Authors: Sam Baker
‘What kind of car?’
‘Any kind.’
‘No,’ she said.
Ghost sits across the lintel of the kitchen door, scowling when she returns from putting out rubbish. Standing, he arches his back, bends his spine in the opposite direction so his head is flat to the ground and sits down sulkily.
‘Move then.’
When she’s certain he has no intention of doing any such thing, Helen steps over him, shutting the door behind her, bolting it top and bottom. If Ghost wants to come in he can damn well use the water butt, and the missing pane in the pantry window, which she dutifully uncovered for him. The plates she and Tom used for toast are still in the sink, along with several mismatched glasses and mugs. Knowing the water from the hot tap won’t be hot enough on its own to wash up, she boils a kettle first, and later puts the newly clean dishes neatly on the rack, running the mugs and glasses under a dribble of cold before upending them. The knives and teaspoons she dries with a tea towel and puts in a drawer that contained beetles and a desiccated bat when she first moved in.
She’s humming, something from when she was younger.
Something really dated. The Cranberries, quite possibly. From habit, she pours herself a glass of water, and wanders up to the little sitting room with the water in one hand and her laptop in the other. Putting the water on the table, she plugs in her laptop and reaches for the lamp.
‘Leave it.’
Helen jumps so hard she knocks the water over. It drips in the half-light on to synthetic carpet.
‘Now look what you’ve done.’
Instinctively she drops to her knees, not knowing what to use to wipe it up. Art sighs.
‘Fetch a towel from the bathroom.’ He says it like she’s stupid, like she’d lose her own head if it wasn’t screwed on.
She does as he says, hurrying to grab a towel from the rail and mopping frantically at the wet carpet.
‘Start with the table.’
Lifting the lamp, she remembers to dry its base before putting it down on a dry patch of carpet. She wipes the table top, returns the lamp and dabs at the carpet below the table as best she can. Then, with the room and the corridor in near darkness, she replaces the now damp towel on the rail and returns to where Art waits, in Gil’s armchair. She could run for the front door and wrestle its bolts open, but there’s no point. By the time she’s unlocked it he’ll have caught up with her. And that would be worse. In trying to lock the monsters out, she’s locked herself in. The irony doesn’t escape her.
‘Strange place to live,’ Art says, conversationally.
‘The flat burned down.’
‘I know, Helen. How did that happen?’
Helen shrugs, before remembering how much he hates her shrugging. ‘I don’t know,’ she says truthfully. ‘I woke up on the bed and there was smoke. Flames were licking up the curtains. The red ones on the long window.’
‘The red ones on the long window …’ he mimics.
‘I managed to get out.’
‘That was clever of you, Helen … Why did you run away?’
‘Why did I …?’
‘Helen …’
‘I don’t know. There was a body. I saw a body. I thought it was you. There were flames.’ She’s talking too fast.
‘You thought it was me, and you didn’t check to see if I was alive?’
She hesitates long enough to feel the air chill. Art never likes having to wait for answers. He doesn’t like having to wait for anything. Being
made
to wait, as he put it. In the year it went wrong, after the miscarriage, her chief rebellion had been walking too slowly.
‘Art, there was a body. The police found a body.’
Carl, she wants to say, it was Carl. Art, why did you kill Carl? She forces herself to stay silent.
‘And you saw it?’
‘Not clearly.’ She can see it now, in her head, though. She can see it through an orange haze. She can see what she couldn’t see before. That the body is too short and thickset, the torso too muscular, to be Art. ‘Yes … yes, I saw it.’
The atmosphere crackles around her uninvited guest, she can almost hear it. ‘How do you think this fire started, Helen?’
‘I don’t know. I don’t remember anything at all.’
‘You don’t?’
‘It’s all blank.’
‘Shock,’ he says thoughtfully. ‘That stress thing you get.’
He gets up and walks towards her and Helen feels her body still.
‘You must have been terrified,’ he says. ‘So terrified, you didn’t think to go to the police.’
Helen opens her mouth, shuts it again, brain rushing to work out what she’s supposed to say next.
‘They’re looking for you, you know. The police. Must be frightening for you.’
His breath is hot on her neck as he comes to stand behind her. Helen forces herself not to freeze, to wait for whatever comes next. The worst thing is she has no idea what that might be. He puts his hand up to the back of her neck and squeezes slightly. He could be massaging the muscles there. He could be seeing how tense she is. He could be about to strangle her. Very slowly he begins to stroke her hair.
‘I don’t like your hair like this, Helen,’ he says. ‘The cut’s terrible. The colour’s wrong. You should dye it back.’
The action is precise, agonisingly repetitive.
‘Aren’t you glad to see me, Helen?’
She nods, gets away without answering properly because he can feel the nod beneath his fingers.
‘I’m glad,’ Art says. ‘So glad I’ve found you. It hasn’t been easy you know.’ He puts his arms around her, hugging her tight. She can feel him go hard against her. His hands grip the side of her thighs, thumbs digging into the front as he holds her in place. There will be bruises. They both know there will be bruises.
‘We should go to bed,’ he says. ‘It’s been a while. I’ve missed you so very much.’
Helen swallows. She doesn’t know what to say. Except, she does. With Art there is only ever one answer.
‘Of course,’ she says.
He knows where her room is. Just as he knew there was a bathroom on this floor when he sent her for a towel. She tries not to wonder how long he’s been in the house. How long he’s been watching. Did he get in when she put out the rubbish? Or before? A long time before, waiting silently for the right moment? She pushes the thought away. When he flicks on the light in her bedroom, pulls back the blankets and looks at the bottom sheet she wonders what he thinks he knows.
‘Undress then.’
She kicks off her trainers. Remembering at the last minute to put them together neatly.
Art smiles, watching as she pulls her T-shirt over her head and folds it before putting it on the chair. She hesitates and his smile freezes, then she reaches behind to undo her bra. ‘You always did have a good body,’ he says, and she makes herself remain still as he reaches for her breasts.
‘You like that, don’t you?’
His eyes are fixed on hers in an unbroken stare. It always was one of the most unnerving things about him.
‘You like everything I do … Touch yourself.’
His fingers tighten when she doesn’t immediately obey. The slight smile sliding from his lips, his gaze hardening.
‘I-I need to use the loo,’ says Helen.
‘
I need to use the loo
…’
She hates the mockery with which he repeats her words, she always has.
He examines her, as if looking at a curious object, his grip just this side of properly hurting as he leans in close for a better look. She refuses to shiver. Her bladder will not empty itself. It will not.
‘When did you last have a bath?’
‘This morning.’
‘Helen …’
‘Yesterday. I had one yesterday.’
‘Morning or night?’
‘Morning.’ It’s the right answer. Sighing, Art releases her. ‘Wash well when you’re done. All over. And clean your teeth.’
In the bathroom the shakes set in, where Art can’t see them and decide he’d like to amuse himself by deepening her fear. After she’s peed, she catches sight of herself half-naked in the mirror. There is such fear in her eyes. A look that wasn’t there this morning.
It has been there as long as Art has.
‘Don’t,’ she tells herself. ‘Either wash and get back in there or think of something else.’ But what? That’s the problem. What else?
She flushes the loo again, very loudly this time. Holding the handle to drain the cistern.
See, I have been doing something.
Running the tap, she splashes water on her face and looks up to see tears. On holiday with Art, a belated honeymoon at a hotel in Turkey he chose from a boutique website – Just us, babes, help us get over it, what more could we want? – an argument on the first night left her with bruises impossible to hide beneath bikini bottoms. A middle-aged woman climbing out of the pool behind her came up to Helen later, when she was waiting for Art in the bar, and told her to get out now because it would only get worse. She was trying to be kind, Helen knew that now. At the time, two days into a two-week holiday, two months married, one month miscarried, it felt like cruelty.
Being with Art wasn’t something she knew how to get out of.
‘Don’t get yourself killed,’ the woman had whispered, squeezing Helen’s arm, her expression a mixture of exasperation and despair.
Don’t get yourself killed.
What was it Art said?
You didn’t check to see if I was alive.
Only, the body wasn’t him, was it? And then his next question. ‘How did the fire start?’ When she’d replied that she didn’t know, he’d said, ‘You don’t remember anything at all?’
Was that why she was still alive? She didn’t remember anything at all …
Helen has pushed open the bathroom window without realising.
The roof of the outhouse slides away towards the ground. Flushing the loo one final time, she turns on both taps to the basin, grabs a filthy T-shirt from the laundry pile and drags it over her head before clambering on to the cistern and squeezing through the window, pulling it to behind her.
Bare feet slide on filthy tiles, slip over the edge and she tumbles down, almost managing to land upright, until she buckles at the last minute, feeling rose-thorns rip her arm.
Up above, there’s a crash as the bathroom door is booted in. Art slams open the window and peers down as she scrambles into the hedge out of sight. He hates getting his nails dirty. He’ll regard kicking in the door as getting his nails dirty. She waits for as long as she dares, and then crawls along the side of the outhouse, down past the stables and ducks inside a square of rotting and overgrown boxwood topiary just as Art appears round the side of the house.
Far from looking angry, he’s smiling. As if her presumption in trying to escape amuses him. Helen feels nausea rise. Pushing back into her shelter, she watches him hesitate as he looks around the ruined garden and his gaze seems to settle on her. It’s lighter outside than in the darkened house but sunset has been and dusk is soon.
There’s a rustle and Art swings round in time to see Ghost jump from the pantry window. Art loathes cats. He steps towards Ghost, who stares him out. Art takes another step and the cat eyes him contemptuously. When Helen sees Art dip for a rock, she crawls from her hiding place, her pale T-shirt catching his eye in the twilight.
‘Helen …’
She hesitates.
‘Don’t make me come after you.’
Turning, she sees him begin to move towards her.
Suddenly the cat streaks across wet grass as if he’s spotted prey and passes just in front of Art, who trips. A howl of fury bursts from Ghost, who hisses and then yowls again, his anger echoing in waves off rotting walls. Still down, Art kicks out and misses.
Breaking cover, Helen runs. Through the lychgate, which slams behind her as she heads up the path towards the Dales. In the distance she can hear Art calling her name. Seconds later, the gate slams again and she knows he’s behind her.
The front door stands open and the black cat Helen has adopted, although it was probably the other way round, lies across the step. It glares balefully, which seems to be its job, and looks not remotely surprised when both of the newcomers step over him.
‘Helen …’ Tom’s shout is loud enough to fill the house. He looks in the kitchen, tries the door to the downstairs drawing room, which is locked, and races upstairs towards the small sitting room. Gil follows. He’d have been more careful; called from the front door, taken longer to search downstairs, kept calling Helen’s name as he went upstairs. He finds Tom standing in the doorway of Helen’s bedroom, an unreadable expression on his face.
In his hands are a T-shirt and a bra. A slightly muddy pair of women’s plimsolls sit neatly on top of a discarded magazine.
‘There’s a tap running.’
Tom keeps looking at the T-shirt and bra.
In the bathroom there are two taps running into the basin, the hot tank has run entirely cold. Turning them both off, Gil instinctively mops up splashes with the bath mat. He looks at the wide-open window, the scattered pile of filthy clothes, and the unexpectedly clean track down the middle of otherwise filthy roof tiles.
‘She got away.’
Tom glances up from the clothes he’s clutching as Gil comes back into the room.
‘She escaped through the bathroom window. You can see how she got to the ground. It has to be Huntingdon. It was never Ridley. It was always Huntingdon.’
Tom opens his mouth as if to ask what the hell he’s on about and then says, ‘I’ll call the police.’
Gil shakes his head. ‘They’ll tell you to wait here until they arrive. Do you want to wait here until they arrive?’
‘They’ll have a helicopter.’
‘Which will take hours to get airborne.’ He sees that Tom is about to object and cuts him off. ‘The paperwork, not the actual take-off. Call them when we know what’s happening. Of course, you’ll have to work out what to say first …’ Together they go downstairs. It’s Tom who discovers blood on the roses. He looks for more and is relieved when he doesn’t find it.
‘Gil, we need the police.’
‘And you’ll say what? Someone back from the dead is trying to kill someone the French police want to eliminate from their enquiries?’