Waiting.
My eyes scan the room. The digital clock shouts 6 a.m. in neon green digits. There’s a warm orange glow emanating from the plug-in night light by the door. Archie thinks it’s funny we have one too. He thinks it’s so we’re the same as him but what he doesn’t know is that I hate the way the night-time swallows me, the suffocating blackness. The fear that something bad, someone bad, will spring out of the shadows.
I know that sometimes they do.
There’s nothing to be heard except George’s breath rattling in his throat. Slowly, my hands relax.
My pyjamas are damp with terror. In my nightmare I had taken Archie to the circus but we were the only ones in the Big Top, the smell of sawdust rising from the empty ring as we took our rickety front-row seats, fluffy pink candyfloss balanced on sticks. The lights went out, Archie had whimpered.
‘It’s okay,’ I had whispered but my heart was pounding. The urge to run immense.
Brightness had filled the tent but only for a second but that second was enough for me to see it. The clown. The lights began to strobe and each time they flashed on, the clown’s face loomed closer and closer. His smiled his slashed red grin, sharp teeth dripping with blood.
And that was when I woke.
There’s a circus coming to the meadow in town in the new year. We won’t go. We never do.
I know I won’t get back to sleep now and so I roll onto my side and gently push George onto his. His snoring stops. I wrap my arms around his waist and press my cheek against his back.
When I get up, Archie is still starfished in his racing-car bed. The mountain of cuddly toys he adores have slid onto the floor in the night, as they always do. There’s a panda, a sloth, a tiger. I’ve never bought him a traditional teddy.
I never will.
The belt on my dressing gown hangs loose and I tighten it as I pad down the landing, relishing the thought of a quiet cup of coffee in a house that will soon be filled with noise.
I see it as I soon as I reach the bottom of the stairs. My feet sinking into the pile of the carpet. My heart sinking into my stomach.
A white envelope on the mat. The noise that woke me must have been the letterbox. It’s too early for the postman. I don’t want to pick it up.
I don’t want to open it.
Somehow I know that whatever is in the envelope has the power to shatter my already shaky resolve to be more.
There’s one word written on the outside:
Leah.
I don’t want to open it.
Where I had felt cold moments before, I now feel hot.
My fingers slips under the seal, the paper rips.
I don’t want to open it.
The world shifts beneath my feet as I read what is scrawled on the paper inside.
I’m still standing there when Archie thunders down the stairs demanding Weetabix, orange juice, a kiss.
I’m still standing there when George sidles up behind me, reading over my shoulder, seeing those two words that shift and blur and move in and out of focus.
The innocuous words that sound like a warning.
FOUR DAYS.
Chapter Fifteen
George
Now
It was George who gently removed the letter from Leah’s fingers. George who settled her on the sofa before retreating to the kitchen to fill the ginormous hole Archie declared he had in his tummy, with milk-soft cereal and sweet-sticky toast.
Four days, the letter had said.
Four days until it will all be over. But then there’s next year. The year after. Thirty years. Forty. The milestones stretch out before him, a long path of unhappiness.
Is he doing the right thing?
He has never felt more conflicted. Last night for the first time in ages he’d felt closer to Leah. They were still a long way from being happy but a token bunch of forecourt flowers and taking the time to talk, to listen, was a start. He owed it to her to try, didn’t he? He owed it to his wife to be honest and true. Look at the state one letter had left her in. For all her bravado last night, George knew she wasn’t strong. She’d be easily broken. The thought of having to pick up all the pieces and glue her back together once more made his chest feel tight. He doesn’t know if he can, not again.
But she needs him right now. He should spend more time at home. For Archie’s sake as much as anyone’s.
George understands what Marie wants from him, but he just can’t give it to her. Not yet.
Is it too late to call the whole thing off? Would Marie forgive? Forget?
‘Leah,’ he crouches beside his wife and pushes a coffee into her hands. ‘It’ll be a journalist trying to scare you into talking. Everyone’s looking for a headline. It’ll be okay.’
‘Do you promise?’ she asks him the impossible.
He closes his eyes against the memory.
Arms and legs wrapped around him. Soft breath and warm moans in his ears.
But it wasn’t real. This is his real life. Morning sun gathering strength, shining a halo over the table where Archie is dabbing up crumbs with his fingers. Strawberry jam smeared around his mouth.
This.
Isn’t it?
He doesn’t promise it will be okay.
He can’t.
Chapter Sixteen
Leah
Now
Four days.
I’ve called work and told them I’ll be late. George offers to drop Archie off at nursery on his way to work. He reassures me again that he’ll remind the staff to be mindful of security, to call if anything out of the ordinary happens. I wave them goodbye out of the window, wearing a bright smile that hurts my face to hold. My hands had touched the letter. I’ve washed them repeatedly until my skin is pink and sore but I can’t wash the words away from my mind. They feel dark and dirty.
Four days.
I pace the living room – treading the same path over and over – a zoo animal.
Trapped.
Watched.
Carly rushes up the driveway. I open the door to usher her inside, as she’s trailed by the shouts of a reporter who has been loitering outside our house all morning.
‘Carly! Is it true he’s out? How do you feel?’
Carly says to me, ‘How does he fucking think I feel?’ She slams the door behind her. Her face is pale. Eyes tinged pink. Although I only saw her two days ago, she seems smaller. Thinner. Shrinking under the weight of the past or shrinking away from the present. Perhaps both.
She doesn’t sit or take off her coat. Instead she smooths out an identical letter onto the kitchen table, which is still lemon-cleaner-damp from where George had wiped away the remnants of Archie’s breakfast. Although my fingers are now encased in gloves, I don’t pick the piece of paper up.
‘What do you think it means?’ I ask when what I really want to know is who does she think sent it but I’m scared that her answer will match the one that is marching around my head.
Him.
‘I… I don’t know.’
‘It sounds like a warning.’ A warning of what, I do not know. Nothing could be worse than it was twenty years ago, but as I catch sight of the photo of George, Archie and I at the theme park I know that things can be unimaginably worse. ‘Do you think Marie got one too?’ She must have. ‘I still haven’t managed to catch her on the phone to tell her.’
He’s out.
‘Leah. Breathe.’ I feel Carly rubbing my back. Suddenly the breath that had been stuck in my throat bursts from me. I sink heavily onto a chair.
‘It’s happening again.’ The eight-year-old inside of me begins to cry.
‘It isn’t.’ She falls back into big-sister mode. ‘It’s probably just some crackpot – you know how people get and there’s been extra media coverage this year.’
‘George thinks it’s a journalist trying to create a story.’
‘There you go then.’
‘Do you believe that?’ Her eyes won’t meet mine. I know she doesn’t believe
it any more than I do.
We take my car, since Carly’s car is full of parcels and her latest charity-shop finds. I don’t feel entirely safe behind the wheel. I don’t feel entirely safe anywhere.
Marie doesn’t answer the buzzer. I rattle the door handle as though it might suddenly open.
It doesn’t.
The letterbox is striped with duct tape from where it had fallen off last time I came and I can’t open it to peep through.
‘She’s not here,’ Carly says.
‘We can’t just leave. I want to make sure she’s okay.’ Not passed out drunk on the floor.
Carly stamps her feet, her breath billowing a cloud. ‘Right, well…’ I look at her expectantly but before she can come up with a plan, there’s a click. A man with a beanie pulled low over his head rushes past us without acknowledgement. Carly thrusts her foot in the door before it can properly shut.
‘Looks like we’re in,’ she says.
Our feet pound against the concrete stairs. We reach the top floor. My heart is thumping but it’s not just exertion making it race. It’s fear.
‘Marie?’ I knock on the door but my gloves muffle the sound and so Carly raps with her knuckles instead while my fingers spider-crawl across the top of the door frame, hoping that it’s still there.
It is.
‘Spare key.’ I slot it in the lock while Carly rolls her eyes and mutters about security.
The smell hits as soon as I open the door.
‘Marie?’ I call into the stale air and dust, somehow knowing that she won’t answer.
There are only four rooms and it doesn’t take us long to conclude she isn’t in any of them.
‘Something is wrong.’ I know it deep in my gut. The mug I had left here two days ago is still on the coffee table. Still half-full of grey tea. The plate of biscuits I had carried through, stale.
Back in the kitchen I see the washing-up piled in the sink is exactly as it was, crusted baked beans line a saucepan, the frying pan coated with burned egg.
‘It’s as though she left after our visit and never came back.’ Momentarily I cover my nose with my hand. The overflowing bin is pungent. ‘I’m going to check the bedroom.’
I really don’t know what I’m checking for as I yank open drawers and rifle through Marie’s belongings. It feels as though I’m intruding as her underwear, black and lacy, spills out onto the floor; the sort of things I’ve never worn, even before I’d had Archie. There isn’t a wardrobe, the room is too small for that, but there are clothes piled everywhere; on the rickety chair by the window, on the bed that clearly hasn’t been slept in. It’s impossible to know whether anything is missing. My stomach convulses as I realize I no longer know my twin well enough.
‘I’ve found something!’ Carly shouts from the kitchen. I hurry back through.
‘Look.’ She thrusts a notebook towards me. On the top page is scrawled in Marie’s handwriting: Stand-in for lead. Broken ankle. Leave tonight. Six-week run! Circled around each sentence are flowers and hearts. I remember the way her schoolbooks were always covered in doodles.
‘So she’s just… gone?’ I shake my head.
Carly shrugs. ‘It seems that way.’ She looks as upset as I feel.
‘But it was only a couple of days ago we saw her. We got on so well. She promised she’d see more of us. Archie.’
‘If she got a call for work we can’t blame her for taking it. Remember her phone kept ringing while she was here? We know she needs the money.’
‘She’s left her washing-up. The mugs in the lounge.’ I open the fridge. There’s a half-empty carton of milk and some drying ham. Two cans of cherry Coke. The sight of the logo makes me feel ill. How can she bear to drink it? To remind herself? Or is she punishing herself? Still, punishing herself.
‘Perhaps we all deserve to be punished,’ Carly says quietly. I must have spoken my thoughts aloud.
I slam the fridge shut. Slam the door on my memories but the lid springs open when I am faced with fridge magnets of Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, Pluto with his lolling tongue. We never did make it to Disneyland. Archie is longing to go but even if we could afford it, I’ll never take him.
‘Did you find anything else?’ My gaze is drawn to the worktops. ‘A four-day letter?’
‘No but ours only came today. She must have left pretty soon after we did because she doesn’t seem to have made any food since we were last here.’
‘But she must have got one. It doesn’t make sense.’ I scan the room again. Nothing makes sense.
‘Maybe he tried but the letterbox downstairs is taped up and he can’t get upstairs without being buzzed in.’
‘He?’ It’s not just my paranoia, she’s thinking the same as me.
‘She. They. Whoever,’ Carly says unconvincingly.
‘Don’t you think it’s odd she didn’t let us know she was going?’
‘She doesn’t usually.’
‘Shall I call Mum?’
The question surprises me as it pops out of my mouth and my surprise is mirrored on Carly’s face. We don’t really see or speak to Mum although Marie still does. A trauma is like a magnet. It has the ability to pull a family together or repel them apart. Our parents are divorced. I don’t think any of us speak to Dad since he left Mum. They blame each other, blame themselves, blame us. Blame is a game we pass between us like a parcel and the one left holding it has to peel off another layer of the lie. Nobody wants to be left holding the truth.
Although I hadn’t wanted to speak to Mum straight after Graham had rung me, this time is different. This time instead of imparting news I need answers. I hold my mobile out to Carly – there’s no way I’m taking my gloves off in this filthy kitchen – and she swipes through my contacts and presses Mum’s number. Neither of us are expecting her to answer, but she does, her voice tinny over the speaker.
‘I know what you’re going to say,’ she says sharply. She hasn’t even said hello.
‘You don’t,’ I cut in quickly. She’ll be expecting this to be one of my usual anniversary phone calls when I call her crying, sometimes drunk – the only time of year I allow myself to be out of control – asking her why she allowed us to be taken. I’d never, never let anyone take Archie. It’s part of the job as a mother, isn’t it? To protect. I don’t meet Carly’s eye. She doesn’t know about my phone calls. I don’t know if she makes them herself. ‘I’m calling about Marie. Do you know where she is?’
‘No.’
‘Do you know the name of her current agent?’
‘I thought she’d been dropped again?’
‘Are there any friends you can think of that might—’
‘She hasn’t got any friends. You girls—’ I hear the spark of flint as she lights a cigarette, a long inhale. She never smoked. Before. ‘You girls used to be enough for each other.’
My eyes water as though I have smoke in them.
‘I’ve got to go, Leah. I can’t do this.’ She cuts the call. I want to redial and ask her what she can’t do. Cope with the prospect that again, she doesn’t know where one of her daughters is.
Carly closes the keypad and hands my mobile back to me. ‘Let’s go.’
‘I wanted Marie to know. That he’s out there again.’ Now there’s six weeks until she comes back. She’ll miss the anniversary. In a way I’m envious. Rather than putting the spare key back on top of the door, I slip it into my pocket as we leave.
Something draws my eye as I’m starting the car. I try to speak but I’m too frightened. Instead I clutch Carly’s arm.
It’s him. Through the teeming rain. The face of my nightmares on the opposite side of the road. He spots that I’ve noticed him, turns and rushes away. Climbs into a black car. The same sort of car I’d seen after I left the BP garage.
He was watching us go into Marie’s flat.
Had he followed her?
Had he taken her?
Is he coming for us all?
I have to know. My foot squeezes the
accelerator. I yank the wheel and we lurch into the traffic.
‘Leah! Slow down.’
Instead I speed up. I can’t risk losing him.
The blare of a horn. The screech of brakes. Carly screaming my name, ‘Leah!’
The oncoming bus.
Chapter Seventeen
George
Now
George feels safe and warm, cocooned in loving arms and a warm quilt. The rain drums against the window of his sanctuary. His mobile buzzes angrily, skittering across the bedside cabinet.
Leah.
He’s tempted to ignore it. He knows she’ll be agonizing over the letter, wanting to go over it again and again. She always finds it impossible to let things go but then doesn’t everyone to some extent? Clinging on to lives that don’t quite fit any more. Living in a skin that feels like someone else’s. The phone quietens. For a minute he worries that it wasn’t Leah’s anxieties that would have poured down the handset if he’d answered, but that something is wrong with Archie. He calls the nursery to check his son is okay.
He is.
George tries to summon up the feeling of a few moments ago when he felt both the protected and the protector. It had been a long time since he had felt that way, life with Leah was a one-way street. But sometimes the rescuer needed rescuing too. He tunes in to the pitter-patter against the glass. Feels her soft body curve against his. Her hand dipping low again. He closes his eyes and tries to relax. Even if Leah looked for him she couldn’t find him. She has no idea of this address.
His mobile sounds again. It seems louder now. A swarm of angry bees, impossible to ignore.
‘You’d better answer, it’s your wife,’ she says.
‘Don’t say wife like that, as though she’s a stranger to you.’ But perhaps that’s the only way she can cope. Theirs is the ultimate betrayal.
He swings his legs out of the bed and sits up, turning his back on the crumpled sheets that smell of sex.
He says a cautious hello. He can feel his frown deepening, gouging lines in his forehead as Leah garbles down the phone while he bites his lip, keeping the words he really wants to say safe in his mouth.
The Stolen Sisters: from the bestselling author of The Date and The Sister comes one of the most thrilling, terrifying and shocking psychological thrillers of 2020 Page 9