The ripping sound the tape made as she pulled another length from the roll seemed to reverberate through the room. She fumbled with the scissors. Finally she had a length of Sellotape in her hands. The huge size of the Victorian window meant just one half of the lower sash would be plenty big enough for her to get through. She pressed the tape to the lower right-hand pane, diagonally, and then another piece the other way, like she’d seen in old wartime films. The pane of glass, streaming with rain, was cold to the touch. She stuck more tape across it horizontally and vertically.
That would have to do.
There was a tweedy throw across the sofa.
She balled her hand up in it and, turning her face away, punched at the window.
The old glass, thankfully, was thin. It shattered, but the tape held most of the shards in place. Lulu punched again with the throw wrapped round her hand. The pieces of glass fell out to the gravel below and rain came flying in at her.
She pushed the remaining jagged shards out of the frame and spread the throw over the bottom edge of it. Then she clambered out into the wet and ran across the sodden lawn to the path that led to the garage, her feet splashing through big puddles.
She still had the spare set of car keys in her bag.
By the time she got to the garage, she was soaked through, water running from her scalp into her eyes. She got the key from the safe and let herself in, unlocked the car and got inside, pushing her hands through her hair and then rubbing them on the upholstery of the passenger seat to dry them.
She started the engine.
Inching slowly out of the garage and along to the fork in the drive, wipers going madly in an attempt to clear the windscreen, it occurred to her that she was safe – that it didn’t matter, now, if he heard the car. Something defiant in her made her gun the engine, roar down the drive and onto the road.
She would go straight to the police. Was there a police station in Langholm?
She was halfway there, splashing through flooded areas of the road, having to keep her speed down because visibility was so bad, when it occurred to her.
What proof did she have that Nick had done anything wrong? The police weren’t going to arrest him because his wife thought he might have put sleeping tablets in her hot chocolate. She had no proof of that. The zolpidem would probably be out of her system by the time they could get round to testing her, if they even bothered.
And she didn’t have the burner phone. She could tell them that Nick’s phone had no calls in the crucial period, when he’d said he was calling clients, and they could check the phone records and confirm that, but Nick would explain that away. She had no proof of anything.
So not the police. Not yet.
London.
She could get her passport and then fly home to Leonora and decide what to do when she was safely away from him. She supposed that Yvonne’s suggestion, that he could have disposed of the family’s bodies using the digger, was possible. But it would still have been very risky, if he’d done it in broad daylight. Michael or Yvonne could have appeared at any moment. Unless he killed them either the night before they supposedly disappeared or very early that morning and disposed of the bodies under cover of darkness? It had been November, so the nights would have been long. Carol had said she hadn’t seen Duncan or Maggie or Isla on the morning of their disappearance. She’d picked Nick up from the end of the drive, as usual.
Yes.
For someone as clever as Nick, it would have been possible.
Maybe she and Michael and Andy, together, could persuade the police to take radar machinery to those fields, like archaeologists used, that told you what was under the ground. If the bodies were found, the police would have to launch a murder investigation. They’d have to seriously consider the possibility that Nick had killed not only Duncan, Maggie and Isla but Yvonne too. Nick’s sleight of hand with the phones would be exposed, maybe, if people who were experts in that kind of thing got onto it. Maybe they could determine that a phone active at Craibstone Wood that afternoon had also been active at Sunnyside, even if Nick had now disposed of it.
What was Nick thinking, now? He had probably realised that she’d gone. Would he try to come after her, to London? To intercept her? Or was part of him, maybe a tiny little part, glad that she’d got away?
Her hands were shaking so much she was having difficulty steering, veering wildly round a sharp corner, almost over onto the other side of the road.
She slowed the car.
No.
All that angst Nick had shown, all that emotion when Lulu had been taking him through the events of that night, the night his family had disappeared . . . he’d been play-acting. The whole Nick persona was an act, designed specifically to appeal to Lulu.