I slept on the train. When I woke it was to the slamming of doors. I leaped up in a panic and without checking where we were, grabbed my bag and hurried to the door, only just managing to get off before the guard waved the train off again. Luckily it was the right station. It was only as I followed the eight or ten local passengers out onto the forecourt that I realized how drunk I still was. Not staggering, falling-down drunk, but the kind of drunk where imitating sobriety becomes the overwhelming challenge; where every little movement from unzipping one’s handbag to smoothing a fly-away strand of hair seems as exacting as brain surgery. Certainly I knew better than to get behind the wheel of the Renault, which, as the last couple of commuters reclaimed their vehicles, soon looked lost and lonely in the long-stay car park.
I found the taxi rank and tried to look like the respectable fare I would have been, had I not had the last couple of shots. I watched the flurry of activity as the few remaining passengers were met by relatives and swept away in hatchbacks and four-wheel drives. I waited a few minutes and then walked to the corner and looked up and down the high street. Apart from a flashing neon sign advertising payday loans, and the bluish glow of refrigeration coming from the organic butcher’s, the town was dark. There would be no taxi. I reached into my coat pocket for my phone, but despite Jude’s special pleading, I found I couldn’t bring myself to ring Nick. I was still too angry and hurt. I knew just how it would go – he would swoop down on me in the Range Rover and fling open the passenger door, hatchet-faced. Then he’d be aloof and condescending on the way home as if I were the one who had something to apologise for. It would get sorted in the bedroom, but I couldn’t face that either. Not this time, not tonight. I was a grown-up and I could get myself home. It was a distance of barely two miles, only the last little stretch without pavement. It would be a chance to walk off the booze.
It was the blue hour. Dusk had not yet quite turned to night, but in the Victorian terraces that lined the road out of town, the curtains were mostly drawn. I could hear canned laughter from a TV sitcom and the distant barking of a dog. On a steeply sloping drive, someone revved a motorbike, shrouding me in exhaust fumes and I crossed on a diagonal to the other side of the road. Soon house gave way to cottage, cottage to barn and barn, finally to open countryside. The land fell away to pasture on my right and climbed behind dense hedgerows on my left and except for the occasional swoosh of a passing car, I was alone.
A harvest moon was rising, silhouetting the trees on the opposite side of the valley and giving a strange radioactive glow to the cream-coloured cows that dotted the fields below me. ‘Beautiful,’ I murmured out loud in an effort, I suppose, to convince myself that the walk might be a pleasure rather than the ordeal it was beginning to seem. I stopped and reached for my phone, thinking to choose an appropriately jaunty soundtrack. I jammed the headphones in my ears and was soon striding out in time to the soft reggae of Jimmy Cliff, feeling if not quite cheery then empowered. I had, after all, drawn a line in the sand: let Nick know that despite my recent frailties, his behaviour had consequences and shown him I was no longer prepared to be a pushover. There had been no messages all afternoon, but that was classic Nick. Never show weakness, never capitulate. He would, I knew, be furious with me for walking out and have resolved to punish me with silence. By now, though, I reckoned he would be getting twitchy, might already be wondering if I were coming back at all. Let him sweat.
I had been walking for about five minutes, when instinct told me I was no longer alone on the path. This in itself was hardly sinister. Plenty of people – well, all right, a few – made the journey from the town to our village just to enjoy the charms of The Fleece. I picked up my pace a fraction – more to put a decorous distance between us than because I felt scared. Another hundred yards on and I’d decided that it was just the echo of my own footfall bouncing off the steep sides of the valley. Fifty more and he was definitely there, slowing when I slowed, speeding up when I did. Now I was rattled. I switched off the music, and surreptitiously tugged the headphones from my ears. Clack, clack, clack, clack. Whoever it was ought to know better. If he was there… was he there? Soon I was resenting the intrusion of my breathing, of my own heartbeat for getting in the way of all the listening I needed to do. All it took was the creak of a bush in the field below me for my pulse rate to soar and my pace to quicken. I stole a glance over my shoulder. Did someone shrink back into the hedgerow? A few yards ahead, the road curved into a canopy of trees, the branches arching overhead like the ribs of a whale. How had I forgotten this was here? This cave, this unlit catacomb? If I speeded up, could I be out the other side before my pursuer entered? Probably not. What had possessed me to think walking was a good idea? I turned on the torch app and its pale beam faltered. I cursed myself and Jimmy Cliff. I had a choice to make now – torch or phone call, phone call or torch. There was not enough battery for both.
Calling… calling… still calling… pick up, pick up…
‘Nick Mulvaney here, can’t get to the phone right now…’
My heart was going like a pile-driver. Decision time. I could follow the path through the tunnel of trees or I could peel off and go across country. I could see the lights of the hamlet down in the dip. It looked close, but it would be a good twenty-minute scramble, through bog and nettle patch. Still, glancing behind me, seeing a tell-tale movement in the darkness, a cross-country assault course seemed preferable to ploughing on into the cave of trees, pursued by this figment, this wraith, this crow-man. I had one leg slung over the wall and was poised to drop down into the field when the phone vibrated in my hand.
‘Nick!’ I almost sobbed. ‘Can you come and get me? I’m on the main road out of town, about half a mile from our turn-off. You know just before it goes into that…?’
The phone cut out.
I stared at it, stunned, trying to remember whether I had given him enough information to find me. Whether I had or not, I must stay put now; make myself a sitting duck. Well bollocks to that. I swivelled my legs back over the wall, strolled casually out into the middle of the road, arms folded, and cast a shrewd appraising glance down the road.
There was no one there. There never had been. What had looked, at a glance, like a sinister figure shrinking back into the darkness was now nothing more than a nest of brambles stirred by a brisk autumn breeze, the footsteps I’d heard after all just the echo of my own. I felt foolish and cowardly and annoyed with myself. I could already see the headlights of the Range Rover carving their way up the lane in the distance, its headlights vanishing and reappearing as if on a lifeboat navigating choppy water. I could hear the expensive purr of its three-litre engine; discern each brief hiatus as Nick moved up the gears, gathering speed until he reached the junction. Then a silence, so long I thought he had dropped clean off the planet, almost long enough to make me believe in my bogey man again, before his tyres squealed onto the main road and his xenon headlamps turned the arch of trees from a gloomy cavern into a green cathedral. I stepped out and waved my arms as if landing a jumbo jet.
‘What the fuck did you think you were doing?’
I turned to find the buckle of my seatbelt, telling myself to stay calm, to not let him rile me.
‘I was mad with you,’ my words tumbled out in a garbled stream, ‘rightly say I’d so… I mean rightly so, I’d say, after what you did to Ethan. You’ve got Jude to thunk that I came back at all. She sheems to be under the impression we’ve got something worth savaging.’
He leaned towards me and sniffed.
‘Have you been drinking?’
I gave a loud hiccup and laughed in surprise. Now the danger had passed I realized I was still quite squiffy.
‘Jesus, Karen! How much have you had?’
‘Not that mush,’ I said.
‘You walked from the station in that condition? You might as well have stuck a sign saying “rape me” on your back and have done with it.’
‘Oh, don’t be riduc – ulous!’
Nick turned up a rutted track, reversing back out straight into the path of an oncoming car.
‘Fuck off!’ he muttered under his breath as the driver flashed his lights, then accelerated homewards, the silence between us stretching out until it seemed impossible to breach.
‘Jude and Dave are getting divorced,’ I blurted, unable to bear it any longer.
Nick didn’t react. I stole a curious sideways glance at him.
‘I know,’ he said after a long moment and I gawped at him.
We had turned into our lane by now. Nick was hurtling recklessly over potholes and around bends, making me feel queasier than ever.
‘How come?’ I said, closing my eyes briefly and gripping the front of my seat.
‘Dave told me when they were down.’
‘But that was ages ago…’
Nick shrugged.
‘Why didn’t you tell me? Jesus. He hadn’t even said anything to Jude then…’
We were on the home stretch now.
‘Because you’d have kept it under your hat, wouldn’t you?’ Nick took his eyes off the road momentarily to give me a scornful glance and in that instant, something loomed out of the dark, pale and sudden as a hologram.
‘Nick! Stop!’ I shrieked and he stamped on the brake so that we were both flung back against our headrests.
‘What the fuck?’
‘It’s OK. It’s OK,’ I said, ‘You didn’t hit her. It’s Jean. What on earth is she—?’
Nick applied the hand brake and I scrambled out of the car and ran around to where the old woman stood like a rabbit in the headlights, white hair stuck out at all angles, clothing in disarray.
‘Jean!’ I said, taking her arm gently. ‘You gave us a terrible fright. What are you doing out here?’
She jerked her elbow away touchily and I realized she didn’t know me. I had fretted over her, empathized with her, watched her house for signs and portents, but for all my supposed concern, I realized, I had never bothered to befriend her.
‘Hello, Jean,’ Nick appearing suavely on her other flank, ‘bit late for a stroll, don’t you think?’ She cowered as he tried to take her arm, huddling towards me as if for protection.
‘Now then love,’ he said, more firmly this time, but she batted his arm away, whimpering.
‘Nick, you’re frightening her.’
‘This is ridiculous,’ Nick muttered grimly, ‘I’ll go and get Gordon.’
I stroked Jean’s arm to reassure her and she turned her face towards me so that the moonlight illuminated a fan-shaped purple stain on her cheekbone – the remnants, I realized, of the black eye she had sustained on the day I went to London. For a split-second I saw again the same subliminal tableau I had conjured that day – a man’s hand raised in violence, a woman’s body crumpled on the floor, only this time the man was Nick and the woman was me and I didn’t know whether I was looking at Jean and Gordon’s past or my own future; whether this was a warning or a curse. And then the image was gone and Jean’s claw-like hand was clutching at me in distress and Nick and Gordon were heading down the path towards us, chuckling grimly like a couple of poachers about to bag a deer.
‘It’s OK, love, we’ve got this,’ Nick said, replacing me at Jean’s right elbow, while Gordon, hatchet-faced, took her left. I bowed my head and hurried homeward, not looking back, only stopping to catch my breath when I could no longer hear the sound of her keening.