by M. B. Shaw
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To Fred Kahane Who keeps me sane.
Prologue
Christmas Day 2017
The sound of the water was deafening. This stretch of the River Itchen was narrow, little more than a stream in places, but it was deep, and the current was fast, causing the ancient waterwheel to churn and splash and creak with unexpected ferocity, like a battlefield’s roar. Somewhere in the distance, church bells were pealing, fighting their way through the din. Five o’clock. As good a time to die as any.
Tying on the stone was easy, despite the darkness and the noise and the cold that numbed one’s fingers. Everything had been easy, in fact. All that fear, the stomach-souring anticipation of the act, had been for nothing in the end. Everything had gone exactly according to plan. So far, anyway. There was a symmetry to that, at least, the satisfaction of a job well done. One could even call it a pleasure of sorts.
Across the bitterly cold water, the lights of Mill House glowed warm and inviting. Through the sash windows of the Wetherbys’ grand drawing room, a Christmas tree twinkled. Gaudy and colourful, rising out of a shiny sea of discarded wrapping paper, torn from joyously opened gifts, it had clearly been decorated by children, as all Christmas trees should be. Few things in life were sadder than an ‘adult’ Christmas tree, tastefully decked out in themed colours. Where was the magic in that?
Not that it mattered anymore.
Nothing mattered anymore.
The water was as cold as stone, cold enough to make one flinch. But only momentarily. It was time to let go. The river opened up eagerly to receive its Christmas gift, pulling it down into the familiar black depths with the cloying, greedy embrace of a lover.
Feet first. Then legs. Torso. Head.
Gone.
* * *
On the opposite bank of the river, a torchlight danced.
Lorcan Wetherby, youngest son of the celebrated author Dom Wetherby and his wife, Ariadne, had ventured outside to play with his Christmas presents: a Scooby-Doo flashlight and a motorised toy boat, his pride and joy. Lorcan could still feel the excitement of the afternoon, when his oldest brother Marcus had pulled the big parcel wrapped in holly-sprigged paper out from under the tree. Handing out Christmas presents one by one under the tree after lunch was a family tradition, prolonging both the agony and the ecstasy for generations of Wetherby children.
‘“To Lorcan”,’ Marcus read aloud. ‘“Merry Christmas and all our love, Mummy and Daddy.’”
Lorcan had torn at the paper like a puppy, emitting a squeal of pure delight when he saw it. Exactly like the one on TV.
‘Remoke control!’ He beamed at his mother. ‘It’s remoke control!’
Ariadne beamed back. She adored her son. ‘That’s right, darling.’
Waiting for his father to put the batteries in and set the boat up had been torture. But after inhaling two slices of Ariadne’s homemade Christmas cake so quickly Marcus could have sworn he saw marzipan chunks coming out of his little brother’s nose, the boat was finally ready and Lorcan had raced down the sloping lawn to the banks of the Itchen to play with it.
Dark had long since fallen. Recently Lorcan had felt afraid of the dark, and particularly of ‘ghosts’, which he saw constantly, hovering around every tree or lichen-covered wall. His father, Dom, blamed it on Scooby-Doo, a new obsession. His mother wasn’t so sure.
‘I wouldn’t be too quick to dismiss it. Maybe he’s really seeing something.’
‘Like what?’ Dom Wetherby frowned. ‘Things that go “bump” in the night?’
Ariadne smiled patiently. For a writer, Dominic could be terribly unimaginative at times. ‘This house is over four hundred years old, darling,’ she reminded him. ‘There may well be ghosts here. Children like Lorcan often see things other people don’t, or can’t. Maybe he’s just more attuned to the supernatural than we are.’
Attuned or not, Lorcan wasn’t afraid tonight. He had seen a ghost as it happened, less than an hour ago, moving through the woods, white and tall and looming. But the ghost hadn’t seen him. He was too busy with whatever he had in his hands. Besides, Lorcan had his Scooby-Doo torch, it was Christmas, and he was at home at the Mill with Mummy and Daddy. He was safe. Cocooned. It was like Mummy said: ‘Ghosts are only people, Lorcan. Ordinary people. It’s just that you’re seeing them in an extraordinary way.’ Lorcan wasn’t sure what that meant exactly, but it made him feel better.
Ghosts were people.
People, in Lorcan’s experience, were nice.
He played with his boat till his hands were so cold they hurt. The church bells rang. He counted them. One, two, three, four, five … six. Time to go in.
Crossing at the bridge safely, where his father had shown him, he reached down gingerly to pull his boat out of the reeds. Behind him, he could hear the waterwheel turning, the familiar sound of rushing water that was the soundtrack to his life. Lorcan Wetherby loved the river. He loved it like a person. He loved the waterwheel and the Mill. He loved his home. His family.
The boat was stuck. The spiky part at the bottom – the ‘keel’, Marcus had called it – had become entangled in something, some part of the cold, watery underworld of the Itchen. Lorcan tugged harder, but still it wouldn’t budge. Carefully setting down the remote-control handset next to him on the bridge to get a better grip, he tried again, with both hands this time, plunging his arms into the frigid water right up to the elbows. Leaning back, he pulled as hard as he could, his muscles burning with exertion as he yanked and twisted the precious boat, willing it to break free.
Beneath the surface, something snapped.
A small movement at first, then a bigger one, then in one great rush up came the boat, rising out of the water like the kraken. It was still heavy, still caught up in something, but Lorcan had hold of it now, the whole, beautiful vessel safe in his two strong hands. He sat back triumphant and exhausted. After a few deep breaths, he began to try to unwind the slimy strands still coiled round the boat’s bottom.
And then he saw it.
It wasn’t reeds that had wrapped themselves, vise-like, round the keel.
It was hair.
Human hair.
Lorcan stared down in horror into the face of the corpse, its skin stretched tight and ghoulish from being pulled by the scalp. White, sightless eyes stared back at him.
Not even the sound of the river could drown out Lorcan’s screams.
PART
ONE
Chapter One
Two months earlier
Iris Grey set down her brush and blew on the tips of her frozen fingers.
It was a bitterly cold morning in Hazelford, leaden and drear, with a stinging October wind that presaged the end of autumn and the onset of winter in earnest. But despite the cold, there was something about the heavy darkness of the morning sky, with its clouds purple and swollen like bruises, that made Iris want to get outside and paint. That and the fact that she’d been aw
ake since four, staring at the ceiling in Mill Cottage, fighting back her own dark clouds of depression, running over everything in her mind until she could stand it no longer. She had to do something.
Picking up her brush again, she dipped the tip into the bright white oil paint she used to re-create the tiny, glancing flashes of light reflected off the river. At least I’m here and not in London, she thought. Not stuck in that miserable flat with Ian.
Ian McBride, Iris’s husband of almost eighteen years, was back at their place in Clapham, no doubt still fast asleep. Nothing stopped Ian from sleeping. Not earthquakes or hurricanes or bombs, and certainly not the trivial matter of a disintegrating marriage. He’s my estranged husband now, Iris thought. Then she laughed, because ‘estranged’ was a stupid word that nobody except newspaper columnists ever used, the same way that railway announcers said ‘alight’ when they meant ‘get off the train’ or ‘beverage’ instead of drink.
Still, ‘estranged’ was what Iris and Ian were, given that Iris had rented Mill Cottage on her own and often spent weeks here at a time without so much as a phone call home. Then again, whenever she did go home, she and Ian barely spoke to one another, making it hard to know what the point of a phone call might be.
Five foot two and naturally slim, people generally considered Iris to be pretty in a petite, elfin, slightly bird-like way. At forty-one, she could easily have passed for five years younger, with her dark hair, shiny like a raven’s feathers, pale, clear skin and sad chocolate-brown eyes that were too big for her face and lent her an almost cartoonish look. On the other hand, she was not a woman who ‘took care of herself’, as the women’s magazines liked to say. She rarely wore make-up, and had never in her life indulged in a pedicure or a facial or any of the other countless rituals that most of her girlfriends seemed to devote so much time to. And although she did like clothes, her art agent had once defined Iris’s style as ‘deranged jackdaw’ – picking out the brightest, shiniest, most colourful garments available and throwing them onto her body in as random and thoughtless a manner as possible. From time to time, for special occasions, Iris would tone it down and, when elegantly dressed, was a strikingly beautiful woman. But today she was wearing a more typical ensemble of oversized dungarees tucked into wellington boots, a rainbow-striped polo-neck sweater, fingerless gloves made to look like sheep, a charity-shop duffel coat two sizes too big for her and a knitted Peruvian hat.
Staring intently at the swirling waters of the Itchen, Iris considered her next brush stroke, pushing thoughts of her husband out of her mind. God, it was hard to paint water. An accomplished portrait painter, Iris was an expert at capturing human expression and emotion, boiling her subjects down to their essence and recording that essence on canvas. Stupidly, she’d always imagined landscape painting as being more static. Less challenging, perhaps, because it was less alive. How wrong could you be?
If nothing else, standing on a cold Hampshire riverbank since the crack of arse had taught Iris that everything was alive. Everything was moving, evolving, changing constantly. The river swirled and danced and rushed; the clouds drifted and morphed their way across the sky; the spindly tree branches swayed and shivered pathetically in the wind like the starved limbs of concentration-camp prisoners, pleading for escape. Even the mellow gold stone of the Mill itself seemed to have a life of its own, glowing with light and warmth at one moment and retreating into gloomy shadow the next.
It really was a beautiful house. The perfect size – large enough to feel stately and grand, yet small enough to remain romantic and charming – the Mill at Hazelford was Iris’s idea of the quintessential English country idyll. Both the house and Iris’s rented cottage in the grounds belonged to Dom Wetherby, author of the wildly popular Grimshaw books, a series of crime novels featuring an ageing, cantankerous detective of the same name. Iris had started reading one of the books a few years ago, but then lost it halfway through and never got around to finishing it. It was some story involving a Swiss bank and Nazi gold. There might have been a Russian prostitute in it. In all honesty, Iris wasn’t really a fan. In her view, the real world was already more than sufficiently populated with grumpy middle-aged men without the need to add to their number in fiction. But she admired Dom Wetherby’s larger-than-life personality and had always coveted his stunning house, which she’d driven past numerous times, en route to various repertory theatres with Ian.
Iris’s husband was a playwright, at one time very successful, although these days a medium run in provincial rep, otherwise known as crumbling, half-empty small-town theatres, was the best Ian McBride could realistically hope for. One dreary weekend at the end of the summer, Iris had just happened to see an advertisement in the Sunday Times ‘Property’ section that felt like fate.
It was headed: ‘The Mill at Hazelford’.
I know that house, Iris thought. That’s my dream house.
‘Two-bedroom cottage to let,’ ran the copy, ‘on idyllic private Hampshire estate. Would suit artist or writer.’
Before she had time to talk herself out of it, Iris rang the number on the ad and rented Mill Cottage for six months. It will be my artistic escape, she lied to herself. A place to go and paint in peace.
She waited for the inevitable explosion from Ian – they couldn’t afford it, not after all the money they’d blown on IVF. It was an indulgence. How dare Iris commit to something like that without discussing it with him first, et cetera, et cetera … But in the event, he merely shrugged and went back upstairs to write. Iris tried not to admit to herself how bad a sign this was for the state of their marriage.
Originally the idea was that she would go to the cottage to paint at weekends, but weekends soon became weeks. Fast-forward a month and a half and here Iris was, effectively living in Hazelford full-time. Alone. Like a mad cat lady, only without the cats.
In their place Iris had her doll’s house, a beautifully made antique Dutch model, hand-turned in elm and complete with working sash windows and miniature louvred shutters. It had been Iris’s most prized possession since childhood, a gift from her grandmother Violet, and she had always treasured it. Obviously she knew a forty-one-year-old woman ‘playing’ with doll’s houses had more than a touch of the pathetic about it. No doubt she should have grown out of it years ago. But admiring and rearranging the miniature rooms, adding over the decades to her collection of tiny, perfectly formed objects, had brought Iris immense pleasure and peace, and it was such a harmless hobby, in the end, she couldn’t bring herself to give it up.
Pulling her thick duffel coat more tightly around her against the cold, she glanced up and smiled broadly. A swan had unexpectedly appeared round the river bend, followed by four cygnets. Pristine white and regal, the mother bird extended her elegant neck and dramatically spread her wings just for a moment, shaking them out like a Brazilian carnival dancer showing off her bejewelled costume. Then she re-folded them neatly onto her back, all the while gliding towards Iris. Behind her, her four adorable brown chicks bobbed along awkwardly, as ungainly as their mother was graceful.
‘Oh, how lovely!’ Iris said aloud, watching the little family pass. But as soon as they’d disappeared from sight, the sadness hit her like a bowling ball in the stomach.
You’re being ridiculous, Iris told herself firmly. You’re an educated, rational woman. You will not feel envious of a bloody bird!
Time for a cup of tea. Putting down her brushes, cold to the bone, Iris held the still-wet canvas at arm’s length and was heading towards the cottage when raised voices made her turn round.
‘Stop! What are you doing?’
Ariadne Wetherby, Dom’s wife and Iris’s landlady, sounded frightened. Iris had barely met the family since she took the cottage. The Wetherbys kept themselves to themselves. But on the rare occasions their paths had crossed, Dom Wetherby’s wife had always come across as a gentle, floaty, hippyish, softly spoken sort of person. It made the alarm in her voice now doubly disconcerting.
‘What? D�
��you think I’m going to drown you?’
The other voice was a man’s, a young man’s. Also loud, but there was no fear in his tone. Only malice.
‘Push you in and hold you down? Like the witch that you are?’ He laughed, a horrible, throaty sound that broke into a smoker’s cough at the end. ‘God knows you deserve it.’
‘Stop it! Billy … no!’
A scream, loud and shrill, made Iris drop her brushes and canvas and scramble up the bank. Slipping on the wet ground, mud splattering onto coat and face, she saw them within seconds, just a few yards further along the bank. A slim, dark-haired young man had grabbed hold of Ariadne Wetherby’s outstretched arms and was forcing her backwards towards the rushing river. From where she was, Iris could only see Ariadne’s back, but the man’s face was clearly visible: handsome, yet made ugly by the contorted, sadistic expression, the narrowed eyes and the cruel, mocking curve of his lips.
‘Is everything all right?’ Iris shouted over the roar of the river. Clearly everything wasn’t, but this seemed the best way to get their attention, to make the man realise he’d been seen at least.
It worked. He looked up, startled, and instantly released Ariadne.
‘Everything’s fine,’ he shouted back coolly.
Ignoring him, Iris moved closer to where they were, addressing herself solely to Ariadne. ‘Mrs Wetherby? Are you OK? Do you need help?’
‘No, no, thank you. I’m fine.’ Ariadne straightened her windswept hair, the imprint of her earlier panic still visible in her strained expression. But then she smiled, relieved, and the tension evaporated. Slipping her hand around the young man’s waist, she leaned into him, as if the two of them were the best of friends. ‘And please, you must call me Ariadne. Sorry if we disturbed you. This is my middle son, Billy. He’ll be living with us at the Mill for a while.’
The young man raised an unenthusiastic hand in greeting. ‘Hello.’
