The Unseen

8

2011

Leah drove all the way into Newbury to find a comfortable café with free wi-fi. The sky was low and sullen for the third consecutive day, and she frowned at the road as she crawled along, stopping at incessant traffic lights, hearing grey water crackling beneath her wheels. Finding a café from a chain she recognised, she collected a large hot chocolate from the counter, tucked herself into the corner of a sofa and turned on her laptop. The tips of her fingers were pink and numbed with cold. Blustery rain hurled itself at the window panes, smearing them with crystals of sleet, and the floor shone with watery footprints. The place stank of wet coats, wet hair; a pile of wet umbrellas by the door. She scanned through her inbox, finding little of interest until she got to the previous day’s emails. There was a message from Ryan. Leah’s heart gave an exaggerated thump. She took a deep breath, hating this reaction that any contact from him caused in her, and opened it.

What no goodbye? Most unlike you – you were always so fond of them. Thanks for taking on the little project I found you, I appreciate it. And so does our dead chum here. He’s been rather sidelined since you left – bumped back into the cold store. We’ve had a fresh batch in from the building site of a new housing estate – I tell you, corpses are ten a penny round here. Oh well, keeps the likes of me in pin money. Let me know how you get on. I’m coming over in a couple of weeks for Dad’s sixtieth. Perhaps we can meet up then to discuss what you’ve found? I did enjoy meeting up with you again over here. Really. Even if you did let me pay for dinner, and then didn’t stay for breakfast.

Keep in touch.

Ryan

Leah read it twice, and then flicked the cursor angrily to the delete button, where her finger hovered, shaking ever so slightly. After a hung few seconds she sighed, moved the cursor away. She logged out instead, and ran a search of Cold Ash Holt Fairy Photographs. Various paranormal and new-age sites came up in a list and, halfway down the screen, the village’s community website. She opened this page, and steered away from church announcements and adverts for local workmen by clicking on the History tab. Two paragraphs sketched the life of the village from its meagre Domesday listing to the decline of the canal trade and the Second World War. There were black and white photographs of the church, and of long-dead farm workers leaning on their pitchforks in front of half-built hayricks. Leah stared into their eyes with the fascination she always found in old pictures of anonymous people. Eyes shrouded by shadow and blur – just pinpricks of white, or the steel grey of an iris. People who could not have known, when their likenesses were captured, that eighty years later she would be sitting in a café, getting to know their faces. Their lives, their thoughts, lost for ever. At the bottom of the page was a separate section of text, which read:

Perhaps the most unusual episode in Cold Ash Holt’s history was the publication, in 1911, of a set of photographs, taken by a leading spiritualist of the time, which claimed to show fairies living in the water meadows on the edge of the village. Robin Durrant enjoyed a brief period of fame when the pictures were first published, and were widely accepted as genuine both by his fellow spiritualists and by the general press. They were later discredited, despite the unswerving support of Cold Ash Holt’s vicar at that time, Albert Canning. Are there fairies in our fields? You decide!

Below were two grainy black and white photographs. The first showed a wide, level meadow, carpeted with high summer grasses and thistles, with tall trees out of focus in the background. In the middle of the picture stood a single tree, a weeping willow by the looks of it; its trunk gnarled and twisted with age, leaves pale as silver. A change in ground levels suggested that it was standing on a river bank, although the water was invisible through the grass. To the right of the tree was a small figure, slightly blurred. It was female, and appeared to have been caught in the act of leaping or dancing. Midway through a giant, exuberant stride, arms and head flung back in abandon, hair so pale it seemed white, streaming out behind it, long and wild, almost half the length of the figure’s overall height. Its face was indistinct, the features not quite captured. Just the juts of a delicate nose and chin; pale, pale skin, and its eyes seemingly closed. It was hard to get a true impression of the figure’s size, since the willow tree might have been fifteen feet high or thirty, the grasses a foot tall or three. It was an oddly unsettling picture. The sky was a flat white, the same colour as the figure’s shapeless, diaphanous dress. The fabric clung to a thin body, flat like a child’s, yet there was something adult in the angular arms and legs; the proportional size of the head to the body. The whole picture had an other-worldly, washed-out glow. As though the light had been peculiar that day, or the air unusually hazy. It was an eerie picture, and Leah stared at it until her eyes ached. The figure seemed more ghost than fairy to her.

In the second picture the figure was even harder to make out. The willow tree dominated the shot, much closer this time, and in its shadow the figure was a pallid smudge, body pressed tight against the trunk, arms reaching up towards its branches, head turned to the side and downwards, so again the face was lost, this time in shadow and behind tresses of its own hair, hanging like long cobwebs down past its waist. Wishing she had a printer, Leah studied the pictures for a long time, her nose creeping closer to the screen. If you wanted to believe in them, you could, she decided. They were odd, and ambiguous enough; the figure androgynous and indistinct, and yet still giving the impression of great beauty and delicacy. She knew from Mark Canning that the man who’d taken the pictures, Robin Durrant, had been staying at The Rectory at the time, as a guest of the vicar and his wife, Mark’s great-grandparents. In Mark, without even really trying, she had found a direct descendant of the woman who had written letters to the dead soldier; but having access to her DNA would not help with the identification of the soldier. Those were not letters written to a family member, Leah knew instinctively. Had they been written to this Robin Durrant?

Outside, the sun came out, blisteringly bright, making her screen hard to see. Blinking in the sudden glare, Leah turned her body away from the window. She skipped through a few of the paranormal websites, where the pictures and story took second place to the better known Cottingley Fairies, famously championed by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. On one site she found a short biography of Robin Durrant, describing him as a theosophist rather than a spiritualist. Leah jotted the unfamiliar word down in her notebook. She leaned back and looked out of the window, at people marching by, squinting. The street outside was rendered black and white by the sudden harsh light; people and buildings were silhouettes, hard outlines. The same sun in a different season would soften everything, and coax out all the many colours. Now it was as sharp and unforgiving as a knife. Leah looked at her watch. Mark Canning had invited her to have a look around The Old Rectory at midday – in an hour’s time. He had told her, in The Swing Bridge pub, that the fairy photographs had always been a source of mild embarrassment to his parents and grandparents, who were deeply logical people and had no time for such things. That an otherwise unimpeachable ancestor, the vicar Albert Canning, had been taken in by such blatant trickery was considered quite baffling, and tragic.

Leah thought about Mark, picturing him as she had last seen him – in the darkness outside the pub as they had said a stilted goodnight. A tiny muscle in the grey skin under his eye had been caught in a spasmodic twitch, a little hiccough visible even by the wan light of the single bulb above the door. A sure sign of exhaustion, and Leah had put her fingers to her own eye socket, pressing them into the skin in sympathetic agitation. Mark had not seemed to notice the odd gesture. She hadn’t asked him anything more about himself, except in the broadest terms – to establish his relationship to Hester Canning. She had been itching to ask more, but he was so extravagantly cagey about it that she didn’t want to frighten him off. His violent reaction to the idea that she was a journalist and might have an interest in him had of course only served to make her more interested. With only a tiny niggle of guilt, she turned back to her computer and googled him. News articles from recent archives appeared. Not huge headlines, but the kind of story that rumbled on for weeks, getting two or three columns on page eight or nine. She skimmed through a few of the articles, her lip clamped between her teeth in fascination, eyes widening. Vaguely, she now remembered hearing a short piece on the news about the case, but it had been early in the morning when she had been staring listlessly at the TV over her breakfast, and not really listening. Small wonder he did not want to talk to a journalist. The press had given him a rough ride over the previous six months.

At noon she walked up the overgrown path to The Old Rectory again. Drops of rainwater on the knocker wet the palm of her hand, made her shiver and tuck her chin into her scarf. In the ruined vegetation of the garden, small splashes of colour were beginning to show. Occasional purple grape hyacinths, and pale yellow narcissi; the minty green spikes of tulip shoots, nosing their way between swathes of rotting brown foliage. Leah was reminded of The Secret Garden, one of her favourite books as a child. And in spite of the drifts of dead leaves that lay all around, half a foot deep in places, by summer, even if nobody paid it any attention, the garden would be a rich jungle. Plants need much less help to grow than gardeners might like to think, Leah thought. She looked to one side of the door. The wooden frame of the nearest sash window was rotten to the core. The paint was a pattern of chipped scales, the putty securing the glass all but gone; a waxy-looking orange fungus frilled the sodden wood here and there. She jumped slightly at the sound of bolts being drawn back from the door.

Mark opened it with a heave that made it shudder.

‘Bloody thing always did stick in wet weather. Come in out of the rain,’ he said. He’d had a shave since she last saw him, and washed his hair. He still looked worn out, but calmer than before.

‘Thanks. I was just admiring the garden,’ she said, smiling away any implied criticism.

Mark rolled his eyes. ‘I know. The whole place has gone to seed, not just the garden. Dad really let it get away from him. I should have helped him more but… you know how it is. Life gets in the way. It’s been empty for half a year now. Since Dad…’ He hesitated.

‘Oh, I’m so sorry – you lost him?’ Leah asked, gently.

‘In a way, yes. Come through.’ Leah stepped into the hallway, which was wide but gloomy. She looked up. There was no light bulb in the single socket that dangled overhead. Spiders had built a cone of dusty webs around the wire. The air was incredibly still, as if one occupant was not enough for the place, could not hope to fill it. It smelled of damp plaster and cold, gritty floors; and the chill of winter seemed to linger even more than it had outside in the rain. ‘I won’t offer to take your coat – you’ll need it,’ Mark said wryly, as if reading her mind.

‘Old houses can get so chilly.’ She grimaced sympathetically.

‘Especially this one. The boiler’s packed up. The kitchen’s the only warm place in the house – I’ve managed to get the Rayburn going. Coffee?’

‘Yes, please.’

They went along a corridor towards the back of the house, where the kitchen light was casting a warm glow out into the shadows. Leah peered through doorways and into corners, her curiosity irresistible. It didn’t look as though the decor had been updated for twenty or even thirty years. In a sitting room, the sofas and armchairs bore deep impressions in their cushions, moulded and flattened by years of being sat upon. There was a thick layer of dust on the mish-mash of furniture, most of which was dark oak, a wood which Leah had always found oppressive. Dog-eared motoring and fishing magazines in a rack in the hallway were a decade out of date. The shades of reading lamps were faded, bleached by the sun of many summers gone by; and beneath her feet were rugs so threadbare and worn that the original patterns and colours were lost, and only the criss-cross of warp and weft remained. Glancing over his shoulder, Mark caught her quick appraisal of the place.

‘Don’t be too horrified. He’s an old-fashioned bloke, my dad. Saw no reason to change something if it still functioned. And in the months before he moved out he was in no state to redecorate.’

‘I’m not horrified,’ Leah replied hurriedly. ‘I’m just so curious about this place. I’ve read the letters your great-grandma wrote here so many times over-’

‘Did you bring them with you? I’d like to read them,’ he said, pulling out a stool for her at the kitchen island.

‘Of course.’ Leah rummaged in her bag.

‘No rush. Coffee first.’ He filled a battered metal kettle, plonked it on the hot plate. A coal scuttle sat next to the stove, pitch black dust twinkling on its lip. The acrid, sooty smell of it filled the room, and a fine layer of smuts speckled the sticky vinyl counter top. A long, sagging green sofa was set against the opposite wall, with a messy stack of blankets at one end, and a small television sat amidst empty cups on a low coffee table next to it. The kitchen units were as dated as the rest of the decor – a fake white marble top, with fake beechwood door fronts. Mark jimmied a drawer open, gritting his teeth in irritation. He gave up after a while, snaked his hand in up to the wrist and withdrew it with a teaspoon pinched precariously between his fingertips. ‘You can see why I thought this would be a good place to hide out. It’s the house that time forgot,’ he said, grimly. Leah wondered whether to say anything about the newspaper articles she’d read. She stole a glance at his careworn face, and thought better of it. There was such tension behind his grey eyes; she knew she needed to tread very carefully. But it was all over, supposedly – the court case, at least. He’d been acquitted, and yet he acted as though he was still waiting for a judgement of some kind.

‘It must have been a gorgeous house in its day. I mean, it still is, obviously, it’s just…’ she floundered.

‘Don’t worry. I know it’s in a state – no offence taken. The rectory was often the grandest house in small villages like this, not including the manor, of course. Back in the days when the vicar was the most important person after the land owner.’

‘How is it the house stayed in your family when it stopped being the actual rectory?’

‘I’m not sure. My great-grandparents must have bought it from the church at some point, I suppose.’ He shrugged.

‘Do you have any childhood memories of her? Of Hester Canning?’

‘No, none at all. Sorry. She died before I was born. I remember my grandfather, Thomas, though – Hester’s son; although he died when I was still just a boy.’

‘So this house passed to your parents? Did you grow up here?’

‘No, no. It passed to my uncle and aunt. My cousins lived here as children. I visited sometimes – a few Christmas holidays. The house only came to Dad when my uncle died ten years or so back.’

‘Not to your cousins?’

‘One died in a car accident when he was twenty-two; the other fell out with the family and moved to Australia. Not heard a word from her in fifteen years.’ He put two mugs of coffee on the work top, and caught her expression. ‘I know, I know. My family isn’t exactly blessed with luck or harmony.’ He smiled ruefully. ‘Witness my own current situation,’ he added, almost to himself. ‘What about you? Domestic harmony or Jeremy Kyle Show?’ he asked. Leah smiled.

‘Domestic harmony, for the most part. We’re very conventional. Home counties, golden retrievers, that kind of thing. My mum is in the WI; Dad plays lawn bowls. You get the picture.’

‘Sounds nice. Wholesome. Do you see a lot of them?’

‘Yes. I suppose so. They never want to come up to London though – too loud for them. I always have to go home to see them.’

‘What made you move to London?’

‘What makes anybody? Work, friends, culture. Isn’t that why you moved there?’ she asked, without thinking. He stiffened, his face darkening.

‘I thought you didn’t know who I was or anything about me?’ he demanded. Leah held up a placating hand.

‘I googled you this morning. Sorry. You were so mysterious the first time we met…’ She tried to smile but Mark’s expression was thunderous.

‘For good reason,’ he said.

‘I know. I mean… I understand. I’m not going to ask you about it,’ she replied. He stared morosely into his coffee cup for a while, dark brows beetling, hooding his eyes.

‘Thank you.’

‘Here are the letters. Have a read,’ Leah said, quickly passing them over.

Mark scanned the pages. ‘Well,’ he said, as he let the sheets of paper fall back onto the counter. ‘I can see why you’re interested in them. Very dramatic, aren’t they? She was in a right knot about something. Living in “fear and suspicion”, and “everything so strange and dark…”’

‘I know. Nothing rings any bells, does it? Reading through them? No family gossip or legends or anything she could be referring to? Or any idea who she might have been writing to?’

‘Come on, Leah – this was nearly sixty years before I was born! I never even met the woman. The only family scandal I know about was the fairy thing. Not much of a scandal even – a guy manages to convince a handful of people of the existence of fairies. And then they all change their minds again,’ he said, in brief summary.

‘I wish she’d dated the letters. Or we had the envelopes with a dated postmark on, or something. If this theosophist guy was around a lot that year, there’s a chance she could have been writing to him, I suppose. He could be the dead soldier – Robin Durrant. I need to find out more about him. Like what is a theosophist, anyway?’

‘Never heard of it. Some odd branch of religion or spiritualism, clearly. A lot of people believed in a lot of strange things back then. Like God, for example.’ He smiled.

‘You shouldn’t joke about that – you’d be amazed how sensitive people can be about it.’

‘Oh, I know. Bit of a double standard, I’ve always thought. Anyone can come to my door and tell me the error of my ways according to their particular deity, but if I stand up and say that there is no God, people get very huffy.’

‘Sounds as though you’re speaking from experience?’

‘My sister-in-law. Just one of the many facets of this whole bloody mess.’

‘I thought you didn’t want to talk about it?’

‘I don’t,’ he said, with a quick, agitated shrug. He glanced away, out of the kitchen window, and Leah took a good look at his face. Long, straight nose, thick hair peppered with grey. He had a gaunt look, slightly starving; his spine curved into a weary slouch, shoulders fixed high and back, the bones sharp and angular beneath his faded jumper. His eyes slipped out of focus all too easily, gliding past her into the middle distance as if helplessly chasing thoughts that ran away with him. Suddenly, Leah saw how fragile he was – that he was stretched far too thin by life. She recognised the exhaustion dogging his every move – remembered it well from the long days of crisis after she’d left Ryan. It was there on the tip of her tongue: I know how you feel. Mark took a long breath and sighed sharply through his nose. ‘Are you hungry? Do you want some lunch?’ he asked.

‘Sure. Thanks.’

With Mark’s permission, Leah took herself on a tour of the house while he cracked eggs into a bowl and cut up mushrooms for an omelette. She climbed the wide staircase with a sense of growing excitement, a childish effervescence that made her smile to herself, made her breathe a little faster. Desiccated floorboards squealed beneath her feet, for if the ground floor was tainted with damp, upstairs the air was as dry as old bones; so dry it prickled the back of her throat, made the threat of a sneeze linger maddeningly at the top of her nose. She looked into the master bedroom, which had been Mark’s father’s room until relatively recently. Curtains with big sprays of fat roses, once red, now a rusty brown like dried blood. A wardrobe, dressing table and chest of drawers, all too small for the wide room. The bed had a massive mahogany headboard, and was covered in piles of dusty feather duvets and eiderdowns, pillows gone the orangey-yellow of beeswax with the sweat and grease of generations of sleeping heads. The smell of it was at once familiar, repugnant, and comforting somehow. Like a favourite garment, unwashed and worn long enough to echo exactly the shape and smell of the body. A clock radio flashed 00:00 in red LED digits, giving a faint electric buzz each time the numbers lit up. There was a Teasmaid at least thirty years old; a dusty trouser press; a collection of wire coat hangers bundled on a hook behind the door. Leah stared into every corner of this sad, neglected room, finding it at once depressing and exciting. She was spying, but on a world so quiet, so out of date that it bore no resemblance to life as she knew it.

Through a doorway in one wall was the en suite bathroom: a trail of blue-grey limescale in the bath, channelling a steady drip of water from tap to plughole; a splayed and dishevelled toothbrush in a chipped yellow mug that said Rise ’n’ Shine! in bold letters on the side; a razor furred with dried soap and traces of stubble. The carpet was dark with mildew around the sink and toilet pedestals; the lace curtains had moss growing along the hem, where the window did not shut properly and a small puddle of rain had found its way onto the sill. Leah pushed the window open slightly and peered out, over the back garden where the grass was knee-high, choppy and beige after the winter frosts. To the far left she could just see the high wall of a courtyard, and a selection of haphazard outbuildings, one of which had a gaping hole in its roof. Two fat wood pigeons huddled up to one another on the ridge tiles, their feathers fluffed against the rain.

Leah continued her tour, drifting from room to room on soft feet as if she might disturb somebody; but none of the other rooms seemed to have been occupied in years. They were full of random items of furniture and junk – one bedroom contained three commode chairs and a shop window mannequin – and crumpled cardboard boxes of books and magazines and blankets and toys and kitchen oddments. The attic bedrooms appeared to have been used as storage space for decades. Boxes and trunks stood in lopsided piles in all three of them. Leah picked her way to one of the dormer windows and peered out at the view. On the window sill, a dusty old fruit box held a stack of pictures in frames, most of which had lost their glass. Leah brushed some mummified flies aside, and flicked through them. Bleached watercolours; a small print of Charles I; another of kittens playing with wool; an embroidery sampler, the motto so faded she could hardly read it, with a small striped cat arching its back amidst flowers in one corner; a sepia picture of the house, with the caption Cold Ash Holt Rectory, 1928 typed neatly along the bottom. Leah drew this photo out, and took it down to show Mark.

The downstairs was better furnished, and better equipped, but it all had an air of long neglect that made Leah slightly sad – gave her a feeling of nostalgia, as though she herself missed the people who had once lived here as much as the house itself appeared to. A door that seemed to go down into the cellars was locked, and Leah left off rattling the handle with a tug of regret. She went back to the kitchen, where Mark had turned on a tinny radio and the lunchtime news was filling the room. His back was to her, at the stove, gently frying the omelette with a meditative air. Leah slid onto her stool, and he looked around as her knee knocked the counter.

‘I don’t suppose you know the property features writer? I suppose the place should go on the market. For a while I’d hoped Dad might come back to it, but he’s not going to. The sooner we all accept that, the better,’ he said absently, as if she’d never left the room.

‘The property features writer? Like I said, I don’t work for a paper. I’m freelance,’ Leah reminded him carefully. His moods seemed to chase across him like clouds on a windy day, and they consumed him. Even now, with his back to her, tension seemed to radiate from him. Leah shuffled Hester Canning’s letters and put the old photo of the house to one side, at a loss for something to say.

‘What’s wrong with your father? Is he ill?’ she asked, before she could stop herself. Mark glanced at her again, as if trying to read her face, to judge her worth. A heartbeat later his eyes softened, and his face fell into the tired lines she was becoming familiar with.

‘He’s in a care home. For the elderly.’ Leah studied him, trying to guess his age and therefore how old his father might be. Mark caught her scrutiny and smiled a tiny, bitter smile. ‘He’s seventy years old, in case you’re wondering. But he has early-onset dementia.’

‘Oh. I’m… really sorry to hear that.’

‘It’s wretched. It’s a wretched, awful thing to happen to a good, kind man; and it’s completely unfair. Which is how life is, I suppose. The last time I went to see him, he didn’t recognise me at all,’ Mark said, in a monotone, as he came over to the island with the frying pan and served the omelette onto two plates.

‘Thank you,’ Leah murmured.

‘Don’t mention it.’ He sat down opposite her and started to shovel the eggs into his mouth as if she wasn’t even there, his gaze far away again, jaw working mechanically. Leah picked up her fork and began to eat slowly. He’d scorched the bottom of the omelette, and the mushrooms hadn’t cooked through, sitting hard and dry inside the folds of egg. She picked at it politely, trying to keep a smile from her lips as she watched Mark chew and chew at his raw mushrooms, his attention finally returning to the room, and to her. ‘This is bloody awful,’ he said at last, and Leah smiled ruefully, nodding her head. ‘Come on, let’s go to the pub.’

After a better lunch of sandwiches and beer, they walked out into the water meadows. The rain had cleared and left the sky china blue, with fat white clouds bowling above their heads as they made their way along a footpath that ran beside a lake, away from the canal. The ground squelched beneath their boots, the turf seeming to bounce as if floating on liquid.

‘These lakes probably weren’t here when Hester wrote the letters, and the fairy pictures were taken,’ Mark told her, marching along with his hands thrust into his pockets.

‘How come?’

‘They’re flooded gravel pits, for the most part. There are still some gravel works around here, even today. It was big business at one point.’ He sniffed – the cold breeze was making both their noses run, and had brought a flush of colour to his cheeks, a shine to his eyes that made him look more alive.

‘I suppose it would have been more open, too – less footpaths and fields and more common land and water meadow?’ she asked. Mark shrugged.

‘Yes, I’d have thought so. Here’s a bit of the river. It weaves in and out of the canal all the way along here – between Newbury and Reading. Sometimes the river and the canal are the same thing, sometimes they’re separate. And all the way along there are these little streams and tributaries and lakes.’

‘I suppose the chances of the tree in the picture still being there are…’

‘Slim to nil, I’d say. It looks like an old tree in the photos, and if it was old a hundred years ago… well, even if it wasn’t chopped down to make way for something, it would have come down of its own accord,’ Mark said. He stopped to consult the photos again. In the study at his father’s house, they had found an original copy of a pamphlet written by his great-grandfather, Albert Canning, about the pictures and the circumstances of their production. In it were the two pictures Leah had seen online, and a couple more besides, in which the thin figure was less distinct. ‘Well, there are rows of tall trees like that here and there all along the canal and the river braids.’ He glanced up at her and shrugged one shoulder. ‘We’ll never know if we’re looking at the exact ones, but those over there are as like them as any, and there’s a hollow in front of this bit of the river, just like in the picture. It’s as good a guess as any,’ he said, handing Leah the pamphlet and gazing around at the landscape.

Leah studied the picture hard again and then looked up. Mark was right – the landscape was as similar to the picture as any they had seen that morning. The sun seemed preternaturally bright after so many wet days, and she shielded her eyes with the pamphlet. The stream by their feet was quick and clear, cutting through the cropped turf with keen efficiency as it hurried by. On its bottom were brown and orange pebbles, chips of grey and white flint and knots of green weed that streamed with the current. The short grass was peppered with pellets of sheep and rabbit shit, and the hedgerow beyond was pocked with burrows and rodent diggings. Suddenly it was spring, as though all it took was the sun to shine for Leah to see it. Dandelions with fat yellow manes; the little white daisies of childhood; tiny purple blooms with hairy leaves that she did not recognise. She crouched and picked up a stick from the ground, throwing it into the stream and watching it whisk away. On the other bank, a startled pheasant bolted away from them, legs pedalling comically. Leah smiled and took a deep breath. The breeze was damp and cool, and tasted of earthy minerals, soft rainwater; but the sun on the top of her head had warmth – a wonderful glow of heat she hadn’t felt since the September before. She tried to imagine the eerie light of the photograph, settled over the bright scene in front of her. Had the photographer used a filter of some kind? It didn’t appear to be misty, exactly, but there was some kind of unfamiliar, pallid glow, softening all the outlines just slightly, just enough to allow doubt to creep in. Doubt, or belief. Leah took another deep breath, all the way to the bottom of her lungs.

‘God! It’s nice to see a blue sky, isn’t it?’ she exclaimed, standing up again and wiping her hands on the seat of her jeans. She turned to Mark and found him watching her with an odd, wide-eyed intensity. ‘What’s wrong?’

‘Nothing,’ he replied. He shook his head and the look was gone, the old troubled scowl back in its place. ‘I used to come here and play with my cousins as a kid. In summer we used to swim – not right here, a bit further along where there’s a big bend in the river and the water is slower. It was freezing.’ He shuddered at the thought. ‘Bone-achingly cold, every time. But I had to go in, of course. Couldn’t be the one left out.’ Leah put her hands in her back pockets and turned in a circle, surveying their surroundings. ‘What do you want to do now?’ Mark asked. He sounded genuinely interested, and slightly resigned; as if entirely at her disposal. She looked across at him, squinting in the sunshine, and realised that he didn’t have anything else to do. Small wonder, then, that he was such a prisoner to his moods and memories.

‘I don’t know,’ she confessed. After all, she admitted to herself, the fairy pictures might have nothing at all to do with what Hester Canning had been writing about. ‘Let’s walk on a bit – make the most of the fact that it’s not pouring down. Then I wouldn’t mind having a better look through the books in the study, if you don’t mind? There might be something in there about theosophy, or this Robin Durrant guy.’

‘Sure.’ Mark nodded. ‘The footpath carries on to the corner of the field there.’ He turned towards it, the hems of his jeans dark and sodden with water from the long grass. He stopped when he got to the muddy path, watched her clambering towards him, waiting for her to reach his side before leading her on, like a taciturn tour guide.

Later, Leah returned to the study at The Old Rectory and began to search the shelves. She found old books on theosophy, their spines chipped and faded, papery shreds hanging from the covers; another slim volume about fairy photography; and precious little else that related to the incident at all. Vast rows of Reader’s Digest condensed works; a huge set of encyclopaedias; novels by the ton, most of them dated historical romances, the heroines on the covers invariably clad in a low-cut bodice, bosoms heaving. Leah rummaged and leafed and felt as though she was achieving something, although she suspected that she probably wasn’t. She resisted the urge to go through the drawers of Mark’s father’s desk, a vast leather-topped affair that crouched like some sleeping beast in the shadow of the mezzanine gallery; but the papers left on top, when she nudged them lightly with her fingertips, were bank statements and utility bills; torn-off calendar pages from two years before; and lists of crossed-out items, scribbled so comprehensively that all the words were lost.

Mark brought her a mug of tea as the sun began to set. He flicked on the lights as he came in, making her flinch. She hadn’t noticed the gathering gloom, pooling like water in the corners of the room.

‘Thanks,’ she said, as he put the mug carefully on a stack of old newspapers beside the tub chair she was sitting in. The leather was worn through on the arms, and she had been running her fingers over the exposed stuffing as she read, picking absently at its gritty innards. A scattering of crumbs lay across her knees and on the floor at her feet. ‘God! Sorry! I didn’t even know I was doing it!’ she exclaimed, brushing hastily at the evidence. Mark smiled briefly.

‘Don’t worry about it, really.’ He looked around the study, from the dusty swags of the curtains to the cluttered shelves. ‘Sometimes it takes an outsider to make you see what’s staring you in the face,’ he said, half to himself. ‘The whole place is crumbling like that bloody chair. It all needs to go. The lot.’

‘But… this house has been in your family for generations…’ Leah said, gently. ‘Aren’t some things worth keeping?’

‘I don’t think I could ever be happy here. And I’m the only one left. Well – my nieces and nephew, my sister-in-law. But I don’t think she’d come here. I don’t think she’d bring them. At least, not while I’m alive,’ he said, darkly. Uncomfortably, Leah flicked the last of the stuffing from her jeans.

‘But your father’s still alive, isn’t he? And it’s his house. Could you do anything, even if you decided to?’

‘Yes. I have power of attorney.’

‘Oh,’ Leah said. She sipped at her tea, unfolded her legs from beneath her. She had been sitting too long that way, and pins and needles blazed down into her calves and feet like wildfire, like a million biting ants. Unable to stop herself, she drummed her feet on the floor like a child to get the blood moving.

Mark glanced up, gave her a bemused look. ‘Stand up and jump up and down,’ he instructed. ‘It’s the only way.’ With a grimace, Leah obeyed him. Hopping with her two feet together, up and down the stringy carpet of the study in her socks, with the floorboards wobbling underneath her feet and the dim light bulbs buzzing overhead. When she stopped she was grinning at her own idiocy, and Mark was smiling stiffly, as if his face was unused to the shape. ‘Better?’ he asked, and she nodded. ‘What do you want to do now?’ he asked, for the second time that day. Leah stopped smiling, and looked him carefully in the eye.

‘Can I meet your father?’

The care home was a crisp, modern, brown-brick building, clad in Virginia creeper and surrounded by neatly kept gardens; windows shining clean, cars parked in neat rows. It was two days since Leah had asked Mark’s permission to visit. He parked his car – a mud-spattered Renault – on the pristine tarmac drive, and a look of grim anxiety covered his face, making Leah nervous. He turned off the engine and they sat in silence for a moment, listening to the hot metal tick.

‘So, did you find out anything more? About theosophy and this Durrell person?’ Mark asked, at length, as if they had come out in the car for a chat, and no other reason.

‘Durrant. No. I think he was a bit of a flash in the pan – there’s no information about him in any of the books or pamphlets after 1911, the year he took those pictures at Cold Ash Holt. I couldn’t find anything online either. I suppose if he was discredited, he might just have slunk off back into obscurity. It’s like he just disappeared, after that summer,’ she said. ‘Perhaps off to the war, but that wasn’t for another three years; and it also seems an unlikely thing for a theosophist to do. From what I’ve read, he’d almost certainly have been a conscientious objector. All life was sacred to them. But perhaps he stopped being a theosophist after that year. However – you can ask me anything about theosophy. I’m a pocket expert now. Eastern philosophy meets Western spiritualism, the many levels of the spirit world, the many orders of spiritual being, and spiritual awareness. Reincarnation. Asceticism. Karma. Clairvoyance. Inner vision… Ask me anything.’ She smiled, counting them off on her fingers. Mark’s hands still gripped the steering wheel, and he looked sideways at her, his face pinched and heavy.

‘Are you ready to go in?’ he asked. Leah’s smile faded.

‘Are you?’ she said. Mark nodded, unclipped his seatbelt.

‘Just… don’t expect too much, OK?’ he warned her.

They were greeted at the reception desk by a smiling young nurse with soft red hair, who took their names and gave them visitors’ badges to clip to their clothes. Inside, the building was bright and overheated, and Leah pulled at the funnel neck of her jumper, which was suddenly too tight and stifling against her skin.

‘You picked a good time. We’re definitely having a good day, today,’ the nurse chirped, passing them a register to sign. Leah wondered if she was referring to the day in general, or Mark’s father in particular.

‘Good. That’s good,’ Mark said. When he didn’t move, the nurse gestured along the corridor to the left of the desk.

‘Room eleven, you remember?’ she said. ‘You can make a hot drink in the common room, if you like.’

‘Thanks,’ Leah said, and turned towards the corridor. A heartbeat later, Mark followed her, never quite catching her up, so that Leah walked two steps ahead, counting up the room numbers with mounting unease. The smell of the place was strong and pervasive. The slightly greasy, fusty smell of people and worn clothes, some harsh artificial air freshener, and underneath it all the nauseating tang of ammonia and bleach. Leah took shallow, cautious breaths, just like when Ryan had shown her the body of the dead soldier.

Geoffrey Canning was sitting in an armchair by the window in a small room that overlooked the front gardens and the driveway along which Leah and Mark had recently driven. The carpet was green, synthetic, and very hard. The furniture looked brand new – pale beech veneers, flimsy looking, the chairs padded with more hard fabric. The window was shaded by vertical blinds, turned to their most open position. Geoffrey himself was a strong-looking man. Even sitting down, Leah could tell from the length of his back and legs that he was tall. There was none of the stoop of old age about him. He looked fit, and strong; as though he might get up to greet them with a hearty handshake, hearing Mark’s diffident knock at the door. He did not. He kept his face turned to the window, his hair smooth to the side of his head, thick and silvery.

‘Dad?’ Mark said, hovering uneasily just inside the door. Leah crowded behind him, trying to smile. Geoff looked over at them briefly, his face registering nothing. Mark gritted his teeth and Leah saw stress knotting every joint in his body. She gave him a soft bump with her arm, which made him glance at her, and then cross the room to his father.

‘Dad? How are you? It’s me, Mark.’ He bent forwards in front of Geoff’s chair and patted one of the broad, wrinkled hands that gripped the arms. Geoff made a slight harrumphing sound.

‘There you are! Where did you get to? You were gone for over an hour,’ Mark’s father said, quite calmly.

‘Uh – sorry, Dad. I had to… pop out for a bit.’

‘Well, well. Not to worry. I told them you wouldn’t be long,’ Geoff said, with a slight smile. ‘Pull up a chair, son, don’t stand about. Your mother’ll be along in a minute with the tea.’ Leah saw this remark visibly strike Mark. She gripped his arm briefly in support, then fetched two hard plastic chairs, like school chairs, from the other side of the bed. The soles of her shoes were scuffing static from the carpet, and when she touched the chairs tiny sparks flew, stinging her fingers.

‘Thanks,’ Mark murmured to her. Geoff had gone back to staring out of the window, nodding his head slightly as if agreeing with some general point that had been made. Again Mark had to touch his father’s hand to get his attention. ‘Dad? This is Leah Hickson, a friend of mine,’ he introduced her. Leah smiled, murmured ‘hello’, but Geoff did not look at her. It seemed so odd, and uncomfortable, to be rebuffed in this way, even though she knew he was not to blame. He had the same grey eyes that had passed to his son, and they drifted from one side of the gardens to the other, without blinking, as if searching for something. The same raw cheekbones as Mark, the same lean look and straight nose. Mark had a smaller frame than his father, was shorter and not as broad, but the resemblance was still strong.

‘You look just like him!’ she said quietly to Mark, who nodded sadly.

‘No, indeed! I take after my mother’s side. Everybody has always said so. These are Giddons hands!’ Geoff told her, speaking so suddenly that they both jumped. He put his hands up, fingers spread, in front of Leah’s face and held them there long enough for the muscles in his arms to protest, and a slight tremor to stumble along them from shoulder to fingertip.

‘That’s right, Dad,’ Mark said, gently guiding the old man’s hands back into his lap. Geoff looked crestfallen and bewildered, as if he couldn’t remember why he’d raised them in the first place.

‘I don’t know why you keep calling me that,’ he muttered, plaintively. Mark cast a bleak look at Leah.

‘Shall I make us some tea?’ she asked brightly, getting up when nobody answered her and slipping from the room. In the common room at the end of the corridor, she filled three mugs with hot water from a steaming urn, dropped three tea bags into them and put them on a plastic tray with a small steel jug of milk.

‘Are you from the club?’ an old lady asked her, appearing behind her so quietly that Leah jumped. She was tiny, bird-like, and so papery thin that it hardly seemed plausible that she should be standing unaided. Wisps of white hair stood out around her wrinkled scalp, as fine as a dandelion clock. A blonde, at one point, Leah guessed.

‘No, I’m not.’ Leah smiled, awkwardly. The woman’s face fell, as if this was a terrible disappointment.

‘Well, when are they coming? I was told Tuesday, that’s what I was told. It’ll be too late, if they don’t come soon…’ she quavered, anxiously.

‘I’m sorry… um… I don’t know when they’re coming,’ Leah told her. ‘I’m sure it’ll be soon.’ The old woman said nothing more, but still stood, looking up at her with such great expectation that Leah gathered up the tea tray clumsily and walked away, feeling a terrible, ill-defined guilt. The place was like a doorway, a crossing-over point into a myriad other worlds, she thought. A place where time and meaning shifted from person to person, and the worlds in which they lived, real, past or imagined, converged.

Back in room eleven, Leah dunked the tea bags, squeezed each one and lifted them out. As she busied herself with the task, Mark asked his father a few more questions, about his health, and how he was being treated. He got few replies, and most of them non-sequiturs.

‘I’ve been to see your lovely house, Mr Canning. The Old Rectory,’ Leah said, as she put two mugs of tea in front of the men. ‘I love old buildings. It must be wonderful to live somewhere with so much history.’

‘My grandparents bought it from the church, you know. After the war. He was a man of the cloth, you see,’ Geoff told her, as clearly and lucidly as if they had been chatting about it all morning.

‘That’s right. The Reverend Albert Canning,’ Leah encouraged him, but Geoff harrumphed again, fumbled with the handle of his mug as if his finger wouldn’t fit through, though this was not the case.

‘Make sure the children aren’t playing near the well, won’t you?’ he said, raising a warning finger towards her.

‘Yes, I will,’ Leah said, carefully. Geoff nodded, satisfied. ‘Do you remember your grandparents, Mr Canning? I was hoping to ask you a bit about them, actually. About your grandmother in particular – Hester Canning? I’ve found some letters that she wrote…’

‘I’m not deaf, you know.’ Geoffrey sounded mildly offended. Leah checked herself. She had been speaking loudly, hoping to get through.

‘Sorry,’ she apologised, glancing at Mark. He shrugged; smiled a quick, wintry smile. Leah waited for a while, but Geoffrey had gone back to his sweeping survey of the garden.

‘Never play near the well. The ghost of a boy lived in it, you know. A little dead boy,’ the old man muttered, his voice growing thin and brittle.

‘Which boy, Mr Canning?’ Leah asked, trying to join up his disjointed remarks.

‘Who are you, miss?’ Geoffrey asked her, looking at her again with that sudden, disconcerting speed.

‘I… I’m Leah…’ she started to say, but Geoffrey turned to his son, gave his knee a conspiratorial nudge with one hand.

‘Blondes have more fun, eh?’ he said, with a mischievous smile.

‘So I hear,’ Mark agreed, raising one eyebrow at Leah. She took a deep breath, uncertain of how to proceed. Geoffrey’s thoughts seemed to jump about and twitch like nervous sparrows, taking flight, scattering in a heartbeat.

Outside it had clouded over – puffy, mottled, grey and white clouds, fat with unshed rain. The light in the room went ashen, leaching the colour from their faces and from the bright, functional furniture. Mark burst to his feet, quickly switching on the overhead lights as if he couldn’t bear it.

‘Mr Canning? Can you tell me anything about your grandparents? Anything at all?’

‘You’re wasting your time,’ Mark told her flatly, as he came back to his chair. He crossed his legs, picked at the seam of his jeans with one thumbnail.

‘Or anything about a family scandal? Something that happened, before you were born?’ she pressed.

‘Leah…’ Mark protested, wearily.

Geoffrey Canning turned to look at her, a pleasant, uncomprehending smile on his face, eyes slightly worried, as if he knew he had forgotten something important. Leah smiled reassuringly, and squeezed his hand.

‘John Profumo. That was the scandal of the day, my word! Yes. Lovely girl – what a cracker she was!’ he told them. ‘And the other one – the blonde.’ Geoffrey nodded sagely. Mark shook his head incredulously.

‘Of all the things he would remember! He always did have a crush on Christine Keeler.’

‘I guess the chances of him remembering any family gossip he’d heard are pretty slim,’ Leah said, somewhat deflated.

‘The memories are there, it’s just…’ Mark twisted his hand in the air between them. ‘Getting to them. They’re all knotted up. The pathways between memories and thoughts don’t work the way they should any more. It’s all disconnected…’

‘He may not even know anything about the fairy photos. It wasn’t much of a scandal, after all. It was probably forgotten about a couple of years afterwards…’ Leah sighed.

‘Fairy photographs? That wasn’t the thing, Mandy! No indeed. There were big secrets, things we weren’t allowed to talk about. Whenever I asked I was told “fairy photographs”, but that wasn’t it. I heard them talking. That wasn’t the big scandal in our house, oh no,’ Geoff told her, shaking his head adamantly. Leah’s heart beat faster, she gripped his hand tighter and he smiled delightedly.

‘What was the big secret, Mr Canning?’ she asked, intently. Geoffrey leant towards her, relishing the drama.

‘Murder!’ he whispered loudly, eyes as wide as a child’s. ‘Bloody murder!’

A shiver slipped between Leah’s shoulder blades. There was something in the way Geoffrey Canning’s eyes lit up, something in the way he whispered it, as though mimicking exactly how he’d first heard it. She was suddenly sure it was a real memory; that it had happened, and that this crime was what had haunted Hester Canning so. Murder!