and Sarah shared. He staggered inside, dropped Sarah’s body to the floor, slammed the door, locked it behind him with his master key and retraced his footsteps, fighting the urge to breathe in before he climbed back out through the window.
The moment he got outside, he collapsed.
Now, standing in the hotel car park, Sampson stepped on his cigarette and savoured the lingering memory of that night.
How much sweeter it would have been if he could have taken Kate into that wood.
He couldn’t believe she was back. Now he was going to get his chance, at last. The chance to make her his. The chance to look into her eyes and see what she saw at the moment of death. They would be naked, slick with sweat, his mouth on hers, her tongue clamped between his teeth, his legs between her thighs. And the most delicious idea of all: as he fucked her he would pick up a knife and slash her throat – and then slit his own. Wouldn’t that be the perfect way to go, at the zenith of experience, the apex of feeling. He would press his neck against hers so the blood from their jugulars flowed and mingled together, and the last thing he’d see would be her, dying too.
The fantasy excited and terrified him in equal measure. What the hell was wrong with him, imagining himself dying in the arms of some woman? It was obscene, that’s what it was. Obscene and confusing. He despised the way she made him feel. He had to put an end to it, to remove this random element, this satellite that stirred the calm, dark surface of his life. He refocused on his fantasy, but this time his own throat stayed intact. Only Kate’s jugular gushed. Only she died in pain.
He had to light another cigarette to calm himself, and as he struck the match he realised how stupid he’d been. How could he not have recognised the man with Kate on the CCTV film? He’d been so busy staring at Kate – but it was him. The doctor. Stephen Wilson. Except – how could it be? There was absolutely no way that could be Stephen Wilson.
What the fuck was going on?
He had to find them. And he thought he had an idea where they might be heading, where he would go if he were them. Back to where it all began. He got into his car and headed for Salisbury.
The St Magdalena Nursing Home made Vernon Maddox feel nauseous. Old people gave him the heebie-jeebies and he wasn’t afraid to admit it. He was frightened of being like them. It only seemed like yesterday when he was young and virile with a thick thatch of auburn hair on his head and chest. Now the hair on his head was falling out and his chest hair was grey. At least Shirl still liked him. He felt a wave of sentiment, then returned to concentrating on the matter in hand. Finding his wife and son.
He’d only met Kate’s Aunt Lil once before – back before she was loony tunes – and it wasn’t a visit he’d ever planned to repeat. If anyone had told him that one day he’d be visiting the old bat in an old folks’ home he would have told them to stop smoking crack, but here he was, clutching a droopy bunch of flowers.
He’d only just recovered from the flight. Flying scared him even more than old people, especially since 9/11. This was the first time he’d been on a plane since that terrible day, even though Kate had pestered him ever since to visit the old country. She’d argued that you shouldn’t give in to terrorists; that you had to live your life as normally as possible. Yeah, right . . . He remembered watching footage from London after the bombings, with Londoners getting back on the subway – or the tube, whatever it was called – and those ridiculous red buses the very day after the bombs went off. Brave? It was crazy, as far as he was concerned.
It hadn’t been difficult at all to find the nursing home where Aunt Lil was waiting for her flight out of here. After discovering his wife’s monstrous betrayal, Vernon had rushed home in a cab and scoured the house. Who would Kate visit in England? She only had two living relatives, Lil, and her mousey sister, Miranda. Although Kate had taken her address book with her she hadn’t deleted the contacts on her computer, and hacking into it couldn’t have been easier to guess – her password was Jack’s name and birthdate. There, under L – and this pissed him off, the way she filed people by their first name instead of their surname – was the name and address of Aunt Lil’s home. He moved on to M and found Miranda’s address. Easy.
On his way back to the airport he had considered calling the police, getting Interpol on the case, or whoever dealt with such crimes. But how long would it take to persuade the authorities that Jack had been abducted, especially as it was by his own mother? It would be far too slow. He wanted his son back now. And another thing – he wanted to do it himself. He wanted to see Kate’s face when he caught up with her. That would be well worth the trauma of the flight and having to spend a few nights apart from Shirl.
The nursing home was in London, so that was where he headed first, after booking into a hotel near Paddington, the first one he saw after getting off the Heathrow Express. He vaguely remembered Kate telling him some tale about how Lil had moved from Bath (pronounced with an ah) to London when she was in her late sixties to be near her old friends. Lil had actually grown up in London.
It was a grand Victorian detached building with ivy scaling the walls. Vernon’s feet crunched on gravel as he walked up to the front door and pressed the buzzer. A woman in a crisp white uniform and a butt to die for beckoned him in, and he explained who he was and who he’d come to see, trying not to wrinkle his nose at the smell that drifted through the building, breaking through the wall of air freshener.
‘Hi.’ He turned on his most charming smile, the one that he liked to practise on female undergraduates. He explained who he was and who he’d come to see. ‘My wife visited the other day,’ he guessed. ‘Kate Maddox. She would have had my son, Jack, with her.’
The nurse beamed. ‘Ah, yes, the American boy. What a little angel. Such good manners.’
‘Yes, he’s been well disciplined.’
The nurse raised an eyebrow, then said, ‘Shall I show you up to Miss Johnson’s room?’
He followed the nurse up the stairs, enjoying the view of her ass in her tight uniform – Shirl’s ass had passed its ‘best before’ date – and was shown along a corridor with a carpet the colour of a blended roast dinner. The nurse knocked on a door but didn’t wait for a response. ‘Lil, darling, you’ve got a visitor,’ she said, ushering him in.
Aunt Lil was sitting in a chair by the window. When she turned her head towards him Vernon was reminded of a skeleton in a horror flick. He could almost hear the creak. Vernon clutched his head, as if proximity to such evident senility would cause him to contract it like it was an infectious disease.
‘I’ll leave you alone,’ said the nurse, closing the door.
It was stiflingly hot in the room. Vernon could feel his shirt sticking to his back. He looked around. A stuffed rabbit lay on the bed, a sign of how Lil had returned to childhood. Jack had a stuffed rabbit that was quite similar. He’d left it behind in Boston. Vernon had felt sentimental when he saw Jack’s rabbit on his bed, but was secretly pleased. He didn’t believe in boys cuddling stuffed toys. He didn’t want his son growing up soft. He bet that his idol, Hemingway, never owned a stuffed rabbit.
He moved as close as he dared towards the old woman. ‘Hi, Lil, it’s me. Vernon Maddox. Kate’s husband.’
Aunt Lil looked up at him with watery eyes, half-obscured by large-framed glasses. ‘Kate? Where’s Kate?’
‘She’s not here. I’m her husband. I’m
