by Sam Baker
The woman nodded, looking halfway between exasperated and intrigued.
‘Ah. I’m sorry,’ Helen said. ‘I didn’t realise … The rain … it was destroyed. The ink was unreadable. My headaches were too bad. When they come I just have to lie in a darkened room and wait for them to pass.’ Understatement of the year, but broadly true.
‘Oh, you poor thing. You should have said. Shouldn’t she have said, Mary?’
One of the old women waiting at the till nodded vigorously.
‘Have you got a mobile number?’ Mrs Millward asked. ‘Might be useful for someone else around here to have it. In case you need anything. If you get headaches a lot, I mean. You don’t want to be stuck out there in that huge house on your own, with no food or company. What if you need help? It’s not as if you’d be able to drive, and it would be no trouble. Honestly, no trouble at all.’
Helen had to admit she was impressed. In another life this woman would have made a great journalist, of a certain kind.
‘Thank you, but there’s really no need,’ she said. ‘The signal out there is hopeless. But thank you, so much. That’s very thoughtful of you. Really, though … when they come – the headaches, I mean – there’s nothing anyone can do to help. I just have to stay in bed and get better. And eating …’ Helen made a face that she hoped made it clear they would not want to know what effect eating might have. ‘Eating is the last thing on my mind.’
Margaret Millward nodded reluctantly before saying brightly, ‘Well, now you’ve found us, I hope we’ll see you in here much more often.’
Recognising an order when she heard one, Helen pasted on her most polite smile. ‘I’m sure you will.’
‘And you will come to the next social, won’t you?’ Mrs Millward said, pressing her advantage as Helen sidled towards the bread shelf. Sliced white or sliced white. After all that, any locally baked loaves – assuming there had ever been any – were long gone.
‘Of course,’ she said, picking up a local paper and putting it down again. Instead she replaced it in her pile with a large bar of Galaxy and balanced a box of Rice Krispies on top. ‘When is it?’
‘First Thursday of the month,’ the woman said, almost sharply, as if repeating the same instruction for an inattentive small child. Then she softened. ‘But don’t worry about that now. It’s much too far away to remember. I’ll drop a note through your door nearer the time. I’ll bring a cake and we can have a cup of tea.’
With her heart beating against her ribs like a bird trying to fight free of its cage, it took Helen another five minutes to extricate herself.
Finally free, she flung her shopping on to the passenger seat. It took three goes to fire the engine into life and, when it started, it sounded like a bastard cross between a tractor and a motorbike. Still, what did she expect for £300 and less than six months left to run on the MOT? She’d taken the handbrake off and had it in gear when one of the old women barrelled out of the shop door and wheeled her trolley straight in front of the car.
Shit! Helen slammed her foot on the brakes, grateful that this time they worked. Mind you, the way she felt right then, an old lady or two would have been justifiable collateral damage.
The vein in her temple throbbed ominously. She couldn’t face going straight back to the house. Huge as it was, it was still too confining. Even the thought of walls made her feel claustrophobic.
Helen had never been a popper inner, for tea or otherwise. Home was a sanctuary. Wasn’t that the theory? A place you were supposed to be free from other people; their presence and their opinions. Even if it didn’t feel that way to you – and Helen couldn’t honestly say it ever had; except, maybe, once, for a short time as a small child – you had to respect people who did. Regardless of whether their home no longer had a roof or a ceiling or a front door, and there was a hole in the wall where the window used to be, and a pile of rubble in what remained of the kitchen, the overwhelming reek of cordite to remind them that this would never really be a home again. Despite all that, you could stand on the street and watch what was left of a family huddled together over a pan of boiling water, trying to rebuild some semblance of normality, some sense of home.
Not now.
Helen shook the image from her head. Even if she had known where home was, she couldn’t imagine ever being there again.
The little Peugeot sped past the house without pausing. It clearly had no intention of pulling in, even if Helen had. But she felt no calling, no lure of kettle or sofa. None of the emotions that people often told her they associated with home. It was just a house, sprawling and empty. With little but climate, local language and location to distinguish it from other ruins she’d inhabited.
At the next T-junction the car took a right turn to Harrogate almost before she’d had a chance to decide. It was a bit of a drive but it wasn’t as if she was short of time. She could stop there for the afternoon. Helen tried to picture herself buying a book and sitting in a tea room reading it, whiling away several hours eating toasted teacake and drinking Earl Grey from a proper cup and saucer, probably white and adorned with flowers, the sort of fine bone china you could bite through. Wasn’t that the kind of thing people used to do? The kind of thing plenty of people still did, without smartphones or one eye constantly on the news sites?
She could picture the scene. She just couldn’t picture herself in it.
At the crossroads for the abbey the car made up her mind for her and took the opposite turn. Whether it was the car or Helen, suddenly she knew she didn’t need tea and cake and more people to watch. She didn’t need smaller, she needed bigger. Something far bigger, far older, more significant than her.
She entered the village from the south, passing a caravan park and a car park, a hot-dog kiosk, a café-cum-gift shop, and a tawdry concrete block of public conveniences. The indisputable ugliness that tourism inevitably spawned. Clearly this wasn’t the remote ruin she’d been hoping for. But the weather gods were watching over her and, as the Peugeot pulled into a space, the mizzle that had hung over the Dales all morning hardened its resolve, sending brightly coloured cagoules scattering for their coaches.
Shoving the ancient guidebook to Yorkshire into the glove compartment, Helen tossed the hood of her parka over her frizz, put her head down and beetled across the emptying tarmac into the village that surrounded the abbey. If her guidebook had been printed in the last century, not the one before, she might have known the priory was no longer the remote thousand-year-old ruin it described but the beating heart of a tourist centre, pumping the blood of outsiders and their credit cards around the surrounding villages and into the arteries of the Dales.
The priory, like the village that bore its name, and the countryside shrouding it, was schizophrenic. The face it showed the village was a working parish church, all neat grey stone façade, scrubbed and polished, surrounded by clipped lawns. More village green than thousand years of history.
There were no ghosts here. She should have been relieved.
Passing a blackboard bearing the legend, Guided Tours 11 a.m. and 3 p.m., Helen glanced at her watch. It was nearly two. Lucky, she was between tours.
Beyond the sign, she skirted the abbey’s soaring façade and ducked under a weathered buttress. As she cut around the side of the abbey, pristine stonework gave way to crumbling panels open to slate-grey sky. Here were the remains the guidebook had promised: a grand building left to decay after the dissolution of the monasteries in 1539. Its destruction accelerated by the valley’s inhabitants who decided, not unreasonably Helen felt, that a deserted priory’s stone could be put to better use in their own walls.
A last, bedraggled group of tourists hurried past, so bent on their search for somewhere dry to wait for the next tour that they hardly seemed to notice her. Perhaps the khaki of her parka rendered her invisible against the stone, compared to the primary reds, blues and yellows they were used to. Good. She’d had enough of people for one lifetime.
Tucking a stray strand of
hair into her hood, Helen stuffed her hands in her pockets and walked into the squall. Back here, swept under the priory’s neatly vacuumed carpet, were the jagged teeth of a ruin. Centuries of rain and snow had exposed the building’s intestines to the elements, leaving them vulnerable and bruised. Arches soared skywards, their skeleton stripped bare of most of what made the building live.
The surrounding countryside was equally unpredictable: to the south the moors, to the north the Dales. One minute gently rolling hills and undulating greenery, almost chocolate-box pretty; the next rocks jutting through thin earth like bone, waters broiling a sinister stew in dark pools beneath. In front of her, tombstones tumbled like broken teeth before the graveyard dropped away towards the river.
Just as well. She wasn’t looking for pristine.
Lining the walls of what little remained of the abbey’s heart was a row of erratically spaced benches, dark with recent creosote, the kind of wooden two-seaters that littered suburban parks and riverbanks all over northern Europe. Clambering over a half-collapsed wall, Helen wandered idly amongst them. Up close, she could see they were scattered with dedications, the formal graffiti of engraved brass plaques screwed to the back of the seats.
Mary, 1910–2003, much missed.
For Margaret and Albert, together now as then.
This seat is dedicated to Ethel who sat here every day, whatever the weather …
Ethel’s bench was slick with rain, but Helen sat anyway, feeling the water soak the seat of her jeans, and gazed across the Dales in respectful silence. Was this the same view that Ethel had seen ‘whatever the weather’? Who, if anyone, would dedicate a bench to her if she died? A year ago, even six months, she might have known the answer to that question. But now?
Closing her eyes, Helen took several long, deep breaths until she felt her heart begin to slow. Then she tucked her face as far back under her hood as her neck would allow. Invisible was a look she’d worked hard to perfect over the years. Professional necessity, personal choice. But she couldn’t keep saying later, later had come and gone. It was time. Following one last, expensive taxi-ride to Bradford, the one that had made her the fifth careless owner of the battered Peugeot with questionable brakes and bugger-all MOT, she now had a second-hand MacBook and three USB dongles with enough pre-paid data to last a few months, plus a reconditioned iPhone she’d persuaded the laptop owner to throw in for another fifty. Tonight she would set up a VPN and go online.
Seized with sudden decisiveness, Helen fumbled in her pocket for her pay-as-you-go mobile and, before she had time to think – before she even had time to be surprised to find a signal out here – she keyed in a familiar number and pressed call, striding away through the ruins as she did so, stepping over a knee-height fence into the old cemetery and starting to walk in tight patterns through the gravestones.
‘It’s me,’ she said when her sister answered. And then held her breath for what might come next.
‘Helen!’ Fran cried. ‘Thank God!’
For a few seconds, all Helen could hear from the other end of the phone was someone taking several sharp, shallow breaths. She closed her eyes, listening as the breathing slowed. ‘Fran,’ she said eventually. ‘Fran? Are you OK?’
‘I didn’t know. We didn’t know … I mean, we knew there was a fire at the flat … and then you didn’t call and we didn’t know where you were …’ Her sister stopped, suddenly composed. ‘Where are you?’
Once a big sister, always a big sister.
‘Resting,’ Helen said. ‘I just called to let you know I was OK.’
‘OK? How can you possibly be OK?’
Now the initial shock had passed, Helen felt Fran’s relief ebb away to be replaced by the lifetime’s irritation that simmered between them. Whether separated simply by a dining table or whole continents and life choices, the friction had always been there. Twenty years on, more, the list of grudges was endless. Stolen Barbies, a broken Girl’s World with blue Biro eyebrows, smashed Lego houses and vanishing homework blurred together with scoldings for crusts uneaten, lip gloss shoplifted and tittle-tattle told.
Were all siblings like this?
‘Where are you?’ Fran repeated.
‘Just away, resting, like I said.’ Helen meant it to sound reasonable, but it didn’t come out that way. Instead she sounded petulant, bratty. The little sister she was.
‘I didn’t mean … geographically,’ Fran was trying for conciliatory. ‘I meant … You sound … echoey. And I can hear water.’
‘I am by water,’ Helen said. ‘A river. Plus it’s raining.’
It was, pouring now, a chill wind clawing at Helen’s hood and driving rain into her cheeks. Her fingers had cramped around her handset, their tips white with cold. She examined her nails and listened to her sister’s irritation on the end of the line. Not blue, her fingernails, not yet. If they turned blue she was in for another migraine. She shouldn’t have let herself think about the fire. Not yet.
‘Go inside then,’ said Fran. ‘You’ll catch your death.’
Helen smiled.
‘Yes, Mum.’
Fran smiled back. Helen could hear it. She was sure she could.
‘I’ve been trying to get hold of you,’ Fran said. ‘I emailed dozens of times, and called, but your mobile’s dead.’
‘I lost it. This is a replacement.’
‘You could have rung.’
‘What do you think I’m doing?’ Helen shrugged. The rain had crept inside her hood and was trickling down her neck. She cast around for shelter, but the ruins she’d been so enamoured with offered none. She tried to remember why she’d called.
‘The police came round,’ Fran said suddenly.
‘The police?’ Helen’s voice was a whisper.
‘They went to Mum’s,’ Fran said. ‘They wanted access to your dental records and she called me. Helen, she was in a terrible state. We all were.’
‘What did they say?’ Helen asked, eventually. ‘The police, I mean.’
She heard Fran take a deep breath. ‘Helen, they said they’d found a body. She told them you couldn’t have been there. You and Art had separated. Although we all hoped it wasn’t permanent …’
Helen forced herself not to respond.
‘That’s what the concierge told them too. Well, that you’d moved out. And Monsieur was away somewhere. She didn’t know where. That’s why it’s taken so long, apparently. The police just assumed the place was empty. And then they cleared the rubble and found …’ Several hundred miles away Fran swallowed.
‘Helen?’
‘Uh-huh.’
‘I don’t think they think it was an accident.’
Closing her eyes, Helen tried to shake the fog that had clouded her brain since that night two weeks earlier. All she could see was an orange glow, the outline of a body slumped awkwardly in a corner, hear the brown noise of electrics crackling.
‘Helen …?’
Helen swallowed hard. Tried to focus.
‘They said that?’
‘They wanted to know if Mum had heard from you. Don’t you understand? It’s been weeks since we heard. I told them that, you know, you travel a lot and sometimes go months without making contact. So if a week or two passed, well, that’s you. But then we have the police on the doorstep asking about dental records, saying your – I mean Art’s – flat burnt down a fortnight ago and no one’s seen either of you since. Where have you been?’
When Helen finally found her voice, it came out small, more afraid than she’d have liked. ‘Somewhere safe,’ she said.
7
It played on Gil’s mind all through lunch and for the rest of that afternoon.
Not so much his brief exchange with the French girl. Woman, he corrected himself. It had been made pretty clear to him over the years that women didn’t much like being called girls; not by middle-aged-plus-a-bit men anyway. The girls at the paper told him he was patronising, even though he’d hear them refer to themselves that way seconds la
ter. It wasn’t so much Mademoiselle Graham’s evident discomfort at Margaret Millward’s forensic gaze. Who wouldn’t be on edge finding themselves the centre of attention when they’d only gone out for a pint of milk? Although even then her discomfort had been extreme.
It was the conversation afterwards.
It didn’t require investigative skills to tell she was thrown by the encounter. She dropped the bread when she opened the shop door, dropped the chocolate when she picked up the bread and took three attempts to start her wreck of a car. And then she stalled. Although that probably had more to do with her near collision with old Maude Peniston’s trolley.
Even Margaret Millward wasn’t that stress-inducing.
Frankly, Gil was irritating himself. He’d long since given up trying to read his book. It was new and he wasn’t yet into it. Just a couple of chapters and he’d had to read both of those twice. He’d switched from Ian Rankin to Denise Mina when he’d run out of Rebus. Swapping Edinburgh for Glasgow mainly because of a Rankin quote on the cover. But he was doing that irritating thing of reading the same page over and over. Seeing the words while being too preoccupied to take them in.
On his third go, he gave up, downed his pint, wrapped his scarf around his neck, tucked the paperback into his pocket and raised a parting hand to Ray. Outside, he turned right instead of left. There was nobody about apart from an occasional car, but he made a point of not looking up as he headed out of the village. Someone would have noticed the break in his routine, he was sure of that. One of the twitchers. They’d doubtless grill him about it later. He wasn’t about to encourage them by making eye contact.
With his long legs and loping cross-country stride it took less than ten minutes to reach the stile he wanted and veer off on a track signposted for walkers. If he kept moving at this rate he’d be deep in the Dales in under half an hour. Gil gave an involuntary shiver. He’d also be drenched. He wasn’t dressed for hiking. Not remotely. His suit shrieked office and though his well-worn brogues were more than up to the challenge, hiking wasn’t the job for which they’d been made.