Secret Story (28 page)

“I thought you’d rather it was while we were together.”

“That’s imaginative of you.” Patricia very nearly said that, but restrained herself to murmuring “That won’t be for much longer. If you’ll excuse me, I’m off home.”

The train gave a lurch that extinguished all its lights. After a moment of utter darkness they flared up to show him crouching at her. “What about dinner?” he said.

Patricia didn’t flinch. “Gosh, I’ve never heard a meal sound so much like a threat.”

He peered into her face before sitting back. “Depends who you think you’ll be with.”

“Nobody tonight. I’m sorry if you thought I said I’d join you. I’m a bit exhausted.” Her upbringing prompted her to add more politely than sincerely “Maybe another time.”

“You don’t mind disappointing Kathy, then.”

“It’s news to me if I am.”

“I told her we were meeting and she said you should come back for dinner. I thought you realised that’s what I meant.”

Patricia might have relented if he hadn’t looked so secretly amused. “You should have told me Kathy had invited me. I hope she hasn’t gone to too much trouble. Make my apologies. No, I will.”

She was reaching for her mobile when Dudley snatched out his. “I will. It’s my fault, isn’t it? She’s my mother.”

He dialled as soon as the tunnel opened to the sky at Conway Park. He hadn’t received an answer when the train burrowed once more into the dark. Patricia might have raised the question of when he’d written “Night Trains Don’t Take You Home” if he hadn’t begun to look nervous. Perhaps explaining to Kathy would be enough of a strain for now.

The carriage had barely emerged into the sunlight when he redialled. Patricia had begun to count the number of rings she was just able to hear by the time he said “She isn’t answering.”

“Oh dear. I hope she isn’t busy on my behalf.”

“She wouldn’t be this busy.” He held the phone away from him to let Patricia hear the small shrill pulse more clearly, then pressed it against himself so hard his cheek reddened beneath his ear. “I don’t think she’s making dinner,” he said.

His eyes were growing watery with more emotion than Patricia had ever seen in them. “What’s the matter, Dudley?” she had to ask.

“We had a row.”

“People do. Was it bad?” she said, wondering if Kathy had at last not given in to him.

“Some of the things I said might have been. She went on my computer and finished a story I was writing.”

“She must have been trying to help, mustn’t she?” With rather less conviction Patricia asked “Was it any good?”

“I wouldn’t want it to be published.”

Patricia tried and failed to imagine a successful collaboration between him and his mother. He ended the call and immediately redialled. “She was really upset,” he said. “I thought having you round for dinner might make her feel better.”

Had he suggested it, then? Patricia wasn’t entirely happy with his using her in this way or assuming that he could. Before she could raise a gentle objection he held the shrill unanswered sound towards her. “She wouldn’t have gone out when she thought you were coming. She must be there, but then why can’t she answer?”

The train was slowing for Birkenhead North. He switched off the mobile and thrust it into his pocket as he sprang to his feet. “Will you come and see with me? She might have—I don’t know.”

“What’s the worst she could have done? She seemed pretty well in control of herself to me.”

“You’ve never seen her upset. Once she said if she ever thought I didn’t love her—I don’t want to say. Can’t you see I’m scared for her?”

He must be, Patricia decided: otherwise she didn’t think he would have exposed his feelings like this. While she wasn’t convinced that Kathy would harm herself, she wasn’t sure either. “Is there a neighbour you could call?” she said.

“I don’t know anybody’s number. I don’t know the neighbours.”

He sounded more desperate than ever. A frown that appeared to be striving to prevent his eyes from widening only made them bulge. “All right, I’ll come,” she said.

He was off the train before the doors had finished parting. He dashed through the stubby passage of the station and along a terrace of houses that edged the pavement opposite, then halted by an empty playground caged by wire as if a thought had pinioned him. Patricia thought he’d been inspired until she saw that he was staring at the supermarket across the road. “I’ve got to buy something. Because of her,” he explained with very little patience.

“Shall I go on? I remember the way.”

“Go on, then. I’ll catch up.”

Patricia hurried to the intersection that was pinned down by a church. She was halfway up the sloping road opposite a car wash when she heard him running after her. A large supermarket bag thumped his thigh at each step. As he overtook her she glimpsed the contents of the bag. For a dismayed moment she thought it was full of bandages, and then she grasped that they were rolls of heavy parcel tape. “Why do you need those?” she called.

“I said. Because of her,” he panted without turning or slackening his speed.

Presumably Kathy had asked him to buy them. Perhaps doing so expressed his hope that she had come to no harm or his reluctance to find out the truth. Patricia sprinted to end up alongside him as he dodged into his road. He glanced at the house next to his, but the curtains—net, which always reminded Patricia of elegant cobwebs—didn’t stir. He shoved his key into the lock and
twisted it, and shouldered the door wide enough for Patricia to follow him at once.

At first she didn’t know why he refrained from speaking even once he’d closed the door behind them, and then she noticed that there wasn’t a hint of dinner in the air. She took a breath that seemed flavoured with absence, thinned by it. “Kathy?” she rather more than said.

As if this was his cue or had shattered his trance, Dudley hurried to throw open the kitchen door. “She isn’t here,” he came close to wailing.

“Do you think she may have left a note?”

Patricia didn’t think it was an unreasonable suggestion—not one that deserved to be ignored by him, at any rate. He pushed past her and ran upstairs as she looked into the other downstairs rooms. She heard him fling a bedroom door wide, and then there was silence. She might have found breathing easier once he spoke if it hadn’t been for his tone, so hushed as to be uninterpretable. “Patricia.”

She took hold of the banister as if that could lend her any necessary strength and began to climb the stairs. She hadn’t reached the landing when she saw a crumpled sheet from a notepad lying on the topmost stair. She picked it up and unfolded it, having already seen that it was signed with Kathy’s name.

Dudley, I’ve done as I promised. All your meals are in the top freezer compartment. I’ve written what they are on them. You won’t see me all weekend or know where I’m staying, so please crack on with your writing. If this doesn’t help I don’t know how I can.

All my love,
Kathy (Mum)
XXXXXXX

How furious ought Patricia to be? At the very least Dudley could have saved her from feeling nervous; it was clear he’d read the note before dropping it or shying it away. He was standing with his back to her in a feminine bedroom that had to be Kathy’s. “Dudley,” Patricia said and stepped onto the landing.

“I’m here all right.” He swung around and thrust out his hand. She thought he was about to snatch the note, but the hand—a fist, to be precise—was directed at her face. “Let’s get properly introduced,” she heard him say, and the fist struck her chin. It felt like a knuckly club, and then at once like nothing, and so did everything else.

As soon as Patricia regained consciousness she wanted to believe she had done nothing of the kind. Even the last thing she remembered—the fist slamming into her face to knock her into nothingness—was preferable to the state in which she began to find herself. It was so dark that she had to wonder if she was able to see at all. Her blood was throbbing in time with the waves of pain in her jaw, and the way its dull sound was crushed into her head made it apparent that her ears had suffered some damage too. She tried to reach for her jaw to learn how badly it was injured, only to discover that she had no hands. She might have cried out except for her lack of a mouth.

He’d removed it along with her eyes and ears. Her entire body was seized by a convulsion that felt like an attempt to give shape to a scream. Her knees thumped a cold slippery unyielding surface
as her spine pressed against the opposite wall of the receptacle in which she was stored. She struggled to stretch out, but the top of her head bumped another wall, and whatever was left at the end of her legs—less than feet, its absence of sensation implied—collided with a fourth. She didn’t know if she could bear to find out any more about her situation. Every detail seemed to leave her more helpless. Perhaps she could only withdraw into herself so deep that Dudley couldn’t reach.

She remembered fighting Simon off—when words had failed to keep him at a distance, her nails in the backs of his hands and her knee in his groin had—but the memory reminded her that she was robbed of all those defences now. Worst of all was her inability to see or hear. She wouldn’t know when Dudley came for her until he set about his research, if he hadn’t already finished. All at once she felt as frail as her nerves, an impression that gathered into a mass of prickling on either side of the small of her back.

It was beyond her wrists. While it was growing close to unbearable, it showed she had hands after all. They were recapturing their circulation so as to let her know that they were bound together behind her. She strove to wrench them apart but merely succeeded in digging her knuckles into her back as her fingernails scraped the wall of the container with a squeal that she felt rather than heard. Her ankles were bound too, and as she remembered the parcel tape Dudley had bought she realised why she was unable to move her face. He’d wrapped up her head, leaving just her nostrils exposed. The oppressive darkness in which she was packaged meant that he’d used several thicknesses of tape.

She couldn’t open her eyes. When she tried, the adhesive tugged like tweezers at her eyelashes. Attempts to open her mouth simply made the skin of her lips feel in danger of parting from the flesh. She strove to open them with her tongue nonetheless until
it retreated from the gluey taste. Her fingernails scrabbled in worse than frustration at the wall behind her, and all at once its hard smoothness let her identify her cramped prison. She was lying on her right side in a bath.

It had to be in the Smiths’ bathroom, but that was all she knew. She couldn’t even recall where the door was in relation to the bath. Nor did she have the faintest inkling whether the room was light or dark. Just because she felt utterly alone in the blackest hour of the night needn’t mean it had to be. All the same, she must have been unconscious for some time—perhaps long enough for Dudley to be asleep despite having captured her. Perhaps satisfaction had put him to sleep.

Or perhaps he was writing about her plight. She had to believe he wasn’t watching her if she was ever to move. If she stirred, she fancied he would let her know whether he was there. The prospect paralysed her like the nightmare that it was, and then fury at her panic gave her strength. As the prickling faded from her crossed hands she edged her feet down the bath.

Nothing prevented her. Dudley didn’t move or speak—she would surely have heard him, even through the clamour of her pulse—or touch her. However watched she might feel, she had to believe he was elsewhere. By pressing her toes against the far end of the oversized bath and her scalp against the near one she was able to twist into her back. At least she was fully dressed, although that meant a trace of moisture was dampening her T-shirt and jeans. She couldn’t take the weight on her hands for long, but neither did she want to rear up and catch her head on the tap. She raised the awkward lump of her bound feet to determine if the tap was at that end. They had just found a thin loose object that she understood to be a chain when they dislodged the plug, which fell into the bath.

She didn’t hear it fall, but she felt its impact, and the chain that trailed over her insteps on the way to sagging across her ankles.
She had no idea how many minutes crawled by while she stayed immobile, wishing she could hold even the shaky breaths in her nostrils still. Her tongue bruised itself against her clenched teeth. When the ache in her trapped hands began to turn to agony as her knuckles seemed to grow embedded in her back, she managed to grasp that however long she waited, her sense of being observed mightn’t lessen. Surely Dudley would have intervened by now if he’d heard any noise. As gingerly as her blindness and deafness would allow, she eased her feet from under the chain. Once she was certain she was free of it, she set about inching up the bath.

How much noise might she be making that she was unable to hear? Perhaps her heels were squeaking against the surface on which they kept losing their hold. Surely nobody outside the room would hear that. There was no point in being afraid to make a sound. She ought to climb out of the bath as fast as she was able. She would have enough problems once she had.

She thrust herself backwards, clawing at the surface underneath her back for extra purchase. In seconds her spine was propped against the end of the bath. She bent her knees again and levered her shoulders over the edge. Another shove with her feet jerked her bound hands up to it. She clutched at it with her fingertips and felt her nails start to bend away from the flesh. Before she could raise her torso the inch that would let her take a firmer grip, her feet lost their hold and the base of her spine thumped the bath.

Her eyes and mouth struggled to widen inside the tape, which plastered tears against her eyelids. Even when the pain dulled and faded she sat still. She didn’t know how audible the impact might have been. Counting slowly to one hundred, and then to another, failed to dissipate the impression of being eyed like a specimen. If nothing would rid her of it, she mustn’t let it weigh on her. She lifted her torso as high as she could despite the renewed
ache at the bottom of her spine, pressing her feet against the floor of the bath and heaving with all her strength. In a moment her fingers were clamped to the edge.