time forgot, and she had the illogical sense that by walking into it she was lost too, and all memory of her in the real world was gone. Silly fool, she told herself, but she shivered, and it wasn’t cold.
The bell pinged above her head, and she found herself in the kind of shop that she guessed had ceased to exist even before she was born, where jars of barley sugar rubbed shoulders with shoelaces and patent medicines on high shelves, and birthday cards stood on a rack next to the half-inch nails and tins of evaporated milk. It smelled both musty and fruity – pear drops, Jenny thought – and the light that filtered in from the street was dim and cast strips of shadow on the sales counter. There was a small post-office wicket, and the woman standing there in a threadbare brown coat turned and stared at Jenny when she entered. The postmistress herself peered around her customer and adjusted her glasses. They had clearly been having a good natter and were none too thrilled at being interrupted.
“Can I help you?” the postmistress asked.
“I wondered if you could tell me where the old Murray and Godwin houses are,” Jenny asked.
“Why would you be wanting to know that?”
“It’s to do with a job I’m doing.”
“Newspaper reporter, are you?”
“As a matter of fact, no. I’m a forensic psychologist.”
This stopped the woman in her tracks. “It’s Spurn Lane you want. Just over the street and down the lane to the sea. Last two semis. You can’t miss them. Nobody’s lived there for years.”
“Do you know if any of the children still live around here?”
“I’ve not seen hide nor hair of any of ’em since it happened.”
“What about the teacher, Maureen Nesbitt?”
“Lives in Easington. There’s no school here.”
“Thank you very much.”
As she left, she heard the customer whisper, “Forensic psychologist? Whatever’s that when it’s at home?”
“Sightseer,” muttered the postmistress. “Ghoul, just like all the rest. Anyway, you were saying about Mary Wallace’s husband…”
Jenny wondered how they would react when the media descended en masse, which they surely would do before long. It’s not often a place such as Alderthorpe sees fame more than once in a lifetime.
She crossed the High Street, still feeling as if she were being watched, and found the unpaved lane that led east to the North Sea. Though there was a chill in the wind, the cloudless sky was such a bright piercing blue that she put on her sunglasses, remembering with a flutter of anger the day she bought them on Santa Monica Pier, with Randy, the two-timing bastard.
There were about five or six bungalows on each side of Spurn Lane near the High Street, but about fifty yards along, there was only rough ground. Jenny could see two dirty brick semis another fifty yards beyond that. They were certainly isolated from the village, which itself was isolated enough to begin with. She imagined that once the reporters and the television cameras had gone ten years ago, the silence and loneliness and sense of grief must have been devastating for the community, the questions and accusations screaming out loud in the air. Even the residents around The Hill, part of a suburb of a large, modern city, would be struggling to understand what had happened there for years, and many of the residents would need counseling. Jenny could only imagine what Alderthorpe folk probably thought of counseling.
As she approached the houses, she became more and more aware of the salt smell of the sea breeze and realized that it was out there, only yards away beyond the low dunes and marram grass. Villages along this coast had disappeared into the sea, Jenny had read; the sandy coastline was always shifting, and maybe in ten or twenty years’ time Alderthorpe would have vanished underwater, too. It was a spooky thought.
The houses were beyond repair. The roofs had caved in and the broken windows and doors were boarded up. Here and there, people had spray-painted graffiti: ROT IN HELL, BRING BACK HANGING and the simple, touching, KATHLEEN: WE WILL NOT FORGET. Jenny found herself oddly moved as she stood there playing the voyeur.
The gardens were overgrown with weeds and shrubs, but she could make her way through the tangled undergrowth closer to the buildings. There wasn’t much to see, and the doors had been so securely boarded up that she couldn’t get inside even if she wanted to. In there, she told herself, Lucy Payne and six other children had been terrorized, raped, humiliated, tormented and tortured for God knew how many years before the death of one of them – Kathleen Murray – led the authorities to the door. Now the place was just a silent ruin. Jenny felt like a bit of a fraud standing there, the way she had in the cellar of The Hill. What could she possibly do or say to make sense of the horrors that had occurred here? Her science, like all the rest, was inadequate.
Even so, she stood there for some time, then she walked around the buildings, noting that the back gardens were even more overgrown than the front. An empty clothesline hung suspended between two rusty poles in one of the gardens.
As she was leaving, Jenny almost tripped over something in the undergrowth. At first she thought it was a root, but when she bent down and pulled aside the leaves and twigs, she saw a small teddy bear. It looked so disheveled it could have been out there for years, could even have belonged to one of the Alderthorpe Seven, though Jenny doubted it. The police or the social services would have taken everything like that away, so it had probably been left as a sort of tribute later by a local child. When she picked it up it felt soggy, and a beetle crawled out from a rip in its back on to her hand. Jenny let out a sharp gasp, dropped the teddy bear and headed quickly back to the village. She had intended to knock on a few doors and ask about the Godwins and the Murrays, but Alderthorpe had spooked her so much that she decided instead to head for Easington to talk to Maureen Nesbitt.
“Right, Lucy. Shall we start?”
Banks had turned on the tape recorders and tested them. This time they were in a slightly bigger and more salubrious interview room. In addition to Lucy and Julia Ford, Banks had invited DC Jackman along too, though it wasn’t her case, mostly to get her impressions of Lucy afterward.
“I suppose so,” Lucy said in a resigned, sulky voice. She looked tired and shaken by her night in the cell, Banks thought, even though the cells were the most modern part of the station. The duty officer said she’d asked to have the light left on all night, so she couldn’t have slept much.
“I hope you were comfortable last night,” he asked.
“What do you care?”
“It’s not my intention to cause you discomfort, Lucy.”
“Don’t worry about me. I’m fine.”
Julia Ford tapped her watch. “Can we get on with this, Superintendent Banks?”
Banks paused, then looked at Lucy. “Let’s talk a bit more about your background, shall we?”
“What’s that got to do with anything?” Julia Ford butted in.
“If you’ll allow me to ask my questions, you might find out.”
“If it distresses my client-”
“
“That’s irrelevant,” said Julia. “It’s nothing to do with Lucy.”
Banks ignored the lawyer and turned back to Lucy, who seemed disinterested by the discussion. “Will you describe the cellar at Alderthorpe for me, Lucy?”
“The cellar?”
“Yes. Don’t you remember it?”
“It was just a cellar,” Lucy said. “Dark and cold.”
“Was there anything else down there?”
“I don’t know. What?”
“Black candles, incense, a pentagram, robes. Wasn’t there a lot of dancing and chanting down there, Lucy?”
Lucy closed her eyes. “I don’t remember. That wasn’t me. That was Linda.”
“Oh, come on, Lucy. You can do better than that. Why is it that whenever we come to something you don’t want to talk about, you always conveniently lose your memory?”
“Superintendent,” Julia Ford said. “Remember my client has suffered retrograde amnesia due to post-traumatic shock.”
