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He hadn’t bought cigarettes.

He hoped she noticed he hadn’t bought cigarettes.

The Bull would be open and Bill already perched on his stool by the bar. There would be the die-hard walkers too, drinking coffee admittedly. Gil couldn’t see the point of drinking coffee in pubs. It was like being celibate in a brothel. If you’re celibate, don’t go there in the first place. Not that he’d ever been to a brothel. It was just something his old news editor used to say.

The front window of The Café on the Corner was steamed up, with seven sodden members of the Wednesday book club gathered inside. They stopped talking when Gil came in, but they didn’t stop looking. He had a pretty good idea they hadn’t been talking about books. He chose a corner, as far away from them as possible, and draped his suit jacket over the back of the chair opposite to dry. Pulling his phone from his pocket, he began rechecking the sites he’d checked yesterday, and the day before, and the day before that.

To test his newfound digital prowess, Gil had set up Google alerts on ‘Art Huntingdon’ and ‘Helen Lawrence’ the previous night. Nothing was flagged, and there was nothing new on Art Huntingdon’s Twitter feed, Facebook page or entry on LinkedIn. Why would there be?

All the same, he checked a couple of search engines. He hoped Helen was wrong about police filters or he’d be right up the Swannee. Mind you, he was a journalist. Journalists were meant to show excessive interest in things that weren’t their business.

Gil smiled at the girl who brought his coffee and she seemed surprised, then smiled tentatively. She was new. Within days she’d be bringing the regulars their cappuccino without them having to ask. Gil wasn’t sure how they stood it. He picked up a local paper someone had dumped on the next table. A smattering of global news, carefully linked back to Yorkshire. Its quick crossword was too easy and the cryptic one too hard. He hated sudoku and the chess problem stared back at him for so long his cappuccino went cold. He couldn’t live like this, not long term. At least holidays were eventually over. He needed to find something that interested him or return to work in one way or another. He’d die of boredom else.

But maybe he’d already found it. One call was all it would take and he’d have a commission. A big one …

‘You busy, Mr Markham?’

One of the younger members of the book group was hovering near his table. Gesturing to the chair with his jacket, Gil invited her to sit and saw her glance at what remained of the group behind her. One of them nodded.

‘It’s just, you’re, uh, friends with … the French woman?’ She blushed. ‘You know? She’s renting the big house …’

He nodded. Here we go.

‘Thought so. Someone’s asking after her.’

‘Someone?’ Gil’s stomach lurched.

‘He said he was an old friend and he had a photograph. She had different colour hair in the picture but it was definitely her. Me and Katie thought he could be a journalist … No offence. Or a private detective. So we said we hadn’t seen her. We don’t think he believed us though.’

‘What was he like?’ Gil hoped he looked calmer than he felt. He was pretty sure he knew the photo she meant. But that didn’t mean a thing. Anyone could have downloaded it.

The girl thought about his question, shrugged. ‘Oldish … Bit fat. Well, not fat exactly, more not thin. Going a bit bald, you know.’ She patted the crown of her head to show Gil where she meant. ‘He was wearing a dark green jacket. Bit like a Barbour, but not. You know the kind.’

Gil did. ‘Is he still here?’

‘Got into a blue car. Said he was going to try the next village.’ The girl thought about it. ‘We think he’ll be back. It was a hire car,’ she added.

‘How do you know?’

She looked at Gil as if he was simple. ‘It had a Hertz sticker in the window.’

‘There was a man,’ Kath said.

Gil waited while the landlord’s daughter-in-law pulled his first pint without being asked and reached behind her for a packet of salt-and-vinegar crisps. He could demand prawn cocktail instead, but he didn’t like prawn cocktail and what was the point of eating crisps you didn’t like just to prove you weren’t predictable? His hand already itched for the B&H he hadn’t bought for the same stupid reason.

‘What was he like?’

‘Don’t you want to know what he wanted?’

Sliding coins across the bar, Gil said. ‘I know what he wants. He was in the café this morning asking about Mademoiselle Graham.’

‘Then you know what he’s like.’

‘Middle-aged, slightly balding, wearing a Barbour.’

Kath sniffed. ‘Tell whoever told you that not to bother applying to join the police. He wasn’t nearly middle-aged. Probably only a few years older than me. Good-looking bloke. Still had his hair, for a start. Well, most of it. And it was a Belstaff, not a Barbour. They’re not even the same colour.’

Waving away his change, Gil said, ‘He had a photograph?’

‘Of your friend? Yes.’

He considered saying Helen wasn’t his friend, but perhaps she was, if not in the way Kath meant.

Gil sighed. He wished he was a bit younger. A bit more modern.

‘This photograph?’ he prompted.

‘It was a few years old, you know. She looked—’

She broke off as a tourist approached the bar. While Kath turned away to serve him, Gil got out his phone to call Helen. It was only when he started to flick through his contacts that he realised he didn’t have her number. Perhaps he should skip his pint and go out there and warn her? Two sightings – three, if you included Helen’s birdwatcher, and Gil wasn’t sure he did – couldn’t be a coincidence.

Kath wandered back with a bar towel to wipe away crisp crumbs and the ring left by Gil’s glass. ‘Sad’s not the right word,’ she continued as if she hadn’t stepped away. ‘Exhausted, maybe. There was something about her eyes. If you said she’d been ill – you know, seriously – I wouldn’t be surprised.’

‘What did you tell him?’

‘Oh, I said she’d been in. He asked if she was a regular and I said not really. She’d come in once that I could remember.’

‘Did you say where she was living?’ Gil’s fist was clenched tight around his pint glass.

‘He didn’t ask.’

Wind howled through the trees and stripped rain from the leaves on to his head and into his face as if it knew he was coming. The sky was dusk dark, although it was not yet four. He should have brought a torch. Anyone with any sense would have brought a torch, but then people would have been seen him coming up the lane from the village to the house and Gil didn’t want to be seen in case somebody was watching.

And for once he wasn’t worrying about the village gossips. He only wished he was.

Stopping at the rusty gates to the house, he unzipped and pissed the pint he’d just drunk against a red-brick pillar, keeping one eye on the road that led past the gates and turned off towards an abandoned sheep farm further up. Follow the road beyond that and it would deliver you to a village on the far side of the saddle where the houses were mostly weekend cottages, incomers or holiday homes.

The rain slowed enough for him to check the road was deserted; and then stopped entirely, just as he opened the small gate in the big wrought-iron one, and prepared to take himself somewhere dry. A sliver of light behind a curtained upstairs window went out the moment he leaned on the bell push. Gil waited for another light to appear, one on the landing or on the stairs or in the hall. It didn’t. All he got was darkness inside the house, and gloom without. Rain pattered from the trees mimicking the way it had fallen from the sky until moments before.

A gargoyle high on a corner of the oldest part poured water in a steady stream on to gravel. There should have been a butt below. There undoubtedly was back in the day when the house had gardeners and servants, and probably an old butler so infirm it was all he could do to manage the door. Gil had picked apples in Wildfell’s orchards when he was barely a teenager for a pittance an hour. Picked apples and tried to get his hand up a girl’s skirt. The skirt was washed-out denim, short enough to be barely there. It had still been enough to keep him out, no matter how he wrestled or pleaded.

‘Who is it?’

Helen’s voice was hoarse, almost disguised. Loud enough for Gil to realise she was standing on the other side of the locked door.

‘It’s me. Gil.’

‘Is anybody with you?’

He looked round stupidly at the wet gravel and sodden trees. He wasn’t sure which would be the right reply but answered truthfully. ‘No. I came alone.’

A bolt shot back and the door slipped open a little, with Helen out of sight behind it. ‘Come in then,’ she said. She sounded cross, or maybe just tired.

In her hand was a pencil torch she used to light her way, only turning it off when they reached the upper sitting room. She shut the curtains before turning on the light. Her laptop was on. A picture of a ruined street filling the screen.
Ruined street
hardly did the picture justice. There was a desolation to the photograph that made it almost painful. ‘I started going through my USBs,’ she says. ‘Seeing if I’ve still got the picture files to put the Paris exhibition together. Not that it’s much use to me now. It’s more the principle.’

‘This was one of them?’

‘No, this is Syria. The picture I told you about …’

‘Are you all right?’

She glanced up, her face lit from the side by a table lamp placed low, and given an unhealthy glow by her screen. She looked like a different woman from the day before, hollow-eyed and haunted.

‘Helen …’

‘I feel watched,’ she said. ‘I thought it was you. I thought it was this bloody village. It’s not. Ever since I came back from London I’ve felt watched. Art would have said it was paranoia. That I needed to get a grip on myself. Stop being hysterical. I shouldn’t have gone to London, but I needed the pills. It was stupid of me. And then, that birdwatcher … standing there, with his binoculars, just staring …’

Gil started to speak but she put up a hand to silence him.

‘Don’t tell me it’s nothing, a coincidence. Someone’s out there. I can feel it. Even the bloody cat’s freaked out.’

‘Where is Ghost anyway?’ Gil looked around.

‘This is the point you’re meant to say I’m being stupid. That, obviously, there’s no one out there watching me. I’m imagining it. Not start me worrying about the missing cat too.’

Gil took a deep breath. Best just to come out with it. ‘Someone is looking for you, Helen. I only just heard about it. That’s why I’m here.’

Helen clapped a hand to her mouth and, for a moment, Gil thought she was going to vomit. It obviously took an effort to force her hand away.

Removing his suit jacket, he shook it on to the floor, then sat in the armchair without thinking to ask. He watched Helen clock the over-familiarity and decide to let it go.

‘I’ve been thinking about it,’ he said. ‘On the walk here. It’s not the police. If they’d found you, they’d be outside with their sirens on. And if they were looking very hard, believe me, they
would
have found you by now. So they’re not. It’s someone in a hire car. My money’s on another journalist, or a private detective. Neither of which is great, obviously.’

‘What if it’s Mark Ridley?’ Helen said suddenly.

‘Who?’

‘Art’s friend. You know, from the Admiral Duncan.’

‘Ah,’ Gil nodded. ‘Why would it be him, after all this time?’

Helen looked slightly sheepish.

Was he going to lose the story to someone else? Gil raised his eyebrows. ‘Something you want to tell me?’

‘He’s been in touch,’ Helen said. ‘With my sister, by email. And he called my doctor, Caroline, trying to find out where I was.’

‘You didn’t think to tell me that?’ Gil didn’t bother to conceal his irritation. ‘Anything else, while we’re on the subject?’

Helen swallowed, and Gil leaned forward. He was a tolerant man – laid-back enough to be horizontal, Jan always said – but Helen was testing his patience.

‘I forget what I’ve said and what I haven’t …’ she started. ‘But yes. You should probably know about Tom.’

‘Tom?’ That name rang a bell. ‘Ex-boyfriend Tom?’

Helen nodded.

‘Been in touch with him too?’

‘No!’ Helen looked indignant. ‘Well, yes, actually, but not how it sounds.’

‘How is it then?’ Gil patted his pocket for his B&H and cursed himself for not buying a packet. All because he had to make a point.

‘I called him, apparently. And no, I don’t know why and I don’t remember doing it, but he told my sister I called him after the fire, and … he emailed me.’

‘He emailed you?!’

‘Don’t worry, I didn’t reply. I’m not entirely stupid.’

Gil turned away. He hadn’t felt this riled up since the last days of Jan.

They sat in silence for a moment, listening to the drip, drip, drip of the guttering straight on to gravel outside while Helen gnawed at her cuticle. Gil had to resist the urge to slap her hand away.

‘So, that’s two suspects: Mark Ridley and Tom … Anyone else I need to know about?’

Helen shook her head and then stopped, colour draining from her face.

‘Art.’

‘What about Art?’

‘What if it’s Art?’

Gil sighed. ‘He’s dead, Helen. You said so yourself.’

‘But what if he’s not?’

‘They’ve got his bloody body. Or what’s left of it. You saw it yourself …’

‘I saw
a
body.’

Gil looked at her.

‘I can’t remember
anything
,’ she said furiously. ‘Doesn’t that strike you as odd? There’s a whole day missing. At least a day, if not more.’

‘What are you trying to say?’ He wasn’t irritated any longer. Either she was a bloody good actress, or she believed it.

‘I don’t know.’ She scanned the room wildly, as if expecting to see a face staring in the first-floor window behind her. ‘I thought I saw Art’s body. But what if it wasn’t Art? He could still be out there, watching me.’

Gil tried not to sigh. She was yanking his chain, playing the hysteric to throw him off the scent. But her body language … the way she hunched up, knees clutched to her chest like a child … What had she said before about trying to make herself as small as possible?