The Girls Who Disappeared(2)

Olivia started trembling uncontrollably as pain and fear gripped her, turning her insides to ice as she remembered how the accident had happened: the figure in the road, which was now empty, stretching into the seemingly dark void.

Who had it been?

And where had her friends gone?





Day One





1



Jenna


Voice Memo: Monday, 26 November 2018


The Devil’s Corridor is an apt name for this long, straight A-road that leads to the market town of Stafferbury in Wiltshire. Over the years there have been reports of many strange happenings: unexplained accidents, apparent suicides, sightings of hooded figures and the sound of a child crying in the dead of night. But none more mysterious than the Olivia Rutherford case twenty years ago this week. Three young women disappeared from a crashed car and haven’t been seen since …

I pause the recording on my phone as I take in my surroundings. There is definitely something eerie about this road. It looks as though it’s been built straight through a forest and all I can see at either side are thickets of tall, dense evergreen trees that reach towards the bruise-coloured sky and the swollen black clouds. So far I haven’t spotted any houses or buildings along here. I could be somewhere Scandinavian rather than the depths of Wiltshire. I’ve been parked on the verge for the last ten minutes and only two cars have gone by.

A presence in my peripheral vision makes me jolt. A man is peering in at me through the passenger window and my heart races. He must have come from the forest. He looks early fifties, maybe a little older: craggy face, a bushy beard, shaggy grey eyebrows beneath a fisherman’s hat. His shoulders are rounded under a long waxed overcoat that reaches mid-calf. He’s holding the lead of a white whippet-type dog with three legs and a brown patch over its left eye. The dog stares soulfully at me. I reach down for the mace in my handbag and place it on the seat beside me, hidden by my thigh.

The man makes a rolling motion with his hands. I lower the window just a fraction and keep my finger on the button. The smell of pine and unwashed clothes hits me.

‘Can I help you?’

‘I was going to ask you the same,’ he calls, in a thick West Country accent. ‘Have you broken down? You shouldn’t pull up here. It ain’t safe to be on this road all alone, like.’ He has a missing front tooth.

Thunder rolls overhead, a low beastly growl that adds to my unease.

‘I was …’ I hesitate. Perhaps it’s best he doesn’t know I’m a journalist yet. ‘I’m just on my way to Stafferbury.’

‘Are you lost?’

‘No. I pulled over to do … something.’ I’m aware I sound vague.

‘Right.’ He frowns, his suspicious gaze sweeping over my modern Audi Q5 before landing back on me. His eyes are very dark, almost black. ‘Well, Stafferbury is just another two miles or so down this road. You can’t miss it.’

‘That’s great, thanks.’

I quickly close my window to discourage any more questions, my hands trembling as I slide the gearstick into drive. I pull away from the grass verge so quickly the tyres screech. From my rear-view mirror I see him standing there, his dog sitting at his feet, staring after my retreating car.

I’m feeling a little less rattled as I arrive in Stafferbury. The town is just how I imagined it would be. Just like the black-and-white photographs I’ve pored over before driving more than two hundred miles to get here from Manchester. It’s hardly changed since the late 1890s and, of course, the standing stones are even older. I notice them first. They are in the adjourning boggy-looking field to my right, set five metres apart in a semicircle, large and ugly, like a set of uneven teeth. They don’t seem to be in any particular formation, not like Stonehenge. Even from here I can see that a film of green algae has formed over them, like plaque.

A family in brightly coloured raincoats, the kids in funky wellies with a small dog in tow, clamber over the stile into the field where the stones are. I wonder what Finn would think of it here. As an image of my floppy-haired ten-year-old son swims in my mind I feel a pang of longing so strong it’s painful. Since the separation from his dad I’m used to being away from him – I have no choice now that we share custody. But I hate it. It feels like part of me is missing.

The high street is set in a horseshoe shape with a war memorial separating the two roads, and in addition to the one I’ve just driven down there is another heading away from the town, snaking between two medieval-looking buildings with an ominous-sounding pub, The Raven, on the corner. Its sign – a big black bird with sinister beady eyes set against a grey sky – gives me the creeps. From my satnav, that road leads to the back-streets and countryside beyond.

I’m staying in the forest in a cabin that looked beautiful and modern on the website. I’d wanted to see the high street before heading to my accommodation so had deliberately missed the turning from the Devil’s Corridor, and now I go back on myself. I continue through the town, which has been dressed up for Christmas, taking in the little boutiques selling mystical ornaments, jewellery and incense, a café in one of the Tudor buildings called Bea’s Tearoom, a few clothes shops sporting tie-dye T-shirts and fringed skirts, and a place called Madame Tovey’s – she professes (according to the large sign outside, complete with a tarot card illustration) to be able to tell your fortune. It’s a cute town, small and quaint, with its Tudor buildings, cobbled streets and Christmas lights twinkling at leaded windows. I can see why tourists are attracted to it, but there is an air of the rundown about it. It’s like Avebury’s poor relation. Maybe it’s more bustling in the summer, I think charitably. It is a cold November Monday, after all, with only a few people about.