Книга - Just Before I Died: The gripping new psychological thriller from the bestselling author of The Ice Twins

Just Before I Died: The gripping new psychological thriller from the bestselling author of The Ice Twins
S. K. Tremayne


Sometimes you can’t even trust yourself…The chilling new psychological thriller by S. K. Tremayne, author of the Sunday Times No. 1 bestseller, THE ICE TWINS.How long can they keep you in the dark?It was just a patch of ice. Just a bit of bad luck. But it was nearly enough to kill Kath Redway, spinning her car into Burrator Reservoir in the beautiful Dartmoor National Park.Miraculously, Kath escapes her accident with a few bruises and amnesia. She is shocked but delighted to be back in her remote moorland farmhouse with her handsome husband Adam, and her shy, gifted daughter Lyla. She’s alive!But her family is not so delighted. Her husband is cold, even angry. Her daydreaming daughter talks ever more strangely, about a 'man on the moor'. Then, as chilling fragments of memory return, Kath realizes her 'accident' was nothing of the kind. And now her life collapses into a new world of darkness, menace, and terror.




















Copyright (#u1511b4cf-7791-5034-a47a-e248e7f84d04)


This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

HarperCollinsPublishers

1 London Bridge StreetLondon

SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk)

First published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2018

Copyright © S. K. Tremayne 2018

S. K. Tremayne asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

Cover design by Claire Ward © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2018

Cover photographs © Jayne Szekely / Arcangel Images (landscape); Dorota Gorecka / Trevillion Images (woman); Sveta Butko / Trevillion Images (girl); Shutterstock (feather in girl’s hand).

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books

Ebook Edition © AUGUST 2018 ISBN: 9780008105907

SOURCE ISBN: 9780008105884

Version: 2018-09-18




Dedication (#u1511b4cf-7791-5034-a47a-e248e7f84d04)


For Star, on Kes Tor


Poor Kitty Jay

Such a beauty cast away,

This silent prayer should paint some peace on her grave

But something broke her sleep

From ‘Kitty Jay’, by Seth Lakeman


Table of Contents

Cover (#ud44a746a-cd6a-51ab-9e2a-5069fde1f003)

Title Page (#uace2b185-afb3-5415-940e-3e8c464a3eab)

Copyright (#u909f494c-5dc9-5e7d-8b17-a1177c65a872)

Dedication (#u266cc4e6-5bda-5bf3-903a-ce32ad86c5a4)

Epigraph (#uff2ffd96-efa9-5ff7-878c-a5a0f4639302)

Author’s Note (#udb94e930-e597-59ea-851c-15592d428401)

Huckerby Farm (#u300e3352-d486-529f-a75f-f709de5ccc1a)

Princetown (#ue5e75c81-c058-5946-93e8-13b7b1d4d1ed)

The Lych Way (#u720de0ec-3274-54e1-932f-249637cbb457)



Huckerby Farm (#uc22e03a4-215c-5246-9bc4-6eacbf2e699c)



Grey Wethers (#u8a28a42e-aa05-50aa-9761-3c9a9cc2b048)



Hobajob’s Wood (#u0ab8d5de-afa2-5c1d-8b54-b262ce8e0f35)



Huckerby Farm (#u55763a61-71db-5750-9321-a68063576c45)



Warren House Inn (#u6a6ad284-e6a1-54c3-824d-06085c16856b)



Vitifer Leat (#u84496d78-c930-5f63-902a-8e0d01a2a5dc)



Salcombe (#u6bf09996-f80b-5bd0-937b-24115ba32126)



Burrator (#ub92c1e94-4acd-5d64-aa02-469bd4fe15d7)



Venner (#u4abed69b-5813-56ce-bfd7-ff06a52c5507)



Princetown (#u096de25c-9a8e-5fe7-a31d-729288549c19)



Hexworthy (#ucb54cd3a-f0f3-584e-980b-fe0c4da504cd)



Salcombe (#u5d92f9bd-e36b-5a30-bbce-689b2370aa10)



Two Bridges Hotel (#u6b1259ea-b650-5f2a-a05c-b98756f662b2)



Morrice Town, Plymouth (#u0c73525f-af54-5001-9733-5994294b0087)



Black Tor (#u89cb437e-7cb7-5c88-a263-918a4cb0c185)



Huckerby Farm (#u48fafa6e-560d-50b9-8df2-980459f37a3d)



Huckerby Yard (#ua545e5dd-ef8e-5152-9e08-aa525d7817bd)



Salcombe (#u2de9bd01-52d5-5620-9ab1-95a2b2397dd4)



The Spaldings’ Farm (#ue0b78702-2a68-5a13-9533-6d2186d33f54)



Dartmoor (#uc4524a51-95b9-59ad-a5ac-ba9ca3c9f992)



Dartmoor (#u3dc34b73-456e-557a-9a53-bb5fd4b9fb7f)



Huckerby (#ub9845f3c-a0ce-5fe9-b157-6326fd90fc16)



Bellever Tor (#uf8fc2226-12d9-5fb9-97b5-99f712eeb1ed)



Tavyhurst Church (#u08eb44fc-3710-57e9-b973-249864fbdaa8)



Kennec Farm (#u8c0ff20f-9d58-544d-8336-57c9b034fc47)



Huckerby (#ue611a519-2ea4-5714-aed5-5cca86f71ae5)



Drizzlecombe (#uc9fd219f-8da9-5d2f-b6ba-16d15b0b3f8e)



Huckerby (#u5e6f8729-f41d-53ca-899c-0cf53407ed93)



Three Crowns Inn, Chagford (#u74a05a60-aedf-5d71-b4cb-a88dcca8d490)



Dartmoor (#u18df620f-686c-586a-a042-35773f92e4ce)



Huckerby (#u2afc8153-8573-536e-a649-53961f10c3eb)



Hobajob’s Wood (#u35e44d3a-2bd1-58d3-b5a5-84360d70a456)



Dartmeet (#u356dde81-aaff-5bb4-ab86-efe3907c26a2)



Keep Reading … (#u14cd97b6-d612-59b5-ae49-8e7b04638162)



About the Author (#u55bebd5c-3a7b-5be7-9f97-3e14f96f9bd9)



Also by S. K. Tremayne (#uf2381e10-d06b-5459-b9c0-beb3bdaf2ef8)



About the Publisher (#u37a9ebb4-ee8f-5008-bcbd-73b290dc20b0)




Author’s Note (#u1511b4cf-7791-5034-a47a-e248e7f84d04)


I’d like to thank everyone who assisted me in my research on Dartmoor, in particular Tim Cumming, for his inspiration, and Loic Rich for his company. Likewise I am indebted to: the staff of the Two Bridges, White Hart and Gidleigh Park hotels; the makers of Plymouth Gin and the brewers of Dartmoor Jail Ale; and my editors at The Times and The Sunday TimesTravel Magazine: Jane Knight, Ed Grenby and Nick Redman.

As always I must thank Jane Johnson, Eugenie Furniss and Sarah Hodgson for their wisdom, advice, and professionalism.

There are many references throughout this book to various Dartmoor locations and place-names. A few of these have been altered or invented, by me, although I hope that the book, in general, is a faithful representation of the uniquely beautiful Dartmoor landscape. Any unintentional errors are entirely my own.

My thanks to Seth Lakeman for allowing me to quote from the lyrics of his songs.




Huckerby Farm (#u1511b4cf-7791-5034-a47a-e248e7f84d04)


Saturday morning

The dead birds are neatly arranged in a row. I don’t know why they are dead. Maybe they were slaughtered, by a domestic cat, in that cruel, unhungry, feline way: killing things for fun. But I don’t know anyone who keeps a cat, not for miles. We certainly don’t. Adam prefers dogs: animals that work and hunt and retrieve, animals with a loyal purpose.

More likely is that these little songbirds died from frost and hunger: this long Dartmoor winter has been hard. The last few weeks the ice has bitten into the acid soil, gnawed at the twisted trees, sent people scurrying into their homes from little Christow to Tavy Cleave, and has turned the narrow moorland roads to rinks.

I shudder at the returning thought, as I cradle my hot coffee and gaze out of the kitchen window. Ice had been a danger on the roads for a while. Yes, I should have been more careful, but was it really my fault? I looked away for a moment, distracted by something. And then, it happened, on the dark road that runs by Burrator Reservoir.

It was just a little patch of ice. But it was enough. I went from heading home at a sedentary pace to being in a car out of control, skidding terribly, ramming the useless brakes, in the frigid December twilight, sliding faster and faster towards the waiting waters. All I remember is a strange and rushing sense of inevitability, that this had somehow been meant to happen all my life: my sudden death, at thirty-seven.

The rising black water had always been meant to freeze me; the locked car doors had always been meant to cage me. The icy liquid in my lungs had always been intended to drown the last of my gasps, on this cold, anonymous December evening on the fringes of the moor, where the bony beacons and balding hills begin their descent to Plymouth.

But it didn’t kill me.

I fought and swam, blood streaming – and I survived. Somehow, somehow. Yes, my memories are still ribbony, still ragged, but they are returning, and my body is recovering. The bruising on my face is nearly gone.

I survived a near-fatal accident and I am determined to number my blessings, as if I am an infant doing sums by counting her fingers.

Blessing number one: I have a husband I love. Adam Redway. He seems to love me too, and he is still very handsome at thirty-eight: with those dazzling blue eyes and that crow-dark hair. Almost black, but not quite. Sometimes he could pass for a man ten years younger, he has that agelessness, despite the toughness of his job; perhaps it is because of his job.

He doesn’t earn that much, as a National Park Ranger, but he adores the moors where he was born, and he adores what he does: from repairing walls so the Dartmoor ponies can’t range too far, to taking troops of school kids to see the daffodils of Steps Bridge, to guiding tourists, for fun, all the way down Lydford Gorge, spooking them out with stories of the outlaws who lived there, in the sixteenth century, the Gubbins who lived in caves, and became cannibals, and died out from inbreeding, and madness.

Adam loves all this: loves the poetry and the severity of the moor. He likes the toughness and the strangeness; he grew up with it. And over the years he has allowed me to become a part of it: we have a happy marriage, or at least a marriage happier than many. Yes, it is regular, ordinary, even predictable. Right down to the sex.

I am sure my friends from uni would laugh at the homeliness, but I find it deeply reassuring. The world turns: rhythmically and reliably. I desire, and am desired. We haven’t made love so much since the accident, but I am sure it will return. It always does.

What else can I give thanks for? What else makes me glad to be alive? I need to remind myself. Because these flashbacks are pretty painful.

Quite often I get sudden, frightening headaches: headaches sharp enough to make me cry out. It’s as if something is crunching in my mind, bone grating on nerves.

Like now. I wince. Setting the big coffee cup by the sink, I put a hand to my forehead, to that tender place where I must have hit the steering wheel, cracking bone and brain and a week of memories into fragments, like a shattered pane of winter ice on a moorland dew pond.

Deep breaths. Deep, long breaths.

Focus on the positive, that’s what the doctor said. Be thankful every day. Makes the healing quicker. Mends the mind faster.

I like my job, working in the National Park tourist office. It’s not the archaeological job I wanted when I graduated from Exeter University. It’s not my dream, and it doesn’t pay well, but I get to write the leaflets, to talk about history, to enthuse to day trippers, and the park authorities let me join the digs in the season, slicing into the turf to find Bronze Age barrows or buried kistvaens – sunken chests – of Neolithic skulls and femurs and backbones, the remains of people who lived here when the moors were warmer, and drier. Kinder.

Better than all that: I love this rented granite house we live in, five miles south of Princetown, lost in the high moorland, a mile from the next inhabited building, the Spaldings’ farm, and two miles from the nearest hamlet, with its pub and tiny shop that sells processed ham and charcoal briquettes, and little else.

I love the wild remoteness, the deep starry skies and deeper silence. I love the dreaming, arthritic, moss-hung rowan trees that line the lanes. I like that the moorfolk call them ‘quickbeams’, or ‘witchbeams’. I also love the battered, stubborn, obstinate history of it all. Huckerby used to be a proper farmstead, and it still has barns and outhouses crumbling in the Dartmoor rains, sprouting cornflowers and campions in the haze of high summer, but the only intact building is the one we live in, a classic moorland longhouse, possibly six hundred years old.

Once there would have been a sizeable family here: humans at the top of the house, animals down the other end. Cattle warming people under the same Devonshire thatch. Now the house is converted, the roof slated, and the interior modernized. Yes, it’s hard to heat and it still gets damp. But it has character. And it is occupied by me, and Adam, and Lyla our daughter, and our two dogs Felix and Randal.

I named the dogs from a poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins. I love poetry, too: I write it occasionally, and never show it to anyone. I hide it away, as shyly as my daughter hides her secrets. I would have liked to be a poet, the way I would have liked to be an archaeologist. But that’s OK: because I am happy, I think, and certainly happy to be alive, and I live in a house I love in a place I love with a man I love and two dogs I love and, best of all, with a daughter I wholly adore.

Lyla Redway. The girl who likes to arrange dead birds in rows and curves.

Lyla Redway. The nine-year-old girl out there in the farmyard wearing a blue beanie hat and a thick black anorak, playing on her own as she always plays on her own – or with Felix and Randal, who she probably prefers to any human beings.

I don’t mind this. She’s a different sort of girl: she is herself, her vulnerable, eccentric, funny, kind, lovable self. How many kids would spend a cold frosty morning in January arranging dead birds?

Sometimes she orders stones, or twigs, or bright blood-red berries. Other times Adam comes home with presents he has found on the tors, things he knows she will like – miniature pink snail shells and delicate bird bones and bleached-white adder skulls – and she arranges these faintly macabre moorland treasures into complex patterns: mandalas, hexagons and zodiacs, intricate visual symbols only she understands, imposing a poetic order on her lonely moorland world. Where she reigns supreme.

And sometimes she does nothing. She stands for hours, listening to an unheard music, seeing things invisible to others, or remembering incidents from her very early childhood. I’ve read that these strange traits, the acute hearing, and that remarkable memory, are all part of her condition, almost proof of her condition. But we refuse to have her diagnosed, or examined, despite the obvious signs.

Adam doesn’t want to label her, doesn’t want to put her in a box, and I tend to agree. We don’t want to set limits on her, because she seems happy, despite her isolation, her solitude.

Though maybe less happy today?

Lyla is staring down at the birds. And standing absolutely still. This is common for her: she seems to have no middle ground of normal movement. Either she is silent and frozen, as now, or she is dancing and twirling, skipping up the moorland tors, as if she has energy she cannot endure, waving her hands, nodding and rocking, and talking talking talking, chattering like the River Dart under Postbridge, nattering away to herself, a babble of information stored in her brain from all the books she reads.

Hyperlexia, they call it. Another symptom. Reading too much.

How can that be a thing? Reading too much? I let her read as much as she likes. Entire books in a day, thousands of words every hour. Filling up her hungry soul. Because this is, I hope, my gift to her.

She has inherited her father’s beauty, the nearly-black hair, the piercing eyes, but she has my love for words. One day she might be the poet I never was. She might have the scholarly life I wanted. And I’m glad she got her looks from her dad rather than me. My looks have always disappointed: brown hair, brown eyes, average height, average face, nothing special to look at, just me, Kath, the woman married to Adam Redway, with the quirky daughter, does something for the National Park, lives way out in the middle of nowhere, over near Hexworthy.

Nearly dying in that reservoir is probably the one exceptional thing to have happened to me, the only thing likely to get me noticed.

Except, I don’t want to be noticed.

Opening the kitchen window to the cold morning air, I call out: ‘Hey, sweetie, are you OK? Sure you’re warm enough?’

Lyla does not move. She is still frowning at the dead birds, some of them arranged in lines like the rows of Bronze Age ritual stones out on the moors.

‘Darling,’ I repeat, but not impatiently: I am used to having to press things with Lyla, to repeat twice or three times when she is in one of her more obsessive moods. ‘Lyla-berry, I want to check you’re not cold, it’s freezing out there. Where are the dogs?’

Still no answer. I might have to go outside and literally turn her face to meet mine, to make her realize I am talking to her, that I am interacting, that a person needs a response.

Opening the front door, I walk towards my daughter, my arms crossed against the chilly breeze. ‘It’s interesting that they’re all dead, isn’t it, Mummy?’

Her eyes are bright like her father’s under the blue beanie.

‘Sorry, darling?’

‘All the birds, so many of them, all of them are dead. I checked. So many, there must be twenty of them.’

‘Probably the cold, Lyla. It’s a bitter winter, worse than usual.’ I place an arm around her slender shoulders.

‘Hm.’ She shrugs absentmindedly, stares at the birds.

I follow her gaze, examining the pitiful little corpses. They’re definitely frozen: beaks rimed with white frost. I don’t know what species they are. I can see a thrush, I think, and a robin. Lyla surely knows: she can identify every bird and every mammal, and most of the moorland flowers.

‘Well I thought it was sad, Mummy, sad that they were all dead, so I put them in a special pattern so they could all have a funeral together, and not be lonely.’ She stoops and rearranges two of the birds, delicately realigning them. It unsettles me to see her so careful, so precise. She makes such lovely patterns, but these are dead birds. Where did she get them from?

‘All right, that’s good, that’s good. Do you want some lunch?’

‘Wait. Wait, Mummy. Nearly finished.’

This elaborate game is spooking me. Dead birds arranged in a pattern I cannot quite grasp. All those glassy little bird-eyes, a trail of twinned black buttons across the frigid mud.

Lyla turns one frozen blackbird this way, and then that way.

‘Lyla! Please. Enough now.’

Straightening up, she flashes me a smile. ‘Don’t you want me to spend the day arranging dead birds? Are you saying this is inappropriate behaviour?’

I am lost for words. Until I realize my daughter is joking, teasing me about my anxieties. Lyla can exhibit startling flashes of adult humour, insightful, surreal, and self-aware. It’s one of the reasons we’ve resisted that diagnosis.

‘No, I think it’s perfectly fine to arrange loads of creepy dead birds in rows and circles.’ I laugh, and hug her again. ‘What kind of birds are they, anyway? And what is the pattern, is it a face?’

But now her head is turned, looking down the farm track, past the conifer plantation, past Hobajob’s Wood, as if she can hear something. In the far distance. I’ve known her to hear cars minutes before they arrive, long before anyone else.

‘Lyla?’

What can she hear? A raven makes a cronking sound overhead as it wheels across the dull grey sky. Yet her focus seems to be on something else, further away. What is she sensing, coming towards us, down from the tors? The memories hurt. My head stings with pain.

‘Lyla.’

No reply.

‘Lyla, what is it, what can you hear?’

‘The usual man, Mummy, the man on the moor. That’s all.’ Her words are a ghostly vapour in the cold. Her anorak is unzipped and I see she is wearing only a T-shirt underneath. She should be freezing, and yet she never seems to suffer from the cold: she likes the fierce Dartmoor winters, same as her dad. They both relish the cold. The snow. The icicles that hang from the splintered granite. ‘You know, Mummy, that if you see a lot of crows they are rooks, but a rook by itself is a crow. Did you know that?’

I reach for her once more. ‘Lyla.’

She squirms away from my touch. ‘Don’t touch me, Mummy. Leave me be.’

She is snarling. Lyla does this when she is angry or alarmed or overstimulated, she snarls, grimaces, and waves her hands. She does this at school as well: she can’t help it, but it means other children laugh at her, or are scared by her. Isolating her further. She has so few friends. She probably has no real friends.

‘Lyla. Stop this.’

‘Go away, grrr …’

‘Please—’

‘YARK!’

There’s nothing I can do. I step away, watching my daughter as she goes running to the farmyard gate, calling for the real dogs: I can hear them yapping, see our two big mongrel lurchers galloping after her.

She could be gone for another two hours now, half a day even, running across the fields, romping through Hobajob’s, hunting for that Saxon cross lost in the nettles by the brook, with Felix and Randal on each side. Adam supposedly bought the dogs for Lyla, but he loves them as much as she does. They hunt, like proper dogs. They bring back dead rabbits, necks lolling, blood dripping from their muzzles. He likes to skin these hot, reeking corpses in front of Lyla, teaching her authentic Dartmoor ways, tossing gobbets of raw meat to the hungry dogs. Eat them up, you eat them all up.

Lyla is far away in the distance.

What can I do?

Let them play, I think, let them go. Lyla is clearly still upset about my accident. We’ve tried to talk to her about it, as gently as possible, I’ve told her I hit some ice and veered into deep water. We’ve spared her too many details but she will surely have heard stuff from kids at school, in the papers, on the net. We’ve also told Lyla that my memories are hazy but that they will return. Retrograde amnesia. Common after car accidents, caused by the brain ricocheting inside the skull.

Back in the kitchen I wash the coffee mug in the sink and gaze out of the window. In the distance I hear barking, getting nearer, louder. Then they come bursting through the door, the dogs happy, big and growling. Lyla lingers in the doorway, oblivious, it seems, to the bitter wind at her back.

‘Daddy is on the moor again.’

‘What?’

She gives me one of her blank, impenetrable smiles. ‘He’s out there again like he’s watching us, Mummy. That’s Daddy’s job, isn’t it?’

‘Yes,’ I say. ‘He’s a park ranger. He has to patrol everywhere, looking out for people.’

Lyla nods and shrugs, and pursues the dogs into the living room. I stare after her, wondering how she saw her father. He’s meant to be working in his normal patch, way past Postbridge. What is he doing down here? Maybe Lyla is just confused or upset. And I can’t blame her for this dislocation, this bewilderment.

Because her mother nearly died. Leaving her alone, forever.




Princetown (#u1511b4cf-7791-5034-a47a-e248e7f84d04)


Monday morning

My daughter is silent, my husband is grimly silent, but the car is making that horrible grinding sound as Adam changes gear. I don’t care. I’m happy. The winter sky over Princetown is sharp, unmarred, and today I get my freedom back.

I’m buying a car for myself, to replace the one still sitting at the bottom of Burrator Reservoir. This is the most intense relief. Living in Dartmoor – especially somewhere as remote as Huckerby Farm – is almost impossible without transport of your own. There are barely any buses; the railway lines were ripped away in the 1960s, and in winter on the lonelier roads you might not see a car from one cold morning to the next, so you couldn’t even hitch-hike.

During these weeks of recovery since my accident, Adam has been driving me around in his knackered old National Park Land Rover, ferrying me to work, helping me do the shopping, and it’s been a source of friction. Adam can be taciturn at the best of times but when he’s had to take me all the way to the Aldi supermarket in Tavistock I’ve sensed a certain repressed seething.

But today I’m buying myself a secondhand Ford, from a cousin of Adam’s. We bundled together some cash from God knows where, as Adam argues with the insurance people. Adam does everything to do with cars and engines and plumbing and stoves; and I like the masculine way he handles all that.

Turning in the passenger seat I look at Lyla, in her grey-and-white school uniform. She is staring out at the dull housing of Princetown outskirts.

‘Hey, sweetpea. From now on I’ll be able to take you to school again, isn’t that good?’

She says nothing. Her face is averted. She is gently tapping the window with her fingernails. I don’t know why she does this. Perhaps it’s another sound she likes. She calls them tinkly-tankly sounds. Crackling, jingling, light metallic sounds, things like the silvery rattle of coins, or keys.

My daughter once told me, when we stood in the summer hayfields over Buckfast, how she loved the sound of butterflies.

There are also sounds that she hates. City sounds. Traffic. Sirens. The jostle of people in crowds. It’s one of the reasons we moved to the remoteness of Huckerby.

‘Lyla?’

She turns, her blue eyes wide. Distant. ‘Mmm?’

‘Did you hear what I said?’

A shake of her head. She offers me a reserved frown: as if I’ve done something wrong, but she is too polite to say. I feel a pang of pity. She is a nine-year-old girl with troubles and issues and dreams, and laughter I sometimes do not quite hear; she’s a girl who has personal names for flies and rocks and frogs, who collects wild lilies and trembling violets from Nine Maidens and Seven Lords’ Land and presses them in books. My girl, my only girl. The idea that I could have died and left her behind fills me with a terrifying sadness, that threatens to make me cry, but I fight back the emotion.

I’ve been getting these sudden spates of sadness, or anger, ever since the accident, but I do think that I am getting the hang of them. Coping. And today I am definitely happy. Or happier. Determined to be positive: yes, it’s winter but winter is the womb of spring.

The car grumbles.

‘Darling, I said today Mummy is getting a car, so that’ll make everything easier, and Daddy won’t have to do all the driving.’ I turn to him, ‘Which will be a relief, won’t it, Adam? I know you’re bored of carting me around.’

Adam nods, wordless, in the driver seat, and takes the left turn on to Princetown’s main road where it descends, literally and aesthetically, from Georgian coaching inns and the glossy new National Park offices, to the grim black outline of the prison, which broods and menaces even in sharp sun.

‘Here we go.’ Adam yanks the brake hard as he parks outside the school. He turns around, ignoring me, and addresses Lyla. ‘All right, Tate and Lyle. Give us a kiss, before you go.’ Lyla sits there, inert.

Adam tries again. ‘Come on, sweetheart, big kiss for Daddy.’

She shakes her head, and grimaces. This is unlike her. She and Adam are close; sometimes I envy their relationship, exploring the moor together, watching the birds of prey riding summer thermals over Blackslade.

Abruptly, she opens the door. Her hands clutch her Jungle Book lunchbox and school bag tight to her chest. ‘I’m going now,’ she says, without looking at me or at Adam, as if she is announcing this to the world, not to us.

‘It’s OK, darling, off you go. We’ll have a special tea this evening. Those fishcakes you like.’

She nods, blank-faced. Not really looking at us. Then she turns, and walks towards the grey school gates.

Adam puts his hand on the ignition key, ready to move off. But I put a hand on his. ‘No, wait. I want to watch.’

‘Watch what?’

‘You know. How it goes.’

He sighs. ‘You always do this.’ But he takes his hand off the key and the two of us watch Lyla entering the school gates.

For a second she hesitates.

I’ve seen this scenario before, so many times. She is trying to be normal. Getting ready to interact as best she can. Perhaps she is slowly improving? In the car, we are helpless observers.

There are lots of kids in the schoolyard, excited by the first day of the week. They are playing and scrapping, boys and girls, dark and blond; they are laughing, chasing, greeting each other: swapping stories and jokes.

Into the middle of them all walks Lyla. Solitary, unnoticed. She pauses and looks around, her pretty face pale and unsure. I know she wants to join in, but she is too shy, too socially awkward to begin a conversation.

And she doesn’t understand random play.

So she looks up and down, fiddling persistently with a button on her cardigan. I guess she’s hoping someone will simply come up to her, start something off. But the kids run right past her, ignoring her entirely.

‘Christ,’ Adam says, quietly.

Lyla makes a big effort: she walks back to the gate and looks directly and hopefully at some taller girl who is late arriving. I think I know this new girl. Becky Greenall. Popular, good at games, socially confident; everything Lyla isn’t. My pity and anxiety surge. Don’t do the smile, I think to myself, please don’t do that smile. Lyla walks closer to Becky and of course she does the smile, that strange rictus grin, that special silent monkey shout that Lyla thinks looks like a smile, but isn’t. She gives Becky a thumbs-up.

It makes her look utterly mad.

Becky Greenall stares at Lyla, and she puts a hand to her mouth, trying not to laugh, or sneer.

Lyla tries once more. She does a little jump, up and down, waving her hands like a bird.

I’m her mother, but I have no idea what she is trying to do – be a kestrel?

Becky is now openly laughing, she can’t help it; then she turns a sudden shoulder and casually blanks my daughter and shouts to some other girls who wave back. Together, these girls head laughingly for the school door. The day has begun. The whole class has sprinted inside.

Except for Lyla, who is the only one left behind in the schoolyard.

Alone and silent, she watches all the other kids disappear into the school. Only the slump in her shoulders betrays her emotions. The loneliness.

I desperately want to run out of the car and give her the biggest ever hug, to make it all better, but I can’t, there’s no use: she would push me away. Instead she walks slowly towards the school; and now she too is gone, in through the doors.

‘Jesus,’ says Adam. ‘Jesus Christ.’

I know exactly what he means. Sadness is deep in me, and for this I have no coping mechanism. I can recover from a car crash, my brain can heal, but there is no convalescing for Lyla.

We are silent. Adam starts the car, turns it and retraces 300 yards, towards the National Park office. He turns off the engine, as if he is prepared to talk. But before he can speak, I say, ‘We have to do something. This can’t go on. It’s worse than last year.’

Adam stares ahead. ‘But she laughs at home. She loves the moors. And she loves the dogs. So she’s isolated at school, so what? She’s a loner. It happens.’

I can see the pain on his face; I know Adam lives for Lyla. Would kill to protect her. He wants only what’s right for her. And I usually listen to him, I want to believe. But I think about Lyla and her wariness in the car, and that lonely walk into school, that humiliation in the yard. I imagine her now, sitting on her own in the classroom, not talking to anyone. I picture her during breaks: sitting by the wall in the playground; a strange, eccentric girl with a weird smile, who mutters to herself about ants and newts while her classmates all talk to each other about selfies and music.

I can’t pretend any more.

‘No, Adam. We can’t go on thinking this is acceptable, that she’s just quirky, it’s not right.’

The muscles in his jaw are flexing: he’s grinding his teeth. ‘So what are you saying?’

‘We have to be proactive, do something. Take action. Because I don’t think she’s happy, not really. The other day I found her arranging dead birds in a pattern. She’s never done that before. All those dead little birds. Why?’

Adam stares ahead. He is in his Ranger uniform: green fleece, green trousers, hiking boots. On most men it might be unflattering but Adam makes it look good. Masculine. I think of the sex we haven’t had in a while. I want it again, I want him to turn and kiss me, sometimes he still does that, he’ll suddenly kiss me, passionately – across a car, while we’re walking the moors – and I love it. But his fierce blue eyes are fixed on the far horizon, as if he is looking beyond horrible Princetown.

I can sense the violent yearning in him. He doesn’t want me: he wants to be out there, alone on the uplands. Striding the heights of the northern moors: standing on Great Kneeset, gazing at High Willhays, Black Tor, Hangingstone Hill, Cut Hill, Fur Tor, Great Mis Tor, the places he loves, the places he has known since he was a boy. A child of the moors, like his daughter. Unlike me.

‘Look at those bloody houses,’ he says.

‘Sorry?’

He tilts his head at a row of grey drab council housing: accommodation for the wardens in the prison.

‘My dad built some of those, when he was a brickie. Imagine that. Imagine if that was your life’s work? Building the ugliest fucking houses in Britain. No wonder he turned to vodka.’

His laughter is sour. Adam doesn’t get on with his father, who fought and drank and womanized, scattering children from Exeter to Okehampton. Adam loves his uncle much better, Eddie Redway, a tenant farmer near Chagford. That’s where Adam did his real growing up, on Uncle Eddie’s smallholding, escaping the boozy arguments at home. That quaint little farm was where Adam came to know and love the moor, with his tearaway cousins, scrumping apples at Luscombe, fishing for little trout in the Teign.

The Redways have been a moorland family for countless generations. They’ve been tenant farmers and quarry workers and turf cutters since there was a church at Sheepstor; they have shaggy cattle in the blood, and buzzards on the brain.

And I am glad my daughter inherits this ancestry. She can claim Dartmoor as I can’t. But today this ancestry is irrelevant: right now, my daughter needs some modern therapeutic help, and Adam and I need to talk about that help.

‘Adam, please. I really think it’s time now, time we went to a doctor. Get her properly statemented? If it really is Asperger’s—’

‘I’m not putting a bloody label on her. Told you.’

‘But I’ve been researching, talking to people, going online. They say that if you get diagnosed earlier it’s better, the earlier the intervention the better the outcome, because you can get real help, therapy for social skills.’

He shakes his head. ‘I’m not hanging a sign around her neck. Look. Here’s Lyla Redway. She’s hopeless. Take pity. Hell with that.’

I raise my voice. ‘Asperger’s kids aren’t hopeless! You can’t say that. It’s a spectrum, we’re all on it somewhere, she’s just further down that spectrum, where you might need some help, and she’s definitely getting stranger – the birds, it was too eerie. Adam! Listen to me, please. She’s getting worse.’

Adam straightens his arms and lays his big hands hard on the steering wheel, as if he wants to race away. ‘And why do you think that is, Kath? Eh?’

‘Sorry?’

His face is turned towards me now: the blue eyes burning. ‘Why the hell do you think she might be getting worse?’

I flounder. Thrown by this outright hostility. ‘Sorry? What? Are you actually blaming me? Somehow it’s my fault? It’s my fault she’s getting worse?’ I have my own anger, now. ‘For God’s sake, it was an accident! It’s not anyone’s fault. I skidded on some ice.’ I search his face for sympathy. ‘I don’t understand, Adam – you and Lyla – you should be happy I’m alive: I nearly died. I’m alive! And anyway: this is about our daughter, not me. We have to think about her.’

‘That’s all I do think about,’ he says, in a low, dark voice. ‘And now I have to go to work. Earn some money. For Lyla.’ Without another word, he leans across and opens my door, inviting me to step outside.

His stubbled jaw is set, his frown is sombre. He won’t be swayed. He is looking at me the way Lyla looked at him. Wary. Distant. Guarded.It feels like our once-contented family is falling into mutual suspicion. And I have no idea why.

‘OK, Adam, OK, but I won’t let it go. Not this time.’

Climbing out of the car, my bag over my shoulder, I watch him drive away, gears grinding. As I turn towards the Park offices I can sense the great prison, looming behind me.

You can always sense the prison, in Princetown.


Monday afternoon

Two p.m.? I stare at the clock on the wall of the cream-painted National Park offices with a sense of unhappy surprise.

Where did the day go?

I’m used to losing track of working hours if the work is compelling. If I am, say, writing new brochures about the history or archaeology of the park, describing the wistful stone circle of Buttern Hill, the cottage at Birchy Lake where the old witches lived with a dozen black cats, the famous grave of Kitty Jay who killed herself for love, after falling pregnant by some wicked toff – that grave on which people still poignantly lay flowers – when I am immersed in writing these wonderful stories, I can happily misplace an entire afternoon.

The same goes for a busy summer day at one of the visitor centres, in Haytor, or Postbridge, when we can’t move for hearty German caravanners and determined French hikers – all looking for maps, loos, Wi-Fi signals – then the hours can fly past.

But it’s the depths of winter. No one comes to the moor in January. Half the National Park staff take long holidays around this time, as there is little to achieve – except what I’m doing now. Tweaking, twiddling. Revising the Park’s official leaflets and websites. Updating the policy on dogs in National Park tea-rooms. It’s deathly boring. The sort of stuff that would normally make the minutes drag by.

And yet I’ve got myself lost in the assignment.

‘What’s up, Kath? Having too much fun?’

It’s my boss, Andy, he must have heard me sigh. He’s a nice guy, blond, younger than me, newish. Been here two years. I sometimes wonder if I should resent him, that I didn’t get the promotion. But I don’t. I like my more varied employment. Usually.

‘Sorry, Andy. Was I sighing a bit loudly?’

‘You could say that.’

‘Well, I’m updating the rules on campervans in car parks, out of season. Perhaps I’m overexcited?’

I hear him chuckle. He’s the only other person in the large, open-plan office today. He is framed by the windows, where the Princetown sky is now as dark and sombre as Dartmoor granite. The winter sun can be so painfully brief.

‘You should pity me, Kath. I’m doing Section 211 on Tree Preservation Orders, it’s practically better than sex.’ He clicks something on his computer. ‘Jesus, I hate January. What we really need is a massive accident to liven things up. Like, a bus could drive into a lake, up at Meldon, that would help.’ He stops, and turns my way. ‘Hey, sorry, ah, Kath, I—’

‘No. It’s OK. I want people to forget, Andy, I’m bored of being The Woman That Had That Accident.’ He listens as I go on: ‘In fact I want to go back to regular work soon, working proper shifts, doing my job as before, I mean: it’s nice you’re giving me half days, letting me work from home, but I’m OK now. Can we get back to normal?’

‘Abso-bloody-lutely. If you really feel you’re up to it, that’s great. We’ll put you back on normal shifts in a few weeks.’

He returns to his work. I gaze at him as he concentrates.

Why won’t he let me do proper shifts now? Sometimes it feels as if everyone is tip-toeing fastidiously around me, scared I might break. They’re not treating me like someone recuperating, they’re treating me like something odd. Unusually fragile.

Returning to my work, I scan the words on my own computer. The official Dartmoor Tourism website.

Dartmoor constitutes the largest area of granite in Britain, with about 360 square miles stretching across central Devon, making it the only true wilderness in Southern England. Much of it is covered by marshy peat deposits, in the form of bogs or mires. The moorland is also capped with many characteristic granite outcrops, known as tors (from the Celtic ‘tor’, meaning tower) that provide varied habitats for wildlife. The entire area is rich in archaeology, from the Neolithic to the Victorian …

I want to edit this, make it flow better, liven it up: but the words blur in my eyes. Sphagnum. Carboniferous. Wassailing …

I hate this new, enduring haze in my mind, I despise this peculiar sensation – since the crash – that my mind has become one of those vast cupboards in my mum’s old kitchen, in the big Victorian house, down on the coast at Salcombe. Those cupboards were dusty and chaotic, and every week my hippy-chick, eco-sensitive mum would reach in and find some pot of organic mustard, or jar of Manuka honey, that she’d clean forgotten, and she’d say, Gosh I didn’t remember we had this, and sometimes she’d have to throw it away, wasting more of the dwindling Kinnersley cash, and sometimes the jar would go back in, only to be forgotten and retrieved and thrown away all over again … and that’s what my brain feels like, since the accident. I don’t quite know what’s in there, and when I put things in there they sometimes get lost, and when I find things in there they are often useless, past their sell-by date, actively unpleasant.

My brain is hiding things from me.

And now it’s 3.15. So dark the office lights are on.

I try to relax. Perhaps I am being hard on myself. The stress about Lyla doesn’t help, the tensions with Adam, too. Perhaps we all need more time. That’s what the doctors repeated from the start: Be patient, don’t expect instant miracles. And remember, they said: remember that you are relatively lucky: because you will heal over time. I was classified with Mild Traumatic Brain Injury, nothing worse; I was apparently unconscious for less than six hours; I was 13–15 on the Glasgow Coma Scale.

Any longer than that, and I’d have been upgraded and they would have taken away my driving licence, for at least a year. At one point in my unconsciousness I was technically dead, flatlining for a minute or so, but the machines flickered into life and I got through. So I was ‘Mild’.

MTBI.

As for my retrograde amnesia, the stuff I’ve forgotten from before the accident, that is expected to recede over the coming weeks, and the misplaced memories will return like ‘hills emerging after a flood’ as one of the psychologists put it, and eventually the whole landscape will be revealed as the obscuring waters drain away.

‘Hey. Is that your new car?’

Startled from this introspection, I look up. Andy is gesturing out of the window: I can see Adam’s cousin Harry, standing by a blue Ford Fiesta, parked right outside. The car is a bit battered and scratched, but that’s fine, nearly every car on Dartmoor is a bit battered and scratched. And so am I.

Harry waves at me. He has the Redway looks: a handsome young man. They all have these looks, the Redway cousins. The eyes and the cheekbones, they are so distinct. Harry does odd jobs all over the moor, when he’s not making a few quid from car dealing. He is a bit of a lad.

But he’s also very likeable. He reminds me of a younger Adam. But then Adam, in the right mood, reminds me of a younger Adam. I think I desire my husband as much today as the afternoon I first met him.

Andy says, ‘You must be chuffed to get wheels again, don’t know how you’ve been coping without a car.’ He flashes me a smile. ‘Go on, Kath, go for it – I’ll see you tomorrow.’

My kindly boss is making my shortened working day even shorter. I can get my new car, collect Lyla from school, go home to Huckerby, and everything will be fine. My brain will be fine. Lyla will be fine.

‘Thanks,’ I say, ‘You’re a superstar,’ and I grab my raincoat, and step out into the wintry afternoon. The cold has abated, which means it is probably about to rain. Harry and I sign the documents and he hands me the keys and he says, ‘It’s not a Ferrari, but it’ll give you a couple of years.’

And I offer my thanks as I climb in. And when he strolls off to a pub, I sit here in the driver’s seat, holding the cold, hard keys in my hand, suddenly scared that I have forgotten how to drive. I haven’t done it since the crash into the reservoir. Since the dark waters tried to turn me into moorland mud.

Key. You put the key in the ignition. You turn it. Then the engine starts. Remember?Come on, Kath Redway: you’ve done this a million times. You got your licence at nineteen. You’ve done this virtually every day for eighteen years. It’s called driving.

I turn the key. I press my foot down. I steer away. I do not crash into the saloon bar of the Plume of Feathers, I do not smash into the leaded windows, crushing off-duty prison wardens in a clatter of stained wood and beer-bottles. I am driving.

From the anxiety of the afternoon, I feel a kind of elation. I CAN DRIVE. It’s another sudden mood swing. I get more of them now. Since the accident.

Happy, even giddy, I collect Lyla from school. She looks a little bemused: she thought she was going to After School Club, to be alone in a whole new place, but she also looks content to be going home early, where people will talk to her, where she can play with the dogs in front of the fire.

Or make cryptic patterns with dead birds.

I CAN DRIVE!

But as we aim for the turning that leads to the open moor, to the wild emptiness, I realize I have left my bag in the office. I was so excited by the car, I quite forgot.

Hastily, I park, once again, outside the Dartmoor NP Office. The day is wintry and dimming, a faint drizzle speckles the windscreen.

Lyla pipes up as I swing open the door, ‘Where are you going?’

‘Nowhere, darling. Just the office. Forgot my bag.’

‘No! Don’t go!’

‘Lyla?’

I turn, surprised, a little shocked. Lyla is trembling in the back seat.

‘Mummy, don’t go. Don’t.’

This is strange. Lyla worries about odd things, shapes, sounds, or the wrong kind of prickly vest, but she rarely worries about being left alone.

‘Darling—’

‘No. Mummy! You might not come back! You might not come back!’

‘Lyla, this is ridiculous. I’ll only be gone a second, really, I promise.’ I put out a hand to calm her but she waves it away. She does, however, seem a little soothed. She turns and gazes at the wrinkles of rain on the window, the black shape of the prison.

I seize the opportunity. Scooting out of the door, I run into the office, past my surprised boss. ‘Forgot my bag!’

He grins. ‘Ah.’

Grabbing the handbag, I head back to the car, but as I do I notice something on Andy’s desk. It’s a row of roundish grey stones, about the size of large golf balls, or wild apples. They might have been there all day.

They’re half hidden by his computer.

All the stones have holes in them. And I’ve seen this sort of stone before. I know the type. And it makes me quietly shudder.

‘Hey,’ I say, trying to hide the tremble in my voice. ‘Where did you get those?’

He glances up at me, the blue light of his computer shining on his spectacles. ‘These rocks? Ah.’ He picks one up and turns it in the light. ‘They were arranged along the window ledges this morning, outside, so I brought them in. Kinda odd, right? Guess some hiker made a collection? Left them here overnight.’

‘No,’ I say. ‘I don’t think so.’

His grin is edged with perplexity. ‘Sorry?’

‘These aren’t any old stones.’

Leaning close, I pick up one of the bigger rocks. It is surprisingly heavy: probably it has some metal ore inside. The hole is naturally weathered, which is crucial to its identity. But of course, Andy wouldn’t know the identity, the significance of these stones, because he doesn’t know the folklore and the mythology of Dartmoor: because all that stuff is my job. I did the archaeology degree, I’ve read the folklore books, I write all the leaflets. ‘These are hag stones.’

His grin is entirely gone. ‘You what?’

‘Hag stones.’ I have a burning desire to throw the stone away. To take all of these stones and bury them far from here, in Cornwall, Ireland, America. I try to disguise my irrational fear. ‘Moorland people used to put them on windowsills, or hang them from ropes over doors. You can still see them on Dartmoor farms, in really remote places. They’re a kind of joke, but I suspect some people still believe.’

He looks at me, frowning. ‘Hags? Old women?’

I turn the stone in my fingers, calming myself. ‘They also called them hex stones. Because they were thought to be apotropaic.’ I don’t wait for his question. ‘Apotropaic means they were used to ward off evil, to thwart black magic. People placed them by windows and doors to stop witches getting in.’ Even as I replace the stone, very carefully, next to its sisters, I can’t help glancing at my desk. ‘Or … or to stop them from getting out. And somebody arranged these stones, in a line on our window ledge, overnight? That must have been deliberate.’

Andy stares at the stones. The rainy light outside is almost entirely gone. But I can see Lyla in the back of my new car. She is sitting up rigid, and gazing straight at me. Unblinking.





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