Minette Walters - The Devil's Feather

My father never forgave himself for what he saw as capitulation. He felt he should have fought harder for what his family had bought and built, and what was rightfully his. He landed a reasonably paid job in London with a South African wine importer, but he hated the insularity of England, the claustrophobia of city life and the modest rented flat in Kentish Town that was a quarter the size of their farmhouse outside Bulawayo.

I take after my mother in looks, tall and blonde, and my father in character, determinedly independent. On the face of it, my mother appears the least secure of the three of us, yet I wonder if her willingness to admit fear shows that she’s the most self-assured. For my father, running away was an admission of defeat. He thought of himself as strong and resolute, and I realized in the summer of 2004 how humiliating it had been for him to cut and run. He hadn’t found the courage to confront Mugabe’s bullies any more than I could find the courage to confront mine…and we both felt diminished as a result.

The excuse I gave them of wanting time and space to write a book was partially true. I’d produced an outline while still in Baghdad (in the aftermath of the Abu Ghraib revelations) and had been offered a publishing contract on the back of it. I saw how twitched I and my colleagues became when the West lost its sheen of moral respectability, and my idea had been to chart the world’s trouble-spots through the eyes of war correspondents. I particularly wanted to explore how constant exposure to danger affects the psyche.

The original advance offered was a pittance but I renegotiated it on the basis that the book would include a full and free account of my kidnapping. It was straightforward fraud, because I signed the contract knowing I would never reveal the truth. Indeed, I couldn’t see myself writing a book at all-I seized up every time I sat in front of a keyboard-but I had no conscience about persuading the publishers I was committed. It was the pretext I needed to take myself out of circulation while I stitched my tattered nerve together again.

I found Barton House on a Dorset agent’s website and chose it because it was the only property available on a six-month lease. It was far too big for one person but the weekly rent was the same as for a three-bedroomed holiday cottage. When I queried this, the agent told me that holiday lets were unreliable and the owner wanted a guaranteed regular income. Since I could afford it, I accepted his explanation and forwarded a money draft under the name I’d used in the hotel, which was my mother’s maiden name-Marianne Curran-but even if he’d told me the truth, that the house was in a poor state of decorative repair, I would still have gone ahead. I was obsessed at that stage with removing myself from the world.

I don’t know what I expected-to be part of a small community where I could close the door when I felt like it, perhaps-but that wasn’t the reality. All the arrangements had been made by email and telephone until my collection of the key from the agent’s office in Dorchester half an hour earlier. The photograph of Barton House on the website had shown climbing plants across a stone façade, with the roof of another building to the side (a garage as I discovered later). I had assumed, since the address was Winterbourne Barton, that this meant it was within the village boundaries.

Instead, it stood behind high hedges, well away from the nearest house, and with most of it invisible from the road. An absence of crowds was exactly what it promised-even isolation-and I halted my newly acquired Mini at the entrance and stared through the windscreen with anxiety fluttering at my heart. The human maelstrom of London had been a nightmare during the three weeks I’d spent with my parents because I’d never known who was behind me. But surely this was worse? To be alone, and hidden from view, with no protection and no one within calling distance?

The hedges cast long shadows and the garden was so wild and unkempt that an army could have been lurking there without my seeing them. Since the moment I’d landed at Heathrow, I’d been trying to conquer my fears by reaffirming what I knew to be true-I was no longer in danger because I’d done what I was told-but there’s no reasoning with anxiety. It’s an intense internal emotion that isn’t susceptible to logic. All you can do is experience the terror that your brain has told your body to feel.

I drove in eventually because I had nowhere else to go. The house was pretty enough-a low rectangular eighteenth-century construction-but, close up, its tattiness showed. The sun and salt winds had taken their toll of the doors and window frames, and so many of the tiles had slipped that I wondered if the roof was even waterproof, despite the agent’s assurances on his website that the property was sound. It didn’t worry me-I’d seen far worse, most recently in Baghdad, where bomb damage left whole buildings in ruins-but I began to understand why Barton House compared favourably with three-bedroomed cottages.

Does any of us know our breaking point? Mine was when the large iron key to the front door jammed in the lock and five mastiffs appeared out of nowhere as I tried to find a signal on my mobile. I was pointing it towards the horizon and only realized the dogs were there when one of them started growling. They took up guard around me with their muzzles inches from my skirt, and I felt the familiar adrenaline rush as my autonomic fear response kicked into action.

Half a second’s thought would have told me there was an owner around, but I was so petrified I couldn’t think at all. It didn’t even register when I dropped my phone. You can reinforce your confidence as many times as you like, but it’s a futile exercise when your fear is so real that a single growl can reawaken nightmares. I’d never seen the dogs in the Baghdad cellar but I could still hear and feel them, and they inhabited my dreams.

I didn’t notice the owner until she was standing in front of me, and I mistook her gender until she spoke. I certainly didn’t take her for an adult. She was wearing denims and a man’s shirt that was too big for her slight body, and her curiously flat features and slicked-back dark hair made me think she was an adolescent boy who was still growing. If she weighed a hundred pounds I’d have been surprised. Any one of the mastiffs could have crushed the life out of her just by lying on her.

“Keep your hands still,” she said curtly. “Birdlike movements excite them.”

She gave a flick of her fingers and the dogs ranged themselves in front of her, heads lowered.

“You look like Madeleine,” she said. “Are you related?”

I had no idea what she was talking about, and didn’t care anyway because I couldn’t breathe. I dropped into a squat, head back, sucking for oxygen, but all I achieved was to set her dogs growling again. At that point I gave up and scrabbled on all fours towards the open door of the Mini. I dived in and pulled it to, clicking the lock behind me, before leaning back in a desperate attempt to get some air into my lungs. I think one of the dogs must have charged the car because I felt it lurch, followed by a sharp command from the girl, but I’d closed my eyes and wasn’t watching.

I knew what was happening. I knew it wouldn’t last and that all I had to do was stop the rapid, shallow breathing, but this time the pains in my chest were so bad that I wondered if I was having a heart attack. I groped for my stash of paper bags in the door pocket and clamped one over my nose and mouth, trying to ease the symptoms. I’ve no idea how long it took. Time didn’t exist. But when I opened my eyes, the girl and her dogs had gone.

Extracts from notes, filed as “CB16-19/05/04”