Authors: Sam Baker
The surrounding countryside was equally unpredictable: to the south the moors, to the north the Dales. One minute gently rolling hills and undulating greenery, almost chocolate-box pretty; the next rocks jutting through thin earth like bone, waters broiling a sinister stew in dark pools beneath. In front of her, tombstones tumbled like broken teeth before the graveyard dropped away towards the river.
Just as well. She wasn’t looking for pristine.
Lining the walls of what little remained of the abbey’s heart was a row of erratically spaced benches, dark with recent creosote, the kind of wooden two-seaters that littered suburban parks and riverbanks all over northern Europe. Clambering over a half-collapsed wall, Helen wandered idly amongst them. Up close, she could see they were scattered with dedications, the formal graffiti of engraved brass plaques screwed to the back of the seats.
Mary, 1910–2003, much missed.
For Margaret and Albert, together now as then.
This seat is dedicated to Ethel who sat here every day, whatever the weather …
Ethel’s bench was slick with rain, but Helen sat anyway, feeling the water soak the seat of her jeans, and gazed across the Dales in respectful silence. Was this the same view that Ethel had seen ‘whatever the weather’? Who, if anyone, would dedicate a bench to her if she died? A year ago, even six months, she might have known the answer to that question. But now?
Closing her eyes, Helen took several long, deep breaths until she felt her heart begin to slow. Then she tucked her face as far back under her hood as her neck would allow. Invisible was a look she’d worked hard to perfect over the years. Professional necessity, personal choice. But she couldn’t keep saying later, later had come and gone. It was time. Following one last, expensive taxi-ride to Bradford, the one that had made her the fifth careless owner of the battered Peugeot with questionable brakes and bugger-all MOT, she now had a second-hand MacBook and three USB dongles with enough pre-paid data to last a few months, plus a reconditioned iPhone she’d persuaded the laptop owner to throw in for another fifty. Tonight she would set up a VPN and go online.
Seized with sudden decisiveness, Helen fumbled in her pocket for her pay-as-you-go mobile and, before she had time to think – before she even had time to be surprised to find a signal out here – she keyed in a familiar number and pressed
call
, striding away through the ruins as she did so, stepping over a knee-height fence into the old cemetery and starting to walk in tight patterns through the gravestones.
‘It’s me,’ she said when her sister answered. And then held her breath for what might come next.
‘Helen!’ Fran cried. ‘Thank God!’
For a few seconds, all Helen could hear from the other end of the phone was someone taking several sharp, shallow breaths. She closed her eyes, listening as the breathing slowed. ‘Fran,’ she said eventually. ‘Fran? Are you OK?’
‘I didn’t know. We didn’t know … I mean, we knew there was a fire at the flat … and then you didn’t call and we didn’t know where you were …’ Her sister stopped, suddenly composed. ‘Where are you?’
Once a big sister, always a big sister.
‘Resting,’ Helen said. ‘I just called to let you know I was OK.’
‘OK? How can you possibly be OK?’
Now the initial shock had passed, Helen felt Fran’s relief ebb away to be replaced by the lifetime’s irritation that simmered between them. Whether separated simply by a dining table or whole continents and life choices, the friction had always been there. Twenty years on, more, the list of grudges was endless. Stolen Barbies, a broken Girl’s World with blue Biro eyebrows, smashed Lego houses and vanishing homework blurred together with scoldings for crusts uneaten, lip gloss shoplifted and tittle-tattle told.
Were all siblings like this?
‘Where are you?’ Fran repeated.
‘Just away, resting, like I said.’ Helen meant it to sound reasonable, but it didn’t come out that way. Instead she sounded petulant, bratty. The little sister she was.
‘I didn’t mean … geographically,’ Fran was trying for conciliatory. ‘I meant … You sound … echoey. And I can hear water.’
‘I am by water,’ Helen said. ‘A river. Plus it’s raining.’
It was, pouring now, a chill wind clawing at Helen’s hood and driving rain into her cheeks. Her fingers had cramped around her handset, their tips white with cold. She examined her nails and listened to her sister’s irritation on the end of the line. Not blue, her fingernails, not yet. If they turned blue she was in for another migraine. She shouldn’t have let herself think about the fire. Not yet.
‘Go inside then,’ said Fran. ‘You’ll catch your death.’
Helen smiled.
‘Yes, Mum.’
Fran smiled back. Helen could hear it. She was sure she could.
‘I’ve been trying to get hold of you,’ Fran said. ‘I emailed dozens of times, and called, but your mobile’s dead.’
‘I lost it. This is a replacement.’
‘You could have rung.’
‘What do you think I’m doing?’ Helen shrugged. The rain had crept inside her hood and was trickling down her neck. She cast around for shelter, but the ruins she’d been so enamoured with offered none. She tried to remember why she’d called.
‘The police came round,’ Fran said suddenly.
‘The police?’ Helen’s voice was a whisper.
‘They went to Mum’s,’ Fran said. ‘They wanted access to your dental records and she called me. Helen, she was in a terrible state. We all were.’
‘What did they say?’ Helen asked, eventually. ‘The police, I mean.’
She heard Fran take a deep breath. ‘Helen, they said they’d found a body. She told them you couldn’t have been there. You and Art had separated. Although we all hoped it wasn’t permanent …’
Helen forced herself not to respond.
‘That’s what the concierge told them too. Well, that you’d moved out. And Monsieur was away somewhere. She didn’t know where. That’s why it’s taken so long, apparently. The police just assumed the place was empty. And then they cleared the rubble and found …’ Several hundred miles away Fran swallowed.
‘Helen?’
‘Uh-huh.’
‘I don’t think they think it was an accident.’
Closing her eyes, Helen tried to shake the fog that had clouded her brain since that night two weeks earlier. All she could see was an orange glow, the outline of a body slumped awkwardly in a corner, hear the brown noise of electrics crackling.
‘Helen …?’
Helen swallowed hard. Tried to focus.
‘They said that?’
‘They wanted to know if Mum had heard from you. Don’t you understand? It’s been weeks since we heard. I told them that, you know, you travel a lot and sometimes go months without making contact. So if a week or two passed, well, that’s you. But then we have the police on the doorstep asking about dental records, saying your – I mean Art’s – flat burnt down a fortnight ago and no one’s seen either of you since. Where have you been?’
When Helen finally found her voice, it came out small, more afraid than she’d have liked. ‘Somewhere safe,’ she said.
It played on Gil’s mind all through lunch and for the rest of that afternoon.
Not so much his brief exchange with the French girl.
Woman
, he corrected himself. It had been made pretty clear to him over the years that women didn’t much like being called girls; not by middle-aged-plus-a-bit men anyway. The girls at the paper told him he was patronising, even though he’d hear them refer to themselves that way seconds later. It wasn’t so much Mademoiselle Graham’s evident discomfort at Margaret Millward’s forensic gaze. Who wouldn’t be on edge finding themselves the centre of attention when they’d only gone out for a pint of milk? Although even then her discomfort had been extreme.
It was the conversation afterwards.
It didn’t require investigative skills to tell she was thrown by the encounter. She dropped the bread when she opened the shop door, dropped the chocolate when she picked up the bread and took three attempts to start her wreck of a car. And then she stalled. Although that probably had more to do with her near collision with old Maude Peniston’s trolley.
Even Margaret Millward wasn’t that stress-inducing.
Frankly, Gil was irritating himself. He’d long since given up trying to read his book. It was new and he wasn’t yet into it. Just a couple of chapters and he’d had to read both of those twice. He’d switched from Ian Rankin to Denise Mina when he’d run out of Rebus. Swapping Edinburgh for Glasgow mainly because of a Rankin quote on the cover. But he was doing that irritating thing of reading the same page over and over. Seeing the words while being too preoccupied to take them in.
On his third go, he gave up, downed his pint, wrapped his scarf around his neck, tucked the paperback into his pocket and raised a parting hand to Ray. Outside, he turned right instead of left. There was nobody about apart from an occasional car, but he made a point of not looking up as he headed out of the village. Someone would have noticed the break in his routine, he was sure of that. One of the twitchers. They’d doubtless grill him about it later. He wasn’t about to encourage them by making eye contact.
With his long legs and loping cross-country stride it took less than ten minutes to reach the stile he wanted and veer off on a track signposted for walkers. If he kept moving at this rate he’d be deep in the Dales in under half an hour. Gil gave an involuntary shiver. He’d also be drenched. He wasn’t dressed for hiking. Not remotely. His suit shrieked office and though his well-worn brogues were more than up to the challenge, hiking wasn’t the job for which they’d been made.
The drizzle was hardening, the wind growing squally and the cloud coming so low Gil felt he should hunch, or un-hunch completely and stand his full height and let the nimbus scrape his head at the point where his hair was thinning. Common sense said turn back; but Gil had no intention of listening to common sense. He needed to think. Indoors was hopeless. He felt … confined. More so, since the cottage was empty. The rooms were too small, the ceilings too low; he’d like to moan that the walls were too thin but, having seen the thickness of the walls Jan had taken a hammer to, he knew the only way you’d hear easily through that would be to tunnel through it. Hunching his head further into his neck, his neck into his shoulders, he pressed on, ignoring the give beneath his soles.
The gossip had been predictable enough, at least to start with.
‘Well, what a piece of luck,’ Margaret Millward was saying. ‘If Mademoiselle Graham hadn’t come in we’d never have known our invitation was destroyed.’
What was with all the
we
? Gil wondered. It was Margaret’s social, Margaret’s invitation, Margaret’s injured feelings. As if anyone else gave a toss.
People’s ability to believe what they wanted despite all evidence to the contrary never failed to astonish him. It was one of the things that had made his job so easy when he’d been a reporter. Self-delusion, a journalist’s best, not to mention cheapest, friend.
‘Hard to believe she’s been living here over a week and she’s not passed through before,’ said the woman with the pram. Youngish, blondish, skin so pale it was bordering on transparent, her eyes rimmed with tale-telling dark circles of four hours’ sleep and night feeds. Gil thought she might have been at school with one of his daughters. Mind you, that went for nearly every woman in the village between twenty-five and thirty-five.
When he’d been gainfully employed he’d lived here for years without passing through. He could see the attraction.
‘Looks like she decided against bringing the child then,’ Mrs Millward said suddenly. That got everyone’s attention firmly back where she liked it.
Child? Gil looked at her, mouth open. Where the hell had she got that?
‘Not sure where I heard it now,’ Margaret Millward continued, as if reading his mind. ‘Gwen got it from the letting agent, I think, something about a little boy. But I’ve heard no mention of it since. Good job too, if you ask me. No place for a child, that big old house … No place for anyone.’
‘Do you really think it’s haunted, Margaret?’ The young woman gave an involuntary shudder as she emptied her purse on to the counter and started counting out change. ‘I mean, if someone’s actually seen something up there, shouldn’t the estate agent have told her?’
‘I don’t think they’re obliged,’ the store owner said authoritatively. ‘Not legally. But you’d think they’d have a moral duty, wouldn’t you? Young woman on her own like that, ought to have all the facts. Especially paying six months up front like she did. She’ll have a hell of a time getting her money refunded.’
There were murmurs of assent and several other women nodded.
Gil turned away and rolled his eyes. Not that old Wildfell is haunted shtick again. If it wasn’t one thing, it was another. The things some people could concoct to pass the time.
With his back to the wind, Gil struck a match, cupped its guttering flame in his hand and sucked until tobacco flared orange. Then he inhaled. Deeply. Nothing tasted as good as an illicit fag with no one hovering on his shoulder to keep count.
The Scar wasn’t an arduous climb from this direction, even with nicotine-drenched lungs and brogues not built for the occasion with leather soles that slid in mud. He was barely breathing hard. The approach had inclined gently, rising to a well-trod path with steps cut into the rear of the Scar, and kept useable by planks at the back of each step, held in place by short stakes at either end. As he crested the top, the Dales dropped away, their swoops and hollows speckled with the red, blue and yellow of ramblers’ anoraks, interspersed with patches dotted with white where sheep clustered together against the weather.
On a clear day the view from the Scar was breathtaking, no matter how many times you saw it. Today he could barely see as far as the next valley. The rain was settling in for the duration now, splattering his glasses and plastering his hair against his scalp. Blinking away water, Gil removed his spectacles, wiped them with the inside of his scarf, held them up to his eyes and frowned. The smears were worse. Reluctantly he turned for home. He might have walked a few miles to clear his head but he wasn’t getting anywhere with his problem. Whichever way he looked at it – and he’d looked at it every which way – the gossip made little sense, no matter how many times he replayed it. His disquiet was at more than village idiocy. It was his village, after all; he was allowed to dislike it.