The Snow Rose

by Lulu Taylor

  THE

  SNOW

  ROSE

  LULU TAYLOR

  PAN BOOKS

  To all the Taylor girls out there

  Contents

  PART ONE

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  PART TWO

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  PART THREE

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  PART FOUR

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgements

  THE WINTER CHILDREN

  PART ONE

  Chapter One

  Heather is behind me in the car. I can see her as I drive. Sometimes she’s gazing out of the window, and at other times she’s humming or talking quietly to herself, expressions flitting over her face like bright little shadows. I wonder what’s going on in that head of hers. She’s always been full of whimsy and imagination. She’s been quieter and more serious lately, but that’s hardly surprising.

  She never asks me where we are going.

  Occasionally I catch a glimpse of myself in the rear-view mirror – just the glint of peroxide-white hair, or the frame of my sunglasses – and I wonder who on earth I’m looking at. I feel a jolt of fear, a rush of panic that makes my palms prickle and the ends of my fingers tingle, and have to fight the urge to press down on the accelerator and escape. Then I remember that this stranger is me.

  Peroxide-white hair. What was I thinking?

  I’m supposed to be anonymous. And here I am, with a platinum bob and a smear of scarlet lipstick on my mouth, looking like something from a science-fiction movie or a spy thriller. I’m even wearing a black trench coat, and my boots have a heel of almost an inch. My theory is reverse psychology: surely everyone will expect me to fade into the background, not draw attention to myself. They might suspect I’ll change my appearance, but not to this.

  Rory once gave me a hat – a big brown fedora sort of thing, the kind with a countryside look about it. I used to wear it out shopping because, I discovered, it concealed me. People I knew would walk by me in the street. The hat was all they noticed, and their innate desire not to be seen to stare prevented them from dropping their gaze to my face.

  That was in my mind when I bought the box of peroxide. By looking extreme, I hope, I will automatically deflect the looks I most want to avoid: the searching gaze at my eyes, the frown as they realise I look familiar. Instead they will look at the bright white hair and that will draw them away from the things that mark me out as me. The things I cannot change.

  I had planned to disguise Heather too. I bought gingery-red hair dye for her, and I was going to face-paint freckles on her nose and cheeks. Then I found I couldn’t bring myself to do it. So I decided I would cut her hair; the feathery blonde tresses would have to go. I’d give her something totally different, a tomboy cut, perhaps even dress her as a boy. But I couldn’t. I picked up the scissors and I couldn’t alter her. So she looks now just as she always has: large china-blue eyes, thick, straight lashes, the chin that has a little round bump with a dimple in it – inherited from her father. And the fair hair rippling over her shoulders.

  ‘Are we nearly there yet?’ Heather asks from the back.

  She has taken everything in her stride. All the huge changes in her young life. Everything that has happened between Rory and me. The departure from her home. The strange days we’ve spent together since then, before I discovered our new place. Our hideout.

  I say cheerfully, ‘Not long now, sweetheart. Maybe an hour or so. Not too much longer.’

  Heather goes back to staring out of the window. Where did she learn this patience of hers? She’s always been so self-sufficient, so able to retreat into herself and find everything she needs there.

  ‘Do you want a story?’ I ask. ‘I can put a CD on for you.’

  ‘Winnie the Pooh?’ she says eagerly. We had it earlier, but I don’t mind if she wants it again. I can shut out the narrator’s voice and think. An entire CD can play and I won’t hear a word of it.

  ‘Yes,’ I say, and push the button to start up the story. The music begins and Heather smiles. I watch the road, mile after mile disappearing under my wheels, hoping that where we’re going is far enough.

  I’m in a hire car. I didn’t use my own because I know that every car on the motorway is recorded on camera and that there’s an automatic number plate recognition system that means anyone using a major road can easily be tracked. I don’t have a satellite navigation system for fear that I can be traced by it, so the journey takes an age because I follow the minor roads through countryside and small towns and villages. Not only that, but I’ve taken a strange, circular route, miles out of my way, in order to confuse anyone who might be on my trail. Every now and then I have to stop in a lay-by and learn the next bit of the route. I can’t hold the whole thing in my mind in one go. That’s something else that’s happened recently: my short-term memory is kaput and things fall out of it swiftly and completely. As we near our destination after a long day driving, the route becomes more complicated and I have to stop more frequently. Heather has dozed off in the back of the car, her head lolling against the side of her safety seat. I’m glad. The journey has been tedious, the breaks at service stations limited to refilling petrol and quick loo visits, and the starts and stops only make it worse. I’m muttering to myself – road names, the order of right and left turns, the exits of roundabouts. We’re in a part of the country I do not know well at all, and I feel almost as if we have gone abroad.

  Perhaps that’s what they will think. That’s where they’ll be looking.

  I laid as many clues as I could to give the idea that we were leaving Britain. I emailed for information on accommodation in France, Italy and Spain. I bought tickets for planes, trains and ferries, creating a trail that led away in many different directions, hoping it would all cause enough confusion to buy me some time. But it probably won’t fool anyone. There won’t be a record of us going anywhere. Our car won’t actually roll onto the Channel ferry, or our luggage be put in the hold of an aeroplane while we take our seats in the cabin. There won’t be any CCTV footage of us, a white-haired woman in sunglasses holding hands with a small girl, as we walk through a terminal or pass through security. Our passports, scanned and checked, would surely be logged somehow to show that we’d crossed the border. Isn’t that what happens? Don’t they keep tabs on us all?

  The problem is that I don’t really know. But I’ve absorbed, somehow, the impression that we cannot hide, not these days. The speed of communication, the networks that surround us, the cameras filming us, the satellites tracking our movements, our elec
tronic footprints – it all means that we can’t go unnoticed for long. And when there is a child involved, there is no doubt that all those glassy, electric eyes will swivel after us, the virtual hounds on our trail, sniffing for our scent, waiting for us to flag our presence with one inadvertent touch of a button.

  Which is why I needed an accomplice.

  ‘You have to help me,’ I said urgently, commandingly. I’d never spoken to Caz like that before and she gazed at me, afraid, cowed by me. There must have been something in my expression that told her that things were different now. I’d been ministering to her for years, while she got over what happened with Philip. I was always there, ready to talk, sympathetic, focusing on her troubles. But that was over. Now she would do what I wanted.

  ‘But . . . how? What can I do?’ She looked confused. It’s strange, how people press their help on you, offer to do whatever it takes – right up until you say, ‘All right then. You can help,’ when suddenly it’s not so possible after all. But I wasn’t going to let Caz wiggle out of anything.

  ‘I’ll need money. I can’t use the cashpoints. And I need some new ID details, so I want to use your address because it’s not linked to me.’

  ‘Use my address?’

  ‘Pretend I live there. Don’t worry, you won’t even get any post because I’ll put a redirection on it. It’s just for their systems. It won’t make any difference to you, I promise.’

  Caz blinked at me, suddenly weak and helpless in the face of my strength and determination. ‘You shouldn’t do this, Kate,’ she said in a small voice. ‘It’s the wrong thing, I promise you. You’re going to regret it.’

  ‘You don’t know what I’m doing,’ I said briefly.

  ‘You’re leaving. You’re going away. I know you won’t tell me where. It’s not right, Kate. I’m telling you, you shouldn’t do it.’

  ‘You don’t understand. It’s all I can do,’ I said. ‘I don’t have a choice.’

  And I was right. It was only this that was giving me the strength to carry on. I was drawing my life force from the need to escape. The urgency of planning, the lists of what had to be done, all of this prevented me from falling into the black abyss that yawned – that yawns every day – below me. That, and Heather.

  So Caz said yes, as I knew she had to. She helped me, letting me use her address and keeping quiet about what she suspected. Even so, I made sure that she knew as little as possible. I created a new email account and only accessed it from the public computers in the library, securing it with passwords unlike anything I’d used before. I applied for a credit card in my fake name and it duly arrived, redirected from Caz’s house. Do these people ever check anything? Once I began to immerse myself in the plans, I even began to relish the game. What strategies could I think of to get around the people who might or might not be watching me? How could I trick them? I felt as though I was tapping into some primal desire to outwit the enemy, or like I was the leader of some small band of rebels working out how to escape a greater, more powerful foe. Robin Hood against the Sheriff. Boudicca against the Roman Empire.

  And all the time I had to keep Rory from guessing what I intended to do. When we spoke on the telephone, which I tried to avoid, he’d always ask me, ‘You’re not planning on doing anything stupid, are you?’

  ‘Of course not.’ As if I would tell you . . .

  ‘You sound . . . different,’ he said just a few days before I planned to go. He’d called in the evening and I’d scooped up the phone and answered it automatically, before realising it was just the time he’d ring me.

  ‘Really?’ I tried at once to sound normal.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘Quivery . . . I don’t know. Pent-up. Are you okay?’

  I said nothing for a moment. I honestly had no idea how to answer that question. As I thought about it, hot rage flooded through me, twisting through my stomach and pounding at my brain. What the hell do you expect? Okay? Okay? Nothing will ever be okay again!

  The line between us was heavy with silence. I could hear only the faint whisper of Rory’s breathing. I knew it was hopeless waiting for him to fill it. Rory was the master of silence. He could tolerate pauses so long I had to bite my tongue not to scream at him to say something, bloody anything, just something to fill the emptiness. It would not have been so bad if I hadn’t known that his head was full of talk, he just refused to bring it out into the open. He’d only speak once he’d processed everything to his satisfaction, while I used talking as a way of understanding my own thoughts, something he could find incredibly tedious. So we each made the other suffer in our own way.

  ‘I’m fine,’ I said at last. The familiar bad taste was in my mouth again. Bitterness.

  ‘Can I come and see you?’

  ‘No,’ I said instantly.

  ‘Okay. That’s absolutely fine.’ The tone of mollification in his voice made me bristle. After a pause, he said, ‘Have you seen the counsellor?’

  ‘It’s pointless,’ I said briefly.

  ‘It might help,’ he said gently. ‘I wish you’d give it a go.’

  ‘Maybe. Maybe soon.’ The idea that an hour of chat with a stranger might go any way to beginning to solve our mess seemed ludicrous. Like tackling a mountain of dirt with a spoon. There’s too much, it’s all too gargantuan. ‘But not yet.’

  ‘When? Next week?’

  It was on the tip of my tongue to tell him that by next week, I’d be far away, out of his reach. I’d have escaped. I knew his plan was to take Heather away from me, even though he pretended it wasn’t. I couldn’t risk that happening, not now she is all I have.

  ‘Yes, maybe next week,’ I said, happy to throw him a bone. I’d managed to escape him, though he didn’t yet know it.

  ‘Shall I book the session for you? I’ll pay for it,’ he said, a hopeful eagerness in his voice. ‘What time would suit you? Wednesday? I know there’s a slot on Wednesday.’

  ‘Yes. All right then. Wednesday. Text me the time. I’ll be there.’

  ‘That’s great,’ he said, his relief audible. ‘It’s the first step, Kate. The first step.’

  ‘Yeah.’ I shrugged. ‘You’re right. The first step.’

  ‘You could . . . could talk about Ady, perhaps.’

  That was too much. ‘No!’ I shouted. The shaking took hold of me instantly. I could feel my head trembling on my neck as though I was a badly handled marionette; my fingers were thrumming, my knees horribly light with the juddering nerves inside. ‘Don’t even say it, Rory!’

  ‘Okay, okay, I’m sorry, I’m sorry. Calm down. No one will make you talk about anything you don’t want to.’

  You’re right, buster. No one will. ‘You know how I feel,’ I managed to say. The trembling had reached my voice, my mouth and lips. I could barely get a word out. My shoulders jerked with the force of my shaking. ‘I c-c-c-can’t.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Kate. Really. I shouldn’t have said anything. Look, I have to go. But I’ll book the session. We’ll go from there.’

  ‘Fine. Goodbye.’

  I clicked the phone off, put it down and closed my eyes. I knew exactly what he was trying to do. The counselling would be the first step in his relentless attempt to take Heather away from me. And there was just no way that was going to happen. I had to make a choice, and I knew exactly what I would choose.

  ‘Kate?’

  I jumped. It was two days before I planned to go and I was fuelled by adrenaline and nerves.

  ‘What on earth are you doing here?’ It was Sandy, my boss, gazing at me with a worried expression as I sat there at my desk.

  ‘I’m . . . I really wanted to catch up on some things,’ I said. Even though she couldn’t see my screen, I swiftly changed to the homepage while drawing her gaze by patting the pile of papers next to me. I’d got them out just in case. The truth was that I was surfing the internet, having logged on as my old assistant, whose details were still live on the system. I’d notified IT ages ago that she
’d left but they had not got round to deactivating her profile. It was lying there, unused, a safe little passageway onto the web. I’d stopped feeling comfortable at the library. As I huddled at my screen, I kept imagining people looking curiously over my shoulder, or the staff beginning to notice me and my visits to the computer terminals. Of course, there was no reason why I shouldn’t be like all the other regulars. I’d begun to recognise them: the little crew of users. Job seekers, probably, mostly young people who plugged in headphones and bobbed in time to tinny music as they tapped away at the keyboard or moved the mouse, staring at the screen with complete absorption. I wondered if I stood out among them, and had lain awake at night thinking about it, wondering how I could get round the problem of not wanting to use the library. I needed the net. It was only once I’d thought about how I might operate without it that I realised how deeply it was now woven into the thread of my life. It provided the information and communication I needed, particularly if I wanted to move at speed. I suppose some people are still content to write a letter by hand, post it and wait for the reply that might or might not come, but I was no longer one of them. I wanted answers today. This afternoon. Within the next hour. Now. Now. Now. There was no time to lose. And that’s when I had the idea of coming into work. Immediately, I wondered why I hadn’t thought of this solution before. I’d fallen asleep, newly relaxed, almost at once.

  Now, as Sandy stood in front of me, concern all over her face, and a certain wariness in her gaze, I realised why this was not going to be as simple as I’d hoped.

  Why is nothing easy? Why can’t I just do what I want?

  She said slowly, ‘That’s really admirable, Kate. But honestly, you don’t need to. We are perfectly able to cope without you while you take the time you need. Lindsey is doing a great job at covering for you.’

  I took a deep breath. Time for some more obfuscation. ‘Well, I know, but actually, I’m feeling a lot better and I just need to . . . I just need to . . . do something.’ I smiled at her, my expression, I hoped, winsome, and perhaps a touch pleading. ‘I’m going crazy at the house with nothing to do. I just felt the urge to come in and tidy up some loose ends. I thought about emailing Lindsey, and then I thought what the hell, I’ll just come in and do it myself . . . and I did.’