FORTY-SIX

It was blustery, cold and dark by the time Anna left Nettleham Police HQ. She hugged her jacket tight around herself as she set off for the pound, following the directions the desk officer had given her. It began, almost inevitably, to drizzle, scattering diamonds in the car headlights and making the flagstones glisten. She upped her pace as the rain fell ever harder, turning into such a violent squall that she ran the final stretch, splashing past a school outside which the last few parents were waiting in their cars for their children.

The pound’s main gate was only a little further on, but she arrived to find it padlocked and its Hours of Opening sign telling her it had closed fifteen minutes ago. She stood there seething at Patterson and Hollis for having wasted so much of her time, and at the desk officer for not bothering to warn her. But there was nothing for it now.

She took shelter beneath a bus stop a little way down the road. She didn’t want to throw herself on Oliver’s mercy, not without at least trying for a taxi. But it was the afternoon rush, and the first two companies she called were booked solid. She was about to try a third when a black SUV with tinted windows parked a little way up the hill from her began to roll slowly out of its spot on the slope, yet without turning on its engine or its lights.

Anna had no memory of her abduction by Harry Kidd. He’d coshed her hard enough that everything between leaving work and waking up in his boot was a blank. And Kidd himself had never spoken of it either, hanging himself in his stairwell before even being charged, and making no mention of it in the note he’d left behind, so self-pitying that it had burned itself into Anna’s memory. Forgive me, he’d written. I saw you in the library and you were so beautiful. I couldn’t stop thinking about you. But they’d found his cosh beneath his floorboards with her blood and hair still on it, and hundreds of photographs of her on his phone and computer from his months of stalking, including dozens between work and home, suggesting he’d been plotting her kidnap for weeks.

Little wonder, then, that she’d become so exquisitely sensitive to cars, particularly in deserted places and at night. The ones outside the school had been fine. Their engines and their lights had been on, advertising themselves to their kids. But the black SUV wasn’t like that, all dark and silent despite the cold and gloom, yet with the silhouettes of two people just visible inside. Her heart began to race. She looked back up the road at the school. The last of the waiting cars had just picked up their child and now was heading off the other way, depriving her of both their headlights and their witness, leaving the road empty all the way down to a late night grocers at its foot.

The black SUV’s engine and lights suddenly sprang on. It accelerated towards her down the hill. And at once Anna found herself back in the forest of her nightmares, being chased by a man who meant her ill. Panic instantly consumed her. She turned and simply fled.