IT’S SNOWING AGAIN WHEN THEY get outside. And velvet dark. Snowflakes bite into Lily’s skin like ice mosquitoes. Tom and Lily train their torches on the ice house in front of them. It’s still a tomb for two. Sara has insisted that Gray stay in the chapel, for now, at least. She keeps the incense flowing and candles glowing. ‘Just as he liked it,’ she says.
‘We should go in,’ Tom says, swallowing. ‘It’s too cold to stay out here.’
‘Colder in there,’ Lily replies. Tom doesn’t disagree.
Even so, they approach the ice house. The door has frozen again, and it takes Tom several kicks to get it unstuck. They leave it firmly open, wedged by several large rocks to stop anyone locking them in.
‘We should put incense in here, too,’ Tom says. ‘To honour them, like Gray.’
Lily knows, though, that he wants to cover the smell of decay that, despite the ice, hangs in the air as on a butcher’s hook.
Lily walks over to Ronnie’s body. She wants to cover him up in a blanket, keep him warm. She always wanted to look after him, and it seems that doesn’t stop in death. It’s why she thinks marriage vows are strange. Why until death do you part? Doesn’t love carry on after death? She holds her mum in her heart, why not someone she loves enough to cleave to forever?
‘It feels wrong to look for the key,’ Tom says. He’s staring down at his brother. His tears drop onto the ice. ‘He’d be gutted that we haven’t had a proper wake for him.’
‘He’d say that if he wasn’t drinking, everyone else should be. He’d want you to dream up macabre punny names for cocktails for him to make, using this ice.’
‘It’s true,’ Tom says, wiping his eyes. ‘He’d be making mortinis for everyone. And morgue-aritas.’
Lily laughs, putting her hand over her mouth. ‘Those are terrible, Tom. Ronnie would have loved them.’
‘He loved you very much, Lily,’ Tom says. ‘And so do I.’
‘Then let’s find the key for him.’
With a peripheral search of the ice house completed and no key found – including looking at the outer walls and roof – Lily starts to worry that they’ll have to move Ronnie and Philippa outside to get to the ice. She can tell Tom is, too. He’s lying on the cold floor, peering into the ice blocks. ‘I can’t see anything,’ he says. He chews his lip, glances at the bodies, then away.
Lily then notices that the ice-pick has moved. When they left Ronnie lying in state on the ice, the pick had been hanging on the wall. Now it was placed against the far side of the ice blocks, away from Ronnie and Philippa.
‘We should try the blocks at the end,’ she says. ‘The ones nearest the ice-pick.’
Tom grabs the ice-pick and begins.
*
Over an hour later, they emerge from the ice house with red faces and an ice-cold key. Mrs Castle is standing deep in the snow with two Thermoses on a tray and tartan wraps over her arm. She hands Tom and Lily one of each. ‘Don’t tell me waiting for us out here was in the rules as well, Mrs C,’ Tom says. ‘Because if it was, Aunt Lil was taking things too far.’
‘It wasn’t,’ Mrs Castle says. ‘I thought you might have frozen in there.’ She then turns and stomps back across the fields towards the house.
‘That’s practically a marriage proposal from Mrs Castle,’ Tom says, as they follow her into the dark.
*
After a dinner of soup, made with vegetables and barley, and fresh baked bread with seaweed butter, Tom and Lily go up to bed. This time, it’s Lily who suggests they sleep in the same room. ‘Do you think we should ask Sara, too?’ Lily asks, really hoping he says ‘no’. ‘She’s in a bad way, I’ve never seen her like this. She almost seemed “nice” earlier.’
Tom’s laugh reverberates round her bedroom. ‘Absolutely not. There is no way I’m going to sleep with her nearby. I’d be killed mid-snore. But don’t worry, I absolve you of the responsibility of looking after her.’
Excusing herself, Lily goes into her little bathroom while Tom fetches things to sleep on and in. Corset unlaced and on the floor, she turns side-on to the mirror. She strokes the swell of her belly in a way she never has before. It’s bigger than when she left London. ‘That’ll be all the Yorkshire air,’ she says to Bean.
Through the door, she can hear Tom lugging his mattress across the floor. He walks back, and she hears a key turn in the lock. They’ll be safe tonight.
She pulls on her flannel pyjamas and looks around for something to cover her tummy. And then stops. This is Tom. If she doesn’t let him see her as she truly is, she’ll never let anyone.
Lily opens the bathroom door and steps into her bedroom. Tom is nestling into his makeshift bed on the floor. He glances up at her at her, and grins. ‘Good to see you not hiding my niece away.’ He waves at Lily’s belly. ‘Hello in there, little one!’ His face grows serious. ‘You’ll still have to be careful, though. If Sara is the killer then she can’t know about the baby. She was saying earlier that it was suspicious that you haven’t drunk at all, but I fended her off by saying you are on mega antibiotics for your terrible cystitis.’
Lily groans. ‘Oh, Tom.’
‘What I think you mean to say is, “Thank you, Tom, for your discretion and valour.”’
‘I do mean that, you’re right,’ Lily says, as she clambers over Tom’s bed and gets into her own. ‘And thank you for always thinking of me. I’m not sure I deserve it.’ As she wriggles deeper under the cold sheets, her feet find something warm at the bottom. Reaching down, Lily pulls up a hot water bottle in her old fleecy penguin cover.
‘Mrs C is being a sweetie again, then,’ Tom says. ‘She can’t fool us with that stern schtick anymore.’
Lily places the hot water bottle against her aching back and lies down in her own nest of arranged pillows.
‘Grief is weird,’ Tom says, his sleepy voice slurring. ‘I was just thinking how brilliant it is that I’ll be an uncle again, and then I plummeted, thinking that Ronnie won’t meet her. And he’s such a good one, too. Better than me.’ He puts his face into the pillow. She can’t hear his sobs, but she can see his shoulders shake.
‘I’m so sorry, Tom.’
Lily moves to get out of bed, but Tom says, his voice still wobbly, ‘Stay there, cuz. You need to rest. We just need to hold on for another few days. Isabelle will be here on Twelfth Night, or maybe Rachel and Holly will have contacted the police.’
‘And then we can leave this place forever,’ Lily says.
‘Unless we win it,’ Tom says. He sits up now. The moonlight creeping through the gap in the curtains lights up his open face. ‘Imagine what we could do with all this space.’
‘This cursed space.’ Lily feels her mood descend again. Tom’s right. Grief is weird, sending you giddy one minute, and plummeting the next. She keeps seeing Gray on the chapel floor. He had been about to tell her something. Something that had him killed, with the silver coins of the betrayer left in his mouth.
‘Whatever it is, someone really wants to get their hands on it. And I don’t want them to get it.’ Tom’s voice has ice in it now.
‘You don’t think it could really be my dad, do you? The murderer?’ Lily says. She hears her voice – it sounds so young. So scared.
‘I should never have said that,’ Tom replies. ‘I was just speculating, conjecturing. But that’s not fair on you. Sometimes my mouth flaps before my synapses adjudicate. I’m sorry.’
‘Apology accepted.’ But the thought of her dad being out there, waiting for her, even being the figure who saved her, remains. Like a piano note fading but never going away.
‘I’m glad you’re here, Lily,’ Tom says. ‘Despite all the horror.’
‘So am I, surprisingly,’ Lily replies. And it’s true. It’s been a while since she has consciously wished she were somewhere else. She doesn’t want to know what that says about her. ‘It’d be nothing without you, though.’
‘Naturally,’ Tom replies, through a yawn. ‘And you’ve made my worst Christmas the best it could possibly be.’
Lily switches off her bedside light. The restful quiet of two people who can be silent with each other settles over them like an extra duvet. Darkness tucks them up tight. Outside, an owl twits; its partner answers with a twoo. Maybe she and Tom can make it through till Twelfth Night after all.