The Watcher
Page 1
THE WATCHER
Kate Medina
Copyright
HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
1 London Bridge Street,
London, SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk
First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2020
Copyright © Kate Medina 2020
Jacket design by Andrew Davis © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2020. Jacket photographs © Ebru Sidar/Arcangel Images (branch), Silas Manhood (figure)
Kate Medina asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780008214050
Ebook Edition © September 2020 ISBN: 9780008214074
Version: 2020-08-19
Dedication
For Bettina and Sean
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Chapter 64
Chapter 65
Chapter 66
Chapter 67
Chapter 68
Chapter 69
Chapter 70
Chapter 71
Chapter 72
Chapter 73
Chapter 74
Chapter 75
Chapter 76
Chapter 77
Chapter 78
Chapter 79
Chapter 80
Chapter 81
Chapter 82
Chapter 83
Chapter 84
Chapter 85
Chapter 86
Chapter 87
Chapter 88
Chapter 89
Acknowledgements
Keep Reading …
About the Author
Also by Kate Medina
About the Publisher
1
One Year Ago
The jetty was made of weather-beaten wooden slats, yawning gaps between each, and with every step he took Robbie could focus on nothing but the grey-black water heaving twenty metres beneath him. He shuddered and his stomach clenched tight. His mind sought out the last time his father had brought him here, so many years ago that the memory was as distant as the horizon. A family open day at the lifeboat station – he must have been only five or six. It had been midsummer, he remembered, bright sunshine and a faint breeze frothing the tops of the swelling waves. The rusty steel handrails of the jetty had been festooned with blue and red balloons, leading the small children along its rickety fifty-metre-length to the lifeboat shed at its end, drawing their eyes away from the drop to the sea.
But Robbie hadn’t been distracted by the balloons.
The very second that he had stepped onto the jetty his attention had been snatched by the chasm below. A jumbled mosaic of brown, yellow and white beach pebbles below him at first, then slippery, seaweed-smothered stones, then that heaving, swirling sea. He had been fixated by that sea – so far beneath – the only thing to stop him falling into its swallowing depths, the bleached wooden stats that flexed and groaned with each timid step he took.
He hadn’t even known then, about the boy. Or about the boy’s dog.
Even so, he had felt the nastiness of this place. Sensed it.
And now he did know about the boy and about the boy’s dog. He knew everything.
One, two, three, four. Don’t stand on the cracks in the pavement. Don’t stand on the cracks between the planks. The yawning, wide gaps that will suck you down and swallow you whole.
‘Robbie.’
His gaze snapped up. Though his father tried to hide his feelings, had learnt to hide them well, Robbie had learnt to read them better and the look of distress in his father’s eyes as he’d looked back and caught him stepping awkwardly, sideways, crab-like, from plank to plank, was toddler-book easy to interpret.
You’re fourteen not four. His father didn’t say it. Couldn’t risk it. Couldn’t risk upsetting him.
‘Are you OK, Robbie?’ That empathetic, singsong voice that Robbie had grown to hate.
He nodded, didn’t speak. He spoke rarely, only when he had absolutely no choice, when shrugs, eye rolls and hand movements failed to communicate what needed to be said.
His father smiled, an awkward smile that didn’t attempt to touch his eyes. He turned and continued his determinedly hearty walk along the jetty toward the lifeboat shed, his yellow cagoule billowing as it filled with autumn wind, making him look like a giant, animated canary. Robbie followed, head down, his gaze focused on the planks, on the grey-blue deadliness far below.
The lifeboat was huge and red, its bow extending from the open doors of the lifeboat shed, towering above them.
‘I always wanted to join,’ Allan said, running his hand along the boat’s hull. ‘To do something great like that.’
Why didn’t you? Robbie thought. Because of me?
He didn’t say that either. Instead, he turned and looked to the horizon where the undulating grey line of sea meeting sky was punctured by the dark grey hulk of a ship. A container ship? A cruise ship? A navy vessel? How far out was it? Kilometres out to sea – too far to identify.
Was the boy out there too? Had he travelled that far by now?
Had his skin and bones?
2
Claudine Fuller twisted the key in the lock, reaching up to
flip open the top bolt, ducking down to unlatch the bottom.
‘Out you go, Lupo.’
The dog looked up at her, its azure-blue eyes catching the kitchen ceiling lights, making them look almost translucent, depthless. She could dive into those eyes, lose herself in them. She often felt as if Lupo could see right into her soul, as if he understood. And now she felt as if she could see right into his. She was sure, sometimes, that he was a wolf, a heroic, storybook wolf. White Fang. She had wanted to call him White Fang, from the adventure story by Jack London that she had adored when she was a teenager, but Hugo had thought that it was a ridiculous name. Hugo didn’t read, despite the scores of leather-bound hardbacks creaking the shelves of his study. To her knowledge the only thing that touched those books was the end of Junita’s feather duster. Claudine wasn’t permitted in Hugo’s study. It had never been an explicit command, but the implicit edict was clear. When he was at work or socializing without her, the room was locked; when he was at home, he was perennially in there, ‘working’, though she suspected that much of Hugo’s so-called work involved arranging extracurricular activities he didn’t want her to know about.
The feel of Lupo’s cold, wet nose tucking into her palm brought her back to the present.
‘Sorry, boy,’ she murmured, pushing open the kitchen door and stepping onto the York stone patio to watch him streak across the dark lawn and launch himself into the woods.
A flash of white – gone.
Another flash, a second later – gone.
He could disappear for half an hour, roaming through the woods that encircled their house and garden, part of their fifty-acre property, but so thick that the sunlight struggled to penetrate the trees’ dense canopy even during the day. Timid by nature, Claudine rarely ventured beyond the edge of the fastidiously clipped lawn, beyond what she knew. An exotic bird in a gilded cage. She had always been that way. My beautiful, delicate, dependent girl, her father had used to call her when he was alive. She envied those independent women who had the guts to study hard, go to university, build their own impressive careers, chase their dreams. But she just wasn’t constructed that way. Her dream had always only ever been to marry someone like her father, a strong man who would look after her. Control me. She pushed the thought from her mind. And so, she had married Hugo, charmed by his self-confidence, his relentless self-belief. Now, fifteen years married, she saw it for what it was: an unswerving conviction that most others were quite simply beneath him. He had married her because she was beautiful and docile and because she had needed him. Hugo loved to be needed.
Claudine shivered. A stiff breeze was swaying the tops of the trees, creaking branches and stirring leaves into a furious stew. Though she would never dare to admit it to Hugo, she had always hated this extravagant house, hated the isolation, the loneliness. Hugo didn’t like her to work. He said that it reflected badly on him, made it seem as if he couldn’t support his wife. Hugo and his mates adored to tease each other about money, wealth. At a dinner party a couple of weeks ago, when someone had asked him which mortgage provider he recommended, he’d announced – ‘I’m not that end of the market, mate’ – and had then laughed uproariously at the man’s expense and his own genius wit. The poor man had only been trying to tap his knowledge of the property market, but Hugo had taken it as an opportunity to stamp on his ego. Just for fun, of course. No hard feelings. Even though twenty of West Sussex’s finest had been clustered around the dinner table, their ears flapping like Dumbo’s.
I hate this house. But most of all, I hate those woods.
Hugo loved them of course, loved the kudos of inviting his bloated property industry friends over to shoot pheasant in the autumn. Claudine would find birds in the garden gasping for air, their chests peppered with shot, or twisting in pathetic circles on the lawn, their wings mangled. But it was the look in their eyes that always cut her deepest, the look of futile hopelessness. Whoever thought animals weren’t sentient beings were idiots. She used to try to rescue them, drive them to the wild bird sanctuary in Sidlesham, but it was ten kilometres of narrow country lanes and, by the time she’d got there, most of the poor things had died of shock. The shooting season was well underway now, but she hid indoors, the radio turned to blaring; let the poor birds spend their last sorry moments alone.
Another flash of white.
Lupo.
She stared hard into the soupy darkness.
Lupo?
But the white shape wasn’t moving, wasn’t a streak. Why was he standing still? What was he looking at? Usually he just tore.
As she squinted hard into the black gaps between the trees, she realized that it couldn’t be Lupo. It was the wrong shape, too big, too tall. Unless. Unless, he was standing on his hind legs, looking up into the trees, stalking a squirrel perhaps. He didn’t usually, he was a sled dog not a hunter …
‘Lupo,’ she called. Still the shape remained motionless. ‘Lupo.’
Could he hear her? The wind was strong, blowing away from her, carrying her scent and surely her voice. But the trees were swirling, their branches creaking, and she’d never had a strong voice.
‘Lupo?’
The harder she stared, the more the dark trunks and black gaps between blended and the white shape shifted until it was gone, and she was no longer sure what she had seen.
Shivering again, nothing to do with the chill wind this time, Claudine stepped back inside the kitchen and pulled the door quickly shut, ducking to flip the bottom lock into place, standing on tiptoes to slide the top lock home.
What on earth had that been? That odd, immovable white shape in the woods? A ghost?
No, of course, not. Even she didn’t believe in ghosts. My beautiful, delicate, dependent girl. She needed to toughen up, be braver, take control of her imagination, her thoughts, rather than letting them control her.
But where was Lupo? He should be back by now.
3
‘Karma? I’m surveying fucking karma and from where I’m sitting it looks great.’
Claudine heard Hugo’s voice booming around the glass atrium that housed their swimming pool as she moved through the changing area. He perennially sounded as if he was addressing a crowd through a loudhailer.
‘Don’t call me again.’
She stepped quietly onto the honed granite tiles that surrounded the swimming pool in jet black. The water, tiled beneath its surface in pale blue-grey granite punctured by scores of tiny, sunken lights, sparkled like the Caribbean Sea on a brilliant midsummer’s day; the temperature in the pool house, too, equator hot. Hugo, reclining on one of the oak steamer chairs, his chest and stomach gaping from a loosely tied white towelling robe, lowered his mobile from his ear.
‘Who were you talking to, darling?’ Claudine queried in a low voice.
‘No one you need to worry about, baby.’ His eyes roved from her toes back up to her face. ‘You know that I don’t like you dressing in jeans.’
‘I’m only hanging around the house, Hugo. I’m not seeing anyone today—’
‘Me, Claudine. You’re seeing me.’
She gave a pensive, scolded schoolchild nod. ‘Lupo hasn’t come back. I let him out about forty-five minutes ago. He disappeared into the woods and he hasn’t come back.’
Hugo made no move to stand. ‘There’ll be a few dead pheasants out there that the gun dogs failed to find.’ He smirked. ‘I’d imagine he’s chowing down on fresh kill.’
Claudine dipped her gaze. Hugo knew how much she loved animals, hated killing.
‘I can’t even hear him barking,’ she said, despising the plaintive tone that crept into her voice whenever she spoke with him, hating the way that Hugo made her feel. My beautiful, delicate, dependent girl. ‘I can usually hear him barking when he runs through the woods, the odd bark, at least.’
Hugo lifted his shoulders disinterestedly.
‘Would you go out and look for him, please, Hugo?’
Hugo spread his hands, indicating his supine form. C
laudine’s eyes glanced over the paunchy spread of his gut, feeling bile rise at the thought of how it slapped against her thighs at night, when he climbed on top of her and spread her legs.
‘No, Claudine, I won’t,’ she heard him say. ‘I’m not about to start crawling around in the woods looking for that sodding dog in my dressing gown. And stop treating him like a surrogate child. He’s a hulking great wolf, not a bloody baby.’
Claudine winced, not only at Hugo’s tone. Not a bloody baby. They hadn’t been able to conceive. She hadn’t known until they were married that Hugo was sterile; evidently, he hadn’t thought it relevant. She had suggested a sperm donor, but of course he wouldn’t hear of it, wouldn’t entertain the thought of bringing up another man’s child.
‘I thought I saw something outside,’ she murmured, her mind’s eye finding the image of that strange, pale figure. ‘In the woods.’
The ring of Hugo’s mobile bookended her sentence. ‘I need to get this, Claudine. Leave me, will you. It’s a business call.’
Claudine gave a tiny nod. What business associate would be calling Hugo at a quarter-to-ten at night? She was pretty sure some of Hugo’s business calls were as legitimate as much of the time he spent ‘working late’.
Pulling the door to the swimming pool complex closed behind her, Claudine crossed the basement hallway, catching sight of her hunched, folded reflection in the darkened glass doors of the wine cellar, inwardly cringing at the outward manifestation of her timidity. She stopped suddenly.
A noise?
Not the boom of Hugo’s voice, but something else, lighter, irregular. She tilted her head to listen.
Nothing for a moment, then there it was again, that same light, uneven noise.
The external door from the basement hallway opened out onto a sunken patio area that led, via a short flight of curved York stone steps, to the lawn. They rarely used the door or the sunken patio beyond it, shaded and dank as it was even in summer, preferring instead to access the garden from the kitchen or sitting room doors upstairs.
But there the noise was again, louder now, impossible to ignore, coming from beyond that seldom used door. And with a huge sense of relief, Claudine realized that it was the sound of scratching. Nails – claws – on wood. Unmistakable now that she had stepped over, was pressing her ear to the solid wood.