Her bones heavy with dread, she crept to the far end of the room. Slumped in the space between the washer and the door was a body. It was difficult, for a moment, in the midst of her shock and the sheer amount of blood, to recognize that it wasn’t Nikki at all, but eventually her mind caught up with what her eyes were seeing; it was a man in his boxer shorts, those parts of his skin not covered in blood painfully white. His neck was gaping open. It was Harry. Harry the artist, his hands lying palms up on his thighs and his face turned up to the ceiling, looking a little like a martyr in a sixteenth-century painting.
“Fuck. Fuck.”
Heather ran back to the living room and snatched up the phone. There was no dial tone. Picking up the unit itself, she saw that the wires had been cut, ending a handspan before they reached the wall. She fumbled her phone out, but of course there was no signal. Outside, Nikki’s car was still missing from the drive way. She was stuck.
She sank down against the cottage wall. It was the middle of the night. Somewhere out there was a killer—someone who had murdered a man, perhaps while she had been sleeping in the same house, and taken her friend. She could not call the police. The nearest neighbor was a good hour’s walk away. You know where.
That was what the woman had said. She had said she knew where, that she had already told her.
“She called me a fool.” Heather thought of the Polaroid, with the beach in the background. The Folly, standing empty behind them—the Folly that was owned by the same environmental charity that partly owned this land. Something about this tickled at the back of her mind, but she dismissed it. There was no time. If she headed out through the woods, she would get there eventually. Right now, she was Nikki’s best hope of getting away alive. And more than that, she had the sense that this was exactly what she had been heading toward all along. Walking into these woods with murder on her mind—it would be a kind of coming home.
Heather went back into the cottage and retrieved her knife. She put on her coat, tucked the blade into an inner pocket, and ran out into the darkness.
CHAPTER43
HEATHER HEARD THE ocean long before she could see it; a huge, hissing roar, both loud and quiet, the canvas that all the other noises were painted on—the crunch of dry leaves underfoot, her own labored breathing, the wind in the trees.
The woods had been dark, yet she had not felt afraid. Instead, she’d had the strangest feeling of being watched—not by enemies, or by this monster she was currently chasing, but by a warm silent presence that urged her on. When she emerged from the tree line she stood still, letting her eyes adjust to the moonlight glinting off the vast stretch of sea, to the pale sand that seemed to contain its own luminescence. To the right was the Folly, a darker shape pointing up into the night sky. She could see no lights there, no glow from the narrow windows, but there was a smaller shape crouched at the base of it. The small, dilapidated house had been missing from the images she had seen of the beach, and she suspected people had been careful to crop it from their photographs. Squat and covered in cheap pebbledash, it quite ruined the bleak romance of the shoreline and the wind-blasted tower.
There was no one in sight, and no movement to be seen anywhere. Checking once more that the knife was still in her coat, Heather began to climb down the rocky bluff that separated the forest from the beach, until she stood on the plain of shingle that led down to the sand. Something about the angle had changed her view of the house, and she could now see a tiny slither of light emerging from under the blind of one window.
“Bastard.”
She curled one hand around the handle of the knife. Fear still felt like a very distant thing. Instead, the dry kindling feeling of rage that had nestled in her chest when she’d slammed the pen through her colleague’s hand was back. It didn’t matter what happened next, because she was right. This person she was chasing, the person she intended to hurt, was a monster, and she couldn’t be feeling guilty for wanting to hurt him. And perhaps she would find the woman who looked like Lillian and hurt her, too. The sensation was incredibly liberating.
As she drew closer to the Folly and the house, she got a better idea of the layout of the place. The Folly didn’t sit directly on the sand—she supposed that would have been a very unstable foundation—but on a spur of rock that had been laid, spiking out from the forested area toward the sea. There was a rough sort of road leading away from it, curling away into the dark somewhere out of sight, and the house crouched within its shadow, a strange sort of afterthought.
She had just stepped onto the rock when the thin line of light under the window blind vanished. Stopping where she was, Heather waited, expecting to see another light come on elsewhere in the house, but several long minutes passed and the darkness remained complete. She listened, too, desperate to get some sense of where this person was, or where Nikki was, but no voices were carried to her on the wind, no slamming doors or footsteps. Everything was eerily quiet. With the knife now held at her hip, Heather circled the place until she found a back door, a short flight of steps leading up to it. In the dark, everything was colorless.
Wait. Wait, wait, wait. She screwed her eyes up tight, trying to concentrate on the small voice of reason. Try
