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By Root 517 0

the schools on the other side of Bath – and if she had seen him, it was only in the street, never to speak to. She’d have forgotten all about him if she hadn’t read about him in the Bath Chronicle – how he’d got into the army, had been blown up in Iraq and nearly died. He’d been given a metal plate to replace parts of his skull, and although the doctors had thought he’d made a full recovery, the army wouldn’t have him back because they said he’d gone mad. His talk was all about nightmares and people having their heads blown off. When she’d read in the papers about him being blown up she’d felt sorry for him – she’d even worried about him from time to time. But Kelvin Burford – the man in the cottage? The one who’d put the lipstick in the car? She wasn’t sure if that made her feel better or worse.

‘And the day I was working, did you speak to him? To Metalhead?’

‘I just said I did.’

‘What did you say? You didn’t talk about why you were there?’

‘No. I mean, I said hi and that. I said my mum was working at Medallion Man’s house.’

‘Does he know your name? Where you live?’

‘I’m not completely thick, Mum. I went into his back garden. He showed me the baby pheasants and that was it. I came back. He let me put some hoods on them, which was kind of cool. Except you don’t want to get too friendly with him. He attacked a girl in Radstock – went to prison for it. That’s why I didn’t tell you I’d been there. Thought you’d freak.’ She lowered her chin and gave her mother an appraising look. ‘And I was right.’

‘Get dressed, Millie.’ Sally gave an involuntary shiver. ‘I’m taking you to school.’

26

Sally couldn’t face parking in David’s parking area again. It was as if the blood that had seeped out of sight into the ground might mysteriously find her car and soak its sly way up into the tyres, into the sills and the upholstery. So at half past nine, when she arrived after dropping Millie at school, she stopped the Ka twenty yards short and inched it into a passing space, out of sight.

She got out slowly, straightened, her back to the car, and scanned her surroundings. It was a clear day, just a few clouds on the horizon. The distant line of yews that marked the northern perimeter of Lightpil House seemed etched hard against the sky. The roof of the gamekeeper’s cottage, with its mossy tiles, was just visible to her right beyond the trees that ran down to the valley.

She moved along the perimeter of David’s property to where the wall ended and a hedge began, and peered over it. In front of her, surrounded by copper beech and leaning poplars, was the cottage. Small, stone-built, a typical eighteenth-century worker’s home, with a low, tiled roof and chimneys. The gardens were a mess – overgrown and filled with junk; a yellow Fiat with a fading canvas roof was parked with its nose in a collapsed hay barn, some rusting disused chicken coops were piled against the far hedge, and, in the centre of the overgrown lawn, an old mower lay on its side, a roll of chicken wire abandoned next to it. Beyond the house was a huge mill shed. Maybe that was where the pheasants were reared. David had talked about his gamekeeper, but she’d forgotten about it until Millie had mentioned him.

After five minutes or more, when nothing in the house or garden had moved, she pushed through the hedge into the garden. The place was eerily quiet, just the faint sound of water running – maybe the stream that came down from Hanging Hill. The driveway was empty. No cars. She turned and went to the bottom of the land – the spoon shape she’d seen on Google Earth. The view here was quite different from up at Lightpil House: this land faced in a more westerly direction, towards Bristol. Where the trees bordering David’s estate stopped, the land fell off, the garden giving way to patchwork farmland. And between them, wide and open like a wound, the yellowish smudge of gravel where it had happened.

She turned and looked up at the cottage. The windows were blank, the sky reflected in them. No movement. Nothing. She glanced again at the parking space, trying to judge