The Girl With Glass Feet by Ali Shaw Page A

Double-headed lampposts stood tall on street corners. Fences were tagged with unimaginative graffiti in tasteless colours. He found the best-looking hotel he could, which had at least made an effort (if a rather meagre one) by laying a tawdry red carpet in the foyer and hanging chandeliers made of plastic in the lobby. A jobbing student with a wonky black bow tie gave him a room key, and he took the stairs up to the fourth floor to exercise legs that had become nearly numb on the coach. He threw his bag into his room, locked the door again and headed straight back out on to the streets, ignoring his rumbling stomach.
    He strode down the roads that led him to the graveyard. He wished there were a florist open at this time in the evening so he could leave Freya her favourite golden irises. In the graveyard he passed a mourner caressing a memorial bench and found his way between the headstones to the white block of stone carved with that strange name that was only half hers. Freya
Maclaird
.
    That bastard Charles Maclaird never even told Carl a tumour was bulging at the top of Freya’s spine. Never even informed him of her death. That was his spite towards him, more hurtful even than his legal ties to the woman. More hurtful even than the idea of the two of them sharing a bed with torturous regularity.
    Crouching by the gravestone with fists clenched in front of his mouth, he wondered how the girl he had seen, the girl he had given his house keys to, had nothing of Charles about her. She was so like her mother had been in her heyday that she could have been a sister. Holding her in his arms had been like… like what he had always imagined holding Freya would be.
    If he had only known Freya were dying he would have come to her bedside and held her, no matter what Charles Maclaird and the rest of the world might think.
    When he had last come to this graveyard (could it be three years back?) he had been so distraught that he awoke the day after to find his fingernails cracked and his fingers bruised by bite marks. He had seriously considered digging her out of the earth. He had been deprived of his rightful place at her deathbed and funeral, and he could scarcely believe his hopes were dashed. He had long held a swaggering belief that Charles would wrong-foot one day and Freya would come running. He had held the belief, albeit steadily eroded by the ageing of his body, that there would be nights with her. Her frame and his, her gasp through parted lips.
    How clean, so much cleaner, the headstone had been three years back. Only fear had stopped him from scrabbling at the fresh dirt back then. Not fear of the consequences should he be caught, but fear of how he might defile her. Instead he had returned to his cottage on St Hauda’s Land.
    There were no flowers on her grave now. Charles should have tended it, but here was the rub: Charles had loathed and despised Freya. Called her a whore, so it was alleged. Carl would havewrung the wretch’s neck if he had witnessed him call her that. At least Ida saw sense. Ida, from what she had told him in letters, saw her father for the selfish bumpkin he was. She might not despise him as Carl did, but it made him grimly pleased to know they were on better terms with each other than she was with the dolt who had engendered her.
    She was every inch her mother, that girl. He bent down to kiss the headstone.

8
     
    An army of leaves roved through Ettinsford’s low-lying park, charging over the bedraggled turf and the tarmac paths. A child in a pushchair tried to catch them as they poured past her. She strained against her harness and squealed as her fingers snapped at thin air. The leaves kept moving, passed the banks of the strait on to which the park backed, rounded the bottom of the painted clock tower. Finally they piled against a hedge behind an old lady on a bench. She screwed up her face as they scrambled over her and caught in her shawl.
    Midas checked the clock tower. Already the