Sleep: The most suspenseful, twisty, unputdownable thriller of 2019!

by C. L. Taylor

  Rum. I’d always had a soft spot for Scotland, not least because my late husband and I took a wonderful coach trip up to the lochs to celebrate our thirtieth wedding anniversary many years ago. When my local travel agent told me there was a walking tour in Rum at the beginning of June, I couldn’t whip my credit card out of my purse fast enough. But deary me, what a troubled bunch my travelling companions were. I could sense the tension in their tight smiles and rigid postures the moment I set foot on the coach. I sat next to a wan, bespectacled man who tensed as I took my seat and looked studiously out of the window, avoiding all attempts at conversation for the first three hours of the journey. Only once did he move and then it was to pop two pills out of a blister pack he retrieved from his bag. Valium. I knew then that he had mental health issues but I didn’t judge. I never do. It wasn’t until I offered him a flapjack from the batch I’d cooked that he spoke a word and then it was a curt ‘no thanks’. But as I’ve said before, I am nothing if not tenacious and I continued to needle away at him, looking for a way in. It wasn’t until he spotted a goshawk, hovering over woodland, and his posture changed that I found it. An ornithologist. Not only that but a survivalist too. Not an unusual preoccupation for a former military man, especially not one so troubled by all that he’d seen.

  Perhaps I was feeling overconfident, maybe even a little reckless, but why kill one bird with a stone when you can kill two? Shortly after we’d arrived at the hotel I borrowed the spare master key from reception and removed the Valium from Trevor’s rucksack. I’m not anti-medication, I am a nurse after all, but Trevor was using that drug to numb himself to all he had experienced. I knew that removing his crutch could help him to discover a much swifter, more permanent end to his pain. Especially with the cliffs being so close.

  I was quite fond of Trevor until he ruined our friendship by rubbernecking David’s passing. Death is such a private event and when I aid someone’s sleep it’s an intimate moment, not a public affair. I had to give David CPR, or at least look like I was while the others were in the room, but I knew he didn’t want me to bring him back. It was his time. His soul knew that even if his body didn’t, but I ignored the twitches and jerks of his arms and legs as I gently covered his mouth with my hand, pinched his nostrils closed and sang him a sweet lullaby, willing him to let go and sleep. It was the same lullaby my father asked me to sing to my mother after he found me, smiling, at the top of the stairs.

  Trevor ran when I saw him at the window, as well he might.

  I wasn’t sure how much he’d seen but I couldn’t take the chance he’d tell the others about it so, when he returned to the hotel, I took him to one side while the others were all running around like sheep. I told him that I’d overheard his conversation about something being stolen from his room and that I was sure Anna had been lying. He opened up to me then, telling me he’d been self-medicating his PTSD and, without his Valium, he was beginning to suffer terrible flashbacks. He’d had one while I was tending to David, he said, and thought I was killing him. He was visibly upset – his eyes darting wildly around and his hands shaking – so I offered him my bottle of whisky, knowing he’d use it to anaesthetise his discomfort. Later, when he smashed up the kitchen, I voted for him to remain incarcerated in the utility room. It’s wonderful how things work out.

  The second time I made use of the key it was to leave Anna the syringe full of insulin. The sound of footsteps on the stairs startled me and I fled to David’s room and hid behind the door. If I’d known it was only sweet Katie sleepwalking, I wouldn’t have panicked. Sadly, in my haste to hide, I left the key in Anna’s bedroom door.

  After that everything that could go wrong did. Anna didn’t die when she fell down the stairs and I had to resort to desperate measures – feigning terror as we crossed the river – to ensure no one left the hotel.

  The fire was all down to my mother. She didn’t possess me or whisper in my ear, I’m not mentally ill. But she came to me in a dream, screaming about her lost family, and when I woke the memory lingered long enough for me to realise that she was sending me a message. Anna’s not the only one who’s in trouble, Christine, they all are. All you need is some crushed Valium, a hot drink and a lighter and they’ll close their eyes and drift off to sleep.

  Chapter 53

  Anna

  ‘Christine, Christine, can you hear me?’ A drop of blood appears on her cheek, a scarlet stain on her pale, lined skin. She’s lying on her side, several feet in front of the car, one arm outstretched as though grasping for the cliff edge, the other curled under her body. There is blood in her white hair, on her throat and across her chest where her sweatshirt is torn. Shards of glass from the shattered windscreen glint on her parted lips, the lids of her closed eyes and on her hiking boots. The hiking boots she wouldn’t have on if she hadn’t started the fire.

  ‘Christine? Can you open your eyes?’

  Another drop appears on her cheek, then another and another. I press the flat of my hand to her skin but blood drops onto that too. I blink as sweat drips into my eyes and swipe my hand across my face but it’s not sweat on my fingers, it’s blood. When I slammed on the brake my seat belt snapped tightly against my chest but not quickly enough to stop my head smacking against the steering wheel. I wipe my hand on my jeans and reach for Christine’s wrist. As my fingers make contact with her skin her eyelids flicker and she groans.

  ‘You can hear me, can’t you?’ I press my fingers into her pulse. It’s weak but it’s there.

  Her right eyelid opens and her eye rolls in my direction. Her voice is little more than a whisper, carried away by the wind.

  ‘What was that?’ I lean over her, lowering my ear to her lips.

  ‘Let me go. Let me sleep.’

  ‘Why me, Christine? Just tell me that.’

  She closes her eyes and sighs softly.

  ‘How many people have you killed?’

  She doesn’t reply but her chest continues to rise and fall and her pulse twitches beneath my fingertips.

  ‘I found your book. I read the notices … all those people. You killed them, didn’t you?’

  She makes a strange grunting sound in the base of her throat, half sigh, half laugh. ‘I was merciful. I saved them from torment and pain.’

  ‘By murdering them?’

  Lying a metre or so from her outstretched hand is the syringe she was about to plunge into my neck. I crawl across the grass and pick it up. ‘What’s in the syringe, Christine?’

  Her lips move and I force myself to draw close again. ‘Insulin.’ She takes a shuddering breath, her eyes still closed. ‘Use it. Help me to sleep.’

  My brain screams ‘No!’ but my grip tightens on the syringe.

  ‘Do it,’ she breathes.

  Blood or saliva rumbles in her throat and she coughs, wincing and groaning with every intake of breath. A movement back up at the hotel catches my eye. Joe is running slowly through the rain towards us, his head dipped against the wind.

  Christine’s eyes flicker open and her watery blue eyes look up into mine. ‘Do it for David.’

  ‘What did you do to him?’

  ‘I put him out of his misery.’

  ‘You don’t get to decide that!’ I jab the needle into her hand and move my thumb over the plunger. ‘You don’t get to decide who lives and who dies.’

  ‘Go on, Anna.’ She smiles softly. ‘Do it.’

  I shake my head.

  ‘We’re more similar than you think.’

  ‘No, we’re not.’

  ‘We’re both killers,’ she breathes, ‘you’ve done it before. You can do it again.’

  The rage I’ve been pushing down since I saw her in the back of the Land Rover courses through my body and I hurl the syringe away and scream into the wind. ‘I DIDN’T KILL ANYONE. IT WAS AN ACCIDENT. IT WASN’T MY FAULT!’

  ‘Anna, Anna.’ Joe wraps his arms around my shoulders and pulls me back against his chest. I twist and I squirm and I fight and I scream at him to get off
me, then all the anger and rage and frustration drains out of me and I slump against him, my chin tipped up to the sky.

  ‘It wasn’t my fault. It wasn’t my fault.’

  Joe says nothing; he keeps his arms tightly locked around me until I stop crying and go limp, then he smooths the hair from my face. ‘We’re getting out of here, Anna. Trevor did take the satellite phone from the cottage. He just gave it to Katie. We’ve radioed for help.’

  Chapter 54

  Anna

  Thursday 2nd August

  My phone bleeps with new WhatsApp messages as I climb the steps and emerge from the train station, blinking into the late afternoon sunshine.

  The first one is from Melanie:

  Good to hear from you, Anna. I’m fine, Malcolm less so since I mentioned divorce, but I’m still worried about Katie. She won’t talk about what happened at the hotel and no amount of cajoling will get her to open up or talk to her school counsellor. Still trying to get a carer in for her mum but it’s just SO … SLOW. Hope you’re bearing up okay. M x.

  After the helicopter ferried us back to the mainland we were all transferred to Belford Hospital in Fort William to be checked over. For most of us the main issue was smoke inhalation but I was told I’d have to have stitches in my forehead and an X-ray, plus scans to check on my arm and shoulder. I held it together for hours and hours, then sobbed like a baby when Mum and Dad turned up to take me home.

  The second WhatsApp message is from Alex:

  It was good to see you last night. I’m here for you, whenever you need me. Promise. x

  I was shocked by how awful he looked when he walked into the pub near Paddington. His trousers were hanging off his hips, he had days’ worth of stubble and dark shadows under his eyes. When he spotted me in the corner of the pub he stopped walking and stared as though he’d seen a ghost, then came rushing over. For a second I thought he was going to give me a hug but then he stopped abruptly and garbled a long, complicated apology about how sorry he was for going on Tinder while we were together and dating my nurse after I left and how he was a terrible human being for getting frustrated with me after my accident and a complete arsehole for not taking the sleep messages seriously, and how he wouldn’t be surprised if I never spoke to him again but he was sorry and he had to let me know how much or he’d never be able to sleep. He was so contrite and yet so utterly OTT that I actually laughed. He looked so horrified that I told him to sit down and chill out while I got him a pint. By the time I got back, he’d managed to pull himself together and I’d processed what he’d just told me. We had a proper chat then, about what had gone wrong in our relationship and how, fundamentally, we hadn’t been right for each other. Alex is not a bad person. Self-obsessed and selfish, yes, but his heart’s in the right place. Mostly.

  The third message is from Fiona:

  I handed in my notice at work. I’ve decided to apply to be cabin crew. It’s something I’ve always wanted to do and I want to see the world (though maybe not Rum for a while). No surprise that Michael didn’t bother getting in touch when I got home – I thought he might give a shit after seeing all the stuff on the news – but I’m over him now. Onwards and upwards (hopefully literally). Fi xx

  The final message is from Joe. It’s a photograph of a sparkling turquoise sea, still and calm, tickling the sand of a clean white beach. In the bright blue sky, in scrawly fingertip handwriting, he’s written, FINALLY FREE. A week after we left Rum he sent me a message saying he was going to Rhodes to get away from the press attention madness and clear his head. He was sorry, he said, for not believing me about Christine and he was really struggling with guilt. I rang him then and we talked for hours – about the fire, the hotel, my accident and his brother’s death. By the end of the conversation we were both crying. We’re going to meet up for a drink when he gets back from Rhodes, as friends for now. I don’t think either of us is ready for anything heavier yet.

  My phone bleeps again as the double doors of the rehab centre open:

  Are you here yet? Just wanted to check that you’re still coming.

  There is already someone sitting beside Mohammed’s bed as I draw closer, a woman slightly older than me with long dark hair pulled back in a ponytail, skinny jeans and an off-the-shoulder top.

  ‘Anna,’ Mohammed says, lifting a hand. ‘This is Ellie, my girlfriend.’

  ‘Oh.’ I draw back. ‘I’m sorry, I can come back—’

  ‘No, it’s fine.’ She flashes me a smile and pushes her chair back from the bed. ‘I was just going. I know Mo wanted to talk to you alone. I’m sorry, by the way, about everything you’ve been through.’

  I return her smile. ‘Thank you.’

  As she walks away, the nerves I felt when I first received Mohammed’s text return. He nodded at me when he spotted me walking towards the bed but his lips were pressed together in a tight line. Now his eyes follow Ellie until she disappears from sight.

  ‘I wouldn’t let her see me for a long time after the accident.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Yeah, I wasn’t in a good place …’ He gives a small shake of his head and looks away, towards the window and the shaft of sunlight that illuminates the floor.

  ‘We don’t have to talk about this if you don’t want to.’

  ‘No,’ he looks back at me, ‘I’m done with bottling up my feelings. I … um … after the accident I told Ellie to stay away. I didn’t want her to see me like this – I couldn’t bear the pity on her face.’ His gaze drifts towards his legs, long, straight and still beneath the tight pull of the sheets. ‘It took me a while to come to terms with what had happened and to accept that I can’t do the things I used to do. I still haven’t, if I’m honest. Not completely. I’m still hopeful that I’ll be able to walk again, eventually.’

  ‘That’s a possibility?’

  ‘A small one. No one’s getting my hopes up but I’ve got some sensation in my right leg.’

  ‘That sounds hopeful.’

  ‘Yeah. I certainly don’t feel as bleak as I did, that’s for sure, and it helps having Ellie around again. She’s got enough determination for both of us. The whole time I refused to see her she stayed in contact with my mum, getting updates on how I was doing. Then when the stuff about Gran came out …’ His lips tighten as he glances away. When he looks back at me the expression in his eyes has changed. He looks angry and upset. ‘When the news about Gran came out Ellie refused to stay away any longer. She told Mum that she was going to come and see me whether I liked it or not and … um … I was glad she did because that, that stuff about Gran, that hurt more than the accident ever did.’

  ‘Sorry.’ He swipes at the tears that spill from his eyes. ‘I’ve got no right to be upset, not after what you’ve been through.’

  ‘You’ve got every right.’

  ‘She went after you because of me.’

  ‘She wasn’t well, Mo.’

  ‘That’s not what they say. They think she’s evil.’ He grabs the newspaper from his bedside table and throws it down on the bed. There’s a photograph of Christine in her nurse’s uniform on the front, her chin tipped down, looking questioningly up at the photographer from behind her glasses. Above the photo the headline blares: Angel of Mercy Death Toll Rises.

  ‘They’re saying she killed over twenty people during the course of her career, maybe more, injecting them with insulin overdoses.’ He snatches up the paper and turns to page three. ‘Look at these, look at all these faces, all these people she killed. They’re even going to exhume Freddy and Peter to see if she killed them too. For fuck’s sake!’ Bitter tears fill his eyes but he shakes them away. ‘When Mum went to visit her in hospital she asked her why she’d done it. Do you know what she said?’

  I shake my head.

  ‘That those in torment deserve the right to sleep. How the hell did she know they were in torment? Half of the people she killed were in intensive care. They were unconscious or comatose. SHE DIDN’T KNOW FUCK ALL!’

  A
man in the corridor, passing the door, raises his eyebrows as Mo’s voice rings around the room.

  ‘Sorry.’ He drops his voice. ‘I shouldn’t lose my shit like that. But I just … I can’t … I’ve been over and over it and I can’t make sense of it. I can’t understand why she’d do something like that.’

  ‘It said in the paper that her dad was a doctor.’

  ‘And that he’d give her mum injections to calm her down, maybe even killed her on purpose. Yeah, I know. But how do you go from that to becoming …’ He shakes his head. ‘They’re calling her a serial killer, for God’s sake, comparing her to Shipman.’

  ‘I’m so sorry, Mo.’

  He slumps back against the bed and runs his hands over his face. ‘I used to look up to her, you know, for how restrained she was, how calm and unemotional.’ He laughs dryly. ‘When she came to visit me I was glad it was her because I knew she was the one person who wouldn’t make me feel shitter than I already did.’

  ‘How could you have known who she really was? To you she was just your gran.’

  And to me she was a stranger, one of seven who’d turned up at the door of the Bay View Hotel with rucksacks on their backs and excited expressions on their faces. I didn’t know who they were, what secrets they were hiding or what kept them awake at night. They were our guests and I labelled them in my head according to what I saw – the married couple, the niece, the older woman, the single man, the single woman and the one who made me feel uncomfortable. Trevor was the only one whose pain leaked out, who couldn’t pretend to be ‘normal’, who had no pretence. He wore his anguish and his torment on the outside while we struggled to keep ours pushed deep inside where it flickered and burned.

  ‘You all right?’ Mohammed asks, jolting me out of the hotel and back into my hard plastic chair. ‘You look a bit … I dunno …’

  ‘Yeah, I’m fine.’ I force a smile.