The Lying Game

Fatima is holding Freya, so I get up and move to the shore window. I can see Kate and the farmer standing close together, their heads bent over the dead sheep. He seems to be more sad than angry, and Kate puts her arm around his shoulder for a brief moment, clasping him in a gesture of comfort that’s not quite a hug, but near it.

The farmer says something I don’t catch, and Kate nods, then together they reach down and pick the ewe up by the fore and hind legs, carrying the poor thing over the rickety bridge, and swinging the body unceremoniously into the back of the farmer’s pickup.

‘Let me get my wallet,’ I hear Kate say, as the farmer latches up the tailgate, and when she turns back towards the house, I see something small and bloody in her fingers, something that she shoves into the pocket of her jacket before she reaches the house.

I step hastily back from the window as the door opens, and Kate comes into the room, shaking her head like someone trying to rid themselves of an unpleasant memory.

‘Is it OK?’ I ask.

‘I don’t know,’ Kate says. ‘I think so.’ She rinses her bloody hands under the tap, and then goes to the dresser for her wallet, but when she looks inside at the notes section, her face falls. ‘Fuck.’

‘Do you need cash?’ Fatima says quickly. She gets up, hands Freya to me. ‘I’ve got my purse upstairs.’

‘I have cash too,’ I say, eager to finally do something that could help. ‘How much do you need?’

‘Two hundred, I think,’ Kate says soberly. ‘It’s more than the sheep’s worth, but he’d be within his rights to get the police involved, and I really don’t want that.’

I nod, and then turn to see Fatima coming back down the stairs with her handbag.

‘I’ve got a hundred and fifty,’ she says. ‘I remembered Salten never had a cash machine so I drew some out at the petrol station on the way through Hampton’s Lee.’

‘Let me go halves.’ I stand, holding a wriggling Freya over my shoulder, and dig into the handbag I left hanging on the stair post. Inside is my wallet, fat with notes. ‘I’ve definitely got enough, hang on …’ I count it out, five crisp twenties, hampered by Freya joyfully snatching at each as they go past. Fatima adds a hundred of her own on top. Kate gives a quick, rueful smile.

‘Thanks, guys, I’ll pay you back as soon as we get into Salten, they’ve got an ATM in the post office now.’

‘No need,’ Fatima says, but Kate has already shut the Mill door behind her, and I hear her voice outside and the farmer’s answering rumble as she hands over the cash, and then the crunch of tyres as he reverses up the lane, the dead sheep in the flatbed of his truck.

When Kate comes back inside she is pale, but her face is relieved.

‘Thank God – I don’t think he’ll call the police.’

‘So you don’t think it was Shadow?’ Fatima asks, but Kate doesn’t answer. Instead she goes over to the sink, to wash her hands again.

‘You’ve got blood on your sleeve,’ I say, and she looks down at herself.

‘Oh God, so I have. Who’d have thought the old sheep to have so much blood in her?’ She gives a twisted smile, and I know she’s thinking of Miss Winchelsea and the end-of-term Macbeth that she never got to play. She shrugs off the coat and drops it on the floor, and then fills up a bucket at the tap.

‘Can I help?’ Fatima asks. Kate shakes her head.

‘No, it’s fine, I’m going to sluice down the jetty, and then I might have a bath. I feel gross.’

I know what she means. I feel gross too – soiled by what I saw, and I didn’t even help the farmer sling the corpse into the back of the truck. I shiver, as she shuts the door behind her, and then I hear the slosh of water, and the scccsh, scccsh of an outdoor broom. I stand and put Freya in her pram.

‘Do you think it was Shadow?’ Fatima says in a low voice, as I tuck Freya in. I shrug, and we both look down at where Shadow is huddled miserably on a rug in front of the unlit stove. He looks ashamed, his eyes sad, and feeling our eyes on him, he looks up, puzzled, and then licks his muzzle again, whining a little. He knows something is wrong.

‘I don’t know,’ I say. But I know now that I will never leave Shadow and Freya alone together. Kate’s jacket is crumpled on the floor by the sink, and I am seized with a need to do something, help in some way, however insignificant. ‘Does Kate have a washing machine?’

‘I don’t think so.’ Fatima looks around. ‘She always used to put her clothes through the school laundry. Do you remember Ambrose used to hand-wash all his painting clothes in the sink? Why?’

‘I was going to put the jacket in, but I guess I’ll just put it in to soak?’

‘Cold water’s better for blood anyway.’

I can’t see where a washing machine could be, so I put in the plug, and run cold water into the sink, and then pick up Kate’s jacket from the floor. Before I put it in the sink, I feel in each pocket, to make sure I’m not about to submerge anything valuable. It’s only when my fingers close on something soft, and unpleasantly squishy, that I remember Kate picking something up from the jetty, and shoving it surreptitiously into her pocket.

When it comes out, it’s unrecognisable, whatever it is – a matted lump of white and red in my fingers – and I make an involuntary sound of disgust as I swish my fingers in the cold sink water. The thing unfurls like a petal and floats gently to the bottom of the sink, and I fish it out.

I don’t know what I thought it would be, but whatever it was, I was not expecting this.

It is a note, the paper soaked crimson with blood and fraying at the edges, the biro letters blurred, but still readable.

Why don’t you throw this one in the Reach too? it reads.

The feeling that washes over me is like nothing I’ve felt before. It is pure, distilled panic.

For a minute I don’t move, don’t say anything, don’t even breathe. I just stand there, the bloody water running from between my fingers, my heart skittering erratically in my breast, my cheeks hot and flushed with a scarlet wave of guilt and fear.

They know. Someone knows.

I look up at Fatima, who isn’t watching, who has no idea what has just happened. Her head is bowed over her phone, texting Ali, or something. For a second I open my mouth – and then a kind of instinct takes over, and I shut it again.

I feel my fingers close over the ball of mushy paper, grinding it, grinding it into pulp, feeling my nails in my palm as I rip and shred and mash the paper into flecks of white and crimson until it’s gone, quite gone, and not a single word remains.

With my free hand, I pull the plug, letting the bloodstained water drain away, out of the jacket, and I dip my fingers in as it disappears down the plughole, letting the shredded mush float free into the spiralling water. Then I turn on the cold tap and I sluice away every trace of the note, every fibre, every fleck of accusation until it’s as if it never existed.

I HAVE TO get out.

It’s ten o’clock, and Kate is in the bath, Thea has gone back to sleep, and Fatima is working, her laptop open on the table in front of the window, her head bent as she ploughs intently through her emails.

Freya is sitting plump-bottomed on the floor, and I am trying to play with her, quietly so as not to disturb Fatima. I am reading to her from the flap book that she loves, with the little babies playing peekaboo, but I keep forgetting to turn the page, and she bangs the book with her hand and chirrups at me as if to tell me, come on! Turn faster!

‘Where’s the baby?’ I say quietly, but I’m distracted, not properly entering into the game. Shadow is still lying unhappily in the corner, still licking at his muzzle, and all I want to do is snatch Freya up and hug her against me and get her out of here.

Outside I can hear the whine of insects, and I think again of the spilled guts of the sheep, spattered across the walkway. I am just opening the flap to show the baby’s surprised face peeking out, when I see, right by Freya’s chubby, perfect leg, a jagged splinter of wood sticking up out of the floorboard.

This place, where I have spent so many happy hours, is suddenly full of threat.