When She Was Bad (25 page)

It seemed almost incredible to recall it now, but a few short weeks ago, work had been just another part of Sarah’s life. Now it was as if the office was her
whole
life. It was the first thing she thought of when she woke up and the last thing on her mind before she went to sleep. The sick feeling never left her, that churning sense of imminent confrontation, of being always at fault and one step away from being caught out. It had got so that Oliver and Sam and Joe were like bit players in her life, secondary to her co-workers and, more particularly, Rachel. ‘Get her out of here,’ Oliver had taken to saying, tapping the side of her head when he saw her gazing anxiously at nothing, knowing she was consumed with thoughts of her new boss. Sarah had always struggled with authority and Rachel’s abrasive managerial style left her nerves permanently shredded.

No one was talking to her and she couldn’t entirely blame them. She knew everyone had had to shoulder more work when she’d been on maternity leave with Sam, despite the promise of extra cover. She remembered what it had been like when Paula had been off for six weeks when her mother died – how they’d all had to divvy up her workload between them. Even though there’d been quiet rumblings about how so and so had managed to do a specific task in half the time Paula normally took, or how someone else had restructured the way Paula normally did something to make it twice as efficient, still they’d all been overworked and couldn’t wait for her to come back. So she could understand their ambivalence about her news, but people were allowed to have children, weren’t they? Surely it was a fundamental right?

Most hurtful of all was Charlie’s reaction. He’d hardly said two words to her since that scene at the rope bridge. Every time she tried to catch his eye he’d pretended to be engrossed in something on his phone. She felt so wretchedly lonely, but when she’d phoned Oliver just to hear his voice, he’d been distracted and irritable. Joe had just spilled a jar of red lentils all over the kitchen floor. ‘Why’d you put the lentils in such a low cupboard anyway?’ Oliver asked her crossly, as if the kitchen design was entirely her doing. And though he apologized later on for being snappy, the moment had passed then where she could whisper, ‘I’m having such a horrible time,’ and be comforted.

Sarah was relieved to notice that the canopy of leaves and branches overhead seemed to be thinning out. Up ahead, the light was still grey but less oppressively so. Emerging from the final ring of trees, she found they were in a clearing. There was a carpet of dead brown leaves on the ground, made mulchy by the fine rain that was falling in a light mist. A stream ran diagonally across the clearing, flanked on either side by steep banks covered with weeds and shrubs, and flowing rapidly over flat, grey rocks. They all stopped walking while Will pointed to a particularly large rock in the middle of it.

‘Around there is where the stream crosses over with a ley line, or so local legend has it. That point is called Devil’s Cross. Apparently these woods used to be full of devil worshippers and that’s where the locals used to drown women they accused of being witches.’

Swaddled inside her suffocating coat, Sarah nevertheless felt a chill pass through her.

‘Cheery thought, isn’t it?’ Will grinned, noticing her shudder. ‘Anyway, this is where I say my goodbyes. But not before I’ve collected up all your phones so no one is tempted to download a Compass App. It has been known!’ Will held open his backpack and they all dropped their phones inside. Sarah was amazed how naked she felt without it.

‘Adios amigos,’ called Will, already heading back the way they’d come. ‘See you on the Other Side.’

Although Sarah had begun to find Will’s relentless chirpiness grating, still a heavy weight settled inside her as she watched him walk away. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d felt so alone, and now she was feeling dizzy too, the trees in her peripheral vision blurring and swaying.

Amira held the Ordnance Survey map.

‘Anyone have a clue how to read one of these things? What do the dotted green lines mean? Charlie, I’m guessing you must have been a Cub Scout in a previous life. You seem like the type.’

Sarah knew that Charlie actually had been made to go to Scouts when he was younger, and had loathed every minute of it. It had been part of his father’s strategic campaign to make a man of him. Charlie claimed he’d got only two badges the entire time he’d been there – drawing and cooking – but he was prone to exaggeration and not above milking his unhappy childhood for a few laughs. It wasn’t that his parents hadn’t loved him, he’d once explained; more that he’d felt a monumental disconnect from them. Still, it was something she’d told him off about on more than one occasion, this tendency to offer up his private sadnesses as a form of mass entertainment.

‘I haven’t the foggiest,’ Charlie said, peering over Amira’s shoulder. ‘Are you even holding that the right way up?’

‘I’m sure Chloe did Geography A level,’ said Paula. ‘Chloe, come and take a look.’

To Sarah’s surprise, the younger woman didn’t come bounding over as she’d normally have expected her to.

‘I’d just be useless,’ she said instead, speaking into her jacket in a low, muffled voice.

‘Come on. Just take a look, see if any memories are jogged.’

Chloe shuffled reluctantly over, her face still half hidden in her jacket, hands shoved deeply into her pockets. Will had marked the new position of the van on the map with a biro cross, but they still had to work out exactly where they were now and then work out which direction to go – no mean feat without a compass.

‘Well, clearly we’re here,’ said Rachel, stabbing at the map with one of her clear glossy nails, ‘where that blue line crosses over the clearing. So all we have to do is get from here,’ she jabbed the page again, ‘to here.’ Now she jabbed the biro cross Will had drawn. Her face had lost the fixed smile it had worn in front of Mark and Will and once again her mouth was set in the hard line familiar from the office. ‘Except how do we know which direction to go in?’

By now Sarah was feeling faint, and sat down on a felled tree trunk with her head in her hands. She’d had ‘funny spells’ as she called them, throughout her two previous pregnancies, times when she felt dizzy and lightheaded, as though the world was receding in front of her. Her stomach lurched and she retched, but without any food left to throw up, she managed to swallow it down.

‘Hang on. Isn’t this something?’ Charlie was squinting at a point on the map very close to the clearing. Sarah knew he had been prescribed glasses by the optician but was too vain to wear them. ‘These two faint crosses here?’

‘Graveyard,’ said Chloe. ‘Little one from the looks of it.’

‘That be where the witches be buried,’ said Amira. No one laughed.

‘According to the map, that graveyard is directly north-east of us, really close by, so all we need to do is find it, and then we’ll be able to work out which direction is south-west, which is where the van is.’

With her head still in her hands, the others’ voices were indistinct and Sarah had trouble following what they were saying. Someone was suggesting they go off in pairs to look for the graveyard, but Ewan and Chloe, who’d been put together, were insisting it made more sense for everyone to go off independently, so they’d cover more ground. The crosses appeared to be really near. They wouldn’t have to go far.

‘I’m afraid I think I’ll have to stay here,’ Sarah said, without looking up. ‘I’m not feeling well.’

Instantly Amira and Charlie came to stand on either side of her, worried.

‘I’ll be fine. I just need to be still for a few minutes.’

Really, she wasn’t fine at all. It wasn’t just that she felt so awful, there was something about this place, something about the way the trees merged into blackness on all sides, and the fetid air that seemed to suck the air from her lungs.

A figure appeared in front of her. With her head bent, Sarah could just make out Rachel’s skinny black jeans and black leather and Gore-Tex hiking boots.

‘I’ll stay with her,’ said Rachel. ‘The rest of you go off and look for the graveyard and report back.’

Dread fought with nausea inside Sarah as she hunched over on the tree trunk. But she was feeling too dazed to protest. She heard the others talking in low voices before disappearing off in different directions through the trees.

Then they were alone.

‘I’m sorry,’ Sarah whispered. She was too hot inside her jacket. She felt as if her veins and arteries and all the little capillaries were on fire and her head was filling up with smoke. ‘I’m just being a wuss. It’s always like this at the beginning of a pregnancy.’

‘Stupid bitch.’

Sarah’s head jerked up so that she was staring straight into Rachel’s blue eyes. For a moment, shock burned a path through the wooziness in her brain so that she was able to take in clearly the edges of cheekbone, the upper lip twisted into a snarl. Then the dizziness returned and she once more dropped her face into her hands to steady herself. She was vaguely aware of Rachel wandering away towards the stream, but by now she was swaying and everything was spinning, and the heat from her coat was overwhelming and the ground, with its carpet of dead brown leaves, was rising up to meet her . . .

A voice brought her back to reality. Someone shouting ‘found it’ from somewhere far off. She opened her eyes and found she was slumped on the ground with her back against the tree trunk; everything felt heavy and unreal. She ran her tongue around her dry lips as she heaved herself to her feet and stood blinking in the grey drizzle.

Footsteps in the leaves announced someone’s arrival.

‘I found it,’ repeated Ewan. ‘The graveyard. It’s just up there.’ He pointed in the direction behind the tree trunk, and then picked up a stick and drew an arrow in the leaves and mud just to be sure. ‘Horrible place, actually. Gave me the creeps.’

Almost immediately the others arrived, summoned by Ewan’s earlier shouts.

‘Well done,’ Amira said, slapping Ewan on the shoulder. ‘Let’s get going. There’s a bottle of fizz somewhere with our names on it. Where’s Rachel?’

Rachel. Something inside Sarah contracted suddenly at the name. And now the fine hairs at the back of her neck were pricking, remembering her boss’s face as she said that thing.
Stupid bitch.

‘I don’t know where she is. I was—’

The scream cut Sarah off mid-sentence. Chloe.

‘Oh my God! Quick! Help!’

She was standing at the top of the steep bank looking down at something in the stream below.

Sarah felt a knot of dread forming in the pit of her stomach.

By now the others had joined Chloe.

‘Is she breathing?’ asked Charlie.

Sarah made her way slowly towards the cluster of figures in nylon jackets and hoods until she could see what they were looking at.

Rachel lay at the foot of the bank, her legs and feet submerged in the water, her head buttressed up against a protruding rock. Sarah clapped a hand to her mouth as she noticed the blood trickling from somewhere in Rachel’s hairline.

‘There’s definitely a pulse, thank God,’ Ewan called up. He’d been first to scramble down the bank and was now on his knees in the water, leaning over Rachel’s motionless body.

As Ewan gently shook her arm, Rachel began to moan softly. If it wasn’t for the blood, Sarah would have sworn she was acting the part of someone injured, so perfect was her dramatic timing.

By this time Amira and Charlie were also down on the bank, crouching next to Rachel.

Amira held her boss’s hand in hers. ‘Are you OK, Rachel? Can you hear me?’

Nothing. Just that soft, ominous moaning.

Ewan looked up so he was staring right at Sarah. ‘What the fuck happened to her?’

Now everyone was looking at her, and Sarah felt herself flushing inside her too-hot coat.

‘I don’t know. I was kind of passed out over there.’

Ewan’s heavy dark brows knitted together. ‘You didn’t look very passed out to me when I got here.’

‘She’s coming round!’ shouted Amira, bending her head towards Rachel.

Rachel slowly sat up, blinking in the dull grey light. She put her hand to her head, looking shocked when her fingers came back covered in blood.

‘What happened?’ she asked. ‘Where are we?’

Between Ewan and Amira, they set about getting Rachel back up the bank, with Charlie hovering ineffectually around them giving instructions. ‘Left foot higher, Ewan. Watch that loose stone, Amira!’

Finally they were at the top, leading Rachel towards the tree trunk where she sank down until she was sitting, then slumped forwards. Her face, always pale, was alabaster white against her dark hair. She opened her mouth as if she was about to speak, then exhaled heavily. Some few seconds later, she tried again.

‘Someone pushed me,’ she said at last.

Chloe let out an audible gasp and Sarah felt herself growing cold.

‘What do you mean?’ Ewan demanded. ‘Who pushed you?’

‘I don’t know,’ snapped Rachel, sounding more like her usual self. ‘I was right here, talking to Sarah, and then I walked over to the stream and was looking down, and all of a sudden someone shoved me from behind.’

And now everyone was turning to look at Sarah.

‘I . . . I don’t know what happened,’ she stammered. ‘I passed out for a bit.’

Rachel fixed her with the shards of her eyes.

‘Passed out? I don’t think so. We were talking.’

And now Sarah remembered something.

‘Yes. We
were
talking. You called me a bitch.’

‘What?’ You had to give Rachel her due, she looked genuinely surprised. ‘I didn’t call you a bitch. I said I was going to look in the
ditch.’

A wave of heat swept through Sarah and she fumbled to unzip the down jacket as if it was on fire.

‘That’s not true. You said . . .’ But now doubt was creeping in. ‘Well, whatever you said, I was sitting here on this trunk, feeling sick and faint and you walked away and the next thing I knew, Ewan was here.’

‘No. You were standing up and wide awake when I arrived.’

She couldn’t believe how confrontational Ewan was being.