her lips were moving and the stars were winking, because she was fading now, turning into black; and he was fading too.
‘June – ’ he whispered, as the last little lights began to tremble, to switch off one by one, as thick mud filled his throat and his nose and his mouth, as the rain beat down on his head, as his lungs were finally starved of air; he smiled as her breath caressed his neck…
THREE
Juniper woke with a start to a throbbing headache and the muddy mouth of unnatural sleep. The surface of her eyes felt grazed. Where was she? It was dark, night-time, but a faint light crept in from somewhere. She blinked and registered a ceiling high above her. Its marks, its rafters, were familiar, and yet it wasn’t right somehow. It didn’t fit. What had happened?
Something, she knew that; she could feel it. But what?
She turned her head – slowly – letting the clutter of loose, nameless objects inside tumble over. She scanned the space beside her for clues; saw nothing but an empty sheet, a jumbled shelf beyond, the merest strip of light spilling in from a door that was ajar.
Juniper knew this place. This was the attic at Milderhurst. She was lying in her own bed. She hadn’t been here in a long time. There had been another attic, a sunny place, not like this at all.
She was alone. The thought came to her as solidly as if she’d read it, in black text on white paper, and the absence was a pain, an aching wound. She’d expected there to be someone else with her. A man, she realized. She’d expected a man.
A strange wave of misgiving then; not to remember what had happened during the lost time was normal, but there was something else. Juniper was lost within the dark wardrobe of her mind, but although she couldn’t see what lay around her, she was filled with a certainty, a heavy dread, that there was something terrible locked inside there with her.
She closed her eyes and strained to hear, cast about for anything that might help. There was none of the bustle of London, the buses, the people on the street below, the murmurs from other flats; but the veins of the house were creaking, the stones were sighing, and there was another persistent noise. Rain – it was light rain on the roof.
Her eyes opened. She remembered rain.
She remembered a bus stopping.
She remembered blood.
Juniper sat up suddenly, too focused on this fact, this small glimmer of light, of remembrance, to mind the pain in her head. She remembered blood.
But whose blood?
The dread shifted, stretched out its legs.
She needed air. The attic was stifling, suddenly; warm and moist and thick.
She placed her feet on the wooden floor. Things, her things lay everywhere, yet she felt disconnected from them. Someone had attempted to clear a space, a passage through the jumble.
She stood. She remembered blood.
What made her look at her hands then? Whatever it was, she recoiled. There was something on them. She brushed quickly on her shirt and the gesture caused a rippling of familiarity beneath her skin. She lifted her palms closer to her face and the marks fled. Shadows. They were only shadows.
Disconcerted, relieved, she went shakily to the window. Pulled aside the blackout curtain and opened the sash. A light cool film of fresh air brushed her cheeks.
The night was moonless, starless too, but Juniper didn’t need light to know what lay beyond. The world of Milderhurst pressed upon her. Unseen animals shivering in the underbrush, Roving Brook laughing in the woods, a faraway bird lamenting. Where did the birds go when it rained?
There was something else, directly below. A small light, she realized, a lamp hanging from a stick. Someone was down there in the rain, working in the pets’ graveyard.
Percy.
Percy holding a shovel.
Digging.
Something lay on the ground behind her. A mound. Large. Still.
Percy stepped aside then and Juniper’s eyes widened. They fired a message to her beleaguered brain, and the light in the dark wardrobe flickered, and she saw clearly, just for a moment, the terrible, terrible thing that was hiding there; the evil that she’d sensed but hadn’t seen, that had filled her with fear. She saw it, she named it, and horror fired every nerve within her body.
The circuit blew and the lights went out.
Damned hands.
Percy recovered the dropped cigarette from the kitchen floor, wedged it between her lips and struck the match. She’d been counting on the familiar action to return her some steel, but she’d been too hopeful. Her hand shook like a leaf in the wind. The flame extinguished and she tried again. Concentrated on striking firmly; on holding the bloody thing still as it sizzled and caught, as the flame leaped; of bringing it to meet the end of her cigarette. Closer, closer, closer – something caught her eye, a dark smear on her inner wrist, and, with a start she dropped the box of matches, the flame.
Matchsticks lay spilled across the flagstones and she got down on her knees to pick them up. One by one, side by side, into the box; Percy took her time, disappeared inside the simple task, wrapped it round her shoulders like a cloak and did up all the buttons.
It was mud on her wrist. Only mud. A small mark she’d missed when she came inside; when she’d stood at the sink and scrubbed the mud from her hands, her face, her arms, scrubbed until she thought her skin would bleed.
Percy held a matchstick between her thumb and forefinger. Looked beyond it but saw nothing. It fell again to the ground.
He’d been heavy.
She’d lifted bodies before, she and Dot; they’d rescued people from bomb-blasted houses, loaded them into the ambulance, carried them again at the other end. She knew that the dead weighed more than the friends they left behind. But this had been different. He’d been heavy.
She’d known he was dead as soon as she pulled him from the moat. Whether from the blow itself or the inches of mudded water into which he’d fallen, she couldn’t say. But he was already dead; she knew that. She’d tried to revive him anyway, an instinct born of shock more than hope; she’d tried everything they had taught her in the ambulance brigade. And it had rained and she’d been glad because it meant she could deny the damned tears when they dared to fall.
His face.
She closed her eyes, clenched them tight; saw it still. Knew that she always would.
Her forehead met her knee and the solidity of the contact was a relief. The hardness of her knee-cap, its cool certainty when pressed against her hot and racing head was reassuring; almost like contact with another person, a calmer person than she was, older and wiser and more suited to the tasks that lay ahead.
For things would have to be done. Other things; more than what she’d done already. A letter would have to be written, she supposed, telling his family; though telling them what, she wasn’t sure. Not the truth. Things had gone too far for that. There’d been an instant, a flame’s-tip moment when she might have done things differently, telephoned Inspector Watkins and laid the whole mess out before him, but she hadn’t. What could she have said to make him understand? To make him see that it wasn’t Saffy’s fault? And so a letter must be written to the man’s
