Hold My Hand (34 page)

Chapter Fifty-eight

I must stay calm. I must stay calm. Got to lock the door, first. Lock him out. Stop him coming in.

She blows out her candle. He's probably already seen its shadow, crossing the windows, but she can't let him know where she is now.

He's here. How did he find me? I don't…

Bridget stoops, lays down her burden, silently, silently, on the flagstones. There is sweat – cold – on her forehead. She bites her lip.

What do I do?

Oh, God, Carol. He's done something to Carol. That's why she's not answering her phone: he's got it, somehow, and that means he's... oh Carol. My friend. Please be okay. Wherever you are. Please don't let him have...

Every nerve tells her to back away from him, not to go closer. She can see the light approaching. He's coming. He's coming to the door.

Don't.

She has to force herself to breathe. Feels it stagger in, in, and release slowly, slowly, as though he will hear her from the other side of the door. Bridget drops to her knees. Crawls forward. Reaches out with unjointed fingers and grasps the bolt. Turns it, slides it slowly, slowly, into the hasp.

The crunch of boots on stone. He's in the porch. Stamping the snow from his insteps.

She reaches up, cowers below the window as she takes the key in her fist. It's in the lock already, where it sits permanently, to prevent it being lost. He'll hear me. He'll hear. He must know I'm here. Must know.

He clears his throat. He's not in a hurry. He's got all night.

Bridget turns the key. Scrape and clunk of ancient metalwork.

He goes quiet. He heard me.

The door handle begins to turn. She can hear him breathing.

He must be able to hear me, too.

She presses herself against the panel, tries to hide herself in the dark. I can't move away. If I try to run, he'll see me through the window. He'll know I'm here. He'll know I know.

Oh, God, help me.

The door moves against her back. Slightly, slightly. And the locks catch, hold, give no more.

Oh, God, help me.

“Faaa,” he mutters. It's him. It's him. She hears him step back into the porch, shuffle around on the stones. Lifts her hand up again, frozen in space, takes the key, lightly, lightly, between her fingers. Eases it, bit by bit, from the lock.

The glass above her shatters. A single tiny pane, big enough for a hand, an arm.

She runs for it. Hears him swear again as he realises she's been within hand's grasp, hears the door resound in its frame as though a body has been hurled against it.

And now she's going full pelt. Through the dining room. Past the windows, too high to see out of, past the table, the great cupboard, past the office door into the kitchen, where appliances hunch silent, brooding, without their power.

Oh, God, help me.

She can hear him, now, wading through the snow, in her wake, slowed by the weight, but coming. Please, please, please…

She snatches the scullery key from the hook inside the kitchen, runs to the door, turns the lock, throws the bolts. Oh, God. None of it will keep him out for long. He'll find a way. He'll find his way in and he'll find his way up the stairs and…

Yasmin. Oh, darling. I am so afraid.

She's screaming inside as she runs up the stairs. Lets it burst from her lungs when she reaches the top. Flounders up the corridor, throws open her daughter's bedroom door. “Darling! Darling! Oh, God,
quickly!
”

She feels her way toward the bed, trips on a discarded shoe and nearly turns turtle. Come on, come on, come
on
. Yasmin shouts out in the dark. “Who's there? Who is it?”

It pulls her up, forces her calm. I can't give her my panic. I can't feed on hers.

“Shhh,” she says. “It's me.”

“What is it?”

“Darling,” she says, “We've got to…”

“He's here,” says Yasmin.

She considers, momentarily, a lie. Then: “Yes,” she replies. “We've got to… quickly. Come on. Hold my hand. We'll…”

He'll find us. Wherever we go he'll find us.

I'll call the police. We'll barricade ourselves in somewhere, and wait it out. My bag. In the bedroom.

Yasmin is silent as they jog along the corridor. She can feel him breathe. Feel him think. He'll be working his way round the house. Finding the chink, finding the weak spots. It's all so old. The window frames are only held together by their paint, some of them. He'll find one. Oh, God, did I check the other door? At the other end of the house? After the Bensons left?

Cold washes through her. She feels weak. Not sure if her knees will support her.

Now they're inside the bedroom, and she's hauling at the chest-of-drawers, dragging it across the carpet. “Find the phone,” she says. “Dial 999.” The chest is heavy; old teak, weighed down by clothes and precious things. If I wasn't so afraid, she thinks, I wouldn't be able to move this. I'm like one of those people who lift cars off their children. Adrenalin. It makes you strong.

You get adrenalin from anger, too. He'll be as strong.

Don't. Don't. Just push.

She heaves it across the door. Pushes it, as hard as she can, up against the panels.

“It's just beeps,” says Yasmin, her face lit ghostly green by the caller display.

She sits against the chest, holds out a hand in the dark. “Give it here.”

There are no bars. No bars. This damn signal. She stares at the phone, despairingly, throws it across the room. Oh, Carol, what's happened to you? He's done something, I know he has. You would have found a way to get a message to me otherwise, I know you would...

“Call them on the landline, Mummy,” says Yasmin, calmly.

“The electricity's out,” she says. “The phone won't work.”

“What are we going to do?”

Bridget puts her head in her hands. “I don't know, baby. I don't know.”

Chapter Fifty-nine

He's got the scent of the chase now. So near to getting her, and so far. He brushed the tips of her hair with his fingertips as she slipped away from him, and now his blood is hot. He prowls round the house, snuffs the air like a hunting wolf.

There are signs of them all over. Her car in the driveway, a six-inch crust of snow on roof and windscreen, a Barbie, half-naked, on the back seat. Through a window, in a room full of washing machines where sheets hang from a ceiling rack like Spanish moss, his wife's old suede coat and Yasmin's anorak, a pair of tiny, unfamiliar boots lined up inside the door. Two pairs of woollen gloves, carelessly discarded on a worktop. He feels a surge of possession run through him, proximity heightening the senses. She is mine. She is mine. Soon she will be.

He tries the door. No give. It's okay. I'll find a way. There will be a way she hasn't thought of.

The snow on this side of the house is battered, scuffed half-way across the lawn. A scruffy little snowman, two feet high, with twigs for arms and black-coal eyes stares, sightlessly at him. He can see them now, oblivious, wavelets of powdered white frothing about their feet. They are laughing. Careless. Thoughtless.

Kieran bites his lip. His eyes narrow. Yeah. Let them forget. They'll remember.

He trudges on, tries a little push on each window he passes. Not firm in their frames, several of them. High up, though.

She knows I'm here. She'll never see me coming.

He finds another door, at the end, tucked into a corner where a dry stone wall runs down towards an area of land where the snow lies so flat he assumes it to be concrete. It's a cramped, low door of tongue-and-groove, its handle small enough to fit a wardrobe. Weaker than the others, its ability to keep people out depending mostly on the assumption that it will never be noticed.

He tries it, for luck. The handle turns uselessly in its socket: it's not attached by anything other than a few screws. It's for pulling, not fixing.

He looks up. Smiles. A Yale lock. A bloody great mansion like this, and they've got it tied up with a Yale lock.

He lifts a boot. Kicks. The door shudders in its frame, holds.

“Fuck,” says Kieran, watches his breath cloud out on frozen air. Fuck, it's cold tonight. You can tell this air's coming down from Siberia. So much for global fucking –

This time, it cracks. Not the lock, which holds. Not the panels. Kieran lets out a laugh. They've put in a new door, but they’ve left the bloody frame. Rotten old weathered timber, and the hinges are just coming free with a couple of kicks.

Oh, I'm in, he thinks. I'm in now. I'm coming.

He steps back, rubs his hands together, blows on them open-mouthed.

Something moves in the corner of his vision.

Kieran's head snaps round. There's a child standing in the snow.

“Hah!”

She's sent her out. She's done a
Shining
on me, sent the kid out to save herself. Sent her out in her bloody nightie and all.

She is walking with her back to him, determinedly, head down so her features are obscured in the moonlight. Walking steadily, away from him, strangely unhampered by the snow beneath her feet.

She's grown, he thinks. And what's happened to her hair? Has she dyed it or something? Did she really think a bad dye-job would put me off the scent?

“Yasmin,” he calls.

The child doesn't pause. Doesn't look up. Doesn't change her course. She is walking toward the small two-storey building down at the edge of the flat place. Walking away.

“Yasmin, it's Daddy,” he calls. “Don't be frightened.”

If she's afraid, she doesn't show it.

Why won't you look at me?

He sets off in her wake. What sort of nightie is that? It looks like it's trailing along the ground. Has she started dressing her in her own stuff, now?

She's got skinny little arms. They look slightly blue in this light. She's lost weight, a lot of it.

“Honey,” he calls, “it's me. Come on. Come to Daddy.”

His boot catches in something and he lurches forward, can't save himself. Lands face-down and catches a mouthful of ice. “Fuck,” he says again. Looks up and sees that she has already reached the shed and is standing in its shadow, watching him, a swathe of unbroken snow between her and him.

“Look, it's not funny!” he shouts. No need to fear the neighbours here. No-one to interfere. “I'm not laughing, okay? C'mere, Yasmin! Now! I'm telling you!”

She turns, goes inside.

And now he's angry. Angry with her, as well as her bitch mother. Pushes himself upright and stumble-runs in the direction his daughter has taken. Right. Have it that way. I'll just bloody take you. Take you and go, and you can find out what happens if you fight, little bitch. You're
my bloody daughter
. You will do what I say, whether you like it or not.

The snow gets deeper as he approaches the building; it's drifted two, three feet thick. He is too enraged to stop, to notice, to wonder why it seems unbroken, why there is no sign of her passing: he just wades, arms flailing, to the door. It's shut, of course. She thinks she can shut me out. Thinks that all it will take is a locked door and I'll be thwarted.

He steadies himself, gets balanced, kicks. More rotten wood. The screws holding the padlock staple to the outside come clean away from the stanchion. The door thuds dully back, rebounds, comes to a rest.

Kieran switches on the torch, steps inside.

It’s not a shed: it's a boathouse. One that smells of rot and fungus, like wet places do. He plays the torch over unplastered walls, over mooring post and rotten wooden steps which lead blindly down into black, scummy water. Not frozen, he notices. You'd have thought it would be frozen.

There's a dinghy, long since holed and sunk, lying prow-up in the dock, and a scrap of rope tied around the post, but otherwise there's nothing here. It's been cleared out, thoroughly: none of the pots of paint, bits of cushion, propped-up oars, you would expect. The building hasn't simply been abandoned: it's been scraped clean. A tangle of cobwebs dangles a collection of blackened dust-bunnies from the beams above his head, but otherwise the room is bare.

From above, a giggle.

Right. That's how you want to play it.

He ducks below the lintel, steps carefully onto the concrete dock. Skirts around the edge to the rough wooden stairs that lead upward from the far corner. Stands at the bottom and calls up.

“Yasmin! You might as well come down. I know you're up there.”

Silence.

He puts a hand on the wall, cranes to see her.

“You won't like it if I have to come and get you,” he threatens.

She laughs again. It's not a nice laugh. It's mocking, contemptuous. He feels the heat in his veins again. Grips the torch and strides up the stairs. I'll get you and I'll fucking –

She's in the corner. He sees her straight away because this room, like the one below it, has been stripped of its contents. She sits with her back to the wall, knees drawn up to her chest inside her loose white garment. Her head is bowed, mop of straggled tangles falling toward her knees. Her feet, poking out from beneath her hem, are bare.

“Come on,” he says. Tries to sound calm, persuasive. Starts across the floor toward her. The smell of rot and rotten things is stronger, here; trapped without an outlet. The boards feel spongy, unresponsive, beneath his boots. “You must be freezing.”

The child uncurls, abruptly, aggressively. Her face is yellow, her teeth black and snaggled, her eyes bright with rage and hatred. She's not Yasmin. She's not any child as he knows them. She's something else. Something long-lost, black and angry.

“I won't go back,” she says, and smiles a smile that holds no joy.

He is startled. Steps back, heavily. Feels the floor give, then splinter, beneath him. Hovers above the hole for a moment, hopelessly grasping at thin air, then spirals, thrashing, down into the water below.