I dropped my gaze to the photos so I didn’t have to maintain eye contact. ‘No,’ I said. ‘If anyone’s walking around the curraghs, they either know where they’re going, or they stick to the main paths.’
‘Does anyone ever get lost in there?’ Cora seemed to have a direct way of asking questions which, honestly, was preferable to Dallin’s habit of skirting around every issue. She fished a pencil out of her satchel and held it poised over the maps.
‘Depends what you mean by lost.’ I picked up my mug of mint tea, which I’d left sitting on the side. ‘Now and again someone wanders off the trail. Last year a group of ramblers on a wildflower walk got distracted trying to follow a wallaby. It took them an hour to find their way back.’
Cora’s lips twitched in a frown as she glanced at Dallin. ‘So there really are wild wallabies here?’
‘Told you so,’ Dallin said. He stirred a hefty spoonful of demerara sugar into his tea. ‘You owe me a tenner.’
‘Forgive me for not believing such a weirdly specific bit of trivia.’ Cora looked at me again. ‘How big are the marshlands anyway? It doesn’t look like much on the photos.’
‘It’s not, I guess.’ I was trying to figure out whether our house was on the photos. It was difficult to tell from the aerial shots. ‘It’s not the biggest area of forest on the island, not by a very long way. But it’s easy to get lost in there. It’s—’ My throat went dry. How to describe the curraghs to an outsider? Looking at those maps and photos, it was difficult to imagine how anyone, even a child, could lose their way in such a small patch of land.
‘Are you able,’ Cora asked, ‘to narrow it down at all? When you found the body, do you know roughly where you were? Even as little as, “more to the north” or “more to the south”?’
I chewed my lip. ‘Listen, I don’t know what you’re expecting from me. But I was a kid. I don’t even know – I’m not certain what I saw.’ I closed my eyes. For so many years I’d insisted on telling the truth, even when no one believed me. Now, with a person who for some crazy reason did believe me, I couldn’t come up with a convincing lie.
But I had to try. Because, as I knew perfectly well, no hope was better than false hope.
‘Sometimes,’ I said slowly, ‘you have to accept that what you think you saw isn’t necessarily what you did see. Especially when you’re a child. People searched the curraghs. I searched. No one found anything.’ I lifted my chin and shook the stray wisps of hair out of my face. ‘I was mistaken. There’s nothing here for you to find. I’m sorry.’
A few seconds passed in silence. Then Cora said, ‘Thank you.’
‘For what?’
‘For being honest. There’s been a lot of people over the years who’ve been happy to spin me a story, for whatever reason.’ Despite the way she held herself with hunched shoulders and restless fingers, there was steel in Cora’s gaze. ‘Some people will do anything for attention.’
Dallin took a tentative sip of his tea; grimaced. ‘Rosie, you’ve stuck to your story for fifteen solid years,’ he said. ‘This is a fine time to start doubting yourself.’
I glared at him. ‘Please stop calling me Rosie.’
‘Oh, right. You hate that.’ He smirked. ‘I totally forgot.’
Cora studied the maps. ‘Is there anything you can tell us which wasn’t on forum? Any details we might’ve missed?’
I pulled up a chair and sat down, suddenly exhausted. My heart went out to the poor woman. ‘I can’t help you find your sister,’ I repeated. ‘Even if what I saw when I was a kid … even if I wasn’t dreaming or hallucinating or—’ I set my jaw. ‘—or making it up. Even if I really did find a human skeleton that day, there’s very little possibility there’s anything left of it by now. It could’ve sunk into the bog without a trace. The bones could’ve been scattered.’ I watched Cora as I spoke, anxious not to cause more upset than I had to. ‘I’ve spent a lot of time trying to find it again. I never have. Neither has anyone else. There’s every chance there’s nothing out there to find. I can’t lead you to your sister.’
Cora nodded. She took a breath in through her nose and out through her mouth. ‘I know. I understand.’
‘Okay.’ I thought about reaching for her hand, to give it a reassuring squeeze. But I’d never been good at spontaneous human contact. ‘So?’
‘I’m still going to look for her.’ Cora glanced at me. That smile flickered again; somehow soft and steely at the same time. ‘Nothing can stop me.’
In that moment, I completely believed her. ‘I’m sorry I can’t help,’ I said. ‘I just don’t remember. I don’t know if I was near the south end of the curraghs or the north end.’
Cora produced a plastic ruler from her bag and started measuring distances on the photos, comparing them to an Ordnance Survey map. ‘I’ll search every inch of that place if I have to,’ she said. ‘I’m not leaving until I’m certain whether or not my sister was here.’
‘Really?’
Cora pushed her hands across the maps to smooth them flat. ‘I’m going to search this swamp from one end to the other, one square metre at a time, until I’ve covered the whole damn lot. I’ll start along the north edge here, work west to east, east to west, moving south with each sweep.’
I leaned over the maps, letting myself see them properly for the first time. Someone – presumably Cora – had drawn a grid over the top of the maps and the photos. Each small square was numbered. The ones at the very perimeter of the curraghs were shaded pale yellow, as was a section in the north-west corner.
‘We can probably discount those areas,’ Cora said, following my gaze along the yellow squares. ‘You were found coming out of the trees on the eastern side of the road, so you can’t have been in this north-west section, otherwise you would’ve had to cross the road. And, from what you’ve said, it sounds like you weren’t on the edge of the swamp. You would’ve noticed, right, if there were fields instead of trees in front of you?’
I nodded. ‘There were trees all around. When I found the skeleton, I stood up and looked around. Like, I don’t know, like maybe someone was there who could’ve helped.’ That’s what you do when you’re a kid, even if you know for one hundred per cent certain that no one’s there except you. ‘I looked around, and there were trees on all sides. No farmland.’
Cora nodded, pleased. ‘And, how far can you see when you’re in the thick of it? Ten feet, twenty feet? More? Less?’
‘It depends where you are. If there’s lots of undergrowth you might not see more than five or ten feet in front of you. If the trees are thin, you can see quite some distance. Fifty, a hundred feet. It depends.’
Cora nodded again. She leaned over the pictures and started making pencil marks on one of the photos.
I was forced to re-evaluate the woman. I’d jumped to the assumption that she’d come here with nothing more than false hopes and unreal expectations. But it looked like she’d done her homework. She’d researched maps and photos, several of which were new to me, despite my living here for most of my adult life. Cora was as prepared as anyone was likely to get.
Watching her, hunched over the maps, I couldn’t suppress a twinge of excitement. If anyone could do this, it might be her.
I tried to smother my hope. ‘When I found it, there was nothing left but bones,’ I said. ‘It will have broken down a lot more since then. We could walk right over it and see nothing. Plus,’ I sighed, ‘I mean, really I might’ve been mistaken. It could’ve been a sheep skeleton for all I know. Or it could’ve been hundreds of years old, someone who was buried on the land and the grave forgotten about, then the tree roots shoved it to the surface. You