The Things You Didn't See(19)

‘Now, stop – I’m warning you!’ Dad’s face bunches up like a red fist. ‘No one needs you to play psychologist, girl. Maya was depressed about the farm. It got too much for her. End of story.’

Dad and Daniel both watch me as if I need to be kept in check. I try to find some compassion in Dad’s eyes but can’t.

No, I don’t believe you shot yourself. And I need to find out who did.





9

Holly

Holly woke earlier than she wanted, unused as she was to sharing a bed. The world outside was dark and quiet, except for the occasional sound of letterboxes being rapped as the newspaper boy worked his way along the flats, pushing thick Sunday papers through doors. But not hers – she avoided lurid stories and, thanks to her synaesthesia, red-tops could make her feel sick on a headline.

Beside her, Leif slept on, his handsome face completely relaxed, blond fringe fallen to one side, his body relaxed and warm. Imprinted on him were the marks of the night before: his lips were slightly swollen from their kissing and there was a pink mark on his shoulder from where her hand had pressed against him as they slept. Seeing this triggered the recent memory of sensual touch, and Holly experienced again the urgent need to be close to him. It wasn’t just sex. Leif stimulated in her a deep sense of calm, the colour yellow and the taste of honey. Not that she’d tell him this: he’d think she was crazy.

As she turned away from Leif, Holly’s brain clicked into another channel and replayed the morbid memory of Maya Hawke’s bruised face, her narrow body under that white sheet. She couldn’t conceive that the woman had done it to herself – her instinct was that Cass was right, and the violence had been inflicted by another hand. She couldn’t stop seeing Maya’s dark hair matted with blood. Her own scalp ached in sympathy.

Innocence Farm, a place she had refused to think about in two decades, was now back in her head. If only I hadn’t run away that night, if I’d stopped to help . . . Holly stopped her irrational thought: she had been a child, just eight years old and powerless. Now she was grown, she believed her synaesthesia was her brain’s way of ensuring she wouldn’t run away again. And now it was pictures of Maya prodding her to get up, to take action, to do something.

Holly kissed the sleeping man goodbye, and with a tug of regret returned to her own flat for a quick cool shower. She washed Leif ’s scent, the salty tang of sex, from her skin and dressed quickly. Putting on her green paramedic’s uniform always soothed her. Glancing at the window and seeing grey marbled clouds, she reached for a raincoat.

Closing her front door, Holly checked for activity from Leif ’s flat, but there were still no lights on. He had a lazy Sunday ahead, but she had work to do. The November air stole the breath from her lungs. She pulled her coat more tightly around her and thought about her parents in America. In November, they always drove to Lake Tahoe for the start of the ski season, a trip her brother James joined them on. This year he’d be taking his Bostonian girlfriend Kaitlin Burgess, whom Holly had met on her last visit. Kaitlin was as beautiful as she was accomplished; a Masters graduate, she developed exercise programmes for varsity athletes. Full of pep and enthusiasm as only Americans can be, Jamie adored her. They’d recently bought a golden retriever puppy, and Holly predicted babies would soon follow.

Thinking of her brother brought back other memories, unwelcome ones. They had been close once, when they were younger and could play the same games. But then he became distant, he resented her hanging around and would spend his weekends shooting his air rifle or tramping through the woods with Carl. There was no space for her in his life and after that Halloween, they never hung around together again. She had never asked him what he thought had really happened that night. When she was eight, she believed he had killed a ghost, but now she remembered the screams as being all too human.

How could she ask Jamie now, when they were half a world apart and it was twenty years in the past?

Thanksgiving was just three weeks away, and in California her family would celebrate it without Holly. It was a festival their father insisted was important, even when they were living on the airbase in Kenley, where a patch of Suffolk soil had been turned into a quasi-America with a bowling alley and a two-aisle Walmart. Her mother, Ipswich born and bred, had been quick to adopt his traditions since she had so few of her own. She had embraced America with the gusto of the newly converted, as had Jamie. They had exchanged Suffolk for the sun of California and never once looked back. Her family’s life in America glowed with success, yet Holly was forever stuck back here, in Suffolk. She was just eighteen when the airbase closed and her father was re-posted to Iraq, his final stint before taking early retirement. She, along with her mother and Jamie, had moved to California. Jamie had excelled at college, made friends quickly. Her mother had made a home for them, never once looking back. Only Holly had felt that she didn’t belong and inevitably Suffolk had pulled her back with so much unfinished business.

Now Innocence Farm once again loomed into her life.

She arrived at the hospital an hour earlier than her shift began, and lied to herself that it was so she could get ahead of the assignment she needed to write before Christmas – a case study she had yet to think about that required her to focus on a disorder or disease of her choosing. But instead of going to the library, she walked into the Garrett Anderson Centre, flashed her paramedic ID and told the ward sister she was doing a follow-up from the call-out on Maya Hawke. But in truth, it was Cassandra whom Holly was thinking about; the vision of her sitting on the step with her blood-tinged hair was imprinted in Holly’s brain. She paused outside Maya’s room, taking a slow breath as she erased the distracting image.