Chapter 3
Four months earlier
The nightmare began as it always did – with the noises: the scraping of a chair across the floor; the banging.
The muffled shrieks: one, two, three. More banging, and then a loud crash.
Bella woke with a start and lay still until almost all of the sounds had subsided – all but the gentle thud, thud, thud against the floor in the kitchen beneath her.
Or was that her heart beating? She wasn’t sure.
At first she was too scared to get out of bed, but eventually she pushed back her duvet and swung her legs out, then made her way across the landing towards the stairs.
She was halfway down before she saw him.
‘Shh!’ he said, putting a finger to his lips. ‘Your mother’s sleeping. Go back to bed.’
And then she woke again, her heart pounding, her body stiff with fright.
She squeezed her eyes shut and breathed deeply, in and out, waiting for her heart rate to return to normal.
When she was as sure as she could be that she was no longer asleep, she took a chance and peeked out.
The curtains were open, the way she always left them, a slant of light from the street lamp sloping down her bedroom wall.
She was pretty sure this was real, although in the nightmare she was usually here, in her own flat in Kentish Town, not in the bedroom she’d had at her mum’s house in Streatham or the one at her dad’s, where she had lived after that, so it could be difficult to tell.
The nightmares had followed her from house to house.
Even now, they were as vivid as they had been the day they started, although she couldn’t actually remember when that was.
After her mother died, obviously. Sometimes, she would go into the kitchen and see everything she saw that day – and more.
Sometimes she would see her mother’s skull, the flesh partially rotted away, and she would wake up screaming.
More often, and especially lately, she never got as far as the kitchen or even the living room.
The man would appear at the foot of the stairs, shushing her and telling her to go back to bed.
She didn’t have any stairs in her flat, nor was there a kitchen beneath her, and now that she was fully awake, she was able to recognise this with relief, but she never seemed able to hack the nightmare to point this out.
She had read that it was possible to influence your dreams; in fact, she and her former therapist had worked on the assumption that her subconscious had added the man as some sort of barrier or saviour – someone who would stop her from ever reaching the kitchen and finding her mother the way she had.
But the man didn’t feel like a saviour; he scared her.
He had always scared her, and lately she had begun to wonder if this part of the nightmare could be real.
Her dad had dismissed this out of hand when she’d suggested it – it didn’t fit with the evidence, he said.
She had gone to bed straight after Jamie Clarke arrived and had slept through the night, not waking again until seven the next morning; that’s what she’d told the police at the time, and she couldn’t go changing it now.
Her boyfriend, Justin, agreed. ‘I’m not being funny, Bel, but if you came downstairs and saw him, surely he would have killed you too?’
This was a good question, of course. And Justin was right: it wasn’t funny.
It was a horrific thing to think about, and so she tried not to.
And it wasn’t as if she had the nightmares every night.
Sometimes she would go months without having one, and sometimes she would go weeks without thinking about Jamie Clarke at all.
But recently she’d been thinking about him a lot, which was understandable, of course, because she had just heard that they were letting him out of prison.
And she was the person who had put him there.