Lara’s heart sank as she heard the rattle of chains. She felt the snap of more metal as he closed handcuffs round first her left, then her right wrist, stretching her out. He quickly jumped up and did the same to her ankles so she was pinioned, face down, to the mattress.
‘Now Lara,’ he said, lifting himself off her and running his hands up her legs and over her buttocks. ‘I’m going to claim your undiscovered territories.’
Afterwards he lay motionless at last, still inside her, sweat on sweat, blood and tears and seed mingled. Lara had a moment to wonder where she had gone in all this. Then, mercifully, her mind shut down, taking her away from the horror that was Stephen Molloy, into a kind of oblivion.
HOWEVER MUCH BELLA TRIED TO WISH THE FALLEN TREE INTO
existence, Gina’s husband had been right. The only obstacle on the road was the car-mangled body of a fawn.
Sean crunched the Nissan up the dirt track to Stephen Molloy’s gate and cut the engine. Bella got out of the car and he followed.
Enrobed in the dust cloud they had created, they surveyed the obstacles in front of them. A locked, ten-foot-high gate with barbed wire on the top. A fence of exactly the same proportions and fortifications. Artificial lines drawn in the forest, stopping them dead. Apart from a keypad, which Bella pressed to no avail, she saw nothing else at the gate – no buzzer, no camera – to tell anyone inside the house they were there.
The katydids in the trees above them made their noise, drilling into Bella’s skull.
‘I mean, I don’t see why we’ve come all the way up here,’ she said finally.
‘Don’t you think you’ve got a right to know?’ Sean said.
She looked at him. His eyes were burning.
‘If I’d had a chance to stop my dad fucking around before my mom found out …’
‘It’s not my business, though.’
‘It’s every bit your business.’
‘Is it?’ She marvelled at the fire of him. She leaned against him and he put his arm around her. ‘What are we going to do, then? How are we going to get in? It’s like Fort Knox.’
‘Local boy knowledge.’ Sean held up his finger. ‘We can get in from the back, cross-country. My uncle owns the land on the other side. The car will only take us some of the way. The rest we’ll have to do on foot.’
‘We’ve got Jack, though,’ Bella said, turning back to look at her little brother, who, from what she could see through the dusty car window, seemed to be alternating between sneezing and talking to Dog.
‘We’ll take turns carrying him if he gets tired.’
They got back in the car and Sean drove along the track, beyond where the tall fence around Stephen’s land turned up away from the lane and into the forest. The road came to an abrupt end five miles later at an overgrown field of maize, high up on a plateau above dense, dark, forested hills. The early-evening insects fogged the air with their buzzing and biting. Bella slapped a couple of stings on her arms – more no see’ums.
‘No one comes up here any more,’ Sean said, cutting the engine. ‘But I spent whole summers here when I was a kid, back when my uncle was well enough to farm the land. Their house used to be over there.’ He pointed in the direction of a red barn that tilted at a forty-five-degree angle to the ground. ‘But it was too exposed. Got hit by lightning. Kind of exploded.’
What a strange world this is, Bella thought, as she stood on that hot, wind-whipped hill, where the red soil bled colour from the setting sun and dazzled against the green of the bolted maize. Houses could explode, brothers could go psycho, mothers could defect with movie stars and she could find the love of her life.
‘Where do we go now?’ she said.
‘South. Down through the forest, where it’s so wild even Molloy wouldn’t be able to put up a fence, up the other side and down again.’
It sounded like a challenge, with a small boy and a dog. But Bella comforted herself with her newly acquired knowledge that nothing was impossible.
‘He says we have to hurry up,’ Jack wheezed. Bella turned to see her little brother, his freckled face all allergy-distended, with his hand on Dog.
‘Jack, are you all right?’ Bella said. She had always assumed that her mother going on about Jack’s allergies and asthma was just babying. But, looking at him now, she realised he needed his inhaler and tablets. She supposed they were back in Trout Island, with Gina.
‘I’m fine,’ he said, as he let Dog go on ahead of them, through the maize field and down into the indigo heart of the forest below. Bella hoped being out in the open air would help.
‘Come on, slow coaches!’ Jack said as he skipped off after Dog.
Sean shut the car doors, took Bella’s hand and led her forward, across the field.
Before the trees swallowed them up, Bella glanced back. Sean’s car, on the brow of the plateau, couldn’t have advertised its presence any more strongly. If those boys wanted to find them, they had a good starting point.
THEY HAD ONLY JUST ENTERED THE FOREST WHEN THE PATH PETERED
out and they were left to stumble through the undergrowth. Dog forged on ahead, with Jack running after him.
‘Is Dog going in the right direction?’ Bella asked Sean.
‘It’s crazy, but yes he is.’
‘Be careful of poison ivy,’ Sean said, as they slid down the hill. They could hear the rush of the river at the trough of the valley below them as it tumbled over stones that had rolled down from the slopes above. ‘They say it doesn’t grow this far north, but I have first-hand knowledge that it’s all over these woods.’
‘I wouldn’t know poison ivy if it hit me in the face,’ Bella said.
‘You’d get the idea pretty quickly. Look.’ He bent to point out a harmless-looking green-leaved vine trailing its way up a tree. ‘Leaves of three, let it be. If you touch that, in a day or two you’ll come up with big old blisters that’ll last for weeks and travel all over your body.’
‘Ugh.’ The forest looked so benign on the surface – like an English oak wood. But with poison ivy and snakes underfoot, bears, coyotes and mountain lions lurking behind trees, and her mother getting up to god knew what with Stephen Molloy somewhere out there, it was not as friendly as it seemed.
They waded down through shoals of crumbled leaf mould until they reached a river. Using reddish-brown rocks scattered through the water, they began to cross. Bella couldn’t get that photograph of Lara and Stephen Molloy out of her mind. Could she
really
stop her mother doing whatever she was doing? She obviously
wanted
to be out there with him. Bella wondered how long they had been carrying on like that together. She remembered Stephen saying they knew each other when they were younger. Was the ‘chance meeting’ here in Trout Island a fake?
She stopped, halfway across the river.
‘I think we should go back,’ she shouted across the noise of water on rock to Sean.
‘What?’ he said, turning to face her.
‘I don’t want to go there. I don’t want to find out. I want to forget I ever saw those photos. I want Dad to sort it out.’
‘If that happens, you know that’ll be the end, right?’ Sean stepped back towards her and took her hand. ‘And you’ll never forget those photos.’
Bella closed her eyes and frowned. He was right. The image of Stephen and Lara was as clear as if it were lasered on the inside of her eyelids.
‘Bella,’ Sean said, as they balanced on a big rock in the middle of the river. ‘Think about that little kid.’ He nodded at Jack, who had reached the other side and was sitting on a boulder, hugging his dirty knees, Dog beside him. He looked very small, dwarfed both by the animal and by the big trees that rose behind him.
‘Are you ready to let his world fall apart?’ Sean said.
Bella looked down and shook her head.
‘It’s our duty to him – to everyone – to give it our best shot.’
Our
duty, Bella thought, looking up at Sean. And, she realised with enormous relief, whatever happened, she at least would not be alone.
‘Come
on
!’ Jack called breathily from his boulder.
‘Coming!’ Bella said, jumping to the next rock.
‘Also,’ Sean said, catching her arm as he joined her. ‘There’s one thing you haven’t considered.’
Bella looked up at him. A dragonfly silently passed between them, a flash of iridescent blue and green.
‘Who took those photographs? And how did they know to send them to you?’
Bella bit her lip. How could she be so dumb? With the shock of the images, she hadn’t given a further thought to who
Your Friend
might be. She had stupidly read them as more of the paparazzi pictures she saw of Stephen and his ilk in every magazine she picked up, as something that
just happened
. She ran through who it could possibly be. She hoped, for Stephen Molloy’s sake, it hadn’t been Olly …
‘Come
on
,’ Jack yelled.
Then it hit her. ‘The stalker!’ she said. ‘Stephen Molloy had a stalker—’
‘Yes, back in LA, Betty said. A real nut job.’
‘You don’t think?’
‘Jesus.’
‘Perhaps Gina’s “quirky old feeling” was right,’ Bella said.
‘Eh?’
‘Come on.’
They jumped across the remaining stones to the other side.
‘At last,’ Jack said. ‘Let’s go, Dog.’
‘Hurry,’ Bella said.
They took off and were halfway up the hill, scrabbling up a scree slope, when a loud gunshot echoed through the valley, stopping them in their tracks. Dog wheeled around, barking at where the shot came from, somewhere behind them.
‘Quiet!’ Sean hissed at Dog.
The forest fell silent. The only sound was Jack wheezing as he tried to catch his breath.
‘What—?’ Bella turned to Sean.
‘Shhh.’ He held up his hand and listened, peering into the darkening forest behind them.
Far away, on the other side of the river, they heard an unmistakable high-pitched cackle, followed by a whoop.
‘Jesus,’ Bella said. Of course Olly and his crew had followed them. She might as well have been unravelling a ball of string to show them the way.
‘Those boys have spent almost every weekend since they were able to crawl out hunting with their marvellous uncle daddies,’ Sean said. ‘It was easy for them to follow our trail up the track – no cars ever go up there any more. Then, well, a new path through the maize, trampled undergrowth. We’ve hardly been covering our tracks.’
‘What do we do?’
‘We go on. We don’t want them to catch us up, and if we double back, they’re bound to spot us, with Jacko and Dog. Our advantage is that we’re nearly at the top of the hill. Come on.’ He ran ahead and scooped Jack up, swinging him on to his shoulders.
With Dog in front of them, they made quick progress up the path. Sean stooped to pick up a stick, which every now and then he threw into the trees for the animal to retrieve.
‘Giving them a few detours on the way up,’ Sean said. ‘Slow them down.’
‘Brilliant.’
‘Common sense for a country boy.’
Bella would have smiled, but she was having difficulty keeping up with him. His legs were a good foot longer than hers. She knew this because they had compared them one lazy afternoon at the pond.
They tore past a tumbledown house, half smothered in moss. It looked like a face with its eyes gouged out.
‘These hills used to be full of people,’ Sean said.
‘They seem quite busy today too.’
‘Come on, Sean!’ Jack said in between gasps for breath, and he tapped him with his heels as if he were his horse.
Finally they were at the top of the hill, bursting out of the trees into a sun-dappled clearing, breathless with the effort of the climb.
‘Bear,’ Jack said. His lower lip began to tremble.
‘Is this where you saw the bear, Jacky?’ Bella looked up at him.
Jack nodded and she noticed his eyes, now two little slits in his puffy, distended face.
‘We have to keep Jack away from Dog,’ Bella said.
‘But I like Dog,’ Jack wailed.
‘Bear’s the last of our worries. Let’s move on,’ Sean said to Bella. They forged on, past a tangle of bushes purpled with powdery berries. Then they plunged back into the woods on the other side and started careering down the hill, along a muddy path, sending orange salamanders slipping for cover.
‘There it is!’ Sean pointed to a spot of red roof through the leaves. ‘Mr Molloy’s shag pad.’
‘Don’t,’ Bella said. Suddenly, the adventure of what they were doing leached from her and she thought she was going to vomit. She stopped for a second.
‘Do we want to take them by surprise?’ he said.
‘I’d rather not.’ She grimaced at the thought. ‘I’d rather they had a bit of warning.’
‘Snakes!’ Jack said, as they reached the edge of the lawn. Coughing, he struggled to get down from Sean’s shoulders. Dog steamed on ahead and sat on the porch, waiting for them.
The house looked silent and empty in the dusk. If it weren’t for the old Volvo and Stephen’s dented Wrangler standing outside, they would have thought nobody was in.
‘You’d better stay out here with Jack,’ Bella said. ‘I don’t want him to see anything too disturbing.’
Sean pointed to the forest behind them. ‘Seeing them doing what they plan to do to me when they get here would be better?’
Bella bit her lip. ‘Olly wouldn’t do anything to you in front of Jack.’
‘You have no idea how comforting that is to me.’
‘OK,’ Bella said, thinking quickly. ‘I’ll knock on the door and show my face first. Then we’ll take it from there. Mum won’t let Olly do anything.’
She went up to the door and looked for a bell. Of course there wasn’t one. There was no way of announcing oneself as a visitor – why would there be when the only feasible way on to the property was so firmly barred? So she knocked gently on the door, half hoping there would be no reply and they could all go home and forget completely about coming up here.
‘They’d better come quickly or we’re completely screwed,’ Sean said, staring up at the forest, where, not too far away, Olly, Aaron, Brandon and Kyle were audibly following their trail. Bella’s boy looked like he was beginning to lose the nerve he had so bravely recovered for her.