ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Nicci French is the pseudonym for the writing partnership of journalists Nicci Gerrard and Sean French. The couple are married and live in Suffolk.

There are now ten bestselling novels by Nicci French: The Memory Game, The Safe House, Killing Me Softly, Beneath the Skin, The Red Room, Land of the Living, Secret Smile. Catch Me When I Fall and all published by Penguin.

THE BEGINNING

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Nicci French

THE MEMORY GAME

One

I close my eyes. It’s all there, inside my skull. Mist following the contours of the lawn. A shock of cold stinging in my nostrils. I have to make a conscious effort if I want to remember what else happened on the day we found the body; her body. The reek of wet, brown leaves.

As I made my way down the short slimy grass slope away from the house, I saw that the workmen were standing there ready. They were clutching mugs of tea and smoking and their warm, wet breath produced a cloud of vapour that rose up from their faces. They looked like an old bonfire that was being rained on. It was only October but this was early in the morning and as yet there was just the promise of sun, somewhere behind the clouds, over the copse on the far hill. I was wearing my overalls tucked a little too neatly into my wellingtons. The men, of course, were obstinately in the traditional rural proletarian costume of jeans, synthetic sweaters and dirty leather boots. They were stamping to keep warm and laughing at something I couldn’t hear.

When they caught sight of me they felt silent. We’d all known each other for ever and now they were unsure how to react to me as their boss. It didn’t bother me, though. I was used to men on building sites, even the miniature, domestic variety of building site like this one, my father-in-law’s soggy patch of Shropshire, the Stead, as it was absurdly called, a self-mocking joke about rural squireship that had become serious over the years.

‘Hello, Jim,’ I said, holding out my hand. ‘You couldn’t resist coming yourself. I’m glad.’

Jim Weston was as much a part of the Stead as the treehouse or the cellar with its sweet smell of apples that lingered even at Easter. He was associated with almost every man-made object on the property: he had replaced and painted the window frames, spent searing August days stripped to the waist on the roof dealing out tiles. There would be a crisis, a growth on a wall, an electricity black-out, a flood, and Alan would summon Jim from Westbury. Jim would refuse, too busy, he would say. Then an hour later he would creak up the drive in his rickety van. He would contemplate the damage, tapping out his pipe and shaking his head sadly, and mutter something about modern rubbish. ‘I’ll see what I can do,’ he would say. ‘I’ll try to patch something together.’

It was a matter of local folklore that Jim Weston never bought anything at list price and wouldn’t buy anything at all if he could obtain it through favour or barter or through even murkier means in his own contribution to Shropshire’s black economy.

When Jim had seen my plan for the new house, his face had fallen even further than usual, as if an architect’s drawing was some newfangled invention for the benefit of mollycoddled fools like me from London who’d never got their hands dirty. I’d given a silent prayer of thanks that he’d never seen my original idea. This small house, an overflow space for the Stead, for all the children and grandchildren and ex-wives and so on that accumulate at the Martello gatherings, was the greatest offering I would ever make to the family, so I’d planned for them the dream house that I would have built for myself.

I had taken advantage of the relatively sheltered situation of the original site to conceive a structure of total clarity, nothing but beams, pipes, joists and plate glass, a functionalist dream: the most beautiful object I have ever drawn. I’d shown the plans to my soon-to-be-ex-husband, Claud, and he’d crinkled his brow and run his fingers through his thin brown hair and murmured something about it being really very interesting and well done, which meant nothing at all because this has been his reaction to virtually everything up to and including my announcement to him that I had decided that we should get divorced. I’d thought that his brother Theo at least might see what I was getting at. He’d commented that it looked like one of his old Meccano sets and I’d said, ‘Yes, exactly, lovely, isn’t it?’, but he’d meant it as an insult. Then I had taken it into the presence of the Great Man himself, Alan Martello, my father-in-law, the patriarch of the Stead, and it had been a disaster.

‘What’s this? The metal frame? What about the thing that’s going to be built around it? Can’t you do a picture of that as well?’

‘That is the building, Alan.’

He’d snorted through his grizzled beard. ‘I don’t want something that’s going to have Swedish architecture critics buzzing round it. I want a place for living in. Take that piece of paper away and build it in Helsinki or somewhere far away like that and I’m sure a publicly funded committee will give you a prize. If we’ve got to have some bloody building in this garden – of which I’m far from being entirely convinced – then what we’re going to have is an English country house, with bricks or dry-stone walls or some decent local material.’

‘This doesn’t sound like the angry young Alan Martello,’ I’d said sweetly. ‘New styles of architecture, a change of heart, isn’t that the sort of thing you’ve always been keen on?’

‘I like old styles of architecture. I’m not young. And I’m not angry any more, except with you. Replace that structuralist horror with something I’ll recognise as a house.’

It was Alan at his most gruff, charming, flirtatious and I was grateful that he’d felt able to yell at me in the old affectionate way while I’d been in the process of divorcing his son. So of course I’d gone away and put together a plan of impeccably rural appearance, complete with a rather amusing gambrel roof. It was designed in the sense that you design the contents of your shopping trolley as you walk around Sainsbury’s. The prefabricated frame construction house was Norwegian, though manufactured in Malaysia. Alan would at least have been grateful to know that the extraction of the raw materials probably involved the destruction of a small patch of rain forest.

‘What’s this up here, Mrs Martello?’ Jim Weston had asked, jabbing at the plan with his pipe.

‘Please call me Jane, Jim. They’re the ridge tiles, set in mortar.’

‘Hmm.’ He’d replaced his pipe firmly in his mouth.

‘What do you want to go messing about with mortar for?’

‘Jim, we can’t argue about this now. It’s all arranged. It’s bought and paid for. We’ve just got to put it together.’

‘Hmm,’ he’d grunted.

‘We excavate here, just a few feet down …’

‘Just,’ Jim had muttered.

‘Then the footings, here and here, and then the hard core, then the damp-course and the damp proof membrane, then concrete and then the tiled ground floor on top of that. The rest is a matter of just joining it together.’

‘Damp-course?’ Jim had said dubiously.

‘Yes, unfortunately there was a Public Health Act passed back in 1875, so I’m afraid we’re stuck with that.’

Now, at the beginning of the first day of work, Jim looked more like something that was growing in the garden than a man who had come to supervise, or pretend to supervise, work in it. His face had been left outside in all weathers and had attained a complexion like the rear end of a toad. Hair sprouted from his nose and ears like moss on an ancient rock. He really was old now and his job consisted of telling his son and his nephew what to do. Their job consisted of ignoring what he said. I shook hands with them as well.

‘What’s this about you digging?’ Jim asked suspiciously.

‘Only a spadeful. I just said I’d like to dig the first spadeful, if that’s all right. It’s important to me.’

I’ve been an architect for nearly fifteen years now, and whenever I work on a building, I have a rule, which amounts almost to a superstition, that I must be there to see the first spade being dug into the ground. It’s a moment of pure sensual pleasure, really, and I sometimes wish that I could do it myself with my own bare hands. After months, sometimes even years, of drawing up the plans and the specifications and obtaining tenders and calming the nerves of the client and bargaining with some functionary in the planning department, after all the compromises and the paper arguments, it’s good to go outside and remind myself that it’s all about dirt and brick and fitting the pipes together so they don’t crack in the winter.

Best of all are the ten- or fifteen-metre excavations which precede the really big buildings. You stand on the edge of a site somewhere in the City of London and peer down at a couple of thousand years of fragments of other people’s lives. You’ll see the suspicion of an ancient building, sometimes, and I’ve heard all the rumours of the contractors surreptitiously pouring concrete across an old Roman floor so that there’s no nonsense about waiting for the archaeologists to give you the nod before the building goes up. We’re constructing the spaces for our own lives on the squashed remnants of our forgotten predecessors and in a couple of hundred or a couple of thousand years they’ll be building on top of our rusting joists and crumbling concrete. On top of our dead.

This was to be the smallest of holes, a scratching of the surface. John, Jim’s son, handed me a spade. I’d measured the area out on the previous day and defined it with cord and now I walked into the middle of the rectangular space and pushed the blade into the ground and stood on it, forcing it into the turf.

‘Mind your nails, girl,’ said Jim behind me.

I pulled the handle of the spade down towards me. The turf crackled and split and a satisfying wedge of soil and clay appeared.

‘Nice and soft,’ I said.

‘The boys’ll just finish it off, then,’ said Jim. ‘If that’s all right with you.’

A hand on my shoulder made me start. It was Theo. The Theo Martello in my mind is seventeen years old with shoulder-length hair parted in the middle, soft white translucent skin, full lips, with a prominent cupid’s bow, that taste slightly of burnt tobacco. He is tall and thin and wears a long army-surplus greatcoat. I find his remembered figure hard to reconcile with this – oh my God – forty-something-year-old man standing in front of me with gaunt chiselled features, rough unshaven stubble, cropped greying hair, and hard lines around his eyes. He’s middle-aged. We’re middle-aged.

‘We didn’t see you last night,’ he said. ‘We arrived late.’

‘I went to bed early. What’re you doing up at this time?’

‘I wanted to see you.’

He pulled me towards him and hugged me close for a long time. I held my favourite brother-in-law tightly.

‘Oh, Theo,’ I said, when he let me go. ‘I’m sorry. I’m sorry about Claud.’

He smiled. ‘Don’t be. Just do what you have to do. It was brave of you to come up here and beard everyone in the family den. By the way, who is coming?’

‘Everybody, of course. All the Martellos. And all the Cranes too, for what we’re worth. Dad and my brother and his lot aren’t here yet, but, by the time they arrive, I count that there’ll be twenty-four guests. The Royal family may be collapsing, and we may have lost the meaning of Christmas, but the annual gathering for the Martello mushroom hunt goes on undiminished.’

Theo raised his eyebrows. The lines around his eyes and mouth creased in a smile. ‘You mock.’

‘No. I’m nervous, I suppose. God, Theo, do you remember, years ago, some ferry was sinking and a rescue boat pulled alongside and the women and children couldn’t get across. So this man lay across between the two boats and the women and children walked across him.’

Theo laughed. ‘You were the worn-out human bridge, were you?’ he said.

‘I felt like it sometimes. Or at least Claud and I were. The weak link that held the Cranes and the Martellos together.’

Theo’s expression hardened. ‘You flatter yourself, Jane. We’re all linked. We’re one family really. And anyway, if there’s one link, it’s the friendship between our fathers that started it, before we were born. Let’s give them credit for that at least.’ He smiled again. ‘At best you were just a secondary link. A supporting mortice or whatever?’

I couldn’t help giggling. ‘Do I hear a technical term? What, pray, is a supporting mortice?’

‘All right, all right, you’re the builder. I never did woodwork. And I’m glad you came here, even if it meant running the gauntlet.’

‘I had to supervise this, didn’t I? Now I feel like I’m going to cry over my drawings and smudge them.’

We went through the French windows into the kitchen and collected mugs of coffee. From upstairs there was the sound of bodies stirring, cups clinking, lavatories flushing in the house behind us as we stepped back out.

‘Shut the door behind you, for fuck’s sake,’ somebody yelled from inside. ‘It’s freezing.’

‘Okay, okay, I’m just stepping outside.’ It was Theo’s brother, Jonah.

‘Hello, Fred,’ said Theo.

Jonah nodded in acknowledgement of the tired Martello joke. The point was that Jonah and his twin brother, Alfred, had been indistinguishable, as children at least. Theo had once told me that they had actually slept with each other’s girlfriends (without the knowledge of the young women concerned), which I’d been too shocked to believe until I had seen the way they’d behaved in all other matters when they had grown up.

‘The way to tell us apart, Theo,’ said Jonah, ‘is that Fred is the one with the red nose and without the sun tan.’

‘Yes, I was going to comment on that, Jonah. Where was it this time?’

‘Tucson, Arizona. A cosmetics conference.’

‘Good?’

‘There were some interesting possibilities floating around.’ Jonah noticed Theo’s smile. ‘Now that everybody’s teeth are so good we’ve got to think of other things to do with them.’

Theo bent over and sniffed the vapour floating up from Jonah’s mug. ‘Among them seems to have been the idea of toothpaste in the form of a hot drink,’ he said.

‘It’s peppermint tea,’ Jonah replied. ‘I don’t like starting the day with an unnatural stimulant.’ Then he turned to me and his virtuous expression melted into a sort of sad smile. God, were they all going to smile like that at me this weekend? ‘Jane, Jane,’ he said, and hugged me in a gesture whose warmth was hampered slightly by having to balance the herbal tea in his mug at the same time. ‘If there’s anything I can do, just ask. That,’ he continued, pointing down at the activity on the grass in front of us, ‘that is a very positive step. It’s a very good thing for you to have done that for all of us, for the family. I’m sure it’s therapeutic as well.’

‘Oh, yes, Jonah,’ I responded, ‘it was very relaxing in my time of need to consult with Alan and Claud and Theo and then redo everything and then go over it in sign language with Jim. I wish we’d stuck with my original plan.’

‘Any carbuncle will be better than having to relive the sort of night I spent in my room last night with Meredith and the kids, who didn’t sleep for more than three minutes at a stretch for the entire night. And Fred plus the bits of his famille that aren’t at boarding school were next door. As far as I can tell, the only couples to get a room to themselves were Alan and Martha and your son and his bit of fluff.’

This last was aimed at me.

‘Alan insisted that Jerome and Hana have a room to themselves,’ I protested. ‘I think it gave him some sort of vicarious, predatory pleasure. I don’t even know where my younger son ended up.’

‘Or who with,’ added Jonah. ‘And far be it from me to breach the inviolable tradition which gives you Natalie’s room to yourself. It sounds like a bedroom farce.’

I followed Jonah and Theo back into the kitchen but I didn’t feel like food, or like joining what was now almost a throng of people fighting for access to the fridge or the stove. I could see no sign of either of my sons. Alan and Martha would exercise the privilege of the hosts and be down late, but almost everybody else seemed to be around. Claud, looking rumpled and pathetic after his night on the sofa, was stirring a large pan of eggs over the gas. Breakfast is the one meal of the day I’ve never been much interested in cooking, but since it is as much an organisational as a culinary matter, Claud has always excelled at it. He nodded amiably at me as he spooned the eggs out onto a large dish for Fred.

It was exactly a year since I had last seen the four brothers together in the same room. Here in their holiday clothes, their old jeans and sweaters or lumberjack shirts, they looked like students again, or even schoolboys, joshing each other and laughing. All except Claud who never quite got it right in casual clothes. He needed a uniform and strict rules. The twins, with their dark complexions and high cheekbones, would have looked more dissolutely sexy after an uncomfortable night on a couch. Claud needed eight hours’ sleep and a well-cut suit to look his best, but his best was very good.

I stole a banana from the fruit bowl and escaped outside again with my coffee. The mist was dispersing in the hollows. The sky was blue now and it was barely eight o’clock. It was going to be a bright day, though very cold, and my overalls weren’t quite warm enough.

I suppose that most of us have a landscape of the mind, the one that we see when we close our eyes, and this rolling patchwork of fields and woods was mine. Every tree, every path, every fence had associations which blended together in a mulch of memories from long summer weeks, and briefer weekends of snow or bare trees or new flowers, in which different years, even decades, were now indistinguishable.

The Stead was far from being an ancient house – the stone over the front door bore the inscription ‘1909–P.R.F. de Beer’, which was the name of the man who had had the house built – but it had always seemed old to us. The front door, though we never thought of it as that, was round the other side of the house and the drive led from it to the B8372 which went to Wales if you turned left and Birmingham if you turned right. But from where I was now standing, in front of Pullam Wood, I was looking across a small depression to the real front of the house, the doors that led to the living room and to the kitchen, and above them, the windows of Alan’s and Martha’s bedrooms and of the spare bedrooms, and above them, on a floor of its own, Alan’s workroom, his sanctum, with its absurd little wooden spire on top. It was a large house, yet it seemed intimate; it was solid, yet the wooden floors were rickety and the walls thin as paper.

I reached the fringes of the wood – which I never go into – and turned to the right, away from Pullam Farm, and made my way around and down to where the men were tinkering with the digger. I heard a car arrive, Paul’s unmistakable top-of-the-range Saab, splendid but not so excessively as to be too much of a betrayal of some political principle or other. Dad gingerly got out of the far side. He didn’t notice me and shuffled over to the house. Then Erica appeared, also from the far side. She must have been sitting in the back seat and she was carrying little Rosie, asleep in an almost theatrical slumber. She bustled quickly inside. Paul caught sight of me and we waved at each other. There was no one left to wait for.

At ten o’clock not very sharp everybody gathered on the lawn for the great mushroom expedition, the inviolable tradition of the Martello autumn. The gathering of the extended family was so large that with a few pink coats and a pack of dogs, it would have looked like the local hunt. All those brothers and their families, and in the case of my brother, Paul, previous family and current family. I thought of one of those unreadable chapters of the Old Testament. Alan begat Theo and Claud and Jonah and Fred. And Chris begat Paul and Jane. I counted twenty people, not including me or Jim’s workers, bustling around and chatting and not looking as if they were going anywhere. The group was held up by the non-appearance of some of the younger generation, most notably Paul’s three daughters by Peggy, his first wife. At about ten past, they finally strolled out, nonchalant, big-booted, long-haired, all in black, wearing one sarcastic expression that seemed to have been stretched across their three lovely faces. Because I was staying behind to oversee the building work, I stood slightly apart and was able to take in the whole scene. Christ, what a family. Everyone else was a mess of jeans and old sweaters but Alan and Martha were properly dressed. This was their day. Alan was wearing some ridiculously correct long jacket that would have kept him dry if he’d been standing under Niagara Falls. There was always the hint of theatrical camp about him, of the person who had been sent down to the costume department with instructions that he be kitted out as an ageing writer living the life of a country squire. He even had a staff that looked like the sort of thing that Errol Flynn used to battle with on fallen trees across streams. Martha looked lovely though: snow-white hair, slim as her granddaughters, and wearing much the same sort of black clothes, but not the Doc Martens. She wore a jacket that had been weathered on real walks and she carried the right sort of wicker basket for laying out mushrooms without mixing or decay. Almost everyone else had plastic shopping bags. I had once tried to explain to Martha that, contrary to legend, plastic bags were a good idea if you were going to eat the mushrooms on the same day, as we always did, because they softened them, made them go high, like game. But she hadn’t listened.

Alan rapped his staff on the ground. I almost expected a peal of thunder.

‘Forward,’ he said.

It would have sounded ridiculous coming from anybody else.

It seemed to happen quickly after that. I went inside and sat at the kitchen table waiting to be needed again outside. I half read the paper and did a few clues in the crossword and there was a tap on the window and I looked up and saw Jim’s face through the glass of the kitchen door. I was going to shout some comment but his face was pale and alarmed. He just gestured me forward and I felt a moment’s reluctance, not wanting to go.

As I came out of the door, Jim shuffled back towards the hole and I saw it was almost completed and I wondered if this was just a pedantic way of telling me about it. The men were grouped around the digger. The small group parted as I approached.

‘We found something,’ said one of them, Jim’s nephew. He looked almost shifty.

I looked down at their feet. At first it didn’t seem as if there were all that much to see. Toffee-textured clay soil, some broken tiles. What were they? Oh, yes, that’s where the old barbecue must have been. That seemed a long time ago. And, shockingly white, there were some bones, jaggedly projecting from the soil. I looked at the men. Did they want me to take charge in some sort of way?

‘Could it be an animal?’ I said. Ridiculously. ‘A buried pet?’

Jim slowly shook his head and knelt down. I didn’t want to have to look.

‘There’s bits of clothes here,’ he said. ‘Little bits. And a buckle. It must be her, mustn’t it? It must be their little girl, Natalie.’

I had to look. I had seen one dead body in my life. I had sat holding my mother’s hand in the final moments of her years of pain. I had seen death wipe the expression from her face and her racked body had relaxed back into the bed. I had pressed my lips against her still-warm face. A day later I had touched it again in the funeral parlour, waxy and cold, her hair brushed, in her best clothes, with a small bag clutched pathetically in her left hand. And this was the body of Natalie, my dear, dear friend, after a quarter of a century, for ever sixteen. I knelt and made myself look closely at the bones. From the legs they must be, large and thick. There were traces of clothing, black, thickly grimed. I felt suddenly detached and curious. No flesh, of course. No sinews. The bones that had been detached from the ground were entirely separate. The soil in which they lay was darker than the rest. Would the hair have decayed? The skull was still buried. I remembered her lean body. Brown that summer. I remembered the mole on her right shoulder, and her long simian toes. How could I have forgotten her for so long?

‘Someone had better call the police.’

‘Yes, Jim, yes. I’ll do that now. I don’t suppose we ought to do any more digging. Is there a police station in Westbury?’

There wasn’t. I looked in the phone book and I had to phone the police all the way off in Kirklow. I felt rather foolish saying to someone I didn’t know that we’d found a body and that it was rather old, about twenty-five years, that I thought it was probably the body of Natalie Martello who had gone missing in the summer of 1969. But they took it seriously and in a short time two police cars arrived and then a civilian car and then later an ambulance, or rather a sort of ambulance that looked like an estate car. It seemed strange to have an ambulance to pick up bones that were so long dead they could have been put into a small cardboard box. One of the policemen asked me some halting questions on which I could hardly concentrate. The ambulance didn’t take the bones away immediately. A flimsy kind of miniature marquee was raised over most of the hole. There was a light rain falling.

I didn’t want to go and look at what they were doing but I couldn’t leave the scene and I sat on a bank near the kitchen door and looked down at the tent and across at the wood beyond. I wondered if people would be coming back soon. I had my watch on but I couldn’t remember what time they had left and I couldn’t even remember how long mushroom hunts take as a rule, though I’d been on so many. I just sat on the bank and finally I saw a small group emerging from the trees. We always separated on these excursions and came back in our own time. They would be able to see the police cars and the incongruous tent but I couldn’t see if they were surprised. I stood up to make my way towards them to explain what had happened but my eyes were suddenly wet and I couldn’t see who they were. It could have been anybody.

Two

The knife slid through the spongy layers into the beige flesh. I peeled off some slimy skin, tossed an edible chunk of cep into a large bowl. Peggy came in with another bucket full of mushrooms; she smelt of the woods, the mulchy earth. Her khaki trousers were stained; she’d taken off her boots in the hall, and now padded in thick grey socks.

‘Here you are,’ she said.

With my fingertips, I gently lifted the yellow, gilled chanterelles lying like waxy flowers at the top, and sniffed at their curved trumpet shapes. Apricots.

‘Who found these?’ I asked.

‘Theo, of course. Are you all right, Jane?’

‘You mean about Claud?’

‘No, about today.’

‘I don’t know.’

In the bucket there were warty, bulbous puffballs, horse mushrooms with a faint whiff of aniseed about them, and delicate white ink caps, fraying around their skirts. The kitchen smelt damply fungoid; wormy parasol mushrooms blocked up the sink, tatters of woody stalks lay on the working surfaces. I wiped my hands, which were still trembling, down my apron and pushed back my hair. The kitchen was brightly lit, but nothing seemed quite real to me – not the horror in the garden, nor this parody of normality in the clutter of the Martello kitchen, heart of their large house. Were we all insane, a houseful of shocked people trapped in ritual? I was losing myself in activity.

‘You did well,’ I said to Paul, who was passing through the kitchen clutching dusty bottles of red wine to his chest.

‘You should have seen them all: we could have picked twice as many. Some of them are useless though.’

He glanced at Peggy furtively on his way out. He looked harassed. We were each of us alone with our thoughts and private alarms. He had the additional burden of being stuck in a house with his ex-wife, current wife, and a sister who was divorcing his best friend. There was a necessity not to think too much.

I started chopping the mushrooms into thin slivers; the flesh was spongily resilient. I turned them and cut them smoothly along the grain. Pots bubbled. The effort of coordination soothed me. I opened the door of the oven and touched the oily red peppers with a fork; their skins were blistering. I drew in a deep breath.

‘Jane? Claud told me to give you these.’ My father held out three plump garlic bulbs. Turning to go – back to the crossword by the fire, probably – he suddenly said, ‘It’ll be all right, won’t it?’ and I saw that his eyes were puffy, as if he’d been weeping. I squeezed his shoulder.

‘It’ll be fine,’ I said, meaninglessly.

I peeled six garlic cloves and crushed them into a large pan on the stove. Peggy, who was stooped over the sink, patiently stripping the spongy layers off the remaining ceps, sung a snatch of song under her breath and then said abruptly, ‘I’m really sorry. It must have been horrible for you, finding it – her.’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I suppose so. But no worse, really, than for everybody else.’

I didn’t want to talk. I was saving up my emotions, I didn’t want to expend them here, while making dinner. Not with Peggy, but she was unstoppable.

‘You were all very brave. It’s funny really: for the first time, I feel excluded from this family. You all know how to deal with each other.’

I turned to her and took her hand. ‘Peggy,’ I replied wearily, ‘that’s not true. You know that we never exclude anybody. We’re the great extended family that starts with Alan and Martha and doesn’t end anywhere.’

‘I know all that, maybe it’s just that I never knew Natalie.’

‘It was a long time ago.’

‘Yes,’ said Peggy, ‘a part of the great legendary idyllic Martello childhood. You all share that, don’t you? It always reminds me …’ She stopped as she caught sight of something out of the window. ‘Look at them! I’ll kill them! Why can’t Paul deal with them? He is alleged to be their father.’

She hurtled from the room. Out of the window I could see her daughters standing conspiratorially behind a bush smoking cigarettes. They must have thought they were invisible. Peggy jogged noiselessly towards them, still shoeless. Jerome and Robert used to smoke in their bedroom, with the windows wide open, then come downstairs smelling of toothpaste, and I’d say nothing. I, too, was surreptitiously smoking, in the garden, late at night when I couldn’t sleep for pondering about my life. Later, they’d learnt to smoke in my presence, even to offer one to me. I’d been itching for a cigarette all day, fidgeting on the edge of the hole, wandering round the garden, waiting for everybody to get back and learn what I had learnt. I stirred the pale yellowing garlic around the pan. A little manageable span of time, a way of measuring out the evening ahead.

‘How are you doing, Mum? Do you mind being left to do all the cooking?’

Robert was standing over me, my tall, handsome son. His lank, dyed blond hair hung straight down over one pale eye. He was clothed in torn jeans, an old blue sweat-shirt that was worn almost grey and a checked shirt pulled roughly over it, cuffs unbuttoned, everything unbuttoned. His feet were bare. He looked good.

‘It’s all right. It helps me, in fact. Could you wash the lettuce?’

‘Not as such,’ said Robert, opening the fridge and peering inside. ‘Is there anything I can eat?’

‘No. What are all the others up to?’ I asked.

‘God, where shall I start.’ He started counting theatrically and sarcastically on his fingers. ‘Theo’s playing chess with Grandpa Chris; Dad’s basically co-ordinating the seating plan and delegating the laying of plates; Jonah and Alfred and Meredith have gone for a walk, probably to try to sneak a look into that tent thing; Hana and Jerry are in the bath, the same bath; and much, much more. I haven’t seen Granny and Grandpa. They must be up in their room.’

There was a pause. Robert looked expectant. I tipped the mushrooms into the hot oil. He was waiting for something.

‘Yes?’ I said.

My knees felt wobbly and my stomach suddenly lurched. He cupped his hands over his mouth and began to speak as if through a megaphone; his voice blared into the kitchen, bitter and angry. ‘Hello, hello, is there anybody out there? This is Rob Martello speaking, a visitor from the real world. I’d like to announce that a body has been found on the premises. The only daughter of Mr and Mrs Alan Martello has been buried outside, about three feet from the back door and about two inches deep, for the last twenty-five years. The management regrets that as a result of this discovery, dinner may be served a minute or two late. We trust this will not interfere with your evening.’

I gave a tired laugh, I couldn’t help it.

‘Robert!’ It was Claud. He had come in behind Robert but he was smiling too. ‘I know it’s awkward …’ Claud began, but Robert immediately interrupted him.

‘What? Awkward? The body of your sister dug up in the garden? Why should that be awkward? And anyway, it was a few hours ago now, wasn’t it? And the police have taken the bones away. Perhaps Alan should have asked them to fill the hole in before they left, while they were at it. The way it is now, there’s a chance that somebody may fall into it tomorrow morning and be reminded of it. On their way to another fucking mushroom hunt.’

Claud tried to look stern but failed and gave a resigned smile. ‘You’re right, Rob, we’re probably not handling this very well but …’

‘But appearances must be maintained. We don’t want something like a dead body to get in the way of a great Martello weekend. Or else something serious might go wrong. You know, like serving the wrong wine with the wrong mushroom.’

Claud turned serious. ‘Robert, stop this now. Natalie’s disappearance happened before you were born, it’s hard for you to understand. We gradually realised that Natalie was dead. Your grandmother – my mother – never really did. She always tried to believe that Natalie might have run away and that she would turn up one day.’ Claud put his arm round Robert. He was tall enough to be able to do it. ‘Today is bad for her – it’s bad for all of us but it’s especially bad for her – and we’ve all got to be strong and help her. If anything, it’s good that this happened when we were together. We can support each other. And above all support Martha. There’s lots to talk about, Robert. And not just about Natalie, about everything. And we will, I promise. But maybe today is just a time for us to be together. Remember that she hasn’t officially been identified yet.’

‘And isn’t it good for us to eat together?’ I said. ‘Come here, my darling.’ I pulled Robert to me and hugged him, hard. ‘I feel silly only coming up to your chin.’

‘So will you help me, Rob?’ asked Claud.

‘Yeah, yeah, Dad, all right,’ said Robert. ‘We can all be mature about this. Perhaps we should make a feature of the hole. Mum, could you redesign your cottage around the hole, the way you did with that tree once?’

‘Is that a yes or a no?’ Claud asked with that touch of steel he could suddenly bring into his voice.

Robert raised his hands in mock surrender. ‘It’s a yes. I’ll be good,’ he said, and backed out of the kitchen. Claud and I gave each other mirrored shrugs of helplessness. We were getting on better than we had when we’d been together. I realised that I had to guard against misleading nostalgia.

‘Thanks,’ I said. ‘That was good.’

Claud leant over a bubbling casserole. ‘That smells delicious,’ he said. ‘Like you said, we’re still good friends, aren’t we?’

‘Don’t.’

‘I didn’t mean anything.’ He paused. ‘I thought we’d eat at nine. Will that be all right for you?’

He looked me over. I was wearing tracksuit trousers and a man’s shirt that had once belonged to Jerome. I had pulled on the first clothes I’d been able to lay hands on after my scalding shower. I’d wanted to wash everything away: the sweat of hard labour, the tears, the muddy soil that had held the body.

‘That’ll be fine, as long as I put the meat on now.’

I crumbled rosemary over the lamb and slid the joint into the oven. Then I turned up the heat under the haricot beans and poured rice into the mushroom pan, stirring vigorously. As always, Claud had lots to do but now he seemed unwilling to leave. He leant against the work surface and toyed with the remnant of a parasol mushroom that I had rejected.

‘They think we’re mad, you know.’

‘Who?’

‘The people around here. The only ones they’ll eat are the ones that look exactly like the kind you get in boxes at the supermarket. But you can see what repels people, can’t you? They’re a little like flesh, don’t you think? Not quite wholesome.’ Claud picked up a field mushroom and stroked it with one finger. ‘They have no chlorophyll, you see. They can’t make their own carbon. They can only feed themselves on other organic material.’

‘Isn’t that what all plants do?’

‘It sometimes worries me that you can say things like that,’ he observed in the mournful tone that, I suddenly realised, I didn’t have to bother about any more.

‘How’s Martha? Have you seen her?’

‘Mother is being wonderful,’ said Claud.

There was a tone of exclusion in his voice that chilled me and I was going to snap something back when Peggy stormed into the kitchen, her cheeks flushed, the soles of her woollen socks stained black from the garden. She picked up a tumbler and a bottle of whisky and marched out of the kitchen again.

‘Peggy,’ Claud called after her retreating back, ‘remember we’re eating in an hour or so and there’ll be lots of wine.’

‘Claud!’ I hissed in rebuke but Peggy could take care of herself. I heard a snort that may have been a response as she thumped up the stairs. Claud turned back to me and said, very kindly, ‘Are you all right, Jane? Is there anything I can do for you?’

Erica gusted into the kitchen, all perfume and purple nails and copper curls.

‘Claud, there you are. Theo wants you to help him move some beds around upstairs. Jane, you angel, what can I do to help?’

She had already changed for dinner, her long slit skirt trailed the ground, her aubergine silk shirt swelled over her large breasts (well, bigger than mine), bangles clanked at her wrists and long ear-rings hung from emphatic lobes. She giggled and I remembered how much, in spite of everything, I liked Paul’s young wife, who flowered so exotically beside poor Peggy’s weary, ostentatious shabbiness.

‘I’ve just seen Peggy’s little girls sneaking into the outhouse. Oh, to be fifteen and smoking in a shed again. Christ, what a weird foul day. Poor Natalie. I mean I assume it is Natalie, and not some archaeological relic. I suppose it must be, and you’re all quite right to feel dreadful. My views about children dying have changed completely since Rosie, you know. Not that I was ever in favour of it, of course. I’d kill myself, I think. Frances was saying that she and Theo think it’s probably a relief for Martha, but I wonder if that’s true.’

She dipped her taloned fingers into a bowl of olives and popped a few absentmindedly into her avid red mouth.

Claud started methodically pulling corks from bottles, till eight of them stood in an open-mouthed row. I grated Parmesan cheese into the steaming pan of mushroom risotto and added a knob of soft unsalted butter, not from the fridge but from the larder, as butter ought to be. I’d always wanted a larder. Theo and his wife, Frances, walked past the window, tall and elegant. She was speaking animatedly, her eyes hard, but I couldn’t make out the words and I couldn’t see Theo’s face. Then my brother-in-law turned his head and looked straight into my eyes. The years reeled back. He gave an embarrassed half-smile but Frances said something else. He turned his face back towards her and they walked on.

When I’m at the Stead I stay in the room I’ve had since I was a child. More like sisters than best friends, Natalie and I used to fight over who would have the bed nearest the window, and she’d usually win. It was her house, her bedroom, her bed. After she disappeared, I couldn’t sleep where she had always slept. I would lie at the other side of the room, under the sloping roof, and hear the grandfather clock down the hall, and occasionally the hoot of the owls which nested in the woods. Sometimes I’d wake in the middle of the night and for a few seconds, until I had remembered all over again, I would see her shape under the blankets. Martha hadn’t got rid of any of her things; she’d always been waiting for her to return. So every year, when we came here for our holidays, I’d have to put my clothes among Natalie’s, mummified in polythene, which gradually became less and less familiar to me, until I realised they were the clothes of a young girl from whom I’d grown away without realising, into adulthood. One day they were gone.

Now I pulled back the curtains and looked out of the window at the garden, which was disappearing into night. Evening mist rose like smoke from the wet grass. The sky was nearly dark, but the horizon was pink. It’ll be a nice day tomorrow, I thought to myself, as I stared out. Heaps of leaves lay in strange shapes round the lawn, waiting to be burnt. Away to the right I could see another, lower shape, the police canopy. Is there a company somewhere that manufactures tents for erecting over places where dead bodies have been found? There must be. It was very quiet. Paul’s girls, down at the edge of the woods, sat in a conspiratorial triangle, now little more than a three-peaked shadow in the gloom. Voices floated up from downstairs, though I couldn’t catch what they said. A pipe gurgled, there was a splashing in a drain outside, footsteps passed by my door and I imagined Jerome and beautiful Hana, pink as a prawn, scuttling down the corridor wrapped in towels. I thought I heard a quiet sob.

I opened my suitcase and lifted out a Victorian jacket, high at the neck and tight at the wrists, sexy-severe. Wearing it made me feel a bit more in control. I dabbed perfume behind my ears, and put on my ear-rings. I thought of Natalie that last summer, trying on purple lipstick, staring at herself steadily in the mirror, like a cat, with her blue eyes like my blue eyes. I thought of the pathetic bits of bone I’d seen in the clay this morning. What was I doing in this house, with Claud whom I was divorcing, and his parents whom I was hurting, and his brother Theo, with whom I was exchanging knowing glances through the kitchen window, like a teenager?

‘Jane, Hana, Martha and Alan.’ It was Claud calling up the stairs. ‘Come on everyone. I’m about to open the champagne.’

Three

Martha and Alan made their entrance like important guests. Alan came in on a crest of conversation, broad hands gesturing, belly hanging generously over his belt, beard untrimmed and grey hair touching his rather worn collar. But the tie was fashionably garish and his tweed jacket was unexceptionable. Always the bohemian who didn’t care about clothes, but a rich bohemian. He hugged Frances, who happened to be standing near the door, and clapped Jerome heartily on the back. Jerome, his hair cut short in a Keanu Reeves crop, dressed in jeans and a black T-shirt, looked depressed and ill at ease. He was speaking only to Hana. She was also dressed entirely in black which emphasised her slavic features. Jerome glared at Alan who didn’t notice.

‘Here we all are then,’ Alan cried, ‘I’m dying for a drink.’

Beside him Martha looked pale, thinner than I’d remembered, her skin softening into old age. I could tell that she’d been crying steadily; she had that bright, fragile look about her. Jonah went and kissed her on the cheek: he was a beautiful man, I thought, dark-haired and blue-eyed. Why had I never found him or Fred attractive, the way I had Theo through that long hot summer? The summer. Perhaps each of them seemed one half of a man; I still thought of them as one word, Jonah-Fred, the twins. And I still found their identical appearances a bit comic, or absurd. Their hair was receding a bit now, their beauty had begun to crack. They wouldn’t age well, I thought. But even their separate wives, families, jobs, homes hadn’t been able to carve out their separate personalities. I wondered if they still played jokes on people.

Claud started easing off the first champagne cork, and everyone stood with their glasses held forward expectantly. There was a murmuring in my ear. Peggy was standing beside me.

‘I’m not sure that champagne is quite the thing in the circumstances,’ she said.

I gave a shrug in response that could have meant anything. There was a harsh clinking. We all looked around. Alan was rapping his cigarette lighter against his champagne glass. Once he had all of our attention, he stepped into the middle of the room. There was a long pause and he looked reflective. If I had not known Alan, I might have been alarmed or embarrassed by this excessive silence. But I was reminded of a television programme I had seen about another megalomanic showman, Adolf Hitler, who had always begun his own great speeches with these lengthy, diffident pauses in order to secure the complete attention of his audience. When Alan spoke, his voice was at first so quiet that we all had to lean forward to hear what he said.