Run Away With Me : A fast-paced psychological thriller

by Daniel Hurst

  At least for now, anyway.

  14

  LAURA

  It’s good to get some food into myself. I hadn’t realised how hungry I was until Adam made bacon sandwiches but the smell, combined with the amazing taste, means I cleared my plate in no time. Adam must have been starving too because he has eaten everything on his plate as well, and it’s funny how having a full stomach can make things seem a little better. But now we have eaten, I plan to press Adam further on the report of his trip into the village.

  After we ran from the car into the cottage and closed the door on the heavy rain, I asked him why he had been gone for so long and if everything was okay. He told me that it was and that the reason for the delay was due to a big queue in the supermarket and a tractor blocking the road on the high street. I imagine that both of those things are quite common here because there’s hardly an abundance of places to shop and the roads are so narrow in these parts that a tractor could easily cause havoc. Lord knows there are plenty of farmers about up here.

  This whole region seems to be one big farm.

  But I’m worried there might be something more to Adam taking so long to get back to me. I’m worried that he isn’t being completely honest about what he saw when he had a look in the newspapers.

  ‘There’s really nothing about the hit and run?’ I ask again as Adam washes up our plates in the sink.

  ‘Nothing at all,’ he replies, and while it is a relief to have him confirm that fact again, I’m still surprised that the discovery of the body in the lane near our house hasn’t been reported on yet by any of the journalists in Carlisle.

  ‘Why do you think that is?’ I ask. ‘I mean surely the body must have been found by now, right?’

  ‘I’d say it was impossible for it not to be found,’ Adam replies rather solemnly, and I can tell by how hard he is scrubbing the plates that he is anxious about it.

  ‘So why hasn’t it been reported? Why would it be kept quiet?’

  ‘I’ve no idea, Laura.’

  ‘It doesn’t make sense. It would be big news for any city, never mind ours where nothing ever happens. How can it not be in the headlines?’

  ‘I just said I don’t know, okay?’ Adam cries, and he drops the plates into the bowl of soapy water, causing them to clatter loudly together and possibly even shatter.

  I feel bad for pushing him on the subject. Here’s my husband still trying to wrap his head around having killed a man and I’m pestering him about why it’s not in the news yet. We should be grateful that it isn’t, and maybe we get lucky and it never will be.

  ‘Are you sure he was dead? What if he was actually okay and he got up after you left? Maybe that’s why it’s not in the news? Because he’s not dead?’

  Adam slams the brush down into the water and turns to face me, and I’m not sure if he’s mad at me or just irritated by my rather optimistic suggestion.

  ‘Do you think I would have dragged us both all the way up here to this bloody cottage if I didn’t have to!’ he snarls at me. ‘He was dead. D-E-A-D. Dead! How many times do I have to tell you?’

  ‘Okay, I’m sorry,’ I say, rushing towards him and wrapping my arms around him to try and pacify some of his anger.

  ‘I don’t know why it isn’t in the news yet, but it’s only a matter of time until it is, okay? Is that what you want to hear?’ Adam says as he pushes me away and walks over to the door.

  ‘Where are you going?’ I ask as he picks up his coat. ‘It’s chucking it down out there.’

  ‘I need some fresh air,’ he replies, and I watch him zip up his jacket and pull his hood over his head.

  ‘You’ve been out all morning,’ I protest. ‘I’ve been stuck here on my own.’

  But it’s no good. Adam is clearly annoyed at me enough to not want to be around me and the sound of him slamming the door as he leaves the cottage is the last thing I hear before the hammering of the rain on the roof returns.

  I look out of the window at the grim weather on the other side of the glass and decide that it’s not worth going after my husband when it’s like this. I don’t want to catch a cold at this stage of my pregnancy. I’m already feeling rough enough as it is without adding a runny nose and a cough to the equation. Instead, I walk over to the sink and check on the state of the plates in the water. As I suspected, one of them cracked when Adam threw them down in his temper. I imagine that his sister wouldn’t be thrilled if she knew that he had just broken one of her plates, but then again, she wouldn’t be thrilled if she knew her sibling was using her cottage as a hideaway from the police either.

  I carefully remove the broken shards of porcelain from the bowl and pour the water away before washing the remaining intact plate under the running tap. It’s tedious household chores like this that usually make up a part of my day anyway, so I don’t mind doing it. What I do mind is knowing that my husband is outside walking around in the middle of a field during a heavy rainstorm.

  I hope he’s back soon, and I hope he isn’t still mad at me when he returns.

  15

  ADAM

  I wasn’t planning on going for a walk in the rain, but I had to get out of the cottage. Laura was getting on my nerves, and I’ve found the best way to deal with that is to get some space when it happens. Ideally, it wouldn’t result in me getting drenched, but I guess this way gives my storming off even more of an impact. She must know that I’m wound up if I’m willing to subject myself to this awful weather.

  But going for this walk serves another purpose other than just giving me some breathing space from my nagging wife. It shows Laura how stressed I am about the situation we find ourselves in, and that is important because any sane human being would react to this situation in the same way if they had killed a man. They would be scared, they would get frustrated, and they would probably smash something like I just did with the plate in the sink. Laura might be worried about me, or she might just be mad, but one thing is for sure. She will understand why I am behaving this way.

  I’m behaving like a man who is scared of going to prison.

  But it’s all an act. I’m not going to prison, and there has been no crime, or at least no hit and run. I have made up the whole thing. The story of the man who hit my car on the country lane was a figment of my imagination. I hadn’t been drinking that night, I wasn’t involved in a hit and run, and I’m not currently wanted by the police.

  We’re not on the run right now because there’s nothing to run from. But Laura doesn’t know that, and that’s the way it needs to stay for a little while longer.

  Keeping my head down as I stride across the muddy field, I can hear the raindrops loudly bouncing off the hood of my coat. I decided to take an alternative route to the dirt track because I suspect that Laura is currently watching me from the cottage window, and it will look like I’m really mad if I’m just marching across the grass instead of sticking to the path. I bet she is feeling bad now for pushing me into storming out and I expect there will be a big apology waiting for me when I get back. I look forward to it. But the time for me listening to and accepting her apologies has long since passed.

  The rain is getting heavier as I walk further away, if that is even possible, but I don’t mind. I’m actually enjoying this beating I’m taking from the weather in a weird kind of way. It’s a reminder to me of the power of Mother Nature.

  It’s a reminder that there are still some things in this world that I can’t control.

  My trip to the police station was a successful one, and I accomplished what I went there to do. I’ll probably have to go back again in a day or two, but that’s no problem. I’ll just tell Laura I’m going out to check the news again. But this time I’ll come back with bad news. I’ll tell her that the newspapers are full of photos of me and that the police are actively working to ascertain my whereabouts. Then Laura will be in no doubt about the preciousness of the situation we find ourselves in. She will know that leaving the cottage then will be a risk she simply can
not afford to take.

  I reach the crest of the hill and look out across the gloomy valley before me. The driving rain and low levels of daylight are doing their best job of concealing the spectacular view, but I can still just about make out one other property in the area. I see a farmhouse nestled in the trough of the valley, and I imagine what it must be like to live in a place like this all year round. There’s no doubt it must be bleak in winter. The rain is bad enough, but the snowfall around here must be something else entirely. You could get cut off for days if you didn’t have the right vehicle to navigate the tiny roads and even then, it might not be enough. On the other hand, I imagine the summers are very pleasant in these parts and waking up to this kind of view with a clear blue sky above your head must be a very special thing indeed. But there is something about being up here when it’s less desirable. Like whoever lives in that farmhouse in the distance, only the strong will survive out here, and I consider myself as strong as they come.

  I know that it is at least a forty-five-minute walk to get to that farmhouse because I’ve done a trial run before. I needed to know exactly how long it would take Laura to get to the nearest property if she did decide to leave the cottage and seek help. But in this terrain, and with the weather at this time of year, I doubt she would even think about making the journey. She’d have to make it to the top of this hill to even know there was another property beyond it. Instead, I bet she will stay in that cottage where it is warm and dry, and that is exactly what I want because that is where I need her to be until this is over.

  I decide to turn back and return to my wife, but I take one last look at the farmhouse as I go. I think about the person or persons who live there and about how they probably picked this part of the world to live in because there is never any trouble around here.

  That thought makes me smile because they couldn’t be more wrong. There is going to be a lot of trouble here in the coming days, and it won’t be long until this peaceful place is overrun with police officers, journalists and busybodies sticking their noses in.

  The locals will be shocked at the turn of events in this sleepy part of the country. But their level of surprise will be nothing compared to that which my darling wife is going to experience. She is in for the shock of her life when she finds out the truth.

  That’s because I’m not the one the police are looking for right now.

  She is.

  16

  ADAM

  2 HOURS EARLIER

  ‘I need to report my wife as missing.’

  It’s a simple eight-word sentence, but it has been months in the planning before I was able to say it. Now that I have, things are going to move fast.

  I can’t wait.

  Since entering the police station and speaking those words, I have been given a checklist to fill in which will provide the police officers with more information to work with as they begin their search for my wife. The first section is easy enough. Name. Date of birth. Current address. The second part is just as simple. Height. Eye colour. Hair colour. Weight.

  I add several pounds onto that last one.

  Laura is pregnant, after all.

  It’s the third section where things get more interesting. This part is asking me to record the habits and personality traits of the missing person. Do they smoke? Drink alcohol? Frequent certain places at certain times? Are they outgoing or shy? What are their spending habits? Are they religious?

  I’m having fun putting all the details of Laura’s life onto this form. It’s making me think of my wife as some kind of a character rather than a real human being. I bet the police get all sorts of interesting answers in these reports. You could learn almost everything that you ever needed to know about somebody just by having them fill one of these in for themselves. But it’s not Laura filling it in, it’s me, which means I don’t have to be completely honest. I can tick whichever box I want to in order to make her the person I need her to be.

  After answering the question about whether Laura chews gum, (what does that have to do with anything?), I move on to the section that relates to the details of the day Laura went missing, which I am classing as some time during the early hours of this morning. I’ve told the police I was asleep in our bed and Laura was gone when I woke, which means she could have left at any time between midnight and 7 am.

  The form is asking me to say what clothes Laura was wearing when she was last seen, but I have no idea because I was “asleep”, so I just mention this beside the boxes and move on.

  I complete the section about where the missing person was last seen, which was our home, and then advance to the last part which relates to the health and condition of the subject.

  I indicate that Laura is pregnant and make sure to concoct a lie about her becoming increasingly distant over the last few weeks as well as mentioning an episode when she got violent with me which I never reported at the time.

  It’s easy to paint a picture of somebody when they aren’t the ones who get to hold the paintbrush.

  I write ‘None’ in the box for family because with both her parents gone and no siblings, I’m all she’s got. Lastly, I tick the box where they ask me if I am willing to provide something that will have my wife’s DNA on it. I’m sure I can find an old hairbrush in the house somewhere.

  With the form complete, I get out of my seat and return to the desk where I slide the piece of paper under the Perspex screen to the police officer sitting on the other side. They thank me and tell me to take a seat where another officer will be with me shortly, and I do as I am told.

  As I wait for the next part of this charade, I think about how this is going as I was told it would. It has certainly helped to have somebody in the police force working with me to pull this off. They know exactly what I need to do and the order in which I need to do it to make it seem authentic and so far, everything is going as planned. The only problem with removing all risk and random chance is that it’s not quite as exciting as it could be, but then I’ve certainly had my fair share of risk over the past few months. Now it’s time to play it safe and stick to the plan, and that’s exactly what I intend to do.

  I watch the numerous police officers working behind the screen on the reception desk, and they all seem to be busying themselves with rather a lot of paperwork which seems a waste of all their training and talent. No wonder there is so much crime in this country if the people who are supposed to be stopping it are too busy sitting behind a desk pushing documents back and forth into paper trays. I don’t think the answer to solving terrorism, knife crime and domestic abuse lies in printing off more paper and getting somebody to read it all, but maybe I’m wrong. Maybe the police know what they are doing.

  But from what I’ve heard from my inside source, they haven’t got a clue.

  I keep that thought to myself as I see the middle-aged female officer approaching me with a warm smile. She greets me and asks me to follow her, so I do as she says because I’m a good husband who is just worried about finding his missing wife. If this policewoman knew what I was really up to then she wouldn’t be such a gracious host, but she doesn’t, so she keeps on smiling and now she is offering me a hot drink or a cup of water. I decline, pretending it’s because I’m not thirsty, but really, it’s because I don’t want to stay long. I have to get back in the car and get on my way to the cottage again.

  I have to get back to my missing wife.

  17

  LAURA

  Adam came back from his walk soaking wet, and now he is in the shower warming himself up. He’s probably going to get ill after being out in that weather for so long, but he doesn’t seem to care. He said he needed the fresh air and that he feels better for it. I’m not sure I believe him, but he’s too stubborn to let me know if he regrets it. Either way, at least he is back in the cottage with me. I’ve spent enough time in here on my own today.

  I’m sitting on the sofa twiddling my thumbs and waiting for him to come downstairs so we can talk about what we are g
oing to do next. There is plenty to discuss. It’s a good thing that there are no reports of the hit and run in the news yet, although I’m not quite sure how that is possible if everything Adam has told me about the incident is correct. A body lying in the middle of the lane would have been found by somebody, and then the police would have got involved.

  How could that not have ended up in the news by now, especially where we live?

  Carlisle is the kind of place where anything makes the paper. I remember one time a cricket ball went through the windscreen of a parked car sitting outside the local clubhouse, and it made the front page. The front page. The article wasn’t even about how dangerous the event could have been but rather was just a chance to use several puns about cricket. If a story like that can make it onto the prominent pages of our local rag then how the hell does a dead body and a hit and run scandal not feature?

  I hear the shower turn off upstairs and listen as Adam unlocks the bathroom door and trots across the landing to the bedroom. It’s annoying having to wait for him to come down so we can talk, but I don’t want to risk another argument until he is ready, so I will wait. Instead, I head over to the fridge and take out the carton of cranberry juice inside. It’s the one Adam got for me when he went on his expedition to the village that seemed to take forever. I’ve been craving this drink more and more lately, but I’m trying not to have too much if I can help it. I don’t want to be going to the toilet any more than I already am. But as pregnancy cravings go, I guess it could be worse. I’ve heard about women who craved much unhealthier things like doughnuts, chocolate or ice cream. I even read about a person in America who craved chalk.