‘Fishy? What does that mean?’
‘Don’t know.’
‘Maybe … Maybe she murdered the old woman. To get her hands on the house.’
Typical Alison, I thought. Silly and over the top. ‘Don’t be daft,’ I said, at which Alison fell silent. Worrying that I might have offended her, and wanting to keep the conversation going, I added: ‘She doesn’t have the bird any more either.’
‘Probably doesn’t come up here much, then,’ said Alison, getting to her feet. ‘Come on. Let’s go.’
‘All right.’ There was a television show I wanted to get home to see, one of my favourite comedy programmes. ‘It’s nearly nine o’clock anyway.’
‘Eleven o’clock in Corfu,’ Alison said, failing to quicken her pace so that I had to slow down in order to fall back into step beside her. ‘Almost bedtime. I wonder if either of our mums has got lucky yet.’
‘Lucky?’ I didn’t understand. ‘I don’t think they’ve gone on holiday to gamble, or anything like that.’
Alison laughed a nasty, superior sort of laugh. ‘Come on, Rache. Even you can’t be that innocent.’ And, when I still looked bewildered: ‘Why d’you think they’ve gone away together, then?’
‘I don’t know … Everybody needs a holiday now and again.’
‘They’re both single. They’ve both been single for years. Don’t you get it? They’ve gone looking for men.’
This idea horrified and enraged me. ‘Don’t be disgusting,’ I said.
‘What’s disgusting about it?’
‘Shut up, Alison. I’ve just about had enough of you.’
‘You need to get real.’
‘You don’t even know what you’re talking about.’ I was fighting back tears now.
‘’Course I do. And I don’t see anything wrong with it either. If your mum wants to go abroad for a week and spend her time shagging the arse off a Greek waiter, why shouldn’t she?’
For a few seconds there was nothing but appalled silence between us. Then I slapped her, hard, across the cheek. She shouted out in pain and put her hands to her face and while she was like that I pushed her to the ground. Then I burst into tears and stormed off in the direction of the house. I looked back once and she was still sitting there, on the yellow sun-baked grass, nursing her cheek and staring after me.
*
I never did get to watch my TV comedy show, because when I got home Grandad was watching a political programme on another channel. It seemed to be making him very angry, but the angrier he got, the more he seemed to want to carry on watching it. It was a report about people-trafficking and forced labour in modern Britain. Of course, I’d never heard either of these expressions before, and when the narrator started talking about migrant workers enduring conditions of ‘slavery’ I was very puzzled, because to me the word ‘slavery’ conjured up images of Roman galley slaves being held in chains or whipped by muscular guards with their shirts off. But the subject of this programme, in a way, seemed just as horrifying: I was soon distressed by the litany of tales of builders and agricultural workers being made to work long hours and live twenty to a room in horrible bedsits.
‘Disgraceful!’ Grandad kept saying, but before I could agree with him he made it clear that he was talking about something else entirely. ‘Week in, week out, the BBC gives us this left-wing propaganda. If these Latvians and Lithuanians don’t like doing British jobs, they should go home and get better ones. Did you know there’s a shop in Selby that only sells Polish food now?’
I think this question was directed at Gran, but she had left the room some time ago. As Grandad didn’t seem to need an audience I quietly slipped away too, and went upstairs to bed. Alison was not back yet, and normally this would have worried me, but I was still too angry with her to care.
I must have fallen asleep straight away. The sky around the edges of the curtains was still only dark blue when I felt myself being shaken awake by a hand on my shoulder. I opened my eyes drowsily. It was Alison, of course.
‘What? What are you doing? I was asleep.’
‘I know, but this is important.’
With some reluctance I raised myself into a sitting position. My eyes opened further and the first thing I noticed about Alison was that she was shaking.
‘What’s happened?’
‘I saw one, Rache,’ she said, her voice quivering. ‘I saw one just now, in the woods.’
‘Saw what?’
‘I saw a body. A dead body.’
Our eyes met. I said nothing.
‘Just now,’ she added: as if that somehow made it any more believable.
I lay down again and turned away from her, facing the wall.
‘Alison, you’re pathetic.’
‘I did, Rachel — really.’
I turned back over and glared at her.
‘A dead body, yeah? In the woods. Just like that man in the paper. Was he sitting up against a tree?’
‘Yes,’ said Alison, and now there was such a note of distress and insistence in her voice that for the first time it crossed my mind she might be telling the truth.
‘I don’t believe you,’ I said, all the same. ‘No way.’
‘It was bloody terrifying. His head sort of … flopped over when I came up to him, so it was like he was looking at me. His eyes were open. He had all this grey hair, long and tangled. His skin was yellow — and all stretched and wrinkled. He was so thin …’
I sat up again, and looked at her carefully. I had an unfortunate history of being gullible when people played practical jokes like this on me.
‘What’s that in your hand?’ I asked, glancing down.
Alison was clutching a single playing card.
‘I picked this up in the wood,’ she said. ‘There were loads of them, scattered all around him.’
I took the card from her hand. On the back was a pattern of yellow and black diamonds. Turning the card over, I found a drawing of a spider. It was a grotesque and horrific thing, standing upright on two of its legs, and raising the others fiercely in the air as if challenging someone to a fight. Against the glossy black background of the card, the pale green of its underbelly shone out with queasy clarity. The artist had dotted dozens of coarse hairs all over its distended belly, at the bottom of which, in a detail which made me feel particularly sick, there hung some sort of fleshy sac filled with God knows what. Although the drawing was crude and cartoonish, it somehow managed, at the same time, to be far too realistic.
As I handed the card back to Alison with a shudder, she threw her arms around me, buried her head against my neck and held me tight. She was still trembling all over and I had no choice, from that moment on, but to believe everything she had told me.
6
‘This is the tree,’ she said. ‘Just here.’
‘You’re sure?’
It was the next morning, a gloriously warm and sunny one. As we explored the little patch of sunken woodland at the eastern end of the Westwood, sunlight streamed through the leafy canopy above us, and by the time it reached us the light was a delicious, cool lime-green. The air was fresh and the only sounds were the occasional chirrup of birdsong and the distant hum of traffic. It was the kind of spot you would come to for a picnic, or to lie beneath a tree reading a book. Instead, we were looking for a corpse.
‘There’s nothing here,’ I pointed out, after we had stood for a few seconds looking at the bare patch of grass. It does no harm to state the obvious every now and again.
‘It’s gone,’ Alison agreed.
What were we supposed to do now? I had read enough kids’ adventure stories and Sherlock Holmes mysteries to know that there was a procedure to be followed in these circumstances. I knelt down and began to stare intently at the ground.