Juliette’sphone went to voicemail. He had to leave a message. He needed to beclear and succinct. ‘Juliette, listen to me. I need you to leavethe house right now. I’m not joking. Someone’s made a threat. Meet me by the church. Phone me when you get this.’ He ended thecall, taking a corner far too quickly, almost skidding off the road. IfJuliette’s going to survive, you need to calm down! he admonished himself.
Morton slammedthrough the sleepy village of Wittersham. He was about half way home.
5:46. Sixminutes.
He dialledJuliette again but there was no signal. Damn it!
He tried toclear his mind, to concentrate fully on the road. Juliette’s lifedepended on it. Besides, it might yet be a hoax, something designed toscare him, to warn him off the Coldrick Case. His instinctstold him that the people he was up against really didn’t do hoaxes.
5:48. Four minutes.
Morton enteredthe village of Playden at sixty-eight miles per hour. He looked down athis phone and saw the 3G signal had miraculously appeared. He hit the phoneicon then selected Juliette’s mobile from the top of the list. Morton’seyes levelled with the road, just as a Jempson’s supermarket deliverylorry limped out of a side road. Morton slammed on the brakes and drew toa near-stop, just meters from the back of the lorry, the de-acceleration sendinghis iPhone to the floor.
‘Juliette, areyou there?’ Morton shouted into the footwell, as he zipped the Mini out intothe oncoming lane to check traffic. Nothing. He sped past the lorryon the descent into Rye. ‘Juliette, if you can hear me, get out of thehouse!’
5:50. Twominutes.
Morton reacheddown and fumbled in the footwell. He finally found the mobile and raisedit to his ear. The line was dead.
He redialledand pushed the Mini even harder.
5:51. Oneminute. He imagined her ‘quickly’ grabbing her handbag. Then herlaptop. Then a few clothes because she had no idea how long she wouldhave to stay away. If it was permanent, then she’d want to go aroundgathering up everything of sentimental value: her grandmother’s wedding dress;the old leather-bound photograph albums of people nobody in the family couldidentify; her external hard drive with thirteen months of their shared life inphotographs on it.
5:52. Time up.
Receivingreproaching and angry looks from pedestrians, Morton sped up Rye HighStreet. One wrong step by a passer-by and that would be it. Heturned the corner into Church Square too sharply, narrowly avoiding an elderlycouple about to step off the pavement.
He stepped onthe brakes outside the church entrance. No Juliette. Where wasshe? Morton leapt from the Mini and raced towards the house, a spasmof tachycardia thumping his body. He knew that if she was still insidethe house then it was too late. She wouldn’t survive. The clock wasnearing zero. Morton neared the front of the house.
‘Morton!’ avoice from behind him. Juliette’s voice. She was in the churchyard,sitting calmly on a bench, like a jaded tourist weary from a day’ssightseeing. No handbag. No laptop. No grandmother’s weddingdress. No photo albums or hard drives. Just her with an anxious,perplexed look on her face. He jogged over to her and sat down beside heron the bench, allowing himself to breathe deeply and properly.
‘Do you want totell me what’s going on?’ she asked.
Morton managedto say one word just as all of the windows of their house exploded outwards ina violent, projectile eruption. They both sat, dumbstruck, as angrytongues of fire licked from the spaces in the brickwork where windows had oncebeen.
Chapter Eleven
Thursday
It was a very strange experience forMorton to wake up in his old bedroom in his parents’ house. He looked upat the brown blemish above the bed that multiple coats of white emulsion hadfailed to conceal over the years after a pipe had burst in the loft during afamily holiday in the Lake District when he was fourteen. That stain wasthe only thing in the room that had existed before he left foruniversity. He thought about how happy they had been as a family on thatholiday. Just eight weeks later his mother was dead. She’d found alump in her breast but elected not to tell anyone until she realised that itwasn’t going to go away of its own volition. By then it was too late.
He wondered ifit was his mother’s death that had prompted his father to seemingly blurt outthat Morton was adopted. Would he now be living in blissful ignorance ifshe were still alive? Maybe if he’d never been told he would now bedutifully keeping a stoic vigil at his father’s bedside rather than studyingthe amorphous mark on the ceiling. He wanted to wake Juliette and pointout the stain, tell her the story about the holiday to Coniston, one of a merehandful of occasions when he had felt a genuine part of the Farrier family, notlike some surplus limb. But he didn’t wake her; he left her curledtightly in a ball beside him, like a new-born kitten. She needed thesleep after all that had happened yesterday.
They hadfinally climbed into bed at three o’clock in the morning after driving from thepolice station to his father’s house. As if watching the entire contentsof his house blasting out of the windows in flames hadn’t been bad enough,Morton had then been subjected to ‘an interview’ by the wonderful police duo ofWPC Alison Hawk and PC Glen Jones. For the second time in nine days thedynamic pair had made him feel like a suspect. It didn’t help thatJuliette was interviewed in a separate room. With typical Julietteforesight, the first thing she did after the explosion was to ‘get their storystraight.’ Only then did she call the fire brigade. The problemwas, getting his story straight made Morton feel all the more guilty. ‘Trouble seems to be following you, doesn’t it, Mr Farrier?’ Hawk had openedhis questioning with. ‘Any reason why someone would want to flatten yourhouse, Mr Farrier?’ Jones had asked, without giving him time to answer thefirst question. Morton shook his head and feigned shock that theexplosion was
