Running in Circles: An international mystery with a heart-stopping twist (Lucy Lewis Thriller Book 1)

by Claire Gray

  Thinking these thoughts, staring at the ground, I follow Lena along a winding path. The trees keep some of the water from us, but sharp, wet shrubs grab at our legs. This path was too narrow and bumpy for the bikes, so we’ve left them lying on the main track. We’re halfway back to them when we hear a shout.

  Lena freezes and I bump into her; hurting my nose and getting some of her wet hair caught in my mouth. We stand with our heads cocked to the side like animals. The voice comes again. It sounds like a man; his words damp and thick like the rain. There’s a garbled sentence but I can’t make it out. It ends on a high note, practically a scream.

  ‘Hello?’ we shout back. But nothing. We only hear the rain now.

  ‘Who was that? What did he say?’ Lena touches my arm with cold fingertips.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I say. ‘But we should help him.’

  Chapter Nineteen

  We run. I’m not frightened, although I’m conscious that I ought to be. Mostly I feel good, knowing that I’m running towards something real, something more than just an idea. We tumble from the bushes and onto the winding dirt track, our feet kicking up mud.

  There’s no one here.

  I bite down on my lip as I stop running. Taste blood. Lena points through the rain. One of our bikes is missing.

  Tracks are visible on the ground where someone has left the forest, gone in circles around the bikes and then taken one, continuing along the path in the direction we were headed. It’s all written in the wet, orange mud.

  ‘He can’t have gone far,’ I say, looking at Lena and at the rain running down her cheeks. I scramble to pick up my bike, which is the one left behind. I catch my ankle on the pedals and see beads of blood appear in a line on my skin. Over my shoulder, I say: ‘I’ll come back for you, I promise.’

  As I bounce over rocks, Lena shouting something after me that I don’t catch, the rain smacks against my face and runs into my eyes. I try to taste it because I’m thirsty, but all I get is mud, and my own salty sweat. I’m probably not going very fast but it feels like I am; I’m flying. And this is the happiest I’ve been since the bomb exploded. I’m going to catch this bicycle thief, and when I have him, I know that things will start making sense again. I knew that someone or something would be out here. I can’t wait to tell Steve.

  But I don’t catch anyone. I don’t see a thing. After a while I lose sight of the other bike’s tracks. Perhaps he left the path and ran into the forest, or perhaps the rain has washed all trace of him away. I stop and listen. Just the rain hitting the trees. The sun glows white and frail through the clouds. I haven’t cried much these last few days, but I could cry now.

  I cycle back to where I left Lena. She’s sitting beneath a tree, her forehead on her knees. Hearing me, she gets to her feet and we meet in the centre of the path. When I stick on my brakes, a little shower of mud hits her ankles.

  ‘Lost him,’ I say, unable to meet her eyes. We look around at the forest, like he could be out there watching us. And he could be.

  ‘Who do you think it was?’ Lena looks over my shoulder at the empty path.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I say, although I think it was Dolph. I feel it with a groundless certainty. ‘He’s disappeared now.’

  ‘He sounded like he wanted to be found, the way he was screaming.’

  ‘That’s true. But there were stretches of path that went totally straight, and I could see a long way ahead. No sign of him.’

  ‘I think he was running from someone,’ Lena says. ‘He was looking for help. When we didn’t reach him quickly enough he continued running. Or cycling.’

  ‘And they’ve found him now, whoever he was running from. They snatched him off the path. You think?’

  Lena shrugs. We don’t know. We stand there in the rain, and realise that we’re not as brave as we always hoped we were. The noise that the man made, sketchy as it was through the distance and the rain, has left me weak; he sounded the way people did the other night, after the bomb exploded.

  ‘Should we go home?’ I ask, ashamed to give in like this but at a loss for anything else to do.

  Lena nods, but first she takes a photograph of me on the empty path, the place where our bike was stolen. I don’t smile, and I shiver as the flash goes off.

  Chapter Twenty

  Our remaining bike begins to squeak as we take turns riding it. Progress is slow and after a while it feels like we’re not moving at all.

  The rain stops but our clothes don’t dry. We can no longer feel our feet as they slap through puddles. Things seem even worse when night begins to fall. Mournful birds call from the trees. Bats flit overhead. There are all kinds of animals out here, talking to each other in their own languages and rustling through the undergrowth. At one point a troop of monkeys cross the path. Another time a wild dog limps out from the trees. It eyes us for a moment with its jaw hanging open and its eyes glowing a pale shade of blue. I just have time to fear it might attack us before it continues on its way.

  Lena has suggested a couple of times that we sleep out here. If she says it again I might agree and curl up beneath one of these heavy trees, let the insects crawl over me. This is all my fault. I decide to apologise and tell her how stupid I’ve been.

  But then we hear an engine.

  ‘Terrorists?’ Lena says.

  We scurry into the trees. The engine sounds big and meaty, a monster of a vehicle. It’s our first instinct to hide; surely anything out here with us, in the dim light and far from town, must be bad.

  ‘But, then again, it might be someone who can give us a lift home,’ I say, as we crouch in the damp darkness. I can’t walk much further. I never exercise, other than to run after Steve when he forgets something, or to swim slowly in the shallow sea; my body can’t carry me much further. And I don’t want to sleep out here; I really, really don’t.

  ‘Perhaps you’re right,’ Lena says, looking at her feet as they sink into the dirt.

  ‘You stay here,’ I say. ‘If they seem dangerous, keep hidden. Okay?’

  I step into the road, wet leaves slapping at my face as I move. Lena follows me, of course, and we stand there with our arms outstretched, asking for help. There’s a car in sight now. It is big. A Bentley or a Rolls Royce; something like that. Headlights bright enough to hurt the backs of my eyes. The noise of it rips the night apart. It knocks against plants at the edge of the road, snapping branches and scattering leaves.

  It’s nearly upon us. And now I’m sure that either it will run us down, or someone will stick a gun out of the window and shoot. Or worse, they will take us and do things to us. I don’t want to be tortured. I don’t want Lena to be hurt, out here following my stupid hunch. The car stops, braking sharply so that little stones and water from the road spray everywhere.

  It’s dark inside the car. The window rolls down and a female voice, American in that clipped, old fashioned way that you hear in black and white movies, says: ‘Girls, I nearly flattened you. This thing can practically drive itself. I was dozing.’

  ‘We were hoping for a ride into town?’ Lena says, bending towards the open window.

  ‘What accent do I hear? Are you German?’

  ‘Yes,’ my friend says, a little tentatively. I can’t see the driver. All I can make out are some lights on the dashboard and the dark dome of a woman’s head.

  ‘I love Deutschland. My father was from Berlin. Just for that, you can join me. Try not to damage the upholstery.’

  I climb into the back. The seats are leather and bigger than Steve’s couch. I can’t find my seatbelt, fumble for a moment but then give up. Mud is flaking from my body but I’m too tired to care. The driver turns to glance at me as Lena introduces us.

  ‘Hi.’ I smile and raise a hand. It’s an effort to do even this.

  The woman is fairly old; I’d put her somewhere in her seventies. She has short grey hair, kind of wiry like a dog’s. Her lips are made up big and red, but she has very small eyes, with wrinkles at their edges. These mak
e her look like she laughs a lot, but who knows. Perhaps she scowls. She doesn’t tell us her name. A silence hangs where it ought to be.

  ‘And what are you two doing out here on your own? You must be up to no good,’ she says, and pulls off very quickly. I wish that I had a seatbelt on. I notice, then, a smell of alcohol.

  ‘We just came out to see the temples,’ I say quickly, and this is when I realise that we left our remaining bike behind, abandoned at the side of the road back there. We’ll never get it back. I feel bad. I feel bad for the abandoned bike and I feel bad for the man who hired it to us this morning.

  ‘Strange day for it,’ the woman says.

  Lena looks back at me over her shoulder, and then she turns to the woman and says: ‘Someone stole my bike. A man. We heard him shouting.’

  ‘A person can hear all sorts of things in the jungle. Did you see this man?’

  ‘No, but we heard him. And the bike was gone. I don’t think it was monkeys,’ Lena says. She looks at me again over her shoulder, frowning.

  She’s going to say more and I don’t think she ought to, so I lean into the gap between their seats and say: ‘Perhaps it was nothing. We were in the middle of the storm.’

  ‘Yes, I expect it was the wind you heard. Or ghosts in those ancient temples,’ the woman says with a smile in her voice. She’s up to no good herself, I think. As if to prove me right, she picks up a bottle from somewhere between her legs and takes a swig of what smells like whiskey.

  ‘Are you sharing that?’ Lena asks, relaxing and sinking lower into her seat.

  ‘It’s two hundred dollars a bottle. So, no.’

  ‘What about you?’ I ask our driver as Lena sits up straight again, folding her arms. ‘Where are you off to? Or where have you been?’ I ask so many questions, all of the time. But it is my job.

  ‘I’m going to see my lawyer, ugly chump. I’m late, obviously. I suppose I’ll have to take a hotel room and see him in the morning.’

  ‘You live on the island?’ Lena asks.

  ‘Sometimes.’ She brakes then, hard, and I hit my face off the back of Lena’s seat. I hear Lena crash against the dashboard, and the bottle of whiskey hit the floor.

  ‘I thought I saw a snake in the road,’ the woman says. She stalls the car, stops for a drink, and then we continue on our way.

  Lena and the woman talk about Germany for a while. Their voices rise and fall. When the woman laughs it sounds like a cough. I’ve never been to Germany, so I sit quietly and watch as the trees thin and we get closer to home. What was this lady doing out in the jungle? The road doesn’t go anywhere except to the temples, so far as I know. I have questions but I decide not to ask any more and neither does Lena. Something keeps us quiet. Lena seems to be enjoying herself, taking gulps from the bottle which is being shared after all, although not with me. I see her face reflected in the windscreen like a light. When she smiles I smile too. I’m glad to see her happy, but I can’t join in. I grip my knees and try to think in straight lines.

  We reach the town. It’s quiet everywhere. The bars seem mostly to be closed. The woman laughs hard and rides up onto the pavement for a bit. I realise that I haven’t been breathing for a while, and as I gulp on the warm, dry air, I’m struck with a feeling that we might never get out of this car. I want to reach out to Lena, grab her arm, but she seems a million miles away and I can’t push myself far enough out of the leather.

  ‘Where the hell is it?’ the woman says then, tapping the steering wheel with her nails. I hear things thudding about inside the boot as we turn a corner too sharply and drift into the wrong lane.

  ‘What?’ Lena asks.

  ‘The Grand Hotel. It’s where I always stay.’

  I give directions, struggling to make my voice heard over the engine and their half drunken laughter. I get an urge to smack Lena across the back of her head and remind her of the noise we heard in the jungle. Don’t laugh. Don’t feel happy. Something terrible was happening to that man and we left him out there.

  We go through a series of red lights. The woman pulls over about a block before the hotel and tells us to get out.

  ‘We don’t actually live near here,’ Lena says. ‘Won’t you drive us all the way?’

  ‘I don’t care where you live. This is as far as you’re getting with me. I can’t arrive at the hotel with a couple of grimy backpackers in tow. I have a reputation to keep.’

  ‘Lucy’s not a backpacker; she’s a well-respected journalist. And I’m a traveller. There’s a difference,’ Lena says, her voice slurred from the expensive whiskey.

  As we get out, the woman is lighting a cigarette with a trembling hand. Lena offers to help but is waved away. We say thank you for the lift but she waves our thanks away too, and then she drives with a stuttering roar towards the hotel.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  I’m woken by the sound of something heavy hitting the floor. As I push away my blanket and sit up, Steve exits through the front door, sending hot air rippling through the room. I notice what I was too tired to see when I got in last night; empty wine and vodka bottles, cigarettes stubbed out on plates, a smell of vomit, and rice spilled over the floor. There’s a bottle still gently rolling on the rug. Steve must have knocked it over as he rushed out of here. When did we last speak? I expect he’s headed for the office. I’ll meet him there.

  In the shower, I scrub hard to get all the mud from my legs. The sick smell is stronger through here, and I notice a pink residue left on the inside of the toilet. Drying myself quickly, I get out of the room.

  I leave the house with a glass of orange juice still in my hand. When I get to the office I realise that I’ve put the glass down somewhere. Across the street is a cat much like the stray one that Steve was petting the other day. It’s chewing on a dead lizard. I watch for a second, and then clatter up the steps. A smile is forming on my face as I open the door. I’m excited to tell him about yesterday’s developments, horrible as they were.

  Steve is hunched at his desk. He peers over his shoulder but then turns back to the screen. He’s on a news website, scrolling down the page too quickly to actually be reading anything.

  ‘Sorry I’m late,’ I say, breathless all of a sudden.

  ‘It’s fine,’ he grunts, and still doesn’t turn around.

  ‘Oh, well, I’m sorry anyway. I should have set an alarm.’

  I move to my own desk, unsure of what to say next. I stack some notepads on top of each other, taking care to keep the tower neat. Steve has left the TV and radio off, so all I can hear is the whirring of the fans, and noises from his computer, which is old and tends to struggle. I clear my throat.

  ‘I suppose I’ll go back to the scrapyard today. And we could go look around the flats near the hairdressers, see if there’s any sign of Bob and Mary. Were those their names? I should have written them down. And I need to tell you some stuff. Listen to this.’

  ‘Where were you yesterday?’ His voice is muffled by his hands.

  ‘I told you, I went to see Lena while you were having a smoke. Did you come in to the office to do some work afterwards? Did you need me? Sorry, I meant to come in, but then...’

  ‘No.’ He spins around in his chair. ‘Where were you? You were gone all day and I was worried. You didn’t call.’

  ‘You didn’t call either.’ I try to sound haughty but actually sound like I might cry, which is how I feel. I don’t like the way he’s looking at me; I’ve never seen Steve angry before, and now he’s angry at me, which I didn’t think possible. Perhaps I’ll just get up and leave.

  He says: ‘I tried to call. I tried for hours but couldn’t get through.’

  ‘Oh. That’ll be because I didn’t have any signal.’

  ‘Like I said, where were you?’

  ‘At the temples,’ I say, making it sound like a question.

  ‘At the temples?’ He half rises from his chair. ‘Why?’

  ‘Lena wanted to get out of town.’ I shrug, hugging myself, trying to squeez
e the lie out because I suddenly don’t want to tell him that the trip was my idea; I should have gone out there with him, not Lena.

  I don’t tell him anything else, although I had been planning to. I’d thought he might come with me to see Officer Kadesadayurat, to help me explain about Dolph’s car, about the voice in the jungle, and all the rest of it. But I don’t say a thing. I grab a pencil and pick at the stained eraser on the end of it. I’m afraid that Steve won’t do the right thing with my information, if I give it to him.

  He rubs at the bridge of his nose and says: ‘I needed you.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I just, you know, started thinking about things a bit too much yesterday. And there was no one to talk to. Not even that stupid cat; it scratched me up real bad.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I say.

  ‘It doesn’t matter.’

  ‘It does. I’m here now.’ My voice breaks on the last word. It’s getting hotter in here, and hard to breathe. I wait for him to say something but he doesn’t. So I say: ‘Is there any news? About anything?’

  ‘Well, one more person died in hospital.’ He waves his hands like he’s swatting a fly, although I can’t see one. ‘Fuck, they were all just like you. Just like you.’

  ‘Like me?’ I whisper.

  ‘Young. Like you and like my daughter. And here I still am, old and useless.’