“You’re a very good writer, you can tell that,” says Snowdrop, looking at a feature he had written in 1998. It was an article on a young girl in desperate need of a bone marrow transplant. Her father, an IT expert, had set up a website encouraging people across the world to be tested for compatibility. Rowan was working for the North West evening Mail at the time. 18-years-old and full of poetry and ambition and bile. He’d won an award for the interview – his descriptions of the girl’s chipped pink nail varnish and trusting blue eyes striking a chord with readers, and the judges of the Regional Journalism Awards. He seems to recall that the girl got the transplant in the end. Pulled through. He wonders whether she’s thriving now or floundering like everybody else. He checks the dat. Wonders if there’s any mileage in a follow-up.
Snowdrop turns the page. “I hope you like it,” says Snowdrop, and moves towards him in the hope of something like a hug. He nods his head, over and over, his throat tightening. He tells himself to hug her. To pull her in for a big squeeze and a tickle. He can’t seem to make himself. Just stands there feeling silly and awkward.
“I’d forgotten most of these stories,” he says, with a cough. He crosses to the sofa and sits down. Snowdrop places the book in his lap, open on a random page. He gives a snort of laughter as he looks at the article he wrote one hot April day in ’99. A teacher from Millom was running as an independent candidate in a local by-election. If elected, he was going to stop the ‘blight’ of wind farms and prevent the building of an access road that was going to lead to increased HGV traffic near the chalet-style houses of a group of pensioners. He’d vowed to stand up for decent people and common sense. Rowan presumes he lost.
“It’s in date order,” says Snowdrop, hoping for a compliment. “Your first murder’s on page nine.”
Awkwardly, Rowan slides the glossy pages forward. Sees his name, third in the pecking order behind the crime reporter and one of the senior hacks. Rowan was still a trainee, but he’d earned the acknowledgment.
He flicks forward, memories coming back like birds returning to the nest. He glances at another article. It’s been cut out neatly and glued down onto black card. Jason Peters, a senior member of the Wasdale Mountain Rescue Team, had been awarded an MBE for dedicated service. Rowan had spent 24 hours in his company for what turned out to be a 600-word double-page spread in the Cumberland News. They’d been called out twice. Once had been a false alarm and the other had culminated not far from the summit of Scafell Pike, where three tourists were turning blue in trainers and T-shirts, shivering behind a wall and agreeing that, with the benefit of hindsight, they should have set off for the summit a little earlier, or a lot better prepared.
He glances over the text. Snowdrop was right. He’d been good with words when he started out. They flowed out of him – often to the distraction of his senior colleagues who always seemed to delight in putting great red lines through his prose. His eyes fall on a paragraph midway through the article. Rowan had asked about memorable incidents; difficult discoveries.
“All you want to do is get people safely off the mountain. That’s what you sign up for – not awards or people slapping you on the back. Yes, I’ve seen horrible things but it would be disrespectful to talk about the injuries people have suffered or the bodies we’ve found after a period of time. I do remember the feeling of helplessness that washed over me when those teenage girls went missing about ten years back. One of them was the daughter of a good friend and all I wanted was to tell him she was safe, that we’d found her. I’ve never known conditions like that. It was like the Valley was fighting us….”
Rowan sits back, one eye closed. He feels a memory unfold itself from the too-small box at the rear of his mind. Girls. Missing girls in the Wasdale valley. He has a sudden clear picture of himself, no older than 19, tie unfastened to his midriff, purple streaks in his hair, asking one of the senior reporters whether they knew what the Mountain Rescue man was talking about when he referred to ‘the teenage girls that went missing’. The deputy news editor had given him a lacklustre synopsis. Said there had been a ‘bit of a hooplah’ at the time’. Three teenage girls from the hippy place in the valley. Word was, they’d gone off with a stranger. Witness statements suggested they might be somewhere on the back route up Yewbarrow. Others said they’d seen them scrambling over the Screes at Wasdale. Mountain Rescue had battled a tempest as they scoured the black fells looking for them. He concentrates, trying hard to remember how his old boss had resolved the tale. Looking back, he realises he hadn’t even listened to the conclusion. Had probably cut her off, drunk on youthful hubris.
“Mum knows one of the ladies in that story,” says Snowdrop, peering over the back of the sofa at the article. “When we were making the portfolio, I mean. She read your article and said somebody from her writing group was one of the girls who’d gone missing.”
Rowan glances her way. She has his attention. “I don’t suppose she desperately wants to share the story of what happened to her, does she? Go on, be kind to your uncle, tell me a good-natured lie. Tell me there’s a story in this which will fix all my problems.”
“What problems?” asks Snowdrop, smiling. “I know you’re only pulling my leg about not having a second book. Maybe I shouldn’t be distracting you when you’re so close to deadline but if you did fancy showing me how to be a proper reporter, well; maybe you could show me what to do with a story like this. I mean, we could do a follow-up.”
Rowan sinks into the sofa. A follow-up to what? If he were still a local newspaper reporter there may be some purpose to writing an anniversary piece – some nostalgic ‘remember when’ article for readers to coo over, uttering inanities about what they might have been up to so long ago. He supposes he could check the date and see if there’s a significant anniversary coming up.
“Google Jason Peters for me,” he says, sighing. “The Mountain Rescue chap.”
Grinning, Snowdrop does as she’s asked, her fingers dancing over the screen of the laptop as she sits on the floor by the fire. She pulls a face. “Dead,” she says, with a note of apology. “Lots of people said nice things when he died, which is good, I guess.”
The glow of the screen casts light onto her face and Rowan smiles as he sees how intensely she is concentrating. She has her tongue pressed against her teeth. He does the same when he’s thinking hard.
“The vicar who gave the service,” reads Snowdrop, raising her finger to the screen. “Reverend Marlish. I know him a bit. He comes into school sometimes, or he did when I was there last.” She rolls her eyes at this, sick and tired of her on-and-off relationship with conventional education, which she sees as an unavoidable consequence of being raised a little off-the-grid. Rowan, who didn’t go to school until he was nine and took his GCSEs in a Young Offenders Institute, has every sympathy. “There’s a quote here, in the article, where he talks about how Jason always put others before himself.” She reads it out loud, putting on a deep male voice. “Like so many others, I was spared grief by Jason and the team. He was a true hero – a life-saver. Every time I hug my daughter I say a prayer of thanks that he brought her home.” Snowdrop looks up, expectantly. “Could be the same friend that Jason spoke about in your article, couldn’t it?”
Rowan chews his lip. The Mountain Rescue Team keeps immaculate records. Would it be such a chore to trawl through the incidents from 30 years back and see if there are any more details? He can feel something unfolding itself in his mind, righting itself like crumpled cloth. He remembers a court case, maybe 18 months back. Somewhere in South London was it? A stabbing or a shooting, he can’t recall which. They all blend together after a while; an ugly melange of victims and villains; of perpetrators and witnesses, killers and the bereaved, all swapping faces with the dead. But he always manages to remember attractive women, and there was no doubt that the Detective Inspector with whom he shared two machine coffees and a cigarette ticked that box with gusto. She’d been there to see some drug dealer get life for killing one of his teenage couriers. Loud, funny and dangerously indiscreet, they’d got on famously. She’d been unapologetically forward, sharing confidences and encouraging him to give various colleagues a roasting in print for the misdemeanours she was happy to elaborate upon. He’d done her a good turn, hadn’t he? He seems to recall that she’d said ‘thanks’ a lot when she texted him, though he has no way of checking. Those messages would have been prudently deleted lest they be glanced at by his eagle-eyed partner. Even so, he can recall the contents – and the picture of her dainty feet propped up on the bath taps that she had sent along with the rather suggestive message ‘thinking of you’. Sumaira, that was it, wasn’t it? Flirty eyes and a big mouth. She’d told him the case had made her mind up, hadn’t she? Said she couldn’t stare into the sewer of London’s underworld any longer. She was going to accept a job up North. They’d chatted for a while as he’d told her about his own connections to Cumbria; his start in journalism, his sister’s love affair with the Lakes. He has no doubt that he could persuade her to see the merits of renewing their acquaintance. Wonders whether his hands are up to it and decides there is no gain without pain.