‘What the hell d’you think you’re doing? You can’t just barge in here. Get out.’ Joanna, blunted by sleep, tries to reason with her intruder; tries harder to keep the terror hammering in her chest out of her demand.
‘Oh, you’d like me to leave, would you?’ a face she remembers from childhood mocks: a face scored with crows’ feet and a lifetime of cigarettes and booze. ‘Well, first off, I’d like my suitcase.’
‘Look, my husband’s going to be back any minute, and he’s not going to take—’ She stops talking, watches a stomach-churning smile curve his mouth.
‘Liar,’ he growls from beneath a set of eyebrows wet with sweat. ‘You’re here on your own. I’ve been watching you.’
Stepping closer: invidious, intimidating; the sheer brutality held in his eyes is enough to force her back down the gloomy passageway, into the sitting room.
‘Now, where is it?’ he asks through the frantic barking of Buttons, without raising his voice.
Joanna shakes her head. The gesture is futile; he’s already seen the suitcase lying open on the floor.
‘Been having a good old nose, have you?’ Rustling inside his bulky blue anorak, his stony sarcasm makes her flinch. ‘Find anything interesting?’
She can’t speak, the room is suddenly too small to stand up in, too small to think.
‘A little bird told me you’d been sniffing around.’ His cadence – calm, controlled – makes his presence all the more lethal. ‘You really shouldn’t go poking around in other people’s lives. You really shouldn’t.’ He peels back his lips, forms another noxious smile that is as menacing as the increasing wind hustling the walls of the cottage. ‘If you knew what was good for you, you’d have stayed outta this. Sticking your oar in – you don’t know what you’ve done, do you?’ He cocks his head, ugly in the pinkish lamplight.
‘You took those photos, didn’t you?’
‘Just give them to me, please.’
His composure makes her shrink away, but doesn’t stop her asking, ‘Why did you take them, let alone keep them?’
‘’Cos I couldn’t bear to throw them away,’ he laughs.
‘Your trophies, are they?’ Her repulsion emboldening her. ‘They’re little girls … What sort of person takes photos of little girls?’ The challenge comes in spite of herself; in spite of pushing her spine to the flaking wallpaper to stop herself from shaking.
‘I like little girls,’ he leers, close to her.
‘You’ve got some of me in there, why have you kept them?’ She flaps a frightened arm at his suitcase; the stuff he wants back.
His eyes narrowed, angled at the floor, measuring what he’s going to do next.
‘You wanna watch your mouth.’ His breath, rancid, crawling, condensing to a cloud. Joanna ducks away, but too quick, too strong, he seizes her wrists.
‘It was you, wasn’t it?’ She winces under his grip. Seeing it clearly – the savagery made identifiable by truth. And yet still the words keep coming. She really shouldn’t rile him, it wouldn’t take much to push him over the edge.
‘You did it. You killed her … you killed Ellie.’ Joanna’s heart: a bouncing jackrabbit. And she sees the black bruises, curved as finger ends, on her friend’s arms as plainly as if she’d been standing beside her now.
‘Shut your mouth.’ He shakes her. Fierce. His stubble dangerously close to her face. The spurt of movement releases a waft of stale cigarettes, the reek of unwashed armpits. The smell grapples for room alongside their tall shadows that have bent in half against the wall.
‘She was only a little girl – what did she ever do to you?’ Stupid to challenge him, but she can’t stem the flow, she wants answers. ‘Why hurt Ellie?’
‘Because she was gonna tell her mother.’
‘Tell her mother what? What were you doing to her?’
The look he gives answers her question.
‘But why her?’ Nausea rising. ‘Why Ellie?’
‘Because she was there. It was easy.’
‘What about that Freya girl, you’ve got pictures of her – did you kill her too?’ Joanna, remembering the contents of her sister’s scrapbook, the conversation with Liz.
‘You know nothing about it. Meddling … you stupid bitch.’ He steps closer, the sourness on his breath buffeting her cheek. ‘You and your fucking sister … It had to be you two who found her, didn’t it.’
It isn’t a question, and Joanna doesn’t answer.
Mike – where the hell are you ? Hardly daring to breathe, Joanna makes her voiceless and desperate plea to a god she has never totally believed in.
‘You haven’t got a clue what it’s been like for me, have you?’ he accuses. ‘Living your perfect little life. Well, just so you know, mine’s been in ruins ever since.’ He loosens his grip a fraction but pinned to the wall by his broad body, there’s no escaping him, nowhere to go. ‘But it would’ve been a whole lot worse for me if she’d opened her fucking gob and told everyone. Oh, yeah, poor little Ellie – poor little slut, more like. Coming on to me all the time . And when I took her up on it, threatening to tell.’
The monster wants me to feel sorry for him ; look at him – he actually believes his twisted, pathetic reasons justify the evilness of his crime . Joanna keeps her thoughts to herself and tries not to make any sudden moves. Her chest tightening, her mouth dry, a portion of her brain constricts in panic. There is something terrifyingly calculating about him, something calm and deadly – he’s insane, and she knows he is going to strike, she sees the brutality building behind his eyes.
‘Yeah, it was me. I killed Ellie.’ He spits his confession. A confession Joanna wasn’t ready for. ‘I don’t think I even meant to kill her, but, well … ’ Another smile that makes the blood slow in her veins, ‘once I’d done it … ’ He tapers off.
What’s he saying ? Snatching back her arm, Joanna gawps at him, wishing she could close the lid over the truth she doesn’t believe she consciously sought.
‘Happy now?’ A callous laugh. His spittle on her ear, in her hair. ‘’Cos you know I can’t let you go now, don’t you?’ A gravelly whisper. ‘Not now you know. That would be beyond stupid, wouldn’t it?’
He strikes her hard across the face, and she folds to the floor. He’s going to kill me , her thoughts in the ringing aftershock, catching his satisfied, almost gleeful look. Blood trickles down her face as she gropes for something, anything, to use as a weapon when he lunges for her again. This time she’s ready for it and grabs his ankle. Stumbling forward, fumbling for the bevelled sideboard to save his fall, the lamp crashes to the floor, extinguishing their shadows. With blood in her mouth, she uses the seconds he needs to correct himself to crawl towards the light haemorrhaging from the hall.
‘Come here, you bitch.’
Close on her heels, he dives for her, dragging her towards him by her socked feet. She thrashes to get free, but his arms are strong, practised in the art of pinning and confining. And in the struggle, things are knocked over and crash to the lumpy rugs, splintering against the wooden boards beneath. Clumsy, messy, he wrestles her to the ground, holds her wrists above her head with one hand and straddles her. A drop of sweat lands on her neck. Then her lip. Tasting salt, along with her blood, the world spins and stops. She cowers, primed for him to strike again. Buttons is barking. Weaving between them: the pink patina of his gums, his puppy-white teeth circling their heads; ineffectual as a toddler. On her periphery, his foot swings out to boot her dog aside. A sickening crack and Buttons yelps and falls away. She rams her knees into her attacker’s crotch – for Buttons, for her – and as he scrabbles to his feet, leaning down to strike her again, she smashes her heel into his head and a dart of pain shoots from foot to groin.
Vulnerable without her boots, her thoughts solidifying with a bizarre regret for removing them as she tears away on all fours. The elastic of her ponytail has worked down to within a smidge of her hair’s end, but she crashes on through her confusion, aiming for the searing white light of the kitchen. His booming voice inches away, as strands of hair float about her face, stinging her eyes, and she scrambles the length of the hall before he catches her. Stretched out, he snatches hold of her damaged foot and squeezes. She screams in agony and in her effort to get upright, loses her sock and the floor slips beneath her. With an almighty thud, she’s down. Down on the slippery linoleum with him mad-eyed and close to her face.
She doesn’t smell the dinner burning. Her nose is clotted with blood and she must open her mouth to breathe. Pressing an agitated hand to her churning insides, she watches him on his hands and knees, sickened by the way he drags a heavy arm across his wide, wet brow, panting as if he’s just finished running a race.
They stop moving.
They watch one another: the killer and the prey.
Has he had enough – is he going to let her go?
Listening to the silence, all she can hear is her own heartbeat.
The cold is moving in. Spilling into the cottage through the gap in the doorway, filling up the rooms, its icy breath creeping under her clothes. Conscious of a chronic numbness spreading over her, Joanna holds him steady in her sights: her eyes big and pleading, it’s the lack of pity she finds reflected in his that makes her shiver. She isn’t going to get out of here, this is it. This is the end.
His boots. Brutish black, steel toe-capped workman’s boots. Joanna registers them in a flash of horrific clarity. One well-placed kick will kill her.
Rolling to the right, up on her knees, with a single movement she spreads her strong pianist fingers and clasps the dog’s yellow bone. Heavy at the end of her arm, she dodges the boots, the clumsy fists that pummel the white puff of her breath, and swings it wide to clobber Ellie’s killer hard on the side of his head. The force is enough to knock him sideways, and he wheels away to tend to himself, an animal sound bubbling in his throat.
This is her chance. And hoping her dog has the sense to follow, she breaks into the night. Straggling thoughts of her husband, her children, how they might never find her, how she might never see them again, she staggers out into the quivering blackness.