by Carla Blake
She is just starting the hovering when there is a knock on the door.
Katherine drives. She has no real idea where she is going, but she knows she is getting there fast. She forces herself to slow down. Getting stopped by a traffic cop is the last thing she needs. She passes a school, devoid now of kids in the playground, and wonders what is was the police found? Probably her fingerprints on the skin of Amy’s neck, she concludes, which would tie in with all the questions as to where she touched her.
I bet they already suspected something yesterday when I was at the station, she thinks. I bet they were hoping forensics would come through with the proof whilst I was still sitting there and they could arrest me on the spot. Well, shame. If they want me, they’re gonna have to find me first.
Where the fuck am I going to go?
“Where is she Megan?”
Clifford looks cross. No, he looks incandescent as he stomps around the lounge, picking up things, scowling at photographs, practically growling at the garden. He sends a lesser mortal to go check out the shed.
Like Katherine would be hiding in there!
Marsh is kinder, softer. She can see the poor girl has no idea where Miss. Johnson is and she makes her sit down, collect her thoughts and give herself time to breathe.
“When did you last see her?”
“Last night. Late. We spent some time together in my annex and then Katherine came over here to go to bed.”
“What were you doing?”
Megan blushes and Clifford suddenly looses interest in the garden to stare at her instead.
“Well?”
“Well, erm.. it’s kinda.... personal.”
“Were you lovers?” He barks, getting a damming look from Detective Marsh. “Is that what you’re getting at?”
“Sort of.” Megan says, gazing at the carpet. “We erm.. occasionally slept together, but that’s all.”
“That’s all? That’s quite a lot if you ask me. And you and Miss. Johnson had intercourse last night?”
Megan nods. Christ, she wants the ground to open up and swallow her. Staring at the carpet she can’t tell if Detective Clifford is one of those guys who gets off imagining two women together or whether he finds the whole idea sickening, but she doesn’t particularly want to look up to see.
Detective Marsh takes her hand. “It’s okay.” She smiles. “No one judges you by your sexual orientation. Clifford’s just sore because Miss. Johnson has temporarily alluded us.” She says, again shooting Clifford a look which clearly says ‘either say something to reassure the poor woman or I’m gonna roast your balls.’
But Clifford merely clears his throat and leaves the room. Megan is glad he’s gone.
“I had no idea.” She says in a small voice. “I just thought she’d left for work.”
“We know and it’s okay. Have you any idea where she might have gone? Has she taken any clothes with her? Any money?”
“Her room was a mess when I went in this morning , so it’s difficult to tell if anything was missing, she has so much stuff. I’m not sure about money. You’re welcome to look if you want.”
They do. Roaming the house and looking in places Megan finds hard to justify. Do they really think Katherine might be holing up in the kitchen cupboards or under the stairs? And would it bloody kill them to wipe their feet after coming in from the garden? Clifford is particularly guilty of this and looks as though he is taking some sort of grim pleasure from tracking mud across the kitchen floor. It infuriates Megan and any thoughts she might have had of mentioning Katherine’s cut lip or the bonfire go out of the window. Especially when he helps himself to coffee and biscuits and then dares her to say something.
As far as Megan is concerned, if this bastard wants Katherine, he can go find her.
Katherine drives into town, parks her car in a quiet, leafy, well to do London terrace and hopes the police will think she has decided to disappear into the city. Locking the car she drops the keys into her handbag, even though it is unlikely she will ever drive it again, and makes for the nearest shops.
Abandoning the car effects her badly. It’s nothing special, her car, just a Honda Civic, but it has afforded her a slice of freedom, away from the chauffeur driven monstrosities Alex is always urging her to take, and she will miss it.
Her trainers hardly make any sound on the pavement as she passes the houses of the famous and wealthy. Her mobile rings and when the display flashes up Alex’s number she almost, almost answers it before remembering the police will be able to trace her last call, and presses the button to reject it instead. Then she drops it to the floor and stamps on it. Shattering the screen and snapping off the battery cover. The Sim card she pulls free and drops into her handbag, the rest of it goes into the nearest dustbin.
On Oxford street, she finds the nearest cash machine and empties as much cash out of her account as it will allow. In a department store, she buys three wigs and leaves wearing the blond one. She tells the sales assistant, who clearly and thankfully has no idea who she is, that she’s buying props for a stage production. The assistant nods sagely and tells her they get a lot of that these days and Katherine is pleased. With luck she won’t remember her at all in a few days time.
In the ticket hall of the nearest train station, she buys tickets from an Indian gentleman who makes her wish she’d walked in with a fully loaded rifle. Safe behind his screen, it clearly doesn’t bother him at all that he can hardly understand a single word she is saying and after several attempts and offers of a train fare to destinations miles from where she wants to go, Katherine gives up and uses the self service machine.
The house in Devon hasn’t been touched since the last time she was there and stepping over the pile of junk mail, Katherine gratefully closes the door behind her and slides to the floor. Getting here has been hell. The trains were crowded, the connections unreliable. And once in the county and without a car, she has had to rely solely on public transport, getting off the rickety green bus miles before her destination and forcing herself to walk the rest of the way so no one can tell where she is going. Like they’d care! She’d shared the bus with an old woman carrying Hessian carrier bags overflowing with vegetables and a family of tourists babbling on about some theme park of other. She doubts if they even saw her let alone remember where she got off.
Standing up, she lifts the blonde wig, sighs at the sudden rush of cool air to her head and gives her scalp a good scratch. It has itched like mad for the last hour and wearing a wig has been very disconcerting. Catching sight of herself in shop plate glass windows has repeatedly caused her to look again and being blonde hasn’t really suited her at all.
She looks at her watch. Four twenty two. It’s taken nearly a day to get here.
She wonders where the police are? If Megan has blabbed? If Alex has any hair left?
It can only be a matter of time before the police discover this place and come here.
She really wishes she could have kept hold of her car. She hates bloody walking.
Leaving the lights off, there’s plenty of light now the clocks have gone forward, Katherine wanders into the kitchen and opens the cupboards searching for food.
She is not disappointed. Megan, bless her, has kept them well stocked and she is faced with a variety of tins and packets. In the fridge she finds several bottles of water, one of wine and several jars of jam. The cheese has gone hard.
The cellar opens up from the kitchen and after a moment’s hesitation, down she goes, risking the light down here as she’s fairly confident it cannot be seen from anywhere inside or outside the house. She still holds onto the handrail though, figuring it would be just her luck if she tripped now and the cops found her broken legged and sobbing on the hard, stone floor. Mind you, she probably wouldn’t be feeling much pain by then. She’d be pissed as a fart.
Th
e cellar is cool and despite the light, gloomy. Katherine gazes at the endless bottles of wine and hopes like hell she wasn’t imagining the thing she found last time she was down here. It had caught her by surprise then, this unexpected discovery, and she’d been delighted with it, even giving way to a childish moment of unadulterated glee when she’d wanted to yell for Megan to come down and see.
Well, thank God she hadn’t. Because it was probably going to save her life now.
“Do you think she did it?”
Alex is at the house with Megan, who called her once the police had left and invited her over. They are sitting in the lounge at either end of the sofa. Their feet are curled up under them, and there is an empty bottle of wine on the table. They are a little soft around the edges but focusing hard on the two steaming mugs of coffee they are now holding and using both the coffee and biscuits straight from the packet to help sober them up.
It is Alex who has asked the question and now Megan shrugs.
“I have no idea,” she says, “but the police seem to think she’s guilty. They talked a lot about evidence and the need to find her. But I don’t know. I mean, murder! Could Katherine do something like that?”
Alex has no idea and neither does Megan, in fact neither of them can quite get their heads around it and they discuss every variation, from Katherine being guilty and how lucky they are to still be alive, a realization that particularly resonates with Megan who suddenly views her night of passion with Katherine in a whole different light, to Katherine being entirely innocent and the real culprit having somehow managed to frame her.
Naturally both of them would like to believe the latter, but its kind of hard when it’s obvious Katherine has done a runner. If she was innocent, she’d stay, wouldn’t she?
“Unless she just panicked.” Megan suggests, biting into a chocolate digestive. “I don’t think I would just run off, purely because it looks so bloody suspicious, but people do weird things when they’re under pressure.”
“Yeah, people do,” Alex agrees, “but not Katherine. She thrives on pressure. It’s me that does all the panicking. Where do you think she’s gone?”
“Christ knows. I thought originally the house in Devon, and that’s the next place the police are going to look, but after that, I have no idea. A hotel maybe?”
“Maybe, but if she pays on her card, they’re gonna know. You checked the safe upstairs yet?”
“What safe?” Megan frowns. “We have a safe? Since when?”
“She’s taken the money.”
Alex is on her hands and knees, her head buried inside the wardrobe. In front of her, the door to the safe is open. Megan can see a few folders and a small, blue box with a padlock fitted to it. She has only Alex’s word that there was ever any money inside.
She asks the question anyway. “How much was in there?”
“Few thousand, easy.” Alex replies. “Katherine called it her emergency fund. Guess she wasn’t kidding. Christ, what am I going to do about the magazine?”
“Keep it going?” Megan suggests. “Get ‘ what’s his face’ in, the bloke who covered whilst Katherine was in Devon. Pretend nothings happened.”
“That might be easier said than done, especially once this gets out, then God knows what will happen. Claire Swallow’s gonna have a field day!”
“Who’s Claire Swallow?”
“Oh, some bitch who’s had her eye on a take over bid for ages. I tell you, the minute she hears about this, her cheque book gonna be out faster than you can say four figure sum.”
“Then you have to carry on as normal and make her see there’s nothing to bid for. And while you do that, I’m gonna keep this place going, just in case Katherine decides to come back.”
Chapter Thirteen
The wine rack moves easily. It is the only one that does, courtesy of four small wheels that are fitted beneath the cage, wheels that cannot be seen easily merely by standing in front of it.
Katherine certainly didn’t see them the first time she discovered it, and that’s why she got such a surprise when, on her first visit to the cellar, she stubbed her toe and reaching out for the nearest wine rack to steady herself whilst she inspected the damage, almost fell over when it moved.
But move it did and behind it was a door. A small door, merely four foot in height and made from wood and Katherine’s first impression was that it was probably some sort of a storage area similar to the one under the stairs. It had, after all, the same kind of feel to it. Except this door wasn’t wood at all, but metal designed to look like wood and instead of opening onto mops and buckets and piles of rags, it opened onto darkness. A great slab of it, thick enough to prevent a hand being seen in front of a face, and the reason was obvious once Katherine had figured it out. There was a thick black curtain covering the entrance, almost like a blanket. A curtain that smelt of oil and had a slightly greasy texture that Katherine didn’t much like touching it initially, although she does now, sweeping it over to the left and groping in with her right hand to feel for the switch she knows is sitting just there.
Light floods the chamber and illuminates the smile on Katherine’s face as she ducks her head and steps inside. Reaching behind her, she shuts the door and pulls at the yellow cord that has been threaded through a tiny hole in the wall. The other end is tied to the wine rack and by pulling the cord, she pulls the whole thing back into place to completely conceal the entrance. The oily curtain falls silently back all by itself.
Katherine smiles. “Uncle Alfred.” She says. “I salute you. You clever, terrified old bugger.”
For the cupboard is in fact a nuclear fall out shelter, and Uncle Alfred has thought of everything. High enough to comfortably stand up in, Katherine finds herself in the first of three chambers. Here she has a bed, with a proper mattress, a brand new duvet and pillows still in their protective wrapping. There is also a small chest of drawers, a lamp, a radio and a bubble wrapped pile of water bottles. A wooden trunk filled with books and drawing materials stands in the corner together with jigsaw puzzles and a game boy complete with games. An acoustic guitar leans against it.
In the second chamber is the food. Tons of it. Tins and tins and tins, holding everything imaginable. There is powdered egg and pot noodles, pasta in sauce mixes, dried beef jerky, sweets, chocolates, although Katherine suspects they are probably white with age by now, and anything that doesn’t have to be kept frozen but can be heated in a microwave, because good old Uncle Alfred has fitted his own generator down here, and although Katherine has no idea how it works, there are full instructions on how to get it going and she is fairly confident she can figure it if the need arises. For the moment though, she assumes the electricity powering the lights is coming from the house’s main supply and providing Megan keeps on paying the standing charges, she assumes that won’t stop.
The third room houses the generator and the toilet. The loo has been plumbed in, Katherine has already flushed it once just out of curiosity, but again there are instruction sellotaped to the lid explaining how to get rid of her waste should the bomb drop and the plumbing fail. Beside it stands a basin and in the corner a shower that so far has only managed to produce brown water. In all three rooms there is stack upon stack of bubble wrapped bottled water. And there is always the wine in the cellar, providing she can get out of the room in the aftermath of a nuclear war and that the wine is still drinkable.
The only thing she hasn’t figured out is how air is getting in and whether Uncle Alfred took into account that subsequent oxygen would be tainted with nuclear fallout, but seeing as how it is very unlikely the bunker will ever be used for its original purpose, she isn’t worrying too much. Not when she has such a brilliant, comfortable, hidden sanctuary.
It is bloody brilliant.
Katherine isn’t sure what wakes her, but her eyes snap open to stare into darkness and she lies, almost
holding her breath, listening to the sounds above her.
Someone is in the house.
Getting out of bed, she grabs her clock and illuminates the dial. It is six in the morning. She knows this because the clock has a sun and moon motif that turns with the hours, so even if she really was sheltering in here after an attack, she’d be able to tell when it was six in the morning or six at night.
The door to her haven isn’t closed and it hasn’t been ever since the first night when not being able to hear a thing unnerved her. Now she keeps it slightly open so she can hear the comforting creak of the house above her and the song of birds filtering through the open cellar window, but it isn’t this that has woken her. Her third morning curled up in her bunker.
Quietly she pulls on jogging bottoms and a sweatshirt. She takes a swig from the bottle of water beside her bed and goes to the door. The noise sounds again and she recognizes it as the back door to the garden being opened in the kitchen.
A male voice says something she cannot make out, but it is enough to make her catch her breath and for her mind to race towards the first possible conclusion.
The police are here! It has to be! They’ve found out about the house and come looking for her. Shit!
But she’s safe. No doubt they will find the cellar, but they won’t find her! And even if they do, Uncle Alfred has taken care of that as well. The door has no key hole or handle but what it does have, and on her side of things, are three, thick steel bars that slide right across the middle, bottom and top. Nothing barring blokes with blow torches and possibly dynamite can get in here. And if they do, then all is still not lost, because there is an exit under her bed. A trapdoor, dug out of the earth and shored up with wood that leads God knows where. There are, even for someone in her desperate situation, limits to the places she is prepared to explore.
