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

‘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 telleverything.

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.’

Afternoon

I do as I am told.

We climb in the car and I drive through the stiffening wind, and then the sharpening rain, to the clifftop pub, the Gurnard’s Head, where David leaps out of the car, and shouts through the weather: Don’t worry, I’ll get a taxi. Then he runs, sheltering under his rucksack, into the pub. Off to see Alex Lockwood. A banker, I think. He’s certainly another one of those wealthy friends of David’s, those tall guys who smile politely at me in yachty bars, like I am a quaint but passing curiosity, after which they turn and talk to David.

Pulling away from the pub, I accelerate down the road – hoping I can get to the house before the lightning starts. Because this is definitely a big, late summer storm, racing in from the Atlantic.

By the time I reach the final miles to Carnhallow the rain is so heavy it is defeating the wipers. A proper cloudburst. I have to slow to five, four, three miles per hour.

I could be overtaken by a cow.

At last I make the gate to the Kerthen estate and the long treacherous lane down Carnhallow Valley, through the rowans and the oaks. I dislike this winding track during the day and it is seriously dark now: storm clouds making night from day. I’ve got the headlights on, to help me through the murk, but the car is skidding, accelerating on the wet and fractured concrete, it’s almost out of control.

What’s this?

Something runs out into my lights. It is a blur through the rainy windscreen, a grey smear of movement – then a swerve of my wheel, and a queasy thump.

Jerking the car to a stop, the wind is salty and loud as I open the door, as I run up the track, heedless of the rain, to see what I hit.

A rabbit is lying in the grass, lit by my headlamps. The pulsing body is shattered, there are red gashes in its flanks, showing muscles, and too much blood. Way too much blood.

Worst is the head. The skull is half-crushed, yet one living eye is bright in its socket, staring regretfully, as I cradle the broken form. A milky tear trickles down, and the animal shudders and then, as I crouch here on the grass, it dies in my arms.

Filled with self-reproach, I gently drop the body to the ground, where it lolls, lifeless. Then I look at my hands.

They are covered in blood.

And then I look at the animal. I take a long frightening look at its sleek, distinctive, velvety ears. It’s not a rabbit. It’s a hare.

110 Days Before Christmas (#ulink_97f24041-3694-5e47-8e01-b1009702d2f3)

Lunchtime

I’m lying to my husband.

‘I told you, I’m going shopping. We need some food.’

His sceptical voice fills the car, disembodied. Calling me from London. ‘Shopping in St Just? St Just in Penwith?’

‘Why not?’

He laughs. ‘Darling. You know what they say, the seagulls in St Just fly upside down because there’s nothing worth crapping on.’

I chuckle, briefly. I’m still lying, though. I’m not telling him why I’m shopping, not yet. Not until I know.

‘What’s the weather like down there?’

I gaze through my windscreen as the car rolls along the coastal road. The stunted church tower of St Just is a grey silhouette on a grey horizon. ‘Looks like it’s going to rain. Bit chilly, too.’

He sighs. ‘Yes, the summer’s pretty much over. But it was good, wasn’t it?’ His pause is earnest. Hopeful. ‘Everything is OK now, everything is getting better, with Jamie, you’re feeling better.’

‘Yes,’ I say, and again I lie, and this lie is probably more important. I am certainly not feeling better: I am still thinking of the hare I killed. I haven’t mentioned it, to anyone. As soon as the accident happened, I cleaned the car and quickly disposed of the body,I wiped the blood from my hands, and then I tried to wipe the event from my mind. My first reaction had been to call David, tell him, share the story. But a minute’s thought told me that, no matter how trivially disturbing, it was probably better to stay silent. The moment I broached the subject, even as a passing and frivolous remark – oh your son said this and then it really happened, how funny, it could appear, to David, that I actually believe his son can foresee events, is clairvoyant, is a Kerthen from the legend. My remarks could make me sound mad. And I must not sound mad. Because I am not mad.

I don’t believe that Jamie has any power. The accident was an uncanny coincidence: animals die on the narrow, rural, zigzagging Penwith roads all the time – badgers, foxes, pheasants, and hares. I’ve seen dead hares before, they always make me sad; hares somehow seem much more precious than rabbits. Wilder, more poetic, I love the fact they live in Penwith. But they do get killed with regularity, as people speed round those granite-walled corners. My encounter on that rainy lane through Ladies Wood was, consequently, Jamie’s anxieties conflating with a simple accident. Yet it still faintly haunts me. Perhaps it was the way the body lolled in my hands. Like a dead baby.

‘Rachel?’

‘Yes, sorry. Driving.’

‘Are you OK, darling?’

‘I’m fine. Gotta find a parking space. I’d better go.’

He says goodbye and says let’s Skype later and then he drops the call. I scan the streets for a place to slot my car. It doesn’t take long. It’s never that hard to park here. Remote, regularly battered by the weather, the ‘last town in England’, one of the last places in Cornwall to speak Cornish, St Just-in-Penwith on the best of days has an empty and melancholy feel: bereft of its mines and miners but not their memories. But it is also the nearest town with the shop I need, the nearest to Carnhallow, and I need this shop right now.

Pushing the car door open I sense the inevitable dampness in the air. It is threatening to mizzle: that specific form of fine Cornish rain which is half-mist, half-drizzle. Like a spa treatment, but cold.

The pharmacy is down the fore street, at the corner of which is the medieval church; the central square is eighteenth-century shopfronts and big Victorian pubs – which retain hints of that wealthier mining past, the days of count-house dinners and hot rum punch, the days when adventurers and stockholders would celebrate the boom days of another copper lode, when giddy mine-captains would bring their sweethearts into the saloon to drink their gin-and-treacle.

Crossing the road, feeling the odd sensation that I am being watched, I press the door. It opens with an old-fashioned chime.

The girl at the counter gives me a look. She’s young. Very pale.

Slowly I make my way around the scented pharmacy. The girl is still looking at me, but hers is a warm, friendly glance. I realize with a sense of surprise that she’s almost my age: I spend so much time alone, or with David, I sometimes forget that I am also young. Only thirty.

The beautiful tattoo of a mandala on her neck implies she might be arty, or musical, the kind of friend I would usually make, without a worry, in Shoreditch. Maybe she’s working here to support a creative career; either way she looks fun and alternative. I’d like to go up to her and crack a joke and have a laugh – make a friend. It’s what I would have done in London.

But I’m still struggling to make real friends here, and I’m not sure why. Over the last weeks and months Cornwall, or Carnhallow, or the Kerthens, have somehow muted me. Or maybe it’s Jamie; the boy absorbs my emotions, even if we barely communicate.

The shelves do not have what I want. I am going to have to brave a conversation. With a glitch of anxiety in my throat, I approach the counter.

‘Do you have any um, um, pregnancy testing kits?’

The girl gazes at me. Perhaps she can tell how important this is from the crack in my voice. Pregnancy is my escape from worry and the growing sense of pointlessness: I will become a new mother, meet other new mothers. I will have a proper role and a real job and something extraordinary to give to David and Jamie. I will forget my anxieties. And I will make my husband happy: I know David is very keen for me to fall pregnant.

I am five days late, as I realized this morning, staring in confusion and tingling hopefulness at the calendar.

The girl is frowning.

‘There aren’t any kits on the shelves?’