Bring Me Back (B.A. Paris)(51)

CLOSER THAN YOU THINK





FORTY-FIVE

Layla

I wanted to stop the countdown. I was so sure I’d been caught when I left the first of the ten dolls on the wall last week. But the voice reassured me. You can post the others, it said. You don’t have to take any more risks. Except that yesterday, I had to leave another on the wall, because it was Sunday again.

Last week, I ordered more Russian dolls. The voice told me to. I ordered twenty this time. They were delivered the next day and it gave me a real rush to open the box and see them lying there, waiting for me to perform caesarean after caesarean after caesarean and release all the little babies. I don’t know what the voice has planned for this newest lot. It’s getting harder for me to ignore it, to shut it out. Maybe it thinks that I’m going to have to extend the countdown. But I have faith in Finn, in his love for me. He will get rid of Ellen.

There are only two days left. If I could, I’d end it all now. It’s why I replied to Finn’s email, asking where I was. Don’t tell him, the voice said, don’t tell him where you are. I couldn’t defy the voice but I gave Finn a clue, hoping he would understand.

And bring me back, before it’s too late.





FORTY-SIX

Finn

I start awake, my heart pounding, my body sleek with sweat. Disorientated, I look around me and find I’m lying on the sofa in the sitting room. It was a nightmare, I tell myself, that’s all. If I go upstairs, Ellen will be safe and sound in bed, not lying crumpled at the bottom of a cliff, her body bloodied and broken. It was only a dream.

It had been so vivid though. I was standing close to a clifftop edge with Ellen while Layla urged me to push her onto the rocks below. I couldn’t see Layla, there was only her voice but I understood the choice I had to make – if I wanted to see Layla, I had to kill Ellen otherwise Layla would disappear again, this time forever. And Ellen, sensing what I was about to do, grabbed hold of me, dragging me off the cliff with her. And as we hurtled to the ground below, my voice was one long scream of Laaaaaaaylaaaaaa!

Had I screamed her name out loud? Is that what woke me? I wait for the drumming in my ears to stop and establish that the house is silent, that if I had been calling out in my sleep, it hadn’t woken Ellen. Dawn is filtering its way through the night sky and I get groggily to my feet, feeling more exhausted than before I fell asleep. Coffee, I need coffee.

The closer than you think message has been going round and round in my head, like a stuck recording. Because of the message I sent warning that the police were looking for her, Layla knows I think she’s in Cheltenham, so if she’s closer than Cheltenham she could be in any of the nearby villages – or even in Simonsbridge itself. It would explain how she’s been able to leave the dolls so easily.

I told Ellen that I’d spoken to Tony, as she had asked me to do, and that he’d said they hadn’t found Layla yet but that they were still looking. None of it was true but it put her mind at rest.

It’s almost over anyway. Yesterday, I got another doll in the post, and the subsequent email – TWO. Today I’ll get the last Russian doll and tomorrow – well, tomorrow I have no idea, only that my time has run out. Ellen is still here, I haven’t got rid of her as Layla asked me to do. So what next? Is she going to carry on with her game, extend the countdown? God, I hope not. But what if it becomes something worse, what if she hasn’t been bluffing? It’s disturbing to know I have no idea what Layla is capable of doing.

I hear Ellen’s footsteps on the stairs and realise with a start that I haven’t checked if the envelope has arrived. I get to my feet then sit back down again. It’s the last one, so it hardly matters if Ellen gets to it before I do.

The mail only arrives as we’re having breakfast. I go out to the hall but Ellen follows me.

‘Anything for me?’ she asks.

‘I don’t know, I haven’t looked yet.’ I wait for her to walk back to the kitchen ahead of me so that I can stuff the envelope under my shirt but she reaches round and takes the post from my hands.

‘It’s just that I’m waiting for my new contract,’ she explains, rifling through it. ‘Cathy put it in the post two days ago.’ She picks out the brown envelope. ‘This must be it.’ She turns it over. ‘Oh, it’s for you.’ A sudden frown creases her brow. ‘It looks like the one I received a couple of weeks ago. Do you think . . . ’ Her voice trails away.

‘Let’s open it and see,’ I say, because there’s no use pretending I don’t know what she’s thinking. ‘Maybe there’ll be a letter or something.’

‘I think it’s another doll,’ she says, feeling the envelope with her fingers. She hands it to me and because there’s nothing else I can do, I carry it through to the kitchen and open it. I shake it onto the worktop, not thinking for one second that it will have its head smashed in. But it does.

Ellen looks at it in dismay. ‘What a shame!’ She picks it up. ‘Poor little doll. I feel like complaining to the post office – they must have dropped a box on it or something. Where was it posted?’

I look at the postmark. ‘Cheltenham, the same as yours.’

‘Is there a letter?’

‘No, nothing.’

‘How strange.’