rubbing the goosebumps on her arms and trying to figure out what felt different. For a minute, or maybe three or four, she managed to distract herself from the unease in her belly by cataloguing the contents of the room: the lamps with their cracked-mirror finish, seemingly absorbing rather than reflecting the smoke-tinted magnolia of the walls; the television on its ill-fitting mahogany-look flatpack unit, its screen partly obscured by the stack of unwatched films; the cabinet full of Wade Whimsies, fastidiously collected in childhood but now little more than a twee reminder of an alien past. The ashtray that seemed to fill and empty itself of its own accord. The sofa that wouldn’t stay plumped up between her leaving for work and staggering home. The faint, sweet aroma that was sometimes there and sometimes not, and impossible to place when it was. The ticking of the clock. The ticking. The ticking. The ticking of the clock . . .
Annie stared at the second hand as it did what a second hand does, at the precise speed a second hand does it. And she was sure, she was sure she hadn’t replaced the battery in that clock. However much she’d drunk, however many minutes or hours ago she’d drunk it, she was sure that clock shouldn’t be running. And she was sure, without daring to drag her eyes to her watch, that as much as it shouldn’t have been showing the correct time, it very much was.
But there had to be an explanation, right? After all, she couldn’t remember everything she did after a drink or six. Most of the time she flat-out didn’t want to, but in this case she was willing to make an exception. So she stared at the clock and chewed her nail and racked her fuzzy brain and conceded that she had been under a lot of stress lately. That was why she’d been drinking so much, wasn’t it? The stress? It wasn’t a need, an addiction or even a habit. It was just stress. And stress can do all kinds of things to a person’s brain, her perception, her memory. And, even to Annie, that made a damn sight more sense than someone – than anyone – than that man – coming into her home and changing the battery in her clock. Didn’t it?
‘Twat,’ she said, out loud to herself, because however she may or may not try to convince herself otherwise, she knew that there was nobody else in the house, and nor had there been. Whatever odd thing she was feeling, it definitely wasn’t that. And the sound of her own voice echoing around the room calmed Annie, and momentarily she dropped her arms and tore her eyes from the second hand of the clock and thought about making a cup of tea. And so she went to the narrow little kitchen that led off the lounge, and she filled the kettle and switched it on. And then she saw the mug upside down on the draining board, the one with the chip in the rim that had cut her knuckle the last time she’d washed it. The one her mother used to use when she’d come to stay for the weekend. The one she couldn’t throw away. The one she’d put back in the cupboard and never, ever used again. Upside down, on the draining board, a dozen tiny spots of water tracing a drying path to the sink.
Annie took a breath and waited for her heart to start beating. And when it finally did, she slumped to the floor in the corner of the kitchen, and shuffled back into the crook of the wall, and drew her knees up to her chest, and listened to the kettle boil, and cried and cried and cried.
‘Michelin Agilis,’ Kevin said.
‘Who?’
‘Adj-i-lis. Ad-jeel-is.’
‘?’
‘It’s a van tyre. 215 mm wide. Standard fit on a Transit.’ Which was the answer I was both hoping for and dreading. And so it was that I drained my fifth coffee of the afternoon, and tried in vain to rub some of the pain from my temples, and left the finger-thin file open on my desk and walked quietly with Kevin over to the impound garage.
It was chilly inside, and harshly lit by fluorescent strips that were like daggers to my eyes, so I put my sunglasses on and tolerated the CSI jokes between Kevin and the pale but craggily handsome chap who signed us in, whose name I’m going to say was Paul, though I might be wrong.
Paul directed us to a bay more or less in the centre of the warehouse, so I ducked out of the line of mirth and set off at a purposeful stride, leaving Kevin halfway through a joke about me auditioning for a Hangover sequel. That he assumed I was still hungover at five in the afternoon, I mused to myself, was the reason he was still a constable.
The place was laid out with a certain kind of haphazard logic. The vehicles that came in under their own power – the uninsured and ill-gotten ones – were lined up on the far shore of a sea of jagged wrecks, crushed and burned and prised apart. In time, Fairey’s Mondeo would be slotted amongst them by an indifferent forklift driver, just another tombstone, all in a day’s work. But for now, there was only one thing in here that bothered me.
There was no dramatic reveal; the Transit was the largest thing in the warehouse, looming above and beyond its devastated neighbours, and I could see it as soon as I walked in. It was parked with its back to me, the tall white double doors ajar, like an invitation. I’d accepted once before, and noted with indifference the ratchet straps, the ceiling hooks, the hose-down floor liner, the white vinyl covering the walls. It had looked to me, back then, like any other van, albeit a sparkling clean one. Now, it looked like such a glaring cliché that I wondered if I hadn’t simply subconsciously dismissed it for being too ludicrously obvious.
Or maybe it was all about context. Here, in this place, under these lights, knowing what I knew now, every step I took towards it made me shiver a little bit harder.
It was certainly no longer sparkling. It was caked up to its door handles in dried-on mud, some of which had cracked and fallen away to form a dusty brown ring on the garage floor. The mirrors were missing, the front tyres flat, and the length of each side was streaked with dirt and crushed weeds and metal-deep scratches ingrained with splinters and bark. And at the front, it was no longer a van so much as it was the mould for a tree trunk.
It had hit just left of centre, the front fascia punched inwards in a ragged semi-circle to the base of the shattered windscreen, the door on that side creased and limp on its hinges, the buckled wheel jammed back into its arch. The bonnet was folded in half and pitched in the middle, the white paint cracked away, exposing glistening sharp edges like knife blades. I stared them down for a moment, trying to feel some – any – kind of emotion, but none stirred in me. It was just metal.
Inside was different. The driver’s door still worked; I unlatched it and it swung stiffly back on its hinges until it caught against the displaced front wing. And here the carnage continued, the dashboard shunted back on the passenger side, pinning the seat against the bulkhead.
It was the undamaged driver’s seat that held my stare, though – the seat from which Erica Shaw had fled the scene of the van’s demise in the woods and somehow spirited herself away from the marksmen, the dog handler, the damn helicopter for heaven’s sake – the seat in which That Man had presumably stalked and watched and waited to himself spirit away Kerry, and Samantha, and God only knew who else.
For a split second I thought that I could smell him in there, beneath the oil and the mud, but I knew it was just an illusion. He had no smell, to my mind. Just the smell of that house; of frying meat, and citrusy bleach, and the blood in my nostrils.
‘She was lucky.’
I jumped half out of my skin at Kevin’s words. I hadn’t heard him sneak up on me; in fact, I might even have forgotten he was there. ‘Stop fucking doing that,’ I snapped.
‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘Didn’t mean to,’ which I knew was a lie.
I let him squeeze into my personal space to get a look inside the van. I didn’t care about his elbow digging into my ribs; I was too preoccupied with the thought of That Man’s sweat soaked into the seat, my brain like a blacklight in one of those germ commercials, luminescing the oil from his fingers on the steering wheel, the gear lever, the stalks and the switches, the sun visor and the door handle, the parking brake and th—