Warren House Inn

       Monday lunchtime

      Lyla is at school and I should be at work in Princetown. Instead I’m parked down the road at Warren House Inn. The fog is so thick I can barely see the humble old whitewashed building, though it is only a hundred yards away. Normally the inn is visible for miles around – because it is the only building for miles in the rolling, bony moorland. Today, in the Dartmoor murk, Warren House looks like the vague, gloomy idea of a cottage, half-formed in someone’s mind.

      Stepping out, locking the car door, I pause and stare at my own hand, unnerved. I never used to do this. Locking my car, in one of the wildest places on the moor. We never lock anything on the moor: bikes, cars, houses. And who’s going to steal my worthless old Ford? A team of stoats?

      One of the shaggy Dartmoor bullocks?

      Or the sheep?

      I can hear sheep, somewhere around me, also invisible in the fog:

      meh, meh meh meh meh, as if they are mocking me.

      MEH, Kath Redway, MEH.

      It was Lyla who first suggested this to me, that sheep say meh not baa, and once she’d said it I couldn’t get it out of my head; because she was right. Sheep are laughing at us, mocking; meh meh meh, look at you, what are you doing here, look at this person locking her car door, meh, why is she locking it, mehh, is she scared she might get back in and drive into a reservoir?

       Mehhhhhhhhhh!

      Thoughts press in on me: I am stuck inside myself. How could I possibly have tried to kill myself? What did I do on that fateful December day? I do not believe it; yet I have to believe it.

      As I walk up the mist-swirled moorland road towards the inn, I go over it for the seventeenth time this morning. Yesterday I thought it through two hundred times or more. I’ve been obsessing like this since Tessa’s visit.

      I remember Christmas, I do remember that. It was nice. We did what we always do, went down to Salcombe like the poor relatives we are, and feasted at my brother’s expense.

      We had a roasted goose, like they eat in Dickens. And Lyla actually got to play with other kids, her rambunctious eight- and ten-year-old cousins, Oscar and Charlie – or Foxtrot and Tango, as Dan calls them. Charlie and Oscar tolerate Lyla because they’ve grown up with her: when she twirls her hands repeatedly or gets phobic about scratchy things or hides shyly under a table with an encyclopaedia, they accept it, and laugh good-naturedly, and that makes Lyla smile and come out from under the table and play with them in her own awkward, funny way, and that’s why I like Christmas. Lyla is always happy at Christmas.

      And I enjoyed Christmas this year, too. I remember crackers and sloe gin, and luxury chocolate assortments my brother bought from some posh London shop, and then a fat, contented drive home to Huckerby on Boxing Day – and that evening Adam went away for a week, to do up the rangers’ hut on the northern moors, leaving me alone with Lyla.

      And after that, the horrible fog comes down on everything, like a door closing, and everything is lost in the remorseless mist of my post-traumatic, retrograde amnesia, the vapours of my bruised and useless brain.

      From Boxing Day onwards my mind is basically a void. Four days later I tried to kill myself, and I have no idea why.

       Meh.

      As I get nearer the pub, I see the door is shut and the windows are dark. It looks as if the pub is closed. The peat fire in this pub has, famously, never gone out since 1847. But sometimes they casually close the place in the dead days of winter. But I need this pub to be open: because it is the one place I might find Adam, when I need to find my elusive husband.