The Retreat Page 7

  ‘I do.’

  She pushed herself to her feet. ‘All right, then. Digging I shall do.’

  We headed up towards the road where Zara’s car was parked. The mist had cleared and the sun had come out, bathing the landscape in buttery, early-spring light. Zara paused to take it in, then looked at me.

  ‘So, you come from round here originally?’ she said. ‘I’m curious. You hardly know this Julia woman, do you? Why are you trying to help her?’

  I was taken aback by her directness. ‘I feel bad for her. I want to help.’

  ‘You sure that’s all it is?’

  We reached Zara’s car, a ten-year-old Honda. Inside, it was littered with fast-food containers and sweet wrappers.

  ‘I’m not sure what you mean,’ I said.

  ‘Oh, nothing. It’s just . . .’ She laughed. ‘Sorry, I know I can be overly frank sometimes. But I’ve seen photos of Julia Marsh. She’s a good-looking woman.’

  ‘And you think I’m helping her as a way of getting her into bed?’

  She unlocked her car. ‘Hey, I don’t mean to offend you. But there’s a certain kind of man who can’t resist a damsel in distress. And by “certain kind of man” I mean one with blood in his veins and a dick between his legs.’ She chuckled as she got into the car.

  She wound down the window. ‘I’ll see what I can find out about the local kiddy fiddlers and call you tomorrow.’

  She drove off, leaving me squinting into the sun and wondering. Was she right? Did I have an ulterior motive? Zara was correct about one thing: Julia was attractive – but it was despite the mask of pain she wore, not because of it. And I didn’t fancy her.

  I felt uncomfortable, though, as I walked back to the house, and I made up my mind. I would give Zara another twenty-four hours. If she didn’t find out anything interesting – and it seemed unlikely that she would – I’d give up, put my head down and finish my book without any further distractions.

  Chapter 10

  Julia was in the garden, talking to Rhodri, who was showing her the mended fence panel. He took his tools over to the shed and Julia waved at me as I walked up the driveway towards her. She was wearing an old-looking top and gardening gloves, hair scraped back, glasses on.

  She looked lovely.

  I mentally kicked myself. Yes, she was attractive, but I didn’t fancy her. It was Zara’s fault for putting the idea in my head.

  ‘Been for a stroll?’ she asked.

  I had the horrible sense she could read my mind. Flustered, I said, ‘Yeah. Just trying to get the mental cogs turning.’

  ‘Where did you go?’

  I hesitated.

  ‘It’s all right,’ she said. ‘I can hear the word “river” without having a meltdown.’

  Rhodri came over, nodding at me. ‘Gorgeous day, isn’t it? Julia told me you come from round these parts. What are your parents’ names?’

  ‘Carol and David Radcliffe.’

  ‘You’re joking. David Radcliffe, the solicitor?’

  ‘That’s right. You knew him?’

  He seemed slightly stunned. ‘I know everyone around here. It’s been a bloody long time, though. What are they up to these days?’

  ‘They retired to Spain,’ I replied.

  He whistled. ‘All right for some. Well, give them my regards when you speak to them.’ He pointed at the flowerbeds. ‘What are you planning to do here, Julia?’

  ‘Weeding mainly. And I was thinking of moving those peonies.’

  ‘What? You can’t do that!’ He acted as if she’d said she was going to pour petrol on the earth and set it aflame.

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘It’s bad luck,’ he replied. ‘If you move peonies, a woodpecker will come and peck out your eyes.’

  Julia laughed, but Rhodri looked deadly serious. ‘Please don’t move them, Julia.’

  ‘Okay.’

  He nodded, satisfied, and headed off to the shed.

  Julia and I exchanged an amused look. ‘Well, I guess the peonies do look all right where they are.’

  ‘I should probably tell him my dad passed away,’ I said.

  ‘Oh. I’m sorry. Did it happen recently?’ I must have cringed because she added, ‘Don’t worry, if you’d rather not talk about it.’

  ‘No, it’s fine. It’s healthy to talk about it, isn’t it? It was five years ago now. Pancreatic cancer. He died three weeks after getting the diagnosis.’

  ‘How awful.’

  I scraped at the ground with the toe of my shoe. ‘Apparently, with pancreatic cancer there are no symptoms until it’s too late. The good thing is that he didn’t suffer for long.’

  ‘How’s your mum?’ Julia asked.

  ‘She’s okay. She lives in Spain, so I don’t see her much. She’s fine, though. She’s one of those women who just gets on with it, whatever shit life throws at her. She’s always been like that.’

  I could tell Julia was thinking about herself, the shit life had thrown at her and her reaction. I was about to change the subject when Karen emerged from the house, carrying her laptop. She saw us and came over.

  ‘I was just going to the cottage to do some work,’ she said.

  We exchanged a few pleasantries about the weather, then she said, ‘I saw the new guest earlier. So now there are five of us.’

  Julia looked puzzled. ‘Another guest?’

  ‘Yeah. I got up at six, and when I came down to make coffee I saw them in the dining room.’

  ‘We don’t have any other guests,’ Julia said. ‘Just you and Lucas, Max and Suzi.’

  Karen opened her mouth, then closed it again. ‘Oh.’

  ‘Were they male or female?’ I asked.

  ‘Female. I think. They had their back to me and I only got a brief glimpse. But I thought it was a woman.’

  ‘You must have imagined it,’ Julia said.

  Karen seemed troubled by this. ‘That’s really strange. I’m sure I saw someone.’

  ‘Perhaps it was Suzi,’ I offered.

  ‘No, I’m pretty certain she was still in bed.’ She chewed a thumbnail. ‘I suppose I must have still been a little . . .’

  She stopped herself, but Julia laughed.

  ‘Stoned? I’m not completely wet behind the ears, Karen. I can smell it in your room. I was going to ask you to do it outside. There are certain boring regulations I have to follow. Sorry to be a massive killjoy.’

  ‘No, I’m sorry.’ Karen cringed. ‘So now I feel like a naughty schoolgirl who’s been caught smoking out the window. I’d better get on.’ She headed over to the cottage.

  ‘That’s all I need,’ Julia said. ‘People seeing things. You should all lay off the weed.’ She tugged at her gardening gloves. ‘I’d better get on.’

  I was going to defend Karen, but Julia had already knelt by the flowerbed and picked up the little fork. She jabbed it into the dirt, grabbing handfuls of weeds and yanking them from the earth. A strand of hair fell over her face and she pushed it away with a gloved fist before attacking the flowerbed again.

  She caught me watching her and I looked away, embarrassed. I’d been imagining her taking off those gloves and laying her hands on me. Inviting me to lie down on the grass with her.

  I walked back to the house on shaky legs, face burning. Not because I thought it was wrong, per se, to be attracted to Julia or to fantasise about her.

  No. It was because it felt like a betrayal.

  ‘What are you up to today?’

  ‘Nothing special. I’m just going to carry on making notes for this new idea.’

  ‘The Sweetmeat one? It sounds good.’

  Priya kissed me goodbye and said something else, but I wasn’t really listening. My mind had already strayed to my book, to this idea that wouldn’t work, that I was on the verge of abandoning, along with my whole writing ‘career’. The ideas, the words wouldn’t come, and half an hour after Priya left for work, I put the TV on, pretending to hope it might stimulate my brain.

  I was watching a p
hone-in about neighbours from hell when the landline rang. It was Priya’s boss at the insurance company.

  ‘I just wanted to check that Priya’s okay,’ she said. ‘You’re supposed to call in if you’re sick. It’s an important rule.’

  ‘But she left for work . . .’ I checked the time. ‘Almost three hours ago.’

  I hung up and tried her number. It went straight to voicemail. I texted her, asking her to call me urgently, and tried to phone her again. There was a knot in my stomach that grew bigger with every passing second.

  She cycled to work every morning, even though I told her it was dangerous, that the roads in London were insane and choked with rage-filled lunatics. She always laughed off my concerns.

  ‘It’s the most exciting part of my day,’ she said.

  Once, I would have said, ‘What, more exciting than coming home to me?’ But I knew the answer. I knew that coming home to her morose, waster, has-been boyfriend was probably something she dreaded. She had been coming home later and later recently, going out for drinks with her colleagues frequently, going to bed early. Our sex life was in a coma. It was all my fault, but I was unable to do anything about it. I was in a pit, wallowing in self-pity, and I wanted to dig myself out but the shovel was too heavy, my limbs too weak. Everything was too much effort.

  Now, though, as I continually redialled Priya’s number, fear jerked me to life like a defibrillator.

  I knew the route Priya took to work. Through the park and down a maze of backstreets before crossing the Thames and hitting the manic main roads of North London. I called the police and the hospital. They told me not to worry. It had only been a few hours.

  But I knew. Something terrible had happened.

  I was about to go out to look for her when an idea struck me. Priya’s iPhone. I knew her Apple password, so quickly opened the Find My iPhone app and logged in as her. A map appeared on the screen, a blue dot pulsing and telling me that her phone was on a quiet street between Clapham and Battersea. It wasn’t moving.

  I almost caused an accident on the Elephant and Castle roundabout, driving across two lanes in my haste to get to that motionless blue dot. Horns sounded. A woman gave me the finger. I checked the map as I rounded Clapham Common, turning off into the leafy residential streets that Priya and I had wandered together numerous times. One day we were going to buy a place around here and raise a family. One day, when I was a bestselling author and we had enough money.

  I found the place where the blue spot pulsed on the map and pulled over. There was no sign of Priya or her phone. There was a shabby mansion block on one side of the road. On the other, a jumble of run-down houses and a dry-cleaners that had gone out of business. A railway bridge crossed the road a little way ahead, covered with graffiti; there was a pile of fly-tipped junk on the pavement. Gentrification hadn’t quite reached this section of the street.

  I opened the Find My iPhone app and hit ‘Play Sound’. At that moment, a car went by, but when it had receded into the distance I heard it. A faint pulsing up ahead, near the bridge.

  I saw the phone first. It was lying beside a pair of wheeled Biffa bins, to the left of the pile of rubbish. I approached the phone slowly, and then I saw the wheel of a bicycle protruding from behind the bin. The sun was out but I couldn’t feel it. Right then, I didn’t think I’d ever be warm again.

  Priya’s body against the brick wall, next to her bike, both of them concealed from view by the bins. There was blood on her face and her left leg was twisted beneath her. Later – after someone heard me yelling and called the police, after the ambulance arrived, after they took her away – a kind young policewoman told me they believed Priya was the victim of a hit and run, that whoever had knocked her off her bike had stopped and dragged her from the street before driving away.

  ‘We’ll find them,’ she said, as if that would make it all right. As if that would make me and all the other people who loved Priya – her mum and dad, her sister, her best friend, her aunts and uncles and cousins – feel better. As if there could be justice.

  Chapter 11

  I woke up with a hangover.

  I had been drunk when I got back to my room. Mid-afternoon, unable to work, I’d gone to the Miners Arms. I didn’t remember seeing any of my fellow writers. I had a blurry memory of chatting to Rhodri about my dad and how I hadn’t inherited his practical genes. He seemed to find this hilarious, although most of the conversation was a blur. I told him about Priya too. I remembered getting angry and tearful – and, wincing, I shoved the recollection back beneath the blanket of my hangover.

  Eventually I dragged myself out of bed and into the shower. Feeling better, I grabbed a coffee from the kitchen and went back to my room. I badly needed to get some writing done. I hadn’t added anything to my word count the day before. Time was running out.

  I opened my laptop and found my work in progress open on the screen. As always, I started to read over the previous chapter before writing anything new.

  The men went from house to house, looking for the right one. The one whose name was called. A girl or boy who no one would miss very much. They searched the land until they found that child. They knew it was the only way to save the skins they’d made. The child cried until she was an empty well with no more tears to cry. But nobody else cried. Nobody cared – except for one man, who wrapped her in his strong arms and whispered with his lips against her hair. Whispered that . . .

  It ended abruptly, the sentence unfinished. I read over it again, perplexed. I had absolutely no memory of writing these words. Had I done it when I got back from the pub? I tried to peer through the haze of my hangover. I had a vague memory of sitting at my laptop when I got back, but was sure I’d just spent a few minutes checking my emails and Facebook.

  But I really didn’t remember working on my book. And these words didn’t sound like mine. The voice was different. It didn’t fit into the novel, either.

  I was clearly a bad writer when I was drunk.

  And I wasn’t very good hung over, either. I attempted to work on my story, but it was no use. After trying to construct the same sentence three times, I gave up and went back to bed.

  My phone woke me. It was dark outside and I couldn’t make sense of it, until I realised I must have slept through and wasted a whole day. I grabbed my phone. It was six thirty.

  ‘Lucas?’ It was Zara and she was whispering. ‘Can you meet?’

  ‘Yeah. Sure. Have you found anything?’

  ‘I’ll tell you when I see you.’

  Thirty minutes later, still a little groggy, I entered the Miners Arms. A few eyebrows went up when I walked in, the kind of looks that said ‘Back again?’ Oh God, I hoped I hadn’t done anything too embarrassing the night before.

  ‘Lucas! We’re over here.’

  It was Max, Suzi and Karen. Shit, I’d forgotten they’d be here. And there, sitting on her own in the corner, was Zara.

  Max got to his feet, intercepting me. ‘What are you drinking? We were wondering where you’d got to. Been hard at work?’

  ‘Something like that.’

  ‘We’re just talking about all the weird stuff that’s been going on in the house. Karen found a dead sparrow in her bedroom today and totally freaked out. I mean, obviously it was that bloody cat, but she’s going on about how it’s a bad omen.’ He rolled his eyes. ‘Anyway, what are you drinking? A pint?’

  Out of the corner of my eye, I could see Zara watching me.

  ‘Sorry, mate,’ I said. My tongue felt sluggish; how much had I drunk last night? ‘I’m, um, meeting an old friend. From when I was a kid.’

  Max looked around. ‘Oh, right. Of course, you were born here, weren’t you?’ He snickered. ‘That’s probably why you’re so weird.’

  ‘Huh?’

  He clapped me on the shoulder. ‘Just kidding, obviously.’

  I could feel his eyes on my back as I threaded my way between the tables to Zara. She sat hunched, a pint in front of her, cap pulled so low it to
uched her eyebrows.

  ‘You look rough,’ she said.

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘You’re welcome. Not drinking?’

  I groaned.

  ‘Ah.’ She fiddled with her beer mat and opened her mouth a couple of times, like she couldn’t figure out how to get started.

  ‘Have you found something out?’ I asked. ‘About Lily?’

  ‘Kind of. Well. Rumours. Rumours about this place.’ Her eyes flicked from side to side and she shuffled closer to the table as if she were afraid of being overheard. ‘One of the things you quickly discover in this job is that if you want to learn about a place, you should talk to a librarian. Not because they’ve read a lot of books or any of that old guff – no offence – but because they know the local people, they see the stuff they’re looking up, they overhear whispered conversations.’

  ‘Sounds sensible.’ I rubbed my forehead. I should have taken some painkillers before coming out.

  ‘So that’s where I went. Except the staff there were young library assistants, none of them with much knowledge of the town at all. To cut a long story short, I found out the librarian who worked there for donkey’s years retired a couple of years ago. And an old dear who was in there gathering a huge pile of crime novels told me he could almost always be found at the chess club.’

  I nodded for her to continue.

  Beddmawr Chess Club was based in a grand Victorian house near the centre of town, just across from the river. Zara paused on the bridge and found herself hypnotised by the swirling water beneath. A nutcase paddled beneath her in a kayak, which made her shiver. You wouldn’t catch her doing that, no way. The only place she liked to get her thrills was between the sheets.

  She buzzed the door of the chess club building and went inside.

  She found Malcolm Jones seated at a chess table, sipping a cup of tea. The seat opposite was free and she gestured to it.

  ‘Go ahead,’ he said.

  He had the lovely, lilting accent of the region, along with a good head of white hair and sharp eyes. He was sharply dressed too, in a tweed jacket that had been around so long it had come back into fashion.