Rose lies in bed that night staring up at the ceiling as car lights wash across it and the shadows turn from grey to black. There is no prospect of sleep.
Her mind has been churning with too many thoughts to process. The idea that her mother was alive for so much longer than she had believed is too big a thing to make sense of right now. That’s something she’s going to need to take out and look at from many different angles. Maybe it never will make sense.
She keeps circling back to that night. Not the one Moony knows about. The one seared onto her memory. The mysterious woman. The shouting. The sudden silence.
She never saw the woman leave, even though she had looked out of the bedroom window every time she heard a sound in the street.
Adele had been so strange after that night and drank more than ever.
Rose’s body reacts to the shape in the bay window of the room before her mind does. She’s out of the bed and holding the police baton, yelling, in one smooth move.
But it is only the hunched form of Adele, silently crying and wringing her hands, which are filthy again. Why are her hands so dirty?
Rose’s heart is beating so hard she can barely catch her breath. ‘What do you want?’ she screams. ‘What is it?’
Adele seems to melt away again with the force of her shouting.
As the night endlessly ticks by, she thinks of herself, smaller, looking through the bars of the stairs and feeling cold inside at the adult drama playing out behind closed doors.
She thinks of Gregory, sitting in the house where a murder had been hidden for so long that it ended up leading to more unnecessary deaths. She thinks of the pain buried within the walls of that house, destined to be played out again and again in a terrible loop of suffering and loss.
She thinks of Vincent. About a suitcase of bones that wouldn’t be forgotten. The remains of a human life that never got to have any of the good things that may have been in his future. Remains that were literally right under her nose but she was too blind to see them.
Rose thinks about cowards who can’t face up to the terrible things they’ve done.
Rose wonders why she keeps dreaming of dirt and graves.
She’s not sure whether a few minutes have passed, or longer. But she pulls on clothes without paying much attention to what they are.
Almost on autopilot, she pushes her bare feet into her boots and goes outside. A thin, misty rain instantly chills her to the bone and she remembers that night recently when she found herself out there in her sleep.
Her subconscious mind is such a busy little bee, it seems. Maybe she needs to listen to it more often.
Rose cracks open the swollen door on the broken-down shed at the side of the garden, which she hasn’t been in for at least fifteen years, that she can recall. She’s not even sure she will find what she needs in here.
But luck is on her side for once.
She goes to the bottom of the garden and stands for a moment as icy rain mixes with the tears on her cheeks.
Then Rose Gifford lifts the spade and begins to dig.