Tuesday afternoon, 3.11pm
Somewhere near Holmrook
If he were writing about this tiny triangle of South-West Lake District, Rowan would use the phrase ‘sleepy’ or ‘picture-postcard’ – rummaging around in the crumbs at the bottom of his bag of journalistic clichés for the simplest way to get the right picture into a reader’s head. In truth, this little straggle of cottages and barns is well past sleepy. It’s asleep to the point of coma. If it had nostrils, Rowan would be tempted to use a mirror to check for breath.
“You’re a genius, son,” he grumbles to himself, wincing each time his damp jeans touch his skin or he hears his sodden walking boots squelch. “Great idea, this. Fucking belter, you twat …,”
He’s reached the outskirts of a tiny place that he thinks might be Santon, or might be Santon Bridge, or which nobody has yet discovered and which is still up for naming rights. On a sunny day there might be shafts of golden light hitting the trees and turning the dew-damp earth into so many miles of crushed emeralds. Instead, he feels like he’s lurched into some gory dystopian TV show. He half expects to see some slavering zombie emerge from one of the forbidding little lanes that split off from the curving grey road like the legs of a giant millipede. Each leads to a barn or a cottage or half-forgotten farmhouse – and all sodden to the bone.
Rowan has been walking for 20 minutes. He’s been pissed off for 19. Earlier, Jo had been gracious enough to drop him off for a lunchtime shandy at the nice foodie pub in Nether Wasdale. He and Pickle had eschewed solids in favour of sampling the unexpectedly good range of single malts. Rowan’s debit card hadn’t worked when they’d come to settle the bill. He’d protested, appalled and embarrassed, plucking random numbers from thin air and claiming that the account contained that precise sum when he checked just a few minutes ago. In the end, Pickle paid cash, peeling off three greasy 20-quid notes from the unseemly roll in one of the pockets of his overcoat. He’d been happy to oblige, if only to ram his largesse down the throats of the snotty-nosed ramblers who’d looked at him with disgust when he’d shuffled in reeking of weed and wet dog. Pickle had been his reliable self, offering a listening ear and a few choice words of support. He agreed with Rowan – there could be a story in all this. What he couldn’t say with any clarity was whether that story could be turned into a pitch for a bestselling true crime novel before the New Year.
Over a measure of Lagavulin, Rowan had filled Pickle in on developments – brushing over the more physical details of his encounter with Sumaira. Pickle had nodded along. He didn’t know very much about Silver Birch, but he certainly remembered the old boy that lived in the woods and used his healing hands on anybody willing to park their cynicism and let him loose on their chakras. .
Before they clinked glasses for a final time, Rowan had mentioned to Pickle that Violet had accepted his ‘friend’ request, and that he was going to speak to her creative writing group the following evening. Pickle had asked that he pass on his regards and to tentatively enquire whether she would be willing to pick up some cargo from a friend of a friend if her pilgrimage happened to take her near Kandahar. Rowan, feeling warm and convivial, had prodded the screen of the mobile and painfully typed out a jaunty hello.
Pickle is missing you! Hope I’ve kept your seat warm.
She hadn’t replied. He’d chosen not to push it. Didn’t want to risk upsetting her before they’d even had a chance to meet. Over the past 24 hours he’d become such an expert in Violet Rayner’s social media profile that it could replace the poems of Seamus Heaney as his chosen subject on mastermind. He senses a yo-yo character – somebody able to project ecstatic highs and ink-black lows, with precious little in-between. He knows the books she likes – romantic, literary, New Age; a trio of self-deprecating comedienne biographies. Knows her favourite movies – Grosse Point Blank, The Notebook; Whale Rider. Has looked upon her seemingly endless photographs. It feels a little like a relationship: the ‘getting-to-know-you’ stage compressed into a couple of hours. He assessed her through critical journalistic eyes. Pictured each of the images as they will look on the pages of his new book: a little caption, a credit and a few solemn words; something sincere about ‘being pictured in happier times’. He knows how she looks dressed up in everything from a Christmas elf outfit to a glitzy dress on a works night out, by way of swimsuit and floppy-hat shots during a two-week break in Marrakech. She’d still been with her ex then – a surveyor from Carlisle by the name of Sam. Her relationship status had changed to ‘it’s complicated’ over a year ago. Rowan’s sifted through her family contacts, her work buddies; her old mates and new acquaintances. There’s been no photos of her since March. Each time she’s updated her profile it has been with a generic illustration or a random bit of far-Eastern philosophy. He’s beginning to wonder whether she might not just be playing a prank on everybody – whether she’s secreted away in a back room of her house, shoving down snacks and drinking beer from the can, revelling in the illusion of being a hippie on a global search for enlightenment.
As the rain doubles back on itself in an effort to slap him twice, Rowan is beginning to regret turning down Pickle’s offer to run him back to the Byre. It hadn’t looked as far as this on the small glowing rectangle of his phone. He’s cold, and the pleasing conviviality of a long liquid lunch has been replaced by a cold that seems to bleed into his bones. He keeps shivering inside his borrowed coat – some stiff, waxed affair that Snowdrop had purloined from a cupboard up at the big house and left on his doorstep along with a basket of warm pain-au-raisin, a coffee and a strip of Ibuprofen. She’d left a note too, incandescent over Serendipity’s insistence she join her at work rather than spend the day with her uncle. She promised that she’d be over later to ‘go over the files’.
Rowan ducks into the cover of a line of tall evergreens. Violet Rayner’s house is a little further up the road. She lives in a decent-sized Edwardian farmhouse at the end of a small row of terraced cottages. He can see its chimneys protruding over the big hedges that mark the boundary to the property. There’s no smoke. If he carries on past it he’ll emerge on the road to Holmkirk within 20 minutes – home within the hour.
“She’s not there, you tit,” he mutters to himself, tasting rain on his lips. “You should have stayed in the bloody dry.”
Rowan already knows what he’s going to do next. Even as he stands still, considering his next move, there is a part of him that is acutely aware he will go and poke around Violet’s house. Worse, he knows what he hopes to find. In 20 years as a journalist he has grown used to a life of moral duality. He’s been present at hundreds of murder sites and enquiries, countless for hunts for the missing-feared-dead. He has always hoped for two things. That they missing be returned unharmed, or that something truly unspeakable has occurred. Both are newsworthy. Both are tremendous stories. Rowan has often found himself hoping after two linked murders that a third corpse will be found, turning a half-decent yarn into a sudden front-page headline. Serial killers sell papers. He has a built-in calculator of a corpse’s journalistic worth. It’s a grotesque skill to have, but he has it nonetheless.
He lets himself in through the low, wrought-iron gate, slipping in to the long front garden as it swings open and clangs against the stone wall that circles the pleasant-looking house. It’s Victorian, looks to Rowan to be as sturdy and unmoving as Her Majesty herself. Six big sash windows surround a black-lacquered front door. Proper iron gutters criss-cross a dark series of lines across the house’s big stone face. Peeping out at the rear of the property are two brick outbuildings with faded white front doors. Neither looks locked, or particularly sturdy. Checking behind him, Rowan quickens his pace and steps from the path to the long, soggy grass, cursing as he crosses nimbly around the front of the property and scurries on towards the rear. He glances at the darkened downstairs window. Sees the vague outline of a standard lamp, a mirror, the back of large TV. Through the rain, almost slipping, he runs to the first outbuilding and uses his boot to pull at the unlocked door. He looks inside – a big white tank in one dusty corner and a complicated series of pipes and fuse boxes at the other. Boiler room. He spots a small white box on the dusty wall to his right and looks at the gauge. The tank is showing as empty. Rowan, shivering, manages to fumble his phone from the pocket of the coat. Quickly, painfully, he takes a couple of shots. He steps back into the rain and moves to the second building. Tries the door. It won’t budge. He yanks with his boot, toes under the lower half of the door, which hangs a few inches off the puddle-streaked stone floor. He hears the clank of a lock. He puts his face to the gaps in the damp wood, squinting, uncomfortable, peering into pitch blackness and flaking white paint from the wood with his eyelashes. He groans, lowering himself in begrudging steps down to the muddy floor. He pulls a face as he angles his head to look underneath – rain soaking his upturned face and trickling into his mouth. He manages to switch on the light of the phone and awkwardly shines it into the darkness. It takes him a moment to make sense of what he is seeing. The torch beam picks out a bare, grey room: the mortar gone from between the bricks, which seem to be held up by beams of rotten wood and great hanging veils of spider silk. The floor is broken up and dirty, a mulch of old papers and glistening black plastic piled in one corner. He changes the angle of the torch. There’s a rocking chair set back in the furthest recess: spindle-limbed and ribboned with cobwebs. In front, a fire sunk into the ground – ashes turned to dusts. He lets the light linger there for a moment, straining his eyes. Slowly he turns the beam. The chair is angled to face a bare wall. It has been painted white, and Rowan has a sudden fanciful notion that perhaps this is where Violet comes to project movies. He tries to picture her in the chair, feet on the lip of the fire-pit, watching old films flickering on the bare brick. He can’t imagine why she would. Can’t think why she …