If Snow Hadn't Fallen (a Lacey Flint short story)

me to the night we’d met. Call me hopelessly sentimental if you want, it just felt appropriate. What with the hot food, a handbag, a couple of carrier bags from my supermarket trip, not to mention keys, I had no hands free to switch on lights. I dumped the food on the kitchen counter and carried on. From my bedroom I can see through a small conservatory directly into the garden beyond.
    Of course, had the lights been on I almost certainly wouldn’t have seen the figure in the garden, but due to the dark interior, the moving shape stood out against the moonlit snow. She was back. And she was here.
    Shocked and surprisingly scared, I stood frozen to the spot, wondering if I’d locked the conservatory door. I was sure I had – I always do – but it’s a question you ask, isn’t it, when someone who really shouldn’t be in your back garden has their attention fixed intently, almost hungrily, on you?
    Each time I’d seen the woman in black up till now, she’d inspired my interest and sympathy. Up close, she was frightening. At a distance, the black of her robes had seemed to intensify against the snow. Close up, it was a different matter entirely. Just yards away from me, the blackness of her seemed to lose substance, no longer solid against a white background, but empty. I looked at where black fabric should be and saw nothing. It was as though the woman in black were sucking away the world and leaving a void in its place. For the first time, I began to feel afraid of her, to wonder if this really were the vulnerable, grieving woman I’d conjured in my head.
    For one thing, those eyes, the only part of her I could see clearly, were just so intense. Catching the light from somewhere, maybe from the flat above me, they were gleaming, and the expression was one I simply couldn’t read.
    The plan, so far as I’d had one, had been to approach her quietly when she showed up, to welcome her inside, encourage her to tell her story, to hold her hand as we went together to the police station. None of that seemed possible right now.
    But someone had to move, because the longer we stood and stared at each other, the harder it became to break the deadlock. Yet still she continued to stand there, as though someone had dropped a life-size granite statue into my garden.
    Looked like it was going to be me, then.
    I reached for the door that led to the conservatory. At the same moment, she stepped back and faded into the gloom.
    ‘Wait!’ I called out. By the time I reached the back door, I couldn’t see her.
    I opened the door, but stayed within the psychological shelter of its frame, still feeling the need for the protection of my own home. I could see nothing of the woman. When I was certain she was no longer close, I stepped outside.
    It wasn’t possible. She could not have vanished. My garden was white with snow. Except it wasn’t really, not now that I was out there. The snow-covered jasmine that scaled the wall to my right was washed orange by a nearby streetlight, and the moonlight had spun a path of pale gold which ran from one corner of the garden to its opposite diagonal. The white of the snow had become silver, even blue, in places, and the dark and shadowy corners had, in contrast, become deeper and gloomier.
    Surely, though, there was nowhere to hide? The path was too narrow, the foliage on either side too thick. Leaves would be trembling, snow falling to the ground like shaken sugar if she were tucked amongst the shrubbery. There hadn’t been time, not if she moved like a mortal woman, to run the full length of the garden and tuck herself away behind the shed. And yet, where else—
    I heard movement, a scraping sound. She was behind me. I turned and saw her halfway up the wall. She climbed impossibly quickly, springing up like a cat, before pausing at the top and leaping out of sight.
    No point trying to follow her. I knew I could never move half as fast as she’d just done. And I was the fittest person I knew.
    A starving Muslim woman who could scamper up eight-foot walls like a squirrel? In floor-length robes? This wasn’t feeling normal to me. And the door to my shed, where I store my fitness equipment and which I always keep locked, was open.
    My garden was just too dark, I decided as I neared the shed. The walls were high and overhanging trees cut off most of the light from either the moon or the streetlamps. With the snow, it was bad enough. When it had gone, it would be worse. I needed lights