Tiding

By Siân Collins

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"Terrific and one of the best books I have read this year." Mark Ellis
The Great Freeze of 1963. A brutal reckoning for the residents of Glanmorfa, caught in the grip of an ancient curse. Or so it appears to Daphne Morgan and her friends who, attempting to navigate the confusing currents of the adult world, find themselves engulfed in mysteries far deeper and more painful than they expected.
An enthralling thriller about memory and the power of imagination…
"This coming-of-age murder mystery, set in an estuary town in south-west Wales, is a must-read for anyone who relishes a compelling page turner." Jane Frase
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• Language: English
• Publisher: Honno Press
• Release date: Jan 12, 2023
• ISBN: 9781912905713

Siân Collins

Siân Collins was born in Pembrokeshire and lives in Carmarthenshire. An Edinburgh graduate, she taught Anglo Saxon and Medieval Literature in South Africa, worked as an assistant editor on The Lancet, and ran English and Drama departments in several well-known London secondary schools. She returned to Carmarthenshire to teach, write, and relish life in the beautiful Tywi Valley. Her debut novel,Unleaving, was published in 2019.

Book preview

Advent: CHAPTER 1

The bone house tunnels deep into the high bank, walled with mossy stones and ivy thick as seaweed. Ancient yew trees muster at the entrance, shadowed, conspiratorial; beyond the heavy wooden door, the space inside is hollow, lightless. It gives her the creeps.

A scrunch of paper—the map, Martin’s list—snags in the shrivelled nettle stalks crowding the edge of the gravelled path. Dropped as they scarpered, the scaredy-cats. The clang of the iron kissing gate at the top of the steps, the boys’ boots skittering on the gravel, Jan’s blue cardigan dodging between the gravestones. Years later, Daphne will remember this, the casual treachery of friends.

With the heel of her wellington, she grinds the paper scrap deep into the nettles, turns and bends down for the box. The coal shovel, a black brute of a thing with a squat iron handle, is sticking out through the flaps. She opens them just a little and pushes it down, out of sight. A musty smell escapes: riverbank, old flower stems rotting in a vase. She holds her breath, slowly counts to three, breathes out. Closes the flaps and lifts the box with both hands, fingers scrabbling for a grip on the slippery cardboard.

It’s late afternoon. The wintry light is dimming and a chill breeze stirs the fallen sycamore leaves around Rev. Josiah Owen’s tombstone on the far side of the path. Passed into the hands of Jesus 1776. Away to the west a bank of cloud is slowly drifting in from the sea, inking the outline of the Moor. She follows the narrow path around the side of the church to where it joins the main avenue between the old graves lined with trees. The path is sprinkled with crimson yew berries; in ordinary times she likes to step on them, to hear that satisfying pop as each ripe fruit explodes, blood drops spattering the tarmac. But this is not an ordinary time.

The previous day, at morning break, the four of them huddled around Martin’s desk, spellbound by their own daring. Smoke from Mr Duckford’s playtime fag curled through the high window of the classroom. Martin’s face was a frown of concentration, tongue lolling pinkly from the corner of his mouth as he drew the map of the graveyard: the lychgate, the wide, steep path up through the graveyard to the church porch, the narrow one forking around the building. Janice, leaning over his shoulder, giggled. ‘Aw come off it, Marty, we all know where the bone house…’ She clapped her hand to her mouth, the horror of naming the word. The classroom door banged open—Terry Dunn, come to collect his breaktime sandwich.

‘What you lot doin’?’

Quick as a ferret, Martin folded the paper into neat squares and slipped it into his shorts pocket, away from those prying eyes.

‘Mind your own blinkin’ business, Terence.’

Manny Edwards kneels on the tarmac inside the lychgate. He is oiling the latch, swinging the heavy wooden gate back and forth to ease the joint. Hearing her footsteps behind him on the path, he gets to his feet and opens the gate wide for her to pass through. The soles of her boots sink into the mouldy drifts of confetti from last Saturday’s wedding.

‘Mind you don’t drop that box, maid—looks heavy.’

Close up, the old man’s face is puffed and blotchy; sweat beads in his wrinkles. Daphne likes Manny. He used to work in the quarry where they found the dinosaur bones and the remains of mammoths and hyenas. One time he called at the front door with two ammonites. Cleaned them specially for the girls, he told their father. ‘No need to thank me, young ladies, I got plenty more at home.’ Nestling her fossil in her palm, Daphne ran her finger over the tiny whorls and grooves, felt the stone weight of the creature’s million years. It’s still on a shelf in the toy cupboard with her other treasures. She has no idea what Sylvia did with hers; her sister is full of secrets.

Manny lifts his cloth cap and scratches at his wispy scalp. He comes up close, trying to look.

‘Vicar sent you for that, did he?’

She shakes her head, hoisting up the box under her chin so he can’t see. The smell from inside is really strong: the claggy stench of estuary mud, a whiff of something ancient, putrid. ‘Lych’ is an old word for a dead body, her mother explained; people used to leave the corpse inside the lychgate the day before the funeral to protect it from body snatchers. Which is what she and the others are, kind of.

‘I won’t tell on you, honest.’ Manny grins, baring crooked teeth. ‘Cross my heart and hope to die.’

She hurries past him out of the lychgate and turns left up Church Street, towards home.

‘Right then, everybody, here’s the list. We need a rope, a torch, the map, a whistle…’

‘What for you need a whistle, Mart?’

‘Case some nosy parker comes up the churchyard, obvious.’

‘What, like her dad?’

Graham turned round then, gave her that look. Even Janice was smirking. She kept her head down, pretending to read Martin’s list, tugging at her fringe, waiting for the barb—vicar’s daughter, goody-two-shoes. But Martin didn’t respond, there were more important things on his mind.

‘A bag. We got to carry it.’

‘How big is it then? You were closer in than me.’

Martin’s hands splayed calloused, stubby fingers. Farmer’s son. Graham’s eyes were round as pebbles.

‘Bloody hell, Mart. Could be a Neanderthal or a Bronze Age.’

Last term was ancient history; they knew everything there was to know.

‘We better bring a box then.’

‘And gloves, I’m not picking that thing up with my bare hands.’

‘Don’t be such a sissy. Alright then, one of you girls bring a shovel.’

The box bumps awkwardly against her thighs and its contents slide queasily into each other. It’s not dark yet but some of the streetlamps have come on, casting shadows across doorways and windowsills, lighting up the bare stems of shrubs in front gardens. Somebody draws the curtains in the front room of one of the cottages opposite and she hears a child’s brief cry. Inside the whitewashed milking parlour of Pentre Farm, the cows shift and stamp their hooves above the steady thrum of the machines. As she passes the forecourt of Jubilee Garage, Fred Davies in his oil-stained overalls is bending over the bonnet of a car, while Howie Clark his apprentice leans against the wall of the adjoining house, cups his hands to light a cigarette—the red burn as he takes the first long drag. From the open door of the office, Elvis crackles through the radio waves, ‘You’ll be so lonely you could die’. She steps off the pavement onto the road to avoid Johnny Nebo in his long grey raincoat and fisherman’s cap, shambling past with that funny lopsided gait of his. He’s mumbling some kind of conversation with himself, shaking his head, and he doesn’t notice her. A light snaps on in the Memorial Hall. She hears the scrape of chairs across the wooden floor, a toilet being flushed. Hetty Lewis the caretaker and her daughter Marge, getting the place ready for Friday’s whist drive.

When Martin walked backwards out of the bone house with the shovel, she’d turned her head away, focused on the trees above the bank, the darkening sky. When he levered it into the cardboard box she still wouldn’t look. Janice had draped the thing with the blue tea towel filched from her mother’s kitchen. An act of courage.

Now it’s Daphne’s turn. She lowers the box carefully to the ground. Light from the nearby streetlamp spills inside. The tea towel has slipped off, exposing the smooth cranium the colour of rusty metal. There’s a deep furrow running like a fault line across the slope of the forehead down to the left eye socket; her gaze takes in the gaping hole of a nose, the rictus of stained, cracked teeth. She and her friends, they’d all seen dead things: fledgling house martins spilled from nests in the eaves and guttering; a pair of rabbits tied by their paws and left outside the back door; the grinning pig’s head in the butcher’s window; the chickens her father killed for Sunday lunch. Never a dead human being.

‘What do you think it is then, Mart? It must be really, really old.’

Martin gathered up his drawing things and packed them away one by one in his metal geometry set. ‘Roman, I expect. Or maybe pirate.’

Graham was decorating the margin of Martin’s plan with a neat little skull-and-crossbones. He put his pencil down and stared, with his round pale eyes, into the beyond. ‘Or maybe it’s a Beaker man. Remember the skeleton they found up Raven Park when they were building the estate?’

Martin rolls his eyes. ‘It wasn’t a skeleton, stupid. Duckford said it was only a jawbone and a bit of pot with slimy stuff in. The archaeologists took them to the museum. If they’d found a Beaker man, they wouldn’t have left him on a shelf in the bone house, would they?’

‘Why you so sure it’s a Beaker man?’ Daphne said. ‘It could be a Beaker woman, for all you know.’

Silence. Boys don’t deal in contradiction.

‘Don’t be so daft, girl,’ Graham snorted. ‘Why would anyone bother to bury a woman?’

‘What if there’s a curse on it?’ Janice’s face had gone a bit pale, her lips wobbled. ‘You know, like with Tutankhamun. People died after they moved his body; that could happen to us.’

Daphne stares at the Beaker woman’s skull, imagines it covered in flesh, with long thick hair, maybe red like her own. Swiftly, she covers it with the tea towel and lifts the box once more. Voices from up the street, coming round the corner by Madras House. Two women—Mrs John and her sister Joan, arm in arm in woollen headscarves and thick coats, walking fast against the cold. Remembering Manny’s curiosity, she is suddenly afraid they will stop her and discover what it is she’s carrying. Martin has made them all promise not to tell.

The women are only a few yards away. She steps off the pavement and crosses the road to the row of cottages. Turns down the cart track leading to the Morlas river which skirts the backyards and gardens of this side of town. The ground is uneven here: she stumbles over deep ruts made by tractor wheels and the muddy hoof prints of cows going back and forth for milking from Hollerton fields on the opposite bank. She can hear the familiar regular plashing of the water, the deeper gurgle where the Morlas rounds the bend from Quaker’s Bridge. The track peters out at the ford and she turns left on to a narrow footpath above the river. A rusty outfall pipe juts from the bank into the water and there’s a stale smell in the air—sewage, something rotting. The footpath skirts a low stone wall built to protect the riverside properties from flooding; there are gaps in places where the stones have fallen out and the gardens behind have mostly run wild, choked with weeds and bramble. Except for the one she is passing at this moment, which belongs to her piano teacher. Two neat vegetable beds, a narrow lawn edged with shrubs and a couple of ancient fruit trees, their branches bare now that winter has come.

Daphne’s chest tightens. Ordinarily on a Friday afternoon she would be at her piano lesson. Her hands would be smarting from Miss O’Dowd’s water torture: the bowl of melted ice in the kitchen sink, the scalding water poured straight from the kettle. ‘For goodness sake, brace up girl, it’s for your own good. Softens the finger joints, helps them stretch to the octave.’

Today is the first time she has mitched a piano lesson. Tomorrow there will be an envelope addressed to her parents, waiting on the bench outside the front door. The summons, on pale blue Basildon Bond notepaper.

Dear Rev and Mrs Morgan, your daughter did not arrive for her lesson yesterday. I trust she is not unwell. Since there was no advance notice of this absence, the usual payment is required.

Daphne knows this format; her sister was always skiving lessons. Unlike Sylvia, Daphne has no music in her, no dexterity in her fingers despite the ordeal of the water. Sylvia, who is afraid of nothing, would steal the clock from the mantlepiece when the teacher was out of the room and move the minute hand forward. Miss O’Dowd never leaves the room while Daphne has her lesson; she must be able to read her lying mind. Miss O’Dowd sits beside her on the hard music stool and notes every single mistake. ‘Once again, please. Use your fingers as well as your thumbs this time.’ And the old marble head in the corner, that dead composer her teacher worships, eyes her with cold white contempt.

There is no light in the back kitchen at the far end of the garden. Miss O’Dowd is probably in the front room composing her summons. Daphne halts and lowers the box onto the footpath. She rubs her cold, stiffening fingers, tries to get the circulation going. A thin moon slides out from behind the copse at the top of Hollerton fields; it catches the ripples on the far side of the river where the current moves faster. The water makes a strange, sucking noise around a heavy limb which has sheared off one of the alders on the field’s edge and lies half submerged.

Flotsam clings to its branches, bobbing and stirring in the downflow: bits of plastic sheeting, barbed wire, a broken fencing post. A long skein of greyish wool drags in the current, like the hair of a drowned woman. Daphne shivers. The riverbank is her playground in daylight, but not now when the shadows are falling thick around her, not now when she is alone with the Beaker woman.

A sudden disturbance in the air above her head. Something passes, swift as a sigh: the thunk of a heavy object hitting the water upstream. Something else rustles in the undergrowth by the water’s edge. There are rats living in holes in the bank, they eat dead animals and the filthy stuff people tip into the river. They’re not fussy, Janice says. Daphne’s heart is beating fast, she badly wants to get home. As she bends down to pick up the box some awful thing—grey, monstrous, flapping—leaps the garden wall and smacks right into her, sending the box and its contents flying and her tumbling off the path, down the bank and into the water.

CHAPTER 2

Eleanor O’Dowd closes her eyes and surrenders to the pulse of the ‘Hammerklavier’. Her strong hands embrace the keyboard, their long deft fingers weaving the patterns of the notes, the tonal shifts and counterpoints, the driving fugue. Nothing matters outside this moment. This marvellous instrument, her capable fingers that infuse the dull little room with the majesty of Beethoven, transporting her to another place, a different time. The last thrilling chord lingering in the air, she allows her hands to rest a moment on the keyboard so she can listen to the dying echo, feel the ivory warm and pliant beneath her fingertips.

She sighs and reaches up to close the lid, briefly runs her fingers across the letters Steinway & Sons, picked out in gold against the polished ebony. The grand piano dominates her narrow-beamed parlour, leaving little space for her scant possessions: an easy chair upholstered in faded green velvet; a small oak bookcase where she keeps her music and poetry; and, in the corner by the window, the mahogany pedestal bearing the alabaster bust of Franz Liszt, the only man she has truly admired. In the house of her childhood, far from this place, he occupied an alcove in the lofty music room, a constant stony-faced reminder of her shortcomings, her fumblings at this same piano, when a wrong note earned a sharp rap over the knuckles from Frau Erdmann. Now she is sole mistress of the instrument, he the sole reminder of her many falls from grace.

The small clock on the mantlepiece trills the hour. She removes Sonata 29 from the music stand and replaces it with ‘Easy Piano Pieces for Beginners’. Her next pupil is late: she always insists they arrive six minutes before the lesson in order to prepare. This one is hopeless, completely tone deaf. Such a shame the promise her sister showed has gone to waste, now she’s in the grammar school distracted by boys and that thing they call ‘pop’ music. Eleanor O’Dowd lifts her gaze from the piano to the mantlepiece, to the sepia photograph in its tarnished silver frame. Two female figures seated together on a garden bench, the younger of the two clutching a small terrier which seems about to spring from her lap. The young woman’s eager smile is directed at something beyond the camera. Her thick, rather wiry hair has come adrift from its pins and her long, patterned scarf spills over the edge of the seat. The ruination of a perfect moment.

Another headstrong girl who refused to listen, always so certain she knew best. Why do they squander their gifts? Reject the people who have sacrificed everything for them? ‘How sharper than a serpent’s tooth…’ Eleanor O’Dowd knows all about that particular, permanent scarring of the heart. She pulls her cardigan closer around her thin shoulders and averts her gaze from the little photograph. Thankless children deserve no forgiveness.

She gets up from the piano stool and leaves the room, a lean, striking-looking woman dressed in her habitual old-fashioned skirt and cardigan, pale-eyed and high cheek-boned, her greying hair coiled neatly at the nape of her neck. In this low-slung cottage built for a smaller breed of Celt, her lofty Englishness, like her grand piano, seems out of place (for she is Oxford bred despite her surname). How she came to be living in this small township on the western edge of Wales is known only to her. She claims no near relations; her religion, nominal though it is for her, is alien to this Anglican and chapel-going community, the nearest unvisited Catholic church ten miles away in a forgotten corner of the county town. On the wooden draining board in the dank kitchen at the back of the house all is prepared: the washing bowl stands ready to be filled with icy water from the pump outside the back door; the kettle whistles on the stove. She opens the back door and stares out at the darkening garden, the wooded hillside rising beyond the Morlas. The late afternoon sky is leaden with clouds massing from the far west, beyond the Irish Sea. She pictures honey-coloured stone, graceful spires and domes, a wintry plume of swans drifting on the Isis, the clever conversation of serious people. She does not hear the front door open, the tread of footsteps on the parlour floor, the swish of curtains being drawn to hide the street. She sighs heavily, turns from the door and goes back through the hall, into the parlour.

‘Ah,’ she says, ‘It’s you.’

CHAPTER 3

Daphne stands thigh-deep in the freezing Morlas. Her boots are full of water, the bottom of her duffle coat is saturated and she cannot feel her legs. She’s not a good swimmer yet, with only the sea to learn in and then only in summer. People have drowned in this river and further out in the treacherous currents of the estuary. Every child in Glanmorfa knows the perils of getting out of your depth.

The river is loud in her ears, she is losing her footing, weighed down by her sodden coat and the pull of the current. She will surely drown, like the Williams brothers, caught in the whirlpool out fishing below Cowyn Head. Johnny Nebo and his uncles only found the bodies a week later. She and her family were away on holiday, staying in a locum parish in Kent. Her father had to drive all the way home to take the funerals. If she drowns, it could be days before they find her, spat out by the river on some mudbank in the middle of the estuary.

The current keeps trying to pull her out into the deeper water and she has to use all her strength to turn back towards the bank. Her feet find traction on the stony riverbed. Slowly, she recovers her balance and drags herself out from the sucking mud. The riverbank is steep here. Her frozen fingers clutch the brittle spikes of reed and vicious bramble; they find the solid