No Safe Place: A gripping thriller with a shocking twist Read online

  No Safe Place

  A gripping thriller with a shocking twist

  Patricia Gibney

  Contents

  Prologue

  Day One

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Day Two

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Day Three

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Chapter 64

  Chapter 65

  Chapter 66

  Day Four

  Chapter 67

  Chapter 68

  Chapter 69

  Chapter 70

  Chapter 71

  Chapter 72

  Chapter 73

  Chapter 74

  Chapter 75

  Chapter 76

  Chapter 77

  Chapter 78

  Chapter 79

  Chapter 80

  Chapter 81

  Chapter 82

  Chapter 83

  Chapter 84

  Chapter 85

  Chapter 86

  Day Five

  Chapter 87

  Chapter 88

  Chapter 89

  Chapter 90

  Chapter 91

  Chapter 92

  Chapter 93

  Chapter 94

  Chapter 95

  Chapter 96

  Chapter 97

  Chapter 98

  Chapter 99

  Chapter 100

  Epilogue

  Patricia’s Email Sign-Up

  Also by Patricia Gibney

  A Letter from Patricia

  The Missing Ones

  The Stolen Girls

  The Lost Child

  Acknowledgements

  For Marie, Gerard and Cathy

  With love

  Prologue

  Tuesday 9 February 2016, 3.15 a.m.

  Her bare feet stuck to the frost, but still she ran. She thought she was screaming, but there was no sound coming from her throat. Her elbow smashed into granite, the pain minimal in comparison to her fear.

  Chancing a glance over her shoulder, she found it was as dark behind her as the blackness that stretched before her. She had unintentionally veered off the path and was now lost among the limestone and granite. Feeling cold stones cutting her soles, she tried to raise herself over the kerb she knew must surely be there, but stubbed her toe and fell head first into the next furrow.

  With her mind void of all thoughts except reaching safety, she hauled herself onto her bleeding knees and listened. Silence. No twigs breaking or leaves being thrashed. Had he left her alone? Had he abandoned the chase? Now that she’d stopped running, she shivered violently in the freezing night. A light down the slope to her right caught her eye as she scanned the near horizon. An enclave of bungalows. She knew exactly where she was. And in the distance, she saw the amber hue of street lights. Safety.

  A hurried look around. She had to make a run for it. Silently she counted to three, getting ready to make her final dash to safety.

  ‘Now or never,’ she whispered, and without a care for her nakedness, she stood up, ready to run like a panther. That was when she saw the breath suspended in the frost of the night.

  She felt his arm encircling her throat, crushing her windpipe, and her body being dragged against his jacket. The sweet smell of fabric softener mixed with the sour scent of anger clouded her nostrils. With one last bout of adrenaline, she jabbed her elbow backwards, thrusting it deep and hard into his solar plexus. A gasp of wind escaped his mouth as he loosened his grip, and she was free.

  She screamed and ran. Banging and crashing into granite, leaping over frozen stones and low kerbs, she tumbled, still screaming, down the slope towards the light. Almost there. She heard his booted footsteps gaining on her.

  No, please God, no. She had to get off this path. Veering to her left, zigzagging, she was almost at the wall when the ground disappeared beneath her. Down she fell, six feet into the cavern, stones and clods of clay tumbling with her.

  Excruciating pain shot up her leg, and an agonised scream exploded from her mouth. She knew that the sound she’d heard had not been the breaking of timber but the bone in her left leg shattering with the fall. Biting hard into her knuckles, she tried to be silent. Surely he couldn’t find her here, could he?

  But as she looked up at the night sky with its twinkling stars heralding further frost, his face appeared at the edge of the hole. All semblance of hope disappeared as the first clatter of clay fell onto her upturned face.

  And as she cried, big salty tears mingling with the dirt, she understood with terrible clarity that she was going to die in someone else’s grave.

  Day One

  Wednesday 10 February 2016

  One

  Lottie Parker woke to the sound of a child crying. She opened one eye and squinted at the digital clock: 5.30 a.m.

  ‘Oh no, Louis. It’s the middle of the night,’ she moaned.

  Her grandson, at just over four and a half months old, had yet to sleep for longer than two hours straight. Throwing back the duvet, she went to the bedroom next to hers. The night light cast a shadowy hue over her sleeping twenty-year-old daughter. Katie had a pillow over her head, the duvet rising and falling in rhythm with her breathing. Louis stopped crying when Lottie lifted him from his cot. She fetched a nappy and a bottle of formula from the bedside cabinet and left her daughter to her dreams.

  Back in her own room, she changed Louis, nestled him into her arms and fed him. She felt the baby’s heart beating against her breast. There was something so soothing and at the same time so grounding about it. Adam would have loved him. Her heart constricted when she thought of her husband, dead over four years now. Cancer. The void left after his passing refused to be filled.

  She feathered her grandson’s soft dark hair with a kiss, and as the baby twisted, pushing the bottle out of his mouth, Lottie winced with the pain in her upper back. She knew she couldn’t afford to be off work. Even though things in Ragmullin were unbearably quiet at the moment, it wouldn’t stay that way for long.

  She winded her little grands
on and he smiled up at her. She smiled back.

  A good omen for the day ahead.

  She hoped.

  Two

  Mollie Hunter settled into her seat. She placed her laptop bag on the table, then rolled up her cotton scarf, scrunched it against the window and rested her head. Her eyelids slid closed, blocking out the impending breakthrough of dawn. Earbuds pumped soft music into her ears, muting the shuffling of her fellow commuters. As the train shunted out of Ragmullin station, she fell back into the sleep she’d risen from just thirty minutes earlier.

  Her dreams resurfaced with the rhythm of the wheels, and unconsciously, she smiled.

  ‘What’s so funny?’

  Mollie heard the question through the haze of sleep, and opened one eye. She hadn’t noticed anyone sit down opposite her. But he was there. Again. The second morning in a row he had ignored other empty seats and occupied that one. Straight across from her. Slowly she closed her eyes again, determined to ignore him. Not that he was bad-looking. He appeared to be fairly ordinary, though his mouth wore a smug grin. He was maybe a little older than her twenty-five years. A mental image flared behind her closed eyes and she found herself awakening fully and staring at him.

  Who the hell was he?

  ‘What’s your name?’ he asked.

  The cheek of him! There was an unwritten protocol on the six a.m. commuter service. No one annoyed anyone else. They were all in the same predicament. Up at all hours, half asleep, coffee hastily prepared and poured into travel mugs. Phones, earbuds, laptops and Kindles the only accessories of this tribe. So why the hell couldn’t he shut up and let her sleep? Once they reached Maynooth, the carriage would begin to fill up and she could ignore him totally. For now, though, she couldn’t.

  His eyes were a cool blue. His hair was concealed under a knitted beanie. His fingernails were clean. Manicured? She wondered for a moment if he was a teacher. Or maybe a civil servant or a banker. She couldn’t tell whether there was a suit jacket or a sweater under his heavy padded jacket, but she knew from previous mornings that he wore jeans. Blue, with an ironed crease down the centre of the legs. God, who did that any more? His mother? But he looked a little old to be still living with his mother. A wife, then? No ring. Why was she even thinking about it? A tremor of unease shook her shoulders, and immediately she felt afraid of him.

  Closing her eyes, she allowed the music to invade her consciousness and the chug of the train to comfort her, hoping for sleep to help her through the next hour and ten minutes. And then she felt his foot touch her boot. Her eyes flew open and she drew back her leg as if scalded.

  ‘What the hell?’ she croaked. The first words she’d uttered since awakening that morning.

  ‘Sorry,’ he said, his eyes piercing blue darts. His foot didn’t move.

  And Mollie knew by the tone of his voice that he was anything but sorry.

  * * *

  He looked kind of cute, Grace thought. The way he bugged the woman who just wanted to sleep. She couldn’t help smiling at him. He didn’t notice her. No one did. But she didn’t care. She really didn’t.

  She curled her fingers in her childish-looking mittens and shrugged her shoulders up to her ears, wishing she could pretend to sleep. But she was never any good at pretending. What you see is what you get. That was what her mum always said about her. And now she was stuck living with her brother for a month. Not that he was around too often. Thank God, because he was awfully fussy.

  She looked down at the empty seat beside her to make sure her bag was still there. No one ever sat beside her until it was standing room only. I’m not going to bite you, she wanted to say, but she never did. She just smiled her gap-toothed smile and nodded. A nod usually put them at ease. You’d think I was a serial killer, the way some of them look at me, she thought. She couldn’t help her anxious fidgeting, and she didn’t care about what anyone thought, one way or the other.

  I am me, she wanted to shout.

  She remained tight-lipped.

  Three

  ‘Chloe and Sean! Do I have to make myself hoarse every single morning? Up! Now!’

  Lottie turned away from the stairs and shook her head. It was getting worse rather than better. At least next week they would be on mid-term break and she could escape to work without ripped vocal cords.

  She unloaded the washing machine. The laundry basket was still half full, so she threw in another load and switched on the machine, then lugged the damp clothes to the dryer. At one time, her mother, Rose Fitzpatrick, used to do a little housework for her, but that relationship was more strained than ever before, and now Rose was feeling poorly.

  Sipping a cup of coffee, Lottie allowed it to soothe her nerves. She swallowed three painkillers and tried to massage her back where the stab wound was doing its best to heal. Putting the physical injuries aside, she knew the emotional scars were embedded on her psyche forever. As she gazed out at the frosty morning, she wondered if she should fetch a sweater to keep out the cold. She was wearing a black T-shirt with long sleeves, frayed at the cuffs, and a pair of black skinny jeans. She’d dumped her trusty Uggs last week and was wearing Katie’s flat-soled black leather ankle boots.

  ‘Here, Mother,’ said Chloe, strolling into the kitchen. ‘I think you might need this today.’

  ‘Thank you.’ Lottie took the blue hoodie from her seventeen-year-old daughter. She noticed that Chloe was wearing pale foundation and a smoky eyeshadow with thick black mascara. Her blonde hair was tied up in a knot on top of her head.

  ‘You know you’re not allowed to wear make-up to school.’

  ‘I do. And I’m not.’ Chloe fetched a box of cornflakes and began shovelling them into her mouth.

  ‘And that’s lip gloss. Come on. You don’t want to get into trouble.’

  ‘I won’t. It’s not make-up. Just a soft sheen to protect my skin from the cold air,’ Chloe said, picking cornflake crumbs off her sticky lips.

  Lottie shook her head. Too early for an argument. She rinsed her mug under the tap. ‘I’m just warning you in case the teachers notice.’

  ‘Right!’ Chloe said and turned up her nose. So like her father, Lottie thought.

  ‘I worry about you.’

  ‘Stop fussing. I’m fine.’ Chloe picked up her rucksack and headed for the door.

  ‘I can give you a lift if you like.’

  ‘I’ll walk, thanks.’

  The front door shut loudly. Lottie wasn’t at all convinced her daughter was fine. Being called Mother still rankled. It grated on her nerves, and Chloe knew it. That was why she did it. Only in times of extreme tenderness did she call Lottie Mum.

  ‘I’d love a pancake,’ Sean said, entering the kitchen holding out his school tie.

  ‘Sean, what age are you?’ Lottie looped the tie round her neck and began making a knot.

  He looked out from under his eyelashes. ‘I can’t wait to be fifteen in April. Maybe then you might stop treating me like a kid.’

  ‘I’ve shown you countless times how to knot your tie.’ She handed it back.

  ‘Dad never learned how to do it. I remember you always making the knot for him.’

  Lottie smiled wistfully. ‘You’re right. And I’m sorry, but I haven’t time to make pancakes. You’ve been watching too many American TV shows.’ She flicked his hair out of his eyes and squeezed his shoulder. ‘See you later. Be good at school.’

  She zipped up her hoodie, grabbed her bag and coat and escaped towards the front door.

  ‘Any chance of a lift?’ Sean said.

  ‘If you hurry up.’

  She waited as he took a tub of yoghurt from the fridge and a spoon from a drawer.

  Picking up his bag, he said, ‘I’m ready when you are.’

  Lottie shouted up the stairs. ‘See you later, Katie. Give Louis a goodbye kiss from me.’ Then, without waiting for her eldest child to reply, she followed her son out the door.

  Just another normal morning in the Parker household.

  Fou
r

  The train stopped at the university town of Maynooth. No one disembarked. Not unusual for the first Ragmullin to Dublin commuter train of the morning. No, the college students would crowd the seven a.m. train. The platform was full, though. Coffee steamed in the frosty air and commuters shuffled towards each other for warmth and seats as they boarded.