Lofty trunks of trees loom like spectres in the drag of dusk. Joanna senses them shift when she cuts the engine. These invisible spirits are all she has to invite her back to this place she knew as a child, and it takes her a moment before she feels brave enough to get out of the car. Grateful to have the dog for company, she strokes his ears and gathers the roses, chocolates and handbag, deciding to come back for her other stuff when she’s established the cottage is habitable.
Mike will be with her this time tomorrow, she’s only got to get through one night on her own. Digging out the keys, she unhooks the side gate and navigates the path with its rain-filled potholes. Instantly identifying the terrace: a crumbling affair of cracked paving slabs plundered by thistles where she, Caroline and Dora occasionally ate alfresco meals. The abandoned wrought iron chairs with their mouldy cushions are so unchanged she could almost imagine the three of them had just stepped away for a moment.
Encouraging the dog to wander the garden, it surprises Joanna how small everything looks. In less than a few strides she’s reached the fence where the horses used to come for apples. Could they still be here? The thought is ridiculous. She scans the spread of darkening horizon. Those creatures would be long gone. It will be night soon, and remembering how it draped everything in a tangible blackness, an infinitesimal tremor runs the length of her. She wonders if it’s the same nowadays, or whether the sprawl Cinderglade has become in the intervening years now pollutes the night-time dark. The world beyond the village’s barricade of trees doesn’t feel closer, but neither does she recall the rumble of the M5 that is clearly evident now. Everything changes, she thinks a little gloomily, watching phantoms of her and her dead sister, the spilt light of childhood in their eyes as they canter across the lawn on their hobby horses.
Unlocking the back door, she flicks on the overhanging bulb. Mrs Hooper did say the electricity was connected, but it still comes as a relief to see she’d been right. Strange to be back, she inhales Pillowell’s stale, unlived-in smell, blinking against the brightness. A white dust, thick enough to draw your name in, hangs over everything, but it’s not as bad as she anticipated. Aside from the mottled brown marks on the walls above the sink, the hammocks of cobwebs quivering in the rush of air, the place looks pretty sound, and although obviously in need of love, it is at least warm.
Placing the Belgian truffles on a work surface littered with the bodies of desiccated insects, she brushes them aside and strains low into a cupboard under the sink for something to soak the roses in. The white petals, to her disappointment, are already fringed with brown, and she doubts they’ll last much beyond tomorrow. She retrieves a grimy jug; the tap creaks when she untwists it, spewing a draught of brown water that takes a few minutes to run clear. Investigating further, she finds the cutlery weighting the drawers is corroded; likewise, the array of cooking utensils suspended from rusted hooks. And a quick poke inside the fridge displays a jar of pickled gherkins, a saucer of something furred in blue, bulbs of wizened onions, which makes her close it again.
‘Hey, Buttons,’ she calls to the dog. ‘Fancy a shot of penicillin?’
Moving to the cooker, turning a dial to the corresponding hob, she is reassured by the building heat as she opens up cupboards, empty but for three rusty tins of minestrone soup and mismatched crockery. Exploring the hall, with its musty smell and lumpy rugs, she finds the radiators are warm to the touch as she leans into the sitting room. With its bare walls and minimal furniture, it looks sad, but they could fill it with the stuff in the London flat after it’s sold; it wouldn’t take much to restore Pillowell to its cluttered beauty. Brightening when she spots a neat stack of wood by the hearth, she decides she’ll light a fire tomorrow, make it cosy for when her family arrives. Kind of Tilly to see to things here, suspecting Mrs Hooper told her she was coming and she went the extra mile. Joanna toys with the idea of dropping into the shop to thank her until the thought of seeing Frank Petley bumps up against her and she changes her mind. The bloke was disturbing enough to her nine-year-old self, she doubts the effect would be any less so now she’s thirty-seven.
‘Come on, boy – let’s go fetch the rest of our stuff.’ She claps her hands at Buttons who, nose to floor, doing a room by room, insists on giving their temporary quarters the once-over first. Watching him, she falls in love with him all over again. ‘I don’t know who you’re trying to kid,’ she jokes. ‘Pretending you’re some kind of guard dog.’ A jerky laugh that makes him look up at her. ‘You’d lick a burglar to death.’
It takes three trips to empty the car. Black bin bags of linen and towels, bags of groceries, a box of cleaning products, her holdall, the dog’s bed. She leaves the suitcase Liz gave her in the boot. Satisfied the fridge is clean enough, she fills it with the foodstuffs bought on the way, loading the fruit and vegetables for the weekend into Dora’s old vegetable rack. Seeing it has slipped down, she repositions the little kitchen sign – Chicken Today, Feathers Tomorrow – to its nail behind the taps, and smiles into a thinning memory of her and Caroline reading it aloud and giggling. Joanna carries her sister’s remembered laugh, along with the bumper bags of linen, through the glow upstairs, stopping halfway to slide an arm over the cobweb-covered Ophelia .
She makes up the beds – Freddie and Ethan are to have her and Caroline’s old room, her and Mike, Dora’s. The carpet and curtains smell damp, but the overall impression isn’t too bad. The duvets and pillows she brought from home, with their pretty cotton covers, are fresh, and the boys, much as she and Caroline had done, will think it’s a great adventure. The latch on the window is stiff and rust comes off on her hands, but prising it open, a fresh breeze travels the room. With it another memory: netted in shadows that never cut her free, she turns to see the spirit of her younger self, staring out at the thrashing rain on her final afternoon in Witchwood. A time when she feared the sun would never shine again after the death of her summertime friend.
Shunted back to the present, Joanna believes those last few days in Witchwood were the saddest in her life. And touching the windowsill, avoiding a toxic spray of mushrooms sprouting from the wall, she picked around the peeling paintwork, her mind spinning to Caroline again. What the hell was the vicar going on about? Referring to Kyle Norris by his first name, as if he knew him. Joanna’s mind, working overtime, scrapes around for something, anything, that allows her to sew the truth together.
Head buzzing, Joanna needs a glass of wine to relax her, help her sleep. ‘Bugger,’ she says, back in the over-bright kitchen, realising the most important provisions have been left in the boot. ‘Another trip to the car it is, then,’ she informs Buttons who, reading her mind, is waiting and wagging by the back door. ‘Come on, boy.’
The screech of a barn owl, amplified against the cloth of night. It spooks her. Grabbing a bottle of Shiraz from the net in the boot, she snatches up the torch Mike keeps in here for emergencies. Stabbing the beam into the flickering undergrowth, her frantic searching triggers a long-buried memory of torchlight around Witchwood: fierce shafts of white, poking the crevasses of the woods as villagers, piloted by the vicar, searched all night long for Ellie Fry.
What was that ? Human or animal, Joanna doesn’t know, and Buttons, soppy as he is, misses it. But something definitely scurried into the trees. She swallows, hears the ancient creep of Drake’s Pike’s undercurrent in her ears, and waits for confirmation; for whatever it was to show itself again.
But nothing does. And breathing into the dangling moments of eerie calm, what the torchlight claims next makes her jolt in horror. A scattering of spent cigarette ends littering the back gate. Bending to examine them, she’s surprised how dry and fresh they are. Someone’s been here, watching her moving around inside the cottage – the assumption, a shocking one, has her pulse bouncing wildly in her wrists.
Rushing inside and locking the door against her fears, she excavates a wine glass from Dora’s old sideboard, noticing the tremor in her hand as she wipes dust from its insides with the tail of her scarf. Untwisting the cap and pouring a generous amount, she gulps it down to steady herself, and wishes she hadn’t come back here, sensing she isn’t welcome. Mike, she thinks, her heart rate slowing; she’ll feel better if she talks to him. Pulling herself together, telling herself the cigarette butts were probably there before she arrived, she takes another fortifying mouthful of Shiraz and retrieves her Samsung Galaxy from the pocket of the coat she hasn’t bothered to remove.
It’s dead.
Not the battery, she’s plenty of that, the problem is the lack of internet or mobile signal. She shakes it through the air, switches it on and off, all to no avail. Maybe – the thought a desperate one – Witchwood is one of those rural blackspots she’s heard about. Just her luck. It’s okay. Determined to stay calm, she hastens to the twilit hall, reaches for the brown shiny-shelled telephone that’s familiar from childhood. She lifts the receiver to her ear. Nothing. The silence communicating the line has been disconnected.
Now what? She promised to call, Mike will be worried. In the unravelling seconds, it dawns on her with a cold clarity that she is totally cut off from the world and, apart from her Labrador, utterly alone. Mrs Hooper will have a phone. But the idea shrivels before it properly forms – there’s no way she’s setting foot out there again tonight. Trailing her billowing unease through Pillowell’s downstairs rooms, drawing curtains and dropping blinds over the blackened window panes, she shuts out the eyes she fears are peering in from outside. No one would hear her scream if she was in trouble. Her trepidation: a bolting horse she can’t rein in, as she feels the pinch of danger.