The Nightmare Place (2 page)

Two

Someone is downstairs.

The thought woke me instantly. One moment I was immersed in that familiar, troubling dream of the waste ground: staring at an expanse of old tarmac, with a ghost standing there beneath an aquamarine sky filled with fast-moving clouds. The next, I was lying on my back in my bed. It was the middle of the night; the room was pitch black. But I was suddenly completely awake. Because …

Someone is downstairs.

For a moment I wasn’t sure if it was true, or whether the nightmare had woken me. So I lay very still, allowing my eyes to become accustomed to the darkness of the bedroom, and listening intently. There was no sound at all, but my subconscious was insisting that something was wrong. That my space had been invaded and I was in danger. And over the years, I’ve learned to trust gut instincts.

I was alone at home tonight, but wherever I sleep, I always take the side of the bed furthest from the door. It’s not that I’m actively
expecting
someone to break in and attack me, but it’s always possible, and I figure it’s better to have those extra seconds and never need them than the reverse. For similar reasons, I prefer to sit with my back to a wall, so I’ve got the whole room in view. As quietly as I could now, I slipped out of bed and crouched down on the bare floorboards by the wall.

The clock on the bedside table told me it was twenty-six minutes past three in the morning. On the far side of the room, the door was open a cat’s width, the way I’d left it, and the landing beyond was dark; I could just make out the banister at the top of the stairs. I listened again. For a few seconds, my ears were full of heavy, ringing silence.

And then it was broken.

A creak from the floorboards downstairs, immediately followed by a muffled thud of some kind. The kind of noises someone makes when they’re trying to be quiet but not trying very hard. Someone who doesn’t really care.

Inevitably, because of the main investigation at work, I wondered if it might be the man responsible – but then I dismissed the idea. Everything we knew about him suggested he was far quieter and more careful than whoever was downstairs was being – and anyway, he would have been upstairs by now. If it had been him, I probably wouldn’t have had a chance to wake up at all.

Burglars, then.

I crouched right down, peering under the bed, and was met by four green circles shining back at me, like marbles illuminated by some internal light. Hazel and Willow, my two cats. They usually sleep downstairs, but would have fled up here at the first sign of intruders – not idiots, either of them. They’re sisters, and I got them from a rescue centre. I guess they must have learned early on how awful human beings can be, because even now they remain timid with strangers; a knock at the door can send them scrabbling and scurrying to hide. Right now, I was glad about that, because you never know what people will do; one burglary I investigated years back, the bastards kicked the family’s golden retriever in the head – for no obvious reason – and the animal had to be put down.

Not wanting to scare the cats, I reached slowly under the bed to pick up the hammer I keep there. It has a reassuring weight and heft: a good solid weapon with a polished wooden handle and a heavy iron head.

It’s another habit of mine – you never really escape the environment you grow up in. Those early years smooth or coarsen all your edges, and unless you work at it, you’re stuck with those angles for life. So I have a mental blueprint of the weapons I keep around the house: the knife in the kitchen drawer closest to the front door; the screwdrivers downstairs on the bookcase and front window ledge; the strong ammonia solution in a spray bottle in the bathroom. The hammer here. There are others. If it came to it, I could defend myself all the way from the front door to this spot, always knowing where the next weapon was.

Taking the hammer with me, I walked around the bed, then opened the door as quietly as I could and moved out into the hallway, to the top of the stairs.

There’s a small area at the bottom. The back door is windowed with rectangles of blurred glass, and the street light out back was casting a sickly yellow light on to the grey carpet. Beside it, the door to the front room was shut tight. I always leave it open, for the cats. More to the point, a thin bright line was visible around it. I certainly don’t leave the downstairs lights on overnight.

More movement from the room below me. The noise was muffled but definitive, and it set the soles of my feet tingling. A moment later, I heard what sounded like quick, whispered conversation, and then a stifled laugh.

So there was more than one of them.

That hushed laugh again. They probably weren’t laughing at me, of course. But it felt like they were.

And that really annoyed me.

‘
Police officer!
’ I shouted.

My voice sounded strong, which was good. The adrenalin had been keeping the fear at bay, and with the choice now made, any final trace of nerves evaporated. Confrontation. No point being timid about it now.

‘I’m armed, and I’m coming downstairs. You’ve got about five seconds to get the fuck out of my house.’

The noise in the front room immediately ceased, but as I trotted loudly and heavily down the stairs, it started up again – much less cautious now. Below me, something shattered loudly. They were scrambling. I supposed I should have been glad they were running, but now that I’d committed to this, a part of me resented it, and as I reached the bottom of the stairs, I realised that I actually wanted one of them to try it on. Give me an excuse to wrap the hammer round his miserable little head.

Keeping my body to one side, I kicked open the door to the front room. It banged backwards against the radiator, and the curtains over the back window wafted out. The sudden light in here was harsh, and I allowed myself a couple of blinks before stepping into the room, holding the hammer close to the head, so that it could be used for short, sharp punches if someone was standing close by.

Nobody was, which was a good thing, because I was momentarily shocked by how
wrong
the room looked. Whoever was here had already taken a fair amount of stuff, most noticeably the TV – there was too much wall showing directly opposite me. Beside it, my bookcase of DVDs had been hurriedly ransacked, and a splay of plastic cases lay in front of it. The rest of the room was in a similar state of chaos, my myriad possessions pulled from drawers and scattered about, and there were streaks of liquid over everything –
wrong, wrong, wrong
– that didn’t make any immediate sense.

And then the burglars themselves.

A couple of them were a cluster of fluttering shadows out of sight in the kitchen, but the last one had only just got to the doorway. He was dressed in dirty blue jeans and a grey hoodie, white trainers, black gloves. No mask, though, the idiot.

‘Hey, what about the hedge?’ I called to him.

And he hesitated. It was a trick I’d learned as a teenager, when I’d been smaller than most of the children who thought they could bully me. When you say something totally incongruous, it short-circuits someone’s brain for a second, just long enough to distract them as you land that crucial first punch. The burglar was too far away for that, of course, but it was enough to stall him – to make him turn to look at me for a moment, so that I got a clear view of his face.

Click.

And then he was gone, pelting outside after his friends.

I went after them, but more half-heartedly now. However pissed off I was, I knew that, legal issues aside, I’d have trouble dealing with more than one of them in an open space. Besides, they were quick: the car engine was already revving as I reached the front door and stepped out into the cold night air. A door slammed, tyres screeched, and I saw lights flashing away down the street. By the time I’d got to the end of the path – more a token gesture now than anything else – the car was out of sight.

I stood in the middle of the road, patting the solid head of the hammer against the tendons of my palm. The silence was almost eerie now: just moths pattering against the nearby street light. It didn’t matter that they’d got away. I’d managed a good enough look at the last one out, and I’d recognised him. It was just a flicker of memory for the moment, but I knew him from somewhere.

Borrowed time, you little shit
.

I stared down the empty street for a few moments, trying to remember – and then realised how much I was shivering. Despite the almost insufferable heat of the past weeks, it was cold out at night, and adrenalin could only add so much cover to a T-shirt and pyjama bottoms.

I headed back inside. Time to inspect the damage.

And phone the police, of course.

‘Christ.’

Half past nine in the morning, and Detective Inspector Chris Sands – my partner – was standing beside me amidst the wreckage of my front room. He looked like he couldn’t quite believe his eyes. Chris is always like that, though. I like him, but he seems to approach every crime scene as some kind of psychic assault on his worldview, whereas for me, it’s more like confirmation: this is the way the world works. If Chris isn’t careful, by the time he’s forty he’s going to have a face like a perpetually disappointed puppy.

Around the corner, in the kitchen, the drilling started up again. The locksmith had arrived just after Chris and was getting straight to work, no messing about: replacing the locks and installing a set of sash jams. He had special instructions to keep the barrel of the old lock, in case SOCO could collect any fingerprints. There wouldn’t be any, of course, but still. Procedure.

Chris shook his head as he looked around. ‘A
messy
burglary.’

‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘It is that.’

The shattering noise I’d heard last night had been the television, dropped in a panic at the far end of the room as the intruders had scrambled out. I’d also lost handfuls of DVDs, scooped from the shelves like they’d been on some kind of fucking supermarket sweep, and my PlayStation and laptop were also missing.

But the financial damage was only part of it, and Chris was right: this hadn’t been a straightforward case of breaking and taking. The burglars had found a tube of sun cream on the table and proceeded to squirt the contents around the room with gleeful abandon. The stains and crusts from it were all over the settee and walls. As if that wasn’t enough, they’d also taken a bottle of olive oil from the kitchen and sloshed that everywhere. Finally, in a particularly disgusting touch, one of them had helped himself to a banana from my fruit bowl, chewed it up and spat it on the floor. The contempt they’d felt for me – a total stranger – was more than evident, and I’d spent a good portion of the night wanting to go back in time and chase the bastards a little harder.

‘Scumbags.’ Chris gestured around as though the damage was inexplicable, or caused by a tornado or something. ‘You can sort of understand it – the burglary, I mean. There’s a point to that. They’re junkies or whatever. They need the money. But why not just take the stuff and get out, you know? It never makes sense to me. Why do this?’

‘It makes sense to me. It’s all there in the word
scumbag
.’

‘I guess.’

He sounded doubtful, but I was right. These people wouldn’t have known who was upstairs – whether it was a single woman like me, or an entire family – and they wouldn’t have cared. It didn’t matter. In their deluded heads, they probably weren’t just helping themselves to other people’s things, but teaching them a lesson as well. Dare to own a home and have possessions? Stupid enough to work hard and build a life? Well, look what we think of you. Imagine us laughing as we take the fruits of your efforts, trash what we don’t want, and spit on what’s left.

I couldn’t stop thinking about the muffled laughter I’d heard. I wasn’t sure I’d ever been as angry as this in my whole life.

‘Prompt response?’ Chris said.

‘The uniforms? Oh, yes. Ten minutes, maybe. They stayed around for about half an hour, as well. One of them even went into the back garden with a torch. Which was useless, obviously, but nice of him.’

‘At least they’re taking it seriously.’

‘That’s true.’

Being police probably helped in that regard, but it wasn’t just down to that. There’s a common public misconception that burglaries aren’t high on our list of concerns. It’s simply not true; they’re taken very seriously indeed, especially when the homeowner is present. It’s just difficult to get a result from them. There are usually no prints, and anything stolen tends to get sold on quickly. The result is that a significant proportion of burglaries are solved by being ticked off the list when an offender gets caught for one and owns up to a handful of others, so that his cooperation can be taken into account during sentencing. Everyone’s basically a winner.

But that’s most burglaries – the ones where the offender just gets in and gets out again. This behaviour, though – the trashing – was closer to an engagement. There was a sense of escalation to it. A few incidents down the line, you could imagine that the individuals involved might take things further: venture upstairs; maybe even hurt people. So they needed catching before we ended up with something far more serious than theft on our hands.

Especially in the current climate.

‘You came downstairs, didn’t you?’ Chris said.

‘Yes. Of course I did.’

‘Right.’

And there he was again with the kicked-puppy face. We’d worked together for years, he knew full well how capable I was, and yet he still found it impossible not to engage his protective side. Often when it surfaced I did my best to hide how patronising I found it, but I didn’t have the patience for that today.

‘What did you expect me to do? I was very angry, Chris. There were people trashing my house and taking my fucking things.’

‘Yeah, but you should be careful.’