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This was the price of being in the place she no longer had any right to be. Beth watched the beast coming at her, its dark jaws quickly closing the distance. She couldn’t outrun it and there was no time to climb a tree. She remembered something she’d been told about disabling a vicious dog by seizing its hind legs. The animal moved as fast as the thought. Beth heard her own guttural exclamation as it reached her.
She protected her face with her hands and stumbled sideways. The Alsatian reared up on its hind legs but remained at a ninety-degree angle. A thick silver chain secured its neck and held it at bay only a few feet from her.
Despite its restraint, Beth’s relief was overridden by its ferocity. Its mouth snapped at the air between them, teeth chopping and exploding spittle as it stood vertical in its attempts to reach her. She stumbled back a few more paces, anticipating the chain breaking under the strain, and met resistance against her hands.
“Kimba!”
Momentarily, Beth was too terrified to identify the source of the splenetic male voice. Each of the dog’s barks seemed to burst inside her chest.
“Kimba!”
A man in a brown oilskin appeared behind the animal and yanked it harshly backwards on the chain. His hair was tied away from his round face in a straggly ponytail and she could see his teeth gritted through his dishevelled brown beard. He dragged the Alsatian further away from her, looking for something either side of him. He located it, a peg in the ground that he wound the length of chain around.
The dog didn’t stop barking, didn’t take its orange eyes off her.
“Pardon.” The man held up his hand in an apologetic gesture but Beth’s adrenaline was still firing.
She opened her mouth to respond but no sound escaped.
Without shifting his gaze, his hand viciously slapped the beast’s flank, and it squealed before falling silent.
Beth swallowed and unlocked her throat. She took a breath and smiled weakly. “Merci.” But she didn’t feel much safer in the man’s company, particularly after he’d so brutally struck the dog.
“Votre main.” The man nodded at her.
Beth followed his gaze and found her right hand was bleeding. She turned and saw the barbed-wire fence beside her that had hindered her escape. She must have grabbed one of the lethal-looking coils as she’d stepped back.
“Laissez-moi soigner votre main.” He roughly shoved the animal’s rear so it was sitting and stepped over it.
Beth couldn’t retreat. “I’m sorry...”
He paused, aware that he was intimidating her. “Anglais?”
“Yes.”
“My apologies. Please. My name is Roland. We need to dress your hand.” He gestured for her to approach and she looked nervously at the dog. “He will not attack now. I give you my word. Come.” Roland gestured behind him and, through gaps in the trees, Beth could see the red brick of a house.
The blood on her hand felt suddenly cold, and she looked at the laceration in her palm and the dark liquid flooding from it. She’d lose a lot more by the time she found her way back to the car, if she could even do that. And then there would still be a drive to the nearest village. Although she was wary of the man who had saved her, she didn’t have a choice.
She looked into Roland’s face and tried to find anything lurking there but a desire to help. “OK, thank you.”
He indicated she should follow again and turned in the direction of the house. She clenched her bleeding hand into a ball and circled the Alsatian. Its head slowly turned with her movement but it didn’t shift from its sitting position. Roland didn’t look back as he led them to a gravel path running up to the overgrown garden. She could see a prominent bald patch that his ponytail clung flimsily to. How old was he, mid to late fifties?
He entered the stable door at the rear and had already passed through the tiny galley kitchen of the house when she stepped inside. A dirty frying pan was sitting on an old-fashioned, mint-green AGA, and the room was filled with the smell of fish. Condensation ran off the racks of large herb jars on the shelves that lined the right-hand wall.
The room beyond, however, was far from what she expected.
