Chapter 32
Chapter Thirty-Two
The footsteps start again. They resume from the side of the cottage where they stopped before – and this time they’re treading faster.
The crunch of gravel gives way to the softer sound of someone stepping on to grass, which means they’ve veered off the path and around the corner towards the back of the cottage.
The back door.
The thought hits me, and I’m on my feet before I’ve finished thinking it.
The front door has both bolts and the main lock – I know that, I did it hours ago, it’s secure.
But the back door. The back door opens on to the yard from the kitchen, and it has a Yale latch and a key lock.
I turned the key when Jeff left, I’m almost sure I turned the key, but there’s no deadlock.
No top bolt, no bottom bolt. Just the lock and the latch and the old, swollen wood of a door that’s likely been warping in its frame since before I was born.
I cross the sitting room and stumble into the hallway.
My shin catches the corner of the telephone table, and pain shoots up my leg, but I don’t stop.
The kitchen is dark – I switched the light off after washing up – and as I come through the doorway I freeze, because the kitchen window is right there, black glass, uncurtained, and the overhead light is off, but the glow from the hallway is falling across the tiles and the table and the worktop, which means—
Anyone outside can see in.
I’ve been walking around in lamplight and firelight all evening with the sitting room curtains drawn, feeling safe, and the whole time the kitchen window has been bare.
No curtain, no blind, nothing. Just glass.
And if someone is standing in the yard right now, they can see straight into this room – the table, the worktop, the back door, me.
I drop to my knees.
It’s instinct. I go down behind the kitchen table and press my back to the leg of it and hold my breath. I’m crouching on the cold tiles in the dark, listening, and my heart is pounding.
The footsteps reach the back of the cottage.
I hear them on the paving slabs outside the kitchen door – a different sound from the gravel, harder, flatter, each step distinct.
They stop. Right outside. Close enough that if the door wasn’t there, I could reach out and touch whoever is standing on the other side of it.
I need to check the lock. I need to get across the kitchen and check the door, but the window is between me and it, and if I stand up I’ll be visible, and if whoever is out there sees me moving—
The handle rattles.
Not the careful, testing depression of the front door handle twenty minutes ago.
This is rougher, harder – a sharp downwards jerk, then a shove on the frame that makes the whole door shudder in its housing.
The Yale holds. The key lock holds. But the wood creaks, and I hear the gap between the door and the frame shift by a fraction, and the sound is so close and so violent that a noise comes out of me, a thin, high whimper that I clamp down on with both hands over my mouth.
I can’t stay here. I can’t crouch behind the table and wait for the door to give. I need to brace it. I need to get something against it – a chair, my own weight, anything.
I crawl. On my hands and knees, across the kitchen floor, keeping below the line of the window, feeling the cold tiles under my palms and the grit that’s collected in the grout.
The table, the chair legs, the bin, the gap between the worktop and the wall.
Three metres. Maybe four. It feels like crossing a field.
The handle jerks again. Another shove. The door jumps in its frame, and the gap at the hinge side widens – just a crack, just a thread of black air from outside. I throw myself the last metre, press my back flat to the door, and brace my legs on the floor.
The wood is cold through my jumper. It vibrates my spine, and on the other side – centimetres away, separated by nothing but swollen oak and a lock that was probably fitted in the seventies – someone is standing in the yard in the dark, trying to get in.
Ross.
The name fills my head before I can stop it.
Ross found me. Ross worked it out – followed Alex, tracked the booking, asked someone, bribed someone, I don’t know how, I don’t care how.
But he’s here, outside my door, and there’s nobody for miles.
My phone has no signal, and although the car keys are on the worktop, the car is in Jeff’s yard over the hill.
It’s pitch-black, and I can’t get there without going outside, and outside is where he is.
I press my back harder on the door. My legs are shaking so badly that my boots are stuttering on the tiles. I dig my heels in and push, and the door holds, I hold, and we stay like that – me and the door and whatever is on the other side – for ten seconds, twenty, thirty.
Then it stops.
The pressure eases. The handle goes still.
The footsteps back away from the door – two steps, three, four – and then nothing.
Silence. Wind and the drip of the gutter and the faraway bleat of a sheep.
I sit braced against the door with my hands flat on the tiles, my chest heaving, and I listen so hard my ears ring.
Has he gone? Has he moved to another window? Is he walking around to the front, trying the door again, circling the cottage the way a fox circles a henhouse, patient and methodical, testing every point of entry until one gives?
I don’t move. I don’t breathe. I sit with my back to the door and my attention fixed on the black rectangle of the kitchen window and I wait.
One minute. Two.
The silence stretches and fills the cottage like smoke. The only sound is the blood in my ears, the tick of the cooling Aga, and the drip, drip, drip of the gutter outside. Slowly – very slowly – I start to believe that whoever was out there has stopped. Given up. Walked away.
My breath comes out in a long, ragged rush. I let my head fall back on the door and close my eyes, my whole body trembling. It’s over. He tried the doors, and they held, and he’s gone.
Then I hear it. Not footsteps this time. Something different. A soft, scraping sound from the front of the cottage – paper being pushed through the letter box, the flap creaking and falling back. A pause. Then the footsteps again, crunching across the gravel towards the track.
A car door opens and slams. The engine starts – a hard, cold sound in the silence – and headlights sweep across the front of the cottage, two white beams that flash through the sitting room curtain and slide across the hallway wall and disappear.
The engine revs. Gravel sprays. The sound moves away up the track, growing fainter, and I sit braced on the back door with my hands flat on the tiles, and I listen to it go.
Fainter. Fainter. Gone.
I don’t get up for a long time. When I do, my legs are so weak I have to hold the worktop to keep upright. I stumble through the kitchen into the hallway, and there on the mat, just inside the front door, is a folded piece of paper.
I kneel and pick it up. It’s handwritten. Ross’s handwriting – I’d know it anywhere, the slight backwards slant, the way his letters crowd together when he’s writing fast. The note is short.
Kim. I’m sorry. I know I shouldn’t have come here, and I know how this looks. I need to talk to you. Please. Meet me at the school tomorrow night. Olivia will be with me.
I read it twice. Three times. And something happens inside me that isn’t just fear any more.
The fear has combined with rage. He’s brought my daughter into this.
He’s written it down, committed it to paper – Olivia will be with me.
What has he done? What has he said to her, promised her?
What does Olivia will be with me even mean?
I hold the note over the dying fire as if burning the paper will burn away the threat. The last corner catches, flares orange, and turns to ash. I drop it into the embers and stand there in the sitting room with the cold pressing in through the curtains and the taste of smoke in my mouth.
I have no idea what to do. Alex needs to be warned, needs to keep Olivia off school tomorrow, make sure she’s safe, and no one can get to her.
But it’s too dark to walk to Jeff’s, my phone’s got no signal, and the Wi-Fi is as useless as it’s been since I got here.
So I pace up and down the living room, trying and failing to figure out what the hell I should do.
Twenty minutes later, there is a brick on the rug.
The sitting room window is smashed – the bottom-left pane, a hole the size of a football, cracks radiating out from the impact like a web.
The curtain hangs at an angle, one ring popped, fabric caught on a shard of glass.
Fragments cover the rug, the sofa cushion, the floor around the hearth.
Cold air pours through the gap, and the fire, which I’d stoked back to life, gutters and fights the draught.
Wrapped around the brick, held in place with an elastic band, is a note. Block capitals this time. Black marker.
COME TO OUR OLD SCHOOL TOMORROW NIGHT. ALONE. NO POLICE.
YOUR CHILD’S LIFE DEPENDS ON IT.
I read it once, then again. The cold from the broken window is on my face, my hands, and my neck, and I can feel it all the way through to my spine.
Your child’s life depends on it.
Olivia.
He came back to ram the message home.
My hands shake so badly the paper rattles.
I put the brick down on the coffee table, hold the note in both hands, and stare at it.
My vision blurs, clears, and blurs again.
I read it one more time – your child’s life depends on it – and the words hit something deep inside me, somewhere below the fear and the shock, somewhere where the only thing that exists is my daughter’s face and my daughter’s voice and the fierce, animal certainty that I would walk into fire for her without thinking twice.
Our old school. He means the school in Keynsham. The school where Ross and I met, where we kissed in the library, where we climbed through the window after hours and sat in the dark and told each other things we’d never told anyone. Our school. He’s calling me back to where it started.
Tomorrow night. Alone. No police.
I fold the note, put it in my pocket, and stand in the middle of the ruined sitting room with glass under my boots and cold air on my face, and I know – with a certainty that sits in my chest like iron – that I’m going.
I don’t care what it costs. I don’t care what he wants, or what he’s planning, or what’s waiting for me in that building after dark.
He put my daughter’s name on that paper.
And that’s the last thing he should have done.