by A J McDine
Theo had a pulse.
He was alive.
Eloise hadn’t killed him, she’d only knocked him out. A single blow in self-defence. Surely there wasn’t a court in the country that would ever send her to prison for that.
Relief made me giddy, and I’d gripped the side of the car for support.
Theo was alive.
Alive!
I was about to blurt the news to Eloise when the words died on my lips. Theo had attacked her twice and had been emotionally abusing her for months. She was terrified of him. His death had brought her peace. The end of a terrifying ordeal that had broken her spirit and almost cost her life.
He said he was going to kill me.
How could I break the news that the man who’d attacked her was still alive?
I couldn’t do it.
Instead, I’d slammed the boot shut and promised her everything would be all right.
And it would be. Because it had to be. And it was up to me to make sure it was.
The house was in darkness, but I needed to be sure Eloise was asleep. I slipped inside, crept up the stairs and listened outside her door until I was satisfied I could hear her rhythmic breathing.
I hurried back outside, locking the door behind me, and jogged over to the wheelbarrow. I felt about in the darkness for the length of rope and my father’s gun, banking on the fact that a city boy from Paris wouldn’t know the difference between a shotgun and an air rifle. I blipped the key fob and as the boot clicked open, I turned on my torch and shone it inside.
When two panic-stricken eyes stared back at me, it took every ounce of my self-control not to recoil in shock. Instead, I played the torch along the length of Theo’s body, from his face to his feet and back again. He was still lying on his side with his knees tucked into his chest and his head bent against the wheel arch.
I took a step closer and waved the rifle in his face.
‘Get out,’ I hissed.
‘Where is Eloise?’ he whispered in a heavy French accent.
I tutted under my breath. I was hardly going to tell him. ‘Get out,’ I said again, prodding him in the chest with the muzzle of the rifle.
He scrambled out of the boot, clutching his head. His eyes darted about.
‘Is she here?’ he said.
I ignored him.
‘Who are you?’
I pointed the rifle at his right kneecap. ‘Shut up or I’ll shoot.’
His eyes widened, and he held up both hands in surrender. ‘What do you want?’
‘Walk,’ I instructed, waving the rifle towards the woods. ‘And don’t try any funny business.’
‘What?’
‘You heard me. Start walking.’
‘Are you mad? I do not even know who you are,’ he said.
‘You don’t need to know. All you need to understand is that if you don’t do what I tell you, I’m going to put a bullet in your leg. Now walk!’
Theo jumped when I shouted and began stumbling up the garden, his hands clasping his head. A trickle of dried blood stained the back of his neck like a claret-coloured birthmark. I followed him, the muzzle of the gun pressing into the small of his back.
He was still wearing his chef’s whites over blue and white checked trousers. He was shorter than I imagined and had narrow shoulders and a lean frame. From the picture Eloise had painted, I’d expected him to be broad and brutish. But bullies came in all shapes and sizes.
We made our way slowly up the garden, passing so close to the sinkhole that it would have taken just one sharp shove for Theo to disappear down it. So easy to finish the job Eloise had started. I was going to have to fill in the bloody hole anyway. He might as well be in it. The world would be a better place without men like Theo.
But, tempting as it was, I couldn’t quite bring myself to kill him. Not yet, anyway. I needed more time to decide what I was going to do with the man who had ruined my goddaughter’s life.
‘Turn right,’ I instructed as we reached the trees.
‘Where are you taking me?’ he whimpered.
‘Somewhere no one will find you.’
‘But why? I don’t understand. What have I done?’
‘Stop talking,’ I said, jabbing him with the rifle.
Yelping, he blundered into the trees.
When we reached the pillbox, Theo stopped in his tracks and looked around.
‘What is this place?’
I nudged him with the rifle, but he was rooted to the spot.
‘Move it!’ I barked.
When he still didn’t budge, I felt a flutter of fear in the pit of my belly. I’d had the upper hand so far because Theo’s head injury had left him disorientated, but he was still much younger and stronger than me. If he turned on me here, in the middle of the woods, I didn’t stand a chance.
My hands tightened on the gun as he turned towards me. If he attacked, I was ready. It took a moment to register the fear in his eyes and when I did, I tutted to myself. Like all bullies, he’d crumpled the minute someone stood up to him. He was the worst kind of coward.
‘Get in,’ I growled, waving the rifle towards the door of the pillbox. Theo shuffled through the door, defeated.
He was silent as I tied his wrists and ankles with the rope I’d brought. Then, I inspected the cut on the back of his head. It could have done with a couple of stitches, but at least it had stopped bleeding.
‘Why am I here?’ he asked so quietly I had to bend down to hear him.
‘Why d’you think?’
‘Whatever you want, you can have it. My family, they have money. They will pay for my release.’
He thinks he’s been kidnapped, I realised. Which could only work to my advantage. He’d assume I had accomplices, which would make him more compliant. Much more likely to sit tight and wait while his family back in France stumped up the ransom money.
‘We’re making contact,’ I confirmed. I gave him a gentle shove, and he sat down on the dusty floor with a thump. ‘You’ll stay here until we have our money. We’ll have men guarding the door. They’ll all be armed, so don’t try to be a hero.’
He nodded, as if this made perfect sense. Wondering just how rich his parents were, I closed the door, slammed the two bolts into their keepers and set off for home.
It took eighteen barrow-loads of loamy soil, dug from my father’s vegetable patch, to plug the sinkhole. I topped it off with some turf, carefully peeled from a small piece of lawn behind the oil tank. No doubt the soil would settle and leave a shallow depression in the ground, but that could be sorted in time.
For now, I would let Eloise continue to believe she’d killed Theo, and I’d buried his body. That way, she would feel safe.
The chances of someone stumbling upon him in the pillbox were remote - the woods were private property and the nearest footpath was a couple of miles away. And it wasn’t as if anyone was going to come looking for him. Eloise was right. No one knew she or Theo were here. As long as everyone assumed he’d hightailed it back to France, we were in the clear. I knew I couldn’t leave him in the pillbox forever, but I had plenty of time to figure out what I was going to do with him.
My back aching and my arms heavy, I clumped back to the house. I yearned to soak my weary bones in a bath, but when I felt the tank, it was stone cold. I had a quick flannel wash instead, scrubbing at my dirt-stained hands until every last speck of mud had disappeared down the plughole. As I crossed the landing to my bedroom, Eloise called my name.
‘You’re awake,’ I said, sticking my head around the door.
‘Is it done?’
I nodded. ‘You don’t need to worry about Theo ever again.’
She pressed her palms to her eyes, then lifted her head and gave me a watery smile. ‘Thank you.’
‘I’m glad I could help.’
‘There is one more thing,’ she said in a small voice.
‘Name it.’
‘Can I stay for a while? I don’t have anywhere else to go.’
&nbs
p; ‘What about work?’
‘That’s the thing about temping. I can phone the agency and tell them I’m not available for the next couple of weeks. That’s if it’s all right for me to stay that long?’
Suddenly my aching bones felt as light as air. ‘Of course it is, darling girl,’ I said. ‘I can’t think of anything I’d like more.’
Chapter Ten
It was still dark when I woke. I pulled on yesterday’s clothes and tiptoed downstairs. In the kitchen, I filled an old plastic bottle with water, cut a corner of cheese from the block of cheddar in the fridge and fished out the remnants of a white sliced loaf from the bread bin. As an afterthought, I crept back upstairs and pulled a couple of blankets from the tallboy. Dinah watched with narrowed eyes as I threw the blankets, water, cheese and bread into a shopping bag and left the house.
Theo was lying on his side when I peered through one of the window slits of the pillbox twenty minutes later. I coughed, and he gave a start, his head jerking in my direction. I opened the door and threw the shopping bag on the floor.
‘Food and water,’ I said, nodding at the bag.
‘How can I eat like this?’ he croaked, glancing over his shoulder at his hands tied behind his back.
I’d turned to the internet the previous night for advice on tying people up and had been left speechless at the search results. The lengths to which some couples went to spice up their love lives was astonishing. But I had found a couple of useful tips.
‘Turn around,’ I instructed Theo. I undid the rope, then retied it with his wrists in front of his chest. I then lashed the rope circling his wrists to the one around his ankles so he could eat and drink but couldn’t get far.
‘Merci,’ he breathed, closing his eyes and rubbing his hands together. ‘My parents, have you spoken to them?’
I gave a non-committal shrug. I was halfway to the door when he said, ‘Eloise, did she put you up to this?’
I clenched my jaw. How dare he blame Eloise when she was the victim in all this? I was about to march back and give him a piece of my mind when I thought better of it. Instead, I stalked out of the pillbox and slammed the door shut with as much force as I could muster.
When I returned to the house, Eloise was at the kitchen table eating cornflakes.
‘I found them in the cupboard,’ she said, tapping the bowl with her spoon. ‘Hope that’s OK?’
‘Of course it is.’ I smiled, then touched her shoulder. ‘Did you sleep?’
‘Better than I thought I would.’ She looked at me curiously. ‘Do you always go for walks before breakfast?’
‘Now and again.’ I shrugged off my coat and hung it on the back of a chair. ‘It clears my head. Listen, I was thinking. We need to get rid of your car. It’s going to be covered in Theo’s DNA.’
She swallowed a mouthful of cornflakes. ‘Of course, but how?’
The internet had provided me with an answer to this, too. My plan was to drive the car to a remote spot, douse it with petrol, and set it alight. But even the most intense fire wouldn’t destroy the chassis number, which meant that any self-respecting police officer could identify Eloise as the car’s owner. She listened carefully as I explained this.
‘That’s OK. I’ll say it was stolen from the car park at the country park where I go running.’
And just like that the plan was agreed. We’d destroy the car and, as far as Eloise was concerned, her nightmare was over.
My nightmare, on the other hand, had only just begun. I couldn’t leave Theo tied up in the pillbox forever. At some point, I needed to decide what the hell I was going to do with him.
Usually I had an answer for everything. Not this time.
By six o’clock it was pitch black outside. I pulled on my coat and asked Eloise for her car keys.
She frowned. ‘You can’t use them.’
‘Why ever not?’
‘Because the car’s supposed to have been stolen while I was out running,’ she said. ‘We’ll have to hotwire it.’
It was my turn to frown. ‘How on earth are we supposed to do that?’
Eloise shrugged. ‘Google it?’
So, for the second time in twenty-four hours I found myself carrying out some dubious searches on the internet. After I’d played Eloise a couple of YouTube videos she jumped to her feet.
‘Let’s give it a go,’ she said. ‘It looks pretty straightforward with an old car like mine.’
I found flat-head and Phillips screwdrivers, a roll of insulating tape, some wire cutters, and a pair of my father’s leather driving gloves. Eloise pulled on the gloves and took the tools.
‘There’s a can of petrol in the back of the Land Rover,’ I said. ‘I’ll fetch it.’
She was waiting outside the back door when I returned a couple of minutes later with the petrol can and a box of matches.
‘Ready for a bit of breaking and entering?’ she said.
The thought was strangely exhilarating. That was the problem when you spent your life trying to be good. Every now and then, the urge to break the rules was too strong to resist.
I found myself thinking about Thelma and Louise as we tramped over to Eloise’s car. The film had come out the summer Juliet graduated. I had another two years at university ahead of me, and that was before I’d even thought about the two-year post-graduate foundation course, let alone the minimum three years’ specialist training after that. As Juliet started applying for jobs in London art galleries and looking for flats to rent in trendy-sounding places like Primrose Hill and Little Venice, I’d questioned my choice of career.
We saw the film at the local Odeon one sticky July night. As I’d sat in the darkened auditorium, Juliet’s bare shoulder almost feverishly hot against mine, I’d felt as though we were watching ourselves. The parallels between Juliet and Geena Davis’s ditzy, too trusting Thelma, were striking. And I felt an unmistakable kinship with Susan Sarandon’s streetwise, tough talking Louise, whose love for her friend was such that she was prepared to kill to keep her safe from predatory men.
Overcome with emotion, I stopped, my hand on my chest.
‘Are you OK?’ Eloise asked in alarm.
‘I was thinking about the time your mother and I went to see Thelma and Louise. It was one of her favourite films. Mine, too. We had a lot in common like that.’
‘You still miss her, don’t you?’
‘I do.’ I smiled into the night. ‘Did she ever tell you we were planning our own road trip the summer she graduated? Only she met your father and, well, the plans changed.’
The fact she’d chosen to spend her final summer with a cocky lifeguard with an ego considerably larger than his intellect rather than me, her best friend, still stung thirty years later.
‘You were around when they first met?’ she asked, a little breathlessly. ‘At the lido?’
In an instant, I was back at the pool, with the smell of chlorine in the air and the shouts and squeals of over-excited children as they splashed about while their mothers gossiped poolside. ‘I was,’ I said.
‘Tell me about it.’
‘I expect you already know your dad had a part-time job as a lifeguard while he was studying at uni?’
She nodded.
‘I doubt their paths would have ever crossed if we hadn’t spent all our spare time at the lido working on our tans. Well, to be factually correct, your mother worked on her tan and I worked on my freckles.’
Eloise didn’t laugh. Instead, she gazed at me with a hunger in her eyes.
‘All the girls had a bit of a thing for him,’ I said, remembering. Danny Reeves was tall, blond and broad-shouldered. He wore tight swimming trunks and aviator glasses. Testosterone oozed out of every pore. The term alpha male might as well have been invented for him. Whistle in hand, he strode up and down the side of the pool with the swagger of a cockerel, bawling kids out for bombing or diving, not caring if he reduced them to tears.
‘You, too?’
It took a minute for me to rea
lise what Eloise was asking. I laughed. ‘Oh no. Danny wasn’t my type at all.’
‘But he was Mum’s type?’ she pressed.
‘He must have been.’
‘Was it love at first sight?’
‘I don’t know about that.’ Keen to change the subject, I handed Eloise the carrier bag. ‘Shall I hold the torch while you do the honours?’
She nodded, pulled out the flat-head screwdriver, rammed it into the ignition, and turned it clockwise. ‘The guy on YouTube said this sometimes does the trick,’ she said. And then, when nothing happened, added, ‘But not today. Can you pass me the Phillips screwdriver please, Rose?’
Her face was the picture of concentration as she carefully removed the screws in the grey plastic panels on the top and bottom of the steering column.
‘It’s a good job it’s an old heap,’ she said, as she took the flat-head screwdriver and prised off the panels, exposing an array of wires underneath. ‘The YouTube man said new cars are almost impossible to hotwire.’
She peered at the complicated jumble of red, brown and yellow wires. ‘Wirecutters, please.’
I fished them out of the bag and handed them to her, like a theatre nurse handing a pair of dissecting forceps to a surgeon.
‘Be careful,’ I warned, a dart of anxiety quickening my heart rate.
‘You worry too much,’ she said, bending her head closer to the wires. I had no idea what she did next, but within seconds, the car’s engine rumbled into life. She pressed the accelerator a couple of times, then jumped out.
‘She’s all yours,’ she said with a little bow. ‘Unless you want me to come with you?’
‘No, go back to the house. I’ll deal with this.’ I climbed stiffly in, pressed my foot on the clutch and, once Eloise had set off towards the house, slipped the car into first gear. I eased my foot up, feeling for the bite point, because stalling wasn’t an option.
I’d thought long and hard about the best place to set fire to the car. I needed somewhere remote where no one would see the flames yet close enough that I could walk home. I’d settled on a small area of coppiced sweet chestnut about a mile away. The woodland was part of a private country estate peppered with Keep Out signs to discourage dog walkers. It was a dank, foggy night, which suited my needs perfectly. And if, by morning, the fog cleared and someone spotted a plume of smoke curling up through the trees, they’d assume it was a woodsman’s bonfire.