“There’s already a piece going out on the evening news,” gasps Derrick, trying to stand and losing his footing. “Eve, I’d never do anything to cause you any problems, I wouldn’t tell them you knew anything, but I need to go in to the station and speak to whoever’s running this …,”
“I’ll run it,” says Eve, firmly. “I’ll tell the team what they need to know. I swear to you, this isn’t him. There might not be a him.”
“I’ll never tell them about the money,” says Derrick, looking deep into her. “I’d die before I betrayed you.”
“There was no money,” hisses Eve, in his face. “You got that? I’m a good copper. I’m changing the way things work, Derrick. I’m making a difference. “
“We need to stop him. He knows this area. If he his Sixpence he can hide the girls …,”
Eve feels as though there is a hot snake coiling and uncoiling in her stomach. She’s worked so hard. Given so damn much. She doesn’t deserve to lose it all.
“The school,” she says. “You search the grounds then – I’ll organise things my end and try to get you some space to manoeuvre. I’ll keep them away until you tell me you need me.”
Eve begins to move down the mountain. There’s a police radio in the car. In five minutes she could be with Rev Marlish, telling him the importance of keeping this investigation strictly low-key, promising to do whatever it takes to get their daughter back safe. Things might be okay. They might still all work out …
“Eve,” shouts Derrick, and the tone of voice makes her stop and spin back, facing into a wind that carries the smells of sweat and rain and the old, newly stirred earth.
“What else?” she asks, and it feels as though there is a steel band inside her bones, thrumming with an electrical current.
“There’s a third girl. Catherine. Violet. And a new girl – Freya. She’s a redhead.”
Eve swallows, drily. Crime scene phots flash in her mind. The man they’re hunting has a thing for redheads. He cut the hair off one when he was a boy. He left Blackpool with one.
“Go to the grounds,” she instructs. “I’ll be there as soon as I can. It will be okay, Derrick. For everybody…,”
As she turns and starts to run down the path, Eve feels a wave of self-loathing wash over her. She shakes it away. She doesn’t want to look at the thought that was chewing at her skull as she stood listening to Derrick. Doesn’t want to admit that while he spoke of bribes and secrets, she had glanced down at the rocky floor and sought the perfect sized stone with which to smash his head until it came apart: until all the things he could use against her spilled out onto the muddy grass.
26
The rain has started coming down harder here, on this quiet mountain road clinging to the lower lip of the Borrowdale Valley. It blackens the pitted grey surface: its fissured shell twinkling, like iron ore, beneath the yellowed moon.
Were it a brighter day, Glebe House would glisten salmon pink, a million-million grains of sandstone reflecting back the sunlight. Here, long past sunset on a wet Thursday in November, the stately home looks as though it has been made out of mud-bricks. In this light, with the storm blowing in across the fells, it is a cardboard cut-out: a black silhouette picking out pointy chimneys, steep-sided rooves; a bar-graph topped with spikes. Beyond it, behind it, past the high stone wall that marks the end of the private land, there are only fells and straggled copses of woodland. They’d stopped at the aptly named ‘Surprise View’, flicking the headlights to full beam to gaze upon the valley’s famed ‘inverted clouds’ – a meteorological phenomenon caused by cold temperatures and high pressure. They had briefly been above the clouds, looking down upon a carpet of soft, dirty fleece.
“Like beaks on a coffin lid,” says Rowan, broodingly, as the raindrops peck furiously at the roof of the car. They’ve parked with their backs to the fells; looking up towards the grand property with its imposing doorway, great crinkled columns of granite: a crush of dazzling black and white. The lights of a silver Range Rover glare, too bright, through the rain-streaked glass. Rowan closes his eyes but an image remains oddly stamped on the darkness; an ultra-violet outline of a middle-aged man in a baseball cap, fumbling about with the windscreen wipers and headlamps while chatting into a mobile phone. An old, conked-out looking Volvo clatters into a space beside them: a damp clanking of chassis and surging gutters. Rowan’s happy here, in the dark of the classic Nissan Figaro. It’s peaceful. He’d heard some nearby church bells chime a few moments ago; a pleasingly old-fashioned sound, rolling out of some mist-wreathed bell-tower with a low and sonorous authority, shushing the raindrops and the cars like impudent children. He’s content. Maudlin, but acceptably so. He’s beginning to regret sucking down a lungful of Pickle’s finest before they’d bundled him into the car: a downcast figure trudging beneath a big umbrella wearing a newly pressed shirt, good jeans and a crumpled corduroy jacket. They’d even given him a shave. He looks piratical with his sharp goatee, his pupils big Kalamata olives. His heart’s racing. He feels paranoid and nervous. He can feel pressure building in his head. So many problems. So many deadlines. So much money! You’ll fallen so far, lad. How did you fuck it up, howdidyoufuckitup? How, lad?
“You’ll be great,” says Snowdrop, in the back seat. “I’ll cough three times if you start to get into trouble.”
Serendipity, driving, gives her daughter a look of pure love. Dippy’s almost glowing tonight, so proud of her baby brother and her unstoppable newshound daughter. She’d cranked up her happy pop music so loud on the journey that the Figaro’s long-suffering windows rattled in the frames.
“There’s not even anything to worry about,” she says, brightly. “Uncle Rowan’s been talking to people since he was little. He’s a great public speaker. That’s why the politicians wanted him – he’s got a way with words and manages to say what he means without coming across as too much of an arrogant sod. If it wasn’t for all the skeletons in his closest he could be making big decisions by now.”
Rowan looks at her as if she’s mad. “Dippy, I sometimes wonder whether you’re watching the same film as everybody else. I’m living in a cow barn, unemployed …,”
“Self-employed,” they chorus.
“…and I’m about to talk about creativity to people who are already better than me.” He looks at her sadly, a labrador full of apology for having eaten the Easter eggs. “Can’t you say I’m ill?”
Serendipity laughs as she shakes her head and opens the car door. At once, a swirl of wet air rushes inside the little car, bringing a squeal from Snowdrop. Rowan raises his hands and looks at the brown, calfskin driving gloves they had forced him into amid a symphony of curses, screeches and tears. Beneath, the wounds appear to be healing. There was less seepage this morning when they changed the bandages and he only took the recommended number of painkillers with his morning coffee, rather than doubling up.
Grumbling, Rowan steps from the vehicle and gives it a pat on the roof as if it were a gun-dog that had brought back a golden eagle. Dippy’s driving style is a tad gung-ho for Rowan’s tastes. The half-hour journey from Holmkirk has been a succession of near-death bends and vertical drops and the Figaro’s narrow wheels span over nothingness on more than one occasion. Rowan has a memory of locking eyes with a terrified Herdwick as they blared past in a riot of stones and spray. He’s sure it had given him a sympathetic glance as it jumped over the low stone wall.