The Death of Mrs. Westaway(86)

Her mouth was dry and she reached for the glass beside her bed, but when she picked it up, it was empty. In her tiredness she must have forgotten to fill it the night before. The chilly walk through the dark landing down to the bathroom below was not enticing, and Hal decided to ignore the thirst. She got back into bed and shut her eyes, but the dryness in her mouth niggled at her, keeping sleep at bay, until at last she gave up, swung her legs out of bed, and picked up the glass. Wrapping her fleece around her, she went cautiously out into the corridor.

It was pitch-black outside, the lino freezing under her bare feet, and she tried the switch on the wall, but as she did, she remembered too late that she hadn’t told anyone about the missing bulb.

Sure enough, the switch clicked fruitlessly, and Hal sighed and went back to the attic room to pick up her phone. The thin tunnel of light from its torch made the corridor feel, if anything, even darker, but at least she could see the black, yawning opening to the stairs.

She was only one step down, when her foot caught on something.

Hal clutched, instinctively, for a banister—but there was none there. She felt her fingers scratch at the bare wall, and then the horrible stomach-wrenching lurch as the phone flew from her hand, and she realized she was falling, with nothing she could do to stop herself.

She landed with a crunch in the hallway below, thudding her head against the floor, and rolled to a stop against the wall, where she lay, gasping, winded, waiting for the sound of running footsteps, questions, solicitous inquiries. But none came.

“I’m—I’m okay!” she called shakily, but there was no response, only the noise of the wind, and beneath it the far-off sound of a muffled snore, coming from somewhere below.

Cautiously, Hal sat up. She felt for her glasses, before realizing she hadn’t put them on in the first place. They were still on her bedside table, which was something at least to be thankful for. She’d almost rather have a broken arm than broken glasses, so far from home. Her phone was on the bottom step of the stairs, facedown, the torch still shining up to the ceiling, and when Hal picked it up the screen was cracked, but the phone itself still seemed to be working.

The water glass, on the other hand, had smashed—there were shards scattered on the floor, and her hand was bleeding, but there was no blood coming from the place where her head had hit the floor, and when she flexed her arms, no bones seemed to be broken. As she got shakily to her feet, dizziness swept over her, but she didn’t fall, only steadied herself against the wall, and it passed.

It was almost unbelievable luck that she hadn’t broken an arm, or even her neck. The wall of the corridor was only feet away from the bottom of the stairs. If she had hit it with her skull, she would have been dead.

A wave of trembling sickness washed over her. Delayed shock, she thought numbly, and she sank down onto the bottom step, feeling her head throb where she’d hit it against the floor, and the uncontrollable shaking in her arms and legs. She was no longer thirsty, and in any case, the idea of picking her way through the shards of shattered glass in bare feet felt impossible. She wanted only to crawl back into bed where it was safe and warm, and let the trembling in her limbs subside.

Slowly she got to her hands and knees, and not quite trusting herself to go upright, she crawled up the stairs, her phone in her hand.

In almost any other position she might have missed it—but as it was, the light from the phone fell straight onto it. It was one step down from the top. A rusty nail, driven into the skirting board at ankle height, a length of snapped string still trailing from it.

Hal felt her breath catch in her throat, and she stopped, frozen, the beam from her phone shining onto the innocuous little thing.

Then she got hold of herself, and forced herself to swing the beam to the other side of the stairs.

There was its twin, driven into the same place, only this one had been wrenched almost out of place by the force of her fall.

She hadn’t tripped. This was no accident.

Someone had driven in those nails, and strung the string across the top step, taking advantage of the fused bulb at the top of the stairs to ensure that she wouldn’t see, even in daylight, what had been done.

It hadn’t been there when she went up to bed, she was sure of it. She couldn’t have passed up the stairs without tripping over it.

Which meant that someone had come up here, while she was sleeping, to set the trap.

But no . . . she wasn’t thinking clearly—they could not have hammered in the nails. She would have heard them. Which meant . . . it meant that this had been premeditated. The nails had been there all along, waiting for the removal of the bulb, and the string to be set up. Someone had been intending this. They had prepared for her to return, back from Brighton, and they had guarded against it.

Hal’s heart seemed to slow inside her chest, a great stillness settling over her.

She should have been panicking. But it was as though something had hold of her inside, and was squeezing . . . squeezing. . . .

She crawled rather than walked the last few steps into the attic room, and shut the door, before subsiding with her back against the wooden panels. Her head was in her hands, and she was thinking, not for the first time, of the bolts on the outside, and of the silent malevolence of the person who had come up those stairs, just a few hours earlier, and set a trap designed to kill.

As she closed her eyes and pressed her forehead into her knees, an image floated into Hal’s head unbidden.