Coombe's Wood (22 page)

George drew up behind, flashing his lights.

Was he warning her this was the end? Maybe he wanted her to pull over. Not a chance. Button, cold and stiff came to mind.

Then the bloody scribbled words flashed in front of her eyes, y
ou’re dead,
a
nd her answer phone with bizarre message. The audience clapped in her head, jeering and shouting her name. She knew what he wanted.

“Not today, you bastard!”

The woods would peter out soon. Back on field bound roads, she could find someone, get the police in on the chase
…

BAM!

He hit her again, and she fell forward in the car. Her eyes widened as she spotted a tree that lay partway across the road. Both her feet slammed down, pressing clutch and brake simultaneously.

Izzy forced the car into a skid; there was just enough room to squeeze by. His car was larger. Hopefully, he wouldn’t. She gripped the wheel and pulled desperately as her Toyota screeched across the lane, and towards the tree. She judged the gap at the end, and smiled. She could get away. The car skidded along the muck, and hit the trunk at an angle. A screech of metal assaulted the forest, as the Toyota scraped along the bark. The friction was too much, her momentum slowed, and then the car came to a prompt stop.

She shook her head, dizzy and disoriented as she hung from her seatbelt.

She could hear heavy metal music. He must have pulled up behind her. Scratchy guitar solos would accompany her beating.

George scrunched through the leaves and twigs on the lane, and was suddenly there, right next to her. His breath fogged the window beside her face. Izzy turned away, and bent over the seatbelt, trying to unsnap it.

“Get out the car, bitch. I need to talk to you!”

Those words said ‘
business
’. Memories flooded back, a hand across her face, a soup bowl dropped to the kitchen floor, the dish released in surprise at the slap.

Izzy jammed her fingers against the red release button. She needed to get out of the seatbelt. What then? Izzy wasn’t sure. But first, she needed to push the button. It wasn’t going to let her go. She struggled, pulled against the seatbelt. The car would pin her here, until George opened her door, and reached in
…
Izzy kept her eyes down. She didn’t want to see him stretch in.

“Bloody let me go!” she whispered at the seatbelt.

George leaned against the window; she could sense him watching her struggle to get free. He cast a shadow across her. She closed her eyes, and pictured a grim smile on his face.

Her fingers still pressing on the button, both hands jiggling, pushing, and hitting the seatbelt, she realised what was wrong. She took a breath and let go, leaning back in her seat at the same time. The tension lessened, enough for the mechanism to remember how to work, and the seatbelt unbuckled. Izzy finally looked up and focused on George.

His breathed a slow laugh, a low ‘
huh-huh-huh
’ sound, and steamed up a patch of mist on the glass. He rested one hand on either side of her window to support his weight, a disturbing twinkle in his eye.

“Little rabbit,” he said. “Come to me baby, you’re all mine now.”

She ignored him. Having solved the seatbelt issue, a sense of rationality had come back. Izzy turned the key and punched the gas pedal. The engine turned over, not quite starting. She turned the key again, to whirr-whirr noises and a stink of petrol.

“Flooded your car? What a shame,” he said.

She tried again, and the petrol stench overwhelming the cloying odour of the oil.

“Please start,” she said, and rattled the key. “Please, please.” She stopped pressing on the gas pedal, and counted slowly to ten. “Now. I want to hear you start. Surprise me, roar into life.” Izzy turned the key. The whirr-whirr sound was weaker. “Last time,” she whispered, hunched over the wheel. She ran a hand along the dashboard. “I’ll pay for your oil leak to be fixed. And I’ll put in the super-unleaded for a month. Just start for me.” She turned the key for the last time. The car whirred again, but didn’t turn over. Her hand fell from the key, and she looked up. George smiled back.

Her mind raced into overdrive. The word, ‘
Escape!
’ repeating over and over in her mind. She searched about the car for possibilities, anything to help. The passenger door was flush against the trunk of the fallen tree. And with George hovering by her door, the boot was the only exit left. Tentatively, she fingered the lever that opened the boot, and added up in her mind how long it would take her to clamber over the back seat and out. George would take three steps, and be there before she even started pushing the boot open. Izzy collapsed back in her seat, letting the lever go, before she could trigger it by accident.

George leaned over and peered inside. She could see now that he’d lost the last strands of hair from the top of his head, and how, in the past year, he’d grown one side long, and swept the hairs over the top. This flopped at the side, looking ridiculous.

Her hands moved to her stomach. She closed her eyes, and tried to remember a prayer, and managed to drag The Lord’s Prayer out from her school days. “Our Father who art in heaven
…
”

Click-clunk. George pulled the handle.

Her time felt short. Connor could live with Feathers. Or should she send him all the way to Portugal? Would her parents want the responsibility of raising another child? What about Feathers? But he might not want Connor. What if Social Services sent him to strangers after the police found her strangled corpse? The thought occurred to her that she wouldn’t be consulted. She would be rotting quietly in some grave. Perhaps on the hill, up from Pangbourne, under a tree – an oak. She’d always liked them. They were grounded, and grand at the same time.

“Bitch!” George shouted from the other side of the glass. “Let me in. I want to talk to you.”

His body hair always made her think of gorillas. He bunched up his hands, and pounded with hairy fists on the window.

“No, I won’t let you in! You want to hurt me,” she cried. Tears wet her cheeks. He banged on the glass, and Izzy jumped back, catching her lower back on the handbrake.

He couldn’t get in. He might be able to frighten her, but locking the door had gifted precious seconds to her.

“Think. There must be a way out.” Izzy looked around. Something had to help.

He tried the handle again. Her heart slowed every time he pulled. She hated feeling this way, this was why she left, took Connor, and drove across England to a town she didn’t know. How dare he invade her life again, threaten her, make her scared.

“Why would I let an abuser like you into my car?” Izzy shouted at George.

“I’m not like that. You know what’s true. Think back, carefully, I never did anything like that, you know I never hit you,” he said. He used to mould her mind like putty, manipulating the truth until it fit his particular skewed view of the world. She hated the self-assured nonsense he spouted to raise doubts, put her in the wrong.

She shook her head; a cluster of brown curls falling down over her eyes, obscuring George’s face.

“Yes, you did. You spent years smashing things into me,” she said.

Overwhelming fatigue washed over her, and an almost uncontrollable psychological return to the dark days she’d escaped from. Attempted suicide. Constant pain. The times when she laughed with colleagues about how her son had ‘caused’ that bruise by playing rough. All the excuses and imagined versions of her life, used on anyone who cared to listen.

George pounded on the car with his gorilla fists.

“Where’s your evidence, little girl, where’s your God damn proof?”

“The proof was on my doorstep,” Izzy cried. “The proof is in the dead rabbit you left on my mat, and the cigarettes butts, and poor Button. How could you do that? How could you be so evil?”

With a sleeve, she wiped tears from her chin. Death was approaching. He was going to skin her like the rabbit and set her insides loose. String her up to a tree and hang her there until she stopped twitching. This man meant to end her life today.

“What the hell are you on about?”

He took a step back from the car. His face queried hers. She studied the wrinkles on his face for the truth. He’d lied so often, she assumed every word he said was questionable.

“I know you did it!” she shrieked, slapping her palms on the window. “Who else would even think of doing such a horrible thing?”

He took another step back from her, almost off the road and into the woods.

“Whoa, I can happily admit to the wrong things I have done. I might even admit that on a couple of occasions over the years, my fists might have collided with your face. But it was all six of one, half a dozen of the other. You gave as good as you got.”

Images of blood on her fingers filled her mind. She heard the hollow thumping sound of objects colliding with her skull, her reflection in a mirror as she tried to cover another bruise. The month she spent unable to hear from her left ear after he burst the drum. She could think of a dozen ‘scuffles’ in the last year they spent together, without having to go further back.

She squinted, trying to force away violent visions. But, this was the closest he’d come to admitting anything at all. She wished she had a tape recorder. Izzy glanced back up at him. He appeared calmer, almost as if somewhere deep inside he cared about the truth.

But if he hadn’t killed those animals, who had?

“Come on out, Izzy. We’ll get through this together. If some sicko is pinpointing you for an attack, I want to be there to protect you.”

He smiled. She reminded herself that minutes before, he’d rammed her car into this lane. He had cornered her with the intention of inflicting pain.

“I’m not coming out, George.”

“But what about the weirdo who’s killing animals on your doorstep? I admit – I was angry that you left me like that and I did throw cigarette butts on your doorstep. But I didn’t come hammering on your door in the middle of the night, did I?”

She nodded slowly, her eyes not leaving his.

“I’ve changed. I wanted to be near you, and the best way, so far as I could figure, was to loiter in the hall. When I got bored, I smoked.”

He placed a hand on the glass, near her face. It seemed a caring gesture, not that of someone in the grip of insanity.

Her fingers crept to the lock. Maybe she was being silly. He had overreacted on the road. But a little overreaction is a long step away from killing someone.

“That’s right. Unlock the door, and we’ll take care of this together. You know what I am capable of, but how well do you know that hippy, Feathers?”

“I’ve known him for a while, he’s a decent guy.”

“Let me guess, he’s a friend who is slowly sliding into your life. One day you’ll wake up with him in your bed, and your life taken over with hippy junk, stinking of flowery oil, and too stoned to move. Other than when you go down the social to pick up your cheque.”

Izzy shook her head minutely.

“And he’ll keep reminding you what a shit I was. And you’ll forget how adept he is in the forest, how he could skin a rabbit in seconds, if the urge took him. That he has a key to your building. He waited for Lou to go downstairs to get the papers that Saturday, watched him come back up the stairs, and chuck the Chronicle by your door. Then got to work.”

Izzy’s mouth fell open. It all made a sick kind of sense. Feathers moved so silently, she’d never hear him moving about on the landing. She trusted him. She’d let him into her life. She gulped, as she remembered he had a key. George was violent, but this was the work of a psychopath. He led her, fooled her with his show of searching for George when they found Button. He knew all along, he was the culprit. But they’d been together at the village hall. She stared up at George her finger still on the lock, thinking. Feathers knew how to do that magic fast-walking trick. He must have slid out the back while everyone was hollering for blood. He’d only need a few minutes.

“And stringing up the cat, that really was the work of a sick fuck.”

A cold chill swept over her body, her fingers, suddenly slippy, slid from the lock. She repositioned them, and asked, “How do you know about the cat? I didn’t tell anyone except the police.” The keys weighed heavy on her fingers. “I didn’t even tell the owners.” She laughed, an unnatural sound that heightened her level of fear. “I was trying to figure out whether to tell them or not. Maybe they’d be better off thinking a fox took Button.”

George ran a hand through his hair. “Someone must’ve said.” He cleared his throat. “Just get out of the car, okay?” He pulled at the handle again. “But I really didn’t do the rabbit.”

“Enough. You’ve messed up, George. Go away.”

Izzy let go of the lock, and swished with her hand. She grabbed the side steering wheel, and concentrated on making a plan. Something came to her. She checked on George, he had started to pace up and down outside her door. Holding her breath, she pressed down on the horn. It beeped into the woods, echoing around the trees. Birds, perched above them, took flight in a flurry of flapping wings and squawks of protest.

“Who’s going to hear you out here, you silly bitch? Get out the car. I’m losing patience with all your games.”