‘You know you could just get another job, right? Why stay working for her when she’s such a bitch?’
Andrew suddenly reached for her, touching his hand to her upper left arm, and when he spoke he was looking her right in the eye, his voice urgent.
‘You have to leave me out of it. If she finds out that I—’
‘Fine,’ Natalie said.
She turned away from him, yanked open the front door and strode outside.
Her mind was racing but for the first time in a long time, she felt like she had more answers than questions. Black Glasses Lady hadn’t been following her, at least not in the way she’d feared. She was The Other Woman just trying to get a look at The Wife.
But Andrew maintained the woman had never stayed here. And he seemed to be telling the truth about not sending the bill.
Had Black Glasses sent it, then?
Why would she do that?
Natalie paused outside the door to Cottage No. 6, the key in the lock and her hand on the key.
If Mike hadn’t stayed here, what reason would there be for that charge, for the bill?
Was Black Glasses trying to let her know what was going on?
She thought back to their encounter in the deli in Sandymount. The way the woman’s face had flashed with what Natalie had identified as contempt, maybe even rage. But what if she was wrong about that? She didn’t know this woman well. She didn’t know her at all. What if the woman had just been caught off guard? What if the expression Natalie had seen was shock?
She unlocked the door and went inside, collapsing into the nearest armchair. The first stirrings of a tension headache were gathering at her temples. Her heart was heavy with the knowledge of what Mike had done.
But things felt clearer now. They were clearer and they’d be clearer still tomorrow, when Natalie would engineer a casual meeting with this woman and they’d have a chance to talk. She’d ask everything she needed to, then she’d get herself on the noon bus out of Shanamore and head back to Dublin to confront Mike.
It would be easier to do it when she had all the information.
More information than even he had himself.
Coming to Shanamore like this was probably the craziest, most ridiculous thing Natalie had ever done. She’d barely stopped to think before she’d walked out of the house yesterday and started the journey here. And until a few minutes ago, all this trip had done was prove Mike right. She was crazy. She was paranoid.
But now she knew that he’d just wanted her to think those things.
Now, she knew the truth.
Now, Natalie knew that she’d done the right thing.
It had been a good idea to come to Shanamore.
Andrew liked to watch documentaries. He especially liked ones about terrible things that had happened to people – terrorist attacks, natural disasters, plane crashes and train derailments – because there were always people for the documentary-makers to talk to, to interview. People who had had these terrible things happen to them but who had, somehow, survived. The people in these documentaries always said things like, My instincts just took over or, I thought to myself this can’t be how it ends or, I guess it was just flight or fight. In the terrible moment when they were put to the test, they all did things they’d never thought themselves capable of. Fear fell away and they took action. Andrew had always imagined that he’d be the same. He’d be on a bus that swerved and overturned, or on a train that jumped the tracks, or in a supermarket when the pop-pop-pop of rapid gunfire cracked the air, and he’d – in an instant – become a stranger to himself. No fear. All action. Selflessly save other people but, in doing so, also save himself. ‘I don’t know what it was,’ he’d tell the documentary-makers afterwards. ‘I can’t explain it. My instincts just kicked in. It was like someone else just took over. I wasn’t even thinking. I was just doing what needed to be done.’
He’d be a good person, he thought, for a change. Or at least able to act like one.
But when the time came, he didn’t do any of those things. He did absolutely nothing.
He just sat there and watched.
A knife plunging into flesh, again and again. Dark blooms spreading on pale clothes. An intruder in one of his cottages, murdering one of his guests.
The fear didn’t fall away at all.
It rose up all around him, stronger than ever.
It rose up all around him and it locked him in. A cage made of fear, pumped full of panic. Impenetrable.
The time-stamp on the video told him this had happened less than fifteen minutes ago. He should call the Gardaí. Or an ambulance. No, the Gardaí. He could say he’d heard a strange noise, a shout or a scream. Any noise at all was easily heard out here. He wouldn’t have to go over there, wouldn’t have to … to see her. That new sergeant would drive out here, look around and discover the woman.
But it was the middle of the night. How long would it take for someone to get here? And that’s if they took Andrew seriously – about a scream in the night? – and came out straight away. It could take half an hour, maybe more. It could take another hour before whoever came discovered that room. There’d be no point in calling an ambulance then.
And once the sergeant walked into it, it’d be an official crime scene. Crime scenes got meticulously searched; Andrew watched cop shows too.
They’d find the camera.
He couldn’t let them find the camera.
If they found that, they’d find out what he was doing, and then surely they’d find out why he was doing it, and what he was.
No.
No.
No.
He couldn’t let that happen.
He replayed the video while he wondered what he should do. The moment at the end, the very last one, is what made the decision easy: the destruction of the camera. That changed everything because that’s how Andrew knew that all this wasn’t some inexplicable, random event.
This had happened for a reason and that reason was him.
His body jerked forward and he threw up all over the floor.
_________
He didn’t know how long he sat there for but by the time he finally moved, the vomit had started to dry and harden on his jeans and a frame of grey light had appeared around every set of drawn curtains in his living room. There was a sour taste in his mouth and his throat felt raw and sore. A red-hot poker of pain had been slipped inside his spine and his muscles ached.
The digital clock on the TV screen said it was gone seven o’clock in the morning. Daylight was coming. The day was coming. People would be waking up, leaving their houses, moving around ...
Someone might see something.
The monitor that had shown him the murder was switched off now, a lifeless black rectangle in which he could make out a poor reflection of himself and the room around him. Had he turned it off? He couldn’t remember.
If there was something to see.
Had all that happened? Andrew wondered now if anything actually had.
When he recalled what he’d seen on the screen hours before it felt distant and weightless, like a news report from the other side of the world.
It could’ve just been a nightmare, he told himself, and hope rose eagerly in his heart. He’d been under a lot of pressure lately. Not sleeping right. Having nightmares. This could just be the latest. He’d go check.
He swapped his jeans for a pair of sweatpants from the laundry basket and picked up his keys and his phone.
Then, on second thoughts, he decided to leave the phone. They could track those now, couldn’t they? He didn’t know on what sort of scale and it was better to be safe than sorry. Fingerprints and all that he could account for – he was the person who cleaned the cottages. But going over there at this hour of the morning would be harder to explain away.
He left the phone and took a torch instead.
Outside, the sluggish breaking dawn cast everything in the same shade of dark blue. The streetlights were still on. It was silen
t save for the odd car in the distance, the quiet chirping of hidden birds and the clip of Andrew’s own footsteps as he crossed the road from Cottage No. 1 to Cottage No. 6.
There was nothing unusual about its outside. All the lights were off, the curtains were drawn and the front door was closed and – he tried to push it inwards – locked. There were no signs of forced entry, no broken glass or damaged locks.
A nightmare, he told himself. Just a nightmare. It must have been.
He started to put his key in the door but then thought better of it and knocked instead. Two firm, loud raps.
Waited. Listened.
Nothing.
He knocked again. He took a step closer to the door and pressed his right ear against it. Waited. Listened.
Still nothing.
He slid his master key into the lock and slowly pushed the door open as quietly as he could.
Everything inside Cottage No. 6 was silent, still and in shadow. Andrew switched on the torch and swung the beam of it about in a large arc, but everything looked as it should. The wall of glass to the rear seemed intact and the backdoor appeared to be shut properly. There were no bloody footprints on the floor, no knife missing from the block on the kitchen counter.
A nightmare. Just a nightmare.
Andrew started up the stairs, careful to keep the torch focused on its steps.
When he reached the landing, he paused again to listen. His heart was beating fast and loud, a primal thump-thump-thump in his ears. It was the only sound he could hear.
On his left, the bedroom door was closed.
On his right, the door to the bathroom was as open as it could be.
He scanned the small, tiled space with the beam of the torch. There were some toiletries around the sink and a towel had been thrown over the side of the bath, but otherwise it looked as he expected it would, as it should. Andrew stepped inside to study the sink for traces of … Well of anything, but it looked perfectly clean to him.
He turned back towards the bedroom door.
Reached for the handle.
Pushed.
_________
Much later, Andrew would marvel at his complete lack of a plan. What would he have done if he’d opened the bedroom door only to discover that she was fine, that it had just been an unforgettably vivid nightmare, and that he was an intruder with a torch in the bedroom of a woman to whom he was a stranger, that he was now the bogeyman? What if she’d woken up? What would he have said? The fact that he hadn’t given this any thought at all was proof positive that, deep down, he knew what he was going to find in the gloom beyond.
The smell of wet pennies.
A shock of brown-red spray on the wall above the bed.
A pale limb pockmarked with wounds and smeared with drying blood.
The morning light was filtering through the thin curtains; Andrew couldn’t see everything clearly, but he could see enough.
His knees buckled and he slumped against the doorframe for support. His mouth was filling with the taste of acrid bile, the signal that whatever was left in his stomach was trying to force its way up.
He wanted to run. Get in his car and drive away. But he couldn’t leave. Where was there to go? They’d just think he’d done this then. And what about—
The camera.
It was hidden in the clock atop the chest of drawers that stood against the wall opposite the bed.
Exceedingly careful about keeping his gaze away from the mess on his right, Andrew took one, two, three steps into the room and pointed the beam of the torch behind the door.
The clock was gone.
He checked on the floor. He shone the torch in the narrow space between the drawers and the wall. He went to the window and lifted the ends of the curtains to check it wasn’t hiding there.
Then, swallowing hard, he pointed the torch back at the bed.
A sob escaped his throat, startling him. The clock was nestled in the crook of the dead woman’s left elbow. Its power cable was wrapped neatly around it and tied, like a ribbon on a gift.
Unthinkingly, he picked it up.
It was slick with drying, sticky blood; he had to hold it in both hands. He felt his skin accidentally touch her skin, which wasn’t cold but had a strange quality to it, an empty lifelessness, like a waxwork.
When he stepped back from the bed he heard a squelching sound and looked down to see that he’d left two perfect shoeprints in blood on the bedroom floor.
_________
His vision blurring with tears and his knees weak and shaking, Andrew hurried back to his cottage, walking quickly with his head down, trying – but failing miserably – to swallow the panic that was rising up, coming up, threatening to overtake him completely.
He locked the front door behind him, leaving the curtains closed and lights off, touching as little as possible.
He looked at the bloody clock in his arms. He didn’t know what to do now or next.
A full ten seconds passed before he realised he wasn’t alone.
‘What …’ He blinked in the gloom. ‘What are you doing up?’
She was standing by the window, looking out into the road. She must have watched him cross it just now. She must know where he’d just been.
She turned to face him, looking him up and down, taking everything in. When she reached the clock, she raised a single eyebrow.
‘Oh, Andrew,’ she said disdainfully, ‘what did you do?’
Tentative steps, first on the rough, broken gravel of the path and then on the sand that gave a little beneath their feet. The eerie white glow from her phone’s torch function illuminating the hem of Richard’s dirty coat, the back of his jeans, his sand-encrusted boots as they hurried a few steps ahead, leading her in a diagonal line towards the shoreline. The inky blackness of actual dark encroaching on all sides just beyond the glow’s reach, yawning open like the mouth of a great abyss. Threatening to consume her. Dwarfing the threat of him, the threat of what he had said he was bringing her to see. The small, flashing orb of the distant lighthouse revealing the location of the water every other beat. The biting wind. The undulating topography of the rock pools, covered in mounds of slick and slimy seaweed and the pale, naked limb that shouldn’t have been in the middle of them, that looked like it had been Photoshopped in from an image of a woman with one leg casually hooked over the side of her bath.
The scene wouldn’t stop replaying in Audrey’s brain.
She’d followed Richard down the beach with three nines already tapped into her phone, half thinking he was luring her to her death, half believing that she was about to see a body. He claimed he hadn’t called the Gardaí yet because he didn’t have a phone, that he’d approached her initially in the car park to ask her to make the call, but that he knew once they did he’d have to talk to the detectives and, when he saw that the person in the car park was Audrey, he realised this might be his only chance to tell his ‘story’ so he decided to do that first. She’d taken one look at the leg and started backing away, then turned and started running up the beach, screaming over her shoulder for him to stay there, to not touch anything, to not let anyone else touch anything either, the shifting sand beneath her feet impeding her progress. Back up at the car park, the call wouldn’t connect. So she’d jumped in her car and roared her way back to the village, where she pulled into the Garda station – she could see from the road that the lights were on in both the station and the house adjacent – and started banging down the door.
‘We’re here.’
The tone implied that this wasn’t the first time the female Garda in the passenger seat had said this.
‘Oh,’ Audrey said, coming to. When she looked, she saw they’d pulled up outside a hotel. The something PARK, the lettering on the glass doors said. ‘Yeah. Thanks.’
She’d driven back to the beach, tailed by a Garda car. The two Gardaí – Seanie Flynn, she assumed, and her old friend from earlier, Steven O’Reilly – made her stay in the car park while they wen
t down the path. By the time they’d come back up, the place was swarming with flashing lights, white vans and reflective vests with GARDA printed on the back and chest, with more arriving every minute. They’d been waiting to start a search in a few hours’ time. Now they’d been deployed earlier than expected, and to a crime scene. It was only when O’Reilly reappeared, pulling off a pair of those same blue gloves he’d used to take the phone from her earlier, that Audrey thought to tell him about the video.
The car door opened and the female Garda – she might have said her name was O’Halloran? – was indicating with a tip of her head that Audrey should get out.
She waited in a corner of the lobby while the guard spoke to the man behind the front desk, and then they both took a silent elevator ride to the second floor. Her room was at the far end of the corridor. The Garda slid the plastic keycard into the lock and pushed open the door for her.
‘Someone will be by in the morning,’ she said, handing Audrey the key. ‘I’d lock this door behind me. The station is less than five minutes’ drive away from here. Ring us if there’re any problems, okay?’
Audrey nodded.
Once inside, she immediately did what she’d been told. She turned the deadbolt until she heard the reassuring click and then flipped the safety latch into place too, just for good measure.
If the room had any features above and beyond the standard chain hotel, Audrey didn’t notice and she didn’t care. Unless there was already another guest in there, it would do. Sleep was tugging on her limbs, weighing down her eyelids, clouding her thoughts. All Audrey could see were the white, smooth sheets of the double bed and the pillows piled high on it. All she wanted was to not be awake.
She flipped various combinations of light switches until the room fell completely dark, then kicked off her shoes and shimmied out of her sand-encrusted, still-wet jeans, which had probably deposited half a beach in the backseat of the Garda car now that she thought about it. She left them where they fell. She went directly to the bed, yanked back the duvet – why were they always tucked so bloody tight? – and crawled underneath it, stretching out her arms and legs. Sighing contentedly in anticipation of the hours of deep, warm and, most importantly, ignorant bliss she was about to sink into.
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