The lane skirting the perimeter had been colonised by traders selling ice creams, floppy hats and sun block and a field had been turned into a car park. The Lexus was air-conditioned, but the moment Hannah climbed out, the heat smothered her. The afternoon was so humid that she could scarcely breathe. It was an effort to drag one leg after the other as she crossed the lane. How much of her exhaustion was down to the weather, and how much to pregnancy, she wasn’t sure, but she was praying for a thunderstorm to cleanse the atmosphere.
She made a donation to the students rattling tin boxes at the entrance and looked around for Nick. Each of the students wore a sweatshirt bearing the question
‘I didn’t expect to see you, Chief Inspector. What brings you here?’
‘Curiosity, I guess, Mrs Howe. I’ve seen skydiving on TV, but never in real life. I thought it was time to fill the gap in my education.’
‘You know Kirsty’s freeflying today?’
Hannah nodded. ‘Sounds terrifying to me. I did a little research. Freefly involves falling through the air with your head facing down?’
‘Twice the speed of conventional skydiving, she tells me.’ Tina exhaled. ‘I’ve only dared to watch her once before and my heart was in my mouth when she hit the ground. According to her, the only serious risk is if you try to show off with some hair-raising stunt and miscalculate so that you hit the ground hard instead of skimming over the dropzone and landing perfectly. But when I tell her to take care, she says I’m a whuffo.’
‘A whuffo?’
‘An American term, it’s what skydivers call sane people who ask the obvious question. What for you guys jump out of them aeroplanes? Kirsty reckons skydiving is the best fun she’s ever had.’ She folded her arms across her breasts. ‘Tell you what, I never had hundreds of people watching the best fun I ever had, but it takes all sorts. Are you here with anyone?’
‘I might ask you the same question.’
‘I sent Sam for ice creams, Peter’s gone for a pee. So you’re on your own?’
‘Looking out for a friend of mine.’
‘Another police officer?’
‘Why do you ask?’
A scornful noise. ‘You’re not telling me you’ve suddenly developed an interest in skydiving. You’re here for a reason.’
Hannah held her gaze. ‘Kirsty must have stacks of courage. Any skydiver must, I’d say. Yet she seems to me to be worried sick. It’s the contradiction that fascinates me.’
‘She is a brave girl. Sensitive, too, her feelings are close to the surface. Not like me or her dad. Or her brother, come to that. But you’re wasting your time if you think you’ll be able to worm something out of her about Warren’s murder. She won’t tell you anything new. There’s nothing to tell.’
‘Daniel!’ Peter Flint was gorging on his cornet and there was a smear of vanilla ice cream on his chin. His shorts exposed bony knees and made him look like an overgrown schoolboy. ‘I didn’t expect to see you here.’
‘We had a meal at The Heights yesterday evening,’ Daniel said. Miranda and Louise had wandered off to look at the bric-a-brac for sale on the stalls. ‘Kirsty mentioned that she’d be here today and we decided to take a look.’
‘Just as exciting to watch as to participate, if you ask me, and a hell of a lot safer. Not that Kirsty would agree. She keeps assuring her mother that freeflying is statistically less risky than fly-fishing. Anglers are constantly slipping off wet rocks and drowning in rivers or lakes, it seems. Parachutists come through thousands of jumps without a scratch.’
Daniel laughed. ‘You know what they say about lies, damned lies…’
‘And statistics, yes. Glad to bump into you. I was meaning to get in touch.’
‘I’m still mulling over your sketches.’
‘I wasn’t meaning to hassle you for business. Sam mentioned something that I thought would interest you. He once heard his father talking about a garden at Tarn Fold.’
Daniel stared at him. ‘Warren Howe?’
‘Yes. According to Sam, he knew people in Brackdale, they told him the story.’
‘What story?’
‘Perhaps I was too hasty with my ideas for a redesign. I’d hate to be accused of vandalism.’
‘Sorry, I don’t understand.’
‘A long time ago, the garden at Tarn Cottage was well known in the valley. There was some sort of folk-tale attached to it. People called it the cipher garden.’
The Cessna 206 Turbo was small and uncomfortable. There was only room for six passengers, even with all seats except for the pilot’s removed. They were sitting on a mat with their backs to the pilot, legs splayed with a spectacular lack of dignity that provoked endless rude jokes. Kirsty’s companions were four men and one other woman, an anorexic redhead who was having an affair with the pilot. Their eyeline was below the level of the window, but through the clear plastic roller door she could see tiny farms and copses and a caravan park. Soon they would circle over the broad expanse of Morecambe Bay and its bright, treacherous sands.
The noise inside the plane was drowned by the thoughts roaring inside her head. Her first instructor had preached that three-quarters of skydiving took place on the ground. So much depended on how you prepared for the jump.
Flying to altitude would take twenty-five minutes. This was always a time she found peaceful, a time when everything else in her life meant nothing. She’d been taught to relax and visualise herself doing what she had set out to do. Yet whenever the pilot called two minutes, her nerves would fray and over and over again she played through the malfunction procedure in her head. Checking release pins, cut-away and reserve handles, and to make sure that bits of parachute were safely inside the rig. Everyone looked out for each other. If a pilot chute deployed inside the plane with the door open, it could tear off the wings and they would all be dead.
Fear. Skydiving was all about conquering fear. As a raw novice about to make her first jump, Kirsty had found her heart beating faster, she’d taken rapid shallow breaths. The irony was, her trainer said, that survival instinct made your muscles tighten when you needed to relax. Embrace the fear was his mantra, along with hips down, head up. You needed to contain the surge of adrenaline. Over time, she’d learned to focus. Leaving the plane remained the moment of deepest fear, but she would scream out, ‘Up, down, go!’, breaking the tension in her chest by forcing out the air. And then she would fall.
‘I was telling Daniel about the cipher garden,’ Peter Flint said.
Sam uttered an unintelligible grunt. Despite the heat, he was tucking into a ketchup-coated burger in a bap and plainly couldn’t be bothered with idle chit-chat.
‘What can you tell me about it?’
A shrug. ‘Not much to tell. I heard my dad speak about it once when I was a kid. That’s all.’
‘What did he say?’
They could hear the plane high above, heading towards the bay. Sam spat casually on the ground, then wiped his lips with the back of his sweatshirt sleeve. His breath smelled of fried onions.
‘Only that there used to be a cipher garden over at Tarn Fold in Brackdale.’
Peter Flint said, ‘He never mentioned it to me.’
‘You’re an off-comer,’ Sam said brutally. ‘This was just a local tale. A legend, like. He heard about it when he did a spot of work at Brack Hall.’
‘What was the legend?’ Daniel asked.
‘I dunno exactly. About why the people died, the people that owned the garden? Something like that.’
‘A family called Gilpin owned our cottage for years. Originally, it was built by a man called Quiller. In between, it kept changing hands.’
‘Maybe people were afraid there was a curse on it.’
Daniel stared. ‘A curse?’
