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

‘This one here?’ Mick grasped the doorknob; it turned easily and the door swung inwards on smooth hinges, with barely a creak. Behind it was what looked like a large cupboard containing a wooden spiral staircase. He glanced back and beamed at her.

‘I was probably turning it the wrong way,’ Zoe mumbled, feeling the colour rising.

‘Well, you’ll know for next time. Go on up, if you like.’ He held the door open and nodded towards the stairs.

The staircase smelled of wood polish and new paint. Light washed down the white walls from above. The air was colder here; as she climbed the short flight, she noticed goosebumps standing up on her arm and realised that she was holding her breath. At the end of the final curve, the stairs opened up into a bright hexagonal room with windows on all sides, wide enough for two people to stand with their arms outstretched. From here, two floors up, you could see across the headland to the north and out over the shining sea to three crooked rock stacks standing sentinel in the water off the coast, lined up like the remaining pillars of a giant ruined pier. On the other side, the view stretched as far as the moorland and the low purple mountains that formed a ridge along the centre of the island. There was no furniture in the room except a high wooden stool and a ledge that ran all the way around under the windows, wide enough to use as a writing desk. It must have been intended as some kind of observatory. No one could approach by water unannounced.

‘It’s quite something, eh? I’d have liked to put a telescope in there.’ Mick’s voice floated up from the foot of the stairs, with that same note of pride and affection that betrayed how much the house had been a labour of love for him. She had heard the pang in his voice as he had shown her around, pointing out examples of local craftsmanship or areas where the restoration had been particularly tricky. He envied her the chance to live in it, that much was plain. Perhaps it had been Kaye’s choice, not to move the children. But what child would not want to live here, with a beach and seals on their doorstep?

‘This view is amazing.’ She glanced around the empty room. The singing had sounded so definite, in the depths of the night, the woman’s pain so stark from behind the door. Strange, she thought, the tricks a fraught mind can play. She looked back out at the sea and, for the space of a heartbeat, she felt someone looking over her shoulder, a cold breath on her neck, so that she snapped around, thinking Mick had come up the stairs silently behind her. The room was empty. Downstairs, Mick gave a little cough, a hint that he wanted to get going.

He closed the door to the turret room behind her and immediately reopened it, turning the handle both ways to prove how easily it worked.

‘There. Definitely not locked.’

‘No. My mistake. Sorry.’ She had the sudden, absurd thought that someone must have been holding the handle from the other side, though she dismissed it straight away.

Mick dropped her in the main street of the village by the parade of shops she had seen the night before.

‘Half an hour do you? You’ve the wee supermarket across the way there and a chemist further down, and there’s – well, you’ll see. Have a wander. I’ll meet you back here.’

Zoe thanked him and was about to cross the street when he called her back, leaning out of the driver’s window.

‘Uh – Mrs Adams?’

‘Zoe,’ she said patiently.

‘I was wondering – had you any thoughts about what you would do for transport?’ He looked embarrassed, as if he should not have to be the one raising this subject.

‘Transport?’ She looked at him, not quite understanding the question.

‘It’s only – you’re a long way from civilisation out there. I mean, I’m happy to give you a lift now and then for the shopping, but there might be other times you run out of stuff or you just, you know, need to get out of there.’ He stopped, his face confused, as if he realised he had slipped up. ‘I mean, you might fancy a trip into town or, I don’t know. And, like I say, Kaye and I will do whatever we can to help, but if we’re not free …’

‘Oh, God, no – I wasn’t expecting you to drive me around the whole time.’ Zoe heard her voice come out unexpectedly shrill. Now she was embarrassed too; it was true that in her impulsive enthusiasm for the beautiful light over the sea she had not given much thought to the fact that she would need food and basic supplies in her splendid isolation. She supposed there had been a vague notion of cabs in the back of her mind. Now that she was here, she realised how foolish that had been. ‘I was thinking maybe I could rent a bike?’

‘It’s a thought,’ Mick said carefully, in a voice that implied it was a stupid one. ‘There’s a bike shop right at the end of the High Street, before you get to the school.’

A quicksilver flicker of interest in her belly at the mention of the school. She thought of the young teacher, his fringe falling in his eyes, his shy smile and his Andy Warhol glasses, and with the thought came that prickling awareness of her own body, alive and responsive, the way she had felt after the previous night’s dream. She had to look away from Mick in case he noticed the colour in her face.

‘But, listen – when the weather sets in, you won’t be wanting to cycle on those roads,’ he was saying, oblivious. He cleared his throat. ‘I only mention it because my pal Dougie Reid up at the golf course has a car he could rent you while you’re here. Very reasonable. Nothing fancy, but—’

‘That’s kind. Maybe …’ Her throat closed around the words. He was right; she had realised during the drive across grandly bleak sweeps of rust-coloured moorland that she would not manage here without her own car. It was six months since she had been behind a wheel. Each time she had tried, the panic rose up through her chest and engulfed her, so that she felt choked by it: the shakes and pounding heart, the numbness in her limbs, the sweat and the fast, shallow breathing. Perhaps here, in a different landscape, she might be able to face that down. There was a different anxiety in Mick’s expression, though, that she could not quite identify, one that had nothing to do with the worry that he would end up ferrying her around. He wants me to be able to escape, she thought, as if by sudden intuition. ‘You might need to get out of there,’ he had said, then tried to correct himself. Did even Mick – stoical, pragmatic Mick Drummond, scoffer at old wives’ tales – fear there was something she might need to flee at the house?

‘Great stuff – let’s find a time to go up there and take a look at it, at least.’ Mick seemed relieved. He glanced at his watch. ‘Half an hour, then. Shouldn’t take you more than that.’

He pulled away with a cheerful toot of his horn and Zoe crossed the street towards the grocery store. The food would be basic here, she suspected, none of the fancy stuff she liked from Whole Foods or the Thai grocer, but that was OK. She had little interest these days in cooking. There had been a time, when she and Dan had first moved in together and the idea of their first home was new and felt like a game, when she had liked to experiment with food. Dan was an enthusiastic cook; they had learned together. But lately, the business of making a family meal had come to feel like a thankless chore, an increasingly hollow pretence at normality, the time and effort expended so disproportionate to the end result, which was only ever bolted down so that everyone could return as quickly as possible to their separate rooms. Here she planned to live simply, to eat only things that required minimal effort. Cold meat, cheese, salad, bread, breakfast cereals. Coffee, maybe even cigarettes. The way she’d lived when she was at art school, and was so driven by her work that it was too important to interrupt for anything as trivial as eating. She wanted to recapture that kind of absorption, see if she was still capable of losing herself like that in the work. That’s why it was good there was no phone signal and no Wi-Fi at the house, she thought. No Twitter, no Facebook, no Instagram. No distractions. Not that she had felt like sharing much in recent months anyway. She couldn’t bear to look at the news, and she only ever looked at her friends’ lives now with a twist of envy below her ribs and a feeling of exclusion, occasionally an unforgivable wish – there and gone in an instant – that some misfortune would slam into their apparently perfect lives. These thoughts quickly warped into self-loathing; she did not wish harm to her friends, how could she? And yet she could not help resenting them either, for their insularity, their self-satisfaction. For some time she had felt it might be easier to disengage entirely. In a flash of what had seemed at the time like boldness, she had deleted her Facebook and Instagram accounts before she left. She wanted to concentrate on being here, not clinging on remotely to the shreds of a life back home or worrying about how to curate her experience for other people’s approval. She was already starting to regret the decision.

A warm gust of air caught her as she walked past an open shop door, a scent of bread and vanilla, and she realised with a twinge that she had not eaten breakfast. In the window beside her, rustic loaves fanned out in baskets and pastries glistened wantonly on silver tiered cake-stands. A painted sign swung above the door, proclaiming Maggie’s Granary in curlicued script. A cinnamon bun from Maggie’s, Charles Joseph had said: the price of his stories. She hesitated on the threshold. If anyone in this place was likely to tell her the truth about the house, it would be the Professor.

4 (#ub5e9202d-7191-5822-bded-edca3cf7cbc1)

The door of C. Joseph, Rare & Second-hand Books produced a sonorous chime as she pushed it open to enter an atmosphere of rarefied, eccentric chaos. The interior was done up like a gentleman’s library from the last century, or the bar at a fancy country club, without trying so hard: all mahogany panelling and scuffed wine-dark leather winged chairs, books stacked floor to ceiling along every wall and piled in precarious towers in corners. It smelled reassuringly of tobacco and old paper.

‘Give me a minute,’ called a voice from somewhere at the back of the shop. Zoe peered around a bookcase to see the old Labrador padding towards her, nose quivering towards the paper bag in her hand.

‘Hey, Horace,’ she said, reaching down to scratch him behind the ears. When she looked up, Charles Joseph was standing in front of her, hands clasped together.

‘She remembered the buns, Horace,’ he remarked to the dog, with solemn pleasure. ‘I told you she would. Your timing is impeccable, Ms Adams – I’ve just put a fresh pot of coffee on. Come through to the back.’

He led her past a wooden desk with a cash register and through an arched doorway into a smaller room. This, too, was lined with bookshelves along the walls, but the central space had been left for a couple of shabby armchairs and a wide desk that looked like an antique. In one corner a jumble of coloured beanbags and cushions sprawled across the floor.

‘I call this the Reading Room,’ he said, with a sweeping gesture. ‘Rather grand, I know. But sometimes people like to have a quiet place to sit down with a book while they’re in town. Some of the youngsters come here to study at the weekends, if they can’t get any peace at home. People drop by in their lunch hour and the children like to stop off on their way home from school. I’m always pleased to have company.’ He waved towards the coloured cushions.

‘You’re better than a public library,’ Zoe said, smiling. The old man’s face grew serious.

‘I’m afraid that’s more or less true. They closed our library down a couple of years ago. Someone on the mainland decided it wasn’t financially viable. I’m all the islanders have now.’ He lifted his hands in a gesture of helplessness. ‘That’s why I give away so many books, though our young friend Edward despairs at my business sense.’

‘And you don’t …’ she hesitated, searching for the right way to phrase it ‘… worry about the money?’

Charles gave an indulgent chuckle. ‘My dear girl, I worry about it all the time. But I’ve been fortunate. I wrote a number of books when I was younger that enjoyed some success. I invested wisely, and that’s given me an income over the years. And I dabble in rare books – now and then I come across an item of more than average value, and that keeps us afloat, with what I make from the maps and walking guides. So I can more or less afford to allow my charitable instincts to get the better of my commercial ones.’

‘What kind of books did you write?’

‘Oh, studies of myths. That was my field. There’s bound to be one around somewhere.’ He poked about on a nearby shelf, running his finger along dusty spines until he pulled out a fat volume in a transparent plastic cover and handed it to Zoe. The Myths That Make Us by Dr Charles M. Joseph. The dust-jacket featured a reproduction of Rubens’ Saturn Devouring His Son.

‘Is it history?’ she asked, turning the book over to look at the back cover.

He tilted his head. ‘Partly. History, anthropology, psychology, literature, art, travel – there’s a bit of everything in mythography. This one found its way on to various university syllabuses over the years – that’s why it’s still in print.’

The inside cover showed a black-and-white photograph of the author in a tweed jacket much like the one he was currently wearing, his eyes crinkled at the edges as he smiled into the camera. He didn’t look a whole lot younger than he did now, Zoe thought, yet this book was clearly published in the last century. She turned to the inside flyleaf to find that it was dated 1975. Charles caught her looking at him and smiled.

‘I was born middle-aged,’ he said. ‘Now then – take a seat while I find a plate for those buns. Milk and sugar?’ He disappeared into a small kitchen through the back. Zoe could hear the chinking of crockery and the hiss of steam.

‘Neither, thanks.’ She sank back into one of the armchairs, the book in her lap, and flicked through a few pages, her eyes lingering over the lavish illustrated plates – reproductions of paintings, sculptures and maps.

‘Take it home if you like,’ Charles said, setting down a mug of coffee on a table he pulled up between them. She handed him the paper bag and he settled into the other armchair, elbows jutting out and hands folded together, watching her. ‘What did you want to ask me, then?’

‘Oh.’ She looked up, startled. ‘I was interested in finding out a bit more about the local history. Since I’m going to be living here for a bit.’

He continued to look at her. ‘Naturally. But I think you wanted to ask something in particular?’

‘What’s the story with the house?’ she blurted. ‘The one Mick and Kaye don’t want me to hear?’

‘Ah.’ He picked up his bun and took a large bite, leaving the question hanging while he chewed it, nodding several times in appreciation. Zoe wondered if he would make her wait until he had finished the entire thing, but when his mouth was empty he glanced towards the doorway. ‘Mick’s put a great deal of time and money into doing up that old place. Love, too, in a sense. It was important to him to redeem it. The house had been left to ruin when his father died – perhaps when you’re more settled you can get him to show you the photos. What he’s done there is extraordinary.’

‘Redeem it from what?’

‘From its history. You’re their first tenant, you know. They’d only had the website live two days when you emailed him, he said, and he was fretting that he might not find anyone at all over the winter. So you were a bit of a godsend – you can understand why they don’t want the locals putting you off the place with lurid tales. Especially a woman on her own.’