The Devil's Feather - Minette Walters [94]
“The first thing she did was tell Nathaniel,” Peter went on. “He was in London when it happened, so Madeleine had free rein with her interpretation of events…which was a souped-up version of what she told you, with Jess as a paranoid schizophrenic. It scared Nathaniel off completely.”
I was more interested in the continuing silence. “Shouldn’t we have heard something by now?” I asked, turning towards the window. “What do you think Jess is doing?”
“Looking for the dogs, I expect.”
“Then why isn’t she calling for them? You don’t suppose—” I broke off, unwilling to put the thought into words.
Perhaps Peter, too, was uneasy. “I’ll go and check,” he said, standing up, “but for Christ’s sake stop looking so bloody worried. You’d have to walk on water to get past those animals of hers.” He smiled. “Trust me. I’ve still got the bruises.”
17
HOW LONG DO you wait in such circumstances? In my case, a very long time. I told myself Peter and Jess were having a heart-to-heart, and the best thing I could do was leave them to it, but I remained glued to the window, watching Jess’s dogs patrol the garden. At one point a couple of them spotted me through the glass and ambled over, tails wagging eagerly, in the hope of food. Could someone have got past them? Logic said no, but instinct had every hair on my body standing to attention. If MacKenzie knew about anything, he knew about dogs.
I remember trying to light a cigarette, but my hands were trembling so much that I couldn’t bring the flame anywhere near the tip. Knowing how easily panicked I was, would Peter really abandon me for Jess without calling out that everything was fine? And why couldn’t I hear them? His wooing technique was based on gentle teasing, and he was incapable of speaking to Jess for more than a few minutes without laughing.
In the end I decided to call the police. The chances were they’d arrive to find Jess and Peter in flagrante delicto on the sofa but I couldn’t have cared less. I was happy to pay any fine they liked for wasting official time, as long as I didn’t have to walk down that corridor on my own.
WOODY ALLEN ONCE SAID, “My only regret in life is that I’m not someone else.” It’s funny if you don’t mean it, and desperate if you do. I’d rather have been anyone but Connie Burns when I tried for a dial tone on the kitchen phone and discovered it was dead. I knew immediately what it meant. The line had been cut some time after I emailed my parents. In the vain hope of a miracle, I tugged my mobile from my pocket and held it above my head, but unsurprisingly the signal icon refused to appear.
Panic came back in waves, and my first instinct was to do exactly what I’d done before, lock myself in the kitchen, turn off the lights and crouch out of sight of the window. I couldn’t face MacKenzie on my own. The fight had been knocked out of me when he’d rammed himself into my mouth and told me to smile for the camera. I couldn’t go through that again. His smell and taste still had me bursting out of nightmares every night. What did it matter if he killed other people, as long as he didn’t kill me?
I can’t pretend it was courage, or a sudden flush of heroism, that took me outside. Rather, the memory of my email to Alan Collins re elderly Chinamen, death-rays, and the difficulties of coping with the guilt. Any problems I had now would be magnified tenfold if I had to live with Jess’s and Peter’s blood on my hands. My plan was to run as fast as possible for the nearest hillside and dial 999. But when I opened the back door, I was met by the dogs, and I had a strong sense that taking to my heels would be the wrong thing to do. Either they’d bark and alert MacKenzie, or they’d bowl me over.
Instead, I walked slowly towards the outhouse in the hope that they’d lose interest and let me cut across the grass