“It’s like the Sahara,” I commented. “Speaking of hotter than hell. What was that she said about deals with the devil?”
Simon scrunched up his face.
“No idea. But I know who to ask.”
The election was five days away, this coming Thursday, and here we were on a Saturday afternoon, trailing candidates for answers.
“I’ll pull in up here,” Simon said, as we came to a stop near the extremely picturesque house a few miles to the east of Dorchester. It was an hour later, and after a spirit-rallying sandwich and iced coffee, we’d traversed through several laneways and exceedingly narrow roads to a village called Forstenmitre.
We’d stopped off at my house on the way here and collected Simon’s notes. Hence why he was driving. And pulling faces at everything my car did. While I sat in the passenger seat and read through his dossier.
I finished reading what he’d said about Suzy – only a bit late – and felt a fool. If I hadn’t been busy swanning about the place, feeling sorry for myself since Riz’s death, I might have been able to help.
Simon parked my car on a tiny verge near an intersection. The fields around us were overgrown, and trees hung over the road. The stone walls that lined the laneway were crumbling. With the sunshine blaring down on us, it was almost too perfect an English idyll. If I got out of the car and there were butterflies in the wildflowers, then I’d know we were in a dream.
“This village is forgotten about,” Simon said. “Long ago, there were more people here. Half the houses are boarded up.”
That seemed unusual in southern England, where every spare scrap of land was accounted for and marked up at a huge profit as we tried to cram in more houses. Because heaven forbid the English learned to live in mid-rise apartment blocks like their continental cousins.
Forstenmitre might be nearly deserted, but its – I loathe to use the word – aura was that of somewhere much more important. Because there are places like this. There are patches of England, so ancient, and so long settled by humans, that the energy is different.
It’s like a point that wants you to forget it,for you to avert your eyes. And when you try to look straight at it, your subconscious says no for reasons you don’t quite understand.
My mother believed in this stuff. Rural, paganist energy.
Magic.
Magic of fertility. Solstices and harvests. Countryside magic. Women’s magic. When we moved to England, the first village we’d lived in had been involved in a scandal in the 1950s of women holding bonfires and chanting. My mother had laughed and gone out looking for them.
“Who put Bella in the Wych Elm?” I muttered under my breath. Forstenmitre was silent. “You doing the talking again?” I asked as we got out of the car.
“It worked well last time,” he said. I frowned. “That came out wrong. I meant, me opening, you do the follow-up, it worked well with Suzy and Errol.”
As we crossed the road to the tumbledown – yet absolutely charming – cottage, the front door to it opened. A little girl with red hair stood shyly in the doorway, sucking on the ear of the stuffed toy rabbit that she held.
“Hello, Matilda,” Simon said in a voice I’d never heard him use before. “Do you remember me? Is your mummy in?”
“She’s in the garden,” the girl – Matilda – said.
Simon thanked her, and we went around the side – the lawn needed mowing, but the plants were thriving.Allthe plants in the village were thriving. Lush and green. Unlike the rest of the parched county.
Around the house, I could hear a man’s voice and the splashing of water. We emerged into the back garden to see a little boy playing naked in a paddling pool, while a woman with her back to us was on her knees pulling weeds out from a flowerbed. A small portable radio was next to her with Radio 4 playing.
“Hello, Marina,” Simon said to the woman’s back. She froze, her hands staying encased in the dirt. Slowly, ever so slowly, she stood and turned. Marina Holt was actually younger than I previously pegged her for. I had thought her mid-forties on our first meet, but she was closer to mine – well, maybe Simon’s – age.
She had her curly auburn hair, which, unfortunately for her, fell naturally like it had been freshly crimped, in a severe ponytail. She must usually straighten it, I realised, which was probably why it always looked darker. Her face was make-up free, and her plucked eyebrows were hunched together in a frown.
She had a thin mouth and a square jaw. She wasn’t unpretty, but nor was she conventionally attractive. Her face was interesting, one might say, rather than beautiful.
The three of us stood there in silence. “What a charming house you have,” I said eventually. The little boy had stopped splashing in the pool and was staring at us.
“I’m not here to cause any problems, Marina,” Simon said. “I need answers.”
She huffed. “Don’t we all?”
Matilda came out of the house, still sucking on that rabbit’s ear, and walked to her mum. She hid behind her legs and peeked out at us.
“It isn’t appropriate for you to turn up at my house like this,” she said.
