by LJ Ross
Phillips simply stared, momentarily lost for words.
He’d grown up sparring with his friends on the street and had spent many of his formative years training at Buddle’s Boxing Gym, which was a local institution in Newcastle. He knew a thing or two about the sport and he considered himself an enlightened man in all things, but he’d never been asked to teach a woman, especially one he happened to love.
“I don’t want to hurt you,” he said, gruffly.
“What makes you think you would? It’s only sport, Frank.” There was a light of challenge in her eyes, one he knew very well. “Perhaps you’re worried I’ll run rings around you, boyo?”
He grinned.
“Alright, you’re on. We can start whenever you like.”
Pleased, she leaned over to plant a smacking kiss on his ruddy cheek.
“What was the second question?”
“Well…”
Phillips detected a serious tone to her voice and wondered whether he’d forgotten to empty the dishwasher or left the toilet seat up.
MacKenzie watched panic flit across his face and almost laughed. Instead, she folded her arms across her chest and looked him dead in the eye.
“I want to know what your intentions are.”
His eyebrows flew into his receding hairline.
“I—my intentions?”
“I might be a modern woman, Frank Phillips, but I want to know how much longer you expect me to carry on living in sin with you like this.”
She tightened the belt of her towelling robe, for added effect.
“Let’s not forget I’m a good Catholic,” she continued, although she couldn’t remember the last time she’d stepped inside a church other than to investigate a crime.
Phillips recovered himself quickly.
“Well, if that’s the way you feel about it, I’d better tell you that I expect you to marry me as soon as possible and I won’t take ‘no’ for an answer. As it happens, I asked your Da a couple of weeks ago and he tells me that I’ll do right enough.”
MacKenzie felt a lump rise in her throat.
“You did? Frank, you know, I was only joking, you don’t have to—”
He silenced her with a brush of his lips against hers, then heaved himself off the sofa.
“Wait there.”
He was gone for a minute, leaving MacKenzie to wonder whether she was ready, whether he was ready and whether he still loved his first wife who had passed away a few years earlier. Thoughts and doubts circled her mind until he returned with a small black box clutched in his hand.
He hovered there, not quite knowing where to begin.
“Denise, you know I was married before.”
“Yes, Frank, and it’s alright. I understand if you don’t feel the same—”
“Will you let me get a word in edgewise?”
He laughed and shook his head.
“Laura was a wonderful woman,” he said honestly. “It hurt, more than I can say, when cancer took her from me. You probably remember how it was,” he added, for they had been work colleagues at the time.
She nodded soberly.
“I remember.”
“I grieved for her and, for a while, I didn’t think I’d be able to love like that again.” He looked over to where she fiddled nervously with the ends of her dressing gown. “But I never bargained on you, Denise. It hit me like an arrow between the eyes, the way I feel for you. Even in the old days when I fought against it, you’d find a way to get under my skin and make me feel like a daft teenager. I don’t like to think of how empty my life would be without you in it.”
Her lips trembled and he came to perch on the sofa beside her.
“Four months ago, I thought I had lost you. I said to myself, if we both came through it, I wasn’t going to be frightened of loving again. If you didn’t want to get married, that was okay. That was just fine, so long as you loved me as I love you.”
“Oh, now you’ve gone and done it,” she sniffled.
“But since you’re so worried about what the neighbours might think”—he grinned and held open the box—“I thought I’d better have this ready just in case your Da came after me with a shotgun.”
She giggled. Nearly forty-four years on planet Earth and she giggled like a girl.
It felt wonderful.
CHAPTER 11
“Is anybody there?”
Alice’s voice was lost inside the deserted hallway. Lamps fizzed and dipped ominously as the storm gathered momentum outside, flickering their weak light at regular intervals as she crept along the corridor, listening intently for sounds of life.
“Hello?”
She pushed open the doors as she made her way down the hallway but found each room empty. Eventually, she stopped and turned around a complete circle. There had been a clattering noise, she was sure of it.
Perhaps she was hearing things.
She was about to turn away when the noise came again.
Alice took a couple of steps further down the corridor and almost jumped out of her skin when a figure stepped through one of the panelled doorways.
“Oh! You gave me such a fright!”
She let out a bright, nervous laugh.
“I thought I heard someone,” she prattled on, failing to notice the look of profound shock on the other person’s face.
“I thought everyone had gone home,” they whispered, glancing in both directions down the hallway.
“I haven’t seen anyone else,” Alice said, helpfully.
She adjusted the strap on her bag, which was overfull and weighed heavily against her shoulder. She happened to glance down and noticed they were clutching a bag tightly, angled away from her direct line of sight. It was a white and blue plastic affair bearing the name of a large supermarket chain and appeared to be full of odds and ends.
“You’re as bad as me,” she observed, cheerfully. “I seem to hoard junk. Be careful, it looks like the handle is about to—”
And she was right.
The plastic buckled, spilling its contents onto the carpeted floor at their feet.
“Damn!”
The sharp expletive surprised Alice and she bent down to help tidy the clutter back inside its miserable plastic carrier.
“Don’t worry, I’ll help you clear it up.”
“No. Don’t.”
“Would you like another one?” Alice continued, failing to hear the stark warning. “I’m sure I have a spare bag in here, somewhere,” she began to search for one inside her own voluminous leather bag.
“I think you should go home.”
“Honestly, it’s no trouble,” she parried.
With an exclamation of triumph, she tugged out a foldaway carrier bag and held it out.
“Here,” she smiled.
They looked at each other for a long moment.
“Go ahead, it won’t bite!”
The smile froze on Alice’s face as she looked more closely at the contents of the spillage, seeing them properly for the first time. She recognised an expensive silver cartridge pen bearing the monogram ‘VS’ and frowned, not immediately understanding its significance.
Then, she noticed their hands.
Why wear gloves inside the house?
Realisation came crashing down like a tonne of bricks. Alice’s eyes flew to the person who watched her closely with a tinge of regret. Slowly, she retracted her hand, staring into the eyes of someone she thought she had known.
“I—I should be getting home.”
“Alice.”
Her legs seemed to have turned to jelly. She needed to move, to get up and run, but she could only manage to edge away like a startled deer. She drew herself up and clung to the strap of her bag for support, praying all the while that somebody—anybody—would interrupt them.
But they were completely alone.
“It’s getting late…” Her voice wobbled and she began to step backwards. Her mouth opened and then shut again, unable to voice the scream that welle
d inside her belly.
“Is there something you want to ask me, Alice?”
She shook her head wildly.
“No. I’m not thinking anything. I just want to go home. I am going home,” she gabbled. “It’s been a long day and I—I need to go home now.”
The figure shoved the contents of Victor’s locker back into the broken carrier bag, grasped the ends in a firm grip and then stood up.
“Why don’t you stay awhile and tell me how the portrait is coming along?”
She heard the words but the eyes held a different message as they watched her like a predator. Alice read the intent as clearly as if it had been spoken and her stomach did a slow flip.
They stood facing one another for one humming second before she whirled around and ran for the door.
* * *
Thirty miles away, Jack Lowerson let himself into the two-bedroom flat he had recently bought in Newcastle and was in the slow process of renovating. He couldn’t quite stretch to one of the swanky new apartments on the Quayside or a Georgian terrace in Jesmond but he was working up to it. For now, he’d taken the little garden flat in Heaton and was polishing it until it gleamed. He enjoyed the sense of achievement it gave him each time he looked at the kitchen he’d helped to install, or at the floorboards he’d sanded, stained and varnished himself. But, God, it was lonely to come home to a microwave dinner and Marbles, his cat.
The feline in question skipped into the hallway as he entered and wound her way through his legs, purring loudly when he bent down to give her a scratch between the ears.
“There’s my girl,” he crooned. “Did you miss me, hmm?”
Uncaring of the mess it would make of his suit, he scooped her up and headed into the open-plan kitchen diner. The purring grew louder as she identified the direction he was headed and she leapt down to stand beside the cupboard where he kept the cat treats.
Lowerson laughed and shook his head.
“Always on the make,” he grumbled but dutifully fed her a packet of meaty biscuits.
He leaned back against the counter and folded his arms across his chest, looked around the immaculate empty kitchen and wondered what Ryan or Phillips would be doing around now. Probably relaxing with their partners in life, chatting over the events of the day or breaking open a bottle of wine.
They certainly wouldn’t be talking to mute animals.
He sighed and flung open the fridge to reach for a microwaveable lasagne.
* * *
Alice flew down the hallway towards the front door. The wind shook the walls of the house until they seemed to cry out, whining against the force of the summer storm and drowning out the sound of thundering footsteps following her down the corridor.
She reached the front door and yanked it open, the air catching in her throat as she turned and caught sight of the person who followed. For a moment in time, their eyes locked and she saw only grim determination.
No remorse, no madness.
Just purpose.
She stumbled outside onto the gravel driveway and into the rain that fell like a deluge. It plastered her long hair down her back and poured into her eyes so that she could hardly see which way to turn. Her car was parked in the staff car park along an access road to the left but she found herself veering right, skidding down a wet gravel pathway leading into the trees.
She heard panting breaths not far behind and she ran faster, feeling the soles of her shoes slipping against the pathway. She sobbed as she scrambled down the slight incline, tripping against the potholes but pushing herself to reach the iron bridge which spanned a small river running between the crag where the house stood and the trees on the other side. Once she crossed the bridge, it was only a few minutes’ run through the trees until she reached her destination.
If she could only make it to Ryan’s cottage, she’d be safe.
The footsteps were getting closer.
* * *
Melanie Yates let herself into the front door of her parents’ house and immediately heard the refrain of a well-known soap opera playing on the television in the living room. “Mel? Is that you?”
“Yes, Mum. I’ll be through in a minute!”
She took her time hanging up her coat and slotting her shoes neatly into the rack her father had built from scraps of MDF wood, back in the days when home improvement shows had dominated Saturday night prime time telly. Twenty years had passed since the country’s obsession with Changing Rooms but still the little shoe rack remained to remind her of the passage of time.
Melanie thought of all the years she’d been coming home and slotting her shoes onto the flimsy rack and experienced a wave of cabin fever. She loved her parents but it was time to strike out, to be independent.
Her mother came into the hallway to seek her out and clucked her tongue.
“You’re late for dinner, love.”
“I’m sorry, Mum. Remember, I told you I’d be working odd hours over the next while. I’ve been seconded to CID,” she said proudly.
Her mother’s face didn’t alter.
“That’s nice, dear. I’ve kept some shepherd’s pie warm for you in the oven.”
Melanie forced a smile.
She had never, in all her life, liked shepherd’s pie. But it was her father’s favourite and, in their household, that was all that mattered.
“Thank you,” she said, and leaned in to peck her mother’s cheek.
She smelled the gin immediately, although there had been a liberal dose of mouthwash to try to hide it. Some days, you couldn’t smell the booze, which usually meant the tipple of choice had been vodka. Either way you looked at it, her mother was a functioning alcoholic and had been for over ten years.
Ever since Gemma died.
Her twin had been the shiny half of the coin, the glossy version of herself that she could never hope to emulate. Much as Melanie tried to carve out her own existence, the knowledge that she was a pale comparison to the child they’d lost was a constant wound and every day she continued to spend beneath her parents’ roof was a reminder of her own inadequacy.
Melanie watched her mother stumble back through to the living room and decided to bypass dinner. She headed upstairs to the room she’d had all her life and closed the door quietly behind her.
* * *
Thunder crashed in the skies far above where Alice Chapman dashed along the rocky pathway. It led down from Cragside house towards a vast wrought-iron bridge spanning two sides of the steep gorge which separated the house from the forest and gardens on the other side. It was also the route towards Ryan and Anna’s rental cottage, and safety.
Adrenaline compelled her to run faster, to push her aching muscles to the limit of endurance, but shock and fear worked together with the driving rain to make progress impossible. Her feet tripped and stumbled against the stone steps that were slick with water and her heavy bag knocked her off-balance.
Alice cast it away and the bag thudded into the shrubbery as she scampered past.
Behind her, the person who raced after her made a mental note of its position, in case they would need to recover it. Their lungs screamed for release as their feet pounded after her and, remarkably, tears began to fall.
It was not supposed to be this way.
If only she hadn’t seen the bag.
No time to think about that now.
Fear was a powerful motivating force and their stride lengthened, closing the gap between them and their quarry.
CHAPTER 12
Less than a ten-minute walk away, Anna watched Ryan pace the living room floor for the hundredth time and wondered what she could do to ease his mind. He’d changed into a fresh shirt of wash-worn cotton and had rolled up the sleeves in deference to the humidity but he had no appetite for dinner.
“Why don’t you come and sit down beside me?” Anna patted the cushion next to her on the squishy, oatmeal-coloured sofa.
Ryan ran an agitated hand through his black hair and let it fall again.
> “I’m going to ring the pathologist,” he said. “Pinter should have done the autopsy on Swann’s body by now.”
“It’s been less than twenty-four hours,” Anna reminded him. “You told me yourself, he has more urgent cases to deal with. Besides, it’s”—she paused to consult her watch—“almost seven-thirty. Would he be at work at this hour on a Sunday?”
Ryan swallowed his frustration because she was perfectly correct. There was no sense in hurrying the pathologist, who he knew to be highly competent and dedicated to his work. Harassing the man at home would only hinder the process.
He would just have to wait.
“Without any physical evidence, all I’ve got is a very bad gut feeling.”
He rapped a fist against his abdomen.
“I can’t justify any more man hours spent diving into Swann’s personal history unless I have something to substantiate it.”
Anna nodded her understanding.
“You’re doing all you can.”
She studied him as he roamed about the room like a caged tiger. The compassion he felt for the dead and their loved ones swam so close to the surface it was almost tangible. Ryan’s vocation was to seek justice for the dead, to avenge them and re-balance the scales, but that came with a weight of responsibility. She wondered how he coped with the ones he couldn’t avenge; the families to whom he couldn’t bring justice, whatever that meant.
“Come and sit down,” she urged. “You’re making me seasick.”
Ryan drummed his fingers against the side of his jeans and made a conscious effort to shrug off the tension. He joined her on the sofa and they sat quietly with their hands clasped together while Billie Holiday sang dulcetly about summertime on the stereo system.
Moments later, there came a tremendous crash of thunder and they both jerked around in shock. Outside, lightning blazed through the sky and the wind circled, wailing like a banshee.
“Did you hear that?” Ryan said urgently, rearing off the sofa to draw back the curtains and look out the window.
“It was only the storm,” Anna soothed.
