Chapter 29
It took me a long time to fall asleep that night.
Beside me, Rachel slept fitfully, snoring gently, fidgeting, her bump resting on the maternity pillow.
It was a warm night, too, and even lying on top of the covers I was sweating.
But it wasn’t really any of those things that kept me awake: it was the thought of those bodies, still lying out there somewhere, exposed to the wilds, waiting to be discovered.
That and the thought that there might be more of them now. If not yet, there would be soon. But then, maybe not. There was no guarantee the dump site would be added to, and no guarantee that it wouldn’t.
When I did sleep, I dreamed I was outside a house.
It was a two-storey building on a long, wide road that stretched far out ahead and behind.
The homes here were all the same: wooden and rickety, hand-made almost, each one sitting in its own fenced-off square of dirty scrubland.
Nothing grew out here. There was a slight breeze, and dust billowed across the tarmac around me, as though a car had dropped me off here and then sped off spinning its tyres.
Above me, in the sky, clouds sped past impossibly quickly.
The house was painted red, but the colour had faded.
I walked up to the front door and pushed; it swung silently open and I stepped into a small hallway.
To the right, there was a lounge, with threadbare settees and a wooden cabinet that seemed wrong, although I couldn’t work out why.
To the left, a dirty kitchen, with ridges of solidified fat on the counter curled around absent cups and plates.
In front of me, a dark staircase led up to the first floor.
I stood there for a moment, listening. Feeling. At first, the house seemed silent, but it wasn’t. There was something. Not a sound so much as a heartbeat. A slow thudding pressure, as though somewhere, behind a closed door, a drum was being sounded.
I started up the stairs, my skin itching.
On the landing, there was a corridor that ended in a bright, arched window that must have faced out over the rear of the property.
Leading up to it, there was a long strip of frayed red carpet, not wide enough to meet the mouldy skirting boards on either side.
In front of the window, motes of dust whirled impossibly quickly, like a cloud of midges, forming half-glimpsed fingerprint patterns in the air.
I started walking slowly along the corridor. As I did, the heartbeat grew louder.
There were three doors. The first was open onto a bathroom. Everything inside was blue and green and shimmering; it was like peering into an artificially-lit underwater cave. I turned away and kept walking.
The second door, on the other side of the hall from the other two, was closed. As I reached it, I realised the heartbeat sound was coming from the room behind.
I stood there for a long time, facing it.
Then I reached out and pushed it open.
Immediately, the heartbeat stopped. Light from the corridor fell into a small, dark room that was little more than a cell.
It was stripped down and empty – but only of fixtures and fittings.
Sitting in one corner, hugging her knees, was a woman in a bright white nightdress.
Her dark hair fell over her bare knees and thin shins.
She appeared to be sobbing, but making no sound at all, as though behind glass. When I breathed in, there was the faintest scent of honey in the air.
‘Hello?’ I said.
The motions of sobbing stopped. For a moment, she was very still.
‘Hello? Are you okay?’
She lifted her head very slowly, revealing her face.
‘Oh,’ I said.
She was a very beautiful young woman – or had been once. The skin of her face was bright white, framed with black hair. Her right eye was swollen shut so badly that it looked like her eyebrow had simply been underlined.
Emmeline Levchenko. A memory or a ghost, assuming there’s even a difference, finding its way into my nightmare. An image of her back when I could have – should have – saved her and failed.
And then a second later she came screaming at me.