by Phoebe Locke
Then came a footstep overhead – closer than she’d expected, fear knife-sharp through her – and soil crumbled down the bank and on to her head, her shoulders. Billie, with her snuffling breaths, her heavy tread. ‘I know you’re here, Am,’ she said, softly. ‘You should just come out now.’
There was a flaking, metallic sound, nails on a blackboard (blade against a tree). Amber didn’t move, didn’t even breathe. Around her, the leaves began to whisper – though Billie did not seem to hear them.
‘Do you want to hear a story, Am? It’s a good one. It happened years ago, when two girls walked into a wood a bit like this one. One of them was just a bit younger than you and me, and the other was only a baby.’ The scraping noise again, the bark flaking softly into the air like ash. ‘They walked into the woods, hand in hand, but only one of them came out again. You’ll know which one obviously, Am, because a few years later, you came out of her, right?’
Amber’s hand crept across the damp ground beneath her, searching for something sharp or heavy. Moss, pebbles, something feathery and damp. Nothing that she could use and yet something was building inside of her, something louder and more powerful than the fear. Something that stilled her shaking hands; that felt new and yet somehow deeply familiar. That felt unspeakably like anticipation.
There was the sound of a branch breaking somewhere further down the slope, the wind hissing through the trees, and Billie took a step or two in that direction, boots squelching into the ground. The silence seemed to last for ever and Amber still could not breathe.
‘No,’ Billie said, thumping upwards again. ‘You won’t get away that easy, Amber. I have to put this knife in you. That’s how this ends. That’s how I free her.’ She took a step forward, stumbling on the edge of the bank, loose soil tumbling down.
Amber stood up, locked a hand around Billie’s ankle. ‘You can try,’ she said.
And then she pulled Billie down into the gully with her.
40
2018
Greta finds her sitting on the edge of the gully, the shadow of a branch spreading its fingers across her back. The air is dank, a smell of belligerent, unstoppable growth, and a bird twitters hesitantly somewhere high in the trees.
‘There were wolves here once,’ Amber says, without looking round at her. ‘My dad told me that.’
Greta sits down beside her.
‘I don’t sleep much,’ Amber continues. ‘I told you that, right? I guess after what happened, he didn’t either. He’d call me and we’d talk all night.’ She glances down the slope to the house. ‘I used to have nightmares about these woods if I did sleep.’ She shrugs. ‘Not sure how he thought knowing the wolves thing would help.’
Greta smiles. ‘He’d moved out by then?’
‘Yeah.’ The bird is joined by another, this one shriller and more insistent. ‘She said she’d hurt him too much already. But I guess really she couldn’t forgive him,’ Amber says. ‘For never telling her that he knew, or helping her face it. Helping her see that those things she saw in the shadows couldn’t hurt her. I don’t know.’
‘Do you forgive him?’
Her lips purse, her eyes narrowed as she considers this. ‘I guess so,’ she says eventually. ‘They both fucked up. It’s like that poem, right?’
‘Larkin?’
‘I don’t know, probably.’ Amber leans back against a tree and looks at Greta. ‘I’m never going to give you what you want, you know.’
‘And what do I want?’
‘You want the tears, you want to hear how my mum was bad and my dad would rather she was mad, and how they ruined my life. You want me to perform for you. But guess what, Greta? The cameras aren’t rolling. You don’t get to hear if I’m sorry or sad and you don’t get to feel better about this whole thing.’
Greta gets up and studies the tree Amber’s leaning against. Its trunk bears faint scars, criss-crossed lines level with her shoulder, and she runs a finger across them. It’s time for her to leave, she thinks. Germany, maybe. Or Jordan, if her brother will have her. Fiji. Hong Kong. Anywhere but these fervent, fetid woods, the stream brown with clay.
‘I didn’t have to kill her,’ Amber says, looking down into the gully. When Greta doesn’t reply, she looks up at her, eyes narrowed again. ‘I didn’t. Billie was clumsy and screwed-up. She wouldn’t have hurt me. I could’ve just pulled her in and run, she wouldn’t have followed.’
‘You don’t know that.’
Amber smiles. ‘Come on, Greta, you’ve seen the coroner’s report, I know you have. You’ve heard what the prosecution said in court. Does it sound like self-defence to you?’
Greta resists the urge to close her eyes, to push away the memory of those photos of Billie’s blue-tinged skin, all twenty-seven of the livid knife-marks. ‘I think,’ she says, ‘that you’d rather be anything than a victim, Amber.’
Amber laughs, a half-hearted sound that echoes through the trees. ‘Maybe you do know me, Gee.’
Greta’s fingers go to the scars in the bark again, imagining Billie standing there two years ago, the last minutes of her life.
‘I went to visit her,’ Amber says. ‘Leanna – Lucy – in prison.’
‘Why?’
Amber shrugs. ‘I guess I wanted to see her. One on one. Not exactly the same when there’s a whole courtroom between you, is it?’
‘She was going to kill you.’
‘But she didn’t.’
‘Because she fell and broke her leg in two places.’
Amber shakes her head. ‘You almost sound like you’re on my side, Gee.’
‘What did she say? Lucy?’
Wind whips through the trees, leaves shivering. Amber glances up at the branches above her, her hands worrying at the edge of her hoody.
‘She asked me if I was special now,’ she says. A bird calls from a tree somewhere further up the hill, a round, warbling laugh.
‘Greta?’ Federica in the distance, calling them from down by the house. Amber stands up, wiping her hands on her jeans.
‘Come on,’ she says. ‘Best get back to it, huh? I’m starving, anyway.’
Greta lets Amber lead her down the hill. When the bird calls again, she glances back at the woods, its pockets of dark.
A girl in silhouette, peeping out from behind a tree.
And a hand reaching out, gently coming to rest on her head.
Pulling her back into the shadows.
41
2016
They found her at the edge of the loch as the sun came up. Her pyjamas soaked in blood, water lapping at her feet. Red reeling slowly away with the waves. The knife clutched in her hand. She stood with her back to them as an officer was sent into the woods; as he stumbled out twenty minutes later and vomited on to the dirt track.
They found Leanna in another crevice further down the hillside, splintered bone white against her blood-soaked jeans. Face drained and grey, pulse weak. They wrapped them both in silver, bundled them into separate vehicles as the blue lights flickered back and forth across the trees, the sky lightening in bands of mauve.
Doors slammed shut, radios were used, and the chain of cars rounded the loch, their neons violent. A lone fisherman watched them from the rocky shore. A photo on his phone of a girl in pyjamas soaked black, her hands being cuffed in front of her.
They turned, one by one, on to the road, potholes and dirt track left behind, and as they sped towards Crieff, one bar and then two appeared on Amber’s phone, still gripped tightly in her bloody, dirty hand. And the phone burst into life with one message after another.
Mum.
Mum.
Mum.
Miles and Sadie were waiting at the police station when she was released. They had been driving all night, long before the call came. Amber had been stripped and swabbed, her fingers pressed into ink and then rolled across official sheets. After that she’d been left to wait, the small station hushed and confused, the cottage combed for clues.
When her parents appe
ared in the doorway, Amber stood and for the first time in a long while, Sadie saw her look uncertain.
‘Baby girl,’ Miles said, crying, but Amber didn’t go to him. Instead, she looked at her mother for what felt like a long, long time.
And then she went to Sadie and folded her arms around her.
‘I did a bad thing,’ she said.
Sadie shook her head no. She put her own arms gingerly around her daughter and brought her mouth close to her ear. She told Amber that Amber didn’t even know what a bad thing was.
And Amber rested her head against her mother’s, her breath silky and cool against Sadie’s skin.
‘I gave her to him, Mum,’ she whispered. ‘I gave him Billie.’
It was the two of them, then. Sadie took the child’s hand in hers and she walked out into the daylight.
They walked, together, towards the trees.
Acknowledgements
I am so grateful to Cathryn Summerhayes for her support and enthusiasm, her tireless championing of this book, and for being bloody great company at every step of the way. Huge thanks also to Melissa Pimentel, Alice Dill, Katie McGowan, Irene Magrelli, Martha Cooke and all at Curtis Brown.
I feel so lucky that the Banners found a home with an editor as smart and passionate as Kate Stephenson, who has bravely ventured into their many dysfunctions with me and been so inspiring to work with. Many thanks and many wines too to Ella Gordon, Millie Seaward, Alex Clarke and the rest of brilliant Team Wildfire. I’m also incredibly grateful to the other editors around the world who have shown such support for the novel.
A special thank you to Arabel Charlaff, who took me on a fairly disturbing journey into Amber’s psyche. I would recommend her couch to any writer.
Ian Ellard and Joey Connolly were the best colleagues I could’ve wished for during the writing of this book. Thanks also to Richard Skinner and Joanna Briscoe.
Thank you, Hayley Richardson, for always reading.
My family deserve a whole essay on all the ways they have supported and inspired me, but instead I’ll just say: thank you for everything. I love you (and I’m so thankful that you’re nothing at all like any of the families in this book!).
About the Author
Phoebe Locke is the pseudonym of full-time writer Nicci Cloke. She previously worked at the Faber Academy, and hosted London literary salon Speakeasy. She lives and writes in London.
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Contents
Praise for The Tall Man
Dedication
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Acknowledgements
About the Author