Dead Scared (26 page)

She caught my eye and gave me a smile. I was about to cross the room and join her when someone spoke to me.

‘Dried off, have you?’ asked a boy I thought I recognized. He looked a little older than the average student, his skin a little more papery, deeper lines around the eyes. He was about five foot seven and thin. Pinched around the face. Runty was a word I might have used, had I been feeling mean.

‘Is it raining out?’ I replied, although I knew exactly what he meant. He saw the look in my eye and almost turned away. I was being Lacey.

‘I take it you were on the green on Tuesday night,’ I said, grabbing a nearby bowl and offering it to him. He glanced down and a confused look took hold of his face. Well, I was offering him pot pourri. Curled wood-shavings and dried leaves, to be specific. Lacey would have put one in her mouth just to prove a point.
Laura
put them back down on the piano and looked sheepish.

‘I’m Laura,’ I said.

‘Will,’ he told me. ‘What are you reading?’

I bit back the temptation to say Dan Brown. ‘Psychology,’ I replied. ‘You?’

‘I’m doing part three of the mathematical tripos,’ he told me and I nodded, as though it meant something.

‘Who were those boys?’ I asked him. ‘The ones on the green the other night wearing masks?’ Scott Thornton I already knew about. Wouldn’t hurt to put names on the others.

He smirked and his eyes fell to my chest. ‘Why, are you planning revenge?’ he said.

‘Just want to know which shins I have to kick when I see them in daylight,’ I said, before I could stop myself. There was something about this guy that was really bringing out the Lacey in me.

‘To be honest I’ve not seen that lot before,’ he said. ‘A lot of freshers get dunked in the first few weeks but not usually by Lone Ranger lookalikes. So did you enjoy the experience of being chained up?’

God, this bloke was a twat. Fortunately, at that moment, people began appearing with loaded dinner plates.

‘I’m starving,’ I muttered. ‘Catch you later.’

Evi had been abandoned by her admirer. ‘Can I get you something to eat?’ I offered. She started to shake her head, then seemed to change her mind.

‘That would be great,’ she said.

Back in the kitchen I joined the small queue. The curry I could smell was a mildly spiced pheasant casserole served with roasted root vegetables. People were still tucking into the first course, though, which was some sort of pâté.

I cut Evi a slice of pâté, found some bread and a knife and carried it back through, meaning to ask her how long she’d known Nick Bell and, if I could do it discreetly, what she thought of him. It probably wouldn’t hurt to find out how good his IT skills were.

It wasn’t to be. Two men were talking to her now. She was beautiful and fragile, like a princess in a fairy tale. They just couldn’t help themselves. I reached around one of them to hand over the plate.

‘Thanks, Laura,’ she said. ‘Can we catch up later?’

I left her to her admirers and went back to the food. The pâté was great, then the dark-haired woman started serving the casserole. I made polite conversation about nothing with people near by and was just wondering whether second helpings were acceptable when my host reappeared.

‘How you doing?’ he asked me.

‘Bursting out of my jeans but otherwise fine,’ I told him. ‘Fabulous food.’

‘Liz and I have an arrangement,’ he said, nodding towards the dark-haired woman. She caught her name being mentioned and gave him the sort of look a son gets from a mother who is just a little too fond of him. ‘I kill it, she cooks it,’ he went on. ‘What we don’t eat she sells at the Third Tuesday Farmers’ Market.’

I was not in Kansas any more.

‘When you say kill it, you’re speaking figuratively, right?’ I said. ‘You mean you pop down to Waitrose, stalk the aisles in a predatory fashion and wrestle the last piece of frozen chicken from a single mum with toddler twins.’

‘You’re in the country now,’ said Liz, who’d crept closer. ‘Jim wouldn’t eat a piece of meat that’s seen the inside of a supermarket.’ She nodded towards a wiry, silver-haired man by the window and Lacey had an urge to ask if Jim were her husband or her brother, or both. Laura, though, gave her a tight-lipped smile. Without returning it, Liz picked up a stack of dirty plates and left the room.

‘So you’re a killer?’ I asked Nick, looking into his eyes, trying to see if there was anything not quite right in there. They looked steadily back, a rich golden brown. Beautiful eyes. With a light in them that I couldn’t interpret.

‘Got a problem with that?’ he asked.

‘Depends what you kill,’ I said. ‘And, I guess, on how you do it.’ Oh, I had to be careful. Lacey was standing on tiptoe, arms outstretched, desperate to be out of her box, and if this man had anything to hide I was probably putting him on maximum alert.

He was a cool customer, I had to admit. He gave me a very wide grin and took my empty plate from me. ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘I’ll show you my lethal weapons.’

*

Jessica Calloway opened her eyes to find she was no longer in her room at college, the scene of so many dreadful nightmares lately. She was in a forest. She got to her feet slowly. She could see stars shining down through impossibly tall trees. The ground was covered with a soft sprinkling of frost that gleamed silver in the starlight.

‘Jessica,’ called a voice from somewhere among the trees. A high-pitched, tinny voice that didn’t sound quite human. This was just another bad dream. She’d wake up soon, trembling and sweating and screaming, but awake and safe.

She was standing on a rough path that had been formed by the constant passage of footsteps. Every few yards or so a small light was half hidden amidst the undergrowth, each giving off a soft glow. The lights seemed to invite her on, deeper into the woods.

A movement above her head made her jump. She looked up to see a creature, a very large bat, swooping down from the trees towards her. Jessica started, then stared at it in astonishment. The bat was the palest shade of blue and it left behind a trail like a silver moonbeam. As Jessica watched, the bat disappeared and the trail shimmered away to nothing.

In the boot room, Nick was holding out an oilskin coat for me. I slipped my arms into it and we stepped outside to find that snow was falling. I felt a flurry of nerves and told myself to chill. We were surrounded by people. This was his home. Nothing was going to happen.

‘I didn’t bring a torch,’ he said. ‘Stay close.’

We followed a flagstone path that led away from the main house towards a row of outbuildings. Some of them looked like stables. As we drew closer the long, pale face of a horse appeared.

‘This is Shadowfax,’ Nick said, stopping to stroke the horse’s nose.

‘You really are a
Lord of the Rings
fan,’ I muttered, as he pulled keys from his jeans pocket and slid one of them into the door of the next building.

‘They’ll be asleep,’ he said. ‘Keep your voice low.’

Inside the shed was darkness, a strong smell of animal waste and an odd, expectant silence. Then a flapping just over my left shoulder. Light began to grow. I could see Nick’s hand in the corner of the room, adjusting a dimmer switch. I was being watched by ten pairs of soft, black eyes.

I’d stepped back against the door. Too quickly. I’d startled them. They jumped, squawked, flapped and grumbled.

‘Are you OK?’ asked Nick, frowning at me. ‘Sorry, should I have warned you?’

‘What are they?’ I asked, my eyes flicking from one creature to the next, taking in that they were all tethered to their perches. I still wasn’t moving from the door.

‘Peregrine falcons,’ Nick replied, approaching the nearest bird. The creature bent its head towards Nick’s outstretched hand, as though it would nuzzle against him. Or bite. Nick pulled out of reach before either could happen.

The birds differed slightly in size but were identical in colouring. The feathers on their backs and upper wings were the colour of rain-drenched slate. Those on their breasts were cream and cinnamon, dappled with black. ‘Fastest creatures on the planet,’ said Nick. ‘Haldir, this is Laura.’

The falcon looked at me. Its eyes were black, rimmed with yellow. I’d seen people with less intelligence in their eyes.

‘I thought that was the cheetah,’ I said. The falcon hadn’t taken its eyes off me.

‘Cheetah, shmeetah,’ said Nick, lifting his fingers towards the bird again, pulling them out of reach as the bird ducked its head. ‘The cheetah can run at seventy miles an hour for a couple of minutes. Peregrines have been recorded diving at two hundred miles per hour.’

At the far end of the shed, on a separate, raised perch, a bird that I was pretty certain was an owl jumped and spread its wings, as though clamouring for attention.

‘Well, I would be impressed, but isn’t that just the same as falling?’ I said. ‘If you’re high enough, don’t you just gather speed ad infinitum?’

Nick held out his arm and the falcon stepped on to it. ‘The
essential
difference between freefall and a controlled dive is that a peregrine can pull himself out of a dive in two seconds.’

I took a step closer to them both. ‘Will he let me touch him?’ I asked. The bird looked at me as if to say,
Try it, sweetheart
.

‘He’s a bit jumpy,’ said Nick. ‘Even I have to watch myself. Leah will, though.’ He put his arm back to the perch and the falcon graciously stepped down.

‘Put this on.’ Nick was holding out a long leather glove. I pulled it on over my right hand. It stretched halfway up my arm. Then Nick raised my arm until it was horizontal and led me further into the shed until we were both surrounded by intense black eyes. He lifted the owl from her perch and put her gently down on my outstretched arm. She was almost entirely white except that the feathers on her back and wings were the colour you might see if a tortoiseshell cat was turning slowly to gold.

‘She weighs nothing,’ I said, lifting my arm a fraction. She gave a little jump and shook her wing feathers.

‘She’s really just a pet,’ Nick replied. ‘A barn owl. Owls aren’t much good for hunting. I fly her sometimes, just for fun.’

‘And these birds hunt for you?’ I asked. ‘They actually catch food that you eat?’

‘More than I can eat. That’s why Liz comes in handy. You should come out with me one day.’

‘Do you fly them every day?’

‘In the season, yes.’

‘How do you find time to work?’ I asked.

‘I’m a GP,’ he said. ‘We work part time and get paid a fortune. Don’t you read the papers?’

Leah turned her head to look directly at me. There was something a bit eerie about the way her head could move independently of her body. Nick reached out and ran his hand lightly over her crown. As his hand left her, she seemed to stretch up towards him.

‘Never thought I’d hear one of you admit it,’ I said.

‘Oh, I’m always honest about the small things,’ he said. ‘That way the big lies tend to go unnoticed. You weren’t too sure when you came in, were you?’

‘Not really,’ I said. ‘A bird very like these attacked me yesterday.’

‘Where?’

‘A couple of miles from here. Not far out of town. I was out running. I thought I might lose my eyes at one point. It was a bit freaky.’

‘Describe it for me,’ he said.

As best I could, from memory, I described the bird that had flown at me the day before. I gave a rough idea of its wingspan, the colour of its feathers. ‘Bigger than these,’ I finished, looking carefully at the falcons. ‘And with different feathers underneath.’

‘Sounds like a buzzard,’ said Nick.

‘Are they known for rowdy behaviour?’

‘Well, funnily enough, it’s not unheard of,’ he replied. ‘Especially in the summer when they’ve got young in the nests. This time of year, though, it is unusual. I can only imagine it had been kept in captivity at some point and became used to humans providing food.’

The birds sensed the commotion before we heard it. One second they were relaxed, getting used to our presence, maybe even enjoying the unexpected company, the next there was a massive ruffling of feathers, excited jumping around and frantic squawking. Nick gave the door a worried glance before reaching out to take Leah from me. He put her back on her perch, spoke softly to the others and led me to the door.

‘You there, Nick?’ called a man’s voice. I stayed in the shed. I’d recognized that voice.

‘We’re here,’ called Nick. ‘What’s up?’

‘There’s a dog in with the yows down at Tydes End,’ said the voice I knew. ‘Causing fuckin’ mayhem, according to Sam.’

Nick sucked in a deep breath. ‘Shit,’ he said. ‘It’s too bloody dark. We’ll need lights.’

‘Got ’em. John’s taken the truck down. I said we’d follow.’

Nick turned to me. I had no choice but to step outside. Two men had approached. One was a tall dark-haired man in his late forties who looked as though he ate too much red meat. The other was smaller and slimmer, with silver hair and narrow-set eyes. He was the man called Jim whom Liz had pointed out earlier. He was also the farmer-bully who’d turned me out of the scary woods the previous day.