When Holly first heard the noise, she was still dreaming. In her dream, she was standing in the middle of woodland with nothing on but her nightdress.
There was a shuffling, scraping sound behind her… and then it flipped so it was somewhere in front of her.
Her dream self whirled around, bare-footed and frantic, trying to see into the dark spaces between the ghostly pale tree trunks.
When she snapped awake, the woodland had disappeared, replaced again by the four bedroom walls.
The dream had dissolved but she could still hear the noise.
Holly held her breath and listened for a few more moments. The glowing digits on the bedside table read 2.01.
She quickly identified that the noise was coming from down in the garden. Just under her window. She sat up and swung her feet down to the floor. Her head thumped dully from the drink she’d had before bed.
She knew that only a narrow stretch of unused land lay beyond the back hedge. There were no street lights, but tonight, her bedroom and the entire garden were bathed in moonlight. It should have been beautiful… if she’d been able to ignore the sick feeling already squirming in the pit of her stomach.
She padded over to the window and gently peeled back the edge of the curtain.
From this angle, she could only see the far end of the garden, the shrubs and hedges a dark, dense mass against the wooden fence.
She pressed up against the wall and tweaked the curtain again, pulling it a little further away this time so she could see immediately beneath her bedroom window, closer to the back door.
The breath caught in her throat as a long, thin shadow flitted across the yard, melting into nothing.
On a reflex, she yanked the curtains completely open and pressed her face to the glass, her eyes flashing around the garden to search out the trespasser – if that was what it was.
But there was no more movement. No fleeting shadows.
A puff of breath evaporated on the freezing window and obscured her view, so she unhooked the window and eased it open. Cold air funnelled onto her clammy face as she squinted down into the gloom. Her face grew watchful, fearful, as she waited on the slightest flicker of movement.
There! There it was again. The curious scraping noise that had visited her in her dream.
It emanated from the right-hand side of the yard, near the kitchen door. A small area that sat in complete shadow, untouched by the moonlight. The vague outline of old patio furniture and discarded building materials was only just discernible in the meagre light.
Holly made a sharp hissing noise, in the hope that any cat hiding there would show itself, but although the scraping stopped, there was no further movement.
It would probably turn out to be something quite harmless, she reasoned silently to herself. It could be a cat, or even a fox, crouching beneath the old patio table. Watching and waiting until she closed the window again.
She’d always had an overactive imagination. It had been responsible for her visualising an amazing future when she’d first moved to Manchester.
Now it was telling her that someone had caught up with her. That someone was watching her furtively from down in the shadows.
Yet nobody from her old life knew where she was, so that couldn’t be the case, surely. But… the person at the shop window, a part of her whispered. The phone call.
Maybe it had been a debt collection company that had somehow managed to trace her. Was it feasible that Kellington’s had registered her on some kind of system as an employee, some database that other companies had access to?
She shook her head in frustration.
It was time to knock her volatile imagination on the head. There really was no need to give herself a hard time like this. She should foster a common-sense approach.
She closed the window with a dull thud, praying it wouldn’t disturb Cora. The last thing she wanted, at two in the morning, was a cup of tea and another raft of forty-year-old anecdotes to listen to.
She must learn to keep her fears in check and not panic at the first sign of something out of the ordinary.
If she’d reacted differently, a harmless noise in the yard could have been swiftly forgotten. With a pair of ear plugs and a pillow on her head, she could have drifted back to sleep, but instead she’d allowed herself to snap fully awake in an instant and conjure up a convincing batch of sinister explanations.
She’d basically written the beginnings of a pretty grim horror story in her head. And now she’d have to pay the price. She’d probably lie awake for hours, running over it all in her mind.
She’d arrive at work looking and acting like a zombie, and that was dangerous because she knew she needed to keep her wits about her. If Emily was lurking around, she needed to remain logical and watchful, and that wasn’t easily done with sleep deprivation.
Maybe listening to some gentle music in her earphones might do the trick.
As she grabbed hold of the curtains to pull them closed again, a cry escaped her lips and her hands flew up to her mouth.
There was a figure at the bottom of the garden.
Square-shouldered. Just standing there, motionless.
She hadn’t imagined it after all.
Someone was watching her. Someone knew she lived here.
She swallowed down the taste of sick in her mouth and looked over her shoulder at the bedroom door. Should she cry out for Cora to come… to witness that what Holly was seeing was real?
Clutching her pyjama top closed at her neck, she looked back at the garden, trying to decide the best action to take.
But the figure had disappeared. There was no trace of anyone having been there at all.
Chapter Fifty-Six
Holly
At the shrill, unwelcome call of the alarm, Holly struggled to open her encrusted eyelids and pressed blindly at the snooze button until the dreadful noise finally stopped.
She tried to rub the sleep from her left eye but only succeeded in irritating her eyeball. She blinked a few times to dissipate the soreness but it still felt full of sand.
She’d lain awake for hours and then dropped into a restless light sleep in which she’d dreamed about what had happened to her back then. As could often happen with dreams, some things were mixed up, nonsensical, but unfortunately it had awakened the real, still vivid memory.
* * *
The day of the elaborately planned meal, Geraldine had continued to insist that Holly join her and her husband for dinner, despite Holly’s polite protests.
She’d gone back to her bedroom for a rare half an hour’s peace while Geraldine took a shower and got changed. Before she’d gone to her own room, her boss had told Holly what to wear and how to style her hair.
Sometimes Geraldine acted so weirdly, Holly had scowled to herself. What other woman would want a young girl hanging around like a spare part when she had the chance of a rare romantic night in with her husband? It didn’t make much sense.
Holly had showered quickly, washed her hair and wrapped herself in a soft, fleecy robe. She’d dried her hair and then pulled the dressing table stool over to the window, where she’d sat, her elbows on the windowsill, staring longingly out at the greenery beyond, luxuriating in the few minutes she had alone,
Over the last week, she’d spotted a new gardener once or twice. A guy around her own age with crew-cut hair and muscled arms. In fact, he looked rather like a younger Brendan.
‘What’s the new gardener’s name?’ she’d asked Geraldine one day, keeping her tone level. Her boss didn’t generally like Holly taking an interest in anything or anyone that didn’t directly benefit Geraldine herself.
‘What? I didn’t even know we had a new gardener.’ Geraldine had shrugged, uninterested. ‘Brendan sorts all that sort of thing out.’
Holly had spotted him again yesterday morning. He had such a nice face, kind and trustworthy, she’d thought. It would be so nice to have someone else to chat to here.