had to get away. No, she’s getting confused, that was earlier. She put her shoes on the passenger seat because the heels were too high to drive in safely. She drove away from the city and yet somehow she has found herself back here.
She keeps going, leaving the city centre behind, and reaching Maids Causeway as the church clocks chime two o’clock in the morning. She is nearly home. Her car is not parked outside her house, haphazardly or otherwise. She has to climb over the fence that surrounds her courtyard.
She has never left a spare key outside the house because she has never found a hiding place she trusts. She will have no choice but to break the smallest window and squeeze through into the basement. She finds a stone garden ornament and sees the large recycling bin has been moved to block sight of the basement window. She wheels it back to where it should be and then drops to all fours in front of the tiny window.
It is already broken. Someone is inside.
* * *
She follows the intruder in. She has no choice. She has reached a place where no one can help. Her feet crunch on broken glass. Stepping away from the shards she picks up the sharpest one that she can see. She doesn’t look at the under-stairs cupboard in the basement, because she never looks at the under-stairs cupboard in the basement, but if she did, she would see that the padlock is still in place.
Conscious of treading blood through the house, she climbs to the ground floor. The bolts are drawn shut on both front and back doors. Her intruder is still inside.
He’s here.
She ignores the voice. The voice isn’t real. It is the man she must find. The man who spotted her in Heffers and who somehow knows where she lives.
He’s known for weeks. He’s been coming here for weeks.
‘Stop it.’
The silence in the house seems to shift. She has been heard. The sense of another presence is so strong she can’t understand why he isn’t in the same room. One by one, she checks the kitchen cupboards that someone could hide in, and those that no fully grown human male could possibly squeeze into. Her cleaning materials are in the cereal and pasta cupboard but that hardly feels like the most urgent problem right now. She takes a second to wrap a towel around her right foot and then makes her way into the bathroom. She searches the bedroom, inside the wardrobe, behind the curtains, even the drawers beneath the divan bed.
She climbs the stairs, and her eyes go to the bolts that Joe fastened on the loft hatch. They are closed. He cannot be in the loft. The glass shard is cutting into her hand as she enters the spare bedroom and her palm is sticky with her own blood. She wipes it against her dress and looks down properly in the light. The stain on her bodice is blood, she is sure of it now.
There is no one crouched under her desk, or in the corner of the room between the filing cabinet and the bookshelf. There is no one beneath the spare bed. She checks her living room last but there are no hiding places in this room. Only when her heartbeat is starting to slow does she remember the under-stairs cupboard on the ground floor.
Well, this is a turn-up. How many times has he come looking for you under there?
‘Stop it. It wasn’t him. I made a mistake.’ As she says this she feels a surge of hope. The man she saw in Heffers wasn’t exactly like the man in the photographs. He looked older, for one thing, and not so handsome.
She’s fooling herself. It was Freddie.
Eight, nine, ten. Coming ready or not!
‘Shut up.’
She reaches the bottom of the stairs, wanting nothing more than to run out of the front door and never return. She jumps back as she opens the cupboard door, knowing he will spring at her. Nothing happens. Her duvet is curled around her pillow as she left it. Her house is empty.
* * *
She removes her dress and underwear and switches on the washing machine. The dress is torn as well as badly stained. She will never be able to wear it again. And yet, still, she feels this irresistible urge to wash it and to do so in the dark. She has turned out all the lights in her house.
She cleans the