The Dead Sing Below

Chapter One: Leasow Lane

The removal van could not make the last two hundred yards.

Leasow Lane narrowed past the final field gate into a rutted track hemmed by hawthorn, and the driver, a bald man with forearms like rolled carpet, stood at the pinch point shaking his head with the slow certainty of a man who had said no in this exact spot before.

"Not happening, pal. I'll shred the sides."

So Andrew Farren carried his life to the cottage in armfuls, up a lane that smelled of wet nettles and cow parsley, while his daughter sat on an upturned crate by the gate and watched him without expression.

Sophie was seven. She had been seven for four months. On her birthday she had opened her presents in order, thanked him for each one, and gone back to looking out of the window, and Andrew had gone into the kitchen and pressed a tea towel against his mouth so she wouldn't hear.

Eleven months. That was how long it had been since Josie's stroke — since the ordinary Tuesday morning when his wife had stood up from the breakfast table to fetch the milk and said, in a puzzled voice, that the room had gone sideways. She was thirty-six. There had been no warning, no lump, no cough, no long slow permission to prepare. There had been a Tuesday and then there had not been a Tuesday any more.

Sophie had spoken perhaps four hundred words since the funeral. Andrew had begun, in the worst weeks, to count them.

"Last box," he said, setting it down on the flagstones of the front step. "Want to see your room?"

She slid off the crate and came to him and took his hand, which was answer enough. Her fingers were cold. They were always cold now, even in June.

The cottage stood alone at the very end of the lane, where the tarmac gave up entirely. Victorian, detached, red brick gone the colour of dried blood in the damp, with a slate roof that dipped in the middle like a swaybacked horse. Four bedrooms. A garden gone to seed. Beyond the garden wall lay a rough meadow, and beyond that, filling the whole northern horizon, stood a dense belt of alder woodland that the estate agent had called "a mature amenity screen" and the village called the Nettles.

The price had been the thing. Andrew had done the sums at three in the morning for six weeks straight, sitting on the floor of the Bristol flat with a laptop and a mug of cold tea, and this was the only four-bedroom house within four hundred miles that his remote contract and Josie's death-in-service payout could carry. He had assumed the low price meant damp. He had budgeted for damp.

Inside, the house smelled of new paint over something older.

"It's big," Sophie said.

Three words. He filed them away like coins.

"It's massive," he agreed. "You could ride a bike down this hall. Don't ride a bike down this hall."

The hall ran the depth of the house, front door to back, with rooms opening off it. The floor was laminate — cheap, honey-coloured, the kind that comes in packs from a warehouse — and it had been laid fast. Andrew noticed it because noticing things was his job; he wrote software for logistics firms, and the whole of his working life was spent finding the one place where a system had been fudged. The laminate didn't meet the skirting cleanly. In the front room, a strip of it had been cut short and the gap filled with beading that didn't match. Underneath, when he crouched and looked, he could see old floorboards, wide and dark, a century old.

The walls had been skimmed too. Fresh plaster, painted magnolia, but in the back room the new surface stood a full inch proud of the window reveal, and in the hall the coving stopped abruptly halfway along one wall, as though whoever had done it had run out of enthusiasm or money or time.

A quick renovation. A cheap one. The kind you do to sell a house that hasn't sold.

"Which room's mine?" Sophie asked.

"Whichever you want."

She went up. He listened to her small feet moving overhead, room to room, and then stopping. When he came up she was standing in the smallest of the four bedrooms, the one at the back with a window that faced the meadow and the wood.

"This one."

"You sure? The front one's twice the size."

"This one," she said, and put her hand flat against the wall beside the window as if she were checking a horse's flank.

They ate fish and chips on the floor of the front room, out of paper, with the last of the daylight going bluish in the windows. Andrew had bought them in the village, a mile back down the lane, at a shop that also sold fishing tackle and paracetamol. The woman behind the counter had asked, pleasantly enough, where he was staying, and when he said Leasow Lane her face had done something. Not shock. A small tightening, like a door being pushed to but not shut.

"The old Peasley cottage," she'd said.

"Is it? I only know it as number one."

"It's the only one," she'd said, and given him his change.

He thought about that while Sophie ate her chips one at a time, in order of length.

"Soph. Do you like it here?"

She considered the question with the seriousness she gave to everything now.

"It's quiet," she said.

"Too quiet?"

She shook her head. Then, unexpectedly, she leaned sideways until her head rested against his arm, and stayed there, and Andrew sat very still, the way you sit when a wild bird lands on you, and did not move for a long time.

He got her bed made up by nine. The mattress had come in the van; the frame was still in pieces on the landing, so the mattress lay on the floor under the window, which she said she preferred. He set up the baby monitor on the windowsill.

He knew it was ridiculous. She was seven. He had bought it after Josie died, in the first weeks, because Sophie had started having night terrors — screaming without waking, thrashing, and once walking into the bathroom door hard enough to bruise her forehead — and he had needed to hear her. She had never asked him to take it away. It sat in her room now like a small white witness, and its twin sat on the kitchen counter downstairs, and Andrew slept, when he slept, with the volume turned up.

"Story?" he said.

"You can just sit."

So he sat on the floorboards beside her mattress with his back against the wall, and listened to her breathing lengthen, and looked out of the low window at the black mass of the Nettles under a sky that still held a rind of light. The alders stood so close together that they made a single shape. No gaps. No paths that he could see.

Something cried out in there — a sharp, torn sound, fox or bird — and Andrew felt the hairs lift along his arms, and told himself it was fox or bird.

Sophie was asleep. Properly asleep. Her mouth was slightly open and her hands were curled loose beside her face, and she looked, for the first time in nearly a year, seven years old.

He crept out and stood on the landing and felt something loosen in his chest that had been clenched so long he'd forgotten it was a clench.

Maybe, he thought. Maybe this was the right thing after all.

Downstairs he opened his laptop on a packing crate and worked for two hours, fixing a routing bug for a client in Rotterdam, and at half past eleven he went to make tea and stopped in the kitchen doorway.

The monitor was hissing its soft grey hiss. Under the hiss, faint, was a sound he took at first for the fridge.

He picked the unit up and held it to his ear.

Breathing. Just Sophie's breathing, slow and deep, with a small catch at the top of each inhale.

And beneath that, so faint he could not swear to it, a low unhurried run of notes — three of them, descending — that stopped the moment he noticed it.

Andrew stood in his new kitchen with the monitor pressed to his ear until his arm ached, and heard nothing more, and eventually he made his tea and let the sound go, because he was thirty-eight years old and exhausted and grieving, and because a man in that condition hears all sorts of things.

That is what he told himself.

He would remember, later, that the notes had been perfectly in tune.