He stood by the cairn for a long while, gazing down into the valley where Arkthwaite nestled. The village was on a minor road that split from the main road, diverting through a small jumble of houses before re-joining the main route once more. Car lights snaked along the highway, heading to Ingholme and beyond.
He wasn’t wearing his expensive outdoor walking socks, and his feet began to chill, so he decided to walk on, following the path down to the far end of the village. The moon was almost full and illuminated enough of his path to make it a good choice, and he walked relatively briskly, swinging his arms to keep the blood flowing.
A valley’s like a trap, he thought as he descended from the moorland and began to pass by more cultivated fields. He came out at the top of a cul-de-sac of modern homes, Bailey Close, and glanced back over his shoulder at the menacing hill looming behind him. Surrounding the village, keeping it in, keeping it close and inward-looking.
He slowed his pace, ambling past the boxy little new-build houses. These people worked in Ingholme or Jesthorpe or even further afield, and probably spent as long sitting in their cars on the daily commute as they did sitting in front of their televisions, watching the lives of others.
He felt his own cynicism itch at his soul and he didn’t pursue his bitter train of thought any further. Instead, he mapped out his plans for the next few days. A bit more sorting-out of stuff, a few rides, the finishing touches to his tax return and a meeting with his accountant. The same old turn of days at this time of the year.
“Evening, Richard.” An angular figure loomed out at him, a dog by his side.
“Evening, Tom. How’re you?”
Tom fell into step beside Richard as they both descended the steep hill to the High Street. “Overworked, underpaid.” He tugged on his dog’s collar, for no reason at all. The old collie was keeping patient step alongside her owner. She was clearly used to random pulls and pushes, because she didn’t vary her pace.
“Same old, eh?” Richard said. He plunged his hands into his pockets and wondered which way Tom was going to walk. “You off home?”
“Aye. Just nipped out to give Bess a bit of a turn. Never get a moment in the day, do I?”
Richard’s heart sank. They’d be walking together along the High Street, then, and there was no polite way to get out of it. “How’s business at the Post Office?”
“Worse from week to week. I’m doing what they said, you know, that consultant that came down. Diversifying. I’m selling hot pasties and taking in dry cleaning for that firm what comes around. I’m putting up adverts in the windows and charging 25p. I’m stocking magazines and cheap biscuits, and all for what? So these bloody incomers can get their shopping online and their car tax online and their bills paid online and their letters sent online.”
“That’s called email, Tom.”
“Well, I don’t like it, and the village is going to die and they all bloody well deserve it. We get the community we earn, you mark my words.”
“I do, I do.” The old curmudgeon had a point, perhaps, but rather than finding comfort in agreeing with Tom, it made Richard feel negative and angry. “But that’s change, isn’t it? That’s progress.”
“Progress is shite.”
“Well, apart from clean water and so on…”
“Yeah, well it’s all right for folks like you.”
Richard quickened his pace. Tom would be turning in at the Post Office, just past the church, and Richard would be free of his doom and gloom. He had enough of his own, for a start. So he ignored Tom’s dig and said nothing at all in reply.
Bess paused at the bus stop a few metres from the Post Office and Tom began to jerk at her lead. “You sniffed it on the way out, you stupid dog. It’s not going to smell any different now.”
“I’ll be getting on,” Richard said, fighting the urge to snatch the lead out of Tom’s hands and teach him what it felt like to be strangled. “Have a good night.”
“And you.”
I was talking to the dog, not to you, Richard thought as he turned up a side street. You can have a bloody awful night for all I care.
* * *
What a week! Helena bounced around her bathroom, tired but buzzing with the sort of energy you only got when you were exhausted with good fortune and pleasure. The window didn’t close properly and she’d jammed a hand towel into the crack, and the room was cold with only a wooden floor and a thin rug, but even that couldn’t dampen her high spirits. She stood in the bath with her jeans rolled up to her knees, and scrubbed hard at the black slime that crusted in the grouting between the tiles. The bathroom door was wedged open with a stool so she could hear her music from the CD player downstairs, and the manufactured pop music spurred her on.
She’d settled in quickly to her new role at the Ingholme branch of Gussy’s. In fact, it had taken her about fifteen minutes to become an established member of staff - by a quarter past eight on the Tuesday morning, she had been sitting on a pallet of shrink-wrapped cement retarder in the warehouse, eating custard creams and looking at photos on one of the forklift truck driver’s smartphones, admiring his kids. Clive had ambled by, mentioned a few things that needed doing “at some point” and offered her a cup of tea. She’d accepted and he’d shown her where the kettle was. Clearly, if there was a woman in the building, tea-making duties naturally defaulted to her. She made a sarcastic comment about how water only boiled in the presence of ovaries but it was lost on Clive and the team, so she sighed and decided it was going to be the only way to get a decent brew anyway.
Bet had rung up every morning to check on how she was doing, and though she was patronising in her support, Helena accepted it gratefully. She was an invaluable source of knowledge for when random deliveries turned up that appeared on no schedule, sales reps hinted heavily at the way “things had always been done” and the printer appeared to default to a secret mode that connected to no known computer in the county.
Still, the endless slew of new things to learn had taken its toll and Helena was feeling weary from the inside of her bones. She had planned to spend the weekend scrubbing, painting and gardening, especially now it had stopped raining, but she changed her mind.
I’ll just finish getting this mould off the walls in here, and that’s it. I’m going to have a break. I want to get to know the area better.
She had entertained romantic notions that her new neighbours would call round with housewarming gifts of homemade pies and possibly homebrew, but apart from a curt “how do” from a wizened old man in a flat cap, no one had come to her door. Perhaps the onus was on her to call on them, and she made a mental note to make some biscuits so she wouldn’t be empty handed. Anyway, she needed to make contact and learn some names, for when Christmas rolled around. She didn’t want to be locked into years of “from everyone at number 24, to everyone at number 14” like she had in her previous house.
Clive and the others, however, still thought she was optimistic to even be planning to stay a few months “out there in the wilds”. He’d muttered darkly about winter and how she’d be cut off from the “real world” for “weeks. Nay, months.” She’d laughed off his exaggerations but their constant teasing had piqued her interest about the village. It really was considered to be some kind of sinister backwater. Then again, Clive probably thought An American Werewolf in London was a documentary.
Which reminds me, I haven’t even been in the pub yet. Although it’s called The White Hart, not The Slaughtered Lamb, I’ll be disappointed if there isn’t a great big pentagram scrawled on the wall in a worrying shade of red.
Eventually the bathroom tiles went a paler shade of grey and she spent some time trying to scrub the smell of bleach from her hands before padding into the kitchen to forage for food. She piled together an enormous sandwich of salads, cheese and meat, and stood by the back door, looking out over the wild garden and up to the hills beyond.
Her rented cottage was an old stone terrace on a road called Top Row that was higher up t
he hill behind the main part of the village lower in the valley. Below this row of cottages were a few others on small side roads, and finally the High Street which ran parallel to the main road. Here at the back of the house, she could barely hear the low hum of traffic on the busy A-road. There were some stunted apple trees in her garden and magpies darted between the branches, chattering to each other and bullying the smaller birds.
I wonder who lived here before me. This place must be over a hundred years old, maybe two hundred. People have been born here, died here. She started to think about the spirits of place, whether they were actual spirits or a way of explaining the way emotions and impressions seemed to implant themselves into a locality. Smells like garlic can linger; why not sorrow or joy?
It was a comforting thought, in a way, that something might remain. And those of us who come after owe it to our ancestors to remember them, perhaps.
I should go for a walk and really open my senses to what might be out there.
Helena finished her sandwich and scattered the crumbs from her plate out onto the scrap of concrete that the letting agents had euphemistically called a “patio”. The magpies swooped down and argued over the morsels, and she left the door open as she went to hunt for her boots and a coat.
She left by the back door and hesitated before locking it. She had a rose-tinted view of country life, she knew that, but even she wasn’t naive enough to chance leaving her house unlocked. She pocketed the key and headed out, clambering over the fence at the bottom of the garden, and straight out onto open access moorland.
She’d explore the village later on. Right now, with her thoughts of magpies and spirits and ancestors, she felt pulled to the wide open spaces that stood guard all around the tiny pinprick of human habitation. The grass was short, as it was early in the season, and scrawny sheep scattered away as she walked up the slope, aiming for the highest point.
As she crested a small rise, she found it was a false summit and the ground continued to climb higher and higher. But it gave her a good view of the valley and the village and she took a moment to get her breath back as she took in the scenery.
She could see a collection of buildings off on another small hill to one side, on her right as she looked back down to the village. A rough track wound up to them, but there were no vehicles or signs of movement that she could see from here.
That will be the local loony lord, she realised. She decided she didn’t want to be shot for trespassing, and moved on in the opposite direction, along a ridge and towards a small stand of hawthorn trees.
The spiky low trees stood in a rough circle and as soon as she passed into the centre, she was struck by the feeling that this would be a good place to hold a pagan ritual. She’d seen no evidence of the promised coven of “hippy trippy witches” or whatever it was that Clive had warned her about, and thought that the residents of Arkthwaite would be much more inclined to spend their Sundays in the local church. She stood right in the middle and spun in a slow circle, gazing between the gnarled trunks to the views beyond.
Pagan moot or church, it would be nice to belong somewhere in that kind of secure, solid way that religious types carried with them. Helena sighed and let her eyes half-close. There must be something in it all, surely? So many people have feelings or convictions that there is more to life than what we see before us. It can’t just be a trick of the mind.
Perhaps it was tiredness, or perhaps it was something else entirely, but Helena sank to her knees in the centre of the ring of trees, and let her eyes close completely.
At first she just thought it, as loud as she could, in her own mind: Hello. Hello, land. Or, er, greetings to the… land? Greetings to the spirits of the place. I bid you, uh, greetings. Why did she feel it ought to be in such stilted language?
And how could she expect the trees to read her mind, anyway?
She felt the wetness of the earth begin to seep through her jeans. That was probably a good thing, she thought, it connects me. Emboldened, she spoke aloud.
“Hello, spirits.”
“My name’s Richard, actually.”
“Jesus Christ on a bike!” Helena’s eyes snapped open and she was on her feet in nanoseconds, her face burning with fright and embarrassment.
“Nope, not even close. Richard,” he repeated, slowly, with a smirk on his face, speaking as if to a child. “Hello there.”
What could she do but brazen it out? She flung her head back, tilted her chin, and met his gaze with a steady, faked confidence. “Hello. I’m Helena.”
He smiled, in a half-quirk way, dragging one side of his mouth up in a sardonic grin. “I don’t usually start talking to the spirits till I’m on my second bottle of them. By the third, they’re talking back.”
“Luckily, I don’t need to drink to find a connection with nature,” she blurted out, surprising herself. His smile flickered and he shook his head.
“Jolly good. Don’t let me disturb you any further. Good day.” He swept his gaze around the hawthorn circle, as if expecting to see a cauldron, and perhaps a broomstick with a cat attached to it. Then he gave a little shrug and wandered past, heading down the hill towards the village.
Helena watched him go, following his progress as he disappeared down a street and behind some houses. His accent wasn’t local and his clothes were of the sturdy fell-walker’s type, a big-name technical coat and over-trousers, not a farmer’s usual garb of boiler suit and baler twine. Hopefully he didn’t usually travel out here to walk the moors; he was probably a passing tourist, out for the weekend.
She brushed herself off and turned back, deciding she’d had enough for one day, and it was time to get home and just curl up with a relaxing book for a while. As for the rumours of crazy pagans dancing about the hills, she knew she’d just added to them further.
Chapter Two
Panic and fear were the first things to flood Helena’s mind when she heard the hammering at her front door. It was seven o’clock and she was still in her pyjamas. It could only be an emergency of the very worst sort, so she dashed to the hallway without a second thought as to her upstanding bed hair or her egg-stained bathrobe.
“Good morning, love. Thought I’d catch you before you went off to work.”
Helena gaped in horror, twitching for a moment before dragging her robe closed, too late to hide her bunny-rabbit-themed nightwear from her chirpy looking neighbour. The elderly man was dressed in his usual three-piece brown tweed suit, and he thrust the parcel towards her, grinning toothily. She hoped his vision was as bad as his thick lenses suggested.
“I…oh. Thank you, Mr, er…”
“Robbins. Archie Robbins. We’ve not been introduced, sorry.”
“No, er, we haven’t.” Was that why he hadn’t called round? He was waiting for a formal introduction? Who from - a chaperone? Perhaps she should have asked her uncle Charles to come and take her around the village. “I’m Helena Wright.”
“Oh, we know all about you,” he said, sucking in his teeth and making dark hollows in his cheeks.
“Really?”
“It’s on the parcel,” he said, and pushed it at her.
Well, her name was on the parcel. What else did “we” all know, she wondered. “Thank you.” She took it and clasped it to her belly, and took a step backwards into the hall. “Well, I’d best be getting ready for work…”
“Aye, you do that, you do that. Nice meeting you, Miss Wright.”
“And you. Thanks again.”
He bumbled off down the path and turned sharply left, heading off into the village with a determined air. Helena stumbled backwards and kicked the door shut with her fluffy slippers, before taking the well-wrapped box back through to the kitchen where she was halfway through her breakfast.
She knew who it was from even before she looked at the return address, so she didn’t rush to open it. Instead she finished her toast and went off to get dressed, leaving it sitting like a baleful omen in the centre of the table.
She came back into the kitchen, ready for work in her loose black trousers, grey jumper, and smart white shirt. She looped her handbag over the chair back and stared at the parcel, almost as if she was about to get into an argument with it.
Perhaps she was.
Well, let’s see what delights you’re sending to your wayward daughter this time, she muttered to herself, and ripped off the paper. A waft of feminine scent rolled out as she lifted a floral-printed note-card from the shiny box within.
Dearest Helena…
How is country life suiting you? At first I was alarmed but then my friend Dorothy reminded me of the Young Farmers’ Clubs and I realised it would be a very good way for you to meet new friends. Do try. We must meet up, perhaps Leeds or Manchester and I can treat you to a little day out. I have been recommended some wonderful spas and I am convinced you would benefit from a day of pampering - I know I would, so it would be lovely for you to keep me company. We don’t spend enough time together, do we?
Helena paused to sigh and absorb the subtle layers of guilt trip as they were applied, sentence by sentence. “Friends” meant “men”, of course.
I have enclosed a few little treats for you. I know I may have mentioned this before, but at your age you cannot afford to continue to ignore your daily beauty routine and a little discipline now will pay dividends in the future. Remember Granny Alice!
Yes, she remembered Granny Alice with the greatest of affection because she was warm, funny and made excellent jam. Her mother only remembered her for daring to have dry skin. Helena frowned at the note.
At the very least, do use the night cream and the day cream with the sun blocker. You will thank me for this. It’s in your best interests. As always, with love…
Helena folded the card and dropped it back into the box. Time to go and catch this bus, I think.
Bad Boys and Billionaires (The Naughty List Bundles) Page 41