But the question Why is he drugging me? kept going round in her head, effectively keeping her awake until the bedroom door opened quietly. She closed her eyes and made herself breathe slowly and deeply. She heard his footsteps approach the bed and then stop. She couldn’t help her breath catching for a second. To disguise it, she moved a little, as if in her sleep, and gave a tiny snort.
It seemed like forever before the footsteps moved away again and the door clicked softly shut. She heard his steps receding down the corridor and got quickly out of bed and went to the door. Very gently, she opened it, just a crack, in time to see him disappear from view on the landing. She heard him jog downstairs, and then his steps on the tiles, crossing the hall. The front door opened and shut, and there was a scraping noise – the key turning in the lock.
She was standing irresolute when she heard the car engine. Going to the window, she watched the Audi coming round the side of the house. In the long summer twilight, she could make Nick out clearly in the driver’s seat.
Where was he going, at eleven o’clock at night?
A sudden image of Maggie’s face came into her head – the way she’d looked at Nick with naked terror. Lulu had seen that look before, on the faces of clients who had been victims of domestic abuse.
Maggie was genuinely scared of Nick.
She thought back over what everyone – Yvonne, Andy, Michael, even Harry – had told her. She thought of how she’d felt this morning, breaking a window to get out of the house. His controlling behaviour in the days and weeks and months before that. She heard Ruth and Jenny chorusing in her head: Typical Lulu.
Oh God.
Oh fuck!
Last night, he had drugged her because she’d found the extra phone and he needed to keep her from telling anyone about it until he could work out how to spin it to her. How to dupe silly, trusting Lulu. He must really have panicked, though, when he’d found her gone in the morning, found that smashed window! He must have realised that she’d rumbled him. But then silly, trusting Lulu had come back after discovering that Maggie and Duncan were alive and well, and he must have worked out her thought process, that she’d convinced herself that he was innocent after all and there was an innocent explanation for that extra phone. He always had been able to read her mind.
Tonight, he had drugged her so she could provide him with an alibi, assure the police that she was such a light sleeper that she would have known if he’d been absent from their bed for any length of time.
Silly, trusting Lulu.
Quickly, she dressed in jeans, a navy hoodie and trainers, and ran downstairs. She needed to warn Duncan and Maggie that Nick could be on his way.
Nick hated Maggie so much.
What might he be intending to do?
She needed to call the police.
She ran into the study. But there were no phones charging on the windowsill.
No phone in the cupboard underneath.
And there was no landline. She went frantically round the house looking for the phones, but he must have hidden them well. She’d have to go to the farm, rouse Michael, get him to call the police. But by the time she’d done that and the police had come from wherever they were stationed – in a rural area like this, that could be some distance away – Nick would have arrived at Rose Cottage, if that really was where he was going.
She ran back upstairs to the bedroom and slung her bag over her shoulders.
Inside was the can of pepper spray Nick made her carry.
And in the garage were the electric bikes that were supplied for the use of the holiday let guests. It was what – three miles to the cottage? She could be there in fifteen minutes.
32
Maggie - June 2019
Duncan had gone to bed, but Maggie was sitting up in the living room with her laptop, messaging Isla’s friends, telling them she needed to get in touch with Isla urgently. She’d tried calling and texting and emailing Isla, and leaving messages on her social media pages telling her to call her mum pronto. But the group were camping in the wilds of Sweden, where there was often no phone signal and no Wi-Fi.
She needed Isla to change her plans, to go someplace else, just in case Nick had found out their new names, maybe through the people who let Rose Cottage. Just in case he went after Isla. Isla had posted all about the Swedish trip on social media, so it wouldn’t be hard for him to track her down.
Maggie and Duncan didn’t do social media as they didn’t want their photographs out there, even under their new names, but when Isla had turned thirteen they had made the decision that it wasn’t fair to ban her from using it, so had allowed her to have accounts as long as she let them have her passwords and never posted photographs of Maggie or Duncan.
Maggie kept thinking of Isla, in her cut-off jeans and favourite faded green T-shirt, innocently blethering to her friends as they strolled along a forest path in dappled sunlight, and Nick jumping out at her – Isla giving him her friendly, open smile, and then realising.
Realising who he was.
Maybe they should fly to Sweden themselves, Maggie and Duncan, and whisk her off somewhere, ban her from social media for the foreseeable future. Maggie’s heart was pumping as she navigated to Erin’s Instagram account. Erin was one of the group in Sweden, a girl Isla had known since school.
Using Isla’s account, Maggie was adding a comment to one of Erin’s posts, asking her to tell Isla to get in touch urgently, when she was aware of a movement. She turned, expecting to see Duncan in the doorway, but there was no one there.
The movement was outside.
On the other side of the patio doors.
She just had time to register the tall shape looming there before the glass shattered.
And now she was up out her chair, yelling, running for the door to the back hall that led to their bedroom. But she could already sense him behind her, smell the night air off him as he grabbed her.
He pushed her to the floor.
Kicked her, hard, in the stomach. In the head.
She kept shouting, she put up her hands to try to ward off the kicks. She could see his hands, glowing ghostly white in the dim light, and she realised it was because he was wearing surgical gloves.
Then nothing.
Then voices.