Above me, the pitch-blackness was giving way to the inky points of stars. The muffled moonlight enjoyed a slightly freer reign. I listened intently, but there was nothing but the wind howling across the Fens.
Unless he’d had a flashlight, he must have lost me, I told myself.
I crouched ankle-deep in the thin ditch water, my feet numb. Another country road, lined with untidy hedges, stretched out from left to right, where it was joined by a footpath, which meandered into a diagonal bent from the fields at my left. A tiny wooden bridge with side slats crossed the water in front of me.
I recognized this bridge from somewhere – but where?
Just before the bridge was a pole, casting a sharp shadow now as the moon gathered its strength, with signs affixed to its top, and thrusting my hot hands into my wet pockets, where they ached with cold, I approached it.
The moonlight waned as I reached its base, but reappeared in a few seconds to tell me that Cambridge was four miles to the left, and Comberton two miles to the right. There was also a little sign, indicating that this was some kind of scenic walk.
Miles and miles of snow stretched away before me, meeting the stormy sky in a straight line – black meets white, with mathematical precision.
I stared up at the sign. Weren’t suicides buried at crossroads? So the ghost couldn’t find its way back home?
Each time the wind ruffled me it sent freezing gusts through my sodden clothes. I could hardly feel my feet any more, now that I’d stopped running. I glanced anxiously back but there was nothing there.
There was a house to my left, over the bridge, a big house, surrounded by walls. I blinked and held my breath. A single light was visible in one of the upstairs windows. It looked huge, rambling, with Jacobean chimney turrets standing stark against the moonlit sky, and big wrought-iron gates.
A house – oh thank God, thank God, some civilization at last! There was doubtless some well-heeled, slightly dotty family living inside, or at least some discreetly wealthy stockbroker or entrepreneur using it as his country retreat, or it might be another one of those language or residential schools that Cambridge is teeming with, full of harried supervisors and confused foreign teenagers with identical backpacks.
Someone who had a phone, at any rate. Though something about the place, with its Escher-esque eaves and iron gates, made me feel uneasy.
Or, as I observed tartly to myself, I could lie at the foot of the crossroads and freeze to death. Suicide or not, I think my ghost would find the way back home. She’d been very tenacious so far.
My teeth chattered. The house and I regarded each other. I don’t know why, but the thought of going through those gates and approaching the faded white door on its porticoed plinth filled me with vague dread. Though perhaps it’s not strange that I’ve been feeling somewhat paranoid lately.
The lane was thickly blanketed with snow. It would take me hours to get back to Cambridge, or even to reach Comberton in this condition, even if I didn’t die of exposure first or my pursuer caught up with me.
And anything could happen to Katie in that time, wherever she was.
I pressed my freezing hands into my armpits and shook my head, as if to clear it of irrational fear. The cold night air pinched my shoulder and my feet trod across the soft, deep snow to the closed iron gates.
At least I was out of the wind.
Walls of dark brick loomed up over my head. The yellow light coming out of the windows could not reconcile me to them. I scratched at my prickling scalp and my teeth chattered.
My shoes squeaked, leaving a watery trail of prints as I mounted the sandstone steps to the door.
There was a dusty bronze doorbell, the casing starting to crack with age. Now I was up close to the place, I understood what had made me think twice – there was an aura of shiftless neglect everywhere – from the weeds creeping through what had once been a careful, sweeping drive, to the cracked window casements and their crumbling putty, their distress plainly visible in the bright white motion sensor light that had come on the minute I opened the gates. A brand-new padlock with sharp steel edges on a shiny chain had swung from the gates themselves, unfastened, as though it had been opened in a hurry.
Comfort and aesthetics might have been neglected by the inhabitants, but there was an obviously new CCTV camera set up on a wall mount, pointed at the gates, and I could see its twin mounted on the side of the house adjoining the rambling brick wall surrounding the estate. Red lights flashed on them in heartbeat time. Perhaps someone was watching me right now.
I pressed the bell.
A loud pure double chime rang out through the house beyond, electronically amplified in some way, as though the people who lived here were used to being too far away to hear an ordinary doorbell.
I strained to listen for signs of life, pressing my ear to the faded white surface of the door paint. My cheek stung against it – I had grazed it when I fell out of the car.
There was absolutely nothing.
Long moments went by.
I tried once more, pressing the button and letting the chimes ring out, again and again. This was an emergency after all. I didn’t have to be intimidated by these people and their big house.
Then once more, I pressed my ear to the wood, trying not to weep.
This time, there was a noise.
I’m not sure I would have heard it in the usual run of things – if it had been daylight, and there had been rustling trees and birdsong, passing cars and aeroplanes. It was very tiny – an irregular rat-tat-tat, like someone tapping on something metal. The sound was buried deep within the house, more of a vibration than a noise.
Perhaps it was the pipes.
My ear still pressed to the door, I rang the bell again.
Again no ambient sounds, no sign of movement in the house, but that tiny rapping started again immediately, and its rhythm had an urgent, no, desperate, quickening – RAT-TAT-TAT-TAT-TAT . . .
A kind of horrible realization bloomed within me.
If I was right, there wasn’t a moment to lose.
I circled what I could of the house, looking for an open window or unlocked door – faint hope, but better than nothing. Most of the windows were resolutely curtained, and under their sills were old rotting wires, the remains of an alarm system. The new alarm system was centred in a blinking red box at the back of the building, undoubtedly complete with sensors and linked to the cameras, to protect the house in its dotage.
I tried to come up with some sort of plan. My thoughts were slow and fuzzy. Perhaps the alarm system was switched off. Perhaps the red blinking box was all there was, a way to deter thieves. I was going to have to walk to Comberton on my numb feet.
But that was impossible. I had to get in there. Now.
I trudged from window to window, all resolutely veiled with damask or heavy cotton. The big ones at the front and sides were leaded in diamond patterns – I could never have broken in through them, so I circled round to the side, my feet crunching through virgin snow on the narrow path. Then there was a smaller window, and then another, but all had net or cheap polyester hanging over them, and I could see no lights in them. They looked like servants’ quarters.
I stared up at the sheer brick walls. There were a few other windows above, on different floors, but they were also unlit and peculiarly forbidding. This part of the house outcropped a little from the rest, so it had presumably been an extension from its antiquated foundations. And there appeared to be no one in it.
At least not yet.
My fingers were curling up into two little blue crabs, and my neck and cut shoulder ached keenly with the cold. I needed to break the glass in one of the smaller windows at the back, but how . . . ?
The padlock and chain, from the gates.
I was running to the gates when the security lights blazed awake with an audible click from somewhere up on the wall, bathing me in white light. Just a motion sensor, but I nearly screamed with terror. The chain and padlock threaded
out through the bolt, their shiny steel newness at odds with the ancient, nicked wrought iron.
Beyond the gates, in the darkness, something moved.
I paused, illuminated, on the drive, blinded by the lights, trying to see any approaching cars. There was nothing. But that didn’t mean there was nothing out there.
I ran back to the window and lashed out with the chain; the thin glass shattered into a thousand pieces with a musical tinkle, as though it had been waiting for this very opportunity.
In the back of my mind, I tensed for the shriek of the alarm. It didn’t come – perhaps it was a silent alarm, or merely there for show.
Or it’s been disabled in some way, I thought. Maybe whoever lives here can’t risk strangers or the police turning up every time some kid tries to break in.
Which implies he probably has something on hand to take care of problems of that sort himself.
No time to worry about that now.
I gathered up the slack of my blue cardigan in my stiff fingers and pressed its sodden mass to the broken edges, snapping them off so I could crawl in. The pieces fell on to the floor of the room, with a glissando crash. It was all I could do not to cut myself in my terror.
There was a bed in the room, which was small and poky, and a chest of drawers with a cheap mirror mounted above them. A half-open suitcase lay on the bed, full of a mix of men’s clothes, and a shoebox lay on top of them, the lid slightly open.
Inside were papers, a passport, two driving licenses, one for Tim Henry who lived in Barton and one for Christopher Meeks who lived in the village, and there was also an ID card for Chris Henry, a driver for North Cambridgeshire Social Services, which had expired eighteen months ago. All of these cards showed images of the same man, with sandy greying hair. Clothes lay everywhere, a flurry of packing halted and waiting to be resumed.
I sat down on the bed, burying my hands in the starchy coverlet. It was icy cold, but at least it was dry.
I smoothed the melted snow out of my hair. When I touched my cheek, my finger came away black with blood. The mirror opposite showed a series of fine scratches across my face.
Looped across one corner of the mirror stand was a little tarnished silver cross on a thin chain.
For some reason, despite the danger, the need for haste, my eye was caught by this detail, and kept being drawn back to it, as though by some enchantment . . .
How had this man found me? Oh, I’d been so stupid. While I’d been arguing with the police over exposing Bethan Avery in the paper with the appeal, I had really been exposing myself.
None of it mattered, though. I needed to find the source of that tapping, to quieten that terrible suspicion in me. I needed to find a phone, and without a moment’s delay.
Outside the door there was a smooth wooden corridor, with flat rugs laid on it, and at its end a big tiled and plastered space opened out. I waited for a few moments, merely breathing, listening – I guessed the corridor led into the kitchen. Perhaps there was a phone in there, and maybe some kind of weapon. I glided cautiously on to the rug, my feet making only the faintest of whispers against the coarse material.
I heard nothing, nothing except the sound of a big house from a bygone age, gloomy and neglected and falling into dust. The tapping had fallen silent.
Through the dusty, cavernous kitchen I moved, where the only thing that had the patina of use was a tiny ancient microwave, crusted with food stains, then through doors to a winding series of staircases with marble steps and steel banisters, the moon reaching down to me through a glass skylight. No sign of a phone still. I fought down my sense of panic.
The double doors ahead of me were shut, but I knew I was heading to the front of the house, and to the room with the big leaded windows near the drive, where I had first heard the tapping.
This was where the light had come from that had drawn me from the path. It limned the shut doors in a thin line of gold.
I threw them open.
I don’t know what did it to me where so many other things had failed, but the blue damask curtains, the black and white tiled floor with its thick, heavy blue rug, that velvet sofa – that fucking velvet sofa – filled me with a terror and rage so intense that I wanted to set light to it.
I knew, with the lightning ring of truth, that I had been very, very unhappy on that velvet sofa.
I remembered this room.
More to the point, I remembered what happened the last time I was in it.
28
It was early evening, and I was out of the cellar.
There had been, as there always has been, the cellar. I think even then I had become so damaged, so dissociated, as Martin might say, that I would have been hard-pressed to remember who I was; that I had once had a mother, Melissa; that my best friend was Natalie.
But some things I had not forgotten.
It was winter and I was always bitterly, bitterly cold, and I constantly thought I was going to die. But I had not died. I had stayed alive because my nanna was terribly hurt and in hospital. I had to get back to her. She was in trouble; in danger.
I had not been allowed out for a long time, and I was so weak I could barely stand up. I was injured – something in my chest hurt and I think one of my ribs was broken. I’d done something to make him angry, but I cannot remember what it was.
In any case, I wasn’t standing up. I was sitting, on that velvet couch.
He said his name was Alex, but I was sure this was a lie. He was skinny and middle-aged (or so I thought, though through the filter of my own experience I suspect he was no more than thirty-two or -three), had thin, sandy blond hair and didn’t often wash. That fusty, sweaty-sour smell is clearer to me than his face. I cannot remember his face very well – I hated looking at him so rarely did, and I took the cues for my own survival from his voice. It was whispery; borderline obsequious, but could change in a heartbeat to a full-throated furious bellowing, usually accompanied by his heavy, driving fists.
He told me that he had rescued me from the men that killed my mother – they were looking for me, too, and for my nanna. He told me he was rich and powerful, and that this was his house. I didn’t know whether I believed that, but I did believe that my nanna was in danger, and that somehow he knew what had happened to Melissa. I believed that he knew my teachers, and that some of them knew I was here, including Miss Costas. That he knew social services – how else had he got my details? – that he knew policemen – that was why nobody ever looked for me.
He thought I should be grateful to him for saving me and my nanna, and that I should show it.
When he spoke to me it was as though he was speaking to some other girl he’d mistaken me for, some other girl called Bethan that he liked better, which was bad news for her I guess. This other girl was his girlfriend and she was in love with him; they were very happy together, though it would be difficult to tell this as she didn’t often speak.
While they were together I simply went away, deep into some corner of myself, and stood with my back to them both.
The last time I was in this room he was being very nice to me – uncharacteristically so. He was sorry he’d lost his temper, even though I’d schemed to escape behind his back, ungrateful creature that I was, despite all he’d done for me; all he continued to do to protect me. He was going to make it up to me. He looked like he’d been crying and his hands shook as they touched me on that fucking velvet sofa. I didn’t go away inside myself that time. I stayed, because I realized that something had changed and that change was bad.
He’d bought me this white nightgown, made of cheap slippery nylon lace, and he wanted me to put it on. He watched while I tried to get it over my head despite my cracked rib, as though I was performing a private striptease for him. Then he made me lie back on the sofa.
‘That’s it, my beautiful darling. Now shut your eyes.’
I did, despite every instinct screaming at me to leave them open. They stayed shut as he leaned in and kissed me, kissed my eyel
ids, and drew back.
There was a faint rustling from the bag the nightdress had come in.
I could not endure it, despite the risk of his rage. My eyes flew open.
He had a ball-peen hammer in both hands and was about to bring it down on my skull.
On the velvet sofa, something that had been lying coiled within me suddenly sprang into life, as though it had been there all along, despite the cold and this crazy man and the sense that I was fractured into a thousand broken pieces, none of which bore any correlation to one another any more.
The thing within me was much more awake than I. It knew not to waste precious energy on trying to defend myself against the falling hammer with my weak arms, or to try pleading for my life against his watery blue eyes, his trembling lip.
I knew I was in the last few seconds of my existence, so instead I lunged upwards, despite the sharp stabbing in my ribs, and jabbed my fingers into his eyes.
There was a shocked curse of pain and surprise, followed by another yell as he dropped the raised hammer and it crashed down on top of his head, the wicked claw tearing against his ear as it fell, leaving him momentarily stunned.
And that was how, suddenly, the hammer – smeared in old, dried bloodstains – was in my hands.
I smacked him with it on the side of his head, and he howled.
You might be wondering why I didn’t go on and kill him with it, and I have to wonder that too. But I think I was wiser than I give myself credit for – he was merely dazed, and already grabbing for the hammer as I lay pinned beneath him, and once the element of surprise was exhausted there was no question of who would win a fight.
With all of my remaining strength, I twisted sideways beneath him, and as he tried to stop me hitting him again, he lost balance and fell off the sofa on to the heavy blue rug.
I leapt to my feet, my injuries forgotten, a creature of pure adrenaline, and made to sprint away.
He grabbed my ankle and yanked backwards. I was falling, and my face smacked down hard on to the black and white tiles where the carpet ended. Pain exploded across my nose, something crunching beneath the skin of my face between my eyes, and blood spattered outwards across the stone. The hammer flew out of my grip, skittered out of my hand over the flags, bouncing tinnily off a wall until it lay still.
Dear Amy Page 27