Читать книгу While You Sleep: A chilling, unputdownable psychological thriller that will send shivers up your spine! - Stephanie Merritt - Страница 11

She spotted the young teacher as he jogged across the empty playground, clutching the hood of a waterproof hiking jacket around his face against the downpour, while she cowered under the brick archway of the bike shop yard, peering out at the sky, bewildered by its sudden betrayal. She took a bold step forward into his line of sight, one hand protectively clamping the saddle of her new bicycle, pretending she hadn’t noticed him. The plastic carrier bag from the supermarket knocked against her leg as it swung from the handlebars.

‘Oh. Hello again.’ Edward’s face lit up as he approached; rain had spattered his glasses and he had to take them off and wipe them with a tissue. ‘You picked the wrong day for a bike ride.’

‘I know, right?’ Zoe pushed a wet strand of hair out of her face and grinned. ‘What’s going on? It was fine when I came out.’ She patted the bike. ‘And I just paid the guy to take this for a month. He didn’t tell me it was monsoon season. Reckon I could get a refund?’

‘If he gave money back for every day it rained here he’d have gone bust long ago.’ Edward smiled. He seemed nervous. ‘Seriously, though. You can’t ride all the way back in this. You should wait it out – the weather changes from one hour to the next.’

‘I see that.’ She pulled her scarf tighter. ‘I was going to take my groceries home. You guys are not big on cabs around here, I understand.’

He laughed. ‘Uh, no.’

‘I guess it’s back to the bookshop till this clears up.’ She glanced along the street. ‘Your Professor will think I’m hitting on him. Though I’m not sure I can afford to pay my way in buns.’

‘You can wait at mine if you like.’ The way he said it; too quickly, trying to make it sound casual. ‘I’m across the green there, in the School House.’ He indicated through the billowing curtains of rain.

She frowned. ‘But you were on your way somewhere.’

‘Nothing urgent. I’ve got biscuits, and coffee,’ he added, as if to persuade her. Zoe wondered if he had seen her from the window; if he had come out specifically to bump into her. The possibility fired a small, bright buzz in her chest.

‘Well – that’s really kind. If you’re sure I won’t be in the way?’

‘Of course not. Charles will be closing up soon anyway, you might as well. Here, let me take that.’ He reached out for the bike; she unhooked the bag and let him steer. Together they scurried across the green, heads down into the rain as it drove harder all around them, bouncing up from the road and sluicing along the gutters in a brown stream.

She stole a glance at his profile as he fumbled to unlock the gate at the side of the School House, the bike balanced against his hip. Neat, regular features, glazed with the uncomplicated smoothness of youth, save for that fine crease between his brows that hinted at deep preoccupations, a serious involvement with the world. A brief shiver of unease rippled through her; an absurd sense that she should not step across the threshold into his life, that to do so would be to invite a curse, as in a fairy tale. She shook the rain from her hair briskly and smiled as he held the front door open.

The School House was built in the nineteenth century from the same hard grey stone as the school it served. Inside it had been furnished sparely, the floral curtains and plain upholstery faded, the carpet’s pattern worn indistinct by the feet of previous tenants. Edward had imposed little of himself on his home, Zoe thought, as he showed her into the cramped living room. A curved silver wireless speaker on the walnut dresser; a black-and-white photograph of dreaming spires in dawn mist; a music stand under one narrow window, his violin case leaning beside it. Scanning the room, she had the impression that he had barely unpacked, and did not intend to stay long. Only the bookshelves offered any glimpse of him. They had been carefully arranged, poetry and classics together, literary novels and the kind of non-fiction she saw extracted in the New Yorker and always intended to read one day. Browsing the spines, she began to feel intimidated by him: his obvious intelligence, his earnest intensity.

‘Tea? Coffee?’ He took off his glasses and wiped them on the tail of his shirt. That English diffidence as he looked at her from under his fringe, fearful of being refused. Funny to think she and her friends would have looked straight past a boy like this in college. Now she was the one who feared being invisible.

‘Tea, thanks. If I have any more coffee I’ll shoot through the ceiling. No milk.’

‘So you’ve been to see Charles already?’ he called through the open door of the kitchen, over the sound of running water. ‘Has he been filling your head with lurid legends?’

‘I wanted him to tell me about the house.’ A wooden staircase led up from the main room, almost opposite the door. Zoe wandered over to the shelves beneath it and began lifting paperbacks from a stack.

‘In defiance of Mick’s Official Secrets Act?’

‘Yeah – what’s with that?’ She picked up a hardback volume of Rilke in a plastic dust-jacket and flicked through the pages. Some had been folded down at the corners and here and there she glimpsed pencil notes in the margin. One of his college books, she guessed, and felt an odd pang of tenderness, to think of him so newly out in the world. ‘Did Mick give everyone orders not to tell me?’

‘More or less.’ Edward came to stand in the doorway, a kettle in his hand. ‘He was afraid it would scare you off. He doesn’t like anyone talking about his family history at the best of times, but especially not in front of paying customers.’

‘It’s a little paranoid. Every old place has its stories. I wouldn’t have chosen to live in a house like that if I was easily spooked.’

‘Even so,’ he said, in a tone that suggested he was struggling to be fair, ‘it would be a big deal for some people, to find out you’re living in a house where a woman killed her child. And then after what happened last year – I can see his point.’

Zoe snapped her head up from the book to stare at him. ‘She killed her child? What did happen last year?’

He froze, guilt slinking over his face. ‘Shit. I thought Charles had told you?’

‘He didn’t get to that part. Oh, come on,’ she said, when it appeared he was turning away, ‘you can’t throw that out and not explain it. Who killed her child – Ailsa McBride?’

Edward sighed, flicking at the kettle lid with his fingernail. ‘I’ve put my foot in it. At least wait till I’ve got the tea on, OK?’

Zoe scuffed impatiently as he clattered about in the kitchen. Over the chink of china and the wheeze of the kettle boiling, she heard him determinedly humming a tune that sounded familiar. She turned over the flyleaf of the Rilke book to find an inscription dated the previous summer in a rounded, girlish hand: My darling Ed – we’ll always have Prague! Here’s to all the summers to come, all my love, L xxxx.

She darted a furtive glance towards the kitchen, where Edward was pouring hissing water into a teapot. Who was L? Nothing about this sparse cottage suggested the existence of a girlfriend. Where was L now, she wondered. What had happened to all the summers to come?

He came in bearing the mugs before him like votive offerings, steam fogging up his glasses. Zoe quickly thrust the book back on the pile, but if he noticed, he said nothing. He set one of the mugs down on another stack of books beside the sofa and gestured for Zoe to sit, then flopped on the opposite end, pressed up against the armrest – there were no other chairs in the room – and tucked one leg under him like a child, both hands wrapped around his mug while he watched her over the rim.

‘Look, Charles is really the person to ask about this,’ he began, half-apologetic, half-defensive. ‘I only know what he’s told me, and the general gossip.’

Zoe smiled encouragement. ‘Tell me the gossip, then. Ailsa McBride killed her kid, is that it?’

He sighed and looked down into his tea, as if he might find a prompt sheet there. ‘Supposedly she went mad, or she was possessed, or something along those lines. She’s meant to have killed her son and then herself. But they never found the boy.’

‘Then how do they know she killed him?’

‘They found some of his clothes washed up on the rocks.’ He bit his lip. ‘I shouldn’t be telling you this.’

‘Screw Mick,’ Zoe said, feeling bolder.

‘It’s not about Mick. I was thinking of you having to go back there on your own.’

‘Couldn’t they both have been murdered?’

Edward tilted his head, considering. ‘I’ve never heard that as a theory, I don’t know why.’

‘Because the whole island had it in for Ailsa, clearly. A woman of independent means, raising her child with no need of a man? Must be crazy. They both get killed – the crazy witch lady must have done it. Case closed.’

‘It is a bit Wicker Man, isn’t it?’ Edward caught her eye and they both grinned; in that instant, Zoe felt the unexpected click of connection and knew, with a pang of relief, that she was no longer alone here. She had an ally.

‘What happened to Ailsa?’ she asked, when she realised they had been holding one another’s gaze a beat too long to be comfortable.

‘Her body washed up further round the coast a few days later, fully clothed, no wounds on her. So they concluded she’d drowned herself after killing the boy.’

‘But if the kid was never found, they can’t even be certain he was killed, surely? Maybe he ran away.’

Edward shrugged. ‘I suppose. But he’d have turned up sooner or later, wouldn’t he, on a small island? People seem to have accepted the Ailsa version as fact, though. There’s a lot of whispering about how the land is bad in that corner of the island.’

‘Bad how?’

‘Cursed. McBride apparently tore down the remains of a ruined chapel and used the stones to build over its foundations, and the chapel had been built on an ancient pagan site to sanctify it, so he was asking for trouble.’ He grinned and shifted position, stretched out the leg that had been folded and tucked the other under.

‘Great. So I’m staying in a house with an ancient curse, haunted by a child-killing witch.’

Edward laughed. ‘Yup. Enjoy your holiday.’

Zoe leaned her head back against the sofa cushion and laughed along. Rain gusted against the window panes like gravel flung with malice, and the wind boomed down the chimney, shaking the doorframe. The room had grown darker around them as the last light leached from the sky; shadows stole out from the corners, settling over the hollows and angles of their faces. Edward reached behind him and clicked the switch on a standing lamp, warming their corner of the room with a soft amber glow. A silence unfolded, unhurried and companionable. She held the mug to her lips, breathing in its warmth, and found she had no desire to leave. For a while, she could almost forget herself.

‘I don’t know why Mick wants to keep all this hushed up,’ she remarked eventually. ‘Plenty of people would pay a fortune to stay in a place with that kind of history.’

‘Exactly – ghouls. Unsolved-murder fetishists. Those weirdos who think you can measure paranormal activity with radio waves.’ He picked at a loose thread on the cushion cover. ‘There was a lot of resentment in the village when he inherited the house and started to do it up. There’d been a kind of unspoken agreement between the Drummonds and the islanders that the McBride house would be left to fall into ruin and the story allowed to die with it.’ He arched his back and folded his hands together behind his head. As he moved, his knee brushed briefly against Zoe’s leg and she felt a small shock jolt through her like static. ‘It’s seen as a taint on the island’s reputation – they take all that Gothic stuff quite seriously and they don’t want to be famous for it. It took Mick a long time to persuade the locals that he wouldn’t use the family history as a selling point.’

Outside, a gull’s mournful cry echoed across the empty schoolyard like a reprimand.

‘So everyone is sworn to secrecy,’ Zoe said, sitting up and wrapping her hands around her mug. ‘Did Mick tell you all this?’

Edward shook his head. ‘He doesn’t like to talk about it. This all happened before I got here. Charles told me most of it – and Annag Logan, the barmaid at the Stag.’

Zoe thought of her lipstick with a stab of resentment. ‘Are you and she …?’ She made a vague motion with her hand that implied conjunction.

Edward’s look of confusion shaded to outrage as he understood her meaning. ‘Christ, no. Would you seriously think …?’ He straightened up, pushing a hand through his hair. ‘Not exactly my type. Apart from anything else, she’s only sixteen.’

‘Is she really?’ Zoe nodded in mild surprise. ‘I’d have said older. I didn’t mean to offend,’ she added quickly. ‘Only – there can’t be many young women out here.’

‘I didn’t really come here to meet women.’ A corner of his mouth twisted; there was a darker note in his voice which piqued her interest. ‘Quite the opposite, in fact.’

‘You came here to meet men?’

It took him a moment to spot the glint in her eye; he threw a cushion at her, laughing as she tried to duck. ‘That’s right – big fishermen and rig workers. I love an oilskin, me.’

‘And how’s that working out for you?’

He made a face. ‘I’m sick of the smell of herring, truth be told. And they’re away so much. I’m a herring widow.’

Zoe laughed and chucked the cushion back; he jerked his mug out of the firing line, too late, as tea sloshed over the upholstery. ‘Hey, watch the sofa! It’s a priceless heirloom.’

‘It’s definitely historic.’ Zoe rubbed the cheap brown fabric with a finger where the arms were worn shiny with use. Wind snarled down the chimney and worried the window frames; she thought she caught the bass note of distant thunder.

‘Should I light a fire?’ Edward glanced at her for approval; when she shrugged, to say she didn’t mind either way, he sprang to his feet and knelt in front of the hearth. ‘I usually sweep it out and leave it ready in the mornings, now the nights are getting colder,’ he remarked, over his shoulder, as he reached for logs from a basket to one side.

It was the sort of thing her grandmother might have said. Zoe watched his careful, methodical movements and found it suddenly unbearably touching – the thought of him waking here alone, dutifully sweeping out the night’s cold ashes before the children piled shrieking into school, laying his little fire for the long dark evening with his music and his poetry. She wondered how he could stand it, the loneliness. The room seemed shrunken in the half-light, the walls and ceiling pressing in. The McBride house was lonely too, but at least there was a grandeur to its solitude; its proud aspect, facing out to the open sea, lent an aloofness to the isolation. This cottage was merely dingy and sad; it smelled faintly of damp and spinsterhood. She watched Edward as he leaned forward, tucking old newspaper around the kindling. The movement caused his shirt to ride up, revealing a hand’s breadth of bare skin above the waistband of his underwear, dusted with blond hairs; fine, taut muscles either side of his spine, not a spare inch of flesh. Zoe felt a stirring deep between her legs, a vestige of that restless energy that had not quite dissipated after the night’s unruly dreams. A hot, strong throb of desire pulsed through her; for the space of a blink, she thought she recalled the elusive face of her dream lover, but when she tried to focus it had dissolved into shadow. She squeezed her thighs together and clutched the mug tighter.

‘Why did you come here?’ she asked him, fighting to keep her voice level. She pressed one hand to her cheek and felt it blazing.

He rocked back on his heels and turned to look at her, a box of matches poised in his hand, his face frank and open and impossibly young. ‘I broke up with someone. I was planning to stay in Oxford for another couple of years while she finished her PhD, but … well. She met someone else. That’s what happened.’ He dropped his gaze to the matchbox, turning it between his fingers. ‘So I wanted to get as far away as I could. I saw this job advertised. I didn’t think they’d take me – I’d only just graduated. But it was halfway through the year and I guess they weren’t overwhelmed with applicants. A place like this isn’t for everyone, I suppose.’

‘Is it for you?’

He paused.

‘It’ll do, for now. I wouldn’t want to settle.’ He stared into the fireplace, letting out a long sigh and covering it with the hiss and flare of a match sparking. The room fell silent; only the crack and spit of the fire as he coaxed it to life. A dark scent of woodsmoke drifted up from the hearth. When he was satisfied, he sat back, cross-legged, and turned his gaze on her. ‘How about you?’

‘What about me?’ It came out sharp-edged; she had not meant to sound so defensive. He blinked, his expression mild behind his glasses.

‘Why did you come here?’

She hesitated, watching him. How much should she say? Could she tell him everything that had happened with Dan this past year; could she unspool the brittle thread of events that had led her to this place? How much of that could he hope to understand, this dark-eyed, earnest boy, whose first serious break-up had sent him fleeing to the other end of the country? The urge to unburden herself rose up through her, fierce and strong; she caught her breath and pulled back from the edge in time.

‘I wanted some quiet.’ She ran a finger around the rim of her mug. ‘A place to paint.’

‘Long way to come for it.’ Edward hugged his knees. His tone offered no judgement, though it was half a question. Zoe made a small movement with her shoulders to acknowledge the truth of this. ‘So, do you have a partner?’ he asked, in the same light tone, when it became clear that she was giving nothing without a prompt.

Firelight sparked in bright reflections from his glasses; behind them, she could not see his eyes clearly. She left a long pause, not because she wanted to guard her privacy, but because she was no longer even sure of the answer herself.

‘I did,’ she murmured, after a while. Her eyes flicked away to the lurching shadows thrown by the flames. Edward nodded, as if he understood. When he didn’t say any more, she let her shoulders unclench and thanked him silently for having the grace not to force it.

‘The Professor was right, then,’ he said, as he levered himself to his feet and brushed down his trousers. ‘We are all running away.’

Zoe looked up at him briefly with a closed little smile. She wrapped her arms around her chest and drew her knees up, turning back to the fire. Edward bent to pick up her mug.

‘Do you want more tea? Or …’ His eyes darted away from hers and he dipped his chin. ‘I have a bottle of wine somewhere, if you’d rather?’

He was looking at her from under his lashes, shoulders hunched, his torso twisting with awkwardness. Zoe shifted, wincing as the sofa’s defeated springs dug into her leg. Again she felt wrong-footed by the difficulty of recognising his motives. If a man her age had offered the same, she might have presumed he was making a move, but she had no way of knowing how Edward regarded her. Perhaps he was being friendly to a stranger because he had been raised well; perhaps he simply wanted someone to talk to, and would be appalled to think she might have taken it any other way – a woman nearer his mother’s age than his. She glanced away to the window; the sky had turned the colour of wet slate and rain drove at the panes with determination. There was no way she could ride the bike back now, whether she had a drink or not. Part of her wanted nothing more than to stay, to feel that first thick heat of the alcohol sliding through her, gently teasing out the snarls and tangles of her mind; to sit here and listen to this beautiful boy, so pristine in all the blithe self-assurance and anxious uncertainty of youth. She would have liked to pretend, for one night, that she was his age again; to drink wine, play music, sit on the floor into the small hours until he suggested that she stay over. Just for the company, the warmth of another body, the knowledge that she was still desirable. She closed her eyes, pinching the bridge of her nose between her finger and thumb. This was exactly the kind of situation she had resolved to avoid. If she relaxed now, she would find herself talking. It would all come out: everything she had worked so hard to tamp down, out of sight. A patient listener would undo her. And she could tell he would listen well; there was a stillness about him, an attentiveness to others rare in a boy his age. The children must adore him, she thought. Caleb would. She swiped that thought away before it could settle. Besides, she had begun to feel a strange compulsion to return to the house, a chafe of anxiety behind her sternum, as if it were calling her back.

‘You won’t be cycling out there now, in any case,’ he said, nodding to the window as if he had heard her thoughts. ‘I can drop you home later if you like, though you’d have to leave the bike here. If I only have one glass.’

‘No!’ The word cracked out of her, hard and fast as a shot, ricocheting off the walls. Edward stared at her, alarmed. She breathed in and out, tightened her hand around the arm of the sofa. She was shocked at herself; she had not meant to sound so fierce.

‘I meant – you shouldn’t drink at all, if you’re going to drive,’ she said, not looking at him, shaping each word clearly and precisely so as to keep her voice steady, though she could feel the colour rising up her neck. ‘You never know—’ She broke off, aware that she sounded like a parent. Well, let him think that.

Edward shuffled, chastened.

‘No, you’re right. I wouldn’t usually, but you don’t get pulled over here. More tea, then?’ When she hesitated, he said, as bait, ‘I haven’t told you yet what happened last year.’

Her scalp tightened. She was no longer sure she wanted to hear any more of these stories. Charles was right; they would take on a different shape once she was back in the house, alone, with the darkness pressing in. Whatever Edward was about to tell her, she could not unknow. But she merely nodded, watching him as he padded softly in his socks back to the kitchen to fill the kettle.

‘A child disappeared at the McBride house,’ he announced when he returned, holding out her mug. He settled himself on the floor near the fire with his back against the sofa. His head was close enough to her knees for Zoe to reach out and stroke his hair. She wondered briefly how he would react if she did, and clamped her free hand firmly under her thigh, because she did not entirely trust herself.

‘Disappeared?’ Her voice sounded high and strange. ‘How?’

‘They don’t really know.’ He stretched his legs out and crossed his feet at the ankles. ‘It was last August, just over a year ago. Mick was a few months into the work and the place was a building site, but the business had stirred up a lot of talk in the town, about the house’s history. Two of the village boys picked up on it and dared each other to spend a night out there, ghost-hunting, for a laugh. One of them didn’t come back.’

The fine hairs prickled along her arm. ‘Jesus. What happened?’

‘The boy who survived, Robbie Logan – that’s Annag’s brother – thought his friend saw something in the ruined house. They’d hidden on the beach at first, but Robbie said when he got there, he lost his nerve and refused to go in. He stayed down by the rocks. Iain Finlay, the other boy, went alone.’ He paused to sip his tea, snatching glances at her from the tail of his eye. ‘Robbie says he heard Iain scream, and saw him running away, up on to the cliffs, but he couldn’t be sure because it was dark and he was terrified, so he hunkered down out of sight.’

Zoe let out a soft whistle. ‘Did he fall, then – Iain?’

‘So they reckon. If he ran up on to the headland, away from the house, he could have missed his footing in the dark and gone over the cliff. It’s a sixty-foot drop there and the water covers the rocks at the foot when the tide’s high. By the time the police were called, it had already been in and out. They concluded the body must have been washed away without a trace.’

‘And the other boy, Robbie – he really saw nothing?’

Edward shook his head. ‘Apparently not. Although …’ he hesitated, rubbing his thumb along his chin, ‘there was a lot of talk about that, too. How much Robbie knew.’

‘Shit. I’ll bet.’

‘The police had trouble getting anything out of him. There was a social worker assigned to the family – she told me all this when I started at the school. Robbie didn’t go home till the next morning – he’d been wandering all night, out on the moorland, he said. He hardly spoke, except to give them that version. The social worker seemed to think he’d been traumatised, but …’ He held out his hands, empty.

‘Not everyone believed it, huh?’

‘He was only ten at the time, but he’s a big lad and he had a reputation as a bully. The younger kids are scared of him, though he mostly keeps to himself now. I think people didn’t buy the idea of him cowering down on the beach. Iain was always the weaker character, they said – he did what Robbie told him.’

‘Why didn’t the parents raise the alarm?’ Zoe sat upright, indignant. ‘How did they not notice their kids were out all night?’

‘The boys snuck out after everyone was in bed, apparently. Though in Robbie’s case, I’m not surprised no one noticed. His mother’s dead and his dad’s a lorry driver, he was away working on the mainland. Robbie was at home with his sister. She says she had no idea he’d left the house until the next morning.’

‘So people secretly think he pushed his friend over the cliff?’

‘Not so secretly, in a lot of cases. It seemed the police did too, for a while, but there was no evidence. Iain’s family moved away soon after, though, and a couple of other families moved their children out of the village school. Reading between the lines, I think that’s what did for the old teacher – the one I replaced. She couldn’t cope with the thought that one of her pupils might be a murderer and no one would ever be certain.’ He leaned forward and poked the fire; a flurry of sparks erupted and vanished. ‘But I think there’s just as many in the village really believe it was the curse of the McBride house. Another vanished boy, on the site of a famous child murder. It got a lot of attention in the Scottish papers and of course they dug up the old story – exactly what the islanders didn’t want.’

‘God. No wonder Mick’s so touchy.’ She fell silent, wrapped in her own thoughts.

‘He was so pleased you hadn’t heard about it. He wanted to keep it that way. I’m sorry – it’s a horrible story,’ Edward said. Zoe kept her eyes fixed on the floor. She knew he had seen her flinch. ‘I shouldn’t have told you. Even if you don’t believe in all that, it’s still …’ He tailed off, uncertain.

‘All what?’

‘Well. Ghosts. Curses.’

She laughed, to show her disdain, but it sounded too loud in the small room. ‘I don’t mind a ghost story. It’s the living you have to be afraid of.’ She stopped, seeing his expression, hoping she didn’t sound paranoid. ‘I mean – when you look at the news, right? The stuff that goes on.’

He nodded. ‘True. There’s enough evil in the world without inventing it. I hope it won’t frighten you away, though,’ he added, glancing up shyly, a half-question in his eyes.

She looked at him, disconcerted; once more her awareness of the age gap that separated them was scrambling the signals. She felt herself flush with confusion. How mortifying it would be to respond as if she were flattered, only to find his concern was whether he would upset Mick; the embarrassment that would persist between them for the rest of her stay would be unbearable. In a place this size she could not risk having to avoid someone. Nor would it be smart to make herself a bigger target for village gossip: the American cougar. Even if he were flirting, what could come of it? She was still technically married, though she doubted that was weighing on Dan’s conscience much, back home. And really, who could blame him, the way she had been this past year?

‘It would take something genuinely terrifying to drive me away,’ she said firmly. ‘Like blocked drains.’

He laughed, but she could not help noticing the way he dropped his gaze back to his mug, as if unsure whether he had been rebuffed. They sat in silence, listening to the whispering of the fire. The conversation seemed to have petered out now they had exhausted the subject of the McBride house. She wanted to ask him more about himself, this curious life he had chosen, but was afraid it would look like she was prying; beyond that, she thought, what did they have in common, she and this boy, besides the fact that they were outsiders here, both running away – the very thing neither wished to talk about?

The rain had eased its assault on the window and through the narrow pane to her left she made out streaks of brightness struggling to break through the heaving clouds, though dusk was approaching. She shifted in her seat as a prelude to leaving, when her eye fell on the violin case in the corner.

‘That song you played last night,’ she said. ‘The haunting one – what was it called?’

‘They’re all haunting,’ he said, twisting to look at her with a smile, seeming grateful that the silence had been broken. ‘It’s the local speciality. Any more clues?’

‘It was right before you took your break. Before we went out for a smoke.’

‘Oh, you mean “Ailein Duinn”?’ He hummed a few bars and she nodded, hard. ‘Yes, that one always gets to people. Especially the way Kaye sings it. It’s a lament for a sea captain who was drowned, supposedly composed by his fiancée. She went mad with grief and drowned herself too, a few months later. So the legend goes. The lyrics are a bit grisly, though.’ He hesitated, as if he wanted to protect her from any more unpleasantness.

‘Tell me.’

‘She sings of how she wants to go to him in the sea. It ends by saying she wants to drink his heart’s blood after he’s drowned.’

Zoe tried to recall how it was to feel that kind of desperate passion for someone, the kind that draws you willingly to your destruction after them. She had been wildly in love with Dan at the beginning, or thought she had, which perhaps amounted to the same thing, but when she tried to remember the sensation it was as if she were remembering a movie she had seen long ago, or a second-hand anecdote. Now there was only Caleb. ‘Eat you up, I love you so,’ she used to whisper into his neck when he was smaller, clean and powdery after his bath, his hair damp; she would nuzzle closer, pretending to chomp his soft, soft skin, until he squealed with delight and wriggled away. Sometimes she felt the breath crushed out of her by that desire to enfold him, take him back into the protection of her body where she could keep him safe. But he had grown too big for that game; he had learned to push her away.

‘The older folk get very emotional about that song,’ Edward continued. ‘We have to play it every time. I suppose it’s not so long since every family on the island knew what it was to lose someone to the sea.’

It sounded like the story of Ailsa McBride. Had she too gone mad with grief for her drowned husband, and walked into the sea to join him, first killing her son, perhaps out of some deranged maternal instinct not to leave him alone? But nothing in Charles’s account so far had suggested that Ailsa’s ‘madness’ was any more than malicious gossip about a woman who refused to surrender her independence to other people’s expectations. Once more Zoe found herself wondering what had really happened to Ailsa and her son.

‘Will you play it for me?’

He looked surprised. ‘Now?’

She shrugged, gesturing to the sky. ‘Before I go.’

‘I can’t sing it,’ he said, with a hint of alarm. ‘It’s not really the same without Kaye.’

‘I’d like to hear the music.’ She smiled encouragement and, after a brief hesitation, he sprang up from the floor in one easy bound.

She watched him tuning the violin, plucking each string with his head cocked, as if listening for invisible echoes only he could hear. In the corners, the shadows lengthened. If that song had been stuck in her head last night, to the point where she had imagined hearing it in the house, there was no sense in reminding herself of it, only to have it turning round and round once more as she tried to sleep. But she figured that perhaps hearing him play it in that drab but oddly cosy little room might rid it of any associations with last night’s strange dreams and sleeplessness; a kind of aversion therapy. If it came to her again in the night she could think of the music without the words, and picture the intensity of Edward’s expression as he played with his eyes closed, lashes resting on his cheeks, lips pressed firm in concentration.

As soon as he struck up the first bars, she realised that she had made a mistake. Dusk fell as if suddenly across the room; the last hopeful streaks of light in the sky obscured by fast-moving clouds. The violin’s mournful notes trembled on the air. Strangely, she found that she knew the words; she had the curious sense that she could hear them quite clearly, though silently, inside her head, as if it were an old familiar tune echoing in her memory – but how could she hear the words so intimately when she had no knowledge of that ancient, guttural language? She wanted to ask him to stop, but the song filled her mind so entirely that there was no room left for other words; she could not form the sounds. Behind her breastbone she felt a pressure building, tightening her throat, a great wave of grief rising up; all the grief she had ever known and buried, gathering force like a wall of black water called into flood tide by the song, threatening to overwhelm her while he went on playing, his eyes shut, oblivious to the danger; she must escape the music or the weight of it would burst her defences and drown her—

With one mighty effort of will, she wrenched herself up from the sofa and ran from the room, snatching up her jacket on the way out, wrestling with the bike in the passageway, trying to ram it backwards through the door as he followed, bow in hand, his face taut with alarm.

‘What is it? What’s wrong?’

But she could only shake her head, teeth clenched; she could still hear the song, yearning and wistful, and her only thought was to get away, as if it were not in her mind now but somewhere in the cottage, so that she might be able to outrun it. He tried to take hold of the handlebars, protesting about the weather and the dark, but she did not hear it, she knew only that she had to get out before she lost control in front of him; yanking the bike from his grasp, she blundered through the schoolyard to the gate, swung herself on to the saddle and rode away down the green without looking back, her plastic bag of shopping smacking hard against her shin, hair whipping in her eyes, her open jacket snapping in the wind.

A mile or so out of the village she found herself slowing as the road began to climb an incline; the street lamps had ended and dusk was closing in fast over the moorland, the daylight all but dissolved, though it could not be much past four. She brought the bike to a stop, aware, as she returned to herself, of the ragged breath tearing at her chest, the blood pounding in her temples. She zipped her jacket up to the neck – cursing at leaving her scarf behind in her haste – and cast a glance around her. The horizon had dwindled to a pale streak above the dark spine of hills. She could hardly make out the line of the road as it rose. The bike was fitted with lights but she had been in such a hurry to leave the shop that she had not waited to check the batteries; now she flicked the switch on the headlight to reveal a wavering beam that did little to cut through the shadows ahead. At least the song in her head had stopped. Rain spiked her face as she strained to listen, relieved to find she could hear nothing now but the cries of seabirds and the low moan of the wind through heather.

Perhaps she should call Mick and ask him to come out and find her in the Land Rover. It would be folly to try and continue along an unfamiliar road through moorland in the falling dark on a bike with poor lights, even if another downpour held off. Common sense told her so unequivocally; weighed against it was her pride, and the embarrassment of her emotional outburst, the way she had fled from the School House like someone in the throes of a breakdown. What must he think of her, the young teacher? Neurotic middle-aged woman, she supposed; it would be the last time she was likely to be invited there for a bottle of wine, anyway, which was probably for the best.

She peered up at the sky. She had come here to learn how to be alone, not to rely on men for company or to ferry her around; she must not crumble at the first hint of difficulty. That was what Dan expected her to do, and so she must prove him wrong. The house was not even five miles away, and a faint light clung to the horizon; from what she could recall, the road ran straight across the moors to the cove. Setting her face into the drizzle, she pointed the bike up the hill, stood on the pedals and picked up her pace, this time feeling every twinge in her muscles without the spike of adrenaline that fear had lent her. Fear of what, though? Nothing she could quite name. Fear of betraying herself, was the closest she could come to defining the panic that had driven her from Edward’s room.

A brief sense of triumph washed through her as she crested the hill, only to ebb away at the sight of a fork in the road up ahead. She did not remember this parting of the ways from her drive earlier with Mick, and neither branch had a signpost. The road that veered away to the left was narrower, less frequented, and since she could not recall a turning, she made the decision to take the right-hand fork, which seemed a continuation of the main road. There was no sign of any traffic. Long needles of rain fell harder across the cone of light from her headlamp; the wind bit colder out here and her fingers numbed around the slick rubber grips of the handlebars. Fifteen minutes of unchanging scenery passed: undulating hills, dark heather, a pale ribbon of road unspooling ahead, edged by occasional boulders. Her legs began to ache and the earlier alarm flickered in her chest. Finally, defeated, she planted her feet and reached inside her jacket for her phone to call Mick, but when she swiped the screen, shielding it from raindrops, she saw that there was no signal. She should have guessed, out here. No choice, then, but to press on.

But as she stood reluctantly on the pedals, she caught sight of a figure up ahead in the distance, walking with a purposeful stride along the left-hand verge at the side of the road, away from her. For an instant, her heart clutched in fear – there was no one else around for miles – but as she peered harder, she felt certain it was a woman, wrapped in a long all-weather coat. One of these hardy crofters who barely noticed the rain, she supposed; out gathering peat or whatever people did up here.

‘Hello!’ she called, but she was too far away and the wind too loud for the woman to hear. Zoe paused to re-tie her wet hair back from her face and redoubled her efforts to catch up, rising out of the saddle, crouching forward, the bottle of wine in the shopping bag bruising her legs with each movement as she pumped towards the brow of the next incline. She tried shouting again but the figure did not turn around before disappearing over the hill and Zoe was too short of breath to put more effort into it. She would overtake her on the downward slope, she thought, pushing onwards, though it seemed the woman must be walking unusually fast. Zoe breasted the hill and eased up on the pedals, coasting a little as gravity took over, straining her eyes to see the woman, expecting to draw level with her at any moment. But the road was empty; there was only the black ridge of more hills ahead.

She called out a third time, but heard no answer. Blinking hard, she wiped the rain from her eyes with the heel of her hand. She had not imagined it; that was impossible. She had seen her, a person walking up ahead, perhaps fifty, sixty yards away. The woman could not have vanished – unless she had left the road and taken a path across the moor, but surely she would have heard Zoe shout. It made no sense.

The rain fell harder; a heavy, vegetable smell of wet earth rose from the moorland to either side. Zoe pressed the inside of her wrist against her forehead, trying to think – the worst she could do would be to waste time here, indecisive and exposed. If Dan could see her now, he would feel entirely vindicated. Before she had left, when he still thought there was a chance he could change her mind, he had insisted, over and over, that she would not be able to cope on her own, but she understood now that this was part of his strategy, one of the ways he had subtly undermined her independence over the years. When she now understood that it was he who could not cope with her finding the determination to make her own decisions, to steer her life without deferring to his judgement and his choices. If it weren’t for Caleb, she would have broken away much sooner, she told herself, and the thought made her immediately uncomfortable. She had been repeating this for months, but it had taken on the shape of a comforting reassurance that she knew, deep down, to be false. She was not even sure that she had left him this time. For now they were both playing along with the idea that this was a temporary departure, a rebellion she had to get out of her system.