Who’d done this? Why would someone have done this? I tore at the blasted bow, tried to haul it from the railing. It was tied too tightly. I pulled, tore at the string until it started to cut through the paper-thin skin of my palms, but still I persisted. There was no way I was leaving that horror hanging there at my gate.

Izzy whined and whimpered, and I shouted at her to leave me alone, realising I was crying and struggling to gain control of my breath. Panic was whipping around me, invading me. Was someone watching? Was this someone’s idea of a sick joke? I looked at the ground, scuffed footprints in the gravel and dust. Indeterminable to my tired eyes.

I couldn’t imagine how anyone could be so unconscionably cruel. Several of my nails broke on the rough iron of the gate as I pulled against the string and the rust until the bow came undone. Drops of my blood coloured the parched ground beneath, seeping into the dust. Even as I held the bow in my hands, I wanted to keep tearing. I wanted to throw it to the ground and stomp on it, to let Izzy toss it around like one of her toys, but I knew that wasn’t the right thing to do. I knew I had to hold on to it and what … call the police maybe? Did they not have enough on their plate with the murder inquiry without dealing with someone leaving poison-pen letters at my house? But what if this was proof that I was at risk, after all? How was it DI Bradley had put it? If someone knew what Clare had said to me they might have wanted to keep me quiet.

I walked back home in a daze, a dejected Izzy at my heels. My tears still falling. None of this made sense. Laura had been dead for two years. Gone. Buried. I’d wake sometimes after nightmares about how decomposed she’d now be lying in that cold earth. At times, I had to physically restrain myself from clawing at the ground where she lay just to try to do something to save whatever was left of her. This – whoever did this – was monstrous.

As I slammed the back door closed behind me and walked into the kitchen, throwing the macabre gift on the table, I picked up the phone to call DI Bradley. The flowers, so beautiful but so menacing wrapped in their mourning colours, taunted me.

Whoever had left them knew just how to get to me and just how to hurt me.

Chapter Sixteen

Rachel