Faces of Fear (19 page)

Raymond slowed down. It looked as if the woman was wearing nothing more than a sodden nightdress. He didn't know whether to stop or not, and offer her a lift. But he was late, and she could turn out to be trouble, especially dressed in her night things, on a dark, wet night in the depths of Kerry – and he didn't fancy the look of her dog, either. The woman looked as if she wearing flowers in her hair, which didn't exactly reassure Raymond that she was altogether sane.

He drew out, so that he could pass her. But as he did so, she turned around, and stepped right into the road, with both of her arms lifted. For a split-second he could see her face, white with panic.

He stepped on the brake, but the Volvo hit her head-on. There was dull thumping sound like somebody dropping a sack of flour. Then the Volvo was spinning around, with Raymond scrabbling frantically at the wheel. It slid backward into the ditch, and he heard the crackle of breaking hedge.

He sat behind the wheel for one long moment, quaking with shock. Then he managed to open the door and climb out onto the boggy verge. The rain lashed him in the face as if it wanted to punish him. Turning up his coat-collar, he hurried across the road, praying that the woman wasn't badly hurt, praying that he hadn't killed her.

He found the dog lying on its side. Its front legs were crooked at a peculiar angle and its skull was crushed. One
mournful eye stared at him accusingly, while blood was washed and diluted by the rain. There were fresh weals on the dog's smooth-haired flanks, but they looked as if they had come from a fierce and systematic beating, rather than any collision with Raymond's car.

He looked around for the woman, but there was no sign of her. He walked back along the road, looking into the hedgerows and shouting out, “Hallo! Are you there? Is anybody there?”

There was no answer. He trudged back to the dog and wondered what to do. He was frightened that the impact of the collision might have hurled the woman over the hedge and into the fields, and that she was lying in the rain, fatally hurt. There was nothing else he could do: he would have to call the Garda.

He went back to his car and found his mobile phone.

“There's been an accident,” he said. “I think I might have killed somebody.”

It took more than two hours of searching before the Garda decided that there was no woman anywhere around. Raymond sat miserably in his car with the rain drumming on the roof, drinking a cup of tea that had been brought for him by the landlay of a nearby bed and breakfast.

At last a police sergeant came over and tapped on his window, and he wound it down. “There's no trace whatsoever of a woman, sir.”

“I saw her. I'm sure that I hit her.”

“Well, sir, if there was a woman, she must have run off, and be well clear by now. Do you think it might have been the dog that caused the impact, rather than her?”

“I don't know. It could have been. It all happened so fast.”

“You say the woman was wearing a white nightdress of sorts.”

“That's right. And something in her hair, like a garland.”

“You mean flowers, sir?”

“Something like that, yes. White flowers, I think, with green leaves.”

The sergeant was silent for a long time. The rain dripped off the peak of his cap.

“Is anything wrong?” Raymond asked him.

“Not exactly wrong, sir. But there's more than one kind of individual out here, if you follow my meaning. Some that live with us, and some that live next to us, so to speak.”

“I don't know what you mean.”

“Well, sir, think of people living in
parallel
, as it were. They're here, but not on the same plane as we are. Except of course if they want to escape from
their
world into ours. Then we see them, now and again.”

Raymond was beginning to wonder if the sergeant was drunk.

“You say the woman was running, sir?”

Raymond nodded, and said, “Yes. And she was running quite fast.”

“As if somebody were after her, would you say?”

“I suppose so. But I didn't
see
anybody after her.”

“No, well, you wouldn't.”

“I don't know what you're getting at,” Raymond protested. “Are you trying to tell me she wasn't real?”

“Oh, she was real, sir, and I believe you saw her. But let's just say that she wasn't in the same reality as you and me.”

“But the dog's real.”

“The dog is something else altogether.”

The sergeant stood up. “We'll search again in the morning, sir, but I doubt that we'll find anything. Meanwhile, why don't you stay here the night, and I'll talk to you again tomorrow.”

“All right,” Raymond agreed. He felt exhausted and shivery. “Can you ask one of your men to move the car for me? I don't think I could manage it just yet.”

“Oh, sure, no problem.”

“There's one thing more.”

“Yes, sir?”

“You said that somebody could be after her. Do you have any idea
who
?”

The sergeant gave him a long, expressionless look, and then turned away without answering.

Sarah arrived at Cork Airport just as the clouds began to stain the sky and the wind began to get up. By the time she had crossed the concrete to the terminal building it was already starting to rain. Her friend Shelagh had told her that it always rained in Ireland, every quarter of an hour for fifteen minutes, and now she believed it. She went to the car rental desk with her hair hanging down in long, dark-blonde rat's tails.

“Ah, Mrs Bryce,” smiled the carroty-haired man behind the counter. “It's you that were wanting the Corsa.”

“Yes, that's right,” she said, trying to be composed, with rainwater dripping off the tip of her nose. She looked bedraggled, but she didn't look as bad as she felt: a tall, slim woman in her early thirties, with brown, wide-set eyes and firm bone structure. She could have been a
Vogue
model for sensible country clothes, or the wife of a senior Army officer.

In fact she was neither. She was an antiques dealer, the recently-divorced wife of a lovable but chronically
unfaithful artist called Ken who had shown too much appreciation for one of his models just once too often. She missed him; but she relished her freedom. His childish dependence on her had kept her tethered for six years like a sacrificial goat. Now she could travel wherever she liked, whenever she wanted – see who she liked, eat what she liked, and watch whatever television channel she liked, which was one of the greatest new freedoms of all. Like a curiously large number of artists, Ken had been an avid football fan.

The carroty-haired man gave her the car keys. “You'll find the little fellow in space 21. Enjoy your visit.”

She hurried through the puddles and found her rental – a tiny Corsa in metallic emerald, very appropriate for Ireland. Gratefully she stowed her bag in the back and climbed inside. She pulled down the sun-vizor and combed her wet hair in the mirror and dabbed her face with her handkerchief. The rain pattered on the roof and ran down the windshield in herringbone patterns.

She was just about to start up the car when she became aware of a man watching her from the other side of the parking-lot. He was very tall and very dark, almost Spanish-looking, although his face was pale. What was strange about him was that he was standing in the pouring rain without a coat and without an umbrella, his hands in his pockets, staring at her unflinchingly, as if he had seen her before and was trying to remember who she was. The runnels of rain distorted her image of him. For a moment he appeared to have a hunched back, and then a twisted torso, and then his face became long and devilish. Sarah started up the Corsa's engine and switched on the windshield wipers, and the man became a normal man again. All the same, she couldn't think why he was staring at her like that.

She drove out of the parking-lot and the man turned around to watch her go. She kept checking her rear-view mirror to make sure that he wasn't getting into a car and following her, but he stayed where he was until she had driven round the curve in the airport roadway and he disappeared from view.

The rain continued to lash down as she negotiated Cork's south-western suburbs, past factories and road-works and mean rows of bungalows and semi-detached houses. At last she found the main road westward to Macroom, and began to make her way out into the countryside; although the rain was so torrential now that the windshield wipers couldn't keep up with it, and she could barely see where she was going. She drove for over half an hour along an empty, winding road, before she found herself in a small town with a church and a long stone wall and a sign that announced that she had reached Bandon, miles out of her way south-westward.

She stopped the car by the side of the road, and breathed, “Shit.”

She could turn back, and try to find the Macroom road again, but turning back was never in her nature. If she was careful, and followed the map, she could keep going westward, and then follow a convoluted road over the mountains that would take her to Bantry, and then north to Kenmare, which was where she was originally headed. Six or seven haughty London dealers had been on the same plane with her, and if she turned up late she would have to suffer the usual taunts about scatty women amateurs who couldn't empty piss out of a Georgian chamber pot even if the instructions were written on the bottom.

A small boy in a tweed cap and a sodden sleeveless sweater came up to her car and knocked on the window. He was pale and freckled and very earnest-looking.

“Are you lost, miss?” he wanted to know.

“Well, a bit,” she admitted. “I'm trying to find the road to Bantry.”

“Sure and that's easy,” he told her. “You follow the main road till you nearly get to the church. Then you turn right and go up the hill. Then left again, till you reach the main road. The turning for Bantry is half-way up.”

“Thanks,” she said, and wound up her window, before she realized that he had failed to tell her how far ‘half-way up' might be. Oh well, she thought, that's Ireland for you. At least the Irish are mad on purpose.

Although it was still raining. Sarah managed to find the narrow turnoff that would lead her over the hill. Through the frantically-whipping windscreen wipers. She saw a wild, green landscape of mountains and boulders, and valleys veiled with drifting rain, like processions of ghostly brides.

She carried on driving for another half-hour, gradually making her way over the mountains toward Bantry. In all this time she saw only one other vehicle, a speeding farm van, with its windows all steamed up. It overtook her at nearly sixty miles an hour and then went careering off in a plume of spray.

Just before two o'clock she reached a small village, two pubs and a post office, and she pulled up outside the least derelict-looking of the pubs. The Russet Bull, and climbed out of the car. Rain poured down the pub's steeply sloping slate roof and gurgled into its gutters. Inside, there was a long, smoky room with a flagstoned floor and battered old wooden settles. A noisy group of young people were drinking and laughing in one corner. At the far end, two determined-looking men with the tweedy jackets of farmers and the hard faces of terrorists were playing snooker. A
tape was playing a Celtic lament, all violin strings and haunted voices.

A plump fair girl behind the bar asked her what she was having.

“A sandwich, if it's not too late.”

“Too
late
?” asked the girl, in mild perplexity, as if she couldn't understand what sandwiches had to do with the time of day.

Sarah sat opposite the noisy young people with a huge wholemeal sandwich filled with slices of fresh ham and a half-pint of Guinness. The men with terrorists' faces gave her a good looking over and then went back to their game, although one of them glanced over at her and said something to the other one, who laughed a sharp knowing laugh.

On the creamy-plastered walls of the pub hung pieces of arcane agricultural equipment, with blackened iron prongs and chains and leather straps, like instruments of, torture from the Inquisition, alongside framed sepia photographs of downtrodden-looking men in cloth caps and tightly-buttoned up jackets. The rain kept on sprinkling against the windows and the endless laments elegantly wailed of lost loves and times gone by, and Sarah began to feel as if she had been here for ever and would never leave.

She had almost finished her sandwich when she noticed the man sitting in the far corner, in the gloomiest shadows, half-hidden by the trailing cigarette smoke from the snooker table. He was dark, with slashed-back hair, and his cheekbones were knobby as a steer's skull found in the desert. From where Sarah was sitting, his eyes were drowned in shadow, but she could tell that he was watching her. One hand rested on the small table in front of him, a long-fingered hand with a heavy silver ring.

He looked so much like the man who had stood watching her at Cork Airport that she felt deeply unsettled. She knew that it couldn't possibly be him. He couldn't have reached this village ahead of her, even if he had taken the Macroom road; and how could he know that she was going to come this way, and stop here?

She finished her sandwich and barely tasted it. The plump fair girl behind the bar said, “God speed, then,” and she was embarrassed because she hadn't thought of saying goodbye. “May you find your heart's desire,” the girl added, as if it were a perfectly normal thing to say, like ‘take care' or ‘see you later.' Outside it was raining even more heavily, and she had to run across to her car.

As she drove away from The Russet Bull she glanced several times in the rear-view mirror to see if the man was following her. But the pub door remained closed and soon she was round the bend and well on her way toward Bantry.

It was getting late now, and she made her way through the mountains as fast as she dared. The rain was pelting almost horizontally across the road, and the wind buffeted the car as if it was determined to blow it off the edge of the ridge and send it rolling four hundred feet into the valley below. Water cascaded from the crags on either side, and gushed down cracks and crevices into the heather. Sarah's windscreen wipers could barely cope.