by C. L. Taylor
She looks down at her phone, desperately hoping that at least one bar of reception has magically appeared in the top right-hand corner, but it’s still showing a no entry symbol. Ringing the police will have to wait.
‘Mike!’ she says. ‘You need to talk to me. Who did this to you and how do I get you out?’
She pulls on the cage door again. It rattles but doesn’t budge.
‘Mike!’
Her ex-husband is still lying on the floor with his eyes closed. His chest is rising and falling and there are no obvious signs of injury. Why isn’t he answering her? If their positions were reversed she’d be screaming for help.
‘Who did this?’ she asks again, but she knows the answer. It has to be Lou. The barn’s directly behind the house. And to think she’d suspected the two of them of having an affair.
Her ex-husband makes a strange retching sound. He clutches at his stomach, twists onto his side and retches again. The third time he retches, his lips part and he vomits violently, spraying the straw-strewn ground with a thin brown liquid, dotted with chunks of food. He vomits again and again, then finally lies still, his hands clutching at his stomach.
‘Mike,’ Wendy says. ‘Say something. Are you okay? Mike!’
For several seconds he doesn’t move, then he slowly opens his eyes and looks at her. He coughs, grimaces, runs the back of his hand over his mouth and says, ‘Hello, Dee.’
Something inside her clenches. Hello Dee? That’s it? She’s his knight in shining armour. His key to freedom and all he can manage is Hello Dee? He doesn’t even look particularly pleased to see her.
‘Can you sit up?’ she snaps.
Mike nods, grabs hold of one of the bars, grimaces and then slowly, painfully, pulls himself into a sitting position.
‘What are you doing here?’ he asks. He speaks slowly, with one hand pressed to his throat as though it hurts to speak.
Wendy ignores him, darts to the barn door and peers outside. There’s no sign of Lou and no lights from the house beaming through the trees at the edge of the garden.
‘Okay, Mike,’ she says, looking back at her ex-husband. ‘I’m going to ring the police now. I’m not sure how far I’ll have to drive to get phone reception, but if I head back towards Malvern then—’
‘No police.’
‘What?’ She stares incredulously at him.
‘No police.’
‘But you’re … you’ve been …’ She can’t make sense of what she’s hearing. Why on earth wouldn’t he want her to go to the police?
‘Dee.’ He drags himself to his feet. ‘You can’t go to the police. Trust me on this.’
‘Trust you?’ She can’t help but laugh.
‘Please.’ He shuffles across the cage, stepping around the pool of vomit. ‘It’s important. Listen to me.’
She stiffens at his tone. It’s the same one he used on her when they were married. Listen to me Dee, you don’t need to worry about that. I’ve got it under control. Listen to me Dee, you’re being neurotic. Listen to me Dee, the police are liars. I haven’t been sleeping with anyone, never mind a fourteen-year-old girl. She’d almost forgotten how patronising he could be. Almost, but not quite.
‘No you listen,’ she snaps. ‘You’re the one in the cage.’
Mike falls silent and stares at her. The muscles in his jaw pulse beneath his grey stubble and haggard skin.
‘Who locked you in there?’
He sighs. ‘Lou.’
She deliberately plays the fool. Mike has no idea how much she knows about Louise Wandsworth and she wants to keep her cards close to her chest for now. ‘Who?’
‘Lou … Louise … the …’ He breaks eye contact with her. ‘The girl … the girl from karate.’
‘Karate? But you haven’t done karate for years … Oh. I see. That girl. But why? I didn’t even know she lived round here.’ Wendy is almost proud of her performance. She could definitely have been an actress in another life. Someone classy like Meryl Streep or Sigourney Weaver.
Mike raises his gaze to meet hers. ‘She does now.’
‘Where is she?’
‘I don’t know. I haven’t seen her for a couple of days.’
A couple of days? She was supposed to go to Wendy’s house on Friday but never showed up. Was she going to confess to her? Tell Wendy that she had her ex-husband locked in a barn at the back of her house? If so, why didn’t she show up and where is she now?
Wendy runs a hand over her hair. It’s started to rain and one side of her head is damp with drizzle. She steps back into the barn and pulls the door closed.
‘Why did she do it?’
Mike shrugs. ‘Who knows.’
Wendy stares him straight in the eye. ‘You know.’
‘She …’ he sighs heavily. ‘I was trying to stop her from harming someone.’
‘Who?’
‘A friend’s daughter. She’s obsessed with her. She’s been to her house, followed her to school and she’s been stalking her at work. I found out and tried to warn Lou off. That’s when she did this.’
Wendy frowns. Quite frankly the whole thing sounds preposterous. What possible reason would a thirty-two-year-old woman have for stalking a child? ‘Which friend’s daughter?’
‘Alan Meadows.’
‘Chloe? Isn’t she nine … ten?’
‘Thirteen – I think.’
There’s something about the way Mike added ‘I think’ to Chloe’s age that chimes a warning bell in Wendy’s head. Lou was only a year older when all the horribleness happened.
‘How did you find out?’
‘Does it matter?’
‘It does if you want me to help you.’
‘I was at Greensleeves, you know, the garden centre. I do deliveries for them and I sorted Chloe out with a job when Alan said she wanted to earn some money. Anyway, I was there one afternoon when Chloe came running into the yard saying some woman was freaking her out. I went to see who it was, recognised Lou and followed her home. She told me she had something belonging to Chloe in the barn that she needed to show me and, when I walked in here, she hit me over the back of the head. Next thing I knew I was in here.’
It’s Mike’s pseudo-earnest expression that sets Wendy off – the downturned lips, pleading eyes and cartoon sad eyebrows – and she explodes with laughter. But it’s not long-lived and, within seconds, her expression is stony again.
‘You’re such a bloody liar.’
‘What?’ Mike gawps at her.
‘Credit me with a little intelligence please, Michael, and tell me the truth.’
‘That is the truth.’
‘Okay, then. The police can find out what really happened.’ She turns on her heel and pushes at the barn door.
‘No! Wait!’
Wendy turns slowly, stifling a smile. Sitting in an office with Lou was nothing compared to the power trip she’s enjoying now.
‘She’s setting me up.’ Mike holds his hands up, palms pressed against the bars. ‘Lou is. That’s the real story. She’s trying to make out I’m grooming Chloe. That’s why she locked me in here, so she could convince her to go to the police or something. She’s tapped, totally fucking cuckoo. Her life’s screwed up and she blames me for it. But I swear to you, Wendy, I haven’t done anything wrong. I haven’t touched the girl. I wouldn’t. You know that. You …’ he tails off. ‘I did you wrong, Dee. I’m sorry. You were there for me the whole time and I fucked you over. But I can put it right. I’ve got money. It’s all yours. You can buy yourself a bigger house. I know how much you miss the old one. Just please … please … hear me out.’
‘Okay,’ Wendy says, feeling more calm and in control than she has in years. ‘Okay, I’ll listen.’
Chapter 36
Wendy
Forty thousand pounds. Forty thousand pounds. The figure whirls round Wendy’s head as she drives through the dark, away from Bromyard and back towards Malvern. It’s not nearly enough to buy a house as lovely as her old one, but it wo
uld be enough to move away from Clarence Road and her nightmare of a neighbour. She might even get a bigger garden, maybe a third reception room for that price if the location was right. She is owed that money. It is recompense for everything she’s been through. And all she has to do to earn it is get a pair of bolt cutters from Mike’s shed and a mobile phone that he’s hidden in his house.
What if he’s lying? What if he is grooming Chloe Meadows?
A loud, insistent voice shouts the question from the back of her brain. She turns on the radio and cranks the volume up. It’s Queen, her favourite band, but the thought persists. Is that why Mike won’t let her call the police? Only a man with something to hide wouldn’t want the police to free him and arrest his kidnapper. But she so desperately wants to believe his story – that Louise Wandsworth is a mentally ill woman who has never got over her teenaged obsession with him. That she returned to Malvern because she blames him for everything that’s ever gone wrong in her life and is out for revenge.
‘I wish I could go back in time,’ Mike had said, staring at Wendy through the bars of his cage. ‘I wish I’d ignored her when she turned up to class, crying her eyes out because her dad was drunk. She said she was going to run away to France because she was scared he was going to kill her. The only thing I did wrong was to go after her to try and keep her safe. She took my kindness and used it against me. And now she’s found a new weapon.’
Chloe Meadows. According to Mike, Louise had infiltrated the young girl’s life and was filling her head with dark thoughts. She was the one grooming her, he’d insisted, not him. If he went to the police about the kidnapping, Lou would retaliate, dragging Chloe along with her and he’d end up in jail again. There was only one way he could prove his innocence and that was if Wendy got hold of his mobile phone before Lou did. There were incriminating text messages from Lou, he said, threatening to make Chloe press charges unless he paid her forty thousand pounds.
‘It’s yours,’ he’d told Wendy, ‘every penny of it. Just get me that phone, get me out of here and the money’s yours. You can do what you want with it. I just want this nightmare to end.’
Indecision gnaws at Wendy’s guts as she turns right off New Mills Way. Logic tells her that the right thing to do is to go to the police and let them deal with the situation. But her distrust of Lou Wandsworth and the lure of the money is too great. Even if she works for another twenty years there’s no way she could save up that much. But, even if she does get what Mike wants from his house, what’s to stop him reneging on their deal? He can promise all he wants, but the money won’t actually be hers until it’s sitting in her bank account. She glances at her phone, on the passenger seat. If he gave her his details she could log onto his account and transfer the money across before she handed him the bolt cutters and his mobile. But then there’s no reception out in the sticks, is there? Not unless Lou’s house has Wi-Fi.
There are no spaces on Mike’s road, so she parks several streets away, wriggles her fingers into her favourite leather gloves, puts on her rain mac, pulls up the hood and gets out of the car. She’s only ever driven past her old house half a dozen times since the divorce, and she’s never stopped. When the judge gave her a conditional discharge for assaulting Mike she was told, in no uncertain terms, that if she broke the terms of her restraining order she would go to jail. The threat of no privacy, no garden and no Monty was enough to make her keep her distance.
She stops walking when she reaches her old three-bedroom semi. It’s dark and the house next door is lit up like a Christmas tree. Before she has time to change her mind she hurries down the path with her head bent low. On the front patio, just as Mike said, are several dozen potted plants and small trees (plants and trees that didn’t exist when she lived there). The spare key is under one of them.
Wendy works quickly, ducking down, lifting pots and feeling underneath.
‘Come on,’ she mutters as she moves from pot to pot. ‘Come on, come on.’
She yanks at the ceramic pot holding an ornamental cherry tree but it’s too heavy to lift with one hand. She bends her knees and pushes at the lid of the pot whilst simultaneously reaching down to steady the bottom with her other hand, but the weight of the tree is too great and the pot slips from her grasp. The tree bashes into the hedge, bounces off it and then crashes to the ground, taking out several pots before it lies still. Wendy clamps her hands to her ears, then ducks down low, as a shadow appears in one of the upstairs rooms in the house next door.
Her heart thunders in her chest. What should she do? Run back to the car? Hide under the hedge? She places a hand on the cold ground, preparing to run, and then she sees it – a silver Yale key lying beside one of the smashed pots. She inches forward, snatches it up, then, keeping low, heads for the hedge. She presses her back up against it, hands quivering against the smooth leaves and sharp twigs and waits. Her neighbour wouldn’t blink an eyelid if a smashing sound came from her front garden – he’d probably be having such loud sex he wouldn’t hear it – but she has no idea who lives next door to Mike now. Hopefully not an off-duty policeman.
She starts to count, in her head. Up to sixty first. Then up to one hundred and twenty. No one comes. She inches away from the hedge and glances up at the bedroom window next door. There’s no one there.
Forty thousand pounds shouts the voice at the back of her brain. Forty thousand pounds!
In an instant she’s at Mike’s front door, pushing the key into the lock.
The urge to explore the house and see how much Mike has changed it since he kicked her out is almost more than Wendy can bear. Instead she chants, ‘Forty thousand pounds, forty thousand pounds,’ as she heads for the kitchen, pulls open the drawer next to the oven and pulls out a steak knife. She slows her pace as she returns to the hallway and carefully counts the floorboards between the kitchen and the front door. Mike told her that the loose one was seven planks away from the kitchen. When she reaches it, she prods it with her fingers. It wobbles, ever so slightly, but doesn’t flip up, so she wedges the knife between the skirting board and the wood and jiggles it backwards and forwards. She swears under her breath as the knife pings out from the gap, then grits her teeth and tries again.
What kind of man hides a mobile phone under a floorboard?
When Mike had asked her to grab his mobile phone, she’d imagined snatching it off the kitchen table or the arm of the sofa, not digging into the floorboards like a drug dealer trying to retrieve her stash. It didn’t make sense. If someone had been blackmailing her, she would have taken the phone straight to the police to show them the messages but, according to Mike, he hadn’t taken Lou’s threats seriously at first. So why hide the phone under the floorboards before he went to meet her? The only possible explanation Wendy can come up with is that he didn’t want to risk Lou snatching it or he didn’t want his phone to give away his location. That, or the blackmail story was a steaming pile of cow shit and he was actually hiding the phone from the police.
On her second attempt the floorboard gives way and she reaches into the recess. Her fingers make contact with something smooth and solid and she snatches it up. Mike’s phone. A noise beyond the front door makes her start. She holds herself very, very still, barely breathing as she listens, then she slowly rises to her feet and creeps along the hallway. She pauses when she reaches the front door and zips Mike’s mobile into her right pocket. She looks at the kitchen knife, considers running back down the hallway to put it back in the drawer, then zips it into her left jacket pocket. Just in case Mike decides to try any funny business. A cool breeze drifts into the house as she turns the handle to the front door. She listens, but the only sound is the thudding of her heart in her ears. She opens the door a little wider. Outside the broken plant pots are still scattered on the patio beside the felled cherry tree but it’s darker than before. Wendy chances a glimpse to her left. Several of the lights in the neighbour’s windows have been turned off. She creeps forward, then runs, light-footed, down the pa
th and onto the street. She sprints round the corner and doesn’t stop until she reaches her car. She takes off her jacket, the knife still in the pocket, and shoves it under the passenger seat, then she slips into the driver seat and, with a shaking hand, shoves a key at the ignition. She pauses. She’s forgotten the bloody bolt cutters.
‘God damn it!’ She slaps the steering wheel with the palm of her hand.
The only tools she owns are a screwdriver set, a hammer and a level. If she’s to stand any chance of getting her hands on Mike’s money, she needs to get him out of that barn before Lou comes back. She jumps back out the car without bothering to put her jacket back on. She’s got to go back into the house.
Wendy scans the walls of the shed. She used to wind Mike up about how OCD he was about his things when they were married – his sock drawer with its neat lines of balled socks and his insistence that all the jars and cans in the kitchen faced forwards – but now she’s grateful for his neatness. The bolt cutters are hanging on a nail on the far wall of the shed, next to a saw. She snatches them off the wall, re-locks the shed and runs back across the garden. With tremulous fingers she locks the back door, then hurries through the dark house towards the front door. She’s barely set foot through it when she hears the wail of a police siren. She freezes. The neighbour must have rung them. Should she hide, go back into the garden or make a run for it?
She’s halfway down the garden path when she realises she’s still carrying the bolt cutters and Mike’s front door key. She ducks down, shoves them under the bush, then speeds out of the gate. She’s halfway down the street when a police officer rounds the corner and orders her not to move.
She immediately stops running, her heart pounding in her chest. As the policeman walks towards her, his eyes fixed on her face, a thousand thoughts flash through her head.
He’s not after me. I’m a respectable fifty-nine-year-old woman.
I’m a fifty-nine-year-old woman with a restraining order against her.
Mike’s neighbour spotted me.