Still Waters

1

The Eskdale Valley, Lake District, Northern England.

Monday, November 19, this year.

9.47am

The morning mist gives this landscape a blurry quality, as if the watcher’s eye were still muzzy with sleep. It transforms the panorama into something oddly fabric in texture: the fells gathered into ruches and pleats; all mismatched swatches of tweed and hessian - felted twists and wisps of downy green wool.

A little cottage stands at the foot of the nearest mountain, half lost in the damp, grey air. It has a red chimney and a new roof of green slate. The two sash windows are big inquisitive eyes above the astonished mouth of the black lacquered door. It has been built of the same grey stone as the low wall which encircles it.

A sign hangs above the doorframe: white letters on black wood. Bilberry Byre.

A thinnish, darkish man stands in the doorway, squinting up at the grey clouds. He is barefoot: his mud-grimed feet turning slowly white from contact with the cold grey stone of the front step. He wears dirty jeans, the knees stained. He is wrapped, toga-like, in a tartan blanket, its folds lying across his shoulders and gathered around his waist. His skin is a gallery: a turmoil of intricate words and pictures.

Rowan Blake, fortyish, is glaring at the world as if he would like punch it in the throat. He flicks his head back and forth: a deranged horse swatting at a wasp. He lowers himself into a crouch. Squats. Moves cautiously forward, braced …then swings: his head a wrecking ball. Something red and brown flutters up elegantly from the overhanging branches, and Rowan leans on the wall for support. He’s sure he just heard his brain strike his skull: a damp splat, as if a squid has been hurled at a wall.

Rowan sags, beaten and sore.

“Give it a rest,” he growls, feebly. He squints in the general direction of the bird that has been driving him to distraction with its song. He can’t see the little bastard.

Probably laughing at you, Rowan, says the voice in his head. Gonna take shit from a tit? You gonna stand for that, son?

Temper breaks like a flung glass. “You’re shit! You’re a shit fucking singer. Your parents are embarrassed, your kids won’t admit they know you! You’re a shit bird in a shit nest. And that’s a shit fucking tree!”

He stops, out of breath. Listens as the echo disappears into the damp swaddling clothes of mist and mountain and Autumn air. He permits himself a small, half-mad laugh. “Come to this, has it?” he mutters to himself. “You’re a joke, mate. An embarrassment. If they could see you now….”

Rowan forces himself to stop. Unchecked, he could well berate himself for ever.

He closes his eyes. Slumps back against the brickwork. Feels gloom settle upon him like ash. The unfairness of it all! Three great steps up the career ladder and each has taken him closer to the bottom. From journalist to writer. Tick! From writer to TV presenter. Tick! And from TV presenter back to square bloody one. Dick! A reporter without a story; a journalist without a journal. Self-employed bordering on full-time unemployed. He feels his disappointment, his resentment, like a physical pain; some herniated lump of gristle right behind his heart. He’d served his time, hadn’t he? 20 years in newspapers, man and boy. He’d been right to take the money from the posh publishers down by the Thames. A two-book deal: two true-crime books, the first to be delivered inside 12 months. That wasn’t a problem, considering he’d already written it. He got most of his money in one go. The agreed fee was supposed to be paid out in different stages – the signature of contracts, the acceptance of the manuscript, the hardback publication and finally the paperback. Rowan was struggling with some old debts and having outright fistfights with some new ones. He agreed to a slightly lower fee, if he could have the bulk of the cash up front. He’d quit his staff job at The Mirror before the transferred cash hit his account.

This is it, lad, he’d told himself, full of pride. You’re going to be a writer. You’ve made it!

The book was a critical success and a commercial failure. His series of interviews with serial killer Gary King were found to be illuminating and repulsive in equal measure. Critics said he had an uncanny skill for letting people believe they were speaking to a confidante. Rowan gave his all to the marketing campaign, writing endless blogs about his poor-but-honest childhood and his sense of journalistic responsibility to the truth. Writers whom he’d admired gave admiring quotes for the front cover and three serial killers wrote to him asking if he would like to poke around inside their heads. Trouble was, not enough people bought it. That’s what it came down to, in the end. There were posters and promos and appearances at every bookshop and library he was willing to attend. It just didn’t do very well. King wasn’t a proper household name and his victims were all middle-aged white men, which meant little public sympathy. If he’d favoured young blonde girls or vulnerable women, King would have made Rowan a fortune. Rowan had come to the conclusion that there is almost nothing more expendable than a bland, white male. If he ever fancied becoming a serial killer himself, he would definitely make them his targets. After teenage runaways and long-term addicts, there is little in society as replaceable as a man.

The publishers expect something more commercially appealing for book two. The brief has been maddeningly broad. Perhaps something from a victim’s perspective, they’d said. A confession, perhaps. Or an unsolved mystery, like those ones on Netflix. Rowan recalls one tall, blonde, frightfully Oxbridge twenty-something looking at him over her chai latte and asking, quite seriously, if he knew of any unsolved cases that he might be able to solve. Preferably one with a personal angle…

Rowan raises his hands as if to push back a loop of hair, looking afresh at the things on the end of his wrists – the things that now pass for hands. His palms and fingers are entirely mummified in bandages and polythene. They hide the grisly mass of peeling skin and yellow pus beneath. Last time he was permitted to look, some of the skin grafts were starting to look a little healthier. In other places he was still just blood and bone. He feels as though he has been wrung out like a damp cloth. Something inside him feels fractured; broken. He looks as if he has been drained; juiced - as if the right gust of wind could carry him away.

Maybe those bastard producers were right after all, he thinks, looking at the mess of cloth and plastic and skin. He sinks in on himself. You couldn’t appear on camera anyway now. Not like that.

He snarls at the memory – at the unfairness of the cards that Fate had dealt him not so long ago. As he’d dug around for a new story, Rowan had been thrown another seemingly golden opportunity when a production company in Manchester approached him to present the pilot episode of a new true crime series on a digital channel. Rowan had given the role his all, convinced this was going to be a permanent gig and a truly life-altering moment. Three months after they finished shooting, Rowan was replaced by a former soap actress. She was going to present, to film the links, to be credited as ‘star’. Rowan was reduced to a ‘talking head’, a named onlooker offering a journalist’s perspective, filmed in front of a wall of old books. Rowan had told them to shove it. None of his old contacts took him back. Nobody wanted to give meagre freelance budgets to somebody who had left on a megabucks publishing deal. And his book publishers were starting to ask for updates. For some pages or an outline at least. If he failed to deliver a manuscript before December 31, he would be in breach of contract. He would have to give a great chunk of money back. And he didn’t have the money any more. He’d drunk it and smoked it and snorted it benevolently from bellies both fleshy and taut. He’d had a wonderful time. Now it was gone. He found himself having to do late night subbing shifts at right-wing tabloids; missing from his girlfriend’s London flat for such long periods that she presumed they’d broken up. In her distress, she’d turned to a handsome gym-bunny called Donnie for emotional support.

Then he’d been. Hurt so badly that the only place to go was home.

Home, he considers. It’s an odd word this little green-brown corner of the Lake District. His upbringing saw to it he never put down roots. Home was caravan parks and halting sites; a seemingly endless succession of woodland enclosures where he and mum and Serendipity cosied up inside the old American school bus that rocked with each lash of the wind. He grew up itinerant, forever on the move; both benefactor and victim of a Bohemian mother and a series of impermanent dads. For a while, school was also a Young Offenders Institute. The foster homes, care homes, and finally free. Home, now, is wherever his sister is and this moody coastal valley is where she has chosen to put down roots.

He stretches, elongating his hands. Emits a simian screech as the wounds threaten to open like flowers.

“You stupid sod,” he mutters, seething. “Stop forgetting!”

Rowan is under doctor’s orders to keep his skin covered. The wounds upon his palms have twice become infected. For a time he seemed to be more blisters than flesh: mottled strips of epidermis hanging from his palm like popped bubble-gum; pus and pain in every line and whorl. Two weeks ago he was admitted to A&E - the doctors concerned he was developing sepsis and pumping him so full of antibiotics that his blood could have healed the sick. He ran a fever that turned his skin a shade of green; steam rising from his forehead while shivering so violently that the nurses feared he would break his teeth. There was talk of an induced coma. His sister was called. Rowan spent five whole days in hospital before boredom and the absence of a bar persuaded him he would be best served by discharging himself. He didn’t get very far. The pain in his hands reached all the way up to his shoulders. He couldn’t steer his car or change gear without weeping. They found him in the car park, trying to reverse out of a parking space using his elbows. His sister had made the decision for him. He was coming to stay with her. There would be no arguments. She would give him space. She’d just had the byre done up and although it was pretty basic and the toilet was outdoors, it would be perfect for his convalescence. He could take it easy. He could write, or at the very least he could dictate into a recording device. He could walk on the fells or skim stones, however inexpertly, on the silver-grey surface of the mountain tarns. He could meet new people, drink real ales and decide what he wanted to do with the rest of his life. He could get to know his niece, Serendipity. They would take care of him.

Rowan still feels as though they took advantage of a sick man.

He looks down as his feet nudge a silvery metal mug, resting against the doorstep. There’s a wildflower wilting on the sealed lid. Rowan grins. Bends down and picks it up with his right hand; his bandaged fingers and thumb looking like a sock-puppet fastening onto prey. He sips strong, black coffee, and gives a little salute to the air.

“Thanks Snowdrop,” he mutters. He glanced around, hoping his young niece may also have gone to the trouble of bringing him a bacon sandwich, three Marlboro Red and a strip of Ibuprofen. Wrinkles his nose, unimpressed with the youth of today.

He sits on the front step, a little cold, a little feverish, and still a bit drunk. The bird starts singing again. He glances back inside, through the door into the tiny space he is currently under instructions to think of as ‘home’. He’s proud of his sister for how hard she’s worked to spin straw into gold. The byre was waist deep in cow dung when she bought it. The bloke who did the renovations spent the first three days shovelling his way down to floor level. Even then he had a hellish job with the drainage and foundations. There are old mine workings honeycombing the ground beneath this part of the valley. Serendipity had to beg two more budget increases from her wife before the byre could be declared fit for human habitation. There’s a different kind of crap to wade through now: imitation welsh dressers, cut little landscapes in wonky frames; rag-rugs and wicker baskets piled with logs and pine cones. It’s homely but too twee for Rowan’s tastes. The absence of hot water or a shower doesn’t help. He doesn’t mind visiting the outhouse now and again but he’s encouraged his hosts to think again before advertising a holiday cottage that expects its occupants to wash their nether regions in the downstairs sink. Rowan is no stranger to roughing it, but he fancies that the fell walkers who flock to this part of the Lake District may expect slightly more for their 600-quid each week.

Rowan’s descent into the warm milk of self-pity is disturbed by a sudden sound at his garden gate. He looks up to see a bundle of effervescence and sunshine.

“Hiya,” comes a voice, bright as ice. “Uncle Rowan! Did you get it? Was it still hot? Is it strong enough? Uncle Rowan! Namaste!”

Rowan pulls himself up and turns his back. Alters his position so he is leaning with his forehead against the doorframe, his back to the front gate. Hears plastic soles striking stone and the shush of disturbed grass as she runs up the path.

“What are you doing?” asks Snowdrop, a giggle in her voice.

“I’m getting paid to hold this building up,” says Rowan, without turning around. “A tenner a day. The lunch breaks are a bit fraught with peril but a job’s a job. I can’t be picky.”

He enjoys her laughter. Turns back, pulling a face that suggests he has been pressing his features too hard into the brick. She laughs again. “You’re so weird,” she snorts. “Mum said you would be weird but you’re like, way out there.”

“Says you,” protests Rowan, pretending to outraged. “You’re the one dressed like a pantomime cow.”

She grins: her face naturally charming. She’s 12-years-old. She has a pale, lightly freckled appearance, red lips and the same blue eyes as her mum, Rowan’s older sister. Two spots of perfect red colour her cheeks. Her hair is a shimmering mass of black and hangs to her shoulders in a jumble of ringlets. Some of the twists in her hair are intentional – pretty curls made last night with twists of paper and elastic bands. The others are more naturally-occurring tangles; a mess of knots and snarls, twisting over and under one another like ivy. There is mud on her bare knees and up the side of her wellingtons. Her bare hands look cold. There is a bruise on her left thumbnail and the last flakes of purply nail varnish on the seashell-coloured cuticles at the end of her long, pale fingers. She smells of the outdoors; of cake baked in a steam-filled kitchen; damp clothes and chunky, old-fashioned soap. She has the air of a Disney princess who has spent a month living rough: a Snow White not above barbecuing her woodland helpers.

“You should be wearing red,” says Rowan, looking her up and down.

“Sorry?”

“And you should be skipping.”

The girl frowns, unsure. She really wants to understand. “I don’t …,”

“Red Riding Hood,” explains Rowan, shaking his head in mock disappointment. “Honestly, you’re supposed to be a writer. Now I know who picked the bloody awful name. Bilberry Bloody Byre …”

Rowan has already made his feelings clear about what he refers to as ‘the saccharine vileness’ of the cottage’s new sobriquet. It was chosen by Serendipity, his sister. Given her own moniker, Rowan believes she should understand the importance of getting a name right. Their mother has a fifty per cent success rate. Rowan suits his name. Serendipity, forever anxious, forever screwing herself into the ground with responsibilities, with her lost paperwork and sob-stories, has always struck her younger brother as more of a Carol or a Mavis. Bilberry Byre is her choice. It’s a thoroughly incongruous affectation, deliberately chosen to suggest a certain cosiness – as if the remoteness of the location and severity of the weather could be somehow camouflaged by the cunning use of alliteration and pastoral imagery.

“I lit the fire myself today,” says Rowan, with a slight air of pride. “My shirt caught fire, but it wasn’t one of my good ones.”

“I can smell it,” sniffs Snowdrop. “Did you smoke yourself out? I told you to clear the grating before you put the kindling on. Your eyes look a bit pink. Did you take the ash out? Mum gets cross if you don’t. And do you need more firelighters? I brought some more anyway. They’re under the croissants. That’s okay isn’t it? Are they poisonous? Will it make the croissants taste funny? Where does the word ‘croissant’ come from, uncle Rowan? There’s a girl at school says her mum calls them crab-rolls. She says they look like them. They don’t, do they? You won’t die from eating them, will you? I’ve got a book on chemicals …,”

Rowan smiles and puts his covered hands to his ears. “Dippy, you‘re going to make my head explode.”

Snowdrop peers past him through the open door. It’s smoky inside the cottage; the grey air peppered with the greasy scents of bacon grease and spilled red wine. Her eyes shoot to the stain on the rag-rug in front of the open fire. Red wine and burned cloth. A small, rather pitiful flame attempts to devour a large stack of A4 pages and a sheaf of newspapers. The fire gives off a pitiful amount of light and makes the cottage feel gloomy: turning the windows into mirrors. The walls seem closer today than when the sun shines. The creak of the gate sounds more threatening, like violin strings played with a saw. Snowdrop wipes her feet on the step and slides into the room like sunlight. She crosses to the far wall and flicks on a standard lamp with a gaudy, seventies-style shade. Yellow light fills the poky room: picks out the wooden ceiling joists, the soft flower-patterned wallpaper; the random smattering of watercolour landscapes and Victorian school photographs in their mismatched frames. A pile of books has toppled over on the little table, knocking dirty glasses and crumb-covered plates onto the flagged floor.

“Nothing we can’t sort out,” says Snowdrop, brimming with optimism. She looks at her uncle, slouched disconsolately in the doorway, and puts her head on one side as if talking to a younger child. “You’re doing so well. You’ve had no practice at this. Who could cope with having both hands out of action, eh? Especially when everything they’re good at involves being pretty nifty with their fingers.”

Rowan chews his lip. “That sounded vaguely encouraging,” he says, moodily. “Have you heard somebody else say that?”

Snowdrop busies herself arranging papers, muttering something about an overhead conversation between her two mums. “Typing, drinking, fighting – that’s what Jo said. Said something about it being like Usain Bolt losing use of his feet….,”

“That’s a clever line,” he says, begrudgingly.

“And no matter what they say, I know you’re working hard here. Just because you won’t tell anybody your idea for book two, it doesn’t mean you haven’t got one. I mean, your deadline’s Christmas, isn’t it, so you’d be pretty daft to not even have a title by this stage!”

He listens to her happy life. Manages a smile. “Yeah,” he grumbles. “That would be the work of a fucking idiot.”

The voice, thoroughly disappointed: Yes, my son.

2

Monday, September 19, 1986

Silver Birch Academy, Wasdale Valley

11.41am

Violet peers up at the bruised sky - the low clouds pressing down upon the valley like a boot heel. She tells herself the specks of purple and yellow are sunflowers and crocuses. Looks down at the reddish stones around her and tries to see something other than blood. It doesn’t work. She’s only ten, and hasn’t yet learned to believe her own lies.

She looks across the stark, still surface of Wast Water. Makes out the shape of the school, emerging from the gloom like an iceberg. Pictures the big wooden door. Imagines her way inside: high ceilings; bookcases; triple-tiered bunk beds and big comfy sofas capable of swallowing the unwary.

Violet is beginning to regret slipping away from the rest of her party and taking herself off to this isolated spot. According to Daddy, Violet makes lots of bad decisions. Violet is a ‘difficult child’. A ‘problem child’. A ‘naughty girl’. Violet is ‘Trouble with a capital T’. Nor, apparently, is she still pretty enough to charm her way out of trouble. Apparently, she has tried it on one too many times. Apparently, it’s time to make big changes before she gets too far down a road from which she won’t be able to come back. Violet hopes that Daddy won’t be cross at her for going off on her own. She also hopes that he’ll be furious. Apparently, she’s a Contrary Mary. When she’s in charge, she intends to take that stupid word out of the Dictionary. Apparently, such grandiose claims are half her problem.

Daddy is a busy man. According to Mummy, he’s ‘well-to-do’. He’s from ‘old money’. He makes their lives easier and it’s the least they can all bloody do to act grateful and give him a moment’s peace, for God’s sake…

This school is Mum’s choice. If Daddy had his way she’d be attending one of the boaters-and-knickerbockers places down in the stockbroker belt. But Mum likes Silver Birch and eventually, Mum tends to get her own way. Daddy’s done a lot of sighing and snorting, letting out little breaths of contempt each time the head teacher has spoken about the school’s holistic approach to ‘whole child’ education. He’d seemed almost evangelical as he spoke of his pride in helping a whole generation of children how to become ‘citizens of the world’ and to appreciate their ‘inner lives’.

“Hippy claptrap,” muttered Daddy, as if he hadn’t already read the brochure cover to cover.

“…. eventually everybody will be taught this way, and even the word ‘taught’ is something I have issue with. This is of course our flagship school and two further academies are on the verge of opening in the next 18 months. Obviously we live in a capitalist world and as such we have to make sure we balance the books but it’s important you share our vision that all funds go straight back into education. We’re trying to create a family here – that’s why we keep the numbers small. For those pupils lucky enough to be boarding with us it’s a real home-from-home mentality. I actually feel very jealous – this is going to be the start of a wonderful chapter in your children’s lives…”

Violet had stopped listening around the time Mr Tunstall had told them that maths was interchangeable on the curriculum with art, drama, homeopathy or modern philosophy. At her last school she was deemed an exceptional student – advanced in all aspects of schooling and extremely literate for somebody who turns 11 on their next birthday. Where she struggles is socially. She can be a boisterous girl. She loses her temper; gets easily upset. When she was small she used to pull her hair until it came out. Mum says she has too many feelings inside her – that’s she’s ‘highly strung’ and ‘neurotic’ and ‘trying to find her path: Daddy calls her a bloody nuisance. Silver Birch is supposed to be a fresh start. They keep promising her things will be different here. They tell her she’ll find peace. She doesn’t believe them. They don’t understand that she’s two people. She’s Violet Sheehan. She’s clever and sweet and caring and artistic. She’s also Violet’s shadow. Those who have witnessed her temper say it is like watching a fight between hissing cats. She is all claws and spit and venom.

“Oh, sorry… I’ll go … I didn’t see you …,”

Violet turns. The girl who emerges from the woods matches her intonation perfectly. She’s a fragile little thing. Frizzy brown hair and glasses speckled with raindrops. She’s probably the same age as Violet but looks younger. Her clothes look considerably older: a big Salvation Army duffle coat is fastened up to the top above a knee-length skirt with shiny wellington boots. She holds herself close: elbows tucked in, like a roosting bird. She makes Violet think of premature kittens – the litter that Midnight had last Spring – just bones and patchy fur, dead in a cardboard box. Daddy had let her keep one overnight, the better to help her say goodbye. She’d held it until it went stiff. Even then she’d continued to try and manipulate the limbs; to open its closed eyes and to push her finger into the squeezed-shut mouth; the pad of her finger searching for the tiny sharp points of teeth.

“I’m Violet,” she says, introducing herself in a loud, proud voice, the way Daddy has told her to. She puts out a hand for the frail girl to shake but quickly withdraws it, feeling silly. Her own hands are powerful – to take this girl’s paw in her feeling like closing a fist around a handful of crisps.

“Are you with the tour?” asks the girl, and Violet notices how wide her eyes are, like freshly cracked eggs on a dainty side-plate. “Are you coming here? You should, you really should. I started last term and it’s not like other schools.”

“I’ve noticed,” smiles Violet, and the girl seems delighted by this small act of fellowship.

“I’m Catherine,” she says, though she doesn’t seem entirely sure about the truth of the statement. “My Daddy’s the vicar in Seascale so I don’t board. He’s very happy with how I’m getting on here. What about you? Where are you coming from?”

“South,” shrugs Violet, and pushes her hand through her mound of honey-coloured hair. “They think the witch doctors here will make me stop going off like a bottle of pop.”

“Do you have control issues?” asks Catherine, sympathetically. “We’ve got a teacher here who’s good for that. Well, not exactly a teacher but somebody who’s good at helping people. He’s a healer. Mr Sixpence he’s called, but don’t be put off. He’s not a weirdo, or maybe he is, but not in a bad way. Anyway, he’s good at making you feel better. Positive visualisation is part of it but there’s meditation and something called mindfulness on offer three times a week. Have you heard of Reiki? We do that too. It’s weird but it kind of helps. You get all emotional and these tears come out that you’ve been holding in since you were a baby. Mam says they’re the tears we weep for the sins of mankind, but she chuckles when she says it so she might just be pulling my leg.”

Violet feels grateful for Catherine’s presence. She’s not great at making friends. She can be too loud. Too boisterous. She loves too hard, that’s what Mum says.

“Is this what you do at playtime then?” she asks, sitting down on a fat rock at the water’s edge and gesturing for Catherine to join her. “Is there a playground? I didn’t see one. I like the ones where you hang upside down.”

“I’m not allowed to do that,” says Catherine, sitting down primly. She smells like an old lady and she seems to give off an air of constant cold. Her teeth chatter a little as she talks, though it doesn’t seem to cause her any discomfort.

“Not allowed to do what?”

“Hang upside down,” explains Catherine. “There was a little playground for a while but Mr Rideal wanted that turning into a nature garden so it’s gone. Like he said, we’ve got the trees and the lake so why did we need it? But I get problems with my balance so I don’t go upside down. I don’t swim either, though I did try with one of those bright red caps on. People said I looked like a match.”

Violet laughs, an obnoxious, donkey-like bray. It lands between them like a rock thrown into still water.

“Daddy says I need to stop letting things get on top of me,” explains Catherine. “I’m not one of the special pupils but he wants me to think about seeing Mr Sixpence. Maybe have a healing.”

Violet picks up a handful of pebbles and starts tossing them into the water. “A healing what?”

“It’s a thing we do here,” says Catherine, and she wriggles on the rock as if she’s uncomfortable. “Like I say, Mr Sixpence isn’t really a teacher. He sort of looks after the woods and the grounds. He used to be somebody quite high up but now he lives in a little …well, it’s like a bus or a van or something, but all painted up and made cosy and filled with his weird stuff. He sometimes comes in to give talks to the class about places he’s been and things he’s done.”

Violet nods enthusiastically. “The witch doctor! I said there was one. Daddy said I was being silly but I saw him in the background in picture in the brochure. He looked like, I dunno – something from a film. Have you seen Sword in the Stone? He looked like Merlin!”

“That’s funny,” says Catherine, her voice a little less fragile. “Daddy says that some of the blokes in the pub in the village actually call him Merlin. Others say he’s a - what’s the word? – a Druid, that’s it. He’s a very quiet person but when he talks to you it’s like you’re the only person in the universe.”

Violet isn’t sure how to respond. At her old school, anybody talking this way about an adult to whom they weren’t related would have had their school bag emptied into the toilets and their heads stuffed down shortly afterwards. Violet would have been in the thick of it, high on pack mentality, shouting encouragement without dirtying her hands. She doesn’t want to be that person any more. Catherine seems nice.

“How does this healing thing work then?” asks Violet.

“I don’t really get it but one of the people who stayed with us – they went to him and seemed a lot better afterwards.”

“Better than what?” asks Violet, intrigued.

“Than before. Sometimes we put pupils up at our house when the boarding hall is booked out or it’s been hired by one of the Scout or Guide groups that come to learn about flora and fauna and homeopathy and stuff. It’s just part of being a vicar’s daughter – you get used to it. This one girl, Honey-Rose, she was really nice one moment and then this complete raving demon the next. That’s Mam’s words, not mine. She’d get a bad phone call from home and start hurting herself. Like, really hurting herself. I saw her coming out of the bathroom once and the backs of her legs looked like she’d been sitting in a wicker chair. But she hadn’t, they were all scars. Daddy said I shouldn’t mention it to her. He said people had been bad to her but she was getting better. Mr Sixpence was helping her but herself back together.”

Violet sits quietly, processing it all. She watches the surface of the lake. It looks like liquid mercury. A spot of rain lands on the stone by her hand. She glares up again, the reddish hue of the Wasdale Screes looming in the corner of her vision, plunging down from the long ridge between Ill Gill and Whin Rigg. She wonders if Mum and Daddy are looking for her.

“It’s a funny name,” muses Violet. “Sixpence.”

“Like I said, he used to be somebody important. A psychiatrist, I think that’s what Daddy said, though I always get that confused with psychopath. Daddy says he went to the same university as Mr Tunstall and Mr Rideal but he was a - what do you call it? - a drop-out. Went travelling and saw the world. He got caught up in a war once – he spoke about it at assembly, though we could barely hear a word he was saying. He mumbles a lot, but when he’s healing people his voice is clear as anything.”

“How does this healing thing work?” asks Violet, intrigued.

“I think it’s a bit like hypnotism,” muses Catherine. “He’ll probably give another talk about it soon. You can hear it, if you come to the school.”

Violet looks at the small, shy girl, and hopes that she gets to become her friend. Hopes, too, that she doesn’t spoil it. Hopes she doesn’t make her usual mistakes. Sometimes she loves so fiercely that it looks a lot like hate.

“If I come to this school, do you think I might stay at yours sometimes?” Violet asks, staring off. “You can show me around. Take me to meet Mr Sixpence …,”

Catherine laughs: a small, snuffling sound, like a shrew with a cough. “That’s out of bounds,” she says, in a tone that brooks no argument. “Mr Rideal takes you up to see him if he thinks it will help your development. There aren’t many rules at the school but we’re encouraged to let people heal in their own way so we don’t ask questions about how it works. Honey-Rose told me she doesn’t remember much of it any way. Just him talking in a deep voice and this constant drumming.”

“Sounds really weird,” says Violet. She picks up a bigger rock and throws it, forcefully, into the water.

“There are bodies down there,” says Catherine, quietly. “Because it’s so deep, they don’t decay. They just go white, like a statue. Like a candle, I suppose. Daddy said.”

Violet looks at the lake. She feels an overwhelming urge to clap her hands and shout – to make noise, to scream, to beat on the rocks and beg the world to notice her, to see her, to understand…

“We could have an adventure,” says Violet, trying to look excited. She comes across as manic: clown-like. “If you know where it is. We could sneak up, see what people are doing…,”

“They’d see,” squeaks Catherine. “He uses a slingshot to kill squirrels, that’s what Perdita in Form 4 said. And he can hear you coming. He has bottle-tops on a wire. Daddy said.”

“Daddy said, Daddy said,” mimics Violet, shaking her head. “It’s just for fun. But if you’re too scared?”

“I am,” agrees Catherine, without missing a beat. “It’s not nice up there. Daddy’s been and he said that Mr Sixpence just wants to be left alone. There are old mine workings in the woods up there, near the house where the boarders stay. He cooks on a campfire; reads books, plays music. He grows his own vegetables and plants flowers. He writes a lot. The last thing I want to do is disturb him. He’s always been very nice. When the children were staying with him it must have been very cramped.”

Violet flares her nostrils, disappointed her new best friend is so worryingly sensible. “He had pupils stay there to? I don’t know if I want that. I mean, he might be a weirdo.”

“He’s not,” says Catherine, forcefully. “He doesn’t do that much anymore anyway. Some of the pupils who weren’t suited for school, they’d go and learn forestry skills and how to take care of yourself and stuff. Daddy said it was too much for Mr Sixpence and so Mr Tunstall – the head – put a stop to it. Mr Rideal had all sorts of plans to start offering alternative therapies to the public but Mr Tunstall stood up to him.”

“And this Rideal? Is he the creepy one with the hair like Dracula?”

Catherine raises a hand to her face, shocked. ”You can’t say that! He’s the owner, yes. He’s put lots of money into this!”

“I’m sure he has. Still looks like Dracula though.” She gives Catherine a little nudge in the ribs, and is pleased to receive a similar one a moment later in return.

She suddenly knows that she and Catherine are going to be best of friends.

3

The phone feels awkward in Rowan’s injured hand: a bar of soap in a wet palm. He fiddles with the gaudy pictures on the cracked screen, flicking clumsily through the audio files. Such technical advancements have disenfranchised the traditional journalist. His skill-set is almost obsolete. There was a time when he could scribble down perfect shorthand in the pocket of his overcoat, a stub of pencil beneath his thumbnail - his jottings running neatly along the parameters of a betting slip or blank taxi receipt. Now all he has to do is press ‘record’ on his mobile.

Sulking, he sips his coffee. His niece will have to help him get dressed soon. Will have to wedge his toothbrush into his padded paw and raise the water-glass to his mouth. She’ll fasten the buttons on his shirt and lace his shoes.

“Did you get the thing?” asks Snowdrop, taking a cloth from a voluminous pocket and starting to scrub the condensation from the windows. The frames are flimsy, the glass thick, but they show the bleak, forbidding vista of the back way up Scafell Pike.

“The thing?” he asks, bewildered.

She turns to him, a little hurt. “I did you a present.”

“The coffee? Yeah, thanks …,”

Snowdrop tuts, hands on her hips, hair sticking out like a damp chimney brush. He feels like he’s being admonished by a cartoon. “Wait there,” she mutters, and runs briskly up the rickety stairs that lead up to the boxy, low-roofed bedroom. He hears the floorboards creak and a moment later she is back down, holding a large folder decorated with scraps of multi-coloured paper.

“I left it out for you to see when you woke up,” she says, holding it out. “I decorated it with stuff from the art box and some wallpaper samples. Do you like it? It’s got your name on.”

Rowan glances at the words on the front, written in black marker.

Portfolio

Rowan Blake

Journalist and Scribe

He realises he is smiling. He reaches out to take it then stops himself in case his ruined hands might stain the pages. He likes the word ‘scribe’.

“I’ll do it,” says Snowdrop, hurriedly. She opens the folder reverentially. Slipped within a transparent plastic sleeve is a picture of a well-dressed, dark-haired man in a neat white shirt, wool-tie, dark braces and a flat-cap. He’s staring up from the page enigmatically, as if he knows something that he might be prepared to share – for a price.

“That’s from your book,” says Snowdrop, unnecessarily. “I took a picture of it from Jo’s iPhone and we printed it out with proper glossy paper last night. It took ages. The rest of them are all genuine though. That’s okay, isn‘t it? I mean, you didn’t have plans for it all, did you? Jo said I should check but I wanted it to be a surprise.”

Rowan watches as she leafs through the pages. He glimpses headlines. Bylines. Black and white and black and white. Sees the word ‘Exclusive’ begin to repeat itself page after page.

“You did all this?” he asks, quietly.

She shrugs, a little embarrassed. “They were going to go mouldy.”

His old cuttings arrived a few days ago, along with the rest of his possessions. They’d been stuffed into boxes and bin bags and piled into his ugly, battered car. His latest ex-partner, Roxanne, had paid somebody she knew from work to drive it up to the Valley and abandon it on her drive. Rowan had encouraged his sister to set light to it – to let everything he used to be go up in a puff of smoke. Instead, she and Snowdrop set about sorting through it.

“You’re a very good writer, you can tell that,” says Snowdrop, looking at a feature he had written in 1998. It was an article on a young girl in desperate need of a bone marrow transplant. Her father, an IT expert, had set up a website encouraging people across the world to be tested for compatibility. Rowan was working for the North West evening Mail at the time. 18-years-old and full of poetry and ambition and bile. He’d won an award for the interview – his descriptions of the girl’s chipped pink nail varnish and trusting blue eyes striking a chord with readers, and the judges of the Regional Journalism Awards. He seems to recall that the girl got the transplant in the end. Pulled through. He wonders whether she’s thriving now or floundering like everybody else. He checks the dat. Wonders if there’s any mileage in a follow-up.

Snowdrop turns the page. “I hope you like it,” says Snowdrop, and moves towards him in the hope of something like a hug. He nods his head, over and over, his throat tightening. He tells himself to hug her. To pull her in for a big squeeze and a tickle. He can’t seem to make himself. Just stands there feeling silly and awkward.

“I’d forgotten most of these stories,” he says, with a cough. He crosses to the sofa and sits down. Snowdrop places the book in his lap, open on a random page. He gives a snort of laughter as he looks at the article he wrote one hot April day in ’99. A teacher from Millom was running as an independent candidate in a local by-election. If elected, he was going to stop the ‘blight’ of wind farms and prevent the building of an access road that was going to lead to increased HGV traffic near the chalet-style houses of a group of pensioners. He’d vowed to stand up for decent people and common sense. Rowan presumes he lost.

“It’s in date order,” says Snowdrop, hoping for a compliment. “Your first murder’s on page nine.”

Awkwardly, Rowan slides the glossy pages forward. Sees his name, third in the pecking order behind the crime reporter and one of the senior hacks. Rowan was still a trainee, but he’d earned the acknowledgment.

He flicks forward, memories coming back like birds returning to the nest. He glances at another article. It’s been cut out neatly and glued down onto black card. Jason Peters, a senior member of the Wasdale Mountain Rescue Team, had been awarded an MBE for dedicated service. Rowan had spent 24 hours in his company for what turned out to be a 600-word double-page spread in the Cumberland News. They’d been called out twice. Once had been a false alarm and the other had culminated not far from the summit of Scafell Pike, where three tourists were turning blue in trainers and T-shirts, shivering behind a wall and agreeing that, with the benefit of hindsight, they should have set off for the summit a little earlier, or a lot better prepared.

He glances over the text. Snowdrop was right. He’d been good with words when he started out. They flowed out of him – often to the distraction of his senior colleagues who always seemed to delight in putting great red lines through his prose. His eyes fall on a paragraph midway through the article. Rowan had asked about memorable incidents; difficult discoveries.

“All you want to do is get people safely off the mountain. That’s what you sign up for – not awards or people slapping you on the back. Yes, I’ve seen horrible things but it would be disrespectful to talk about the injuries people have suffered or the bodies we’ve found after a period of time. I do remember the feeling of helplessness that washed over me when those teenage girls went missing about ten years back. One of them was the daughter of a good friend and all I wanted was to tell him she was safe, that we’d found her. I’ve never known conditions like that. It was like the Valley was fighting us….”

Rowan sits back, one eye closed. He feels a memory unfold itself from the too-small box at the rear of his mind. Girls. Missing girls in the Wasdale valley. He has a sudden clear picture of himself, no older than 19, tie unfastened to his midriff, purple streaks in his hair, asking one of the senior reporters whether they knew what the Mountain Rescue man was talking about when he referred to ‘the teenage girls that went missing’. The deputy news editor had given him a lacklustre synopsis. Said there had been a ‘bit of a hooplah’ at the time’. Three teenage girls from the hippy place in the valley. Word was, they’d gone off with a stranger. Witness statements suggested they might be somewhere on the back route up Yewbarrow. Others said they’d seen them scrambling over the Screes at Wasdale. Mountain Rescue had battled a tempest as they scoured the black fells looking for them. He concentrates, trying hard to remember how his old boss had resolved the tale. Looking back, he realises he hadn’t even listened to the conclusion. Had probably cut her off, drunk on youthful hubris.

“Mum knows one of the ladies in that story,” says Snowdrop, peering over the back of the sofa at the article. “When we were making the portfolio, I mean. She read your article and said somebody from her writing group was one of the girls who’d gone missing.”

Rowan glances her way. She has his attention. “I don’t suppose she desperately wants to share the story of what happened to her, does she? Go on, be kind to your uncle, tell me a good-natured lie. Tell me there’s a story in this which will fix all my problems.”

“What problems?” asks Snowdrop, smiling. “I know you’re only pulling my leg about not having a second book. Maybe I shouldn’t be distracting you when you’re so close to deadline but if you did fancy showing me how to be a proper reporter, well; maybe you could show me what to do with a story like this. I mean, we could do a follow-up.”

Rowan sinks into the sofa. A follow-up to what? If he were still a local newspaper reporter there may be some purpose to writing an anniversary piece – some nostalgic ‘remember when’ article for readers to coo over, uttering inanities about what they might have been up to so long ago. He supposes he could check the date and see if there’s a significant anniversary coming up.

“Google Jason Peters for me,” he says, sighing. “The Mountain Rescue chap.”

Grinning, Snowdrop does as she’s asked, her fingers dancing over the screen of the laptop as she sits on the floor by the fire. She pulls a face. “Dead,” she says, with a note of apology. “Lots of people said nice things when he died, which is good, I guess.”

The glow of the screen casts light onto her face and Rowan smiles as he sees how intensely she is concentrating. She has her tongue pressed against her teeth. He does the same when he’s thinking hard.

“The vicar who gave the service,” reads Snowdrop, raising her finger to the screen. “Reverend Marlish. I know him a bit. He comes into school sometimes, or he did when I was there last.” She rolls her eyes at this, sick and tired of her on-and-off relationship with conventional education, which she sees as an unavoidable consequence of being raised a little off-the-grid. Rowan, who didn’t go to school until he was nine and took his GCSEs in a Young Offenders Institute, has every sympathy. “There’s a quote here, in the article, where he talks about how Jason always put others before himself.” She reads it out loud, putting on a deep male voice. “Like so many others, I was spared grief by Jason and the team. He was a true hero – a life-saver. Every time I hug my daughter I say a prayer of thanks that he brought her home.” Snowdrop looks up, expectantly. “Could be the same friend that Jason spoke about in your article, couldn’t it?”

Rowan chews his lip. The Mountain Rescue Team keeps immaculate records. Would it be such a chore to trawl through the incidents from 30 years back and see if there are any more details? He can feel something unfolding itself in his mind, righting itself like crumpled cloth. He remembers a court case, maybe 18 months back. Somewhere in South London was it? A stabbing or a shooting, he can’t recall which. They all blend together after a while; an ugly melange of victims and villains; of perpetrators and witnesses, killers and the bereaved, all swapping faces with the dead. But he always manages to remember attractive women, and there was no doubt that the Detective Inspector with whom he shared two machine coffees and a cigarette ticked that box with gusto. She’d been there to see some drug dealer get life for killing one of his teenage couriers. Loud, funny and dangerously indiscreet, they’d got on famously. She’d been unapologetically forward, sharing confidences and encouraging him to give various colleagues a roasting in print for the misdemeanours she was happy to elaborate upon. He’d done her a good turn, hadn’t he? He seems to recall that she’d said ‘thanks’ a lot when she texted him, though he has no way of checking. Those messages would have been prudently deleted lest they be glanced at by his eagle-eyed partner. Even so, he can recall the contents – and the picture of her dainty feet propped up on the bath taps that she had sent along with the rather suggestive message ‘thinking of you’. Sumaira, that was it, wasn’t it? Flirty eyes and a big mouth. She’d told him the case had made her mind up, hadn’t she? Said she couldn’t stare into the sewer of London’s underworld any longer. She was going to accept a job up North. They’d chatted for a while as he’d told her about his own connections to Cumbria; his start in journalism, his sister’s love affair with the Lakes. He has no doubt that he could persuade her to see the merits of renewing their acquaintance. Wonders whether his hands are up to it and decides there is no gain without pain.

Snowdrop comes and sits down beside him. She’s warm and smells of the outdoors; of baking. She points at the picture that accompanies the article. It shows a young Rowan, wearing Mountain Rescue red; a ridiculous half-moon hat buckled to his head. He’s talking with a spry, wiry man with a dark moustache and unruly eyebrows, similarly attired.

“You’re only about six years older than me there,” she says, in wonder. “Do you think I could be a journalist even younger than that?”

Rowan looks down at his feet. He wrote an article on this subject a year ago – a virtual obituary for court reporting and regional journalism; a desperate cry of anguish about the state of the media industry and how free content providers and the internet had turned journalism from a profession into a hobby.

“Apparently, you can be anything that you want to be,” he says, meeting her eye. “So if anybody can, it’s you.”

She seems satisfied with the answer. She shifts a little, ducking into his eye line. They sit in silence, watching the firelighters kiss the paper and twists of card; the haphazardly chopped tinder; the great hunks of sap-scented wood. She tries to rest her head on his shoulder. He sucks on his lower lip, his curiosity unfolding like an origami rose. He can sense an opportunity. Can see the faintest light of possibility: a haze of phosphorescence in the darkness. He’s spun baser materials than this into gold. Has polished far darker turds to a truly dazzling gleam.

“Go on then,” says Rowan, trying to make it sound like a hard-won favour. “I can give you a masterclass in what to do next, if you like.”

Snowdrop grins, little fizzing sparks in her eyes. “Can we really? Can you show me how to be a journalist and a writer and find stuff out …?”

“If you stop dancing about, yes,” he replies, smiling at her and meaning it.

She stops performing her unsettlingly vigorous jig and considers him as if he were a particularly intriguing fossil. “Uncle Rowan, you wrote a book once, yes?”

Rowan laughs, drily. “I’ve written lots – I’ve published one.”

“And it got good reviews but not enough sales, is that right?”

“Oh I’m glad you’re so well-informed ..,”

“But everybody said you were great at getting into people’s heads. I mean, you wrote about a serial killer and you were able to make him sound somehow normal. Said you were like a locksmith when it came to getting people to open up. Lots of people said it was very unsettling.”

“And?”

“Well, Mum’s friend sounds like somebody who wants to talk.”

“Talk about what?” he asks, losing patience.

“What happened when she was abducted,” says Snowdrop, pronouncing each syllable as if he’s simple.

“Abducted? It doesn’t say that,” says Rowan, glancing at the yellowing newsprint in its glossy coat.

“No, but Mum says there’s more to it. She was a bit surprised when she saw the article, actually. Last night – when we were making this. I don’t think she would have put it in the portfolio if she’d have been on her own. I saw her trying to put it to one side but I told her – every article from when he was starting out needs to be in portfolio. I’ve Googled it – that’s what you’re supposed to do.”

Rowan sits forward. His fingers are tingling a little, and he wonders if sensation is about to return with a kiss or a punch.

He closes his eyes. He gives the order like an embittered submarine commander urging his crew to launch the torpedoes. There’s a weary resignation in his voice.

“Go on then,” he says. “Get the laptop, and the phone. Two pens. A lined notepad. Set them up on the table where the phone signal’s best.”

“Yes,” hisses Snowdrop, performing a mini fist-pump. “What do we drink?”

“Whisky,” says Rowan, slithering down into the embrace of the sofa. He raises a hand. “I would type but I’ve got flippers.”

“Do you want a straw?” she asks, over the banging of cupboards.

“I haven’t sunk that far yet,” he says.

He hears the squeak of the chair across the flagged floor. “So,” she says, after a tiny hesitation. “What do I do?”

On the sofa, Rowan smiles. Raises a bandaged hand and manages to close it, gratefully, around the tumbler of amber fire and ice. It’s a 12-year-old, all seaweed and peat. “They should call this Snowdrop,” he mutters, and manages a gulp without spilling a drop.

“Dial this number,” he says, and begins to recite from memory.

Snowdrop, energetically does as she’s told. She stops three digits from the end. “That’s Mum’s number,” she says, suspiciously.

“Aye,” he confirms. “I want to know what she knows…,”

“She’ll be cross,” protests Snowdrop. She slaps her forehead. “Damnit – that’s rule 1! I shouldn’t have revealed my source!”

“No,” says Rowan, ruefully. “That’s way down the list. Rule one is simple. Be prepared to be unpopular. Can you do that?”

At the tiny table, Snowdrop draws herself up. Nods, solemnly. “Whatever it takes.”

Rowan hides his grin behind the glass.

4

Saturday, July 11, 1987

Silver Birch Academy, Wasdale Valley

4.01pm

The girls are lounging in the little horse-shoe shaped bay at the edge of Wast Water, their backs to the school. This is a favourite spot. The trees form a screen. They’re not up to anything naughty, but they still enjoy the sensation of being able to do what they want without fear of observation.

Violet is in one of her moods today. She’s quiet. Sullen. She wants somebody to say something negative to her so she can tell them how little she cares. She has a habit of chewing her cheek until it bleeds. Catherine, who has learned to read the signs, is doing her best not to be annoying. She doesn’t really know what will trigger an outburst, as the rules seem to change every day. She sits quietly beside her, trying to exude the warm, golden light that she has been reliably informed she can employ as both sword, shield and blanket. She tries to centre herself. To listen to her heartbeat and to breathe in tandem with the vibrations of the universe. More than anything, she tries not to be annoying. Violet’s temper scares her.

Violet is glaring into the depths of the lake. She fancies that she can taste it somehow: all iron and dirt and vinegar on her tongue. If she concentrates hard, she can see what’s below the great silver mirror of the surface. She can see down through the cold, still bleakness and make sense of the perfect dark. She can see the dead people. San see their cold, bloated skin: white, like the belly of a fish. Can see dead eyes, staring upwards, into nothing. Can feel what they feel, the loneliness and rage. Mr Sixpence is the only person she has confided in about her visions. Mr Sixpence tells her she has a gift. He wants her to learn how to harness it. To channel it. He has warned her not to listen to those who tell her she is ill. It is a blessing, he says. A gift.

Violet feels the pull of the water. If she concentrated hard enough, she thinks she could swap places with one of the dead. She could swap consciousness with one of the bodies, bound in plastic and pitched into the inky black depths by any one of the succession of murderers who have chosen this place to conceal evidence of their deeds.

She moves closer to Catherine. Screws up her eyes until the feeling passes. Turns to her friend and punches her in the arm.

“Don’t!” hisses Catherine, wrapping her left hand around her skinny bicep. She looks hurt. “I’ve asked you to stop doing that.”

“You’re building up your tolerance,” says Violet, trying to sound matter-of-fact. In truth, she doesn’t know why she keeps giving her best friend dead-arms. She doesn’t know why Daddy used to do it to her. He seemed to enjoy it more than Violet does when she inflicts them on Catherine or the other girls at the boarding house. She supposes she just likes the feel of it. Likes the way soft skin responds to her own hard knuckles.

“I’ve got bruises,” says Catherine, sticking out her lip.

“Do it to me, then,” shrugs Violet. “Hit me back.”

“I don’t want to hit you. You’re my friend.”

Violet rolls her eyes, all scorn. “You’re my friend, you’re my friend. God, Catherine, you’re pathetic. A pathetic little girl.”

“I’m older than you, Violet.”

“I’m older than you, Violet…,”

“Stop copying me!”

“Stop copying me …,”

They catch one another’s eye and start to laugh. They’ve been best friends for a year now. They sit together as often as they are allowed. Violet spends more time at the vicarage with Catherine and her parents than she does in the boarding house. She’s going to spend the summer with them too. There had been talk of going home, but mum has been suffering with her nerves of late and Daddy has too much on to be dealing with ‘a houseful’ so she is going to stay with the Marlish family instead. She likes it there. They’re a little bit feeble sometimes and she finds the prayers before dinner a little embarrassing, but she likes them both well enough. They always want to know her opinions on things. They want her to be happy. They ask questions about what she wants to be when she grows up, and about how her parents met, and whether or not she feels as though she’s living a better ‘inner life’ than she had been before Silver Birch accepted her. Violet always finds it hard to answer. She doesn’t think much about the future. Her parents never told her how they met. And yes, her inner life seems a little more peaceful than it had been when she was starting endless fights at her old school, but that’s more to do with the fact that none of the wimps at Silver Birch are willing to say or do anything to piss her off. Sometimes the place seems so peaceful she wants to burn it down.

“Do you want to say goodbye to him?” asks Catherine, pushing her bushy hair out of her face.

“Who?”

“Whom, you mean…,”

“Piss off. Do you mean Sixpence? I doubt he’ll be there.”

“We can try.”

Violet looks at her friend. She’s got a sheen of perspiration on her forehead. It’s always there. She’s the clammiest person Violet has ever met. Cold hands, but always a little veneer of sweat on her brow and her top lip. Her mum always insists she dress for winter, even when the sun is bright. They are allowed to wear their own clothes at Silver Birch, but Catherine always looks as though she’s dressed for Sunday school, with her sensible shoes, knee-socks and long, neatly-ironed skirts. Violet, by contrast, is pushing the dress policy as far as she can. Mr Tunstall and Mr Rideal both champion the notion of dressing independently and creatively, but Violet’s ever-diminishing hemlines are becoming a cause for concern.

“You might not see him for the whole summer,” says Catherine, quietly.

Violet gives her a hard look, searching for a hidden meaning. Catherine knows that Violet is fond of the peculiar man who lives in the woods and who sometimes come to give talks to the school. He’s quiet. There’s a gentleness about him. Violet said he reminded her of something from a Disney movie. She could imagine baby birds nesting in his beard and hedgehogs dozing contentedly in the pockets of his big camouflage coat. His battered old campervan is parked up a little way from the water’s edge, tucked in a small clearing in the woods behind the school. To command the pupils to steer clear would be to go against the ethos of the school but the teachers have encouraged the girls to respect his privacy. Most do. Violet cannot allow herself to obey even this most gentle of suggestions. She regularly stomps her way through the woods to chat with Mr Sixpence. There is something about him that both soothes and energises her. She always feels better after time in his company, even if they have talked about nothing but the weather or the volume of moss on the trees. She feels cleverer for time in spent in his company.

“I don’t fancy him or anything,” says Violet, harshly. She puts her face in Catherine’s. “He’s an old man. He’s a weirdo. A weirdo like you.”

Catherine looks down at her feet. “You don’t have to be like that,” she says. “Why would I think you fancy him?”

“Cause I said he was interesting.”

“So. That just means he’s interesting.”

“Fine, then. Fine, if it matters that much to you. Let’s go see him. Say goodbye.”

Violet turns and trudges off towards the trees. Catherine waits a moment, hands on her hips, gathering herself. She doesn’t like to cry in front of Violet. It makes violet feel guilty, and when she feels guilty, she’s twice as mean.

Then Catherine follows her friend into the woods.

She would rather die than be left behind.

5

Rowan is standing by the front door again, huffing out soft plumes of grey air. The ragged breaths gather about his face like unwrapped bandages before drifting away to muddle with the great white smears of mist and fog that colour the dips; the rises, at the foot of the fell. He has a sudden image of a battlefield: of pain and mud and jagged coils of wire; of trenches and bomb craters filled with toxic mustard gas - smoke trapped inside a glass.

He walks halfway down the garden and peers into the nothingness between the straggle of trees. He can see it being lovely here in the summer. If he had the inclination, he could put down some jaunty flagstones at the edge of the little stream. Could give himself a place to hit, his toes in the gurgling water, rubbing his soles over moss-slimed rocks. He can almost picture himself here, leaning back on his palms, gazing up at a sky of gold and blue.

A low growl erupts at the back of his throat. He curses, pissed off with himself. Each time he ends a relationship he promises himself the same – that he won’t let fantasies undo him; that he won’t spurn reality in pursuit of some idealised daydream. He keeps telling himself to focus on the here. On the now. He can’t help thinking that being an early reader did him no favours. He grew up a Romantic, retreating into the pleasures of fiction even as the facts of his reality became harder and harder.

“Uncle Rowan! She’s done yelling! She wants to talk to you!”

Rowan walks back towards the house. Snowdrop is in the doorway, holding out her phone. She’s wincing. Serendipity is a magnificent interrogator. She doesn’t do shouting or swearing or very much in the way of telling-off, but she has a way of sounding let-down that could cause the most hardened of political prisoners to denounce their ideology and declare they had acted without thinking.

“You okay, Sis?” he asks, as brightly as he can.

There is a pause. Wherever she is, it’s windy. He can hear the rushing of wind past the mouthpiece. “I’m not having a go, Rowan …,”

“No.”

“But I’m not sure I’m happy about my daughter becoming a Fleet Street hound.”

Rowan laughs. “Sorry, is this 1978…?”

“I encouraged her to do creative writing. Maybe some poetry. I don’t know if journalism is a career I could encourage …,”

“Nor me,” says Rowan, dropping his voice. “Look, we’re just helping the day pass by. I’m healing. She’s my helper. It’s a game, really. I want to show her how the job actually works – or how it used to.”

He glances at Snowdrop, holding his glass of whisky and staring at the different patterns held in the ice. Rowan has lost whole days to such a pursuit. She gives him a thumbs-up, tells him he’s doing well.

“Look, it’s nothing anyway …,” begins Serendipity.

“I told her as much. That’s why we’re workshopping this particular story. It’s educational. I’m just showing her how to check some facts.”

“I suppose …,”

“So, she said there had been a kidnapping …,”

“No. No I never said that. I mean, maybe I said ‘abduction’ but it’s not that I know anything. Not really.”

He hears her start to attune herself to the right frequency. Prepares himself for answers to questions he hasn’t even asked.

“Look, Violet has been having some problems, that’s all …,”

“Sorry, Violet …?”

“Oh, well it was Sheehan then but it’s Rayner now.”

“Ha! Yeah, that’s it, that’s what we had. So, you said she’d been having a hard time …,”

“I don’t know the ins and outs of it,” she says, louder now, as the wind whips up around her. He can imagine gulls and spray.

“But the abduction, after what she went through, she was always going to have difficulties …,”

“No, that was it,” protests Serendipity. “She was great for ages. She was fine with not remembering. She was happier not to know, I think. She’s such a riot of a girl when she’s doing well. I don’t know, things just started coming back to her. I didn’t read the story in detail.”

Rowan stays silent, not wanting to break the spell. “Read?” he asks, at last.

“Yes, that’s why I know she’s been having a hard time. She did this piece of writing for her group. About how hard it was to live without knowing what had been done to you. With fragmented memories. It was quite powerful, apparently. “

“And this said what had happened to her?”

Suspicion creeps into her voice. “What do you actually know, Rowan?”

He grimaces. Game up. “Enough to make a start …,” he mumbles.

She growls down the phone, frustrated. “Look, there’s no drama here. I just mentioned to Snow that one of the articles she’d put aside for your scrapbook ..,”

“Portfolio,” he corrects her, amid demonstrations of appreciation from Snowdrop.

“Yes, portfolio. I said that one of the girls who the mountain rescue man was talking about might have been Violet, who I only know a little bit. She wrote a piece saying she’d never known what had happened to her when she was a kid but how she thought she was ready to confront it. Jo told me about it. It was on the wall at the library, in a display. I thought I might be able to help.”

“Go on,” prompts Rowan.

“And I told Jo to tell her about some alternative practitioners who might be able to help if she wanted to work through bad memories…,”

Rowan smiles, pleased with his sister. She’s always desperate to help and there’s never a price to be paid. She wouldn’t think twice about contacting a virtual stranger and offering to help them find their light.

“So Jo did that, and said I knew some people, and gave her the number of the house phone and she got in touch. We aren’t friends or anything, but she’s a nice lady ….,”

Rowan crosses to the table and leans over his niece’s head. Painfully, he jabs the tip of his bandaged right hand at the keyboard, thumping in a name. “Google that,” he whispers to Snowdrop. “Then Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, anything new and funky I haven’t heard of. Use ‘Sheehan’ too.”

She looks up at him in dazed bafflement. He’s talking to her like she’s a senior reporter on an editorial team. He waves an apology. Gives his attention back to his sister.

“You’re saying she was remembering?” He sounds dubious. “You’re saying she doesn’t know what happened to her way back when? That she’s no memory of whatever it was? That’s hard to swallow, sis. Weren’t there another two girls? Couldn’t she just ask them?”

“I don’t know the ins and outs,” says Serendipity, and now she has to shout over the gale.

“Bloody hell, could you shout up?”

“I mean, everybody’s friends with everybody here…,”

“You’d never do the wrong thing, sis. Whatever you do, it’s always the right thing.”

As she waits, he wonders what she might be up to. He presumes she’s out doing good deeds. Whenever he asks how she’s spent the day it has invariably been on some lost cause – saving old sycamore trees from the council chainsaw or demanding better play facilities for the park in some dying fell side village. She spends a lot of time at meetings, munching cheap biscuits in her fingerless gloves and trying to inject some compassionate liberalism into agenda items. He’s amazed she hasn’t yet thrown herself into the sea.

“It’s not going to appear anywhere, is it Rowan? You’re not going to actually write anything?”

“Sis, it’s just a little game. I’ll make sure she does the spelling and punctuation all the way through. And you said she had to be my hands for a bit. This is what my hands do.”

“I suppose it’s not like the confessional,” she mutters, talking to herself.

“I don’t want to set her off on the wrong foot, Dippy,” he says, using his childhood nickname for his beloved big sister. She gives in.

“Look, Rowan, you know how it is round here. People can buy into a lie or a story that crosses generations. People can look at new-born babies with an Afro and swear they look the very image of their blonde-haired, blue-eyed dads. I don’t think Violet told me anything that wasn’t already public knowledge but it’s not my story to tell …”

“Told you when?” he asks, casually.

“Months back. Spring, I think. I gave her the number for my friend, she’s very good ….,”

“And who is she?” he asks, patiently. “Shamanic priestess. That’s where she was going to go for soul retrieval.”

Rowan smothers the laugh. He doesn’t look down on any religious or spiritual practice but can’t help laugh at the matter-of-fact way she can use ‘shamanic priestess’ in a sentence, as if introducing a butcher or postman. He doesn’t need to ask her about shamanic traditions, or soul retrieval. Both played parts of his childhood.

“Do you think you could come back to the house?” asks Rowan, moving agitatedly. He wants to pace. He likes pacing. The damn room’s too small to do it properly. And cobbles! Who could pace properly on cobbles!

“I’m doing something, Rowan,” she says, patiently. “That’s why you’ve got Snowdrop, remember. I’m working.”

“Oh come on, I’m sure whatever albatross chick you’re bathing will forgive you. Come on, this might be important…,”

“What do you think I do, Rowan?” she asks, chilly. “Albatross chick?”

Snowdrop is trying to get his attention. She’s found Violet Rayner (nee Sheehan) on Facebook. Rowan glances at the profile name. She’s signed in as him. He glances at the centre of the screen. It shows that they have two FB friends in common. One is his sister, one is a librarian in Whitehaven, and a man whose name always gives Rowan a delightful trill of anticipation.

“She knows Pickle?” he asks. He leans back over Snowdrop’s shoulder and jabs again at the keyboard. Pickle has commented on several of Violet’s posts and she has done the same for him. In March, he’d left a comment below a mournful black and white picture she had posted – the words ‘That’s It – I’m Done!’ in big angry letters in the very centre. 32 people responded with crying Emojis. Pickle had left a comment urging her to come see him ‘for a decompression session’. She’d sent back a thumbs-up and a smiley face. Sometimes, the poet in Rowan truly despairs.

“Oh she must be interesting then, Dippy. I mean Pickle’s like a massive great magnet for the dangerous and the deranged. He’s only up past the Falls. I’ll wander over, get some air …,”

“No,” snaps Serendipity, too quickly. “No, you aren’t taking her to Pickle’s.” She raises her voice again, fighting the wind. “Rowan, do you hear me, he’s not a good environment …he’s not all there … he smokes every moment of the …,”

“Sorry sis,” he says, walking towards the dead zone at the far end of the room. The signal begins to drop out. He smiles at her frustrated, tinny voice, growing fainter with each step.

“…that thing …with the buffalo… no… always come back stoned…Ro…do you …,”

“Lost her,” he says, sadly holding up the phone. He grins, suddenly transformed. He adopts an exaggerated swagger as he walks back to his niece. She creases her eyes and nose into a smile that seems to take in her whole self. He suddenly has a memory, sharp as cut glass. He sees her as the little girl she was: a toddler, a tot, not much more. Big multi-coloured dungarees and rainbow jumpers; a bow in her hair and pudgy pink bare feet. A mind like a rocket. Bright eyes. Always so eager to learn. And kind, too. Happy to listen and burble as he told her where it had gone wrong and why this girl or that girl had left him. He wishes he’d sent just one of the letters he’d promised to write her. Wishes he’d turned one the silly bedtime stories he made up for her into a manuscript she could hold in her hand. Always too busy. He feels an overwhelming urge to somehow become considerably less shit.

“You did brilliantly,” he says and finds himself giving her a bump with his shoulder. It feels kind of good. She preens; a stroked cat. He moves, quickly. “Pickle,” he says. “Real name Gareth Church. Gentleman-farmer-cum-impeccable-weed-dealer. A giant of a man. A colossus. Philosopher and recognised global number one when it comes to remembering trivia and quotes from the film Withnail and I. He sort of killed somebody once but he feels bad about it…,”

“Killed somebody?”

He grins. He doesn’t know many people locally but of those he’s had the fortune to acquaint, Pickle is the only one he’d like to think of as a friend. He’s been putting off going to see him, constantly pushing back arrangements for get-togethers, dinners, a ‘good smoke and some Lucozade out in the shed’. He hadn’t wanted to show Pickle just how low he’d fallen since the last time they’d got drunk together. He fancies he can brave it now. He wants to show his niece that as a journalist, you are guaranteed to meet some weird and wonderful people. Such a demonstration would fall into Pickle’s skill-set perfectly.

“Is he the one Mum says is a weed dealer?”

Rowan grins. “Thought never entered my head.”

6

Rowan feels his mood lift with every step he takes away from the cottage. There’s a mizzling rain slapping at his face and the low cloud makes it seem that he’s looking at the world through a cigarette paper, but he’s never prescribed to the notion that beauty only belongs to warm days.

“River sounds full,” he says, making conversation. He jerks his head back down towards the Irt - clucking and surging, hidden by the swirl of mist. Beside him, Snowdrop is glaring at his phone, occasionally losing her footing on the slippery surface as she gives the screen her full attention.

“Sorry?” she asks, looking up. Her eyes widen; two perfect drops of spreading blue ink. “You’re not out of breath,” she notices, approvingly. “Mum’s always out of breath by now.”

Rowan shrugs. He’s never been much of a one for the gym and he treats his body the way a foot treats a shoe, but he’s spent most of his working life ambling relatively large distances, eating up miles of pavement as he meandered from court to council to pub to office to home.

“There’s one of the rules of journalism for you,” he says, brightly. “Always buy comfortable shoes. A good reporter shouldn’t be afraid of putting in the miles. A lot of news happens in cities, and nine times out of ten the reporter on foot can get to a scene before the reporter in the pool car. And then of course, you’re not encumbered by having to stay sober …,”

“I’ll write that down when I have a moment,” mutters Snowdrop. She’s got one eye closed, focussing all of her energy on the web page. “I’ve heard of your friend Pickle before,” she adds, warningly. “Jo says he’s bringing house prices down. I didn’t know he had a real name. Were you joking when you said he was a murderer?”

“That’s the word the court chose,” says Rowan, ruefully. He decides she’s old enough to learn how shitty the world really is. “There’s this old law called ‘joint enterprise’. Dates back centuries to when people used to fight duels. Well, it’s still in effect and sometimes prosecutors like to stick a murder charge on every member of the gang that were there when one of them stabbed a rival to death; or if a load of people go to somebody’s house intent on violence and the intended victim is killed – the whole lot are culpable. I’ve written about it a lot.”

“What do you think about it?” asks Snowdrop.

Rowan laughs, taken aback. “Me? What do I know? I just write about it, Snowdrop, and Pickle’s case was one I’d heard of even before I got to know him. Him and some university mates got drunk and thought it would be jolly funny to grab one of the lads from a nearby dorm and whisk him away like he was being kidnapped. He woke up as they were trying to get him out of his bed. He lashed out with this bloody great bayonet he kept under his pillow. It got one of his mates. Instinct kicks in and Pickle grabs the knife. Pulls it out of his mate’s stomach, sober as a judge now. Ended the night with one dead, one dying and nobody being able to say who’d done what. Pickle stood with his friends, refusing to deviate from the story they all agreed on. At the last moment the other two changed their plea to guilty and pinned it all on Pickle. A very grateful Crown Prosecution Service gave them reduced sentences. Pickle was done for manslaughter in the end. Served 11 years. He was supposed to be a barrister or a doctor by now. Instead he does little bits of this and lots of the other, living in the last of his dad’s farm buildings. He’s a bit of a character. Sort of lost himself after prison and it took a lot of chemicals to bring him back. You’ll love him.”

Snowdrop glares at her phone. “Signal’s about to go …,”

Rowan trudges on, the slope starting to get steeper. He likes it here, boots kicking up mud and grit on the edge of the quiet, tyre rutted path that leads through the tangle of woodland and up towards the Falls. He can hear the distant growl of the tumbling water.

“Bit quiet of late,” says Snowdrop, over the sound of their feet crunching over damp stone. “Only a few posts since the summer. Usual silly Facebook stuff like Mum puts on. What does your thumb-shape’ say about you? And celebrations of ‘friendship anniversaries’. She’s got over 600 ‘friends’ She used to be quite busy on it but seems to have lost interest. She’s got photos and videos and lists of favourite books and films and stuff …,”

“What does she like?” asks Rowan, intrigued. “Books, I mean.”

“Oh all sorts,” says Snowdrop. “Weird mix. Everything from Harry Potter through to crime fiction, a biography of some comedian I don’t know, and a load of enlightenment stuff, the stuff Mum pretends to read. Warrior Goddess; Grow a New Body; Inside the Divine Pattern, or something…,”

“I’ll read it properly when we’re back,” says Rowan. “Is there a picture? Recent?”

Snowdrop fiddles with the phone and holds it up for inspection, displaying a screen-grabbed image of Violet Rayner (nee Sheehan). She’s grinning for the camera; a big mess of frizzy hair piled up on top of her head and wooden earring dangling down below the level of her slightly rounded chin. She’s a few years older than him but he thinks she looks younger. She’s got healthy skin and the whites of her eyes are bright as a new moon. Her dark eyebrows have been accentuated with pencil and brush but she wears no other make-up. There’s something about her that suggests a fizzing kid of energy; a gleam in her eye that says she’s enjoyed the kind of evenings out that don’t finish until breakfast.

“Single,” says Snowdrop, as if reading his mind. “I’ve got family, friends, workplace, past events. She’s barely got anything set to ‘private’ but I’ve sent her a friend request from your account.”

Rowan shoots her a look. “My own account?” he asks, feeling the pressure of the climb in his calves. “That’s not always the best move …,”

“You have other accounts?”

Rowan smiles, glancing ahead as the track slips back into the cold wet strip of forest. The light is swallowed up as if the sun has been swallowed whole. He focuses on his steps and throws a look at Snowdrop. If his wounds didn’t hurt so damn much he would be tempted to offer her a hand though he couldn’t say for sure whether it would be her benefit or his.

“I’ve got three accounts,” says Rowan, quickening his pace. “I’m me, I’m a grandmother called Caron, and I’m a 26-year-old mother-of-one from Canning Town.” He puts on a London accent. “I work in childcare, don’t I, but I hope to become a professional make-up artist. I’m quite acid-tongued when I want to be. I’ve got one of those Live, Laugh, Love pictures on my bedroom wall and I’m a fiend for my prosecco.”

Snowdrop laughs, grinning up at him. “Do you really? Do you really use different names? Pretend to be other people? Is that not a bit, well, wrong …,”

“Wrong?”

“Well, it’s lying. Pretending. I mean, people might tell you stuff and then be upset they’d been fooled…,”

“I didn’t invent social media, Snowdrop,” says Rowan, tartly. “That came along on its own and hit my industry so hard that it’s never got back up again. Don’t forget, when I started in this game mobile phones were still a novelty and the internet looked like a fad. I found my first stories by getting to know people, by earning people’s trust, by putting in the hard yards to prove myself. Christ, if I wanted to speak to somebody I didn’t know I’d have to sit with an open phone book in my lap, trying to find the right Mrs Smith of Workington. I wrote on a computer that didn’t have a back-space delete function! I had to write letters to people to make arrangements for interviews. And faxes! You won’t even know what that is, I bet. If the whole world has changed its mind about privacy, who am I to argue. People stick their whole lives out there to be vetted and filtered and judged. That’s like leaving your diary open on the bed, isn’t it? We’re information-gatherers, Snowdrop. That’s what the job is.”

Snowdrop says nothing for a while, mulling over some moral conundrum. “It’s for the greater good though, isn’t it?” she asks. “Breaking stories, uncovering corruption, bringing down wrong-uns …,”

“Sometimes,” mumbles Rowan, petulant. “Sometimes we do good, yeah. But do you know why journalists want to go after the big story? It’s to show off. It’s for that wonderful word ‘exclusive’. It’s to say ‘I knew this before you’.”

“That’s quite a bleak outlook,” says Snowdrop, a touch disconsolately. “But I know you mean them and not you.”

Rowan is saved from replying. His phone buzzes in his pocket and he manages to retrieve it without swearing too much. A call has gone straight to his voicemail service: another curse of the intermittent reception in this part of the world. He listens to the message from Harriet Kay, who runs the press office for Cumbria Constabulary. Her accent is local, her attitude too.

“Rowan, this is Harriet from the police press office. I’m not sure you’ll remember but we chatted a few years back when you were up here covering the murders on the coast? I’m just ringing because I got a message from the cold case review team. Apparently you’re keen to speak with DI Sumaira Brennan about an old investigation. We’re keen to do things through the proper channels so if you could make all such requests through me, that would be a big help. I’m here for a little while if you want to call back…,”

Rowan hangs up, a little disappointed that Sumaira had shunted him back to the press office without even returning his call. He quickly comes to the conclusion that she hadn’t got his message and that some jobsworth colleague had taken it upon himself to keep her from getting back in touch. He prefers that version of the truth and decides to stick with it.

“Oh goodness, that’s rank!”

Snowdrop isn’t wrong in her exclamation. Rowan wrinkles his nose, the smell of red diesel and soggy hay climbing into his nostrils. He looks up, noticing a little watery light bleeds back onto the path. They’re nearing the last stretch of trees. He detects movement high up in the corner of his vision. Squints at what might be a hovering bird, static just above the treeline.

Pickle’s place emerges from the mist; the hazy suggestion of white stone and black roof delineating into the outline of a squat, sturdy dwelling made up huge whitewashed boulders. A great sail of black tarpaulin is flapping against one of the holes in the slate roof: a raven’s wing slapping fatly against the exposed timber.

“Is this where they film zombie movies?” asks Snowdrop, coming to a stop. “Is it abandoned?”

Rowan grins at the run-down, seemingly deserted property. Gradually, more objects emerge from the gloom. There are two outbuildings a little further down the track and a battered grain silo blocks the view of the rising fell beyond. Vehicles in various states of disrepair litter what passes for the driveway. There are doors and bonnets missing in places and each has its bonnet up; great blooms of rust consuming the paintwork. He can make out an ice cream van, tyres gone, propped up on bricks and a green-slimed statue of a Roman deity. He walks towards the house, noticing a horse-box peeking out from behind a parked RV. The back of the box is open and Rowan can see that the storage space within has been given over to creates upon crates of cardboard boxes. He squints, and realises that the tinny high-pitched noise that has been pecking at his ears is coming from the dozens of tiny finches that are poking their beaks through the air-holes of their cardboard prisons.

“He’s grand,” says Rowan, quickly, as Snowdrop spots the birds. He jerks his head in the direction of the house. No two curtains are the same and each of the window panes seems to held together by sticky tape, holding together cracks in the glass. The front door is wedged open with a breeze block, offering a tantalising view of a mazy floral carpet and the edge of what looks, to Rowan’s untrained eye, like a Wurlitzer organ.

“Pickle! Is that you, you sexy beast?”

Rowan turns at the sound of the great cheerful voice, spilling out from the nearest outbuilding. A grin breaks out on his face.

“Why’s he calling you Pickle?” asks Snowdrop. “He’s called Pickle, isn’t he?”

“He calls people ‘Pickle’,” explains Rowan, hastily. “We don’t really know why. Every person he meets, he just calls them ‘Pickle’ and that’s kind of him become his nickname as a consequence. It’s weird.” He stops, feeling the explanation to be a little inadequate. “Just go with it. He’s a good lad.”

“Mum doesn’t say so. Does he call her Pickle?”

“I should say so,” affirms Rowan. “Probably does with your other mum too, though in her case I can see why. Probably to do with the vinegar.”

The man who emerges from the little brick outbuilding is, in every observable way, a catastrophe of a human being. Pickle is a lumbering mess of a man: with limbs that look as though they belong to a recently racked orang-utan. He’s 6ft 7” and would probably be taller still if he ever walked upright. Instead, his gait suggests he is trying to use his forehead to keep the rain off his Wellingtons. As he lollops down the track, Rowan and Snowdrop take in the full horror of his clothes. Today he’s wearing a police issue, high-visibility coat and a bobble-hat which sports ear-flaps made from the pockets of old jeans. His face is dirt and oil and bacon grease and there’s a rolled-up cigarette hanging from the bottom corner of his mouth. Like a half-pulled tooth.

“I’ve seen him before,” whispers Snowdrop. “He ran the canoes on the lake at Ennerdale…,”

“Aye, he lost that job,” says Rowan, discreetly. “I think he still refers to that time as the ‘sinking of the Armada’. He bought the canoes off a mate of his – more hole than wood. Patched them with some timber from his log pile. Got hold of some old Scout life-vests that were discontinued around 1953. It was his finest hour. Didn’t work, but you had to admire the gumption.”

“Did you write about that?” asks Snowdrop, nervously.

“No,” he says, shocked at the very suggestion. “No, Pickle’s the sort of mate that you don’t want to throw away on a page 5 lead. If you ever do throw him under the bus, you’d better hope you’re bringing down a Cabinet member or a TV presenter.”

Pickle reaches out to take Rowan in a bear hug but stops himself as he spots the bandages protruding from his sleeves. He stops a few steps away and Rowan catches the familiar smell: that wet-dog tang of clothes dried in damp rooms. He smells of smoke and wet grass. Rowan coughs, eyes watering, as he gets a sudden whiff of pungent cannabis. It seems to emanate from Pickle’s skin and clothes and hair like steam from a compost heap.

“Heard you were around,” says Pickle, in a breezy Cumbrian accent. He gestures at the hands. “You been to Glasgow, have you? They’ll eat owt up there.”

“Deep fried,” explains Rowan, grinning. “Pickle here is a master in the cultural stereotype.”

“Indeed,” laughs Pickle, whipping off his hat and performing an elaborate bow. “Stick around and we’ll take the piss out of just about everybody. It’s equal opportunities. None of it’s offensive because I’m hardest on the English.”

“You’re not English,” smiles Rowan. “You’re not even officially classified as human. You’re a breed apart.”

“He’s not human?” asks Snowdrop, moving closer to her uncle. She seems to be struggling with her manners. She’d like to shake his hand and introduce herself as she has been taught, but she’s also remembering the instruction that she avoid strangers. Pickle may be her uncle’s friend, but she doubts she’s seen anybody stranger.

“Skin grafts,” says Rowan, and a little of the light fades from his eyes. He shrugs, holding up his hands. “They’re healing. My niece here is my hands until then.”

“Poor girl,” says Pickle, giving Snowdrop his attention. His pupils are pin-pricks – the nucleus of an unfertilised cell. “The stories those hands could tell, eh? What’s he like to work for? Grateful? Diligent? Reasonable? I have my doubts. Once this lad’s got the whiff of something in his nostrils he’s like a greyhound out of the traps. You’re Serendipity’s daughter, aren’t you? You’ve got a look of her. Batty, but likeably so.”

Snowdrop gives him a once-over, clearly deciding that being identified as ‘batty’ by a man so extraordinary in appearance, is probably a compliment of sorts.

“I’m rolling, if you’re tempted,” says Pickle, pointing back towards the barn. “Got a fire in the brazier. Knocked a chimney into the roof with a sledge-hammer when I was a bit stoned. Heather’s got a video of the moment when I realised I probably shouldn’t have stood on the roof to swing it. You should have seen me – went through in a cloud of dust and bricks and asbestos. Woke up with my face all bricks and bird nests. We pissed ourselves later…,”

Rowan glances at his niece. If she understands what he is being offered she’s not showing any signs. He wonders whether it would make him a terrible person if he were to go and smoke weed in a draughty barn with a convicted murderer and his 12-year-old niece. He has a suspicion that the right thing to do would be to say no. Instead he hears himself telling Pickle to lead the way.

“Were you passing or did you want me in particular?” asks Pickle as their boots slurp noisily through the muddy path. “You know the door’s always open ..,”

“Aye, quite literally.”

Pickle looks down at his friend, his gaze softening. He looks upon Rowan like an injured bird. “You okay? You look proper green around the gills. You’ve gone skinny again – the skinny you go when you’re misbehaving. I’d have come to see you but I heard about the hands.”

Rowan swallows. “What did you hear?”

“Just that you were staying at your sister’s place to convalesce. I like that word, don’t you? Convalesce, convalesce, conversation, conservation, lets rise up destroy the nation!” He starts to repeat the impromptu lyric to himself, jerking his beck forward and back to some imagined rhythm.

Rowan and Snowdrop follow him into the gloom of the barn. There are colossal holes in the roof and evidence of fallen slates and brick and timber mounded up in one far corner. A trio of plastic school chairs has been drawn up around a large metal brazier full of timber and coal. The grill from a commercial oven has been removed and placed across the mouth of the brazier and fat sausages are blackening, greasily, in the heat from the scorching flames. At the rear of the barn is a battered Land Rover and a quad bike, covered in enough mud to disguise the colour of the paint. The rest of the space is somewhere between a modern art museum and a junkyard. Arabic rugs are turning to mulch on the soaking ground, pressed into the earth by the mound upon mound of stacked oddities. Towers of mismatched wooden chairs sway precariously in the shifting light. Cracked tiffany lamps are bundled up in a haphazard pile of multi-coloured glass. He spots stage lights; a sign warning about the nearness of sharks; a mannequin sawed in half at the thighs. There’s a glass cabinet filled entirely with first-edition Troll toys – their big eyes and stoned smiles making them the perfect witnesses to Pickle’s daily leisure pursuits.

“I saw you on the drone,” says Pickle, plonking himself down in the chair and gesturing for his guests to join him. From under his seat he removes a small assemblage of metal and plastic and paint. It has two propellers on top and a state-of-the-art camera underneath.

“New toy?” asks Rowan, sitting down.

“New venture,” he confirms, putting the drone down reverentially and removing a baccy tin from his pocket. He glances at Snowdrop. “You fancy taking a walk to see the horses in the top field?”

Snowdrop sits down beside her uncle. “We’re working,” she says, firmly. “You go ahead and smoke, I’ll try not to breathe it in.”

“She’s a good one,” says Pickle, approvingly. “Maybe we’ll get your mum up here for a smoke someday, eh?”

Snowdrop glances at her uncle. He gives a tiny shake of the head. Both are aware that for Serendipity, one smoke would be too many.

“It’s about your friend,” says Snowdrop, pulling a notebook from her pocket and looking at Pickle accusingly. “A friend from Facebook. We want to talk to her. I’m trying to be a reporter and we’re trying to find out what happened to three missing girls thirty years ago, okay?

Pickle glances at Rowan. “Half-term, is it?”

Rowan shrugs. “People play Doctors and Nurses. Why not Reporters?”

“Okay boss. Ask away. You’ll mean Violet, yeah?”

“Yes,” says Snowdrop, jutting her chin out and looking deeply suspicious. “What’s the nature of your relationship?”

“Wow,” says Pickle, eyes wide, playing along. “You must be ‘bad cop’.”

“Sorry mate,” says Rowan, sitting forward. “Youthful exuberance. You know the young ones, they’ve no time for the niceties.” He shakes his head at Snowdrop. “There’s a dance to this, Snow. We’re English. We chat. We small-talk and gossip and slag off the politicians and eventually we get round to asking each other the thing we met up to talk about. It’s not dynamic, but it’s authentic.”

Snowdrop looks confused. Shakes her head at the pair of them. Pointedly, she takes the phone, opens the microphone function, and presses record. “I’m waiting,” she says, eyebrows angled in sharp peaks.

Pickle reaches down and picks up a miniature snooker table. On the green baize is a bag of weed almost large enough to pass for a head of broccoli. Pickle looks at them both, picks up a Rizla, and sticks it to his forehead.

“White flag,” he says, by way of explanation. He starts to skin up a joint, fingers moving on muscle memory. Grins, and two gold teeth wink in the firelight. “I surrender.”

“She good company?” asks Rowan, casually. “Violet, I mean. When she came for a smoke?”

Pickle nods his head. “Aye, great lass. Used to be more of a giggler but she’s a chilled-out kind of stoner now. Likes to just lay back and float on the breeze for a while. Had to change the rota so she didn’t bring down the room, y’know.”

Rowan laughs, delighting in Pickle’s very existence. He runs the barn like a drop-in centre for those seeking temporary disassociation from the misery of their reality. Over the course of any 24 hour period, he provides narcotics, succour and a listening ear for half the social stoners in West Cumbria. On any given day, bankers, teachers, farmers and any number of neglected spouses might find themselves sitting on a plastic chair in Pickle’s barn, sharing tales of self-pitying woe or giggle-till-you-piss tales, eating Haribo and dipping Pringles in Nutella, wafting smoke and staring into the glowing embers of their own personal stairways to Heaven. He’s a valuable public service. The locals call such sessions ‘a decompression’. There’s a kind of community spirit to it. Marriages have been saved, rampages avoided and partnerships repaired thanks entirely to a couple of communal hours sharing the pipe of peace in Pickle’s guru-like presence.

“She’s a talker too,” he continues, lighting the joint and inhaling until his eyes cross. “You know those stories we tell when we’re drifting on the wave? The way that after a little while you’re not telling anybody else but just straight talking to yourself. Dreaming aloud, I suppose. Yeah, she was one of those. Good company, like you say.”

“Teacher, isn’t she?” asks Rowan, casually.

“Did a bit of that, aye,” nods Pickle. “Of course she’d say she was an interior designer first, teacher second.”

Rowan nods. He’s starting to get the picture. “She a seasoned smoker or a newbie?”

“She’s the ‘old lag’,” smiles Pickle, inspecting the end of a rotting fingernail and deciding that whatever organism is burrowed in beneath the cuticle has earned the right to stay there unmolested. “The type who pops in for a stretch and pops out again. You know the sort. Every few years they’ll enjoy six months of hitting it hard while whatever problem they’re having goes away, then off it and back to reality. It’s like medicine, really. She told me about the first time she smoked, I remember that.”

“Yeah? Go on.”

Pickle sits forward as if imparting a confidence. “That’s a good conversation starter, actually. Gets people talking. Her’s was a belter. She said the first time she smoked she was still at school and some busker gave her a blowback from this massive great hard-on of a joint.”

“Is that rude?” enquires Snowdrop, pencil pausing on the pad.

“No,” says Rowan, shaking his head. “It’s when you bloke the smoke from your joint into somebody else’s mouth, like a kiss. It’s very sensual.”

“What’s sensual? asks Snowdrop, frowning.

“We’re drifting away from the point, I think,” says Rowan, swiftly. “At school? That might have been around the time….,”

“Aye, I suppose.” He nods, seemingly in agreement with a voice in his head. “She said it was pretty damned sensual, actually. ‘Gave us all a go’, she said. Some pretty-boy who thought he was so fucking cool because who used pages from the Bible for his joints.”

“He did what, mate?” asks Rowan, sitting a little straighter in his seat.

Pickle sniffs, momentarily transformed into a Victorian grand duchess passing judgement on a country cousin’s lack of sophistication. “Bit bourgeoisie for my taste. Very tacky. That was one of her darker smokes, for definite. She was here chatting with Helicopter Heather and Dan The Man With The Van.”

“Is that his full name?” asks Snowdrop.

“It is to me,” says Pickle, slapping his legs. Clouds of dust and assorted organic samples rise into the air. He gives Rowan the closest thing he ever gets to an accusatory look. “There’s something to this, I can tell. You know something you aren’t saying. Don’t do her any harm, Rowan. She’s had her problems. Been through a lot.”

Rowan looks momentarily hurt. “Pickle, it’s a game. We can chat about something else if you like.”

Pickle shivers as a gust of wind thunders in off the mountain, stirring the fire and sending up a swirl of ash and flame: a collage in ripped silk and dirty snow. He stares at the spot where she had sat. “Sorry mate,” he mutters. “Going through some stuff myself and it’s a right downer thinking of Violet. She was pretty bleak once the tide took her.”

“Bleak?”

Pickle puts on an accent, imitating her. “All this ‘We didn’t know, we didn’t know.’ It was hard to watch, like. I tried to get her back to earth but she was all tears when she came back to herself. I felt awful, to be honest.” He leans in. “You don’t like to provide a bad high, do you? Not to people in pain. And she wasn’t herself for a bit. Didn’t talk much. I suppose we all have all locked doors in our head and sometimes they fly open.”

“All your doors are open, Pickle,” smiles Rowan.

Pickle looks at the glowing tip of the joint and jerks his head as if trying to dislodge something from his ear. Whatever memory he’s searching for, it comes back with a bang. “Violet went missing for a few days when she was at school. The posh school up past Gosforth – the hippy place that cost an arm and a leg. It closed donkey’s years ago but it was still around when she and her mates were all running about in knee-socks and blazers and pleated skirts. The other girl who went…,” he conducts the air with his burning spliff. “Yeah, the other girl, her mate - the vicar’s daughter. Was it Marlish? And I think I remember something about the third one being a redhead though I never knew her.”

Rowan glances at Snowdrop and is pleased to see her pencil moving, even as the microphone takes down every word. He looks back to Pickle. “I can hear the floodgates opening, mate,” he says, friendly. “What else you got inside that fascinating head?”

Pickle laughs, open mouthed – his molars packed with enough undigested pastry to feed a family. “New scoop, is there? New book on the way? I did read your last one. It was compelling. They like that word - the book-people. Everything has to be compelling.” He stops himself, lost in some labyrinth of mental-cul-de-sacs.

“Violet, mate,” prompts Rowan, gently. He feels like he’s talking to a suicide bomber in roller skates. The wrong nudge could see things end very badly.

Pickle gives him his attention: pupils swelling and diminishing in rapid bursts, as if controlled with a hand-pump. “All right, here’s what I know. Way I heard it, three went into the woods, and only two came back. But that’s just between you and me, of course.” He glances at the phone. “And for the benefit of the tape, I have smoked a great deal of marijuana….”

“Sorry, Pickle? Three went in, two came back …,”

He glances behind him, peering at a row of potato crates which groans beneath the weight of clutter. Old papers; mulched magazines, empty pop bottles and crunched-up cans of energy drink. He turns back, satisfied that whatever had distracted him has slunk back into the earth. “You do know what went on, don’t you? It was big at the time.”

Snowdrop and Rowan fix their gazes on the fire.

“Remind us …,” smiles Rowan.

7

Saturday, July 11, 1987

Silver Birch Academy, Wasdale Valley

4.44pm

“Look,” says Violet, wiggling her fingers in Catherine’s face. “I’ve got claws. Purple claws!”

Catherine does as she is told. Her friend has removed ten foxglove heads and placed them on her fingertips. It now looks as if each tanned and slender digit is wearing a purple witch’s hat.

Violet swipes at the air, growling like a tiger. Catherine can sense that in a moment her friend will test the effectiveness of the makeshift claws by slashing at her face. Catherine tries to distract her before the idea occurs.

“I thought we were seeing Mr Sixpence …,”

“He’s got friends,” says Violet, wrinkling her nose at having to use such a saccharine word. “Sat up there like garden gnomes around the fire, waiting for him. I scarpered before they saw but Rideal and Tunstall are up there. Some tall bloke too.” She looks at her fingers, then her eyes slide across Catherine’s face and to the cold, clammy hollow of her throat. “I don’t know if I feel like a cat or a witch …,”

“I think they’re poisonous,” says Catherine, quickly. She realises that she is sounding like a kill-joy and back-pedals at once. “But that’s probably just a lie they make up to stop us having fun.”

Violet looks at the flowers on her fingertips. She makes a face. “Actually, I think I’ve read that somewhere. Digitalis, I think. Shit. Have you got any wet-wipes?”

Catherine shakes her head. “Sorry, I didn’t think …,”

Violet rips the flowers from her fingers and glares at her friend. “You didn’t think? Says it all, doesn’t it?” She reaches out and wipes her fingers on Catherine’s coat, glaring at her, daring her to say something. Catherine looks at the floor.

Violet loses interest almost at once. She glares around her at the dense, dark wood. The treetops block out most of the light and the forest floor is a tangle of fallen branches and twisted roots. They came here with their registration class a few months ago – Mr Tunstall telling them all about the history of the wood. She tries to remember what he’d said. She remembers the names of the trees. Sweet chestnut. Larch. He’d said that most of the wood was planted around the time the school was built. Said it had red squirrels and that the sparrowhawks were vicious. He’d seen one tearing apart a blackcap in mid-flight. He’d talked about rhododendrons. Earned a snort of laughter from Violet when he said the numbers of great Tits were on the rise. They’d seen Mr Sixpence that day. They’d say outside his campervan in two semi-circles, bums on the damp forest floor or becoming numb on one of the rocks or tree-stumps. He’d shown them how to breathe. How to feel the universe flowing in and out of them. How to reach out with their minds and feel the cosmos. Then he’d made them find a favourite tree and hug it. She can see them now, only half laughing, wrapping their arms around gnarly, knotted trunks and pressing their faces to the bark. Violet had offered no words of scorn. She held the twisted rowan long after the other children had let go.

“Shall we be spies?” asks Catherine, and is surprised at herself for the boldness of the suggestion.

“Spies?”

“We could go listen. See how close we can get without disturbing them. You said you saw that lad in the Sinbad trousers last time you went up there by yourself. Bet we could get proper close.”

Violet closes an eye, scowling at her. “You want to be spies? You?”

“We probably won’t be back much over summer. It’s just for fun.”

Violet appears to weigh things up. She glares down at the pulped purple flowers on the forest floor then gives a shrug. “All right, but I’m going first. You follow my tracks. And if you step on a stick and snap it, You get three undefended punches, right?”

Catherine smiles, pitifully grateful. Violet rubs the juice from the foxgloves off Catherine’s front and smears her hand on the seat of her tight denim shorts. “Soz,” she says, though it’s too quiet for Catherine to hear.

They move quietly through the forest, Violet several steps ahead, picking out a path that feels markedly different from the one they took when they visited with school. It feels as if Violet is leading them into the pages of some dark fairy-tale. The further they go from the lake, the denser and darker the wood becomes. The mountains to the east shuts out the sunlight so the ground never seems to dry out properly. Each step feels wetter than the last. The forest seems older here, too. Thicker. The trees have fatter trunks and their branches fork off at odd angles, like limbs that have been broken and improperly set. The air feels somehow heavier. When Catherine licks her lips she tastes raw meat. She raises an arm and pushes on through the twist of trees. In places, the ground is uneven. Old stones push through the earth like skulls. There was a building here, once.

Two beeches have grown at odd angles, their trunks leaning inward and branches weaving around one another to form an archway. Violet is leaning against one of the trunks, smiling, proudly.

“Never made a sound,” she says, softly, and Catherine gives a tight, nervous grin in reply. She’s starting to wish she’d taken the punches.

“Can we go back a different way? My feet are soaked. I don’t like being spies …,”

“Ssshh,” whispers Violet, and takes her friend’s cold hand. It’s an affectionate gesture, and reminds Catherine just how sweet her friend can be when she isn’t trying too hard to be mean. She is about to speak when a sound from up ahead makes her freeze where she stands. She feels like an intruder. Her head fills with a thousand different terrifying scenarios. She’s heard that some farmers and landowners shoot people found on their land. Without thinking, she squats down in the earth, dragging Violet down with her. Violet stifles a giggle. “What are you doing?” she hisses.

Catherine pulls a face, exasperated. “Sssssh,” she says, frantic. “That’s Dad!”

Violet raises her head from the forest floor. There are leaves stuck in her hair. Up ahead, in the clearing where Sixpence has parked his old campervan, she can hear raised voices. She squints: a hopeless attempt to make her hearing more acute. Catherine pulls her back down.

“Let’s go back to the water,” she whispers. “I don’t like hearing when I shouldn’t …,”

“I thought we were spies,” smiles Violet, raising her head again.

“Violet, please …,”

Violet cocks her head, listening hard. There are four voices, all male. Slowly, like a face forming in fire, the sounds become people, and the noise becomes words. She hears Mr Tunstall. Mr Rideal. Rev Marlish. Another man, too. His voice is softer, harder to hear, but it contains a solidity that makes it seem like an iron bar surrounded by the willowy branches of the other speakers.

“…he did everything he could, you know that! He’s a healer, not a magician…”

“Nothing was ever done that went against your wishes. He tried. The boy fooled him. Fooled all of us.”

“What you’re asking is impossible. It goes against our every principle. I appreciate that you’re upset but how can we possibly countenance that? This is a place for learning. For healing….,”

“Let him tell me himself. Let him look me in the eye and explain why he took a sick boy and made him sicker. Taught him things that twisted him inside out. His mother’s scared of him. His own fucking mother …,”

“He comes and goes. Sometimes we don’t even know where he’s gone. That’s why we stopped accepting the private sessions. The Reiki. The healing. He only did those things as favours to old friends. We’ve pushed him too hard. He has problems…,”

“Yeah, he fucking does. Me. He has a problem that he’s going to put right. You’re all going to put it right. You’ll do what I tell you to do or by God I will rain down vengeance on all of you. If you were to see the mess he made of her. My own boy. He came here to be put right and you sent me back a fucking monster …,”

Violet’s smile fades as the language grows coarser; as the tone grows more aggressive – as the sounds of violence cascade through the wood.

She looks to Catherine, who has her face buried in her forearm. She wants to snuggle into her. Her friend has no understanding of moments such as these, when words are no longer enough and only the thud of skin on skin, bone on bone, is enough to release the rage within. She doesn’t know why the men are arguing. Doesn’t know what service they are refusing to provide. They are protecting Mr Sixpence, that much is clear. But from what? What could the kind, gentle man have done to bring down an enemy upon himself who spoke as if with the gift of prophesy?

From behind, she senses movement, as if a shadow has folded her in its embrace. She snaps her head towards the tangle of woodland back towards the lake. Mr Sixpence sits on his haunches, his body streaked green and brown; great swirling handprints all over his gristly, knotted body. There is dirt in his hair; thick mud holding it back from his camouflaged face like lacquer. He has a finger to his lips; the nail painted a green that makes her think of old bottles.

He looks more like a tree than a man, thinks Violet. And his face, with his broken nose and tangled beard sinking into hollow cheeks – he looks to Violet like a carving on a church door; a satyr; some ancient representation of the Green Man. He blends in with the forest so perfectly that Violet could have lain upon his bare leg and been unaware she was not resting on a tree root until she registered the warmth of his skin.

He is looking at her. Looking at her with perfect green eyes. She hears a voice, clearer than any of those that wash down from the place where the men wait for Mr Sixpence.

Go. This is not a place for you. They will not find me until I wish it.

Violet hears it in the centre of her skull. It is a soft, gentle voice. A voice that she is powerless to ignore. She closes her hand around Catherine’s and together they slither back through the archway of and squirm back through the forest. Neither speaks. Neither says anything until the angry voices fade away, and they can see the top of Whin Rigg rising above the tops of the trees.

When Rev Marlish picks them up, neither girl mentions the mud on his trousers, or the blood on his hands.

8

Snowdrop gives her uncle a damp nudge with her forehead - a dog trying to wake a corpse.

“Well?” she asks, raindrops spraying from her lips. “Have I got a nose for this stuff or what?”

Rowan shrinks into his coat, deep creases of concentration lining his forehead. He scowls out at the rain, blowing in from all sides, bouncing off the forest floor like coins thrown at a trampoline. Above, they sky is the colour of stagnant water. The wind hurtles in from the coast like an angry tide: tearing along the ground, reaching up to grasp bedraggled trees that creak and grown in anguish. Rowan and Snowdrop have found a kind of shelter in the boggy entranceway of this half-roofed sheep-pen. They’re only a mile or so from home and probably can’t get much wetter but the rain has throbbed them into submission. They shiver in the doorway, faces pale, hair slick, the fronts of their jackets three shades darker than they should be. They have their heads together.

Rowan, still mildly stoned, is considering his options. There’s a story here, though he’s no idea what it is or what to do with it. The so-called ‘women’s-interest’ magazines still pay decent money for first-person exclusives and he’s considering testing the waters. He’s ghost-written a few himself in the past: lurid stories with headlines like ‘My Boyfriend ate My Leg’ or ‘Grandad’s Cross-Dressing Shame” There’s usually a decent yarn somewhere within the text. Sometimes they’ll take something with a bit of the supernatural to it. Messages from dead grandparents warning of impending transportation disasters is usually a good one. If he does get a chance to speak to Violet Sheehan, he’s pretty sure he can persuade her to talk about how her repressed memories of childhood trauma led her to seek out a Shamanic ceremony. A couple of pictures, some show-don’t-tell anecdotes about what happened during their captivity and it could be the best part of 500-quid. He makes a note to check which of the gossip magazines has folded in the past six months and which of the commissioning editors at the remaining tiles has any legitimate reason to think him a prick. He’s left with a paltry collection, but he seems to recall there was a nice woman at W0-Man! magazine who had said she could always make use of proper old school journalists. He should probably buy Snowdrop an ice cream when they pay up. She’s done well. Stopped herself from butting in too often and even nudged the subject back on line when he wandered off. He wishes he were providing her with a less particular set of skills.

“I’m pinging,” says Rowan, the words sounding a slight echo in his skull. “He nods at the pocket of his sodden trench-coat, where Snowdrop had slipped the phone when the deluge began. She rummages, quickly while Rowan stands in absolute silence, uncomfortable.

“Violet’s accepted your ‘friend’ request,” reads Snowdrop, as raindrops begin to jewel the screen. “That’s good. And she’s sent a ‘wave’ emoji, so that’s a good sign.” She smears her finger across the screen, skimming Violet’s profile. “Not much more to see as a friend than on a drive-by,” mumbles Snowdrop, sounding briefly like a New York private-eye. “Few more pictures, few more ‘shares’ of political stuff, animal welfare, a bit of a rant about the ignorant driver who cut her up on the Mungrisedale turn-off …”

Rowan watches the rain. Watches the trees bend in the gale: branches stirring the damp air.

“Pictures aplenty,” continues Snowdrop. She runs her finger down the screen. “Lovely sandy beach…. Palm trees.. lovely sandy beach …blue waters … oh good, a tree with coconuts …,” she looks up, grimacing. “This is not an interesting person any more…. sandy beach, oh good, a market, and ah yes, finally, a picture of her.” She turns the phone.

Rowan looks into the cheerful face of Violet Rayner, squinting against the sun, hand raised to push back a tangle of fringe. Her eyebrows are raised so the whites of her eyes seem too-large. She looks paler than in the other image he had seen and she has lost a little weight. She looks tired. Behind her is a triangle of featureless green field. The picture is captioned Let’s Finally F**king Do This Thing! and features what Rowan considers to be a truly certifiable number of emojis. She has garnered 29 thumbs-ups and a lot of smiley faces. The number of enquiries about whatever this ‘thing’ might be is dispiritingly small.

“April,” reads Rowan, and somewhat self-consciously uses the tip of his nose to navigate down the screen. “Plenty of selfies before she went away – none since.” He shrugs. “I don’t know, might be nothing.”

“We could knock on her door,” says Snowdrop, brightly.

“She’s away,” Rowan reminds her. He sags, suddenly tired, as if one of the strings holding him up has snapped in two.

“It’s ringing,” says Snowdrop. “Somebody called Aubrey, hang on…,”

“Don’t,” hisses Roan, waving frantically. “Hang up, hang up…,”

“Oh, sorry, I answered,” says Snowdrop, her smile fading as she glances at the darkening features of her uncle. Desperate to make amends she lunges forward, pressing the phone to his ear. He squawks in protest and suddenly he can hear his editor saying his name. Although her lips move perfectly around immaculate Sloane Square vowels, he forms a distinct impression of a small canine yapping at a postman.

“Aubrey,” he says, making it sound as if this is a real treat. In truth he has been ducking calls from both his agent and his book editor for months. He’s tried to stay optimistic – to cling to the belief that something will turn up. He’s never seen a newspaper with ‘Nothing Going On’ as a front page splash. There’s always a story to be found somewhere. He just hasn’t unearthed it yet. His policy to date has been to keep his new book’s subject matter a closely guarded secret. At present, and with six weeks to go, he’d dearly love to be let in on it.

“Oh Rowan, thank goodness,” she says, and this time he flashes on a mental picture of some fragile heiress in a black and white movie, clutching her pearls with long, elegant fingers. “I’ve been going slightly ga-ga wondering if I might have said something at our last meeting that had caused some upset. I’ve been trying so hard to get hold of you; I’ve had poor Morwenna ringing every 15 minutes. I hate to come down heavy-handed but I’m getting so much pressure from the sales team. Marketing too. They need something to put in next year’s brochure at least.”

Rowan feels his skin prickling beneath the bandages.

“Rowan” she asks, insistent. “It for the brochure, you must understand …”

“Oh so you do plan to put something in the brochure, do you?” he hears himself ask, petulant and stoned. “That’s good, that’s good. Certainly a step up from the last one where you forgot about the paperback …,”

“Rowan, we’ve had several conversations …,” says Aubrey, with a sigh so heartfelt it seems to come from her toes. “Every possible effort was made to ensure the King book hit big ....

Rowan can sense the word ‘bollocks’ making its way brashly towards the conversation. He’s about to give it the stage when he’s diverted by a sudden trilling of the phone, which feels wet as an open oyster against his face. He realises there’s very little point in arguing. If he ever had any moral high ground he has long since conceded it. She’s right to be chasing her for a book she’s bought. He’s the twat for not delivering. Her knows this, believes it – he just can’t seem to stop himself from swinging every time he feels himself under attack. He glances at the phone, vision obscured by his soggy collar and the rain on the glass. It’s only a message telling him he has unopened mail, but in the fraction of a second that he looks into Violet Rayner’s tired eyes, he hears himself start to talk – fast and urgent, as if he hasn’t got long.

“Aubrey, I’m so sorry, it’s just I’m in this thing now. Properly in it. The things I’ve seen, Aubrey – I thought I was a hard man but I tell you, my heart’s in bits…,”

“Rowan,” she whispers, as if calming a feverish child: “Just stop. Just take a breath and a moment. Are you okay? It sounds dreadful where you are …,”

“I can’t tell you where I am,” hisses Rowan, urgently. He looks at Snowdrop and rolls his eyes, his lips tight around an exaggerated smiles. “Look, I know this is unprofessional it’s just I need to protect the few people I care about and I’ve had to stay properly off-grid.” He glances again at Snowdrop, who is mouthing the words ‘off-grid’ at him, questioningly. “Every communication with the outside alerts them. You don’t know what these people can do!”

“When can we speak?” she asks, her own voice falling to a whisper as if the people who she imagines to be threatening Rowan are leaning in to hear. “I just need a few words, just an outline …,”

“Three missing girls,” says Rowan, rain flicking from his lip to speckle the image on the screen. “Terrible things happened to them. Two came back – what happened to the third? And why does nobody want the truth to get out? More importantly, why hasn’t anybody asked these questions before ?”

“Oh that’s good,” says Aubrey. “Will you call me? Or email a precis – just an idea …,”

After hanging up, Rowan isn’t sure whether he said goodbye. He decides it probably doesn’t matter. His heart begins to thump as he realises what he’s just done. This morning, he had to find a story good enough to fill a bestselling true crime book – preferably with a personal angle. Now, it has to include a missing teenager and a conspiracy of silence. He’d suddenly very much like to go back to bed.

“Looks like it might be clearing,” says Snowdrop, gesturing across the muddy ground to where the folds of rain are becoming less ferocious. She gives him a nudge. “Are you going to message her right now? What are you going to say?”

“It’s ‘write’,” grumbles Rowan. “What am I going to write?”

“I don’t know, that’s what I’m asking,” says Snowdrop, completely missing the grammar lesson. She grins, excitedly, and she looks as though she would have no problem with going and jumping up and down in a puddle. “Are you going to do a book? A book on this? On my story?” She looks at him, accusingly. “Will I get a mention? Maybe not as an author, but like, a contributor? An acknowledgement, or something. That would be so cool …,”

Rowan feels his spirits sink into the cold, wet ground. He looks away, thinking of a way to change the subject. He freezes, spirits lunging downwards like a weighted corpse. A gaunt, jointy-limbed woman with iron-grey hair stalks purposefully into his line of sight; materializing from the grey murk with the demeanour of a fairy-tale witch intent on finding out why she wasn’t invited to the Palace for the party. She’s much the same colour as the sky: her expensive, pencil-shaded coat blending in with well-pressed pewter trousers tucked into battleship-coloured Wellingtons.

“Snowdrop,” she snaps, looking past Rowan. “You have had me worried sick.”

“Morning, Kitten,” starts Rowan, largely for his own pleasure. “That’s a wonderfully literary outfit, you temptress. Fifty Shades of ….,”

“Rowan,” she says, stopping him as if pulling down a blind. She stands on the track, glaring at them both. He realises she is holding a rolled-up golf umbrella behind her back. She shakes her head as she gives him a once-over. “Drunk again,” she declares.

Rowan gives an understanding smile. “That’s okay Jo, you can come back when you’re sober. Anyway, how’s you? You didn’t ride that brolly, did you? That’s a point, where did you park your broomstick?”

Jo lets a tiny smile disturb her thin lips. There is a part of her that seems to relish these little interactions with her wife’s hapless younger brother. She has made a small fortune since establishing her network of workplace consultants, scooping up dissatisfied educators and turning them into well-paid experts in impossibly tedious aspects of recruitment, marketing, consumer law and global logistics. She’s a named partner in the Belgravia-based firm but spends most of her life ensconced in her palatial office at the converted farmhouse half a mile further down the River Irt. Rowan has never understood how somebody so drearily strait-laced ever came into contact with his effervescent sister, let alone whisked her off her feet, married her and agreed to act as stepparent to her precocious child. Rowan is actually quite fond of her, although he doubts he will ever express it. He remembers how Serendipity used to be.

“Serendipity said you were doing something educational,” she says, sniffing the air. Rowan doesn’t worry. The smell of the weed is definitely well hidden amid the cow-shit and wet grass. She purses her lips. “I’m going to the bank. Whitehaven. Serendipity has suggested it might be useful if I were to pick up some books. Do you have any requirements?”

Rowan and Snowdrop share a smirk. Jo has a way of talking that speaks of school matrons or some stern governess. “That’s kind, Jo,” says Snowdrop. She’s never called her second mum by any other name than her given, though Serendipity is always ‘Mum’. Rowan wonders if that must be hard. Realises that of course it must. His thoughts are interrupted by Snowdrop grabbing his sleeve. “We could go with her,” she says. “You can show me how to do research. Will they have those old machines from the old films …,”

“Stop saying ‘old’,” mutters Rowan, feeling 90. “Look, most research is stuff we can do back at the byre online. Get a fire going, maybe have forty winks …,”

Jo looks from one to the other, reading the situation as if it is written in large-print. Rowan is a moment behind. They’re trying to keep me busy. They’re trying to take me out of myself. They’re trying …

“That’s decided then,” declares Jo, as if a judgement has been made. “Snowdrop, you can come back and get a change of clothes before you go. Rowan, you could do with being wrung out as well, though I shan’t be obliging. I won’t ask where you’ve been as the answer will only upset me.”

“Tell me where you’d like us to have been,” says Rowan, nicely. “Let’s both be happy.”

“Snowdrop,” she says, ignoring him. “When you’re ready.” She puts out a hand, a sprinter waiting for a baton. Snowdrop grins at her uncle and runs to Jo, taking the proffered hand with a practised familiarity. Rowan feels a pain in his chest: something like heartburn, or loss.

He stays where he is brooding and feeling left out. The rain has changed direction, hurling great damp handfuls at him from what seems like a few inches in front of his face. Slowly – because he’s not even bothered, no way, whatever, no matter what anybody says, he’s too fucking impervious to this kind of shit to be bothered, to feel left out - – he follows them, a little sulkily, down the path.

9

Tuesday, February 4, 1988

Silver Birch Academy, Wasdale Valley

10.28am

“Everybody warm and toasty? Remember, there’s no such thing as bad weather – just the wrong clothes. That’s it, that’s it, come in, Philomena. You go and stand next to Calpurnia there – the heater’s are on so you’ll thaw out in no time. Everybody have a nice breakfast? How was meditation, Astrid? Excellent, good, good. Wow, what a fine-looking bunch. Violet, could you and Catherine shuffle up a little so that Delphine can sit down? Of course there’s room…,”

Violet rolls her eyes at Mr Tunstall. She moves half an inch to her left. Catherine follows her and gets an elbow to the ribs for her trouble.

“Stop crowding me!”

“I’m not crowding you, I’m moving up.”

“You smell like your dad. Like breakfast.”

“You had the same as me, Violet…,”

“You had the same as me, Violet …,”

There are a dozen pupils seated in haphazard semi-circles in the cosy, high-ceilinged space known to staff and pupils alike as the Map Room. When the school was still a private residence, this large, wood-timbered space was one of the main rooms for entertaining guests: peacock-patterned silks and Javanese furniture, splendid in the glowing warm light of the great black fireplace. Now it is a study space – beanbags and slouchy chairs, book-cases crammed with well-loved paperbacks and pristine textbooks, donated by any one of the new age charities that have done their damnedest to be associated with a facility that offers a truly unique education, focussing as it does on hearts and souls as well as academic excellence. It’s a pleasingly tatty room, with threadbare carpets concealed with big multi-coloured rugs, and the cracks in the walls are covered with old maps of the local area; contour lines grouped tightly together like the whorls in a thumbprint.

Tunstall starts to remove his huge outdoor coat and bobble-hat, to reveal the crumpled suit and crooked tie beneath. He wears his hair long, almost covering his ears, and the plump moustache that sprouts from his top lip looks as though it is marking time until the day it turns into a butterfly. He looks at Violet. Tightens his smile into something more like grim resignation. Violet and Mr Tunstall have had a lot of mediation sessions together recently. He is being very understanding. He’s listening. He wants to help. He’s making allowances for her unique set of personal challenges and extending her every courtesy even as she deliberately tries to sabotage the educations of children who do not find things as easy as she does. But she needs to meet him halfway. Needs to stop pouring scorn on what they are trying to achieve. Needs to stop picking on poor Catherine while pretending to be her best friend. Violet already hates him. The more time she spends in his company, the more she comes to realise that beneath his warm demeanour and hippy bullshit, he is really starting to hate her too.

“Some of you will already know Mr Sixpence,” says Tunstall, brightly. “He’s the glue that holds this school together. He’s caretaker, groundsman, maintenance-man and pot washer-in-chief. He makes the best cup of pine-needle tea you’ll ever drink and he’s one of the most interesting men I’ve ever met. He’s also my friend, and he knows lots of stories about what I used to get up to in my misspent youth, so you can imagine why I only let him talk to you all on special occasions.”

There’s a dutiful titter from the assembled pupils. They’re starting to remove their coats, apologising under their breaths as they catch one another with jointy elbows and cold hands; the snow on their boots melting, vapour rising to join the hazy grey cloud of condensation that is forming up near the ceiling rose.

“Mr Sixpence has spoken to us before,” says Amber, a thin blonde girl with gappy teeth. “He told us about shamanism.”

There are nods from a handful of other pupils. Some, new to the school, have been looking forward to this. There is something intriguing about the quiet, strange little man who lives out in the woods and who sometimes helps the more challenging pupils deal with issues like temper and self-esteem.

“Is he going to tell us about the dead people?” asks Elora, a robust 12-year-old with dirty glasses and frizzy brown hair. “I like it when he talks about the dead people. Mr Tunstall? Will he talk about the dead people, sir?”

Mr Tunstall turns to the door, where a ragged figure is leaning against the frame. Violet has seen him twice since the day in the forest and each time he seems to have lost more weight. There’s not much to him now. He looks to Violet like a long-dead corpse that somehow never stopped growing hair or nails or teeth. He’s not much over 5ft tall and his skin hangs over his bones like towels folded over a rail. There are gaps in his top row of teeth but the lower set of canines are big and square and stained a nasty shade of toffee-brown. There is snow matting his straggly grey hair, held back from his lined, sunken face by a threadbare Russian military hat. He wears small, frameless glasses, perched midway down a broken nose. With his big unlaced combat boots and his woollen fingerless gloves, he looks as though he started partying during the Summer of Love and didn’t stop until the Winter of Discontent. His eyes, green irises and tadpole-black pupils, sparkle with a quiet intelligence. He smiles at the girls, his tongue visible through the gaps in his teeth.

“Dead people, Elora? I might have one or two stories that appeal to your rather macabre fascination.”

Violet glances at Elora and sees he give a little fist-pump of celebration.

“Good to see you, Mr Sixpence,” smiles Tunstall, making way for the shambolic figure who takes his place in front of the fire”

“And you, Phil. Sorry, Mr Tunstall.” He surveys the room. There’s naughtiness about him, a certain whiff of devilment that suggests he could at any time reach into one of the pockets of his voluminous Afghan coat and pull out a bottle of brown ale.

“I’ll leave you to it, if that’s okay,” says Tunstall, rubbing his hands together. “Paperwork. Meetings. You know the drill.”

“No I don‘t,” he says. “But I’ve heard about it. Sounds bloody awful.”

The girls laugh and exchange excited looks. This is going to be good.

“I’ll be by this evening to discuss that other matter,” says Tunstall, pointedly. “It’s quite pressing, so I’d appreciate it if you could make sure you’re around.”

Sixpence rubs his nose with the back of his glove. Gives a loud sniff. Finally he nods, and Tunstall, looking relieved, makes his way to the door. Sixpence watches him leave. Slowly, he turns back to the group.

“You look a lively bunch,” he says, his eyes stopping on each of the girls in turn. When his gaze falls on Catherine, she fancies that he gives her the tiniest, most fleeing of winks. He doesn’t look at Violet at all.

The questions start at once.

“Sir, is it true you’re a shaman – that you can talk to the dead?”

“My dad says you make a fortune helping rich people talk to their own souls, or something …,”

“Sir, are there spirit animals? Really? Proper spirit animals?”

“Sir, my dad wants to buy a drum from you. He says you make them yourself. Is that right?”

Sixpence pats the air, smiling. He doesn’t know who asked which question, but seems happy enough to answer whatever comes at him.

“Am I a shaman?” he asks. He shrugs. “No, I don’t think so. I’m a Shamanic practitioner.”

“What’s the difference?”

“Quite a lot, if you charge for your services,” he says, smiling and staring at the map on the wall by the big mullioned windows. “But whatever you want to call me is fine by me. I like to think of myself as a helper. Maybe a healer. If you need it in absolute basic terms, Shamanism has been around for as long as human beings. There is archaeological evidence that suggests shamanism in one form or another dates back 20,000 years. And yes, we are guides, of a sort. We are messengers. Do you know the word ‘intermediaries’? Well, we’re kind of a go-between, linking the natural world and the spirit world.”

“My dad says that’s all hippy bollocks, sir.”

“Your dad’s entitled to believe that,” says Sixpence, smiling at Violet. “And I’m entitled to think he sounds like an arsehole.”

There are laughs at that. Violet joins in. When she feels it’s okay to do so, Catherine follows suit.

“You’re right, Elora – I do make my own drums,” says sixpence, when the hubbub subsides. “I have friends who bring me my materials. Different leathers, which I stretch tight over a frame. It’s a part of the Shaman’s toolkit, along with many other ceremonial objects, like knife and staff and mask….,”

“Cool!”

“And you heal people, yeah?”

“I try,” he smiles. “I try to enter a certain kind of state of mind; a higher consciousness, a place where I can journey between one world and another. In this state I can communicate with an individual’s power animals …,”

“Their what?”

“I am able to visit the realm of the spirits, to seek help and guidance and to heal those who need it. Shamanic practitioners cross the borders between reality and nonreality at will. We seek the portals that lead to the other side of the sky. The higher realm and the lower realm.…,”

“How long have you been doing this, sir?” asks Catherine: her mousy voice almost lost above the hubbub of excited vowels.

“Since I changed my ways,” says Sixpence, turning soft eyes upon her. “I used to be a different person, Catherine. A different man, with a different name. I was in the Royal Navy, if you can believe such a thing. I wanted what other people seemed to want. Money. A girlfriend. A nice house and maybe a couple of kids somewhere down the road. I didn’t get that kind of life. A different destiny chose me.”

“Sir?”

Sixpence looks down at his boots. He twitches his face, moving his glasses up his nose. A sadness settles upon him like snow. “I made bad decisions when I was a young man,” he says. “I wasn’t as kind as I should have been. I was angry a lot of the time. I think I was looking for something and I didn’t know what it was. So one day I decided to seek it out. To turn my back on what everybody else believed to be the right way to live. I travelled. I saw the world. I learned how other people lived and I came to the conclusion that we have gone awry. We’ve lost our way. We’ve lost sight of what is important. It took a special person to show me the true way.”

“Some hippy like you, sir?” asks Violet, smirking.

“If that word helps you understand then yes, Violet,” he replies, quietly. “But to me he was a teacher. A doctor. A philosopher and a guide. He showed me how to journey. I drank the herbs that he bade me drink and I opened my eyes to a different reality. He healed me. Retrieved the parts of my soul from the dark place where it was lost. And at length, he taught me how to open those doors within me.”

“Was this in the Sixties, sir?” asks Cassandra, with her cut-glass vowels.

“I don’t know,” he says, quietly. “I sometimes don’t even know how old I am. None of it matters. I feel a connection with all things. A oneness. I try to help people….,”

“Daddy says you charge people to help them,” says Violet, obstinately.

He looks at her, his voice softening. “I don’t need many material things, Violet. I have my campervan, up there in the woods. I have enough to eat. I have books to read and records to listen to and I have friends who come to talk with me and listen to the birds. Sometimes, I have people stay with me so they can learn how to put right those parts of themselves that go wrong. This school – the school that is trying to open your eyes to see a different way of living – this school sometimes asks for donations. That’s between the board and the patrons. But I would never deny my services to those in need.”

“What’s it like, sir?” asks Catherine, quickly. “The other place. You know my dad’s a vicar, yeah? Well he says that heaven is a place of pure happiness; pure peace, pure love. Is it like that, sir?”

Sixpence turns his eyes upon her, pupils swelling to devour the dark irises. “Sometimes,” he says, softly. “Sometimes the sensation is of absolute serenity – a oneness, a place within a greater whole. Sometimes, if I journey in tandem with a particular soul, it is a darker, more menacing environment. Imagine being trapped for eternity in the worst nightmare you ever had. There are those whose minds are so troubled that such a realm exists within them. I have journeyed to such worlds to help retrieve their lost souls. I have glimpsed things that have terrified me.”

“Tell us, sir. Tell us what it’s like ….,”

Sixpence looks at Violet. His gaze is so intense that the space between them seems to crackle with energy. Violet does not look away.

“I would not wish the knowledge on any of you,” he says, at last. He shakes his head. “But there are those of you who will one day see.”

10

The day is only a little past noon, but the cars and vans that swish down Whitehaven High Street all have their headlights on, pitching great circles of lurid yellow onto the grubby shopfronts and the condensation-streaked windows of this tired, rain-lashed road. The Lake District starts a few miles inland, and the difference in atmosphere and affluence is remarkable. Rowan knows from checking on his phone that he’s worryingly close to the nuclear power station: a big silhouette of oblongs, orbs and squares. A mile the other way, the crumbling clifftop drifts into the village of Seascale; all rusty goalposts and untended playing fields; a wind-pummeled swathe of muddy beach and guest houses closed for the winter. Rowan likes the grit of the place – the heartfelt lack of pretension. West Cumbria has a sense of itself that always seems to raise a coal-grimed middle finger in the face of gentrification. It’s always seemed a place much more at ease with the opening of a new kebab shop than with any Italian-themed coffee house, as if donner meat and garlic mayo is intrinsically more in keeping with the spirit of this down-at-heel West Cumbrian harbour town than a skinny macchiato with extra foam. But for all that he admires the spit-and-sawdust earthiness, his mood matches his clothes. He’s still soaked to the skin; shivering hard enough to make his teeth rattle. He managed to change into a cleanish black T-shirt and steer his arms through the sleeves of a baggy cardigan but he couldn’t face the rigmarole of stripping off his jeans, socks or boots. Damp material clings to his thighs, his calves, ankles, soles. His toes feel like chipolata sausages straight from the freezer. He’s taking comfort in the fact that he has left a perfect arse-print on the calfskin leather of Jo’s vintage Nissan Figaro. She’s told them she would be back in an hour, dropping them off in the car-park of the DIY store and giving firm instructions not to cause mischief. Rowan had saluted, earnestly, then turned the hand gesture into one more in keeping with his feelings as she drove away in a burst of spray.

“I know I’m working, but will there be time to read?” asks Snowdrop, hopefully, beside him. She’s changed into dry clothes; big baggy lumberjack shirt now spilling down to her shins, where rainbow leggings peep out above sequinned high-top trainers. She’s wearing a genuine Lambretta parka and a floppy hat. She looks to Rowan as though she’s raided the dressing-up box.

“You can do whatever you feel like doing,” says Rowan, scowling. He can smell a pub. Can smell hops and vinegar and the humid embrace of strangers in too-damp clothes. His head’s spinning. The reality of his situation is starting to hit home, his thoughts grinding against one another like plates of pack-ice. He has to give Aubrey something, if only to buy himself time. He’s ducked them long enough. He’s not ready to tell the truth to anybody so he’s going to have to put his faith in a captivating lie.

Wincing into the cold wind, Rowan makes his way towards the big red oblong of the town library. There’s a sale on in the off-licence. A two-for-one offer in Specsavers. Five sausage rolls for a pound in Gregg’s. He mooches down a side street, past a charity shop where a woman in her eighties is standing in the window trying to put a leather jacket on a mannequin. The windows are steamy with condensation and through the smears of damp glass, it looks to Rowan as if two corpses are preparing one another for a night out. He pushes open the doors and steps into the warm, yellowy light of the library. It soothes him like a church. There are posters on the wall advertising author nights; book groups; tea mornings and computer literacy classes. A small woman with spectacles and extraordinarily frizzy hair is sitting on the floor with a toddler lap, reading from a colourful picture book. She’s doing all the voices. Rowan pegs her as a first rate parent.

“Can I go read?” asks Snowdrop, tugging his sleeve. “I’ll join you in a bit, I just want to see if my favourite book’s there …,”

Rowan waves a hand, trying to make the point that he couldn’t care what she does, provided it doesn’t cause him any headaches. She scampers off as if she’s won a trolley dash through a sweetshop.

Alone, Rowan considers his options. He could dictate an email to his agent, explaining what he’s working on and cautiously enquiring about a deadline extension. He could make a list of the few vague bits of intriguing information that he’s learned about Violet Rayner and see whether it looks as thin written down. He could slip away, hit the pub and do some serious research on what kind of glass his problems look better when viewed through the bottom of. He gives a little growl to himself, aware that Snowdrop has high expectations. Sulkily, he moves into the warm and towards the desk. A harassed-looking woman with greying black hair is attempting to repair a damaged paperback. She has strips of sticky tape hanging from the arms of her spectacles: a time-saving efficiency that Rowan admires. She’s maybe 60, and very neat; cardigan and polar neck: a gold locket and polished, unpainted nails. She looks up as he approaches. Looks down again, then jerks her head up as if a hand has taken a fistful of hair and yanked it.

Rowan gives a good smile. “Local history,” he says, by way of greeting. “Newspaper cuttings. I’m not quite sure what I’m after.” He stops. Composes himself. “Sorry, that was all a tad garbled. I’m just visiting, so is there a temporary password to use the computers?” He holds up his mangled hands, feebly. “And somebody who could occasionally feed me crisps?”

The woman behind the counter is giving him a peculiar look. “You’re a writer,” she says, a little Geordie in her accent. “Serendipity’s brother.”

Rowan rolls his eyes. “I’m thinking of wearing a sandwich board with that written on it. You know Dippy?”

“Oh yes, she’s a marvel. Helped with the fundraising for the youth project and always brings us a treat when she pops in. She and her partner sometimes come to our book group.”

“It’s wife, actually,” says Rowan, quietly, as if correcting a faux-pas.

She recoils, mortified. “Oh, yes, yes. Goodness, I do try and stay up to date …,”

Rowan grins, letting her know she’s off the hook. She breathes out, relieved. “She said you were a bit of a devil.”

He smiles, delighted. “I’m presuming she described me as a walking disaster area, yes? Hence the instant recognition?”

“Oh no,” says the librarian. “No, it’s from the photo in your book.” She casts a critical eye over him and registers her disappointment. He feels like a first edition hardback that’s been dropped in the bath. “It’s still a relatively good likeness,” she says, and he appreciates the lies.

“You’ve read it?” asks Rowan. “What are the chances of that – meeting my one reader …,”

“Well, I’ve flicked through it,” she replies, apologetically. “I ordered it in recently, you see. It wasn’t one we stock but we can order almost anything. We had it when it first came out – just the one copy, but that wasn’t returned and we didn’t restock.”

Rowan isn’t quite sure what to say. “Well, if they didn’t return it they must have enjoyed it. That, or thrown it off a cliff in disgust …,”

“Perhaps,” smiles the librarian. “It’s funny how things come and go in waves. Whatever the reason you’re definitely experiencing a new surge in popularity up here. I’ve ordered two new copies in the past week. There’s a waiting list.”

Rowan gives a little bark of laughter. “That’s Snowdrop, I’m sure. Or Serendipity’s. Any decent feedback?”

The librarian nods. “If you’re still here next month you can ask Eve what she thinks. That’s Mrs Cater. She has a copy. The other just whizzed out the door before lunch.”

“Cater,” he repeats. Something stirs. “Detective?”

“She was,” nods the librarian.

“Maybe I should say hello. Do you have an address?”

“I’m afraid I can’t give that out,” she says apologetically. “Ask your sister, they’re acquainted. Of course, round here, so’s everybody.”

Rowan wonders if it matters. He’s new in town, after all. Word gets around. Surely it would be natural to look for more information.

“You should come and talk to our creative writing class,” says the librarian, eyes opening wide as if she’s just had an extraordinary idea. “We’re meeting Thursday night for a chat on setting and place but I know they’ll drop that in a flash for a chat from you. The evenings when we have a speaker are always very well attended.”

Rowan makes a face. “I doubt I’d be able to get enough books sent up from the distributor to make it worthwhile,” he complains. “And I’m trying to only do paying gigs. I doubt you’re about to offer me a few hundred quid to do it, are you?”

The librarian shakes her head. “Sadly not. There are some lovely baked good though – we all chip in for the buffet. There’s always a bottle open and we’re enthusiastic. We’ve published two anthologies, short stories and poems. We had one gentleman, a crime writer from Preston, he was drunk before he even arrived. He was very indiscreet about his day job. Solicitor for the Crown Prosecution Service! He was quite the scamp. We had a wonderful evening. I ‘ve asked Jo to sound you about it but when I didn’t hear back I presumed you weren’t up to it.” She glances at his hands. “Sore?”

“Only when I breathe,” mutters Rowan. He’s conflicted. He doesn’t feel qualified to give anybody advice, but he knows it makes him feel good when people are interested in what he has to say. Most importantly, he might get to meet some new people. Every new acquaintance is a potential lead for whatever story might suddenly take the bait. And he’s willing to admit to himself that Violet Rayner is starting to intrigue him. He remembers what Dippy had told him – she’d written a story. She was starting to remember. Perhaps if he went along he might be able to charm a copy of whatever it was she’d written. And it would help him seem less like some nasty outsider and more like a known quantity.

“You do know I’m not really a creative writer, yes? It’s factual.”

“I thought some parts were rather beautiful,” says the librarian, smiling. “I’m Julie, by the way. I’d shake your hand but I’m frightened what I might take away with me.”

“Can I bring Snowdrop?” asks Rowan, giving a polite nod in response to the sudden camaraderie. “She’s likely the only person who can stop me swearing or offending anybody.”

“Of course, of course,” says Julie, pleased. “Our members brings her little girl when her husband can’t have her. She sits with her toys and we pass her from knee to knee. It’s all very friendly. Of course, Catherine always feels like she’s being a burden and she apologises about fifty times a night, but that’s her way. Wonderful poet, you’ll like her.”

Rowan chews his lip. Sometimes, he knows, a story will keep jumping up and down until it attracts the attention it craves. He’s starting to wonder some hidden truth is clamouring to be exposed. “Catherine? Rev Marlish’s daughter?” he asks.

“Oh, you know the family?” asks Julie, surprised. “Excellent. And you can see what Ms Cater thinks of the book, too…,”

Somewhere, at the very rear of his consciousness, Rowan begins to compose the opening lines of his email to his agent.

Sorry for the radio silence, but I think I may be onto something …

“Here you go,” says Julie, handing him her phone. “That’s the piece she wrote for us. Violet, I mean. It might be useful. Very powerful.”

Rowan looks at the screen. Raises his bandages to hide the smile.

Creative Writing Assignment

Recollections

By Violet Sheehan

I have a decent memory. I’m good with faces, better with names. If we’ve arranged to meet next Tuesday at 6pm and I don’t turn up by quarter past, call the police or question whether I actually like you, because I promise, I won’t have forgotten. I know the star signs of all of my friends. I never get home to find I’ve run out of bread or milk. I send in the meter reading as soon as the electricity people ask for it and I can tell you where I was and what I was doing at pretty much any time in my life going back to three-years-old. But there’s a gap. You all know the gap I’m talking about. Or at least, it feels like you all do. There’s a black hole, snipped out of my brain like a photograph pulled from an album. It feels like somebody has reached into my brain and sheared a piece away.

If you don’t know what I’m talking about, then sorry for wasting your time. I can be a little paranoid sometimes. Maybe that’s why I’m single. I’ve had my share of company over the years but I’m not very good at letting people get too close. I always wonder what they’re really after. I can’t imagine that there’s anything about me they’re eager to get close to. I suppose look okay and I can’t argue with the teachers and the shrinks and the bosses who have all told me I’m too clever for my own good, but I’m not really very nice. I was a horrible cow at school and I still don’t know why. I never really knew how to act. It always felt as though I’d missed a class when everybody else had reality explained to them. People seemed better at living than me. They still do, I think.

Sorry, I’m waffling on. I was trying to explain. Some of you will know that when I was a teenager, I went missing for a few days. I met somebody who played the guitar and sang in a lovely voice, and he got me and my friends stoned and drunk and we spent a couple of nights partying in the woods while people went a bit nuts trying to find us. You might even be sitting there now, wishing you could ask me about it. What would I tell you if you did? For a long time I would tell you the same thing I told everybody else. I don’t remember. Whatever happened, it’s gone. I don’t think it’s some sort of suppressed memory – a way of protecting myself from trauma. I think it’s because I was so unbelievably out of it that I couldn’t make memories at all. So whatever happened, it’s not a memory to be retrieved, because it was never made in the first place. That’s what Catherine says when I dare to bring it up. She’s the same as me. It’s just a gap in her head, and maybe that’s for the best.

Is it, though? That’s what I’ve been asking for a while now. Maybe coming to this group has helped. I like writing. I used to be good at it when I was young. I liked poetry when I was a teenager. I liked a lot of things that were a bit of an acquired taste. Catherine despairs of me, but after 30 years of friendship I doubt she’s about to ditch me now. I don’t tell her often enough what she means to me. I hope to goodness she doesn’t cry like a toddler if this is the piece that’s picked out for a reading.

I think I’ve been a bit harsher than usual with Catherine recently. I’m sorry for that, I think. She doesn’t seem troubled by it the way I am. She accepts it all. It was her act of rebellion, a little interlude of partying and acting up and giving the vicar a reason to go out of his mind. I don’t think I can leave it at that. You see, bits have been coming back. You know that feeling when you see something random and it reminds you of a dream you had when you were a child? It’s like that. Suddenly, I’m asking questions of myself. I have a memory of a dark, wet, sparkling place. I can taste the taste you get after you’ve had a filling – like iron filings and chemicals. More than anything else, I can see the girl I haven’t let myself think about in three decades. Freya. Red hair. White lines on her arms. Older than us. She was there, I know she was. She never said goodbye. Left, like she’d left all the other schools. I’ve started looking for her, Catherine. I know I said I wouldn’t, but I have. I’ve started looking into myself as well. There are pictures there. Not memories, but echoes. Something that comes to me when I sleep. Do you remember the old caretaker? The man in the woods who used to talk to us about oneness and vibrations and journeys between different planes of reality? I’ve been thinking of him a lot. You tell me I shouldn’t hang around with my friends at the farm but they’re good listeners, and they help me find the frequency I lost that day. I know it will come back to me. Eve is worrying about me too. She’s been worrying for 30 years. Do you remember that day I called her Mum by accident? Oh my God I’m still so embarrassed.

So, that’s where I’m at. I’m the girl with the gap in her memory – a story with a missing page at its heart. Freya’s the answer, I’m sure. Freya, and the hippy man with the weird name. I’ve asked the girls to try and remember. They don’t owe me any favours, but maybe they will. And Freya, if you somehow hear that I’m looking for you, please get in touch. I know you’re the glue that would put me back together. I need to know if I’m remembering the truth, or what they’ve told me to. And I know you’re the one with the answers.

11

Wednesday, October 20, 1988

Yem How Wood, Wasdale

8.03pm

The woods that close around Arthur Sixpence reach out for him with black talons. They grab at his feet as he stumbles; whip at his face like a flail. It feels as if the forest is trying to claim him.

He hears his breath coming in ragged bursts and tries, desperately, to hold onto his sanity. He glances around, trying to get a sense of where he is, but he cannot make sense of forward and back, up and down, inside and out. He feels like a fly in a tangled mass of spider-silk. The forest around him is a terrifying a black mass; all whistles and trills and shuddering branches. He hears sticks snapping beneath his feet with the gunshot crack of snapping femurs. Sees the darkness disassemble; to pixilate and disintegrate into a million falling leaves.

He is lost now. Lost in the darkness.

“I tried to help you,” he hisses, into the darkness. “I tried to heal you!”

He reaches out his hand and feels the knobbled bark of a tree trunk. He realises his feet are wet, that water has soaked past the lip of his boots. He splashes backwards, onto soft ground. His right boot slips and his knee hits the wet ground, hard. His teeth bang together and he mashes the side of his tongue. He can taste blood. He spits on the forest floor, raising a gloved finger to his mouth. Even through the leather he can feel the wetness.

Just breathe, he tolls himself. He’ll come back. Just breathe. You’re fit – you’re not done yet….

His cheeks feel raw as the wind slices against the tears and he wipes his face dry with the back of a glove. He screws up his eyes, peering again into the gloom. There are vague shapes, but nothing more. He takes a tentative step and realises his boots are now on soft leaves, rather than the hardness of the path. He shuffles forward again and strikes something firm. He curses and stops again.

Don’t go any further, he urges himself. Stay and wait. Stay near the water, where they can see you. Stay where there’s still the chance of light.

He removes his gloves and plunges his hand into the pocket of his coat. His hands close on metal. He grips the Zippo lighter. Pulls it free and spins the wheel. There is a tiny spark but the flame is swallowed by the wind. He curse and cups the lighter with his hand, trying to shield it from the gusts that seem to be growing stronger, whisking the detritus of the night. The flame catches but disappears again when he takes his hand away.

He flips the wheel on the Zippo and there is an explosion of light and power as his world is turned red, orange and vermillion.

It feels as though a cold, bony hand has reached inside his chest and squeezed his heart.

This is happening, he realises. This is when it all comes to an end. This is when he comes for you…

“Please!” he shouts, looking back, desperately, at the great lumpen mass of the mountains. The clouds are purple and silver; roiling and twisting like skulls in a sack. He lights the Zippo again, desperate not just for light but for some kind of warmth.

There is a shape to the darkness – an outline of flesh and bone. A creature. Pale skin and a vile, twisted pig-mask where their head should be. His guts twist and it is all he can do not to clutch at his heart like the feeble old man he tries so hard not to become.

His senses are suddenly alive as the tumblers of understanding start to fall into place.

“No,” he says, and his voice is snatched away by the window. “No, it wasn’t like you think. I helped you. Healed you! Your father …,”

The figure steps forward, and suddenly Sixpence understands. Suddenly, he knows how very wrong he has been, and how very bad the things he has done. He turns, trying to run. He does not take more than a step.

Legs and arms entangle.

Hot breath, chaos and confusion and a hand pushing against a face.

Tumbling now, rolling in the dirt, enmeshed in one another. Then a flash of face, like a sliver of moon, flits by close to his own: a glimmer of snarling white, and there is fist in his gut and he is on his back again, pinned under meat and bone, gazing up. His hands scrabble in the mud and dirt. Rake through wet leaves as the pressure builds in his throat. His eyes feel like they might pop.

He reaches up, and even through the leather of his gloves he recoils at the tough of the wrinkled porcine skin; the yellowed teeth and rucked, rancid snout.

He tries to form the word ‘please’.

He opens his mouth just enough for a single syllable to escape, and then something cold and hard and utterly unyielding is pushing through the soft skin beneath his jaw, crunching upwards to skewer his tongue to the roof of his mouth and fill the hot wet cavern of his face with cloying, iron-scented blood.

He’s still alive when his attacker starts to drag him towards the hole in the earth; the small, hidden space beneath the roots of the big, bone-white yew.

He will wish, in his final hours, that he had not fought so hard for life. That he had not spent so much of his life seeking the spirit world. Soon, it is true and endless death that he will crave above all else.

12

Bing

Bing

Bing

“Fucking bong,” mutters Rowan, silencing his phone and returning his attention to the laptop on his knee. There’s cigarette ash on the keys; on the back of his bandaged left hand and smudged into the tartan blanket around his shoulders. He’s been concentrating hard. He can sense a story lurking in the words on the screen.

A small, sly thought slinks around inside his head like a cat in a locked room. What if this is it? What if this is the story? What if Violet is about to hand him a second chance? There could be something to this, couldn’t there? Three girls from an apparently posh school, wondering off to God knew where. And Pickle had said only two came back – that rumours persisted about the third girl ending up at the bottom of the lake. Written well, it could even carry a whiff of the occult, couldn’t it? A small rural community closing ranks? He can almost see it. Can see the accompanying documentary and the mornings spent on breakfast TV with one of his grateful interviewees, spewing superlatives about how he exposed the truth, and helped a troubled soul find peace.

“Don’t get carried away, son, don’t get carried away,” he mutters, raising his glass like a toddler with a beaker and taking a decent slurp of red. “Pickle said Violet had being trying to track her down, which kind of kills off the idea that she and her schoolmate did her in.” He scowls into his glass, wondering. “Suppressed memory,” he mumbles, and it’s as much a proposition as a query. He closes an eye. “Don’t think it, don’t you dare …,”

He doesn’t want to look directly at the thought as it slinks, catlike, around the skirting boards of his mind.

It would be a better story if she were missing.

It would be a better story if she were dead.

Outside, the rain hits the windows like handfuls of grit; the wind testing the old building for gaps in the masonry, the roof joists, the hearth. Soot and ash keep swirling out from the fireplace with each fresh gust of wind. He could very happily sit here and get drunk until bedtime, but he can’t help but feel that he’s somehow trodden on the tail of something big.

Rowan is currently neck-deep in the digital archive of the Cumberland and Westmoreland Gazette: a database of words and images so old-fashioned that Rowan confidently expects to see actual footage from the thawing of the last ice age. He’s typed any amount of keywords and dates into the tiny little search facility but it’s still a mixed bag of offerings. He’s found the original article printed on the Saturday after the girls went missing: early November, 1991. They aren’t named in the article and the Detective Sergeant quoted as being concerned for their welfare is an Evelyn Cater of Whitehaven CID. There’s no byline on the story. The next piece is from three days later. It’s accompanied by an image of a small, wiry man with thick black hair, small eyes and an impeccably smart suit. His name is given as Derrick Millward. The still vastness of Wast Water takes up the background: divers in dinghies emerging, golem-like, from the thick mud of the water’s edge. Rowan scans the text and smiles, gratefully, as he recognises the name of the writer. Chris Gardner was working as a sub-editor at the North West Evening Mail when Rowan started out. He was a quiet, diligent chap who’d eschewed the lure of London in favour of a quiet life, a steady job and a nice house just outside Millom, which he planned to share with his wife and their then baby daughter. Last time he saw him was at the funeral of an old editor they had in common. Chris’s wife had died of breast cancer three years before, he’d been made redundant from the Mail, and the house had halved in value due to a subsidence problem and the rumour of Japanese knotweed in the back garden. Chris was bearing up under the strain of it all. He believed there were people who had it worse. Rowan wasn’t sure who.

Rowan performs a quick Google search for Chris Gardner, alongside a few words that might narrow it down. Millom. Journalist. Sub-editor. Unlucky bastard. He finds him listed as a page designer for a glossy lifestyle magazine based in Kendal. Rowan follows the link. The front page is given over to a pretty middle-aged woman staring wistfully at a tree, all yard-boots and Barbour and expensively bleached hair. The accompanying banner promises an exclusive interview with a landowner determined to build a natural burial ground on land in the Wasdale Valley. Rowan rolls his eyes. Gives an unkind tut of disapproval and mutters darkly about provincialism. Calls the number and wonders if Chris is in the mood to help an old friend.

“Hello, Features desk …,”

“Chris!” says Rowan, brightly. “Rowan Blake, all grown up. My God, mate, it’s been far too long. What was it? Pete’s funeral, I suppose. How’s it going? You good?”

There is a pause before Chris answers. Rowan pictures him. He’s probably 50 now. Glasses, like in the old days, but with thicker lenses. Maybe his hair has continued its retreat across his scalp. He’s no doubt his clothes will be presentable: he was always a neatly attired chap.

“Well, of all the voices I expected to hear, you’re way down the list,” says Chris, quietly. “Where you at now? Did I hear you were at some website? Or was it telly research? I read your book, by the way. You do let your pen run away with you but you can still sprinkle the glitter.”

“I’m back up here, actually,” says Rowan, getting comfy. “My sister – I don’t think you’ll know her – she’s got a place near Boot. Old farm. They’ve done up one of the old outbuildings as a holiday cottage. I’m trying it out. I’m sure she’d be grateful of any publicity when it’s a holiday let, if you were able to pull any strings.”

“Sounds great,” says Chris, enthusiastically. “Bet you’re going cold turkey, aren’t you? Sucking on exhaust pipes, trying to get a dose of smog.”

“As long as I keep smoking my heart won’t stop,” says Rowan, flicking the computer screen to bring up the text. “I’m actually looking into something local. Bit of telly interest, definite book deal on the cards. A kind of follow-up to the Gary King book but with a bigger scope. An exploration of the cases that don’t resonate with the collective consciousness. What happens to the families of the people whose deaths never trouble the tabloids.” He pokes out his lower lip as he considers what he’s said. He might actually be telling the truth.

“That’s got legs,” muses Chris. “You know better than anybody that if it’s outside London or the victim’s not a pretty girl from a nice white family, too often it sinks without a trace.”

“It’s a disgrace,” says Rowan, and means it. “But to do it properly I need some case studies and thankfully I’ve got a belter right on my doorstep. I mentioned it in the book but only in passing. I’ve been going through the online archive and apart from a couple of paltry snippets and a picture, it’s barely had any coverage.”

“You mean the coven,” says Chris, flatly.

“Sorry?”

“The three girls from the hippy school. Lovely old house on Wast Water. One of those places with about nine kids to each year. Closed in the mid-nineties, I think. It was one of those hippy-trippy places, holistic approaches to learning and mornings spent saluting the sun. It was part of a group that was supposed to revolutionise education but I guess that went the same way as most of the best ideas. Silver Birch, I think it was called.”

Rowan chooses to say nothing. Lets Chris fill the silence. He can hear him settling back – perhaps picking up a mug with ‘Shit Happens’ written on it in big letters and slopping a gulp down his front.

“I was on the Gazette then,” says Chris. “You know me, I was never much of a one for reporting. Give me a desk and a design job any day. But I served my time. We thought we’d got a big one when it came in. It was Damian who got the tip off from one of his police contacts. Did you ever meet?”

“Damian Crow? Tall lad? Too grey for his age? Aye, he was chief reporter when I started. Didn’t like me very much.”

“Retired now, but he was a good operator back in his day. He had good links with the coppers so they’ll have gone straight to him. Newsdesk asked me to be on standby in case it came to something. It didn’t take us long to get names.”

“Remind me,” says Rowan, fingers poised.

“I know there was a Catherine Marlish. Daughter of the vicar, if I recall. Lovely couple, her mum and dad. Couldn’t do enough to help. I think they’d have given me the whole family album if I’d asked.”

“Freya and Violet were the others weren’t they…?”

Chris pauses, the silence stretching out like chewing gum. “Freya was a redhead,” he says, locating the memory. “I think the surname was ‘Grey’. With an ‘e’. That’s about as much as we ever got. Related to one of the pastoral staff at the school, as far as memory serves, but we never got the chance to print much. Initial appeal and a request for information. I had a pad full of notes from Rev Marlish about his daughter but the cops requested we hold off on publishing for ‘operational reasons’ and we weren’t in a position to argue. You lose your contacts in this job, what are you? Anyways, it came to nought in the end. Wasdale Mountain Rescue found Violet and Catherine somewhere over Patterdale way.”

“But not Freya?” asks Rowan. “So what, they just thought ‘two out of three aint bad’? That’s a bit hard to swallow, mate.”

Chris gives a snuffle of laughter, though it sounds fake to Rowan’s ears. “I’m probably remembering it wrong, Rowan. Maybe they found her somewhere nearby and it wasn’t mentioned in the first press release that came out. We might have printed an amendment, or just left well alone. We’re a local paper and the nationals never took any notice because it was all over so quickly. If something had gone amiss, if she’d never been found or there was a suspicion of foul play, somebody would have kicked up a fuss by now, surely.”

Rowan glares into his drink and tries to keep his temper. He knows from bitter experience how many people fall between the cracks – how many girls, boys, women and men fade from reality like the colours in a sun-bleached photograph. He knows how many killers have preyed upon society’s disposable people. How many lives have been snatched because their murderer didn’t expect anybody to notice?

“You still there Rowan?” asks Chris, forced jollity entering his voice. “Look, if you’re really interested you should have a look on the Mountain Rescue’s online archive, it’s pretty good. I think it was Jason – he passed away a few years back – who brought them home. He was always good with us but apparently he wasn’t allowed to talk about the incident, so draw your own conclusions there.”

Rowan chews his lip and considers the screen before him. “Who’s this guy in the photo I’m looking at? Dark hair, fifty-ish …,”

“Come on Rowan, it was thirty years back,” protests Chris. “Hang on, let me see what you’re looking at…,”

Rowan listens to the sound of fingertips moving swiftly over keys. He looks at his own, useless digits and swallows down a surge of jealousy.

“Oh right, right,” says Chris, up to speed. “That’s Derrick Millward. Local lad, though we’re probably talking pre-war. Spent his life catching the worst of the worst. You might have heard of him, to be honest. Bit of a legend in some circles – old school copper. He had some connection to the case, as far as I can recall. I think he was introduced as a ‘liaison’ – somebody to make sure the family were kept up to date. He’d retired from policing but I think he had some connection to a private detective firm. Blackpool, I think? Was it Blackpool? Honestly Rowan, you should have emailed me and I could have found my old notebooks.”

“You always were horribly efficient,” smiles Rowan. He narrows his eyes. “Three girls missing,” he muses. “You’ve told me one didn’t come back. I’ve heard that before. What’s the story?”

“It probably sounds more exciting than it was,” says Chris, apologetically. “The coppers never did tell us the ins and outs. We got a very short press briefing saying the vicar’s daughter and her mate had been found - that they were receiving medical attention and the families appreciated being left alone. Even on a local paper it was never big news. I only remember the bits I do because I wrote a piece a few years back about the retirement of Eve Cater and the case was one she remembered as being a significant one in her career. I don’t know if I’ve got a copy of the piece. I know she got hurt, that’s about all I can remember.”

Rowan turns his head as the dust in the grate puffs up. It looks as if a giant foot has thudded into the ground outside.

“Is this Millward still with us?” asks Rowan, tightly. “He might be better with a door-knock than a phone call.”

“No, popped his clogs a few years back,” says Chris, ruefully. “Good age, though. We carried an obit. So did the Cumberland News and one of the nationals. He’d been around. Saying that, there was nobody around for him when he was going downhill towards the end. I think the care home would have ended up in court if anybody had kicked up a fuss.”

Rowan decides to say nothing. Just swishes the blood-red wine in the well of his glass and hopes to God he’s onto something.

“His number two’s still around,” says Chris, helpfully. “And I suppose after all this time there’s nothing to stop you speaking directly to the girls. They’re still local. You’ll find Catherine

through her dad, I think. He’s vicar at St Olaf’s, among others. You’ll find Derrick there too. Buried there because of his connections to the valley. It’s the smallest church in England so spaces are a premium. We carry a story every year where they appeal to people not to scatter the ashes of their loved ones in the churchyard. When there’s no breeze it starts to look like there’s been a nuclear winter! I tell you what, that place has a history worth a book…”

“It’s really good of you to help out, Chris,” says Rowan, grateful. “We should have a beer. How’s that gorgeous daughter of yours, eh?”

Chris’s tone changes. “Ah, that’s a sad one, Rowan. Poor lass. But I’m so proud of her. She’s fighting it so bravely …,”

Rowan lays his head back. Listens as Chris outlines a life so full of grief that Rowan wants to reach inside him and take it all away. Her stops listening. Types Derrick’s name into Google. Sits back, glass in hand, and begins to read.

Twenty minutes later, he drops his head back against the cushion, and breathes out slowly. This is starting to feel like something. He doesn’t believe he’s stumbled onto a genuine atrocity, but he knows he has the skills to make it sounds like one.

He reaches down and his sore skin touches the cool glass of the whisky bottle. Splashes a good measure into a mug and takes a swallow. He realises he is nodding to himself as if listening to music. He can feel a kind of nervous energy within him. He listens back to his conversation with Chris and stops it when he hears the mention of the school by the lake. The ‘hippy’ place. It takes him moments to find reference to the Silver Birch Academy online: a story in the Independent published in 1993. He rinses his mouth with the last of the whisky and dives straight in.

A Sad End for the School That Promised a Golden New Age of Education

By Nicky McKenna, education reporter

“If things had gone differently, all children would have been educated this way. It’s a source of great regret to me that we weren’t able to keep the dream alive.”

So says Phillip Tunstall, the pioneering head teacher whose holistic approach to education was the driving force behind the controversial Silver Birch Academy, which has closed its doors after almost 20 years providing ‘new age’ education.

The academy, based on the shores of Wast Water in a converted mansion house built by wealthy industrialist Steadfast Hookson, was the flagship school for the Whitecroft Trust, which has run several co-educational schools across the UK. The Trust has now been bought out by an investment partnership and Silver Birch is among the schools to be axed in a cost-cutting drive.

Mr Tunstall, who remains a Trustee within the organisation he started along with Cumbrian landowner and businessman Alan Rideal, told the Gazette that he was proud of what the school had achieved.

He said: “It’s always best to be positive – that’s what we’ve always taught. We did things our way, a holistic way, where the school’s responsibility was to fit around the pupil rather than the other way around. Spiritual, moral, social and cultural development has always been at the very heart of our philosophy and I can say with absolute certainty that we have turned out some exceptional human beings over the years. The school’s aims and philosophy regarding how pupils live their lives and learn supports them in developing mature and responsible attitudes to living in a community. Of course it is a blow that the school will close its doors but the Whitecroft approach will continue and I have not lost any of my enthusiasm. I still believe in what we started back in the Seventies, when I had lots of big ideas and even bigger hair!”

Mr Tunstall, 51, has been at the helm since the school’s opening in 1974. Backed by philanthropist Alan Rideal, it has never had more than 40 pupils on roll at any time and has actively resisted the normal monitoring and evaluation processes, preferring to offer a ‘holistic’ approach to education favoured by pioneering educators overseas.

While some pupils have attended from the local Lake District community, many have been boarding pupils whose families were attracted to the first-rate facilities with the emphasis on a ‘home from home’, and ‘universalist’ approach to development. The school’s philosophy was that pupils learned more when free from coercion, so many lessons were optional. The timetable was flexible, allowing pupils to pick and choose the times they felt most inclined to learn, but were encouraged to participate in meditation, yoga and mindfulness sessions alongside curriculum-based activities.

“All in all, we’ve done a lot of what we set out to do, but I think I would be lying if I didn’t say that it hurts to see the doors close. I have a memory of the three of us standing in front of this ruin of a house and knowing what we wanted to do and how to do it. I’d like to thank the many people who have helped me to fill my head with such wonderful memories.”

The school has not been without its controversies. The local education authority has been at constant loggerheads with the school over its refusal to allow inspectors to see pupil records, while in 1989 the Times ran an exclusive story on alleged irregularities with the Trust’s finances, claiming that the families of some pupils were paying three times as much as others to attend the school, while so-called ‘scholarships and bursaries’ seemed to be given out without any fixed criteria.

Copeland MP Jack Guinness said: “I’ve always admired what they were trying to do at Silver Birch but we need to have a uniformity of education in this country – a standard start for each of us. For all of its talk of inclusivity this was an elitist school that went out of its way to keep the authorities from becoming too involved.”

Rowan clicks his tongue against the roof of his mouth. Looks for further references in the archive to Alan Rideal or Phillip Tunstall. Exhales, slowly, as he finds what he’s looking for in a banner headline from November, 2004. The search for missing fell-walker Alan Rideal has been called off. Tributes are pouring in for the Cumbrian philanthropist who poured money into local good causes.

“….experienced fell-walker…died doing what he loved …Mountain Rescue conducted an exhaustive search…Wast Water, Screes …” Rowan mutters to himself as he scans the article, clicking his tongue, again and again, until he annoys himself. He feels jittery now. Feels things starting to come alive. Scans the remainder of the page and finds no reference to a next of kin. The only named associate in the article is Phillip Tunstall, who went back to get help when Mr Rideal began to experience chest pains during their ascent of Great Gable. Tunstall’s address is given as Bleng Hall, Nether Wasdale.

Rowan allows himself a grin. He stands and paces a little, tripping on the cobbles only twice. He feels fizzy with it. Jittery. He can almost feel the first line of chapter one, slithering around in his thoughts like a live snake in a bag of dead worms.

He calls DI Sumaira Barnett. The young man who answers her phone at the Cumbria Constabulary Cold Case Review Unit tries for fifteen agonising minutes to redirect him to the press office. Rowan keeps hanging up and calling back, hoping Sumaira will pick up on a different extension. He doesn’t raise his voice or make any kind of threat – just keeps ringing back and asking to speak to DI Barnett. Eventually, he hears some muzzy expletives somewhere in the office and a harassed-sounding South London voice demands to know what he wants.

“Sumaira,” he says, smiling. “It just occurred to me I still owe you a machine cappuccino and a Kit-Kat. Can I drop them round this afternoon or are you going to charge me interest? If so, I can stretch to a bottle of red and a decent steak.”

She responds with a low growl. “I knew I recognised the name. Bollocks. Now isn’t a good time. Last year, when I was ringing you and you weren’t replying – that would have been a good time. What is it you’re after?”

“Some company,” he says, a smile in his voice. “I’m adrift in Lakeland. Withering in my bloom…,”

“You’ve got a sister here,” she says. When she speaks again it’s clear she’s remembered something else. “Did I hear that you’d had a bit of an incident with an online troll?”

“I’ll tell you at dinner,” says Rowan, looking at his hands.

“I’m up to my eyes,” she protests. “What is it you’re after anyway? I mean, I’m flattered you’ve looked me up but I know you must want something more than company.”

Rowan makes himself comfortable. Presses ‘record’. “What do you know about three missing teenagers, and the Silver Birch academy?”

She pauses before answering. Rowan listens to her breathe.

“I can be free by 9pm,” she says, at last. “And I warn you, I’m an expensive date.”

13

10.14pm

Hotel Vin de Mere, Lake Windermere

“I think it’s some sort of tapenade,” says Sumaira, cautiously. She pokes the dish with a finger. “Smells a bit like posh olives? Is it pesto? I’m not brave enough.”

The substance in question is being employed as a sort of gastronomic cement: a khaki-coloured glue that adheres the vibrant hunks of yellow tomato and silvery radish to the piece of slate in front of her. The waiter had told her it was called ‘pistounade’ and formed part of the fifth course, of the nine-serving taster menu. She’d laughed: a fulsome, pleasing cackle that had caused at least two other diners to tut out loud.

“You reckon those fit in the dishwasher?” asks Rowan, nodding at her platter. He’s trying to be funny but it feels horribly false. He’s uncomfortable; slick with sweat inside his faded black shirt. He’s managed to eat some of the ludicrous little servings without asking for help but he can tell that Sumaira is itching to cut his meat for him and feed him like a child. He’s unable to feel like anything other than a total arsehole every time he looks at the unwieldy leather gloves which hide the bags and bandages on his hands.

“How did you get here?” asks Sumaira, dabbing at a small drip of spilled mimosa on the tablecloth and trying to turn her finger into a sponge. “I didn’t see a skateboard in the car park.”

“My sister,” says Rowan, with a sigh. “She gave me a lift and says if I ring her before 11 she’ll come and pick me up. Any time after that I have to call a cab, which I can ill afford, so I’ll probably have to ring my mate Pickle for a lift.”

“Pickle?” asks Sumaira, eyes widening. “You’re mates?”

“He’s everybody’s mate. He’s Clifford the Big Red Dog. He’s one of the good ones.”

Sumaira pulls a face. “His record would suggest otherwise.”

“So would mine,” says Rowan, surprising himself. He hadn’t intended to bring up his past, or his lack of funds. He can’t seem to get a hold of himself at the moment. Keeps saying and doing things that offer no obvious advantage.

“We’ve all got a past,” shrugs Sumaira, sucking in her cheek so that a dimple suddenly appears. “I wouldn’t be a copper if I hadn’t had dealings with the law when I was young.”

“I presume you know a little about my misspent youth,” says Rowan, holding her gaze.

“Enough,” says Sumaira. “I checked you out after we met. I never thanked you properly, by the way. You could have made us look very bad that day.”

Rowan waves her gratitude away. He can’t even remember what the story was or how he had chosen to report on it but a cop’s gratitude is always a thing worth banking.

“I read your book,” she says, and begins to play with a fine gold necklace that hangs in the well of her throat. “You’re a good writer. You didn’t glorify him, you just understood him. I thought it was brave.”

Rowan manages a twitch of a smile. It belies his true feeling. He feels sick: his tongue too big for his mouth, his throat dry and sore. His thoughts keep drifting away from him. He tries to centre himself, the way shrink had told him to. He imagines himself in the place he feels safe. Imagines the space beneath the seats of the old school bus, tucked up warm and cosy in that musty little space, snuggled up with Serendipity, music turned down low as a pulse; her cold fingertips on his temples, his eyelids, telling him it will be okay, that it was just a nightmare, that the bad people have gone away

“….a while to settle in and obviously it’s a very different kind of ethos but we’ve had some good results and I’m definitely feeling better for the fresh air …,”

Rowan realises he has missed some conversation. He drapes his arms over the wooden back of the small, cosy booth. He points at the pretentious montage on the table between them. Sumaira’s slate is balanced on four small jars of different coloured sand, which in turn sit upon a squat, rustic table top. The table has been polished to a high gleam and reflects the distant ceiling; all wrought iron and exposed brick: old bird cages hanging from hooks and fruit crates full of curiosities nailed to the walls.

“It’s nice to see you again,” says Rowan, and means it. “I know ‘nice’ is one of those utility words, but it fits here. This is nice.”

Sumaira looks at him over the top of her huge, square spectacles. She’s somewhere in her thirties: tall, with highlighted brown hair cut too short at the front. She wears a fluffy V-necked jumper and a long black skirt with plum-coloured court shoes. She was wearing a designer Duffel coat when she arrived; rain sparkling on the cerise fur trim around the hood. Her cheeks had been flushed, her nose pink from the glacial air. She’d seemed unusually nervous for an experienced copper, as if this was a date she had been looking forward to for some time. She’d kissed his cheek and commiserated about his hands, informing him that the bastards would no doubt get what was coming to them on the inside. Rowan doesn’t doubt it. Arrangements have already been made.

“Nice?” she smiles, and pushes her hair behind her ear. “Yeah, you’re right. I don’t tell people that very often, so enjoy it.”

“I’ll make a note.”

“It’ll have to be a voice memo,” says Sumaira, nodding at his hands. Rowan looks away before his expression betrays him. His phone is on the table between them, serving as a decoy. On his thigh, his voice recorder is taking down every word.

“So,” he begins. “I was wondering …,”

“You never called me,” she says, abruptly. She glares at him, eyes wide, seeking explanation or apology. “I thought we got on.”

“We did,” says Rowan. “But I was seeing somebody.”

“So was I,” laughs Sumaira. “I’m not any more. Well, maybe a bit. There’s a thing with my builder that might become something. Maybe not. What about you?”

“I continue to attract women who deserve better,” mutters Rowan, performing mental arithmetic as he tries to decide if he can afford another double whisky. “Roxanne was the girl I was seeing when you and I met. She’s with somebody else now.”

“Love’s a bastard,” says Sumaira, and seems to mean it. “You must have been sweet on her – you never called me back.”

Rowan shrugs. “Maybe I was. I’ve never worked it out. I mean, she was lovely to look at and she knew how to keep me from coming unglued, but if I’m honest, we weren’t a neat fit. She wanted more for me. Or more for her, maybe.”

Sumaira pretends to play a tiny violin. “Tried to fix you, did she?”

Rowan drains his glass and allows himself to consider his latest failed love affair. He sits back in his seat. “It’s nice to have somebody on your side, but she always made it seem like we were a work in progress. Or I was, at least. Like I was a house that needed fixing up but the budget had got out of hand. She kept me right, I guess. Made sure I met my deadlines and went to work and didn’t drink so much that I couldn’t remember the stories I’d wheedled out of people in the pub. At least she made it look as though somebody loved me.” He gestures at himself, bitterly. “I didn’t look like this.”

“You look like you,” says Sumaira, casting a critical eye. “That’s how you’re meant to look, I think. And if I’m honest with you, she wasn’t doing that great a job of keeping you right when I met you. There was a haze of drink coming off you and I don’t think you had a pupil in either eyeball. If you were dating a mother-figure then I reckon you had a case for neglect.”

Rowan finds himself laughing. “I don’t think I was doing that,” he protests. “She was younger than me, anyway. And I didn’t like all that housewife stuff she wanted to do. I paid for a cleaner so she wouldn’t have to pick up after me.”

“You could always have picked up after yourself,” smiles Sumaira, with a grin. “Sounds to me like you don’t know what you want. You’re a Romantic, maybe. See the shine on somebody for a few weeks or months and then you start seeing the rotten wood beneath. I know your type, I reckon. You gave away a lot about yourself in the book. You can tell that it hurts you when bad things happen to good people, but then you identify so strongly with the bad. I reckon you spend most days unsure of whether you’re the best thing since the Rampant Rabbit, or you’re the AntiChrist.”

Rowan chews his lip, biting back a smile. “You should be a copper,” he says, and realises how much he is enjoying her company.

“I think I know what you’re looking into,” says Sumaira, reaching into her bag and pulling out a slim, buff folder: a magician’s puzzle of conjoined rings staining the front. “Truth be told, I’ve been waiting for somebody to ask me about this one but it seems there are even fewer investigative journalists out there than there are decent detectives, so maybe I should just be grateful somebody’s taken an interest. I wouldn’t have had it to hand but I’d already dug it out for a Freedom of Information request – not that it ever went anywhere.”

Rowan angles his leg, raising the dictaphone. “Somebody else is interested?”

There is a clatter as Sumaira’s shoe drops from her toe and lands on the floor between them. She smiles. “Worrying you’ve got a competitor?” she asks. “Don’t be. Private citizen, not rival writer, though apparently she’s got ambitions in that area?”

“Yes?” asks Rowan, aiming for nonchalance. “Are you able to tell me?”

Sumaira shakes her head. “No, of course not. That would be an appalling breach of confidentiality. But it’s a Ms V Sheehan. Requested the information through the correct channels in July of last year. A standard letter was sent back while we performed due diligence on the request. God they’re a pain in the arse. Anyway, the two files were linked.”

“Violet,” says Rowan, quietly. He locks eyes with Sumaira. “Explain it to me like I’m an idiot. Explain like you would to a six-year-old child off his tits on Calpol.”

Sumaira lets out another laugh. “In July last year, an FoI request was made…,” she stops, and adopts a school ma’am tone. “That’s the Freedom of Information Act and the Environmental Information Regulations, under which you have a right to request any recorded information held by a public authority, such as a government department, local council or state school. Or us. While searching out the information on an incident in 1991, we found the files cross-referenced in both hard copy and on the database, with a case that had been put forward for Cold Case Review when I first moved North. As it happened, we took a look and realised there weren’t the resources to take it forward but we intended to keep a watching brief.”

“I know this one,” says Rowan. “A watching brief is where you do bugger all, yes?”

“Precisely,” says Sumaira, brightly. “Now, the case this person was linked to, well, that had a connection to the Silver Birch Academy. I know you know all about that place.”

“Go on,” prompts Rowan, quickly.

“Three teenagers were reported missing on October 28, 1991. They were all pupils at the Silver Birch Academy. Went to Keswick on a shopping trip and didn’t get the bus they were expected on. The dad of one of the girls went looking when they didn’t come home. So did the house master at the accommodation. They couldn’t find them. Eventually, they called us. It didn’t take long to rustle up some witnesses. As it transpired, they’d met a bad-lad – some busker in the subway near the pitch-and-putt. For some nice privately-educated girls he must have been irresistible, don’t you think? Anyway, they went with him. Gone for some heavy duty partying in the woods. We think they got pissed, fooled around, and took what sounds a lot like magic mushrooms. Best couple of days of their life by the sounds of it, though that’s not in the file. Mountain Rescue found them in the end. They were in a bit of a state but that’s hardly surprising. From the file it’s clear there was some concern about sexual assault because they were found wearing not very much in the way of clothing.” She glances at the file, double checking. “Covered in body-paint too. Sounds like they had themselves a proper little festival.”

“You have to elaborate, Sumaira.”

“I like the way you say my name,” she smiles, and looks back at the file. “There’s no forensics held on file because it never went that far but there are some old photos somewhere. All I’ve got here is the image description. It says ‘runic symbols’ on back of vic 1 and ‘possible blood-spattering’ to vic 2, though by the time they got to the nearest cop-shop that was all pretty much gone. Rain was coming down like a sea.”

“Runic?” muses Rowan. “That could be anything.”

“Yes, it could.”

Rowan glances towards the lake. “Three girls missing, two found. What does it say about that? What did the girls say when it all calmed down?”

Sumaira spreads her hands, apologetically. “There are a couple of handwritten notes from the senior investigating officer. She stood down the Mountain rescue team after the two girls were discovered, so she must have been in possession of information that the other one was safe. Maybe she toddled off home before the others. It doesn’t say. It’s crap record-keeping but it’s also from a time before computers ensured we can’t chew our toenails at our desks without having to log it.”

Rowan winces. “It sounds iffy, Sumaira. I’ve heard rumours that she was never found. That she’s at the bottom of Wast Water.”

“We’ve already found the people at the bottom of Wast Water,” says Sumaira, checking her teeth in the reflection of her knife. “It’s a huge spot for divers. Did you know there’s a garden of gnomes down there? Divers put them out for a laugh. There’s no bugger else down there.”

“Did it lead to any convictions?” asks Rowan, hopefully. “This busker – he must have been in line for more than a slapped backside.”

“No follow-up worth the name,” says Sumaira, sitting back. She looks around for the waiter, seeking food and drink and a chance to talk about something less depressing. “It seems there was a bit of pressure to sweep it under the rug. It was probably a bit embarrassing for the parents – people thinking your kid’s been abducted then finding out they’ve just been partying their brains out. The file’s pretty thin. The statements given show they don’t remember very much besides the busker they met in Keswick, and some weird ramblings about a medicine man, or somesuch.”

“The Medicine Man?” asks Rowan, and immediately imagines pitching the name to a news editor. “You’re sure?”

Sumaira opens the file and flicks through the sheaf of papers. “Shaman, that was it. Like I say, the statement’s a bit of a mess. This is the bad old days, remember. Not exactly softly-softly, and as for the record keeping….we can’t even find the third girl’s statement. The file’s a disgrace. CID talk about Eve Cater like she’s this legend, but she must have been having an off-day when it came to putting in the paperwork.”

Rowan sits quietly. Waits for more.

“The girls were pupils at Silver Birch Academy,” says Sumaira, looking around for Jez and indicating an increasing readiness for more food. “Holistic, hippy-drippy school that closed years back. Well, a statement was taken at the time from a few of the pupils, staff, the pastoral team. It was privately owned, you see, and I think the men it belonged to, well they were very keen to get things sorted swiftly. There’s a letter in the file from solicitors representing owners Alan Rideal and Phillip Tunstall, written a few days after it all happened, saying very complimentary things about our sainted Eve.”

“Indeed?”

“Well, as it happens, both of those names were familiar to me, as they’d both been named in a briefing document I’d been shown when I joined CCRU. Missing persons report, made October 1988. One Arthur Sixpence.”

“Fuck off,” snorts Rowan. “That’s not his name.”

“No,” grins Sumaira. “Not originally. He was probably a Bob Smith to begin with but he changed it both colloquially and legally so many times we can’t actually trace him back to his origins. He was Arthur Sixpence when he went missing, so that’s what’s on the file. Anyway, it wasn’t much of a case. Sixpence was this eccentric old boy who did odd jobs and a bit of happy-clappy yoga and stuff at the school. He lived in the grounds, which can’t be bad as it’s a lovely spot there by the lake. He had a camper in the woods. Kept himself to himself, as the best ones always do. No sign of him for a few days, so the police get called in. There’s a bit of a scare for everybody when blood is found by a sniffer dog not far from his cabin, but it seems the coppers at the time weren’t too concerned because it never went much further up the ladder. Sounds like a friends in high places situation to me, and it’s hard to go back and check because the guy who bankrolled the place died in a mountain climbing accident and the school’s been sold off to a Youth Hostelling Association.”

Rowan gives thanks to the world for sending him Sumaira. She has a cab driver’s approach to discretion.

“And I’m taking it Arthur wasn’t found?” asks Rowan.

“Grown man went missing, didn’t come back,” exhales Sumaira. “It happens a lot.”

Rowan sits forward, elbows on the table. “And the owners were questioned on that, were they?”

“Not as suspects,” says Sumaira. She flicks through the file, checking a fact. “It was actually a local man who called us in. He was a friend of Arthur’s. A Mr Gordon Shell, from Nether Wasdale. God, don’t they have funny names up here?”

“He worked at the school and yet nobody had been to check on him?” frowns Rowan. “That’s a bit …,”

Sumaira suddenly looks sulky. “There’s supposed to be pudding, yes?” She turns back to him. “I’m doing all the talking here,” she says, narrowing her eyes. “You came to me about Silver Birch. Come on, what do you know? Is it one of these owners – have you found out something terrible?”

Rowan tries to look enigmatic. “I wish I could tell you but I’m not sure I know myself.” He nods at the folder. “The lady who requested that. Violet. She was remembering things about what happened. Maybe that led to her asking questions she shouldn’t have asked. I’d love to talk to her but apparently she’s away finding herself somewhere exotic, which means this line of enquiry is looking a bit dead in the water.”

“Oh yes,” smiles Sumaira, her eyes widening in delight as Jez approaches with a platter containing six tiny plates and enough dessert to cover one of them. She gives Rowan a moment’s more attention. “You should speak to Eve. I’d love to know what she has to say – especially about those friends in high places I just alluded to. She still has a personal interest in the case, that’s clear. She was on the phone as soon as we started the FoI request, suggesting oh-so-politely that we might want to leave that particular bit of paperwork near an open window on a windy day.” She shakes her head. “Formidable woman, that one, so good luck if you do go up there.”

“I’m glad you’re thinking of my personal safety.”

Sumaira frowns. “Speaking of which, you might want to check in on this lady if she’s been gone a few months and you’ve only got Facebook messages to show she’s okay. I can tell you some stories about that, believe me.”

Rowan sits back in his chair and decides he will probably enjoy watching her eat all the desserts. He gestures for her to enjoy herself and she tucks in. He wishes more coppers were like DI Barrett. She reminds him of a time when people said whatever they wanted to and then lied about it later – a time before recording devices and screenshots and a video camera in every pocket. He begins to feel nostalgic.

“This is so good,” says Sumaira. “Seriously, I’m reaching a plateau of pleasure. Do you want a taste?”

Rowan meets her smile head on. He suddenly realises that he is going to let her pay for dinner, and possibly drive him home too. She seems a thoroughly modern woman and he’s no doubt she’ll appreciate the gesture.

“Tell me,” he says, getting comfortable. “Come on. Push yourself. Tell me your secrets..” Then, with a glint: “We’ve got all night.”

14

Sunday, October 26, 1988

Yem How Wood, Wast Water

8.06am

The morning mist clings to the ground, soft as cotton. It drapes a veil upon the face of the clustered mountains which glare down into the cold, black gloom of Wast Water. Only the weakest tawny light bleeds through from the cold, vein-blue firmament behind the clouds. It puddles into the shadows and scars of Great Gable; of Kirk Fell and Yewbarrow, of Scafell Pike and Lingmell: casting tiny iridescent flecks of yellow and lilac into thick pelts of green and grey and dirty gold.

Gordon Shell doesn’t look up as he trudges long the broken path. The view is as familiar to him as his own face, and he has long since stopped thinking of that as something worthy of further study. He walks with both hands behind him, coupled at the wrist, as if wearing handcuffs. He stoops a little, but it’s the effect of habit rather than old age. He’s spent his life here, in this wet, quiet valley, secreted away between the mountains and the sea. It’s a panorama of ridges and peaty holes, harsh slopes, lethal drops. He has learned to watch where he puts his feet. He’s broken both ankles and one leg. Knows the shotgun crack of a femur broken clean in two. Once found a climber at the base of Nape’s Needle, his skin the colour of a duck egg and his waterproofs punctured with spears of bone.

Despite the easy familiarity of the path, there is something of a spring in the farmer’s step. He’s on his way to visit with his friend. He enjoys the old hippie’s company more than he enjoys anybody else’s. He’s not really one for friends, though he knows enough people to clutter his mantelpiece with unreciprocated cards each birthday. He has no shortage of associates; men he’s known all his life, hard-grafting Herdwick and Swaldedale men, fighting to keep their farms in profit, battling the weather, trying to live within nature and despite it. But Arthur is the first person in a long time to have actually qualified as a proper mate, like he used to have when he was at school.

He finds himself thinking about the first time he met the ragged little man, trying to ease the battered campervan through the narrowest of spaces on the little road that led up through Yem How Wood. Shell has stopped to help, once he’d explained his reason for being there. He was going to be working at the posh school – a caretaker of sorts. He’d been offered a room indoors but preferred the more familiar space of his cramped, sagging motorhome. Shell had talked him through the trees, gauging angles and throwing out gruff commands until the creaking old vehicle had negotiated the most unlikely of routes into a little clearing surrounded by larch and rhododendron. Anybody finding it would presume it had been there before the wood was even planted.

They’d celebrated the moment with a couple of tins of strong German lager and shared a roll-up or three by the fire. That was the first time since the Sixties that Shell had sampled marijuana. It greased the wheels of their friendship, though Shell had found himself a little maudlin on the walk back to his lonely, leaky farmstead on the fell. In the years since, they have come to enjoy one another’s company. Shell finds Sixpence fascinating. He didn’t used to be sure whether he believed all of the older man’s stories but that has never stopped him enjoying them. The story about body-paint and Diana Dors in a Yurt near Stevenage has woken him in fits of laughter on more than one occasion. But for all his skills as a raconteur, it’s his spirit that fascinated Shell. There’s something about him; some strange elemental peace. He can understand why the women in Gosforth, in Seascale, in Whitehaven and Workington, all fall over themselves to keep him warm and fed. There’s a charm to him, but it’s more than that. He gives out a warmth; a gentleness, a sense of peace. In a different time, Shell imagines that men would have followed him. Others, fuelled by fear, would have persecuted him. He still hasn’t made up his mind whether he thinks of him as a wizard or Jesus.

Shell pushes through the trees, following the familiar path. He watches where he places his feet. His grandfather was a youngster when Steadfast Hookson sunk his exploratory mining shafts into the land here, honeycombing the earth in search of copper and tin. He found nothing of any use; just a network of tunnels and caves that looked set to cave in if any of the geologists or black-faced miners did so much as sneeze. He’d filled in the holes and let the woods grow back, but there had been plenty of times over the past hundred years when the earth had given way and the older trees had sunk into the earth as if being devoured. He’d warned Sixpence about it as he manoeuvred his campervan through the trees.

“Riddled with it,” he’ said, nodding at the tangle of trees obscuring the gently sloping ground. “Kids used to come up here looking for the entrance to some of the old shafts. Cavers too. We had a load of posh boys from university stomping around trying to find holes to crawl into before your new boss bought the building. Never understood it myself. Hobby for a dog, isn’t it? Going scurrying about in holes…”

Sixpence had listened, head cocked, letting information sink into him like rain into soft earth. Then he’d spoken, softly, earnestly, his face half obscured by the thick exhalation of smoke.

“There’s a place in Siberia. They call it the White Shaman cave. It was the home of the Khakas people. Mongolian descent. Pagan, if such a word can be used. They practised animal sacrifice. Human sacrifice. There are stalactites taller than a man, surrounding an altar on which there are still bones. That’s where the shamans of the past performed their rituals. Some people say that it has absorbed the energies of these ancient healers. That it has a dark power. I heard a story when I was in St Petersburg. A group of students decided to explore. 20 young men and women went beneath the ground. Two returned. One was completely insane. She spent the rest of her life in a psychiatric ward. The other was found nearby, her hair turned grey, holding a little stone figurine. She was dead within a month. Nobody’s been back. I’m rather tempted, if I’m honest with you. I’d like to feel those energies. I don’t believe they can be a force for darkness. All energy can be used for good. If you’d permit me, I’d be glad to journey with you. There are pieces of you missing, I can see that. There used to be pieces of me missing too. Then I found my path …,”

If anybody had told Shell that he would have listened to the little man’s story with anything other than scorn, he would have dismissed the notion. But there had been something about the way in which he spoke of his beliefs. Something that spoke of a knowledge of things that normal people could only dream of. Shell had listened. He had never allowed Sixpence to perform any of his healing techniques upon him, but he had enjoyed hearing about those who did. About the rich men and women who paid the bosses at the posh school for a chance to spend time in the woods with the strange little man as he banged his drum ad sang his songs and surfed on their energies like a a bird riding a thermal. He’s seen him in his full costume, a gift from medicine men in Peru who had shown him how to brew the potions that helped them to cross over. The mask was a thing of beauty and horror; a ragged leather patchwork of different shades of brown, stitched and twisted into something resembling a wild boar – yellowing tusks forming a portcullis around an open, snarling mouth. “Is it real pig-leather?” Shell had asked. Sixpence just smiled, and told him that some questions were best left unanswered.

Shell listens out for the tell-tale signs of life coming from Sixpence’s clearing. He has no doubt he’ll be awake. He sleeps outside most nights and generally wakes with the sunrise. He invariably gives the inside of the campervan to his guests. He’s had no shortage of people staying with him during the years he’s been Shell’s friend. Some are not dissimilar to Sixpence in appearance; ragged troubadours in tie-dye and Doc Martens, following old lay lines and footpaths on their personal pilgrimages to wherever the spirits have told them to go. But others have surprised Shell. Well-to-do ladies, barefoot in skimpy white dresses. Handsome, well-dressed men squatting by the fireside with tears in their eyes and a joint between their lips. Children too. Wild-eyed, half-feral creatures, squatting on the steps to the camper; meditating, cross-legged, giving their face to the first rays of the sun or helping stretch soft leather over a circular frame to make the drums which beat out the rhythms of a world Shell does not claim to understand.

He moves through the archway form by the two fallen trees, and stops. Tunstall and Rideal, the two men from the posh school, are sitting by the remains of Sixpence’s fire. There is no smoke. The wood has burned Bible-black. Tunstall has his head in his hands as if praying. Opposite him, Rideal rakes, nervously, through the crumbling remains of the fire. Shell realises he should speak. Should cough or whistle to announce his presence. Instead he stands still. There is something about the postures of the two men that make him feel his presence would be unwelcome. He cocks his head and listens as the two men speak in short, angry bursts.

“…moved on, Alan. That’s what he does. That’s what he is. He’s stayed still longer than we ever expected. It doesn’t mean anything.”

“You’re telling yourself that because you want to believe it. But he would have said goodbye. And he likes it here. Likes what we do. He believes in this.”

“Times are changing. You know we’re going to have to change with them. We’re going to have a proper curriculum. Proper tests. A roll-call of pupils, paying agreed fees….,”

“That wasn’t what we set out to do.”

“But it’s what we have to do now.”

“He wouldn’t leave for that. And not without saying goodbye.”

“Oh God man, he was never our friend. What do we really know about him anyway? I let you have him here because he looks the part and because his bullshit helps pay the bills but the education authority was never going to let this carry on indefinitely. A bloody shaman? Having pupils to stay? Residential soul-retrievals for damaged children? Look where that got us.”

“He did his best. That boy was damaged beyond repair. And Pearl blames him. You heard what he said.”

“That problem was put to bed. That’s over. He’s just gone. We don’t need to make a fuss…,”

“He’s left everything. His books. His crystals. Even his maps. What if he fell into the lake? Or the mineshafts. You know how obsessive he could get – all that nonsense about the Siberian caves – out here at all hours looking for holes into the earth. We can’t just act like he didn’t exist …”

Shell has heard enough. He clears his throat: a noise like a rutting stag in the still morning air. Steps into the clearing. The two men swivel towards him, startled, guilty. Rideal even looks afraid.

“I was looking for Arthur,” he says, gruffly. He doesn’t know if he wants them to know that he has heard.

“Ah, Mr Shell,” begins Rideal, stammering. “We were actually looking for him ourselves. But you know these travellers – they don’t stay still for ever …,”

Shell is about to reply when something glimpsed out of the corner of his eye gives him pause. A little way from the fire is a jagged rock, sparkling with a rusty metal ore. Its point is sharp, like a tooth. Its tip is crowned with a thick, viscose red. Shell moves towards it and the two men follow his gaze. Shell squats down. Two fat flies rise up, sated and red. Shell angles his head. He sees a long grey hair tangled around the rock like the severed rope of an abseiler.

He turns to the two men, his expression brooking no argument.

“Call the police,” he says. “Now.”

15

Rowan finds himself giving quiet thanks for the absence of mirrors in Bilberry Byre. He’s laid out on the cobbled floor of the living room, not quite naked but a long way from dressed – mildly indecent in leather gloves and solitary black sock. A snipped tie-wrap handcuff hangs from one wrist and he feels like there may be a bite-mark on his eyebrow. He has the dazed, sore look of somebody who has been run over, and enjoyed it.

“Don’t get up,” whispers Sumaira, putting her spectacles back on and blowing him a kiss from the doorway. She’s immaculate. “I didn’t want to wake you. You looked very sweet like that. What do you call that painting by Da Vinci? With the arms and legs sticking out? You look like that. Well, that or a starfish, any way.”

Rowan wiggles upright, self-conscious. The only light in the room comes from the smouldering coals in the grate but they are enough to illuminate a scene of disarray in the small, cramped living room. They’ve broken the sofa, knocked a series of Coniston slate pictures from the wall and the contents of the log basket and fire bucket are scattered across the cobbles, interspersed with splinters of broken crockery. He isn’t sure whether the sharp, scratchy pain in his back is smashed glass or Sumaira’s fingernails, embedded in his skin like a cat’s claws left in a tree.

“I wasn’t expecting any of this,” begins Rowan, unsure what tone to take. “I don’t want you thinking I’m trying to romance information out of you …,”

Sumaira gives him a grin. “Rowan, I’m a Detective Inspector. I’m not some giggly girl. I do what I choose to do and tonight, I chose to have a lovely time.”

“Lovely?” asks Rowan, reaching out for his shirt and finding that it only has one button left. “Are we using the word ‘lovely?’”

“You’re the writer – you can find something more suitable if you’d prefer. Anyway, I have to be off. My fella’s been texting since midnight.”

Rowan raises his eyebrows. “Fella?”

“Don’t worry your pretty head,” grins Sumaira. “And look, I don’t know what you’re writing or where you’re taking it but do try and be the best version of yourself about all this.”

Rowan sits up. “And that means what?”

“People do get hurt, Rowan,” says Sumaira, squatting down in front of him. She’s reapplied make-up and sprayed perfume but she still gives off a trace of sweat and sex that comes dangerously close to reviving him. “Not all secrets are desperate to be dragged into the light, that’s all. And maybe, if you’re going to tear anybody’s life apart, you should ask that person whether they mind. This Violet, she’s obviously working through some stuff. Perhaps that’s private.”

Rowan swallows. Resists the urge to say anything clever.

“I think it might be better if this was a one-time deal,” says Sumaira, gently. “I mean, you’re fun and I like you but you seem a bit needy, if I’m honest. A bit vulnerable. But I’d love it if we could be friends. You get your rest, yeah? It’s been a blast.”

Rowan doesn’t give in to the laughter until the door has closed and he hears her footsteps fade away down the path. Then he drags himself upright, and winces himself into dark trousers, round-neck T-shirt and a baggy black cardigan. He pops two of his painkillers from the dimple packet and knocks them back with the last dregs of a whisky he can’t actually remember pouring them when they arrived back at the little cottage. He checks the clock on the mantle. 1.24am. He could sleep, he’s no doubt about that, but it feels like wasted time. Clumsily, he fills the kettle and sets about trying to make himself a cafetiere with the posh coffee. As the kettle boils, he listens back to the voice recordings. His thoughts start to speed up: an athlete finding their rhythm on a treadmill. He pours the coffee and moves to his favoured position, on sentry duty in the entryway, door half closed behind him.

It’s a cold, squally night, but there’s a decent sized moon and the clouds, so constant during the day, have unlaced their feathery edges to allow a glimpse of the stars. He angles his head towards the fell. There is dead bracken on the lower slopes of Scafell. In this light it has the appearance of an old bloodstain: coppery splatters upon woollen sheets.

“Right, just get it over with,” mutters Rowan, sliding off the gloves, teeth bared, trying not to squeal as the new skin tugs against the old wounds. He blows on the exposed fingers, turning the livid pink skin this way and that in the cold air. He spares a moment’s thought for the prick who did it. The internet troll who called himself @h8crimez is on remand in a wing of Hull Prison, awaiting trial. So far, nobody has hurt him, though all Rowan has to do it give the word. He knows a couple of the wardens and half a dozen of the inmates and it wouldn’t take more than a phonecall for @h8crimez to get a mug of boiling sugar-water poured slowly over every millimetre of his sensitive parts. Rowan doesn’t know why he’s holding back. He’s hate to think it were some sense of empathy: some whiff of compassion for wannabe who got in over his head and ended up with a terrible choice to make.

For half an hour, Rowan sits in the doorway and drinks his coffee, his fingers hurting less as he dictates a few e-mails to people he has been neglecting. He apologises wholeheartedly to Matti, his agent, and gives him a masterfully vague precis of what he’s working on. He provides a snippet of interview transcript: 30 seconds of Sumaira bitching about poor record-keeping in the bad old days and being pressured by Eve Cater to lose the FoI request. He doesn’t know if he’ll include the snippet in the finished work, because he’s no idea what the finished work will be, but he’s no doubt that Matti will be suitably wooed. Next he contacts the assistant producer on the TV show that dispensed with his services in favour of a soap star. He keeps it light and friendly: dresses it up as an opportunity for them to have first refusal on a ‘global exclusive’ he’s been working on since last they spoke. He copies the text and sends the same exclusive offer to half a dozen other producers and the news desk at ITV, Channel 4 and Sky. He can’t bring himself to offer it to the BBC. They always ask too many questions.

When he’s done, he begins working through his mental checklist. He knows he needs to speak to eve Cater, that much is certain, and he’d like to know a lot more about Derrick Millward. More importantly, he wants the Silver Birch pupils on his side. With Violet on her travels, he has to hope that Catherine will be keen to talk. He’ll get to that at the book group. He doesn’t want to start looking for Freya until he knows a little more and he has yet to truly make up his mind what he hopes will be the outcome of his search. He can’t help thinking it would make for a far better story if she were dead, and while he knows this makes him a good journalist, he accepts that it makes him a somewhat terrible human being. In the meantime, Alan Tunstall has to be worth giving a gentle nudge. He’ll be an old boy by now but he was present when his business partner went missing, when the caretaker vanished from the grounds and when three of his pupils disappeared for a weekend. That makes him more than interesting to Rowan – it makes him positively entrancing.

“Tell me all about yourself,” mutters Rowan, a pen between his teeth, as he settles on the sofa in front of his laptop. Somewhere, he can hear a robin singing. Further on, a herd of chunky Swaledales have drifted into a bare, soggy field. At least two of the sheep appear to have a smoker’s cough and Rowan keeps jumping, abruptly, as he hears the wet hacking sound.

It doesn’t take long for Rowan to get an address for Tunstall. He’s 80 now, and still lives at Bleng Hall, Nether Wasdale. Rowan performs a search on two real estate sites and cross-checks with the Land Registry. He’s lived in the property since 1986, when it was transferred into private ownership by the Whitecross Trust, along with a large parcel of private woodland to the rear of the property that once formed the Silver Birch Academy.

“Nice perks,” mutters Rowan, pleased with the discovery. He puts the address into the search engine and finds several images. Some are in black and white and linked to newspaper archives – others more recent and the captions are full of architectural terms fawned over by readers of magazines delivered free to homes of distinction. He clicks his tongue against the roof of his mouth and selects an image at random. He’s confronted with an image of a large, white-painted manor house: Georgian in origin and style: green paint around the sills and frames and doors. He flicks through the accompanying images. High ceilings, solid oak floors; a ballroom with timbered ceiling and cruise-liner chandeliers. He flicks through the remaining images with a scowl on his face. He’d quite liked the sound of Tunstall from his farewell speech to the papers. He’d sounded genuine in his belief in a new way to educate the masses. There’s something about seeing the excessive luxury of his home that makes Rowan instantly disbelieve his motives. He likes his heroes to suffer.

“…. built by Steadfast Hookson in 1823,” reads Rowan, shivering suddenly, as he realises for the first time that he’s cold, and tired too. “I know that name …,”

Rowan nods as he swallows down the details of the article, which appeared in Country Living Lakeland in 2009. The text made no mention of the occupants but did say that the ‘long-term residents’ had attempted to stay true to the original spirit of the house, which was built as a companion to the larger property at nearby Wast Water.

“Steadfast Hookson,” mutters Rowan, stifling a yawn. “Built Silver Birch Lodge in 1851 having grown wealthy in his native West Yorkshire trading in ores and textiles. Bought in to mining concerns in Eskdale, Wasdale, Borrowdale…helped fund the Ravenglass Railway and pay for the upkeep of three local churches… Victorian philanthropist, died in 1890, leaving the last of his fortune to notable good causes.” Rowan stops, scowling. “Sounds too good to be true.”.

He flicks the cursor over to Facebook and checks whether Violet has left another clue as to her current whereabouts. Sure enough, there’s an image on her timeline – a dainty mandala framing a silhouette of a blissed-out woman in a yoga pose. The accompanying caption states that she’s having the ‘best time ever’ in Rishikhesh, Uttarakhand, in the foothills of the Himalayas. Rowan licks his lips, as he types a simple reply.

I’ve got friends there – message me and I’ll hook you up.

He smiles as he closes the screen.

He reaches out and pulls himself up by the door-jamb, barely heeding the pain in his palm. His head feels suddenly over-full; as if names and dates and addresses are going to start spilling out his ears. He needs to rein himself in – not let things get too big. Three missing girls. That’s the centre of it. Two came back. What the hell happened to the other? Maybe Violet’s looking for her. Maybe she’s found her and they’re busy chatting about the old times, when they were all kidnapped by a serial killer. Maybe she’s presently in mortal danger and his search for her will lead him bank into the good graces of his publishers and his bank account back into the black.

As he climbs the rickety stairs to bed, he gives another thanks for the absence of a mirror. He isn’t sure he could look himself in the eye.

16

Tuesday, October 28, 1988

Silver Birch Academy, Wasdale Valley

2.20pm

Violet stands at the water’s edge. She feels empty. Weightless. Her whole being seems insubstantial, as if it is resolve alone that stops her from disintegrating into protons and particles to be disseminated by the breeze. She considers this. Thinks of spores and bees. Decides she would like to be a part of a swarm; a speck in a shared consciousness. Would like to become nothing more than energy; cosmic vapour wafting into and out of trees and stones and raindrops. A pleasing thought dances through her mind. Perhaps she could become a sensation. An impulse. She would like to become a moment of somebody else’s consciousness; her entire essence distilled into a stranger’s unbidden sense of joy. The picture makes her smile. She imagines herself as vapour, fleetingly inhaled. Mr Sixpence will be pleased that she was paying attention as he spoke, so softly, about the lower world; about what lay beyond the veil.

The thought saddens her. They say that he’s moved on. They say that he’s been hurt. Elora says he’s gone down into the dark world beyond our own and now exists entirely as energy, but Elora has a tendency to talk in riddles and bollocks. Either way, she’ll miss him. He always tolerated her without it seeming like an effort. And he was interesting. Saw things in her that nobody else saw.

“You’re the one they call Ultra, yes?”

Violet turns away from the great mirrored bowl of the lake. Looks back up towards the school. It’s a view she knows well, and today, with the soft rain drifting in from the east, the old building looks almost ghostly as it peers out from the ragged fringe of trees. Violet’s 12 now but looks older. She’s tall and well-proportioned; her eyes bright, her smile ever so slightly disdainful in its half-hearted curl. She’s womanish in her baggy, pyjama-like top and trousers, her hair pulled back into a ponytail that exposes an elegant neck. .

“Ultra, yes? That can’t be right, can it? Here, love, help me out ….”

Violet looks away from the water and into the unreadable face of a woman who appears to be modelled after a fertility icon: an earth mother baked in clay. She’s small and smooth-edged, a sketch composed entirely ovals and curves and circles. She’s dressed in a suede bolero jacket, unzipped, which exposes an inflatable mattress of belly-fat beneath her cream, cable-knit jumper. Her glasses are the same slightly ovoid shape as the face on which they sit – poorly maintained brown hair piled atop her head like shaving foam upon a palm. There’s something about her face that makes Violet think of goblins. Her eyes are sunken and her cheeks seem to stick out too far as she talks, making her glasses twitch up and down almost of their own volition.

“It’s Violet,” she corrects her, stepping forward and putting out a hand to be shaken. The little woman seems to appreciate the gesture. Her hand in Violet’s is plump and warm, the nails bitten down and ringless.

“And you get ‘Ultra’ from ultra-violet, yes?” asks the woman, one cheek twitching with a strange, lopsided smile. “Could be worse. I’m Eve. Evelyn, to be precise. I’m a Detective Sergeant, and I’m a bit lost. Do you think you might be able to spare me a moment or two?”

Behind her back, Violet makes fists. “Me? Yes, yes, of course. Um. Where you going?”

“Right now, nowhere. Bit steep that walk, innit? Thought I’d join you here for bit of a skive.”

“A skive?”

“Bunking off. Truanting. Twagging, as they say in Yorkshire. I’m supposed to be taking statements but I’ve got two decent constables who can do the job for me, which means I get the chance to go stare at the view and hope that the clouds shift.”

Violet can’t seem to make herself smile. She’s agitated. Twitchy. She tries to concentrate on her breathing but the imp in her chest won’t let her be still. She feels hyper: revved up, as if about to run a race or jump from a too-high branch. She’s known since yesterday morning that there would be questions – people in uniforms with notepads and serious faces, wanting her to be as helpful as she can be.

“You know why we’re here?” asks Eve, her hands in the pockets of her coat. She looks clammy, despite the cold of the day.

“Mr Sixpence?”

Eve nods, satisfied with the answer. Behind her, she can see two tall figures, blue as the hydrangeas in the conservatory up at the dorm. She can make out the distant figures of Mr Tunstall and Mr Rideal, busy noising around the two police officers like sheep at feeding time. Violet can imagine the differing ways in which the school’s two most senior figures are dealing with the disruption to the usual school day. Can picture Mr Tunstall, calm and orderly, insisting that there is nothing to be alarmed about: voice smooth as molasses. Rideal will be squirming. Rubbing those big pale hands together, steepling his pale, pointed fingers, slicking back his brilliantine black hair to better pronounce the sharp widow’s peak. He looks like the oil paintings in the Library. Looks just like the men in his family who came before – who owned this chunk of the valley and who called themselves ‘squire’. There are issues between the two of them – arguments about the direction the school is heading in; about whether to expand, to formalise the Silver Birch philosophy; to turn the neighbouring accommodation building into another wing of the school and to apply for permission to build new dormitories for an increased catchment.

“Heck of a name,” smiles Eve.

“Apparently it wasn’t always his name,” confides Violet, quietly. “I heard he used to be something important but he gave all that up to live in his bus and catch squirrels and talk about weird stuff. He knows a lot about crystals. He’s interesting.”

Eve pauses, appearing to be trying to work something free from a back molar with her tongue. She pushes a small, stubby finger behind her spectacles and wipes the glass.

“You know Mr Sixpence well?” she asks, when she’s finished.

“Nobody knows him that well,” says Violet, honestly. “He gives assemblies sometimes and if one of the regular teachers is ill he’ll come and monitor but we tend to see him more when we’re in the grounds. He looks after things. He talks to you if he sees you or if you ask him something. Some people are a bit mean about him, but I’m not. Honest.”

“Mr Rideal hasn’t been able to tell me very much about his actual duties,” says Eve. “Did I understand correctly – he’s like a sort of guidance counsellor here too? Is that right? I don’t know the phrase.”

“He’s just Mr Sixpence,” says Violet and she becomes aware of an unpleasant, prickling sensation in the air. “I think he makes drums when he’s not doing other stuff. I’ve seen him stretching skins out on this circular frame outside his bus. He kills rabbits with a slingshot. Do you know what a slingshot is? He’s really good with it, apparently. I don’t think he likes killing things though. He looks a bit sad, sometimes. Maybe not. Um …,”

“Going to be a storm,” says Eve, looking up. She licks a finger and holds it up. “You can feel it, I bet. Hair like that, I can imagine it standing on like you’ve rubbed it with a balloon. Always gets me in my fillings. Sizzles, like sausages in a pan. One of my first jobs as a copper was guarding the body of a poor roofer who’d been hit by lightning. There was still smoke coming out of his ears and the leather around his steel-toed boots has peeled back like skin.”

Violet wonders if this is normal behaviour for the small police woman; whether she is in the habit of sharing grisly anecdotes with 12-year-old schoolgirls.

“When did you last see him?” asks Eve, without making any attempt to produce a notepad.

“Mr Sixpence? It was about a week before Hallow’en. I know he wasn’t here by then because he’s normally the one who helps make the pumpkin lanterns and we all have to keep the seeds for him. It was Mr Tunstall who oversaw that this year. So the time I saw him before that will have been the last time, if that makes sense.”

“And where was that?”

“Just in the woods,” says Violet, weakly. “There’s a spot I like to go – it’s quiet and there are rhododendron bushes where I’ve seen a red fox slinking about. I just sit on the log and read my book until I get cold and then it’s time to head back to the dorm, or to Catherine’s – wherever I’m going.”

“That’s Catherine Marlish, yes?”

“The vicar’s daughter – my best friend,” confirms Violet. “I don’t mind staying at the dorm – I mean, it’s a gorgeous big house and everything, but I prefer it at Catherine’s. I don’t really have any other friends at the boarding house.”

“I’m sorry to hear that,” says Eve, and appears to mean it. She leans in, two old pals having a gossip. “Truth be told, it must be hard to find a good pal in a place like this. All a bit stuck-up, don’t you think? I dunno, they just seem to act like they’ve got all the answers and everybody else is not much more than a lump of nothing. You’re the first normal teenager I’ve met!”

“I’m only 12,” points out Violet, as she gives in to a smile. She likes Eve immensely now.

“Bloody hell, you’d get served in most bars,” laughs Eve. “Hey, just quickly – what was Mr Sixpence up to when you saw him?”

Violet tries to keep her face neutral. This was what she had been afraid of when the message came through at breakfast. Somebody has reported Mr Sixpence missing. The police were coming to talk to staff and pupils. They had to be as honest as they could, but not worry. Everything was going to be okay. She doesn’t think she wants to tell her about the time she saw him naked and painted green, hiding in the woods while the teachers and Rev Marlish and the man with the deep voice had argued outside his cabin. That doesn’t sound great for anybody concerned. But she’s happy to tell her about the other thing she saw – the unwashed, strange-looking man she had glimpsed once before.

“He was talking to somebody,” says Violet.

“Oh yes?” asks Eve, conversationally. “Who?”

Violet looks away. “It’s ‘whom’,” says Violet, and wonders why she feels compelled to correct her. She shakes her head, angry at herself. “I’m sorry, I’m a bit all over the place today. It’s a bit of a shock. It’s sad. I’m trying to work out what I feel.”

“Don’t get your pigtails tangled,” says Eve, smiling. “And don’t worry about the ‘right’ feeling. Honestly, between you and me I reckon Mr Sixpence as you call him has got a bit sick of cutting down trees and skinning squirrels and listening to a load of rich-kid hippies whinge about getting nervous before gymkhanas. He’s a Traveller so I reckon he’s travelled on. But we have a duty to follow up on a report of a missing person, which is why I’m here, on this miserable bloody day, having this chat with you. The quicker you can help me out with something useful, the quicker I can sod off back to a nice warm office and a mug of tea. You understand, yeah?”

Violet presses her lips together in case the imp says something silly. She can feel the gathering storm. There’s a chill in the air; a purplish blackness to the sky. The air tastes somehow roasted. She wants to open her mouth, to pop her ears, but she doesn’t trust herself not to spoil this new friendship before it’s begun.

“I didn’t recognise him,” she mutters.

“Him?”

“He looked like the people you see on the news – the ones that Thatcher keeps moving on. The ones who caused all the fuss at Stonehenge. He looked like that.”

“They all look different, love,” says Eve, kindly.

“Straggly, then. Unwashed. I didn’t really see him properly at first because he was wearing a camouflage coat but he had these sort of patchwork trousers on, like Sinbad wears in those old movies. I think he’d been talking to Mr Sixpence. They looked like they could have known each other.”

“Did he see you?”

Violet shakes her head.

“Did Mr Sixpence? Does he know you and your friends? Do you spend a lot of time up there?”

Violet keeps her face inscrutable – tries to distil what is memory from what is imagination. “We all know where his bus is but we don’t go up there,” she says, brushing over the question. “There are mineshafts that you can fall down and never come out again. He gave us an assembly about that. So did Mr Rideal when he told us about the history of the two houses – the school and the dorm. Mr MacBride, he’s the head of pastoral, he always jokes that there are secret passageways and underground rooms in the old part of the house. He’s only joking though, I’m sure.”

“Were they talking, or arguing?” asks Eve, cocking her head as if trying to clear a troublesome blockage.

“Mr Sixpence doesn’t shout,” says Violet, shaking her head. “I literally saw them for a moment. It was Mr Sixpence who was doing the talking and all he was saying was that he couldn’t make it happen.” She nods, agreeing with a mental picture. “Couldn’t make it happen so it was going to have to be a no. I think that was it. The younger man, I can’t tell you anything else about him. I barely saw him.”

Eve purses her lips, her philtrum touching the tip of her nose. She sighs. “Do you see him with other people, up at that spot? Where the fox lies down in the rhododendron, you say? I should imagine a man like him would enjoy a place like that. Somewhere pretty.”

Violet shrugs and hopes it isn’t taken as a rude gesture. “He lives up there. It’s all pretty. Do you think he’ll come back – it’s just, I was hoping Mr Rideal might take me to be healed.”

Eve shoots her a look that is entirely at odds with all that has gone before. “To be healed?”

“It’s a gift he has,” explains Violet, dropping her voice. “He helps. He heals. It’s like Reiki but deeper.”

“And what’s Reiki?” asks Eve, her brow furrowing.

“You should ask Mr Rideal …,”

Eve seems to be having a conversation with herself. She sniffs, foully, and looks ready to spit. She changes her mind in deference to the company.

“Is it true?” asks Violet, suddenly. “That Mr Shell, the farmer who called you – is it true he saw blood.”

Eve licks her lips. There are wrinkles in her top lip and they seem more pronounced after she wets them with the pink tip of her tongue.

“I think you and I might be friends,” says Eve, at last. She wets her finger and holds it up, looking past Violet to where the gathering wind is whipping up shark-fins of silvery water. She watches as the fine strands of hair begin to swirl and dance upon her crown.

“Friends?” asks Violet, and her teeth feel fizzy with static.

“Oh yes,” says Eve.