Why Don't You Come For Me?

Diane Janes.

CHAPTER ONE.

Harry half walked, half ran up the lane. All-out running made the torch beam swing wildly from side to side, but when he slowed down to see where he was going, the night-time sounds crowded in on him and his own footsteps echoed in mocking pursuit. When an owl hooted somewhere close by, he all but dropped the torch. It was the sort of thing his parents went on about all the time, these so-called joys of the countryside, banging on whenever they heard a woodp.e.c.k.e.r or sighted a deer, and going into ecstasies that time a badger scurried across the road. Every school holiday it was the same, coming up to 'the cottage' as they called it, when he would much rather stay in Heswall with his mates. If they had to have a second home, why couldn't it be in the Algarve with a swimming pool, like his uncle John's villa, instead of b.l.o.o.d.y c.u.mbria, where it rained nine days out of every ten? And if they had to come to c.u.mbria, then why not the touristy bit, rather than a miles-from-anywhere hamlet, with the stupid name of Easter Bridge, where there was nothing to do? At least you could hire rowing boats in Bowness Bay, but they hardly ever went anywhere like that. Bowness wasn't 'the real Lake District', his dad said, although the shop selling thirty-six different flavours of ice cream seemed pretty darned real to Harry, and a d.a.m.n sight more interesting than Easter Bridge, which consisted of fewer than a dozen houses, strung out along a little-frequented lane, which wasn't even within a mile of a lake. Lake District pah!

He thought it must be even worse for Sean, who was stuck here all the time, the only kid in the place when Harry and his younger sister Charlotte weren't there. The parents had been really pleased when he told them that Sean had invited him round to play computer games. They seemed to imagine that it signalled some kind of rite of pa.s.sage acceptance by the locals becoming part of the community. Their disappointment on learning that Sean's family were incomers had been palpable.

Anyway, Sean's company had been a G.o.dsend this half-term, getting him out of several boring walks, to say nothing of evenings playing Monopoly and Jenga en famille. It was quite a laugh hanging out with Sean, who had the new Grand Theft Auto, which Harry's own parents had refused him on grounds of its violent content, but tonight had been their last night together, because after a week at the cottage it was time to go home.

It had been right at the end of the evening when Sean had come out with it. Harry had been sounding off about Easter Bridge, and how it must be the dullest place on earth, when Sean looked up from the shelf where he was taking out a DVD and asked, 'What would you say if I told you there was a murderer living in Easter Bridge?'

Harry had restrained himself from the temptation to respond, 'I'd say you were a d.i.c.khead, who is absolutely full of it,' because, after all, Sean was not one of his mates from home, but still something of an unknown quant.i.ty. He was a recent acquaintance, and some eighteen months older than Harry, to say nothing of being his only lifeline from all those 'Let's-climb-h.e.l.lvelyn' initiatives that his parents categorized as good clean family fun. So Harry had bitten back his instinctive response and said instead, 'No. You're kidding me?' At which Sean just fixed him with a look which said he wasn't.

'How do you know?' Now Harry stopped to think about it, that wasn't the most obvious question.

'Oh, I know. I've got proof. I'll show you some time maybe when you're next up here. I don't want to put anything on Hotmail. It's not secure.'

'We might not be coming back until the Easter holidays.'

'Next time,' said Sean. He turned back to the shelf containing the DVDs. It was a gesture of dismissal.

Harry knew he was being toyed with, but the digital clock already stood at 10.05 p.m. and his return time had been specified as 10 p.m. (It was a point of honour to be a little late to demonstrate disregard, but not such outright disobedience that the parents could claim they had been worried about him.) 'OK then. See you.' Harry tried to make it sound as if he didn't much care whether Sean told him more about this supposed murderer or not. But now he wondered as he hurried along had Sean been winding him up? It was easy to imagine anything, out here in the dark, with the wind making the trees creak and sending whispers through last year's dried-up beech leaves. Surely he must be bulls.h.i.tting. A story to scare the kid up from the south?

Harry reached the gate of his parents' cottage, almost wrenching it off in his hurry, then letting it go with a bang once he was safely through. If either of them said anything, he could say the wind caught it.

Jo looked up from her book when she heard Sean descending the stairs. 'Has Harry gone?' she called into the hall.

Sean appeared in the doorway, his expression contemptuous. 'Didn't you hear the door?'

Since she had obviously heard Sean on the stairs, it was pointless to deny that she had also heard Harry. She had intended the question to be the opening gambit in a friendly conversation; to afford Sean an opportunity to tell her something about what he and Harry had been getting up to in his room for hours on end, but the initiative had already stalled.

'If you heard him go, why ask?' His tone was unmistakably sarcastic.

She managed a reasonably neutral tone in return. 'Please don't be rude, Sean. I was only making conversation. It's what normal people do.'

He shot straight back: 'Are you saying I'm not normal?'

'Of course not ...' She paused, about to add something else, but he stalked off in the direction of the kitchen, leaving Jo feeling that she had just lost another round of a contest in which she wanted no part. For a moment she considered following to remonstrate with him, but she decided to let it go.

'It's difficult being a stepmother,' people had a.s.sured her. 'You have to work things out gradually.' She tried very hard, for Marcus's sake, but in the six months since Sean had come to live with them, the relationship between herself and her stepson had not improved. Sean hardly spoke to her unless he had to, and she found the prolonged silences between them a strain. Sean had the ability to render silence hostile in a way she could not easily explain to Marcus, who appeared oblivious to it.

When she and Marcus first got together, there had been no suggestion that Sean might become part of the package. Marcus had been divorced for years, and although a model absent father, maintaining contact, sending presents, periodically appearing to provide trips and treats, he had never expected his son would want to live anywhere but with his ex-wife. All this had changed with the arrival of a new man in her life. 'I don't like him,' Sean told his father. 'Mum doesn't have time for me any more, not now she's expecting another baby. Why can't I come and live with you?'

'It won't be for ever,' Marcus had said to Jo. 'He's fourteen now. He'll be eighteen and off to uni before we know it.'

She had a.s.sured him that she did not mind. She knew that with a partner came the baggage of their past relationships and Marcus had always been the most understanding man in the world when it came to that. She had tried to make allowances for the fact that she and Sean hardly knew one another. She did everything she could think of to welcome him: spent money hand over fist redecorating his room, involving him, letting him choose whatever he wanted to have in it. She endeavoured to provide the food he liked at mealtimes, to be supportive when it came to starting his new school. She even covertly studied books about how to be a good step-parent, but none of the advice seemed to work. Was it just a teenage-boy thing? Maybe it was teenagers in general, she thought. Everyone said teenagers were difficult. Her only real experience of teenagers was being one herself, and that had been a long time ago.

She was not used to having teenagers or even children in general around. Her eyes strayed to the stainless-steel photo frame which stood in a prominent position on the pine dresser. A head-and-shoulders shot of a blonde toddler, snapped against a backdrop of garden flowers. A happy little face, looking straight into the camera. Lauren's smiling eyes met hers. 'I love you, Mummy,' they said.

Sometimes Lauren reproached her in dreams. Where are you? Why don't you come for me? Sometimes, even now getting on for nine years after it happened, Jo would still wake suddenly, thinking she heard a child's cry. For a split second the wind in the trees outside the bedroom window would sound like the sea as it surged up the shingle beach and Jo would picture the buggy, suspended among the brambles which grew on a rocky outcrop, a dozen or so feet below the cliff top. Sometimes she called out, clutching at the empty air beyond the bedclothes, imagining she saw the child, falling, falling, tumbling head over heels in a long, slow-motion descent past the off-white chalk: the tiny figure in its scarlet t-shirt and sky-blue dungarees, bright against the dull backdrop like a splash of paint flung at a prepared canvas. She always woke before Lauren hit the ground. Shuddering in the darkness, Jo would remind herself that Lauren had not plummeted to her death. Nothing had been recovered from among the smooth, clean stones. There had been no sign of a child's body. The summer tides never reached the foot of the cliffs. Only the empty pushchair had been found, crazily tilted among the bushes, leaning at an angle potent with false suggestion.

There had been pictures of the empty pushchair in many of the papers, photographs taken from far below with a telescopic lens. One appeared under the headline WHERE IS BABY LAUREN? It was the question everyone had asked a million times. Lauren where was Lauren? At each of the news conferences, Jo had vowed to go on searching. 'I will never give up hope.'

'Never give up.' She had spoken those words a thousand times sometimes standing in Lauren's empty bedroom, where only a gaggle of abandoned toys remained to hear her. But never is a very long time. Someone else occupied the bedroom now. Someone else played in the pocket-handkerchief garden, where Lauren had taken her first faltering steps.

On the day when the toys were finally packaged up, that room, that house vacated, Jo had comforted herself with the thought that Lauren would be far too old for those things now. She would need new toys when she came home, toys more appropriate to her age group. Other people tiptoed around the issue of the baby toys, saying if they spoke of it at all that this long-overdue act of disposal was a positive step, a way of moving forward. They didn't seem to understand that moving forward inevitably meant leaving something or someone behind. As the timescale lengthened until it was reckoned in years, Jo did sometimes forget. Gradually she had learned that respite could only be found in forgetting.

Marcus had helped, of course. To love and to be loved, that was the nearest thing to a cure for everything. So first had come the tonic of Marcus's love, and then the idea of turning their mutual interests into a business the all-encompa.s.sing project that had become M. H. Tours. The irony was that when she and Marcus had begun M. H. Tours, it had been with the idea of working together. In the early days, they had jointly accompanied nearly all the tours, only working separately as the business expanded and they offered more itineraries to cater for increasing demand. People tended to a.s.sume that the name M. H. Tours had been chosen because of Marcus's initials, but in reality it started as a private joke Magical History as opposed to Magical Mystery a company which provided holidays in various parts of the UK for groups and individuals with a pa.s.sion for history. It was squarely aimed at the top end of the market, with some tours themed to specific periods or events Battlefields of the Wars of the Roses, or Monastic Life in Medieval England. Some were based around the lives of famous people: there was a Mary Queen of Scots tour, one featuring Richard III and another which majored on Brunel. The company had their own luxury midi-coaches, which transported guests between carefully chosen accommodations. As well as British travellers, there was a big market among the Americans and j.a.panese, and the business had blossomed even further since M. H. Tours had gone into partnership with Flights of Fantasy Ltd, a similar company to their own, specializing in holidays themed to Lake Country writers such as Beatrix Potter, Arthur Ransome and William Wordsworth. The timing of their amalgamation with Flights of Fantasy had proved unexpectedly opportune, not only in its potential for further expansion, but also in that it provided a fresh source of experienced specialist guides at the very time when Sean's arrival necessitated Marcus and Jo taking turns to stay at home.

In spite of the difficulties child care presented to a couple whose working life had hitherto been spent largely on the road, she fully accepted that Marcus had a duty to his son and that she in turn had a duty to Marcus. Unfortunately, these new arrangements not only contrived to leave her alone with the boy for days at a stretch, but also ensured that periods at home with Marcus were invariably shared by Sean. She soon realized that unless she set aside a great many Sean-related grievances, a lot of their time together as a couple would be dominated by her problems with Marcus's son.

Being away with M. H. Tours had been a way to immerse herself and to forget the surest anaesthetic for a pain which was otherwise too great to bear. The waves of guilt that followed each period of forgetfulness were a terrible side-effect, but like a cancer sufferer enduring chemotherapy, Jo had come to realize that without recourse to the antidote, she simply could not go on living. Like a painful amputation, the agony became less acute; one adapted, got used to living with a part of oneself gone. Sometimes she wondered if her new life had helped her to forget too well, so that as time went by she almost welcomed the return of the pain. Sometimes the harder it hurt the better she felt, because remembrance was payment. And she must never forget not that there was much chance she or the world at large ever would that it was she who was to blame. It had been she who had left their sleeping child unguarded.

Such a nice day. A sunny day, holidaymakers strolling around in summer clothes, everything gaudy and bright, like a scene in a child's picture book: the sort which has a happy ending. It had not begun like a story where some devil steals away the golden-haired child. The village street was busy with people (so busy with people, and yet no one saw a thing), just ordinary people having a day out (were they all blind?). Dom had slipped into the little chemist's shop to replace his forgotten razor. He had come away on holiday without it, left it sitting on the bathroom windowsill at home. 'I'll catch you up,' he said.

She had only walked on a matter of yards, drawn to take a closer look at The Sh.e.l.l Shop. She had scarcely expected such an old-fashioned seaside emporium would still exist. The proprietors had expanded their operation on to the pavement, setting up tables out front which were covered in sh.e.l.ls for sale, tables placed too close together to allow for the pa.s.sage of a pushchair. She had only slipped inside for a moment. For a long time afterwards she could not even remember why. 'Did you want to look at something?' the policewoman kept on asking. 'Was there something you wanted to buy?' As if she would want to buy some piece of old tat made from sh.e.l.ls, for heaven's sake. But if not, then why why had she left Lauren alone?

The shop had a coloured awning which extended right out over the pavement with 'The Sh.e.l.l Shop' spelled out in huge letters across the blue and white stripes, the words faded by five seasons of sunshine. Hooks had been driven into the outer edge of the awning, and from these were suspended strings of sh.e.l.ls, ropes of sh.e.l.ls, sh.e.l.ls fashioned into wind chimes, sh.e.l.ls made into dangling objects reminiscent of an Australian bushman's hat. There were sh.e.l.ls which shifted in the breeze, clattering uneasily against one another like unwieldy strings of giant worry beads. Every spare inch of window s.p.a.ce was filled with objects adorned with sh.e.l.ls. Useless, tacky souvenirs which screened anyone inside the shop from what was happening on the pavement outside, where Lauren was sleeping in her pushchair.

She remembered fingering a mouse on skis the whole thing made from sh.e.l.ls contemplating it as a joke present for some friends (remembering this only much, much later far too late to convince the police that this had been her original motive for entering the shop). She didn't buy anything. Mere minutes had pa.s.sed between her entering and emerging from the shop. On her way out she had to wait while a fat woman momentarily blocked the doorway, then threaded her way between a table stacked with sea urchins and another covered with the polished vacated homes of a hundred queen scallops, before she could get back to Lauren. The empty s.p.a.ce on the pavement stopped her dead. A pair of feet had moved into the s.p.a.ce where Lauren's buggy should have been. A pair of feet in open-toed sandals, which belonged to a man wearing a pair of brown shorts. He was picking up items from the display, showing them to a disinterested teenage daughter. Jo stared at him, all but shoved him away, as if by removing him she could recapture what she ought to be seeing there.

A solution presented itself in a rush of anger. Dom must have pushed Lauren further up the street, not thinking of the fright he would give her when she emerged from the shop and found Lauren was gone. Then she saw him approaching. The smile as he caught sight of her died in an instant. Her expression and the absence of the pushchair told him everything. It was then that she began to scream.

CHAPTER TWO.

Jo made sure that Sean set out for the school bus in good time on Monday morning. A little cloud of guilt descended on her as she watched him slouching away from the house. Did all parents' hearts gladden to see the back of their offspring at the resumption of each new term? She called a goodbye from the doorstep, but when he did not turn she let the arm she had lifted in farewell fall back to her side.

Was this the answer to all those prayers, all that yearning to have a child in the house? She had often imagined how life would be when Lauren was restored to her. She had even tried to kid herself that if she took proper care of Sean, maybe the Fates would see what a good mother she could be given the opportunity and then Lauren could come home. Of course, life did not work like that, but at least if she lavished enough love on Sean and was seen to take good care of him, then maybe people would stop thinking ...

She was rinsing a bottle at the sink when she caught sight of the Phantom Jogger. That was what Marcus had nicknamed him, because when he first started to pa.s.s the house on a daily basis, a grey shadow in his faded jogging bottoms and pale t-shirt, they could not imagine where he had come from. Although their house, aptly named The Hideaway, was partly screened by trees, from the kitchen window it was just possible to see a short stretch of the lane where it began its descent to the little stone bridge from which the hamlet took its name. Jo watched the Phantom Jogger as he steadily covered the ground, striding out easily, looking neither to right nor left, until he went out of sight where the lane bent sharply to avoid an outcrop of rock. Although his ident.i.ty had initially been a mystery, within a week of his first appearance, Maisie Perry, who pa.s.sed for the next best thing to a town crier in Easter Bridge, had informed them that the daily jogger was the latest tenant of High Gilpin.

High Gilpin belonged to a family called Tunnock, but was often let on short leases to people who were working on temporary contracts, or needed a base while looking for a permanent home in the area. It was generally considered that if any place was calculated to put you off country living, it was High Gilpin, a one-time working farm, which stood in an isolated spot at the end of an unmade track, a good half-mile or so from the next nearest habitation. After heavy rain, ice or snow the track was impa.s.sable to any but four-wheel drives, and the house was completely off the radar of delivery vans or taxi firms. Easter Bridge might be the best part of ten miles from the nearest shop, but at least you had a handful of neighbours to whom you could turn in extremis. When the power line blew down and the lights went out at High Gilpin, you were on your own.

When Jo had finished with the milk bottle and dealt with the rest of the recycling, she crossed the hall and went into the room they called the office, in order to check emails. There was a new message in from Nerys, sent from an internet cafe on the other side of the world a couple of chatty paragraphs in which Jo could hear her friend's voice outlining her latest adventures in New Zealand.

She missed having Nerys readily available at the end of the phone. Not that she begrudged the trip for a moment. If anyone had earned their midlife gap year it was Nerys, who had survived redundancy, divorce and a brush with cancer. 'There's a million and one reasons why every woman knows all the words to "I Will Survive",' Nerys once said.

Resolute, grounded Nerys, whose friendship had stood the test of time, someone with whom she had managed to stay in close touch, even after moving north with Marcus. When Nerys fell ill, Jo had made frequent trips down to visit her, both in hospital and at home. It had been during one of these that Nerys had announced, 'I've decided when this is all over, I'm going travelling. I'm going to see the world.'

At the time the prognosis had seemed so dire, Jo could only wonder at Nerys's determination no ifs, or buts, she was going to go travelling. That conversation had been four years ago, but it had taken time for Nerys to get well again, and almost as long to formulate her plans and put them into action. 'I've been taking lessons from my nephews and nieces,' she told Jo. 'The thing to do is b.u.m a bed from anyone you can claim the slightest link with: third cousins once removed, long-lost colleagues, friends of friends. All the kids do it they're quite shameless, and I'm getting good myself. I've even managed to trace a girl I used to know at school whose family emigrated to New Zealand. Turns out she lives near Snells Beach, which isn't far from Auckland, and she's offered to put me up for a couple of nights.'

About a week before she left, Nerys held a going-away party. Marcus had been tied up with work, but Jo travelled down to be there. It was great to be part of the send-off, yet at the same time she had experienced a faint sense of misgiving. There was something so final about a going-away party. It made you feel as if you might never see the person again. Nerys must have picked up on this, because when she gave Jo a farewell embrace, she said with attempted gravity: 'You do know that I might not be coming back?'

'What do you mean? Of course you'll be coming back.'

'Not if I meet a millionaire and he takes a fancy to me. An oil tyc.o.o.n would do nicely. And, of course, if I'm discovered on some beach in California and they want to put me in the movies ...'

'Well, don't forget that if you do land the lead in a remake of Gone with the Wind, I want to be the first to hear about it.'

'Absolutely. I expect Spielberg has got broadband in his mansion and if not, there's sure to be an internet cafe just down the road.'

To date, Nerys's emails had made no mention of millionaires or film directors, but she had been swimming with dolphins, hiking on the Tereziana Trail and photographed in front of the Taj Mahal ... Maybe not as slim as Diana, but much funnier ... you should get some tours organized in India. Can't you come up with a Kipling link? Without a set itinerary, she had overstayed her time everywhere and arrived in New Zealand at least six weeks later than originally antic.i.p.ated, so it was no surprise to read this morning: I'm hoping to extend the trip. It sounds as if my tenants would be happy to stay at least another six months, and my money is lasting really well. Everyone is so hospitable, and won't let me pay for anything.

'I miss you,' Jo said aloud. 'Don't stay away too long.' She hit the reply key and began to type. That would be fantastic. It's so great that everyone is giving you such a lovely welcome.

She did not have much news to offer in return for Nerys's lively description of the Takapu gannet colony. Spats with Sean and what she thought of Sebastian Faulks's latest novel were rather small beer by comparison, and seemed to emphasize an increasingly large gap in her life. Before the amalgamation with Flights of Fantasy, she had been much more involved with the day-to-day running of the business. At the inception of M. H. Tours they had employed an extremely capable woman called Moira, who had driven out from Ulverston four days a week to work in the little office at The Hideaway, but Moira eventually decided that her elderly mother needed her more than Jo and Marcus did, and after Moira there had been a succession of short-term staff, some better than others, until the company eventually acquired proper offices in Kirkby Lonsdale, with two full-time women, both of whom seemed more than adequate to the task. The location of the company's offices had been chosen for its proximity to the home of Melissa Timpson, one-time proprietor of Flights of Fantasy and now their business partner, which meant that when Melissa was not guiding tours herself, she was nicely placed to keep an eye on things.

These new premises were a good forty-five minutes' drive from Easter Bridge, but as Marcus said, with phones and email what did that matter? It was undoubtedly far easier to recruit good staff to work in the little market town than it was to persuade them to drive out into the countryside, and besides which, the room they used as an office at The Hideaway was not large enough to allow for expansion.

When she and Marcus had originally agreed to take it in turns to stay at home, Jo a.s.sumed that during her periods as the parent 'off-tour', she would go into the office at Kirkby Lonsdale while Sean was at school, but though she had initially tried to establish this routine, she soon began to feel surplus to requirements. Sally and Janice ostensibly went out of their way to make her welcome, but on volunteering to check the drivers' hours, she would be greeted by, 'Oh, Melissa went through them yesterday.' A suggestion that she might relieve them of inputting some invoices would be met with the smiling rea.s.surance that Janice had them all completely up to date and the statements too. When the telephones rang, she was always just too late picking them up. The business which she had coaxed gently into life, nurtured like a baby and helped totter to its feet, was all grown-up and doing very nicely without her. She consoled herself with the thought that she and Marcus had not begun M. H. Tours so that they could sit in an office, shuffling papers. She still went out regularly with the tours, and after all, that was the heart and soul of the enterprise.

Thus Jo had fallen out of the habit of going into the office, using her new-found leisure to catch up with long-postponed household jobs, initially luxuriating in the chance to watch a film or read a book during the day. Marcus certainly had no problem filling the days when it was his turn at home not with satellite television beaming cricket and rugby from around the globe virtually twenty-four/seven. Which was not to say that he did not put time in on the business too. Somehow his visits to the office seemed to be more productive. Jo had seen the way Sally and Janice visibly brightened as he swept in, full of easy charm, always ready with an amusing anecdote about something which had happened on a tour. He didn't need to justify himself with offers to help out his mere presence had a positive impact on staff morale. He also managed to research and work out new itineraries, often in collaboration with Melissa, whose days at home seemed to coincide with his quite frequently, so that when Jo got home after a week with a coach load of Richard III enthusiasts, she would find Marcus br.i.m.m.i.n.g with their latest ideas. She tried to stifle any feelings of exclusion because she didn't want to dampen his enthusiasm, and on the odd occasion when she had grumbled that at one time he would have talked through the new Daphne du Maurier tour with her rather than Melissa, Marcus simply could not see her problem. What difference did it make who came up with the ideas, or who worked on what particular aspects of the business? The three of them worked as a team now. It did not matter which particular permutation of staff was involved, so long as they got the job done well.

Jo attempted to compete with some suggestions of her own, but somehow her ideas were never so inspired or so workable as the schemes which Melissa and Marcus dreamed up in her absence in spite of her having an abundance of thinking time. That wasn't a good thing, either. For the past few years a large part of her survival mechanism had relied on not thinking too much, keeping busy, always having something immediate to think about, something to do. In the past few months there had been terrible stories in the news about young girls being kidnapped and kept prisoner for years, used as s.e.x slaves, never seeing daylight. It could send you mad, dwelling on stories like that.

As an antidote to having too much time on her hands, she had recently taken up sketching. She had not done any 'art' since school, but it was one of those things she had always yearned to have a go at. She told herself that she might eventually buy some watercolours, then maybe enrol in a cla.s.s, although the peripatetic nature of her work made any regular weekly commitment impractical. She was disinclined to sign up for any of the painting days which were always being advertised, in case everyone else turned out to be an experienced artist and she looked ridiculous. Instead she began to work alone, almost secretively. At first she arranged groups of objects in the house, rather as they had done in art cla.s.s at school, but soon she was venturing beyond the house, trying to capture trees, buildings and the natural features of the landscape, then figures covertly observed from a distance as they ate their picnic lunches. All of these were infinitely more satisfying than a trio of oranges in a bowl. She knew she was improving, but was shy of showing her work to anyone even Marcus, who teased her gently about her 'secret sketches' whenever he caught sight of the drawing book lying about. Going out to draw had become a regular routine. On days when the weather permitted, she packed her sketch pad and pencils into a rucksack, together with a flask of raspberry tea and her mat to sit on, before heading out in search of a subject.

After a whole week of being at home with Sean, she badly needed to escape the house. It was a cold day, but dry and bright ideal weather so long as she wrapped up warmly. Her walking boots sounded loudly on the tarmac as she headed north away from the old stone bridge. The Hideaway stood at one extreme of the hamlet, a modern house set back from the road. A much older building stood a few yards further north on the opposite side of the lane. There had been no blacksmith at The Old Forge in living memory, but according to Sean, who had a penchant for the macabre, the house was haunted by the ghost of a drunkard who had burned to death after falling into the blacksmith's fire. Sean said he got the story from someone at school, and although Jo regarded all this with considerable scepticism, she had always thought there was something creepy about the place, even before Sean related his dubious tale.

More recently The Old Forge had been home to Mr and Mrs Pearson, but the latter was long dead and old Mr Pearson had eventually gone into a nursing home, leaving the house unoccupied for almost a year. About a month before Christmas, news had reached them of Mr Pearson's death, and in January a house-clearance firm had removed all contents save the greying curtains at the windows. Soon after that, a black and yellow 'For Sale' board had appeared, nailed to the rotting front gatepost. The property particulars described The Old Forge as 'an investment opportunity', although Marcus said 'money pit' might be a better term. Very little had been done to the place since the Pearsons moved in at the end of the 1960s, but in spite of the obvious drawbacks, there had been a good deal of initial interest. Glimpses of the estate agent's silver BMW were a frequent event, and it was not long before a red 'Sold' sign was fixed to each side of the yellow and black board.

Jo glanced at The Old Forge as she pa.s.sed. The place had been empty for more than a year, but she often felt as if there was still someone inside the house, watching. Even as she ridiculed the notion, she found herself reluctant to look up at the windows, lest she glimpse a pale face there in confirmation of her fears. Subconsciously she quickened pace, hurrying past much as Harry had done a couple of nights before.

The next building was an old farmhouse, now a holiday let and currently unoccupied. For practical purposes this was The Hideaway's next-door neighbour, although it was too far away to have much impact on them unless occupied by exceptionally noisy visitors. They occasionally caught a whiff of barbecuing, if the wind was in the right direction, and once discovered a woman exploring their garden, her justification arising from the townie notion of a 'right to roam' anywhere she liked, once she got into the countryside.

Across the lane from the farmhouse was Honeysuckle Cottage, a seldom-occupied second home, and a few yards beyond Honeysuckle Cottage lay Throstles, home to Maisie and Fred Perry. (After more than half a century of jokes about cheap Wimbledon tickets, the unfortunate man's smile was wearing a little thin.) The Perrys were a retired couple with a pa.s.sion for gardening. When not fulfilling their duties at Holehird Gardens, where they were both enthusiastic members of the Lakeland Horticultural Society, they were tending their own plot with such a.s.siduous devotion that in summer their bungalow was almost obscured by the fecundity of the garden. Marcus was convinced that the real motive for Maisie's constant presence in the garden was the insight it gave her into other people's business, privately theorizing that the princ.i.p.al attraction of Throstles for Maisie lay not so much in the generous size of its garden but its position on the bend, from whence the gateway to every other property in the lane was visible, affording Maisie a virtually uninterrupted view of all her neighbours' comings and goings.

As Jo approached the Perrys' gate, she caught sight of Maisie emptying some peelings into a compost bin near her kitchen door. There was no chance of escape because Maisie looked up at just the wrong moment, waved a hand in greeting then made purposefully for the gate. Maisie did not bother with any 'how are you' preliminaries a sure sign that she had some news worth sharing.

'Have you heard who's bought The Old Forge?' She scarcely waited long enough for Jo to shake her head before continuing: 'Well, as you know, I had heard a rumour that it was going to a builder. There was some talk of planning permission and I said to George, "They'll be putting in to knock it down and start again. We'll have no peace if that goes ahead." My friend up at Holehird has been driven mad this past year, what with the alterations her new neighbours are having done noisy jack hammers and mud everywhere.' Maisie paused to take a breath. 'But apparently it isn't a builder who got it in the end. Definitely a private buyer a widow with a daughter and she plans to live here all the time.'

'I expect they'll still need to have a lot of work done,' said Jo. 'It hasn't had anything done to it for years. Is the daughter grown-up?'

'No. Just a youngster of thirteen or fourteen, so I heard. That would be nice for your stepson, wouldn't it another young person? I saw Harry going up and down last week. What a shame he and his sister aren't here all the time. It makes for a proper little community, having children around the place, the way things used to be in the old days.'

Jo didn't want to get into a discussion about second homes and vanished communities. It was one of Maisie's pet topics, although Jo was not entirely sure what kind of community Maisie imagined had ever existed at Easter Bridge. It had never been large enough to call itself a village. There had never been a school or a shop here if anything, the small settlement had expanded in recent times thanks to an enterprising local farmer selling off building plots before the inception of stricter regulations imposed by the National Park Authority. Fortunately, Maisie showed no inclination to mount her soap box and Jo managed to escape after a brief exchange about the weather, crossing the opening where the track led up to High Gilpin, then heading steadily up the hill.

The next two buildings on Maisie's side of the road were extremely incongruous in the context of a c.u.mbrian hamlet. The first of them, Ingledene, was a double-fronted Victorian house, complete with bay windows and streaky-bacon brickwork, which would not have looked out of place in a London suburb. It had been built to house a minister for the matching chapel next door, both structures dating back to the last decade of the nineteenth century, when the farmer at High Gilpin, having found religion in a big way, financed the erection of both buildings in the expectation of a New Jerusalem arising in the valley.

Folk history had it that the family from High Gilpin and their minister held services in splendid isolation, with even their immediate neighbours declining to join them in the new oak pews. After a short life as an active place of worship the chapel had enjoyed a chequered history, eventually becoming an art gallery, which was currently run by Brian and Sh.e.l.ley, who lived in bohemian disorder at Ingledene.

Jo got on well with Sh.e.l.ley, and quite often dropped into the gallery for a chat when she thought Brian was not around. Something about Brian had always unnerved her. He was a well-known local artist whose work commanded four-figure sums, a great bear of a man, known for his intensely held opinions and very short fuse. It was rumoured that he once took such violent exception to the views expressed by an art critic at a Royal Academy Summer Exhibition that he punched the man in the jaw and was prosecuted for common a.s.sault. Another reason for her eschewing the local art cla.s.ses was that Brian sometimes taught them. Sh.e.l.ley was an artist too, but she was far less commercially successful or volatile than Brian.

The gallery was still in darkness as Jo pa.s.sed. Sh.e.l.ley and Brian did not generally open for business until about eleven. There was not much pa.s.sing trade they relied on people who were serious about art, Sh.e.l.ley had once explained; people who came out of their way specially, because the gallery had a high reputation and only hung work which represented the very best of local artists.

Local artists ... It suddenly occurred to Jo that it might be possible to build a tour around artists a.s.sociated with c.u.mbria. She did not know much about famous local painters, apart from Ruskin and Collingwood, who featured in their existing literary tours, but maybe this was something she could talk to Sh.e.l.ley about not Brian, who she thought sure to be contemptuous and dismissive of the whole idea.

A few yards beyond the gallery she reached the last dwelling in Easter Bridge, The Hollies, a barn conversion now the country retreat of Harry's family. She knew that they had returned south on Sat.u.r.day, and guessed that the place would probably sit empty for several weeks now. Maisie Perry was wont to cluck about this, but Jo tended to be more realistic: it was not merely house prices which put a house like The Hollies beyond the reach of a family on a modest income. There was no work nearby, no shops, no local school, no viable public transport unless you counted the twice-daily school bus. Ordinary life in a place like this was too expensive for any family on a low income. Living out here required at the minimum a well-maintained car for every working adult in the household. Food shopping had to be carefully thought through and involved a round trip of almost twenty miles with cheaper supermarkets all but double the distance. Television reception was only available to those who could afford a satellite dish. In Jo's opinion, the so-called scourge of second homes and holiday cottages was often what prevented tiny hamlets like this from falling into the semi-dereliction of rural poverty.

A hundred yards or so past The Hollies, she negotiated the squeeze style at the side of the lane and began to climb a steep footpath through the trees. Apart from a nearby robin, it was exceptionally quiet; no cars pa.s.sing along the lane, no voices floating up from the gardens. There was a timelessness up here: it might have been tomorrow already, or a hundred years ago. It was very damp among the trees. Mosses and lichens were misted with winter moisture. In places water oozed up from beneath the carpet of fallen leaves, forming puddles around the soles of her boots, deep enough to flick muddy water on to her thick woollen socks when she lifted her feet.

It was a fairly stiff climb at the beginning, and after a few minutes of steady walking, the path turned rocky, becoming a stream in places, with a hundred miniature waterfalls each singing their own distinctive tune. When the path eventually emerged on to the open moor, the change was abrupt, the contrast almost startling after the close intimacy of the trees. From here Jo headed north-west, until the Coniston range loomed into view, impossibly large, making you wonder how it could have hidden itself behind a small ridge for so long.

When she reached a group of large flat stones, an imperfect circle which looked as if it had been set out there on purpose for a meeting, she dragged her mat out of the rucksack, sat down and prepared herself to draw, securing the sides of her sketch book with bulldog clips to prevent the light breeze from interfering with her endeavours.

You could lose yourself in drawing. That was one of the great things about it: if you really focused on what you were doing, there was no room to think about anything else. And whenever Jo attempted to capture the landscape on paper, she always saw things that she had never noticed before a tiny thread of water marking its course downhill; the shadows which darkened the side of Brown Pike. It was a different way of looking a new way of seeing.

This total concentration did not always work entirely to her advantage. Left to their own devices some of her thoughts a subversive group which operated to an agenda of their own had a nasty habit of bursting to the forefront of her mind when she was least expecting them. Thus, after she had been working steadily for a time, she abruptly became aware of Sean's voice in her head, repeating the question he had put to her on Sat.u.r.day night: 'Are you saying I'm not normal?'

It was a horrible accusation something she would never say to a child. A memory returned, sharp as a shard of freshly broken gla.s.s: Jane Hill's tenth birthday party the pointing fingers and staring faces. Some of the mothers not her own mother, of course; her own mother had not been there other people's mothers ranged around her, tall as houses, all crowding into the Hills' kitchen, where they had taken her to be out of sight of the other children. Staring at her, their faces curious or anxious in varying degrees, whispering among themselves, someone saying in a low voice which she was not supposed to hear: 'She's not normal.'

One of them tried to give her a hug, but she had torn herself away, backing into the corner until the intervention of the draining board prevented further retreat; all the time that horrible music going on and on, the children's voices half drowning it out with their shrieking now that the party games had resumed in the front room, while in the kitchen all those other mothers kept on staring at her.

With a determined effort, she focused her attention back on her sketch of the hills, but as soon as she did so she gave a little cry. She had ruined it doodling in the bottom right-hand corner of the page when her mind was somewhere else. She pulled out her rubber and attacked the intrusion savagely, not stopping until the fat face topped by an old-fashioned policeman's helmet had completely disappeared. Perhaps if she drew some rocks in the foreground it would cover the smudge.

She worked at the drawing steadily for some time before looking up again. Clouds of a similar hue to the marks left by her rubber had begun to appear from behind the ridge above Torver. If she did not pack up and begin the return journey, there was a strong possibility she would get wet. It was always quicker going home downhill all the way, for one thing. She saw no one as she hurried along the lane under the darkening sky. Everywhere looked barren at this time of year, before the daffodils brought a splash of colour to the roadside verges. There was a lot of grey in c.u.mbria, she reflected: stone buildings under slate roofs, walls instead of hedges.

When she opened the front door she saw that the postman had called in her absence. The face on the home-made picture postcard looked up at her from the mat. A chubby face surrounded by blonde hair, trusting blue eyes, pink baby mouth parted in a smile. She reached for the card with trembling fingers, turning it over to read the words printed on the reverse, although she had already guessed what the message would be, because she knew it off by heart: I still have her.

CHAPTER THREE.

The enormous success of M. H. Tours was due in no small part to the influence of its co-founder, Marcus Handley. From the outset the company prided itself on providing a very personal service, and Marcus excelled in creating a sense that every possible thing was being done to ensure each traveller's individual enjoyment and well-being. He exuded approachability, with no question too obscure or too trivial for the application of his undivided attention. He knew instinctively which of their predominantly female clientele would respond well to intellectual flattery, and which to gentle flirtation. Women liked Marcus, and men respected him. His long, thin face and shoulder-length curling locks, often held back by a pair of gla.s.ses perched atop his head in the fashion of an Alice band, gave him a scholarly appearance. He stood well over six feet tall, and was slim enough to make jeans work with an open-neck shirt and smart jacket. There was a comforting solidity about Marcus Handley which made people feel they could rely on him. He was the sort of man who, when helping you into the lifeboats, would still have found time for a pleasant word to everyone, remaining completely calm even as the liner was sinking beneath his feet.

This easy bonhomie required a level of concentrated effort, seldom suspected by partic.i.p.ants of the tours he escorted. Marcus maintained his focus from the moment he appeared in the hotel foyer shortly before breakfast, until he switched off just before falling into bed at the end of each day, having often sat conversing in the bar until well beyond midnight. This attention to detail, which some might have defined as obsessive, Marcus merely deemed professional. Melissa, Jo and their other guides endeavoured to offer a comparable service, but Marcus did it best.

It was an absolute given that he and Jo did not interrupt each other's working day with anything short of a major emergency, which was why her calling him on the mobile about the arrival of the postcard was so annoying. He understood that she was upset of course he did but the arrival of the card did not represent something about which he could, at that precise moment, do anything at all. And distressing as it was, they had been here before: it was not the first of its kind and nor, he supposed, would it be the last.

Marcus accounted himself an exceptionally patient man, who had always done his best to consider the feelings of others. He invariably approached issues pertaining to Lauren with the utmost sensitivity, but surely Jo could see that the arrival of the card albeit unpleasant did not const.i.tute the kind of major emergency which licensed her to phone him at this most inopportune of moments, just when he was addressing his little group of Bronte devotees prior to their entering that literary Holy of Holies, the parsonage at Haworth.