The Family Man: An edge-of-your-seat read that you won’t be able to put down
It was someone from the college coming for lunch, that was all. Usk was full of cafes and restaurants, but The Hanging Garden was picturesque and had great food, and was a firm favourite.
‘Different car,’ she said. ‘Get real, Jayne Bond.’ Sitting there in her idling car, the heat felt more oppressive than ever.
The lights turned green. She dropped into gear, and from behind she heard the heavy, angry roar of a vehicle accelerating. She’d pulled across the white line by the time the Jeep flashed past, missing her wing by inches.
‘Prick!’ She stamped on her brakes, jarring to a halt and readying for a crunch as the supermarket truck hit her from behind. There was no impact. The Jeep roared past the roadworks, then its brakes glared and smoke breathed from its wheels as it slewed across the road. Its back end slid around, almost embedding in the hedge. It rocked to a standstill.
Emma was panting. She glanced in her mirror at the cars behind.
The Jeep’s driver’s window powered down.
The man was staring right at her. He rested his left hand on the steering wheel, right elbow on the windowsill. He was expressionless, and even from this far away his eyes seemed to pierce to the heart of her. He was anywhere between forty and sixty, with masses of wild, curly, unkempt hair streaked with grey, and a big beard that filled his face and almost reached his chest. One finger of his left hand tapped the wheel, and she wondered what music he was listening to.
Emma rarely judged by appearances. The people she’d mixed with during her tumultuous early years had left her very open-minded, and in her day job she often met caring, sensitive and intelligent students with more art on their skin than a gallery, more metal in their faces than a robot. It was what existed on the inside that mattered.
This man scared her. He looked truly wild, but it was also in the way he stared. At her. There was nothing in his eyes, no expression on his face. No glimmer or hint of what he was thinking. Charles Manson eyes, she thought, no idea where the image came from.
He didn’t even appear to blink.
‘Motherfucker,’ Emma muttered. It was her favourite extreme curse-word. She drove forward, aimed directly at the Jeep fifty metres ahead. She had no intention of ramming it. She wasn’t really sure what she intended, but the man’s stare felt like an assault, and her aggressive reaction was pure instinct.
The Jeep straightened and powered away. The driver’s expression hadn’t changed at all as he looked away, and a second later he was out of sight. The Jeep was much faster than her car. Even so she followed faster than she should have, watching its tail end moving quickly ahead until it disappeared around a bend.
She slowed as she approached the bend a few seconds later, breathing a sigh of relief when she cleared it and there was no sign of the white vehicle.
Two minutes later, parking in The Hanging Garden’s car park and switching off the engine, she gripped the steering wheel and took several deep breaths. Her sweating wasn’t only due to the heat.
‘Just some nutter,’ she said. Then she shivered. Someone walked over my grave. It was a weird saying her mother used to use, and it had always spooked the hell out of her.
She pulled out her phone and called Dom.
Chapter Nine
Soft Bitch
Dom made several mistakes in work that day.
The worst was when he sliced his thumb with a Stanley knife. He bled all over his client’s new kitchen floor, dabbing up blood with a dust cloth as he held his wounded hand over the sink. He swilled the cut and examined it. He probably needed a stitch or two. Instead, he waited a while, then wound a handkerchief tightly around his thumb, held in place with several loops of insulating tape.
The house they were working on was on the side of a hill above Monmouth town, a big, sprawling place that had been extended several times. The owners kept out of their way, other than the frequent tea and biscuit supplies, leaving him and Davey to get on with things.
Dom liked that. Because the job was quite spread out he’d spent most of the day on his own. His phone being without reception was an added bonus.
He’d needed time to think.
He left just before four in the afternoon, taking the van to pick up supplies for the next day. It would be their final day on the job, and Davey wanted to stay later that evening to get things close to finished. It would mean more overtime payments, but Dom was happy with that. Even more so when Davey said his girlfriend would pick him up when he was done.
Heading along the winding driveway, out into the lanes, and down the hill towards the town splayed across the river plain below, his phone started to chime and beep. He’d have expected three or four notifications, but the frantic flurry of sounds communicated real urgency.
He stopped in the next field gateway and left the engine running. He was already soaked in sweat from the van’s sauna-like interior, but seeing the notifications on the screen caused a chill. Four missed calls from Emma, three from Daisy and one from Andy.
His heart jarred in his chest, causing him to cough. He suffered from mild palpitations sometimes, nothing to worry about his doctor had said, ease back on the caffeine and stress. He gripped the wheel and coughed again, and when his heart had settled into a worried gallop he called Andy.
‘What’s happened?’ he asked as soon as his friend answered.
‘Car’s fixed,’ Andy said.
‘Nothing else?’
‘Like what? I’m on the way back, just stopped for a drink. It’s like Death Valley out there.’
‘Emma and Daisy have been trying to call, I’ve been out of service.’
‘So have you called them back?’
‘No. Only you. I thought something …’ He trailed off, closing his eyes and trying to calm down. Sweat trickled down his temple. When he opened his eyes again, they stung.
‘Dom, you need to call your family. See what they want. Then go home and get pissed in your garden. Just … chill.’
‘Chill,’ Dom said, chuckling.
‘I can drop your car down this evening, if you like.’
‘I’ll pick it up from yours. I’ll park the van in the town car park, get Davey to collect it in the morning.’
‘It was three hundred quid.’
Dom was stunned silent.
‘Joking,’ Andy said. ‘Text me later, mate. Fucking hot, isn’t it?’
‘Steaming. Thanks, Andy.’ Dom signed off, then dialled Emma’s phone. He was almost calming, almost breathing normally, on the verge of enjoying the heavy summer heat and the buzzing of bees, the stunning views down over the town and river, and the idea of sitting in the garden polishing off a bottle of Pinot that evening.
‘Where the hell have you been?’ Emma shouted as soon as she picked up.
‘Babe?’
‘Why haven’t you been answering—?’
‘No reception. You know my phone’s dodgy at this place.’
‘You should have phoned! You should have …’ She was so angry it sounded like she was crying. Emma hardly ever cried. ‘Should have given me their landline number, Dom.’
‘What’s happened? Slow down and tell me.’
‘Nothing, nothing really.’ She sighed heavily, anger settling as quickly as it had exploded. But a cool hand was clutched around Dom’s spine, twisting and turning so that the world around him swayed with it.
‘Emma, what’s wrong? Daisy tried calling me too.’
‘I’m in You For Coffee with her now.’
‘I thought she was going to Lauren’s after school?’
‘She did, then Lauren and her mum came into Abergavenny with Daisy. Daisy called me to come and pick her up, she said she’d wait in the park for me. Lauren’s mother bought her an ice cream.’
‘She left her alone in Abergavenny? She’s only eleven!’
‘Dom, she’s been to town before, and waited until I picked her up.’
‘Right. So what’s wrong?’
‘Daisy was on her phone. A woman walked up to her, like directly to her across the grass. Daisy says she looked up to see what she wanted, and the woman just stood there staring straight at her. Then she said, “Soft bitch,” and walked away.’
‘What? What woman? Why?’
‘I don’t bloody know!’
Dom heard Daisy say something in the background. She and Emma mumbled something, then there was a scratching sound and her daughter came on the line. ‘Dad?’
‘Honey, you okay?’
‘Yeah, I’m fine. But that woman was scary. Really grinned a lot, almost laughing. Like Mum just told you, she said “Soft bitch,” and then walked away. Really slow. She wasn’t worried about anything, you know? Didn’t think I’d stand up to her or anything.’
‘Did you know her?’
‘Never seen her before. She smelled of sweat, though. Real stinky.’
‘So what did you do?’
‘Left the park, tried to phone you, rang Mum and then came to the coffee shop. Do you think she knows the man in the Jeep?’
‘What man? What Jeep?’
‘Oh, hang on, Mum hasn’t …’ She trailed off and Dom was left with a quiet phone, more rustling in the background, distant voices.
‘Emma? Daisy?’ His voice was raised, almost shouting, and the car’s interior suddenly felt claustrophobic. When he drew in the humid air was it was devoid of oxygen. Throwing the door open, he almost fell out onto the road. The tarmac was hot and sticky. The air was so still that even the birds seemed too lethargic to sing. The landscape held its breath, and through the phone jammed against his ear he heard only the background sounds.
‘Emma!’ he shouted again, and then she was there.
‘Some guy in a Jeep. I think he’s been following me.’
Dom closed his eyes. The Loony Tunes had been in a van and a BMW, not a Jeep. The crashed BMW had been found, but not the van. And they were proper criminals, armed and dangerous, so of course they wouldn’t use their own vehicles to do the robbery.
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