Читать книгу In a Cottage In a Wood: The gripping new psychological thriller from the bestselling author of The Woman Next Door - Cass Green, Cass Green - Страница 18

Neve sleeps for most of the nine-hour journey to Penzance from Victoria, head resting on her bunched-up fake fur coat, her hoodie a makeshift blanket. It’s not comfortable, but in her exhausted, hungover state, it’s enough.

She barely notices the movement of the coach or the stops at pick-up points along the way. It is only the insistent wah-wah wail of a baby that finally tugs her back to consciousness and at first she’s convinced it’s Maisie crying. She opens her eyes and is about to call for Lou when she realizes she’s looking at a grubby purple-grey patterned seat back. There is an elderly man next to her, who nods at her with a big smile.

He has cottony white hair over a pink scalp. A pair of bright blue eyes peer merrily out of his craggy face.

‘Gosh, you’ve been out for the count,’ he says and offers her a Polo mint from the packet held in his shaky hand. ‘I half wondered if I should give you a nudge to make sure you were alive.’

Neve hasn’t quite regained the power of speech and simply smiles weakly. Her mouth feels foul and lined with wool, so she takes the Polo with a nod of thanks.

‘Where are we?’ she says, and suddenly remembers her and Lou saying, ‘Are-we-there-yet,’ over and over again to annoy their parents when they were little and going on family holidays. The memory gives her a dull ache under her ribcage when she remembers how she had left her sister this morning.

‘We’re about five miles from Truro, I think,’ says the man. ‘Better give my daughter a call and let her know we’re almost there!’

Neve smiles vaguely and then fumbles in her bag for her phone; it is on five per cent battery. The phone has taken to hiding calls and messages from the home screen and she is grateful for this now. Pushing the uncomfortable thought that Lou and others might be trying to contact her, she looks out of the window.

They’re on a motorway. She has no idea which one. Neve doesn’t drive – something both Daniel and Lou have nagged her about at different times – and she has only the dimmest notion of major roads.

Looking at her watch she sees it is now half past eight, but it feels much later. The darkness outside increases her feeling of being far away from anything.

The old man is still looking at her and she shoots him a nervous glance. He immediately smiles again and Neve hopes she won’t be forced into uncomfortable conversation for the rest of the journey.

Instead she roots inside her handbag for her earbuds. Her phone is almost dead, but he doesn’t know this. Jamming them into her ears she sees the old man is jabbing a large finger at his mobile phone. It is the sort that looks like a toy, with large buttons designed for the elderly.

He begins to speak in a loud voice. Her own dad never seemed to understand that phones had sensitive microphones either.

‘Hello, flower,’ he says. ‘It’s Dad. I’m just calling to let you know that we won’t be all that long into Truro now.’ There’s a pause and he says, ‘Uh-huh, right,’ then abruptly, ‘Well goodbye then. See you soon.’

Neve turns herself around to face the window, jamming her earbuds further into her ears. Her hands tremble. Something is starting to fracture inside.

Dad used to call her Flower. The old man’s conversation has had the effect of an uppercut punch to her diaphragm. She gasps a breath and her eyes prickle.The man makes a gentle ‘tsk’ sound and thrusts a man-sized tissue at her. She takes it gratefully and blows her nose.

‘Are you alright, dear? Is there something I can do?’

‘I’m fine. Thank you.’ Her voice is a tiny, lame thing.

Neve manages a weak, watery smile.

‘I don’t want to be nosy,’ he says. ‘But are you visiting friends or family in Truro?’ He looks genuinely concerned. ‘Is someone going to meet you off the bus?’

Neve wants to tell him the truth. But it’s too bizarre.

‘Yes,’ she says. ‘I’m all sorted. And really, I’m fine now. Thank you again for being so kind.’

He gives her a small nod.

Turning back to gaze out of the window she sees they have turned onto a dual carriageway. Before long signs are announcing they are in Truro.

These sudden swerves of grief take her by surprise, eighteen months after her dad died.

At first the loss had been a constant, gnawing ache. Her heart, which hadn’t yet recovered from losing her mum, felt like a lump of beef that had been whacked all over with a meat tenderizer.

But as time moved on, the nature of the grief changed. In some ways it was almost crueller in the way it took her. She’d find she hadn’t thought about it for a day or so and then it would suddenly bloom painfully in her chest, as violent as a physical assault. And the same thoughts would slam into her: an orphan.

Really? It was such a desolate little word.

She and Lou had lost their mother to cancer a year before their father died. Their dad, who had met his wife when they were both eighteen, had seemed to shrink as the space in the small semi in a Yorkshire village had swelled. Their mother had been a loud presence, prone to outbursts of emotion and jollity, while Dad was a quiet, reserved man.

They were older parents, only having Lou at forty, then Neve at forty-two. Neve had been a bit embarrassed about their age, especially as one of the girls in her class had a mother who was only seventeen years older than her.

They’d been foster carers for a time before Lou came along and would receive the odd Christmas card from people who had briefly lived with them. Neve used to feel a bit jealous of these mysterious troubled children with dramatic lives. As though they remained in the home as shadows, still jostling for her parents’ attention.

Neve occasionally fretted that they would start fostering again as she got older, picturing brooding teenage girls with violent tendencies moving in and taking over her bedroom. But her parents said they’d ‘done their bit’ and that this part of their lives was now behind them.

The brain aneurism that killed her father hadn’t given any warning and the doctor told her and Lou that he had most likely been carrying it around for a long time, like a tiny ticking bomb.

Neve had been away with Daniel, visiting musician friends in Brighton. It was one of their lost weekends, passing by in a blur of drinking, dancing and weed and it wasn’t until late on Sunday afternoon that Neve had realized she had lost her phone. It was only when she and Daniel wearily arrived back in the flat that she noticed the flashing lights on the barely used landline recorder and discovered the messages from Lou saying she had to get to the Whittington Hospital immediately.

He died half an hour later after she erupted onto the hospital ward. Everyone said that he had waited for her.

Lou had never voiced what she thought about being the one holding vigil at the bedside for two long days. But the look on her face when Neve finally roused the courage to meet her eye had felt like being sandblasted. They have still never spoken of that final day.

Neve is keenly aware now of how little she visited her father in the period after Mum died. She kept meaning to go and spend more weekends with just the two of them.

They had a particular routine. He would cook her proper Welsh rarebit and they would eat it on trays, each with a Guinness, watching reality television he had recorded on his Freeview box. Her dignified dad had a weakness for anything like that, and despite reading hefty non-fiction about history and politics, he could converse with the best of them about what was happening on The Voice or even America’s Next Top Model.

When she thinks about the fact that she will never, ever get to do this with him again she experiences a vertiginous swoop in her stomach, as though someone has just pressed a button and taken the floor out from under her feet. It’s a sensation of falling through space. She is no longer tethered to anyone other than Lou, who has her own family now.

Neve sighs and roots in her handbag for her make-up bag. It’s the hangover and the uncertainty of what she is doing that is making her feel like this; she just needs to get a grip.

Stretching out the stiffness from her neck, she waits in the aisle to get off the coach. People groan and gather bags from above their heads, gazing blearily out of the window.

Neve thanks her seating companion, who lets her go first and begins to move towards the doors. There’s a pinch of worry in her stomach about arriving somewhere in darkness. She hasn’t really thought this through. The words ‘as usual’ rise up in her mind as though someone has whispered them in her ear.

Standing at the side of a road with a car park on one side and residential houses on the other, she watches people purposefully walk to cars or stamp their feet in the cold and look around for lifts. The old man gives her a final wave and she watches as he laboriously climbs into a small white car. A woman with glasses and a dark ponytail is in the driver seat and he leans over for a kiss, talking all the while. Neve has a sudden urge to call him back and tell him everything; about Isabelle Shawcross and the cottage, about work, about Lou. About her mum and dad …

But it’s too late now. She begins to shiver as the shocking temperature – always so much colder outside of London, she thinks, despite her Northern heritage – begins to bite, making her eyes sting and her nose stream.

She takes an experimental sniff and realizes with disappointment that she can’t smell the sea. It can’t be that far away, can it? Neve thinks again that she knows nothing about Cornwall and experiences a queasy lurch of anxiety about this whole plan.

Pulling her coat around her and yanking on a lilac beanie with flowers on the side that she had found in Camden market, she goes to a central area and attempts to work out which bus she should get to this Cador place.

It’s no good though, she can’t see any bus that will help. When she’d looked this up hurriedly on her phone in London, it had seemed relatively straightforward. But now …

A bus driver is about to close his doors when she reaches out her hand and quickly steps on board.

‘Mind yourself,’ says the driver, a bald man in his forties with a tattoo curling up his neck to his fleshy, pink ear.

‘Sorry,’ she says with an apologetic smile, ‘but can you tell me where I’d get a bus to a place called Cador? It’s near St Piron?’

The driver sighs and then picks up an iPad. He swipes at it and then looks up.

‘No buses from here go there. Best bet is to get to St Piron on the 198 and then you’ll have to walk.’

‘Oh,’ says Neve, doubtfully. ‘Er, thank you.’

It is only twenty past ten but feels like the middle of the night. Neve’s back and bottom ache after nine hours on a coach, then another hour being rattled on a hard seat. The bus seems to hare with dangerous speed through small villages lit by a few streetlights, but most of the journey is spent tearing around dark, twisty country roads.

When she is finally disgorged at the side of a road and told by the disinterested driver that to get to Cador she needs to walk ‘a couple of miles … maybe a bit more’, it starts to become apparent that this is definitely one of her more ill-thought-through plans.

Knowing her battery won’t hold out for much longer, she uses her phone as a torch only in short bursts. Luckily, there seems to be a main road lit by street lamps that leads in the direction she has been told to follow. Her headache has returned and she is desperate for something to eat and drink. All she has left is a mouthful of water in a bottle and a couple of pieces of gum. Her wheelie case squeaks in complaint as she drags it along behind her, shoulder beginning to cramp.

A couple of men pass her at different times. The second of the two, a weaselly guy with an ugly moustache, stares at her just long enough for fear to surge up her throat. She hastens her step.

Eventually she comes to a row of shops, all closed. Then she spies something that feels like a beacon above the doorway of a fish and chip shop; a glowing sign that says simply, ‘Taxi’.

Neve hesitates, gnawing on her bottom lip as she thinks this through. She has no job. No prospects. She’s only intending to come for a few days but her remaining £400 is going to have to last. She’d had vague images of cooking giant batches of chickpea stew and holing up in the cottage with a pile of books until she worked out what to do with her life, back in London. The £400 seemed like a fortune, put like that.

But now she wants a taxi so badly she is incapable of doing anything but walking across the road towards the light. She tells herself she must do this for her own safety.

A few minutes later she is climbing into a saloon car. The thin-faced, middle-aged driver puffs vigorously on a Vape and regards her in the mirror.

‘Where you wanting, then?’ he says.

‘Can you tell me how much will it cost to get to Cador?’

The driver regards her.

‘That’ll be thirty.’ His voice has a slow, West Country drawl.

This seems like an outrageous sum and Neve feels a flash of anger that she is being ripped off. She is of the view that everywhere outside London is cheap. The cost of this will clean out her purse. But she doesn’t really have any choice.

‘Okay,’ she says grudgingly, mentally thinking she wouldn’t have given the miserable git a tip anyway.

She tells him the rest of the address. The driver punches it into the satnav then pulls away.

Before long Neve realizes that Cador is considerably further than the two miles the bus driver specified. For once it feels that, in taking this taxi, she is doing the sensible thing.

The driver doesn’t say a single word as they drive. While she would ordinarily welcome this, part of her feels the need for some reassuring conversation.