by Amanda Mason
‘She was showing me on her laptop, she wanted to know how to find them online. She has quite a few.’
‘Oh. Of course.’
Sarah puts her mug down and sits forward. She seems to have made some sort of decision. ‘But I don’t think …’ she says. ‘The thing is …’
Lucy’s phone buzzes angrily on the table top. She picks it up.
Flor.
Sarah’s not tired, or not just tired; she’s worried. But as Lucy unlocks the phone’s screen, this thought flutters away. ‘Sorry,’ she says, ‘it’s my brother. I’d better answer this.’
When she’s finished speaking with Florian, who seems only to be ringing to have everything Dan has already told him confirmed, with no intention of making the long journey north, or of cooperating with any investigation at the farm, Jean has arrived and she and Sarah have made a start on organising breakfast.
‘Lucy,’ Jean says, ‘is everything all right?’
‘Fine,’ says Lucy. ‘I woke up early and I thought I’d make myself some toast. I hope you don’t mind.’ The kitchen table has been cleared, their mugs and plates have vanished, Flor has said his piece and she has promised to keep him informed.
‘Of course not, but you’re welcome to eat with Cathy in the dining room.’
‘Actually, I thought I might take her a tray up. If that’s allowed.’
‘I’m sure we can manage that, can’t we, Sarah?’
‘Yes, Mrs Wyn Jones,’ says Sarah, conspicuously busy at the sink, ‘I can sort that out for you.’
Cathy disapproves of breakfast in bed. ‘Is that for me?’ she says, struggling to sit up. ‘I’m not an invalid, you know, not yet.’
Lucy stands in the doorway. ‘Well, I’ll take it back downstairs, then, shall I?’
Cathy pulls herself upright and looks at her daughter waiting.
‘Here,’ says Lucy, placing the tray carefully on her mother’s lap.
‘Thank you.’
Lucy draws the curtains and ties them back. The garden below is empty and lightly dusted with frost. ‘Did you sleep all right?’ she asks. ‘How’s your wrist?’
‘Sore. But I’ll live.’ Her mother lifts her hand, flexes it gently; she looks well enough this morning, despite the darkening bruises on her face.
‘I spoke to Dan,’ Lucy says. ‘He sends his love. Flor too.’
Her mother nods. ‘The last time Dante wrote he suggested we talk on – the sky, well, not the sky but—’
‘Skype.’
‘Yes, that’s it.’
‘Do you have an account?’
‘I think so. Sarah helped me set something up, so I can talk to the girls.’ Dan’s daughters, Helen and Marianne. ‘But I haven’t used it yet.’
‘That was kind of her.’
‘I suppose so,’ says Cathy, ‘but I think I’d rather write. Proper letters, you know, emails are too – quick. There’s no time to think.’
Lucy sits in one of the armchairs.
‘I was talking to Sarah. She said you’d told her about the farm. That you’d been showing her some photographs.’
Cathy looks down, stirring the milk around her cereal bowl. ‘Yes,’ she says. ‘I had to get her to help me. I can manage most of the time but, looking for things, you know—’
‘Using a search engine.’
‘Yes. So many answers and most of them no help at all.’
‘You have to think about the terms of the search.’
‘So she said.’
‘Only – I was thinking. Do you think that might be it? What happened when you went outside? Maybe you were looking at old photographs and …’
You forgot where you were.
Cathy doesn’t reply and Lucy blunders on. ‘Because – well … I wouldn’t like to see you getting … upset.’
‘I wasn’t upset.’
‘I think you were. When you rang me, when you went wandering off.’
‘I told you. I made a mistake.’
‘We were worried. Me, Dan, Flor—’
‘I didn’t mean to frighten anyone.’
‘Anything could have happened.’
‘But nothing did.’
‘You can’t do that, Mum. You can’t just leave the house in the middle of the night chasing …’
She can’t bring herself to say it.
‘It wasn’t the middle of the night.’
‘There was no one there.’
‘Then there’s nothing to worry about.’
‘You could have been hurt. Seriously hurt.’
‘I’m fine, Lucia.’
‘But even so. It’s not a good idea, raking over the past like that. People shouldn’t be bothering you with questions about the farm. Look where it’s got us.’ She doesn’t want to think about it. She will not cry; she will not.
As her mother dresses, Lucy goes through the emails again; they’ve been corresponding for weeks. She makes a mental note of the group Nina Marshall keeps referring to, the Society for the Study of Anomalous Phenomena. She’s never heard of them.
She rereads the most recent message. They’ll be there now, at the farm, and Cathy still won’t be put off meeting with them.
She has to do something.
Lucy closes the laptop and when she looks up, her mother is sitting on the bed, coat on, hat and scarf in hand. She looks like a schoolgirl expecting a treat. ‘Let’s go out,’ Cathy says. ‘We could go down to the harbour.’
They walk along the sea front, past the shuttered amusement arcades and the row of cafes still stubbornly open for business, plastic skeletons and pumpkins lighting up windows which face out onto the flat grey sea. ‘We used to make turnip lanterns,’ Cathy says, as they pass one window, ‘do you remember? We used to cut a face into them and put a candle inside.’
‘I remember you doing it,’ says Lucy. ‘I think I remember trying, but it was hard to cut the flesh out with a blunt knife. I must have been what, five or six?’
‘We did them every year.’
‘When we were still living in Leeds.’
‘Yes.’
Leeds before the farm, Ipswich after.
Home-educated and running wild on the moors one minute, secondary school, uniforms and ‘O’ level options the next. It had been a relief, in the end, trying to fit in, to go unnoticed. No longer one of a pair, just herself alone. Lucy had erased her accent within a month of starting school, beginning the long journey away from Iron Sike Farm and the summer they spent there. ‘Tired yet?’ she asks, as they cross the road that runs along the sea front and leads to the little harbour and the pier.
‘I’m fine,’ says Cathy, her hands shoved into her coat pockets. ‘Shall we walk along to the Lifeboat House?’
‘If you like.’
Ipswich had meant staying with their grandparents: regular bedtimes, proper table manners and pocket money. Lucy had ended up attending Cathy’s old school – a comprehensive doing its best to pretend it was still a grammar. By the time they’d moved out to a place of their own, Lucy had caught up with her classmates, and was starting to outstrip them. Good marks were predictable, safe, and she began to treasure them.
The sky was doing its best to hold back the rain, but Lucy could practically smell it in the air. Clouds hung low over the sea. Fishing boats, cobles for the most part, were tied up in neat rows alongside the pier, jostling gently against each other in the lazy swell. At the far end of the sea front the Lifeboat House loomed, Victorian redbrick, damp and solid.
As soon as the last of her children had left home Cathy had moved back north, to be close to the farm.
They reach the Lifeboat House. Beyond it on the pier a fisherman sits, wearing waterproofs and wellington boots, solitary and silent. Lucy isn’t really dressed for walking along the beach, but still she follows her mother down the slipway and onto the sand.
‘It’s not as if we can stop them, you know,’ Cathy says as they walk down towards the bay, following the curve of the high-water mark. ‘And it’s no
t as if any of you would want to speak with them, is it? Or have I got that wrong?’
‘No, of course not.’ Lucy tries to ignore the flutter of panic this idea provokes. ‘But I’d still like to know what they’re looking for.’
‘You read the letters,’ says her mother. ‘They call it something different now …’ But she hesitates, struggling with the unfamiliar phrase she can’t call to mind.
‘Anomalous phenomena,’ says Lucy carefully.
‘Yes. That. She sent me a letter,’ Cathy says. ‘I don’t know how she found me, but it’s an unusual name, isn’t it? So I expect that helped. And she told me what they were going to do; that they were going to go back. And I wasn’t going to answer, not at first. I thought she’d get tired in the end, maybe she’d write me off as a dotty old lady and leave me alone. I meant to tell her to … But then I saw … I didn’t expect …’ She stops and looks out to sea, where in the distance a container ship makes its slow way along the horizon, blocks of grey and brown and white stamped against the pale grey sky. ‘She asked me about you.’
‘Yes.’
‘And Bianca too.’
‘Oh, Mum.’ Lucy takes her mother’s hand. ‘I’m going to talk to them. I’ll make sure they don’t bother you any more. I think it’s for the best—’
‘No. Absolutely not.’ Cathy pulls away.
‘They can’t do this. It’s our lives. Don’t they understand that they might … upset us?’
That they might confuse an ailing old lady and send her out of the house in the middle of the night, looking for a girl, a girl who couldn’t possibly be there.
‘I said no,’ says Cathy. ‘I want to talk to them.’
A sharp breeze cuts through Lucy’s coat, and she can feel icy seawater leaking through the expensive suede of her boots. ‘Can we just – go get a coffee or something?’ she says. ‘I’m freezing.’
‘You used to beg me to bring you to the seaside. Both of you.’
‘Yes, well. That was then.’
‘You told me once that if I brought you here, you’d never ask for anything else, not ever.’
‘What a delightful child I was.’
‘You used to follow Bee around like a little shadow.’
‘Mum. Don’t.’ This is the last thing Lucy wants, and exactly what she fears. Her mother reminiscing, wallowing in the past; it won’t do any of them any good.
She looks at the footprints they have left along the beach and tries to ignore the chill prickling at her spine, the feeling she has that someone is following them, just out of sight.
5
Then
Isobel lit a cigarette and inhaled deeply. She’d had to park on the grass verge, still within sight of the village school, so she was hardly setting a good example to the little darlings, but she was gasping for a smoke. Primary schools, or maybe it was just the kids, seemed to bring out the worst in her. She could have driven back down into Longdale, but it was another clear, blazing hot day and the car was like a bloody oven. She’d left the driver’s door as far open as she could get it and then she’d hoisted herself up onto the dry stone wall and kicked off her sandals. Five minutes, then she’d make a move. The school was right on the edge of the village and the road was quiet; she didn’t have to be anywhere. Five minutes’ peace. She closed her eyes. She was still sitting there when she heard the car pull up.
‘All right, love?’
Isobel sighed and opened her eyes. It had been nice while it lasted.
Across the road, the police officer had wound his window down, his hand resting on the door frame. Carefully, she stubbed her cigarette out on the wall before getting down and putting her shoes back on.
‘Martin. Your turn for the toy car today, I see.’
‘Oi, less of your lip, or I might have to get the cuffs out.’
Oh, please. Martin was nice enough, but he was the village bobby. Born and bred here and likely to die here too.
‘You coming or going?’ he asked.
‘Going. Rehearsals for the end of term concert.’
‘You get some nice snaps?’
‘Nice enough.’
‘I’ll look out for them on Friday, then. Front page, is it?’
She was used to the heavy-handed teasing that seemed to be part and parcel of her job and mostly she ignored it. So she only worked for a local paper? That didn’t mean she wasn’t ambitious, or that she didn’t have a plan. Not that Martin was particularly interested in her career prospects, she was sure. She crossed over the road and bent down to look in the car.
‘Am I keeping you from something, PC Thorpe? A bank robbery? Drugs raid? A nice juicy murder?’
‘I’ve always got time for you, sweetheart, you know that.’
She couldn’t be sure, but she thought he might be looking down her shirt. She stood up again. ‘Right. OK. I’ll see you, then,’ she said, turning away.
‘No. Hang on.’ He was flushed and sweaty, and no wonder, in his stupid uniform in this heat.
‘Well?’
‘Do you fancy a pint tonight?’ He’d asked before, and he’d probably ask again.
‘What, here?’
‘Well, I can’t drive anywhere, can I? Not if I want a beer. And I’m on early tomorrow.’
‘What about me? How am I supposed to get back home?’
‘We’ll think of something.’ He smiled up at her hopefully.
She could almost admire his nerve. ‘I don’t think so, Martin. You’re not the only one with work in the morning.’
‘Oh, go on. Just a quick half. Two at the most. I’ll make it worth your while.’
Isobel smiled, despite herself. ‘And how are you going to do that? Have you got a big story on sheep rustling?’
‘Better than that, Issy. Go on. Seven at the Lion.’
There was a beer garden at the Red Lion, and it might be nice, just for half an hour, to see what Martin Thorpe thought passed for news round here. She could get over to the office in Whitby and then drive back when she’d done the contact sheets.
‘Go on then,’ she said. ‘Eight o’clock though, and I’m not hanging around all night, so don’t be late.’
The beer garden was full by eight o’clock so they’d had to settle for a table in the public bar, squashed in next to the huge fireplace. Martin had bought her a drink, and they’d chatted for a bit – he was all right really, Isobel supposed, if only he could work out that he really wasn’t her type – and when she’d laughed at enough of his jokes he’d insisted on a second round, refusing to let her pay. She’d given in, in the end, knowing full well that was the only thing he’d be getting his way on. A few visitors, hikers most likely, were squeezed around one of the tables by the door and Isobel watched as one of them, a pretty blonde girl, walked across the room to the jukebox and leant over it and the lads close by raised their voices, hoping she might turn and favour them with a smile.
‘So, what’s this big story then?’ she said, fanning herself with a damp beer mat as Martin put their drinks on the table: beer for him, orange juice for her.
‘Bloody hell, I thought we were having a good time.’ He pushed her glass across the table. ‘It doesn’t all have to be business, does it?’
The ice in her drink clattered as she picked it up and she resisted the temptation to press the beaded glass to her neck to feel its comforting chill. ‘You’re the one who said he had a story. You wouldn’t have got me here under false pretences, would you? ’Cos that’s not nice, Martin. Not very nice at all. Not when I could be home with my feet up and a good book.’
Martin looked at her. ‘OK,’ he said, ‘OK, have it your own way.’ He took a long swallow of his pint, put his glass on the table and then glanced over to the bar. ‘But you didn’t hear this from me, right?’
‘Right.’
‘It’s not really a police matter, there’s no charges going to be made or anything …’ He fell silent for a moment, tapping his fingers against his glass. ‘You’re not going to laugh,
are you?’ he said eventually.
‘Well, I don’t know, do I?’ She could feel the sweat trickling down between her shoulder blades, and the backs of her legs were sticking to the fake leather bench. All she really wanted now was for Martin to get on with it so she could go home.
‘Do you know Iron Sike Farm?’ asked Martin.
‘No.’
‘Well,’ he trailed a finger through a beer puddle on the table, ‘the road goes through the village, right? Slices it in half, goes out past the school, out past where I saw you today, then over towards Whitby?’
‘Yes.’
‘And a couple of miles past the school, there’s a turning on the left and that goes past Iron Sike Farm and then up onto the moors.’
Why did men have to do this? Reduce everything to bloody road maps?
‘OK.’
‘The farm – the land and the animals – that belongs to Peter Eglon, right? Alongside everything at Low Moor Farm, so the house there – at Iron Sike – that’s no use to him and so he rents it out.’ He stopped and took another drink of beer.
‘And?’
‘He’s rented it out to this bloke, reckons he’s an artist, and his wife and their kids.’
Across the room, the jukebox kicked into life and Martin hunched over the table, his voice so low Isobel had to lean across to hear him.
‘I got called out there the other night.’ Martin picked up his pint and finished it in one swallow. ‘They’ve not been there that long, OK? They moved in back in April and they’re – I don’t know, hippies. There’s a handful of kids but none of them go to school. He paints, she – well, I don’t know what she does, the house is a bloody tip …’
He fell silent again.
‘So why did you go?’
‘Hmm?’
‘Who called you out to the farm?’
‘She did. And she was bloody terrified.’
She must have been. In Isobel’s experience, the kind of people Martin was describing didn’t generally want to have anything to do with the police.
‘What had he done to her?’
‘Who?’
‘Him. The husband.’ Isobel had the vague idea she might have seen him once, here in the pub, a tall, dark man with raggedy hair and a handful of silver rings. Good-looking, she supposed, with no one to talk to but the barmaid, not that he’d seemed to mind that.
