In a Cottage In a Wood: The gripping new psychological thriller from the bestselling author of The Woman Next Door
from losing her mum, felt like a lump of beef that had been whacked all over with a meat tenderizer.
But as time moved on, the nature of the grief changed. In some ways it was almost crueller in the way it took her. She’d find she hadn’t thought about it for a day or so and then it would suddenly bloom painfully in her chest, as violent as a physical assault. And the same thoughts would slam into her: an orphan.
Really? It was such a desolate little word.
She and Lou had lost their mother to cancer a year before their father died. Their dad, who had met his wife when they were both eighteen, had seemed to shrink as the space in the small semi in a Yorkshire village had swelled. Their mother had been a loud presence, prone to outbursts of emotion and jollity, while Dad was a quiet, reserved man.
They were older parents, only having Lou at forty, then Neve at forty-two. Neve had been a bit embarrassed about their age, especially as one of the girls in her class had a mother who was only seventeen years older than her.
They’d been foster carers for a time before Lou came along and would receive the odd Christmas card from people who had briefly lived with them. Neve used to feel a bit jealous of these mysterious troubled children with dramatic lives. As though they remained in the home as shadows, still jostling for her parents’ attention.
Neve occasionally fretted that they would start fostering again as she got older, picturing brooding teenage girls with violent tendencies moving in and taking over her bedroom. But her parents said they’d ‘done their bit’ and that this part of their lives was now behind them.
The brain aneurism that killed her father hadn’t given any warning and the doctor told her and Lou that he had most likely been carrying it around for a long time, like a tiny ticking bomb.
Neve had been away with Daniel, visiting musician friends in Brighton. It was one of their lost weekends, passing by in a blur of drinking, dancing and weed and it wasn’t until late on Sunday afternoon that Neve had realized she had lost her phone. It was only when she and Daniel wearily arrived back in the flat that she noticed the flashing lights on the barely used landline recorder and discovered the messages from Lou saying she had to get to the Whittington Hospital immediately.
He died half an hour later after she erupted onto the hospital ward. Everyone said that he had waited for her.
Lou had never voiced what she thought about being the one holding vigil at the bedside for two long days. But the look on her face when Neve finally roused the courage to meet her eye had felt like being sandblasted. They have still never spoken of that final day.
Neve is keenly aware now of how little she visited her father in the period after Mum died. She kept meaning to go and spend more weekends with just the two of them.
They had a particular routine. He would cook her proper Welsh rarebit and they would eat it on trays, each with a Guinness, watching reality television he had recorded on his Freeview box. Her dignified dad had a weakness for anything like that, and despite reading hefty non-fiction about history and politics, he could converse with the best of them about what was happening on The Voice or even America’s Next Top Model.
When she thinks about the fact that she will never, ever get to do this with him again she experiences a vertiginous swoop in her stomach, as though someone has just pressed a button and taken the floor out from under her feet. It’s a sensation of falling through space. She is no longer tethered to anyone other than Lou, who has her own family now.
Neve sighs and roots in her handbag for her make-up bag. It’s the hangover and the uncertainty of what she is doing that is making her feel like this; she just needs to get a grip.
Stretching out the stiffness from her neck, she waits in the aisle to get off the coach. People groan and gather bags from above their heads, gazing blearily out of the window.
Neve thanks her seating companion, who lets her go first and begins to move towards the doors. There’s a pinch of worry in her stomach about arriving somewhere in darkness. She hasn’t really thought this through. The words ‘as usual’ rise up in her mind as though someone has whispered them in her ear.
Standing at the side of a road with a car park on one side and residential houses on the other, she watches people purposefully walk to cars or stamp their feet in the cold and look around for lifts. The old man gives her a final wave and she watches as he laboriously climbs into a small white car. A woman with glasses and a dark ponytail is in the driver seat and he leans over for a kiss, talking all the while. Neve has a sudden urge to call him back and tell him everything; about Isabelle Shawcross and the cottage, about work, about Lou. About her mum and dad …
But it’s too late now. She begins to shiver as the shocking temperature – always so much colder outside of London, she thinks, despite her Northern heritage – begins to bite, making her eyes sting and her nose stream.
She takes an experimental sniff and realizes with disappointment that she can’t smell the sea. It can’t be that far away, can it? Neve thinks again that she knows nothing about Cornwall and experiences a queasy lurch of anxiety about this whole plan.
Pulling her coat around her and yanking on a lilac beanie with flowers on the side that she had found in Camden market, she goes to a central area and attempts to work out which bus she should get to this Cador place.
It’s no good though, she can’t see any bus that will help. When she’d looked this up hurriedly on her phone in London, it had seemed relatively straightforward. But now …
A bus driver is about to close his doors when she reaches out her hand and quickly steps on board.
‘Mind yourself,’ says the driver, a bald man in his forties with a tattoo curling up his neck to his fleshy, pink ear.
‘Sorry,’ she says with an apologetic smile, ‘but can you tell me where I’d get a bus to a place called Cador? It’s near St Piron?’
The driver sighs and then picks up an iPad. He swipes at it and then looks up.
‘No buses from here go there. Best bet is to get to St Piron on the 198 and then you’ll have to walk.’
‘Oh,’ says Neve, doubtfully. ‘Er, thank you.’
It is only twenty past ten but feels like the middle of the night. Neve’s back and bottom ache after nine hours on a coach, then another hour being rattled on a hard seat. The bus seems to hare with dangerous speed through small villages lit by a few streetlights, but most of the journey is spent tearing around dark, twisty country roads.
When she is finally disgorged at the side of a road and told by the disinterested driver that to get to Cador she needs to walk ‘a couple of miles … maybe a bit more’, it starts to become apparent that this is definitely one of her more ill-thought-through plans.
Knowing her battery won’t hold out for much longer, she uses her phone as a torch only in short bursts. Luckily, there seems to be a main road lit by street lamps that leads in the direction she has been told to follow. Her headache has returned and she is desperate for something to eat and drink. All she has left is a mouthful of water in a bottle and a couple of pieces of gum. Her wheelie case squeaks in complaint as she drags it along behind her, shoulder beginning to cramp.
A couple of men pass her at different times. The second of the two, a weaselly guy with an ugly moustache, stares at her just long enough for fear to surge up her throat. She hastens her step.
Eventually she comes to a row of shops, all closed. Then she spies something that feels like a beacon above the doorway of a fish and chip shop; a glowing sign that says simply, ‘Taxi’.
Neve hesitates, gnawing on her bottom lip as she thinks this through. She has no job. No prospects. She’s only intending to come for a few days but her remaining £400 is going to have to last. She’d had vague images of cooking giant batches of chickpea stew and holing up in the cottage with a pile of books until she worked out what to do with her life, back in London. The £400 seemed like a fortune, put like that.
But