Hanging Hill - Mo Hayder [119]
Watched …
She’d been sure, so sure, that night that no one could be watching her and Steve in the garden. So how could it be? How could it be? What had she overlooked?
She pulled the laptop towards her and opened Google. When Google Earth had first come out she and Millie used to spend hours looking at it – zooming in on friends’ houses, going into street view and taking virtual walks down streets they knew. Streets they didn’t know. Streets they might never visit. Now she zoomed it in on Peppercorn. The familiar double-pitched roof of the garage, the grey gables – three at back and front – the stone chimney and the thatch. The photo had been taken in midsummer and the trees were as fluffy and fat as dandelion clocks, casting short, puffy shadows on the lawn. She traced her finger across the screen in a huge circle around the cottage. There was nothing, no overlooking buildings. She zoomed the image out and still there was nothing. Just the familiar planting lines through the crops in the neighbouring fields.
She pushed the computer away and sat for a while, a finger on her lips, thinking. She got up, switched off the light and went to stand at the window. There was nothing out there. No movement or change. Only the distant twinkle of cars on the motorway and the faint grey of the moon behind the clouds. She took off her shoes and padded silently down the corridor, into Millie’s room. She was asleep in bed, her breath coming evenly in and out, so she went back to the hallway, put on her wellingtons and a duffel coat and found the big, high-powered torch that Steve had insisted on buying her from Maplins, because he said it was craziness her being out in the middle of nowhere when there were power cuts all the time. Steve. God, she wished he was here now.
Silently she let herself out of the back door. It was cool – very cool, almost cold after the unseasonable heat of the day. She stood for a moment looking around at the familiar surroundings, the great line of silver birch on the north perimeter, the patch of wood to the east, the top garden where a kiwi tree grew, its fruit hard and bitter. Her car was parked at the place she and Steve had stood six nights ago, shaking and sick with what they had done.
She locked the door behind her and went to the car. She stood with her back to it and slowly, slowly, scanned the horizon. Nothing. She moved around the car and did the same on the other side. There was nothing there. No building or place someone could have stood and watched. She crossed the lawn to the flowerbed where she’d made the bonfire yesterday. The earth was still grey and luminous with the ash and she could smell the faintest trace of carbonized wood in the air. She hefted up the huge torch, switched it on and aimed the beam into the trees. She’d never used the light before and it was so powerful she could make out details hundreds of yards away. If it found glass, a window-pane she’d overlooked, it would flash back at her. She swept the torch across the fields, going in a wide circle up the side of the cottage, the garage, bumping over the hedgerows. She could see individual leaves and branches in the forest, the trees bending and whispering. In the copse at the top of