Chapter 4

By now, Claire was both worried and angry. One side of her brain decided that Jim was dead in a ditch somewhere and she was panicking about what to do. The other side of her brainthe female, cynical sidedecided he was just being a dick and not responding to her. She had now left at least a dozen messages and voicemails, each shorter and sharper than the last. 'Fine', she thought. Be like that. I'm not going to waste my time.

But, she did. She sat down, flicking through the channels on the TV, not paying attention to any of them but grateful to be occupied in some way. The sound of voices from the various programme's presenters, talking about sizzling shallots, parliamentary procedure, or the latest updates from Uzbekhistan only irritated her further. She cared very little for what they had to say. Their inane uttering only got in the way of her thoughts. The ones, of course, that she was not going to waste her time on. She turned off the TV, stood abruptly and picked up her purse. She walked purposefully to her keys, dragged them into her pocket and put her still-damp jacket back on. She looked at her phone again, just to be sure. Its blank screen confirming, almost smugly, that no-one was replying to her today. The hallway echoed after she slammed the door closed and walked out to the parked cars.

'Find my friends' still showed Jim's pulsating blue dot as located halfway along the A369. Maybe there was some team-building exercise going on today, Claire suggested to herself. Some sort of outdoor thing where colleagues formed deep, special, lifelong friendships and workplace trust through moving logs and cones together in a field. Or, maybe he's shagging someone. She set the engine running, flicked the wipers back onto full, and pulled away in the direction of Jim's supposed location.

Jim was indeed still in the vicinity of the A369, although his signal had cut out a few hundred metres before he had eventually been forced to stop. His updated GPS location was slightly inaccurate, as it always seemed to be, but his phone had last registered his 'precise' location only a short way back down the lengthy country road. His car would be easy to spot for anyone who cared to look. They would not, however, find him in it, as he was now at the rear of Neates House still unsuccessfully trying to garner the attention of anyone inside.

There only appeared to be two entrances. One at the front that he had already tried and another smaller door at the rear, which from the window next to it looked to be a very large kitchen. Both doors were locked, and both doors elicited no reaction from anyone who wasor as now seemed likelynot inside. At this point, Jim was thoroughly soaked. His skin felt clammy and water streamed from every piece of saturated clothing. He literally could not get any wetter. He felt as though he could not get any more miserable, either, but knew he had had worse days in the past. He no longer cared about avoiding the rain. He looked out at the grounds from the rear of the property and saw that there was nothing but more fields and trees. Random outhouses and sheds were dotted in the distance, but as far as he could tell they looked unused and empty.

He sat on the edge of a large, empty plant pot and looked down at the phone in his hands. It gave smug confirmation that there was still no signal. He started tapping out a message to his girlfriend, thinking of ways to explain his current predicament, hoping that it would send as soon as some tiny speck of service appeared.

"Can I help you?"

Jim nearly dropped his phone in fright.

"Shit," he said, "you scared me!"

"What are you doing?" A tall man said, who Jim could now see was stood less than a metre behind him. He looked up at the figure and took in the unfriendly features of the scruffy source of the question. The man looked about seventy, although he was probably a lot younger, not blessed with a smooth complexion or youthful glow. He looked a bit like Wurzel Gummidge in Jim's opinion. His eyes were sunken and his eyebrows were like bunches of dark straw. A long, hooked nose completed the facial ensemble, with little tufts of grey hair sticking out of each large nostril. He was wearing an oversized wax jacket, brown corduroy trousers, and plain black Wellington boots.