He sucks his cheek. Closes an eye. Eventually he shakes his head. “Whatever it is, it’s best you don’t know about it.”
“I don’t like the thought of you hurting people, Rowan. You’re not like that. Not really.”
“I don’t know what I am. Neither do you.”
“I know that you care about people. That’s why people talk to you. Why you write with compassion.”
Rowan sniffs, cold and sore. “I can put on a good act.”
“It’s real,” says Dippy, and Rowan is amazed to see tears in her eyes. “I know you’re a good person, I really do.”
Instinctively, Rowan puts out a hand. He wants to make her feel better but doesn’t understand what’s wrong. She seems cross at him in her usual way but there’s something more. She chatted nonsense on the drive back to her house from the side road in Whitehaven where she had picked him up; shrill inanities about her day and Jo’s plans for the garden and how Snowdrop was bugging her for a new laptop so she could start to write her masterpiece.
“Dippy, I’m sorry if I’ve done something daft and not noticed it. I don’t always get the bigger picture, you know how I am. I’m trying, I promise. Don’t be worrying about me …,”
She sniffs, wiping her tears with the heel of her hand. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I just want to be right about you., Snowdrop loves you so much and I want you to be worthy of that. Just tell me – do you think this Freya person that Violet was looking for, do you think something bad happened to her?”
Rowan opens his mouth, preparing to bluster – to spill some vagaries about being able to make a story out of it whatever happens. But his sister’s expression stops him. “I don’t know,” he says, under his breath. “I think this busker might have done bad things to them. It makes sense they never spoke of it and if there was a third girl it makes sense that she put plenty of miles between herself and where it happened. It even makes a kind of sense that Rev Marlish would use some influence to make sure the coppers underplayed anything that did happen – especially if his daughter had managed to bury the experience so deep that it took three decades and a shit-load of ayahuasca for the memory to surface. But then I think about this Arthur Sixpence, vanishing from the site and his mate’s belief that something bad happened. I think about a private detective assisting a former protégé with a case and her refusal to talk to me about it. The language she used – it’s sorted. Leave it alone. There’s something there, I know it.” The more he talks, the more sure he becomes.
“Elrik,” comes a voice, from behind. Rowan turns. Catherine Marlish is standing in the kitchen, pale-faced, hair stuck to her cheeks. There’s a bruise on her cheek and her bottom lip is scabbed with dried blood.
Rowan turns to his sister. “Dippy?”
“Catherine’s fallen out with her husband, Rowan,” sniffs Serendipity. “She lost her nerve after the talk the other night. Rang Marjorie to ask for her story to be returned. It wasn’t in the pile, as you know. Snowdrop took it. For you.”
Catherine steps through the door and into the cold grey air. Up close, her injuries are easier to read. The bruise on her cheek is a palm print: the cut on her lip around the place a thumb would strike if she were struck with a big open palm. Rowan feels sick.
“I got upset,” says Catherine, meekly. “Started getting hysterical. He had to calm me down.”
“What a fucking hero,” hisses Rowan, through gritted teeth.
“He doesn’t know his own strength,” stammers Catherine. “And I was losing my mind. I should never have written that story, let alone handed it in. Violet said not to. But why does she get to have it all, eh? It’s her out there looking for Freya. Her who’s remembering all this stuff and putting horrible pictures in my head that I don’t want to see again...”
“I read your story,” says Rowan, gently – moving towards her as if trying to shush a nervous pony. “It’s very good. You’re an excellent writer.”
“You didn’t tell me the truth,” sniffs Catherine, fresh tears gathering. “You’re writing about what happened. About me. About what he did…,”
“And what’s that?” asks Rowan, softly. He glances at Serendipity, looking for some sort of moral how-to guide. He doesn’t want to push but he can’t let it go. “What happened in those days before you were found, Catherine?”
She reaches for the wall, her hang going white at the knuckles as she leans her weight on the damp brick. “I don’t know,” she says, falteringly. “Truly. I remember meeting him and I know that he gave us something to drink ..,”
“Where?” asks Rowan, quietly. “After you left the subway where did you go?”
“He had a van. Well, more like a really tiny camper. It was a mess. All painted up with swirls and shapes and the inside was disgusting. It smelled like when grass has been left to go mouldy.”
“And where was it parked?”
“Near the lake – where the theatre is now. Where you get the bread for the ducks.”
“And he told you his name?”
“Elrik,” she sniffs, looking down at her feet. “It was like we got high on him. It was the most grown-up thing I’d ever done. And Freya was there so we knew it would be okay. She was older than us, or seemed it at least. She knew how to look after herself. So when she drank from the bottle we thought it would be okay. I swear, I don’t remember anything properly after that – just shapes and sounds and that smelclass="underline" all rusty and wet. It’s all just a dream until I’m waking up in my own bed and Daddy’s holding my hand and telling me it’s over and never to think about it again. And that’s what I tried to do.”
“And Freya?” asks Rowan.
“Mr Tunstall and Mr Rideal said the school had got a letter from her. She’d been upset about what happened. The school pretty much kicked her out.”
“And Elrik? He abducted you. Drugged you …,”
Catherine shakes her head. “I don’t know if that’s true. He chatted to us. We got in his van. He offered a drink and we accepted it.”
“You were underage,” says Serendipity, quietly.
“Yes, we were, and that’s bad, sure. But I told Daddy when he asked me and I’ve told everybody else since – I don’t remember anybody hurting me.” She looks at Rowan, embarrassed. “I was still a virgin, I promise.”
Rowan sucks in a breath, unsure whether he wants to embrace this fragile, broken soul, or to shake her until she stands up for herself. “You weren’t wearing any clothes when you were found,” says Rowan. “There was paint all over you. Symbols…,”
Catherine shakes her head. “No. No that’s not true. Eve said. We got drunk, took things we shouldn’t have, but it all worked out okay…,”
“You sound like you’ve been hypnotised,” says Rowan, shaking his head.
“Ask Violet,” she says, childlike. “Violet remembers more than me but if anything like that had happened she would have told me. She’s friends with Eve. And Eve looked after us. Violet should never have started making me remember. She was happier not knowing too. All that stuff with drugs and chanting and drums and that horrible thing she painted on the wall. I thought she was trying to scare it all out of me.”
Rowan tries to hold her gaze. “I’ve seen it. It’s a wild boar, isn’t it?”
Catherine shudders. “She was trying to be like him. She’d sit and smoke Bible pages and chuck bacon fat in the fire pit, trying to make her memory come back to life. I didn’t want to do it but the memory of everything that came before – it just pinged into my head. I remembered him. The busker. Elrik. And when I said it out loud, that’s when she started to remember too.”