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Fear seeped into Miranda. She tried to move away but Terry held on to her shoulders and shook her violently until her head wagged back and forth on her
neck so that she began to be afraid it would fall off altogether.
His teeth clenched, he grated, ‘Now, listen to me, and listen hard. I want you to vanish, go away, stay away – from the firm, from me and from my son, and especially from the police! And when I say I want you to do this, I’m warning you that if you don’t, you’ll regret it. Do you understand?’
He shook her again and Miranda cried out at the pain of his grip. His long, brown fingers dug into her and hurt.
‘Do you understand?’
She nodded. Through the iron railings of the park she saw sunlight and flowers and laughing children, but here in this car there was a brooding, threatening darkness. Terry’s physical bulk loomed over her. She was scared.
‘I understand. Please, let go of me, Terry!’
He released her and straightened in his seat, started the engine. As he began to drive on, he said flatly, ‘Get a job somewhere a long way off. I’ll give you a good reference. And to help you with expenses, you can have three months salary on top of whatever you’re entitled to. Just so long as you drop all this nonsense about Sean.’
‘The police said they would want to see me again today.’
‘Well, tell them you realise now that you imagined it all. You had a flashback. One of your crazy dreams. You know that now and you’re sorry you gave them so much trouble.’
He stopped the car outside her flat. ‘Don’t come anywhere near the office again. If you’ve left anything personal, I’ll have it packed up and brought here today.’
She got out of the car, closing the door behind her. His engine flared again; she stood watching him streak off into the oncoming traffic.
As stiffly as a wooden doll, she turned to go back into the building, then stopped as she saw someone standing on the other side of the road.
She wasn’t even surprised to see him there. He was still haunting her. The angel of death.
Chapter Three
For a second she stood there, staring. He was still in black, but today his dress was casual – jeans, a t-shirt, a leather jacket. His head towered above those of people swirling around him. Whenever she saw him she was struck by his physical presence; his height, his good looks, the piercing dark eyes.
He took a step forward, as if to cross the road to meet her, and she panicked. Twice now she had seen him and death had followed.
Her eyes clouded with unshed tears of fear and misery, remembering the sounds in the bathroom, the way Terry had spoken to her, her lost job, her anxiety for the future. The tears made her almost blind, seeing through crystal, as she had seen shadows through the window of that bathroom when she was listening to the muffled groans of the dying girl.
She forgot she had been about to go into her apartment block. Without thinking where she was going, what she meant to do, she turned and ran towards the corner of the street. She had to get away from him before something happened.
Tearing round the corner she headed across the street towards a small alley which cut through to another road where there was a shopping centre she often visited. In there, she could hide, keep out of sight, sit at a café and observe who went past.
She ran flat out, breathing heavily, forgetting to make sure no car was coming. She was so absorbed that she didn’t hear a car turn the corner, drive up behind her, until too late.
Only when a horn blared did she look over her shoulder. A black car, a foreign make, she thought, was very close; only a few feet away, coming fast. She lunged forward, sideways to the left, to get out of its path, but at the same instant, the car swung left, too, as if the driver was, in turn, trying to avoid her.
The car’s bonnet hit her in her right side. Miranda wasn’t even conscious of the impact. Fear and pain oddly muted her sensations. She did not know that she flew up into the air, arms flung wide, legs limp, body twisting in flight.
She did not know that she landed against the metal wing and was thrown off again instantly, fell on to the tarmac of the road and just lay there, arms and legs sprawled.
She had already lost consciousness.
She came back to awareness to see a ring of faces staring down at her. Miranda focused on the cold, remote, dark eyes, not surprised to see him there.
‘Am I dead, or dying?’ she asked him, and heard the others in the crowd take a sharp, indrawn breath of shock.
He didn’t reply, just stared down at her. Pain beat through her, she found it hard to concentrate through the agony.
She couldn’t be dead, or she wouldn’t be in such pain, surely? Did dying hurt?
‘Hello there,’ a bald man in a green paramedic uniform said, smiling down as he knelt on the road, very close to her. ‘I’m Derek. What’s your name?’
