Never Whistle After Dark

Chapter 1: The Keeper's Photograph

The care home on the edge of Peterborough smelled of lavender polish and gravy, whatever the day of the week. Christine Turner signed the visitors' book at the front desk, said good afternoon to Precious, the nurse on duty, and walked down the long carpeted corridor to Room Fourteen.

Her father was sitting by the window with a tartan blanket over his knees. The September sun lay across his hands. They had been huge hands once, cracked and brown, hands that could lift a sack of seed potatoes as if it were a cushion. Now the skin was thin and spotted, and the knuckles stood up like stones in a dry riverbed.

'Hello, Dad,' she said.

Arthur Turner was eighty-two. Dementia had come for him slowly at first and then quickly, the way the tide comes in over flat sand. Most days he thought Christine was her mother, Joyce, who had been dead for nine years. Some days he thought she was one of the nurses. On the bad days he did not look at her at all. He watched the car park through the glass as if he were waiting for a lorry that never came.

She pulled the visitor's chair close and sat down. She told him about the traffic on the Parkway, and the rain they had had at the weekend, and Andrew, who was coming on Saturday with a tin of the shortbread Dad liked. She talked the way you talk to someone on the other side of a high wall. You never knew which words would make it over.

Arthur's eyes moved slowly around the room. They passed the television, the photograph of Joyce on the bedside cabinet, and the vase of supermarket carnations. Then they stopped on Christine's face.

His hand came off the blanket and closed around her wrist.

It was not an old man's grip. It was hard and sudden, and it hurt.

'Chrissie,' he said.

Nobody had called her Chrissie in thirty years. She had been Christine at school, Christine at the bank where she had worked for most of her life, Christine to her ex-husband and to everyone since. Chrissie belonged to a much younger girl.

'I'm here, Dad.'

'Don't let them pull the black trees.'

His voice was perfectly clear. It was the voice he had used when she was small and about to run into the road, the voice that stopped you with one foot in the air.

'What trees, Dad?'

'The black ones. In the long field.' He leaned towards her. His breath smelled of milky tea. 'You have to stop them. They're pulling them out again. I can hear the chains.'

'Nobody's pulling anything. You're safe. You're in Thorpe Lea, remember? It's Tuesday.'

He did not seem to hear her. His pale eyes searched her face as if he were looking for something he had dropped there. Then he asked, very quietly, as if it were the most important question in the world, 'Have you been whistling?'

Something cold slid through Christine's chest.

She had not whistled since she was nine years old. Not once in forty-seven years. Not at football matches, not at dogs, not in the bath, not walking home on summer evenings when everyone else seemed to do it without thinking. At school the other girls had whistled pop songs through their teeth in the playground, and she had stood with her lips pressed together. When her husband, back when she'd had one, had teased her about it, she'd laughed and told him she had never learned how. That was a lie. She had learned. She just didn't do it.

'No, Dad,' she said. 'I haven't been whistling.'

'Good girl.' His grip loosened. His thumb moved once across the back of her hand, the way it used to when she had a temperature. 'Not after dark. Never after dark.'

Then he was gone again, back behind the wall. He turned his face to the window and watched the car park.

Christine sat very still. Her wrist ached where his fingers had been.

Precious put her head round the door a few minutes later. She was a broad, kind woman from Zimbabwe who called all the residents 'my darling' and somehow made it sound true every time.

'He's been restless today,' she said. 'All morning, asking about trees. There was something on the local news at breakfast. Wildlife people out on the fens, digging up old wood. He got very upset. We had to turn it off.'

'Which fen?' Christine asked. Her mouth had gone dry.

Precious shrugged. 'One of them out east. I don't know the names, my darling. They all look the same to me. Flat.'

Christine kissed her father's forehead, which he did not notice, and went out to her car. She sat behind the wheel for a long time with the keys in her hand. Then, instead of turning right towards home, she turned left, and drove out of the city and onto the fen.

The land opened up quickly once you left Peterborough behind. The hedges went first, and then the trees, until there was nothing but black fields running away on both sides to a horizon as straight as a ruler. The sky was enormous. It took up nine-tenths of everything. A line of electricity pylons marched across it, and here and there a farmhouse sat alone like a boat on a calm sea.

The road ran along the top of a bank. Christine had forgotten that. On the fens the roads rode higher than the fields, sometimes by six or eight feet, so that driving along them felt like driving on top of a wall. A child would ask why. She had asked why, once.

She followed the signs without needing to think about them, which frightened her a little. Her hands seemed to know the way. Benwick. Then a narrower road. Then a small green sign, its paint faded, that said MARDLE FEN.

She had not been here since the summer of 1971.

In her family it had always been called the flood year. The year Dad lost the farm. They had told it at Christmas sometimes, as a story with funny parts: the night the water came, the chickens on the roof of the henhouse, Mum arriving home from hospital with the new baby to find the whole fen turned into a lake. Andrew always laughed at that part, because he was the new baby. Christine had told the story herself many times. She had told it at work dos and at dinner parties. It had a beginning and an end, and nothing in the middle that anyone needed to know.

The engine house stood where she remembered it, at the far end of a long, straight drove, with its back against the high green bank of the river. It was a tall brick building with arched windows and a chimney like a pointing finger. A new sign stood by the gate. MARDLE ENGINE MUSEUM. Open Tuesdays and Sundays, 1 till 4. Volunteers Welcome.

It was ten past three. The door was open.

Inside, a man in a green fleece sat behind a folding table with a cash box and a pile of leaflets. He was about seventy, with a cheerful red face and reading glasses on a cord.

'Three pounds,' he said. 'Or two-fifty if you're a pensioner, but I won't ask. I'm Keith. Have you been before?'

'A long time ago,' Christine said.

She paid and walked through into the main hall.

The engine filled the building the way an organ fills a church. A great iron cylinder rose from the floor, taller than a man, and above it, high in the shadows of the roof, the beam lay across its iron pillar like the arm of a giant set down to rest. The beam was as long as a bus. At the far end it connected to a rod that went down through the floor into darkness, where the scoop wheel had once turned. Everything was painted dark green and red and polished until it shone. Everything was cold.

She remembered it moving. She remembered the sound it made, a slow, deep thud that went through the soles of your feet and into your chest.

'Built in 1846,' said Keith, who had followed her in. He liked to talk; she could tell. 'Drained Mardle Mere. That was the biggest open water in the county once, a mile and a half across. Eels, pike, wildfowl, all sorts. The fenmen lived off it for hundreds of years. Then the engine came, and in ten years it was gone. All farmland now. Well,' he corrected himself, 'it was farmland. The Wildlife Trust have bought most of it. They're going to flood it again, if you can believe it. Turn it back into wetland.'

'When did the engine stop?'

'Nineteen seventy-one. Ran on steam right up to the end, which was unusual. There was a bad flood that year. The old sluice at the outfall failed in a storm, and the whole fen went under. After that the Drainage Board put in diesel pumps. This was left to rot until the society took it on.'

Christine was hardly listening. She was looking at the photographs on the wall.

There were a dozen of them, framed in black, showing the engine house through the years. Men in flat caps standing in a row. A horse and cart loaded with coal. The fen under snow. And one, larger than the rest, with a small brass plate underneath it.

MARDLE ENGINE, 1890. THE KEEPER, MR A. DODD.

A small, weathered man stood in front of the boiler door. He wore a waistcoat over a collarless shirt, with the sleeves rolled up past the elbow. His arms were thin and corded. He held a tin mug in one hand. His face was brown and creased, like a walnut, and his eyes were narrowed as if the photographer had made him laugh just before the shutter clicked.

'Funny one, him,' Keith said. 'The Drainage Board's wage books list a Dodd as keeper here from the 1840s right through to the end. Must have been the same family. Father, son, grandson, all with the same initial. People did that then. Kept a job in the family like an heirloom.'

Christine did not answer.

She knew that face. She knew the creases at the corners of the eyes and the way he held the mug, with his thumb hooked over the rim. She knew what the tea in that mug tasted like, strong and stewed, with too much sugar and a faint taste of smoke. She had drunk it, sitting on an upturned crate by the boiler, with her feet not reaching the floor.

'Never whistle after dark, gal,' he had said. 'Not on Mardle Fen.'

And standing in the cold museum with her handbag on her shoulder and her car keys still in her hand, Christine Turner, fifty-six years old, felt the story she had told all her life come apart. Underneath it, whole and bright and terrible, lay the spring she was nine.