Run, Darling

by Nicola Tee

  “I soon realised no amount of pleading or trying to escape was going to get me home, it would just get me killed, so I cuddled my chin into my soaking wet jumper and stared out the window. I think he took every country lane he knew to keep me out of sight, as in the end all I could see were hundreds of trees dotted around. The best way to describe it is like it was an apocalypse, there was no one left but the two of us. With every mile travelled I knew home was getting farther away and that was a hard fact to accept. It did not take long for all my hope to vanish and once it did I— well, let’s just say my thoughts went into a dark place.”

  “I am so sorry this happened to you,” the detective kindly says whilst gently reaching out and brushing my hand with his fingertips. My whole body tenses. I want to scream, ‘Don’t touch me!’ But I don’t. I allow the interview to take an informal turn. I allow him to attempt to comfort me.

  “Do you know what the funny thing is?” I add.

  “What?” he quizzes as he folds his arms and perches them on top of his belly.

  “The fact that I am a story. One of those stories you read about, a kidnapped child, a broken family, those stories. And you feel heartbroken for the families involved and the victims but then you move on and read something else and you push to the back of your mind another family’s pain because you do not know them. But, the weirdest thing is you never think it will happen to you. I don’t know whether that is because ignorance is bliss, but never in a million years would I ever of thought I would have been on a ‘missing’ list, and my family would be the family that people would read about and show a minute or two’s compassion for.”

  “Do you remember anything else about the day you were kidnapped?” asks Mr. Simmons.

  “Once I concluded there was nothing more I could do to escape I closed my eyes and started praying. How silly, as I never even believed in God. I know that was very deluded of me, but I had no physical fighting spirit left in me, so I thought if there was a God I would hand my life over to him. And then I woke up: lying on a mattress in a freezing cold room, and I knew I was a million miles away from my home. How am I ever meant to sleep peacefully at night again, knowing I have lived out my own nightmares? He has robbed me of my past, present and future. How can one man do that? How can one man be allowed to do that? How can one man want to do that?”

  “Calm down. You are safe now,” he states with a gentle smile, watering eyes, and flush cheeks. His poker face is slowing peeling off with every word spoken between us. I suppose it is quite nice, not being the only emotional wreck in the room.

  “I will never be safe as long as he and I are alive,” I whisper, staring at the floor, hoping the tape hadn’t caught that last bit.

  Everything goes silent. The room feels like it is caving in on me. The tape ends the silence by making a scratching sound signalling that it needs to be changed before we can go any farther.

  We Have Found It

  “My officers have found the cottage, but it is empty. Do you have any idea where the man who did this to you might be?” the detective impatiently quizzes.

  “Don’t worry, he will come for me. Maybe not at this precise moment but give it time and he will come, trust me he will come,” I cry.

  “We won’t let him hurt you ever again. Help us find him and get you and Lizzie justice,” he proposes.

  “He might go to this cottage place he used to talk to me about, he used to go there as a kid for weekends with his father, he called it his ‘happy place’. He would talk for hours about the fun times he had there, almost like they were his only good memories. The cottage is in rural Wales, on the border, I think. It is just one cottage in the middle of acres of land, with no neighbours, which was what his mum wanted. Also, there was a lake behind the cottage; that might help you find it. That lake was the reason Mr. Hump turned out the way he did.”

  “Do you have any other information on the cottage?”

  “Mr Hump told me about this one thing that happened at the cottage; maybe that will help you find it. It was a big thing so maybe the news covered it.”

  “Yes? What was it?”

  “Mr. Hump told me that one summer he and his father built a boat and started to sail it along the lake outback when Mr. Hump’s mum pulled up and demanded they bring their boat in and help her to make a start on dinner. The moment he mentioned the word ‘mother’ his eyes filled with tears. I didn’t know how to react to him showing me such vulnerability. Thinking back, I should have exploited his weakened state, but I was too intrigued to hear what had happened next. After a few moments of silence, he cleared his throat, took a deep breath, shook his head a few times and continued. She got her hunting gun out of her car boot and aimed it at them because they weren’t paddling the boat back to the dock quick enough. Bang! Bang! She fired two shots at them because they disobeyed an order. ‘No one disobeys my orders! No one disobeys my orders!’ He kept repeating those words till he was screaming them in my face, I thought he was going to hit me as he got himself that wound up over the flashback.

  “I sat there in complete shock while he told me how one of the bullets ripped through his dad’s torso, which catapulted him backwards into the lake. This little boy had to swim at the bottom of the lake to the other end, so his mother couldn’t kill him too and then he ran. He witnessed the death of his father: that can never be unseen, can it? It broke my heart when he told me, especially as the woman who did it was the person who brought him into this world. The one person who was meant to protect him from evil not, be the evil he needed protecting from. An orphanage took him in and once he turned eighteen he left and has looked after himself ever since.

  “Maybe you should pull orphanage records in the Wales area as a starting point to finding him,” I suggest.

  “Let me worry about that. Do you have anything further to add?”

  “My opinion, if that counts?” I ask.

  “Go on,” Mr. Simmons nods granting me authority to continue.

  “Maybe it is all down to the famous saying, ‘The apple never falls far from the tree’. My nan used to say that all the time when I was a kid. Think about it, his mum was psychotic and so is he. Surely, I am not the only person who feels sorry for him. You must feel empathy for him too, right? I mean, do not get me wrong, I hate him, but I do feel for the inner child in him. If I close my eyes I can picture this petrified little boy running away from his mother after witnessing the brutal murder of his father. She is no doubt the reason he is a messed-up adult. Like I said, the apple didn’t fall far from the tree.

  “Oh, and one more thing, when he was telling me the story, I reached out to hold his hand to comfort him without even realising what I was doing. The moment my fingers brushed the top of his hand his whole body tensed; his shoulders rose, he clenched his fists and shifted all his body weight backwards into his chair. He repelled human contact, or maybe just my contact. He looked straight into my eyes and whispered, ‘Never touch me again’. He then marched to his sink and frantically started washing the back of his hand, almost like I had a killer virus.”

  “Thank you. What we will do is build a profile of him using your insight, so is there anything else can you tell me about him?”

  “Well, as each day went by I learned more and more about him. I was in his head and he was probably in mine. It did not take me long to realise that he had terrible OCD which spilled over into nearly everything he did, from eating the same meals to sitting in the same chair, and even needing the tea bag left in for ten seconds and only one teaspoon of milk. It took me a good few hundred times to get his tea perfect for him, and in a disturbing way I felt a sense of achievement when he finally cracked a slight smile and said, ‘The tea is just how I like it’. Elizabeth called me a kiss-ass for days after that; I guess I tried to justify it by telling myself that if he liked me he might let me go. Now I know how deluded that was of me. If anything, it made him rely on me further, as in the end, I was his; nail clipping girl, foot massage lady and tea ma
king server. Lizzie got away with doing nothing, but that didn’t end too well for her, did it?

  “I cannot really remember life before Lizzie came along. I think my brain has blocked out those days to protect me from thinking about when I was at my most vulnerable. I do remember the day she arrived though, it was exactly one thousand two hundred and seventy-seven meals after me. The only way I could tell what time of day it was, and roughly how long I had been there was by counting my meals, and I got three meals a day. You can do the maths.”

  “Do you remember what happened on the day of Lizzie’s arrival?”

  “Yes, after breakfast the house felt quieter than usual. Most of the time I could hear Mr. Hump thumping around in his garage but that morning I could have heard a pin drop. I laid on my mattress lost in my own thoughts when the silence was abruptly interrupted by a woman’s screams. I flew up, desperate to know what was going on but all I could see were four white walls, and then, once again, everything went silent. But that silence was deafening. I sat back on my mattress waiting for something, anything, to give me a clue as to what was happening.

  “‘Please, God, let me go home’. I heard those words continuously being spoken by a timid voice, I desperately tried to find where the voice was coming from. I placed my left ear against the vent system which enhanced the sound of the prayers. I crouched down next to the system and quietly sang the first song that popped into my head: ‘Bye, bye, Miss American Pie’. I spent all of Lizzie’s first day quietly singing to her to try to calm her down and then she must have dozed off as once again silence fell."

  “Do you know why he kidnapped Lizzie?"

  “I think he was stalking Lizzie before he abducted her as he knew so much about her, from how many sugars she had in her tea to her obsession with muffins. She never got a cup of tea or a muffin, but I think he got off on the fact that he knew that about her and wouldn’t let her have them. It allowed him to show dominance. When he was feeling particularly cruel he would buy her favourite treats and eat them in front of her, whilst her rib cage was protruding out and indirectly begging for a bite. The thinner she got the more he taunted her, well at least, that was the impression I got.”

  “That is terrible.”

  “Honestly, I hate him with every fibre of my being for what he did to my dear Lizzie, but I hate myself even more because I had no choice but to sit back and watch him starve her to death. Every single time a tear rolled down her cheek my heart broke, but I couldn’t do anything because if I did I would be in the self-dug grave with her now instead of being here with you. Have you ever had to watch someone fade away? I mean literally fade away! The image of her going from a healthy girl to a bag of bones will haunt me to the day I die. I never want to fall asleep again because as soon as I do I will see her ribs, collarbones, and cheekbones escaping through her skin. It’s a permanent image embedded in my memory that haunts me if my mind is not kept busy.”

  “Did he ever let on as to why he picked you and Lizzie?” questions detective Simmons.

  “I am pretty sure he chose Lizzie because she is someone who stands out in a crowd. I, on the other hand, do not stand out amongst the crowd. I am someone who has always blended in, and that never bothered me, I was and am a plain Jane and proud to be one. My hair has always been dark and long, my eyes are a generic brown and I am of average height, so as I said, I blend in. None of my features pop. But I, bizarrely, was his target, and I know that because he knew so much about me. He knew I hated peanut butter, I was a vegetarian, I loved green tea and my father’s real name was Jonathan, when most people assumed his actual name was Jay as he was called that since he was a little boy. I mean, how did he know all that? How long was he stalking me to know all that? He probably watched me for months which was a complete invasion of my privacy, and it makes me want to scrub my old existence away, so he no longer knows me. I want to erase myself.”

  “So, he targeted you because of the way you look?” the detective quizzes, basically summarising my prior points, proving to me that his interview tactics are that of a repetitive nature.

  “Well, at first I thought I was his target because I was a plain Jane and therefore easy for him to morph me into who he wanted, but one evening I came to learn the truth. Mr. Hump’s house was exactly that: a house, not a home. There wasn’t a personal item in sight; no photos, no family heirlooms, nothing. Literally just the house, him, basic necessities for living, oh, and a vase on the mantelpiece that he never mentioned but always stared at when I was around. And then one evening when I was invited, or should I say summoned, into the T.V. room I saw a photo in a crystal-encrusted frame perched on the edge of the dark oak mantelpiece. I was completely shocked. He actually had a personal item and it was actually on show. I moved closer to the picture and once I got a clear look at it I answered the looming question of, ‘Why me?’ I know he was playing games with me by having it on show, but that game gave me a huge advantage as it stopped me from sending myself crazy with guessing why I ended up his victim.

  “You see, I was a spitting image of the woman in the photo, the resemblance was uncanny. It could have easily passed as a picture of me if it wasn’t in black and white. It was his mother. I was a surrogate for her. I went to bed that night feeling so angry at myself.”

  “It isn’t your fault that his mum looked the same as you when she was young,” Mr. Simmons sympathetically whispers.

  “It is my fault,” I snap back.

  “How?” he barks. We are currently behaving like two dogs squaring up to each other.

  “Just before my sixteenth birthday my mum offered to cut my hair into a bob to try to reduce my plain Jane exterior, but I said no. If only I said yes! I might not have reminded him of his mum when she was my age, and I might not have been his target. I know it is a long shot to think like that, but when you have too much time on your hands you think of the most out-of-this-world scenarios.

  “I told Lizzie about it that night through the vent system, and her reply was bang on the money. She said, and I quote, ‘You fell into his trap’. She was right, he needed me to see the photo, he knew I would over-analyse it and he wanted it to consume my thoughts and it did, it does. I answered the ‘Why me?’ question with that picture but I was then left with another overpowering question of, ‘Why Lizzie?’ Who was she replacing? I don’t know. And that makes me furious every second of every hour of every day. I tried so hard to help her survive, but the fight in her slowly faded to the point where I knew she wanted to die so the suffering would end. I repeatedly begged her to be good, so she could get some food, but my pleas went in one ear and out the other. I even tried to use Michael as a way of making her fight, but it was too late, she was mentally gone, all she was waiting for was to be physically gone too, and that day sadly came. Lizzie will never know this, but she saved me, she ignited that fire in my stomach to help me fight my way out.”

  “I think we should take a break now. Is there anything you need— A drink? A snack?”

  “No. I only want one thing, and that is to go and pay my respects to Lizzie. I want you to take me back to the cottage.”

  “That is not a wise decision and against protocol as it is a crime scene, so minimal contact to prevent contamination.”

  “I want to go. And if you do not take me then I will invoke my right to remain silent, meaning this interview is over for good.”

  Memory Lane

  I step into this white zip-up suit which instantly drowns my skeletal frame and hook these blue plastic shoe protectors over my plimsoles, causing me to immediately feel uneasy on my feet due to the lack of grip. There will definitely be no contaminating the scene with all of us wearing our zipped-up hazmat suits looking like germ-fearing aliens (that is simply my interpretation of how we all look).

  I take a deep breath and wipe away my falling tears. I step inside the garage; a wave of déjà vu floors me. I can’t believe I was here only a few hours ago, standing in that very corner shaking like a leaf, ready to f
ight my way out of hell. I slowly walk past the table full of tools and into the kitchen, the tools are still in the same disarray that I left them in. It must have been hard for Mr. Hump, to walk past the mess I had made of his workshop as he needs an organised environment to cope in life.

  “One tile, two tiles, three tiles… forty-five tiles.” I can’t stop my brain from automatically counting the kitchen floor squares. I need to know they are all there.

  I continue through the hallway. I see my bedroom door and it all becomes too surreal. There it hangs, a door with a gold-plated lock on the floor next to it. That one lock was always between my freedom and my imprisonment. I must have launched all of my body weight at that door to get it open thousands of times, but all I did was cause myself bruising, it never budged. That door probably wouldn’t budge even if the world’s strongest man launched himself at it.

  I shuffle slightly closer to my old room. An inch of my foot crosses the threshold, my whole body tenses up, stopping me in my tracks. I gaze inside, and the moment I see my mattress I feel — everything and nothing. I can see myself in a foetal position lying on it, sobbing my heart out, whilst praying for my mummy to come and save me. I pluck up the courage to walk inside, instantaneously, I reach out my hand to touch the little girl’s shoulder to comfort her. My hand gets lost in thin air. I feel nothing. She’s gone. I am gone. It’s all in my head, my mind is playing my past out to the finest detail right in front of me. Anger washes over me. I am determined to find the man who has done this to me, and even more determined to put him in prison so he can have a taste of his own medicine.

  “I must remember something. I must remember something!” I scream out loud. I hurry back to the kitchen and take a seat at the table. The detective goes to take a seat opposite me, and as soon as his bum cheeks hit the wood I want to explode. How dare he sit without being told to! His lack of appreciation for the rules is shocking. I can sit down because I am allowed to. I was granted permission long ago to sit in this chair. Who is he? No one said he could sit! He thinks his suit, tie and badge gives him the right, well, they don’t.