Anything for Her (24 page)

‘Doesn’t look like she’s in,’ Chris says.

‘That doesn’t mean she’s gone shopping.’

‘Where do you think she is?’

She hesitates for a moment.

‘I just hope she got back from the search all right.’

She peers through one of the large windows facing the back garden.

‘It looks tidy – really tidy. This house hasn’t been tidy since I first came to see Louise.’

‘Someone must have come to board up the window yesterday. Do you think she did it before then?’

‘Yeah, perhaps. But that was yesterday morning. She likes a drink, and there aren’t any empty bottles lying around. She wouldn’t have gone a night without drinking, not when her daughter is missing. Not after finding that suitcase yesterday.’

‘So, she didn’t come home?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘What do you think we should do?’

‘I think we should come back in an hour, and again this evening. If nothing comes of either visit, we’ll apply for a warrant to enter. Something doesn’t feel right.’

‘Do you think she might have done something to harm herself?’

‘No. Not many mothers kill themselves before their child is found, unless they are the reason the child is missing.’

‘So she’s alive, we just don’t know where.’

‘I never said she was alive. I just said it’s likely she hasn’t committed suicide.’

They both fall silent.

‘We’ll come back in an hour.’

They walk round to the front of the house together, both wondering what has become of Louise Leighton.

Chapter Forty-nine

Louise wakes up after fourteen hours of sleep. Her body aches all over from her night in the woods. Her skin feels tender. Her chest feels tight: she flinches in agony whenever she coughs.

Although it was the longest sleep she has had since arriving in the village, she doesn’t feel refreshed or well rested, but nauseous and disorientated.

She uses the bathroom and makes her way downstairs. She gulps down a pint of water and eats a bowl of cereal, the quickest meal she can prepare to fill her grumbling stomach.

Fourteen hours have gone by, and she can’t help but wonder if her circumstances have changed.

Has Brooke been found?

It’s the only question she longs to know the answer to.

She makes a mug of tea, sits on the sofa in the living room and lights a cigarette. Her traumatised lungs cough and splutter in outrage. She continues to inhale the smoke until her lungs submit and allow the toxins to enter.

There is no sign of the wind blowing outside. Just silence.

She can’t help but wonder what Michael is doing
right this minute, or what Dominic is up to.

Are they spending more time together in our absence? Has the experience of losing Brooke and me helped them become closer than before? Is Dominic coping okay?

She knows she is being a bad mother to her son. She knows that by running away from London to the Cotswolds she is being ruthlessly selfish, despite the fact that it’s necessary, so that she can heal. It is so close to Christmas, and she has yet to buy presents.

She sips her tea and smokes her cigarette, staring ahead in a trance. Her imagination concocts scenarios about Brooke: what she is doing or where she might be.

Is Brooke being kept in the village? Or has she been whisked miles away, to another country? Is she alive or dead?

She realises that she won’t make it through this ordeal alone. She can’t isolate herself forever. She can’t hate Michael – not now – not when Brooke is missing. Their daughter may never come back. And she can no longer neglect her son, who needs her more than ever and whose life is falling apart just as much as hers.

Louise, it’s time for you to go home
.

She must return home, however hard it is to do, and face her new reality. She can’t be alone anymore. She can’t neglect her son any longer. She will go home.

The lights cut out suddenly, like a lightning strike has come and gone, leaving the house in darkness awaiting thunder. She freezes, the smoke from her cigarette rising in grey, silent curls above her.

Her heart races as she looks around the room, waiting for something or someone to come lunging at her from the shadows. The moonlight shines in through the windows; dark shadows, cast by falling snowflakes, drift down the wooden floorboards on the floor like ash. When the lights were on, she hadn’t seen it – the message that has been written on two of the windowpanes for her to read:

LOOK OUTSIDE

The words have been written with a fingertip dipped in something and dragged to form letters on the other side of the glass. Blood. That something is blood.

She stubs out her cigarette and puts her mug of tea by the ashtray on the coffee table. She gets up on trembling legs and goes towards the message. Her breath steams up the glass as she peers through the slanted letter
O
into the dark back garden. All she can see is the snow on the ground and the shadows of the night. Light suddenly floods the garden as the security lights come to life above the patio. She flinches, taking a defensive step back.

Outside stands a man. He is dressed in black from head to toe. A kitchen knife rests in his right hand: a knife from her kitchen. The sharp blade is encrusted
with old blood. But that isn’t why Louise screams – she screams because beside the man is her daughter, not standing – but dangling. Her feet are far from the ground. She has a noose around her neck, which is tied to a sturdy tree branch, allowing her lifeless body to sway in the wind.

Through her screams and sobs, Louise can see the similarity of this scene with another. Brooke has been hanged and stabbed several times in the stomach. The girl who died that night had her neck snapped by the seatbelt with shards of glass and metal penetrating her torso like serrated daggers.

Brooke killed the woman, and has been murdered and displayed in a recreation of the scene.

The man moves silently around the side of the house, the knife still clamped in his hand. She watches from the other side of the glass and screams as she is thrown into darkness again. Her daughter’s body is absorbed by the night’s shadows. All she can see is the full moon in the sky and snowflakes drifting to the ground. All she can hear are her own panicked breaths and whimpers, both steaming up the windowpane. She stares out into the darkness behind the window, trembling violently and hysterically sobbing, her damp palms pressed against the glass.

He darts from the darkness with a raised hammer. She screams and runs for the stairs, as the man strikes the window and sends the glass crashing into
the house. She reaches the top of the staircase and darts into the spare room, which is filled with storage boxes and odd pieces of furniture that were not thrown away after the refurbishment of the townhouse. She weaves through the path of boxes and ducks down in a gap between the piano and the wall. She bows her head and presses her wet cheeks against her knees. Her breath is hot, fast and loud. She covers her mouth with trembling hands.

Brooke is dead. The killer is coming for you. This is real. This isn’t a dream
.

Heavy footsteps climb the staircase, and then silence. From a mirror propped against the wall, she can see him standing at the top of the stairs, listening for her inside the house. She holds her breath. Her heart thrashes inside her chest. She listens to the killer’s light, calm breaths. His heart won’t be racing for the same reason as hers: it will be pounding with excitement, not horror. His eyes won’t be wide and terrified like hers, but sharp – and focused on finding his next victim. His hands won’t be sweating and shaking like hers, but steady, dry and holding a knife.

He moves out of the mirror’s view and his footsteps head along the landing. The man has clearly been in the house before. He knows exactly where to look. She knows it was the same man who she chased into the barn that day.

This is her only chance – run now or be found. Live
or die.

She slides out of her hiding space and snakes through the maze of boxes on the tips of her toes, trying to avoid brushing against any boxes. She reaches the open doorway and sees the killer at the end of the hallway in her bedroom, searching under her bed, stabbing a pillow when he doesn’t discover her there. Feathers erupt from the pillow like blood from a severed artery, and fall on to the bed and floor like the snow drifting past the windows.

She steps out on to the landing.

A floorboard creaks.

The killer turns around, knife raised.

Louise bounds down the stairs and towards the window, thrusting her bare feet into the shattered glass on the floor. She leaps through the window, leaving bloody footprints behind her.

She runs past the tree where her daughter sways in the shadows, the rope twisting and creaking with the playful wind.

She heads down the winding garden path. Stems and branches from overgrown plants stray out in front of her, as though they are trying to restrain her.

She looks behind her and sees the killer advancing, thrashing at the foliage with his knife. She has nowhere to go and nowhere to hide.

She reaches the back gate, which is surrounded by thick ivy; the moon shines through the gaps in the
wooden door, illuminating her escape.

She knows the gate is locked. She knows it is her only way out. She knows the lock has rusted from years of neglect; the gate itself is old and weathered – its wood is soft and damp. She runs and throws her weight against the gate, landing on the snow-covered ground on the other side with a mighty thud. The gate whips round and crashes into the brick wall, breaking away from its rusted hinges.

She jumps to her feet and sprints. The cold air burns her lungs and throat, and her heart is pounding so fast she can barely think. She runs and refuses to look back, racing across the snowy field on numb, bleeding feet. There is a house in the far distance. A light is on, emitting a golden yellow glow from one of the windows. She races towards it, panting and wheezing.

Suddenly, she is thrown to the ground. She lands on her back and the hard thud winds her. She strains to inhale air into her startled lungs. The man stands above her, holding a lock of her blonde hair in one hand, and the knife in the other. He is out of breath, almost gasping for air, but his eyes still hold sadistic ferocity.

She cannot breathe. She cannot beg for her life. She cannot scream for help. She can do nothing but look up at the man and stare into his merciless blue eyes.

The man steps across her body and sits down on
her hips, pressing her to the ground. She claws at the snow around her, gasping for air in pitiful heaves, but his hand snatches her throat and presses her head to the ground.

She looks up at the sky, the clear night lit by the full moon and the stars. Her pathetic exhalations escape like tiny clouds before her. He pushes down on her windpipe.

‘You know why,’ he says, in a deep, gravelly voice. ‘You helped kill my little girl.’

She knows his voice.

He removes his hood.

The man from the search: the man whose daughter died. Her daughter killed his.

Everything falls into place just as the knife plunges into her chest. She looks up into his eyes as he watches her every spasm, witnessing every emotion and thought flash in her eyes. Blood stains her teeth and fills her mouth. It flows over her lips and pours in thick streams down her neck, over his hand, and onto the snow below. His lips creep into a satisfied smile as she begins to choke on her own blood and flinches when he twists the blade. The last sensation she feels is a searing heat in her chest, a hot agony. Her last scents are those of the winter night, the man’s sour breath and the metallic tang of her own blood. Her very last thought is of her last words to Dominic before she left. She didn’t know that she was lying to him at
the time, but now she knows that he will forever see it as a betrayal.

‘You promise you’ll come back?’

‘I promise, my angel. I’ll be back.’

The sky above her begins to fade, and the sharpness of her pain begins to ease, as she slips from life to death, and falls limp under the man’s grasp.

***

He yanks the blade from her chest. He pulls Louise’s journal from inside his coat and places it on her bloody wound. On top of the journal, he places his last dead robin. He takes off his glove and dips his finger in her blood. He drags it across the yellow journal, dipping his finger into the blood continuously as he uses it for ink, and writes his last message. He climbs off the woman below him and kneels beside her, breathing heavily, so nervous his mouth breaks into an unnerving smile.

This is it
, he thinks to himself.
It’s finally over
.

The man raises the bloody knife to his neck, presses down, and slices it along his skin hard and fast. Blood gushes out like water from a burst pipe, spraying his face and clothes, and the lifeless body below him. He gurgles on the blood filling his throat, tries to breathe and inhales his own blood. Red rivers stream from his
nostrils and down his face. He twitches, spasms, and falls to the ground. His blood pools and joins with his victim’s, as they both lie still in the night. The only sound left to hear is that of the wind rustling the trees and enticing the snow to dance in its wake.

Chapter Fifty
That Night

Louise and Brooke drive home in stunned silence, listening to the hum of the hot air blowing through the vents in the dashboard, and the snow on the road crunching under the car tyres. Louise grips the steering wheel so tight that under her gloves her knuckles are white. Brooke sits in the passenger seat, her numb hands clenched between her shivering thighs, and her eyes set on the road before them. She doesn’t see the road, she sees every second of the crash replaying in her mind – and every drop of blood on the snow below the dead woman’s feet.

For Louise, the night had begun so well. She had felt content with her life: she and her husband were profoundly happy, her children were healthy and well looked after, her business was thriving, and her home was a blissful nest where she kept everything dear to her close. Now, everything has been tarnished. Her happiness has been torn from her like the flesh from her back. She is a liar, a killer, and will be running from this night for the rest of her life. She will never escape its grasp and knows it will be the death of her somehow.