As I round the corner the perfume of the honeysuckle and jasmine that grow over the church walls overwhelms me. I lean against the iron railings and use them to prop me up, staggering towards the large iron gate. Thank God. I’m coming, Frances. I’m coming, Edie. I reach the gate and push against it. It doesn’t move. I lean harder, straining until the muscles in my arms tremble and a fresh blast of agony detonates in my skull.
‘Fucking move!’ I yell, rattling the gate back and forth. The large padlock holding the gates closed rattles uselessly. What now? I think, hopeless, knees buckling, head pounding. What now?
I think of Peter Liverly’s bungalow and the wall that runs along the back of it. Didn’t Edie once say they’d got in that way, over the wall maybe? I can’t scale that.
I have to.
I stumble towards the bungalow but a horrible feeling – something akin to dread, bloated and toxic – balloons inside me. I’m too late, I think, desperately, I’m already too late.
Frances – Now
The torchlight lances through the hollow like a needle, a single beam revealing cobwebs and wood slick and black with damp. A nest of woodlice, startled by the intrusion, scuttle deeper to safety. I lift myself higher on my toes, pointing the light downward. The smell in here is rich and pungent, the smell of rotting leaves and black earth. There is a rustling as something in the bowl of the hollow – a mouse, maybe, or a rat – escapes.
‘I don’t see her.’
‘You’re not looking hard enough.’
I draw the light down, down. The faint shimmer of sunlight that comes through the leaves is lacy and finely grained like an old photograph. Behind me I hear a sound – it’s familiar and yet I don’t place it, my concentration elsewhere, falling into this dark hole with the wavering needle of light. A whisper of leather, the clink of a belt buckle. I’m not listening, not really, and by the time he puts the belt around my neck – gently, like a caress, so I don’t flinch or fight back – it’s too late. I feel it draw tight about my windpipe and try to make a sound; it comes out like air from a puncture, whiiiii. I put my hands to my neck and it’s funny because it’s William I’m looking for to save me, William who I’m trying to call out for in my high, whistling gasp. Help me, William, someone is attacking me. It takes me a good minute to realise that the person attacking me is him. My fingers scrape uselessly for purchase against the strap and I hear him grunt as he tightens his grip, leaning against me, crushing the air from my chest.
His voice, low and thick, presses against my ear. ‘I wish Mum could see me now.’
My throat burns, my heart’s a fast-running drum. Stars flash in my vision.
‘I’ll tell her what I’ve done. She’ll be so proud of me.’
My nails tear at the trunk of the tree and I don’t feel the pain of the splinters. There’s a lightness in my head as if my skull is disintegrating, all of my bones full of air, hollow, like the tree. Stars, stars. I blink and they come back. His hand on the back of my neck, holding the noose of the belt together. He sounds genuinely happy. ‘I’m doing it, Mum! I’m doing it!’
There is a gurgling sound in my chest. It forces its way up the thin reed of my throat. My face is hot. Black dots swarm in front of my eyes. This is it, I think, this is death. William tightens his grip for the final gasp.
Samantha – Now
They didn’t want to show me but I looked anyway, because I am dogged, because I am that bitch with a knife. ‘Who stabbed you, sir?’ the police had asked William, handcuffing him and helping him to his feet, and he had pointed and said, ‘That bitch with the knife.’ I hadn’t answered, of course. I was too busy looking into the hole in the tree, using the torch I’d picked out of Frances’s cold hands.
Autumn’s coming. That’s what the weather forecast says. Cobwebs are strung in the hedgerows glittering with dew and mist lingers over the churning water of the Ouse, the sky a softly smudged charcoal. I’m wearing a beanie hat to cover up the scar on my crown, the one William stove in with a hammer blow. The doctor says it’s healing nicely but they want to look at my brain to be sure. I wonder what they’ll see in there? Holes where the light escapes? A dark shadow creeping across the scan? I hope not. Despite it all, I still have a lot left to live for.
I knew it was Edie as soon as I saw her. I grew those bones inside the cage of my own. They had to cut the tree open to get inside, like a surgery. I saw the photos they’d taken of the scene. Like I said, they didn’t want to show me at first, but I reminded them I’d already pictured it in my head a thousand times.
Weeds and ivy had grown through her ribs. Spiders had built nests in the cavities of her eyes. Tangled around her sternum was a silver necklace with a dragonfly pendant. That’s what got me. I held that photograph in my hand so long it started shaking. The bones were old and yellowed and dirty, her clothes rotted away. Her jawbone was missing, as was her lower left foot, taken by scavenging animals slipping through the gaps in
