The Things You Didn't See(7)
Despite the passage of time, she didn’t need to look at a map. Her internal navigation knew this journey as though she’d travelled it every day of the twenty years she’d kept away. After leaving the A14, the minor road to the outlying villages was a tunnel of trees, oak and sycamore, their leaves burnt and brittle, hanging from black skeletal branches. On and on she drove, down the familiar twisting lanes, then a sudden turn and a change in light, like coming up for air. A cheery farm shop on the left – it hadn’t been here back then – advertising bread and local milk. Then a sign announced Kenley.
Kenley village was still just one row of houses, terraces built for farm labourers way back when. The local pub was in need of a lick of paint, as was the red-brick school, its navy-painted door and eaves peeling with neglect. When her family had lived here, the American soldiers at the base would volunteer to do tasks like this: good deeds in the community to ease the disquiet of the locals, putting up with a military base in their midst. But in the eighties the Cold War thawed, the base was run by a skeleton of staff through the nineties and closed completely after the invasion of Iraq; it became a ghost town. Today the playground lay empty. Half-term, Holly remembered, school was out for the week, although there were no children on the street either. Too early. And the headmaster wouldn’t let them play on school premises during holidays, so they’d be left to roam the fields and woods nearby.
There was just one new addition, just one sign of change in the twenty years she’d been gone – a six-foot banner, hung across the front of the school building, emblazoned in black capitals with the message: HANDS OFF OUR COUNTRYSIDE!
Once she was through the village, the landscape turned barren. Here, the road was flanked by flat fields of turned earth with dirty pigs snuffling around domed metal huts. She turned down Innocence Lane. She’d always known she’d have to return one day, but still she didn’t feel ready.
The hedgerows were untended and bleached by the sun with singed grasses and wires of ivy. Beyond, fields sprawled, stubbly with cut corn. When they were younger, she and Jamie had played here until they were spotted and shouted away by the farm workers. Before. Rooks jumped on the ashy white soil and cawed to each other in warning, rabbits darted around the muddy mounds. This stretch of Suffolk was remote – not an area a tourist would simply happen upon, so the perfect spot for a controversial American airbase, now derelict. In the distance, the perimeter fence still stood intact, but grass grew through the cracks on the sidewalk and the roads led to abandoned homes. The Yanks had gone home. Now this was a site of controversy and debate, given the lack of houses locally, but no one wanted to live out here: no shops, no employment. It was a problem. Something had to be done with the place.
A few hundred yards further down the lane came a wooden sign that hadn’t been there before. It had a fat pink sow painted alongside a plump red hen and cheery script with the name INNOCENCE FARM. Staked into the mud beside it was a long banner, the twin of the one outside the schoolhouse: HANDS OFF OUR COUNTRYSIDE!
An uneven track, better suited to a tractor than her Fiat, eventually opened onto a gravelled drive that must once have been grand. In the middle was a stone fountain, the pump long since broken, judging by the mossy stone beneath. A squad car and an ambulance were already parked on the gravel, the police had secured the scene and Jon and another member of the team would be inside, expecting her.
There was the black skeletal barn that had both drawn and repelled her so much when she was a child. She looked away, unable to stand the memory. Instead, she looked up at the farmhouse, solid and square with its proud red-brick facade, dark glassy eyes for windows. A building that had seen generations of people come and go, and knew it would outlast them all. Holly pulled her Fiat in beside the ambulance, switched the engine off and left the safety of her small car.
Inside the farmhouse, Holly’s senses picked up the faint metallic tang of gunshot, and it spun her back two decades. She followed the scent, past the grand entrance with its wide staircase to the back of the house, where, in a dimly lit hallway, two of her colleagues were working to save a woman’s life.
A few yards away was a pale, stocky man with slate-grey hair – Hector Hawke, the farmer who had shouted her off his land so many times. Now, he lay slumped on the floor, one hand cupped to his chest, in a posture of defeat. Holly felt an ache along her left arm, a painful tingling in her fingers that mirrored his pain, as a black spaniel ran in crazy circles around him.
Seated on the third step, a confused expression on her face, was a woman in her thirties, who Holly hadn’t seen in twenty years. Cassandra Hawke had attended the Victorian primary school, just like Holly, but the four-year age gap was too wide for them to have been friends. Besides, their worlds were radically different. Cassandra was the posh girl who lived in the haunted house, beautiful and aloof. She had been a figure of fascination to Holly, but as unapproachable as the Queen of England. Her cheeks were puffy from crying, and Holly felt her own cheeks dampen and swell. Despite this, the woman was as beautiful as ever, a sheath of golden hair falling to her shoulders. Except that the tips were matted with blood, as were her hands.
‘Holly,’ called Jon, suddenly noticing her, ‘come over here and make yourself useful, please.’
4
Cassandra
It takes a moment, then I differentiate the uniforms around me: the bottle-green uniform of the paramedics, a man and a woman; the navy blue of a police officer who wears white overshoes to check upstairs and then pulls on blue gloves to remove the rifle.