While You Sleep: A chilling, unputdownable psychological thriller that will send shivers up your spine!

‘It’s definitely historic.’ Zoe rubbed the cheap brown fabric with a finger where the arms were worn shiny with use. Wind snarled down the chimney and worried the window frames; she thought she caught the bass note of distant thunder.

‘Should I light a fire?’ Edward glanced at her for approval; when she shrugged, to say she didn’t mind either way, he sprang to his feet and knelt in front of the hearth. ‘I usually sweep it out and leave it ready in the mornings, now the nights are getting colder,’ he remarked, over his shoulder, as he reached for logs from a basket to one side.

It was the sort of thing her grandmother might have said. Zoe watched his careful, methodical movements and found it suddenly unbearably touching – the thought of him waking here alone, dutifully sweeping out the night’s cold ashes before the children piled shrieking into school, laying his little fire for the long dark evening with his music and his poetry. She wondered how he could stand it, the loneliness. The room seemed shrunken in the half-light, the walls and ceiling pressing in. The McBride house was lonely too, but at least there was a grandeur to its solitude; its proud aspect, facing out to the open sea, lent an aloofness to the isolation. This cottage was merely dingy and sad; it smelled faintly of damp and spinsterhood. She watched Edward as he leaned forward, tucking old newspaper around the kindling. The movement caused his shirt to ride up, revealing a hand’s breadth of bare skin above the waistband of his underwear, dusted with blond hairs; fine, taut muscles either side of his spine, not a spare inch of flesh. Zoe felt a stirring deep between her legs, a vestige of that restless energy that had not quite dissipated after the night’s unruly dreams. A hot, strong throb of desire pulsed through her; for the space of a blink, she thought she recalled the elusive face of her dream lover, but when she tried to focus it had dissolved into shadow. She squeezed her thighs together and clutched the mug tighter.

‘Why did you come here?’ she asked him, fighting to keep her voice level. She pressed one hand to her cheek and felt it blazing.

He rocked back on his heels and turned to look at her, a box of matches poised in his hand, his face frank and open and impossibly young. ‘I broke up with someone. I was planning to stay in Oxford for another couple of years while she finished her PhD, but … well. She met someone else. That’s what happened.’ He dropped his gaze to the matchbox, turning it between his fingers. ‘So I wanted to get as far away as I could. I saw this job advertised. I didn’t think they’d take me – I’d only just graduated. But it was halfway through the year and I guess they weren’t overwhelmed with applicants. A place like this isn’t for everyone, I suppose.’

‘Is it for you?’

He paused.

‘It’ll do, for now. I wouldn’t want to settle.’ He stared into the fireplace, letting out a long sigh and covering it with the hiss and flare of a match sparking. The room fell silent; only the crack and spit of the fire as he coaxed it to life. A dark scent of woodsmoke drifted up from the hearth. When he was satisfied, he sat back, cross-legged, and turned his gaze on her. ‘How about you?’

‘What about me?’ It came out sharp-edged; she had not meant to sound so defensive. He blinked, his expression mild behind his glasses.

‘Why did you come here?’

She hesitated, watching him. How much should she say? Could she tell him everything that had happened with Dan this past year; could she unspool the brittle thread of events that had led her to this place? How much of that could he hope to understand, this dark-eyed, earnest boy, whose first serious break-up had sent him fleeing to the other end of the country? The urge to unburden herself rose up through her, fierce and strong; she caught her breath and pulled back from the edge in time.

‘I wanted some quiet.’ She ran a finger around the rim of her mug. ‘A place to paint.’

‘Long way to come for it.’ Edward hugged his knees. His tone offered no judgement, though it was half a question. Zoe made a small movement with her shoulders to acknowledge the truth of this. ‘So, do you have a partner?’ he asked, in the same light tone, when it became clear that she was giving nothing without a prompt.

Firelight sparked in bright reflections from his glasses; behind them, she could not see his eyes clearly. She left a long pause, not because she wanted to guard her privacy, but because she was no longer even sure of the answer herself.

‘I did,’ she murmured, after a while. Her eyes flicked away to the lurching shadows thrown by the flames. Edward nodded, as if he understood. When he didn’t say any more, she let her shoulders unclench and thanked him silently for having the grace not to force it.

‘The Professor was right, then,’ he said, as he levered himself to his feet and brushed down his trousers. ‘We are all running away.’

Zoe looked up at him briefly with a closed little smile. She wrapped her arms around her chest and drew her knees up, turning back to the fire. Edward bent to pick up her mug.

‘Do you want more tea? Or …’ His eyes darted away from hers and he dipped his chin. ‘I have a bottle of wine somewhere, if you’d rather?’

He was looking at her from under his lashes, shoulders hunched, his torso twisting with awkwardness. Zoe shifted, wincing as the sofa’s defeated springs dug into her leg. Again she felt wrong-footed by the difficulty of recognising his motives. If a man her age had offered the same, she might have presumed he was making a move, but she had no way of knowing how Edward regarded her. Perhaps he was being friendly to a stranger because he had been raised well; perhaps he simply wanted someone to talk to, and would be appalled to think she might have taken it any other way – a woman nearer his mother’s age than his. She glanced away to the window; the sky had turned the colour of wet slate and rain drove at the panes with determination. There was no way she could ride the bike back now, whether she had a drink or not. Part of her wanted nothing more than to stay, to feel that first thick heat of the alcohol sliding through her, gently teasing out the snarls and tangles of her mind; to sit here and listen to this beautiful boy, so pristine in all the blithe self-assurance and anxious uncertainty of youth. She would have liked to pretend, for one night, that she was his age again; to drink wine, play music, sit on the floor into the small hours until he suggested that she stay over. Just for the company, the warmth of another body, the knowledge that she was still desirable. She closed her eyes, pinching the bridge of her nose between her finger and thumb. This was exactly the kind of situation she had resolved to avoid. If she relaxed now, she would find herself talking. It would all come out: everything she had worked so hard to tamp down, out of sight. A patient listener would undo her. And she could tell he would listen well; there was a stillness about him, an attentiveness to others rare in a boy his age. The children must adore him, she thought. Caleb would. She swiped that thought away before it could settle. Besides, she had begun to feel a strange compulsion to return to the house, a chafe of anxiety behind her sternum, as if it were calling her back.

‘You won’t be cycling out there now, in any case,’ he said, nodding to the window as if he had heard her thoughts. ‘I can drop you home later if you like, though you’d have to leave the bike here. If I only have one glass.’

‘No!’ The word cracked out of her, hard and fast as a shot, ricocheting off the walls. Edward stared at her, alarmed. She breathed in and out, tightened her hand around the arm of the sofa. She was shocked at herself; she had not meant to sound so fierce.

‘I meant – you shouldn’t drink at all, if you’re going to drive,’ she said, not looking at him, shaping each word clearly and precisely so as to keep her voice steady, though she could feel the colour rising up her neck. ‘You never know—’ She broke off, aware that she sounded like a parent. Well, let him think that.

Edward shuffled, chastened.

‘No, you’re right. I wouldn’t usually, but you don’t get pulled over here. More tea, then?’ When she hesitated, he said, as bait, ‘I haven’t told you yet what happened last year.’

Her scalp tightened. She was no longer sure she wanted to hear any more of these stories. Charles was right; they would take on a different shape once she was back in the house, alone, with the darkness pressing in. Whatever Edward was about to tell her, she could not unknow. But she merely nodded, watching him as he padded softly in his socks back to the kitchen to fill the kettle.

‘A child disappeared at the McBride house,’ he announced when he returned, holding out her mug. He settled himself on the floor near the fire with his back against the sofa. His head was close enough to her knees for Zoe to reach out and stroke his hair. She wondered briefly how he would react if she did, and clamped her free hand firmly under her thigh, because she did not entirely trust herself.

‘Disappeared?’ Her voice sounded high and strange. ‘How?’

‘They don’t really know.’ He stretched his legs out and crossed his feet at the ankles. ‘It was last August, just over a year ago. Mick was a few months into the work and the place was a building site, but the business had stirred up a lot of talk in the town, about the house’s history. Two of the village boys picked up on it and dared each other to spend a night out there, ghost-hunting, for a laugh. One of them didn’t come back.’

The fine hairs prickled along her arm. ‘Jesus. What happened?’

‘The boy who survived, Robbie Logan – that’s Annag’s brother – thought his friend saw something in the ruined house. They’d hidden on the beach at first, but Robbie said when he got there, he lost his nerve and refused to go in. He stayed down by the rocks. Iain Finlay, the other boy, went alone.’ He paused to sip his tea, snatching glances at her from the tail of his eye. ‘Robbie says he heard Iain scream, and saw him running away, up on to the cliffs, but he couldn’t be sure because it was dark and he was terrified, so he hunkered down out of sight.’

Zoe let out a soft whistle. ‘Did he fall, then – Iain?’

‘So they reckon. If he ran up on to the headland, away from the house, he could have missed his footing in the dark and gone over the cliff. It’s a sixty-foot drop there and the water covers the rocks at the foot when the tide’s high. By the time the police were called, it had already been in and out. They concluded the body must have been washed away without a trace.’

‘And the other boy, Robbie – he really saw nothing?’

Edward shook his head. ‘Apparently not. Although …’ he hesitated, rubbing his thumb along his chin, ‘there was a lot of talk about that, too. How much Robbie knew.’

‘Shit. I’ll bet.’

‘The police had trouble getting anything out of him. There was a social worker assigned to the family – she told me all this when I started at the school. Robbie didn’t go home till the next morning – he’d been wandering all night, out on the moorland, he said. He hardly spoke, except to give them that version. The social worker seemed to think he’d been traumatised, but …’ He held out his hands, empty.

‘Not everyone believed it, huh?’

‘He was only ten at the time, but he’s a big lad and he had a reputation as a bully. The younger kids are scared of him, though he mostly keeps to himself now. I think people didn’t buy the idea of him cowering down on the beach. Iain was always the weaker character, they said – he did what Robbie told him.’

‘Why didn’t the parents raise the alarm?’ Zoe sat upright, indignant. ‘How did they not notice their kids were out all night?’

‘The boys snuck out after everyone was in bed, apparently. Though in Robbie’s case, I’m not surprised no one noticed. His mother’s dead and his dad’s a lorry driver, he was away working on the mainland. Robbie was at home with his sister. She says she had no idea he’d left the house until the next morning.’

‘So people secretly think he pushed his friend over the cliff?’

‘Not so secretly, in a lot of cases. It seemed the police did too, for a while, but there was no evidence. Iain’s family moved away soon after, though, and a couple of other families moved their children out of the village school. Reading between the lines, I think that’s what did for the old teacher – the one I replaced. She couldn’t cope with the thought that one of her pupils might be a murderer and no one would ever be certain.’ He leaned forward and poked the fire; a flurry of sparks erupted and vanished. ‘But I think there’s just as many in the village really believe it was the curse of the McBride house. Another vanished boy, on the site of a famous child murder. It got a lot of attention in the Scottish papers and of course they dug up the old story – exactly what the islanders didn’t want.’

‘God. No wonder Mick’s so touchy.’ She fell silent, wrapped in her own thoughts.

‘He was so pleased you hadn’t heard about it. He wanted to keep it that way. I’m sorry – it’s a horrible story,’ Edward said. Zoe kept her eyes fixed on the floor. She knew he had seen her flinch. ‘I shouldn’t have told you. Even if you don’t believe in all that, it’s still …’ He tailed off, uncertain.

‘All what?’

‘Well. Ghosts. Curses.’

She laughed, to show her disdain, but it sounded too loud in the small room. ‘I don’t mind a ghost story. It’s the living you have to be afraid of.’ She stopped, seeing his expression, hoping she didn’t sound paranoid. ‘I mean – when you look at the news, right? The stuff that goes on.’

He nodded. ‘True. There’s enough evil in the world without inventing it. I hope it won’t frighten you away, though,’ he added, glancing up shyly, a half-question in his eyes.

She looked at him, disconcerted; once more her awareness of the age gap that separated them was scrambling the signals. She felt herself flush with confusion. How mortifying it would be to respond as if she were flattered, only to find his concern was whether he would upset Mick; the embarrassment that would persist between them for the rest of her stay would be unbearable. In a place this size she could not risk having to avoid someone. Nor would it be smart to make herself a bigger target for village gossip: the American cougar. Even if he were flirting, what could come of it? She was still technically married, though she doubted that was weighing on Dan’s conscience much, back home. And really, who could blame him, the way she had been this past year?

‘It would take something genuinely terrifying to drive me away,’ she said firmly. ‘Like blocked drains.’