Читать книгу While You Sleep: A chilling, unputdownable psychological thriller that will send shivers up your spine! - Stephanie Merritt - Страница 9

Zoe had installed herself outside on the veranda, leaning back on the bench with her legs stretched out, bare feet braced against the wooden balustrade and a sketchbook in her lap, when Mick arrived at noon. She heard the growl of the Land Rover and the scattering of gravel in the drive. After a few moments, he made his way around the side of the house, calling brightly so as not to alarm her, and approached the veranda from the beach. His expression was hesitant at first, anxious even, but it softened into relief to see her so apparently at ease.

‘I see you’re straight to work.’ He shielded his eyes to look up at her as he climbed the steps.

‘Couldn’t miss this light.’ She waved her sketchbook and grinned, surprised by her own jauntiness. The sensuality of the previous night’s dream seemed to have left her lit up, more awake, more aware of her own body and her physical presence: the damp wood against the soles of her feet, the play of the wind on her face, the pencil’s precise weight and balance between her fingers. She felt unusually vivid.

‘And you slept all right?’ Mick seemed caught off guard by her good humour, as if it was not what he had expected to find and was not quite convinced by it.

‘Like a log, thanks.’ She felt the colour flare up in her cheeks.

He looked at her, pulling on his earlobe as if he was on the point of asking another question, but after a hesitation he smiled and breathed out. ‘Well, that’s great. It’s nice and quiet, at least – apart from the wind.’

‘And the sea,’ she said, laughing. ‘And the gulls, and the seals.’ She stopped, abruptly. She had almost said, ‘and the singing.’

‘True. But you’ll get used to those in time, I hope. Can I interrupt you for a quick tour of the boring stuff?’

He showed her how to change the timer for the heating and hot water, the outbuilding at the front of the house where he had stacked chopped wood for the kitchen range, the fuse box under the stairs and the cellar with the generator that would, in theory, run the electricity in the event of a power cut. She wasn’t wholly paying attention to the instructions; the cellar had a dank, forbidding atmosphere and a musty smell that made her want to get out as quickly as possible, and she was alarmed by the thought of being stuck out here with no power.

‘You’ll be fine, don’t worry,’ Mick said, catching her expression as he demonstrated how to light the hurricane lamps. ‘It’s just that it’s all very new out here – there was no mains electricity or running water when we started doing up the house, it all had to be put in from scratch. The pipes make a bit of a racket too, I’m afraid, you probably noticed – banging and what have you. Everything’s settling in and we don’t know how it will fare in the winter storms.’

‘So I could be stuck here with no lights?’ She heard the catch in her voice as she pictured herself alone in the house with only a candle. A sharp memory of that pale singing jolted through her and she shivered, despite the sun.

‘No, no – that’s why we’ve put in the generator. Don’t fret – you won’t be left sitting out here in the dark.’ He laughed, a touch too loudly. ‘Well, then. If you’re ready, I can drop you into town for the shops and bring you back before I have to get to the pub.’

‘Oh – what about that door that’s locked upstairs?’ Zoe asked, as they returned to the kitchen.

Mick frowned. ‘What door?’

‘On the top landing. Right at the end.’

‘The turret room, you mean? Have you no had a look up there? Lovely views all across the headland. On a clear day, you can see right across to—’

‘But I don’t have the key.’

‘There is no key.’ The crease in his brow deepened. ‘None of the rooms are locked.’ He looked at her as if trying to work out whether she was having him on. ‘Maybe the handle’s stiff. Shall I take a wee look?’

‘Don’t worry if it’s—’ she began, but he was already in the hall, bounding towards the stairs, telling her it was no trouble. She followed him up two flights, conscious of a flutter of apprehension in her stomach as they approached the closed door at the end of the second-floor landing.

‘This one here?’ Mick grasped the doorknob; it turned easily and the door swung inwards on smooth hinges, with barely a creak. Behind it was what looked like a large cupboard containing a wooden spiral staircase. He glanced back and beamed at her.

‘I was probably turning it the wrong way,’ Zoe mumbled, feeling the colour rising.

‘Well, you’ll know for next time. Go on up, if you like.’ He held the door open and nodded towards the stairs.

The staircase smelled of wood polish and new paint. Light washed down the white walls from above. The air was colder here; as she climbed the short flight, she noticed goosebumps standing up on her arm and realised that she was holding her breath. At the end of the final curve, the stairs opened up into a bright hexagonal room with windows on all sides, wide enough for two people to stand with their arms outstretched. From here, two floors up, you could see across the headland to the north and out over the shining sea to three crooked rock stacks standing sentinel in the water off the coast, lined up like the remaining pillars of a giant ruined pier. On the other side, the view stretched as far as the moorland and the low purple mountains that formed a ridge along the centre of the island. There was no furniture in the room except a high wooden stool and a ledge that ran all the way around under the windows, wide enough to use as a writing desk. It must have been intended as some kind of observatory. No one could approach by water unannounced.

‘It’s quite something, eh? I’d have liked to put a telescope in there.’ Mick’s voice floated up from the foot of the stairs, with that same note of pride and affection that betrayed how much the house had been a labour of love for him. She had heard the pang in his voice as he had shown her around, pointing out examples of local craftsmanship or areas where the restoration had been particularly tricky. He envied her the chance to live in it, that much was plain. Perhaps it had been Kaye’s choice, not to move the children. But what child would not want to live here, with a beach and seals on their doorstep?

‘This view is amazing.’ She glanced around the empty room. The singing had sounded so definite, in the depths of the night, the woman’s pain so stark from behind the door. Strange, she thought, the tricks a fraught mind can play. She looked back out at the sea and, for the space of a heartbeat, she felt someone looking over her shoulder, a cold breath on her neck, so that she snapped around, thinking Mick had come up the stairs silently behind her. The room was empty. Downstairs, Mick gave a little cough, a hint that he wanted to get going.

He closed the door to the turret room behind her and immediately reopened it, turning the handle both ways to prove how easily it worked.

‘There. Definitely not locked.’

‘No. My mistake. Sorry.’ She had the sudden, absurd thought that someone must have been holding the handle from the other side, though she dismissed it straight away.

Mick dropped her in the main street of the village by the parade of shops she had seen the night before.

‘Half an hour do you? You’ve the wee supermarket across the way there and a chemist further down, and there’s – well, you’ll see. Have a wander. I’ll meet you back here.’

Zoe thanked him and was about to cross the street when he called her back, leaning out of the driver’s window.

‘Uh – Mrs Adams?’

‘Zoe,’ she said patiently.

‘I was wondering – had you any thoughts about what you would do for transport?’ He looked embarrassed, as if he should not have to be the one raising this subject.

‘Transport?’ She looked at him, not quite understanding the question.

‘It’s only – you’re a long way from civilisation out there. I mean, I’m happy to give you a lift now and then for the shopping, but there might be other times you run out of stuff or you just, you know, need to get out of there.’ He stopped, his face confused, as if he realised he had slipped up. ‘I mean, you might fancy a trip into town or, I don’t know. And, like I say, Kaye and I will do whatever we can to help, but if we’re not free …’

‘Oh, God, no – I wasn’t expecting you to drive me around the whole time.’ Zoe heard her voice come out unexpectedly shrill. Now she was embarrassed too; it was true that in her impulsive enthusiasm for the beautiful light over the sea she had not given much thought to the fact that she would need food and basic supplies in her splendid isolation. She supposed there had been a vague notion of cabs in the back of her mind. Now that she was here, she realised how foolish that had been. ‘I was thinking maybe I could rent a bike?’

‘It’s a thought,’ Mick said carefully, in a voice that implied it was a stupid one. ‘There’s a bike shop right at the end of the High Street, before you get to the school.’

A quicksilver flicker of interest in her belly at the mention of the school. She thought of the young teacher, his fringe falling in his eyes, his shy smile and his Andy Warhol glasses, and with the thought came that prickling awareness of her own body, alive and responsive, the way she had felt after the previous night’s dream. She had to look away from Mick in case he noticed the colour in her face.

‘But, listen – when the weather sets in, you won’t be wanting to cycle on those roads,’ he was saying, oblivious. He cleared his throat. ‘I only mention it because my pal Dougie Reid up at the golf course has a car he could rent you while you’re here. Very reasonable. Nothing fancy, but—’

‘That’s kind. Maybe …’ Her throat closed around the words. He was right; she had realised during the drive across grandly bleak sweeps of rust-coloured moorland that she would not manage here without her own car. It was six months since she had been behind a wheel. Each time she had tried, the panic rose up through her chest and engulfed her, so that she felt choked by it: the shakes and pounding heart, the numbness in her limbs, the sweat and the fast, shallow breathing. Perhaps here, in a different landscape, she might be able to face that down. There was a different anxiety in Mick’s expression, though, that she could not quite identify, one that had nothing to do with the worry that he would end up ferrying her around. He wants me to be able to escape, she thought, as if by sudden intuition. ‘You might need to get out of there,’ he had said, then tried to correct himself. Did even Mick – stoical, pragmatic Mick Drummond, scoffer at old wives’ tales – fear there was something she might need to flee at the house?

‘Great stuff – let’s find a time to go up there and take a look at it, at least.’ Mick seemed relieved. He glanced at his watch. ‘Half an hour, then. Shouldn’t take you more than that.’

He pulled away with a cheerful toot of his horn and Zoe crossed the street towards the grocery store. The food would be basic here, she suspected, none of the fancy stuff she liked from Whole Foods or the Thai grocer, but that was OK. She had little interest these days in cooking. There had been a time, when she and Dan had first moved in together and the idea of their first home was new and felt like a game, when she had liked to experiment with food. Dan was an enthusiastic cook; they had learned together. But lately, the business of making a family meal had come to feel like a thankless chore, an increasingly hollow pretence at normality, the time and effort expended so disproportionate to the end result, which was only ever bolted down so that everyone could return as quickly as possible to their separate rooms. Here she planned to live simply, to eat only things that required minimal effort. Cold meat, cheese, salad, bread, breakfast cereals. Coffee, maybe even cigarettes. The way she’d lived when she was at art school, and was so driven by her work that it was too important to interrupt for anything as trivial as eating. She wanted to recapture that kind of absorption, see if she was still capable of losing herself like that in the work. That’s why it was good there was no phone signal and no Wi-Fi at the house, she thought. No Twitter, no Facebook, no Instagram. No distractions. Not that she had felt like sharing much in recent months anyway. She couldn’t bear to look at the news, and she only ever looked at her friends’ lives now with a twist of envy below her ribs and a feeling of exclusion, occasionally an unforgivable wish – there and gone in an instant – that some misfortune would slam into their apparently perfect lives. These thoughts quickly warped into self-loathing; she did not wish harm to her friends, how could she? And yet she could not help resenting them either, for their insularity, their self-satisfaction. For some time she had felt it might be easier to disengage entirely. In a flash of what had seemed at the time like boldness, she had deleted her Facebook and Instagram accounts before she left. She wanted to concentrate on being here, not clinging on remotely to the shreds of a life back home or worrying about how to curate her experience for other people’s approval. She was already starting to regret the decision.

A warm gust of air caught her as she walked past an open shop door, a scent of bread and vanilla, and she realised with a twinge that she had not eaten breakfast. In the window beside her, rustic loaves fanned out in baskets and pastries glistened wantonly on silver tiered cake-stands. A painted sign swung above the door, proclaiming Maggie’s Granary in curlicued script. A cinnamon bun from Maggie’s, Charles Joseph had said: the price of his stories. She hesitated on the threshold. If anyone in this place was likely to tell her the truth about the house, it would be the Professor.