Willow Walk

by SJI Holliday

  Praise for WILLOW WALK

  ‘Tense, atmospheric and gripping from page one. A first-rate psychological thriller.’

  – Mason Cross, author of The Samaritan

  ‘Dark as a smoker’s lung, but Good God it’s a marvellous read. Perfectly paced and crafted by a writer on a par with any of the big names.’

  – David Mark, author of Dead Pretty

  ‘Feverish and intense, Willow Walk is a worthy follow up to S.J.I. Holliday’s highly regarded debut, Black Wood. A writer who doesn’t flinch in the face of twisted impulses and unspeakable desires, few can match her for the creation of truly disturbing characters.’

  – Eva Dolan, author of After You Die

  ‘A hugely compelling, creepy story that ratchets up the tension and delivers moments of perfectly twisted darkness. Beautifully written and a cracking read.’

  – Amanda Jennings, author of In Her Wake

  ‘Drugs, sex and murder are mixed together in another deliciously dark cocktail from S.J.I. Holliday. The effect is intense.’

  – David Jackson, author of the Detective Callum Doyle series

  ‘An addictively creepy exploration of the past coming to call.’

  – Quentin Bates, author of Chilled to the Bone

  ‘The writing is sublime and the storyline is darkly delicious with some thought-provoking themes and genuinely intriguing characters.’

  – LizLovesBooks

  ‘I got so caught up in it that I only looked up to check there was no one lurking in the dark corners of my room. The darkest of love stories. A chilling read.’

  – Grabthisbook

  ‘A compelling tale of obsession and dark secrets that grips you from the first chapter and holds you right through to the startling and dramatic conclusion.’

  – Ava Marsh, author of Untouchable

  ‘This is a tightly focused, grimly believable story about the secrets people carry and the dreadful mistakes they make that never lets up.’

  – John Rickards, author and reviewer at namelesshorror

  ‘Chillingly nuanced, pulse-poundingly suspenseful and totally unputdownable. A must-read for psychological-thriller fans.’

  – CrimeThrillerGirl

  ‘Willow Walk is the kind of book I adore discovering, one that stays with me long after I’ve finished. I cant wait to read more about Banktoun and its residents.’

  – Jenny Blackhurst, author of How I Lost You

  ‘Holliday has done it again: she has created characters who are believable and relatable, and shrouded them in a dark, suffocating psychological thriller that has you gripped from start to finish.’

  – Rebecca Bradley, author of Shallow Waters

  ‘Willow Walk: a great, worthy successor to Black Wood. It needs to be made into TV!’

  – Daniel Pembrey, author of the Harbour Master series

  ‘Small towns are fertile playgrounds for crime writers, but they’re rarely mined with such a feeling for their suffocating nature and invisible ties as practised here.’

  – Nick Quantrill, author of the Joe Geraghty series

  ‘This is a gripping, roller coaster of a novel, which digs deep into the small-town psyche and comes up with a nightmare scenario. I couldn’t put it down!’

  – Helen Cadbury, author of Bones in the Nest

  ‘Breathtakingly sinister and darkly compelling Unputdown able.’

  – Jane Isaac, author of Before It’s Too Late

  ‘Willow Walk is gripping, creepy and tense and covers some highly emotive contemporary issues. It kept me intrigued all the way through.’

  – Off-the-shelf book reviews

  ‘Close relationships can be the most toxic, and if the thrill of crime fiction is the way it delves into our darkest places, this book truly delivers.’

  – William Shaw, author of The Birdwatcher

  ‘Holliday has that wonderful Hitchcockian knack for making the ordinary seem deeply menacing. You will never see Lego in quite the same way after this.’

  – James Benmore, author of Dodger of the Dials

  ‘A brilliantly dark and twisted tale that expertly builds the tension until you find yourself biting your nails to the quick as the pages fly by.’

  – Steve Cavanagh, author of The Defence

  S.J.I. Holliday grew up in Haddington, East Lothian. She spent many years working in her family’s newsagent and pub before going off to study microbiology and statistics at university. She has worked as a statistician in the pharmaceutical industry for over sixteen years, but it was on a six-month round-the-world trip that she took with her husband ten years ago that she rediscovered her passion for writing. Her first novel, Black Wood, was published in 2015. You can find out more at www.sjiholliday.com.

  First published 2016

  by Black & White Publishing Ltd

  29 Ocean Drive, Edinburgh EH6 6JL

  www.blackandwhitepublishing.com

  This electronic edition published in 2016

  ISBN: 978 1 78530 036 3 in Epub format

  ISBN: 978 1 78530 021 9 in paperback format

  Copyright © S.J.I. Holliday 2016

  The right of S.J.I. Holliday to be identified as the author of this work

  has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs

  and Patents Act 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored

  in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, or by any means,

  electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without

  permission in writing from the publisher.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  Ebook compilation by Iolaire, Newtonmore

  Contents

  Title Page

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  31

  32

  33

  34

  35

  36

  37

  38

  39

  40

  41

  42

  43

  44

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  To my Dad – the best pub landlord ever . . .Who works a Sunday?

  ‘Invisible threads are the strongest ties.’

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Prologue

  Four bodies. Vague shapes.

  A stale, sticky smell. Spilled beer and vomit. Cigarette smoke. Weed. A sudden flash from the night before: a couple behind the sofa, bangs and thrusts. An audience looking on. The girl riding and bucking. Big grin on her face, eyes closed. Oblivious.

  She walks slowly towards the sofa, crouches down. Peers around the back. They’re still there, arms wrapped around each other. Totally out of it. A mist of sex lingers. Something else. Something stronger.

  That makes six.

  Her head spins as she stands up. Her eyes sting. She has a vague memory of waking up in darkness, peeling contact lenses off her parched eyes, tugging at dry eyeballs. She can barely see without them, everything fuzzy-edged and hard to decipher. She squints, stumbles against the sofa. A head lolls against her.

  ‘Shh, sorry,’ she says, low, under her breath. No
response.

  A girl is draped at an awkward angle, long dark hair trailing on the floor. A man sits, head leaning off one side of the sofa; his soft hair tickles her hand. She nudges him gently and his head rolls back onto his chest as she moves carefully away.

  Try not to wake them.

  On the other side of the room, a skinny figure lies splayed across an armchair, head hanging off one side, legs off the other. Under the window, a girl is curled up and facing the wall. Her fair hair is matted and spread out around her like the head of an old mop.

  The room shifts. Tilts.

  She feels sick. Brings up bile and swallows it back. The syrupy taste of Red Bull burns the back of her throat. Memories of vodka and cheap fizzy wine whirl around her head and her stomach like an aspirin fizzing in water.

  All around, there are shadows. Dark patches and pools. Spilled things. Dirty things. She squints, trying to work out who is who, what is what. But her eyes hurt too much. Her head thrums, and the smell is getting worse. Body odour. Piss. Carnage and decay. Bottles and cans everywhere. Discarded bits of clothing. Upended ashtrays. Her stomach lurches again. She has to get out. Now.

  It’s too quiet. Too claustrophobic.

  She lifts the latch. The door opens with a squeak, and she flinches. Hears a soft thud from somewhere behind her. She turns back. Sees that the girl from the sofa’s hand has slid off from where it had been resting on her stomach, and it now flops uselessly on the laminate flooring. But she hasn’t woken up.

  There’s a faint banging sound. Tap. Tap. Tap. A draught. Someone has left the back door open. Maybe someone is out there now, having a fag, or a morning sup from one of the cans of warm beer she imagines to be littering the kitchen worktops. She hesitates. Should she go through? Offer to help clear up? Sort out the drunken mess of bodies scattered across the lounge like a pile of coats?

  She squeezes her eyes shut and sparks flip and leap across her vision. No. She has to get out. She needs air, water and sleep. She needs a wash too. A long hot bath, to get rid of the stink that seems to be seeping into her pores from the toxic air. She needs to shake off the memories of the night before, threatening and bothering at her like tiny pinpricks jabbing at her skull.

  Something happened. Something went wrong.

  She walks out into the early morning sun, shielding her eyes. She takes a gulp of fresh air and feels the nausea subside – for now, at least. A chorus of blackbirds twitters in the trees. Will she manage to walk home without bumping into someone, or something . . . or getting knocked down by a car as she stumbles, half-blind, down the road?

  She bangs the door shut. Hard. Starts walking. Fast.

  Something pings at her. Get away from here. You need to get away.

  Behind her in the house, no one flinches. No one stirs.

  No one breathes.

  1

  A ribbon of air bubbles trickles upwards, vanishing to nothing as the tiny orbs pop and break the surface of the pale-blue water. She stares at them, eyes wide and stinging. Is the water really blue? Or is the reflection from the tiles causing an optical illusion? Sometimes it’s hard to accept what’s real, what’s fantasy. She closes her eyes. Lets her thoughts drift off. Tries to clear the clutter from her mind.

  Forty-seven, forty-six, forty-five . . .

  It’s been years since she’s done it. Wonders if she still can. Thirty-three, thirty-two . . . There’s fluttering in her chest. She’s only halfway there. She blows out through her nose, flaps her palms upwards, gently. Just enough to keep herself anchored to the tiled floor of the swimming pool. Nineteen, eighteen . . . She’s going to do it. She has to do it. Her chest tightens. Pips of pain patter inside her head. Ten, nine, eight . . . She lets herself drift up. Four, three, two . . . She fixes her feet onto the bottom and thrusts hard.

  One.

  She bursts out like a champagne cork. Her face burns, her lungs squeal. She grabs for the side of the pool, hugging onto the edge of the drainage channel while sucking in great lumps of air that stick hard in her throat as she tries to gulp them down. Eventually, her breathing slows. Her face begins to cool. She opens her eyes, stares into the drain, watching as the water slips over the lip and gets sucked inside.

  A rubber squeaking sound from the poolside stops abruptly just above her line of vision, and she glances up to see a pair of white trainers. ‘Hey, you OK down there? I was about to grab a net and fish you out.’

  She tips her head back and looks up. The lifeguard looks about half her age. He must be new, because she comes here every day and she’s never seen him before. He smiles down at her, half smirking, probably thinking we’ve got a right one here, and she wonders what he knows about saving anyone’s life.

  In fact, she’s surprised he’s even got up out of his chair to come and find out what she’s doing. He’s definitely new. Give him a week and he’ll be nowhere to be seen, like most of the others.

  ‘Sorry, didn’t mean to freak you out. Just something we . . . I used to do when I was a kid. I wanted to see if I could still do it.’

  ‘Right. Good on ya,’ he says. His Australian accent seems to turn the statement into a question. He nods, gives her another small smile. Continues his ambling circuit of the pool. She swivels herself round, watching him go. Tanned, toned legs in a pair of white shorts. He probably has quite an effect on some. But not her.

  A family appears from the changing rooms. A cute blonde girl with pink armbands jammed onto twig-like arms and a father and son in matching blue Bermuda shorts. The mother has her hair tied in a topknot, her expression pulled tight. ‘Come on,’ the young girl screeches. Her voice echoes around the walls. ‘Come on!’

  Marie turns away, a different pain stabbing at her now.

  She slides down the wall, under the surface again, presses her feet against the side, arms straight out in front. Pushes away into a glide, followed by a neat dolphin kick for half a length, before slicing her left arm down, cutting gracefully through the water as she begins a slow front crawl. She tips her head to the left after four strokes, sucks in a breath. When she’s about a metre from the end, she flips forwards into a perfect tumble turn, and continues her stroke.

  She tries to clear her mind. Tries not to think about the letter.

  It’s her daily ritual. Sixty lengths – an equal, ordered mixture of front crawl, breaststroke, backstroke and butterfly. She always cools down by taking off her goggles and cap and sculling gently on her back for another four lengths, hands paddling by her sides. She loves the feel of the cool water caressing her scalp, filling her ears. A stir of echoes muffled by water. It makes her feel alive.

  She’s done.

  Sixty-four lengths: sixteen hundred metres. She walks the width of the pool to climb the steps, and that covers the nine-metre shortfall that makes it exactly one mile. She doesn’t even know why, but there is something important about it being a mile. Everyone’s got their obsessions. She checks the clock. Forty-eight minutes. Three minutes more than usual, but she puts that down to sitting on the bottom of the pool and the recovery afterwards. She hasn’t done that since she was twelve. Hearing from him has triggered something.

  Memories.

  Curiosity.

  Fear.

  She watches the cute blonde girl in the baby pool nearby as she climbs the steps out of the training pool. The girl is kicking her legs hard, her small pointed chin poking high out of the water. Her mother walks slowly along beside her, trying in vain to avoid being splashed in the face. Marie longs to go into the baby pool. Sit in the warm, shallow water, watching the little ones splash and kick and squeal with delight. Graeme always said it was warm because so many kids pissed in it. That rumour about the council putting some special dye in there to make it turn bright blue. It never happened.

  Graeme.

  Marie smiles at the mother as she walks past her towards the changing rooms. The mother smiles back. A ‘what can you do?’ smile. Marie wouldn’t care if she got splashed in the face, if it meant she
had a little girl to do the splashing.

  She steps into the communal showers and slams the heel of her hand against the ‘on’ button. One of those ones you have to lean on permanently or it goes off after ten seconds. She tilts her head and lets warm water skitter down over her face. Leans back onto the button, stopping it from popping back out. It digs hard into her back and the pain jolts, wakes her up. She runs a hand down her side, imagines the faint alien feel of the scar tissue through the thin fabric of her swimming costume. Even after all these years, it marks her. It has grown with her. Tortures her. Burns her through her clothes. She wishes she was in a private shower cubicle, so she could peel off the tight, wet Lycra and scrub hard at the scar with cheap pink soap. But all she can do is let the lukewarm trickle rinse her gently, barely removing the scent of chlorine.

  Swimming is her quiet time. When you’re on your feet all day, it’s nice to be weightless for a while. Away from the chatter, the repetitive banality of TV sport, the bells and clatter of the fruit machine, the sounds of the till drawer being slammed shut, of cutlery being scraped on plates and pint glasses being dumped on the bar; the stink of sweat, fish and chips, bleach on lino, old men’s farts. The coolness of the water on her skin takes her away. The slow, rhythmic breathing and the gentle movement of gliding through the water is therapy. It’s her medication, her meditation, her head-time.

  But now he has invaded it.