Dog Rose Dirt Read online

  She was shoving the photos back inside the box when her phone pinged back with a message from Nikki.

  Sorry, was finishing up some marking. Scary stuff. Why wasn’t DI Parker there? How did your mum hide all this stuff? Do you think it’s true? Are you okay, Heather?

  Was she okay? Putting the box back on the floor, Heather pulled the bed covers up over her legs, thinking. On the one hand, she certainly did know more about her mother – she never would have suspected that she was the wild-child type, that she had run away from home at the age of fifteen, or even that she had a fascination with eerie fairy stories. Yet somehow all this new knowledge had only exposed more holes in what she had thought was real, leaving gaping absences that seemed to lead to something darker and more terrible – like the awful wounds in the bodies of the Red Wolf’s victims.

  Whether or not the police would let her speak to Michael Reave again, she would need to fill in some of those holes.

  16

  Abi pulled her hood up and gathered her arms around her, cursing the thin material of the sports top. If she’d been thinking clearly, she’d have grabbed her coat as well, but the perpetual itch of withdrawal didn’t leave much space for clear thinking, and she’d been anxious to get out of her brother’s house so she could give him and his date some space. He had said more than once that she didn’t have to go out, of course not, but she had seen it in his face clearly enough: few things put a girl off faster than your junkie sister sleeping on the sofa.

  She wandered to the end of their road and stood for a moment, considering which way to go. Her lower back ached faintly. She was too old for sofa-surfing, but she’d lost her third job in a row and had little choice about that. It was too cold for wandering the streets too, but she didn’t have enough money to do anything else. Abi chose to go right, and started walking again.

  It was the run-down end of town, where most of the shop fronts were either boarded up or displaying posters for betting shops, and one or two of the street lamps were dead. There was a pub called The Joiners on the corner, and Abi looked longingly towards its dimpled windows, but the thought of standing in there just for the warmth was humiliating; the thought of hoping someone would buy her a drink, even more so. She hadn’t had the heart to tell David that she didn’t have the money to ‘amuse herself’ for the evening and that his cosy date would be condemning her to a night of slightly cold boredom.

  Abi walked on past the pub, pretending that she didn’t have an end destination in mind. She turned another corner, heading down an even seedier road, wondering already if anyone would be there. She could see the park at the end of the street, obscured by a chicken-wire fence and an ugly steel gate. There were the swings and the rusting roundabout, the looming shadow of the slide, but she couldn’t make out any figures. Sometimes, she reminded herself, when it was cold, they would sit underneath the slide and pass out their goodies.

  She was so intent on reaching the park, Abi almost missed the figure coming towards her, a tall stocky man also wearing a hood, his face in shadow. Despite the itch, she felt abruptly afraid, and she kept her head down, wishing she had been paying more attention, wishing that she had thought to cross the road. As he came closer, she caught a whiff of something rotten and feral, and for the briefest second she was sure he was going to shout at her, or grab her – he smelled mad, inhuman.

  And then he was past her, and gone, his footfalls thumping rhythmically away down the street. Abi stopped by the mouth of an alley, watching him go. The stench was still with her, making her wrinkle her nose and cough, and she had just started to figure out that perhaps the smell hadn’t been coming from the hooded man at all when a dark shape stepped out of the alley and curled a strong arm around her neck.

  17

  Whytewitch59, or Pamela Whittaker as she was likely known to her whist buddies, lived in a council flat in Elephant and Castle. As she made her way up the stairwell, Heather checked her phone again, but there were still no missed calls from DI Parker. When she had phoned him that morning his line had gone to voicemail, and she had left a somewhat rambling message about the photo of Fiona Graham, before taking a snap of it on her phone and emailing it to him.

  When she reached the second floor, she knocked at flat number 87 and the door opened to reveal a tall woman in her early seventies, much less rat-faced than her profile picture had suggested, although she peered at Heather with faintly anxious eyes. She was wearing a khaki-green knitted cardigan that came down to her knees, the sleeves of which were dotted with flecks of paint. Her hair, which was a solid gunmetal grey, was held away from her eyes with a pink plastic alice band.

  ‘Miss Evans?’

  ‘Heather, please.’ Heather smiled warmly and shifted the strap of her bag to sit more comfortably over her shoulder. ‘Are you still okay for a chat, Ms Whittaker?’

  Pamela Whittaker waved her in. The flat was cramped, the orange and brown wallpaper peeling away from the walls where it wasn’t covered in picture frames.

  ‘Tea? Coffee?’ Pamela Whittaker waved her towards a sofa. The living room was crowded with the usual stuff, chairs and cabinets and coffee tables, all supplemented with easels and rolls of paper, palettes crusted with browns and greens, mugs turned rainbow-like with daubs of paint. On an occasional table near the sofa Heather caught sight of a large framed photo, clearly given pride of place among the general chaos, showing a younger Pamela Whittaker with her arms around a short, curvy woman. Somewhere amid the mess a television screen held it all within its single black eye. ‘Squash? I have some cordial somewhere here …’

  ‘Tea would be great, thank you.’

  Pamela vanished through a narrow doorway, then reappeared almost instantly with two mugs of steaming tea – she must, Heather reasoned, have had the pot brewing already. Pamela seated herself on a chair opposite, sitting forward with her mug clutched between her hands.

  ‘I saw your work online, Ms Whittaker, and I thought it was great. Very compelling, atmospheric. I’m putting together a story about Fiddler’s Mill, and I thought it would be really interesting to get an artist’s point of view.’

  A variety of emotions passed over Pamela’s face, and Heather watched closely, trying to match them up. Pleasure at the praise of her work. Uncertainty, maybe even fear, at the mention of Fiddler’s Mill. And pride at being called an artist. Pamela leaned forward, staring down into her tea.

  ‘Yes, well, thank you. I, well, I am entirely self-taught, you see. Parents couldn’t afford to send me to art college, so I did it on the side. It’s been, it’s been my life’s work. Capturing, capturing the true face of nature, you see. The rawness of it.’

  Heather nodded seriously, as though she had any idea what the woman meant by this. She had interviewed a few people when she’d been working at the paper, and the key was heavily loading the front end with flattery – people always liked to talk about themselves. It was the subject they knew best, after all.

  ‘That’s so interesting. You continue to work, I’m glad to see. Do you still largely work with the pastoral landscape? Was Fiddler’s Mill the beginning of that for you?’

  Pamela curled her fingers around her mug. ‘Yes, yes, I suppose it was. You are very perceptive.’ She flashed Heather a brief, shy smile. ‘I was there in my early thirties. I’d been travelling for a while, across Europe, surviving on beans and waitressing jobs, but there was so much to see, you see. And I ended up back in England, and a lot of my friends were talking about this place in Lancashire that was supposed to be about getting back to earth, to the soil, and it seemed to feed directly,’ Pamela nodded, as if confirming something to herself, ‘seemed to feed directly into my work.’

  ‘The pieces you produced from that period are so atmospheric,’ said Heather. She sipped her tea. ‘Did it inspire you?’

  Pamela’s face seemed to close up again, and she looked away towards the window, although it faced out onto the walkway and there was little to see there. While Heather waited for Pamela to fi
ll the silence, she found herself looking at the clutter of the living room instead; there were lots of little framed drawings and prints, some clearly of Pamela’s own work, and others by artists Heather didn’t recognize. One, which Heather found particularly unnerving, showed a naked male figure scrawled in thick strokes of black and red, his head replaced with that of a snarling wolf.

  ‘You could say that,’ said Pamela eventually. She reached up and nervously fiddled with the alice band. ‘It’s a place of great energy. You really have to go there to feel it …’ But all the previous enthusiasm had drained from her voice, and instead she went back to staring at her tea.

  ‘So, what was it like? What did you do?’ Heather smiled encouragingly. ‘Smoked some weed, listened to music? A sort of nature worship? I’ve read some bits and pieces online.’

  Pamela frowned. ‘There was a group, and I was on the fringes of it I suppose, but yes, they were very much concerned with nature worship. The idea of the haunted landscape, of returning to an earlier time when people always carried the earth under their fingernails, when we knew the rhythms of the forest …’

  Heather thought of Michael Reave, sitting in his little yellow room in prison, saying similar things.

  ‘Forgive me, Ms Whittaker, but what does that actually mean? Were there rituals? Did you sing hymns, cast spells? That sort of thing?’

  Pamela looked up sharply, clearly expecting some sort of mockery, so Heather kept her face carefully blank.

  ‘Sun up, sun down, chanting …’ She was becoming vaguer, staring at the window again. ‘There was dancing, and drugs, yes. There were the two priestesses, thought they were better than everyone else, lording it about. But it was, that was, the softer fringe of it. If you got close to the centre …’

  Suddenly Pamela Whittaker’s demeanour changed completely. She shook her head and crashed the mug down on the coffee table, causing little waves of tea to splash over the sides, soaking an embroidered tea cloth.

  ‘Ms Whittaker, are you—’

  ‘I saw things! Terrible things. Women being used, and hurt, but when I complained about it, they told me that I was imagining it, or even worse, that I was just jealous because I wasn’t part of the inner circle. They told me I just didn’t understand, because I was …’ Her sallow cheeks had turned a hectic pink. ‘I saw blood, in the woods, but we weren’t to talk about it.’

  Despite the close warmth of the living room Heather felt a chill travel down her spine.

  ‘Didn’t you go to the police?’

  Pamela Whittaker shot her a pitying look over her glasses. ‘A strung-out hippy lesbian, talking about abuse in the woods? They would have dismissed me out of hand, Miss Evans. That’s if they didn’t just arrest me for being a pot head.’

  Heather found herself reassessing whytewitch59. Yes, she had the flighty neurotic artist persona, but there was a steely streak of realism to her too.

  ‘It was an evil place.’ Pamela looked down at her hands, an expression of hate twisting her features. ‘Evil. Like I said, you have to be there to feel it, I think. If there’s one thing I still believe from those days, it’s that the landscape remembers – deep down in its stone roots, the landscape remembers all the terrible things, all the blood shed on it. Fiddler’s Mill is a place like that. You couldn’t pay me to go back there now.’

  ‘Ms Whittaker, would you be prepared to tell me exactly what you saw? If there were crimes, then we should get justice for them. I could help you do that. Can you describe what was going on out there?’

  All the anger and certainty seemed to bleed out of the older woman, the line of her mouth becoming wet and infirm.

  ‘It was so long ago … Even with the best will in the world, things get clouded. I painted some of it, and some of it I couldn’t. Babies crying, blood in the earth …’

  ‘I’m sorry? Blood in the earth?’

  Pamela Whittaker shook her head but didn’t say anything.

  ‘Pamela, are you aware that Michael Reave was there, at the commune?’

  The older woman went very still, like a rabbit in the grass when there’s a dog in the woods.

  ‘Do you know who I mean by Michael Reave? The Red Wolf?’

  ‘I thought you said you wanted to talk about my art.’ Pamela Whittaker’s voice was a small thing now, and vaguely petulant. ‘I feel I’ve let you in here under, under false pretences. You’re a journalist, I know that, or you used to be. I can use Google, you know.’

  Heather shrugged a little, feeling all her previous admiration for Pamela Whittaker dissipating. She didn’t want to think about her old job, or how she had lost it.

  ‘Don’t you think it’s interesting though? Here you are telling me that Fiddler’s Mill is evil, that you saw some terrible things – and all the while there was a serial killer there. I reckon that makes your story even more believable, but you don’t seem very willing to actually talk about it. Why is that?’

  Pamela Whittaker pressed her thin lips together. ‘He was there. There were others, too. I told the police later, when all that came out … I can’t talk about it now.’

  ‘What happened? Did they threaten you? Who else was part of this circle?’

  The old woman shook her head slowly, her face creased with distaste. ‘There were always rumours flying about. Rumours about sex parties in the woods, what those led to, the aftermath. I got to know a young woman called Anna. She was very fragile, very vulnerable, and she should not have been in a place like that … I didn’t realize until it was too late, of course.’

  ‘What happened to her there?’

  ‘Truly? I don’t know. But she left Fiddler’s Mill deeply changed. I won’t lie to you, Miss Evans, Anna wasn’t entirely well to begin with. In the head, I mean. But when I saw her afterwards she told me that she had got pregnant at the Mill, and she had had it, out in the woods. And then creatures came and took the baby away, stole it from her.’

  ‘Monsters stole her baby? That’s what she said? Did you see her pregnant while you were there?’

  Pamela Whittaker heaved her thin shoulders into a shrug. ‘I wasn’t always there. I drifted in and out for a while, looking for work in the area, but I do remember there was a time when she seemed happy. She wouldn’t tell me why, but she kept her hand on her stomach a lot then. I should add,’ she looked at Heather from under her eyelashes, ‘she didn’t look pregnant to me then, and she was a tiny slip of a thing. A pregnancy would have stuck out like a bowling ball.’

  ‘Didn’t she go to the police, if she thought her child had been stolen?’

  ‘You don’t understand. Anna was … unreliable. A woman like her now would get help, be on all sorts of medications, but then … She fell through the cracks, and Fiddler’s Mill made her worse. I felt so sad for her. Still do.’

  Heather sat back a little in the overstuffed sofa. There was no way to tell if anything she was being told was useful at all. ‘Did Anna know Michael Reave?’

  Pamela Whittaker turned her head away. ‘Not that I saw. But he was an enigma. He would come and go all the time – I’ve no idea who knew him there, not really. This is all very upsetting, you realize. Bringing all this back up.’

  ‘Pamela, I’m sorry, but I think my mother was there too, and I really need to know why. Would you have known her? Her name was Colleen, she would have been in her teens at the time. Skinny, blonde.’

  ‘Your mother? Is this what it’s actually about? I have no time for liars, young lady.’

  Abruptly, Pamela Whittaker stood up and stalked from the room. Heather watched her go, wondering if she was going to come back with a rolling pin and chase her out of the flat. She pursed her lips. She’d gone in too strong, as usual, and frightened the woman off.

  Instead Pamela returned with what looked like a thick black photo album, which she passed to Heather. Her face was closed again, the hectic pink of her cheeks sunk back to the colour of old cheese.

  ‘I didn’t know anyone called Colleen, but there were a lot of u
s there. Here, this is my work from that period, I had copies made. This is how I file things, how I keep track. Perhaps you’ll find something in there.’

  Heather opened the album. Instead of containing family snaps, it was filled with decent-quality colour prints of paintings and photographs, most of which were A4. There was a date painted on the leather cover in white Tipp-Ex: 1978–83.

  ‘Take it, borrow it. Anything I have to say about Fiddler’s Mill is in there. It might help you, with whatever it is you are doing, Miss Evans.’ She took a deep breath, hovering over Heather, clearly wanting her to leave. ‘And go and speak to Anna. I’ve written the address on a Post-it on the inside. I don’t think you’ll get much sense out of her – I haven’t been able to, not for a long time – but I don’t know, maybe it’ll do her good to think that someone cares about her baby, or whatever it was.’ She suddenly looked to be on the verge of tears. ‘Terrible things happened there, Miss Evans, but forgive me, I don’t want to expose myself to that again, not even to remember the details you want.’ She shuddered all over. ‘It’s a wound that never heals.’

  Heather looked up, but Pamela Whittaker was already turning away. She thought of her mother’s suicide note again: monsters in the wood.

  ‘Now, if you wouldn’t mind, I have a lot to be getting on with.’

  On her way back down the cold concrete steps, Heather’s phone rang. Pausing by a battered and ancient telephone box, she pressed receive.

  ‘Miss Evans?’

  ‘Oh, DI Parker. Hello.’