In the Still of the Night

Gingerly, avoiding contact with the spiny thorns in the stem, she freed it and dropped it on the floor. Had she brought it up to bed with her last night? She was still half asleep and couldn’t remember.

She was always being given flowers, of course; people sent them all the time, fans of the show, men who wanted to date her – the house was usually full of expensive, extravagant displays, hothouse blooms without scent, so unreal they could be artificial.

She didn’t like flowers in her bedroom, though, they sometimes made her sneeze in the closed atmosphere. Maybe her cleaner, Tracy, had forgotten that?

But why hadn’t she noticed it last night when she got into bed? Her mind was blank for a few seconds, then she remembered her mother’s accident. Of course! She had been upset last night, her mind occupied with other things. Still, it was hard to believe that she wouldn’t have noticed a rose on her bed. Not that it was important.

She must ring the hospital and find out how her mother was this morning, check what time she could go in there to visit Trudie.

What time was it? She looked on her bedside table and froze. There was a Valentine’s card propped in front of the clock.

For a second she thought she was imagining it, she had been on tenterhooks, dreading its arrival for days, maybe she had started seeing things!

All her colour went. She shut her eyes. You’re going crazy! she thought. He was really getting to her. She was starting to see Valentine’s cards everywhere.

But when she opened her eyes again it was still there. There was no envelope, just the card: wildly romantic, a huge red satin heart, trailing white lace ribbons which fluttered against her fingers as she shakily, reluctantly, reached for it.

There was a message above the heart in red, glittering foil. FOREVER MINE.

She shrank back from it, and that was when she saw the little spots of blood on her white pillow. She looked at the rose – when it ran into her shoulder, had she bled? Was that her blood? Or … his?

The blood and the card seemed to mock her – love and horror linked in her mind, inextricable, unavoidable, as in her dream – Johnny and Roger Keats, pleasure and pain … red roses, an agony like dying.

Annie’s heart began to beat so hard it hurt. She couldn’t breathe. She opened it, the stiff card rustling.

The printing was the same, but this time, for the first time, the words were different.

‘BE SEEING YOU SOON, ANNIE. NOT LONG NOW. I TOLD YOU I’D BE BACK TO GET YOU, DIDN’T I?’

Panic surged through her. How had it got there? He must have got in while she was asleep. Oh, God, he must still be here. Where? Where is he?

She threw a terrified look around the room, half fell out of bed, stood there, tense and shaking, listening to the echoing silence in the house, then ran barefoot to the door and opened it, listened again. Not a sound.

Then it hit her. Her mother wasn’t here, Jerri wasn’t here. There was nobody but her in the house.

Her and him … wherever he was.

She closed the door and bolted it, then bit her lip. What if he was hiding in here? What if she had just locked herself in here with him? There were plenty of places to hide. Under the bed, in the wall-to-wall closet, in the bathroom … he could be anywhere. Her terrified eyes flicked round the room. Nothing moved. Not a sound.

She ran to her bedside table and unlocked one of the drawers in it, slid out the one thing it held. A handgun she had kept there ever since she had some police training on firearms – one of Sean’s ex-colleagues, a retired police superintendent, had given her the gun when she had some rather nasty threats against her from a fan who was caught later trying to get into her house.

He turned out to be a schizophrenic who had stopped taking his medication and was in a manic phase. He had been returned to a mental hospital, but Annie had kept the gun. She had got a licence for it, but she had never for an instant imagined she might ever use it.

She almost dropped it, her fingers were shaking so much. It made her feel a lot safer and yet at the same time it scared her, it made the situation seem too real.

Holding it too tightly, she went down on one knee to look under the bed, pushing aside the frilled valance. No, nobody there.

She tiptoed over to the bathroom door, it was ajar and she could see the whole room reflected in the mirror on one wall. Empty. He wasn’t in there.

Annie turned then and stared at the wardrobe. That was the most likely place, wasn’t it?

She crept over there, hesitated, stiffened the hand that held the gun, pointing it, then slid back the first door, nerves stretched in case he leapt out at her. In the crazy way the mind worked, she thought of a jack-in-the-box; she had always hated them when she was small.

She hated anything that made her nerves jump. She could feel the blood beating in her ears, deafening her. Her fingers tightening round the trigger, she breathed fast, shallowly, as she opened each compartment.

Nothing happened; the clothes just hung there, moving faintly on their hangers. Taking an audible breath, she put out the hand that didn’t hold the gun and pushed clothes aside, fingers trembling. Nothing.

Annie looked round the room – there was nowhere else in here for him to hide. Was he somewhere in the house? Downstairs?