The Poison Garden (2019 Sphere Edition) Read online

  Alex Marwood is the pseudonym of a journalist who has worked extensively across the British press. She is the author of the word-of-mouth sensation The Wicked Girls, which won a prestigious Edgar Award and The Killer Next Door, which won the coveted Macavity Award. She has also been shortlisted for numerous other crime writing awards and her first two novels have been optioned for the screen. Alex lives in south London.

  Also by Alex Marwood

  The Wicked Girls

  The Killer Next Door

  The Darkest Secret

  Copyright

  Published by Sphere

  ISBN: 978-0-7515-6600-0

  All characters and events in this publication, other than those clearly in the public domain, are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Copyright © Alex Marwood 2019

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.

  The publisher is not responsible for websites (or their content) that are not owned by the publisher.

  Sphere

  Little, Brown Book Group

  Carmelite House

  50 Victoria Embankment

  London EC4Y 0DZ

  www.littlebrown.co.uk

  www.hachette.co.uk

  Contents

  About the Author

  Also by Alex Marwood

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Among the Dead: September 2016

  1. Romy

  2. Sarah

  3. Sarah

  4. Sarah

  5. Romy

  6. Sarah

  Before the End: 2001–2002

  7. Romy

  8. Romy

  9. Romy

  10. Somer

  Among the Dead: October 2016

  11. Romy

  Before the End: 2002–2003

  12. Romy

  13. Romy

  Among the Dead: October 2016

  14. Romy

  15. Romy

  16. Sarah

  17. Sarah

  Before the End: 2008–2010

  18. Romy 2009

  19. Romy 2009

  Among the Dead: November 2016

  20. Sarah

  21. Romy

  22. Sarah

  23. Romy

  Before the End: 2010–2011

  24. Romy 2010

  25. Romy

  Among the Dead: November 2016

  26. Romy

  Before the End: 2012

  27. Romy

  Among the Dead: November 2016

  28. Romy

  29. Sarah

  30. Romy

  31. Romy

  Before the End: 2012–2014

  32. Romy

  33. Romy

  34. Somer

  Among the Dead: November 2016

  35. Sarah

  36. Sarah

  37. Romy

  38. Romy

  39. Romy

  Before the End: 2014

  40. Romy

  41. Romy

  Among the Dead: November 2016

  42. Romy

  43. Sarah

  Before the End: 2015–2016

  44. Somer

  45. Romy

  Among the Dead: December 2016

  46. Romy

  47. Romy

  Before the End: June 2016

  48. Somer

  49. Somer

  50. Romy

  51. Romy

  Among the Dead: December 2016

  52. Romy

  53. Sarah

  54. Sarah

  Before the End: June 2016

  55. Somer

  Among the Dead: December 2016

  56. Sarah

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgements

  For Erin Mitchell, who is amazing

  I am in blood

  Stepped in so far that, should I wade no more,

  Returning were as tedious as go o’er.

  William Shakespeare, Macbeth

  Give me the child until he is seven years old

  and I will show you the man.

  St Ignatius of Loyola

  Prologue

  Kill me now.

  Police Constable Nita Bevan has realised that her partner, Martin Coles, is a windbag. Three weeks together in the car and he’s barely drawn breath. He’s pretty good when they’re handling a shout, but the rest of the time it’s babble, babble, babble. And once he’s on a topic, there’s no escaping it. No matter how tepid her responses, no matter how inconsequential the subject matter, you can guarantee that when he gets back into the squad car and says, ‘Now, where was I? Oh, yes,’ he will literally pick up in the middle of the sentence he was speaking when the radio call came in. As though he’s stuck a bookmark in his brain.

  He’s at it again as they drive along the Dolgellau road. Subject of the day: cheese toasties and who does the best ones. He’s hoping they’ll get done with this shout in time to get to the café in Fairbourne, which he recommends even above the Old Station Café in Bala and the Sea View in Barmouth.

  ‘Lovely bit of Caerphilly,’ he says, ‘and a spot of onion chutney. They do a good Welsh cake, too. Like Welsh cakes, do you?’

  Kill me now.

  ‘Not sure I’ve had one,’ she says. She’s only been in Wales a month, after all. They’re not a foodstuff that’s common in Essex.

  ‘Never had a Welsh cake?’ he cries. ‘Well, you haven’t lived!’, and to her intense relief they round the corner and see the Land Rover they’ve been looking for, its owner standing beside it in his hill farmer uniform of checked shirt, wellington boots and binder twine.

  ‘Here we are,’ she says, and pulls onto the side of the road. The hill folk tend to divide into two types: the garrulous, like her partner, and the taciturn. To her relief, Gavin Rees turns out to be closer to taciturn. Certainly not interested in bothering with local niceties. They’d be here all day before they got to the actual call, otherwise.

  ‘Thanks for coming,’ he says. ‘I don’t like to go up there by myself, you see. Trespassing.’

  ‘But you’re a neighbour, right?’ she asks.

  ‘Yes. Next farm over the hill. But they’re not very neighbourly, like. They don’t like visitors. I’ve barely been up there more than a handful of times, and then only by arrangement.’

  They’re five miles inland, beside lush deciduous woodland in the Snowdonia foothills, but the air is filled with the cries of seagulls. Seagulls and crows. If she didn’t know better, she would suspect, from that and the smell that hangs in the air, that someone had started a clandestine landfill behind the trees. She eyes the little lodge house, the high metal gates, the wall that surrounds the woods. They’re closed, and the lodge shows no sign of occupancy.

  ‘And you think something’s wrong because … ?’

  Martin has shut up, and is listening intently. A strange mix of a man. You’d think from meeting him that he wouldn’t notice a thing around him, but he has a memory like a steel trap when it comes to interactions with members of the public.

  ‘Well, it’s the smell, you see,’ says the farmer.

  ‘Oh, okay,’ says Nita. ‘So this isn’t normal?’

  ‘Does it smell normal to you?’ asks Rees.

  She pulls a non-committal face in response. No, it doesn’t, but smells have many sources. She’s been in enough farmyards that she doesn’t immediately jump to conclusions any more.

  This smell is somet
hing else, though. It’s pervasive, nauseating. Sewage and ripe cheese and rot. The air is thick with it; so thick that it feels as though it will stick to her clothes. Martin won’t be wanting his toastie once they’ve dealt with whatever’s behind those gates.

  ‘And the cattle,’ says Rees. ‘They’ve been lowing up in the high pasture for days now. Like they’re in distress. I don’t think they’ve been milked.’

  ‘Okay,’ she says. ‘And the owners?’

  ‘They’re a … ’ he considers his next words ‘ … bunch of oddballs. Survivalist hippy types. Been up there thirty years preparing for the apocalypse.’

  ‘The apocalypse?’

  He nods. ‘Years’ worth of food they’ve got stored up there.’

  ‘How many of them are there?’

  He takes off his flat cap and scratches the back of his head. ‘Hard to tell, really. You know, if you don’t go in and they never go out … Quite a few.’

  ‘Right,’ she says. ‘Okay, well, I’ll just report in to base and we’ll get those gates open, eh?’

  They find the first body halfway up the hill. A man, thin and shaved bald, face-down on the one-track road. They pull up the squad car behind Rees’s Land Rover and get out, stand and stare at him in silence. No need to check his pulse. He’s purple, and bluebottles fly busily in and out of his open mouth.

  ‘Any idea who this is?’ she asks. Rees shakes his head. The taciturn has kicked full-in now. He blinks and blinks.

  She radios in to base, to order back-up. Dead bodies are above her pay grade. The two men stand by the corpse and gaze walleyed up the road ahead. Nita realises that she’s the calmest of the three of them. But that’s why I came here, she thinks. After her burnout in London, constantly on guard for terrorists and stabby teens, the prospect of a rural life of farm thefts and the occasional pub fight had been very appealing.

  But she’s clammy inside her hi-vis jacket. This body isn’t making her optimistic about what’s further up the hill.

  ‘I think we’d better walk from here,’ she says, eventually. ‘We’ll need to leave this guy as he is, for forensics.’

  The birds are the first, the most obvious sign. The seagulls she noticed before, and the big black bodies of carrion crows. There are crowds – clouds – of them, wheeling and plummeting, over the land enclosed by a high wall on the far side of the orchard, where the chimneys of some grand old house soar up into the sky. The air rings with their cries. I had no idea all this was up here, she thinks. It looks like nothing from the road. Laundry – linen – hangs on cords strung between the apple trees, though it’s been drizzling the past two days. I don’t like this, Nita thinks. I don’t like it at all. There should be people. There should be people everywhere.

  ‘Do seagulls eat carrion too?’ she asks.

  ‘I think so,’ says Martin, finally finding his voice again. ‘I think they’ll eat anything.’’

  There’s something behind that wall, she thinks, and I think it might change us all for life. She glances at her companions and sees that they are thinking the same thing.

  *

  The gateway is elegant, topped with pineapple finials. But someone has beaten out a message in metal letters and attached them in an arch over the top. She has to squint to read the words against the bright grey sky. Everybody is a nobody, reads the outer layer; Everyone is a someone, slightly smaller, inside. Not a good place, she thinks. It might have been once, but this is not a good place.

  And then she sees the foot. Right there, in the gateway: bare, pointing upwards and black on the heel, the body to which it is attached hidden by the wall. It is only eight inches long.

  ‘Oh, God,’ she says. ‘Are there children?’

  None of us will be the same, by tomorrow, she thinks.

  It’s a boy. Nine, ten years old, long hair tangled into fingers, face creamy-white beneath its healthy outdoor tan. His mouth is open, and so are his cloudy eyes, and flies rise from the folds of the loose pyjamas in which he’s dressed. One foot – the foot that was hidden as they approached the gate – still has a canvas shoe on: rubber sole, elastic across the top. The other lies sole-up in a puddle three feet away.

  And beyond him, among lush beds of summer vegetables, lies hell.

  They look like a river. Scattering out of the doorways, down the steps of the house, like a host of tributaries, joining together on the paths. More and more of them the closer they come to the gate. Piled on top of each other, frozen where they have fallen. As Nita, Martin and Rees step into the courtyard and the foetid, faecal smell overwhelms them, a tornado of gulls shrieks its way into the air.

  The faces are blue, and green, and black. Mouths gape at falling rain. Fingers claw the empty space around them. Many eyes are open and many, she sees, are missing. Carrion birds love eyes. So tender.

  Crawling, she thinks. They were crawling. Clambering over each other, trying to get to the gate. Trying to get out.

  She gropes for the radio attached to her jacket as Martin bends at the waist to vomit.

  They look for all the world like human jackstraws.

  Among the Dead

  September 2016

  1 | Romy

  Where I grew up, when someone died, we never spoke of them again.

  Out here, among the Dead, it’s not so easy. I’m the only adult still alive, and all anyone wants to talk about is the bodies left behind.

  One more day, they say, and I would have been among them. Another statistic. As it is, this leg is never going to be what it was. They kept me for two weeks in the hospital. Then four days in a police station. They couldn’t think of anything to charge me with, but they didn’t want to lose me, either. Only Surviving Adult is, it seems, a status that makes you indispensable: a higher status than I’ve ever held in my life. Then they sectioned me, which meant that they could shut me away on mental health grounds in a thing called a ‘facility’ and ask me questions every day, and I couldn’t run away unless I literally ran away. And, to be fair, I was quite mad when they let me out. In the two days of silence after the screaming was done, I had begun to think that the world had ended while I lay on my sickbed.

  So I lived alone in a cell, like a monk, but not without luxury – my own toilet in the corner and three meals a day and access to the showers – hot showers – whenever I asked.

  They were kind to me, on the whole. Brought extra bedding and a television, and a pleasant young family liaison officer took me out for slow, recuperative hobbles on my crutches between interrogations. I saw streets and shops and a small park filled with trees, children running and shrieking beneath a blue sky. There was a canal, an artificial river built before the railways to connect the cities. Little painted boats lined the banks, tin pots full of geraniums on their roofs and bicycles chained to their sides. People live on them. I like that. I would like to live on a boat, if I could. Cast the ropes off and float to the middle of the water. It would be like having a moat.

  Every day someone would come and ask if I had remembered any more, and every day I would give the same answer: I was full of morphine. I was on morphine until everyone died, and after that was nothing but white-hot pain. And they would bring photographs of people they thought might have been among those livid blue corpses. Everyone changed their names to join the Ark, which has made identification a difficult process. I’ve seen so many young people in these photos. People with hair, people with families, teenagers with garish blue eyeshadow, smiling young adults in black cloaks and square-topped black hats clutching certificates. I saw Luz on a horse, in a tweed jacket and a hard hat, and Siraj with thick green hair gelled up into spikes and a tight sleeveless T-shirt emblazoned with the words ‘Never Mind the Bollocks’. And there were others I didn’t recognise: lost young people of the 1980s, the 1990s, the ones who vanished and left their families wondering. So many, so many, lost for the first time long ago. I would nod when the faces were familiar, and shake my head with the regret I suspected was appropriate when I didn’t.


  Sometimes the interrogator would tell me who they were in the photos. That way, I learned that Father’s real name was Damian Blatchford, and Ursola was a Michelle. My own mother’s name was Alison Maxwell, last definitely seen in Finbrough, Berkshire, at the age of eighteen, living in a caravan with a baby who was me, but I knew that. She was thirty-eight when she died at Plas Golau, which makes me almost twenty-one. It turns out that I have a birth certificate, which they say is a lucky break as it will make my life out here among the Dead less complicated.

  They told me that Damian-pre-Lucien taught philosophy and politics at a thing called a plate-glass university on the south coast of England. He gathered a small group around him in the early 80s – most of them long gone, left or banished; one or two, I know, long buried in the chapel graveyard – and from there the Ark was born. With Vita – beautiful Vita – things are murkier. She was American, which makes it harder. They know she was in the country by 1986, because apostates from the early days have come forward and mentioned her as a driving force even then. You know how many Americans passed through the country in the decade before 1986? Literally millions, they tell me, and nobody really knows how many actually left. Somewhere in the big box wastelands of Ohio or Oregon or Tennessee, a family has probably thought her dead for decades.

  I wonder if anyone has mourned me.

  After a month they moved me here, to a place called a Halfway House. It’s a large house in a town by the sea called Weston. It’s mostly full of philosophical junkies and humorous alcoholics, but there are a few ‘vulnerable adults’ like me. Most of my peers in this category spend their time crying in corners, or smoking with intense concentration on the steps outside, so I don’t feel particularly vulnerable by comparison. I, at least, am prepared for the disasters to come and stand some chance of surviving them.

  We do group therapy once a day, and twice a week I see a counsellor. I have been designated ‘disabled’ because, I think, they don’t know what else to call me, and so every two weeks I can go to a machine in a wall and insert a plastic card, and it will give me £110 from a bank account they’ve set up in my name. I don’t really know what to spend it on – they give us two meals a day here and I was given an assortment of trousers, T-shirts and underpants while I was in the station. The Infirmary clothes they found me in were bagged up and taken away as ‘evidence’. So I bought a pair of stout boots and a waterproof jacket at a hiking shop in Weston, and I buy tobacco for my new friend Spencer, because he likes it and says he has few pleasures left to him now that heroin is off the table.