“All dead. His mother, as I mentioned before, vanished when he was a kid, and if she’s still alive she’d be very old now, and she certainly wouldn’t fit our profile. There was a father and an older sister, both of whom have a few scattered reports on social services—suspicions of sexual abuse in the family.”
“Jesus.”
“But they’re both dead now, too. Some distant relations, but nothing that leads anywhere.”
Outside, under the cold blue sky, Heather stood alone at a bus stop, still thinking about her mother and the mysteries she had left behind. It was clearer than ever that Colleen Evans had been of enormous importance to Reave, had represented something to him that Heather couldn’t begin to understand. And she had to believe that Colleen had had a similar attachment to him, yet nothing about that fit in with the strict and unbending woman Heather had grown up with. There was something else, some other connection. There had to be.
When the bus eventually came along, Heather got on board without looking at the driver. She found a seat at the back of the bus, got out her notebook, and began writing.
CHAPTER26
BEFORE
EARLY MORNINGS IN the woods were full of birdsong and light. The muttering from Michael’s graves was at its quietest but he still liked to visit each one, letting them feel his wolf-shape as he passed over—it was important that they knew he was there, no matter how far he travelled these days. On this particular morning, the wood was awash with bluebells, a near-purple haze that peeked around every corner. Michael was considering picking some to take with him on his next outing—he had taken to placing flowers in the mouths of his women, so that a little piece of Fiddler’s Wood would rot with them—when he heard a soft voice calling.
“Is someone there?”
He lent his shovel against a tree and moved toward the sound.
“Hello?”
He saw her long before she ever saw him. There was a girl in the woods, wearing tight blue jeans, mud spattered green wellies and a diaphanous white shirt that floated around her arms. She had pale blonde hair that fell in soft waves across her shoulders, and a pale, slightly pinched-looking face. There were two spots of hectic pink blush on the tops of her cheeks, and she was carrying a battered looking paperback book under one arm. When he stepped out from the trees near her, she startled, almost dropping it.
“Oh,” she laughed, her face turning pinker. “I thought I heard someone else walking here. Sorry.”
“You’re from the commune?” Michael cleared his throat. He didn’t much want to speak to anyone, not with mud on his hands and the graves so close, but right from the very start there was something about her—something that provoked him.
“Yeah.” She hugged the book to herself. “Are you not?”
“Did you get lost?”
She shrugged and looked away. “I wanted to see the woods in the morning. I didn’t think anyone else would be here, because …”
When she trailed off, Michael nodded. The other young people from the commune wouldn’t be here because they spent every night drinking and smoking weed, staying up until the small hours, talking and laughing before sleeping until midday in their fetid sleeping bags. Or grunting together like animals. Michael had heard them himself, from his room in the house, or from the woods.
“I can walk you back there.” It was clear she didn’t want to go back just yet, that she’d come here with the express intention to wander a little longer, but she bent to his will easily enough, nodding once so that her hair bobbed up and down. “What are you reading?”
She looked down at the book in her arms as though she’d never seen it before. “Oh, this is my old Grimm fairy tale book.” She held it up for him to see; the brown cover was covered all over in white creases, and in the middle was a stark woodcut of a huge black wolf, its jaws open wide to reveal lots of white teeth. Its feet were tangled about with ivy, and it stood against a stark white sky. Michael’s heart began to beat faster at the sight of it. Who was this woman who carried what he was in her arms?
“It doesn’t look much like a children’s story,” he said, uncertain what else to say.
“They’re not, not really, or not how we’d think of them.” The girl shrugged, half smiling. “They’re very old, passed down from family to family. An oral tradition. But I love them,” she added with sudden feeling. “They’re just so honest, you know? It’s all about the dangers of the wild world, and good and bad, and doing the right things …” She trailed off. “I thought it would be good to read them out here, as if they … as if they would be more real out here.” She flushed a darker shade of pink, clearly embarrassed. “Anyway.”
They had come to the edge of the woods, and the commune stretched away in front of them. It still wasn’t huge but, as the man liked to put it, its citizens were enthusiastic. From where they stood, Michael could see the man—he looked so much older among all these young people—standing over a group who were mostly sitting. There was a fire going, and the smell of coffee drifted toward them. Most of the men and women looked barely awake, but there were the two Bickerstaff sisters standing with the man, and they looked alert enough, their long blond hair recently cut very short, into identical pixie cuts. The man called them his “Hitchcock girls,” although Michael had only the vaguest idea why; the one time he had been to the cinema, he had panicked when the lights had gone down and he had had to leave rapidly—the cupboard had seemed very close, that day.
“He’s good, isn’t he?” The woman sounded uncertain
