“If you’re sure.”
When Nikki had vanished from sight in the car, Heather went and got dressed, and stood for a moment with the Polaroid in her hands. Someone was fucking with her. Someone who had followed her from London, someone who knew more about her mother’s history than she did. Despite everything, she found it hard to believe that the person responsible for the photograph was the new Red Wolf—he had been far too busy dismembering women in Lancashire to be the person leaving notes at her mother’s house in outer London—but she was aware that as rational as this assumption was, it was still a dangerous one. Her most concrete link to this person, whoever they were, was the photo that had been left on her pillow. Time to see what she could find out about it.
It was cold and gray again when she stepped outside, the chill taking her breath away. Nikki having taken the car was annoying, as it meant she was stuck walking everywhere for the day, but once she started across the fields she was almost glad—the cold and the freshness of the air chased away the lingering effects of her sleepless night, and she felt stronger, more focused.
And perhaps it was more than just a feeling. Halfway up the hill that led to the imposing form of Fiddler’s Mill House, she realized that she had seen the odd building in the back of the photograph before, on a coffee table. The old man called Bert had said it was Fiddler’s Folly, a building belonging to the family who had once lived in the old house—and like all follies, it was a place with no obvious use or purpose. That meant that the photo had been taken here, on the coast.
She stopped where she was, ignoring the gusts of freezing wind, and wrestled the map out of her coat pocket. It was clearly produced with tourists in mind, covering the natural nearby attractions and the stretches of wild countryside, but it did just about reach the coast, at the very outer edge of the map. Heather squinted at it, looking for something likely to be the Folly, but she couldn’t spot it. Either it had been named something else, or they’d simply left it off. Frowning slightly, she folded the map and continued heading up the hill. She needed a reliable Internet connection.
“Oh. Can I help you?”
The orange woman with yellow hair looked pained at the sight of her. Heather stamped off some of the water onto the slick marble floor of the foyer and summoned her most winning smile.
“Hi, yeah. I was wondering if I could use your wi-fi?”
The woman frowned theatrically and appeared to consult a sheet of paper on her desk.
“Are you a guest here currently?”
“You know I’m not.” Heather leant on the desk, then thought better of it. “I’m sorry, I don’t mean to be a pain in the ass. Don’t you have a café or something? I’ll buy a coffee, a sandwich, whatever you like. The place where we’re staying is located in some sort of technological black hole, and I desperately need to get something sent off for work. Deadlines, you know how it is.”
The woman narrowed her eyes. “How do I know you’re not going to start, I don’t know, mouthing off to our guests about murders, and drugs, and so on?”
Heather held her hands up. “I’ve no interest in doing that, I promise. You’ve been really helpful so far—I’ll mention you personally on my Tripadvisor review.” She looked at the name badge on the woman’s shirt. “Melanie.”
“Fine.” Melanie turned back to her computer screen. “The café is to the right. You get the wi-fi password on your receipt when you buy something. So, you will have to buy something.”
In minutes Heather had a cup of coffee and a plate of crushed avocado on toast, her laptop set up at a small table and her browser open. Very quickly she found Fiddler’s Folly on Google maps, although now it was called The Heron Look and it was owned by the same environmental charity that partly owned the Fiddler’s Mill spa. That was interesting, but as far as Heather could tell the building was still standing empty, and she could find no information about whether it was now used as a hotel, storage, or some sort of headquarters for the charity. Looking a little deeper, she found a number of references to the “rumors” the old man Bert had mentioned, although they were all annoyingly vague. The family that had built it had dwindled and died off, but she got the impression they weren’t thought of with any affection by the locals.
Eventually, she gave up on Fiddler’s Folly—she now knew, at least, where exactly the photo of her mother and Michael Reave had been taken—and began looking up Polaroid websites. Through these, she discovered that it was possible to figure out the rough date the Polaroid film had been manufactured, if not the date the photo had been taken. A long string of numbers on the back, very faded and almost impossible to read, revealed that the Polaroid film had been made in April 1982, which certainly fitted with the date scribbled in black ink. According to the website, back then instant film had been very expensive, and many families with Polaroid cameras would save their shots for important occasions. Feeling the coffee turn to a sour slick in her stomach, she imagined someone—possibly Michael Reave—buying the film, perhaps smiling over all the “special” moments he would capture with it.
She looked at the photo, which was lying next to her on the table. There must, she reasoned, be thousands like it—quick snaps of couples on beaches, their arms around each other. Very few, she suspected, would have such a dark history surrounding them.
She retrieved
