There was a figure about sixty yards to her rear.
Silhouetted against the distant glow of the streetlight, it was no more than a black, hunched outline, walking not running.
She had to look again, just to be sure.
Yes, it was only walking – though at faster-than-average speed.
Nan increased her own pace. Her breath came short and quick.
It occurred to her, somewhat belatedly, that it might be a police officer. There’d been a few of them around recently. But she couldn’t see any reason why this would be a copper. Coppers usually did one of two things: they watched from a place of concealment, or they came and knocked on your door.
They didn’t do this: follow you round at night, trying to frighten you.
She glanced over her shoulder again, walking even faster, wishing she had longer legs. Even without running, this guy might catch up before she reached the main road. However, he wasn’t significantly closer. She faced forward again and saw that she only had another fifty yards to go. Unless he started running at the last minute, she ought to make it – and he surely wasn’t going to do that, otherwise he’d already have done it. As she approached the end of the pathway, she looked back one more time. He was still forty yards off and still no more than a silhouette.
With a sense of relief, she emerged onto the pavement, into the yellow radiance of the streetlights. She made a sharp right and continued on her way.
Just ahead, on the other side of Orchard Park Road, there was another cut-through, ‘the Ginnel’ as they knew this one, which passed between the rear fences of houses before opening onto her estate. In daylight hours, it was an easy and safe shortcut home. But she certainly wasn’t chancing it now; she would stay on the main road.
There wasn’t a great deal of traffic about. But it didn’t matter. Nothing would happen to her while there were occasional cars flitting by. She felt certain of that. You heard some bad stories, of course. If she was honest, this wasn’t the best part of town to live in. But it was only at the godforsaken times of night when people Nan knew had been mugged.
Assuming that was what this was.
She’d almost given up on the idea that it could be one of those stupid kids from the Spar. If it was, he’d come an awful long way simply to laugh at her again.
She glanced back, now seeing no one on either side of the road. A break occurred in the intermittent traffic, so she crossed over. The entrance to the Ginnel was about ten or twenty yards behind her, but thirty yards beyond that, the mouth to the Strode stood in the shadow of several sycamore trees. The man could be waiting there, watching her, and she wouldn’t know it. It was difficult to see where else he could have gone. Even if he hadn’t been following her, shouldn’t he be out here on the main road somewhere? She put the question from her mind. There was no point puzzling over something when you didn’t have all the facts. He could live close by and have already gone indoors for all Nan knew.
She continued on, her breathing coming easier as she turned down a side street and entered the estate. She was almost home now. Circling a block of council maisonettes, she cut across an open green space, beyond which lay the subway – another poor choice at night, but there was no real option. After that, she’d be at Hellington Court, the horseshoe-shaped apartment house on whose first floor she lived. But then she caught movement in her peripheral vision, at the bottom end of the Ginnel in fact.
Nan hadn’t taken the shortcut. But he had.
Undoubtedly, it was the same figure, though now much closer; hands tucked into his front pockets, a hood pulled down over a lowered head as though he was walking through driving rain – or trying to keep his face concealed from CCTV cameras.
‘My God,’ she whimpered, her heart hammering her stick-thin ribs as she broke into a run.
It was a perilous course. The green was strewn with bricks and bottles, any one of which could turn her ankle, but she stumbled on blindly, risking another glance backward. He too was on the green, head still bowed. Not running, but walking much faster, as if he couldn’t allow her to get too far ahead.
‘Oh my … my God,’ Nan gibbered.
Fear applied wings to her heels. She sped on, tripping only once, but though she tottered and stumbled, she managed to right herself before falling.
Just ahead, the steps led down into the subway. She took them without hesitation.
Another quick glance showed that he was about twenty yards to her rear.
At the bottom of the steps, she dashed up the concrete passage. Of the thirty-odd lights installed along its damp ceiling, only a few worked, filling the tunnel with gloom.
With a series of echoing thumps, feet descended the steps behind her. Gasping with terror, Nan staggered on. The end of the passage was clearly visible thanks to the streetlights beyond it, but it was still some forty yards ahead. Before that stood the long-abandoned relic of a pram, nothing now but corroded framework and shreds of upholstery. She thought about grabbing it and flinging it behind her to create an obstacle. But a voice told her to act her age, because that only worked in films.
She looked back again. Incredibly, he was still walking, not running; even more incredibly, he was much closer. She could make out the details of his clothing: grey tracksuit pants; a black hoodie top with some faded insignia on the front.
With a shriek, she ran into the pram.
How ridiculous, she thought, as she seesawed over the top of it, landing hard on the wet, grimy floor. She’d dismissed the idea of using the object against her enemy because it probably wouldn’t have worked and then had fallen foul of it herself.
A fastener snapped open and the contents of her handbag skittered out, but Nan didn’t wait to regather them. She jumped to her feet, which was some achievement considering that she’d winded herself, grazed both her hands and hurt her left hip – the latter stung abominably where a piece of jagged metal had torn through her clothes and punctured the flesh – and lurched on, aware that he was less than ten yards behind her. When she got to the steps, she hammered up them, expecting to hear an explosion of footfalls as he finally started running.
But that didn’t happen.
Was it possible, was it even vaguely conceivable, that he was innocent, just an ordinary guy on his way home after a couple of pints in the pub?
No. How bloody ludicrous are you, woman!
An ordinary man would most likely have shouted after her when she fell over the pram, to enquire if she was OK.
She reached the top of the steps, throat raw with panting. The edifice of Hellington Court loomed on her right, and she scuttled towards it. The first entrance, the one directly facing her, was no longer used by residents; it led into a series of ground-floor utility rooms which were now seen as places to dump rubbish in. Nan took that route anyway, because just entering her own building felt as if it would offer some modicum of protection. As an occupant, she ought to know her way around in there better than he did.
But, of course, it wasn’t that easy.
In the first room, she tripped on a pile of rusty old bicycles, and when she fell on top of them, sharp prongs snagged and cut her again. In the next room, which she entered via an arched brick tunnel that was so dark she had to feel her way, she bounced between abandoned fridges and stacks of mouldy furniture. There was no point looking back to check on his progress now, because he could be right behind her and she wouldn’t even see him.
In the third room, Nan glimpsed what looked like a row of upright bars with light shining down behind them from above. The bars were accessible through another brick passage, but when she got there, they ran floor to ceiling and left to right, seemingly closing off this entire section of the building. The light spilled down an interior set of fire-escape stairs, but there was no way through to them.
From behind – in either the first