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.