“Three missing girls,” says Rowan, rain flicking from his lip to speckle the image on the screen. “Terrible things happened to them. Two came back – what happened to the third? And why does nobody want the truth to get out? More importantly, why hasn’t anybody asked these questions before ?”
“Oh that’s good,” says Aubrey. “Will you call me? Or email a precis – just an idea …,”
After hanging up, Rowan isn’t sure whether he said goodbye. He decides it probably doesn’t matter. His heart begins to thump as he realises what he’s just done. This morning, he had to find a story good enough to fill a bestselling true crime book – preferably with a personal angle. Now, it has to include a missing teenager and a conspiracy of silence. He’d suddenly very much like to go back to bed.
“Looks like it might be clearing,” says Snowdrop, gesturing across the muddy ground to where the folds of rain are becoming less ferocious. She gives him a nudge. “Are you going to message her right now? What are you going to say?”
“It’s ‘write’,” grumbles Rowan. “What am I going to write?”
“I don’t know, that’s what I’m asking,” says Snowdrop, completely missing the grammar lesson. She grins, excitedly, and she looks as though she would have no problem with going and jumping up and down in a puddle. “Are you going to do a book? A book on this? On my story?” She looks at him, accusingly. “Will I get a mention? Maybe not as an author, but like, a contributor? An acknowledgement, or something. That would be so cool …,”
Rowan feels his spirits sink into the cold, wet ground. He looks away, thinking of a way to change the subject. He freezes, spirits lunging downwards like a weighted corpse. A gaunt, jointy-limbed woman with iron-grey hair stalks purposefully into his line of sight; materializing from the grey murk with the demeanour of a fairy-tale witch intent on finding out why she wasn’t invited to the Palace for the party. She’s much the same colour as the sky: her expensive, pencil-shaded coat blending in with well-pressed pewter trousers tucked into battleship-coloured Wellingtons.
“Snowdrop,” she snaps, looking past Rowan. “You have had me worried sick.”
“Morning, Kitten,” starts Rowan, largely for his own pleasure. “That’s a wonderfully literary outfit, you temptress. Fifty Shades of ….,”
“Rowan,” she says, stopping him as if pulling down a blind. She stands on the track, glaring at them both. He realises she is holding a rolled-up golf umbrella behind her back. She shakes her head as she gives him a once-over. “Drunk again,” she declares.
Rowan gives an understanding smile. “That’s okay Jo, you can come back when you’re sober. Anyway, how’s you? You didn’t ride that brolly, did you? That’s a point, where did you park your broomstick?”
Jo lets a tiny smile disturb her thin lips. There is a part of her that seems to relish these little interactions with her wife’s hapless younger brother. She has made a small fortune since establishing her network of workplace consultants, scooping up dissatisfied educators and turning them into well-paid experts in impossibly tedious aspects of recruitment, marketing, consumer law and global logistics. She’s a named partner in the Belgravia-based firm but spends most of her life ensconced in her palatial office at the converted farmhouse half a mile further down the River Irt. Rowan has never understood how somebody so drearily strait-laced ever came into contact with his effervescent sister, let alone whisked her off her feet, married her and agreed to act as stepparent to her precocious child. Rowan is actually quite fond of her, although he doubts he will ever express it. He remembers how Serendipity used to be.
“Serendipity said you were doing something educational,” she says, sniffing the air. Rowan doesn’t worry. The smell of the weed is definitely well hidden amid the cow-shit and wet grass. She purses her lips. “I’m going to the bank. Whitehaven. Serendipity has suggested it might be useful if I were to pick up some books. Do you have any requirements?”
Rowan and Snowdrop share a smirk. Jo has a way of talking that speaks of school matrons or some stern governess. “That’s kind, Jo,” says Snowdrop. She’s never called her second mum by any other name than her given, though Serendipity is always ‘Mum’. Rowan wonders if that must be hard. Realises that of course it must. His thoughts are interrupted by Snowdrop grabbing his sleeve. “We could go with her,” she says. “You can show me how to do research. Will they have those old machines from the old films …,”
“Stop saying ‘old’,” mutters Rowan, feeling 90. “Look, most research is stuff we can do back at the byre online. Get a fire going, maybe have forty winks …,”
Jo looks from one to the other, reading the situation as if it is written in large-print. Rowan is a moment behind. They’re trying to keep me busy. They’re trying to take me out of myself. They’re trying …
“That’s decided then,” declares Jo, as if a judgement has been made. “Snowdrop, you can come back and get a change of clothes before you go. Rowan, you could do with being wrung out as well, though I shan’t be obliging. I won’t ask where you’ve been as the answer will only upset me.”
“Tell me where you’d like us to have been,” says Rowan, nicely. “Let’s both be happy.”
“Snowdrop,” she says, ignoring him. “When you’re ready.” She puts out a hand, a sprinter waiting for a baton. Snowdrop grins at her uncle and runs to Jo, taking the proffered hand with a practised familiarity. Rowan feels a pain in his chest: something like heartburn, or loss.
He stays where he is brooding and feeling left out. The rain has changed direction, hurling great damp handfuls at him from what seems like a few inches in front of his face. Slowly – because he’s not even bothered, no way, whatever, no matter what anybody says, he’s too fucking impervious to this kind of shit to be bothered, to feel left out - – he follows them, a little sulkily, down the path.
9
Tuesday, February 4, 1988
Silver Birch Academy, Wasdale Valley
10.28am
“Everybody warm and toasty? Remember, there’s no such thing as bad weather – just the wrong clothes. That’s it, that’s it, come in, Philomena. You go and stand next to Calpurnia there – the heater’s are on so you’ll thaw out in no time. Everybody have a nice breakfast? How was meditation, Astrid? Excellent, good, good. Wow, what a fine-looking bunch. Violet, could you and Catherine shuffle up a little so that Delphine can sit down? Of course there’s room…,”
Violet rolls her eyes at Mr Tunstall. She moves half an inch to her left. Catherine follows her and gets an elbow to the ribs for her trouble.
“Stop crowding me!”
“I’m not crowding you, I’m moving up.”
“You smell like your dad. Like breakfast.”
“You had the same as me, Violet…,”
“You had the same as me, Violet …,”
There are a dozen pupils seated in haphazard semi-circles in the cosy, high-ceilinged space known to staff and pupils alike as the Map Room. When the school was still a private residence, this large, wood-timbered space was one of the main rooms for entertaining guests: peacock-patterned silks and Javanese furniture, splendid in the glowing warm light of the great black fireplace. Now it is a study space – beanbags and slouchy chairs, book-cases crammed with well-loved paperbacks and pristine textbooks, donated by any one of the new age charities that have done their damnedest to be associated with a facility that offers a truly unique education, focussing as it does on hearts and souls as well as academic excellence. It’s a pleasingly tatty room, with threadbare carpets concealed with big multi-coloured rugs, and the cracks in the walls are covered with old maps of the local area; contour lines grouped tightly together like the whorls in a thumbprint.