‘I think we should leave,’ Hazel says. Their bedroom is glaring white from the fresh snow that covers the ground outside. ‘There’s a poem,’ she says, running her hands over her face. ‘I can’t remember who wrote it, but it’s stuck with me. It says the snow is winter folding her linen. But it’s not, is it, Jonny? It may as well be a pit of writhing snakes. Where we are. Now, I mean.’ She turns round to look at him, propped up in bed, bare-chested, sleep-tousled. ‘We’re stuck here and the snakes are coiling round our ankles. It just seems crazy to stay when they’re going to say it’s me, pin it on me. Say that I’m involved at least. And . . .’ She looks at him, panic shadowing her face. ‘I want to go. Get out of here.’
‘We can’t,’ he answers, his eyes fixed on hers.
The early morning is quiet, the winter sun just above the horizon. The sounds of the hotel are muffled: the occasional clang of cutlery on glass, the aroma of coffee percolating up through the floor. The air has that stillness, an atonal hum of peace, which lengthens languidly before it is overtaken by the clamour of industry and the brio of a day that is gathering momentum.
‘If we leave,’ Jonny says, ‘we look guilty. It’s obvious. We have to stay and see what happens. See if the girl is found.’
Hazel extends her arms to him, splays her palms as if presenting him with the room. ‘But all of this, Jonny – all of this will be gone. You don’t understand. You haven’t been there. I have. Once people know . . . all of this – all of my life as I know it now – will be taken away from me.’
Jonny breathes in deeply, pushes back the covers and gets out of bed. He pulls Hazel towards him. Her arms drop down by her sides, limp as a doll’s.
‘You can’t hide forever,’ he says into her hair.
‘But this,’ she says again, pushing him away, ‘isn’t the way. With a girl missing it’s too similar. To before. They’ll attack me – attack us. They’ll say it was me.’
‘But we know it isn’t.’
Hazel looks at him. ‘It doesn’t matter. Once the press come – and they will – they’ll be like a pack of dogs.’ Her voice begins to rise. ‘You don’t know what it was like. For my parents. For all of us. They won’t let it go.’
‘They will.’ Jonny’s voice is firm. ‘They’ll have to. There’s nothing to link you to this girl, to what’s happened here. It’s just . . .’ He grabs a handful of his hair in frustration. ‘I do accept that it’s appalling timing. I’m sorry.’
Hazel manages a small smile for him. It’s all she can do as she realises that Jonny is on a different path from her. He is hoping that this is an aberration, something that will pass in the night like a fever. He doesn’t see that nothing will be the same for them ever again. ‘Oh God, Jonny,’ she says and turns her back on him, looking once more out onto the snow. ‘God help us now.’
Max is up too, sitting at the desk in his room, eyes glazed as he faces his laptop. He slept badly last night, staring up at the dark ceiling, thinking about Alison and his girls.
And Georgie.
Is she out there? he kept wondering. Huddled near the rocks, trying to get warm. Or is she being held somewhere against her will? Little Georgie, crying for her mother, not understanding why she’s been taken away from her. Eventually he had got up and paced his room. Memories of Polly and Grace as babies, as toddlers, chubby, built like tanks, scattered through his mind. That utter dependence, no concept of fear, of any insecurity. He remembers them waddling around, big-eyed and messy-haired. Their smell of Johnson’s baby powder, dried milk, lavender shampoo.
Now it is light and the night before seems like a dream. The New Year has come in less like a lamb than a phantom, a reckoning over a line drawn in the deep snow banked outside. Max can hear the sound of shovels as staff clear a path from the front door down the driveway. They are trying to lead the hotel back to reality, exorcising the spectres that floated above its medieval walls last night.
Balcombe Court is already filled with ghosts. Max has done his research. Headless coachmen; gluttonous gargoyles feasting on the entrails of maidens; lost loves of dead sailors; hung, drawn and quartered pirates. It has them all.
And now it has the spirit of Georgie Greenstreet. A half-spirit as yet, calling to them from wherever she is, alive or dead or somewhere in between. Max rubs his face and takes a long gulp of instant coffee made from the tiny kettle in his room before swigging from a bottle of Gaviscon, trying to quell the constant heartburn he has felt for weeks now. He has to work. He has fifteen hundred words to write today, missing child or not. His deadline looms just the same as it did yesterday and if he wants to make it back to Alison and his girls by the middle of January, he has to finish this book.
He opens up the document and stares at the last paragraph he typed yesterday lunchtime. He had shut down the computer and then gone to the dining room to stretch his legs and order a sandwich. He had seen Georgie, sitting with her parents attacking a plate of spaghetti bolognese. The dining room was fairly empty. The only others in there were the people he had seen again last night, huddled together on the window seat. The pretty woman he now thinks of as Ingrid Bergman, and her partner and the teenage girl.
Max frowns and then closes his eyes. Where has he seen that woman before? Maybe in London when he was working there a few years ago for a literary magazine? A friend of a friend? He prods his fingers into his forehead, straining to remember, before sighing and giving up. Reminding himself that memory never works to order, he turns his thoughts back to The Buccaneer’s Daughter and the scene he was struggling with the day before, where Constance Mandeville discovers that she is bound in marriage to Jago D’Aubert despite her love for Santo Perowne.
Max begins typing, his lips moving as he does, writing the scene again from the beginning, changing the location to the top of the cliffs where Santo climbs down to his ship, abandoning Constance after hearing of her betrothal. As he climbs, Constance – in her grief and despair – tosses a flower down after him. She chooses a primrose, the county flower of Devon.
Primrose.
Max’s hands hover above the keyboard, his whole body frozen as the memory ricochets back to mind at last.
Minimising his manuscript, he brings up the internet and does a rapid search.
Of Primrose.
And murder.