Last Night

by Kerry Wilkinson

  ‘I was a bit lost and I noticed the, er…’

  I find myself pointing at the gap in the hedge.

  ‘Happened last night,’ he replies. ‘Some bugger going too fast.’

  ‘You make it sound like it happens a lot.’

  He snorts through his nose. ‘Aye. It bloody does. At least once a month. Usually some kids. Then they wonder why their insurance is so high.’ There’s a hole in his body warmer near the belly and he reaches through the material to give himself a good scratch.

  I’m not sure if I feel better or worse at this fact. ‘Is this your field?’ I ask.

  He nods, pointing to either side of the road. ‘And that lot,’ he replies. ‘What brings you out this way?’

  The man turns to look at my cleanish car and it’s unmistakeably out of place in the middle of nowhere.

  ‘I’m lost,’ I say. ‘I’m on my way to, er…’ My mind races but the only thing I can come up with is the name of the hotel. ‘…the Grand Ol’ Royal hotel,’ I add.

  He shakes his head: ‘Never heard of it.’

  I show him my phone. ‘I’m following directions but I can’t work out if I’ve gone wrong.’

  ‘Those things are bloody clever nowadays. I stream all my music while I’m out in the fields.’

  When I laugh with surprise, he joins in.

  ‘Aye. Betcha didn’t expect that.’

  My poker face is awful: ‘I guess not.’ I point towards the gap in the hedge. ‘What happens now? Do you fix it up again?’

  A shake of the head. ‘No point. It’s always the same spot.’

  ‘Why?’

  He points to a kink in the road a little further along. ‘They take that bend too fast. Was in the news a few weeks ago. Had some fella here with a camera taking photos. Not done any good, has it?’

  ‘No…’

  I wonder if that’s what I did. In my sleepy, confused state. I was racing home, took the corner too quickly and then woke up in the farmer’s field. It still doesn’t explain why I was travelling on these roads. It’s far from the direct route home.

  ‘Mud on the road don’t help,’ he adds. ‘But what am I s’posed to do? I need to get my tractor round and about.’

  He’s right about that, too. There are narrow tyre tracks coming away from the gap – the ones I made – but, further along, most of the surface is covered with a thicker padding of muck. It seems so straightforward now he points it all out. It could happen to anyone. I’m not special at all, perhaps not even that unlucky.

  ‘Hope you find your hotel,’ the man adds. When I turn back to him, he’s already a couple of paces away, heading towards a wide metal gate to the side of my car. I watch him disappear over the top into the field beyond and then there’s only the distant fluttering of the breeze. It’s so silent that there’s a moment in which I wonder whether the man existed at all. He came from nowhere and then disappeared back there as well.

  I walk along the verge until I’m at the mud on the road. It’s thicker than it looked from further away, packed tight from the weight of vehicles bumping over the top. I’m almost ready to convince myself that I simply slid off the road in the way many others appear to have done so when the truth comes punching back. It doesn’t explain the blood. I move slowly along the edge of the road, checking the edges for any sign of an animal I might have hit. After searching one side of the road, I double back and look along the other.

  There’s nothing.

  There was no sign of anything last night and the same is true now.

  When I return to my car, I sit in silence for a moment or two but nothing feels any clearer in my mind. There’s a part of me for which this all feels like a dream – but the physical evidence is there. Or was there. I got rid of most of it.

  I turn the radio up and follow the directions of my phone until I’m back on the dual carriageway once more. Traffic is busier as rush hour approaches and it’s easier to focus on the bumper in front and simply follow, rather than have to think too much about where I’m going. That’s all well and good but I’m so absorbed in my thoughts that I almost miss the exit that will take me back to North Melbury.

  Our little corner of the world is slightly too big to be called a village but probably too small to be a town. It sits in Lincolnshire and is where I’ve always lived. There’s a stream, a small High Street and a swathe of green around the outskirts. At one time, it felt so important, as if the centre of everything went on outside my front door. Now I wonder if I’ve wasted my life by rarely spending more than a few days at a time outside the Britain In Bloom signs that surround the boundary. Dan’s midlife crisis is fitness and firming up his body and I wonder if this is mine. That wanderlust and sense of missing out. The realisation that I can never go back and change things. This is the life I’ve built.

  I drive along the High Street, remembering how much of it has changed over the years. The bakery used to be independent, where the owner knew people’s names and took weekly orders for various things. Now it’s a Gregg’s. The café on the corner was once run by Mrs Griggs. The creaky, wooden furniture inside smelled of exotic teas – or they were at least exotic to me as a little girl. My mum would take me there in the school holidays and it was something of a day out. It’s a Starbuck’s now. I’m never quite sure if we’ve lost something or gained it. I don’t even know if it matters but it’s something I think about too much. A melancholic sense of sadness for something about which I don’t have any overly strong feelings.

  It’s not long until I’m on our street. I wait for the garage to open itself and then pull inside. Dan’s car isn’t there, but then he spends longer and longer away from the house – not that I blame him.

  When I get into the main part of the house, the first thing I notice is the draught. I wonder if it’s just me, if the chill is a leftover sense of bewilderment and confusion.

  It’s not.

  As soon as I move around the kitchen counter, I can see where the breeze is coming from. There’s glass on the kitchen floor, sprinkled and splintered from the shattered window above the door handle.

  Someone has broken in.

  Chapter Nine

  ‘Hello…?’

  My voice echoes around the walls, bouncing the final ‘oh-oh-oh-oh’ back to me with haunting despondency. There’s no reply. The house feels cool; devoid not only of people but as if nobody’s been home in a long time.

  ‘Anyone there?’ The quiver in my voice betrays an undercurrent of apprehension.

  Nothing.

  ‘Liv? You home?’

  I edge backwards, avoiding the glass as I head for the stairs, repeating Olivia’s name from the bottom. Again there’s no reply – it’s only me here.

  It’s been a really long sixteen or seventeen hours since waking up in that field and the exhaustion hits me all together. I lean on the kitchen counter, closing my eyes and battling a yawn. I fumble through my thoughts, trying to remember what I’m supposed to do. I’ve already pressed the second ‘9’ on my phone, when I realise 999 is meant to be for emergencies. As I stare at the broken glass, I’m second-guessing myself. Am I in imminent danger? Will I be wasting someone’s time? There are those adverts in which someone’s in desperate need of an ambulance – but the emergency call is delayed because of someone phoning up to complain about whoever got voted off X Factor or Strictly that week. The thoughts clutter together and I have to force myself to Google the non-emergency number because 101 has somehow eluded me.

  The call handler is kindly and polite with the exact type of soothing authority that I think I need to hear. She first asks if I’m all right and it’s only at that when I hear the crack in my own voice as I assure her – waveringly – that I am.

  She asks if there’s anything missing and there’s a strange moment in which I wonder why it never occurred to me that something might be. I fumble my words embarrassingly and look across to the living room. The television is on the cherry-wood unit, where it always is. I apologise to the
handler for taking my time and check the drawers underneath the television. The laptop and iPad are both there, where Dan or I left them. Not that any of it is particularly valuable to a burglar, but the mixer, coffee machine and microwave are all present and correct in the kitchen. A silly thought flutters across my mind of a thief trying to sell a food mixer on the streets of North Melbury to fund some sort of drug habit. It’s ridiculous and I’m not sure where the idea came from but I have to suppress the smile when I tell the handler that everything seems to be where it was.

  She is reassuring and gives me a crime reference number, saying that I can pass it on to my insurance company.

  ‘Is that it?’ I ask. ‘Isn’t somebody coming out?’

  ‘I’m afraid there are no free officers,’ the voice replies. She sounds genuinely apologetic.

  ‘Don’t you normally send someone out to check for DNA, or fingerprints, or something…?’

  I wonder if I’ve seen too many TV cop shows but it doesn’t seem like too much to ask for.

  ‘No one is available until morning, I’m afraid.’

  She goes on to say that I should take photographs of everything – but that’s it. Nobody is coming to look for clues. I could kick off and bang on about paying taxes and the like, but there’s no fight in me. There would be no point anyway – this woman is only doing her job. She can’t decide how many officers are available at any given time. This is the age in which we live: cuts, austerity, not enough ambulances and break-ins for which the best a victim can hope for is a reference number to give to the insurance company. I wonder if it would have been different if I said things were missing. Bit late now.

  I say goodbye and tread carefully around the glass, checking the back door to find that it’s unlocked. The spare key is still in the kitchen drawer with the rest of our junk and I can’t believe anyone would be capable of stretching through the glass to reach the drawer and key. It’s near – but it’s not that near.

  Except that the door is unlocked. Did either Dan, Olivia or myself leave it like that? We do pop in and out to put things in the bin, so it’s possible. Unlikely, but possible.

  I move around the house, checking drawers and cupboards. My most expensive jewellery – which isn’t worth much – is still at the back of the bottom drawer in the bedroom. Not that I’m a cliché, or anything. I poke my head around Olivia’s door, taking in the bomb site and figuring it’d probably look a bit cleaner if someone had broken in. At least the intruder would have picked out anything valuable, meaning some degree of sorting would have happened. As it is, her floor is littered with clothes, shoes, cables and who knows what else. I don’t dwell.

  Downstairs and the keepsakes with no particular value are fine. There is the official photograph from the day Dan and I were married pinned to the wall; with plenty more pictures of Olivia growing up. I take a moment to brush dust from the frames, remembering the happy times on beach holidays. She’s there with her father, each licking an ice cream; then in another photo with me riding the donkeys at Blackpool. She’s on the London Eye, pointing at Parliament, riding a canal boat somewhere I can’t remember – and so on. Each photo has her a little older than the last until everything stops in her mid-teens.

  I check the drawer that contains our birth certificates, passports and the like – but they’re all present, too. The more I look, the less I see. What would be the point in breaking in to steal nothing? And if nothing has been taken, then why break the window? There’s no easy way into our back garden, except for climbing a fence and dropping down. Someone would surely be more likely to break in through the garage?

  The last place I check properly is the drawer near the back door. There are small shards of glass on the floor and I wince at the crunch under my feet as I try – and fail – to manoeuvre around the remnants of the windowpane.

  As well as the back-door key, the drawer is full of the same junk I looked at earlier. Other random keys, receipts, coupons, lottery tickets. The stuff neither Dan or I can be bothered to throw out. I empty it all onto the kitchen counter for the second time that day and notice that the emergency money has gone. There’s normally two twenties and a ten-pound note and I’m certain it was there a few hours ago. It could be Olivia who took it, of course – except that she never has in the past. She’s many things but I don’t think a thief is one of them.

  I pick through all the scraps of paper, piling and replacing them in the drawer until I’m certain the money has gone. Is this what the break-in was about? Fifty quid? It’s not much compared to the expensive electrical items that have been left – and it’s a lot of effort. That said, I don’t know much about drugs. I’ve read that most crime is drug-related in one way or another, so perhaps two twenty-pound notes and a ten will go a long way for someone.

  Either way, it’s very disciplined of the thief to only take that.

  Despite that, something doesn’t feel right. How would someone know to come to this drawer specifically? Or was it simply chance?

  It’s only as I’m replacing everything in the drawer that I find myself staring at the single object I know for a fact wasn’t there this morning. It was the reason I emptied everything in the first place. I couldn’t find it then – but here it is now, my work pass, sitting among the rest of the junk, exactly where it wasn’t a few hours ago.

  Chapter Ten

  Dan gets in from the gym and heads straight to the fridge. His top has a V of sweat from his neck to his belly button and there’s still a sheen across his forehead. It’s only when he turns around, protein shaker bottle in hand, that he notices the wooden board across the pane of glass.

  ‘What happened?’ he asks.

  I’m on the other side of the room, sitting on the sofa, half-watching TV but really refreshing the news sites. There have been no hit-and-run reports but also no updates on Tom Leonard. The hotel worker is still missing.

  I also had a good nosey at Natasha’s Instagram feed. She went to a local pub after work, where she had some sort of salad. It was both #yummy and #scrummy apparently.

  ‘I’m not sure,’ I reply. ‘We might have had a break-in.’

  Dan gawps at the door and then me. ‘How do you mean, “might”?’

  ‘When I got in, there was glass on the floor and the back door was unlocked. It doesn’t look as if anything’s been taken. I called the police but there was no one available to come out.’

  ‘Did you say there’d been a break-in?’

  ‘What do you think I said?’

  Dan blinks away the remark and I suspect he knows I’m not in the mood for this. He swishes his vest, blowing a bit of air onto his saturated chest. I never know if he’s going to shower at the gym or wait until he gets home. There’s seemingly no pattern to his behaviour. He drops his gym fob into the kitchen drawer while still examining the board I’ve nailed across the window in the back-door frame. We actually have a his and hers membership. It was something he talked me into last Christmas when there was some sort of joint offer on. It ended up being our gift to each other, which saved the usual lack of imagination we show when buying gifts. I almost never use the membership he bought for me, but he’s at least getting good use from his. Every time he says he’s going to the gym, I think I can sense that small accusatory tone that I’m not doing the same. I’m probably imagining it. I don’t know any more.

  ‘Did you come home for lunch?’ I ask.

  He does sometimes – our house is only ten minutes’ drive from the school – but Dan shakes his head. ‘I didn’t leave the school until after five,’ he replies.

  ‘I think the emergency money is gone,’ I say.

  Dan reopens the drawer and swishes a few things around. It’s natural, I suppose, but it’s still annoying. As if I could be mistaken about such an obvious thing. He does this a lot, probably without even thinking about it. He’ll ask if I’ve seen the weather forecast for the following day and then, after I tell him what it is, I’ll find him checking it anyway. He’ll ask if I�
��ve emptied the dryer and then look inside to make sure I’ve not forgotten anything. And so on. That’s him – or at least it’s how he is now. He never used to be like this.

  ‘Someone broke in and stole the money…?’ Dan sounds unsure.

  ‘I guess so. It could be Liv – we’ll have to ask her. If they did take that money, there’s nothing else missing. I don’t know what to think.’

  He nods along, apparently agreeing.

  ‘Did you see my work pass earlier?’ I ask.

  ‘Was it in the drawer?’

  I deserve that, of course.

  ‘No,’ I reply.

  ‘I’ve not seen it other than that.’

  He sounds breezy, as if it’s not something that would concern him, and then he nods at the back door.

  ‘It was probably kids with a football, something like that.’

  ‘Where’s the ball?’

  ‘Perhaps they came into the garden and retrieved it?’

  ‘What about the emergency money?’

  A shrug. ‘If someone broke in, why wouldn’t they take the telly? Or the iPad?’

  I can’t answer that because he’s only querying the things I’ve asked myself. None of what’s happened in the past day makes much sense.

  Dan wiggles the board I’ve nailed to the door and tuts. Without another word, he hurries into the garage and then he’s back with a hammer and more nails. I sit and watch as he first tugs out the nails I’d hammered in and then bashes in a dozen or so of his own. He wipes his brow with his forearm, flashing the newly rediscovered muscles in his arms and shoulders. When he’s done, he rocks the board back and forth once more, making sure it’s firmly in place. I can’t see any difference between his handiwork and mine but it’s not worth arguing.

  I’m not sure how our relationship got to this point because, as I watch him, I feel little other than hatred. It’s a strong word; a guttural, destructive emotion – but it’s hard to force away the rage.