“Colleen.” She looked up at him, and he saw that the blush had turned her cheeks quite pink. He knew then that she felt it, too. “What would I do without you?”
CHAPTER33
“I NEED TO GET out of here for a bit. Do you want to come with me?”
Nikki clearly hadn’t been home long as her shopping was still on the kitchen counter and she had kicked her tights off in the hallway, replacing them with a pair of fluffy pink slippers that looked especially quirky with her sober navy blue shirt.
“Where were you thinking of going?” She shifted the shopping out of the way and began filling the kettle. “Cup of tea?”
“Got anything stronger?”
Nikki looked pointedly at her watch, but nevertheless went to the fridge instead and liberated a half full bottle of white wine.
“Hev, you look like you’ve been up all night. What’s going on?”
Heather shook her head and accepted the glass of wine, taking three deliciously cold gulps before answering.
“I’ve had enough of that house, Nikki. It’s, uh, it’s sending me round the bend. I was thinking of driving up to Lancashire, going to this Fiddler’s Mill place, having a look around. Why not? Call it a tribute to my mum, call it closure, whatever.”
Nikki joined her at the kitchen counter, a glass in her hand.
“And what about your visits with Michael Reave?”
“They’re over. After the article, I, …”
“Hmm. You haven’t heard from the detective, then?” Nikki’s face was carefully blank. She knew all about Heather’s night with Ben Parker, thanks to a hushed chat before her mother’s funeral, and so, inevitably, Heather had texted her the ignominious details of the end of the whole thing, too.
“I think, I can safely assume I’ve lost my chance there, in more ways than one.” Heather forced herself to smile, hoping to cover up exactly how painful those words were. “A trip to the countryside is what I need now. It won’t be completely terrible, I promise. The big old building is a spa now, and there’s a nice cottage where we can stay, in the grounds. Fresh air, long walks, and I could do with some company. Stuck inside that house by myself, it’s not healthy.” She thought of the petals on the stairs, the heart on the terracotta pot. “Diane might have fucked me over with the Red Wolf story, but that doesn’t mean I can’t eventually write my own version of it. And this would be great background—absorb the atmosphere of the place. And maybe get a massage at the spa, I don’t know.”
Nikki swirled the wine in her glass, frowning into its depths.
“And, okay, mostly I am just curious to see the place. Pamela Whittaker said it was evil.” Heather smiled as Nikki rolled her eyes. “I want to see this miserable patch of grass my mum apparently thought was so amazing. Where this all started. I’m sure that … I’m sure that if I want to know more about her, I have to go to this place and see it for myself.”
“This place is in Lancashire, isn’t it?”
“Yup.”
“Lancashire, where they recently found bits of a woman’s body shoved inside a tree.”
“Come on, it’s the same county. It’s not like the murderer is on the welcoming committee as you drive up the M6.” For a moment, an image of the petals and the dead bird floated across her mind. She could still smell the blood. Guiltily, she pushed it away.
“Hmm.” Nikki, who had been nursing the wine rather than drinking it, took a long swallow of her drink, then shrugged. “All right. I have some time off owing. And apparently, I have nothing better to do.”
Heather had always liked long car journeys. They put her in mind of her earliest childhood, when her dad was still alive and he would get a sudden urge to drive to the coast. Her mother would give her a big bag of barley sugars to settle her stomach—never forgetting the incident where she had vomited noisily out the window while they were on the motorway—and she would spend hours sucking sweets and looking out the window at stretches of green and brown, smears and smudges of places she would never know. Sometimes she would play games with her dad, iterations of I-spy or word games based on number plates, and when they got to their destination, she would always be faintly disappointed. There was something precious and strange about having both her parents’ undivided attention for so long.
Nikki looked less excited about the journey, repeatedly fiddling with her phone in its holder on the dashboard, which was serving as a sat-nav. Factoring in breaks, it was a good five hour drive to Lancashire and they had set off in the late morning, shunting and winding around the slow-moving traffic of London, and now they were out beyond the M25, free of the city’s shackles. Hours passed, and anonymous fields and stretches of vegetation zipped by on both sides of the motorway, the sky overhead gray and nondescript.
They got to the borders of Lancashire just as the last of the sun was bleeding from the sky. Heather had been dozing in the passenger seat, but something woke her as they turned down a country road. She sat up, blinking and trying to recapture the specific sensation. A voice saying her name? Had she been dreaming?
“Oh good, you’re awake,” Nikki sounded distracted. “Can you keep an eye on the map for me? These roads are all really twisty, and this place is
