Darkside

He stood, jerked forward as if to rush into the house, and then stopped and caught his breath. The killer could be there. He couldn’t just rush in. He needed to think. He couldn’t afford to screw this up. Lucy needed him. Now more than ever.

He couldn’t fall apart on her now.

The front door was closed but unlocked. His fault. His fault. Leave it open for people so Lucy wouldn’t have to keep getting up. This was the countryside; his home village. They’d felt so safe! Leaving the door unlocked had become a dangerous habit, and a bedtime oversight.

He sucked air into his burning lungs and pushed open the door.

Everything was the same.

He peered into the dark front room but the TV was off, although the fire still burned softly behind the guard.

No light in the kitchen. He crossed quietly to it. It was empty, and the washing machine hummed.

Up the dark stairs, pausing at every other step to listen for an intruder, missing the tread halfway up that creaked so badly.

The bookcase at the top of the stairs had been moved slightly, which Jonas discovered painfully with his left shoulder. A little gasp of surprise escaped him before he could apprehend it.

No answering sound.

The light was on under the bathroom door. Jonas went in.

The air was still slightly warm and heavy with moisture from his earlier shower.

Jonas’s gut lurched. There was blood on the tap.

There was blood.

On the tap.

He went closer to the basin. The smear of blood was unmistakable – as if someone had turned the tap on or off with a bloodstained hand. A little drip ran down the porcelain.

He frantically looked around with eyes attuned to this one thing, and found more. Two drops on the floor, a smear near the laundry basket, what looked like half a handprint on the outer edge of the basin – four slightly splayed strips where someone had rested their printless fingers.

Jonas turned sharply to go and caught a movement close to his head that made him flinch and put up a hand in self-defence.

He almost laughed. He’d jumped at his own fuzzy reflection in the cabinet mirror!

He stopped dead.

In the lingering condensation on the cold glass mirror was a message he had no doubt was meant for him.

‘Lucy!’ he cried in strangled horror, and ran to the bedroom, slapping on lights. She was not there. He ran into the box room. Empty. Jonas was no longer looking for, or afraid of, the killer. He only wanted to see his wife.

The back bedroom. His childhood room. She wasn’t there but, behind the door, the loft ladder had been dropped from the attic.

‘Lucy?’ he hissed. He was wary again now. He couldn’t see how Lu could have extended the ladder, let alone gone up it, without help.

Or without being forced.

Halfway up the ladder was a long smear of blood.

He bit his lip to keep himself quiet. He peered up into the black hole. There was no light in the attic; they used a camping lantern. A lantern that was no longer in its usual place on the bedside table.

Jonas gripped the ladder and slowly climbed into the dark.

* * *

From his secret place the killer watched with a dispassionate eye as Jonas Holly warily ascended the ladder. He knew what he would find up there, and knew that this would soon be over.

It was sad, but it was the way things had to be.

* * *

Reynolds and his team were lost.

They had run across the fields more slowly than Jonas because they did not have a wife in danger on the other side and because they were not as fit, as fast or as tall as him. The snow was a problem – both that which was deep underfoot and the fresh flakes that were whipped stingingly into their faces.

They followed Jonas’s tracks to where they appeared to run straight into a hedge.

‘Shit,’ said Reynolds.

They could see the lighted window in the cottage on the other side of the hedge, but there seemed to be no way to get to it.

‘There must be a gate,’ Reynolds said, and so they started to look for it, splitting into two groups, each going in opposite directions down the hedge-line.

Singh tried to find a place to burrow through, but learned a quick lesson in blackthorn and sheep wire.

They reconvened at the place where Jonas’s tracks were now filling with new snow, and Reynolds turned towards the lane and started a methodical circumnavigation of the field in an attempt to find a way out.

* * *

Lucy jumped at the rattle of the ladder. The yellow patch of light in the attic floor was darkened by a shadow and she got out of the armchair, groping for the knife.

She saw the silhouette of a man’s head rise into the attic space and held the blade out towards him in hands that shook uncontrollably.

‘Who’s there?’ she said in a tremulous voice.

‘It’s me!’ Jonas sounded hugely relieved. ‘Are you OK, Lu?’

‘Don’t come up here!’

His head and shoulders were already in the attic and she could see him cocking his head, trying to squint into the darkness to make her out.

‘Sweetheart, what’s wrong?’

He stepped up another rung so he was up to his waist in the attic.

‘Stay there!’