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‘An armchair. It needs to go to the dump. I live in Acton Green.’
‘That’s a way out so it’ll be pricey. Forty quid.’
‘That’s fine. When can you get here?’
‘Six thirty all right?’
I told him it was fine and gave him my address. I held my breath, waiting for that spark of recognition, for him to comment that he’d been to the farm before. Instead he said,
‘All right then Milly, I’ll see you later.’
Then the call ended, just like that.
By the time I got to work I didn’t have more than five minutes to run a comb through my hair and print out my emails before Alison buzzed me to tell me that Dr Wendy Harrison was waiting in reception for me. That was a strange meeting. I’ve met some interesting clients in my time – including the man who talked to my chin rather than looking me in the eye, a woman who continuously tapped a pen against her teeth and the man who addressed all of his questions to my male colleagues rather than me – but I’ve never met anyone like Dr Harrison before. She had a very odd manner for someone with a background in nursing – clinical, rather than caring. I could feel her watching me while Gary gave his presentation and then, after she’d ordered him from the room to make more tea, she stared at me like a specimen under a microscope. Then she started asking me personal questions, her strange, fixed smile not faltering once. As I wondered if she might be on the autistic spectrum, she sprayed me with ink.
Let’s just say I won’t be gutted if we don’t win the bid.
6.12 p.m.
After a week’s worth of tidying, the house finally looks as I remember it, but it doesn’t feel like the house where I grew up. I always used to feel safe here – until the arguments started between Mum and Dad anyway. It was always draughty and the ancient cracked tiles in the kitchen were so cold I’d hop from foot to foot as I poured out my cereal, but the sounds were reassuring. It was always so noisy – the radio babbling away in the kitchen, the television blaring in the living room and Dad chopping logs in the garden while the dog barked at birds. All those noises have gone now and it’s eerily quiet. It’s true what they say, about people making a house a home. I never really understood that until now.
‘Right.’ I grab the arm of Dad’s old green armchair and pull. ‘I’m not letting Mike in this house, which means you’re going in the barn.’
I am dripping with sweat by the time I reach the back garden. The lawn is more weeds than grass and the bright pots of flowers that Mum spent hours planting and tending are long gone. The only decorative touch Dad added is a pile of abandoned car tyres and a collapsed pile of logs. The gate at the back of the garden is almost rusted shut. I have to give it a good shove before it swings open, then I drag the armchair into the yard. When this was a working farm, there would have been tractors, trailers and farm machinery filling the space, but all that’s left is a huge dilapidated barn and the three fields that wrap around the house. Dad was an architect but he had designs about becoming a farmer when he bought this place. He swiftly changed his mind after the chickens he kept in the back garden were wiped out by foxes. His next bright idea was to try and convert the barn. It’s accessible by a track that runs down the side of the house as well as through the garden, but the council rejected his planning application. He pretty much gave up on the place then, and himself.
The chair’s wheeled feet creak and groan as I drag it over the concreted yard and pull at the barn door. It’s the first time I’ve been inside since I came back. Mum hated this building. I did too.
I brace myself as the barn door swings open, but the row of steel cages still makes me catch my breath. Dad’s decision to allow the local hunt to house some of their dogs here caused the biggest argument I can ever remember my parents having. Mum, an out-and-out city girl who’d met Dad at a wedding, was horrified at the idea.
‘Fox hunting!’ she screamed as I perched at the top of the stairs in my pyjamas. ‘I’m not supporting fox hunting.’
‘No one’s saying you have to support it. You’re not going to be shoved onto a horse and made to blow a bloody horn. We’ll just be looking after the dogs. Geoffrey needs somewhere to keep them for a little—’
‘I don’t want animal rights protesters throwing paint at our car and shouting and blowing whistles outside our house. We’ve got a thirteen-year-old daughter, Steve. What if they set fire to our house like they did to Geoff’s barn?’
‘That’s not going to happen, and anyway, there’s no proof that they burned—’
‘Of course it was them. It was the same people who threw red paint all over William’s haulage trucks last year. If it was some random arsonist, why wait until the dogs were on a hunt?’
‘Oh, for god’s sake. No one’s going to burn the barn down or hurt Louise. Anyway, it’s just for a few months, until Geoff’s barn is rebuilt. You were the one who said we need to make more of an effort to be part of the community and it’s not like we’re doing anything with it.’
‘It’s our barn. We don’t have to—’
‘Whose barn is it?’
The cold silence that followed made me shiver.
‘I knew you’d do this,’ my mother said tightly. ‘Lay down the law when it suits you.’
‘I did buy the house, Maggie.’
‘You think I don’t know that?’
I’d long stopped asking my parents why they weren’t married. They both claimed that they didn’t need a piece of paper and an expensive wedding to prove how much they loved each other, but I’d once heard my mum confess to a friend that she was sad she’d never got to have her big day.
When Mum and Dad split up, she told him that he should sell the house so she could buy somewhere for me and her to live. Dad said he wasn’t going anywhere and if she was that worried about me living somewhere nice she should leave me behind. Mum said she’d rather bring me up in a hovel.
The sound of their argument was still ringing in my ears as I trudged down the stone steps that led to the dojo and opened the door. Mike was sorting the pads and gloves in the corner of the room. He took one look at me and asked what was wrong. The concern in his voice made me burst into tears. My parents were splitting up. It was the end of my world.
He put an arm around my shoulders and squeezed the top of my arm. His palm wasn’t touching the soft material of my gi for more than a couple of seconds but the warmth of his touch remained—
A violent shiver courses through me. The sun has disappeared and the sky is thick with heavy, black rain clouds so, mustering all the energy I have left, I drag the armchair into the barn. The cages are even bigger and more imposing than I remember. They’re tall enough for a man to stand up in and almost as wide, with huge great padlocks hanging from the doors. They look like somewhere to house prisoners of war, not animals. The musky, yeasty smell of dogs is long gone but the air is rich with the sour, musty scent of sawdust, hay and ammonia.
When I reach the other side of the barn, I abandon the armchair, push open the door and peer outside. Rain is bouncing off the tarmac and puddling in the cracks. The field at the end of the yard is already flooded where it dips down into the lake. Much more of this rain and the roads will flood too. I’d be cut off from the world and no one other than my solicitor and a handful of friends in London know that I’m here.
A loud, angry, insistent sound cuts through the soft pattering of the rain.
It’s a car horn.
Mike is here.
Chapter 12 (#ulink_9bf09230-8059-5e26-ab8c-eea5c3f80d80)
Lou (#ulink_9bf09230-8059-5e26-ab8c-eea5c3f80d80)
I spot the white transit van through the gap between the house and the garage as I run across the lawn. The van windows are misty with condensation and the windscreen wipers are sweeping back and forth. My hair is stuck to my cheeks, my hoody is clinging to my back and my trainers are caked in mud. I slow my pace as I reach the house and duck under the eaves, out of sight of the van. My chest is tight and I’ve got pins and needles in both of my arms. I have never, ever felt more scared in my life. Why did I think this was a good idea? I’ve got no mobile signal, no neighbours and no way of calling for help. Mike never threatened me, but I know how dangerous he can be. If anything happened to me, it would be days before anyone sounded the alarm. But why would he turn on me? When the police arrested him, he was still in love with me. I didn’t testify against him. And he has no idea that I’m the one who reported him to the police for kissing Chloe.
The horn sounds again, making me jump. There’s no way Mike could have seen me. I could just stay here, out of sight, until he gives up and drives away. I don’t have to do this.
But what about Chloe? a small voice whispers at the back of my brain. Mike will continue to abuse her. If she’s not already broken, she soon will be. Could you live with that, knowing you could have stopped it?
I tried. I rang the police. I visited her parents. I spoke to her. Even if I do talk to Mike there’s no guarantee anything I say will make a difference.
You wanted to do this. You wanted to confront him, to make him face up to what he did to you. You wanted him to know how much his ‘love’ fucked up your life. That’s why you moved up here, Lou. To exorcise your demons. If you don’t, you’ll spend the rest of your life screwing up relationships with decent men like Ben. Just get it over and done with.
I step back into the rain, through the gap between the house and garage, and walk up to the van. The driver side window opens slowly. An elbow appears, swiftly followed by a face.
‘Milly Dawson?’
‘Mike.’
I brace myself, waiting for his eyebrows to raise and his jaw to drop. He didn’t react on the phone when I gave him my address but he had to recognise the house as he drove up the track. And he has to know who I am.
But there’s no spark of recognition in his eyes as they flit over my face.
It’s the strangest sensation, staring into the eyes of the man I once loved and feared in equal measure. It’s him and yet it’s not him. His face, once so familiar, has been stolen by a much older man. There’s a sagginess to his jawline that wasn’t there before and a hollowing beneath his cheekbones. His eyebrows are thicker and wirier, the hoods of his eyes are heavier, almost obscuring the bright blue of his irises. There’s no passion or love behind his gaze. As I continue to stare, the edges of his lips curl up into a smile and he gives me a little nod. He doesn’t recognise me at all.
‘You might want to get a coat on,’ he says. ‘Although I’m not sure you could get much wetter.’
He laughs then and the sound catches me by surprise. His face may have changed and his voice may have become a little raspier but his laugh is the same.
‘I’m …’ I pull my hood over my head and plunge my hands into the pockets of my hoody. ‘I’m okay.’
‘Well, if you’re sure.’ He gestures at the house with his thumb. ‘In there, is it?’
For a moment I have no idea what he’s talking about but then I remember – I asked him to take the armchair to the tip.
‘It’s in the barn.’
‘Interesting place to keep a chair.’ He raises an eyebrow. ‘Where’s the barn?’
‘In the yard, past the garden.’
He moves to look out of the window even though there’s no way he can see into the garden from the angle of the van.
‘Or you could take the track round the house and I could open the gate to the yard.’
He looks back towards the garden, as though considering his options. A dimple appears in his chin as he presses his lips together. I used to push my little finger into that indentation to try and make it disappear.
‘My left leg’s a bit fucked. I’ll drive. Get in.’
The command makes my blood run cold but, after a moment’s hesitation, I do as he says.
We are sitting so close that, when he just changed gear, I had to lean to my left to avoid his forearm brushing mine. A wave of panic courses through me. The last time I was in a car with this man we were driving through France. But Mike doesn’t recognise me. He did a quick sweep of my body as I rounded the van, a casual appraisal any man might do to a woman he’s never met before, but there was no spark of interest when I opened the passenger door and got in. Why would there be? I’m a grown woman, not a child.
As he navigates his way back down to the road and up the muddy track to the barn he chatters away about nothing in particular – the weather, the flooding, the news. I nod and shrug but I’m not really listening. I can’t stop staring at his face. He’s forty-nine now and his hair is more grey than black, but it’s still thick and wavy, cut short above the ears and at the nape of his neck. Deep lines stripe across his brow and fan out at the corner of his eyes. He looks old and tired.
I was afraid that all the feelings I’d had as a teenager would come flooding back and overwhelm me, but I don’t feel love or desire. Not even hate or fear. What I feel, as I look at his long, thick fingers curved over the steering wheel, is revulsion.
‘Here we are then.’ He pulls on the handbrake and turns off the engine. We’re in the yard. Parked up outside the barn.
‘In here is it?’ Mike says, gesturing at the barn, as he gets out of the van. It’s raining heavily now and there’s an air of impatience in his voice. Am I keeping him from something? An illicit meeting with Chloe perhaps?
‘That’s right.’
He doesn’t say anything as he lollops past me – there’s definitely something wrong with his left leg – but his head turns sharply as he opens the barn door. He’s spotted the cages.
‘Got dogs, have you?’
‘No,’ I say. ‘They were—’
But he’s not interested. He’s already halfway across the barn. He grunts as he squats to pick up Dad’s green armchair. He was the strongest, fittest man I knew eighteen years ago. Now he’s unfit and wheezy, with a stomach that hangs over the belt of his jeans.
‘Mike, before you put the chair in the van you need to—’
He grunts again as he lifts the chair up. ‘I’m a bit pushed for time at the moment, but if you need to book in another job give Joy a call and she’ll sort something out.’
‘It’s not about a job.’
The expression on his face switches from friendly to irritated as he takes a step towards me. ‘I’m sorry, love, but I haven’t got time for a chat.’ He pauses to take a breath. ‘I have to be somewhere after this.’
‘I’d rather you stayed, Mike. And it would be in your best interests to listen.’
I’m not going to let him walk away without hearing me out.
‘Look,’ he sighs heavily, ‘I don’t know what this is about but this is heavy and—’
He’s interrupted by the tinny sound of a mobile phone ringtone. He lowers the chair to the ground, reaches into his pocket and presses his phone against his ear.
‘Hello Chlo, are you okay?’
I stiffen at the sound of her name. I was right. He was trying to get away so he could meet up with her. The sick bastard.
‘It’s okay, it’s okay,’ Mike says. He’s lowered his voice but I can still hear every word. ‘Take a deep breath. All right … now tell me what’s going on.’ He pauses. ‘What? Oh no. Oh, Chlo, there’s got to be a mistake. There’s no way you would …’ He pauses again. ‘What woman? What did she say?’ He turns, almost in slow motion, and his eyes meet mine. He scans my face, his eyes clouded with confusion, as the tinny voice in his ear rattles on. The confidence I felt less than a minute ago vanishes. Why is he looking at me like that?
‘Mike,’ I say as the confusion on his face is replaced by shock. ‘Mike you need to—’
He holds out a hand, silencing me.
I don’t breathe a word. Instead I take a step backwards, towards the door. I shouldn’t have done this.
‘I’ll give you a ring back in a bit, Chloe. Okay? Stay where you are and I’ll come and get you. It’s going to be okay. I promise.’
I take another step back. My heel catches on something and I have to steady myself on the wall.
‘It’s you, isn’t it?’ Mike says, looking straight at me as he hangs up. ‘You fucking bitch.’
Chapter 13 (#ulink_54124ed3-5796-529c-9c67-d365183a9729)
Lou (#ulink_54124ed3-5796-529c-9c67-d365183a9729)
It all happens so quickly. One second Mike is on the other side of the barn, the next he’s speeding towards me, a look of absolute fury on his face. With no time to run, all I can do is raise my hands in self-defence and brace myself. In a heartbeat he’s right next to me but he’s unsteady on his feet and I’m quicker and fitter than he is and, as his fingers grasp at my hair, I swerve out of reach. Before he can regain his balance, I shift my weight to the left and kick out with my right leg. The sole of my trainer smashes into Mike’s bad leg. It’s like felling a tree with a single axe blow, the way he lurches to one side, his left leg crumpling beneath him. I kick out at him again, this time landing my foot square in his chest. The force of the blow sends him reeling backwards and through the open door of one of the cages. His arms flail at his sides as he tries and fails to weave his fingers through the metal bars, then SMACK, the back of his head makes contact with a pile of bricks stacked up next to a bucket.
He’s not moving. His eyes are closed, his neck tilted to the left, his head propped up on a brick, his fingers unfurled and slack at his sides. Across the barn the armchair lies on its side; Mike’s mobile phone is half-buried in the straw beside it. I reach into my back pocket for my mobile. No reception.
‘Mike?’ I take a step towards the cage. My heart is beating so hard I feel sick. When his head hit the brick it sounded like a watermelon being hurled at the floor. If he’s not dead he’s badly injured. I need to call an ambulance.
I move towards the entrance to the barn, hesitate, then walk back to the cage. I should lock it. Just in case he comes round and tries to find me. Mike’s eyes are still closed and he hasn’t changed position.
‘Mike!’ I shout his name. ‘Mike, wake up!’
When he doesn’t stir, I cross the barn and pull a bamboo stick from a pile propped up in the corner. I push it into Mike’s leg. He doesn’t so much as twitch. I prod him harder. Nothing.
I step into the cage, not taking my eyes off his face as I crouch down and reach for his wrist. His eyes remain closed, his lips slightly parted as I extend the first two fingers of my left hand and feel for his pulse. If he’s got one, I’ll lock him in and ring an ambulance. If he’s dead, I’ll ring the police.
My hand is shaking so much I can’t hold my fingers still against the thin skin of his wrist. I try again, wrapping my thumb around to anchor them in place, but I can’t feel anything. I’ve only ever taken my own pulse before. Rain is battering against the roof of the shed and the wind is whistling through the open door. Was that a dull throb I just felt beneath my fingertips? I close my eyes to concentrate. Yes, there’s a pulse. It’s strong and deep and—
A scream catches in my throat as Mike’s arm twists beneath my hand, his fingers close around my wrist and he looks straight at me.
