65

LAUGHTON WAKES TO THE GENTLE buzzing of her phone in her pocket.

She looks up and sees her father lying asleep on his bank of pillows, his hand still resting on hers.

She gently pulls her hand free so as not to wake him and fumbles her phone from her pocket as she tiptoes to the door, smiling when she sees who’s calling, then feeling a flash of annoyance when she also sees how late it is. Why didn’t the police guard come and find her? Then she realizes he probably did and her father would have waved him away.

She steps out into the corridor, where the lights have been dimmed and the droopy mustached guard is snoozing on the sofa, his newspaper crumpled on the floor next to his empty cup. She closes the door softly so as not to wake him either and takes a few steps up the corridor before answering.

“Hey!” she whispers.

“Hey. You OK? Everything OK over there?”

“Yeah. All quiet, why?”

“I was just going through the witness statements, and a lot of the people in the house share where Slade was killed are medical workers, and I started thinking about Mark Murphy’s deathbed, you know, the drip and everything, and how it looked like it had been set up by someone who knew what they were doing. I was just thinking we should run a check on everyone working in that building you’re in, make sure everyone is properly vetted. I tried calling your duty guard but it went straight to voice mail.”

Laughton ups her pace, a sudden anxiousness banishing all trace of tiredness. She turns the corner and feels a flood of relief when she sees the guard at the far end of the corridor, still sitting in his chair next to Gracie’s room.

“He’s in position,” she says. “I’m looking at him right now. The signal’s not great in here, maybe it’s that. I’ll pass on the message.”

“Thanks.”

She passes the nurse’s station, where the duty nurse is also asleep, his head lying on his folded arms, his chair pushed back and jammed against a filing cabinet.

“Listen,” Tannahill says. “When we catch this guy, I was wondering whether you’d think about maybe staying on to consult on other cases. I mean we’ve got a huge backlog, and there’s some really interesting cases in there that would really benefit from your insight.”

If he’d asked her that morning she would have hung up on him, but now the thought of carrying on and getting extra income—and working with Tannahill—seems much more appealing.

“Maybe,” she says. “Let me just get past these next few days, then let’s talk again.”

She draws closer to the guard and sees that he too is asleep, his head tipped back against the wall, his empty cup on the floor by his feet.

So much for black coffee and two sugars.

She steps past him, looks through the window into Gracie’s room, and stops dead.

The skinny figure in the green orderly’s tunic is standing with his back to her, his hand resting on the drinks trolley as he stares down at the sleeping form of Gracie.

“Try and get some rest,” Tannahill says, and in the quiet of the midnight hospital his voice is loud enough to make the man turn around, and white noise and terror floods Laughton’s mind when she sees what is standing by her daughter’s bed.

The child’s unicorn mask is too small for his face, but the eyeholes have been cut larger and his pale eyes now stare at her through them.

“He’s. Here,” Laughton whispers, staring at the monster returned from her childhood.

“What!?”

“He’s. Here,” she repeats, her mind screaming, her body frozen to the spot, a rabbit in the headlamps of those ragged-edged eyes.

He takes a step toward her and she backs away, not from fear but because Gracie is in the room with him and she needs him to follow her, she needs to get him away from her daughter.

The thought jolts a memory loose and she is back in the terraced house in Acton she grew up in, her mum standing in the hallway looking at the distorted shape of a man through the pebbled glass of their front door, watching as he pulls something white over his face that turns him from a man into something else.

Go upstairs, her mother had said, pushing her in front, keeping herself between her daughter and whatever that was outside their door.

Upstairs they had squeezed into the large airing cupboard at the end of the hallway, closed the door, and listened to the sounds of him entering the house, moving around downstairs, opening doors, breaking things.

When he comes upstairs, her mother had whispered, he’ll go in my bedroom first. We need to wait until he’s in the en suite bathroom, then we run. I’ll count to three, and on three we run. We run and we keep on running. OK?

And then he was coming.

Up the stairs.

The slow creak of each step heralding his approach and stretching time tight until it was almost too much to bear. She could see out into the hallway through a gap in the louvered doors as they hid in the cupboard, wrapped in the trapped heat and the smell of laundry, the sound of their own breathing seeming way too loud in the tight space.

And then he was there at the top of the stairs, his face turning in their direction. That mask and those hideous eyes, eyes that could see anything, could even penetrate the door and see where she was hiding.

But then he had turned away and entered her mum and dad’s room, just as her mother had said he would, and her mum had started counting, gripping her hand tight, whispering each number as she gauged the right time to run.

One . . .

Two . . .

But Laughton couldn’t stand it. She had to get away.

She burst from the cupboard too soon, the door banging loudly as she rushed for the stairs. And her mother, not ready to run, stumbled to catch up, and Laughton had almost made it to the stairs when he appeared and grabbed her arm, the knife rising up, ready to strike.

Then something had knocked him backward, breaking his grip, and he had fallen onto the floor of the bedroom, Laughton’s mother on top of him, beating at his face with her bare hands.

“RUN!” she had screamed, and Laughton had run, down the stairs, out into the street, her mother’s words repeating over and over in her head.

We run and we keep on running.

We run and we keep on running.

We run and we keep on running.

It was only later, when the police had come and the questions had started, that she realized her mother had not been behind her as she ran from the house.

She had told her to count to three.

Three was the safe number.

But Laughton had gone on two, when the monster was still too close, when her mother wasn’t ready—and she had died because of it.

It had been her fault her mother was killed, not her father’s. All this time she had blamed him for not being there, and for bringing the monster to their door, but she was a monster too, because she was weak, because she was a bad daughter. And now her own daughter was going to die, because she was a bad mother too.

The man in the unicorn mask opens the door to Gracie’s room and steps out into the corridor.

Laughton continues to move away, stumbling backward, weak in the face of this thing from her nightmares but knowing one thing, that she must draw him away from Gracie.

She can hear Tannahill’s voice frantically calling her name on her phone, but he’s too far away, and there’s no one here to help her. The nurse is asleep. The guard is asleep, both of them are. Drugged by whatever the man in the mask had given them.

And he has a knife in his hand now. A black-and-green zombie knife like the one that killed Kate Miller.

. . . First he had to kill you, that was the price of entry . . .

That was what Tannahill had said earlier.

. . . Then he could kill Gracie, that was his reward . . .

He has to kill her first, Laughton realizes, that’s the deal. So if she can just stay alive then Gracie will be safe. But in this same moment of realization her back hits a wall and she has nowhere left to go.

He takes another step, his eyes shining like glass in the ragged holes of the mask, and raises the knife higher, ready to strike.

Then something hits him hard in the side, sending him sprawling across the floor.

Laughton looks down in frozen shock at the tangle of limbs and struggling bodies.

Then her father looks up and says the same word her mother said to her more than a decade and a half earlier.

“RUN!”