It was the Neary allotment.
Calling it an allotment was quite generous, though, since it was little more than a length of overgrown waste ground, tangled with weeds and brambles and heaped with piles of rubble, rotting fence panels, old tyres, broken tools, rusted garden furniture, and empty plastic sacks flapping like the wings of dying birds. For the twelve years since Sarah Neary had gone to prison no new tenant had ever taken it on and so it had become little more than a rubbish tip for the neighbouring plots – though Dennie had never dumped anything there herself. Nothing would induce her to go an inch closer to it than she absolutely had to, and right at this very moment she wished she’d stayed in bed and told Viggo to shut up.
Because there was someone crawling about on the Neary plot, and it was no common garden-variety thieving shitbag. She had no idea what this was.
The figure was little more than a deeper shadow against the background, and even though it was stooped over as it worked its way to and fro through the weeds, she could tell that when it stood upright it would be huge. It – he, she told herself, it must be a man – was tearing out clumps of weeds, snuffling at them and tossing them away again. Then it – he – scooped up a handful of soil towards his face and she distinctly heard the sound of chewing.
‘What the…?’ she breathed.
Its head snapped up, then it reared to its full height, and she heard it sniffing in her direction, catching her scent. It started to move towards her, its gait shambling, but Viggo, who had been very well behaved up until this point, was having none of it. His growls became full-throated and furious barks, slobber flying from his jaws, and even though she could feel him quivering through the leash that strained in her hand, he stayed with her since she hadn’t yet given him permission to attack.
The figure hesitated, obviously having second thoughts. Then it turned and was gone.
She let Viggo lead her back to the shed, and with hands that fumbled on autopilot lit her little camp stove for a cup of tea. Then she bundled herself back up in her sleeping bag and sat in her old wicker chair, sipping and staring into nothing while Viggo whined and thumped the floor with his tail, trying to reassure her. There was no chance of getting any more sleep tonight. At her age a decent six-hour stretch was a bonus anyway. It briefly crossed her mind to pack up and go back to the house, because what if it – whatever it was – was still out there and decided to come back? But it felt safer in here; she wasn’t surrounded by empty rooms where anything could have been hiding. She would have spent the rest of the night wandering around like a madwoman, convinced that she’d heard something in her children’s bedrooms, or the kitchen, or the study, or any one of a dozen other places. Here in the shed it was simple. Always had been.
* * *
She must have dozed off at some point, though, because she became aware of two things simultaneously: a grey morning light was sifting through the curtains, and the fact that she was as stiff as a board. Dennie groaned and levered herself out of the wicker chair. Her hip felt like there was ground glass in the joint. She swallowed a couple of ibuprofen with another cup of tea, fed Viggo, and when she couldn’t put it off any longer went to have a look at the Neary plot.
If she’d expected it to look harmless in the thin light of day, she was mistaken. It was fringed with a veil of white winter-dead rosebay willowherb whose stalks rattled and whispered to each other in the chill breeze. Further in, knots of black-red brambles curved amongst the piles of rubbish like tangled loops of shoulder-high razor wire, some of the stems as thick as her wrist and all crowded with thorns capable of piercing the thickest gardening gloves. Past them and towards the bottom end of the plot was a copse of skeletal hawthorns and orange crab-apples. The plot obeyed the standard dimensions of a council allotment – five yards wide by fifty long – but was so overgrown that it was impossible to see its full extent, giving the impression that it was much larger on the inside than it should have been, as if anyone careless enough to trespass over its boundary might find themselves lost in a wilderness of thorns. Absolutely impossible to tell if someone had really been here during the night. But if there had been, if it hadn’t all just been the product of her half-sleeping imagination, then it would have been up here, at the top end near the access track.
The end where Sarah Neary had buried the body of her husband.
The police have erected a blue evidence tent over the top end of Sarah’s plot, and officers in disposable white overalls have been bustling
