I sit up and reach for the TV remote. The all-night news is on, filled with scenes of an apocalyptic landslide in India. Crowds of men and women have gathered at the site, calling and wailing until they organise themselves into a human chain, their hands outstretched to help those who can still be reached. The camera pans across from above, showing a river of languid, swirling mud. The remnants of buildings float, splintered like matchsticks. It’s as near a scene of hell as I can picture, the hands, the screams, the sickly movement of the mud, slow and thick and relentless. Not hell, I think, but purgatory – the victims who are not quite dead trying to swim, arms floundering, legs sinking, mouths opening and closing only to gag on the clagging brown sludge. I can’t watch.
I turn over to another channel. This time it’s a crime drama. There’s a woman screaming off-camera and a man flings himself into a darkened room. The window is wide open, net curtains sucked out by the wind. The camera pans from the outside of the building in. He passes through a bedroom into the en suite. Blood lies slick across the floor and one arm hangs limp over the side of the bath. The music pounds like something out of Psycho. It’s been done so many times before, but it works, doesn’t it? The thrill of someone else’s terror, the frisson of their last moments, the satisfaction of their horrifyingly violent death. Cathartic. Safe. Not me.
I flick through more channels and it’s all the same: pain and death and drama and conflict, shouting, screaming, music so loud my headache will surely worsen … Why am I watching this stuff?
I switch off the TV and slide further back onto the sofa.
I don’t want to think about Harry and his daughter anymore, or Duncan’s dog-in-the-manger attitude to my spending time with them. It’s not very likely that I’ll ever see Harry again. He didn’t offer me any contact details and I didn’t ask.
Instead, my mind turns to that man in the field, Ray Turner. He still bothers me. Joe must think he’s got wind of what he’s found. The puppetrider, it’s such a distinctive name for a coin. And the image of the skeletal half-figure clattering on his horse is hard to ignore. That Joe should find that coin after all these years seems prophetic.
I jump up and pace the room. I need to talk to Duncan, to tell him about the coin. But I daren’t. We’ve never talked about it in all these years, a damning secret buried between us. If I did say anything, Joe would never forgive me. I’ve betrayed him once already, haven’t I? It’s just a coin, I think. Maybe not even the same coin. I twist my head from side to side. No, this is my guilty conscience coming back to torment me.
The kitchen is cold, the underfloor heating having long since switched itself off. Duncan always did like the house cold, another petty dispute between us. I pull the rug around my shoulders and move across to a small standing desk, pushed against the wall by the fridge. I need to know more about the puppetrider. How many are out there and what one coin is worth. I retrieve my laptop from under the bills and lift up the screen. I turn it on and type in the words:
How rare is a puppetrider?
Nothing much useful turns up – there’s a load more coin-listing sites and images. But not a lot specifically about puppetriders other than what I’ve read before. I can see that coin values vary from a few pounds to hundreds or even thousands, depending on the metal content and rarity. I tap my fingers restlessly against the desk. Maybe I’m not searching hard enough. I lift my head to check the long corridor – there’s no sign of Duncan. I return my gaze to the screen.
I swap to viewing images instead of text and open up one picture that shows me both sides of the coin at the same time. It’s such a distinctive pattern. I could never mistake it. It must have meant something. I find a chat site where people talk wistfully about finding one. I swap back and forth between the two pages to find them speculating on who the rider on the back of the coin is. A sun god, a roman warrior, or perhaps a pre-Celtic representation of Death itself.
One commentator goes on about a folk tale about a young man who’s lost. He enters a cave, lit up by a host of candles. They’re set in the sandy floor and pushed into the tiny alcoves in the rock, all of them flickering in the dark. As his eyes adjust to the gloom, he notices that the various candles have different heights. Then he sees an old man standing in the shadows.
‘Do you like my candles?’ says the old man.
‘Yes,’ says the other, ‘but why are there so many?’
‘Each one is the soul of a living person. Those that are taller are babies and children, those that are short are old like me, or have some other reason why their life won’t be long.’
The young man looks at all the tiny flames illuminating the cave. He swallows and the inevitable question comes.
‘Which one is mine?’
‘Are you sure you want to know?’ says the old man.
‘Yes!’ comes the reply.
‘That one.’
The old man lifts a bony finger and points to the smallest. The young man gasps.
‘B … but that can’t be mine,’ he says. ‘I’m only twenty-one years old!’
The old man shrugs. The young man thinks.
‘How about this one? Whose is that?’ he says.
He points to a stubby candle directly behind the old man. The old man turns to look and in that split second, the young man snatches up a new candle and jams it onto what’s left of his. The flame is snuffed out. The young man falls dead. Death, says the narrator, cannot be cheated.
When you’re young, you don’t believe you’ll ever die. It’s one of those things you know is inevitable, unthinkable, but a long, long way away.
I toggle through more search results. There’s reference to the ancient custom of placing a coin on each eye of the dead, or in the corpse’s mouth, of giving a coin to the ferryman in payment for one’s passage to the underworld. Or is it two coins – for the journey there and back again? My eyes are dragged back to the photos of the puppetrider. No wonder Joe’s been obsessed with this coin. It has such a wild and pagan look.
It feels all wrong, knowing the coin is a payment for death. I, we, had no idea. It was intended as a discreet marker. I feel the horrific irony of it engulf me.
It must have slowly wriggled from its hiding place in the cement, or broken loose and fallen into the water. Then been washed out by stray currents through the tunnels of the old workings. Out into the wild. I picture it ebbing and flowing in the silt until it had finally lodged itself somewhere on the shore, our shore, right at the bottom of our fields.
What else lies nearby waiting to be found? Bones, tiny finger bones, like white pearls in the mud?
Duncan promised me it would be safe.
That no one would ever find her …
CHAPTER 39
CLAIRE – AFTER
I am angry with myself. For what happened earlier this morning and the time before, when I went in the other direction as far as the cattle grid and convinced myself I was driving to the police station. It seemed so real. And yet I had this kind of paralysis, sitting there at the wheel, imagining it all. Was that almost-crash in the fog also my imagination? I bite my lip, I am going mad. I can’t go on like this. Not sleeping, not eating, living in self-imposed isolation.
There are people in the village. I think back to the man I met. The village is occupied after all, he’d said as much. And someone has to be responsible for the removal of all my posters. Unless I’ve imagined that too. No, that was real, he was real. Maybe I could speak to him, ask him what’s going on. I don’t understand why anyone would take them down like that. If I’ve upset anyone with my posters, I’m keen to explain myself. Besides, maybe one of them knows something about Joe.
I decide to walk to the village. I’m not driving this time. It’ll do me good, a bit of exercise. The rain has gone, but the hanging basket by the back door has blown off its hook and scattered compost over the pathway. I can’t face picking it up, gathering the pieces and having to go back inside again to clean up. So I leave it, rolling awkwardly back
and forth like a severed head.
I turn left at the bottom of the track. The wind rips through the trees with the fury of a vengeful god thrusting his hand across the canopy. It buffets me from behind, pushing me down the lane. Almost like it wants me to go there. My steps are brisk and purposeful. The lane winds down into the valley and I stop at the first house.
This one’s a little bigger than the others. It has a front door with a small window on each side. On the doorstep is a pair of worn-out leather boots; I don’t remember seeing them before. The shoelaces are encrusted with mud with a peep of dirty yellow. I go to the door, one hand raised to knock, yet something makes me hesitate. There’s an unexpected suck of air and the door is open. An old woman stands in front of me.
‘Hello,’ she says.
Her hair is like a wraith of white smoke about her head. Her face has a startled look with thin, painted eyebrows and eyes that blink a busy hazel brown. She looks strong, resilient, but her skin is thin and sallow. One hand grips the doorknob as if she needs it for support, and her veins are pronounced and blue-blooded with age.
‘You’ll be the new one up top o’ the hill,’ she says.
‘Yes,’ I reply, not sure what else to add.
Word has spread. I guess you’d expect that in a place as small as this.
‘You’d better come in.’
She pushes the door wide open and lets me pass. I get a whiff of freshly baked bread. I catch a glimpse of a room with black beams and dried herbs hanging down from cast-iron hooks, then we pass into a front sitting room.
There’s a sofa against the wall with white lace cloths draped on the back. An armchair has been placed directly under the window and the old woman perches on it as I sink into the sofa. Her face is shadowed by the morning light, so I can’t quite see her facial expressions. I wriggle in my seat, metal springs digging into my legs beneath the fabric. The room’s not as big as I thought it was when I first sat down – she’s too close.
I’m not sure where to start. I unfold one of the posters and lay it out flat on my lap.
‘This is Joe,’ I say. ‘He’s my son. He’s gone missing.’
I offer her the poster. She sits unmoving.
‘I put these posters up, along the valley, but I don’t understand – someone has taken them all down.’
‘’E looks a lovely boy,’ she says, her tone level and appeasing.
She’s ignored my question. I feel my frustration rise.
‘He’s eighteen. It’s important; he’s not well. He hasn’t come home for …’ I frown, a wave of tiredness sweeping over me. ‘Several weeks.’
‘Gone missing has ’e?’ says the old woman. ‘Are you sure about that?’
‘Yes.’
There’s uncertainty in my voice. I don’t understand what she means – it’s like she’s suggesting that Joe wants to be missing.
I lean back, angry with her, myself. I’m already regretting being here.
‘They grow up so fast, don’t they?’ she says, watching me.
She stands up awkwardly, each foot shuffling after the other. She walks over to the fireplace, lifting a birdlike hand to pick up a photograph frame. She looks down at the picture. It shows a man in an old-fashioned suit and two boys – both teenagers. It must be her family, a long time ago.
‘I ’ad boys,’ she says. ‘A mother stays close to her boys. But they grow up eventually, find a wife and move on; if yer lucky.’ She turns back to me. ‘It’s ’ard, letting go.’
I don’t want to let him go. I want to find him. What’s she going on about?
Her hazel eyes are sharply focused. I notice the irises, like the shoelaces outside, are flecked with yellow.
‘I’m only trying to find him. I don’t mean to upset anyone with my posters.’
‘Posters?’ says the old woman, as if she hadn’t heard what I said before.
I nod eagerly.
‘I put them up a couple of days ago and someone’s taken them all down?’
I phrase it as a clear question, but she still doesn’t give me an answer.
‘Have you seen him? Has anyone else in the village said they’ve seen him?’
I hold out the poster with Joe’s photograph, waggling it in my hand, willing her to take it. But she stands unmoving. I think of the man by the Hall gates. The one who scrunched up my poster. What’s wrong with these people? I don’t get why no one seems to want to help me.
My eyes flit across the furniture in the room, the photograph on the shelf. I’d assumed this house was empty, that the whole village was empty, but evidently that was a mistake. I slide my eyes away, embarrassed, remembering the way I simply walked into one of the cottages before.
I note the wooden radio on the shelf in the corner, the sunburst mahogany mirror hanging by a chain over the fireplace, the red-and-white gingham tablecloth on the table half-folded back against the wall. It makes me think of my grandparents’ front parlour, the kind of room kept only for Sundays and unexpected visitors.
Am I an unexpected visitor? Unwanted, for sure.
‘A lad like that, well …’ The old woman shrugs. ‘I’m sorry, I know it’s ’ard. Where do you think he is?’
We’re getting nowhere. She’s asking me questions and dammit, I don’t want to appear rude, but this is clearly a waste of time.
I stand up.
‘Thank you,’ I say. ‘I’m sorry to have disturbed you. If you hear anything, anything at all, please get in touch.’
I press the poster down on the table and turn to leave, still irritated that she hasn’t taken it from my hand.
She follows me to the front door and I turn round to take one more look. Her skin is sunken against her face, paper thin. I can see right through to the bones beneath.
‘Goodbye,’ she says, those yellow-brown eyes slowly blinking. Her voice is crackled and painful now, like a bad radio transmission fading in and out. ‘Maybe don’t knock on the neighbours’ houses just yet – people are quiet around here, don’t like to be disturbed – d’yer understand?’
I nod, mortified.
‘Good,’ she says. ‘I really do wish you luck with your son. We’ve all been there.’ Then she appears to hesitate. ‘Have you thought of searching the Hall?’
I’m startled. It’s like she knows. Joe’s been found there once before.
‘I … I don’t want to intrude,’ I say.
She peers at me with a quizzical look, and something else. Sympathy or pity.
‘It’s okay,’ she says. ‘If you go now, in daylight, you’ll be okay. The place isn’t lived in.’
But her words seem contradictory, as if there is someone living in the hall. Or something. If you go now, in daylight, you’ll be okay. I’m not sure I know what she means by that.
‘Maybe it will help,’ she says.
CHAPTER 40
DUNCAN – AFTER
Duncan hated Claire when she left him. Not hated it, hated her. There was a difference. It was a visceral feeling, deep in his gullet. Born of a consuming sense of betrayal. As if he’d even had the right to feel that way. He’d betrayed her, not the other way around, that was how everyone else would see it. They didn’t know the truth of it. Life is never black and white.
He was in the media room. He’d come home after work and withdrawn to his usual favourite spot. It was womblike down there, with the blackout blinds down and the lights turned low. The TV was on the sports channel, the screen a luminous green. The tiny figures of footballers in red and white shirts ran across the grass accompanied by four-way shadows from the floodlights overhead.
The volume on the TV exploded with rhythmic bursts of chanting. The commentator jabbered like an overexcited hyena. Colours flashed before Duncan’s eyes and the camera zoomed in and out, taking care to pick out the bright lettering of the advertising boards lining the stadium. Then it swung to a trio of young women on the front row. They were wearing tightly fitted kit. They all had identical swathes of long layered hair and big, s
hining teeth and T-shirts emblazoned with a finance company logo. Duncan’s eyes lingered in spite of himself. It was all about the advertising, he thought, never about the sport.
He let the colours and noise wash over him, reaching out to pick up his can of lager from the storage cavity in his seat. The light from the TV flashed up against the walls, across the handful of oversized cinematic armchairs, casting shadows in every corner. It seemed only to emphasise the emptiness of the room. This had been his space, the one room that he’d spec’d out for himself, at the far end of the house where it was quiet. Claire had never liked it. There’d been a certain satisfaction in that.
‘If we’re going to go for that all-out modern luxury thing, we need a swimming pool,’ she’d said. ‘We could put it in the cellar.’
She’d always fancied a swimming pool.
‘But we’ve already planned to have a billiards table in the cellar,’ he’d said. ‘A pool isn’t at all practical. It’s far more hassle than it’s worth – no one’s going to use a pool enough to warrant the expense.’
‘I’d use it,’ she replied, ‘and it’ll add value to the house – great if we move on.’
She could be obstinate when she wanted. But then so could he.
‘We’re not going to move on. This is it, our home for life. I want us to have the things we’ve always dreamed of.’
His dreams, he’d meant, not hers. He acknowledged that. But then it had been him bankrolling all this, hadn’t it?
‘You can join a health club,’ he added. ‘We don’t need a pool. Think of the noise from the extractor units, the steam and the vapour. It creates all sorts of problems. I’ve seen too many people put those things in and never use them. Joe would love to have his friends round and lounge about watching films, or spend time chilling out playing billiards. It’s something we can do together, too. It’ll soften the blow of the location.’
What teen wanted to be stuck out in the countryside, unable to drive, reliant on lifts from his parents or the intermittent buses? That’s all it took to win an argument, referencing Joe’s needs. Claire had always caved in to that. So the swimming pool idea was ditched, and the billiards table in the basement and the media room at the far end of the house won out. Not that Joe had ever wanted to use either.
Magpie: The gripping psychological suspense with a twist Page 17
