Snake in the Grass

  Snake in the Grass

  Dominic Luke

  ROBERT HALE · LONDON

  Contents

  Title Page

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  FIVE

  SIX

  SEVEN

  EIGHT

  NINE

  TEN

  ELEVEN

  TWELVE

  THIRTEEN

  FOURTEEN

  FIFTEEN

  SIXTEEN

  SEVENTEEN

  EIGHTEEN

  NINETEEN

  TWENTY

  TWENTY-ONE

  TWENTY-TWO

  TWENTY-THREE

  TWENTY-FOUR

  TWENTY-FIVE

  TWENTY-SIX

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  TWENTY-NINE

  THIRTY

  THIRTY-ONE

  THIRTY-TWO

  THIRTY-THREE

  By the Same Author

  Copyright

  ONE

  ‘Oh shiiit!’

  Something had darted out into the road in front of him: a dark shape picked out momentarily in the glaring headlights. Dean swerved and braked, acting from instinct. His car skidded wildly across the road and onto the verge, where it paused for a second before slowly tilting forwards to end up nose first in the ditch. Dean was flung towards the steering wheel. The seat belt cut into his shoulder. It hurt. It hurt a lot. He would have yelled with the pain of it, had he not already been yelling with terror.

  It was all over in the blink of an eye. Dean stopped yelling. He turned off the engine. Suddenly it was eerily quiet, except for his thumping heart and panicky breathing. He felt as if he’d been picked up and given a good shaking by a disgruntled giant. He’d never been more scared in his life.

  What was it that had run across the road in front of him? Dean pictured the dark shape as he had seen it spotlighted by his headlights: a sleek black creature with glaring green eyes. The creature had given him a look as if to say: get off my road.

  But that couldn’t be right. It had to be down to his overactive imagination. It was true that there had been an item on Radio 5 a few weeks back about beasts which lurked in the countryside, killing sheep and eating them, terrorizing dog walkers in secluded woodlands and savaging their pets. The police knew all about it but kept it quiet. Dean, however, scoffed at such rubbish. There was not a shred of evidence, just hearsay. You had to be scientific about these things or you’d end up believing anything. What he’d seen just now had probably been an ordinary-sized cat made enormous by his unruly imagination. It was highly unlikely that panther-sized creatures were roaming the English countryside undetected. There was nothing dangerous about the countryside – unless you brought that danger on yourself, as he had just done by having this stupid accident. Now he needed to decide what to do next. He couldn’t just sit here staring down at the bottom of the ditch. What if his car exploded? He wasn’t sure if cars really exploded or if that only happened on TV, but it was better to be safe than sorry.

  He kicked open the door and scrambled out, making a mental note as he did so not to use such a hackneyed phrase as better safe than sorry in future: it was the sort of thing his mother would say.

  There was water in the ditch. His trainers got soaked. He crawled up onto the verge, slipping and sliding in the mud. What next? He looked all round. Thin clouds were scudding across the sky, lit from behind by bright moonlight. Moonlight also lay coldly across the soggy fields. He must be miles from home and he didn’t have his phone with him. Why oh why had he left the party in such a hurry? He’d have to walk now. In the dark. With wet shoes. He’d get trench foot. Or hypothermia. Or worse.

  Some night this was turning out to be.

  He was shivering: shaking like a leaf, as his mother would have said in her hackneyed way. The effect of shock, perhaps. A normal reaction? Or was he being a wimp? Richard would say wimp; and his stepfather would go on about teenage drivers and what a menace they were. But who cared what his stepfather would say? The man was only interested in money, the cost of things. And as for Richard: well, Richard was a bastard.

  Headlights flicked across the moonlit fields. A car was coming. That was a stroke of luck, on this little-used lane. No need to tramp in the dark. He could get a lift home.

  Then again …

  His overactive imagination was off once more. He couldn’t rein it in.

  What if the driver of the car was a serial killer?

  It was a ridiculous idea, he told himself. What were the odds on meeting a serial killer? Millions to one. On the other hand, serial killers – unlike wild beasts – were real: it was a well-documented fact, there was evidence. It would be just his luck to meet one, a serial killer who picked up hitchhikers and took them back to his grotty flat (serial killers always had grotty flats: the ones on channel 5 did, anyway). Once in the killer’s lair, Dean would be strangled with an electric flex, his body dismembered and dissolved in acid….

  No, no, no! Shivering and shaking, Dean cursed his imagination as the hum of the car grew ever louder in the still, cold air. Other people didn’t have this problem. They didn’t let their imaginations run away with them. It was just him. There could be no two ways about it: he was a freak.

  The car slowed as it rounded a bend, then accelerated on the straight, bearing down on him. The headlights were like piercing eyes – but at least they weren’t green, like the panther’s. The panther didn’t exist. It was a figment of his imagination. As was the serial killer.

  All the same, it was better to be safe than—

  Dean stepped back from the road, crouched down behind the upended boot of his car. ‘Don’t stop, don’t stop, please don’t stop.’

  The car slowed, pulled over to the verge, stopped. The engine revved once, twice, then fell silent. Nothing happened. Slowly, Dean straightened up, blinking in the glare of the headlights. The lights suddenly snapped off, plunging him into darkness. The moonlight seemed very dim after the glare. All was quiet.

  The driver’s door opened. Two legs swung out. A woman’s head appeared. She stood there looking at Dean with the door between them.

  ‘Hello there! Need any help?’ Her breath smoked in the cold air.

  ‘My car’s in the ditch.’ Dean added, ‘Something jumped out into the road. I swerved …’ as explanation, justification.

  ‘Fox or pheasant?’

  ‘It was black and looked like a cat. It wasn’t a cat,’ he added hastily: it sounded silly, to have driven into a ditch for the sake of a cat. ‘It was big, enormous.’

  ‘A panther?’ The woman’s voice expressed amusement, curiosity and scepticism all at the same time. ‘There are beasts lurking in the countryside. I heard about them on Radio 5.’

  ‘It did look rather like a beast,’ Dean admitted. ‘It had green eyes.’ He was rather doubtful now about the colour of the eyes, but felt it would be too much like shilly-shallying to change his story at this late stage.

  ‘Gosh! How exciting!’ The woman closed her car door and walked towards Dean, placing one foot precisely in front of the other, heels clicking on the tarmac. ‘You seem harmless enough. One has to be careful, you understand, in my position: a woman on her own at night …’

  Dean was greatly insulted at being termed harmless. He was not sure that the same could be said of the woman. She had black hair, was dressed in black. He skirt was very short, her legs looked very long: Dean was fascinated by them. She seemed very sleek and athletic, like the beast. The beast, though, had been a figment. This woman was most definitely not.

  She was near at hand now, scrutinizing him carefully. He could not guess at her age in the moonlight. Not old. But not young, e
ither. She seemed very self-confident – reckless even. Dangerous. He could no longer see her legs, but her breasts were … oh my … her breasts …

  Dean gulped, made an effort to look away. Not that he was doing anything wrong. It was her own fault. She was asking for it, wearing a top like that. Wasn’t she freezing?

  He didn’t like the way she was looking at him. Speculative. Acquisitive. Hungry.

  ‘You are shaking like a leaf.’ A hackneyed phrase, shaking like a leaf; but the way she said it was anything but.

  ‘It’s cold.’

  ‘Shock makes you feel cold.’

  ‘It’s December. It’s cold.’ Dean refused to admit to shock.

  ‘Your poor car!’ The woman laid a pale hand on Dean’s arm.

  ‘What are you doing?’ he asked in alarm.

  ‘Treating you for shock.’

  He backed away but there was nowhere to run. She had him trapped against the upended boot of his car. Her hands were all over him, fingers probing. His knees buckled, his heart was going haywire. Every time she touched him, it was like an electric shock. He jerked and flinched and gasped.

  Whatever she was up to, it wasn’t murder.

  ‘Oh, ah, oh!’ He gulped. ‘Do you really – ah, ah – do you really think this helps? Why are you undoing – ow, ouch, oh – undoing my – ah, ah, shit, ouch, shiiit…!’

  She stepped away from him. It was all over.

  Had one minute passed, or many? He had lost all sense of time. He pulled up his jeans with shaking hands, fumbled with the zip. It was a lot darker now. Thicker clouds had come across, covering the moon, drawing a veil over the scene of the crime.

  Crime? Well, that was what it was. He’d been assaulted. Molested. And he’d just stood there and let her get on with it. And to think he’d been worried about being strangled and dissolved in acid. However weird things got in his head, real life always turned out to be far, far—

  As he struggled with his belt, his brain went into overdrive, firing off questions like sparks from a Catherine wheel. Or was that what all the fuss was about? Or had he missed something? Did she know that it had been his first time? Could women tell? Had he made a fool of himself in some way? What if she was laughing at him? Why did he now feel so jittery, so spaced out? Was this normal? Or was it the first sign of some horrible disease? What if she’d given him warts or crabs or scabies or herpes or gonorrhoea or syphilis or AIDS or—

  Shut up! Shut up! Leave me alone!

  ‘Well?’ The woman was standing by her car, her clothes back in place, smoothed down. She was holding the passenger door open. ‘Can I give you a lift anywhere?’

  ‘No thanks.’

  ‘Are you sulking?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You are.’

  ‘Am not.’

  ‘Then get in the car.’

  What else could he do? If he refused, she would just go off and leave him there, and he had no idea how to get home. He’d probably freeze to death long before he found his way, or he’d fall into a ditch and drown. This woman was his only hope – and she knew it.

  With great reluctance, he got into the car and pulled on the seat belt. He sat tensed up, scowling.

  He watched out of the corner of his eye as she drove. Her pale, long-fingered hands stroked the steering wheel, caressed the gear stick – the same hands that had been stroking and caressing him a matter of minutes ago: invading his personal space, toying with him. His overactive imagination had not been too far out after all. There had been a wild beast lurking, waiting. It was her. She was a panther. He was her prey.

  ‘Are you going to say anything?’

  ‘No.’ Dean clamped his lips together. Why should he talk to her? Why should he be cooperative? It was bad enough that his body had cooperated just now, betraying him – not that he wasn’t used to it. He was used to being scourged by spots, having muscles that never got any bigger, feet that smelled, hair with a mind of its own, reflexes he had no control over. But he could still choose who he talked to and who he didn’t.

  ‘Why were you driving so fast?’ Her words probed intrusively, the way, just now, her fingers had done.

  ‘I don’t know what you mean. I wasn’t driving fast.’

  ‘Don’t try pulling the wool. If you hadn’t been speeding, you wouldn’t have ended up in that ditch.’

  ‘I told you, there was a—’ He stopped, frowning. He wasn’t going to tell her anything. ‘You’re a weirdo,’ he muttered.

  ‘Quite possibly.’ The woman changed gear, driving uphill. She added, as if to herself, ‘This is where too much gin gets you.’

  Dean seized on this. ‘You’re drunk? A drunk driver?’ No wonder she seemed dangerous, reckless. She was out of control, sozzled.

  ‘Never mind me. I asked you a question. Why were you out driving?’

  ‘If … if you must know—’ Dean couldn’t help himself. It all came spilling out. ‘—I was pissed off. Really pissed off.’

  ‘And why was that?’

  ‘Because of my party.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘I had the house to myself. I decided to have a party. A Christmas party.’

  ‘What went wrong?’ She glanced across at him. ‘You might as well tell me. I can see that you are dying to get it off your chest.’

  ‘Smart arse,’ muttered Dean. But she was right. He simply couldn’t hold it in. ‘Richard turned up, that’s what happened: Richard, my stepbrother. I didn’t invite him but he turned up anyway. Everything had been going to plan until he came along. He had a vodka jelly. All the girls went, “Ooh, Rich, how clever, what a great idea!” They were well impressed. Like it’s anything special, a poxy vodka jelly.’

  ‘He stole your thunder?’ the panther suggested. ‘You had hoped to impress the girls yourself?’

  ‘No,’ said Dean, meaning yes. He tried to turn his back on the woman, which was not easy in the passenger seat of the car. He hated her. She was too clever by half. And she seemed to think it was amusing to mock him. She could talk to herself from now on.

  His shoulder was killing him. He’d probably dislocated it in the crash. He’d be crippled for life. And as if that wasn’t bad enough, he couldn’t stop thinking about the party. Rage boiled inside him.

  Finally, he couldn’t keep a lid on it any longer. Words came spouting out like steam from a pressure cooker. His party had been perfect, he insisted, everything in place: he’d researched it on the internet. It hadn’t been boring, naff or a pile of pants: that was just people trying to be clever at his expense. But then Richard had arrived. Richard had gatecrashed. Richard had brought a vodka jelly and a whole bottle of tequila. He’d turned the music up full; he’d monopolized Sandra Hays; and, as if that wasn’t bad enough, when he was drunk he’d started to dance on the kitchen table, stripping off at the same time. Dean ground his teeth, remembering how his party had veered out of control as Richard gyrated on the kitchen table in nothing but a pair of boxers. The boys had whooped and guffawed. The girls had watched with wide eyes, giggling. It was at that point that Dean had stormed out in a rage, venting his spleen by driving at dangerous speeds along the country lanes – but the panther didn’t need to know about that bit: he kept quiet about the speeding.

  ‘He sounds like quite a character, this Richard,’ she said as she negotiated a crossroads.

  ‘Well, he’s not. He’s a bastard.’ Dean gave the woman a sidelong glance. Just who was she, this raving lunatic? Even his imagination had never come up with something this bizarre. ‘I hate people who just barge in without being invited,’ Dean muttered darkly, thinking about his trousers as well as his party.

  The woman gave a bark of laughter. ‘I take it you don’t get on with your brother?’

  ‘He is not my brother. He’s my stepbrother. I hate him. Everything was fine until my stupid mother decided to get remarried. I liked being an only child.’

  ‘But you’re not an only child. What about your sister?’

  Dean was jolted
out of his sullen mood. He glanced at the woman with some trepidation. Was she more of a witch than a panther – a witch who could read your mind? ‘How do you know about my sister?’

  ‘I see her around. I saw her the other day, shopping in Waitrose with your mother.’

  Dean blanched. His sister and his mother. What else did this witch-woman know? He’d thought she was a complete stranger.

  His heart was pounding. He couldn’t breathe. He was having one of his panic attacks. (Don’t exaggerate, darling, they’re not panic attacks. It’s teenage angst, perfectly normal. His bloody mother: what did she know?)

  ‘Your mother used to attend an evening class I taught. Painting for beginners. That, of course, was in the days before your father ran off with his secretary.’

  ‘She was not his secretary.’ Dean spoke through gritted teeth. ‘She was his business partner’s wife.’

  ‘Oh? They say secretary in the village, but the gossips are not always accurate. I suppose it is less of a cliché to run off with one’s business partner’s wife.’

  ‘Why don’t you just shut up and mind your own business!’ Dean shouted. He was feeling faint. It was one thing being ravished by a total stranger, quite another when she turned out to be someone who shopped in Waitrose and knew your mother. And now, not content with having rooted about inside his trousers, she seemed to want to root through his family’s private affairs. She had no sense of decorum. Was off her head on booze. Was probably a loony too. She certainly acted like one.

  He did his best to ignore her.

  They drove on in silence. The car purred into the village, turned into Dean’s road.

  ‘H-how … how do you know where I live?’

  ‘It’s a small village. I live here too.’

  ‘But I’ve never seen you before in my life!’

  ‘I find that hard to believe. We live only a stone’s throw from each other and I’ve been teaching at the college in town for years.’

  ‘M-my college?’ Dean squirmed in his seat. This was getting worse and worse. She had to be playing tricks on him. Or maybe the whole thing was a hallucination caused by the shock of the accident. He didn’t know her, he didn’t, he didn’t …