paper.’

‘Since when have you cared about the news?’

‘Did you even know there’s been a war in the last few months?’

‘’Course I did,’ said Alison. ‘But there are always wars. My mum says war is stupid and people are stupid.’

‘Well, we had no choice this time. We had to go to war, because Iraq had nuclear weapons aimed at us and they could have nuked us in forty-five minutes.’

‘Come off it. Who says?’

‘Tony Blair.’

For the first time, Alison seemed to be showing a flicker of interest. She pointed at the front page of the newspaper. ‘So who’s this guy, then?’

I explained who David Kelly was — to the best of my knowledge and ability — and something of the circumstances in which he’d died. Halfway through my somewhat garbled explanation I could tell that Alison was losing interest again; but she could sense that I was troubled by this story, and she wanted to share in this disquiet, either as a way of getting close to me or in order to appropriate it for herself, to claim it as hers. So she seized upon one detail: the discovery of Dr Kelly’s body, propped up against a tree in that lonely patch of hilltop woodland.

‘Wow, that’s scary,’ she said — missing the whole point, as far as I was concerned. ‘Imagine that. You’re out for a stroll one morning, walking your dog or something, and suddenly … you find that, smack in the middle of your path.’

‘Nobody really knows why he did it, though,’ I said. ‘Grandad says it’s Tony Blair’s fault but he hates Tony Blair anyway …’

Alison didn’t care. All she wanted to talk about was this single image, which seemed to play in her mind like some scene out of a horror movie.

‘Fuck,’ she said. ‘That would so freak me out. Finding a dead body like that. Right in the middle of nowhere.’

I stared at her, feeling a sudden wave of hatred. She was using that word again — inside my grandparents’ house. I wanted to say something and was furious with myself that the words wouldn’t come. I was a coward. A scaredy cat.

5

Alison owned a device which seemed to me, at the time, to be literally magical. It was called an iPod and even though it was not much bigger than a matchbox it was apparently capable of storing thousands and thousands of songs so that you could take them anywhere with you and listen to them any time that you wanted. It was a beautiful clean white colour and had a little wheel in the middle which clicked when you turned it with your finger.

Nevertheless I thought it rather sad that, with all this storage capacity, Alison only ever seemed to listen to one album. She listened to it over and over and when she wasn’t listening to it she made me listen to it instead.

‘Your mum’s got a nice voice,’ I assured her, easing the slightly waxy earphones out of my ears and handing the machine back. In truth I hadn’t cared much for the song she’d played me for the umpteenth time. Precociously, I was more interested in classical music in those days, and my favourite CD at home was a recording of Fauré’s Requiem.

‘She sang that song on Top of the Pops, you know,’ said Alison.

‘Yes, you told me.’

‘She’s pretty famous.’

‘I know. You said. Only …’ (I had been meaning to say this for some time, but hadn’t been able to think of a way of putting it tactfully) ‘… only, this was a few years ago, wasn’t it?’

‘So?’ Alison pouted, and put the iPod away in the little satchel she was carrying with her. ‘She still sings, you know. Makes demos and stuff. You can always get back in the game.’

It was quite late in the evening, and we were sitting at the foot of the Black Tower, our backs against its glistening brickwork. We had become quite fearless, over the last few days, about exploring by ourselves and staying out until it was almost dark. Most times we would head for Westwood, which we knew well by now, although as children of the city we could still not quite get used to the idea that this sprawling tract of moor and woodland was ours to roam, freely and at will. We liked to come here because we were hoping to get another glimpse of the Mad Bird Woman, whom I had described to Alison in some detail, her image having been stamped indelibly on my memory ever since that one transient encounter four years ago. According to Gran and Grandad she still lived in Beverley, in a big house which had been left to her by the wheelchair-bound old lady when she died. Her real name, it seemed, was Miss Barton.

‘It sounds as if people don’t like her very much,’ I told Alison. ‘They say she shouldn’t have been given the house. Gran said there was something fishy about it.’

‘Fishy? What does that mean?’

‘Don’t know.’

‘Maybe … Maybe she murdered the old woman. To get her hands on the house.’

Typical Alison, I thought. Silly and over the top. ‘Don’t be daft,’ I said, at which Alison fell silent. Worrying that I might have offended her, and wanting to keep the conversation going, I added: ‘She doesn’t have the bird any more either.’

‘Probably doesn’t come up here much, then,’ said Alison, getting to her feet. ‘Come on. Let’s go.’

‘All right.’ There was a television show I wanted to get home to see, one of my favourite comedy programmes. ‘It’s nearly nine o’clock anyway.’

‘Eleven o’clock in Corfu,’ Alison said, failing to quicken her pace so that I had to slow down in order to fall back into step beside her. ‘Almost bedtime. I wonder if either of our mums has got lucky yet.’

‘Lucky?’ I didn’t understand. ‘I don’t think they’ve gone on holiday to gamble, or anything like that.’

Alison laughed a nasty, superior sort of laugh. ‘Come on, Rache. Even you can’t be that innocent.’ And, when I still looked bewildered: ‘Why d’you think they’ve gone away together, then?’

‘I don’t know … Everybody needs a holiday now and again.’

‘They’re both single. They’ve both been single for years. Don’t you get it? They’ve gone looking for men.’

This idea horrified and enraged me. ‘Don’t be disgusting,’ I said.

‘What’s disgusting about it?’

‘Shut up, Alison. I’ve just about had enough of you.’

‘You need to get real.’

‘You don’t even know what you’re talking about.’ I was fighting back tears now.

‘’Course I do. And I don’t see anything wrong with it either. If your mum wants to go abroad for a week and spend her time shagging the arse off a Greek waiter, why shouldn’t she?’

For a few seconds there was nothing but appalled silence between us. Then I slapped her, hard, across the cheek. She shouted out in pain and put her hands to her face and while she was like that I pushed her to the ground. Then I burst into tears and stormed off in the direction of the house. I looked back once and she was still sitting there, on the yellow sun-baked grass, nursing her cheek and staring after me.

*

I never did get to watch my TV comedy show, because when I got home Grandad was watching a political programme on another channel. It seemed to be making him very angry, but the angrier he got, the more he seemed to want to carry on watching it. It was a report about people-trafficking and forced labour in modern Britain. Of course, I’d never heard either of these expressions before, and when the narrator started talking about migrant workers enduring conditions of ‘slavery’ I was very puzzled, because to me the word ‘slavery’ conjured up images of Roman galley slaves being held in chains or whipped by muscular guards with their shirts off. But the subject of this programme, in a way, seemed just as horrifying: I was soon distressed by the litany of tales of builders and agricultural workers being made to work long hours and live twenty to a room in horrible bedsits.

‘Disgraceful!’ Grandad kept saying, but before I could agree with him he made it clear that he was talking about something else entirely. ‘Week in, week out, the BBC gives us this left-wing propaganda. If these Latvians and Lithuanians don’t like doing British jobs, they should go home and get better ones. Did you know there’s a shop in Selby that only sells Polish food now?’

I think this question was directed at Gran, but she had left the room some time ago. As Grandad didn’t seem to need an audience I quietly slipped away too, and went upstairs to bed. Alison was not back yet, and normally this would have worried me, but I was still too angry with her to care.

I must have fallen asleep straight away. The sky around the edges of the curtains was still only dark blue when I felt myself being shaken awake by a hand on my shoulder. I opened my eyes drowsily. It was Alison, of course.

‘What? What are you doing? I was asleep.’

‘I know, but this is important.’

With some reluctance I raised myself into a sitting position. My eyes opened further and the first thing I noticed about Alison was that she was shaking.

‘What’s happened?’

‘I saw one, Rache,’ she said, her voice quivering. ‘I saw one just now, in the woods.’

‘Saw what?’

‘I saw a body. A dead body.’

Our eyes met. I said nothing.

‘Just now,’ she added: as if that somehow made it any more believable.

I lay down again and turned away from her, facing the wall.

‘Alison, you’re pathetic.’

‘I did, Rachel — really.’

I turned back over and glared at her.

‘A dead body, yeah? In the woods. Just like that man in the paper. Was he sitting up against a tree?’

‘Yes,’ said Alison, and now there was such a note of distress and insistence in her voice that for the first time it crossed my mind she might be telling the truth.

‘I don’t believe you,’ I said, all the same. ‘No way.’

‘It was bloody terrifying. His head sort of … flopped over when I came up to him, so it was like he was looking at me. His eyes were open. He had all this grey hair, long and tangled. His skin was yellow — and all stretched and wrinkled. He was so thin …’

I sat up again, and looked at her carefully. I had an unfortunate history of being gullible when people played practical jokes like this on me.

‘What’s that in your hand?’ I asked, glancing down.

Alison was clutching a single playing card.

‘I picked this up in the wood,’ she said. ‘There were loads of them, scattered all around him.’

I took the card from her hand. On the back was a pattern of yellow and black diamonds. Turning the card over, I found a drawing of a spider. It was a grotesque and horrific thing, standing upright on two of its legs, and raising the others fiercely in the air as if challenging someone to a fight. Against the glossy black background of the card, the pale green of its underbelly shone out with queasy clarity. The artist had dotted dozens of coarse hairs all over its distended belly, at the bottom of which, in a detail which made me feel particularly sick, there hung some sort of fleshy sac filled with God knows what. Although the drawing was crude and cartoonish, it somehow managed, at the same time, to be far too realistic.

As I handed the card back to Alison with a shudder, she threw her arms around me, buried her head against my neck and held me tight. She was still trembling all over and I had no choice, from that moment on, but to believe everything she had told me.

6

‘This is the tree,’ she said. ‘Just here.’

‘You’re sure?’

It was the next morning, a gloriously warm and sunny one. As we explored the little patch of sunken woodland at the eastern end of the Westwood, sunlight streamed through the leafy canopy above us, and by the time it reached us the light was a delicious, cool lime-green. The air was fresh and the only sounds were the occasional chirrup of birdsong and the distant hum of traffic. It was the kind of spot you would come to for a picnic, or to lie beneath a tree reading a book. Instead, we were looking for a corpse.

‘There’s nothing here,’ I pointed out, after we had stood for a few seconds looking at the bare patch of grass. It does no harm to state the obvious every now and again.

‘It’s gone,’ Alison agreed.

What were we supposed to do now? I had read enough kids’ adventure stories and Sherlock Holmes mysteries to know that there was a procedure to be followed in these circumstances. I knelt down and began to stare intently at the ground.

‘What are you doing?’ Alison asked.

‘Looking for clues.’

Alison crouched down beside me. ‘What sort of clues?’

‘I don’t know.’ I thought about mentioning footprints or fingerprints but that seemed rather old-fashioned. Then I remembered something I’d seen on a TV show recently. ‘DNA,’ I said, with an air of confidence. ‘You always find DNA at a crime scene.’

‘OK.’

We both started to examine the area minutely, parting the very blades of grass with our fingertips.

‘What does DNA look like?’ Alison asked.

‘Kind of … slimy, I think.’ I didn’t have the faintest idea what I was talking about. ‘Slimy and see-through.’

‘Well, I can’t see anything like that.’

Alison was not as patient as me. Before long she was standing up again, looking around vaguely, without any clear intention. I tutted and continued with my search. Perhaps I would find something else significant — a lost button, or a fragment of torn clothing. Or perhaps this was, after all, a complete waste of time: just part of some malicious joke on Alison’s part, her revenge for the slap I’d given her last night, which she hadn’t mentioned since and for which I was yet to apologize.

Soon she had wandered off altogether. I didn’t know where she’d gone; I only knew that the wood had started to feel quieter than ever. Even the birds seemed to have stopped singing, and I couldn’t hear a single car even though the road was only a couple of hundred yards away. So when I heard the sound of a branch or twig snapping nearby, it was almost as if a gunshot had rung out. I jerked upright and looked around sharply in every direction. But there was no one there.

‘Alison?’ I said.

No answer.

I stayed like that for another minute or two, still kneeling. The silence was absolute once again. Of course it had only been some bird hopping from one spot to another; or perhaps a rabbit (we had seen one or two of those over the last few days); or Alison playing some tiresome game of hide and seek. There was no need to be jumpy about it. I would continue looking for clues.

The second noise was louder than the first, and seemed to come from a point about ten yards away, to my left. Louder than just the snapping of a twig this time, it sounded unmistakably like a footstep in the undergrowth. At the same time I saw — or thought I saw — the shadowy movement of some object or figure in the bushes. A whisper of motion, nothing more. Then everything was silent and still once again.

Alison. It had to be. What was she playing at?

‘Alison?’ I called. ‘Alison, where are you?’

This was getting really annoying now. Or rather, I was doing my best simply to find it annoying, while trying to ignore the way my heart had started to thump and a sheen of sweat was breaking out on my brow. I rose to my feet, slowly and cautiously, feeling it important to make as little sound of my own as possible. I looked again towards the bushes where I thought I had heard a sound, and seen a fleeting movement. The temptation just to bolt, to make a run for it, was getting very powerful. But I decided not to do anything sudden. In a careful and studied movement I turned through 180 degrees, heading directly away from the bush and whatever danger my fevered mind had decided lurked inside it. Another dozen of these steps would take me away from this dense cluster of trees and bushes and out into more open woodland. Then, and only then, I would start running.

But after only a few more steps, something caught my attention and stopped me in my tracks. Caught between the branches of a bush, above my eye level, was another playing card: just like the one Alison had found, only this time the illustration showed a fish, not a spider. A blue-and-yellow-striped fish against a shiny black background. As with the spider, there was something disturbing, even repulsive, in the cartoonish simplicity of the drawing: the way the fish’s eyes bulged and its mouth drooped open stupidly. Was this the clue that I had been, subconsciously, looking for? I had no idea what these playing cards might have to do with Alison’s macabre encounter in the woods last night, but it seemed of overwhelming importance, now, that I should retrieve this piece of possible evidence. I stretched out my hand but the card, maddeningly, was just out of reach. I stepped forward and stood on tiptoe. If I stretched any further I would surely fall over. But now I could almost touch it. Another half an inch and I would just about be able to hold it between two fingers.

And then, another hand — a grown-up hand — appeared out of nowhere, was thrust towards the card and snatched it.

I gasped and wheeled around: and there she was, right behind me. Her face was red with anger. Her cropped hair, piercings and tattooed neck and throat were just as before. Her grey eyes bored into me.

The Mad Bird Woman.

‘This is mine, thank you very much,’ she said.

I don’t know where she came from, but now — somehow or other — Alison was standing beside me. Terrified, we faced the apparition together. We stared at her, and she stared back, none of us uttering a word. It was like a staring competition. The silence of the wood pressed down upon us.

‘Are there any more of these around here?’ she said at last.

‘I … don’t think so, miss,’ Alison faltered.

‘They must be returned to me. All of them. And you’re not to tell anyone about this.’

‘Yes, miss,’ we said in rough unison.

‘Good. Now clear off.’

We didn’t move. We were too stunned.

‘NOW!’ she shouted.

And then we were gone, out of the woods as fast as we could run, back across Westwood in pursuit of safety, our tiny bodies a whirl of spinning legs and pumping arms, our fugitive figures shrunk to nothing by the ageless, impervious bulk of the Black Tower behind us.

7

My grandparents’ house did not provide quite the sanctuary we were expecting. We returned to find that the living room was full of people. Full of old people, to be precise: nothing but silver hair and cups of tea wherever you looked. After one glance at this lot (Grandad and his next-door neighbour being the only ones I recognized) we beat a rapid retreat to the kitchen, where Gran was standing at the table laying chocolate biscuits and custard creams out on serving plates.

‘What’s going on in there?’ I asked.

‘The local Conservative Club,’ she said. ‘It’s our turn to be the hosts.’

‘They look like a right bunch of old relics,’ said Alison.

‘Never mind that,’ said Gran. ‘Take these in, will you? I’m going to have a bit of a sit down.’

She gave us a plate of biscuits each and we set off nervously to make a tour of the room. When we made our entrance Grandad’s neighbour (whose name, I discovered later, was Mr Sparks) was holding forth on the subject of vagrancy, another word I’d never heard before.

‘Vagrancy,’ he declaimed, ‘is becoming a serious problem in Beverley and its environs. The council should be dealing with it but frankly they seem to lack both the will and the means.’ He noticed, at this point, that I was holding a plate of custard creams under his nose. ‘Ah! Is one of these for me? How very kind.’

‘As usual,’ said a lady with alarmingly pointy horn-rimmed glasses, who was sitting in Gran’s armchair, ‘Norman has hit the nail on the head. My evidence is only anecdotal, but at Saturday market I have personally noticed a marked increase in the presence of … undesirables.’ She practically sang the word out, in a deep, throbbing alto, stretching the third syllable to a semibreve at least. ‘Many of them, needless to say, belong to the ethnic minorities.’ Precisely as she whispered these last two words she became aware of Alison, standing right in front of her and offering her a chocolate biscuit with the sweetest of smiles. ‘Why, thank you, dear,’ she said, thoroughly flustered. ‘Of course, I didn’t mean … I wasn’t trying to say that all …’

We returned to the kitchen with the plates still half full of biscuits and set about working our way through them.

‘What are they blathering on about in there now?’ Gran asked. She didn’t seem to think much of Grandad’s friends.

‘I wasn’t really listening,’ I admitted. ‘Something about vacancies at the Saturday market.’

‘They called me an ethnic minority,’ said Alison, in a tone of bemusement but also pride.

‘How rude.’

‘I don’t think she was being nasty,’ I said. ‘She just noticed that you were from a different … culture, I suppose.’

‘What nonsense. Alison’s from just the same culture as all of us. Aren’t you, lovey?’

‘Well, not really,’ said Alison. ‘I’m from Leeds.’ She took the last custard cream and popped it in her mouth in one go. ‘Anyway, it’s my dad who’s black and I hardly ever see him. My mum’s as white as they are so I don’t really see what they’re on about.’

‘Quite,’ said Gran, and we all fell silent.

‘What is a Conservative, anyway?’ it now occurred to me to ask.

‘Well, I suppose a Conservative,’ said Gran, ‘is someone who likes things the way they already are. They think that the world is essentially how it should be and we shouldn’t mess about with it too much.’

After reflecting on this I said: ‘That sounds OK. I like things the way they are, too. Doesn’t Tony Blair?’

‘Mr Blair is the leader of the Labour Party,’ said Gran, ‘which in days gone by used to believe in a thing called socialism. Socialists think that the world could be made much more fair for everybody but in order to do that, you have to change things and sometimes scrap things which are traditional and perhaps a bit out of date.’

‘But he doesn’t believe that any more?’

‘Well … nobody is quite sure what he believes.’

‘And what about you, Gran? Which one are you?’

She let out a heavy sigh. ‘Frankly, Rachel, right now I think I’m one of those people who’s starting to believe that none of it matters in the slightest.’

She turned away from us: perhaps, even, because she was trying not to cry, although neither Alison nor I was likely to notice. From our point of view, this conversation was getting a bit boring, and we had far more exciting news to tell her.

‘Ooh, Gran, guess who we saw up in the wood?’ I said. ‘The Mad Bird Woman. She gave us a terrible fright.’

Alison glanced at me: a silent reminder that we were not supposed to have told anyone about this. But since the secret was out now, she added:

‘We were just walking around, minding our own business, when she sort of popped out from behind a tree. It was almost like she wanted to scare us. Nearly gave us both a heart attack.’

‘Oh dear,’ said Gran. ‘How horrible for you both. She really is the nastiest, most difficult person …’ She pursed her lips. ‘If she deliberately scared you then I suppose I should really — one of us should really go and speak to her about it …’ She tailed off, clearly not relishing the prospect of such a confrontation. I felt sorry for her, and said:

‘Don’t worry, Gran. There’s no need to do that. Is there, Ali?’

I looked to my friend for confirmation but all she said was: ‘Where does she live?’

‘There’s a tiny little road,’ said Gran, starting to rinse the biscuit plates under the hot tap, ‘which runs off Newbegin. It’s called Needless Alley, because it doesn’t go anywhere. That’s where Mrs Bates used to live. And when she died, she left the house to Miss Barton.’

‘Why did she do that, I wonder?’

‘Yes, a lot of people wondered that,’ said Gran. ‘In fact, they did more than wonder about it. They got very angry about it, which was a bit stupid of them.’

‘Yes,’ I agreed. ‘Because it was none of their business really, was it?’

‘Exactly. But people can be very … judgemental.’

‘What’s the number of the house?’ Alison asked. She was trying to sound casual but I could tell there was some secret purpose behind these questions.

‘I can’t remember, offhand,’ said Gran. ‘But you can’t miss it. It’s the one that’s covered in ivy and laurel bushes and goodness knows what, and the whole thing is covered in netting and behind that she keeps birds.’

‘Birds?’

‘Oh yes. A regular aviary, it is. Budgerigars and canaries and all sorts.’

‘No kestrels?’ I asked hopefully.

‘No, she doesn’t have a kestrel any more. I don’t know what became of it.’

It seemed that we had exhausted Gran’s knowledge of this topic now, but in the process she had stretched our curiosity to breaking point. When we went upstairs to discuss our plans for the rest of the day, I knew exactly what Alison was going to suggest.

‘We don’t have to go inside,’ she insisted. ‘I just want to see what it looks like. Don’t you want to see all these birds and everything?’

It was true, I was desperate to see where the Mad Bird Woman lived, even though she scared me almost to death. And so later that afternoon Alison and I set out to find Needless Alley.

It didn’t take long to get there. Newbegin was a long one-way street leading from Westwood down towards the town centre. The Alley peeled off from it towards the left, running at first between the walls of two very tall houses: this part of it was so narrow that there was barely room for the two of us to walk abreast. Soon, however, it widened into a short cobbled street with large, venerable, eighteenth-century houses on both sides. The one we were looking for could not have been easier to spot. It was set quite apart from the other dwellings, being separated from its nearest neighbour by a long, low wall running around an expanse of unkempt, not to say chaotic, front garden. On the front door was the house number in rusty silver numerals. It was Number 11.

Presumably the house was built of brick, but you would never know it, looking from the front. The entire façade was covered in foliage of one sort or another — mainly ivy, although there were also many other climbing plants which I couldn’t identify, all mingling and interlocking and twining themselves around each other in a thick jungle of greenery. In the midst of all this, dozens of little birds were hopping, fluttering or resting: a few of them were exotic and brightly coloured but mostly they were your regular songbirds — sparrows, thrushes, that sort of thing. Dark-green netting was stretched over the whole front of the house, preventing them from flying away to freedom. They were basically trapped in a huge verdant open-air cage, but they seemed perfectly happy about it, and kept up a pleasant chorus of chirruping which contrasted with the otherwise sinister ambience of the Bird Woman’s house. I couldn’t help noticing how thickly the ivy creeped over the walls, trespassing on the windows as well, obscuring half of them almost entirely so that it must, I imagined, be quite dark all day inside most of those rooms. I was glad that we’d found it and seen the birds, but still, it was the kind of house you immediately want to run a mile from, the sort that gives you bad dreams. Only a crazy person, I thought, would want to live in it; or even go inside; or stand any closer, for that matter, than the two of us were standing now.

At this point Alison cheerfully pushed open the gate and walked into the garden.

‘What are you doing?’ I hissed. ‘I thought we were just going to look at it.’

She turned and gave me a challenging smile. ‘Are you coming?’

‘Coming where?’

‘Go on, let’s have a look through the downstairs windows at least.’

‘Why? What would be the point? What are you looking for?’

Without realizing it, I had taken a few steps forward myself, and was now standing beside her in the front garden, my heart thudding inside my ribcage with a violence that was actually painful.

‘Have you forgotten what I saw in the woods last night?’

‘Thought you saw,’ I muttered, under my breath. I was still suspicious of the connection between David Kelly’s death and this convenient sighting of Alison’s.

‘The point is,’ said Alison, picking her way through a pile of fallen rockery that lay strewn in the garden path, ‘this woman probably has something to do with it.’

‘How do you work that out?’ I asked. It seemed like quite a leap of the imagination to me.

‘Why else would she want to scare us off from the woods like that?’

Just now, as we were getting close to the front door of the house, Alison stumbled on an especially large stone in the pathway and almost fell.

‘Fuck,’ she said. It looked like rather a minor stumble but she still had to sit down and start rubbing her leg.

‘Are you OK?’

‘My leg still hurts from where I fell out of that tree, you know.’

‘In the same place?’

‘Yeah.’

I looked around anxiously, prey to a growing, irrational sense that we were being watched. Then I noticed something.

‘What are you sitting on?’

‘Eh?’

Alison realized, for the first time, that she had sat down on some kind of metal armchair, surrounded by overgrown bushes, some of which had tangled themselves around it, tethering it to the ground. It was, in fact, a wheelchair. She rose to her feet quickly, as if she had come into contact with something contaminated.

‘Woah! What’s that doing here?’

‘It must have been Mrs Bates’s,’ I said, trying and failing to pull a rope of ivy out from between the spokes of one wheel. ‘It must have been here since she died.’

‘God, that’s freaky. Come on, let’s take a look through the windows and then get out of here.’

We crept nearer to the front of the house. We now had our noses up against the netting, and one or two of the bolder, more inquisitive birds hopped from their leafy perches to take a look at us. They might have been hoping for crumbs of bread but we had nothing to give them. Peering through the thick tendrils of ivy, we could just about see into one of the downstairs windows, but the room beyond seemed to be empty and was in any case so dark that we could make nothing out, except that there appeared to be a large, gloomy picture hanging on one of the walls. The second downstairs window looked into the same room. Once we had done this I felt that honour had been served and we could beat a dignified retreat.

Alison, however, had other plans.

‘Now where are you going?’ My voice was tight with panic.

‘Oh, come on, there’s no one around.’

‘How do you know that?’

I hurried to catch up with her as she made her way down the little alleyway at the side of the house.

‘What are we looking for anyway?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Alison, in a preoccupied way, glancing from side to side. The alleyway was strewn with rubbish, besides containing three green wheelie bins which were also full to overflowing. I noticed a lot of old brushes and paint pots. ‘I just wanted to get an idea … a feel for what this —’

She stopped in mid-sentence. Froze, would be a more accurate way of putting it. Her gaze was fixed on a long, thin window at the back of the house, just above ground level, beneath the level of the room we had just been looking into. A basement window, in other words. Behind the dust-and dirt-streaked glass was the bright yellow glow of a powerful light bulb. It was the glow that enabled us to see, quite clearly, the shadow of a human figure in sharp outline.

The figure was in profile. He (or she) was standing (or more likely sitting) perfectly still. We could see the suggestion of a face in silhouette: a short, flat nose, a pointed chin with skin hanging loosely beneath it, straggles of thin, uncombed hair reaching almost down to the shoulders. That was about all we could make out, but it was enough for Alison to exclaim, in an awestruck whisper:

‘That’s him! I mean — that’s her — it — whatever it was …’ And finally, just to spell it out for me: ‘That’s who I saw yesterday in the woods.’

Our eyes met as the reality of the situation began to sink in. Neither of us could explain things, neither of us knew what was going on, by any means, but we were both convinced, now, that we had stumbled upon something huge: something sinister and secret and potentially explosive. This was the biggest, most shocking thing that had ever happened to either of us.

Suddenly, high up in the house, a sash window was yanked open and a woman’s voice shouted:

‘OY! YOU TWO!’

We did not even look up to see her face glowering down at us. We turned and ran: out through the front garden, back down Needless Alley, faster than we could have believed possible.

8

It was late that night, when the lights were out and I was almost asleep, that Alison had her brainwave.

‘Oh. My. God,’ she said, sitting up in bed slowly. ‘I think I’ve got it. I know what’s going on in that house.’

I sat up too, and waited for the explanation. ‘Well?’

‘Have you seen Psycho?’ Alison asked.

‘Psycho? The film? Are you serious? Of course I haven’t seen Psycho.’

‘You’ve heard about it, though, right?’

‘I’ve heard that it’s the scariest, most horrible film ever made. Why?’ I couldn’t stop myself asking the question, even though the answer was pretty predictable. ‘Don’t tell me that you’ve seen it?’

‘’Course I have. My babysitter brought it round and I watched it with her, about three years ago.’

‘Your babysitter?’ Every time I got these little insights into Alison’s life I was torn between horror and envy.

‘Sure. She was cool. Anyway, you do know what the story’s about?’

‘Can you remind me?’ I said, not having a clue.

‘There’s this mad guy — he’s the psycho — who lives in this big old house by the side of the road. Next to the house is this motel that he runs, and when this woman comes to stay there for the night he kills her while she’s having a shower. So then her sister comes looking for her and meets this man and straight away she can tell he’s some kind of psycho, so she goes into the big old house to look for his mother, ’cause she thinks he might be keeping his mother captured there or something. So she goes down to the cellar and finds his mother sitting there in a chair. Only she’s dead.’

‘Dead?’

‘Yeah. Turns out she’s been dead for years and he’s been keeping her body in the house with him all that time. Sometimes he keeps it in the cellar and sometimes he takes it upstairs and lies it down on the bed.’

I thought about this and a practical difficulty occurred to me. ‘Don’t people start to … smell a bit, after they’ve been dead for a few days?’

‘He’s been pickling her,’ said Alison, matter-of-factly.

I pictured an old lady’s body being squeezed into an enormous jar, filled with the same horrible-tasting liquid I’d seen in Mum’s jars of pickled onions. How on earth this would be feasible was quite beyond my imagination; but right now that seemed the least of my problems.

‘You don’t mean …’

‘Why not? Didn’t your gran say there was something fishy about the old lady dying and leaving her the house?’

‘Yes, but … If you killed someone to get their house, why would you keep their body? You’d want to get rid of it, wouldn’t you?’

‘A normal person would, yes. But this is the Mad Bird Woman, remember?’

The objections to this theory were numerous, I thought.

‘But you saw the dead body in the woods, not the house.’

‘Yes. She’d taken it there.’

‘Why?’

‘I don’t know. To give it some exercise and fresh air. Rachel, she’s mad. Totally crazy. Who else would live in a house covered with birds?’

‘How would she carry the body into the woods? It’d be too heavy.’

Alison was silent, and for a moment I thought that I’d actually scored a point. But the victory was short-lived.

‘Of course — the wheelchair! That’s why she’s still got the wheelchair in her garden.’

I wasn’t convinced by this for long, either. ‘But it was covered in ivy and stuff. It looked like it hadn’t been used for months.’

Alison ignored this objection, and played her trump card. ‘Never mind that. In the film, do you know what the psycho’s name is? Norman Bates. His mother’s name is Mrs Bates. Mrs Bates.’

I couldn’t tell you, now, why it was this argument — the silliest and most irrational argument of all — that finally clinched it for me. Perhaps Alison had just worn me down. But from now on, without agreeing that every feature of the situation corresponded with every detail in the film (besides which I was, in any case, still very hazy on most of those details), I was more persuaded than ever that we had stumbled into the very epicentre of a mystery; that the Mad Bird Woman was the key to it; and that if we wanted to solve it, we were going to have to find out more, somehow, about the person — or the thing — whose silhouette we had glimpsed that afternoon through the window of Number 11, Needless Alley.

In other words, we would have to go into that cellar.

9

Alison’s second brainwave broke upon her late the following morning.

When she came to tell me, I was sitting by myself up near the top of the plum tree, trying to get some peace and quiet.

It had been a stressful morning. At breakfast, Gran and Grandad had seemed unusually tense. Gran was fussing around making toast and tea in a very absent-minded sort of way, and Grandad was hiding behind his newspaper. The front-page headline, as usual, was about the war in Iraq. ‘Saddam Hussein’s Sons Captured and Killed,’ it said. (Or something like that.)

Buttering my toast and sugaring my tea, I was unnerved by the silence between them. It was most uncharacteristic.

‘Grandad,’ I said, timidly. ‘Can I ask you something?’

‘What?’ he said, in a tone that was far from encouraging. But I pressed on.

‘Are we still at war with Iraq?’

‘It’s complicated,’ he said, without putting the paper down.

‘Oh.’

Gran noticed my tone of disappointment, even if he didn’t.

‘Nobody really understands what’s going on,’ she said. ‘The good thing is it’s all happening a long way from here.’

‘Saddam Hussein’s going to be pretty angry, isn’t he, now that his sons have been killed?’

‘I think he was quite angry already, what with one thing and another.’

‘But does this mean he might start attacking us now? Because I know that before he died, David Kelly said —’

Before I had a chance to proceed any further, Grandad slammed down his paper with an angry snort.

‘Your gran’s got more important things to do than answer your stupid questions,’ he said. He stood up, and fished his car keys out of his pocket. ‘I’ll go and get the car out of the garage,’ he said to Gran. ‘She —’ (meaning me) ‘— can do the washing-up when we’re gone. And the other one, if she ever gets up.’

He left the kitchen and in the cold silence that followed Gran laid her hand on my shoulder and gave it a squeeze.

‘Take no notice,’ she said. ‘He’s all worked up this morning.’

I was glad of the gesture: Grandad’s behaviour had startled and upset me. ‘Are you going out somewhere?’ I asked.

‘Just to the doctor’s. We’ll have to leave you two girls alone for a couple of hours.’ She pursed her lips doubtfully. ‘Perhaps I should ask Mrs Sparks to come round and keep an eye on you.’

‘There’s no need,’ I said, wanting to quash this idea at once. ‘We’ll be good. We won’t even leave the house.’

‘Well, if you’re sure …’ said Gran. ‘I suppose it’s all right. If you need anything, just go next door.’

About half an hour later Gran and Grandad drove off, both looking as pale as ghosts. I realize now, of course, that they had been waiting for this morning for many weeks; that this was the meeting where they would be told once and for all what had caused Gran’s ‘bit of a funny turn’; would be told, basically, whether she was going to live or die. But I guessed nothing of this at the time, and had little more serious on my mind, as I wandered through the garden, than my shock at the way Grandad had spoken to me, and a more pressing — though shapeless — anxiety about how Alison would propose to continue with our investigation into Number 11, Needless Alley: something which I was beginning to think had already gone quite far enough.

At the top of the garden, once again, I climbed up the plum tree and found my favourite spot among its branches. I had already come to love this tree. There was nothing nicer than sitting here by myself, amidst the soft rustle of its leaves, looking down on the surrounding gardens, watching the little fragments of suburban life being played out there, or tilting my face towards the sun, feeling its gentle heat on my closed eyelids. I could have sat there forever. This is what my week with Gran and Grandad should have been like, all the time. Instead, Alison was ruining it with her silly, selfish fixation on this weird narrative she had constructed around the Mad Bird Woman, the body in the woods, the mystery of Number 11 which might not even be a mystery at all. And here she was now, trotting up the garden path towards me, that familiar mischievous glint in her eye, doubtless bursting with some unwelcome new suggestion or foolish piece of information to torment me with. The shocking truth revealed itself to me suddenly: I was beginning to hate her.

‘OK,’ she said, clambering on to the branch beside me, causing it to sway and judder, clumsily breaking off a blameless twig as she settled herself. ‘I’ve got it all worked out.’

‘Oh yes?’ I said, keeping my voice flat, trying to convey as little interest as possible.

‘The thing is — what’s stopping us from going round there, knocking on the door, and walking into the house?’

I sighed. ‘Well, that’s obvious. She’d never let us in.’

‘True,’ said Alison. ‘Not unless we had some excuse. Like, for instance, if we had something that she wanted.’

‘But we don’t,’ I pointed out.

‘Ah,’ said Alison, proudly, ‘but we do.’ She held up the playing card, the one with the really revolting, brightly coloured picture of a spider. ‘Remember what she said to us in the woods? “They must be returned to me — all of them.” But we haven’t given her this one.’

My heart sank. Alison was outwitting me again. It was true: the Bird Woman had insisted that every one of those cards be returned to her, so we would only be doing what she had asked.

‘So you think we should take it round?’

‘Yep.’

‘When?’ I had been so happy sitting here. And now I was less inclined to move than ever.

‘No time like the present,’ said Alison, brightly. ‘Come on, let’s get it over with.’

We locked up my grandparents’ house with the spare set of keys, and set off into town. We were breaking my promise to Gran that we would stay at home, of course, but Alison was no longer to be swayed by thoughts like that. She strode on ahead of me so quickly that we reached Needless Alley in little more than ten minutes. When we arrived, it was getting on for noon and the fierce July sun was high in the sky. Beverley appeared placid and friendly that morning, but as soon as we turned into the narrow opening between those two tall houses, shadows started to encroach, the temperature seemed to drop, and Number Eleven, as we approached it with increasingly reluctant footsteps (on my part, anyway), looked more threatening than ever. A thick, blanketing silence covered the street, as it had yesterday, and it wasn’t until we had penetrated the front garden and almost reached the front door that it was broken: first of all by the sound of our footsteps scuffling against the stony obstructions in our path, and then by the melancholy chirping of the birds trapped in the leafy aviary that made up the house’s bizarre façade.

At the foot of the four steep steps that climbed up to the front door, we paused. This was it. Our last chance to think better of the adventure, and turn back.

Alison’s eyes met mine. I saw at that moment something I had not suspected before: she was as apprehensive as I was. But she was also, at heart, much braver: and without any more dithering she now marched boldly up the steps, grasped the heavy iron knocker (in the shape of some contorted gargoyle) and let it fall three times against the door’s thick oak panelling.

There was a long pause: long enough to allow me the luxury of some sweet relief, a few moments’ precious hope that the knock would not be answered at all. But finally we heard shuffling footsteps behind the door; and then it was pulled open.

Already dark with suspicion, the Mad Bird Woman’s face hardened still further when she saw us.

‘You! What do you want?’

‘Please, miss,’ said Alison, ‘we’ve got something that belongs to you, and we’ve come to give it back.’

I looked at her full of new admiration: her tone struck just the right balance between insolence and wheedling politeness. She held up the spider card and, as soon as she saw it, the Mad Bird Woman reached out a demanding hand.

‘Ah, yes. We were wondering where that one had got to. Come on, pass it over.’

But Alison kept the card back. ‘Please, miss, we’ve walked all the way across from the other side of town to bring you this, and now we’re thirsty. Can we have something to drink, please?’

The Woman’s eyes narrowed at the audacity of the question. She licked the studs on her lower lip, thought for a few seconds, and said: ‘All right. Come in.’

We squeezed past her into a hallway which was gloomy enough already, but was plunged into even greater blackness when she promptly slammed the door behind us. Now she was just a shadow, a mannish bulk looming indistinct against the dun-brown background of the wall. We had all become shadows.

‘I’ll get you some water,’ she said.

‘I’d rather have a cup of tea, please,’ said Alison. ‘With milk and two sugars.’

The Woman gave an incredulous grunt, and said, ‘Would you now?’ But she threw open a door, all the same, and held it wide for us. ‘In here, then.’

We stepped into a room which was slightly — but not significantly — brighter than the hallway we had just left behind. Most of the noonday sunlight was held at bay by the thick screen of ivy which covered much of the window, in the midst of which a couple of dozen birds were hopping and nesting and looking in at us with bright eyes and curiously inclined heads. This was the same front room we had peered into the day before. It was dominated by a long, narrow dining table in dark wood, with massive wrought-iron candlesticks at either end; and by a large, murky oil painting, half abstract and half landscape, which took up most of the wall opposite the windows. The walls must once have been white, I supposed, although now they were closer to grey. Cobwebs sprouted from every corner and dangled down from the flaking cornices. It was a singularly cold and cheerless room.

‘Are you going to give me that?’ the Woman asked again, holding out her hand.

‘Tea first — card later,’ said Alison, in a defiantly sing-song tone. The Woman glowered at her and left the room, closing the door behind her with a firm slam.

I rushed to the door and tried the handle, fruitlessly.

‘Now look what you’ve done,’ I wailed. ‘We’re trapped! She’s locked us in!’

Alison strolled over and opened the door in a relaxed and easy movement.

‘Calm down, can’t you? You were turning the handle the wrong way. We can leave any time we want.’

‘Then let’s leave now,’ I said. ‘She doesn’t want us here. She looked like she was going to murder us. Did you see those … things all over her face? And those tattoos!’

‘Lots of people have tattoos,’ said Alison. ‘And if she didn’t want us here, she wouldn’t have offered us tea.’ Now she wandered over to a second painting, a smaller one, some sort of still life, which hung next to the door. ‘What do you make of this?’ she said.

‘For heaven’s sake. We’re not here to look at paintings. What did you want to come inside for? Why couldn’t we just have given her the card and gone home?’

‘Because that wasn’t what we came for. Now look — when she comes back, I’ll slip out and go down to look in the cellar, so you’ll have to keep her talking.’

I was horrified. ‘What? I can’t keep her talking.’

‘All right, then — I’ll keep her talking, and you go down to the cellar.’

‘No! I can’t go down to the cellar either.’

‘Well, there are only two of us. You’ve got to do one or the other. Is that meant to be a tennis racket, do you think? And what about this? It looks like a football.’

I tugged her away from the painting, maddened by the insouciance with which she now seemed to be accepting this desperate situation. I was convinced that we were never going to get out of this house alive.

‘By the way,’ Alison added, ‘did you notice what she said?’

‘When?’

‘Back on the doorstep, when I showed her the card. She said, “We were wondering where that one had got to.” Not I was wondering. We.’

She gave me an emphatic, meaningful nod, seeming happy at this apparent confirmation of her theories. As for me, this further proof — if proof it was — of the Bird Woman’s madness sent my heart plummeting even further. The thought of being alone in the room with her made me want to be sick. In fact, I couldn’t do it: there was simply no way. I was going to have to choose what now seemed (incredibly) to be the lesser of two evils.

‘Look, Ali — I’ll go down to the cellar. You stay here and keep her talking.’

‘Are you sure?’

I nodded miserably, and just then the door was opened again and our terrifying host reversed into the room, carrying with her a tea tray rather than an axe or a carving knife. This was some consolation, I suppose, although it still left open the possibility that she intended to poison us.

‘Here you are, then,’ she said. ‘Two nice mugs of tea.’ She put the tray down on the table and then swirled the teapot around a few times before starting to pour. ‘Aha!’ (She noticed that Alison had wandered over to the larger of the two paintings.) ‘Admiring my artwork, are you?’

‘Did you paint this?’ Alison asked, evidently impressed.

‘All the paintings in this house are mine.’

‘Cool. So where is this?’

Still carrying the teapot, the Woman came over to stand beside Alison and look more closely at the canvas. Despite everything, my gaze was drawn towards it too. Now that I looked at it properly I could see that it showed a bleak swathe of moorland, beneath a stormy and cloud-covered sky rendered in such brutal strokes that it appeared at first to be a mere chaos of grey and black shades.

‘North Yorkshire,’ said the Woman. ‘You see this house?’

She laid her finger upon a patch of canvas. Perched almost on the crest of a vast, forbidding ridge, overlooking a large expanse of dismal and featureless water, was a gaunt mansion rendered in the blackest of blacks. It took up very little of the painting, but somehow seemed to dominate it: a mad conglomeration of gothic, neo-gothic, sub-gothic and pseudo-gothic towers which collectively resembled nothing so much as a giant hand, snatching at the clouds as if in the conviction that, despite their vaporous insubstantiality, they could be pilfered from the sky itself.

In the bottom right-hand corner of the picture, two words had been written: ‘Winshaw Towers’. They were followed by the initials ‘P. B.’ and the date ‘1991’.

‘That’s a real house,’ the Woman continued, ‘where I used to work for a while. As a nurse. Until one night, twelve years ago …’

She fell silent, lost in a memory; and not a very pleasant one, by the sound of it.

‘Twelve years ago …?’ Alison prompted.

‘Something bad happened.’

We waited, but clearly no further explanation was forthcoming. Not wishing to talk or even think about it any more, the Woman went back to the table and the tea tray. ‘Milk and two sugars, wasn’t it?’ she said. ‘Is that the same for both of you?’

‘Yes please,’ I answered; and then — aghast at my own courage — I began to set the plot in motion. ‘Can I use your toilet?’

She threw me a look full of mistrust, but after weighing the request briefly she seemed to relent. Turning away from me to concentrate on pouring the milk, she muttered: ‘All right then. There are three doors at the end of the hallway. It’s the one on the left. Don’t touch either of the others. And come straight back.’

‘I will. Thank you.’

I began to back out of the room, slowly and unwillingly. Now that the deed had to be done, I was still not sure that I was capable of it. Alison glanced at me, her eyes eloquent with the command to hurry up and get on with it. But still I lingered, gripped by some sort of absurd inertia. In desperation, Alison turned back towards the Woman and began to babble at her about the other painting.

‘Can I ask you something about this?’ she said. ‘I just wondered what you were trying to do when you painted it. I mean — this is a football, right? And this is a tennis racket …’

Upon hearing these words, the Woman made a noise we had not heard before — something akin to a growl — put down the milk jug and came storming over towards the picture. This was my cue, at last, to beat a final retreat, and this time I actually managed to slip out through the door and back into the hallway, staying within earshot just long enough to hear the disgruntled artist say:

‘Why does everybody get this painting wrong? It’s Orpheus, for God’s sake! It’s the lyre of Orpheus and his disembodied head being carried along by the waters of the Hebrus. How many times do I have to explain this …?’

I left her to her rant, and stole quickly through the shadow-filled hallway, past a steep and thinly carpeted staircase ascending to the first floor on my right, until I had reached the three doors at the corridor’s very end.

The first door, to the left, opened on to a small bathroom containing toilet and hand-basin. The second door, in the middle, was solidly locked. The third door, which led under the staircase, was obviously the one that would take me down to the cellar. Before putting my hand to the doorknob, I prayed that this one would be locked as well. Then all I would have to do would be to go back to Alison and report failure. I would have done my duty, at least. Please God, I prayed silently, let this be what happens. Don’t make me go down there. Don’t make me go down into the darkness.

Then I grasped the doorknob, turned it … and the door swung creakily open.

The first thing that hit me was a strange, damp, stale smell wafting from somewhere in the depths. It had elements of dry rot, rotting fruit and fried onions — or fried food of some sort, at any rate. It was not quite as off-putting as I had expected.

What was off-putting, certainly, was the profundity of the darkness that greeted me as I stepped forward and peered down the stairs towards the cellar. It was almost impossible to make out anything at all. With my left hand I reached out and found that there was some sort of rail or bannister to hold on to. The steps beneath my feet were concrete. I took one more glance towards the room where the Mad Bird Woman had served us tea — half expecting her to be looking out through the doorway, checking on me — and then started my descent.

As I got closer to the foot of the stairs, the silence became heavier and the smell grew stronger. Surprisingly, too, it became slightly easier to see ahead of me. This, I realized, was because the staircase ended in a closed door, and from behind this door, visible around its edges, a soft yellow glow was emanating. And so, whether the cellar was occupied or not, there was certainly a light on in there. Just like we’d seen yesterday, through the window.

I stopped outside the door. In the silence I could hear my heart beating, my breath coming and going, the blood ringing in my ears. Nothing else. Not another sound.

I laid a hand upon the door, and pushed. It began to swing open.

Again, it creaked: much louder than the door at the top of the stairs. But the noise was still not loud enough to disturb the figure sitting at the table in the centre of the room.

From where I was standing, it was evidently the dead body of an elderly lady. Her back was towards me, illuminated by the harsh glare of a light bulb hanging directly above her. I could see straggles of thin grey hair hanging off the skull, down as far as the prominent shoulder blades. She wore a blouse which was torn, decaying, almost in tatters; what was left of the yellowing flesh peeped through in patches underneath. I took a few reluctant, appalled steps towards her, my head swimming, my stomach tightening with nausea, and even though I knew that she was dead, stupidly, irrationally, I could not help myself saying, in a tiny voice:

‘Mrs Bates? Mrs Bates?’

But the corpse remained quite motionless. I came closer, and realized that she was sitting — or had been placed, rather — in front of a table. A green baize card table. Laid out on the table was a game of Pelmanism. The cards featured those by now familiar crude, slightly sickening pictures of animals, and had all been paired off, one with another: fish with fish, tigers with tigers, snakes with snakes. There was only one that was lacking its partner: the card showing a single, giant spider, standing upright on two of its legs, raising the others fiercely in the air as if challenging someone to a fight, the pale green of its underbelly shining out with queasy clarity. It was waiting to be paired off with the missing card, the one we had come here to return.

Tearing my eyes away from this horrid but compelling image, which I could see from behind the dead body by peering over one bony shoulder, I raised my hand slowly, wondering if I actually dared to touch the thing. Would it crumble and decay the moment I laid my hand on it, however careful I tried to be? Would an arm fall off in a cloud of powder and dust, the bones clattering to the floor? How long had she been here? What sort of state was she in?

My hand came closer, closer to the brittle, angular shoulder blade.

‘Mrs Bates?’ I whispered, again.

And then, at the moment of contact …

… at the moment of contact something truly astonishing happened. The corpse jerked abruptly and violently into life. It swivelled around in its chair and instead of being confronted by a fleshless skull I found that I was looking into a pair of wide-open, startled, madly staring eyes. And then the mouth opened, too, and a terrible sound came from inside it. A long, animal monotone: a single-note scream of fear and incomprehension which, the moment it started, felt as though it was never going to stop. Which meant there were two screams, of course, because I was already screaming, too, at the top of my voice, and it must have been the pitch and volume and suddenness of my scream that made the figure raise its painfully thin arms up in the air, crashing into the light bulb and sending it swinging, back and forth, back and forth, so that now his crazed, distorted face (because it was a man, after all, there could be no doubt about that) was bathed in light then shadow, light then shadow, as the bulb above it swung like a pendulum, and the two of us locked eyes and continued to scream as long and loud as we could until there were footsteps on the stairs and the next thing I knew …

10

… the next thing I knew, I was sitting in the most comfortable armchair in the world, in a room flooded with natural light, where one of the walls was made entirely of glass and looked on to a beautiful, manicured, walled garden, filled with fountains and rose bushes. A lovely piece of gentle classical guitar music was playing in the background. Alison was sitting on a footstool beside me, holding my hand. On a little table next to my chair was a fresh mug of tea, from which I took a sip: it was strong and sweet and deliciously reviving.

‘Where am I?’ I murmured.

‘This is Phoebe’s studio. Great, isn’t it?’

I felt so tired, it was an effort to get even one more word out. ‘Phoebe?’

‘The Mad Bird Woman. Only I don’t think we should call her that any more. Her name’s Phoebe.’

I managed to turn my head and look around the room. It was indeed filled with canvases, easels, paint pots and brushes. There was also a dining table — about half the size of the one in the front room — at which the man from the cellar was sitting, wrapped in a blanket, still playing his game of Pelmanism.

‘Who is he?’ I faintly said to Alison.

‘We don’t know. But we think that his name’s Lu, or something like that, and he comes from China.’

A door opened and Phoebe herself came in. Glimpsing a view of the hall through the open doorway, I realized that the door to this wonderful, light and airy studio must have been the second one that I had tried: the one that had been locked. At this memory, images of my horrific descent to the cellar began flooding back for the first time. I drank some more tea eagerly.

‘How are you feeling now, Rachel?’ Phoebe asked.

‘OK, thank you,’ I said. Was this the same woman I’d been frightened of for the last few days? She seemed so gentle and kind.

‘You shouldn’t have gone down there, you silly girl. You must have given each other a terrible fright.’

I smiled. ‘Yes, we did.’

Over at the table, Lu gave what seemed to be a cry of satisfaction. Going over to look at the progress of his card game, Phoebe put her hand on his shoulder and said: ‘There you are — brilliant! Not a single card missing. You did it.’ To which she added a few broken words in (I suppose) Chinese. Lu turned and grinned at her. At least a third of his teeth were missing, but it was still a nice smile.

‘W zuòdào le,’ he said, in a harsh and cracked voice.

‘He’s been playing that game for more than a week now,’ Phoebe explained, drawing up a chair and coming to sit between us. ‘I gave it to him because he seems to have lost his memory and I thought it might help him to get it back. The cards are very old — they belonged to my parents. They’re kind of horrible but pretty easy to remember, at least.’

‘So … what were they doing in the woods?’

‘I can’t keep him here,’ Phoebe said. ‘I can’t hold him prisoner. That’s not the idea. It’s just supposed to be somewhere he can feel safe for a while. He’s free to come and go as he wants. So one evening he went off to sit in the woods, and he took the cards with him. He takes them everywhere, in fact. But I expect he got confused, and forgot them, and left them all behind.’ She smiled at us, and must have seen the confusion on our faces, because now she launched into a fuller explanation:

‘It was in the woods that I found him, about ten days ago,’ she said. ‘It was early in the morning and he was sitting up against a tree and he was so weak that he could barely move. He looked as though he hadn’t eaten for weeks. He wouldn’t come with me so I went home and fetched him some food. Even after that, he was still scared of me and it didn’t help that I couldn’t understand a word he was saying. But I wanted to get him to some sort of safety. I didn’t want to get the police involved because I didn’t think they’d be sympathetic. People in Beverley are pressuring them to crack down on vagrants and I thought that was the category they’d probably put him into.

‘After a while I realized that he did understand a bit of English, and by the end of the morning, I’d managed to persuade him to come home with me. I told him that he was welcome to sleep here for a few days — my guess was that he’d been sleeping rough, I don’t know how long for — but he didn’t want to be in any of the bedrooms, for some reason. The place he really seemed to like was the cellar so I fixed it up for him as best I could, put in a camp bed and a few rugs and chairs and bits and pieces to try and make it more cosy. He seemed happy down there. That was where he wanted to be. Maybe because it made him feel safe.’

‘Why was he so scared?’ Alison wanted to know. ‘What’s he running away from?’

‘Well, unfortunately, I haven’t been able to get much sense out of him,’ said Phoebe. ‘The language that he speaks is Mandarin, I’m pretty sure of that, so he’s come to this country from China. He’s probably come here looking for work, and my guess is that he has been working here, for quite a while. Working very hard, which is why he looks so worn out. I don’t think he’s anything like as old as he looks.’

I had a sudden inspiration. ‘Has he been trafficked?’

Alison and Phoebe both looked at me, equally impressed. I did feel rather proud of myself for being so worldly and knowledgeable.

‘I saw this programme on the television the other night,’ I explained. ‘Apparently there are slaves in England. Real slaves. Most of them come here from other countries and they have to work, like, twenty-four hours every day and if they try to run away they get beaten up or attacked by dogs.’

‘I don’t know if he’s been trafficked,’ said Phoebe, ‘but I think he has been doing some kind of forced labour. There aren’t many clues, because he doesn’t have a passport with him or anything like that. Probably his employer’s got it. But he did have this in his pocket.’

She showed us a slip of paper. It was a handwritten payment slip, scribbled out on cheap blue headed notepaper. The name of the company at the top was ‘Sunbeam Foods’.

‘Sunbeam Foods?’ said Alison. ‘Who are they?’

‘I did some research on the internet,’ said Phoebe. ‘They’re a food-processing company, based down in Kent. Outfits like this send cheap labour to farms all over the country. So it looks like Lu’s been working for them. And I’ve got a pretty good idea what he might have been doing. There was one word that, when I mentioned it to him, completely freaked him out. It was chickens.’

At the mere sound of the word, Lu turned sharply towards us, panic etched on his face.

‘Chickens?’ he said. ‘No. No chickens.’

Phoebe got up and comforted him, rubbed his shoulders, soothed his brow. ‘No chickens,’ she kept saying, until his agitation had subsided. ‘It’s all right, Lu. No chickens. No chickens for you.’

‘What’s his problem with chickens?’ Alison asked.

‘We did factory farming in school, don’t you remember?’ I said. ‘It was horrible. Some of the class had to leave the room. Isabel and Anunya have been vegetarian ever since. Was it something like that, do you think?’

‘Considering that Sunbeam Foods is one of the suppliers for the Brunwin Group, yes, I think it probably was,’ said Phoebe. (But she did not explain what ‘the Brunwin Group’ was, and I did not — at this stage — know.) ‘They market themselves now as being free range and humane and all that sort of thing but … well, that can cover a multitude of sins. And it still means there are people like Lu working some way down the supply chain in terrible conditions.’

‘So what are you going to do now?’ asked Alison, drawing the conversation back to practicalities.

‘I don’t know. Just wait and see, I suppose. I got some Teach Yourself Mandarin tapes from the library, so every day we understand each other a tiny bit more. And every day he seems to be remembering a little bit more, as well. He keeps saying this one thing, which for a while I thought was a word I didn’t understand, but now I think it’s somebody’s name: “Xiang”.’

At the sound of these two syllables, Lu turned again, and stared at Phoebe intently. His eyes blazed with urgency.

‘Xiang,’ he repeated. ‘Xiang!’

‘That’s right,’ said Phoebe. ‘You want to find him, don’t you? I’m going to help you.’

‘Find Xiang,’ he answered, nodding furiously.

‘My theory is this,’ Phoebe explained. ‘And it is only a theory. But: supposing he and this Xiang came over from China together — either legally or illegally, but in any case probably paying some dodgy character a small fortune to help them. At some point they get separated, maybe before Lu starts working for Sunbeam Foods, maybe after. Perhaps they both worked there together. Who knows? But obviously, if the company is based in Kent, and Lu has ended up here in Yorkshire, he and the other workers were being driven long distances all over the country to work on different farms. Supposing Lu decided he couldn’t take any more of this. So one night, maybe they were parked in some lay-by and getting a few hours’ sleep or something, he just slipped out and ran away.’

‘But he wouldn’t have gone without Xiang,’ I insisted.

Phoebe thought about this for a moment. ‘No, you’re right,’ she agreed. ‘They must have got separated ages ago. Maybe when they first arrived in the UK.’

‘Well, I do hope that he’s all right,’ I said, sitting up and finishing the last of my tea. There was a clock on the wall of the studio and I’d noticed that it was almost 2.30. Gran and Grandad would be home by now, and would be wondering where on earth we had got to. ‘Thank you very much for the tea, and for looking after me so well. But Alison and I should really be going home.’

Phoebe saw us to the front door.

‘Call again if you want to,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry we got off on the wrong foot. I didn’t mean to scare you in the woods, only I was a bit paranoid about finding those cards. I don’t think it would be a good thing if the police worked out that Lu’s here, so … do keep it to yourselves, won’t you?’

‘Of course we will,’ said Alison.

And then, just before leaving, I thought to ask: ‘What happened to your kestrel, by the way?’

Phoebe seemed taken aback. ‘How did you know that I used to have a kestrel?’

‘I saw you flying it once,’ I said, ‘up on Westwood. A few years ago.’

‘Tabitha …’ said Phoebe, musingly. Her eyes were briefly glazed with sadness. ‘I used to keep her in a shed out in the garden. But one night somebody got in. I never found out who it was. They strangled her.’

We both gasped. ‘Oh, that’s awful,’ Alison said. ‘Why would anyone do something like that?’

‘I don’t know. They were angry with me, I suppose, because Mrs Bates liked me, and left me this house. People are strange, very strange.’ She smiled now, and held out her hand for us to shake. ‘But now you’ve met me, and you know that I’m not as bad as people make out. Tell your grandparents I’m not this mad scary woman who goes round murdering old ladies. Spread the word.’

‘We will!’ I promised.

Then we both shook her hand vigorously, and I knew for the first time that I was not frightened of the Mad Bird Woman at all. But I also knew that I would never get used to the piercings all over her face, or the tattoos all over her neck and throat and around her eyes. Why would you disfigure yourself like that? What had inspired her to do it? I had a vague but deep-rooted intuition that it had something to do with the painting in her front room, that wild stormy wasteland and the menacing black house that overlooked it. But I was not brave enough to ask her, either then or later.

11

In fact we only ever saw Phoebe one more time.

When we got back to the house that afternoon, Gran and Grandad were already home, and didn’t even ask us where we’d been. I had never seen them looking so happy. Only now did we learn of the cloud that had been hanging over them that week. But all was well, in any case: Gran had been given the results of her brain scan and the doctor had told her that she did not have cancer after all. She had something called a meningioma, apparently: a benign tumour that was not too difficult to operate upon. The sense of relief, of thankfulness and light-heartedness, that pervaded the house from that moment onwards was so sweet and strong that we felt we could almost touch it with our fingers and taste it on our tongues. The house and garden seemed drenched in light.

On Thursday afternoon, our last full day in Beverley, all four of us went up to Westwood with a picnic. Gran and Grandad sat on the wooden bench that encircled the foot of the Black Tower; Alison and I laid out a couple of rugs in the sunshine, and gorged ourselves on fish paste sandwiches and Gran’s homemade chocolate cake. Afterwards, Alison lay flat out and closed her eyes and seemed to have fallen asleep. I sat upright and let the thoughts course through my head. I was looking forward to seeing my mother again, but also felt prey to a gentle, pressing melancholy at the prospect of leaving this place, which had come to feel so welcoming and familiar, so much like home. I remembered the first time I had sat here with my brother, some years ago, on a cold and grey afternoon in late October, the same afternoon on which, as dusk descended, he had played that nasty joke on me in the Minster. And then, just as my memory was calling up images of Phoebe pushing Mrs Bates’s wheelchair across the moorland, with her kestrel Tabitha perched on her arm, Phoebe herself appeared in the distance; approaching us, it seemed, from exactly the same spot, but now waving cheerfully in recognition. She came and crouched down beside us on the rug and I introduced her to Gran and Grandad, who (having already been given a carefully edited account of our visit to her house) half rose from their bench with instinctive politeness, and extended their hands to give hers a cautious shake, but never stopped looking uncomfortable in her presence.

Phoebe had come to say goodbye, but she couldn’t stay for long. She had something on her mind.

‘Lu disappeared,’ she told us. ‘I’m not sure when. I went down to find him yesterday morning and he was gone.’

‘We have to find him,’ I said. ‘Alison and I can help you. He won’t have gone far, surely.’

Phoebe shook her head. ‘I spent all of yesterday looking. I took the car out and drove for miles. But it wasn’t any use. There’s nothing much I can do now. I don’t think he would have gone unless he felt ready for it. He has some money, and he’s a lot stronger than when I found him last week. We just have to hope for the best.’

‘We’re going home tomorrow,’ Alison said. ‘You will write and tell us, won’t you, if you hear from him again?’

‘Of course,’ said Phoebe. But she never did.

Strangely enough it was Alison, out of the two of us, who kept in occasional contact with her after that. Phoebe’s paintings — in fact not just the paintings but the studio, the atmosphere in her house, her whole way of life, everything about her — seemed to have inspired Alison and from then on art became her passion. When her mother came back from holiday the next day she brought a new boyfriend with her, and before long Alison and her mother had moved down to Birmingham in order to live with him. From then on, of course, we hardly saw each other at all: but the events of that week in Beverley had created a bond between us which was not easily broken. I had begun by feeling indifferent towards Alison; then at one time, briefly, I had hated her; finally, we had come to be friends, and that friendship has strengthened and endured, now, over many years, despite absence and distance, despite the ways in which we have grown up and grown apart, and sometimes misunderstood each other.

Those few, intense and mysterious days in the early summer of 2003 continue to haunt me. The memories are strong. I remember how the discovery of David Kelly’s body was reported on the news, how it had shocked and angered my grandparents, and how it made me realize something about the finality of death. I remember the shadow of death that hung over their house during that time, and the tingling euphoria that seized us all when it miraculously lifted.

There is another thing I have no trouble remembering. I have no trouble remembering it because I have it in front of me, right now as I write these words: the Pelmanism card with that loathsome picture of a giant, brightly coloured spider. The afternoon of our picnic, Phoebe had the pack of cards with her, and she gave me and Alison a spider each, as a souvenir of our adventure, and as a token of our friendship, which she told us we must never neglect because it was one of the most precious things we would ever possess. I never spoke of the cards to Alison again: I don’t know whether she kept hers, or whether she lost it. But mine has always stayed with me: first at home, in a special drawer of my bedside cupboard; then at Oxford; and now …

Now it sits in front of me on my desk. It has never been a pleasant thing to look at it, it has always filled me with dread, and tonight, in the deathly stillness of this house, it poisons my mind once again with strange imaginings, and I can’t help walking over to the window, one more time, pulling back the curtain and looking into the garden. Peering into the shadows at its furthest depths.

There is nothing there. Nothing at all.

Such silence. Such darkness. It is no wonder that in a world like this, things can disappear. Even people. People like Lu, whose existence seemed so precarious, so unrecognized, that there was nothing to stop him slipping away into that woodland at dawn and simply evaporating, blending into the mist. Did he ever find his friend? I’ve wondered about that, many times, over the years. The men who drowned in Morecambe Bay the next year, picking cockles for their gangmaster as the treacherous tide rushed inwards … they were Chinese, most of them. Just the other day, I read once again about their terrible deaths on the internet and my stomach tightened when I saw that one of them was called Xiang. But I expect it’s a very common name in China.

~ ~ ~

Dodie Smith, I Capture The Castle (1948):

‘Perhaps watching someone you love suffer can teach you even more than suffering yourself can.’