He shook his head. “No. Of course not.” He paused. “How’s Sean getting on with all that?”
She shrugged again. “You know. He doesn’t really say.”
• • •
SEAN AND HELEN lived in the home that Patrick had once shared with his wife. After she died, Sean and Patrick had lived there together. Much later, after Sean’s marriage, they converted the old barn just across the courtyard and Patrick moved out. Sean protested, saying he and Helen should be the ones to move, but Patrick wouldn’t hear of it. He wanted them there; he liked the sense of continuity, the sense of the three of them being their own little community, part of the town and yet apart from it.
When he reached the cottage, Patrick saw right away that someone had been there. The curtains were drawn and the front door was slightly ajar. Inside, he found the bed unmade. Wine-stained glasses stood empty on the floor and a condom floated in the toilet bowl. There were cigarette butts in an ashtray, roll-ups. He picked one up and sniffed it, searching for the scent of marijuana, but smelling only cold ash. There were other things there, too, bits of clothing and assorted junk—an odd blue sock, a string of beads. He gathered everything up and shoved it into a plastic bag. He stripped the sheets from the bed, washed the glasses in the sink, threw the cigarette butts into the dustbin and carefully locked the door behind him. He carried everything out to the car, dumping the sheets on the backseat, the rubbish in the boot and the assorted debris in the glove compartment.
He locked the car and walked to the river’s edge, lighting a cigarette on the way. His leg ached and his chest tightened as he inhaled, the hot smoke hitting the back of his throat. He coughed, imagining he could feel the acrid scrape against tired and blackened lungs. He felt suddenly very sad. These moods took him from time to time, seized him with such a force that he found himself wishing it was all over. All of it. He looked at the water and sniffed. He’d never be one of those who gave in to the temptation to submit, to submerge themselves, to make it all go away, but he was honest enough to admit that sometimes even he could see the appeal of oblivion.
By the time he got back to the house it was midmorning, the sun high in the sky. Patrick spotted the tabby, the stray that Helen had been feeding, moving lazily across the courtyard, heading for the rosemary bush in the bed outside the kitchen window. Patrick noticed that its back was bowed slightly, its belly swollen. Pregnant. He’d have to do something about that.
Thursday, 13 August
ERIN
My shitty neighbours in my shitty short-let flat in Newcastle were having the mother of all arguments at four o’clock this morning, so I decided to get up and go for a run. I was all dressed and ready and then I thought, why run here when I could run there? So I drove to Beckford, parked outside the church and headed off up the river path.
It was hard going at first. Once you pass the pool you’ve got to get up that hill and then back down the slope on the other side, but after that, the terrain becomes much flatter and it’s a dream run. Cool before the summer sun hits, quiet, picturesque and cyclist-free—a far cry from my London run along Regent’s Canal, dodging bikes and tourists all the way.
A few miles up the river, the valley widens out, the green hillside opposite, speckled with sheep, rolling gently away. I ran along flat, pebbled ground, barren save for patches of coarse grass and the ubiquitous gorse. I ran hard, head down, until a mile or so farther up, I reached a little cottage set back slightly from the river’s edge, backed by a stand of birch trees.
I slowed to a jog to catch my breath, making my way towards the building to look around. It was a lonely place, seemingly unoccupied but not abandoned. There were curtains, partly drawn, and the windows were clean. I peered inside to see a tiny living room, furnished with two green armchairs and a little table between them. I tried the door but it was locked, so I sat down on the front step in the shade and took a swig from my bottle of water. Stretching my legs out in front of me, flexing my ankles, I waited for my breathing and my heart rate to slow. On the base of the doorframe I noticed someone had scratched a message—Mad Annie was here—with a little skull drawn alongside it.
There were crows arguing in the trees behind me, but apart from that and the occasional bleating of sheep, the valley was quiet and perfectly unspoiled. I think of myself as a city girl through and through, but this place—weird as it is—gets under your skin.
DI Townsend called the briefing just after nine. There weren’t many of us there—a couple of uniforms who’d been helping out with house-to-house, the youngish detective constable, Callie, Hairy the science guy and me. Townsend had been in with the coroner for the postmortem—he gave us the lowdown, most of which was to be expected. Nel died due to injuries sustained in the fall. There was no water in her lungs—she didn’t drown, it was already over by the time she hit the water. She had no injuries that could not be explained by the fall—no scratches or bruises that seemed out of place or that might suggest that someone else had been involved. She also had a fair amount of alcohol in her blood—three or four glasses’ worth.
Callie gave us the lowdown on the house-to-house—not that there was much to tell. We know that Nel was at the pub briefly on the Sunday evening, and that she left around seven. We know that she was at the Mill House until at least ten-thirty, which was when Lena went to bed. No one reported seeing her after that. No one has reported seeing her in any altercations recently either, although it is widely agreed that she wasn’t much liked. The locals didn’t like her attitude, the sense of entitlement of an outsider coming to their town and purporting to tell their story. Where exactly did she get off?
Hairy has been going through Nel’s email account—she’d set up an account dedicated to her project and invited people to send in their stories. Mostly she’d just received abuse. “Though I wouldn’t say it’s much worse than a lot of women get on the Internet in the normal course of things,” he said, giving me an apologetic shrug, as though he was responsible for every idiot misogynist in cyberspace. “We’ll follow up, of course, but . . .”
The rest of Hairy’s testimony was actually pretty interesting. It demonstrated that Jules Abbott was a liar, for starters: Nel’s phone was still AWOL, but her phone records showed that although she didn’t use her mobile much, she had made eleven calls to her sister’s phone over the past three months. Most of the calls lasted less than a minute, sometimes two or three; none of them was particularly long, but they weren’t hang-ups either.
He’d managed to establish the time of death, too. The camera down on the rocks—the one that wasn’t damaged—had picked something up. Nothing graphic, nothing telling, just a sudden blur of movement in the darkness, followed by a spray of water. Two thirty-one a.m., the camera told us, was the moment Nel went in.
But he saved the best for last. “We got a print off the case of the other camera, the damaged one,” he said. “It doesn’t match anyone on file, but we could ask the locals to start coming in, to rule themselves out?”
Townsend nodded slowly.
“I know that camera was vandalized before,” Hairy continued with a shrug, “so it won’t necessarily give us anything conclusive, but . . .”
“Even so. Let’s see what we find. I’ll leave that with you,” Townsend said, looking at me. “I’ll have a word with Julia Abbott about those phone calls.” He got to his feet, folding his arms across his chest, his chin down. “You should all be aware,” he said, his voice low, apologetic almost, “I’ve had Division on the phone just this morning.” He sighed deeply, and the rest of us exchanged glances. We knew what was coming. “Given the results of the PM and the lack of any physical evidence of any sort of altercation up on that cliff, we are under pressure not to waste resources”—he put little air quotes around the words—“on a suicide or accidental death. So. I know there is still work to be done, but we need to work quickly and efficiently. We aren’t going to be given a great deal o
f time on this.”
It didn’t exactly come as a shock. I thought about the conversation I’d had with the DCI on the day I got the assignment—almost certainly a jumper. Jumping all round, from cliffs to conclusions. Hardly surprising, given the history of the place.
But still. I didn’t like it. I didn’t like that there were two women in the water in the space of just a few months, and that they knew each other. They were connected, by place and by people. They were connected by Lena: best friend of one, daughter of the other. The last person to see her mother alive, and the first to insist that this—not just her mother’s death, but the mystery surrounding it—was what she wanted. Such an odd thing for a child to suggest.
I said as much to the DI on our way out of the station. He looked at me balefully. “God only knows what’s going through that girl’s head,” he said. “She’ll be trying to make sense of it. She—” He stopped. There was a woman walking towards us—shuffling more than walking, really—muttering to herself as she did. She was wearing a black coat, despite the heat, her grey hair was streaked with purple, and she had dark polish on her nails. She looked like an elderly goth.
“Morning, Nickie,” Townsend said.
The woman glanced up at him and then at me, eyes narrowing beneath beetling brows.
“Hmph,” she muttered, presumably by way of greeting. “Getting anywhere, are you?”
“Getting anywhere with what, Nickie?”
“Finding out who did it!” she spluttered. “Finding out who pushed her.”
“Who pushed her?” I repeated. “You’re referring to Danielle Abbott? Do you have information which might be useful to us, Mrs. . . . er . . . ?”
She glowered at me and then turned back to Townsend. “Who’s this when she’s at home?” she asked, jabbing a thumb in my direction.
“This is Detective Sergeant Morgan,” he said evenly. “Do you have something you’d like to tell us, Nickie? About the other night?”
She harrumphed again. “I didn’t see anything,” she grumbled, “and even if I did, it’s not as if the likes of you would listen, is it?”
She continued her shuffle past us, down the sun-bright road, muttering as she went.
“What was that about, do you think?” I asked the DI. “Is she someone we ought to speak to officially?”
“I wouldn’t take Nickie Sage too seriously,” he replied with a shake of the head. “She’s not exactly reliable.”
“Oh?”
“She’s says she’s a ‘psychic,’ that she speaks to the dead. We’ve had some trouble with her before, fraud and so on. She also claims she’s descended from a woman who was killed here by witch hunters,” he added dryly. “She’s mad as a hatter.”
JULES
I was in the kitchen when the doorbell rang. I glanced out of the window and saw the detective, Townsend, standing on the front steps, looking up at the windows. Lena got to the door before I did. She opened up for him and said, “Hi, Sean.”
Townsend stepped into the house, brushing past her skinny body as he did, noticing (he must have noticed) her denim cutoffs, the Rolling Stones T-shirt with the tongue sticking out. He held out his hand to me and I took it. His palm was dry, but his skin had an unhealthy sheen to it and there were greyish circles under his eyes. Lena watched him from beneath lowered lids. She raised her fingers to her mouth and chewed on a nail.
I showed him into the kitchen and Lena followed. The detective and I sat down at the table, while Lena leaned against the counter. She crossed one ankle over the other, then shifted her body and crossed them again.
Townsend didn’t look. He coughed, rubbed one hand against his wrist. “The postmortem has been completed,” he said in a soft voice. He glanced at Lena and back at me. “Nel was killed by the impact. There’s no indication that anyone else was involved. There was some alcohol in her blood.” His voice grew softer still. “Enough to impair her judgement. To make her unsteady on her feet.”
Lena made a noise, a long, shuddering sigh. The detective was looking at his hands, now folded in front of him on the table.
“But . . . Nel was surefooted as a goat up on that cliff,” I said. “And she could handle more than a few glasses of wine. Nel could handle a bottle . . .”
He nodded. “Perhaps,” he said. “But at night, up there . . .”
“It wasn’t an accident,” Lena said sharply.
“She didn’t jump,” I snapped back.
Lena squinted at me, lip curled. “What would you know?” she asked. She turned to look at the detective. “Did you know that she lied to you? She lied about not being in contact with my mother. Mum tried to call her, like, I don’t even know how many times. She never answered, she never called back, she never—” She stopped, looking back at me. “She’s just . . . why are you even here? I don’t want you here.” She stalked out of the room, slamming the kitchen door behind her. A few moments later, her bedroom door slammed, too.
• • •
DI TOWNSEND and I sat in silence. I waited for him to ask me about the phone calls, but he said nothing; his eyes were shuttered, his face expressionless.
“Does it not strike you as odd,” I said at last, “how convinced she is that Nel did this deliberately?”
He turned to me, his head cocked to one side slightly. Still he said nothing.
“Do you not have any suspects in this investigation? I mean . . . it just doesn’t seem to me that anyone here cares that she’s dead.”
“But you do?” he said evenly.
“What sort of a question is that?” I could feel my face growing hot. I knew what was coming.
“Ms. Abbott,” he said. “Julia.”
“Jules. It’s Jules.” I was stalling, delaying the inevitable.
“Jules.” He cleared his throat. “As Lena just mentioned, although you told us that you hadn’t had any contact with your sister in years, Nel’s mobile phone records reveal that in the past three months alone, she made eleven calls to your phone.” My face hot with shame, I looked away. “Eleven calls. Why lie to us?”
(She’s always lying, you muttered darkly. Always lying. Always telling tales.)
“I didn’t lie,” I said. “I never spoke to her. It’s like Lena said: she left messages, I didn’t respond. So I didn’t lie,” I repeated. I sounded weak, wheedling, even to myself. “Look, you can’t ask me to explain this to you, because there is no way of doing so to an outsider. Nel and I had problems going back years—but that doesn’t have anything to do with this.”
“How can you know?” Townsend asked. “If you didn’t speak to her, how do you know what it had to do with?”
“I just . . . Here,” I said, holding out my mobile phone. “Take it. Listen for yourself.” My hands were trembling, and as he reached for the phone, so were his. He listened to your final message.
“Why would you not call her back?” he said, something akin to disappointment on his face. “She sounded upset, wouldn’t you say?”
“No, I . . . I don’t know. She sounded like Nel. Sometimes she was happy, sometimes she was sad, sometimes she was angry, more than once she was drunk . . . it didn’t mean anything. You don’t know her.”
“The other calls she made,” he demanded, a harder edge to his voice now. “Do you still have the messages?”
I didn’t, not all of them, but he listened to the ones I had, his hand gripping my phone so tightly his knuckles whitened. When he finished, he handed the phone back to me.
“Don’t erase those. We may need to listen to them again.” He pushed his chair back and got to his feet, and I followed him out into the hall.
At the door, he turned to face me. “I have to say,” he said, “I find it odd that you didn’t answer her. That you didn’t try to find out why she needed to speak to you so urgently.”
“I thought she just wanted attention,” I
said quietly, and he turned away.
It was only after he had closed the door behind him that I remembered. I ran out after him.
“Detective Townsend,” I called out, “there was a bracelet. My mother’s bracelet. Nel always wore it. Have you found it?”
He shook his head, turning again to look at me. “We’ve found nothing, no. Lena told DS Morgan that while Nel did wear it often, it wasn’t something she had on every day. Although,” he went on, dipping his head, “I suppose you couldn’t have known that.” With a glance up at the house, he climbed into his car and backed slowly out of the driveway.
JULES
So somehow this has ended up being my fault. You really are something, Nel. You are gone, possibly killed, and everyone is pointing the finger at me. I wasn’t even here! I felt petulant, reduced to my teenage self. I wanted to scream at them, How is this my fault?
After the detective left, I stomped back into the house, catching sight of myself in the hallway mirror as I did, and I was surprised to see you looking back at me (older, not so pretty, but still you). Something snagged in my chest. I went into the kitchen and cried. If I failed you, I need to know how. I may not have loved you, but I can’t have you abandoned like this, dismissed. I want to know if someone hurt you and why; I want them to pay. I want to lay all this to rest so that maybe you can stop whispering in my ear about how you didn’t jump, didn’t jump, didn’t jump. I believe you, all right? And (whisper it), I want to know that I am safe. I want to know that no one is coming for me. I want to know that the child I am to take under my wing is just that—a blameless child—not something else. Not something dangerous.