Chapter 38
They are silent as they drive away from Suzie’s house, turning to take the road out of town, rattling over the packhorse bridge, tires kicking up a spray of muddy slush.
Cathy is the first to speak, her face lit in the glow of her phone screen. “This is the third time this week I’ve been in a car with you. Me and you, eh? Who’d have thought it?”
“Not me, Cathy,” Suzie tells her, and means it. She is on edge, jaw clenched, shoulders hunched. She is wearing smart leather gloves, not because of the cold, but because the skin of her hands feels as if it is crawling.
“You want to take the left just up here. Like you’re going up to the Spit.”
“You sure?”
“That’s what the map says. Danny and his friend were just a mile or so southeast of where Hazel’s pin was dropped.”
Suzie nods. Sleet patters against the windscreen. The dark clouds are windswept and restless. She slows as the lane winds between tall hedgerows, a narrow corridor of unpaved, stony road.
“Do you think I took that money?”
Suzie glances over at her. “What money?”
“The money from Hazel’s wedding.”
“I’ve no idea one way or the other, Cathy.”
Cathy releases a long, shivering breath. “I did. I took it.”
Suzie struggles to keep the shock from her face. Even though she’d always suspected it, to hear it from Cathy that way is still a surprise.
“Ever since their wedding, I’ve been saving. Four thousand pounds, plus interest. I was going to give it to Hazel when I saw her last week. That, and a big apology. I feel like somehow I probably cursed that marriage, and I don’t know how else to make it up to her.”
“Whew, Cathy. I don’t know what to say.”
“You don’t have to say anything, I just needed to get it off my chest. I don’t expect you to understand being so broke that you’re feeding your son from the bins behind restaurants or sleeping in your car, but that’s where I was at.
I was at the fucking bottom. Then I got the invite to their stupid wedding and I had to borrow money to get there and leave Danny with his feckless, lazy father because the invite said ‘no children,’ not even her own nephew.
I turned up with a handmade present in a loaned dress and they stuck me on a table at the back of the hall with people who didn’t even bother to learn my name. ”
Suzie remains silent. The road is narrowing. There are no streetlights up here, on the road into the woods. They pass a horse leaning over a gate with eyes like polished black marble.
“I know it sounds like I’m making excuses. I guess I am. But I’m also trying to tell you that I didn’t feel guilty about it, at the time. Not at all. I was jealous, in a way. Hazel always got things the ways she wanted. Even when we were kids.”
“Oh, I’m sure that’s not true—”
“It is, Suzie. I know you find it hard to believe, but all parents have a favorite, and Hazel was theirs. After she went into hospital, Mum and Dad treated her like she was made of glass, couldn’t believe she would do anything wrong. They poured all the love they carried into her.”
The headlights pick out a red phone box at the side of the road, the plastic windows misted with condensation.
Cathy sniffs loudly, wiping at her eyes.
“It’s going to sound silly, but after the operation, it was like Hazel had come back different.
Meaner. Sometimes it was”—she swallows, glancing toward Suzie—“it was like they’d brought a different girl home.
Bad things started happening, and I usually bore the brunt of it. ”
“Bad things like what?”
Cathy shrugs. “Some of it was little things happening around the house. That’s how it started.
Doors opening on their own, footsteps going up and down the hallway.
I’d hear Hazel talking to herself in her room, and one night I caught her stuffing handfuls of slimy wet hair into the toilet and trying to flush.
‘She won’t go!’ Hazel kept saying. ‘I’m trying to flush her away and she won’t go!
’ We started finding moldy food everywhere; potatoes gone black and soft, furry cheese.
Fruit that had rotted overnight and turned to liquid, covered in flies.
Soon after that, mushrooms started to appear.
They grew in the corners of rooms and along the window frames and my dad just waved it off and said the house was damp.
It’s been a wet winter, he told us, he’ll throw some bleach on them.
But they kept coming back, and then they started growing in other places.
Towels and sinks, even inside my mum’s shoes.
I found some one morning that had sprouted overnight on my pillow. You ever heard of such a thing?”
Suzie tells her she has not.
“Our old cat Gandalf started acting weird—he began hissing at nothing. He was a soft old thing, more blanket than cat, but now if you went near him, he’d go nuts trying to bite and scratch you. The day he got put down, I found one of those little black mushrooms growing inside his ear.”
Suzie wrings her hands on the steering wheel, wishing she was still at home. The car fishtails slightly, but the snow tires hold. Good old Teddy, she thinks. A sensible man.
“Did you tell your parents?”
They slow as they approach a turnoff, with Cathy jabbing her finger against the windscreen, indicating a narrow turning between the trees. “In there. I think we’ve gone past the Spit already. Hard to tell in the dark.”
Suzie grimaces. “There won’t be anyone up at the Spit tonight, that’s for sure. Reckon we’ll have the woods to ourselves.”
The thought frightens her, and she wishes she hadn’t said it. The gears grind as the road leads upward, winding a narrow path into the trees. Cathy is still talking, as if she is unable to stop until she is finished. These things have to come out, Suzie knows. It’s like an infection.
“Yeah, I told them, but my parents thought I was making it up. They said I was only saying all this stuff because I was jealous of the attention Hazel was getting when she came out of hospital. At home, we weren’t allowed to talk about the operation, because what they’d taken out of her had scared my parents.
The tumor. I suppose you know about that. ”
“I do.”
The car shudders as they bump over potholes and frozen deadfall. Frozen branches crack beneath the tires like gunshots.
“Hold up, wait! Stop!” Cathy slaps the dashboard with the palm of her hand. “Over there. Something caught the light.”
“What kind of something?”
“It looked like metal. It glinted. You didn’t see it?” Without waiting for an answer, Cathy unhooks her seat belt and opens the door. Cold air washes in. “Wait there. I’ll go look.”
“No, don’t—” But Cathy is already outside, burrowing her chin down into the collar of her coat, lifting her phone high in the air so that the screen lights the area around them in a dull, green glow.
The snow has drifted deeper here, up in the hills.
The wind has sculpted it into peaks around the base of the trees, the low boughs heavy with it.
The windscreen wipers tick-tick as Suzie sits tense behind the wheel, watching Cathy move away from the car in slow, careful steps.
Her stomach feels sour, her mouth very dry.
It’s all this talk of Hazel, the strange infestations of mushrooms. It’s made her nervous, that’s all.
Liar.
Suzie fights the urge to call Cathy back to the car. Instead, she fiddles with the radio to find some music to drown out that irritating inner voice. There is a viselike sensation in her chest as if all the air is being squeezed from her lungs.
Through the windscreen, Suzie notices Cathy has moved out of the circle of headlights and is now little more than a light moving between the trees a short distance away. She rolls down the window, gritting her teeth against the cold. “Cathy?”
Cathy doesn’t turn. The light dims, grows brighter, dims again.
As if she is moving it around. Suzie flicks the radio back off, and the silence swarms violently in.
They’re a long way out of town here, maybe even out of reach of a mobile signal.
She can’t help but remember all the sleepover ghost stories she’d sat through, her hands pressed over her ears but her fingers spread so a little sound could still filter through.
That troublesome, persistent curiosity, ever present.
Joseph Bray with his axe—or had it been a butcher’s knife?
—hacking his family into pieces while the snow fell.
The lights that were said to flicker in the places where the shadows grew fattest beneath the beeches and oaks.
They lured you in, those lights. There were old stories about children who followed them off the path and into the woods who never came out again—
Bang!
Suzie screams, gripping the steering wheel so tightly she is almost convinced it will snap off in her hands. Cathy’s hand, slapping on the roof as she leans in the window, her face flushed with the cold. In one hand, her phone. The other is pointing off toward the trees.
“Holy shit, Suzie, there’s a truck! We found it, I can’t believe it! Danny’s directions were absolutely spot on!”
Suzie climbs out of her seat, her legs treacherously unsteady. Fear is running through her as black as volcanic glass. Cathy tugs her by the sleeve, still talking a mile a minute, her eyes gleaming with a crazy light Suzie recognizes from school.
“I had to brush the snow and leaves off the roof but I’m positive it’s the same truck we saw in the CCTV. I bet if I could open it, I’ll find something Hazel left inside. Maybe her purse.”
“We’re not breaking into the truck, Cathy.”
Cathy laughs scornfully. “Ha! You’re kidding, right? We’re trying to find a missing woman, Suzie, not earn a Girl Guide badge. I know you don’t want to hear it, but sometimes you have to break the rules to get results.”
They follow Cathy’s footprints, deep divots in hard-packed snow that crunches under their feet. The humped shape reveals itself slowly, emerging from the dark like something rising out of water.
Cathy turns her phone light toward it, and Suzie gasps.
It’s the same truck, she thinks immediately.
Has to be. She moves closer, cupping her hands at the driver’s window to peer inside the cab.
She doesn’t need Cathy’s phone light to see that it’s empty.
There’s some litter in the footwell—a couple of takeaway coffee cups and food wrappers—but nothing out of the ordinary, certainly nothing incriminating.
She puts a hand on the hood. It’s cold to the touch, but that doesn’t reassure her.
On the contrary, it could mean the driver is heading back to it right this moment.
She walks to the back of the vehicle and turns to Cathy. “You know we need to look under that canvas, right?”
Cathy visibly wobbles. It’s a tremor that seems to run right through her, from the ground up. Her face visibly pales. “You do it. I can’t face it.”
Suzie considers this. If Hazel is lying under that tarp, she’s likely already dead.
The temperatures have been below freezing all day, and the nights are even colder.
A spray of snow has settled on top, as if it hasn’t been moved in some time.
Suzie has never seen a dead body before.
She wonders if it will be like the movies, where there is a little beauty in it: rolled-back clouded eyes, lips slightly parted.
As she holds her hand out for Cathy’s phone, she knows it won’t be.
It will be brutal, like the weather. Like nature itself, with its rot and decay, the softening and liquefying of all things.
“Okay.”
Suzie clamps the phone between her teeth so she can work the strap holding down the cover free with both hands.
There is a sensation of detachment in her as she lifts the corner of the canvas, as though she is drifting away from her body.
A helium balloon, rising over the trees.
Even as she shines the light into the dark, cramped space, her mind is orbiting somewhere far above her, buffering her from the shock she is certain is coming.
A glassy eye, a clawed hand, stiff with rigor.
But there are only tools lying there. Spades. A rake. A long length of hose.
“Nothing.” She exhales, laughing slightly. She looks up at Cathy. “Just gardening stuff.”
“Gardening?”
Cathy walks around the truck to stand beside Suzie and look beneath the canvas for herself. Her expression changes. Hardens, Suzie thinks. Like a crust of ice.
“What?”
“Huh. That man, the one I talked to at Belle Vue. He was a gardener. He was planting hydrangeas in the flower beds. He works for the council.”
Suzie can see Cathy is working toward something. It’s like untying a knot in the heart of the brain, so that it can free all the loose ends.
“Fuck. I talked to him about Hazel. He came into my house! Into my son’s room!”
“Cathy—”
“‘Drive safe,’ he said to me. ‘Think of your sons.’ Isn’t that weird?”
“Did you get his name?”
“Andrew.”
Suzie is pulling her phone out of her pocket.
Cathy frowns. “What are you doing?”
“Calling the police.”
“Well, good luck. We lost signal about twenty minutes ago.”
Suzie glares at her. “You didn’t think to tell me?”
“Look. The house Danny saw is right over there. We’ll walk for an hour, okay? If we can’t find it in that time then we’ll come right back to the car. I just want to take a look, that’s all.”
Suzie hesitates. Her mouth opens, as if she is about to speak but can’t form the words. She is twisting her crucifix necklace so tightly that Cathy reaches out and puts a hand on Suzie’s arm.
“You’re going to snap that thing off if you’re not careful,” she tells her.
“Look, I’ll tell you what. You stay here.
Sit in the car, keep warm. I’ll be gone thirty, maybe forty minutes.
I’ll find the house and then I’ll come right back and we’ll drive till we get a signal and call the police.
I just don’t want to wait, Suzie. I’m sick of doing nothing. ”
“You know I can’t let you go alone.”
Cathy smiles and squeezes Suzie’s hand. “Then let’s go. Now.”