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

‘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 (#ulink_bfc8c449-bed8-5fc3-811c-46048f9d7360)

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.’