End. A chill wind caused the branches of trees to hiss like waves breaking on shingle and great clumps of dislodged snow came thudding silently to the ground. A full moon blazed brightly in a crisp black sky, the stars standing out clear and sharp.
As he trudged down the path he noticed the cottage door was ajar and he cursed himself for forgetting to lock it in his haste to tend to Erica. A small drift of snow had accumulated just inside the room. He scooped the snow away and closed the door, not thinking anything of it till he glanced down at the remains of damp, muddy footprints on the carpet leading into the living room. He turned on the light. He’d clearly made one set of prints when he’d dashed in to phone for the emergency services and collect the duvet from upstairs. But there was another set of prints, on closer inspection, that evidently did not belong to him. They were larger than his for one thing, and the remains of the deep tread told him unequivocally they were made by a pair of boots and not by the soles of his light shoes.
He began to get worried that, as remote as this place was, he’d been burgled. He went immediately to his few pieces of furniture — drawers, a bureau — but there was no evidence that anything had been disturbed. It was only when he turned to check upstairs that he noticed the symbol painted on the wall. A circle, painted in black, a cross in the middle of it, a star in the centre of the whole.
‘What the blazes…?’ he said, going closer to it.
He noticed it wasn’t a straightforward circle; it was a serpent eating its own tail.
20
He supposed he’d better call the police to report a break-in and damage to the wall. He was told to leave the scrawl until the police had been to check it out. An officer eventually turned up four days later. Break-ins were apparently not a priority for a force having to endure savage cuts to frontline staff and the pressures of the recent bad weather.
The terminally tired officer asked to be taken into the living room where the damage had been done.
‘Looks like the work of kids,’ he surmised. ‘Some young ne’er do well with time on his hands decided to take advantage of you leaving your door open.’ He looked meaningfully from above his pad at Gareth.
He grinned sheepishly. ‘Probably true, but aren’t the footprints on the large size for kids?’
‘Trust me, some teenagers these days are fully grown except for up here in the head. I think they come out of the womb fully grown. What you have there,’ he said with a decisive point of his pen at the symbol, ‘is a common or garden graffiti tag. Some kid marking out his territory.’ He slapped his cap back on purposefully. ‘My advice would be to get better locks and remember to use them in future. Isolated cottages like this are a magnet for trouble. Good job there’s nothing stolen; the insurance companies won’t pay up if you leave the door open and invite them in.’
Gareth took it on the chin and watched as the police officer took a photograph of the drawing. ‘If we can match this up with tags from elsewhere we might catch the culprit.’ He took more photos of the muddy footprints. They’d faded considerably, dried into the carpet. ‘Not your size,’ he noted. He pocketed the tiny camera. ‘So, you’re definitely sure nothing’s gone missing?’
‘As far as I can tell,’ said Gareth, ‘everything’s still here.’
‘Kids,’ he said, ‘fooling around.’
He told him they’d be in contact just as soon as they heard anything, which, he detected from the dull tone of voice, was likely to be never. Gareth walked him to the door, watched him get into the police car and drive away, rather rashly, thought Gareth, as the slush had turned to ice.
Searching out an old tin of emulsion paint Gareth did his best to cover up the symbol, but despite a couple of coats the thing kept creeping back. In the end he gave up, the ghost of the image never quite going away, reminding him these had been a strange and unsettling few days.
So who was she? Who was Erica and where the hell did she go? Likewise, who was the American guy searching for her? Eventually he stuffed the box of jewellery down in the cellar, in the hope that one day he’d be able to return it to her and partially to try and forget her. But he found that was impossible. She stuck like a thorn in his mind.
Life got back to something representing normal. But everything had been washed clean of the meaning it had before he met her. His work suffered. He really had to get more productive, he told himself. He took long walks along the coast in the hope that inspiration would blow in on the wind and that his growing obsession with Erica would blow away on it. She was a poison that had infected his system, he thought grimly. A poison that had begun with a kind of euphoria and was ending in a black swirling cloud of emotions which threatened to engulf and suffocate him.
He became so absorbed he forgot to stock up on provisions. It was only when he went to the cupboard to search out something to eat that he did a Mother Hubbard; same for the fridge. He slipped his arms into a coat and set off for the Cavendish store to grab a few groceries, reluctantly acknowledging that it was the mundane necessity of the everyday business of having to eat that forced him back into the real world again.
The two sisters who ran the store were never far from one another. It could be quite threatening to have them both serving you at the same time, he thought. But they must have sensed his dark mood and even offered him vocal support, even if that were limited to pointing out where the two-for-one cupcakes they had on offer were to be found.
He half-heartedly wandered along the thinly populated shelves of food and gradually filled a basket with all the basics. He’d go to the supermarket in a few days, he thought; these prices would cripple him. He was acutely aware of them watching his progress up and down the two tight aisles, his final approach to the counter quietly disturbing, for they were staring at him pretty much as they had when he’d first landed in Pembrokeshire. He thought those days were behind him.
One of the sisters silently began to unload his basket; annoyingly slowly too. The other offered him the sort of smile a ferret might give before plunging down a rabbit hole.
‘We had someone come into the store yesterday asking about you,’ she said casually.
Gareth raised a brow. ‘Me? Are you certain? Who?’ He hoped it was Erica.
‘Well, it might have been you but we couldn’t be certain,’ broke in the other sister, glowering at his carton of milk as if it had been misbehaving before tossing it unceremoniously into a carrier bag.
‘Of course it was him!’ she said, rolling her eyes. ‘He said he was a reporter from the Clarion.’
‘It wasn’t the Clarion!’ she corrected.
‘Then which paper was it?’
‘I can’t quite remember, but it most certainly wasn’t the Clarion, that much I do know.’ A bag of potatoes followed the milk. ‘He was American.’
‘An American?’ said Gareth.
‘Clarion or not, he was a reporter and he said he was looking for the man hereabouts who knocked over a young woman in the snow.’
‘You’re certain he was American?’ asked Gareth.
‘Jones the Post said that your Land Rover was involved in an accident.’
Gareth took the carrier bag and handed over his money. ‘How did he know about the accident?’
‘Jones the Post knows all sorts of things,’ she said, throwing his money into the till and slamming the drawer shut. ‘I’ve had to charge you 5p for the carrier bag,’ she added. ‘It’s policy.’
Gareth mumbled that it was fine. ‘What did this man look like?’ he asked.
They went on to describe, in detail, the man from the hospital.
‘But we didn’t tell him where you lived or anything like that,’ said the sister at the till.
‘Oh no,’ joined the other. ‘He wasn’t from around here. Anyway, we don’t trust reporters — all that phone- hacking stuff, it’s just deplorable! We only take reputable papers in the shop now.’
‘Was she badly injured?’ she said, coming from the till to lean on the counter. ‘You didn’t kill the woman, I
