Back in their chalet she took a shower, washing away the make-up and the hairspray, but not the image of poor Julie, filled up with lard, which repeatedly flared across her mind’s eye like the persistent memory of a camera flash. She was really tempted to talk to Francis about it, and she knew she could trust him to keep it to himself, but honestly, why wreck his sleep too?
When she emerged, wrapped in her robe, hair twisted into a towel, Francis had gone to bed, leaving her latest packet of plasticine on the table with a note: ‘Make a cat.’ He knew she liked a challenge. She smiled and sank into a chair, reaching for the packet. Twenty minutes later she had made one cat and three kittens, snuggled up against their mother’s belly. The adrenaline pounding through her veins for the past three hours had finally settled down and sleep began to beckon.
She hit her pillow with damp hair, uncaring. What a night. She’d had some shockers, recently, but this was uniquely disturbing. She couldn’t make sense of what had happened to Julie. Who would do that to her? And why? She had never seen anything like it.
Stop thinking about it now. Sleep.
Who would go to so much trouble to create that horrifying scene? They must have poured the fat in as liquid, knowing it would set hard and white.
Think about something ELSE.
Lucas Henry flashed through her mind right away.
No… not HIM.
She was conjuring him up way too often. Usually in her sleep, though. Often along with Mabel and Zoe, both in varying degrees of life, death and decay. Tonight she’d outdone herself, though, seeing that vision of him in the bar.
Wait.
She sat up abruptly. The look on the Lucas-alike’s face… it had been… shock. The jaw was dropped, just like hers, as if he was amazed to see her. If she had been merely conjuring him up — or mistaking someone else for him — why would that face have been mirroring her own? Unless…
‘Shit! No!’
She flung herself out of bed and threw on some running joggers, her sports bra and a sweatshirt. She rummaged into her holdall and found her Nikes, slipping them onto her bare feet. Letting herself carefully out of the chalet, she locked up as quietly as she could, keen to leave her brother undisturbed, and tucked the single key and its wooden fob into the sports bra. Then, with her slim leather wallet in one hand, she broke into a run along the grassy path towards the main pavilion and the car park beyond.
She reached the car park in four or five minutes. Dawn was lightening the eastern sky and she could hear the sea hissing and sighing in the distance. A security guard was in the little hut by the car park. She ran up to it and rapped on the glass window. He looked up; an older guy than the one who’d ushered them in yesterday — grey-haired and careworn.
He slid the glass across. ‘Can I help you?’
‘I’m DI Kate Sparrow,’ she said, flashing her ID. ‘Looking into the investigation that’s ongoing here tonight.’ She didn’t mention that she was, to all intents and purposes, just a punter here. ‘Just a quick question — can you check the vehicle log for me? I’m looking for a motorbike that may have come in yesterday evening.’
He pulled a foolscap book open and ran a thick finger down its handwritten entries. ‘Um… yes… a biker came in last night. Bought a day pass for the evening’s entertainment.’
‘The number plate?’ queried Kate, a rush of goosebumps already hitting her shoulders.
He reeled it off. Every letter and every number sliding into place with a precise, chilling clunk of validation.
Kate drew a long breath and let it out slowly, resting one palm on the side of the hut. She had memorised that registration months ago, and not forgotten it. She knew she wasn’t mistaken. Unless he’d recently sold his Triumph Bonneville to a new owner, who had randomly decided to drop by a holiday village in Suffolk yesterday evening, Lucas Henry had not been a mirage in the bar last night.
Lucas Henry had been standing there, watching her, in the flesh.
18
‘Are you awake?’
Ellie turned over and stared across the narrow strip of carpet to the single bed opposite, where Nettie was gnawing on her lip, the duvet pulled tight around her neck.
‘Yeah. It’s hard to sleep, isn’t it?’ Ellie prodded her bedside clock. It was just after three-thirty and they would need to be getting up in four hours — five, maybe, at a push.
‘I can’t believe it,’ said Nettie. ‘Two people dead within a week. What the hell is going on around here?’
Ellie sighed and sat up. Outside, the eastern sky was growing paler; dawn wasn’t far away. She felt dog-tired but her brain wouldn’t shut down. Not long after midnight, she and the other Blues had been rounded up by a strained-looking Gary and informed that their help was needed to guide eight families out of their chalets and along to the deluxe lodges at the other end of the site. Ellie had already tumbled into bed and fallen asleep, and had to be woken by Nettie, but most of the others were still up and dressed. She had flung on her tracksuit in a daze to join them.
At first, Gary had said only that there had been an ‘incident’ in chalet 28 but, faced with eleven agog and slightly pissed Bluecoats and their incessant questioning, he had confessed that someone was dead. That was all he knew, he said. He didn’t know if foul play was involved, but the police were already on site, and after speaking to all the families in nearby chalets they wanted everyone moved out, away from the cordoned-off area.
It was a bloody nightmare. Getting those families out quietly and discreetly was about as easy as herding cattle through a glassware factory. Still, they had done it, within
