A Dark and Secret Place

by Jen Williams

  When the light began to seep from the sky, they conceded defeat, heading back to the cottage with sore feet and empty stomachs. Once inside, Nikki began cooking a chili, neatly laying out her ingredients on the side before browning some mince in a pan.

  “So,” Heather leaned on the kitchen counter, trying not to look at the darkness beyond the windows. “Harry the artist then. What’s your progress?”

  Nikki continued chopping onions. “What do you mean, what’s your progress?”

  Heather snorted. “Do me a favor, Nikki. I am an investigative journalist, remember?”

  “Is that what you call it?” Nikki shot her a rueful look before sliding the onions into the pan with the edge of her knife. “I dunno, I’m thinking of asking him to do me a commission.”

  “Oh, is that what you call it?”

  Nikki threw a tea towel at her.

  “We’re only here for a few days, aren’t we? But,” she shrugged, and Heather knew she’d won. “We did talk about going out for a drink tomorrow. There’s a place he knows a short drive from here, they do a really good fish pie.” When she met Heather’s eyes, she looked abashed. “I won’t go though, if you want me to stay, of course.”

  Heather rolled her eyes at her. “Who am I to stand in the way of true love? And those muscles.” When Nikki opened her mouth to protest, Heather shook her head. “No honestly, go. I’m glad you might actually have some real fun on this little jaunt, rather than just traipsing around in the mud with me all day.”

  “It’s just an evening thing, and …” Nikki sighed. “I am worried about you though, Hev. Do you really think you should be alone at all? With everything that’s happened?”

  “Oh god, don’t start. I’m fine.” She thought of the dead bird on her mother’s dressing table, the petals like drops of blood leading up the staircase. She forced a smile on her face. “Honestly. It’s doing me good, to be away. Maybe my mum was right about this place. It’s peaceful.”

  “If you’re sure.” Nikki went to the cupboard and retrieved a can of chopped tomatoes. “Did we have another bottle of red? It’d go better with the chili than the white.”

  “I think I’ve still got one in my case.”

  The shadows in her room were already the deep shades of night. Heather flicked the light on and began rummaging around in her case, trying to retrieve the bottle of wine that was nestled beneath her discarded socks and t-shirts. Her fingers had just closed around the neck when she saw a dark shape sitting neatly in the center of her pillow. She dropped the wine and straightened up, her heart skipping sickly in her chest.

  Although it wasn’t the right size or shape at all, for an awful instant she was sure it was a dead bird, even as her eyes confirmed the truth—it was an old Polaroid photograph, very much like the two she had found in the abandoned caravan. The photo showed a typical scene between two lovers—a man and a woman on a beach, the sea a burnished strip of blue behind them, the man with his arm draped possessively around the woman’s narrow shoulders. They were both wearing coats and hats, their cheeks pink with the cold. The woman’s face was coyly turned inward, nuzzling a little at the man’s broad chest, and her left hand was tucked snugly between the man’s knees. She was grinning, her eyes shining. She looked very young. There was no question that these two people were a couple, and it was almost charming in its simplicity—a couple on a beach, enjoying themselves, very much in love.

  Except that the man was a notorious serial killer, and the woman was her mum.

  Heather snatched the photo off the pillow. Her breathing sounded too loud, whistling in and out like a kettle boiling. She shook the photo and pressed her fingers to the shiny surface in the strange and slightly desperate hope that it would prove to be a fake—something crafted in photoshop and printed on fancy paper. But she’d handled enough photos in the newspaper’s archive to know what it was. It was real. A real photograph of Michael Reave and Colleen Evans, cozied up with their arms around each other. Her mother even had on the same thick winter coat she had been wearing in Pamela’s photo.

  She turned it over. On the back were two scraps of writing, each written in a different hand with a different color pen. The first one, written in black ballpoint pen, said:

  Fresh air!! March 27th, 1983

  The second, in red ink and a familiar, blocky font, read:

  I know what you are, and I think you do too.

  For long, elastic minutes, Heather couldn’t do anything at all. She stood with the Polaroid clutched between her fingers. She couldn’t stop looking at the date.

  March the 27th, in 1983. Heather’s birthday was in October of that year.

  No.

  If the date was correct, then her mother was already pregnant in this picture. Had been pregnant for maybe six or seven weeks.

  No.

  Reluctantly, she turned the photo over and looked again at her mother, this girl-child image that she had never seen before. There was no way of telling, with the big coat covering her lap, but then some women didn’t show until fairly late in their pregnancy, especially when it was their first child. And hadn’t her mum and dad gotten married when she was a toddler? Why had she never questioned that? They had always told her they had known each other since school, that they had started dating when Colleen was nineteen, but that had to have been a lie. An image of her dad floated into her mind, his round, easily flushed face, the strawberry blond hair that edged into straight-up ginger near his ears, or when he grew a beard.

  I look nothing like him. I never did.

  “No.”

  She didn’t realize she’d spoken aloud until she heard Nikki call out from the living room.

  “Hev? Are you ever getting that bottle or what?”

  Reluctantly, her eyes were drawn back to the picture of Michael Reave. He was young here, even handsome, his face as yet free of the lines that would be etched there by his time in prison. She couldn’t help noticing his dark hair, the particular shape of his cheekbones, the line of his nose.

  “Hev?”

  Nikki’s voice was closer, as though she was standing in the little hall that led to the bedroom.

  “Coming, sorry, just got distracted!”

  She looked around the room, but nothing else seemed out of place. The window was shut and locked, as she’d left it, and the little dressing table was littered with the usual junk she took out of her pockets every night—receipts, loose change, sweet wrappers. Everything was normal, except …

  She turned back to the bed, a cold hand walking down her back. The bed was made, the covers pulled up neatly to the pillow, which was itself straight and freshly plumped up. The only time Heather ever made the bed was just before she got into it herself, and then it was really only a case of tucking in the under sheet again, or retrieving a pillow. Whoever had left the photo had also made her bed.

  For a horrible, suffocating second she thought she was going to laugh. And then she heard Nikki’s footsteps going back to the kitchen and the compulsion passed. Instead, she slipped the photo into her pocket, snatched up the bottle of wine, and closed the door firmly behind her.

  CHAPTER

  39

  BEFORE

  HE REMEMBERED WHERE each of them was so clearly that often he felt like he could almost see them. Women sitting on the edge of the stream with their feet in the water, or women up in the trees, their souls taken up in the roots and spreading through the leaves. He could almost hear them sighing as he walked through the woods, and the gentle thrum of their hearts was ever present. Their bodies were far away, arranged with precision and care in distant green places, but they were here really, with him, in Fiddler’s Wood. They all wore red coats.

  It was raining on the day he lost Colleen, and although it was only around six in the evening the woods were rushing eagerly toward darkness. Michael moved through the shadows contentedly, listening to the graves and the patter of raindrops against leaves and mud, when he heard a sudden, piercing scream. He stopped and he
ld himself very still, the hair raising on the backs of his arms. Screaming held no terrors for him—how could it?—And he was by now used to the noise generated by the commune, but this was a noise out of place, a noise that shouldn’t have been there. A few seconds passed, and there was another scream, somehow more desperate and then abruptly cut off.

  He left the woods, stepping into the downpour that the trees had been sheltering him from, and ran toward the big house. On the way there, he saw two figures hurrying away down the hill, and he moved to intercept them. It was both the Bickerstaff sisters, looking oddly similar to how they had on the first day he had seen them; their heads touching, walking with their sides pressed together, although now one of them held a shawl over their heads, and the other was clasping some small bundle to her chest. When they saw it was him, she gathered the little shape closer to her so he could not see it. One of them—Lizbet, he thought—levelled her cold gray gaze at him, but did not speak. The rain picked up, and Michael realized that the path beneath their feet was pinkish with watery blood, blood that was washing off of them.

  ‘What’s happening?’

  They drew closer together. Beyond them, the fields and hedgerows looked hazy and indistinct as the rain blurred their edges.

  ‘He wanted to see it,’ said Beryl, as if that explained anything. ‘When it came into the world.’

  “What is it?”

  Michael took a step forward to get a look at the thing they were carrying, but the two sisters exchanged a look of disgust between them, as though he was a dirty child at their feet.

  “You’ll see it again soon enough,” said Lizbet.

  “Who was screaming?”

  “Anna isn’t feeling herself. Go on up and have a look, if you’re so worried.”

  “Where’s Colleen?”

  The two women smiled identical, icy smiles. “She’s a good one, isn’t she? Too good for the likes of you.”

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “You didn’t think you could keep her, did you, Michael?” Despite the shawl, Beryl’s face was wet, shining unhealthily. “What a fool you are.”

  With that they hurried away from him, heading down the hill and back toward the commune, leaving a trail of watery blood behind them. Michael looked up at the big house. There were lamps burning in the living room windows, casting squares of brash yellow light out onto the gravel drive. The house had always seemed like a haven, a place where he could exist fully. He had slept with the lights on all night; had eaten dinners in a silence that wasn’t challenged; had washed blood from his hands and clothes, over and over and over. Yet tonight it did not feel safe. Tonight, he looked at it and saw what Colleen saw—an empty place that housed a monster, perhaps several monsters. He knew suddenly that if he went back there, if he went and opened the door now, his sister would be waiting for him with her kindly smile and her red coat. She wasn’t dead at all—none of the hearts buried in the woods belonged to her, not really, and she could still have him, if she wanted him.

  He turned and ran back down the hill. The Bickerstaff sisters were already out of sight, vanishing into the cluster of tents, cars, and vans that littered the commune, but it wasn’t them he was looking for. There were a few people about, despite the rain. He caught glimpses of pale, uncertain faces, some of them slack from drugs and drink, others looking alarmingly sharp, their eyes going again and again to the big house, where the screaming had come from. Once or twice he thought he saw the big black dog running alongside him, a shape flitting across the spaces between caravans.

  Colleen kept her campervan on the very edge of the gathering, but he already knew what he was going to find before he got there. He skidded to a halt, the taste of something foul in the back of his throat. The screaming red landscape shivered and beckoned, making the fields and the woods look insubstantial and dream-like.

  The campervan was gone, along with the little tent just outside it where she liked to sleep sometimes. In its place there was a patch of yellowed dead grass and a light scattering of damp cigarette butts.

  Colleen was gone.

  CHAPTER

  40

  THAT NIGHT, HEATHER did not go to bed. When they went off to their separate rooms, she waited half an hour or so for Nikki to go to sleep, and then she crept back down the hall to the living room, where she sat with her phone in her lap and her legs tucked up under her for the rest of the night. She listened, and she looked at Ben Parker’s number on the small electronic screen. There was no signal, but she could use the phone at the cottage to call him. As easy as that. Despite the late hour, she was almost sure he would answer.

  But instead she stayed awake, one small lamp on next to her and a knife from the kitchen lying in easy grabbing distance on the sofa. She listened and watched, her body thrumming with tension like electricity through a wire. Someone here knew who she was. Someone here was playing with her. Why? What did they want?

  Was the new Red Wolf watching her?

  By the time Nikki got up the next morning, Heather had brewed a pot of coffee and put the knife away. In the daylight, the crisp green landscape around them seemed less threatening, and all the horrors of the previous night—whose daughter am I exactly—seemed ludicrous.

  “You’re up early.” Nikki yawned hugely, taking the cup of coffee in both hands. “Raring to go?”

  Heather smiled, although it felt sickly and false on her face.

  “Not exactly. My head is killing me.”

  Nikki sat on one of the kitchen stools, her mouth turning down at the corners. “A migraine?”

  Heather nodded and sipped from her own cup, ignoring the slippery feeling of guilt in her chest.

  “Bloody hell. Do you want to go to a doctor or something?”

  “No, but I think I’m just going to lay low for the day. Maybe you could move your date with Harry forward a bit? Spend the day with him.”

  “But …”

  “Don’t worry about me, honestly. It’s hardly fair to drag you all the way up here then doom you to a day of tedium because I’ve got a migraine, is it? Just test the water, see what he says.”

  “If you’re sure.”

  When Nikki had vanished from sight in the car, Heather went and got dressed, and stood for a moment with the Polaroid in her hands. Someone was fucking with her. Someone who had followed her from London, someone who knew more about her mother’s history than she did. Despite everything, she found it hard to believe that the person responsible for the photograph was the new Red Wolf—he had been far too busy dismembering women in Lancashire to be the person leaving notes at her mother’s house in outer London—but she was aware that as rational as this assumption was, it was still a dangerous one. Her most concrete link to this person, whoever they were, was the photo that had been left on her pillow. Time to see what she could find out about it.

  It was cold and gray again when she stepped outside, the chill taking her breath away. Nikki having taken the car was annoying, as it meant she was stuck walking everywhere for the day, but once she started across the fields she was almost glad—the cold and the freshness of the air chased away the lingering effects of her sleepless night, and she felt stronger, more focused.

  And perhaps it was more than just a feeling. Halfway up the hill that led to the imposing form of Fiddler’s Mill House, she realized that she had seen the odd building in the back of the photograph before, on a coffee table. The old man called Bert had said it was Fiddler’s Folly, a building belonging to the family who had once lived in the old house—and like all follies, it was a place with no obvious use or purpose. That meant that the photo had been taken here, on the coast.

  She stopped where she was, ignoring the gusts of freezing wind, and wrestled the map out of her coat pocket. It was clearly produced with tourists in mind, covering the natural nearby attractions and the stretches of wild countryside, but it did just about reach the coast, at the very outer edge of the map. Heather squinted at it, looking for something like
ly to be the Folly, but she couldn’t spot it. Either it had been named something else, or they’d simply left it off. Frowning slightly, she folded the map and continued heading up the hill. She needed a reliable Internet connection.

  “Oh. Can I help you?”

  The orange woman with yellow hair looked pained at the sight of her. Heather stamped off some of the water onto the slick marble floor of the foyer and summoned her most winning smile.

  “Hi, yeah. I was wondering if I could use your wi-fi?”

  The woman frowned theatrically and appeared to consult a sheet of paper on her desk.

  “Are you a guest here currently?”

  “You know I’m not.” Heather leant on the desk, then thought better of it. “I’m sorry, I don’t mean to be a pain in the ass. Don’t you have a café or something? I’ll buy a coffee, a sandwich, whatever you like. The place where we’re staying is located in some sort of technological black hole, and I desperately need to get something sent off for work. Deadlines, you know how it is.”

  The woman narrowed her eyes. “How do I know you’re not going to start, I don’t know, mouthing off to our guests about murders, and drugs, and so on?”

  Heather held her hands up. “I’ve no interest in doing that, I promise. You’ve been really helpful so far—I’ll mention you personally on my Tripadvisor review.” She looked at the name badge on the woman’s shirt. “Melanie.”

  “Fine.” Melanie turned back to her computer screen. “The café is to the right. You get the wi-fi password on your receipt when you buy something. So, you will have to buy something.”

  In minutes Heather had a cup of coffee and a plate of crushed avocado on toast, her laptop set up at a small table and her browser open. Very quickly she found Fiddler’s Folly on Google maps, although now it was called The Heron Look and it was owned by the same environmental charity that partly owned the Fiddler’s Mill spa. That was interesting, but as far as Heather could tell the building was still standing empty, and she could find no information about whether it was now used as a hotel, storage, or some sort of headquarters for the charity. Looking a little deeper, she found a number of references to the “rumors” the old man Bert had mentioned, although they were all annoyingly vague. The family that had built it had dwindled and died off, but she got the impression they weren’t thought of with any affection by the locals.