“Fiddler’s Mill.” Heather said it carefully, somehow convinced that the name would upset the woman, but she didn’t show any particular reaction. “Pam mentioned the place. Said that you had a hard time there.”
The unspoken question hung in the air for a moment. Anna lifted her arms again in the slight, almost hugging motion, then laid her hands on her stomach instead.
“There were some bad people. Good drugs, bad people. Funny how that works, isn’t it? I … I had some fun there. It’s a strange place, that bit of the countryside. I grew up in a flat on a council estate and the closest we got to green stuff was the scrubby grass in the swing park but that place … there’s so much of it. You go out there and stand in the middle of the woods, it’s like it could be any time. Like, a hundred years ago, three hundred years ago, I don’t know. Maybe even before people were around, you know? That sort of place. So quiet, so lonely.” She shrugged. “I got lonely there, I made myself less lonely. That’s how drugs work sometimes—they make it easy not to be lonely.”
“A lot of free love?”
Anna smiled wanly, although there was an expression about her eyes that worried Heather. She glanced around and saw a portly nurse come into the room, the first person she had seen in any sort of uniform. The woman paused at a table to pick up an empty cup.
“Not sure free is a good word for it. Certainly bloody costly to me. But yeah, I suppose.”
“Anna, while you were there, did you know a woman called Colleen?”
Heather pulled an old photograph from her satchel and laid it on the table between them. It was a photo of her mother at a birthday party, standing next to a cake covered in unlit candles. Heather guessed she was in her late-twenties at the time, and she looked, as she did in all photos, slightly uneasy. The tops of her cheeks were flushed pink.
“Colleen?” Anna was peering at the photograph.
“Yeah. She might have been at Fiddler’s Mill at the same time as you. Do you recognize her at all?”
“Why? Why are you asking about this?” Anna looked confused. She touched her fingers to the photograph and then brought them away quickly, as though it had burned her. “I thought you were a friend of Pam’s?”
“Oh, just curious. It turns out I knew someone who went there, too. Weird coincidence, isn’t it?” Heather smiled, watching Anna’s face for any sign of recognition, but there was only bafflement.
“There were lots of girls there,” Anna said eventually. “And a lot of drugs. I don’t know. It’s a miracle I remember Pamela, to be honest.” But as she turned away from the photo, Heather thought she saw another expression in the set of her eyes, and the corners of her mouth; guilt.
Heather picked up the photograph and put it back into her satchel.
“Was there other stuff going on, Anna? Weird stuff, I mean.” For a second she considered asking about the scars on her arm, but Anna had turned her chin up to the ceiling and narrowed her eyes, as if looking up at a bright summer sky.
“They grabbed you so hard sometimes, it bruised. Would wake up in the morning with these dark smudges all up my arms, you know? I would think it was dirt, but it wouldn’t wash off.”
“Who? Who would grab you?”
“They said it all had to go back to the land, it’s what they always said—that the land was hungry, so thirsty, and we had to make it better again. I think that’s where …” Her chin and lower lip crumpled, as if she were about to cry. “I think that’s where they put her.” She spoke her final words in a whisper.
“Put who, Anna?”
“My baby.” She dropped her head and looked directly at Heather. Her eyes were abruptly full of tears. “My baby. They took her.”
“You were pregnant at Fiddler’s Mill, and gave birth there?”
“He took her.” Anna’s voice had risen, becoming wavery and shrill. Heather felt rather than saw the other occupants of the room turning to look at them. “I gave birth to her in the woods, in the mud, and they ripped her from me while she was still covered in my blood.”
“Anna, it’s okay, you don’t have to talk about this —”
It was too late. Anna was on her feet, the seat behind her knocked to the floor. “They stole her!” she howled. “Stole my fucking baby and no one will believe me!”
The nurse appeared at the table, moving so quickly and quietly Heather was half convinced she had materialized there.
“Anna honey, it’s okay. Maybe it’s time to go back to your room?” To Heather’s mild surprise the nurse had an American accent—somehow this only made the situation more surreal, and she found herself looking at the corners of the ceiling, wondering where the cameras were. Anna wasn’t mollified by the nurse. Instead, she stumbled away from the table, tears running freely down her face.
“Where did she go? Why don’t you fucking believe me?”
Dr Parvez appeared at the entrance to the communal room, and at a nod from the nurse he took Anna’s arm gently, easing her away from Heather.
“Come on Anna, let’s get you settled, shall we?”
The woman shuffled from the room, her head down and her hair hanging in her face, still muttering about her baby, how she had been taken, how no one believed her. Heather watched her go with a tight wad of distress in her stomach. The nurse turned toward her, her mouth pursed with displeasure.
“Why would you go and talk to her about that? She’ll be like that for the rest of the day now.”
“I didn’t know,” said Heather, not
