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The cabin in the woods – isn’t that a film? – is about twenty-odd miles away from civilisation of any real kind, unless you count the wildlife – who, incidentally, can be a massive help if I want to dispose of smaller body parts.
There have been four girls before Bryony. Later, I’ll have them all moved to a different place, a wasteland about forty miles from where I live.
Then it’s just a matter of time before they’re found. I don’t think it’ll be long.
Bryony’s a bit different though. When I move them, I don’t want to leave her with the rest. She fought back more. She was in a different league.
I pick up my spade and go outside the cabin. The air outside is heavy with damp, but it’s mild enough.
I go to the back of the cabin and out towards the undergrowth.
I step over the four raised mounds of earth near the line of trees and begin to dig. Nothing fancy, or too deep, just enough like when you sow a row of seeds.
All I can hear, now the blood in my ears has stopped pounding, is the spade slicing through the soil.
It takes no time at all and I go back to get Bryony.
When I’m done, and have scattered a layer of soil over her, I take a few steps back and lean my weight against the spade.
I look at the five mounds of earth, from the bottom where their feet are, right up until I reach their faces.
Five bodies buried up to their necks, five faces left uncovered, looking skyward. They remind me of marble statues or the effigies you see adorning the top of a sarcophagus.
They are less than perfect, obviously. I can’t stop decomposition.
This is my garden, they are my seeds. Pretty things might grow here, even after they’ve gone, and join the sea of reds and pinks that are here already.
I head back inside, leaving the spade outside for later.
I go to the mirror on the cabin wall and take a moment to study my face.
So, there it is. This is me. What I do.
It’s a primal instinct. Something tuned in, buried deep, part of my DNA, never to be erased.
People write books on it – the reasons why people kill. Reality is, they’ve only just scratched the surface. They don’t know how deep down the rabbit hole it goes.
They don’t know about me.
As I said, it’s a primal instinct.
And that’s what makes me so dangerous.
PART ONE (#ulink_3ff0e384-bb68-5908-87ee-7bd94814e334)
Ring-a-ring o’ roses,
A pocket full of posies,
A-tishoo! A-tishoo!
We all fall down.
…We all fall down.
We all fall.
We. All.
Fall.
CHAPTER 1 (#ulink_6782acd1-d199-5806-933f-5672d311a36d)
CHARLOTTE
The taste of acrid smoke, like ash in my mouth.
This is what I always feel in that first waking moment after a nightmare.
The ashes in my mouth. That and the heat from the fire.
Since the accident it’s all I can think about when I shut my eyes at night.
I remember . . . I remember opening my eyes, seeing twisted and bent metal keeping me prisoner in the wrecked shell that was my old Citroën Xsara.
I say was, because in the immediate aftermath, from where I was lying, it didn’t resemble anything like a car.
I remember the heat of the fire, seeing the flames licking ever closer. I remember looking at twisted metal, torn upholstery and flames drawing dangerously close to the exposed fuel pipe.
It’s like I was in a daze. I couldn’t think about what I had to do next. I was, I guess, frozen in that moment, unable to move.
Then I was dragged out of what remained of my car by the man who had been in the vehicle behind mine. Assessing the damage, he knew I had maybe a minute before the car’s petrol tank exploded.
He’d cleared us to a distance of about thirty feet before the inevitable happened.
In one deafening explosion, the car was completely engulfed in flames, and I breathed a sweet sigh of relief that I was not burning to death.
It was a miracle I was alive or that things didn’t turn out worse considering my injuries. I suffered concussion, cuts, bruises, fractured ribs and a punctured lung, but the worst was my face . . .
I’d survived a collision with an HGV that had misjudged a bend in the road while coming from the opposite direction. The driver, Paul Selby, caught my car, crushing the side, and the force had spun me around before I came off the road, going through a fence and down an embankment. The car had flipped, rolling several times before coming to a standstill. Wreckage was strewn across the road I’d previously been driving on, and I was now stationary in a field.
Paul Selby was arrested for dangerous driving, using a mobile at the wheel and causing injury by dangerous driving. He got bail, but the court date is coming up and I can’t deny the stress has been getting to me of late.
I have to keep it all in perspective, though – or so I keep being told.
It’s a crash no one should have survived.
But somehow I did.
Six months on and I had used the time to reassess my life. Life is precious. Life can be taken as quickly as it can be given.
My daughter, Elle, is currently telling me she wants a car for her seventeenth birthday, which is in almost two weeks’ time.
I keep seeing that HGV and my insides do a somersault.
‘I’ll need driving lessons too. I can’t have a car just sitting there on the drive,’ she’s telling me.
I want to scream at her not to drive.
Ever.
It’s too dangerous and I just want to protect her. She’s my only child and what if it had been her in that crash? What if something like what happened to me, happens to her?
I grip hold of the tea towel I have been using to dry the dishes, and try to pull myself together. I’m being irrational. That’s what my Iain would say if he could hear what’s going on inside my head right now.
Because I’ve gone pale, quiet, she is now peering over her iPad, staring at me. I need to stall.
‘I don’t know, Elle, cars are expensive and—’
‘Dad said I could have lessons,’ she interrupts, anticipating my predictable response.
So much for a united unit, sharing the roller-coaster ride that is living with a teenager.
‘Well, Dad hasn’t discussed anything with me.’
‘Mum, I’m nearly seventeen.’
‘I never had a car at seventeen,’ I say, turning my back to her, busying myself with the drying up.
‘I need my independence.’
I turn to look at her. I know I’m biased, but my daughter is a beauty. She’s got long brown hair that brings out the colour of her bright-blue eyes. Her features are almost perfect and I know her classmates are envious because Elle’s blossomed early.
She’s looking at me now, eyebrow cocked, while playing with her necklace.
I stare at the pendant. It’s a green-enamel four-leaf clover. Iain and I got it for her sixteenth birthday. I remember thinking it was expensive at the time, but compared to a car . . .
Elle lets go of the pendant and gets up from her chair. Standing there in her skinny jeans and slouchy Nirvana top – which she’s only wearing because she thinks it’s fashionable, not because she thinks Kurt Cobain was a lyrical genius – she looks like she could pass for an adult already.
When did my daughter become so grown up?
She looks at me, hope in her eyes.
I’m about to speak but I hear Iain coming down the stairs. He comes into the room dressed in his usual work uniform.
‘How are my favourite girls?’ He comes over to me and, as he shoves dirty clothes into the washing machine, gives me a squeeze and plants a kiss on my cheek.
I immediately look to our daughter.
Iain frowns. ‘Have I just interrupted something?’
‘Mum says I can’t have a car for my birthday.’
I raise my eyebrows at him and he winces as he heads towards the coffee machine. ‘Elle, I didn’t promise anything,’ he says as he grabs a mug.
Elle’s face scrunches up. ‘Yeah, you did.’
He looks at me. ‘I really didn’t.’
‘Don’t lie,’ Elle says.
‘I said we would consider it.’
He says this to me, because apparently I need convincing. I hold my hands up. ‘You shouldn’t say anything without discussing it with me first.’
He looks sheepish.
‘Typical,’ Elle says under her breath, but loud enough for me to hear it. She busies herself with her iPad.
Iain watches my face and mouths a sorry. I face the sink. He is beside me again.
‘I didn’t think,’ he says in my ear and slips his arms around my waist.
‘You don’t think,’ I say. ‘That’s the problem.’
He frowns, eases his grip around me. ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’
‘Nothing.’
He stares at me until I look at him. He gives a shake of his head. ‘Not in front of her . . .’ he says and goes to the television on the other worktop and flicks it on.
The silence is punctuated with the sound of a commercial and Iain sips his coffee as he flicks through the channels.
‘What’s happened now?’
I don’t bother to turn my head to see what he’s talking about
It’s then that I hear the sound of the twenty-four-hour news programme.
‘I think they’ve found them.’
I hear the concern in his voice and now I do turn to pay attention to the TV screen, feeling as if my blood has turned to ice in my veins at what I see.
Live footage of an isolated wasteland fills the screen.
It’s early May.
Usually you’d see signs that spring is arriving, but not here. What little grass there is dotted around has grown in straggly brown tufts.
