0007464355 (16 page)

‘Oh,’ she said, following his gaze. ‘I don’t really look at the Internet unless I can’t avoid it. I was just downloading something.’

‘Not even for news?’

Helen smiled grimly. ‘Especially not for news.’

Gil shrugged. He didn’t get it. Why would you have two papers in the house and a USB dongle knocking around if you weren’t interested in news?

‘How long are you planning on staying?’ Gil ventured. He had a feeling he was on borrowed time. Better to ask her now. If she threw him out, he might not get another chance. ‘Reports differ.’

Her mouth quirked. ‘Not sure,’ she said eventually. ‘A few months maybe. I’d hoped for longer, but to be honest, I’m not sure I fancy being here in January and February.’

‘Can I ask what you’re doing?’ he didn’t expect her to answer, but in for a penny.

‘Here? I’m working on something. A project …’

‘A book?’

She bit at an already sore hangnail. ‘Possibly. I haven’t decided what form it should take yet.’

‘You’re a writer then?’

Helen shook her head. Laughed. ‘Can’t write to save my life.’ Squeaking her chair back, she pushed herself to her feet, picked up her mug and reached for his. As she did, her sleeve brushed the trackpad and her Mac lurched into life. Its screen saver flashed up with a password box obscuring the middle. A picture of a ragged boy, maybe five or six, sitting on a filthy doorstep, surrounded with rubble. Bare legs skinny and bruised, ending in lace-less plimsolls. He was playing with a plastic figure.

Slamming the lid with something just short of force, Helen smiled a quick tight smile and turned to the sink. Gil’s audience was over. But there was something about that picture, something haunting. It wasn’t the poverty that made Gil’s guts churn. It was the certainty he’d seen the boy before.

‘That picture …?’

Helen Graham stared at him, eyes unreadable.

‘The boy? Is he someone you know?’

She didn’t answer, just turned and walked out of the kitchen and through the hall to the front door in silence, leaving Gil no option but to follow. She held the door so Gil could pass through it.

‘Was he?’ he repeated, feeling the door start to close on him before he was entirely clear.

He didn’t expect her to answer. Then, just as the door was about to close, she stopped. ‘Knew,’ she said, when Gil looked back in surprise. ‘He died.’

16

She locked the door behind him, more from instinct than because she expected him to return, then leaned against it and closed her eyes, taking comfort from the solid wood against her back, the sound of gravel crunching beneath his brogues. As his footsteps faded, her breathing slowed. It took an age for the sound to vanish altogether. His pace was heavy, solemn, and Helen was surprised to feel a pang of regret through the panic that had surged when he’d homed in on the boy. She was starting to like him. He reminded her of an old boss, one she’d had a lot of time for, and, though she’d never have admitted it, she’d been glad of the company. Until he’d started to pry.

What was it with this village?

Perhaps Gil was right. Perhaps it wasn’t this village, perhaps it was all villages.

Not for the first time, Helen wondered if she should have stayed in the city.

A draught lifted the hairs on the back of her neck, and she shivered. Glanced around but she couldn’t see the source. It was chill out here in the entrance hall, all rattling windows and gaping floorboards. Chill everywhere in this damn house. Dark, too, despite the fact it was gone noon and outside, behind the ever-present clouds hanging low over the Dales, the sun was high in the sky. Wildfell seemed impervious to weather. Like a black hole, it sucked in the light; a permanent February. Helen shuddered and wrapped the stolen robe more tightly around her.

Ever since she’d got back from London, the house had seemed darker, more forbidding. Not the comfortable sanctuary she’d conjured in her mind by the time she’d checked out of the Premier Inn, contraband robe complete with coffee stain in her rucksack. Unused rooms and corridors had grown shadowy. The mansion’s quirks and quinks, always there, had grown noisier, more vocal, as if they’d regained their voice during her absence. There was no reason they should be silenced. It wasn’t as if they expected her to stay. It wasn’t as if she expected to. But still she couldn’t shake the sense that when she entered a room, someone else left.

Well, she told herself,
someone
else probably did.

While she was away, the cat appeared to have moved in. He didn’t think she’d noticed, but she had. A flicker at the corner of her eye, a tail vanishing round a door, a smudge of black on a window ledge, the occasional carefully positioned mouse corpse.

If that was what passed for company here, it would have to do.

Driven back into the kitchen by the cold, Helen moved instinctively towards the kettle, then caught herself. If she had to drink one more bloody cup of tea she’d scream. Instead, she lapped the room, checking the pantry and the doors to the outhouse, opening cupboard doors and closing them again. Outside, the trees were beginning to shed their leaves. In a few weeks, the copse that protected Wildfell from the Dales would be bare, leaving the unkempt grounds looking even more deserted. On the other side of the window, a crow squawked. Helen jumped in surprise, banging her hip on the corner of the table as the bird took flight less than a foot from her face.

This was ridiculous. She had to get a grip.

Company.
Helen Lawrence looking for company? That was a laugh. The fact she didn’t need it, scorned it, even, was part of her psychological scaffolding. Something she knew about herself. She was good at being alone. Wasn’t that what Fran had said?

Art, on the other hand, could do company. He was good in company. He could put company on and take it off like a mask. War reporters … Even former war reporters are not naturally gregarious. A tight group of comrades whose ability to fake it in larger groups got them through what they need to get through. As for her … she liked people, most people. But send her to a desert island for a week and she’d have said, fine, no problem. What she’d failed to notice before this, though, was that no matter how many out-of-the-way places she’d been, she’d always been surrounded by people: journalists, locals, villagers, officials, police, translators, soldiers …

Self-sufficient, maybe. A loner, no. Show her a strange city where she didn’t speak the language, couldn’t even read the alphabet, and she’d find her way across it. But there was a skill to being entirely alone. She was discovering now that she didn’t have it.

The journey back to Wildfell had been uneventful, but she hadn’t been able to shake the sense that she was being watched. At the station, on the train, on the bus to the airport. At the airport, though, the feeling had shifted a little and she’d put it down to paranoia. Even so, she’d taken a circuitous route from the bus stop to the long-stay car park just in case and kept her eye on the rear-view mirror on the long drive home over the moors.

Relenting, Helen made another cup of tea and then perched in front of the laptop, exactly where she’d been sitting when Gil arrived. Photographs flickered across the screen. Faces blurring until she stopped, attention caught by a colour, a pose, a moment in time that triggered a recollection. Some of the pictures had been filed geographically or chronologically, the rest she’d bundled on to the cloud in random folders before she left for her last assignment. The mess wasn’t a problem, she could find her way around it. Better messy than destroyed. She’d come close to discovering that the hard way.

This morning, she’d been toying with a different sort of narrative. A way of putting them together that would tell a story that was theirs, not hers. Every so often an image caught her eye and she stopped, appraised it and added it to a collection. It was only when she’d built the first catalogue that she noticed it. So many children. When had she started focusing on children? It was the children standing in the ruins that made her fingers freeze. And women. Lots and lots of women. Some faces blank and hopeless, their homes destroyed, husbands dead. If the women were lucky, children clustered round their legs, hiding from the foreigner with the camera.

If they weren’t …

Helen shuddered, tried to concentrate on her fingers skimming the trackpad, creating new folders and dragging pictures into them until gradually their story began to emerge.

The more life stories she could build, she figured, the less time she’d have to think about Art’s.

Art had been dead nearly three weeks now and yet, the more time passed, the more she felt his presence. As if the removal of his physical presence had bolstered his psychic one.

Something clattered the other side of the door, and Helen froze. Sat stock-still, listened.

Just the hum of the fridge, the distant call of crows.

It was probably nothing, she told herself, turning on the old Roberts to obliterate the nothing, and returned her attention to the pictures.

His was a constant presence – Art’s – and the boy’s too. They seemed weirdly inter-linked, always there, always out of sight. Although that sequence of pictures had nothing to do with Art, quite the opposite in fact.

She had forgotten about the boy, more or less, until she thought she saw him out on the Dales. And she hadn’t seen him since, although she’d felt him right up until she went to London. It wasn’t just this house. The boy had been with her for years. As long as Art, now she thought about it. Not that she’d realised that, not at first. But the minute she uploaded the image and those button brown eyes looked up from his Power Ranger and fixed on hers, she knew it had been him all along.

She’d carried him home in her camera.

What was it about him that had caught Gil Markham’s attention? She cursed to herself. It was a good picture, she knew that. Along with its twin, it had won her awards, another front page, more than one, in several languages. They had been everywhere for a time, those pictures. They had changed her life in more ways than one. Hardly surprising that someone who’d never met her before and knew nothing about their origin, might recognise them.

But Gil had seemed too interested.

She’d been telling him the truth about the Internet. She hadn’t used it since she got back. The VPN had made her careless, given her a false sense of security. A security that had been taken away by a single tiny news story and two calls from Mark Ridley. Now the house she’d been so desperate to return to was beginning to feel like a trap of her own making.

Checking the USB had a signal, she logged on to her secure connection and typed in two words ‘Gil Markham’. Then she opened a new page beside it and typed in two more words ‘Gilbert Markham’, making sure they were one and the same.

As the links appeared on the pages in front of her Helen’s heart sank. Far from being a harmless friendly local, Gil Markham was a bloody journalist. A handful of local awards. Ex Fleet Street and now retired early, according to the most recent snippet she could find on the local paper’s website. That didn’t help. In her experience, a journalist with time on his hands was a dangerous animal. And Gil didn’t look old enough to be retired.

Shit, she muttered under her breath, as she logged off. Just as she was starting to like him.

After that, Helen couldn’t settle.

She was unable to shake the feeling that she was no longer alone.

Guilt, that’s what Caroline would say. Banquo’s ghost. There was no one in the house. Helen knew that. Whatever her 3 a.m. self thought. No Art, no boy, no friendly neighbourhood busybody. Apart from anything else, it simply wasn’t possible, not with her intensive lock-checking regime. Then it occurred to Helen: if not someone inside then how about out? She eyed the kitchen window, looking for some telltale movement beyond, but all looked still. When she pushed back her chair, its wooden legs screeched on terracotta tiles so loudly it quite literally set her teeth on edge. Behind her, on the worktop, the Roberts radio had slipped into white noise without Helen noticing.

Clonidine would take the edge off her terror.

But she wasn’t allowing herself to take the pills. Knowing they were there should be sufficient. Despite the slight shimmer of colours around her, the prickling of her temples and the sweat under her arms, Helen was determined to prove she could do it.

Helen caught herself. That was precisely what had kept her with Art.
I can do this.
She used to think stubbornness showed character. Now she suspected it simply showed stupidity.
I can do this
turned too easily into
I don’t know how not to do this.
Becoming
, I don’t know how to stop this
.

Passing the back door she flexed its wrought-iron handle from habit. Locked. Twice: Chubb and newly installed bolt. Through the pane of glass in the top half she could see another bolt, also newly installed on the wicket gate. Both products of her trip to London.

Helen didn’t hear the scratching until she passed the pantry with its square of cardboard taped over the broken pane. Distant but persistent. It wasn’t the first time she’d heard it. At night, usually. Mice she assumed. Or rats, which would be worse. Helen hated rats, more so since she saw the corpse of a woman in Syria who’d been tortured with them. This time, though, the noise was less scrabbly, more focused. On the larder’s shelves were empty Kilner jars. On the floor a huge and filthy microwave dumped there and moved no further. By the time she reached the back the noise was gone.

A handful of seconds later, it started up again behind her.

Circling the kitchen, Helen strained her ears for the source. Flicking off the radio, she skirted the room, listening at doors and opening cupboards. She could imagine how she looked. Mad as a box of frogs, make-up free, with her hair knotted on her head, spooking and stealthing around a gloomy room in socked feet, looking for the flicker of movement that told her a mouse had just left the building.

The scratching resumed, louder now.