Bill wondered about the time. The morning had taken an age to arrive as he shivered through the night, the new day visible only as a faint glow at the top of the stairs.
Trudy sat opposite, curled up in her coat and a blanket from the boat, but she wasn’t sleeping. She had been awake and alert all night, time marked by the slow tap of her knife on the floor.
She’d left him alone for a few minutes, and he’d pulled at the ropes, but they were too tight. His arms felt numb from being for so long in the same position.
There were footsteps on the stairs. Was it Sean coming back? No, the footsteps were too light. It was Trudy, her footsteps slow and faltering. Bill lifted his head. Trudy was carrying something heavy and it made her tentative on the stairs.
Bill tried to shrink away, but the chair stopped him from moving. As Trudy got closer, she lifted whatever she was carrying and threw it towards him.
The cold water hit him like a deluge. He gasped, his body in shock. It was dirty and rank, dredged up from the canal. Trudy threw the bucket on the floor. Bill shivered and moaned. The cuts on his chest and legs stung.
‘I thought you needed a shower.’
Bill closed his eyes. He couldn’t play these games anymore. ‘Stop, please. I can’t take it.’
Trudy knelt in front of him. ‘You’re desperate to get away, even die, but if I passed you a knife I bet you wouldn’t kill yourself.’ She reached into her waistband and took out her knife. She gripped Bill by the throat and pushed his head back, pressing the knife against the flesh just below his chin. ‘I could do it now. Slice your jugular. This will be the last thing you’ll see. This cellar. My face. My pleasure. Is that what you want?’
Bill didn’t respond.
‘I can, if you ask. Just nod, that’s all you have to do.’
Bill glanced down towards Trudy’s arm, the bulging vein that betrayed how firmly she was gripping the knife. The gleam in her eye told Bill that she was desperate to slit his throat, but something was preventing her.
It was fear. She was losing control of the situation. She’d lost it once before, when Sean went to prison for Rosie’s murder.
At least he was still alive.
‘No?’ Trudy said, as she pulled the knife away. She tapped it on Bill’s cheek. The sharp tip made small pricks in his skin not far from his eye, bringing small dots of blood to the surface, but he didn’t flinch. He wouldn’t give her that much.
As Trudy stepped away, it felt like he’d gained some ground. For as long as he was alive, he was going to beat this. He’d felt old before, not much heart for the fight left in him, but his anger was taking over, giving him energy. He couldn’t let them win.
Then something else occurred to him. If this was about not letting them win, there was only one way to do it: work out how to get away.
Jayne checked her watch as she drove too fast on the motorway. She’d overslept, her electricity card was out of money, so her radio alarm hadn’t gone off. She’d had to rush to the shop to top up the card so that she could have a shower and iron her shirt, a morning in court demanding that she wear better clothes than her usual gear of jeans and ex-army combat jacket.
Dan would already be there, dressed in his finery, and she was missing whatever was going on. She was frustrated, but angry with herself too. There were too many of these cock-ups in her life.
At least the motorway was quiet, the rush hour traffic long gone. Her gaze wandered to the views around her. It was just fields on either side. There was cattle in some, whereas others were just the long spread of the valley before the spine of heather-topped hills to the north.
Something attracted her attention, but it was gone before she could register what it was. A twinge of familiarity. Her rear-view mirror was vibrating too much to allow her a clear view.
There was a junction ahead. She turned off and followed the roundabout to go back along the motorway on the other side. It would make her even later, but she couldn’t shake off the feeling that it was important.
She scoured the fields as she drove, waiting to be grabbed by the same feeling of recognition.
There it was. She banged her steering wheel and shouted, ‘Yes!’
A glint of water, a gentle ribbon that ran alongside the motorway until it curved underneath, and next to it, crumbling and old, was a cottage. It was the same cottage that appeared in the photographs in Sean’s book.
She turned off at the next junction and took a road that disappeared into the countryside, trying to work her way back towards the cottage, but the route she was on curved away from the canal. Hawthorne hedges lined both sides of the view as she raced towards a village in the distance and what looked like a road heading back towards the water.
The canal went out of view as she kept driving, slowing down as she reached the centre of the village. She turned in a direction that she thought would take her down a hill. She caught glints of sunlight on the water as she peered through the gaps between houses, the countryside turning into an impossible maze.
Then she saw it.
She slammed on her brakes and reversed quickly to a narrow lane that seemed to head in the right direction. As she drove down it, fast, she dreaded another car coming in the opposite direction, but the lane was clear. Looking through a break in the hedgerow and over a gate, she saw the cottage at the end of a long, rutted field.
Jayne braked hard and skidded, then backed into a small space in front of the gate, jumping out as soon as the car stopped.
The sun was shining in her face. She shielded her eyes as she peered towards the cottage.
It was definitely the same one that was in the book. She realised why the pictures had bothered her at the time. She’d seen this cottage so many times as she’d driven along the motorway but had paid it no heed. It was just another piece of a slowly decaying past. She remembered her theory about Sean and his superiority complex: that he’d wanted to taunt his readers as he’d taunted Pat. It was obvious from the pictures Sean and Trudy had come here regularly. The cottage was important to them.
Then she saw a dark shape further along the canal, under the motorway bridge, almost hidden from view.
She remembered her camera. She went back to the glove compartment and dug it out. She zoomed in on whatever was there.
She lowered her camera. ‘Shit.’
She was right. It was a boat, and judging by the colours, it was Sean’s boat. She was too far away to read the lettering, but the shapes of the words, two of them, looked right.
She zoomed in further. The image in the viewfinder became shaky as she kept zooming in as much as the camera allowed her, the focus pixelating from blurred to sharp before settling down. Once it did, she saw that her suspicions were confirmed, the name on the boat was Somewhere Quiet.
She clambered over the gate. There was no time to waste.