by C. L. Taylor
Chloe
Chloe touches the scalpel to the paper. She cuts through the top edge then, slowly and carefully, drags the blade down its length. There’s something so satisfying about the cccccch sound the scalpel makes as it slices through the A4 sheet. It helps her blot out the sound of Mike’s voice, and the look on his face when she slapped him. Surprise. Disappointment. And then anger. He’d scared her when he’d lunged for her. She didn’t recognise him. When her dad burst into the small hallway with his fags and beer in a plastic bag, she almost cried with relief. She didn’t. She ran straight up the stairs and didn’t look back. Her dad’s laughter followed all the way to her room. She could hear Mike and her dad talking and laughing until about three o’clock in the morning. When she crept downstairs after they finally went quiet they were both passed out on the sofas. Her dad was still asleep but Mike was gone when she and Jamie slipped out of the door in the morning, dressed and ready for school.
Ccccccch. Ccccccch.Ccccccch. She runs the scalpel over the page again and again.
‘Chlo,’ Kirsteen nudges her elbow. ‘What are you doing? You’re supposed to cut out your design, not slice through it.’
Chloe ignores her best friend and carves out another long strip. It’s Design and Technology, her favourite class, but she didn’t feel a rush of pleasure as she walked into the classroom ten minutes earlier. She didn’t feel anything at all.
‘Have I done something wrong?’ Kirsteen asks.
Chloe shakes her head.
‘Then why have you stopped talking to me?’
‘Because my dad took my phone.’
‘I’m not talking about text messages. I mean now. You’ve been really quiet today. Are you sure I haven’t done something wrong?’
Chloe shakes her head again. Normally she’d be quick to reassure her friend that of course she hadn’t done anything wrong and she’d apologise for acting weirdly. Normally. Normal. What even is that?
‘Chloe?’
She jumps at the weight of a hand on her shoulder and spins round, scalpel raised.
‘Woah!’ Mr Harris, her Design and Technology teacher, jumps back, both hands raised. ‘Careful!’
‘Sorry, Sir.’ Chloe puts the blade on the desk and forces a smile.
‘So you should be. You could have had my eye out. Or worse. I just wanted to see how you were getting on.’ He steps forward and peers over her shoulder. ‘Bad day?’ he asks, nodding at the pile of thin strips of paper in front of her.
‘I made a mistake.’
He smiles kindly. ‘Bit of a drastic solution isn’t it, destroying the whole thing instead of trying to fix it?’
‘No.’ She looks him in the eye. ‘No, I don’t think it is.’
Mr Harris presses his lips into a thin line and raises his eyebrows. ‘It’s your work,’ he says as he moves away and peers at Kirsteen’s neatly cut out prototype.
‘Yeah,’ Chloe says under her breath as she reaches for her scalpel and slides it off the desk and into her school bag. ‘And it’s my life too.’
When the bell rings Chloe is the only student to turn right rather than left as they file out of the D&T studio.
‘Chlo?’ Kirsteen tugs on her arm and gestures in the other direction. ‘We’ve got biology now.’
‘So?’
‘Aren’t you coming?’
‘No.’
‘Where are you going then?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Why are you being so weird? You’re really starting to piss me off.’
‘You and the rest of the world.’ She yanks her arm free and starts to run towards the emergency fire exit.
Kirsteen doesn’t run after her. No surprise there.
Chloe takes off her blazer and lays it down on the ground. It’s cold, tucked away in the bushes, away from the warmth of the May sun, and she pulls the sleeves of her jumper down over her hands as she lies down.
For several minutes she does nothing apart from stare up into the leaves. There’s nothing much to look at apart from an abandoned spider’s web and a greeny-black beetle that marches along a branch like it’s on a mission. When it disappears from view, Chloe sits up. She opens her school bag and takes out the scalpel and her mobile phone, stolen from her dad’s sock drawer while he slept.
It’s nearly time.
Chapter 43
Lou
I take a step away from the door, keeping a wary eye on the heavy bolt cutters in Wendy’s right hand as she approaches the cage. Her face is pale and puffy, her nose red and swollen and her eye make-up is a black stain around her bloodshot eyes. She’s a mess now but she came back to the barn to let Mike out. That’s why she brought the bolt cutters. But how did she know he was here in the first place? Did she come to the farm looking for him, or for me? I don’t know if Mike was lying when he said Wendy stabbed him in the leg but I need to be careful.
Wendy unhooks the padlock, lifts it from the door and takes a step backwards. I can’t read her eyes. I’ve got no idea if she’s angry, fearful or upset. But she doesn’t look away when I meet her gaze. She looks at me steadily, watching, waiting for me to do something, and she’s still gripping the bolt cutters. If she attacks me when I walk out of the cage, I don’t know if I’ll be able to fight her off. I might be twenty odd years younger than she is and I’m a lot lighter, but I haven’t got a weapon. And one of my arms is broken.
‘I’m going to come out now, Wendy.’ I raise my good arm as though in surrender and wait for her to respond. When she doesn’t, I take a step forward.
Wendy tightens her grip on the bolt cutters.
‘We’re on the same side.’ I push at the door and step out of the cage. Now there’s nothing but two or three metres of air separating us. ‘I need to go to the police. I should have gone a long time ago.’
Wendy doesn’t reply. She’s still staring at me with that same strange, intense expression on her face. She reminds me of the fox I found in the porch – backed into a corner, unsure whether to attack or run.
‘I’m going to leave the barn now, Wendy.’
I breathe shallowly as I walk towards the barn door, my shoulders tense, my good hand twitching at my side. My body feels like it’s on red alert, waiting for the sound of Wendy’s shoes skirting over the straw, the touch of her hand on my shoulder and a blow on the back of the head. I can already feel the weight of the bolt cutters smashing into my skull, my knees giving way beneath me and the rough sensation of the barn floor under my palms and it’s all I can do not to duck and run with my fingers cradling the back of my head.
I keep walking. No sudden movements. No loud sounds. As soon I’m out in the yard, I’ll run for my car.
I touch a hand to the barn door and pause. What if Mike’s waiting for me outside? What if he sent Wendy in to set me free so he could—
‘Louise?’
I freeze at the sound of Wendy’s voice.
‘Before you go to the police there’s something you need to see.’
I scroll quickly through the texts, skimming rather than reading. Wendy watches my face, waiting for a reaction. She doesn’t get one until I reach the photos.
‘Where did you get this?’ I click out of the messages and hand the phone back to her.
‘Mike’s house. Under a floorboard.’
That’s why the police couldn’t find any evidence of grooming when I reported him for kissing Chloe – as I thought, he keeps it hidden when he’s not at home – and they must have missed it when they searched his house. It makes me feel sick, the idea of him poring over a young girl’s messages with the curtains closed, hidden away from the world.
‘He told me to get it,’ Wendy says, misreading my shock. There’s a defensive note to her voice that suggests it wouldn’t be entirely out of character for her to creep around Mike’s house uninvited. ‘He said you’d been blackmailing him and there were texts on there that he needed to take to the police.’
‘Weren’t you suspicious? Who hides their ph
one under a floorboard?’
‘Of course I was. Why do you think I checked it? I’m not stupid.’
I raise an eyebrow. Wendy’s moods are so mercurial it’s hard to predict how she’ll react from one moment to the next. ‘I know you’re not stupid, Wendy.’
‘So what happens now?’
‘I take the phone to the police and tell them everything.’ I correct myself as she raises her eyebrows, ‘Almost everything. I’ll say he had the phone in his jacket or something. He needs to spend the rest of his life in jail, Wendy. I won’t let him do this to another girl. I can’t.’
‘Fuck.’ I pause as I reach the barn door. ‘Mike’s taken my car.’
‘So we go in mine.’ She smiles tightly. ‘Don’t worry. I’m not going to kidnap you, Louise. I think you’ve got that particular life skill covered, don’t you?’
Neither of us says very much as we drive from my house to Malvern. Wendy seems lost in thought but there are a hundred questions I’d like to ask her.
‘Wendy—’
I’m interrupted by the sound of a mobile phone bleeping.
‘Sorry.’ She slips her hand into the plastic pocket in the driver side door and pulls out her phone. She frowns as she glances at the screen. ‘That wasn’t mine.’
We share a look.
‘It was Mike’s,’ she says. ‘It’s in the glove compartment. The code’s 0808.’
I unclip the glove compartment, take out the phone and key in the code. The messages icon is showing one new message.
‘Wendy,’ I say. ‘You need to pull over. Now.’
The photo is of Chloe Meadows. She’s in her school uniform with the sleeves of her white shirt rolled up to the elbow. She’s sitting cross-legged on the ground, surrounded by leafy green undergrowth. The photograph has been taken from above and she’s angling her chin to one side, staring sulkily into the lens. It could totally be a normal selfie except for two things – the word ‘Goodbye’ overlaid on the image and the scalpel she’s holding in her left hand with the blade pressing into her wrist.
‘Oh my god.’ Wendy covers her mouth and nose with her steepled hands and stares at me over the tips of her fingers. ‘What do we do?’
‘Ring the police. Give me your phone.’
She reaches into the door, then shakes her head. ‘No, we need to text her. Tell her not to do anything. Use Mike’s phone. She’ll listen to us if she thinks we’re him.’
‘This is my fault.’ I look in desperation at Wendy. ‘When Mike came back to the barn, he said I’d turned Chloe against him. They must have had an argument about what I wrote in my diary, that’s why she’s threatening to kill herself. Or maybe it’s something she read.’
‘You don’t know that. Just text her,’ Wendy prods the phone in my hands. ‘Send her a message. Tell her not to do anything stupid because you’re on your way.’
‘I can’t.’
‘I’ll do it then.’ She reaches for the phone.
‘No, you don’t understand. Mike’s got two phones. Chloe texts them both. If we reply and Mike replies, she’ll know something’s up. She’ll ask him why he’s texting from both phones and he’ll realise we’ve got the other one. He might run.’
‘So we go with your plan and tell the police.’
‘But if Chloe has texted Mike’s other phone he might already be on his way to meet her. By the time we get to the police station he could already have …’ My neck spasms as I turn my head to look out of the window.
‘What?’ Wendy says as I press a hand to my throat. There are four tender spots on the left of my neck and one on the right, bruises left by Mike’s fingers. ‘He could what?’
I love you, Lou. You know I’d never hurt you, don’t you? Promise me you’ll never leave me, no matter what.
‘Louise.’
Your love keeps me sane, Lou. It makes me feel human. I don’t know what I’d do without you.
‘Louise?’
If you ever left me I wouldn’t be responsible for my actions.
‘LOUISE!’ Wendy taps me on the shoulder, making me jump. She waves the phone at me. I didn’t even notice her take it.
‘What is it?’
‘We don’t have to go to the police. I know where she is.’ She drops the phone in my lap. ‘See that bush, behind Chloe in the photo? It’s a Viburnum arboricola. It’s not native to the UK. It’s from Taiwan. The head gardener goes abroad each summer to gather unusual plants. He tells me about them whenever I run into him. Chloe’s in Priory Park.’
Chapter 44
Lou
‘This way, quickly!’ Wendy leads the way, running past the bandstand, over the bridge and along the pathway that loops around the pond. We sprint over a wide patch of grass, past a huge oak tree and through a gap between the hedges. Each step makes my broken arm bounce in its sling and I have to hold it against my body with my other arm to dull the pain.
‘Chloe!’ I shout, as we run over another patch of grass. I’m scanning the bushes for the one in the photo but they all look the same. She could be anywhere.
‘Chloe!’ Another shout carries across the park. It’s faint but I recognise the voice instantly.
‘Shit.’ I look at Wendy. ‘It’s Mike. Chloe texted his other phone and he’s looking for her too.’
We speed up, weaving between willow trees and zig-zagging around dozens of small paths. I follow Wendy through a gap between two hedges, then almost plough into her as she stops abruptly. We’re standing on the edge of a small square of grass, surrounded on all sides by trees and bushes and hidden from the rest of the park.
Standing in the middle of the clearing with his hands cupped around his mouth is Mike. The shocked expression on his face when Wendy and I burst out of the bushes gives way to a slow smile.
Wendy, standing beside me, makes a sound that’s half scream, half sob.
‘You bastard. You contemptible, lying, dirty bastard.’
She lunges at him.
‘Don’t.’ I grab her by the wrist and yank her back. ‘Don’t rise to it. It’s what he wants.’ I lower my voice. ‘We can deal with him later. We need to find Chloe first.’
‘That’s right,’ Mike says, nodding at me and raising a hand as though in thanks. ‘You hold that psycho back. Where’s your knife, Dee? Come to stab me in the other leg have you?’
‘I hate you!’ Wendy tries to pull away from me, but I’ve got hold of the back of her coat, as well as her wrist. ‘I hate you. I fucking hate you.’
‘Oooh, would you listen to the mouth on that. Vile language. Filthy. You see that, Lou? You see what I had to put up with for all those years?’
I scan the clearing for any sign of Chloe. The bushes are so thick she could be anywhere. But if she can’t see us she can definitely hear us.
‘Is it any wonder,’ Mike says, ‘that I ran off to France rather than live here with that?’
‘You’re the worst kind of monster,’ Wendy screams. She snatches at my fingers with her free hand, yanks her arm free and slips out of her coat. ‘You abuse children. How could you—’
She flies at Mike, arms whirling, landing punches on his face, his neck and his chest.
‘Wendy, no!’ I start towards them but, before I’m close enough to pull her away, Mike grabs her by the throat and pulls back his right arm. There’s a terrible crunching sound as his fist smashes against her jaw, and Wendy’s head snaps backwards. The second Mike lets go of her she drops like a stone, her limp body crumpling onto the grass.
‘Wendy!’ I drop to my knees beside her and touch the side of her neck. Her lips are parted and she’s breathing but her closed eyelids don’t so much as flicker. I crawl away, reaching for her dropped jacket. She put both phones in the right pocket before we got out of the car.
‘Oh no you don’t.’ Mike weaves his fingers into my hair and yanks me upwards. I howl with pain and grab at his hand, but he’s too quick and strong and he twists my good arm behind my back.
‘Is my phone in there?�
��
‘No.’
‘Liar!’ He yanks on my broken arm, making me groan with pain. ‘I know she’s got it. Now, nice and carefully, get the phone and give it to me.’ He lets go of my wrist and dips me back down towards the coat, still holding me by the hair.
I reach out a hand and pluck at the zip on one of Wendy’s pockets.
‘Just the phone.’ He tugs on my hair, jerking my head back sharply. ‘Don’t even think about calling the police.’
‘Got it?’ he says as I slide two phones out of Wendy’s pocket and grasp the one that’s not in a butterfly blue case.
‘Yes.’
‘Okay, now up we come.’ He pulls me back onto my feet. ‘The passcode is 0808. Unlock it but don’t do anything after that.’ He gives a warning tug on my hair. ‘Now,’ he says after I enter the code, ‘go to the messages, hold your thumb down on the thread and select delete all.’
I hesitate. If I do that all the evidence that he’s been grooming Chloe will disappear. She could be lying in the bushes right now, bleeding to death. If Mike finds her and takes her phone no one will ever know that he was responsible, but if I threw the phone into the bushes he’d—
‘Hello Mike.’
Chloe steps out of the bushes. As she moves towards us, Mike lets go of my hair and grips the bicep of my broken arm. At the same time he grabs my right wrist. The phone slips from my fingers as he twists my arm behind my back. There’s a faint thunck as it drops onto the grass.
‘What’s she doing here?’ Chloe stops about three metres away from us. Her face is pale, there are dark circles under her eyes and her hair is wild and unkempt as though she just got out of bed. But it’s not her face I stare at. It’s the silver scalpel blade pressed into the thin skin of her left wrist. ‘Who’s that?’ She looks dispassionately at Wendy, still unconscious on the ground.
‘My ex-wife,’ Mike says. ‘She’s not very well.’
Chloe swivels her strange, glassy eyes in my direction. ‘Why are you doing this?’
‘I’m not doing—’ I gasp as Mike digs his fingers into my damaged arm.
‘If you say another word,’ he hisses in my ear, ‘I’ll whip the scalpel out of Chloe’s hand and slit her throat with it. Do we understand each other?’