Читать книгу Just Before I Died: The gripping new psychological thriller from the bestselling author of The Ice Twins - S. Tremayne K. - Страница 12

Wednesday morning

Today is another inset day. A training day for teachers at Princetown Primary, when the kids get a day off. These days come around every so often, and it means that one of us – Adam or me – has to clock off work, to look after Lyla, one-on-one. It’s always intense, because Lyla has no proper friends; play-dates are out of the question.

But I still, usually, look forward to the chance to bond with her. To take her out on the moors, go for a summer swim, or autumn horseriding. But today is dank, and very chilly. It might even snow.

And my mind is elsewhere, and perhaps Lyla senses it. I am thinking about the hag stones left on the window ledge at my office. Could be it really was a hiker who set them down for a moment, and forgot. Could be it was kids having a laugh. But did they know the stones symbolized the driving away of witches? And why did they choose my office?

As I pensively clear the breakfast plates, my daughter kicks the table leg. Kick kick kick. Kick kick kick. She wants her mother’s attention.

And she deserves it.

‘What can we do, Mummy?’

‘I don’t know, darling, it’s a horrid old day. Something indoors? Like Castle Drogo?’ Kick.

‘It’s nice there, Mummy, but they don’t like dogs. Can we please do something else?’ She looks at me yearningly. ‘With Felix and Randal?’

I struggle to think. Look at a good map or a detailed guidebook and there are so many enticing places on Dartmoor, so many places with fairytale names – the Lost Crosses, Hameldown Daggar, Quintin’s Man – but today I am not enticed. Lyla needs to be entertained, diverted, though. I don’t want her spending the entire day lonely, lost in books. Not again.

An idea forms.

‘I know,’ I say, with a studied brightness, ‘Let’s go somewhere to see the standing stones you like.’

Her face brightens: she loves Dartmoor’s ancient circles and menhirs.

‘Merrivale? Scorhill?’

‘No,’ I say, slightly mischievously. ‘Somewhere you haven’t been before.’

She beams with delight. ‘Where? Tell me!’

‘Hah. No.’

‘Tell me, Mummy!’

‘Get ready, and I’ll make a picnic and we’ll go on a mystery tour! Put your boots on, and a coat. Everything else is fine.’

My daughter looks down at herself: she’s wearing a pair of black jeans, and a grey shirt, with a yellow pullover. She always mixes up colours wildly, I’m not sure she understands how clothes go together, yet she usually gets away with it, with her father’s blue eyes, his pale, nearly Slavic cheekbones, and that dark, dark hair. That beauty. I remember the boy I saw in the pub when I was seventeen, the boy I have loved ever since, the blue-eyed boy who gave me this blue-eyed girl. Adam Redway, my childhood sweetheart.

‘Do I really need boots? I hate wellies, they’re scratchy.’

‘Yes, you do. It will be wet in the bogs, and muddy. So go and get your things and I’ll pack some sandwiches.’

‘Peanut butter? So it’s a Special Occasion!’

I laugh. Lyla laughs. Whenever we go on a jaunt we always take peanut butter sandwiches: the comic predictability is a family in-joke. Jumping up from her chair, Lyla runs out of the kitchen, shouting out to Felix and Randal, who are slumbering in the living room, ‘Felix! Randy! Going on a walk! Big huge walk!’

I hear her scamper upstairs and the dogs canter after her, their claws skittering on the wooden steps.

Ten minutes later I’ve packed a hasty picnic in a bag, dropped the bag in the car boot, the dogs are jumping in the back seat, on either side of Lyla, and I have the key in the ignition. We’re having a day away from Huckerby Farm. My intent is Grey Wethers, a pair of poetic stone circles on the far eastern edge of the moor. Merely getting there will be a high adventure. It will take up the whole day. A good day outdoors with the dogs, even if the cold and gloom persists.

As I reverse the car, Lyla says, from the back seat, ‘You know … I saw a man.’

I trundle the car down the lane, towards what passes for a road in remoter Dartmoor. ‘Sorry, darling?’

‘I saw a man.’

The tension tightens inside me. I slow the car to hear my daughter better. ‘When, darling, what man?’

I’m looking at her in the mirror, but her face is averted. She is tickling Felix behind his ear. For a long while she says nothing.

‘Lyla?’

I drive at about five miles an hour through the squelch of a wintry Dartmoor day, over tiny medieval bridges never meant for cars.

At last she says, ‘It was a man that you know. I saw him at Huckerby. Near Huckerby.’

Who can she mean? It seems important but I don’t know why. She could be referring to anyone; she might be recalling a dream.

‘When, Lyla-berry? And what did he look like?’

‘Two or three times. I don’t know, he was far away. He looked …’ She squirms, ‘He looked a bit like Daddy. A lot like Daddy. And I think he was there the night you went to …’ Her voice is trembly. ‘The night. That night. When you left me with Auntie Emma.’

This is Lyla’s name for our neighbour, Emma Spalding. Emma was looking after Lyla when I was working late: the night I skidded into Burrator. Emma has been like an aunt, or like the grandmother Lyla never had, because Adam’s mum died years ago, and both my parents are gone.

We drive on. The roads are a mess of mud and fallen leaves. What is Lyla saying? That she saw a friend of mine that night, and she’s seen him since, near Huckerby? Or does she really mean Adam? It is impossible. My own husband is not following me. Could it be someone that looks like him, though? Harry? Or one of his many other cousins? The Redways are scattered across the moor.

But why would anyone follow me?

I slow the car down, my hands firm yet feeble on the wheel, gazing out of the window, trying to work it out.

The trees bend in a cold wind, tatters of grey moss fluttering. Birds hide among the leafless twigs. The only colour apart from dull grey and green is the shivering yellow of gorse flower.

In the mirror, Lyla’s face is rigid. I know this mood, what it means: she doesn’t want to speak. At its worst she can go into total and prolonged silence. Elective mutism. Another Asperger symptom. But I can’t let it go. ‘Lyla, this is very important. You say you saw someone I know.’ She is mute.

We turn on to the main road to Widecombe and Fernworthy, the faster road. And almost immediately, I slow. Dartmoor ponies, their rich black manes rippling in the breeze, are standing on either side of the tarmac. In this pose they always strike me as guardians of the moor, essential spirits of the place. ‘Lyla? Please?’ Nothing.

‘Lyla—’

‘It was the day you left me.’ Her blue eyes meet mine in the mirror, and they are piercing, ‘The day you left me alone. You must remember that day, Mummy.’

Her face goes still again, still and quiet and pale. Even angry. And I know if I ask one more question she will not say another word for hours, or days. Or a week. Yet I am anxious to interrogate her further. What is she trying and failing to say? Is it something so unspeakable she cannot bring herself to say it clearly?

The words already spoken pain me quite enough. She seems to be blaming me for the accident. I want to tell her: it wasn’t my fault.

Foot down on the brake, I bring the car to a total halt as another pony crosses the road. Heedless of our presence, living in a different world, the pony trots along the verge, then canters away – over the brown crest of a hill, its rich mane flowing like a dark flame on the wind.

The scene reminds me of my daughter: with her black hair streaming on a cold blustery day, running with the dogs, happy in herself. Alone with her thoughts and dreams, and as mysterious as the weather beyond Haytor.