Beyond Here Lies Nothing

CHAPTER ONE

IT STARTS, FOR him, with an ending…

In fact, it begins with a funeral.

Death is a constant in the Concrete Grove, just as it is everywhere else in the world. People come and they go; they live and they die, blooming and then withering like seasonal flowers on the stem. This natural cycle perpetuates, bringing existence and extinction and joy and sorrow, and everything else in-between, into sharp focus. But in the Grove these fundamental truths are pushed even closer to the surface, like a spiritual hernia; it is a place where the cycles of life and death are played out at an intimate scale across an epic canvas. A million different beginnings and endings, each with their separate details, their intimate little secrets…

But for Marc Price, it begins with an ending…

CHAPTER TWO

MARC WATCHED THE short funeral cortege as it made its way off the main road and into the grounds of the Near Grove Crematorium, following the narrow tarmac road past the gravestones and monuments. Most of the cars were old, outdated models, but kept in good shape by their mostly aged owners. None of the old man’s friends had been what anyone might call well off. They were normal people, with normal amounts of cash in their pockets.

He sat in his car outside the front gates, watching through the grimy windscreen. He recognised not one of the cars in the small queue of vehicles. In fact he didn’t know anyone who’d known Harry Rose apart from his uncle, but his uncle was dead too, five years in the grave from cancer of the liver. Uncle Mike had introduced Marc to Harry Rose, but only from beyond the grave — his name had been enough to convince the old man to talk to him. The two men had once drunk together. They’d been long-ago beer buddies.

The stereo was playing softly; the CD was a compilation of Ennio Morricone’s film scores Harry Rose had given him not long after their first meeting. Marc closed his eyes and listened to the music, trying not to think about the immediacy and inevitability of death.

When he opened his eyes again, the final car in the grim little procession was inching its way through the crematorium gates. Bright shards of sunlight broke through the clouds and made patterns on the shiny roof and bonnet, which were a direct contrast to the dirty, dented bodywork of his little Nissan. He stared at the layer of dust on the dashboard, a light scattering of grey. The torn seats, the battered interior… somehow the poor condition of the car represented a facet of his lifestyle that he didn’t like to think about. It had been new once, this vehicle, but now it was old. Not a profound insight, but one that moved him deeply on this particular day at this grim hour.

Marc turned off the engine, removed the ignition key, and opened the car door. He stepped out onto the road, glancing to the side to make sure there were no cars speeding towards him, and locked the door (he used the key; there was no central locking on this old beast). He pulled up his collar against the slight autumnal chill and jogged across the road, towards the iron crematorium fence. He had not been here for a long time — not since they’d cremated Uncle Mike. The place made him feel uncomfortable, exhuming memories that he’d rather stayed buried. Conflicting images and sensations almost overwhelmed him: the smell of booze on his uncle’s breath, the man’s strong arms lifting him off the ground when he was a child, his harsh voice, the way the skin around his eyes had creased when he smiled, almost covering his eyes.

He stood at the fence and stared through the trees. People were moving around in there, climbing out of their cars, milling around like geese in a field before the service began. He could see some of them shaking hands or speaking softly to one another, and others lit up cigarettes to smoke away the minutes before they were allowed to enter the small redbrick crematorium building. The weight of the dead was heavy here. Marc could feel it everywhere, even on the oft-trodden footpath outside the fence.

Marc wasn’t sure what he was doing here. He had not known Harry Rose for long, and he had not known him too well. Yes, the two men had forged a bond of sorts over the past few months, but it was based on Marc’s desire for information and the old man’s need for company in the long, dim days before he died. They had been convenient companions, nothing more.

Yes, Harry had once known Marc’s Uncle Mike well, many years ago, but Marc had known neither of the men beyond the superficial.

He reached inside his pocket and took out his mobile phone, checked it for messages, and then switched it off. He rarely received calls or texts. He led a deliberately friendless lifestyle, preferring to spend time on his own. He didn’t know why he chose to ostracise himself from others, but isolation agreed with him. That was all he needed to know, the only justification he required.

He started towards the main gates, reluctant to enter, yet knowing that it was the least he could do — to pay the man his respects, say a final goodbye before the flames took him. He didn’t need to hang around afterwards, and the strangers here would not press him to do so.

Loose stones crunched under his feet as he walked along the path, between grubby monuments and grave markers. The air was chill, the sky bright and open. Traffic noise dimmed behind him, as if he were in the process of entering a sealed environment.

Marc stood at the edge of the small group of mourners, trying not to be noticed. He wished he hadn’t given up smoking; that would have given him something to do with his hands as he waited.

“Excuse me.”

Marc looked up, resisting the urge to sigh. He had been staring at his feet, so failed to notice the man’s approach. “Hello,” he said, holding out his hand in an instinctive gesture that he didn’t really mean.

The man shook his hand and smiled. “You must be Marc.” His face was lined, his hair was thin and grey; he looked as if he was in his early sixties. “I’m Vic. Victor Rose… Harry’s brother.”

Marc nodded. Of course; Harry had told him about his brother, and the falling out the two men had experienced several years ago — some family thing, a silly argument that had stretched and changed into a longstanding estrangement. “Ah, yes. I’m pleased to meet you.” When the man let go of his hand he didn’t know what to do with it, so he just let it hang at his side, the fingers clasping an imaginary cigarette.

“I suppose Harry told you about me. About what happened between us?”

“A little bit, yes. Not in any great detail, though.” He felt awkward, not really knowing what to say to this man. He hated small talk. It was meaningless.

“I wish we hadn’t been so stupid. If I knew what was going to happen… how ill he was… well, you know.” He smiled, sadly. His pale blue eyes were moist. His face was like parchment paper stamped with the signs of loss.

“I know. And I’m sure Harry felt the same.” He had no idea what Harry had thought about the matter. Even if he’d been told, he had not retained the information.

An awkward silence descended between the two men, pushing them apart. Again, Marc wished that he could smoke. He hadn’t felt the craving this strongly in a long time, perhaps for a couple of years.

“If he’d have told me how ill he was, I would’ve gone round, made up with him. He was my only brother… I loved the old bastard, even though I don’t think I ever told him how I felt.”

Marc was just about to say something — he didn’t know what; just anything to break the uncomfortable, candid moment — when people started to shuffle inside the building.

“Looks like we’re on now,” he said, smiling at Victor Rose. “Please, after you.”

Rose nodded and began to walk towards the entrance, hanging back enough that he didn’t get too far ahead of Marc. He doesn’t want to go in alone, thought Marc. He increased his speed and drew level with the older man. “Okay if I sit with you?” He was unsure why he’d made the offer, but once he did he felt better. Perhaps in this situation, a companion would help ease the tension.

Rose looked relieved. “Yes… yes, that would be fine.”

Marc placed a hand on Rose’s shoulder and guided him inside. He hoped that he would never get so lonely that he needed the company of a stranger at a family funeral — then he realised that he was already there. If he was called to the interment of some distant family member tomorrow, he’d have nobody to take with him.

Perhaps he’d ask Victor Rose.

They followed the other mourners inside and took their seats near the front of the narrow room. Marc looked around and concluded that there must be no other family members present. Not one person acknowledged Victor; no-one even looked in his direction. Either the trouble between the brothers had been worse than he imagined, or Victor had become so detached from his older sibling’s life that he did not know these people.

Whichever reason were true, it was a sad state of affairs.

They stood when the service began, sang half-heartedly along with the hymns, and listened to the vicar as he described someone Marc barely even recognised. After what felt like a very short time, the velvet-draped coffin began to move on its roller towards the furnace door.

Marc felt unmoved by the brief ceremony. He was unable to connect with anything that had happened, any of the words the man at the front of the room had said. It all seemed too generic, so homogenised, that it might have come out of a can. Instant funeral service: just add water.

Before long, the mourners started to file outside. Their faces were unchanged; nothing had penetrated the façade.

“Can I offer you a lift?” he asked Victor Rose, as they were standing outside, waiting for something that had already happened.

Rose nodded. “Thank you. I came here on the bus… it would be a rather depressing ride back to Harry’s patch on my own.”

Marc said nothing. He just led the way to the car, walking slowly to enable to other man to keep up.

Once the car was moving, he switched on the radio, keeping the volume low. The local news was reporting more job lay-offs and a story about yet another company going into liquidation. Times were hard; people were struggling. It was the same old story told in a different way, or a sequel in which every move could be predicted on the evidence of what had gone before.

“Back there in the crematorium.” He glanced to the side, at his passenger’s profile. “It didn’t seem like anyone knew you. I mean… not one of those people spoke to you.”

Rose sighed. “My brother and I led very different lives. To be honest, I very much doubt those other mourners even knew who I was. Even before we fell out, Harry and I were distant. We always have been — ever since we were children.”

Marc didn’t respond.

“I suppose you think that’s strange?”

Marc shook his head. “I really wouldn’t know. My own lifestyle isn’t exactly what you’d call conventional.” He thought of his ex-wife, who was now living with a female tattoo artist in Singapore, and his nomadic existence as a freelance reporter for a variety of newspapers and magazines; his self-imposed exile from the human race. He’d never settled down, never made a mark of any kind in the world. Even the stories he reported faded a day or two after they were told, impermanent, not mattering to anyone for longer than the minutes it took to read them.

“We were very different people, my brother and I. My friends don’t know he exists, and I daresay his friends never knew much about me. It’s how we worked. We didn’t need to be close in order to feel close. That probably doesn’t make much sense — I know it doesn’t to me — but it’s just how we were. Who we were…” He fell silent, as if tired of the sound of his own voice.

Marc followed the route from Near Grove to the Concrete Grove, feeling as if he were chasing a long, dark thread through the corridors of a familiar maze. He always became downbeat when he approached the area. It made him feel so low that sometimes he wished he’d never heard of the place. The closer he got to the heart of the area, the more dilapidated the buildings became, the more potholes appeared in the road, and the shabbier the people on the street began to seem. Part of this was psychological — his reaction to the location — but not all of it. This place was dark; it was well shadowed. Things had always been different here.

Marc had a theory that some places were always in shadow, no matter how hard the sun was shining. The Concrete Grove was a joyless estate. Apart from the poverty and the criminality that bred here, there was another layer of darkness that could be sensed rather than seen. He thought of a dark sea lapping against concrete pilings, the waves occasionally slopping up onto the land and breaking it away, slowly encroaching. But that wasn’t quite right. The analogy was close, but not precise enough to communicate exactly what it was he felt.

He drove the car along Beacon Grove Rise, following a couple of other vehicles that had left the crematorium just before them. As he drove, he was struck by the way things never changed around here. It was like a film set that had not been taken down when the production company moved on, and people had moved in to set up home inside the two-dimensional backdrop. There was a sense of impermanence, yet also the belief that everything would remain as it was now, as it had been since the estate was built.

He parked the car on Grove Terrace, in a spot opposite the small row of shops. When he glanced over at the newsagents, a short Pakistani man with thinning grey hair raised a hand in an informal wave. Marc smiled and nodded. The man turned away and went inside his shop.

“I suppose we have to go in, don’t we?” Rose was staring along the street at the Unicorn pub. His eyes were narrow and his lips were pursed.

“We don’t have to. I could take you home if you like.” Suddenly Marc was afraid. He didn’t know what had caused the fear, but it was there, gnawing away at him and unsettling his emotions.

“Thank you, but no. It wouldn’t be right. I should at least show my face.” He turned towards Marc, a tentative smile now playing at his lips. “Could I buy you a drink?

“No,” said Marc. “But I’ll buy you one. Come on, let’s get in there and raise a glass to your brother, the miserable old bugger.” He smiled and patted Rose’s arm.

They got out of the car and walked slowly along the street, not saying anything, just content to be silent. A few people entered the pub ahead of them, and when the door opened Marc heard the sound of many voices speaking at once, competing for attention, before it swung shut again.

They reached the pub doorway. Marc glanced at Rose. The old man nodded and Marc opened the door and stepped into the Unicorn.

He’d been inside the Unicorn a few times before, with Harry Rose. The old man had enjoyed a drink, and this place was just a few doors along from his house so had served as his local. Those times, clientele had been thin on the ground — just a few old men sipping bitter and studying racing forms, or the occasional young wannabe gangster spending his drug money and trying to play the big man in an infamous watering hole. Marc knew of the Unicorn’s reputation. Even in Far Grove, where he’d been raised by Uncle Mike, the place was spoken of as a roughhouse bar filled with hard men and aging prostitutes who’d take you to a nearby side street and gobble you for the price of a pint.

These days the place had lost its edge, but the essence of that hostility remained, wedged like ancient mortar into the brick joints. Even today, packed out with old men and women who were seeing off an old friend, there was the sense that violence might kick off at any given moment, triggered by nothing more than a change in the temperature or a rogue air current drifting in through an open window.

“What are you having?” He turned to Rose and leaned in towards the man, so he could hear a reply over the clamour.

“Whisky, please.”

“Double?”

“Well, I wouldn’t say no.”

Marc elbowed his way through the crowd and towards the bar. The two members of staff on duty were struggling to cope with the rush, so he had to wait a while before catching the barmaid’s eye. She raised her eyebrows to signal that she’d made a note of his presence and finished off pulling a pint of mild for an old man who looked drunk already.

The man paid for his beer and staggered away from the bar, slopping half the contents of his glass down the front of his shabby suit jacket. The barmaid moved over to where Marc was standing.

“Aye?”

“A double whisky and a bottle of Becks, please.”

She turned and bent over to the low-level cooler box, opened the glass door and took out a cold bottle. Marc stared at her enormous backside, unable to look away. The thin waistband of her tight black trousers had slipped down to reveal the lacy edge of her underwear and the flesh of her ample waist formed a bulging muffin-top around the beltline. She straightened and poured the whisky from the optic: two aggressive jabs with the glass.

“Anything else?” she asked as she turned back to him and placed the drinks on the wet bar. She had a pretty face but her dyed blonde hair was tired and dried out. Her makeup failed to hide the scars of a hard life.

“That’s all, thanks.” He took a sip of his beer straight from the bottle. It felt good, like a soothing balm for whatever might ail him.

Marc paid for the drinks and made his way back over to Rose. The man wasn’t standing where he’d left him and he felt stranded for a moment, gripping the two drinks and scanning the interior for a sighting of his companion.

Rose waved to him from across the room, where he’d managed to squeeze onto the end of a long seat at the edge of a table cluttered with empty pint glasses. Marc made his way over to the table, dodging elbows and spirited hand gestures. He reached the safety of the table without spilling a drop and set down the drinks before spotting the low three-legged stool Rose had commandeered for his use.

“Thanks,” he said, grabbing the stool and sitting opposite Rose at the narrow wooden table.

“Cheers,” said Rose, raising his glass. “Here’s to Harry.”

“To Harry,” echoed Marc, lifting his bottle and taking another drink.

The level of conversation inside the pub had settled to a lower volume. Now that everyone had a drink they were beginning to settle in and find a rhythm.

“I’m glad you called me to let me know about Harry,” said Rose. “I’d never have forgiven myself if I’d have missed his funeral.” His eyes were glazed. Marc wasn’t sure if the whisky was working already or the man was holding back tears.

“It’s okay,” said Marc. “To be honest, I was only doing what Harry asked me to do.”

Rose put down his glass. “What do you mean?”

“He’d asked a couple of times that I call you if anything happened to him. He knew he was ill. His heart wasn’t good. The doctor had told him that he shouldn’t make any long term plans.” He took a drink, licked his lips. “So he gave me your number and asked me to make you sure were informed when it happened.”

“Shit,” said Rose, wiping the back of a hand across his eyes. “We really were stupid… stubborn and stupid and intractable.” He gulped down the rest of his whisky. “My round,” he said and rose to his feet. “Same again?”

Marc finished his bottle. “I might join you in a whisky,” he said.

“Good lad.”

He sat and looked around as he waited for Rose to return with the drinks. Making mental notes, he studied the other people in the pub. It was the curse of a writer, this constant logging of minor details. He was unable to be anywhere without mentally listing character traits, quirks and twitches, even the dun colour of the wallpaper behind the heads of a chatting couple.

Most of the customers were the wrong side of middle age, but there were a few younger people present. Only about a third of the people here had been at the funeral, so Marc assumed that the rest of the group was made up of regulars and those who knew Harry but not well enough to attend the service. A bunch of kids in their early twenties occupied the bay window, talking in low tones, their faces hidden by the peaks of baseball caps. He watched a man and a woman as they kissed in the corner by the cigarette machine; her lips mashed against his teeth and Marc caught a glimpse of her tongue as it snaked into her partner’s mouth.

He wasn’t quite sure when he felt her gaze — even later, when he thought back to this moment, he could not be certain of the exact moment that he noticed her — but he gradually became aware of a vague warm sensation at the back of his head. Turning, he looked past the crowded bar and saw a tall, thin woman leaning against the wall by the jukebox. He’d caught her eye just as she looked away, but he knew that she’d been staring at him.

The woman’s face was long and narrow, vaguely horse-like, with a long nose and a wide, appealing mouth. Like a lot of women on the estate, she had dyed blonde hair, but hers was pulled back into a severe ponytail. Her black suit was cheap and in need of ironing but the blouse she had on underneath the jacket looked as if she’d spent a bit of money on it back when it had been in fashion. She looked at him again but this time she didn’t look away immediately; she held his gaze for a long moment and a smile played at the edges of her broad mouth.

“There you go.” Rose was back. He pushed a shot glass into Marc’s hand and slammed down two bottles of Becks on the table. “I dunno about you, but suddenly I feel like getting pissed.”

Marc raised his glass. “I’ll drink to that.”

CHAPTER THREE

THE AFTERNOON WORE on in a comfortable haze of whisky and beer. The craving for tobacco was almost crippling at times, because Marc kept seeing people nip outside for a smoke. He was drawn to follow them, as if some invisible umbilical were tugging him in that direction. But he fought the urge and managed to get through the worst of it. He drank more alcohol instead. It seemed to numb the craving.

He and Rose talked about a lot of things but they didn’t discuss anything of importance. Their conversation lurched between football and politics (Rose was a life long supporter of Newcastle United; Marc was a Sunderland fan. They both voted labour but Rose was in favour of a return to a more rigidly socialist doctrine), women and wine, friendships lost and broken and relationships renewed. The old man soon became maudlin and the effects of the whisky were showing. At some point after 3 pm, he announced that he was going to call a taxi and rose unsteadily to his feet.

“Here,” said Marc, all too aware of the slurring in his voice. “Use my mobile.”

“Thanks.” Rose thumbed the number and ordered a cab. He was told that it would arrive in about five minutes.

“I should’ve left earlier. I can’t take the booze like I used to.” His face was loose on the bones, the skin sagging. “But I’m glad I had someone to drink with, Marc. You’ve saved me from an afternoon sat in a corner drinking alone and wallowing in self-pity.” He smiled and showed his teeth, which were so white and even they could only be dentures.

“I’ll keep in touch,” said Marc. “Harry was a good man, and it would be a nice tribute if his death meant that we stayed friends.” He was surprised to find that he actually meant what he said.

“I’d like that. I know I can’t take back what happened between me and Harry, but the fact that you spent time with him in his last days is comforting. Right then…” He stood, swayed, and steadied himself against the table, clattering the glasses. “I have to go. My cab will be here soon. I’ll speak to you next week?”

Marc nodded. “I’ll give you a call. We can go for a pint.”

He watched as the old man wove across the floor, managing not to walk into anyone, and then pushed through the door and went outside.

Marc had about an inch of whisky left in his glass and the beer bottle was only half full. He knew that he should drink up and go, but the urge to keep drinking surged within him, a throwback to his younger days when he’d struggled with an addictive nature.

Just one more, he thought. One more drink after this one, and then I’ll leave.

The room seemed to shimmer around him. He knew he was drunk, of course; but what he didn’t realise was how drunk. He hadn’t stood up for about half an hour, and his legs felt strange, as if they’d blended with the table and the chair and were conspiring to keep him seated.

He finished the whisky without really tasting it and picked up the Becks bottle.

When he put the empty bottle back down on the table it was like coming out of a trance. He knew that only seconds had passed between his last thought and the act of replacing the green bottle on the table, but it felt like he’d somehow fallen asleep and lost at least a couple of hours. The air in the room felt different, heavy. The quality of the light had changed, as if the sun outside had moved across the sky without him noticing the passage of time. He was familiar with this sensation of dislocation from drinking bouts in the past, but still it troubled him. It was as if he’d emerged from a lacuna, a blank spot. Anything could have happened while he was away.

Panicked, he checked his pockets. His wallet and his phone, his car and house keys… they were all still there. He hadn’t been pick-pocketed during his mini fugue. He had no idea how anything like that could even have occurred, yet it made him feel calmer to confirm that everything was still in place about his person. The world might have changed fractionally, but he was still the same.

He glanced up and around and realised that the Unicorn was a lot less busy. People had drifted away, perhaps going home to their families or seeking a cheaper method to bring on oblivion by raiding secret stores of black market beer and spirits kept in the space under the stairs or beneath the bed.

The woman he’d noticed earlier was still in her spot by the jukebox, but now she was pushing coins slowly and methodically into the slot, one after another. He’d been aware of music playing but only now that the volume of the drinkers had lowered could he identify a tune. Neil Diamond: Sweet Caroline. That song, he knew, was one of the many that formed the soundtrack to the lives of people who drank in rough pubs and social clubs. Songs like this one — sad and sweet and with an instant hook — were sung by club singers throughout the country. The performance was always the same — a low-rent crooner on a low stage belting out bygone hits through a dodgy sound system. An overweight man in an ill-fitting black suit with white sweat marks under the arms, singing songs about divorce and heartbreak; always delivered in a fake American accent in a small northern town, a desperate attempt to delineate the boundaries of even smaller lives. To Marc, it was one of the most depressing experiences the world had to offer.

“Jesus,” he muttered. And he fought the urge to laugh at his own bleak musings.

He needed to do something to break his mood, so he slowly rose from the chair and started moving in a crouch towards the bar. At the last minute he jinked to the right and walked along the length of the bar, following its curve towards the jukebox.

The woman picked that exact moment to stop feeding money into the machine. She turned around and faced the room. Marc was too close to her by now to back out, so he kept going and only stopped walking when he was right in front of her.

Suddenly this seemed like a bad idea. It was as if he’d entered another of those drunken fugues and only come out of it when it was too late to make any difference to the situation.

“Hi,” he said, aware that he was swaying gently.

The woman stared at him. Up close he could see that she was wearing too much makeup. The dark rings around her eyes looked like week-old bruises. Her lips were thin and her skin, beneath the layer of foundation, was slightly rough, as if it had been sandpapered. But her eyes were beautiful: ice blue, piercing, holding within them the promise of something that he couldn’t define. Staring into those eyes was like catching sight of a cold, quick, elegant movement; the flickering of something living encased within an iceberg.

“I, erm… I noticed you earlier. Thought I’d come over and say hello.”

She didn’t stop staring at him but she looked bored, barely even interested in what he had to say. Not that he could blame her: his patter was as stale as the air inside the pub, and as lifeless as her stoic face.

“Okay… sorry. I’ll go away.” He started to turn, his cheeks burning. He wasn’t usually this awkward around women. In fact, he usually found it easy to turn on the charm; faking was simple, it was honesty he found a difficult trick to pull off. But there was something about this woman that disturbed him — the same thing that drew him to her.

“White wine and soda,” she said, without moving. She had her back to the wall. The glass in her hand was almost full. Slowly, she raised the glass to her lips and swallowed the contents. Her eyes never left his face.

She handed him the glass.

He struggled to think of a witty response, but there was nothing left to say. He turned around and walked over to the bar, ordered the drinks. Then he returned to her side, feeling as if he’d been trapped somehow, or manipulated into doing something against his will. Not a big thing, just a tiny act of coercion, something unnoticeable to everyone but himself: a minuscule defilement of his sense of self, or a minor mutilation to a part of his body that would remain unseen.

He handed her the drink and waited. Why was he acting like this? What the hell was wrong with him?

“What’s your name?” He couldn’t stop looking at her eyes. He wanted to see that movement again, to try and discern what had caused it.

“Abby.” Her voice was cold and hard, the inflection flat. The vowels were truncated, as if she could barely be bothered to form the words.

“I’m Marc.”

“Oh.” Her thin lips twitched apart as she spoke. She took a sip of her wine.

“I’m not usually this crap with women,” he said, thinking that honesty might be the way forward. “You make me feel uncomfortable. Do you know that? The effect you have. Are you aware of it?”

“Do I look like I give a shit, Marc?” Those icy eyes, that tough voice.

“Listen… you’re obviously not interested. Enjoy your drink and I’ll –”

“No.” That was all she said. Just one word. But it was enough to keep him there, as if someone had applied quick-setting glue to the soles of his shoes.

“You don’t want me to leave you alone?”

She shook her head. “You can hang around for a bit. Talk to me. Nobody else does around here, not these days. It’s like they’re afraid they might catch something off me.”

Puzzled by her choice of words, he wondered if she perhaps had some kind of disease. She looked thin enough that something might be eating her away from the inside. The suit jacket hung loosely on her frame and her legs beneath the hem of the skirt were so thin that he was afraid they might buckle if she stepped away from the wall and put all her weight on them.

Cancer? Was that it? It might explain her demeanour, the way that she didn’t seem to care, and that faintly hostile coldness behind her eyes.

“It’s nice to see a new face around these parts,” she said, as if continuing some conversation the precise details of which he’d missed. “You get sick of these mardy bastards around here.” She twitched her head, indicating everyone else in the pub. “Sometimes I want to smash their faces in just to see what they’d do.” She smiled at last, but it was a bitter expression that didn’t quite suit her long face. “Do you know what I mean, or am I scaring you?” The question was a challenge. He could feel it. She was testing him, feeling him out.

“No, I knew exactly what you mean. Sometimes I get like that myself.” But it ran deeper than that. He knew it even if he was unable to vocalise his feelings. This place — it lent force to the everyday negative emotions people had, and it amplified them. He didn’t know how, or why, it happened, but here in the Grove bad thoughts took on substance, became even worse deeds-in-waiting. All it took was a trigger, and sometimes the finger pulling that trigger was the last one you expected.

There was a pause, then, and she looked around the room, her face resuming its previous set expression of mild distaste. Marc tried to judge the true shape of her body underneath her clothing, and he was left with the off-putting impression of skin and bones. Usually he was attracted to women with a fuller figure, and he failed to understand what it was about Abby that he found so appealing. Was he simply drunk and horny and had seen an opportunity here, or did the attraction run deeper than merely the possibility of a quick fix of empty sex? He couldn’t be sure; his thoughts refused to settle and his emotions were unfamiliar.

“How about another?” he said, draining his bottle. He’d abandoned the whisky in favour of sticking to beer. He was already too drunk to repair the damage, but at least he could prevent drinking himself insensate.

“Yeah,” she said. “Thanks.” Gratitude — this was new. He felt like he might be getting somewhere.

His journey to the bar this time was fraught with anxiety. Although the pub was quieter now, and he knew that he wouldn’t collide with anyone, he felt too exposed. His drunkenness was a badge of dishonour; it was difficult putting one foot in front of the other without stumbling.

He made it to the bar and clung on for dear life. He looked down at his hands. The knuckles were red.

“Yer in there, mate.”

He turned to his left and examined the owner of the voice. It was a short, fat man dressed in jeans and a ripped black T-shirt that was pulled out of shape and faded from being washed too many times. “Sorry?”

“The lass,” said the man. “She’ll go with anyone, her. Yer in for a shag the neet.”

Marc blinked. His eyes felt gritty. The man’s smile was wide and vaguely threatening, as if he were pushing for a fight.

“We’re just chatting,” he said, wondering why he felt the need to justify his actions to this stranger. “You know, a bit of harmless fun.”

The man shook his head. The muscles in his neck bulged and there was a blue tattoo of a swallow on his throat.

How witty, thought Marc, resisting the urge to grin.

The man turned slightly, so that he was facing Marc head-on. He was broad; his biceps were large and hard. More tattoos snaked down his wide forearms. “Don’t worry, mate. I’m only havin’ you on. Bit of a laugh, like. But, seriously, if you play it right she’ll take you home with her the neet. Game on, like.”

The barmaid — a different one this time; they must have changed shifts — came over and Marc ordered another bottle of Becks and a white wine and soda. He glanced back at Abby. She was slumped against the wall, her eyes heavy-lidded, starting to close, and her hips swayed gently to the music. She was even drunker than he felt. Now that she’d let her guard down, he could see how far gone she really was.

He carried the drinks over to the jukebox. Johnny Cash was singing about a Ring of Fire. Behind him, the short, fat man and his friends started to laugh. Marc was too tired, and too drunk, to even care.

“Ta,” said Abby, straightening her spine and attempting to smile. The expression was lopsided. Marc thought that it was an apt metaphor for how he felt.

“Listen,” he said. “We’re both a bit pissed here.” He glanced out of the nearest window. It was getting dark. “I haven’t a clue what time it is, but I haven’t eaten a thing since breakfast. How about going for something to eat? My treat.”

She slid a few inches down the wall and then forced herself to stand straight again. “How about a takeaway?” she said. “We could go back to mine and order one in.”

“Yeah, okay.”

The men at the bar laughed again.

“Come on, then,” said Abby. She gulped at her drink, draining the glass in seconds. Her eyes were glassy. “Let’s fuck off out of here.”

CHAPTER FOUR

ROYLE SAT IN his car and watched the estate, hoping that he didn’t see anything nefarious go down. He was off-duty, half-drunk, and incapable of acting professionally if anything did happen. He watched as a couple of young boys made their way towards Grove Alley, laughing. They walked with the stylised gait of chimpanzees: bow-legged and with their arms bent and swinging as if they were carrying rolls of carpet under their arms.

Wannabe hard men; trainee gangsters. This place was full of the fuckers.

Royle switched on the police radio and listened to random call-ins: a possible burglary in Cramlington, a domestic in Near Grove… all the usual night-time scenarios. He switched it off again and stared through the windscreen. The boys had gone. The street was quiet and empty. It was late. Some of the lights in the houses were still on but others lay in darkness. He could hear the steady rhythmic thud of bass-heavy dance music coming from somewhere across the estate.

He got out of the car and nipped along Grove Street, then followed the Roundpath until he came to the gate in the hoardings that surrounded the old concrete tower block. He stood outside and stared in at the Needle, at its cruel walls and its boarded windows. There was a light on in the security cabin that squatted in the building’s shadow. He turned and walked a few paces along the Roundpath, stopped and bent low to the ground. He reached down and ran his hands over the loose gravel; small stones and wood chippings passed beneath the tips of his fingers.

This was where it happened. The man, Simon Ridley, had been stabbed to death by a person or persons unknown. His two friends had been standing with him when it happened, but they were unable to identify the assailant. Ridley had died almost instantly. Royle remembered coming out here to see the body. A young constable had already been on the scene, making the area secure with police tape. The body had been covered by a white sheet that was too small to hide everything and Ridley’s legs from the knee down had been visible. There had been a lot of blood on the ground; it had stained the sheet.

He’d lifted the sheet to look at the man’s face. The victim had been smiling.

Even now, over three months later, he could not forget that smile. He dreamed about it regularly; it followed him through the darkness. At the time he couldn’t be sure what it was about the corpse’s facial expression that had disturbed him so badly. Only afterwards had he realised that it was because it was a smile of pure irony.

Royle didn’t usually become emotionally involved with cases, and his level of obsession in his work was manageable — at least most of the time, and apart from one special case. But this one was different; he wanted to know the real reason behind that smile. He needed to find out who had stabbed Simon Ridley, and why they’d done it. Royle knew that his thought process was flawed, but for some reason he couldn’t help thinking that if he answered these questions he might be able to understand more about his own life, and about the ghosts that haunted him.

He rose to a standing position and took one final look at the Needle. The place had always made him feel uncomfortable, as if the cold, grey structure hid something that wasn’t quite ready to be seen. He’d worked this patch long enough to know that strange things happened in the Grove. The estate was like some kind of locus for negative energy; in Medieval times it would have been considered cursed. Once he had read an article in a magazine about something called the Hum — low level electro-magnetic waves that some people were able to hear in the form of a low-frequency humming noise. These people heard it all the time; whenever they were close to electricity pylons, the sound became more apparent. One theory was that the Hum originated from all the electrical goods people pack into their homes. It had even driven one or two people insane.

There was something like that operating here, in the Grove. But it wasn’t a discernable sound. More like a feeling, a sensation; like the slow, burning sensation at the nape of the neck when you feel like you’re being watched. He felt that all the time. It only ever went away when he left the estate.

Royle had a name for it: he called it the Crawl. Because that’s how it felt: as if invisible insects were crawling across his skin, wandering around all over his body. The sensation wasn’t exactly invasive, but it was persistent. Sometimes he wanted to rip off his clothes and leap into a river to wash it off — anything to be rid of the terrible feeling that things were crawling all over his body, treating him like a patch of ground.

The Crawl.

He could feel it now; he could always feel it, when he was here, on these streets. Thinking about the Crawl made it seem worse, because it drew his attention to the sensation.

He turned away from the hoardings and walked back to his car, head down, skin crawling, shoulders hunched, and with his hands stuffed deep into the pockets of his coat.

Royle drove out of the estate towards Grove End. He passed very few people, apart from a couple making their way along the street from the direction of the Unicorn pub. The woman was tottering on her high heels and the man looked pensive, slightly out of place in his surroundings. He thought he recognised the woman, but he couldn’t be sure.

The farther Royle travelled from the source, the less bothered he was by the Crawl. Eventually, when he was roughly a mile away from the Needle, the feeling stopped completely and he was able to relax. The three whiskies he’d enjoyed earlier that evening no longer warmed him. He reached out and turned on the car’s heating system, listening to the slow suction of air into the interior of the vehicle.

When he arrived at his flat he sat there still waiting for the car to heat up. After a couple of minutes he got out and walked to his door, fishing his keys out of his pocket. He let himself in, climbed the stairs, and went straight to the drinks shelf. He took a sip of whisky before taking off his coat. It felt good, like an old friend.

The off-license downstairs was still open but he had enough supplies to see him through most of the following week.

He supposed that it had been stupid to rent a flat situated directly above so much temptation, but he’d long ago realised that it was impossible to fight his cravings. He could manage the problem, but would never defeat his addictive nature. Vanessa wanted to arrange for him to attend AA meetings, or see a counsellor, but he wouldn’t accede to her demands. He knew that he was drink-dependent — he wasn’t an idiot, locked into a cycle of self-denial — but the basic fact was that the dependency sustained him. If he didn’t have the drink, he’d lose his ability to cope with the job he did. Almost everyone he knew on the force had a drink problem. Nobody talked about it out in the open, and as long as it didn’t affect the way you did your job, it was simply accepted as part of the territory.

He walked across to his tiny stereo and flicked on the radio. There was a late-night phone-in programme about street crime. He changed the station to a sports discussion show and sat down in his chair by the window. He liked to watch the streets at night. It gave him a sense of the mechanics of how society worked. There were phases of activity after nightfall: the early evening crowd of street kids marking out their territory, then the after-pub crowd staggering home, followed by an emptiness that seemed almost holy.

Sometimes, when he sat and stared out of the window, he saw signs of something bigger than himself, a vast conscious energy that stirred the litter in the gutters, the leaves on the trees, the swings in the playground opposite his flat.

Royle had never been a religious man, but as he got older he became more aware of his burgeoning spirituality. He wasn’t sure what he believed in, but he knew that he believed in something — or that he wanted to believe.

In his trouser pocket, his mobile phone began to vibrate. He took it out and opened the text message. It was from Vanessa.

Are you awake?

It was a system they’d worked out between them. He struggled with insomnia and the pregnancy was causing her to sit up late at night, unable to sleep. So if one of them wanted to talk, or simply to listen to another voice on the phone whatever the time of day or night, they’d send a quick text to see if the other was amenable to a chat.

He reached over and retrieved the landline phone from its spot on the windowsill and dialled her number. She answered on the second ring.

“How are you?” she said, without preamble.

“The usual. Can’t sleep, mind refuses to shut down. You know…”

He pictured her smile and the way she always ducked her head slightly, as if to try and hide her chin.

“What about you? Baby keeping you awake?”

“Yeah. Baby’s been restless tonight. I don’t think it enjoyed the mushroom sandwich I had earlier. Maybe Baby’s getting a bit sick of mushrooms.”

“The way it got sick of cooked meat?”

“Yes.” She paused, and he sensed some minor apprehension on her behalf. “I know I shouldn’t say this, but I’m missing you tonight. Sorry. No… I definitely shouldn’t have said that.”

He adjusted his position in the chair and rested his fingertips on the edge of the whisky glass. “No, it’s okay. I know what you mean. I’m feeling a bit down myself, and kind of wish that I had someone here in the flat. Just another presence around the place.”

“Uh-hum. That’s it. That’s exactly it. I wouldn’t want you to speak to me, or do anything. Just be here. Be around, to make it less lonely.”

He felt an ache in his chest. Nothing major, a slight twinge that was gone just as quickly as it had arrived. “Yes,” he said. “Yes.”

They both stopped speaking, then. It was a comfortable, companionable silence. If they’d been sitting in the same room, one of them perhaps reading a book, it would have felt natural. But on the phone it was slightly strained. Royle listened to the static on the line and thought about the Hum. This thought led on to the Crawl, and he shut his eyes to try and disperse the negativity it brought. He was out of its range here; the Crawl could not reach him.

There was a crackling noise in his ear — or was it more of a clicking sound? Then the low-grade white noise surged back in and drowned out the other sound he thought he’d heard.

“This is awkward, isn’t it?”

He nodded and then remembered that she couldn’t see him. “It isn’t usually like this,” he said. “It’s probably me. I’m tired and frustrated.”

“Is it that young man, the one who was stabbed?”

“Yes… it’s always about him, lately. I can’t seem to shake it. I need to find out who did it, bring them in, and file it all away neatly.”

“Life isn’t like that. You know it isn’t. How many unsolved cases have you been involved with? How many dead people were buried without the answers to why they ended up that way? You know better than anyone that these things can’t be tied up in a bow and put away on a shelf somewhere, all neatly packaged. It doesn’t work like that.”

She was right. She was always right. About this, and about everything else. About them, their relationship, the way they had to live apart if they were to stand any chance of getting back together.

“How’s the drinking?”

He knew she’d ask. She always did.

“The same.” He waited for the sigh but it didn’t come.

“But are you working on it?”

He looked at the whisky glass perched on the arm of the chair. The amber fluid glimmered with light reflected from the window.

“Yes,” he said. “Slowly. I’m working on it slowly.”

He heard a soft smacking sound as she pursed her lips or sucked her teeth. He imagined her small, pink tongue poking between her lips.

“We’ll get there,” she said, and for a moment he wasn’t quite sure what she meant. “You and I, we’ll get there in the end.”

“I hope so. This can’t go on — not once Baby’s born. We tried so hard, we were so desperate for a family, and now that it’s happened we have to make sure that we are a family.” He felt like crying. The force of emotion was staggering; it made his body ache, filled up his head with acid.

“We’re getting closer, Craig. I can feel it. Things are changing and that can only be a good thing. The fact that we both want to be together makes me confident that we will be.”

His hand clenched around the glass. He stared at the hand, as if it belonged to someone else. He had no sense of trying to make a fist; he could barely even feel the hand as the fingers tightened around the glass. He wondered if it would break, and he’d cut himself on a shard, bleeding onto the chair.

“I’ll let you go now.” Her voice sounded so incredibly far away, a distance that could not be measured by common means. The words meant so much more than she intended, and for a moment he wished that he could explain to her exactly how he felt. Then he realised that he couldn’t do that, because he didn’t understand it either. There were no rules of engagement in the war he was waging against himself. He was making it all up as he went along, hoping that the casualties would be slight. He felt like the walking wounded, travelling along a road towards a salvation that might not even be there when he got to the end.

“I love you,” he said, his voice trembling with emotions that were so new to him they didn’t even have a name.

“I know.” She hung up the phone.

Royle returned the handset to its home on the sill and once again stared out of the window. The empty play park opposite looked different, as if subtle changes had occurred. The swings rocked slowly, the roundabout turned as if it had been pushed gently by an invisible hand; the climbing frame seemed as if it were tensed for movement, like a large spider waiting to pounce.

Five years ago, on this day, a seven year-old girl called Connie Millstone had disappeared from that park. Royle was in charge of the case — his first high-profile assignment after he’d been promoted to Detective. There was a big fuss made in the press at the time, articles in the red-top papers about predatory paedophiles, low-rent journalists calling for citizens to unite against a perceived societal threat. It had been absurd; a witch-hunt.

Despite the case having never been solved, Royle had been praised by his superiors for the way he’d handled the media-created outrage.

But little Connie Millstone was only the first of what soon became a spate of disappearances. The press began to call them The Gone-Away Girls.

Over the next year, three other kids went missing, all young girls. The disappearances were linked by a similar M.O. and the demographic of the victims. The only child to be linked directly to the Grove estate was a girl called Tessa Hansen; the rest had lived outside the area.

These were all children aged between seven and ten. Each one went missing from a supposed safe place (if anywhere in the Concrete Grove could be called that). A playground, a supermarket car park, the Far Grove skateboarding park, and in Tessa Hansen’s case a corner sweetshop on Far Grove Way — a street which formed part of the unofficial boundary between the estate and the district of Far Grove. There were never any witnesses, and no reports of anyone suspicious hanging around. The kids just… went away.

Connie Millstone, aged seven.

Alice Jacobs, aged eight.

Fiona Warren, aged nine.

Tessa Hansen, aged ten.

They were all in the same approximate age group. Each of them had fair blonde hair, a slight build, and was said by relatives to have a certain dreamy aspect to their personality and a loner’s ability to enjoy their own company. There was a link between them, but Royle had never discovered what it was. Other than the superficial similarities in their appearance and the fact that they each lived within a two or three mile radius of the Concrete Grove, there didn’t seem to be anything that connected the girls. They didn’t even know each other; they all went to different schools and moved in separate social circles. The fact that each subsequent girl was a year older than the last might be relevant — some kind of pattern — but he couldn’t see how or why. It was simply another part of the puzzle whose meaning eluded him.

It was maddening.

Like Simon Ridley’s smile, those disappearances still haunted Royle, and with this being the five-year anniversary of the first incident he was unable to rid his mind of the memories. He saw the places where those children had been, the holes they’d left in the fabric of existence, wherever he looked. Child-shaped gaps in the world. The Gone-Away Girls didn’t seem to be coming back, and every drink he took was a reminder that he’d failed them, failed their families, failed everyone, including himself.

Peering out into the darkness, he spotted something in the playground. There was something perched on the bottom of the slide. From this distance, it looked like it might be a bundle of clothing someone had dumped there, or a particularly small vagrant sleeping on the slide. He stood, leaning closer to the window, and tried to make out further details.

The bundle was about two-feet long. It could be a child, lying there on the end of the slide. Was it happening again, or could this be one of those missing children returning?

No, that was impossible. They’d be teenagers by now, if they were even still alive.

He blinked and then refocused his vision, hoping that the image would be gone. But it wasn’t. There was somebody on the slide.

Somebody.

Some body.

A body.

He moved quickly across the room, grabbing his coat, and was out the door, down the stairs, and in the street before he realised that he had not brought along his mobile phone. He’d left it by the chair after reading Vanessa’s text. There was no way to contact the station if this was in fact a dead body, or if he got into any kind of trouble investigating the scene. He could have run back up to the flat and grabbed the phone, but he experienced a sense of urgency that would not let him turn back.

He ran across the road, stepped over the short fence that surrounded the playground, and moved towards the slide. As he watched, the bundle began to move. It twitched several times, rolled over, and slipped off the edge of the slide, out of view. He felt the Crawl upon him — on his skin, like beetles.

Royle slowed his pace. The situation was so strange, so unlike anything that he could think of, that he was suddenly too afraid to move. So he stood there in the centre of the playground, wishing that he’d paused to pick up the phone.

The air was cold. The night was quiet. He couldn’t even hear a distant siren or an alarm. Not even the noise from a car or motorcycle. He stared at the slide, but the bundle was still out of sight. It had fallen to the side furthest away from him, and the darkness prevented him from seeing underneath the slide.

Slowly, he moved forward, ready to run or defend himself if something were to occur.

When he reached the slide there was no sign of the bundle — or the body, as he’d first imagined it was — so he made a quick inspection of the area. There was nothing on the ground nearby. The breeze had dropped so there was no movement from the swings or the roundabout.

He heard a rustling sound behind him, followed by a soft clicking noise. He turned around and looked at the trees bordering the northern edge of the playground, forming a boundary between the area where kids played and the tiny pavilion where old ladies and workers from the office a few streets away liked to eat their packed lunches. The leaves nearest the ground were moving, as if something had just crawled under there.

The Crawl, he thought. It’s the Crawl, and it’s come to get me.

His skin tingled.

He walked over to the spot and waited, trying to hear another sound. There was only silence — a silence so intense that it was almost like a new form of sound. He bent his knees and lowered himself into a squatting position, looking intently into the shadows under the trees. The leaves were no longer moving, but from deeper inside the undergrowth he heard a soft rustling, as of something moving away from him in the direction of the pavilion.

He spotted a fallen branch nearby and picked it up. Shuffling forward, he used the stick to prod at the area where whatever he had seen must have scuttled through and into the bushes. He lifted the hanging leaves and peered into the darkness. Nothing moved. There were no more sounds to indicate that anything might be in there, hiding from him and watching his every move.

The Crawl.

He stood and threw away the branch. Walking backwards, he moved away from the trees but kept watching them, looking for signs of movement. When he was satisfied that there was no longer anything there, he turned and headed back towards the road.

Behind him, something made a single clicking sound. He stopped, didn’t turn around. Waited.

The sound was not repeated.

This time, when he started walking, he had to fight the urge to run. If there was something (why did it have to be a thing, rather than a person, that he imagined back there?), he would not show it that he was afraid.

Because if the Crawl smelled his fear, it might come after him.

CHAPTER FIVE

ABBY LIVED IN a small two-bedroom semi-detached house at the south end of Grove Rise, overlooking the old railway embankment. They walked side by side along the wide footpath but didn’t touch one another. Marc thought that he should at least reach out and hold her hand, but it didn’t feel right. Even their proximity felt awkward, as if there was something wrong with the dynamic.

Abby stumbled on her two-inch heels and then righted herself. “It’s just along here,” she said, slurring only a little. The buttons on her jacket had come undone and it flapped open, displaying the small humps of her breasts beneath the blouse and the excess material at her flat stomach. The top two buttons of the blouse were also undone. Her sternum was prominent, with only a scant covering of pale flesh.

She’s so thin, he thought. Almost emaciated…

Again, he was confused by the strength and source of his own desire.

Curtains and blinds were shut at the windows of most of the houses they passed, but pale light bled around the edges and through the gaps. Marc caught sight of the occasional red eye of a lit cigarette as someone smoked on their doorstep. There was a feeling of mute desolation, a sense that behind this façade there was nothing but a deep, black emptiness. He had no idea what time it was, but it felt late. Too late to turn back, anyway.

When they reached the house, she stopped underneath a streetlight. The sickly light made her look ill. Marc waited to see what she would do, and when she reached for him he twitched in shock. Then, as she leaned in close and opened her mouth, he let himself go with the moment, enjoying the seedy glamour of her overly made-up face closing in on his.

When she kissed him, she did it with such force and urgency that he feared she might leave bruises. It felt as if she were trying to eat his face without breaking the skin. Her thin lips were hard; her large mouth was soft and wet and tasted of wine and soda. When she forced her tongue into his mouth it felt like an invasion, the prelude to a rape. He almost gagged but then he got the reaction under control, stopping it before it went too far. His stomach flipped. The muscles in his thighs tightened.

Abby’s long, firm tongue explored the inside of his mouth and he brought his teeth together softly, nibbling gently.

They came apart slowly. She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. His crotch was aching. She reached down and brazenly cupped his balls, and then rubbed her hand across the front of his trousers, pressing her palm so hard against his erection so that it began to throb. “Let’s go inside,” she whispered.

He followed her through the gate and along a narrow concrete path. The lawn on each side of the path was overgrown and filled with weeds. The curtains were open at the large front window. There was a standing lamp switched on inside the lounge, shedding weak light across the carpet. The TV was on and showing scenes from a 1970s action movie: Clint Eastwood, Sondra Locke; cops and criminals in grey suits with flared trousers running through the grimy streets of downtown San Francisco.

She opened the door and stepped inside, kept going along the hallway. She’d left the door open, so Marc assumed that he was meant to follow her inside. He shut the door behind him and continued towards another door at the end and on the right: the living room. When he went inside, Abby was closing the curtains. She’d taken off her jacket; the thin material of the blouse clung like crepe paper to her slight form. Her arms were painfully thin.

She turned around and smiled. She seemed more relaxed on her own turf, as if she’d also taken off a layer of the armour that had been so apparent in the Unicorn.

“Drink?” She moved gracefully across the room, running a hand across his chest as she passed him on her way to the door. “Or should I try to find a pizza menu, or something?”

“To be honest, I’m not really that hungry anymore.” He took off his coat and threw it onto the sofa.

She smiled. “Beer okay?” She walked out of the room before he had a chance to answer.

Marc sat down on the sofa and watched the muted television. The film had come to a break. Adverts for banks and supermarkets played out before his eyes, not even touching him.

“Here,” she said, opening a can of bitter and sitting down beside him. “It’s cold but I don’t know what it tastes like — I never drink bitter.”

He barely paused to wonder why she had cans of the stuff in her fridge.

He sipped the bitter and felt her place a hand on his thigh. When he looked over at her she was sitting staring at him, a strange, unreadable expression on her face. She seemed to be looking inward, staring at something that lived inside her. That was the only way he could think of to describe how she looked.

He put down the can on the floor and leaned in towards her, knowing that it was what was expected of him. He kissed the side of her neck and she moaned softly. He pulled away, feeling as if he was doing something wrong. Nothing felt right. He was simply going through the motions and feeling nothing of any substance.

He looked around at the living room. There were a couple of cheap prints on the wall, framed landscapes of places he didn’t recognise. On the mantelpiece above the electric fire was a small plastic model of the Angel of the North. Shoes were scattered on the floor in one corner. On a small occasional table to one side of the television there were photographs of a little girl. These were all held inside pretty little silver frames. One of the photographs was of the girl in school uniform. Another showed her smiling on a desolate beach. There were at least seven or eight of these images: it was like a small shrine.

“My daughter,” she said, noticing his interest. “That’s our Tessa.”

“She’s a beautiful girl,” he said.

“She was. She was very beautiful… my little Princess.”

Marc knew what was coming. He should have known that the woman’s damage must have come from something like this, but he’d been too drunk and aroused to stop and think about what he was doing, who he was really with.

“She went missing five years ago. She was only ten years old.”

He looked again at the photos. Placed among them were other items: a few crude, childish examples of arts and crafts. Perhaps they’d been created by the girl when she was at school or attending a day nursery. There was a fired clay saucer, a primitive pottery figure, and two small macramé animals. This was the art of loss, bespeaking all manner of private grief.

“Should I go?”

She shook her head but remained silent. The television flickered like a faulty god from across the tawdry room.

“Are you sure?”

She nodded. Her eyelids fluttered in the gloom. She slid across the sofa so that their thighs were touching. This time the contact was electric; he imagined sparks flaring between them, forming an arc of white light. She leaned in close. He felt the soft warmth of her breath against his cheek. She closed her eyes and opened her mouth, and this time when she kissed him it was less hungry, more relaxed and intimate. This time it felt like she knew exactly who she was kissing.

He embraced her, running his hands across her back, feeling her bra strap through the thin blouse. She was breathing heavily. He felt constrained, wanted to get out of his clothes and feel her naked skin against him. He moved his right hand, bringing it around to the front and slipping it between them. He cupped her left breast. She took a sharp breath and smiled into his kiss.

They were upstairs before he’d even registered that they’d moved off the sofa. They picked at each other’s clothing, pulling away garments like hunters skinning an animal. That’s how it felt: primal, necessary. An act born out of need rather than want.

Her body was so thin that she was made up of angles. Her elbow bones were sharp points in the dark and her kneecaps stood out from the skin. Her breasts were small, with large nipples and dark areolae. He bent forward and kissed them, one at a time, teasing the nipples erect. She tugged his trousers down to his knees and he backed away from her to take them off and throw them across the room. She slipped off her knickers and displayed the darkness between her thighs. He knelt like a supplicant, moved his head forward, and began to lap at her crotch, feeling her open up for him. She reached down and pushed the back of his head. He tensed his tongue, jabbed the tip into her clitoris.

She moaned something under her breath but he couldn’t make out the words.

The sex was both hard and soft, it was desperate and yet it was also strangely rhythmic. They felt their way towards separate climaxes, and then, after a short and silent period of rest, they made love again. This time it was slower, more relaxed, and although lacking the same urgency it was no less intense.

Afterwards, Abby fell asleep in his arms, her head resting against his chest. It was uncomfortable but he didn’t want to move in case he woke her. After several minutes she shifted, turned her back to him, and curled up with her spine bent, the bones prodding her skin. He reached down and touched her flesh. She was hot to the touch.

He was sober now, and unable to sleep. The sex had invigorated him, washing the tiredness from his system. He stared at the ceiling, and then at the walls. In this room, too, there were several photographs of Tessa. She was a pretty girl with a wide smile. She looked a lot like her mother, with a similar long face and thin lips. She had the same ice-blue eyes.

The walls were covered with a type of wallpaper that had been in fashion half a decade ago. The ceiling was plastered with ridged white swirls of Artex. The furniture in the room — the double bed, a built-in wardrobe, a dressing table and chair — looked inexpensive, mass-produced.

Gently, he slid out of bed and went to look for his trousers. He found them near the door and put them on. He didn’t bother looking for his shirt. The heating must be on; it was warm inside the house.

He glanced back at the bed but Abby hadn’t moved. The skin of her back was white in the darkness, like dead flesh. He could make out the individual bones of her vertebral column through the papery flesh. Her shoulders were so narrow that she could have been a child lying there on the mattress, sleeping uneasily in her parents’ bed.

He opened the door and left the room, closing it gently behind him. He padded across the landing and paused at the top of the stairs. There were two other rooms up here — one must be the bathroom. He moved further along the landing and tried the first door. It opened onto the second bedroom. This must have been where Tessa had slept. There were posters of ponies and fairy tale characters on the walls. The bed was covered in a pink duvet. There was a small TV, a stereo, an Xbox, and all the books on the shelf above the headboard were storybooks about princes and princesses and faraway lands.

Abby must have kept the room exactly how it had been when her daughter went missing. He was again reminded of the small table-top shrine in the living room. At the centre of the bedroom there was a large, roughly triangular pile of what at first he took as random objects. Then, when he moved further into the room to take a closer look, he realised what the objects were. Broken toys, the pages from what might have been her favourite books, stuffed animals that were missing an arm or a leg, and in one case even a head. There were doll parts, oversized jigsaw pieces, fractured board games, foreign dolls in national dress, and the remnants of a destructed playroom: all the sad parts from the broken toys that nobody ever got around to fixing.

The pile of discarded playthings formed a small pyramid, the apex of which was level with Marc’s mid-thigh. He stood before it and wondered how long it had taken to build. Had Abby created it all in one go, or had she added to the mound gradually, forming a kind of homemade monument to her memory over the past five years since her daughter had disappeared?

He put out his hand and let it hover above the totem. That was how he’d begun to think of the weird construction: with each layer of toys representing a period in the girl’s life. The older toys were nearer the bottom — baby things, the mobile from above her crib, perhaps even her first stuffed toy — and the newer stuff was at the top.

As he stepped around the mound, he noticed a photograph attached to the top of the pyramid. A small monochrome portrait of the girl, possibly taken not long before she’d gone away: her last school photograph, or maybe one taken by Abby on their final family holiday? The background was a greyish blur, so he couldn’t make out where the picture had been taken. It wasn’t even clear if the girl had been indoors or outside in the open air.

When he looked closer he realised that her eyes were shut. What he’d at first assumed were the girl’s eyes were in fact drawn on; somebody had sketched false eyes onto her eyelids. He bent down to inspect the photograph closer, to try and understand what it was he was looking at.

Was it an image of a dead girl, like Victorian post-mortem photography? Or was she simply asleep, and whoever had drawn the eyes had been playing a joke? There wasn’t enough detail to be sure, but the image disturbed him. Perhaps if the photograph had been in colour, he might have been able to discern more detail. As it was, this was just a girl with eyes drawn onto her closed lids.

He backed out of the room slowly, trying not to make a sound. He could not turn away from the grim totem, and now that he’d seen the photograph he was unable to think of anything else. Even when he closed his eyes, he saw that face: the drawn-on eyes stared at him from the red-tinted darkness.

He shut the door on the dreadful image and went to the next door along the landing. It was the bathroom. He locked the door and sat down on the toilet, trying to clear his mind. But all he could think of — and all he could see, like a flash against his retina — was the girl’s small, white face and those crudely drawn eyes.

He stood and lifted the toilet lid, took a piss and stared at the clean white tiles above the cistern. As he washed his hands, he tried not to meet his own eyes in the mirror above the sink. He knew that they would look haunted, just as this house was haunted by something that was not immediately apparent — a quiet spectre, a ghost of sadness and decay. He wasn’t afraid, he was mournful. The death of this child — if she even was dead, and not simply being held somewhere by another haunted and tormented soul — permeated the bricks and the mortar, the very fabric of the building in which he stood. Her absence was like a physical thing, taking up space that it did not own.

He dried his hands on a frayed towel and left the room, shutting the door and walking back to Abby’s room. He paused outside the door and listened, trying to make out if she had woken or if she was still sleeping. There was no sound from behind the door, so he opened it and went inside.

Abby was in the same position she’d been in when he left the room. She hadn’t moved, not even a fraction, as far as he could tell.

“Abby?”

There was no answer. Either she was fast asleep or faking it. He wasn’t sure which of these options he preferred.

He walked over to the bed and slipped beneath the covers, pulling them down to his waist. He was still warm, despite the chilling sight he’d stumbled across in the second bedroom. He turned over onto his side and stared at the base of Abby’s neck, where the bone was most prominent. She had a small tattoo on her right shoulder; her daughter’s name in a fine, looping script. He moved closer and kissed the opposite shoulder softly, just allowing his lips to rest there for a moment. Her skin was warm and clammy. The thin layer of sweat there tasted of smoke and Chardonnay.

CHAPTER SIX

MARC WOKE LATE the following morning. His head was aching and his hands felt numb, as if he’d been punching walls in the night. He sat up in bed, resting his head against the pillows, and was glad that Abby was not lying next to him. He tried to clear his head. A patch of sunlight moved across the floor towards the bed, as if hunting him. He glanced at the window, and saw that it was bright outside. The day looked new, as if it might turn into something glorious.

He smelled frying bacon and his stomach began to twist and grumble. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d eaten. They’d not got around to ordering takeaway last night and he’d consumed a lot more alcohol than he was used to.

He rubbed his head, clawed at his cheek with his bitten fingernails, feeling the stubble there.

Sounds drifted up the stairs and into the room, through the open door. The radio was playing and Abby was humming along to the tune.

Marc got out of bed and slipped into his clothes. He didn’t want to have a shower; it would be best if he just ate and ran, leaving the woman downstairs to come to her own conclusions about last night. He remembered the ferocity of their lovemaking, as if the act of sex had stripped away her grief for as long as it took her to come. He wasn’t quite sure how he felt about Abby, and even less sure regarding how she might feel about him. She gave little away; her defences were impressive.

He left the room and walked towards the bathroom, glancing over at the other door — the one that led to the absent child’s room, where that bizarre structure was hidden. He tried not to think about it and went into the bathroom. He opened the cupboard door and found a spare toothbrush still in its wrapper. Next to it, on the shelf, there was a packet of cheap men’s razors, a half-used bottle of aftershave, and some shaving foam. He wondered who they belonged to, or if in fact they were there for anyone who needed them. For some reason, Abby didn’t strike him as the kind of girl who said no often. He recalled the comment he’d heard in the pub yesterday, when that pissed-up bloke had told him that she’d sleep with anyone who bought her a drink.

He stared at his face in the mirror above the sink. His eyes were red, the skin around them swollen. His lips were dry and his teeth looked yellow.

“Morning, handsome,” he said, tilting his head and grinning.

He brushed his teeth, took a piss that seemed to last forever, and left the room. This time he’d managed not to look over at the other bedroom door. He went straight for the stairs and walked down them silently, as if afraid to be heard.

He turned at the bottom and saw her through the kitchen doorway. She was bending over the table, setting out a couple of plates and some cutlery. Her short dressing gown had hitched up over her thighs. There were old, faded scars there that he’d failed to notice the night before and faint marks like old bruises that had never healed.

Marc felt like running, but he told himself not to be stupid, not to judge this woman before he even knew her.

She turned around and saw him, a smile appearing briefly on her face before it was swallowed by some other expression, one that he could not read. Was it regret? Dread? Terror?

“Morning.” He walked towards the kitchen doorway.

“Hi,” she said, turning away. “I made bacon and eggs. I hope you’re hungry.”

“Cheers,” he said, sitting down at the table. “That would be great.”

“Coffee?” She didn’t turn to look at him when she asked the question.

“Black, thanks. One sugar.”

She nodded, but still didn’t turn.

He watched her as she poured hot water into two mugs Her shoulders were narrow, her arms were thin. She was tiny, breakable. Like a porcelain doll. Last night she’d seemed more like a warrior.

“Here.” She turned and set down one of the mugs on the table. The handle of the spoon stuck up above the rim. He grabbed it and began to stir, slowly. “Food’s nearly ready.”

“Thanks.” He stopped stirring. “How do you feel this morning?”

She tensed. “What do you mean?”

“Well…” He wished he hadn’t started this; he should have just kept his mouth shut, or maybe talked about the weather. “You know. After we… what happened between us.”

“After we fucked, you mean?”

He was shocked, but what stunned him more was his reaction to her words. He’d expected her to be like this, so why did it have such an impact? “Yes,” he said. He took a sip of coffee.

“I feel fine. I’m used to it. You’ll probably hear this anyway, so I’ll tell you now.” She turned to face him. Her eyes were large, glaring. Her cheeks were tensed. “I’m a slag. I’ll fuck anyone, me. It’s what I do, just so I don’t feel so alone. It doesn’t make you anything special.”

Marc wasn’t sure what he was meant to say, so he went with a joke: “You say the nicest things.”

There was a pause, and then she smiled. Even her eyes lit up. “Thanks.” She turned back to the cooker and started serving up the bacon and scrambled egg. She’d made too much, but she piled it onto the plates anyway.

“This looks good.” He stared at the plate of food. He wasn’t lying. It looked fantastic. The bacon was well done, just the way he liked it, and the eggs weren’t too soft.

“Eat up, then,” she said.

He took one mouthful and his stomach began to ache. He answered this by shovelling in more food, unashamed at how ill-mannered he was coming across. He was starving. Ravenous. He’d never felt so hungry in his life.

“I like to see a man with a big appetite,” she said. She hadn’t touched her own food. Clearly she preferred to watch him eat.

Marc took a break halfway through, gasping for breath. He swigged his coffee like a navvy on a tea-break, enjoying the way he almost choked on the now lukewarm liquid. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, almost slobbering. “Jesus… you must think I’m a pig.”

Abby shook her head. “I worked you hard last night.” Beneath the table, he felt her bare foot touch his leg, rubbing along his shin bone. “You need to replace that energy.”

“About last night…” He shook his head when the cliché came out of his mouth. “Fuck, that sounds crap. I’m sorry. I’m trying to be original, I really am.”

She shook her head. “Don’t worry. I’ve been here before, too many times. I know the script by heart. It was a one-night stand. You don’t want to see me again. Don’t even want my number.”

“No, wait…”

“It’s fine. Really, it is. I don’t want to give you my number anyway. I’m not after a boyfriend, or even a fuck buddy. I don’t need anybody permanent in my life.”

“Listen, that’s not what I meant.”

She stopped talking, started pushing the eggs around her plate with a fork.

“I meant the opposite, actually. I… I would like to see you again. I do want your number.”

She raised her eyes and stared directly into his face, as if examining him for facial scars. Her eyes narrowed, her nostrils flared.

“My daughter wasn’t the first one to go missing. She was the fourth. The final one.”

Marc said nothing. He didn’t want to break the spell. That’s exactly how it felt; as if some kind of magic was being weaved, some form of urban witchcraft.

“The Press called them the Gone Away Girls. It has a nice ring to it, doesn’t it? Like poetry, or a song lyric. They loved that fucking name, the reporters. They used it all the time…I think they were gutted when my Tessa was the last and they didn’t get to use it again, except whenever they resurrected the case to sell some extra copies.” She was rubbing her hands, as if soaping them at the sink, trying to scrub off the dirt.

Marc put down his knife and fork. “You don’t have to tell me any of this. It’s okay. I understand. It’s personal.”

She stood, carried her plate to the sink, and left it there. Then she sat back down at the table. “Tess’s father is still around. He lived in the area. Not in the Grove, not anymore, but nearby. He comes round here sometimes. I don’t know what he’s looking for, but he always wants to have sex. He cries when he comes. He weeps like a baby into my shoulder.”

Marc sat and stared as she spoke, unable to focus his thoughts. Was this a brush-off, or something else? The woman was maddening. She always made him feel as if he’d not quite understood what she’d said, or had missed the crucial point of the conversation.

“I think he wants to save me,” said Abby, looking down at the table, still wringing her hands. “But that’s the last thing I need. They always, always want to save me, and not once do they stop to even think that I might not want to be fucking saved.” Her eyes were shining. She blinked several times before continuing. “Just promise me one thing, Marc. Promise me that you won’t try to save me.”

He could not fight her. The will was too strong.

“I… I promise,” he said, not entirely sure what kind of promise he was making. It felt so much wider, deeper, than what she’d asked.

She nodded her head. “That’s the only thing I’ll ever ask of you, and if you break that promise I’ll ask you to leave and never come back again.” She stood and went to a cupboard, opened the door and took out a cardboard box file. “Every man I’ve ever met seems to think I want to be saved, when all I want is a nice fuck and a warm body next to me at night.”

She dropped the box file onto the table and stepped back, folding her arms across her tiny chest. “There they are. The Gone Away Girls.”

Marc reached out and opened the file. Inside was a sheaf of newspaper clippings, each one reporting the disappearance of a young girl. By the second one — Alice Jacobs — they were already using the collective title Gone Away Girls. Abby was right; they’d been in love with their own invention.

He flipped through the clippings, not reading them but skimming, noting the similar details of each case: a young girl, taken from a place that was considered safe, never seen again. He wondered why he’d never heard of this, especially since he was a journalist. But he’d been working freelance at the time of these abductions, and living in Birmingham for much of the time. Five years ago… where exactly had he been then? It was difficult to pinpoint because he’d moved around so much, chasing stories, looking for the big score that never came. Maybe he’d even been in London, on one of his regular trips to the city? He could never quite settle there, but he always stayed at least a month, sleeping in friends’ spare rooms or on their floors. But he always returned to the north; he always failed to find the big story, the one that would set him up for life…

He wished he’d been the one to coin the term Gone Away Girls. It was a classic, the kind of epithet that lasted, sank deep into the consciousness of everyone interested in the case. He didn’t even feel bad about his envy. He was used to having thoughts like these, and so familiar with the mercenary thought processes of journalism that he’d moved far beyond any vestigial sense of shame years ago.

He put away the clippings and closed the file. Abby was still staring at him. Her eyes were flat; her mouth was a tight little line. “I don’t know what you want me to say.”

Abby unfolded her arms. She reached down and took the file, clutching it tightly against her chest. “Just remember my little girl’s face, and appreciate that I don’t need saving.” She turned back to the cupboard and put away the file, pushing it right to the back. When she straightened up again, she turned around and leaned the small of her back against the work bench.

They stared at each other in silence.

Somebody began to knock on the front door, quietly at first but with increasing vigour.

Abby glanced over towards the open kitchen door, and the hallway beyond. The knocking continued. Marc looked along the hallway. At the front door, he could see the fuzzy outline of a head beyond the frosted glass.

“Aren’t you going to answer that?”

She shrugged. Her fingers were fidgeting with the buttons on her dressing gown. She crossed her legs at the ankle, one over the other.

Marc finished his coffee.

The knocking grew louder. Then a man’s voice said, “Open the door. I know you’re in there.”

Marc pushed his chair a few inches away from the table, wincing as the legs screeched across the cheap laminated floor covering. He stood and turned towards the back door. “Maybe I should go.”

“No,” said Abby. “No, it’s okay. I’ll deal with this. You just sit down and have another cup of coffee.” She reached for the kettle and flicked the switch to set the water to boil again. “I won’t be a minute.” She moved quickly across the room, closing the door on her way out. The edge of the door bounced when it hit the frame, opening again, but just a couple of inches. He moved across the front of the table, positioning himself so that he could see through the gap. He watched Abby’s white-gowned figure as she approached the door. She smoothed the gown across her hips, flicked her head to shift the hair from out of her eyes, and opened the front door.

Marc couldn’t quite see the man clearly. The doorstep was set down lower than the hallway floor, and Abby’s thin body further obscured his view. They spoke quietly. The man must not be annoyed after all. Perhaps he was merely concerned. Abby glanced over her shoulder a couple of times, as if she were talking about him. The man attempted to manoeuvre his way past her and through the doorway, but she angled her body to block him.

“Come back later,” he heard her say. “I’m busy.”

“Who’s in there?” The man’s head, with his close-cropped hair, bobbed up and down, back and forth, trying to see past her and into the house. He had a thick neck. He wasn’t tall, but he was broad through the shoulders.

Marc jumped in shock when the kettle clicked off. He turned and watched the steam as it rose in a smooth line from the spout. He walked over and made himself another cup of instant. His hands were shaking. Behind him, the door slammed shut. Footsteps padded along the hallway, towards the kitchen door.

Let her be alone, he thought. I don’t want any trouble.

When he turned to face the door, she entered the room and sat down at the table. Her eyes were red, as if she’d been crying, or fighting tears. Her face was white but there were pink streaks on her cheeks.

“Are you… are you okay?”

“Yeah.” She looked up, trying to smile, but it didn’t quite work. “I’m fine.”

“Who was that?” He wished he hadn’t asked, but the reporter’s instinct never let him down: he always, always asked the questions that came into his head, as if he did not possess a mental cut-off switch.

“Just an ex-boyfriend… He pesters me sometimes, wants me to have him back.”

“Oh.” He blew on his coffee. Suddenly he didn’t want the drink.

“Listen, I’m sorry but that bastard’s upset me. Can you go?”

He put the mug down on the work bench and stepped away. Suddenly he didn’t know what to do with his empty hands. “Yes, I’ll go. Give you a bit of peace.”

“Thank you,” she said, as if she really meant it.

“Can I have your number?” Again, he wished he’d never asked.

She stared at him, her eyes boring into his, her lips parting slightly. “Are you sure? Are you really sure you want it?” She was challenging him, making him prove that he was man enough.

“Yes. I’m sure.”

She nodded. There was a fruit bowl in the centre of the table. As far as he could tell, it contained nothing but a couple of apples and several dried-out tangerines. She reached into it and withdrew a stubby little betting shop pen, then wrote down her number on a slip of paper she produced from her dressing gown pocket — as if she’d been carrying it around with her for this exact moment.

Marc stepped forward and held out his hand.

She placed the folded paper on his palm. “Give me a call,” she said. “But remember what I said.”

“Don’t worry. I won’t try to save you.” He could see by the look in her eyes that she didn’t believe him, but she was willing to give him a chance.

“I’ll call you a taxi,” she said, standing. Her dressing gown gaped below the waist, flashing her narrow thighs, the unkempt patch between her legs. Marc felt himself grow hard again.

He gritted his teeth. “No thanks. My car’s parked near the Unicorn. I can walk over and get it.”

“Whatever,” said Abby, and turned away.

They stood in the hallway, standing with their backs against opposing walls, facing each other, with a foot or two of carpet between them. Even in her bare feet, she stood a few inches taller than him. Marc wanted to reach out his hand and unbuckle her dressing gown. She didn’t say a word; she just watched him, her eyes examining every inch of his face, his eyes, his mouth, his throat… looking for his all-too-visible flaws.

Marc was lost in the moment, falling into her seedy little world and drowning in whatever it was he found there.

“Well,” he said, softly.

“Yeah,” she replied.

He left the house without saying anything more, and did not look back. He couldn’t. If he turned around and saw her there, standing on the doorstep in her short white dressing gown, he might just turn back and go inside. But he wasn’t ready for that; he needed to think things through, to decide if he really did want to use the number she’d given him.

He walked in the direction of the Unicorn and read the number. Abby had not written a message, only the digits. Finally he turned his head and looked back. She was still standing in the doorway, a tall, white figure with painfully thin legs.

She lifted her left hand, waved once, and then turned around and went inside, slamming the door behind her.

CHAPTER SEVEN

ERIK BEST SAT in his car and watched the man leave. He gripped the wheel with his scarred hands, staring through the windscreen. The man moved away slowly, as if there was all the time in the world. Erik knew otherwise; experience had taught him that time was a limited resource and had to be used sparingly.

Just before the man reached the end of the street, he turned back to look at Abby. She was standing on the doorstep waving, her free hand clutching her dressing gown at the throat. She turned and went inside. The door slammed shut.

He remembered when he used to love her, and wondered what those feelings had now changed into. What he felt for Abby these days wasn’t love; he had no idea what it was. He supposed it might even be described as a form of hate. He couldn’t stand seeing her but he always went back; he hated the way she looked these days but he kept dreaming about making love to her, lying with her beneath clean satin sheets. Nothing made any sense. His emotions were like the colours in a kaleidoscope, constantly changing and blending and making new patterns.

“Bitch,” he said, starting the car. He pulled out from the kerb and slowly followed the man around the corner, staying far enough back that the bastard would not guess that he was being followed.

He reached out and switched on the radio — a local station discussing the big Premiership match in a few days. Erik shook his head and changed the channel. He’d stopped caring about football when the game changed so much that it was barely a contact sport, and all the players became prancing millionaires. He preferred boxing, or martial arts. Sports in which real men challenged for dominance, not overpaid prima donnas with overactive libidos.

Erik watched the man climb into a boxy little Nissan and drive away. He followed the Nissan off the estate and towards the A1. He had no idea where it was heading, but he was going to follow until it got there. He’d grown up in this area, knew its roads and highways by heart. Wherever this car stopped, he would be familiar with the location in some way. He’d probably done business nearby. Erik Best had done some kind of business everywhere in the northeast.

The Nissan eventually headed into Gosforth, along the High Street towards the Gosforth Hotel pub, where it turned right and continued up the slight hill. Erik had a couple of mates who drank regularly in the pub, and he’d enjoyed some good nights there, getting pissed and picking up women, often getting into a fight after last orders was called at the bar and they were forced to relocate to some other late-night drinking establishment.

The Nissan pulled in at the kerb outside a small terraced house with dingy curtains. The tiny patch of garden outside the front door was overgrown with weeds. The door itself was dirty and weathered. There was a To Let sign stuck in the tiny patch of soil underneath the front window, as if nobody had bothered to take it down because these properties went up and down for rental so often.

Erik stopped the car a little further along the street and waited, watching in the rear-view mirror as the man got out and started fumbling in his pocket for his house keys. He was about medium height, but skinny. Erik would have no trouble with this one. He gripped the wheel with his hands and emptied his mind of distractions. This was it: he needed to be turned on, tuned in, and ready to dance. This was his comfort zone; he only ever felt at home when he was about to do violence.

He got out of the car and walked briskly towards the man. He’d done this so many times before, and his timing was always immaculate. Just as the man inserted his key into the lock, Erik glanced behind him, just to check on the surroundings. The street was clear. Nobody was standing outside their house or at their front door, watching the street. There was a sense of quiet abandonment, as often there was in suburban streets in the early morning.

The man opened the door; Erik increased his pace and went right up behind him, pushing him against and then through the opening door and into a cramped hallway beyond. He reached behind him and shut the door, forcing the man right inside. He said nothing. He let his muscles do the talking.

The man staggered, regained his footing, and turned to face Erik. He looked shocked but still under control. He had no idea who he was looking at.

“Hello,” said Erik, smiling. He’d practised the smile for hours in front of the mirror when he was younger, and knew that it made an impression. The smile made him look slightly insane, but just about sane enough to make whoever it was turned upon do whatever he said. At least until the shock wore off.

It was the smile of a killer, and he was proud of being able to summon it to order.

“Go inside. I’m right behind you.” He made the smile wider. “Don’t try anything silly.”

The man did as he was told, walking slowly but tensely along the hallway and through a door on the left.

Erik entered the small living room behind the fucker, stopping in front of the door, blocking the exit. Behind the man — who had turned to face Erik as he entered — there was another doorway that led into a sunken galley kitchen. There would be a back door in there, one that led out into the yard, but it would be locked. Even if this dude bolted, he wouldn’t get the door open in time.

“Who are you? What the fuck do you want?” The man was regaining his composure. He clearly felt embarrassed about obeying a stranger’s orders in his own home. Bravado was beginning to take hold.

“My name is Erik Best. Now shut the fuck up and tell me your name, and what you’re doing with Abby Hansen.” He waited, staring at the man. Still smiling, his hands open but ready for action.

“I don’t have to tell you anything. Get out, or I’ll call the police.”

Erik sighed theatrically and looked over at the phone. “Go on,” he said. “Try it. I reckon that phone’s about ten yards from where you’re standing. I’m five yards away from you. If you think you can make it across the room, pick up the phone, and tell them what’s going on before I get to you… well, you’re welcome to try it. I could do with the workout.” He shifted his weight from one foot to the other. It was done for effect, but it also made him feel ready to pounce, like an animal in the wild. His leather shoes creaked. The clock on the wall ticked away the seconds.

The man shifted his gaze away from the phone and looked back at Erik. “My name’s Marc Price. Now, would you please just leave?”

Erik shook his head. “I’m not planning to hurt you, Marc. Not this time, anyway. All I want is information. Understood?”

Price nodded. He backed away; just a step, but it betrayed his intense fear. “I don’t know what you’re after, but I have no money. Look at this house — it’s a shithole. I don’t even own it. There’s nothing of value here.”

“Right, let’s just relax. Now tell me what you’re doing hanging around Abby Hansen’s place, marra. Can you do that?”

“We… she… we’re friends.” He looked down, at the top of his shoes. His cheeks flushed. He’d been caught out and he knew it.

“So you picked her up last night, went back to her place and had a good shag?”

Price nodded. He didn’t look up.

“It’s okay. Like I said, I’m not going to hurt you. This is simply a warning. Okay, marra?”

Silence; the slow tick-tock sound of the clock on the wall; the gentle creak of leather as Erik took a soft step towards the other man, his feet moving lightly across the carpeted floor.

Price looked up. His eyes were wide. His mouth was open, the lips slightly apart. Those lips were trembling.

“Leave her alone, marra. She’s had enough trouble over the years and doesn’t need any more. You don’t know her. You have no idea what she’s been through. She doesn’t need fly-by-night fuckers like you stuffing one up her and taking the piss out of her grief.”

Price tried to inflate his chest. He took a deep breath. “Listen, mate, I’m sure Abby can make her own decisions. She’s a big girl. She doesn’t need someone like you looking after her. Let me guess… are you the ex-boyfriend that came round there earlier? Maybe one of those sad bastards she told me about, the ones who won’t take no for an answer.” There was sweat on his brow and his upper lip. “The kind of bloke who follows her around like a lost puppy, trying to catch a sniff of her so he can wank about it later.”

Erik sighed; he shook his head.

Was he going to have to use violence after all, simply to get his point across to this idiot?

He planned the moves in his head: a brisk step inside, throw a quick, short uppercut to the chin; step back out again, deliver a hard right hook to the side of the head. Easy, so fucking easy… The kid wouldn’t get back up for a long time.

He smiled. “This is a friendly warning, marra. Next time I won’t be as gentle.” He clenched his hands into fists, raised them to stomach level. It would be good to knock the fucker out, but that wasn’t his purpose today, not if he could help it. “Next time I won’t come to your house. I’ll wait somewhere else for you, the place you’d least expect to see me. In fact, you won’t see me. You won’t even feel it when it comes.”

“I don’t want any hassle.” Price’s posture was loose now; he’d finally lost his nerve. He wanted to run; it was obvious in the way he was carrying himself. No violence was required, after all. “We just fucked, mate. That was all. It was a one-night stand. I believe she’s had a few others in the past… that’s what she told me. I’m not the first… no way will I be the last.”

Erik winced, and he hated himself for showing his emotions to this stranger.

Abby was so easy; she always gave herself away so damned cheaply, and to men who didn’t even realise how special she was. He clenched the muscles in his jaw, ground his teeth together. “Just let that one fuck be the last, and then we won’t have any problems, you and me. Got that, marra?”

Price’s gaze flickered back and forth, as if he were looking for a weapon. Part of Erik hoped that he spotted one and tried to use it. He didn’t like the way the bastard was talking about Abby; he showed no respect for her, as if his night in her bed had meant nothing.

“Yeah…” Price’s shoulders relaxed. He deflated fully; his shoulders slumped, his chest shifted inward. The bravado was fading; the fight was leaving him quicker than it had arrived. “Yeah, okay. I don’t need this shit. Not for the sake of an opportunist fuck.”

“Now, tell me what you’re doing sniffing around the Grove.”

Price ran a hand through his hair. He was a good-looking guy. This made Erik dislike him even more. “Listen, I’m a freelance reporter. I’ve been researching a book. That’s all. Nothing suspicious about that, is there?”

Erik laughed. “You’re writing a book about the Concrete Grove?” His anger dissipated; there’d be no blood spilled today. He wasn’t even in the mood. “Jesus Christ, marra, that’s a good one.”

“No, no… Not exactly. I’m writing a book about the Northumberland Poltergeist. Ghosts are back in fashion — I’m just trying to jump on the bandwagon and make some quick cash.” He shrugged, still afraid but calming down a little, realising that he was not going to be beaten up.

Erik shook his head. “Man, that’s fucking priceless… The Northumberland Poltergeist. I haven’t heard that name in years.”

“Now,” said Price, raising his open hands, pointing at the door. “Would you mind getting the fuck out of my house? You’ve done what you came here to do: I’m scared. I’m terrified, actually, if it makes you feel any better. I won’t be messing around with Abby again. Now, just leave me alone.”

Erik paused, and then he turned and walked out of the room. When he reached the door he opened it, turned around, and said “Remember what I said. Oh, and don’t even think about doing anything daft, like phoning the police.” He took the silence as an affirmative response and shut the door behind him as he left the house.

Walking back towards his car, he looked up at the sky. The clouds were dark, troubled. He knew how they felt. His entire life was nothing but trouble — one long succession of bad things, queuing up to make their mark. Situations like this one happened to him all the time. It often felt as if he was dogged by bad things, like stray cats following him in a line along the street.

Erik unlocked the car and got inside. He turned on the engine and killed the radio, and then just sat there, staring at the sky, at those grumbling clouds, waiting for more trouble to come for him.

CHAPTER EIGHT

MARC TOOK A bottle of whisky from the cupboard in the kitchen and opened it. His hands were shaking; his mouth was dry. He didn’t like violence, never had. Before the accident, his old man had been quick with his fists, especially on points of honour. He’d even hit Marc a few times when he was a small boy, but he was certain it didn’t run in the family.

Some people thought of Marc as a coward, but that wasn’t quite true. Hadn’t he just stood up to that psycho who’d forced his way inside the house? Well… sort of. Until his nerve had gone.

No, he wasn’t a coward. He just hated physical violence. He was terrified of it. He’d seen the results of true violence a lot in his job, particularly when he’d worked on the crime pages. Beatings, murders, suicides… he’d reported all kinds of messy situations. He knew what a gunshot wound looked like, and had examined stab wounds at close range. Once he’d even stood there while a young woman who’d thrown herself in front of a truck on a busy motorway was scraped up off the road by policemen armed with snow shovels.

He poured an inch of whisky into a glass, and then added another inch because he knew the first wouldn’t last long. He took a swallow and felt the pleasing burn in his throat. It felt good, purifying. He’d always liked the taste of good malt whisky, and right now it tasted even better than ever. The drink was good medicine for whatever ailed him.

He thought about Abby Hansen, and asked himself if she was really worth this kind of hassle. The answer, he was sad to discover, was yes. He tried to convince himself that he was mistaken, but it was no use: he was becoming mildly obsessed with her.

But what was it about her that drew him? Why could he not stop thinking about the woman? She wasn’t his usual type — he liked hefty, athletic brunettes with big thighs and even bigger chests — and she could hardly be described as a great beauty. Her hair was badly dyed and in terrible condition; her skin was dry; her body was wracked by alcohol and the effects of borderline malnutrition.

So why the hell was he so keen to go back there, to see her, to fuck her again — no matter what Erik Best had told him? Why did he want to climb back into her bed and spend another night with her, clinging to her slender form in the darkness of her grotty little house?

He drifted from the kitchen to the living room, running a hand across the dust on the top of the television. There was a photo on there, held in an expensive frame. It showed Marc aged six; and there were his parents, flanking him and smiling at the camera. His dad looked stocky and aggressive, even when he grinned. His mother just looked tired. She’d always looked that way, right up to the day that they both died. He couldn’t remember a time when she hadn’t looked exhausted.

He recalled the day he’d lost his parents as if it were only yesterday: the memory was imprinted on his brain, too perfect, as if it had been put there by someone else.

He’d been in the car with them, strapped into the back seat and reading a comic — Superman, of all things. The car had skidded on the wet road. It had been nobody’s fault, just one of those fluke accidents that happen every now and then, as if God was getting a bit bored and needed some entertainment, so he decided to wipe out somebody’s folks in the rain.

His mother had been driving, and when the wheels locked she didn’t know what to do. The car had moved slowly, as if it was on a conveyor belt, edging sideways towards the edge of the road and the sheer drop into a farmer’s field below. He remembered looking out of the side window and watching the drop approach, and then glancing into the front to see his parents holding hands and staring into each other’s eyes. Again, this memory was more like a movie than something that had actually happened. It was simultaneously distant and up-close, as if he were separated from the image by a sheet of glass.

Still, they could have survived the crash. That’s what everyone told him, even now. It was a fluke, a crazy accident. The car had tilted and the outcropping branch of a tree had smashed through the passenger side window, almost taking off his mother’s head, tearing away her chin and smashing her teeth, causing her to choke to death on fragments of her own skull. His father had been turned to face her at the time, and the branch had slowly sheared off his face as he screamed his life away.

Marc’s mother had died comparatively quickly — the collapsed red ruin of her head was proof of that. But it had taken his father a long time to go because the car was falling so slowly… Marc had seen it all, and he still saw it now, whenever he dreamed. His mother’s sunken, partially crushed head, his father’s red-screaming skull… another film; a succession of images that played out on a mental screen whenever he closed his eyes.

At first he didn’t like to dream. For a long time, he’d taken drugs to stop the dreams from coming. Then, when they stopped working, he simply accepted them, imagining them his penance for surviving the accident. He almost welcomed them now, and it scared him that he did this so willingly.

They hadn’t been very good parents, not particularly. But they’d been the only ones he had, and after that he had none. He was left with no one, except a distant uncle who at first had treated him like a lodger who rented a room in his home rather than an orphaned family member. After a while — as he developed into a young man — Uncle Mike’s attitude had softened. He’d started to show affection. They became a small, weird family unit for a short while, at least until Marc was old enough to leave and go to University. After that, he’d lost touch with Uncle Mike, until he’d received a call one Saturday afternoon telling him that the man was dead.

He took another drink and sat down on the sofa, trying to clear his mind. Images of his dead parents mingled with those of Abby’s naked body, and the effect made him feel dirty and ashamed. Her bony body; his father’s fists; her tiny breasts; his mother’s smile; blood and semen; love and hate; sex and death. He blinked, rubbed at his temples, and leaned back against the sofa, allowing the cushions to grasp him. He leaned forward again to pick up his glass and then back again to try and relax. He felt like he was being pushed and pulled in every direction but the one he wanted to move in. He always felt like that; his life was a series of manoeuvres designed to shove him one way and then the next, without taking into consideration his desires. He was always dodging something — the past, the present, or simply himself — rather than moving with any clear direction in mind.

“Fucking hell…” He reached out and grabbed the remote control, flicked on the television to distract his thoughts. He picked a music channel and turned up the volume. Some ragtag indie band he’d never heard of capered across the screen, playing toy instruments and wailing about lost love. He let the music wash over him. It wasn’t bad; he’d heard worse. He even started to hum along with the chorus, once he picked up on the tune.

Who the hell had that guy been, the one who’d invaded his home? Erik Best. The name meant nothing to him. He wasn’t the biggest man Marc had ever encountered, but he was certainly the scariest. Not too tall, but broad through the shoulder, his hair buzzed down to a skinhead cut. He exuded a sense of menace like no one else Marc had ever met.

Marc had come across dangerous people before, and had even interviewed a few gangster types when he was working on stories for the cheaper red-top papers. He remembered speaking to convicted murderers, rapists, drug addicts… but none of them had possessed the sense of barely repressed violence that his visitor had sweated from his very pores. The man was terrifying. He didn’t even have to do anything to generate fear; all he needed was a few words, a simple gesture, a calmly worded warning… that was more than enough to get his point across.

“You idiot…” He knew that he was going to see Abby Hansen again, despite what the man had said. He kept picturing her naked, or on all fours on the mattress, pressing lazily against him as he thrust into her. She’d made love the same way she acted outside of the bed: unbothered, nonchalant, she couldn’t give a damn.

Jesus, was that it, just because she didn’t seem to care? Was that why he wanted to see her again — to try and force her to care, or even to pretend? Was he really so shallow? Or so desperate to make her like him, want him?

None of this made any sense. He’d acted strangely in the past, often embarking upon relationships with unsuitable partners, or starting situations that he knew would end badly. But this was another dimension entirely. He didn’t even like the woman. Nor was he attracted to her, not really. But he wanted to fuck her so much that he felt the desire as a constant ache in the pit of his stomach.

He’d heard stories from some of his wilder drinking buddies about affairs with what they called “dirty women” — back street slappers, rough trade, even full-blown whores — but not once had he been tempted to follow their lead and go after someone he deemed that kind of person. And was Abby really like that? Was that how he saw her?

No; she wasn’t a dirty woman. Abby was damaged, she was almost crippled by her loss and her grief, but she wasn’t one of those women some of his nasty-minded friends prized as perverse trophies.

Perhaps he was simply attracted to her pain. He was self-aware enough to realise that he’d done this before, forged a relationship with someone who had experienced a similar kind of loss to his own. But that had been years ago, when he was young and didn’t understand his own motivations. He was older now; he knew what he was doing and why he did it. These days he tended to deliberately forge bonds with people who were well balanced, emotionally centred… or not forge bonds at all. His own pain was enough. He no longer needed to mix it with someone else’s.

Except now all that was changing… and he had developed this strange infatuation with a women which whom he’d only spent a single night. Was that really enough to justify this level of craving?

Craving.

It was an interesting word. It sounded the way it felt: hard, sharp, and dangerous.

He finished his drink and stood up to get another. He’d left the bottle in the kitchen rather than bring it through into the main room. He didn’t want to get drunk. He knew that if he did, he might just get out the piece of paper with Abby’s number written on it and give her a call. Say hello. Beg her to let him go round there.

The phone rang as he was entering the kitchen. He put down the glass and turned back into the living room, trying to remember where he’d put his mobile. His jacket; it was in his jacket pocket. He moved across the room, picked up his jacket from the arm of the sofa, and started prodding at the pockets. He felt the hard rectangle of the phone through the material, grabbed it, and answered.

“Yeah.”

“Hello… Marc? Is this Marc Price?”

He recognised the voice but couldn’t place its owner. “Yes, this is Marc. What’s up?”

“Marc, this is Vince… Vince Rose, from yesterday. I’m sorry to call like this… I hope I’m not disturbing you.”

Marc remembered the old man, and how they’d promised to keep in touch. “Oh, yeah… Hi. How are you?”

“Listen, Marc, I’m at my brother’s house. I’m at Harry’s place. I’ve found some stuff that you might like to see. Are you free at all any time today?”

He looked at his watch. It wasn’t even noon. “Tell you what, offer me some lunch and a couple of cans of lager and I’ll be round in half an hour. How does that sound?”

“Splendid,” said Rose. “That would be fine. I’ll pop out to the shop and get us some booze and sandwich makings. There’s tea and coffee here, but not much else.” He paused, as if he couldn’t quite select the right words he needed to continue. “I think it’s in your interest to see what I’ve found… there might be something useful here. Perhaps even something that’ll help you with your book. I’m not sure what most of this stuff is, but I think it’ll mean a lot more to you than it does to me.”

The book: Marc had almost forgotten about the fucking book.

The project had really started to come alive for him when he’d met Harry Rose, and he was afraid that it might die along with the old man if he didn’t make an effort to carry on with his research. But this phone call seemed promising; it might lead to the book actually being finished. He already had a publisher interested, and if he managed to show them something interesting the advance would pay his bills for a few more months of freedom while he weighed up his options.

“I’ll see you soon, Vince. We’ll talk more then. I can’t wait to see what you’ve found there.” His lips were dry. He hung up the phone and headed back towards the kitchen.

Just one more drink, he thought. It wouldn’t hurt. One more little drink for the road…

CHAPTER NINE

THE LIGHTS ARE off. The house is silent. A solemn gloom fills the empty rooms, making them seem occupied by something patient and unmoving; a thing that lies in wait.

Abby Hansen is flat on her back, naked, in the bed that she once shared with Tessa’s father. Her eyes are open, but she does not see. Her legs are parted and her hands are cupped there, over her pudenda, in a protective gesture. The bedroom curtains are closed, filtering out the light, but the room is nowhere near dark at this time of day.

The house creaks and settles. Other noises sound outside: car engines, yelling children, somebody calling loudly for a dog or a child named Socrates. Far off, a police helicopter prowls the skies, its unseen occupants looking for wrongdoers.

Abby does not move. She hears none of these sounds. The only noises she registers are internal: trees and brushes rustling within the confines of her mind, the gentle thrumming of a tiny bird’s wings, a small animal padding through undergrowth, and a light breeze stirring close to the ground.

She sits up jerkily and stares at the wall — through the wall, to whatever it is that dwells in the places nobody else can see, the gaps in the world that only a few people can discern. She stays that way for several minutes, not moving, barely even breathing, just staring blindly through the solid brickwork. She does not even blink.

Abby Hansen has one foot in this world and one in another, far stranger place.

She is conscious but she is not awake; nor is she asleep, not really.

Whatever she does during this fugue-like state, she will remember nothing of it later. She will simply assume that she took a nap; that the previous night’s exertions tired her out and she’s been catching up on her rest. After all, a woman like Abby needs all the rest she can get these days.

A car radio booms outside the house; tinny dance music fills the street. Somebody starts to shout and swear; another voice joins in, but softer, less aggressive. Laughter. A car wheel-spinning away along the road, churning up loose stones. The music fades into the distance, becoming an imitation of itself, just another sad piece of aural flotsam cast adrift on the currents of life.

Still Abby Hansen does not blink. She does not move. She grips herself between the legs, as if she needs to urinate, or masturbate — perhaps she’s caught between the two acts, unsure of which is the more appropriate response.

After a short while, she twitches. It is just a slight jerk of the head, which she then tilts to the side, like a dog listening to its master’s call. She removes her hands from between her thighs. Her fingers are wet; her pubic hair glistens. The muscles in her thighs are twitching rhythmically, as if a weak electrical current is passing through them.

She slides her legs across the duvet, placing her feet on the floor and twisting to face the door. She sits like that for quite some time, as if waiting to be summoned into another room. Her face is blank, expressionless; her hands are open at her sides, as if she is balancing an invisible item in each palm. She rubs her still damp fingers together, then raises her hands and licks away the residue.

She freezes, her head still tilted to one side.

Finally, she moves again. In one smooth, clean motion, she stands and turns to face the door. Her movements are much more graceful than usual, like those of a dancer. She steps lightly across the room, her bare feet making little sound on the carpet. She walks slowly and softly, barely making an impact on the world — either this world or the other, the one contained within her. As her reflection passes across the glass of the long mirror on her dressing table, she does not even glance that way. She walks through the door and out onto the landing, not noticing that her reflection is fuzzy, faded, as if she is barely there at all.

She knows who she is — she is aware of her name — but that is all. She has no past, no future; all that exists is the present, this moment. Nothing else matters; it isn’t there, doesn’t touch her at all.

She reaches the stairs and descends them silently, heading down and towards the kitchen. She walks across the kitchen floor, to the cupboard under the sink. Bending her legs in a fluid motion, lunging so deeply that her bare buttocks almost brush against the floor tiles, she opens the cupboard door. Her head does not move; she keeps it fixed straight ahead. The muscles in her neck are tensed and bunched, standing out like cables beneath the skin.

She takes a small plastic bag filled with candles out of the cupboard, closes the door, and stands up straight. The candles are the type used for decorating cakes. These are all she has in the house. She turns around and goes into the living room, where she picks up a photograph of Tessa. The one she took in the park, a few days before the girl disappeared. In the photo, Tessa is wearing her bright red quilted gilet over a grey long-sleeved fleecy top, and her favourite dark jeans and running shoes. It is the same outfit she was wearing the day she vanished.

Abby moves across the room, not caring that she is naked. Her thighs are soaked; she’s been secreting sweat from her skin and fluid from her vagina, as if her waters are breaking prior to giving birth.

The curtains are open but nobody is passing by in the street outside. She opens the bureau beside the bookcase and takes out a brown package. She unfolds the paper package and removes the old pair of Tessa’s pyjamas, the ones the girl was wearing the night before she went away. They are still stained with her urine. She wet the bed that night for the first time in years, as if she was afraid of something or experienced a premonition of what was to come.

She returns to the stairs and ascends, holding tightly onto these items. She turns right at the top of the stairs and stands outside Tessa’s room, gazing at — no, through — the door with her thousand-yard stare. If she is aware of anything around her, she does not betray this on her face. Her eyes are still open, but they are like the eyes of the blind: wide, empty, unseeing. Glazed. For all she sees of her surroundings, they might as well be shut tight.

She reaches out without looking and opens the bedroom door. She steps inside and closes the door behind her.

The curtains are closed to ensure that the room is dim; she always keeps it this way, as a form of tribute. This room is not meant to see the sun again until her child returns.

She approaches the shrine she’s made and kneels down beside it. She places the photograph on the floor, and then begins to arrange the candles around the base of the crude pyramid. Inside the bag where the candles were stored is also a box of kitchen matches. When she’s finished setting out the candles, she lights them one by one with a match. She does not look down, but she doesn’t burn her fingers. Her body knows exactly what to do. This is not the first time she has carried out this homespun ritual, despite the fact that she has no memory of doing so before or afterwards. Like an athlete’s muscle memory, her body stores the information and carries out the task without even bothering her mind.

Once the candles are lighted, she takes hold of the pyjamas and presses them against her face, inhaling the smell of her missing daughter’s dried piss. Still there is no expression on her face.

She puts down the pyjamas and tucks her legs and feet beneath her bottom, drawing in her knees tight in front of her. Slowly, she begins to rock on her knees and calves, back and forth; a small, rhythmic movement. She smells wet grass and hears the rustling of tree branches. Somewhere beyond the grove of ancient oaks, a small figure is waiting. She cannot identify who this person is, but it seems familiar.

More liquid leaks out from between her legs.

She feels the wet grass under her legs. The wind blows against her skin, rising slowly. Branches creak; tiny animals move in the undergrowth. It is dark within the protective circle of the trees. She is outside, naked, but does not feel the cold. The light of the moon keeps her warm, even though it is a cold light, a dead light whose warmth can never reach her. Menstrual blood runs down the inside of her thighs; the animals hiding in the trees smell it and began to whine, like wolves scenting fresh meat. They are hungry. They need to feed.

Abby opens her mouth and begins to chant:

“Tessa, Tessa, Tessa… bless her, bless her, bless her… come back to me.”

Her voice is dull, flat. There is no sing-song quality to the chant, but still it is a song of sorrow, a short chorus of mourning.

“Tessa, Tessa, Tessa… bless her, bless her, bless her… come back to me.”

She rocks faster on her knees, hearing footsteps crunching towards her on the fallen leaves. The quality of the air changes subtly; someone is approaching from out of the thickest trees. Somebody is coming. The rich blood she spilled has called whoever it is to the scene.

She chants the rhyme over and over, a litany, a calling.

In front of her, the trees part; in front of her, the makeshift shrine shifts, one of the objects that form it moving slightly to create a small opening.

“Tessa, Tessa, Tessa… bless her, bless her, bless her… come back to me.”

The cold, dead moon shines down its pale light, making her milky skin shimmer.

Something moves in the opening, emerging from inside the shrine. It is a short, scrawny tree branch — not much more than a sapling. It moves sinuously, curling and twisting as it quests forth, tasting the air of two worlds that have momentarily become one.

Abby keeps chanting. She continues to rock back and forth on her knees. Her bladder fails and urine pools around her legs, soaking along with the blood and other fluids into the weave of the carpet. The smell is sharp, pungent, as it finally reaches her nostrils, like a spilled chemical.

The scrawny sapling reaches out further, towards her face. Like a small arm, its tip spreads out into four spiky wooden fingers and a thumb, and it makes to caress her cheek. Then, quickly, it changes direction and whips briskly against her flesh, making a minuscule nick and drawing a spot of blood below her right eye. Abby does not even wince; she does not pause in her lament.

“Tessa, Tessa, Tessa… bless her, bless her, bless her… come back to me.”

She rocks and chants, chants and rocks. The two worlds begin to merge more fully, and then to separate before the culmination of these events can take place. The grove of oak trees dims, becoming shadow and silhouette, and then the harsh light of the world outside the house seeps gradually back into the room. She stops speaking. She becomes still. Her eyes — although already open — snap into focus as if she is opening them for the first time.

SHE LOOKED DOWN, at the candles, and then threw down onto the floor the pyjamas she was clutching. The carpet was wet with blood and piss and ejaculate. The room smelled like a hospital toilet. She started to cry, silently but deeply. Her entire body shook with grief as it remembered giving birth to her child, her Tessa.

Once she managed to stop the tears, Abby reached out and snuffed out each of the candles with her forefinger and thumb, like a vicar putting out the votive candles in a church after prayer.

She put the candles and the matches back inside the plastic bag, gathered up the rest of her things, and left the room. She didn’t bother getting dressed. She went back downstairs and put the stuff away, then filled a plastic bucket with hot water from the tap, squirted washing up liquid into the water and stirred it with her hand. She returned upstairs, to Tessa’s room, knelt down once again, and scrubbed the carpet clean. She did not weep again. When she was finished, she rinsed out the bucket in the upstairs bathroom and left it on the floor. She took a long, hot shower to clean her body and dried herself with the oldest, toughest towel she could find in the airing cupboard. Like a hair shirt, it punished her, making her skin turn red.

She returned to her room, to her bed, and sat there, staring at the wall.

She was unsure what had just happened, but something inside her felt broken. It was a familiar feeling, one that had kept her connected to her emotions for such a long time; she remembered experiencing a sensation just like it when she lost her virginity at the age of fifteen to a family friend, and then again, when she pushed out Tessa into the world.

She picked up her cigarettes off the bedside table and lit one, drawing deeply from the smoke. She opened a drawer and took out the small whisky bottle she kept there; it was half full. She drank the whisky straight from the bottle and smoked the cigarette down to a stub.

Only when the whisky bottle was empty did she allow herself to lie back down on the bed, on top of the cheap duvet.

She thought about the guy she brought home last night and ran her hands slowly along her thighs, feeling strangely aroused. He had touched her there, too, but he did not touch her inside. Nobody could, not now. Not ever again. Other forces were at work inside her womb. She was sure of it. The desire passed, like a cloud crossing the sun.

She closed her eyes and thought about a grove of ancient oak trees, a high, cold moon, and the sound of approaching footsteps in the undergrowth. In the darkness behind her eyes, she saw a small, skinny arm with four claw-like fingers, and wondered if it was real or just a dream she’d once experienced.

She reached up and felt the small nick below her right eye. It had stopped bleeding but it was still sore. The slight pain was a comfort; it meant that all the things she struggled to remember might just be real after all.