SCARED
TO LIVE
SCARED
TO LIVE
The seventh novel in the Ben Cooper and Diane Fry series
CHAPTER ONE
Sunday, 23 October
Even
on the night she died, Rose Shepherd couldn’t sleep. By the early hours of the
morning, her bed was like a battleground – hot, violent, chaotic. Beneath
her, the sheet was twisted into painful knots, the pillow hard and unyielding.
Lack of sleep made her head ache, and her body had grown stiff with discomfort.
But
sleeplessness was familiar to Miss Shepherd. She’d started to think of it as
an old friend, because it was always with her. She often spent the hours of
darkness waiting for the first bird to sing, watching for the greyness of dawn,
when she knew there’d be people moving about in the village. There might be
the sound of a van in the street as someone headed off for an early shift at the
quarry, or the rumble of a farmer’s tractor in the field behind the house. She
didn’t feel so completely alone then, as she did in the night.
For Rose
Shepherd, this was the world. A distant noise, a half-heard voice, a snatched
moment of indirect contact. Her life had become so confined that she seemed to
be living in a small, dark box. The tiniest crack of light was like a glimpse of
God.
By two
o’clock, Rose had been out of bed twice already, moving aimlessly around the
room to reassure herself that she was still alive and capable of movement. The
third time, she got up to fetch herself glass of water. She stood in the middle
of the bedroom while she drank it, allowing her toes to curl deep into the
sheepskin rug, clutching at the comfort of its softness, an undemanding
gentleness that almost made her weep.
As
always, her mind had been running over the events of the day. There was no way
she could stop it. It was as if she had a video player in her head, but it was
stuck in a loop, showing the same scenes over and over again. If they weren’t
from the day just past, then they were snapshots from previous days –
some of them years before, in a different part of her life. The scenes played
themselves out, and paused to allow her to fret whether she could have done
things differently. Then they began over again, taunting her with the fact that
past events were unalterable. What was done, was done.
It was
one of the reasons she couldn’t sleep, of course. Her brain was too active,
her memories too vivid. Nothing seemed to slow down the thoughts that stalked
backwards and forwards in her consciousness, like feral animals roaming the edge
of the forest, restless and apprehensive.
But Rose
was glad that she’d been out the previous day.
She’d been doubtful about it beforehand. No journey was without its risks,
even if it was only three miles over the hill and down into the
Standing
in her bedroom, Rose smiled at the recollection of her own weakness. Matlock
Bath had been busy, as she ought to have known it would be. At first, she’d
been disturbed by the number of people on North Parade, and nervous of the
motorcyclists in their leathers, clustered by their bikes eating fish and chips
out of paper wrappings. When she passed too close to them, the smell had been so
overpowering that she thought she would faint. And that would never do.
She
turned slowly on the rug, fighting the muzziness and disorientation of being
awake when her body wanted to sleep. There were only two points of light in her
bedroom – the face of her alarm clock, showing two thirty-three, and the
echo of its green luminescence in the mirror on the opposite wall. She found it
difficult to focus on the light, because she couldn’t judge its distance from
the reflection.
She could
smell those fish and chips, even now. The odour was so powerful that for a
moment she had no idea where she was. Time and place began to blur, a street in
a Derbyshire tourist village merging into an image of a deserted roadside with
the smell of gunfire in the air,
then whirling back to her bedroom, with those two green points of light rushing
towards her out of the darkness. Feeling giddy, Rose steadied herself with a
hand on the wall and sat down in a chair by the window.
No, no,
she was wrong. It was a bad mistake she’d made yesterday.
The sort of mistake she’d taught herself to avoid, that she had made such
careful plans against. But she hadn’t been able to avoid it. There was no
other way out.
Rose
breathed deeply, trying to control the dizziness. For a moment, it had been just
as if those motorcyclists had entered her bedroom. She could hear the creak of
their black leathers, the thud of their heavy boots against the doorframe. There
was the rustle of their paper wrappings, the acrid tang of the vinegar.
Somewhere, perhaps, the rumble of an engine, coming closer.
The
bikers had been irrelevant, though. Waiting in Matlock Bath, Rose’s first
impressions had been the steepness of the hills above her, the denseness of the
trees, the roofs of houses perched among them in apparently impossible places.
Soon a sense of her vulnerability had become too strong, and she had to get off
the street, to find somewhere she could feel safer.
So Rose
had paid her money to enter the aquarium, and for a while she’d watched
children feeding carp in the thermal pool. Even now she could remember feeling
the shape of the item she carried in its plastic bag, and knowing she was making
a fool of herself in the most dangerous way. But perhaps no one had noticed her
nervousness, because people were too wrapped up in their own interests.
She
thought about taking some more of her herbal tablets. But that would mean
walking as far as the bathroom for a glass of water, and it wouldn’t make any
difference anyway. Not now.
Her
doctor knew about her anxiety and insomnia problems. She’d gone to him out of
desperation, breaking her own rules and knowing it was a mistake. But he
hadn’t been able to help her. For a start, he’d never understood why she
wouldn’t continue taking the sleeping pills he gave her. Rose had felt quite
sorry for him when she saw his perplexed frown, his fingers hovering over the
keyboard to tap out an automatic prescription for Nitrazepam. In the end,
she’d told him the pills gave her heartburn, and he’d accepted that as a
reason.
Of
course, he was a rural GP, and he hadn’t met anyone like Rose Shepherd before.
He didn’t understand that she wasn’t just another neurotic, middle-aged
woman. He couldn’t possibly have known that she was even more frightened of
never waking up than of not being able to sleep.
Rose had
always known she’d be killed. Well, it felt like always. She could barely
remember a time before she’d known. She expected to meet her death because of
the way she’d led her life. It was a question of when it would happen, and
how. All she could hope for was that it would be sudden, and painless.
Two
forty-five. The house was very quiet, wasn’t it? Even her bedside clock had a
tick so faint that she had to listen hard to be sure it was working. There was
an Edwardian longcase in the sitting room downstairs, but it would be another
fifteen minutes before it was due to strike. Its chimes had counted away many of
her nights.
In some
ways, knowing her fate only made things worse. It meant that she lived every day
in fear of a phone call, a knock on the door, the smashing of glass in the
middle of the night. Every time she went out of the house, she expected not to
return. Whenever she looked through the window, she was surprised not to see
dark figures in the garden, watching her house. For a long time now, she’d
considered it more difficult to live than to die.
She tried
to imagine what the neighbours would say about her when they were asked. No
doubt they’d all agree that Rose Shepherd was a very private person, who never
called round to say ‘hello’ and didn’t mix much in the village. They knew
she’d lived alone for the past ten months at Bain
House in Foxlow, deep among the Derbyshire Dales. Some would put her age at
nearly seventy; others would frown and say she could only be in her fifties,
surely? But they hadn’t really got a close look at her. The postman might
recall she had an accent that wasn’t local, but she’d never spoken more than
a few words to him.
And that
was pretty much all anyone would know of her. The details of her life were
shrouded by trees and protected by electronic gates. And that was the way it had
to be. It was what had kept her alive until now.
Rose
smoothed out her sheets, turned over her pillows and went back to bed. Ten
minutes later, she was hovering fearfully on the edge of consciousness when a
black Mitsubishi Shogun with tinted windows drove into Foxlow and stopped
outside her gate.
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Leaving
through the back door of a cottage on the corner of
Darren
watched the vehicle coming back towards him from the corner. He was slightly
puzzled by its speed. There was no other traffic anywhere on the road at this
time, and most drivers would whizz through a place like Foxlow in seconds. But
maybe this was some old fogey who thought you had to obey speed limits, even
when there was no one around.
He
wasn’t as good at recognizing makes of car as some of his mates were, but
Darren could see this was some kind of four-wheel-drive job. A big one, probably
Japanese. He liked black cars – there were too many grey and silver
models around these days, and they all looked the same. Tinted widows, too. That
was cool. He could barely distinguish the outline of a driver as the car passed
under a streetlamp near the phone box.
Finally,
the car had gone, and Darren began to move again, keeping close to the wall of
the cottage to avoid the light as he made his way to the back gate. His blue
Astra was parked under the trees on Church Walk. No streetlamps here, not even
any houses where he could be overlooked. There was just the old church somewhere
in the darkness. If he looked up, and through the trees, he could see the top of
its square tower against the sky, with its little stone ramparts like broken
teeth.
Darren
shuddered when he thought about the church and its graveyard. He’d been scared
silly of these places when he was a kid, and even now he preferred to stay away
from them. They made him think of bats and vampires, and dead people coming up
out of their graves. He’d rather not even go to funerals, if he could avoid
it. All those folks dressed in black with their long faces gave him the creeps.
He always tried to make an excuse that he was too busy working, and then he’d
go along for the sausage rolls afterwards, if he could get away with it.
Why
Stella had decided to move here when she got divorced, he had no idea. It
wouldn’t suit him at all – it was too far out in the sticks, miles from
anywhere and full of old noseys who wanted to know every detail of your life.
The city was a lot better. You could move around there without anyone knowing
who you were or where you’d been. But at least he didn’t have to live in
Foxlow himself.
He
grinned to himself as he got into his Astra and reversed it in front of the lych
gate. A visit to Stella was always worthwhile, he had to admit. As long as no
one found out, of course – especially Fiona. That would be a disaster.
She’d murder him for sure.
Darren
shivered again as he drove out on to the street. But this time it was nothing to
do with his superstitions. The
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A
few minutes later, the Shogun had turned at the top of High Street and was being
driven too fast down Butcher’s Hill. Its headlights were on full beam,
sweeping across the hedgerows, reflecting off gateposts. Anyone coming in the
opposite direction would be momentarily blinded, too dazzled to see the
vehicle’s model or colour, let alone its driver. In a burst of sodium light,
it would be gone as soon as it appeared.
When it
reached the bottom of the hill, the Shogun slowed to halt. It idled for a moment
in the road, with its front windows half-open and its engine ticking over. Then
the driver swung the wheel to the right. He rammed his foot on the accelerator,
and the car surged off the road through an open gateway. Its headlights dipped
and swayed as it bumped along the field boundary and followed an uncultivated
strip of land close to the hedge. With its four-wheel drive engaged, the vehicle
growled towards the top corner of the field, where it turned and coasted along
the back gardens of the houses in
Finally,
the headlights died and the Shogun rolled the last few yards in darkness. After
it stopped, there was silence for a moment, then the whirr of a window lowering,
the creak of seat leather as a body shifted position, and the slow, careful
scrape of metal. With a final click and a grunt, the movement stopped. From a
position near the driver’s seat came a green glow and a faint electronic
beeping.
A hundred yards away, in Rose Shepherd’s house, the clock was softly chiming three as the bedside phone began to ring.
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Copyright
Stephen Booth 2006
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SCARED
TO LIVE is published in the UK by HarperCollins in hardback at £12.99
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