The House of Birds and Butterflies

She worked quickly, finding the black metal casing, the batteries and the spring. She was nearly there, so close to being able to leave the darkness and run home to safety and warmth, when the meagre light from her iPhone was joined by a much bigger, softer, glow. She looked up to find that the front door of Peacock Cottage was open, light spilling across the road, a tall figure silhouetted against it.

‘Hello?’ Jack said. ‘Is anyone there?’

Abby stayed still. Chances were he wouldn’t see her – she was just out of the reach of the pooling light – would dismiss it as any one of a number of irritating creatures, and go back inside.

‘Hello?’ he said again. ‘Who’s there?’ Was his voice wobbling? Abby couldn’t tell over the blood pounding in her head.

She spotted the torch bulb and reached inchingly towards it, and then a third, almost blinding light had her in its grasp. Of course he had his own, powerful torch. Of course he did. It was probably MI5 issue.

‘Abby! Shit, are you OK?’ He was at her side in moments, kneeling in the dirt. ‘Are you hurt?’

‘I’m fine. I tripped, broke my torch. Nothing to worry about.’

‘OK, but can I …?’ He placed his torch on the ground.

‘What?’ she asked, but he’d started running his hands down her arms, his touch feather-light, pausing as he turned over her hands and saw the grazes on her palms. She didn’t want him to touch her, it reminded her too much of her daydream. She tried to pull away but he’d let go of her hands anyway, was patting his hands gently down her legs, from her knees to her feet. She winced as he got to her right ankle.

‘I’m fine, thank you, Jack. I should get home.’

‘You have no light – that doesn’t count,’ he added, when she waggled her phone. ‘And you’ve hurt your ankle.’

‘I haven’t. It got stuck, that’s all.’

‘Come inside, let me check you over properly.’

‘No, I—’ she sighed as he gripped her elbows and pulled her to standing. ‘I’m fine to get home.’ She put her foot gingerly on the floor, relief spiking as she realized it wasn’t that sore, that walking wouldn’t be a problem. ‘Thank you for looking out for me.’ She started putting the bits of broken torch in her bag.

When she’d finished, Jack hadn’t moved.

‘I’m not letting you walk home on your own with only that ridiculous phone light to guide you.’

‘Well, I’m not letting you force me into your house so you can do God knows what to me. Are you a qualified doctor as well as a novelist? It seems unlikely! Your pat-down just then was more like you were searching for hidden weapons at an airport than seeing if I was injured.’

He stared, aghast, and for some reason, Abby kept going.

‘Perhaps you want to experiment on me, to work out all the gruesome ways the victims in your next book will get murdered. How do I know I can trust you?’

‘If I practised my murders before I wrote about them, don’t you think the police would have put two and two together before now?’ Jack shot back. ‘Discovered victims who had reached similarly bizarre ends, and done a bit of digging? I’m not clever enough to commit the perfect murder, and even if I was, right now I’m too cold to even entertain the prospect, and I’m just offering to look at those cuts on your hand for you, check your ankle’s OK. I’m sure your parents told you never to talk to strangers, but I’m really not an ogre, whatever our last two encounters may have led you to believe. Come on, I’m not wearing a coat.’ He bounced up and down on the spot, and Abby bit back the urge to laugh.

‘That’s very kind of you,’ she said, ‘but I have to be at work early in the morning, so I need to get home.’

‘At least let me drive you.’

‘It’s a ten-minute walk! Do you have any idea how much fuel you’ll use up in that huge thing doing a completely pointless journey?’

In the light from the door, she saw Jack roll his eyes. ‘I am not going back inside and leaving you out here,’ he said. ‘Either you come in with me, or you let me drive you home.’

She wondered briefly whether, if she was to take him up on his offer, she’d find Flick Hunter sitting on his sofa. She almost said that he could walk her home if he was that bothered, and then she realized that would involve spending more time with him, and also that she would worry about him getting back safely when he was such a city boy and couldn’t even cope with a few pheasants.

‘Fine,’ she said, sighing heavily. ‘You can drop me at home. Thank you.’

‘Good. Arm?’ He held his hand out, and she reluctantly let him take her arm. It was a few short steps to the Range Rover, and her ankle was barely bruised, and yet she found herself leaning into him, feeling the solid weight of his support. He pointed his fob at the car to unlock it, opened the passenger door and waited while she climbed into the seat. It was even more luxurious than it had looked, and she sank into the soft leather, smelt its creaminess, felt sleep tugging at her instantly so she had to pinch her arm to stay awake.

Jack hopped into the driver’s seat, started the engine, which was much quieter than she had expected, and reversed expertly out of the driveway. She held her breath, waiting for the telltale crunch that meant there was a stray piece of torch she’d failed to pick up, then relaxed when none came. Jack drove slowly, turning left as she instructed when they reached the junction with the main village road, and then round, past the darkened walls enclosing Swallowtail House, the silent building and whatever ghosts inhabited it beyond, then turned right into Warbler Cottages.

It took no more than three minutes, but Abby spent that time studying Jack’s profile, the straight, proud nose, the high forehead partly obscured by his thick, untidy hair. His fingers on the wheel were long and slender, he wore no jewellery, no rings, but a plain, white-faced wristwatch with a gold surround and tan leather strap. It looked classic, expensive.

‘This one?’ he asked, cutting the engine.

‘Yes, this is it.’ Abby looked at her terraced house. It wasn’t remotely cottagey, not in the way Peacock Cottage was, but it was snug, it was her home, and she could see Raffle, his nose pressed up to the glass of the downstairs window, waiting for her as if he could sense when she was on her way back to him.

‘Is that a husky?’ Jack asked, peering over her shoulder.

‘That’s Raffle. He’s my rescue husky. Do you want to come in and meet him?’ The words were out of her mouth before she could stop them. She looked back at Jack, frozen mid-breath, hoping with equal measure that he would say yes, and also no.

He drummed his fingers on the steering wheel. ‘I’d love to, but perhaps not now. It’s late, as you say, and I … sure you’ll be OK?’ He gestured towards her hands.

‘They’re just grazes, fine once I give them a good clean. Thank you for the lift, and for … coming to look for me. It was brave.’

Jack frowned and ran a hand over his jaw. ‘Brave?’

‘Your cottage is in the middle of the woods,’ she clarified. ‘I’m a fan of nature, as you know, but if I lived somewhere like that, there is no way I’d step outside after dark in response to a noise, not unless I had a weapon with me, not even if it sounded like there was a fairground starting up right outside the front door. I was only there because I had no choice. If we were in opposite places, I wouldn’t have come to your rescue, I would have left you to get eaten by bears, or make your own way home, whatever.’

‘Which, I seem to recall, is pretty much what you wanted me to do when I found you.’

Abby felt the flush creep up her neck and was glad of the darkness. ‘Sorry about that. I was flustered, annoyed with myself for getting scared, and—’

‘I was the last person you hoped to see?’

‘You were inevitable, considering where I tripped.’

Jack laughed, the sound loud inside the confines of the car. ‘I was inevitable?’

‘God, that came out wrong! I just meant nobody else would be around, only you.’ The words somehow had more weight than she had intended, and she scrabbled to change the subject. ‘I saw you venturing out into the village today.’

He nodded, not quite meeting her eye. ‘I know Flick Hunter from a charity event we did a couple of years ago,’ he said. ‘I didn’t realize she was here, but it was good to see her. A friendly face amongst, well—’ he gestured around him. ‘I’m new here, as you know.’

‘She’s anchoring the television show at the nature reserve on the other side of the marsh,’ Abby said quietly.

‘She was telling me about it. Has it affected things at Meadowsweet?’

‘Not really,’ Abby admitted. ‘Not that noticeably, anyway. We need to be more proactive about drawing in visitors regardless, so in some ways the push has been good.’

Jack stared out of the windscreen. ‘That’s often the way, getting forced in a direction you never intended, finding out that it was the right move all along.’ He faced her again. ‘Let’s hope it works out for both of us.’

Abby wanted to ask more, to connect the dots between his words and what Rosa and Octavia had told her about him, but she didn’t want to seem nosy, and now, with Raffle waiting inside and her bed calling to her weary bones, wasn’t the time. ‘I’ll keep my fingers crossed,’ she said. ‘Thanks again for rescuing me. Your car’s comfortable, by the way.’

‘Noted.’ He nodded, suppressing a smile, his lips lifting at the corners. Abby wondered if she’d conjured them up right in her fantasy, how the lips she was staring at would feel if they were pressed against hers.