by Lone Theils
36
She discovered an outbuilding that looked like an old stable, inside which a battered, red pick-up truck and a dark grey BMW were parked. The door to the pick-up was unlocked, but there was no key in the ignition. She wasted precious seconds searching for it under the driver's seat, under the visor, and finally in the glove compartment. No key.
She ran back to the basement.
Lulu was still sitting on the floor, clutching her head, curled up like a child. When she spotted Nora, she looked up at her, her big eyes overflowing with tears.
‘She pushed me,’ was all she said. As if she were seven years old and could tell tales to a teacher.
Nora glanced nervously up at the house where the flickering flames glowed orange in the twilight. Hix or Lisbeth or one of the dogs could appear at any minute.
‘Lulu. You’re coming with me now!’ she ordered her.
Lulu stood up mechanically. ‘Oh, OK.’
‘Hurry up!’
Lulu accelerated ever so slightly and they made it to the outbuilding at last.
‘Where do they keep the car keys?’
Lulu pointed silently to the left side of the stable door. Nora ran on ahead and started searching for them. She cut herself on a rusty nail and swore.
‘Where's that bloody key?!’ she screamed in frustration.
Lulu wailed. ‘It's always there. It's on the nail...’
Nora looked around frantically. There was only the one nail, but no key. She started pulling down tins from a shelf next to the door. Still no key.
‘Lulu. We really need that key. Where else could it be?’
Nora kicked the car out of sheer anger and as she did so, she spotted a glimmer of metal in a pile of rags near the door. She rummaged through the pile with her uninjured hand, and finally her fingertips found a bundle of keys. She snatched it and got into the pick-up truck.
Thankfully it started at her first attempt. Lulu stared at her, but remained frozen.
‘Get in, for Christ's sake! NOW!’ Nora yelled.
After what felt like an eternity to Nora, Lulu finally did as she was told. Nora put the car in gear and drove like a maniac down the gravel road, out through the forest and away from that cursed house.
‘Lulu. I need your help. Where are we?’
Lulu said nothing.
They drove on, while Nora tried desperately to get her bearings. There would have to be a big gap between her and Hix before she dared breathe or stop to find a place from where she could call the police.
Finally they reached a tarmac road.
‘We need to go left here,’ Lulu piped up at last.
Nora turned the wheel so hard she almost lost control of the car. She managed to straighten it up and followed the winding country lane while praying for no oncoming traffic. It had grown dark by now, and Nora was only too aware that if Hix or Lisbeth followed them, the pick-up's headlights would broadcast their location to high heaven, but she didn’t dare turn them off.
They drove on. Nora could feel her adrenaline stabilise just below panic and a fair level above extreme emergency. She could see no road signs or houses.
She turned to Lulu. ‘That little road coming up, where does it lead to?’
‘Brown's potato farm.’
Nora decided to risk it and turned down the muddy side road. They soon reached the farm. Nora pulled up behind a barn, so the pick-up couldn’t be seen from the tarmac road.
No lights were on and the farm appeared deserted.
‘Lulu. Does anyone live here who has a phone we could borrow?’
Lulu shook her head. ‘No, I guess they’ve all gone home by now.’
Nora turned off the engine and the lights, ran up to the barn and tried the door. It was locked. She clutched her head. Several minutes wasted. Minutes where Hix could catch up with her. She made a quick decision.
They were better off staying here for a while, and hoping that Hix would drive straight past without seeing them. They sat very still in the car in the darkness, and Nora could hear faint ticking from the engine as it cooled down. She turned to Lulu.
‘OK. We’ll just have to wait here and hope for the best.’
Lulu snorted. ‘With Bill it's always the worst,’ she said emphatically.
And then, the still of the night was broken by the sound of a highly tuned engine. Very much like that of a BMW. The sound got closer and closer.
Inside the pick-up Lulu whimpered: ‘I’m scared.’ Nora said nothing, but turned the key in the ignition and put her foot on the clutch, ready to press it with a second's warning.
She didn’t have to wait long in the darkness. The next moment she saw the yellow headlights of the BMW. They were getting closer, and their glow through the dark trees behind the barn told Nora that the car must have turned down the side road. Now it was a question of perfect timing, so the BMW didn’t block their escape.
Nora bit her lip and waited ... and waited ... and waited. Then suddenly everything happened at once. The BMW came round the barn and drove up behind them. Nora started the pick-up with a roar and raced back to the tarmac road. She could only just feel solid tarmac under the wheels when the dark grey BMW came right up her tail. The driver had put the headlights on full beam. The reflection in the rear-view mirror hurt her eyes and made it impossible for her to see who was behind the wheel.
‘Oh no, oh no. He's coming to get us,’ Lulu whimpered.
Although Nora didn’t disagree with Lulu's analysis of the situation, she still wished that she would just shut up.
‘Where does this road end? Somewhere with other cars? Lots of people? A phone?’ she asked desperately.
‘It leads to the care home.’
37
Three minutes later the road came to an end in the car park behind Cedar Residence. Nora slammed on the brakes, so the pick-up skidded diagonally and blocked the narrow entrance to the car park. It wouldn’t stop Hix, but it might buy them a few extra seconds.
She grabbed Lulu's arm and ran as fast as her sore ankle permitted towards the care home. The door was locked. She entered one-two-three-four, but the expected click never came. Her heart was in her mouth. She tried desperately to come up with other obvious combinations. Four-three-two-one didn’t work either. Her fingers flew across the keypad, while she looked nervously over her shoulder. Lulu was whimpering.
‘He's coming after us. He's coming to get us.’
‘Will you shut up!’ Nora hissed.
In sheer frustration she hit the button marked ‘one’ four times and was rewarded with a dry click from the lock, which opened, and they stumbled into the care home's reception area. She slammed shut the door behind her. She caught a glimpse of Hix crawling over the bonnet of the pick-up truck, and a flash of a knife.
Lulu was sobbing openly now.
‘Follow me,’ Nora said, yanking her arm. Lulu, however, stood frozen like a pillar of salt.
‘No, we had better split up,’ she insisted.
Nora didn’t have time to argue with her, so she ran as fast as she could down the nearest corridor. She stopped halfway, went through a door and found herself in a large, dark room.
She fumbled her way around, too scared to turn on the light in case it attracted attention. Steel surfaces. Plenty of cupboards. A kitchen. She was aware that it wouldn’t take Hix long to find a way into the care home.
She tiptoed further into the kitchen, while searching walls and surfaces for a telephone. Just her luck to have ended up in possibly the only room that wasn’t equipped with a telephone. Had she been in any of the offices or one of the residents’ rooms, she would now be enjoying a pleasant conversation with the emergency services. Instead Globalt's star reporter was staring at a pile of industrial-sized saucepans. Great job, Nora Sand!
She heard a bang that sounded like a door slamming into a wall at full force. OK. Hix had arrived.
Nora stood very still and listened with every nerve in her body on high alert. In her mind she return
ed to her most recent visit and tried to calculate the easiest route to Lisbeth's office. There was bound to be a telephone there. Nora thought she even remembered seeing one on the desk.
Carefully she opened the door to the corridor a fraction. In the beam of light pouring in from the deserted corridor, she spotted a wall-mounted telephone beside the gigantic fridge in the kitchen. She quickly closed the door again and fumbled her way to the telephone, picked up the receiver and pressed the biggest button in the hope of getting an outside line.
Beep-beep-beep.
‘Shit,’ she burst out as she realised it wasn’t a telephone. What she had done was activate the intercom and just announced via every single speaker in the care home that she was a massive technological dunce. Oh, and she had let Hix know that she was still in the building.
She steeled herself, opened the door, looked left and right, crossed the corridor and ran back to the reception area where she nearly tripped over a wheelchair someone had left out. She tried the door to the reception office because she could see a telephone through the glass in the door, but it was locked. Where was the duty manager?
She heard the sound of someone kicking down a door, followed by a short, high-pitched scream. Then it grew silent. Eerily silent.
Nora swallowed her nausea and tried to work out where the noise could have come from. The silence was rent by something that sounded like a chair being upended and a muffled roar coming from Lisbeth's office.
She ran down another corridor, her heart pounding, and she didn’t slow down until she reached the door. It was ajar, and in the light from the corridor, she could see the contours of two people in a close embrace. She caught a flash of Lulu's protruding eyes, heard her wheezing breathing. Nora then realised that Hix was trying to strangle Lulu with the cable of the telephone on which she must have tried to ring for help. Hix had his back to Nora, and she entered the room instinctively. She had to distract him, make him release Lulu. She looked around for a weapon, spotted the paperweight with the Duomo and hurled it at his head. At the critical moment, he shifted unexpectedly to one side and the snow dome merely clipped his ear without doing much damage. Hix roared with rage, but he didn’t let go of Lulu.
In a last desperate attempt she grabbed hold of the top of the bookcase and pulled it over the pair of them. Books cascaded on to the floor, and she heard Hix grunt before she ran down the next corridor as fast as she could. By now there was an infernal cacophony of call bells each trying to ring louder than the other, and several lights were turned on.
She knew it was only a matter of time before Hix came after her, so she sprinted down the corridor and into the next. The fourth door she tried was unlocked and she stumbled into the room.
An old lady was lying in a hospital bed, her eyes wide open. Above her, a nightlight cast a golden glow across the room. Nora recognised where she was. The tape recorder that had narrated Jane Austen. The old lady who had sat in her armchair calling out for George in that heart-breaking manner.
Nora quickly surveyed the place. On the bedside table, next to a pewter tankard with flowers, was something that looked like an ancient, black Nokia phone. She tiptoed as softly as she could towards the bed, while trying to keep her panting breathing under control. When she was three paces from the bed, so close that she could almost touch the mobile with her fingertips, the old lady opened her blind eyes.
‘Hello? Is anyone there?’ she called out.
Nora tried to settle her. ‘Shh. I can’t explain right now. But, please, please, be quiet.’
‘Who's there?’ the woman cried out. There was fear in her voice.
‘Shh. Please be quiet. It's a matter of life and death,’ Nora tried, before reaching for the mobile.
But the woman was quicker. In a practised movement, she snatched the mobile and hid it under her duvet. ‘I’m calling George. I’m calling him right now!’
Nora threw all decency to the winds, reached under the duvet and prised the mobile out of the old woman's hands. ‘I’m sorry, I’m so, so sorry. I really am. I’ll explain later.’
‘Help! Help! Thief!’ the old woman screamed.
Nora checked the display. It showed two words in a childish font: Fisher Price. She was holding a useless toy that had been given to a confused elderly lady who ‘called’ George several times a day.
It was only a matter of time before the old lady's screams would attract Hix. Nora snatched the pewter tankard and tipped out the water and the flowers. It weighed solid and heavy in her hand. Then she turned off the nightlight and took up position behind the door. On second thought she dragged the woman's Zimmer frame, which was parked beside her bed, and placed it in front of the door to stall Hix when he arrived.
She could hear him coming down the corridor. The old woman kept shouting: ‘Help! Help! George! I want George to come now!’
And with a bang the door swung open. Nora was ready with her pewter tankard and aimed it straight at the back of Hix's head. He, however, tripped over the Zimmer frame, and the mug hit only the empty air.
He had fallen flat on the floor and attempted to get up at the same time as he was trying to drag Nora down. She kicked out at him, but overbalanced when he punched her in the knee.
Nora felt Hix's hands around her neck. Saw his piercing, black eyes and arrogant smile very close to her face. The effect bordered on hypnotic. She could feel the onset of dizziness and white spots started dancing in front of her eyes. With considerable effort she managed to force her hands in between his arms and she groped for his eyes in order to poke her thumbs in them, as Enzo had taught her to do ‘in an extreme emergency’.
This manoeuvre surprised Hix, who wasn’t used to his victims fighting back; they had always been drugged and incapacitated. He relaxed his grip for a second, and that was enough for Nora to wriggle free and scramble to her feet. Her hands searched the floor frantically and found the pewter tankard. As she bent down to pick it up, he lunged at her, and her head collided with the door frame. She, however, let herself roll with him so that he encountered much less resistance than he had expected, and he lost his footing. At that moment she used what felt like her very last strength and hammered the pewter tankard into his temple. Hix passed out as if someone had pressed his off switch.
And that's a knockout,’ Nora whispered to herself, turned on the light, and looked at the tankard in her hand, which was engraved with the words ‘To George Ashcroft for honourable service to Cornwall Miners’ Association’.
‘I owe you one, George,’ she whispered.
With adrenaline pumping through her body, she went hunting in the bathroom and took the cord from a dressing gown. She used it to tie Hix's hands behind his back. In the bathroom cabinet she found three rolls of support bandages. She rolled all three around his ankles as quickly as she could manage. She had to work fast. He could wake up at any moment. She raced back to reception, found the abandoned wheelchair waiting at the reception area, and pushed it to the room.
‘What's going on? Who is it? Where's George?’ the old lady was distraught.
‘Mrs Ashcroft?’ Nora said in her most reassuring voice.
‘Yes, that's me.’
‘I can’t explain everything right now, but someone will be with you soon to take care of you. I promise.’
The woman appeared to calm down somewhat once she was addressed by her name. Nora rummaged through the woman's wardrobe and stole the belt from a moth-eaten trench coat. She tied the now faintly groaning Hix to the wheelchair. He was close to regaining consciousness.
She pushed him out into the corridor, right down to the end where a door led to the garden. The key was in the door. She unlocked it and pushed him out on the terrace. The cold evening air made Hix stir again. She could see his eyelids quiver.
With her very last strength, she pushed the wheelchair through the pea shingle, out on to the lawn and onwards. He was starting to resist and when he finally opened his mouth, she regretted not having gagged him.
‘I’ll make sure you suffer so much that you’ll beg me to kill you. But I won’t let you die. I’ll torture you until you no longer know your own name,’ he groaned.
Nora tried ignoring him, but her strength was nearly used up. They had arrived. She parked the wheelchair and tried the door. It was unlocked. She pushed Hix inside the darkness of the tool shed and slammed the door shut.
Outside the tool shed she found an abandoned broom, which she wedged under the handle thus locking the door, before her legs buckled underneath her like cooked spaghetti. When she came round a few seconds later, she was propped up against the door and a furious Mrs Fletcher was looming over her, both hands planted firmly on her hips.
‘Well, I must say! What's going on here? This time you’ve gone too far. Who do you think you are? And don’t give me any more of your stories. You’re staying right here. I’ve called police, and they’re on their way.’
Nora looked up at her with a grateful smile. ‘Thank you. I thank you with all my heart.’
She never heard Mrs Fletcher's reply before she slipped back into a soft darkness.
38
She woke up to the sound of clattering china. She tried opening one eye as an experiment. She was lying in white bed linen. In a hospital. On the bedside table was a glass of water and a steel vase empty of flowers. On the wall facing the bed was a television, which was turned off, and a poster of an oversized yellow rose with droplets of moisture on the petals. It was hideous, Nora decided, before closing her eye again. A door rattled in the distance. The side ward was very quiet. She tried sitting up, but felt a searing pain to the back of her head, and raised her hand. She felt a bandage. She touched it carefully and tried to remember what had happened.