by Kate Medina
‘This isn’t the way,’ she said.
‘Sure it is. I’ve been driving a cab for years and I know every road. It’s a short cut.’
Was it? Her mind, still hazy, refused to focus. She didn’t have a driving licence anyway and spent every car journey with her mum or dad looking at her mobile phone. How well did she know the roads? Not well at all, she realized. She had no idea where they were. There were millions of narrow, tree-lined country lanes like this around Chichester.
‘Can’t we stick with the main road?’
He shook his head. ‘We’ve gone this way now and I’m not turning back.’ He glanced across. ‘Trust me, OK, love.’
The car bounced and groaned, going too fast for such a narrow lane, Sophie thought, as her stomach heaved. The man’s eyes were fixed on the tarmac and he was gripping the steering wheel hard. Sophie thought of that cut on his arm again. It had been deep and there had been other, fainter marks, surrounding it. They looked like scratches, from twigs. Or fingernails.
Another bounce, and her stomach heaved again. But it wasn’t only sickness she felt now, but also a gnawing fear in the pit of her stomach, banishing the alcoholic fog from her mind. The car hadn’t had anything on the outside to show that it was a minicab, had it? And inside? Her eyes grazed across the dirty dashboard, to the windscreen, to the torn paper pine tree air freshener swinging from the rear-view mirror, blurred now by her tears. God, she’d been so stupid, climbing blithely into a stranger’s car, without knowing anything about him. Slowly, surreptitiously, she reached her hand from her lap to the door handle, along it, fingers feeling for the lock.
‘It’s central locking,’ he said, smiling across at her. ‘The controls are here on my door.’
She hadn’t realized that he’d been watching her.
‘I want to get out,’ she said suddenly.
‘I can’t let you out here, love.’
‘Please. Please just stop and let me out.’ Her voice was rising, a raw edge of fear that made him visibly wince.
‘Sorry, I couldn’t have that on my conscience, letting a young girl out of my car in the middle of the woods at night. What if something happened to you? I don’t want to be reading about you in the paper tomorrow morning.’
At his words, the picture she’d seen in the paper of the Fullers, the newspaper headlines that her dad had pored over for the past two days, rose in her mind. Her dad had been obsessed with the article, with seeking out news of the murders on the television. He had barely talked of anything else, but when her mum had asked him why he was so interested in people he didn’t even know, he’d got angry. I just want to keep my family safe, that’s all, he’d said. And now, here she was, trapped in a car with a man she didn’t know. A mad man. The killer.
Pressing herself against the passenger door, as far away from the man as she could possibly get, Sophie jammed her eyes shut, biting down on a sob. She couldn’t fall apart, had to think. What the hell was she going to do? God, I’ve been so so stupid.
The seatbelt tightened across her chest and she realized suddenly that the car had stopped. Terror snapped her eyes open.
‘Marine Drive, love. Which house is yours?’
34
Denise Lewin bolted upright in bed.
‘Leo?’
Her heart was racing, a thousand beats a second, and her forehead was beaded with sweat.
Leo?
She listened. No noise from Leo’s room on the opposite side of the wall, behind her headboard, or from anywhere else inside the house that she could hear. Absolutely no sound. Nothing at all.
But what had woken her so suddenly?
There must have been something.
Fumbling for the bedside light, she snapped it on, bathing herself in a disc of bright yellow. Feeling horribly exposed, she switched it off again. She had slipped the carving knife from the knife block as she left the kitchen this evening, slid it back in and grabbed the whole knife block – the bread knife, fish knife, gutting knife, the lot – carted it upstairs and plonked it on her bedside table. Now, the light turned off, she stretched out a hand, wrapped her fingers around the cold aluminium handle of the carving knife and drew it silently out of the block.
A noise, a crash?
It must have been something to bolt her from sleep so suddenly. But now, there was just that absolute silence. The absolute, deadened silence of deep night-time. Sliding out of bed, the knife clutched in both hands in front of her, Denise tiptoed to the bedroom door. The landing light was on – Leo insisted on it – and usually she was glad of the light, but now, as she walked across the landing, she felt merely vulnerable. A target.
But for who or what?
Her heart was knocking in her chest, her blood rushing like a burst fire hydrant in her ears. Her shoulders were tensed and she barely dared to breathe, waiting … waiting for what, though? For the ghostie of Leo’s imagination to leap out and engulf her? For that monster from Scooby-Doo that had so terrified her when she’d seen its reflection in the lounge doors?
Ruh-roh, Raggy.
I’m mad. I’m going totally doolally crazy.
She reached Leo’s ajar bedroom door, safe.
But of course I’m safe. This is my house and the doors are all locked.
Unwrapping the fingers of her left hand from the knife, she reached out. As the door swung open, it took her eyes a moment to adjust to the darkness, for the block shapes inside Leo’s bedroom to morph into his chest of drawers, his toy trunk, his cabin bed. And Leo. Eyes closed, blond hair messed, eyelashes fluttering on his apple cheeks as he dreamt, looking so innocent, so heartbreakingly adorable that she wanted to snatch him up and gobble him whole. God, she loved him so much it actually hurt. A physical ache in the pit of her stomach.
Baloo, his teddy bear, was on the floor where he must have tumbled when Leo had relaxed his grip as he drifted to sleep. Tiptoeing across the room, Denise ducked down and picked Baloo up, tucked him carefully under Leo’s podgy arm. Her boy really was still so little, just a baby. She glanced towards the curtains. Tight closed, not even a hair’s breadth of a gap between them; she’d never make the same silly mistake that Simon had.
The barbed-wire ball of tension inside her uncoiled as she breathed out. Nothing here, nothing to worry about.
Backing onto the landing, she pulled Leo’s door partly closed and walked back to her own bedroom, smothering a yawn into the sleeve of her pyjamas. She felt ridiculous now, creeping around her own house clutching a carving knife like some deranged horror movie harridan. She’d never tell Simon. He’d honestly think that she had completely lost it.
Sliding the carving knife back into the block, she climbed back into bed, all thoughts of ghosties and Scooby-Doo monsters fading from her mind now. There was nothing to worry about. It was their home, the doors and windows were all locked, and they were safe.
35
Though it was knocking two a.m. and she’d promised to be home by midnight, Sophie thought her luck might be in as she stood on the pavement, sheltered by next-door’s magnolia, and rummaged in her handbag for her door keys. Her heart was still beating like a jackhammer from the taxi ride, though her head was clear for the same reason, the alcoholic fug erased by the terror. It had been a taxi after all, must have been, despite the fact that it hadn’t sported recognizable markings. The man – Charles – had deposited her home, safe, though the intense fear she’d felt while she’d been trapped in his car had made her realize that, however drunk she was in future, hopping into a random bloke’s car without checking, really checking, that he was a taxi first was beyond idiotic. She’d given herself a proper fright, had been certain, when he’d turned into that dark, tree-hemmed lane, that he’d pull over, rape her – rape and then kill her. The image from yesterday’s front page that had so caught her dad’s eye rose in her mind: the Fullers. They had looked so ordinary, as much as posh Sussex could be called ordinary. Ordinary and so alive.
From where she was sheltering,
she could see the upstairs over the tall privet hedge that bordered their drive, see that the lights were off. She was on half-term, but her parents both had work tomorrow. She’d told them that she and Lucy were spending the evening at Julia, a new girlfriend from school’s house, and the false sense of security her lie provided them with – images of an evening spent painting nails, braiding hair and discussing boys – had presumably worked its magic and nodded them into a deep sleep.
It was still raining, more heavily now than when she’d been in that weirdo’s taxi, and a wind was gusting off Chichester Harbour, a few streets away. She could just make out the rhythmic sound of the yachts’ metal halyards pinging against their masts. It was a sound that reminded her of midsummer, of her fifteenth birthday in August, when her dad had sailed her, Lucy and her other two best friends over to Seaview on the Isle of Wight on his Albin Vega 27, to swim off the boat and barbeque on the beach.
Shivering, the memory evaporating with the cold, she hauled her coat tight around her neck with one hand, slipped off her heels with the other and jogged across the deserted road, the tarmac feeling white-hot against her bare soles, it was so cold. But at least she could pull off a silent approach, rather than pecking down the gravel drive on her metal-tipped stilettos. As she rounded the thick privet hedge that shielded their garden from the street, she stopped. The lights were off downstairs too, not even the hall light shining from behind the faux stained-glass panel in the door.
Strange. Her parents never switched it off when she was out for the night. Awesome news for her though, as it meant they were definitely asleep. She didn’t care about the dark as she had her phone torch to guide her, and anyway, they’d lived in this modern detached house on Westlands Estate in Birdham since she was five years old and she could navigate every square inch with her eyes jammed shut.
The gravel on the drive was sharp against her soles as she padded to the front door. She wouldn’t put it past her dad to be playing a trick on her, teach her a lesson for staying out too late, by jumping out at her in the dark hallway and giving her heart failure. She smiled at the thought – it wouldn’t be the first time – but she could really do without it after the multiple heart attacks she’d had in weirdo Charles’ taxi.
Using her mobile phone to light the keyhole, she unlocked and creaked the front door open. She stood for a second on the threshold, every sense more alert than it had been in hours, feeling sober now, elated, calm, tearful, hyper, an intense stew of emotions all mixed together. So deliriously happy just to be home safe.
She couldn’t make out any lurking Dad-shaped shadows and, now that she held her breath and listened, really listened, she was sure that downstairs was deserted. It sounded deserted, felt deserted. And her dad had never had much patience, would have jumped out by now if he was hiding.
Shutting the door quietly behind her and latching the chain, she shucked off her leather jacket and hooked it over her father’s wax Barbour. It made her laugh that he dressed like a country gent, even though they lived in a modern detached house in Birdham, cheek by jowl with their ‘executive estate’ neighbours. She didn’t know where the ‘gent’ influence came from. They weren’t poor, but they didn’t have loads of dosh either. Her dad was only a conveyancing solicitor at a practice in town. Her parents played golf, but only at the pay-and-play in Chichester, and he had his yacht, but it was a shitty old tub that looked as if it had been salvaged from the Ark and would only be worth a couple of quid if anyone was stupid enough to buy it.
The rhythmic metallic pinging of halyards on masts was dulled now that she was inside the house, the noise replaced by the rhythmic tap-tap-tap of a branch of the silver birch in the back garden, knocking against the roof. Her mum had been meaning to get a tree surgeon in for weeks to cut it back, but it hadn’t mattered over the summer, with the benign weather, and now that it was autumn, windy and cold, none of the ones she’d called could come out for at least a week. The noise irritated them all to death and a couple of roof tiles had already broken.
Laying her feet softly heel to toe, Sophie moved silently from the front door to the bottom of the stairs. She used to hate walking upstairs towards a pitch-black landing when she was younger, feeling as if she was ascending into a malignant black hole full of hidden terrors. But now that she was older and focused on maths and sciences rather than English at school, that vivid imagination she’d had as a kid was boxed up and shoved in the loft alongside her favourite childhood toys.
She could still hear the branch tapping on the roof as she started up the stairs, feeling her way in the dark, her phone tucked in her skirt pocket. Her parents would doubtless have left their bedroom door open and she didn’t want to risk snapping them awake with the light. One step and another, the feel of the carpet under her bare feet so familiar, every groove and bump of the banister imprinted on her palm’s memory, that incredibly annoying tapping drilling a hole in her hungover brain, like her dad’s snoring did in her mum’s. And then suddenly, overlaying the tapping, a different noise.
Water?
It sounded like water running, as if a tap had been left on.
She stepped onto the landing. ‘What the hell?’ The shock of her foot squelching, as if she had just sunk into muddy ground, made her shriek the words out loud. Fuck – she clamped a hand over her mouth and fumbled her mobile from her pocket. The landing carpet was wet, soaked in fact, she immediately saw, water rising up between her bare toes. ‘Oh fuck.’
Her parents would go ballistic if there was a leak from the water tank in the loft. They’d only had the landing and hall downstairs repainted in the summer. Angling her phone, Sophie shone it at the ceiling directly above her – no dampness or water stains. No water leaking down the pristine pale grey walls either. As the weak beam of her mobile phone torch traced along the walls and found the doorway to her parents’ bedroom, she yelped again.
A reflection, she realized a millisecond later, not a spotlight shining up from their bedroom floor. A reflection in the water that had flooded her parents’ bedroom carpet bloomed from the doorway onto the landing.
What the fuck?
She moved gingerly forward, water swilling around her bare feet with every step. Her brain doing flips with confusion, she reached the door to her parents’ bedroom, and stepped over the threshold.
‘Dad? Mum?’
No answer.
Then she saw him. Dad. Sitting on the floor in the doorway to their en-suite bathroom, wearing the pale blue pyjamas he always wore, leaning against the jamb, his back to her.
‘Dad?’
What the fuck is he doing?
‘Dad.’
Why is he just sitting there? Is he drunk?
‘Dad. Daddy.’
She reached for his shoulder and, as she did so, her gaze found the bath beyond, brightly lit by the rows of halogen spots in the bathroom ceiling. Water running over its edge from the flowing tap, the milky white body of her mother floating naked, face up in the bath. It took a long moment for Sophie to realize that her mother was dead. As her mouth opened in an agonized scream, her hand found her father’s shoulder, gripping, shaking, gripping and shaking.
‘Daaaddddd.’
He slumped sideways, his head lolling back on a rubbery neck, and she saw the gaping black holes where his eyes had been, his face a mask of blood and deep animal gouges.
Stumbling out of the room, she staggered across the landing, missing the top step and falling, her mouth open in a silent, agonized wail. At the bottom of the stairs, she clawed herself to her feet, and flung herself against the front door, grappling the chain unlatched, yanking it open, charging headlong, screaming, into the street. Crying and screaming in her little black dress, until lights flicked on in the neighbouring houses.
36
In his twenty-five years of policing, Marilyn was sure he’d never been so pleased to see his front door and for once he’d been able to park within spitting distance of it. Usually, when he arrived home after seve
n p.m., which he’d done virtually every day of his working life – Who the hell had these fabled nine-to-five jobs and where did he go to sign up for one? – he was forced to circumnavigate the block at least twice before he found a parking spot. So today he was gratified to see a Z3-sized rectangle of empty tarmac, almost directly across the narrow road from his tiny Georgian terrace. Stalk-eyed with tiredness, he tucked his car into the space, inching backwards carefully to ensure that he didn’t grind his wheels against the crumbling kerb, which to be fair was in better shape than his alloys.
As he crossed the narrow street, a snatch of siren cutting through the chill night air snapped his eyes towards the main road in time to see a police car zip past, heading south.
NMP, he thought, not my problem.
Shimmying sideways to squeeze between the bumpers of two cars that were parked intimately close, Marilyn fished in his jacket pocket for his door key, a single, simple bronze Yale key, for the one simple Yale lock on his door. His house was cheek by jowl with its neighbours, barely a few arm’s lengths across from the facing houses. Thieves knew better than to try their luck in this narrow, quiet market-town-centre street, nowhere to pull over, engine idling, ready for a quick exit.
A chime. Just one from the cathedral clock. He tilted his head to listen. No more. One a.m. Not too late, all things considered.
Pushing his front door open, he stepped into the tiny hallway, his eyes finding the steep cream-carpeted stairway, almost wishing he’d kept the Stannah stairlift the previous owner had installed, so that he could flop into it and glide effortlessly upstairs to bed. As the door clicked shut behind him, his mobile rang. For fuck’s sake. He was tempted to ignore the call. It would doubtless be Dr Ghoshal, still in the autopsy suite, dotting the ‘i’s, crossing and double crossing the ‘t’s, aligning each letter until they were sentry-smart on parade, re-dotting, re-crossing with the anal attention to detail that made him the supremely talented pathologist he was. Precisely the anal details Marilyn didn’t want or need to be kept abreast of at one a.m., after two all-nighters.