Five Parks

by Ross McGuinness

  I nod with enthusiasm. Harding goes to the door, shouts into the corridor for some liquid refreshment, and also asks for my handcuffs to be removed.

  When she returns to her seat, she seems almost cheery, as if she has turned into my best friend. She clenches one of my fists in her palm.

  ‘Don’t worry, we’ll have those off right away.’

  She withdraws her hand and goes back to rifling through her folder, then takes out a new set of sheets and places them on her side of the table. Even though they are upside down from my viewing angle, I recognise my own handwriting; she has photocopied the pages of the notepad.

  ‘Do you mind if I try to solve your puzzle, Suzanne?’

  She is giddy now. She may as well have asked me if I wanted another mojito.

  I nod my permission and away she goes.

  ‘In this room, you wrote in your notepad that when you were running through the foyer of the Gaumont State Theatre, the names of the musical artists you recognised jumped out at you from the notice board. Correct?’

  She knows it’s correct. She’s got it all in front of her. If Harding hadn’t made detective, she could have been a lawyer. She reminds me of Michael. I throw her another nod, slower this time.

  ‘Right. And you mention a few names like The Beatles and The Rolling Stones – I can’t believe they both played in Kilburn! – but also Bill Haley and the Comets, The Who and Buddy Holly. Do you know what kind of room you were being held in, Suzanne?’

  This question – this misdirection – throws me off. I shake my head. My ignorance is genuine.

  ‘Well, as you can imagine, our officers have been in to have a look. The room you were in was an old recording studio, built under the theatre back in the 1950s when all these big names started performing at the venue. The owners thought they might make a bit more money if they enticed some of their star attractions to hire the recording studio to lay down some tracks before and after their gigs.’

  She’s talking like she’s an old maid who’s never heard of rock n’ roll. ‘Musical artists … lay down some tracks’ – I’m not sure if she is trying to rile me. But the recording studio angle makes sense. It was soundproofed – very little noise came in or out while I was being held, amazing if the studio was constructed more than fifty years ago – the perfect place to hide someone. That’s why the walls were textured like the carpet. That’s why there were speakers somewhere in the ceiling.

  ‘The recording studio didn’t work out, however,’ says Harding, ‘and eventually it was converted into two rooms on top of each other, with a floor in between and a hatch to gain access to the top level. This top room was used briefly as a room for the caretaker to sleep in – hence the rusty old bed and mouldy mattress – but was long discarded. Until you woke up there on Saturday.’

  I wince at the memory of stirring in there. Another shiver rattles the handcuffs. When is she going to take these things off me?

  ‘In your blogs, you wrote that music was being pumped into the speakers in the room. That music was a clue to your location. Do you think whoever took you wanted you to know where you were? Wanted you to figure it out?’

  These questions weren’t posed to be answered. Harding keeps going.

  ‘You played a very clever game, Suzanne. When “Rock Around the Clock” burst through the speakers, you identified it correctly as Bill Haley and the Comets. But when more songs were played, you didn’t want to reveal you recognised them in case your captor didn’t include it in your published blog posts. You thought if you didn’t match the artist to the song in your writing, your captor would continue to publish exactly what you had written, not fearing that someone on the outside would have worked out your location from the music selections.’

  I keep wearing my best poker face, but Harding is spot on.

  ‘But even when feigning ignorance, you couldn’t help leaving a clue or two for more eagle-eyed readers, could you? So they could work out your location. You wrote that you didn’t know “WHO” performed the song “I Can’t Explain”, which wasn’t the most subtle of clues, but still effective. You knew it was The Who, and you also knew Elvis Presley didn’t sing “Rave On”. Why else would you have written this directly underneath?’

  Harding returns to her notes and reads me back my own words.

  ‘“I used to love shuffling through Michael’s embarrassing iPod Classic, which he refused to throw out; everything from Chesney Hawkes to Weezer and whatever was in between.”‘

  Harding lowers the sheet of paper and smiles over it at me. I can’t help smiling back.

  ‘This one is fun!’ she says. ‘I was older than you in the Nineties, so I remember it well. Chesney Hawkes, as well as being “The One and Only”, also starred in a film called Buddy’s Song. And Weezer’s first big hit was a song called “Buddy Holly”.’

  I wait a few seconds, almost expecting her to let out a celebratory ‘Ta-Dah!’, before I flash her another smile of congratulations. I flick my eyelids at my restraints.

  ‘If I wasn’t in these handcuffs, I’d applaud,’ I say.

  ‘Thank you,’ she says, leaning back. ‘But it was all your efforts. And you know what? It worked. Your friends found you because of your clues and told us where you were. You did very well, Suzanne. And you wrote about the chimes. Thankfully, a bit of wear and tear over the years let some noise through the soundproof walls of your room. The Wurlitzer – and the theatre itself – is only used once a week, on a Sunday, by a church ministry from Brixton who have leased the venue for the past number of years. Other than that, the place is usually empty, except for Wednesday afternoons, when the church’s caretaker comes in and the theatre is open in case anyone from the public wants a quick tour. Which, he assures us, is rare.’

  The organ really did remind of me of the ice cream van.

  ‘That was all brilliant writing, Suzanne, I have to say, but you did get one thing wrong.’

  Harding is fiddling with her sheets again, but I know it’s just an act to keep me waiting, because each plucked page has a bright yellow post-it along the top. She is prepared. She reads more of my words.

  ‘“At the beginning, it was just me, Rob and a laptop.” You wrote that quite early on, Suzanne, just before your alleged kidnapper came into the room for the second time … with a knife. Were you trying to send a message to the world? That Rob was your captor?’

  I keep my head still. Let her read on.

  ‘And later you wrote, “Rob was my only companion at that stage, just a few days ago, and he stepped up when he was needed.” Again, were you trying to accuse Rob of taking you?’

  I concentrate on long deep breaths in and out my nose and nothing else.

  ‘Okay then, because you should probably know, we brought your friend Rob in for questioning earlier in an attempt to get to the bottom of all this. He had some lovely things to say about you.’

  Harding’s new line in sarcasm proves she’s not a complete android.

  ‘He also had an airtight alibi. After you blew him off in the park on Saturday afternoon, he went to the pub with a few of his friends and got, what he called in his own words, “absolutely shitfaced”. You had hurt him and he wanted to drink the blues away. His story stacks up. On Sunday, he went to the pub again, then on Monday and Tuesday he went to work. We have numerous people to back all that up. He certainly wasn’t holding you prisoner. So we had to let him go.’

  I don’t know what all this is for. Phillips took me, not Rob, although Harding is right; I dropped those clues into my blogs because for a long time I was sure Rob had taken me, and I wanted to help anyone who might be reading. I wanted to help Sylvie and Michael if they were reading and hadn’t given up on me.

  ‘Suzanne, do you make a habit of accusing people of things they haven’t done?’

  The mood in the interrogation room has changed. Don’t answer that. Harding wouldn’t understand, anyway. She wasn’t where I was. She wasn’t trapped in the dark, armed with only her memories a
nd a rotting carcass of a blog. I did the best I could with what I was given. I had to try to find out who took me, and fast, and if that meant offending some people along the way with accusations that didn’t materialise into fact, then that was unfortunate but necessary. Rob will have to get over it. I don’t plan on seeing him again, so it’s none of my concern.

  ‘You got it wrong about Rob. That’s understandable I suppose, given the circumstances. No one gets every question on the exam paper right – I know I didn’t.’

  What is all this about? Why am I still chained up? Why won’t she let me clean up? I still stink of my own piss. I am afraid to ask her. I have swapped one captor for another.

  Harding reaches down under the table to her magic bag, still talking as she searches for her latest document.

  ‘You planted your clues brilliantly, Suzanne. You really wanted to be found, didn’t you? Desperately. And you made sure you were found.’

  Of course I did. I’m not sure what she’s getting at. I maintain my silence. I am exhausted, but I need to hang in there. I need to stay on my toes with Harding. I don’t trust her. Why am I being held in here after what I’ve been through?

  She has dug out new reading material and plants it on the table in reverse, so it’s upside down to her but legible to me. It is a copy of Monday’s Daily Herald newspaper. She wants to torture me.

  The headline in the paper, across a two-page spread, matches the web version.

  ‘EXCLUSIVE: The web of deceit behind Five Parks and online dating’s Willy Wonka’

  The sight of my captor in print sets my two rows of teeth together. The anger is so great I almost feel I could snap the handcuffs into pieces with the power of my own wrists.

  There are two photos of him alongside the exposé. In the largest, he is Aaron, reaching over to offer me a plastic glass of Prosecco over a picnic blanket in Regent’s Park, smiles on both our faces. In the smaller image, tucked up high, underneath the headline, he is Miles Phillips; his picture byline leers at me from the page. The online article buried me. Seeing the print version feels like someone walking over my grave.

  Harding is looking for a reaction, and I try not to give her one.

  ‘Pretty damning stuff, huh, Suzanne? And, remarkably – for a tabloid newspaper – almost all of it true. You admitted as much in your blog, of course, but we thought we’d double check, just to be safe. When we spoke to your friend Rob, he confirmed you didn’t receive a single application for the first date in your Five Parks project.’

  I wish she would stop calling Rob my friend.

  ‘But we didn’t just want to take his word for it, we wanted to hear it from the horse’s mouth. And so we had a chat with Jordan. Oh, I’m sorry, Suzanne – I meant Johnny.’

  I keep staring at Miles Phillips’s article. I don’t want to look up and let Harding catch my eye. If I do, she will see that it is boiling up a tear. The police have spoken to Johnny. I’m sorry I ever dragged him into this mess.

  ‘We thought it was best to talk to all of your former flames to get a sense of your state of mind. And I also had an interesting chat with your boss – sorry, your former boss – at the City Voice. He confirmed that you lied in your features that you wrote for the newspaper.’

  Harding is sticking hot coals into me, but she is building up to setting me alight. I wish she’d just get there and spare me the torture.

  ‘I want to help you, Suzanne, but I just want to get a few facts right first. I want you to talk to me. Your notepad doesn’t tell me everything I need to know.’

  She withdraws the paper and spins it round, all with one finger. She pretends to read the article for a few seconds. Then her eyes meet mine above the handcuffs.

  ‘You lied in the features you wrote at your old job. You lied about Date #1 of Five Parks. What else have you lied about, Suzanne?’

  Don’t tell her anything.

  ‘I wonder where that glass of water is,’ she says, lolling her head to the door and back to me, demonstrating how little she cares about the glass of water.

  ‘You must be thirsty, Suzanne. It must be what, almost three days since you’ve had a drink? That must be torturous for you. You must be dying of thirst. The thing is, though, when we searched your room under the theatre, we found the water bottle under the bed. And it was empty. Can you explain that?’

  I can. I acted tough on the blog, writing that I only drank from the bottle once – after Phillips came into the room and tortured me with a knife – but the truth was I guzzled at it almost from the start. I was so thirsty. The heat in the room sucked all the fluids from my body. I needed to drink. I didn’t care if Phillips had laced the water with something to put me to sleep, because sleep was my only respite. When I slept, I wasn’t awake in a living hell. I don’t choose to tell Harding this, however, because she already knows it.

  ‘Are there any other lies you want to share with me before we go on, Suzanne?’

  Right now, I can only think of one, or one that I want to tell Harding.

  ‘Valentine’s,’ I say.

  She shuffles her skirt across her chair. ‘I’m sorry? What?’

  ‘The Valentine’s Day card,’ I say, glad to disarm her with something trivial. ‘The one I wrote about in the room. The one Charles Blake sent to me in primary school.’

  She is irritated by this disruption. Perhaps she didn’t read that blog entry. ‘Yes, what about it?’

  ‘I sent it to myself.’

  Harding can’t help letting out a smile, but her eyes tell me she is frustrated I have steered us off course. She bangs her fist on the newspaper and I jump to attention.

  ‘How does this article make you feel, Suzanne?’

  ‘Regretful,’ I say. ‘It makes me regret the things I did. As you said, most of what is in there is true.’

  This is not a lie; it’s just not the whole story.

  ‘Very good, I understand that. But doesn’t it disgust you that this journalist, who, by your own admission, you took a shine to, gutted you like this? Aren’t you pissed off that the date with him – the best date you’d ever had – was a stitch-up?’

  It does piss me off. But I am past it, on to something else. I was angry at Phillips – and myself – when I was trapped in the room and my captor put the article in front of me. But back then, I didn’t know Phillips was that captor. I’m still angry that he deceived me and wrote his article, but not as angry as I am at him for kidnapping me, torturing me and trying to kill me.

  ‘Let me ask you this, Suzanne; why was Miles there on Date #5? Tell me the truth.’

  He was in the park because he followed Rob for a whole day, pursued him across London, from Regent’s Park to Gladstone Park. That’s how much he wanted to kidnap me. I had embarrassed him when I blogged from my kitchen while he was waiting below in the bedroom. And then I wouldn’t take his calls. He thought I had discarded him and plotted his revenge.

  ‘On Five Parks, you wrote that Miles – or Aaron as you knew him then – told you he had tailed Rob to Gladstone. But when you wrote that, you were such a mess you don’t even remember doing it. The first thing you wrote in your prison cell, that’s what you said, Suzanne. But I think you know there is a simpler explanation. We’ve discovered an email in your sent box, Suzanne. An email that was sent two days before Date #5. An email you sent to Aaron telling him to meet you in Gladstone Park after your date. Do you remember sending that email?’

  They have my laptop, and they’ve been in there poking around my emails, just like my captor. I don’t remember sending that email, because I didn’t send it. I can’t let Harding cloud my narrative.

  ‘Did you send that email?’ she asks.

  I shake my head.

  ‘Well, I’ll just have to ask Miles about it when he comes round.’

  Phillips is alive. I was worried I might have killed him. Worried about the consequences, not the act. He deserves to suffer for what he did to me. When his red eyes closed before me on the floor of that bright o
uter room, I accepted that they may never open again. It was him or me. I am happy with my choice.

  Harding lets her last pretend throwaway comment hang between us for a bit, then realises I am not going to bite.

  ‘You’re not interested in knowing his condition?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Well, I’ll tell you anyway. He’s in the Royal Free Hospital, undergoing surgery right now for a broken leg. Particularly complex fracture. How was he when you last saw him?’

  Phillips’s broken face and those dead red eyes flash behind my own.

  ‘He was passed out,’ I say.

  ‘He wasn’t in a good way when our officers go to him. In and out of consciousness. He had been badly beaten. Tell me this, Suzanne; in your notepad when you describe your escape, you write about the Gaumont State Theatre like you’ve never been in there before. But that’s not true, is it? You have been in there before.’

  I nod. Of course I have been there before. How else would I have known to leave all the clues? One lazy Wednesday a few months ago wandering around Kilburn when I should have been at home freelancing, I stepped out of the rain and into the theatre – as Harding says, it was open to the public for a few hours a week. I strolled around the foyer for a bit and peeked in at the stage and the Wurlitzer, and when the rain eased off a bit I went back out on Kilburn High Road and walked home.

  ‘We know you’ve been in there because the caretaker recognised you when you smashed through the glass doors. He had a scan through his visitors’ book for us and sure enough, you signed it when you went in, back in April.’

  I nod again. If I hadn’t been there before, I wouldn’t have twigged where Miles had hidden me, and I wouldn’t have been able to signal my location to Sylvie and Michael.

  ‘But your name was in the book again much more recently – just a few Wednesdays ago.’

  No. That is wrong. I had only been there once.

  ‘You wrote in your blog that your captor kept you in that room for three days, from Saturday until today, Tuesday.’

  Another nod, even though I know she is walking me into a trap – I just don’t know when it will be sprung.