Pamela curled her fingers around her mug. “Yes, yes, I suppose it was. You are very perceptive.” She flashed Heather a brief, shy smile. “I was there in my early thirties. I’d been travelling for a while, across Europe, surviving on beans and waitressing jobs, but there was so much to see, you see. And I ended up back in England, and a lot of my friends were talking about this place in Lancashire that was supposed to be about getting back to earth, to the soil, and it seemed to feed directly,” Pamela nodded, as if confirming something to herself, “seemed to feed directly into my work.”
“The pieces you produced from that period are so atmospheric,” said Heather. She sipped her tea. “Did it inspire you?”
Pamela’s face seemed to close up again, and she looked away toward the window, although it faced out onto the walkway and there was little to see there. While Heather waited for Pamela to fill the silence, she found herself looking at the clutter of the living room instead; there were lots of little framed drawings and prints, some clearly of her own work and others by artists Heather didn’t recognize. One, which Heather found particularly unnerving, showed a naked male figure scrawled in thick strokes of black and red, his head replaced with that of a snarling wolf.
“You could say that,” said Pamela eventually. She reached up and nervously fiddled with the Alice band. “It’s a place of great energy. You really have to go there to feel it …” But all the previous enthusiasm had drained from her voice, and instead she went back to staring at her tea.
“So, what was it like? What did you do?” Heather smiled encouragingly. “Smoked some weed, listened to music? Some sort of nature worship? I’ve read some bits and pieces online.”
Pamela frowned. “There was a group, and I was on the fringes of it I suppose, but yes, they were very much concerned with nature worship. The idea of the haunted landscape, of returning to an earlier time when people always carried the earth under their fingernails, when we knew the rhythms of the forest …”
Heather thought of Michael Reave, sitting in his little yellow room in prison, saying similar things.
“Forgive me Ms. Whittaker, but what does that actually mean? Were there rituals? Did you sing hymns, cast spells? That sort of thing?”
Pamela looked up sharply, clearly expecting some sort of mockery, so Heather kept her face carefully blank.
“Sun up, sun down, chanting …” She was becoming vaguer, staring at the window again. “There was dancing, and drugs, yes. There were the two priestesses, thought they were better than everyone else, lording it about. But it was, that was, the softer fringe of it. If you got close to the center …”
Suddenly Pamela Whittaker’s demeanor changed completely. She shook her head and crashed the mug down on the coffee table, causing little waves of tea to splash over the sides, soaking an embroidered tea cloth.
“Ms. Whittaker, are you—”
“I saw things! Terrible things. Women being used, and hurt, but when I complained about it, they told me that I was imagining it, or even worse, that I was just jealous because I wasn’t part of the inner circle. They told me I just didn’t understand, because I was …” Her sallow cheeks had turned a hectic pink. “I saw blood, in the woods, but we weren’t supposed to talk about it.”
Despite the close warmth of the living room Heather felt a chill travel down her spine.
“Didn’t you go to the police?”
Pamela Whittaker shot her a pitying look over her glasses. “A strung-out hippy lesbian, talking about abuse in the woods? They would have dismissed me out of hand, Miss Evans. That’s if they didn’t just arrest me for being a pot head.”
Heather found herself reassessing whytewitch59. Yes, she had the flighty neurotic artist persona, but there was a steely streak of realism to her, too.
“It was an evil place,” Pamela looked down at her hands, an expression of hate twisting her features. “Evil. Like I said, you have to be there to feel it, I think. If there’s one thing I still believe from those days, it’s that the landscape remembers—deep down in its stone roots, the landscape remembers all the terrible things, all the blood shed on it. Fiddler’s Mill is a place like that. You couldn’t pay me to go back there now.”
“Ms. Whittaker, would you be prepared to tell me exactly what you saw? If there were crimes, then we should get justice for them. I could help you do that. Can you describe what was going on out there?”
All the anger and certainty seemed to bleed out of the older woman, the line of her mouth becoming wet and infirm.
“It was so long ago … Even with the best will in the world, things get clouded. I painted some of it, and some of it I couldn’t. Babies crying, blood in the earth …”
“I’m sorry? Blood in the earth?”
Pamela Whittaker shook her head but didn’t say anything.
“Pamela, are you aware that Michael Reave was there, at the commune?”
The older woman went very still, like a rabbit in the grass when there’s a dog in the woods.
“Do you know who I mean by Michael Reave? The Red Wolf?”
“I thought you said you wanted to talk about my art.” Pamela Whittaker’s voice was a small thing now, and vaguely petulant. “I feel I’ve let you in here under, under false pretenses. You’re a journalist, I know that, or you used to be. I can use Google, you know.”
Heather shrugged a little, feeling all her previous admiration for Pamela Whittaker dissipating. She didn’t want to think about her old job, or how she had lost it.
“Don’t you think it’s interesting though? Here you are telling me that Fiddler’s Mill is evil, that you saw some terrible things—and all the while there was a serial killer there. I
