Little Girls Tell Tales
RACHEL BENNETT

One More Chapter

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First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2020

Copyright © Rachel Bennett 2020

Cover design by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2020

Cover images © Shutterstock.com

Rachel Bennett asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

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Source ISBN: 9780008333300

Ebook Edition © May 2020 ISBN: 9780008333294

Version: 2020-02-03

About This Book

This ebook meets all accessibility requirements and standards.

Please be advised this book features the following content warnings: bereavement, homophobia, missing persons, child abuse, murder.

Table of Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

About This Book

Dedication

Chapter 1: August 2004

Chapter 2: Fifteen Years Later

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Also by Rachel Bennett

About the Publisher

For Jacob and Elliott

Chapter 1
August 2004

If the weather had been better that summer I wouldn’t have found the body in the wetlands. We were only outside that day because, after four solid days of rain, our mum chased me and Dallin out of the house as soon as the clouds broke.

We were allowed to play in the curraghs, the sprawling acres of boggy marshland that began almost on Mum’s back doorstep, so long as we kept to the main paths. Mum had told plenty of stories about how easy it was to get lost, or worse. Some of the boggy ponds were so deep, she said, that if a girl stepped into one it would swallow her forever. I was mostly convinced the stories weren’t real.

My brother Dallin was twelve; two years older than me. He’d spent countless hours playing in the curraghs and reckoned the bog-land held no secrets from him. He never missed an opportunity to lord it over me, this advantage he’d gained by living full-time here with Mum, while I was stuck in Douglas with our dad.

So it was only natural we should follow him without question. Dallin went racing ahead down the main path. His was all legs and arms, like a disjointed puppet. Right behind him was Beth, who’d been in the same class as Dallin since they were at playschool. Her parents had dropped her off at Mum’s house earlier that day. Beth was a quiet soul, as if she’d long ago decided Dallin would be the brash, noisy one. Her brown hair hated being confined to a ponytail and was always escaping in wisps and tufts. Beth and Dallin would never call each other best friends, but only because they never needed to voice such things. When Beth was with us, I felt superfluous.

‘This way!’

Dallin ducked off the main path, vaulted a water-filled ditch, and set off into the trees on the other side, without checking to see if we were following. The trees were spindly and twisted, as if there wasn’t enough substance to the ground to anchor them, and one grew above fifteen feet tall. But that was tall enough. Once we were amongst them, I could no longer see the mountains to the south, my only point of reference on that flat stretch of land.

‘This is more muddy than last week,’ Dallin said over his shoulder. ‘But you’d expect that, right? After all that rain, it’s gonna be like a proper swamp in here, we better not take a single step off the path—’

He chattered away as we walked. Dallin was always talking, always making noise, always restless. Sometimes it was exhilarating to be caught in his slipstream. Other times it was exhausting.

Today I didn’t have much tolerance for him. Maybe it was because we’d been cooped up in the house, or maybe it was the calm press of the trees, but I found I didn’t want to listen. I walked slowly, putting a little distance between us. Beth glanced back once and smiled at me. One of those understanding smiles she was so good at. She was beautiful, I realised in surprise, with golden sunlight caught in wayward strands of her hair. It was the first time I’d noticed.

The path we were following ran along the top of an old dry-stone wall. A hundred years ago, this whole area had been drained for farmland, and these flat-topped walkways had stood waist-high along the boundaries of the fields. But the farmers left, the waters returned, and the trees reclaimed every inch of land. Tree roots climbed up and over the broken stone of the walls to bind them tight. I picked my way over a gnarled surface made of a dozen warring roots.

‘Look, Rosalie,’ Beth said, pointing. ‘Wallaby.’

I hadn’t believed Dallin when he’d told me there were wallabies living wild up here in the north of the island. According to him, they’d escaped from the wildlife park on the other side of the curraghs about fifty years ago, and had been living here ever since. It sounded like one of Dallin’s stories, but Mum had backed him up, for once.

‘They’ve been here longer than any of us,’ she’d said with good-natured annoyance, ‘so I suppose they have the right to go wherever they want. But I could do without them getting into my garden and chewing the bark off my fruit trees.’

It’d been a few years since Mum had snapped our family in two by moving out of our Douglas home and buying the farmhouse up here in the middle of nowhere. The summer holidays, when I was parcelled out to her for up to three weeks, were marked by my sullen silences and unshed tears. At age ten, I blamed her for everything wrong with my life.

Over the last two summers, I’d spotted several wallabies while we were out in the curraghs. They were always at a distance, sitting so still they could be mistaken for broken tree stumps. There was something vaguely sinister, I thought, about the way they watched us. Like sentinels of the swamp.

I followed Beth’s pointing finger and saw the wallaby. It looked bigger than the ones in the wildlife park. Obviously it had spotted us, because it was staring straight at us both, keeping a cool eye on what we were doing.

‘She’s got a joey,’ Beth whispered.

Beth’s eyes were much sharper than mine. I had to squint before I made out the tiny woolly head poking from the mother’s pouch. I wouldn’t have seen it at all except it was restlessly shifting around.

‘Neat,’ I said.

Beth flashed another smile at me.

We kept walking. I glanced back a few times but the mother wallaby was quickly lost to sight. Still, I couldn’t shake the feeling that others were watching us.

The track stepped down off the remains of the wall and wound off through the trees. I kept my eyes on my feet. The path was reassuringly solid, but the ground on either side was muddy and soft. My blue wellies left perfect imprints. On either side of me, standing pools of water gave off a sweet-stagnant smell. The air was heavy and damp with humidity. I looked up. Above the treetops there was nothing but the round bowl of the sky, dotted with clouds. It made me dizzy. Better to concentrate on my feet.

It was maybe five or ten minutes later when I raised my eyes and realised I was alone.

I paused to listen. Dallin would still be talking, I knew. His voice had been a constant drone throughout the summer holidays, half comfort and half annoyance. But now I couldn’t hear him. The only noise was soft birdsong, water dripping from leaves, and the murmur of the wind in the trees.

Dallin and Beth must’ve been somewhere ahead. I’d fallen behind a little, then a little more, until they were out of sight. But soon enough they’d realise I was being slow, and they’d wait for me.

I kept walking.

It didn’t occur to me that I might be lost. The wetlands weren’t that big or sprawling. Probably they were no bigger than the plantation of pine trees near Douglas where me and Dad went out for walks. And I’d never managed to lose myself there. But maybe that was because the plantation was on the slope of a hill. The thousand or so pine trees in their regimented straight lines drew clear pathways back to safety. Even if I got turned around there, I could walk downhill until I found the road.

The curraghs were different. Everything was flat, with no landmarks. There were plenty of paths – dozens of them – but many led in circles or disappeared into bogs.

I walked for some time, thinking – if I was thinking at all – that I was bound to catch up with Beth and Dallin soon. I figured I would come around a clump of trees and there they’d be, waiting for me with a sarcastic remark. But I kept walking and I remained alone.

In the mud off to one side I spotted several elongated, parallel footprints. Wallaby tracks. They led off along an ill-defined trail that headed in what I thought was the direction of the road. I stepped off the path to follow the trail, even though it soon became little more than a line of slightly firmer ground between the stagnant mud puddles.

A few broken chunks of stone protruded from the earth here and there. The remains of a wall, marking the edge of someone’s land? Or maybe part of a sheep-pen, which would lead me round in a loose circle. Perhaps part of someone’s house. There were no clues. Everything had been swallowed by the trees.

At that point I began to feel frightened. Not because I was alone or possibly lost – neither were new experiences for me – but by the evidence of history around me; of time reclaiming the land. A hundred years ago there’d been people living here, but now there was nothing left, except the faint tracery of the walls they’d built. It shocked me to think that time would eventually sweep away the fragments of my own life, the crooked trees tangling over everything that made me unique and memorable.

I had the sudden urge to drop to my knees and dig down through the mud. Buried somewhere must be a few lost remnants of the people who’d gone before.

Later – weeks, months, years later – I would piece the day back together from fragments of memory, looking for signs and augurs I should’ve spotted. There must’ve been something to warn me my life was about to change. Was it significant, the way the wind dropped to an eerie calm, or how the wild geese chattered somewhere off in the distance, or how I spotted those clumps of bogbean – that beautiful, delicate white flower Mum had told me to look out for – growing in sudden abundance in an overwise unremarkable clearing?

It was the flowers that made me pause. The trail I’d been following had petered out to nothing. Ahead, the ground looked boggier, like it might not take my weight. I stopped. The bogbean flowers on their slender stems nodded in the gentle breeze. They poked up between a tangle of sticks in a muddy pond. The sticks were whitish grey, stripped of their bark. I thought of the wallabies that’d chewed Mum’s fruit trees.

I studied the jutting curve of the sticks where they emerged from the water. It took me a surprisingly long time to recognise it as a ribcage.

I’d never seen one in real life, of course. But I’d seen the plastic skeleton at the St John Ambulance headquarters, where my schoolfriend Amanda went to Badgers. I’d spent a long, bored time fiddling with the artificial joints of the skeleton, nicknamed Boney M, while I waited for Amanda to finish training so her mum could give us both a lift home.

What I was confronted with now didn’t look much like Boney M. The ribcage, if that’s what it was, was squashed and malformed, with half the ribs bent at the wrong angle. The bones were discoloured to the same greenish grey as the lichen on the trees. An arm – a possible arm, I told myself – was loosely attached at the shoulder by tatters of greyish material. The hands could be under the water, tucked up beneath the chest. Sleeping. Peaceful.

I brushed aside a few bogbean stems and found what might be the skull. It was partly submerged. Above the water was a smooth curve, part of an eye socket, and the edge of the jaw, complete with a few grimy teeth. The lower jaw had fallen open, or fallen away. One of the molars at the back had a filling in it, grey metal, like the ones my aunt showed when she laughed too loud.

I straightened up, suddenly dizzy. It was a person. I’d found a person.

An unpleasant tingle of surprise worked its way through my stomach. What should I do? In movies, if someone discovered a skeleton, they screamed, or cried, or threw up, or ran away. None of those reactions seemed justified right then, in that sun-dappled clearing, with the birds calling from nearby trees. This wasn’t someone who had died yesterday or the day before or even a week ago. No one was looking for them. And neither was it someone alive and hurt who needed me to run and get help.

This person had been dead a long, long time, perhaps even as long as the farmland had been flooded. Nothing about the scene made me want to scream or cry. There was no blood, no guts, not even a particularly bad smell – or at least, no worse than the rotted-vegetable smell of the mud itself.

Instead of fear or disgust, I felt only sadness. Who was this person? How come they were here? Had they worked in these ancient fields, before the land was reclaimed by trees?

I took a step closer and my boot sank deep into the mud. I jerked back in a hurry. The mud sucked at my boot as I pulled it loose. I stumbled back, breathless.

The first sting of fear hit me then. This was such a lonely place for someone to die. What if the person had been just like me, a little bit lost and a little bit abandoned, and she’d stumbled into the mud and couldn’t get out?

If I got stuck, would anyone hear my shouting? How long would Dallin and Beth search for me? What if I was never found?

I eyed the mud. The divot my boot had made was already filling with scummy water. How deep did the mud go? Could it swallow me whole, as fast as sinking sand? Would I disappear forever, like Mum had warned, held close in a freezing, muddy embrace?

It was that thought that sent me stumbling away, onto a barely-delineated trail that switched back and forth and sometimes vanished altogether. I walked as quickly as I dared. My boots clomped over roots and stones. I almost blundered into another deep pocket of mud, and, after that, I forced myself to go slower. With each step I eyed the ground. Several times I stopped and prodded the mud ahead of me with a stick I’d picked up, to check the ground would definitely take my weight. I took long circular routes around even the smallest ponds.

I had no way to measure time. Later, a great many people would tell me I’d been wandering out there for almost three hours. At the time, the minutes blended together, until it felt like I’d always been walking. My legs ached and my calves were chafed red raw by the top of my wellies.

When I at last stumbled out onto a road – far from where I’d thought I was – I was so numb and exhausted that I kept walking for another half-dozen steps before I noticed I was no longer amongst the trees.

Then a woman I didn’t recognise snatched me up and started shouting, ‘She’s here, Rosalie’s here, we’ve found her,’ like I was an Easter egg that’d been hidden too well, rather than a ten-year-old girl who was so tired she could barely stand.

Someone put a warm jacket around my shoulders. Someone else gave me a packet of biscuits – a whole packet, just put them in my hand and told me to eat, eat as many as I wanted. And then Mum was there, crying and gasping like she’d been drowned, pulling me into a crushing embrace. The biscuits were squashed between us and ended up mostly as crumbs.

‘Where were you?’ Mum asked into my tangled hair. ‘Where did you go, pumpkin?’

I pulled away so I could see her face, and said, ‘I found a dead person.’

The police were already on the scene, having been called by Mum an hour earlier, when Dallin had finally found the courage to go home and tell her he’d mislaid his little sister. I could see the bright police car blocking the road near the car park. There were eight or nine other cars, I realised, clogging the road and parked in the passing places. I would later discover that over two dozen people had turned up to look for me.

‘I found a dead person,’ I said again, because Mum was staring at me like she hadn’t heard. It was important everyone should know.

‘Hush,’ my mum said. She pressed my head back to her shoulder. ‘Hush.’

The police searched the curraghs for the skeleton I’d seen. They kept going until the light faded, and then continued the next day, and the day after. They found nothing.

Three days later, I went back into the curraghs, with a search team of five people, in the hope I could lead them to the clearing with the bogbean growing up through the stripped bones. But, just as I couldn’t find my way out before, now I couldn’t find my way back. Every path looked the same. Nothing was familiar. It was as if the wetlands had shifted and rearranged overnight.

The search team reassured me, but I could see annoyance on their faces.

‘She’s had a nasty scare, being lost,’ one of Mum’s friends said later. ‘It’s enough to play tricks on anyone’s mind.’

‘It’s no surprise she’d make up something like that,’ a few people whispered when they thought I wasn’t listening. ‘She’s always had an overactive imagination, that one.’

‘She did it on purpose,’ only one person said to my face – Dallin. ‘She must’ve heard us shouting for her. We yelled like crazy. She heard us. She just wanted to stay lost.’

I knew other people thought the same. I told my story as many times as I had to, and only stopped when I realised no one believed me. Not my family, not my friends, no one.

‘The police would’ve found something,’ Mum said, at her most diplomatic. ‘They searched everywhere. They took sniffer dogs in to help. I’m sorry, pumpkin, but if there was anything to find, they would’ve found it.’

The only person who supported me was Beth. ‘I’ll help you search again,’ she offered one day at the end of summer, in her soft, sincere voice. ‘We’ll keep looking until we find it.’ And every time we went into the curraghs after that, I knew she was scrutinising the ground as we walked, both of us looking for the bones that haunted me.

In time though, everyone else quietly decided I had, at best, been mistaken. The phantom skeleton in the curraghs was forgotten.

Chapter 2
Fifteen Years Later

In the mornings, mist would collect in pockets throughout the curraghs, like fragments of stuffing caught on a thousand thorns. It was slow to disperse, waiting until the sun rose high enough to burn it away.

I liked to stand at the back door and watch the sun come up. It hit the slopes of the hills to the south first, soft and golden. The air around our house stayed chill for another hour or so, even after the sun found its way to our garden. Sometimes, I couldn’t help but think the curraghs were to blame for this; that the chill seeped outwards from the wet, shaded ground.

Early morning was the only time I could bear to look out at the wetlands. In those soft, half-awake moments, when the land was still slumbering, I could look at the gnarled and twisted trees and feel a shadow of the peace they’d used to inspire. When we’d first come to live here, six years ago, to the house Mum had treasured, the trees gave me a sort of reassurance. We shared a secret, after all, them and me. I would listen to their whispering and smile.

Now, though, I couldn’t stand to look at the trees for long. Their whispering voices sounded harsh. Like they knew too many of my secrets.

As the sun reached our garden, I turned away from the wetlands. The birds had woken up with a dozen competing songs in their throats. The top leaves of the trees twisted in the breeze as the branches stretched to greet the sun. But the marshy ground beneath the trees was still dark. The shadows would linger there for a while yet.

I shut the porch door and put my cup down on the table. The herbal tea I’d made half an hour earlier had cooled, half-finished. I still hadn’t found a tea I liked to drink first thing in the morning. They were all either too sharp or too sweet.

I miss coffee. The thought cropped up quite often and always made me sigh.

The next step in my morning routine was to go through the house and open all the curtains. As usual, I had to force myself do it. Over the last eighteen months, I’d been careful to maintain the necessary, everyday routines to keep the house in shape, even when there seemed no point. Especially when there seemed no point.

Sometimes I struggled to remember when I’d had an actual schedule, imposed by factors outside my own head. When I’d had to get up and dressed and out of the house in time for work. How had I ever coped? The idea of rushing around in the early morning to meet a deadline made my chest tighten. And yet, I’d used to love how busy I was. I’d used to love my job.

Strange how quickly everything could change.

I opened the kitchen blinds to let in the morning sun. That was relatively easy. The curtains in the front room were more difficult, because allowing light into that room illuminated Beth’s trinkets and ornaments, which covered almost every flat surface. I hadn’t wanted the knick-knacks cluttering up the house, but Beth loved them, so we compromised. Beth had restricted them to the front room. And now, even though I couldn’t bear the sight of them, I also couldn’t face getting rid of a single one. Wherever Beth was now, she would’ve laughed to see me forever tethered to the hundreds of tacky ceramic animals.

I swished the curtains open and left the room quickly. It was too early in the day to deal with heartbreak.

Out in the hall and up the stairs. Here were more reminders of Beth, her face smiling from almost every framed picture on the wall. But there were also reminders of Mum. The wallpaper was her favourite shade of green. There were ring marks on the pale wood of the lowermost three stairs, where she’d rested her cup of tea while she’d chatted on the phone to my aunt for hours. After Mum moved out, we could’ve changed the wallpaper or sanded the stairs, but again Beth had talked me round. ‘It’s charming,’ she’d said. ‘Gives the place character.’

After I’d opened the curtains in the two upstairs bedrooms, I went into the study and sat down. There were no blinds in here because the dormer window was such an awkward shape, and the sun hit the room squarely at this time of day, gradually warming the dusty air. I rolled the chair into the rectangle of sunlight and closed my eyes.

The house was too big for me on my own. Together, me and Beth had filled the rooms, but now I was too aware of the echoing hardwood floors and high, cavernous ceilings. It’d turned out Beth was right – we could’ve used more clutter. It might’ve disguised the hard edges of the house that I’d never noticed.

But I knew I could never move. For a start, there was no way I could afford anywhere half as nice. The house was still in Mum’s name, but after I was signed off work, she quietly stopped asking me for rent. My benefit payments covered the utilities and my daily expenses. I knew exactly how lucky I was. Not everyone in my position could live somewhere so lovely.

Lucky. My mouth twisted. Lucky me, to be living in a beautiful house in a beautiful location, where every little thing reminded me of what I’d lost.

I’d taken a week off before and after the funeral. Then my doctor had signed me off for another week. My employers had been understanding; how could they not? They’d told me to take as much time as I needed. Maybe they would’ve thought twice if they’d known how long I genuinely needed to recover. Like maybe forever. Eighteen months later and here I was. Still not whole.

In fact, if it wasn’t for Mum I’d probably never leave the house. It was a ten-minute journey into Ramsey, where Mum lived in her conveniently pokey flat. I made the drive once a week, every Sunday afternoon, combining it with a visit to the supermarket. I stuck to the routine for the same reasons I made myself draw the curtains each morning. Because it was too easy to sink. I had to keeping kicking my legs, at least a little, if I wanted to stay above water.

It frightened me how simple it was to give up. Although my employers had told me they’d keep my job open, in case I ever came back, I’d long ago accepted I wouldn’t return. I’d felt nothing but relief when I’d finally admitted it.

Since then, the house had become a sanctuary, despite the constant, unavoidable reminders of Beth wherever I looked. It was the one thing that rooted me to the world. I tidied, I sorted, I tended the garden. The garden in particular never failed to calm me. Here, the influence of my mother was strongest. Mum had planted these flowers, tended these beds, pruned these saplings. I would smile at the smallest things, such as the chicken-wire still wrapped loosely around the trunks of the fruit trees to guard against marauding wallabies.

‘A garden’s a promise you make to yourself,’ Mum would say. ‘You’re promising you want to be here to see it grow.’

It made me sad Mum couldn’t visit more often to see the garden growing. Every couple of months, I would take her for an outing, driving her back to the house so she could visit the garden and the curraghs. Those trips had been more frequent before Beth died, of course. Everything had declined since then.

I got out of the chair in the study and went back downstairs. Time for another cup of tea before I got dressed. I checked the doormat automatically and breathed a silent sigh of relief to see there was no post that morning.

After that I changed the bedsheets, hoovered the bedrooms, and put the bedding in to wash. That took me until lunchtime. After lunch, when the washing machine had finished, I hung out the sheets, in time to catch the sun at its warmest. Then I worked quietly in the garden. I spent a considerable amount of time tying up the honeysuckle at the side of the house, which had exploded into a million trailing shoots, each determined to burrow its way into the gutters or drainpipes. I loved the honeysuckle, but between it and the clematis at the opposite side of the house, I was fighting a constant battle for control.

Maybe that was the attraction of the garden. Mum had been smart to encourage me to spend as much time as possible with my hands in the dirt. As if she’d known I’d someday need this to occupy my mind and my hands.

I’d just come inside to make my fifth cup of herbal tea when the doorbell rang.

I washed my hands quickly and wiped them on my jogging pants as I went to the door. It was half past four on a Thursday afternoon. I wasn’t expecting any callers. But answering the door was an accepted part of life. I didn’t want to become the sort of person who hid from the outside world.

As I approached the door, I saw a letter lying on the mat, and my stomach dropped like a lead weight. I recognised the plain Manila envelope with the sloped handwriting on the front. It must’ve come while I was in the garden, unless … unless it’d been delivered right now, by the person outside.

Through the frosted glass of the upper half of my front door, I could see the fuzzed outline of my visitor. They rang the bell again, then cupped their hands to peer through the glass. I was sure they saw my shadow.

‘Rosie?’ the person called. ‘Rosie, you there?’

The voice was muffled, but I recognised it.

I snatched up the envelope from the mat and dropped it facedown onto the phone table before opening the door.

‘Rosie,’ my brother Dallin said with a smile. ‘Hi! How are you?’

I took a bit too long to answer. I blinked several times, as my brain processed this shock, on top of the unpleasant nausea provoked by the arrival of the envelope, before I remembered to smile back. ‘Dalliance,’ I said. If he could use childhood nicknames then so could I.

Dallin laughed and swept in to hug me. I was taken by surprise but didn’t try to stop him. Over the past couple of years, I’d become used to people hugging me, whether I wanted them to or not. Plus, it gave me another moment to deal with the fact that he was back, suddenly, inexplicably.

‘What on earth are you doing here?’ I asked into his shoulder.

Dallin pulled away, although he kept hold of one of my hands. ‘I’m so sorry,’ he said. ‘I should’ve called. I’ve got a million excuses why I didn’t.’

I kept the smile on my face. Yes, I thought. I’m sure you do.

‘Here.’ Dallin took a step back. ‘This is Cora.’

I’d been so fixed on Dallin I’d barely noticed the woman who hovered awkwardly nearby. She looked as if someone had stapled her feet to the floor to keep her from fleeing. As she made eye contact she flickered a smile. It looked like she’d coached herself to smile at strangers. Honestly, that made me warm to her. It looked like we both knew the difficulties of social interactions that everyone else took for granted.

‘Thank you for this,’ Cora said, with another flickering smile.

I frowned, but Dallin was already leaning past me to look into the house. ‘Wow,’ he said, ‘the place is going great. I love the … those, y’know, those flowers there.’

He was pointing to the vase of sweet peas I’d placed on the phone table. ‘You should come in,’ I said, standing aside, because that’s what was expected of me.

Dallin stepped into the hall. ‘That’s brilliant, thank so much. Hey, I’m glad you kept the wallpaper, Mum always loved that colour.’

It was so familiar, the flow of thought and speech that characterised Dallin. Hearing it again, in this house, was a weird mix of jarring and comforting. The house was missing voices, I realised. The hardwood floors and high ceilings cried out for warm conversation and soft laughter. I hadn’t been able to provide either recently.

I ushered Dallin into the kitchen. The woman, Cora, followed. Briefly, I wished today had been the day for tidying the downstairs rooms rather than the bedrooms. It wasn’t like the place was a mess, just not as spotless as it might’ve been. I picked up a pile of magazines from the kitchen table then, realising there was nowhere better to stash them, put them back down.

‘The kettle’s just boiled,’ I said. Although, now I thought about it, I would need to boil it again, with enough water for three. ‘And – I don’t have any coffee. Or tea. I mean, I’ve got herbal tea. Peppermint. Or mint. Or spearmint.’

‘Tea sounds great,’ Dallin said. It was likely he’d only heard half of what I said. He was making a slow circuit of the room, examining everything. He studied the fridge magnets as if they held the secrets to the universe. I was glad I’d brought him and his friend into the kitchen rather than the sitting room. I couldn’t have coped with Dallin examining Beth’s ceramics with that somehow mocking, supercilious smile on his face. At least there was nothing in here except those stupid magnets, most from places me and Beth had never been.

I busied myself with the kettle and tried to gather my thoughts. Dallin was here. That was unexpected, to say the least, given it was six years since he last set foot in this house. But what could I do, tell him he wasn’t wanted? Shut the door in his face? Maybe I should’ve. But when I considered it, I almost felt Beth poking me between the shoulder blades. She never would’ve tolerated me acting like that towards my brother. Even if Dallin deserved it, and a million times more.

‘What were those kinds of tea again?’

I jumped. I hadn’t expected Cora to appear at my elbow. ‘Sorry?’

‘The teas.’ Cora tried another smile. This one didn’t look like she’d practiced it. ‘Three types of mint, right?’

‘Yeah. The peppermint is shop bought, but the mint and spearmint are from the garden.’

‘Like, leaves?’ Cora’s eyes crinkled. Her blonde hair was cut into bangs which fell forward whenever she dipped her head. Her ears had five or six piercing holes each, although she wasn’t currently wearing earrings.

‘Leaves. Yeah.’ I tucked my own hair behind my ears. I hadn’t showered that morning or done anything more with my hair than pull it into a messy topknot with tangled strands hanging down on all sides. All at once I was aware of how I must look to outsiders. I’d got used to no one seeing me for days at a time. ‘I’m sorry I don’t have any proper tea.’

‘It’s okay. I can’t have proper tea anyway.’

‘No? Why not?’

‘Because proper-tea is theft.’ Cora smiled, a little wider, a little more genuine, with a shrug that acknowledged the pun but refused to apologise for it.

I laughed. ‘So … mint?’

‘Sounds good. Thank you.’

I fished two extra cups from the cupboard. ‘So, why are you—?’

‘I can explain all that,’ Dallin said. He adjusted a seat at the kitchen table before sitting down.

Immediately he looked at home. Which was fair enough, I thought, since technically this had been his home before it was mine. The thought caused a twist of discomfort deep in my stomach. If Dallin had stayed, instead of running, it might’ve been him living here instead of me. I might’ve never had those beautiful years here, with Beth.

‘Cora’s looking for her sister,’ Dallin said.

I crinkled my brow. ‘Oh?’

‘Simone went missing twenty years ago,’ Cora said. Her attention stayed on my hands, watching as I made the tea, as if eye contact was too difficult right then. ‘She was fifteen. I was only nine. We never found out where she went.’

Dallin fidgeted in his seat. It was obvious he wanted to tell the story. ‘Cora thinks—’

‘I’ve been trying to put together what happened to her.’ Cora’s voice was soft but she spoke over Dallin with ease. ‘Trying to … piece things together. I’ve spent a lot of time chasing down vague hints and old clues. The police were involved at the time, I guess, but not for very long. Simone ran away. Nothing more to it than that. If she didn’t want to be found …’ Cora shrugged one shoulder. There was a softness to her movements as well. I got the sense she’d said these words a dozen times or more, and she’d become used to crushing the emotion so her voice didn’t shake, so now there was no inflection to her words at all. ‘It was only recently I started asking questions. My parents refused to talk about it.’

I stirred the mugs and scooped the leaves into the compost bucket. I wasn’t exactly sure why Cora was telling me all this. But I was used to people telling me their stories. It seemed to come with the territory. I had lost someone I loved. Apparently that meant other people needed to tell me their own traumas.

‘We know she went north.’ Cora took one of the mugs from me with a grateful half-smile. ‘The night Simone left home, she was caught on CCTV, getting onto a train. After that, she vanished. Never seen again.’

‘I’m sorry.’ I said it automatically, even though it always annoyed me when people apologised. Everyone’s sorry. It goes without saying. But even so, the quiet sadness in Cora’s expression made something twinge inside me. I’d spent so long pretending to be hardened, careful not to feel anything in case it set off the tsunami inside me. As harsh as it sounded, I didn’t want to feel sad over Cora’s story. I wanted to stay as I was. Feeling nothing.

‘Tell her the rest,’ Dallin said. There was a bright excitement in his eyes that he tried to hide.

‘There was a possible lead,’ Cora said. ‘Someone thought they saw Simone getting onto a ferry at Heysham. The police checked the CCTV at the time.’ She looked away to conceal the haunted look in her eyes. ‘They told me it showed a girl who was about the right age, right height, wrong clothes, but that doesn’t prove anything either way, does it? She could’ve changed her clothes easily enough. And the camera was pointed the wrong way. The police said they couldn’t see her face. And, of course, they didn’t bother keeping the footage on file, so I have to take their word for it.’ She blew on her tea to cool it. ‘Anyway, the footage wasn’t enough for the police. They looked into it – at least, they said they did. But they never found her here. Or anywhere else.’

I glanced at Dallin. From the look on his face, he was expecting something from me. But I couldn’t see what Cora’s story had to do with me.

Cora also frowned, looking hesitant again. ‘Did … did Dallin tell you this? He told you, right?’

Dallin said, ‘I sent you an email, Rose. Did you get it?’

I rolled my eyes. ‘What on earth made you think that was the best way to get in touch with me?’

‘I don’t know. Everyone does everything by email.’ Dallin raised his hands in weak apology. ‘I figured it might be a bit much for me to call you out of the blue.’

‘But turning up on my doorstep, that’s fine?’

Cora set down her mug. ‘I’m sorry. I had no idea … I thought you’d invited us here. I wouldn’t have … I’m sorry.’ She picked up her bag from the chair when she’d left it.

‘Wait. Cora, wait.’ Dallin intercepted her before she could walk out. ‘It’s okay. Rosie, it’s alright that we’re here, yeah? I’m sorry you didn’t get my message. But we’ve both come a long way. You need to hear what Cora’s got to say.’

He looked at Cora, expectant. He was still hanging onto her hand, like he’d hung onto mine at the door. Cora had her bag on her shoulder. It was obvious she wanted to stay, for whatever reason, but she was also reluctant to intrude where she wasn’t welcome. I knew how she felt.

Cora sighed. ‘I think you found my sister,’ she said to me.

‘I—?’ I frowned. ‘You think she’s living over here somewhere?’

‘No, I—’ Cora tucked a strand of blonde hair behind her ear. ‘I think you found her. When you were a kid, when you were out in the marshes.’

Realisation dawned. ‘Oh my God.’ I looked at Dallin, aghast. ‘You told her about that?’

‘It was on a website.’ Cora rooted in her bag for her phone. ‘I can find it for you. I read about the skeleton you found. Just near here, right?’

‘Um. Right.’ I couldn’t get my brain back in gear. ‘It was in the curraghs …’ I half-turned to gesture through the kitchen window, but lost what I was trying to say. ‘You read it on a website?’

‘It’s more of a forum,’ Dallin said. ‘There’s a lot of stuff about myths and urban legends and, y’know, that sort of stuff. Big cat sightings. There’s a page about your story.’

Cora held her phone out to me. The screen showed a black screen with white text that wasn’t formatted properly for mobile phones. It made me immediately think, I’d love to show this font to Beth, she’d hate it. Beth had been a keen blogger, right up to the end, and nothing wound her up more than white text on a black background.

I almost smiled, until I remembered what I was reading.

I skimmed the text. As if reading it fast might protect me. The page consisted of several long paragraphs and a few stock photos of the curraghs – at least, I figured that’s what they were, but the pictures were loading one line at a time on Cora’s phone. I sped-read through a slightly glorified account of how I’d found the body. It matched the story I’d told dozens of times to dozens of people over the years, with a few embellishments that hadn’t happened, and a few that I myself had forgotten. It was shocking to see it all written down in white and black.

‘People … people believe this?’ I scrolled up and down the page. ‘They believe me?’

‘Why wouldn’t they believe it?’ Cora asked. A brief flicker of anguish crossed her face. ‘Are you saying it’s not true?’

‘No, no. It’s just … no one ever believed me.’ I couldn’t help but laugh in disbelief. ‘Fifteen years I’ve been telling this story. No one ever believed me. And now apparently there’re people talking about it on the internet.’ I scrolled to the bottom of the post and skimmed the comments. ‘People believe me.’

‘Don’t ever read the comments, Rose-Lee,’ Dallin said. He took the phone off me and gave it back to Cora. ‘But sure, yeah, of course people believe you. They always did.’

I could only laugh again. Did he really think that? Wasn’t he paying attention when people were quietly shaking their heads and catching each other’s eyes over the top of my head? Had no one told him about the months when our dad had kept me out of school, when I was having bad dreams every night?

‘The timelines fit,’ Cora said then. ‘Simone disappeared in June 1999, and you found the skeleton in August 2004. That’s right, yeah? It could be her.’

‘You think …?’

‘I think you found Simone, yes. Possibly.’ Cora was trying hard to hold back the hope, I saw. How many years had she spent chasing fruitless leads and false hopes? ‘There’s a chance it could be her. I mean, it has to be someone, right?’

I examined my hands because I couldn’t look at either Dallin or Cora. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I don’t know what to tell you. It was so long ago.’

‘You don’t remember it at all?’ Cora asked.

I couldn’t bear how the woman was staring at me. ‘I remember, sure. But it was fifteen years ago, and I was a kid. I don’t think I can tell you anything that isn’t on that website there. I’m sorry.’

Dallin started to say something else, but I turned away quickly and walked to the back door. I was overwhelmed – by Dallin coming back into my life, by Cora, by the past getting dredged up. I couldn’t deal with any of it.

I opened the back door and stepped outside.

Chapter 3

The sun was going down, casting long shadows into the back garden. I followed the path to the rear wall. There was a bench, sheltered beneath the sweet pea trellis, which only caught the sun at this late stage of the day. I rarely came down here anymore. Weeds had sprung up between the flagstones. I laid my hands on the rough limestone of the wall at the back of the garden; felt the coolness of the day against my palms. The smell of the curraghs was strong but not unpleasant, just a warm green scent that slowed my heartrate and smoothed out my tangled thoughts.

How many times over the past few years had I come here to calm down? Whenever I’d woken in the early hours and been unable to get back to sleep. Whenever me and Beth argued. On the day Beth got her diagnosis, when I’d realised I couldn’t cope. I had come here. Looking for something that could root me to the ground.

On those occasions, when nothing in the real world made sense, I would stand with my palms on the cool stone wall, and whisper to the ghost of the skeleton I’d found.

It’d started when I was still young, maybe three or four months after I found the skeleton. No one else would listen to me. Beth went to a different school, so I only ever saw her outside term time, and I missed her support desperately. It felt like the only person who might possibly know what I was going through was the person who’d got lost and died out there in the wetlands. When it got too much for me, I would beg my dad to let me stay with Mum for a few days, and then I would come down to the end of her garden like this.

I’d often imagined who the person in the curraghs had been. They’d had a life, a name. In the absence of the truth, I’d invented details. I pictured a girl my own age, wild and windblown, barefoot, running through the curraghs. I’d even given her a secret name: Bogbean, like the tiny white flowers that had blossomed in abundance around the gravesite. Sometimes I’d whisper the name aloud, into the silence of the evening air, but I’d never told it to anyone.

Good thing too. Otherwise it’d be on that stupid website right now.

My mouth twisted. Bogbean, the lost girl in the wetlands, had always belonged just to me. For fifteen years, whenever I needed to ground myself, I would speak my fears, aloud or inside my head, to Bogbean. Sometimes I imagined I heard the whisper of her answer.

‘Simone,’ I murmured now. ‘Is that your real name?’

There was no answer except the wind in the trees.

Everything had become so weird and so different, in the space of an evening. All of a sudden, Bogbean had a possible name, a possible life, family, friends. She was no longer a figment of my imagination.

‘Who are you?’ I murmured. If I half-closed my eyes, I could imagine Bogbean at my side, just beyond my peripheral vision, leaning her bare forearms on the top of the wall. But she said nothing, not even a whisper or a faint shrug. Right now, no one had any answers.

I heard the back door open as someone else came outside, but I didn’t turn around. I shut my eyes and breathed the cool air.

‘Hey,’ Dallin said from behind me. ‘You okay?’

‘Sure. Why not?’ I sighed, then turned to face him. I had a moment of disconnect, because I remembered him as a gangly teenager charging around this garden, leaping the flowerbeds like they were hurdles in his way. Now he looked awkward and out of place in what should’ve been his home. He kept his shoulders hunched, and avoided looking at the twisted trees beyond the back wall of the garden.

‘I’m sorry.’ Dallin lifted his hands in a shrug. ‘I thought you got my email. I didn’t mean to rock up here without warning. I know you don’t like that sort of shit.’

‘I just … I don’t understand why you’re here.’ I gave him a shrug of my own. ‘How did Cora even find you?’

‘We met on the forum. I stumbled onto it a while ago, and, y’know, obviously I was interested, because there was at least one person on there who remembered,’ Dallin flapped a hand at the curraghs, still without looking in that direction, ‘all this. I ended up chatting to some of the folks. That’s how I met Cora.’ He came to stand next to me, turning so he could lean his back against the wall, facing the house. ‘I told her I knew about the curraghs legend first-hand. I mean, obviously, that wasn’t something I should’ve done. There’s a lot of crazy people on forums like that. And when Cora told me her story …’ He put his hands in his pockets. ‘I had to take it with a pinch of salt, you know? I was okay with messaging her and hearing her story, but I was ready to bail if it turned out she was one of the crazies.’

‘What convinced you she wasn’t?’ It hadn’t occurred to me to doubt Cora’s story. But then, I always thought the best of people. Yet another thing that had consistently driven Beth nuts.

‘She understands it’s a longshot,’ Dallin said. ‘She’s not coming here with a burning sense of surety that this time she’ll definitely find Simone. This has been going on for a lot of years. She says she began looking seriously about three years ago, and she’s not let up since.’

Why then? I wondered. What had kickstarted her search after so many years, rather than when she was much younger?

‘What she’s doing here is following one more possible lead,’ Dallin said. ‘She understands, completely understands this might come to nothing. And she’s prepared for that.’

‘So, if I went back in and told Cora I didn’t see anything in the wetlands that day, that I’d made the whole thing up, she’d be okay with it?’

Dallin laughed. He leaned his head back so he could look at the dusky sky. ‘C’mon, Rose-petal. We all know you didn’t make it up. You invented some daft stories in your time, but you didn’t have that morbid sort of imagination.’

It was a backhanded compliment at best. ‘You shouldn’t have brought Cora here,’ I muttered. ‘All you’ve done is give her false hope.’

‘It’s not false hope. There’s a chance she’ll find something.’

‘No, there’s not.’ I turned so I was facing him. ‘Do you know how many times I’ve walked the curraghs? I’ve searched every inch of that place. If there was anything to find, don’t you think I would’ve found it?’

Dallin gave me a lop-sided smile that was so familiar I had to stop myself smiling in return. ‘Not necessarily. I’m not doubting you. I’m just saying there’s an outside chance you’re wrong.’

My expression hardened. ‘If you won’t tell her she’s wasting her time, I will.’

Dallin laughed again and gestured at the house. ‘Go ahead. Let me know if she listens to you, because she sure as hell didn’t listen to me when I told her the exact same thing.’ As I walked away towards the house, he added, ‘I should probably mention, she’s come prepared. Very prepared.’

Chapter 4

Cora’s bag was a green satchel, decorated with applique owls. From inside the satchel, she produced a wodge of folded papers, which she spread out on the table.

‘There aren’t a lot of maps available online, would you believe that?’ Cora said. ‘But I got what I could and I cross-indexed it with a bunch of aerial photos, so I think we’ve got as accurate a picture of the land as we’re going to get.’

Dallin put the kettle back on. It looked like he was starting to feel more at home. I ignored another pang of distress. Everything about this situation was distressing. When was the last time there were this many people in my kitchen? My eyes watered from trying to look at both Dallin and Cora at once.

‘The main paths run through here and here,’ Cora said. She drew a finger along a pale line that meandered from one corner of an A3 photo to the middle. Her nail polish was a delicate pink, chipped at the tips. ‘As I understand it, there are dozens of other paths that lead off from the main trail. Plus unofficial animal tracks and such. Is that right?’

I startled, realising the question was addressed to me. ‘Um. Yes.’

‘And there aren’t any trail maps of the marshlands? Not even unofficial ones that people or tourists maybe use to find their way?’

I dropped my gaze to the photos so I didn’t have to maintain eye contact. ‘No,’ I said. ‘If anyone’s walking around the curraghs, they either know where they’re going, or they stick to the main paths.’

‘Does anyone ever get lost in there?’ Cora seemed to have a direct way of asking questions which, honestly, was preferable to Dallin’s habit of skirting around every issue. She fished a pencil out of her satchel and held it poised over the maps.

‘Depends what you mean by lost.’ I picked up my mug of mint tea, which I’d left sitting on the side. ‘Now and again someone wanders off the trail. Last year a group of ramblers on a wildflower walk got distracted trying to follow a wallaby. It took them an hour to find their way back.’

Cora’s lips twitched in a frown as she glanced at Dallin. ‘So there really are wild wallabies here?’

‘Told you so,’ Dallin said. He stirred a hefty spoonful of demerara sugar into his tea. ‘You owe me a tenner.’

‘Forgive me for not believing such a weirdly specific bit of trivia.’ Cora looked at me again. ‘How big are the marshlands anyway? It doesn’t look like much on the photos.’

‘It’s not, I guess.’ I was trying to figure out whether our house was on the photos. It was difficult to tell from the aerial shots. ‘It’s not the biggest area of forest on the island, not by a very long way. But it’s easy to get lost in there. It’s—’ My throat went dry. How to describe the curraghs to an outsider? Looking at those maps and photos, it was difficult to imagine how anyone, even a child, could lose their way in such a small patch of land.

‘Are you able,’ Cora asked, ‘to narrow it down at all? When you found the body, do you know roughly where you were? Even as little as, “more to the north” or “more to the south”?’

I chewed my lip. ‘Listen, I don’t know what you’re expecting from me. But I was a kid. I don’t even know – I’m not certain what I saw.’ I closed my eyes. For so many years I’d insisted on telling the truth, even when no one believed me. Now, with a person who for some crazy reason did believe me, I couldn’t come up with a convincing lie.

But I had to try. Because, as I knew perfectly well, no hope was better than false hope.

‘Sometimes,’ I said slowly, ‘you have to accept that what you think you saw isn’t necessarily what you did see. Especially when you’re a child. People searched the curraghs. I searched. No one found anything.’ I lifted my chin and shook the stray wisps of hair out of my face. ‘I was mistaken. There’s nothing here for you to find. I’m sorry.’

A few seconds passed in silence. Then Cora said, ‘Thank you.’

‘For what?’

‘For being honest. There’s been a lot of people over the years who’ve been happy to spin me a story, for whatever reason.’ Despite the way she held herself with hunched shoulders and restless fingers, there was steel in Cora’s gaze. ‘Some people will do anything for attention.’

Dallin took a tentative sip of his tea; grimaced. ‘Rosie, you’ve stuck to your story for fifteen solid years,’ he said. ‘This is a fine time to start doubting yourself.’

I glared at him. ‘Please stop calling me Rosie.’

‘Oh, right. You hate that.’ He smirked. ‘I totally forgot.’

Cora studied the maps. ‘Is there anything you can tell us which wasn’t on forum? Any details we might’ve missed?’

I pulled up a chair and sat down, suddenly exhausted. My heart went out to the poor woman. ‘I can’t help you find your sister,’ I repeated. ‘Even if what I saw when I was a kid … even if I wasn’t dreaming or hallucinating or—’ I set my jaw. ‘—or making it up. Even if I really did find a human skeleton that day, there’s very little possibility there’s anything left of it by now. It could’ve sunk into the bog without a trace. The bones could’ve been scattered.’ I watched Cora as I spoke, anxious not to cause more upset than I had to. ‘I’ve spent a lot of time trying to find it again. I never have. Neither has anyone else. There’s every chance there’s nothing out there to find. I can’t lead you to your sister.’

Cora nodded. She took a breath in through her nose and out through her mouth. ‘I know. I understand.’

‘Okay.’ I thought about reaching for her hand, to give it a reassuring squeeze. But I’d never been good at spontaneous human contact. ‘So?’

‘I’m still going to look for her.’ Cora glanced at me. That smile flickered again; somehow soft and steely at the same time. ‘Nothing can stop me.’

In that moment, I completely believed her. ‘I’m sorry I can’t help,’ I said. ‘I just don’t remember. I don’t know if I was near the south end of the curraghs or the north end.’

Cora produced a plastic ruler from her bag and started measuring distances on the photos, comparing them to an Ordnance Survey map. ‘I’ll search every inch of that place if I have to,’ she said. ‘I’m not leaving until I’m certain whether or not my sister was here.’

‘Really?’

Cora pushed her hands across the maps to smooth them flat. ‘I’m going to search this swamp from one end to the other, one square metre at a time, until I’ve covered the whole damn lot. I’ll start along the north edge here, work west to east, east to west, moving south with each sweep.’

I leaned over the maps, letting myself see them properly for the first time. Someone – presumably Cora – had drawn a grid over the top of the maps and the photos. Each small square was numbered. The ones at the very perimeter of the curraghs were shaded pale yellow, as was a section in the north-west corner.

‘We can probably discount those areas,’ Cora said, following my gaze along the yellow squares. ‘You were found coming out of the trees on the eastern side of the road, so you can’t have been in this north-west section, otherwise you would’ve had to cross the road. And, from what you’ve said, it sounds like you weren’t on the edge of the swamp. You would’ve noticed, right, if there were fields instead of trees in front of you?’

I nodded. ‘There were trees all around. When I found the skeleton, I stood up and looked around. Like, I don’t know, like maybe someone was there who could’ve helped.’ That’s what you do when you’re a kid, even if you know for one hundred per cent certain that no one’s there except you. ‘I looked around, and there were trees on all sides. No farmland.’

Cora nodded, pleased. ‘And, how far can you see when you’re in the thick of it? Ten feet, twenty feet? More? Less?’

‘It depends where you are. If there’s lots of undergrowth you might not see more than five or ten feet in front of you. If the trees are thin, you can see quite some distance. Fifty, a hundred feet. It depends.’

Cora nodded again. She leaned over the pictures and started making pencil marks on one of the photos.

I was forced to re-evaluate the woman. I’d jumped to the assumption that she’d come here with nothing more than false hopes and unreal expectations. But it looked like she’d done her homework. She’d researched maps and photos, several of which were new to me, despite my living here for most of my adult life. Cora was as prepared as anyone was likely to get.

Watching her, hunched over the maps, I couldn’t suppress a twinge of excitement. If anyone could do this, it might be her.

I tried to smother my hope. ‘When I found it, there was nothing left but bones,’ I said. ‘It will have broken down a lot more since then. We could walk right over it and see nothing. Plus,’ I sighed, ‘I mean, really I might’ve been mistaken. It could’ve been a sheep skeleton for all I know. Or it could’ve been hundreds of years old, someone who was buried on the land and the grave forgotten about, then the tree roots shoved it to the surface. You have to consider these things.’

‘There were fillings in the back teeth,’ Cora said. ‘That’s what you saw, right?’

I made a face. ‘Oh my God, how much of my life is on that stupid website? Is there anything the whole world doesn’t know? How’d they even get details like that?’ I’d forgotten about the fillings myself until right then.

‘You’re not going to talk anyone out of this search,’ Dallin said. He’d remained standing, leaning against the counter with his arms folded. ‘Believe me, plenty of people have tried. But we’re here, and we’re not leaving until we’ve finished the search. Right, Cora?’

Cora pressed her lips together and nodded. ‘Right.’

The pair of them were staying at the campsite at Ballaugh, a few miles down the road. I came out to the doorstep to say goodnight.

Cora gave me an awkward smile. ‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘For helping us. I know you think you can’t do anything, but thank you for at least hearing me out and not dismissing us straight away.’

‘Don’t worry,’ Dallin said. ‘Rosie’s been called a crackpot for years by folks around here. If anyone’s likely to believe you completely, it’s her.’

Cora winced at his crass words; tried to cover it with another hesitant smile. ‘We’ll let you know how we get on, yeah?’

‘Sure.’ They were going out into the curraghs early the next day, to start the search. She’d hinted I was welcome to join them. ‘Drop round any time you need a cup of tea,’ I said. ‘I’m almost always here.’

‘Certainly will.’ Cora grinned again then got into the driver’s seat of the car.

Again, I couldn’t help but admire her determination. There was a lot to admire about Cora. I almost wished we were meeting under different circumstances.

I hunched my shoulders. I could practically feel the weight of Beth’s gaze pressing down on me from the house. I looked away from Cora quickly.

Dallin remained behind for a moment. He reached to hug me and I instinctively stiffened as he put his arms around my shoulders.

‘It’s good to see you, sis,’ he said.

‘Yeah, well.’ I turned my face away so I was staring over his shoulder at the garden. ‘Have you been to see Mum yet?’

‘Not yet, no.’

Something in his tone made me pull away from him. ‘I usually visit on Sundays, but I could go with you tomorrow if that’s better?’

‘I’ll have a think, sure.’

There it was again, that dismissive tone. ‘Dal, you have told her you’re here, right? She knows you’re back on the island?’

‘I figured it might be a nice surprise.’ Dallin gave a weak, apologetic grin.

I looked away. ‘I don’t know why I expected anything different.’

‘That’s hardly fair.’

‘Don’t tell me what’s fair and what isn’t.’ I kept my voice and my expression neutral so Cora wouldn’t notice anything wrong. ‘You’re quick enough to run and help when a girl you barely know needs it but you wouldn’t come home when your actual family needed you.’

Dallin started to say something else, but I turned away and went back into the house. I closed the door and twisted the key in the lock.

I stayed there in the hallway with my arms wrapped tight around myself, until I heard the noise of the car fade as it turned left at the end of the road. And then, at last, the house was silent again.

If I tried hard enough, I could almost pretend none of the evening had really happened. That no one had invaded my self-contained world and threatened to upend it.

My eyes fell on the Manila envelope on the phone table. Before I could stop myself, I snatched it up. There was no stamp, because it’d been hand-delivered, like all the others. The flap was held closed with a strip of Sellotape.

I opened the envelope and took out the folded papers inside. Even though I’d known exactly what they would be, still my stomach twisted with fresh nausea. My eyes skimmed the printed sheets which, as always, had been highlighted in yellow for my convenience.

Near the bottom, I saw one highlighted word, and it was enough for me to want to fling the sheets away from me.

Death, it said.

***

You never wanted to leave. You just never really wanted to stay.

Things were difficult for us both. Difficult parents, difficult family, difficult life. You were thirteen when you told me you’d realised something important: you didn’t have to stick around to endure the fights and the arguments and the occasional stinging slap from our ma. All the negative stuff that would echo through the house and leave us with ringing ears and red marks on our legs. You could walk out at any time.

‘The world is waiting for us,’ you used to tell me.

But I was never scared you genuinely would abandon me.

Not until you met him.

Chapter 5

The next morning I wanted nothing more than to stay in bed. I could’ve kept the curtains closed, the door locked, the lights off. I wanted to stay like that until the sour feeling in my stomach went away. Until I felt strong enough to restart my everyday routine.

But maybe the shadow of Beth was still at my side, because something made me wake before dawn and get out of bed. I made tea and toast without observing my usual ritual of watching the sun rise over the curraghs. Today I hurried around the house to open the curtains even before I’d finished my tea.

I had somewhere I wanted to be. It was something that hadn’t happened for over a year.

You can help them, Beth would’ve said. Yes, that was definitely it. Beth would’ve laughed and made a game of it. Chased me out of bed. Held the door and told me off for dawdling. Smiled like she always had, from the day I’d got lost in the wetlands right up until the day she died. She’d always smiled like we were both still children. Still capable of taking on anything the world could throw at us.

You can help them.

Wrapped up in my warm coat and bobble hat, I paused on the front doorstep to breathe the chill morning air. It wasn’t just Beth who was urging me on. There was a second shadow on my other side, just outside my field of vision. Bogbean.

For them, I could do this.

Besides, I wanted to not think about the letter that’d arrived yesterday. I didn’t want to be tempted to take it out from inside the photo album where I’d hidden it the night before.

I got into my car and started the engine. It always hated to start, especially on cold mornings. The problem was I never drove enough to keep the engine in good condition. I usually only took it out once a week, on Sundays, to visit Mum. The rest of the time it just sat there. Several times over the winter months I’d tried the ignition only to find the battery had gone dead. If it hadn’t been for Mum, I probably wouldn’t have bothered to call out the garage to get it fixed.

Today the car started after two attempts, which was fairly good, on average. I drove out to the main road and around to the car park in the curraghs without seeing another car on the road. The drive took almost ten minutes, even though the car park wasn’t geographically that far away from our house, because the road curved half a mile out of the way then back again. Plus the road was shockingly bad. I stayed in first gear most of the way, slowing to a crawl over a few particularly bad potholes. I hoped Dallin had thought to warn Cora.

When I reached the curraghs, I found Cora and Dallin already there. Cora was sheltering under the open boot of the car as she packed a backpack. Dallin was standing a short distance away, smoking a cigarette. It must’ve been a recently acquired habit. He’d never used to smoke.

You haven’t seen him in years, I reminded myself. He could be a completely different person by now, with a hundred bad habits you don’t know about.

As I pulled up behind Cora’s car, Cora looked up in surprise. Her face was tight with concern. But a smile lit her face as she recognised me.

I got out of the car and pulled my jacket a little tighter against the chill. Dallin nodded to me but stayed distant while he finished his cigarette.

‘Morning,’ I said.

‘This is a lovely surprise,’ Cora said. ‘Everything okay?’

Now I was closer, I could see the gauntness of her face. She looked like she hadn’t slept. I drew a breath then asked, ‘I wondered if you could use an extra set of eyes today?’

‘Oh, wow, yes, definitely. Are you sure? I don’t think the weather’s going to get much better than it is right now.’

‘I’d like to help.’ It was the truth. I’d sat up for half the night thinking about her story. I still didn’t think we’d find anything, but I wanted to help her look.

‘That’s really kind. Thank you.’

Her smile made warmth rise to my face. I made a pretence of looking at the road we’d come in on. ‘Did you get here okay?’ I asked. ‘I forgot to warn you about the road.’

‘Yeah, that was a bit of an adventure. It was like Wages of Fear finding this place.’ She adjusted her bobble hat, tucking loose strands of blonde hair out of the way. ‘I thought this was a fairly popular spot. For walkers and stuff? Why don’t they maintain the road?’

Dallin laughed. ‘This is completely average for the roads over here. I’ve seen potholes you could lose a Smart car in. Are we ready?’

In all honesty, I wasn’t sure if I was ready. The morning had a weird sense of unreality hanging over it. I tried not to think too hard about what we were doing here or what we hoped to find. If I avoided that, I could pretend this was a normal outing. No big deal.

Except that’s a lie too. When was the last time you went on an outing with anyone?

‘I’ve got the maps here,’ Cora said. She’d spread them out in the boot. ‘We’re going to try to cover sections A12 through A27, then back along B28 through B11 this morning. Once we get back to the road—’

‘What’s that in English?’ Dallin asked.

‘We’re going to start at the top of the map, roughly in the middle where the road cuts through and work our way across, left to right, then back again. English enough for you?’

Cora held out one of the maps so I could see. The hand-drawn squares were marked with letters and numbers. A1 was in the top left; Q39 at the bottom right. I saw at once the route she’d described, running from the road eastward through the curraghs until it came almost to the field boundary, then doubling back on itself.

‘Once we get back to the road,’ Cora said, ‘we’ll assess how much we’ve done and figure out whether we have to pick up the pace or not.’ She looped a dark green scarf around her neck and tucked the ends down the front of her waterproof jacket. ‘Weather forecast is changeable, but we hopefully won’t get rained on until later this afternoon. Be aware it might get warmer. Hope everyone wore layers.’

Dallin rolled his eyes. ‘She wouldn’t let me out of the tent this morning until I proved I was wearing at least three layers,’ he said. ‘She’s like a mother-hen.’

‘I’m sure your mother would kick me in the shins if she thought I was letting you catch a cold out here,’ Cora replied. I saw Dallin wince.

I picked up my own backpack from my car. I’d been worried the others wouldn’t think to bring snacks and water, but now I saw I’d been concerned for nothing. Cora was better prepared than I was. As well as the maps, she had two bottles of water, a large bar of chocolate, a small first aid kid, and a torch shoved into her bag. She adjusted the water bottles so they wouldn’t dig into her back, then swung the bag onto her shoulder.

‘Which way first?’ I asked.

The car park was little more than a slightly wider bend in the road. If more than a few cars arrived at the same time, the road could get completely blocked. On all sides the trees hemmed us in. Off to the left, a faded noticeboard showed a map of the main route through the curraghs, as well as a few diagrams of the local wildlife. Beyond it, the path cut through the trees towards a five-bar gate, which led to the main track.

I’d assumed we would be starting from the main track, but Cora paced off up the road in the direction we’d come.

‘Are you really planning to go cross-country right from the off?’ I asked. I snuck another look at the map before Cora tucked it into a pocket of her backpack. ‘I don’t know if there are any real paths at that end of the curraghs. At least, not any that’ll go right the way through and back again.’

‘We’ll have to go cross-country at some point,’ Cora said. ‘Might as well get used to it.’

I fell into step beside her. I wasn’t sure it was such a great idea to stray off the main trails on the first day. The going would be tough, if not impossible in places. It might be enough to discourage Cora from her search before it’d even begun.

I glanced down. Cora wore decent wellies, with waterproof trousers tucked into them. None of her gear looked new. Either she did a lot of hiking, or she’d borrowed good clothes from someone who knew what they were doing. Either way it was reassuring. She’d done her homework and she’d come prepared.

Out of interest, I glanced back at Dallin. He wore a bright blue waterproof jacket that still had the sheen of newness, but also jeans and scuffed trainers. He’d have to take care where he trod, or he would spend the day with wet feet. I wondered if no one had bothered to tell him to dress appropriately … or if he’d deliberately not listened.

I shrugged off the question. Dallin had grown up playing in the wetlands. If he didn’t know to wear wellies, it wasn’t any of my business.

At least he’s wearing layers. I started to smile, then stopped as I remembered his offhand comment. Dallin had made it sound like him and Cora were sharing a tent. Was that true? I watched them both as we walked, looking for clues as to whether they were something more than friends. I told myself I was just curious.

No one spoke as we marched off towards our starting point. It occurred to me Cora hadn’t asked if I had anything else to do that day – like going to work or seeing friends. Maybe Dallin had already briefed her on my situation.

I glanced again at Dallin. It stung a little, to think of him talking to people about me, telling them my private life. How much had he said? Did Cora know about my mum and dad? Did she know about Beth?

And then I wondered who else he’d spoken to. Perhaps everyone in his life knew about his sister who lived, broken and alone, in her house in the curraghs.

I shoved my hands into my pockets. For the last year, I’d felt safe and forgotten. No one came to visit anymore. The few friends I’d had – Beth’s friends – had phoned and texted and emailed, with less and less frequency as time went on, until at last, no one checked in with me anymore. I’d ignored my social media accounts for so long they’d probably been deactivated.

I still received those letters, of course, in their plain handwritten envelopes. Nothing could stop them arriving.

Possibly it was being out here in the curraghs which had so quickly soured my mood. Me and Beth had walked those pathways so often. It felt weird being there without her. I hadn’t properly taken that into consideration before leaving my house that morning.

Cora was consulting her smartwatch. She slowed, stopped, took two more paces then a shuffling half-step. ‘That’s us,’ she said. ‘Right here.’

We’d all but reached the edge of the curraghs. From here, along the rest of the length of the road, there were only sparser trees and hedges. Cora double-checked her watch, which showed a bare-bones map and GPS coordinates, then turned to look at the trees at the side of the road. They appeared no different to any other section of the curraghs. The most obvious difference was there was no path of any sort leading into the wetlands. There was also a ditch separating the road from the trees.

‘So, how’re we finding our way, exactly?’ Dallin asked.

‘We’re trailblazing.’ Cora half-smiled at him. ‘Shall I lead the way, or do you want to?’

Dallin muttered something under his breath. There were shadows under his eyes, like maybe he’d been drinking the night before. Not that I blamed him. In a way I was almost jealous. It’d been a long time since I’d last had alcohol.

How sad do you have be, to be jealous of someone with a hangover? This thought, at last, did bring a smile to my face.

Cora jumped over the ditch and pushed aside a couple of branches. The twisted, shallow-rooted trees that grew in the curraghs were springy and resistant, and didn’t much like being shoved out of the way. Cora stepped through them with difficulty.

I looked at Dallin, but he seemed happy to bring up the rear.

I took a short run-up and leapt across the ditch, but lost my balance on the other bank. I would’ve fallen backwards into the brackish water if Cora hadn’t shot out a hand to grab me.

‘Thanks,’ I said, a little breathless, as I regained my footing. ‘It’s been a while since I did anything strenuous.’

In fact, just that small bit of exercise made me realise how out of shape I’d become. I knew I’d put on weight over the eighteen months, due in part to my medication, but it hadn’t really affected me. Staying indoors so much, I wasn’t bothered when my lightweight summer clothes no longer fit. Loose fitting T-shirts and jogging pants had always been my preferred outfits anyway. Without Beth to encourage me to cook meals from scratch, I’d fallen into the bad habit of easily prepared processed food and ready meals; without Beth to drag me out for long walks in the countryside, I’d lost the inclination to go outside.

Now, all of a sudden, I felt self-conscious as I followed Cora through the half-gap in the trees.

There was no path, not even an ill-defined trail left by animals. We were immediately stepping over mud pockets and sunken tree roots. At least the trees were less tightly clumped together here. Weak morning sunlight slanted in through the thin leaves. A few metres to our right, a barbed wire fence marked the edge of someone’s field. Beyond it, tall grass swayed in the soft breeze.

‘We’re too near the edge of the curraghs,’ Dallin said. He’d hopped over the ditch without any issues. ‘We need to search further into the middle.’

‘We need to search all of it,’ Cora said. ‘If we start in the middle we might miss out whole sections by accident.’ She kept one eye on her GPS as she walked. In her other hand she also carried her compass. ‘Has this area changed much in fifteen years?’ she asked me. ‘I mean in terms of size. Has it spread out, or have people built in on the edges, anything like that?’

‘I don’t think so,’ I said. ‘The only building that might’ve expanded into it would be the Wildlife Park.’ I pointed south, in the vague direction of the park. ‘But I’m not sure if anyone would be allowed to expand outwards into the curraghs. This is all protected land.’

‘Protected by who?’ Cora asked. ‘We’re not going to get arrested for going off-piste like this, are we?’

Dallin laughed. ‘National Heritage have got better things to do than prosecute ramblers. If anyone complains, we’ll say we got lost. Happens all the time, apparently.’

Cora set the pace, moving steadily between the trees, keeping to the scant dry patches of land, but never letting herself get drawn off the arrow-straight path she’d mapped. We followed her. I fell into a rhythm, glad we weren’t walking too fast. I worried now about exhausting myself before the day was half done. How had I not noticed my stamina was so low?

But, even with my internal concerns, it felt good to be out of the house. The curraghs were peaceful that morning. The early birds had flitted off to find breakfast, and the only noise came from the trees quietly whispering as they brushed together.

It was so peaceful in fact that I completely forgot I was supposed to be checking the ground for signs of the missing skeleton. It was Cora who reminded me. She cast her gaze back and forth with each step, searching the mud on either side, delaying each step forward until she was totally sure there was nothing there to find. I felt a pang of guilt. Neither me nor Dallin were paying as much attention as her. Perhaps subconsciously I agreed with Dallin – we were too close to the edge of the curraghs, and therefore there was no real point in looking out for anything.

After fifteen or twenty minutes, the trees thinned out further and the ground became a lot boggier. I spotted where a drainage ditch at the side of the field had burst into the curraghs. The water had an oily, polluted sheen to it.

‘I knew things were going too smoothly,’ Cora said. She stepped gingerly onto a tussock of grass, testing to make sure it wouldn’t spill her into the bog. ‘I think we can get across like this.’

‘I thought you’d figured it all out from your maps,’ Dallin said. ‘How come a patch of bog can sneak up on you?’

‘Maps and photos are all well and good,’ Cora said, ‘but no plan survives boots on the ground.’ She hopped to the next tussock. The movement sent ripples through the muddy water. ‘There’ll always be surprises. Not that I’m happy about it, of course. I don’t like guesswork. Don’t like not being sure. In an ideal world, a superior plan will always beat any surprise the world might throw at you. But, what can you do? I don’t—’

The next clump of grass was too small to bear her weight, and tipped her off balance. Cora made an ungainly leap for the safety of solid ground. She fell only a little short. One foot went down into the mud, almost to the top of her welly, but she was able to grab a branch and haul herself free. Her booted foot plopped free with a sucking noise and a belch of bad air. Still hanging onto the tree, Cora kicked some of the mud off her boots, flapping her free hand in a vain attempt to disperse the silage smell. She glanced at her GPS.

‘It’s okay,’ she said. ‘We’re still on track.’

‘Balls to this,’ Dallin said. ‘I’m going around.’

‘Quitter.’ Cora grinned.

It took me considerably longer to get across, but with Cora calling encouragement, I made it, via a more circuitous route. I got a high-five and a smile from Cora, which made the whole endeavour worthwhile.

‘Great. We’re still on course,’ Cora said. ‘Well, two thirds of us are, anyway.’ She tilted her head. Some distance away, Dallin was trying with little success to find a dry path. It was possible to track his progress by the steady stream of swearing coming from amongst the trees.

‘I’m glad we’re not relying on him for directions,’ Cora said. ‘He’s more … out of his element than I expected.’

‘It’s a long time since he’s been home,’ I said, then corrected myself. ‘Since he’s been here. And, I know he lived with all this on his doorstep, but he never … he never felt comfortable out here, in the curraghs. He stuck to the main paths. Never went off exploring like this.’

‘He’s missing out.’ Cora consulted her GPS, and pulled her hat down more securely over her ears. ‘This place is something else. What about you?’

‘Oh. I lived with our dad. When our parents split up.’ I shrugged. ‘Well, you know what it’s like, when things go bad between people. Me and Dallin were caught in the middle. He ended up living with Mum; I lived with Dad.’

‘That must’ve been difficult.’

‘You get used to things.’ It hadn’t seemed too strange at the time. Lots of kids at school had unconventional home-lives. ‘But it meant me and Dallin were never really close. We went to different schools, had different friends, only saw each other at weekends and holidays. What about you?’ I asked then. ‘Were you and Simone close?’

‘No.’ Cora laughed at my obvious surprise. ‘Not all the time. We could fight like two cats in a bin liner when the mood took us.’

‘So why—?’ I bit my tongue.

Cora smiled sadly, like this wasn’t the first time the question had come up. ‘A lot of the time, I wasn’t as good a sister as I could’ve been,’ she said. ‘It took me a while to realise that. And longer before I knew I had to make up for it. Searching for Simone now is pretty much the only thing I can do for her.’

I peered through the trees. We could still hear Dallin but couldn’t see him. ‘Should we wait for Dallin?’ I asked.

‘He’ll catch up,’ Cora said. ‘C’mon. We don’t want to lose time.’

Chapter 6

Dallin did indeed catch up. But he remained sullen and uncommunicative. I couldn’t help notice his trainers and the cuffs of his jeans were covered with mud.

There was an odd mood to the search party as the morning wore on. We couldn’t forget why we were there. But the very fact gave us a purpose.

‘It’s weird,’ Cora admitted. ‘I’ve been planning this for so long. We’ve been planning this.’ She glanced back at Dallin, who was still bringing up the rear. There was a look on her face that I hoped I’d misinterpreted. ‘It’s hard to believe we’re finally here. This feels like … I don’t want to jinx it. But you feel it, right? This feels like something. Like this could be the real thing.’

I didn’t know what to tell her. ‘You’ve been searching for about three years, right?’

‘I ought to say I’ve been looking since Simone disappeared, but that’s not really true. I’ve always been asking questions. Three years ago I started properly searching.’

‘Why then?’

‘My mother got ill. Pneumonia. For a while we thought – we thought we were going to lose her.’ Cora brushed her fingers against a tree as she passed, letting her touch rest a moment on the bark. ‘She was delirious for a bit, in hospital. She kept thinking I was Simone. It made me realise … none of us ever got closure. When Simone vanished, she ripped a big hole in our family. I hadn’t properly understood what it’d done to us. So that’s why I started looking.’

I raised my eyes briefly to the tangled tree branches above us. ‘And it led you here.’

‘Eventually. There’s been a hell of a lot of false starts.’ Cora pushed aside a springy branch that attempted to bop her face. ‘There were a few times when it felt like we were getting close. Last year I was convinced I’d traced her to a remote part of Scotland. I trekked all the way up there and spent a very long weekend in the weirdest bed and breakfast ever. Ask me about it after a couple of drinks sometime.’

‘How do you find those leads?’

‘Oh, y’know. Everywhere. Newspapers, websites, gossip, urban legends. I know where to look, and I’ve got friends online who’ll notify me if something new pops up. Like they did with your story about the curraghs.’ She favoured me with a smile. ‘It appeared on the forum about six months ago. I’m a regular on that board so I noticed it pretty quickly. As soon as I did, I thought, this could be it.’

I paused to catch my breath. The steady pace helped me avoid getting winded. Even so, my calf muscles ached from the unaccustomed exercise. Cora kept walking.

‘So, did you have to get time off work to come here?’ I asked as I started moving again.

‘Sort of,’ Cora said. She’d unfolded the map from her pocket and held it flat in front of her with the compass laid on top as she walked. ‘I work for a charity. They know my situation and they give me a lot of leeway.’

‘That’s good of them.’ I wondered whether she looked forward to a time when she could return to work without this search weighing on her mind. I thought about my own job.

‘They employ a lot of people who – who’re like me,’ Cora said. ‘Not my exact circumstances, obviously, but similar difficulties. Believe me, a lot of them are far higher maintenance than I am.’

‘What about Dallin?’ He was far enough behind me that I didn’t think he’d overhear. ‘Did he have trouble getting time off from work?’

‘Not as far as I know. He hasn’t mentioned anything.’

‘You guys must be good friends. Not everyone would drop everything to help a person out. Especially if it involved travelling across the country and wading around a marsh.’ I was fishing for information. I couldn’t help it.

Cora smiled. ‘We only met for the first time a few weeks ago. There was no way I would’ve asked him to do this. I was already booked on the ferry and ready to go. Then he announced he was coming with me. He said I could use his help when we got here, to find my way around and know who to talk to, stuff like that. Plus I think he wanted to see you.’

I stopped myself from making a nasty comment. There’d been more than enough opportunities for Dallin to come home. ‘What about your family?’ I asked instead. ‘Didn’t any of them want to come with you?’

‘I haven’t told them I’m here.’

‘You haven’t?’

Cora kept walking. It was difficult to be sure what she was thinking, since her eyes were alternating between watching the ground and checking her map and compass. ‘Simone kinda broke our family when she left,’ she said. ‘There were a whole bunch of arguments and fallings out, and half of us still aren’t talking to the other half.’ She brushed another tree trunk with her fingertips. ‘You know what families are like. Anyway, the upshot is, I don’t have a lot of people I can fall back on in times of need. The last time I told my parents I was going on one of these expeditions, it caused a huge argument. Mum thinks I’m wasting my time. Dad thinks I’m deliberately dredging up the past to cause fights. So, I’ve stopped telling them where I’m going.’

‘I would’ve thought they’d be keen to find out what happened to Simone.’

Another faint smile. ‘I would’ve thought so too.’

I wondered about Dallin. Possibly he was here because he’d genuinely wanted to help Cora. Helping out a friend, I could understand that. Helping a friend he’d only met a short while ago, on what was probably a wild goose chase that would take him away from home for a whole week? That didn’t sound like something Dallin would do on a whim.

They’re definitely more than just friends, I thought.

‘What about you?’ Cora asked, changing the subject. ‘What’re your family like?’

‘I don’t have very many people. My dad died when I was twenty.’ I skipped over what exactly had happened to him. I also skipped over Beth. I couldn’t face raising either subject right then. ‘So it’s just my dear brother Dallin, and our mum.’

Cora looked surprised. ‘His mum lives over here?’

‘In Ramsey. She’s got one of those new-build flats. It’s quite nice, but I know she misses her garden. She used to own the farmhouse where I live. Still does, technically.’

Cora’s brows knitted together. ‘Dallin didn’t say anything about her. He made it sound like you were the only family he’s got.’

I glanced over my shoulder, to where Dallin was plodding along some distance behind us, with his sullen gaze firmly on the ground. ‘Why would he say that?’ I wondered aloud.

‘We’ve only known each other a short while,’ Cora suggested. ‘He’s under no obligation to overshare with me.’

‘Hmm.’ I didn’t particularly want to speculate. It upset me that Dallin hadn’t mentioned Mum. Had they fallen out? On the rare occasions when Dallin’s name came up, Mum always sounded wistful, as she said how she wished he would get in contact more often.

I recalled my conversation with Dallin on the doorstep last night. It’d sounded like he didn’t intend to tell our mother he was on the island at all. The callous nature of that made something hot bubble inside my chest.

When was the last time you felt angry about anything? The thought surprised me. But it was true. There’d been plenty of anger – impotent, directionless, hopeless anger – throughout Beth’s illness, but in recent months a kind of dull funk had settled over my life. I didn’t feel angry or inconsolable anymore. In fact, I pretty much felt nothing. The tablets my doctor had prescribed probably contributed, smoothing out my emotions so I no longer had to deal with the horrific lows and occasional, sickening highs that’d plagued my life after Beth died.

So, I could look at this sudden bubble of anger towards Dallin with a strangely clinical detachment. The anger was brief and unformed and not even particularly strong – it faded almost as soon as it appeared. But it was something I hadn’t felt for a long time, and that was interesting.

A little further on, we reached the east edge of the curraghs. Cora made us walk ten paces south, then turn west to walk back to the road.

‘We just walked this section,’ Dallin complained. ‘There’s nothing here but mud.’

‘That’s how the plan goes,’ Cora said. ‘We cover each square metre. So far we’ve done this bit.’ She showed him on the map. ‘Now we’re doing this bit. If you want to make things smoother, walk next to one of us, not right at the back. That way we’ll cut down on the chances of missing something. Or, even better, go back in time three weeks to when we were discussing this exact point and put forward your arguments then.’

Dallin shifted the straps of his backpack. ‘Seems like we’re wasting a lot of time going over the same ground, that’s all.’

‘If it bothers you that much, I will happily put the maps into your hands.’ Cora presented the map to Dallin with a flourish, then hastily snatched it back. ‘Actually, no, that’s a lie, these are my maps and I love them. If it bothers you that much, you can go buy your own map and plot your own course.’

I looked out over the fields. There were clumps of bog myrtle growing here, and the air was perfumed with its distinctive smell. It made me think of Beth, who’d often brought home sprigs of the pungent leaves, insisting it would keep midges away in the evenings when she sat out in the garden.

Usually, I would’ve avoided dwelling on the memory. There were so many things that reminded me of Beth. Everything I did or said would contain some echo of another time. I’d learned not to focus too long on each memory as it surfaced, because they all had sharp edges, even the happy ones. Especially the happy ones.

But now, for a moment, I breathed deeply and remembered the times Beth had come home with pockets full of wild mushrooms or foraged leaves or pignuts, those knobbly ground-nuts which she would leave scattered on the draining board, still half-coated in mud.

Beth had loved the curraghs, and they’d been good to her in return. Now, she was gone, but the land remained the same. This bog had been here long before me and Beth ever ventured into it, hand in hand, and it would be here long after all trace of us vanished from the earth. It was a permanent yet ever-changing place.

Behind me, Cora and Dallin had come to some kind of peace. We set off walking back towards the road.

I found myself at the back with Dallin. He was still in a huff, his hands shoved deep into the pockets of his jacket.

‘You agree with me, right?’ he said to me.

‘About what?’

‘We’re wasting time searching up here.’ Dallin gave a curt nod towards the fields which were visible through the thin trees to our right. ‘You weren’t anywhere near here when you found the body. Otherwise you would’ve said you could see the fields. So why’re we wasting our time?’

I thought about it before I answered. ‘I said I couldn’t remember seeing the fields,’ I admitted. ‘But I also said I’d been everywhere in the curraghs since that day. And I can honestly say I’ve never been here, in this exact spot. It never occurred to me to search at the edges. So maybe Cora’s right – maybe she has to search everywhere, including the places that don’t seem likely. If she skips bits, she’ll always wonder if Simone’s remains were lying in one of these out-of-the-way spots where she didn’t think to look.’ I shrugged. ‘She needs to be sure. That involves checking everywhere.’

Dallin grunted. ‘Still seems daft to me.’

‘You know what seems daft? The fact you’re here at all. It would’ve been much easier for you to just point Cora in the general direction of the Island and leave her to it. But you came all the way out here, in person. Why?’

‘I wanted to help.’ He tried and failed to sound sincere. ‘She’s a vulnerable person. I wanted to give her all the help I could. And I didn’t know if you would talk to her if I wasn’t there to smooth things over. If she’d turned up on your doorstep out of the blue, you might’ve turned her away.’

‘So why not call and explain the situation to me?’

‘I emailed.’

‘No, you didn’t. Last night I checked my emails from the last two months, plus the junk folder. You didn’t email me. And anyway, how much effort would it take for you to pick up the phone? It’s not like you don’t know the number; it’s the same as when you lived at home.’

Dallin pushed a hand through his hair. ‘You’re mad at me.’

‘Yes.’ It was easy to admit. ‘I’ve every reason to be mad.’

‘Listen, if I’d known it was such a big deal for you to get prior warning I was coming here, then—’

‘That’s not why, and you know it.’ I slowed my pace. I didn’t want Cora to overhear this argument. ‘I can’t believe how much of a hypocrite you are. Talking about how Cora needs you and you can’t possibly let her down. What about me? What about Beth?’

As I spoke, I realised this was the first time I’d said Beth’s name aloud in months. It rang in my ears. I wanted to snatch it back, like it was something private, not to be shared.

Dallin kept walking. He kept his eyes fixed on the ground. ‘I’m sorry about what happened to Beth,’ he muttered.

‘So am I.’ A bubble of hurt expanded in my chest. For a moment I was filled by it, unable to breathe. Gradually it subsided. But that moment reminded me of all the moments before it, when the slightest word could trigger something. The hurt was always there. I’d come to understand it would never fully go away.

‘I’m sorry I lost contact with you,’ Dallin said. ‘With both of you. I thought—’ The words seemed to tangle in this throat. ‘I thought you were fine, y’know? You were living your lives and I didn’t want to intrude.’

‘She was really upset you wouldn’t come to the wedding,’ I said. Each word felt like broken glass. I spoke carefully so I wouldn’t cut myself.

‘I was out of the country. I wanted to come, believe me.’

I didn’t believe him. ‘You didn’t even reply to the invitation.’

‘I was travelling. By the time I got her email, it was too late. I’m sorry.’

‘What about the other messages? She tried to contact you after that, a bunch of times, after she got sick. Why the hell didn’t you reply?’

Dallin let out a long breath. ‘Honestly? I didn’t realise how ill she was. If she’d come right out and told me, of course I would’ve come home.’

‘She didn’t want to spell it out in an email. You should’ve known that.’

‘Listen, in hindsight, you are completely right. I should’ve come home. But at the time? I thought – I don’t know. The way she danced around the issue. All those half-hints. I thought it was one of her games.’

I almost choked in disbelief. ‘A game?’

‘I know how terrible that sounds. But that’s what she was like as a kid. She would say something crazy and see which friends would come running. That’s all I thought it was.’

‘How could you think that? Why would she lie about something so awful?’

‘I have no idea why she would do anything. Let’s be honest, I barely even knew her by then.’ Dallin kicked a tree stump in annoyance. ‘I didn’t know either of you, apparently.’

I stopped walking and faced him directly. ‘Is that why you acted like a spoiled baby? Because you had a stupid childhood crush on your best friend and it turned out she wanted to be with me instead?’

Dallin met my gaze briefly. ‘You never loved her like I did.’

The anger that’d been absent from my life for so long rose up in me. I swung my arm and punched him in the jaw. It happened so fast I couldn’t believe I’d done it. One second I was standing there, the next, Dallin was reeling backwards. He put his foot down in a marshy puddle and almost overbalanced. If he hadn’t caught hold of a tree branch for support he would’ve fallen.

‘She was my wife,’ I said. My voice rose along with my anger. ‘Don’t you dare talk about her that way.’

I shoved past him.

Cora was staring at me with shock on her face. I walked straight past her too.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I can’t do this.’

It wasn’t possible to run in the thick bogland, but I hurried as fast as I could in the direction of the road.

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