The Retreat(26)

‘Oh, shut up. What if Julia’s had an accident? You’re going to feel pretty stupid if they find her lying unconscious in her room.’

He grunted. ‘She’s probably gone out.’

Perhaps it was because I was worried about Julia, and my head was still throbbing so I was irritable, but I snapped, ‘While we’re on the subject of you being a massive dickhead, what’s going on with you and Suzi? It’s obvious you fancy her.’

He was speechless.

‘You’re married, aren’t you? Do you love your wife? Do you value your relationship? Maybe you should appreciate what you’ve got.’

Max’s mouth was still flapping when Suzi and Karen reappeared. ‘She’s not up there,’ Suzi said.

‘Her room was kind of a mess,’ Karen added in a quiet voice.

‘Does anyone have her mobile number?’ I asked.

We all looked at each other. The website only listed the landline number for the retreat.

‘I didn’t see her before I came to the pub,’ I said.

‘Me neither,’ Karen responded, and the others murmured in agreement.

I went to the front window and peered into the darkness. Julia’s car was parked in its usual spot. Then I noticed something. ‘There’s light coming from the cottage.’

‘It looks like candlelight,’ Suzi said.

She was right. The light was yellow and weak, flickering behind a downstairs window.

‘Come on then,’ Max said, heading for the front door.

I stopped him. ‘No, you wait here. The last thing we want is for you to go charging in there complaining about your empty belly. One of the women should go.’

‘How sexist,’ Max protested.

‘Shut up, Max,’ said Karen. She and Suzi exchanged a glance. Karen had gone pale. ‘I don’t know if I feel brave enough to go,’ she said. ‘It’s creepy. What if she’s . . . dead or something? I couldn’t cope with finding her body.’

‘Dead? What makes you—’ I sighed. ‘All right. I’ll go.’

As I crossed the garden, Karen’s words rang in my ears. What on earth made her think Julia might be dead? It was stupid. But by the time I reached the cottage I was bracing myself to find something awful. In my increasingly fevered imagination, Julia had committed suicide, unable to cope with the loss of her daughter any longer. I would find her hanging from a beam, or slumped on the floor with an empty bottle of pills beside her.

I didn’t think I’d be able to cope with finding another dead body. Especially not Julia’s.

‘Julia?’ I said as I opened the front door. ‘Are you there?’

No response.

The candlelight was coming from the little dining room next to the kitchen. The door was shut. I tapped at it lightly and said her name again. Still no answer.

I went in.

It was almost dark in the room. Julia sat at the dining table. In front of her was a cake, covered with lit candles. She didn’t look up when I entered, just continued to stare at the cake. The yellow light touched the tear tracks on her cheeks.

‘Julia,’ I said. I was whispering. ‘Are you all right?’

‘She was here,’ she said.

‘Who?’

She lifted her face towards me. ‘Lily.’

I didn’t know what to say. I pulled a chair out from the table, the scrape on the stone floor making me wince, and sat beside her. It was bitterly cold in the room but Julia seemed oblivious to it.

‘It’s her birthday today,’ she said. ‘She’s eleven. She was so looking forward to it – we promised when she turned eleven she could have her ears pierced.’

I counted the eleven candles on the cake. It was round, with pink frosting. Lily’s name had been written on the surface in white icing.

‘She grew out of pink years ago,’ Julia said. ‘But it still makes me think of her. When she was little.’

‘What did you mean when you said she was here?’ I asked, still speaking quietly.

She wasn’t looking at me any more; she stared at the cake, at the candles, the tiny flames reflected in her eyes. ‘I brought this cake over here because . . . I thought it would be private. Just me and her. I was going to light the candles, sing “Happy Birthday”, cut the cake. Just spend some time alone, thinking about her, you know?’

I nodded.

‘I lit the candles then realised I didn’t have a knife. There aren’t any knives in the kitchen here so I went back to the house to get one. And when I got back, the candles had been blown out.’ She looked at me. There was yearning in that look. A yearning for it to be true. To be believed. But my first thought was that it must have been the wind.

She read my mind. ‘There’s no wind in this room. No breeze. She was here. She came to blow out her candles.’

‘You mean . . .’ I could hardly bring myself to complete the sentence. ‘You mean her ghost?’

It was as if I’d slapped her. ‘She’s not dead!’

The sudden rise in volume, the raw emotion in her voice, made me flinch. As if I’d been slapped. And then she started to cry – great, rasping sobs, her whole body shaking as she twisted her hands together and whispered, between gasps, ‘She’s alive, she’s alive, she’s alive.’