Page 69 of The Friend Request

Maybe the driver is lost. A car that took a wrong turning, came down the track, and they realised it was a dead end and reversed out. That happens. Even here, in the middle of nowhere, people make wrong turns. Satnav sends them down lanes that don’t lead anywhere, and they curse and do a three-point turn and go back the way they came. That’s all this is. A wrong turn. A lost driver. Already gone.

But the engine stopped. I heard it stop. A lost driver doesn’t stop – a lost driver reverses, or turns, or at the very least sits there with the engine running while they check their phone. This car drove up, switched off, and went dark, as if whoever was driving it had arrived where they meant to be.

Then I hear the footsteps.

Not loud. Not heavy. Just the soft crunch of shoes on gravel, coming from the side of the cottage – the left side, where there’s a narrow gap between the wall and the fence that runs along the field boundary. The sound moves slowly. Deliberately. One step, then another, then a pause, then another, as if the person is feeling their way along the wall in the dark, or stopping to listen at each window.

My legs go cold. The blood drains out of them so fast it feels like the floor has tilted. I take a step backwards from the window, and my hip catches the arm of the sofa. I grab it to steady myself, and the crisps fall off the table and hit the rug with a soft crackle that sounds deafening in the silence.

The footsteps stop.

I hold my breath.

For five seconds, ten seconds, fifteen, nothing moves. The fire ticks. The television throws blue light across the walls. Outside, the wind pushes at the windows and dies and pushes again. I stand in the middle of the sitting room with my hand on the sofa and my mouth open and my gaze locked on the front door at the end of the hallway.

The footsteps start again. Closer now. Heading along the front of the cottage, past the window box, past the drainpipe that gurgles when it rains. Coming towards the door.

I should do something. I should call someone – Alex, the police, Jeff, anyone. My phone is on the kitchen worktop next to the car keys, but the phone has no signal, I know it has no signal, I’ve checked it a hundred times. The Wi-Fi. I could try to get the awful Wi-Fi going and message Alex. I could email. I could⁠—

The door handle goes down.

Not a knock. Not someone calling out, not a hello, anyone home?, not the polite rattle of a visitor who’s trying to work out if the place is occupied. Just the slow, firm depression of the handle – down, held, tested – and then the faint resistance of the lock catching, and then the handle releasing and going back up.

Silence.

I’m standing six feet from the front door. The hallway is narrow and dark – I didn’t turn the hall light on – and I can see the door, the frame, the handle. The bolt is across. I slid it when Jeff left this afternoon, the way I do every evening, top bolt and bottom bolt and the main lock. It felt excessive at the time, and now it’s the only thing between me and whoever is standing on the other side of that door.

The handle moves again. Down, hold, release. As if the person is confirming what they already suspected – that the door is locked, that I’m inside, that I know they’re there.

My hand is over my mouth, my breath hot and fast against my palm, my pulse in my ears, not beating but roaring, a sound so loud I’m terrified the person outside can hear it, too.

Then nothing. The handle doesn’t go down again. The footsteps don’t resume. The wind blows, the fire crackles, and the television throws its silent blue light across the wall. I stand in the middle of the cottage with my hand over my mouth and my back against the sofa, and I wait.

I wait for a knock that doesn’t come. I wait for a voice that doesn’t speak. I wait for the sound of the car starting, or footsteps retreating, or anything that tells me the person has gone, and I get nothing. Just silence. The huge, pressing, terrible silence of a place where nobody lives for miles and nobody can hear me if I shout for help.

I don’t know how long I stand there. It could be five minutes. It could be thirty. At some point my legs give out and I slide down the sofa and sit on the floor with my knees pulled up and my arms wrapped around them. The muted television plays on above me – Kate Winslet and Jack Black in a video shop, laughing, falling in love, a thousand miles away in a world where the worst thing that can happen is a broken heart.

The car keys are on the kitchen worktop. Jeff’s farmhouse is over the hill. The phone has no signal.

I sit on the floor and I stay still and I don’t sleep and I watch the front door until my eyes burn.

The handle doesn’t move again.

But nobody drives away either.

Chapter Thirty-Two

The footsteps start again. They resume from the side of the cottage where they stopped before – and this time they’re treading faster. The crunch of gravel gives way to the softer sound of someone stepping on to grass, which means they’ve veered off the path and around the corner towards the back of the cottage.

The back door.

The thought hits me, and I’m on my feet before I’ve finished thinking it. The front door has both bolts and the main lock – I know that, I did it hours ago, it’s secure. But the back door. The back door opens on to the yard from the kitchen, and it has a Yale latch and a key lock. I turned the key when Jeff left, I’m almost sure I turned the key, but there’s no deadlock. No top bolt, no bottom bolt. Just the lock and the latch and the old, swollen wood of a door that’s likely been warping in its frame since before I was born.

I cross the sitting room and stumble into the hallway. My shin catches the corner of the telephone table, and pain shoots up my leg, but I don’t stop. The kitchen is dark – I switched the light off after washing up – and as I come through the doorway I freeze, because the kitchen window is right there, black glass, uncurtained, and the overhead light is off, but the glow from the hallway is falling across the tiles and the table and the worktop, which means⁠—

Anyone outside can see in.

I’ve been walking around in lamplight and firelight all evening with the sitting room curtains drawn, feeling safe, and the whole time the kitchen window has been bare. No curtain, no blind, nothing. Just glass. And if someone is standing in the yard right now, they can see straight into this room – the table, the worktop, the back door, me.