---

Sam stares out across the lake. The water looks like thick black tar, the reflections from the sun scattered pieces of tinfoil. He throws a stone in and rings spread out around it, then they are quickly gone again, healed over. He takes a sweeping video shot across the landscape. The mounds of grass in the fields that surround the lake give it a strange, otherworldly feeling; a set for a film that takes place on another planet.

Midges mingle above the water and rushes, invisible until they get caught in a beam of sunlight. Sam drags his sleeves over his hands and pulls his jumper up around his face. Insects are attracted to him; they always eat him alive.

He dips his hand into the freezing water. It feels thick, full of floating things. His fingers come back out dirty, black blobs of slime, green strings collecting along them. Every so often a breeze makes the water wrinkle up like fabric then smooth itself out again.

‘A local beauty spot,’ some described it as, when Sam looked the lake up on the Internet earlier, visited it on Google Earth before the drive to Conley.

There’s something about it but it’s desolate too, only the occasional car whooshing past.

Filming another semicircle around the lake, in the viewfinder Sam now sees someone sitting on the bench at the picnic table, where there had been no one before. It must be Dean, who he has arranged to meet, although he hadn’t seen anyone arrive. He looks around and there are no cars anywhere. He gets a shot of the man looking over the lake. He hasn’t noticed Sam yet.

It takes Sam longer than he anticipated to walk round to the picnic table, as if he’s on a slow travellator. The lake is bigger than it looks. ‘Dean?’ he says when he reaches him, and the man jumps, twisting his body round. ‘Sorry, mate, didn’t mean to scare you.’

They shake hands but Dean doesn’t meet his eye.

‘I’m Sam. We spoke about the documentary I’m doing. Cheers for agreeing to meet me.’

‘No bother,’ Dean says, rubbing at his nose, skittish.

‘I didn’t see you turn up?’ Sam looks back at the road.

Dean points. ‘I just walked across the fields.’

‘OK. Well, unless you’ve any questions, we’ll get going, if it’s alright with you,’ Sam says, positioning the camera.

Dean’s face freezes for a second. ‘Can you just remind me again where this is going to be on?’

‘I don’t know for sure yet. I’m just doing the research, getting some preliminary footage together, then pitching it out.’

This seems to make Dean relax a bit. Assuming the footage will never see the light of day, no doubt. A fair assumption, Sam thinks.

‘I wasn’t sure about doing this, you know,’ Dean says. ‘I’m still not. It’s just ’cos I saw her mother in the paper again. That’s why I agreed.’

Sam fiddles behind the camera, zooming in then out until there’s just the right balance of the lake behind Dean.

Dean expels air. ‘Listen, can we just get it over with? I feel like I’m at the dentist or something here.’ His legs are jiggling under the table. He arranges his hair, scraping greasy, grey strands back off his face.

‘Look at me, not the camera. It’s more natural,’ Sam says.

Dean nods, his hands stuffed between his knees.

‘So, you found the body?’

Dean looks up, shoulders narrowed. He has the head of an older man on the body of a skinny teenager, Sam thinks.

‘Yeah, it was a Sunday and I used to walk my dog, Jessie, every night. She’s gone now, bless her, but she was an energetic little thing then. Sheep dog so she needed to be walked twice a day.’

‘Did you always walk her at the lake?’ Sam asks.

Dean shifts in his seat and pauses to think before answering. ‘Not always. In the morning I’d walk her closer to my house, because I needed to get to work. But in the summer, I liked to bring her up to the lake. It cleared my head up here.’

‘How old were you at the time?’

Dean considers for a few seconds again. ‘I was twenty-one then. I was still doing an apprenticeship – just finishing. To be a joiner.’

‘Was there anything unusual or remarkable about that Sunday?’ Sam says, reminding Dean to look at him and not straight into the camera. His eyes keep flicking towards it anyway.

‘No, I wouldn’t say so.’ Dean’s hands are fidgeting in his lap under the table. ‘I had a bit of a hangover, if I’m honest. I’d been out in the town the night before. I wasn’t feeling too clever that day. So I went up to the lake for that reason, too. Try and blow the cobwebs off a little bit.’

‘What time was it?’ Sam asks.

Dean answers with certainty this time. ‘It was nine, nine thirty. I liked the light at that time of the evening in the summer.’

‘And you always drove up here to the lake?’

‘Usually I walked, like today. But you know, the hangover. So I took the car. It was my dad’s car. The weather was nice, I remember that. But it had turned nasty so quickly the day before and I didn’t want to get caught out in that. Not on a Sunday night up here so, yes, I brought the car.’

Dean keeps glancing at the camera as if it’s a person fixing their stare on him.

Sam softens his voice as much as he can. ‘Can you talk about what happened, then, that night? It’s OK, you can take your time.’

Dean looks at his watch repeatedly, a kind of tic. ‘Well, it was Jessie. She was usually pretty good. She did as she was told. But I threw a stick for her and she didn’t come back. She was agitated. You know, wagging her tail and everything. And she was looking at something in the water and barking.’

Dean glances over now towards the lake, and Sam makes a mental note to cut in a shot of the water, the midges fizzing on the surface.

Dean bites at his lip and carries on. ‘Honestly? I thought she’d seen a wasp or something or that she might have been barking at her own reflection. Because she did that sometimes in mirrors.’

Sam lets Dean go on.

‘Yeah, so I went over to her, to Jessie, to tell her to chill out and check if she was OK and I saw it, this…’ Dean rubs his hand over the top of his hair, ruffling it. ‘I saw a hand on the water. In the water.’ He swallows hard. ‘It was near some rushes. I thought it was severed at first. But when I looked closer I could tell it was a body. A woman. Well, a girl.’

‘What was your reaction?’ Sam says.

Dean’s eyebrows shoot up and he runs his hands across the curve of his head again. ‘I just couldn’t believe it, you know? Never in a million years would I have thought I’d see something like that. And not up here.’ Dean shakes his head. He needs less prompting now. ‘I got a stick and I tried to move the rushes a bit just to be sure. And I saw her properly then, saw her face. I physically staggered backwards, I remember now. I fell to the ground’

‘And you went to get the police straight away?’ Sam asks.

‘Yes,’ Dean says. ‘Well, not straight away, because I remember thinking I didn’t want to go; I didn’t want to leave her there on her own. I didn’t know whether to pull her out or leave her. But mostly I remember thinking that someone should stay with her. We didn’t all have mobile phones or nothing then, of course. So I had to get in the car, and I drove and stopped at the first house I saw. I could hardly drive, I was shaking that much. It seemed to take so long to get to it. And then I came back up here and waited with her while the police came. Me and Jessie waited.’

‘Thanks, Dean.’ Sam reaches out to adjust the camera, but Dean puts his hand out for him not to, thinking he’s about to switch it off.

Dean looks back into the camera then at Sam. ‘They didn’t keep me up to date or nothing, the police, you know. I asked them to and they said they would. I never heard nothing. I used to ring up myself, but in the end I just gave up and read the papers like everybody else. And then it stopped being in there anyway.’

Sam forces himself to ask the question on his mind. ‘Were you worried? That they’d think it was you? Because you found her?’

Dean’s face twitches and his eyes fix on Sam’s. ‘Yes,’ he says.

Sam had expected him to say no.

‘But I didn’t do it, did I, so why should I care what they think? It isn’t about that. It’s about finding out who did kill her. Today, this is the first time I’ve been up here in years. I hate it up here now. That water is more polluted than ever,’ Dean says, jabbing his finger.

His attention has drifted over Sam’s shoulder and Sam senses it’s not just the camera distracting him. He turns to see a man standing behind him. The man and Dean exchange small nods.

Dean climbs out from the picnic-table bench. ‘Let me know if you need anything else. And keep me posted,’ he says to Sam, and then shrugs. ‘Doubt you will.’

They shake hands and Dean walks around the lake towards the field, hands shoved in his pockets. Sam watches him go. On the other side of the lake, Dean climbs over the wire fence and walks across the field, the grass coming up to his knees. Sam films him as he gets further and further away.

‘Very arty,’ a voice says, and Sam is surprised to see the man who had been standing behind him is still there, now leaning against the picnic table.

‘Martin,’ the man says, offering a handshake.

‘Sam,’ he says, automatically taking it.

‘Do you two know each other?’ Sam asks, gesturing in the direction of where Dean walked.

‘Not really. Know of,’ Martin says. ‘I’ve seen him around. Everyone mostly knows everyone round here. Filming something for the local news?’

‘No,’ Sam says, feeling himself involuntarily puff up a little. ‘I’m making a documentary.’

‘Oh?’ Martin says, scowling.

‘About Victoria Preston.’

‘Ohhhhh,’ Martin’s face opens up in recognition.

‘You walk up here a lot?’ Sam asks.

‘Me? Yes – a fair bit. Been coming up here for years. A lot of people stopped after what happened. You don’t get so many picnickers and things now. Puts you off your lunch somewhat, I suppose. But I still like the air up here. Don’t you?’

Sam takes a breath in through his nose.

‘The Victorians used to come up here,’ Martin says. ‘Because it’s high above Conley they could get away from the smog of the factories. They’d swim up here in the summer. You wouldn’t do that now, that’s for sure. And there were boats too. And in the winter they’d be ice-skating.’

Looking around now, Sam can’t imagine realistic scenes of this, only stylised pictures: Christmas cards, illustrations on vintage-style calendars.

‘You can’t fathom it getting that cold now, can you?’ Sam says. ‘Cold enough for solid ice?’

Sam and Martin walk towards the lake, peering into it. Sam takes some footage of their reflections wobbling on the surface of the water.

‘They’ve pulled all sorts out of here, you know,’ Martin says, poking at the water with a long stick he has picked up. ‘Dead things, cars, the lot.’

‘There were drownings, too, weren’t there?’ Sam says.

Martin looks puzzled. ‘You obviously know more than me.’

Sam films Martin’s movements in the reflection of the water. ‘I read the stories about a girl falling into the ice and drowning. On a local history website.’

Martin thinks for a moment. ‘Heard something about it. I don’t remember the details.’

‘It was 1898, I think, some time around then anyway. Some say her name was Clara and she was fourteen,’ Sam says. ‘Others say it was earlier and she was an Emily, and she was just eight. She was skating up here alone and the ice gave way – just in one spot. That’s what they reckon.’

Martin’s mouth turns down at the edges. ‘You have been doing your research, eh? Well, maybe it was Emily that fell in, maybe it was Clara, maybe it was neither. I guess we’ll never know, will we?’

‘Could have been both.’ Sam looks back at the lake into the opaque water, as if it might give them a clue about Emily, or Clara. Or Victoria.

Martin shrugs his shoulders. ‘Well, one thing’s for sure. Victoria Preston wasn’t ice-skating up here, was she? And she wasn’t having a picnic either.’

Wordlessly they both step back from the water and begin to walk towards the road, Sam stuffing his camera back into its bag.

‘You from here?’ Sam says.

‘Born and bred for my sins.’

‘You followed the case then? Victoria?’ Sam asks.

Martin’s arms are folded around his torso. ‘I wouldn’t say I “followed” it, but it was a big thing around here at the time, of course. Everyone in Conley knows about it. In a sense you can’t not follow it when you live here. Not that there’s been a lot to follow of late. How about you?’

‘Me? I’m from Wales. Journo by trade. Made redundant. You know how it is with local papers.’

Martin nods in agreement. ‘Ours is a rag. They don’t leave the office. They don’t get out for stories any more. All rehashed press releases and ads. All written while they’re stuffing biscuits into their gobs.’

Sam has to stop himself ‘going off on one’ about it, as his daughter would say. His job had been swallowed up soon after the owners introduced a content-sharing model across the regional papers, meaning each edition only produced a handful of local stories in-house. The rest were produced by a central team in Liverpool and farmed out to all the regional papers. Sam had been unable to help himself loudly scoffing at the idea whenever he’d got a chance, and he knew it was unlikely to have helped his case when they had to decide exactly where the axe was to fall.

His habit of replying to readers’ comments on his stories, and setting them straight on their opinions, might have had something to do with it, too. The new online editor had started finding fault with Sam’s articles out of the blue, nit-picking about tiny mistakes – from a misspelled name (it only happened once and, as Sam had pointed out, there were typos in the Bible) to his wording of a headline. Proper journalists strive for accuracy but everyone makes mistakes – a small omission, a slightly off date. You’d be hard pushed to find any articles that are 100% accurate. Writers are humans, not robots – not yet.

‘Good to see someone out on a story getting the soles of their feet dirty,’ Martin says now, as they approach the dirt track near the road. ‘So what brings you here? To Conley?’

Sam hitches the camera bag onto his shoulder. ‘Well, I’m unemployed right now… ahem, I mean “freelancing”. I’ve been tinkering about with making films for years – shorts, music videos for mates, and all that. I’ve always thought about having a go at documentary-making. Got my redundancy and thought it’s now or never.’ He can feel himself flushing. It sounds pretty pathetic laid out like that. ‘This story, Victoria’s story, just captured my attention.’

Martin raises an eyebrow, like he’s going to say something, then drops it again. He slaps Sam lightly on the back. ‘Well, good for you. It’s never too late to reinvent yourself.’

‘Cheers, hope so.’

Martin isn’t ready to let it go, though. He stops, forcing Sam to as well. ‘But… I’m curious. Why this story in particular? Why Victoria? There are plenty of dead people to choose from.’

Sam swats an insect away that’s buzzing in front of his face.

‘Sorry, I’m just genuinely curious,’ Martin says. ‘We don’t get a lot of interest like this in Conley. As you might imagine.’

‘I covered crime a lot when I worked on the paper. And I’ve just always been interested, read a lot of true crime too.’

Martin’s face is blank.

‘Something happened when I was younger,’ Sam blurts out, annoyed at himself for feeling such a need to justify himself.

Martin draws shapes in the dirt with the toe of his shoe.

‘Well, not to me, to my sister. She’s a year older.’

Martin stops dragging his foot and looks at Sam now.

‘She was walking home one day when she was about thirteen. There was this area near the house that was just a dirt road. He asked her, this man in a car, if she wanted a lift. She said no, of course. He said he knew our dad. She sensed something was off and she carried on walking.’

Sam feels self-conscious, but Martin’s eyes are fixed on him. He finds himself stuttering, his teeth catching on his lips.

‘He followed her in the car and it was all just fields around. There was no one else around.’

‘So what happened?’ Martin says.

The tension breaks a bit then. ‘She climbed over a turnstile so he couldn’t follow her in the car any more.’ Sam can feel his heart thumping.

‘Why was she there?’ Martin says. ‘At the dirt road?’

It takes Sam by surprise. It’s not the question he was expecting.

‘She was just… she was just walking there, I don’t know. We did that then.’

Martin seems happy with the answer. ‘So…?’

‘The man got out of the car and chased her. He got close, almost within grabbing distance, but she managed to lose him. She knew her way around better than him, I guess. She came tearing into the house, blurting it all out, and Mum called the police. They didn’t find anyone, but they said it wasn’t the only report they’d had of similar things happening.’

‘Blimey,’ Martin says. ‘You OK? You look a bit peaky.’

‘I’m fine. It was in another lifetime. Sorry, it just kind of came out there.’

‘Sounds like quite an ordeal. Your sister OK now?’

‘Emma? She’s fine. But when I read about the Victoria Preston case, it sort of reminded me of that. I’m sure a psychologist would link it all up and have a field day with it. Probably some kind of hero crusade,’ Sam says.

‘Probably.’

At the side of the lake next to the road there’s a small dirt-track area. It looks as if cars have parked there recently, perhaps to sit and look over the water. A road runs past the lake, miles of fields, the odd farm, eventually leading to other towns. It’s intersected by another steep, narrow road that takes you back into the town of Conley.

Standing on the dirt track, Martin opens his arms out. ‘So, this is where Victoria was said to have been dropped off.’

Sam tries to visualise it. He had on his way into Conley too. He’d come over the tops, driving through the night to avoid traffic and to try to get a sense of what it was like up here in the dark – for Victoria, that night. He was surprised at how rural and remote it felt, as if it didn’t belong to the ordinary, seen-better-days town it was officially a part of. He’d hardly seen anyone else on the road, apart from the roadkill every now and then: foxes, badgers, rabbits – unidentified beast-shaped mounds in the headlights. He’d sat there, at the edge of the lake near the road, until it started to get light that first night, and only counted one other car go by.

A ripped paper sign catches on the wind and flaps loudly on a lamp post. ‘SAY YES TO THE FOOTPATH‘ it says.

Martin follows Sam’s gaze. ‘Oh that. Local walking group wants a footpath to be built between the town and the lake. To make it safer and easier to access, they reckon. There’ve been people almost run over and killed, a cyclist knocked off his bike coming up that narrow road. Those dry-stone walls make it like a tunnel and there aren’t any lights. Drivers can’t see people at all.’

‘What’s the problem, then?’ Sam asks. ‘With the footpath. Why the campaign against it?’

Martin laughs to himself. ‘Oh, it’s never that simple round here. You’ll see. Some of them say it should remain countryside, they don’t want hordes of people trooping up here, “spoiling” it.’

‘Isn’t there some dodgy stuff goes on up here?’ Sam says. ‘Maybe some people don’t want that disturbed either?’ He had seen comments online that the area was used for drug-dealing and dogging, sex workers bringing customers up here in cars.

Martin laughs again. ‘Maybe you’re right. You really have been doing some digging, eh.’

‘That sort of stuff going on when Victoria died?’

Martin shrugs. ‘I’m not an expert on the matter, but I’d have thought so, wouldn’t you? It’s hardly a new phenomenon, is it?’

Sam takes the camera back out of its bag and puts it up to film. The sun is low in the sky now, casting a haze across the lake, a faint rainbow of coloured light refracting in the beam. He kicks at the dirt, as if the tyre tracks from the car Victoria got out of here, twenty years ago, might still be there.

‘It just doesn’t make sense, does it? Why would she be up here that late at night? Who would she be meeting?’

‘Well, that’s the question, isn’t it?’ Martin says, eyes fixed on Sam’s shoes. ‘That’s why it’s so frustrating. And so alluring to people like you and your future viewers, I suppose.’

‘You going back into town?’ Sam asks Martin. ‘Want a lift?’

‘Yeah, why not. Cheers.’

On the way back into Conley, Sam and Martin sit in silence for a while, watching the fields go by. The road is steep and mostly unpavemented, flanked by dry-stone walls that look like they could tumble down at any moment.

Finally, Martin speaks. Sam had sensed he was working up to something. ‘Don’t be fooled by Dean,’ he says.

It takes Sam a few seconds to process it. ‘Sorry?’

‘The “ooh I’m so nervous” schtick. He’s been dining out on that story since he found her.’

‘Really?’ Sam asks. He can’t picture it. ‘How do you mean?’

‘He might make out he’s reluctant to talk, but he’ll tell anyone that’ll listen. Doesn’t need a lot of prompting. Sometimes none at all. I’ve heard him in the pub. He was on all the news bulletins back then.’

Sam had seen Dean on some of the TV recordings he’d been able to find online.

Martin doesn’t take his eyes off the road. ‘And all that stuff about saying he wanted to stay with her, that got embroidered on afterwards. The more times he told the story after, a little bit got added each time.’

‘You think he’s lying, then?’ Sam says.

‘Not at all,’ Martin says. ‘I don’t say he’s lying as such. That isn’t what I said. Reframing, maybe. I’m sure he even remembers it slightly differently now.’

Sam doesn’t respond, staring at the road ahead.

‘What was at number one that summer, the week when Victoria died?’ Martin says.

‘Sorry, what?’ Sam can hear irritation creeping into his voice at Martin leaping around from topic to topic.

‘Just guess.’

‘Dunno…’ Sam has to think to locate that period of his life. He had recently got married. He was working long hours at the paper. It was a good time to be a local reporter then. The divorce and redundancy, where he was now, wouldn’t have seemed possible.

‘Um… Blur? Oasis?’ he says.

‘Try again.’

‘Oh, I don’t bloody know.’

‘Take That!’ Martin says, triumphant.

Sam turns briefly to look at him.

‘I’d have never got that right if my wages depended on it,’ Martin says. ‘But it was Take That: “Never Forget”.’

‘How do you know that?’ Sam says. ‘And more to the point, what’s it got to do with anything?’

‘I came across it somewhere quite recently. Pub quiz, maybe. I love a good quiz, don’t you? I’m not being flippant, far from it. But it just shows how your memory plays tricks. You think you know something but everything gets… coloured. After twenty years, you’re going to have a job on with your true-crime documentary.’

The countryside gives way to a disused farmhouse, then a while later a bus stop, before houses and schools become the usual glut of petrol stations, shops and bars.

‘Where’d you want to be?’ Sam has to say it twice.

Martin snaps out of a daydream.

‘Thinking about Take That, were you?’ Sam says.

‘Something like that. Just drop me by the library, if that’s alright.’

‘You sure? I can drop you at home, if you like? It’s starting to rain.’

‘No, library’s fine. Somebody has to use it or they’ll get rid of that too.’

‘Suit yourself.’

Sam excuses himself and opens the glove compartment in front of Martin and fumbles for a CD to put on, for a break from the small talk. He picks up an Elbow CD.

Martin shakes his head. ‘Not that music for bed-wetters, please.’ He has started flicking through the CDs, too, and holds up one in a badly cracked case – The Best of Elvis. Sam had forgotten he even had it, can’t remember where it came from. Maybe one of his dad’s that he kept after he died.

‘Oh, come on, you’ve got to love a bit of Elvis. My all-time fave.’

‘Is it?’ Sam says, genuinely taken aback. ‘I wouldn’t have had you down as an Elvis fan.’

‘No?’ Martin looks proud, or perhaps offended. ‘Who’d you have said, then?’

‘Dunno. John Denver? Mumford & Sons?’

‘Doesn’t bode well for your investigation. I’ve been to Graceland twice. Got all the box sets.’

Martin takes the CD from the case and slides it into the player. The jaunty strains of ‘Return to Sender’ play out and he drums the tune on his knees, trying but failing not to look self-conscious.

---

After Sam drops Martin off, he drives to Sylvie’s house. Judith had called a few days ago to let him know she was back in town.

On his list of interviewees, Sylvie is at the top. Anyone commissioning the documentary would want her.

He arrives in Sylvie’s street and checks the house number again against the one he’d noted down.

A small pink bike sits leaning against the wall opposite Sylvie’s, but there’s no sign of its owner. A slide and Wendy house in one of the front gardens are similarly deserted. Up at the window across the street, a row of teddy bears is lined up, pressed against the glass.

There’s something about the day, the silence and the drabness of the air that transports Sam back to his own childhood. To Sundays when there was nothing to do. The house smelled of roast dinner for the whole day, there wasn’t anything on TV at night, boring films and sport in the afternoons.

The curtains are drawn at the front of Sylvie’s house. Everyone else’s are still open. The front patch of garden is overgrown with weeds, the soil dried out, greying. Sam stands on the concrete landing area at the top of the steps, knocks on the front door and waits, but there’s no answer. He thinks he can hear someone moving around inside so he knocks louder and the sound stops.

He takes a deep breath and bends down to shout through the letter box. Judith didn’t know how long Sylvie would be staying. Sam needs to catch her while she is in town. Letter box open, looking through the open living-room door, he can see baby paraphernalia strewn across the place. The house looks shabby, disorganised, dated décor from the snatches he can make out.

‘Hello, Sylvie. My name’s Sam. I was hoping I could talk to you.’

He closes the letter box and flaps it loudly one more time. Nothing. He steps back and looks up at the house, half brick, half pebble-dashing. From the corner of his eye, he thinks he sees movement upstairs, in the crack in the lace curtain. But when he looks closer, it’s completely still.