Kiera Hudson & The Creeping Men (8 page)

Gasping for breath, I called out her name as I ran.

“Kayla! Kayla!”

If she could hear me, she didn’t answer. Perhaps like me, Kayla had run as fast and as hard as she could to get away from danger. With each stride I took, I willed my legs to run faster like they once had – moving so fast that I became little more than a blur as I soared high up into the air. But by the time I reached the wall, my legs were aching and I had a stitch in my side.

Looking back, I could see Sir Edmund skulking through the trees toward me, and as he came, he shouted at the top of his voice what sounded like “leash, leash, leash!” Without looking back again, I scrambled up the wall and over it. Falling into the bushes on the other side, I cried out as they snagged at my hair and cut long scratches down the side of my face. Scrambling to my feet, I fought my way back through the undergrowth to my car. I yanked open the door and climbed inside. My car spurted and sputtered as I forced the stick into gear and headed back down the track toward the road. Glancing back in the wing mirrors, I searched for any sign of Kayla, hoping that she too had managed to escape over the wall.

I reached the road. Again I looked left and right, but could see no sign of my friend. Should I go? Stay? Search for her? I leant forward, resting my head against the steering wheel. Was it even Kayla, I finally dared ask myself. Had I not conjured her up? But why and how? Because I missed her, that was why. But she had been there. Kayla had been within touching distance from me. She’d called out to me.

She had said my name. Wasn’t she meant to have forgotten me? As far as Kayla knew, I had never existed. That was the agreement I’d made with Noah. That’s what he had told me and the only reason I had agreed to
push
them back without me. My friends were meant to have forgotten me. I didn’t want them feeling any sense of loss. I didn’t want them to remember how I had tricked them onto that train without me. My fear was that they may never understand my reasons for doing such a thing and they might grow to hate me for it. So it had been better if they had never known me – as if I had never existed to them, just like I hadn’t existed to the Potter in this world until I met him on the front steps of
The Creeping Men
offices yesterday evening. But if that truly had been Kayla I’d seen, then she hadn’t forgotten me. She had said my name.

For an hour or more, I drove the quiet back roads that circled the grounds of Bastille Hall. Every moment I spent scanning the hedgerows, fields, and thickets for any sign of Kayla, but there was none. Feeling bewildered and lost, and not because each road I took looked practically the same, I looked down at the clock fixed into the dashboard. The face was cracked, but it had always kept good time. It was almost 9 a.m. and I was some miles from town and the offices of
The Creeping Men
, where I was meant be starting my full day of work for Potter. Giving up my search for Kayla – if that’s who I’d really seen – I made my way down into the Ragged Cove.

Potter was sitting at his desk with his feet up as always, a smoke dangling from the corner of his lips. As I cut my way through the blue haze of cigarette smoke, he glanced up at the clock on the wall, then back at me.

“What kinda time do you call this?” he said.

“I’m sorry I’m late,” I said, glancing up at the clock myself and seeing that it had gone half past nine already.

I went to the other desk across from Potter’s – the desk where a pipe lay on its side. I looked at it. Potter got up, came across the room, and closed his fist around the pipe. I watched him place it into his pocket and out of sight.

“Smoke a pipe too?” I asked.

“I thought you’d make more an effort,” he said, ignoring my question and looking me up and down.

“What do you mean?” I asked him.

“Most people on their first day turn up to work on time and not looking like they’ve been pulled through a hedge backwards,” he grunted, returning back to his seat and swinging his feet back up onto the desk again. He flicked ash from the end of his cigarette onto the floor. “This isn’t some Mickey Mouse outfit,” Potter continued. “I’m a professional and expect all my staff to be the same.”

“Staff?” I cocked an eyebrow back at him, taking a seat at the desk where the pipe had lain. “There’s only me and you working here.”

“There have been others,” he said.

“Where are they now?” I pushed him, wanting to know if those others had been my friends.

“Sent them back to the agency,” he said.

“Why?”

“Because they turned up late for work and dressed like shit,” Potter said, dropping his cigarette to the floor where he ground it beneath his boot. “So take that as a warning, sweet-chee – sorry – I meant to say
Ky
-era.”

Part of me wanted to ask him why he had to be such a jerk the whole time, but what was the point? I knew why. And besides, he was already mad because I was late.

“So what happened?” he said, looking at the scratches to my face and the dirt on my clothes.

“I fell over,” I half lied.

“Fell over? You look like you’ve been run over,” he said. “Make sure you’re on time tomorrow and don’t turn up looking like you’ve been hit by a bus. I like my secretaries to look… to have…”

“What?” I glared at him. Had my Potter really been as arrogant as this?

“Some finesse,” he said. “It’s nice to have something to look at – a bit of eye candy. It goes down wonders with the punters – the male ones at least.”

With mouth falling open, I shot to my feet. “Eye candy?” I seethed. “Is that all I’m good for?”

“I don’t know, I haven’t tested your tea and coffee making skills yet,” he said, plucking up a newspaper from his desk and looking at it. “Be a good girl and go fix me a coffee.”

“Oh, my god,” I breathed. “No wonder your fiancée thinks you’re a complete and utter dick-head. No wonder she threw the ring back at you.”

“She’ll be back,” he said, squinting down at the headline splashed in bold across the front of the newspaper. “She never stays with her mother more than a week.”

“Well, I won’t be coming back,” I said, marching toward the office door. “You can stick your job…”

No sooner had I closed my fist around the office door handle, Potter’s hand was closing over mine. He must have moved across the office at lightning speed to have reached me before I’d had the chance to step outside.

“Get off me,” I said, trying to pull my hand free of his. He let it go, but he was now standing between me, the door, and the outside world. “Get out of my way.”

“Got a better offer?” he said, his dark eyes reading mine. “Got some other place to go?”

“I’m sure the agency will find me another position,” I said, wanting to leave but a part of me hoping that he would convince me to stay.

“The agency has already found you a position,” he said, so close now that I could feel his breath against my face. I looked away, the urge to suddenly kiss him overwhelming. This was becoming something close to torture. “And that position is here with me.”

“Well, I want to leave,” I said, trying to sound as adamant as possible.

“You don’t get to decide when you leave,” he said, his shadow falling over me as if swallowing me up. “You’ll go back to the agency at the end of the week, as agreed.”

I turned to face him. “Why do you want me to stay if I look such a state – if I turn up late…?”

“Because we’re in a middle of an investigation here,” he said.

“Investigation? Ms. Locke?” I scoffed. “I thought you said she was…”

“I know what I said,” Potter sighed, stepping away from the door. He looked at me as if testing me – seeing if I would march out now that he was no longer barring my exit. Or would I stay? That’s what he was thinking. I knew it. And he knew that, too.

Not knowing whether I would later regret it or not, I turned my back on the door and looked at him. I could see a faint smile playing at the corners of his lips.

“So you think differently now about Ms. Locke?” I asked, watching him sit on the edge of his desk. He propped a cigarette in the corner of his mouth and lit it.

“While you were doing whatever you were doing this morning, I was busy contacting some of those schools in Switzerland,” he said, much to my surprise.

“And?” I asked, now stepping away from the door completely.

“I found out that Amanda Lovecraft was meant to have started at some private school three weeks ago, but she never showed up. The school contacted the father, Sir Edmund, who sadly informed them that his daughter had been killed in a tragic car accident back home in good old England. Now what do you think of that?”

“Interesting,” I said, dropping down into the chair behind the desk again.

“Interesting?” Potter groaned. “I thought you’d be off your tits with excitement.”

“And what makes you think that?” I quizzed him.

“I could see that sparkle in your eyes last night while Locke was talking.” Potter grinned knowingly at me. “You were creating all kinds of conspiracy theories in that pretty head of yours. I don’t blame you. Unlike you, I was a cop once…”

“You were a police officer?” I asked.

“Yeah, but that was a while ago now…” he started.

“What happened?” I wanted to know. This was more than a similarity between my Potter and the one who now stood before me. Could they be the same? I still couldn’t be sure. Was this my Potter who had forgotten me as planned? Was it Kayla I had seen in the wood? Had she remembered?

“I got into a bit of a fix. We don’t have time to talk about it now, but if you don’t run out on me before the end of the week, you might be around long enough for me to tell you all about it,” he said.

I sat and stared at him.

“What?” he asked, squinting through the blue trail of smoke that spiralled up from the tip of the cigarette still dangling from the corner of his mouth.

“You want me to stay because you know that you were wrong about the Locke case and now you need me to help you figure it out,” I said. Now it was my turn to look smug.

“Don’t flatter yourself, hot-lips,” he said, tossing me the newspaper he had been reading. “Have a read of that while I go and make a cuppa.”

“Are you sure you know how to?” I said, snatching the paper out of the air.

“You’ll learn that I’m full of surprises,” he said, sauntering from the main office and into the corridor that led to the old cells.

Alone in the office, I read the headline splashed across the front of the newspaper.
BRUTAL MURDER OF TEENAGE GIRL IN LOCAL WOODS
, it read. Sitting up in my chair and gripping the edges of the newspaper, I read the report. It described how an Emily Cartdew, sixteen-years-old, had been seen wandering into the local wood. It was not the one on Sir Edmund’s land, but it wasn’t too far away. Just a few miles down the road on the edges of the Ragged Cove. Her friends reported that Emily had broken away from the group and headed into the wood. When they called after her, she looked back and said that she had seen her younger brother at the treeline. Emily called to her friends, telling them her brother had called out to her by name, beckoning her deeper into the woods. Before her friends could react, Emily had stepped into the woods and disappeared from view. At first they thought it was a joke being played on them by Emily, but when she failed to reappear after some twenty minutes, her friends ventured into the wood in search of her, and it was then they made the grisly discovery – Emily Cartdew’s mutilated body. When witnesses were asked why they had thought Emily had been playing a practical joke on them, one of her friends replied, “Emily’s brother died over two years ago. She couldn’t have possibly seen him in the woods. It couldn’t have been her brother who had beckoned her…”

“So what do you make of that?” Potter said, placing a steaming mug of tea down onto the desk before me.

“Huh?” I said, folding the newspaper in half and glancing up at him. Thoughts of Kayla beckoning me forward and deeper into the wood swam before my mind. “Do you think the murder is connected to the disappearance of Amanda Lovecraft?”

“No,” he said with a shrug, going back to his desk, coffee mug in hand.

“Then why show me?” I asked him.

“Because that’s the sort of stuff I want to be investigating, not the old-bollocks the likes of Heather Locke come by with,” he muttered. “I need something that’s going to challenge me mentally. You know, a tough case to crack – not a missing person’s enquiry.”

“But I thought you said that the Locke case…” I started.

“Yeah, so I think it’s odd that the girl never showed up at the private school and the dad came up with some bullshit excuse,” Potter started to explain, “but perhaps the old git isn’t as rich as he pretends to be. That’s why he came up with the bullshit excuse that the girl had croaked it.”

“It’s a bit extreme to tell the school the girl died, isn’t it?!” I asked.

“Is it?” he said. “That school ain’t ever gonna chase him for any admin fees or to pay for the cost of the place that would have been filled by another kid. Those schools aren’t cheap. I bet he realised he couldn’t afford it after all, so he packed his daughter off to some other cheaper school – anywhere other than in the care of Locke. And that’s probably the real reason he’s given the old biddy the shove. He can’t afford her wages anymore.”