She sank into the nearest chair and closed her eyes, relishing the peace and quiet. She could never retire to the countryside, she had lived too long in a city to find solitude appealing, but sitting here she could understand the allure.
There had been no need to light the fire because there was central heating, which she had switched on as soon as she had arrived, but tomorrow, she thought, tomorrow she would be highly industrious and get the logs going.
Over the next two days, life drifted into an easy, comfortable pattern of breakfast, followed by a walk, then lunch, much reading and not too much thinking, and in the evening she lit the fire and after supper was content to simply lie on the sofa with her feet up and set her mind to the strenuous task of dozing and reading.
Three more days of this, she thought, and she would return to London fortified against anything. Fortified, particularly, against her silly preoccupation with Ross, which, in the solitude of a cottage miles away from anything, now appeared laughable and a little crazy.
Abigail stuck her book on her stomach and grimaced. Silly, she told herself. Silly and crazy.
She closed her eyes, fell asleep, and woke up the following morning with a stiff neck and a back that felt as though it had been twisted into several contradictory directions.
Automatically she went across to the window, yawning and flexing her arms, and then stopped.
No snow, no indication of it at all since she had arrived. She had blithely assumed that the forecasters, as usual, had been up to their old tricks of exaggeration.
Outside the sky was a heavy, leaden colour and light flakes were drifting down, nothing too terrible but not exactly heart-warming either.
She had a quick breakfast of cereal, and then changed into her jeans, with several layers of clothes over them and her waterproof coat.
Outside the sudden drop in temperature was noticeable. She stuck her hands into her pockets and within minutes of walking she could feel her face beginning to go numb with cold. I am, she laughed out loud, Scott of the Antarctic.
She knew not the first thing about meteorology but she peered up at the sky anyway, and dubiously decided that things didn’t look too bad. It must have started snowing only shortly before she woke up with the stiff neck and the dodgy back, because there was no build-up on the ground. That was good news. Less good was the fact that, although the fall was slight, it was persistent, and it was cold enough to ensure that what fell stayed.
She spent another half-hour walking, and then made her way back to the cottage.
She tried her routine of lazily doing nothing much, but she couldn’t manage it because by three o’clock, with darkness already beginning to throw its mantle over the ground, she was now worriedly assessing the situation and feeling no humorous comparison to Scott of the Antarctic whatsoever.
Her original conclusion that things didn’t seem too bad was starting to wear thin at the edges. The snow was getting thicker. It wasn’t so thick that you couldn’t see between the flakes, but it was whirring down steadily and the branches of the trees were already white and covered.
She had an early supper, at six, and drew the curtains. No point gazing out and contemplating the worst, was there? She had earlier made sure that the supply of logs by the fire was restocked from the shed at the back, and the cupboards, thank heavens, had enough food to feed the starving thousands for quite some time. Visitors had generously supplied grateful leaving gifts of tins of salmon, pate, tuna, in additional to the usual dried foods.
She had never actually been snowed in, anywhere, in her entire life. It had always been the sort of thing that she had read about in books, something that sounded exciting and vaguely romantic.
She had a bath, then changed into her pyjamas and drifted back down into the small sitting-room, curling into one corner of the sofa and resisting the temptation to do a spot check on the weather.
It was a bit of a shame that there was no telephone in the place. Emily had said that her parents had never thought it right to have one installed, just as there was no television set. They had liked to have that total feeling of getting away from it all.
With snow outside, Abigail wryly thought that a link to the outside world, however pointless, would have been welcome. Right now she felt a bit like the last remaining survivor on planet Earth.
It was terribly comfortable in the sitting-room. With the log fire burning, she felt warm and cosy. She could quite happily drift off, but the memory of the aches and pains which had accompanied her last lapse the night before were too vivid in her mind for that mistake to recur.
When she felt her eyelids beginning to droop, she went upstairs and promptly fell asleep.
She didn’t know whether it was the need to go to the bathroom that awakened her, or else the deep cold that had managed to wriggle under the blankets and clamp itself over her body. She shivered and reached to switch on the bedside light and felt a sudden, stiffening jolt of panic when nothing happened. No warm glow, nothing.
She threw back the blankets, sprang out of the bed and tried the switch by the door. Nothing.
Oh, God, she thought, don’t tell me the electricity’s gone. No electricity equalled no lights, equalled no heating, apart from the fire in the sitting-room.
She fumbled her way down the stairs with her arms clasped around her, thankful that she had at least had the sense to pack her warmest pyjamas, and hopelessly tried the remaining light switches, even though she knew that she would find the same irritating, unrewarding click.
The log fire had died, and after what seemed like hours rooting around in the dark while her eyes acclimatised to the blackness, she managed to get it going again.
Then she sat down in front of it with her feet tucked under her and thought.
Snowed in and freezing wasn’t a winning combination. Her mind threw up a lot of very graphic images of what could happen and none of them was very pleasant.
What if, for instance, the logs ran out and she couldn’t make her way to the shed because she couldn’t get out of the house? What if the matches ran out and there were no more packs in the house? She hadn’t thought to look when she had first arrived because there were sufficient on the mantelpiece and besides, there was always the central heating, but without matches or heating she would freeze to death.
She laughed uneasily to herself. Her imagination was running away with her, for heaven’s sake. This was England. The electricity would be back within hours, most probably, and the snow wouldn’t stay on the ground for longer than a day, a couple at the outside. In the morning she would have a good laugh at herself.
Her head began to droop down, and with some effort she made herself go back up to the bathroom, this time with some light from the fire to guide her. She would hunt down some candles when she got back downstairs. Everyone had candles in their house. Even she had candles in her little apartment, even though the electricity had never yet failed her.
But she didn’t get around to it because when she returned downstairs, the first thing she did was to peer outside, and that was when she saw something moving. Out of the corner of her eye. The glimpse of a shadow which was gone even before it had had time to register on her consciousness.
Then she began to feel real terror.
CHAPTER SEVEN
ABIGAIL didn’t know what to do. The easiest thing would have been to tell herself that she had imagined it all, but the sickening feeling in the pit of her stomach was telling her too strongly that that was no figment of her imagination. She had really seen something, and it hadn’t been some harmless animal seeking shelter.
She thought quickly. The door at the back was bolted, a precaution that came as second nature to her from living in London where unlocked doors were open invitations to burglars.
The front door was likewise bolted. That just left the windows which, for a man determined to enter, would provide very little by way of a barrier. All he would have to do would be to break the glass and open the window from the inside, and he wouldn’t even have to watch how much noise he made because he could make as much as he liked without fear of being heard by anyone.
She tiptoed across to the window, cautiously drew back the curtain but only fractionally because she had no intention of drawing attention to her presence in the cottage, and looked outside, but everything was silent. The snow, climbing steadily up the trunks of the trees, was still falling and there was a stillness about the scene that now struck her as very eerie indeed.
She frowned, wondering what to do, whether there was any useful weapon in the house apart from one of the logs by the fireside which would be too unwieldy to be of any use, when there was an almighty bang on the door and she jumped in shock.
Then there was another bang, and she nervously made her way to the front door and looked at it as if searching for inspiration.
The man, seven foot two in her imagination and bearing a strong resemblance to pictures of primitive caveman, was going to enter. He would either assume that no one was in if she didn’t answer, and then break in, or else, if she did answer, would immediately realise that she was alone and vulnerable and would break in. Either way he wasn’t going to leave politely the way he came.
‘Yes!’ In the quiet of the room, her voice bounced off the walls and startled her with its volume. ‘What do you want? My husband is asleep upstairs and I shall call him immediately if you don’t go away at once!’ By the way, she wanted to add, he’s a bodybuilder with a black belt in karate and can break bricks with his bare hand. ‘If you’re looking for shelter,’ she shouted, hoping the caveman wouldn’t sense that she was scared stiff, ‘use the log shed. You’ll be out of the snow.’