Flowers for the Dead

THE NEIGHBOUR

It is early morning when I hear the engine roar, lying awake as I often do. It is barely dawn, the light outside white and grey. Must be an old car, the way it sounds. I saw lots of cars like that before I moved here. Now, not so much.

A country road leads past my drive, single lane, old stones piled up into low walls on both sides, grey during the day and black at night. It is absurd. Even after all this time, I still start when I hear a car. They come down this road so rarely.

Surrounded by starch-white pillows and sheets, I listen to the sound of the engine, trying not to be nervous. You can hear them coming a mile off, cars like that. Do not be nervous. And do not get up. It is an obsession, my therapist told me. You are obsessed.

The sound of the engine turns louder. I turn onto my back, fiddling with the bed sheets. They are clean and stiff. There are no other houses down this road, bar one.

Is that why you bought the Kenzies’ home? my therapist asked me. No, I lied, I needed more space.

The windows are frail things. I feel the draft wafting in. When I heard the Kenzies were moving, when I saw the price they had put the house up for, I did not hesitate. I phoned up Mrs Kenzie and went round and signed the lease the following week.

The car is up on the crest of the hill now.

I do not have an obsession.

I get up, bare feet cold on the old wooden floor. The boards creak when I put my toes on them. The summer nail polish came off a while ago, only traces left, dark green like the forests where I was born. I pull back the curtains, white lace so that I can look out and watch the road even when they are drawn.

The house is situated off the dirt road; when it snows, you cannot make it out of here without a 4x4. Like in Gdańsk, but that feels very, very far away. It always smelled like salt there. I still wake up and miss the sea.

The car comes into view, headlights cutting through the woods.

It has the right colour. I have seen it on her social media.

A frisson runs through me.

You are obsessed, my therapist says, her voice very calm.

Aren’t you? I would like to ask her back.

I see it, a white blur through the gnarly trees and their bare branches, a white blur in the heavy fog. I watch it.

My body is shivering.

It is the right make.

It could be her.

LINN

Mist thickens into fog as dawn approaches. I am heading along Grassington Road after I turned off the A59 at Skipton. The narrow road dissolves into a milky grey mass. Houses are turned into shadows, rising and falling by the side of the road as I pass them. Trees seem to suddenly appear, gnarled branches reaching across the road, as if they were reaching for me. The steep slopes of the peaks are familiar even in the dark. The grass, grey in the morning, is glinting with dew. I even recognise the old stone walls, black blurry lines climbing up the bare slopes. My fingers are clenching the steering wheel so hard my knuckles hurt. Have been ever since I passed the sign: COUNTY OF NORTH YORKSHIRE.

The fog thickens and thickens as I continue down the A684, on and on. I pass through Aysgarth and along the Ure. This must be Worton. Then Bainbridge, this sharp bend to the right, past the low houses and the roses climbing up their walls, sprawling like spidery fingers in the fog. I am so very close now. On and on I go, turning off the A684 onto the single-lane side road leading to our village. I thought it would make me nervous, these narrow roads, not wide enough for two cars. But it is not the roads I am worried about. Nor is it the shadows passing me on both sides, the silhouettes of trees and walls and roadside heath.

I do not slow down until I see the silhouette rise on my right: the crippled old oak tree by our village sign. The village I know so well, even when I cannot see it. The narrow old bridge across the brook, the High Street where I used to play, the farns growing thick on the steep slopes surrounding us. The Dresden Dolls are filling the car with their disturbing sounds, louder and louder the closer I get to my parents’ old house.

It is far out of the village, sitting on a dead-end dirt road where farns and goatsbeard and marsh orchids grow, with only one neighbouring house, the Kenzies’. And even they lived a mile off before they moved away. They were friends, Mum and Dad and the Kenzies. Best friends. It was they who sent me the parcel – the Kenzies. In the letter that came with the parcel, they explained that they had moved out of their house, out of that village, not half a year after my parents’ death. They said that they were now settled in their new home in the East Riding, by the coast, and that they wanted to send me a few things of my parents’ they’d found as they’d unpacked their boxes. The dried nightshade, for example, which my mum had given to them for safekeeping. She hadn’t said what they were keeping it for, only that she didn’t want it to be thrown away, but that she no longer wanted it in her house, either.

That was Mum’s thing, drying flowers. They were all over the house. Even this one. Deadly nightshade.

The fog is so thick that I do not see the graveyard, either. Thank God. I know I pass it on the left. Know where it is. Know whose graves I haven’t been to see.

I do not slow down but drive on, drive on until the dirt road comes into view, sloping up into a forest before it leads to the two lonely houses. I turn.

At the crest of the hill, driving past the Kenzies’ old house, I take a glance, but the fog is still too heavy. I only catch a glimpse of the sharp gable and the uppermost window, emerging from the white, milky mass.

For a moment, I believe I see someone standing there. A slim silhouette. Dressed all in white.

Watching me.

The car stutters. Quickly, I push my foot down on the accelerator. When I look back up, the window is empty.

The Kenzies never said whether they had found a buyer. My begonias bob their heads up and down on the back seat, peeking out of the plastic bag as I keep driving. They make me think of our flat in Leyton. Make me glance in the rear mirror. Just to check.

As if I had to. This is the last place Oliver would expect me to go. On our computer, I’d checked websites for a few cheap places to stay in Brittany, in Norfolk and Kent, just in case. But wherever he would suspect me to be, it wouldn’t be here. Not after I didn’t even return for my parents’ funeral, twelve months ago.

My face turns hot as I think of it. There is something wet in my eyes. I blink rapidly as the road turns narrower and narrower, from a dirt road to a path in the woods, snaking its way back to the main road on the other side of the forest. It disappears amidst the pale stems of the sycamores and the winding branches of the ash trees, between the wych elms and bare rowan trees. I used to take my bike down that path, even when it was dark. It seems far too frightening now that I look at it, dwindling like a dying brook in the headlights ahead of me.

I nearly miss our drive even as the fog keeps clearing. At the last moment, I recognise the downy birch and the high hedge and derelict stone wall on my right. I realise my hands are shaking so badly that I cannot stabilise the steering wheel. As if there are climbing plants sprouting in my lungs, it is difficult to breathe.

*

Braking, I turn into our drive. Between the shreds of fog, the old house emerges: two floors, made of limestone, standing between hunched hawthorn and sharp holly and tall birches. There is an abandoned garden and a wooden front porch with a roof, damp and dark.

You can do this, I tell myself. You have to do this if you want to find out what happened to you. This house is a part of it. This house surrounded by woods, with a front porch and a set of chimes by the door that I gave to my mum when I was fifteen, the small bells still dangling in the wind when they left for the hike they would never return from.

The moment I come to a stop at the bottom of the drive, the moment I turn off the engine, I sink back into my seat.

I made it.

For a moment, all I feel is light. As if I am floating. I made it. I did the right thing.

A little unsteady on my feet, I get out of the car, the cold wrapping me into its cool arms. I open the boot and take out my suitcase. It’s heavy. Then I fetch the begonias from the back seat. ‘We made it,’ I whisper to them. ‘Well done, my darlings.’ I’m a florist, and let me tell you, you don’t pass your exams if you don’t talk to flowers.

The pot in my arms, I walk up the front porch, a rather eccentric addition of my father’s. I walk past the chimes on the front porch.

Wait.

I stop. Turn to the side, still on the wooden steps. I remember the chimes. Dangling onto the stairs, announcing every visitor. Remember their sound. Remember the doorbell. Remember the sweat and the noises.

But the chimes are gone.

Putting down the begonias carefully, I walk up and down the porch, then onto the dead meadow on both sides, looking for them. They must have been blown away by the wind. Or a cat came and … I don’t know. The Kenzies told me in their letter that the chimes were still here. But I suppose that happens. No one has been here since my parents left.

A hiking accident. That’s how they died. Here, too. Right here in the Dales.

Returning to the front steps, I take my begonias back up and look for my parents’ keys in my handbag, blinking rapidly, trying not to think about the Kenzies’ voices over the phone, stained with tears as they delivered the news. My hands are cramping, so are the soles of my feet. Instead, I think about having a bath, or a shower, after I have lugged the suitcase from the car into the house. A nap on the couch, even, once I’ve got the heating back up and running. Before I face my parents’ bedroom. Before I make a battle plan.

Finally, managing to fish the keys out of my bag in spite of the cramp in my hands, I bend over to put them into the keyhole. It is a bit rusty, I think at first, when I do not manage to turn the key.

Then I realise that is not the case.

I cannot turn the key because the door is already open.

THE DETECTIVE INSPECTOR

Things get stolen here. Not often, mind, but it does happen. There is no such thing as 100 per cent security. Other than that, we are doing well. Break-ins, occasionally. This is an area where people don’t exactly come from old money. Some, though. And the break-ins, they have become more frequent. It is a problem.

A set of chimes, though? To be honest, I think she’s blowing things out of proportion a little, don’t you? I don’t want to say hysterical. It’s not like she’s shouting. But a set of chimes. You might think the wind has blown it away or some animal has come and torn it off. Maybe the Kenzies took it when they moved. Who would go all the way out there just to steal some chimes?

I look at her. Clutching that flowerpot to her chest and trying very desperately to smile. I haven’t seen Linny in years. Recognised her straightaway, though, when she walked in, and what a shock that was. To see Linny back here, Linny of all people, after all these years. How long has it been, twenty years, nineteen? Hellfire! Nineteen years since I last saw her. I mean, not even at the funeral. Can you believe that? The only child not showing up to her parents’ funeral? And that house of theirs just sitting down in that hollow at the end of that dirt road, all empty and nobody using it?

So, you know, a right shock, seeing her again. But shock’s nothing new to a policeman, is it? So, when Linn shows up like that and tells me her parents’ door was open, not just unlocked, I thought it was serious, I really did. But then we drove there together and went inside, and nothing had been stolen or damaged or even moved, and I looked at that rusty old thing of a lock and have to say I’m not surprised it didn’t hold.

Didn’t say that, though. We’re back at the station now and I want to help her, I do. She’s always been a darling of ours, Little Linny from Down-in-the-Dip. That’s what we used to call her parents’ house, Mark’s and Sue’s, because of how they built it right at the bottom of that hollow in the woods. It’s the only house on that road except the Kenzies’. But the Kenzies don’t live there any more. Mind you, it’s none of my business whom they sell their house to. I only know, I wouldn’t have picked that one. That’s all I’m saying. But I guess they didn’t want to stay after Mark and Sue were gone. Bloody hiking accident.

‘You’re in good hands here,’ I tell Linny as I take out a form from the shelf behind me. The police station has been renovated. It’s all white and modern now and there are neat lines on the floor telling people where to stand and where not to go. Not to come too close to the counter, for example, unless they’ve been asked to. That must be a London thing. Where they have shootings at police stations when someone from Tower Hamlets comes walking in. Or Leeds, at the very least. Here, I tell everybody to just come up to the counter. Right up.

‘Come here, Linny,’ I tell her. She’s in ratty jeans and a worn coat that used to be quite nice, I think. Her hair has turned a little bit lighter. Thinned out, too. I remember her hair as black as the forest up by her house, and her eyes as large as a doe’s, even when she was a teenager. Pretty girl, that. She moved away pretty early, right out of school. With her boy. Her man. Oliver. Good man, that one. Promising swimmer, he was, and I should know, I coached the team for a while. Shame he didn’t go into swimming professionally. He could have really made it as a swimmer. Better than Jacob Mason, even. Olympics, absolutely. Gold for England, that would have been something!

So, we were sorry to see them go. Her parents especially, of course. But I did not blame them. How could I?

I knew it was my fault. Know it was my fault she never came back, not even to visit. I tried to do all I could to help, but she didn’t want to stay after all that.

All the more reason why I want to help her now. That’s why I don’t say, You know, the fair was in town a couple of months ago, may have been a few teenagers out for an adventure, or just time passing and wearing down that old lock, you know? Taking the chimes as a bonus, so to speak.

Besides, I get it. Alone as a woman, you’d get flayed easily, wouldn’t you? Scared, I mean, you’d get scared easily. So I hand her a form and when she’s filled it all out, I fax it straight up to Northallerton (tried and true, a fax machine). Looks like it puts her at ease. She’s smiling again, and that’s all I want.

Let me tell you about all the ways this girl could smile. She had the most expressive face as a kid – you could always tell there was something going on in that bright mind of hers. Especially when she’d played a trick on you and you hadn’t found out yet. There was that twitch in her face. She loved to play tricks, Little Linny did. Now, her smile’s friendly, maybe a little shy. I walk around the counter to show her out, putting my hand on the small of her back to reassure her. Let her know I’m here.

‘I’ll keep you posted on any developments, Linny,’ I say.

‘Thank you, Detective.’

Something tugs at my chest as I remember her as a little child, coming to play knock, knock, ginger with her friends in the town centre, giggling behind the bushes on the other side of the street as I pretended not to see them. Ding, ding, ding, that’s how they always rang the doorbell. Everybody in the village knew it.

‘Please, Linny, call me Graham.’

There was that boy with them, too. A bit weird, wasn’t it? Even as teenagers, they still stuck together. Linny and Anna and that boy. Teoman Dündar. He didn’t play footie or go loitering around pubs with other young men his age, smoking cigarettes. Wasn’t that what folks of his background did? Instead, always trailing those lasses. Maybe that’s what people do where he’s from, though. Don’t take women seriously, do they? Linny’s parents were worried, in any case, I remember that.

I watch her leave, still trying to smile, dropping purple petals where she goes, watch her through the bulletproof windows (another London regulation, that, I’m sure). There is a feeling just beneath my skin. A prickling sensation.

Just a set of chimes.

I return to the counter, tell Angela, I mean Constable Johnson, that I’ll be right back. Then I go into the back. Down the set of stairs, grey concrete, low ceilings. Along the narrow corridor, dark walls and blue doors with a couple of cells behind them. At the end, the only wooden door, the one leading to the archives.

Takes me a while to dig out her file. It’s still on paper. I can’t believe I haven’t looked at it in so long. The prickling turns stronger.

I have sharp instincts, I do. I wonder if it’s coincidence. I wonder if she knows.

That Teoman is back as well.

LINN

I know it’s silly to have gone to the detective. To Graham. I couldn’t believe it at first, when I saw it was him standing behind that counter. Not because of how much, but of how little he seemed to have changed. Sure, he looked different, but he still talks, moves, listens exactly like he did all those years ago.

I try to relax my hands around the handle of the suitcase. Graham was kind enough to take note of my complaint, and the lock was very old. It may have come undone, simply, like the chimes. It gets fairly windy here, even down in the hollow in the woods. We’ve arranged for a new one to be put in. The locksmith will be by later today.

Now I am standing in the hall of the house, clutching my bags. The house I have not been in for nineteen years. Slowly, I put down the bags and push open the first door on the left. It leads to the mud room. Cloakroom, my mum called it, a euphemism if ever I heard one. There is the low wooden bench we threw all of our coats on, and the rack for the shoes and the wellies, and the shelf for the gardening tools that Mum said she needed at hand, not all the way out in the shed in the garden. All of it is covered under white sheets. The Kenzies must have done this after the funeral. I pull off the sheets, one by one, dropping them onto the floor. The tools are still up on the shelf, some of them rusty, some of them still shining bright, bought only recently, never to be used.

I put my coat down on the bench and toe off my shoes. A pair of trainers sits on the rack still. They were my father’s.

I go back out into the hall, the kitchen the first door on my right, the staircase to the first floor right ahead. I go into the kitchen first, pulling away sheet after sheet, uncovering birch wood and local pottery, the blue heavy plates and mugs from my childhood. The sitting room next, windows and the back door leading out into the garden, framed by high bookshelves. Looking out, I can see the shed behind the house by the tree line, blue paint flaking away.

And then I climb the wooden staircase, the carpet soft under my feet. The stairs still creak in all the right places as I ascend to the first floor, to the two bedrooms and the bathroom. Here, the furniture under the sheets is all of dark wood. It was my grandma’s, and so are the doors. The house still looks so much like it did back then. It even smells like back then, because everywhere, on every available surface, sit Mum’s dried flowers.