Connie lay awake all night, thinking she’d been a fool. How had she allowed herself to be trapped like this? At first she’d thought she’d been so clever. She’d panicked, of course, when she first got the phone call. It had come early in the morning, threatening, insinuating, demanding. The voice disguised, she’d been sure of that. She’d had threatening phone calls following the publicity of Elias’s death. They’d been malicious and mindless, but not like this. Not terrifying. There’d been letters then too. In the end she’d burned them without reading them. The police had said to give the letters to them: it might be possible to prosecute the writers. But Connie hadn’t been able to bear the thought of a stranger seeing them. They might believe the dreadful accusations. This phone call had been more horrible than the letters, and Connie had taken it seriously. She’d known she had to leave Mallow Cottage. She had to take Alice and get away. She couldn’t be seen to be talking to the police.
Then Veronica had arrived. Connie hadn’t been able to tell her the truth, of course. That would have been unthinkable. She could hardly tell this respectable woman that she was running away from the police! She’d said the press were on her back and she needed to disappear for a while. They’d tracked her down, connected her to Jenny Lister’s murder. And Veronica – who had been so hostile, who had poisoned the village women with her stories – had suddenly become helpful. She’d understood the need for utter secrecy. Of course the tabloid press were ruthless and devious. Veronica had read how they searched dustbins and put taps on mobile phones. Veronica said she had a holiday home, not far away. Connie and Alice could stay there for a little while until the police had found the real murderer. It was basic and it had been empty over the winter, but she thought it would do. There was a Calor gas stove and they could stock up on supplies. She’d camped out there when she was a child and had always loved it.
They’d taken Connie’s car to the supermarket to buy food. They couldn’t use Veronica’s because it had no child seat for Alice. Then they’d driven down a grassy track and had arrived at the boathouse. Alice had been enchanted. Any child would be.
‘You’ll have to be very careful close to the water, dear,’ Veronica had said to the little girl, kneeling down so that her face was very close to Alice’s. ‘It’s very deep here, even so near to the shore.’
Then they’d gone inside and thrown open the windows to let in the air, because at that point it still hadn’t started raining. Veronica had found linen in a painted white cupboard and they’d hung the sheets over the deck rail to air.
Inside there was one big room, with two sets of bunks built into the wall. At the end without windows there was a wood-panelled cubicle with a sink and toilet and a candle on a saucer standing on a shelf. Veronica had shown them how the stove worked and they’d cooked sausages for lunch. It had been Veronica’s idea to phone Joe Ashworth, when Connie had shown her how often he’d called.
‘You don’t want them thinking you’ve got something to hide! Really, I would phone him, dear, or they’ll be looking for you all over the county.’
Then she’d driven away in Connie’s car, saying she’d leave it where no reporter would find it. She’d come back in two days’ time with more food. Though by then, of course, the murderer might have been arrested and it would be safe for Connie to move back home.
That first afternoon, after they’d watched Veronica drive away, they’d gone for a walk in the wood and Alice had loved it, balancing on the fallen logs and picking flowers that later they’d put on the windowsill in a chipped enamel mug. They’d come across a cairn made of small white pebbles that looked like a shrine, a small bunch of primroses laid carefully on top. In the evening Alice had fallen asleep immediately in the bottom bunk and Connie had read by the light of a tilley lamp, listening to the rain and imagining herself in her father’s shed at home.
The next day it had been raining and Alice had been fractious and bad-tempered. There was no television to distract her. Connie would have phoned Veronica, but the battery on her phone was flat. She’d brought the charger with her, but of course there was no electricity in the boathouse. There was a box of games on the table and they played Snakes and Ladders and Snap. The rain battered on the roof and Alice put her hands over her ears.
‘I want to go home! I hate it here!’
‘Tomorrow,’ Connie had said. ‘Tomorrow Auntie Veronica will come and we can go home. Then perhaps you could visit Daddy for a couple of days.’
There was no fridge in the hut and the fresh food had all been eaten. She cooked pasta and mixed it with a tin of tuna. Afterwards she let Alice have a whole bar of chocolate for pudding. As soon as the girl was asleep, Connie climbed into the bunk and lay flat on her back, awake for most of the night. She thought this must be what it would feel like to be in prison. Though she supposed there would be odd and frightening noises in prison. Here there was complete silence. Eventually she slept.
She woke the next morning at dawn, gritty-eyed and still tired. The curtains at the windows were very thin and it seemed, even lying in her bunk, that there was something strange about the light. It was the same light as waking up to snow, brighter than it should have been. She got up quietly, pulling the blanket from her bed around her shoulders, and looked outside. The water level of the lake had risen in the night and the house was surrounded. Little waves lapped against the decking. Everything was still, and the trees on the opposite bank were perfectly replicated in the water.
She saw at once that they were in no immediate danger of drowning, but still she felt panic rise in her stomach and almost turn into a scream. She could see how beautiful everything was – the reflected light that had made her think of snow, the composition of trees and hills in the water – but that didn’t stop her being frightened. The notion of imprisonment had become a reality. She understood how people caught in a burning building could become so desperate that they would jump to almost certain death. It wasn’t a fear of the flames, she thought, but of being trapped. She could hardly swim, but the temptation to let herself out of the door to slide into the water was almost irresistible.
She heard a noise behind her and then she did give a little whimper of fear. Perhaps it was a rat. She’d heard that rats were pushed out of their natural homes during floods. Could rats swim? But of course it was Alice, who’d climbed out of her bunk and was standing shivering beside her. And then Connie had to turn their plight into an adventure.
‘Isn’t this fun! It’s just like being on a boat. Where shall we imagine we’ll sail away to this morning?’
Even to her own ears her voice sounded desperate. Alice climbed into her arms and began to cry.
Connie heard the car driving down the track after they’d had breakfast. They were so far from anywhere, hidden by the trees, that the sound carried and seemed very loud. Once she might have worried that it could be the police. That fat female inspector, with her huge hands and her filthy feet and her questions. Now she’d have been glad even to see Vera Stanhope. But perhaps it would be Veronica. This was her territory after all. The boathouse must have flooded before. She’d know the best thing to do. Connie leaned out of the window and caught a glimpse of the car through the branches. Not her car. It was the wrong colour for that, and her little Nissan wouldn’t make it through all the water. But it might be Veronica all the same.
It was still early in the year and the sun, which had come out now, was very low in the sky. The emerging sun made the figure on the shore nothing more than a silhouette, appearing suddenly from the high wall surrounding the old garden. Perhaps the car had got stuck, or perhaps they’d decided to walk the last part. Connie had to squint even to see the figure as a person. It was a shadow with waterproofs and boots. She could tell no more than that.
A small dinghy that had once rested on the bank now floated on the pool, tethered by a rope. The man tugged on the rope and pulled the boat towards him. Because it was a man, Connie thought. The action seemed too strong and purposeful for her visitor to be a woman.
She called to Alice. ‘Look, sweetheart, we’re going to get rescued.’ And the two of them waved like mad things. The man on the shore only raised his hand in greeting.
Now he’d pulled the dinghy onto the bank and had taken out a couple of oars that must have been stowed under the seat. He pushed it back into the pool and waded in as far as his calves, then he climbed aboard.
He rowed towards them, circling towards the boathouse. The light was no longer behind him, but as he approached he had his back to them and still Connie couldn’t make out who it was. Even when he’d reached them, and tied the rope around one of the planks that made up the rail of the deck, she didn’t recognize him. Then her attention was elsewhere, stuffing all their belongings into a bag, making sure that Alice was with her and not too close to the water.
‘Just wait a minute!’ she shouted and some of the panic returned. Though that was ridiculous because their saviour wouldn’t just turn round and row back to dry land without them.
She heard him climb onto the boathouse deck. There was the creak of the planks, the splash of displaced water as his weight left the dinghy, then footsteps. He stood in the doorway and she saw him properly for the first time and recognized him. She’d seen that face before.