by cass green
He died half an hour later after she erupted onto the hospital ward. Everyone said that he had waited for her.
Lou had never voiced what she thought about being the one holding vigil at the bedside for two long days. But the look on her face when Neve finally roused the courage to meet her eye had felt like being sandblasted. They have still never spoken of that final day.
Neve is keenly aware now of how little she visited her father in the period after Mum died. She kept meaning to go and spend more weekends with just the two of them.
They had a particular routine. He would cook her proper Welsh rarebit and they would eat it on trays, each with a Guinness, watching reality television he had recorded on his Freeview box. Her dignified dad had a weakness for anything like that, and despite reading hefty non-fiction about history and politics, he could converse with the best of them about what was happening on The Voice or even America’s Next Top Model.
When she thinks about the fact that she will never, ever get to do this with him again she experiences a vertiginous swoop in her stomach, as though someone has just pressed a button and taken the floor out from under her feet. It’s a sensation of falling through space. She is no longer tethered to anyone other than Lou, who has her own family now.
Neve sighs and roots in her handbag for her make-up bag. It’s the hangover and the uncertainty of what she is doing that is making her feel like this; she just needs to get a grip.
Stretching out the stiffness from her neck, she waits in the aisle to get off the coach. People groan and gather bags from above their heads, gazing blearily out of the window.
Neve thanks her seating companion, who lets her go first and begins to move towards the doors. There’s a pinch of worry in her stomach about arriving somewhere in darkness. She hasn’t really thought this through. The words ‘as usual’ rise up in her mind as though someone has whispered them in her ear.
Standing at the side of a road with a car park on one side and residential houses on the other, she watches people purposefully walk to cars or stamp their feet in the cold and look around for lifts. The old man gives her a final wave and she watches as he laboriously climbs into a small white car. A woman with glasses and a dark ponytail is in the driver seat and he leans over for a kiss, talking all the while. Neve has a sudden urge to call him back and tell him everything; about Isabelle Shawcross and the cottage, about work, about Lou. About her mum and dad …
But it’s too late now. She begins to shiver as the shocking temperature – always so much colder outside of London, she thinks, despite her Northern heritage – begins to bite, making her eyes sting and her nose stream.
She takes an experimental sniff and realizes with disappointment that she can’t smell the sea. It can’t be that far away, can it? Neve thinks again that she knows nothing about Cornwall and experiences a queasy lurch of anxiety about this whole plan.
Pulling her coat around her and yanking on a lilac beanie with flowers on the side that she had found in Camden market, she goes to a central area and attempts to work out which bus she should get to this Cador place.
It’s no good though, she can’t see any bus that will help. When she’d looked this up hurriedly on her phone in London, it had seemed relatively straightforward. But now …
A bus driver is about to close his doors when she reaches out her hand and quickly steps on board.
‘Mind yourself,’ says the driver, a bald man in his forties with a tattoo curling up his neck to his fleshy, pink ear.
‘Sorry,’ she says with an apologetic smile, ‘but can you tell me where I’d get a bus to a place called Cador? It’s near St Piron?’
The driver sighs and then picks up an iPad. He swipes at it and then looks up.
‘No buses from here go there. Best bet is to get to St Piron on the 198 and then you’ll have to walk.’
‘Oh,’ says Neve, doubtfully. ‘Er, thank you.’
It is only twenty past ten but feels like the middle of the night. Neve’s back and bottom ache after nine hours on a coach, then another hour being rattled on a hard seat. The bus seems to hare with dangerous speed through small villages lit by a few streetlights, but most of the journey is spent tearing around dark, twisty country roads.
When she is finally disgorged at the side of a road and told by the disinterested driver that to get to Cador she needs to walk ‘a couple of miles … maybe a bit more’, it starts to become apparent that this is definitely one of her more ill-thought-through plans.
Knowing her battery won’t hold out for much longer, she uses her phone as a torch only in short bursts. Luckily, there seems to be a main road lit by street lamps that leads in the direction she has been told to follow. Her headache has returned and she is desperate for something to eat and drink. All she has left is a mouthful of water in a bottle and a couple of pieces of gum. Her wheelie case squeaks in complaint as she drags it along behind her, shoulder beginning to cramp.
A couple of men pass her at different times. The second of the two, a weaselly guy with an ugly moustache, stares at her just long enough for fear to surge up her throat. She hastens her step.
Eventually she comes to a row of shops, all closed. Then she spies something that feels like a beacon above the doorway of a fish and chip shop; a glowing sign that says simply, ‘Taxi’.
Neve hesitates, gnawing on her bottom lip as she thinks this through. She has no job. No prospects. She’s only intending to come for a few days but her remaining £400 is going to have to last. She’d had vague images of cooking giant batches of chickpea stew and holing up in the cottage with a pile of books until she worked out what to do with her life, back in London. The £400 seemed like a fortune, put like that.
But now she wants a taxi so badly she is incapable of doing anything but walking across the road towards the light. She tells herself she must do this for her own safety.
A few minutes later she is climbing into a saloon car. The thin-faced, middle-aged driver puffs vigorously on a Vape and regards her in the mirror.
‘Where you wanting, then?’ he says.
‘Can you tell me how much will it cost to get to Cador?’
The driver regards her.
‘That’ll be thirty.’ His voice has a slow, West Country drawl.
This seems like an outrageous sum and Neve feels a flash of anger that she is being ripped off. She is of the view that everywhere outside London is cheap. The cost of this will clean out her purse. But she doesn’t really have any choice.
‘Okay,’ she says grudgingly, mentally thinking she wouldn’t have given the miserable git a tip anyway.
She tells him the rest of the address. The driver punches it into the satnav then pulls away.
Before long Neve realizes that Cador is considerably further than the two miles the bus driver specified. For once it feels that, in taking this taxi, she is doing the sensible thing.
The driver doesn’t say a single word as they drive. While she would ordinarily welcome this, part of her feels the need for some reassuring conversation.
There is pure darkness on either side. Neve tries to suppress the queasy sensation that they could be going anywhere. This is like pitching into nothingness. Their journey is mirrored in miniature as a blue line on black on the satnav mounted on the dashboard.
‘How far away are we?’ she asks. Her voice sounds loud in the humming peace of the car interior.
The driver shoots a look at her in the mirror.
‘Almost there. You here on holiday?’ he says, and grins to himself, as if this concept is funny.
Neve frowns. What’s he getting at? Is it really such a strange idea to holiday here?
‘Sort of,’ she says cautiously. ‘But just for the weekend.’
Belatedly, she thinks of all the stories she has read about rapist taxi drivers. She would never get into any old mini cab in London. What was she thinking? Why should different rules apply here?
She pictures the scene through a camera, complete wit
h eerie soundtrack. He’s going to pull up to a dark house that’s obviously unoccupied and watch her fumble her way inside.
Alone. With no one around for miles to hear her scream.
The car heater seems to be pumping out a nauseating fog of heat and sweat prickles in her armpits.
Shit …
They turn off the main road. The surrounding darkness seems to be solidifying into a tunnel now, swallowing them as they move forwards.
‘Right oh,’ says the driver after a moment. ‘I can see Stubbington Lane up ahead but it looks a bit narrow. More of a track.’
Neve peers at the window but can only see her own pale face reflected back at her.
‘Is this Cador then?’ she says doubtfully. ‘Isn’t it a village?’
The driver taps the satnav. ‘Nah, just a collection of houses,’ he says.
‘Oh,’ says Neve. She was prepared for this being rural, but had pictured the cottage being in a small village at the least. She’d foreseen a village pub, a shop with a blue bike parked outside, and an attractive display of local produce in the window.
The car turns and slowly begins to make its way down a narrow track, pitted with potholes. The driver grumbles quietly about his suspension as the car jolts and bumps its way forwards. Neve holds onto the seat with clenched, sweaty hands. The car comes to a stop.
‘Well, this is as far as I can take you,’ says the driver. His tone is softer now. ‘You going to be alright?’
Neve swallows what feels like a solid bolus of fear in her throat.
‘I’ll be fine,’ she says, trying to quell the shaking of her voice.
‘You sure?’ he says. ‘Your friends definitely going to be in?’
The taxi driver being a rapist suddenly seems like a small concern. She has to bite her lip to stop herself from asking him to come with her to the door, and possibly to stay over.
Neve reaches into her bag for her phone and switches on the torch app, praying she will get at least a few minutes before the battery dies completely.
‘It’s alright,’ she says, straightening her back. ‘What do I owe you?’ Then, hurriedly, ‘Think we agreed thirty pounds?’
After she has paid and left the car it reverses into a small lay-by, and turns awkwardly. She watches the white headlights illuminate the bushes, then the two red tail-lights seem to blink off as the car exits the lane, leaving her alone.
14
Taking a deep, wobbly breath, Neve holds up the phone and attempts to splash the narrow beam around, to get her bearings. Tall trees line one side of the track, thin and silvery trunked. She can’t see how far back they stretch, but there are no other houses to be seen.
Luckily, the icy beam reveals enough of the muddy, potholed way ahead for her to be able to walk forwards in small, nervous steps. She pictures herself twisting an ankle, or worse, and having to lie in the mud until someone – who? – comes to help.
The night seems to be filled with scritches and scratches and scurryings. A bright moon peeps out from behind lacy skeins of cloud and reveals a gap in the bushes, filled by a rickety wooden gate. The beam of light picks out the words Petty Whin Cottage.
This is it, she thinks, before tentatively opening the gate and walking through.
She realizes now she had been carrying a vague mental picture of the cottage: white stucco paint, maybe a plant growing up the front. Possibly a thatched roof.
It’s too dark to see the cottage properly but first impressions are of a squat, low property that feels distinctly unwelcoming. Its overall shape reminds her of the ugly old cricket pavilion they used to smoke in after school.
Louder rustling in the bushes nearby now makes her heart thud harder. Neve tries to breathe slowly, forcing herself not to run towards the cottage, knowing this will set off full-blown panic. Her foot goes into a pothole and she feels her ankle give, painfully, just as she had pictured.
‘Shit, shit, shit,’ she breathes, hobbling the last steps to the front door. She has been carrying the large set of keys in her other hand as a weapon since she left the relative safety of the car. Something about this had been reassuring but now she is picturing complicated locks that must be opened in some magical sequence she doesn’t know.
Neve points the iPhone’s beam – thankfully still holding out – at the doorway and attempts to find the key that is most likely to fit the main lock.
There appear to be three locks: a deadbolt style at the top and bottom of the door and a Chubb. Why so many? It seems excessive.
The Chubb is straightforward, but she uses the others in the wrong order and the door doesn’t yield. Her fingers are trembling with fear and cold and the bunch of keys slips from them and lands by her feet. Neve cannot help the squawk of misery that bursts from her, part-wail, part-curse. She bends over to grab at them, expecting at any moment to feel a meaty hand circling her neck, or the cold blade of a knife against her throat. Her shoulders are tortoised up to her neck – as if this would protect her – and she is lightly panting now.
She has forgotten the order she tried the keys before and anyway, they look identical.
‘Shit, shit,’ she says through gritted teeth as another attempt fails.
She tries again and this time – hallelujah! – feels the beautiful click of the mechanism releasing. Two more to go. She quickly unlocks the bottom one.
There is another loud rustle in the bushes now, like something large is forcing its way through towards her. Neve cries out, stabbing the last key into the lock.
The door opens and she almost falls through the front door into the chill, dusty air inside.
The iPhone’s light blinks out.
It is an even deeper darkness here, inside. So absolute it almost has a texture.
Breathing heavily, Neve dabs trembling fingers along the wall until she finds the nub of a light switch.
A sickly glow emanates from an old-fashioned glass shade above her head.
She is in a narrow hallway, standing on a worn runner of carpet in faded pinks and greens.
A wooden coat stand just to the right of the doorway has a single jacket on it – a Barbour – and a pair of wellies stand neatly underneath, every bit as if someone has pulled socked feet from them mere moments before.
She’s aware now that a strange smell is coating the inside of her nostrils. She can almost taste it.
Neve’s heart thuds against her ribs as she timidly opens the nearest door and peeks inside. The smell of old potpourri with a hint of damp wafts out. Fumbling with the light switch on the inside of the door, she finds it doesn’t work and gently closes the door again. She has the sensation of trying not to wake someone, or something, up. Maybe the house itself, whose atmosphere feels like a held breath.
This thought gives her stomach such a fearful twist that she strides to the end of the corridor, forcing herself to thrust the door open confidently. Her feet crunch on something gritty on the carpet.
Moonlight pools on a lino-covered floor. She slaps at the light switch and two long strip lights stutter and buzz into life.
Neve looks around and lets out a small moan of dismay.
She doesn’t really know what she had been expecting. Maybe a large, friendly room with worn flagstones and dried herbs hanging neatly above an Aga. Not that she would have had the faintest idea what to do with an Aga. But she’d hoped for something warm and homey.
It certainly wasn’t this. Clumps of mud and dirt cover the floor and the bin is overflowing with rubbish that smells so bad she has to cover her face with her hand. There’s a draught coming from somewhere.
The 1970s lino flooring and mud-brown cupboards are bad enough. But she never expected it to be so filthy.
There are white bits of some material she can’t identify scattered around the sink area. Approaching cautiously, she sees what they are.
Feathers. White ones, and some grey and black too. Grimacing, Neve dips a quick look into the sink and then rears back with a squawk, crashing against the bi
g kitchen table behind her. She has to steel herself to edge forwards slowly to take another look.
‘Oh God.’ She covers her mouth as a wave of nausea brings sweat prickling to her temples.
It’s a magpie.
Dead.
Neck bent, sightless eyes like small dull holes. The feathers still have an oily sheen, black with a blueish tinge, and the white chest has a rust-coloured bib of blood. One wing is twisted and the bird’s claws curl inward, grotesquely. Neve’s nose twitches in protest at the odour of old fish and sweetish rot.
Her mother had been terrified of birds. She can still recall the prickly horror of Mum’s pallor and tight too-bright voice when a sparrow had been trapped in their bathroom. Now, illogically, Neve’s as afraid of this dead thing as if it were capable of attacking her.
Swallowing another surge of nausea, she reaches for a tea towel that’s hanging by the sink and, whimpering, begins to wrap it around the bird’s body, trying not to touch it. This strategy proves to be useless. When she tries to lift the package, the bird falls with a dull plop back into the sink. Breathing heavily through her mouth she tries again. This time she is forced to touch the cool damp feathers as she bundles the bird up into the cloth and she shudders all the way to her toes.
There’s no obvious key for the back door so she awkwardly opens the broken window, which is small and deeply recessed into the wall. Neve slings the whole package outside. She’ll deal with it in the morning when she has more resources.
Then she stands for a moment, breathing heavily, in the silent kitchen.
What a welcome.
Daniel would have called that dead magpie ‘serious bad voodoo’.
She imagines Lou saying, in her usual weary tone, ‘Best get rid of it, then.’
Neve begins to look in the cupboards and finds bin bags and a dustpan and brush under the sink. She clears up the broken glass. Then, she finds bleach spray in the cupboard, and squirts the whole area around and in the sink until her nose begins to sting, drying it using kitchen towel from a roll attached to the wall.
There’s a broom resting to the side of the sink and Neve uses it to get the worst of the dirt swept from the lino. Emptying the filthy contents of the bin, which seem to contain lots of takeaway cartons, cans of beer and a stinking, fetid nappy, she ties the bag inside three more until she can no longer smell it. She can deal with it in the morning, when she finds the back door key.
