Prologue
The biggest risk, of course, was that some busybody would see the smoke and in due course mention it to the police. In fact, she wouldn’t put it past the village busybody-in-chief, Mrs Bowles across the lane at The Laurels, to come and see what was burning, to ‘pop over just to check everything was okay’ – because autumn or winter was the proper time for a bonfire, not the middle of June. Not the middle of the breeding season. Only a barbarian would cut back and burn vegetation while birds might still be nesting in it.
But it had to be a bonfire.
She could hardly dump a binbag of blood-soaked clothing in the charity recycling bank at the village hall. Or in their own or a neighbour’s wheelie bin. The police were unlikely to devote much in the way of resources to the investigation, but she couldn’t count on them being slack enough to neglect the basics.
If she’d had a bit more time, she could have jumped in the car and driven thirty miles and left the bag in a random bin no one was going to search.
But she had no time.
And complete incineration was the safest option.
She wanted to know that it was gone. That all trace of what she had done was gone. Maybe then she could get into the mindset of the person she needed to be when the police got here, like an actor, a method actor inhabiting her role so completely that she almost believed it herself, almost believed that she was just a poor traumatised soul who was as bewildered by the whole thing as anyone else.
The traumatised bit was going to be easy enough.
Her hands were shaking so much that she dropped the matchbox into the tangle of sticks and logs that she’d built up and had to rootle around in them to retrieve it. Striking a match was the next challenge, but she managed it; she managed to hold the wavering flame to the scrunched-up newspaper until it caught and flared.
Only when the fire was roaring away, the centre glowing orange with a heat so fierce that she had to stand back from it, did she throw on the first of the garments.
The saturated T-shirt.
It smouldered for a while, damping down the flames under it, sending streams of billowy white smoke up over the yew hedge that screened this workaday part of the garden from the lawns and the house. Then, when the moisture had evaporated off, the material caught and started to char, permeating the air with the aroma –
She staggered away from the fire, bile rising as, in a vain attempt to dislodge the smoke trapped there, she forced a long breath out through her nose.
But then she had to breathe in again and oh God.
Yes. What she was breathing, what she was tasting at the back of her throat, was the savoury aroma of a summer barbeque.
She couldn’t do this. She just couldn’t.
She had to get away from the smoke so she ran, she ran down the shadowed path between the woodshed and the hedge, feet pounding on the damp, moss-slick packed earth –
And straight into the person standing there, quite still, in the gloom.
The person standing there, silent and wide-eyed.
1
Oliver Oliver Oliver.
Her feet seemed to beat out his name on the road as a sort of invocation, a prayer, an entreaty to whatever gods there may be, whatever forces for good there may be, that had the power to keep him safe.
Oliver Oliver Oliver as she ran through the dark, through the funnels of light under the streetlamps that illuminated, briefly, the rain that stung her face and hands, as she ran through the foaming sea that crashed onto the road, flung against her by a wind so strong it was like a solid thing, a thing she had to push through, breathe against, somehow.
Let him be safe.
Let him be there.
Let him be safe as she ran past all the empty blank windows of the empty cottages to the one she needed, the one where he must be.
Oh please.
Oliver.
The pend, the lane between the fisherfolk’s cottages, was so narrow that she could almost have reached out and touched the wall of Evie’s house and the wall of the house opposite at the same time. In the shelter of the buildings, in this shelter from the storm – please let this be his shelter from the storm – it was possible, finally, to breathe.
She filled her lungs and shouted:
‘Evie!’
She tried to put her finger on the doorbell but her hand was shaking so much it slipped off the little plastic nub and she had to hold that hand with the other one, she had to focus focus on pressing that white plastic nub and she was still shouting and why was it so dark in there? And please please Oliver.
Why weren’t there any lights in the windows?
She banged on the door and she kept shouting her sister’s name.
‘Evieeeee!’
Where was Evie? Why would she have taken Oliver? Without even telling her?
A widening triangle of yellow light shone on the rain as a door opened but not Evie’s, it was the door of the next cottage and it wasn’t her own face looking back at her, it wasn’t her own twin’s face, it was an old woman, it was Margaret who lived next door and
‘Where’s Evie?’ Sarah shouted into her saggy face and Margaret just stared at her, she stared and then she shook her head and said something, but Sarah didn’t know what she was saying, there was too much noise from the wind and the crashing sea and Margaret was standing back inside her house and
‘Oliver!’ she shouted and ‘Oliver’s missing!’ and
‘Who?’ said Margaret with a funny pursed-up face and
‘Oliver!’ and
‘Who’s Oliver?’ said Margaret and
Oh God and ‘My son, my son!’ and please let Margaret not have dementia, surely Evie would have said if she had, but Sarah hadn’t seen Margaret for months – no, years – so this was possible, this could be, because sometimes Evie didn’t tell her things she thought might upset her but
The stupid old bitch!
It wasn’t her fault, she knew it wasn’t poor Margaret’s fault, with her staring eyes, her frightened eyes but
‘My son!’ She pushed the words out. ‘You know – my son – you know – Oliver! He’s missing! I just – checked. His cot. He’s gone – someone’s taken –’ She dived at the closing door but she was too late, the old woman had slammed it and when Sarah tried the door handle and pushed she met the resistance of a lock, the bitch, didn’t she care, didn’t she care that a little boy was missing? That Oliver was gone? He was out here somewhere –
And suddenly she couldn’t move, she couldn’t do anything but stare at the locked door. There was a tightness in her chest, as if her lungs were shrinking and shrinking and every time she breathed out they shrank a little bit more. Soon she could only get sips of air, tiny sips, before her tiny shrunken lungs pushed it back out again.
Oliver.
She shut her eyes and made herself not breathe. Made her lungs be still, as Evie had taught her.
Oliver loved being outside.
He wasn’t afraid. It wouldn’t even occur to him to be afraid.
She heaved in a breath.
The sun is coming out to play…
When he was born, when Evie had seen him for the first time, she’d whispered, ‘Rah-Bee!’ – the twins’ childhood codename for Sarah, Sarah Booth, Sarah B., Rah-Bee – ‘Rah-Bee, he looks exactly like the sun in Teletubbies! You know, the sun with the baby’s face in it!’ Evie had started watching children’s TV, even before Oliver was born, to select the programmes she thought would be suitable for a child prodigy, which of course he was going to be. Oliver’s red little newborn scrunched-up face didn’t really look like that Teletubbies baby, or, indeed, any kind of prodigy, but that was where it had started, with Evie saying that.