The Hidden

by Melanie Golding

Genres: Suspense; Horror

Synopsis

One dark December night in a small seaside town, a little girl is found abandoned. When her mother finally arrives, authorities release the pair, believing it to be an innocent case of a toddler running off. Gregor, a seemingly single man, is found bludgeoned and left for dead in his apartment, but the discovery of children's toys raises more questions than answers. Every night, Ruby gazes into Gregor’s apartment, leading to the discovery of his secret family: his unusually silent daughter and his mentally unstable wife, Constance, who insists that she is descended from the mythological selkies. She begs Ruby to aid in finding the sealskin that Gregor has hidden from her, making it impossible to return to her people. DS Joanna Harper's investigation into Gregor’s assault leads her to CCTV footage of the mother-daughter pair from town. Harper realizes she knows the woman almost as well as she knows herself: it's her estranged daughter, Ruby. No matter the depth of Ruby’s involvement, she knows she will choose her daughter over her career. Steeped in local legend and exploring the depths of what it means to be a mother, Melanie Golding's newest novel is a lyrical and atmospheric folktale for the modern age (Bustle, on Little Darlings).

Release date: November 9, 2021

Publisher: Crooked Lane Books

Print pages: 336

Sample

Chapter One

She steals to the window, and looks at the sand,

And over the sand at the sea;

And her eyes are set in a stare;

And anon there breaks a sigh,

And anon there drops a tear,

From a sorrow-clouded eye,

And a heart sorrow-laden,

A long, long sigh;

For the cold strange eyes of a little Mermaiden

And the gleam of her golden hair.

MATTHEW ARNOLD, ‘The Forsaken Merman’, 1849

NOW

Leonie

Friday, 21 December

Leonie presses her palm to the outside of the shop window. The glass is cold; the fat little star of her hand leaves an imprint in condensation when she pulls it away. She laughs and slaps her hand back on the window, stamping another and another, a bit like when she does potato printing at the kitchen table, the potatoes soon left aside in favour of dipping her

hands straight in the paints. She concentrates on tracing the outlines of the handprints with a fingertip, before they fade away.

‘Mamma,’ she says. ‘Come look. Me do painting.’

Behind her, a handbag stands abandoned on the pavement. She turns around, toddles over, picks up the bag. She looks up and down the street, her whole body turning first one way, then the other. There is no one else there. The chill wind blows in her face, tightening the skin on her cheeks and almost toppling her, almost taking her pink bobble hat from her head. Two bobbles; like a teddy bear’s ears.

‘Mamma?’

Leonie is still, wearing a small frown. Then, she upends the handbag onto the slabs. Nappies and wipes fall out, nappy bags are whisked up the street by the wind. There is a coin purse, a collection of receipts, a bunch of keys attached to a smooth pebble with a hole in it. Picking up the pebble, she shakes the keys so that they rattle, then drops the lot back on the ground. A fruit bar, half-finished and wound into its torn wrapper is what she reaches for next. She has it in her mouth when she hears the shop bell. The heavy door creaks as it opens, spilling yellow light and warmth onto her fingers, now almost blue with cold, that peep out beyond the cuffs of her coat.

Though it isn’t late, it’s nearly dark; the shortest day of the year. The girl toddles towards the shop’s light, towards the Christmas tree just inside, past the stranger at the door who has stepped aside to let her in, who is saying, ‘Where’s your mummy?’

Leonie reaches for a bauble, a shiny thing, sparkling. There’s a chocolate bell too and she drops the fruit bar to take it in her hand.

‘Whose child is this?’ calls the stranger, as the man from behind the counter comes forward, rubbing his hands together, his eyes wide with concern.

‘Mamma?’ says Leonie to the shopkeeper, recognising nothing but the worry in his expression. Her bottom lip wobbles in uncertainty. Then, her grip on the foil-covered decoration is lost and it hits the floor tiles, smashing into pieces that scatter from the wrapping as it splits. There is stillness as she looks at all the bits in turn, her face registering surprise. This, seemingly, is the most upsetting thing. She shuts her eyes to cry, face to the ceiling, fists clenched, mouth open, revealing eight perfect teeth.

The customer crouches, hovering his hand near the toddler, saying, ‘Shh, it’s OK, don’t worry. We’ll find Mamma.’

Both of the adults expect a loud noise, and brace themselves for it. But when the cry comes it is a faint, keening whisper, like distant wind. The child’s face is posed in a scream, but there is hardly a sound.

The two men exchange a glance, agreeing that something is wrong, but at this moment there are bigger problems than the strangeness of this cry. The customer starts to pat the toddler on the shoulder, the pads of his fingers barely making contact, and all the time he’s glancing around, talking to the shopkeeper, saying, ‘Did you see who she was with?’ Leonie opens her eyes and screams silently into his face. The soundlessness of it makes it worse, somehow, than if

the scream were deafening. The man stands, snatches another chocolate decoration from a branch and gently takes one of the child’s trembling fists in his hand. He unpeels the small fingers, places the confection on her upturned palm. Her mouth shuts, and she inspects the red Santa figure, turning it over, searching for how to open it. She hiccups once. Snot runs down her chin.

The bell on the door rings as the shopkeeper yanks it open. He steps outside and looks both ways, then up at the darkening sky and finally down, at the handbag spilling its contents. He walks forwards, nudges the pile of nappies with a toe, notes the keys, the packet of wipes. He’s looking for a phone, or a wallet with something like ID in it, but there’s nothing. The coin purse contains only cash. He picks up the empty handbag, weighs it in his hand. He finds a pocket at the front and unzips it. Inside is what he thinks is a rock, but on closer inspection is a seashell.

One or two snowflakes swirl in the wind, landing on the concrete and making wet speckles. In the distance, the seals call to each other across the waves, making a sound like human screams, but besides a slight jerk to the head the man doesn’t react. If you live here it’s a familiar sound, the seal-song, like that of the waves, and the gulls.

The sea sighs as the tide licks the shore, sucking the surface of the beach into new shapes: gentle, curving undulations different from yesterday, that will be different tomorrow, and with every tide that turns.

Just out of sight, a small pile of clothes, buried in haste in the sand, is covered up by the advancing water. Gentle eddies loosen the folds of the fabric, so that a parka slowly unfurls like a flower opening in the darkness. Soon the sea will probe further, uncovering the heel of one boot. Later, the clothes will be completely removed from their rudimentary hiding place by the many strong hands of the currents. Later still they will be scattered on seven different shores. The other boot will remain here, wedging itself between two rocks, unseen by anyone until the litter pickers come in the spring.

Chapter Two

NOW

Bathwater

Friday, 21 December

The water fills the bathtub slowly, over a number of hours. As it does so, the body of the man begins to float, rising with the level of the liquid, the small amount of fat and the air in his body keeping him on the surface, for now. Falling from the tap, the water is clear. As the thin stream enters the tub it mixes with the man’s blood, so that the colour of the bathwater varies from pale rose at his feet, to plumes of bright red near his head, where pulse pressure shoots the blood from the wound in regular bursts. It takes a long time, but when the bath is full, the solution finds its way to the overflow, and from there it trickles through the many metres of pipework to the sewers, deep below the block of flats.

In the bathtub, as well as the man and the water and the blood, there is a towel. The towel is drawn towards the overflow, until at last a combination of the man’s legs and the bunching of the thick fabric blocks the hole completely. No one is there to turn off the tap; the bath keeps filling, and keeps filling, so

that soon, like a bloody version of the magic porridge-pot, it goes over, flooding the bathroom, searching out the edges of the vinyl, breaking through, soaking into the floorboards, pooling in the cavity under the floor. There’s a layer of sealant there, and a layer of soundproofing, but the water finds the lowest point. It accumulates, becomes heavier, weakens the plasterboard. It only needs a tiny gap, a pinprick, to break through.

In the flat below, Mrs Stefanidis is preparing to eat her lunch, a small cheese sandwich on white bread. She feels rather than hears something drop, disrupting the air close to her face, but when she places her hands on the tabletop and feels around, there appears to be nothing amiss. After a momentary frown, her fingers find the plate and raise the sandwich to her lips, the macular degeneration that has reduced her vision to a sliver of peripheral preventing her from noticing the spreading pink circle that has wetted the middle of the bread, the droplet of blood-and-bathwater that landed there, that came from the ceiling above. As she opens her mouth, another fat sphere drops and bursts, this time on her hand, and she puts the sandwich down.

Something in the ceiling gives. It starts to come faster, dripping like a broken gutter in the middle of the kitchen table, spattering the walls, flecks of it on the white net curtains, on the clean cups that stand on the draining board. Mrs Stefanidis feels under the sink for the bucket, locates the leak and places the vessel just so, to catch it. She dries her hands on her apron, then reaches into her apron pocket to phone for the maintenance man. Using the specially enlarged buttons on her handset she speed dials Terry’s number, listens to it ringing, hopes he won’t mind coming to help her; there’s no one else to ask. On the table, the bucket is filling, slowly but surely. Soon it will be too heavy for her to lift. The apron she wears is made of crisp cotton. She doesn’t see the pinkish prints her fingers have made there.