minute or two they drove in silence. It would take them twenty minutes to get home, twenty-five if the roads were busy, and at this rate they probably wouldn’t speak all the way there. Evi had been watching Harry’s reflection in the passenger window. She turned to face him. She had to find something to say, even something really lame.
‘They’re nice people,’ she said. Yep, that was pretty lame, even by her standards.
Harry stepped on the brake and the car slowed down. At the side of the road a lone sheep looked up lazily from the grass she was chewing.
‘Who are?’ said Harry, steering round the corner and picking up speed again.
‘The Fletchers.’
‘Oh yeah, sorry,’ he said, glancing at her. ‘I was thinking about something else. How did you find Tom tonight?’
Evi thought about it for a second. How had she found Tom? Still puzzling, was the honest truth.
‘Alice said she’d mentioned schizophrenia to you,’ said Harry, when she didn’t reply straight away. ‘Is it possible?’
‘Tom isn’t psychotic,’ Evi said. Harry had shaved that evening. She could see the small scars of a rash just above the collar of his coat.
‘What about these hallucinations?’ he said, glancing at her again. ‘Alice said he hears voices in his head.’
‘Actually, he doesn’t,’ she replied. ‘He doesn’t hear them in his head.’
Ahead of them they could see the headlights of another vehicle. Harry pulled over on to the grass verge, inches from the wall. They sat, waiting for the car to reach them. Now that he was looking directly at her, Evi was finding it hard to maintain eye-contact.
‘Tom’s voices, according to everything Alice has told me, come from outside of himself,’ she continued, dropping her eyes to the wooden trim of the dashboard. ‘They come from round corners, behind doors. And always from the same source. A young girl who he thinks is watching the family, whispering to them – to him, in particular – muttering scary, threatening things.’
The approaching car drew level, flickered its headlights at them and passed by. Harry released the handbrake and set off again.
‘He’s trying to prove to us that this weird little girl of his is real,’ said Evi.
‘How is he doing that?’ Harry asked. ‘Wait, don’t tell me. Has he been trying to take her photograph?’
Evi nodded. ‘He showed me over twenty shots he’d taken tonight. Five of them show a small, indistinct figure, huddling against stones.’
‘Who did he say it was?’
They turned another bend and caught sight of Heptonclough, already some way below them, twinkling in the dark like a city from a fairy tale.
‘He said he didn’t know,’ replied Evi. ‘That he hadn’t known anyone was there. He was lying, of course, the figure was the focal point of the shots. Tom would have had to know he or she was there. I suspect he’s got some friend of his to skulk around in the churchyard, pretending to be this girl. But the point is, it’s clever and it’s rational. It suggests to me he knows the little girl isn’t real but still needs us to believe in her. He deliberately takes pictures he knows will be ambiguous.’
‘So he didn’t actually claim it was the girl?’
Another bend, another glimpse of the dark landscape below.
‘No. He still hasn’t admitted her existence to me. So I couldn’t mention her either. I have to wait from him to do that. Why are we heading up the moor?’
‘Short cut,’ said Harry. ‘What if she is real?’
Evi thought for a second and then smiled at his profile. ‘According to his parents, Tom talks about this girl in terms that suggests she’s not human,’ she replied. ‘And, by the way, there are no short cuts across the moor. Are you kidnapping me?’
‘Yep,’ he said. ‘What about someone who looks unusual? Tom only sees her at night, from what I understand. He could be getting confused. What if there is someone who likes to hide, play tricks on people, maybe somebody a bit disturbed?’
They climbed higher and the darkness spread itself around them like a pool of black ink, flowing across the moors. From somewhere below a firework exploded. As the sparks died away, Evi could see the dark outline of trees against the sky.
She thought for a second and then shook her head. ‘Only Tom sees and hears her. Where are we going exactly?’
‘What if Gillian hears her?’
‘Gillian?’
‘Gillian hears her dead daughter calling to her. She swears it’s Hayley’s voice. Did she tell you that?’