Weyward(98)

She reached East Finchley, where her nephew and his family lived, just before 8 a.m. No one answered the door when she rang the bell.

Violet got back in the car, for the first time wondering if it hadn’t been a little mad, tearing across the country like this. But then she thought of the cross under the sycamore. She had already lost her daughter. Kate was her second chance – she couldn’t let anything happen to her.

Where were they? It was a Thursday. Of course – on the way to school.

She parked near the house and sent the crow ahead, to be her eyes and ears in the sky. Her heart thudded with relief when the bird found her nephew and his little girl a few streets away, approaching a zebra crossing. But then she saw a car turning onto the street and ice brushed her spine.

It was the same red car from her dream.

Henry and Kate were already crossing the road. The car was getting closer.

Violet had to do something.

She closed her eyes, focusing on the gold glint she’d discovered inside herself, all those years ago.

As the crow called to her great-niece, Violet felt its cry in every beat of her heart, in every cell. Her only hope was that Kate did, too. She had to pull her away from that car, from the cruel-faced man she was certain was inside.

At first it seemed like it would work. The girl stopped and turned, gazing at the trees overhanging the road. But the car wasn’t slowing down.

Get off the road. Hurry!

The crow took flight, and Violet saw Henry run back to his daughter. She saw him shout, then shove Kate out of the way. Rubber sang on metal as the driver hit the brakes.

But it was too late.

The sun lit on Henry’s face for one brief moment, before his body crumpled underneath the car. The trees and the road swam together, a blur of green, white and red.

After the peal of the sirens had died away, Violet started the engine and drove back to Cumbria. For the whole journey back, the accident played itself across her vision, again and again. Henry, risking his life to keep his daughter safe.

He was a good man, not like Violet’s own father.

Even if Violet hadn’t been there, he would have done anything to defend his child. He would have kept her away from the cruel-faced man. But Violet had never imagined such a possibility, that a father could be capable of such love.

So she interfered, and in trying to save Kate, had instead put Henry in harm’s way.

And now he was dead.

A strange, animal keening filled her ears. It took her a moment to realise that it was the sound of her own weeping.

Violet didn’t go to Henry’s funeral. How could she face his wife and daughter, after what she had done?

The years rolled on, and it was easier not to put pen to paper, not to pick up the phone. Violet comforted herself by picturing her great-niece growing up. She imagined the skinny child maturing into a young woman, with the dark hair and glittering eyes of her forebears. A strong young woman, Violet told herself, in spite of her loss – reaching for life the way a plant reaches for the sun.

She’ll be eleven now, starting secondary school.

Eighteen. Headed to university. Science, perhaps, like me. Or English, if she likes to read.

She still dreamed of the cruel-faced man, the driver of the car. Perhaps, she told herself, she really had spared the girl a fate worse than the loss of her father. Perhaps she had been right to intervene.

Henry had loved his daughter. Maybe he’d have understood what Violet had done.

Recently, Violet had had the disturbing realisation that she was old. In fact – both her parents having died relatively young – she was the oldest person she’d ever known. (Apart, of course, from Frederick. He really was like a cockroach clinging to the underside of a rock.) Her skin and muscles seemed to be loosening from her bones, preparing to abandon ship. Before falling asleep each night, in that strange half-light between waking and dreaming, she had begun to wonder if she would still be there come morning.

Like a once bright fire burning to embers, her life was coming to an end.

She was running out of time to see her great-niece.

She’d hired a private investigator to track Kate down. He’d found an address, and Violet had been so thrilled that she’d braved the long drive down to London the next day. It was raining, and as the countryside passed in a green blur, her heart ached at the thought of a similar journey made so many years before.

But this would be different. A happy occasion.

She imagined embracing her great-niece, admiring the life she’d created. (A brilliant career, a beautiful home – filled with plants and animals, perhaps children, a kind man to share her bed. Two crickets, singing in harmony.) Sunshine broke through the clouds, making crystals of the raindrops on her windscreen. She touched the locket under her shirt and her heart swelled.

But her excitement faltered as she pulled up outside Kate’s address. A block of flats.

Later, Violet would pinpoint this as the moment she knew something was very wrong. How could Kate be happy in this soot-stained place, the air warm with rubbish and exhaust? There wasn’t a single note of birdsong, a single blade of grass.

But she hobbled carefully out of the car, forcing a smile.

A happy occasion.

‘Hello – is Kate here?’ There was something familiar about the man who answered the door. He wore an expensive-looking bathrobe, and Violet flushed at the realisation that she’d interrupted her great-niece on a Sunday. Was this man her husband, boyfriend? She looked at him more closely. His hair was a tawny sort of gold, rather like a lion’s pelt. His narrowed eyes were faintly pink, as if he’d had too much to drink the previous evening.