‘You just jump very high and hope you make it to the other side, I guess. Like the bonfire.’
‘And did you make it across?’ She stopped, turning to face him. The sun was warm on her back and her bare toes curled into the cool sand. She felt a piece of seaweed beneath her foot and toyed with it nervously. They’d stood like this countless times before as teenagers, and each time Claire had prayed that Nick would lean in and kiss her. They’d had their moment long ago, she knew that. But it still added to the churning sadness inside.
‘Think I’m stuck mid-leap.’
‘You need a hand to pull you across then.’
‘And what if there’s no one standing on the other side?’ he said, drawing her in for a hug. Claire allowed it only briefly before pulling away.
‘If I tell you something, will you keep quiet?’ she asked, walking on again. Nick nodded. ‘Callum told me that Maggie… well, he said that she’d come on to him the other night.’
‘OK,’ Nick said slowly. ‘Tell me more.’
‘On the one hand, I don’t believe Maggie would do a thing like that, but then I don’t get why Callum would tell me such a thing if it wasn’t true.’ They walked to the water’s edge and stood with the sea washing around their ankles. ‘Anyway, look, forget I mentioned it. It hardly matters in the scheme of things.’ She kicked at the sand, but Nick led them on walking again.
‘I think it matters a lot. It’s your oldest friend, your husband.’
‘Such a cliché,’ she said. ‘I can hardly ask Maggie about it at a time like this.’
Claire wished she hadn’t mentioned it, wondering if he felt uncomfortable, because he quickly changed the subject. ‘I’m so sorry to see your dad unwell. He really doesn’t seem like himself. When I arrived back from London earlier, I found him in the yard. He had no idea where he was.’
‘Oh, not again.’ It broke Claire’s heart to hear this. She stopped in her tracks.
‘What is it?’
‘You’ll think I’m silly,’ she said.
‘Try me.’ Nick laughed.
‘See that little boy over there with the kite? It reminds me of something I saw years ago.’ She looked at him, her face serious. ‘I once thought I saw Lenni, Nick. In the early days she was everywhere. In the supermarket, on the television, walking down the street…’
‘That’s only natural.’
‘But there was this one time, it was different.’ She shook her head, knowing it sounded ridiculous. ‘It was about three years after she went missing. I was down here on the beach, heavily pregnant with Marcus at the time. A little boy was flying a red kite. I remember it so clearly, as if it were yesterday. I was watching it when a glint on the headland caught my eye.’ Claire pointed to the rocky jut. ‘I thought it was a pair of seals at first. Silly in hindsight because seals would never go that far up onto the land. Anyway, I wanted a better look, so I walked – no, waddled – closer. I was very pregnant,’ she said with a laugh. ‘As I got nearer, I could see that it was actually two people. A man and a girl.’
She felt Nick’s warm hands slip around the fists she hadn’t realised she’d made. ‘They were still a good distance away and the man had his back to me but the girl, oh Nick, I swear it was Lenni up there.’
‘Our minds can play cruel tricks. I’ve seen a thousand Isobel lookalikes since she died.’
‘This was more than a lookalike, Nick. I walked as fast as I could towards the headland, calling out her name, but my line of sight became obscured by the rocks at one point. It was so breezy I don’t think they heard me calling out, and by the time I’d got closer, they’d gone. There was no way I could climb up in my condition. I called the police and they sent someone out immediately. They found nothing, Nick. Nothing at all.’
‘I’m so sorry,’ he replied, leading her away from the boy and his kite. They headed back towards the farm, chatting about everything, from Nick’s new restaurant to the weather to Claire’s job. At the top of the track leading up from the headland, when the dark slate of Trevellin Farm’s rooftop came into view, Claire stopped. ‘I don’t want to go back just yet,’ she said. Even though she wanted nothing more than Nick to say the same thing, for them to carry on walking, she needed some time alone. ‘I’ll see you back at the farm in a bit.’
Nick nodded, and she felt his eyes on her as she walked away from the house. She went through the kissing gate, passing through a couple of paddocks and briskly up the steep hill of the most distant of the farm’s fields. This was where they’d always kept the goats, but these days the few animals her parents owned lived in the smaller, more easily accessible paddock near the house. Amy loved to go and feed them handfuls of grass after school and, if she had friends to play, it was the highlight of their afternoon.
She continued on over the crest of the hill where the breeze kicked up, blowing against her face, her hair flying everywhere. The view was stunning. Down below to her right was the array of buildings making up Trevellin Farm, her own house included, and down to her left was the jade-green expanse of fields leading down to the cliffs and the coast. Beyond this, a strip of white-flecked royal-blue sea was visible, and today there was the smudgy-grey outline of a tanker on the horizon. Clouds rolled in from the west.
Claire pressed on down the other side of the hill, the land sloping more gently. After another ten minutes’ walk, the grassy pasture turned into granite outcrops and a scrubby woodland. She’d not been out this way for a few months, though she knew her father still tended to the stone walls and stock fences, albeit badly. It was a ritual to him. In his blood to do it. No one could keep him off the land.
As kids they’d played endlessly up here, leaping between the rocks that stuck out from the ground like the elbows or knees of long-buried giants – that’s what they’d pretended anyway, as their father worked nearby. Having him close made the monsters in the wood not quite so scary.
Claire continued through the coppice towards the derelict cottage. The mossy stone and rotten timbers of the fallen-out windows soon materialised through the mottled light and, as she stepped out into the clearing where the old building stood, she felt a pang of sadness at how dilapidated it had become. It was in far worse condition than Galen Cottage, although it did look remarkably similar, making her heart race as she was reminded of Saturday’s scare. Whoever bought the place, she could only imagine them knocking it down and starting from scratch rather than trying to salvage it. The thought broke her heart.
She walked up to the front door – or rather the place where the front door had once been – and peered inside. Half the roof was missing and many joists were hanging down, covered in the rampant ivy that was strangling the building. She daren’t go inside all the way for fear of dislodging something and bringing the whole place down. Inside was the same old broken furniture that had been there when they’d played here as kids, but it was rotten now. It had been their real-life Wendy house, and she and her friends had arranged the old table and chairs and sideboard as if they were a happy family living there. Once or twice the table had been turned upside down, a broom-flagpole erected with a pillow-case tied on the end, and they’d set sail to Africa. Claire’s eyes misted with tears.
‘Oh God,’ she said, covering her mouth, spotting the ancient refrigerator where they’d stored their sandwiches when they’d come out to play for the day. It hadn’t done much in the way of chilling their food – the electricity had been cut off long ago – but it made their make-believe house all the more real. Eventually, their father’s repeated words about the dangers of the place finally sunk in and they had to play elsewhere, usually climbing on the bales of straw in the barn until Shona declared that off limits too when Lenni fell and badly hurt her ankle. The real dangers in life weren’t always the visible or the obvious ones, she thought.