“Next Wednesday, at one o’clock, Baleford crematorium. I invited everyone I could find in my mum’s address book, I must have missed you.” She forced herself to smile. “You’re very welcome to come along, of course. I don’t imagine there will be many of us there—Mum didn’t have any family left, and she tended to keep to herself.”
“Oh, I think you’d be surprised.” The knowing tone made Heather look up, but Lillian already seemed to be thinking about something else, her thin mouth creased with displeasure. “A cremation? Is that what Colleen wanted?”
Heather shrugged. “She was very clear about it in her will.”
Lillian made a small noise, then gestured with her glass to the printouts on the table. “Are you working on a story? I would have thought you’d be too grief stricken for such.”
With a lurch, Heather realized she had left whytewitch’s images out, but before she could sweep them away Lillian was picking up one of the photographs with her free hand. She nodded slightly.
“Fiddler’s Mill? Goodness, this must be a very old photograph.”
“You know it?” Heather couldn’t keep the surprise from her voice.
“Me? Not personally, dear, but your mother talked about it a lot. It was a memorable time for her, I think.”
Heather put the glass of wine down. “She did? That surprises me, to be honest, because she never even mentioned it to me.”
“Well.” Lillian shrugged gracefully. “There are things you don’t want to talk to your daughters about, at least, not while they are young.”
“Perhaps you could tell me what you remember?” Heather nodded to the stools at the kitchen counter, and they sat together. “Anything she said about it would be useful.”
“Are you writing a story about it?” Lillian asked. “Colleen talked a lot about your career as a journalist, too.”
“Not really.” She assumed that her mother hadn’t mentioned that she’d been thrown off the newspaper in disgrace. “I’m just curious about, you know, her life, her past. I feel like I missed out on some things that were important to her.”
“Well, I’m not sure that I can help you.” Lillian sipped from her wine again, looking across the kitchen to the back door as though the memories were waiting out there for her. “My memory, you see, it isn’t what it was.” She smiled brightly at Heather. “Don’t get old dear, it’s quite tedious.”
Heather smiled back, thinking of the photos of the women with their bodies left dismembered in fields. “It’s better than the alternative. Is there nothing you can tell me?”
“She mentioned communing with nature, eating a lot of very bad food. There might have been a boyfriend.” Heather sat very still, trying to ignore the creeping dread settling over her with every word. “Maybe more than one.” Lillian chuckled. “As I said, these aren’t the things you talk about to your daughter, not if you want to be setting an example. Perhaps you should go up there, dear. Have a look around.”
“Up there?”
“To Fiddler’s Mill. It could be,” she shrugged one shoulder, “what is it young people say? Closure. A way of dealing with your grief. To go and see this place that was so important to your mother.”
Important to Mum, thought Heather. And important to a notorious serial killer. Great.
As Lillian was leaving, she paused at the front door, appearing to peer out at the sky—it had been threatening to rain.
“Do you have far to go? Did you want to borrow an umbrella?”
“Thank you dear, I’ll be fine. Just up the road.” But as she turned back, her face was serious. “I don’t want to worry you, but I thought I saw someone hanging around your trees earlier today. A man.”
“When was this?” Heather thought of the figure she thought she had seen the night before, when she’d been putting the bird out. She had half convinced herself she was imagining it, but perhaps …
“This afternoon. You haven’t left any spurned lovers behind, have you?”
Despite herself, Heather smiled at the archaic phrase. “Hardly. I’m sure I’ll be fine, Lillian. Thanks for dropping by.”
But she watched the old woman to the end of the path, and when she was gone, she stood for a time, looking at the darkness that surrounded the lawn. Could it be someone from the newspaper? There was at least one person there who would be keen to upset her, if not actively harm her. Eventually, the rain began to fall, the thick heavy rain of autumn, and she closed the door.
Later, Heather crashed on the bed in the spare room and opened her laptop. Waking up her phone, she popped off a quick message to Nikki, asking how she was and giving a swift rundown of her day at Belmarsh, and then she checked her emails. To her vague surprise, there was one there from whytewitch59, who apparently possessed the somewhat more prosaic name of Pamela Whittaker—she was happy to meet up for a chat, and wanted to know if this week would suit her? She emailed back, suggesting a time, wondering as she did so if she was setting herself up for an awkward half an hour of paranoid hippy nonsense.
Browsing a news site, she saw that DI Parker was right: news of a missing PE teacher in Lancashire had broken, and there was an appeal for information on the front page. Next to the headline was a photo of her, taken during some sort of school sports day, and that seemed to turn on some obscure light in the back of Heather’s head. She went out into the hallway and retrieved one of the boxes she’d brought down from the attic. This one contained a heap of loose photographs—photos that her mother
