knew the number from a television programme. Nine nine nine. A female voice answered.
‘Hello. There has been a terrible murder.’
‘Excuse me?’
‘There has been a murder.’
‘It’s all right. Calm down, don’t cry. Can you speak English?’
‘Yes, yes. I am sorry. Mr Mackenzie is dead. Killed.’
It was only when she had replaced the receiver that she thought of Mrs Mackenzie and walked upstairs. It took only a second for Mrs Ferrer to see what she had feared. Her employer was tied to her own bed. She seemed almost submerged in her blood, her nightie glossy with it against her gaunt body. Too thin, Mrs Ferrer had always thought privately. And the girl? She felt a weight in her chest as she walked up another flight of stairs. She pushed open the door of the one room in the house she wasn’t allowed to clean. She could hardly see anything of the person tied to the bedstead. What had they done to her? Brown shiny tape around the face. Arms outstretched, wrists tied to the corners of the metal grille, thin streaks of red across the front of the nightgown.
Mrs Ferrer looked around Finn Mackenzie’s bedroom. Bottles were scattered across the dresser and the floor. Photographs were torn and mutilated, faces gouged out. On one wall, a word she didn’t understand was written in a smeary dark pink: piggies. She turned suddenly. There had been a sound from the bed. A gurgle. She ran forward. She touched the forehead, above the neat obscuring tape. It was warm. She heard a car outside and heavy footsteps in the hall. She ran down the stairs and saw men in uniform. One of them looked up at her.
‘Alive,’ Mrs Ferrer gasped. ‘Alive.’
Two
I looked around me. This wasn’t countryside. It was a wasteland into which bits of countryside had been dropped and then abandoned, a tree or a bush here and there, a hedgerow stripped bare for winter, a sudden field, stranded in the mud and marsh. I wanted a geographical feature – a hill, a river – and I couldn’t find one. I tugged off a glove with my teeth to look at the map and let it fall on to the slimy grass. The large sheet flapped wildly in the wind until I concertinaed it into a wad and stared at the pale brown contours and dotted red footpaths and dashed red bridleways. I had followed the dotted red line for miles but had failed to reach the sea wall that would lead me back to the place where I had begun. I peered into the distance. It was miles away, a thin twist of grey against sky and water.
I looked at the map again, which seemed to disintegrate under my gaze, an unbroken code of crosses and lines, dots and dashes. I was going to be late for Elsie. I hate being late. I’m never late. I’m always early, the one who’s kept waiting – standing crossly under the clock, sitting in a cafe with a cooling cup of tea and a tie of impatience under my right eye. I am never, not ever, late for Elsie. This walk was meant to take exactly three and a half hours.
I twisted the map: I must have failed to see the fork in the path. If I cut across to the left, along that thin black line, I could cut off the headland of marsh and meet the sea wall just before it reached the hamlet where my car was parked. I shoved the map, now splitting at its folds, into my anorak pocket and picked up the glove. Its cold muddy fingers closed around my numbing ones. I started to walk. My calf muscles ached and my nose ran, snotty little dribbles down my stinging cheeks. The huge sky threatened rain.
Once, a dark-coloured bird, its long neck outstretched and its wings heavily batting the air, flew low past me, but otherwise I was quite alone in a landscape of grey-green marsh and grey-blue sea. Probably something rare and interesting, but I don’t know the names of birds. Nor of trees, except obvious ones like weeping willows, and the plane trees that stand on every London street, sending out roots to undermine the houses. Nor of flowers, except obvious ones like buttercups and daisies, and the ones you buy from a florist on a Friday evening and stick in a vase for when friends come round: still-life roses, irises, chrysanthemums, carnations. But not the feeble plants