by Adam Nevill
She stared at the second dust ball accusingly, and then at its neighbour which she had not long fished out of the kitchen bin. Using a laminated chopstick from the Chinese culinary set, a housewarming present from her agent, she poked the balls of dust. Thick and grey, the dust had collected around and encrusted upon what appeared to be several long black hairs that formed a circular scaffolding inside the dross.
After the builders and designers had left the farmhouse, the entire building had been professionally cleaned. Since her arrival she had not found a speck of dust on any surface. Dust was something she never overlooked on her travels. She guessed this was the kind of dust that gathered in old buildings, poorly insulated buildings with gaps between the skirting boards and floors, dust that wafted across rooms beset by the infinitesimal debris of ages.
Her underflooring and floor had been newly laid; she had admired the workmanship on her arrival. There were no gaps around the sides of any of the rooms to allow dust like this to puff up and into her shining new world, and in a mere seven days too.
Perhaps the dust had come up and around the steps of the stairs. The wood of the stairs was newly varnished, though the steps were still original to the farmhouse.
Amber’s mobile phone vibrated and she started, then swept up the handset to see who was calling; few people had the number.
Josh.
The sudden rush of relief at the very sight of his name on her phone screen made Amber dizzy. ‘Thank God.’
‘I was driving when you called,’ he said. ‘Motorway. Pulled over soon as I could.’
Amber heard him, but his explanation didn’t register. She didn’t recognize her own voice when she said, ‘He’s here. I saw him. Outside. In the road—’
‘Slow down. He? Fergal?’
‘I saw him less than an hour ago.’
SEVENTY-THREE
‘Are you sure? Did you get a good look at him?’
‘Yes. No. But how many men are that tall? It was him.’
‘What was he wearing? I’ll get a description to the police right away.’
Amber tried to recall what she had actually seen, and for what must have been no more than a second before her car stalled. ‘Don’t know. Because the sun was setting behind him. I only saw a silhouette.’ But it was the outline of a man she wouldn’t forget in a hurry.
She rubbed the outside of her arms; they goosed at the remembered suggestion of the figure’s height, and the direction the long bony head had been turned in.
‘How could he possibly know you are there?’ Josh was trying his best to maintain a sympathetic tone of voice, but she knew that he didn’t believe her. He’d always maintained mostly unshared reservations about her testimony, about her sanity. She couldn’t blame him. They all did; everyone she had employed. Everyone thought the same things about her: that exhaustion and depression and anxiety had taken such a toll on her that she had begun hallucinating inside 82 Edgehill Road from the first day of her residency. That she was hyper manic, as one doctor had suggested, and that she had become acutely paranoid because of what they had done to her and threatened to do to her. Trauma did that. Shock did that. Sustained terror and an unrelenting fear of your own death did that. The prolonged anticipation of torture and rape did that. Loss of control and imprisonment did that.
Her instability had hampered the inquest from the start; that’s what she had been told politely and impolitely on numerous occasions. But she was paying Josh and he had to take her seriously. Josh had always acknowledged that her fear was genuine – that was never his grievance – but he could not believe what she said about the other things.
Amber’s eyes burned with tears. Her distress remained silent until she sniffed.
‘I’m on my way. Give me three hours. I’m in Worcester.’
Amber cleared her throat, heeled both eye sockets with a hand. ‘The dust, and him … I had a dream. A new one. Inside here. They were in here. They got inside, Josh. They were in my room…’ Her voice failed.
‘OK, OK, I’m setting off now. I’m going to assume you have your “little friend”?’ Josh’s voice was strained with disapproval at her possession of the weapon while she employed him. He had not asked her the question to verify that she was ready to defend herself; he was afraid that she might use the handgun on herself, or on one of the neighbours who might foolishly walk their dog across the top of her drive.
Amber sniffed. ‘I’m ready. Ready for that prick. I almost want him to show up. You know, that’s the crazy thing. Part of me is even excited by the idea of finishing this thing. Of finishing him.’
She had come down from fear to light up with rage. Even her hands trembled. It felt good too, if good was the right word. It felt natural and necessary and vital and unstoppable; she couldn’t prevent this kind of rage even if she chose to. They had gifted the rage to her the night they locked her in the ground floor flat. Where she had been.
In the background, beyond the border of her thoughts that were lit up red, and that made her teeth grind until they felt like they were made of clay and oozing together, she could hear Josh’s voice. A stern voice that was gradually rising in volume: ‘OK, Amber. Amber! Listen to me. Amber, now I need you to calm down. To think this through. Amber, are you listening to me?’
But she wasn’t heeding him. This was her home, her sanctuary; she had suffered for this and she had earned this and she had paid for it with more than money. And that rat-faced prick was not coming back to frighten and threaten her.
To break her.
‘I will not let him! I will not! Where is he? Josh! Where the fuck is he?’ And she only realized she was screaming a few seconds after she’d begun. ‘Three years! Three years and he’s still out there. He’s got her. Her! Why can’t you find them? Why? Why, Josh? Because he took her from the house. That’s why. They never found her…’ And then, to the shocked silence at the other end of the phone, she whispered, ‘She hid him. Hid him, Josh. That’s the only way Fergal got away. She knows how to hide. She hid in that building for a hundred years. Why will none of you believe me?’
Josh stayed quiet. Not even he knew what to say. He’d been in Iraq and Afghanistan; he’d been in wars and Amber believed he had killed men. He was now a bodyguard for the wealthy and their children because Josh knew how to spot danger and anything that might seem suspicious or risky; he was a risk manager. He knew how to hide and he knew how to hide people from their enemies. But not even a man like Josh was in her league.
Her.
Maggie.
Black Maggie.
The words thumped deep and low, rhythmically, like a little drum in a wooden box, beaten by unseen hands in a black room that opened doors onto another place you could not see the end of.
‘In about an hour I’ll pull over and check in.’ Josh was doing his best to remain calm and professional after she had screamed at him and practically accused him of failing her. ‘Then I’ll call you as I am approaching the house. It’ll be late. But do your best to stay calm until I get there.’
Amber sniffed. ‘Is there any news? Anything that you can tell me?’
‘Sorry. No.’ And she knew that as he said this, Josh was also struggling to comprehend how a sub-literate career criminal, well over six foot tall, with limited resources, with filthy clothes and hands covered in blood, with no known friends in the West Midlands, with half his face burned away by concentrated sulphuric acid, could have stayed hidden for three years and left no trace of his whereabouts. Aside from the body of the Accident and Emergency nurse he had followed home and forced to treat his injuries, before he throttled her to death with her own tights, the day after his flight from that place.
Amber placed a tea towel over the dust on the newspaper, and then uncapped the bottle of Sailor Jerry.
SEVENTY-FOUR
There were people were in the garden. Men in white suits with elasticated cuffs and rubber boots. Some of them were moving. Their faces were obscured by masks and hoods. The men moved
around the holes they had dug in the black earth. On thin paths made out of slats, they carried blue crates as they walked between the holes.
One of the insertions into the soil had been covered by a white tent. Through the entrance she could see a figure bent over and scraping at something they held close to their face.
Green canvas screens had been erected across the back of the property so people couldn’t see inside the garden, and the maize in the fields, an ocean of waxy leaves swept by the wind all the way down to where the sea splashed and frothed upon the stony shore, was hidden from her view. But she could hear the crop and the sea out there, the old and eternal sea, hissing.
Underneath the longest limb of the oak tree that grew in the middle of the lawn, four women hung by their necks, their heads cocked like pensive birds. They watched the movement below their booted feet, as the men in white suits collected more of the brown things that looked like sticks from inside the holes. They put the sticks inside clear bags and then gently placed the sealed bags inside the blue plastic crates.
A machine juddered and sucked water out of a hole dug close to the house. A woman stood by the machine and smoked a cigarette. Amber wouldn’t meet her eye but knew the woman was looking at her.
Lights in the sky made parts of the garden white and left other sections in darkness. It was hard for Amber to tell what was shadow and what was a person slipping about in the mud, made worse by the rain. Amber peered at the night sky. She could see four big lights, but no stars. Sometimes the lights moved over the house, sometimes they just hovered. The sounds of the rotors made her nervous because she knew she was being watched and filmed.
In the field at the side of her property, through the tree branches, she could see the candle flames of the vigil. She could hear the singing of the women’s group that had been camped in the field for days.
Downstairs, inside the building, a crowd of people chattered. All of them were talking at the same time as each other.
From behind her back a voice called her name. A man’s voice she recognized and her eyes filled with tears at the thought of Ryan being so near. But there was something wrong with his voice and when he called to her again, ‘Stephanie’, it sounded as if his mouth was crammed with food.
She turned from the window and looked at the red door of the bedroom, now open and resting against the foot of the bed. From where she was standing the figure inside the bed distracted her from Ryan; she could only see the top half of a dark body with arms thrown out sideways. The face was covered. The occupant of the bed wasn’t moving.
‘Stephanie,’ Ryan repeated, the word moist, lisping and more slurred than before, as though he was struggling to move his jaw around an oversized tongue. He turned his face away, dipped his head. ‘Got ver deposssit.’ When he said this she was sure he must have been dribbling, because he made a sucking sound as if to draw something back inside his mouth.
‘I don’t want to be late for work,’ she told him. ‘Can I stay at your place?’ she asked, afraid of the building around her. She didn’t want to stay another night inside the farmhouse.
The light in the corridor outside winked out and put the already dim passageway into darkness. The lights were on timers. She could no longer see Ryan’s legs in the doorway.
She ran into the corridor on the second floor of the house. This was not where she lived; she lived one floor down, in the room with black walls and mirrors.
She heard Ryan on the stairs, going down. Lights from the garden flashed against the window of the stairwell, but Ryan would not look at her and kept his face turned away as he descended.
When Amber arrived downstairs she couldn’t find Ryan. She kept calling his name.
Down here, it was hard to hear herself think. She wasn’t sure whether the sounds of rustling plastic were coming from the doors that opened onto unlit rooms, or whether the voices were coming from the walls.
* * *
The ringing of her phone woke Amber. She sat bolt upright and said, ‘Ryan. I can’t find—’
And then she realized many things all at once: she was lying on the sofa in the lounge of the farmhouse with the curtains closed; her phone was vibrating across the coffee table; the television was still switched on, and the film must have finished because she could see the DVD menu on the big screen mounted on the wall. She had fallen asleep and had had a bad dream.
Thank God.
But all of this information about her situation and her surroundings confused her. Because someone was running up the stairs outside the room, and she had caught the last of their shadow leaving the living room as she sat up.
Amber looked at the ceiling.
Footsteps bumped heavily across the floor upstairs, and then stopped.
She reached for her phone and tried to work out which room was directly above the living room.
Your bedroom.
She picked up the phone and answered the call from Josh.
‘Amber. It’s me. I’m—’
She cut him off, her voice so tense she squealed, ‘He’s here.’
SEVENTY-FIVE
‘Just you and me, Amber. There’s no one else inside this house.’
Even though the space at the top of the house was little more than a crawlspace, Josh had gone inside the loft with his Maglite. He’d walked through the entire building swiftly and silently while Amber waited in the kitchen, holding her breath and anticipating the sound of a struggle from upstairs. But she’d only heard Josh once, opening the doors of the walk-in wardrobe. He was the third man in a single day to search the premises for an intruder.
Josh slumped into an easy chair in the living room and the leather upholstery wheezed around his shoulders. He was relieved to know his client was safe, she knew that. Josh made her feel safe and she didn’t have the courage yet to ask him how long he could stay with her at the farmhouse. She knew he was in demand, mostly protecting the children of the super-rich from kidnap. For the first two years after her emancipation from Knacker and Fergal, she had been constantly surrounded by people. In her third year, she had wanted to be left alone and had begun to believe the advice of the police that Fergal was long dead. But she now found herself reconsidering her decision to not employ a permanent bodyguard in Devon.
When she’d first met Josh, two years ago, after the publication advance and newspaper serial fee had come through and she was able to privately hire someone to look for Fergal, to augment the unsuccessful police manhunt, Amber had struggled to believe that Josh had ever been in the military, let alone the special forces. He wasn’t tall and didn’t look athletic; his body was firm, but bulky, like the old-school English cricket players that her dad had idolized. His hair had gone and he invariably wore an innocuous Gore-Tex coat over loose-fitting black trousers, hiking boots on his feet. But one consultation covering her personal safety, changing her identity, and how he had tracked criminals and their kidnap victims, had dispelled all of her doubts about his expertise.
‘The only room I haven’t checked is the locked one.’
‘Study.’
‘The study. But there is no one in your room. I even looked under the bed, but there is no under-your-bed. It’s like a solid plinth.’
‘For good reason. And before you get comfortable, can I see for myself? Or I’ll never sleep.’
‘Of course.’ He stood up. ‘Follow me.’ And paused to eye the gun on the black marble kitchen counter. ‘Either put that away or give it to me. Just knowing it’s here is the end of my career. You know that. I’m going to need to get rid of it soon, Amber.’
When you find him. That’s what they’d agreed as a compromise.
Now the danger had passed, though perhaps there had been no danger, Amber was reluctant to touch the gun. Her genuine reticence about firearms seemed to be the sole factor reassuring Josh about her possession of the weapon; he was happy to pocket the gun and would replace it for her inside the case. ‘Just show me where you keep it.’
‘I’m so
rry, Josh.’
‘For what?’
‘Wasting your time.’
‘Your personal safety and peace of mind is not a waste of my time. I was in Worcester on your account anyway, but I’ll be billing you for the digression.’
‘A lead?’
‘Thought it might have been. But alas no. I received information about an assault. The attacker’s description was not dissimilar to our man. Tall. Transient. Facial disfigurement. Even ginger. Police got him. But not our boy. This chap once had his cheeks sliced back to his ears with a Stanley knife by football hooligans in Cardiff. They were old scars.’
‘Jesus Christ.’
‘I sometimes wish he’d stop by and say enough is enough, people.’
‘I never know where Jesus fits into all this.’
Josh stayed silent and led the way up through the house.
‘God, Jesus, whatever,’ she said, reticent but unwilling to change the subject. ‘I mean, I believe now. You know?’ It was awkward for her to talk like this, and Josh was never going to be the ideal participant in a discussion of this nature. But it had been a long time since she’d had a conversation with anyone, and maybe that was why she needed him to listen. ‘I know that there is something else, after this life. But I’m not sure what.’
‘Let’s hope your brush with the other side is not all there is, eh?’
Josh had always been an understanding ally; he had two daughters, the eldest was Amber’s age. He knew about her experiences in great detail and sometimes she sensed the profound effect they had upon him. Once, Amber had even seen him wipe an eye clear of tears with a thumb, while they went through the evidence about what had happened to the other victims of 82 Edgehill Road. Back then, Amber pretended she hadn’t noticed Josh’s distress, but his tearful reaction had endeared him to her, and his involvement had remained personal. Fathers with daughters. My own would have been the same.
‘Beats looking after the brats of the rich every day, eh?’ he’d said when he finally accepted her custom. Across two weeks he’d deliberated the idea and potential consequences of taking her on as a client; the delay on his decision was due to his reservations about the other things that she had claimed about her time in the house in Birmingham. A familiar anxiety now bustled anew inside Amber: that if she kept pushing at that side of her experience, one of the few people she could trust might abandon her.