by Jen Williams
‘You are out of your fucking mind.’ Heather swallowed hard. Standing up felt like the hardest thing in the world, and there was a ringing noise in her ears. Distantly she was aware of blood pooling inside her jeans, and every time she moved fresh lines of pain encircled her body. ‘All of you.’
Bert pursed his lips together. Now that he was looking at her dead on, she could see that one of his eyes was false; it looked dull under the fierce white lights.
‘Michael, he didn’t care who he took. He was always so primitive, that one. That little beast. But I was interested in the perfect victim, one bred for the very purpose of dying – and the longer we waited to reap our harvest, the sweeter it was. The power of knowing that there are lives out there that are owed to you, that you can take at any time. Don’t you see how fine that is? How apt? Livestock, ready for the culling. Ripe.’ He grinned, revealing his long teeth. ‘But then, we couldn’t wait forever. Time wears us all down in the end. We raised the boy to have more refined tastes than his father. And if the police started to think that perhaps they hadn’t got the real Red Wolf, all those years ago, well … The lad was keen to see his father again. A boy like Lyle, he can’t exactly go visiting people, as I’m sure you’ll agree.’
‘You mad old bastard. Haven’t you got it yet? This is the end of your nonsense. Your weapon is dead, and me and Nikki and Cathy are bloody walking out of here right now.’
He cocked his head to one side again. The dog sat up, its ears pricked.
‘You have to get through me, lass. You’ll have to kill me. And you don’t have what it takes to do that, because your blood is weak. Michael was a suggestible idiot, easily moulded into what I wanted him to be, and in the end Lyle was even worse, tainted by the blood of your mother. And what are you? Just some other little offshoot of a damaged, incestuous family.’ Seeing the look of surprise that passed over her face, he grinned a little wider. ‘You wouldn’t know, of course, but the woman Michael killed when he was a child wasn’t his real mother. Ask him some time about the woman in the red coat. Ask him what she did to him.’
‘Enough.’ Heather raised the knife. ‘Get out of my way. Now.’
‘I told you, you’ll have to kill me.’ He raised his hands up, palms flat. ‘And you don’t have it in you, little girl.’
Behind her, Heather heard Nikki moving against the concrete, but sounds in the square concrete room were growing distant and distorted. She could see the old man in front of her, his sneering expression of disgust twisting his face into something goblin-like, but hanging over him and obscuring him was a stark, red landscape – a place that beckoned to her, that called her home. She held the knife up.
‘You don’t know me at all.’
She slammed the knife into his chest. A fierce bolt of joy passed through her, and briefly all the pain from her own wounds was wiped out. The old goblin made a strangled noise and he seemed to crumple in front of her. There was a dog barking, somewhere.
Heather, Heather, Heather.
And then reality crashed back into her in a rush. At some point, she had pulled the knife back out again – she had stabbed him in the upper part of his chest, not far from his collar bone – and bright spurts of his blood covered her hands and arms. In a shudder of revulsion and horror she dropped the knife, and it clattered against the concrete floor.
‘Fuck!’
‘I knew it,’ he croaked. ‘All of you, so weak.’ He pressed one gnarled hand to the wound turning his shirt black. ‘Why … do I even … waste … my time?’
‘I can’t …’ Heather glanced at the knife, then back to the old man. ‘I’m not—’
From the shadowy stairwell behind him, an arm reached out of the dark and circled his neck. The old man was yanked backwards, and this time he did scream, just before something shiny and lethal ripped his throat into a giant gaping mouth. There was a brief struggle, Bert’s arms flapping at nothing, and then he fell back to the floor in a rapidly expanding pool of blood. Heather had a glimpse of the figure on the stairs – he wore her face, though his eyes were not human, not human at all – and then Lyle was gone. His footsteps were light scuffles on the steps, and there was the crash of a door opening and closing. Gone.
With some difficulty, Heather reached down and plucked the knife from the floor, then staggered back to Nikki and the woman called Cathy. She tugged away her friend’s gag, then used the last of her strength to cut the bonds around her hands.
‘Hev? Are you all right? Christ, you’re bleeding all over.’
Heather nodded dumbly. She sat down, and she now had the distinct feeling she couldn’t get back up. Nikki was still looking at her even as she untied the other woman.
Heather looked slowly around the room. It was growing darker. ‘Hey, where’s the dog? I didn’t see where the dog went.’
‘What dog?’ Nikki took her arm then and shook it. ‘Stay awake, Hev. What dog? There wasn’t any dog. Hev?’
46
Before
The nightmare of Fiddler’s Mill retreated for Colleen, but only so far. The creatures she had left behind in the woods didn’t forget about her, after all – and all her life, she felt them watching.
There was the summer fête, where she had seen the Oak Leaf symbol on an awning, where small children were queuing to pick up their prizes. It was his company, his way of keeping track, and although he wasn’t there, it was as though she could smell his fetid old-man breath on the back of her neck. In a blind panic, she had scooped Heather up into her arms and turned towards the car park.
There was the card, left outside their front door. When she thought how close they had come then to finding out the truth, it had knocked all the strength from her.
And then, eventually, there came the Bickerstaff sisters, creeping around her door and pushing their way inside. All of Colleen’s careful defences, built up over so many years, were tattered into pieces over that long, horrific afternoon. She learned the fate of her long-lost child, of the harvest that was coming, and still they kept her pinned in place with the worst threat of all: tell anyone, and we’ll come for your daughter, too.
When they finally left her – after they’d extracted every painful secret she’d ever held close to her heart – Colleen went and fetched her nicest notepad, the one she had never used to write to Michael. She sat down at her own kitchen table and, just like her daughter, she tried to find the words.
47
The forest did not seem darker with him in it. The birds still sang, the sunlight still filtered down through the branches, a dappled blessing on the earth and grass. Michael Reave walked with his face turned up, trying to take it all in, and Heather watched him closely. It seemed wrong that Fiddler’s Wood did not recoil from him, that the skies didn’t turn black and the trees die, but then, she reminded herself, he was their creature. He had fed the roots and nourished the ground, in his own way.
‘Heather?’ He turned to face her, smiling. ‘Look, do you see that there?’ He nodded towards a hole next to a small mound of fresh earth. ‘That’s the entrance to a badger sett. I used to see them sometimes, but they’re shy animals. They can have big families living inside them, the larger setts. A clever little network of tunnels.’
‘This isn’t a nature walk.’
‘No, lass.’ He put his smile away, and his eyes drifted up to look over her shoulder. ‘No, you’re right there.’
Behind her, she knew he could see the police gathered, DI Ben Parker among them. They were never far behind.
So far, Michael Reave had led them to the remains of four women, one of which, he said, had never been listed as one of his official victims. Identifying them was going to be difficult – he had only ever buried what he called ‘the soft parts’ of them within the woods, although he had sometimes included other things – trinkets, items from their purses, or hairclips, even a shoe. He had agreed to do this as long as Heather continued to visit him and came with him on these little jaunts to Fiddler’s Wood. With the d
eath of Albert ‘Bert’ Froame and the capture of Lyle Reave, all his pretences of innocence had vanished.
‘You’re happy here.’ It wasn’t a question.
‘Aye. I was happy here, once.’ He stopped, so she stopped. His hands were bound behind his back with steel cuffs, and he had made no threats towards her, but she still didn’t like to get too close. ‘Before it all really started …’ He shrugged. ‘There was a bit of time where I thought I was free, and I spent it here, with these trees. Those were good memories.’
She nodded. She supposed that, if you didn’t know what was buried here, it could seem like a peaceful place.
‘I wanted to ask you …’ Heather glanced back to the police, making sure they were close enough to help, but far enough away not to hear. ‘About the woman in the red coat.’
Michael Reave straightened up. He took a long, wavering breath in, then held it for a moment. His eyes were too bright.
‘My sister,’ he said eventually. ‘My older sister. Only she wasn’t just that. My father, your granddad, was a sick man, and he infected the whole house with his sickness. My sister was born in 1947, her name was … Evie.’ He stopped. Saying her name seemed to cause him some physical pain. ‘And then when she got a little older, when she’d just turned thirteen, Evie had me.’
Heather looked down at her hands, feeling sick. She thought of Ben Parker telling her that killers had almost always experienced abuse.
‘The woman who called herself my mother, she hated me for it,’ continued Reave. ‘I was a sign of everything that was wrong with our family, lass, do you see? And Evie, I think she tried to make up for it, for how much her mother hated me. But she only knew one way of expressing that. Because of what had been done to her. She would come to me, at night.’ He paused, shuddering. ‘I still remember her standing in my bedroom door, in her red coat. Smiling. She said she just wanted to love me.’
‘What happened to her? To Evie?’
‘She died. Long after I ran to Fiddler’s Mill, she drifted away to live with some bad people. The house she was staying in burned down while she was in it. I only heard about it because it was in a newspaper.’ When he looked at Heather again, he had composed himself. ‘And … I don’t think you should hear any more about it. It’s not healthy, lass.’
Somewhere in the trees above them, a magpie was making a racket. He looked up into the branches, smiling again.
‘I would like to tell you another story,’ he said.
Heather shrugged.
‘Once upon a time, there was a rich man who had spent all his life doing evil deeds. He had been mean, never shared his wealth, and had watched as others starved. He had hurt people for his own pleasure and enjoyed it. Then one day he had a change of heart. When his neighbour, a poor man with hungry children, came calling at his house, he promised that the poor man could have half his food and wealth if, when he died, he watched over his grave for three nights in a row. He was worried …’ Michael Reave paused, his face slack. ‘He was worried that the devil would come for his soul.’
For a long time, Reave didn’t say anything more, although Heather was sure that wasn’t the end of the story. They walked a little further, with the soft trample of the police coming along behind.
‘This doesn’t change anything, you know,’ Heather said eventually. ‘It doesn’t change who you are, or what you did.’
‘No,’ he said. ‘It doesn’t.’ He turned to look at her, and not for the first time Heather felt a shiver of discomfort; it was as though he looked straight to the heart of her. As though he could see down to her bones.
‘What is it?’
‘I was just thinking.’ He smiled, that rueful almost-smile made so famous by his mugshot. ‘I was just thinking that Colleen should have given me you, instead of Lyle. There’s so much more of me in you.’
It was spring. The dog roses on the cliff path were all in bloom, their soft pink and yellow heads nodding in the freshening sea breeze. Heather brushed her fingers against the petals as she passed them, plucking one or two blooms and thinking of nothing in particular until she came to the cliff’s edge. Yawning away below her was the drop, and the solid blue sea – the last thing her mother had ever seen, probably.
Colleen Evans had been faced with a terrible decision – the worst decision, perhaps, that anyone could have to make – and, ultimately, she hadn’t been able to live with it. Certainly not when the Bickerstaff sisters had come sniffing around her door, not when the time had come for the dark harvest of Fiddler’s Wood. Such a decision had broken her, twisted her into something sharp and cold, and Heather wondered if Lyle, sitting in his prison cell, deserved to know that: if he deserved to know how it had broken their mother, to give him to the monsters. She thought, all in all, that it was a mercy he hadn’t earned. However small a mercy it was.
‘I think I’m more like you, actually.’ She said it forcefully, but the wind picked up her words and snatched them out to sea. ‘I really do think that. I’m sorry I didn’t see it sooner, Mum.’ A seagull cried overhead, a clear and hopeful sound. ‘I’m sorry.’
Heather scattered the dog-rose petals where she stood and walked away from the cliff’s edge.
Acknowledgements
This book essentially owes its entire existence to my brilliant agent and friend, Juliet Mushens. We have long shared an interest in true crime, swapping stories and Wikipedia links, and one day, when I joked about passing off all my dodgy internet activity as book research, she fixed her eye upon me – via WhatsApp – and said, ‘Well, why don’t you write a thriller, Sennifer?’ Thank you, Juliet, for being the kick up the bum I needed, and of course for being one of my dearest, wisest friends.
So, Dog Rose Dirt was a new genre for me, and never has a single book taught me so much. I’ve been lucky enough to have an extraordinary team of excellent minds to lead me through it and very kindly teach me all the things I needed to learn. Huge thanks to Natasha Bardon at HarperFiction, who saw through to the bones of this book immediately and made it work, and to Jack Renninson, who has kept everything on track and offered thoughtful advice at each stage. Enormous gratitude also to the team at Crooked Lane Books, who made me feel so welcome and championed the book with such enthusiasm – Faith Black Ross, Melissa Rechter, and Madeline Rathle, you all rock. Many thanks also to Jenny Bent, another agent who has had my back at every step.
I happen to be writing these acknowledgements in the middle of a worldwide pandemic, which is certainly not a sentence I ever expected to write, to say the least. We’ve been in lockdown for around three months now, and it’s not an easy time to do anything creative, let alone write fiction. The two brilliant bookshops where I work, Clapham Books and Herne Hill Books, haven’t seen me for a while, but my colleagues have been so supportive and brilliant during a period that has not been the best of times (for various reasons). Nikki, Ed, Sophie, and Roy – thank you so much.
As ever, I am grateful to have had the backup, moral support, and effervescent company of a bunch of writer friends. Den Patrick, Andrew Reid, Adam Christopher, Alasdair Stuart, and Peter Newman – thank you for being the best sounding boards and drinking buddies. I would also like to give a shout out to the Onesies; I hope to get back to adventuring with you soon. And, of course, unending gratitude and love to my mum and the rest of my family, some of whom might even read this book since it features murders rather than dragons.
Lastly, all my love to Marty Perrett, my partner and best friend, who I think has always been slightly concerned by my interest in missing persons and body disposal. It turns out it was all for a book, after all. Love you babe.
Also by Jen Williams
The Copper Promise
The Iron Ghost
The Silver Tide
The Ninth Rain
The Bitter Twins
The Poison Song
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