Free A Cry in the Night by Tom Grieves Page B

until he was sure that Alby was back inside. He looked up again and the sun was lower, the peaks were no longer illuminated. He imagined his wife, sat at the table in that airless room, and for the first time,imagined her plotting about things he didn’t understand. He looked up again at the peaks. Their majesty seemed tarnished. Right now they were just dirty silhouettes against a fading sky.

SIXTEEN
    ‘Sarah Downing seemed nice enough when we met her,’ said Zoe, watching Sam throw stones into the lake.
    ‘Nice? Is that what you thought of her?’ Sam said as he scrabbled amongst the rocks, discarding pebbles that were the wrong shape or size.
    ‘Well, no, not “nice”. But not a child killer.’
    The stones hit the water and were swallowed up. She watched him lumber about before finally turning to her.
    ‘You’re unhappy,’ he said. She shrugged an acknowledgement back at him. ‘Okay, let’s go through it again,’ he said, and waited for her to take the lead.
    ‘Arthur and Lily leave school but don’t go home. Why?’
    ‘Because of Sarah’s temper, perhaps.’ Sam said. ‘Like Bud told you.’
    ‘Maybe they just wanted to play.’
    She bent down and scooped up a couple of pebbles herself.
    ‘What was the weather like on the day?’ Sam asked.
    ‘Dull, but not rainy.’
    She looked around. It was dull today as well. The kind where the cloud hangs thick and low. It was quiet and the lake was dead calm. The wind would cause tiny flurries across its surface, but the further you looked out, the more it felt like someone had placed a steel lid on top of it. She threw her stones and felt a little weak at how much further Sam’s flew.
    ‘I suppose it could have been both,’ she conceded.
    ‘Okay. But their mother was expecting them home.’
    ‘That’s what she said.’
    ‘So they’re a bit naughty and come down here …’
    Sam walked around, trying to recreate the scene. It felt, to both of them, a little bit fruitless. Zoe tried to help out.
    ‘So they come down … disappear … a bit later some of those teenagers come down looking to buy some drugs, and then Sarah appears and sees her son’s bike. After that we have a lot of shouting and running about.’
    ‘With the husband and Bud in tow,’ Sam added.
    ‘And for some reason, she then retells the story and tries to airbrush him out of it.’
    ‘Stupid of her.’
    ‘That’s people for you,’ she said. ‘And the local police didn’t pick it up. Hardly picked up anything at all, did they?’
    But Sam wasn’t buying. She threw another stone and was pleased as it skimmed across the surface, further than before.
    ‘So the kids came down to score?’ she asked.
    ‘Yeah.’
    ‘From who? We need to find the dealer.’
    ‘They said there was no dealer,’ Sam said. ‘It was all a blowout.’
    ‘We should still find out who they get their gear from anyway – it could be important.’
    ‘You’re right. Good thinking.’
    Sam dutifully wrote it down and Zoe felt pleased with herself.
    ‘Anyway, we all know that the witches did it,’ she added.
    ‘You got that too, did you?’
    They laughed at the way that they were constantly mentioned; the way no one really believed a word, yet were unable to dismiss them entirely, like some form of voodoo. Sam told her the story he’d heard, having been collared by an old man outside the pub.
    ‘Apparently there were a bunch of them, six or so women who got drunk on mead or wasted on mushrooms or something. Anyway, they went mad, off their tits, and led a bunch of children into the woods. They lit a fire and then started to roast them, one by one, claiming they were pigs for a feast or something. Fortunately one of the kids got away and some guy called John Stern, who was a farrier or something, he came down and saved them all.’
    ‘What happened to the women?’
    ‘They drowned themselves.’
    ‘What?’
    ‘Story is the women went crazy, like lemmings jumping off a cliff or something. They