Black Valley (19 page)

A chill of fear ran up her spine. So Blake was here, at the tower, and he’d tried to hide his traces. She put her foot on the accelerator. What could he be doing there? Might he have
encountered Dresler, and, if so, what would be happening? And where was Elinor? Had Blake perhaps caught up with her, brought her here?

She parked the car, slamming on the brakes, cut the lights and got out. The wind was blowing hard, and the trees were moving in the wind, creaking and groaning. She put the mobile in her pocket
and hugged her jacket around her, retracing her steps. She wished the bloody phone was working properly. She didn’t like the idea of being stranded out here with no communication. Of course,
there must be a landline somewhere in the hotel, but the owners appeared to have gone to bed. And there still didn’t seem to be any other guests in the place.

The entrance door remained unlocked, so she went in. When she came into the hallway, she saw that there were no lights on in the sitting room, just the glow of the embers in the fireplace.
Dresler must have gone up to the bedroom.

The staircase was dark, so she pushed the timer button on the wall, and the narrow stone spiral lit up. She climbed the winding steps up to their room, stopping every now and then to push the
timer button again. When she passed the bathroom, she saw that there was no light on in there, either.

As she came to the top floor of the tower, where their bedroom was, she felt a blast of cold air coming down from the staircase. There must be a door up there, she thought, that led to the
parapet outside. Someone must have left it open.

She stopped on the landing and opened the door to the bedroom, hoping to find Dresler in there. The light was on, but it was deserted. So she turned and climbed on up the stairs to a narrower
spiral that led to a tiny wooden door – the source of the draught. When she reached it, she saw that it was swinging open on its hinges. There seemed to be no lock on it.

She felt her heart thump in her chest. What was going on? Where the hell was Dresler? Where was Elinor? She thought of Blake’s car hidden under the trees by the driveway. He must be here
somewhere, lying in wait perhaps . . .

She eased herself through the door, taking care to leave it open behind her. When she came out, she was standing on a stone parapet, encircled by a low, turreted wall. The wind whistled in her
ears, and above her head, she could see a dazzling array of stars. The tower was so high that she seemed to be walking among them.

For a moment, she felt dizzy, blinded. Then she realized someone was shining a torch at her.

‘Careful. Don’t go near the edge.’ She jumped as she heard Dresler’s voice.

Jess put a hand up to her forehead, shielding her eyes from the beam of light. ‘What’s going on?’

‘Stay there.’ Dresler lowered the torch and came towards her. In the starlight, she saw that his face was deathly pale.

He stood beside her. She put out her arm, and felt that his whole body was trembling.

‘What’s the matter?’

He didn’t reply. He seemed to be in a state of shock.

‘Jacob? What is it?’

‘It’s Blake.’ His voice came out in a hoarse whisper. ‘He’s . . .’

The whisper faded to nothing.

‘What? He’s what?’

Dresler indicated the edge of the parapet. Then he turned his head away.

Jess took the torch from him.

‘Don’t go over there.’ He found his voice again. ‘You don’t want to see it. Please . . .’

She ignored him, marched to the far end of the parapet, and shone the torch over the edge. What she saw made her catch her breath.

Far below, on the ground, lay a dark lump. She ran the beam of the torch over it and saw that it was a body, the limbs splayed out at strange angles. But that was all she could see.

She heard Dresler come up behind her.

She turned towards him. ‘What’s happened?’ Suddenly she had a vision of Blake and Dresler fighting, Dresler punching Blake and Blake falling off the edge of the tower.
‘Please,’ she said, her voice high-pitched and hysterical, ‘tell me what’s happened.’

Dresler walked over to her and put his arms around her. She could feel him shaking. ‘No,’ he said, ‘there was no one here when I arrived. But . . .’ He pointed towards
the ground below. ‘He must have thrown himself over.’ His voice was still shaking. ‘I came up the stairs and the door was open, so I got a torch and came out here. That’s
when I found him.’ He paused. ‘He can’t have been there long.’

Jess wondered how Blake had got up to the tower. And whether Dresler was telling her the whole truth about what had happened.

‘We’d better get down there.’

‘I can’t.’

‘Course you can. Come on.’ Jess grabbed his arm and together they walked over to the door. She eased herself through it, waited for him to do the same, pressed the timer light on the
stairs and then ran down them, as quickly as she could. He followed behind her, at a slower pace.

When she got to the bottom, she ran across the hall, out of the entrance, and round to the side of the tower. There was a small gravelled path that led all around it, dotted with garden lamps.
She stopped when she came to the dark mass, partially illuminated by one of the lamps. The lamp was smeared with blood, casting an eerie shadow over what lay beside it.

It was the body. Blake’s body, or what was left of it. One of the arms was shattered, and one side of the head was a mass of red flesh, where it had hit the ground. Around it was a pool of
blood, soaking into the gravel. A little way away was a dismembered piece of flesh that had sheared off from the arm.

Jess turned her head. She felt the urge to vomit, but overcame it, clenching her teeth and swallowing hard. Then she forced herself to look again, this time more closely.

It was definitely Blake. He was wearing the same clothes she’d seen him in that morning – jeans, a dark blue coat and walking boots. She noticed the tufts of black hair on his head.
There were streaks of blood in them now, mixed with fatty innards that could have been brains. It was a horrific sight, yet strangely banal. Apart from the collapsed head and the shattered arm, the
rest of the body was just as she’d seen him that morning, dressed stylishly for a day out in the country. It seemed utterly surreal that half of him was now a bloody mess, while the other
half was intact. It was almost comical, like a bad zombie film.

Dresler came round the corner and stood beside her. She heard his intake of breath.

She closed her eyes and leaned back against him for a moment. He put his arms around her waist, and together they rocked back and forth.

Then she snapped into action.

They went back into the hotel. She told Dresler to go and wake the owners, found a landline on the reception desk, and called the emergency services. She reported that there was a dead man on
the ground outside the tower, and that he appeared to have jumped off of his own accord. Her voice was calm as she gave directions to the hotel. She’d dealt with suicide before. There was a
procedure to go through, and following it to the letter would help, as she knew from experience.

For the next few hours, Jess continued in professional mode. The emergency services came. Blake’s body was removed, the innards carefully placed in a separate bag, and
the remains scraped off the gravel. Photos were taken, and tape put up around the area where Blake had fallen. Meanwhile, she, Dresler and the elderly couple who ran the hotel were questioned by
the police. The couple, bewildered in their dressing gowns, appeared to have seen nothing, having retired early to bed.

The local police seemed satisfied by the statements, but then a more senior figure, a colleague of Bonetti’s from Cardiff, arrived. He took Jess and Dresler to one side and asked them what
had happened. They ran through the story again. Occasionally, he stopped to ask for clarification, which the other police officers hadn’t done. Jess explained how, shortly before the body was
found, she’d had a call from Elinor, who’d said she was at the tower, and that Blake was there too, in an angry mood. She said she was worried about whether Elinor was all right, since
she hadn’t been able to get hold of her. The DI questioned them closely on the timing of the evening’s events, some of which they were unable to be exact about. Then, satisfied that
they had told him everything they knew, he went on to talk to the proprietors.

When he’d finished, Jess and Dresler went upstairs to bed. They were both exhausted. After a speedy trip to the bathroom, they undressed quickly and got into bed. The room seemed colder
than ever. Their feet and hands were freezing, and every time they touched each other, they gave little gasps of pain.

‘I don’t know how I’m going to get to sleep. I can’t get that awful sight out of my mind.’ Dresler reached out and put his hand on her shoulder.

‘There are ways of doing that.’ She drew in her breath as his icy fingers touched her. ‘It’s a technique called mindfulness. You have to focus on the immediate sensations
around you. Take them in, savour them. Don’t try to banish extraneous thoughts or images that come into your mind. Like . . .’ She wanted to say,
Blake’s dead body
, but she
couldn’t.

‘OK.’

‘Just register them, acknowledge their presence, and let them go.’

‘I’ll try.’

They lay in the dark, side by side, looking up at the ceiling. He put his arms around her, and she felt that his body was shaking. She tried to calm him, but her heart was thumping in her chest.
They hugged each other closer, until they rolled together and began to make love, more to comfort each other than to chase pleasure.

It was a long, slow process, and several times it seemed as though one or other of them would give up, but gradually she felt his trembling subside and her heart begin to beat more quietly.
Eventually she climaxed, more in relief than ecstasy. When she did, with the moment of clarity that sometimes comes with orgasm, she saw herself gazing down at the long, lonely Black Valley, as if
she were one of the kestrels rising above it. In the far distance, at the horizon, she saw Bob; in the crook of the valley below, Nella, entwined with Gareth; and nearer to her, in the meadows
beside the tower, Rose.

Yet to her surprise, Dresler, whose body she was clasping so tightly in her arms, was nowhere to be seen.

The following day, they woke up early. After a hurried breakfast, they packed up, paid the bill, and went out to the car. Although neither of them said as much, they
couldn’t wait to get away.

As if mirroring their mood, the weather had turned even colder. There was frost on the grass outside and a thin, damp fog in the air. As they passed the path that led around the tower, Dresler
turned his head away, but Jess peered around the bend. The police tape was still around the area. She noticed that the blood on the gravel had been cleaned away. The garden light had been wiped
off, too. Tonight, she thought, when it was illuminated, those sinister streaks would cast their shadows over the place where Blake’s body had lain. But there would be no trace of the tragedy
that had happened there.

The two of them walked on towards the car, loaded their bags, and got in. Jess started the engine, and turned on the fan. There was a thin layer of ice on the windscreen. While they sat in the
car, waiting for the heater to melt it away, Dresler took her hand.

They watched as the clear lines on the windscreen grew wider, until all the ice had melted. Then she started the car and pulled away. As they drove off, neither of them looked back.

Once they got further down the road, away from the tower, they stopped the car on the verge and looked at the map. Their plan had been to stay in the valley that day, visiting an old woollen
mill, but instead they decided to have a quick lunch somewhere nearby, then head back through the Brecon Beacons to Cardiff, where Dresler would take the train to London.

They were both traumatized by the previous night’s events, and Jess in particular was keen to get home; she wanted to be with her daughters, have them close, and safe, and under her wing
again.

They took the road that cut through the valley, this time in silence. It was slippery with ice, and Jess had to take care. The sky was white, the sun invisible except for a faint glow in the
sky, and all around them, the landscape was outlined in a sparkled coating of hoar frost. As the woods cleared and they passed fields, they saw sheep huddled together on the hillsides, standing
stock still as if to keep out the cold. When they reached the moor, the white of the ground merged with the white of the sky, so that they seemed to be driving into a void, given shape only by the
silvered spikes of gorse that lined their path. Neither of them broke the silence, awed by the pitiless beauty of the place.

They drove on, through the narrow Beulah Pass at the top of Cwm Du, and out of the valley. The cold white landscape around them now seemed sinister, and Jess couldn’t wait to get away from
it. However, she kept her speed steady; there were patches of black ice on the road, and it would have been easy to lose control of the steering had she been going too fast. The road seemed to wind
ahead endlessly, up hill and down dale, as if to test her patience; but finally, it dipped into woodland for the last time, and curved its way back into civilization in the shape of the old market
town, with its reassuring bustle.

They found a space in the car park and wandered around, not sure what to do with themselves. Neither of them was in the mood for browsing the shops. They weren’t hungry, either. So
instead, they went into a cafe and ordered some coffees. Jess tried to phone Elinor again, but as ever there was no reply. As they sat there together, waiting for the coffees to arrive, Jess wished
she could roll back time to yesterday morning, when they were just two tourists enjoying a weekend break together, away from the cares of the world. Now they had Blake’s suicide to try to
make sense of.

‘Why would he do that?’ Dresler shook his head, as if he still couldn’t believe what had happened. ‘Why choose the tower?’