“Or why they were searching the abbey and the cottage. Maybe we’re hallucinating this entire day. Like a virtual reality game.” She lightly slapped her cheek several times. “How can we be sure about anything? My head hurts—actually.”
His headache was back too. He hadn’t noticed it had gone away. “I never did find those painkillers. You say you heard Griffin and Rhys talking, in the study. What did they say?”
“I didn’t catch much. I remember hearing, ‘It’s not bloody here now.’ And then I knocked into a vase on the landing, and they went quiet. I hid and they left. No wonder they weren’t bothered to find me—they were intruders too.”
“‘It’s not bloody here.’” Tom repeated. “What wasn’t?”
“If they were still in the abbey overnight, and then in Duncan’s house this morning, maybe they didn’t find whatever it was.”
“Whatever’s going on, at least now we know who we’re running from.”
As they reached the house, Tom began trying doors and windows. Amelia got the idea and dashed further along, doing the same. Like those on the ground floor of the abbey, they were old-fashioned sash windows, but not a single one budged. Deadbolted, by the look of them. Tom used to tag along with Eddie and Connor when they messed about with the Pritchard brothers in their teens, though his grandfather disapproved.They’re not our people, he’d say. They’d always been a little wild, but this?
“There are security cameras,” Amelia said nervously, looking up at one above a side door.
“We’ll be in and out super quickly. Assuming we can get in at all.”
“You could learn something from their security,” Amelia said, taking a second go at jiggling a window, once they had circled the entire house.
“I prefer to trust in human nature.” He peeked through a window. “I guess they have something to hide.”
Tom yelled Duncan’s name. The only answer was an echo through the wood. “Worth a shot,” he said. “I’ll have to break a window.” He briefly sized up the shotgun butt before crossing a pathway to the shed. The gun was already likely to be out of alignment. No point making it worse if there was another option. He skirted around one of two quad bikes to a drum of garden tools. He plucked out a spade and tested its heft.
“Tom,” Amelia said quietly, from behind him. She brushed past, heading for a rudimentary shelf at the far end of the shed. “Cyclops. Light-up tentacle…”
“What?”
“Headlamps.” She pointed to two miner’s lamps. “What if that’s what we saw? One of the cyclopses seemed to stare right at me, but what if it wasn’t an eye I saw, but a light? And your light-up tentacle…”
Tom came up alongside her. “That makes sense. It would explain why we couldn’t make out their faces. They would have been in darkness, next to the lamps.”
“So maybe they shot Duncan near the house—the gunshots were very close at one point. And he managed to make it inside to try to get help.”
“And they followed him and broke in somehow.”
“Somehow? It’s not exactly The Tower of London.”
“It wasn’t designed as a lock up and leave. If you’re intent on finding a way in, you’ll find one.”
“And he ran to wherever that rug was, and they finished him off there, or something, so they took him and the rug to get rid of the evidence? And they didn’t realize they’d been seen until the cop turned up. But how would they have known she came by?”
“You’d be surprised how quickly word gets around, especially when it involves my family. And they could have been watching the place, waiting to see when he was discovered missing.”
“You thought you heard someone in the hallway outside the kitchen, when we were talking to the cop.”
“Ididhear someone.”
“If they overheard that conversation, they’d have heard her say that our memories would come back.”
“I wish that would hurry up and bloody happen. I keep thinking there has to be a simple explanation for all of this that doesn’t involve… But every hour that goes by… I should have told Duncan to stay away from them yesterday.”
Amelia squeezed his shoulder. “You did. And you weren’t to know. All we can do is—” She cocked her head, listening.
“Amelia, what is?—?”
And then he heard it. A vehicle.
“It’s getting louder,” she said. “They’re coming back, fast.”
