The Influence (23 page)

She felt herself falling blindly, and grabbed at whatever could support her: something soft, covered with cloth. She thought she might never dare open her eyes, but when she did she found she had clutched the back of a seat. She was facing the doors, which had slid shut again. There was no sign of her pursuer except for a grey drooling patch where its mouth had been squashed against the glass. She fled toward the nearest door that would let her onto the platform—if the train stopped.

Mail vans gleamed as though they had been painted red that morning, and then the station lumbered into view. The train was slowing. Rowan prayed that it would stop, prayed so hard she couldn’t think of words. Fog drifted across the platforms, where she could see blurred figures, most of them in uniform. The sight threatened to paralyze her. As soon as the train was alongside the platform, she jumped.

She had to run along the platform for fear that she would lose her footing, and it seemed safest not to stop running. She dashed past the uniformed figures without daring to glance at them, but they seemed not to notice her. Nobody was collecting tickets at the barrier. She dodged past the shuttered bookstall and out into the street with a panicky backward glance to make sure she wasn’t being followed. Beyond the station, steps led up to a road above the tracks, and a sign glittering with dew indicated a way to Liverpool across the bridge. She raced to the top of the steps and stared down at the deserted road outside the station, and then she fled over the bridge.

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Five minutes after Alison had put down the receiver, she wanted to call Derek back. Even supposing he found Hermione, what could he do besides fly at her for wandering off in pursuit of her obsession instead of taking care of Rowan? Wasn’t he doing exactly the same? He must be so close to his feelings that he couldn’t see the chance that having someone stay at Hermione’s had given him. She dropped the percolator on the draining-board, screwed the cold tap shut, and ran to the phone in the hall.

The woman who responded announced the number so slowly she must be reading it from the dial. “Is my husband still there?” Alison pleaded. “I’m Hermione’s sister.”

“Don’t worry, dear, your hubby’s well on his way. Won’t you try and get some sleep? No need for us all to stay awake. I’ll give you a call the moment there’s any news.”

“Thank you,” Alison said dully, and made herself move away from the phone before she could be tempted to phone her parents. Her head felt large and empty as the house for lack of sleep, with a brain that was uselessly bright as the top floor, but sleeping would be like forgetting Rowan. She filled the percolator and watched it boil, she poured herself a coffee and took a sip that scalded her lips, and then there seemed to be nothing to do except, agonisingly, think.

She felt as if all the fears that had ever wakened her in the depths of the night had become all that was left in the world. She ought to have insisted on meeting Vicky when she’d had the chance. She would have found out more about her if she hadn’t been reacting against Hermione’s obsession with her. Even so, couldn’t Rowan be at Vicky’s now? Perhaps at this very moment she was dreaming, and daylight would bring her home.

Alison gulped coffee and parted the living-room curtains to gaze over at Jo’s. Of course the house was dark at this time of the morning. If anyone saw Alison now they might take her for some old woman, wandering through her rooms because she’d lost the ability to sleep. She stared at the locked-up houses, at Eddie’s car, and then she realised she could borrow it as soon as Eddie came over to carry on decorating, if she hadn’t heard from Rowan by then. She could go over as soon as it was daylight and ask one of them, not Patty, to stay in her house.

Waiting was harder now that there was something definite to wait for. She poured herself another mug of coffee and wandered from the stony kitchen to the gloomy living-room. The television had closed down hours ago, and the newspaper seemed full of reports about children who had come to harm. Every time she thought of Rowan she experienced a spasm of sharp fear. Though she was afraid to do so and afraid to think why she was, she trudged up to Rowan’s room.

She would have lain on the bed in the hope that might make her feel closer to Rowan, except that to feel calm would be to risk falling asleep. She gazed at the Muppet poster Rowan had had since she was three years old, the shelves piled so haphazardly with books that it seemed moving any one of them would dislodge them all, the chest of drawers with the toe of a sock drooping from the drawer that would never quite close, eight years’ worth of dolls huddled in the corner nearest the bed. Suddenly the room seemed so empty that she wanted to weep, and she could hardly bear to look at the bed. Then she saw something under the sheet where it was pulled taut over the pillow.

Rowan must have left it there when she was making the bed. It was a folded sheet of the flowery notepaper Hermione had given her last Christmas.
To my mummy and daddy
, it said, and Alison had to close her eyes and take several deep breaths before her hands were steady enough to unfold the paper.

Dear mummy and daddy, I love you and I realy dont mind if you dont buy me things becose you cant aford them, I wish youd told me about father Christmass not being real sooner becose then I wouldnt have ecspected so many presunts, Ill try not to cost you so much and you dont need to give me any pockit mony as long as we can all live together and I dont mind where,

Lots of love from your,

Rowan

Alison stared at the note and the lines of kisses at the bottom, and suddenly her hands were as steady as stone, and as cold. She’d thought for a moment on Thursday night that someone was listening to her argument with Derek, and now she was certain that Rowan had been. No wonder she’d asked to go to Hermione’s. Perhaps now she wasn’t with Vicky at all, perhaps she had run away into the night because she thought nobody wanted her. Alison let out a sob that scraped her throat and resounded in the empty bedroom, and stared upward with eyes that felt like embers. She might have been going to pray, but overhead was only Queenie’s floor, bare and stark. She was taking shuddering breaths that felt like sobs when the phone rang.

She managed to let go of the note with one hand as she jerked, her heart thudding. She saw herself place the note carefully on Rowan’s pillow. That took two rings of the phone, and then she was running down the shabby corridor and grabbing at the banister so as not to fall on the canted stairs. She snatched up the receiver and heard the pips begin.

It was a pay phone. It must be Rowan. Thank God you’re safe, she thought, stay where you are and I’ll come and get you, whoever I have to waken so I can borrow a car. The pips choked on a coin, and Derek said “Hello?”

“Derek.” Her voice felt lifeless in her mouth. “What is it? Where are you?”

“At the police station. They told me this phone would be quicker, I’d have to wait to use theirs. Listen, love, I’m sorry. Try and keep calm. They found Hermione. She’s dead.”

Alison leaned her forehead against the metallic leaves of the wallpaper and let out a despairing sigh. “How?”

“It was what I thought. She was at the graveyard. She’d dug up—you know. They think it must have been too much for her, for her heart. But—”

The pips cut him off. She imagined him fumbling for another coin, cursing and perhaps wasting time in his haste. She made her hand into a shaky fist and drove it between her forehead and the wall, as if the sensation might help her keep control. She was gripping the receiver so hard that the mouthpiece dug into her lip. She had heard in Derek’s voice that he had something else to tell her, and she was afraid to learn what it was.

Chapter Twenty-Eight

The road beyond the railway bridge led under falling leaves past a mile of hotels. Whenever Rowan looked down, the sodden tapestry of the pavement entangled her vision in colours and patterns. People must be going to church, for she kept seeing figures emerging from the hotels ahead. They were always walking away from her, and so she never saw their faces. Whenever she glanced nervously behind her there was nobody, no movement to be seen except the slow fall of dying leaves through the retreating fog.

Though she was running, she didn’t feel tired. Perhaps she wasn’t moving as fast as she thought she was; perhaps that was why she couldn’t catch up with the procession of figures. In any case, she didn’t think she wanted to: even if she met a policeman in uniform now, she would be afraid to see his face. The hotels gave way to suburban houses, beyond which a roundabout interrupted the road. She hesitated at the intersection, then darted across, staying well back from the procession that filled the misty road ahead.

Their clothes and their hair and the little she could see of their bodies glowed white as mist under the strengthening sun. A second roundabout marked the beginning of the motorway to Liverpool. By the time she reached the roundabout they had left the road and were dwindling across a sunlit field. For a moment she wanted to follow them, for the sight of them made her breathless, filled her with a yearning she didn’t understand. They seemed to brighten as they grew more distant, until they were a cluster of light that vanished into the fog. She had to get home to her parents, to safety and comfort and, at long last, sleep. She turned aside, down the concrete ramp, and stepped onto its grassy spine.

She felt as if she were walking on the sky, on thousands of rainbow stars that grew brighter as the sunlight did. They were tiny drops of water, clear and still as crystal. If she stooped to any one of them she might be able to see into its world, but that seemed too like being tempted to let go, as Vicky had wanted her to. She was almost glad when the wedge of grass that led down to the motorway narrowed to a weedy strip between crash barriers.

It led as far as her vision could reach. The fog was shrinking from the sun, exposing the sparkling fields on either side and a sign ahead that told her it was twenty-five miles to Liverpool. Daddy took twenty minutes or less when he was driving, but how long would it take her to walk? That didn’t matter, she told herself. At the end of it she would be home, safe, able to sleep.

She glanced up the ramp to make sure nobody was following, and then she stepped between the barriers. They were as high as her waist, and so were some of the weeds and grass. The greenery must be soaking her, but she couldn’t feel it; she must have walked so far that her legs were numb. The only sign of life as she picked her way along the narrow island was the music-box chiming of distant church bells. She thought of being trapped between the streams of weekday traffic, racing one another at close to a hundred miles an hour with hardly a car’s length between some of them and only the low barrier to protect her, and hoped she would be off the motorway before they appeared. She stopped short of admitting to herself that she was hoping she would be off the motorway before night fell.

She sidled around concrete posts that supported overhead gantries, she edged past the metal stems of speed signs. She thought she had walked only a couple of miles when she realised that the sun was at its height. The waste of concrete stretched ahead of her and behind her, weeds sprouting from banks that cut off her view of the fields, and she felt as if she’d wandered onto a disused section from which she might never find her way home. The sun glared down as the last of the haze dissipated, and ragged shadows of weeds groped over the edges of the motorway, growing blacker, blackness reaching out of the earth for her. She stared back at the lifeless concrete and fled.

By the time the motorway began to slope upward, the sun had moved from her right to her left. The motorway climbed out from between the overgrown banks, and she saw Ellesmere Port ahead. Huge drums which she supposed were full of chemicals clustered like fungus, grey or white, beside the road. Pipes fatter than she was tall wound among the bunched drums, orange flames danced at the tips of tall thin blackened metal chimneys. Thick smoke squeezed out of stouter chimneys and seemed to stick like mould to the sky. The vista of metal and concrete and fumes went on for miles, but it had lifted Rowan’s spirits. It was on the Mersey coast, and she could almost see home. She began to skip through the discoloured grass to the top of the overpass.

The distant cathedrals of Liverpool glinted across the grey river, under the gathering of smoke. She hurried down between the barriers. Drums and chimneys sprouted around her, flames leapt as if desperate to pierce the lowering smoke. Despite the time of day, orange lights shone harshly among the pipes and storage tanks. They made the landscape seem abandoned, pumping out its fumes and flames like a gigantic machine trying to be a volcano. The chimneys gave out as banks rose on both sides of the road. She was still between the banks when the sun vanished.

The shadow of the left-hand bank swallowed the shadow of the barrier that had been trailing over her path. The path was immediately colder, but the sensation seemed distant, separate from her. She was running to be somewhere other than the enclosed deserted stretch before night fell. She turned a long blank curve as the sky to the west grew glassy and sullen, and saw a sign ahead.

The intersection it mapped was below the motorway. Before she reached it, she was able to see over the banks. Ragged trees waited to finger the low sun, which had laid a path of dying light across the fields. The road that crossed the intersection would take her to Birkenhead, and it might be easier for her to steal onto the ferry there than onto the bus through the tunnel at the end of the motorway. Besides, there would be houses on the road, perhaps even people on their way to evening mass. She dodged across to the ramp and hurried down.