And then, eventually, there came the Bickerstaff sisters, creeping around her door and pushing their way inside. All of Colleen’s careful defenses, built up over so many years, were tattered into pieces over that long, horrific afternoon. She learned the fate of her long-lost child, of the harvest that was coming, and still they kept her pinned in place with the worst threat of all: tell anyone, and we’ll come for your daughter, too.
When they finally left her—after they’d extracted every painful secret she’d ever held close to her heart—Colleen went and fetched her nicest notepad, the one she had never used to write to Michael. She sat down at her own kitchen table and, just like her daughter, she tried to find the words.
CHAPTER47
THE FOREST DID not seem darker with him in it. The birds still sang, the sunlight still filtered down through the branches, a dappled blessing on the earth and grass. Michael Reave walked with his face turned up, trying to take it all in, and Heather watched him closely. It seemed wrong that Fiddler’s Woods did not recoil from him, that the skies didn’t turn black and the trees die, but then, she reminded herself, he was their creature. He had fed the roots and nourished the ground, in his own way.
“Heather?” He turned to face her, smiling. “Look, do you see that there?” He nodded toward a hole next to a small mound of fresh earth. “That’s the entrance to a badger sett. I used to see them sometimes, but they’re shy animals. They can have big families living inside them, the larger setts. A clever little network of tunnels.”
“This isn’t a nature walk.”
“No, lass.” He put his smile away, and his eyes drifted up to look over her shoulder. “No, you’re right there.”
Behind her, she knew he could see the police gathered, DI Ben Parker among them. They were never far behind.
So far, Michael Reave had led them to the remains of four women, one of which, he said, had never been listed as one of his official victims. Identifying them was going to be difficult—he had only ever buried what he called “the soft parts” of them within the woods, although he had sometimes included other things—trinkets, items from their purses, or hairclips, even a shoe. He had agreed to do this as long as Heather continued to visit him and came with him on these little jaunts to Fiddler’s Woods. With the death of Albert “Bert” Froame and the capture of Lyle Reave, all his pretenses of innocence had vanished.
“You’re happy here.” It wasn’t a question.
“Aye. I was happy here, once.” He stopped, so she stopped. His hands were bound behind his back with steel cuffs, and he had made no threats toward her, but she still didn’t like to get too close. “Before it all really started …” He shrugged. “There was a bit of time where I thought I was free, and I spent it here, with these trees. Those were good memories.”
She nodded. She supposed, that if you didn’t know what was buried here, it could seem like a peaceful place.
“I wanted to ask you …” Heather glanced back to the police, both making sure they were close enough to help, and far away enough not to hear. “About the woman in the red coat.”
Michael Reave straightened up. He took a long, wavering breath in, then held it for a moment. His eyes were too bright.
“My sister,” he said eventually. “My older sister. Only she wasn’t just that. My father, your granddad, was a sick man, and he infected the whole house with his sickness. My sister was born in 1947, her name was … Evie.” He stopped. Saying her name seemed to cause him some physical pain. “And then when she got a little older, when she’d just turned thirteen, Evie had me.”
Heather looked down at her hands, feeling sick. She thought of Ben Parker telling her that killers had almost always experienced abuse.
“The woman who called herself my mother, she hated me for it,” continued Reave. “I was a sign of everything that was wrong with our family, lass, do you see? And Evie, I think she tried to make up for it, for how much her mother hated me. But she only knew one way of expressing that. Because of what had been done to her. She would come to me, at night.” He paused, shuddering. “I still remember her standing in my bedroom door, in her red coat. Smiling. She said she just wanted to love me.”
“What happened to her? To Evie?”
“She died. Long after I ran to Fiddler’s Mill, she drifted away to live with some bad people. The house she was staying in burned down while she was in it. I only heard about it because it was in a newspaper.” When he looked at Heather again, he had composed himself. “And … I don’t think you should hear any more about it. It’s not healthy, lass.”
Somewhere in the trees above them, a magpie was making a racket. He looked up into the branches, smiling again.
“I would like to tell you another story,” he said.
Heather shrugged.
“Once upon a time, there was a rich man who had spent all his life doing evil deeds. He had been mean, never shared his wealth, and had watched as others starved. He had hurt people for his own pleasure and enjoyed it. Then one day he had a change of heart. When his neighbor, a poor man with hungry children, came calling at his house, he promised that the poor man could have half his food and wealth if, when he died, he watched over his grave for three nights in a row. He was worried …” Michael Reave paused, his face slack. “He was worried that the devil would come for his soul.”
For a long time, Reave didn’t
