by Alice Feeney
Sam bought a bottle of overpriced whisky – he didn’t want to meet his friend empty-handed – and the old crow gave him directions anyway. When Sam gave her a ten-pound note to say thank you, she drew him a map.
Sam felt like a character in one of his favourite detective novels once he was back on the road. The phone calls from Henry ended around two years earlier – the same time the woman in the shop said the author stopped going into town. Sam didn’t know anything about a housekeeper, old or new, Henry never mentioned them. The only person Henry ever really wanted to talk about was his daughter, Robin. Their estrangement still bothered Sam, because it clearly made the old author very sad indeed.
Robin was a difficult child. Her mother – a romance novelist who Henry met at a literary festival back in the day – died when the girl was only eight years old. She drowned in the bath. Robin had two authors for parents, so it probably shouldn’t have been a surprise that she struggled to separate fact from fiction. Henry said she was always making up stories, and it got her in trouble at boarding school as well as at home. She got suspended once, for telling girls in her dormitory tales about witches who whispered their victim’s names three times before killing them. It was all just the result of an overactive imagination – which to be fair, she’d inherited – but when Henry tried to discipline her, Robin cut off her own hair with a pair of scissors one night, leaving two long blonde plaits for him to find on her pillow.
Henry blamed grief, and himself, but nothing he did to try to help the child worked. She ran away from Blackwater Chapel too many times for him to count, and when she was eighteen, she ran away for good. Henry didn’t know where she was for years, until Robin got in touch asking him to help her husband. Henry was fond of Adam from the start. He always sounded like he was smiling when he talked about the man Robin married. He didn’t like the screen adaptations of his novels, but the fact he continued to agree to them was testament to how much he liked Adam. It was obvious that Henry grew to think of his secret son-in-law as the son he never had. He thought Adam had been a good influence on his daughter’s life, and so long as she was happy he was happy to stay out of it. That’s all he wanted to know when he asked Sam to follow them.
Was she happy?
Robin was always fond of writing letters as a child, as well as making things up that got her into trouble. She wrote Henry one last letter before she ran away to London. It was a thank you, as well as a goodbye. She said the only thing that he had ever given her that she truly loved was her name. Her mother had insisted they christen her Alexandra, but Henry never liked that, so always used the child’s middle name instead, the one he had chosen: Robin. He said she liked it so much because it made her feel like a bird, and birds can always fly away. When Robin flew, she never came back.
Sam kept one eye on the winding Highland roads – which were difficult enough to navigate even before it got dark. He also kept glancing down at the hand-drawn map the woman in the shop had given him, trying to make sense of it. He noticed that Patty had also scribbled down her phone number. Sam shuddered. Despite being lost in the desert for a long time when it came to the ladies, he’d rather die of thirst than drink at that well. When he turned off the main road, he saw that there had been a sign for Blackwater Loch all along. He’d driven past it several times earlier because, by the looks of it, the sign had been chopped down. Possibly with an axe.
This was clearly a place someone didn’t want people to find.
He drove along a little track, narrowly avoided hitting some sheep, and passed a small thatched cottage on the right. It looked abandoned. Sam was about to give up, had decided to maybe try and find a hotel for the night, but then his headlights illuminated the shape of an old white chapel in the distance.
Sam’s fuel gauge was low but his hopes were high as he parked his third-hand BMW outside. His optimism didn’t last long. The chapel was in total darkness. He could already tell that nobody was home: the big old wooden doors weren’t just closed; they were chained together with a padlock. Henry clearly wasn’t there, and from the thick cobwebs covering the doors, it appeared he hadn’t been for some time.
Upset at the thought of a wasted journey, and not quite ready to give up, Sam grabbed his torch from the boot of the car and went for a walk around the chapel. He hoped he might find another way in, but despite endless stained-glass windows there were no other doors. He did stumble across several wooden statues in the dark though. The eerie-looking rabbits and owls, carved from ancient tree stumps, were so well hidden by shadows, that Sam walked right into the first one and automatically apologised before taking a step back. Their ghoulish, gouged eyes made him shiver. But then he felt a strange surge of relief – Henry had talked to him about how much he loved to carve wood, he found it calming after a long day plotting to kill people – and Sam knew that he was at least in the right place.
Then he found the cemetery at the back of the chapel.
The granite headstones blended in with the rest of the pitch-black scenery at first, but when Sam got closer, his torchlight revealed that most were seriously old. So much so they were either leaning at angles, falling apart, or covered in moss. But not all of them were ancient or impossible to read. The newest one, which stood out from its crumbling neighbours in the distance, and couldn’t have been more than a year or two old, grabbed his attention. He headed in that direction, but tripped over an unexpected mound of dirt and dropped his torch. Sam was pretty hard to scare – he’d read all of Henry Winter’s novels twice – but even he had a dose of the heebie-jeebies as he crawled on his hands and knees, in a graveyard, late at night, trying to retrieve his torch. The heap of dirt suggested that someone had been recently buried there, and the grass hadn’t quite had enough time to grow over the uneven soil. There was no marker, no name, and it reminded him of a pauper’s grave. But then he noticed something sticking out of the ground… an old inhaler.
Sam felt uneasy all of a sudden, and the shopkeeper’s warning about the chapel being cursed returned to haunt his thoughts. Then he heard someone whisper his name three times in the shadows just behind him.
Samuel. Samuel. Samuel.
But when he spun around, there was nobody there.
It must have just been the wind. Fear and imagination can lead the brightest of people down dark paths. No wonder a child growing up here imagined so many awful and twisted tales confusing fact and fiction, he thought, remembering all the stories that Henry said Robin had made up. He was going to ask the old man about that again as soon as he tracked him down. He had spotted a small police station in Hollowgrove, and made a mental note to stop there on the way back, hoping they might know where his friend was living now. Somebody must. World-famous authors don’t just disappear. Besides, Henry had a new book called Rock Paper Scissors coming out next year. Sam knew because he had already pre-ordered it.
He picked himself and the torch up off the muddy ground, and walked over to the newest-looking headstone in the cemetery. He had to read what was engraved on it several times before his brain could begin to process the words.
HENRY WINTER
FATHER KILLER OF ONE, AUTHOR OF MANY.
1937–2018
He didn’t believe at first that Henry was dead.
There was a tiny glass box on the grave, the kind someone might keep trinkets inside. Sam shone his torch on it, and hesitated before bending down to take a closer look. When he did, he saw that the box contained three items. A sapphire ring, a paper crane, and a small pair of vintage scissors, designed to look like a stork. It was the ring that caught his eye, not just because of the sparkling blue rock, but because it was still attached to what appeared to be a human finger. The wind picked up then, and Sam thought he heard someone whisper his name again, three times. He didn’t believe in ghosts, but he ran to his car as fast as he could and didn’t look back.
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Acknowledgements
Huge thanks as always to Jonny Geller and Kari Stuart, not just for being the best agents in the known universe, but also for being two of the best, wisest and kindest human beings I am lucky enough to know. Huge thanks also to Kate Cooper and Nadia Mokdad for selling my stories around the world, and to Josie Freedman and Luke Speed for the screen adaptations of my novels. Thank you to all the lovely people at Curtis Brown and ICM, with special thanks to Viola Hayden and Ciara Finan.
Thank you to the wonderful team at Flatiron Books, especially my editor Christine Kopprasch. I am quite superstitious when it comes to writing, and I don’t tell anyone anything about my books until I have written them. Not even my dog, and I love him the best. I had wanted to write about face blindness for a long time, so imagine my surprise when my agent sent Christine this book, and she revealed that she had the condition. Thank you, Christine, for your genuine love of books, your persistent kindness, and for making this book so much better than it was. Thank you to Cicely Aspinall and the team at HarperCollins in the UK, and to all my other publishers around the world for taking such good care of my books.
Thank you to Scotland for inspiring so much of this story. If there is a more beautiful place on earth, I have yet to find it. All of my books have been partly written and/or edited in the Scottish Highlands, and my visits grow longer each year. Special thanks to the face in the window of the property I rented during the ‘Beast from the East’ snow storms of 2018, and the converted chapel where I had the idea for this novel. I remember every single thing about the day this story happened inside my head.
Thank you to Daniel, for being my first reader, best friend, and best lockdown partner a girl could wish for. For all of those reasons and so many more, this book is for you.
Thank you to the booksellers, librarians, journalists, book reviewers, book bloggers, and bookstagramers who have been so kind about my novels, and to everyone else who has helped put my books into the hands of readers. My final and biggest thanks is to all of you. Your beautiful pictures of the books and kind words always mean the world to me, but even more so this year. When I look back at 2020, I know it was the kindness of readers that kept me writing during the darkest of times. I’m forever grateful for your support, and I hope you continue to enjoy my stories.
About the Publisher
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