“Fulwell?” she’d asked as soon as they’d met. “I don’t suppose you’re related to Rob and Lily at the park.”
She’d laughed so Grace had felt no obligation to answer, but the question had made her uneasy. Since arriving at the cottage, since hearing the story of Bella swinging from the beam in the barn she’d been frightened. She only felt safe when she was alone in the hills, and even then occasionally she had a sense of being followed.
When she arrived back at Baikie’s it was almost dark. She hesitated on the doorstep, tempted in a moment of panic, to turn round and walk away. There was a smell of food. Rachael, in the kitchen, must have heard her boots on the yard because the door opened. Grace didn’t know what to make of Rachael. Sometimes she thought she was more dangerous than Anne.
“Hi,” Rachael said. “Come in. I was just starting to worry.”
Walking in from the clear air the smell of tomatoes, garlic and browned cheese made Grace’s stomach tighten.
“I’ve made a veggie lasagne,” Rachael said. “Why don’t you have some?
There’s plenty. It’s a bit late to start cooking.”
“Great. Thanks.” She didn’t know what else to say.
Because it was cold they sat in the easy chairs, pulled close to the fire, with the plates on their knees. No one had bothered to draw the curtains or put on the main light. Anne was still working at the desk, with the table lamp turned onto her papers, so they sat in shadow, lit occasionally by the red flash of a spitting log.
“I’ve been looking at your survey results,” Rachael said. Grace felt her stomach clench again. She poked the food with her fork.
“Yes?”
“Amazing! I mean I didn’t realize. This valley must have the greatest density of otters in the county. In the North of England.”
“I don’t know about that. I think they’ve generally been underestimated.”
“When this is all over you should think about publishing.”
At this Grace looked up, wondering why Rachael was so insistent.
“Oh?”
“If you don’t someone else will. You’ve done the work. Why shouldn’t you take the credit?”
“I suppose so.” Though she knew she would never present these figures for scientific scrutiny. She gathered up the plates and took them into the kitchen quickly, so Rachael couldn’t see how little she’d eaten.
When she returned to the living room Anne had stood up and was stretching her hands towards the fire.
“I called at the post office today,” Rachael said. “There was some mail. I should have given it to you earlier.”
She handed Grace a white envelope. It was the first letter she’d received since the project started and the other two stared at her, expecting her to open it immediately. But she folded it in two so it fitted into her jeans pocket.
Anne was equally secretive about one of the letters she’d received. She ripped the envelope open immediately as if she couldn’t wait to see what was inside, skimmed the contents then stuffed the page back into the envelope.
Rachael studiously avoiding any suspicion that she was prying, read her book while this was going on, but Grace watched. She saw that the letter was handwritten but that the paper had a corporate logo at the top. Even from the brief glimpse she had convinced herself that the logo was that of Slateburn Quarries. That only added to her unease, her sense that there was no one here she could trust.
Later she tried to find the letter. When Anne was in the bathroom that night, washing her hair, Grace went through the chest where she kept her clothes, and her handbag. She even emptied the waste bin onto the floor but there was no sign of the letter. Either Anne had kept it with her or she had burnt it when no one was looking. That, in itself, Grace took to be suspicious.
Although she was awake long after the others were asleep, Grace didn’t open her own letter that night. She had enough to think about. She waited until the next morning when she was out on the hill and she could see to the horizon in every direction.
The letter was from her father. He was still living and working in the restaurant and he’d been bad about keeping in touch since she’d left school. This was much longer than his usual notes. Even when she’d been at university she’d been able to tell a lot about his state of mind from the length of his contact. When he was sober and happy he kept in touch with chatty phone calls, postcards with a dirty picture on one side, and on the other gossip about Rod and work, perhaps a new recipe that had excited him. The length of this letter, even before she started reading it, made her suspect that he was depressed again and that he’d been drinking. The tone, obsessive, panicky, convinced her and made her own anxiety worse.
The letter started with a list of questions about Bella. He’d heard somehow about the suicide and he wanted to know all about it. “How did she die?” he asked. “Were you there when they found her?”
“Are they sure it was suicide?”
At first the questions confused her. Why should her father, even in an agitated state, care so much about the death of a middle-aged farmer’s wife? Then an almost throwaway line made her understand. He had written, as if he could take it for granted. “Of course you do remember Bella from the hospital.” Then it came back to her. For the first time she made the connection between the suicide victim and Bella the patient, the central member of the therapy group in St. Nicholas’.
Perhaps though she’d already made the connection subconsciously and that was why the memory of her father’s stay in hospital had been the subject of so many of her daydreams. It was an unsettling thought.
The letter continued: “There was a notice in the paper about her funeral. I’d like to be there. She was a friend and I feel awful that I didn’t give her more support when she needed it. But I can’t face those dreary rituals and I wouldn’t know what to say to her family and friends. So I thought I’d come to see you that day instead. It’ll stop me brooding. I’d like to see where Bella finished up. Strange that she ended her days so close to where I started mine. Perhaps you can take me for a walk. I’ll point out some of my old haunts. Don’t worry about my getting there. A friend has offered to give me a lift.”
The letter ended on a strange note. “You will take care, won’t you?”
She found that touching. He didn’t usually worry about her. She was the one that did all the worrying. All the same it hadn’t occurred to him that it might be inconvenient for him to visit her, or that after his making so many demands on her she might not want to see him.
“It would serve him right if I phoned him and told him not to bother,” she said out loud, but she knew she wouldn’t do it.
She tore the letter into many tiny pieces and threw them a handful at a time up into the air and watched the wind scatter the fragments safely over the hill. Then she walked on, well outside her survey area until she came to Langholme village. She thought she would use the public phone to talk to her father, but quite by chance she stumbled on the house in the photograph, the house where her father had lived before he had married her mother.
It was much more ordinary than she’d expected, on the outskirts of the village, not very close to the big house at all, though you could see Holme Park at the end of the long straight lane. It was tidier, of course, than in her father’s day. The bags of rubbish had gone. She wondered if it might be possible to dream up a plausible excuse for looking inside, but then Anne Preece arrived, intruding again with all her questions. Apparently she’d been at Holme Park drinking coffee with Lily Fulwell. That surprised Grace, who hadn’t previously had the impression that the two were good friends. It was another warning that she had to be careful.
Chapter Twenty-Seven.