‘HAVE YOU THOUGHT any more about coming with me to see Dean Underwood?’
Ashley squeezed the steering wheel. She was glad she was driving because it gave her an excuse not to look at Freddie while he said this. It was early the next morning, and they were driving to Penrith, where Magda Nowak lived with her four other children. The day felt fully autumnal, filled with that strange golden light that only appears in the mornings and early evenings of autumn days. The sky overhead was peerless and blue, and the spectacular hills and mountains of northern Cumbria tore pieces from it with their jagged teeth.
‘You’re definitely going, whether I do or not?’
There was a beat of silence. The Parma Violet was not a quiet car, and Ashley was glad for its rumbling in that moment.
‘I have to explore every avenue, Ashley.’ He cleared his throat. She wanted to look at him, to try and gauge his mood, but she was worried about what she would see there. ‘The likelihood is that he will spout a load of garbage and none of it will be useful. But I can’t just assume that.’
‘He tried the insanity defence, and it didn’t work,’ she said, her eyes still on the road. ‘But you can’t tell me he was sane. The stuff that he said in court …’
‘He’s since been diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic, and he’s medicated. Do I really think he holds the key to the Gingerbread House Murders? No. Do I think it’s very likely that he’s heard about your involvement and wants to use it as an excuse to have contact with you? Yes.’
They had come to a junction, all lights red. Ashley sat staring ahead, biting her lower lip.
‘Hey.’ Freddie put his hand on her hand. ‘Can you look at me a sec?’
Reluctantly, she looked at him.
‘I won’t lie, I want you to come with me. But I also will not let anything harm you, all right? I won’t put you in any danger. Ever. I enjoy your company too much for that. If you don’t want to come with me, it’s fine. I won’t pressure you to do anything.’
A car beeped behind them, and Ashley realised the lights had turned green. She cleared her throat and accelerated away from the lights. She could still feel the faint press of Freddie’s fingers on her hand, the warmth of it.
‘Let me think about it,’ she said, when she was sure her voice would sound normal. ‘I need to get used to the idea. Just let me think. And I enjoy your company too.’
* * *
Magda Nowak lived in a run-down semi-detached house with a variety of rusting cars in the front garden. She was expecting them, and was even at the door before they were both out of the car. Standing in the darkened doorway with a toddler in her arms, she was a short, slight woman with thick dark hair and circles under her eyes. From within the house came the sound of children shouting and shrieking.
‘Mrs Nowak?’
‘You are the podcast people, yes? Come in, I have tea.’
The hallway was cluttered with toolboxes and car parts. As they stepped inside, Ashley briefly caught sight of a child of undetermined gender on the stairs, but as quick as a bird, they were off out of sight again. There was a brief thunder of small footsteps overhead.
They settled eventually in the kitchen, at a table that appeared to be the only place in the house free of car parts. As she filled their mugs from a teapot, Magda Nowak picked up another lump of oily metal and moved it elsewhere.
‘My husband, his business is cars. You would think cars, that would be outside the house, but not so much, as it turns out.’
‘Thank you for agreeing to speak to us, Mrs Nowak,’ said Freddie.
‘Call me Magda. The police, they were here every day at one point, but now I barely hear anything, from week to week. Eva has been gone three years.’ She sat down at the table with them, her face stern. ‘So I think, why not speak to you? My niece listens to these podcast things, and she tells me that sometimes they can change a case, or help solve them.’
‘That can sometimes happen, but I feel like I should tell you it’s not very common,’ Freddie said carefully. ‘We do have a good chance of getting more people to think about Eva, though, and perhaps someone will remember seeing her. Getting more publicity around the case is always, I believe, a good thing. Would we be able to record this conversation?’
Magda nodded, and there was a faint chime as Freddie set his phone to record. It was chilly in the kitchen. Steam rose from their fresh cups of tea.
‘What happened to Eva?’ Ashley cleared her throat and started again. ‘I mean, what happened the day she disappeared?’
‘It was a school day. She went missing from school.’ Magda reached into her bag, which sat next to the table leg, and pulled out a large photograph of a girl in school uniform. She had dark curly hair, which was partly held in place with a yellow hair clip in the shape of a pineapple. ‘It was her first year of high school, and she loved it. Loves it.’ Magda blinked rapidly and passed the photo to Freddie. ‘She is such a sunny soul, excited to do everything. She had signed up for every after-school club going – learning musical instruments, editing the school newspaper, football club. It got so that I had to get her to sit down and choose just a few, because she would need two of her to get to everything.’ She smiled tightly. ‘And some of the clubs, of course, they cost money. Eva has four brothers and sisters. They can’t always have everything they want.’
Freddie passed Ashley the photograph. She knew it was the power of suggestion at work, but Eva did indeed look like the sort of kid who wanted to be into everything – a kid who made friends easily. The opposite of me when I was a kid.
‘Was she at one of these clubs when she disappeared?’
‘No. It was in the middle of a school day. It was lunchtime. I remember the day for obvious reasons, but also I remember because she was excited they had a visitor at the school that afternoon. A writer or poet, something like that. But then at lunchtime, she went off somewhere by herself, and she never came back. Just gone. Poof!’ Magda made a gesture with her hand as though chasing away a moth, and Ashley noticed that her fingers were trembling.
‘The school doesn’t know where she went?’ asked Freddie.
‘She was caught on the CC television going up to the big field. And that is where the camera coverage ends. She was not seen on the road that runs alongside that field. There was a hole in the fence though, that had been there for some months. The children knew about it and would use it to go to the café up the road. They would buy doughnuts.’
‘Did the school know about the hole?’ Ashley asked. There was a tight, sick feeling in her stomach.
Magda let out a long, ragged sigh. ‘At first, they said they did not know. But it had been there for months! Eventually, the police found a memo for the groundskeeper to deal with it. He just hadn’t got around to it.’
‘You must be very angry with the school,’ said Ashley quietly. ‘I know I would be.’
For the first time, Magda’s severe expression wavered, and it was like catching a reflection in a pond before something disturbs the surface – for an instant, Ashley saw a broken woman, her face lined with impossible grief. ‘You think that they are safe at school, don’t you? Two of her siblings go to the same school, and I would move them if I could, but it would mean so much travel, new uniforms, the disruption. We can’t afford it.’
‘I’m so sorry,’ said Ashley. She realised that she liked Magda, with her chaotic house and her stern face. Her pain was invisible yet present in every movement and every word, and it felt painfully unfair. ‘You must be going spare.’
‘My husband … What can we do? We have four other children, they all need our attention, our help. The youngest is four years old – she doesn’t remember Eva now. She just knows her from pictures.’
‘If you don’t mind, could you tell us what happened after Eva vanished at lunchtime?’ asked Freddie. Ashley glanced at him; he looked too big for the small, crowded kitchen: his jaw too square, his shoulders too broad. It added a surreal note to the day, and she wondered how Magda felt about it.
‘The school were late to raise the alarm, because the event with the poet in the afternoon meant that they didn’t take register immediately. Another thing they have since said will never happen again. When they did, the police were called. At first, the police had all these awful questions – did Eva have troubles at school or with friends? Was she sad? Did we have any arguments? They asked if she might have run away! She was eleven! At night, when she slept, she would still have a night-light on.’
‘But they changed their minds about that,’ said Freddie. It wasn’t quite a question.
Magda nodded. ‘Yes, this is what you mentioned on the phone. The police took it away. I only saw it for a few minutes, but …’ She stood and went over to the kitchen unit. One of the cubby holes was stuffed with papers and letters; she pulled a small stack of glossy photos from it, larger than the school portrait. ‘I took photos with my phone, and then I had a place in town print them out, make them bigger. I imagine the police officers did the same.’ She put the photos on the table, in front of Ashley and Freddie. ‘We got a box in the post the morning after Eva disappeared. This is what was inside it.’
At first, Ashley couldn’t make head or tail of the images. To her, it looked like a random pile of sticks, thin and splintered, with dark brown bark and flashes of pale inner wood. There was string too, the sort of sturdy twine a butcher would use around a joint of pork or beef. She frowned and pulled one of the photos closer to her – the bundle of sticks and twigs sat inside a very normal cardboard box.
‘Oak, holly, and hawthorn branches,’ said Magda in a matter-of-fact tone. ‘I could not tell from looking, but the police told us this. It was only when the thing was out of the box that I could see what it was. A child for a child.’
Ashley looked up, startled by the phrase. Magda picked out one of the photos and laid it on top of the others. In it, the bundle of sticks had been laid against something white – a tablecloth, maybe – and its shape became horribly clear. It looked, very roughly, like a baby. A baby made of sticks.
Freddie was staring at the photo. ‘Was it delivered by your usual postal service?’
‘Yes.’
‘And what did the police say about it?’
Magda shrugged. ‘Very little. They said that they could not be sure it was definitely linked to Eva’s disappearance, but who would send such a thing otherwise?’
At that moment, a girl of around nine or ten – wearing pyjamas – poked her head around the door. For a wild second, Ashley thought that Eva herself had just decided to come home; the little girl looked so much like her older sister, it was like a punch to the gut.
‘Mum, can I have some soup or something?’
Magda waved her over. ‘This is Julia. She is off sick from school today.’ The girl came over to the table and stood next to her mum, looking up at Ashley and Freddie through her dark eyelashes. ‘It used to be that I told them, you must go to school every day, you can’t stay home just because you feel under the weather.’ She shook her head, and Ashley thought of her own mother. ‘Now I do not worry so much. What is one day of school?’ She put her arm around the girl and squeezed her fondly, burying her face in the child’s hair before letting her go. ‘I will bring you some in a minute, Julia. Go back to bed.’
When the girl had gone, Ashley drew one of the pictures to her. It was the one that most clearly resembled a baby.
‘Would you mind if I took a photo of this, Magda? I have a friend I would like to ask about it.’
Magda shrugged. ‘You can take it. I have more copies.’
They stayed for another fifteen minutes or so, drinking the rest of the tea and asking more questions, although there seemed little more to say. Eva Nowak had vanished one day in the middle of a school week, in the middle of a school day, and hadn’t been seen since. The next day, Eva’s family had received a strange package, which the police had taken away with them. Since then, there had been very little. No concrete sightings, no more strange packages, no significant updates from the police, and, although none of them mentioned it around that kitchen table, no body either. Mrs Nowak was left in an agonising limbo.
Back in the car, Ashley took the photograph from her bag and looked at it again. There was something familiar about it, she was sure; some tiny detail that seemed to prick at the back of her mind.
‘So this is the thing that is tying all the cases together,’ she said aloud. ‘All of the official victims received something like this in the post.’
‘It seems that way.’ Freddie was pensive. They had pulled over to the side of the road in the middle of nowhere. The shadows of clouds skirted rapidly across the green flanks of the hills. The wind was picking up. ‘Does it look like a child to you?’
‘Yes.’ Again, there was that faint prickling in the very back of her mind. What was it? ‘Have you seen anything like this in any of the other cases you’ve read about?’
Freddie didn’t answer immediately. He looked out the window and drummed his fingers on the dashboard. ‘It makes me think of Matthew Hoffman. He killed three people and hid their bodies inside a hollow tree. And his house, when they raided it, was stuffed with bin bags full of old leaves. But it’s not the same, not really.’ He shook his head, frustrated. ‘He was obsessed with trees. He loved them. Trees were the point. But this’ – he glanced at the photo in Ashley’s lap – ‘I don’t think the material is the point. I think the shape is the point. Don’t you?’
‘A child for a child, she said.’ Freddie’s face looked uncharacteristically grim. ‘Are you all right?’
‘Oh, I’m fine.’ He gave her a brittle smile. ‘That was just hard, you know? She was keeping it together amazingly well, but you could still feel how much pain she was in. I’ve done a lot of interviews with people who have suffered terrible things, and I guess you never know which ones will get under your skin.’
‘Magda is very brave.’
‘Yeah.’
Ashley looked at the photo again. The discoloured twine was wrapped around the neck, while the flexible twigs were bent into a rough loop that formed the head. The arms and legs were simple bunches, but the twine cinched them so that they seemed to have elbows and wrists. Here and there, the long spikes of the hawthorn sprouted, making the thing look dangerous, even evil. She frowned.
‘Freddie, I will come with you to see Dean Underwood.’
He looked at her, startled. ‘You will? What made your mind up?’
Ashley smiled slightly, then shrugged. ‘If Magda can suffer like that and still be brave, I reckon I can go and speak to Underwood. It’s a small thing, really. And I’ll hold on to this for a while.’ She held up the photograph. ‘There’s someone I want to show it to.’