Kneeling, she checked the first few issues. The date. The date was the same. A quick scan across the rest of the line confirmed that the publication dates matched on all of them. They’d all been put out on the same day, and were all one year apart.
Grabbing a few sheets from one of the other piles, she checked the dates on those. Those dates didn’t match the blue-printed editions, and they didn’t match each other, either. There seemed to be no pattern to when those other issues had been published, just the ones in blue.
Behind her, Taggart growled.
Still crouching, Sinead turned to find the little dog lying flat on the floor, the fur on his collar rising as his eyes went to the window, and the darkness that lay beyond it.
“What’s the matter?” Sinead asked.
She reached out and patted the dog, and the growling abated. His eyes, however, remained locked on the darkened glass, and the moment Sinead lifted her hand away, the scruff of Taggart’s neck began to rise again.
And then, she heard it, too—the scuff of a footstep on the gravel outside.
She froze solid, her outsides becoming a statue of ice, while her insides churned, and whirled, and spun. Taggart, either sensing her distress or terrified himself, commando-crawled closer to her on his belly, and pressed his shoulder against her ankle.
“It’s OK. It’s nothing. Don’t worry,” she said, though she couldn’t say if she was talking to the dog or to herself.
Without moving from her spot, she tried to look outside, but with the station lights on the window had become a mirror that reflected a view of the ceiling tiles and showed nothing of the darkened world beyond.
Her heart was a hummingbird in her chest, fifty beats per second, badabadabadabadabum.
Taggart’s ears twitched, and his growl crept further back into his throat. First his eyes, then his head shifted, like he was following the progress of someone as they made their way around the side of the building towards the…
The door. Had she locked the door? She’d closed it, yes, but locked it?
She cursed herself below her breath, not daring to make too much noise. Could she get to the door in the next few seconds? Without being seen? Without being caught?
She tried to logic away her fear—it was probably nothing, and even if there was someone there, so what? That didn’t mean they meant her any harm.
But try as she might, her body wasn’t listening. Her adrenal glands had drowned out all sense of reason, and now she was back in that farmhouse, back in that room, back on that bed with the monsters closing in from the shadows around her.
There was a knock on the door out front, and Taggart let out three high-pitched barks and the start of a howl, then rolled onto his back and pawed at the air like he was going to get in trouble.
She should move. She knew that. She should get up off the floor, go to the front, see who was there.
But she couldn’t. Try as she might, fight as much as she liked, her legs were not for budging.
Another knock, louder this time. Sinead took her phone from her pocket. No signal. Of course.
The landline was out front. The radio, too.
She was alone in a strange place, with somebody hammering on the door.
“Come on. Get it together,” she hissed, curving her hands into tight fists until her fingernails dug into her palms. “Grow up.”
But growing up wasn’t the problem. Sinead of five years ago would’ve had no problem marching over to the door and pulling it open.
Sinead of six months ago would’ve thought nothing of confronting the late-night caller, or of giving him a mouthful about sneaking around in the dark.
But that Sinead hadn’t been on that bed, in that room. That Sinead hadn’t gone through what she had.
That Sinead was an idiot.
There was another knock, and this time the door creaked open. Sinead’s breath caught at the back of her throat. Even Taggart had frozen now, his eyes bulging with the stress of it all, his big tongue licking furtively across his lips.
Whoever had been out there wasn’t out there any longer. They were inside. In here. With her.
“Hello? Is anyone here?” a man’s voice called. Older, she thought, and some vague sense of familiarity made her rising heartbeat level off. “I was passing, and I… I saw the light on. I was hoping to talk to someone.”
Sinead gritted her teeth and forced her legs to move against their will. She stood, inhaled through her nose until her lungs were full, then tried to remember how to walk as she headed through to greet the late arrival.
He had been turning as if to leave when she emerged from the room at the back of the station, and jumped with fright when she said his name.
“Mr Finley-Lennox?” she said, recognising the politician, even from behind.
Oberon turned, looked momentarily surprised, and then a smile spread slowly across his face. “Aha! I was beginning to think the place had been deserted,” he said.
“Almost,” Sinead said. “We were about to pack up.”
“We?” Oberon’s gaze flitted past her to the room she’d come from. “Is there someone else here?”
Sinead had left the door open, so the MSP had a decent view of the inside from where he was standing. There was no point in lying to him.
“The others are going to be back in a moment,” she said. “Would you like to wait a few minutes, or is there something I can help you with?”
“Uh…” He looked her up and down. “Actually, I think you’ll do just fine,” he said, then he closed the station door with a click. “You see, I’m afraid I have a confession to make.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
There was something inherently amusing about a chip shop smoked sausage. The shape played a big part in that, obviously. The size helped. What really made Shona laugh, though, was the way it waggled about if you held it by one end, as she’d demonstrated three times now, in the past two minutes.
They’d swung by the Hilton Chip Shop on the way back to his place. Logan had gone traditional—fish supper, lots of salt and vinegar, couple of pickled onions on the side. Add a wee squirt of salad cream for dipping, and you had Heaven on a plate. Or, in this case, in a cardboard box that was rapidly being disintegrated by hot grease.
Shona finished boinging her jumbo-sized smoked sausage around like it was some sort of large mammal sex aid, and took a bite off the end that drew an involuntary wince from the man on the couch beside her.
“I’m not actually that keen on the taste,” she said as she chewed. “I just can’t resist when I see one, though.”
“I was going to say you’re such a child,” Logan told her. “But I’d have some serious welfare concerns about any child I saw waggling one of those big bastards around like you’ve been.”
“Can I have one of your chips?” Shona asked, helping herself without waiting for his approval.
“You could’ve had chips,” Logan reminded her. “I asked if you wanted chips.”
“I don’t,” Shona said.
“Well, you’re holding a chip now,” Logan pointed out. “It’s there in your hand, see?”