A Window Breaks

by C. M. Ewan

  I studied their dimensions. Their body language. Their outfits. White plastic coveralls with their hoods up. Blue nitrile gloves on their hands. Blue rubber boots on their feet. Surgical masks over their faces.

  Still I pursued the thought, chasing it around and around my mind. The thought scratched, and scratched, and then . . .

  Blue gloves.

  Both men were wearing them.

  Just like the mugger in the alley had worn.

  A shudder ripped through me.

  And they were covering their faces. In the alley our attacker had worn a pair of tights over his head. Here, the men had on cupped paper masks and a hood.

  Was it possible there was a connection? I’d thought of the attack in London as a random act of violence. One of those unfortunate, albeit terrifying, I-hope-I-never-experience-it-for-myself side effects of living in a big city. But what if it hadn’t been random? What if there was a line running from that incident to this? Because, really, what were the chances of these two things happening to us in such quick succession?

  Hold it. Don’t jump to conclusions. People sometimes talk about confirmation bias – the phenomenon of believing something you want (or perversely, maybe really don’t want) to believe. I don’t know a huge deal about it, but my guess is the effect is more pronounced when you’re trying to make sense of something that’s essentially nonsensical. The kind of experience, say, that involves a sustained overload of shock and fear on levels you’ve previously never come close to being exposed to before. Plus, I was basing this on gloves. Cheap disposable gloves. I could go into any DIY shop in the country and buy a box of gloves just like them. Same thing with the masks.

  But still.

  Again, I studied the build of the two men. Could one of them have been the mugger? The smaller one, possibly. The mugger hadn’t struck me as particularly big at the time. But why would he follow us here?

  My head crackled with electric fear. I wanted to ask Rachel and Holly about it but I was afraid to talk or move. The men were close enough to hear any sound we might make. To spot any disturbance in the trees.

  I looked again at Rachel. Her face was scrunched up tight and she was having to fight not to cry out in agony. It was a reminder of just how tough and resilient my wife really was.

  The men stopped in the middle of the yard, peering blindly into the night. They spun a complete 360, the smaller one turning clockwise, the bigger one anticlockwise. The rain beat hard against their coveralls with a sound like ball bearings dropped onto a metal tray.

  I didn’t breathe. Didn’t blink. I just stared through the saturated foliage and reached over to squeeze Holly’s hand as the bigger man squinted right at us, trying to wish myself invisible as I struggled to get a handle on what was going on here. Thinking clearly was difficult because, well, I’d banged my head, I was petrified and that same electric crackle raged on in my skull. My body was flooded with adrenaline and the same mix of fear-or-flight endorphins that had overwhelmed me during the mugging in the alley. So maybe that’s all the connection I was feeling really was. A chemical echo. Maybe the two incidents weren’t linked. Maybe we’d just been incredibly unlucky.

  No. I didn’t buy it, either.

  Something about the set-up, the men, had to be connected.

  But why?

  The bigger man’s gaze swept on past us. He hadn’t seen us. Then the smaller man nudged him with his elbow and gestured at the Volvo. I’d left the boot open, hoping to lure the men away in the opposite direction to where we were.

  Holly stifled a whimper as they advanced on the car. The smaller man adjusted his grip on the shotgun and raised it under his chin, sighting along the barrel. The bigger man followed from behind with the handgun braced over his right forearm.

  ‘You can come out,’ the smaller man shouted, suddenly. ‘We won’t hurt you, I promise.’

  I reached up and placed my muddied fingers against Holly’s lips. Her skin was cold to the touch.

  Again, thoughts hurtled inside my head. These men had come here to kill. They were violent. They were armed.

  I thought of the way the mugger had punched Holly in the alley. It had been an extreme and brutal act. At the time, I’d thought he’d wanted to silence her to stop her from screaming or shouting for help, but what if his intentions had been more sinister?

  Take it a step further. The man had put his knife to Rachel’s throat. What if he hadn’t been planning to simply mug us? What if he’d been intending to kill us there and then? What if they’d come here tonight to finish the task?

  Also: why?

  Why would anyone want to terrorize my family like this? Why would they want us dead?

  PC Baker’s words came back to me again. Do you have any enemies at all, Mr Sullivan? Does your wife? But we didn’t. Oh, there were people we didn’t get along with. The odd distant relative who’d slighted us or we’d vaguely insulted over the years. Colleagues at work who bore petty grudges, maybe. But this? No, nothing like it.

  ‘We just want to talk,’ the smaller man yelled.

  I peered at Holly and shook my head. Don’t fall for it. Don’t speak. She swallowed and blinked, trembling hard, like it was taking all her willpower not to scream out in the night.

  A cold shiver ran down my spine.

  The men looked at one another. They waited. The wind tore at their coveralls. The rain splattered back off the waxy plastic coating of their hoods.

  The smaller man’s body was all hunched up against the damp and the cold. The bigger man appeared better equipped for the conditions. Maybe he had a jacket on underneath. That could account for some of his bulk, I supposed.

  When the men got no response they continued on to the threshold of the carport. Then they split up. One crept to the left of the Volvo. One crept to the right. They circled wide and took their time, sighting along their weapons, checking the front seats through the passenger windows, then the rear cabin.

  They neared the back of the Volvo and paused, then moved very fast, jumping sideways and aiming their weapons into the space behind the boot.

  Holly clapped a hand to her mouth.

  Neither man fired.

  They remained still for a long, tense moment, and then they relaxed and shook their heads and scuffed the ground with their boots, just two guys acknowledging with an ‘aw shucks’ kind of embarrassment that maybe we’d fooled them this time.

  I watched in a strange kind of wonder as they relaxed a little and lowered their firearms and moved back towards the threshold of the garage to huddle up just out of the rain. The smaller man cupped his hand around his masked mouth and raised himself on his toes to talk into the bigger man’s ear. The bigger man nodded along, then turned and strode away, tramping back across the gravel yard in the direction of the lodge.

  ‘What’s he doing?’ Rachel whispered, through gritted teeth.

  I held up a hand, wanting her to be quiet. She stared at me, dark eyes flicking side to side in the black.

  The bigger man was using short, choppy strides. I guessed his boots were built for indoor terrain. Maybe there was no tread pattern on the soles. Better to be sure and keep his balance than to slip. Falling down onto two broken fingers would be bad.

  ‘Tom? Please. What’s happening?’

  ‘Shh.’

  The bigger man crossed to the broken kitchen window, rose up on his toes and peered inside. Then, when he failed to spot us, he turned and jogged away to his right, stepping onto the deck and heading around towards the front of the lodge.

  ‘Is he going back inside?’ Rachel hissed. ‘Why’s he doing that?’

  Again, I didn’t answer. I was thinking. Hard.

  If they split up, it would be bad in some ways. Bad because splitting up might increase their chances of finding us. Bad because we’d have to contend with two separate threats instead of one consolidated threat.

  But it could be good in some ways too. Good because the chances of our survival in a three-on-one confrontati
on were a little better than our prospects in a three-on-two confrontation. Good because a lucky swing with the wheel wrench, if it came to it, might just be enough to take out one of the men. Assuming that man happened to be isolated. Assuming I could sneak up on him unseen. Especially if he had two broken fingers and a handgun instead of a shotgun.

  But all of that – crazy as it was to even contemplate – turned out to be irrelevant. Because shortly after we’d watched the bigger man hurry into the lodge he emerged again to reteam with the smaller man.

  This time, he was carrying a torch.

  20

  The torch was long and black and the shiny metal casing gleamed in the hard outdoor light.

  I watched, barely breathing, as the bigger man stepped into the gravel yard with the torch held up by his head and his arm bent at the elbow. He pressed a switch with his thumb and a powerful beam punched a cone of light through the black rain into the smaller man’s masked face. His white hood flared and winked in the gloom as he reared back and put his gloved hand in front of his eyes.

  My body tensed. What was their plan here?

  The bigger man lowered the beam and tramped on through the saturated gravel, the torchlight jinking side to side with his stunted strides. There was a weighted bulge on the right-hand side of his jumpsuit trousers. The butt of his handgun was poking out of a pocket there.

  When he reached the middle of the yard he swung at the hips and started another careful 360, this time with the torch. We ducked even lower. The teeming rain swirled and glittered in the dazzle. The torch carved a funnel of bright light through the blackness, probing among bushes and trees. It lit up the steep gradient of the driveway, then swept over our heads, staining the foliage around us a livid, pale green. My lungs screamed for air. I held my breath. Holly pressed her face into the dirt. She was shaking all over. The beam passed on, paused, jinked back, then whirled on again like a lighthouse lantern.

  I inhaled and started to breathe more easily, but not for long. They weren’t giving up. They were determined to find us.

  Again, I wondered why. And again, I had no clue. I can’t tell you how much I wished they would just leave us and go. But then, maybe they knew – as I’d begun to understand with a numbing dread – that we were essentially trapped here. Our car was undriveable. We couldn’t call for help. And sure, the grounds of the lodge were large and we could try to hide, but ultimately the estate was bordered by the sea on one side, the gate on the other and a fence everywhere else. That fence. Something that was designed to keep threats out was now keeping us in. Not exactly a comforting thought, and not one I had much success pushing out of my mind.

  Very gently now, I placed my hand on Holly’s back and began to rub it in small circles. I don’t know if it helped. Probably not. But I didn’t want her to think she was on her own.

  Once the bigger man had completed his sweep, he tramped on towards the smaller man. The smaller man pointed at the Volvo and the bigger man splashed torchlight over it. He stepped in under the shelter and took his time opening the passenger doors. He checked the front footwells and the cavity in front of the rear seats. He crouched and shone the light under the chassis. The men were being very deliberate and very thorough. I didn’t like that at all. In my mind, it added credence to my theory that this was somehow linked to the mugging in London. Maybe the mugging hadn’t played out how they’d wanted, but they were intending to see it through to whatever grisly conclusion they had in mind here. I don’t know if thinking that made things worse or better. I did know I wanted us to survive and, right now, trying to think of an angle – any angle – that would give some insight to what was going on here seemed like a good move.

  Eventually the two men congregated at the open boot and spent some time there, probably asking themselves why we’d opened it and what we’d taken. There was a good chance they’d spot that the wheel wrench was missing. After that, it was guesswork.

  Holly shifted beside me, raising her head. I was squatted low and my thighs tingled with an acid burn. Rachel tilted her head back and strained to look out through the undergrowth, her breath steaming in the dank forest air. She was grinding her heel into the ground against the pain from her shoulder. I didn’t know how much more she could take.

  I took my hand off Holly and rested it on Rachel’s stomach. Her abdominals were all clenched up. I leaned down close to her ear.

  ‘Is there anything I can do to help?’

  ‘You can . . . pop my shoulder . . . back in.’ She gritted her teeth and whined faintly. ‘But it’s . . . going to make some noise.’

  I glanced out through the trees to where the two men were conferring in the carport. ‘I think we have to wait. I’m sorry.’

  She nodded, pressing her lips tightly closed and shutting her eyes against a fresh surge of pain.

  ‘What about painkillers?’ I whispered. ‘Have you got something in your bag?’

  ‘Afterwards.’

  I gave her hand a quick squeeze. Rachel squeezed me back, blinking against the tears that had sprung from her eyes as she gazed up at the canopy of trees overhead. She swallowed again, like she was about to say something more.

  ‘What is it?’ I asked.

  Her eyes flickered. She shook her head quickly.

  ‘Rachel?’

  I moved even closer, until I was looking down at her face. But Rachel wouldn’t meet my eye.

  ‘Tell me.’

  She shook her head again and, as I stared at her, I felt a pair of invisible hands close around my throat and slowly begin to squeeze.

  Did Rachel have some idea of what was going on here? Could she know why these men had come?

  I felt a queasiness in my gut as my mind flashed on her response to finding the remains of the campfire and the snare out in the woods. And true, I’d been thrown by it, but really wasn’t it Rachel’s unease that had been the catalyst for my own? It was Rachel who’d pushed ahead with calling Brodie to try to find out more. And wasn’t the main reason that I’d gone out into the woods to reassure her?

  Then there was last night. I’d found her in tears in her bedroom. She’d even – and here, I didn’t want to dwell on my own behaviour too closely – probably slipped into my bed as much for comfort as anything else.

  What was it she’d said to me in her bedroom before that?

  There’s something I have to talk to you about. Something important.

  I do want to be thinking clearly. I have so much I need to say to you, Tom.

  I’ve messed up so badly.

  I felt a terrible tremor in the base of my skull. Had she known, on some level, that this threat existed?

  No. Surely not. Rachel would never have let us come here if that was the case. I may not know everything about my wife but I do know this: she loves Holly without limit. She’d wanted us to come to Scotland for Holly’s sake. If I was honest with myself, I was pretty sure she’d been willing to take another pass at mending our relationship for the same reason. Losing Michael had come close to destroying Rachel. There was no way she’d risk losing Holly too.

  But still, I sensed there was something there. Something just out of reach.

  Torchlight flared again in my peripheral vision. It swung around from the rear of the car and whirled and blazed directly at us. I stopped breathing again. I stayed dead still. I had this terrible, game-over sensation – like I was an inmate caught attempting a prison break, pinned by a searchlight glare.

  But no, the dense foliage must have shielded us because the bigger man didn’t react in any way. He simply arced the torch beam down at the ground and then the two men stood together in its glow on the concrete plinth under the carport roof, talking and looking around them as the rain fell thunderously down and bounced and splashed in the puddled gravel.

  I peered closer. The smaller man was now holding a torch of his own and I realized with a sinking feeling that it was the old spare I keep in the boot of the Volvo. I hadn’t thought to grab it myself.

&
nbsp; He clicked it on. The filament stuttered and cut out. He slapped the torch against his thigh. It flickered to life but the beam was yellow and weak. Small mercies. I’m not the most organized, most practical guy. Rachel often gives me hell for it. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d replaced the batteries.

  The smaller man shook his head, as if dismayed by my tardiness, and issued more instructions to the bigger man. This time, his movements were more abrupt and severe. Like he was starting to lose patience because things weren’t going according to plan. Then he nudged the bigger man with the back of the hand he was holding the shotgun in and he jabbed the muzzle into the trees behind the carport.

  You go that way.

  The bigger man nodded and the smaller man raised the hand holding the torch and inverted his wrist and bounced the lens off his chest. He straightened his arm and pointed the watery beam up the driveway.

  I’ll go this way.

  Another brief conference and they parted company.

  I shifted position, my muscles cramping with fear, and watched as the bigger man skirted around the side of the carport with the blazing industrial torch. He stood still for a long moment, searching the woods across from us. The torch beam winked off tree trunks and undergrowth. It illuminated the dense canopy above. Then he set a course with the beam and took a series of long, exaggerated strides into the woods, pausing briefly between each one. Maybe he was afraid I was hiding close by with the wheel wrench cocked behind my shoulder. Or perhaps he just didn’t want to rip his coveralls on the brambles and thorns.

  The smaller man watched him go, then turned and marched up the driveway, the weak beam of his torch blurring the darkness around him into a faint orange dim. I waited until I was sure they were both out of earshot before whispering again.

  ‘I think the smaller one’s going up to check the gate.’

  ‘How do you know?’ Rachel asked me.

  ‘Because it’s the only way out of here.’

  Holly whimpered and cradled her head in her hands. I looked at her, wanting so badly to change what was happening, knowing I couldn’t.