Peter James - A Twist of the Knife

It was a pleasant-looking mock-Tudor semi, with a cherry tree in the front garden and a stone birdbath. There was nothing immediately evident about the property to suggest a reason for the terror Susan Miller felt every time she saw it.

‘Number 12’ — white letters on the oak door. A brass knocker. And, in the distance, the faint sound of the sea. She began to walk up the path, her speed increasing as she came closer, as if drawn by an invisible magnet. Her terror deepening, she reached forward and rang the bell.

‘Susan! Susan, darling! It’s OK. It’s OK!’

The dull rasp faded in her ears; her eyes sprang open. She gulped down air, staring out into the darkness of the bedroom. ‘I’m sorry,’ she whispered hoarsely. ‘The dream. I had the dream.’

Tom settled back down with a grunt of disapproval and was asleep again in moments. Susan lay awake, listening to the steady, endless roar of the traffic on the M6 pouring past Birmingham, an icy fear flooding her veins.

She got out of bed and walked over to the window, afraid to go back to sleep. Easing back the edge of a curtain, she stared out into the night; the large illuminated letters advertising IKEA dominated the horizon.

The dream was getting more frequent. The first time had been on Christmas Eve some ten years back, and for a long while it had recurred only very occasionally. Now it was happening every few weeks.

After a short while, exhaustion and the cold of the late-October air lured her back into bed. She snuggled up against Tom’s unyielding body and closed her eyes, knowing the second nightmare that always followed was yet to come, and that she was powerless to resist it.

Christmas Eve. Susan arrived home laden with last-minute shopping, including a few silly gifts for Tom to try to make him smile; he rarely smiled these days. His car was in the drive, but when she called out he did not respond. Puzzled, she went upstairs, calling his name again. Then she opened the bedroom door.

As she did so, she heard the creak of springs and the rustle of sheets. Two naked figures writhing on the bed spun in unison towards her. Their shocked faces stared at her as if she were an intruder, had no right to be there. Strangers. A woman with long red hair and a grey-haired man. Both of them total strangers making love in her bed, in her bedroom. In her house .

But instead of confronting them, she backed away, rapidly, confused, feeling as if it were she who was the intruder. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I’m so sorry. I’m—’

Then she woke up.

Tom stirred, grunted, then slept on.

Susan lay still. God, it was so clear this time — it seemed to be getting more and more vivid lately. She had read an article in a magazine recently about interpreting dreams, and she tried to think what this one might be telling her.

Confusion was the theme. She was getting confused easily these days, particularly with regard to time. Often she’d be on the verge of starting some job around the house, then remember that she had already done it, or be about to rush out to the shops to buy something she had just bought. Stress. She had read about the effects of stress, in another magazine — she got most of her knowledge from magazines — and that it could cause all kinds of confusion and tricks of the mind.

And she knew the source of the stress, too.

Mandy. The new secretary at the Walsall branch of the Allied Chester & North-East Building Society, where Tom was Deputy Manager. Tom had told her about Mandy’s arrival a year ago, then had never mentioned her since. But she had watched them talking at the annual Christmas party last year, to which spouses and partners were invited. They had talked a damned sight too much for Susan’s liking. And they emailed each other a damned sight too much.

She had not been sure what to do. At thirty-two, she had kept her figure through careful eating and regular aerobics, and still looked good. She took care of her short brown hair, and paid attention to her make-up and her clothes. There wasn’t much else she could do, and confronting Tom without any evidence would have made her look foolish. Besides, she was under doctor’s orders to stay calm. She had given up work in order to relax and improve her chances of conceiving the child they had been trying for these past five years. She had to stay calm.

Unexpectedly, the solution presented itself when Tom arrived home that evening.

‘Promotion?’ she said, her eyes alight with excitement.

‘Yup! You are now looking at the second youngest ever branch manager for the Allied Chester & North-East Building Society! But,’ he added hesitantly, ‘it’s going to mean moving.’

‘Moving? I don’t mind at all, darling!’ Anywhere , she thought. The further the better. Get him away from that bloody Mandy . ‘Where to?’

‘Brighton.’

She could scarcely believe her luck. In their teens, Tom had taken her for a weekend to Brighton; it was the first time they had been away together. The bed in the little hotel had creaked like mad, and someone in the room below had hollered at them and they’d had to stuff sheets into their mouths to silence their laughter. ‘We’re going to live in Brighton?’

‘That’s right!’

She flung her arms around him. ‘When? How soon?’

‘They want me to take over the branch at the start of the New Year. So we have to find a house pretty smartly.’

Susan did a quick calculation. It was now late October. ‘We’ll never find somewhere and get moved by then. We’ve got to sell this place, we’ve got to—’

‘The Society will help. They’re relocating us, all expenses paid, and we get a lump-sum allowance for more expensive housing in the south. They’re giving me the week off next week so we can go there and look around. I’ve told the relocations officer our budget and she’s contacting some local estate agents for us.’

The first particulars arrived two days later in a thick envelope. Susan opened it in the kitchen and pulled out the contents, while Tom was gulping down his breakfast. There were about fifteen houses, mostly too expensive. She discarded several, then read the details of one that was well within their range: a very ugly box of a house, close to the sea, with a ‘small but charming’ garden. She liked the idea of living near the sea, but not the house. Still, she thought, you spend most of your time indoors, not looking at the exterior, so she put it aside as a possible and turned to the next.

As she saw the picture, she froze. Couldn’t be , she thought, bringing it closer to her eyes. Could not possibly be. She stared hard, struggling to control her shaking hands, at a mock-Tudor semi, identical to the one she always saw in her dream. Coincidence , she thought, feeling a tightening knot in her throat. Coincidence. Has to be. There are thousands of houses that look like this .

12 Bolingbroke Avenue.

Number 12, she knew, was the number on the door in her dream, the same dream in which she always heard the distant roar of the sea.

Maybe she had seen the house when they had been to Brighton previously. How long ago was that? Fourteen years? But even if she had seen it before, why should it have stuck in her mind?

‘Anything of interest?’ Tom asked, reaching out and turning the particulars of the modern box round to read them. Then he pulled the details of the semi out of her hands, rather roughly. ‘This looks nice,’ he said. ‘In our bracket. “In need of some modernization” — that’s estate agent-speak for a near wreck. Means if we do it up, it could be worth a lot more.’