Still Waters

30

St Michael and All Angels Church

December 3, 1991

8.03pm

Violet sits in the front pew, shivering. It’s colder indoors than out. She wears her bone-white exhalations like a scarf: wraith-like shapes stark against the pure black of her coat and the inky curtains of loose-hanging hair.

It’s peaceful here, in a melancholy way. It makes her think of damp Sundays at Catherine’s house: Mum and Dad gently arguing; the sour fug of boiled greens and roasting lamb; one of the weekend boarders inflicting clandestine dead legs during the ad breaks in the Grand Prix; Rev Marlish fussing with his notes for the evening sermon.

She trembles, as if somebody is blowing on her neck. Raises her eyes from the cold flagstone floor. Glances up at prayer books and psalm numbers. There’s a damp patch on the wall behind the altar. A page marker lolls from the splayed pages on a big, red-bound Bible: a tongue of silk dangling in the frigid air. Technicolour disciples gaze down from the stained glass, faces serene, halos golden. One is captured mid-blessing, his hand raised, three fingers extended. He looks like he’s asking the others if they’ve stolen his glove-puppet. The blessed onlookers seem bemused: fat angels and unfeasibly clean shepherds, shouting out a chorus of denials from the white clouds that adorn the masterful painting on the far wall. The image seems to shimmer in the pin-pricks of heat that rise from the candles, and Jesus, sat atop the mural like a fairy on a cake, looks at once beatific and sinister in the rippling air.

She tries to pray. Feels like a dick-head and stops herself. Screws up her eyes and scratches at the cold, red skin on her knees. She feels dirty. Stained, as if there’s a smudge of grease somewhere inside her that she can’t reach, no matter how hard she scrubs at herself with the black, chemical-scented soap.

Violet lowers her head. Folds her lips in on themselves and tries again. How to start? What to say? Dear God? Dear Lord? Our Father? She wants to scream, and cry and take a hammer to something beautiful.

Hello God, she mutters, her lips barely moving. It’s me. Violet. You know my friend’s dad. Um, I don’t really know how to do this. I think you wouldn’t like what I’ve been doing. What I’ve been seeing. Um, I’ve been trying to remember. To make sense of what I feel. I don’t know what to say. Um, please bless the poor. And the weak. And the hungry. Um, please bless the people who deserve it and, well, help those who don’t to become better people. If you want. I mean, just do what you’re doing, really, I’m not offering advice…

She stops, appalled at herself and feeling ridiculous. Tries again.

Is she okay, God? Freya, I mean. Nobody will talk to me about her, you see. They just want to forget. People always say that it’s better to talk about things and not bottle them up but that’s what they want me to do whenever I mention it. They want it to not have happened. But it did happen, God. You know it did. He tricked us. Made us believe he loved us. All that talk of how special we were, what we could become – all those lies about greater truths and higher selves.

Violet opens her eyes to find her vision clouded by tears. She realises she has been speaking aloud, the words gathering softly about her mouth. She feels like sucking them back in: inhaling the uttered secrets before they can be swallowed up by anybody else.

Is she alive, God? I don’t know how badly he hurt her. He hurt me, I know that. It still hurts sometimes. But I’m here. Catherine too, and somehow it seems to have all done her some good. There’s a light in her now that wasn’t there before. She won’t talk about it either. The police have made it plain – we talk and everybody finds out what happened. Everybody finds out what we did. They’ve got their own secrets to hide. I know they think we’ve got more to tell them but I promise, I don’t. All I remember is waking up on the floor, all muddy and bloody and numb. Catherine was shaking me, crying like she’d never stop. All her fingernails were gone. There was dirt all over her. And Freya was gone. He was gone. And nobody will tell me what really happened. They’re scared of something. Sometimes I think they’re scared of me ….

She suddenly realises that she doesn’t really believe anybody is listening. She’d expected as much. She’d harboured hopes that here, in the quiet and the cool of the church, she might feel something divine. That she might be filled with God’s love and to let her fears and sadnesses be washed away upon the divine flood of His love. Instead she just feels daft.

A fine, ghostly memory scuttles across her mind. She feels it as a physical thing; all gossamer and spider legs scampering across the inside of her skull.

Him.

The clearing in the woods. Cross-legged on a fallen branch, eyes closed, the sun throwing tiger stripes across his upturned, beatific features. She and Violet and Freya, naked as the dawn, heavy-lidded and languid in their ecstasy, passing the pipe between them as they daubed pretty patterns upon one another’s skin – the dry earth turning to paint as they splashed libations of aniseed-scented liquor into their palms.

She shakes her head. Raises her hand and rubs at her forehead, kneading at the tense areas above her eyebrows. The headaches have been getting worse. She feels sick more often that she doesn’t. Sometimes she can’t even raise her arms.

Amen, she mutters, and feels something inside her flare briefly, then die.

She feels a sudden breath of cold air upon her neck – a door creaking open and a gust of mountain air surging into the church as if fleeing whatever waits outside.

There is the soft click of a closing door.

Alone, in the dark, her sniffles and tears gradually become the words he taught her. She reaches into the darkness with all that she is.

Slides onto the cold flagstones as if she is made of straw.

31

10.16am

Seascale, West Cumbria

Fine rain greases the cracked tarmac beneath Rowan’s feet. Chilly air sprints in from the cliff-edge in a swirl of salt and sand, gathering up the dead leaves and the chemical stink and hurling it back inland. Rowan has only moved seven or eight miles from the lonely greenery of the valley, but this is a different world.

“Keep going,” he repeats. “You won’t think there’s a house there, but there is…,”

He hopes the nice lady in the post office in the village hadn’t been pulling his leg. Chris had managed to discover that retired Detective Chief Inspector Eve Cater lives in a clifftop bungalow just outside of Seascale. Serendipity had dropped him off in the village on her way to the appointment with the education authority – Snowdrop looking gloomy and horribly unlike herself. She’d been made to slick her hair down; to wear sensible shoes and to wipe the mismatched nail varnish from her fingers. Serendipity had squeezed herself into one of Jo’s work outfits and scraped her hair back into a n explosive ponytail. Both looked as though they were heading to a court case that could lead to the Gallows. He’d trudged around for a bit, acquainting himself with the likeably down-at-heel village on the very edge of West Cumbria. The woman who ran the little café hadn’t been able to help but she’d sent him to see Sara, who ran the post office. Rowan had run in as if out of breath. Given a Bafta-worthy performance as an exasperated man trying to follow instructions – the sat-nav in his imaginary car refusing to co-operate. How do I find Mrs Cater’s place, he’d asked, exuding a studied haplessness that always seems to bring out the maternal instincts of women of a certain age. Sara had drawn him a map and given him a free Kit-Kat to keep his strength up on the walk.

He reaches the end of the track and emerges into a wide stretch of grassy clifftop: old farm-buildings and rusty machinery spaced out erratically around a small grubby-white cottage with a sun-bleached door. The house has its back to him; its face staring out towards the nearby cliff edge - a fisherman’s wife awaiting a ship’s return. It’s a bleak, desolate place to call home but there is something about it that Rowan finds appealing. He can see himself here, writing bad poetry by lamplight, the single-glazed windows rattling in the crumbling frames; the ceaseless gale howling down the chimney to stir the ash in the grate. He’s known a lot of coppers in his life and none have chosen to spend their retirement in such a location. It’s the sort of place where Rowan can imagine a Medieval prison: some hellish stone tower perched on a promontory, the howls of the prisoners lost amid the crashing waves and the screeching gulls.

A small red car is parked a little way ahead. Rowan notices mud streaks up its side and pressed into the tread of the tyres. More mud hangs from the wheel arches, where tufts of wildflowers and a ragged fistful of grass sticks out of the space between the plastic and the metal. He glances in the dirty windows as he makes his way to the back door. A tartan blanket covers the back seat. There’s a cardboard takeaway cup in the holder and a blue binder on the passenger seat. It’s spotless on the inside.

He looks towards the house. The windows are dark and he can only see his own image reflected back, rain-streaked and distorted. He glares through himself, into the dark. Wonders if he should just turn around and go home. This is where it becomes real, he tells himself. This is where you find out whether you’re following a story or making things up.

She emerges from the gloom like an iceberg. At first she’s just a single blue light, a dot of gaudy azure, static in the darkness. Then, like an image forming on photographic paper, she becomes Evelyn Cater . Rowan finds himself being scrutinized by a small, round, elderly woman: her grey curls framing a round face. Her features are sunken, unpretty: dark eyes and a Roman nose, fleshy around the neck, as if she is sinking into herself. She’s smoking an electronic cigarette, the tip glowing bright with each drag. It casts an eerie light, a blue halo, like a police lamp, illuminating a plain round-necked sweatshirt atop a floral shirt with a twisted collar. She’s staring straight at him, her face inscrutable. Rowan suppresses a shiver. For an instant he feels like a child. Can imagine a coterie of giggling schoolchildren hidden somewhere nearby, watching as the bravest of their number knocks on the door at a witch’s cottage. He tries to make himself look innocent. Manages a smile and a roll of the eyes and an elaborate pantomime of gestures, pointing at the door and signalling that he had tried to phone, that he could just have a moment of her time, that she should think of him as a welcome presence.

She looks at him for a long while, her face completely immobile. Behind her, he glimpses a n oval mirror, hung on wire from a thick nail. Sees wallpaper patterned with feathery pink flowers – a crack running from ceiling to floor. There’s a small sideboard, doilies covering its surface like fresh snow. Pictures in frames, black and white, faded colours: all too indistinct to make out.

Rowan finds her gaze unnerving. He imagines her in the interview room, stare burning holes in a suspect. He feels like a document full of spelling mistakes being given a once-over by an editor. Wishes she would smile. Just blink, or smile.

A full thirty seconds goes by before Mrs Cater gives the slightest of nods and recedes back into the gloom. Rowan stays still, uncertain, watching the gulls and the crows fight for thermals and scraps of food in the bathwater-grey sky. He looks around at the forgotten farm buildings. The rusty iron guts of a tractor stick up like dinosaur bones in the open doorway of a red-roofed barn. Beyond, he sees shelves packed with stained tins of paint; sees wires and bulbs and a snarl of cables hanging from a metal hook. Car batteries are stacked like bricks.

He turns at the sound of a key turning in a lock. She’s standing in the doorway, one eye closed, the e-cig still wedged between her lips. She looks a bit like Popeye. She looks her age too. Beneath her jumper she’s soft and plump: clementines in a hessian bag. The lines in her face are an Ordnance Survey map of a mountain range – tight contours marking impossible peaks. When she talks, it’s clear the vaping is a recent compromise. Her throat rasps with the tell-tale roughness of a lifelong smoker.

“Before you start, I’ll be having none of it,” says Ms Cater, raising a small, plump, ringless hand.

“I’m sorry?” asks Rowan, his rehearsed opening gambit fading on his tongue. “None of what?”

“Whatever it is you’re selling,” she snaps. “If it’s pegs, I’m up to my eyeballs. If it’s insurance, I’ve got nowt valuable. I can’t have double glazing because it’s a listed building and I don’t have a clue what PPI is, although it sounds like a dirty thing to me.”

Rowan finds himself grinning. He likes her at once. “None of the above,” he says, standing on the path by the door. From behind her he can catch the smell of stale cigarettes and damp. Something else. A scent like burnt jam; acrid and sweet.

She disappears for a moment, the door swinging open invitingly. He wonders if she’s extended an invitation. Before he can move she’s back, thick bi-focal glasses sitting uncomfortably on her nose. She glares at him before her mouth twists into a harsh grimace. “I’m reading your book,” says Ms Cater, and she does not sound like a fan.

“It’s a new service,” says Rowan, trying for charm. “We’re going door to door, visiting readers, filing in any gaps in the narrative and checking you’re happy with your purchase …,”

She doesn’t smile. Lets him talk until he stops. “I wondered if we might have a chat,” he says, weakly. She has a way of leaving silences, or making him feel awkward, that he has always associated with a certain type of police officer. He has no doubt that if she pulled him over for speeding he would confess to having three bodies in the boot.

“A chat?” she asks, removing the e-cig. “Now why would you be wondering that?” Her lips smack as she talks, a sibilant shushing sound. She’s toothless, and isn’t wearing dentures.

Rowan gestures around him at the cold and the rain. “Could we maybe talk inside?” he asks. He raises his gloved hands. “I’m hiding a multitude of injuries here. I need to take my painkillers and a glass of water would be very much appreciated.”

She snorts, scornfully. “Don’t try that bollocks, lad,” she says, disappointed in him. “I’ve seen your sort in action enough times to be on my guard. Saw some prick from The Mirror rip his own trousers just so he could knock on the door of a grieving wife and ask for a needle and thread to help him cover his dignity. Stole a photo off the wall while he was alone in the doorway. It was in the paper the next day. I’d have ripped more than his trousers if it impacted on the case.”

Rowan tries to exude an air of apology – heartfelt regret at what some of his unscrupulous competitors were willing to do. Makes a mental note to stop wearing jeans and to invest in cheap polyester trousers with a rippable seam, just in case. He weighs up the likelihood of Ms Cater falling for any of his bullshit and decides to drop any pretence.

“If you’re reading my book, you’ll know a little ab out me,” he says, closing one eye to mirror her expression. “You’ll know what I do.”

“Aye,” she confirms, a tiny smile twisting her lips. “You’re good at talking to people, I’ll give you that. You got more out of Gary King than the copper who took him down, but then, all the copper could offer was a shorter life sentence. You were offering fame and fortune.”

“No fortune,” says Rowan. “He didn’t make any money.”

“But you did,” she says, and he sees her reaching for the door.

“A little,” he admits. “Not enough to compensate me for the hours spent in the company of somebody who made my flesh crawl.”

“Sounded like you got on, from what I read,” says Ms Cater.

“Rowan shrugs. “That’s the job, isn’t it? You were a copper more than thirty years. You’re telling me you’ve never been nice to a killer to get them on-side?”

Ms Cater removes her glasses, as if she’s seen enough. “Serendipity’s brother, aren’t you? Thought so. You comfortable in the Byre, are you? Christ, it comes to something when that’s where you choose to convalesce.”

“You know a lot,” says Rowan, as somewhere overhead a gull screams as if on fire. “Reading up on me, were you?”

Ms Cater nods, almost imperceptibly. She seems to be having a conversation with herself. “I’m only guessing,” she says, “but I reckon you’re here to ask me about Violet.”

Rowan chews his lip, unsure how to proceed. The recording device in his pocket is only picking up the sounds of the gale and the faintest muffle of conversation. He wants to get inside and get comfortable. He’s good at getting older ladies on-side. A few compliments, a few variations on the theme of ‘you’re never really 75 are you?” and usually it’s less than half an hour before they’re giving him everything he wants over fruit scones and loose leaf tea. Evelyn Cater doesn’t seem like a standard OAP. She looks as though she’s cracked a few kneecaps with a hammer and isn’t above doing it again. He has a vision of some crook-backed East European peasant woman, carrying twice her bodyweight in hay: a cast-iron will and bloody-minded refusal to succumb to age.

“You have her post, apparently,” says Rowan. “Rosie says you’ve been picking it up for the past few months.”

“Does she now?” replies Ms Cater.

“I’d hoped to have a chat with Violet myself,” says Rowan, keeping his eyes upon hers, even as he feels the urge to look away. “Apparently she’s been gone a good long while. Finding herself, is that right?”

She looks at him for a long moment. He feels as though he’s being weighed on a scale.

“I’mn writing a book,” :he says. “There are unanswered questions.”

“About Violet?” asks Ms Cater, suddenly scornful. “Who’s asking questions?”

“I am,” he says, and it sounds absurd to his own ears. “About what happened in 1991. When they went missing.”

Ms Cater’s face sets like concrete. She glares through him. “Fuck all happened in 1991, son,” she growls. “She and two of her mates got drunk and spent a weekend living large. Then they came home.”

“It really would be better to talk inside,” says Rowan, moving towards the door. He sees Ms Cater stiffen where she stands, and he suddenly realises that the left side of her body has remained concealed behind the wooden door since she opened it. He wonders what she’s holding. He’s been on enough rural properties to be painfully aware how easy it is to obtain a shotgun licence. Easier still for a decorated ex-cop.

“I think I’d like you to go,” says Ms Cater, flatly. “It’s not how it’s done, you see. Not here. You don’t just turn up and expect people to dance to your tune. I’ve got things to do.”

From behind her, he hears a second voice; brighter, younger. Somebody is shouting her name. Ms Cater gives a jerk with her chin. “Violet’s none of your business. There’s no story here. You’d be as well to fuck off before you get properly hurt.”

Rowan gives a bark of laughter, holding up his hands. “Carl Jung said there can be no coming to consciousness without pain.”

“Did he? Well he sounds like a prick as well.”

Rowan stands still, weighing his options. He wants her onside. He doesn’t know whether he’s played this wrong or whether she would have greeted him the same even if he’d turned up carrying flowers and cash. He feels his temper stirring, partly at the mean old bitch in the doorway but mostly at his own feckless self.

“Freya Sheehan,” he says, throwing the name out like a trump card. “We’re talking online. Violet and me are too. I’m seeing Catherine Marlish too. Lovely girl – gifted writer. If you want to get a message to Violet, just tell me, I’ll pass it on.”

Her lip curls. She looks like she wants to spit. “Leave it,” she says. “No more.”

“It’s amazing what you learn when you pull a thread,” he continues, twin points of red temper on his pale cheeks. “All the stuff that unravels. You can weave the most extraordinary tapestry of lies but one loose thread and it all comes apart. I thought you might want to make sure you were on the right side.”

She flares her nostrils as if there’s a bad smell. From behind her he can hear her name being called again. It’s friendly, a sing-song call for ‘Eve’.

“There’s no threads to pull, lad. There’s nowt to find out. Violet’s having the time of her life. Freya doesn’t need owt dragging up. Catherine’s a soppy sod but she’s doing okay. Don’t spoil it. it’s all the way it should be.”

Rowan wants her e-cig. Wants the warmth of a fireside. He doesn’t know if he can take things forward without her help. He starts thinking about the other officers named in the case. Wonders whether he can find a next of kin for Derrick Millward. If he’s buried in the Wasdale church then Catherine’s father will be bound to know. Perhaps he could leave her to stew a little and come back when he knows more. Perhaps she’s had a bad morning. Maybe she’s not always got a face that could curdle breast milk.

“I’m sorry if I’ve come at a bad time,” says Rowan, softening his demeanour. “I’m struggling for transport and your number isn’t in the book. I wouldn’t have bothered you if I didn’t have some real concerns about Violet. I don’t know if you’re on Facebook but all these posts she’s been sharing – none of them have pictures. And she made no preparations for going away. I’m told you’re good friends, so that means you know how out of character this is …,”

“No more,” says Ms Cater, holding up a hand like a traffic cop. “I’ve asked nicely. Now I’m going to tell you to fuck off.”

Rowan gives a sad smile, beaten. Nods, and the rain runs down his face. For a moment, Ms Cater’s demeanour seems to soften. Just as quickly it is gone. The door slams shut with an air of absolute finality and Rowan is left with just the damp air and the howling gale and the mournful cawing of the birds. He turns and trudges back the way he came, grinding his teeth together. He’s got a long walk back into the village and an even further walk home. He hadn’t really imagined things going wrong. He’d presumed that by now he would be sitting in a comfortable chair, sharing stories and bringing some much-needed distraction into an old lady’s life.

He looks up at the roiling clouds as he stomps past the tatty outbuildings and back into the unfinished tunnel of spiky hedges and trees. He’s offered a little protection from the wind and manages to get his phone out of his pocket without too much discomnfort to his healing skin. He’s recorded nine minutes of static and air. His heart sinks as he scrolls through his messages. Matti, his agent, has had a chat with his editor and they’re really excited about what he’s going to deliver. They really need to see some pages, and fast. Rowan growls as he dismisses the message and flicks past an unsolicited message from Snowdrop, telling him she can’t wait to hear how his chat with Ms Cater has gone. He’s considering throwing the phone at a low-flying gull when it pings in his hand. It’s a message from Violet, finally responding to his cheeky missive, sent while smoking with Pickle. It’s terse in tone, thoroughly dispiriting.

Away at moment. Peace and love.

Rowan looks back towards the cliff. Sometimes, it would be easier to just give in to the masochistic impulse. He can see himself lying smashed on the rocks below, his body undone, guts and bones a grisly sculpture across the sand. He keeps trudging on. There had been a pub in the village, hadn’t there? He’s sure he can persuade the landlord or landlady to open early. He can make good on any promise he makes about how much he intends to spend. He’s got a thirst, suddenly. Can feel a nervous prickling in his skin, like the air before a storm.

There is a sound behind him like distant thunder. He glances back and sees the little red car trundling slowly towards him over the pitted track. There’s a blonde lady at the wheel. He recognises her at once. She’d been at the writing group.

He makes a show of star-fishing himself against the hedge, sharp twigs pressing into his back. She slows down, the window sliding down. He gets a smell of bleach and lemon-scented wet wipes. Smells something a little like damp dog. She’s leaning across, her face open and friendly. He bends down to the open window, managing a weary smile. He takes a quick mental picture for later analysis. His age, near enough. Blonde hair, quiffed on top and shaved almost down to the skin at the back and sides. She’s wearing glasses, spotted with raindrops. Beneath a sensible fleece jacket he sees the bottom of a blue apron, rumpled around the thighs. At her neck is a glimpse of blue cord that disappears down into the folds of her clothes.

“She didn’t bite then?” asks the driver, grinning. “I wince when I hear the way she talks to visitors, I really do. Don’t take it personally, I’ve seen her reading your book and she was properly engrossed. Sat with it like she doing a crossword, underlining bits.”

“You don’t have to be extra nice just to compensate,” says Rowan, pretending to sulk. “Truth be told, I probably got what I deserved.”

“Was there anything I could help with?” she asks, looking genuinely keen to help. “I mean, I could sweeten her up for you if you tell me what you’re after. My name’s Vicky. Well, Vicky-Louise, actually.”

Rowan shrugs. “Rowan, like the tree. I’m not sure what I’m after. Somebody mentioned a case she’d worked on and I thought she might be able to fill in some gaps. Didn’t work out.”

“Ah,” nods Vicky, as if this was only to be expected. “Not one for talking about the past, our Eve. She’s a sweetie underneath but since she’s been on her own – well, you can imagine. The last house before the power station, moving closer to the cliff edge every year… it’s hardly going to keep your spirits up.”

“Is there nowhere more suitable?”

Vicky shakes her head. “Not a chance. She’d shoot the first bugger who suggested it.”

Rowan pretends to suddenly recognise her. “You were at the group, weren’t you? The writing group – at the posh house with the woman who sounded like Penelope Keith? You stood out. Youngest by about thirty years, I’d say.”

She rolls her eyes, tutting. “I reckon you were saying much the same to the vicar’s daughter. My mam enjoyed herself. Said you were very cheeky, but said it in a nice way.”

“You didn’t hear the talk?” asks Rowan, doing mental calculations.

“I just picked Mam up,” she says, apologetically. “She loves it. I told her for years to write her stories down but she’s doing it at last and she’s loving it. I’m always telling my old lords and ladies to get their memories down before they fade. It must be awful to have been here and nobody remember.”

He jerks his head back up the road. “I doubt you’ll get Ms Cater along to something like that,” he grumbles. “Writing is supposed to come from the heart, and I’m sensing a distinct absence of apparatus.”

The driver gives a polite smile. “You’d be surprised,” she mumbles, and the car rocks slightly as the wind catches her words.

“Sorry,” protest Rowan, cupping a hand to his ear. He notices her looking at the glove and wincing in sympathy. She already knows what happened.

“I’m Vicky,” she says, raising her voice. “Do you need a lift somewhere? I’ve got a house to do down at Ravenglass but the lady isn’t back until tea-time so it’s not a bother.”

“You have a cleaning firm?” asks Rowan, taking a guess.

“Not exactly a firm,” smiles Vicky. “But yes, I clean. I’ve got three young kids and one big one at home so if I’m not earning money for cleaning I’m usually picking somebody’s stuff up for free.” She gives him a little grin. “What was it you wanted from Eve, anyway? She’s not the sort who enjoys a chat, though she’s always nice to me. I got tickets for a spa day at the Sharrow Bay last Christmas – I proper filled up when they fell out my card. My mate Violet said not to worry about it – that it was her way of putting up with being a cantankerous cow some days. She suffers, you see.”

“Suffers?”

“She’s not very well, I’m sure you spotted that. She won’t talk about it and she won’t accept a lift to her appointments but she’s been at the hospital a lot this past year. Still, she’s doing good for her age.”

“Violet Rayner, is that?” asks Rowan, guilelessly. “Small world. She’s a friend of Catherine’s, isn’t she? My sister too, of course. Have you heard from her on her big adventure?”

“Just what I’ve seen online,” says Vicky, shivering as a gust of wind finds its way into the car. “I hope she’s back soon though, because Eve’s house is going to start sinking under the weight of her bloody post. If it wasn’t for the wood-burner the recycling bin would have burst.”

“All right for some,” says Rowan, rolling his eyes. The car looks warm. Vicky does too.

“So?” she asks, invitingly. “I can’t leave you out in this.”

Rowan opens the door and ducks into the passenger seat, wiping the water from his face and muttering grateful thanks. Some tinny, cheesy pop music is bleeding out of the stereo. She switches it off, the sleeve of her fleece rising up to reveal a swirl of tree roots. Beneath the ink, he catches sight of thin white scars.

“I haven’t eaten,” says Rowan. “Would you get into trouble with any of your clients if I was to buy you a tea and a sticky bun?”

She grins, impish, and he sees smoker’s teeth and the glint of the silver stud which pierces her tongue.

“I don’t think I’d risk trouble for tea and a sticky bun,” she says, turning back to the road. The wipers carve a silhouette of Sydney Opera House onto the mud-streaked glass.

“How about a pint and a packet of dry-roasted?” asks Rowan, turning to face her. He’s suddenly enjoying this game.

Vicky smiles. “Sold.”

32

Sancton Bridge, Wasdale

The home of Violet Sheehan

January 8, 2020

The wall is cool against Violet’s forehead: damp, like a vodka bottle straight from the freezer. It’s a pleasant, sensual feeling. She rolls her head from side to side, as if grinding out a cigarette butt with her brow. Trundles her face from side to side, pressing first one cheek, then the other, against the clammy green surface.

Left.

Right.

She pulls back. Looks at the image her sweat has created. Sees a butterfly: two symmetrical wings patterned with circles, captured mid-flight. She leans in and draws eyes in the condensation with a bruised knuckle. Crafts a garish smile. Daubs imperfect teeth. Tusks. Smears the imprint into something vague and grotesque, a mess of meandering tracks and over-spilling features, trickling into and over one another. Sees wrinkles gathering at eyes, running into nose, mouth, dripping, blooming, to puncture and trickle into nothingness.

She feels dizzy as she stares, watching her likeness bleed and dissolve.

She feels a hand upon her back.

“It’s okay. Let it guide you. Flow. Be at one with your surroundings …,”

Violet remembers this feeling. This sensation of staring into one’s own eyes. Of skin kissing glass: glowering into his own features until they became alien and unrecognisable. She has done this many times. As a child, she used to like saying her own name, again and again, monotonously, never rising, never falling, over and over, eyes swimming in the edgeless pools of her own reflected vision, losing all sense of herself, just shapes and words, noises and textures, splitting, like single celled creatures beneath a microscope, halving themselves, again, again, becoming more and less than themselves….

The ayahuasca tastes bitter on her tongue. Bitter, like burning sage. But behind it there is a sweetness. A memory of nectar. Of something honeyed and warm and wholesome. She flashes on a memory. Sees images that fight for the surface like drowning sailors.

“Catherine,” she gasps, and for a moment she can see her friend, dressed in white, blue marking on her skin. She sees a girl with red hair and white lines carved into her arm. She can see a man with green toenails, standing above her, head coked, as a drum beats nearby like the heartbeat of the earth.

She has a moment of perfect clarity. She sees herself here. Now. In the little room at the back of her house on the quiet road between the valleys. She can hear the gentle, calming voice of the shamanic healer who strokes her back and guides her mind and tries to reach inside her to pull out the fractured pieces of her soul and the ripped pictures of her memory.

She needs to remember. It has been too many years. For three decades she has left a part of her mind boarded up and shut down. For thirty years she has tried to pretend that she believes what they told her about those nights in the forest. For thirty years she has told herself that eve Cater is her friend because she likes her, and not because she is staying close, looking for signs of her memory coming back – of one day recollecting perfectly what happened in that place beneath the ground, when she and Catherine woke to find themselves in a place of bones and broken glass; the body of Arthur Sixpence dangling from an iron ladder high above.

A scream rips upwards and out of her throat. The memory is perfect. Clear as day. She feels warm blood upon her skin. The Shaman’s blood. Sees herself clambering towards the light. She hadn’t stopped for Freya. Had just clambered, drunkenly, up the jagged slope and clawed her way into the darkness of the forest. She had lost sight of Catherine. And then something startled her, and she had lashed out, unthinking, just as she had when the pig-faced thing tried to touch her. She had hurt Eve. Had spilled her blood. Had ripped off her clothes and dragged herself through the roots and branches and fallen trees and hadn’t stopped running until she fell into the arms of the Mountain Rescue men. Catherine was with them, sobbing, terrified, eyes like skulls.

She had let them soother her. Calm her. Had given in to sleep. And she had let go of the memories: disappearing like flakes of ash above a fire.

She knows that she will not rest easy again until she finds Freya.

Finds her, and asks her why so many people lied to cover up the fact that she never came back. That she and Catherine had left her there to die. Left her with the body of two dead shaman, trapped at the bottom of an old mineshaft filled with bones.

33

The Harbourmaster in Whitehaven is the sort of boozer where Rowan feels instinctively comfortable. It’s not so much spit-and-sawdust as phlegm-and-fibreglass. The cosy pubs in the valley are infinitely nicer to look at and he’s got nothing personal against landscapes, log fires or exposed wooden beams, but there’s something delightfully honest about watering holes where the main aim of the clientele is to get cheaply pissed. He likes people who make no pretence about their recreational habits. People come here to drink. To talk nonsense. To escape solitude or company or whatever else menaces them at home. The men and women who drink here do so because the food is cheap and brown and filling and because they can get more lager for their money than they can anywhere else.

It’s at its quietest now, just after lunch. Those who started drinking at breakfast time have gone home for a microwave meal and a doze. The evening crowd has yet to come in. The handful of men and women who mill around the bar drinking pints of Foster’s and Carling are damp from the fine rain and Rowan keeps hearing snatches of their conversation. He has to suppress a smile as dialect words half-remembered from years before bubble up from the mouths of the pleasantly pissed.

Daft raji.

Proper charver.

Her gadgi; his bewer.

Aye, that’s proper bari.

On the table, his phone vibrates, moving itself closer to a sticky streak of spilled beer. The bottom of the pint glasses have left a perfunctory Olympic symbol on the grainy varnish of the table-top.

He squints at the screen. He’s downed a couple of pints of the local real ale and it’s done nothing to help his headache. He feels as though his eyeballs are expanding in the sockets. If he could use his hands he would be massaging his sinuses. Although he and Vicky are enjoying getting drunk together, he isn’t sure they’ve reached the stage in their relationship where he can safely ask her to knead his Eustachian tube.

“You Bobby Dazzler,” mutters Rowan, as the words come into focus. An hour ago he left a post on the Friends of Silver Birch Academy Facebook group. He’s gone for a soft, deferential tone, in keeping with the general character of the fake social media persona he’s selected for the role.

Thanks so much for letting me join – I won’t bore you all with the details but I’m putting together a bit of a surprise do for one of our number (she’s blocked from seeing this, ha ha!). I want as many of her old friends to be there as possible so watch this space for more info. Which of you good ladies were at the school in 1991? A list of all her classmates would be such a help. And if any of you see Violet on her travels, tell her she has to get back in time for the festivities. Lol!

He smiles to himself as he stares at the list of names, provided so helpfully by the site administrator. Sees Catherine’s names in among others that, so far, mean nothing to him. An older pupil, her avatar showing an attractive brunette with a Botoxed forehead and inflatable lips, has promised to dig out some class photographs for him. He notices a couple of Friend requests from members of the group. Accepts them both and opens an accompanying message. It’s from a sweet-sounding lady called Natasha.

Hi there Rowan and welcome to the Group. I don’t want to sound like a killjoy but there were a few shenanigans back in ’91 that might make things a little awkward on the party front. I’m not sure if you know but Violet and two of her friends were in the paper at that time because they went off with this busker they’d met in Keswick. We had an assembly before they came back and Mr Rideal and Mr Tunstall aid we all had to be very understanding and leave them be and not ask questions in case it upset them. The other girl – I think her name was Fleur or Freya or something – didn’t come back to school but somebody told me she’d gone back to Ireland and she’s never been in touch with any of us. She wasn’t at the school very long. Anyway, thought you should know. Have a great time and do let me know when it’s time for the big shindig ..xx

Rowan clicks his tongue, aware that his leg is jiggling up and down.

It’s a fascinating old building, types Rowan, as quickly as he can. I’ve been having a proper snoop around and it’s such a shame that things didn’t work out for the owners. Seems to me that one of them should have bought some lucky heather when it was offered. Am I right in thinking one of the owners was lost while fell-walking? And who’s this Mr Sixpence I keep hearing about? Hope I’m not disturbing you. Violet does talk about her school days with a lot of affection which is why I want so many of her classmates there. I don’t want to put my foot in it though, so if I’m making a faux-pas just shout at me! xx

He hits ‘send’. Glances around, his fingers steepled at the tips. He suddenly wants to have some space in which to think. The jingle of the slot machine and the bursts of raucous laughter from the table by the window are starting to grate on his nerves. He looks up, irritated. Two middle-aged men are beerily pawing at a younger woman with slicked back, batter-blonde hair. She’s putting up with them because they’re buying her drinks: bottles and glasses and crisp packets spread out on the table like casualties from a battle. As Rowan watches, one of the men raises his buttocks from the red velvet bar stool and emits a long, trumpeting fart. He laughs, delighted with himself, as his mate slaps him on the back and tries to belch an echo. The girl’s dutiful smile stops well short of her eyes.

He looks back at the phone. The trio of dots indicate she’s typing a response. He feels himself becoming restless, as though he’s sitting at a stop-line on a deserted road. He reads the reply quickly, thinking fast.

Mr Sixpence! Ha! Yeah, he was a proper character. We all used to make up stories about what he’d been like before he went a little bit peculiar. He was my first experience of a proper hippy, though he wouldn’t have called himself that. He was like a guidance counsellor as much as an odd-job man. He knew loads of stuff and it was nice to have an occasional teacher who could go from telling you about the philosophies of Carl Jung to instructing you in Reiki healing and teaching you how to catch squirrels. I’m sure wherever he disappeared to he was gratefully received, though we missed him after he’d gone. It was sad seeing his old camp left to go to ruin like that – it was nice him being there in the woods, smoking by the fire, telling his stories about all the places he’d seen and the people he’d helped. He’s probably long dead now but if you happen to find a relative or a next of kin, tell him Mr Sixpence was always our favourite.

Rowan rubs his cheek, little points of light burning in the darkened windows of his eyes.

Wow, at my school the most exciting teacher was the head of geography, and that was just because he had a wig that could defy the laws of gravity. We used to think he’d trained some horribly mutated platypus to cling to his shiny scalp! Anyway, I’ll leave you to it. Before I go, do you think Violet would want Mr Tunstall to get an invitation? He’s still around isn’t he?

He looks up nervously, listening to the clatter of bottles hitting the table; of bar stools screeching across the scarred floor. He can hear the two drunken arseholes trying to work out which actor played James Bond after Roger Moore. The effort of thinking seems to paining them. He keeps hearing the leader say ‘Morgan. That Morgan bloke. Slick fella.” Rowan realises that his brain has got stuck on the word ‘Piers’ and replaced Brosnan with a truly horrifying prospect. Either way, he is resisting the urge to tell them that they’re wrong about this, and a lot of other things too.

He wouldn’t come! Lol, that’s priceless! No, he won’t even come to reunions, though that’s hardly unusual. I think we’ve maybe seen two or three of the old staff since it closed. He’s a bit bitter, I think, though he’s got himself a very nice house out of it and he didn’t do badly when the Trust wound up, or so I heard. He’s geriatric now anyway. Last I saw him was at a memorial service at St Olaf’s. They have one every once in a while for those lost on the mountain. He was there for Rideal, I suppose. Didn’t look well but he was civil enough.

Rowan plays it safe with his reply.

You don’t sound like you were a fan …

She’s back on in moments.

He didn’t have much to do with the school. Good at speeches and even better with the finances apparently but not somebody you’d think of as a neat fit in a school that pushed alternative, independent thinking. He was much more of a suit, though I guess the world needs a few of those to function. And to be fair, when Sixpence went missing and there were fears for his safety, it was Rideal who gave the assembly and told us he had no doubts the old boy was having the time of his life somewhere. Same when there was the other incident in ’91. He was good at stepping up when the outside world came sniffing. Even so, we weren’t exactly blubbing when we heard what had happened on the mountain in 2004. I mean, what was the silly sod even doing up there? He’d had bronchial problems going back years. That was what made him so creepy to us girls, I suppose – this snorting, horrible breathing noise, like a pig with its nose in the trough. Sorry, I don’t suppose this is any use to you, is it? I do rattle on!

Rowan looks up, as he hears the girl mutter the correct answer to the Bond conundrum, slightly louder than the previous four times she has tried to get a word in.

“Bollocks, no its not. The bloke from Flash Gordon? He never played Bond.”

“He did …,”

“It’s Timothy Dalton, you wanker,” grumbles Rowan, trying to concentrate on a reply. He realises he’s said it loudly enough for heads to turn.

“That’s better,” laughs Vicky, stumbling back from the ladies toilets, trying to straighten her tabard and tuck herself in without spilling the last of her pint. The beer, she insists, is for sustenance and nourishment. It’s the trio of double vodka-tonics that are the indulgence. Rowan isn’t sure she’ll make it to Ravenglass or whether she will be in any fit state to wield a vacuum when she gets there.

“I’m sorry about that lot,” mutters Rowan, gesturing at the table and putting his phone away. He shoots a glance at the barman. He’s probably younger than the woman. Perhaps 20, no more. A tight T-shirt, grimy glasses and a body that’s all joints and gristle. Rowan feels a swell of pity for the lad. The two boorish dickheads are twice his size. The nearest has a roll of fat at his neck like a pug. He’s wearing a Fred Perry tracksuit top with shiny blue jeans and white trainers. He’s around Rowan’s age, and still sports a hairstyle made famous by the footballer Lee Sharpe around 1992: short hair gelled forward and snipped in a perfectly straight line at the fringe. His mate is wearing a checked shirt beneath a short bomber jacket – chunky gold chains around his neck.

“Which lot?” asks Vicky, looking around. “Oh, you mean Daz Shipley?” She looks back to Rowan. “Fancies himself a bit. I would say he’s harmless, but he’s not. That’s Robin with him. He went to school with my first boyfriend. Ploughed his dad’s Peugeot into Santon Bridge when he was 15. He escaped unhurt but thankfully his dad had the presence of mind to break his jaw. He’s talked a bit funny since. If you do end up writing a book about this place, don’t waste a page on those arseholes.”

Rowan is enjoying Vicky. He’s learned more than he needs to. She’s from Carlisle originally, which makes her positively cosmopolitan in these parts. She lives in a three bedroomed terraced house near the seafront in Seascale with four children and a lodger: a reclusive Polish man who works in one of the posher Lakeland hotels. She’s been married twice, she has an older sister called Beth, and she cleans for seven different private clients in the West Cumbria area. She worked as a care assistant at a retirement home for a few years but was placed on a zero-hours contract a while back that couldn’t guarantee her the hours she needed. For all that he is now well-versed in her life, Rowan is beginning to wonder whether there is anything further to be gained from the exchange. He’s bought all the drinks so far and he hasn’t got the energy to sleep with her. He’s considering making a show of draining the last of his pint. Wonders if it would be rude to leave her a tenner for a cab and to wish her well with whatever comes next in life. He’d quite like to smash Shipley’s head trough the fruit machine as he goes. Wonders if this pain to his hands will be worth the satisfaction of punching at least one of them in the face.

“It’s a shame you never met her partner,” says Vicky, unexpectedly. She’d been gazing at a picture of a racehorse on the wall behind them and it takes Rowan a second to work out that she isn’t referring to the animal.

“Eve, you mean? Ms Cater?”

Vicky turns back to the barman and signals for two more drinks. Ruefully, Rowan realises he’s not going anywhere yet. He watches as Vicky retrieves her phone from the pocket of her tabard and sends a quick message. She spins the screen. “They’re my boys,” she mutters. “Tyler’s got my eyes, don’t you think? My dimples are cuter though.”

Rowan nods, encouragingly. “Who was her partner?” he asks, steering her back on course. “And you mean romantic partner, yes? Not that they owned a business together.”

“Romantic in a way,” shrugs Vicky, as the drinks appear on the edge of the bar. She looks at the barman, expecting him to bring them over. He looks away, pretending not to see her. She stands up, noisily, and returns a moment later with a double vodka for herself and a pint of the local ale for Rowan. He’d swap it for a glass of even the cheapest whisky if given the chance.

“In a way?” smiles Rowan, taking a sip.

Vicky makes a show of narrowing one eye at him. “Don’t think you’ve got me fooled,” she says, mischievously. “I’m not buying this ‘little-boy-lost’ act of yours. I know what you’re doing.”

Rowan takes a longer swallow, buying time. Decides to just take whatever’s coming. “And what am I doing?”

“You’re writing about what happened,” she says, pulling her chair closer to the table. “Violet and Catherine and the other girl.”

“Freya,” says Rowan, meeting her eyes. “Freya Sheehan. Do you know the name?”

Vicky shakes her head. Sips her drink. “I don’t know the vicar’s daughter very well but Violet’s been a visitor at Eve’s place for as long as I’ve been cleaning for her.”

“And how long’s that?”

“Five or six years, I reckon,” she says, chewing her cheek. “I looked after Derrick first and then Eve needed a bit of help with a few bits at home so I stayed in touch.”

Rowan licks his lips. He glances at the two men who sit at the table by the bar. Shipley has turned away from the girl and is staring at Rowan. His cheeks are flushed and he seems to be sucking spit through his teeth; a whale feasting on krill. “Tell me about Derrick,” he says, giving Vicky his full attention. “You looked after him?”

“When I was a care worker,” she says, rubbing her finger around the top of her glass. “Lovely place not far from Kendal. It wasn’t cheap but you get what you pay for. Like I say, if they’d given me a proper contract I’d still be there.”

“I’ve heard he was a decent soul,” smiles Rowan, sensing that Vicky feels a warmth towards Derrick. “Good copper, by all accounts.”

“He had plenty stories to tell,” smiles Vicky. “He was frail, obviously, though that wasn’t unusual. He got cross when he couldn’t do things and he never got comfortable with being looked after, not really. He had terrible arthritis and he suffered terribly with pain in his joints. He’d fallen in love with the Lakes when he moved back up here and I know it hurt him that he couldn’t do much walking like he did when he was young. He always wanted the window open in his room. Loved it when the wind was properly blowing. He was somebody who liked the outside.”

“I’ve read the obituary,” says Rowan. “No children.”

Vicky shakes her head. “He was married once but that had long since broken down. No, I think his significant other was eve, though you wouldn’t have put them together. He was a charming so-and-so, very softly spoken, very thoughtful. He was clever too. He could barely hold a pen but I’d read him the clues from the crossword and he’d always know the answers. When he didn’t he’d insist I look them up. He couldn’t stand not knowing things. I’m just grateful there wasn’t too much suffering. When he went downhill it was quick.”

“Physically or mentally?” asks Rowan.

“Both,” says Vicky, softly. “It happens that way. He started having nightmares. It breaks your heart to see them like that, these old men who used to be, well… I suppose you’d use the word ‘formidable’. He’d been a copper and a private detective and he’d done a lot for a lot of people. Eve told me when she’d come to visit. I think she wanted me to know just who it was I was looking after.”

“The article about his death was a bit vague,” says Rowan, glancing back at Shipley. The other man is looking at him too, whispering in Daz’s ear. Rowan ignores them, focused on Vicky.

“Well, you can’t blame the care home, not really,” says Vicky, draining her glass and staring at the tabletop. “He might have been vulnerable but he wasn’t a prisoner. He’d picked Levens House because he’d always loved the outdoors and he’d always felt pretty confident taking a walk in the grounds. That was one of his pleasures in life.” She smiles at a memory and Rowan is surprised to see tears glisten in her eyes.

“I can see him now. He was always so smart, right to the end. Even when he was losing his way, when he couldn’t remember things properly, when his eyesight was going – even then he wanted a daily shave and wore a suit and tie. He’d never let me do his hair. That was one of his pleasures. He only had a few strands left on top by the end but he would slick it back with a metal knit-comb and a blob of Brylcreme. You could tell he’d been handsome once. Like I say, him and Eve weren’t a neat match but you could see what they meant to each other. She’d visit every day. Read to him. Sit out in the grounds, even when it was raining. I sometimes think she asked me to clean for her just to keep that connection after he was gone. She still likes me to talk about him when I can – anything I remember, any daft joke he might have told. She misses him. Maybe that’s why she gave you short shrift.”

Rowan stays silent, flicking his eyes back towards the two half-drunk men. Daz jerks his head, his chin jutting out. “Help you?” he shouts, and it’s a challenge. “I can take a picture for you if you like.”

Rowan sighs, ignoring him. Vicky begins to turn around but Rowan shakes his head. He wants to hear more. Doesn’t want her to get distracted.

“You don’t work there now,” says Rowan, making sure he looks her in the eye. “You could tell me about the way he died and it wouldn’t be a betrayal of confidence. And I’m very good at protecting my sources.”

“I’m sure you are,” smiles Vicky, pushing her hair out of her eyes. She looks tired suddenly, as if the drink and the conversation has exhausted her. She stretches, hugely, something cracking in her shoulders.

“There was a suggestion of suicide in the article I read,” says Rowan, cautiously. “An open verdict, but I can read between the lines.”

Vicky presses her lips together, shaking her head. “It was ugly. He didn’t deserve that. I didn’t know he had that kind of hate in him.”

“Hate? Who did he hate?”

“Himself,” says Vicky, sadly. “You wouldn’t do that if you didn’t, would you? I mean, I’ve had couples take overdoses in the past so they could die together. One pair, they’d been together 60 plus years. Dressed themselves in their best clothes and took a month’s worth of their heart pills. Fell asleep holding one another’s hands, staring out the window at the sea. Not a bad way to go. Better than Derrick.”

“I don’t want to bring up bad memories,” says Rowan, aware he is lying. That’s exactly what he wants to bring up.

“It wasn’t me that found him, thank God. I think that would have done me in. Poor Radka – she’s one of the Polish ladies… well, she got such a scare. It was a week before she stopped shaking. It wasn’t unusual, him going for a walk after the evening meal. That was still a pleasure for him and it didn’t matter a jot if it was raining or hailing or if it was waist-deep in snow. He’d take a shuffle around the grounds. You could always tell where he’d been from the pipe smoke. He’d leave a grey trail hanging in the air. I can still smell it after all these years. It’s a nice smell. I fill up when I think of it.”

“What happened, Vicky?” he asks, tenderly.

She looks past him, staring deep into a memory. “It was suffocation,” she says, closing her eyes. “The thing on his face almost smothered him and he’d taken a handful of pills just to make sure. His notes were almost illegible but he was saying goodbye. I think the coroner would have said it was undoubtedly suicide but Derrick’s mind had gone a bit and I still don’t know if he really intended to end it. I hate to think of how much he must have kept to himself. If I’d known the nightmares were getting so bad I could have done something, but he was one of those old-school men. You’d find his bed wet through, his pyjamas soaked, but he wouldn’t admit to fear. I think it got to him in the end.”

“The thing on his face,” repeats Rowan. “Can you tell me?”

Vicky’s cheerful mood has disappeared along with the last of the ale. Rowan pushes his half-full glass towards her but she ignores it. She winces as she talks.

“It was a mask,” she says, her lips sticking together as the whispered words rush out. “Radka thought she’d found a monster. She’d done her 10.30 check and his bed was empty. It was an awful night and she thought she should go and check he was okay. She had no doubt she’d find him out in the grounds at one of his usual spots, puffing on his pipe like a steam train. It took her half an hour to find him. There’s a chapel in the grounds, you see. Levens House used to be a private residence. It’s a lovely old building, with a little brick church set in a square of wood. We’d have the odd service there, on warm days, but it was always too drafty to use regularly. As far as I was aware it was locked when it wasn’t in use but one of the maintenance staff must have forgotten to turn the key properly because Derrick got in without a struggle and his hands were little more than claws by the end. You should have seen how he struggled with his matches trying to light his pipe. He was determined, I’ll give him that.”

“The mask,” nudges Rowan. “What did Radka see.”

“It was like something you’d buy in a joke shop,” says Vicky, frowning at the ugliness of it. “A pig mask. This horrible pink thing that he’d pulled right over his head. It was so realistic – the snout all wrinkled like it had been pushed in and slits for the eye-holes. He tied it tight around his neck. Used one of his ties. Just sat there in the cold and the dark and breathed the last of the air. Best clothes and a pig mask. Like I say, Radka hasn’t been right since.”

“Jesus,” mutters Rowan. “There must have been an enquiry. I mean, that’s pretty damn suspicious …,”

“All a bit above my pay grade,” says Vicky. “We did have a staff meeting not long after where the owners told us the police weren’t looking for anybody. As far as they were concerned it was either a suicide or an accident and neither was going to lead them to a righting of a wrong so it was left well alone. His funeral was pretty. Barely a dry eye in the house. I just hope he’s at peace now.”

“Who told Eve?” asks Rowan.

Vicky shakes her head. “I didn’t have the pleasure. It was days after he died that I saw her and by then she had her hard face on. She was sorting through his things. I wanted to ask her what the goodbye note had said but it wasn’t really my place. Next thing was when she asked me whether I could do a bit of cleaning for her, just a couple of days a week. I’d quit the care home by then. Too many bad memories.”

Rowan rubs his gloved hand across his chin. He feels the stubble rasp against the soft leather. He glances up at the sound of a chair squeaking across the floor. Shipley and Robin are moving towards him, their body language speaking entirely in capital letters and exclamation marks.

“Where the hell would he get a pig mask?” asks Rowan, perplexed.

“I don’t know,” says Vicky, and it’s clear she’s wondered the same herself countless times. “It’s just such a horrid thing to happen. I always thought he was proud of being a policeman but towards the end he’d go on about being filthy, being a beast, being a pig – muttering in his sleep with tears running down his face. He stopped using the communal areas, retreated inside himself …

“Here we go,” mutters Rowan.

Vicky turn at the sound of raised voice. Whips her head back to Rowan in alarm. “Don’t get involved,” she hisses, quickly. “They’re just dickheads really.”

“I saw you looking,” spits Daz, standing unsteadily by the table. “Want a bit, do you? She’s cheap. Posh boy like you could afford her I’m sure.”

Rowan looks up, eyes on Daz. There’s a tingling in his gut but he’ll be damned if he’s going to show fear.

“Posh boy?” asks Rowan, quietly. “Are you out of your fucking mind?”

“You look posh to me,” says Robin, behind him.

“I should imagine everybody looks posh to you, mate,” smiles Rowan, giving him his attention. “That’s what comes with being a couple of steps down the evolutionary scale. Maybe if you were in a cage full of monkeys you could aspire to being middle class but even then I have my doubts.”

“What’s he saying?” asks Robin, nudging Daz. “Is he taking the piss? Daz, is he taking the piss?”

Daz leans forward, both hands on the table top, looming over Vicky. She growls a complaint but when she tries to wriggle free he puts a hand on her shoulder and holds her where she is.

“I know you,” growls Daz. “Know your hippy sister too. Fucking lezza. You’re the writer.”

“I’m a writer,” corrects Rowan. “If there was only one, my sales would be better.”

“You’re a cheeky shite,” spits Dazl, his breath all larger and tobacco and pickled onion crisps. He sneers at Rowan’s gloved hands. “What’s with the gloves? Not want to get your nancy-boy hands dirty?”

“Nancy boy?” asks Rowan, breaking into a smile. “Can you hear yourself? How old are you?”

“Old enough, you cunt,” says Daz, pushing forward until they are almost nose to nose. Rowan can see pastry crumbs in his back teeth and there’s white powder crusting one nostril.

“I’ve had a spot of bother,” says Rowan, brightly. “I’ve got some nasty injuries under here. I’m recuperating, which is the main reason that I’m sitting here politely and you’re not bleeding.”

Daz laughs, loud and bitter, turning to his aptly-named sidekick. “Do you hear this wanker, Rob? Do you fucking hear him?”

“Fuck it,” mutters Rowan, under his breath. “Fuck it all.”

Daz turns back to face him and Rowan lunges out of his chair like a spring. His forehead slams into the bridge of Daz’s nose and he hears the crunch of displaced cartilage and a spray of hot sticky wetness on his face. Daz crumples back like a collapsing building, knocking over glasses, tangling his feet in the chairs. Beside him, Robin’s mouth opens in absolute shock and Rowan turns on him, blood on his forehead, hair hanging loose across his face, eyes wide around pin-prick pupils.

“Do something,” begs Rowan, and picks up an empty glass, wielding it like a dagger. “Fucking do something, I dare you.”

Robin backs away, hands raised. Behind him, the other customers are popping up like meerkats. The girl at the table has her hands to her mouth, her mascara sticking her spindly eyelashes together. He gives her a smile and an absurd thumbs-up. She doesn’t move.

Rowan becomes aware of a thudding in his chest. There’s a taste of sour fruit and iron on his tongue. His head is starting to throb. He’s panting, half mad, as he gives his attention back to Vicky. The blood has drained from her face but she holds his gaze. There is no pain as he retrieves a card from his pocket and places it down on the table-top for her. She takes it, her hands shaking. He stands and wipes his face with his gloved palm. He’s suddenly greasy with sweat.

“You saw,” he mutters. He raises his voice for the benefit of the barman. “I never started that.”

“You bloody finished it,” whispers Vicky.

Rowan stands, legs shaking. Manages to pick his way out from the booth, glass still in hand. Robin is leaning over his fallen mate, who is making a grotesque, porcine snuffling sound: blood forming a slick goatee on his chin. Rowan rolls his eyes, his mood changing, suddenly full of regret. “Recovery position,” he mutters, heading for the door. He puts the empty glass on the bar. The barman nods his thanks, though Rowan isn’t completely sure which service he is grateful for.

“I’m not like this,” mumbles Rowan, pushing open the door and feeling the cold air slap his hot face. He glances back at the other drinkers. “I’m not like this,” he says, again.

Nobody speaks.

He barges out and onto the street, his chest tight, blood surging in his ears like pebbles rolled by the tide.

Bends double, and pukes two and a half pints into the gutter, all bile and acid and flat real ale. He staggers away. Reaches for his stone as if it is a holy relic. Manages to stop the recording at the third attempt. Names the file ‘Vicky’. Controls his breathing and phones Serendipity.

“Please,” he says, and finds his cannot turn the word into a sentence. He just repeats it, tottering down towards the harbour in the swirling rain, his face full of pig-masks and blood. Then again, for emphasis: “Please.”

34

Rowan stares out at a blur of rocks and trees, disappearing greyly down to the water’s edge. The taller trees have been decapitated by fog. Beside him, he sees Serendipity looking at his hands.

“They’ll heal,” she says, quietly. “Eventually, everything does. It hurts for a while but if it doesn’t kill you, it persuades you to come back stronger. I know I said I wouldn’t ask, but what are you going to do to the man who did it?”

He sucks his cheek. Closes an eye. Eventually he shakes his head. “Whatever it is, it’s best you don’t know about it.”

“I don’t like the thought of you hurting people, Rowan. You’re not like that. Not really.”

“I don’t know what I am. Neither do you.”

“I know that you care about people. That’s why people talk to you. Why you write with compassion.”

Rowan sniffs, cold and sore. “I can put on a good act.”

“It’s real,” says Dippy, and Rowan is amazed to see tears in her eyes. “I know you’re a good person, I really do.”

Instinctively, Rowan puts out a hand. He wants to make her feel better but doesn’t understand what’s wrong. She seems cross at him in her usual way but there’s something more. She chatted nonsense on the drive back to her house from the side road in Whitehaven where she had picked him up; shrill inanities about her day and Jo’s plans for the garden and how Snowdrop was bugging her for a new laptop so she could start to write her masterpiece.

“Dippy, I’m sorry if I’ve done something daft and not noticed it. I don’t always get the bigger picture, you know how I am. I’m trying, I promise. Don’t be worrying about me …,”

She sniffs, wiping her tears with the heel of her hand. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I just want to be right about you., Snowdrop loves you so much and I want you to be worthy of that. Just tell me – do you think this Freya person that Violet was looking for, do you think something bad happened to her?”

Rowan opens his mouth, preparing to bluster – to spill some vagaries about being able to make a story out of it whatever happens. But his sister’s expression stops him. “I don’t know,” he says, under his breath. “I think this busker might have done bad things to them. It makes sense they never spoke of it and if there was a third girl it makes sense that she put plenty of miles between herself and where it happened. It even makes a kind of sense that Rev Marlish would use some influence to make sure the coppers underplayed anything that did happen – especially if his daughter had managed to bury the experience so deep that it took three decades and a shit-load of ayahuasca for the memory to surface. But then I think about this Arthur Sixpence, vanishing from the site and his mate’s belief that something bad happened. I think about a private detective assisting a former protégé with a case and her refusal to talk to me about it. The language she used – it’s sorted. Leave it alone. There’s something there, I know it.” The more he talks, the more sure he becomes.

“Elrik,” comes a voice, from behind. Rowan turns. Catherine Marlish is standing in the kitchen, pale-faced, hair stuck to her cheeks. There’s a bruise on her cheek and her bottom lip is scabbed with dried blood.

Rowan turns to his sister. “Dippy?”

“Catherine’s fallen out with her husband, Rowan,” sniffs Serendipity. “She lost her nerve after the talk the other night. Rang Marjorie to ask for her story to be returned. It wasn’t in the pile, as you know. Snowdrop took it. For you.”

Catherine steps through the door and into the cold grey air. Up close, her injuries are easier to read. The bruise on her cheek is a palm print: the cut on her lip around the place a thumb would strike if she were struck with a big open palm. Rowan feels sick.

“I got upset,” says Catherine, meekly. “Started getting hysterical. He had to calm me down.”

“What a fucking hero,” hisses Rowan, through gritted teeth.

“He doesn’t know his own strength,” stammers Catherine. “And I was losing my mind. I should never have written that story, let alone handed it in. Violet said not to. But why does she get to have it all, eh? It’s her out there looking for Freya. Her who’s remembering all this stuff and putting horrible pictures in my head that I don’t want to see again...”

“I read your story,” says Rowan, gently – moving towards her as if trying to shush a nervous pony. “It’s very good. You’re an excellent writer.”

“You didn’t tell me the truth,” sniffs Catherine, fresh tears gathering. “You’re writing about what happened. About me. About what he did…,”

“And what’s that?” asks Rowan, softly. He glances at Serendipity, looking for some sort of moral how-to guide. He doesn’t want to push but he can’t let it go. “What happened in those days before you were found, Catherine?”

She reaches for the wall, her hang going white at the knuckles as she leans her weight on the damp brick. “I don’t know,” she says, falteringly. “Truly. I remember meeting him and I know that he gave us something to drink ..,”

“Where?” asks Rowan, quietly. “After you left the subway where did you go?”

“He had a van. Well, more like a really tiny camper. It was a mess. All painted up with swirls and shapes and the inside was disgusting. It smelled like when grass has been left to go mouldy.”

“And where was it parked?”

“Near the lake – where the theatre is now. Where you get the bread for the ducks.”

“And he told you his name?”

“Elrik,” she sniffs, looking down at her feet. “It was like we got high on him. It was the most grown-up thing I’d ever done. And Freya was there so we knew it would be okay. She was older than us, or seemed it at least. She knew how to look after herself. So when she drank from the bottle we thought it would be okay. I swear, I don’t remember anything properly after that – just shapes and sounds and that smell: all rusty and wet. It’s all just a dream until I’m waking up in my own bed and Daddy’s holding my hand and telling me it’s over and never to think about it again. And that’s what I tried to do.”

“And Freya?” asks Rowan.

“Mr Tunstall and Mr Rideal said the school had got a letter from her. She’d been upset about what happened. The school pretty much kicked her out.”

“And Elrik? He abducted you. Drugged you …,”

Catherine shakes her head. “I don’t know if that’s true. He chatted to us. We got in his van. He offered a drink and we accepted it.”

“You were underage,” says Serendipity, quietly.

“Yes, we were, and that’s bad, sure. But I told Daddy when he asked me and I’ve told everybody else since – I don’t remember anybody hurting me.” She looks at Rowan, embarrassed. “I was still a virgin, I promise.”

Rowan sucks in a breath, unsure whether he wants to embrace this fragile, broken soul, or to shake her until she stands up for herself. “You weren’t wearing any clothes when you were found,” says Rowan. “There was paint all over you. Symbols…,”

Catherine shakes her head. “No. No that’s not true. Eve said. We got drunk, took things we shouldn’t have, but it all worked out okay…,”

“You sound like you’ve been hypnotised,” says Rowan, shaking his head.

“Ask Violet,” she says, childlike. “Violet remembers more than me but if anything like that had happened she would have told me. She’s friends with Eve. And Eve looked after us. Violet should never have started making me remember. She was happier not knowing too. All that stuff with drugs and chanting and drums and that horrible thing she painted on the wall. I thought she was trying to scare it all out of me.”

Rowan tries to hold her gaze. “I’ve seen it. It’s a wild boar, isn’t it?”

Catherine shudders. “She was trying to be like him. She’d sit and smoke Bible pages and chuck bacon fat in the fire pit, trying to make her memory come back to life. I didn’t want to do it but the memory of everything that came before – it just pinged into my head. I remembered him. The busker. Elrik. And when I said it out loud, that’s when she started to remember too.”

“I know that name,” says Rowan, quietly. “Elrik.”

“She wouldn’t stop,” sniffs Catherine. “Wanted me to be a part of it with her and kept telling me everything she was learning.”

“And that was?”

She takes a breath. “In Shamanic mythology he’s a god of death. A monster. The face and teeth of a pig with a human frame. A deity of evil, darkness, lord of the lower world and judge of the dead.”

Rowan glances at Serendipity. “I remember,” he says, softly. “Mum’s lessons.”

Serendipity chews her lip. A cold breeze lifts her hair. “He’s what other shaman are fearful of,” says Serendipity. “He piggy-backs the journeys of others. He seeks out souls. Imprisons them forever in a place that’s neither life or death…,”

Rowan feels a memory lift off like ash from the fire in his skull. Back before he went wrong. Went bad. Back when he was small. That night, parked up in the woods; the sound of bullet-hard apples bouncing off the roof of the school-bus; an angora shawl around his shoulders and his feet near enough to the stove to pass for warm. He’d been snuggled down with Serendipity and Mum, listening to one of the older men talk about the bad thing that had happened at a camp they knew. Telling them about the man with the mismatched eyes who had tried to buy mandrake and ayahuasca from a dealer they shared. The dealer had told him she didn’t dabble with that stuff and told him not to ask again. He’d taken a nail to her. Driven a four inch spike into the bone of her breastplate, slamming it home with his palm. The man had escaped when the screams roused the families from the other shelters on the site where they had made camp. Sipped out of a smashed window, leaving a flap of skin hanging on shredded glass. His victim named him as Elrik. Told Mum to be careful. To look out for strangers and to believe her gut when it suggested a person shouldn’t be trusted…

“It’s Hungarian,” says Rowan, surprising himself. “The god of death. A very powerful figure in Shamanism.”

Serendipity looks sideways at him. “You remember?”

He shrugs. “I’m good at playing ignorant. People enjoy explaining things they’re an expert in – educating the uneducated. I’m happy to play that role.”

“When in truth …,”

He smiles, weakly. “We grew up with this, Dippy. If it wasn’t howling at the moon or making potions for the Wiccan gods we were dabbling in Pagan rituals and reading each other’s tealeaves. Mum’s mates always told me I had a touch of the old ways about me too. Had me convinced that the things I used to see were manifests – gifts from another form of consciousness. They said I could be a healer. Then when reality got its hands on me I discovered there was another way to view it. I was ill. I couldn’t see auras, couldn’t read souls. I needed medication and care.”

“And now? What do you believe?”

Rowan looks up at the sky. “I don’t know. People who believe too deeply in things tend to become zealots. Extremists.”

“Is she in trouble, do you think?” asks Catherine, quietly. “I’m not allowed on Facebook but people say she’s having a good time on her travels. She’s okay, isn’t she? And Freya – she’s okay too? It shouldn’t be like this. It was better before. Better before this all came back.”

Rowan closes his eyes and wishes he knew what kind of person he wanted to be. He smiles at Catherine, and feels grateful that he knows how to lie.

“Yes,” he says. “I’m sure she’s fine.”

She swallows the deceit like wine.

35

It’s a little after 3pm and Rowan’s back in the doorway of the Byre. The impenetrable cloud serves as a lid of sorts - a grimy grey-black plug hammered atop the green of the valley.

In his ear, Sumaira is in full-blown Detective Inspector mode, sounding cross, disappointed, exasperated and lightly too busy to have to deal with her needy dining companion’s problems right now

“I bet you think you were being chivalrous,” grumbles Sumaira, with a sigh that could knock over a pot-plant. “Headbutting a wanker is only good for the soul temporarily, Rowan. After that, it’s just another headache.”

“They were asking for it,” mumbles Rowan, rubbing his head with the back of his hand. “I mean, that’s not a confession, Detective Inspector. I’m not saying this happened …,”

“I’m looking at the bloody footage as we speak!” she snaps. He hears the creak of a door on a hinge and the sudden blast of fresh air. “There were three uniforms stood around the screen watching it when I walked through CID! All laughing like bloody drains. It’s pure good fortune that you chose to nut somebody that everybody else would gladly throw bricks at. The barman didn’t even want to hand over the footage, but Shipley was making a fuss. At least, I think that’s what he was doing – he was just making noises like a cow in distress.”

Rowan presses his lips together. “I appreciate this call,” he says, sincerely. “I would never have used your name. Not for this or anything else. If there are consequences, I’ll face them.”

“Stop it with the noble knight crap,” snaps Sumaira. “You nutted him because he pissed you off and I can respect that a lot more than I can respect the idea you felt some girl, whose life you know nothing about, needed protecting. Do you know how insulting that is?”

“I don’t know what I thought,” begins Rowan, then stops. He has to face the truth some time. The presence of the girl had simply given him a veil of decency with which to clothe an act of violence.

“I take it your meeting with Eve didn’t go well,” grumbles Sumaira, though some of the temper seems to be bleaching out of her voice. “I’ve ducked three calls from her this afternoon but the messages were pretty bloody clear. Some pain-in-the-arse writer knocking on her dor, stirring up trouble, making accusations. She’s threatening to come in and make a formal statement, which at least means I’ll get a chance to ask her to translate some of the notes left in the file. It’s all frigging hieroglyphs and Cuneiform to me.”

Rowan kicks at a stone, sending it skidding away across the slick grass. He looks up to follow its path and sees movement in the trees; a flash of dirty blonde against the dark tapestry of mist and trees and gathering dark.

“How are the hands anyway?” asks Sumaira, who seems to have decided the lecture is over. “And the rest of you, for that matter? I hope you don’t think I was rude slipping away the other night but it’s all a bit complicated at my end.”

“You should see a doctor about that,” says Rowan, automatically, craning his neck to see who is making their way to the gate.

“You sound very glum,” says Sumaira. “Is it not going well? What exactly is the story you’re writing, Rowan? I’m intrigued.”

Rowan scowls. “It’s all connected,” he says, wincing at his own vagueness. “A school with a hippy caretaker who goes missing and is never seen again. Three teenage pupils who meet a busker who smokes Bible pages as roll-ups. The school closing down and the head teacher getting to keep this great bloody house a few hundred yards away from the main building. A copper hanged in a pig-mask; Violet starting to remember; to question, to try and get back into the headspace she used to inhabit when she was young. And then there’s the ayahuasca. That’s potent, powerful stuff and it takes a master to make it. Maybe the sort of master who spent time in South America on a spiritual journey. I don’t know, but there are too many things to add up to nothing, don’t you think? I mean seriously, what do you think? I’m really asking.”

Sumaira pauses before replying. “I think you’re in the right job,” she says, a smile in her voice. “If you were a copper, you’d never to get a conviction. You’d need evidence and forensics and witness statements. But you’re a writer. A journalist. Which means that even if none of it’s true, you can still make it sound as though it might be.”

Rowan licks his dry lips. Hears the squeak as Vicky pushes open the gate and walks up the damp path, carrying what looks like a case for a musical instrument in her left hand, wrapped up against the drizzle in a fluffy green parka.

“If somebody did mistreat those girls in 1991, that person should pay for it,” says Rowan, quietly.

“That’s your prime motivation, is it?” asks Sumaira, not unkindly. “That justice is done? You’re telling me that if it came to it, you’d put justice ahead of your own interests?”

Rowan doesn’t reply. He manages a tight smile for Vicky, who stands a little in front of him, pale-faced, shivering, like a house-cat locked out on a grisly day.

“I’m not trying to be a cow,” says Sumaira. “But look, you said the other night that you were a little concerned for Violet. Have you considered the fact that maybe there’s nothing untoward here at all? That maybe she got drunk and stoned with this busker, had a blast of a weekend, and has chosen not to remember anything more? And yeah, if she’s gotten into this shamanic stuff and gone all New Age, then that’s hardly a surprise, is it? She went to Silver Birch – she had a grounding in alternative lifestyles and medicine. And yes, maybe she did track down Freya. So what? The fact that her Facebook statuses don’t show a picture means nothing at all. Maybe she’s slimming and wants to come back to undiluted applause. There could be so many reasons, Rowan.”

“The busker,” says Rowan, softly. “You can’t tell me you don’t want to know who he was. I mean, he and this Arthur Sixpence could easily have moved in the same circles. How do we know that he didn’t send this busker to finish something he started, eh? Or what if the busker snatched the girls, drugged them and brought them to him for some horrible purpose?”

He hears another sigh from Sumaira. “The busker, as you call him, remains unaccounted for. There’s a statement in the Cold Case Review documents giving a piss-poor description. Twenties, hippy-looking, with baggy trousers, dreadlocks and a floppy hat, which could be just about anybody from the alternative scene at that time. His toenails were painted green, though that doesn’t help a great deal. The description matches an unknown person of interest in so many cases it could make your head spin, but then, so does anybody white with a shaved head and a gold tooth, and we’re not accusing anybody of that description of being a secret serial killer.”

“I never said that,” mutters Rowan. “I don’t know what I think …,”

“I think you know this is bullshit but you’re not going to admit it because it could get you out of a hole,” says Sumaira. “I think since you got hurt you haven’t known who you are or what you’re for and a story like this, however much bullshit it stinks of, however much pain it might cause – I think you’re willing to dismantle anybody who stops you showing the world you’re still this barely-housetrained pittbull.”

“Can I stop you there?” asks Rowan, politely.

“Of cou…,”

Rowan hangs up. Gives Vicky his best smile, and steps back into the clutter and gloom of the Byre. She follows him; a smell of fallen leaves and wet clothes; furniture polish and cheap soap.

“I should have called,” mumbles Vicky, as Rowan prods at the half-dead fire and grabs her a hand-towel from the kitchen. She ruffles her hair, gratefully, exposing a face that looks a lot less vibrant than when they parted.

“I’m so sorry about what happened,” he begins, and places his hands upon her forearms, moving her closer to the fire. She manages a tight smile, looking past him towards the muzzy hump of the slumbering fell. “I’m not a thug, I want you to know that. I went too far – I thought he was out of line but not as out of line as me.”

Vicky waves a hand, swatting ineffectually at an invisible fly. “I’ve seen enough fights in the pub to be able to eat popcorn and offer encouragement,” she says, a sudden sparkle in her eyes that looks, to Rowan, like the beginning of tears. “No, look, it’s not that, it’s about what I told you earlier, about Derrick…,” she seems flustered, angry with herself. She pulls a balled-up handkerchief from her sleeve and dabs at her eyes. Rowan gets the impression she’s more accustomed to giving both nostrils a thorough excavation and clear-out, and admires her restraint.

“Please, sit down,” he says, gesturing at the sofa. “Look, is this a social call? I’m honoured if it is, though as you can imagine I’ve got so much to do …,”

“Thanks.”

“Can I get you something?” he asks, playing the gracious host.

“I thought I should show you something,” says Vicky, taking a deep breath that seems to settle her a little. She gestures for Rowan to pass the small case and she takes it from him with a nod of thanks.

“Trumpet recital?” he asks.

“Hardly,” says Vicky, weakly. She opens the silver clasps on either side of the handle and opens the battered old container. There’s a smell of pipe-smoke and camphor and the distinctive mildewy scent of damp paper dried in an airless room. She opens the lid and looks at Rowan with big eyes: serious now.

“You’re going to write about this whatever I do, I can tell,” says Vicky, sincerely. “I checked you out properly after you left the pub. You’re the real thing, aren’t you? I read some of the quotes people gave you about your book. They said you were tenacious. And I saw what you did when you thought Shipley was mistreating that young girl. I know you’re going to keep at this so I’ve told myself that if I help you, I’m doing a good thing. That’s right, isn’t it?”

Rowan nods and puts his hand upon her forearm, his leather gloves ludicrous: his splayed hand resting on her bare, pale skin like a chimp’s foot. “I don’t think you’re the sort of person to do anything for the wrong reasons, Vicky,” he says, and lowers himself onto the arm of the sofa. “You strike me as one of the decent people.”

She shakes her head. Drops her eyes. “This is Derrick’s,” she says, nodding at the open lid of the box. Rowan wants to peer inside – to see whether this whole act is worth his while.

“You two were close,” he says, warmly. “If you have it then it’s because Derrick would have wanted you to. What is it you’re hanging onto, Vicky?”

Vicky weights an extra couple of beats than is comfortable, looking into his eyes as if trying to style her hair in the reflection on his irises.

“The letter he wrote when he did what he did,” she says, at last. “The one he left for Eve Cater. The one she gave to the coroner before the inquest. It wasn’t all that he left behind.”

“No?”

“The one he left for Eve was in an envelope on the windowsill in his room at the care-home, sealed up tight and with her name written on it in his shaky handwriting. That was none of my business, was it? I would never have touched that. But this – in the wardrobe beneath his good walking boots – the ones he couldn’t wear any more – this was for me. He said so. The letter said so.”

Rowan’s mind is racing ahead. He understands. Vicky never told anybody that her favourite patient had left something for her. Not Eve, not the police, not the coroner. She’d taken it because it was for her, and now she was going to share it with a journalist.

“What was in the letter, Vicky?” asks Rowan. “It was an emotional time, I’m sure any sensible person could forgive you for not wanting all and sundry poring over a private message …,”

“That’s it,” spurts Vicky-Louise, relieved. “Exactly. He’d written it for me, hadn’t he? Eve had her letter and that was up to her but he’d always been so fastidious and such a nice old boy and it made sense to me that I should still try and do my best by him. So after I read it, and found the box, I sort of thought it best to let sleeping dogs lie. I mean, it was clear it was suicide. Nobody suggested anything else. And he wouldn’t have thanked me for suddenly telling the world he had all these reams of gobbledygook stashed away – page after page of ticks and swirls and gibberish.”

“Can I see?” asks Rowan, sitting forward.

She nods, energised now. Reaches into the case and pulls out a handful of faded, folded pages. On top, in barely legible script, is a short note.

“Dear V,” reads Vicky, sniffing. “You’ve always been a good friend to me and you have kept me going through some horrible times. I want you to know how sorry I am it has come to this. I think one day people will start to say bad things about me, and the people I’ve helped, but I want you to know that I did everything with the best of intentions. In the morning, they’ll find me dead. I don’t know whether I’ll swing or bleed or drop from something high but I know I’ll be dead. That’s OK, love. I’m ready for what comes next. Judgement. The veil. Whatever they’d have had us believe. I’ve had enough, if I’m honest, and if I can do this last thing well then maybe Eve will have a chance to get through until it doesn’t matter any more. I can’t bring myself to put her in harm’s way, not even now. There’s a few years left in the old girl and I want her to have them in peace. There’s a box in the cupboard beneath my old boots. There are some papers in there. It’s going to sound odd, love, but I want them in the casket with me. Don’t be frightened, I’m not off my rocker. It’s important to me. I want them deep. They’re in a plastic wallet and you can just slip them into the silk. I’ve arranged it all in advance – chose the casket at the same time I took the plot at St Olaf’s. There’s space for it. Just visit me at the Chapel of Rest and slip it in. Don’t let Eve see. I want her to die a grand old dame before that happens. It won’t matter to her after that, and when they sink her into the ground on top of me, I reckon our secrets will come up by the shovelful. I don’t know how old you’ll be by then, but I know you’re a good person and I want to make sure you know I always appreciated you – and this kindness. If you feel obliged to show Eve, or if you think the authorities should be told, I will understand. I simply ask that you do not. I’m putting my faith in you, alongside …,” she stops reading, her throat dry.

“Alongside?”

She clears her throat. “Alongside this 12,000-quid,” she finishes.

Rowan sits back. “Ah,” he says. “I’m with you.”

“What could I do?” asks Vicky, colour rising in her cheeks. “I mean, that was a new start for me. A better life. But to take it I had to do what I asked, didn’t I? If I wanted the money, I had to keep the letter away from Eve. And he knew I would do it, he knew.”

Rowan looks around for something to drink. “You looked where he said?”

Vicky nods. “It was like he said it would be. An envelope full of papers.”

“You opened it?”

“He’d sealed it shut but I had to!” she wails. “How could I not look? I had to know what I was sticking in the coffin with him that was so important.”

Rowan raises his chin a fraction. He’s not going to speak again.

“They were police reports! Witness statements, maps, aerial shots, names. Things he shouldn’t have, should he? He shouldn’t have had them? And he wanted me to pretty much see that they were buried. That would be like destroying evidence or something, wouldn’t it? I could have got into real trouble.”

Rowan chews his lip. Nods.

“I’m a bad person,” says Vicky. “I took his money but I didn’t do the thing he asked. I never told Eve about the letter but I didn’t put the folder in the coffin. I was too scared to go through with it and there was always somebody else there saying their goodbyes. I nearly plucked up the courage at one moment but then that cranky arsehole who ran the hippy school barged right through me, sobbing like a baby … and so I’ve just kept it. I haven’t had the guts to throw it away and Derrick had been so clear he wanted it found, but not until long after Eve was dead and gone. I mean it was very ghoulish, wasn’t it? I thought it was just like him – very Edgar Allan Poe. He said they used to call him Corvus, after the raven, because he had this slicked black hair when he was young. I could see him getting a kick out of this, in a weird way. But what was he doing it for? I mean, I’ve read the pages and it’s dry really - and there’s nothing earth shattering in there. The missing girls you were asking about – statements, background stuff, social services and childcare reports. Like I say, stuff he shouldn’t have.”

Rowan looks at the sheaf of pages, trying not to lick his lips. “Can I see?” he asks.

Vicky cocks her head slightly. Sniffs. There’s a fraction of a smile playing at her mouth. “I did wonder, given that this may be quite important to your book, whether there might be a fee payable,” she says, in a way Rowan immediately dislikes. “I mean, I’m probably going to end up looking very bad and that might need some element of compensation, don’t you think? I mean, I haven’t solicited this. I’d have kept the files under the potting shed like before, but then you start asking questions and suddenly it kind of makes sense. Maybe this is what he would have wanted. Eve’s not long for this world, I reckon. You should see the pills in her bedside table, and don’t get me started on the homeopathic shite she brews up, stinking out the kitchen like she’s steaming her smalls.”

Rowan stands, Crosses to the fireplace and makes a show of gazing out the window at the gathering dark.

“So you’d leave the burden of guilt to me, would you?”

“I’d imagine you’re used to it.”

Rowan closes one eye. “How much? Just to look?”

“I need ten,” she says, almost apologetically. “Look, it’s like you were saying after you nutted Shipley, this isn’t who I am. I don’t do this. Derrick made me an offer and I took it and I couldn’t do what he wanted, but now I can honour his wishes, and make enough money to buy Tyson the quad-bike he’s after and pay off a couple of bailiffs. What would you do if you were me?”

Rowan gives a small bow. He can’t dispute the logic and he actually admires her pragmatic approach. He can feel himself almost salivating at the thought of poring over the pages held out on her lap. He turns back to the window, looking through the haunted revenant of his own reflection and seeing a thin beam of torchlight flicking through the near darkness.

“You can have a percentage…” he begins.

“Nope, I can’t wait for all that – I need it now.” Her voice has risen a notch. He realises that she all but threw herself at him when he visited Eve’s house and had gone along to his talk – obviously looking for a payday and a scapegoat from the off.

“I don’t have any money, Vicky,” he says. “Look at where I live. Look at the state of me. I owe the publishers money, not the other way around. I’m standing on the thinnest of thin ice and I’m taking a hot steaming piss on my shoes. I will see you right, I promise, but I can’t give you what I haven’t got, and without sounding too melodramatic, I’ve just come to the conclusion that there really is a story here, an important one, and that means some of my other suspicions might be true, such as what might have happened to Violet Rayner, so it’s really important you show me what’s in there.”

“Are you serious? Are you playing the morality card?” She claps her hands, hooting with derision. “Fuck, you’ll do anything. I need ten, Rowan. Maybe another writer might like to pay it.”

“You said the contents were ‘dry’,” ventures Rowan.

“Yeah, they’re dry if that’s what you’d call a list of victims dating back to 1978 …,”

“And you have that there, do you?” asks Rowan, his whole manner changing. For a moment he’s back in the young offenders’ institute, back to the wall, baring his fangs as the bigger boys took their turn. His voice drops low. “Right there, in your dainty hand. What’s to stop me taking it?”

Vicky sits up straight, eyebrows raised. She seems scornful rather than shocked. “Are you threatening me? Over this? You’re going to get rough with me over something so pitiful?”

He sags, disgusted with himself “I’m sorry,” he says. “Truly. I’m at the end of my rope, here. There’s a lot riding on this for me. Professionally. Personally. I feel like it’s my last chance, I suppose, and you’re standing there brandishing a Holy Grail of stolen documents in front of me. But I can’t give you what I don’t have. My car’s a piece of shit but you can have that. I’ve got some books and albums and a guitar I could sell, or give you, if you like The Levellers and Otis Redding. And Serendipity might lend me something. But Christ, if I was you I would go and give them to somebody else. Maybe just go and hand them straight in at the nick. A know a lady. A good cop. Strategically scatter-brained and very fair. Give them to her and rest easy that you’ve done the right thing. Tell her you put the money in the church poor-box or something. I’ll pick up some journalistic work when it all comes out – whatever it is. And the police will do things properly - not blunder around in the dark ..,”

The door swings open and Snowdrop bursts in to the room, her cheeks pink, the torch held in a hand that protrudes from the sleeve of a bright yellow raincoat. Her mouth opens in a perfect O as she spots Vicky.

“Hiya Snowdrop,” says Rowan, affecting a textbook cow-eyed melancholy. “This is my friend. Hey look, you know the book I was writing, well, look, this is hard to admit, but I think I’m going to have to pull the plug …,”

“Oh for fuck’s sake,” mutters Vicky. “Any more and I’ll be drowning in my tears. You don’t half lay it on thick. She brings her hands down on her knees. “I want ten,” she says, again. “But I’ll take the car and the books as a down-payment and the rest as soon as you bloody can. For that, you this much.” She peels off a centimetre of paper and card and places it on the sofa. Then she peels off a single page from the remaining pile. Glances at it and gives a nod. “You’ll need that, I reckon.”

The page shows a list of names and dates, written in a neater hand than the scribbled text of Derrick’s letter. There are 18 names on the list. At the top, are five words, deeply underlined.

The Missing and the Dead.

“I’ll see myself out,” says Vicky, as Rowan sinks into the chair and invites his niece to sit beside him. “I’m pleased that this weird shit is bringing you closer together. Or something.”

As she pushes out the still-open door, she mumbles something about ‘fucking weird family’.

In the chair, by the light of the fire, drinking the red wine from the picnic hamper, Rowan and Snowdrop start to read.

Neither notices the fire go out. By then, the chill within them has spread far beyond the reach of the flame.

36

January 23, 2020

Sun-Wheel Holistic Therapy Retreat, Monahdliath Mountains, Imverness

8.11am

The woman reaches down to pick up a stone. She wants to hold something solid: to fill her pockets with weight so she does not drift away. She starts to bend down and notices that her feet are bare. She thinks of her feet as ugly things. Trotters, her last man called them. Her little toe crosses over the next one on both of her feet. There is hard, calloused skin upon her soles. Like sleeping with a cheese-grater. That’s what he said, whenever she drifted from her side of the bed onto his side. Such teasing always served as a gateway. The insults would drift up and over her as if she were lowering herself into water. Chubby ankles, toddler legs, pudgy knees, dimpled arse. He’d reach over and grab her belly. Squeeze great handfuls of her. She’d be crying by the time he reached her nipples. Rubber-fingers, he called them. Pulled out his phone and shoved pictures under her nose; sows suckling their young: swollen purple teats, bruised and sticky with greenish milk. Her tears would stoke his temper. He’d call her weak. Tell her she disgusted him. That by 46 she should know her strengths and how to cope with a little banter about her appearance. Peevishly, fatly, he would turn his mass away from her, shaking his head into the pillow, muttering about how he was trying to have fun, to make her laugh, that she could take the piss out of him if she wanted and he wouldn’t fucking cry about it. It would fall to her to apologise: clinging to his sweaty shoulder like moss.

She’d been within her rights to do what she did. She’d imagined that it would be harder to do to somebody that she cared about what she had done to so many strangers. But it had been easier. If anything, she had taken more pleasure in the act.

She had explained it to him, at the end. Explained that she did not blame him, but that she needed to be cherished – to be venerated as a goddess the way a stranger had worshipped her for one perfect, exhilarating summer 30 years before. He had adored her feet. Had caressed every part of her. Had reached inside her and stroked her soul with the same expert caresses that he has touched her skin. He had seen what she truly was – what she was capable of. He had made her feel alive. Had made all of them feel alive. Her. Catherine. Violet. Under his guidance they learned to embrace their higher selves. They became one.

The memories are at once beguiling and painful. She has not allowed herself to think much upon what happened all those years ago. To do so would be to invite rage to enter her, and to do so would undo so many years of hard work. She has pieced her soul back together countless times. Has learned to journey into the place where he still exists. Where he waits for her. The place she visits each time she jockeys upon the soul of the strangers who surrender to her will. She has never allowed herself to think upon the girls who shared that dark space with her. The girls who left her there. She was in that dark, cold space for a very long time. Was there so long that when the voice started speaking to her, she was so grateful for company that she did not question her sanity. He was dead, yes. She had smashed his skull in like a spoon striking a boiled egg. But something of him remained. Something that spoke to her. Something that floated in the centre of her vision. He has been with her ever since. Has been witness to three decades of learning. Of discovery. She is a master of her craft now. She lives within two realms. She is a bridge between the living and the dead and often she nudges people from one side to the other. In such moments, she feels him. Feels Cormac. He spoke to her last night as she sat, half-smiling, in front of the computer screen. Violet was calling her home. Violet wanted to remember. Violet was ready to see …

She already kinows that she will return to the place where this journey began. He will be stronger there. stronger, near his bones. Near the bones of the man who tried to help him, and who paid with his life. She can already feel his excitement, eddying and swelling inside her. She can almost taste him. He’s always there, floating just out of reach. It used to be that he came to her in her dreams. She would see him in his entirety, his haunting eyes, that half-smile, the gentle lullaby of his syrupy voice. Now she carries him with her at all times.

Freya looks back down at her feet. Long ago, she was told that it was possible for a true creature of light to reach into the essence of another and to switch them off – to squeeze the heart in the fist of the mind. To push another through the veil as if it were an open window.

Freya looks up. The mountains are changing colour. The clouds seem wrong. The sky is fizzing with a lurid golden static; a fizzing wire of ultra-violet vibration seems to thrum above every leaf and branch, every pebble and blade of grass. She feels an energy within her; something at once familiar and new.

She turns to look at the big stone farmhouse where she has been a resident these past eight years. They are nice to her here. She teaches sometimes. Gives classes to the new practitioners. Tells them about the places she has been. The journeys to Peru, to Siberia, to South America, ever searching, ever learning. All she asks in return is a place to pitch her tent, and that they do not ask too many questions. She doubts they would like the answers.

She begins to walk, barefoot, towards the house. As she approaches the stone steps that lead up to the big front door, she is stuck with a hammer-blow of memory. Sees Violet, moving through the tangled copse of trees, scratches on her skin, clothes ripped, muddy handprints upon her forearms, sticks in her tangled hair. Sees Catherine, bleeding from the mouth and nose: flies already landing in the crusted crimson pool, her eyelids flickering, looking up through the pleached trees, the arched branches, soundlessly pleading for help. Remembers her own strangled yell, cut-off at its apex. She has a sense-memory: her muscles perfectly recalling the way the bark of the yew tree felt against her skin and the rich, metallic flavour on her lover’s hands as he stuffed his blood-smeared fingers into her mouth, pushing her lips open, pressing his lips and tongue into her hot, wet mouth.

As she trudges back into the cool of the main hall, she hears it. Hears the whispers. . Hears the low, throaty voice. It resonates inside her; a tuning fork plunged into her skull.

“I give you all she was.”

“She is my gift to you.”

“One day you will understand. ”

She glimpses down at her feet. Remembers the surge of white-hot ecstasy as he moved his healing hands above her. Felt herself cross-over. Felt death and rebirth and the sudden, certain knowledge that here, in this moment of execution and resurrection, she glimpsed Paradise. She will offer the same to Violet., Will take her to that place beneath the earth. Will be a passenger upon her soul as she journeys between worlds, again and again, over and over, until Cormac’s bones start to sprout flesh.

Thinks: I am coming home.

37

It’s cold inside Bilberry Byre. If he hadn’t drunk half a bottle of Bushmill’s and wrapped himself in a quilt, Rowan doubts he would be able to press his damaged fingers against the keyboard. He’s shaking a little. There’s a sensation of intrusion in his mouth. He can feel fingers in his throat, pressing down on his tongue. If there were any food in him he would be struggling to keep it down. The whiskey has already turned to acid inside him. He can taste bile and misery. He’s no stranger to the taste but he can’t explain it to himself. He knows his strengths and weaknesses and only doles out portions of self-loathing when it is deserved. He isn’t sure what he’s done wrong. He followed a story, and now he’s in it. He just doesn’t know what to do with it.

“Focus,” he mumbles to himself. “This is the good bit. “This is what you do …,”

He can hear himself slurring, his voice thick with drink. Snowdrop went home a little after 8pm. It hadn’t been the fun and games she’d been hoping for. He’d been short with her: distracted and preoccupied. He kept barking out orders, telling her to get her fingers off the keys of the laptop if she couldn’t do things properly. Kept telling her to make a call to this number or that number while she was still busy with the previous task. He kept sighing at her: grumbling, telling her she’d never get her foot in the door at a newspaper if she couldn’t handle the pressure. It wasn’t until after she’d made her apoloigies and told him she was going to go home that it occurred to him what a wanker he was being. This was supposed to be a bonding exercise for an enthusiastic pre-teen and her hapless uncle. He’d turned it into a hunt for a serial killer and unearthed decades-old corruption and a missing woman.

He’s slumped in the armchair in front of the dead fire, laptop on his knee, phone on the arm of the chair. The only light comes from the little angle-poise lamp on the table beside him. It throws his shadow onto the wall. He spent ten minutes playing with the silhouettes, making birds and spiders and wolves with his fingers before the effort of stretching his tender new skin became painful. He’s saving his energies for more important things. Needs to roll cigarettes and unscrew the cap of the various medicines that will see him through until the morning. Sometimes he needs the dark, and a glass, and the peace to lash himself without leaving a scar.

He’s come to a conclusion almost subconsciously. These past days he has changed his mind without noticing it. At first, he’d seen a scenario with enough big gray areas to drop a narrative into. He’d seen an opportunity to take an insignificant missing persons case from 30 years back and pump it up into something compelling. Somewhere along the way he has begun to believe the bullshit. He believes that Violet, Freya and Catherine were abducted by a persons unknown and subjected to something terrible. He has seen no evidence that Freya ever came back. Violet began to remember things – terrible things - and sought out alternative therapies to try and recover her memories. She hasn’t been seen in months. He believes that Eve Cater is complicit in a cover-up. He has suspicions about the disappearance of a hippy caretaker-cum-guru by the name of Arthur Sixpence, the ‘suicide’ of retired cop Derrick Millward, and the disappearance on a mountainside of Alan Rideal If he were a police officer, he does not think he would be able to make a case stick. But he’s not a police officer. He’s a journalist and writer and he holds himself to a far lower level of accountability.

“Explain it to yourself,” he mumbles. “Pitch it.”

He starts to think in headlines and opening paragraphs: sees his byline on the front page of both red-tops and broadsheets and imagines his glossy hardback on promotional tables in every bookshop from Waterstone’s to Waitrose. Each time he considers it there’s a tightening in his chest; a prickling sensation all over his skin. There’s sweat at his temples and inside the gloves his hands feel slick with grease.

“Make a decision, you twat,” he mutters, and his breath is tight in his chest. “Are you going to do the right thing, or the thing you already know you’re going to do …,”

Some of the names on the cover-sheet given to him by Vicki-Louise mean nothing to him. He can find no record online or in any newspaper archives. But three correspond to names on the UK’s missing persons database: a charitable website groaning under the weight of pictures and names, dates and disappearances. Rowan had felt hot tears prick at his eyes as he’d stared into the page after page of smiling faces: children, teens, women, men, all colours and creeds, ethnicities, religions. Page after page of staring into the features of those who vanished without trace, and for whom somebody, somewhere, still holds out hope.

Among the names on Derrick’s list was one Cormac Pearl. He went missing in June 1985, disappearing from the family home near Blackpool, aged 19. The mugshot shows a good-looking, dark-eyed lad; young for his age, with longish curly hair and slender, strangely feminine features. He’s smiling for the camera: an incongruous thumbs-up obscuring a portion of his lower face. He’s bare-chested, but the image is black and white so it’s impossible to say if it was an intimate snap, or simply a candid moment on a sunny day. Beside it is a graphic projection of what Cormac might look like now. Digital software has been employed to age his fine features. Hairless, a little jowelly, the fifty-something version of Cormac Pearl looks thoroughly unremarkable and any hopes Rowan held that he might recognize him were quickly dismissed as fanciful. Despite that, he is getting better acquainted with the young man’s disappearance, cross-referencing the name against the National Crime Agency’s missing persons archive: a grisly database full of digitally reconstructed faces of corpses as yet unidentified. He knows that Cormac was the only son of Deaglan and Siobhan Pearl, but can find little other information online about the family. He’s managed to track down an In Memoriam announcement in the Blackpool Gazette, dated 1992. Siobhan died at a private nursing facility after a short illness. She was 44. The family asked that donations be made to a charity set up in memory of their son. The accompanying memento mori was in Gaelic but translated as: “No matter how long the day, the evening comes”. He glances at the screen again and begins to think about the Irish families he has had dealings with – great sprawling clans of half-cousins and step-nephews spread out across the globe, united by the faintest bonds of blood. He widens the internet search and changes the language settings. Quickly finds mention of Siobhan Pearl and her untimely death: the accompanying classified notice incomprehensible to his English eyes. He runs it through a translation service and the jumble of consonants turn into names he can search for. Sisters, brothers, nieces. He sits forward, all other thoughts forgotten. Types a half dozen keywords into a generic search engine and finds himself grinning as he spots what he’s looking for. He often hopes to proven wrong in his cynicism about the nature of people but it hasn’t happened yet. People need to share. They need to have their stories told. The internet has been a true leveler: an equalizing platform granting the illusion of an audience to those who may otherwise have had to stand at bus-stops shouting their stories into the air. The family history website administered by one Tegan Pearl, based in Boston, USA, is ab abominable collusion of lurid yellows and pinks and seems designed entirely to give the user a migraine. Rowan has to squint to navigate his way through the mess of anecdotes, family trees and links to other, paid-for sites, with links to the family surname. He searches under the name ‘Cormac’. It comes up with two hits. One is under the heading: A Prayer for Cormac.

Hey Pearls of the World, I know you probably all say a prayer for the whole clan but can I ask you to say a special Hail Mary for poor Cormac, who’s been gone 30 years now. For those of you who don’t know, Cormac is the only son of Uncle Daeglan and Auntie Siobhan, from the Wexford branch of the family. Cormac went missing in June 1985 and despite Uncle Daeghlan’s best efforts, he’s never been found. The pain of it all put Siobhan in hospital, where she picked up a virus and died. She was too young. I have such lovely memories of her (we’re third cousins, on Dervla’s side) and I’ll always remember how welcome she made us when we visited them in England when I was still not much more than a girl. I don’t have many memories of Cormac but I remember a nice young man who let me play with his sister’s toys and didn’t mind me riding on his back like he was a horse! I still get a Christmas card from Uncle Daeghlan and I know it would mean a lot if you all included him in your prayers. I think we all know that Cormac isn’t coming home but some kind of closure would help everybody, I think. Much love, thankyou, God bless.

Rowan clicks his tongue against the roof of his mouth. Reads the comments below the posting. Sits forward, jockey-like, as he sees the comment left in January, this year, by somebody named eviec41.

What a blast from the past! Seeing all these names has really got me feeling nostalgic. Daeglan always managed to scare the life out of people but he always struck me as a good man who bad things just kept happening to. I’d love to send him a letter or a card if you could give me an address please? We lost touch after Siobhan passed away. Does anybody else remember the wake? By God that was a proper funeral – it took me a month to sober up!

Below, a user named gadflypearl has included a black and white photograph, taken in 1992, at a country hotel in County Wexford. It’s a group shot: a great tide of black suits and black dresses, mourning veils and pale, downturned faces. Sitting at a round table, resembling the pint or porter she holds in a small plump hand, is Eve Cater. She’s talking to a tall, broad-shouldered man. He wears a swatch of material around his neck: the knot peeking out from his open-collared shirt. There’s a chill to the way he holds himself; something in his pose that speaks of a grief held in so tightly that to move would be to risk fragmenting. Between them, sits a girl in her late teens: unpretty, awkward, hunched over herself like a vulture defending a kill. The image is monochrome, but her face is pale and the hue of her slicked back hair speaks of a fiery red.

Beneath the picture, the simple words: “Is this You?”

There is no reply.

38

February 15, 2020

The Wasdale Valley

8.30pm

“I am cleansing this sacred space. Here, we are untroubled by time. There is no time. Here, we are each governed by the same heartbeat: our pulse is the creaking of the fire and the beating of my drum. This is a place of freedom, untainted by negative energies. This is a gateway for the spirits, a barrier between two worlds: a veil between the here and the hereafter….”

Violet is perhaps three feet above the floor, close enough to make out the carpet of mulched leaves, of gravelly dirt and scattered straw that forms the floor of this small, round construction. Feathers and bottles hang on lengths of twine from the fan of thin wooden poles that spread out from the central column. Had there been a fire in the entranceway? A black cooking pot? She fancies she saw a pile of books, pages creased at each corner, tossed carelessly into a tangled clump of grass and roots. She cannot be sure what she saw and what she remembers. It has been this way for a long time. This past year has been excruciating – her mind a labyrinth of locked rooms, bursting open to allow glimpses of tusk and snout and tooth. This place, this here, this now, it has been some thirty years in the making. This is what she must undergo if she is to come to understand herself. Freya has been clear about it all. To heal, she must suffer. In cruelty, she will find truth.

She concentrates, hard, trying not to let the strange droning incantations seize the edges of his consciousness. An upturned milk crate had been placed beside the table. She had glimpsed crystals; green, purple, lapis-lazuli. She hadn’t paid attention. Had been too busy watching the shadows of the trees move across the forest floor; too busy catching droplets of fine rain upon his dirt-grimed face.

She experiences a moment of absolute clarity. A memory so bright and fresh that it seems newly painted. Sees herself, sitting up in bed, hair wild, eyes red, grinning at her laptop screen like a crazy person as the message pinged through from the one person who could provide answers. Freya. Freya - who promised to help her. To heal her. To tip the ayahuasca down her throat the same way the boy had done three decades before. Who promised to hold her hand as the visions came.

Violet feels herself grow light-headed. Her limbs are too heavy for her body; her thoughts a soft swirl. Thirty years of memories spin, gently, in front of her drowsy eyes. She tries to centre herself. Sees herself doing as she was told; making her way to the secluded little spot halfway up the fellside in a knotted tangle of trees. She had been sweating from the steep climb through the forest, boots caked with mud, shirt clinging to her back, camera bouncing from her softly rounded belly with each step up the near-invisible path. A broad-shouldered, shaved-headed woman had greeted her with an embrace, pressing her own softness against her. She had shushed her even before she found breath to talk. Had helped her from her shirt and her shoes. Led her inside the sacred place and laid her down. She had not spoken. Didn’t make a noise until the incantation began.

She hears movement. Senses a shape draw near as the light in the room flickers and fades.

Freya …

She realises she has thought the name instead of spoken it. She cannot seem to make her mouth obey her commands. She has so much to ask. She came here for answers: to embrace what happened in the darkness thirty years ago. Freya has been so kind these past weeks. Has taught her so much.

The thoughts evaporate as she moves closer; her scent briefly penetrating the mixed aromas of the small, hot space. He smells her sweat. Smells the high, keening song of earthy skin rubbed with moss and wild garlic.

She tries not to wriggle as he feels the small, cold objects being placed upon her back. There is a smoothness to the stone at the small of her back. The others are more jagged, their make-up crystalline, and there is something oddly sensual in the way they prickle her skin. There is an unexpected warmth to their surface, as if they are generating heat.

She feels her eyes close again. Takes a deep breath. Smells dead flowers and disturbed stones. The forest floor seems to be moving, as if snakes and eels are wriggling beneath the thin carpet of green. She can taste the bitter, brackish liquid on her tongue. There’s a sickness in her gut, swelling like a living thing.

Memory hits her like a wave.

She sees herself underground; the pink-pink-pink of water tumbling down a jagged crevasse, hidden beneath the roots of the tree where Mr Sixpence used to help those who came to him when nobody else could. She can see him now: the tall, grey-haired man, the braid in his beard, the blue ink on the backs of his hands. Can see herself and Catherine Marlish draped around one another, skins not their own, adrift in delirium, giggling and puking and crying as the man with the green toes banged his drum.

An image pushes itself up from the pile of dead leaves in her memory. A picture long since submerged – hidden from herself in the place where bad dreams go. She sees Freya, as she was then. Sees the new girl who’d been so kind. Sees her stroking the hair of the singer from the subway. Sees the thing gangling from the bottom rung of the old iron ladder high above. Here, at last, she sees what she should have noticed all those years ago. She sees the look that passed between two kindred spirits. Sees the truth about the man with mismatched eyes, and the red-haired girl who helped him find troubled souls on which to prey.

Through the haze of hallucinations, Violet becomes aware of the clamminess of her skin. It’s too hot inside the yurt. It’s a dank, dark heat. She feels as though there is a crust forming upon him; a rind of salt and dirt. It is as if the canvas walls of the little round dwelling are made of flesh. She pictures deerskins. Sees the carcasses of flayed animals heaped into a gory red mound of festering flesh. Sees the woman who stands above him: Imagines her crimson-handed, squatting above the forest floor, a bone needle in her hands pulling lengths of sinew through the tattered buckskin pelts of slaughtered doe.

The smoke is catching in her throat. It feels as if there is something in her mouth; some fruit-slimed peach stone blocking her oesophagus. Freya’s voice has changed; slow, breathy, a wood flute playing a funeral reel. It makes her limbs feel heavy, her skin turning to rubber. She hears the rustle as she moves around the space. She smells something sweet and floral. Feels a sudden tickling heat at her feet; a warmth just the right side off painful. There is an electrical charge within her – a copper wire inside her bones. She becomes aware of the connection between them. She smells a rich, green tang of sage. For a moment she is a mosaic; a pixilated image; a whole made up of a billion parts. Inside her skull, an orange glow, like watching a bright sun through closed eyes.

Her mind fills with images the way another’s eyes might brim with tears. Her feet jiggle up and down as though he is running. She feels as though there are ants beneath her skin.

A hole, black and wide as a whale’s mouth, opens inside her skull and she pours through it as if being sucked into a pit of tar. She is suddenly 14 again. 14, and scared, Catherine’s hand in hers, dragging herself up and out of the forest floor like a corpse rising from a grave.

Inside her mind, Violet runs. Her bare feet catch on tree roots; risen from the muddy ground like swollen veins. Sharp pebbles puncture her skin: the sting eclipsed a moment later by the sensuous suck and pull of warm mud and dew-moistened grass. She is only dimly aware of these sensations. Could not speak if she wanted to. Her throat is afire: her tongue swollen; the taste of rotten bark filling her mouth and nose.

“You have been chosen,” comes a voice: an icicle melting in the centre of her skull. “You will be reborn ….”

39

Friday, 2.16pm

Seascale, West Cumbria

Evelyn wakes in the kitchen, face down on crossed arms. There’s an empty bottle of Famous Grouse on the table and two Mars bar wrappers scrumpled up on her paperwork. A mugshot of Rowan Blake’s face is staring up at her from the inside flap of the red book. She fell asleep while reading. Dreamed of tall, angular figures moving towards her through fire-blackened trees; the shadows and the objects that cast them indistinguishable; bindings about her elbows and ankles; soft earth in her throat.

Groggily, she reaches out for the last dregs of her water-glass. Tips it into her mouth and swallows, drily. She’s pleased the whisky bottle was almost empty when she unscrewed the lid. She’d have kept on drinking were there more to drink.

Her gaze returns to the kitchen window. The day is already darkening and she can see more of her own reflected kitchen than she can the steel-grey sky and squabbling gulls in the space where the cliff disappears into nothingness. She pulls herself up and stumbles to the light switch, turning it off in the hope that the darkened room will give her a better view of what lays beyond the glass. Instead she sees only herself; small and round and old; her face pudgy and slack, creased and rumpled with the pattern of her watchstrap temporarily embossed on the wrinkled skin of her cheek.

A belch bubbles up: chocolate and spirit and bile. She grimaces. Wonders when the crossover happened – when she went from being able to knock back six pints and a revolver of chasers and get up the next day ready for a bacon sandwich and a ruck. Hospital, she reckons,ngiving it some thought. The stabbing. The operation – when they cut parts of her away.

She leaves the darkened kitchen and makes her way to the living room, flopping down into a floral Ercol chair. She’s started making old-person noises too. Started groaning when she lifts herself out low seating and responding with elongated vowels to pieces of news. She’s already promised herself that if she starts to eat her dinner with a spoon or piss herself any more noticeably, she’ll chuck herself off the cliff without a backwards glance.

The door into the hallway is half open, half closed, and as she looks at it her mind plays a cruel trick. For a moment she sees him, with his dark hair and his big teeth and his neat tie, smiling at her in that way of hers, telling her she was doing a grand job, wondering if she might be able to spare a moment of her valuable time.

She feels a tightening of her throat. Closes her eyes and lets herself fall into it: to tumble over the lip of the precipice and into the person she used to be. Two years of chasing shadows. Of coming up with lie after lie, disappearing from her real life in increments. Two years of watching Derrick grow more intense, more obsessive, in his pursuit for a man that she was beginning to suspect did not exist. It was Eve who put the miles in, criss-crossing the country, tracking down camps and communes, wrapped up in a world of psychedelia, of communion with nature; of the blissful struggle of life outside the lines. Her notebooks groan under the weight of names: one-word monikers of people who may have come to harm, or who may have simply moved on to another camp; another life. Young women with names like Happiness; like Delilah and Morning. Young men: Water, Kaftanman, Squirrel Red. In a scattered community of itinerants determined not to play by society’s rules, she has found it impossible to determine what qualified as a missing person. And everywhere she has asked about Arthur Sixpence, about Cormac Pearl, she has drawn the same response.

“Sure, we’ve heard the rumours – but we look after our own. We welcome people in but we wouldn’t allow anybody who gave us a bad vibe. We’re about peace. About nature. About love …,”

The break came in 1990 A contact has nudged them towards a halting site further north than she had ever managed herself needing to travel. Mr Pearl had bankrolled the journey. He provided the car, paid for the hotels, and gave Derrick an envelope thick with cash in case he needed to be persuasive. She can see herself now, pulling up at the bank of Loch Linne, high up in the tip of Scotland: the car so full of Derrick’s smoke that it had been like driving in fog. It took the best part of nine hours to reach Raspberry Layby. They’d had to have the car pulled out of mud twice before they were able to make sense of their scribbled directions and weave their way to the secluded spot where a ragged community of families had made a home. Suspicious, bright-white eyes peered out from mud-crusted faces. Children played in the dirt, bare-legged and snot-faced. A man with an arm missing at the elbow and a straggle ginger beard emerged from a canvas tent; his belly hanging over a pair of camouflage trousers and a tangled collection of necklaces stuck in his chest hair like moths in a spider’s web. He was carrying a canvas backpack.

“You’re police, yeah?” he asked, his accent pure Glasgow. Thought you’d come eventually. She left this.” He held out the sack as if it were a bomb. “I’ve heard you’ve been asking. If you want my opinion she’s probably dead, but she might just have found a place to get him out of her head.”

Eve and Derrick exchanged glances. The Glaswegian set the bag down on the floor. Derrick crouched down. Retrieved a gold pen from his pocket and opened the top flap. Written on the canvas in felt pen, framed in a childish loveheart: Cormac and Freya 4 Eva.

“Where did you get this?” asked Derrick, his voice catching.

“She left it. Only stayed a night. She was running, I’ll tell you that. I’ve asked around and there’s nobody further North than us so she’s not fallen in with anybody friendly. She said she didn’t want to live that life any more. He’d gone too far. He was going home – that’s what she said. He was going home.”

“Is there somewhere we can talk in private?” asked Derrick, glancing around. People were emerging from tents and battered vehicles to gawp at the two newcomers as if they were some aquatic lifeform that had grown legs and climbed a mountain.

“Not much to tell you,” said the man, not unkindly. “She asked if she could join us for a night. Ate with us. Sang with us. She didn’t tell us anything other than her name and we’re not the sort to ask questions. It only rang a bell with me because I’ve an old pal who spoke to one of your officers at a folk festival near Cambridge back in May. That’d be you, I reckon,” he said, smiling at Eve. “He said you were pretty. He was right.”

“But you do believe in him, yes?” asked Derrick, his tick more pronounced than ever, his chin jerking as if pulled by a string. “You do believe he’s real …”

She arches her back, feeling the old wound pull on her stomach. She feels as though she is coming to the end of things. She wonders if this is how Derrick felt in those final days – as if he’d been spread too thinly over too much bread. Whether he’d let go of life in tiny steps or whether death had come in one great colossal punch.

She looks around for the letter – the one she’s pored over more times than she can count. She reads it daily, always looking for a new, more palatable truth. Each time she finds herself coming to the same conclusion. Derrick didn’t write this, and if he didn’t write it, then perhaps his suicide was a lie too.

She reads it again, eyes tired, even though she could recite it from memory.

Dear Eve.

I know you’re going to be cross with me for a little while. You’re going to grumble and bang things down and probably drink too much and eat the wrong things, and you’re going to say I was a coward who took the easy way out. You’ll be right about all of it. All I ask is that you forgive me. I’m doing this for the right reasons. I’m letting go. I’m tired, eve. Tired of carrying all this horrible darkness inside me. I’m tired of the bad dreams. I’m tired of being scared. I have to do this so your last years aren’t for nothing. I have to do this so you’re free to grow old the way you want to. I know you don’t believe in an afterlife or any of the hippy nonsense we spent so long looking into, but it means so much to me that we’re going to share the same patch of ground. It meant more to me than any wedding, though I reckon you were more likely to say yes to this than to any other question I popped. I want you to know, I understand. I won’t ever judge you, Eve. You had your reasons, I had mine. I’ll be waiting for you, forever grateful to be your friend.

With love,

D.Millward

Eve thinks that she could have left it at that. She could have persuaded herself that it really was a goodbye letter from an old, fragile man who simply couldn’t stomach any more suffering. Then she heard about the way he was found. About the mask, and the way he would wake, shrieking, in the cold dark space of his bedroom. Somebody sent him that mask, she knows that. It 3was on his bed, in a padded envelope. Somebody had left it there for him. Had he really staggered out to the old chapel, slipped a noose around his neck and pulled the ugly pig mask onto his face. Had he really dropped from a pew and strangled, slowly, in the dark? She would rather believe that than the alternative. Would rather believe he did it to himself than that the sins of the past were coming back to haunt her.

She looks again at the picture on the inside flap of the book. Rowan Blake. She’d seen it in his eyes when he knocked at the door – seen the hunger, the desperation, the need for this to become something he could use. She knows he won’t stop. It will all come out, in time. Everything that she achieved will be wiped away in one great black headline. The crimes she covered up and the people she left to die; the money she took and the killer she allowed to walk free. She made a terrible error – a decision made in temper, in the funeral shrouds of a cold hospital bed.

There is a creak from the floorboard beneath the doorway into the kitchen. She has a memory of that little bedroom at the guest house on Rydal Water – Derrick on the big four-poster, herself sat in the high-backed chair, talking about the disappearance of a healer and speculating about the connection to Cormac Pearl – the boy who heard things; saw things; who stayed with him for years having almost killed a member of his family.

She turns, slowly.

Sees her.

Sees the one who fooled them all.

The one they saw as a victim, but who was always more huntress than prey.

Eve doesn’t try to bargain for her life. Doesn’t apologise or ask that her good deeds be weighed against the bad. Doesn’t tell her that for nearly 30 years she has lived with some vile, carcinogenic lie bleeding its poison into her old bones.

She simply raises her head, and waits for the knife.

Eve tries to mouth the word ‘Violet’. To ask after the girl who would not stop looking for answers, even when her questions brought her within kissing distance of evil.

“Let go,” says Freya, quietly. “He’s waiting for you. They’re all waiting for you.”

When it comes, there is something almost compassionate in the way the blade saws across her withered flesh.

40

February 15, 2020

The Wasdale Valley

8.30pm

Violet is adrift in delirium, her thoughts a jumbled mass. She is at once herself, and another. She is now, and she is then: woman and child, united in one body. She feels like a skin-suit, stitched tight over two people.

She wears a long white nightdress. The hems are torn and the delicate embroidery is obscured beneath splashes of mud. In places, the material clings to her skin. She’s plump and pink. There are patterns on her flesh; serpentine sigils and jagged circles, daubed in sticky fingerprints on the ripe fruit of her skin. Her mind is a basket of slithering shapes, interweaving, gorging on one another. She cannot distinguish her own consciousness from the voices that whisper, sibilant, in the shushing of the trees and the fizzing of her blood.

Her throat is agony. Her mouth is bitter with the taste of burned herbs, a tingling numbness in her tongue and gums. From somewhere, Catherine’s voice.

“Violet! Violet, please ….!”

A branch snaps in two beneath the sole of her left foot, gunshot-sharp against the silence of the night. Unbidden, her eyes flutter open. She glimpses at her surroundings and feels panic claw its way up her aching throat. Mist rises from the mulch of the woodland floor; shapeless wisps that coil around the bases of the rain-blackened trees. The moon is a leering eye, half hooded by a skein of thick cloud. It finds its likeness in the flat, bronze-black surface of the lake.

She sees a shape, moving towards her through the trees. A round, motherly shape. She reaches down and the action makes her stomach heave. She throws up onto the forest floor; the bitter drink and the green liquor spattering into the forest floor. She scrabbles in the mulch. Her hands close on something hard and sharp – a twisted tent peg, rusted and bent. She clutches it like a blade.

“Violet … Violet, I’m frightened.”

Desperately, she hisses Catherine’s name. Looks back and sees the small, pathetic figure of her best friend, wriggling out of the hole beneath the twisted tree roots, mud and blood and tears and snot forming a mask upon her flesh as terrifying as the pig-skin shaman mask that the man had handed to Freya with the reverence of an acolyte.

Her mind feels as though it has been ripped into strips. She needs to get somewhere safe, somewhere loud, where she can try and put the picture into focus.

She runs. Runs until Catherine’s voice fades away.

The forest seems older here. 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 she licks her lips she tastes raw meat.

“A little further,” comes a voice, in the darkness. “You are so close …,”

A twig whips at her face as she pushes through a tangle of spindly branches. She becomes aware of a sound, a keen-edged rhythm: a saw finding purchase in wet wood. She realises that it is the sound of her own breathing; that she is softly hyperventilating. Ghosts of warm breath gather in the black air around her face, drifting away to mingle with the mist and the cold night air.

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.

“You must be strong. You have been chosen. Chosen for rebirth …,”

She pushes through the arch of trees, trying to steady her breathing.

She emerges in a small clearing. On all sides, the trees form a tight mesh, snarled up with blackberries and thorns. She suddenly thinks of fairytales. Of Sleeping Beauty. The thought emerges as if from nowhere and is met with a screech of pain inside her skull, as if the simplicity of the memory has caused physical pain to the voice that whispers inside her. She shakes her head, angry wasps inside her skin; scratching at herself so hard that she scores red lines into the bare skin of her chest.

The clouds uncouple for a moment and a little yellow light anoints the clearing. There is a hole in the earth; a yawning maw of disturbed ground. A mound of loose stones has been built into a cairn at the far end of the hole. She starts towards it, her feet moving over damp grass. The light reveals the wildflowers that rise from the flattened ground; purple foxgloves, violet knapweed; a constellation of gold and yellow blooms, winking like the lights of a distant town. She reaches the edge of the hole and leans forward. She gasps, sucking in a lungful of cold air. She smells decay. Spoiled meat and sour milk. She catches a taste of her own scent; all sweat and churned roots.

There is a moment’s hesitation. The voices in her head fall silent, cowed, as a new voice enters her consciousness. It is a funereal monotone, a throat-sung requiem, but somehow each syllable throbs with a power that makes her flesh prickle. She feels flies landing upon her bare skin, attracted to the stink of her sweat. She hears a low buzzing sound, more of a vibration that a noise, and she realises that there is a part of her that does not want this. A part of her that still fears the dark. That wants to turn and run and rip the darkness with raucous screams.

At the edge of the clearing, a twist of darkness takes shape. Even in the swirl of her delirium, she identifies it as a yew tree, its circumference vast, its branches splayed out like the fingers of an upturned hand. There are great scars in the trunk; the bark ripped away and the wood exposed. She finds her vision blurring as she gazes into the face of the ancient tree. Sees knot-holes become eyes, a porcine snout, a hanging mouth of obsidian black.

“She’s here! Christ, Derrick, she’s here!”

She spins at the sound of the new voice. Slashes upwards with the hard metal skewer she holds in her right fist. It rips through the flesh of Eve Cater’s gut as easily as a spoon through ripe melon.

Through the disarray of her thoughts, she becomes aware of the sound of footsteps. She can make out the sound of small, running feet – a haphazard scuttling noise, as if the clearing has suddenly come alive with children. She realises she is on her belly, on the ground, and that the small cop who came looking for is trying to stuff her guts back in; blinking and pale, telling her it will be okay, that help is coming – that they’ll get him for this.

Something seems to vibrate beneath her. She hears chattering, high and childlike, then peals of bright laughter. It seems to come from all sides. She pulls her arms in to her waist. Woodlice scamper across her exposed face; bristly, multi-legged creatures criss-cross her skin, trailing webs; as if lacing her into a corset. She tries to raise her head but some sinewy root has wound itself into her hair and as she pulls herself upright it holds her fast.

She glimpses bone. The yellow-white of a leathery skull, all bristles and tusks, the insinuation of matted hair over bare, brick-red skin. She opens her mouth as the walls of the grave begin to close around her; a toothless maw engulfing her in one slow, slithering swallow. She feels roots tangle about her limbs; tiny, wriggling things climbing into her hair, the weight of cold earth pressing upon her like tombstones. She cannot breathe. Cannot see. Cannot hear the voice. Darkness takes her, nightmarish visions dancing just out of reach. The last thing she feels is a distant sense of pain, some vague apprehension that her skin is beginning to sizzle and blister; that the leather shroud around her skin is evaporating into the earth, leaving her body to be devoured and digested by the hungry soil beneath the ancient tree.

She wakes to darkness; to the stench of the tent; the burnt-sage reek of the sacred space she had sought in a desperate quest for answers. She tries to move but her limbs refuse her commands. Her eyes bulge in their sockets as she tries to see the thing that stands beside and above her, looking down, pig-faced and hideous.

Freya leans down, leather and sweat and rotten meat. Her words are muffled by the mask. They echo, inhuman, inside her skull.

“You wanted to remember, Violet. This is what you wanted. So I’m going to help you. I’m going to take you through the veil. Take you to the other place, again and again and again. And every time I come back, there will be a little less of you. I’m bringing him back in pieces, do you understand. Bringing back the one who understood. He’s there, waiting for us both. I can feel him. I would never have understood if you hadn’t tracked me down. You opened my eyes. You showed me what I had been. All those years, wasted on lies. All I had to do was find you. Find that silly girl Catherine. You were the ones who left him there. Ended him. Abandoned him to that place. It will take time, but together we will bring him back.”

Violet feels as though a hole has been torn in reality. She sees the darkness tear itself into the shape of a yawning, hungry mouth.

It closes

41

Rowan squints out through the window. It’s cold and black and the rain comes in handfuls. He should probably have walked Snowdrop home, he realises. Should have put on his coat and acted like a grown-up….

He opens a cupboard and roots around for something drinkable. There’s a sloe-and-damson gin that looks as though it might be good for his chest pains. He’d like to roll a joint but isn’t sure his fingers can manage it. He curses as the phone begins to trill. He stomps back to the sofa. Looks at the number and curses. It’s Serendipity again – no doubt planning on delivering another saccharine homily about his failings as a grown-up and the importance of trying harder. He can’t face it. He knows he’s done wrong but he can’t imagine himself suddenly starting to get things right any time soon. An apology would be fatuous. How could he apologise for misdeeds that he knows he is destined to repeat? He’d rather wait until Death is knocking at the door then repent for his entire life in one go.

The ringing stops and immediately starts again. It’s a withheld number this time. He shakes himself, screwing up his eyes, intent on sounding sober.

“Rowan Blake …,”

Nobody speaks. He can hear breathing, the slightest hint of a painful exhalation; a bronchial rattle to the outbreath.

“Hello? It’s a bad line. This is Rowan Blake – I can’t hear you.” He listens again, his patience dissolving. “You’re welcome to call back on a different line. Or email me. I’m available.”

He hangs up, his head thumping. He feels as though he should drink a big glass of water but his body is craving something he can turn into the right kind of fuel. He knows he’s nearly there – that the pieces are all laid out in front of him and all he has to do to complete the jigsaw is to chew one or two errant edges into a more pleasing shape. He wonders if he should call Matti. Maybe it would be better to go straight to Aubrey. He can picture her at some book launch, a glass of white wine in one hand and a tote bag full of paperback samplers in the other, toasting the launch of some hot new thing destined to set the publishing world alight. He’d like to remind her that she’s already got a bona fide A-plus true crime writer on her books. He thinks of Sumaira, suddenly. He’s no doubt that when it comes to taking his findings to the police, she’ll be the friendly face best suited to the task. Just as quickly, his mind fills with the mingled faces of Violet and Catherine. Of two women who spent a weekend being tormented by a sadist and have spent the last 30 years trying to be something other than victims. He shakes his head, angry at himself for considering it. Screws up his hands, painfully, as the thought trails another… where is Violet now? He suddenly come to the inescapable conclusion that the right thing to do would be to report his findings to the police and insist they begin treating her as an active missing person. All that is stopping him is the thought of the story leaking out to a competitor before he’s able to make it truly his own. And he isn’t sure that he really believes that’s a good enough reason to stay quiet.

He crosses to the sink. Turns on the taps pushes his face under the stream, enjoying the sensation of sudden icy cold on skin turned soft and pink by the scorching heat of the fire. It wakes him like a slap. He straightens up, hair dripping onto his bare shoulders and chest, dribbling down to soak the waist of his trousers.

He presses his forehead to the glass. Feels the chill upon his skin. Stares into his own eyes and tries to focus on the view beyond. He can’t seem to make anything out. The darkness is oily and absolute, an iridescent shade of gleaming black that makes him think of raven wings. He crosses to the little lamp by the chair and flicks it off. Crosses back to the window in the dark. Resumes his position, leaning against the cold glass, eyes shut.

Counts down in his head.

Three

Two

One

Opens his eyes and feels a frozen, gauntleted hand close around his heart.

An inch away, beyond the mullioned glass, two eyes are staring straight back into him, glaring into his irises like infra-red beams through a magnifying glass. He staggers back, goosepimples rising on his skin.

Sees a face; all snout and teeth and leather; all tusks and meat.

Sees the thing smear breath and spit upon the glass.

He staggers backwards, his hand rising to the inked symbols on his chest. Clatters over the armchair and tumbles to the floor, the last of the red wine tumbling onto the carpet: the smear of red expanding like a bloodstain.

He moves towards the door and trips over his own feet. Tumbles to the floor and catches his head upon the edge of the table, pain exploding inside his head.

He looks up into the leather and the hair and the round yellow eyes: porcine teeth curving down like sword. He opens his mouth. Feels the sudden thudding impact of a fist, beating down upon his skull as if pounding in a nail.

Feels the cold and the darkness wash over him like silk.

42

Rowan wakes to pain. He feels as though hot iron is being pressed against his flesh. There is a pain in his shoulder joints; an agony so hot and perfect that for one delirious moment he feels as though wings have been stitched to his back.

He traces the source. Tries to make sense of himself. It’s almost as dark with his eyes open as closed. Away from the places where his skin seems to sizzle, he is cold. A sharp breeze lashes at his skin.

Icy cold water drips upon his face from above. He tastes something brackish and mineral. He spits, his tongue too big for his mouth. Something about the action feels wrong. Skin is touching his cheeks. His face feels as if it is being pushed into his sternum.

Panic blooms in his chest: fresh blood blotting funeral shroud. He realises he is not touching the ground. His arms are above his head. Something hard and metallic is chewing into the skin of his wrists, deep enough to touch bone. He’s dangling over nothingness. He jerks, instinctively. The parts of him that were numb come to life: a shriek of pain emanating through every part of him. He jerks and hears metal upon metal – feels the cold bindings at his wrist take another bite of his skin. He kicks out again, legs moving in ragged circles in the pitch dark, pumping his legs like a cyclist. The constriction in his throat suddenly the centre of his being. He is sinking into himself. The weight of his own body is pulling him down into a cold, dank darkness,.

He can’t speak. Can’t lift his head. Something is crusted to his face. He takes a choking breath and tastes blood. He begins to cough, each gasp seeming to pull the manacles deeper into his flesh. He stretches his neck. Reaches out with his fingertips and touches a link of metal with his middle fingers. They’re looped over a cold metal rod.

Handcuffs.

The rung of a ladder.

He tries again to speak. Forces his head out of his neck and stares upwards. Little droplets of water catch a faint, almost phosphorescent light. The darkness seems to shimmer.

A cave, he thinks. Underground. A shaft. One of the old copper shafts from when they built the house. ..

He hears the sound of distant running water.

He can feel his heart beating faster, responding to the desperate fight-or-flight burst of adrenaline that is rushing through his system. He tries to slow it down. To focus. And yet the pain and the fear are absolute. All he wants is for this horror to stop.

A voice drifts up from below. It echoes against the wall. It sounds like more than one voice. Sounds as if a dozen or more people are reading from the same script.

He kicks out again, trying to turn himself as if he is suspended in water. Bites back the hiss of pain that threatens to erupt from his bloodied, dry mouth.

He twists, suspended in the darkness: his arms two snakes joined at the mouth. He glares into the dark. Slowly, the shapes begin to come into focus.

A woman with pale skin is laid out on her back. She wears a light shift dress, filthy and ragged. She is little more than skin and bone. Streaks and swirls have been daubed upon her skin. Even in the darkness and after the desecration of her flesh, Rowan recognises her. It’s Violet.

He twists, desperately, and a fresh bu8rst of pain rips down his arms. He bites down upon the fat of his cheek to stop from screaming. Peers through the half light and tries to make sense of what lays below him.

There are bones scattered on the damp floor. Too many bones. Hundreds of bones. Rowan pictures a bear cave – the lair of something carnivorous and unstoppable.

He spins, helplessly. He feels as if something has broken in his head.

He hears movement, down there, in the shadows by the cave. He sees the thing that haunted Violet’s dreams. Sees Elrik. The Shaman. Cormac Pearl …

Rowan narrows his eyes.

The Shaman wears only the mask: eyes like saucers, gray white tusks; stitches jagged where the flesh has been pulled too tight.

The body beneath is female. Rounded-shoulders and motherly hips; a triangle of greying fire at her thighs.

Freya.

The girl nobody looked for, because she never really existed.

Despite the pain, despite the fear, Rowan suddenly understands. Thirty-five years ago, Mr Sixpence tried to help a troubled young boy called Cormac Pearl. He taught him how to meditate. To breathe. To channel his energies. He showed him how to journey into the next world and to return stronger than before. But Cormac had no interest in helping people. The darkness inside him swallowed the light. Sixpence cast him out and he returned home to the family that he had already sickened with his violence. They took him in, only for him to betray them. He fled Blackpool in the company of a young woman – a drifter; an alternative – somebody who had slipped through the cracks. He discarded her soon after, but he found a new world of willing victims. Found broken souls who allowed him to place his healing hands upon them. Who held their hand in the moment of their death and rode their dying spirit like a jockey.

Rowan glances down again. Violet is stirring. He can see from the terrible state of her that she has been here, in this place, for a long time. He watches as Freya nudges her with a naked, dirty foot. The nails are painted green.

Rowan closes his eyes. He feels as though his arms are going to come out of their sockets. He looks up, into the darkness and the tumbling rain of dirty water. Tastes metal on his tongue. Questions line up in his mind like bullets. What had happened to Sixpence? To Tunstall? To Cormac Pearl?

He swallows, his throat an agony. Then he yells her name.

“Freya!”

Below, the pig-face jerks upwards. Rowan spins: a moth twisting in a noose of spider-silk. She stares a hole through him – the eyes of the boar and the ones beneath drilling into him like twisted iron. Slowly, as if there is a thread connecting them, she turns her head towards the pile of rags and sticks than lays, scarecrow-like, amid a jagged outcrop of sparkling rocks.

“She did that,” shouts Freya, her voice echoing off the walls. She slides off the mask, glaring up, madness in her eyes but face as still as water. “Destroyed something beautiful. We would have let her go. Her and Catherine. But they had to fight him. He would have shown them such beautiful things, the way he showed me. His father never understood what he was trying to do. Just saw the darkness in him. I saw so much more. There’s a beauty In fire, don’t you think? It hurts, but it’s beautiful. I didn’t understand that until Mr Pearl asked me to help find him. He said he knew his son’s habits. That old copper with the dark hair – he’d found the route he liked to take. He was always going to come back to where it began. To where Sixpence showed him the truth of things. I still looked young enough toi pass for 14. That’s what people liked about me. That’s what the punters had liked. He took me off the streets and paid to pretty me up. Got me in to Silver Birch without anybody asking questions. I was just Freya. The new girl. And I went along with it because it was exciting, and because I didn’t really believe it, and because before Mr Pearl found me I was sleeping in doorways and sewers and letting men stick themselves in me for the price of a bag of chips. He told me what to be. How to behave. Who to make friends with. And he told me that all I had to do was keep watch for a drifted called Cormac.”

Rowan tries to make fists. Tries to stop himself screaming as the metal bites into his flesh.

“I never met Cormac, but I found Elrik,” she says, smiling. “Woke up find him at the end of my bed. He said he knew who I was. What I was. Said he understood my pain and could help me use it to grow strong. He showed me things I didn’t believe were possible. He said his father wanted him dead and that I was nothing but bait. That as soon as I told Mr Pearl or his tame copper that I’d made contact with him, they’d swoop in and take him away and he’d end up with a bullet in his brain. Put down, like a dog. He said ti give him a chance to show him he didn’t deserve that sort of end. He said he could show me the nature of things. All he needed was the two girls who were sleeping in the next room. Said to put my faith in him.”

Freya shakes her head, twitching as if stung by countless invisible bees. “So much of it vanished afterwards. After they escaped. After that fat little policewoman got hurt. They broke the circle, do you see? The sacred place. He was jockeying their souls, taking them to the next world, showing them all the wonders that were going to be his to control. Something must have scared them. Woke them. I remember him inside me. Remember seeing with his eyes, with my own; looking out through the consciousness of Violet; of Catherine… and then it was all darkness. They climbed the ladder. Wriggled through the earth. He’d tried to stop them, you see. Tried to pull them back. But his consciousness was still in the place beyond. He fell. Came apart like he was made of straw. They left me down here. Elrik spoke to me long after his heart stopped beating. Spoke to me until I could hear nothing else but his voice.” She presses her hands to her head and lets out a high, tittering laugh. “By the time I emerged from the ground I think I had gone a little mad. I didn’t know what was real and what was not. But I knew I’d done wrong. That I had let people down. That there was a bad man who would want to know why I hadn’t kept my side of the bargain…,”

A hiss of pain shoots from Rowan’s locked teeth. He feels himself slipping. Looks down at the sparkling black floor; the carpet of bones, and feels as though he is dangling over a void of absolute blackness.

Freya looks down at Violet, helpless and broken on the floor. “She helped me remember. For so many years I hid the truth from myself. For three decades tried to be good – to turn the things Elrik had shown me into a positive force – a way to help people. The ayahuasca; the drink that we had shared, it turned those days and weeks beneath the ground into something unreal. I’d run so fast and so far that by the time I stopped running I had all but lost sight of what had caused me to flee. And I didn’t want to remember – not really. I wanted to forget. The money he’d had in his bag – I spent it on forgetting. On drugs and drink and anything that closed the windows in my head. By the time I was locked up – by the time they sectioned me – I didn’t know what was memory and what was hallucination. But I found my peace, I need you to know that. I made sense of it. I knew I would never disentangle it so I concentrated on being as good as I could be. I took all the courses, all the classes. I learned to be a healer. I took classes in Reiki, in Shamanism, and all the while the voice in my head kept trying to break through, to force me to remember. Only when I took control of myself, when I began to believe myself to be well – only then did it break through. Only when I felt well enough to face the past did it all come back like a punch.”

She looks down at Violet. Replaces the mask.

“She found me. She made me remember. She brought Elrik out of the space behind my heart and put him at the front of my mind. She did this. And she deserves everything that’s been done to her.” She looks up at him, eyes narrowing. For a moment it seems as though something else is staring out through her black lenses; a sensation of snout and tail. “You will too.”

She turns away from him. Reaches down and takes Violet by the hair. Drags her closer to the where the cavern becomes nothing but darkness.

Rowan glances up at his ruined hands. The bandages have come loose. His churned, glistening skin oozes blood; the meat of his hands shredded to offal.

Slowly, he becomes aware of a rhythm. It surges up from the cavern floor like a wall of foaming water; a sensory avalanche; an ancient thunder of wood upon skin; the temp furious, the reverberations striking him in the heart and vibrating down to the bone.

He hears a voice inside himself. Sees in a thousand shades of crimson and vermillion; his every sense crystallizing into a vision of colours so vibrant they threaten to overwhelm him. He smells ammonia and burning sage.

Rowan feels himself slipping. It is as if strong, desperate hands are holding his legs and pulling at him. He can’t decipher how high above the ground he is. The figures below seem at once close and far, far below. He can make out a colour that seems familiar: a flash of something bright and oddly cheerful – a flower among dead leaves.

He feels himself dying. His head sinks back into his chest, compacting his airways, wrenching harder at the sockets of his shoulders. Over the thunder of the drum he hears tendons and bones creak and strain.

He hears a voice inside himself. A small, quiet sound, like a child still unsure of their voice.

Your hands.

The new flesh.

Rowan yanks down. Feels the cuffs bite into the fat of his hands, gnawing into the pink and blue skin below the ball of his thumb. The pain is like nothing he has ever known before. He does it again. Again.

He squints into the blackness. Sees. Curled up like a foetus, her skin faded alabaster-white, is the outline of a woman who nearly died here, in this place beneath the ground, some thirty years ago. Violet Rayner. He can’t see whether she is breathing. But he hears Snowdrop’s shouts – a harsh, desperate screech over the heartbeat syncopation of the drum.

He glances at the ladder from which he hangs. There’s another set of cuffs, dangling from the rusted run. Somebody died here. Dangled in the dark until their heart gave out and didn’t fall to the cave below until their flesh and bones rotted through.

He tugs. Pulls. Grits his teeth.

He feels the metal slide under the tortured epidermis of his ruined hands. Feels skin and pus-soaked bandages peel away from the meat beneath. He cannot contain the scream. It explodes from his mouth: a screech of bats and ravens erupting from the jaws of an ink-dark cave.

He hears a sound like sailcloth being torn in two.

His hands, pared almost to the bone, slip through the teeth of the old handcuffs. He falls into the darkness like a stone.

Freya beats her drum. Raises her voice to the old gods and the new. Feels the spirits rise around her. Feels the void opening around her: the thinning of the veil between worlds. Here, in this place where she was reborn.

There is a sound from above – the screech of a rabbit taken by a crow.

She looks up, glaring out through the pig mask: eyes huge, all tusks and teeth and hair.

And the man with the fleshless hands falls from the sky.

She folds in on herself beneath the impact, her head slamming into the hard ground. The tusks in the porcine mask are pressed upwards by the impact, skewering the soft flesh beneath her jawbone. Both legs snap at the knee. Something splinters inside her; split rib bones pushing out through the flesh of her gut.

Rowan tumbles away, bones breaking, blood pouring from his nose, his mouth, his ears. He cannot see. Cannot make sense of himself. Puts out a hand and slips to the floor. He raises his arms and looks at his palms. Sees bones. Tendons. Sees something flash – a shape in the darkness, a sudden surge of frenzied movement.

Freya should not be able to move. Her bones are brokwn. Her torso is a mess of blood and paint and splintered bone. And yet she moves with a strength and speed that is the product of pure and perfect hate.

Instinctively, Rowan scrabbles behind him, his ruined flesh sliding off stone and drenched wood. He fleshless palms close upon something firm. He brings it up, blood frothing from his mouth, eyes wide and white and terrified.

The fractured bone punctures Freya’s heart like a lance plunged into the flank of a charging boar.

Her dying breath, all spit and blood and foulness, rushes into Rowan’s open mouth like a gust from an open door.

He does not try to move her. Does not try to stand. Just lays on the floor of the cave and watches the distant, twinkling lights.

It feels like a long time before he hears the voice. He feels the pressure on his chest ease a little as the corpse that sits astride him is levered onto the floor. Then violet’s face is above him; all wide eyes and matted hair.

“I saw,” she whispers. “Saw what was out there …,”

Rowan swallows. Tastes blood.

She looks at him, reading something that perhaps only she can see. “You helped me. You did.” She says it as if making a decision – as if the alternative would be to bring down a rock upon his skull. “Can you walk? I remember the way …,”

Rowan closes his eyes. Finds the strength to raise his arm and to proffer a bloodied, skin-stripped hand.

“Rowan Blake,” he says, trying to smile. He manages to hold her gaze for a moment. “I want to tell your story.”