Human Remains

it now.
    We drove straight past Colin’s road and onwards, through the leafy suburbs, past the business park and the council dump, and then right down a lane that took us out of town completely and past fields. The windscreen wipers squealed back and forth like fingernails down a blackboard.
    ‘Where are we going?’ I said quietly, unable to keep silent any longer.
    ‘I have a house where you will be safe,’ he said. ‘You can make your own choice, your own decision. Whatever you want to do.’
    His voice was jerky, odd, a staccato rattle, and I realised that he was jumpy too, whether through nerves or excitement I couldn’t tell. I didn’t want to look up at him. Not just because I was afraid, but also because it didn’t feel like the right thing to do. I kept my head down.
    ‘We can talk things through, again, like we did before.’
    ‘I just want to go to sleep,’ I said.
    ‘Good,’ he said. ‘That’s good. You can sleep soon. We’re nearly there.’
    We took a left turn down another lane. If there was a sign, I missed it. As we turned, I glanced out of the window at the thick bushes in case there was a road sign. There wasn’t. I tried to think which way we’d come out of town, which villages we should have passed, but I’d never been that way before.
Think, Annabel
, I told myself.
Focus. Concentrate. You’re here to do a job
.
    If we’d come out of Briarstone towards the east, we should have hit Baysbury. But we hadn’t been through a village – just fields and trees – so we must have skirted it somehow. We’d been driving for about five minutes, so that meant – how far had we come? Thinking about it was making my head hurt. About four miles, maybe five?
    I looked up, through the windscreen, determined to try to get my bearings even if it did make him wonder. Did he really think I was still under his influence, hypnotised or whatever it was he’d done to me? He wasn’t trying to hypnotise me again, anyway, was he? Unless he was saving that for when he could give me his full attention. He wanted to talk things through. That was his plan – he was going to do it again, whatever he’d done. The thought of it made me afraid, and just for a moment I thought I’d made a big mistake. I wasn’t this brave person. This wasn’t me.
    Sam wasn’t following us. I didn’t know this for sure; I just felt it, as though there was a cold wind behind me, an emptiness. There was something about the narrow lane, the bushes high on either side, blocking out what little daylight remained under the leaky clouds, closing in on us. If he’d been following us, Colin would have noticed. He would have said something.
    We reached a T-junction and Colin turned left again. The road opened out and for the first time since we’d left the town other cars passed us in the opposite direction: a brown removals van, a pickup truck from a local builder’s merchant. I could see houses up ahead and wondered if this was Baysbury, but before we got there I heard the tick-tick of the indicators and we turned right into another narrow country lane. This time I saw the sign, on its back, half-buried in the undergrowth as though someone had taken the bend too quickly and knocked it over: Grayswood Lane.
    I felt a shot of triumph, just a brief one. I’d been right. And the log I’d sent to Frosty would tell them where to look.
    The car slowed and turned into a driveway. I heard the tyres on the gravel and then we stopped. I looked up, at last. It was a big house, old, with a limestone portico. I sat where I was until he opened the door and then when I got out I could take it in properly. The front garden, which must once have been beautiful, was overgrown. The gravel driveway, spotted with weeds, swept in an elegant turning circle around a stone fountain which was dry, the bowl of it coloured with a dried green slime that might once have been algae, the outside of it pitted with lichen. The grass lawn that edged the driveway was waist-high, and beyond it the yew hedge that hid the house from the road, and which must once have been trimmed to neat angles, was bushy and losing its shape.
    ‘Come on,’ he said impatiently.
    ‘Is this your house?’ I asked, following him up the steps to the front door.
    He paused, fishing out a single key from his pocket. ‘Yes.’
    The door opened and the smell hit me at once. Food gone rotten, rooms that hadn’t seen fresh air for a long time, damp fabric, mould, must. But above