Just Before I Died
Page 29
‘Felix,’ says Lyla, whispering. As she kneels by his side, Felix lifts a muzzle, sensing her touch. He licks her hand, gently, gently, for the very last time. And then he rests his head beside Randal. Who is now unmoving.
The dogs are dead.
I am trying not to cry as much as Lyla. Adam looks at us both, he puts a hand on his daughter’s shoulder. Lyla is still kneeling and stroking the charred fur of Randal, and as she does this, she sings her little song,
‘O little blue light in the dead of the night,
O prithee, O prithee, no nearer to creep …’
I gaze around.
The fires are moving on now. They are done with Hobajob’s.
‘Come on, girls, come on.’ Adam takes us by the hand, one on each side. ‘Let’s go back to the house. It will be much safer there. Fires won’t reach Huckerby. The wind is taking them north.’
He is pulling us, urging us both on, up the lane, over the ancient wall, out of the woods, away from the woodland fires and the pungent smoke. In exhaustion and silence we make our way down the lane, through the gates, into the house.
I lock the big front door and we all sit at the table. I think of the song. My daughter’s song. The song that tells you that a death is coming,
O little blue light in the dead of the night
And then I look up, at the windows. A strange blue light shows at the windows of the longhouse, flickering and throbbing in the mist.
The eerie blue light gets nearer, and nearer: ghostly, and watery. Quivering.
It is the flashing blue light of police cars.
Dartmeet
Summer
I love this place, where the cold, chattery waters of the East and West Dart finally collide, down from the bridge, under the shading oaks, and the gracious willows. Like two awful gossips leaning together, sharing the same rumours. Like a broken family: rowdy, yet reunited.
‘Try not to fall in,’ I call to Lyla. ‘We haven’t got any towels.’
She turns, and smiles rather sarcastically; she’s paddling the water with her dad, and Charlie and Oscar, and her new friend from her new school in Brixham, by the sea. Her new friend is Alice. She’s as crazy as Lyla about animals, and plants, about birds and nature, as obsessive and enchanted. Alice’s mum is happy for us to bring her up here at weekends, which is about the only time I see Dartmoor these days.
Dan and Tessa gave us the Brixham cottage a few days after Luke died, along with Felix and Randal, in that terrible fire, which burned out a third of Hobajob’s. They gave us the whole house, just like that. Handed it over, keys and freehold.
It was their attempt to right the ancient injustice. To undo the wrongs of my mother.
Adam was persuaded to swallow his pride; he in turn persuaded the National Park to let him live off the moor. And thus it was done.
Now he drives up in the morning, from the coast, and drives home at night. And Lyla has decided she likes the ‘golden-rushing’ noise of the sea at Brixham. She can watch the waves from her bedroom window; she loves all the yachts and boats in the little harbour, which really do tinkle-tankle. She’s gained confidence. Perhaps because she essentially saved our lives, by working out the truth, by warning me to grab the knife. I think this confidence has enabled her to gain a friend. Only one friend. But still: a friend.
We scattered the ashes of Felix and Randal in the back garden of Huckerby, by the daffodils, before we left it for the last time. We scattered the ashes of Lucas Kinnersley over Kitty Jay’s grave. It seemed the right place, perhaps the only place. Mother and son reunited. Adam said a few words, as Luke’s father. Dart, Dart, every year thou claimest a heart. And as the soft spring wind blew the grey ashes over the grass, I saw the sadness in my husband’s eyes: despite it all, Luke was his son, a son who was abandoned and condemned from the start.
The inquest told us more of Luke’s story. How he’d moved to England, joined the army at the age of seventeen. How he was discharged because he was disturbed, and because of the drugs. How he became a petty thief, smoking weed, living in squats in Plymouth, hiking the moors, reading books, grimoires, old books of magic, the valuable books Mum left to him, not me or Dan. The inquest explained how he came ever closer to us. Trying to kill me first on 30 December, then waiting weeks, as he played his mind games, for a second attempt. A second assault when he would use the swaling to do the job. Burn the witches. Feeding the fires with petrol to bring them close to Huckerby.
But the verdict – death by misadventure – never really got to the heart of it. Never identified the source of the wrong. My mother.
All along, it was her. My selfish, narcissistic mother. Unable to bear rejection. The cancer can’t excuse her. Yes, she did it just before she died, with tumours in her brain, but she did it lucidly, deliberately, and cruelly. From the stupidly unfair inheritance, to those vile and poisonous letters, some of them designed to explode decades down the line. She must have known how people would react, not least her son by Adam, a very troubled and neglected boy, given a letter on his fifteenth birthday, obliging him to take revenge for his awful childhood.
What does that make my mother? Is there even a word for her?
Nothing seems to fit.
Tessa interrupts my thoughts, my endless, babbling thoughts that flow like the silvery Teign, down to Drewe Weir. ‘You OK?’
She is in a bright summer dress, cross-legged on the picnic blanket. Her sons are happily playing with Lyla and Alice. Adam is pointing at things in the water, little fishes, or eels, giving them scientific names. Lyla and Alice look particularly rapt and earnest. The boys are more intent on splashing each other.
Tessa repeats, ‘You OK, Kath?’
‘Yes,’ I say. ‘I’m fine. I was thinking about – you know – all the stuff. Luke, Mum, everything.’
She nods. ‘I think about it too, quite a lot. I’m still trying to work it out.’
‘What do you mean?’
Her face is turned halfway towards mine and her smile is uncertain.
‘It’s the evil. The concept of pure evil. It’s been on my mind a while. Because I think I might have seen it a few times in Princetown jail, and now, well, I wonder if I’ve encountered it in Luke, or rather, in what your mother did. And it leaves me – I don’t know – troubled. Sort of.’
‘Why?’
‘Because,’ she says, ‘if pure evil exists, pure goodness must also exist. Right? And pure good surely means God. But I can’t believe in God. I’m an atheist, a materialist, a scientist.’ She shakes her head and laughs sadly; and she changes the subject. ‘Want another sandwich?’
I smile in return. ‘I will, thanks, they’re lovely, what is it again? Something Spanish?’
‘Jamón ibérico de bellota,’ she says. ‘I’m positively addicted.’
We return to silence. Contented, familial silence – apart from the whoops of the kids. It is a happy moorland scene. We’ve found a slightly emptier riverside space, away from the tourists. Tomorrow the working week begins again. I have a new job, managing a little independent bookshop. It’s not very dramatic, and it’s not very well paid, but I enjoy it. And it means I can make the most of bright warm Sundays up on the moor, like this.
The only person missing is my brother Dan. He made a terrible error but I miss him, especially on family outings. I have to ask, ‘How are things at home?’
She sighs. ‘The boys want their dad back. So we think we might try again. For a few weeks, or months, you know. See how we go.’
‘That’s good, Tessa.’ I smile, and put a hand on hers.
‘Well,’ she says, doubtfully, ‘I still don’t trust Dan, and I’ll never love him the same way again. But, for the boys …’ She looks up. ‘Oh God, I think Oscar’s trying to drown Charlie. That’s suboptimal.’
I laugh. She gets to her feet, and calls out, ‘Boys, boys! Please don’t kill each other! I’ll get into trouble.’
She runs down to the riverside. Charlie and Oscar are still squab
bling, though I think it is good-natured. Adam looks up, and waves to me and I wave back. From a distance you can’t see any of the scars, the burns on the side of his neck and right down his arm. The burns he got while walking through those flames, to save us, making it all the way to Huckerby.
Arriving minutes before the police.
In the event, we saved ourselves: or the dogs saved us. But, still, Adam proved that he loves us so much that he risked his life. And he has the scars to show it.
Lyla and Alice are climbing out of the river, wet and laughing. They make quite a pair, Lyla with the almost-black hair and piercing blue eyes, Alice the opposite, very blonde.
‘We’ve been learning,’ Lyla says, giggling. ‘All about the wet grasslands, the flowers here, Dad’s been teaching, showing us. Marsh plume thistle, devil’s bit scabious, sharp-flowered rush!’
Alice butts in, ‘Ivy leafed bellflower, purple moor grass!’
They are an act, a comic duo. I watch Lyla for stims as she talks, as she tells Alice about the new puppies we are buying to replace Felix and Randal. She does these stims much less often now. Sometimes I see her quietly repeating words; sometimes she still dances and jogs. And her hand, when she’s anxious, will still twirl like a bird, like a kestrel hovering. She will always be different, eccentric, quirky, but now I see it all as strength. She is herself, the strongest thing you can be. We will never put a label on her, apart from her name. She is Lyla Redway.
And yet, what Lyla, for all her special gifts, can never know, what no one can ever know, is what actually happened in the car at Burrator.
The memory returned to me, a few weeks ago. Entire and complete.
Luke didn’t take me to Burrator to fake a suicide. The poem was coincidental. He probably never even saw it. He took me there, after the rape, because he literally wanted to see if I was a witch. I think he believed in half of that stuff, or maybe most of it: the hag stones, the symbols, the spell with my blood in Hobajob’s. And so he wanted to test me, as is traditional, by swimming, by dunking, by drowning.
The idea excited him. It was something from the Middle Ages, from the witch-hunts, something from all the books my mother bequeathed him. Luke was convinced our mother was a witch, so he thought I was a witch, and he thought Lyla was a witch. So he hid in the back of the car with a knife, forcing me to drive to Burrator. I suppose, at the end, he intended to drag me out the car and simply throw me in the reservoir.
But as we parked, I found a torch down the side of the seat, a big, heavy, old-fashioned torch, and I hit him, and knocked him out. And I shoved him on to the floor of the car, and I got ready to drive off, to go to the police, but Luke stirred, he came to; and it was then that I decided, in my panic, that I had only one choice. To guarantee Lyla’s safety.
We both had to die, that moment, right there.
It was the only way to save Lyla for certain. Drive into the water. Drown us both.
So I did attempt suicide. To save my daughter. Yet by some black miracle, dark as the tors, both of us escaped from the car and from Burrator. And Luke made his plans to kill me all over again. By slicing me and Lyla to pieces, like they do to witches in Greenland. This time because he was, now, truly convinced that I was a witch.
Because witches float.
Lyla will never know any of this. No one will ever know any of it. But it still makes me wonder. Was Luke completely mad, and completely wrong? Sometimes I think there is something special, and different, in this family. Yet it has nothing to do with me or my mother: it is not in the Kinnersleys. No, it is in the Redways, who have been here on Dartmoor for a hundred generations.
It was probably in Adam’s nan. Possibly it is in Adam, and very likely it is in my daughter. I think of Lyla’s ability to summon animals. The ponies that night. The dogs, who saved us. How did Lyla do that? In all that noise and fire and smoke? How did those dogs sense her danger, across burning fields and woods?
It was uncanny. Some might call it magical.
‘Alice,’ says Lyla, ‘shall we go and look up there? There’s herons and eels, and everything.’
Alice nods happily and the two girls run off. Barefoot in the grass. Giggling in the warmth. Then gone.
Lying back, I stare up at the sky. I can hear some other picnickers, down the riverbank, they are playing a song. It’s ‘The White Hare’:
‘I heard her in the valley
I heard her in the dead of night
The warning of a white hare
Her eyes burning bright …’
And, listening to it, I am taken back to those early days when Adam and I were falling in love, and he’d bring me to places like this: sweet green corners of the moor. And when I think of this love, and what came since, I know that we will make it. This little family. Adam, Lyla, me. We have been tested. We survived. I reckon we will get through.
But this pretty, melancholy song also reminds me of that other side, the darkness, the winter mists on Hexworthy, the tinkling silver chains at Huckerby, those hours of cold and black and terror. The sadness hasn’t gone away; the shade is still there, it chequers everything. We are certainly happier, but it isn’t pure happiness. Because, in leaving Dartmoor, we have forsaken something, a part of our souls has been left behind, up here, where the grey moors rise and fall, like the lonely call of a waterbird.
We have paid a price in beauty; we have lost that daily loveliness.
As I lie here, I let the sunlight, dappled by the oak leaves, play across my face, and I daydream, sweetly, yet bitterly, of the wildflowers on the high grounds in the summer: the meadowsweet at Whitehorse Hill, the foxgloves down at Broada Marsh, the sundews and the shepherd’s dials, the pennyroyals and the roses.
Loved Just Before I Died? Enjoy another psychological thriller by S. K. Tremayne…
ONE OF SARAH’S DAUGHTERS DIED. BUT DOES SHE KNOW WHICH ONE?
About the Author
S. K. Tremayne is a bestselling novelist and award-winning travel writer, and a regular contributor to newspapers and magazines around the world. The author’s debut psychological thriller, The Ice Twins, was picked for the Richard and Judy Autumn Book Club and was a Sunday Times No.1 bestseller.
Born in Devon, S. K. Tremayne now lives in London and has two daughters.
Also by S. K. Tremayne
The Ice Twins
The Fire Child
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