Promises to Keep

Elizabeth Haynes worked for many years as a police analyst. Her debut novel,
Into the Darkest Corner
, won Amazon's Book of the Year in 2011 and Amazon's Rising Star Award for debut novels.

Elizabeth grew up in Sussex and studied English, German and Art History at Leicester University. She is currently taking a career break having worked for the past seven years as a police intelligence analyst. Elizabeth now lives in Kent with her husband and son, and writes in coffee shops and a shed-office which takes up most of the garden. She is a regular participant in, and a Municipal Liaison for National Novel Writing Month - an annual challenge to write 50,000 words in the month of November.

Into the Darkest Corner

Revenge of the Tide

Human Remains

Under a Silent Moon

Published by Sphere

ISBN: 978-0-7515-5573-8

All characters and events in this publication, other than those clearly in the public domain, are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

Copyright © Elizabeth Haynes 2014

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.

The publisher is not responsible for websites (or their content) that are not owned by the publisher.

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It usually takes her ten minutes to find her stride. By that time, she’s run the length of the field and has been in the woods for a quarter of a mile. Her breath evens out, her pace becomes hypnotic. Nothing but the smell of the damp, compacted earth pounding under her trainers. Even Dixie has found his rhythm; he’s given up the sniffing and the scampering from bush to tree, it’s all about the run for him now, just as it is for her.

When she gets to this point, her mind wanders. Everywhere else in her life her mind is like a city rush hour: exhausting, hot, intense, sometimes it’s like nothing can get through. Here, in the woods, it all unravels like a knotted rope into a single zen-like thread. Patterns become clear. Conversations play out the way they should have done, there is clarity, calm. Hope.

Conversations like the one this morning, for instance, Jo sitting at the table in the kitchen, hands wrapped around a mug of mint tea. Sam comes in dressed for work, freshly showered, grey trousers, navy blouse. Her heavy blonde hair is still damp at the ends.

‘You’re up early,’ she says, kissing the top of Jo’s head. She drops bread into the toaster.

‘Yes. I’m going to the library.’ Jo can feel Sam gazing at her.

‘It’s only six. I’m fairly sure the library won’t be open for a while.’

Her voice is gentle but even so, Jo bristles at it. ‘I wanted to see you off to work.’

‘You’re not going for a run, are you?’

The toast pops up in the seconds before Jo thinks of her reply. In the end, she settles for the basic lie: ‘No.’

If Sam thinks she’s lying, she manages not to say. ‘That’s good. We can go out together when I get home from work, then.’

The truth is, Sam won’t be home until late, because that’s just the way it is. It’s getting dark by five, and Sam hasn’t been home that early since this job started a week ago. It’s a murder investigation, that’s all Jo knows about it. It’s usually either that, or a kidnapping, or a rape. She’ll be lucky if Sam’s home before bedtime. There will be no run this evening.

Sam eats her toast and Jo sips her tea, trying to think of something to say. Trying to be bright and happy and positive. She can’t even manage to pretend. The cloud is big today, big and black and overwhelming. For a moment she thinks twice about going for a run, despite Dixie twisting himself around her legs, his tail thumping against the table. She thinks about going back to bed, pulling the duvet over herself and waiting.

‘I wish I could stay home with you today,’ Sam says.

She’s noticed, then. She usually does.

‘I’ll be fine, it’s okay. I’ll be better when I’m out.’ Jo gets up from the table and washes her mug at the sink, even though it was still a quarter full, to hide the tears that are brimming.

Sam comes up behind her, slips her arm around her waist, nuzzles into her neck. Jo tries not to flinch. She has no reason to, but intimacy doesn’t seem to help when it feels this bad.

‘I’ll call you later,’ Sam says. And then, when she’s pulling on her jacket: ‘Promise me you’re not going to the woods?’

But the woods are the only place Jo can run. The roads are too busy, too many people, even in the middle of the day when they should be at work. Jo doesn’t like to see people. She doesn’t like to stop and chat and pass the time of day. She has a plan when she’s running: it takes her eight minutes to reach the post in the woods, seven minutes to get to the clearing in the centre. Any longer than this and she’s slacking.

She rarely sees anyone in the woods, but today there’s someone up ahead. She considers running past but the path is narrow; she’ll need to stand to one side. She pulls an ear bud out of one ear, calls the dog: ‘Dixie!’

The dog is ahead of her now, trotting up to the stranger. It’s a man, scruffy-looking, an unkempt beard and long hair – a rough sleeper? But his clothes are clean. He’s carrying a rucksack over his shoulder, which he drops to the floor as if it’s heavy. He’s patting Dixie, who’s wagging his tail. Jo has slowed to a walk, annoyed that her rhythm has been interrupted.

‘Morning,’ the man says brightly. ‘Nice dog.’

‘Yeah,’ Jo says in reply, taking deep breaths. ‘He’s a good runner.’

‘Likes the rabbits, does he?’

Jo’s wary now, because she knows people use dogs for lamping in the fields around here. She doesn’t want Dixie to be nabbed. ‘He’s not fast enough to catch anything,’ she says.

Dixie’s lead is around her neck. She wears it like this when she’s running, the ends clipped together, so she doesn’t lose it. But right now it makes her feel vulnerable. She clutches the lead clip and fiddles with it. The man looks at her fingers, and the smile drops from his face.

Jo is aware of the strands of hair sticking to the sides of her face, a trickle of sweat running between her shoulder blades. He’s looking at her chest. She feels a sudden clutch of fear, takes a small step back into the nettles.

He chuckles at her reaction, nods to himself. ‘Right,’ he says, and then he moves to pass her.

She feels relief, stands to one side to let him through. Dixie decides to let out a low growl, despite his friendliness just a few moments ago. Jo takes hold of his collar.

When he’s past her she prepares to run again, putting the earbud back into her ear, and then she hears something. She removes it again, turns: the man is facing her on the track. ‘I’m sorry,’ she says, ‘did you say something?’

‘I said, you should be careful, running out here, all on your own.’

He turns and heads off down the path.

Her rhythm has been disrupted by this encounter. Her heart is thumping with it, her breathing shallow and not helping her recovery. From somewhere quite close comes an animal sound, a low, throaty growl – so deep that it feels as if the ground itself is vibrating under her feet. The sound increases in volume and then fades. The first time she heard this noise, Jo had been terrified, imagining an earthquake or something, but a little investigation had revealed it to be nothing more sinister than the Eurostar trains thundering their way to France and Belgium, somewhere deep beneath her feet. Now she likes the predictability of the sound. She’s learned to time her run so that at some point between the beginning of the woods and the end, she will hear and feel the train. The continental dragon, growling at her from its underground lair.

The train makes her think of Mohammed. It always does. He didn’t come on the Eurostar, of course: he crossed the Channel on the top of the driver’s cab of an articulated lorry. He and his younger brother Hassan were hiding behind the windbreaker, holding on to each other and whatever else they could. ‘He says he was very afraid,’ the interpreter had told her. ‘He says he was worried his brother was going to fall.’

Nevertheless, something about the journey, the crossing, whether made by sea or rail, reminds her of him. Every time.

Dixie has seen a rabbit, his bat-like Podenco ears pointing forwards. He regards it and then gives Jo a look, as if to point out that he could easily catch it if he chose to; it’s just that right now, he’s busy with other things. The rabbit watches from the path ahead, assessing the risk, pushing its luck to the limit before skittering off into the bushes.

Within a minute, she’s back in her rhythm, and it feels good. Despite the cold air, the damp ground underfoot soaking through her trainers, she feels good. Her breath sounds heavy but even in her ears, rising above the hiphop beat she runs to. The clearing is ahead. Beyond it, she can see the path snaking through the trees towards the industrial units. At that point the path turns left, runs alongside the chainlink fence at the back of the warehouses. It’s a wide, open track, fresh tyre marks across the potholed concrete. If only she felt this good all the time! For a moment she feels almost euphoric and she can believe that she’s better, she’s fixed, the events of the past few months and the way she’s dealt with them – badly – are all behind her. Her thighs are burning – this bit’s uphill.

But now she’s started thinking about Mohammed, she can’t stop. He was fifteen. And she could have saved him.

The tears are making it difficult to see the path, so for a moment she stops, hands on hips, breathing hard. This is the highest point on her run, where the industrial estate ends and the fields start. From here, she will run on the footpath beside the field, back down to the woods and then home. She doesn’t normally stop, but since her rhythm was disrupted by that man, she has no reason to push the pace. Jo wonders briefly where he was coming from, with his heavy rucksack. There are no houses up here, just the buildings behind the chainlink fence, half of them unoccupied.

You should be careful, running out here on your own
.

Jo wipes her eyes. She is ready to run again. And then she realises something is missing. She pulls her earbuds from her ears, listens. ‘Dixie!’ There is no sound, no answering bark, no crashing through the foliage, no tick-tick of his claws on the concrete. She turns around, her eyes searching the path. ‘Dixie!’

And just when she’s about to panic, the dog comes galloping up the path towards her, tail high, coated from ears to rump in something dark brown and noxious.