AT HOME, ALL the lights in the house were still on, and as soon as Ashley let herself in, her mother appeared, fussing around her like a moth around a lamp.
‘Ashley? Ashley, what happened? Are you all right?’
As usual, when faced with her mother’s shrill panic, Ashley felt herself draw away from it, her own raw emotions carefully packed away and hidden. She forced herself to smile, even though all she wanted was to go to bed and cry in the privacy of her own room.
‘Mum, I’m fine.’ Realizing that this was a painfully obvious lie, she added, ‘I mean, it’s been a horrible day. But I’m all right.’
‘Are you hungry? I can warm you up some dinner.’
Ashley let herself be drawn into the kitchen, then watched helplessly as her mother shovelled a portion of shepherd’s pie onto a plate and then into the microwave.
‘Where’s Dad?’
Her mother seemed to shiver, and she ran her hands up and down the sleeves of her jumper.
‘The phone kept ringing. People from newspapers, TV, all of it. I stopped picking it up in the end.’
‘What?’ Ashley thought of the crowd of reporters outside the police station. She was lucky they weren’t camped outside the house, she realised. ‘Fuck me, what a mess.’
‘My angel, please don’t speak that way.’
‘Sorry. Where is Dad? Is he back?’
The microwave dinged, and her mother placed the steaming plate of lamb mince and mashed potato in front of where she sat at the breakfast nook. Ashley picked up a fork and then looked at the food, her stomach churning.
‘Your father.’ Her mother’s voice was flat. ‘Yes, he came back. All of a … all of a tither. You know him.’ She rubbed her fingers compulsively on a tea towel, her mouth thin with distaste.
I know him, Ashley thought. What will this be to him? An awkward scandal? No. Free publicity more like.
‘He went back out again though. I didn’t ask him where.’
Helen Whitelam had learned many years ago not to ask her husband where he went at night.
‘It’s all over the news, you know, that the little lad has been found.’ Her mother was twisting the tea towel in her hands now, wringing it back and forth like the neck of a chicken. ‘And I thought, thank God, thank God my angel was there to bring him home.’
Ashley thought of how the moss had been growing merrily across his cheek. She put the fork down and pushed the plate away.
‘Mum, I don’t think I can eat this. I’m sorry. I’m just going to go to bed.’
At that moment, the door slammed, and they heard the familiar sound of Ashley’s father stomping down the hall. He got to the kitchen and stood for a moment, glaring at them. His eyes looked watery.
‘I’m not sure I know what to say to you, girl,’ he said eventually. ‘How did you do it?’
‘Dad, I …’
‘Because if someone’s giving you tip-offs, you’ll have to tell me. I’ve spoken to our solicitor, and if we share this information with the police up front, it might clear up some of the mess you’ve made.’
‘Tip-offs? No one is giving me tip-offs!’
‘Then what?’ He took a step towards her, his hands curled into fists by his sides. Ashley couldn’t tell if he was angry with her or frightened of her.
‘I …’ Ashley shifted in her chair. ‘I saw something.’
‘Saw what?’ He scowled. ‘You can’t have seen the poor lad from the road.’
‘No, I mean, I saw …’ How could she possibly explain this? ‘I saw shapes, figures. Shadows. Crowded around the trees.’
For a long moment, no one said anything at all. Ashley listened to the hum of the fridge. Heat was prickling across her back.
‘You’re seeing the angels again,’ her mother said brightly into the silence.
‘No.’ Logan took another sharp step towards Ashley, almost as though he meant to strike her. His face had turned red. ‘Not this bloody nonsense again. I’m not having it. I will not have it.’
‘My mother used to see the angels too,’ Helen said softly, just as though Logan hadn’t spoken. ‘Did I ever tell you that, Ashley? When I was little, she talked about them all the time.’
‘Yes, and your fruitcake mother ended up in the loony bin,’ Logan snapped. He pointed at Ashley with one thick finger. ‘We had all this nonsense when she was a kid! I won’t have you telling these lies again, Ashley.’
Despite herself, Ashley laughed. ‘You could have fooled me, given that’s how we make a bloody living!’ She stood up from the table, the chair screeching over the kitchen tiles. ‘I’m telling you the truth, Dad. The Heedful Ones, they’re back. They showed me where the kid was.’
‘Angels,’ Ashley’s mother added quietly. ‘They’re angels. That’s what my mum called them.’
‘You will shut up about your bloody mother.’ Logan turned his furious gaze on Ashley again. Sweat had beaded on his shining scalp. ‘You’ve had a difficult day, Ash, so I’m going to let this slide. Go to bed, get some sleep. In the morning I expect to hear some bloody sense out of you. Right?’
Ashley froze, swallowed hard, then nodded. This was always the way it had been with them. It had been a mistake to mention the Heedful Ones at all. Her mother looked at her with wide, bloodshot eyes, the tea towel still twisted around her pink fingers. Under the bright kitchen lights, she looked like a lurid mannequin.
Up in her own bedroom, Ashley closed the door and then locked it – the lock on her door was another hard-won concession, one that she was only supposed to use during the day and never at nighttime. She went and opened the window and stood by it, letting the cool air from outside move against her skin until she had goose bumps. Then, she took her phone out of her pocket. She had several missed calls from Aidan, so she called him back.
‘Bloody hell, Ash. Are you all right?’
Ash laughed softly. Speaking to Aidan was easier. ‘I’ve had better days. Who would have thought your plan would be quite so successful? The police certainly weren’t expecting it, I can tell you that much.’
‘Shit. I am sorry, Ash.’
‘What are you apologising for? You could hardly have known I’d actually find him.’ You couldn’t have known, Ash repeated to herself. She thought of DCI Turner asking if she was protecting anyone, and she shook her head. ‘Dad’s having kittens, as you can imagine.’
‘How did you do it? I’ve been thinking about it all day, and I can’t get my head round it.’ Aidan gave a hoarse bark of laughter. ‘I mean, fuck. You really are the prodigy of the family.’
‘I don’t know.’ Ashley thought of trying to tell Aidan about the Heedful Ones, but the idea of him dismissing her the way their father had was too much. He had not believed her when they were kids, and he wouldn’t believe her now. ‘I had a … hunch.’
‘A hunch?’ This time Aidan laughed properly. ‘I never thought you’d actually find the kid. Or anything useful. I thought we’d generate some publicity, get some more punters in, try a few more police jobs, go from there. You’ve managed to skip that stage and propel us straight into the big time.’
Ashley frowned. ‘What do you mean?’
‘Ah.’ Aidan sighed. ‘He didn’t tell you? Dad’s on the case. He’s been arranging interviews with newspapers, TV people, you name it. You’re in for a busy week.’
‘Fuck.’ Heat prickled across her back. ‘I don’t want to do any of that. What is there to say? I found the poor little sod, and I’m probably scarred for life because of it.’ She made a strangled noise that was something like a laugh, but she felt close to crying. ‘I certainly don’t want to relive the whole bloody thing over and over.’
‘Ash, come on, you’ll have to speak to someone about it. I know it’s awful, but’ – his voice became very quiet – ‘it couldn’t have worked out better, could it? Your name and face all over the news, you’ll be booked in advance for years. Red Rigg House will be at capacity.’
‘A little boy died, Aidan.’ Ashley pressed her lips together.
‘Yeah, and now his parents have a body to bury, thanks to you.’ Aidan sighed. ‘I am sorry, Ash, but I feel like this is something you can’t avoid. People will want to know how you did it. So you’ll have to come up with a good story.’
‘It was luck,’ she replied. ‘Just luck. Good or bad, depending on how you look at it.’
She wished her brother good night, put on her pyjamas, and crawled into bed. She took one of the small blue tablets Aidan had given her to help her sleep, and then she got out her MacBook and the slip of paper that had been under her windscreen wiper. The Murder on the Mind podcast had a swish-looking website, and it had feeds on Apple Music and Spotify, but so what? Anyone could make a podcast look professional these days. With a bit of poking about, she found that it had over 30,000 regular listeners, and that made her pause. Previous episodes covered a variety of old and new true crime cases. There was an episode on the mysterious deaths of three Girl Scouts in America in the 1980s that had recently been solved through DNA analysis, and an episode on the disappearance of a young man who had been seen walking into a busy bar on CCTV, only for him to never reappear. On the About section of the website, there was a brief biography of the person behind the podcast. Freddie Miller was an audio engineer from Maine with a degree in criminal psychology. From the photo, he was in his early thirties, handsome in that clean-cut and firm-jawed way Americans often were, slightly undercut by an infectiously goofy grin and a big pair of wire-framed glasses. To Ashley, he looked as though he ate apple pie every day and drank a glass of milk with dinner. It was difficult to imagine him chasing her for salacious details about the body she’d found. She looked again at his handwritten note. I love this car!
‘What would Dad do if I went over his head?’ It was an interesting thought. If Aidan and her father insisted that she had to talk to someone, perhaps it was only fair that she should get to choose who that someone was. She ran her finger across the trackpad and opened up Gmail.