✥
‘NO ONE WILL save you.’ The roar of the demon shakes the house. ‘They are all dead-dead-dead,’ it shrieks.
Down the stairs, I go, two at a time into the darkness, following the pound of her feet. If she’d had the sense to creep I might never have found her in a house this size, not in the time I have left.
She’s along the corridor. Her footsteps are more padded now by the carpet, but I can still hear them.
And then they stop. In the pitch-dark of that hellhole, Kate Webb starts to creep.
I stand in the corridor and listen. Nothing except me panting and my heart banging, and a voice in my head saying: Think. Where will she have gone?
Maybe to the Garstangs. The candle still shines through their open door and they are still dead, and exactly where I left them.
Where would I go? Not to Brian because I don’t suppose she even knows exactly where his room is. I would try to get out. The doors are locked and she doesn’t have a key. Her only chance is a downstairs window, but there are so many of them.
I go to the top of the marble stairs and I’m about to go down when I hear a creak. The fifth step on the wooden stairs in the tower.
I creep down them and stand in the hall, listening. If I go to the wrong room it will give her time to open the shutters and get out, and then I will be caught and people will know what I did and why, and what will happen to poor Nathan then?
I am just about to start searching the rooms one by one when I hear it. A definite click. There’s a bar being lifted, and then another, and I think: Where would I try to climb out? Not into the garden where I could be trapped, but at the front, the first front window, the main drawing room. I’m so sure I’m right, I don’t even worry about the noise. Speed is what matters now. I rush to the door and throw it open, and there she is, sweet little Kate, one slender leg over the sill, the wind in her chestnut hair, an inch away from freedom and life, but I’m on her. I throw her to the ground and slam the shutters closed, and I can’t even dream about what happened next. The demon had taken over by then.
Merciful Jesus, I think, as I kneel beside her body, she looks like a saint.
*
George Pound put a thumb and forefinger in his philtrum. ‘From the disarray of her nightdress and the bruising – quite apart from the knife wounds – I thought she had been… interfered with.’