The Likeness

It had been a good call. Daniel had known he could trust Abby to keep it together; if anyone flaked out, it would be Rafe or Justin. He had got them separated, put them both under supervision and come up with a plan that kept them both busy, all within seconds. The guy was wasted on academia.

“I’m not sure we were really as quick off the mark as we think,” Justin said. “We could have been standing there in a daze for a good five or ten minutes, for all I know. I can barely remember that part; my mind’s wiped it out. The first thing I’m clear on is that, by the time Daniel and I got to the back gate, you were gone. We didn’t know if you’d headed for the village to get help, or collapsed somewhere, or-”

“I just ran,” I said quietly. “I just remember running. I didn’t even notice I was bleeding for ages.” Justin flinched.

“I don’t think you were, at first,” Abby said gently. “There wasn’t any blood on the kitchen floor, or on the patio.”

They had checked. I wondered when, and whether that had been Daniel’s idea or Abby’s. “That was the other thing,” Justin said. “We didn’t know… well, how bad it was. You were gone so fast, we hadn’t had a chance to… We thought-I mean, I thought, anyway-since you had got out of sight so quickly, it couldn’t be all that serious, could it? It might have been just a nick, for all we knew.”

“Ha,” said Rafe, reaching for an ashtray.

“We didn’t know. It might have been. I said so to Daniel, but he just gave me a look that could have meant anything. So we… God. We started looking for you. Daniel said the most urgent thing was to find out if you’d gone to the village, but it was all locked up and dark, just the odd light on in bedrooms; there was obviously nothing going on. So we started working our way back towards the house, going back and forth in these big arcs, hoping we’d cross paths with you somewhere along the way.”

He stared down at the glass in his hands. “At least, that’s what I assume we were doing. I was just following Daniel on and on and on through this pitch-black labyrinth of lanes; I had no idea where we were, my sense of direction was completely gone. We were afraid to switch on the torch and afraid to call you-I’m not even sure why, it just seemed too dangerous: in case someone in a farmhouse noticed or in case you hid from us, I suppose, I don’t know which. So Daniel just flicked on the torch for a second every few minutes, cupped his hand around it and did a quick sweep, then switched it off again. The rest of the time we felt our way by the hedges. It was freezing, like winter-we hadn’t even thought of coats. It didn’t seem to bother Daniel, you know what he’s like, but I couldn’t feel my toes; I was sure I was getting frost-bite. We wandered around for hours-”

“You didn’t,” Rafe said. “Trust me. We were stuck here with a bottle of disinfectant and a bloody knife and nothing to do but stare at the clock and go out of our minds. You were only gone about forty-five minutes.”

Justin shrugged, a tense twitch. “Well, it felt like hours. Finally Daniel stopped dead-I bumped straight into the back of him, like something out of Laurel and Hardy-and he said, ‘This is absurd. We’ll never find her like this.’ I asked him what else he suggested we should do, but he ignored me. He just stood there, staring up at the sky like he was waiting for divine inspiration; it was starting to cloud over, but the moon had come up, I could see his profile against it. After a moment he said-perfectly normally, as if we were in the middle of some dinner-table discussion-‘Well, let’s assume she’s headed for a specific place, rather than simply wandering around in the dark. She must have been meeting Ned somewhere. Somewhere sheltered, surely; the weather’s so unpredictable. Is there anywhere nearby that she-’ And then he took off. He was running, flat out, and fast, I didn’t know he could run like that-I don’t think I’d ever seen Daniel run before, have you?”

“He ran the other night,” Rafe said, grinding out his cigarette. “After the torch-bearing villager. He’s fast, all right, when he needs to be.”

“I didn’t have a clue where he was going; all I could think about was trying to keep up. For some reason the idea of being out there by myself sent me into a complete panic-I mean, I know we were only a few hundred yards from home, but that’s not what it felt like. It felt…” Justin shivered. “It felt dangerous, ” he said. “Like something was happening, all round us, and we couldn’t see it, but if I was on my own…”

“That was shock, hon,” Abby said gently. “It’s normal.”