There were a few beats of silence, into which one of the guards coughed. Behind Heather, DI Parker sighed very quietly.
“Huh. What a charming story.” Heather cleared her throat. “Mr. Reave, I’ll be honest, telling stories about little girls being eaten isn’t the best way to convince anyone of your innocence.”
Michael Reave chuckled, his face lighting up in apparently genuine amusement. “I know. Most of the old stories, the ones collected by the Brothers Grimm, sound like they were written by murderers. That story was called Brother and Sister, and it was one of the ones your mum collected. She had loads of them, copied out of old books or written from memory.”
“My mum?” Heather half smiled in disbelief. “There’s no way. Mum didn’t like me watching television after 9 PM. All the picture books I had when I was a kid were about flower fairies worried about their pet unicorns. You must be thinking of someone else.”
But even as she said it, she was thinking of the torn crumpled page on her mother’s dressing table. And the book, the old book she had rescued from under the sofa and discarded.
Michael Reave shook his head slowly, still smiling. “You wanted me to tell you about your mum, didn’t you? She loved those stories. Back then, she loved the countryside like I did—wanted nothing more than to be under the sky, to walk in the woods. Those stories were, for her, a link to the time when that’s just what we did. When we were rightly afraid of the forest, and we knew the rhythms of the world. My point is, there’s likely a lot you didn’t know about your mum, lass. That’s what people are like. Lots of layers, some of them darker than others. Your mum, she was good at hiding things. Better than anyone.”
Heather realized that she had her hands clasped together tightly under the table; tight enough that her fingers were turning white. With some difficulty she untangled them. Her memories of the day at the mortuary seemed very close, as though she might turn to her right and see a cold white table, the cold white faces of the morticians. She squeezed her hands into fists under the desk, concentrating on the dull pain of her nails digging into her palms.
“The countryside, that’s right. In the letters you talk about a place where the two of you lived for a while, a sort of hippy commune up north. I thought that sort of thing died out in the sixties, but it sounds like it went on for some years. Is that where you met? What can you tell me about it?”
Michael Reave looked down at the table. All of the animation that had entered his face while he had told his grim fairy tale seemed to seep away.
“I don’t see why I should talk about that. It’s all ancient history.”
“Why not? Everyone getting back to nature, escaping the rat race and so on. In the letters you call it Fiddler’s Mill. What was it like?”
He turned his head to look at the far wall, just as though there was a window there he could look out of.
“I think I’m done,” he said quietly. “I think I want to go back to my cell now. No more talking for me.” Heather blinked, surprised by his sudden change of attitude. As DI Parker touched her shoulder, inviting her to leave, Michael Reave met her eyes one last time. “Did you understand the story, Heather? Do you see what the sister should have done?”
Heather didn’t answer.
“She should have drunk the water, too,” he said.
DI Parker offered her a lift back since he was going that way anyway, and she took it gladly, pleased to be avoiding buses as the skies turned dark with rain. The interior of his car was untidier than she’d expected of a police officer—hollow McDonalds cups, empty Tupperware, a few screwed up chocolate bar wrappers—and she spotted a faint pink flush cross his cheeks as she chased a plastic bottle top off her seat. It was sort of adorable.
“Sorry about the mess,” he said, grimacing faintly as they pulled out onto the rain-slicked roads.
“Don’t worry, you should see my place.” Heather paused, both amused and horrified by the way the sentence seemed to hang in the air between them. Inviting him back to my place already. Bloody hell. “Do you have a siren hidden in here somewhere? Zipping home like I’m in The Bill would mean this day wasn’t a total write off.”
DI Parker grunted. “Those things are literally for emergencies, Miss Evans. And listen, don’t take it so badly. You did well in there today.”
“I did?”
He shrugged one shoulder. “It’s a start. It’s certainly the most I’ve ever heard him say to someone. He’s interested in talking to you, and we have to hope that will open up some new threads. Maybe he’ll let something slip. I’d like to put you back in there, if that’s all right with you.”
Heather glanced out the window. Raindrops had turned the outside world into something uncertain, smeared with red and yellow lights. Despite her description of the session as a write off, she had to admit that it had been fascinating; both Reave and his unsettling confidence, and the morsels of information he had dropped about her mother.
“It’s quite the thing, speaking to … someone like that. If you saw him in a pub you wouldn’t look twice, yet I can feel he’s holding stuff back. Stuff about my mum.” She looked at Parker briefly, feeling vaguely embarrassed. “Hark at me, been in one interview and I think I’m Miss Marple, right?”
DI
