One Last Breath. Stephen Booth
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sister for the past hour, ever since Andrea had called from London, already in a panic and imagining the worst. Rebecca wasn’t answering either the house number or her mobile. Of course, Andrea had wanted to contact the police straight away, but Dawn had managed to talk her out of it. And now she was regretting it. It was a little too dark up here in Aston, where there was no street lighting and all the houses were screened from the neighbours by trees. Rebecca never forgot to switch on the outside lights at night.
Dawn was well prepared, though. She fumbled in her glove compartment for the torch she always kept in case of breakdowns. It was a pity Jeff was at that conference in Birmingham tonight, because she would have preferred him to be with her. But she ought to be able to do some things on her own, and checking on her sister was one.
Carefully locking the car, she went to the back door of the house. It was the door she always used when she visited her sister, and besides she had a spare key so she could water the plants or feed the dog when Rebecca was away.
Dawn could think of only two possibilities. Most likely, her sister had gone out somewhere and forgotten to take her mobile phone. The garage door was closed, so she couldn’t tell whether Rebecca’s car was there or not. Everyone forgot their mobile now and then. It was even possible to forget your mobile and not remember to switch on the outside lights when you left the house.
There was also a chance that Rebecca was ill. She suffered from migraines sometimes, and she might have taken her tablets and gone to bed to sleep it off. Probably she wouldn’t have heard the phone that way. Dawn imagined her sister lying in her bedroom upstairs, and felt slightly reassured. It was something that could be dealt with.
Even as she tried the key in the lock, Dawn knocked on the back door, knowing it was a useless thing to do. Obviously, Rebecca wouldn’t be sitting in the house with all the lights out.
But the key wouldn’t turn. Dawn pulled it out, looked at it with the torch to make sure she had the right one, and tried again. She rattled it backwards and forwards, and found it turned to the left quite easily, then back again. The door hadn’t been locked.
With a sense of dread, Dawn turned the handle and pushed the door, jumping a little at the soft tearing sound as the seal parted. It was only then that it occurred to her she ought to have gone in through the front door, where the controls for the burglar alarm were located. But she knew with a cold certainty by now that the alarm wouldn’t go off.
Sure enough, the house was completely silent. Dawn called her sister’s name, listening to the waver in her own voice. She called again, a bit louder, trying to sound confident.
‘Rebecca? Are you home?’
Rebecca could have forgotten to lock the back door too, she thought. If she was in a bad state with one of her migraines, all that sort of thing could have gone out of her head. Andrea would be very cross with her mum when she found out.
But Andrea’s worries kept going through Dawn’s mind. Though she knew there was no logic to it, she had to pluck up courage to switch on the light inside the house. She had come into the utility room, and the fluorescent light flickered and gleamed suddenly on the innocuous shapes of a couple of chest freezers, an automatic washing machine and a tumble drier. Through the door at the far end was the kitchen, still in darkness, and past that the hallway and the stairs. She could hear one of the freezers humming, perhaps a faint trickle of fluid. The house was very warm and airless, warmer than Dawn would choose to have her own home.
She crossed the utility room to the kitchen doorway and reached for the light switch. But she stopped. The hum of the freezer wasn’t all she could hear. There was another sound, quite close by. It was just a slight movement, nothing but the tiniest scratch of something hard against the tiles.
‘Rebecca? Are you there?’
She was answered by a noise that chilled her skin, despite the warmth of the central heating. It was a whimper. A small, pitiful whimper, so quiet that if she hadn’t been standing still she might not have heard it at all. It was no more than a tiny sob, an involuntary release of sound into the silence of the house. Even now, Dawn might have convinced herself that she’d imagined it. But then it came again. And the noise wasn’t ahead of her, in the darkened kitchen. It was behind her.
Dawn spun round, staring at the bright, white surfaces of the utility room and at the back door, which she now realized she had left open.
‘Who’s there?’ she said, finding a strength and authority she hadn’t known she possessed.
She shone her torch at the back door, but it made no impression on the darkness outside. She listened carefully, holding her breath. And gradually, her attention focused on one of the freezers.
The unit stood a few inches away from the wall. Dawn thought it had always been like that, but she wasn’t absolutely sure. It was quite a large one, too, because Rebecca liked to buy organic meat in bulk from a local farm shop. It would take some strength to move it when it was full. So probably there had always been that slight gap between the freezer and the wall.
Dawn looked at the back door and decided to leave it open. She glanced around for a weapon, but could see nothing. Instead, she took a firmer grip on her torch and walked towards the freezer. She was about to open the lid when she heard the noise again. A soft brush against the wall, a scratch on the tiles. Something was behind the freezer.
She leaned over and shone her torch into the gap. Dust had gathered on the back of the freezer, although it hadn’t been in place all that long. In among the pipes and cables she saw what at first appeared to be an old-fashioned fur muff jammed into the narrow space. It was brown and white, it smelled of urine, and it trembled when the light hit it.
‘Oh, my God. Milly.’
It took Dawn a couple of minutes to prise the elderly Shih Tzu from behind the freezer, where she had crammed herself into an impossibly tiny ball. The dog’s claws scratched frantically on the tiles and wall in an effort to prevent herself from being dragged into the light.
‘Milly, you poor old thing. What happened to you?’
As far as she could tell, the dog seemed physically unharmed. But when she saw how terrified the animal was, Dawn hardly needed to look any further. She knew without a doubt that her sister must be dead.
On the way back from Castleton, Ben Cooper drove past the Hope cement works and over Pindale to reach the Eden Valley. A tiny hamlet lay at the foot of Pindale, with a restored mine building and a camp site. But few people took this route – the road was single track, and too steep and narrow to make for comfortable driving if you didn’t know it well.
Further on, he crossed the Roman road, Batham Gate, and joined the B6049 south of Bradwell. After a few more miles, he crested the final hill and looked down on Edendale.
The Eden Valley lay at a sort of geological collision point where the two halves of the Peak District met. On one side were the limestone plateaux and wooded gorges of the White Peak, with its patchwork of fields and quiet villages. Enclosing them on three sides like the fingers of a hand were the higher slopes of the Dark Peak. Its barren peat moors were scattered with gritstone outcrops, eroded into the grotesque and sinister shapes that had created so many folk legends.
For Cooper, the White Peak and Dark Peak carried an irresistible symbolism – they represented light and dark, good and evil. Because of Edendale’s location, he sometimes got the idea that he was literally walking the line between good and evil as he moved about the landscape. But the line wasn’t so clear-cut as it might at first appear. Those dark outcrops of twisted rock had a tendency to erupt in places you didn’t expect them. There was always a kind of darkness lurking just below the surface, ready to thrust its way into the daylight.
Cooper drove into the centre of town and reached his flat in Welbeck Street. He could see thunder clouds approaching in the west. They seemed to hang on the horizon for a while until they amassed a large enough bulk, and then they moved to blot out the sky. When he got out of the car, he could feel the air already becoming heavier and more humid. People would be going around saying ‘It’s going to break’ with a note of