Belinda Bauer - Darkside

Any attempt at stealth ruined, Jonas burst through the front door.

‘Lucy!’

No answer.

Please be OK. Please, please, please .

He opened the door into the front room.

Lucy was on the couch under the friendly glow of the fire, her eyes closed and her head nestled on the tasselled cushion.

Jonas released a huge breath he didn’t know he’d been holding. She was safe. She was fine. The driver had probably asked to use the phone, that was all—

The back door closed quietly.

Jonas’s heart pumped a shot of pure ice into his system. He could even feel it in his teeth.

He grabbed the poker from beside the fire and rushed into the kitchen.

Empty.

Jonas crossed the room in three strides and yanked open the back door. By the light spilling out of the kitchen it was easy to make out the herringbone treads.

‘Jonas?’

Jonas ignored Lucy and ran into the night once more. As soon as he was beyond the reach of the kitchen light, he lost the tracks, but he ran anyway, past the Beetle domed with snow, out into the road and down the hill.

In the jerking beam of the torch, he saw the indistinct shape of the man running for his life through the fast-falling snow. He was fast, but Jonas was gaining.

And then he wasn’t.

He lost his footing and went down heavily, the torch flying out of his hand. He skidded again getting up and lurched sideways. It was crucial. Even as he rose, Jonas heard the car door slam. He ran blindly towards the sound as if through a snowy waterfall, but the super-reliable Japanese engine caught first time and revved furiously as the wheels spun and then caught. The lights were not switched on; Jonas never even saw the car go.

He stood panting at the foot of the hill. He hadn’t even taken down the car’s number earlier. Basic stuff. Basic .

He got into the Land Rover and rumbled back up the hill to home.

He came through the still-open back door.

‘Jonas?’ Lucy called from the other room, sounding scared.

‘It’s OK, Lu,’ he called and locked the door behind him. Now he had stopped reacting and started thinking, the shock of disaster averted hit him like a wall, and he had to put his hand on the counter and double over to get his breath.

The killer had been here.

Right here in Rose Cottage.

While Lucy slept unaware on the couch, the killer had come into their home.

Had he seen her?

Had he already stood over his victim in life and mused on how best to make her dead?

Had he touched her hair and known that this one was next?

He shivered and realized he was shaking uncontrollably.

He couldn’t fall apart on her now.

‘Jonas?’

He couldn’t tell her; it would scare the hell out of her. She must never know how badly he’d fucked up or how close she had come to being killed. He would stop going out at night. Hell, he would stop going out during the days if he possibly could! How could he have been so stupid? How could he have gone out to protect the village and left Lucy to protect herself? His most precious thing in the whole wide world! Was he fucking crazy?

Jonas suddenly thought that he might be crazy. Had maybe been crazy ever since he’d found Lucy behind the front door in her pink flannel pyjamas and the joke bunny slippers he’d bought her two Christmases ago. Or maybe before that – maybe when they’d sat together in that bastard doctor’s office and he’d told them that Lucy Holly, his perfect wife and best friend, was going to spend the next several years dying in front of his eyes. Or was it when his parents both left him alone? One minute here, the next minute gone – their immaculate little car turned into instant scrap by a head-on collision with an idiot driver who was halfway through a text to his wife at the time: On my wax CU soo — They had read it out at the inquest into all three deaths.

On my wax .

If that wasn’t enough to drive anyone crazy, Jonas didn’t know what was.

Or maybe it was even before that. Maybe he’d always been crazy. Who the hell knew? Right now he couldn’t remember the last time he’d felt completely sane.

Jonas picked up his hand to watch it shake.

Then his eyes refocused on the kitchen counter beyond it.

Between the kettle and the toaster were two mugs. Wisps of steam still rose from them and the tea bags floated just under the surface of the dark liquid like two little drowning victims.

The killer had been making tea.

One for himself and one for Lucy.

That made no sense.

No sense at all.

Why would a killer—

With a hollow jolt, Jonas realized the man he’d chased from his home could not have been the killer.

Then who the fuck was he?

Steven Lamb liked delivering newspapers. He’d had this job for almost three years now – ever since Skew Ronnie Trewell had got his driver’s licence and lost interest in the Exmoor Bugle and the Daily Mail as a means to an end.

Steven liked the early mornings in the summer, and bore them in the winter. He liked the smell of the newspapers as Mr Jacoby cut the plastic tape that bound the quires, and he liked the fleeting snapshots of world news he glimpsed as he helped Mr Jacoby stuff each paper with shiny brochures advertising debt consolidation and credit cards.

Most of all he liked the £11.50 he got every week.

That was the reason he’d wanted the job in the first place, of course. What boy doesn’t want to earn money and start buying? He’d had to fight for it though. Not other applicants, because Mr Jacoby had told him the job was his if he wanted it. No, Steven had had to fight his mother and grandmother to be allowed to do the job. They didn’t want him getting up and walking to Mr Jacoby’s shop in the dark; they didn’t want him knocking on doors of a winter’s evening and asking for payment; they didn’t want him outside at all really – day or night.

They said it was dangerous.

Most boys his age would have scoffed and whined and dismissed them both as fussy old hens, but Steven understood that it was dangerous. That he knew as well as anyone and better than most.

He also knew in his secret heart that if he didn’t have to go out into the world every day, he might never leave the house again; might cringe indoors and think too much about what might have been and what very nearly was.

His mum and nan had finally bowed to the sheer weight of his persistence and Steven had lain awake all night before his first day, shaking with apprehension.

He’d had therapy. He didn’t know who had paid for it, but he suspected it was not his mum or his nan, because they encouraged him to go as often as possible.

But Steven Lamb still knew what fear was.

He recognized it when it whispered from the high hedges that hemmed the narrow lanes; when it made him shudder alone on the moor on a warm summer’s evening; when it visited his dreams and settled over his sleep in a visceral veil. But he’d also grown adept at throwing it off, at staring it down – and at turning his back on it and daring it to do its worst. Every time he hoisted the weighty DayGlo sack over his shoulder, and every furled newspaper he pushed through springy letter boxes helped him to thumb his nose at fear.

As did the Fracture Snub skateboard he’d bought with the first £60 he’d managed to save; and the secondhand iPod shuffle he clipped to his jeans; and the first real grown-up present he’d bought his mother for her birthday – a slim gold chain with a tiny green birthstone on it.

Something in Steven understood that each of these was a trophy he awarded himself for living his life and kicking fear’s ass.