by C. L. Taylor
YOU’RE NOT LISTENING.
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Chapter 16
Ursula
Definitely no spy cameras in the bathroom. Ursula looked everywhere – twice – and then searched her room. It’s 11.05 p.m.
and she’s lying back on her bed, a book in her lap and head-
phones clamped to her ears. She can’t settle, and not just because of nail brush-gate. It’s been a good day in a lot of ways – she delivered all but two of her parcels, nothing hugely stressful happened and she didn’t steal anything. But she can’t stop
thinking about the woman at number six. Was she telling the
truth? About being agoraphobic? Ursula moves her book onto
the bedside table, then swings her legs off the bed and stands up. She stretches, fingertips nearly grazing the textured ceiling, and wanders over to the window. A name has been scratched
into the thick gloss paint on the sill: Nick.
She runs a fingernail over it, wondering how many people
lived in her room before her, then pulls back the curtains and looks outside. Unlike Charlotte’s house with its incredible view 96
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of Bristol’s twinkling lights, there’s nothing of interest at the rear of Ed’s – just a matchbox-sized patio with various dead
plants in tubs and the backs of other people’s houses. She presses her palms against the glass and raises her gaze. No stars, just a sliver of moon, peeping out of a murky grey-black sky. It’s one of the things she misses most about her old life: being able to see the stars. She and Nathan would travel up to the Lake
District every opportunity they had. They’d camp out and lie
on their backs outside their tent, gazing up at the inky black sky, making up stories about the shapes they could see in the
stars.
Ursula presses a hand to her chest, suddenly struggling to
breathe. The radiators are pumping out heat and the room feels stiflingly hot. She fiddles with the latch on the old window then, as the painted sill cracks and groans, gives it a shove. It swings open, then BANG, the wind grabs it and slams it against the
side of the house.
‘Fuck!’ She says under her breath as she leans out of the
window, hair wrapping around her face as she reaches for the
metal arm. ‘Fuck, fuck, fuck.’
She tenses as she pulls the arm towards her, anticipating a
shattered pane or a bloody great hole where the glass used to
be, but the window is still intact. As she sighs with relief there’s a bang from somewhere else in the house that makes her bedroom door shudder on its hinges.
She stares across the room, listening. Did Ed just come home
and slam the front door? He wasn’t in when she got back a
little after seven o’clock. The TV in the living room was off and cool to the touch, and she couldn’t hear anything when she
listened at his bedroom door. She went into the bathroom,
half-expecting to see police tape festooned around his stuff, but everything was as it had been that morning, including the nail brush on the shelf. She stood for a while, staring at it, trying to 97
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work out how he’d known she’d touched it. It was lined up
with his other toiletries, each item about an inch apart, all labels facing forward. Had she just chucked it back in? She couldn’t
remember.
When her stomach rumbled noisily she headed down to the
kitchen and made beans on toast topped with grated cheese.
She ate it standing up, shovelling forkfuls into her mouth as she leaned over the counter. She was already in Ed’s bad books and she didn’t want to make things worse by dropping a rogue bean
down the side of the sofa. Afterwards, she quickly washed the
dish and the pot she’d used, put them away and scurried back
to her room. She’s been listening out for Ed ever since. He hasn’t responded to her Sorry, it won’t happen again text and, in Ursula’s mind, that can only mean he hasn’t forgiven her.
She moves across her room and listens at the door for the
sound of footsteps, the clank of pans or the squeak of the stairs.
Nothing. The house is still silent. She puts a hand on the handle and slowly eases the door open. She steps out onto the landing and peers down the stairs. The front door is shut and the only coat on the peg is hers. So Ed hasn’t come home. But what was
the noise?
She turns as something catches her eye. There’s a small piece
of paper wedged in the floor, in a gap between two of the planks directly outside Edward’s room. She crosses the landing and
stoops down to pick it up. It’s a photo clipped out of a news-
paper, a full headshot of a smiling man. On the other side is
part of an article about new building regulations in Bristol.
There’s something about the man’s face that looks vaguely
familiar but she can’t place his name. The clipping wasn’t on
the landing when she got home; she would have noticed it when
she went into the bathroom. Did the wind blow it out from
Edward’s room? She drops to her knees. It’s a Victorian house
and there are gaps under a lot of the doors. She presses her
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cheek against a cold wooden board, screws up her right eye,
and peers under Edward’s bedroom door. She can’t make out
much, mostly the floorboards of his room, but there is something else. More pieces of paper. The bang she heard must have been
Edward’s window. By opening hers she caused a draught and
the wind scattered his collection of newspaper clippings all over the floor. Shit. She gets to her feet and tries the handle to his door. Locked.
She crouches down and slides the photo she found under the
door, but the man’s smiling face doesn’t make it all the way
back into Edward’s room. She isn’t sure why she can’t bring herself to push him all the way inside; maybe it’s the little voice in her head telling her that it’s not normal to cut out photos of people from newspapers, or maybe she’s curious to find out
what Ed will do when he realises it’s missing. Either way, she plucks it back up, carries it to her room, tucks it under her
pillow and lies down on her bed. She glances at the door and
the mess of parcel tape covering the missing lock and makes a
mental note to ask Ed when he’s going to replace it, then promptly falls asleep.
The sound of creaking wood infiltrates Ursula’s dream. She’s on a beach, looking for Nathan, and the noise makes her turn
towards the sea. She looks for a rowing boat, oars dipping and turning, gently bobbing on the waves. But there’s nothing there.
Just miles of sea that fades into a dull grey sky.
‘Nathan!’ she calls. ‘Nathan, where are you?’ But her shout
is drowned out by the creak, creak, creak of the wood. She turns towards the dunes, looking for whoever, or whatever, is making the noise. But there’s no one in the dunes either, just long blades of grass that curve and bend in the wind.
That way, it seems to whisper as it points in the direction of her house. He went that way.
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‘He’s not there,’ she tells
the grass but as she waits for its answer the blades fade and swirl, drifting and twisting and then vanishing completely. Her eyes flicker open and she blinks, still trapped in the arms of the dream. There’s a length of dark
material a metre or so from her head. She stares at it, wondering why there’s a curtain on the beach, then jolts at the sound of a creaking floorboard.
There’s someone in her room; a dark shape, a man, standing
next to her chest of drawers, going through her stuff. Ed. He’s so absorbed in what he’s doing that he hasn’t noticed that she’s awake. Her lips part, but terror has stolen her voice and all
she can do is watch as he moves silently from the chest of
drawers to the pile of clothes draped over the chair in the
corner of the room. She forgot to prop it up against the door
before she fell asleep. Edward keeps his back to her as he picks up her sweatshirt and wriggles a hand into the pocket. He
discards it, then picks up her jogging bottoms and does the
same. Her heart pounds, urging her to run. But Ursula can’t
move. She’s barely breathing. So instead of running she pretends to be asleep.
I’ll scream, she tells herself as she closes her eyes and sweat prickles on her temples. I’ll fight. If he so much as touches me I will fight back. She mentally scans her room, searching it for weapons to use in self-defence. There’s an umbrella propped up against the chest of drawers, the tip hard and pointed. But even as she wills herself to open her eyes, get off the bed and grab the umbrella, she can’t move. She feels like a shop mannequin
tipped onto its side: rigid, cold and immobile.
A floorboard creaks, then there’s silence. She hears Edward
breathing, a short, sharp snort of irritation. Then there’s a soft click and the room falls silent again. She waits, her damp T-shirt clinging to her back, the muscles in her arms and legs aching.
What if Edward closed the door to trick her into thinking he’d 100
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gone? What if, right now, he’s standing beside her and when she opens her eyes his face is millimetres from hers?
I have to open my eyes, she tells herself. I WILL open my
eyes. In three . . . two . . . one . . .
Her eyelids fly open and she throws her hands up by her face
but there’s no one to protect herself from, no slight figure with dusty blonde hair and intense eyes standing beside her bed. She flips over and looks towards the door. Closed. He’s definitely gone . . . unless . . .
An image flashes into her mind, of a woman in an episode
of Luther, swinging her legs over the side of her bed only to have her ankles grabbed by a man hiding beneath it. Ursula lies very still, holding her breath, listening for sounds of life in the room. Logically she knows it’s unlikely that Edward slid under her bed without making a sound. But what if he did? What if
the click she heard wasn’t the bedroom door closing but the
blade of a Stanley knife being extended?
She stares up at the ceiling, listening, skin prickling and her heart thumping against her ribs, forcing her to take a breath.
Did Edward just hear that – the gasp of air entering her lungs?
Is he smiling up at the springs, his hand gripping the knife?
Ursula, stop it! she tells herself.
Girding herself, she sits up sharply. She imagines Edward,
beneath her, sucking in his breath as the springs sag towards
him.
He’s not under there, she tells herself but a louder voice tells her to run. You can get to the door faster than he can wriggle out from under the bed.
He’s not under there. The click you heard was the door.
I don’t . . .
CHECK UNDER THE BED!
As adrenaline surges through her, she grips the edge of the bed and peers underneath. Her imagination fills the dark space beneath 101
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and she sees Edward’s face, leering out at her, the glint of a blade in his hand. Then he vanishes. Other than a few dust balls and a scrunched tissue, there’s nothing, and no one, there. She collapses back against the pillows and runs her hands over her face. She feels sick. Her heart’s still pounding so much she can feel it in her throat. She knew it was a risk, moving in with a stranger and taking a room with no lock on the door, but she’d convinced
herself she was safe. She hit six foot three the year she turned sixteen and for half her life she’s towered over almost every man she’s met. She’s never clutched her keys between her fingers when walking home from a pub alone late at night. She’s never had a man press up against her in a crowded train or crossed the street when a man was walking behind her. Charlotte was aghast when
they discussed it once and Ursula had looked at her blankly and said, ‘Why would I do that?’ She hadn’t been brought up to be
afraid of men. Her six foot six father had drummed it into her from an early age that she should be proud of her height, not an apologist for it; that she should walk with her shoulders back and her head held high. She’s lost count of the number of men
who’ve jumped when they turn from a bar, pints in their hands, to see her standing behind them, waiting to be served. She’s been ridiculed and laughed at, pointed at and mocked.
Regret courses through her as she reruns what just happened.
Why did she pretend to be asleep? Why didn’t she just sit up in bed and scream at him to get out? She was passive, a victim,
letting him invade her room, allowing him to be the one in control.
She hears her dad’s voice in her head, bellowing over her thoughts.
‘No one has the right to make you feel inferior, Ursula. No one should make you apologise for the space you take up or the
person you are. You are many things, my dear, but you are not
weak and you are certainly not an apologist. Stop slouching, stop crying and push your shoulders back and raise your chin. You
are Ursula Andrews; be proud of who you are.’
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A sudden spike of rage slices through her. This isn’t about
her and how she should have acted or reacted. It’s about him.
How dare he go into her room while she was sleeping and sift through her personal belongings? How dare he make her feel so afraid!
She reaches under her pillow and pulls out the newspaper
clipping she rescued from the landing earlier, then crosses the room to the window and pulls back the curtain. It’s 6.02 a.m.
and the sky outside is marbled with orange and pink.
‘Who are you?’ she whispers to the black-and-white image.
The man in the photograph says nothing. He stares up at her,
all big grin and mischievous eyes. Whoever he was, or is, he’s important to Ed. Ursula looks back at her heavily taped bedroom door. The sensible thing to do now would be to pack up her
stuff and move out. If Charlotte were in the same situation she’d rather forgo the £500 rent and deposit she’ll never get back and spend the rest of her life living in the back of the van than spend another night under Edward’s roof. But Ursula is not Charlotte.
Whatever it is that her landlord’s up to, she’s going to find out.
She is Ursula Andrews and no one gets to make her feel small.
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Chapter 17
Gareth
Wednesday
As Gareth marches up the broad driveway that leads to an
impres
sive detached Georgian-style house, he presses a hand to his stomach, not because he’s nervous but because he hasn’t had breakfast yet. He lifts the heavy brass knocker on William
Mackesy’s door. He tried ringing the man several times last night after he found the note on the flowers, but there was no reply and there’s no way Gareth can do a full day at work without
answers. He’d been a fool to think his dad might still be alive, that he was wandering through the Meads looking for his son,
when all along it was obvious who was behind the postcard.
Bloody William Mackesy. Not content with extorting money
from the desperate and the grieving, now he was branching out
and sending postcards from the dead. It was an idiotic thing to do. No one with healthy neurons would ever believe a dead
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relative had magicked words onto a card then floated it into a postbox, and even his own mother, with her protein-coated cells and her withered synapses, thought the card was from a living
person. Was Mackesy trying to befuddle her to work his way
into her will somehow? His visits certainly seemed to have
increased in frequency recently, if Sally’s reports were anything to go by.
Bang
Gareth brings the knocker down hard.
Bang
Bang
He steels himself, pushing back his shoulders and drawing
himself up to his full five foot seven. Dogs – at least two or three – respond by barking frantically. The sound has a strange echoey quality. Gareth has never been to William Mackesy’s
house before but it didn’t take much to persuade the church
secretary to hand over his address. After all, hadn’t Joan made such a generous donation?
‘Hello?’ The door opens to reveal a man not much taller than
Gareth with thinning grey hair, wire-framed glasses and a face that wouldn’t be out of place on an ageing game show host.
‘Oh.’ He looks Gareth up and down, struggling to place him.
‘I’m Joan Filer’s son,’ Gareth says. ‘We met briefly at one of your . . . events . . . about a year ago.’
‘Joan’s son. Oh, of course!’ Mackesy holds out his right hand.