‘Thank God you lived,’ I mouthed, before slipping out.
16
I ARRIVED HOME with a Chinese takeaway, from the restaurant Mark Joesbury had taken me to the night we’d met. Call me hopelessly sentimental if you want, it just felt appropriate. What with the hot food, a handbag, a couple of carrier bags from my supermarket trip, not to mention keys, I had no hands free to switch on lights. I dumped the food on the kitchen counter and carried on. From my bedroom I can see through a small conservatory directly into the garden beyond.
Of course, had the lights been on I almost certainly wouldn’t have seen the figure in the garden, but due to the dark interior, the moving shape stood out against the moonlit snow. She was back. And she was here.
Shocked and surprisingly scared, I stood frozen to the spot, wondering if I’d locked the conservatory door. I was sure I had – I always do – but it’s a question you ask, isn’t it, when someone who really shouldn’t be in your back garden has their attention fixed intently, almost hungrily, on you?
Each time I’d seen the woman in black up till now, she’d inspired my interest and sympathy. Up close, she was frightening. At a distance, the black of her robes had seemed to intensify against the snow. Close up, it was a different matter entirely. Just yards away from me, the blackness of her seemed to lose substance, no longer solid against a white background, but empty. I looked at where black fabric should be and saw nothing. It was as though the woman in black were sucking away the world and leaving a void in its place. For the first time, I began to feel afraid of her, to wonder if this really were the vulnerable, grieving woman I’d conjured in my head.
For one thing, those eyes, the only part of her I could see clearly, were just so intense. Catching the light from somewhere, maybe from the flat above me, they were gleaming, and the expression was one I simply couldn’t read.
The plan, so far as I’d had one, had been to approach her quietly when she showed up, to welcome her inside, encourage her to tell her story, to hold her hand as we went together to the police station. None of that seemed possible right now.
But someone had to move, because the longer we stood and stared at each other, the harder it became to break the deadlock. Yet still she continued to stand there, as though someone had dropped a life-size granite statue into my garden.
Looked like it was going to be me, then.
I reached for the door that led to the conservatory. At the same moment, she stepped back and faded into the gloom.
‘Wait!’ I called out. By the time I reached the back door, I couldn’t see her.
I opened the door, but stayed within the psychological shelter of its frame, still feeling the need for the protection of my own home. I could see nothing of the woman. When I was certain she was no longer close, I stepped outside.
It wasn’t possible. She could not have vanished. My garden was white with snow. Except it wasn’t really, not now that I was out there. The snow-covered jasmine that scaled the wall to my right was washed orange by a nearby streetlight, and the moonlight had spun a path of pale gold which ran from one corner of the garden to its opposite diagonal. The white of the snow had become silver, even blue, in places, and the dark and shadowy corners had, in contrast, become deeper and gloomier.
Surely, though, there was nowhere to hide? The path was too narrow, the foliage on either side too thick. Leaves would be trembling, snow falling to the ground like shaken sugar if she were tucked amongst the shrubbery. There hadn’t been time, not if she moved like a mortal woman, to run the full length of the garden and tuck herself away behind the shed. And yet, where else—
I heard movement, a scraping sound. She was behind me. I turned and saw her halfway up the wall. She climbed impossibly quickly, springing up like a cat, before pausing at the top and leaping out of sight.
No point trying to follow her. I knew I could never move half as fast as she’d just done. And I was the fittest person I knew.
A starving Muslim woman who could scamper up eight-foot walls like a squirrel? In floor-length robes? This wasn’t feeling normal to me. And the door to my shed, where I store my fitness equipment and which I always keep locked, was open.
My garden was just too dark, I decided as I neared the shed. The walls were high and overhanging trees cut off most of the light from either the moon or the streetlamps. With the snow, it was bad enough. When it had gone, it would be worse. I needed lights out here.
And my sense of unease wasn’t helped by remembering the last time I’d come out here to investigate an intruder. It had been some time in the early hours, and as I’d approached the shed, I’d seen the warm flicker of candlelight. My punchbag, hanging from a hook in the centre of the roof, had been ‘adorned with the addition of a real human head.
I wasn’t in the mood for any grisly early Christmas presents this evening. I pushed at the door, relieved – I think – to find the shed in darkness. Switching on the light didn’t throw up too many surprises either. Everything was much as I’d left it. The punchbag rotated slowly, but it always did when I opened the door. On the other hand, the padded mat that I use for floor work appeared to carry the indentation of a human form. I bent down and touched it. Slightly warm. And that was a chocolate wrapper on the floor.
The woman had eaten in here – the chocolate was the same brand I’d bought in the supermarket – and had lain down on my exercise mat. So Tulloch had been right. She was homeless. I’d given her my address and she’d moved in.
17
WHEN I WOKE in the night, it was to the immediate thought that she was back. The electronic clock told me it was just after two in the morning. I’d been asleep for under three hours. I was groggy, with that ache in my chest and weakness in my limbs that told me the only sensible place to be was back in the land of nod. But I’d heard something that hadn’t been the usual nighttime noise of a kicked beer-can or a horny cat. I sat up and the air around me felt unusually cold.
I’d left the door open. Even now, she was inside, letting cold air and malevolence sneak through the flat.
Except I knew how carefully I’d locked the doors and windows after my adventure in the garden. I’d even switched on the alarm. For a modest, rented flat in south London, my home has state-of-the-art security. Joesbury had arranged it for me when it had looked as though our Ripper copycat was getting just a bit too focussed on me. The windows were double-glazed and lockable, the two outside doors had bolts top and bottom and heavy-duty deadlocks. There were security cameras and an alarm, both of which had at one time been wired up to Scotland Yard. I was no longer on a direct line to the Yard, but everything else was still in place. She could not be inside. But she had come back. There was definitely someone moving around out there. And that was the sound of the outside door handle. Well, I’d practically invited her round, and maybe this time she’d talk.