Cry for Help (22 page)

Just a man, she told herself, but it wasn't true.

She realised now that she'd been wrong: it wasn't possible for her to deal with this. A phone call had the ability to reduce her to almost nothing. If she saw her father up close and heard his voice . . . it would be impossible. Something inside her would snap in self-defence, break irreparably into pieces that nobody would ever be able to put back together.

After a moment she leaned over, her hand shaking, and picked her book off the coffee table. It had once been a thing of beauty to her, but now it felt almost treacherous to the touch. You came back to save me. Her father had delighted in dispelling everything good she saw within it, and yet she'd never given up hope. Faith, even. If it wasn't true then there was nothing left.

So Mary clung to that now: the image of Ana with the knife held high over her breast, saved at the last moment just as all seemed lost. It was all she had left. She couldn't face her father on her own, but she wouldn't need to. Her mantra shifted; it was no longer a cry of defiance.

Someone will come, she told herself.

Over and over, repeating it until the words filled her head.

Someone has to.

Chapter Twenty-one

Friday 2nd September

At half past seven I should have been sitting down for a meal with Sarah. Instead, I was in my parents' kitchen, sitting at the small wooden table by the wall.

My car was parked beside the skip at the bottom of the curling tarmac drive, next to those arched trees I was too big to climb. The first thing I'd done when I arrived was check the house and make sure it was secure. It seemed to be. As far as I could tell, nobody had been inside since Rob, Sarah and I had started cleaning it out.

The next thing I'd done was come into the kitchen and check the drawer under the counter, selecting a knife that would fit in my coat pocket. It was madness to think I'd ever be capable of using the thing, but I did it anyway. I could feel the weight there now, an insistent, surreal question at my side: what the fuck are you doing?

The short answer was nothing. I was sipping a glass of water and waiting to see what would happen. There was no phone line here. I'd remembered that on the drive over: it had been cancelled after my father died. A fax machine sat in his old office, and still seemed to work, but the phone on it was dead. No matter what he'd said in the email, Tori's abductor wasn't going to be calling me here.

Which must have meant I was going to be meeting him.

Face to face.

I was trying to subdue the panic at that idea and think. As carefully and rationally as I could.

The only thing I knew for sure was that someone had kidnapped Tori. It was natural to assume it was the same man who'd murdered Julie and the other girls, but that raised a series of uncomfortable questions. Was it a coincidence that he'd taken Julie and then Tori? If so, it was a big one. And where was she? According to the media, the previous victims had all been tied up and left in their homes. Perhaps not, though. Maybe if one of their boyfriends had gone round to her house in time, he'd have found a letter there instead, just like me.

But it was useless to speculate; you had to deal with what you knew. And that was simply the note, the email, and the things he'd made me do so far. Two of my ex-girlfriends were involved, my fingerprints were now at one of the crime scenes, and I'd been forced to run from the police. Was he intending to frame me in some way? He had to realise that wouldn't work.

What the fuck are you doing?

I stood up and went across the hallway to Owen's room, then turned the light on to reveal the grey, forgotten world inside.

The sensible, rational thing to do right now was go to the police. I remembered reading a book about hostage negotiations, and the main rule was always the same: the kidnapper was never allowed to leave, even if it meant that all the hostages died. The situation had to be contained. By acting on my own like this, I was in danger of getting both me and Tori killed, and leaving her abductor free to hurt someone else. If I went to the police, they'd at least have a chance of catching him.

I knew that.

But I couldn't do it.

I walked over and nudged a book on Owen's desk; it scraped out of place, revealing a pale square of polished wood amongst the grey. I ran my finger down the bedpost, collecting an ellipse of dust on the tip.

And remembered something.

It wasn't true that nobody had been in this room. I'd come in here myself, a year or so after Owen died. I'd stood inside, thinking about the gunshot I'd imagined I'd heard, and I'd been full of guilt. Because if the beliefs my parents had started to reassure themselves with were true, then I could have saved him that day, and I hadn't. It wasn't long after that when I started kicking back at them, but the lesson had always been there. He had slipped, and I had let him.

I remembered. I'd sat on the bed and looked around, missing my brother more than I could ever tell anyone. I'd hoped that - if he was still conscious somewhere - he didn't hate for me what I hadn't done that day. And I'd wondered whether my parents would ever love me again.

Time dragged on, and nothing happened.

I began to worry I'd missed something: a creeping fear that I'd messed things up in some way; that I'd been too late or stupid to catch whatever ball he'd thrown. Or that the man's plans had been interrupted. He might not have realised there wasn't a phone in my parents' house. I had no idea what was going on in his head.

Gradually, the fear was supplemented by frustration and anger. I hadn't missed anything; he was just giving me a chance to stew, and it was working. However much I tried to keep calm and push my feelings aside, they stayed close. The police were going to show up; I was going to walk into the next room and he would simply be there, standing in the middle; Tori was dying right now . . .

Isolated in my parents' house, my emotions bred like bacteria, and by eleven o'clock I was practically climbing the walls - wired for fight or flight, but with no one to confront and nowhere to run. I was aimlessly pacing the living room when I heard it.

A phone was ringing.

For a moment I stood very still, shocked by the noise. Then moved out into the hallway.

Where was it coming from? The sound was muffled, so I started off towards the far end of the house, but the ringing grew quieter that way, so I stopped and turned back again.

The front door. The noise was coming from there.

I walked down and peered through the spy hole. There was nothing to see. But it was so dark outside I could hardly even make out the garden.

Do it.

I took out the knife and held it down by my side. With my other hand I undid the chain - then stepped back and pulled the door open.

The cold night breeze rushed in past me.

A sprinkling of rain. Nothing else.

The phone lay on its back on the doorstep, the screen glowing softly. Rather than picking it up, I stepped out into the rain and looked around. The garden was full of shadow: intricate shapes that were barely distinguishable from the darkness around them; the trees just grey skeletons standing shivering against a black background. Despite the rain, the breeze was almost gentle. It rushed and rustled in the distance.

I put the knife back in my pocket and picked up the mobile.

[Number withheld].

I answered it and held it to my ear, scanning the night. If he was nearby, I should have been able to see the illumination from his own phone. There was nothing.

'Hello?' I said.

There was no immediate response from the other end, but I could tell someone was there. I could hear a sound like wind on the line.

'Be quicker next time,' he said.

The voice was harsh and impatient, and it didn't seem to be disguised. Had I ever heard this man before? I couldn't be sure, but I didn't recognise him.

'Where is she?' I said.

'Nowhere.'

'I want to speak to her.'

He laughed. It sounded very far away. 'No.'

'How am I supposed to know she's not dead?'

'Because I'm not a killer.' He spat the words at me in contempt. 'She's only been gone a day and a half. Don't you know how long it takes someone to die of thirst?'

I remembered a mantra from some survival programme on television: something about the rule of threes. Three minutes without air, hours without shelter, days without water, weeks without food. But the body started breaking down long before that, the damage becoming more and more serious. Irreversible. Not to mention the pain.

I put the image of Tori out of my head and didn't reply.

'All you need to know is that she's alone and suffering, and that it's going to stay that way until you help her. But you won't.'

'Why are you doing this?'

'I'm not doing anything. Just like you.'

'I don't understand.'

'Try harder. This is about whether you choose to stop her dying. That's all. It's not complicated, Dave. If you choose not to, you'll never hear from me again.'

'Until they find you.'

'Even if they caught me in time, I'd never tell them where she is. So you'd have killed her, wouldn't you? This is the only chance she'll ever have to stay alive. You'll have to work out what's important. '

'I'm not hanging up,' I said.

'Not yet.'

His words hung in the air for a moment, and I sensed a hundred others were being held back. There was such hatred in his voice - such anger at me. I could even feel the venom coiling in the silence.

'What do you want?' I said.

'Have you got the note?'

I nodded, wondering if he could see me.

There was no reply.

'Yes,' I said.

'And the email?'

'I deleted it.'

'I know that. But your fat friend printed it out.'

How did he know that? I tried to remember some of the people I'd seen in Carpe Diem, or walking near the office, but their faces were lost to me now. I just knew that nobody had caught my attention.

'I've got that too,' I said.

'Then the first thing you're going to do is leave the house and go to your car. Close the front door, but don't bother locking it. The police will only have to kick it in.'

'Okay.'

The rain swiped at me as I made my way up the path, conscious of that long, dark spread of garden behind me. I glanced back, but the blackness down there was implacable. As my shoes tapped on the stone steps, I half-expected someone to jump down at me from the arched trees above, but there was nobody there - just the rain softly coming down against the leaves.

My car was still parked up at the bottom of the drive, but there was something else there now.

Someone had left a cardboard box beside the back wheel.

I forced myself to walk across. The lid was closed but not taped up: the four flaps folded one under the other, the way you need to bend one back to do properly. It was slick from the rain. Water was creeping up the sides from where the base touched the driveway.

'What's this?'

'Don't open it yet.'

Frustrated, I rotated on my heels, looking in different directions. Everywhere was dark. No glow from a mobile.

'So what do you want me to do then?'

'Put the box on the passenger seat, then get in and start the engine. At the top of the drive, turn left. Carry along the street for about twenty metres, then stop.'

I took out my keys. The central locking click-clacked open.

'I need two hands for the box.'

He hung up on me.

The box was about the size of the five-ream paper boxes we ordered in at the office, but whatever was inside, it wasn't paper. The box was too light for that. I put it on the passenger seat, then started the car. The gears hitched as I reversed around in a loop, then I drove up the steep slope to the road.

At the top I turned left, then pulled in against the kerb a little further on. The wipers squeaked across the glass.

I glanced in the rear-view mirror.

My parents' house was on a quiet street in a residential area, and the road was deathly quiet at this time of night. But a single car was back there, parked just beyond my parents' driveway. The headlights were on but dimmed; the wipers sweeping steadily, silently, back and forth.

I could make out the dark shape of a man behind the wheel.

I watched him in the mirror, wondering what would happen if I got out and ran at him. Or reverse quickly, I thought - smash into him. But even if I got to him in time, what exactly was I going to do? I had a knife, but I expected he did too. Even if I did manage to get him, what if he wouldn't tell me where Tori--

The mobile rang.

I accepted the call, watching the car behind me. A small pinprick of green light was visible in his windscreen.

'The note and the email,' he said. 'Screw them up and throw them out of your window.'

'I'll have to put the phone down.'

I took the silence for consent, so rested the mobile on the passenger seat, then scrunched the two sheets together into a ball and threw it out. It skittered over to the far gutter.

'That okay?'

'Lucky for her it didn't go down the fucking drain. Be more careful next time.'

'What now?'

The lights on the car behind me went to full beam.

'Drive on a little. About twenty metres. Then pull up again.'

I released the handbrake and eased the car forwards. As I did, his own vehicle began crawling along, neither gaining nor losing ground.

When it reached the bunched paper, he pulled over slightly and came to a stop, and then the driver's-side door opened. I struggled to catch a glimpse of him, but I couldn't see anything behind the shield of those headlights, just a sense of movement, like birds fluttering in a column of light. The door closed and I saw him back behind the wheel again.

'Now what?' I said.

'Wait.'

In the mirror, the green light disappeared. He'd put the phone down. It took me a moment to realise that he was checking the paper to make sure I hadn't tricked him. The contempt and anger in his voice were in stark contrast to the care and precision he was taking with his actions. He'd planned this carefully and knew exactly what he was doing.