The Girl by the River (12 page)

Life was good at The Pines, and he’d never regretted buying it. But detaching from his mother hadn’t worked out and, after months of stress and arguments, she’d finally agreed
to move in with them, into her own downstairs apartment and a square of garden. She had electricity and a bathroom with hot water, luxuries Annie had never experienced.

Earlier that day, Freddie had bought Kate a bouquet of a dozen fragrant red roses. It was sitting in a jar of water in Herbie’s office, and the two men had joked about not letting a single
speck of stone dust spoil those precious roses. Freddie was looking forward to going home and seeing Kate’s radiant smile when he gave them to her.

He allowed himself one brief stop on the best viewpoint high on the hills. He lit a fag and sat gazing across the Levels. Far below, a silver ribbon of water wound its way through the water
meadows. And it was then that he heard a cry. The cry of a child.

His skin began to prickle. His pulse quickened in the way it had done years ago in his youth, always just before he saw or heard something he wasn’t allowed to talk about. Forbidden fruit.
Fruit of the spirit. Don’t talk about it, boy. You’re a liar. A liar.

The air shimmered, and Freddie inhaled a lungful of smoke from the last of his fag. He stubbed it into the dashboard ashtray which was so crammed with dog ends that it wouldn’t close. He
wound the window down and got out, suddenly needing the reassuring turfy fragrance of the hillside. He walked a few strides over the grass, stepping between the ant hills, looking down at the pink
mats of wild thyme, scarlet pimpernel and blue scabious. Butterflies flitted over the flowers, bobbing like Lucy’s blonde curls did when she ran.

Freddie knew he should be working, but something drew him up to the skyline, to a spot where he and Kate had often sat. He tried to ignore the insistent cry in his heart, the relentless
shimmering of the air that announced the unseen presence of a spirit who wanted to talk to him.

He sat down on the skyline, and lit a second fag, the nicotine dulling his senses. He listened intently to the skylarks and the linnets, and the clack-clack of a hay-baler far below in the
fields, the sound of hammering from the village, the drone of a tiny aeroplane. He closed his eyes and put his hands over his ears. All the sounds in the world could not block this insistent voice.
He felt the touch of a hand, like a tulip brushing his shoulder. He smelled her perfume, honeysuckle and lavender. And she was there, clear as a painting, Granny Barcussy with her radiant,
two-toothed smile. In his difficult childhood she’d been his only friend. So why was he trying so hard to ignore her, while she was trying so hard to speak to him, to wrap him in the feel of
a hug that swung around his tired shoulders like soft velvet?

‘I gotta work,’ he said aloud. ‘Have to fetch another load from the quarry.’

He stood up, and allowed himself a final gaze at the blue-green landscape. Again that glint of water caught his eye. The cry came again. Tessa. It was Tessa. Those pale aqua eyes, appealing to
him, needing him. He knew beyond doubt that Tessa was in trouble. But then, Tessa was always in trouble. So why was it different today?

Freddie got back into the lorry, turned it round and headed down the winding hill, away from the quarry, and he drove more and more recklessly, the words of the gypsy haunting his thoughts,
‘I see a girl, a girl with pale blue eyes . . .’

DOGS WITH RED EYES

‘Don’t you DARE take those sandals off,’ Kate had said to Tessa in her ‘I must be obeyed’ voice. So when Tessa had reached the mill stream that
morning and realised the only way to follow it was to paddle in it, she had kept her sandals on. For a long time she stood in the water, watching it crinkling in the light, making nets of gold
flicker across the clay bed. The clay was different colours, ochre yellow in some places, grey in others, but mostly it was a pinky red, embedded with pebbles that made the water babble and gurgle.
Mesmerised, Tessa watched it turning her white socks into grubby dishrags, striped with skeins of green weed. Her new sandals filled with water like two sauce boats, her small feet sloshing around
in them. She had a blister on each heel from the hard new leather, and the ice cool water healed the fiery soreness. When she lifted her foot out of the water, a shoe-shaped cascade poured out,
glistening like crystal. Stamping was even more fun, raising shoe-shaped splashes of lemon-white spray.

Tessa had never been so ecstatically happy as she was now, by herself in the glittering mill stream. She felt the water was talking to her, and so were the creatures of the stream who stared at
her with the brightest, friendly eyes: the gold-skinned frog who hopped ahead of her, and lingered in the grass, staring at her, waiting for her to catch up; the dragonflies, visions of turquoise,
escorted her on wings like golden glass, flying ahead, pausing, watching her with complex eyes; the indigo scissor-like glint of the swallows who flew low over the water in front of her, snatching
a drink. They were leading her. All the magic creatures. Leading her into their world as if she were a giant they had befriended.

The way the creatures of the stream looked at her with undisguised curiosity and friendliness was nurturing to Tessa. It gave her a sense of belonging, a sense of unconditional acceptance.
People didn’t look at Tessa like that. Their eyes were accusing, puzzled or angry. Only her beloved dad, Freddie, looked at her with peaceful eyes, loving her, no matter what kind of mood she
was in.

The stream was leaving the water meadows now, winding into a copse of willow and poplar, the banks sculpted into mounds and hollows with carpets of cowslips and starry white stitchwort. Tessa
climbed out and picked a bunch of cowslips. She sat in a patch of sunshine, holding their fat pink stems and burying her face in the extravagant fragrance and velvet of the yellow and sage-green
blooms.
Friends, she thought, these flowers love me, they don’t tell me what to do
.

She felt inclined to stay there and go to sleep with her face covered in flowers. Once her mum had told her about an auntie, Auntie Ethie who had drowned in the Severn River – and how her
family had gone out in a boat and thrown flowers on the water in her memory. The flowers were to say they loved her.

Tessa stood up. She breathed in the perfume of the cowslips one last time, then threw them, one at a time, into the water and watched them twirling away like ballerinas. Little moments of
stillness, then wild dancing on the polished water. ‘In memory of Auntie Ethie,’ she said, and tears poured down her cheeks. It didn’t matter, because there was no one there to
tell her not to cry.

When the stream reached the road, it plunged into a stone tunnel, too low for Tessa to walk through. She dropped to her knees in the water, wetting the edge of her dress and the ends of her
plaits. In the cold of the tunnel she almost panicked when a pair of heavy Shire horses clopped overhead, pulling a hay cart that rumbled like thunder. She touched the stone ceiling and felt it
vibrating under her fingers.

It was a water vole with merry black eyes who led her through to the other side, his wiggling body trailing a wake of minute bubbles. She watched him swim out into the mysterious garden of the
mill, his back glistening as he swam across the deep dark pool.

Tessa hesitated. She wanted to find ‘the brimming river’ out there in the sunlight, leading to ‘forever’. Instead, confronting her was the polished black surface of the
mill pool. She watched some willow leaves floating with a few rose petals and one of her cowslips. At first they twirled slowly on the black surface, then vanished at speed over the roar of the
weir.

Ivor Stape was a reclusive old man with a secret even darker than the mill pool. His wife, it was rumoured, had left him long ago, and he ran the water mill on his own,
employing young boys who were too desperate for work to stand up to his bullying ways. No boy ever stayed longer than a month or so before leaving under a shadow of silence. He was fanatical about
his garden and kept a pair of basset hounds to patrol the property. Their bark was a fearsome sonorous baying, guaranteed to spook the most intrepid intruders.

Such a bark was intimidating but when magnified inside a tunnel it became heart-stoppingly loud, especially to a sensitive soul like Tessa. Now soaking wet, she had crawled to the exit where the
stream poured with the silence of oil into the black pool, and the few sparkles on the surface reflected in an oscillating lattice on the roof of the tunnel. She crouched in the water, peering into
a gloomy garden of heavy evergreens and sloping lawns. In her mind, Tessa was trying to guess the depth of the pool. She couldn’t swim. But maybe she could wade around the edge and get onto
the lawn. The garden was full of good hiding places. An eerie, birdless quiet hung there, punctuated only by the chug and whoosh of the great water wheel turning at the side wall of a house swathed
in Virginia creeper.

The howling bark of the dogs turned Tessa to stone. They charged along the bank of the pool to the tunnel and looked in at her. There was a moment when they both saw her there in the water and
the barking turned into a frenzy, echoing down the tunnel, a terrifying sound to a seven-year-old child. Tessa stared in horror at their eyes and thought they were red. Dogs with red eyes! Like the
dog with three heads in her fairy-tale book. Red eyes. Red jaws. Red like blood. A colour that terrified Tessa. It went right back to the moment she’d been born into a world of screaming
women and blood-soaked sheets.

She turned round and scrabbled to get back to the tranquillity of the water meadows. Her heartbeat shook her right to the core, so fast, so urgent she thought she was going to die. The bed of
the stream was slippery in the tunnel and now she was going against the current. The water rushed and swirled towards her, filling her cotton dress, her knickers and socks. In her panic, she even
swallowed some of it, gasping, breathing it in and coughing it out again. Shivering from the chill of the sunless tunnel, she paused to look back at the dogs, and saw they had gone. Where were
they? She listened and heard the scuffle of their paws as they raced across the road above. They had anticipated her planned escape, and seconds later they were both at the other end of the tunnel,
barking furiously and bouncing up and down.

Tessa heard herself screaming at them. Her hands clawed at stones embedded in the stream bed, hurling them out at the dogs, the stones ricocheting off the walls. ‘Get off me,’ she
howled. ‘Leave me alone.’

Returning to the black mill pool seemed to be her only option. Shivering violently, she turned round again.

And there, leering at her from the bank of the pool, was a man who looked like a troll.

‘Well, well, well,’ muttered Ivor Stape. ‘God has sent me a water baby.’ And he rubbed his fleshy red hands together and smiled.

As the sun mellowed towards evening and bars of saffron light stretched across the water meadows, the search for Tessa became ominous. The people of Monterose gathered at the
iron gates of the school, grim-faced, a few helmeted policemen among them. Some carried torches or had dogs on leads, the women in dresses and wellies, the men in caps and work-worn jackets. They
set off in silence, fanning out across the fields and woods, their eyes searching the ground, as instructed by the police, for any small sign of Tessa; a piece of ribbon, or a hanky, or a footstep,
or a thread ripped from the blue and white cotton dress she’d been wearing.

Annie had never seen Kate in such a state, her lovely rosy face pale as marble and covered in tears. Kate and Lexi had walked miles through the woods and fields, searching hay barns and hedges,
and places where Tessa and Lucy had played. The railway embankment was a favourite haunt of theirs, a wonderland of wild strawberries and tall pink fireweed growing in the beds of cinder from years
of steam trains.

Kate had told them never to go on the railway lines, and she believed they wouldn’t. Yet this afternoon she and Lexi had climbed up there and stood looking hopelessly at the long cold
curve of the rails. It was too awful to contemplate.

Neither of them had a watch, but relied on the chimes of the church clock. When it struck six, Kate felt they should go home. They’d no way of knowing if Tessa had been found. She might be
there, waiting for her mum. With that thought, Kate had hurried home through the hot afternoon, feeling giddy and light-headed. She’d had nothing to eat or drink for hours and her delicious
tea was untouched on the table. Lexi had turned out to be a good and sensible friend in a time of trouble. She’d sent Susan and the children home with Tarquin to sort out the horses. Lexi had
insisted on staying. She’d stuck with Kate, searching and shouting Tessa’s name, trying to reassure her that all would be well. ‘She’ll be there waiting for us, you’ll
see,’ she’d said repeatedly.

The worst moment had been arriving home and finding no Tessa, and no Freddie either. Kate was surprised. She knew Freddie wanted to avoid the tea party, but he hadn’t said anything about
working late. She clung to the idea that Tessa might have gone to find her daddy. Even now he might be bringing her home.

It was Lexi who insisted on telling the police. They came to the house and interviewed the distraught Kate. It was horribly familiar. The police interview. The beginning of the search. The
aching, empty hours of waiting. Just as it had been when Ethie went missing.

‘You MUST remain here, Mrs Barcussy,’ the police had insisted. ‘It’s important for Tessa. When she is found – and we WILL find her – she’ll want her mum
waiting at home.’

So Kate stood in the garden in the rose-scented evening, watching the road until the welcome sight of Freddie’s lorry came into view. She watched him swing his long legs down from the cab.
Then he turned and reached inside, backing out again with a bouquet of red roses. He came to her smiling, his blue eyes twinkling. ‘Happy anniversary, dear.’

‘Oh Freddie –’ Kate collapsed into his arms and wept. She couldn’t speak.