Cold Hands Read online

  Contents

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Also by John J. Niven

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Postscript

  Copyright

  About the Book

  A terrifying, evocative and gut-wrenching thriller – announcing the arrival of a major new voice in the genre.

  Donnie Miller counts himself lucky. Living in a beautiful, spacious house in the wild and remote landscape of central Canada, he spends his days writing for the local newspaper, working on a film script, and acting as house-husband. After a troubled and impoverished upbringing in Scotland, he now has all he wants: a caring wife, a bright and happy son, a generous father-in-law. As the brutal northern winter begins to bite, he can sit back and enjoy life.

  But his peace is soon broken. There are noises in the nearby woods, signs of some mysterious watcher. When the family dog disappears, Donnie makes a horrifying discovery. Is it wolves, as the police suspect, or something far more dangerous, far darker? What secrets has Donnie been keeping? And why does he have the terrible sense that his dream was never going to last?

  A taut, shocking and visceral thriller that will leave you gasping for breath, Cold Hands is the first brilliant thriller by the remarkable John J. Niven.

  About the Author

  John J. Niven was born in Irvine, Ayrshire. Writing as John Niven, he is the author of the novella Music from Big Pink and the novels Kill Your Friends, The Amateurs and The Second Coming. He lives in Buckinghamshire. This is his first thriller.

  As John Niven

  Music From Big Pink

  Kill Your Friends

  The Amateurs

  The Second Coming

  Cold Hands

  John J. Niven

  For my sister, Linda

  A real girl

  Had I thy brethren here, their lives and thine were not revenge sufficient for me. No, if I digged up thy forefathers’ graves, and hung their rotten coffins up in chains, it could not slake mine ire, nor ease my heart.

  Henry the Sixth, Part Three

  Prologue

  Coldwater, Florida; Present Day

  IT´S WARM HERE, in Coldwater. I’ve lived in four different countries, if you count Scotland and England as separate countries – which most of us Scots would – but this is the first warm one. They say it’s good for what’s left of my leg.

  Florida is a strip mall: stretches of highway lined with parking lots, the lots surrounded by eateries offering $3.99 breakfasts and Early Bird Specials, by drugstores bigger than the biggest supermarkets where I grew up: entire aisles of toothbrushes, walls of shampoo, the uncountable brands of mouthwash. Every hundred yards, it seems, there’s the Colonel’s face smiling down at you, or the blood-red, head-of-a-spot-yellow of another McDonald’s. It’s not the kind of place I thought I’d ever live but then, when I arrived here, just over a year ago, I didn’t really care where I ended up.

  With the two-year anniversary coming up Dr Tan thought it might help if I could stand to write it all down. I don’t have to show it to anyone. Just put it all down on paper.

  She thought it might help me to identify ‘specific areas’ I wanted to work on in our sessions. ‘After all,’ she said, ‘you used to be a writer, didn’t you?’ Well, I managed a laugh at that.

  I’m writing this at the desk in the little ground-floor bedroom I’ve made my office. It’s really just a place where I come to read. The house is what they call ‘colonial’: lots of white oak, cool, light and airy. From my window I can see the jungly garden and the small egg-shaped pool. I can smell the azaleas, the beach. Cora, the housekeeper, comes every day. She’s cheerful, black, small and wiry. She straightens the place up and fixes supper.

  I’m writing longhand – my left hand still hurts too much for typing on the laptop; the deep, savage scar on my palm, going red when I make a fist, gradually whitening as I unclench it. I am forty-three years old, but I feel, and look, older, like I really have lived two lives concurrently. In strands and streaks, grey is threading through my hair at the temples. The pouches beneath my eyes are now unrelieved by sleep. Taxi drivers will say, ‘You look tired, friend,’ and it doesn’t feel unusually rude. Finally, in the last two years, unable to exercise properly any more, flab has begun to pool and gather at my sides, at my waist. Lying in the bath the other day, straining forward to reach the taps, I found myself out of breath.

  She said I didn’t have to show it to anyone, but it has to be written for someone. All writing is aimed at someone. So who is this for? Who is its ideal reader? Walt? Sammy? Maybe Craig Docherty? Strangely, I think it’s for her. For Gill. The account she was due. And where to begin? Where’s the jumping-off point? The ‘inciting incident’? (Ah, how fondly I remember those screenwriting manuals – Raymond G. Frensham, Syd Field, Denny Flinn – and their inscriptions: ‘Happy birthday, Donnie, love S XXX (Just do it!)’ Relics of a happier time.) I should really start in Scotland, all those years ago, but I can’t face going there right away. Better to start with the events that led up to that night. Which I think means starting with the dog.

  We’ll start with the dog.

  1

  Saskatchewan, Canada; Two Years Earlier

  ‘DADDY, I CAN’T find Herby.’

  Slipping my cellphone into my pocket I turned around on the deck that ran the front length of the house, coffee mug in hand, steam rising into the November air, and looked down at Walt. He had a hand raised to shield his eyes from the morning sun reflecting crazy-brilliant off the snow. He was wearing his beige parka with fur trim and a blue Ralph Lauren scarf with a little teddy bear on it. His mittens dangled on strings from his sleeves, hung men, ghost hands echoing the real ones. Walt’s thick fringe fell into his eyes, tea-coloured, an amalgam of his mother’s muddy blonde and mine: black as burnt toast. My son would soon be nine and, thankfully, so far, it looked like he was inheriting his mother’s hair, fine and silky, flopping naturally into a graceful parting. Not mine, this dry, wiry Scottish hair.

  ‘He’ll be around somewhere, Walt,’ I said, stepping towards him, the snow styrofoam-squeaking beneath my boots. ‘He’s probably with one of the neighbours.’

  Part of this was an outright lie – I had just rung both the Franklins and Irene Kramer that morning. Herby, our caramel Labrador was definitely not with either of them – and the rest of it was said with an assurance I did not feel. While it was true that Herby had run off several times before (‘Saskatchewan is so flat,’ the old joke goes, ‘you can watch your dog run away from home for a week’) and it w
as possible that the dog was somewhere on our five-acre property, he had never made off in winter before. It wasn’t true Canadian winter yet – the temperature was still hovering above zero – but much worse was forecast for the weeks to come. We’d soon be into minus five and minus six and then the blizzards when the real winter began: fifteen, twenty below. Hoth.

  ‘That’s what Mommy said,’ Walt began. I could see Sammy through the glass behind him, crossing the huge kitchen, heading for the sink, one of the sinks, to rinse a coffee cup. (Sammy is fastidious.) ‘But what if –’

  ‘Well, Mommy’s probably right, huh? She usually is. Come on, let’s go back in. It’s cold and you’re gonna be late for school.’ I took a last look around the surrounding fields, hoping against hope to see the bronzed outline coming hopping towards us, tongue lolling. Nothing – just miles of snow.

  The view from our deck was the reason Sammy wanted to build the house here; we’re up on a ridge, looking down the valley with Lake Ire in the distance, fringed with pine trees, burning silver. The Franklin property is a mile and a half to our right; Irene’s place, the old Bennett farmhouse, our closest neighbour, a half-mile to our left.

  But nothing, no dog. (Thinking back now my memory keeps trying to add something; black shapes wheeling in the sky, crows circling a spot down at the end of our field, towards Tamora Road, the main route in to town. But I cannot be sure that I saw this at the time.)

  I shepherded Walt through the sliding glass door – a door in an entire wall of glass that runs the length of the kitchen – and back into the warmth and scent of breakfast; toast, coffee and oatmeal, a bowl of which Sammy was finishing while she watched the small flatscreen TV that hung above the central island in the middle of the room. She was perched on the edge of the scrubbed oak table, her legs crossed at the ankles. Sammy was three years older than me, but looked several younger. (Lousy Scottish genes, I often thought, while being aware of the therapy cliché that when we blame our genes we’re really blaming ourselves.) She wasn’t conventionally beautiful and could quickly list you what she felt her defects were. Her teeth were too prominent, almost buckish, a trait she would hide touchingly by covering her mouth with her hand on the occasions when she laughed spontaneously and unreservedly. There was the faint tracery of acne scars in the hollows of her cheeks and the knotted furrow that appeared in the middle of her forehead when she was concentrating, or irritated. Sammy was tall, nearly six feet, a couple of inches taller than me, and, she felt, gangly. Self-conscious of this as a teen, she’d developed a slouching, stooped posture to try and disguise it, something she could still slip into now and then. She’d been a natural at sports, however – netball and lacrosse for her school – and still had something of the jock about her. She could beat me at a stroll on the tennis court: on vacation, at the club outside Alarbus, or at her parents’ place, with her graceful positioning, that slight pause before she whipped the racket through, brushing up the ball, imparting topspin, sending me skittering back on my heels.

  That morning, in the kitchen, her lips shone from the honey that glossed her oatmeal and her hair was scraped back into a taut ponytail. She was wearing a dark grey wool suit over a black V-neck sweater: a look from the smarter end of her business wardrobe. (I have no business wardrobe. I work from home, sprawled in robe or sportswear in front of the TV or the laptop.)

  ‘Would you listen to this lying asshole?’ Sammy said, nodding towards the TV, some politician being interviewed on CBC.

  ‘Mommy swore.’ Walt said this matter-of-factly, un scandalised.

  ‘You look nice. Got a meeting on today?’

  ‘Advertisers lunch. Pain in the ass.’

  ‘Again.’ Walt.

  ‘Any luck?’ Sammy said softly, raising her eyebrows. She’d been watching me out there with the cellphone. I shook my head.

  ‘Any luck with what?’ Walt asked.

  ‘Do we need anything?’ I said, ignoring him, opening the fridge, the gleaming Sub-Zero. ‘I’m gonna take a run in to town this afternoon. Thought I’d pick up some fish or something for dinner and –’

  ‘There’s those duck breasts in there,’ Sammy said, pulling her coat on now. ‘Some wild rice in the cupboard. Might be nice.’ Sammy the editor, always editing.

  ‘Any luck with what?’

  ‘Have you checked the roads?’

  ‘They’re fine. Christ, you worry, Donnie.’

  This was true. Over fifteen years out here and it still shocked me that Canadians routinely drove through weather that would have brought the army onto the streets of Britain.

  ‘Any luck with what?’ Walt said for the third time.

  ‘Nothing! Christ, Walt, if –’ I checked myself. ‘Look, maybe Herby’s in the house somewhere, eh? Having a wee sleep. I’ll look again after you’re at school.’

  ‘He’ll turn up, sweetie,’ Sammy said. C’mere . . .’ She knelt to embrace him, her car keys in one hand. ‘Daddy’s going to look everywhere, isn’t he?’

  ‘Yeah,’ I said, Sammy and I exchanging a look behind Walt’s back.

  ‘OK, see you boys tonight,’ Sammy said, straightening up. ‘Remember, we need that review by lunchtime.’

  ‘Yes, boss.’

  She leaned in to peck me on the cheek and whispered close to my ear, ‘Check all the outbuildings and call the neighbours again, huh?’

  I nodded and clapped my hands, turning to Walt. ‘Come on then, trooper. Front and centre right now or we’re gonna miss your bus.’

  Looking back now, the sheer normality of that weekday morning – the three of us in the kitchen with our goodbyes, our last-minute instructions and half-eaten toast – seems utterly blissful.

  2

  WALT AND I waved to Sammy’s anthracite Range Rover as it vanished around the grove of pine trees at the bottom of the drive before we turned and took the path that ran along the woods bordering the Franklin place; the short cut we always used to get down to the bus stop on Tamora. Our Caterpillar boots crump-crumped through the ankle-deep snow, our breath wreathing behind us, the air so crystalline that breathing it in pierced your lungs sharply. Walt’s hot little hand in mine, snowdrifts stretching out ahead of us to the horizon.

  I’d drifted here too. Scotland, then England, then Toronto, then on to Saskatchewan. Heading further north and west, further, always further away from home. Huge and landlocked, a long, rectangular slab of prairie land covering over 200,000 square miles but with only a million or so inhabitants, Saskatchewan contained the population of Birmingham spread over an area more than twice the size of Great Britain. Head south from Regina or Moosejaw and you’re soon into America – Montana and North Dakota. To the north – the gleaming icescapes of the Northwest Territories, subarctic once you get much further north than Prince Albert, where Canada’s coldest ever temperature was recorded: minus fifty-seven.

  ‘Land of Living Skies’ the licence plates say here. The skies didn’t seem to me to be living so much as endless. I felt tiny and irrelevant beneath them, like plankton, like krill in the fathomless Atlantic that now separated me from home. Sometimes, in the summers after I first moved here, before I met Sammy, I’d drive out of Regina into the country, heading north towards Saskatoon in the ancient Nissan I’d bought. I’d pull off the road, onto the dusty verge, and lie on the bonnet in the warm Chinook wind, surrounded by wheat fields or cattle, gazing up into those rolling clouds, knowing that if I kept going north for long enough the wheat fields and the cattle and the Chinook winds would all gradually disappear, giving way to the nothingness of the Northwest Territories. Beyond that, Greenland. The Arctic itself. The lemmings, musk ox and caribou. The North Pole. Permafrost. Oblivion.

  I’d lie there with the thin car bonnet rippling and buckling beneath me, the metal warm through my shirt. I’d lie there and look north.

  Later Sammy told me about the Inuit, the fearsome tribes of hunter-warriors who made their home in the tundra. They’d lived untroubled by the modern world until after the Second Wor
ld War. Then we arrived, bringing the things we bring: the booze and the substances and the TV. Now much of what was left of the Inuit lived in housing projects in Nuuk, Greenland’s capital, doing battle with depression and alcoholism and drug addiction.

  Sammy said that the Inuit once believed that suicide purified the soul and made it ready for its journey to the afterworld. That the elderly who had become a burden upon the tribe would often request permission to take their own lives. They had to ask three times and family members could try to dissuade them but, at the third time of asking, the request had to be complied with. They would turn their clothes inside out, bring their possessions to be destroyed, and hang themselves in public. I often wondered about that third conversation. About the look on someone’s face when their mother or father approached them and began it. Listening, head inclined, knowing that the request now had to be acceded to.

  I became aware that Walt was tugging at my hand, expecting an answer to something. ‘Sorry, Walt?’

  ‘I said, are you going to say the movie was good, Dad?’

  Walt had only recently started experimenting with ‘Dad’, with the shortened form, and I was shocked at how diminished I felt when he used it, how grown-up those three letters made him sound and how old they made me feel. The loss of innocence they represented. I missed ‘Daddy’. Mommy was still always ‘Mommy’.

  ‘Uh, yeah. I guess so.’

  ‘You really liked it?’ Walt was talking about the movie we’d watched the night before; a DVD release I had to review for the paper: a hundred-million-dollar riot of fight sequences, implausibility and wooden dialogue. He’d loved it, despite finding the climactic battle a bit traumatic.

  ‘No, Walt, not really.’

  His brow furrowed, like his mother’s, as he thought about this contradiction. ‘How come?’

  I thought about the film, about its garish, sickening riot of colour, about how every inch of the screen had been filled to overloading. About its cardboard acting and howling exposition. ‘Um,’ I said, ‘I guess I didn’t really like the characters.’ I remember putting an arm around Walt to guide him up a couple of icy steps, onto a higher plane of ground. This was when you noticed it for the first time. Out of the corner of your left eye. The splash of colour. The hopping birds.