THREE

Before she headed back to Little Malvern, to tell Leonard about her extraordinary find, Catherine detoured to a place she was once very familiar with, Ellyll Fields, or ‘The Hell’. A village between Green Willow and Hereford, where she’d endured the first six years of her life. A place she’d never returned to and had tried to forget. Because the scene of the abduction and probable murder of a child she had known well was a part of the world she’d not felt inclined to revisit in the following thirty-two years of her life. The thought alone of returning had always been enough to make her feel sick. When visiting clients in Herefordshire, she’d even become adept at not seeing that part of the page in her road atlas.

This afternoon would mark a return to a time in her life she’d never shared with anyone besides three therapists and her parents. That morning, for an unpleasant moment, merely driving close to ‘The Hell’ to get to Green Willow had felt like a trap. And a fate predestined. One she had hitherto suppressed. But as advised by her most recent counselling, returning to the scene would reveal the place to be innocuous and bereft of the poignancy of her lingering childhood dread.

She had been prepared by a cognitive behavioural specialist to identify and repel outbreaks of paranoia. Which she duly did, because coincidence was rarely conspiracy. She knew her feelings about her birthplace were irrational. And these days, she had to keep in mind, the distant part of her memory that ‘The Hell’ occupied only really intruded upon her thoughts when she was confronted by compatibly tragic news stories about missing children or bullying.

Despite her own reassurances, and those of others, for the first time since she began working for Leonard Osberne, she wished her boss was able-bodied. Were he not confined to a wheelchair Leonard could have attended to the Mason account in person and she could have maintained her distance from ‘The Hell’.

She’d never seen Leonard so excited about the prospect of a new account either. ‘This could be big, my girl. If Edith has any of her uncle’s work still hanging around out there, we’ll probably make the papers. And I’m not talking about the locals. Didn’t I promise I’d make you a star! You wouldn’t get this kind of work in London.’

Running away was rarely graceful, or even satisfactory, and Catherine’s departure from London still harnessed the power to warm her with shame, and occasionally freeze her with panic. Reliving the memory of a particular incident that ruined her professionally in the capital still stretched her mental resources beyond a healthy tension. Only once she’d reached her parents’ house in Worcester, eighteen months before, did she feel she’d passed beyond the range of her enemies in London, along with the unfortunate reputation she’d fled. But her afternoon in Green Willow and her current journey to Ellyll Fields forced her to acknowledge that by leaving London and coming home, she’d moved back within range of the unhappiest period of her life: the beginning. As if she had been driven back by one of the unconscious compulsions her therapists had been so keen to reveal as a mainstay in her life.

Catherine tried to stayed focussed on the road, but wondered again if her childhood unhappiness had been the reason she’d gone to a university in Scotland, and then to another three distant cities to work after graduation. That she’d spent her entire adult life running from ‘The Hell’.

But here you are, girl.

She picked up the A road that would lead her into Ellyll Fields, and her feelings immediately smouldered beneath a messy collage of actual recollections and her memories of photographs from family albums. And in the anxious mix came a force of apprehension that made her breathless.

But she could not deny she was strangely excited to be going back there too. Excitement that felt reckless. An unstable desire to revisit a strangeness in her childhood that she considered the only relief in a thoroughly miserable introduction to life.