House Of Shadows. Nicola Cornick

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      ‘Are you mad?’

      Guy had emerged from the spare room two minutes previously wearing only his crumpled boxer shorts, bleary-eyed, his hair standing on end in bad-tempered spikes.

      ‘You can’t shoot off to Wiltshire at this time of night,’ he said. ‘What a bloody stupid idea.’

      ‘It’s Oxfordshire,’ Holly said automatically. She checked the clock, pulling on her boots at the same time. The zip stuck. She wrenched it hard. Two twenty-seven. She had already wasted ten minutes.

      She had rung back repeatedly but there had been no reply. The mill house, Ben and Natasha’s holiday cottage, did not have a landline and the mobile reception had always been patchy. You had to be standing in exactly the right place to get a signal.

      ‘Have you tried Tasha’s mobile?’ Guy asked.

      ‘She’s working abroad somewhere.’ Ben had told her but Holly couldn’t remember exactly where. ‘I left her a message.’ Tasha had a high-powered job with a TV travel show and was frequently away.

      ‘Ben’s probably turned up again by now.’ Guy sat down next to her on the bed, putting what she supposed was meant to be a reassuring hand on her arm. ‘Look, Hol, don’t panic. I mean maybe the kid got it wrong—’

      ‘Her name’s Florence,’ Holly said tightly. It irritated the hell out of her that Guy seldom remembered any of her family or friends’ names, mostly because he didn’t try. ‘She sounded terrified,’ she said. ‘What do you want me to do?’ She swung around fiercely on him. ‘Leave her there alone?’

      ‘Like I said, Ben will have turned up by now.’ Guy smothered a yawn. ‘He probably crept out to meet up with some tart, thinking the kid was asleep and wouldn’t notice. I know that’s what I’d be doing if I was married to that hard-faced bitch.’

      ‘I daresay,’ Holly said, not troubling to hide the edge in her voice. ‘But Ben’s not like you. He—’ She stopped. ‘Ben would never leave Flo on her own,’ she said.

      She stood up. The terrified pounding of her heart had settled to an anxious flutter now, but urgency still beat through her. Two thirty. It would take her an hour and a half to get to Ashdown if there was no traffic. An hour and a half when Flo would be alone and fearful. The terror Holly had felt earlier tightened in her gut. Where the hell was Ben? And why had he not taken his phone with him wherever he had gone? Why leave it in the house?

      She racked her brains to remember their last phone conversation. He’d told her that he and Florence were heading to the mill for a long weekend. He’d taken a few days off from his surgery in Bristol. It was the early May Bank Holiday.

      ‘I’m doing some family history research,’ he’d said, and Holly had laughed, thinking he must be joking, because history of the family or any other sort had never remotely interested her brother before.

      She was wasting time.

      ‘Have you seen my car keys?’ she asked.

      ‘No.’ Guy followed her into the living room, blinking as she snapped on the main light and flooded the space with brightness.

      ‘Jesus,’ he said irritably, ‘Now I’m wide awake. You’re determined to ruin my night.’

      ‘I thought,’ Holly said, ‘that you might come with me.’

      The genuine surprise on his face told her everything she needed to know.

      ‘Why go at all?’ Guy said gruffly, turning away. ‘I still don’t get it. Just call the police, or a neighbour to go over and check it out. Isn’t there some old friend of yours who lives near there? Fiona? Freda?’

      ‘Fran,’ Holly said. She grabbed her keys off the table. ‘Fran and Iain are away for a couple of days,’ she said. ‘And the reason I’m going—’ she stalked up to him, ‘is because my six-year-old niece is alone and terrified and she called me for help. Do you get it now? She’s a child. She’s frightened. And you’re suggesting I go back to bed and forget about it?’

      She picked up her bag, checking for her purse, phone, and tablet. The rattle of the keys had brought СКАЧАТЬ