There was nobody else here. The car park had been empty, apart from Lucas’s bike. It was a weekday in term time but she would have expected to meet dog walkers and joggers somewhere around here. It seemed they had all gone elsewhere today. Was she safe? She was ninety-nine per cent sure that she was. But that still left a single percentage point of doubt, didn’t it?
Lucas took a steep path, winding down off the ridgeway to a lower part of the beauty spot, where a thicket of trees clung to the hillside. Grasshoppers sang in the sun and the peaty scent of the lower slopes rose up on the light breeze. Kate felt her breathing quickening and she squeezed a small slug of plasticine in her jacket pocket, trying to ground herself.
‘Lucas,’ she said. ‘Are you taking me to see… something?’
He only nodded. He did not look at her. She felt her phone, in the other pocket, and her thumb brushed the redial button while her mind spun with indecision. The last number she had called was to the station — to Chief Superintendent Rav Kapoor. Her boss had recently decided to champion Lucas, after experiencing first-hand the evidence — and the benefit — of the dowser’s talent. He had gone as far as discussing with her the option of putting Lucas on their regular police consultant list.
She had called Kapoor this morning to update him on the events in Suffolk, before DS Stuart could do that for her. Kapoor had been shocked at her bad luck in getting the long weekend from hell at Buntin’s, so soon after her other tribulations. He’d urged her to take a week off to recover, and then given in when she’d said time off was the very last thing she needed. She’d be back in tomorrow, she told him. She had just one thing to do today.
Now she wondered if she’d be seeing Kapoor sooner. No, Kate… no! called her inner voice, the voice of a ten-year-old who had utterly trusted the boy who was now the man clambering down a steep path beside her, gripping a lump of glass which might or might not be leading them both to something too terrible to imagine.
‘Lucas, I’m not feeling very comfortable with this,’ she said, finally pushing out words that had to be the understatement of the year.
‘Me neither,’ he said. He flicked her a glance and then stopped, resting his right hand on the trunk of a slender birch tree and taking a deep breath. ‘You are like her, but you are nothing like her,’ he said, again. He reached out and ran his left hand over her shoulder, pulling her closer to him. For a long moment she stood, caught in a riptide between fear and desire, watching his mouth and wondering what it would feel like on hers. She could feel the warmth of his breath reach her lips.
‘It was never like this,’ he said. ‘Never felt… like this. God… she was so manipulative. She could make you do almost anything.’
‘Sounds like you didn’t really like her that much after all,’ said Kate, coldly, stepping away.
‘No… you don’t understand. I loved her. Kind of. I loved them both.’ He looked at his feet and his face coloured up.
‘What are you telling me, here?’ demanded Kate.
‘I was just a kid,’ he said. ‘I was fifteen, and a stew of hormones and terror. Mabel… she was really confident. She wanted… she wanted sex. She wanted to know what it was like.’
Kate felt a wave of nausea. ‘So you showed her, did you?’
His reaction was somewhere between a laugh and a sob. ‘She showed me. I was fucking useless at it. What the hell did I know? I did my best, but it was all fumble and panic and over within a minute. She just laughed. And it was… laughable.’
‘So… you got mad..?’ Kate’s words came out in a whisper.
‘What?’ He squinted at her, shielding his eyes with one hand as a shaft of sun hit the side of his face. ‘Mad? Angry mad? No! No — I was embarrassed. Just… sick with embarrassment. And then Zoe…’
‘Did she join in? Did she start teasing you as well?’ Kate could picture it all too easily. She thought she really might be sick.
‘She was kind,’ he said. ‘She felt bad about the way Mabel had laughed at me. Mabel told her everything… like sharing the details of her last shopping trip. Told her everything, right in front of me.’
‘Right there in the quarry?’ Kate asked, lightly.
’This was before that day,’ he said. ‘A week or so before that day. And however bad I was at it, she still wanted to try again. She told me that, next time we were all on the downs again. She wanted to see if I could improve. Only… I didn’t want it. I mean, she was sexy as hell, but she was… cold, you know? I knew I couldn’t take it, if I failed again. And then Zoe…’
‘What? What about Zoe..?!’ Kate heard the edge creeping into her voice. She sounded like she was back in the Salisbury nick interview room, sitting next to DS Ben Michaels, taping this conversation while they both took turns at coaxing the truth from their suspect.
‘Zoe stuck up for me,’ he said. ‘She told Mabel not to be a bitch and then we walked home together. We left Mabel on the downs and we went back, and when we got to my house, out of nowhere, Zoe kissed me. She told me she loved me. She was everything Mabel wasn’t. She wasn’t sexy and controlling but she made me feel OK about myself and honestly, when you’re fifteen and your mum’s a drunk and your dad’s vanished and nobody really seems to give a flying fuck about you, that counts for quite a lot.’
Kate held her breath. She was losing the thread of this.
