The bikers had been irrelevant, though. Waiting in Matlock Bath, Rose’s first impressions had been the steepness of the hills above her, the denseness of the trees, the roofs of houses perched among them in apparently impossible places. Soon a sense of her vulnerability had become too strong, and she had to get off the street, to find somewhere she could feel safer.
So Rose had paid her money to enter the aquarium, and for a while she’d watched children feeding carp in the thermal pool. Even now she could remember feeling the shape of the item she carried in its plastic bag, and knowing she was making a fool of herself in the most dangerous way. But perhaps no one had noticed her nervousness, because people were too wrapped up in their own interests.
She thought about taking some more of her herbal tablets. But that would mean walking as far as the bathroom for another glass of water, and it wouldn’t make any difference anyway. Not now.
Her doctor knew about her anxiety and insomnia problems. She’d gone to him out of desperation, breaking her own rules and knowing it was a mistake. But he hadn’t been able to help her. For a start, he’d never understood why she wouldn’t continue taking the sleeping pills he gave her. Rose had felt quite sorry for him when she saw his perplexed frown, his fingers hovering over the keyboard to tap out an automatic prescription for Nitrazepam. In the end, she’d told him the pills gave her heartburn, and he’d accepted that as a reason.
Of course, he was a rural GP, and he hadn’t met anyone like Rose Shepherd before. He didn’t understand that she wasn’t just another neurotic, middle-aged woman. He couldn’t possibly have known that she was even more frightened of never waking up than of not being able to sleep.
Rose had always known she’d be killed. Well, it felt like always. She could barely remember a time before she’d known. She expected to meet her death because of the way she’d led her life. It was a question of when it would happen, and how. All she could hope for was that it would be sudden, and painless.
Two forty-five. The house was very quiet, wasn’t it? Even her bedside clock had a tick so faint that she had to listen hard to be sure it was working. There was an Edwardian longcase in the sitting room downstairs, but it would be another fifteen minutes before it was due to strike. Its chimes had counted away many of her nights.
In some ways, knowing her fate only made things worse. It meant that she lived every day in fear of a phone call, a knock on the door, the smashing of glass in the middle of the night. Every time she went out of the house, she expected not to return. Whenever she looked through the window, she was surprised not to see dark figures in the garden, watching her house. For a long time now, she’d considered it more difficult to live than to die.
She tried to imagine what the neighbours would say about her when they were asked. No doubt they’d all agree that Rose Shepherd was a very private person, who never called round to say ‘hello’ and didn’t mix much in the village. They knew she’d lived alone for the past ten months at Bain House in Foxlow, deep among the Derbyshire Dales. Some would put her age at nearly seventy; others would frown and say she could only be in her fifties, surely? But they hadn’t really got a close look at her. The postman might recall she had an accent that wasn’t local, but she’d never spoken more than a few words to him.
And that was pretty much all anyone would know of her. The details of her life were shrouded by trees and protected by electronic gates. And that was the way it had to be. It was what had kept her alive until now.
Rose smoothed out her sheets, turned over her pillows and went back to bed. Ten minutes later, she was hovering fearfully on the edge of consciousness when a black Mitsubishi Shogun with tinted windows drove into Foxlow and stopped outside her gate.
Leaving through the back door of a cottage on the corner of Pinfold Lane, Darren Turnbull saw the black car as it drew away from Bain House. He stepped back into the shadows, wishing that Stella wouldn’t insist on having that security light. He had to walk right through its glare to reach the lane by the church, and it didn’t do much for his anonymity. In this place, he felt sure that some nosy neighbour would see him and find out all about him before he got his car keys out of his pocket. Stella sometimes talked about him leaving her house like a thief in the night. With that bloody security light, he was more like an actor stepping out on to a stage. He prayed there was no audience tonight.
Darren watched the vehicle coming back towards him from the corner. He was slightly puzzled by its speed. There was no other traffic anywhere on the road at this time, and most drivers would whizz through a place like Foxlow in seconds. But maybe this was some old fogey who thought you had to obey speed limits, even when there was no one around.
He wasn’t as good at recognizing makes of car as some of his mates were, but Darren could see this was some kind of four-wheel-drive job. A big one, probably Japanese. He liked black cars – there were too many grey and silver models around these days, and they all looked the same. Tinted windows, too. That was cool. He could barely distinguish the outline of a driver as the car passed under a streetlamp near the phone box.
Finally, the car had gone, and Darren began to move again, keeping close to the wall of the cottage to avoid the light as he made his way to the back gate. His blue Astra was parked under the trees on Church Walk. No streetlamps here, not even any houses where he could be overlooked. There was just the old church somewhere in the darkness. If he looked up, and through the trees, he could see the top of its square tower against the sky, with its little stone ramparts like broken teeth.
Darren shuddered when he thought about the church and its graveyard. He’d been scared silly of these places when he was a kid, and even now he preferred to stay away from them. They made him think of bats and vampires, and dead people coming up out of their graves. He’d rather not even go to funerals, if he could avoid it. All those folks dressed in black with their long faces gave him the creeps. He always tried to make an excuse that he was too busy working, and then he’d go along for the sausage rolls afterwards, if he could get away with it.
Why Stella had decided to move here when she got divorced, he had no idea. It wouldn’t suit him at all – it was too far out in the sticks, miles from anywhere and full of old nosies who wanted to know every detail of your life. The city was a lot better. You could move around there without anyone knowing who you were or where you’d been. But at least he didn’t have to live in Foxlow himself.
He grinned to himself as he got into his Astra and reversed it in front of the lych gate. A visit to Stella was always worthwhile, he had to admit. As long as no one found out, of course – especially Fiona. That would be a disaster. She’d murder him for sure.
Darren shivered again as he drove out on to the street. But this time it was nothing to do with his superstitions. The village of Foxlow suddenly felt very cold.
A few minutes later, the Shogun had turned at the top of High Street and was being driven too fast down Butcher’s Hill. Its headlights were on full beam, sweeping across the hedgerows, reflecting off gateposts. Anyone coming in the opposite direction would be momentarily blinded, too dazzled to see the vehicle’s model or colour, let alone its driver. In a burst of sodium light, it would be gone as soon as it appeared.
When it reached the bottom of the hill, the Shogun slowed to a halt. It idled for a moment in the road, with its front windows half-open and its engine ticking over. Then the driver swung the wheel to the right. He rammed his foot on the accelerator, and the car surged off the road through an open gateway. Its headlights dipped and swayed as it bumped along the field boundary and followed an uncultivated strip of land close to the hedge. With its four-wheel drive engaged, the vehicle growled towards the top corner of the field, where it turned and coasted along the back gardens of the houses in Pinfold Lane.