How I Wonder What You Are Read online

  ‘Don’t tell me, he’s got two willies.’ She toasted me with her glass.

  ‘Shut up about him for a moment, will you? This has nothing to do with the vanishing naked guy. This is about me. Last night I was looking out of the window and I saw these … lights. In the sky, I mean, not in the village – I might be a bit mental but I think even I would know if I was looking at house lights. These were … twinkly. Colourful.’ Disturbing.

  Caro shrugged again. ‘Could be anything. Chinese lanterns, lasers if they were having a disco in Pickering – do people still say “disco”? Or maybe …’ she drew her eyebrows down and hunched her shoulders, curling the fingers of the hand not holding her glass into witches’ claws, ‘… maybe you saw the Alice Lights.’

  I sighed. ‘I know I’m going to regret asking this but what are the Alice Lights?’ I felt a lot better now that I’d put the subject out into the open. There had been something otherworldly and ethereal about those pinpricks of illumination in the sky, but now Caro had possession of the facts they’d lost the unearthly aura they’d had in my head. Caro was so ‘down to earth’ that she was practically magma.

  ‘Nothing. Stupid stuff that my dad used to make up. I remember him saying something about lights in the sky being the Alice Lights.’ She swigged another mouthful of the wine with a healthy disregard for early morning starts. ‘Like I said, this place is all ghouls shrieking and headless women walking and strange black shadows that move when you’re not looking at them.’ She wiggled her eyebrows. Especially round at Mr Patterdale’s old place.’

  ‘Right, that does it.’ I put my glass down heavily. ‘I’ll go round there tomorrow. When it’s light. And the sun is shining. I’ll be the one carrying a fully-loaded crucifix, two Bibles and a shotgun. He can manage without his wallet until then. After all, what’s he going to use it for? The shop’s closed until the morning and I really don’t think he’ll be doing any Internet shopping, not with our wretched broadband connection out here.’

  ‘Not even sure Howe End has electricity.’ Caro got up and peered in a cupboard, returning with crisps. ‘Mr Patterdale was a bit old school.’

  ‘Having no electricity isn’t “old school”, it’s practically workhouse!’

  Caro tore open the crisp bag and stared at the wallet that was lying innocently on the table. ‘Have you looked inside?’ She poked it with a forefinger. ‘To check that he isn’t a multimillionaire?’

  ‘I looked when he asked me to. When he couldn’t remember his name.’

  She made a face. ‘Oh. That kind of unconsciousness. You sure you don’t want me to come with you to give it back?’

  ‘I’m only going to shove it through the letterbox. I’m not going to enter a debate.’

  ‘So, what’s he got in here?’ Before I could stop her Caro had picked up the wallet and tipped its contents onto the table. ‘Blimey. She’s a bit tasty.’

  In a transparent section at the front was a photo of a woman lying in a deckchair, wearing an enormous sun hat and a bikini. She was slim and pretty, head turned towards the photographer to show a wide, appealing grin.

  ‘He’s obviously got an eye for the girls. Funny, could have sworn he was far too cute to be straight.’ She flicked through the things that had fallen out. ‘Pretty girlfriend, plenty of credit cards, one bank card, a driver’s licence … and half a packet of Prozac.’

  ‘I don’t think we should be going through his things, Caro.’

  ‘Why not? He must have found out that he’s lost it by now, and known exactly where it was, if he asked you to check it out. Hasn’t been back to pick it up, has he? He’ll have to take his chances that we’re not a couple of international Internet fraudsters hell bent on squeezing his cards until they squeak.’ She held up a platinum American Express card. ‘Mind you,’ she said thoughtfully, ‘the feed bill is due, and China could do with a new set of shoes all round.’

  I snatched the card from her fingers. ‘Stop it. I’ll take it back tomorrow.’

  ‘Good. And if the whoo-whoos come to get you, I’ll be in York.’ She let me tuck all the receipts, cards and pills back into the wallet. ‘In York, no one can hear you scream.’

  ‘No ghosts,’ I said firmly, after all I had to walk back across the road in the dark to get home. ‘I don’t believe in anything that I can’t personally poke in the eye.’

  ‘Well, it’s time you did some kind of poking.’ Caro divided the last of the bottle between our two glasses, erring slightly in favour of her own. ‘Even I get more success than you do, and I’m nearly ninety and completely without any favourable features at all.’

  ‘Liar.’ Caro was thirty-eight, with a boyish figure and a laugh that could stun pigs. ‘I hope you’re not suggesting that I start making eyes at a tramp squatting in a deserted house with no mod cons.’

  ‘An attractive tramp, though. And he’s a doctor.’ She flicked the wallet.

  ‘No thanks.’

  Caro’s eyes were suddenly serious. ‘It’s not good for you, Moll, being hidden away here. I mean, I know you want to be hidden but … eighteen months? Don’t you think you’ve let long enough go by now? Isn’t it time you stopped locking yourself away here and got out and found yourself a real job? Met some real people?’

  ‘I’m going home. Before you persuade me to sit here all night and I end up taking Stan out tomorrow with a hangover from hell.’

  Caro waved me towards the door. As I left, her cry of ‘You can run, but you can’t hide!’ followed me out and across the narrow potholed road that separated Caro’s old farmhouse from the row of cottages where I lived.

  But she was wrong. I could both run and hide. And I had.

  Chapter Four

  Phinn woke slowly, not so much to a world of hurt, more a universe of agony. His back ached and his body felt as though a field of virulent nettles had risen up against him. Everything stung, throbbed or twinged. He let out a sigh and lay back on the inflatable air bed, which had lost a considerable amount of inflation during the night and now formed a kind of plastic skin between him and the floorboards.

  A knife blade of sunlight had inserted itself between the ragged curtains and the illumination it provided let him see the dust lying thickly on the window, the cobwebs that adorned the ceiling like grubby tinsel and the mouse droppings that condimented the floor and over which he’d tiptoed reluctantly on his way to bed. Hell. He sighed, and even that hurt.

  He’d been hoping that the whole Riverdale thing had been a dream, that he’d wake up back in the flat in Bristol with the king-size bed, the carpets and the clutter. To think he’d once wanted minimalism, bare space, that he and Suze had fought many of their lesser squabbles over her inability to stop collecting and his unbending desire for clear floors.

  Suze. Even the memory of the name squeezed his heart. Less now than it had; time – as everyone repeatedly told him – was a healer. But he’d discovered that it was an inept nurse, sticking plasters over wounds that ripped open anew without warning, leaving him bleeding all his hope for a future into the dark.

  With another sigh that made his ribs click, Phinn rolled over, reluctantly climbed out from underneath the duvet, and began to get dressed, sniffing as he went. Damp. Definitely damp. The house seemed to suck the moisture from the air and deposit it straight into any fabric that he’d brought with him. His jeans smelled mildewed after minutes on any floor and all his T-shirts were turning mottled. But better than the flat as he remembered it, would always remember it, with the silence and the half-packed suitcases.

  Yawning and scratching idly at his chest, he made his way down the creaky staircase and into the kitchen, where he’d left the primus and a loaf of bread, if it wasn’t already growing a lawn of mould, feeling the need for coffee writhing through him. Coffee. Proof that intelligent life existed on this planet. Licking his lips he reached a hand to the corner cupboard and jumped several feet into the air when the kettle was pushed into his hand.

  ‘What the—’

&n
bsp; ‘Keep your PhD on, you four-eyed twat,’ the blonde-haired visitation said, leaning back against the unlit iron range. ‘What, didn’t you think I might come looking for you? Shove the kettle on, some of us have been up all night with inadequate GPS trying to find this place.’

  With the feeling that he was moving through a dream, Phinn lit the primus and complied.

  * * *

  Cautiously, I turned off the main village street and into the driveway of Howe End. The marks of tractor wheels had bitten deeply into the mud and half-hearted gravel, churning it into an almost impassable Somme of high-sided ruts and stagnant pools and my jodhpur boots only came up to my ankles. I tiptoed over the highest peaks, trying to avoid breaking the surface crust and being plunged into depths of generational frog-hatcheries.

  I’d never been here before. Never needed to. Howe End had been the home of Mr Patterdale, a semi-reclusive old farmer who’d somehow managed to persuade the truculent owners of the village shop to deliver his groceries and had only occasionally been seen from a distance, pottering around his sizeable garden. He’d waved to me once when I’d cantered by on the ridge that overlooked the house, but since I’d been rather afraid that I was trespassing and that he was simply waving to warn me off his land, I’d not waved back and felt rather bad when I’d found out that he’d died the following week.

  The house was impressive, if your tastes ran to the shambling Gothic, but in this early spring sunshine, with the mellow walls and creeper-adorned frontage, it looked attractively Homes & Gardens-ish. A few windows held remnants of curtains, wisping across dark spaces like coy eyelashes as I crept under cover of some overgrown blackcurrant bushes towards the front door.

  A blackbird’s panicked flight made me jump and I fled the final yards to the door. The area where I would have expected normal domesticity, such as a washing line or outdoor furniture, was crowded with just-leafed elder which meant that I couldn’t see the front door until I was almost at it, and then found that it was contained within a deep porch, edged with stone seating like a church coffin-gate. I entered the forbidding gloom and bent to grope for the letterbox, wallet held out ready to push through as soon as I found it.

  I’d just located the hinge end and was fumbling for the flap when the door opened and I was staring at the knees of someone wearing jeans.

  ‘It appears to be a hunched woman offering us money,’ the jeans-wearer called back over his shoulder. ‘Yorkshire is clearly far more friendly than I’d thought.’

  ‘Shut up, Link.’ Phinn Baxter’s voice travelled from somewhere close by, and I straightened with as much dignity as I could manage.

  ‘I’ve come to return your wallet.’

  Link, a chunky man with hair so blond that it made him look prematurely grey, stood back and waved an arm in invitation. ‘The master will see you now.’ He bowed as I passed him and then winked and whispered, ‘Nice arse.’

  ‘I’ve … I’m here to bring this.’ I advanced into the deeper gloom of the house, holding out the wallet as though to ward off a financially motivated supernatural attack. ‘You left it yesterday.’ I was ignoring the arse comment as hard as I could, but had become very conscious that Link was following right behind me as I walked in.

  Phinn was standing in an enormous room where the floor was made up of huge slabs like gravestones and the low ceiling bore beams covered with hooks. It was dark after the brightness of outside and I could only make out his outline, although my nose was compensating for my diminished sight by giving me the whole olfactory experience of mouldy dust with just a hint of territorial tomcat and a top note of sour milk.

  I blinked a couple of times and his shape gradually resolved to reveal that he was leaning against the wall with his arms folded. He was taller than he’d looked horizontally, and more austere; dressed all in black that made him look as though he’d draped himself in shadows. I stopped, and said without thinking, ‘You look really different with your clothes on.’

  Behind me Link snorted like Stan.

  ‘Right. Yeah, thanks a lot.’ Phinn pushed off the wall and came over. ‘And thanks for the wallet. I’d forgotten about that.’

  There was an impasse during which I could hear Link stifling laughter. ‘Right. I’ll be off then,’ I said, performing a tricky turn so as not to walk slap into his chest. ‘I’ll just … yes. Right.’

  ‘Oh for God’s sake, Baxter, you can’t let her leave without at least offering coffee.’ Link moved over to where a tiny camping stove was supporting an old-fashioned kettle. ‘Come on, man, you’ve got a woman in here! Stage one of your plan to prevent an overdeveloped right arm and cellophane bedsheets!’ He pulled a set of mugs from a cupboard. ‘Although, if she’s already seen you starkers, I reckon you’ve got up as far as stage five, with a possible option on stages six through to nine.’

  ‘Ignore him,’ Phinn said with a sigh, taking the wallet from me and pushing it straight into his back pocket. ‘God knows, I try to.’ The light from the little window was reflecting on his glasses so I couldn’t see his eyes, but there seemed to be a touch of humour in his voice.

  ‘But I’m like a movie zombie.’ Link poured water, which looked to be hot rather than boiling, into mugs and passed me one. ‘I just won’t lie down and die. There’s no milk, by the way, it went off. Rather like Baxter.’ He shot a meaningful glance at Phinn, who was back to leaning against the wall again.

  ‘Look, Link—’

  I wrinkled my nose. ‘How come you can’t believe in a place called Riverdale, which happens to be a dale with a river in it, and yet you’ve got a friend called Link?’

  ‘Pure bad luck on my part.’ Phinn sipped at his coffee, grimaced and put the mug down on a stone slab.

  ‘There is a long and interesting history to my name.’ Link took the final mug and began drinking from it without any kind of acknowledgement of the awfulness of its contents. ‘And one day I shall explain it to you.’

  ‘It’s a character in a video game.’

  ‘Shut up, man, I’m trying to build a sense of allure and mystery. All right, maybe it’s not that long and interesting but I’m trying to engage in social chit-chat here, people, come on, help me out. Don’t you two ever talk?’

  ‘We only met yesterday.’ I sipped my coffee. It was lukewarm and bitter, rather like the reception I’d got from Phinn.

  ‘Wow. And you’ve got his clothes off already? That is impressive.’ Link toasted me with his mug.

  ‘It wasn’t like that.’ Phinn came to my conversational rescue. ‘Molly found me up on the moors. I was … ah, I’d … had a bit of an episode.’

  Link’s mouth twisted. ‘What the hell is it with you? Are you determined to screw up every single thing you touch right now?’

  ‘I wanted … look, never mind, this isn’t the time and place for this discussion.’ Phinn rolled his eyes in my direction, clearly trying to indicate that he didn’t want to talk with me in the room. Which was fine, because with the way these two were squaring up to each other, I didn’t want to be in the room either.

  ‘I’d better go. You’ve obviously got things to talk about.’ I put my mug down, its ceramic clatter as it hit the stone work surface echoed into the chilly silence. ‘It was nice to meet you both.’

  I got as far as the dimly lit entrance, and was trying to find the door handle, when Phinn caught up with me.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I’ve behaved badly. I continue to behave badly, and having the bloody conscience-fairy there turn up unexpectedly hasn’t helped.’ He scrubbed a hand through his hair. ‘It was kind of you to bring my wallet back. Thank you.’

  ‘’S all right,’ I muttered, desperate to be gone.

  ‘And I’m sorry I left yesterday without saying thanks.’ This time he smiled. ‘That really was badly behaved of me, and I can’t even blame Link. You were very kind to go to all that trouble for a guy who could have been – well, anyone.’

  ‘Are you really an astrophysicist?’

  The
change of conversational direction seemed to baffle him. ‘What?’ A frown made his glasses slide forward down his nose until he poked them back. ‘Yes. Why? Do you want to know what my thesis was?’

  ‘You don’t look like a scientist, that’s all.’

  ‘He’s got a Doctor Who T-shirt!’ came a voice from the kitchen. ‘And he quotes Monty Python.’

  Phinn gave me a sudden grin. The shadows under his eyes disappeared. ‘I can’t keep apologising, can I? Yes, I’m an astrophysicist. If you ever find yourself short of someone to do a little deep space research, well, you know where I am.’ He opened the front door, being able to locate the knob in the deep gloom. ‘Thanks again, Molly.’

  ‘And UFOs! Did he tell you about the UFOs?’ Link called and the smile fell away from Phinn’s face.

  ‘Goodbye,’ he said briefly as though he’d already lost any interest he might have had in me, and the door closed with a swing and a slam that told me he’d gone back inside before I’d even reached the end of the porch.

  Chapter Five

  I took Stan out onto the moors to try to clear my head. The day was bright and the wind had dropped, giving us a tiny foretaste of what summer might have to offer, always supposing we had a summer since the weather this far north showed a distressing tendency to drop us straight from chilly spring into damp autumn. Stan plodded along, happily undisturbed by my attempts to chivvy him into a canter and I soon stopped trying to ride seriously and let my thoughts wander.

  I’d have to do something soon. My savings were being eaten at a remarkable rate by the necessities of rent, bills and food; they’d probably only float me for another couple of months and then … something would have to change.

  I loved working for Mike, writing for the magazine, but he couldn’t afford to pay me much more than the basic freelancer’s rate. I’d been trying to knock out a few articles for other magazines, even a couple of short stories, but my lack of confidence was clearly showing, everyone had turned me down. They may have given me more consideration if I’d sent them my CV, but that would mean putting my head above the parapet, maybe drawing the attention of people that I’d rather not see – hell, stop being so mealy-mouthed Molly, it might draw Tim’s attention.