by Mo Hayder
Eventually, certain that Lucia won’t come back, Matilda turns and stares at the mess, the way it’s been mingled and studded with plant matter and earth. It’s been here a while, more than a few hours she guesses from the shiny patina. Drying out in the heat. Bluebottles landing on it, some lingering. Laying eggs, she supposes.
Oliver rubs his nose. ‘I think we’re making too much of this.’
‘Are we?’
‘We know he can’t be back.’
‘We know, Oliver? Are you so sure of that?’
‘Of course I’m sure.’
‘Do we know he hasn’t been let out? I mean, I haven’t checked on him recently. Have you?’
Oliver huffs something about having other things on his mind. Not having time to check up on prisoners. ‘I’m sure he can’t be free. We’d have been told. Everyone would be talking about it.’
‘Well, that’s fine then.’ She grabs the rake from where it leans against the tree, and turns for the house. ‘That’s fine, and of course I believe you. But I’m still going to call the police.’
The Reflection Grove
FIFTEEN MILES TO the east of the Anchor-Ferrers’ house the weather is more troubled. Small clouds bump restlessly across the sky. The sun flashes on and off and sudden localized rainbursts punctuate the day. The West Wiltshire countryside is alive with birdsong and the new, acid greens of May. In a small grove on an otherwise deserted hillside, almost a hundred people have congregated. A middle-aged woman in towering stilettos, mini-dress and black veiled hat, holds centre stage on a beribboned platform. She appears to be holding back tears as she delivers a speech to the waiting journalists.
‘Lots of people are going to come here just to think about their lives and stuff.’ She opens her arms to indicate the grove they stand in, its bunting and flags and hospitality tables. ‘It’s a place for them to have a really good think about what’s happening in their personal journey, so what the clinic and me have decided we’re going to call it, is … the “Reflection Grove”.’
Oooooh, murmurs the crowd appreciatively. Clickety-click go the cameras.
‘Yeah,’ she says. ‘The Reflection Grove. And I want to say thank you for this, from the bottom of my heart, thank you to everyone who made it happen. It would have meant everything to my beautiful daughter to know other people are going to get something out of her tragedy. It’s so beautiful to be able to give something back.’
This is Jacqui Kitson. Two years ago her twenty-two-year-old daughter, then a minor celebrity, wandered away from a rehabilitation clinic located a mile away from this hilltop. She’d taken a lethal mix of drugs and alcohol and, disorientated, she eventually collapsed and died at a spot right under the feet of the gathered journalists. Her body lay for several months before it was discovered among the leaves.
Jacqui Kitson has lived through the trauma and come out the other end. In its wake she’s raised £15,000 through charitable donations to buy this glade on behalf of the clinic. A memorial for her daughter, a place for the residents of the clinic to come with their solitude and their thoughts. A willow-weave pagoda has been erected in the centre of the glade. On its lower floor are cutaway arches, with benches on the interior so that people can sit and gaze out at the view of the Wiltshire plains.
Ten current patients have attended the celebration. They wear an assortment of clothing, tracksuits, denim, trucker hats, and they stand in shuffling formation around the platform. The directors of the clinic are here too: three women in suits, each of them itchy with the desire to speak to the waiting journalists. Only one man doesn’t want to be part of it. One man who stands alone, keeping his distance, set a little apart from the melee in a place shielded by the lofty birches. A place he can watch, not participate.
DI Jack Caffery is a CID officer in his mid-forties. He is here out of duty, to show a police presence, but he will do anything to keep removed from this spectacle. He stands quite still, hands in his pockets, watching as people crowd around Jacqui Kitson. She smiles and nods and shakes hands. Poses for a photograph with one of the clinic directors. They hold up glasses to clink for the cameraman. Green tea, not champagne – this is, after all, a place to escape from the reach of intoxicants. Someone asks her to sit in the pagoda for photographs. She does this without blinking an eye, her hands resting demurely on her knees, her chin lifted in the direction of the sun.
Caffery is a seasoned detective; he has worked a lot of the country’s most notorious and difficult cases. He has seen things, a lot of things, and been in many situations that have made him uncomfortable. But he’s never wanted to get away from something quite as much as he wants to get away from this.
Bear
THE ANCHOR-FERRERS ARE all back in the house. They’ve locked the doors and windows in a mood of subdued panic. Lucia watches Dad in the hallway, his head bent. He is using a butter knife to prise open the cordless phone and check the batteries, frowning because Mum’s tried to call the police and inexplicably can’t get a line. Sunlight is coming through the great stained-glass window, falling on his face. Jewel-bright greens and reds, harlequining his expression into something monstrous. As if the day wasn’t surreal enough to start with.
Here in the kitchen, Mum is busy tidying things. The bags are all unpacked, the cake has come out of the oven and is sitting on the wire cooling rack, and every now and then Mum stops to smooth her clothes down, almost as if she’s expecting guests.
Except it’s not guests she is expecting, Lucia thinks. At least not the kind that come to eat cake.
‘Lucia,’ Mum says. ‘Look after Bear. She wants some attention.’
Lucia stares numbly at her mother. She wants to respond, but nothing comes out of her mouth. It’s like being shot through with anaesthetic; her face, all her muscles are immobile. What is in the garden is just like it was before. Exactly the same and there is no escaping it. She knows what the scene is meant to look like – and she can guess who has done it – but now it’s upon her it all feels so unexpected and wrong.
‘Lucia? Did you hear me?’
With an effort Lucia blinks. She tries to focus on Mum’s face but her eyes can’t help wandering past her, out to the coppices and the woods beyond. The funny thing is the trees themselves are the greatest shock. The normality of them. The fact they haven’t changed or reacted when everything else is all so wrong.
‘Deal with Bear.’ Mum is getting exasperated. ‘Lucia. Please. Stop her barking, I can’t hear myself think.’
Under the table Bear has been made nervous by all the activity. She is giving small, querulous yaps and tugging on the lead, making the chair scrape across the flagging. Lucia comes back to herself with a jolt. It’s happening. It’s really happening.
She crosses the room on legs that feel like rubber. Sweat is soaking into her T-shirt. Bear turns agitated circles, getting herself tangled in the lead. They should have got round to chipping her, then she wouldn’t have to be tied up here. She’s been known to head for miles – once as far as Farrington golf course. It’s as if she’s always known there is something bad about this place, despite the fact she wasn’t even born when the murders happened on the Donkey Pitch.
‘It’s OK, Bear.’ Lucia unhooks the lead and bundles her up. She sits in the window seat and holds Bear’s wiry body against her chest, hushing her, whispering. ‘It’s going to be OK, I promise, it’s all going to be OK.’
It breaks Lucia’s heart that Bear is scared like this. She loves this little animal more than anything in the world, and most of the time she thinks Bear’s the only living creature that really cares about her. Lucia might be silent and dark a lot of the time, but she’s not stupid and not much gets past her. She knows perfectly well that she’s not Mum and Dad’s favourite; she’s lived with that knowledge all her life. And as for what happened fifteen years ago … well, she will never, ever recover from those wounds.
Hugo … Hugo.
She will never, ever forget Hugo. Since his death the only th
ing she has felt safe to love is this little dog.
Light
THERE IS A homage to the Anchor-Ferrers family in the huge stained-glass window that Oliver installed twenty years ago above the minstrel’s gallery. It shows the four of them: Matilda, Oliver, Lucia and Kiran, standing on a shrunken globe, surrounded by radiating sunrays, tangerine and yellow.
Oliver loves light. Loves it possibly, Matilda feels, more than he loves his own family. He worships it and considers it in every waking hour. Her friends tell her that at least light is free, whereas golf or flying a single-engined Cessna or fly fishing in Peru – well, those things certainly aren’t free and Matilda should consider herself lucky. Nevertheless she’s always felt a little envious of light. Even the children are named after light – there’s Kiran, meaning beam of light, and Lucia, which to many people’s ears sounds too close to Lucifer for comfort. Matilda has never been totally happy about it.
The window depicts the family as subjugated to light and to the heavens. The sky is like something William Blake might have painted, ablaze in glory. The house behind them is meant to be The Turrets, though it’s a poor and clumsy representation, in Matilda’s opinion. There is no dog there either – which is wrong, because there’s always been a dog in the family’s life. And no garden. Nothing to capture who they are. No flowers being picked or cakes being cooked.
A stupid thing to worry about, she thinks now, because actually nothing could matter less. Ollie stands under the window, busily fiddling with the phone. Alarmingly, it has chosen this moment to lose its power. Lucia is huddled in the window seat with Bear scrunched up against her chest, and Matilda doesn’t know where to put herself. She’s done nothing more constructive than walk agitatedly to and fro, moving things around, trying to put the place in order. Double-checking doors are locked and windows closed.
‘Check the back door again,’ she tells Lucia. ‘Do the top bolt too.’
Lucia goes down the small corridor and can be heard rattling bolts. Matilda can’t recall if the front door in the hallway has been bolted, but as she turns to go to it something brings her to a halt. She stares down at the floor, her heart beating low and slow. Four or five drops of something brownish red are there, each a long teardrop shape.
She drops to her knees and uses a thumbnail to scratch at the biggest. It comes away in flakes on her thumb. She raises her head and scans the room. The kitchen is huge – it straddles the side of the house and incorporates a small dining area, as well as a living area with a vast inglenook. It’s all familiar and old as the hills to her, except something is not quite right. It’s more than just what is looped in the bushes down in the coppice; something inside the house is out of place too. A smell? A vague unfamiliar scent. And this? She rubs the flake between her thumb and forefinger. It disintegrates and softens down into the grains of her fingerpads. Blood? Is it blood? No, good God, no. Of course it can’t be. She goes to the sink to rinse her fingers. There’s no connection between these drops of red – which could be anything, let’s face it, anything at all – and what she has just seen in the trees. Oliver is right. Those belong to an animal which has been brought down by a predator. An entirely normal occurrence and to assign any other significance to it is sheer hysteria.
She wipes her hands furiously. Dips at the waist and leans forward so she can peer back down the corridor into the huge hall where Oliver is still picking away at the telephone. What’s keeping him? It should take him two minutes to replace the batteries.
He stops fiddling with the phone and rolls his head to the side, fixing her with a look. His face is very puffy from the medication and there’s a single blue vein in his forehead that Matilda has never noticed before. As if the surgeons have given him an extra blood vessel during the surgery.
He holds up the phone. ‘It’s not working,’ he mouths. His expression says: What do I do? Is this really happening?
Matilda doesn’t react. Lucia has come back into the room and she mustn’t be panicked. But inside Matilda is screaming. The house phone is their only lifeline. When the doctors finally told Ollie he was free to leave London they asked whether he had quick access to a hospital, The Turrets being so isolated, and Matilda said she’d drive him into Wells or call an ambulance. There’s no mobile signal up at The Turrets, but there’s a perfectly good landline. There’s never been a problem with it. Not until now.
Matilda has a runaround car they keep locked in the garage, but the keys are in Oliver’s study at the other side of the house. The Land Rover, their London car, they park down the drive. That’ll be quicker. She goes into the mudroom and puts her hands into the pockets of her oilskin that’s hanging there. Ferrets around for the Land Rover keys and mobile phone. There is a weak phone signal at the bottom of the driveway. She’ll have to drive down there and call the police. But the keys aren’t in the oilskin. Maybe they’re in her handbag, hanging on the chair in the hallway.
She goes back into the kitchen and stops short. At her seat in the window Lucia has her face up, her mouth hanging slightly open, and is staring in amazement at two men who have appeared in the kitchen doorway with Oliver, who stands next to them, regarding them in bewilderment, the broken phone forgotten in his hand. Beyond them, in the hall, the front door is ajar.
The men are dressed in dark grey suits and both wear serious expressions. One is short and long-armed, with freckles and ginger hair cut close like a soldier’s. He wears black-framed glasses and stands a little awkwardly, his eyes roving the kitchen nervously. The other is calmer. He is tall and straight-backed, with a large nose and very pale green eyes, fringed with fair lashes. His fair hair is curly, but it has receded back so far that the top of his head is as naked and shiny as a monk’s, giving him the look of a young Art Garfunkel. He is holding a police warrant card.
‘Mrs Anchor-Ferrers?’ he says. ‘Detective Inspector Honey. This is Detective Sergeant Molina. Sorry to barge in – we buzzed the intercom by the gates at the bottom of the driveway, but no one answered so we had to walk up.’
‘No,’ Matilda says distantly. ‘We’ve been outside in the garden.’
Sergeant Molina exchanges an uncomfortable glance with Inspector Honey, who clears his throat. Puts his card back in his pocket. He doesn’t smile.
‘I wonder,’ he says, ‘could we have a word with you?’
The Sickness
DI CAFFERY IS a good-looking man. Medium height, clean shaven with close-cropped dark hair. He’s a senior officer in his unit too, so he is often sought out by journalists. Their affection for him isn’t reciprocated; he avoids them whenever he can. He still has not learned how to give them what they want to hear, and despises the fakery and game-playing. Today, however, the journalist has got to him before he can escape, and now he is obliged to answer her question, ‘What does today mean to you and the rest of the force?’ He does so quickly and efficiently, bending slightly to speak into the small microphone she holds. He’s careful not to meet her eyes so she doesn’t see the lies in them.
‘Mixed feelings. Of course we were devastated by the family’s loss and that we couldn’t bring the search to a happier conclusion, but now, seeing the way Jacqui is rebuilding her life so positively …’ He gestures to the clearing where the crowd is gathered. ‘Then I can say we – the force – are delighted that the family are moving on with their lives.’
‘Do you think Jacqui has closure? I mean, her daughter’s body may have been found, but it’s still not known exactly what happened to her.’
Caffery stares at her. He hates the expression ‘closure’. It sounds like something connected to solicitors and house purchases. She sees him hesitate, and prompts: ‘Closure? Has she got it?’
‘I don’t know. I’m not even sure what the word means. Thank you.’
He nods and, ignoring the next question, moves away, heading for the cover of the trees where he can monitor events without having to speak. Startled by his rudeness, the journalist is momentarily lost for words. He man
oeuvres himself further back into the trees, so she isn’t encouraged to follow him.
He remains there in the shadows, leaning back against a tree, because today he is struggling to keep upright. Caffery is ill. For two weeks now he has been blighted by the sort of headache that won’t be dulled by painkillers. He can’t sleep, and on the rare occasions he does sleep he dreams of being tied down. Of sinking in mud or quicksand. He hasn’t been to the doctor – doesn’t even know who his GP is – and anyway, he knows there will be no diagnosis. There is no physical root to the pain, he’s sure of that. It’s coming from something deeper, something intangible he can’t quite pinpoint. But he does know that listening to Jacqui Kitson talk about her daughter will make the pressure in his head worse.
The journalist, apparently having given up on her pursuit of Caffery, has found her way to Jacqui, who by contrast is eager to talk. She rolls out the same old lines, about how awful it was for the months when her daughter was missing, the agony of not knowing what had happened. Caffery’s hands twitch in his pockets with every sentence she speaks. It’s true that he knows more about the disappearance of Jacqui’s daughter than anyone else – he’s the investigating cop and there are things about the case no one will ever know, fabrications around what really happened that will never be revealed. But that’s not what’s troubling him today. It’s something more profound than that. Something about Jacqui’s demeanour and words scrape like sandpaper in his head. Every time she opens her mouth, the tension increases.
He pushes himself away from the tree and shuffles a few feet further into the woods, just to keep himself moving, get some life into his body. But it doesn’t work. He is tired. So very tired.
Minnet Kable
OLIVER IS A scientist, but a physicist, not a biologist, and he isn’t too sure if he understands exactly what is going on in his body. He has noticed that since the operation his thoughts come more slowly. Sometimes it’s like being in a dream – as if people are speaking to him from a different room. When the front door handle first turned, opened, and the bigger of the two put his head round the door, peering at Oliver in the hall, he struggled to work out how they’d got here. Who called them? He was sure it wasn’t him because the phone wasn’t working.