Mice

37

‘What are we going to do, Mum?’ I cried, but she was already on her feet, snatching up the gun and hurriedly secreting it in the fleece’s front pouch.

She turned on me fiercely, bringing her face close to mine and clutched my wrist hard in her right hand. ‘Leave everything to me, Shelley! Don’t do anything, don’t say anything! Let me do all the talking!’

The arrival of the blackmailer had transformed her. She was suddenly wired, suffused with a hard, determined energy. Every vestige of her jaded torpor was thrown off in an instant. She swept her hair impatiently out of her eyes and strode into the lounge. Slavishly I staggered to my feet and followed her.

The dining room and lounge were much darker than the kitchen, deprived as they were of sun until the afternoon. The fireplace, the piano, the armchairs and sofa, appeared dark, solid, funereal, and it took a few moments for my eyes to grow accustomed to the gloom. Mum, who was standing directly in front of the window, was just a silhouette. I felt the sudden need to be physically close to her as this unknown danger neared the house, and I walked towards her on legs as faltering and uncertain as a toddler’s.

The crunching of gravel, the dry whining of the brakes grew louder and louder until a car suddenly lunged into sight across the lounge window.

I stopped dead in my tracks, unable at first to comprehend what I was seeing, unable to believe the evidence of my own eyes — almost, almost convinced by the physical impossibility of this apparition that I wasn’t really awake at all, but wrestling in the coils of another monstrous nightmare.

The battered turquoise car, the car we’d got rid of weeks before in the car park of the Farmer’s Harvest — Paul Hannigan’s car — was coming slowly to a halt behind our Ford Escort.

The floor seemed to tilt suddenly beneath my feet and I had to put out a foot so as not to fall, like a gymnast who’s mistimed her landing. It didn’t make any sense! It wasn’t possible! We’d got rid of the car! Paul Hannigan was dead! How on earth had the car found its way back here to Honeysuckle Cottage? How on earth had it found its way back to us?

So it was true, after all. The dead don’t stay dead. Paul Hannigan had come back to take revenge on us for what we did to him.

Mum turned away from the window, her face grim, terrible, as white as bone. She started towards the front door, but I blocked her way and seized her hands.

‘What is it, Mum? What’s going on?’

She didn’t answer me. A car door clunked shut outside.

‘I don’t understand,’ I moaned. ‘We got rid of his car! We got rid of his car! What’s it doing back here?’

I could hear heavy footsteps making their way slowly across the gravel, coming closer to the front door.

‘Leave everything to me, Shelley.’

She freed herself from my grip and tried to go into the hall, but I held on to her, seizing hold of her fleece, gripping the belt of her jeans.

‘Don’t open the door, Mum!’ I pleaded. ‘Don’t let him in here!’

Mum pulled my hands roughly off her. ‘Don’t be stupid, Shelley!’ she shouted. ‘Don’t get hysterical! We have to let him in! This has to be brought to an end one way or another!’

There was a resounding thump at the front door that shook the entire frame and set the chains rattling.

I followed Mum down the hall and leaned against the balustrade for support. I watched her undo each of the locks and chains and slip the bolts — one at the bottom, one at the top — and as she yanked the front door open, I fully expected to be confronted by the vengeful, bloody ghost of Paul Hannigan.