In the Moors (15 page)

Gloria placed two enormous triangles of cake on separate plates and sat down across the table from me. It was as golden as honeycomb and soft chocolate drooled from its middle. I let out a little moan of ecstasy.

“So,” said my foster mum. “How's things going?”

I pulled a face. I didn't want Gloria to feel the entire weight of the burdens I had begun to carry around with me. She had to be following Cliff's progress on the TV news, and she'd burst a button if she knew how deeply I was involved. But I did want to pick her brain. “Mum, d'you know anything about tracing people? If you only have a first name and a vague idea about their age?”

To my surprise, Gloria leaned over the table and squeezed my hand. “But you do have enough, you just don't realize it.”

“What?”

“You know your own full name and date of birth. If you use that, you'll have traced your family soon enough. I'm just surprised you haven't started sooner.”

I blinked, feeling stupid. “I'm not looking for
me
.”

“You should be. It's not right to have no roots.” Gloria smiled, opened her wide mouth, and slid fatless sponge into it.

Déjà vu.
For the second day in a row I'd watched an elderly lady eat homemade cake while I sat frozen with shocking realization. Gloria was right, of course. I had no idea about my parents. I didn't even know if Dare was my father's family name or my mother's.

I gave myself a shake. “Gloria, you're the only mum I need. I don't care about the past. It's the present that counts.” Unless, like Cliff, the past nudges at you, ruining your life. “I wanted to find a person, that's all. I don't even know where to begin.”

“As far as I understand, if you're looking for certificates—birth, death, marriage—you go to the Register Office. If you want to know where people lived, you go to the Record Office, where they keep parish records, that sort of thing.”

“How d'you know all that?”

She grinned. “Wisdom comes with age, girl. So I can guess this has something to do with one of your batty therapies.”

I waved my hand in a careless fashion. “A client … amnesia …trying to trace the bits of his life he's forgotten.”

“Learn delegation. Let him do it himself.”

“It's a bit more complicated than that. He's in prison at the moment—that's why I'm up in Bristol.”

“Prison!”

“Honestly, Mum, he's innocent, I know he is.”

“
Pshaw
! You should leave that sort of thing to the police.”

I nodded. “Of course you're right, but that's complicated too. The detective who's working on the case … Reynard the fox …” I felt a blush warm my cheeks.

“What?” asked Gloria. “
What
?”

“He's a dish.”

I watched her roar with laughter. “Girl, you will find trouble even when it's buried six foot deep.”

I shivered at her choice of metaphor. “Rey isn't trouble, exactly.”

“That'll make a change. You usually pick your men out of police lineups.”

“I can't have done, Rey
is
the police. And I haven't picked him. In fact, I wish I could stop dreaming about him. He clearly thinks I'm a notch away from crazy.”

“Opposites attract.”

“Yeah, well that clarifies
my
feelings, but Rey seems to have his own agenda. I don't know where I stand with him, is the truth.”

“I'll tell you where you stand,” said Gloria, holding up a silencing hand. “You should make sure that the guy is always a bit sweeter on you than he thinks you are on him.”

I laughed. Gloria's knack with matters of the heart was legendary in her family. “Okay. I'll go for that. It might encourage Rey to answer my questions.”

I thought about questions. They'd multiplied since seeing Cliff. And Gloria was right. I couldn't answer them myself. But they needed answering, and in express time.

I sprang up from the table. “I have to get back.”

“Hey? I thought you'd hang around for Charlene and the kids.”

“I'm sorry. There'll be another time. Soon, I promise. But right now—”

“You haven't even finished your cake.”

“Wrap it up for me, will you? I'll eat it in the car.”

I put my foot down all the way back to Bridgwater, but Rey had already left for the day by the time I reached the police station. Gone home to his lager and crisp supper. Instead I was presented with Detective Constable Abbott and taken into a little room where he towered over me like a shadow in a dungeon.

Even when they'd been arresting Cliff, Abbott had reminded me of portraits of the Tudors. The square of his torso would perfectly fit into the box-shaped tunics and rucked-up shorts they wore back then. His hair, as black as a villain's, would have looked great curling from beneath a feathered hat, and he had those eyelids that cover the upper half of the eye like a tight-fitting garment. The pupils swiveled away from me when I looked back at him, as if Abbott only sneaked glances when you weren't noticing.

I had the impression, mostly from this eye-avoidance, that Abbott had disliked me on first sight. Maybe it was because of Rey and me. I checked myself. There was no
Rey and me
, and I should be severely worried that I could even think such a thing.

“Sorry to disturb you like this,” I said, starting out on the wrong foot—never apologise is my usual motto.

“I don't mind disruptions,” said Abbott, “so long as they bring useful information my way.”

“Well, I'm hopeful that this will.”

“I'm pleased you've come in,” said Abbott, sounding anything but. “You must recognise it was only a matter of time before you were interviewed more formally in regards to this case.”

“I've honestly told you all I knew about Cliff. This is something that came up in a meeting with his solicitor. We both want you to investigate it.” I searched back in my mind. Linnet had said
something
like that, I was sure.

Abbott hadn't sat down. He was shifting about the room, his body language telling me to astound him or go away. I took a breath, tried to get my thoughts in order. So far, rushing back to Bridgwater hadn't gone to plan. I'd hope to sweet-talk Rey into investigating the girl called Patsy. Abbott looked a much harder proposition.

“Directly before the Wetland Murders happened, two people may have been reported missing. One was Cliff Houghton. The other was a girl called Patsy. I'm hoping she had a report filed. You keep Missing Person files that long, don't you?”

“Patsy what?” said Abbott in a calm, bored voice.

“I don't know her second name. Cliff doesn't remember. Perhaps he doesn't even know.”

Abbott closed his heavy lids for a second, as if despairing. “You want us to find a missing person—”

“Not necessarily. Just seeing the report details would be a good start.”

“I'm sure it would. But at the moment we're investigating a recent murder and an even more recent child disappearance. I don't have time for any of this
is there anybody there
stuff.”

“All we're asking you to do is check the Missing Persons lists.”

He gave a cold laugh. “Let's just say our resources may not stretch to that. Besides, Miss Dare, I'm confident that you can find this person by merely closing your eyes.”

I ignored the sarcasm. “It could really help.”

“Yes, help screw up our case.” I saw Abbott smile at his own bad joke, and the burning smog of anger that plagued my teenage years smothered me so that I could hardly breathe.

“Fine,” I spat. “No need to investigate the crime, once you've framed your prime suspect. And while you're at it, why not harass innocent citizens. Until they bring up evidence, that is, then go right ahead and ridicule them.”

Abbott's mouth hardened against his fine teeth. He came over to the chair I was perched on and positioned himself so that when he spoke, his spittle would land directly on my face. I felt sure he used words where spittle might be increased.

“Sabrina Isabel Dare. That's your full name, isn't it? I never liked the idea of bringing you and your charlatan shamanism into this case. The idea stinks. It was the detective sergeant's pitch, but I'm fucking sick of this floating about with phantoms. You might fool your
clients
, Miss Dare, but you don't fool me.”

I felt my cheeks burn as he mentioned Rey. “What d'you mean,
bringing in my shamanism
?”

Abbott didn't reply. He walked to the door, opened it wide, and stood like a sentry, waiting for me to pass.

I thought he might toss off a final sarcasm as I scuttled down the corridor, but all I heard behind me was his derisive silence.

By the time I'd finished work that evening, I felt completely done in—ready for bed at a quarter to nine on a Saturday night. I poured myself a glass of chardonnay and switched on the telly, but I couldn't concentrate on the shifting pictures and chattering sounds, so I zapped it off and found myself wandering through the house, trying to make sense of it all. I needed to tie down the loose ends that were flapping about in my mind, because I was sure that they were all connected.

“Be sure of this Sabbie,” Bren used to say to me. “Everything connects.” I'd lived with the Howells for the three years of my degree, and as the time went on, I became more than fond of them; they were family to me, my third set of parents.

I guess losing both my natural parents—my father before I knew him and my mother when I was six—made it okay to have two sets of surrogate parents. Philip and Gloria Davidson had defused the spitfire kid and created someone ready to take their place in the world. But living with the Bren and Rhiannon Howell had changed me even more drastically.

The Howells made me listen when a tree shakes its branches. They showed me how to get drunk just looking at the moon. Bren had taught me the phases of the moon as we worked in his garden, introduced me to a small community of Pagan people hidden by the North Welsh hills. We'd light a fire of split logs in the centre of the garden with its herby flowerbeds. Bren would trace a circle and draw a five-pointed star within it. The magic of the pentangle. Once drawn, Rhiannon called power to us. She used the four ancient elements, as I do today in my therapy room—fire, water, earth, and air. Only when we felt empowered and protected in this way, did we begin the work that went on in our minds. Squatted on a variety of damp-proof seating arrangements, we traced paths to other worlds. Sometimes the sounds of the night and the crackle of the fire were our accompaniment; other times there would be a drum to give a steady rhythm, or a chanter repeating an arcane word or phrase over and over until it stilled my racing thoughts and let the visions come.

At first, I had not believed I would see things. When I did, I told myself it was all my imagination.

“Imagination?” said Rhiannon, when I'd explained how I felt. “What d'you think that is, Sabbie?”

It took me a long time to understand what she meant, especially as, at that point in my life, I was attending lecture after essay after seminar on the psychological workings of the human mind.

“What are the pictures we see in our mind?” I asked my professor. “What happens when we're imagining something so deeply, we don't even hear a friend speak to us from across a room?”

“Ah,” he said, gearing himself up into lecture mode. “That is the Alpha brainwave state.”

“But what happens?”

“Our brain's electrical impulses slow into Alpha rhythm.”

“But what
happens
?”

“You sound like my six-year-old,” he said, moving so that his shoulder formed a barrier between us. “She's
why, why, why
all the time. You must phrase your questions more academically, Miss Dare.”

I was twenty-four years old when I left Bangor with my honours degree. By then, I had decided I wouldn't be Bren's cunning apprentice. Herbalism was fascinating, but it wasn't close enough to the things I wanted to explore. I was pulled to the very edges of my degree subject, the areas my teachers couldn't tell me about. What are the pictures we see in our mind? What happens when we're in a trance? Why do silly coincidences keep happening when we're concentrating on one thing? Does a spirit world really exist?
These
were the questions running through my thoughts.

I went back to Bristol. The job at the residential home was waiting for me as if I'd never left it. I started an aromatherapy course in my spare time. I knew I only had to wait. Bren had come to me in my dreams when I'd needed him most, and I felt sure something would happen quite soon.

Gloria, on the other hand, had nearly exploded. “Why the devil are you cluttering up my spare bedroom again?” she kept asking me. “You should be using that degree, girl.”

Sometimes you've got to nudge the spirit world. In a New Agey magazine I spotted a small advertisement for a therapeutic shaman. At that point, I didn't even know what that was, but I rang him anyway, because something had been bothering me.

“I keep dreaming about otters,” I had said. “I'm hoping someone can tell me why. I don't know anything about them. Actually, I've never even seen one alive, but last week, a lady was admitted to the residential home I work at, and she wanted to bring this stuffed animal in a case with her. I thought it would be gross, but it was so beautiful. I wanted to tell her I was dreaming about an otter, but I couldn't quite manage it.”