by Tim Weaver
In fact, while I was watching the house yesterday, I started thinking about something: what if I really did get rid of him? I’ve thought about it a lot since the night I followed him to the supermarket. I’ve thought constantly about how much better it would be if he wasn’t here. I could make the world forget him, just like they forgot Nora. I’m good at planning things like that. I have the patience for it. After I split up from Nora, as Erik was helping me clear my head in our sessions, I watched her for months and she never even realized I was there. I wanted to know what she did, her routines; that way, I knew how to lure her in, to get her where I needed her to be. I would do the same for your husband if you wanted me to.
He would never see me coming, I promise.
Knowing the type of person you are, I’m sure you would want it to be over quickly for him, despite the way he’s let you down, and I’d do that for you, Derryn. I would. If I severed an artery, just like I imagined that night at the supermarket, he’d be unconscious in ten seconds. He wouldn’t suffer, even though he deserves to.
And then it would just be the two of us.
I think you’d like that, especially if you really are in a bad way now. You’d remember what a connection we had and I think it would give you a lift. We could talk about whatever you wanted. I could read you passages from No One Can See the Crows at Night. Even though it’s not my favourite Gainridge book, I would read the entire thing to you if it helped.
I would do anything for you.
But then I saw you again today and everything else – all the plans I was making – faded into the background. It happened after your husband finally left the house. He was crying again. I watched him come out and get into his car, and as he drove past mine, wiping his eyes, it dawned on me: I would still kill him, if that was the most effective way to bring us closer, but I didn’t have to wait until then to be alone with you. It seemed so simple, so clear, I wasn’t sure why I’d never thought of it before.
I’d been inside your house many times.
I’d just never thought to go inside when you were there.
I gave it a couple of minutes, just to be sure he definitely wasn’t going to come back and disturb us, and then accessed the back garden in the same way I’d done before, when you’d both been out. I scaled the fence at the side and then picked the door at the rear. Inside half a minute, I was standing in your living room.
The house had changed since I’d last been in. It smelled of sickness. In the kitchen, there were unwashed plates. It felt dirty and unclean. I stood there for a moment and listened, tried to hear if you were moving around. But all that came back was silence. As I went through to the hallway, I felt anger throb like a pulse in my throat. He hadn’t left the house in seven days, so why had he let it get like this? Why was he failing you so badly, Derryn?
I walked to the bedroom door.
Even before I got there, I could hear you, the air rattling in your chest. Your breathing sounded like an old motor struggling to turn over. When I looked in at you, you were under the sheets, asleep, your eyelids fluttering, your skin waxy and pale. You looked like a mannequin. I’m not sure what I was expecting, but it wasn’t this. I gripped the door frame and edged further inside, but you didn’t even move.
‘Derryn?’ I said.
I went to the foot of the bed.
You were so gaunt. Your skin had settled on your bones like wet paper, falling around your cheeks, your chin. You were a skeleton covered in a sheet of silk; a husk, a meagre reflection of the woman I’d first seen walk on to that hospital ward, confident and smiling and beautiful. As I came further around the bed, your breath staggered in your throat, struggling to make it to your mouth, and I watched your windpipe shift like a piston – up and down, up and down – as your body went into panic. I reached forward and gripped your hand, and the touch of your skin on mine – even as thin and as brittle as it was – sent a charge of electricity through me. I hesitated for a moment, watching you, and as you settled, I leaned in and kissed you gently on the forehead.
When you didn’t stir, I did it again.
‘I love you,’ I whispered.
Your eyelids fluttered, but you didn’t wake, and then I noticed that there was saliva at the corner of your mouth, bubbling. It looked undignified, unattractive, so I looked around the room for something to wipe it with. There was nothing to hand, so I tried the drawers of your bedside cabinet, searching for tissues.
But, in the second drawer, I found something else.
A copy of No One Can See the Crows at Night.
It was a hardback edition. I reached in and took it out, and as I did, the book slid away, as if its covers didn’t fit properly, and the novel tumbled to the floor.
Except it wasn’t a novel inside the covers.
It was something else.
62
A light came on in the house just before 11 p.m.
I’d been waiting for an hour in the car park at Killiger, my Audi covered in shadows, looking up the slope towards the holiday cottages. Beside me, circled by knee-high fencing, was the children’s play park, the swings moving back and forth as the wind rolled in off the sea. To my left was Killiger itself, or what amounted to it, little more than a few squares of light and wisps of chimney smoke. Behind me was the cove that everything was set around: a crescent of beach hemmed in on both sides by huge chalk cliffs, sloping upwards like giants hauling themselves from the shingle.
From what I could see with binoculars, there were two main doors on the house, at either end of the property, one for access to each holiday cottage. The building had been divided in two, and because of that, there were matching slate patios at both ends. Until now, I’d seen no activity in either part of the house – no hint of anyone.
I focused the binoculars on the window. It wasn’t very big and its glass was frosted, so it seemed likely that it was a toilet, or maybe some sort of utility room. I watched for signs of movement inside and adjusted the focus a fraction more. As everything sharpened, I picked up something: a distorted hint of a shape. Was it the woman? McMillan?
The room went dark.
I’d kept the engine running, the heaters going and the headlights off, but now I silenced the car, got out and went to the boot. The light in the house had only been there for thirty seconds, maybe less, but someone was inside and that was all the confirmation I needed.
Grabbing my bag, I slipped it over my shoulders, locked the car and headed away from the car park, back up the narrow, single-track road I’d driven down. At the top was a lane running west to east. I headed east, rain in the air. The weather had slowly started to change on the drive down from London, cloud knotting together in the clear winter skies. The closer I’d got to the coast, the fiercer the wind had become, and as I tried to pick up the pace now, it pressed against me even harder, almost as if it were trying to drag me back, some premonitory force telling me to turn around.
Ahead of me, a gap in the hedgerows emerged, a wooden gate set into it separating the road I was on from an uneven, loose-stone track that led down to the house. I stopped at the gate and looked over it. From where I was, it seemed as if the cottages were clinging to the edges of the headland, about to plunge on to the beach itself.
I waited for a moment.
There was very little natural light here, just whatever was leaking across the fields from Killiger, and what had made it this far from the lighthouse at Beachy Head, three miles further along the coast. There were no street lamps. No other houses nearby. If it had been a clear night, it would have helped me; instead, the rain had started to get heavier, crackling against my jacket, the clouds letting nothing through from above.
I scaled the gate and dropped down, on to the other side. As the track was full of loose stones, I switched to the grass either side, using it to disguise the sound of my approach. At one point, I looked back over my shoulder and realized that hardly anyone would see this place from the main road if they were driving past. It would hav
e been visible from out to sea, from the beach and the car park, but not really from Killiger itself. And because the beach and the car park weren’t used as regularly in winter, especially in weather like this, the house would exist in relative isolation at this time of year.
That was why it was such a perfect hiding place.
As I arrived at the entrance to the near-side cottage, I checked for signs of movement around me. It was hard in the rain, the wind shifting the grass, the sea crushing the sound of everything else, but when nothing registered, I returned my attention to the house and moved around to the other half of the building.
That was where the light had come from.
The first window was a bedroom, the bed made, some ornaments on a set of drawers in the shadows. Next to that was the kitchen. It was hard to see into, but there was enough residual light from the digital readouts on the cooker and the microwave for me to see plates and mugs piled up in the sink, packets of food on the worktops, and one of the chairs pulled out from the table, an anorak hanging from the back of it. Through the bi-fold doors, I saw an untidy living room, cushions bunched up where they’d been used as head pillows, a remote control on the floor and some scattered DVD boxes. Close to me, only a few inches from the doors, I saw something else: the phone socket. The Internet had been disconnected.
I headed past the utility room and the bathroom and then stopped short of the window into the second bedroom. Swinging my bag off my shoulders and leaving it on the grass, I leaned against the wall and peered inside. A man was lying on the bed, asleep, facing me.
McMillan.
I’d found him.
But any flurry of excitement was brief.
Inside, he moved, moaned. I looked in at him as he rolled on to his back, a hand coming up towards his chest – and that was when I saw blood all over the mattress, his shirt, his hands.
He wasn’t sleeping.
He was dying.
63
I rushed to the front door and tried the handle. It didn’t move. Dropping to my knees, I reached for my picks and started trying to spring the lock. It took me longer than it should have done, the pressure getting to me, my hands trembling, the image of McMillan in my head.
But then I heard a click.
I pushed at the door. Ahead of me, muddy footprints glistened on the oak flooring.
Someone else is here.
I glanced around in vain for a weapon and then out to the blackness of the fields surrounding the house. Everything was movement: rain and grass and wind. I switched my attention back to the interior of the house, unzipped my bag and pulled out a torch. Flicking it on, I shone it deeper into the cottage.
Its beam reflected off the walls, the wooden floors.
It came back at me from a nearby mirror.
And then so did my reflection: I was bloodless and frightened. I could hardly remember the last time I’d slept, could feel the exhaustion weighing on me like chains. Before I’d driven down from London, I’d managed an hour on the sofa, but it had been fitful, agitated, and eventually I’d given in: I hadn’t wanted to sleep, I’d wanted to get to Killiger and find out who was using the cottage as a hideaway.
Now I wanted to be anywhere else but here.
I made a quick half-turn, out towards the fields again, the beam of my torch cutting through the rain like a knife, and – when I couldn’t see anyone – grabbed my bag off the floor and slipped it over my front. It was the best I could do, the only way I could shield my torso from any blade.
I didn’t want to end up like McMillan.
The house was warm, the heating on. I listened to a radiator ticking in the hallway, and then passed the door to the downstairs bathroom, my eyes trained on the kitchen. That was where the muddy footprints led. There was no exit in there, so if that was where McMillan’s attacker was, they’d have to come back this way.
I paused at the bathroom.
It was the one that had been used less than ten minutes ago. The door was open an inch, enough for me to see – with the torch – that there was no one inside. On the floor were the same muddy footprints – and there was blood in the sink, partially washed away. Bandages on the top of the toilet. Tape. Antiseptic.
McMillan hadn’t used the bathroom.
Someone else had.
So had they been trying to help McMillan? Had they found him like this? Or had something got out of hand?
Even with the wind howling outside and the rain against the roof, I could hear his moans, and the closer I got to the doorway, the louder they got. He was saying something too, his words indistinct.
Keeping my gaze on the kitchen, I stepped up to the door, then took a quick look in at him. He was on his side, facing me, blood-soaked sheets beneath him.
He’d seen me.
‘Look,’ he wheezed, eyes on me.
I frowned, checked the kitchen for any sign of his attacker, and then mouthed: What?
‘Look,’ he repeated. ‘Look …’
Look at what?
He shook his head.
I turned towards the kitchen again, trying to angle my head in order to see more of it, and then McMillan started coughing.
I glanced at him again.
‘Look …’ He coughed. ‘Up.’
And then it felt like I got hit by a sledgehammer.
I was on the floor before I even really understood what had happened. Somewhere beyond the rain and the wind and the crash of the sea, I heard the squeak of wet shoes on wooden floors, someone breathing, and then frantic, rhythmic footsteps, dulling as soon as they hit the fields. Everything pinged back into focus only a couple of seconds later, but I was still on my back, staring up at the vaulted ceiling, at the timber beams criss-crossing above my head.
I turned, trying to prop myself up on to an elbow, and pain streaked across my chest: whoever had landed on me had crunched my collarbone, the edges of my throat and neck. I took a deep breath and looked out into the night.
Vaguely, I spotted a shape sprinting away.
They were making a break for the beach.
64
I hauled myself up on to all fours, took another even deeper breath and then tried standing. I felt unsteady, dazed, but I started running all the same. Ahead of me, maybe two hundred feet away, a silhouette was tearing across the fields, following a faint chalk path in the direction of the cove.
For the first time, I saw something else too, faint against the night, but unmistakable: a boat.
It had been pulled up on to the shingle.
I tried to pick up the pace, but the faster I went, the more nauseous I started to feel. I was blowing hard, struggling to find my footing in the wet grass, the chalk slick and the wind fierce. The next time I looked, the figure was at the stern of the boat, shoving the vessel towards the water.
Grey light from the village and a lingering, pulsating glow from the lighthouse showed the figure’s outline, and then my torch beam confirmed it: stocky and well built, dressed in black waterproof trousers and a dark anorak, the hood up. Instantly, I thought of the shadow man in the CCTV video: he’d moved the same way.
Because it’s him.
He’s here.
Again, I tried to move faster, to raise the torch so that more of the man might come into view, but he was only appearing in flashes now, blinking in and out of existence as the torch beam jerked around. I was still woozy from where he’d landed on me, and my throat was burning as I breathed.
His feet started kicking up water.
‘Stop!’ I shouted instinctively, but the wind carried it away, a worthless word that was never going to be heeded. I’d caught him up by a few yards, but it wasn’t enough: he was in a foot of water now, the boat beginning to glide. Once it did, he gave it another, much harder shove and then leapt into it.
The boat rocked on the waves, left and then right, but he adjusted his balance, staying at the stern, by the motor. He began fiddling with something close to the throttle, then the choke.
I
t spluttered.
As he tried it again, I closed the gap, feeling a charge of electricity – I can get to him, I can still get to him – but the motor erupted into life, the boat jolted forward, began to move smoothly away on the water, and he grabbed the tiller.
An ashen glow washed in from the lighthouse again. He was out in the water now, more exposed to its beam, his identity no longer protected by the darkness and the slopes either side of the cove.
But he knew the light was coming.
A second earlier, he’d been side on to me, looking at the engine, reaching for the tiller, the profile of his face inching out beyond his hood. But then he made a fractional movement away, out towards the horizon, and all I could see as the boat took off, as the lighthouse blinked, was the back of him, his coat, his hood.
The beach became dark again.
The boat began dissolving into the night.
And then there was nothing left of him.
Except that wasn’t quite true: as I moved to the shoreline, I realized he’d left something behind. When I’d been running after him, I’d missed it because it was so faint, but now, as I looked at it more closely, I saw how it trailed from the edge of the sea right back to the grass in infrequent, sporadic dots. It was on the shingle and in the field. It was all the way back at the house.
Blood.
I thought of the mess that had been left in the bathroom at the cottage – blood in the sink, a bottle of antiseptic, bandages, tape.
McMillan hadn’t made the mess, the man had.
He was injured.
65
Once I was back at the house, I headed for the bedroom. There was blood everywhere. McMillan had moved, dragging himself off the bed and on to the floor. I leaned down, grabbed him under the arms and hauled him into a chair.