Weyward(76)

He arches back in her chair and – Kate’s heart stops – screams.

‘Get away!’ he shrieks, spittle flying towards her. ‘You’re supposed to be gone!’

An orderly comes running – young, cheeks bright with acne, peach scrubs loose on his thin frame.

‘There, there, Freddie, old mate,’ he says. ‘Let’s take you back to your room.’ He glares at Kate as he steers Frederick’s wheelchair into the corridor.

‘What’d you do, to upset him like that?’ The orderly throws over his shoulder.

‘I – nothing,’ she says, still stunned by Frederick’s outburst.

‘Hold on, are you that woman he’s always talking about? Valerie, or something?’

‘Violet?’

‘That’s right. Look, I don’t know what happened between you two, but he’s not stopped going on about you since he got here. What are you, his granddaughter?’

‘No, I—’

‘So you’re not even family. Honestly, miss, I think you should go. It’s Saturday. Visiting hours end at 4 p.m. anyway.’

Kate can hear the orderly reassuring Frederick as he is wheeled away.

‘You’re all right, mate. Just a little scare.’

‘But it was her.’ She hears him take a great, shuddering breath. ‘She’s the one who sent them. The one who sent the insects.’

Fresh snow begins to fall as Kate drives home from Ivy Gate.

She’s so distracted that she stalls the car twice. Luckily, there’s barely any traffic in the valley. Both times, before she manages to get the car started again, panic snakes its way up through her body, gaining intensity as it passes through her stomach, her heart, her throat.

He thinks Violet was responsible for the infestation.

She remembers something else he said, when she went to Orton Hall. That the insects had died last August.

Just like Violet.

It is snowing harder now, the air so thick with it that she can barely see the road. The radio sputters with static, and she turns up the sound to catch the weather forecast. ‘Heavy snowfall …’ a man is saying. ‘Disruption while travelling …’ The signal is lost.

In her gut, panic blooms. She shouldn’t have come. What if she’s put the baby in danger?

She is driving past the woods, the trees sugared with ice. The woods. Where she’d felt such unease, before her unsettling visit to Orton Hall. Fear bubbles in her chest, the steering wheel suddenly slick under her hands. She remembers the claustrophobia of those tightly packed trees, the way they’d blocked out the light.

Kate forces herself to look straight ahead, at the reflective lines of the road curving ahead of her, away from the wood, disappearing into a haze of white. The wind roars. She needs to turn the fog lights on so that she can see better, but in her terror, she can’t remember how. Her fingers slip and fumble on the wheel and the dashboard, and she takes her eyes off the road briefly. There. She’s found the button. She lifts her eyes back to the road and the twin beams illuminate the remains of an animal – matted, bloodied fur; pale limbs – strewn across the road. The blood impossibly bright against the snow.

She screams. She loses control of the wheel. The car careens forward, and the noise of the trees scraping against the roof and smacking the windshield is deafening.

Everything goes white.

Kate’s heart pounds in her chest. It takes her a moment to realise that she has crashed into the woods, that the front seat of the car is littered with ice, with glass from the windscreen.

The wind howls through the jagged edges of the windscreen. Kate shivers. She is so cold.

Oh God. The baby.

She places her hands over her stomach, willing her child to show her some sign of life.

Please. Kick. Let me know you’re OK.

But there is nothing.

She needs to get help. Wincing at a bolt of pain in her shoulder, she twists to reach for her phone on the passenger seat. Please God, don’t let it be broken.

She exhales with relief when she sees that the screen is intact. Relief turns to horror when, unlocking it, she sees only one bar of reception: it flickers for a moment, then disappears.

Shit.

She thinks she’s about 5 miles from the cottage: the road loops around the fells in long, lazy circles, adding extra distance. The direct route, across the fells, is shorter. Two miles, no more, she thinks.

At this hour, while the light dims in the sky, the woods seem so black and thick that it feels as if the car has been swallowed up by a beast and has come to rest in its ribcage. She imagines the dark stretch of trees, a spine running across the land.

She could wait by the side of the road, see if someone drives past. Then she remembers how quiet it is here, how she hasn’t seen a single other car for the entire journey back from Ivy Gate. And no one is going to take to the roads in a blizzard. She could be waiting till morning. It’s already so cold in the car with the broken windscreen. People die of exposure in situations like this, don’t they?

She doesn’t have a choice. If she wants to get home before night falls, she’ll have to walk.

She pushes the car door open, scraping against branches, gasping as the cold hits her.

Snowflakes sting her face as she makes her way back to the road, stumbling over icy tree roots and clogs of mud. The tarmac is dusted white. There is the body of the animal – it is a hare, she sees now – splayed out and flattened. She can’t take the road, not unless she wants to risk sharing its fate.