I listened to the people, the conversations going on, snatches of voices. I could smell the fish and chip shop. My face still, my eyes opening and closing slowly. Waiting. Even this, even this feeling, trying to fake it now but actually it was easy to do: the loneliness, people all around me but even so I might as well not exist. Sitting here on a wet wooden bench in the rain wearing my cardigan, the rain soaking my hair and my clothes, and nobody looked at me, nobody stopped. Feet walking past. School kids laughing and pushing each other around. I didn’t look at them. I didn’t look up. It was this—inertia—this waiting, waiting for something to happen, for something to act upon me so that I didn’t need to act myself.
I remembered then how it felt, waiting for him.
After a while I almost forgot to look up. It was such a strange feeling. Quiet, cold, waiting.
I saw a pair of feet walking directly toward me and I almost thought to myself, at last, someone is going to ask me if I’m all right, and I nearly raised my head. Then I remembered what I was doing, and why, and I kept still, my eyes looking down at my knees.
He stood directly in front of me. I found myself looking at a pair of brown brogues, obviously coated in some kind of water-repellent suede protector spray, because there were small bubbles of water on them that hadn’t soaked in. Dark blue jeans, with a crease down the shin where they’d been ironed.
“Annabel?”
I recognized the voice and for a moment I was afraid, a shuddering fear that was oddly accompanied by the same jolt of relief I’d felt when I’d thought he was an angel. His voice was so calm, quiet—so soothing.
“Annabel?” he said again, and this time I looked up, slowly, raising my head and blinking as though I wasn’t sure of anything, where I was, what I was doing.
He was looking at me with concern. And then he looked left and right, as though he was worried someone might be playing some kind of cruel trick on him. He looked at the bench and brushed the raindrops off it with his hand, shooting the water off and onto my feet, down my legs. Then he sat down next to me.
I lowered my head again. What was I supposed to say? This was difficult. I could get this wrong, so wrong.
“You’re—you are . . . Ed?”
“That’s right,” he said, his tone even. “You remember.” He was leaning toward me, and as I thought about what to say next he touched me on the arm, a light touch.
“How are you, Annabel?” he asked.
I shook my head in reply, slowly, and then faster so that my wet hair swung in rats’ tails around my cheeks. I made a face. Was it working? I had no idea. At the same time as trying to create these feelings—whatever they were that had attracted him to me in the first place: desolation, grief, confusion, despair—I realized they were still inside me, somewhere.
“You said I could go,” I said then. “You said it would all go away and I’d be all right.”
“Yes,” he said. “I’m sorry.”
“It didn’t work,” I said. “I’m still here. I’m still in hell.”
He paused then and took his arm away and I had the terrible feeling that I’d said the wrong thing without knowing it, that I’d somehow given myself away. The phone, small as it was, felt like a brick against my skin, sticky and warm. My blouse was damp and clinging to me, and I pulled the wet cardigan around me just in case he could see the outline of the phone.
“Help me,” I said.
“You can help yourself, Annabel,” he said.
“How?” I said. “Tell me what to do. Please tell me.”
“You can go home.” he said, “And shut the door . . .”
I was shaking my head before he’d finished. “No, they’ll find me again. They put me in the hospital. They watch me all the time. I just want to be alone. There’s nowhere I can be alone.”
I looked up at him then, even though it would have been better to keep my head down. I wanted to check his face, to see if he looked suspicious. The rain was running down my face like tears and I didn’t brush it away. He didn’t look suspicious. He looked sad, sorrowful, but his eyes were bright.
I thought he was going to say, “I can’t help you.” I could picture him saying it and standing again and going back to his Fiesta and driving away. And if he had done that, I would have found Sam and we would have probably gone back to his house and dried off and everything would have been fine. We would have lost nothing—other than the chance to find Audrey.
But he smiled, and stood up, and held out a hand to help me to my feet. I’d gotten stiff sitting there in the rain and the awkwardness in standing up was completely genuine.
“You can come with me,” he said.
I didn’t smile back. I just kept my head down, out of the rain, and followed his feet back to the parking lot, my steps measured, docile, compliant. He had a bag with him, a reusable canvas bag, swinging against his legs, full of groceries. My stomach grumbled and I wished I’d thought to eat something before launching myself into this crazy plan.
He stopped next to the Fiesta and opened the passenger door for me.
I think I hesitated, just for a moment. What was I doing? What was I getting myself into?
“Get in, then,” he said.
I got in and sat down. Colin shut the door and a few moments later opened up the trunk, putting the grocery bags inside and slamming it shut again. The windshield had started to mist up almost right away, but I could see Sam across the parking lot, walking toward his car, hunched into his jacket. I hadn’t been afraid until then, not really, but something in me made me want to launch myself at the door and open it and run toward Sam.
And then the driver’s door opened and he got inside. I didn’t look at him. I looked at my hands in my lap.
“You put your seat belt on,” he said.
It had been habit. I hadn’t even thought about it. His tone—curious. Suspicious?
“Yes,” I said simply, and went back to sitting with my hands in my lap, head low.
This seemed to satisfy him and he reversed out of the parking space and drove through the exit, then turned left onto the main road. We were heading up the hill toward his home. Surely he wasn’t going to take me there? I wanted to look behind to check whether Sam was following but I didn’t move. I was sitting as still as I could but now, for the first time, I felt the panic rising inside me like a swell of salty water, and I had to concentrate to keep my breathing steady. I could hear my heart above the noise of the car, the blood rushing through my ears. And I was picturing the DCI asking what the hell I thought I was doing, jeopardizing a case that I’d been specifically told I was not involved in.
This was not a good idea. It was insane. A wave of terror hit me. And it was far too late to back out of it now.
We drove straight past Colin’s road and onward, through the leafy suburbs, past the business park and the city dump, and then right down a lane that took us out of town completely and past fields. The windshield wipers squealed back and forth like fingernails down a blackboard.
“Where are we going?” I said quietly, unable to keep silent any longer.
“I have a house where you will be safe,” he said. “You can make your own choice, your own decision. Whatever you want to do.”
His voice was jerky, odd, a staccato rattle, and I realized that he was jumpy, too, whether because of nerves or excitement I couldn’t tell. I didn’t want to look up at him. Not just because I was afraid, but also because it didn’t feel like the right thing to do. I kept my head down.
“We can talk things through, again, like we did before.”
“I just want to go to sleep,” I said.
“Good,” he said. “That’s good. You can sleep soon. We’re nearly there.”
We took a left turn down another lane. If there was a sign, I missed it. As we turned, I glanced out of the window at the thick bushes in case there was a road sign. There wasn’t. I tried to think which way we’d come out of town, which villages we should have passed, but I’d never been t
hat way before. Think, Annabel, I told myself. Focus. Concentrate. You’re here to do a job.
If we’d come out of Briarstone toward the east, we should have hit Baysbury. But we hadn’t been through a village—just fields and trees—so we must have skirted it somehow. We’d been driving for about five minutes, so that meant—how far had we come? Thinking about it was making my head hurt. About four miles, maybe five?
I looked up, through the windshield, determined to try to get my bearings even if it did make him wonder. Did he really think I was still under his influence, hypnotized or whatever it was he’d done to me? He wasn’t trying to hypnotize me again, anyway, was he? Unless he was saving that for when he could give me his full attention. He wanted to talk things through. That was his plan; he was going to do it again, whatever he’d done. The thought of it made me afraid, and just for a moment I thought I’d made a big mistake. I wasn’t this brave person. This wasn’t me.
Sam wasn’t following us. I didn’t know this for sure; I just felt it, as though there were a cold wind behind me, an emptiness. There was something about the narrow lane, the bushes high on either side, blocking out what little daylight remained under the leaky clouds, closing in on us. If he’d been following us, Colin would have noticed. He would have said something.
We reached a T-junction and Colin turned left again. The road opened out and for the first time since we’d left the town other cars passed us in the opposite direction: a brown moving van, a pickup truck from a local builder’s merchant. I could see houses up ahead and wondered if this was Baysbury, but before we got there I heard the tick-tick of the indicators and we turned right onto another narrow country lane. This time I saw the sign, on its back, half-buried in the undergrowth as though someone had taken the bend too quickly and knocked it over: Grayswood Lane.
I felt a shot of triumph, just a brief one. I’d been right. And the log I’d sent to Frosty would tell them where to look.
The car slowed and turned in to a driveway. I heard the tires on the gravel and then we stopped. I looked up, at last. It was a big house, old, with a limestone portico. I sat where I was until he opened the door and then when I got out I could take it in properly. The front yard, which must once have been beautiful, was overgrown. The gravel driveway, spotted with weeds, swept in an elegant turning circle around a stone fountain that was dry, the bowl of it colored with a dried green slime that might once have been algae, the outside of it pitted with lichen. The grass lawn that edged the driveway was overgrown, and beyond it the yew hedge that hid the house from the road, and that must once have been trimmed to neat angles, was bushy and losing its shape.
“Come on,” he said impatiently.
“Is this your house?” I asked, following him up the steps to the front door.
He paused, fishing out a single key from his pocket. “Yes.”
The door opened and the smell hit me at once. Food gone rotten, rooms that hadn’t seen fresh air for a long time, damp material, mold, must. But above it, overpowering, a smell I recognized from Shelley’s house. Someone in here had died.
I put my hand over my nose and mouth. Perhaps I should have been unconcerned, but I couldn’t help it. I felt my stomach, empty, heaving.
“Sorry. The smell—I forget,” he said. “Come on. It’s not so bad upstairs.”
The hallway was dark, quiet, the deep red carpet that ran up the wooden staircase dull with a film of dust. Beside the front door was a pile of newspapers, takeout menus, and unopened post. I glanced at it, tried to see if I could see a name, but he was waiting for me at the bottom of the stairs.
“Annabel, come with me.”
I followed, watching his back as he climbed the stairs. The fear, which had abated a little with the triumph of realizing that my analysis had been spot-on, was coming back.
Last time we’d met, I’d been in a very bad place. Lack of sleep, grief, shock, the horror at losing my mother so suddenly—and he’d appeared. Whatever it was he’d said to me, whatever he’d done, I didn’t remember it at all. I remembered his appearance, an ordinary-looking man, not old, not unattractive, his head shaved to hide the receding hairline, green eyes, unsmiling but not threatening in any way. His clothes had been unremarkable. I could have passed him any number of times on the street and not looked at him twice. But, in that crazy few minutes when my heart was shattered and my head spinning, I looked at him and listened to what he said and I had genuinely believed he was an angel, and that he was there to take care of me.
And what he was doing now amounted to the same thing, didn’t it? He hadn’t hurt me, and, even though I was jumpy and afraid and felt as if I’d taken a stupid risk, I didn’t think he was going to hurt me now. He’d just done exactly what I’d asked him to do—taken me somewhere where I could be alone. Was that not what he’d done to all the others? Helped them achieve what they could not do alone? Answered their prayers?
At the top of the stairs a hallway stretched down to an arched stained-glass window at the end; behind it the branches of a tree created dancing patterns, rattling against the glass, scratching against it like clawing fingers. All the doors on either side of the hallway were closed. I followed him down toward the window, to the last door on the left, which he opened.
It must have been a guest bedroom once. The double bed was covered with a pink satin bedspread, but the box spring underneath it was bare. The carpet was peach with swirling patterns, gray with dust. The curtains, heavy, frilled, were closed against the grayness outside, leaving the room gloomy. Built-in wardrobes lined one wall, the doors closed. A dressing table was set into the wardrobe with a stool tucked underneath, the seat a dark green velvet, a gold-colored satin twist fringe coming away from one corner and hanging forlornly underneath. The walls were painted a pastel pink, two faded landscape prints hanging from the walls in pink plastic frames either side of the bed. A single bedside table held a lamp with a shade tipped to a drunken angle, an old-fashioned alarm clock with two bells and a hammer, no tick.
I didn’t know if I was getting used to the smell or if it was just fainter up here, but the odor coming from the room was not unpleasant, merely musty, the smell of a room with no fresh air—a faint sweetish floral scent to it. On the dressing table I noticed a porcelain bowl filled with a brown pile of dried flowers and a single pinecone, all of which were coated in gray dust. Nothing said “guest bedroom” quite as loudly as a bowl of potpourri.
Colin stood to one side of the open door, watching me with interest. I could feel his eyes on me as I looked into the room.
“You can stay here,” he said.
“Yes,” I said. I walked into the room and stood still, waiting for whatever came next. I didn’t hear him shut the door or leave, so I sat down on the edge of the bed. He was filling the doorway, watching me, and the glance I had of him made me alarmed. In that one glimpse I could see how alive he looked, how animated—excited, even.
He paused for a moment, and then he said, “I will come back in a little while to check you’re all right. We can talk some more then, if you want.”
Then he closed the door, without waiting for me to reply. A second later, I heard the key turn in the lock. He was locking me in! Why? Surely he had no need to do that? But of course I kept quiet, and then I heard muffled footsteps receding as he went down the hallway.
I waited for ten beats, thinking that he might come back right away, might have forgotten something. The room was silent. I could hear nothing, not even the wind, or the rattling of the branches on the window in the hallway.
I reached inside my blouse for the cell phone. There was almost no signal here. Hadn’t Sam been going on about that? But of course it was rural; it was quite possible that I wouldn’t be able to connect to the network. I checked again that the phone was on silent; it wouldn’t be good to give myself away now. Then I sent a text to Sam.
Am in big house on Grayswood Lane. Am alone now.
He has locked me in a room. Did u follow? A
A few moments, then a message illuminated the screen.
Error—Unable to send text. Retrying.
I stood up and went to the cabinets, opened them one by one. They held piles of linens, towels, curtains, bed sheets, everything folded neatly. Clouds of dust rose from everything. I wanted something solid, something I could use to lever the door open, or even just to use as a weapon if I needed it. In the second wardrobe on the top shelf was a suitcase, a brown one with leather straps around it. I thought about getting it down but it might make a noise. Better to wait until I was sure he was gone.
The floorboards under the thick carpet creaked faintly as I crossed the room and for a moment I held my breath, hoping that wherever he was he hadn’t heard. Nothing. I went to the window and pulled the curtain to one side a fraction so I could see out. The room was at the rear of the house. I’d already worked that one out. I wasn’t going to be able to see if the Fiesta drove away, but if I could open a window I might be able to hear it.
The window was a sash one, heavy-looking, and the catch hadn’t been opened in years. I could see a yard, a long slope of overgrown grass leading down to a tall brick wall with a gate in an arch at the middle of it. The trees bordering the yard were immense, and moving soundlessly in the wind.
From somewhere in the house, I heard a bang. I stood still, in case he was coming back, but there was just empty silence. Had that been the front door? Had he left?
I went to the door, trying the handle gently. The door stayed firmly shut. I bent down and looked through the keyhole, which showed me a tiny patch of flock wallpaper on the opposite side of the hallway. He had taken the key with him.
I went back to the bed and took out the phone again. The message was still showing as pending. I tried to dial Sam’s number but all I got was a disconnection bleep. I took the phone over to the window to see if there was any signal there, but it was no better. Would they still be able to trace the phone, if there was no signal? I tried various places in the room, with no result. After that I went to the door and pulled at the handle again, turning it and tugging at the door. It gave a little, just a little, but the lock held firm.