She darted a furtive glance towards the kitchen, where Edward was pouring hissing water into a teapot. Who was L? Nothing about this sparse cottage suggested the existence of a girlfriend. Where was L now, she wondered. What had happened to all the summers to come?
He came in bearing the mugs before him like votive offerings, steam fogging up his glasses. Zoe quickly thrust the book back on the pile, but if he noticed, he said nothing. He set one of the mugs down on another stack of books beside the sofa and gestured for Zoe to sit, then flopped on the opposite end, pressed up against the armrest – there were no other chairs in the room – and tucked one leg under him like a child, both hands wrapped around his mug while he watched her over the rim.
‘Look, Charles is really the person to ask about this,’ he began, half-apologetic, half-defensive. ‘I only know what he’s told me, and the general gossip.’
Zoe smiled encouragement. ‘Tell me the gossip, then. Ailsa McBride killed her kid, is that it?’
He sighed and looked down into his tea, as if he might find a prompt sheet there. ‘Supposedly she went mad, or she was possessed, or something along those lines. She’s meant to have killed her son and then herself. But they never found the boy.’
‘Then how do they know she killed him?’
‘They found some of his clothes washed up on the rocks.’ He bit his lip. ‘I shouldn’t be telling you this.’
‘Screw Mick,’ Zoe said, feeling bolder.
‘It’s not about Mick. I was thinking of you having to go back there on your own.’
‘Couldn’t they both have been murdered?’
Edward tilted his head, considering. ‘I’ve never heard that as a theory, I don’t know why.’
‘Because the whole island had it in for Ailsa, clearly. A woman of independent means, raising her child with no need of a man? Must be crazy. They both get killed – the crazy witch lady must have done it. Case closed.’
‘It is a bit Wicker Man, isn’t it?’ Edward caught her eye and they both grinned; in that instant, Zoe felt the unexpected click of connection and knew, with a pang of relief, that she was no longer alone here. She had an ally.
‘What happened to Ailsa?’ she asked, when she realised they had been holding one another’s gaze a beat too long to be comfortable.
‘Her body washed up further round the coast a few days later, fully clothed, no wounds on her. So they concluded she’d drowned herself after killing the boy.’
‘But if the kid was never found, they can’t even be certain he was killed, surely? Maybe he ran away.’
Edward shrugged. ‘I suppose. But he’d have turned up sooner or later, wouldn’t he, on a small island? People seem to have accepted the Ailsa version as fact, though. There’s a lot of whispering about how the land is bad in that corner of the island.’
‘Bad how?’
‘Cursed. McBride apparently tore down the remains of a ruined chapel and used the stones to build over its foundations, and the chapel had been built on an ancient pagan site to sanctify it, so he was asking for trouble.’ He grinned and shifted position, stretched out the leg that had been folded and tucked the other under.
‘Great. So I’m staying in a house with an ancient curse, haunted by a child-killing witch.’
Edward laughed. ‘Yup. Enjoy your holiday.’
Zoe leaned her head back against the sofa cushion and laughed along. Rain gusted against the window panes like gravel flung with malice, and the wind boomed down the chimney, shaking the doorframe. The room had grown darker around them as the last light leached from the sky; shadows stole out from the corners, settling over the hollows and angles of their faces. Edward reached behind him and clicked the switch on a standing lamp, warming their corner of the room with a soft amber glow. A silence unfolded, unhurried and companionable. She held the mug to her lips, breathing in its warmth, and found she had no desire to leave. For a while, she could almost forget herself.
‘I don’t know why Mick wants to keep all this hushed up,’ she remarked eventually. ‘Plenty of people would pay a fortune to stay in a place with that kind of history.’
‘Exactly – ghouls. Unsolved-murder fetishists. Those weirdos who think you can measure paranormal activity with radio waves.’ He picked at a loose thread on the cushion cover. ‘There was a lot of resentment in the village when he inherited the house and started to do it up. There’d been a kind of unspoken agreement between the Drummonds and the islanders that the McBride house would be left to fall into ruin and the story allowed to die with it.’ He arched his back and folded his hands together behind his head. As he moved, his knee brushed briefly against Zoe’s leg and she felt a small shock jolt through her like static. ‘It’s seen as a taint on the island’s reputation – they take all that Gothic stuff quite seriously and they don’t want to be famous for it. It took Mick a long time to persuade the locals that he wouldn’t use the family history as a selling point.’
Outside, a gull’s mournful cry echoed across the empty schoolyard like a reprimand.
‘So everyone is sworn to secrecy,’ Zoe said, sitting up and wrapping her hands around her mug. ‘Did Mick tell you all this?’
Edward shook his head. ‘He doesn’t like to talk about it. This all happened before I got here. Charles told me most of it – and Annag Logan, the barmaid at the Stag.’
Zoe thought of her lipstick with a stab of resentment. ‘Are you and she …?’ She made a vague motion with her hand that implied conjunction.
Edward’s look of confusion shaded to outrage as he understood her meaning. ‘Christ, no. Would you seriously think …?’ He straightened up, pushing a hand through his hair. ‘Not exactly my type. Apart from anything else, she’s only sixteen.’
‘Is she really?’ Zoe nodded in mild surprise. ‘I’d have said older. I didn’t mean to offend,’ she added quickly. ‘Only – there can’t be many young women out here.’
‘I didn’t really come here to meet women.’ A corner of his mouth twisted; there was a darker note in his voice which piqued her interest. ‘Quite the opposite, in fact.’
‘You came here to meet men?’
It took him a moment to spot the glint in her eye; he threw a cushion at her, laughing as she tried to duck. ‘That’s right – big fishermen and rig workers. I love an oilskin, me.’
‘And how’s that working out for you?’
He made a face. ‘I’m sick of the smell of herring, truth be told. And they’re away so much. I’m a herring widow.’
Zoe laughed and chucked the cushion back; he jerked his mug out of the firing line, too late, as tea sloshed over the upholstery. ‘Hey, watch the sofa! It’s a priceless heirloom.’
‘It’s definitely historic.’ Zoe rubbed the cheap brown fabric with a finger where the arms were worn shiny with use. Wind snarled down the chimney and worried the window frames; she thought she caught the bass note of distant thunder.
‘Should I light a fire?’ Edward glanced at her for approval; when she shrugged, to say she didn’t mind either way, he sprang to his feet and knelt in front of the hearth. ‘I usually sweep it out and leave it ready in the mornings, now the nights are getting colder,’ he remarked, over his shoulder, as he reached for logs from a basket to one side.
It was the sort of thing her grandmother might have said. Zoe watched his careful, methodical movements and found it suddenly unbearably touching – the thought