My mind turns to Brenda, the detective I’m meeting in the morning. And then I need to try to pay a visit to Olivia. I want to get her unawares, but who knows if she’ll talk to me? After the accident Olivia had been in hospital for months recovering from numerous operations on her leg to try to save it from amputation and had to have metal pins put into it. She’s never given any interviews.
I turn over, pressing my face into the pillow. I need to sleep. I’m just drifting off when I hear a high-pitched scream. It’s so loud and piercing that it rips right through my consciousness and I bolt upright in bed, my heart hammering, sweat breaking out all over my body.
What the fuck was that?
Another chilling scream, then silence, although I can hear the blood pounding in my ears. I climb out of bed and go to the window, pulling aside the curtains. Someone is standing just beyond my car, their hood pulled up so that it’s impossible to see the face clearly. I think it’s the same person I saw earlier with the dog. Should I call the police? I turn and grab my phone from the nightstand, but when I look back nobody is there.
4
Olivia
Olivia turns over in bed, blinking in the darkness, wondering what woke her. The room is cold, her mother rarely turns on the heating, and the single-paned window rattles in the wind. She can hear the far-off whinny and stamping of hoofs, which isn’t unusual in a storm. She reaches across to snuggle up to Wesley and finds his side of the bed empty. He must be in the loo as it’s still warm. She presses her face against the pillow and tries to go back to sleep. But she’s awake now and she knows she’ll continue to be so until Wesley returns. When the minutes tick by and he still hasn’t come back she realizes she’s going to have to find out where he’s gone.
Slowly she puts her feet to the floor, wincing as the pain travels up the ankle of her left leg and into the knee. She limps to the door. The corridor is dark and empty – she always found it spooky as a child with its shady corners and creaky floorboards. Her mother’s bedroom is at the other end of the landing, and between their rooms are two others, one a bathroom, the other unused, a place for junk. The bathroom door is ajar, and from where she stands she can see that Wesley isn’t there. Has he gone downstairs? Maybe he couldn’t sleep but, even so, he wouldn’t just wander around the house on his own: it’s not his home. He’s respectful like that, is Wesley. And as a result her mother loves him. Probably – she sometimes wonders – more than she does.
She eyes the stairs with a sense of dread. For nine months after the accident she’d slept in the dining room. But now, after years of physios and operations, she can live a normal life, most of the time. Physically at least, with the help of painkillers. But stairs, particularly at the end of a long day, can still play havoc with her knee. She’s got used to living with the chronic pain. The accident had damaged her muscles and nerves, but the emotional pain was harder to deal with.
Survivor’s guilt, her therapist had told her. She’d only managed five sessions before he’d started probing too deeply and she’d had to leave.
She peers down into the darkness. It doesn’t sound like Wesley is there. He must have gone home. Why? Why would he just abandon her in the middle of the night, to go back to his depressing one-bedroom flat above Madame Tovey’s, without even waking her up to say goodbye? He’s never done that before. She recalls their conversation. They’d talked in bed in low whispers for nearly an hour so as not to wake her mum. Did she say something to offend him? Is he now in one of his moods? She knows from experience they can last for a week. He didn’t seem angry or annoyed and she’d fallen asleep with his arms wrapped around her.
She turns and heads back to her room, slumping onto the edge of her bed. Wesley is such a force of nature, so in control. They’d only been together a little over a month at the time of the accident, and afterwards she’d handed herself over to him gratefully, amazed that this wonderful man still wanted to be with her. Wanted to look after her. She’d fancied him for years at school with his thick dark hair and intense blue eyes, his confident stance. She’d put him on a pedestal, really, but he hadn’t been interested in her then. It wasn’t until after they’d left school and all the business with Sally was finally over that he’d turned his attentions to her. Now, as he’s aged, she often thinks his confidence is more of the brash quality, the kind that, on occasion, makes her wince. But back then he was quirky, funny and popular at school, always hanging around in a large crowd, a lot of whom he’s still friends with. He was a year above her and never knew she existed. It was Sally who had first caught his eye. Sally with her big doe eyes, her clear skin and her long, swishy chocolate brown hair that never frizzed in the rain, like hers did. Sally … Olivia squeezes her eyes shut, trying to push the thought of her best friend from her mind. She can’t think of Sally now. Or teenage Wesley, or any of it. It’s too painful, even after all these years.
Instead she turns her thoughts to her earlier conversation with Wesley. His insistence that she doesn’t talk to this journalist, whoever she is. Not that he needs to convince her of that. What seems off, though, is why he seemed panicked at the idea that she would. He always said he wouldn’t be interviewed either out of respect for her, but the way he was acting tonight and his air of desperation have made her wonder if maybe she isn’t the only one with something to hide.
5
The Holiday of a Lifetime
Stace hated the heat. She hated the stickiness of it and the way it made her T-shirt and shorts cling to her body and her stomach turn over, like she’d eaten something bad. It hit her like a wall as soon as she got off the plane so that she felt she couldn’t take deep enough breaths. The others were excited, chattering away on the drive from the airport to the villa, faces slick with sweat, dark patches under the arms of Maggie’s yellow T-shirt, Trevor with a straw hat he wouldn’t be seen dead in in England but that now sat at a jaunty angle atop his curly head. Martin’s ultra-pale skinny legs protruded from khaki shorts. Legs she hadn’t seen since school. She couldn’t bring herself to join in on the good-natured banter with the driver of their minivan. She already knew she should never have agreed to it. John-Paul had persuaded her.
‘But we can’t afford it,’ she’d said, hoping that would be the end to it when he first broached the subject. They were flat broke, that was the truth of the matter. Holidays to exotic far-flung places were for other people, not them. And that was fine. She was happy with their little life, their weekly outing to the local pub, their takeaways in front of the TV and their tiny rented flat above the launderette with the damp patch shaped like a butterfly on the ceiling above their bed.
But John-Paul wasn’t like her. John-Paul was different. She’d known that the first time she’d met him eighteen months ago. He had been an out-of-towner – a stranger, an outsider – but that was what had attracted her to him. There was something of the exotic about him with his Spanish mother and his Catholic upbringing and his lust for travel. He had strayed into her life by accident, really, just ‘blowing through town like tumbleweed’， he’d said when she’d first met him. And she’d liked that, the poetic-ness of it. He was that kind of person, always talking in similes and analogies in his soulful voice with a hint of a Spanish accent. A wanderer, he’d said, but then they’d fallen in love and she’d convinced him to stay, and over time he’d stopped talking poetically or about his writing ambitions, instead swapping his tie-dye T-shirts for a data-inputting clerical role, but she could see it in his eyes sometimes, the wildness of him, like a beautiful caged animal that was desperate for escape.