Tuesday, Hazel wasn’t due at work until after lunch. She didn’t set the alarm. She thought she’d sleep until ten o’clock in the morning and wake like a giant refreshed.
In that she was wrong. Perhaps she was more concerned than she’d let either of them think, DCI Gorman or Gabriel Ash. Worry will murder sleep more effectively than anything except pain. In the darkness and the silence – Railway Street did not on the whole keep party hours – she lay cocooned in her winter-weight bedding, comfortable enough, waiting for sleep to return. Growing irritable when it did not.
It was all so stupid. None of it made any sense. Not the death of Trucker Watts; not the involvement of Leo Harte; not the advent-calendar visits of her secret admirer. They made no sense considered as separate episodes, and even less as parts of a greater whole. And her friends wanted her to feel threatened by this nonsense? She was damned if she would. No one had any reason to harm her. The only one who might conceivably have borne her some ill will was Trucker, and he was no threat to anyone now.
She turned on her side, drawing the quilt up under her ear; sleep remained elusive. She couldn’t think why. She’d been tired enough when she fell into bed, and morning was still hours away. She found herself listening, although there was no sound from the street to disturb her rest. Even Mrs Burden’s Alec, who had a habit of singing Gilbert & Sullivan on his way home from the pub, liked to be tucked up with his cocoa before midnight. Perhaps there was a stray dog raiding bins just on the edge of hearing. Perhaps there was a fox. They were getting bolder, becoming more urbanised, all the time. Perhaps …
That wasn’t a dog, it wasn’t a fox, and it wasn’t a sentimental Glaswegian claiming to be three little maids in an improbably high falsetto. And it wasn’t as far away as the street. There was someone in the house.
Hazel’s first instinct, the one that came from that primitive part of the brain shaped in a time when human beings were not top of the food chain, was to freeze. Her muscles cramped up so rigid that she had to fight them as if there was another person holding her down. But if someone had broken in here intending her harm, she had to move. She had to not be where he expected to find her. She had to be ready to fight back.
Then, when she’d battled through the fear paralysis to regain command of her own body, her second instinct was to turn on the light, and that was wrong too. Right now, in all her hand she held only two good cards. She was awake when the intruder expected her to be asleep; and she was familiar with her surroundings in a way that he was not. Together, they gave her an edge that would disappear if she turned on the bedside light. Tonight, darkness was her friend.
When she’d lived in student lodgings, she’d kept a cricket bat to deal with unwelcome night-time incursions. That bat had become evidence in a criminal case, and though the case had long ago been resolved, she didn’t think it had ever been returned to her. She tried to think what else she could use to defend herself. She didn’t play golf, and both brass candlesticks and marble statuary were rather Victorian for her taste.
But she had what no Victorian damsel defending her honour could resort to: she had a mobile phone.
There was no lock on her bedroom door. Her heart thumping in her throat, conscious that he might already be upstairs, that as she emerged onto the landing she could find herself gripped by unseen hands, she had to force herself to open the door anyway and seek a refuge that was more defensible. Silent on unshod, chilly feet, she crossed the landing to the bathroom – no hands reached for her, as far as she could tell – and with infinite care shut and locked the door behind her. With the phone to her face and a towel to muffle the sound, she called not 999 but the number of the front desk at Meadowvale, which she thought would get help to her quicker.
Wayne Budgen picked it up. ‘This is Meadowvale Police Station, Constable Bud—’
‘Wayne,’ she whispered urgently. ‘It’s Hazel. I need the area car. Someone’s broken into my house.’
‘Hello?’ he said. ‘Is there someone there?’
‘Wayne!’ she hissed again, her voice quivering with fear and impatience and adrenalin. ‘It’s Hazel! Hazel Best. There’s someone in my house. I can’t speak up, I don’t want him to hear me.’
‘Hazel?’ Then the penny dropped. ‘Hazel! You’ve got an intruder? Are you somewhere safe?’
‘I’ve locked myself in the bathroom.’
‘Good. Stay on the line. The area car will be with you in three minutes.’ There was a pause in which she could hear him talking to the patrol car. Then he was back on the line. ‘Is he downstairs or upstairs?’
‘Still downstairs, I think,’ she whispered. ‘I haven’t heard the stairs creak.’
‘Is there anything you can wedge behind the door?’
It was a small house with a tiny bathroom: all the furniture there was room for was a towel-rail and a linen-basket. ‘Only me.’
‘No – stay away from the door. Is he armed?’
‘I’ve no idea. I haven’t seen him. I just heard someone downstairs. What time is it, anyway?’
‘Twenty past three. Listen, Hazel – get in the bath.’
She wasn’t expecting that. ‘What?’
‘I know those houses. My aunt used to live in Railway Street. Have you still got the old cast-iron bath? Because if he’s armed, and he starts shooting, the door won’t stop bullets but that bath will.’
She hesitated no longer. She threw everything off the towel-rail in first – cast-iron is a cold prospect in winter, which is why so many old baths have been replaced by warmer but less bullet-proof materials – then eased herself over the edge, trying not to rattle the toiletries on the rim. Then she waited.
If he was just trying to freak her out, he might place his latest present on the kitchen table and leave whatever way he’d got in. (How had he got in? She knew she’d locked both front and back doors, left no downstairs windows ajar, and didn’t have a cellar.) It was already a big step up from leaving chocolates on her doorstep, a photograph on her car. But if she heard footsteps on the stairs, his purpose here was more sinister still.
If he’d been watching the house, he knew which room she slept in. That was the first place he would go. He wouldn’t turn the light on, so it might take him a minute to realise she was no longer in bed. (If she’d thought quicker and panicked slower, she might have done the old thing with the pillows under the quilt: let him drool over that for a while, or shoot it, or jump its bones – whatever he’d come here for. But she hadn’t.)
He might try the other bedroom, the one that had been Saturday’s, next. But probably he would realise that, aware of his presence, she’d headed for the one room in everyone’s house that has a working lock. She’d know he’d found her when the doorknob turned.
What would he do when the door didn’t open? If he’d any sense he would run, try to get away from the house before help arrived – because he would know by then that it must be on its way. The house phone was in the hall downstairs, but everyone sleeps with their mobile beside the bed, don’t they? (Except Gabriel Ash, she thought parenthetically, who left his on the hall table with his car keys whenever he came in.) So the sound of the doorknob – she wouldn’t see it move in the dark, but in the small-hours silence she should hear it – should be followed in quick succession by the sound of someone running back downstairs, no longer trying not to be heard, anxious only to be away from this house before the police arrived.
And if he didn’t run? Well, that was bad news of a whole new order. That meant that what he had come here to do mattered more to him than getting away with it. The bathroom door, with or without the linen-basket behind it, wouldn’t stand up to a determined assault.
Three minutes, Wayne had said. Surely at least one of them had passed already?
In her ear he said, ‘Are you all right, Hazel? They’re on their way. They’re passing the park already. Another minute and you’ll hear them. So will he.’
And if he wasn’t prepared to run, would the sound of the siren drive him to an act of desperation? Would he attack the bathroom door with a hatchet? Would he start shooting through it? Hazel flattened herself against the bottom of the bath, cold along her breast and belly despite the towels, keeping her head below the level of the rim. She could still catch a ricochet. And if he’d come armed with both a hatchet and a gun …
Surely that must be another half-minute gone?
The creak of old timbers, that she heard so often she never normally heard at all. ‘He’s on the stairs,’ she whispered into the phone. ‘Oh Jesus, Wayne …’
She heard her bedroom door open. Seconds dragged past. She heard Saturday’s bedroom door open. Then she heard the sound, part creak, part rattle, of a hand on the bathroom doorknob.
In the tucked-up silence of the long winter night, undisturbed even by Alec Burden being the very model of a modern major general, the sound of a police siren carried half a mile through the sleeping town. Deep in her cast-iron bunker, Hazel heard it and her heart rallied. Outside the bathroom door the intruder heard it too. There was an intake of breath, a muffled curse, and then heavy-booted feet heading down the stairs much less carefully, much more noisily, than they had come up.
The area car would come to the front door – the back gardens in Railway Street were little more than yards giving access to a ginnel – so, whatever way he’d got into the house, he had to leave by the back door if he didn’t want to run straight into the arms of two large policemen. Suddenly Hazel wasn’t prepared to let him get away scot-free. With the promise of support already within earshot, the fear that had been clutching her innards in a cold hand turned in a heartbeat to hot anger, and she rose from the depths of the bath like Venus rising from the sea-shell, only crosser and wearing pyjamas.
She vaulted over the bath rim, threw open the door, flicked on the landing light as she flew past and took the stairs two at a time, saved from disaster only by her familiarity with their treads and the fact that she was now too furious to be afraid. She wanted to see his face before he got clean away. She wanted to know who was persecuting her.
If she’d caught up with him, she might well have tried to arrest him, though she knew that would be deemed reckless by DCI Gorman and insane by Gabriel Ash. In the event, however, she never got that close. She saw a thick-set body in a thigh-length khaki parka, fur round the raised hood, standing at the back door as he fumbled the latch. Then the door flew open and he leapt the two steps, crossed the yard in three paces, wrenched open the back gate and was gone.