The Hiding Places Read online

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Map

  Firstly

  1: Three Girls

  2: The Doll

  3: Nature’s Child

  4: Touched

  5: The Change

  6: Allies

  7: The Roots of Things

  8: Deeper Still

  9: Dead Ends

  10: Two Confessions

  11: Beginnings

  Author’s Note and Acknowledgements

  Also by Katherine Webb

  Copyright

  Firstly

  On the day of the killing the sky above Slaughterford dropped down – almost to the treetops – and it poured with rain. Lavish, drenching summer rain, the first in weeks. The villagers all claimed, on having woken to such weather, to have known that something was very much amiss. They were superstitious people, prone to seeing signs and portents everywhere, and to suspecting the worst of every one. Sid Hancock, out at Honeybrook Farm, swore he saw the By Brook run red. Heads were nodded, ruefully, though the murder hadn’t happened near enough to the riverbank for blood to have reached the water. Woolly Tom, who kept a flock of sheep on a small-holding up on the ridge, said he’d known a death was coming ever since one of his ewes had birthed a two-headed lamb back in the spring. He’d been carrying a desiccated rabbit’s foot everywhere with him since then, in case the shadow tried to fall on him. Death was common enough, in Slaughterford. But not this kind of death.

  What troubled people most was the sheer blamelessness of the victim. Nobody could think of a single bad thing to say of them, or recall a single cruel or shameful thing they’d done. There was a wrongness about it that shook them. Grave illness could happen at any time, as could a fatal accident. Only the year before, six-year-old Ann Gibbs had climbed over the cock-up stones designed to prevent exactly that, and had fallen into the well at the top of the lane to Ford. She’d drowned because her brother had told her the fairy folk lived inside. Fits, flu and seizures took their annual tithe of loved ones, but if your time was up you could hardly argue with that. Tragedy and ill-luck abounded, but for one of their own to be cut down with such savagery, for no reason at all … It simply wasn’t natural. They were people of the land, and struggled with anything that wasn’t natural. They channelled the shock of the murder into the rocks beneath their feet, just like lightning rods. And they all wondered whether one such act of violence could help but lead to another.

  1

  Three Girls

  The morning before it all began, Pudding paused by the little window at the top of the stairs and saw her mother outside on the lawn. Louise Cartwright was near the back wall, looking out over the drenched tussocks of the paddock that sloped away down the valley, and fiddling with something in her hands that Pudding couldn’t see. It was early, the sun not yet clear of the horizon; the sky had an immaculate, pale clarity, and it looked like being another hot day. Pudding felt the little thump of dread she was coming to know so well. She waited for a while, but when her mother didn’t turn or move, she carried on down the stairs, more slowly now. A gentle snore came from the darkness of her parents’ room, where her father was still asleep. In earlier days he’d been the first to rise every morning. In earlier days he’d have fed the stove and put the kettle on, and been shaved and buttoned into his waistcoat before Pudding and Donald stumbled down to the kitchen, rubbing the sleep from their eyes. Now Pudding usually had to go in and wake him, feeling guilty every time she did. His sleep was like a stupor.

  The kitchen at Spring Cottage was more chaotic than it had used to be – the bowls on the shelves were no longer stacked in exact order of size; the hop garland looked dusty; crumbs in the cracks and splashes of grease made the smell of stale cooking hang about. Donald was waiting at the kitchen table. Not reading, or mending anything, or jotting a list. Just sitting, waiting. He’d stay like that all day if nobody roused him up and sent him on his way. Pudding squeezed his shoulder as she passed behind him, and saw him swim up from the unfathomable depths inside himself to smile at her. She loved to see that smile – it was one of the things about him that hadn’t changed at all. She kept a tally in her head: things about Donald that were just the same; things about him that had changed forever. It was the forever part she struggled with. She kept expecting him to shake it off, get up from the table with his old abruptness, quick with energy, and say something like, Don’t you want some toast with your jam, Pudding? They’d spent the first two years after he’d come home watching, waiting to see what would return to him. A few things did, in the first year: his love of music; his love of Aoife Moore; his fascination with machinery; his appetite – though he sometimes struggled to swallow, and ended up coughing. But during the past year, nothing else had come back. His dark hair was just the same – soft, shiny, unruly. So very lovely. And that ironical curve to his mouth, though irony was one of the things he’d lost.

  ‘Morning, Donny,’ said Pudding. ‘I’ll just see what Mum’s up to, then we’ll have some breakfast, shall we?’ She patted his shoulder, and was already by the back door by the time he managed to reply.

  ‘Good morning, Puddy.’ He sounded so normal, so like her big brother, that Pudding had to take a deep breath, right down into her gut, to stay steady.

  She pulled the door to behind her, then looked up for Louise with that stubborn optimism she couldn’t suppress. She hoped her mother would have moved, hoped she’d only been picking parsley for the scrambled eggs, hoped she’d been on her way back from the privy and had stopped to watch hares boxing in the field. But her mother hadn’t moved, so Pudding distracted herself by noticing other things instead. That her breeches were getting too small again already, the waistband dragging down at the back so that her braces dig into her shoulders; that one of her socks was already sagging, bunching infuriatingly in the toe of her shoe; that her shirt was pinching under her arms because her chest seemed to get bigger every day, however much she willed it not to. It felt like her clothes were at war with her – delivering a constant, unnecessary commentary on her unwelcome expansion, upwards and outwards. The air was glassy-cool, fresh and green. Louise’s footsteps through the dew showed up dark green against the silver. Pudding stepped into them exactly, shortening her stride.

  ‘Mum?’ she said. She’d planned to say something jovial, to brush off the oddness of the scene, but it wouldn’t come. Louise turned her head sharply, startled. For a moment, there was no recognition in her face. That blank look, tinged with trepidation, was becoming the thing Pudding feared most. She found she couldn’t quite breathe. But then Louise smiled, and her smile was only slightly vague, slightly hollow.

  ‘Pudding! There you are, love. I’ve been looking for you,’ she said, and in her eyes was that struggle to catch up, to guess at the truth of her statement. There was nothing in her hands, Pudding saw. The constant fiddling had been with the bottom button of her yellow cardigan. She always started at the bottom, but she’d got no further with doing them up that morning.

  ‘Have you, Mum?’ said Pudding, forcing her clenched throat to swallow.

  ‘Yes. Where have you been?’

  ‘Nowhere, just up in my room. I can’t have heard you calling. Come on.’ Pudding rushed on, before this fiction had time to bewilder her mother. ‘Let’s go in and get the kettle on, shall we? Make a nice pot of tea?’

  ‘Yes. That’s what we need.’ Louise sighed slightly as she turned to walk back beside her daughter. They obliterated their original footsteps; the dew flicked up and soaked through Pudding’s socks around her ankles. Still, she felt an irresistible surge of cheeriness as a phalanx of swifts shot across the sky above them, screeching out their joy, and the Manor Farm dairy herd, on the other
side of the valley, lowed as they were let out from milking.

  ‘Did you see hares in the field, Mum?’ she asked, recklessly.

  ‘What? When?’ said Louise, and Pudding rushed to retract the question.

  ‘Oh, nothing. Never mind.’ She took her mother’s arm and squeezed it, and Louise patted her hand.

  Dandelions were crowding the back step, and the ash pail needed emptying; the blackcurrants were going over, unpicked except by blackbirds, which then left purple droppings on the path and down the windows. But when they got back into the kitchen Pudding’s father, Dr Cartwright, was there, stoking up the stove, and the kettle was hissing on the hot plate, and he’d combed his hair and dressed, even if he hadn’t shaved yet and his eyes were still a little sleepy.

  ‘Two roses, fresh with dew from the garden,’ he greeted them.

  ‘Morning, Dad. Did you have a good sleep?’ Pudding put the butter dish on the table; rattled open a drawer for knives; fetched yesterday’s loaf from the crock.

  ‘Far too good! You should have woken me sooner.’ The doctor rubbed his wife’s upper arms, smiling down at her. He pushed some of her unbrushed hair back from her forehead, and kissed her there, and Pudding looked away, embarrassed, happy.

  ‘Toast, Donny?’ said Louise. She’d done up her cardigan, Pudding noticed – every button in the right hole.

  ‘Yes please, Mum,’ said Donald. And they moved around each other as breakfast was assembled, perhaps not quite as they always had, but in a version of old habit that felt blissfully familiar. Her family strayed in the night, Pudding thought. They scattered like thistle seeds, carried here and there by currents she couldn’t feel, and didn’t understand. But she understood that it was up to her to gather them together again in the morning. As she sliced the bread she sang a snatch of ‘Morning Has Broken’ in her worst possible singing voice, to make them smile.

  * * *

  When Irene heard the rattle of Keith Glover’s bicycle her heart gave a lurch, walloping into her ribs, and she was careful not to look up or twitch – so careful not to react at all, in fact, that she wondered whether her extreme stillness would give her away instead. She felt as though her guilt were written all over her face in bright red letters for Nancy to read; Nancy with her eagle eyes and her disbelief in everything Irene said and did worn quite openly. She was sitting opposite Irene at the breakfast table, putting the merest scraping of butter on her toast and frowning at any overly large pieces of peel in the marmalade. The sun glanced as brightly from her silver hair, combed back into its usual bun, as it did from the rosewood tabletop. She was small, slim, hard as iron, and sat with her tiny feet crossed at the ankle. She flapped the page of the newspaper to straighten it, read for a moment and then grunted in derision at something. Irene had already stopped expecting her to elucidate, but Alistair glanced up, expectantly. He glanced up every time, with half a smile on his face, ready and waiting. His optimism appeared fathomless, and Irene marvelled at it. It made his eyes sparkle above the soft pouches in which they sat, and made him look younger than his middle years – younger than Irene’s twenty-four even, though she was almost fifteen years his junior. She felt she’d aged a decade in the six weeks she’d been in Slaughterford.

  Boot heels sounded on the yard; the brass flap on the letter box squeaked. Irene stared at her fingers on the handle of her coffee cup, and forced them not to tremble. The diamond in her engagement ring and the yellow gold of her wedding band stared back at her. As usual, after the guilt came the anger – at herself, at Fin, at blameless Alistair. A rush of bright, hot anger at the situation she was in, and at those who had put her there – herself most of all. She rejected her new role completely, even as she played it as best she could. The anger burnt out as quickly as it flared, and despair came hard on its heels. Despair like a pit she could drown in, without something to save her, something to cling to. The lifebuoy of a word, a sign, a token. Some proof that, even if her misery couldn’t end, she was not, at least, alone in it. What she would do if she actually saw Fin’s writing on an envelope, she had no idea. She wouldn’t be able to keep still then – she’d probably fly to pieces. Her stomach writhed, tying itself in knots. She remained perfectly still.

  ‘Well, it looks like being another beautiful day,’ said Alistair, suddenly. Irene glanced at him, startled, and found him smiling at her. She tried to make her own face respond and couldn’t tell if it moved or not.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. Flick, flick, flick went Nancy’s eyes – from Alistair to Irene, back to Alistair.

  ‘What are your plans, darling?’ Alistair asked Irene. He put his hand over hers on the table, and her coffee cup rattled as her stiff fingers fell away from it.

  ‘Oh, I … I hadn’t thought.’ Irene heard Florence coming along the hall to the breakfast room – her light, apologetic tread on the boards. The girl had the beady eyes and pointed nose of a mouse, which matched her personality well. Irene’s heart escaped her control, and went bounding up into her throat.

  Florence knocked softly, came in with the letters on a tray and put them on the table by Alistair’s elbow, bobbing awkwardly before she went again. Alistair flicked through them – four envelopes. Irene couldn’t breathe. Then he picked them up, straightened them, and slipped them into his jacket pocket as he got to his feet.

  ‘Well, enjoy the day, anyway, both of you. I’ll be back for lunch – if it’s as fine as yesterday, we should have it out on the terrace.’ He pushed his chair away tidily and smiled at Irene again. His smiles seemed in endless supply, like his optimism, when Irene felt like she’d run out of both. His whole face was geared for it – that softness to his eyes, and the upward curve of his lips and cheeks. Without his smile, his face looked bereft. ‘You might visit Mrs Cartwright, and see how she is.’

  ‘Mrs Cartwright?’

  ‘Yes – the doctor’s wife. You know. Pudding and Donald’s mother.’

  ‘Yes, of course.’ Irene knew she should be learning all these names, and matching them to faces – the wheelwright, the smith, the vicar’s wife, the woman who ran the shop and her son who brought the post. She knew that in a village as small as Slaughterford it was unforgivable not to know. She seemed to have done much that was unforgivable of late, but, just then, she couldn’t face paying a call to the doctor’s wife – a complete stranger and an invalid, she vaguely remembered being told. She hadn’t the first clue what she should say to her. But then Alistair left, and Irene was alone with Nancy again. The long day yawned ahead of her, a void to be filled. She looked up at her husband’s aunt, knowing that Nancy would be watching her, judging her openly without Alistair to moderate her. Sure enough, there was the knowing look, the arched brows, the mocking half-smile. Nancy seemed a particularly cruel part of Irene’s penance. She was in her seventies but lean and well-preserved; the lines on her face were thin, faint, refined. When Alistair had told Irene his aunt lived with him at Manor Farm she’d imagined a separate cottage and a pleasant old bat filling her time arranging flowers for the church, and holding charity luncheons. A separate wing of the house at least. Not this constant sharp edge, everywhere Irene went, waiting to cut her. When she remarked on it – on her – to Alistair, he’d looked hurt.

  ‘My mother died the day I was born, Irene. Nancy has raised me as her own – she’s the closest thing to a mother I have. I don’t know how my father would have coped, if she hadn’t been here with him. Well, he wouldn’t have.’

  Irene took hold of her coffee cup again, though she had no intention of drinking the contents. It was stone cold, and filmy on top. Eventually Nancy folded the newspaper away and stood.

  ‘Really, Irene, my dear, you must eat something,’ she said, offhandedly. ‘It may be all the rage in London to look at death’s door, but you’ll stand out like a sore thumb down here. Anyone would think you weren’t happy – unthinkable for a new bride, of course.’ Nancy kept her pinned for a moment longer, but Irene knew that she wasn’t expected to reply. Unthinkable, unfor
givable. All these new words for Irene to describe herself, and for others to describe her. ‘You’re a Hadleigh now, young lady. And Hadleighs set the standard around here,’ said Nancy, as she turned to go. Only when she’d shut the door behind her did Irene let her chin drop, and her hands fall lifelessly into her lap. The silence in the breakfast room rang.

  * * *

  Kingfisher, wagtail, great tit, bunting. Clemmie kept a list in her head that almost became a chant as she walked, keeping rhythm with her steps and her breath puffing in and out as she climbed. Kingfisher, wagtail, great tit, bunting. The early sun was a glorious flare in her eyes, and sweat prickled under her hair – her mad pale curls, so like her mother’s, which defied any attempt at order. She was climbing the narrow path that cut between the field hedges from Weavern Farm to the lane that led down to Slaughterford. The path was tolerable then, early in the morning. By the afternoon it trapped the sun, and hummed with gnats and horseflies, so she came back along the river’s edge instead – the longer way, and winding, but cooler. The hedges were full of dog roses now, laden with flowers and baby birds. Her father’s cattle tore up the grass to either side of them; she could hear them, and smell their sweet green stink. Kingfisher, wagtail, great tit, bunting. The bottles of milk and rounds of cheese in the baskets yoked across her shoulders clanked as they swung. The yoke was almost too wide for the path; cow parsley flicked her arms, and foxgloves, nodding with bees, and wild clematis.

  Her parents no longer bothered urging Clemmie to come straight back from her errands; she got back when she got back, sooner or later, depending on how long she spent with Alistair Hadleigh, or watching the river, or caught suspended in a daydream. She usually tried to hurry – she knew there was always work to be done. But even if she set off fast she tended to slow down by the water, or in the woods. Sometimes she saw things that stopped her, and absorbed her, and she didn’t even realise it – didn’t even realise time had passed until she noticed where the sun was in the sky, or the way her sisters rolled their eyes when she finally did get home, greeting her with varying degrees of resentment, depending on the hour, saying, Here’s our pretty ninny, if she hadn’t been needed, or Look what the cat dragged in, if she had. But Clemmie would wander. She had to wander. So they set her to delivering the milk to the mill canteen, though they knew they might not see her for hours. Like the other, larger, dairy herds in the area, Manor Farm, which also owned the mill, sold its milk by the gallon to the butter and condensed milk factories, which left the local deliveries to the smaller Weavern herd.