Crooked Daylight Read online

  Crooked Daylight

  Helen Slavin

  About the Author

  Helen Slavin was born in Heywood in Lancashire in 1966. She was raised by eccentric parents on a diet of Laurel and Hardy, William Shakespeare and the Blackpool Illuminations. Educated at her local comp her favourite subjects at school were English and Going Home.

  After The University of Warwick she worked in many jobs including, plant and access hire, a local government Education department typing pool, and a vasectomy clinic. A job as a television scriptwriter gave her the opportunity to spend all day drinking tea, living in a made-up fantasy world and getting paid for it (sometimes).

  Helen has been a professional writer for fifteen years. Her first novel The Extra Large Medium was chosen as the winner in the Long Barn Books competition run by Susan Hill.

  A paragliding Welsh husband and two children distract her and give her ample opportunity to spend all day drinking tea, nagging about homework and washing pants for England. In the wee small hours she still keeps a bijou flat in that fantasy world of writing. When not working with animals and striving for world peace, Helen enjoys the music of Elbow and baking bread. Her favourite colour is purple and if she had to be stranded on a desert island with someone it would be Ray Mears (alright, George Clooney is very good looking but can he make fire with a stick? No. See?)

  She now lives, with her family, in Trowbridge, Wiltshire where, when she’s not writing, she’s asleep. Or in Tesco.

  * * *

  If you’d like to hear more from Helen, visit her website, www.helenslavin.com

  Also By Helen Slavin

  The Extra Large Medium

  The Stopping Place

  Cross My Heart

  From a Distance

  Little Lies

  After the Andertons

  To the Lake

  Will You Know Me?

  The Witch Ways Series

  Crooked Daylight

  Slow Poison

  The Witch Ways Whispers

  The Ice King

  Breaking Bones

  Whyte Harte

  Crooked Daylight

  Helen Slavin

  This edition published in 2016 by Ipso Books

  Agora Books is a division of Peters Fraser + Dunlop Ltd

  55 New Oxford Street, London WC1A 1BS

  Copyright © Helen Slavin, 2016

  All rights reserved

  You may not copy, distribute, transmit, reproduce or otherwise make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or by any means (including without limitation electronic, digital, optical, mechanical, photocopying, printing, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

  1

  Fire Hazard

  “We are doing the right thing,” Charlie said, both her sisters turned and nodded. As she glanced back towards Cob Cottage the open door of the stolen hearse parked alongside seemed to yawn at her, the rain that had persisted all day already soaking the shiny oak and brass fittings. The rain made a pittering pattering sound on their grandmother’s eco-coffin, the soft drumming like a mournful tattoo heralding their path down to the lake.

  “Yes. We are doing the right thing,” Charlie said to herself.

  The Way sisters managed their grandmother’s coffin easily between the three of them, Anna leading, carrying the foot of it, and Charlie and Emz holding the shoulders of it, one hand clutching the hand woven hemp handles, the other holding the bottom of the cardboard and basketwork structure. The rain had soaked the soft grass and sandy earth of Havoc Wood but the sisters were sure-footed with their burden.

  * * *

  Their grandmother, Hettie, had died very suddenly the previous week. Only three days before, the sisters had been with her at Cob Cottage and it had been a normal July day. Anna had cooked them a feast as Charlie and Emz had helped their Grandmother in the garden. They had eaten at the sun-bleached wind-dried old table on the front porch. A moody sky hung over them, the clouds lowering and they watched the storm skirt the edge of Woodcastle and decide to crackle across the urban sprawl of Castlebury instead. The air had been sharp with the scent of nasturtiums that Anna had put in one of the salads. They each thought of the farewell they had taken of their grandmother that last day; Charlie with a quick and casual hug; Anna, a glancing peck on the cheek because she’d been hurrying off to work; Emz a tight hug, her grandmother holding her so tightly she felt eight once more. None had known or guessed that this was their last time, that these brief bright moments were the end.

  Three days later the shock of Grandma Hettie’s death rattled their world and nothing had felt right in the ensuing days, until this moment.

  For the first time, Charlie felt thankful that her grandmother’s death had given Anna something to focus upon. Everything with her eldest sister was shorthand since the tragic events of last October. They had been afraid that Anna might break and so they watched her, in the way of security guards patrolling a priceless piece of ancient china.

  Vanessa, their mother, had organised their grandmother’s funeral very swiftly and efficiently and sent them texts with the details. Charlie, Emz and Anna had descended on their mother’s house after work; Anna still in her chef’s whites, Emz in muddied hoody and wellies from clearing out the pond at the wildlife centre, Charlie scented with malt from the brewery. The sisters had understood their grandmother’s funerary requirements perfectly but their mother disagreed.

  “You can’t do that. She wasn’t a Viking and it’s a fire hazard,” she said, her head half in the fridge as she reached for some cheese and a slightly elderly looking head of lettuce.

  “It’s not a fire hazard. It’s a boat. It would be on the lake. The lake is water. End of.” Emz argued.

  “No,” her mother’s voice rose slightly, “you can’t do it. That’s what the crematorium is for Emz. Official, licensed, legal. If you had wanted to act on your plan you’d have to get… I don’t know… planning permission or special dispensation from the Pope or something. This is how we’re doing it. A funeral. The usual way.”

  The sisters were united in silence. Charlie felt frustrated. All their lives Anna had been the archetypal eldest, the one who led and said. Charlie had found it difficult since last October to cover for her at those moments. Her instinct was to swear at their mother but she knew that wouldn’t work. Several phrases repeated themselves around her head, all feeling like a difficult language course because none of the words fitted. The silence however, appeared to fill in for them very effectively, Charlie could see it had thrown her.

  “I appreciate what it is you think you’re doing…” their mother said, she was in brusque scientist mode, her confident tone scotched by her frenzied attempt at making her sandwich, her hands fluttering and inept, butter greasing over the worktop instead of the bread. “You think I don’t but I do. But… the fact is that a funeral is a funeral and this is the way we do things. Off to the crem and then back to the cricket club for sausage rolls. Nothing Pagan.” She looked up. “Nothing you can get fined or arrested for.”

  The silence held its fingers to the lips of the Way sisters and without speaking they had all decided what they would have to do.

  * * *

  Their mother had chosen a final resting place for their grandmother in the Weeping Willows section of the After Life Crematorium. The place was new and state of the art, a former brownfield site at the edge of Castlebury, not even in Woodcastle itself. It was the farthest from Havoc Wood it could possibly be and a knot of major roads looped the loop beside its eastern boundary. If you had binoculars you might, in your ghos
tly manifestation, be able to see the top edge of Havoc Wood where it rose steeply onto Horse Hill. You had no chance of glimpsing Pike Lake itself.

  * * *

  “When. How. We’ll know,” was all Anna had said as they planned in the kitchen last night. Emz, for one, was panicking because although they had sketched out the details they were now waiting for Anna to give them the lead, to give the signal. They had travelled behind the hearse all the way to the crematorium waiting for something that seemed like an opportunity for their plan and yet no opportunity had arisen because Anna was not taking charge. It seemed almost too late. The undertakers were opening the hearse.

  “You can’t do this.” Anna spoke up. The effect was as though the coffin itself had opened, not just the back door of the hearse. Everyone stopped, one of the pallbearers even stumbled. Since last October, Anna had chosen words as carefully as small pebbles, two or three each week at most, and now the lifting of her almost silence was a shock.

  “You can’t do this.” Her voice was heavy sounding. Above the chapel door, Jesus looked uncomfortable on a large grubby looking wooden cross, his head angled down as if to ask the vicar, in her surplice and Hotter shoes, what she might answer.

  “No. I can. I’m the vicar. I’m a trained professional.” The vicar blushed a fierce red and fumbled with her prayerbook.

  “Anna…” their mother spoke but did not take a step. The few other guests, the four ladies from the WI for instance, looked disapproving. Anna took in a breath.

  “You… have NO IDEA…” Anna’s voice was building, not in volume but in timbre, vibrating through everyone in the crematorium driveway. The air seemed to darken around them. “Take your Big Book of God and go because you cannot do… this.” Vanessa was stepping forward to touch Anna’s arm but Anna wrenched it away. Was it only the rainclouds gathering above that were shutting off the light, chilling the air?

  “Anna… Anna darling… Crem and cricket club remember? Crem and cricket club… Don’t do this.” Their mother’s voice was muffled-sounding so that everyone had to listen very hard. Anna turned on her.

  “DON’T YOU…” Anna’s voice was a siren now and her arm shot out “…DO THIS!” her finger pointing towards the hearse, a gesture that sent the undertakers scuttling backwards towards the chapel’s stone porch. “Do not do this… do not… do… NOT.”

  “Anna.” Their mother’s voice was a sharp bark now “ENOUGH.” She grabbed Anna’s arm and they tussled. Anna looked over to her sisters as she wrestled their mother to the floor, at which point Emz and Charlie reached into the hearse and began to throw out the sprays and wreaths of flowers. In the scuffling confusion of petals and shiny ribbon Anna broke away running, with a further glance to her sisters, towards the driver’s door of the hearse. It only took one turn of the key to start the engine but the energy with which Anna, Charlie and Emz jumped into the vehicle could have propelled it at least the half mile back to the crematorium gates.

  At the gates Emz got out and closed them behind the hearse, knotting a bit of ribbon from a wreath around the latch for added delay. The funeral party could be seen attempting pursuit, the WI hurrying into their little hatchbacks and, in their black coats, red linings flapping, the undertakers themselves, running, like a small cohort of the Goth relay team in a bid for Olympic Gold.

  The police car tried to head them off at the supermarket roundabout but Anna was not to be thwarted. The hearse lurched sideways as she steered up over the kerbing, the wheels spinning slightly in the flower bed. Anna gunned the engine and all three Way sisters willed the hearse onwards. It bumped forward, Grandma Hettie’s coffin slumping forwards as they skidded through the gap in the shrubbery and another rattling thud and clang sounded as they rolled off the other side. Cars beeped their horns, brakes screeched but Anna ground down a gear and with another push on the pedal sent the hearse speeding towards Horse Hill Road.

  Anna glanced in the mirror to see the police vehicle snarled into a tangled gridlock that would not be resolved until eight o’clock that evening.

  It was a brief drive towards the leafy green edges of Woodcastle.

  As they drove, the rain drove harder. Emz rested her head against the coffin, the surface felt warm under her skin. Her mind drifted through a series of memories of her grandmother, always at Cob Cottage, her hand sifting through Emz hair when it was longer and she was younger. Once sitting by the fire, her grandmother plaiting her hair; another outside at the lake’s edge, sitting on the flat stone, this time Emz had been the one fishtail plaiting her grandmother’s grey hair and the word “skein” whispered through her head and she recalled the feel of her grandmother’s hair in her fingers, thick and grey and alive.

  Anna took two attempts to turn them in at the edge of the wood, the hearse proving less than manoeuvrable on a tight corner. The turn off was tarmacked for a half mile or more, running down through the most recent plantation of trees which masked the real Havoc Wood, the ancient heart; elder, ash, hazel, oak, elm, beech, birch. As the names repeated themselves over and over in Charlie’s head, she wound down the window of the hearse so that the sound of the trees whispered in.

  They bumped down the gravel track next and then at last they were down to the dirt and then they could see the lake slivered through the trees and, further round, the curved, yellow ochre comfort of Cob Cottage.

  The boat was tied up, as it had been for as long as any of them could remember, at the small jetty that jutted out onto the gunmetal surface of the lake. The rain did not stop as they hefted the coffin from the hearse and down to the tethered boat. It rained harder as they stacked the boat with faggots and kindling. It occurred to Emz as they raided the wood store that Grandma had extra wood cut, as if in readiness.

  “Where’s Anna?” Charlie looked up from her task, wiping the rain out of her eyes, her hair smearing across her forehead. They both looked around and the flash of panic was tamped by the sight of their sister returning from the garden, her arms laden with a bouquet of herbs and dried end-of-summer plants. She had remembered everything.

  It had always been Emz’s job to reach for the tinderbox from its place on the mantel above the range, but it was Anna’s job today to strike the sparker. The little starbursts reached out to catch at the dry grasses and as the flames grew, snatched hungrily at the kindling, Charlie untied the rope and the three of them gave the boat a strong push into the water. The boat moved smoothly outwards as if powered by a motor, making a small wake that sent the lake waters licking at the shore. The flames burst and cracked, breathed with a subtle dragonish roar and a twisted veil of smoke curled upwards. With a single bitter squawk a heron took off from the reeds. Beyond, a hundred or more jackdaws chattered out of the trees and into the sky.

  * * *

  After they returned the hearse to the yard at Jeffery & Sons it was cold and dark so Charlie and Anna opted to walk their sister home.

  At their mother’s house, Vanessa was programming the state of the art kettle to make hot chocolate.

  “Mini-marshmallows?” was all she said about the day’s events and they sat in silence in a sickly avalanche of ballet pink and ice white.

  2

  Tea and a Toast

  At the Moat Tea Room, owner Jo Gauntlett was having a break in the garden when she heard the WI pull their little hatchbacks into the small car park by the church. You could always tell the WI were parking by the screeching brakes and the grinding of metal. Jo had had a very busy afternoon with a coach party from Castlebury roaming the Castle and then descending on the Moat to raid it of its supply of lemon drizzle cake and Earl Grey tea, but Jo was always prepared in case the WI popped by.

  She knew today was a landmark day for them. Things would shift and change from now on and Jo Gauntlett was keen that things at the Moat Tea Room remained unchanged and stable. With this in mind she had baked specially and set aside the best vintage china.

  You would need a calculator to add up the combined ages of the four ladies who ma
de up the ranks of the Woodcastle WI. Gathered at their usual table in the window so that they could exchange gossip whilst still keeping an eye on events outside for even fresher gossip, they stared out into the street, each woman alone with her thoughts. There had been some other customers but gradually their tea had chilled or they’d discovered a sudden urgent errand they’d failed to complete and within fifteen minutes and a couple of slices of hummingbird cake the Woodcastle WI had the Moat Tea Room pretty much to themselves.

  The eldest of the women, Alizon Wilde, thin, dressed in red, who might possibly have been sixty, raised her teacup.

  “A toast, I think…” Her voice broke their silence as the gilded edge of her cup caught the late afternoon sunlight and was matched by the other cups as they chinked from saucers. “A final and fitting farewell to Hettie Way,” the woman in red intoned. Their teacups met in mid-air sending a cold tinkling sound around the room.

  “How do you think they will fare?” asked the scruffy one, Liz, who was possibly fifty, fiddling her messy hair into a tangle of bun.

  “Who?” said Isobel, who would never tell anyone her age but who looked anywhere from thirty-eight to fifty-eight in her bland-looking fleece, her metal framed glasses and her straight lank hair. The other women made exasperated sounds.

  “Them. Hettie Way’s granddaughters? Charlotte, Emily and Anna… The Way sisters.” The fourth woman, Jen, effortless and elegant in black, possibly fifty, maybe sixty, couldn’t possibly be seventy, barked. No one wanted to answer. Shoulders shrugged, faces were pulled into doom-laden grimaces. The scruffy one lifted her teacup once more.