Never Go There Read online

  Contents

  About the Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Nuala – Friday, 17th November, 2017

  Emma – Friday, 17th November, 2017

  Maggie – Friday, 17th November, 2017

  Nuala – Saturday, 18th November, 2017

  Nuala – Saturday, 18th November, 2017

  Six months ago: Nuala – Thursday, 11th May, 2017

  Maggie – Saturday, 18th November, 2017

  Nuala – Saturday, 18th November, 2017

  Three months ago: Nuala – Tuesday, 23rd August, 2017

  Nuala – Saturday, 18th November, 2017

  Emma – Saturday, 18th November, 2017

  Maggie – Saturday, 18th November, 2017

  Two months ago: Nuala – Wednesday, 13th September, 2017

  Emma – Saturday, 18th November, 2017

  Nuala – Saturday, 18th November, 2017

  Seven years ago: Emma – Tuesday, 10th August, 2010

  Seven years ago: Emma – Tuesday, 10th August, 2010

  Seven years ago: Maggie – Tuesday, 10th August, 2010

  Nuala – Saturday, 18th November, 2017

  Two months ago: Nuala – Friday, 15th September, 2017

  Emma – Saturday, 18th November, 2017

  Nuala – Saturday, 18th November, 2017

  Emma – Saturday, 18th November, 2017

  Nuala – Saturday, 18th November, 2017

  Seven years ago: Maggie – Tuesday, 10th August, 2010

  Seven years ago: Maggie – Tuesday, 10th August, 2010

  Maggie – Saturday, 18th November, 2017

  Maggie – Sunday, 19th November, 2017

  Maggie – Monday, 20th November, 2017

  Seven years ago: Emma – Wednesday, 11th August, 2010

  Seven years ago: Emma – Wednesday, 11th August, 2010

  Maggie – Monday, 20th November, 2017

  Nuala – Tuesday, 21st November, 2017

  Maggie – Wednesday, 22nd November, 2017

  Seven years ago: Emma – Wednesday, 11th August, 2010

  Maggie – Friday, 24th November, 2017

  Nuala – Friday, 24th November, 2017

  Maggie – Monday, 11th December, 2017

  Maggie – Monday, 11th December, 2017

  Maggie – Tuesday, 12th December, 2017

  Nuala – Tuesday, 12th December, 2017

  Maggie – Tuesday, 12th December, 2017

  Maggie – Tuesday, 12th December, 2017

  6 months later: 7th June, 2018

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Rebecca Tinnelly lives amongst the twisted sessile oaks of the Somerset coast with her two children and two cats. No doubt fuelled by the stories she was told by her stepmother, a consultant pathologist, Rebecca is most interested in writing about the darker side of society and family life. After a successful career in sales, most recently selling wicker coffins, she waved goodbye to the office to pursue a career in writing. And, when not writing, enjoys baking the odd cake or two. Never Go There is her debut novel.

  www.hodder.co.uk

  First published in Great Britain in 2018 by Hodder & Stoughton

  An Hachette UK company

  Copyright © Rebecca Tinnelly 2018

  The right of Rebecca Tinnelly to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead is purely coincidental.

  A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library

  ISBN 978 1 473 66448 7

  Hodder & Stoughton Ltd

  Carmelite House

  50 Victoria Embankment

  London EC4Y 0DZ

  www.hodder.co.uk

  For Aoife and Ruadhán

  Prologue

  The metal is cold, her arms aching from the weight as she lifts it.

  In the window she sees herself, her hands gripping the object, her fingers in a claw. The moon seeps into the tableau from the black sky outside and obscures her features in the process, her face lost to the bright round orb. If she stepped forwards or back, she would see herself clearly, see the twist of her lips, the arch of her eyebrows, the tremble of her shoulders as she readies her arms.

  If the other woman looked up, looked up right now, she would see their reflection in the single-glazed window.

  But she doesn’t.

  The other woman stares, instead, at a Polaroid, held in her thin-fingered hands, her right thumb stroking the face of the man in the white-framed square.

  ‘Thank you,’ the other woman mutters, almost under her breath, and it’s not clear if she’s talking to her or to the man in the picture. ‘For giving me this, thank you.’ Her voice cracks at the end, on those difficult words.

  One hard hit should be enough to knock the woman clean out.

  She holds her breath.

  She is ready, calm.

  The other woman, the woman in front with the picture in her hands, moans. The sound is low, filled with longing, regret, her thumb still stroking that face.

  That face.

  That man.

  Her man.

  Her arms reach their summit, hands high above her head, wiry muscles taut, ready.

  The thud of her heart in her chest is so strong she’s sure the other woman can hear it.

  Her fingers tighten around the object in her hands, her pulse beating against the cold metal, beating out the rhythm of those words. The sides of her mouth turn down, her face setting in a foul grimace.

  A distant gunshot rings from the bleak hills outside, from lampers out hunting, the sound making the other woman lift her eyes to the window. Her gaze lands on their reflection.

  The other woman’s mouth freezes in an O.

  The first thump is clean, no mess, only noise.

  The blood comes with the second sharp blow, the face in the Polaroid now marked with a red spatter.

  Her hands lift and pound, lift and pound, opening the other woman’s head like a crushed, boiled egg.

  If she looks up she would see her reflection. She would see eyes wild, open and blue, her mouth a clenched mass of teeth, dripping with spit.

  But instead she looks down, at the head that’s no longer a head, her hands covered in the other’s blood, the man in the photograph smiling through the dark liquid.

  Her original plan, the idea of a clean death, is rendered obsolete. The idea that any of this could be clean is a bad joke.

  She can still make out his face, that face that’s been ceaselessly haunting her. She draws her arms up then back down, again and again and again until the Polaroid drowns in the other woman’s blood.

  She is oblivious to the world around her, to the noises outside, to the cheers and barks from the hunters on the hill as another rabbit is shot and killed.

  Her hands beat the metal through skin and through hair, through layers of skull, through the soft, squelching mass of pulped brain.

  The moon the only witness to what she has done.

  To what she has been driven to do.

  Nuala

  Friday, 17th November, 2017

  It wasn’t like she had imagined. The pictures online had been blue-skied
, not night-dark. The branches above her car, those thin wire fingers from the stunted oaks, hadn’t featured at all. But here they were – this was the road, the hill, the place.

  A crack and scrape of metal, a rock hitting the car’s underside. She wasn’t even driving on tarmac any more, just dirt, the creaking sound reminding her of the letter box opening that morning.

  She felt for the letter on the passenger seat, the paper already soft from re-reading despite having had it for just a few hours, her finger tracing the words in the dark.

  The trees were close, the half-moon hidden by their thin branches, twisting to meet each other inches above the car. She could feel the thud and bump of the aerial bristling against bark. No leaves, of course, not in November with the wind lashing the hill. She knew about that, the wind. But she had always, regardless of his warnings, expected sunshine. Her fault for leaving London so late in the day. Her fault for waiting until November when she should have come in May, but it had taken her months to stockpile the courage.

  Three miles to go, the Sat-Nav said. Nearly there.

  Too late to call on her now, especially as it was unexpected. She would have to wait, do it in the morning, in the blessed sunlight.

  At least there was somewhere she could stay. He had told her about the pub, about the woman there: his neighbour, friend, the woman he’d turn to when his mother’s attention got too much.

  That’s two people in the village who would welcome her. She was sure they would, even if she had come alone, ignoring his warnings about the kind of place this was. Not like London: the neighbours they used to nod to but never converse with, the endless hem of pavements, the anonymity. This place was different. Close was the word he had used, his mouth in a sneer as he spoke. Neighbours in each other’s business, in each other’s houses, lives. No privacy. No understanding. No desire to change.

  But surely it would have changed?

  Because places do change, people do change, in seven years. Even he would have admitted that, Nuala was sure of it.

  The moon shone through the car window, the wood behind her now, an expanse of night-grey grass in its place, a glint of dark sea in the distance.

  Nuala was here. Even if the letter had been addressed to him only, asking him to come, Nuala was here. She could already feel the arms around her, the press of a palm on her back and a ‘Come in, come in!’ The warm vapour of tea in the air. The insistence that she should stay, for as long as she wanted, needed.

  The moon vanished again, hiding behind a cloud this time, the reflected light dirty grey. And the road was sinking down.

  Two miles to go.

  The headlights caught a sign, low gear advised, the slope steep. The track lurched into the combe, winding between more stunted trees and barren hedges. A dip, a corner, and the road plummeted downhill.

  Nuala gripped the wheel, reduced her car to a crawl. No option for a low gear, not in an automatic, and she had visions of the car skidding down, gathering speed until the bitter end, when metal and glass would meld with the stunted oak trees and their writhing branches would claim her.

  But the wheels held true, the car slowed and the tyres gripped the road.

  The letter had slipped from the passenger seat and lay in the foot-well, shadowed. The envelope remained on the seat, showing his name above the address of the house they had shared in London, scrawled in a harsh, black hand and bearing the postmark of a town she had passed nearly an hour before.

  Nuala had Googled Taunton many times, so too the Quantocks, but the village she was heading for remained a stubborn mystery. The most she had found was a petition from the local newspaper, trying to force BT to install decent broadband for the residents. It had failed.

  The road carried on down, lower and lower until the bleak plateau seemed a dream. The trees became bigger, trunks thicker, branches heavy with dying leaves, protected from the wind by the banks of the combe.

  Everything looked bleak at night, that was all. In the sunlight it would be beautiful, just like she’d imagined, and the hills would protect Nuala, keep her safe, help her heal.

  But the road sank down and her gut went with it.

  Half a mile to go.

  The trees thinned, hedges remained, the road levelled out. The first house of the village lit up in the glare of the headlights. Cracked plaster, sagging thatch.

  She had reached her destination.

  She left her car at the side of the road, outside the house she had come all this way to visit. The clock on her dashboard read 7.30 p.m., but the lights in this house were all out. Nuala didn’t like to knock in the dark. A woman living on her own may not answer, and she needed that first impression to be a good one, considering the news she was bringing.

  She grabbed her bag, slipped the letter into her pocket. Her empty back pocket. Idiot. She’d forgotten her phone, again. Probably no reception here anyway, but the torch from the camera would have been useful. There wasn’t a single streetlight.

  She picked her way between piles of rotting leaves and horse shit, her boots made for pavements, not dirt. The moon, at least, was visible again but the wind had returned, nipping her through her jeans and sweater. No coat. Idiot.

  The road bent round and then there was the pub he’d told her about, spoken of fondly enough, for Nuala to know it was safe. That Maggie would be there, that she would surely look after Nuala just as she had looked after him.

  It looked more like a house than a bar, a small cottage with a sign above the door and lead hatching on the windows, the glass a warm red that told her a fire was lit somewhere inside. She had the urge to knock but held back, took a breath, and stepped in.

  The warmth hit her first, a wall of heat from the fire, sending her nose and eyes streaming, vision blurring. She could make out the shape of a man at a table, the orange glow from the hearth, a figure behind the bar. The smell of spilt ale, wood smoke and cider.

  ‘All right?’ A voice came from behind the beer taps.

  Nuala blinked her vision clear and sniffed, hiding her nose with her hand. The room was just as he’d described it. Low ceiling, small, stuffed with three chairs, the card table, a sleeper bolted to the wall in place of a bar and it was too much, too accurate, he should have been there with her.

  Why had she come alone? She needed him here, needed him to tell her what to do, what to say.

  ‘All right?’ Louder this time, impatient, and the woman at the bar was staring. Her hands, red and raw-looking, were drying glasses with a rag. Blond hair hung either side of her face, a face far younger than the state of her hands would imply, her top lip bitten between her teeth.

  Nuala had no idea who this woman was, there were no stories she fit into. She was expecting Maggie, older and greyer and fatter by far, not this young thing with thin arms and narrow shoulders, the small, pointed features of a nymph.

  Places change, she’d told herself. People change. What if too much had changed? What if none of it was as she’d been told?

  A cough from the man at the card table, a whiff in the air of stale clothes.

  ‘I was looking for a room …’ Nuala tried to stay steady but the heat, after the cold wind outside, made her body sway, pulse jump.

  The air was so damn close.

  The woman at the bar put the glass down, threw the rag on the floor out of sight. Her lips were tight together, brow furrowed and Nuala was sure she was about to say no, no you can’t, but then the woman sighed and rubbed the creases from her brow.

  ‘How long for?’ she asked Nuala.

  The man at the table got up, lumbered to the bar and Nuala noticed his feet, shod in work boots, were impossibly small. Size four, maybe five.

  ‘Just tonight,’ Nuala said, hoping it was true, hoping that, by tomorrow, she’d be somewhere else. Have someone else. That she hadn’t come all this way for nothing.

  ‘I’ll take you up.’ The voice came from the man, his back still to Nuala, the curls of his grey hair growing over the collar of his red p
laid shirt. His trousers were corduroy, a dirty, pale brown, and he was short, five foot three and an easy four stone overweight. He hid his mouth in the crook of his elbow, coughed into the fabric. ‘We’ve just the one room.’

  The voice was all wrong, the cough clearing the airway, making it softer. It wasn’t a man after all.

  Nuala had expected Maggie to wear florals and aprons, her hair short but femininely styled. She never pictured her wearing men’s clothing, never thought her grey hair would be so short at the sides, a curled mullet growing to the nape of her thick neck.

  ‘Give us your details, then I’ll take you up,’ Maggie said, turning around. And there was the scar he’d described, running from her cheek to her jaw bone and disappearing into the folds of her double chin.

  ‘Do you take credit cards?’ Nuala asked, searching in her bag for the wallet she knew was hiding inside, somewhere. Her fingers, still cold from outside, fumbled and missed, the wallet falling to the floor and skidding to a halt by the serving hatch. ‘I’m an idiot,’ she said, to herself more than Maggie. ‘Such an idiot.’

  ‘No, you’re not, it’s easily done.’ Maggie bent down and lifted the wallet, and offered it back with a smile, her scar creasing. ‘Cash only, don’t take cards.’ She nodded to the young woman behind the bar, who in turn looked up like a doe caught in headlights, ‘Give Emma your name and a tenner as deposit. Any bags?’

  Nuala thought of the baby clothes in bin bags at home, of the suitcases full of jumpers, coats, jeans she’d left behind in her London attic, two hundred miles away.

  ‘Just this one, I can handle it,’ she said, even though it was dragging her shoulder down, even though her heart sank at the reminder of the bags and bags of things she’d left behind.

  ‘Name?’ asked Emma, a blue-covered exercise book appearing on the wooden sleeper in front of her, pen poised above the empty page.

  The letter throbbed like a heart in Nuala’s pocket, her own pulse weak in comparison. Come back, it read, reminding her of why she was here, who she was here for, please come back to me.

  ‘Mrs James,’ she said, averting her gaze as Emma wrote it down.