It was an invitation no one could refuse, and the man tucked the handkerchief back into his pocket and stepped closer, raising his hand slightly, as if to anoint the little fellow.
Her mother moved then with startling haste. She wrested the baby away, depositing him roughly on the ground behind her. There was gravel beneath his bare legs and for a child who knew only pleasure and love the shock proved too much. Crestfallen, he began to cry.
Laurel’s heart tugged, but she was frozen, unable to move. Hairs prickled on the back of her neck. She was watching her mother’s face, an expression on it that she’d never seen before. Fear, she realised, Ma was frightened.
The effect on Laurel was instant. Certainties of a lifetime turned to smoke and blew away. Cold alarm moved in to take their place.
‘Hello, Dorothy,’ the man said. ‘It’s been a long time.’
He knew Ma’s name. The man was no stranger.
He spoke again, too low for Laurel to hear, and her mother nodded slightly. She continued to listen, tilting her head to the side. Her face lifted to the sun and her eyes closed just for one second.
The next thing happened quickly.
It was the liquid silver flash Laurel would always remember. The way sunlight caught the metal blade, and the moment was very briefly beautiful.
Then the knife came down, the special knife, plunging deep into the man’s chest. Time slowed; it raced. The man cried out and his face twisted with surprise and pain and horror; and Laurel stared as his hands went to the knife’s bone handle, to where the blood was staining his shirt; as he fell to the ground; as the warm breeze dragged his hat over and over through the dust.
The dog was barking hard, the baby wailing in the gravel, his face red and glistening, his little heart breaking, but for Laurel sounds were fading. She heard them through the watery gallop of her own blood pumping, the rasps of her own ragged breaths.
The knife’s bow had come undone, the ribbon’s end trailed into the rocks that bordered the garden bed. It was the last thing Laurel saw before her vision filled with tiny flickering stars and then everything went black.
Two
Suffolk, 2011
IT WAS RAINING IN SUFFOLK. In her memories of childhood it was never raining. The hospital was on the other side of town and the car went slowly along the puddle-pitted High Street before turning into the driveway and stopping at the top of the turning circle. Laurel pulled out her compact, opened it to look into the mirror, and pushed the skin of one cheek upwards, watching calmly as the wrinkles gathered and then fell when released. She repeated the action on the other side. People loved her lines. Her agent told her so, casting directors waxed lyrical, the make-up artists crooned as they brandished their brushes and their startling youth. One of those Internet newspapers had run a poll some months ago, inviting readers to vote for ‘The Nation’s Favourite Face’ and Laurel had won second place. Her lines, it was said, made people feel safe.
Which was all very well for them. They made Laurel feel old.
She was old, she thought, snapping the compact shut. And not in the Mrs Robinson sense. Twenty-five years now since she’d played in The Graduate at the National. How had that happened? Someone had speeded up the damn clock when she wasn’t watching, that’s how.
The driver opened the door and ushered her out beneath the cover of a large black umbrella.
‘Thank you, Neil,’ she said as they reached the awning. ‘Do you have the pick-up address for Friday?’
He set down her overnight bag and shook out the umbrella. ‘Farmhouse on the other side of town, narrow lane, driveway at the very end. Two o’clock still all right for you?’
She said that it was and he gave a nod, hurrying through the rain to the driver’s door. The car started and she watched it go, aching suddenly for the warmth and pleasant dullness of a long commute to nowhere special along the wet motorway. To be going anywhere, really, that wasn’t here.
Laurel sized up the entry doors but didn’t go through. She took out her cigarettes instead and lit one, drawing on it with rather more relish than was dignified. She’d passed a dreadful night. She’d dreamed in scraps of her mother, and this place, and her sisters when they were small, and Gerry as a boy. A