Nicola Cornick - House Of Shadows

‘I’m at the mill.’ Florence was crying. ‘Daddy’s been gone for hours and I don’t know where he is! Aunt Holly, I’m scared! Please come—’ The line crackled, the words breaking up.

‘Flo!’ Holly said again, urgently. ‘Flo—’ But there was nothing other than the rustle and hiss of the line and then a long, empty silence.

‘Are you mad?’

Guy had emerged from the spare room two minutes previously wearing only his crumpled boxer shorts, bleary-eyed, his hair standing on end in bad-tempered spikes.

‘You can’t shoot off to Wiltshire at this time of night,’ he said. ‘What a bloody stupid idea.’

‘It’s Oxfordshire,’ Holly said automatically. She checked the clock, pulling on her boots at the same time. The zip stuck. She wrenched it hard. Two twenty-seven. She had already wasted ten minutes.

She had rung back repeatedly but there had been no reply. The mill house, Ben and Natasha’s holiday cottage, did not have a landline and the mobile reception had always been patchy. You had to be standing in exactly the right place to get a signal.

‘Have you tried Tasha’s mobile?’ Guy asked.

‘She’s working abroad somewhere.’ Ben had told her but Holly couldn’t remember exactly where. ‘I left her a message.’ Tasha had a high-powered job with a TV travel show and was frequently away.

‘Ben’s probably turned up again by now.’ Guy sat down next to her on the bed, putting what she supposed was meant to be a reassuring hand on her arm. ‘Look, Hol, don’t panic. I mean maybe the kid got it wrong—’

‘Her name’s Florence,’ Holly said tightly. It irritated the hell out of her that Guy seldom remembered any of her family or friends’ names, mostly because he didn’t try. ‘She sounded terrified,’ she said. ‘What do you want me to do?’ She swung around fiercely on him. ‘Leave her there alone?’

‘Like I said, Ben will have turned up by now.’ Guy smothered a yawn. ‘He probably crept out to meet up with some tart, thinking the kid was asleep and wouldn’t notice. I know that’s what I’d be doing if I was married to that hard-faced bitch.’

‘I daresay,’ Holly said, not troubling to hide the edge in her voice. ‘But Ben’s not like you. He—’ She stopped. ‘Ben would never leave Flo on her own,’ she said.

She stood up. The terrified pounding of her heart had settled to an anxious flutter now, but urgency still beat through her. Two thirty. It would take her an hour and a half to get to Ashdown if there was no traffic. An hour and a half when Flo would be alone and fearful. The terror Holly had felt earlier tightened in her gut. Where the hell was Ben? And why had he not taken his phone with him wherever he had gone? Why leave it in the house?

She racked her brains to remember their last phone conversation. He’d told her that he and Florence were heading to the mill for a long weekend. He’d taken a few days off from his surgery in Bristol. It was the early May Bank Holiday.

‘I’m doing some family history research,’ he’d said, and Holly had laughed, thinking he must be joking, because history of the family or any other sort had never remotely interested her brother before.

She was wasting time.

‘Have you seen my car keys?’ she asked.

‘No.’ Guy followed her into the living room, blinking as she snapped on the main light and flooded the space with brightness.

‘Jesus,’ he said irritably, ‘Now I’m wide awake. You’re determined to ruin my night.’

‘I thought,’ Holly said, ‘that you might come with me.’

The genuine surprise on his face told her everything she needed to know.

‘Why go at all?’ Guy said gruffly, turning away. ‘I still don’t get it. Just call the police, or a neighbour to go over and check it out. Isn’t there some old friend of yours who lives near there? Fiona? Freda?’

‘Fran,’ Holly said. She grabbed her keys off the table. ‘Fran and Iain are away for a couple of days,’ she said. ‘And the reason I’m going—’ she stalked up to him, ‘is because my six-year-old niece is alone and terrified and she called me for help. Do you get it now? She’s a child. She’s frightened. And you’re suggesting I go back to bed and forget about it?’

She picked up her bag, checking for her purse, phone, and tablet. The rattle of the keys had brought Bonnie, her Labrador retriever, in from her basket in the kitchen. She looked wide-awake, feathery tail wagging.

‘No, Bon Bon,’ Holly said. ‘You’re staying—’ She stopped; looked at Guy. He’d forget to feed her, walk her. And anyway, it was comforting to have Bonnie with her. She grabbed Bonnie’s food from the kitchen cupboard and looped her lead over her arm.

‘Right,’ she said. ‘Let’s go.’ In the doorway she paused. ‘Shall I call you when I know what’s happened?’ she asked Guy.

He was already disappearing into the bedroom, reclaiming the space she had left. ‘Oh, sure,’ he said, and Holly knew she would not.

Holly rang Ben’s number every couple of minutes but there was never any reply, only the repeated click of the voicemail telling her that Ben was unavailable and that she should leave a message. Eventually that stopped, too. There was no return call from Tasha, either. Holly wondered about calling her grandparents in Oxford. They were much closer to Ashdown Mill and to Florence than she was, though the car was eating up the miles of empty road. The mesmerising slide of the streetlights was left behind and there was nothing but darkness about her now as she drove steadily west.

In the end she decided not to call Hester and John. She didn’t want to give either of them a heart attack, especially when there might be no reason to worry. Even though she was furious with Guy, she knew he might be right. Ben could have returned by now and Florence might be fast asleep again and, with the adaptability of a child, have forgotten that she had even called for help.

Holly had not wanted to call the police for lots of reasons ranging from the practical – that it could be a false alarm – to the less morally justifiable one of not wanting to cause problems for her brother. She and Ben had always protected each other, drawing closer than close after their parents had been killed in a car crash when Holly was eleven and Ben thirteen. They had looked out for each other with a fierce loyalty that had remained fundamentally unchanged over the years. Their understanding of each other was relaxed and easy these days, but just as close, just as deep. Or so Holly had thought before this had happened, leaving her wondering what the hell her brother was up to.

She pushed away the unwelcome suspicion that there might be things about Ben that she neither knew nor understood. Guy had planted the seed of doubt, but she crushed it angrily; she did know that Ben and Tasha were going through a bad patch but she could not imagine Ben being unfaithful. He simply wasn’t the type. Even less could she imagine him neglecting his child. There had to be some other reason for his disappearance, if he had actually vanished.

But there was Florence, who was only six, and she had been alone and terrified. So it was an easy decision in the end. Holly had called the local police, keeping her explanation as short and factual as possible, sounding far calmer than she had felt. If anything happened to Florence and she had not done her best to help, she would have failed Ben as well as her niece.

The sign for Hungerford flashed past, surprising her. She was at the turn already. It was twelve minutes to four. Ahead of her the sky was inky dark, but in her rear-view mirror she thought she could see the first faint light of a spring dawn. Perhaps, though, that was wishful thinking. The truth was that she didn’t feel comfortable in the countryside. She was a city girl through and through, growing up first in Manchester and then in Oxford after her parents had died, moving to London to go to art college and staying there ever since. London was a good place for her glass-engraving business. She had a little gallery and shop in the mews adjoining the flat, and a sizeable clientele.