The Fire Child: The 2017 gripping psychological thriller from the bestselling author of The Ice Twins

149 Days Before Christmas

Lunchtime

‘Verdejo, sir?’

David Kerthen nodded at the waiter. Why not drink? It was Friday lunchtime, and he was already en route home, for once ending work early, instead of at ten in the evening. So today he could drink. By the time the plane landed at Newquay he would have sobered up. There was barely any chance of being caught by the police on the A30 anyway. The Cornish police could often be spectacularly inept.

The drink might, also, allow him to forget. Last night, for the third night in a row, he’d dreamt of Carnhallow. This time he’d dreamt of Nina wandering the rooms, alone, and naked.

She used to do that a lot: walk naked about the house. She found it erotic, as he found it erotic: the contrast of her pale skin with the monastic stone or the Azeri rugs.

Sipping his Verdejo, David remembered the night they came back from their honeymoon. She’d stripped and they’d danced: she was naked and he was in his suit and the champagne was ferociously cold. They’d rolled back the carpets in the New Hall to make the dancing easier, he had put an arm around her slender waist, one hand clasped in another. And then she’d slipped from that grasp, running away from him, shadowed and arousing, disappearing into the darker corridors, a blur of youthful nudity.

The memories killed him. Their early happiness had been overgenerous. The sex was always too compulsive. It still gave him bad dreams, charged with a tragic desire or a child-like neediness, followed by regret.

He checked his watch: 1.30. Oliver was late. Their table was half empty, yet the dark, plutocratic Japanese restaurant was conspicuously full.

Unbuttoning his suit jacket, David looked around, taking the mood of Mayfair, checking the oil of London. The wealth of modern London was gamey: the city was marbled with success. You could smell the opulence, and it wasn’t always nice. But it was heady, and it was necessary. Because David was a beneficiary of London’s commercial triumph. As a fashionable QC he got a regular table at Nobu, a sleek office in the serene Georgian streets of Marylebone and, best of all, a half-million-pound salary, with which he could restore Carnhallow.

But they certainly made him work for it. The hours were grim. How long could he keep it up? Ten years? Fifteen?

Right now he needed more alcohol. So he sipped the Verdejo, alone.

David didn’t like being alone at lunch. It reminded him of the days after Nina’s fall. The dismal, solitary meals in the old Dining Room, with his mother self-exiled to her granny flat, refusing to talk. David winced internally as he recalled the eagerness with which he had returned to work after the funeral. Leaving his mother and the housekeeper to look after Jamie in the week. He had, in effect, run away. Because he simply couldn’t face the way all the different emotions had combined into a symphony of remorse. London had been his escape.

Draining the wine glass, David gestured for a refill. As he did, he noticed Oliver, striding to the table.

‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘I had a meeting that dragged. At least we are fashionably late?’

‘Yep, a week after they lost their Michelin star.’

Oliver smiled, pulled out a seat. ‘It doesn’t, ah, seem to have affected business much.’

‘Have a glass, you look as if you need it.’

‘I do, I do. Sss! Why did I join the civil service? I thought I would be serving the country, but it turns out I am serving a cabal of halfwits. Politicians. Can we have the black cod?’

The waiter was attending, fingers poised over tablet.

David knew the menu by heart. ‘Inaniwa pasta with lobster, bluefin tuna tataki. And that cabbage thing, with miso.’

The waiter nodded.

Oliver said, ‘We really have been friends for too long. You know exactly what I want. Like a bloody wife.’ He raised a glass, ceremonially.

David was happy to join in, to toast their friendship. Oliver was the only friend he still kept from Westminster School, and he treasured the sheer longevity of their relationship. They’d been so close for so long they now shared a form of private language. Like one of those obscure languages spoken by two people in New Guinea. If one of them died, an entire tongue would be lost, with all its secret histories, its metaphors and memories.

The third member of their trio was already dead. Edmund. Another lawyer. Gay. The three of them had formed a gang at school. A trio of conspirators.

So here they were, twenty-three years later, sharing their ancient schoolyard jokes. And talking about Rachel.

‘It’s just that,’ Oliver sat back, his round face slightly flushed from the toil of eating a three-hundred-pound lunch. ‘Well, I didn’t expect it to get so far, so fast.’

‘But you got us together.’

‘Well, I know I introduced you, yes. And I also knew that you’d like her.’

‘And how did you know that?’

‘She’s smart. She’s petite. She’s very ornamental.’ Oliver dabbed his lips with a napkin. ‘I think God designed her for you.’

‘So why the surprise?’

Oliver shrugged. ‘I rather presumed that you would do your normal thing.’

‘Which is?’

‘Sleep with her, get a little bored, move on to the next.’

David sighed. ‘Christ. You make me sound terrible. Am I really that bad?’

‘You’re not evil, just annoyingly successful with women. I’m jealous, that’s all.’

‘Well, stop. I only do it on medical advice. They say multiple partners reduce rates of prostate cancer.’

Oliver laughed, and ate the last morsel of poussin yasai zuke. He shook his head. ‘But, ah, Rachel Daly turned out to be different. Of all the women you’ve bedded. Rachel Daly. And you married her within a month.’

David sat back, swirling his Verdejo. ‘Eight weeks, actually. But it was a bit quick.’

‘Putting it mildly.’

‘But I really did fall for her, Oliver. Is that so implausible? And she got on so well with Jamie. It felt entirely right.’ David scanned his friend’s face for a hidden meaning. ‘Are you implying it was too soon – after Nina?’

‘No,’ Oliver shook his head, emphatically, maybe awkwardly. ‘No no no. Of course not. It’s more that Rachel is so, well, different to your usual girlfriends.’

‘You mean she’s working class.’

‘No, I mean she’s underclass. You do know where she came from?’

‘The rookeries of Plumstead. The favelas of Tooting Bec. What does it matter?’

‘It doesn’t, not really. It’s more that it’s such a leap. She’s so very different to Nina. I mean she looks similar, that elfin face, that gamine quality you always go for, but in every other way—’

‘But that’s the point.’ David leaned forward. ‘That’s one of the reasons I fell in love with Rachel, so quickly. She’s different.’ He was talking slightly too loudly now, his talk fuelled by wine. But he didn’t care. ‘All those nice girls from Notting Hill, from Paris and Manhattan – Rachel is superbly different to all that. She’s had experiences I can’t imagine. She has opinions I never hear, she has ideas I could never expect, she is also a survivor, she’s been through serious shit, yet come out of it intact, intelligent, funny.’ He paused. ‘And, yes, she is sexy.’

The table was silenced. David wanted to say: She’s almost as sexy as Nina, she’s the only woman I’ve met who might actually one day compare to Nina, but he didn’t. Because he didn’t want to think about Nina. Instead he ordered two Tokays.

Oliver smiled affably. ‘I suppose you and Rachel have also got things in common.’

‘You mean both our fathers were bastards, and we’re both clearly and ridiculously impulsive.’

‘No, I was thinking that – you’re both a little fucked up.’

‘Ah.’ David laughed. ‘Yes. Possibly the case. But damaged girls are better in bed.’

‘Sweet.’

‘Though the same surely applies to men. Maybe that’s why I was good at womanizing. I’ve got issues.’ David looked across the restaurant at a young family. At a laughing child, happy with his parents. His words came as a reflex. ‘God, I miss Jamie.’

Oliver offered a sympathetic smile. David summoned the waiter, and asked for the bill. Their wine glasses glittered subtly in the low restaurant light.

Oliver sat back. ‘Is it worse, missing kids? Worse than missing girlfriends, or partners? I wouldn’t know.’

David shook his head. ‘Trust me. It’s worse. And the worst of it is, there’s nothing you can do. Even when you do have a nice time with your kids, it makes you regret how you should have done more of the same in the past. Having a kid is like an industrial revolution of the emotions. Suddenly you can mass produce worry, and guilt.’

‘Well, at least you’ll see him tonight.’

David brightened. ‘I will. It’s the weekend. Thank God.’

The lunch over, they wandered out into a bright, soft afternoon, into London at its most benign: the plane trees of Piccadilly caging the city sunlight in softening green. Shaking hands, and slapping backs, Oliver walked off to St James and David headed the other way, tipsily grabbing a cab to his office in Marylebone, picking up his weekend case, and then taking the same taxi, for Heathrow.

But as the traffic stalled through Hammersmith, the good buzz of the booze began to ebb. The bad thoughts came back, the wearying yet unavoidable anxieties.

Jamie. His beloved son.

It wasn’t just that he missed Jamie: it was the fact that the boy was behaving strangely, again. Not as badly as the first terrible months after Nina’s funeral, but there was definitely something amiss. And it was seriously dismaying. David had hoped that bringing Rachel to Carnhallow would mark a new chapter in their lives, would definitively draw an emotional line under it all, let them move into the brighter light of the future, but that hadn’t happened. Jamie was, if anything, regressing. The latest of his letters, to his mother – which David had found in his son’s room just last week – was particularly disturbing.

A quiet panic made David loosen his tie, as if he was being physically choked in the back of the taxi. If only he could tell someone he might at least feel unburdened. But he couldn’t tell anyone, not his new wife, not his oldest friends, not even Oliver – as the lunch had proved. Edmund was the only one who’d known it all. And now Edmund was gone, and David was alone. David was the only one who knew the truth.

Except, perhaps, for Jamie himself.

And there again was the source of David’s ongoing torment. How much did his son know? What had she told him? What had the boy seen, or heard?

David looked out at the endless traffic. It had now come to a complete stop. Like blood frozen in the veins.

136 Days Before Christmas

The August sun is bright, the distant sea like beaten tin. David is taking me walking, on the final day of his summer break. This Sunday hike will lead us, David says, away from all the tourists, high up on to the peak of the Penwith moors.

David is in jeans, jumper, boots. He turns and grasps my hand to help me over a granite stile. Then we walk on. He is telling me some of the history of Carnhallow, Penwith, West Cornwall.

‘Nanjulian, that means the valley of hazels. Zawn Hanna means the murmuring cove, but you know that. Carn Lesys is the carn of light—’

‘Gorgeous. Carn of light!’

‘Maen Dower, that’s stone near the water. Porthnanven, port of the high valley.’

‘And Carnhallow means rocks on a moor. Right?’

He smiles, his sharp white teeth framed by a holiday tan and dark stubble. When he goes a few days without shaving, David can look decidedly piratical. He only needs a thick gold earring and a cutlass. ‘Rachel Kerthen. You’ve been at the library!’

‘Can’t help it. Love reading! And don’t you want me to know all this stuff?’

‘Of course. Of course. But I like telling you things, too. It makes me feel useful when I come home. And if you know everything’ – he shrugs, happily – ‘what will I have left to say?’

‘Oh, I’m sure you’ll never run out of things to say.’

He laughs.

I go on, ‘I also looked up Morvellan: that means milling sea, right?’

A nod. ‘Or villainous sea. Possibly.’

‘But “Mor” is definitely sea, right? The same root as in Morvah.’

‘Yes. Mor-vah. Sea grave. It’s from all the people that died, in shipwrecks.’

I can barely hear his answer: I have to run, slightly, to keep up with him as we stride between the heather and furze. David forgets he is so much taller than me, and therefore walks much faster than I do. His idea of a stiff hike is more like my idea of a jog.

Now he pauses, to let me catch up; then we stride on, breathing deeply. The moorland air is scented with coconut from the sunwarmed gorse. To me it’s the smell of Bounty bars, the coconut-and-chocolate sweets I rarely got as a kid.

‘Actually, that name always creeps me out,’ I say. ‘Morvah.’

‘Yes. And the landscape doesn’t help – all those brooding rocks, next to the wildness of the waves. There’s a famous line from a travel book which describes that bit of road: ‘the landscape reaches a crescendo of evil at Morvah’. Very apt. Hold on, another stile. Give me your hand.’

Together we jump the warm stone stile, and continue down the dried-out mud of the footpath. We’ve barely had rain in the two weeks of David’s summer holiday. It’s been an almost flawless fortnight of sunshine. And David has been equally perfect – loving, charming, generous: taking me to local pubs, buying me wine in the Lamorna Wink, and fresh crab sandwiches in riverside Restronguet. Introducing me to his rich, yacht-owning friends in St Mawes and Falmouth, introducing me to the hidden caves of Kynance Cove, where we made love like teenagers, with sand in our hair, and little seashells on my tingling skin, and then his dark, muscled arms, turning me over.

It’s been lovely. And for this reason I’ve stayed silent about my doubts. I haven’t mentioned Jamie’s odd behaviour, the staring, the silence, that odd dream about blood on my hands, and a hare. I haven’t wanted to fracture our summery happiness with some vague misgivings. The dream, I have decided, must have derived from Jamie’s traumas, his grief. The silences are the confusion of a child getting used to a new stepmother, such a painful transition. I want to share this pain, and so dilute it.

Besides, all three of us have had a happy time this last fortnight. David’s continued presence has apparently calmed Jamie down. I have brilliant memories of David, Jamie and myself, these past two weeks, walking the coastal paths at Minack, watching the seabirds playing with the waves, or lying in the warm clifftop grass, sharing picnic sandwiches, admiring sea-pinks on the way home.

Today, however, it’s me and David. Jamie’s friend Rollo has a birthday party. Cassie is picking him up later. I’ve got precious time alone with my husband, before he goes back to work. Before the perfect summer ends.

We are still talking about language. I want to know more. ‘So did you ever try to learn Cornish?’

‘God, no,’ he says, striding along the stony path. ‘A dead language. What’s the point? If Cornishness survives as a culture it won’t be because they revive the language, it’ll be the people. Always the people.’ He gestures at the weathered scenery, the eroded boulders, the stunted trees. ‘You know these little paths were made by the miners? They would walk for hours over the moors, through the woods and heather.’ He is facing away from me now, talking into the cooling breeze. ‘Imagine that life: stumbling through the dark, walking to the mineshafts, across the cliffs. Then climbing down hundreds of fathoms, for an hour – then crawling for a mile under the sea, and digging the tin from the rocks all day.’ He shakes his head, like he is doubting it himself. ‘And all the time they could hear the ocean boulders rolling above them in the storms; and sometimes the seas would break through, pouring into the tunnels—’ He stares wildly, at the sky. ‘And then they would try to run, but the sea usually claimed them. Dragged them back, sucked them in. Hundreds of men, over hundreds of years. And all the time my people, the Kerthens, we sat in Carnhallow. Eating capons.’

I gaze his way. Not sure what to say. He goes on:

‘And you want to know something else?’

‘Uhm. Yes?’

‘According to my mother, on really quiet summer evenings, when the stamps were silent, and the family was in the Yellow Drawing Room, sipping their claret, they could hear the picks of the miners half a mile beneath them. Working the tin that paid for the wine.’

His face is shadowed by a passing cloud. I have that urge to heal him, as I want to heal his son. And perhaps I can try. Coming close, I stroke his face and kiss him, gently. He looks at me, and shrugs, as if to say: What can I do?

The answer, of course, is nothing.

Clasping hands, we stride uphill, nearing the highest point of the moors. Here is another ruined mine, with noble arches, like a Norman church.

Regaining my breath after the climb, I lean a hand on the fine brickwork of the Engine House. The view is magnificent. I can see much of West Cornwall: the dark vivid green of the woods surrounding Penzance, the grey road snaking to Marazion, and the dreaming mysteries of the Lizard. And of course the vast metallic dazzle of the sea around St Michael’s Mount. The tide is in.

‘Ding Dong mine,’ David says, slapping the sparkling granite wall. ‘Reputedly the oldest in Cornwall. It was said to have been worked by the Romans, and before them the Phoenicians. Or maybe the fairies. Shall we sit down, out of the wind? I’ve brought strawberries.’

‘Why thank you, Mr D’Urberville.’

He chuckles. We sit down together on a rug from David’s rucksack. We are in the lee of the high moorland breeze, protected by the Engine House at our backs. The sun casts vivid warmth on my face.

A couple of hikers in lurid blue windcheaters are navigating a valley below. Otherwise we are alone. David gives me a strawberry from a plastic punnet.

I snuggle closer to my husband. Here is a lovely moment. Us, alone, together: in the sun.

He says, abruptly, ‘Don’t worry about Jamie.’

My heartbeat quickens. If there was ever a time to mention it, to speak out, this is it. But I don’t want to hurt or upset David. I’m not sure I have anything important to say, so I shall say nothing direct.

‘Jamie is still grieving, isn’t he? That’s why he is kind of distant sometimes?’

David sighs. ‘Of course.’

My husband slings a protective arm around my neck. ‘It’s not even been two years … And it was horrific as well as confusing. So he can be absent, or distracted, but he’s getting better. He’s been good these last two weeks. Please don’t worry about it. He will come to love you, and accept you.’

‘I don’t worry.’

David up-tilts my chin with a hand, as if he is going to kiss my lips; instead he kisses my forehead.

‘Are you sure, Rachel?’

‘Sure I’m sure! He’s a lovely boy. Angelic. Fell for him the moment I first saw him.’ I smile and kiss David on his lips. ‘In fact, it was when I met him that I began to really fall for you.’

‘Not when you saw pictures of Carnhallow, then?’

‘Oh. Listen. Funny man. Idiot.’

We fall companionably silent. David sucks a strawberry, and tosses the green stalk into the grass.

‘When I was a boy we used to come up here, my cousins and I, during the summer holidays. When my father was away in London.’ He pauses, then adds, ‘I think that was the happiest time of my childhood.’

I squeeze his hand, listening.

‘Endless summers. That’s what I remember, endless summer days. We’d go down to Penberth, beachcombing, looking for driftwood, old masts, crab-pots, Korean pickle packets. Anything.’ He hugs me as he talks. ‘The sea has a unique colour, at Penberth. Kind of a transparent emerald. I think it’s the pale yellow of the sand, seen through the blueness, the unpolluted waters. And there would be these amazing sunsets. Tingeing the hills and rocks with gold, filling the valleys with this purple glow. And I’d look at the shadows of me and my cousins, on the beach, the shadows getting longer and longer – going on for ever, until they were lost in the warmth, and the haze, and the midsummer dark. And then we knew it was time to go back to Carnhallow, for supper, heading home for cold meats and hot drop scones. Or strawberries and clotted cream in the kitchen. With the windows thrown open to the stars. And I was blissfully happy, because I knew my father was away in London.’

I am surprised, and touched. David is a lawyer, he can be very eloquent, but he seldom talks like this.

‘Were you really that lonely, the rest of the time?’

‘In the holidays, no. But the rest of the time? Yes. Before I toughened up.’

‘Why? How?’

‘They sent me to boarding school, Rachel, at eight years old. And there was no reason to send me away, Mummy wasn’t working. It was simply his choice. He had one son, one child – and he sent me away.’

‘Why?’

‘That’s the worst of it, I don’t really fucking know. Because he was jealous of the bond between my mother and me? Because he was bored with having me around? Mummy wanted me to stay, and there are plenty of good day schools in Cornwall. Perhaps he did it to hurt her. A pure act of sadism. And now he’s dead. So I will never know.’ He hesitates, but not for long. ‘I sometimes think the best thing a parent can do is live long enough for the children to grow up, so the kids are old enough to ask their parents, How the fuck could you get it so wrong?’

Another strawberry. Another stalk, hurled into the grass. The sun is dipping its chin in the west, turning rags of cloud to purpled gold. Some of those clouds look ominous, anvil-shaped: a summer storm, perhaps. Storms come so fast in West Cornwall, summer idylls to brutal squalls in bare minutes.

‘On clear days you can see the Scilly Isles from here,’ David says. ‘I must take you there one day. They’re beautiful, the light is marvellous. The Islands of the Blest. The pagan afterworld.’

‘I’d love that.’

He eats half of the last strawberry, then turns, and gives it to me, lifting it to my mouth. A strawberry taken from his hand. I eat the strawberry, taste its lurid sweetness. Then he says, ‘One day, perhaps, you could tell me about your childhood?’

I try not to flinch at this.

He goes on, ‘I know you’ve told me a bit of it. You’ve told me about your father, the way he treated your mother, but you haven’t told me much more.’ He looks at me, unblinking, perhaps seeing the anxiety in my expression. ‘Sorry. Talking about my past – it made me think of yours. You don’t have to tell me anything, darling, if you don’t want.’

I look at him, also unblinking. And I feel a huge desire to yield, and confess. Yet I am blocked, as always. Can’t tell, mustn’t tell. If I do tell everything, he might shun me. Won’t he?

David strokes my face. ‘Sorry, sweetheart. I shouldn’t have asked.’

‘No.’ I stand up, brushing grass from myself. ‘Don’t be sorry. You should want to know, you’re my husband. And one day I will tell you.’

I want this to be true. I so want this to be true. I want to tell him everything, from my tainted entrance into university to the dissolving of my family. I will tell everything.

One day. But not today, I don’t think. Not here and now.

Does David detect my sadness? Apparently not. Brisk and confident, he gets to his feet, and tilts his head to the west. To those darkening clouds, busily turning blue to black. ‘Come on, we’d better get going, before the rains kick in. I told Alex I’d have a quick drink with him at the Gurnard’s, last chance before I go back to work. You can drop me off.’