Chapter 11
Chapter Eleven
The house is too quiet without them.
Alex took Olivia to his parents’ place in Leicester this morning – a weekend visit they’ve done every few months since she was born.
His mum likes to see her, his dad likes to comment on how much she’s grown, and Olivia likes the attention and the fact that Grandma lets her eat biscuits for breakfast. Normally I’d go, too, but this time I said I had a deadline.
A cover that needs finishing by Monday. Alex didn’t argue.
He packed the car, kissed me on the cheek in the hallway, told me to get some rest, and drove off with Olivia waving from the back seat.
That was nine hours ago. I’ve done nothing since.
The cover is open on my laptop. I’ve moved the same text box four times. I’ve stared at the colour palette until my eyes ached, then stared some more. I’ve made three cups of tea and drunk one. I’ve checked my phone so many times the screen has a smudge from my thumb that won’t wipe clean.
No new messages. The conversation with the blank profile sits where it’s been sitting for days – my reply in blue, his silence underneath, the two ticks confirming he read it. No dots. No response. Just the patient quiet of someone who hasn’t finished yet.
By six o’clock the walls are closing in.
The house feels wrong without Olivia’s noise and Alex’s presence, too still, too clean, too much like a set from a property programme where nobody actually lives.
I’ve turned on every light downstairs, and the television is running in the background, some Saturday evening cooking show I’m not watching.
The fridge hums, the boiler clicks, and none of it fills the silence the way it should.
I need to get out.
Not far. Not for long. Just out of these four walls and into somewhere with other people and background noise and the ordinary comfort of being in public.
I want a drink – not alcohol, not tonight, just something warm in a glass in a room where I’m not alone – and I want to sit and breathe and feel like a normal woman doing a normal thing on a Saturday evening.
I put on my coat, pick up my keys, and drive to the high street.
The café Olivia and I went to for hot chocolate is closed, so I park round the corner and walk to the pub at the end of the row – The Crown, a place I’ve been to a handful of times with Alex for Sunday lunch, nothing special, just wooden tables and brass taps and a fireplace that’s always lit in winter.
It’s busy enough to feel safe and quiet enough to feel calm.
I order a lime and soda at the bar and carry it to a table near the window.
For twenty minutes, it works. I sip my drink and watch people come and go – couples, groups, a man reading a newspaper at the bar, two women laughing over a bottle of wine at the table behind me – and I relax, just enough for me to take a full breath without my ribs aching.
The fire crackles. The jukebox plays something old and vaguely familiar. The ice clinks in my glass.
I don’t check my phone. Not once. I leave it in my bag and I sit and I breathe and I let the pub do what pubs are supposed to do, which is make you feel like part of the world instead of hiding from it.
By half seven, the drink is finished and the pub is getting louder. A group of lads has arrived at the bar, all pints and noise, and the jukebox has been turned up. I don’t want to be here when it tips from cosy into rowdy, so I pick up my bag, zip my coat, and walk out into the cold.
The high street is quiet. Most of the shops are shut, and the pavements are empty except for a couple walking their dog on the far side and a teenager on a bike who pedals past without looking up.
The street lights are on, throwing orange circles on to the wet tarmac, and the sky is dark and starless.
My car is parked on a side street, two minutes from the pub.
I know the route – left past the chemist, right at the estate agent, down the narrow lane between the old post office and the church hall.
I’ve walked it a dozen times. It’s nothing.
Three hundred metres of pavement and street lights and parked cars and terraced houses with lit windows.
I turn left past the chemist.
The lane narrows after the estate agent, the buildings pressing in on both sides, and the street lights thin out to one every forty metres or so, leaving patches of shadow between them that I wouldn’t normally notice but notice now because my nerves are already shredded and because the lane is empty, the pub noise has faded behind me, and the only sound is my boots on the pavement.
And another sound. Behind me.
Footsteps.
I don’t turn around. Not immediately. I keep moving at the same pace, my bag against my hip, my keys in my pocket, and I listen. The footsteps are steady. A man’s stride – longer than mine, heavier, the hard knock of a shoe sole on tarmac – keeping a consistent distance, maybe twenty metres back.
Someone heading home. That’s all. Someone who left the pub after me and happens to be going in the same direction. In a minute he’ll turn off down a side street or cross the road or stop at a front door, and I’ll feel stupid for letting my heart rate spike.
I reach the next street light, and the lane opens up slightly. The church hall is on my left, its windows dark, and the old post office is on my right, boarded up since last year, and my car is parked fifty metres ahead, tucked beside the kerb behind a white van.
The footsteps are still there.
I walk faster. Not running, not yet, just lengthening my stride, closing the gap between me and the car. My keys are in my pocket. I wrap my fingers around them, press the fob, and feel the little click of the button under my thumb, ready to unlock the doors the moment I’m close enough.
Behind me, the footsteps quicken.
My mouth goes dry.
I tell myself it’s nothing. Coincidence.
A stranger in a hurry, adjusting his pace because the cold is biting, and he wants to get home.
There’s no reason to think it’s anything more than that.
No reason to think the person behind me is doing anything other than walking down a public lane on a Saturday evening.
But my body doesn’t believe me. My body has been running on adrenaline and dread for over a week, and it has decided that the man behind me is a threat and is preparing to run.
I risk a glance over my shoulder.
A silhouette. Thirty metres back, maybe less, moving through the shadow between two street lights. Tall, lean, hands at his sides, face hidden by the darkness. He’s striding fast, faster than he was a minute ago, and the gap between us is shrinking.
I turn back and go faster. My heels are loud on the pavement, my breath is coming in short, sharp bursts, and the blood swooshes in my ears. The keys are digging into my palm where I’m gripping them too tight.
Twenty metres to the car.
The footsteps behind me break into a jog.
I run.
I don’t decide to. My legs just go, propelled by something older and deeper than thought, and I’m sprinting down the lane in my boots and my coat with my bag bouncing on my hip and the car getting closer, the Volvo’s dark shape growing larger with every step, and I press the fob and the indicators flash once, twice, and I grab the door handle and yank it open and throw myself into the driver’s seat.
I slam the door.
My fingers find the central locking button. I press it, and there’s the clunk of every door sealing shut, and I sit there with my chest heaving and my vision blurred with panic.
A face appears at the window.
Ross.
He’s standing right outside the driver’s door, close enough that I can see the rise and fall of his chest, the damp at his temples, the way his breath fogs the glass.
He’s wearing a dark coat, the collar turned up.
His face is pale under the street light, and his eyes are fixed on mine through the window with an expression I can’t read – urgent, desperate, something that in different circumstances might pass for concern but right now looks like nothing except threat.
He tries the handle.
The door is locked. The handle lifts and catches and drops back, and the sound of it – that small, mechanical click – goes through me like a slap.
He tries it again.
‘Kim.’ It’s muffled by the glass, but I can hear every syllable. ‘Kim, please. I just need to talk to you.’
I shake my head. My hands are on the steering wheel, but they’re shaking so badly I can’t grip it. I fumble the key into the ignition and turn it. The engine starts, the dashboard lights up, and the radio comes on, something bright and terrible that I stab off with my fist.
‘Kim, stop. Just give me five minutes—’
I drive away from the kerb. The tyres squeal on the wet road, the car lurches forward, and Ross appears in the wing mirror, standing in the road with his arms at his sides, shrinking as I accelerate. Then I turn the corner and he’s gone.
I drive.
I don’t know where I’m going for the first thirty seconds.
I just drive – left, right, left again, through the residential streets around the high street, past houses with lit windows and parked cars and wheelie bins on the kerb.
My hands are locked on the wheel, my jaw is clenched, and I’m trembling as if I’ve been pulled out of cold water.
He followed me. He was there. He was in Keynsham, behind me in the dark, and if I hadn’t locked the car door—
I pull over. A cul-de-sac off the main road, quiet, empty, a street where people are indoors watching television and putting their children to bed. I stop the car and turn off the engine. Then I sit in the silence, press my hands against my face, and try to breathe.
My whole body is trembling. Not just my hands – my arms, my legs, my shoulders, my jaw. A full-body tremor that I can’t control, as if my nervous system has been ripped out and replaced with something made of wire and static.
He was there. Right there. His hand on the door handle. His face at the glass.
I take out my phone. My first instinct is Alex, but Alex is in Leicester with Olivia and his parents, and if I call him now, voice breaking, barely coherent, he’ll ask what happened, and I’ll have to tell him everything – the dinner, the walk, the kiss, the messages, the blackmail, the man who just chased me down a dark lane and tried to get into my car – and it will all come out at once, messy, terrible, and impossible to take back.
I can’t. Not like this. Not over the phone while he’s standing in his mother’s kitchen with Olivia in the next room.
I lock the phone and drop it in my lap and lean my head on the seat.
How did he know where I was? How did he know I’d be at that pub, on that street, at that time? Did he follow me from the house? Has he been watching all day, waiting for Alex and Olivia to leave, waiting for me to be alone?
The thought revolts me. I check the mirrors. The cul-de-sac is empty. No figures, no movement, no dark coat, no face pressed to the glass.
I’m alone.
I start the engine, drive home, and park the car. The house is dark. I unlock the front door, step inside, and close it behind me. Once it’s locked with the chain on, I stand in the hallway with my back against the wood and my eyes closed.
The television is still on in the living room, the cooking show long finished, replaced by something I don’t recognise. The kitchen light is on. The kettle is cold. Everything is exactly where I left it two hours ago, undisturbed, untouched, safe.
But safe doesn’t mean what it used to.
I check the back door. Locked. I check the windows – kitchen, living room, dining room, utility room. All locked. I go upstairs and check the bedroom window, the bathroom window, Olivia’s room. Everything shut. Everything sealed.
I come back downstairs and sit on the bottom step with my coat still on and my bag still over my shoulder and stare at the front door. And I think about Ross Mercer standing outside my car with his hand on the handle and his mouth forming my name through the glass.
He knows where I live. He knows when I’m alone. He followed me through the dark, ran when I ran, and the only thing that stopped him was a locked car door.
I grab my phone and look at the blank-profile conversation one more time. My message. His silence. No reply, no dots, no new threat.
He didn’t need to type a response.
He came in person.