The Watcher by Charlotte Link

anyway. Perhaps she had only imagined the beam of light this time. She had been dozing, after all. Perhaps she had even fallen asleep.
    But something had woken her.
    She tried to brush away the eerie feeling that had crept up on her. She really was all alone out here. She was fine with that during the hours of daylight, but in the evenings she sometimes had to tell herself to get a grip, to stop all kinds of unsettling thoughts from taking over.
    She turned the light on again and went into the kitchen. It was a beautiful room of white-stained wood, with an Aga and a long breakfast bar opposite the terrace door where you could read the paper and sip at a cup of coffee. She poured herself a drop of whisky, downed it in one, and then chased it with another. Normally she didn’t react to problems with alcohol, but for the moment it seemed to help calm her nerves.
    After Sean’s death, she had not once tried to find comfort in drink. She had not sought any help anywhere. In her experience, work was the best medicine for all psychological problems, and so she had plunged into gardening and painting, so coming through the hard first year. Now two and a half more years had passed, and she had everything under control. Herself, her pain and her life out here far from anyone.
    Sean had died when everything was ready. In the middle of summer, just a few weeks after his sixty-fifth birthday. He had stopped working in June, just four weeks after Anne had retired from her job as a GP. At the beginning of July they had wanted to throw a house-warming party for the new house. They planned to have it in the garden, which seemed to be sinking under a sea of blossoming jasmine. They had invited almost eighty people; almost all of them had said they would come. The day before the party, Sean had climbed up on to the roof, because he had his mind set on tacking fairy lights to the guttering. Coming down, he had missed the top rung of the ladder and fallen to the ground. It didn’t seem too dramatic; he only broke the head of his thigh bone. Nothing worse than that. Of course he was angry and disappointed to be lying in the hospital and having to cancel his party. But then he had contracted a lung infection, antibiotics didn’t help at all, and within four weeks he was dead. Anne didn’t have time to really understand what was happening.
    She had buried him. Sometime in November, she, in turn, climbed up on to the roof and took down the fairy lights – a stupid, garish chain of bulbs not worth anything, let alone the damage they had caused.
    After a second drink, Anne finally relaxed. She decided that she had imagined the headlights’ beam. Something on television had probably woken her up. A scream, a gunshot. That was what you got in whodunits.
    Still, tonight she would use the safety chain on the front door, which she normally didn’t do. And she would close the shutters on all the downstairs windows.
    That couldn’t do any harm.

Friday, 4 December
1
    ‘And? What do you spend your days doing now?’ asked Bartek.
    It was loud in the pub. Every table was taken. Everyone was laughing, chatting, drinking. Shouting. Samson was not all that fond of the pub, but Bartek always insisted, and as Bartek was his only friend, he didn’t want to upset him. They sometimes met here on Fridays, if Bartek had the day off. They met up early, at six or half-six. Bartek’s girlfriend gave him aggro if he spent all evening in the pub with a friend, so they normally went home by half-eight at the latest. Samson had come by car, although that meant he couldn’t drink. But he was never a big drinker and taking the bus seemed to him like too much hassle. He had no wish to stand in the cold at the bus stop, let alone walk all the way. As usual, he had spent the whole day wandering around outside. He had had enough of that now.
    He had inherited the car from his mother. He knew that Millie held it against him. Even now, after all these years. She could never