Copyright

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First published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2018

Copyright © S. K. Tremayne 2018

Cover design by Claire Ward © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2019

Cover photograph © Joanna Jankowska / Arcangel Images (background with leaves).

© Mark Fearon / Arcangel Images (feathers).

S. K. Tremayne asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books

Source ISBN: 9780008105884

Ebook Edition © AUGUST 2018 ISBN: 9780008105907

Version: 2019-10-09

Dedication

For Star, on Kes Tor

Poor Kitty Jay

Such a beauty cast away,

This silent prayer should paint some peace on her grave

But something broke her sleep

From ‘Kitty Jay’, by Seth Lakeman

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

Author’s Note

Huckerby Farm

Princetown

The Lych Way

Huckerby Farm

Grey Wethers

Hobajob’s Wood

Huckerby Farm

Warren House Inn

Vitifer Leat

Salcombe

Burrator

Venner

Princetown

Hexworthy

Salcombe

Two Bridges Hotel

Morrice Town, Plymouth

Black Tor

Huckerby Farm

Huckerby Yard

Salcombe

The Spaldings’ Farm

Dartmoor

Dartmoor

Huckerby

Bellever Tor

Tavyhurst Church

Kennec Farm

Huckerby

Drizzlecombe

Huckerby

Three Crowns Inn, Chagford

Dartmoor

Huckerby

Hobajob’s Wood

Dartmeet

Keep Reading …

About the Author

Also by S. K. Tremayne

About the Publisher

Author’s Note

I’d like to thank everyone who assisted me in my research on Dartmoor, in particular Tim Cumming, for his inspiration, and Loic Rich for his company. Likewise I am indebted to: the staff of the Two Bridges, White Hart and Gidleigh Park hotels; the makers of Plymouth Gin and the brewers of Dartmoor Jail Ale; and my editors at The Times and The Sunday Times Travel Magazine: Jane Knight, Ed Grenby and Nick Redman.

As always I must thank Jane Johnson, Eugenie Furniss and Sarah Hodgson for their wisdom, advice, and professionalism.

There are many references throughout this book to various Dartmoor locations and place-names. A few of these have been altered or invented, by me, although I hope that the book, in general, is a faithful representation of the uniquely beautiful Dartmoor landscape. Any unintentional errors are entirely my own.

My thanks to Seth Lakeman for allowing me to quote from the lyrics of his songs.

Huckerby Farm

Saturday morning

The dead birds are neatly arranged in a row. I don’t know why they are dead. Maybe they were slaughtered, by a domestic cat, in that cruel, unhungry, feline way: killing things for fun. But I don’t know anyone who keeps a cat, not for miles. We certainly don’t. Adam prefers dogs: animals that work and hunt and retrieve, animals with a loyal purpose.

More likely is that these little songbirds died from frost and hunger: this long Dartmoor winter has been hard. The last few weeks the ice has bitten into the acid soil, gnawed at the twisted trees, sent people scurrying into their homes from little Christow to Tavy Cleave, and has turned the narrow moorland roads to rinks.

I shudder at the returning thought, as I cradle my hot coffee and gaze out of the kitchen window. Ice had been a danger on the roads for a while. Yes, I should have been more careful, but was it really my fault? I looked away for a moment, distracted by something. And then, it happened, on the dark road that runs by Burrator Reservoir.

It was just a little patch of ice. But it was enough. I went from heading home at a sedentary pace to being in a car out of control, skidding terribly, ramming the useless brakes, in the frigid December twilight, sliding faster and faster towards the waiting waters. All I remember is a strange and rushing sense of inevitability, that this had somehow been meant to happen all my life: my sudden death, at thirty-seven.

The rising black water had always been meant to freeze me; the locked car doors had always been meant to cage me. The icy liquid in my lungs had always been intended to drown the last of my gasps, on this cold, anonymous December evening on the fringes of the moor, where the bony beacons and balding hills begin their descent to Plymouth.

But it didn’t kill me.

I fought and swam, blood streaming – and I survived. Somehow, somehow. Yes, my memories are still ribbony, still ragged, but they are returning, and my body is recovering. The bruising on my face is nearly gone.

I survived a near-fatal accident and I am determined to number my blessings, as if I am an infant doing sums by counting her fingers.

Blessing number one: I have a husband I love. Adam Redway. He seems to love me too, and he is still very handsome at thirty-eight: with those dazzling blue eyes and that crow-dark hair. Almost black, but not quite. Sometimes he could pass for a man ten years younger, he has that agelessness, despite the toughness of his job; perhaps it is because of his job.

He doesn’t earn that much, as a National Park Ranger, but he adores the moors where he was born, and he adores what he does: from repairing walls so the Dartmoor ponies can’t range too far, to taking troops of school kids to see the daffodils of Steps Bridge, to guiding tourists, for fun, all the way down Lydford Gorge, spooking them out with stories of the outlaws who lived there, in the sixteenth century, the Gubbins who lived in caves, and became cannibals, and died out from inbreeding, and madness.

Adam loves all this: loves the poetry and the severity of the moor. He likes the toughness and the strangeness; he grew up with it. And over the years he has allowed me to become a part of it: we have a happy marriage, or at least a marriage happier than many. Yes, it is regular, ordinary, even predictable. Right down to the sex.

I am sure my friends from uni would laugh at the homeliness, but I find it deeply reassuring. The world turns: rhythmically and reliably. I desire, and am desired. We haven’t made love so much since the accident, but I am sure it will return. It always does.

What else can I give thanks for? What else makes me glad to be alive? I need to remind myself. Because these flashbacks are pretty painful.

Quite often I get sudden, frightening headaches: headaches sharp enough to make me cry out. It’s as if something is crunching in my mind, bone grating on nerves.

Like now. I wince. Setting the big coffee cup by the sink, I put a hand to my forehead, to that tender place where I must have hit the steering wheel, cracking bone and brain and a week of memories into fragments, like a shattered pane of winter ice on a moorland dew pond.

Deep breaths. Deep, long breaths.

Focus on the positive, that’s what the doctor said. Be thankful every day. Makes the healing quicker. Mends the mind faster.

I like my job, working in the National Park tourist office. It’s not the archaeological job I wanted when I graduated from Exeter University. It’s not my dream, and it doesn’t pay well, but I get to write the leaflets, to talk about history, to enthuse to day trippers, and the park authorities let me join the digs in the season, slicing into the turf to find Bronze Age barrows or buried kistvaens – sunken chests – of Neolithic skulls and femurs and backbones, the remains of people who lived here when the moors were warmer, and drier. Kinder.

Better than all that: I love this rented granite house we live in, five miles south of Princetown, lost in the high moorland, a mile from the next inhabited building, the Spaldings’ farm, and two miles from the nearest hamlet, with its pub and tiny shop that sells processed ham and charcoal briquettes, and little else.

I love the wild remoteness, the deep starry skies and deeper silence. I love the dreaming, arthritic, moss-hung rowan trees that line the lanes. I like that the moorfolk call them ‘quickbeams’, or ‘witchbeams’. I also love the battered, stubborn, obstinate history of it all. Huckerby used to be a proper farmstead, and it still has barns and outhouses crumbling in the Dartmoor rains, sprouting cornflowers and campions in the haze of high summer, but the only intact building is the one we live in, a classic moorland longhouse, possibly six hundred years old.

Once there would have been a sizeable family here: humans at the top of the house, animals down the other end. Cattle warming people under the same Devonshire thatch. Now the house is converted, the roof slated, and the interior modernized. Yes, it’s hard to heat and it still gets damp. But it has character. And it is occupied by me, and Adam, and Lyla our daughter, and our two dogs Felix and Randal.

I named the dogs from a poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins. I love poetry, too: I write it occasionally, and never show it to anyone. I hide it away, as shyly as my daughter hides her secrets. I would have liked to be a poet, the way I would have liked to be an archaeologist. But that’s OK: because I am happy, I think, and certainly happy to be alive, and I live in a house I love in a place I love with a man I love and two dogs I love and, best of all, with a daughter I wholly adore.

Lyla Redway. The girl who likes to arrange dead birds in rows and curves.

Lyla Redway. The nine-year-old girl out there in the farmyard wearing a blue beanie hat and a thick black anorak, playing on her own as she always plays on her own – or with Felix and Randal, who she probably prefers to any human beings.

I don’t mind this. She’s a different sort of girl: she is herself, her vulnerable, eccentric, funny, kind, lovable self. How many kids would spend a cold frosty morning in January arranging dead birds?

Sometimes she orders stones, or twigs, or bright blood-red berries. Other times Adam comes home with presents he has found on the tors, things he knows she will like – miniature pink snail shells and delicate bird bones and bleached-white adder skulls – and she arranges these faintly macabre moorland treasures into complex patterns: mandalas, hexagons and zodiacs, intricate visual symbols only she understands, imposing a poetic order on her lonely moorland world. Where she reigns supreme.

And sometimes she does nothing. She stands for hours, listening to an unheard music, seeing things invisible to others, or remembering incidents from her very early childhood. I’ve read that these strange traits, the acute hearing, and that remarkable memory, are all part of her condition, almost proof of her condition. But we refuse to have her diagnosed, or examined, despite the obvious signs.

Adam doesn’t want to label her, doesn’t want to put her in a box, and I tend to agree. We don’t want to set limits on her, because she seems happy, despite her isolation, her solitude.

Though maybe less happy today?

Lyla is staring down at the birds. And standing absolutely still. This is common for her: she seems to have no middle ground of normal movement. Either she is silent and frozen, as now, or she is dancing and twirling, skipping up the moorland tors, as if she has energy she cannot endure, waving her hands, nodding and rocking, and talking talking talking, chattering like the River Dart under Postbridge, nattering away to herself, a babble of information stored in her brain from all the books she reads.

Hyperlexia, they call it. Another symptom. Reading too much.

How can that be a thing? Reading too much? I let her read as much as she likes. Entire books in a day, thousands of words every hour. Filling up her hungry soul. Because this is, I hope, my gift to her.

She has inherited her father’s beauty, the nearly-black hair, the piercing eyes, but she has my love for words. One day she might be the poet I never was. She might have the scholarly life I wanted. And I’m glad she got her looks from her dad rather than me. My looks have always disappointed: brown hair, brown eyes, average height, average face, nothing special to look at, just me, Kath, the woman married to Adam Redway, with the quirky daughter, does something for the National Park, lives way out in the middle of nowhere, over near Hexworthy.

Nearly dying in that reservoir is probably the one exceptional thing to have happened to me, the only thing likely to get me noticed.

Except, I don’t want to be noticed.

Opening the kitchen window to the cold morning air, I call out: ‘Hey, sweetie, are you OK? Sure you’re warm enough?’

Lyla does not move. She is still frowning at the dead birds, some of them arranged in lines like the rows of Bronze Age ritual stones out on the moors.

‘Darling,’ I repeat, but not impatiently: I am used to having to press things with Lyla, to repeat twice or three times when she is in one of her more obsessive moods. ‘Lyla-berry, I want to check you’re not cold, it’s freezing out there. Where are the dogs?’

Still no answer. I might have to go outside and literally turn her face to meet mine, to make her realize I am talking to her, that I am interacting, that a person needs a response.

Opening the front door, I walk towards my daughter, my arms crossed against the chilly breeze. ‘It’s interesting that they’re all dead, isn’t it, Mummy?’

Her eyes are bright like her father’s under the blue beanie.

‘Sorry, darling?’

‘All the birds, so many of them, all of them are dead. I checked. So many, there must be twenty of them.’

‘Probably the cold, Lyla. It’s a bitter winter, worse than usual.’ I place an arm around her slender shoulders.

‘Hm.’ She shrugs absentmindedly, stares at the birds.

I follow her gaze, examining the pitiful little corpses. They’re definitely frozen: beaks rimed with white frost. I don’t know what species they are. I can see a thrush, I think, and a robin. Lyla surely knows: she can identify every bird and every mammal, and most of the moorland flowers.

‘Well I thought it was sad, Mummy, sad that they were all dead, so I put them in a special pattern so they could all have a funeral together, and not be lonely.’ She stoops and rearranges two of the birds, delicately realigning them. It unsettles me to see her so careful, so precise. She makes such lovely patterns, but these are dead birds. Where did she get them from?

‘All right, that’s good, that’s good. Do you want some lunch?’

‘Wait. Wait, Mummy. Nearly finished.’

This elaborate game is spooking me. Dead birds arranged in a pattern I cannot quite grasp. All those glassy little bird-eyes, a trail of twinned black buttons across the frigid mud.

Lyla turns one frozen blackbird this way, and then that way.

‘Lyla! Please. Enough now.’

Straightening up, she flashes me a smile. ‘Don’t you want me to spend the day arranging dead birds? Are you saying this is inappropriate behaviour?’

I am lost for words. Until I realize my daughter is joking, teasing me about my anxieties. Lyla can exhibit startling flashes of adult humour, insightful, surreal, and self-aware. It’s one of the reasons we’ve resisted that diagnosis.

‘No, I think it’s perfectly fine to arrange loads of creepy dead birds in rows and circles.’ I laugh, and hug her again. ‘What kind of birds are they, anyway? And what is the pattern, is it a face?’

But now her head is turned, looking down the farm track, past the conifer plantation, past Hobajob’s Wood, as if she can hear something. In the far distance. I’ve known her to hear cars minutes before they arrive, long before anyone else.

‘Lyla?’

What can she hear? A raven makes a cronking sound overhead as it wheels across the dull grey sky. Yet her focus seems to be on something else, further away. What is she sensing, coming towards us, down from the tors? The memories hurt. My head stings with pain.

‘Lyla.’

No reply.

‘Lyla, what is it, what can you hear?’

‘The usual man, Mummy, the man on the moor. That’s all.’ Her words are a ghostly vapour in the cold. Her anorak is unzipped and I see she is wearing only a T-shirt underneath. She should be freezing, and yet she never seems to suffer from the cold: she likes the fierce Dartmoor winters, same as her dad. They both relish the cold. The snow. The icicles that hang from the splintered granite. ‘You know, Mummy, that if you see a lot of crows they are rooks, but a rook by itself is a crow. Did you know that?’

I reach for her once more. ‘Lyla.’

She squirms away from my touch. ‘Don’t touch me, Mummy. Leave me be.’

She is snarling. Lyla does this when she is angry or alarmed or overstimulated, she snarls, grimaces, and waves her hands. She does this at school as well: she can’t help it, but it means other children laugh at her, or are scared by her. Isolating her further. She has so few friends. She probably has no real friends.

‘Lyla. Stop this.’

‘Go away, grrr …’

‘Please—’

‘YARK!’

There’s nothing I can do. I step away, watching my daughter as she goes running to the farmyard gate, calling for the real dogs: I can hear them yapping, see our two big mongrel lurchers galloping after her.

She could be gone for another two hours now, half a day even, running across the fields, romping through Hobajob’s, hunting for that Saxon cross lost in the nettles by the brook, with Felix and Randal on each side. Adam supposedly bought the dogs for Lyla, but he loves them as much as she does. They hunt, like proper dogs. They bring back dead rabbits, necks lolling, blood dripping from their muzzles. He likes to skin these hot, reeking corpses in front of Lyla, teaching her authentic Dartmoor ways, tossing gobbets of raw meat to the hungry dogs. Eat them up, you eat them all up.

Lyla is far away in the distance.

What can I do?

Let them play, I think, let them go. Lyla is clearly still upset about my accident. We’ve tried to talk to her about it, as gently as possible, I’ve told her I hit some ice and veered into deep water. We’ve spared her too many details but she will surely have heard stuff from kids at school, in the papers, on the net. We’ve also told Lyla that my memories are hazy but that they will return. Retrograde amnesia. Common after car accidents, caused by the brain ricocheting inside the skull.

Back in the kitchen I wash the coffee mug in the sink and gaze out of the window. In the distance I hear barking, getting nearer, louder. Then they come bursting through the door, the dogs happy, big and growling. Lyla lingers in the doorway, oblivious, it seems, to the bitter wind at her back.

‘Daddy is on the moor again.’

‘What?’

She gives me one of her blank, impenetrable smiles. ‘He’s out there again like he’s watching us, Mummy. That’s Daddy’s job, isn’t it?’

‘Yes,’ I say. ‘He’s a park ranger. He has to patrol everywhere, looking out for people.’

Lyla nods and shrugs, and pursues the dogs into the living room. I stare after her, wondering how she saw her father. He’s meant to be working in his normal patch, way past Postbridge. What is he doing down here? Maybe Lyla is just confused or upset. And I can’t blame her for this dislocation, this bewilderment.

Because her mother nearly died. Leaving her alone, forever.

Princetown

Monday morning

My daughter is silent, my husband is grimly silent, but the car is making that horrible grinding sound as Adam changes gear. I don’t care. I’m happy. The winter sky over Princetown is sharp, unmarred, and today I get my freedom back.

I’m buying a car for myself, to replace the one still sitting at the bottom of Burrator Reservoir. This is the most intense relief. Living in Dartmoor – especially somewhere as remote as Huckerby Farm – is almost impossible without transport of your own. There are barely any buses; the railway lines were ripped away in the 1960s, and in winter on the lonelier roads you might not see a car from one cold morning to the next, so you couldn’t even hitch-hike.

During these weeks of recovery since my accident, Adam has been driving me around in his knackered old National Park Land Rover, ferrying me to work, helping me do the shopping, and it’s been a source of friction. Adam can be taciturn at the best of times but when he’s had to take me all the way to the Aldi supermarket in Tavistock I’ve sensed a certain repressed seething.

But today I’m buying myself a secondhand Ford, from a cousin of Adam’s. We bundled together some cash from God knows where, as Adam argues with the insurance people. Adam does everything to do with cars and engines and plumbing and stoves; and I like the masculine way he handles all that.

Turning in the passenger seat I look at Lyla, in her grey-and-white school uniform. She is staring out at the dull housing of Princetown outskirts.

‘Hey, sweetpea. From now on I’ll be able to take you to school again, isn’t that good?’

She says nothing. Her face is averted. She is gently tapping the window with her fingernails. I don’t know why she does this. Perhaps it’s another sound she likes. She calls them tinkly-tankly sounds. Crackling, jingling, light metallic sounds, things like the silvery rattle of coins, or keys.

My daughter once told me, when we stood in the summer hayfields over Buckfast, how she loved the sound of butterflies.

There are also sounds that she hates. City sounds. Traffic. Sirens. The jostle of people in crowds. It’s one of the reasons we moved to the remoteness of Huckerby.

‘Lyla?’

She turns, her blue eyes wide. Distant. ‘Mmm?’

‘Did you hear what I said?’

A shake of her head. She offers me a reserved frown: as if I’ve done something wrong, but she is too polite to say. I feel a pang of pity. She is a nine-year-old girl with troubles and issues and dreams, and laughter I sometimes do not quite hear; she’s a girl who has personal names for flies and rocks and frogs, who collects wild lilies and trembling violets from Nine Maidens and Seven Lords’ Land and presses them in books. My girl, my only girl. The idea that I could have died and left her behind fills me with a terrifying sadness, that threatens to make me cry, but I fight back the emotion.

I’ve been getting these sudden spates of sadness, or anger, ever since the accident, but I do think that I am getting the hang of them. Coping. And today I am definitely happy. Or happier. Determined to be positive: yes, it’s winter but winter is the womb of spring.

The car grumbles.

‘Darling, I said today Mummy is getting a car, so that’ll make everything easier, and Daddy won’t have to do all the driving.’ I turn to him, ‘Which will be a relief, won’t it, Adam? I know you’re bored of carting me around.’

Adam nods, wordless, in the driver seat, and takes the left turn on to Princetown’s main road where it descends, literally and aesthetically, from Georgian coaching inns and the glossy new National Park offices, to the grim black outline of the prison, which broods and menaces even in sharp sun.

‘Here we go.’ Adam yanks the brake hard as he parks outside the school. He turns around, ignoring me, and addresses Lyla. ‘All right, Tate and Lyle. Give us a kiss, before you go.’ Lyla sits there, inert.

Adam tries again. ‘Come on, sweetheart, big kiss for Daddy.’

She shakes her head, and grimaces. This is unlike her. She and Adam are close; sometimes I envy their relationship, exploring the moor together, watching the birds of prey riding summer thermals over Blackslade.

Abruptly, she opens the door. Her hands clutch her Jungle Book lunchbox and school bag tight to her chest. ‘I’m going now,’ she says, without looking at me or at Adam, as if she is announcing this to the world, not to us.

‘It’s OK, darling, off you go. We’ll have a special tea this evening. Those fishcakes you like.’

She nods, blank-faced. Not really looking at us. Then she turns, and walks towards the grey school gates.

Adam puts his hand on the ignition key, ready to move off. But I put a hand on his. ‘No, wait. I want to watch.’

‘Watch what?’

‘You know. How it goes.’

He sighs. ‘You always do this.’ But he takes his hand off the key and the two of us watch Lyla entering the school gates.

For a second she hesitates.

I’ve seen this scenario before, so many times. She is trying to be normal. Getting ready to interact as best she can. Perhaps she is slowly improving? In the car, we are helpless observers.

There are lots of kids in the schoolyard, excited by the first day of the week. They are playing and scrapping, boys and girls, dark and blond; they are laughing, chasing, greeting each other: swapping stories and jokes.

Into the middle of them all walks Lyla. Solitary, unnoticed. She pauses and looks around, her pretty face pale and unsure. I know she wants to join in, but she is too shy, too socially awkward to begin a conversation.

And she doesn’t understand random play.

So she looks up and down, fiddling persistently with a button on her cardigan. I guess she’s hoping someone will simply come up to her, start something off. But the kids run right past her, ignoring her entirely.

‘Christ,’ Adam says, quietly.

Lyla makes a big effort: she walks back to the gate and looks directly and hopefully at some taller girl who is late arriving. I think I know this new girl. Becky Greenall. Popular, good at games, socially confident; everything Lyla isn’t. My pity and anxiety surge. Don’t do the smile, I think to myself, please don’t do that smile. Lyla walks closer to Becky and of course she does the smile, that strange rictus grin, that special silent monkey shout that Lyla thinks looks like a smile, but isn’t. She gives Becky a thumbs-up.

It makes her look utterly mad.

Becky Greenall stares at Lyla, and she puts a hand to her mouth, trying not to laugh, or sneer.

Lyla tries once more. She does a little jump, up and down, waving her hands like a bird.

I’m her mother, but I have no idea what she is trying to do – be a kestrel?

Becky is now openly laughing, she can’t help it; then she turns a sudden shoulder and casually blanks my daughter and shouts to some other girls who wave back. Together, these girls head laughingly for the school door. The day has begun. The whole class has sprinted inside.

Except for Lyla, who is the only one left behind in the schoolyard.

Alone and silent, she watches all the other kids disappear into the school. Only the slump in her shoulders betrays her emotions. The loneliness.

I desperately want to run out of the car and give her the biggest ever hug, to make it all better, but I can’t, there’s no use: she would push me away. Instead she walks slowly towards the school; and now she too is gone, in through the doors.

‘Jesus,’ says Adam. ‘Jesus Christ.’

I know exactly what he means. Sadness is deep in me, and for this I have no coping mechanism. I can recover from a car crash, my brain can heal, but there is no convalescing for Lyla.

We are silent. Adam starts the car, turns it and retraces 300 yards, towards the National Park office. He turns off the engine, as if he is prepared to talk. But before he can speak, I say, ‘We have to do something. This can’t go on. It’s worse than last year.’

Adam stares ahead. ‘But she laughs at home. She loves the moors. And she loves the dogs. So she’s isolated at school, so what? She’s a loner. It happens.’

I can see the pain on his face; I know Adam lives for Lyla. Would kill to protect her. He wants only what’s right for her. And I usually listen to him, I want to believe. But I think about Lyla and her wariness in the car, and that lonely walk into school, that humiliation in the yard. I imagine her now, sitting on her own in the classroom, not talking to anyone. I picture her during breaks: sitting by the wall in the playground; a strange, eccentric girl with a weird smile, who mutters to herself about ants and newts while her classmates all talk to each other about selfies and music.

I can’t pretend any more.

‘No, Adam. We can’t go on thinking this is acceptable, that she’s just quirky, it’s not right.’

The muscles in his jaw are flexing: he’s grinding his teeth. ‘So what are you saying?’

‘We have to be proactive, do something. Take action. Because I don’t think she’s happy, not really. The other day I found her arranging dead birds in a pattern. She’s never done that before. All those dead little birds. Why?’

Adam stares ahead. He is in his Ranger uniform: green fleece, green trousers, hiking boots. On most men it might be unflattering but Adam makes it look good. Masculine. I think of the sex we haven’t had in a while. I want it again, I want him to turn and kiss me, sometimes he still does that, he’ll suddenly kiss me, passionately – across a car, while we’re walking the moors – and I love it. But his fierce blue eyes are fixed on the far horizon, as if he is looking beyond horrible Princetown.

I can sense the violent yearning in him. He doesn’t want me: he wants to be out there, alone on the uplands. Striding the heights of the northern moors: standing on Great Kneeset, gazing at High Willhays, Black Tor, Hangingstone Hill, Cut Hill, Fur Tor, Great Mis Tor, the places he loves, the places he has known since he was a boy. A child of the moors, like his daughter. Unlike me.

‘Look at those bloody houses,’ he says.

‘Sorry?’

He tilts his head at a row of grey drab council housing: accommodation for the wardens in the prison.

‘My dad built some of those, when he was a brickie. Imagine that. Imagine if that was your life’s work? Building the ugliest fucking houses in Britain. No wonder he turned to vodka.’

His laughter is sour. Adam doesn’t get on with his father, who fought and drank and womanized, scattering children from Exeter to Okehampton. Adam loves his uncle much better, Eddie Redway, a tenant farmer near Chagford. That’s where Adam did his real growing up, on Uncle Eddie’s smallholding, escaping the boozy arguments at home. That quaint little farm was where Adam came to know and love the moor, with his tearaway cousins, scrumping apples at Luscombe, fishing for little trout in the Teign.

The Redways have been a moorland family for countless generations. They’ve been tenant farmers and quarry workers and turf cutters since there was a church at Sheepstor; they have shaggy cattle in the blood, and buzzards on the brain.

And I am glad my daughter inherits this ancestry. She can claim Dartmoor as I can’t. But today this ancestry is irrelevant: right now, my daughter needs some modern therapeutic help, and Adam and I need to talk about that help.

‘Adam, please. I really think it’s time now, time we went to a doctor. Get her properly statemented? If it really is Asperger’s—’

‘I’m not putting a bloody label on her. Told you.’

‘But I’ve been researching, talking to people, going online. They say that if you get diagnosed earlier it’s better, the earlier the intervention the better the outcome, because you can get real help, therapy for social skills.’

He shakes his head. ‘I’m not hanging a sign around her neck. Look. Here’s Lyla Redway. She’s hopeless. Take pity. Hell with that.’

I raise my voice. ‘Asperger’s kids aren’t hopeless! You can’t say that. It’s a spectrum, we’re all on it somewhere, she’s just further down that spectrum, where you might need some help, and she’s definitely getting stranger – the birds, it was too eerie. Adam! Listen to me, please. She’s getting worse.’

Adam straightens his arms and lays his big hands hard on the steering wheel, as if he wants to race away. ‘And why do you think that is, Kath? Eh?’

‘Sorry?’

His face is turned towards me now: the blue eyes burning. ‘Why the hell do you think she might be getting worse?’

I flounder. Thrown by this outright hostility. ‘Sorry? What? Are you actually blaming me? Somehow it’s my fault? It’s my fault she’s getting worse?’ I have my own anger, now. ‘For God’s sake, it was an accident! It’s not anyone’s fault. I skidded on some ice.’ I search his face for sympathy. ‘I don’t understand, Adam – you and Lyla – you should be happy I’m alive: I nearly died. I’m alive! And anyway: this is about our daughter, not me. We have to think about her.’

‘That’s all I do think about,’ he says, in a low, dark voice. ‘And now I have to go to work. Earn some money. For Lyla.’ Without another word, he leans across and opens my door, inviting me to step outside.

His stubbled jaw is set, his frown is sombre. He won’t be swayed. He is looking at me the way Lyla looked at him. Wary. Distant. Guarded. It feels like our once-contented family is falling into mutual suspicion. And I have no idea why.

‘OK, Adam, OK, but I won’t let it go. Not this time.’

Climbing out of the car, my bag over my shoulder, I watch him drive away, gears grinding. As I turn towards the Park offices I can sense the great prison, looming behind me.

You can always sense the prison, in Princetown.

Monday afternoon

Two p.m.? I stare at the clock on the wall of the cream-painted National Park offices with a sense of unhappy surprise.

Where did the day go?

I’m used to losing track of working hours if the work is compelling. If I am, say, writing new brochures about the history or archaeology of the park, describing the wistful stone circle of Buttern Hill, the cottage at Birchy Lake where the old witches lived with a dozen black cats, the famous grave of Kitty Jay who killed herself for love, after falling pregnant by some wicked toff – that grave on which people still poignantly lay flowers – when I am immersed in writing these wonderful stories, I can happily misplace an entire afternoon.

The same goes for a busy summer day at one of the visitor centres, in Haytor, or Postbridge, when we can’t move for hearty German caravanners and determined French hikers – all looking for maps, loos, Wi-Fi signals – then the hours can fly past.

But it’s the depths of winter. No one comes to the moor in January. Half the National Park staff take long holidays around this time, as there is little to achieve – except what I’m doing now. Tweaking, twiddling. Revising the Park’s official leaflets and websites. Updating the policy on dogs in National Park tea-rooms. It’s deathly boring. The sort of stuff that would normally make the minutes drag by.

And yet I’ve got myself lost in the assignment.

‘What’s up, Kath? Having too much fun?’

It’s my boss, Andy, he must have heard me sigh. He’s a nice guy, blond, younger than me, newish. Been here two years. I sometimes wonder if I should resent him, that I didn’t get the promotion. But I don’t. I like my more varied employment. Usually.

‘Sorry, Andy. Was I sighing a bit loudly?’

‘You could say that.’

‘Well, I’m updating the rules on campervans in car parks, out of season. Perhaps I’m overexcited?’

I hear him chuckle. He’s the only other person in the large, open-plan office today. He is framed by the windows, where the Princetown sky is now as dark and sombre as Dartmoor granite. The winter sun can be so painfully brief.

‘You should pity me, Kath. I’m doing Section 211 on Tree Preservation Orders, it’s practically better than sex.’ He clicks something on his computer. ‘Jesus, I hate January. What we really need is a massive accident to liven things up. Like, a bus could drive into a lake, up at Meldon, that would help.’ He stops, and turns my way. ‘Hey, sorry, ah, Kath, I—’

‘No. It’s OK. I want people to forget, Andy, I’m bored of being The Woman That Had That Accident.’ He listens as I go on: ‘In fact I want to go back to regular work soon, working proper shifts, doing my job as before, I mean: it’s nice you’re giving me half days, letting me work from home, but I’m OK now. Can we get back to normal?’

‘Abso-bloody-lutely. If you really feel you’re up to it, that’s great. We’ll put you back on normal shifts in a few weeks.’

He returns to his work. I gaze at him as he concentrates.

Why won’t he let me do proper shifts now? Sometimes it feels as if everyone is tip-toeing fastidiously around me, scared I might break. They’re not treating me like someone recuperating, they’re treating me like something odd. Unusually fragile.

Returning to my work, I scan the words on my own computer. The official Dartmoor Tourism website.

Dartmoor constitutes the largest area of granite in Britain, with about 360 square miles stretching across central Devon, making it the only true wilderness in Southern England. Much of it is covered by marshy peat deposits, in the form of bogs or mires. The moorland is also capped with many characteristic granite outcrops, known as tors (from the Celtic ‘tor’, meaning tower) that provide varied habitats for wildlife. The entire area is rich in archaeology, from the Neolithic to the Victorian …

I want to edit this, make it flow better, liven it up: but the words blur in my eyes. Sphagnum. Carboniferous. Wassailing …

I hate this new, enduring haze in my mind, I despise this peculiar sensation – since the crash – that my mind has become one of those vast cupboards in my mum’s old kitchen, in the big Victorian house, down on the coast at Salcombe. Those cupboards were dusty and chaotic, and every week my hippy-chick, eco-sensitive mum would reach in and find some pot of organic mustard, or jar of Manuka honey, that she’d clean forgotten, and she’d say, Gosh I didn’t remember we had this, and sometimes she’d have to throw it away, wasting more of the dwindling Kinnersley cash, and sometimes the jar would go back in, only to be forgotten and retrieved and thrown away all over again … and that’s what my brain feels like, since the accident. I don’t quite know what’s in there, and when I put things in there they sometimes get lost, and when I find things in there they are often useless, past their sell-by date, actively unpleasant.

My brain is hiding things from me.

And now it’s 3.15. So dark the office lights are on.

I try to relax. Perhaps I am being hard on myself. The stress about Lyla doesn’t help, the tensions with Adam, too. Perhaps we all need more time. That’s what the doctors repeated from the start: Be patient, don’t expect instant miracles. And remember, they said: remember that you are relatively lucky: because you will heal over time. I was classified with Mild Traumatic Brain Injury, nothing worse; I was apparently unconscious for less than six hours; I was 13–15 on the Glasgow Coma Scale.

Any longer than that, and I’d have been upgraded and they would have taken away my driving licence, for at least a year. At one point in my unconsciousness I was technically dead, flatlining for a minute or so, but the machines flickered into life and I got through. So I was ‘Mild’.

MTBI.

As for my retrograde amnesia, the stuff I’ve forgotten from before the accident, that is expected to recede over the coming weeks, and the misplaced memories will return like ‘hills emerging after a flood’ as one of the psychologists put it, and eventually the whole landscape will be revealed as the obscuring waters drain away.

‘Hey. Is that your new car?’

Startled from this introspection, I look up. Andy is gesturing out of the window: I can see Adam’s cousin Harry, standing by a blue Ford Fiesta, parked right outside. The car is a bit battered and scratched, but that’s fine, nearly every car on Dartmoor is a bit battered and scratched. And so am I.

Harry waves at me. He has the Redway looks: a handsome young man. They all have these looks, the Redway cousins. The eyes and the cheekbones, they are so distinct. Harry does odd jobs all over the moor, when he’s not making a few quid from car dealing. He is a bit of a lad.

But he’s also very likeable. He reminds me of a younger Adam. But then Adam, in the right mood, reminds me of a younger Adam. I think I desire my husband as much today as the afternoon I first met him.

Andy says, ‘You must be chuffed to get wheels again, don’t know how you’ve been coping without a car.’ He flashes me a smile. ‘Go on, Kath, go for it – I’ll see you tomorrow.’

My kindly boss is making my shortened working day even shorter. I can get my new car, collect Lyla from school, go home to Huckerby, and everything will be fine. My brain will be fine. Lyla will be fine.

‘Thanks,’ I say, ‘You’re a superstar,’ and I grab my raincoat, and step out into the wintry afternoon. The cold has abated, which means it is probably about to rain. Harry and I sign the documents and he hands me the keys and he says, ‘It’s not a Ferrari, but it’ll give you a couple of years.’

And I offer my thanks as I climb in. And when he strolls off to a pub, I sit here in the driver’s seat, holding the cold, hard keys in my hand, suddenly scared that I have forgotten how to drive. I haven’t done it since the crash into the reservoir. Since the dark waters tried to turn me into moorland mud.

Key. You put the key in the ignition. You turn it. Then the engine starts. Remember? Come on, Kath Redway: you’ve done this a million times. You got your licence at nineteen. You’ve done this virtually every day for eighteen years. It’s called driving.

I turn the key. I press my foot down. I steer away. I do not crash into the saloon bar of the Plume of Feathers, I do not smash into the leaded windows, crushing off-duty prison wardens in a clatter of stained wood and beer-bottles. I am driving.

From the anxiety of the afternoon, I feel a kind of elation. I CAN DRIVE. It’s another sudden mood swing. I get more of them now. Since the accident.

Happy, even giddy, I collect Lyla from school. She looks a little bemused: she thought she was going to After School Club, to be alone in a whole new place, but she also looks content to be going home early, where people will talk to her, where she can play with the dogs in front of the fire.

Or make cryptic patterns with dead birds.

I CAN DRIVE!

But as we aim for the turning that leads to the open moor, to the wild emptiness, I realize I have left my bag in the office. I was so excited by the car, I quite forgot.

Hastily, I park, once again, outside the Dartmoor NP Office. The day is wintry and dimming, a faint drizzle speckles the windscreen.

Lyla pipes up as I swing open the door, ‘Where are you going?’

‘Nowhere, darling. Just the office. Forgot my bag.’

‘No! Don’t go!’

‘Lyla?’

I turn, surprised, a little shocked. Lyla is trembling in the back seat.

‘Mummy, don’t go. Don’t.’

This is strange. Lyla worries about odd things, shapes, sounds, or the wrong kind of prickly vest, but she rarely worries about being left alone.

‘Darling—’

‘No. Mummy! You might not come back! You might not come back!’

‘Lyla, this is ridiculous. I’ll only be gone a second, really, I promise.’ I put out a hand to calm her but she waves it away. She does, however, seem a little soothed. She turns and gazes at the wrinkles of rain on the window, the black shape of the prison.

I seize the opportunity. Scooting out of the door, I run into the office, past my surprised boss. ‘Forgot my bag!’

He grins. ‘Ah.’

Grabbing the handbag, I head back to the car, but as I do I notice something on Andy’s desk. It’s a row of roundish grey stones, about the size of large golf balls, or wild apples. They might have been there all day.

They’re half hidden by his computer.

All the stones have holes in them. And I’ve seen this sort of stone before. I know the type. And it makes me quietly shudder.

‘Hey,’ I say, trying to hide the tremble in my voice. ‘Where did you get those?’

He glances up at me, the blue light of his computer shining on his spectacles. ‘These rocks? Ah.’ He picks one up and turns it in the light. ‘They were arranged along the window ledges this morning, outside, so I brought them in. Kinda odd, right? Guess some hiker made a collection? Left them here overnight.’

‘No,’ I say. ‘I don’t think so.’

His grin is edged with perplexity. ‘Sorry?’

‘These aren’t any old stones.’

Leaning close, I pick up one of the bigger rocks. It is surprisingly heavy: probably it has some metal ore inside. The hole is naturally weathered, which is crucial to its identity. But of course, Andy wouldn’t know the identity, the significance of these stones, because he doesn’t know the folklore and the mythology of Dartmoor: because all that stuff is my job. I did the archaeology degree, I’ve read the folklore books, I write all the leaflets. ‘These are hag stones.’

His grin is entirely gone. ‘You what?’

‘Hag stones.’ I have a burning desire to throw the stone away. To take all of these stones and bury them far from here, in Cornwall, Ireland, America. I try to disguise my irrational fear. ‘Moorland people used to put them on windowsills, or hang them from ropes over doors. You can still see them on Dartmoor farms, in really remote places. They’re a kind of joke, but I suspect some people still believe.’

He looks at me, frowning. ‘Hags? Old women?’

I turn the stone in my fingers, calming myself. ‘They also called them hex stones. Because they were thought to be apotropaic.’ I don’t wait for his question. ‘Apotropaic means they were used to ward off evil, to thwart black magic. People placed them by windows and doors to stop witches getting in.’ Even as I replace the stone, very carefully, next to its sisters, I can’t help glancing at my desk. ‘Or … or to stop them from getting out. And somebody arranged these stones, in a line on our window ledge, overnight? That must have been deliberate.’

Andy stares at the stones. The rainy light outside is almost entirely gone. But I can see Lyla in the back of my new car. She is sitting up rigid, and gazing straight at me. Unblinking.

The Lych Way

Tuesday morning

Adam had been walking this path for ten minutes, deep in thought, before he realized he was on the Lych Way. The old corpse road, named for when the Dartmoor villagers were forced to carry the coffins of their dead to the official parish church, right across the moor at Lydford.

In the lee of a biting wind, beside a stand of dark pines, he paused, imagining the scene – a dozen ragged peasants hefting the wooden box from Bellever Tor, over the Cowsic brook, up and down the bleak, shaved hills, Lynch Tor, Baggator Clapper, the Cataloo Steps.

And when the river was running high at Cataloo, what did they do then? They must have waded waist-deep into the freezing water, holding the coffin over their heads, before heading up Corpse Lane to Willsworthy. All so they could deliver their dead to the decreed resting place.

Twelve miles they carried those corpses. Twelve bloody miles.

Walking on, Adam scanned the horizon, watching for wildlife, seeking solace in the landscape. As he topped a rise, a kestrel caught his eye, hovering in the white winter sky. Instinctively, he stopped to admire the tremendous skill of the bird, that delicate trembling of the tips of its feathers, exquisite, masterful.

Windfuckers, his uncle used to call them, kestrels were windfuckers, because when they rode the wild air it looked as if they were fucking the wind – possessing it, owning the breeze, followed by that sudden climactic rush of a dive, a frightening swoop on some prey, then gone.

He paced on, still following the Lych Way, the old way of the dead, guessing that the cross should be along here somewhere, near the Iron Age settlements.

We saw a stone cross had been vandalized, on the road by Sittaford, that’s what the hiker who called it in had said.

But it was difficult to focus on the job. His mood was darker than the pines. He was trying his hardest, but today he couldn’t lose himself in Dartmoor. The human world pressed around him, the unfurling, uncontrollable emotions he felt for his wife, the sense of resentment he tried to hide for the sake of sanity, for the sake of his daughter. But how was he meant to hide this kind of emotion? What she’d done, and what she’d said, and what she had so conveniently forgotten. How was he meant to cope with that and pretend it didn’t matter?

All he’d ever wanted was to live his life and love his family, and be happy in his job, tending the moors, repairing the hedges, helping the tourists, watching the buzzards above Sourton Down, and normally he was happy. They had all been so happy. Yet now his family was crumbling.

Approaching a stile, Adam paused, vaulted, and took a deep cold breath, before striding on, the squared green conifer plantations falling far behind him. He was trying not to think of his family, trying not to surrender to despair, or to this growing dislike, whirled with guilt. Even as he loved and desired his wife, he felt a surging fury towards her.

Lyla. What was all this doing to Lyla?

He closed his eyes to steady his surging emotions, then looked across the landscape once more.

He could see the greener, emerald turf of a bog to his left, the faint sparkle of soggy acid grass, flashing in a break of winter sun. A memory returned: he was eight, or nine, with his Uncle Eddie, crouching to watch a snipe, right here, performing its nuptial display, the bird rising fast and steep in the air, then abruptly stooping and diving with its wings scarcely open, the tail delicately flared, making that strange noise. That sad, thrumming sound of the outspread tail feathers, vibrating in the dive. Once heard, never forgotten.

And on the way home from these days of learning about the birds and rocks and streams, his uncle would teach him the old moorland words:

Dimmity, meaning twilight. Owl-light, a darker kind of dusk. Radjel, a pile of rocks. Spuddle, to mess about. Tiddytope, a wren. Gallitrop, a fairy ring.

Appledrain, a wasp. How beautiful was that?

Moor-gallop: wind and rain moving across high ground. Drix: brittle wood. Ammil, a fine film of silvery ice that rimes the leaves and twigs and grass when a hard Dartmoor freeze follows a deceptive Dartmoor thaw, like an ice-storm, but more delicate. That was how precise the farmers had to be: they had to have words to describe the most beautiful and unusual states of frost and thaw and ice. Because lives depended on this precision: knowing when to gather the cattle, shelter the ponies, tend the struggling crops, nurse the suckling lambs.

Another, bigger, stile. Catching his breath before he clambered over, Adam stopped, and gazed to the horizon.

Every inch, every square mile. He’d seen it all so many times, and still he loved it. The grouse over Steeperton in the autumn, feeding on ling, and whortleberry. The glades of Deeper Marsh, with its alder buckthorns, where the yellow butterflies come to feast, heralding the late Dartmoor spring. The caves of Cuckoo Rock, where the smugglers once cached their brandy. And the great empty spaces of Langcombe, where he would tramp on a summer day: out there where you could imagine you were the only person in the world, with a featureless expanse of wafting grass and sedge all around you, mile after mile of nothing, no one to be seen, nothing to be done, the sun beating down, and all you could hear was the whirr and murmur of insects: that, and the silent moving clouds, and your own beating heart.

Those were probably his happiest moments; those, and when he was out with Lyla, teaching his little girl about the ravens and rock basins, the damselflies and purple orchids. She loved the moor as much as him. They spent endless sunny hours, walking the Abbot’s way, down to Rundlestone, or looking for the old blowing house, by the King’s Oven, or hunting for blackberries, up by Dunstone, and Shilstone, their lips and fingers purple, their teeth bright pink, and laughing – and then, at the sweet weary end of these days, they would drive home to Huckerby, and Kath would have passed by a supermarket, and they’d all sit and have tea, and a plate of fruitcake, and they were all happy. And Lyla would make clever patterns with the pretty petals she’d collected, arraying them on the kitchen table. Beautiful, complex patterns that only she truly understood. Or patterns she made for Daddy.

They were once so very happy.

And now it was all different. Now Lyla was confused and scared and sad, and often she wouldn’t let him – her own father! – hug her like he used to. These days Lyla sometimes gazed at him as if he’d done something wrong, all because of Kath, that Kinnersley family. All of them. And yet at other times – before bed, before sleep – Lyla sometimes hugged her dad so very close, so desperately close, it was like she was scared he too would disappear in the night – like her mother.

This was no good. Adam tried to drive the spiralling, dangerous thoughts from his mind. It was as if they were all being sucked into a Dartmoor mire: Dead Lake, Fox Tor, Honeypool: the more they struggled to get free, the deeper they sank into frustration, and anger. The best thing was to calm yourself. Not make it worse. Not to do anything rash.

Adam could see the old cross now. A metre high, with a weathered and lichened green-grey granite disc at the top. Probably Anglo-Celtic, probably a thousand years old or more. Someone had hit it pretty hard, knocking it over, probably some fool in an SUV, drunk or skunked, driving offroad and having a laugh. The disc of the cross was cracked and shattered; it had survived so many centuries and now it was grievously damaged, possibly irreparable. Something good had died.

Adam knelt beside the antique stone, stroked the cold granite as if it was the mane of an injured foal. Feeling the scratchy roughness of the lichen under his hands, feeling utterly helpless. Trying not to feel any more futile emotions. Trying to be practical.

Rubbing air between his raw fingers to keep out the winter chill, he stood up and began the long walk back to his Land Rover, and as he did so he made his decision about the cross. No matter how difficult, they would try to repair it. Because that was his job: to preserve this precious place, from the antiquities to the landscape to the chittering fieldfares at Soussons. To preserve as much of it as possible, and hand it on to the next generation, to Lyla, to Lyla’s children.

He would call the archaeology department at Exeter, get them to send an expert. Yes. It could be saved.

If only love were the same, he thought as he headed down the corpse road. If only love could be repaired, re-erected, restored. But once you smashed up loyalty, smashed up a loving family, that was it, wasn’t it? And what if that love was replaced by suspicion, even contempt, what did that do to you? Where did that lead you? In what dark, dark wood did you wake up? Perhaps the path you took might lead you even deeper into darkness.

Adam had nearly reached the Land Rover. He could see another kestrel, hovering in the cold air, framed by the pale green heights of Hurston Ridge. The bird was so beautiful, so perfect, quivering, elemental, doing precisely what it came here to do. Trembling with intent, with a fierce and irresistible desire to kill; to survive.

What did Kath do that night, and all the nights he was away? The question was simultaneously unapproachable and unavoidable. If he got to the answer he might get the measure of her guilt – and their marriage would be over. If he didn’t, he would seethe with speculative rage forever, and their marriage would be over.

And either way, Lyla ended up without a mother. So probably he should let it go; yet he could not. He loved her, he hated her, he loved her, he hated her. The confusion of emotion was like a wet moorland fire, making smoke rather than heat: it choked him. It killed his hopes, smothered things forever.

As he opened his car door, Adam remembered what his uncle used to say about the wilderness of Dartmoor, as they castrated the rams and dehorned the shrieking cows, as they took the frightened, lowing bullocks to the blood-slicked slaughterhouse, where the sheets of blood shone like a gorgeous lacquer, in luxurious swirls of scarlet and purple.

The moor is beautiful, lad, because it is dangerous.

Huckerby Farm

Wednesday morning

Today is another inset day. A training day for teachers at Princetown Primary, when the kids get a day off. These days come around every so often, and it means that one of us – Adam or me – has to clock off work, to look after Lyla, one-on-one. It’s always intense, because Lyla has no proper friends; play-dates are out of the question.

But I still, usually, look forward to the chance to bond with her. To take her out on the moors, go for a summer swim, or autumn horseriding. But today is dank, and very chilly. It might even snow.

And my mind is elsewhere, and perhaps Lyla senses it. I am thinking about the hag stones left on the window ledge at my office. Could be it really was a hiker who set them down for a moment, and forgot. Could be it was kids having a laugh. But did they know the stones symbolized the driving away of witches? And why did they choose my office?

As I pensively clear the breakfast plates, my daughter kicks the table leg. Kick kick kick. Kick kick kick. She wants her mother’s attention.

And she deserves it.

‘What can we do, Mummy?’

‘I don’t know, darling, it’s a horrid old day. Something indoors? Like Castle Drogo?’ Kick.

‘It’s nice there, Mummy, but they don’t like dogs. Can we please do something else?’ She looks at me yearningly. ‘With Felix and Randal?’

I struggle to think. Look at a good map or a detailed guidebook and there are so many enticing places on Dartmoor, so many places with fairytale names – the Lost Crosses, Hameldown Daggar, Quintin’s Man – but today I am not enticed. Lyla needs to be entertained, diverted, though. I don’t want her spending the entire day lonely, lost in books. Not again.

An idea forms.

‘I know,’ I say, with a studied brightness, ‘Let’s go somewhere to see the standing stones you like.’

Her face brightens: she loves Dartmoor’s ancient circles and menhirs.

‘Merrivale? Scorhill?’

‘No,’ I say, slightly mischievously. ‘Somewhere you haven’t been before.’

She beams with delight. ‘Where? Tell me!’

‘Hah. No.’

‘Tell me, Mummy!’

‘Get ready, and I’ll make a picnic and we’ll go on a mystery tour! Put your boots on, and a coat. Everything else is fine.’

My daughter looks down at herself: she’s wearing a pair of black jeans, and a grey shirt, with a yellow pullover. She always mixes up colours wildly, I’m not sure she understands how clothes go together, yet she usually gets away with it, with her father’s blue eyes, his pale, nearly Slavic cheekbones, and that dark, dark hair. That beauty. I remember the boy I saw in the pub when I was seventeen, the boy I have loved ever since, the blue-eyed boy who gave me this blue-eyed girl. Adam Redway, my childhood sweetheart.

‘Do I really need boots? I hate wellies, they’re scratchy.’

‘Yes, you do. It will be wet in the bogs, and muddy. So go and get your things and I’ll pack some sandwiches.’

‘Peanut butter? So it’s a Special Occasion!’

I laugh. Lyla laughs. Whenever we go on a jaunt we always take peanut butter sandwiches: the comic predictability is a family in-joke. Jumping up from her chair, Lyla runs out of the kitchen, shouting out to Felix and Randal, who are slumbering in the living room, ‘Felix! Randy! Going on a walk! Big huge walk!’

I hear her scamper upstairs and the dogs canter after her, their claws skittering on the wooden steps.

Ten minutes later I’ve packed a hasty picnic in a bag, dropped the bag in the car boot, the dogs are jumping in the back seat, on either side of Lyla, and I have the key in the ignition. We’re having a day away from Huckerby Farm. My intent is Grey Wethers, a pair of poetic stone circles on the far eastern edge of the moor. Merely getting there will be a high adventure. It will take up the whole day. A good day outdoors with the dogs, even if the cold and gloom persists.

As I reverse the car, Lyla says, from the back seat, ‘You know … I saw a man.’

I trundle the car down the lane, towards what passes for a road in remoter Dartmoor. ‘Sorry, darling?’

‘I saw a man.’

The tension tightens inside me. I slow the car to hear my daughter better. ‘When, darling, what man?’

I’m looking at her in the mirror, but her face is averted. She is tickling Felix behind his ear. For a long while she says nothing.

‘Lyla?’

I drive at about five miles an hour through the squelch of a wintry Dartmoor day, over tiny medieval bridges never meant for cars.

At last she says, ‘It was a man that you know. I saw him at Huckerby. Near Huckerby.’

Who can she mean? It seems important but I don’t know why. She could be referring to anyone; she might be recalling a dream.

‘When, Lyla-berry? And what did he look like?’

‘Two or three times. I don’t know, he was far away. He looked …’ She squirms, ‘He looked a bit like Daddy. A lot like Daddy. And I think he was there the night you went to …’ Her voice is trembly. ‘The night. That night. When you left me with Auntie Emma.’

This is Lyla’s name for our neighbour, Emma Spalding. Emma was looking after Lyla when I was working late: the night I skidded into Burrator. Emma has been like an aunt, or like the grandmother Lyla never had, because Adam’s mum died years ago, and both my parents are gone.

We drive on. The roads are a mess of mud and fallen leaves. What is Lyla saying? That she saw a friend of mine that night, and she’s seen him since, near Huckerby? Or does she really mean Adam? It is impossible. My own husband is not following me. Could it be someone that looks like him, though? Harry? Or one of his many other cousins? The Redways are scattered across the moor.

But why would anyone follow me?

I slow the car down, my hands firm yet feeble on the wheel, gazing out of the window, trying to work it out.

The trees bend in a cold wind, tatters of grey moss fluttering. Birds hide among the leafless twigs. The only colour apart from dull grey and green is the shivering yellow of gorse flower.

In the mirror, Lyla’s face is rigid. I know this mood, what it means: she doesn’t want to speak. At its worst she can go into total and prolonged silence. Elective mutism. Another Asperger symptom. But I can’t let it go. ‘Lyla, this is very important. You say you saw someone I know.’ She is mute.

We turn on to the main road to Widecombe and Fernworthy, the faster road. And almost immediately, I slow. Dartmoor ponies, their rich black manes rippling in the breeze, are standing on either side of the tarmac. In this pose they always strike me as guardians of the moor, essential spirits of the place. ‘Lyla? Please?’ Nothing.

‘Lyla—’

‘It was the day you left me.’ Her blue eyes meet mine in the mirror, and they are piercing, ‘The day you left me alone. You must remember that day, Mummy.’

Her face goes still again, still and quiet and pale. Even angry. And I know if I ask one more question she will not say another word for hours, or days. Or a week. Yet I am anxious to interrogate her further. What is she trying and failing to say? Is it something so unspeakable she cannot bring herself to say it clearly?

The words already spoken pain me quite enough. She seems to be blaming me for the accident. I want to tell her: it wasn’t my fault.

Foot down on the brake, I bring the car to a total halt as another pony crosses the road. Heedless of our presence, living in a different world, the pony trots along the verge, then canters away – over the brown crest of a hill, its rich mane flowing like a dark flame on the wind.

The scene reminds me of my daughter: with her black hair streaming on a cold blustery day, running with the dogs, happy in herself. Alone with her thoughts and dreams, and as mysterious as the weather beyond Haytor.

Grey Wethers

Wednesday lunchtime

It’s taken us an hour to walk here, through the serried pine plantations of Fernworthy, out on to the expanse of brown moorland.

‘There,’ I say.

‘Where?’

I point to Grey Wethers, the two stone circles, barely visible in the distance, set on a slope, staring at the nothingness all around them. Grey Wethers is one of my favourite places on Dartmoor: there’s something poetic about the silent, twinned nature of these circles, raised three thousand years ago by men who knew how to use a landscape, how to adorn it, respond to it, with simple rings of grey moorland rock.

Grey Wethers is as beautiful, to me, as a palace or a castle. The only reason I don’t come here more often is that it requires a long and boring walk, first through regimented conifers, then hopping over quaggy ground, boots sinking into unsuspected pools of stagnant, cressy water, shins cracked on hidden moorland boulders.

‘What do you think?’ I say. ‘It’s kind of lovely, isn’t it?’

I scrutinize her passive face for clues. Who did she see at Huckerby? If it is someone I know, that makes it even more bewildering. I barely have any friends – let alone male friends – who live nearby; my old university friends are mainly in London, or scattered around the world.

So she must mean a relative of mine. And I have so few contenders. My brother is down at Salcombe, in my mother’s house. We like the distance between us; it prevents us squabbling. As for my father, he is long dead.

It keeps coming back to someone who looks like Adam, as Lyla said. The man on the moor. Or could it be Adam himself?

No, absurd.

In silence, we approach the nearest of the circles. The dogs are running ahead; for once Lyla is not interested in their romps and explorations.

Instead she frowns gently, puzzled, gazing first at the stones, then at the horizon, alert to something. Finally my daughter walks to the centre of the nearest stone circle. And sits down.

‘Are you all right?’

She nods. I sit down beside her, cross-legged. The cold wind has dropped and a feeble hint of January sun pierces the cloud cover. The turf beneath us is quite dry. Apparently it hasn’t rained here for weeks. Dartmoor weather is so strange. Adam says that on July days he can leave tourists sunbathing by a moorland river, then walk ten minutes up a tor – and be hit by driving snow; yet when he walks back, the kids in the valley are still swimming in the sunshine.

‘Shall we have a sandwich?’

Lyla says a quiet please. I unbuckle my rucksack and take out the picnic box and for several minutes we eat our peanut butter sandwiches in companionable silence, listening to the whirr of the gentle wind in the sedge, and the trill of a cold moorland stream in the distance. I can also hear the dogs, barking happily over the next shallow hillside, hunting out rabbits, or hares. Or digging up old human bones from Stone Age cairns. Kistvaens. Those chests containing ancient skeletons, where the bodies were cruelly bent to fit them in: knees pressed to chin, as if the burial was a torture in itself. Perhaps they buried some alive. No one is quite sure.

Setting down her sandwich, Lyla says, ‘I’m sorry for what I said about the man. I don’t think I saw anyone. Sorry, Mummy. I get scared?’

‘Ah … OK.’

Confusion settles upon confusion. I begin to fear that one day I may wake up, trapped, snowbound by all this strangeness. But Lyla is still traumatized by her mother nearly dying; confusion would be understandable. Expected.

Taking another bite of bread and peanut butter, she chews diligently, and says, ‘I like it here. I like the silence and the forests over there, so far away. I always like the stone circles.’

‘That’s good.’

‘I like Scorhill and Totterton and Sourton and Buttern Hill and Mardon, all of them, but they’re not the best ones. Do you know my favourite?’

‘No …’ I am wrapping the sandwich foil into a ball, putting it back in the box. ‘But tell me.’

‘Merrivale!’ she says, smiling brightly.

I smile in return. We’ve been to Merrivale several times: it’s definitely one of her cherished places on the moor. Merrivale, with its stone rows and burial cairns, arrayed along a bald and windswept crest of moorland.

‘Why do you like Merrivale?’

‘Because they called it Plague Market! I read that was its name. Do you know why it was given that name? I had to look it up.’

‘No.’

Her eyes turn to meet mine, unblinking. ‘During the Black Death, the moorland people would leave food in the stone circle. And later the coastal people, all the people who had the plague already, they would come and take the food, and leave gold and silver as a payment, in a trough full of vinegar, then they would go away. And that’s how they tried to stop it, stop the Black Death spreading.’ She blinks, once, and goes on. ‘Isn’t that amazing? A special plague market, on the moor, between the stones, where no one had to meet, so no one saw anyone else, like they were all ghosts. And all that gold and silver in the vinegar.’ Lyla frowns, toying with a blade of grass, ‘But … but it didn’t work, that’s what I read. The Black Death spread anyway, right across the moor. So all the people died. Even when you leave gold in vinegar, Mummy, it doesn’t work. Everyone dies.’

The anxious, fluttering wind carries the scent of newly chopped pine from the forest. I’m not sure whether to be disturbed by my daughter’s monologue, one of Lyla’s Aspergery lectures, or happy that she is, at least, communicating.

‘Have you finished with your drink?’

Lyla says yes and hands me her finished carton of apple juice.

‘Thanks for bringing me here.’

‘Hey. It’s nice for me too, Lyla. I love these circles, like you.’

She nods, but she also shakes her head.

‘What is it?’ I ask.

‘You’re wrong though, Mummy. Wrong.’

‘Why? Wrong in what way?’

‘You said I’d never been here before. But I have been here before. Here to Grey Wethers. I remember it.’ As she speaks, she repeatedly brushes non-existent sandwich crumbs from her jeans. Brush brush brush. ‘I’ve been here before, with you and Daddy.’

I reply, very gently, ‘No, darling, you haven’t been here, not with me, perhaps you came here with Daddy, or Uncle Dan, but not me.’

Lyla shakes her head. Stops brushing. ‘I have been here. You’ve forgotten.’

‘No, darling, I—’

And now I remember. I murmur, out loud: ‘Oh, yes, my God.’ She’s right. Lyla has been here before. In fact she was here the very first time I came here. Adam brought me to see the Grey Wethers and I was carrying Lyla on my back, in a harness, because she was nine months old.

For a moment I am speechless.

I know that my daughter, like quite a few people on her part of the spectrum, has this ability to recollect way back beyond normal human memory, but it always surprises me. And delights me. My daughter has issues; but she also has gifts. And this is one of these gifts, however unsettling.

Lyla gets to her feet. Picnic time is over. We begin the walk back to the car.

‘So you had a nice time?’

‘Yes, Mummy, yes, thanks. Look, here’s Felix and Randal, can we give them the last of the peanut butter sandwiches?’

The dogs are galloping over the windswept brown turf. Lyla takes the picnic box from my rucksack, unwraps the foil, and hands out the crusts. The dogs eat as if they haven’t been fed since they were pups. I’m sure they’d prefer fresh meat, but they would probably eat dust and pebbles from Lyla’s hand: their adoration of her is total.

Our long, chilly walk back to the car is quiet, the journey to Huckerby is quiet, everything is quiet, until we are a mile from home and Lyla asks if we can go to Hobajob’s Wood. It’s another one of her favourite places: she finds rare flowers there – eyebright, fritillary – and the iridescent shells of nameless blue beetles. Flowers and insects and little weathered claws.

I glance at the wintry sky, ‘It’s getting really dark, sweetheart. We need to get home.’

‘Oh please, Mummy. We’re so close.’

‘Hmm.’

The day has been good. One of our best since my accident. I experience a surge of maternal happiness. Why not indulge her? ‘All right, but only for a few minutes. It’ll be night in half an hour.’ Parking the car in the lay-by, we begin the cold walk along the cold valley to the cold and dense little wood with its twisted, moss-hung oak trees, clawing at the blank winter sky. Hobajob’s Wood is like a smaller version of famous Wistman’s Wood. Not quite as atmospheric, but not as touristy, either. Hidden away.

Our secret.

The dogs run ahead, leaping over boulders. They know the route well, it looks as if they are keenly following the scent of a badger or a fox. I pat my pockets, wishing I had brought a torch. The daylight will be gone in twenty minutes. Anxiety rises, very slightly. I want to get home, to a nice roaring wood-fire. Whatever timid warmth the day possessed has now gone for good.

It’s going to be a very bitter winter night on the high moorland.

The trees surround us, their cold branches scratching my anorak. It must be below freezing now: the perpetual Dartmoor dampness has turned, here at Hobajob’s, into a hard-core frost. The twigs and leaves underfoot make brittle, snapping sounds as we pace. Lyla is eagerly pursuing the dogs towards the gloom, towards the little clearing in the middle of the wood, where she always finds her treasures. The clearing was probably a Stone Age hut, many thousands of years ago, or some Neolithic shrine, no one quite knows.

We have to cross a stile, an ancient wall, it could be two hundred years old, it could be two thousand, after that we climb a hill and the woodland deepens again, surrounding the clearing. Cages within cages, no birds sing.

The dogs are already there. I can see them in the frosty gloom, circling shapes, like loping wolves in a Victorian picture book. They are barking wildly, oddly. Making a noise I have never heard from them before. What have they found?

Lyla turns to me, her face worried.

‘What’s wrong with Felix and Randal? Mum? Something is wrong!’

I have a fierce and overwhelming urge to turn and run back along the deepening shadows of the path to the car. It’s freezing cold. It’s nearly dark. I am scared, of what I do not know.

But I don’t want to show Lyla my fear. Get the dogs, and go home. Now.

Lyla runs towards the dogs as their howling gets even louder. I can barely see a thing; the winter evening is falling fast, dark grey and black, and the mossed and gathered trees make it darker still. ‘Mummy!’

Lyla’s yell cuts right through me.

She is yards ahead, in the clearing; I push icy brambles aside and run into the sombre glade. The dogs are circling and yowling. Fiendish. Perhaps they are simply scared of the weather, and the whiteness: here in the dark cold core of the forest, there’s been an ammil, that strange Dartmoor phenomenon when an initial thaw in cold weather is turned to ice, once again, as deep winter suddenly returns, devouring and glaciating.

In the slantwise evening light, this ammil, as always, looks beautiful. The special moorland ice storm that makes silent glasswork of the world.

My mother always loved the ammils.

As the dogs raise their eerie lamentations I look around, in something like wonder, an infant on a dark Christmas Day: every twig on every branch on every wizened little tree looks like the finger of a candied skeleton, a slender see-through bone of sugar. All the holly leaves are turned to immobile flames of white frost; through the trees I can see the distant shaggy cattle walking on grass made of tiny crystal spears.

But the dogs won’t stop their yowling. What is frightening them?

‘Look, Mummy, look!’

Lyla is pointing to the centre of the clearing. I can see a couple of dead birds and a few dead mice, three or four, lying, claws in the air, no doubt killed by the vicious returning cold. They’re in a kind of line, but that means nothing. Next to them is a trail of household rubbish. Daily waste. Casually dumped. It makes me so angry when people do this to Dartmoor, it makes Lyla even angrier.

It sometimes makes her cry.

Yet something snags. I look again at the scattered line of trash in the frost. I can see a hairbrush. Incongruously pink, and now rimed with a varnish of frost.

It is mine. I am sure it is mine. I lost it a while ago. And now I step a little closer I can see my own fine brown hairs are still meshed in the prongs, though stiffened to wire by the cold, and there are scrunched-up, mouldering tissues trailing from the brush, red and stained, either kissed with lipstick, or dabbed with blood. I shudder in the freeze. Is this my blood? And there, at the end, under the tree, is that a tampon? One of my used tampons? I have to throw away tampons carefully, in bags: our sewage system out in the wilds cannot cope with these things, but why would my tampon be scattered out here?

Revulsion shudders through me. I feel invaded, or poisoned. Violated. It must be the scent of all this, the blood, the hair, the waste, that is freaking out the dogs, who are now backing away from the clearing, hackles up, growling.

Lyla calls after them. I stare at the tissues daubed obscenely with my blood. Who is doing this? Who has taken my trash, my hair, my brush, and laid them out here in the wood, next to these sad little birds, stiffened and killed by the cold? I look at my daughter, could she have done this, as a joke, or some ritual, making a pattern? Why? This is not her style, she is not sly or conniving, and she looks as shocked and alarmed as me.

‘Mummy, what’s wrong with the dogs?’ Lyla’s face is even paler than usual. ‘Where are they going?’

My blood thumps. I wonder if it was me that dumped this here, or lost this here, and I have simply forgotten. Part of my amnesia. Yet why such intimate waste? Blood, tissues, hair.

Abruptly, Lyla grabs at my hand, her fingers freezing, and lets out a piercing scream.

‘Mummy! I can hear someone coming!’

Hobajob’s Wood

Wednesday evening

‘What? Where?’

I clutch my daughter’s hand, very tight. It is so dark now I can hardly see the bare frozen twigs of the dead trees on the other side of the clearing.

‘Lyla, what can you hear?’

She shakes her head and tilts her face, listening intently. My words are clouds of mist. The twigs tinkle in a subtle breeze, like sentimental chimes. It could be minus five. We need to get away, get far away from this wood and this sickening trail of trash.

‘Lyla, come on.’

Lyla shakes her head at me, almost angrily. ‘Listen!’

I strain but can’t hear anything unusual. ‘There’s nothing, no one. Come on, Lyla—’

‘No! That’s him!’

She’s almost screaming. Her hearing is ten times better than mine. Needles of fear prickle my fingers.

‘Who? Lyla, who can you see?’

‘No one!’ she says, whispering now. Hard and low. ‘But I can hear him, he’s out there, I know it! Mummy, he’s watching us, it’s him, the man on the moor, in the freeze.’

‘Stop this. Let’s go! When we get home we can call the police.’ I pat my raincoat pockets for my phone. I have no phone, of course, and anyway it wouldn’t get a signal out here, but it does have a little torch. But I left it charging in the car. So we don’t have any light. We have to leave right now.

‘Lyla, come on, we have to go.’

‘But what if he sees, Mummy, what if he catches us on the way? He’ll do it again … He’ll take you to the lake.’

‘What are you talking about?’

‘Mummy, Mummy, look!’

She is chattering with cold, or terror. Helpless, I stare around at the quiet wood. In the gloom, the leafless, frosted, moss-hung trees seem to edge towards us, their dark, frost-rimed fingers lifted to the twilit sky as if they were once a crowd of trapped, imploring people, burned to blackness by an awful fire.

Is that someone, or something, in the trees?

‘Mummy, he’s so close! That way, over there!’

I look and think, for a second, I see movement. But no, there is nothing here, is there? Just us and the dogs and the dead birds, and my hairbrush, and a hideous used tampon.

My resolve is snapped, by a crackle of frosted twigs, a human footfall.

‘Mummy!’

Lyla bolts. She wrenches from my grasp and goes sprinting down the frosty path, out of the woods, towards the distant car. She is a faster runner than me, she runs so much on the moor. But I must not let her out of my sight. I hear the dogs barking wildly as they scatter into the woods, not pursuing us: pursuing someone or something else. Or they are being pursued in turn.

‘Felix!’ I shout. ‘Randal! Come on!’

Lyla is racing away, a dim little figure, getting dimmer in the dusk. Trees and brambles snag at me, lacerate my hands and neck as I stumble on cold, mossy rocks. I urge myself on; it is so dark, I can barely see, but I can hear my daughter. I fall, cracking a knee on an icy tree stump. Ah. Ah ah ah! I shout at the sudden sparkling pain, and look ahead. Lyla has stopped, on the path, by a little wooden footpath sign.

She turns in the gloom, and shrieks, ‘Mummy, he’s coming! He’s coming after you! Right behind you!’

‘Lyla—’

‘Don’t look back, Mummy, get up get up!’

I can hear crashing noises behind me, something big emerging from the cold heart of Hobajob’s Wood; the dogs, or someone else?

Someone I know.

Pushing myself to my feet, I start running, again. But Hobajob’s Wood wants to lock us inside. Dead branches block the path, ice patches crack as I trample my way, breathing chilly fog. I have reached the ancient stone wall, toothed with new icicles. Climbing over, I jump down, the crashing behind me as loud as ever – but I am too scared to look back.

There. The car. A welcome grey shape in the deathly twilight. I see Lyla is already inside, her face pressed to the rear window, her eyes wide with fear.

The cold car door handle stings my hand, I yank it open and fall into the seat and twist the key into the ignition, but Lyla shouts at me, ‘Wait, Mummy, the dogs, where did they go?’

‘They ran off, but they’ll find their way back. We have to go.’

‘No! He’ll kill them.’

She is right, she is wrong, she is screaming, I open the door again, to the frigid dark air, and see – what? Who? Something? – and there is Felix, crashing over a fence, leaping it in one go, three foot high. He tears towards us, leaps across me into the car, wet and cold and doggy and yowling. He jumps on to Lyla, clearly terrified.

Forcing Felix away from her face, Lyla cries, ‘Where’s Randal, we can’t go without him!’

I can hear something. Getting nearer.

‘We can’t wait any longer!’

‘Over there!’

I stare, helpless, into the dark pillars of the trees and the crouched shapes of bushes. It is now too dark to see anything for sure. It is as if I am drowning again in the black waters of Burrator. Even as it formed, the ammil is beginning to melt. Drip, drip, drip. The black ice dwindles.

‘Hide, Mummy. Duck down so he can’t see!’

It feels ludicrous. Surely he will see us. He’ll have heard us slamming the car’s doors. But I don’t know what else to do.

Lyla is nearly crying. ‘Duck down low, Felix, Mummy, please hide.’

I do as she says; cower low in my seat. Maybe he will run past. Maybe he has got Randal. Maybe he’s been watching all along, for weeks.

The seconds pass. Felix whimpers. Lyla shushes him, fiercely.

Seconds become minutes. He is here, he will open the door.

My fingers and lips are numb from the cold. I try to keep my breathing as quiet as possible. And I wait.

Nothing happens. The silence endures. From crashing and panic to total immobility and total calm. The cold is the only noise, like a steely ringing in my ears.

My limbs ache from this cramped position. I need to stretch. We’ve been here ten minutes. Nothing has happened. Was there ever anything? I begin to doubt. The brush, I definitely saw the brush, and the dead birds, and the tissues – but was that tampon, stained with blood, really mine? Was any of it really mine? There’s no sure way to tell.

Maybe we just panicked. Overreacted. People dump litter all the time in Dartmoor. Adam loathes them. Says he will set the dogs on them if he ever finds them, let the lurchers tear the yobs apart, limb from screaming limb. See how they like their lungs and kidneys being scattered across the tors.

Even as I think this, I hear a friendly, recognizable growling, outside the car.

Kicking open the door, I see Randal, his tongue lolling, smoking cold breath in the dimmity. He jumps casually into the car, and on to the back seat, to be fussed by Lyla, and nuzzled by Felix. He does not seem frightened. He does not act like a dog that was chasing, or being chased. It’s Randal. Our dog. Behaving normally.

Lyla’s face is blank now, the terror gone.

‘Let’s go,’ I say.

She nods, and shuts her eyes.

I work it through; and I work it out. It really was a simple panic. We panicked. It’s what people do in woods. In the dark, as the cold and the night kicks in. They panic: they see the Great God Pan. The fabled monster. But the monster is always your imagination, conjuring terror out of rowans and frost and little dead birds. And it was an average plastic hairbrush, iced with frost. Could have been anyone’s.

I turn the key and the lights illuminate our drive home. Shadows of trees line the route as we unbend the narrow road and reach Huckerby. We open the door to a warm kitchen, I turn all the lights on and make a pot of tea. Neither of us speaks. The dogs are fed. Lyla is subdued, can’t even look me in the eye. It is as if she feels guilty, or is still scared. She sits at the kitchen table, nibbling a biscuit, drinking a glass of milk. I feel a need for one of Andy’s hag stones, to hang on the lintel of the door. To keep the witches out, the evil influences of Dartmoor that creep their way along the thorny hedgerows, trying to find a way into your home.

At a beam of car lights, Lyla looks up. I hear the familiar sound of an engine, which is turned off.

Adam has returned.

He opens the door, brushing snowflakes from the shoulders of his fleece. As he shuts the door behind him his expression says it all as he looks at us.

We have mud on our hands and faces. I have scratches on my neck from the twigs and brambles.

‘Jesus. What happened to you two?’

I don’t know quite what to say. ‘Well, there was this load of crap in Hobajob’s, rubbish and tissues – anyway, we got a bit scared, and probably it was a joke, or coincidence, but it was frightening—’

Without warning, Lyla bursts into tears. She waves a hand at me, angrily. ‘I don’t know, I’m sorry, Mum, I thought I heard him, saw him, I thought he was coming to take you away again.’

Adam steps toward Lyla, but she turns and shakes her head and says,

‘Sorry, Daddy. Sorry. I want to go to sleep.’

And with that, she leaps to her feet, and runs up the stairs.

The dogs, as always, rise and follow, cantering noisily up the wooden steps to join her in her bedroom. We hear her bedroom door slamming shut.

Adam looks as if he wants to go after; I raise a hand. ‘Wait, please – let her be, for now. She’s frightened because, you see, there really was a scare. There wasn’t any man, but there were these dead birds—’

‘It’s freezing, it’s Dartmoor, it’s winter.’

‘Yes, but all the rubbish, strewn everywhere – it looked like it was from our bathroom.’

He regards me, sceptically; I press on.

‘And I wondered if Lyla is taking it there, likes she takes stuff to her den? Making patterns. But she’s too embarrassed to admit it. And yet, I don’t know, because she seemed as freaked out as me.’

‘Tell me the whole thing,’ he says. There is real anger in his expression, or some other emotion I cannot discern. ‘Tell me everything, Kath.’

And so I tell him the whole story, as he pulls up a wooden chair. I tell him about the day at Grey Wethers, the stones and the forest, and the trip to Hobajob’s; then the accelerated sequence of the yowling dogs, the tissues, the birds, and pattern of familiar household rubbish made so evil by the setting. My blood, my lipstick, my hair, arranged in lines and circles. In a ring of fine frost. And I admit the panic, the manic fear that gripped us, the sense of an imaginary man. A predator.

Adam stays silent as I explain, he is still in his damp Ranger’s fleece, as if he is a passing visitor.

‘So that’s it,’ I conclude, wearily, wanting his understanding, his sympathy. ‘Everything freaked her out, I mean it freaked me out, a used tampon? Someone’s hair, someone’s blood? Possibly mine?’

He gazes my way, his expression undecipherable. ‘You can’t know it was yours. We get fly-tippers all the time.’ He offers me a shrug. ‘Probably kids from Princetown. Bunch of tossers.’

‘I know,’ I say, unsurely. ‘Yes, I know all that. But in the middle of Hobajob’s, why there? And Lyla is really scared of something happening, to me, all over again. She’s not herself. So what do we do now?’ I want him to come over and hug me. To sort this out, be my husband, to help, to hug, to kiss. ‘Will she get over it, Adam? Will we be all right? When she sees I’m not going anywhere, will she stop imagining things?’

His expression is tinged with proper anger now. ‘No,’ he says. Firmly, coldly. ‘No. She won’t simply get better.’

Rising, he walks to the sink, and takes down a Plymouth Aquarium mug from a hook under the cupboard. His voice is low and sombre, darker than ever. ‘All this lying isn’t helping, it’s making things worse.’ He turns to face me. ‘Kath. It’s time. The time has come. There’s something you need to know. About your accident.’

Huckerby Farm

Thursday morning

Adam is getting Lyla ready for school. He’s said nothing more since last night, nothing to explain his cryptic words. He’s told me I need to meet someone, and she will explain. Later yesterday evening, I heard him make a series of muffled phone calls, outside in the freezing yard, where there is sometimes better reception. It sounded as if he was arranging something.

Now he stands here in the kitchen, helping Lyla into her winter coat. We all turn to the sound of a car, squelching through frost and mud, into the farmyard. Adam goes to the door.

And there she is. Tessa. My brother’s wife. My thirty-eight-year-old sister-in-law. The woman we once sought out, for advice on Lyla’s suspected Asperger’s: because she is a psychologist, teaching psychology at Plymouth University.

Tessa walks into the kitchen and stands next to my fridge, with its magnets spelling Love You Mummy from Felix, a joke by my daughter, who likes to pretend Felix and Randal can read and write, as if they are real friends who can talk with her, and understand her.

‘Hello, Kath,’ says Tessa.

I don’t say anything in return. I glare at my husband. He looks back at me carefully, yet rather coldly.

Why has he brought Tessa Kinnersley to Huckerby? If he has something to say, why can’t he say it himself? Why involve Tessa, a psychologist?

As if I am mad.

In the distance I can hear the dogs barking happily. The normality makes me angry.

I am not mad. My memory is fragmented and I have odd panics but this was all anticipated. Mild to moderate brain injury, they said. Expect mood swings, sudden anxieties or depressions, difficulty with daily tasks, insomnia, nerves, prickliness, but you should also expect a slow and steady recovery.

Tessa comes a little closer. ‘Kath, I know this must be weird, and I’m really sorry, but I’m here to talk. That’s all. Adam thought it might be better if you heard things from me.’

‘What things?’

She flashes a glance at my husband. He responds with a subtle nod as he chats quietly with Lyla. Making sure she has everything in her schoolbag. He is ushering her away from the scene, telling her to wait in the car. I gaze at Lyla but she’s not even looking at me, as she exits. What is going on? The hag stones, the symbols made of birds, the objects in the forest, maybe it is all imagination and coincidence sending me to the edge. Perhaps Tessa really is the kind of person I need to see. A trained psychologist, who used to work at the prison, and for the police.

‘Kath.’

My husband’s voice rouses me. How long have I been stood here, lost in pointless thought? ‘Sorry,’ I say, and immediately regret it. Now I’ve apologized, I’m on the defensive. I feel a need to protect myself. This feels like a hostile situation. I am the woman who gets panicked in woods. How can she be allowed to drive?

‘Kath,’ says Adam. ‘This is difficult for everyone, but Tessa is a friend and a professional. You know that. So we thought it was the right way to do this. Cos it’s really important. There are questions you need to be asked. There’s stuff about your accident that you need to hear.’

He comes over and puts a protective arm around my shoulders. And I feel an urge to sink into those arms, forever. My big husband, the National Park Ranger, the guy who rescues drowning tourists from quarries.

But no. Stiffening myself, I ease out of the hug. I mustn’t admit to my stirring feelings of disintegration, my fear of stones and brushes and dead animals. I’ve got to stay sane and sensible. Because, if they take my driving licence away it could permanently fracture my marriage, and really drive me over the edge. A few weeks of reliance on Adam, for transport, left us bickering. What would a year do? We can’t move back to Princetown, we all hate it. And park rangers are obliged to live within the Park. And Lyla has to live in the wilds, she loves it here, she hated it in town.

Without a car each, we’d be screwed.

‘All right,’ I say, forcing a smile. The way my daughter forces a smile, because sometimes she doesn’t know how to smile. ‘I’ll answer questions. I’ve got some of my own, I think.’

‘Good,’ says Adam, backing away. ‘I’ll take Lyla to school.’

The door opens and closes. I hear the rumble of the Land Rover, fading away.

Recalling my manners, I offer Tessa some tea. She nods and says sorry, again, and I feel my hostility melt, somewhat. She is a good friend, or at least one of my few remaining friends, of any kind. She gave us good advice on Lyla. When I was wondering if we should have her assessed, but Adam was more reluctant.

The fat brown teapot is placed on the kitchen table. ‘Can I ask you some general questions first, Kath?’

‘I suppose so. OK.’

‘Would you say you are happy, or were happy, before the … accident? Happy in your life, that kind of thing?’

I look her in the eyes. Startled. ‘You really think that’s a general question?’

She lowers her gaze, apologetically. ‘OK, but this is tricky. Let’s do it the other way round. Let me build a picture first, for both of us.’ She reaches for her fashionable handbag and pulls out a black notebook.

‘You’re taking notes.’ I can’t help bristling. ‘Really? You’re not my doctor, Tessa, you’re my friend. I saw loads of psychiatrists after the accident. What is the point of this? Who are you taking notes for, the police?’

She opens the notebook. Pen in hand. ‘No,’ she says calmly, and pauses. I can hear the moorland rain rattling on the windows. ‘No, not yet, Kath. We all really want to avoid anything like that.’

Again, I am put on the defensive, and simultaneously alarmed. Avoid the police? Why should the police be anywhere near this? That has all been dealt with. Adam handled all that. I was still in hospital. So why has he asked Tessa here to talk about the police?

I don’t know. But I have to believe my husband is doing this for a good reason, acting in my best interests. He must be. Adam has always done what’s best for me, and Lyla.

‘You met Adam when you were very young, isn’t that right?’

I shrug, bemused. Tessa surely knows this backstory almost as well as her own.

‘Tessa, you’re married to my bloody brother. Why do you even need to hear this stuff?’

‘I know some of it, Kath, yes, but—’ she sighs apologetically. ‘I really want to hear it from you. Please let me run with this?’

More mystery. Things are being hidden. In the back of the kitchen cupboard.

Taking a gulp of tea, I sigh. ‘I was seventeen, at a private girls’ school in Totnes.’

‘OK. Go on.’

‘Dan must have told you the story. We bunked off to the pub one day. I was underage, of course, so I was frightened to buy a drink, to break the rules, but then this very good-looking guy came up. It was Adam, he was eighteen. We went on a date the next day, started going steady the day after. He already had a job at the Park, as a trainee, and I went off to uni.’

‘Exeter. Yes.’

Her brisk smile is meant to be reassuring, I am not reassured.

‘I did archaeology, as you know.’

‘You enjoyed it?’

‘Sure. Yes. I really liked it.’

‘And you stuck with Adam?’

‘Yep.’ I smile, faintly, at the memory. ‘Everyone at university was sceptical, everyone scoffed and said Oh it won’t last, you’ll break up by Christmas, but I knew they were wrong, and they were wrong, and it did last, we stayed loyal, we had fun. Adam would come over to my halls of residence.’ I look her in the eyes. ‘Some days we never got up, just stayed in bed. After a few terms we got engaged. And when I graduated we got married. A year after you and Dan.’

Tessa takes more notes. Meanwhile, the January weather is at the windows, listening in, rattling panes. I wonder if the weather can hear my deeper thoughts, the occasional recurring doubts about my marriage, that trouble me from time to time: did I ever really deserve a handsome guy like Adam Redway? I know I brought the education to the marriage, and the faded poshness of the Kinnersleys: that was my side of the marital contract, but I’ve always thought I definitely got the best of the deal. Adam Redway: loyal, rugged, sexy – look at him, 100 per cent man. What did he see in her? I’ve watched women openly ogling my husband all the way through our marriage.

Has he stayed loyal? Does something like infidelity lie underneath this oddness? No. No. I do not believe that. Adam is loyal, and honest, and he loves me.

‘It’s around this time,’ Tessa says, scribbling away, ‘when you went off to uni, that your mother died?’

This is a change of tack. Now I feel vaguely affronted, again. ‘Look. I’m sorry, Tessa, and I don’t want to be rude, you’re always so kind to us, but … Can you please tell me why you’re here?’ I look at the clock on the cooker. ‘I’ve got work to do, too.’

‘Yes, I know, I’m sorry, Kath. I totally understand your confusion and irritation. But …’ She sets down her pen, and meets my gaze. ‘I need to colour in the blanks, and then I’ll tell you. It’s best we do it this way round. So that, you know—’

‘What? What do you have to tell me?’ I’m trying not to freak out. What can be so bad that Adam calls in my sister-in-law who happens to be a psychologist? Why does it need this long preamble, as if I am being prepared for the worst?

Tessa ignores the flush in my cheeks, and puts a pen to her notebook, ready to write. ‘Please, Kath, it’s best this way. Honestly.’

I look at her: the nice shoes from London, the cashmere cardigan. And I yield, wearily. ‘It was my second year at uni. Mum died in an ashram, when she was in India, which was typical of her.’

‘How do you mean, “typical”?’

‘Because Mum was always, like, alternative. Give her a crazy religion, Mum went for it. Reiki, Buddhism, wicca, astrology, shamanism, putting crystals up your bottom. She didn’t believe in things, she believed in everything. I think at one point she was simultaneously vegan, vegetarian, pescatarian, breatharian, and oddly fond of ribeye steak. And red wine. She always loved wine.’

Tessa smiles. ‘You miss her?’

I smile wistfully, in return. Oh yes. I miss Mum, even now. As I gaze across the kitchen I can see, on the shelf, one of the many souvenirs of her solo travels, when she would hare off to far corners of the world, dumping us kids with bemused but tolerant relatives; this particular souvenir is a garish, ancient doll from Greenland, an Inuit spirit-doll, I think, made of feathers and bird bones, with a leering face. Walrus teeth carved very crudely into human teeth. Yellow and awkward.

Adam hates this doll, I like it, because it’s Mum’s. She always loved eccentric things, quirky, broken, eerie things, stuff no one else liked. And I miss that artiness, that curiosity, and I miss her generous, scatterbrained foolishness, and I miss her wild and waspish wit. I also think I disappointed her. I was so normal, so conservative, wanting to fit in; yet in myself I loved her, revered her, despite her egotism, her partying.

I wished I could have showed it to her, more.

Looking back at Tessa I realize I have been lost in silence. For too long.

‘Yes,’ I say, sighing deeply, ‘I miss Mum. I miss her daily, even now. She was great fun, most of the time.’ I pause, and look at the smirking Inuit spirit-doll with its yellow teeth, like an old smoker. ‘Mum was Mum. Always herself. She grew up rich, I mean – you know we were an old family, the Kinnersleys. She used to talk about a big house in Dorset, long ago sold, but by the time it got to her, or at least me and Daniel, most of the money had gone and she was determined to spend the rest on experiences. She wanted to try everything, go everywhere, Greenland to Zambia, and she did. She used to say no one ever died wishing they’d bought a bigger TV: they died regretting things they didn’t do. Which is true, I think. I often wish I could live by those words, but I haven’t got the guts. Or the money.’

I take a breath. This is possibly the most I’ve spoken in one go since the accident. Which in itself is striking.

Tessa nods. Pen poised. ‘You never knew your father?’

‘Nope. Dan did a bit, but not me. No. He was American, based in London, and he wasn’t in her life that long, and never lived with us, never even lived in Devon, and he died when I was barely two, Daniel five. You should ask Dan about the funeral; by all accounts it was mad. Sitars and pentangles – and a Cornish harp. And Dad was pretty soon replaced.’ I chuckle, a little sadly, a little bitterly. ‘Mum was, you know, never into domesticity, never wanted to be bossed around, with a man around the house. But she certainly loved male attention, and men loved her back.’

Tessa looks at me. I can guess what she is thinking.

‘Of course Mum was a beauty, so I am told, but she bequeathed her looks to Dan. I got her intellectual curiosity, I think.’

‘I see. I see.’

Tessa squints at her notebook, and then looks at me, and I wonder if I can see embarrassment in her eyes. I sense an awkward question coming.

‘Let’s talk about your mother some more. The bequests. Does it hurt you that she left the Salcombe house entirely to Daniel?’

I flinch. Because, yes, this does hurt. It hurt a lot, and it sometimes still hurts, now. I look at Tessa’s expectant face. ‘Yes, that was pretty difficult. Emotionally.’ I am surprised at my own honesty; surprised by my vehemence. ‘The house was the last major asset Mum owned and she gave it all to my brother, supposedly because he’ – I do sarcastic air quotes with my fingers – ‘“always loved Salcombe so much more than me”, and Mum allegedly balanced it by giving me shares and antiques.’ I stare at the Dartmoor calendar on the kitchen wall, the picture of Kitty Jay’s grave, pretty and sad in the snow. ‘The shares and antiques turned out to be virtually worthless. Stuff my mum bought when she was stoned. God, she loved weed.’ I roll my eyes. ‘She used to buy it in Totnes from druids. I hate drugs. Hate them.’

Tessa writes brisk, efficient notes. Like a proper detective. I wonder if it is displacement activity, to hide her own discomfort. She glances at me.

‘So you still feel a certain resentment? Towards Dan, and your mother? About our Salcombe house?’

‘Yes. No. Oh, I don’t know. Yes, a little. But not really – I know there’s always that bit of friction between me and Dan, because of the house and all that, but I also love my brother. He’s an extrovert – not like me. He’s funny. And most of all we both endured Mum, together: that’s a profound bond, and of course it’s not his fault Mum was so scatty.’ Our eyes meet; I go on. ‘And of course I like you, Tessa, and I totally love your two little boys, and so, yes, sure, Dan has the big house, and yes, you guys get the money and the life, and we have to rent this place – but he’s loaned us cash when we’ve been hard up, you’ve bought holidays for me and Lyla, and that’s helped, Dan’s been a big, big help.’

‘OK. I see.’ Tessa is nearly expressionless. ‘And that brings us round to Lyla.’ She takes another sip of tea, which must be nearly cold. Mine is. ‘Let’s talk about that. And after that we’re nearly there, Kath.’

Nearly there? Nearly where? The tension builds like snow on snow – that snow which piles up and up, until the roof collapses.

‘You only had one child. Or have, I should say.’

‘Yes. We wanted more, but remember, Adam got Hodgkins, a few years back, and he needed chemo. And so he can’t have kids any more. So, as you know, Lyla is it. But it’s fine, he’s better. And I adore her, I love her, and Adam’s illness made us stronger.’ I push my mug away, defiantly. ‘It set us back financially, it was horrible – but we saw it through. It united us even more, and here we are. A family. A unit. This is who we are, and I like it.’

‘OK. This is my last question, Kath.’

‘Good.’

‘How are you coping with Lyla’s, ah, quirks?’

‘Her Asperger’s?’

‘She’s still not been officially diagnosed,’ Tessa says quickly, ‘As far as I am aware?’

‘No, but I reckon that’s what it is. Anyway, it means our lives are different; she still hates bustle and towns and loud noises, and new people, they make her panic, and she loves animals. So we live here, in the wilds, in the quiet, where we can have dogs, and there are horses. It’s fine, it’s all fine. Or it was until the bloody accident.’

Tessa nods and puts down her pen. My session, it seems, is over.

‘All right, taking all this into consideration, would you say that, on the whole, you were happy – or at least content – at the time of the accident at Burrator?’

‘Yes,’ I say, with some force: because it is true, and the truth is easy to say. ‘Tessa, that’s what makes it so awful! What gives me flashbacks, the horrors: I nearly lost it all. I have a husband I love, a daughter I love, a home I love, and I nearly lost it all, because of some stupid ice on a stupid Dartmoor road. I am very lucky. I’ve been given a second chance. I was actually technically dead for a few seconds!’ I shake my head, marvelling at my own luck. ‘Yes, life could be better: we need more money, Lyla needs help, it’s far from perfect, but what is money compared to life? No one ever died wishing they’d bought a bigger TV.’

Tessa smiles politely, yet I think I detect a faint, sad blush on her face. For a moment we both listen to the wind, knocking things over in the farmyard outside, like a drunk returning home from the pub. I wonder what Lyla is doing now. At school. Sitting alone in assembly, perhaps. Not talking to anyone. Ignored and friendless. Her mind wandering on to the moor, thinking of her newest bird feathers, and that piece of antler-felt her father found.

‘Kath, you clearly know you have retrograde amnesia? Because of the brain trauma?’

‘Yes. Of course! I know I’ve forgotten some stuff from before the crash, a week or so, but there are fragments, and the psychiatrists at the hospital say it will all come back. But, Jesus, I wish I could forget the actual crash! I still see the ice, the skid, the water – ugh—’

I close my eyes to dull the mental pain. When I open them, Tessa is frowning.

‘Well, the thing is, Kath: what the doctors at Derriford Hospital might not have properly explained about this amnesia is that you can forget that you’ve forgotten. That is to say, there are holes in your memory that you don’t even realize are there, and the mind tries to fill them.’

The wind has stopped abruptly. The whole house is quiet. I realize that the dogs must have gone with Adam and Lyla. All I can hear is Dartmoor rain on the window. A tinkly-tankly sound. I feel a sense of congealing fear. Some kind of horror is approaching. Like a moorland witch, creeping along the hedgerow. And we don’t have any hag stones. We have nothing to keep the witches away.

I can’t stand this any longer.

‘OK, this really is enough, Tessa. Tell me why you are here, in my kitchen?’ I am close to shouting. ‘I’ve told you everything. You know most of it already. So now it’s my turn to ask. Why are you here?’

‘Because,’ she says, looking deep, deep into my eyes, ‘you didn’t have an accident, Kath.’

‘What?’

‘Your mind has invented this. Invented the ice, invented it all.’

‘What?’ The panic rises in my throat, an acrid, metallic taste. ‘What? What do you mean? I had the bruises, I’ve seen the doctors. The bloody car is at the bottom of Burrator Reservoir. I had to buy a new one!’

‘Yes, it is. The car is down there. But that’s because you drove it in there, deliberately.’

I sense my life pivot around this moment. A ritual dance. ‘You mean – you mean – you can’t possibly—’

Tessa Kinnersley shakes her head, and I see the most enormous pity in her eyes. ‘Kath, there was no accident. You tried to leave your husband and daughter behind, to destroy yourself, to destroy everything. You tried to commit suicide. We just don’t know why.’

Later Thursday morning

Absolute stillness. That’s what it feels like. Absolute stillness, as if the beating heart of the world has slowed to a stop. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing. Then a lash of rain hits the windowpanes, breaking the quiet, and my words rush out.

‘How can you think that?’

Tessa remains calm, doing her job. She’s not here as a friend, but as a professional psychologist.

‘You were observed.’

‘Sorry?’

‘There was a witness at Burrator. By the reservoir. Walking his dog. It was night but there was a full moon, and he saw you drive your car, quite deliberately, into the water.’

‘But—’ The panic rises, like that black cold water, the water I can so vividly remember, and yet I can’t? ‘But. No. No way. Can’t be. There was ice. I skidded.’

‘Check the records, Kath, go back and look.’ Her arms folded, Tessa continues, her voice deliberately low and kind: overtly calming. ‘Go online and look at the weather for that night, December thirtieth. It was one of those dry and mild winter evenings we get. Twelve degrees centigrade. A southwest wind. There was no ice. Also …’ I flinch, inwardly.

‘Also, Kath, there is a wall around Burrator, you must remember that. A big, thick brick wall, a solid Victorian construction, far too strong for a car to smash through. You know Burrator well, you must recall this?’

She’s right. I do. There is a wall. Yet my mind has deceived me, recreated a different place: a place where I might drive in accidentally.

‘So how did I … I don’t get it—’ I swallow. I mustn’t cry.

Tessa guesses my question. ‘They were doing some construction at Burrator, rebuilding part of the wall, leaving a gap, barely wide enough for a car to slip through. The chances of skidding on ice, or whatever, and hitting the right spot would be pretty tiny, infinitesimal. But anyway you didn’t skid, and there was no ice, and you simply aimed the car, very carefully.’

‘There must have been someone else in the car.’

‘I’m sorry, it was you, just one person was seen, driving, and it was you. Only you drove into the reservoir; only you came out.’

‘I don’t believe it!’

The tears gather now. I stare, blurrily, up at that calendar. Kitty Jay’s grave, covered in snow, the flowers so forlorn against the whiteness. This is the famous beauty spot near Chagford, where my mother’s ashes are scattered: and I shrink inside. I huddle from the thought, the irony: what would Mum think of me? Of this terrible thing. Suicide? Like Kitty Jay herself? My mum loved life, she devoured it, despised the idea of suicide, and she taught that to me.

The words come again, all too quickly. ‘But why would I kill myself, Tessa? Why on earth would I do that? It’s hateful, suicide: it’s so selfish, the most selfish thing, and I was quite happy, I was. Yes, we had problems, with money, and Lyla, but I love her, I love – I love my husband – I love my daughter!’

And now the waters engulf me, and the truth pours in through the car window. Adam obviously knows all this, hence his cold anger, his strange distance, these past weeks. And I don’t blame him. What must he think of me? I tried to kill myself, for no apparent reason, I was prepared to leave him without a wife; and, worst of all, far worse, the deepest, darkest water of all, I was prepared to leave Lyla without a mother.

‘No,’ I say, flatly, defiantly. ‘NO. I don’t believe it. I would never do that. Never leave Lyla without a mother, never ever, ever. I am not that kind of woman, not that sort of mother! I love Lyla to bits. I would die for my daughter. Not die and leave her here. Oh God.’

I have to take a huge breath or I will shatter. I am a monster, a gargoyle. I am a leering thing made of dead birds and smeared blood. A horrible Inuit spirit-doll with feathers and yellow teeth. Here I sit in this warm bright kitchen with its ancient walls and the Come to Dartmouth tea towels: and yet I am something grotesque, a woman who would leave her lovely, fragile daughter without a mother … No.

‘I didn’t do it, Tessa. I didn’t! There has to be some other explanation.’

Tessa looks at me assessingly, as if judging how much I can take; reaching into her bag she lifts out a folded piece of paper, places it on the table. As she unfolds it, carefully, she reveals an image. The image looks scanned, photocopied. There seems to be handwriting on it, and it is small, introverted handwriting: scratchy and spidery.

I recognize this distinctive handwriting, from all the way across the kitchen table.

It is mine.

Tessa advises me, gently, ‘Adam has the original. This is a copy.’

I know what I am about to see: it is obvious. It doesn’t have to be said. But I also need to see it, to secure the lid on this. To hammer in the iron nails, so that no hope can escape.

Tessa pushes the paper across the table. With trembling hands I turn it around, and read my own handwriting:

The words are mine. I don’t remember writing them, don’t remember them at all, but this is my handwriting: I wrote this.

I tried to kill myself.

I shunt the paper aside, lean forward on my folded arms, gently rest my head on them. I can smell the clean, honest wood of our kitchen table, where I have spent so much time, with my husband, with my daughter, cooking suppers, drinking wine, laughing loudly, being a family. Here at this table. And now, at this same table, I quietly break into a sob, and keep sobbing.

Tessa says nothing, I stare down at the darkness between my arms, and sob and sob, in my white-painted kitchen. But I am not crying for me, I am crying for Adam, for my dead mother, for my brother, for this house, for this place around me, for the wildflowers on the high moors in the summer, for the meadowsweet at Whitehorse Hill, for the foxgloves down at Broada Marsh, for the sundews and shepherd’s dials and pennyroyals and roses – all the flowers my daughter loves, all the ones that she can name and I cannot, all the one she shows me, all the flowers and rocks and feathers she collects, because I am crying, crying, crying for my daughter, the little girl I was prepared to hurt, to damage, to dismiss, to throw away; the girl I picture, standing alone in the farmyard, listening for the tiny animals, puzzled in her anorak, wondering why her mother tried to run away forever.

To kill herself.

And my God. It is too much. And the rain tinkle-tankles on the window, as my tears run to their end.

How long I sit there, with my head slumped, I don’t know. An hour or more. But even the fiercest tears find a cease, as all things must die, and I lift my head. Tessa is sitting there patiently with a look of deep pity on her face.

‘Sorry,’ I say.

Warren House Inn

Monday lunchtime

Lyla is at school and I should be at work in Princetown. Instead I’m parked down the road at Warren House Inn. The fog is so thick I can barely see the humble old whitewashed building, though it is only a hundred yards away. Normally the inn is visible for miles around – because it is the only building for miles in the rolling, bony moorland. Today, in the Dartmoor murk, Warren House looks like the vague, gloomy idea of a cottage, half-formed in someone’s mind.

Stepping out, locking the car door, I pause and stare at my own hand, unnerved. I never used to do this. Locking my car, in one of the wildest places on the moor. We never lock anything on the moor: bikes, cars, houses. And who’s going to steal my worthless old Ford? A team of stoats?

One of the shaggy Dartmoor bullocks?

Or the sheep?

I can hear sheep, somewhere around me, also invisible in the fog:

meh, meh meh meh meh, as if they are mocking me.

MEH, Kath Redway, MEH.

It was Lyla who first suggested this to me, that sheep say meh not baa, and once she’d said it I couldn’t get it out of my head; because she was right. Sheep are laughing at us, mocking; meh meh meh, look at you, what are you doing here, look at this person locking her car door, meh, why is she locking it, mehh, is she scared she might get back in and drive into a reservoir?

Mehhhhhhhhhh!

Thoughts press in on me: I am stuck inside myself. How could I possibly have tried to kill myself? What did I do on that fateful December day? I do not believe it; yet I have to believe it.

As I walk up the mist-swirled moorland road towards the inn, I go over it for the seventeenth time this morning. Yesterday I thought it through two hundred times or more. I’ve been obsessing like this since Tessa’s visit.

I remember Christmas, I do remember that. It was nice. We did what we always do, went down to Salcombe like the poor relatives we are, and feasted at my brother’s expense.

We had a roasted goose, like they eat in Dickens. And Lyla actually got to play with other kids, her rambunctious eight- and ten-year-old cousins, Oscar and Charlie – or Foxtrot and Tango, as Dan calls them. Charlie and Oscar tolerate Lyla because they’ve grown up with her: when she twirls her hands repeatedly or gets phobic about scratchy things or hides shyly under a table with an encyclopaedia, they accept it, and laugh good-naturedly, and that makes Lyla smile and come out from under the table and play with them in her own awkward, funny way, and that’s why I like Christmas. Lyla is always happy at Christmas.

And I enjoyed Christmas this year, too. I remember crackers and sloe gin, and luxury chocolate assortments my brother bought from some posh London shop, and then a fat, contented drive home to Huckerby on Boxing Day – and that evening Adam went away for a week, to do up the rangers’ hut on the northern moors, leaving me alone with Lyla.

And after that, the horrible fog comes down on everything, like a door closing, and everything is lost in the remorseless mist of my post-traumatic, retrograde amnesia, the vapours of my bruised and useless brain.

From Boxing Day onwards my mind is basically a void. Four days later I tried to kill myself, and I have no idea why.

Meh.

As I get nearer the pub, I see the door is shut and the windows are dark. It looks as if the pub is closed. The peat fire in this pub has, famously, never gone out since 1847. But sometimes they casually close the place in the dead days of winter. But I need this pub to be open: because it is the one place I might find Adam, when I need to find my elusive husband.

It’s not his fault he’s a ranger. But it means he ranges, across a sizeable tract of moor with all its sparkling streams and clapper bridges, its hidden spinneys and forgotten villages. He is always out and about, usually in remote areas with no mobile coverage, so I can’t get hold of him. And right now I want to get a proper hold of him. We’ve spent the days since Tessa’s visit quietly not addressing the massive issue: pretending that this enormous thing isn’t there, didn’t happen. Let’s have some more tea and say nothing. I know Adam is resentful but he keeps it pretty much hidden.

This morning my mood changed. I dropped Lyla at school, went back to the office at Princetown, opened my computer and typed in some words: The first recorded instance of the word ‘swaling’ comes from a thirteenth-century poem. It means the spectacular, controversial winter burning of Dartmoor’s stubborn gorse and bracken, and can still be witnessed every winter, on the higher moors … And then I stopped writing and looked at my stupid words, so irrelevant to the gaping void in my life, the open wound in everything, about to be infected. So I decided I had to leave the office and talk to my husband: immediately. And I made my excuses and headed out here.

Enough tea; enough denial. Enough imaginary men in woods.

I need the facts.

Turning the rusty handle of the knackered wooden door, I step through. The pub is open, but almost empty. There are a few local drinkers with drams and pints at one end; a huge grey wolfhound snoozes by the undying fire at the other.

I suspect this story about the eternal Warren House fire is a lie, told for tourists, but we all tell lies, to get by. And why not? I wish I had more lies, to tell myself. I would happily lie to myself for the rest of life if I could: I didn’t really try to commit suicide, no: I was trying to explore the reservoir. I was trying to see if my car would float. I was in a parallel universe at the time. I never tried to kill myself and leave my daughter alone, meh meh meh meh meh. I feel like crying again.

‘Hello, Katarina.’

A friendly face: Ron, behind the bar. He’s owned this pub for decades, possibly centuries: I wonder if he kindled the hearth fire in 1847. He certainly knew my mum, who loved this poetic little pub with its ghosts and legends and mummified cats buried in the walls, and the stones of the Iron Age village visible from the saloon bar windows. He knew she called me Katarina, and he knows that I shortened it to Kath because I felt it was pretentious. So he teases me.

‘Hey, Ron. Call me Kath?’

‘Nah,’ he says. ‘Doesn’t feel right. What would your mum think?’

We’ve probably had this conversation six hundred times. It is comfort food for my soul, right now.

‘How are you, Kat? I heard about the accident.’

‘Oh, OK. Recovering. Wouldn’t mind the odd holiday in the Maldives, you know.’

He ponders. ‘Isn’t that the place that’s, like, sinking underwater?’

‘Bit like Dartmoor in January, then.’

He chuckles, and turns to serve another customer, lifting a glass to the optic, draining a shot of Gordon’s. I look at him as he works, his weatherbeaten, grog-blossomed face. He probably kissed me as a baby, when I was called Katarina Olivia Mirabel Kinnersley, not Kath Redway.

I am shortened. Abbreviated. Truncated. I have fallen off a social cliff. And I don’t mind. Because all I wanted was an ordinary life, with ordinary happiness, and my ordinary and handsome husband and my extraordinary and beautiful daughter, and the happy dogs and the ancient house, and yet I tried to throw it all away? To damn them to a kind of hell, without me?

I must not crack. I must keep a grip.

I wonder if Ron knows the truth about my ‘accident’. I wonder how many people know that it was actually a suicide bid. I don’t think it appeared in papers, I suspect the local police did Adam a favour, a Dartmoor favour for Dartmoor people. Because Adam is popular, the handsome Chagford boy, one of the Redways, a National Park Ranger, and the moorland people are so tight-knit.

And I am not quite one of them. I’m a well-spoken girl from the coast, with connections on the moor, and I’m always very welcome – but I’m not quite one of them. And never will be.

‘So, Kat, love, what can I get you?’

‘The usual.’

He chuckles. ‘Your husband? I’m not sure if he’s been by today, I was out this morning.’

We nod at each other. Ron leans over the bar, and calls out to one of the drinkers at the distant tables, a farmer I’m guessing by his muddy boots. He’s drinking on his own. I think I recognize him: yet another cousin of Adam’s. He has so many: so many with the very same dark hair, striking eyes and rakish, slanted cheekbones, the looks inherited by Lyla. This particular handsome cousin is on Adam’s aunt’s side, his dad’s sister. And I’m not sure he and Adam get on.

‘Jack, you seen yer cuz?’

Jack nods as he drinks his beer. ‘Adam? Yeah. By an hour back. He’s up at Vitifer, I think, some sheep in a wire.’

Ron turns to me with an expressive shrug which says: What do you want to do?

‘How far is Vitifer, where is it?’ I ask.

Ron shakes his head. ‘Half-hour walk, straight across the moors. But you don’t want to do it in this fog, Kath, you’d get lost in five minutes, we’d have the air ambulance out. And that goes on my tax bill.’ He is grinning. I’m not.

‘I really have to see him. It’s really, really important.’

‘C’mon now, Kath, please—’

‘I have to. Please. I have to! HAVE TO.’

I realize, too late, that I am shouting. The wolfhound lifts a lordly muzzle, sniffing the tension amidst the peatsmoke. The pub is silenced: the fire is probably going out. I have caused a scene. I never cause scenes.

For a moment there is deep embarrassment. The silence is shrill. Then someone says, ‘Hey. That’s all right. I’ll take ya.’ It’s Jack, again. He comes across, puts his empty glass on the bar. Grins at me. ‘I’ve got to go that way anyway, gonna see a mate about some feed. Thanks, Ron.’

Ron looks at the two of us, he squints unsurely at Jack, and he shrugs in my direction. ‘You’re more like your mum than I thought, Kath. She loved taking risks.’

Jack grasps me by the arm. Ten minutes later I am jumping from tussock to tussock and squelching through the foggy mire, with Jack at my side, guiding me carefully.

Ron was completely right. I wouldn’t have had a clue where to go in this mist. I’d have wandered off track immediately, got stuck knee-deep in a marsh, fallen head first in a leat, knocked myself out and drowned. Oh look, she tried to kill herself again. And this time she succeeded.

Meh.

Jack tells me he farms sheep, though I knew this already. He tells me all about sheep, as we hike through the fog.

‘You know they say sheep are stupid,’ he says, helping me over a wooden stile. ‘Well they’re right. Only thing sheep is good at is dying. You name it, they get it. Lice, ticks, scabs, big fat worms as long as a toddler’s arm.’ He laughs, his hand firm on my arm, or sometimes, rather too warmly, right around my waist. ‘Foot rot, braxy, tetanus, pulpy kidney, blackleg, lamb dysentery, black disease, pasteurella. And if that isn’t enough, if they haven’t managed to kill themselves eating ragwort, or drowned themselves down at Black-a-Tor, they go and stick their heads in wires. I sometimes think they are naturally suicidal.’

I try not to react. Does he know my story? Is he winding me up? I’m pretty sure Adam doesn’t like Jack Bryant. Some ancient family argument.

That arm strays to my waist again.

Squeezing.

‘Then there’s the devil-worshippers.’

‘What?’

‘Yeah,’ says Jack, steering me over a little clapper bridge. ‘Get a lot of that all over: weird patterns, burned circles, tortured animals. Adam deals with it all the time.’ He pauses, in the mist, looking at me. Smirking. ‘There was this one case, with a foal. Jeez. Did he not tell you?’

‘No.’

‘Guess he doesn’t want to bring it home, scare that little girl of yours, Lyla?’ His grin is very wide, like he finds it all funny. ‘Anyway, yeah. Last autumn he found a foal. Bloody odd, it was surrounded by these patches of charred grass.’ Jack chuckles loudly. ‘He called me and asked me to help. What a job. That poor bastard foal. They’d cut its tongue and eyes out, and cut off its, you know, genitals, cut ’em all off, and sliced off an ear. And there was this weird white paint on one leg, some symbol, a star or pattern.’ Jack is scanning the horizon, though all I can see is fog, then he puts his hand on my hand. ‘And the weirdest thing of all was, they’d dragged the bleeding corpse, when the animal was likely still alive, they’d dragged it round and round in circles and stars, making these crazy patterns of blood in the frost. Demon symbols, I heard. Strangest thing I ever saw. Sent a fucking shiver right down me. Happened over near your place, Pete Bickle’s farm. Not far from Hobbyjob’s and Huckerby. Which I thought was kinda funny, cos your mum would have loved the spookiness, if you see what I mean.’

‘What?’

I gaze at him. Those blue eyes so like Adam’s, but colder still. ‘My mum? You knew my mum?’

‘Sure I knew your mum, Kat, way back, when we were all kids, all of us cousins, lads in Chagford. And she was all into that pagan stuff, wasn’t she? You do know that? I don’t mean she tortured animals, nothing like that.’ He laughs. ‘All I mean is that she was into those symbols. Spells. Spirits, spooks, deadly nightshade, wacky mushrooms, whatever. Dancing naked around stones: all stuff they used to do on the moors back in the day, all the hippies from Totnes. Amazing she didn’t die of flu, your mum, amount of time she was starkers up the tors. They did like a party.’ He stops abruptly. As if he is teasing me.

‘There’s Adam.’ He pauses. ‘At least, I think it’s Adam. This mist is a right fucking job.’

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