‘Mmm …’ He was still staring at the walls.
I looked more closely at the photos, trying to tell which one of the boys was Duncan as a child, but the sepia toning made them all look a mass of sun-freckled faces and the absurd haircuts gave the whole thing a very nineteen fifties feel. ‘You look like you modelled for Enid Blyton.’
Now he gave me a vague smile. ‘Mum had a bit of a homespun idea about bringing up children. She cut all our hair herself, made a lot of our clothes, cooked everything from scratch. Which probably explains why we all had the hell bullied out of us at school.’
He still had that air about him, as though the house was telling him stories and he was listening, not really paying me much attention.
‘Okay. Well, why don’t you do whatever it is you have to with the camera and then we can …’
I stopped. Duncan had opened one of the doors that led off the hallway and was staring into the blackness with an expression that wouldn’t have looked out of place in Munch artwork.
‘The police stripped this room,’ he said. ‘Last time I saw it they’d taken all the furniture and the carpets for testing. There was blood …’ His hand gripped the doorframe and his body was arrested in mid-step. Half of him wanted to go in and look, half was terrified of what he might see, it was obvious in every inch of his body. ‘I told them, Alasdair had had a nosebleed when we’d been down the year before, but they didn’t believe me.’
He turned around and looked over the hallway again. ‘They took this place apart, Grace. Every room, every pair of curtains, every speck of dust, everything was swabbed and checked. They were that sure that I’d done something to her in here.’
That explained his expression. He was seeing the house not as it was, but as it had been that last time. No wonder he hadn’t come back since. I put my hand on his elbow, feeling him shaking slightly.
‘Duncan. They found nothing, otherwise you wouldn’t be walking around free, would you?’
‘Nothing to find.’ His eyes eventually stopped looking at the past and focussed on me. ‘She was fine, if a bit crabbit when I left for York. When I came back, she’d gone. That’s it, that’s all I could tell anyone, which was no good for the police, of course. It was a dreich old day up here, fog all round, so nobody saw her. Wouldn’t have been able to see her, unless she’d fallen over them, it was that bad, and they had it in their heads that I’d done away with her, so …’ A sigh. ‘Thorough, though. Give them that. No stone unturned, and all that.’
‘And there’s seriously been no sign of her since?’
He just shook his head. It did, briefly, cross my mind that this could be a very convincing act, but why? What did it matter what I thought had happened? But Duncan’s obvious unhappiness drove those thoughts away. He either had no idea what happened to his girlfriend all those years ago, or he was wasted as an archaeologist when he should have been sweeping the BAFTA board.
‘This whole place.’ He looked around again. ‘It’s all just one big reminder.’
‘Right. Let’s just get it done then. Where is the camera?’
Duncan jerked an elbow. ‘Above the front door. It monitors the track and the whole area out there, it’s all linked up to some local firm who check the alarms and keep an eye on the place.’ A small smile. ‘For a woman so entrenched in family values, my mother has no faith in the general public not to swipe her Tupperware while her back is turned.’
He walked back down the hallway to a small box on the wall beside the front door, which he flipped open. ‘Thank you,’ he said, bending down and poking inside.
I wasn’t sure if he was talking to me or not. ‘Why?’
‘For coming with me.’
‘It was either that or jump out of a moving Land Rover shouting “no, no” though, wasn’t it?’
I carried on scanning over the faces in the photographs. I thought I could identify Duncan now, sited somewhere round about the middle of the sprawl of brothers, a solemn lad who was often just out of focus reading a book.
‘Okay, well, thank you for not insisting on standing outside then.’ His busyness and averted face told me that this was a big deal.
‘I don’t think you did anything to your girlfriend, if that’s what you’re asking in your male way,’ I said. ‘I believe she walked out on you and vanished.’
There was a moment of quiet. ‘I’m waiting for you to qualify that with a but …’ he said, but sounded lighter somehow, as though a worry had slithered off his shoulders.
‘The only but I’ve got is what the hell is your mother doing owning a house like this in the middle of Yorkshire?’
Duncan clicked some switches and fiddled a bit more. ‘She’s from here, originally. This place was built by her grandfather on the site of the old family farm. They’ve been here for generations, sheep farmers and drovers and … I don’t know what people did living out here. Rain collectors or something. I’m a prehistorian, I fade out somewhere round the Iron Age.’ Another bout of switch flicking. ‘Ah. There, that’s got it. Fuse was blown.’
‘It feels a bit impersonal,’ I said, walking down the line of photographs and somewhat slap-dash oil paintings. ‘But I like the pictures.’
‘Like I said, we only use it for holidays now. Mum and Dad live in Dundee. Look, there’s a drinks cabinet in here somewhere, how about we give the pub a miss and I’ll show you around? It would be nice to see what they’ve done with the place since I was last here, apart from put up the edited highlights of my and my brothers’ childhoods.’
I looked at him across the expanse of good, but undecorative, carpet. The whole place seemed to be done out in shades of neutrality, and it crossed my mind to wonder whether his parents were secretly wondering if the police might not be back to trawl through their carefully beige colour schemes again.
‘Are you sure?’
‘Fifteen years is long enough. I want to wipe out those memories of police footprints all up the stairs and the forensic team ripping off wallpaper, yes.’ Duncan showed he meant business by unzipping his coat and hanging it on the edge of the hallway radiator, next to the menacing stuffingless dog. ‘Come on.’ I hesitated. ‘Truth is, I want to look over the place for old time’s sake, and it feels wrong to have you standing around in the hall, criticising my mother’s taste in childhood haircuts while I’m doing it. So …?’ He held an arm wide, indicating via the medium of baggy sweater sleeve that I was to precede him into the rest of the house.
Well. It was either tour the house or sit and be disgruntled on the front step, and it beat playing whist under damp canvas, so I pulled a face at him and led the way past the staircase and into the darkness beyond.
Chapter Fourteen
2000 BC
Hen picked the last of the berries and put them in the basket she’d carefully lined with moss. Tor had been looking at the shadows cast by the tall stone that marked the sleeping place with increasing interest for the last few days, and he’d announced that the next moon phase would bring the day for the celebration of the Ripening. Which, she knew, was her call to wander the hills and bring home the first load of nuts and fruits to share out among them. Tor would make a pot of liquid that froze the voicebox and they would take it up to the sleeping place, drink and eat, and ask the ancestors for help with bringing in the harvest. The children loved the Ripening, because the adults all became silly with drink and even Airwen would allow them a little more freedom than usual.
She stopped and turned. Below her in the little valley, the four huts huddled together like old sheep before the first snow, threads of smoke rising through their peat roofs. She could hear Caerlynn already complaining at Arthfael and Morcant, not the words but the sing-song rise and fall of her tone. Vast’s small dog, who guarded her hut so fiercely during the day that even Hen hadn’t dared to check on Ninian, was yapping at some birds that had lande
d in the cornfield and the air smelled of juniper and birch sap.
Hen sighed and rested her basket, reassuringly heavy with the start of this year’s crop, on her hip. Life was good at this time of year. They’d traded, as ever, at the Midsummer, so stocks of foodstuffs were plentiful; they’d exchanged some sheep for others bred over the valley, and they had new blankets and tunics. Everyone was well, Drustan’s ankle was completely healed, and the good summer weather had ripened berries and plumped out nuts. All was good.
And yet … She jumped as a hand touched her shoulder. ‘Tor! You startled me.’ She bent her head, unnecessarily, to check the contents of her basket, hiding a blush.
‘I was up on the hill. Part of the ditch around the corn had fallen and I was hollowing it further so the sheep stay away from the crop.’ He let his hand fall from her shoulder, but did not move away. ‘How goes the Ripening collection?’
Hen held out the basket for him to see. ‘Well. Although I have torn my skirts on the rocks.’ She bit her tongue. Why did I say that? Tor does not care for the state of my dress.
He plucked a berry from the basket and ate it thoughtfully, gazing out over the sight that had so recently captivated her. ‘Sweet. It will be a good year.’ His eyes went to her necklace, almost reluctantly, as though he was loathe to admit her strangeness, her difference. Then he nodded at his hut. ‘My lady would like another of your mixtures when the moon waxes. She still hopes … and if she conceives a child now it would be born around Midsummer.’ And be old enough to survive the winter, he did not add, but Hen knew his meaning.
‘I shall bring it to her. After the meal is prepared.’ Hen wondered why Tor remained standing beside her. He had seen the collection, told her of his lady’s wishes. ‘And what of you, Tor?’
His gaze flashed to her face. Those eyes, so hot and heavy … she felt her pulse quicken, beating in her throat hard enough to drive those berries she’d eaten back toward her mouth. ‘I fear my lady will not conceive,’ he said, his voice low. ‘I fear her disappointment every month, her sadness that she cannot hold a child within her.’
‘I know you love her, Tor,’ Hen said, quickly. ‘I wish I could do more but I fear she is barren.’
‘I have learned to love her,’ Tor said, and now his voice was as heavy as his gaze. ‘When the elders told me that you were not to be my lady – even though some suspected that you already carried my child – I thought I could not bear it. But we have made this life, have we not, Hen? You gave Drustan to me and my lady cares for him as though he were her own born, though she knew not where he came from.’
Hen remembered, probably more clearly than Tor. How they had lived in that temporary hut that he had built himself, high on the hills, surrounded by stubby copses of birch and ash, while Tor had laboured on the walls of the new hut in the shelter of the vale. Every day with Tor deepened her love for him and her hatred of the place she had left. That place where she had been invisible, her feeling that she existed only to serve others; where her real self had become lost. Here was where she could truly be, with the man she had come to realise was her soulmate.
And then she was pregnant. Tor was matched with Airwen, a matching he could not ignore, for the weight of expectation placed upon him. Airwen had moved into the hut that Hen knew Tor had built for her, and Hen knew she should go home, back to her own people. Those who would help her birth and raise her child. And yet, she found herself unable to leave. Unable even to try, knowing it would mean she would never see Tor again, even for those few shared moments they snatched when he visited her lonely dwelling as the clouds grew deep around her in the high air.
Drustan was born, red-faced and angry, on a late spring day, with nobody in attendance except the larks who sang him into being as she pushed and swore and cried. And then – and then, he was the most precious thing in her life, equal measures of love and terror surrounding him. Love like she had never known and terror that she could not care for him in this place, that she would feed him something that would kill him. She lacked the skills, she lacked the knowledge to care for him in this strange land and so, heart heavy, she handed him over, blue-lipped and crying, to his father to present to his lady as a child found in the snow. After an interval Tor brought her to the settlement that grew around his need to keep his sister and his niece and their children safe, built her a hut and she found her position as healer, from where she could watch their son grow. ‘Yes,’ she almost whispered. ‘We have made this life, Tor.’
And then his mouth was upon hers, his kisses tasting of the berries, his lips as soft as the feathery casings of the nuts. His arms were strong around her, bearing her backwards into the drifts of grass and bracken. The basket tumbled from her grasp and she caught him around the neck to pull herself more firmly into his embrace.
‘Lady Hen …’ His voice was rough, torn. ‘I have learned to care for my lady, but it is you that I love. You know this.’
She knew it. It was Tor that had brought her here, Tor that kept her safe. Tor that had allowed her to become part of the extended family under his protection, to stay near her son. She loved him, despite their love being an unregarded thing, disallowed by the elders who oversaw the wider family, those who formed the alliances. There had been others, before Tor, but what she had felt for them was like a ripple on a river, vanishing into nothing beneath the feelings she had for this conflicted man.
His hands were firm on her breasts, cupping them reverentially, then moving down. Hen smiled to herself – she had taught him well – then her smile was replaced with a gasp, ragged breaths that grew faster as his fingers moved beneath her skirts. It had been so long … so long since they had coupled together like this … her skin heated, his kisses cooled her cheeks but the rest of her body became hotter and hotter until she cried out, arching herself into the stems that laced behind her back. Then Tor was inside her, still kissing her face, her neck; his fingers dancing like the wind borne seed heads over her skin, he moved. Faster and faster until they were both caught in the rhythm. Hen cried out again at the wonder of it all, and Tor slowed, with her name on his lips, to tumble beside her into the cool shelter of the long grass.
‘We said we would not do this again,’ she said, into his shoulder, his arms around her body. ‘We said we would live as we were.’
Tor sighed. ‘I strive to be a good man, Hen. I care for so many … My lady cares for me in her own way, but to her I am a means to a child within her. My sister and my brother-daughter, they need me to protect them. You …’ He turned his face towards her and she traced his gentle, sad expression with a finger stained with berry juice. ‘… you know how hard it is for me. You care just for me.’
Yes. Hen watched Tor slide into sleep, curled into her body in their secluded bower. I love you, Tor, despite what that love has brought me to …
Chapter Fifteen
Duncan lay on his fold-up camp bed, desperately still to prevent it from trying to fold up underneath him. It had a will of iron and springs of stainless steel and any undue movement was liable to cause it to either tip up or snap shut with a noise that would bring people running. Idly he wondered if anyone had ever managed successful sex on a camp bed, then tried to expunge the thought from his mind. This was no time to be thinking about sex …
Except, he couldn’t stop himself. The sight of Grace, yesterday, perched on the desk in his father’s old study, lost in thought as she looked over the old maps hung on the wall … Long legs in grubby jeans, hair all scrubbed up at the back where the wind up at the sieves had been tangling it. All the initial polish and city-ness she’d had when she first came to the dig had rubbed away. He tried to switch thoughts from rubbing anything. Yes. She’d lost that superficial gloss and the grubbiness suited her far better, made her look more approachable, more human.
Duncan turned his head and found himself looking at the worn old mirror he had propped on the crate in the cor
ner and used when he shaved, if he could be bothered. Yes, Grace was like that mirror. All the silvering was worn away and there were blackened patches all over it, the frame was cracked, but it was still a mirror.
She was breathing in the other room. He heard a deeper sigh and a rustling, as though her dreams were confused and she was turning over to escape them. His mirror image frowned at him and reminded him that he really shouldn’t be listening. She was a digger, one who’d found herself temporarily shelterless, and he’d offered the back room to. Just as he would to Kyle or Alex, or Morwenna … Don’t be fooling yourself here, Duncan. If it had been one of them you’d have asked around the dig, tried to find an under-occupied tent where the inhabitants wouldn’t mind another bunk up. But then, this crowd mostly know each other, they’re all on the same course at York, or they’re volunteers who’ve come in twos and threes. Grace is the odd man out. Alone, out of her depth. Wet Sieve Volunteer …
Okay. So. He fancied her, so what? It happened, didn’t mean he was going to make any moves. She was widowed, still grieving by the look of her, not up for any casual campsite leg-overs. What his dad would call ‘a puir sad lassie’. Plus, he knew better than to mix sex with work, his girlfriends, such as they were, had all been as far removed from archaeology as possible, he’d even gone out with a zoologist once. But none of them had known why he monitored their movements so closely. One had called him a controlling bastard when he wanted to check what time she would be back from a night out, and he had never been able to bring himself to tell them about that late summer day fifteen years ago. How could he? How could he explain to any of them about that huge, drastic emptiness, the suspicion, the fear, that somehow … somehow they were going to make it his fault? How he’d lived with the terror of a body being found, that bone-crunching horror that woke him in the night, even now, that she was in a shallow grave somewhere, waiting for the moment …
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