We Belong Together

by Beth Moran

  We Belong Together

  Beth Moran

  For Julia Childerhouse

  As iron sharpens iron, so a friend sharpens a friend.

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Author’s Note

  Acknowledgments

  More from Beth Moran

  About the Author

  About Boldwood Books

  1

  As I hurtled down the country lane, horrendously lost and half blind with panic due to fleeing for my life, sanity and quite possibly my soul, it was perhaps understandable that I didn’t spot the sheep in time. A sudden crack of lightning through the rain-splattered windscreen revealed it to be about five metres closer than whatever the stopping distance was for apocalyptic tornado-like conditions.

  Screeching in horror, I automatically wrenched the steering wheel to the right while jamming on the brakes, skidding into the opposite lane and praying that no one else would be stupid enough to be out here at five in the morning.

  A few terrifying moments later, as I tried to remember how to undo the seatbelt, I swapped that prayer into hoping that someone would not only be heading my way, but carrying a tow rope and whatever else it would take to haul this hunk of junk back out of the ditch I’d ended up in.

  I closed my eyes, dropping my head to rest against the steering wheel as I fought to steady my rasping breath, and tried to ignore the creaks of the wheels straddled between the grass verge on one side and the muddy bank on the other.

  ‘Come on, Eleanor, get a grip,’ I eventually croaked. ‘You can’t stay here for the rest of the night.’

  Or could I? Huddling in the tiny seat, a loose spring poking into my backside, I contemplated whether the best thing to do was sit it out until the storm cleared and the sun came up.

  A sudden thud against the passenger window startled me out of my stupor. I scrabbled about for the interior light switch, feeling a mix of dread and hope as I finally managed to pop open the seat belt and shuffled across to peer through the blurry window.

  ‘Baaa!’ The sheep – presumably the same one, I didn’t get that good a look at it the first time – knocked its nose against the window, giving me another jolt. Slumping back into the driver’s seat, I resumed the head-against-the-steering-wheel-until-a-better-solution-miraculously-presents-itself position.

  It was January. Four days earlier I had celebrated the new year, ripe with promise and potential, in a Welsh castle, surrounded by the rich, famous and genuinely fabulous. Wearing an outfit that came with the compliments of a hot new British designer, swigging sophisticated cocktails and sampling food created with the express purpose of impressing me, as the revellers chanted down to midnight I leaned over and kissed my gorgeous boyfriend, who whispered that this would be the Best Year Ever. And I had agreed with him. Now, half-buried in a ditch, the tatty remains of my life spilling across the back seat, thunder and lightning booming in my ears, fear and exhaustion rattling my bones, I changed my mind. Which made sense, seeing as nearly everything else he’d ever said to me had turned out to be a crock of lies.

  But enough wallowing. If the sheep wasn’t going to help, I’d better come up with another plan. I grabbed my phone from my bag and clicked to contacts.

  Okay… who to call?

  Not my parents. They were hundreds of miles away, and would be blissfully asleep for another hour at least.

  Not Marcus, obviously, since he was a scumbag liar who I was never talking to again.

  My thumb hovered over Lucy. As someone who worked for me, was it okay to wake her up this early in the morning and ask her to come to my rescue? Maybe, but considering that later today I’d be terminating her internship, it hardly seemed fair. Besides, she couldn’t drive. What was she going to do, order an Uber to pick me up from ‘shallow ditch, winding road, back of beyond, somewhere in the Midlands’?

  Were you supposed to call the police under these circumstances? I twisted round to see if I could tell whether the back half of the car was sticking into the road. Thanks to the sizeable verge, I didn’t think so. Could I call them anyway, or was that a waste of police time, given that there was no emergency? I wasn’t hurt beyond several bumps and bruises, and a quick check of the car door confirmed that I was quite capable of exiting the vehicle without assistance.

  And once I had to provide my name, let alone other details like why I was here in the first place, driving through the heart of a severe weather warning in what might possibly have once been a stolen vehicle in the middle of the night…

  I didn’t want to go there.

  The perfect person to call was Charlie. While she was unlikely to be able to help, as the person who I was on my way to visit, she lived at least somewhere in the area and would surely know someone who could. Either way, she would turn the whole thing into a hilarious story by the end of the call, and have a bath running and a hot chocolate waiting for me when I finally made it to her farmhouse.

  But I couldn’t call Charlie, because the last phone number I’d had for her had stopped working over a year ago, around the same time she disappeared on social media for the hundredth time since I’d met her.

  I opened the maps app to find out the name of the road I was on, in case I could persuade a local taxi firm or an all-night breakdown service to come and help. Bolstered by discovering that I was on Ferrington Lane, given that the village nestled into the border of Charlie’s family farm was Ferrington, I began searching, managing to type in ‘taxi’ right before the screen went black.

  And yes, while racing about my flat chucking random stuff into bags four hours earlier, I’d forgotten my charger.

  This was not good news.

  I slipped a few inches lower in the seat, shrinking my hands up into my coat sleeves and tugging the hood over my head.

  A couple of tears may have trickled out – my face was too numb with cold to feel anything. At this point, I had two choices: clamber out, wade through the rapidly swelling ditch water, and wander about in the storm until either I found help, someone found me, or I died of exposure. Or I could wait it out until morning and spend the time trying to figure out what my next move was, or even better getting some sleep.

  Resigned to option two, I gingerly climbed into the back and buried myself under a pile of clothes. The slight tilt of the car meant that I had to wedge myself in a half-sitting position so I didn’t topple forwards into the footwell. The rain continued to hammer the car from every angle, even as the flashes of lightning grew fainter and the storm gradually blew into the distance. Eyes fixed on the deep darkness, I watched for the first glimpse of sunrise.

  I was woken up sometime later by a glare of light accompanied by the sound of tapping on the window and a man’s voice. ‘Hello?’

  Jerking upright, my stiff limbs sending jump
ers flying, I hastily rubbed the sleep from my eyes. It took a few gormless seconds for me to remember where I was, what had happened, and who I was. Tugging my coat around mismatched pyjamas (I’d left in a hurry), I braced myself. The man opened the car door, the glow of the sunrise casting his face in shadow.

  ‘Are you okay? Can you move, or are you hurt?’

  ‘I’m okay.’

  He leant in and offered a hand to help me clamber out, steadying me as I navigated the gap between the back of the car and the sodden grass.

  Ouch.

  In answer to his second question, yes, I hurt. Almost everywhere. My numb fingers found a bump on the side of my forehead, coming away smudged with blood, and I vaguely remembered my head smacking against the window as I’d bounced into the ditch. The man released one elbow, and I staggered, my knees buckling until he grabbed it again, peering anxiously into my face.

  ‘Are you all right to ride in my car? It’s about thirty minutes to the hospital. If I call an ambulance it could take hours to get here.’

  ‘No!’ I shook my head, instantly regretting it as a bolt of pain ricocheted around my skull, but my voice was a hoarse whisper and I needed him to understand. ‘I don’t need to go to hospital. I’m just stiff and a bit sore.’

  I straightened my body as far as possible to prove it, biting back a wince as I took a step away from his grip, managing to stop wobbling after a couple of seconds.

  ‘I really think you ought to get checked out.’

  I shook my head. ‘No. Thank you.’

  We stood there for a moment, surrounded by the stillness of the storm’s aftermath. Murky fields stretched out beyond the verges on either side of the road, the horizon crowned with the scattered silhouettes of bare trees against a background of soft pink and gold, watery streaks of winter dawn. The man, who looked to be somewhere in his early thirties, glanced at the muddy Jeep parked a few metres away and then back to me.

  ‘I can drop you at the surgery then. The nurse will be able to get you cleaned up.’ He gestured at my head, frowning.

  ‘Honestly, it’s a few bumps and scrapes. What I really need is a hot shower and a change of clothes.’ I did my best to put on a nice, normal smile. ‘But my phone died last night so I can’t get hold of anyone. Would you have time to give me a lift to Damson Farm? I got totally lost last night, so I don’t even know what direction it’s in.’

  He folded his arms, the frown deepening.

  ‘It’s near Ferrington. Salters Lane?’

  ‘I know where it is.’

  Well, that was a start. Although he didn’t appear very willing to take me there.

  ‘Or, if you don’t have time, could I quickly borrow your phone and call a taxi?’ My weary legs wobbled again, causing me to suck in a sharp breath as pain shot up my back. I limped back a few steps and leant against the side of my car, which promptly slipped several inches further into the ditch.

  ‘Come on.’ The man had grabbed my arm just in time to stop me tumbling backwards into the empty space where the car had been. He started walking me over to his car, one arm around my waist as I rested my weight against his thick raincoat, too spent to argue.

  ‘Oh, I need my stuff!’ I only remembered this crucial information once I’d reached the Jeep and he’d helped boost me into the passenger seat. Before I could say anything else, he’d jogged back and fetched my shoulder bag. Finding the keys still in the ignition, he locked the car.

  ‘No, my things from the back. And the boot.’

  ‘I’ll fetch them later.’ He slid up into the seat next to me.

  ‘I really need to change my clothes.’ Or, more accurately, change into clothes that didn’t create the impression I’d absconded from a care home.

  ‘It’s fine.’

  ‘No, it really isn’t fine!’ He started the Jeep and began pulling away, leaving me beginning to wonder just who I’d willingly climbed into a vehicle with on a deserted road at no-witnesses o’clock. For all I knew he was part of this whole thing – you idiot, Eleanor! I swivelled my aching neck around to get proper look at him. Hmmm. Tufts of dark hair poking out from under his woolly hat. More than a smidgen of stubble covering a tough-looking jaw and mouth set in a firm line. Wary hazel eyes fixed on the road ahead. I didn’t think his thick, curling eyelashes were relevant to this assessment, but the faint scar slashing from his eyebrow down to his earlobe was undeniably interesting. His hands were definitely working hands. Rough hands. Murderer’s hands, ready to strangle a woman and leave her for dead in a dirty ditch, far enough away from her abandoned car not to arouse suspicion?

  As if echoing my increasingly lurid thoughts, a thin wail erupted behind me. The driver simply sighed.

  I inched my head further round to find a baby in a car seat. I didn’t know a lot about babies, but from what I could make out of this one, face poking out from the giant orange ski-suit thing she was engulfed in, she was too small to walk, or talk. Her eyes closed as she took a deep breath and let out another wail, scrunching her tiny face up and waving stubby arms, hands hidden in the sleeves of the suit.

  Without taking his eyes off the road, the man flicked a button, the pulsing tones of hardcore dance music filling the car.

  ‘Really?’ I couldn’t help asking. Even I knew this was not standard lullaby fare. But within a matter of seconds, the baby had stopped crying, stuffed a suit cuff in her mouth and now stared at me with giant hazel eyes, as solemn and unnerving as her dad’s.

  And while the frenetic music pounded at my headache, I felt a prickle of excitement at the choice of tune. This was one of Charlie’s favourites. A coincidence – or a sign?

  I was about to find out. Before the first song had come to an end we had turned off the road and bumped our way down an unpaved track up to Damson Farm. I rested my head against the back of the seat and blew out a long sigh. The dashboard display told me it was 8.17 a.m. The odds were a three-way split that Charlie would either still be in bed, still be up from the night before, or be up and dressed and on her way out the door to catch a helicopter. Either way, I really hoped she’d be in. I was in desperate need of a bathroom, a cup of tea and somewhere I could rest my battered bones.

  To my surprise, my rescuer not only got out of the Jeep, but unclipped the baby from her seat and walked with me towards the main house. The farmhouse was not quite how Charlie had described it. She’d told me stories of a place bursting with life and colour, chickens pecking about, semi-wild cats slinking round every corner and dogs greeting visitors with a wagging tail. This place felt deserted. Like a ghost farm. Faded, chipped paintwork on the door and shuttered windows. A dead clematis hanging off a rotting trellis beside the front door. The weather didn’t help, admittedly, gloomy skies reflecting off the grey puddles pooling in the gravel yard, but there was nothing else. Not a pot plant or a hanging basket. Not a bird singing in the distance or a string of lights left over from Christmas. Just quite a few straggly weeds.

  This did not look like the kind of place my best friend would live. For the first time, I felt a stab of anxiety that maybe she wouldn’t be here.

  But I shook that off, even as I limped across, concentrating so my trainers didn’t slip on the wet slabs that formed a square in front of the door. Damson Farm had belonged to Charlie’s family for generations. She belonged to the farm. If she’d moved on, she’d have told me. She always had before. But the tweak of hesitation was enough to allow the man to stride past me, open the door and step right in. After a moment dithering, my bladder compelled me to follow him, moving through a hallway and finding myself in the kitchen that Charlie had told me about so many times. Again, the picture she’d created of hustle and bustle, baking and cooking, the Aga always warm, the kettle always steaming, was a million miles away from this cluttered, soulless, decidedly grubby and sad-looking room.

  The man dropped his car keys onto a pile of mess on a dresser. ‘There’s a bathroom across the hall.’ He nodded towards the entrance hall, paved with the same dark
red tiles as the kitchen. It was when I glanced back that I spotted the highchair. The empty baby bottles amongst the mound of dirty pots by the sink. The pram pushed up against one wall.

  This was his house. His and the baby’s house. So, where was Charlie?

  My brain stuck there, unable to process the possibility of what a man and a baby in Charlie’s house could mean. I ducked across into the bathroom and spent a hasty five minutes sorting myself out as best I could – which wasn’t very much, given what I was working with. After an initial glance in the mirror I had to steel myself before I could face a closer inspection. I’d lost my hat at some point during the night, and my deep brown mahogany-on-a-good-day hair was now a matted mess. Huge greyish-purply rings surrounded each listless, bloodshot blue eye. The bump on my head was smeared with dried blood, speckles of which also covered the rest of my face. And if you could find a foundation to match this skin-tone it would have been called ‘hint of corpse’.

  Lovely. I splashed water on my face, dabbing gently at the blood stains with some toilet roll, and wondered why on earth this man had let me in his car, let alone his house.

  I didn’t wonder for long. My frazzled brain had far more important things to worry about right then. And to be honest, if he had turned out to be one of the bad guys, as long as he let me sit down and maybe have a hot drink before bludgeoning me to death, I couldn’t summon up the energy to care.