Taking it to the bed, she made herself comfortable and began to sift through the pictures. She knew which one she was looking for, and she knew it would be in the box. Her mother wouldn’t have put it in an album, she was sure of it.
Images of the past slipped across her lap; the older ones slightly grainy to the touch, the more recent glossy and cold. There were lots of photos of the parties her dad used to throw for his construction firm, filled with anonymous red-faced men drinking punch and looking worse for wear—in a few she caught sight of her dad, and these ones she paused to look at for a moment longer, her fingers lingering over his ruddy face. And then, there it was, nestling at the very bottom. The single photo of a summer fête she’d attended when she was about six years old.
Heather lifted it out of the box and peered at it carefully. It wasn’t a great photo really, a touch overexposed, and a few of the children had picked up that unnerving red-eye effect. There was a bunch of them, kids and adults, crowding around a picnic blanket covered with egg sandwiches and packets of biscuits. Heather picked herself out immediately; a pale and slightly solemn looking kid with dark hair and a pink lunchbox clutched to her chest. There was her mother, her expression closer to a grimace than a smile. And there: a little red-headed girl, perhaps a year older than Heather had been, standing up in a pair of bright blue shorts and grinning straight at the camera. There was a smear of cream on her cheek from where she’d been eating cake.
Fi. Heather remembered her name clearly, because she had been so certain that Fi wasn’t a name at all. Fi was the first bit of the giant’s rhyme in Jack and the Beanstalk. Fee-fi-fo-fum, I smell the blood of an Englishman. And she remembered the day so clearly because her mother had started crying and shaking quite abruptly in the middle of it, and they had had to go home.
She never had been told why her mother had broken down like that, but she did remember that she had been sad to leave Fi, who was boisterous and sturdy and very keen on climbing trees. They had exchanged names, repeating them over and over so that they might be able to find each other again in the future—when you were a child, names still seemed like magical things. Fi. Fiona Graham.
Of course, she had only ever seen her that once, and they had never gone back to that particular summer fête. Perhaps she was imagining it. She looked at the little girl with the red curls and the freckles and remembered the hot grasp of her hand in her own.
Now, she looked at the photo on the news site and her stomach clenched. They certainly looked like the same person to her. Fiona Graham, it seemed, had grown into a good person, a teacher. A woman who had done nothing wrong aside from go about her life as normal, and then someone had broken into her house, and likely hurt her. Fiona Graham had probably helped countless kids more than she could know; had mopped up their tears and taken them to the nurse’s office when they’d grazed their knees. Her students probably thought of her fondly, or would, when they were far away enough from school to have positive feelings about their teachers.
And none of that had saved her.
There was a video clip of Fiona’s parents at a press conference, asking for anyone with information to come forward, and they looked shell-shocked and fragile, as though they had been hollowed out overnight and now the slightest breeze could tatter them to pieces. It was difficult to see how they were related to the vibrant, laughing red-head standing with a group of school girls in shorts. Inevitably, Heather’s mind turned back to the images she had seen earlier that night. Was this the fate of Fiona Graham?
She was shoving the photos back inside the box when her phone pinged back with a message from Nikki.
Sorry, was finishing up some marking. Scary stuff. Why wasn’t DI Parker there? How did your mum hide all this stuff? Do you think it’s true? Are you okay, Heather?
Was she ok? Putting the box back on the floor, Heather pulled the bed covers up over her legs, thinking. On the one hand, she certainly did know more about her mother—she never would have suspected that she was the wild child type, that she had run away from home at the age of fifteen, or even that she had a fascination with eerie fairy stories. Yet somehow all this new knowledge had only exposed more holes in what she had thought was real, leaving gaping absences that seemed to lead to something darker and more terrible—like the awful wounds in the bodies of the Red Wolf’s victims.
Whether or not the police would let her speak to Michael Reave again, she would need to fill in some of those holes.
CHAPTER16
ABI PULLED HER hood up and gathered her arms around her, cursing the thin material of the sports top. If she’d been thinking clearly, she’d have grabbed her coat as well, but the perpetual itch of withdrawal didn’t leave much space for clear thinking, and she’d been anxious to get out of her brother’s house so she could give him and his date some space. He had said more than once that she didn’t have to go out, of course not, but she had seen it on his face clearly enough: few things would put a potential girlfriend off faster than your junkie sister sleeping on the sofa.
She wandered to the end of their road and stood for a moment, considering which way to go. Her lower back ached
