Питер Мэй - I'll Keep You Safe

She moved forward carefully towards the living room at the end of the hall, fingertips on the wall so as not to lose her orientation. Her eyes were growing accustomed to the faintest of light provided from the outside by her headlamps. Furniture began to take shape around her. The breakfast bar off to her left.

Then suddenly a shadow rose up straight in front of her. A face, barely lit, but burning with some inner intensity. A face she had seen on CCTV video footage barely two hours ago. She had no time to react before she felt the blade punching into her abdomen. Ice-cold, razor-sharp. Once, twice. The third time it slid between her ribs and up into her heart. She dropped to her knees, clutching feebly at her wounds and feeling the blood running warm through her fingers. The life ebbing out of her.

She realized, with a sense of disbelief, that she was going to die. How was that possible? How could this have happened?

She would never catch those flights tomorrow, or tell Faubert what he could do with his job. She would never see her children again, nor they her. The choices she should have made long ago would never now be taken. And as darkness consumed her she knew, too, that there was nothing she could do to stop her killer from taking Niamh’s life as well.

The fog was impenetrably deep. Niamh felt lost in it, wandering about with arms outstretched, hands like antennae feeling the way ahead. Somewhere in the far distance there was a light. So faint it was barely discernible in the mist. But sounds came to her now. Voices and music. Distant, too. Travelling the way that sound does across water.

And then she opened her eyes to a wave of nausea washing over her. It was all she could manage to keep down the contents of her stomach. She retched and gagged and rolled over to see that the light came from a landing beyond an open door. A cold yellow light that penetrated the darkness of the bedroom.

It was with a shock that Niamh realized suddenly that there were two other people on the bed with her. Two young men, barely more than boys, fast asleep and folded into each other’s arms. Fully dressed. As was Niamh. To her relief.

She swung her legs over the edge of the bed and felt another wave of nausea, accompanied by a searing pain in her head. What in God’s name had been in those drinks they gave her? If not alcohol, something much worse. She sat for several minutes simply breathing, deeply, letting the pain and the nausea pass. She looked around for a clock on a bedside table. But there wasn’t one. Then she focused on her watch and saw with a shock that it was after midnight. She had been unconscious for hours. A small sash window had been left open, and the rain was driving in on to the carpet, soaking curtains that billowed into the room.

Niamh found her handbag on the floor, and got unsteadily to her feet to stagger to the open window and breathe in deeply, feeling the rain cold and delicious in her face, before sliding it shut. Neither man on the bed stirred.

There was still music pounding away somewhere downstairs as she made her way out on to the landing and a staircase that led down to the next floor.

The vast lounge with the grand piano stood empty but fully lit. People lay around sleeping in the salon and in the TV room. No one else in the house seemed to be awake, or troubled by the music. Bottles lay about the floor, glasses leaving rings on table tops and dressers. Cigarettes smouldering in makeshift ashtrays. It was almost as if someone had pressed a pause button and brought the world to a standstill. All except for Niamh, who drifted through it like a shadow, slipping now down the stairs to the entrance hall, where she stood for some moments listening for signs of life. There were none.

She fell down the steps on to the gravel outside, and immediately emptied the contents of her stomach, almost fluorescent green, on to the chippings. She crouched on her hands and knees in the rain, gulping in air. By the time she had forced herself back to her feet, her head felt less fogged, and her stomach less liable to further retching. She looked around and realized that she had no idea if Lee Blunt had ever returned. But the Range Rover he had been driving at the funeral was nowhere to be seen.

Niamh stumbled to her Jeep, and holding the door open against the wind managed to climb up into the driver’s seat. She knew she shouldn’t drive. That it was madness in this state. But all she wanted was to get away. To escape these people, and this nightmare.

She fumbled in her bag for her key and turned it in the ignition, revving hard before backing out across the gravel and turning on to the road that would take her back in the direction of the old whaling station, and the A859 heading north. To Ness. And home.

The storm had begun to abate a little as she nursed the Jeep through the rain-filled potholes that pitted the track south across the moor to Taigh ’an Fiosaich. It was some time after two, the night as black as sin beyond the tunnel cut through it by her headlights. She felt physically and mentally drained, as if someone had pummelled her with boxing gloves. Her fatigue was very nearly palpable, the longing she felt to fall back on her bed and close her eyes only marginally more powerful than the desire to pull over here and now and let herself fall asleep behind the wheel.

She was not surprised when she navigated past the rise at Bilascleiter to see that there were no lights on in the house. But startled by the presence of a car there, its headlamps reflecting light back from its walls. She pulled up beside it on the gravel apron. The rain had stopped now as she slipped from the Jeep, but the wind still hit her with a force that nearly knocked her from her feet. Holding on to her vehicle, hair whipping into her face, she made her way around it to look at the other car. A saloon car. Not many people would have risked a vehicle like that on the road out here. Its engine was running. And she saw a rental sticker on the rear windscreen. Lewis Car Rentals. She frowned. One of Lee Blunt’s party? But how would any of them even know how to get out here? Where to come.

She felt a sudden foreboding. Someone had tried to kill her yesterday. And now there was someone in her house. In the dark. Someone unknown. For a long time she stood buffeted by the wind, trying to decide what to do. The safest option would be to climb back into her Jeep and drive away. But she had neither the strength nor the will. She was being overdramatic, she decided. If someone had come to kill her, they would hardly leave their car parked outside, engine running, lights on to signal their presence.

She approached the door and opened it slowly, carefully, into the house. The darkness inside was penetrated only by the lights of the car outside. She eased the door shut behind her and reached for the shelf above the coat hooks, fumbling for the torch they always kept there for emergencies. Clumsy fingers knocked it off the shelf and it went clattering to the floor, rolling away into the hall.

Niamh cursed under her breath, forced to drop to her hands and knees to find it, reaching out to feel for it ahead of her. Whoever was in the house would know by now that she was back. Her fingers closed with relief around the curvature of the torch’s long handle, and she stood up, feeling for the switch to turn it on.

Its light, cold and hard, was startling. And at almost the same time that she directed its beam along the hall and into the living room, she became aware of an alien odour in her house. Very background, but off-pitch and disquieting. Like rusted iron.

‘Hello?’ Her voice seemed tiny. She cleared her throat and called again. ‘Hello? Who’s there?’

The absence of any reply pushed her heart up into her throat, real fear quickly displacing disquiet. She swung the beam of her torch from left to right in the darkness ahead of her, seeing it reflected in the windows all along the far side of the living room. Now she moved forward very carefully, adrenalin heightening all her senses, but it wasn’t until she reached the end of the hall that a shadow on the floor ahead drew her eye.