Night Visitor by Gillian White

Author:Gillian White [White, Gillian]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-4804-0224-9
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 2013-02-13T22:23:00+00:00

SIXTEEN

JESSIE REDFERN, PALE AND twitchy, walks on rusty leaves down the broad residential avenue towards her sister’s flat. She feels the world’s invasion pressing against her head like a hard rubber swimming cap. Nearly at the railings, beside the road where staked and spindly sycamores replace the long-dead elms, she hears a scuffling in the bushes—a dog, perhaps, or a fox? At the crossing is the usual six-o’clock traffic jam, and Jessie hates to walk along beside the cars because how can you tell who is inside or what they are saying?

Other, ordinary people are making their way home from work with briefcases and umbrellas; their expressions range from bored to urgent, but none of them show fear on their face, unlike hers. She normally uses her Mini, of course, but two tyres were flat when she went to retrieve it from the student car park that evening, and Jasmine the capable mannishly jacked up the car, removed the two offending tyres and has pledged to collect two new ones and put them on in the morning.

Why they suddenly went flat like that Jessie doesn’t know. The garage will tell Jasmine when she takes them in.

Once, when Jessie was visiting here, Belinda lurked outside in the bushes.

This evening, summoned by a phone call from her sister—an urgent call demanding her presence and refusing to expand any further—Jessie leaps at every sound and her eyes are permanently on the swivel for any sudden attack.

She keeps her mobile phone switched on and pretends to be deep in conversation.

Daisy’s spacious flat, consisting of half the top floor of the house, is basically two large rooms divided by an arch—off the bedroom is the bathroom and off the sitting room is the kitchen. Comfortably furnished, with large, shabby sofas and chairs, rugs that fall on top of each other and floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, the lamps normally give the high-ceilinged rooms a cosy warmth. But when Jessie walks in this evening the tension cuts her like an arctic draught before she’s even sat down.

William is standing by the window, as stiff as a guardsman on parade. He and Daisy have been having words. Daisy says nothing, but she seems to have rehearsed this well because the coat she holds up has the kind of dramatic effect she must have planned.

‘I’d only worn it twice,’ she says, the cold words jolting the silence. ‘It was an early Christmas present for myself. William was going to give me half the money nearer the time.’

The full-length blue-grey coat with fur round the collar and cuffs must have cost Daisy a bomb. It’s wonderful, a once-in-a-lifetime coat, until, years later, you find another. The ugly rents from hem to waist, the mindless slashes that trail on the floor like dead men’s fingers, are an abomination on something so beautiful.

Jessie starts out of shocked disbelief. ‘And you think this was…?’

‘It was hanging in the staff cloakroom,’ Daisy goes on, her voice expressionless. ‘The staff cloakroom at the library is supposed to be kept locked.

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