by S J Bolton
‘What’s that?’ I asked.
‘Industrial estate,’ Nick replied. ‘Couple of miles outside Cambridge. We’ve walked quite a way.’
Between us and the estate was a long, narrow wood of beech trees. I could see a line of quivering willow trees too, telling me a river was close.
‘I think that’s where I had my buzzard encounter,’ I said. ‘And where your friend Jim Notley ordered me off his land, incidentally.’
Nick gave me a surprised look. ‘He never told me.’
‘I don’t think he recognized me. I was in running gear.’
‘That’s a footpath down there,’ Nick said. ‘He shouldn’t have ordered you off that.’
‘I wasn’t on the path,’ I admitted. ‘I’d gone into the woods to escape the blood-sucking feathered fiend.’
‘Ah, well, that explains it. Jim’s very protective about that copse. He has a lot of nesting pheasants in there.’
‘In January?’ I asked, not entirely sure when the pheasant breeding season was but thinking midwinter seemed a bit unlikely.
‘Maybe it was force of habit,’ Nick said. ‘The ground round here’s riddled with rabbit holes. Take care.’
‘There was something odd about those woods,’ I said. ‘There were effigies.’
Nick stopped walking. ‘There were what?’ he said.
‘Stuffed figures, hanging from trees. It was a bit freaky.’
He frowned at me. ‘Are you sure?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘It’s possible they were something else entirely. A bit of sphagnum moss hanging from the trees and I just mistook them for human figures. And the dead animals strung up could have been, I don’t know, litter from the industrial units. Possibly balloons; maybe your friend Jim’s planning a party.’
‘Dead animals?’
I shrugged and he started walking again.
‘Jim’s a bit odd but I haven’t heard of anything like that before,’ he said. ‘Unless some kids have been hanging around. Maybe that’s why he was a bit jumpy with you.’
That certainly seemed reasonable but I wasn’t sure Jim was ever going to be a bosom friend. There’d been something unhinged about him.
‘What was that?’ I asked, stopping in my tracks and making Nick jump to one side to avoid walking into me. The sound had been low-pitched, metallic, almost mournful.
‘Ask not for whom the bell tolls,’ Nick said, stepping closer to me. The wind, gentle for such a cold day, blew in our faces.
‘There’s a church near here?’ I’d known it was a bell the second it had sounded up. It had just seemed so unlikely in the middle of the Cambridgeshire countryside.
‘That’s the foundry bell,’ said Nick.
Bell, Bryony had written.
‘Foundries don’t have bells.’
‘The whole estate is built on the site of an old Victorian bell foundry. Why do you think it’s called Bell Foundries Industrial Estate?’
‘I didn’t know it was.’ I’d assumed Bell was a person, that Nick Bell was probably the one Bryony was scared of. I’d never thought it would be an actual bell.
‘What you can hear is an ancient iron bell hanging from the wall of the old factory building,’ Nick said, taking my arm and steering me towards home. ‘You can only hear it when the wind’s in the right direction.’
Which it was now. As we headed for home I could hear the low, sonorous clanging, eerie, like the sound of a ghost ship about to materialize out of fog.
AT THREE O’CLOCK, when the sun was low in the sky, Evi and the dog that was already answering to Sniffy went outside. There were tracks in the snow from Sniffy’s earlier explorations. And two none-too-fragrant little presents from previous calls of nature. As Sniffy padded round, poking her nose under shrubs and squatting periodically to leave pools of yellow in the snow, Evi walked the length of where she judged the path would be.
At the bottom of the garden was a low brick wall with an iron gate that led to the river bank and a tiny landing stage. Tied to a post and covered in tarpaulin was a small canoe. Evi had plans, when she was feeling better, to take up canoeing. Her arms were as strong as anyone’s and there was no reason why she wouldn’t make a reasonably good canoeist.
If she ever felt better again.
She’d spent most of the night huddled under the duvet, waiting for painkillers she shouldn’t have taken to kick in or for the amitriptyline to knock her out. The dog had joined her on the bed and Evi hadn’t the heart to push her off. Sniffy’s presence soothed her somehow, even though it was the dog, more than anything, that was making Evi believe that Laura’s first instinct might have been right after all. That she was nuts.
Because Sniffy had been completely unperturbed, either by the music or by the voice. There couldn’t have been anyone in the house, playing music and speaking to her, because the dog would have heard, sensed or smelled them. The only conclusion left was that the music and the voice had been in Evi’s head.
Excited by the snow, Sniffy was leaping around the garden now, digging with her front paws, hurling snow into the air with her nose. She raced down to the wall, turned and sped back again. She was very fast.
A few hours before dawn, Evi had fallen into an exhausted doze, only to be woken at seven when Sniffy needed to go out. Laura had called round mid-morning, as promised, to take her out for a run. They’d been gone for an hour and had returned drenched in sweat and trembling with exhaustion.
Exercise-induced weariness aside, Laura had been looking hugely better that morning. She’d slept well and thought she was managing to shake off whatever bug had been threatening. Her sleep hadn’t been disturbed by a single dream.
Evi had said nothing about her own night.
After Laura had left, Evi had called Jessica’s friends in St Catharine’s to see if they’d heard from her. They hadn’t. At six o’clock that evening, they told her, Jessica’s tutor would contact the police. Evi sent a short email to the tutor stating that, in her opinion, Jessica was a vulnerable person who needed to be located as a matter of priority.
Evi fall.
Before coming out, Evi had wrapped her thickest coat round her shoulders. She’d pulled on gloves and a scarf. None of them stopped her shivering. Twice now, once on a mountain in Austria, once in a new house in Lancashire, she’d almost died after a fall. Sometimes she dreamed that she was falling. She never hit the ground in her dreams but in those few seconds it always felt as though this was how it was meant to be. That Evi was destined to fall to her death.
No one could have learned that on the internet. No one could have Googled Evi Oliver and discovered that the song with the power to break her heart was Springsteen’s ‘Dancing in the Dark’. No one could have found out that she hated fir cones. Laura had been wrong. This wasn’t someone bent on revenge, or even someone down here trying to stop her from rocking the boat. She was losing her grip on reality. Going nuts. It was as simple as that.
‘YOU’RE VERY QUIET,’ said Nick, topping up my wine glass.
‘I had a new experience today,’ I said, managing a smile. ‘That usually makes me thoughtful.’
Thoughtful didn’t nearly cover it. Bryony had named a bell as something she was scared of. Scott Thornton, a man with unusual hobbies involving female humiliation, had visited an industrial estate named after an old bell foundry. Had I found a connection? And was it significant enough for me to break Joesbury’s embargo on contact?
We were in the large old-fashioned kitchen of Nick’s house. I’d helped him settle the birds in their shed and feed them; an interesting, if slightly gory experience, given that they ate dead chicks and pieces of the game we’d caught that wouldn’t make the grade as human food. After the birds were sorted, Nick mixed up three buckets of horse feed and gave one to the grey gelding, Shadowfax. He usually rode him early in the morning, he told me, with the dogs going along for the exercise. I was beginning to feel as though I’d stepped into the pages of Country Life.
By the time we f
inished supper I knew I should really get back, phone Evi, check whether there was any news on Jessica and try once more to re-establish contact with the elusive Mark Joesbury.
‘Anything you want to share?’ Nick asked me.
On the other hand, they all had my mobile number. And I really needed to strike Nick off my list of prime suspects if I could. ‘You know this thing Evi Oliver’s been worried about,’ I said. ‘The suicides?’
Nick gave a theatrical sigh, but put his glass down and leaned back on his chair. ‘Go on,’ he said.
‘You know she’s been talking about suicide websites and online goading.’
He nodded.
‘Well, let’s just say that it’s a bit more organized than that. What if someone is actually targeting vulnerable people, then making their lives as miserable as possible?’
‘With the sole intent of driving them over the edge?’ said Nick, a tiny smile on his face that told me he thought I was being fanciful.
‘Yes. Is it possible, in theory, to spot potential suicides?’
‘That’s really a question for Evi,’ said Nick.
‘You’re right,’ I said, putting both hands on the table in front of me, as though I were about to stand up. ‘I’ll go ask her.’
Beneath the table, first one long leg, and then the other, wrapped themselves around my ankle. I wasn’t going anywhere.
‘Anyone suffering severe emotional pain, for whatever reason, must be a potential suicide,’ said Nick. ‘But that’s a lot of people. Very few of whom, fortunately, will take the ultimate step.’
‘How do you find them, though? They don’t wear badges.’
‘It’s not difficult to spot someone with problems. Anyone with half a brain can do it. You, for example.’
‘Me?’
One hand reached out and covered mine. ‘You’re hiding a dark secret,’ he said. ‘Going to tell me what it is?’
Where would I start? ‘So it’s just a question of finding someone with issues and getting to know them better,’ I said. ‘Finding out what buttons to press?’ I was thinking of what Evi had told me about Jessica, the girl with an eating disorder who’d been publicly teased about her weight. Nicole had been afraid of rats and had been teased about it.
‘That would be the minimum, in my view. The survival instinct is pretty strong in most people.’
‘So what else? If you were going to drive someone to suicide how would you do it?’
‘Making them live in this house from December through February would be a start,’ he said.
‘Seriously.’
‘Can we talk about something nice soon? Like the fact that the skin just below your collar bone looks like the perfect place to warm my cold nose.’
‘You’ve been spending too much time with your dogs. Come on, how?’
‘Seriously,’ he said, ‘I’d attack their body and their mind simultaneously. I’d find out what they were afraid of and then feed their fears.’
‘How?’ I said.
He gave his head a funny, sideways shake. ‘Blimey, I don’t know,’ he said. ‘Give me a minute to think about it. OK, let’s say they’re afraid of spiders. I’d fill their houses with them, every night. Get them permanently on edge.’
‘And their bodies?’
‘Sleep and food deprivation would work fastest, but quite how you do it without making it obvious I don’t know. Pain would also be pretty effective. Dealing with severe pain on a regular basis is a lot for anyone to cope with. Lots of suicides have major pain issues.’
‘If someone has found a way to do this, anonymously …’
Nick pushed himself back from the table. ‘Laura, what are you getting into?’ he asked me. ‘You’ve only been here a week. You have a huge amount of catching up to do. If you end up blowing your chance here because Evi has dragged you into some hare-brained scheme …’
‘Evi isn’t an idiot,’ I said, and I was actually a bit annoyed that he didn’t seem to be taking me seriously.
‘I know she’s not. And, if you must know, I’m going to bring this up tomorrow morning at our partners’ meeting. If I can get their support, we can make a joint approach to the university and the police. I also happen to know, because Evi called me this afternoon, that the coroner is concerned. These people between them will find anything there is to find and they’ll deal with it. It’s not your problem.’
Now he was starting to sound like Joesbury. Which probably went more towards convincing me he was genuine than anything I’d learned so far. ‘You’re right,’ I said. ‘Sorry, I get a bit intense at times.’
‘I think Laura Farrow is probably the loveliest name I’ve ever come across,’ he said.
Oh, this was getting a little beyond my comfort zone. If this man wasn’t playing me, trying to find out what I knew, then it was starting to look as though he actually liked me. And I’d been going along with it, letting him think the two of us had a chance at a relationship. Loveliest name he’d ever … Laura Farrow didn’t even exist.
‘Do you realize that if you drink any more of that wine, you won’t be able to drive home?’ he asked me. ‘And I can’t leave the dogs at night to drive you. They panic.’
I looked down. The glass was large and it was my third of the evening. What Nick didn’t know was that most of the previous two had been poured down the kitchen sink when he’d been out of the room. I may indulge in casual sex but I never do it drunk. As though it belonged to someone else, I watched my hand reach out towards the glass and raise it to my lips.
Monday 21 January (one day earlier)
I WOKE IN darkness, with no idea where I was. Blue cotton sheets. A man’s bed.
‘Laura,’ said a voice behind my head. I turned. Nick was in the doorway, a mug of steaming liquid in each hand. He was dressed in a shirt and tie, neatly creased black trousers, ready for work.
‘I forgot to ask whether you drink tea or coffee in the morning,’ he said. ‘So I brought both.’
He put both mugs down on a bedside table that rocked dangerously under their weight. ‘It’s almost eight,’ he said. ‘I have surgery at nine and I expect you have lectures.’
It was Monday morning. ‘The good news is that there’s lots of hot water in the bathroom,’ he said. ‘The bad being that the rest of the house is freezing. See you downstairs.’ He stood up and turned to the door. Then he stopped and came back to squat down beside the bed. He leaned forward and kissed me. ‘Good morning,’ he said.
‘Morning,’ I replied, conscious of smudged make-up and seriously bad breath.
‘So for future reference,’ he said, ‘which is it? Tea or coffee?’
‘Both,’ I replied. He grinned at me and left the room.
I sat up. Oh boy, he hadn’t been kidding. The room was so cold it felt as though my face and shoulders were being slapped. I took a deep breath and pulled the covers back, swinging my legs over the side before I could change my mind.
My clothes were scattered around the thick sheepskin rug in front of the fire. I knelt on the rug, hoping some warmth might have survived the night, and found underwear, socks and my sweater.
Last night the fire had blazed as Nick had kissed me. I’d watched bold, darting flames licking over the logs as he’d slowly unbuttoned my blouse. He’d pulled off his own shirt and then both his skin and mine had glowed in the firelight. Sparks had shot into the air like fireworks when the heat found a damp piece of wood. And I’d known I couldn’t go through with it.
‘I’m sorry,’ I’d said, stepping back and bracing myself for a fight, even if just a verbal one. ‘I guess I’m just not ready. I’ll go.’
Looking round now, I found my jeans slung over an old-fashioned CD player. I hadn’t been allowed to drive home. Nick still thought I’d drunk more than I really had and I could hardly disillusion him. Gallantly, he’d left me in his own room and taken himself off to a spare.
As the flames had died down and the embers began to gleam like fire opals, I’d fallen asleep. I
’d dreamed of gently stroking hands, probing fingers, soft kisses running the length of my spine. And when, in my dream, I’d opened my eyes, the ones looking back into mine hadn’t been russet brown.
My boots would be downstairs.
Pulling the bedcovers straight, I stepped out into the corridor. The first door I tried was locked. The second was the bathroom. The mirror told me my eye make-up had smudged but not appallingly so. My hair was a mess but I told myself in a sexy sort of way. The water was hot but I wasn’t getting undressed again in this icebox Nick called home so I splashed some over my face and used the loo. I would sort myself out when I got back to St John’s.
Sipping on the tea, holding the coffee in my other hand, I made my way downstairs. I’d never woken up in a man’s bedroom before. It was more my style to go home with a man, have sex with him, say goodbye and leave. I had no idea how to handle a morning after. Could I just go? Dump the mugs down, slip out of the door and drive away without seeing him?
Apparently not. Because to do that I’d have to cross the kitchen and he was in it, slicing bread that smelled like it had been baked that morning. I could hear the gurgle of a coffee machine. This room, thank God, was pleasantly warm, most of the heat coming from an ancient-looking Aga against one wall. Both pointers were curled on a rug in front of it. They both looked up as I came in. One of them gave me a merry wag of the tail. The other sighed heavily and settled down again, uninterested. A woman in the house in the morning wasn’t anything they hadn’t seen before.
Nick had set the table for two. There was a glass of orange juice at the place that I guessed must be mine. As I sat down, he ran the bread knife through the brown loaf in the middle of the table again. The yeasty smell intensified. As did the feeling that I’d woken up on Mars.
‘Were you up at five baking?’ I asked.
‘I was up at five mucking out the horse, walking the dogs and checking the birds,’ he told me. ‘The bread is courtesy of the bread machine. I set the timer before we went up.’