Page 118 of No Safe Place

‘Friday afternoon,’ he said, with a flourish. ‘And his housemates hadn’t seen him, had they? So, he’s got no alibi for either attack.’

It’s never this easy, Field thought again.

Chapter 83

Sunday | Afternoon

Andy

It didn’t come as a surprise.

Andy was always listening, and no amount of therapy or CBT could stop him. And as quiet as they thought they had been, they weren’t quiet enough. The soft tread of boots on the stairs, the squeak of the banister taking someone’s weight.

It was a relief.

His whole arm was on fire, radiating out from the wound on his forearm, up to his shoulder blades. The paracetamol and antiseptic weren’t cutting it.

Andy slipped his noise-cancelling headphones on and lowered himself to the ground. The pain of putting his injured arm above his head made him feel sick, but it was the only way he could think to protect himself.

Even with the headphones on, the sound still reached him. The door smashing in and the shouting, all faint and muffledand far away, until someone ripped the headphones off, and he could hear the roar of it all.

Metal bit into his wrist and Andy was dragged upwards. He couldn’t see who was behind him and the pressure of the noise in the room – shouting stamping doors banging – meant he probably couldn’t have processed it anyway.

He twisted, trying to ask someone to pick up his neatly packed rucksack, but he was shoved forward again, and this time there was a hand on his bad arm. Andy screamed in pain, and it was a strange noise, one he’d never made before.

The yelling intensified, and whether Andy planned to resist arrest or not, within seconds he was being slammed into the wall next to the door, his face pressed hard into the embossed, flowery wallpaper.

Andy didn’t know how many hands were on him. His shoulders, his head – pushed into the wall with a force he thought he probably deserved, although he couldn’t say why. He couldn’t understand the words, the sounds the voices were making – but their tone was angry and urgent, buzzing in his ears after they’d finished speaking.

Hot tears stung his eyes, and he closed them.

And it was David’s voice he heard, in his head, telling him not to panic.

Chapter 84

Sunday | Afternoon

Lily

Part of her hoped that Cal would be there, and part of her didn’t.

The police had left a voicemail to say they were done, and Lily could go back home. She didn’t want to go inside yet, but she wanted to see it – the house.

Their street was quiet. Windows were open in every home, curtains hanging limply in the still air. There was nothing to indicate the horrors of a few days ago.

The house looked the same as it always had. Middle of a terrace of identical little houses. Scruffy front garden, with a pop of colour from the pot of geraniums she planted for Paige, every spring.

But behind the house, over the roof, the sky was shot through with orange. A warning colour, caused by dust from the Sahara, according to the News app.

Lily’s stomach rolled and pitched, and she stopped walkingfor a moment, sitting down heavily on a crumbling brick wall opposite, a few houses down. She wasn’t going to be sick – she was almost sure the actual vomiting was over. She just had to breathe through it.

The feeling was so familiar, now she knew what it was. When she was younger, beta blockers had made her feel ropey, but it was diazepam that had really fucked with her.

Three separate doctors had tried her on diazepam, prescribing more pills for the side effects. No one listened when she asked, begged, not to go back on it. Patronising smiles promised that if she could power through for a few short weeks, her body would adjust, and she’d start to “really feel the benefit”.

The worst had been the second time, just after her thirteenth birthday. She was painfully thin already, and the pills set off a chain reaction of sickness, fever and migraines that blurred her vision for days.

Another deep breath in.