Eleven

He lived another life in dreams.

And he was, in the last hour before dawn, dreaming now.

Robert Wilde travelled backwards, dropping the years as always, like redundant clothes, running faster to a point of light. He would feel the days, the weeks, brush past him with their ghost-like voices, with their tenuous hands, their prickling fingertips brushing his body. And, as he swept past them, released from the present night, he would become less heavy, as if his flesh were falling away from him with the backward-falling passage of time. He would have a sensation of dropping, of faces flickering, of rooms, streets, and hills, flexing and fading as the light became brighter.

Then, it would stop.

There would be a moment of absolute tension, while he hung stranded between two worlds. And then, abruptly, and with intense gratitude, he would find himself standing in the old place, in the old silence.

The lake was thousands of feet below him, the grass was cropped short under his feet, and there was a faint veil of dew on his face. It was always first light. Six a.m. Far down the valley, Crummock Water was an unreflective curve of grey.

It was thirty years before, the summer of his eighteenth birthday, the year that he met and married Christine. He was on Fleetwith Pike, waiting for his father, whose progress up the mountain was slower than his. He sat down on his haunches, hugging his knees, looking at the track, at the mist dissolving on further peaks, at the pattern of grey and green and slate blue below, at the thin white line of water, a near-vertical fall of water from Sheepbone Buttress to the black surface of Buttermere.

Three thousand feet below, the village was two or three small white rectangles—the walls of the hotel, and the houses on each side. Somewhere down there was their own house, and his mother.

Then, he would hear a movement on the track, and turn his head. But, instead of his father, it was always Christine. Christine when they were first married. She wore, improbably, a pair of pedal pushers and a white shirt. Her feet were bare on the bright green lichen stretched over the rocks of the summit. She would come to a stop. He would stand up. They would face each other over the few yards of empty air, at what might have been the top of the world, the sides of the mountain disintegrating on each side, the first light touching their heads and shoulders.

He would always know, in the familiar repeated phases of the dream, that Christine had never really climbed Fleetwith or The Stacks with him. But even though it was an experience that they hadn’t shared, his brain perpetually reran it, trying to make the regretful fantasy fit. It was a picture of Christine walking up his parents’ lawn in her bare feet that his sleeping self tried to superimpose on the mountain. Eerie softnesses would touch his face as he stared at her. Strangely textural caresses.

And then he would realize, with utter certainty, that the moment was real. That he had been truly transported back to this place, that he actually stood on the mountain in the delicate hour of dawn. That far under his hand, birds circled the lake, shapes in an unseen current. That he was no longer forty-five, but eighteen. That he had stepped through some kind of unmarked door, into a country where she was still alive.

He watched her face, waiting for the old words.

‘Hello, Robert,’ she said.

And then, as always, he woke up.

For a few seconds Robert Wilde lay on his back, staring up at the ceiling. It was already light, here in the alternative world. He turned his head and looked at the clock. Six a.m. The same time as the dream. But six o’clock three hundred miles and almost thirty years away. Six o’clock on a … what was it? He forced himself back into the present day. It was Wednesday. Wednesday in June. He sighed deeply, and levered himself up on to one elbow.

The coming day filtered through in disconnected details. Alice had a French test today. They had spent last night going through French vocabulary, then discussing her school trip in three days’ time. He put his hand over his eyes momentarily. He saw past Alice’s face, frowning over the book yesterday evening. Saw past into today, to work. To his office. To the incident room they had rigged up, the thirty desks, the computer screens, the faces lined up before him. He took his hand away, opened his eyes again. Christine standing on a mountain. The smile, like Alice.

He swung his legs out of bed, pulled on a pair of shorts, and opened the curtains to look at the street. It was sunny already. A quiet suburban picture met his gaze. Cars lined up in neat driveways in neater gardens. One straight road leading down to the school. Carefully tended colours. Not a leaf out of place.

He went downstairs, plugged in the kettle, telling himself to let go of the dream.

Alice had been five years old, and had just started at primary school, when her mother, Christine, had died. Alice was a most organized child, insistent that her lunchbox should be sitting on the kitchen worktop, in sight the moment she came downstairs in the morning. Always aware what she needed the next day. It had made Christine laugh, because Christine was possibly the least organized person on the planet. Robert would bring her a cup of coffee every morning, early. Christine would make the effort to sit up, complaining. Yet, after her shower, another person would emerge—Christine the whirlwind, the working mother, gathering up Alice and bundling her into the car along with her own folders and bags. Christine had had a research job that year, in a laboratory connected with the Constabulary. She had an eye, an ear, for the specialized mystery of forensics.

He poured the hot water into the cup.

And Christine would have had an idea about this girl—this girl that had been in the car with Alisha Graham. The girl who wouldn’t speak. Christine would find the fact that slipped just beyond the conscious list; she had had a talent for pinning down fragments. In the kind of work that took facts and only facts—facts as cold and hard as they came—Christine had been able to let her mind take leaps. It had come naturally to her. And in those leaps would occasionally be a nugget of truth. Robert had tried to emulate that talent ever since, and sometimes he got it right, but more often than not, like everyone else, he got it wrong, or he was unable to make even the slightest leap into the unknown, reluctant to move past the security of figures on a sheet, names in a file.

‘You have to let go of what you know,’ Christine had always said. ‘Look away from it, pretend you don’t care about it. Think of it like a game. A game of hide-and-seek. Turn your attention away, and it’ll come hurtling up from behind. Like answers come in dreams.’

In dreams … in dreams.

He had taken the coffee up, as usual, that terrible morning.

It had been the same as always: her gradually sitting up in bed, uncurling herself. He had put the coffee down on her bedside cabinet, and pulled the curtains. Then, behind his back, he had heard her breathe in sharply. When he had turned around, he had seen his wife sitting quite upright, her eyes widened a little in an expression of surprise, and her right hand at the back of her head.

‘What is it?’ he had asked.

‘I don’t know,’ she had told him. ‘My head …’

He made the coffee now, grimacing, telling himself to shut the image away. Christine had suffered a cerebral haemorrhage at the age of twenty-nine.

One other memory remained of that black hole of a week.

Alice being picked up by another mother and taken into school, the day before the funeral. Her grey school skirt had needed to be ironed. He remembered standing in the hallway, having ham-fistedly rigged up the ironing board. Remembered trying to get the pleats into the skirt, his fingers feeling like lead. He hadn’t known the right way to do it, and the task, simple though it might have been, had defeated him. Alice had stood watching him.

‘Mummy doesn’t do it like that,’ she had said.

He had bent over the ironing board, tears springing to his eyes, fear and grief knotted in his throat. Defeated by this one small task for his little daughter.

Alice had taken the skirt from him and solemnly put it on.

‘It’s all right … look,’ she had said, trying to reassure him, thinking that he had started to cry because of the awkwardness of ironing the pleats. And the studied intensity of her reassurance, and his anxiety to protect her from the dreadfulness of Christine’s loss, and the fumbling over the fabric of the skirt, had swept over him, dragged him down. When Alice had gone to school, he had lain on the living room couch and wept for a prolonged hour, wretched at his ineptness, afraid of the future.

A long time ago. Nearly ten years. He looked down at his left hand, where he still wore the wedding ring.

He opened the back door of the house now, and walked up the path into the garden.

‘Let go of what you know.’

All right.

He sat down on the bench under the apple tree.

Letting go of what they knew in this particular case wasn’t difficult, for they knew next to nothing about the girl. They knew that she had been in the car, they knew that Alisha Graham was dead, they knew—or, rather more accurately, they guessed, until the post-mortem came in today—that Alisha Graham had been strangled. Knew that by the marks on her neck and around her eyes. Knew that the girl seemed unperturbed … at least, he had thought so until she had cried yesterday. No words, just tears. So he knew … what? He knew she had feelings, at least. Perhaps that she felt afraid. Perhaps grief. Did that mean that she knew Miss Graham, cared for her? Was she weeping for the dead woman, or herself?

The police surgeon’s report had come in late in the afternoon. The mouth swabs, the hair and nail samples. All facts recorded. They may—or may not—mean something once the reports also came in from Alisha Graham and the girl’s clothing, and from the interior of the car.

What else did he know about the girl?

He let his mind drift, and it came to rest on her fingers.

On her fingers, and the marks on her arm.

He frowned as he looked down into his coffee cup. Flat, rounded fingertips, slightly reddened … he ought to know what that was. He had seen it before, on someone else, someone …

He tried to meet the knowledge that skimmed at the edge of his consciousness. Tried to grasp it. But it evaded him. He drained the coffee cup, stood up, and stretched. Damn it, he was still no good at Christine’s game of hide-and-seek.

But it would come to him.

In time.

In the police station, they were just changing shifts.

The sergeant was going through the book, running through those kept in the cells. There were only two: an elderly drunk, known to them all, who was a regular visitor. And the girl.

‘Seemed to sleep during the night,’ the sergeant said. ‘No sound, no fuss. Nothing at all.’

His successor gave him a questioning glance. ‘Hasn’t she said anything yet?’ he asked.

‘Not a word.’

‘Funny business,’ the younger man said. ‘Funny peculiar.’

Together, they went to the cell doors.

The drunk was lying on his back, snoring loudly. Even through the grating in the door, the smell in the small room was overpowering. They closed the aperture, grimaced at each other.

‘She’s in cell three,’ said the sergeant. As he reached her door, he paused for a second. ‘Feel a bit sorry for her,’ he said quietly.

They opened the slat in the door.

At first they couldn’t see her: she was not on the bunk.

The sergeant did a reflex double-take, and leaned forward, expelling his breath in a grateful sigh when he glimpsed her sitting on the floor. Just for a second, an image of finding her stretched out, as dead as Alisha Graham, had illogically sprung into his head.

But his relief from perplexity was short-lived.

The girl was facing the door. She was kneeling on the floor in a little patch of early sunlight. Her arms were raised to the light in an attitude of prayer. She was utterly still, carved from rock.

And down each forearm, blood from the scratches of her own fingernails was already dry.