Dog Rose Dirt Read online

  ‘No,’ he told it. ‘It’s up to me.’

  He packed it back into the earth.

  When he returned to the house hours later, the sun was just sinking towards the horizon and the man was gone. This wasn’t especially unusual. The man had a car and sometimes he would be gone for hours, returning in time for dinner, or bringing back bags of groceries. Michael did not pay much attention – it didn’t seem important. He slunk back up to his bedroom, where he moved restlessly for an hour or so, unable to concentrate. He looked down at the thick black dirt under his fingernails and thought about how each chick’s heart had stopped. Eventually.

  When he heard the man come back into the house, he did not stir from his place on the bed until a sharp bark summoned him downstairs. There, the man looked him over, seeming to take in the mud soaked into his trousers and the dirt ground into his palms. He smiled, his fake eye flashing with the orange light of sunset.

  ‘I’ve something else for you.’

  There was a sack on the dining-room table – a rough hessian thing that had been printed with the single word: DARTS. It was moving slightly. Without needing to be told, Michael went to the sack and opened it, revealing four tiny kittens, all still with their eyes shut, and all a piebald mixture of black and white. He reached in and picked one up, feeling the hectic warmth of its body against his skin. So alive, and so powerless.

  ‘Michael, lad, have you ever heard of the barghest?’

  He curled the kitten against his chest.

  ‘The what?’

  ‘It’s a great demon dog, a wolf really, that haunts lonely roads and stiles. An old legend of the north.’

  ‘Like … a fairy story?’

  The man smiled, exposing his long, yellow teeth.

  ‘Not really, lad. The barghest is an omen, but it’s also thought of as a spirit of the land, a symbol of death and rebirth. Where it walks, it makes no sound and leaves no mark, but if it bites you, the wound will never heal.’

  ‘All right,’ said Michael, uncertain what he was supposed to say.

  ‘The wolf has an important role, lad. You know that? He gives life to the land, because the land is always hungry.’ The man went to the sack, where the other kittens were clinging together, mewling at each other. He covered them over with a piece of hessian. ‘There are people who don’t recognize the power of that. Your dear old mother, for one. Women, lad. They have a different role to play.’

  Michael winced.

  ‘But you already solved that problem, didn’t you?’ He turned to the boy, and his face changed again; an onlooker would have taken him for a kindly uncle, pleased to be treating his nephew. ‘The kittens are yours to play with.’

  Michael nodded.

  15

  Feeling a little shaken and more than a little tired, Heather opened the door to her mother’s house, half expecting more trapped birds. Michael Reave’s reaction had frightened her, but more than that, she felt haunted by dead women – by Sharon Barlow and Elizabeth Bunyon, by all the women butchered decades ago, and most of all, by her mum. Reave, with his scarred hands and green eyes, was connected to all these deaths, and if she could just figure out how … Perhaps she could end it. And that might just ease some of her relentless guilt.

  Instead of birds, she was greeted by the gentle sound of the radio and the faint smell of the coffee she had brewed that morning. The normality of the situation reassured her, and she made herself a pile of scrambled eggs on toast and wolfed it down in front of her laptop, eating for once at the kitchen table.

  Reading the names of his victims, seeing the photos of them while they were still alive, none of it had really conveyed the monstrousness of what he had done. She and Nikki had skirted around the edges of it with their own serial killer research, but there had been an unspoken agreement between them not to unearth anything they couldn’t handle. Well, today she felt she had caught a glimpse of the beast Michael Reave really was, and perhaps it was time to face that.

  She revisited the brief Wikipedia page, but there was very little information there about his background, or details on the murders themselves – all of which backed up DI Parker’s comments about Reave’s past being a mysterious blank space. She would have to look elsewhere for the information she wanted.

  Back when she had worked on the newspaper, she had picked up the skills required to excavate the murkier bits of the internet, and taking sips of wine every now and then, her plate empty save for a few scraps of egg, she began to look for the raw reality of the Red Wolf murders. Quickly the screen was filled with some very basic-looking websites, all favouring vaguely unpleasant colour schemes of black, green, and red. There were titles like ‘nightmare fuel’, ‘dead lovers’, and ‘corpse faces’.

  These forums were created and curated by people who regularly sought out the bloodiest details of the worst side of humanity, and it wasn’t long before she found a long thread detailing the Michael Reave case. There were pictures of crime scenes, and of bodies. In some cases, just pieces of bodies. Judging from the clinical lighting and lack of dramatic angles, some of these at least seemed genuine, photographs snuck out from police archives or from the investigation in the late Eighties and early Nineties, and in the face of them something, some barrier she hadn’t been aware of, was broken into pieces. She thought of the images of Reave’s victims she had already seen, their faces caught smiling or uncertain in photographs that would go on to become infamous – this was where they ended up. Because of Michael Reave.

  One of the first pictures showed a young woman lying naked and face down in a field. Her arms had been bound behind her back, and she had long red hair, glossy and loose, across her shoulders and across the grass. Her skin looked painfully white, and around her body was a rough garland of bedraggled wild flowers, clearly placed there with some thought and care. Heather, who knew virtually nothing about plants and nature, thought she recognized some of the blooms – bluebells, daisies, pale yellow primroses, and the nodding heads of foxgloves, pink and purple and somehow obscene. Next to her was an item of clothing that was difficult to identify, both because of how it lay against the grass, and the fact that it had been soaked with blood.

  The next picture had also been taken outdoors, and the woman was lying with her eyes to the sky. In the centre of her chest there was a large, almost round hole, and bursting up through it was a young tree, the sort you could buy from garden centres, small and ready to plant. Heather could see the dark wetness of the inside of her chest, although the hole itself was relatively clean. She wore what looked like a white shirt, unbuttoned, but it was stained a dark, brownish red; only a small patch on the collar gave away the fact that it had ever been white at all.

  ‘He dresses them,’ she said, feeling her stomach turn over. The eggs felt heavy and unwelcome. ‘He dresses the bodies, arranges them. He cares more about them dead than alive. He cares about this picture he’s creating.’

  She scrolled down, already wondering why she had decided to do this to herself. Hadn’t today been enough?

  There were a few posts from people speculating on the Red Wolf’s motives, talking about possible links to paganism and devil worship. The hearts, someone claimed, had never been found, along with other soft tissues – the poster was of the opinion that he might have eaten some of them, like Jeffrey Dahmer or Albert Fish. Heather got up to refill her wine glass, glancing uneasily at the windows. It was fully dark now, and they showed her nothing but her own reflection.

  The doorbell rang, startling her into putting down her glass. Snapping the laptop shut, she went to the door, peeking out through the spyhole before opening it.

  ‘Lillian?’

  ‘Hello, dear.’ The older woman stepped past her smoothly into the hallway, then as if catching Heather’s aggrieved look, held up a tote bag. ‘Sorry, I know it’s quite late. Just come for my casserole dish, if that’s all right? I need it for tomorrow’s dinner. I hope you’ve eaten it by now or it will have gone peculiar.’
/>   ‘Oh, sure, no problem. It’s all washed and ready. Come through to the kitchen …’

  Except that Lillian was already there, locating her blue casserole dish and placing it carefully into her bag. Heather eyed the washing up from the day before – she’d always been lazy about chores – and felt her cheeks grow warm.

  ‘Would you like a glass of wine?’ She cleared her throat, feeling ridiculously formal.

  Lillian raised her eyebrows at her and smiled. As before, she was dressed smartly, in a fitted green tweed suit, a brooch in the shape of two intertwined silver fish on her lapel, and her black leather handbag shining expensively. She wore pearl earrings, tiny and discreet flashes of white on her earlobes.

  ‘That would be lovely, dear. Just a small one, if you don’t mind.’ When Heather had handed her a glass she took the smallest sip imaginable. ‘How are you getting on? Holding up all right?’ Her grey eyes were kind. ‘When is the funeral? I would dearly like to attend. Colleen was such a good friend.’

  Heather took a long gulp from her own drink to hide her discomfort. She had been trying not to think about the funeral at all; most of the arrangements had been made as soon as her mother’s body had been released from the mortuary, and since then she had done the bare minimum.

  ‘Next Wednesday, at one o’clock, Balesford crematorium. I invited everyone I could find in my mum’s address book, but I must have missed you off.’ She forced herself to smile. ‘You’re very welcome to come along, of course. I don’t imagine there will be many of us there – Mum didn’t have any family left, and she tended to keep to herself.’

  ‘Oh, I think you’d be surprised.’ The knowing tone made Heather look up, but Lillian already seemed to be thinking about something else, her thin mouth creased with displeasure. ‘A cremation? Is that what Colleen wanted?’

  Heather shrugged. ‘She was very clear about it in her will.’

  Lillian made a small noise, then gestured with her glass to the printouts on the table. ‘Are you working on a story? I would have thought you’d be too grief-stricken for such a thing.’

  With a lurch, Heather realized she had left whytewitch’s images out, but before she could sweep them away Lillian was picking up one of the photographs with her free hand. She nodded slightly.

  ‘Fiddler’s Mill? Goodness, this must be a very old photograph.’

  ‘You know it?’ Heather couldn’t keep the surprise from her voice.

  ‘Me? Not personally, dear, but your mother talked about it a lot. It was a memorable time for her, I think.’

  Heather put the glass of wine down. ‘She did? That surprises me, to be honest, because she never even mentioned it to me.’

  ‘Well.’ Lillian shrugged gracefully. ‘There are things you don’t want to talk to your daughters about, at least, not while they are young.’

  ‘Perhaps you could tell me what you remember?’ Heather nodded to the stools at the kitchen counter, and they sat together. ‘Anything she said about it would be useful.’

  ‘Are you writing a story about it?’ Lillian asked. ‘Colleen talked a lot about your career as a journalist, too.’

  ‘Not really.’ She assumed that her mother hadn’t mentioned that she’d been thrown off the newspaper in disgrace. ‘I’m just curious about, you know, her life, her past. I feel like I missed out on some things that were important to her.’

  ‘Well, I’m not sure that I can help you.’ Lillian sipped from her wine again, looking across the kitchen to the back door as though the memories were waiting out there for her. ‘My memory, you see, it isn’t what it was.’ She smiled brightly at Heather. ‘Don’t get old, dear, it’s quite tedious.’

  Heather smiled back, thinking of the photos of the women with their bodies left dismembered in fields. ‘It’s better than the alternative. Is there nothing you can tell me?’

  ‘She mentioned communing with nature, eating a lot of very bad food. There might have been a boyfriend.’ Heather sat very still, trying to ignore the creeping dread settling over her with every word. ‘Maybe more than one.’ Lillian chuckled. ‘As I said, these aren’t the things you talk about to your daughter, not if you want to be setting an example. Perhaps you should go up there, dear. Have a look around.’

  ‘Up there?’

  ‘To Fiddler’s Mill. It could be,’ she shrugged one shoulder, ‘what is it young people say? Closure. A way of dealing with your grief. To go and see this place that was so important to your mother.’

  Important to Mum, thought Heather. And important to a notorious serial killer. Great.

  As Lillian was leaving, she paused at the front door, appearing to peer out at the sky – it had been threatening to rain.

  ‘Do you have far to go? Did you want to borrow an umbrella?’

  ‘Thank you, dear, I’ll be fine. Just up the road.’ But as she turned back, her face was serious. ‘I don’t want to worry you, but I thought I saw someone hanging around your trees earlier today. A man.’

  ‘When was this?’ Heather thought of the figure she thought she had seen the night before, when she’d been putting the bird out. She had half convinced herself she was imagining it, but perhaps …

  ‘This afternoon. You haven’t left any spurned lovers behind, have you?’

  Despite herself, Heather smiled at the archaic phrase. ‘Hardly. I’m sure I’ll be fine, Lillian. Thanks for dropping by.’

  But she watched the old woman to the end of the path, and when she was gone she stood for a time, looking at the darkness that surrounded the lawn. Could it be someone from the newspaper? There was at least one person there who would be keen to upset her, if not actively harm her. Eventually, the rain began to fall, the thick heavy rain of autumn, and she closed the door.

  Later, Heather crashed on the bed in the spare room and opened her laptop. Waking up her phone, she popped off a quick message to Nikki, asking how she was and giving a swift rundown of her day at Belmarsh, and then she checked her emails. To her vague surprise, there was one there from whytewitch59, who apparently possessed the somewhat more prosaic name of Pamela Whittaker – she was happy to meet up for a chat, and wanted to know if this week would suit her? She emailed back, suggesting a time, wondering as she did so if she was setting herself up for an awkward half an hour of paranoid hippy nonsense.

  Browsing a news site, she saw that DI Parker was right: news of a missing PE teacher in Lancashire had broken, and there was an appeal for information on the front page. Next to the headline was a photo of her, taken during some sort of school sports day, and that seemed to turn on an obscure light in the back of Heather’s head. She went out into the hallway and retrieved one of the boxes she’d brought down from the attic. This one contained a heap of loose photographs – photos that her mother had never got around to organizing or pressing into her many sets of leather-bound photo albums.

  Taking it to the bed, she made herself comfortable and began to sift through the pictures. She knew which one she was looking for, and she knew it would be in the box. Her mother wouldn’t have put it in an album, she was sure of it.

  Images of the past slipped across her lap, the older ones slightly grainy to the touch, the more recent glossy and cold. There were lots of photos of the parties her dad used to throw for his construction firm, filled with anonymous red-faced men drinking punch and looking the worse for wear – in a few she caught sight of her dad, and these ones she paused to look at for a moment longer, her fingers lingering over his ruddy face. And then, there it was, nestling at the very bottom. The single photo of a summer fête she’d attended when she was about six years old.

  Heather lifted it out of the box and peered at it carefully. It wasn’t a great photo really, a touch overexposed, and a few of the children had picked up that unnerving red-eye effect. There was a bunch of them, kids and adults, crowding around a picnic blanket covered with egg sandwiches and packets of biscuits. Heather picked herself out immediately: a pale and slightly solemn-looking kid with dark hair and a
pink lunchbox clutched to her chest. There was her mother, her expression closer to a grimace than a smile. And there: a little red-headed girl, perhaps a year older than Heather had been, standing up in a pair of bright blue shorts and grinning straight at the camera. There was a smear of cream on her cheek from where she’d been eating cake.

  Fi. Heather remembered her name clearly, because she had been so certain that Fi wasn’t a name at all. Fi was the first bit of the giant’s rhyme in ‘Jack and the Beanstalk’. Fee-fi-fo-fum, I smell the blood of an Englishman. And she remembered the day so clearly because her mother had started crying and shaking quite abruptly in the middle of it, and they had had to go home.

  She never had been told why her mother had broken down like that, but she did remember that she had been sad to leave Fi, who was boisterous and sturdy and very keen on climbing trees. They had exchanged names, repeating them over and over so that they might be able to find each other again in the future – when you were a child, names still seemed like magical things. Fi. Fiona Graham.

  Of course, she had only ever seen her that once, and they had never gone back to that particular summer fête. Perhaps she was imagining it. She looked at the little girl with the red curls and the freckles and remembered the hot grasp of her hand in her own.

  Now, she looked at the photo on the news site and she felt cold. They certainly looked like the same person to her. Fiona Graham, it seemed, had grown into a good person, a teacher. A woman who had done nothing wrong aside from go about her life as normal, and then someone had broken into her house, and likely hurt her. Fiona Graham had probably helped countless kids more than she could know; had mopped up their tears and taken them to the nurse’s office when they’d grazed their knees. Her students probably thought of her fondly, or would, when they were far away enough from school to have positive feelings about their teachers.

  And none of that had saved her.

  There was a video clip of Fiona’s parents at a press conference, asking for anyone with information to come forward, and they looked shell-shocked and fragile, as though they had been hollowed out overnight and now the slightest breeze could tatter them to pieces. It was difficult to see how they were related to the vibrant, laughing red-head standing with a group of school girls in shorts. Inevitably, Heather’s mind turned back to the images she had seen earlier that night. Was this the fate of Fiona Graham?