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  Quiet, well-to-do, respectable Colleen Evans had been writing to a man in prison. She had been doing so while Heather’s father had been alive, all through the early years of their marriage. It also appeared that in the Seventies, her mother had been a part of some sort of hippy commune, somewhere up north.

  Heather rubbed her hand across her eyes, trying to make sense of this new information. Her mum had never been the type for reminiscing, and Heather had never questioned it. Now it was apparent there was a whole stretch of her life that had never even been hinted at. As far as she’d ever known, there had been no other serious relationships with anyone other than her dad. Yet here was this man in the letters. This man who, it seemed, was in prison.

  And in all of the letters Heather had read, her mother hadn’t mentioned that she had a daughter. Not once.

  Who was this man? Reluctantly she thought of the suicide note again, the strange phrases her mum had used – as though she was talking to someone else as well as Heather.

  ‘Oh, shut up,’ Heather murmured to herself. ‘You’re jumping to conclusions now.’

  She gulped down the last of the coffee and pulled her laptop from her bag. Her mother had always been something of a technophobe and had refused to get even dial-up internet, so Heather had to piggyback off the mobile internet on her phone, but within seconds she had the browser page up. She looked at the name, Michael Reave, sitting in the search box.

  She paused before clicking search. ‘There could be nothing at all, right?’ she said to the empty kitchen.

  The first image that came up was his mugshot, and of course she knew it – it was as familiar to her as the hateful, lax faces of Myra Hindley and Ian Brady, as familiar as the snarling goblin face of Fred West. For a moment the bitter taste of coffee lapped at the back of her throat, and she wondered for an agonizing second if she was going to be sick on the kitchen table, but then her stomach croaked and settled. In the photo, Michael Reave was looking straight at the camera, his tousled black hair not quite meeting his collar. There was none of the blankness you often saw in these sorts of photos; Michael Reave looked aggrieved, even faintly rueful, as though the arresting officers had made some sort of foolish mistake that they’d feel bad about soon. He was unshaven, but it suited him, and the little lock of white hair at his temple only made him seem appealingly quirky. As pictures of serial killers went, it was a reasonable one.

  A serial killer.

  ‘Fucking hell, Mum. Fucking hell.’

  There was a Wikipedia page, which in the little introductory paragraph explained that Michael Reave was a convicted serial killer from the UK, known in the British tabloids as ‘the Country Ripper’, ‘Jack in the Green’, and, more popularly, ‘the Red Wolf’. He was finally caught in 1992, but not before murdering five women in Lancashire and Manchester, with another possible ten victims elsewhere. The article noted that it was widely thought he was responsible for a great many more missing women, but that Reave had always protested his innocence, and continued to do so. The page was oddly truncated; Heather knew Wikipedia well enough to know that anything involving grisly murders tended to have paragraph after paragraph of lovingly researched detail, but here there was little to go on. She scanned through what there was, her lips pressed into a thin line of revulsion. Michael Reave was known for leaving flowers with his victims, sometimes planting them in wounds – Heather looked away for a moment, trying not to picture that – and sometimes winding blossoms through their hair or placing them in their mouths. The ‘Red Wolf’ nickname was one he had apparently given himself; he had left a note with one body reading simply: ‘the Red Wolf hunts’.

  Heather clicked back to the search page. Under the image tab there were pictures of some of his victims. They were young women mostly, their old-fashioned haircuts catching them in time like flies in amber, their images forever linked to the man who had killed them.

  The house was very quiet. Heather sat, thinking about her mother, sitting in this kitchen, probably at this table, writing letter after letter to a man who had butchered women. Her daughter in the other room watching television, her husband out at work, while she wrote letters to a killer.

  She thought about her mum sitting at the kitchen table, writing a suicide note.

  Monsters in the wood.

  Feeling sick, Heather picked up her mobile, her thumb hovering over Nikki’s number. She felt cold, and untethered somehow, but she also couldn’t help noticing a certain tension inside her, a kind of delirious excitement that was oddly familiar; it was a little like the feeling she got when an enormous story landed in her lap. Biting her lip, she pressed the number. When her friend’s voice came on the line, it was suddenly difficult to say anything, but she forced the words out.

  ‘Nikki, can I come over? I need to talk to someone.’

  6

  Putting the marking aside finally, Fiona smiled at the little pile of cards and presents on her desk. Her A-level girls had been working on old exam questions, and she was half convinced that their sudden interest in her birthday was all a way of buttering her up, but there were worse things to find on your desk at the end of the day – plenty of teachers had horror stories about that. Besides, Fiona was in a generous mood and willing to forgive a bit of outright bribery; she had about as much interest in reading essays on ‘Opportunities for and the Effects of Leading a Healthy and Active Lifestyle’ as they had in writing them.

  Next to her, the radiator ticked on, and she shuffled her chair a little closer to it. No doubt it would be warmer at home, and the cat would be annoyed that she was taking her time, but the girls would be disappointed if she didn’t have all the cards opened on her desk first thing in the morning.

  She made her way through the pile, smiling faintly at ‘Happy Birthday Miss Graham’ and ‘Have a great one, Red!!!’ Having any sort of distinguishing characteristic as a teacher could be disastrous – a facial mole, a lisp, bushy eyebrows – but Fiona felt like she’d got off lightly with red hair. There had been a few less than pleasing nicknames, such as ‘ginger minge’, a gift from a group of especially charmless year eights, but the more grown-up ones seemed to consider it a feature to be admired. Not surprising since they were all in the habit of dyeing their hair a different colour every week.

  The presents were small things: little boxes of chocolates, a set of flavoured lip balms. One girl, Sarah, had given her a Boots voucher, of all things.

  ‘When I was a kid, teachers were lucky to get an apple,’ she murmured to the empty classroom.

  One of the presents didn’t have a gift tag on it and wasn’t attached to any of the cards. The wrapping paper was curious: a slightly old-fashioned paisley print, like the lavender-scented paper from her nan’s wardrobe, and there were two wilted pink flowers set on top of it.

  Frowning slightly, she unwrapped the parcel only to find a large, smooth pebble. It was cold to the touch and made her think of the seaside. Someone, not very artfully, had scratched the shape of a heart into one side of it.

  ‘Huh.’ Fiona’s frown deepened, trying to think of who might do something like that. You did get the occasional artistic kid, the child who savoured the role of being the one to do something shocking or different. But then, in all honesty, very few of them ended up in an A-Level PE class. They were all doing Art or Drama.

  In the end, she lined up the cards along the front of her desk, and set the pebble down next to them, scratched side facing the class. And then she went home.

  7

  Before

  The man took the boy to his house, although it was not a house in the sense he knew. It was a vast, sprawling place with shining floors and old, dark furniture, warm with polish. It was clean and cold and silent, with no marks on the walls or dirty cutlery lying around. The big black dog trotted across the wooden floor briskly, its claws clattering the quiet up into pieces, and the man came in behind them, taking off his hat and hanging it on a hat stand.

  ‘You can stay here now, Michael. I
t is Michael, isn’t it?’

  The boy didn’t reply. He was watching the dog, which had passed in front of a tall mirror on the wall, and briefly there were two black dogs, eyes like amber fires. The boy followed the animal and saw another creature in the mirror – a filthy stick figure with a shock of black hair, a dark thing smeared with dark matter. Abruptly, he could smell himself, and the thought of being in this clean place and making it dirty forced a noise of distress from his throat. His skin felt hot and prickly.

  ‘Nuh. Unh …’

  ‘Come on. I’ll run you a bath.’ The man came up beside him and looked down, and for the first time the boy saw that one of his eyes was wrong – the white was a little too white, the brown of his iris too smooth. ‘You’ll feel better, lad.’

  The man left him alone in a bathroom with a bathtub filled with hot, soapy water. He circled it for a time, unnerved by the slippery white enamel and all the unfilled space in the room. Crisp, yellow light filtered in through a frosted window, and he felt exposed. He did not look in the mirror over the sink. Eventually, after listening at the door for a time, he peeled off his sodden shirt and shorts – chucked in a pile on the floor, they didn’t look like clothes at all – and sank into the bath, making small huffing noises as the hot water inched up over his chest. He stayed there until the water was utterly cold, and a thick brownish film had ringed the sides.

  Later, he sat at a long table in a set of pyjamas that were slightly too big, while the man put plates of food in front of him. Soft white bread and pink bacon, crispy brown at the edges; a pat of yellow butter, a jar of pickles, half empty and filled with mysterious murky shadows. A tall glass of milk.

  ‘When I’m away, the woman who cleans the place brings her son to stay,’ he said. ‘He’s about the same age as you, I’d say, but he’s got a bit more meat on his bones. I don’t reckon he’ll miss a set of pyjamas, do you?’ The man’s voice was warm and soft, unconcerned. The boy thought of how he had smiled at him in the grass, smiled down at the ruined body of his mother. ‘You can eat the food, lad. It’s safe.’

  Was it safe? The boy wasn’t sure. Hesitantly, he curled his hand around the glass of milk but didn’t pick it up. Food was a tease, a punishment, a myth.

  ‘How did you get those scars on your neck, Michael? The marks around your wrists?’

  The boy looked up. The man was still smiling, but the light from the big windows collected in his false eye, turning it into a flat piece of opaque glass. There was a clatter of claws against polished wood, and he knew that the big black dog was behind him again.

  ‘There’s always a family everyone whispers about, in every town,’ continued the man. He sounded faintly amused. ‘I know that better than most. A family that keeps its secrets, keeps to itself. Rumours and tales grow from those families, like ivy on a house, and most of the time the stories are just nasty gossip, a load of vicious nonsense from old women with too much time on their hands. And then, sometimes, the stories are true, aye, Michael? Something else I know a little about.’ He took a slow breath in through his nostrils. ‘You’re safe now, lad.’

  ‘I can’t stay here.’ It was the first complete sentence he’d said in months, and it felt strange in his mouth, alien. ‘They’ll come for me.’ He didn’t say who.

  The man’s smile widened.

  ‘Just do as I say, lad.’

  ‘They’ll come.’

  It was three whole days before they came.

  In that time, Michael had had four more baths – the smell of the prison cupboard seemed to hang around him – and he had slept in an old-fashioned room with big windows, filled with a blank, white autumnal sky. At night he kept the light on and slipped out of bed repeatedly to check that the door hadn’t been locked. He couldn’t keep it open, because he could see a sliver of stairs beyond it. During the day he had been allowed to wander the house, feet moving silently out of habit, and he quickly realized that the man was alone here, apart from the dog, and that the rooms seemed endless. Some of them were locked, which gave him a bad feeling in the pit of his stomach, but Michael turned his back on those doors and headed elsewhere. Sometimes, he would catch the big black dog watching him, an indistinct shape at the top of stairs or across the landing, and he would beckon to it, but the dog did nothing but grin wetly at him.

  When they came, Michael was in the room where he slept, his hands full of a pack of cards the man had given him. There was a crunch of boots against gravel and he knew, he knew immediately who it would be, and for a few dangerous seconds his eyelids flickered and his fingers went numb; he was suddenly close to passing out. But a sharp bark from the dog somewhere in the house acted like a slap, and instead he scrambled over to the window. A doorbell rang.

  His father, a bow-legged man with thinning black hair, was standing in front of the porch, but he was alone; no red coat against the gravel, no sharp white fingers. His sister wasn’t here. Michael leaned heavily against the sill, briefly too relieved to think or move, even though he knew that if his father spotted him in the window he would be dead. And then his father vanished from view, and a door slammed.

  There was some shouting. Michael thought of his mother’s body. They had left it in the lively grass, and he imagined her eyes filling up with rainwater, slugs tracing their delicate dance across her yellow smock. Eventually, he became aware that the voices had grown quieter, and without thinking too closely about what he was doing, he crept out onto the landing and peered down through the bannister struts. There was the man, his hands clasped behind his back as though he were admiring a painting, and there was his father. He was wearing a dirty blue rain mac, and he looked strangely small.

  Snatches of conversation drifted up the staircase towards him. You know as well as I do, and sordid business, and better left unsaid.

  Michael thought of other words: beast, dirty beast, animal, but when he looked up he saw that the dog was there, watching him.

  Eventually the door slammed again, and when he looked back his father was gone. The man spoke without moving, knowing somehow that Michael would hear.

  ‘You don’t have anything to worry about now, little wolf.’

  8

  When Heather stepped through into Nikki’s living room, she was pleased to see several bookcases rammed with books and a television so enormous it dominated one wall. The decor was soothing and pleasant and clearly chosen by someone without much interest in interior decorating. Heather paused by one small cabinet, smiling.

  ‘I remember these from your mum’s house. Is it genetic or something?’

  Nikki grimaced. The cabinet contained a little collection of pastel-coloured ceramic figures, including swans, shepherds, milk maids, and ladies with frothing dresses.

  ‘Don’t. Mum buys me a new one for every birthday and every Christmas. I don’t know what to do with them. Do you want a cup of tea?’

  ‘Go on then.’ She followed Nikki into the long kitchen at the back of the house, which smelled pleasingly of some recent spicy dinner. ‘How was school?’

  ‘Fine, the usual dramas.’ She was pouring hot water over teabags, fragrant steam filling the kitchen. ‘Are you okay? You sounded weird on the phone.’

  Heather opened her satchel and pulled out the biscuit tin. Now that she knew what was inside, it felt heavier, like she was carrying around a severed head rather than a bunch of letters. She opened the lid, already looking at the scrabbly handwriting with a sense of dread.

  ‘I found these letters in Mum’s attic, under a pile of old records.’

  ‘Letters? What sort of letters?’

  ‘Well, I … Maybe it’s better if you just have a look.’

  Nikki took the proffered bundle and began reading. Heather watched her face. As Nikki’s brows drew together in an expression of confusion, Heather got up and finished making the tea. When she came back to where Nikki stood at the worktop, her friend was holding the paper in her hand as if it might bite her.

  ‘Is this what I think it is?�
�

  Heather half laughed, although she felt very far from amused. ‘I know, right? I might have been a bit out of touch with my mum over the last few years, but this? This is a bit of a shock.’

  ‘Michael Reave. The Red Wolf.’ Nikki was shaking her head slightly, as though to clear it. ‘Heather, have you not heard the news?’

  ‘No? What do you mean?’ Heather blinked. Normally she was all over the news – since she laughingly still liked to refer to herself as a journalist, she took it as part of her job to keep up with current events – but for the last couple of days she had been, she realized now, avoiding the world. Listening to her mum’s old CDs, watching old movies. It was easier to do with no internet in the house.

  Nikki put the letters down and went back into the living room. She returned with a newspaper, which she held out to Heather. The headline read ‘THE RED WOLF STRIKES FROM WITHIN PRISON’, while the lead underneath stated: ‘Police are concerned a copycat may be at large’. Feeling oddly light, as though her head might float up to join the ceiling at any moment, Heather read on.

  ‘Are you fucking kidding me?’ she said eventually. Nikki, meanwhile, had got her laptop out and was reading rapidly through the same Wikipedia article Heather had seen. Her eyes had grown very wide.

  ‘Hev, this bloke was a monster. He used to arrange the pieces of these poor women’s bodies in these elaborate displays, all interlaced with plants and … bloody hell, I’m sure I’ve seen the CSI episode based on it. There were bits of their bodies they never found. They still think there are victims they don’t know about yet. Hev, did your mum know? Did she know what he was doing before he was caught? Do you think this could have anything to do with her, you know …’