‘Thea’s wrong about Adil,’ says Magdalene, after hearing Emory out. ‘He would never kill Niema.’
‘He attacked her, Mags,’ Clara points out, trying to be as gentle as possible.
‘He wasn’t well,’ Magdalene says, taking Emory’s hands. ‘You remember what he was like. He’d give anybody anything. He just wanted us to be happy.’
‘I remember,’ replies Emory, thinking back to those days. Adil was best friends with Matis, and would often sit with him while he worked. They would talk about philosophy all day long, happy to never get anywhere.
Emory remembers him being tall for the village. He was a mason, sinewy and strong, always fidgeting. He drank endless cups of ginger tea, and was never far from the kitchen. He was warm and kind, and everybody liked him.
Could that man have killed Niema?
Her heart says no, but her heart doesn’t believe anybody could have, making it a somewhat unreliable source.
‘I’m not going there to accuse him,’ says Emory. ‘I just need to hear his side of the story.’
‘Somebody should,’ replies Magdalene. ‘You know the morning he …’ she falters, unsure of her wording ‘… did what he did, he ransacked my dorm room first. Any paintings I’d made of the elders, he slashed with his knife.’
‘Why?’
‘I don’t know, but he’d never have vandalised my art without a reason. He loved my paintings. He was the only one who did.’ She closes her eyes, struggling to speak through her loss. ‘He went to the school straight after. The story went around that Adil attacked Niema immediately, but they talked first. I was there, behind him. He kept asking her to give them back. He said it over and over again. He was begging her.’
‘Give what back?’
Magdalene shakes her head. ‘Neither of them ever said, and he was exiled straight after. Those were the last words I ever heard him say.’
THIRTY-FIVE
Pushing open a wooden gate, Emory and Clara enter the farms that feed the village. They’re built on a narrow plateau between the foothills of the volcano, and the rocky coast. The black soil is rich with nutrients and each individual has a ten-pole plot, on which they’re expected to grow their own food.
Parcelled into neat squares are orderly rows of carrots, avocados and lettuce. A patchwork of red, green and yellow peppers are hemmed in by heads of corn sprouting like fireworks, while aubergines dangle precariously above piles of dry manure.
Almost every vegetable imaginable is here, some sheltering under ivy canopies, others exposed to the brutal sun. Sheep congregate along a fence to their left, and there’s a beehive on almost every plot to provide honey.
Amid all this colour and life, Emory’s alarmed to see a large patch of rot blotting the healthy crops; the vegetables are putrid, and drained of their colour.
‘What could do this in a night?’ asks Emory, plucking a tomato from its vine and watching as it dissolves in her fingers. ‘Do you think they’re diseased?’
‘This isn’t a disease,’ says Clara. ‘They don’t work this quickly.’
She lifts up some soil and sniffs it. ‘Smells like chemicals to me,’ she says, letting it fall between her fingers. Rummaging in her bag, she removes her testing kit.
Grunting draws their attention towards Shilpa and Abbas, who are dragging a cow’s carcass towards a freshly dug hole, their shovels discarded on the ground. They’re so covered in dirt, they look like they crawled out of the pit themselves.
The cow died in a shelter the villagers use to get out of the heat, and the floor is covered in a pool of congealed blood, the glossy puddle marred by footprints.
Seeing that Shilpa isn’t wearing her boots, Emory holds up the replacement pair I asked her to bring.
‘You got here just in time,’ responds Shilpa gratefully, sticking her feet into a nearby bucket of water to wash the dirt off. ‘The ground’s getting hot. I thought I’d have to hop home.’
‘Why are you barefoot?’ asks Emory curiously.
‘No idea,’ she says, shrugging. ‘I was wearing my boots when I went to sleep, but they were gone when I woke up. Somebody left their sandals for me, but they’re not very much use on this rocky earth.’
The crinkle of her forehead is the only indication she finds this strange, as I’ve spent the morning hammering down her curiosity.
‘Did you hear about Niema and the others?’ asks Abbas.
‘Mum found them.’
‘Was the cow alive at curfew?’ asks Emory, who hasn’t been listening. She’s staring at the sticky crimson pool where the cow lay.
‘Yeah,’ replies Shilpa guiltily. ‘The poor thing died terrified, while we slept.’
‘Which means its blood congealed during the night,’ says Emory. ‘These footprints can’t be yours. Did your boots have a corner missing from the heel?’
‘That’s them. Have you seen them?’
‘That’s the shape of the print in the blood,’ explains Emory. ‘Somebody walked out here in sandals, only to realise they were no use on this terrain. They saw you asleep and traded their sandals for your boots. They were walking east, and they weren’t going alone. There’s another two sets of tracks alongside them.’
Shilpa and Abbas exchange a blank look, while Emory kneels by the puddle, examining the footprints in the congealed blood.
‘I know this tread,’ says Emory. ‘These are my prints and I was pulling a cart. You can see the grooves left by the wheels.’
After thanking Shilpa and Abbas for their help, Emory casts around for more prints, but it rained all night and into the morning, washing them away. She doesn’t find any more until they reach the eastern boundary of the farms, which are marked by snapping red flags, grown tatty with age. Beyond this point the terrain becomes rocky and treacherous. Impossible to till, and nearly as difficult to cross.
The villagers aren’t allowed to go any further unless they’re accompanied by an elder, but there’s no reason why they’d want to. Anybody who needs to reach the east coast of the island typically takes a boat, or else the cable car up to the cauldron, and then the goat track down. Both routes are considerably faster, and much less likely to leave you with a broken ankle.
There’s an old, twisted apple tree a few paces ahead, and sheltered by its boughs Emory spots a third set of footprints.
‘I left the village,’ she says, bewildered. ‘Far as I know, the only thing out here is Adil’s cottage. What on earth would compel three people to go there in the dead of night?’
‘Let’s find out,’ says Clara, striding across the boundary line.
Her body freezes mid-stride, her mouth still parted on the word ‘out’.
‘You know I can’t let you go beyond the village limits,’ I say, in her thoughts, turning her around on the spot and walking her back to Emory.
The children play this game sometimes when they’re bored, seeing how far they can get before I take control of their bodies. It doesn’t hurt. They’re just passengers for a little while.
‘Why did you do that?’ demands Clara, swinging an arm at the barren terrain. ‘I’ve spent the last three weeks out there.’
‘You were with Thea,’ I point out. ‘If you want to go exploring with your mother, you’ll need permission from an elder.’
Clara shoots an appealing look towards her mother, but Emory’s thoughts are elsewhere. ‘If you can take control of anybody, how is Niema dead? How did Adil manage to hurt her all those years ago?’
‘First of all, I can’t control humans. I’m not woven through them in the same way I’m woven through your people. I can’t even enforce curfew on them. Secondly, Adil is suffering from one of the neurodegenerative conditions that Thea mentioned this morning. It’s going to kill him, but until it does he’s completely free of my control, and has been for the last five years. Finally, it takes a few seconds for me to take control of somebody’s body. Anybody who acted in the heat of the moment without forethought would have had time to stab Niema.’