In the silence all her senses strain to detect him. They strain so hard she feels sick. After a while, she’s semi-confident. Stiffly, she half-stands, it’s all the space allows her to do, and begins, slowly, to work her way back through the foliage.
She doesn’t see him coming.
He grabs her upper arm and shakes her so hard she cuts her lip on her incisors and when he stops, she leans forward and a drop of blood falls from her mouth onto his shoe and she starts to scream but the sound is deadened when he covers her mouth with his other hand as if he’s going to suffocate her.
“Sweetheart,” he whispers in her ear. “Stop it. Stop now. You’re okay. Daddy’s here.”
William drives the women from the barn back down to the farmhouse. Maggie and the dog have stayed with the body. “Your dad shouldn’t be on his own,” she said, and William agreed. Hewonders if he’ll ever experience a love story as powerful as his parents’.
He wants these women to go, to leave his family to themselves. He no longer cares about them or their letter. It’s hard not to think of their presence here, and their behavior, as a catalyst for what his father has done. Whether that’s fair, or not, he doesn’t care right now.
Emily sits in the passenger seat.
She watched Jayne and Ruth emerge from the fog as they walked back to the barn, Jayne holding Ruth up, and she couldn’t help hating them. If they’d just all gone back down to the farmhouse the moment they’d read the letter, the way Emily suggested, none of this would have happened.
Ruth isn’t well. She slumps on the back seat of the car, leaning against Jayne. They’ve made sure she’s hydrated and warmed her up. She has no other injuries.
Jayne is awash with relief that there was no accident with the gun. It’s safely back in her bag. But the “what if’s” are tormenting her.
Emily’s nerves build, the closer to the farmhouse they get. She can’t stop thinking about the car she heard earlier, coming up the valley, although she hasn’t mentioned it, not after hearing what happened.
As William drives, it feels as if they must hang on for dear life. He blinks back tears and has his foot too hard on the gas.
Jayne thinks about the scarecrow and whether John Elliott put it there, or whether someone else did. She feels as if she has no idea about anything anymore. Her lapse of judgment with the gun was so profound, it’s knocked her sense of herself. Nobody apart from Ruth must ever know that Jayne brought a gun up here.
What was she thinking? Her plan seems ridiculous to her now. She’d read about a Viking burial ritual, where weapons, which were considered to have great power, were maimed and left in theground alongside the bodies of their owners after death, and she got the idea that she and Mark could do this to his pistol. That it would be symbolic. Healing.
She’d intended that they would hike together to the burial chamber. Obviously, the chamber on the Elliott land was Neolithic, not Viking, but for Jayne it was loaded with just as much symbolism. Once there, they would permanently disable the gun, dig a deep hole, and bury it with its ammunition. They would walk away from it together and not look back and would never return. It would be their last link to violence, an ending of sorts. They left the military six years ago after Mark had been passed over for promotion. Jayne might have had a future, a chance to progress beyond captain, but they decided on a clean break for both of them. They just didn’t count on trauma tracking them across the years. But this could have marked an end to it. If they did it right, she was convinced that the difficult elements of their past could be left respectfully behind.
Now, she wonders, what kind of disordered mind comes up with such a plan and puts so much store in it? Would Mark really have bought into it?
And did she plan it more for her, or for him? After all, she’s the one who disassociates, not him. If she’s honest, it’s she who’s struggling to cope with the trauma. Mark’s done much better than she.
A plan that felt perfect and pure, healing and hopeful to her a few hours ago now feels foolish, selfish, and incredibly reckless. She’s ashamed.
As the Land Rover descends it’s clear the fog hasn’t lifted in the lower reaches of the valley. And as it rolls into the farmyard, Emily feels crushed by disappointment when she sees that the only vehicles in the yard are their rental and cars belonging to William and Maggie.
But a few seconds later, Jayne’s and Ruth’s phones both start to ping.
“I’m sorry,” Imogen says and can’t stop repeating it, as if she’s unable to form any other words. His grip on her arm is a vise. She stumbles and bumps against him as she tries to keep up with him. Attempts to meet his eye and connect with him don’t work. He stares firmly ahead, won’t even glance at her.
She thinks she might throw up. Her brain can’t keep up, can’t process this. It feels like violence. But this, she knows, is hardly violence at all.
They pass nobody. Imogen sucks in air as if she’s been starved of it. When she tries to shake her arm out of his grip, he tightens it in response. It hurts. She feels as helpless as a toddler.
He takes her the longer route back to the house because there’s no way they’ll both get through the hole in the hedge. She prays they’ll see someone, a dog walker, maybe, anyone, but they don’t. She considers shouting for help but it’s a risk. Who would hear? Will it make him angry?
What would she say, anyway? He’s a family friend.
And what might he do? She’s never seen him behave like this before. Would he hurt her properly? Or hurt whoever she pleaded with for help?
The ease with which he’s holding her is terrifying. He has a strength she wasn’t aware he possessed. She knows, of course she does, that men are stronger than women, but she’s never personally experienced how effortlessly a man can physically overpower a woman, how it seems built into them naturally, packed into their muscles, written into their brains’ pathways.
His strength isn’t the worst thing, though, or the fact that he’s ignoring her pleas. The worst thing is what he said: “Daddy’s here.”
She doesn’t know what he means.
As the Land Rover pulls to a stop, Emily leans over the back of her seat. “Your phone,” she says to Jayne. “Please? Can I?”
