Accidents Happen A Novel

CHAPTER THIRTY



Kate watched the young au pairs on the cricket field.

A ranger was shining a torch in their direction, and it briefly illuminated them. The Spanish one was slightly heavy, wearing a light coat and had a bright smile. The other one had a long dark ponytail, and a square face, and was as skinny as Jack, and not much taller. Kate watched their awkward stances, knowing they were new to all this. Still finding out where they fitted in, in this enormous metropolis.

‘Why them?’ She turned to Jago.

‘Why not?’

‘Because they look like nice girls.’

‘You’ve got to get out of this way of thinking, that how you behave controls your fate. Fate is fate. We all have bad luck sometimes.’

‘But they’re just young. That guy on the boat at least looked like he’d . . .’

‘Kate. You’re not going to murder them.’

She rolled her eyes.

‘Please. We’ll be out of here in half an hour and I won’t let anything bad happen to you, or them, I promise. I just want you to follow them for a bit in the dark. See what it feels like. It’ll be good for you. Now, listen, I’m going over to the field.’

‘What?’ she said alarmed.

Jago glanced up. If the moon was usually visible from here, it was now hidden deeply from sight behind charred clouds. Kate realized she could hardly see his face. She looked back in the direction of the cricket field, which was becoming difficult to make out. The torch had moved ahead of the au pairs, and the girls had disappeared into the dark cloak that fell over the cricket ground, inside this thick bowl of forest that sharply cut out the city lights behind it.

‘It gets so dark inside the trees – you can’t see twenty feet beyond your face. I’m hoping the rangers won’t notice me now, as long as I keep inside the shadows. And while I’m doing that, I want you to head that way –’ he pointed to the right – ‘and take the path behind the trees. Follow it to end up near the cricket scoreboard. Wait behind it. Just make this noise –’ he made a five-beat clicking noise, with his tongue, that could have been a bird pecking at a tree – ‘and I’ll find you.’

‘But I . . .’ she began to protest.

He squeezed her hand. ‘Try it.’

Kate tried out the noise, shaking her head at the ridiculousness of it, and he gave her the thumbs-up. To her shock, he then finally unzipped his jacket, revealing underneath it a dark fleece with some sort of badge on the chest. With his khaki trousers and black bat detector, she realized what he could pass for.

A Highgate Woods park ranger.

Before she could open her mouth to exclaim, Jago pulled out the black box and slipped off into the dark.

She was on her own.

Half an hour, he said. And this would be over.

Nothing bad would happen. He promised.

She waited until she thought she could make out Jago’s shadow emerging from the trees. When rangers shone the torches, she could see a few of the people pointing black boxes at the sky, and hear the young boys yelling as a high-pitched tutting noise over the airwaves indicated a bat. All faces pointed upwards. Small groups started to scatter left and right in the darkness as bats were spotted, the two rangers accompanying some of them. It was then that she saw Jago do it. The dark outline of his head moved beside the two au pairs, who were standing nervously at the edge, presumably too polite to ask someone to share their bat detector with them.

She saw the shape of the Spanish girl’s nose as she turned towards Jago, and Jago’s cheekbones lift as he smiled and handed her his bat detector, checking the other rangers weren’t looking over. The second au pair turned, and the three of them spoke.

Kate started to move as well as she could in the blackness of the woods. Uneasily, she crept to the rangers’ hut, then down behind the cricket field.

She stole along the boundary, holding onto tree branches, deep in the shadows. The shouts of the bat-watchers drifted across the cricket field from different directions now, fifty yards apart. She could make out the young boys in the middle of the field with some sort of neon glowsticks snapped to their wrists, running around randomly, yelling and playfighting.

Kate felt her way to the scoreboard and settled herself behind it.

From here, she could make out the distant outline of the wildlife hut again. So many happy memories with Jack in this place destroyed.

The men who killed Hugo would not leave her mind.

She pictured them for the first time in years, leering and swearing at her in court.

Those angry fists they gestured with, the hands that had ended Hugo’s life so cruelly. All Hugo had ever done was be true to his heart, and loyal to his family. He had tried to lead a good life, and they had ripped it to shreds, like animals.

Curiously, Kate regarded the groups of bat-watchers.

It was an intriguing sensation, Jago was right.

None of them knew she was here.

She was the shape in the shadows, the noise in the wardrobe.

She was the one in the dark, waiting.

Just for a moment, she shut her eyes to see how it felt.

She opened them at the sound of Jago’s voice drifting towards her.

‘You’re right, well done. I’m Irish.’

She realized the Spanish au pair was answering him in heavily accented English.

‘Ah. From Dublin, maybe?’

‘Very good!’ she heard Jago exclaim. ‘Not many people would get that first time.’

He was flattering the girl, Kate realized. Drawing her and her friend towards Kate. She peeked out from the scoreboard and saw Jago had taken them quite some distance from the crowd.

‘I’m afraid we’re not having much luck here,’ he said pointing his bat detector at the sky. ‘Probably the noise of the children in the field. I think we might take a few of you up this path and see if we have more luck.’

To Kate’s amazement, Jago pulled his phone from his pocket.

‘Janet. Robin here. I’m taking my group down Hazelnut Path. Do you want to bring a few others over here? See if we have better luck? . . . OK. See you in a minute.’

He turned to the au pairs. The Polish girl was still pointing the detector at the sky, giggling. The box emitted a crackling sound.

‘Well done!’ Jago said. ‘There must be a bat up there. We’re close,’ he continued. ‘Let’s see what we can find.’

And with that he led the au pairs off the edge of the dark cricket field into a narrow path behind a row of hornbeams.

Kate paused, unsure of what she was supposed to do. So she followed them.

Jago kept talking to the girls, leading them onto an even narrower, blacker path. Soon, they were deep inside the woods with only Jago’s torch for light. Kate noticed he kept it ahead of his body, trying not to let the rangers back on the field spot it.

‘Up there,’ Kate heard him exclaim. Then she heard him say into his fake phone, ‘Janet. Are you on your way? We’re on Oak Path now.’

She saw the au pairs’ cheeks rise in the dim torchlight, as they presumably smiled innocently. ‘The others are just coming,’ Jago said. ‘You keep pointing up there, and I’ll just pop back and shine my torch to tell them we’re here. You girls OK here for a minute?’

They nodded beaming.

Kate watched. It was a strange sensation of power, them not knowing she was here.

Jago walked down the path, and with the girls’ backs to him, switched off his torch.

Kate saw Jago take a silent step into the trees off the path, about ten feet from where she stood.

She made a gentle clicking noise with her tongue.

Jago came over, leaned right into her ear and whispered, ‘They’re lost now. The bat-watch finishes in ten minutes. I’m going back to the field to fill out the numbers. That gives you ten minutes to follow them around a bit. Then come back to the field in case the rangers do a head count and we need to make up the numbers again.’

‘But what do you want me to do?’ Kate whispered, glancing round the tree trunk at the girls, who were still looking up at the sky.

Jago breathed heavily into her ear. ‘Kate. A true predator has no morals. Those men who killed Hugo had no morals. If you really want to know what it feels like, you have to lose yours. Even just for a few seconds.’

A timid voice drifted towards them in the dark.

‘Where is the man?’

The other one now: ‘Eh. Hello?’

‘Do it, Kate,’ Jago murmured, before disappearing off into the woods.

Kate stood uncertainly, trying not to crack the twigs under her feet.

She crept forwards to the side of the tree trunk, and saw the girls glancing anxiously up and down the path, whispering to each other. The light from the fake radar sat under the Polish girl’s chin. Her eyes were round and scared. The girls turned round once, then again, looking disoriented, then began to call out together.

‘Excuse me!’

‘Hello? Sir?’

‘Are you there?’

Kate stepped back. Her heel pressed into a twig. It broke in two with an explosive crack.

The girls froze.

‘Hello?’ they whispered.

Kate watched, knowing they would be starting to feel like she had in Chumsley Norton. Their senses heightened. They would hear every sound magnified.

One of the girls spoke breathlessly. The other took her hand, and they began tentatively to walk down the path, away from the noise Kate had made, presumably trying to take themselves back to the cricket field.

But they were going the wrong way.

Further and further into the woods.

Kate looked on, knowing again how they were feeling. Their hearts would be thumping, their palms sweating, their bodies covered in goosebumps, waiting for evil to jump from the shadows. Just like she felt when she got home to Hubert Street every day. Walking round the house, shoulders hunched, anticipating the monster who would leap from behind a door, or inside a wardrobe.

Kate hung her head. She was so sick of it.

Sick of being scared because of those men who had killed Hugo and left him in a pool of blood for her and Jack to find. The poacher who had carelessly shot an animal and left it to die in pain, in the path of her parents’ car. The burglars who had smashed her window and broken into her home. Together they had done this. Created the shadows in her bedroom at night that made her start awake with a gasp and run to check Jack was OK. The creaking floorboards. The broken windows and muddy smears, the imagined footsteps on the stairs.

The people who made her and her child sleep inside a cage in their own home.

Kate watched the girls and saw her own fear transferred onto their faces as they tried to escape from the footsteps cracking twigs behind them in the woods.

Her footsteps.

The moon disappeared behind the clouds, shutting off the light.

Jack lay on his side on the trampoline, praying for it to return, listening for the footsteps of the Year Eight boys on the lawn.

He glanced at Mum’s text message again, hoping she’d sent another one. He lifted his head for the twentieth time, and scanned the fence at the bottom of the garden, as Gabe and Damon threw down cards and laughed more loudly than normal. He knew Gabe was as nervous as him but trying not to show it.

‘Be quiet,’ he wanted to say. ‘If someone comes they’ll hear us. They’ll know we’re here.’

‘What’s up, Jack-off,’ Damon said, whacking his arm.

‘Nothing,’ he replied crossly, turning and looking at the trees.

‘I’m going for a pee,’ Damon announced, climbing out of his bag and jumping off the trampoline.

‘Me too,’ Gabe said, following him. ‘Deal the cards, J.’

‘Wait . . .’ Jack said, trying to keep his voice calm, but they had already jumped off, making him bounce upwards.

‘Your mum said we couldn’t pee on the carrots. But she didn’t say we couldn’t do it on the flowers,’ Damon was laughing.

Jack sat up nervously, and gathered together the cards.

Trying to focus on the numbers, he dealt them out, one by one, straining his ears for the other two to come back.

And then, he felt it.

The feeling from the river path. The heavy blurred shadow that emerged from the bushes and settled its weight on him.

He tried to ignore it. Tried to ignore the cramps in his stomach that made him want to run to the toilet again.

But this time there was something new.

There was a crack.

Jack spun round.

And there, looking through a gap in the fence, were two bright eyes.

Watching him. Not moving. Not blinking. Just staring at him through the crack.

The pain in Jack’s stomach rose up for a second then stabbed down through it like a knife, making him bend over with an alarmed gasp.

Gabe and Damon were around the corner, giggling.

He grabbed his phone and looked at Mum’s text message.

are you all right?

He wanted her here now.

But she was in London with that man.

So he kept his eyes away from the fence, and fixed them on Mum’s words, shaking, as if she were here and keeping him safe.

Kate didn’t mean to chase the girls, she just did.

As she came behind them, snapping more twigs in the trees, they moved as fast as they could along the path. Their panting was so loud she could hear it. The Spanish girl was whimpering.

She’d stop in a minute, she told herself. Just a minute longer to know what it was like to be on the other side.

‘Who is it?’ the Eastern European girl called out hopefully into the trees, but when Kate didn’t reply, she carried on trying to run.

Kate kept a few feet behind them, in the pitch dark, on the other side of the trees.

Every time her foot crushed something with a crack, the girls’ eyes flew back behind them. When they reached the top of the next path, they came to a fork. They backed into a tree at the side of the path, and looked left, then right.

Kate watched them as their faces turned towards her and caught a shaft of moonlight along the path.

They were terrified.

Finally the truth broke through to Kate from some place she had buried in her mind.

Is that what Hugo had looked like in his last moments: horrified. Eyes bulging, forehead sweating?

Is this what her parents had looked like as their car lay upturned in the river, the water rising?

Is this what the monster of fate had done to everyone she loved?

The truth would not leave her alone. As she watched the girls, she realized she had believed what she had wanted to believe, because it was all she could endure. That her parents had died instantly before the car sank in the ditch. That Hugo had fought those men to the end. Shouted at them. Charmed them. Been his big, brave, confident, ebullient self till the second when he had fallen fatally, at which point he had selflessly spent his last seconds thinking of her and Jack.

Now Kate looked at the fearful au pairs.

Was this the truth? The reality. Is this what these men did to people when they caught them? Left them frantic? Gasping? Desperate for help? Their dignity stripped away like animals, begging for life.

The girls were both whimpering now. The Spanish au pair opened her bag, and scrabbled inside it.

And pulled out a mobile.

She was going to ring someone.

Alarmed, Kate tiptoed forwards till she came silently to a stop behind the tree where the girls now stood, their backs against the trunk, watching the path.

If the girl rang someone, this would be over in minutes.

‘Say him to ring the police,’ she heard the Polish girl whisper.

Seconds, even. The police would ring the rangers straight away. The rangers might do a head count and spot Jago.

Can you do it, Kate? Jago’s words came back to her. Have no morals? Even just for a few moments?

She smelt the girls’ cheap perfume turning sour as it mixed with the sweat of fear.

The Spanish girl began shakily to tap numbers into her phone.

Predators have no morals.

Tap, tap, tap . . . One, two, three numbers . . .

Kate knew then what she was going to do.

Just once she was going to know what it felt like to be those men.

She began to lift her arms slowly, like a ballerina.

Tap, tap, tap . . . Four, five, six . . .

Kate continued her port de bras, until her fingers reached around the side of the tree.

No morals.

Just for a few seconds.

Kate shut her eyes, forced herself to see all the people who had hurt her family . . .

And then as the Spanish girl went to tap in the seventh number, Kate reached around the tree, sank her fingers into both the girls’ hair and yanked their heads back tightly against the tree trunk.

‘Aaaa-ieeeeee!’

Their screams sliced through the woods like lightning.

She held them there for three seconds, then let go, shocked.

As Kate stood gasping, the Spanish girl dropped the phone and, without looking back, the two girls raced off along the unlit path, frantically sobbing.

Kate fell back into the shadows.

What had she done?

She had to get out of here. She scrambled out onto the path, and hurried in the opposite direction to the girls, till, minutes later, the large patch of moonlit sky opened up ahead of her, telling her she was nearing the cricket field.

Tears started to form in her eyes at the sound of the girls’ cries.

As she approached at a jog, she saw the distant movement of the bat-watchers and dropped again behind a tree. They were gathered in larger groups and heading back towards the hut. Checking there were no suspicious rangers walking around with torches to see where the scream had come from, she crept behind the cricket scoreboard and crouched down, waiting for Jago.

Nettles stung her ankle, but she didn’t care.

She sat in the dark, heart thumping, incredulous.

Where the hell had that come from?

A hand suddenly appeared round the back of the scoreboard and grabbed her, making her gasp.

‘Quick,’ Jago whispered. ‘They’re going to do a head count.’

Jumping up, she followed him around the perimeter hedge of the cafe towards the rangers’ hut.

‘Did you hear the scream?’ she whispered as they crept along.

Jago shrugged. ‘It sounded as if it came from the road. Nobody took much notice.’

They reached the dark mass of the group, keeping their faces hidden inside their hoodies and looking at the ground as a ranger shone a torch over the tops of their heads, and counted.

‘Twenty?’ he said.

‘Yup. Twenty,’ the other ranger agreed.

Kate felt Jago grip her hand firmly as the rangers began to lead the group back to Onslow Gate, one in front, and one behind. She couldn’t speak. Couldn’t believe what she’d done.

Sickened by her own behaviour.

Surreptitiously, she kept looking for the girls, knowing, however, that they would be lost now, far over the side of the woods, about to be locked in for the night, with no torch, the Spanish girl’s phone lying on the ground where she had dropped it.

The other girl might have a phone, she told herself. And if she doesn’t, they can listen out for the traffic and find their way to the fence. Climb over.

She gripped Jago’s hand as they moved through the woods, a terrible sense of guilt descending on her, fighting the urge to go back for the girls and explain.

‘What’s up, J?’ Gabe yelled, arriving back.

Jack was standing on the trampoline, desperately grabbing his sleeping bag and bed roll.

‘What?’ Gabe said, his nerves finally showing. ‘I saw something. Over there. Someone watching us.’

‘Where?’ Damon shouted, coming up behind him.

Jack pointed, trying not to cry. ‘Someone over there. Behind the fence.’

‘Where?’

Gabe peered over. ‘I can’t see anything.’

Jack stood up. ‘There is someone there!’ he shouted at them. ‘Stop telling me I’m LYING!’

The boys both looked at him, stunned.

They’d never heard him shout before.

‘There,’ Jack said dropping his voice.

He turned at pointed at the fence, his sleeping bag in his hand.

But the eyes had gone.

‘You’re just imagining it, Jack,’ Gabe said, anxiety entering his own voice.

‘Come on,’ Damon said, sitting down and picking up his cards. ‘Ignore him. Want us to call your mummy?’ He sniggered. ‘Oh no. That’s right. You can’t. She’s in London with her boyfriend.’

‘Shut up, Damon,’ Gabe said, looking at Jack.

‘Sorry,’ Damon said in a stupid voice.

‘Come on, J, it’s all right,’ Gabe said quietly. ‘Look, there’s nothing there.’

Jack shook his head. He put his sleeping bag back down and picked up his cards, knowing they were wrong and he was right.

‘Jack – look!’ Gabe said again.

He grabbed Jack’s shoulder and made him turn round.

The eyes were gone. And now nobody would believe him.