Page 43 of Watching You

But he might find her again. He just might.

And she might be more badly hurt than she felt as yet.

The body had a wonderful inbuilt pain relief system that kept you going for a while before letting you know just how bad things really were.

Worse than that, he might get away. He had to have a car or motorbike in the area, there being no easy way of getting where they were without a vehicle.

And it was possible that she’d just get lost. More than possible.

Probable. Her head was already spinning.

That left only the prospect of going after him in the direction of her cabin and car. She needed her keys, her wallet and her mobile. That was all. If he really was as badly hurt as she suspected, it was possible that he wouldn’t bother her at all.

She moved several metres to the left of his tracks and followed as quietly as she could, clutching the cracked rib and stopping to check there was no blood in her saliva. It was clear. That was good. No wet sounds in her breath, either.

The man she was walking towards had lost someone under her knife. A woman. Beth hadn’t got much of a look at his face, but the glimpse she’d had was all she needed. That, and his scream. He’d yelled that at her once before.

His mother had been brought in by ambulance having suffered a suspected heart attack.

She’d been kept alive en route with shocks and drugs, but as soon as Beth had cut her open, the damage was obvious.

Such were the perils of decades of smoking topped up with years of alcohol abuse.

The woman had been thin, almost emaciated, and it had been clear that all her calories had come from an off-licence and that even when she wasn’t actively smoking, the air she was breathing in at home was still tainted with toxins.

A postmortem had confirmed extensive cardiovascular damage, a massive blood clot in her heart and several small tumours forming in her lungs.

The cancer would have claimed her, had her end not been quickened by the heart attack.

Her body had been a corpse-in-waiting. There had been no kind way to break the news to her family, but as ever, it was hard to tell people that someone they loved had caused their own death, and that there had been nothing medically the team could do to save them.

There had been an older man there, Beth now remembered.

Unemotional, almost closed off. The adult son hadn’t been in the room as she’d broken the news to his father.

It was only as Beth had exited with the two other doctors who’d volunteered to be present to answer questions, that the son had appeared.

‘You killed her!’ he’d screamed at them.

‘Keep walking,’ one of the other doctors had warned Beth as she’d turned round to look at him, preparing to go back and talk it through. ‘I’ll call security.’

‘But—’ she’d begun.

‘You know the protocols. It’s dangerous to talk with family when they’re that upset. Best advice is to walk away and let them calm down.’

They’d rounded the corner as he was still yelling, but he hadn’t run after them.

The image in her mind was of a man somewhere between twenty and forty, with mid-brown hair, a sprinkling of moles on his face, with deep-set brown eyes and square shoulders that seemed to jut out from his neck at ninety degrees.

But it was the desperate screech of his voice that had stuck in her memory.

The sense that he needed to vent at them, that he needed it to be someone else’s fault.

Grief was a parasite, and its favourite meal was blame.

Still she couldn’t summon the woman’s name.

Working in trauma, there were so many losses that it was a necessary protection of her own sanity to let some of it go.

The oncologists she knew all said the same.

If you carried every death with you every day, if you could see all their faces and name all their names, you were on a slippery slope into depression that would land you in a breakdown.

Beth thought she knew a little more about slippery slopes given what she’d just been through.

As she drew closer to the cabin, her footsteps slowed and her pulse quickened.

She could see her car through the trees.

The front door of the cabin remained closed, but of course, unlocked, because she was an idiot who’d allowed her need to escape to override common sense.

Beth stood still and listened. Distant birdsong, some insect noises.

Was that a chainsaw a long way away? The sound could even be echoing from across the loch.

But near her position? Nothing. The air was dead.

Had that silence been caused by her approach or his?

Part of her wanted to scream that she was there, to get it over with, to make him rush out of the trees or out of her cabin, or from behind her car, or wherever the bastard was. His trail went out into the clearing but she couldn’t see further than that without giving herself away.

Do or die, Beth thought. The world was spinning faster with every passing minute.

She took several deep breaths, removed her hand from her side so as not to indicate weakness just in case he was watching her, and stepped out into the clearing.

Time stopped.

Even her thudding heart was quiet.

She wanted to cry with the tension, with the need for it to be over – the waiting, the fear, the danger.

Still nothing.

The vacuum began to fill with a diluted version of hope.

Beth took one more step towards the cabin and forced herself to breathe out. Another step and she breathed in again, unable to control the wince that came with the movement of her ribcage.

The silence and stillness remained unbroken.

The cabin door was just a few steps away now, and inside, her car keys were on a little table that she could reach from the threshold. She wanted her mobile but would do without it if it meant a guaranteed getaway.

Beth tried another step, stumbled but righted herself on her car, then moved forward again.

Now she could almost feel the door handle in her palm and remembered it would squeak as she pushed it down, but there was nothing she could do about that.

If he was in there waiting for her, she was doomed anyway.

Another move forward, still holding the car, but the cabin door was just a metre away.

She reached for it, biting her bottom lip, desperate not to have been wrong, not to have signed her own death warrant.

He came at her from the side, running and bellowing, a warrior from some action movie holding a log aloft as he staggered. Beth lurched for the door handle, gripping it and pushing down. Inside was safety. Inside was life.

She made it a second before he reached her, rushing in and shoving the door shut with all her might, waiting to feel his weight thrust against it as she turned the thumb bolt.

Nothing.

Beth grabbed a wooden chair from the side of the dinner table and pulled it beneath the door handle, not that it fitted the way she’d seen on TV.

It was better than nothing though. Clutching her side again, she stepped quietly to the window and gathered every ounce of courage to pull back the curtain.

Was he poised ready to break the glass? Had he already gone round the back to find another way in?

And where the hell had she put her mobile?

She peeked out.

There he was on the gravel in front of her car, face down.

One of his legs was in a position that must have been agony, and his hair was a bloody mess.

The log he’d been wielding had rolled out of his grasp.

Beth drew the curtain fully back and took a better look, studying the rise and fall of his chest. His breathing was laboured and uneven.

She could imagine exactly how it would sound if she held her stethoscope to his chest. The fingers of his left hand were spasming.

He was in trouble, more so even than her.

She sighed. It was hard to watch anyone in pain as a doctor. One phone call and she could ensure her own safety and get him help, both physical and psychiatric.

‘Barbara Smith,’ Beth announced. ‘That was your mother.’

And then the world fell away.

Barbara Smith, deceased. Husband’s name long since forgotten. But it was her son who’d yelled at her in the hospital corridor. Her son, presumably, surname also Smith.

A synaptic connection snapped into place in her brain, far, far too late.

‘Oh God, it was all my fault,’ Beth said.

The man who’d started out as Karl Smith, then become Carl Smith, after that Carl Smyth, next Carlos Smit, and at the end of his overt communications Cal Smee, had targeted her daughter for one reason and one reason only. His mother had died on Beth’s operating table.

He’d never referenced it, never mentioned Beth, never hinted at it, and so Beth had never made the connection.

Not once. How was it possible that she hadn’t even considered Molly’s stalker might have been her fault?

It hadn’t once occurred to her, so certain was she that all she ever did in her job was good.

Beth knew that nothing would ever be enough for him.

No amount of loss, pain or suffering. He would hate her forever and follow her to the ends of the earth to take his revenge.

No one in her life, near or far, would be safe.

And Beth had to look after the people she loved.

It was all so fragile and so easily lost.

‘He came here to kill me,’ she told the transparent reflection of herself in the glass. ‘He would have done it, too, if he’d caught me.’

She walked to the door, gulped down the nerves that were rising in her throat, unlocked and opened up.

He hadn’t moved.

Beth felt her lungs burning and her right eye bulging. There wasn’t much time.

She went back to the kitchen area and picked up a knife, holding it out in front of her as she stepped onto the gravel drive and approached him.

There was no horror movie moment. He didn’t suddenly leap up or grab her ankle. She prodded him with her toes once, twice, three times.

‘You destroyed Molly,’ she said. ‘You tried to kill me.’

He didn’t respond.

How should she do it? Not should she do it, she realised. She’d skipped all the way through to the end of the argument to methodology. No time for philosophy. The sky was warning her that it would soon be lights out.

The knife was the obvious answer and she was good with a blade.

But if it was ever found, there would be no question about what had happened to him. No grey area. It could only have been a murder.

Prepare for the worst, hope for the best, her father whispered from some dim place inside her subconscious.

‘Ah yes,’ Beth said, as if she’d misplaced her car keys and just remembered she’d left them in the ignition. ‘Silly me.’ She walked around Karl Smith’s body and picked up the log he’d dropped. ‘It needs to look like you fell onto this, not that someone hit you with it.’

Beth put down the knife, used Karl Smith’s hair to lift his head, and whacked the front of his skull on his forehead hard enough to sound like someone had just hit a six at The Oval. She laid his head back down carefully onto the gravel and waited for the inevitable.

Karl’s body convulsed, then lay still again. His breathing grew ragged then shallowed. She made herself wait a full ten minutes before taking his pulse. It was weak, thready and uneven.

‘Time to get moving,’ she muttered.

She tucked the knife into the waistband of her leggings, rolled Karl onto his back, arms up over his head, and took one hand in each of hers behind her back.

Dragging him was slow going and even harder once she reached the trees.

Twice she had to stop and hump him up and over fallen branches.

Twenty minutes later, she found what she’d been looking for: another drop-off with a ditch below it, and by then the last dribble of bloody light had slithered from the horizon.

No phone, no torch, in agony and desperate, Beth hauled him to the edge of the ditch until his jeans got caught on a branch.

She pulled too hard, and she knew it as she was doing it. The pop of her arm from its socket was the last straw in a day that she’d believed for a while would be her last. Even then she couldn’t scream and risk some dog walker or camper hearing and calling the police.

The pain was a firework set off inside her body.

‘Fuck,’ she growled, ripping at the stuck jeans with her good hand and feeling for his neck in the pitch black. No pulse. No breaking sounds. All good. He was done.

Finally, with a last push of her foot, he rolled down into the ditch that would be his resting place.

Beth kicked some leaves down after him. It wouldn’t do to make it look as if he’d been buried.

That, too, would arouse suspicion. But just maybe, if he ever was found there in the middle of the forest, it might be that he’d been hiking, lost his footing, hit his head, and died there in that nowhere, that last ditch.

She said a short prayer for her own soul but did not pray for his. Why should she? He’d brought it all on himself.

It took her forty-five minutes to get back to the cabin in the dark, and more than once she felt that the woods simply did not want to let her go.

But she made it, threw her belongings back into her bag, left the cabin exactly as it had been when she’d arrived, and climbed into her car.

She paused only to message the letting agent to say there had been a change of plan, that she was stuck in Edinburgh and would not be able to get away for her break after all but understood that she wouldn’t be eligible for a refund.

Then she drove back to Edinburgh one-handed, fiercely grateful for having an automatic car, and took herself straight to the hospital.

It was a risk, and one she felt bad about.

Several times she thought the pain might make her pass out, but she couldn’t be found in her car away from the city.

Her face in the rearview mirror belonged to a ghost more than a living person.

But it was only fair that she suffered, she realised. It was the price she had to pay.

Karl Smith had finally been reunited with his mother. It was a fitting end for him, lying with the skittering, slithering things that he’d driven her beautiful daughter to paint over and over again until madness had taken her.

Beth parked at the hospital, staggered in through the doors and collapsed on the mat before anyone could reach her.

It was another twelve hours before she would open her eyes and know that she’d survived the night.

And another four hours after that, Karl Smith would – unbeknown to her – do the same.