by Nicci French
There were three police cars parked near the tattoo parlour. She walked past them without slackening her pace. A cluster of people stood nearby, and when they saw her, they nudged each other and gaped at her openly. She saw them whispering but couldn’t hear the words. A man coming in the other direction stared at her. News spreads fast, a network of facts and rumours and lies. Did you hear? Did you know? Look. Look at her. Can’t you tell? Stand aside. Evil eye. No smoke without fire.
On the other side of the road she saw a woman she recognized as Liz Barron, a journalist from the Daily Sketch who had written about Frieda before. She was talking to someone, notebook in hand, nodding ever so sympathetically. In the distance, there was a television crew. The media had descended on Braxton.
Frieda didn’t alter her pace. She passed the baker’s, whose shelves were almost empty now, the shop selling cheap drink and DVDs, the newsagent’s. A group of teenagers stood at the curve of the road. For a few moments, she saw Chas, Jeremy, Lewis, Ewan, Vanessa, Eva, Sarah, Maddie. She saw herself. All of them so young, just starting out, not yet sure of the roads they would take, trying on different selves. And then their faces faded, and they were just strangers, jostling on the pavement, staring at her avidly.
‘That’s her,’ she heard one say, as she walked by. ‘That’s the woman.’
That’s the witch.
A figure approached from the distance, dressed in a bright long skirt with vivid red hair. Eva. Who had been her mate, her best friend in a different world. But she was on the other side of the road and was talking animatedly into her mobile, at the same time fishing in her capacious bag for something. She didn’t see Frieda. Frieda didn’t stop. Indeed, she couldn’t stop. She was leaving.
Over the brow of the hill ahead lay the witch’s burning ground, now a crime scene and taped off. On the other side of the valley was Lewis’s house, where Max had nearly died. To the left was Eva’s, filled with pottery, herbs, the smell of biscuits, and waiting for a companion. To the right was the house where Maddie had lived and Becky had died, and also the house where Ewan and Vanessa had raised their daughters and never spoken out loud to each other of what they had done together. Behind her lay the house that had been her childhood home; her broken past and her bitter memories; the formation of the woman she had chosen to become. But now her road lay ahead, as shops petered out, then houses thinned, and the clear, shallow river marked the way from the town.
Her steps quickened as the town fell away and the darkness grew thicker. Soon she was on the brow of the hill and only then did she stop and turn to look back. Braxton lay spread out beneath her. The street lamps and the lights of houses glittered in the darkness, under the sprinkling of stars. The church spire pointed upwards, sharp and admonishing. Small coils of smoke diffused in the night sky. She would never return, and as she stood there she almost felt the town’s power weaken, as if a weight was falling from her.
At last she turned away; the town was at her back. Perhaps Dean was walking beside her, out of sight but always there, her shadow. Yet for now she wasn’t thinking of Dean. Or of Sandy, or her dead mother. She wasn’t thinking of the murdered girls, of Ewan, of Vanessa, of any of those who had wrenched her life out of shape. She was thinking of the place she was going to and of the people who waited for her there. She was loved and she was alone and she was free.
THE BEGINNING
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PENGUIN BOOKS
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First published 2014
Copyright © Joined-Up Writing, 2014
Map of the River Walbrook © Maps Illustrated, 2014
Images: Girl © Mark Own / Trevillion Images, Fence © Antony Spencer / Getty Images, Clouds © Larry Dale Gordon / Getty Images
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The moral right of the author has been asserted
Typeset by Palimpsest Book Production Ltd, Falkirk, Stirlingshire
ISBN: 978-0-141-96404-1