The Devil's Feather - Minette Walters [13]
I knew what was happening. I knew it wouldn’t last and that all I had to do was stop the rapid, shallow breathing, but this time the pains in my chest were so bad that I wondered if I was having a heart attack. I groped for my stash of paper bags in the door pocket and clamped one over my nose and mouth, trying to ease the symptoms. I’ve no idea how long it took. Time didn’t exist. But when I opened my eyes, the girl and her dogs had gone.
Extracts from notes, filed as “CB16–19/05/04”
…I used to be afraid of the dark, but now I sit for hours with the lights off. It felt as if red-hot pokers were burning through my lids when Dan ripped the duct tape away. He was upset when I refused to open my eyes and look at him but I didn’t know who it was. He could have been anyone. The voice didn’t sound like Dan’s. He didn’t smell like Dan either.
…I do find it frightening that I can’t bear anyone to come too close. My invadable space has grown to house-size proportions. Is that how the mind works? I shut myself in little spaces but need a palace around them to give me room to breathe. I can manage to sit in a room with my parents, but no one else. I freak if I’m in the street and a passer-by brushes against me. I don’t go out now unless I’m in my car.
…I told my parents I was going for counselling, and it’s odd how much better it’s made them feel. I must be OK if I’m in the hands of “experts.” Despite my mother’s endless questions, I think she’s secretly relieved that I’ve rejected Reuters’ help. The quid pro quo for official support would have been an obligation to deliver my “story.” But she and Dad are private people. It was hard for them when I was all over the newspapers and the phone never stopped ringing…
…Instead of counselling, I go to a church in Hampstead for a couple of hours every other day. It’s cool and quiet and has its own car park. No one troubles me much. They seem to feel it’s bad form to question why anyone would want to sit there. Perhaps they think I’m talking to God…
4
IN ORDINARY CIRCUMSTANCES I wouldn’t have met Jess Derbyshire. She was so reclusive that only a handful of people in Winterbourne Barton had seen inside her house; and the rest were happy to spread the rumour that the local policeman went in once a month to check she was still alive. He didn’t, of course. He was as scared of her dogs as everyone else, and he took the view that the postman would notice if she wasn’t collecting her mail from the American-style box at her gate. She owned and managed Barton Farm, which lay to the south-west of the village, and her house was even more detached from the community than mine.
I discovered very quickly that Jess was both the most invisible resident of Winterbourne Valley, and the most talked-about. The first thing any newcomer learnt was that her immediate family had been killed in a car crash in 1992. She’d had a younger brother and sister, and two thoroughly nice parents, until a drunk in a Range-Rover ploughed into her father’s ancient Peugeot at seventy miles an hour on the Dorchester bypass. The second, that she was twenty when it happened, making her older than she looked; and the third, that she’d turned her family home into a shrine to the dead.
There’s no question she had an uncongenial personality, something she was happy to foster with her pack of thirty-inch high, hundred-and-eighty-pound mastiffs. It showed itself most obviously in her unfriendly stares and curt way of speaking, but it was the close relationship between her immature looks—“arrested