Ben is dreaming about Ellie. He is sitting on a pebbled beach watching her swim through a choppy grey sea. Not too far out, just beyond the breakers, swimming in a horizontal line to the shore, her slim arms slicing neatly into the water, exactly as he’d taught her.
Rachel is beside him, long bare legs stretched out on a towel, her thick red hair scraped up in a high ponytail, her caramel eyes soft and smiling, full lips curved to show just a hint of teeth.
He turns back to the water and sees that Ellie has been joined by someone else. He squints and feels a surge of emotion. Gemma. The two of them – his daughter and his sister – are bobbing in the waves like strange, disembodied heads, until synchronised, they begin to alter course, swimming together towards the horizon, moving away in a steady front crawl. He watches them, the ache in his chest expanding with every stroke, until the tiny bobbing heads are nothing but specks and he stands and shouts their names, feeling a rising panic, knowing they are too far away to hear, watching helplessly as the miniscule smudges disappear from view. When he turns back to Rachel, she, too, has vanished.
Ben’s eyes snap open in the dark, instantly awake. Ellie. He should check on her.
The blue light from the clock illuminates the curly blonde hair spread across the pillow beside him. Chrissie. Not Rachel. He is at home with Chrissie. Which means he won’t be peeling himself from the mattress to check on Ellie. She isn’t here.
The clock shows 00:31. He’s only been asleep an hour or so. Which means it’s going to be a long night. Rolling onto his back, Ben stares at the ceiling, waiting for his heartbeat to slow. He knows this crushing panic. The adrenalin. The nightmares. He remembers them well, his frequent night companions after Gemma’s death.
Lying in the dark, he returns to the counselling session he’d attended after Gemma’s death, the one Rachel had organised for him. The one where he’d sat in a quiet room on a cushion-scattered sofa and listened as a softly spoken Scottish woman had asked him about these moments of panic. How he coped. What he did.
He’d regarded her with confusion. What he did? He did nothing. He endured. He let the panic rise like a tide from the messy knot of turmoil at his core, let it engulf him. ‘I’m a police officer,’ he’d told her. ‘It comes with the territory.’
The counsellor had considered this for a moment. ‘Your fight-flight response is important for your job. It’s there to protect you. But you don’t want it to overwhelm you. There are things you can do, to help yourself in moments of extreme stress.’ She’d held his gaze. ‘Or in moments of extreme emotion, like fear… or grief.’
She’d shown him how to tap into a sensory memory, one he could return to as a calming mechanism. Sitting there in the safety of her consultation room, he’d returned in his mind to a favourite afternoon at a skate park with Ellie as a young girl, where he’d watched proud as punch as she’d thrown herself down concrete ramps and runs, before they’d sat together on a bench eating ice creams, Ellie’s short legs swinging as she’d turned to him and said, unprompted, ‘I love you, Daddy.’
‘How much?’ he’d asked, nudging her with a playful elbow.
‘More than skateboards and ice cream.’
Such innocence. Such simplicity.
To a degree, Rachel had been right. The session had helped a little. Sometimes it was annoying being married to a therapist. But here he was, five years later, with that familiar panic rising in his chest and the sweat beading on his brow and his dreams about Gemma returning in full force, only this time shot through with his fears for Ellie. It didn’t take a counsellor to decipher any of it. Yet no matter how hard he tries to fix on a moment from another time, a moment when he felt happy and at peace knowing everyone was safe, he can’t rid himself of this new dream, of the image of Ellie swimming with Gemma into the deep grey ocean. Terrible things happened in the world. None of the people he loves are immune. How does he live with himself, if he cannot protect them?
His thoughts drift to Rachel. He wonders if she is awake. If she is lying in bed staring up at the ceiling worrying about their daughter. If he knows anything about Rachel anymore, he’s almost certain she’ll be wakeful and worried, too.
Ben tries a breathing exercise and after a time, feeling his pulse gradually calm, he realises there is something else. Something floating just out of reach. He knows this feeling. It comes to him sometimes, when he’s working a case. A tantalising sense that there is order to be found, if only he can arrange the pieces of the puzzle into the correct order. He tries to focus. Tries to push away thoughts of Rachel and Chrissie and pull the fragments of whatever eludes him closer, but they slip away, muddling out of shape. Beside him, Chrissie murmurs. She shifts her position, but she doesn’t wake.
What is he missing?
He knows the way his colleagues work, their modus operandi. The theories they’ll be batting back and forth. He’d be exactly the same… is exactly the same. Keep an open mind. Follow the evidence, the breadcrumbs. But right now, the breadcrumb trail only seems to lead in one direction. Straight to Ellie. Her lies. Her bloodstained clothes. The mask from her costume. Her altercation with the dead girl up at the folly. He remembers Ellie standing in Rachel’s kitchen, evading his gaze, agitated under their scrutiny. She lied to you, says a small voice in his head. What else is she lying about? What else is she hiding?
Ben’s mind zeroes in. Hiding.
What was it Ellie had said that night? Something about the woods. Something that had caught his attention. Something that had made him think she wasn’t being completely honest. He grapples with the memory, replays it over and over until her words return. Did they check the woods? she’d asked. They’re good hiding places.
It had struck him as an odd thing to say at the time. Did she know something? Was she intimating that they had missed something in their search of the crime scene?
Ben slips quietly from the bed. Downstairs, perched at the kitchen island, he powers up his laptop. He might have been taken off the Sarah Lawson case, but he still has access to the central police database. Ben chews his lip, his face cast in the blue light of his screen. He logs into the system and types ‘Thorncombe Folly’ into the search function. The system isolates twelve or so reports that he scans through in turn, hoping something of note will leap out.
Most of the files are of criminal damage to the folly, dating back sporadically over the years, mainly vandalism and graffiti to the steel door that had once blocked entry to the tower. He filters through the rest, one relating to a clumsy arson attempt eight years ago, when some idiot had attempted to set fire to the structure; another logged by a concerned local about discarded syringes found in the vicinity. The last is a report on illegal tree-felling traced to a group of travellers who had passed through the area in 2021.
He tries another search filter, typing ‘Thorncombe Woods’ to cast his net a little wider – too wide, perhaps – but it’s worth a shot. A flurry of additional reports appears. Fly-tipping. An abandoned stolen vehicle blocking one of the woodland trails. A couple cautioned for an act of indecent behaviour in the woodland car park. His fingers hesitate over the ‘death by dangerous driving’ RTA report logged on the Sally in the Wood road five years ago, the date of Gemma’s death. Ben sighs. It’s no good. None of it seems connected to the Sarah Lawson case.
He rubs his eyes. Exhaustion is catching up with him. He tells himself to go back to bed and try to catch a few hours’ kip, but there’s still something nagging at him. Check the woods, she’d said.
They had checked the woods. Khan had demanded a grid search of the steep vale.
The woods are huge, she’d said. The quarry, the caves… they’re good hiding places.
He straightens on the stool. The caves. Why would Ellie mention the caves? Was it a place the kids frequented? It could’ve been a throwaway comment, but on the other hand perhaps she knew something, something they had overlooked? Had they found a way inside them?
At the team briefing, DC Crawford had assured them the cave entrances beneath the escarpment were sealed from entry. But had he actually checked? What if it wasn’t about what was going on up in the woods… but below them?
Ben types ‘Thorncombe Caves’ into the search bar. He’s not expecting much, but two reports flash up on the system. One about a potholer causing a kerfuffle back in 2020 by getting stuck in the caving system during lockdown. The other, a more recent incident recorded just two months ago. Ben pulls up the case of indecent exposure on the hillside above Sally in the Wood, unsure why this should’ve come up in his search.
He is only a few lines in when he feels the hairs on the back of his neck prickle. Two dog walkers had reported an early morning encounter with an unknown male in the woods. Rounding a corner on one of the steep walking trails above the roadside, they had come across a dishevelled-looking man in a state of undress. One of the women had screamed in alarm and the man had taken off into the woods, their dog giving chase. The dog had remained in the woods, barking incessantly, refusing to return on command and so in the end, the women had reluctantly gone to retrieve the animal. They’d found it fussing at a sealed entrance into the old quarry caving system. The women had managed to get the dog back on its lead and had returned to the trail without further incident, but they had been unnerved by their encounter and had reported it to the local station later that morning. The officer handling the case? DC Dave Crawford.
Ben sucks in a breath. Crawford had gone out to take a look but had found no trace of anyone loitering in the woods and reported the cave entrance sealed. Reading on, Ben finds the women’s description of the male. ‘I couldn’t be sure of his age, he looked rather pale, with skinny, stringy hair, but there was something all over him. Dirty black markings. Words, possibly tattoos, though I don’t think so. It was ever so creepy.’
Ben feels the air compress in his lungs. He minimises the report on his screen and opens an internet search browser, typing ‘access Thorncombe caves’, scrolling until he finds a local website devoted to amateur potholers and cavers. He reads through the chat forum, zeroing in on a thread where a handful of cavers discuss how to gain access to the sealed caves. It’s even easier than Ben had imagined. With a little determination and a few tools, it seems anyone could gain entry, if they wanted.
Ben sits back on his stool, the possibilities turning through his mind. Good hiding places. It could be nothing. But on the other hand? He’s got nothing to lose by heading back into the woods and investigating for himself.