Mice by Gordon Reece

Author:Gordon Reece
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Horror, Young Adult, Adult, Thriller
ISBN: 9780670022847
Publisher: Viking Adult
Published: 2010-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

We went downstairs together in stunned silence and went through the motions of having breakfast in the dining room – neither of us was ready to return to the kitchen to eat. I tried to force down some toast, but Mum didn’t want anything. She just drank cup after cup of coffee. Black and very strong. She was horribly pasty, her bruised eye tinged a dirty yellow round its edges.

‘We mustn’t panic, Shelley. We’ve got to stay calm and think this thing through logically,’ she said. But I could see that she wasn’t finding it easy to stay calm herself – she chewed her bottom lip distractedly and dragged her hand through her hair over and over again.

‘We’ve got to think this through,’ she said, more to herself than to me, ‘we’ve got to think this through.’

‘What is there to think through?’ I cried in exasperation. ‘The burglar’s car is parked right outside our house – it’s going to draw the police to us like bees to a honey pot!’ I was overcome with a suffocating sense of panic. ‘It’s going to lead them right to us! I knew something like this would happen! I knew it! I knew it!’

‘Calm down, Shelley. Let me think. It might not be his car. It could belong to someone who broke down in the lane last night. It might have been abandoned by joyriders. We don’t know that it’s definitely his car.’

‘Oh, come on, Mum. It’s a bit of a coincidence, don’t you think? It’s parked right next to our house! That’s the corner of the garden he was heading towards when I – when I caught up with him.’

‘But we didn’t see it yesterday. Maybe it wasn’t there yesterday.’

‘Mum, we were too out of it to notice anything yesterday – and anyway, it can only be seen from my bedroom window and I hardly went in there all day yesterday.’

Mum sat in gloomy silence, seemingly set on trying to convince herself that the car wasn’t the burglar’s.

‘Mum, we’ve got to move it! We’ve got to get rid of it!’

She looked at me as if I’d gone mad. ‘Move it? How?’

‘Don’t you remember? There was a bunch of car keys in his pocket, they’re upstairs in one of the bin bags now. We’ve got to drive the car away from here – leave it somewhere. We’ve got to do it right now!’

‘We can’t do anything right now, Shelley. There isn’t time. I’ve got to get ready for work, and besides, it’s too dangerous in broad daylight—someone might see us.’

I wanted to scream at her, to get hold of her and shake her out of her complacency. ‘We can’t leave it another day, Mum – it’s blocking the road out there. Someone’s going to report it to the police. They’ll come here. They’ll start asking questions!’

‘We can’t do it now, Shelley. It’s too risky. We’ll have to wait for it to get dark.’

I began to protest, but Mum interrupted me. ‘I know it’s a risk to leave it another day, but it’s a risk we’re just going to have to take.

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