‘Please, let me go,’ Eric heard himself saying.
‘Not yet. You still haven’t given me what I want, Eric.’
Eric put a hand to his head, trying to steady himself. ‘I can’t do it, I just can’t do it. I’ve tried, but it’s impossible.’
‘You will do it, Eric.’
‘I will, I promise I will. Just please, leave my family alone, please.’
A cruel smile flickered across his lips. ‘How is Jane?’
Eric looked up at him, trying not to break down. ‘You must know.’
If he did, his expression didn’t give anything away. ‘Know what?’
‘She’s dead, she, she killed herself, because of what you did.’
His facial expression didn’t change. ‘I’m sorry that she suffered because of your actions.’
Eric put his head into his hands and started to sob. He was right. It was all down to him. He had caused all this.
‘You give me what I want, and no-one else will get hurt.’
‘Just hurt me, not my family,’ Eric slurred.
The man scoffed. ‘I just want what’s owed to me, Eric, that’s all.’
‘I’ll get you want you want, I swear, I swear I will get it, please.’
‘Good. Now cover his eyes.’
The two other men moved towards him. One put on the blindfold with the other held him firm. Eric didn’t struggle.
‘Now we’re ready,’ the man said, as a gush of air rushed into the van through the open doors. Eric hadn’t even noticed that they’d stopped moving. ‘Get up, Eric.’
Eric tried to get up from the bench, but fell back down. His balance had gone AWOL. He tried again, this time really focussing on staying upright. But he straightened up too early, smacking the top of his head into the van’s roof.
‘Watch it. I think you’ve had a bit too much to drink, haven’t you?’
Eric heard laughs as he was guided out of the van and down onto ground level. He swayed in the darkness, before being led, legs-buckling, to a lock-up garage. He heard the door being opened, and was pushed inside. The door was closed behind them and his blindfold removed. Blinding light exploded from a single bare bulb hanging from the ceiling. The inside was spinning. The garage reeked of petrol and was ringed by shelves filled with car accessories. Then Eric’s vision cleared slightly and he saw something on the ground.
A large sack, and it was moving.
‘We don’t like being messed around, Eric.’
He couldn’t keep his eyes off the sack. Was it really moving, or was he imagining it?
Within seconds his question was answered, as the man brought his heel down hard on the object. The sack seemed to spasm and Eric heard a muffled cry.
‘People have to learn,’ the man said, stamping on the sack with full force. ‘That no-one messes with me. No one tries to ruin my plans.’ He took a few steps back, wiping saliva from his mouth like an animal going in for the kill.
‘Now you take over,’ he gestured to Eric. ‘Kick the bastard.’
Eric felt the bile rise as he contemplated the act. He stood, swaying.
‘Do it now!’ he shouted. ‘Or the next person in that sack will be your wife, and then your grandchildren.’
Eric shook his head, taking a stumbling step back. ‘Please, let me go, please, don’t hurt my family.’
‘Do this now,’ the man said, ‘or they will suffer.’
Eric didn’t doubt it. He took a step forward, muttering a silent prayer for forgiveness as he kicked out at the unknown person. He felt his shoe against bone. It was the worst feeling, and he found himself crying.
‘Harder.’
Eric kicked out again and again. The person in the bag stopped moving and became an inanimate object. It was easier now. He kicked and stamped as the world spun around him.
‘It’s finished,’ the man said, as Eric stumbled backwards. ‘Congratulations, Eric, you’ve done a good job.’
Hyperventilating, Eric tried to steady himself against the shelving, but dislodged an oil can. It fell to the floor and the lid flipped off, spilling out the dark liquid onto the concrete. He watched the sack as the men untied the rope. There was still no movement from whoever was inside.
They removed the sack and Eric caught his breath.
His plan, his one last hope, had failed.
The man who he had met two days ago was unmoving, blood staining his teeth. There was a deep red gash along his right eye. His nose had collapsed; flattened by Eric’s blows.
‘Now don’t try anything like that again, Eric, and everything will be alright.’
15
‘Why would she say that?’
Cullen shrugged. ‘I was hoping that you might be able to answer the same question.’
Sam looked off to the left. ‘Why would she say that?’ he said out loud, but this time directed at himself. He couldn’t see any rationale for Alison’s actions – why would she want to implicate him in that way?
‘She might just be looking for someone to blame,’ Cullen offered. ‘And you’re the person she’s chosen.’
Sam looked back at him. ‘Did she say anything else?’
Cullen shook his head. ‘Not according to Shirley Ainsley. She just said that and put the phone down.’
‘So you still don’t know where she is?’
‘No.’
‘But at least she’s safe.’
He nodded. ‘Are you certain that you don’t remember anything else that might explain what Alison said?’
‘No,’ Sam replied without hesitation. Why was Cullen not letting go of this? ‘You don’t believe it was my fault, do you?’
‘Like I said, suicide looks the most likely option, but we can’t and shouldn’t rule anything out at this stage.’
‘So you do think I could be involved?’
‘Personally no. I think that Jane Ainsley wanted to die, and drove down onto that line. You just happened to be in the right place at the right time. I’d be a fool to think anything different.’
‘But you just have to cover your bases.’
‘Exactly.’
It was reasonable from Cullen’s perspective to consider all the possibilities, and Sam had no divine right to be believed without question. ‘So what next?’
‘We hope that Alison gets back into contact very soon. She’s the one person who really does know what happened.’
He was in the room before Louisa even noticed. She’d been facing the door, rooting through her filing cabinet for one of her patient’s records.
‘Miss Owen, I wanted to see you.’
Louisa spun around. Richard Friedman was stood in front of the closed door, and moved a pace towards her.
‘Stay there,’ Louisa heard herself say. Her voice was shaky. ‘You shouldn’t be here.’
‘I had to see you,’ he replied, staying on the spot. ‘Please, I’m sorry. I need to talk to you. Please, talk with me, Miss Owen, please.’
Louisa ran through her options. She couldn’t phone for help without making things worse. And she wasn’t prepared to just push past him and fight her way out of the office. So talking was the only way.
She gathered herself as much as she could, trying to calm down inside so her fear wouldn’t leak out and risk antagonising the situation. ‘Okay, sit down, Richard. But I can’t be long. I have to see another client in a few minutes.’
It was a lie but a worthy one.
He nodded, and almost fell into the seat as Louisa took her place opposite. ‘Thank you, thank you, Miss Owen, thank you so much.’
Louisa met his eyes. They were blood red, and he was looking right through her, as if focussing on some distant point.
Was he drugged up?
She tried to pretend that this was just another consultation, taking a deep, steadying breath. ‘How are you, Richard?’
He shook his head, his eyes closing. ‘Not good, not good at all. I’m sorry, so sorry.’ He brought a shaking hand up to his head.
&nbs
p; Louisa didn’t really want to ask the question, but she had to. ‘What are you sorry for, Richard?’
‘For what I’ve done to you,’ he said, his head now buried in his hands.
Maybe he had come to admit it all. If it had been him who had done all those things, she would be relieved. ‘Do you want to tell me about it?’
He nodded.
Louisa took a chance, pulling out her new mobile from the desk drawer and holding it below the level of the table. She pressed speed dial 1 and placed the phone on her lap.
‘I’ve done bad things, bad, bad things.’
She waited.
‘I’m sorry, so sorry.’
‘You’re sorry for coming to my home?’
He nodded vigorously. ‘I’m sorry. So sorry for everything. Please, I just needed to be close to you, I needed to be close.’
‘But coming around to my house, you know that’s not right, don’t you? We agreed that there are boundaries – we have to keep a distance outside of the hospital.’
‘I know, I know, I’m just so sorry.’
‘I asked you not to do it, Richard, but you keep coming. Like now, just turning up at my office when you know you shouldn’t do it.’
‘I know. But please, please Miss Owen, can I still see you here, at the hospital?’
Louisa shook her head as he looked on with pitiful child-like expectancy. ‘I’m really sorry, Richard, but it’s for the best that you see Karl instead. He’s a very nice man, Richard, and a very experienced counsellor.
‘No, please,’ he pleaded. ‘I need to see you. I can’t cope without you.’
Louisa glanced down at the phone. It was still connected.
‘Karl will really be able to help you. I’ve made sure that he knows all the background.’
Richard shook his head. ‘No, please, I want to see you.’ This time there was force behind the statement.
‘It’s not possible. I’m sorry.’
‘You called the police,’ he said, his forehead creasing in confusion. ‘They questioned me about stealing telephone and threatening your friend.’
Louisa had decided not to go down this route, but so be it.
‘Did you take my telephone, Richard?’
He started weeping.
Louisa tried a different tact. ‘Richard, you said you’re sorry for what you’ve done. What else have you done?’
Richard looked up. ‘I did it for the best.’
Louisa was confused. ‘Did what?’
He closed his eyes. ‘I should have waited for her. I shouldn’t have crossed the road on my own. I wasn’t there when she needed me. The screams, I can hear the screams; they’re getting louder now.’
His mind was blending the past and present again. She wouldn’t get any sense out of him now. The priority was to calm him. ‘Richard you still need time to grieve. What you’ve been through, it takes time to recover, years for people to come to terms with their loss – especially when the event was so traumatic and unjust. What you’ve been through for all these years, the pain has built up and built up. It would take its toll on anyone.’
Richard nodded. ‘I did it for the best.’
This was a new statement; unlike anything he’d said to her in the past. ‘I don’t understand.’
‘It was to make everything better,’ he replied cryptically.
‘Richard, you need more support to recover from everything you’ve been through, but I won’t be able to help you anymore. I’m really sorry. But Karl will be there to help you now. He can help you through all this and you will come out the other side, I promise.’
‘No.’
This wasn’t working. Louisa decided it was time to get a little firmer.
‘It’s best that we don’t see each other again,’ she said. ‘And please, Richard, don’t come to my house again. If you do, I’ll have to speak to the police again, and I really don’t want to have to do that. I don’t want to get you into trouble.’
‘No, no, no,’ he said, his teeth clenched. ‘I can’t do this anymore.’
And then he produced the knife.
Sam stepped inside the apartment and headed for the kitchen. Making a cup of tea, he thought about what Paul Cullen had said. Maybe this was just a way that Alison was coping with the tragedy. Who knows what state she was in right now, alone, without any support from family. And she was so young to cope with such an event. Cullen was right. He was an obvious person to blame. After all, he had failed to free her mother from the car. Maybe that’s what she had really meant – he was to blame because he had failed to save her mother.
He moved into the lounge with the drink. The house was empty without Anna. Too quiet. She was the one who filled their home with laughter and life. Looking around, he smiled at the slightly scary but exciting thought that in nine months this place would be home to a new arrival.
Sam glanced at his watch. It would be late afternoon in Bangladesh. He wondered how Anna was getting on. He moved into the office room and booted up the laptop. A couple of minutes later he was online, logging into his email account. Maybe Anna had sent a message.
She had. It wasn’t overly long, but it was more than he could have hoped for, given the remoteness of her location and the hectic nature of her task. She had mailed first thing in the morning. The group were set to travel out to a remote rural area just north of the delta region, which had been especially hard hit by the typhoon. The population had been without clean water for days and the situation was grave. Sam smiled at the last sentence.
Lots of love from Anna and Baby Becker the first. Can’t wait to see you very soon! xxx
He replied, leaving out mention of the meeting with Cullen. He would update her when she got back. Hopefully by then Alison would have reappeared, the person would have stopped calling him, and things would be back to normal.
Sam returned to his email inbox and began deleting the half a dozen spam messages that had built up over the past two days. Most were offering him the chance to enhance the size of his penis or claiming that he’d won the lottery.
But one message was different.
Cathy B wants you to check out her profile.
Sam hovered over the title with the cursor. Could this really be a reference to his sister? It was from a sender which screamed spam:[email protected].
He knew it was risky to open such a message. Last year they’d nearly lost their entire hard drive contents thanks to a computer virus that had been delivered by email. But the title was just too tempting.
He opened the message. It repeated the title of the email, but with an accompanying link to a page on a site called Dream Date.
Again, he knew it wasn’t wise to follow the link. But he couldn’t resist. He waited impatiently as the computer connected to the destination site. And then it appeared on screen, and Sam caught his breath.
‘What the hell?’
It was a profile page for his sister Cathy. On the right hand side was her photograph. Her bright smile shone back at him. She was just fifteen years old in the photo. Her life lay ahead of her, or so they had all thought. Sam looked across at the text running beside the photo. It listed her likes as camping, walking on the beach, and late night drinking.
‘Sick bastard,’ he mouthed. ‘Who the hell...’
Her dislikes were listed as “dying young”.
Sam shook his head. He wanted to smash the screen.
There was no more information, apart from a button to click if you wanted to get in touch with her. But when he did, the site asked for registration details.
‘Who the hell would do this?’
Before he could think of what to do next, his phone rang.
It was Louisa.
‘But coming around to my house, you know that’s not right, don’t you? We agreed that there are boundaries – we have to keep a distance outside of the hospital.’
Her voice was low. ‘Louisa, are you okay?’
There was another voice, a man’s, but it
was not loud enough to hear.
‘I asked you not to do it, Richard, but you keep coming. Like now, just turning up at my office when you know you shouldn’t do it.’
Sam got to his feet as the horror of the situation dawned. Richard Friedman was at her office. ‘Louisa?’
And then the phone connection went dead.
16
Sam phoned through to the hospital’s main switchboard as he threw open his car door and slid into the driver’s seat.
The hospital’s automated voice recognition system requested a name.
‘Operator.’
He started the engine, resisting the temptation to drive off with phone in hand. It would be difficult enough to concentrate on the road, without trying to deal with a phone conversation at the same time.
‘Calling Operator,’ the system replied.
The phone seemed to ring for ever as Sam continued to fight the urge to just sink his foot down on the accelerator.
‘Hello, Operator speaking.’
At last.
‘Hi, this is Sam Becker. I’m a consultant on the Cardiac Unit. I need you to get security up to the second floor, clinical psychology, right away - Louisa Owen’s office, 2G27. It’s an emergency.’ He injected all the authority he could muster into his voice. The operator needed to be in no doubt as to the seriousness of his demand.
‘Of course,’ the operator replied, her tone recognising the urgency. ‘What’s happened?’
‘A patient has forced his way into her office,’ Sam replied. ‘He’s dangerous. Louisa called me but the phone went dead.’
‘Right,’ the operator said, ‘I’ll call security straight away. I’ll also call the police.’
‘Great,’ Sam said. ‘But get security up there right now.’
Sam neared Louisa’s office, having parked the car in the drop off area right outside the front entrance to the hospital. He wasn’t comforted to see a group of security guards talking to a policewoman, right outside Louisa’s door. It looked like a crime scene.
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