Doctor Who_ Deep Blue - Mark Morris [57]
Mike crouched down and shoved the corpse to one side. It rolled slowly over on to its back, quills rattling and rustling.
Charlotte scrambled out from beneath it, eyes bulging, her mouth a quivering moue of panic. She looked like an animal, terrified almost to the point of insensibility.
Mike grabbed her and held her tightly. ‘Everything’s all right now,’ he whispered over and over, and gradually he felt her shaking subside. Cautiously he relaxed his grip a little and was about to say, Let’s get out of here, when all at once she doubled over in pain as if someone had punched her in the stomach.
‘What’s wrong?’ Mike asked in astonishment.
Charlotte looked at him with frightened eyes, her face suddenly deathly pale, almost grey. ‘My baby,’ she whispered.
‘Help me please...’
Then she passed out in Mike’s arms.
It was nice to get a break from the kids, but ever since arriving here on Friday June Goldsmith had felt nervous.
There was a funny atmosphere in the town; everywhere she looked people seemed unaccountably aggressive. It was the way they stood, the way they stared at you - as if you’d done something to offend them. And it wasn’t just her imagination either - she had witnessed a fight between two men in a restaurant, had watched people (both male and female) squaring up to each other on the beach. There’d been some sort of incident on a fishing boat out in the bay as well; no details had been released, but the rumour was that everyone on board had died in mysterious circumstances. And last night there had apparently been a riot in a town-centre pub in which one man had been stabbed to death.
The kids - Freddie, who was nearly five, and Dana, two and a half - ran her ragged, but secretly June would be pleased when the weekend was over and she and Terry were in the car, heading back to Sheffield. Terry had done his best to reassure her, to convince her that whatever weird thing was going on in the town had nothing to do with them, but June could tell the tension was getting to him, too; he’d become more irritable as the weekend had progressed, and had developed a rash on his upper arms which he kept scratching, much to her own irritation.
They were walking hand in hand along the beach now. A last stroll along the sand, Terry had suggested, before heading back to the hotel to pack. June had wanted to pack straight after lunch and reach her mother’s in time to give the kids their tea and put them to bed, but she didn’t want to get Terry’s back up again this weekend so she had smiled and said, yes, that would be lovely.
Only it wasn’t lovely, was it? It was every bit the ordeal she had been expecting. She gripped Terry’s hand tightly, avoided eye contact with each person staring at her as she walked past, and concentrated on putting one foot firmly in front of the other.
Making a conscious effort to appear casual, June looked at Terry, who was walking closest to the water’s edge, gazing out to sea. They had met ten years ago when they were both twenty-six, in a disco in Sheffield. It had been her best friend Millicent’s hen night, and June had been very drunk. The following morning she had not been able to remember much about Terry, even though it had been the start of a relationship leading eventually to marriage, to their own house, to two beautiful children.
Ten years on, and looking at Terry now, June realised that she had never once regretted writing her phone number on a beer mat and thrusting it into his hand at the end of that riotous evening. Too many business lunches had thickened his girth and doubled his chin, and the thick dark hair that had once grown on his head now seemed to have chosen to sprout from his nose and ears instead, but none of that altered the fact that she loved him as much now - if not more
- as she ever had.
She squeezed his hand, and when he didn’t respond she murmured her pet name for him: ‘Terribubble.’
He looked round, face