The Hunger Trace (17 page)

Louisa heard an undertone of curiosity in his voice. ‘You’re not how I expected, on the phone,’ she said.

‘How did you expect me to be? How am I meant to speak to someone who follows me around?’

‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

‘Well. You need to think on what you’ve been doing the past few . . . however long. Think on whether you’re behaving properly.’

‘Oh, says
you.
’

‘I know what
I’m
doing. I’m square with it. I go into it with my eyes wide open.’

‘That’s too much information,’ she said.

‘Aye. It probably is. According to the advice of my solicitor, I should have hung up by now.’

‘But you haven’t.’ Louisa said.

She heard the dial tone.

‘Bastard,’ she said. She counted to one hundred, aware of a growing sense of excitement. Then she dialled 141 and called again.

‘Yep.’

‘I was talking to you,’ she said.

‘You were talking
at
me. Drinking at me, too, I reckon. Look—’

‘Are you scared of me, or something?’ she said.

‘No. I’m not. But I can’t do this all night.’

‘Got appointments, have you?’

‘Aye, I have actually. Do you want one?’

‘Yes,’ she said, immediately.

Momentarily, he seemed taken aback. But not for long. ‘Do you want to go out? I can do Notts, Leeds or Sheffield if you don’t want to stay local.’

Louisa tried not to think too hard about what she was saying. ‘I don’t want to go out.’

‘You want me to call round? Where do you live?’

‘Drum Hill, in Detton.’

Silence. ‘Oh. You’re the neighbour,’ he said.

‘Yes.’

‘I can’t believe I didn’t figure it out.’

‘I’m very clever,’ she said.

‘What about—’

‘Leave your car at the bottom of the hill,’ Louisa said. ‘I’ll collect you. Can you do tomorrow?’

‘No. I’m busy all weekend. Are you free Monday?’

She didn’t need to check. ‘Yes. Seven-thirty onwards.’

‘Fine. It’s one-fifty an hour, four hundred for a stop-over. What’s your name?’

‘Louisa. You won’t be stopping over.’

‘You never know.’

She put the phone down as soon as it occurred to her to do so.

Maggie woke at 3 a.m., on hearing something smash downstairs. Still tense after the break-ins, and disturbed by the rebel spirit of the park staff, she put on a jumper and crept halfway down the stairs. From there she saw Christopher pissing up against the radiator in the hall. He whistled, stumbled slightly, and began walking upstairs.

‘Oh hi,’ he said, raising his hand briefly. ‘I’ve had an absolute, erm, skinful.’

Maggie caught the sugary chemical smell from a good distance away.

‘Are you okay?’ she said. ‘Did you see Louisa?’

‘No. She was, erm, hiding in her lair. I had to go on my own, but that’s okay. I’m a lone, erm, erm, wolf,’ he said. Then he howled, and laughed like David. He walked past her, stepped into the bathroom, flushed the toilet and went to his bedroom, supporting himself by leaning against the wall. Maggie could see the dust collecting on the sleeve of his jacket.

She went to her own bedroom and laughed for a moment with her head in her hands. But she found she could not sleep for worrying. What would happen to Christopher if he carried on like this? With Louisa retreating, Maggie resolved that she would have to deal with him alone. She turned on her bedside lamp, and opened her laptop. She had recalled the bedroom of a school-friend who had a poster of the actor Michael Praed, dressed in Robin Hood gear, kneeling before a giant antlered spirit. The TV series had first aired in the 1980s, and it was not so difficult to find online. Maggie promptly ordered the box set.

She fell asleep with the deercam open, the grey light beaming into her face until the battery ran down, leaving the room in darkness.

Adam spent Monday morning in the rain, sawing overhanging branches from the beeches that lined the tenth fairway. When he switched off the brushcutter, the sounds of the golf course remained muted outside his ear defenders. All he could hear was the fierce roar of his own blood.

As he bagged the branches, the thought of his evening appointment reared again. This woman, Louisa, was different. He recalled the feeling he had in his car, as it dawned on him that he was being followed: the double-take as he looked in his rear-view mirror and realised that the kidney-coloured van had been there yesterday, and the day before. The shock had been visceral, almost exhilarating.

He could smell the petrol fumes from the brushcutter now, and the soaked mulch of crushed nettles. These past few days, his senses had sharpened. He saw his surroundings as though for the first time. He marvelled at the crimson colour of the two-stroke fuel as he filled his machine for tomorrow, and at the bristling of the long grass which seemed blue beneath the cloudy sky. The rain came down on his ear defenders in tiny clicks. He removed them, and the world flooded in. He was done for the day.

Adam tried to tell himself that his Golf GTi did not look so out of place in the car park of the country club, though he was the only man covered in grass cuttings. He sat with the door open and brushed down his trousers, swapped his toe-capped boots for trainers. He smoked a cigarette.

Much of Adam’s business came by word-of-mouth but this Louisa, he suspected, had not arrived at his name by the usual route. It seemed strange that she wanted to meet at her house, but did not want the neighbour to know. He recalled the smell of her vehicle as he closed the door of his own. He thought of her staring ahead on the hill as he spoke to her through the window of her van. Her quick glance in his direction. The vulnerability of that glance. He felt a strange pressure in his skull.

The roads home were narrow, bordered by dry-stone walls. The tarmac was uneven, and rainwater had begun to settle in the dips. The day after he realised she was following him he had secretly observed her movements, pretending that he hadn’t noticed. She had waited outside the gym and followed him home. At one set of traffic lights, she had come to a stop only a few yards behind him, in the next lane. He had seen her face quite clearly – the strong jaw, and the light eyes like a husky.

He checked his mirrors now, and saw the fields and the golf course unravelling behind him. For a moment he thought he saw a flash of red, and squinted, but it was just a golf bag. When he looked back at the road he saw that the bend had come upon him too quickly and, just beyond it, a herd of sheep was crossing from one field to another. He locked the brakes, then tried to pump them, but aquaplaned off to the right through a big puddle, the road disappearing from view, replaced by the spinning green of the land, as the car took a wooden gate off its hinges and smacked against a stone wall. On impact, the passenger airbag inflated, but – inexplicably – not his own and he was thrown sideways, banging his head slightly against the window.

In the stillness, Adam took a huge breath, released the pressure on the pedals and looked at the powdery white balloon filling the other side of his car. He cast a glance in his mirrors, but there was nobody on the road behind. ‘Get it together, lad,’ he said to himself, rubbing his neck. He opened the door, stepped down into the mud and looked at the crumpled nose of his Golf. The wall had bent his left front wheel on its side.

The farmer approached him. ‘What the fuck are you doing?’

‘Not much now, pal,’ Adam said.

Several miles away, Louisa was out with Diamond, hunting to work off her nervous energy. A pheasant went into cover, and when they flushed it, the bird was so waterlogged it could hardly get into the air. Diamond put in two short stoops and stunned the thing with the second, as though disconnecting a wire. The pheasant made a splash when it hit the ground, its head amputated on contact, spraying water as it spun away from the body.

The sky was like grey shag-pile rubbed in places against the grain. Louisa finished early because she could not concentrate. She wished that the memory of the phone call she had made would stop bolting through her torso. The rain quickened as she drove home. Other falconers had been saying that it would be a bad year for rain, that you had better get out there now, because the end of the season would be a wash-out.

Adam’s confidence began to fade that evening on the train to Detton. Something about the dissolving day dragged at him. He tried to blame it on the dark weather and the sight of his car being towed away. Without meaning to, he recalled the feeling of power as he trapped the woman on the hill, and made her roll back down towards the main road.

The floor of the train was covered in a silty filth, imprinted with soles. The carriage was empty but for a couple of old boys going out to the factories for the night shift, and a man with his infant daughter.

Adam wondered if what he was feeling was nerves. He tried to remind himself of the guidelines he had created for his behaviour with clients. He never spoke of his family: his estranged mother back in Belton, the former industrial village where he had grown up. He did not smoke on a visit. Of course, he never mentioned his child. He did not speak about his work, or his other clients. That rule would be particularly relevant in this case, the woman living in such close proximity to another client. He never swore, but spoke in a firm, forthright manner; the women had called him, and should not have to ask twice.

That, perhaps, was the difference with Louisa. Most of the women he saw relied on him to seduce them; as soon as he had left their houses (sometimes even their bedrooms), he was dead to them. A source of shame. But this was a woman who had pursued him through the streets. He had seen her buy a drink from the take-away near his house. She had bought two more for the little boys playing football in his street. He recalled her bouncing on her haunches, passing the cans to the children.
I’m very clever
, she had told him on the phone. That seemed true enough.

The little girl in the train carriage began to scream for her mother. She was blonde, her face dark pink, so that she looked like a half-chewed saveloy. The screaming settled into a rhythm, with the stress on the second syllable. ‘Mu-
mee
, Mu-
mee
.’

The father turned to Adam. ‘I’m sorry about this,’ he said.

‘It’s no bother, youth,’ Adam said. ‘She’s saying what we’re all thinking.’

Usually he could swallow his emotions. It was just as important to his job as any sexual technique. When he felt particularly bad, he consoled himself with this: nobody could see into his mind. As the train slowed down, the windblown rainfall was like an animal clambering across the roof of the carriage. He tried to pull himself together. Maybe it’s just the time of day, he thought. The early evening was a dark, penitent time for him, heralding the changeover from one life to another. He patted the pockets of his jeans as the train stopped. He’d forgotten his phone.

Louisa bathed, looking down at the outcrops of her belly and breasts, the dismorphic limbs beneath the glass-green water. Bubbles quaked in her leg hairs. After all those private years, her body now felt like a diary left in a café. She flushed with the outrage of her vanity. She would shave for no man, she thought. And yet she felt the pull of shame.

Her mind went back to the entrance hall in the big house, the echo of Maggie’s coughing as she took off her clothes on the day they had rescued Diamond from the pond. Maggie had stepped from her jeans like a hawk trying to free herself from the leash. Louisa remembered the shimmer of the netted fabric of her underwear, the neat thin strip of pubic hair. All sorts of wonders. Louisa hoped Adam would not be expecting such things from
her.

She stood, and put her right foot on the edge of the bath. She soaped the lower part of her leg and then took hold of the disposable razor with which she usually shaved her armpits. She dragged the blade upwards from her ankle and immediately felt the blunt pluck of it. Dots of blood mixed with the green soap on her skin. ‘Sod it,’ she said. ‘I’m paying.’

She dropped the razor into the water where it twisted slowly. But when she had unplugged the bath, she took a new blade from the packet and started again.

She tidied, tucked the stock of her shotgun under the sofa and boiled coffee bags to cover the bird smell although she could no longer detect it herself. For the first time in many years, she applied make-up, and tried to keep thoughts of her own hypocrisy at bay. She was, after all, doing exactly what Maggie had done.

She waited, drinking Guinness and then Scotch. The drink bloated her, made her feel ridiculous, so that by 7 p.m. she no longer wanted him to come. It was a grotesque idea. Why had she entered into this so rashly? What if someone found out? What if she didn’t fancy him when she saw him up close? He could have grown a moustache. What if the whole thing was awful?

The phone rang at half past and she heard his young voice. ‘It’s Adam Gregory.’

Oh God. Here he was calling her, with his
surname.
‘Oh. Hello,’ she said.

He was surely calling to cancel and, after all her reservations, she was desperately disappointed by the prospect of spending the evening alone.