Chapter Eight
I scanned the subject matter of my bookshelves in search of inspiration. ‘Walks around the moors — done it. The old lime workings — done those; the wildlife of North Yorkshire — done the bits of it that stood still long enough. Bugger it, there must be something I haven’t written about already.’
Most of the books had belonged to Caro’s late father, but the rest were mine, dragged with me from London in the back of my old Micra, whose wheels had almost grooved the tarmac all the way, weighted down as it was with my possessions and my heart. I hadn’t even known where I was headed, I’d just pointed the car at the first motorway I’d found and kept driving until darkness forced me off the road and I’d found myself in Riverdale. A September evening, with the dusk lying thick and heavy in the dale, the air sodden with the smell of old leaves and peaty water and no sound but that of the river scouring its way towards a distant sea.
I’d parked up, walked into the pub and almost instantly fallen into conversation and then friendship with Caro. A cottage, a horse and a sort-of job writing articles for Mike had all followed, and I’d never questioned any of it, apart from the pathetic level of income.
I felt, I had to admit to myself, a little bit like one of those bugs trapped in amber. Fossilised in beauty, fixed in a setting so unbreakably lovely that it made my heart ache to look at sometimes. But still trapped.
The phone rang and I glanced over at the caller display with the usual pang that caught me in the back of the throat. Mike. I picked up.
‘Just callin’ to ask if you’ve settled on an article yet?’ Mike’s ‘Norf Lundun’ accent was completely assumed because he was from Weybridge and had been to Oxford University. I think he did it to ‘put people at their ease’, which really only worked if you were at ease in the company of cockney wide-boys and the cast of EastEnders , but still made me momentarily homesick. He was a bright and eager magazine publisher who also ran a shop for extreme sports enthusiasts, survival courses in the wildernesses of Hampstead Heath and had a long-suffering wife and three, equally hyperactive, children.
He’d expressed disbelief when I’d first mooted the idea of writing ‘outdoor’ articles for him but, thankfully, hadn’t asked questions and had bought said articles regularly and without fuss. ‘Only I’m ’avin’ a bit of a crisis ’ere, love.’
‘What sort of crisis?’ I felt my heart start to sink. Times were hard, I knew that, and the circulation for Miles to Go wasn’t exactly stratospheric. Was Mike about to fold the magazine? I held my breath.
‘Advertisers mostly. Bastards, all of ’em. Also, Derry’s bust ’is leg, laid up in ’ospital in traction, so ’e won’t be turnin’ anythin’ in for a bit. Any chance you could come up with a real cracker for me, love? Fill a bit of space? I could get some other freelancers to chip in, but I knows your work and you never gives me much to do, edit-wise. Well, I suppose you wouldn’t, would you, you bein’ an award-winner an’ all.’
And then I felt it, the stabbing pain somewhere underneath my heart. The agony of knowing that there was so much more than this, this column in a magazine no one read, this tiny cottage in a village no one had heard of. This tiny life. It had once been so much bigger, reached so high that I thought I could touch the stars.
‘There’s always UFOs,’ I said, hopefully. ‘Very popular. And I’ve got some first-hand experience.’
A pause and I heard Mike sucking his teeth. ‘Got any pictures?’
‘Well, no, not as yet, but—’
‘Y’see love, what it is, the Fortean Times ’ave all that guff sewn up. Not really our brief, see.’
‘Oh.’ I let my eyes roam the shelves again. ‘I don’t suppose we cover busty blondes being saved by dinner-jacketed heroes either, do we?’ Caro’s father had had a very seventies blockbuster approach to literature, it seemed.
‘Not this month, no. Unless it happens up Snowdon.’
‘Hm. Usual six month lead time?’
‘Yep.’
‘Something autumnal, then.’
I heard him sigh. I was keeping him talking and he knew it. ‘You got anything, Moll?’
Then suddenly I saw it. A plain, off-white spine, slightly bent, with simple lettering. Traditional tales of Riverdale — old stories from an ageless village by Jack Edwards.
‘Folk tales,’ I said, my voice rising in excitement. ‘Traditions and ghost stories and old legends and stuff like that. It’ll be Halloween for this edition, won’t it?’
‘Hey, yeah. Sounds good.’
‘I can write up a lot of stuff from this village and the surrounding moors. North Yorkshire is awash with spooks and smugglers, all kinds of stories.’
‘Blood-curdling?’
I crossed my fingers. ‘Oh, yes. Lots of gore and mystery.’
‘Well, all right then. Can you make it a double for me, Moll? Take up some of Derry’s slack? I’ll get some stock photos in, all dark and moody shots, ‘it the ’Alloween thing running.’
I heard him smile and I relaxed a bit. ‘Are you sure you don’t want UFOs? Very trendy right now, very “happening”.’
‘Nah, you’re off base with that one, babe. Get a draft off to me soon as you can, will ya?’
With my eyes still fixed on the warped spine of the book at the top of the bookshelf nearest to the window, I agreed and hung up. Then I walked the length of the room, not daring to move my eyes in case the book evaporated. I banged my shins on a stool and hardly noticed.
‘Now that,’ I said, reaching up on tiptoe to pull the book towards me, ‘is what I call a close one. How long has that been there?’
It wasn’t completely surprising that I’d not noticed it before. It was a smaller than average book and had got pushed between a dog-eared Jaws and an Ian Fleming novel with a missing cover that still managed to give the impression of being full of over-endowed women being patronised by over-endowed men. The spine of Jack’s book was only visible because of the angle of the sun, which had illuminated the recess in which it lay.
‘It’s like one of those murder-mystery things that are solved with a clue that can only be seen at midsummer, when the sun shines on a certain brick.’
I clearly had also got a touch of seventies blockbuster.
I tipped the book into my hand and took it over to the table to read. I’d just pushed back the cover when there was a cursory single-knuckle rap at the back door and Caro came in. ‘Hey, it’s a nice day, wondered if you and Stan fancied an outing?’
‘Look.’ I held the book up, cover first. ‘I found it on the shelf.’
‘Gosh. Dad’s book.’ Caro sat and gently took the book from me. ‘I knew I’d seen a copy over here once, but I didn’t think it survived the redecoration. Wow.’ She turned it over and ran a finger over the name printed on the cover. ‘He had them privately done. Sold a few in local bookshops but . . . I thought they were all lost.’ Her eyes were swimmy and she was biting her lower lip. ‘This must have been his copy.’
Caro was lost in a world of memory, tracing the letters on the cover with the tip of a well-worn finger. ‘Mum died when I was very young so it was only me and Dad. He bought me my first pony and supported me while I was doing my BHSI qualification to teach people to ride. And then, when I’d just qualified, he made Moor Farm over to me and bought this place for himself to live in. All done just for me.’ Her voice firmed up and she looked at me. ‘I wish you’d known him, Moll, he was a lovely man.’ She flipped some pages. ‘An incorrigible old bugger, of course, but still a lovely man.’
‘Can I keep this for a while?’ I indicated the book. ‘I’ve just told Mike I’m going to write about folk tales, and this is my entire source material.’
She grinned. ‘Course. Just give the old sod a credit, would you? It’ll probably be the biggest exposure this book’s ever had, he was hardly in the J K Rowling league as a writer. Anyhow, you up for a ride? I want to find out what you were up to raiding the banty coop at stupid o clock this morning, and don’t think I didn’t see you heading out to the old Haunted Homestead down the road there, swinging your carrier like Shirley Temple.’
I realised suddenly that I didn’t want to tell Caro about the lights. She’d pretty much taken the piss last time I’d mentioned them, all that ‘ghoulies and ghosties’ stuff, and I didn’t want her practicality brought to bear on this. There was something about the way those points of colour had swung about the night sky that had been unbearably intimate somehow. As if they’d been meant for me, and me alone. Although where that left Phinn Baxter I wasn’t quite sure.
‘I took them some bacon and eggs. Thought it would be a neighbourly thing to do, and you are always complaining that you’ve got too many eggs now the hens are in lay.’
‘Sure, yes, I don’t mind, obviously.’ Caro raised her eyebrows. ‘So, you and that scientist banging yet?’
‘ What? No, of course we’re not! Caro! For the record, in fact, he is so rude that he walked out on me in the middle of a conversation this morning. So I don’t even think a gentle tapping is in order, let alone . . . what you said.’
‘I saw that other bloke heading in there this morning. Looked to have got off the bus.’ Caro held the door open for me. ‘You coming, or what? Only Stan’s chewing his way through another rug in that stable, so it’s either get him out for a hack or give him a crossword to do.’
‘Link?’
‘Dunno what his name is, but he looked far too cute to be allowed on public transport.’ Caro waited for me to grab my hat from the rack, force my feet into my jodhpur boots and find my jacket. ‘I wouldn’t mind throwing him over my saddle and riding off into the sunset. Except you’ve cornered the market in that sort of thing, haven’t you?’
I gave her A Look as I pulled the door closed behind me. ‘Once, Caro. Once. And absolutely never again.’
‘If you say so. I wonder if he can ride?’ She gave me a lusty wink. ‘In every sense of the word.’
‘You two would get on like a house on fire,’ I said. ‘You both appear to have taken your approach to life from Smutty Jokes for Twelve-Year-Olds .’
‘Nothing wrong with a bit of smut.’ Caro did the wink again. ‘You know me, a place for everything and everything in its place. Hur hur.’
I gave a deep sigh and led the way across the road to the yard, where I saw Stan’s head appear over a loose-box door, shreds of expensive New Zealand rug hanging from between his teeth like enormous strands of dental floss.