The Silent Ones: An absolutely gripping psychological thriller(2)
When she got back from the bathroom, she gasped when she saw the blood seeping steadily from the side of Bessie’s head. It pooled neatly on the worn, patterned carpet and sank into the grooves around the corner of the cream tiled fire surround.
‘What happened?’ She swallowed down a knot of panic.
‘It… it was an accident,’ her cousin stammered.
The girls backed out of the room and had just stepped into the kitchen when they heard it… a scuffling sound, like the movement of feet.
They froze as a shadow loomed in the hallway and advanced towards them.
Had Bessie jumped up and started coming after them covered in blood looking like a zombie from a horror film?
Alarmed, they let themselves out of the kitchen and darted around the side of the house until they were out in the front garden again.
Behind them, through the open window, they felt sure they heard Bessie laughing.
They were halfway up the street, heading back home, when they heard the sirens.
Day One
One
Juliet
I offload the last armful of red and blue toddler painting smocks and push the empty delivery box away with my foot, sinking down on a nearby chair.
‘I thought we’d never get to the end of that lot.’ I stick out my bottom lip and blow air up onto my face, damp wisps of hair flying off my forehead, as I think about the mountain of other stuff I have to get through today: I offered to pick up Mum’s prescription from an out-of-town pharmacy, and then I have to wash Josh’s football kit for his away match the day after tomorrow.
‘You know, we could take somebody on part time to help with stuff like unpacking.’ Chloe, my sister, cuts into my thoughts. ‘Our time could be spent far more productively and you might not complain about being exhausted the whole time.’
Compassion isn’t one of my sister’s strong points. Now I regret telling her in a moment of weakness that the doctor has put me back on my medication. Just until I can feel I’m back in control of everything, feel less overwhelmed.
‘Maybe we can look at taking on help in another year or so.’ My best friend Beth is the obvious choice for the job, but I refrain from voicing that, as she and Chloe can’t stand each other. ‘Are you coping with the admin?’
Chloe isn’t just an employee, she’s also a director of my business, InsideOut4Kids, so she’ll hate me for checking up on her, but this stuff is important.
Top of her to-do list is our insurance renewal, and some quarterly expenses paperwork the accountant asked for over a week ago now. As the main shareholder, I make it my business to keep a discreet eye on what needs doing.
Every time I ask her if she’s OK, I simply get a stock ‘yes thanks’ in reply, so I’m reluctant to ask. But Chloe has always been one to take the path of least resistance, even when we were children. She’d always rather Mum buy a cake than help her bake one. So I feel I have to keep tabs on the stuff she’s doing, because it could make or break the company.
‘I’m on top of my responsibilities, thanks for asking,’ she retorts. ‘The fact remains that we spend a lot of time sweating the small stuff that someone else could easily take on.’
I try to appeal to her logical side.
‘Like Beth says, for now we need to plough any spare cash back into the business. I can’t afford to do anything to jeopardise this order now I’ve put the house up as collateral. We talked about all this, remember?’
Chloe folds her arms and shoots me a belligerent look.
‘Yes, Mother, I do remember,’ she snipes back. ‘But let’s at least make decisions off our own bat. The business actually has sod-all to do with Beth bloody Chambers.’
I should have known better than to mention Beth again, but her knowledge and advice have been invaluable to me as I try and build the business. In fact, if Beth hadn’t encouraged me to go for it, to take a chance, I probably wouldn’t have had the confidence to start up in the first place.
We began eighteen months ago from my spare bedroom, getting our trademark kids’ clothes made by local home workers and selling them on eBay.
Now we have a sophisticated website complete with shopping cart function and we sell clothing wholesale to independent shops up and down the country. Six months ago, we moved out of my box room and rented a local industrial unit.
We have big plans to expand by selling to Europe in the next twelve months, and there’s still a sense of celebration in the air after we recently won a very lucrative contract for major Dutch wholesaler Van Dyke.
Pretty rapid by anyone’s standards, though still not quick enough for Chloe, judging by her comments today.
But she’s not the one who has remortgaged her house to fund the merchandise to satisfy this big new order.
‘Sir Alan Sugar never got anywhere in business by being cautious.’ Chloe’s is a big fan of The Apprentice. ‘We need to talk about these issues seriously, Juliet. If we moved production to Bangladesh or India, we’d double our profits overnight.’
Her phone rings and she glances down at it on the floor between us. The screen lights up with the words ‘No Caller ID’ and she ignores it.
‘Remember what we said when we started out?’ I sigh. ‘Fairly paid work for local people, and we get vibrant, happy clothes made with care. Not a load of tat churned out by some poor soul trapped in an unregulated sweatshop.’