Dedication

For Bill and Joan, with thanks

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Part One

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Part Two

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Part Three

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-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

Part Four

Chapter Thirty-Five

Chapter Thirty-Six

Chapter Thirty-Seven

Chapter Thirty-Eight

Chapter Thirty-Nine

Chapter Forty

Chapter Forty-One

Chapter Forty-Two

Chapter Forty-Three

Chapter Forty-Four

Keep Reading

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Also by the Author

Copyright

About the Publisher

Part One

CHAPTER ONE

A red light on the side of the phone began to blink on and off, which meant that there was a call. Adam had switched the ringer tone onto mute because sometimes when it rang it startled the hell out of him. Now as he watched the light he made no move to pick up the receiver. It was late; past ten and he knew who it was. He wondered how long she would let it ring before she gave up. He could picture her standing in their living room at home or pacing back and forth from the kitchen. Her mouth would be clamped shut, her lips an unyielding line. The colour of her eyes would be vivid blue; they were a darker shade when she was angry. These days she was angry a lot.

He counted the flashes: seventeen, eighteen. Then the light went out. He waited to see if she would call back but the light remained off. Later, when he got home, or in the morning if she was asleep by then, she would ask where he’d been. He’d say he was working and she’d say she’d phoned, the suspicion in her voice cracking like a whip. He’d tell her he hadn’t noticed and then it would start; the familiar argument which would escalate and veer off in different directions but would ultimately come back to the same well-worn theme. He was never home. One day he’d come through the door and she would be gone and then maybe he would be sorry. Accusations flung like rocks. Work! It was always his fucking work! Well, what about her? What about them?

The office he rented was small. A long narrow room above a photography shop in Fulham. He didn’t need a lot of space. In fact as a freelancer he could have worked at home easily enough, which he had before he and Louise had married. In those days he could keep whatever hours he wanted. Now he had this place. He even kept a camp bed there for the nights when he was so exhausted he would begin to nod off as he worked.

The notes and pictures for the story he was working on were scattered messily along the long wooden bench that served as his desk. Transcripts of interviews with police, family, neighbours, friends, in fact almost anybody who had come into contact with Elizabeth Mount since she had vanished. Some of the photographs her parents had given him were pinned on the wall. He liked to see the faces of the people he was looking for whenever he glanced up. That way they remained real. They were people not merely names. The more he learned about them the better he felt he knew them. Often he knew more about them than their own families because he learned things from their friends that children rarely tell their parents. Usually about boys (if they were girls, and usually they were) or plans they had to go somewhere or do something their parents wouldn’t approve of.

Elizabeth was sixteen. Her friends called her Liz. Her birthday had been in April, three weeks after she’d vanished. It was late May now. The initial inquiry and attendant publicity had tapered off. The official view from the police was that she had run away. She had joined the thousands of others like her who fled their families and home towns each year for the cities, where they melted into the anonymous underbelly of society. Sometimes their families never heard from them again. They changed their names, became involved with drugs, prostitution, criminal activities. All the usual litany of the underclass.

It wasn’t as if Adam hadn’t heard the story before. He had files crammed full of notes about kids like Liz, mostly girls, though there were a fair percentage of boys too. Runaways. People sent him letters all the time. They used to phone as well until he made his number unlisted. He had a reputation now. Not only did he write about kids that went missing, sometimes he found them. Not always, but enough times that he had made this particular patch of expertise his speciality; he’d achieved a degree of minor fame. A couple of times he’d been interviewed on TV, and lots of times on radio. The families of the missing turned to him out of desperation, when nobody else would help. They asked him to find their children, and sometimes he did. The trouble is they were usually dead.

Was Liz dead? He didn’t know. She had vanished one morning on the way to school and hadn’t been seen or heard of since. But it turned out she’d taken a change of clothes with her that day. A witness reported seeing her on a train to London but she wasn’t wearing her school uniform. An anonymous caller had claimed she was living on the streets near Paddington. The police had her down as a runaway, but her family were adamant that she wasn’t the type. But then that was often the case. The family sometimes didn’t know what type their children were. Or didn’t care. Or were lying to cover up abuse. But then those people weren’t the ones who normally contacted Adam.

So far he’d spent five weeks looking for Liz, talking to everybody she had come into contact with. He knew that on the day she vanished she had got on a train to London. One of her friends had finally admitted to him in confidence that Liz had talked about doing it, though she maintained that Liz had meant to come back the same day. Adam didn’t know about the anonymous caller. Maybe that was somebody covering their tracks, trying to mislead the police.

He stared at her picture. A smiling girl with brown hair and a few adolescent pimples. Plucked eyebrows, a bit of make-up, trying to look older and more sophisticated than she was, as girls of her age do. She had a boyfriend who swore he hadn’t seen her that day. In fact they’d argued a few days earlier. Motive to kill her? Adam didn’t think so, and anyway the boy had an alibi for that day. Adam had traced every hour of Liz’s movements for the week prior to her getting on that train. Nothing unusual, nothing at all out of the ordinary. No strangers that she’d spoken to, no behaviour that was abnormal either at home or among friends. But one Thursday morning she had boarded the nine o’clock train to Euston and after that nobody had seen or heard of her again. Apart from the anonymous caller. She had simply vanished.

It was past midnight when Adam arrived home. He moved about the flat quietly and when he looked in on Louise she was asleep. He watched her for a while from the doorway. He felt guilty about what was happening to them. They had been married less than eighteen months. Not very long. Her blonde hair was fanned out on the pillow, visible in the dim light that leaked from the hallway. He remembered the first time he’d seen her in a bar with some friends. She had her back to him and it was her hair he’d first noticed, long and pale yellow so that it looked almost silver. It had jolted a memory and for a brief moment he’d held his breath thinking it was her.

Of course it hadn’t been. When Louise turned around she’d met his gaze with her cool blue eyes. There was a resemblance in her face, though only slight. She’d felt him watching her, she’d claimed later. He had pursued her. Plotting his campaign. Seven months later they’d tied the knot at the register office and spent a week in the Caribbean.

He closed the door quietly and went to the living room where he poured a Scotch and lay down on the couch. He’d spent a lot of nights there lately. Sometimes he had dreams and they were peopled by the faces of lost children. They swam in and out of focus. Now and then he dreamed about one in particular. She had dark hair, almost black, that floated about her head in tendrils. Her features were slightly blurred though he knew who she was. She always appeared with her arm outstretched, a mute gesture of appeal, though in her eyes he glimpsed an accusation. Usually when he had that dream he woke up sweating with the bedclothes tangled in a knot.

Beyond the window the rooftops of Islington were lit with the pale, smoky sunlight of early spring. As Adam turned away he noticed the way Paul Morris was watching him. He suddenly felt like a butterfly pinned beneath the scrutiny of an objective collector.

‘Sorry, where were we?’ Adam asked.

Actually, he quite liked Morris. He didn’t look much like a psychologist in his jeans and open-neck shirt, or at least Adam’s conception of what a psychologist was supposed to look like. His consulting rooms on the third floor of a terraced Georgian house had a pleasantly casual feel. The walls were pale and the windows flooded the rooms with light and air.

‘Last time you were here, we talked about your work,’ Morris said. ‘Do you think what you do has had an effect on your marriage?’

‘Obviously Louise thinks so.’

‘Yes, but what do you think?’

Adam started towards his chair and then changed his mind. He preferred to roam around the room during their sessions, looking at books and the prints on the walls, the view beyond the window. At least that way he felt less as if he was being analysed. Morris couldn’t be much older than himself. A year or two maybe, which made him what, thirty-three or -four? When he’d agreed to relationship counselling he’d expected somebody older.

Adam paused by the bookcase as he considered how to answer Morris’s question. ‘Louise would like me to get a regular job with a magazine or something. She’d like me to leave for work at eight-thirty in the morning and be home by seven and have the weekends off.’

‘Has she actually said that?’

‘Not in so many words perhaps. But she doesn’t need to. Louise thinks I put my work before my marriage.’

‘And you think the way she feels is unjustified?’

‘Yes. No. Not exactly.’ Adam moved away from the bookcase and went back to the window. ‘Look, the thing is I don’t deny that I work long hours, or that I’m away a lot. What I do isn’t like being an accountant. The hours aren’t regular and they wouldn’t be even if I wasn’t freelance. The point is I was doing this before I even met Louise. She knew what she was getting into.’

‘You know, Louise said that’s what you would say.’

‘Well she was right,’ Adam said sharply.

‘I’m not taking sides here,’ Morris said. ‘I’m just trying to give each of you the other’s point of view. Sometimes it’s easier coming from an intermediary.’

‘Okay. I’m sorry. It’s just that Louise and I have been over this a hundred times before.’

‘You said that she wants you to give up what you do. Get a regular job. But that isn’t what she told me. Actually, she said she always knew how important your work is to you. She says she never had a problem with that before you were married.’

‘But now she does.’

‘Only because, and these are her words, since you were married you actually spend more time working than you did before. A lot more. In fact, Louise used the term obsession. She thinks your work has become an obsession.’

‘She doesn’t understand,’ Adam said. ‘She never has. The people I work with have almost lost hope. These are parents whose children are missing. They’re desperate but nobody will listen to them. They know something is wrong. The police tell them their kids are runaways but they know it isn’t true. They feel it inside. Here!’ He thumped his chest for emphasis. ‘Sometimes I’m the only chance they feel they have to get at the truth.’

‘And you believe that Louise doesn’t appreciate any of this?’

‘I don’t think she understands that when I’m working on a story, I can’t just drop it because I have to be home for dinner.’

Morris was reflective for a moment. ‘The other day Louise said something else that I found interesting.’

Adam stared out of the window. ‘What was that?’

‘That she felt after you were married it was almost as if you had changed deliberately. As if you spent more time working in order to shut her out.’

‘That isn’t true. Look, I’m the way I am because . . .’ Adam faltered.

‘Because of what?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘You were going to say something then.’

‘I was going to say what I do is a part of me. There’s nothing I can do about it.’

‘That’s interesting,’ Morris said. ‘Can you explain what you mean?’

Christ, he had walked right into that, Adam thought. He moved away from the window and eventually took the chair opposite Morris. He had a choice here. He could back off or he could try to answer Morris’s question. He’d never talked about any of it before, not to anyone. But a part of him recognized that he’d been leading up to this for some time. He knew he had to try and explain. Perhaps to himself as much as anyone, and Morris was the first person he’d ever come close to opening up to. He supposed it was because there was an element of the impersonal about a professional relationship. Or maybe it was because then Morris could try to explain it all to Louise. Something he couldn’t do himself. Or wouldn’t. The result was the same.

‘I just meant that isn’t our behaviour, the way we are, supposed to be determined by the things that happen when we’re young?’

‘Much of our personalities is shaped by our early influences, certainly. That and our genes.’

‘Nurture over nature?’

‘Broadly, though most people perceive that to mean that it’s our parents who have the greatest influence over us.’

‘You don’t agree?’ Adam asked, suddenly interested.

Morris shrugged. ‘Not directly. As children once we start school our peers become the dominant influencing factor. The attitudes and behaviour of our friends and how we relate to them shape us. More so than our parents.’

Well, he wouldn’t argue with that, Adam thought. There was a short silence.

‘You were going to say something before. Was it to do with your work? Why you chose your particular field?’

‘Yes. I suppose it was,’ Adam admitted.

Morris laced his fingers and assumed a practised expression that mixed mild interest and nonjudgemental detachment.

Adam remembered the day they had moved; the changing landscape outside the car window. The sky was overcast, a solid grey mass hanging heavy and leadenly ominous just above the level of the rooftops. Beyond the valley loomed the stark hills that marked the northern edge of the Pennines shrouded in cloud. It seemed about a million miles away from Hampstead.

His mother had smiled encouragingly from the front seat. ‘You’re going to love it here, Adam. All this beautiful countryside and fresh air.’

He’d wondered which one of them she was trying to convince. He noticed she and Kyle exchange glances.

Castleton turned out to be more of a large village than a town. The main road crossed a stone bridge over the River Gelt before winding past the square, around which were clustered a few shops, a church and a small branch of Barclays bank. The estate was a few miles further on and was approached through wrought-iron gates guarding a road flanked by twin columns of sweet chestnuts. At the end stood a massive sandstone manor. The estate manager’s house was out of sight, itself a substantial Edwardian building with a walled garden.

‘How old were you?’ Morris asked.

‘Thirteen. Kyle was my stepfather. My dad died when I was six. Kyle had worked for some international corporation managing Third World projects until he met my mother, and then he decided to settle down and announced he had this job managing an estate in Cumbria.’

‘I take it you weren’t thrilled with the move.’

‘You could say that. I had to leave everything I knew. Friends, school.’

‘How did you feel about that?’

Adam smiled wryly. ‘I didn’t think you people really said that.’ Morris smiled, but didn’t respond. ‘Lonely,’ Adam said eventually.

A week after they’d moved Adam rode his bike into Castleton along lanes bordered by hedges and stone walls, past fields full of docile cows. When he reached the town it was mid-morning and people were beginning to emerge from the church.

At the newsagent he picked up The Sunday Times for Kyle and the Observer for his mother. The girl behind the counter had pale blonde hair and was about his age.

‘You must be from the estate,’ she said. ‘What’s your name?’

‘Adam,’ he answered, surprised. ‘How did you know I live on the estate?’

‘My friend’s dad works there. She said there was a new lad who talks posh.’

He wasn’t sure if he ought to be insulted. His cheeks burned. As he left, the old-fashioned bell above the door rang with a silvery note and glancing back he saw the girl watching him with an amused look.

‘Bye, Adam.’

He mumbled something in reply.

He came across the boys half a mile from the town. There were three of them sitting on a stone wall, their bikes lying down in the grass. As he drew nearer one of them walked out onto the road. He was tall and solidly built with thick brown hair. He stood with his hands on his hips and waited for Adam to come to a stop.

‘Where are you going?’ he demanded.

‘I live on the estate.’

‘You have to pay to go on this road if you’re not from ’round here. Fifty pence.’

Adam remembered the thudding of his heart and how his mouth had become suddenly dry. Kyle had once told him that if you could it was better to talk your way out of trouble than to fight. ‘Actually, I suppose I am from around here now,’ he’d reasoned.

‘Actually, I am from around here old chap.’

One of the other boys parodied his accent. He was thin with pinched features and black hair that lay flat on his head. His jeans were filthy and had tears in both knees and the sole of one shoe flapped loose. He reminded Adam of the kids from the tower estate he used to pass on the way home from school who used to yell names and throw stones or even empty bottles.

The boy in the road seemed amused. ‘What school do you go to?’

‘It’s called Kings,’ Adam said. ‘But I haven’t started yet.’

‘Fucking grammar boy,’ the thin one sneered.

They had given him an ultimatum; pay or fight, otherwise he had to take the long way around.

‘What did you do?’ Morris asked.

Adam was surprised at how vivid his recall was. He could almost feel the sun on his back making him sweat, the smell of cut hay from the fields mingling with hot tarmac and he experienced again the stinging humiliation of being the victim of bullying. He was alone, an outsider.

He had known he would have to fight or never hear the end of it.

They had said he could choose which one of them he took on. Fucking generous of them. The one who’d stopped him was easily the biggest and exuded a kind of lazy confidence. The thin one was the smallest but obviously a nasty little bastard, as Kyle would say. Which left the one on the wall, who so far hadn’t spoken. He was trying to look tough but he was as nervous as Adam was.

They waited for him to decide and when he eventually pointed at the big one he was almost as surprised as they were.

Morris was intrigued. ‘Why did you do that?’

The truth was Adam wasn’t sure. He’d often wondered if it had been a sudden attack of bravery, the tactical response of those with balls of brass; take out the biggest guy and everybody else falls into line. Or had it been something less heroic. Instinct perhaps?

He shrugged in reply. ‘It was all over pretty quickly.’

He’d thrown a few wild punches and remembered at least one connecting with its target, and the expression of pained surprise the other boy wore before he retaliated by swinging his fist in a blur of speed. The blow caught Adam on the cheek with the force of a house brick and knocked him to the ground, but somehow, probably accidentally, he’d managed to grab the other boy’s legs. Next thing they were rolling on the tarmac scrabbling and flailing at one another amid shouts of encouragement from the other two.

‘Finish him, Dave!’

‘Hit him!’

There was blood in Adam’s mouth and his lip felt thick and swollen. Tears of humiliation pricked his eyes. His arms were pinned. Get it over with he’d thought. Fucking country bumpkins. He’d remembered his mother always telling him how great it would be living in the country. How London was full of crime and vandals. All those glue sniffers and thugs on the tower estates. But he’d never been beaten up there. He’d never had three kids try to rob him. At least there he’d had his friends.

And then unexpectedly he was being pulled to his feet and the other boy was half smiling as he wiped blood from his nose and examined it with faint surprise.

‘Shit! You alright?’

‘I think so,’ Adam said.

They faced each other awkwardly and then the boy fetched Adam’s bike. ‘Sorry. It was just a bit of a laugh really.’

Some fucking laugh. The other two boys hung back, the thin one scowling with sullen disappointment.

Adam fell silent, lost in reflection. All these years later and the memory of that day remained as fresh as if it had happened just a day or two ago. He remembered feeling a curious pride for having stood his ground. The boy he’d fought looked at him differently, with a kind of respect. Even then, at that very moment Adam realized that some bond had inexplicably formed between himself and the boy whom he later knew as David. He wasn’t the only one to feel it. The thin one who turned out to be called Nick sensed it too. His eyed had glowed with resentment.

‘What happened?’ Morris asked.

Adam shrugged. ‘They let me go. I didn’t see them again until term started. It turned out I was going to the same school as the one I had the fight with.’

Morris waited expectantly as if there was more. But Adam didn’t feel like going on. He looked at the clock and noted with relief that his time was up.

CHAPTER TWO

The house was set back from the road and all but hidden behind a hedge. All that was visible was the thatched roof, but earlier Adam had wandered past the gate, pausing at the end of the driveway to get a better look. It was the kind of quaint two-storey Sussex village cottage in demand by well-heeled city commuters. Cloud Cottage was the name on the wooden barred gate. A black Labrador trotted over and dutifully though half-heartedly barked before wagging its tail hopefully. It watched with disappointed eyes when he went back to his car.

The first houses on the edge of the village were around the bend several hundred yards away. The railway station was in the next town, where Liz had caught the train to Euston. Mr and Mrs Thomas lived in Cloud Cottage with their three children. Liz had been their baby-sitter until a year earlier, a piece of information Adam had only stumbled across when he’d asked Liz’s father, Paul Mount, to go to the station with him a couple of mornings in a row on the very long shot that he would see something or somebody that would open up a new avenue in what had become a fruitless search.

On the second morning Paul had nodded to a middle-aged man in a suit. ‘Alan Thomas. He works in the City I think. Liz used to baby-sit for them.’

What was it about Thomas that had triggered some kind of internal alarm? He was just another business commuter like hundreds of others. Nothing to mark him out from anybody else, but discreet questioning had revealed that Liz had stopped baby-sitting for the Thomases a year ago. Why?

‘I don’t know really,’ Paul Mount had said. ‘I think it was a bit far and they were often out late.’

Adam had moved into the village pub, which was called the Crown, and for several days had been quietly digging and watching. He knew Alan Thomas caught the seven-thirty-two most days, but sometimes he went in late or not at all. His wife was on the plain side but well groomed. She didn’t have any close friends in the village, which wasn’t unusual for incomers like the Thomases. They tended to socialize with other people like themselves from the country club up the road. Their children attended private schools.

Adam had learned that the police hadn’t interviewed the Thomases. There was no reason to. In the morning he went back to the station and watched the other people who boarded the seven-thirty-two. There was a young woman whom Thomas seemed to know. Adam followed her to her office in the City and after work introduced himself. He said he was a journalist and wondered if she had time for a drink.

‘Adam Turner?’ Her brow furrowed and then her eyes lit up with recognition. ‘I’ve read something of yours.’

Minor fame had its uses. In a wine bar near the station she answered his questions. He didn’t expect her to remember the day Liz had vanished, but in fact she did. Such strokes of fortune happened occasionally and he accepted them as his share of luck. Dig deep enough and often enough and sooner or later something has to fall into place, and he was nothing if not diligent. He hadn’t been home for a week.

‘Actually, it was my birthday,’ she said, as she sipped a Côte de Rhone. ‘So I went in late that day. I caught the nine o’clock. Wasn’t that the one this girl was supposed to be on?’

‘Yes. Did you see her?’

She shook her head. ‘If I did I don’t remember. I sat next to Alan.’

‘Alan Thomas?’

‘Do you know him?’

‘Not really. He was on the same train?’

‘Yes. I remember he said he was running late because his wife was away and he couldn’t cope without her or something. He made a joke of it. Anyway he promised to buy me a drink after work, but he never turned up. Actually, I was glad.’

‘Why?’

She hesitated. ‘It’s just that his wife was away, and you know, I wondered if he was making a pass. He didn’t actually say anything suggestive or anything. I’m probably being completely unfair.’

‘But something made you uncomfortable?’

‘A little I suppose.’

‘Intuition.’

She shrugged. ‘Perhaps.’

But Alan Thomas had sat with her all the way to London, she was positive of that. Had she seen him again after they left the train? She hadn’t. Who was to say he hadn’t bumped into Liz on the platform?

The next day he went back to London and when he arrived home Louise told him that Morris had phoned. ‘You didn’t cancel your appointment,’ she said. Her arms were folded, a wine glass in one hand.

‘I forgot. I’ll call him tomorrow.’

‘Will you make another time to see him?’

‘I don’t know. I think I’m on to something with the Liz Mount story. I might have to put Morris off for a little while.’

‘Christ!’

She slammed her glass down on the counter.

‘Look, it’s just temporarily,’ he said.

‘Right. Your bloody work comes first. Again!’

‘Come on, Louise,’ he said, and reached for her arm as she swept past.

‘Don’t touch me!’ she yelled, yanking free. ‘Just leave me alone!’

‘It’s not a case of my work coming first, dammit. This girl …’

‘I don’t want to hear about her! I don’t want to hear about any of it. There’s always some girl, some parent, somebody. Anybody except me! Where do I come in, Adam? Tell me that. Where do I come into your list of bloody priorities?’

‘That isn’t fair,’ he started to say, but she shook her head and turned away. He watched her go, heard the slam of the bedroom door.

Out of guilt Adam called Morris and made an appointment for two days’ time. When he arrived at the door he suddenly wondered if there was really any point going inside. That morning he and Louise had argued again. Nothing unusual about that, but it had quickly become a bitter fight. Things had been said by both of them that wouldn’t easily be forgotten. The kind of barbed remarks that are designed to inflict maximum damage. He didn’t think she deserved that. He didn’t either for that matter. By the time he’d left the house they’d both been ashamed to look one another in the eye, and anger had been replaced with the dull knowledge that perhaps this was hopeless.

Deep down, however, Adam knew that Louise’s anger stemmed from her frustration with him and he felt badly about that. In the end he kept his appointment and presently found himself at the window while Morris sat behind him, his fingers steepled beneath his chin.

‘During our last session you were telling me about Castleton. You mentioned that you felt lonely when you moved there.’

Adam turned around. He’d been thinking about Liz Mount, wondering what his next move ought to be. ‘It got better after I started school.’

‘The boy you had the fight with went to the same school didn’t you say?’

‘Yes. His name was David Johnson. Nick and Graham, the other two who were there that day, went to the local comprehensive. David and I got to know each other. We ended up being friends.’

‘So, you felt accepted after that?’

‘Not exactly. Sometimes.’

When he looked back now, Adam didn’t think he’d ever felt accepted. Maybe if it had just been David, or even David and Graham it would have been okay. But Nick had never liked him. He tried to explain.

‘Graham was fairly easy-going. A follower I suppose. But when I came along Nick resented me. It didn’t help that David and I both went to the grammar school. David’s dad owned the local sawmill which had the contract for the wood on the estate, so he and Kyle had a lot to do with each other as well.’

‘Nick was jealous?’

‘Probably.’

‘And what was the effect of that?’

‘I think David felt caught in the middle sometimes.’

He recalled a time when they had arranged to go rabbiting. It was early and the town was quiet. They had arranged to meet at the church. Graham and David arrived a few minutes after Adam, but quarter of an hour later there was still no sign of Nick.

‘Why don’t we ring him?’ Adam suggested. There was a phone box on the other side of the square.

‘They haven’t got a phone,’ Graham said.

‘Let’s go to his house then. He might have slept in or something.’

‘It’s best if we wait,’ David said. ‘He’ll come when he can.’ He started idly scuffing his feet along the path between the gravestones while Graham began examining the palms of his hands.

‘I got these bloody blisters yesterday,’ he said, picking at the skin.

It was as if invisible shutters had closed. The subject wasn’t open for discussion but Adam felt excluded by his lack of understanding. He swallowed his frustration.

During that first year he’d lived in Castleton, Adam had never seen where Nick lived. He knew vaguely where it was; somewhere down past the council houses at the bottom end, close to the eastern edge of the wood, but he’d never been there. A faint air of mystery surrounded Nick’s family. Adam knew there was a younger sister who caught the school bus in the mornings and was as scruffy as Nick and just as sullen, and he’d seen their mother around town wearing a shapeless worn coat, her pale blotchy legs bare even in winter. But Adam had never seen Nick’s father, James Allen. Nick never mentioned him, and neither did David or Graham.

What little Adam had known he’d overheard in snatches of conversation between Kyle and his mother. Whenever there was poaching on the estate, or there had been an outbreak of theft, Kyle blamed Nick’s dad. He heard stories about Allen getting drunk in the local pubs and starting fights with men from the estate. Once he’d seen Nick’s mother in town with a black eye. Over time Adam had formed a mental image of the whole family living in Dickensian squalor, terrorized by an evil-tempered thug.

Eventually Nick had turned up that morning but he hadn’t offered any explanation for being late.

They rode their bikes out of town across the bridge and took the road that climbed steeply towards the fells. By eight the sun was already warm on their backs and the effort of the climb had made them sweat. At one point he and David had paused to rest. The others were still out of sight around a bend in the road behind them. On one side the road was bounded by a wall, and on the other by a thick hedge. A blackbird flashed by, chattering in alarm.

When the others finally appeared they were pedalling slowly. Nick’s bike was a big heavy machine that seemed to be made of cannibalized parts. He was wearing boots that looked too big for him, though the laces were undone. The leather was cracked, and the sole of one had come loose at the toe. It was flapping up and down, making a slapping sound as Nick struggled up the hill. The chain creaked with every turn of the pedals. Creak slap, creak slap.

When they finally caught up Nick dropped his bike on the ground and went to sit on the wall. He dumped the sack that was tied over his shoulder on the grass and it moved as the ferret inside poked and snuffled looking for a way out. Nick lit a cigarette butt he found in his pocket, though he was still panting. He coughed and spat then muttered something under his breath as he lifted his T-shirt to wipe the sweat from his face, revealing for an instant his pale skinny body. There was a vivid purple black bruise the size of a melon across his ribs.

‘Bloody hell. What happened to you?’ Adam said without thinking.

He knew straight away he should have kept his mouth shut. The others were looking away as if they hadn’t seen or heard anything. Nick looked up in surprise, and some ill-defined expression briefly flashed in his face before it was quickly replaced with an angry glare. Abruptly he dropped to the other side of the wall and walked fifty yards up the hill where he sat down.

‘A few minutes later David and I started off again,’ Adam recounted. ‘Nothing was said but I knew I’d crossed a line. David gave me the cold shoulder all the way up the hill. I kept thinking about the look I’d seen on Nick’s face. It was shame. I’d embarrassed him.’

‘And you felt bad about it?’ Morris asked.

‘A bit I suppose. But I’d be lying if I said I was that worried. Nick made it clear he didn’t like me and the feeling was mutual. Somehow he always managed to turn things around. Like I said, it was mostly because of him that I never really fitted in.’

That day Adam and David had waited for the others at a place known as the Giant’s Chair. It was a rock formation that roughly resembled a huge seat. Local legend had it that a race of giants had once roamed the fells and this was all that was left of their existence. It was easy to climb to the top by the gently sloping grassy rise on one side, but once in the seat itself the drop was a sheer one. It was like standing on the edge of a cliff. From there the road was visible, winding back down to the valley. The town was out of sight but parts of Castle ton Wood could still be seen. A pine forest lay to the north, and fringed inside its southern edge was Cold Tarn, a natural deep lake that even on a day like this, when the sun was beating down from a cloudless sky, appeared black. Sometimes they fished for pike and perch there, and in season wildfowlers stood in the reeds that fringed the shore to shoot ducks. Behind them, Cold Fell rose 600 metres above sea level at the northern extent of the Pennines.

Back the way they’d come two tiny figures were visible more than a mile away, moving slowly up the steepest part of the hill.

Adam had pulled a book from his pack and started reading while David sat with his feet dangling over the edge of the rocks, chewing on a stem of grass.

‘What’s that you’re reading?’ David asked after a while.

Adam silently held it up so that he could see the cover but he didn’t say anything.

‘The Crystal Cave? What’s it about?’

‘I’ll let you read it when I’ve finished.’ He was being sarcastic because David didn’t read anything unless it was about sport.

For a while David tossed small pieces of rock out into the open, seeing how far he could throw them. Eventually he stopped and said, ‘What’s up with you?’

Adam put his book down. ‘So, now you’re talking to me again, is that it?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Come on. You haven’t said a bloody word since we left the others.’

David found another stone, and threw it hard out into the air where it dropped from sight.

‘I just said it without thinking,’ Adam said. ‘For Christ’s sake I didn’t mean to embarrass him or anything.’

But if David had heard him, he didn’t give any sign of it. He picked up another stone and threw it out into the air.

‘How do you think he got that bruise anyway?’ Adam said, though David kept his back turned and didn’t reply. He sensed that David’s refusal to talk about it stemmed from loyalty to Nick, but the reasons behind it were something Adam was excluded from. At first he’d tried to make friends with Nick, but every gesture he’d made was openly rejected. Once Kyle had offered to give all four of them a lift to Carlisle so they could go to a film they all wanted to see but Nick had refused to go at the last minute even though Kyle had said he’d pay for all of them. It had developed into an argument and in the end Adam had had enough.

‘You’d go if David’s dad was paying though wouldn’t you?’

Nick had glared at him and clenched his fists. ‘Fuck you, grammar boy!’

For a second Adam had thought Nick was going to throw a punch. David and Graham were looking on silently and in that moment Adam had realized that if he and Nick had a fight they would be forced to take sides. That afterwards no matter who won or lost nothing would be the same again. He knew they wanted to see the film and it was obvious that Nick was being unreasonable, but he sensed that they would side with Nick. Even as the realization hit him David had stepped in.

‘I changed my mind about the film anyway. Let’s go fishing instead.’

It was meant to defuse the situation and Adam knew it. But he also knew Nick had won a subtle battle. They had gone fishing, but Adam had never forgotten how he’d felt.

Watching David’s back as he threw stones from the edge of the Giant’s Chair Adam knew it was pointless to push it. He went back to his book and after a few minutes David started whistling and murmuring snatches of a song. After a while he gestured to the view.

‘This is great isn’t it? I’m never leaving here.’

Adam looked up. ‘What about if you go to university?’

‘Why would I do that? I’m going to work for my dad when I leave school. What about you, Adam, what are you going to do?’

He thought about it. He wanted to be a journalist and work for a newspaper. ‘Go back to London one day, I suppose.’

David shook his head. ‘You’re a city boy. Do you miss it?’

‘Sometimes.’

‘I’d feel out of place there,’ David said.

The others had eventually caught up and they had spent the day rabbiting.

‘Have you ever done that?’ Adam asked, to which Morris replied that he hadn’t. ‘What happens is you find a warren and net all the holes then shove a ferret down one of them to flush out the rabbits. In theory anyway.’

He’d never really enjoyed that kind of thing. He only tagged along fishing, shooting and rabbiting with the others because that was what they did.

Nick had become frustrated that day because his ferret kept killing rabbits down the holes instead of chasing them out. Then the ferret would go to sleep and Nick would have to dig it out. The others had taken it in their stride but if it hadn’t been for the satisfaction of seeing Nick thwarted Adam would have been bored out of his skull.

Late in the day they had found another warren and when they were finished Nick came and checked the last hole Adam had netted. He kicked at one of the pegs and when it came out of the ground easily he sneered.

‘That wouldn’t hold a bloody mouse.’

The others looked on without comment while Nick made a show of doing the job himself.

‘He did it to humiliate me,’ Adam told Morris. ‘And to make a point. He was always doing that kind of thing.’

Finally Nick had sent his ferret down a hole. An hour or so passed before it was clear that once again he would have to dig it out again. He set to with a short spade, his face set in anger while Adam lay in the sun watching with quiet satisfaction.

It took Nick half an hour to find his ferret. He bent down to pluck it from the ground and Adam got up, hoping that perhaps now they could go home. But instead of returning it to the sack Nick pinned the ferret to the ground with his foot. The animal squirmed briefly under the pressure and then almost carelessly Nick raised his spade and then suddenly jerked the blade downwards and the ferret was still. Without a word Nick wiped the blood off on the grass.

Adam was silent, recalling his mingled shock and revulsion.

‘A few days later David tried to explain that Nick had to do what he did because the ferret was no good. Looking back I suppose Nick’s family probably ate what he caught but I didn’t see it that way then.’

‘But it made you feel different from them.’

Adam nodded. ‘I was different.’

That night Adam stayed late at his office. He was thinking about the Mounts, both of whom he’d gotten to know while he’d been looking for their daughter. They were lucky, they had found strength in each other, but the strain was indelibly etched in their faces. A kind of haunted look. It was the not knowing, they had told him, which was the hardest thing to bear. It always was. He looked at the photographs of their daughter on the wall. He had a feeling about her, that she was slipping away as he got closer. It was always like that. The ones he found left him in peace. Those in his dreams were the ones he never found.

Louise was asleep when he got home. He went into their room and for a little while he stood inside the door watching her in the dim light that leaked in from the landing. She bore a physical resemblance to many of the women he’d been out with over the years and she wasn’t the first to tell him that he worked too hard, or that there was a part of him she felt he kept locked away from her.

Quietly he closed the door and went to the couch in the living room.

His leg was aching as it sometimes did when the weather was damp. He sat down and kneaded the ridged and scarred flesh. It still looked red and inflamed after all these years.

CHAPTER THREE

‘Last time we talked you told me that despite your friendship with David you felt different from the other boys. Why do you think that was?’

‘Different reasons,’ Adam replied from the window. It was raining outside, a fine misty drizzle that hung like vapour in the air. ‘We had different experiences. Castleton was a small rural town and I’d grown up in Hampstead. The two places were worlds apart.’

‘But you tried to fit in?’

‘I suppose that’s human nature isn’t it? To belong to the tribe.’

‘For most people it is,’ Morris agreed. ‘Generally speaking we look for others like ourselves to associate with. The friends of Arsenal supporters are usually other Arsenal supporters.’

Adam smiled. ‘If you’re going to use football as an analogy I suppose I felt like a reserve. When Nick wasn’t around I was brought on to play, I felt like one of the team, but then Nick would turn up and I’d be back on the sidelines.’

‘During our last session you said that you thought Nick was jealous of your friendship with David. Was that because you shared experiences with David, like school, that Nick was excluded from?’

‘I suppose so.’

‘But you felt excluded from some of the experiences that Nick and David had in common. So, were you jealous of Nick?’

Adam had never thought of it that way. ‘If I’m honest I suppose the answer is yes.’

‘It sounds almost as if you were in competition with each other, in a sense, for David’s friendship.’

‘I don’t think I felt that way,’ Adam said.

‘How did you feel?’

‘It was more like feeling a constant need to prove myself.’

‘To whom?’

‘I suppose to David. I wanted our friendship to be as important to him as Nick’s evidently was.’

‘You didn’t think it was?’

‘Going back to the football analogy I felt as if I was always fighting for my place on the team. I was looking to score the goal that would finally cement my place. I mean it wasn’t simply about David, it was about acceptance in the wider sense.’

‘And did you? Score that goal?’

‘I thought I had,’ Adam said.

Morris rested his chin thoughtfully on his steepled fingers. He sensed that this was what Adam had been leading up to.

The year was 1985 and spring had been unusually warm and dry. By summer the country was baking in a heat wave. Adam had turned sixteen and had a holiday job at the Courier in Carlisle. The pay was terrible, and his job was mostly running errands and making coffee, but at least he got to see how a real newspaper worked, even if it was only a local daily where news meant local horse shows and reports of council meetings.

The editor was a dour Yorkshireman who spent most of his time secluded in his glass-walled office. Now and then he would emerge and gruffly summon one of the reporters. The door would close and the unlucky victim would have to sit in full view of the rest of the office while his or her work was savagely criticized. The only person who escaped these sessions was the paper’s senior reporter who, alone it seemed, had the editor’s respect.

Adam had been at the paper for three weeks the first time he spoke to Jim Findlay. He was standing at the photocopier feeding endless sheets of paper into the machine when Findlay paused on his way past.

‘Adam isn’t it?’

Findlay was rarely in the office. He did most of his work from the pub on the corner, where he habitually sat at a table in a sunny corner by the window with a pint glass and a whisky in front of him and an ashtray brimming with cigarette butts. He was Scottish and spoke with a broad accent. He looked to be in his forties, and had thinning hair that was turning grey and mournful eyes that gazed on the world with a kind of weary resignation.

‘Yes it is,’ Adam answered, recovering from his surprise.

Findlay nodded. ‘How’re you liking our wee paper then?’

‘It’s fine. I mean, I’m enjoying working here.’

‘Is that so? I expect you’ll be wanting to become a journalist yerself one day, is that it?’

‘Hopefully, after university anyway.’

Findlay seemed amused. ‘University eh? You’ll no’ want to be working at a place like this then. I’ll expect you’ve bigger plans.’

There was something faintly mocking in his tone, though Adam didn’t feel that he was the target, but rather that Findlay was mocking himself. The humour in his eyes faded and was replaced with something closer to regret. He placed a hand briefly on Adam’s shoulder.

‘Don’t mind me laddie,’ he said, and with that he wandered off.

At the end of the day Adam caught a bus back to Castleton. It was a sunny late afternoon, the heat of the day trapped in the narrow lanes between the hedgerows. In the fields the grass was drying to pale yellow. The hedgerows of hawthorn and crab apple and cow parsley were in full bloom. Towards the woods the air shimmered in a haze.

As the bus rounded a bend and crossed a stone bridge, a cluster of vehicles and caravans parked in a cut off the bridleway came into view. A grey horse was tethered to a tree stump near an ancient truck and smoke drifted lazily across the river. Back in April Adam had first seen the camp on the way home from school. David had stayed late for cricket practice and the only other person on the bus had been an old man who sat across the aisle. He had pale skin and thin wispy hair and his eyes were rheumy and red-tinged.

‘Gypsies,’ he’d muttered. ‘Come around every few years they do.’ His mouth turned down in a grimace and he said something quietly to himself.

A little further along the road the bus had stopped and the old man got off and walked towards some cottages set back from the lane. The bus had barely moved off when it slowed again and pulled hard over so that the hedge scraped against the side. Out of the window Adam saw a brown horse carrying three figures on its back. Two were small children, and behind them was an older girl of perhaps seventeen or so. Her head was almost level with Adam so that as she passed by only the glass and a few feet of space separated them. He registered wide, dark eyes, a full mouth, and thick, unruly, almost jet-black hair. She stared back at him without expression. She wore a simple shapeless plain cotton dress. After she had passed he looked back and glimpsed her bare legs and the full rounded shape of her breasts against the material of her dress. The horse had no saddle and only a rope for a bridle. As he watched the girl kicked her bare heels into the horse’s flanks, and then the bus turned a bend and they were lost from sight.

The gypsies had stayed throughout the spring and into the summer. The old women called at houses selling lucky charms and muttering curses if they found a door slammed in their faces. The rate of break-ins and petty crime in the area rose, which people generally attributed to the gypsies. Johnson’s sawmill was broken into one night and a load of lumber stolen, but though the police went to the gypsy camp none of it was ever recovered. Kyle warned Adam to steer clear of them.

When the bus reached the square in Castleton, Adam crossed the street towards the newsagent’s with his jacket slung over his shoulder. The bell above the door rang as he went inside. He paused, allowing his eyes to adjust to the comparative gloom. The shop smelt of sherbet and liquorice, underlain with the whiff of tobacco. Angela smiled when she saw him.

‘Hello, Adam.’

‘Hi.’ He went to the fridge and took out a cold bottle of coke. ‘Hot out there.’

‘It’s lovely.’ Angela pulled a face. ‘Not that I would know. I’ve been stuck in here all day.’

He handed her some money, and as she operated the register her smock tightened over the swell of her breasts. His gaze lingered for a fraction of a second and then he fixed his eye on the magazine rack.

‘Here’s your change.’

‘Oh, thanks.’ He feigned distraction, hoping she wouldn’t notice the flush of colour creeping into his cheeks. Her eyes were blue, but unlike any blue he had ever seen. Pale, but shimmering with light. Her long pale yellow hair was bleached in highlights by the summer sun, her arms brushed with a light tan.

‘How’s your job going?’ she asked him.

‘Fine. I like it.’

‘Are you going to the disco?’ She gestured to the notice board on the back of the door where a bright orange flyer advertised a disco at the church hall at the weekend.

‘Are you?’ he asked impulsively. He realized his question could almost be construed as asking her out and he felt his cheeks burn. He wished the ground would open up and swallow him whole. If she noticed, however, she didn’t let on.

‘Yes,’ she answered.

The door opened. ‘Well, I better go,’ Adam said, relieved and disappointed at the same time.

‘See you at the weekend then.’

‘Right. See you there.’ As he left he caught the eye of a woman coming in. She smiled at him.

He walked down through the town to the bridge and then along the path across the water meadow. On the far side Johnson’s sawmill was hidden in a copse. The familiar tangy scent of cut pine and sawdust hung in the air. The gates were open and two trucks were parked in the yard outside the cutting shed. The saws were silent. On one side of the yard stood a two-storey wooden building with an outside staircase that led to the office door. Underneath was a room where the men had their tea. Every morning Adam left his bike around the back before he caught the bus to Carlisle.

As he passed the open tearoom door he almost tripped over Nick who was sitting outside smoking a cigarette in the shade. He had left school by then and was working full time at the sawmill.

‘Sorry, didn’t see you there.’

Nick squinted up at him, his expression managing to look like a sneer, though it might have been the sun. ‘Been working hard then? All that sharpening pencils and making the tea, you must be knackered.’

Adam ignored the sarcasm and stepped over Nick’s legs.

‘Better watch you don’t get a blister on your little finger.’

‘I’ll try to remember that. Is David around?’

Nick shrugged unhelpfully and picked a shred of tobacco off his lip. ‘Somewhere.’

Just then David appeared at the top of the stairs. He was tanned and muscular from working outdoors in the sun, in contrast to Nick, whose face remained pale beneath his black hair and who still looked like a skinny kid.

‘Have you finished?’ Adam asked. He was thinking that they could go down to the river for a swim but David shook his head.

‘We’re working late today. There’s an order that needs doing.’ He aimed a kick at Nick’s foot. ‘Come on. We’ll see you tomorrow, Adam.’

Adam watched as they headed towards the shed and Nick laughed at something David said. He knew that when Nick had applied for a full-time job a few months earlier David’s dad hadn’t been too keen on the idea. Adam had overheard David pleading Nick’s case, insisting that Nick couldn’t be blamed for the way his dad was, and though in the end Mr Johnson had conceded, Adam had the feeling he’d never really been happy about it. He wondered if Nick knew about that.

It was getting dark by the time Adam and the others arrived at the disco at the weekend. A group of younger boys lurked in the darkness at the edge of the tiny car park furtively smoking cigarettes. In the entrance hall two women from the church social committee sat behind a scarred wooden table taking money and dispensing entrance tickets. One of them cast a disapproving eye over Nick’s leather jacket.

‘You can leave that in the cloakroom if you like,’ she said.

He gave her his money without answering and held her eye until, flustered, she dropped her gaze. Inside they stood bunched near the door. The hall was about half full. The music was loud and clusters of local kids stood around the walls, boys on one side, girls on the other, except for three young girls dancing together near the stage at the front. The DJ seemed to be absorbed with his record collection. A bank of coloured lights in front of his sound system blinked on and off with the music and a single silver glitter ball suspended from the rafters cast a forlorn pattern on the dance floor. A woman and a balding man wearing a knitted tie with a brown check shirt were selling cups of orange juice and sandwiches, which nobody was buying. The woman wore a fixed smile and jigged determinedly in time to the music. Occasionally they both glanced uneasily towards a group of four teenagers standing in one corner of the hall.

They were conspicuous both by their appearance and by the space around them that set them apart from everybody else. Their clothes looked like hand-me-downs and they shared a common dark hue to their skin and eyes. If anybody looked their way they stared back with silent hostility. Adam recognized one of the two girls as the one he’d seen from the bus back in the spring, though there was something different about her. He decided she looked smaller than he remembered, perhaps because last time he’d seen her she was on horseback. She also seemed young, which he put down to the fact that all the other girls in the hall wore clothes and make-up that made them look older than they really were. She looked over as if she sensed him watching her until one of the boys with her noticed and glared at her.

‘Fuckin’ gyppos,’ Nick muttered.

Graham nudged him and nodded towards a couple of girls who had started dancing together. ‘There’s Christine Abbot and that friend of hers.’

They wore high heels and short tight skirts, and when one of them noticed they were being eyed she said something to her friend and they both giggled. Nick and Graham went over to talk to them.

Adam looked around for Angela but he couldn’t see her anywhere. He and David lingered by the door. A few boys plucked up the courage to approach a group of girls. They paired off and started moving to the music with blank expressions. The music seemed to get louder as if the DJ thought sheer volume would make up for what else the hall lacked. It was hot and airless and after a while Adam told David he was going to get a drink. In the toilets he splashed water on his face and then made his way to the entrance and went outside where it was cool and the sound of the music faded.

‘Hello, Adam.’

He turned around and found Angela smiling at him. ‘Hi,’ he said and for a second or two was at a loss for anything more to say. She wore jeans and a pink T-shirt with the imprint of a pair of lipsticked lips on the front like a big kiss. With the touch of make-up she wore and her hair done differently she looked older. ‘I thought you weren’t coming,’ he said eventually.

‘Were you waiting for me?’

He wasn’t sure what to say. His heart was beating faster than normal. ‘Would you mind if I was?’

‘No.’ For a moment neither of them spoke, absorbing the fact that they seemed to have crossed some kind of invisible boundary. ‘What are you doing out here anyway?’ she asked.

‘It was hot inside.’

She gestured towards the children’s park next door. ‘Shall we go over there then?’

‘Don’t you want to go in?’

She looked at the door. ‘Not really.’

The park was deserted, lit with a single overhead lamp. Angela sat on a swing and caught the chains in the crook of her elbows. They talked for a while about nothing much, the sounds from the hall drifting over to them. He told her about his job and she told him that she liked art at school but didn’t know what she wanted to do when she left.

‘What about you?’

‘I think I’d like to be a journalist.’

‘You mean work at the Courier?’

‘No. I mean for a national paper. Or perhaps a magazine.’

‘You’d have to live in London or somewhere wouldn’t you?’

‘I suppose.’

‘Don’t you like it here then?’

‘Sometimes I do,’ he said, and grinned at her.

She smiled. ‘Like now?’

‘Yes.’ Suddenly emboldened he said, ‘I’m glad you came tonight.’

She reached across and found his hand. ‘I’m glad too.’

They went for a walk hand in hand around the park. It was warm and the air felt thick and soft in the darkness. The sounds from the hall grew fainter.

‘Shouldn’t you go back inside?’ Angela asked. ‘Who’d you come with?’

‘David and the others. I think Graham and Nick were talking to some girls though.’ He frowned, looking back at the hall, thinking perhaps he should go back, though he didn’t want to.

Angela squeezed his hand. ‘David’ll be alright. All the girls fancy him.’

He was surprised, but when he thought about it he supposed it was true. David was popular and easy-going and he made the girls laugh. He experienced a faint twinge of jealousy. ‘What about you? Do you fancy him too?’

‘David?’ She laughed at the idea. ‘I suppose I never thought of him like that. I prefer the dark serious type,’ she teased. ‘I remember the first time I saw you after you moved here. I felt sorry for you.’

‘Sorry for me? Why?’

‘You looked lonely.’ She squeezed his arm and he smiled though he was slightly uneasy that she had felt sorry for him.

It was late when Graham and Nick came out of the hall with the two girls they’d been talking to. When Nick put his arm around one of them she laughed coarsely and pushed him away, but then the four of them made their way around the back of the building and vanished in the darkness.

Angela raised her eyebrows and looked amused, then looked at her watch. ‘I should be getting home.’

‘I’ll walk you,’ Adam offered.

‘Alright.’

‘I better just go and tell David.’

‘I’ll wait outside.’

It was crowded in the hall and at first he couldn’t see David anywhere. He looked twice around the hall until he finally found him talking to the gypsy girl he’d noticed earlier while her friends looked on with sullen suspicion. One of them in particular stared with obvious hostility. He had the same general look as the girl and might have been her brother.

‘I’m off,’ Adam said when he went over.

‘Alright. See you later.’

The girl went back towards her friends and David followed her with his gaze.

‘Did I interrupt something?’

‘I just asked how long they were staying.’

‘I don’t think her friends liked her talking to you.’

‘They’re gyppos, Adam. They don’t like outsiders much.’ David looked around the hall. ‘Where’ve you been anyway?’

‘Just talking to Angela Curtis.’ He tried to make it sound casual, but he didn’t think it worked. ‘I said I’d walk her home anyway, so I better go.’

David grinned and said he would see him later. When he got outside Angela was leaning against the wall beyond the light from the door. ‘I thought you’d got lost.’

‘Sorry, I couldn’t find him.’

She smiled. ‘It doesn’t matter.’

As they started walking towards the road she slipped her hand inside his.

Approaching the end of a long hot August, Castleton and the surrounding country seemed smothered in a sleepy stupor where late in the day nothing much stirred. Cows lay down in the shade of oak trees in the fields and buzzards circled lazily in the thermals high above the fells. Then something happened which abruptly shook the town from its lethargy.

One Saturday afternoon Adam was waiting outside the shop when Angela finished for the day. She wore a band in her hair and a denim skirt that ended mid-thigh. They walked along by the river where she took off her shoes, holding on to his shoulder for balance as she stood on one leg. They followed the path away from the town, past the sawmill and along the edge of Castleton Wood. At one point they passed the gypsy camp on the other side of the river where a woman was hanging washing on a makeshift line and some grubby children were playing with an old bike. The woman stared at them as they passed.

‘I wonder why they live like that,’ Adam mused aloud. ‘Do you think they’re as bad as people think?’

‘My dad doesn’t like them coming into the shop. He thinks the kids will nick anything they can get their hands on. When I was young he used to tell me I should stay away from them because gypsies sometimes stole children.’

‘That’s a bit strong isn’t it?’

She smiled ruefully. ‘It’s true the kids will nick from the shop though. You have to watch them like hawks. Little buggers.’

Half a mile further on there was a bend in the river where a willow tree grew and made a pleasant shady spot to sit. The water was shallow close to the bank where it flowed crystal clear over pebbles and rocks. They sat in the long rye grass that was flecked with splashes of vivid red from the poppies that grew in the field. Angela tilted her face to the sun and closed her eyes. She took a deep breath.

‘I love that smell, don’t you?’

It was the sweet smell of hay from a nearby field from where they could hear the drone of a tractor.

A week ago they had been to the cinema in Brampton and on the way home had taken a shortcut through the graveyard. They had paused under the big oak tree by the south wall and kissed. Adam remembered the feel of her body pressed against his, her quickening breath.

She opened her eyes and caught him watching her. The air seemed suddenly still. He didn’t try to conceal what he felt sure must be evident in his eyes. She leaned towards him and kissed him briefly and then her expression grew serious. She hugged her knees, not looking directly at him.

‘Adam … can I ask you something? Have you ever had sex?’

‘No. Have you?’

She shook her head. ‘Sometimes though, I feel as if I want to. With you I mean. It’s just … I want it to feel right. I want it to be special. Does that sound silly?’

‘No.’

‘There are girls in my class at school who’ve had sex with their boyfriends. They make it sound so casual. I don’t want it to be like that.’

‘Neither do I,’ he said.

She picked a stem of grass and began shredding it. ‘Let’s wait. Can we?’

‘Of course.’ He reached for her hand. ‘As long as you like.’

She smiled and they lay down side by side. He felt closer to her somehow. They linked hands and the warmth of the sun and the drowsy hum of insects lulled them into a languorous daze.

‘This is so beautiful,’ Angela murmured. ‘I don’t think I ever want to live anywhere else.’

‘Never?’ he questioned.

She opened one eye. ‘Why would I?’

‘Don’t you want to travel?’

She thought about that. ‘I suppose so,’ she said at last. ‘I’d like to go to America.’

‘What about somewhere closer? France.’

‘Paris. I’d love to go to Paris. I want to see the Eiffel Tower and all the glamorous shops. And I’d like to go to Italy. But I’d always want to come back here.’

He pondered what she’d said and then abruptly Angela sat up. ‘I’m hot,’ she announced. She stood up and went down to the river’s edge and waded into the water until it reached just below her knees while Adam sat on the bank watching her.

‘What’s it like?’ he asked.

She turned around and grinned. ‘It’s freezing.’

A dragonfly skimmed the surface of the water, and the sun shining through the branches of the willow made shimmering patterns of light. Where the bottom was stony the water was clear, the colours of the stones bright and hard, sandy browns and darker reds, but further out towards the far bank the river grew deep and dark where it was shadowed by overhanging branches. As Angela bent to scoop water in her hand, her long hair fell across her shoulders and as she stood she pushed it back and splashed her face. Adam felt his throat tighten. He wanted to capture this image of her and store it away in his mind, to absorb the detail of the light and the reflections on the water, of a green weeping willow and a girl whom he thought he was falling in love with.

When she came back to sit beside him again, she gestured to the paperback he’d shoved in his back pocket and asked what it was.

‘Cider with Rosie. It’s by someone called Laurie Lee.’ He showed her the cover. ‘It’s about a boy growing up in Gloucestershire before the war.’

‘Is it good?’

‘Yes.’ He started to tell her about it. She sat with her knees drawn up to her chin as he described the sense of another time that the book evoked.

‘Who’s Rosie?’ she asked.

‘A girl.’

‘What’s she like?’

‘She’s nice,’ he said. ‘He thinks about her all the time.’ An insect landed in Angela’s hair, and he reached out and brushed it away. She smiled and then turned to look at the water and for a while neither of them spoke.

It was evening by the time they walked back towards town. The light had grown soft and hazy, turning purple in the dusk. They passed the gypsy camp and heard the sound of voices from behind a caravan. The smell of wood smoke filled the air. Close to town they crossed the water meadow near the now quiet sawmill. On the other side of the river Adam glimpsed two figures in the trees. He stopped.

‘What is it?’ Angela asked when she saw where he was looking.

The figures had gone, however, slipped back among the trees as if they didn’t want to be seen, though not before Adam had formed a fleeting impression of a boy and a girl, the boy tall with thick brown hair, the girl slender and dark. For a moment he was sure it had been David. He was on the verge of saying so, but in the end he didn’t.

‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘Thought I saw something that’s all.’

There had been times over the last few weeks when Adam had seen the gypsy girl in the trees across the river from the sawmill. She appeared to be waiting for somebody and she always hung back in the gloom as if she didn’t want to be seen. When he thought about it he hadn’t seen so much of David lately, though he’d been spending time with Angela so maybe that was it. Besides, if David was seeing the gypsy girl he probably wouldn’t want his dad to know about it, which might explain why he hadn’t said anything. And maybe it hadn’t been David anyway.

But if it was, he wondered as they walked on, had David told Nick?

Two days later, on Monday, the Courier was buzzing with rumours of a big story. For once Findlay turned up and went to the editor’s office where the two men were seen talking for almost an hour. When Findlay finally emerged he disappeared for the rest of the day, but he returned late in the afternoon and spent an hour at his desk hammering at his typewriter. Adam was proofing ads for the following weekend’s edition when Findlay surprised him by appearing at his side.

‘Working late I see, Adam.’

‘I thought I’d just get this done.’

Findlay glanced at the ads. There was something different about him, a kind of gleam in his eye. ‘Where is it you live, Adam? Over Brampton way somewhere isn’t it?’

‘Just outside Castleton.’

‘Aye, I thought it was. Do you know anything about the gypsies that are camping over there?’

‘I’ve seen them,’ Adam said uncertainly.

‘One of them’s gone missing. A girl. She hasnae been seen for a couple of days now. Do you ever talk to any of them?’

‘Nobody does much.’

‘No, I suppose they don’t. They’re not much liked, eh? Still, this wee lassie is a good-looking girl I’ve heard. Mebbe she just met some local lad, eh? And the two of them have eloped.’ He chuckled, but his gaze was penetrating. ‘If you hear anything, will you let me know?’

‘Alright,’ Adam said.

‘Thanks. Anyway, I expect she’ll turn up. Don’t work too late, Adam.’

In the morning the story was all over the front page of the Courier. The missing girl’s name was Meg Coucesco. There was no photograph, but the police had provided an identikit and Adam recognized her as the girl from the disco. He read the story through with growing unease. She was seventeen years old and had last been seen late on Saturday afternoon when she had left the camp alone. She had never returned. There was little detail in the story other than a description of what she’d been wearing, and a statement from the police expressing concern for her safety. A search of local land had been organized for that day involving local police and volunteers, and anyone who had visited the camp over the summer, or who knew the girl, was asked to come forward and speak to the detectives on the case. The final quote was from a unnamed senior officer who said that at this stage the actions they were taking were merely a precaution. There was always the chance that the girl had simply chosen to run away of her own accord.

Adam wondered about that. If the police thought she had run away, why were they conducting a search and asking to speak to anyone who knew her?

At the end of the day he was glad to be alone on the bus, to give him a chance to think. Whenever he’d seen Findlay around the office that day he’d done his best to avoid him, though he wasn’t sure why. He unfolded a copy of the paper he’d brought with him and stared at the picture of the missing girl. It was a good likeness though curiously expressionless, which made him think of the first time he’d seen her from the bus when she’d stared back at him through the window.

He kept thinking about the times he’d seen her near the sawmill and about the two figures he’d glimpsed vanishing among the trees on Saturday. He’d been thinking about it all day.

When he got off the bus Adam went to the sawmill. The saws were quiet and men were packing up or leaving for the day, though Nick was still working in the shed stacking freshly cut planks of pine. He found David outside the tearoom underneath the office and took him aside before he handed him the paper.

‘Have you seen this?’

He watched as David read the headline, his gaze lingering over the identikit picture of the girl. Though he frowned slightly he didn’t react in any other way.

‘The police want to talk to anyone who knows her.’

David regarded him blankly. ‘What of it?’

‘Shouldn’t you talk to them?’

They could hear David’s father talking on the phone through the open door at the top of the stairs. David lowered his voice.

‘Me? Why me?’

‘Well, you talked to her that night at the disco.’

‘Adam, I spoke to her for about a minute. That’s all. I don’t know her.’

Adam experienced a sense of relief. What had he thought anyway? It must have been somebody else he’d seen in the trees with Meg.

Just then Nick came over from the shed. He looked curiously from one to the other. ‘What’s up?’

David handed him the paper and after he’d read the headlines he glanced at David and gave it back. There was something in his expression that Adam couldn’t put his finger on.

‘So?’

The question was directed towards Adam. Suddenly his relief evaporated, though he wasn’t sure why. ‘I’ve seen her a couple of times,’ he said. ‘In the trees across the river. I got the impression she was waiting for someone.’

‘What if she was?’

He didn’t know how to answer. ‘I’m pretty sure I saw her there on Saturday. She was with somebody.’

Nobody spoke. The silence seemed to press down on Adam like a heavy weight.

‘Did you see who it was?’ David asked finally.

There was something faintly challenging about his tone. ‘Not really. I mean I’m not sure. I thought I did, but …’ Adam broke off. He was struck by the way Nick was looking at him. That same old sneer.

‘But what?’ David said.

Something clicked in his brain. All of a sudden he was certain that it was David he’d seen. ‘Nothing.’ Adam met his eye. ‘Nothing, I don’t know who it was.’

The story about the missing girl remained on the front page for the rest of the week. Findlay wrote a feature about the gypsy way of life which delved into the historical roots of Romany travellers and the suspicion and distrust they encountered wherever they went. The evidence that they were involved in petty crime was indisputable but some of the other things gypsies were accused of such as illegal prostitution and gambling, along with many of the more lurid myths like baby stealing, were less common and in some cases had probably never been true.

As the days passed and despite massive searches there was no sign of Meg Coucesco. The Courier reported the police speculation that she had merely run away. Adam read each report with increasing unease. He kept replaying the scene in the yard with David and Nick when he’d felt compelled to deny what he’d seen. Though he asked himself why he’d done it he already knew the answer. It was for the same reason that he hadn’t asked David since then to explain himself. He wanted to show David that he trusted him, that he could be trusted in return, as much as Nick. Even more.

As the days passed he found himself facing a dilemma. He knew he ought to persuade David to go to the police because he must know something about Meg Coucesco’s disappearance. He didn’t believe that David had done anything to hurt her, but the problem was whenever he decided to talk to David he always found Nick around, and anyway as each day went by he became less certain about what he’d seen. Sometimes he thought he had glimpsed David’s face, if only for a moment, and at other times he was sure he hadn’t seen anything more than a tall, indistinct shape. The fact that David seemed completely normal and utterly untroubled only added to his self-doubt. David, in fact, took little interest in the story.

One evening he questioned Angela about what she remembered. ‘When we were out by the river on Saturday, did you see anything in the trees across from the sawmill?’

She looked mystified. ‘Like what?’

‘I don’t know. Anything. I thought I saw somebody.’

‘You didn’t say anything. Who was it?’

‘I don’t know. It was probably nothing.’

The day afterwards at work he caught Findlay watching him thoughtfully and when he had to deliver some copy to the pub where Findlay was again ensconced, the reporter took it without even a glance and gestured to a chair.

‘Why don’t you sit down, Adam?’

He wanted to refuse but didn’t see how he could. Findlay lit a cigarette and studied him through a haze of smoke.

‘Would you like a drink of something?’

‘No thanks. I have to get back.’

‘Don’t be in such a rush, laddie. Stay here a minute and let’s have a wee chat. The place’ll no fall down without you.’ He chuckled softly to himself. ‘I suppose you’ll be finishing with us soon to go back to school, eh?’

‘In a couple of weeks.’

‘Aye, you’ll probably be glad to get back.’

Adam didn’t reply. He had a feeling this was leading somewhere, that Findlay was interested in more than how he felt about going back to school.

‘This business about the wee gypsy lassie has affected us all. It makes you think when something like this happens in your own back yard. It must have been bothering you too, eh, Adam?’

‘No more than anyone else I suppose.’

‘No? I thought since you live over that way … Mebbe you’d seen the girl around, you know.’

‘I might have once or twice.’

‘Is that so? What was she like?’

‘I don’t know. I never spoke to her.’

‘But I mean, what was she like to look at? It’s hard to tell from the identikit pictures, you know? Would you say she was pretty?’

‘I suppose so.’

‘Mebbe the police are right then, do you think? Could be she just met a lad from some other town and they ran away together. Did you ever see her with anyone?’

‘No.’

‘Not even with a local lad?’

‘No.’

Findlay stared at him. He had the uncomfortable feeling that the reporter could see everything that he was thinking.

‘Mebbe you heard something about a lad the girl might have been seeing, even if you didnae actually see them yerself.’ Findlay persisted. ‘There’re rumours she was seeing somebody you know.’

‘I never heard anything,’ Adam said.

‘Ah well, it was just a thought, you know.’ Findlay made a gesture as if to dismiss the subject. He lit another cigarette, and smiled. ‘Let’s talk about something else, eh? You know I used to live in a village like Castleton myself, Adam. Did I ever tell you that?’

‘No.’

‘Aye, well I’m glad I’m no there any more. I don’t like these wee places where everybody knows what everybody else is up to, you know what I mean? Like when I was living in this place, I knew this lad who was nicking sweeties from the shop on the corner. Him and his brother used to go in there and fill their bags with stuff, and I don’t just mean they were taking a few gobstoppers and the like. They were getting away with whole boxes of chocolates. You know what they lads were doing with all this stuff, Adam? They were selling it to all the other kids around there.’

Findlay paused for a moment and emptied his glass. He studied it reflectively. ‘The trouble was, the woman who owned the shop was my auntie. I knew how it was affecting her losing all this stuff, and my mother knew that I must have some idea who was responsible. You know what she wanted me to do? She wanted me to tell her who it was. Difficult decision that. ’Course, I was only a wee lad then.’

‘So what did you do?’

‘What would you have done, if you’d been me, Adam?’

‘Idon’t know.’

‘Well, I didn’t know either. But in the end I had to decide. It was a case of divided loyalties you might say. I realized then, Adam, that we all have to make moral choices in our lives.’

He paused again and then he stood up. ‘You sure you don’t want something to drink?’

‘I have to get back.’

Findlay let his gaze linger, then nodded. ‘Aye, well, I’ll see you later.’

What Findlay had said stayed with Adam throughout the day and on the bus ride home. He was still thinking about it when he crossed the water meadow towards the sawmill. David and Nick were leaving work for the day, heading along the track towards the road. He hung back watching them, and then for no reason that he could put his finger on he started following them from a distance.

He soon realized they were heading for a steep hill called Back Lane which led to the part of town known as the bottom end. He followed them past small cottages with front doors that opened directly onto the road, and then past several streets of council houses that had been built after the war, a collection of prefab bungalows with pebble dash cladding and iron roofs. At the bottom of the hill Back Lane ended in an unpaved bridle track that vanished among tall trees.

He gave them a few minutes before he followed. The houses on the edge of town were quickly lost from sight as the track curved towards a bridge over the river. Tall leafy elms and oaks filtered the light, lending a green-tinged hue. It was quiet other than for the twittering of birds and the gurgle of water beneath the old stone bridge where the river was dark and sluggish. Around the next curve the trees ended and on the edge of a meadow three cottages formed a terraced row beside the bridleway. On the other side of the meadow was the edge of Castleton Wood, which formed the boundary of the estate.

The cottages had slate roofs and stone chimneys, their gardens long overgrown with weeds and brambles. Some of the windows were missing glass and had been covered with plastic sheeting, and the paint on the doors and frames was peeling and blistered. A proliferation of junk lay in the unfenced gardens. Old car parts, rusted wire netting, and a rotting chicken house that appeared to be slowly dissolving into the ground poked out of the weeds and nettles. A battered van was parked just off the track and a skinny mongrel dog lay asleep by an open door, its leg twitching as it dreamed.

Confronted for the first time with the reality of where Nick lived, Adam realized he’d expected something more dramatic. The vague air of unspoken mystery that had always surrounded him, the sullenness and obvious results of physical abuse, had conjured dark family secrets. But the truth was simply depressing and squalid.

Adam hung back, remaining hidden in the trees until David and Nick emerged from the first of the cottages. There was something oddly furtive about them. They looked around as if to make sure they were alone and then, apparently reassured, they opened the back door of the van. David reached into his pocket and then leaned inside. When he reappeared a few seconds later he said something to Nick before he quickly turned and started walking back along the track. Adam remained hidden, pressed against the trunk of a tree as David passed by no more than eight feet away. When he peered back towards the cottages a minute later Nick had vanished and the scene was once more quiet and deserted.

In the morning it was on the news that James Allen had been arrested and taken into custody for questioning about the disappearance of Meg Coucesco. It was Findlay who told Adam that the police had found a bracelet in his van belonging to the girl.

‘They were acting on a tip-off.’ From the look in his eye Adam realized that Findlay suspected that he had had something to do with it.

For twenty-four hours Adam was plagued with uncertainty about what he should do but before he could reach any decision Allen was released due to lack of evidence. He learned from Findlay that the fact that there was no body made it difficult for the police to press charges, though Findlay had spoken to a detective who was convinced that Allen knew what had happened to the girl. He was known to have been to the camp regularly that summer, and he had a history of violence.

When Allen vanished after he was released Findlay was unsurprised.

‘If he showed his face around Castleton again the gypsies would nae doubt take matters into their own hands, Adam,’ he said.

In the event, though, they didn’t need to. He was killed a few days later in Derbyshire when his van hit a petrol tanker and he was burned to death.

‘Poetic justice, eh, Adam,’ Findlay commented philosophically.

‘She was never found,’ Adam finished. He was standing by the window. The rain had stopped and the sun was struggling to break through the clouds above Islington.

Morris was thoughtful. ‘What do you think happened to her?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Didn’t you ever speak to David about it? Even after Nick’s father was killed?’

Adam went over and sat down. His leg was playing up, causing him to limp slightly. ‘We never mentioned it.’

‘Obviously this whole event made a significant impression on you,’ Morris said. ‘Are you saying that your choice of career stems from this incident?’

‘I suppose so.’

‘Why do you think that is?’

‘Aren’t you the one who’s supposed to come up with the psychological whys and wherefores?’

‘I’m more interested in what you think.’

‘I suppose I feel guilty.’

‘Why?’

‘Because I didn’t tell anyone what I’d seen.’

‘So, you think David had something to do with whatever happened to the gypsy girl?’

‘Don’t you? I’m sure he knew her. I think he was seeing her. It must have been him that I saw in the trees the day she vanished. And what about the bracelet the police found?’

‘You think he planted it in Nick’s dad’s van?’

‘What else was he doing?’

‘I think it’s all what the law would call circumstantial evidence. You’re telling me that your choice of career, your dedication to your work …’

‘You mean obsession.’

Morris smiled. ‘You’re saying that this all stems from a sense of guilt.’

‘Maybe not guilt exactly. Partly perhaps.’ Adam struggled to articulate something he’d always known, but had never confronted openly even to himself. ‘Maybe when I’m looking for a missing child, I’m looking for her too in a sense. For Meg.’

Morris considered this, and then gave a little smile. ‘It seems very neat.’

‘Neat?’

‘Your extreme dedication to your work stemming from this incident when you were what, sixteen? Which results ultimately in the breakdown of your relationship with Louise. That is what you seem to be telling me isn’t it?’

‘I’m not telling you anything. I thought you were the one who came up with the answers.’

‘If that was true, I would say that there is more.’

‘More?’

‘That you haven’t told me everything. In my experience psychological cause and effect is never so straightforward as this.’

Adam didn’t say anything. Morris was right. There was more. But none of it was relevant. Louise just needed to understand that once a girl had vanished and she remained on his conscience, rightly or wrongly. ‘Time’s up,’ he said, rising to leave.

There was a postscript to Meg’s disappearance that Adam didn’t tell Morris about. During the final weekend of the summer Adam went fishing with David and the others at Cold Tarn. It was a long ride up to the fells and then through the forest to the lake. When they got there Adam wandered off along the shore and found a shady place where he cast his line out into the water and then propped his rod against a log and sat down to read The Catcher in the Rye. After a while he felt drowsy, lulled by the peace and the stillness of the water. He nodded off and when he woke it was getting late. He checked his line and found his bait gone as usual, but no fish on the hook so he packed up and started back along the shore to look for the others.

There was a part of the shore where he had to cut into the woods that fringed the lake to avoid a high rocky promontory that formed one side of a small bay. He would have passed by, but he saw David standing by the water’s edge, seemingly deep in thought. Intrigued, Adam put his gear down and moved closer, quietly making his way out along the promontory. David remained motionless looking out across the lake. Though Adam followed his gaze there was nothing to see but the still, almost black waters of the tarn, and high above the far shore the small outline of a walkers’ hostel that was open in the summer months.

As Adam watched David looked at something he was holding in his hand. He stared at it for several seconds before he suddenly drew back his arm as if to throw it into the lake, and whatever it was flashed when it caught the sun. But then he froze and after a few moments he dropped his arm again. As he did Adam dislodged a piece of loose rock that skittered down the slope and dropped to the water. David appeared startled and looked from the spreading ripples on the lake towards the trees where Adam crouched hidden. For a moment they seemed to look directly into one another’s eyes, then David turned away and quickly vanished among the trees.

CHAPTER FOUR

A few weeks after what had turned out to be his final session with Morris, Adam followed a man as he made his way through the crowds at Euston and climbed aboard the six-fifteen from platform seven. They shared the same first-class compartment, the other man nodding briefly before he opened the evening paper. Alan Thomas was forty-six. He was an executive for a print firm. Adam knew a lot about him. He had three children, a boy and two girls. Adam knew their names, where they went to school, when their birthdays were. Thomas’s wife, Christine, habitually wore a vaguely trapped expression that manifested itself in a kind of desperation in her eyes.

The train started moving and as it did the compartment door opened. A man with a briefcase started to come in until Adam stood up and blocked his way.

‘Sorry, this compartment is full.’

The man looked startled and then puzzled by the empty seats. Adam smiled apologetically, though he didn’t move out of the way. ‘I’m sure there are seats further on,’ he said. Eventually the man made a snorting sound and turned on his heel. There was a rustle of paper as Thomas regarded Adam warily, perhaps thinking he was sharing a compartment with a madman. Adam closed the door and returned to his seat. He weighed up the man opposite him. Thomas was heavier, but running to fat. He probably ate lunch at expensive restaurants too often, drank too much. Maybe lately he was drinking more. To help him sleep. If things went wrong then Adam thought he would come out on top. He was younger and fitter, even with a bad leg. He clenched his fist, and unclenched it again and he stared at Thomas coldly. He almost hoped Thomas tried something.

‘I want to know what you did with Liz Mount’s body after you killed her,’ he said.

He saw the reaction in Thomas’s eyes. The sickening fear and perhaps a kind of relief as well. Relief that the demons he’d lived with for months finally had a face if not yet a name.

When he got off the train forty minutes later Adam went to the police and told them what he knew. He couldn’t give them the name of Liz’s friend who’d told him that Liz had confided that Thomas had once tried to kiss her when he’d taken her home after baby-sitting, and that he’d put his hand up her skirt. He’d said if she told anyone they wouldn’t believe her and she would get into trouble. It wasn’t worth it, she’d said to her friend. She just wouldn’t go back.

Thomas hadn’t admitted anything, but Adam could guess some of what had happened. Thomas had probably seen Liz on the train that morning and perhaps he’d followed her. When she went back later he’d been on the train with her. Somehow he’d managed to get her to his house without anyone seeing them, though Adam didn’t know how. Perhaps he’d threatened her, perhaps it was just opportunist luck. Maybe he hadn’t even meant to kill her.

The police would question Thomas, and they would find Liz’s body somewhere near the house, Adam was sure of that, either before or after he confessed. After he left the police station he went to see the Mounts. He sat outside their house for a long time before he finally went to the door. Parents have a kind of extra sense where their children are concerned, especially mothers. He believed in the intuition of women. Carol Mount opened the door and as soon as she saw him she began to cry.

He found out later that Thomas had tried to assault Liz on the train and when she had resisted he’d pushed her out. Later he’d driven back to the spot where she’d fallen and recovered her body.

When he finished the story he wrote Adam sat for a long time in the dark. The light on the phone didn’t blink. By then Louise had left him.

Part Two

Two Years Later

CHAPTER FIVE

The Reception area at Condor Publications was self-consciously trendy. Visitors were confronted with a long, curved silver counter behind which sat two young women who might have been part-time models. Having given his name and stated his business Adam was invited to take a seat. There was a choice of three couches, each a different colour. He chose the grape and idly flicked through a magazine, one of Condor’s mass-market coffee-table monthlies.

The phone call that had brought him here had been slightly mysterious. Karen Stone had managed to avoid revealing exactly why she wanted him to come in, except to say that she wanted him to meet somebody she was certain would interest him. Beyond that she wouldn’t be drawn. He wasn’t busy, in fact wasn’t working on anything at all, and so he’d agreed. He was also a little bit intrigued, he admitted to himself. The past six months had been spent ghostwriting the autobiography of a twenty-five-year-old pop star. He’d laboured to make the accumulation of obscene amounts of money by somebody who was largely uninteresting and devoid of talent sound interesting, and he was relieved to have finished. It had reaffirmed his belief in the notion that there is no justice in the world. The book had been a break from his normal work. An attempt to make some changes in his life. It had been a largely unsuccessful experiment, he decided.

‘Adam.’

Jolted from his reverie he turned to find Karen Stone smiling warmly at him. He stood up and she offered her cheek to be kissed. She smelled of expensive perfume and looked, as ever, fantastic. He tried to remember when he’d last seen her. A month ago? Longer, he thought. Too long.

‘You look well,’ she said. ‘Thanks for coming. Come on through.’

She led the way through a set of doors and along the corridor that housed the various editorial offices.

‘By the way, congratulations on the promotion,’ he said.

‘Thanks. It’s brilliant isn’t it? I still can’t believe it.’

He could, however. She was only twenty-nine, but then magazine publishing was a young person’s business and in her field Karen was the best editor he knew. They’d met about a year earlier when he’d first started casting around for commissions. She knew his work and though she’d expressed surprise at his change of direction, she’d been happy enough to give him the odd lifestyle piece. He’d accepted two before he’d decided that writing features about liposuction and country hotels didn’t do it for him. This time she hadn’t been surprised, and though they hadn’t worked together since, they had remained friends.

They came to a door with a plate bearing Karen’s name and her title of Publishing Editor.

‘Impressive.’ He ran his finger over the raised gold lettering.

She grinned. ‘I think so.’

‘So, are you going to tell me what this is all about now? Who’s the mystery person you want me to meet?’

‘Her name’s Helen Pierce, she’s an old friend. She came to see me a few days ago to ask for my help and after I’d listened to what she had to say I thought of you.’

He was immediately wary. ‘What kind of help does she need exactly?’

‘I think it would be better if she explained that herself. Come and meet her.’

He put his hand on her arm to stop her opening the door. ‘I get the feeling I’m not going to like this. Listen Karen, if this is about your friend’s missing child I can’t help. I’m sorry but I don’t do that any more.’

She regarded him steadily, searching the depths of his eyes. ‘So, what are you going to do? Another hack job on some flash-in-the pan pop star?’

‘Ouch.’

‘I just can’t believe you’d waste your energy on something so frivolous.’

He looked around with mock confusion. ‘Sorry, there must be some mistake. I didn’t realize this was The Times.’

‘Very funny. Look, you’re here now. At least come and meet Helen, hear what she has to say. Do it for me, please. She doesn’t know who else she can turn to. And incidentally there’s no missing child. Helen doesn’t have children. In fact nobody is missing.’

This last part finally convinced him and he gave in, as he was sure she had known he would. ‘No promises though,’ he said.

‘Fair enough.’ She squeezed his hand briefly, then opened the door.

A woman who had been standing at the window turned to face them. She was about Karen’s age and was wearing a dark-coloured suit. She was attractive, he thought, but not stunning. Her suit was well tailored, probably expensive, but not the sort of cutting-edge fashion favoured by most of the women who worked for Condor. She might have been a consultant of some sort, or maybe a lawyer.

Karen did the introductions. ‘Adam Turner, Helen Pierce. Helen, this is the writer I told you about.’

As he shook her hand he had the feeling it was his turn to be appraised. Her expression was guarded. ‘Karen’s told me a lot about you, Mr Turner.’

‘Don’t believe any of it,’ he joked. She offered a hesitant smile. She was nervous, he thought, and then revised his judgement. She was on edge.

They sat around a small conference table where Karen held her meetings and wielded her power. On the wall behind her desk were the framed covers of the magazines under her control, including Landmark, which occupied pride of place and was the prize that went with her recent promotion. Condor published mostly gossipy coffee-table monthlies, but Landmark was the exception, mixing arts and social commentary along with the occasional investigative piece. It was the least profitable magazine in the Condor stable, but it conferred a degree of respectability on Ryan Cummings, Karen’s boss and the owner of the company.

‘Karen tells me you two are old friends,’ Adam said, breaking the ice. ‘Are you in the publishing business too?’

‘Actually, I work for a research company.’

‘Helen and I were at university in Exeter together,’ Karen explained. ‘We shared a horrible flat for two years.’ To Helen she said, ‘I told Adam that it would be best if he heard what you have to say first-hand.’

‘Alright, though I’m not sure where to begin, exactly.’

‘Take your time,’ Adam told her. He felt himself slip easily into his old persona. How many times had he sat with parents who needed his help to find their son or daughter, trying to get them to open up and talk freely about a subject that, despite them having sought him out, was inevitably painful for them. ‘If I need to clarify anything I’ll ask questions.’

She nodded and dropped her gaze while she composed her thoughts. ‘About a month ago, at the beginning of September, I learned that my brother, Ben, had been killed in a car crash. The fact is that since then I’ve come to believe that his death wasn’t an accident.’

She paused and met Adam’s eye. She was, he knew, trying to evaluate his reaction. She would have told her story before, most likely to people who hadn’t necessarily believed her, including the police. She would have been listened to politely at every level. Sympathy and condolences would have been offered, but in the end the disbelief she encountered would have become increasingly obvious. Frustration and a sense of isolation would have set in. He knew all this had happened otherwise she would not be sitting at this table now.

A year ago he had decided that he couldn’t do this kind of work any more. At least not if he was trying to make up for something that had happened seventeen years earlier. After his divorce from Louise he had begun to seriously question the direction his life was taking. Louise wasn’t the first casualty of the guilt he felt about Meg Coucesco. There had been others over the years, all of them eventually driven away. Maybe getting married had been an expression of a subconscious desire to change, as writing the autobiography of a spoiled pop star had been a conscious one. Neither had worked. Besides, nothing was ever that simple. Even now as he listened to Helen Pierce he felt a familiar stirring of interest. He hadn’t felt that way for a while.

‘Why do you think your brother’s death wasn’t an accident?’ he asked, conveying no judgement either by his tone or expression.

She took a visible breath. ‘Ben was killed with two of his friends when their car left the road and rolled down a hill. The police report said that Ben was driving and the autopsy showed that his blood alcohol level was four times the legal limit. But that can’t be right. Ben didn’t drive. I mean he couldn’t drive. He didn’t know how. And he didn’t drink either. At least not to the extent the police are claiming. I’ve never known him to have more than the odd beer.’

‘Then how do you explain the autopsy report? Mistakes are very rare.’

She gave a quick impatient shake of her head, her eyes flashing a brittle defensiveness. ‘I can’t explain it. But I know, I knew, my brother.’

‘Tell Adam why Ben didn’t drink,’ Karen prompted gently.

‘Since he was a child he’d suffered from epilepsy. It was controllable though he still had the occasional seizure, but he had to take medication every day. Something called Lamictal. Drinking reacted with the drug and made him violently ill.’

‘Is it possible he had stopped taking his medication when the accident happened?’ Adam asked.

‘No. The autopsy report showed that it was present in his blood.’

Her point, Adam thought, was interesting rather than compelling. At least from the point of view of a detached third party, which was always the role he forced himself to take, at least initially. ‘How old was Ben?’

‘Nineteen. He was studying at London University.’

‘You said that he didn’t drive. That’s unusual for somebody of his age.’

‘It was because of his illness,’ Helen explained. ‘Legally he wasn’t allowed to hold a driving licence. Even though his medication largely controlled his condition he still sometimes had seizures.’

‘So, what exactly made the police so sure he was driving when the accident happened?’

‘He was behind the wheel when the car was found, still wearing his seatbelt. Look, I know how it looks. I can understand why the police drew the conclusions they did.’

‘But you still think they have it wrong?’

‘I’m certain of it. I wish there was some way I could convince you. It’s here, inside, that I know that somehow this is all wrong.’

She put her hand against her chest. Her expression was intense and her eyes almost pleaded for him, for somebody, to listen to her. He felt instinctively that she was genuine. Not everybody was. Sometimes it wasn’t even intentional, just a kind of self-delusion, a refusal to accept the facts. In the past he had chosen the cases he worked on not because of any revelatory fragment of information he had learned when he interviewed relatives, but because he was moved by their certainty, their instinct about what had happened to their child. Often there was nothing solid to go on. He felt Helen’s instinct was true, but on the face of it the police appeared to have drawn the logical conclusion.

‘Tell me this,’ he said. ‘If you don’t believe your brother’s death was an accident, then what do you think happened?’

The pleading in her eyes turned to defeat, frustration. ‘That’s the trouble. I just don’t have an answer to that question. Believe me I’ve thought about it, I’ve looked at this from every possible angle, I’ve even doubted myself on occasions. I’ve wondered if the police were right, if it was just one of those terrible things, a momentary lapse of judgement. If something made Ben act out of character and he got drunk and then for some reason he got behind the wheel of that car. Sometimes I’ve even half believed that. If enough people tell you that you’re wrong, Mr Turner, believe me after a while you start to wonder, no matter what your convictions are.’

‘And yet despite the evidence … ?’

‘I still can’t accept it. And I can’t simply stand by and do nothing. I tried to get the coroner to listen to me at the inquest, but he accepted the police version of events. The verdict was accidental death.’

‘Why don’t you tell Adam about the protest, Helen,’ Karen interjected.

‘The protest?’

‘Ben had just finished his first year of an arts degree. Last year he got involved with an environmental group through some people he met at university. They lobby against habitat destruction, the use of pesticides and so on, organizing petitions and protests, that sort of thing. To be honest I don’t think Ben was as committed as a lot of them. He cared about the issues like most of us do, but he was never really a political person. He got involved through a girl he met. Her name was Jane Hanson. She was a year or so older than him, very pretty, very serious type. I met her once when he brought her round to the flat. I think she’d been involved in the protest at Newbury when she was at school, she came from that way somewhere, and she was completely immersed in this sort of thing.’

Something in her tone struck Adam. Was it a faint trace of bitterness? Jealousy perhaps.

‘Anyway, she was taking part in a protest during the summer,’ Helen went on. ‘A group of activists were trying to prevent some woodland being cut down to make way for a holiday camp and Ben decided to go with her. They’d dug tunnels and built tree huts and all that sort of thing to keep the bulldozers out. That was in June. He was supposed to come back in September, but he was killed a week before he should have left.’

‘There had been a lot of bad feeling between locals and some of the protesters,’ Karen added.

‘Some people were beaten up, threats were made, that sort of thing,’ Helen explained.

‘Was Ben threatened personally?’

‘I think so. He mentioned on the phone that there had been some incidents but it was nothing serious, at least not that I know of.’

‘The police knew about this?’

‘I imagine they did. Yes, I’m sure they did.’

‘Do you think there could be a connection between the protest and your brother’s death?’

He saw her indecision as she considered how to answer, and guessed that it was tempting for her to say yes, to latch onto anything that might make some kind of sense, but to her credit she shook her head wearily.

‘To be honest I just don’t know. I can’t say that Ben ever gave me the impression that there was anything sinister going on. It was just the sort of clashing between groups you’d expect really. It’s possible that he wouldn’t have said too much though. He wouldn’t have wanted to worry me.’

‘What about this girl you mentioned, Jane Hanson? Was she in the car when the accident happened?’

‘No,’ Helen answered, her mouth tightening. ‘She left the protest a week earlier.’

‘Have you spoken to her or anybody else from the camp to see if the threats were any more serious than Ben told you?’

‘I haven’t spoken to Jane, but I did go to the camp. Nobody there seemed to think there was any reason why Ben would have been singled out.’

‘Helen,’ Karen said. ‘Tell Adam about your parents.’

‘Both my parents are dead, Mr Turner,’ Helen said. ‘Ben was my only family. He lived with me ever since he was thirteen, when my parents’ car was hit by a van travelling at eighty miles an hour. The driver was drunk. Both my parents died at the scene but he survived. That’s why when Ben knew he had epilepsy he decided he would never learn to drive. It’s also why I know that it’s inconceivable that he would have been drunk behind the wheel of that car, even if for some inexplicable reason he had decided to drive that night. Ben wouldn’t even be a passenger in a car if the driver had so much as had one drink. He was almost obsessive about it.’

It was, Adam thought, the most convincing argument she had put.

‘I don’t know where else I can go, Mr Turner,’ she said. ‘I’ve wondered if I should let it go. Nothing will bring Ben back. But I can’t. He was all I had. I loved my brother and now he’s dead and I want to know what happened to him. What really happened. I can’t go through life always wondering.’

Again there was a plea in her eyes. He wasn’t sure yet if this was something he wanted to get involved in. He was aware of Karen watching him, trying to gauge his reaction. In fact he was intrigued, and he was moved by what Helen had said. He understood what she was going through, and he reasoned that in this instance there were no obvious parallels with Meg Coucesco. But he needed time to think. He promised that he would consider everything she’d said, and she didn’t press him, but took her cue and rose to leave. She held out her hand.

‘I want to thank you for at least listening to me, and for not being patronizing. Whatever you decide, I’m grateful for that at least.’

He shook her hand and Karen showed her to the door, murmuring something to her quietly, and as he watched them he remembered something. ‘Wait a minute. You didn’t say where all this happened. Where exactly was your brother killed?’

‘In Cumbria,’ she said. ‘Near a town called Castleton.’

He barely registered her leaving, or Karen coming back to the table. She looked at him, her brow furrowed. ‘What is it, Adam?’

‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘It’s nothing.’ He looked at his watch. ‘Look, I have to go, can we meet later?’

He arranged a time and hurriedly left, and only paused when he stood outside again and was gulping lungfuls of air. ‘Christ,’ he muttered.

CHAPTER SIX

Adam sat stirring a long black outside an Italian café near Covent Garden. He saw Karen stop at the lights and wait for them to change before she crossed. She looked over and when she saw him she waved. She was tall, her short, dark hair framing fine, even features. He lost her when a bus thundered past spewing out diesel fumes into the already polluted London air, and then the lights changed and a swarm of people stepped into the road.

When she arrived he pulled out a chair and signalled to a waiter. ‘I ordered you a cappuccino. Do you want something to eat?’

She shook her head. ‘I can’t, Nigel’s picking me up to go to dinner. Some business thing. You go ahead though if you want.’

‘Maybe later.’

Nigel. Tall, good-looking Nigel, who was an investment banker and whose family owned half of Shropshire. Old money, old school tie. He tried to imagine Karen being the perfect hostess on one of those country weekends, hanging out with the polo and horsey set and dressing for dinners in some great baronial hall. Somehow he couldn’t see it.

‘So, how is Nigel?’ he asked.

‘Fine. He’s very busy.’

He stirred his coffee, saying nothing.

‘You don’t like him do you?’

‘I don’t know him.’

‘That’s right, you don’t,’ she said, a trace of defensiveness in her tone.

‘Maybe I just don’t like the idea of him taking my best friend off to live in the country.’

‘Flatterer,’ she said, though she smiled. ‘Anyway, Nigel knows my career is here.’

Does he? Adam wondered. Nigel struck him as the type who, when he married, would expect his wife to give up her amusing hobbies, like her career for instance, and settle down to produce lots of little well-bred Nigels to continue the family line.

‘Besides, it isn’t as if we’re engaged or anything,’ she said.

Yet, Adam silently added. The waiter brought Karen’s coffee and Adam changed the subject. ‘I’ve been thinking about your friend Helen.’ She looked at him over the rim of her cappuccino. ‘I can’t help, Karen. I’m sorry.’

She looked surprised. ‘Is that because you don’t want the commission, or because you don’t believe her?’

‘It isn’t because I don’t believe her.’

‘Then you don’t want the commission?’

‘I wasn’t aware there was a commission. I thought you were helping a friend.’

‘I am.’

‘But you think there might be a story in it for Landmark, is that it?’

‘I’m not sure I like the way you said that,’ she replied in clipped tones.

‘Sorry. I didn’t mean that to sound the way it came out.’

‘Apology accepted.’

‘But you do want to commission me professionally I take it?’

‘Yes. But I don’t know if I would run the story, even if it turned out there was one. It would depend on the story. If for example it turned out to be a case of police bungling I might not be interested. But if it was more than that

‘Like what?’

‘I don’t know. That’s your part isn’t it, to ferret out the truth? But whatever the case I wouldn’t run anything without Helen’s agreement.’

‘Fair enough. But as I said, I can’t help. Sorry.’

‘But you still haven’t told me why.’

‘I’m busy at the moment.’

‘I thought you’d finished the book you were working on.’

‘I have.’

She waited, saying nothing, levelling her intelligent gaze on him, and he knew he’d have to do better than that.

‘Alright. The truth is I’m not sure this is the direction I want to take.’

‘Oh. So it’s that again. Sorry, I must have mistaken you for somebody I knew who had a mission in life.’

‘I wouldn’t say it was a mission.’

‘Wouldn’t you? Righting wrongs. Helping people like Helen who don’t know where else to turn. That girl you wrote about in Suffolk, the one who was pushed off a train, she’d never have been found if it wasn’t for you.’

‘Liz Mount. That was her name. Perhaps it would be better if she hadn’t been. At least her parents could have clung to the hope that she was alive and well somewhere.’

‘I don’t think you believe that,’ Karen said.

‘Well, maybe not.’

Karen sipped her coffee thoughtfully. ‘So, what’s the real reason you don’t want to do this? I get the feeling you’re not telling me something.’

‘You’re wrong.’

‘Then at least promise you’ll think about it.’

She had pricked his conscience, as of course she had intended. She gave no quarter, Karen, which was probably why he liked her so much. ‘Alright. I’ll think about it.’

‘Thank you, Adam.’ She reached across the table and briefly put her hand over his.

Just then a taxi drew up by the kerb. The rear door opened and Nigel poked his head out. He was wearing a dark pinstriped suit with a red handkerchief in the breast pocket. His dark hair was smoothed back over his aristocratic forehead. ‘Come on, darling, we’ll be late.’

Karen withdrew her hand. ‘Sorry, I have to go. Will you call me tomorrow?’

‘Yes.’

She bent to kiss his cheek as Nigel looked impatiently at his watch. ‘Hurry up, Karen. You know what the traffic’s like at this time of day.’ He held the door for her, and then belatedly remembered Adam. ‘Sorry to drag her off like this. You weren’t discussing anything important were you?’

‘No, not really,’ Adam answered, but it was a rhetorical question and Nigel was already turning away.

He watched the taxi pull away from the kerb, and for a moment he experienced a faint regret.

Karen sat back as the taxi negotiated rush hour traffic. Nigel was telling her about the people they were having dinner with, giving her tips on whom she ought to be especially nice to. Or perhaps instructions would be a better term. Like when he’d taken her home to meet his parents and he’d lectured her on etiquette for the entire journey, as if he was afraid she’d embarrass him by using the wrong cutlery at dinner. She tuned him out, turning her thoughts instead to Adam.

She wondered why he was reluctant to take on this commission. If Helen was right about her brother here was a possibly innocent victim whose death might not be what it appeared to be, a police force who wouldn’t listen, and apparent discord between a bunch of protesters and locals. It was exactly the sort of thing that would normally interest him. She sensed there was something he wasn’t telling her. She remembered a year ago, shortly after they’d met when Condor had put on a launch bash and she’d invited him to go along with her. Sort of a date. The truth is she had been interested in him. He was intelligent, and quite good-looking, and there was something else about him that appealed to her. He was a loner, slightly mysterious in some fashion. Maybe that was it. The lure of mystery.

Somebody had organized a karaoke machine and Adam, quite drunk, had got up to do a rendition of ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’, spoofing Freddie Mercury’s camp antics. To her surprise he was funny, hilarious in fact, and when he finished it was to loud applause and calls for an encore, which he’d declined. At two in the morning they’d found themselves sitting together outside, watching the lights reflected on the Thames at Kew, sharing a bottle of Heineken. She had looked at him lopsidedly and directed a playful punch to his arm.

‘You’re a dark horse, Adam Turner. Who would have thought you could take off Freddie Mercury?’

‘That’s me. Dark horse from way back,’ he’d agreed.

‘But you really are, aren’t you?’

‘Absolutely.’

She’d regarded him solemnly. ‘You know what? I don’t really know anything about you.’

‘There’s not much to know.’

‘There must be something. I don’t even know where you’re from.’

‘Hampstead.’

She’d frowned. ‘I thought you mentioned once that you went to school in Scotland or somewhere. Up North anyway.’

‘Did I?’

She’d pointed to his knee, which he’d absently begun massaging the way he did sometimes. ‘And what about that? How did that happen?’

‘An accident.’ He passed her the Heineken bottle. ‘Look at the lights on that boat out there. See the way they’re reflected on the water, like a mirror image. The water looks like oil.’

‘It probably is fifty per cent oil,’ she’d said, and then sighed. ‘There you go. You always do that. Change the subject whenever we start talking about you.’

‘Bad habit. Sorry.’

‘Tell me about Louise.’

He’d looked surprised. ‘My ex-wife? What about her?’

She wasn’t sure why she’d brought the subject up, except that she was curious, she supposed. He’d mentioned her once and then abruptly steered the conversation in another direction. ‘What went wrong between you two?’

‘Long story.’ He’d stood up and offered her his hand. ‘We should look for a taxi.’

She’d sighed. ‘Dark horse. That’s what you are.’

There were no taxis around so when they did finally flag one down they decided to share, but since they lived in opposite directions she’d suggested he should stay at her place. When they got in she put on some music and said she was going to get ready for bed. When she came out of her bedroom wearing her Dodgers T-shirt he was flaked out on the couch, with his shoes off. She’d given him a pillow and a blanket.

‘Here you go, Freddie.’

He’d looked up at her, and somehow he’d seemed vulnerable. Or maybe she was just drunk, or maybe a lot of things.

‘I had a good time tonight,’ she’d said at last.

‘Me too.’

Another silence. Then she’d said, ‘That couch is lumpy.’

‘It is a little.’

‘So … perhaps you should sleep in there.’ She’d gestured vaguely towards her bedroom, and he’d pondered that gesture for a while before he agreed that yes, he could do that.

They got into bed from opposite sides, and after a few seconds they slid together. He was wearing his shorts and she still had the T-shirt on. Tentatively they’d wrapped their arms around each other. She’d rested her head on his chest. In the darkness the alcohol had seized her brain again and everything was spinning a little.

‘Wow, I feel a little woozy,’ she’d said.

‘Me too.’

‘Can we just lie here like this for a little while?’

‘Of course.’

It felt kind of safe and pleasant. Like being with a friend, and yet not quite. ‘I’m sleepy now,’ she’d murmured.

‘Yes.’

She’d nuzzled closer, her leg over his, and felt his breathing become deep and regular. ‘This is nice,’ she’d murmured.

‘It is.’

‘Night, Freddie.’ Then she’d drifted off into a happy oblivion.

In the morning when she woke she had a massive headache. She’d sat up groaning, and only then realized that Adam was gone. She saw the depression in the pillow beside her, and fuzzily recalled the previous night. A minute later he’d appeared, already dressed, carrying orange juice. He’d sat on the end of the bed and from there it was all downhill. They’d talked chiefly of feeling terrible, and commenting with wonder on how much they’d had to drink, recounting moments from the previous night, laughing, shaking their heads. It all had a hollow ring and went on for too long, as if each of them was desperate to avoid mentioning the most glaringly obvious of all the evening’s developments.

In the end, their conversation withered into silence and he’d said he should be getting along, inventing, she was sure, some urgent task. She wasn’t sure how to feel. She hadn’t wanted him to go, but she was uncertain about whether to say anything. Perhaps he regretted what had happened. Or nearly happened anyway. Perhaps he was trying to let her know he didn’t feel that way about her. In the end it was a relief of sorts when he did leave.

Two days later she’d arrived at his door, and when he’d answered she’d launched into her prepared speech.

‘I don’t want this thing to come between us, Adam. I like you and I feel we’ve become friends. I value that.’ She’d thought he looked relieved.

‘I don’t want it to come between us either.’

‘So, we’re still friends?’

‘Friends.’

‘Great.’

And in fact their friendship had survived intact, though it had taken several months before they were completely easy again in each other’s company, before that shadow dissipated. It wasn’t really until Nigel had arrived on the scene. Perhaps that was partly why she’d started seeing him, because she’d sensed it was a way to finally clear the air between herself and Adam.

And yet, sometimes, she wondered at the way Adam looked at her. Christ, she had to stop thinking about him like this. They were friends weren’t they? Wasn’t it supposed to be men who couldn’t handle a relationship with a woman on that level?

Abruptly she realized that Nigel had stopped talking and was looking at her strangely. Guiltily she came to. ‘Sorry, what did you say?’

‘Karen.’ He sounded exasperated. ‘I said perhaps it might be a good idea not to have more than a glass or two of wine tonight. What do you think?’

‘You mean instead of my normal bottle and a half, is that it?’ she said testily.

‘Actually,’ he said huffily, ‘I was talking about me. I’m still taking those antihistamine tablets.’

Contrite, she put her hand on his arm. ‘I’m sorry, Nigel.’ She looked away, suppressing a giggle.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Adam’s flat was on the second floor of a converted Victorian semi in Wimbledon. It was cluttered but comfortable. He rarely ate there, avoiding all forms of cooking unless they were ready-made meals from Marks & Spencer that he could put in the microwave. After the break-up of his marriage he’d given up the office he used to rent in favour of working at home. At first he’d converted the spare bedroom for use as an office but after a while he’d moved into the living room where he felt more comfortable. When he and Louise had split up, she had taken the TV, and he had never replaced it. His work and the remains of his life outside of work had merged.

He sat at his desk, which was actually a long table that occupied the wall space on one side of the room. He was slowly drinking a glass of Scotch, and thinking about Helen Pierce and the way fate intervenes in life sometimes. Earlier he’d posed the question to himself that had Helen’s brother been killed in say, Devon, would he be willing to help her? The absolute truth was that he wasn’t sure. He liked her, he wanted to help her, but he wasn’t certain on the face of what he knew whether he could. Beyond her own conviction that her brother’s death hadn’t happened the way the police said it had, there was little to support her. But then there never was. He received letters from people all the time whose children or sisters or brothers had vanished or died. They all believed something had happened that didn’t tally with the official version, and they all asked for his help. Of course he couldn’t help them all, though he did reply to each and every one of them. But of the ones he did look into the truth was never obvious. Normally it was only the conviction of the family that convinced him to investigate.

He knew he wasn’t going to ghostwrite another book, and he wasn’t about to go back to doing lifestyle pieces either. The thing that really bothered him was the idea of going back to Castleton. Who knew what can of worms that would open up? But a quickening in his chest belied his reluctance.

His thoughts drifted back to the summer a year after Meg had vanished. Throughout the intervening year he and Angela had continued seeing each other though their relationship had stalled on the knowledge that he would eventually go away to university and from there would probably move to London to begin his career. For the same reason they hadn’t had sex. The commitment to one another that step seemed to entail foundered on the looming presence of the future.

In August the country was assaulted by a sudden heat wave after a long damp July. A crowd of them had gone to a pool in the river where the water was deep and clear. He recalled lying in the grass as he dried off, warmed by the sun, watching Angela climb the bank towards the bridge which some of them had been jumping from. Nick was smoking, wearing wet cut-off jeans, his body skinny and pale. He wore a familiar faintly contemptuous expression. He no longer suffered any outward scars or bruises, but whatever damage had been inflicted inside by a father who’d been dead nearly a year would probably always remain.

In the river David and Graham were encouraging people to jump from the bridge. A girl leapt out and shrieked as she hit the water and when David helped her up the steep bank she laughed flirtatiously. He grinned. He was tanned with a lean muscular build, his thick hair lightened by the sun.

Angela stood on the edge of the bridge and looked down. She stretched out her arms to the sides and balanced on her toes.

‘I’m going to dive,’ she announced.

Her hair was wet, and droplets of water glistened on her skin. She wore a one-piece black swimsuit cut high on her hips that emphasized the flat plane of her belly and the swell of her breasts. She grinned and raised her arms above her head and slowly tipped her weight forward. As if in slow motion she fell forward, entering the water with a muffled splash to emerge moments later in a cascade of spray. She swam smoothly to the bank where David took her hand and helped her up. In that moment they looked at one another and with a jolt of awareness Adam saw something unspoken pass between them. She smiled uncertainly and as she walked away David followed her with his eyes. Sensing somebody watching him Adam turned to find Nick looking on with an amused, sardonic light in his eyes.

After that the rest of the summer seemed fraught with unspoken currents and subtle tensions. Angela was prone to long silences, and sometimes he would watch unnoticed when she and David were together. The smallest gesture or an intercepted glance seemed loaded with meaning.

It all came back with a sudden vivid clarity that surprised Adam. It was strange, he thought, how long dormant memories could return, bringing with them the smell of hay drying in the fields, the sound of laughter in the air, and the sense in her silence and her startled smile when he spoke, that Angela had been drifting from him.

His knee was aching. He rolled up the leg of his jeans and massaged the bare ridged and curiously misshapen flesh. It hurt when the weather was cold or damp, like rheumatism, but sometimes the pain just came unexpectedly. He sometimes wondered if it was just a way of reminding himself. Of making sure he didn’t forget.

A little after nine he called the number Karen had given him for Helen, and asked if he could come and talk to her the following day after she had finished work. He said there were some things he wanted to clarify. She agreed, and gave him her address in Hammersmith.

Adam arrived just after six to find that Helen lived in a flat on the fourth floor of a converted building overlooking the Thames. He looked out of the living-room window at the view, comparing her flat with his own. Research must be rewarding, he mused. Helen must have guessed what he was thinking.

‘When our parents died Ben and I inherited their farm. Ben’s share was held in trust until he was twenty-one. I used mine to buy us somewhere to live.’

She handed him a drink and led the way to her brother’s room, where she lingered in the doorway. It was orderly, everything in its place. A life packed away.

‘When did you say he went to Cumbria?’ he asked.

‘June. The beginning of the month.’

‘The other two boys in the car, did you know them?’

‘Not really. I don’t think Ben had known them long.’

‘Who did the car belong to?’

She went to a dresser and picked up a framed photograph. ‘This one. His name was Simon Davies. The other one was Keith Frost.’ There were four people in the picture, which was slightly out of focus. Three young men and a young woman sat on a stone wall smiling at the camera, with trees in the background. ‘Ben sent this to me not long after he went up there. This is him.’

The colours in the picture had a vaguely washed-out look. A cheap processing shop, Adam thought, one of those one-hour places. Helen’s brother had short brown hair, and wore jeans and a T-shirt with some logo on the front. Next to him sat a girl with long reddish-coloured hair and a slightly more reserved smile than the others. She wore glasses, which gave her a slightly studious look, though she was undoubtedly attractive. Her hands, Adam noticed, were clasped in her lap, while Ben’s arm was around her shoulders. There was something about their body language that the picture had caught. They were out of balance.

‘Do the families of the others know how you feel about what happened?’ Adam asked.

‘No, I haven’t said anything. I spoke to them on the phone but I got the feeling they didn’t want to talk. I didn’t realize until later it wasn’t just because they were upset.’ There was an echo of anger in her tone. ‘I can’t entirely blame them,’ she said. ‘It’s just … I don’t know. They don’t have any reason to doubt the official version, do they? They think their sons were killed because Ben was drunk.’

Adam looked at the picture again. ‘I assume this is the girl Ben was going out with. Jane something?’

‘Hanson. Yes.’

Again he thought he detected the faint bitterness he’d noticed in Karen’s office. ‘You said you hadn’t spoken to her at all since Ben died?’

‘No. The last time I spoke to Ben he told me that Jane had left. This was about a week before he died. I gathered they had broken up, but he didn’t want to talk about it so I didn’t press him. I always got the impression that he was more interested in her then she was in him. Perhaps if Ben had a fault that was it. He wore his heart on his sleeve a bit.’

‘When you spoke to him then, did he say anything that struck you as out of the ordinary? Did he sound worried at all?’

‘He sounded a bit down, which I put down to Jane leaving him.’ Helen looked away. ‘She never even phoned me, you know. I didn’t really expect her to be at the funeral. She may not even have known about it, but she must have heard about what happened sooner or later. I thought she would have phoned.’

Adam didn’t say anything. What could he tell her? Who was to say what the girl’s reasons had been for leaving? Maybe she and Ben had split up because after a couple of months living in the woods together she couldn’t stand the sight of him any more, but he didn’t want to tell Helen that. Neither did he want to say that for somebody who lived with his heart on his sleeve, as she’d said Ben did, losing a girlfriend might be enough to make a person act out of character. Perhaps get drunk and get behind the wheel of a car he didn’t know how to drive.

‘What about the protest, did he say anything about that when you talked?’

‘No. I asked him when he was coming home, and he thought about a week or two. He was vague.’

‘Nothing else?’

‘No.’

He questioned her some more about the protest itself, but she really didn’t know much about it. He asked if he could keep the picture.

‘I’ll scan it into my computer and print you a copy. Would that be okay?’

‘Fine.’

She hesitated. ‘Does this mean you’ll be going there?’

Up until then, he hadn’t really decided, but once she’d posed the question he knew the answer. ‘Yes, but I can’t promise anything,’ he told her.

Relief and gratitude jostled in her eyes. Finally somebody was taking her seriously. ‘Thank you,’ she said quietly.

A vague unsettling guilt niggled at his conscience. He wished he was more certain of his motives.

Later he called Karen at home, and told her what he’d decided. ‘Before you say anything I have to say I’m really not sure about any of this. Helen told me that Ben had just broken up with his girlfriend. You know how it can be. Heartbroken young guy gets drunk and kills himself. It could well be that the police have got it right. When you talk to her, try to dampen her expectations a little could you?’

‘Alright. But I’ll fax you a contract in the morning, anyway.’

‘I’ll be in touch.’

‘Adam,’ she said quickly, before he could hang up. ‘Tell me something. You must have a feeling about this, an instinct if you like. I mean you wouldn’t be taking this on otherwise.’

He heard an underlying probing note to her tone. He was sure she was wondering what had changed his mind. ‘If I find anything I’ll let you know,’ he said.

She accepted the gentle rebuff. ‘Goodnight then.’

That night he dreamed. The images were confused. He was in a forest in the dark, the moon occasionally glimpsed overhead. Ahead of him a figure materialized and as he drew nearer, his heart pounding, fear tightening his insides, he saw that it was Meg. She was pale, her hair matted, her clothes ragged, and he knew that she had been dead a long time. Her wide eyes beseeched him, but he didn’t know what it was she wanted. And then it wasn’t Meg, but Angela. She was laughing, her head tipped back, and David was with her. Then suddenly a flash accompanied by a roar of sound and he woke with a cry escaping his lips and his body soaked with sweat.

CHAPTER EIGHT

The M6 cut a swathe through the industrial north midlands past Stoke-on-Trent. Adam stopped occasionally for petrol or to stretch his legs. The weather continued to be uncharacteristically warm, the whole country basking in a kind of Indian summer. It was a good day for driving and this was the first really long run he’d made in the Porsche he’d recklessly bought six months earlier. It was a 911, with muscular flared arches and a whale-tail. Metallic green with tan leather trim. His pride and joy. He’d always wanted a Porsche, and when he’d finally realized he would never be able to afford a new one he’d considered going the classic route. He’d bought a magazine and thought about it for a couple of weeks, pondering the upkeep and the fact that he didn’t know one end of a spanner from another, then decided what the hell and started making phone calls anyway. Eventually he’d bought a ’seventy-eight model from a man in Lewes who’d owned it for ten years, during which time the car had been fully restored and treated with the respect of an enthusiast. Adam hadn’t even haggled over the asking price.

She rumbled like a big cat, with a throaty growl, and when he put his foot down the power pressed him back against his seat. The insurance was a killer, but some things in life you just have to have.

Beyond Preston vistas of the countryside opened up, and after Morecambe he had the Yorkshire Dales on his right and the Lake District on his left and Ocean Colour Scene on the CD player. The quickest route was to follow the motorway all the way up to Carlisle and then it was less then forty minutes to Castleton through Brampton. An alternative, more scenic route was to turn off at Penrith and follow minor roads along the valley through the villages that huddled beneath the fells, and that was the way he chose.

The sun was going down as he plunged into the countryside. He opened up the throttle along the deserted roads and the sound of the engine echoed back from the dry-stone walls. In the hollows where the sun had already fled he switched on the headlights. Trees and fields flashed by on either side, the bleak high fells looming to his right. He slowed as he passed through villages where the old houses and buildings were built from local red sandstone, his memories stirred by familiar sights; the churches with their squat, square towers topped with battlements like castles; high hedgerows where cow parsley grew profusely among the hawthorn and crab apple and pink soapwort; village pubs and a local garage with two old-fashioned pumps outside that looked as if they belonged to another age.

He crossed stone bridges spanning rivers and streams and took arbitrary turns as he came upon them to delay his arrival, wanting to savour the last of the journey, and the odd mixture of apprehension and exhilaration he experienced at the prospect of his return. Finally, as he drove through Halls Tenement he pulled over outside a pub, its windows lit in yellow squares, a couple of Land Rovers and a handful of cars in the car park outside. He got out to stretch his leg, which was aching after the drive. The sun had vanished and dusk had taken over the countryside, casting villages, fields and woods in eerie purple half-light.

He drove the last few miles at a sedate pace and when he arrived in Castleton it was almost dark. As he crossed the bridge over the river he glanced across the water meadow to the dark line of trees that hid Johnson’s sawmill, if it was still there. Further on the main street narrowed as he passed the newsagent that was once owned by Angela’s father. The shop looked the same but the name above the door was no longer Curtis. He emerged into the partly cobbled square and turned through the gates of the New Inn, which was a pub and hotel and hadn’t been new since 1745 when the coach house had burned down and a new one had been built. The barns at the rear had been converted into extra rooms, four on ground level, four above, with steps leading up the outside and a walkway past the doors.

He hadn’t booked, but the tourist season had ended and there was no problem getting a room. He chose a new one in the conversion, and as he signed the register the young woman who checked him in asked if he would like to have dinner in the restaurant across the hall, which when he looked was empty. The hum of voices emanated from the bar, however, along with the smell of roast beef and gravy.

‘I’ll get something at the bar,’ he said. She smiled and asked how long he would be staying. ‘I’m not sure. Say a week.’

On the way past the bar he heard a woman laugh and when he looked inside and saw her standing among a group with her back to him his heart skipped a beat. For an instant time confused him and he thought at first it was Louise. She was slim with long blonde hair that shone in the light, but then he remembered where he was and it was no longer Louise he thought of but the person she had reminded him of the first time he’d seen her. He stood transfixed but then the woman in the bar turned and she wasn’t Angela after all.

He went to his room and sat down on the bed. His heart was still beating too fast and he experienced an odd sense of revelation. All these years he had harboured a memory of her, but it was like something covert and hidden. Only now did he begin to sense the force of everything he had kept shut inside himself all that time.

He went to bed early and woke at six-thirty as it was beginning to get light. The hotel was quiet other than the first sounds of stirring from behind the kitchen doors when he looked in the restaurant. He decided to go for a walk before breakfast, partly from curiosity and partly to loosen up his leg, which had stiffened overnight. The town was deserted, the sky purple, beginning to turn blue as the sun crept up over the hills. When he reached the river he followed the public footpath across the meadow and as he approached the trees on the far side he detected the familiar, tangy scent of cut pine and sawdust. As he drew nearer he could see that the sawmill was still there. He paused, flooded with memories of riding his bike this way in the holidays before catching the bus into Carlisle and his job at the Courier. Other memories crowded and jostled in his mind and when he turned and walked back the way he’d come crows flapped from the trees and mocked him.

At the hotel he ate breakfast alone in the restaurant, though next to him a table covered with the litter of empty cups and egg-smeared plates was testament to the fact that others had also been up early. Afterwards he drove along the valley towards Brampton and took the main road to Carlisle where he followed the signs to the new hospital. Inside he followed directions to the pathology department and asked to speak to Dr Keller.

‘My name’s Turner,’ he told the receptionist. ‘I have an appointment.’

Dr Keller, when she arrived, didn’t fit the mental picture Adam had already formed of her based on their brief phone conversation when he’d called from London. He was expecting somebody older than the woman in her mid-thirties who approached him. Her smile was friendly as she offered her hand.

‘I’m afraid I can’t spare you more than half an hour,’ she said, speaking with a soft Scottish accent as she led the way along a narrow corridor.

Her office was large and untidy. Files in brown folders that hadn’t made it to the filing cabinets were stacked on every available surface. She made space for him on a chair beneath a framed certificate from Edinburgh University on the wall.

‘On the phone you mentioned a road accident.’ She sat behind her desk and opened files she had already retrieved. ‘Three young men. Pierce, Frost and Davies?’

‘That’s right.’

‘And you’re a journalist?’

‘I’m a freelance writer. I specialize in investigative features.’

‘I see. Well, I’ve checked with the police and there’s no investigation pending. The coroner’s verdict was accidental death, but I take it you’re aware of that.’

‘Yes.’

Dr Keller laced her fingers together on her desk. ‘So, how can I help?’

‘When we spoke you said autopsies were performed on all three victims. Did you examine the bodies yourself?’

‘Actually, yes.’

‘Can you tell me if you found anything unusual at all? Anything to indicate this could have been something other than an accident.’

She furrowed her brow. ‘I’m afraid I don’t follow you.’

He explained briefly that Helen Pierce maintained that her brother, who was supposedly the driver of the car, not only didn’t know how to drive, but didn’t drink either. ‘I understand the autopsy results showed that his blood alcohol level was several times above the legal limit.’

She listened without comment, and then began to scan the contents of the files in front of her. ‘That’s correct.’ As she leafed through the pages she laid out some photographs on the desk. They were black and white prints, each of the naked body of a young male, Ben Pierce among them. He lay face up on the autopsy slab, the channels designed to carry away body fluids clearly visible.

‘Judging from the contents of his stomach and by measuring the rate of alcohol absorption in his blood and brain I’d say this young man had consumed the equivalent of a large glass, or about a quarter of a bottle of spirits prior to the accident.’

‘Enough to make him drunk?’

‘People react differently when they drink, but I’d say so, yes. In his case the reaction might well have been worse.’

‘Oh? Why is that?’

‘He also had traces of a drug called Lamictal in his blood. Do you know what that is?’

‘The medication he took to control his epilepsy?’

‘That’s right.’

‘His sister claims that he didn’t drink much because of his medication. Apparently more than a beer made him sick.’

Dr Keller met his eye and though she didn’t look entirely unsympathetic she shrugged slightly. ‘That’s quite possible. The side-effects people experience from drugs like Lamictal can vary, but certainly for some mixing it with alcohol could make them quite ill. However, there is no doubt that this young man had been drinking.’

‘There’s no chance of some kind of error I suppose? Perhaps his results were mixed up with somebody else’s.’

She shook her head, and smiled a little wryly. ‘I’ll disregard the implied slur on my professional conduct, Mr Turner. There is absolutely no chance of a mistake having occurred.’

‘No offence intended, Doctor.’

‘Then none is taken.’

Somehow it was this one thing, this anomaly that Helen Pierce had been so adamant about that had struck Adam most of all. If she was wrong about that, then perhaps she was wrong about everything else too. Maybe she simply hadn’t known her brother as well as she thought.

‘You said that this young man’s sister claims that he couldn’t drive,’ Dr Keller said.

‘He never learned because of his epilepsy. Apparently their parents were killed in a car accident. By a drunk driver.’

‘Have you considered the possibility that that fact in itself may very well explain what happened here? A young man whose judgement is impaired by alcohol gets behind the wheel of a car. His inexperience leads to the accident.’ She shrugged. ‘It’s tragic, but I’m afraid not unusual.’

On the face of it, her logic made sense, Adam had to admit. Except that Dr Keller hadn’t known Ben Pierce the way Helen had.

‘Anyway, I don’t see anything unusual here,’ Dr Keller said at length. ‘The injuries are consistent with those I would expect to see with victims of a road accident.’

Adam examined the picture of Ben, looking in particular at a black mark between his neck and shoulder. Other than this blemish he appeared uninjured. ‘What is that, a cut?’ Streaks of what he assumed was blood ran away from the wound and down across his shoulder and ribcage.

‘Yes.’ Dr Keller referred to her notes. ‘There were traces of paint in the wound that matched samples from the vehicle. The wound itself is around six inches long, and penetrates to a depth of almost an inch. About half of it appears to be a clean cut, the edges are more or less neatly severed. The rest is messier, more jagged.’

‘What does that mean?’

‘My guess would be that it was caused by a section of metal from the wreck. It was forced in like so.’ She demonstrated what she meant by pointing her hand and thrusting downwards towards the space between her own neck and shoulder. ‘The angle of entry suggests it might have come from the roof. Then, forced by the momentum of the crash it cut through the flesh towards the base of the neck.’ She slashed towards her own neck with the tips of her fingers. ‘That would have produced this jagged section of the wound. It was this that killed him by the way. The artery was partially severed. Other than that this young man suffered only a few minor abrasions, apart from a blow to the head, which very likely rendered him unconscious. Though it wouldn’t have killed him.’

‘So, you’re saying cause of death was what exactly?’

‘He bled to death. Probably over several hours.’

Adam thought about that. ‘He was found in the driver’s seat, I believe, still wearing his seatbelt. If it took so long for him to die, why didn’t he get out of the car? Wouldn’t you expect him to go for help?’

‘As I said, he was probably already unconscious. With the amount of blood that he lost, I doubt that he ever came around.’

‘But it took several hours before he died?’

‘I would say so.’

Adam looked at the photographs of the other two bodies, and something about them struck him. Both Keith Frost and Simon Davies appeared to have suffered more visible injuries than Ben. They were each marked with a mass of what looked like bruises and abrasions. He pointed it out. ‘Isn’t that odd?’

‘Actually there is a logical explanation. They were both found some distance from the car. My guess is that neither of them was wearing a seatbelt. The first time the car rolled the doors probably popped open like the ends of a can and they were thrown out. It happens all the time. That partly accounts for their more obvious injuries. Both were killed almost instantly by the way, and both from a massive trauma to the head.’

‘You said partly,’ Adam said. ‘Partly accounts for their injuries.’

‘Yes. Some of these injuries occurred prior to the accident. About two or three days earlier I’d say. Mostly bruising and abrasions, some minor facial cuts, though one of them had a cracked rib.’

‘Any idea how they might have happened?’

She pursed her lips. ‘If I had to guess? I’d say they were probably in a fight. Quite a violent one.’ She paused for a moment, her brow furrowed in a puzzled frown.

‘What is it?’

‘It’s probably nothing. But I did wonder at the time why one of these two young men hadn’t been driving. Perhaps then we wouldn’t be sitting here now.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘Well, neither of them showed any trace of alcohol in his blood,’ she said, and then saw his expression. ‘I thought you knew that. I suppose these injuries could be the explanation. Perhaps neither of them was up to it.’

He pondered her theory, but it didn’t make a lot of sense. It looked as if Frost and Davies had taken some punishment, but hardly enough that they’d allow someone high on a cocktail of drugs and booze to get behind the wheel. Especially if that person didn’t know how to drive.

‘You look sceptical,’ Dr Keller observed.

‘It’s my nature. But you said yourself that these older injuries on the other two were mostly cuts and abrasions.’

‘Yes.’ She looked again at the pictures. ‘As I said, it did strike me as unusual at the time. An anomaly shall we say.’

‘But not enough to raise in your report?’

‘No. The facts are inescapable. Ben Pierce was found in the driver’s seat. Both of the others were thrown clear before the car came to rest. The evidence at the site, and the injuries I recorded during my examination of the bodies both there and here confirm that.’

‘There’s no chance any of them were moved?’

Dr Keller frowned. ‘Moved?’

‘Perhaps they were switched. Perhaps one of the others was driving.’

‘Why would anyone do that? Besides, it isn’t possible. As I said, the evidence is clear. Both of these young men were in the back seat before they were thrown clear. I found fragments of tissue and clothing away from the wreck that clearly showed where each of them had fallen. I’m afraid there’s no mistake.’

Nevertheless, Adam thought, he had come looking for answers and instead had found one more thing that didn’t make sense. He thanked Dr Keller for her help, but as he left the hospital he was beginning to think that perhaps Helen’s misgivings were justified. Something about this didn’t feel right.

The police station in Castleton occupied a plain, purpose-built building behind the town’s only supermarket. On one side a metal gate opened to a small area where a police Range Rover with the Cumbrian police insignia on the door was parked. Adam went inside and pressed a buzzer on the counter and a few moments later a young police constable appeared.

‘Can I help you, sir?’

‘My name’s Adam Turner, I’m a journalist and I’m looking into an accident that happened near here in September. Three university students were killed.’

‘Yes. I remember that.’

‘I was hoping I could speak to the officer who attended the scene.’

‘Just a moment.’

The constable disappeared and a few minutes later a man wearing the uniform of a sergeant appeared. He wore a curious, uncertain expression and there was something familiar about him, which it took Adam a moment to place. He was heavier than when Adam had last seen him, more solid, and his once rosy cheeks were more ruddy and weathered now, but it was unmistakeably Graham. For a moment he gaped in surprise. It was Graham who spoke first, extending his hand across the counter.

‘Hello, Adam.’

They shook hands. Of course Adam had expected to run into them all sooner or later. Graham and Nick, and of course David. Somehow he’d known they wouldn’t have moved away. But he hadn’t been prepared for this. ‘Sorry,’ he said, realizing how he must look. ‘It’s the uniform that threw me there for a minute.’

‘I joined when I was eighteen,’ Graham said. ‘I didn’t know what else I wanted to do really. It was either this or an apprenticeship.’

‘Looks like you did the right thing,’ Adam said, gesturing to the stripes on Graham’s sleeve.

‘I got these a year or two ago when they moved me back here from Brampton. It’s not exactly Scotland Yard, but it’s not a bad life. We don’t get the sort of problems they have in the city, thank God. Not yet anyway.’ He looked around, perhaps pondering the surroundings where he could probably expect the rest of his career to be played out. ‘What about you, Adam, where are you living now?’

‘London.’

‘And you’re a journalist. When I heard the name I wondered if it was you. You always knew what you wanted to do. How long have you been back?’

‘I arrived last night.’

‘I don’t suppose it’s changed much.’

‘No, not really.’

‘So, what brings you back here anyway? Gordon said something about you wanting to know about the lads that were killed in that accident last month?’

‘I’m looking into it for the sister of one of them. She has some questions about what happened.’

‘Helen Pierce,’ Graham said, frowning.

‘You spoke to her?’

‘A few times. Ben, wasn’t it, her brother’s name? He was driving but she said he couldn’t have been. Something to do with his illness. He was epileptic.’

‘According to Helen her brother never learned to drive because of it. She said he didn’t drink either.’

‘Because of the medicine he was taking. Yes, she told me that too.’ Graham opened a flap in the counter. ‘Look, why don’t you come inside where we can talk properly?’

They went through to a small inner office and Graham gestured to a chair at his desk. ‘Have a seat, Adam.’ He went around the desk and settled himself in his own chair. ‘Is Helen Pierce a friend of yours, or is your interest in this professional?’

‘A bit of both, I suppose you could say.’

‘You know there’s been an inquest already? There’s really no doubt that Ben Pierce was driving the car when it crashed, and the autopsy results proved he’d been drinking.’

‘I know. I talked to the pathologist this morning.’

‘So, how can I help?’

‘I don’t know exactly. I’d like to find out more about how the accident happened,’ Adam said.

‘Hang on.’ Graham got up and went to a row of filing cabinets where he dug out a copy of the accident report. ‘It was the fifth of September. A woman reported seeing the wreck from the Geltsdale road when she was taking her kids to school. I went up there straight away.’

The Geltsdale road crossed the fells and wound down to the valley in a series of curves, passing through the forest for a good part of the way. From what Adam could remember it was pretty steep in places. Graham pushed the report across the desk.

‘It’s all there if you want to see it. Ben Pierce was in the driver’s seat just as you see him in the photograph; the others had been thrown clear. They were all dead when I arrived. The accident happened some time the night before.’

Adam scanned the report. Everything had been measured and recorded, including the skid marks on the road, and the contents of the car, which had been recovered. Mostly clothing and other belongings, including three backpacks. ‘It looks from this as if they were going somewhere,’ Adam said, reading through the list.

‘Probably back home to London. They were part of a load of protesters we had here over the summer. A lot of them were leaving about then.’

‘What time did the accident happen?’

‘Between about nine and ten as far as we can tell.’

‘Funny time to be leaving,’ Adam said, to which Graham made no comment.

An empty half-bottle of supermarket brand whisky had been found, which might seem a little convenient to a suspicious mind, but Adam couldn’t see anything in the report that looked obviously wrong. The car itself was found to have worn tread on one of the tyres but was otherwise mechanically sound. The logical conclusion anyone could draw was that the driver had been drunk while travelling too fast along a dangerously steep road at night. He’d lost control and skidded over the edge. End of story.

‘What were they doing there?’

Graham got up to file the report away again. ‘What do you mean?’ he asked over his shoulder.

‘They were packed up as if they were planning to leave, and they were travelling towards Castleton. But it’s a long way from anywhere up there.’

‘Perhaps they’d been to a pub somewhere.’

‘But there are no pubs up there, unless you go right over the fells,’ Adam reasoned. ‘You didn’t check?’

‘There was no reason to.’

That was true, Adam acknowledged silently. ‘What about this protest they were involved with? Where was that?’

‘On the estate at Castleton Wood, at the northern end.’

‘Castleton Wood?’

‘Didn’t you know? The estate is for sale. A company called Forest Havens wants to buy it. The woods have been full of bloody protesters since the spring. They’ve got a camp up there.’

A definite trace of rancour had appeared in Graham’s tone, which Adam wondered about. But something else struck him. ‘The wood is nowhere near where the accident happened. In fact it’s the other way, so they couldn’t have been coming from there.’

‘Perhaps they’d been to Alston.’

Maybe they had, Adam thought, though that was a twenty-mile drive over the fells. ‘You didn’t try to find out then?’

‘Like I said, I had no reason to.’

‘Not even after Helen Pierce expressed misgivings?’

‘I listened to what she had to say, but facts are facts, Adam.’

Adam glanced through the report again, looking for something out of place, but if there was anything there he couldn’t see it. He thought about the injuries on the bodies of Ben’s friends. ‘I gather from what you said a minute ago that you don’t have a lot of sympathy for the protesters?’

‘They’re bloody troublemakers, a lot of them. All kinds of hippy types sitting on their arses collecting the dole all summer. Half of them on drugs.’

‘Is that the prevailing opinion?’

‘You could say that.’

‘Has there been trouble between them and local people?’

‘Not to speak of.’

‘Helen Pierce thought her brother might have been threatened.’

‘There might have been a few scuffles, but nothing serious.’

‘When I spoke to the pathologist she said that she thought two of the boys, Frost and Davies, might have been in a fight a few days before the accident. One of them had a broken rib among other things. What do you make of that?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Well, did you know about it? It must have been in the autopsy report.’

‘I don’t know what you’re getting at,’ Graham said, sounding suddenly defensive.

Adam pressed the point. ‘Maybe the accident and the protest might be linked somehow.’

‘Linked, how?’

‘I don’t know. Why would anybody beat them up? People get worked up about these things. It seems to me it would have been worth looking into anyway.’

Adam knew that he was implying criticism of the way Graham had handled Helen Pierce’s concerns and it was clear from his expression that Graham didn’t appreciate it.

‘There’s nothing to suggest that those three lads being part of the protest had anything to do with this,’ Graham said. ‘What happened was an accident, plain and simple. Young lads out drinking, happens all the time. Take my advice, Adam, don’t start trying to make something out of this that isn’t there.’

‘But you said yourself you didn’t really investigate any other possibility.’

‘There was nothing to investigate.’

‘Maybe on the face of it,’ Adam insisted doggedly. He knew that based on the evidence he was being unreasonable, but he pushed the point anyway. ‘After Helen Pierce talked to you didn’t you at least wonder why her brother was driving? You know neither of the other two had been drinking. Even the pathologist wondered about that.’

‘But she also said both of them were in the back of the car when it left the road,’ Graham said flatly. ‘So what was I supposed to do?’

‘You might have tried to find out where they had been. Perhaps to see if anybody had seen Ben drinking, maybe in a pub in Alston. It could be that somebody even saw him get behind the wheel when they left. At least that would have proved the point to Helen Pierce.’

‘I could have done those things, yes. But I didn’t, because there was no need,’ Graham said angrily. ‘It might not be like London here, but that doesn’t mean I have time to run around all over the country asking questions I already know the answer to. Nobody doubts that lad was driving except his sister. I feel sorry for her loss, but it doesn’t alter the facts. I can’t tell you any more than that.’

There was nothing else Adam could think of to ask for the moment, and it was clear that Graham was losing patience so Adam thanked him for his time and rose to leave. Graham showed him to the door.

‘That accident had nothing to do with the protest, Adam,’ he said. ‘There’s already been a lot written in the papers about that, and most of it bloody rubbish. Some people around here have had enough of journalists. You might want to remember that before you go around stirring things up.’

‘I’ ll bear it in mind,’ Adam said, thinking that if he didn’t know better, he’d have thought Graham’s warning had sounded almost like a threat.

CHAPTER NINE

Angela parked her car in the driveway outside the large red sandstone house that had once belonged to David’s parents. It had a walled garden, and was on the edge of the town. Behind it there was a paddock where Kate, their ten-year-old daughter, kept her pony. Across the fields the River Gelt cut a path through the valley from the fells, which rose up behind the house. In the summer the hills were a patchwork of pale greens and browns and the purple of the heather. In the winter they were grey and barren, shrouded with cloud and often covered with deep snow. In bad years the blizzards could rage for weeks.

She went inside the house and put away the groceries. When she was done she went upstairs to the attic room that had been converted for use as her studio and checked her email. She loved this room, with its big roof window that looked out towards the river and the fells. There was a message from Julian Crown, who was her publisher. He wanted her to call him.

As she stood in front of her drawing board looking at the illustrations for the story that she was working on, she wondered what he wanted. The books that she wrote were very simple, aimed at two- to four-year-olds. It was the accompanying pictures that breathed life into her words. It was a career she’d stumbled into almost by accident, when she’d answered an ad in one of the Sunday papers. After Kate was born the doctors had told Angela she wouldn’t have any more children, so when Kate started going to kindergarten she suddenly had the house to herself again and she was bored. David had said she could help out with the office work at the sawmill if she wanted to, but the business was doing well enough without her, and he already had Mollie as his personal assistant-cum-secretary-cum-administrator. Besides which, the sawmill was David’s passion. She wanted something for herself.

She had phoned her old boss at the mail order company in Carlisle where she’d worked after she’d finished art college, and he’d offered to give her back her old job, but seeing the old office again, and many of the same faces, had made her hesitant. While she was thinking it over she saw an ad inviting people interested in a career as an illustrator for children’s stories to submit samples of their work.

Believing she had nothing to lose she’d gone to the library and pored over a stack of books like the ones she’d read to Kate when she was younger. Then she had gone home and written one herself, basing it around Castleton and the fells and surrounding countryside, and including a few whimsical watercolours. She’d posted it off quickly, before she changed her mind, not really expecting anything to come of it.

The publisher, it turned out, liked her work. His name was Julian Crown. Over the phone he told her that her pictures evoked a strong sense of childlike innocence that was, in his words, ‘really quite charming’. She went down to London on the train to meet him, suspicious that there would be a catch, half expecting him to ask her to pay for the production of her book herself. In fact he turned out to be a likable and genuine man who wore a suit with a buttonhole flower. He took her to lunch at a restaurant in Poland Street and told her that if she listened to his advice he thought he could sell her work. She had, and he did. Since then on average she’d produced a book a year. She wasn’t about to retire to the South of France on the proceeds, but she enjoyed the feeling of independence and the sense of purpose it gave her. She only worked a couple of hours a day, usually in the mornings after Kate had left for school. She could have done more if she wanted. Julian was always trying to persuade her that she should.

She picked up the phone and called the number for Kimberley Books and was put through to Julian.

‘Angela, you got my message.’ He sounded pleased to hear from her.

‘Hello, Julian, how are you?’

‘Marvellous. Couldn’t be better. How’s life in the wild open spaces?’

‘It’s Cumbria, Julian. It isn’t exactly the Russian Steppes.’

He laughed, but to him it might as well have been. On one of her occasional visits to London he’d taken her to meet his wife. They lived in a three-storey Georgian terrace house in a leafy street near Belsize Park. The world of publishing apparently involved an endless round of social events. In between cocktail parties and book launches Julian and his wife, who Angela had thought was beautiful and sophisticated, went to the opera and the theatre and ate at fine restaurants. Their house was tastefully and expensively furnished. Angela had showed Julian on a map exactly where she lived and she recalled his expression of surprise.

‘My dear, it’s practically in Scotland.’ He seemed to think civilization ended somewhere just north of Hampstead, and Hadrian’s Wall hadn’t been built for nothing.

Now, as they chatted, and he asked how her current book was progressing she wondered what he really wanted. She told him the book would be finished on time.

‘Excellent,’ he said, and there was a significant pause.

‘Was there something specific you wanted to talk about, Julian?’

‘Actually there is, now that you come to mention it. An American firm is interested in publishing you.’ He paused to allow a moment for that to sink in. ‘They like your work, but they want you to do a series specifically for their market.’

‘You mean, set them in America?’

‘Actually, they want you to make them more English. Or at least more like the average American’s idea of England. Put in a few teashops and the odd m’lord perhaps. There is a catch,’ Julian added.

‘A catch?’ She should have known there would be. The excitement she’d begun to feel rapidly dissipated.

‘The thing is they want nine books over the next three years.’

‘Nine?’ she echoed.

‘And they would want you for a publicity tour.’

Suddenly she realized exactly what would be involved. What had begun as an interest, something she found personally rewarding, would become a full-time career. Three books a year would mean taking on a commitment way beyond her current contract with Julian. She understood that it wouldn’t end there. It would just be the beginning. A tour would mean she would have to go away, perhaps for weeks. Her life would change. ‘I don’t know, Julian. There’s Kate to think of.’

He sighed. ‘I was afraid you’d say that. This kind of opportunity doesn’t often come along, Angela. It may never happen again. Before you turn it down, at least think about it. Will you promise me?’

She hesitated before she agreed. She owed him that much. ‘Of course I will.’

‘That’s all I ask.’

He then spent another fifteen minutes reiterating what was at stake. He kept repeating that it was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. If things went well perhaps other countries would publish her books too. The Americans would launch her with a tour of their major cities. New York, San Francisco, Chicago. When he finally let her go her head was spinning with the thought of all those places she had only ever read about. After they hung up she gazed out of the window at the fells. Once she had thought that this was the only life she ever wanted; herself and David and Kate, this house. They had been happy. Her expression clouded with sadness.

Downstairs Angela paused in the doorway to David’s study. The room smelt vaguely musty so she opened the window to let in some air. She glanced at some papers on the desk. A recent bank statement for the sawmill revealed that there was more money going out of the business than was coming in. She opened the drawer where she knew David kept his Scotch and the bottle she found was only two-thirds full. Yesterday it had been unopened.

She looked around at the hunting and fishing prints on the wall, the clutter of male effects. Three or four fishing rods in one corner, an old leather shotgun case that he kept behind the bookcase. The room had David’s stamp all over it. It was a man’s room. She used to think she knew him. For most of their married life together they’d been happy. They had the occasional argument and there were things about David that irritated her, but they weren’t important. No doubt he felt the same way about some of her habits. But these last few months he had changed. At first she’d put it down to worry about the sawmill. The local economy, which was so reliant on farming, had taken a battering in successive years, and uncertainty over the estate hadn’t helped matters. But it was more than that. She had the disconcerting feeling that this was the room of a stranger. These days when David was at home he sat in here brooding and drinking. He wouldn’t talk to her any more, though she knew there was something eating away at him. She couldn’t remember when he’d last slept in their bed. A month? Six weeks? It was affecting Kate as well. She avoided her father and these days hardly ever brought friends home from school.

For the first time in thirteen years Angela faced the possibility that her marriage was in trouble. How much longer was she prepared to go on like this? Briefly she envisaged a new life for herself and Kate. It was just a momentary speculation, prompted in part by her conversation with Julian, partly by an increasing sense of hopelessness. Almost immediately she banished the thought. What was she thinking? Guiltily she left the room.

CHAPTER TEN

As Adam went into the newsagent’s the bell over the door rang. He paused, savouring the mingled smells of tobacco and sugar confectionary. A middle-aged woman behind the counter looked up and smiled. He didn’t recognize her. He went over to the counter and picked up some chewing gum.

‘Wasn’t this shop once owned by George Curtis?’ he asked casually. ‘I noticed the name over the door had changed.’

‘I couldn’t tell you,’ she said. ‘I haven’t lived here long.’

Her accent, he realized, wasn’t even Cumbrian. She sounded as if she was from Newcastle. He smiled, feeling foolish, and went back outside. As he walked back towards the square he watched people pass by, searching for a familiar face. Across the road a woman came down the steps from the bank. She was fishing in her bag, perhaps looking for her car keys because she stopped beside a Renault parked by the kerb. He watched her, his heart beating hard in his chest. At that moment she looked up, and their eyes met.

Her hair was still long and pale blonde. She wore jeans and a dark jacket, and his secret fear that the years would have changed her was swept away. She broke their gaze and found her keys, but then as she was about to get into her car she looked again, and this time her brow creased in a puzzled frown. All at once her expression slowly dissolved. She gave a small, disbelieving shake of her head and smiled uncertainly. She began to cross the road, and as he went to meet her, her smile broadened.

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