The Poison Garden Read online

  Praise for The Poison Garden

  “I devoured The Poison Garden. . . . Gripping and utterly convincing, it’s Alex Marwood at the top of her (already impressive) game.”

  —Jojo Moyes, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Me Before You

  “Highly imaginative, yet consistently believable, this wonderful dystopian novel is both terrifying and unsettling as if a harbinger for our times. A well written and thrilling read.”

  —Lisa Ballantyne, international bestselling author of Everything She Forgot

  “An extraordinary novel of psychological suspense that is more wicked than Marwood’s Edgar-winning Wicked Girls (2013) and darker than her Macavity-winning The Killer Next Door (2014).”

  —Booklist (starred review)

  “Intelligently assimilated research, a slow build with a growing sense of unease and a chillingly believable plotline add up to the best sort of dark psychological thriller.”

  —The Guardian

  Praise for The Wicked Girls

  “The suspense keeps the pages flying, but what sets this one apart is the palpable sense of onrushing doom.”

  —Stephen King

  “Harrowing.”

  —Marilyn Stasio, The New York Times Book Review

  Praise for The Killer Next Door

  “If you read Alex Marwood’s The Wicked Girls, her new one—The Killer Next Door—is even better. Scary as hell. Great characters.”

  —Stephen King

  “With her sophomore outing, Marwood has turned out not just a spooky, blood-and-guts thriller, but a cannily observant novel that explores social fissures while delivering a modicum of hope.”

  —The Boston Globe

  Praise for The Darkest Secret

  “If there has been a better mystery-suspense story written in this decade, I can’t think of it . . . transcend[s] the genre.”

  —Stephen King

  “This third novel from one of psychological suspense’s best writers confirms Marwood’s first hat trick.”

  —The Boston Globe (Best Books of 2016)

  “Brilliant.”

  —The Atlantic

  “[Marwood] demonstrates, without a doubt, that she is one of crime fiction’s brightest stars.”

  —Megan Abbott

  To access Penguin Readers Guides online, visit penguinrandomhouse.com.

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  THE POISON GARDEN

  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, The Killer Next Door, which won the coveted Macavity Award, and The Darkest Secret. 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.

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

  penguinrandomhouse.com

  First published in Great Britain by Sphere, an imprint of Little, Brown Book Group, 2019

  Published in Penguin Books 2020

  Copyright © 2019 by Alex Marwood

  Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Names: Marwood, Alex, author.

  Title: The poison garden / Alex Marwood.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2019022501 (print) | LCCN 2019022502 (ebook) | ISBN 9780143110521 (paperback) | ISBN 9781101992692 (ebook)

  Subjects: GSAFD: Suspense fiction.

  Classification: LCC PR6063.A2438 P65 2020 (print) | LCC PR6063.A2438 (ebook) | DDC 823/.914—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019022501

  LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019022502

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Cover design: Elizabeth Yaffe

  Cover image: plainpicture / Tine Butter

  Version_1

  Contents

  Praise for The Poison Garden

  About the Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  Among the Dead

  1 | Romy

  2 | Sarah

  3 | Sarah

  4 | Sarah

  5 | Romy

  6 | Sarah

  Before the End

  7 | Romy

  8 | Romy

  9 | Romy

  10 | Somer

  Among the Dead

  11 | Romy

  Before the End

  12 | Romy

  13 | Romy

  Among the Dead

  14 | Romy

  15 | Romy

  16 | Sarah

  17 | Sarah

  Before the End

  18 | Romy

  19 | Romy

  Among the Dead

  20 | Sarah

  21 | Romy

  22 | Sarah

  23 | Romy

  Before the End

  24 | Romy

  25 | Romy

  Among the Dead

  26 | Romy

  Before the End

  27 | Romy

  Among the Dead

  28 | Romy

  29 | Sarah

  30 | Romy

  31 | Romy

  Before the End

  32 | Romy

  33 | Romy

  34 | Somer

  Among the Dead

  35 | Sarah

  36 | Sarah

  37 | Romy

  38 | Romy

  39 | Romy

  Before the End

  40 | Romy

  41 | Romy

  Among the Dead

  42 | Romy

  43 | Sarah

  Before the End

  44 | Somer

  45 | Romy

  Among the Dead

  46 | Romy

  47 | Romy

  Before the End

  48 | Somer

  49 | Somer

  50 | Romy

  51 | Romy

  Among the Dead

  52 | Romy

  53 | Sarah

  54 | Sarah

  Before the End

  55 | Somer

  Among the Dead

  56 | Sarah

  Epilogue | Romy

  Acknowledgements

  For Erin Mitchell, who is amazing

  I am in blood

  Ste
pped 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 something 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 wall-eyed 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: r
ubber 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.