by Wyer, Carol
She wasn’t annoyed. He probably shouldn’t have come back to work so soon after the stabbing incident anyway. He had been seriously injured. Still, he was no use to her if he was out of sorts. ‘You feeling okay to work today?’
‘Definitely. I’m fine.’
‘Okay, good.’ She was about to bring him up to speed when Murray arrived. He threw open the door and spoke.
‘Melissa Long has just made an urgent appeal on the local radio to her daughter, begging her to come home.’
‘So the news is out then,’ said Natalie.
Ian looked perplexed. ‘What have I missed?’
‘Quite a lot,’ said Murray.
‘You can bring him up to speed in a second. There’s been a development. First off, Harriet’s phone pinged at five forty-five a.m. The signal was triangulated and covered an area close to her home in Bramshall so MisPer have moved back there to hunt for her. Secondly, a video’s been posted on a website called Disappear. Are either of you familiar with it?’
No one had heard of it. Ian sat down and began typing immediately. He was the best of all of them on all matters to do with the Internet. Murray and Natalie edged closer to him and watched as a black screen manifested itself.
‘That it?’ Murray said.
‘No, wait,’ Ian replied as, one by one, words in large red font manifested across the screen:
Do… you… dare… to… disappear?
The words vanished and a fresh screen appeared, this time with a lengthier message.
Have you got the wits and courage to outsmart everyone?
Can you remain hidden and fox even your best friends?
12… 24… 48… or even 72 hours.
How long can you stay under the radar?
Clever enough to vanish?
Then we dare you to…
Disappear.
Ian pressed the word ‘dare’ that was now flashing and was taken to an information page with hints from those who had taken up the challenge.
Ian read out some of the tips. ‘This guy – Erik from Stuttgart – says you should make sure you take nothing of sentimental value with you or your parents will believe you have run away. You want everyone to think you have completely vanished off the face of the earth. This person, KJ, says it’s important to keep your mobile switched off when you are not filming yourself because it can be traced. Best to buy a burner phone and leave your usual one at home.’
Natalie rubbed at her forehead. ‘What the fuck is this nonsense?’
Murray spoke out. ‘It’s a dare. The website is daring people to disappear. Wasn’t there a craze a while back for kids to go missing for twenty-four hours? It’s along those lines.’
‘Shit, yes. I heard about that.’
Ian clicked onto a section called ‘Hall of Fame’, featuring a leader table of names of those who had managed to hide for the longest periods of time, then another section, ‘How did you do it?’ This was a page containing videos of teenagers who’d filmed themselves during hiding, and the most recent was the video Natalie had received from Graham.
‘We believe that’s Harriet,’ she said.
‘Then it seems she’s deliberately hiding.’
Natalie shook her head. ‘No. I don’t think so. It isn’t like the other videos here. Surely, she’d have posted one of herself hiding not screaming behind a door. This is different. Somebody wants us to believe she’s hiding. I think she’s in danger.’
* * *
Harriet sensed it was daylight. Not that she could see anything, shut up as she was in the pitch-black of the cramped space. It was the sound of birds that had woken her – the first one like a note from a flute followed by another that sounded a little like a jangling of keys. At first, she’d thought the sounds were human, but as they intensified she understood them to be coming from birds who would only be singing if it was daytime. Her toes tingled with pins and needles and she tried to relieve the pain by wiggling them. Her body was clammy and cold, damp with sweat.
She’d dozed off. How long had she been asleep? Hours? Minutes? She strained to hear any movements or sounds that would indicate she wasn’t alone. The noise of water rushing downstream or a faraway waterfall in her ears confused her momentarily, but she soon realised it was coming from her own body that was pumping her blood so quickly it made her feel faint. Was she alone or was her tormentor still close by?
She swallowed painfully, her throat dry from screaming so loudly. She’d yelled for hours but nobody had heard her. No one had come to rescue her. She fought back fresh tears that sprang to her eyes. She wanted to go home. She wanted to see her mum and cuddle the baby, who smiled at her when she tickled him, and hug her younger brother, who called her Hattie and told her he loved her even though she pretended to ignore him.
She wanted this horror to end. She hated being trapped in the dark. Harriet didn’t like the dark. She’d never admit to her friends she was afraid of it – they all thought she was daring, the daughter of a criminal, and she lived up to that image. Harriet was always the first to rise to a dare – the girl who others looked up to with her devil-may-care attitude, who didn’t give a shit when teachers told her off, who hung with the older kids and had smoked dope and taken E and had a proper boyfriend. The truth was she was always putting on a front. She hated being the show-off but it was the only way she knew how to behave.
If her classmates could see her now, they’d laugh at her. She was nothing without her bold make-up, false nails and attitude. She was Harriet Long, half-sister to two demanding brats and the person who was most ignored at home. She was the pain in the neck who argued about stuff even though she didn’t mean to. She suddenly wanted to tell her mum she was sorry for being such a nuisance. She didn’t know why she played up. She couldn’t help it. Maybe it was because she craved attention that she did stupid things and annoyed her mum. Any attention was better than none.
Her mum wouldn’t even know she was trapped here. She’d believe the story that she was with Emily. Harriet released a sob. She’d done some dumb shit in her life but this was the dumbest. Why had she told Kyle she was staying at Emily’s? Now her mum wouldn’t even be looking for her. She snivelled noisily, trying to focus on how she might escape even though, deep down, she knew it was hopeless. She was never going to see her mum again.
A creak!
Panic like invisible mist filled her chest, clogging her airways and causing her breath to come in little gasps. There was another, louder creak. Harriet began to tremble and her mind went blank, all thoughts consumed by some primeval sense that told her something even more terrible was about to occur.
* * *
Ian rang Natalie, who, together with Murray, was on her way to visit Harriet’s friend, Emily Rowley.
‘I’ve received a call from West Midlands Police to say a group of travellers have arrived on their patch. Officers are on their way to establish who they are and if Lance Hopkins is with them.’
She thanked him and punched out the remainder of the text message she’d composed for her daughter, Leigh, telling her she hoped she’d managed to get her maths homework done okay. She read it through and decided it sounded horribly formal. She heaved a sigh, added a ‘love you’ and sent it anyway. At least Leigh would know her mum was thinking about her. She typed another to Josh – a brief message saying she’d see him later and was sending love – and pressed the send button. When had it suddenly become so difficult to communicate with her two teenagers? She found it difficult to remember what it was like to be that age. If she was honest, she tried not to think about those years at all. They were filled with too many memories of her sister Frances. She slid the phone back into her pocket.
‘What were you like as a teenager, Murray?’
‘A right tearaway. Got into a shitload of trouble.’
‘Would you have taken up a dare like this one?’
‘Probably. You have no fear at that age. Everything’s a laugh, isn’t it? You want to show off to your frie
nds, and if they’re into something, you probably are as well. I did all sorts of crazy nonsense – tried to jump from the roof of a building to another one time. Well, that was the plan until we got spotted and a security guard marched us off the premises. In retrospect, I don’t know what we were thinking of. It seems to be a phase that teenagers go through.’
Murray kept his attention on the road. Natalie figured he had a point. Teenagers had little fear or sense when it came to such challenges. There’d been a glut of them in recent years thanks to social media, including a fire challenge that involved soaking parts of the body with a flammable liquid and setting fire to it before jumping into a pool or shower to douse the flames, all the while filming it for Instagram, and a cinnamon challenge where participants ate a spoonful of the spice without any water, which had resulted in some of them choking and being rushed to hospital. Natalie worried her own children could be influenced by such challenges. If Harriet had taken up this particular vanishing dare, she might have tried others.
Emily Rowley was dressed for school and sat on a kitchen stool with her hands in her lap.
‘Thank you for talking to us, Emily,’ Natalie said.
The girl shrugged nonchalantly.
‘You must be concerned about Harriet.’
‘Sort of. Yeah. I watched the video online and I was scared something had happened to her.’
Emily’s mother intervened. ‘She told me straight away it was Harriet and I rang the police. She’s worried, all right, aren’t you, babe?’
The girl winced before reprimanding her mother. ‘Mum!’
‘Did Harriet say anything about taking up the Disappear challenge to you?’
‘She talked about it a couple of weeks ago. I hadn’t heard of it but she told me about the website, Disappear, and we looked at the ways you could go missing for a day or longer, and at some of the videos. She thought they were cool. I never thought she’d try it herself. I mean, she does all sorts of stuff but I never thought she’d try and vanish. After Harriet’s mum rang and we found out she was missing, I wondered if she was doing the dare, and that’s why I went on the website – in case she’d uploaded a video. She had but it wasn’t like the other videos there. I expected her to have done a selfie video – you know, talking to the camera.’
‘How did she find the website, Emily?’
‘Chatting online. She’s really into social media challenges and was discussing them with others and somebody mentioned the Disappear website.’
‘Do you know anyone else who’s done the dare?’
Emily shook her head. ‘No. Harriet and I only talked about doing it. We discuss all sorts of dares but we don’t do them. We just watch videos of people who have.’
‘You say she’s done other stuff – what exactly has she done?’
The girl’s cheeks flushed. ‘Just silly stuff. Loads of kids do it. Challenges. Dares.’
Natalie was under the impression Emily had joined in with some of it and didn’t want to divulge too much in front of her mother.
‘When did you last talk to Harriet?’
‘Lunchtime yesterday.’
‘She didn’t say anything at all about going missing?’
‘No.’
‘Has she ever said anything about home life? Maybe talked about being unhappy?’
Emily shook her head. ‘Not really. She misses her dad. She doesn’t ever get to see him and she gets annoyed with her little brothers, especially Jack, at times.’
‘Did she say anything about Kyle?’
She blushed. ‘Only rude stuff about him being a bit of an idiot.’
‘She doesn’t get along with him?’
‘She gets on with him but she doesn’t think much of him. He’s not a bit like her dad, and she thinks the world of him.’
‘Was she behaving differently in any way to normal?’
‘She was in a really good mood because she’s got a new boyfriend. She wouldn’t tell any of us who he was except he’s really good-looking and he owns a car. I thought she might be going to see him because she did her nails at lunchtime. She’d brought some falsies to school – you aren’t supposed to wear them there – and she stuck them on. She laughed and said the teachers wouldn’t notice. She wanted her hands to look nice for later but refused to tell us why. She just winked. That’s why I thought it was for her boyfriend. She has a thing about nails.’
‘Did she say anything to you at lunchtime about taking up this Disappear dare?’
‘No. After we looked at the site, I asked if she’d ever do it. She laughed and said there were better ways to spend your time than hiding from everyone.’
‘Did you discuss where you would hide out if you took up the dare?’
‘Yeah. I said I’d go to her house and hide in her bedroom, and she said that was dumb because it was way too obvious, and she’d go somewhere nobody would think of. She said she knew a secret place in Watfield she’d been to with her boyfriend, and she’d go there.’
An urgent phone call to Tenby House and Garden Services had resulted in them establishing Stu was currently on the M6 motorway with his work colleague, Will Layton. Natalie rang Stu on the mobile number his boss had given her.
‘Stu, we need to speak to you.’
‘I’m on the motorway.’
‘It’s a matter of some urgency regarding Harriet Long.’
There was a garbled conversation and then he said, ‘We’re not near any service stations so we can’t pull off, and we’re a good ten miles from the next junction. Can I talk to you on the phone?’ His voice sounded anxious. Natalie would rather talk to him face-to-face but time was of the essence.
‘Harriet told her friend Emily you had shown her a secret place. Where might that have been?’
‘A secret place? I don’t know what you mean.’
Natalie suddenly lost patience. ‘I can have your vehicle stopped at any moment and you brought in for questioning so don’t make this harder for yourself than it needs to be.’
‘I’m not!’ The indignant voice went up an octave.
Natalie tightened her grip on the phone. ‘Stu, where did you and Harriet go when you met up with her?’
‘A few places – outside her school, the chip shop near me or the retail park. She once caught a bus into town and walked down to meet me when I finished work at the Hopkins’ house. We went to the park behind the house. The park behind the house… Wait a sec… That must be what she meant. It isn’t actually a secret. It’s a building in the park. It’s boarded up now but we sat on the porch for a while. It’s out of sight behind some bushes.’
Natalie looked at Murray, who nodded.
‘What sort of building is it?’
‘Dunno… looks like a house with boarded windows and a long terrace and a clock on the roof.’
Murray mouthed ‘cricket pavilion’ at her.
‘Could it be a cricket pavilion?’
‘What’s one of those? I don’t know what a pavilion is. Will?’
There was mumbling and he came back on the line. ‘That could be it. It looks like that. Have you not found her?’ The voice sounded unnerved.
‘Not yet.’
‘Do you think she might be there?’
‘I hope so.’
She thanked him and ended the call then rang Graham, who was still heading the search for Harriet, with the new information. He knew about the pavilion.
‘My team searched it when we were hunting for Savannah. It’s most unlikely Harriet would be there. It’s extremely run-down.’
‘Well, it’s all we’ve got to go on, so we’ll take a look just in case she is actually hiding there.’
He sounded jaded. ‘Okay. We’re concentrating on the Bramshall area. We’ve covered the entire housing estate and nearby streets and are fanning out. Good luck.’
Floral tributes had been laid beside the park railings along with stuffed toys, photos and messages for Savannah, who would never see or read them. The park gates were clos
ed and a sign saying the park was closed for the meantime had been placed on them. Natalie cast about for signs of life inside the park and, spotting no one, said, ‘There’s only one thing for it. Climb over.’
The railings weren’t very high but it took careful manoeuvring to avoid the sharp, golden spikes at the top of each ornately painted upright. Murray landed with a heavy thump beside her. A lorry rumbled past them along the main road, the occupant oblivious to them both.
On their way to the park, Natalie had searched on her phone for information about the pavilion and established there’d been a bowls club pavilion in the park at one time. She spun 180 degrees. ‘Where’s this pavilion?’
Murray peered at the map on his mobile and pointed left. ‘If I’m looking at the right place, it’s in that direction.’
‘There must be other ways of getting into this park,’ she commented as they jogged along the pathway.
‘You’d have to cross the railway lines and nip through a break in the hedge. There’s only one entrance. Turn here.’
He swerved right and raced up an incline, Natalie close behind him. At the top of the slope she slowed and glanced down onto the houses below and the back gardens adjoining the park. One such house belonged to Jane Hopkins. Each had hawthorn hedging forming a barrier between the gardens and the park. It was unlikely anyone could have entered the park from any of these houses. If Harriet had come here, she must have climbed the railings like them and taken a chance she’d have been spotted by passing traffic. It didn’t seem likely. If Harriet had wanted to hide, she wouldn’t have chosen a route where she might have drawn attention to herself.
Murray had increased his lead so she picked up her pace again, passing a children’s play area and a set of three swings. Murray drew to a halt and examined the screen again. Natalie caught him up, pleased to not be out of breath. He turned his head left then right. ‘There.’ He darted towards thick bushes and forced his way between them. Natalie brought up the rear, squeezing between the thick leaves overgrown over time to provide a screen for what lay beyond – a structure similar in style to a small wooden chalet complete with two steps leading to a wooden terrace running along its length. This was the old bowls pavilion.