Hold My Hand by M J Ford

Author:M J Ford [Ford, M J]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780008258825
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2018-02-06T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter 14

Dusk was falling, and in the well-to-do residential streets around her brother’s house, the street lights were flicking on with eerie synchronicity, like nocturnal animals stirring to life at the scent of prey. Being a Sunday evening in a semi-rural village, most people were in their homes, and Jo caught flashes down the capacious driveways of families or couples together in lit windows.

She wasn’t sure exactly how far she’d go, but she took a route that led away from the houses, until she was running uphill along a single-track road without a pavement. As always, she went off faster than she’d intended, and her chest was soon burning, the lactic acid leading her calves. She pushed harder, sucking in huge lungfuls of air. The odd car passed, but she saw their approach in the distant glow of headlights and stood up on the verge to let them pass. She wondered if Stratton really did leave after a single drink and if the others were still going. Ben would be. He must have been staying in a local hotel.

She continued down the hill on the other side, thighs protesting as they took the brunt of the decline.

I’ll have to tell them about me and Ben at some point, she thought. They’re my family.

And it wasn’t fair on Will. The sooner she broke it to him that Uncle Boo wouldn’t be coming round any more, the better.

In the distance, she could see the bypass, lights snaking across the countryside. She knew she could either turn round, returning by the same route, or take a longer track that ran past the old Horton waterworks, then cross a dismantled railway before looping back to the estate. She and her mates used to hang around over that way as kids, even though it was the sort of place mothers told their innocent teenage daughters to avoid. Maybe that explained why they went there.

But she was a thirty-nine-year-old woman, with moderate-to-good self-defence skills, and her mother probably didn’t even remember her name. She opened a kissing gate and set off along the track.

The ground was uneven, and without the benefit of the street lights, she found herself stumbling a little, unsure of her foot placement. Any thoughts she’d had, about Ben, about the case, about Dylan or Niall, tried and failed to take root because all her attention was on the path and not falling over. With the hedges either side deepening the darkness further, judging distance was difficult as well. She wondered if her memory was letting her down and actually this was a track she’d never come down before. She couldn’t tell if she was running fast or slow, and cursed herself for not bringing her phone. At least it had a torch setting.

Just as the odd sense of disquiet was morphing into something more visceral, she saw the squat towers of the waterworks ahead, behind a metal fence. The path along its edge was as she remembered too – but narrower, with the bushes overgrown and overhanging.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.