Bone Harvest

she told herself, because of course nothing would have been changed or disturbed. How could it, when she was the only living soul here? There wasn’t much to disturb anyway. The children’s rooms had been stripped back to a spartan utility – no toys, books, posters, or clothes. She’d made sure that when each of them had left home they’d taken anything of sentimental value with them and given the rest to charity shops, and when Brian had ventured the opinion that this seemed a bit cold she’d told him, ‘It’s an empty nest, not a bloody shrine. They’ve got their own lives now and that’s the way of it.’ On the rare occasion when they all came back – Christmases, birthdays, Brian’s funeral – she happily let their bustle and mess flow over her while it lasted, and then when they were gone again she replaced the bed linen, hoovered up, and shut the doors. To keep the warmth in and the dust out, she told herself, but she really knew it was because of the echoes.

There was a particular kind of echo to her children’s empty rooms that she found unnerving. It wasn’t an echo in the strictest sense of the sounds being repeated – more like the way the noise she brought in with her, even the whisper of feet on the carpet or the click of the latch, would resonate a little more, as if bouncing off extra corners in the room that shouldn’t be there. More than once in the long, dark months after Brian’s passing, before she’d learned to close the doors, she’d fancied that the sounds she made just moving around on her own might get caught in those odd corners and be amplified, feeding on themselves until they took on a life of their own and started whispering to her.

That was another good thing about the shed: it was too small and cluttered for echoes.

She quickly popped her head into each of the rooms to check that of course they were okay, closed them again and went to settle into her bath. She lay back with a sigh of contentment, letting the heat seep into her old bones. Just a quick one to scrub off the unclean feeling, not a long soak; it was only ten in the morning, after all.

It couldn’t have been more than five minutes before she heard Viggo making a fuss at the back door, scrabbling and whining to be let in.

‘Sod,’ she grumbled. ‘Couldn’t you have waited…’ But as she moved, and the bathwater sloshed around her, she realised her mistake. Viggo had waited. The little carriage clock on the window ledge told her that it was nearly eleven, and the water in which she’d been lying for nearly an hour was barely lukewarm. Viggo whined and scrabbled, scrabbled and whined. If he hadn’t, how long might she have gone on sitting there?

Shivering with more than just the cold, she got out of the bath, wrapped herself in a towel, and went to let him in.

2

NEW NEIGHBOURS

DENNIE KEPT AWAY FROM HER ALLOTMENT FOR THE rest of the weekend but went back again on Monday morning because she needed to get a start on chitting her potatoes. It was comforting and repetitive work, picking out the unwanted eyes in the little seed potatoes and setting them with their sprouting ends uppermost in some old egg boxes by the shed window, and it allowed her to forget about the strange events of Friday night. Every so often she would pause to lob Viggo’s slobber-sodden tennis ball down to the end of her plot, and he would make a great fuss about hurtling to retrieve it and then drop it at her feet.

When she spotted Angie through the half-open shed door walking on the Neary plot she thought at first that the secretary of the allotments association was following up on her report about the intruder, but then she saw that Angie was accompanied by two other people – a man and a woman, neither big enough to have been the huge figure from that night.

Both looked to be in their twenties, and were obviously a couple. The man was normal-sized, dressed in jeans and boots with his hands stuffed into the pockets of a long winter coat. His hair was dark and close-cropped, but not shaven like a thug, and probably good looking if you liked your men a bit dark and angular. Every so often he would kick at the soil a little, as if inspecting it. She was the taller, dressed in a style that would have been dismissed forty years ago as hippy chic: heavy boots, a tie-dyed gypsy shirt and denim jacket covered with patches, swathes of tasselled and glittering scarves over a loose-knit burgundy jumper that hung past her hands in ragged cuffs. She was also extraordinarily pale, with an oddly square jaw framed by masses of curling dark hair tipped over to one side.

They were chatting and smiling with Angie, standing right on the Neary plot as if they were just passing the time of day on a normal allotment like any other.

Journalists, Dennie decided. They popped up from time to time like weeds whenever they found out about the murder for the first time and thought they could unearth a unique new angle to an old story, but they never did – mostly because of what Angie was doing right now. Not warning them off, exactly, just making it clear that there was nothing more to be found.

‘Shall we go and give her a hand?’ Dennie asked Viggo. ‘Shall we? You can bite him if you like.’

Viggo picked up his ball and trotted after her, but they weren’t even halfway there when he started growling.

‘I wasn’t serious about the biting,’ she said. ‘Shut up, you big idiot.’

He subsided, but with her hand on his collar she could feel the tension bristling in him all the same.

When she was close