I am not bound and gagged. I’m not bleeding or semiconscious. In films, they crawl through the backseat and open the trunk; kick through the taillights and wave for help. They signal for attention; send Morse code messages with mobile phone flashes.
I am not in a film.
I sit meekly behind my mother as we leave the motorway and make our way through the streets of southwest London. We slow at a set of lights, and I contemplate banging on the windows. Screaming. There is a woman in a Fiat 500 in the turning lane to our right. Middle-aged. Sensible. If she calls the police, follows me till they get to us . . .
But what if she doesn’t? If she doesn’t notice me, or she dismisses my shouts as idiocy, or doesn’t want to be involved? If it doesn’t work, I anger my mother for nothing.
And right now, she’s on the edge. I think back to when I was a child, when I would be able to read the signs and know when I could interrupt to ask if I could play outside, or to wheedle extra pocket money, a late pass for a Brighton gig. I would approach slowly, see the pulse throbbing in her temple, and know to leave it till later, when the stresses of the day had retreated and she was relaxing with a glass of wine.
Even though I know the child locks are on, I move my hand slowly to the inside of the door and press the button to open the window. There’s a dull click as the mechanism registers the action and blocks it. In the rearview mirror, my mother looks up.
“Let us out.” I try again. “You can take this car, and Ella and I will go home . . .”
“It’s too late for that.” Her voice is high. Panicky. “They’ve found Tom’s body.”
A shiver runs through me as I think of my father in the septic tank. “Why?” I manage. “Why did you do it?”
“It was an accident!”
In her car seat, Ella wakes with a start and stares at me with unblinking eyes.
“I . . . I was angry. I lashed out. He slipped. I . . .” She breaks off and screws up her face, as though pushing away whatever images are inside her head. “It was an accident.”
“Did you call an ambulance? The police?”
Silence.
“Why come back? You’d got away with it. Everyone thought Dad had committed suicide. You, too.”
She chews on her lip. Checks her mirrors and moves into the right-hand lane, ready to turn. “Robert’s extension. He’d been planning it for months, but I didn’t know he’d need to dig up the sewers; otherwise, we’d never have . . .” She stops short.
“We?” Fear wraps itself around my insides.
“I tried to block it. He was refused permission, and then he went to appeal. I put in an objection, but I needed to see . . . I needed to see . . .”
“You needed to see what?”
The response is a whisper. “If there was anything left of the body.”
Bile rises in my throat. “You said we.” I think of the Mitsubishi. My mother’s fear was real. “Who was following us? Who are you so frightened of?”
She doesn’t answer.
The GPS sends us left. We’re almost there.
I start to panic. Once we’re in the flat, escape will be impossible.
Surreptitiously I unbuckle Ella’s straps so I can grab her the second Mum opens the car door. I picture the underground car park beneath Mark’s Putney flat. The electric door opens with a code and closes automatically, rolling slowly shut with a creaking groan that used to set my teeth on edge when I visited Mark there. The space for his apartment is on the opposite side of the car park. How fast does the door close? I think back, remembering the way the natural light shrinks as you walk from the car to the lift, then disappears altogether as the door clunks to the ground. There will be time. I’ll have to be fast, but there will be time.
Blood is thudding so fiercely in my head I’m convinced I can hear it out loud. I slide one arm under Ella. I daren’t pick her up too soon, daren’t give my mother any reason to believe I might make a run for it. She’ll come after us, of course, but even out of shape and with a baby, I can run faster than her. I can make it. I have to be able to make it.
My mother hesitates, unsure where the GPS is taking her. I can see the entrance to the underground parking but I say nothing. I don’t want her to know I’ve been here before and that I’m familiar with the layout. I need every advantage I can get.
She crawls forward, peering at each entrance until she sees the right one. It takes her three attempts to enter the code Mark gave her on a slip of paper, her fingers shaking so much they slip from the keys.
Slowly, the metal door slides upward. It’s slower than I remember, and I’m glad, because it will descend at the same pace. I picture the distance between the parking space and the exit, mentally preparing myself for the sprint, imagining Ella in my arms.
The car park is dark, lit only by sporadic fluorescent lamps in the absence of daylight. The roller door grinds as it opens.
We are through the entrance and down the ramp before I hear the clunk of the door hitting the top of the mechanism. There’s a pause, and then the grinding resumes. The door is closing.
I can’t help myself. “I think the space is over there.”
She maneuvers the car to the next row, and along to the bay. I start to lift Ella from her car seat. She stiffens, complaining, and I silently beseech her to comply. My mother hesitates, contemplating whether to reverse in, then changes her mind and slots the car neatly into the space.
Ella is in my arms. Mum’s out of the car. Come on, come on! I glance behind, see the rectangular shaft of open air squaring off as the door descends.
Her hand on the car door handle.
Come on!
There must be twenty meters between the car and the exit. Ten seconds before the gate hits the floor. It’s possible. It has to be possible.
She opens my car door.
I don’t hesitate. I kick out, hard. The door slams into my mother and sends her flying backward. I scramble out of the car, Ella clutched to my chest, and run.
CHAPTER
FIFTY-NINE
I would have let them out. Anna and Ella.
When I stopped the car and told Anna to get out, I really meant it. Not just because I could have gone—disappeared somewhere too far to be found—but because I never wanted either of them to get hurt.
Now it’s too late. I’ll have to keep them. As insurance. Collateral.
If only I’d gotten rid of your body on my own, this wouldn’t have happened. But I couldn’t.
I kneeled on the floor, your blood seeping into my jeans. I was feeling for a pulse—looking for the rise and fall of your chest—even though the bubble of blood between your lips told me everything I needed to know. There was no coming back from this. For either of us.
I couldn’t have told you whether I was crying for you or for me. Maybe it was for both of us. All I know is I sobered up fast. I put my arms on either side of you, tried to heave you into a sitting position, but my hands were slick with blood, and you slipped from my grasp and smashed once more against the tiles.
I screamed. Rolled you over and saw the tissue through the crack in your skull. Vomited once. Twice.
And it was then, when I was sitting there covered in your blood and crying in fear of what they’d do to me, that the door opened.
CHAPTER
SIXTY
ANNA
Carrying Ella throws me off-balance. I lurch from side to side as I run, like a drunk chasing the last bus. Behind me Mum moans as she picks herself up. She’s hurt.
I hear her shoes—comfortable flats to suit the frumpy persona she acquired as Angela—slapping against the floor as she breaks into a run.
The car park is punctuated with gray concrete pillars. Fluorescent lights flicker behind dirty plastic casings, throwing twin shadows of each pillar onto the ground between them. Disorienting me. I focus on the square of freedo
m directly ahead of me; the square that—even as I watch—is changing dimensions, as though someone has tipped the rectangle of the open door on its side.
Separating the rows of parking bays are half-height walls I had thought I would hurdle. They’re higher than I remember—wider, too—so I scramble over the first one, skinning my knee through the rip in my jeans, and almost dropping Ella in the process. I clutch her tight to my breast and she opens her mouth and lets out an air-raid siren of a scream that bounces off the car park walls and comes back to me tenfold.
I glance over my shoulder but I can’t see my mother. The absence makes me check my pace. Has she given up? But I hear a sound and look to my left. She’s veered off to the side. It doesn’t make sense, until I realize there are no walls that way, no columns to dodge. Her path is longer than mine, but it is clear. She will get to me before I reach the door. Unless . . .
I sprint faster. There are two walls between me and the door, and there’s no time to stop and climb over them. I shift Ella under one arm, which increases her screams but frees my torso to lean into my run. The first wall looms in front of me. When did I last hurdle something? A decade ago?
Three paces.
Two.
I lift my right leg, extending it forward as I push off with the left and tuck it up behind me to clear the wall. My foot clips the concrete but I’m over the wall and sprinting, sprinting.
The door mechanism grinds. Metal against metal. The bottom of the door is a meter from the ground, the shaft of night air shrinking back from the darkness of the garage, as though it’s as afraid as I am.
The final wall.
Three.
Two.
One.
I take off too early.
The wall sends me hurtling forward and to the left, and I only just manage to twist Ella to one side as I smash onto the hood of a Mercedes.
The air leaves my body in one sharp breath.
“Don’t make this hard, Anna.”
I’m light-headed with lack of air; with the pain in my stomach and chest. I lift my head—my body still sprawled across the hood—and see her standing there. Between me and the exit.
I give up.
The garage door is still closing. The thick metal bar across its bottom is lower than my waist but higher than my knees. The light calls to me. There is time.
But she’s standing right there.
And although her hand shakes, and although she swore she wouldn’t know how to use it, I can’t bring myself to ignore the shiny black barrel of the gun.
CHAPTER
SIXTY-ONE
I wish you were here. That’s ironic, isn’t it?
You’d know what to do.
You’d put your hand over mine, and you’d lower my arm until the gun was pointing at the floor. You’d take it out of my hand and even though I’d yell at you to leave me alone, like I yelled when you tried to take the vodka, like I yelled when you told me I’d had enough, I would let you. I would let you take this gun.
I don’t want it in my hand. I never wanted it.
He came around with it. Shifty. Collected that week’s rent, then put it on the table and said he thought I might want this. Two grand.
He knew money was tight. Knew that cleaning toilets—even at a posh girls’ school—didn’t earn that kind of cash, and that everything I’d brought with me I’d given to him in rent.
But he knew I was scared, too. He offered me a loan, with an interest rate that made my chest tighten, but what choice did I have? I needed protection.
I took the loan. Bought the gun.
I felt better knowing it was there, even though I never thought I’d use it. I used to imagine what would happen if I was found; imagined diving for the drawer where I kept the gun. Aiming. Firing.
My hand’s shaking.
She’s your daughter. That’s your granddaughter!
What am I doing?
I hear the faint strains of a siren and half hope it will get louder, but it drifts away. I need someone to stop me.
I wish you were here.
But I suppose if you were still here, I wouldn’t need you now.
CHAPTER
SIXTY-TWO
ANNA
I want to look at her—to see if her trembling hand means she’s as scared as I am—but I can’t take my eyes off the gun. I wrap my arms around Ella, as though they could stop a bullet, and I wonder if this is it: if these are the last few seconds I will spend with my daughter.
I wish now I’d banged on the car window. Shouted to the woman in the Fiat 500. Tried to kick out the glass. Something. Anything. What kind of mother doesn’t even try to save her baby?
Years ago, when I was walking back from a friend’s house, someone tried to pull me into a car. I fought like an animal. I fought so hard I made him swear.
“You fucking bitch,” he said, before he drove off.
I didn’t even have to think about it. I just fought.
Why aren’t I fighting now?
She jerks the barrel of the gun toward the corner of the car park. Once. Twice.
I move.
It isn’t just the gun. It’s because of who she is, because of how I’m programmed to be with her. She’s like a best friend who suddenly turns on you, or a lover who throws an unexpected punch; I can’t reconcile what’s happening now with the person I thought I knew. It is easier to fight a stranger. It is easier to hate a stranger than your own flesh and blood.
From outside I hear a noise like a distant machine gun, drumming on the sky. Fireworks. It’s still an hour till midnight—someone’s celebrating early. The car park is deserted; all the residents either out for the night or settled at home.
The lift opens onto a carpeted landing. Mark’s flat is at the end of the corridor and as we walk past his immediate neighbor, there are raucous screams. Top 40 music blares from inside the apartment. If the door is on the latch—for people to come and go from the party—I could open the door and be inside in a second. Safety in numbers.
I’m not aware that I’ve checked my pace, that my entire body is gearing up for this final attempt to save my life—to save Ella’s life—but I must have done because there’s a hard jab against my spine and I don’t need to be told that she’s holding the gun to my back.
I keep walking.
Mark’s apartment is a far cry from the way I remember it. The leather sofa is scratched and torn—the stuffing exploding from a rip on one arm—and there are cigarette burns all over the wooden floor. The kitchen has been cleared of the garbage left by the previous tenants, but the smell has been slower to leave. It catches the back of my throat.
There are two armchairs facing the sofa. Both are filthy. One is covered in what could be paint. The soft woolen throws Mark used to keep folded over the back of each one are scrunched into a heap on the other.
We stand in the center of the room. I wait for her to give me an instruction, to say something—anything—but she just stands there.
She doesn’t know what to do.
She doesn’t have a clue what she’s going to do with us, now she has us here. Somehow, I find that more frightening than knowing this is all part of a grand plan. Anything could happen.
She could do anything.
“Give me the baby.” The gun is in both hands now, clasped together in a parody of prayer.
I shake my head. “No.” I hold Ella so tight she lets out a cry. “You’re not having her.”
“Give her to me!” She’s hysterical. I want to think someone will hear her, knock on the door and ask if everything’s okay, but next door’s party is throbbing through the walls, and I think even if I screamed no one would come.
“Put her on the chair, then get over to the other side of the room.”
If she shoots me, Ella will have no one to save her
from this situation. I have to stay alive.
Slowly, I move toward one of the armchairs and lower Ella onto the pile of soft throws. She blinks at me and I make myself smile, even though it hurts so much to let her go.
“Now move.” Another jerk of the gun.
I comply, never taking my eyes off Ella as my mother picks her up and cradles her against her chest. She makes shushing noises, bounces up and down on the balls of her feet. She could be any devoted grandmother, were it not for the gun dangling from one hand.
“You killed Dad.” I still can’t believe it.
She looks at me as though she’d forgotten I was there. She walks from one side of the room to the other—back and forth, back and forth—but whether it’s to soothe Ella or herself isn’t clear. “It was an accident. He . . . he fell. Against the kitchen counter.”
I cover my mouth with my hands, stifle the cry that builds at the thought of Dad lying on the kitchen floor. “Was he . . . was he drunk?”
It changes nothing, but I’m searching for reasons, trying to understand how my baby and I came to be imprisoned in this flat.
“Drunk?” Mum looks momentarily confused; then she turns away and I can’t see her face. When she speaks, she’s trying not to cry. “No, he wasn’t drunk. I was.” She turns back around. “I’ve changed, Anna. I’m not the person I was back then. That person died—just like you all thought she had. I had a chance to start again; not to make the mistakes I made before. Not to hurt anyone.”
“This is what you call not hurting anyone?”
“This was a mistake.”
An accident. A mistake. My head is spinning with the lies she’s told, and if this is the truth, then I’m not sure I want to hear it.
“Let us go.”
“I can’t do that.”
“You can, Mum. You said yourself: this has all been a big mistake. Give me Ella, put down the gun, and let us go. I don’t care what you do after that—just let us go.”
“They’ll put me in prison.”
Let Me Lie Page 30