Chapter 2
When the service was over, the teenagers ran on ahead, though the adults lingered a while, waiting for Kelvin’s sister to go before they got up and left by the east entrance, which led into the graveyard. They didn’t want to bump into the press who were ranked outside the west gate, gathering around Kelvin’s sister.
The three of them went to the bench under the buddleia tree to wait it out. Sally sat on Steve’s knee, Zoë stood in front of them, smiling, a hand up to shade her eyes from the sun. She looked gorgeous, Sally thought, like an Amazon. Dressed in white from head to foot, with an incredible tan she’d picked up just from being on her bike. Her face had healed completely and she wore a solid cherry-red lipstick that hadn’t smudged or faded.
‘I like your dress,’ Sally said. ‘And the hat.’
‘Thanks.’ Zoë pulled off the hat and sat next to them. Tried to shake a crease out of the skirt. ‘It’s not really my thing. You know, dresses and hats. Still – proves I scrub up OK.’
‘Ben’s not here?’
‘Yes – he’s waiting in the car until the press go. See him?’
Sally looked across the graves and the cypress trees and saw a dark-blue Audi pulled up in the patchy sunlight. Ben was inside it, wearing sunglasses. ‘He’s staring at us. He doesn’t look happy.’
‘Ignore him. He reckoned we shouldn’t have come to the funeral. Thinks we’re nuts.’
Behind Ben, Nial and Peter’s Glastonbury vans were parked. Peter had got into his and now Nial was unlocking the side door of his and pulling it back to let in some cooler air. In the days since the inquest Nial had painted yellow flowers and skulls on it. He’d stencilled a line around the middle, a Plimsoll line in pale blue, with the words ‘Projected Glasto mud level 2011’.
‘They’re going to Glastonbury tonight,’ Steve told Zoë. ‘Sleeping in the van for three days. Nice.’
‘The Pilton mudbath? Oh, Christ, I feel so jealous. You’re happy to let her go? After everything?’
Sally watched Millie lean into the cab of Nial’s camper and attach something – a charm or a ribbon – to the mirror. She saw Nial loosen his tie – he still had a brownish mark on the side of his face where he’d scraped it in the tumble down the cliff. Both of them looked awkward and wrong in their formal outfits – a white blouse and black skirt for Millie, bare legs in black pumps, which looked vulnerable and out of place, Nial in a suit that was a little short in the legs, his hands dangling out of the sleeves. He was growing into himself, just as Sally had known he would eventually. There’d been story after story about him in the papers. Nial – little Nial, suddenly pushed into the shoes of the hero – leading Kelvin to Pollock’s Farm away from Millie, whom he’d hidden in the camper-van. The tarot had been wrong that Millie was going to die. A warning, of Kelvin and what was to come, but not a warning of death. ‘I’m not worried.’ Sally smiled. ‘She’ll be all right with Nial.’
‘He’s totally in love with her,’ Steve said.
Zoë laughed. ‘He might be in love with her, but what about Millie? Has it worked? He’s a hero now – is she in love with him?’
‘No.’ Sally sighed. ‘Of course not. Poor Nial.’
‘No?’
‘It’s Peter. It’s always been Peter.’
Zoë narrowed her eyes at Peter, who was sitting in his van fastening his seatbelt. ‘That waste of space? I never liked him, not from the moment I set eyes on him – he’s too full of himself.’
‘I know. He’s split up from Sophie now, though, so you never know.’ She shook her head. ‘One day Millie’ll look back and see what she missed in Nial. I just hope it’s not too late.’
Sally meant it. She was sure Nial was the right one for Millie. It wasn’t just the heroics of the night, it was something that had happened the day Nial was released from the hospital. He and Millie had come to Sally with serious faces and told her a different version of the events at Pollock’s Farm. Even now she was still turning this new version round and round in her head, trying to decide where to put it, what to think of it, whether she should be angry with them. They had told her that, coming home from school the previous night, Millie had been terrified about what Sally might be doing and whether she was going to confront Kelvin. They both knew what he was capable of, so Nial had taken the situation in hand.
Kelvin hadn’t followed Millie out to Pollock’s Farm at all. In fact, quite the opposite. He’d been lured there by Nial, who had decided, as part of his heroic fantasy, that he was going to take Kelvin on. Fight him face to face like a man. Millie hadn’t known anything about it, Nial insisted valiantly, until at the very last minute. All she knew was that twenty minutes after they’d got home Nial had stepped outside to make a private call. Minutes later he’d come hurrying back inside, telling her to hide quickly in the Glasto van. Of course he hadn’t foreseen the awful outcome, the long, clumsy chase that had taken them over the edge of the cliff. He’d only done it because, above everything, he and Millie had wanted to protect her, Sally.
She’d smiled quizzically at him when he said that, flattered, but puzzled. She wondered why anyone would ever want to protect her. She felt like a lion. She didn’t think she’d ever need protecting again. She thought life was very wild, and weird, and wonderful.
‘Zoë,’ she said now, ‘do you think it’s OK to do the wrong thing for the right reason?’
Her sister put her head back and roared with laughter. ‘Good God! What do you think I think?’
‘But what about the pattern?’
Zoë smiled and let her eyes wander over to Ben’s car. ‘The pattern?’ she said softly. ‘Oh, that always works itself out in the end.’
Sally smiled at that, and blushed, and looked down at Steve’s hands, linked across her lap. She thought about the three of them, she and Zoë and Millie, locked for ever to one person by a secret. For Zoë it was Ben and for her it was Steve. And that was OK. They were the people they wanted to be locked to. But for Millie …?
Well, for Millie it would happen eventually. One day she’d look at Nial and know she’d met the one.
Chapter 3
As soon as Zoë got into the car she saw that Sally had been right: Ben really was in a mood. His expression was solemn. Guarded.
‘What?’ She buckled the seat-belt and glared at him. ‘Because I went to his funeral? Well, I know why now. We wanted to show strength, not cowardice, like he did. Is that a sin?’
He took off the sunglasses and started the car. ‘It’s not that.’ He checked the rear-view mirror and pulled out of the parking space. ‘Not that at all.’
‘Then what? For Christ’s sake.’
‘We’ve got to talk. About all of this.’ He waved a hand behind him to indicate the church. ‘Something’s gone seriously awry.’
Zoë stared at him. She could feel a pulse ticking in her temple. ‘Awry?’ she said carefully. ‘What does “awry” mean?’
‘I’ve been going through the stuff from Kelvin’s place. We weren’t just looking for things to connect him to Lorne, we were looking to see if he had anything to do with David Goldrab’s disappearance.’
‘I know.’
‘It would be such a lovely tick in the box on our clear-up rates.’
‘Did you find anything?’
‘Not what we expected. We found something that turned everything around.’
‘What? What have you found? Something I left? My phone?’
‘Not a trace of you. No, we found something that …’ he moved his jaw from side to side, grinding his teeth ‘… something that just doesn’t make sense. However I look at it.’
Chapter 4
Sally stood next to the window in the utility room at Peppercorn Cottage, washing a lace blouse in the sink, her eyes raised to the perfect blue sky, crisscrossed with vapour trails. The awful silences that had gathered around Peppercorn after David’s death had gone and now it felt like a proper home. Steve was in the garage, hammering back some weatherboarding that had come loose. Next to the garage Nial and Millie were swarming around the VW camper-van, piling things into it. A cooler that Nial had adapted to run from the cigarette-lighter socket was stuffed with beer – no food or anything of any nutritional value as far as Sally could tell. There were rolls of bedding and Millie’s dresses arranged on hangers in the windows. She was already frantic – Nial had accidentally dropped her mobile phone into the washing-up bowclass="underline" it now lay in pieces on the dashboard, drying off in the sun with two of her blouses, a pair of denim shorts and some underwear that hadn’t come out of the wash in time.