The brass bell above Henry Otter's door gave a thin, reedy note as Lorna Peck shouldered it open, and the sound hung in the cold hallway like a held breath.
She had forgotten how small the village felt. The lane outside had been quiet in that particular Yorkshire way, where even the wind sounded polite, but inside the building the air was close, scented with old paper and furniture polish and the faint metallic tang of a radiator working too hard. A clock on the wall ticked in a slow, almost apologetic rhythm. Lorna set down her bag and let her eyes adjust to the watery light that came through a single tall window, grey as dishwater, falling across stacks of ledgers and a brass inkwell the size of a child's fist.
"Through here, dear. Mind the step."
Henry Otter appeared in a doorway at the end of the passage, his shirtsleeves rolled to the elbow, his spectacles pushed up onto a forehead that seemed too broad for the rest of him. He had aged since Lorna last saw him at the post office counter, that had been, what, six years back, but his smile was the same, creased and shy, as though he was perpetually surprised anyone had come to see him at all. He waved her through into what had once been the front parlour of his house and was now his working room, dominated by an oak desk so heavy it had probably been there when the cottage was built.
"Sit you down. I've put the kettle on. Only thing is, I've gone and forgotten which cup is which since Margaret passed. They all look the same to me now." He gestured vaguely at a row of mismatched mugs on a side table, then lowered himself into the swivel chair behind the desk with the careful movements of a man whose knees had started making their own weather forecasts. "You came up on the train, did you? From down south?"
"Manchester," Lorna said. "I was in Manchester."
"Manchester. Right. Good line that, mostly." He nodded to himself, as though confirming a small private fact. Then he straightened, and the playfulness went out of his face. "Now then. About why I've called you."
He opened a drawer and took out a long envelope, pale blue, the colour of skimmed milk, with the words LAST WILL AND TESTAMENT OF MARGOT ELSPETH HARGRAVE written in a clerk's careful copperplate across the front. The paper smelled of the same furniture polish as the rest of the room, and underneath it, something older, mustier, the particular dust of documents long undisturbed. He set it on the desk between them like a card he was afraid to turn over.
"Margot Hargraves, of Saltwind Lane, deceased the fourteenth of November last," he said, and his voice had gone formal, the old postmaster reading from an official script in his head. "I am the sole executor. I have, in accordance with her instructions, gathered those whom the will concerns, and I shall now read the operative clauses aloud, with such explanations as are required."
Lorna nodded. Her throat felt dry. She had not known Margot Hargraves well, only by reputation, only by the angled glimpses the village gave of its quieter residents, but the letter Henry had sent three weeks ago had said simply: Margot has left you something, and I should rather you came up in person. It had been written in his soft brown ink, and she had turned it over twice in her hands before booking the train.
There was a small knock at the door. Henry raised a hand.
"That'll be Miss Stride. Come in, come in, Nell, my dear."
Nell Stride came in the way she came into most rooms, Lorna thought, with the quick, appraising look of someone who had learned to read a space before she read the people in it. She was taller than Lorna remembered, or perhaps only held herself straighter now, the collar of her grey coat turned up against the cold, her dark hair pushed back behind her ears. She nodded to Lorna, then to Henry, and took the chair nearest the door without being asked.
"Right then," he said. He unfolded the will with the slow ceremony of a man who understood that paper had its own kind of gravity. His spectacles slid down his nose. He pushed them up. He cleared his throat.
"I, Margot Elspeth Hargraves, being of sound mind, do hereby revoke all former wills and testamentary writings made by me, and declare this to be my last will and testament."
He paused. Lorna watched Nell's hands fold themselves in her lap, one thumb turning slowly over the knuckle of the other. The radiator clicked twice and settled. Outside, a car went past on the lane, its tyres hissing on the wet tarmac, and was gone.
"Clause One. To Nell Stride, currently of such address as is known to my executor, I bequeath the freehold property known as Saltwind Lane House, together with all fixtures, fittings, and contents therein at the date of my death, save and except such items as are otherwise disposed of under this will. The said property is to pass with vacant possession, and without conditions or encumbrances of any kind."
Nell's thumb stopped moving.
"Clause Two," Henry read, and his voice had gone a shade softer, as though he wanted the words to land gently. "To Nell Stride I bequeath a sealed envelope, marked with my initials and the date of the ninth of October in the year two thousand and three, said envelope to be delivered into her hands unopened, and to remain unopened at her sole discretion. Should she choose to destroy it, that destruction is to be witnessed by my executor and recorded in a memorandum to be lodged with my papers."
"Clause Three. To Nell Stride I bequeath a wooden box, of oak, with a brass clasp, currently in the keeping of my executor, the contents of which are unknown to me in their entirety, but which are to pass to her with the box. I direct that she open the box, if she chooses to open it, in the presence of a witness of her own choosing, and that she make no record of its contents for any third party, this being a condition of bequest and not a request."
Henry turned a page. His hand was not quite steady. He looked at Lorna, then at Nell, and he lifted his chin in the small, courteous way of a man who had delivered many such documents and knew when to wait.
"Clause Four," he said. "All the residue of my estate, including but not limited to my remaining monies held at the Yorkshire Building Society, my shareholding in Harrow Holdings Limited, my personal effects not otherwise disposed of, and any property of whatsoever kind not the subject of Clauses One, Two, and Three, I give, devise, and bequeath unto Harrow Holdings Limited, of registered office number such-and-such, for the consideration of one pound sterling, receipt of which is hereby acknowledged."
He stopped there. The clock ticked. The radiator gave a long, slow sigh through its pipes. Henry folded the will along its original creases, set it down, and took off his spectacles, and for a moment he looked at the two women across the desk with an expression Lorna could not quite place, somewhere between embarrassment and a kind of stubborn pride.
"One pound sterling," he said, as though repeating it might make it less strange. "The whole of the rest of it, for a pound. To Diana Belmore's company. Those are the words."
There was a silence. Then Nell spoke.
"May I see the envelope?"
Henry opened the drawer again and took out a second object, smaller, square, the colour of old cream. It had been sealed with a pressed wafer of red wax, and across the front, in an unsteady hand Lorna recognised even without knowing her, Margot had written her own initials in a looping M, and the date. Nell took it without a word and turned it over twice, once, twice, in her hands, and then she set it on her knee and did not open it.
"The wooden box," Henry said, more gently now. "That one I'd like to keep a day or two, if you'll allow me, until I've found a place to put it where it won't get damp. Margot was particular about damp. She made me promise."
Nell nodded. She had not yet looked up. Her thumb was turning again over the knuckle of her other hand, the skin there gone white with pressure.
"Henry," Lorna said. Her voice came out smaller than she meant it to. "What about Margot herself? Where is she buried? Who looked after her at the end?"
Henry looked at her for a long beat. He folded his spectacles and put them in his breast pocket.
"Diana Belmore looked after her," he said. "Diana Belmore, and one or two others. The funeral was a quiet one. Margot had asked for it to be quiet. You'll find the details in the second envelope I've prepared for you, when you're ready to read them. For the moment, I've said what Margot asked me to say, and I shall abide by it, and I'm glad I've said it, and I'm also, if I'm honest, a little relieved that part is done."
He stood up, slowly, and went across to the kettle.
"Now. Tea," he said. "I've got Yorkshire, I've got a builder's, and I've got something herbal that Margaret used to drink when she was up. Your choice, but I'd take the Yorkshire if I were you. There's a cold wind getting up outside, and you both look as though you've come a long way to hear a will read aloud by an old man in his own front parlour."
He set out three cups, the same three, and none of them matched, and the steam from the kettle began to cloud the small window and blur the grey lane beyond, and somewhere down the lane a dog began to bark, three short barks and then silence, and Nell Stride still had not opened the envelope on her knee.
The kettle clicked off and the steam rose in a thin, steady column. Henry poured the water with the careful concentration of a man for whom this small ritual was the day's first proper undertaking. He set the teapot on the table between them, a brown glazed pot with a chip on the spout, and dropped in the tea leaves, and the smell of it filled the parlour, dark and tannic and vaguely like the smell of the lane after rain.
"There we are," he said. "Three minutes for the Yorkshire. I've got a biscuit tin somewhere if Lorna wants to dig it out, but I shouldn't bother if I were you, the ginger ones have gone soft and I'm not sure about the chocolate."
Lorna did not move. She was watching Nell.
Nell Stride sat in the armchair opposite the window, her coat still on, her scarf still wound twice around her neck. The envelope lay on her knee like a thing she had not yet decided whether to pick up. It was a plain manila envelope, of the kind one used to buy in packs of a hundred from the stationer's on the high street, and across the front, in Margot's careful slanting hand, was written one word in blue biro: NELL.
The kettle ticked softly as it cooled. The dog down the lane had stopped barking. Somewhere in the house a clock was marking the seconds with a thin, mechanical patience.
Lorna could see, even from her chair, the small tremor in Nell's fingers. She had seen that tremor once before, on a night in Leeds when Nell had rung her at half past two in the morning and said, very quietly, that she thought she might have got something wrong, and Lorna had driven across town to sit with her, and they had not spoken much, and they had not needed to.
"Tea," Henry said again, and this time he brought the pot to the table and set it down with a small, decisive sound, as though tea were the final argument against any further delay. He poured three cups, one after the other, the stream of liquid dark in the grey light of the window, and he handed the first to Lorna, and the second to Nell, and kept the third for himself.
"Now then," he said, and he sat down in his own chair, and folded his hands on his knee, and looked at the envelope on Nell's knee as though it were a small, contained weather system that he had been watching for some time and was now content to observe from a safe distance.
Nell did not take the cup at once. She looked at it. Then she looked at Lorna.
"You open it," she said.
"No," Lorna said. "It's yours."
"It was addressed to me. That doesn't mean it has to be me who opens it."
"It means exactly that. It was Margot's last instruction. She wanted you to read it."
Nell made a small sound in the back of her throat, not quite a laugh and not quite a sigh. She set the teacup down on the little table beside her, untouched. She straightened the envelope on her knee. She smoothed her thumb across the blue biro of her name.
"She didn't write to me for ten years," Nell said. "Not a card, not a phone call, not so much as a forwarded letter. And then, six weeks ago, this arrives. Hand-delivered. No postmark, no franking, no trace. Henry's handwriting on the outer envelope, Margot's handwriting on the inner. And inside, a single line. 'Come home, Nell. I've left you what I couldn't take with me.' That's all it said. That was six weeks ago, and I have been trying, ever since, to decide what to do about it."
"And now you've come home," Henry said.
"And now I've come home," Nell agreed. "And I've found Henry, and I've found you, and I've found an old man in his front parlour who has told me the things Margot asked him to tell me, and I still haven't the faintest idea what any of it means."
Lorna set her own cup down. She did not drink either. The steam from the teapot rose between them, and the parlour smelled of hot tannin and cold linen and something else, faintly, like paper kept too long in a drawer.
"Open it," Lorna said.
Nell did. She slid her thumb under the flap. The adhesive was old and brittle, and a little of it came away on her skin, and she wiped it on her coat. She drew out a single sheet of paper, folded twice, and the paper was yellowed at the edges and had the slightly waxy feel of a thing that had been kept a long time.
She unfolded it. She looked at it for a long time.
Lorna saw her face change.
It was not a dramatic change. Nell Stride's face had always been a careful instrument, the face of a woman who had learned to keep her expressions in reserve for the people she was interviewing rather than the people she loved. But something moved across it now. A softening at the mouth. A slight widening of the eyes. The faintest tremor in the line of her jaw.
"What is it?" Lorna said.
"It's a map," Nell said. "Of Hollow Point. Hand-drawn. In Margot's hand."
She held it out, and Lorna took it, and Henry leaned forward in his chair, and the three of them looked at it together.
It was a map, and it was drawn with the patient precision of a woman who had lived in this village all her life and knew every wall and every gate. The streets were drawn in thin brown ink. The houses were drawn as small rectangles. The church was drawn larger, with a spire. The pub was drawn larger still, with a chimney that had a wisp of smoke curling from it. The lane that ran past Henry's house was drawn with a double line, and the field at the end of it was drawn as an open space with a single tree in the middle, and the river at the bottom of the village was drawn as a broad, pale wash of blue.
Across the map, in the same blue biro as the address on the envelope, seven small circles had been drawn. They were not placed at random. They were placed at points Lorna recognised.
The first was at the lych-gate of St. Mary's.
The second was at the stone trough on the green.
The third was at the bus shelter, which was no longer a bus shelter but had become, in the years since Margot had drawn this, a covered place for smokers to stand.
The fourth was at the iron gate of the schoolhouse.
The fifth was at the war memorial.
The seventh was at the back door of Hattie Pells' pub.
The sixth, and this was the one that made Lorna catch her breath, was at the low stone wall at the end of the lane, where the lane met the river, and where, when Lorna had been a girl, a stone had fallen out of the wall and never been replaced, so that there was a small gap through which a child could slip and reach the water.
Beside each circle, in Margot's slanting hand, was a date. The dates were not the same. The dates ranged, as far as Lorna could see at a glance, from the late spring of one year to the early winter of another, and the earliest of them was 1972.
And beneath the map, in a single line, in the same blue biro, was written:
Ask Hattie what she buried in 1972.
The parlour was very quiet. The clock ticked. The tea cooled in its three cups.
Henry cleared his throat.
"Well," he said. "I wasn't to read that. Margot was very particular. But I think, Nell, you and Lorna had better take it down to Hattie's before the evening draws in, because Hattie doesn't much like visitors after the lamps are lit, and she likes them less if they've come to ask her questions she's been waiting a long time to be asked."
He stood up. He took his cup and carried it across to the dresser. He set it down carefully, and he stood for a moment with his back to them, looking out at the lane through the small, steamed window.
"I have said what Margot asked me to say," he said, "and I have done what Margot asked me to do, and I am very glad that part of my work is over. I shall not be coming down to the pub with you this afternoon. I shall be staying here. I have a wireless that needs new batteries, and a cat that needs feeding, and a kettle that needs descaling, and I have done enough for one morning, and that's the truth of it."
He turned back to them. He had taken his spectacles out of his breast pocket and was polishing them on the tail of his shirt.
"Go on, now," he said. "Before the light goes. And give my regards to Hattie, and tell her I'm sorry, and she will know what you mean."
Lorna looked at Nell. Nell looked at the map.
"Right," Nell said.
She folded the map and put it carefully back into its envelope. She stood up. She took her scarf from around her neck and wound it again, twice, and pulled her coat straight, and looked down at Henry.
"Thank you," she said.
"Not at all," Henry said. "Don't mention it."
Lorna picked up her cup and drank the last of the tea, which was strong and a little bitter and exactly what she had needed. She set the cup down beside the pot and stood up, and the two of them went out into the cold wind of the lane, and behind them the door of Henry's parlour closed softly, and somewhere down the lane a dog began to bark again, three short barks and then silence.
The lane was narrow and the wind came up it from the river like a held breath. Lorna pulled her coat tighter at the throat and matched her pace to Nell's, and they walked in silence for a few steps, their breath making small ghosts in the air between them.
"How much of this village do you remember?" Nell said, after a while.
"Enough," Lorna said. "More than I'd like."
They passed the lych-gate of St. Mary's, the first of the seven circles, and Lorna saw Nell glance at it, just briefly, and then look away. They passed the stone trough on the green, the second, and the trough was dry and a little cracked and had a child's mitten lying in the bottom of it, forgotten or abandoned. They passed the bus shelter, the third, and there was no one in it, but the smell of stale cigarette smoke hung in the cold air like a faint, disagreeable perfume.
"I used to think Margot knew every stone in this place," Nell said. "I used to think she had it all catalogued. Every name, every wall, every date."
"And now you think she had a map."
"Now I think she had a map."
They came to the iron gate of the schoolhouse, the fourth, and Lorna stopped for a moment and looked through the bars at the empty playground, and the asphalt was dark with recent rain and there were no children on it, and the climbing frame stood in the middle like a small, rusting monument to a Saturday afternoon.
"Come on," Nell said, quietly. "Before the light goes."
They walked on. The war memorial, the fifth, rose ahead of them on its low plinth, the names carved into it black with soot and weather. And beyond it, at the bottom of the village, they could see the chimney of the pub with its wisp of smoke, and the low stone wall at the end of the lane where the stone had fallen out and never been replaced.
Lorna felt, suddenly, as though they were being read. As though the village itself were reading them, with the patient, careful attention of a woman who had lived in it all her life and had left, on a single sheet of yellowed paper, a set of instructions for anyone who came after her with the courage to follow them.
"Ready?" Nell said.
"No," Lorna said. "But let's go in."
They went in.
The bell above the door rang with a small, bright sound, and the warmth of the pub folded around them like a cloth. Lorna felt the cold retreat from her cheeks, felt the stiffness in her shoulders begin, slowly, to unknot. The smell of beer and wood smoke and something frying in the back, potatoes perhaps, came to meet them, and there was the faint hum of a radio somewhere, turned low, and the scratch of a dart on a board in the far room.
Hattie Pells looked up from behind the bar. She was a small woman, broad-shouldered, with hair the color of tarnished silver pulled back in a knot that had been tight an hour ago and was now, recognizably, beginning to give. Her eyes moved from Nell to Lorna and back again, and Lorna watched her mouth set itself in that particular way it had when she was deciding how much to say.
"Well," Hattie said, brisk. "Look what the wind's dragged in. Both of you. Together."
"Hattie," Nell said.
"Don't Hattie me in that voice, Nell Stride, I know that voice, that's the voice you use when you're about to ask me something I'd rather not answer." But she was already reaching under the counter for two glasses, and already turning to the pump. "Pint, Lorna?"
"Small one, please."
"Pint," Hattie said, firmly, and drew it, and set it on the bar with a small, deliberate clink. She drew another for Nell and pushed it across. "Now. Sit. And tell me what you're doing in my pub on a Thursday at half past five looking like that."
"Like what?" Lorna said.
"Like two women who've just walked the length of the village counting bus shelters." Hattie leaned both hands on the bar. Her rings caught the low light. "I've been behind this bar twenty-six years. I know the look. It's the look of someone who's been somewhere they shouldn't have been, or seen something they wish they hadn't."
Nell sat. Lorna sat. The wooden stools were old and worn smooth in the middle, and the brass rail at the foot was cold against her ankle.
"Margot," Nell said.
Hattie's hands went still on the bar.
"What about her?"
"We found another letter," Nell said. "The second one. Hidden in the bus shelter by the school."
"Bus shelter by the school," Hattie repeated, slowly. "That's the third, that is. The one with the asbestos."
"That's the one."
"And she put a letter in the bus shelter with the asbestos." Hattie picked up a glass, began to polish it, although it was already clean. Her movements had the careful, automatic quality of someone who needed her hands busy. "And what's in it, this one?"
Nell looked at Lorna. Lorna looked at Nell.
"It's a map," Nell said. "Of sorts. Five locations. Five bus shelters. Five letters."
"And you've found two."
"Two."
"And what are the other three?" Hattie set the glass down. Her voice had changed. The briskness was still there, but underneath it was something else, something Lorna could not quite place, a kind of careful attention that she had heard, very occasionally, in the voices of doctors.
"That's what we're trying to find out," Nell said.
Hattie was quiet for a moment. The radio murmured. A door closed somewhere at the back of the pub, and there was the sound of a chair being dragged across a floor, and then nothing.
"Listen to me," Hattie said, and her voice dropped, and the Cockney in it came up, the old East London that she usually kept pressed down beneath the briskness. "I don't know what Margot was doing. I don't know what she found. I don't know why she wrote to you, Nell, after all these years, and not to me, and not to anyone else in the village who'd have come running if she'd whistled. But I knew her. I knew her thirty years. I served her a gin and tonic every Friday for fifteen of those years, and I never once saw her look the way she looked the week before she died."
"How did she look?" Lorna said.
"Like someone who'd opened a box she couldn't shut again." Hattie picked up the glass again, put it down, picked up a cloth, folded it. "Like someone who'd seen a thing and knew she'd have to do something about it, and didn't know what."
Lorna felt the weight of the second letter in her pocket. She had not taken it out. She had not unfolded it again. She had been afraid, she realized, of reading it a third time. Of letting the words settle into her the way they had settled into Nell, who had read it twice on the walk and once at the bus shelter and who was, Lorna could see now, carrying it the way one carries a stone in a pocket, heavy and present and impossible to forget.
"Did she ever say anything?" Nell said. "About the village. About anyone in it. Anything that struck you as odd?"
"Odd." Hattie considered the word. "She said a lot of things, Margot. She was a talker, when she was in her cups. She talked about the war, about her husband, about the school, about the Belmores, about the Strides, about the whole long, sorry history of this place. None of it struck me as odd. It struck me as Margot."
"And the week before she died?"
"She didn't come in that week."
The words sat between them. Hattie reached under the counter and brought out a small tin, opened it, took out a cigarette, lit it with a match from a book on the bar. She inhaled, and the smoke rose, and the smell of it cut through the smell of beer and frying.
"Not once," Hattie said. "First time in fifteen years. And I thought, well, she's ill. And then she was dead. And I thought, well, that was quick. And then the letter came to you, Nell, and I thought, well, there's something I don't understand."
"What do you think it is?" Lorna said.
Hattie looked at her. The cigarette smoldered between her fingers. Her eyes were very dark, and very still.
"I think," she said, slowly, "that Margot found something. And I think she told someone what she'd found, and I think that someone didn't like it. And I think that's why she stopped coming in. And I think that's why she's dead."
The radio stopped being a murmur and became, for a moment, a voice, a woman reading the shipping forecast, and then it went back to being a murmur.
"We'll find out," Nell said. Her voice was very quiet. "We'll find the other three. We'll find out what she wanted."
"You'll be careful," Hattie said. It was not a question.
"Yes."
"Swear it."
Nell looked at Lorna. Lorna looked at Nell.
"We'll be careful," Nell said.
Hattie nodded, once. She stubbed out the cigarette in a small glass ashtray that had been there, Lorna realized, since before either of them had been born.
"There's stew," Hattie said. "If you want it. I've got potatoes on the go and there's enough for three."
They stayed. They ate. The stew was thick and dark and tasted of thyme and beef and something else Lorna could not place, something older, something that might have been the smell of the pub itself, soaked into the pot over decades. They did not speak much. Hattie moved around them, pouring tea, clearing plates, wiping the bar, and the sounds of her movements were the sounds of a woman who had decided to look after them, in her own way, and was not going to be thanked for it.
When they left, the village was dark. The stars were out, and very bright, and very cold. Lorna could see her breath, and she could see Nell's, and the two plumes rose and dissolved above them like small, brief ghosts.
"Thank you," Nell said, at the gate.
"For what?"
"For walking with me."
"You'd have walked anyway."
"Yes. But it's better with someone."
Lorna nodded. They stood for a moment at the gate, and the village was very still around them, and the only sound was the faint, distant sound of the pub door closing behind Hattie as she locked up.
"Get some sleep," Lorna said.
"You too."
They parted at the lane. Lorna watched Nell walk up toward the cottage, her shape dark against the stars, growing smaller, and then the shape turned in at the gate, and the gate clicked, and Lorna walked on, alone, toward her own door.
She did not hear it.
She heard it later, much later, after the phone had rung and after she had paced and after she had made herself a cup of tea she did not drink. The sound of glass breaking. Not a crash, not a smash, but a single, clear, sharp sound, like a note struck on a glass.
She was in her own kitchen when the phone rang. Nell's voice, very tight, very controlled.
"Come," she said. "Please. Now."
Lorna went.
The cottage was dark except for the kitchen. Nell was standing in the middle of the floor, and she was not moving. On the linoleum, in front of the sink, there was a scatter of glass, bright and sharp in the light from the overhead bulb, and among the glass there was a stone, flat, grey, river-worn, the kind of stone you might find in any beck in any dale in Yorkshire. And wrapped around the stone, held in place by the weight of it and by a single turn of what looked like gardening twine, there was a photograph.
Lorna picked it up. Her fingers were steady. Her heart was not.
The photograph was of Margot. It had been taken in the morning. Lorna could tell because of the light, the way it fell from the left, the way it caught the side of her face and the line of her jaw and the small, familiar earring she always wore. She was standing in front of the cottage, this cottage, Nell's cottage, and she was looking slightly to the left of the camera, and she was smiling, but the smile was the kind of smile that came just before someone says something they have been thinking about for a long time.
Across her face, drawn in thick black ink, or perhaps in black paint, there was an X. A single, deliberate X, the lines pressed hard enough to dent the paper, hard enough to score the photograph beneath, hard enough to show through, on the other side, like a wound.
Lorna turned the photograph over. On the back, in the same hand, in the same ink, there were three words.
STOP LOOKING.
She looked at Nell. Nell looked at her. The glass crunched, faintly, under Nell's foot.
"I'm calling the police," Nell said.
"No," Lorna said.
"Lorna."
"No. Not yet. If we call the police now, they'll take the photograph, and the stone, and the twine, and they'll ask us questions we can't answer, and by morning it'll be in a drawer somewhere in Thirsk and no one will look at it again. We keep it. We look at it. We find the other three."
"And then?"
"And then we call the police."
Nell was quiet for a long time. The clock ticked. The wind moved, faintly, outside the broken window, and the cold came in, and the curtain stirred, and the photograph, in Lorna's hand, was very still.
"All right," Nell said, finally. "All right."
Lorna set the photograph down on the kitchen table, face up. Margot smiled at them from beneath the X. The stone lay beside it, grey and wet and silent. The glass glittered on the floor like a small, bright field of something that had been, very recently, whole.
In the morning, Lorna thought, they would begin again. They would walk the village. They would find the other three bus shelters. They would find the other three letters. They would find out what Margot had found, and who had found out that she had found it, and who had stood, that morning, in front of this cottage with a camera and a smile and a question she had not yet asked.
But for now, for this hour, for this night, they sat in the kitchen of the cottage with the broken window and the photograph and the stone, and they did not speak, and the wind moved, and the cold came in, and somewhere, in the village, someone was awake, and watching, and waiting to see what they would do next.