Martin Edwards - The Frozen Shroud

‘Hannah.’ His breath was hot on her face. ‘Are you okay?’

She moved so that she was almost lying on the sofa, head propped against a leather cushion as he eased forward so that his face was above hers. He tugged her jersey over her head and let it fall onto the floor. She saw him drinking in the sight of her. When she’d come back here to change before going out to the pub, she’d put on a black bra and knickers in fine silk, bought a month before the break-up with Marc and never worn since. Not because anything was going to happen with Greg, but because she was sick of feeling like a harassed people manager and wanted to feel like a woman again.

And now something was happening with Greg.

He slipped the straps off her shoulders, and fumbled with the hooks. Funny that he seemed clumsy — wasn’t he supposed to be the expert seducer? A light glinted in his wide open eyes, as if he couldn’t quite believe what she was allowing him to do.

As for Hannah, she’d given up on believing. She was so sick of careful, diligent, do-the-right-thing Hannah, the inadequate toer-of-lines who believed in going through the proper channels, yet somehow still managed to screw everything up. Life was short. She wanted, yes she wanted, to behave badly.

Her nipples stiffened at the touch of his fingers. For once, she wasn’t worrying her breasts were too small or too freckled or the wrong shape. No time to wonder if, now he’d finally broken through her defences, he’d find her disappointing.

Greg bent forward, his tongue moving delicately from one breast to the other. She started to unbutton his shirt. It slid off his shoulders, revealing a chest covered with fine hair. He had a sportsman’s arms, muscular and firm. As he breathed harder, she felt the intensity of his excitement. His hands slid to her starchy new jeans, loosening the belt, yanking at the zip. She closed her eyes and waited.

Somewhere outside the room, a door creaked. Her mind was empty of everything except the man she was with; she’d surely imagined the noise. But she felt Greg’s body become rigid with tension.

‘What was that?’

‘Just the wind.’ This was a fib, she had no idea really, but she couldn’t bear the moment to end. ‘It’s nothing.’

‘No, it’s something.’

Then she heard it too. Footsteps, hesitant footsteps, but definitely footsteps, in the hall. Right outside this room.

‘Hannah?’ The cry was strangled. ‘Hannah?’

‘Oh fucking hell,’ Greg muttered. ‘Fucking, fucking, fucking hell.’

The living room door swept open. Hannah closed her eyes.

This is a nightmare, all I need do is open my eyes again, and everything will be all right.

She looked up, and beyond Greg. In the doorway stood Marc, the man she’d lived with for so long. He was staring at the two of them, half-dressed on the sofa.

For a few seconds — or was it years? — nothing happened. The three of them might have been wax dummies in a weird tableau, silent, rigid and cold. Hannah’s temples pounded; she thought she was about to scream. Her mouth opened, but not a sound came out.

Marc was the first to move. As he turned to go, he gave her a lingering look over his shoulder, before shutting the door behind him with extraordinary care.

Louise wasn’t timetabled for work on Hallowe’en, and she and Daniel stopped in Kendal to pick up their party costumes before driving over the Kirkstone Pass. After overnight rain, the skies had cleared, and as they descended into the valley of Ullswater, the sun sidled out from behind the clouds like a bashful schoolboy. In the old mining village of Glenridding, they parked near the public hall, and Louise pointed out the house she wanted to buy. A cottage built of green Lakeland stone, perched at the foot of Helvellyn, looking out towards the steamship pier and the serpentine lake beyond.

‘You’ll have the most beautiful commute imaginable,’ he said.

‘Only snag is, the pass will be closed in the worst of winter.’ Her laughter reminded him of the mischievous girl she’d once been, before their father left home, and she grew a spiky skin for self-protection. ‘Plenty worse places to be snowed in.’

Three miles on, they stopped again, and entered the labyrinth of woodland paths beneath Gowbarrow Fell. The route wound past the Money Tree, a toppled beech trunk into which people had hammered thousands of coins from all over the world. Once these were private pleasure grounds, landscaped for the family of a wealthy landowner. These days everyone could stroll through the glades on a pilgrimage to Aira Force, retracing Wordsworth’s footsteps. Here the great man had found poetic inspiration in the daffodils, but on this last day of October, the flowers were long gone, and the paths were treacherous with mud and wet leaves.

Aira Force made itself heard before they set eyes on it. The waterfall’s roar reached a crescendo as they walked onto an old stone packhorse bridge spanning the top of the cascade. Luckily, neither of them suffered from vertigo. The spectacle of the water crashing into the chasm below was dizzying. A chattering Italian couple, kitted out for the Antarctic, squeezed past. Daniel caught the name Sir Eglamore. The woman was telling the story of the valiant knight’s beloved, whom he awoke from sleepwalking, only for her to plunge to her death in Aira Force. A legend Wordsworth turned into yet another poem.

‘It’s an unlucky place we’re going to,’ Louise said. ‘Two women murdered. Do you think Melody’s hunch is right, and the mad Mrs Hodgkinson was really innocent?’

He watched the swirling patterns made by the foaming water. ‘With murder, like most things, the obvious explanation is usually right. On the face of it, there’s even less mystery about who killed Gertrude Smith than who battered Shenagh Moss to death. Letty Hodgkinson’s suicide looks like a confession of guilt, Craig Meek died before he could be questioned. But what if things aren’t what they seemed?’

‘So Melody’s succeeded in stirring your curiosity.’

Something in her tone made him look up. ‘What are you getting at?’

‘She told you her husband was unfaithful. Better watch out, in case she’s in the mood to pay him back.’

He shook his head. ‘Have you ever known me get involved with married women? She wasn’t chatting me up. What Melody fancies is the idea of collaborating on the Gertrude Smith story.’

‘Oh yeah?’

‘Yeah. She’s decided my name might help her sell a book. Probably it’s just a rich woman’s passing whim. But she has interested me in the Ravenbank murders. Both of them.’

‘Don’t let her use you.’

Closing his eyes, he listened to the deluge rage below, as he puzzled over the contrast between Melody’s conviction that Letty Hodgkinson was innocent, and her refusal to accept the same might be true of Craig Meek.

After lunch in a tea room overlooking the River Eamont at Pooley Bridge, they followed pony trekkers along the road that clung to the east bank of the lake, and past the small harbour at Howtown, before zigzagging up the hairpin bends of the Hause towards Martindale. Parking at St Peter’s Church, they climbed the gentle contours of Hallin Fell to the stone cairn at the summit. Mist clung to the distant fells, far below the steamer chugged away from Howtown pier, and an instructor in a wetsuit bellowed commands at a group of teenagers with dinghies.

As the sun dipped out of sight, Louise waved a hand, indicating a small, wooded promontory poking out into the lake to the south of the fell. The peninsula was shaped like a human skull, connected by a neck of land to the valley of Martindale. The trees formed a copper, brown, and green mosaic. Close to the water’s edge stood a large triple-gabled house. Even at this distance, Ravenbank Hall looked lonely and bleak. Somewhere in the grounds, Letty Hodgkinson, the supposed murderer of Gertrude Smith, was buried. From their vantage point, it was impossible to make out the design planned by Letty’s husband. The Hall was undeniably imposing, but its design was curiously irregular and idiosyncratic, so that it seemed slightly strange and out of kilter. Ravenbank’s other buildings were invisible, and so was the lane prowled by the Faceless Woman. A century after Hodgkinson had set out to master the landscape, Nature had reclaimed most of its own.