It was getting late as Laura headed back to her aunt's house and although the sun had long dipped below the hills there was a glow of bluish light in the west. Midsummer would soon be here, heralded by the perpetual twilight. The moon shone high and Laura was glad of its light, in absence of streetlighting, for her to get back to the house at Ash Rake.
As she drove along the steep and winding roads from the hotel to Ashlow, the events of the evening were present in her thoughts. It had been quite a shock to see Iain Mcleod again.
She wasn't quite sure how she felt. This, she knew, was a bad sign. She knew that it signified that any old feelings she had for Iain weren't quite at rest. Seeing him had certainly stirred up all the old memories she'd carefully placed away. Iain had hurt her badly but she also remembered the good times with him too. It had been a passionate and intense relationship. They'd had lots in common and worked well together in the lab. This had extended into their private life which had made Iain's betrayal feel even worse. But now, with the long expanse of years between events, Laura was thinking more of how much fun they'd had together. It was this route through her memories that seemed to prevail. It also struck her that the Iain she'd spent time with that evening had seemed different from the cocky young pathologist she had known back in college. He was mellower and a little sadder she thought. He'd not given any details about the split from his wife but she sensed he was a little broken from it. Perhaps that showed he had changed. Regardless, what had also interested Laura was Iain's impressive career history. Not only what he had achieved overseas but also what he had been involved in when he had come back to the UK. On a solely personal basis, getting reacquainted with Iain in a professional way would be rather beneficial to her, and to her team and the lab back in Oxford.
Parking up outside Ash Rake House Laura turned her car's engine off and glanced at her watch. It was past 11 and she wished now she'd come back sooner. The following day's activities looked tedious as well as physically demanding. Although it had been a very informal reception, with a start Laura realised she'd not really introduced herself to any of the other team members.
She also realised she'd not seen Robbie leave the drinks reception. It occurred to her that her attention had been fully taken with Iain. She frowned to herself. This wasn't like her. She wasn't sure how she felt about seeing Iain again after all these years but suddenly she felt bad for not even noticing Robbie leave the lounge. Clearly, though, he had not deemed it necessary to say good night to her.
She thought about the two men. Iain, dressed in expensive casual clothing and still as arrestingly handsome, if not more so than when they had been at college. Robbie on the other hand had come to the drinks in his usual suit and tie and when she'd overheard the younger members of his team poke fun at him behind his back Laura had felt a pang of protectiveness over him. When she'd gone to the bar she'd overheard DS Thompson, whom she disliked, making fun of Robbie to DC Andrews, sniggering over the fact that Robbie was wearing a vest under his shirt. You can all mock she thought, but Robbie was the only man she knew who hadn't had a midlife crisis. Other than the very real crisis he'd faced when Val had died. God forbid any of you have to go through what he's been through she'd thought to herself as she regarded the younger members of Robbie's department. As for mid-life crises, Thompson was a prime candidate for either a Harley Davidson cap or an electric guitar and lessons when he reached 45.
She'd looked over to Robbie and he'd looked back over to her at the bar as she got drinks for them both and he had smiled and winked at her. At the same time she had heard Thompson snigger with his comments and she had given him a withering glare.
Robbie was oblivious and Laura suddenly found herself witness to how honest and decent he was and how rare that was. She was aware he had these genuine qualities, a deep vein of goodness that she knew he would never waver from, no matter what. Just for those traits alone she had felt she could always trust him and she had found herself strongly protective of him, especially after Val had died. Early on, even before Val's death Laura had made her allegiances clear to Robbie's colleagues and co-workers over the years, stood up for him without him ever knowing it and as such her professional reputation and integrity had strengthened just from working alongside him for all those years. It felt odd that he hadn't said goodnight and she wondered if it was because of Iain.
She sighed and looked up at the front of her aunt's house. The entrance had a carved stone porch of gritstone, common to the limestone built properties of its age. In the lintel above the door the name, ASH RAKE HOUSE, was chiselled into the stone. The moonlight shone over the carving and the front of the house and as Laura reached the entrance she put her hand on one of the large blocks of limestone that faced out from the front wall of the house. The whiteish grey rough sharp texture of the limestone caught the moonlight and looked cold and craggy. She traced her fingers over the rough sharp stone until her fingers found something familiar. It was a fossil of an ancient sea creature that lived millions of years ago. The local limestone was full of fossils, and often they could be seen in the drystone walls that crisscrossed the landscape. They were so common that they could often be found in just in a piece of stone picked up from a valley pathway. The house at Ash Rake was built from the local stone and as such had a profusion of the fossils embedded in the exterior walls. The fossil near the front door of her aunt's house had always fascinated Laura. In a large piece of stone next to the front door and similar in appearance to a lily or a sea anemone, the fossilised remains of a large crinoid could clearly be seen. As a child, Laura had simply accepted the fossil's presence but as she had grown older her inquiring mind had wondered what and how and why it was there. Her investigative and questioning nature had always been there from a young age and she clearly remembered the joy and wonder of finding out for herself, from books, exactly what and how and why the fossil was in the wall of her aunt's house. The long passage of time thrilled and awed her and whenever she had visited the house she had always sought out the fossil and each time thought of how once, hundreds of millions of years ago, it had been alive and at the bottom of a calm tropical sea.
Time passes she thought to herself and let herself into her aunt's house.
She closed the door behind her and found it was with a shiver as she stood in the hallway of the house. As before she only felt the unease disappear when she had locked the big oak door behind her, twisting the big brass knob and turning the large key to hear the old lock clunk into place. The house was in darkness but the moonlight shone through from the doorway on the left from the front parlour as her aunt had always called it. To the right was another room which had been used as a dining room but had not been utilised very often, her aunt having kept the old oak furniture covered with sheets for most of the year when she had been on her own and had no need to dine in there. There were cardboard boxes full of her aunt's belongings ready to go to various charity shops and some of the rooms were half packed into boxes awaiting a house clearance company.
Laura stepped forward and was about to turn on the lights when she saw something, glistening in the moonlight, on the floor at the end of the hallway. She frowned in puzzlement. There was that scent again, minty and floral almost. Laura couldn't quite pin it down. She stepped up the hallway to investigate the glittering patches on the tiled floor. Towards the end of the hallway was a door that led to what her aunt had called the back scullery. It was an old pantry, large and full of bits of old furniture and junk from the house that was waiting to be cleared. Her aunt had also kept her washing machine in there. Laura wondered if the glistening effect was from moisture, from the damp in the house perhaps. She took a closer look and, touching the glistening patch on the floor, found it to be some sort of residue, almost gritty. She frowned in consternation, and there was the scent again in her nostrils. Perhaps, she thought, the odd material in front of her was washing powder mixed with dirt from the scullery floor. Accepting that this was what it had to be, as there was no other explanation. Unless of course it had to be categorised as unexplained. Stopping short of conducting her own homespun forensic investigation she shook her head at herself, almost laughing at how a few nights on her own in the house had brought back all the old ghost stories she had been told as a child. Even so, she opened the door to the scullery. The room was dark save for the small windows set high into the walls. A glow of reflected moonlight tinted the room with a very pale white light. Laura sniffed the air and decided for sure that the mystery scent had come from the room and that it was from the small amount of washing she'd done for herself the day before. Satisfied with this explanation she closed the door of the scullery and went back into the hallway before making her way to the back of the house and the stairs that led to the upper floor and the bedroom she was staying in.
Outside, on the hill above ash rake house, a figure, crouched down low, watched from the inside of the enclosure of ash trees, as Laura turned on the light in the upstairs bedroom and pulled the curtains closed against the cooling night air and the moon that was shining as bright as day.