Table Of ContentPublished by Accent Press Ltd – 2007
ISBN 1905170394 / 9781905170395
Copyright © Lynne Barrett-Lee 2007
The right of Lynne Barrett-Lee to be identified as the
author of this work has been asserted by her in
accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
The story contained within this book is a work of fiction.
Names and characters are the product of the author’s
imagination and any resemblance to actual persons,
living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be
reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted
in any form or by any means, electronic, electrostatic, magnetic
tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording
or otherwise, without the written permission of the
publishers: Accent Press Ltd, The Old School, Upper High St,
Bedlinog, Mid Glamorgan, CF46 6SA
Printed and bound in the UK
Cover Design by Anna Torborg
The publisher acknowledges the financial support
of the Welsh Books Council
This one is for my beloved children
Luke, Joe and Georgia
xxxxxxx
Acknowledgements
Accepted wisdom has it that writers should always write about what
they know.
Rubbish. If I did that, all I’d have to show for my endeavours would
be several lengthy tomes of unbelievably dull twitterings, plus the
odd exposé, for which I’d probably get sued. The trick is to cheat; to
look upon your friends as a research archive, and to write about
what they know instead.
My first thanks, therefore, go to Rachel Hurford, who, as well as
being a dear friend, is also an optometrist, which handily provided
Sally with a sensible job. To Kiran Kapur, Anne Catchpole and
Adrian Magson, who, unlike me, have all done that ‘Outward
bound’ thing and who sent all the emails that informed chapter
seven. Thanks, mates. To the 8th Penge and Beckenham North
Venture Scout unit, which may well be no more, but lives on in my
heart. To Della Galton, who first posted the Sherlock Holmes email
– okay, so almost everyone in the world has now heard it, but it
stays because – well, because it made Sally laugh. To the lovely folk
at both Labour Party Headquarters and Charing Cross Police Station
– I’m so, so sorry I didn’t write down your names. To Merlin,
wherever you are these days – woof woof! To Philips, for inventing
the Planisphere – so clever. And finally, (though he doesn’t, as yet,
even know it) to Patrick Moore, who wrote Philip’s ‘Night Sky’ and
so gave authority to my ill-informed passion for looking at the stars
and going ‘Wow! Look at that!’ How spooky that it should have a
photo of the Pleiades on the cover. Must have been written in the
stars…
Prologue
It is five twenty-seven in the morning. And, some thirty-nine
thousand feet over the north Atlantic, an aeroplane is heading
swiftly and silently towards Gatwick airport. Aboard it, and crick-
necked beneath his itchy red blanket, Nick Brown has spent much of
what passes for night on this flight path trying, and failing, to sleep.
His legs, which are long, are rammed hard against the seat-back in
front of him, and his head, which feels woolly, against the cream
cabin wall. He should be in business class. He should be in an aisle
seat. But life, as it seems to a lot for Nick lately, has conspired to
relieve him of any expectations of comfort: the plane he should have
boarded is grounded at LAX, and this one, on which he has just
scraped a passage, could only offer him row twenty-seven, seat A.
Thus he has shared ten or so tortuous hours with a small boy called
Luke, and his sister, Georgina. And sporadically, their mother, plus
ripe smelling baby, who are seated, when seated, in row twenty-six.
The plane heaves on eastwards. The captain announces their
imminent descent. Resigned now, Nick abandons his blanket, but
the sleep that’s eluded him since tea-time on Thursday now engulfs
him with a sudden and irresistible force. He is a chronic insomniac,
and this is its pattern. His eyelids are heavy now. Closing despite
him. Ensuring that, come the long wait in Arrivals, he will move as
in treacle and feel like the pits. The small child beside him has a
foot in his groin and one sticky hand on his new silk tie. He’d like to
remove it but doesn’t want to wake him. He looks so very like his
own son did at that age.
In twenty or so minutes the plane will touch down. He’s not
only not slept, he has not eaten either. As the plane begins to make
its final approach, his stomach lurches unpleasantly. He feels for his
shoes with cold, sluggish feet and, because they have told him to,
squirms very gently, retrieves the warm buckle from under him, and
does up his belt. He rubs his eyes and looks down at the quilt of
landscape beneath him, bisected by a seaside rock ribbon of traffic,
and punctuated, here and there, with small huddles of trees. Far
beneath him grow clumps of roofscape and garden. The odd
swimming pool, stable, and pale, gravelled drive. The faux-rural
1
backdrop of this part of Sussex. Scenery all at once familiar yet
strange. They sink lower still. The rock splinters. Becomes car
lights. The gardens get flowerbeds. The windows get curtains. He
stretches his arms, scans the houses below him. It is five fifty-two.
Dawn is coaxing the sun up. He sees, very clearly, a light snapping
off.
As the plane swoops silently over the north Sussex countryside,
carrying Nick Brown to his tryst with a crisp cotton pillowslip in the
North Terminal Meridien Hotel, Sally Matthews, chilly in a T-shirt
and knickers, switches off the light and pads back to her bed. She
has lain wide-eyed on the single bed in the spare room since three
thirty, but must return to bear witness to the alarm clock, which will
buzz its sharp greeting in seventy-eight minutes. By which time, she
knows, she will be deeply asleep.
‘Nnnnggch,’ says her husband, Jonathan, exhaling. He has
spiralled the duvet, swiss-roll style, around him.
Sally eases the remaining flap over her goose-pimpled legs.
There is no duvet inside this bit of cover because the two are
incompatible, the latter a generous John Lewis cover, the former a
rather scant Debenham’s quilt. The resultant deficit – a good
twelve-inch strip along one side (always her side) – barely covers
one leg. Were she to move across the bed and snuggle her cold body
up to that of her husband, she could have filled duvet cover aplenty.
But she can’t do that or she will wake him. And if she wakes him he
will be in a mood. And if he gets in a mood he will stay in a mood.
So she stays where she is at the edge of the mattress, breathes lightly
and quietly and tries not to fidget.
She lies there and looks out. Their bedroom, which is cool,
spacious and full of heavy old pine furniture, has a large picture
window. It doesn’t afford quite the view of the skylight in the spare
room, but, from her place on the left of the marital bed, Sally can
still see a big chunk of the night sky. It’s cloudless and black and
peppered with stars. Stars and planets and, presumably, comets.
There’s movement now, up there. Tiny, but actual. She fancies, as
she tends to most nights, that she’ll see one. A shooting star,
shooting…to wherever stars shoot. But, no. Not tonight. There’s a
red light. An aircraft. Making arrow-straight progress across her
window pane vista. A jumbo, she guesses. On its way into Gatwick.
It winks at her now as it passes.
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Chapter 1
It was magnificently starry, that Friday-night sky. A sky so densely
studded with twinkles and sparkles and heavenly bodies that even
the most dour and unimaginative people might find themselves
pausing to draw breath in wonder. To marvel at the miracle of the
universe before them. To muse on the breathtaking brilliance of
space.
And there was me, Sally Matthews, forty-one, very sleepy,
slightly damp, somewhat peevish, forging my weary way along the
B-roads of the Sussex countryside, to retrieve my darling daughter
from her friend’s house. Stargazer that I was, heavenly body I was
not. Pausing to wonder I most definitely was not.
I remember I was very tired. Tired and rather irritable, to be
honest, as I had been rudely interrupted from one of those
aromatherapy candle-lit baths magazines are always banging on
about, and was not very pleased to be trolling across the county with
still-soggy hair, a whiff of burned wax about me, and the remnants
of a passion-fruit exfoliating face pack still clinging like bogies to
all the chinks in my face.
I had taken Jonathan’s car. Not because it made any difference,
but partly because mine didn’t have a lot of petrol in it, and mainly
– OK, wholly because he didn’t like me to drive it. It was an act of
irritable defiance, because the two of us had just had a row. The sort
of row you have when your teenage daughter phones you at God
knows what hour in the morning and entreats you, in that special
way daughters have, to please please please please please please
pleeeease come and fetch her. Like now. You know the kind of
thing.
‘What the hell is she doing calling us at this hour?’ he’d said.
‘She wants me to go and pick her up.’
‘What? Now? At this hour?’
‘At this hour. She’s had some sort of row with Amanda and
wants to come home.’
‘Well, she can’t. I’m not having you traipsing off out at this
hour.’
‘So you go, then.’
3
‘Me go? I’ve had the best part of a bottle of claret!’
‘Well one of us has to. I told her I would.’
‘Well you can just go and untell her. She’s nearly seventeen,
for God’s sake. She can stay there and lump it.’
‘But I can’t just leave her. She sounded upset.’
‘Well tough, frankly. Sal, she’ll get over it.’
‘But I can’t –’
‘Yes you can. She runs rings round you. Why on earth did you
say yes? She’s got to learn that she can’t expect –’
‘I know I know I know! But she sounded really upset, and I
don’t want to think of her –’
‘And doesn’t she know it! Don’t you realise –’
‘Don’t you care? Jonathan, don’t you care that –’
‘Oh, for God’s sake, don’t start! Go, then, Sal. Go. Do what
you like!’
That kind of thing.
So I had thrown on pyjamas and a pair of battered Reeboks,
and, pausing only to snatch up Kate’s dreadful black cardigan, had
stomped off into the night feeling martyred and angry while
Jonathan stayed put and huffed in his chair.
The road was big, wide, empty, dark. All the sorts of things
country roads generally are at night. It was flanked by tall trees,
almost all in full leaf now, a dense black filigree against deep inky
blue. I passed the garden centre, the garage that sells those dreadful
flapjacks, and Mr Chip’s olde worlde rocking-horse factory, before
pulling off on to the long sinew of road that connected the real
world to the chocolate-box village where Amanda’s family lived.
It’s a road I’ve travelled many times over the years. Kate and
Amanda having been friends all their lives. Hmm. Yeah, right. Until
now.
I took the dog, of course. If I had to go galumphing about the
countryside in the small hours on my own, it made sense to have
something more ferocious on board than just the smell of Jonathan’s
sweaty cricket kit.
So there I was, muttering the sort of things mothers mutter
when they know they’ve been slaves to their kids because they’re
slaves to their hormones, and fastening vaguely mutinous thoughts
on my recalcitrant husband. And I didn’t see him coming. Didn’t
see it coming. And if that sounds ambiguous and slightly portentous
that’s because, looking back, it’s just how it was.
4
I had rounded a bend in the road, the trees giving way to an
undulating hedgerow, and the tarmac now climbing, it seemed, right
to the horizon and beyond. So much so, in fact, that at first I
mistook the light on the brow of the hill for a star. I blinked at it.
No, no. Not light. Lights. Another car, then. I flipped my headlights
to dipped. The lights burned brighter, blotting the world out.
Squinting now, I eased off my speed a little and waited for the other
car’s full beam to be switched off as well. But it wasn’t. Didn’t
seem to be, at any rate. The illumination grew stronger. Whiter. The
damp hair at my neck began to prickle. What on earth was the driver
doing? I slowed even more. I could not see the road now – could not
see a thing bar the twin orbs that were rapidly approaching, their
haloes growing brighter and increasingly blinding, second by
shimmering second.
It was then that it struck me, with terrifying clarity: I was going
to die. I was going to die at any moment. I was going to die,
moreover, in a pair of tartan pyjamas and a grubby black cardigan.
For whatever was attached to the headlights in front of me was
actually driving on my side of the road.
I don’t recall quite what it was that I did, only that self-
preservation must have kicked in and wrestled some sort of sense
from the flapping of my arms. At any rate, a squeal, a swerve and a
couple of bumps later, and I’d come to a shuddering ABS-enhanced
stop, amid the wide swathe of lush and exuberant foliage that
formed the verge that ran down the side of the road. The lights
ahead vanished, having slewed off themselves now, and the
carriageway appeared again, way over to my right.
For some seconds I stared at it, fish-eyed and speechless, then
swivelled my head around and braced for the sound of an impact.
The other car, for car it was, careered wildly but briefly, then came
to an untidy stop at the edge of the other carriageway. Its tail lights
burned a ruby glow on to my retinas. Merlin, displaced but
apparently unmoved by his near-death experience, had hoisted a leg
up and was scratching his ear.
‘Jesus!’ I squeaked to him. ‘Ohmygod! Crikey! Jesus!’ and lots
of other stuff along the same lines. The car had stalled and I
fumbled for the ignition. The headlamps both flickered as the engine
roared briefly but, try as I might, I couldn’t make it go. I could hear
the wheels whizzing but the car wouldn’t go. My hands and my legs
5
had begun to shake uncontrollably. I looked back down the hill
again. Nothing. No movement. No sound.
What should I do? I craned my neck to see. No impact. No
visual evidence of a crash. Should I do something? Phone someone?
Get out and go see? In my pyjamas? On my own? No, no. Phone
someone. That was best. Call the police. God alone knew what sort
of maniac was out there. A drunk driver most probably. That was it.
So this was best. Don’t get out. Getting out very stupid. Call the
police. Stay in the car. Lock the car. Wait till they come. I
unbuckled my seat-belt with trembling hands and groped in the
passenger footwell for my bag. Call the police. That would be best. I
rummaged in my bag in the darkness for my mobile, but my fingers
were all wibbly and wobbly and useless. Where was the damn
thing? I hauled my bag on to my lap. I was sure it was in there. I had
definitely had it in there earlier. I looked behind me again. Still
nothing. No movement. No sound. I threw the bag on the seat in
disgust. And no phone. What now, then? Oh, God. What next? What
next with no phone and a car that wouldn’t go? And then a new
thought popped up to fuel my rising panic further. Suppose the other
driver was injured or something? Dead, even? Yikes. Suppose it
wasn’t a maniac at all? Suppose it was an old person? Suppose it
was a septuagenarian in a flat cap? Who’d had a heart attack? Or an
epileptic fit? Or a stroke? Oh, God.
I could see the headline: ‘Heartless Woman Leaves Injured
Pensioner For Dead’. ‘Merlin,’ I said, reluctant but decided. ‘We’ve
got to get out. We’ve got to go and see if they’re all right. Act
fierce. Just in case. Fierce, OK? Dangerous.’
Merlin, ears pricked enquiringly, cocked his head to one side. I
opened the car door. ‘Go grrr. OK? Got it? “Grrrr”. Nice and loud.
Show your teeth.’
The night air was chilly and damp against my bare shins.
Merlin, clearly pleased with the development of this unscheduled
adventure, bounced out and sniffed the ground appreciatively. How
I envied him his easy confidence. His complete lack of worry. So it
was night time. What of it? Same as day time only darker. Oh, to be
a stupid dog. I’d driven this road a thousand times before but for me
it seemed suddenly unrecognisable. More bleak. More Jurassic.
More remote. More dark.
More scary. I could see another headline: ‘Defenceless Woman
In Questionable Nightwear Raped and Pillaged and Left to Die in
6
