Jack was watching her. ‘Careful. It’s loaded.’

‘I’d be surprised if it wasn’t.’

‘Gives me the horn, you holding that,’ he said with a grin.

‘Yeah?’ Belle stood up and came over to him, running the barrel of the pistol lightly over the skin of his chest.

Jack kissed her and took the gun out of her hand. Then he kissed her again; deeper, harder. When he drew back, his eyes were dark with hunger.

‘Get on that bed,’ he murmured against her mouth.

Belle was smiling. ‘Is that an order?’

‘You bet your arse it is,’ he said, and picked her up and tossed her, laughing, onto it.

153

Next day Belle went back. It was the weirdest of sensations when Jack parked the Jeep in one of the pulling-in points a long way along the lane. They walked the rest of the way, looking all around; then they passed through the unattended and unlocked gates to the house and up the gravel walkway to the gatehouse. It was the same and yet somehow completely different. She’d played in the hallway as a kid, with Milly. They’d been so young, so innocent. Now the gatehouse seemed full of shadows, weird empty echoes of the past.

Oh Christ, poor Mum.

‘OK?’ Jack pushed the front door closed behind them.

Belle nodded and he moved ahead of her, down the hall to the kitchen. There could be cameras set up, booby traps, anything. Jack had warned her about all this before they’d left the farm. Told her to follow where he stepped and to be watchful, careful.

But as they moved through the gatehouse it became clear there was nothing. Just an empty, echoing building, a remnant of a past life that had stopped the day Harlan came marauding through it. Upstairs, the cupboard door Belle and Jill had hidden behind still hung ajar. There was a tiny dead bat on the windowsill – probably it had battered itself to death on the windowpane. There was no other sign of what had happened. Nothing at all.

‘OK, pack up what you need then and let’s get out,’ said Jack.

Belle grabbed a holdall from the top of her wardrobe and stuffed garments in. Underwear, dresses, jeans, T-shirts, her one formal black skirt suit. She scooped up brushes, her hairdryer, some jewellery, then paused at her dressing table to look at the silver-framed pictures there. Her and Dad. Mum and Dad smiling, together. Then all three of them. Blinking back tears, Belle picked those up, put them in the holdall and zipped it.

‘That the lot?’ Jack asked as she grabbed some heels.

‘Yeah.’ There was nothing else left here. Not any more.

154