The Edge of Dark Read online

  Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Acknowledgements

  Prologue

  October 1986

  Urgent hands scooped her out of her bed. She murmured in protest but she wasn’t afraid. Her mother’s smell was familiar, and she slumped over her shoulder, ready to slide back into sleep. But then they were running, running down the stairs, the way her mother said she never should in case she fell, and she woke properly, alarmed by the jolting and her mother’s harsh, jerky breathing.

  ‘Oh-god-oh-god-oh-god . . .’ Her mother kept saying the same thing over and over, the words running together in a stuttering gasp. She felt like her mother, and her hair smelt the same, but she sounded like a stranger, a stranger who was trying not to cry, and Rosalind began to struggle. She didn’t like this. The night was for sleeping, not for running through a darkness thick and foul and swirling with a horrible smell that made her choke and stung her eyes.

  ‘Mummy . . .’ she whimpered. ‘Mummy, stop.’

  But her mother didn’t stop. She didn’t cuddle Rosalind on her lap and stroke her hair and say that it was just a bad dream, that she was to go back to sleep and everything would be all right in the morning. She just kept on lurching and stumbling through the darkness, still muttering ‘Oh-god-oh-god-oh-god-oh-god’ under her breath as if she didn’t know she was saying it at all.

  The horrible smell was stuck in Rosalind’s throat and she coughed and coughed as her mother stumbled into the kitchen. Rosalind barely recognized it in the dark. Before she went to bed she had sat at the table eating macaroni cheese and peas with Emily and Amanda and the room had been bright and cheerful. Mikey had squirted tomato ketchup all over the table so there was none left for anyone else, and her mother had sent him to his room, but apart from that, everything had been normal.

  Now nothing was. The breath tearing from her mother’s throat was shockingly loud in the silence. The kitchen units were humped black shapes in the darkness. They seemed to be watching Rosalind as her mother blundered through the room. It was as if the table and chairs had deliberately put themselves in their way, and were trying to grab at them. Rosalind clutched her arms around her mother’s neck and buried her face in her shoulder.

  There was some fumbling at the back door, and then they were outside. It was dark and damp and the wind gusted through the trees, making them heave and sway, their leaves shivering and rustling and protesting as they were tossed against each other.

  For a moment her mother sagged against the door frame to draw great rasping breaths of the clean, cool air. She was trembling, her eyes darting around from side to side, and Rosalind wriggled against the tightness of her grip, confused and frightened.

  ‘Mummy . . .’ Her voice rose precariously and her mother pressed her back into her shoulder.

  ‘Shh . . . shh, Boo . . . please.’

  A last shuddering gasp and they were running again, across the grass, past the trees and the slide and the plastic chair that lay on its side, past the washing line and Mikey’s bicycle, to the shed.

  Rosalind hated the shed. It was mouldy and full of cobwebs. Her father kept the lawnmower in there, and the shed smelt of old grass cuttings. There were tools hanging on the wall and plastic boxes full of bottles and cardboard for recycling, and a tottering pile of junk that her father kept saying he would take to the dump and never did. Everything was dirty and old. Mikey had shut her in the shed the weekend before and whispered through the door about spiders and earwigs, and then he had run away and left her. She had trodden on a snail by mistake and squashed it, and she had had to bang on the door until Amanda heard her and let her out.

  Her father had made Mikey apologize, and he had said he was sorry, but Rosalind knew that he hadn’t meant it.

  So when her mother shifted her onto one hip to wrench at the shed door, Rosalind began to struggle in earnest. ‘No!’

  ‘Boo, please . . . I want you to stay here and be very quiet.’

  ‘Where’s Daddy?’ she whimpered.

  ‘I’m going to get Daddy now. And Emily and Amanda.’

  ‘And Mikey?’ He was mean to her, but he was her brother.

  It was too dark to see her mother’s expression, but she felt her flinch as she lowered Rosalind to the floor and tried to loosen her daughter’s grip on her neck. ‘I’ll find Mikey too,’ she said after a moment. ‘But first you have to stay here. You mustn’t follow me back to the house, do you understand?’

  Rosalind didn’t. She didn’t understand what was happening, but she nodded her head miserably because she knew that was what her mother wanted her to do.

  ‘You must promise me.’ Her mother’s voice wavered with desperation and she kept looking over her shoulder through the shed door to the house where a strange orange light was flickering in the bedroom windows. ‘Look at me, Boo.’ She took Rosalind’s face between her hands and made her look into her eyes. Even in the darkness, Rosalind could see the intensity of her mother’s expression, so fierce and so frightening that she tried to squirm away but her mother wouldn’t let her go. ‘Look at me!’ she commanded again. ‘You know what a promise is?’

  This time Rosalind’s nod was more certain. ‘Daddy told me.’

  ‘It means you do what you say you’re going to do, doesn’t it? And you must never, ever break a promise or something terrible will happen. I want you to promise to stay here in the shed and be quiet as a mouse, and don’t come out until I come and get you.’

  There’s spiders in there as big as saucers. And beetles. And earwigs. Rosalind could still hear Mikey whispering through the door, the way he had sniggered as if he was glad she was frightened.

  Her lower lip trembled. ‘I don’t want to,’ she said, trying to cling to her mother. ‘I want to go with you.’

  ‘Promise!’ her mother shouted, and Rosalind shrank back, appalled by her anger. Her mother never raised her voice. She was gentle and kind. She didn’t shout or scold. Rosalind didn’t want her to be cross with her. ‘Promise you’ll stay very quiet and you won’t open the door.’

  ‘I . . . I promise,’ she whispered tearfully.

  ‘Good girl.’ She was rewarded with a hug so tight it hurt. ‘See, I brought a blanket for you.’ She pulled the rug from Rosalind’s bed off her shoulder and shook it onto the dirty shed floor, over the dust and the dried snail shells and grass cuttings and dead earwigs and all the things Rosalind didn’t want to see. ‘And here’s Pook.’

  Pook was a toy dog that had been Rosalind’s constant companion since she was a baby. Mikey had pulled off his eyes and he had been sucked and crushed and washed until he barely looked like a dog any more, but Rosalind couldn’t sleep without him. She clutched at him for comfort and buried her face in his soft fur.

  ‘Be a brave girl for Pook,’ her mother said, her own voice unsteady. ‘You know he doesn’t like you to cry.’ She touched Rosalind’s hair. ‘I’ll come back as soon as I can, all right?’

  Unable to speak, Rosalind nodded wordlessly into Pook’s head, and after a moment’s hesitation, her mother drew a ragged breath. ‘Remember your promise,’ she said, and turne
d away, only to slump in exhaustion as she saw the orange light spreading gleefully from window to window upstairs.

  ‘Oh God . . . oh God, Mikey, what have you done?’ she whispered.

  Pushing herself upright with an effort of will so great that even Rosalind could see it, she pushed the door of the shed closed behind her and stumbled back up the garden towards the burning house.

  Rosalind was plunged back into darkness. Her heart was thumping painfully and there was a rushing in her ears. She mustn’t cry. She had to be quiet. She had promised. She squeezed Pook tightly to her, seeking comfort in his familiar smell, but her throat was tight still with the effort of not crying.

  ‘You’re five now,’ her father had told her on her birthday the week before. ‘You’re a big girl, too old to suck your thumb.’ Rosalind had been trying not to, but now her thumb slid into her mouth without her realizing it was going to. She stood very still in case there were spiders on the blanket, and she held onto Pook. She had been given a special doll for her birthday that she had called Emma. Emma had big staring blue eyes, golden hair and a rosebud mouth, and she was dressed like a bride in a long white dress with lace and a veil. Rosalind thought she was the most beautiful doll she had ever seen, but right then she was glad she had Pook with her instead.

  She wanted her mother to come back. She wanted her father to lift her up into his arms and carry her back to her bed so that she could wake in the morning with Emma beside her and the sun shining through the curtains. She wanted to go next door and clamber into bed between her parents, and then afterwards maybe Amanda and Emily would play with her. Mikey would be hunched obsessively over his models. He never joined in any more, but Rosalind wouldn’t mind, as long as they were all there and she wasn’t left alone in the dark shed.

  A sob pushed into her throat and she sucked hard on her thumb, her brows drawn fiercely together to stop herself crying. Pook didn’t like her to cry. She wished her mother would come back. She wished she knew what was happening, but she mustn’t open the door. Her mother had told her not to, and she had promised.

  You must never, ever break a promise or something terrible will happen.

  Rosalind didn’t sit down. She didn’t dare, not with the spiders and the earwigs, but she did stay in the shed. She didn’t open the door. She waited for her mother to come and get her.

  Her mother never came. Her father didn’t come either. Nor did her sisters. Nor did Mikey. The fire engines came. When Rosalind peeped through the shed window she could see their blue lights swooping eerily over the house. The police came and the neighbours gathered in appalled groups, but nobody came for Rosalind. So she stood in the dark and she sucked her thumb and she held onto Pook and she stayed very quiet, just as she had promised.

  Chapter One

  York, present day

  Her case was heavy. Roz put it down and flexed her fingers as she studied the sign. York. She’d wondered, of course, if coming back would trigger some memory of her early life, but there was nothing. It was just a word, barely that, more a collection of lines and curves against a white background, the ‘O’ a fat contrast to the spiky ‘Y’ and ‘K’.

  ‘Promise me you won’t go to York,’ her aunt had begged when Roz had been applying to university. Sue had been fragile then, still shocked by her husband’s sudden death. There had been other places Roz was considering anyway, and she hadn’t wanted to upset her aunt, who had brought her up since she was five. She’d promised, and applied elsewhere. She hadn’t bothered to ask why.

  Now she knew.

  Roz hoisted her laptop bag back onto her shoulder and bent to pick up her case once more. Knowing didn’t make any difference. She wasn’t in York to pick over the past. She was here to do a job. This was her big break, and she couldn’t afford to turn it down, even if she had wanted to.

  ‘You’ve got to face it sometime,’ Nick had said the night before. He was lounging on the bed, watching her pack. ‘You can’t pretend that you don’t know what happened.’

  ‘I’m not pretending.’ Roz shoved another jumper into her case. Everyone knew it was colder up north. ‘I’m just not obsessing about it, like you.’

  ‘I’m just saying, it’s a big deal to find out that your whole past was a lie,’ Nick said. ‘Somewhere along the line, you’re going to have to deal with it.’

  ‘My family weren’t killed in a car crash as I always thought, they were burnt to death. Yes, I’m shocked.’ Roz was grabbing handfuls of underwear from a drawer and cramming them into the case that lay open on the bed next to her husband. ‘Yes, it was a bit of a surprise to discover that after years of thinking I had no siblings, it turns out that I’ve got a sociopathic brother who is apparently alive and well and living in York under an assumed name. My aunt lied to me for years, presumably because she thought she was doing the right thing. I’m not pretending none of that is true. How else am I supposed to deal with it?’

  ‘You could find out what really happened.’

  She slammed the drawer shut. ‘I don’t want to find out! Oh God, I haven’t packed any shoes yet . . .’

  Snatching open the wardrobe doors, she began scrabbling around in the bottom, throwing shoes and boots behind her as she found them. ‘I don’t remember anything before I went to live with Aunt Sue and Uncle Keith, and I’m guessing there’s probably a good reason for that. Why bring back memories of something that must have been so traumatic my brain went to a lot of effort to blank it out? I can’t change the past, Nick. Nothing I do will bring my parents or my sisters back, so why keep picking away at it?’

  ‘You can’t change the past, but you can understand it.’ Roz straightened, exasperated.

  ‘When did you buy into all this understanding the past crap anyway?’ she demanded as she swooped down on the shoes that scattered the floor, matching pairs and either tossing them into the case or back into the wardrobe.

  ‘You know when,’ said Nick evenly. ‘And you know why.’

  With a sigh, Roz threw the last pair of shoes into the case. What else did she need to take? The top of the chest of drawers was littered with necklaces, the bold pieces that she favoured. She’d been to a seminar once on power dressing, and a striking necklace was part of her professional uniform now. ‘Fine,’ she said, sorting through for her favourites, meeting Nick’s eyes in the mirror. ‘You want to spend your time trying to work out how you suddenly acquired a fourteen-year-old son, that’s up to you, but what’s the point? He’s not going to disappear just because you’ve understood why Ruth didn’t tell you she was pregnant.’

  ‘And you wish he would.’ Nick’s voice was flat.

  It was true. Roz wasn’t proud of it, but Nick seemed to have forgotten how stubbornly he had resisted the idea of starting a family. I’m not ready for sleepless nights and nappies. We’re too young. We’re having too good a time. We don’t need a kid to keep us together. Roz had heard all the arguments while her body clock clicked and whirred and the urgent tugging in her uterus twisted into an ache and then a rawness that flared every time she saw a baby or heard about another friend who was pregnant.

  And then, then, when she was raw with grief and shaken by the discovery of her family’s terrible death, Daniel had turned up, and suddenly Nick was converted to the joys and responsibilities of fatherhood. He’d said he was going to tell her, of course, when she was less distracted, but Roz had found out by accident, and his secrecy, coming on top of her aunt’s lie, had knocked the foundations of her world askew.

  Roz knew she should have been more understanding about Daniel. She wanted to be, but resentment was lodged like a burning coal in her throat and she couldn’t force the words out. For years she had wanted a child, and all Daniel had to do was track Nick down on Facebook and bang, they were supposed to be a happy modern family. Roz couldn’t do it. She couldn’t pretend to be okay about the situation. She just couldn’t. She wanted to yell and cry and drum her heels on the carpet but instead she had barricaded herself behind a mask of c
omposure that cracked only in the occasional snappy, scratchy skirmish over loading the dishwasher or exactly what kind of rice was best. She found herself taking a stand over issues that didn’t matter, and their arguments over the small things took on an increasingly vicious edge.

  They could do with some time apart.

  Nick didn’t want her to go to York. He thought she should stay in London and confront her past, or some such nonsense. Roz didn’t have time for that. She held up two necklaces, weighing their advantages, then chose one to add to her case.

  ‘Look, I’m just saying I want to concentrate on my career for now. The York job is a great opportunity for me. I can’t throw it away just because our pasts have turned out to be not quite what we thought they were.’

  Nick swung his legs down and sat on the edge of the bed, dangling his hands between his knees. His face, normally so alert and mobile, was set in stern lines.

  ‘What about us?’ he asked.

  ‘Nick, we’ve been through this,’ she said tiredly. ‘It’s only for a year, and I can come home most weekends.’

  ‘You said you wanted to start a family,’ he reminded her.

  ‘And you said you weren’t ready,’ Roz retorted, unable to help the bitter edge to her voice. Their arguments always ended up going round and round like this. ‘I accepted that, and started to build a career as a freelancer, and suddenly you want me to drop all of that because, oh yes, you know about being a father now and you’ve realized it’s not as bad as you thought it was. Well, I’m sorry, but now it doesn’t suit me.’ Angrily, she yanked on the zips of her suitcase. The zipping noise scraped on her nerves. It sounded too much like hopes being ripped apart. ‘Given the circumstances, I don’t think it’s a bad idea for us to have a bit of space, do you?’

  And Nick had said no, he thought she was probably right. It was all very civilized.

  She had done the right thing coming to York, Roz reassured herself, labouring down the steps with her case. This wasn’t about the past; it was about doing a job, and doing it well. And that was what she was going to do.