No One Gets Out Alive (42 page)

Glancing into the rear seat, she surveyed the results of her successful shopping trip that had concluded one hour before sunset. She’d spent a day moving between Totnes and Torquay and had
set off back to the house at seven p.m. because of her aversion to driving at night. In the rear of the vehicle bags of fresh fruit and organic vegetables, bought at a farmers’ market, were
neatly packed inside fabric bags-for-life; she kept the bags in the car to remove the possibility of ever having her shopping packed in plastic. Two ornamental stone owls destined for the patio of
the rear garden continued in their ability to amuse her, as did the bedding plants, grow bags and stone pots she had bought impulsively, when suddenly overcome by the idea that she should make the
house more her own.

Magazines and a good haul of books from Waterstones, plus a dozen DVDs and two HBO box sets of series she had missed while at sea, would account for a few weeks’ worth of relaxing
evenings. Anything else she’d forgotten to buy at the start of the week rolled about inside the shoulder bag that had fallen into the footwell of the passenger seat.

The gate finished its shuddering arc and was now open. Amber released the handbrake. Out of another ingrained instinct, she took a glance into the rear view mirror.

The lane behind her was clear of traffic, but who was that standing at the side of the road, at the corner before the hedgerow curved out of sight?

Amber flinched and removed her foot from the clutch pedal. Was thrown forward in her seat. The car was still in gear. The engine stalled. A light flashed and something beeped in alarm on the
dashboard, the sound adding an impetus to the shriek inside her mind. Her hand scrabbled for the ignition key to restart the car quickly.

The Lexus rumbled alive. She turned her head and peered through the rear windshield.

The lane behind her vehicle was empty.

‘No you don’t.’

She hit the switch for the electric windows on her arm rest. The windows rose with a whir. She reversed onto the road to face the direction in which she’d seen the figure in the lane, then
squeezed the key fob to close the gate.

One hand on the steering wheel, the other thrusting the gear stick up to third, Amber revved the engine and drove up the lane to the curve in the road.

There were no inlets to the fields opposite her property; the hedgerow was too thick to climb through and there was no footpath, just a narrow drainage ditch, a thin grassy verge, and then
tarmac. When she’d first seen the lanes around her home she was reminded of bobsleigh chutes. If someone was standing in the lane, just before it bent out of view, they should still be on the
road and visible the moment she rounded the bend.

Would the man, because it had been a man, a very tall man, even have had the time to move out of sight while she turned the engine over and reversed? Maybe, but he would have had to move fast to
remove himself from sight. Even on such long legs it would have been a stretch. Perhaps he had dropped down into the ditch to hide himself. Maybe a man could lie flat and be invisible from the
road. But on closer inspection, in a surveillance sharpened by anxiety and fear, she could see that the grassy drainage trench was not deep; not even a rabbit would escape her view into the
depression.

Amber slowed down and put the Lexus into second gear to take the bend. She held her breath as her car nosed around the curve in the road.

She was presented with a view of a long empty incline that rose to the top of the hill she had so recently descended. There was no one in the road.

But she had seen the figure of a man. A man standing on the grass verge looking directly at her vehicle. He had been watching her, there was no doubt in her mind; such a figure was not something
she could have merely imagined.

Or was it?

Amber continued to the first section of road wide enough to turn her car around. The manoeuvre became a ten point turn, her judgement and control of the vehicle spoiled by her state of mind. She
stalled the Lexus again before she managed to move the car back in the direction of her home.

During her slow return journey to the farmhouse, she scrutinized the hedgerow on either side of the road again, looked for a break in the foliage through which a gangly figure might have slipped
into the surrounding fields, where it might then crouch down and grin, pleased with itself, after having intentionally shown itself to her.

Because
he
has found you.

The dream. A sign.

Such was her desire to get back onto the front drive, and to shut herself inside the walls of her property, that Amber shot the Lexus through the open gates as soon as the metal bars clanked and
wobbled three parts open, nearly scraping one glossy black door on a gatepost. From here on, the motion sensors would trip the alarms if anyone clambered over the walls or the front gate.

Amber parked close to the front door of the farmhouse. Abandoned her shopping and scrambled out of the Lexus to get to the porch. Eyes flitting in her sockets to take in the front garden, trees,
and the top of the walls, she let herself into the house. Then closed the front door.

In the hall, which she had never been so pleased to see, she realized that in her panic she had left her handbag in the car. Which meant the pepper spray was back inside the Lexus. She
remembered the spares in her bedside cabinet, close to a bed she had, until recently, slept so peacefully inside.

Mobile phone clutched in one hand, the fingers of her other pawing at the panic button set inside the silver locket that she kept around her neck on a chain, Amber ran for the stairs. And nearly
fell at the top.

The sight of a mouse with a long black tail would not have surprised her as much as the sight of the dust on the top step: grey, furred, and no bigger than a golf ball, trailing tendrils of what
appeared to be black hair.

He’s inside.

Amber depressed the panic button. Then stood still as the alarms began to scream in the hallways, both upstairs and downstairs.

Fumbling down one wall, her balance shot by fear, she moved towards her bedroom and realized that in the din of the alarms she’d be unable to hear the sounds of an intruder.

Get to the bedroom. Get it out. Get it out. Get it out.

It took a reckless, unthinking impulse to get across the threshold of her bedroom; she worried
he
might be standing behind the door, or lying on the floor at the side of her bed. She
would have to get mirrors positioned in every room of the house, like road safety mirrors, so she could make sure that each room in the house was empty before she entered.

There was no one inside her room.

Nonetheless, she could not get to the bedside cabinet fast enough to unlock her armoury. On the ring that contained the keys for the house and car, her frantic fingers located the key for the
locked safety deposit box.

She unlocked the box, flipped the lid. Then tore the black Beretta out of its grey spongy moulding; an illegal handgun she had acquired online, after working out what to ask for on a website
forum.

Safety catch off, the gun gripped in one hand, she scooped up the can of pepper spray from the drawer and tucked it into the back pocket of her jeans, then ran to the door to lock herself inside
the bedroom. The shriek of the alarms muted.

Her phone was vibrating; she hadn’t heard the ringtone because of the alarms. She answered the call. It was the security firm.

‘Sorry, I am not the home owner,’ she said to the operator who’d barely had time to recount his minimalist spiel. But what she had said was enough: the code for a rapid
response.

‘Can you give me your location at the property?’

‘Master bedroom.’

‘Please lock yourself inside.’

‘Have done.’

‘Is the intruder inside or outside the premises?’

‘Not sure.’

‘Is the intruder still on the premises.’

‘Don’t know.’

‘A team will be with you shortly. Please stay on the line.’

It was dark by the time the two men from Pretorian Security finished their search and drove away.

From inside the kitchen, Amber had watched their torches in the fields beyond the rear wall of the garden, the lights jogging up and down as the two men were forced to run behind their dogs
while searching for any sign of an intrusion.

The security men, or ‘operatives’, had eventually returned to the house to report that there had been no intrusion; none of the alarms had been tripped on the perimeter, which meant
no one had climbed over the gates, or the walls that circled the grounds.

The two men were convinced, and convincing, when they told her that a swift manoeuvre through the side of a hedgerow that impenetrably thick, ‘to keep even panicking livestock off the
road’, was ‘highly unlikely’. Though they did concede that whoever she had seen may have been able to vault the hedgerow from the road, and that ‘the foliage had been
sufficiently elastic to resume its previous shape’.

The operatives were very professional and took her claim seriously. She was a good judge of what people thought of her, and she was sure that both of the men recognized a very frightened girl
when they met one. The alarms and motion sensors were tested and deemed in perfect working order, and two patrols would now inspect the outside of her property that night. There was nothing more
they could do.

But
he
had been outside, and there had been an intrusion inside the property.

This.

Amber had arranged the second offending ball of dust on a piece of newspaper on the kitchen counter. One she could accept as an anomaly; two signified an unnatural occurrence.

She stared at the second dust ball accusingly, and then at its neighbour which she had not long fished out of the kitchen bin. Using a laminated chopstick from the Chinese culinary set, a
housewarming present from her agent, she poked the balls of dust. Thick and grey, the dust had collected around and encrusted upon what appeared to be several long black hairs that formed a
circular scaffolding inside the dross.

After the builders and designers had left the farmhouse, the entire building had been professionally cleaned. Since her arrival she had not found a speck of dust on any surface. Dust was
something she never overlooked on her travels. She guessed this was the kind of dust that gathered in old buildings, poorly insulated buildings with gaps between the skirting boards and floors,
dust that wafted across rooms beset by the infinitesimal debris of ages.

Her underflooring and floor had been newly laid; she had admired the workmanship on her arrival. There were no gaps around the sides of any of the rooms to allow dust like this to puff up and
into her shining new world, and in a mere seven days too.

Perhaps the dust had come up and around the steps of the stairs. The wood of the stairs was newly varnished, though the steps were still original to the farmhouse.

Amber’s mobile phone vibrated and she started, then swept up the handset to see who was calling; few people had the number.

Josh.

The sudden rush of relief at the very sight of his name on her phone screen made Amber dizzy. ‘Thank God.’

‘I was driving when you called,’ he said. ‘Motorway. Pulled over soon as I could.’

Amber heard him, but his explanation didn’t register. She didn’t recognize her own voice when she said, ‘He’s here. I saw him. Outside. In the road—’

‘Slow down. He? Fergal?’

‘I saw him less than an hour ago.’

‘Are you sure? Did you get a good look at him?’

‘Yes. No. But how many men are that tall? It was him.’

‘What was he wearing? I’ll get a description to the police right away.’

Amber tried to recall what she had actually seen, and for what must have been no more than a second before her car stalled. ‘Don’t know. Because the sun was setting behind him. I
only saw a silhouette.’ But it was the outline of a man she wouldn’t forget in a hurry.

She rubbed the outside of her arms; they goosed at the remembered suggestion of the figure’s height, and the direction the long bony head had been turned in.

‘How could he possibly know you are there?’ Josh was trying his best to maintain a sympathetic tone of voice, but she knew that he didn’t believe her. He’d always
maintained mostly unshared reservations about her testimony, about her sanity. She couldn’t blame him. They all did; everyone she had employed. Everyone thought the same things about her:
that exhaustion and depression and anxiety had taken such a toll on her that she had begun hallucinating inside 82 Edgehill Road from the first day of her residency. That she was hyper manic, as
one doctor had suggested, and that she had become acutely paranoid because of what
they
had done to her and threatened to do to her. Trauma did that. Shock did that. Sustained terror and
an unrelenting fear of your own death did that. The prolonged anticipation of torture and rape did that. Loss of control and imprisonment did that.

Her instability had hampered the inquest from the start; that’s what she had been told politely and impolitely on numerous occasions. But she was paying Josh and he had to take her
seriously. Josh had always acknowledged that her fear was genuine – that was never his grievance – but he could not believe what she said about the
other things.

Amber’s eyes burned with tears. Her distress remained silent until she sniffed.

‘I’m on my way. Give me three hours. I’m in Worcester.’

Amber cleared her throat, heeled both eye sockets with a hand. ‘The dust, and him . . . I had a dream. A new one. Inside here. They were in here. They got inside, Josh. They were in my
room . . .’ Her voice failed.

‘OK, OK, I’m setting off now. I’m going to assume you have your “little friend”?’ Josh’s voice was strained with disapproval at her possession of the
weapon while she employed him. He had not asked her the question to verify that she was ready to defend herself; he was afraid that she might use the handgun on herself, or on one of the neighbours
who might foolishly walk their dog across the top of her drive.