She stares at me and presses her lips together.
I don’t know why I call him Mr Brown. I ought to call him the Monster or the Liar. But somehow, referring to him as plain old Mr Brown helps me maintain a distance from him, helps me remove his threat and keep my mind calm.
‘Right!’ Mrs Barrett claps her hands. ‘Holly, you go and get changed upstairs, and David, you can help me with tea if you’re at a loose end.’
‘I’m not at a loose end.’ I clench my hands. ‘I only came over to see… if everything was all right. With the water pressure.’
Mrs Barrett turns on both kitchen taps and the water gushes out at full pelt.
‘There. Nothing at all wrong with it today.’
Before they can say anything else, I turn round and head back up the hallway to the door. I imagine their eyes burning into my back like laser beams.
They’ll be talking about me when I leave, I just know it.
Mrs Barrett will explain to Holly that I have a problem with Mr Brown, and then Holly will ask why and the whole sorry state of affairs will be revealed.
I don’t have Holly down as a gossip, but what if she is?
What if she blabs at work – maybe just by mistake, through simply not thinking – and Mr Kellington gets to hear about it and calls me into his office?
He might not believe my account of events. He might wonder if he’s made a mistake in appointing me to such a responsible position in the company.
When I get back home, Mother is preparing a pasta sauce.
‘Is everything all right, David?’ The words sound muffled, as if she’s saying them from behind a thick wall of glass.
I watch as she breaks up plum tomatoes with a fork, mashing and slicing the smooth elongated spheres of fibrous red flesh.
I often dream of doing the same thing to Mr Brown’s face.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Holly
Up in her bedroom, Holly stood back from the window and unbuttoned her blouse.
It had been an odd exchange downstairs. David had seemed very upset but she couldn’t quite grasp why.
It felt like there were some pretty major things that were being left unsaid by the people around her.
She looked down towards the bottom of the garden.
Nick had ear defenders on and was pushing and pulling the mower from one side of the lawn to the other. As she watched, Cora appeared and walked down the garden. Nick shut off the mower and stood listening to her, his head bowed.
Cora’s hands were animated, as if she wanted to add weight to whatever point she was making. After a minute or so, Nick nodded, and Cora walked back up toward the house, her lips pressed together in a grim line.
Holly took another step further back into the room, in case Cora looked up and caught her watching, although she certainly hadn’t said or done anything wrong. She sat down on the edge of the bed and thought about Nick’s words.
Watch him, he’d said. That’s all I’m saying. Watch him.
Just a few words that had now planted a seed of doubt and discomfort in her mind. David did seem a bit weird in some respects, she’d already gathered that.
But he was harmless enough… wasn’t he?
On the other side of the fence, she spotted Brian again. Smoking now, amongst the bushes and looking back up at the houses. She stepped back, keen to avoid drawing his eye.
She pulled on a pair of black leggings, the inner thigh seams rubbed and threadbare. As she slipped a long, baggy T-shirt over her head, she made yet another mental note about items to buy once she got paid. She was now beginning to regret throwing away some of her clothing when she’d first arrived.
As she hung up her clothes for the next day, she caught sight of the laptop. Cora had only just started to make tea, so she probably had another ten minutes or so before she was called down.
She sat on the edge of the bed and opened the computer, reaching under her pillow to pull out her small notebook and pencil.
She’d done so much work over the last eighteen months, trying to track down Geraldine and Evan in any way she could think of, but she had met an immovable brick wall in every direction.
It was the fault of what she called the bad time. That wasn’t the official term; the doctors had termed it repressed memory, which sounded altogether more serious. She didn’t feel like she was repressing anything; she just chose not to think about it.
Who’d want to keep revisiting those cruel, vile events? She had to think about herself, about preserving her sanity.
She’d told them this, but they’d said repressing memory was something that happened in the subconscious. She wouldn’t have been aware that she was doing it.
The fact was, Holly had done too much over-thinking. She’d racked her brains about ways to trace the two of them and had simply lost track of everything.
So she had decided to start again. She would methodically and systematically work through each and every avenue or idea, no matter how trivial.
She’d started with the obvious biggies: social media and online clues.
She opened her fake Facebook account and inspected the list of names. She’d already crossed off ten possibles – she’d been focusing on Geraldine, trying different combinations of her middle name, maiden name, that sort of thing.
It wasn’t an easy thing to do, to trace someone while trying to remain hidden yourself, but it wasn’t impossible, and the private investigator she’d worked with briefly – until his ludicrous charges had eaten up her credit card limit in record time – had given her a few tips and tricks.
She added a few more names now, squinting at the thumbnail-sized photographs on the list of matching profiles, to no avail.
‘Holly? Tea’s ready, dear,’ Cora called from downstairs.
She glanced at the clock display on the bottom right of her screen and was shocked to find that nearly twenty minutes had elapsed while she’d been absorbed in her thankless task.
‘Coming!’
She crossed off the names she’d checked and set the laptop aside with a heavy heart.
Sometimes, like tonight, it really did feel like looking for the proverbial needle in a haystack. She closed the laptop and set it charging on the floor again.
Just before she went downstairs, she felt an irresistible pull to see Evan’s face again. She rummaged in the drawer and gently peeled back the tissue paper, allowing herself to get lost in those beautiful eyes.
Were they happy together, Evan and Geraldine? She was such a conniving, believable bitch, Holly couldn’t blame him if he’d fallen for her lies. Hadn’t she herself been sucked into her world, believing that Geraldine truly cared about her?
What a fool she’d been.
She knew deep down that Evan loved her just as much as she loved him. He was probably searching online himself, hoping to track her down. It was torture having to remain hidden when she knew the love of her life was desperately trying to find her too.
One day they’d be together again, she knew it.
She had to believe that, because the alternative meant life would no longer be worth living.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Holly
She’d felt so full of dread, waking up after that first night in the Manchester drug den.
Despite her initial determination not to sleep, she’d ended up drifting off.
She’d snapped awake and found the room was now light, with Markus still sleeping soundly beside her. She had immediately looked around, heart pounding, but thankfully their luggage was still safe; in fact, Markus was using his holdall as a makeshift pillow.
The vile smell had seemed more pungent than ever upon waking, and she’d clamped the handkerchief to her face once more.
Her eyes had soon become accustomed to the daylight, and the urge to just run as far from the place as she could manage filled her again.
The darkness of the previous evening had been preferable, she’d realised. Then, she had seen only vague shapes. Now those shapes were revealed to be wretched, skeletal people surrounded by used syringes and bits of ash and foil.
She’d reached over and shaken Markus.