Читать книгу The Killer Inside - Cass Green - Страница 16

I was cycling home when it happened.

I’d naïvely thought, moving from London, that it would be easy to cycle here. I’m not exactly sure what planet I was on, thinking city drivers were the aggressive ones, but the way they hammered round the narrow lanes here at all hours had come as a bit of a shock. Still, we only had one car and Anya needed to drive to the next station along for the better train connection to London, where she worked, so I cycled in every day.

I was on the road that led from the top end of town when I heard the sound of a car behind me. It didn’t overtake as I’d expected it to where the road got wider. I turned to look behind me, but the driver had on a baseball cap and sunglasses; plus, they were sort of hunkered down in their seat. The car was a dark SUV – black or dark blue, I couldn’t really tell.

An uneasy feeling rippled up my neck and I pedalled harder, knowing that the turning to lead me off this road was coming up soon. The car just seemed to purr malevolently along behind me for ages. I thought about that movie Duel, where the guy is terrorized by a never-revealed maniac in a huge truck. The road was coming closer and I pedalled even harder. I was almost there when I heard the roar of the engine behind me – right there. Awash with shock, I wobbled and then toppled sideways, crashing onto the narrow pavement. The car zoomed away with an angry roar around the corner before I got a chance to see the number plate.

‘Shit!’ I said. Pain sliced through my knee, which was caught under the bent frame of the bike. My hands blazed with a burning, stinging pain. Looking down, I saw a constellation of tiny stones and beads of blood on both my palms. The front wheel of my bike was all bent from hitting the pavement, and I’d jarred my back.

‘Bastard, bastard,’ I said with feeling and hobbled towards home, having to hold the front half of the bike off the ground all the way.

I was surprised and grateful to find that Anya was there when I got back. She didn’t normally get in until about seven.

I’d taken the bike down the alley to the backyard and I opened the kitchen door to find her standing at the stove, stirring something in a pan. When she saw me, her face went from pleasure to concern in half a beat.

‘Did something happen?’ she said, wiping her hands and coming over to me.

‘Fell off my bike,’ I said. She made a sympathetic noise and took my backpack from me. ‘Well, I say that, but I was essentially forced off it by some tosser who thought I was Dennis Weaver.’

‘Oh no!’ she said, and it made me smile, despite the fact that most parts of my body were hurting right now. One of the things about being married that had never stopped thrilling me was the near-telepathy over cultural references.

She came over and turned my palms round, then gently kissed the grazes. It hurt but I managed not to wince.

Anya helped me wash the grit out, as I told her all about what happened, and then she gently applied antiseptic. Her brow was sweetly scrunched, as if she was doing highly skilled surgery.

My right knee ended up with a large plaster across it, which was bound to come off straight away, but I let her apply it anyway.

‘So,’ she said, as she put away the first aid kit and washed her hands. ‘Did you get a look at the guy’s face? The one in the car?’

‘No, not really,’ I said wearily. ‘He had on a baseball cap and sunglasses. Anyway, it all happened …’

I paused.

‘What?’ said Anya, turning back to me.

‘It’s probably nothing,’ I said. ‘Just that I had an encounter with a parent today and he was a bit aggressive.’ I filled her in on what had happened.

‘Do you think it was him who knocked you off your bike?’ she said. Her back was to me and she turned on the gas under the pan again, before starting to stir. ‘You really didn’t see him? Can you describe him at all?’

I thought about it for a moment, touched by how seriously she was taking this.

‘No,’ I said after a few moments. ‘I can’t believe he’d do that. I mean, it really was nothing.’ I paused again. ‘It’s just that …’

‘What?’

I blew air out through my mouth. ‘I don’t know, Anya, he just said this really strange thing about knowing me. I swear I’ve never spoken to the man before.’

‘Knowing you?’

‘Yeah … sort of like we’d had a beef before.’

We were both silent for a moment, thinking about this.

‘Do you think he might be confusing you with someone else?’ said Anya, turning to me now.

I shrugged. ‘Who knows?’

As I said it, I thought about the way the man had looked at me when he was standing outside the school. Stock still, staring, his eyes cold. Aggression seeming to radiate off him. I experienced a small chill.

I went over to her and wrapped my arms around her narrow middle, leaning down to rest my chin on her shoulder. She smelled better than any person I’d ever known, and I breathed her in for a moment.

‘You’re feeling better?’

She nodded, looking down at the stove top.

‘I’m …’ I began ‘… I hope I wasn’t a dick the other day.’

She twisted her head and gave me one swift kiss on the lips before turning back to her stirring.

‘Don’t worry about it,’ she said, which didn’t exactly reassure me.

‘What are you cooking?’ I said.

‘Making a cheese sauce,’ she said. ‘For a mac cheese.’

I smiled into her neck. I was obviously forgiven. Despite all the things that my palate had been introduced to in the last few years – from crocodile steaks to guinea fowl, quinoa to (unforgettably) coffee that came out of a civet’s bum – I still hankered for the comfort foods of my childhood, sometimes. This was one of the few things my mum used to cook from scratch and eating it made me think of being cosy on the sofa and watching telly together on winter evenings.

‘To what do I owe the honour?’

She turned and pecked me on the cheek.

‘I just thought the first day back marshalling the little monsters of Beverley Park might warrant comfort food,’ she said. ‘Especially now I know you’ve had to deal with thuggy dads and stave off maniacs in trucks.’

‘Well,’ I said sheepishly, ‘it wasn’t exactly a truck … but thanks.’

She started to stir more vigorously. I took the hint and moved away, going to the fridge to find some juice.

‘I meant to tell you,’ she said. ‘Managed to lose my phone yesterday.’

I hadn’t clocked that we hadn’t had a text exchange today, what with everything that was going on.

I paused with the juice carton in my hand. ‘That’s a bummer,’ I said. ‘Have you used the finder app?’ We had a program that showed you where your phone or laptop had last been used. It had been very handy when I’d lost my laptop last year, enabling me to track it down to a café on the seafront.

She carried on stirring, her back to me.

‘Yeah but it’s clearly been unlocked and disabled by someone.’ She flashed me a quick, bright smile. ‘Don’t worry,’ she said. ‘It was a bit knackered anyway. I treated myself to an iPhone 8. I’ll give you the new number, wait …’

She fished the phone from her back pocket and tapped at the screen. My own phone buzzed with her message, but I ignored it, a little distracted by what she’d said.

‘Why did you change the number?’ I said after a moment.

She shrugged. ‘Oh, it was just a security thing … they prefer you to do that when it’s been stolen … or whatever.’

I didn’t reply. I’d never heard that before. Plus, it was unlike her to blithely spend money like that; and then I remembered that she had been with Patrick and Julia yesterday. They would have given her the cash for the new phone.

Those were the kind of things that rankled a bit, much as I loved my parents-in-law. It was the assumption that they could just spare, what, seven hundred pounds like that. As though it meant nothing.

When dinner was ready, we settled in front of the Sky planner with our food on trays.

I got through my portion quickly and was rising for more when I looked over and saw that Anya had basically rearranged hers, barely touching her food.

‘Not hungry?’ I said and she shrugged.

‘Just a bit tired, is all.’

It was a strange evening, overall. I was aching all over from my earlier tumble and took myself off for a hot bath after we’d watched two episodes of a crime drama we’d been following. It was a good one, but watching the murder victim being covered in dead roses by the masked killer who had been hiding in their attic wasn’t exactly a mood-lifter.

Before I went for my bath I looked over and saw Anya staring at the television with the oddest expression on her face.

It was a hard, angry look; quite unlike her, really. She’d turned the telly over to some sort of dating reality thing and it was almost like she was glaring at the contestants currently making idiots of themselves.

‘Hey, you don’t have to watch that, you know,’ I said and for a second she snapped her gaze towards me in a way that made me stop in the doorway. Her face relaxed into a smile then and she gave a big yawn, arms above her head so the baggy sleeves of her favourite cardigan slipped down over her slim, freckled arms.

‘I like enjoying the discomfort of others,’ she said with a grin. ‘Plus, I get to be really judgemental.’

‘Well, I’ll leave you to your schadenfreude,’ I said as I went through to the bathroom.

‘You and your fancy book learnin’,’ she said, in a daft American accent, before throwing a cushion at me.

She went to bed before me and I thought she was asleep when I came in later. I was a natural night owl and Anya was the opposite. I slipped gingerly under the duvet in the dark, wincing as my knee stung and my lower back throbbed.

But she turned to me straight away, bringing her face close. I saw the gleam of her wide eyes and felt her warm breath on my face.

‘I love you,’ she whispered.

‘I love—’ I started to say but then her mouth was on mine, hard, mashing against my lips so that after a moment I tasted blood. Then she was pushing the duvet away and climbing onto me. She was ready and, despite all my aches, I was too. I slid inside her with a groan. She started to rock quickly, fists pressing onto my chest, so I could feel each of her knuckles grinding into my skin. Even though it hurt, it was so exhilarating and unexpected I found myself unable to hold back after a few moments.

‘Ah, sorry,’ I said sheepishly. She stopped moving and leaned down, kissing me tenderly on the bruised place on my lip.

‘No need to be,’ she said. ‘I was almost there before you came into the room. I was having a very hot dream.’ She paused. ‘And then there you were.’

‘I’m glad I was,’ I murmured and, as she turned round, I pulled her in towards me and let my sore, happy body melt into the bed.

The sound of smashing glass woke us at three am.