by Meg Carter
With the coast clear, she staggers towards the road.
Beyond the protection of the trees, the wind is gathering once more.
As she reaches the point where rough track meets tarmac, Zeb notices for the first time how the banks are raised either side of the road, which is the only route back down to the village. She stops. Once she starts walking she will be committed to continuing along the same way until either side of the road flattens. There will be no place to hide should she encounter the man along the way. But she has little choice, and the sooner she starts the sooner she’ll be out the other side.
Zeb breaks into a slow run.
The road is straight for the first half kilometre, so she reduces her speed only as she nears the point at which the road curves out of sight to the left. Walking, she rounds the bend and sees a shorter strip before it kinks once more, this time to the right. She starts to run again; her sights fixed on a spot a couple of paces before the bend.
The road begins to narrow and then she recalls how on the way up the width had shrunk at a couple of points to a single lane. She takes her time, peering around the corner cautiously then ducking back at the sight of a silver estate car tightly wedged into a passing place on the left-hand side just a dozen or so paces ahead.
Zeb sinks back against the grassy verge, desperately considering her options. She must pass the car if she is to get back down to the village – there really is no other option, but how?
A gap has been cut into the bank opposite: there is an overgrown path leading up and through it, into what must be the field beyond. It might be possible to make her way down towards then past the car, shielded by the verge.
Crossing the road to investigate, she almost loses her balance as she stumbles through the gap, catching her foot on something solid, half-buried in the ground. It is a piece of discarded agricultural equipment. A bit like a lawnmower blade. She stares at it for a moment.
Wary of staying still, Zeb steps over the metal and presses on.
The cleft in the bank leads her not into a farmer’s field but a desolate, almost lunar landscape. It is some kind of abandoned industrial site, with a piece of bare ground on the far side on which squat a cluster of prefabricated outhouses. She hesitates, perturbed by how perilously exposed she is, even though the buildings appear deserted.
A rough track leads away from the closest outhouse, towards what looks like a gate at the furthest end of the plot – well beyond where the silver car is parked on the road, she calculates. But the terrain between where she is standing and the distant exit is scored by a series of empty drainage ditches. She will have to stay close to the road but concealed below the bank if she’s to make it, she decides.
Crouching low, Zeb makes her way along the side of the road, praying the man will not think to scale the uneven banks either side of the road to get a better view. Passing what must be the halfway point, she catches sight of a dark shape lying on the ground a dozen or so paces ahead – a pile of discarded clothes, perhaps. But as she draws closer, she breaks into a desperate run.
‘Fraser?’ she calls out, as loudly as she dares. A beat later she is on her knees by his side.
Lying on his back with his head against a large clod of earth, he is barely conscious. It’s not his ashen face or incoherent mumbling that claims her attention, however, but his right foot. It is trapped between the rusted jaws of an old-fashioned poacher’s snare.
‘Fraser,’ she says again, frantically scanning the ground around them for anything she might be able to use as a lever to wedge the trap open. ‘Help me, here,’ she implores. ‘Tell me what I should do.’
‘Nothing,’ he rasps, his eyes sharpening as they come into focus. ‘Don’t try anything. Don’t touch it – it’s one of Davy Duffy’s, so God only knows what might happen if you do.’ His eyes roll for a moment. ‘Just get help,’ he groans.
‘But your foot—’ Zeb objects, noticing for the first time the ugly, chewed-up mess of it. The depth of flesh into which the metal teeth have sunk. The glimpse of white from bone now visible between the blackened fabric of his ripped trouser leg. How much blood has spilled out into the surrounding grass. She can’t leave him, not like this. She fumbles in her jacket pocket for her phone but finds there is no signal, then pats Fraser’s jacket to see if he’s brought his, but all he can do is shake his head.
‘There’s never any signal up here. Just tighten my belt if you can,’ he pants, motioning towards the makeshift tourniquet he has somehow managed to fashion around his injured leg, just above the knee. ‘Then get help. Please. As fast as you can.’
Zeb adjusts the belt then takes off her scarf and gently knots it around his neck. She slips her hat over his head, too, but it refuses to sit snugly over his curly hair. ‘Don’t go anywhere,’ she whispers, her stomach tripping as he stares back at her, bleakly.
It takes just a couple of minutes to reach the gate which, as Zeb hoped, brings her out onto the road a short distance below – and out of view – of the pull-in where the silver BMW had stopped. Her ears strain for the distant sound of life, but she hears nothing.
Struggling to think against the swell of blood now pushing at her temples, Zeb works out that the road she’s on is a minor one – a single lane that snakes with little enthusiasm in either direction through a kind of no man’s land: silent, empty, abandoned. But it shouldn’t take long to get back down to the village once she gets onto a busier road, where she will surely be able to hitch a lift.
Fraser, the voice inside her chants, blotting out any lingering thought she might have of her meaningless exchange with Anna, the appearance of her pursuer, how foolish she’d been to retrace her steps to Scotland, what Richard will think, how she should never, ever, have left Matty.
As her breath shortens, her chest grows tighter.
You’ve got to get help. For Fraser.
A short while later, just ahead, is a junction where the track must join the road back to Beauloch. Zeb bursts out onto the road amidst the unexpected grind and squeal of brakes. She is struck heavily from the blind spot on her left and for a second she is flying, then she is sent crumpling downwards onto the tarmac where the side of her head meets the ground with a sharp crack.
The world darkens, briefly, and she smells the burn of overheated rubber.
‘Christ, girl, what were you thinking?’ It is a man’s voice, and as he bends towards her she notices his breath smells like fish. ‘No, focus on me – that’s it. Keep looking, good girl. Are you OK?’
Though her shoulder is screaming and her head is pounding, Zeb senses that otherwise she is unhurt. She turns her head delicately, and as she does her eyes widen at the sight of the car that’s just hit her. A silver BMW. Its driver side door yawns open. A figure is slumped on the back seat. It’s the woman she met earlier, Anna. Has she fallen asleep?
As the man offers to help her to her feet, Zeb groggily pushes his arm away. ‘I’m fine,’ she declares.
‘Can I give you a ride back into town?’ he presses.
Zeb peers into the car at Anna who seems to be panting heavily. ‘Is she OK?’
‘It’s happened before,’ he replies. ‘A panic attack. Though this one’s bad, which is a worry given her asthma. That’s where we were heading, to get her checked out. Let me give you a lift – we can drop you off en route.’ He opens the nearest rear passenger door.
Zeb thinks of Fraser and the blood from his mangled leg clotting the grass. She has seen no other traffic pass since they had set out from McLellans this morning.
How long would it take by foot? she asks herself, noticing the spots of rain now starting to streak the car’s windscreen.
Too long, surely, for him to stand a chance.
‘Well if you could drop me at the hotel—’
‘Climb in, then,’ the man says. ‘I’ll drop you at the crossroads – you can walk from there, if you prefer.’
‘OK, thanks,’ she mumbles. As she clambers onto the seat next to Anna,
she almost sits on something blue and plastic. ‘Yours?’ she offers, passing the reliever inhaler to the woman. But Anna is so short of breath, all she can do is close her fingers around it and nod.
‘Hold tight.’ The driver’s foot pumps the accelerator. ‘Breathe long, breathe slow, Alma, all right?’
Zeb turns to stare at the woman beside her whose gasps now slow as she battles to regain her breath. Alma? Perhaps she’s misheard him. Maybe it’s the ache now pulsing in her head. Too much to think of. So much going on. ‘Shouldn’t she breathe into a paper bag or something, if she’s having a panic attack?’ she calls out, suddenly struck by the greyness of Anna’s face. The stickiness of her hair. The drops of sweat freckling her skin.
The driver shakes his head. ‘The opposite, if you’re an asthmatic,’ he replies. ‘A paper bag is for when you hyperventilate, but when you have an asthma attack the problem is you don’t get enough air.’
The woman beside begins to mumble. ‘Anna…’ she gasps. ‘It’s Anna, not Alma… Anna Dee—’
‘Enough, Alma,’ he interrupts, gently. ‘Please, I mean it. You’ve found her. She’s here. Now tell her.’
‘Alma?’ Zeb exclaims, turning towards the woman by her side. ‘But you said you were—’
‘No,’ Alma gasps, tightening her grip around the door handle with a shaking hand. ‘Not… like this… Brian. Not… now.’
Not like what? Zeb thinks, reaching for her own door handle as the car slows to a halt at another blind junction. It can’t be far from here back to the hotel.
‘Sorry, love, faulty child locks,’ he says without turning around. ‘But you don’t want to be getting out now, surely?’ He waves with a dismissive hand towards the bleak, wind-swept landscape, now dashed with slants of sleet. ‘There’s water in the back footwell if you’re thirsty, by the way,’ he adds, almost kindly.
Zeb sees a bottle of water at her feet. It looks full; its seal unbroken. But she doesn’t move.
‘Two peas in a pod,’ he mutters.
An odd couple, Zeb thinks, as the car rides over a bump in the road. What past do the two of them share? They must be around the same age, she guesses, though that’s as far as any similarity goes.
The man, Brian, has a physical intensity that makes her think maybe he’s served time in the forces. He speaks with a flat, anonymous accent peppered with the occasional East End intonation. Alma, though, seems to have come from another world – an artist, her birdlike frame and slender hands suggest – though she, too, speaks in a flattened, neutral tone that gives little hint of where she might have been raised. England, certainly; southern probably.
Is this the same woman whose plaintive love letter she found at Dad’s, what now seems like weeks ago?
The driver sighs. ‘Like mother, like child.’
The cry this elicits from the woman sitting beside Zeb is more like a yelp of pain; desperate and uncontrollable. Involuntary. And it is this – more than anything that has been said so far – that feels most shocking. Makes her realise the seriousness of the situation. Forces her to admit that she, like Anna – Alma – is completely at their driver’s mercy.
The car, which has turned onto an A-road to bypass the village she noticed a little earlier, is circumnavigating a large, inland expanse of gunmetal-coloured water. But with no signposts visible, it’s impossible to tell if they came this way before, and nor can she see which direction they are driving. If he won’t stop… she thinks, remembering Fraser with a dread that verges on hysteria. How. Can. I. Get. Out?
‘Look, I should explain,’ she gushes. ‘I’ve a friend who’s been hurt and he needs my help. So perhaps if you let me out here?’ Another car will come along soon enough, surely? But before she can continue, Alma reaches out a hand as if to reassure, then quickly lets it drop.
‘I’m so… sorry,’ the older woman gasps.
What’s wrong with her? Zeb wonders, regarding the stoic toughness in her fellow passenger’s face. This woman seems like the sole survivor of some catastrophe, the wreckage of which she has dragged herself through against all odds by sheer strength of will. But then Zeb is struck by something else. The unexpected memory of the photo she found in that memory box of a younger, smiling Dad beside a pretty young woman. It was taken in a pub garden somewhere. They were standing hand in hand. ‘You know, Elizabeth…’ Alma begins.
Zeb turns towards her, sharply. Is this the same woman in that old snapshot, thirty years on? she wonders. It can’t be. There is a hardness about Alma that makes her seem at once both broken and resilient; passive yet, in a curious way, threatening. The woman next to her is surely some kind of chancer. Zeb narrows her eyes.
Alma watches her companion as she struggles to regulate her breath. ‘Pete would have… so… hated this,’ she wheezes eventually.
Floored in an instant by this unexpected reference to Dad, Zeb’s spirit folds in on itself then crumples as she turns away.
Outside, the air is filled with snow. Inside, the car windows have begun to mist. Her face feels damp and hot. Her coat is still twisted around her – she should take it off; but to do so would be like admitting she knows she’s going nowhere, and that would be like an admission of defeat.
Closing her eyes, Zeb reluctantly finds herself back in a tree-lined cemetery.
The morning of Dad’s funeral had dawned unnaturally bright. So bright that as she left the chapel the white light wrought in her a curious sensation, like being reborn. She remembers, too, the flowers laid across the stone flags just outside the main door. How overwhelming they were in their textures, scents and colours. How different was the stranger’s tribute, so simple and plain. How she read then reread the card with its cryptic message and no name.
Straightening up, she’d stared across the sea of granite and stone towards the solitary figure in the ragged shadow of what in a few months’ time would reveal itself as a maple, staring back at her. Thick-set. Square-shouldered. Dressed in black.
With a gasp, Zeb’s eyes open.
‘It was you,’ she exclaims, fixing her gaze on the rear-view mirror. ‘At his funeral. In the graveyard after. You were there.’
Alma groans. ‘I… asked him to because… I couldn’t.’
Zeb stares at the woman, hoping to find some sort of reassurance, but Alma has slumped back against the headrest. Though her eyes are still open it is as if she is shutting down, somehow – closing in on herself. Zeb’s head is throbbing and she’s becoming increasingly uncertain whether this is her imagination or for real.
Until, suddenly, she sees the outskirts of Beauloch.
‘Just here would be lovely, thanks,’ Zeb cries out. But as the crossroads comes into view Brian shows no intention of slowing down: they overshoot the turning up to the Round House, then speed right past McLellans.
Zeb prods Alma’s arm to get her attention but now her head is lolling. ‘Wait a minute, you said—’ she begs. The thought of Fraser pinioned by the mantrap, broken and bloody, is dizzying and for a second or two Zeb fears she will be sick. But when nothing happens she moves her hand to the inside catch on the passenger door. Weighs up the speed at which the vehicle must now be travelling. Assesses the potential risks of barrelling out. Remembers the faulty child locks.
What the hell does Brian think he’s…?
Her consternation quickly fades, to be replaced by something else. Fear. For as she stares into the rear-view mirror, willing Brian to meet her gaze, Zeb sees his sights are set; his attention is elsewhere. He is fixed on the unfolding road and with hope of finding help for Fraser fading fast, Zeb’s grasp on the present – her sense of self and desire for escape – melt away, to leave only despair.
Succumbing to fatigue, her body is all out of fight. Her eyes close and the world fades into darkness.
26
Mornington Crescent, November 1975
As soon as Alma pushes open the door to Pete’s flat she is struck by its fetid smell. Feeling her way down the inside wall, she finds the
light switch. She steps inside and shuts the door, then dashes along the corridor into the sitting room to throw open both windows.
Leaning with arms crossed against the sill, she stares out at the cityscape below. Allowing her eyes to trace the railway tracks, she starts to calm. Mapping the roads like concrete threads, she ponders the legions of nameless towns and faceless cities that lie beyond the uncertain horizon with their promise of anonymous sanctuary.
A sharp breeze makes her step back from the window. She turns to survey the room: the collection of dirty plates on the side table; hand-washed stockings on the fireguard with the suspender belt still attached; a plastic bucket containing a soiled terry nappy.
Alma gags. Hurrying into the kitchen, she stumbles towards the sink and gulps handfuls of cold, running water. After a few minutes she takes rubber gloves, a roll of dustbin bags and a bottle of bleach from the cupboard beneath. Holding her breath, she flushes the liquid mess from the bucket down the toilet and seals the nappy in a knotted polythene bag.
Only once she has liberally sprayed both sitting room and kitchen with cologne she’s found in the bathroom does she check the rest of the place, opening every window. Until, finally, she steps into the spare bedroom and sees the wooden cot.
Nappies stiff as boards hang from the radiator beneath the window, though these ones are clean and dry. Someone has left a pin hairbrush on the windowsill; its spikes are clogged with long bottle-blonde hairs. A plastic make-up pouch as big as a granny’s handbag lies on its side on the bed. On the bedside table someone has left a diamond and emerald ring.
Alma sinks onto the edge of the candlewick bedspread and shakes her head. The place feels transformed since she was last here, only a week ago. And when she’d seen Pete for lunch earlier that week, he’d made no mention of having guests. She stares at the array of lotions and cosmetics. More hair lacquer. Expensive conditioner. Baby oil.
Is this Cyn’s stuff? Is it possible the woman used to stay here before marrying Phil and still has a key?