When we finally came to Coldbarrow itself there was a cobbled slipway leading onto a dirt road that ran around the perimeter. Rutted and claggy with sludge and sand it looked impassable, yet there were footprints and tyre grooves criss-crossing the lane all the way towards Thessaly, which sat away on the edge of the cliffs at the north end. Nevertheless, it was better to cut across the heather moor and save our boots. Mummer would only start asking questions if we came back up to our knees in mud.
I held open a barbed wire fence for Hanny to climb through and then showed him where to hold it so that I could do the same. The land rose a little and then we were on the peat moor where the heather had been ravaged to stubble by the wind.
It was easy to see why no one ever came here. What was there to come for? No livestock could survive for long on the stony ground and anything one tried to build would be knocked flat by the first storm to come barrelling across the Irish Sea. For there was nothing beyond Coldbarrow, only a yawning openness of grey water until one hit the coast of County Louth a hundred and fifty miles away.
Perhaps that was what made me stop and look across the sands at our footprints. To know that there was a place we could go back to.
The mainland was a thin strand of grey, the pillbox barely distinguishable in the range of dunes. Only Moorings stood out, white against the trees of Brownslack Wood that moved in the wind like the pelt of a huge, dozing animal.
Seeing it like that, so thickly heaped over the fell, I reckoned Mr Belderboss was right. Maybe no one had set foot in there for centuries. There must still be places like that, even in England, I imagined. Wild woods left to themselves.
Hanny tugged at my hand and we carried on through the heather. As we walked, I became aware of a faint ringing sound, like someone running a finger around the rim of a wine glass.
‘Can you hear that?’
He stopped and I touched my ear.
‘That sound,’ I said.
He shook his head.
The grass rustled and then a flash of white fur made us both turn at the same time. A slender, staring cat emerged and mewed with a tiny voice. Hanny put out his hand and it came to him. It had no collar and no name tag, but it wasn’t feral. The fur had been well looked after.
It was an albino, with eyes that looked as if they had been marinated in blood. It mewed again and sprayed its musk onto a rock, its tail erect and shivering. Again came that faint, high pitched smoothing of the air. It seemed to be calling the cat. It licked its paw and then sprang off through the grass towards Thessaly.
***
Hanny got there before me and was standing at the end of a cutting that led to the house through the black stems of heather and the ferns that had yet to unfurl their little crosiers.
The ringing sound was stronger here and I realised that I had been hearing the wind moving the bell in the small brick tower that they said the Devil had built for Alice Percy to entice poor foreign sailors onto the rocks.
The wind wasn’t strong enough to swing it against the clapper and it shimmered over its surface instead, producing a delicate, liquid sound that floated on the damp air.
The girl we had seen at The Loney was sitting under the lopsided portico of the house in her wheelchair. After a moment she held up her hand and Hanny started to walk towards the house, following the albino cat.
Standing close to it for the first time, Thessaly was an ugly place. Built low and long to withstand the weather, it seemed to have emerged from the earth like a stunted fungus. Every window was black and stains ran from the sills down the grimy plasterwork as though the place was permanently weeping. The portico was an attempt at elegance that had failed in the most spectacular way and reminded me of the gateways to the vaults in the graveyard at Saint Jude’s with their life-sized angels and broken gates.
Hanny stopped a few feet from the girl and was staring at her as she smoothed her hands over her swollen stomach. Perhaps it was the dry, russet hair and its attendant dribble of freckles across the bridge of her nose; perhaps it was pregnancy that had given her a fleshiness about the face, but she seemed even younger than I’d first thought. The prettiness that Mrs Belderboss had noticed came and went too quickly for it to be a constant quality and it disappeared altogether when she grimaced as the baby moved.
The door behind her was open and Laura’s voice came from inside the house.
‘Is that him back?’ she said, and then looked disappointed as she came out and saw me and Hanny standing there.
She was smoking a cigarette and was dressed in a matching liver-coloured skirt and jacket. She had pearls around her neck and, like her husband, smelled strongly of fragrance.
‘Can I help you?’ she said, touching the edges of her painted mouth with her little finger.
I told her that we’d come for the watch.
‘Watch?’ she said.
‘Your husband found a watch yesterday at The Loney. It belongs to us.’
‘The where?’
‘The beach,’ I said. ‘He found it in the sand.’
‘I don’t recall seeing you there,’ she said.
‘Well, we were.’
Laura took another drag and tapped the ash from the end with her forefinger.
‘What’s the matter with him?’ she asked, gesturing towards Hanny.
‘Nothing,’ I said.
‘Why is he staring at me? Is he a bit slow?’
I nudged Hanny to stop and he looked at his feet instead.
‘Do you live around here?’ Laura said.
‘No.’
‘On holiday?’
‘Yes.’
‘Poor you,’ she said, as the rain started again.
She looked at us both and then turned back into the house.
‘Come in,’ she said. ‘I’ll see if he’s left it lying around. Give Else a hand over the step.’
The girl smiled at Hanny again, hoping that he would do the honours.
‘He doesn’t understand,’ I said.
But Hanny took hold of the handles and wheeled her backwards through the doorway and into a long corridor lined with empty coat hooks on which a smell of old, damp gabardine hung. There was room for little else other than a pair of wellingtons and an umbrella.
There were no stairs, only doors either side and one at the end, next to which there was an upturned plant pot for a telephone to sit on.
The rain came down hard outside and the hallway darkened. I had been right to think of the place as a tomb. The plaster had been left unpainted, the woodwork without varnish, as though it had been built and immediately abandoned. Its walls had never contained a family. No one had ever laughed there. It had a kind of airlessness, a heavy silence, that made it immediately unsettling. I’ve never felt it anywhere else since, but there was definitely something that I picked up with a different sense. Not a ghost or anything ridiculous like that, but something nevertheless.
‘Wait here,’ Laura said and went along the hallway to the door at the end where she paused to sort through the bunch of keys. She unlocked the door, there was a brief glimpse of a bare kitchen, and then she closed it behind her, locking it from the inside.
‘What’s his name?’ Else said to me.
‘Andrew,’ I said.
‘That’s a nice name,’ she said and smiled at Hanny.
Hanny smiled back and touched her hair.
‘Don’t do that,’ I said.
‘No, it’s alright,’ said Else, rearranging it back behind her ears.
She shifted in her chair and winced a little and breathed out.