And then suddenly it all comes together. The explanation jumps into his head, almost blinding him with its clarity.
Why did I come here? he thinks. For my ID, of course. Yes, but before that. What was the original reason? It was to look for abducted children, wasn’t it? And if you’ve got children who don’t want to be with you, you need to lock them up. You need to put them in a room with locks on the outside. And if you don’t want visitors to the house to suspect anything, you need a way of telling those children not to make any noise. You need a signalling system of some kind. Something that can be operated from downstairs. A switch.
Oh my God.
‘You’re here,’ he breathes. ‘You’re here, aren’t you? Poppy? Ellie?’
He waits. Gets nothing.
And then . . .
‘Yes.’
A single word. Barely audible, yet shattering the silence. A word that changes everything, that brings with it a fundamental change of perspective. A word that charges Cody with alarm, with adrenaline, and with a renewed sense of danger.
He whirls too late, sees the silhouette in the doorway too late. Something comes at him in an arc, too fast to evade. It strikes him on the side of his head, and his world explodes in a fury of colour and pain. He feels himself falling, landing heavily on the carpeted floor. It’s all he can do to raise his arms in protection, but it’s futile. He hears an immense intake of breath – the kind that precedes an act requiring supreme effort.
And he hears one other thing.
It manages to penetrate just before the second blow lands, just before it seems to smash his skull into a million pieces, obliterating all his thoughts and hopes and memories and fears.
It’s the sound of a child’s cry.
PART THREE
44
Should’ve worn a hat, thinks Malcolm.
Not because of the cold. He has never in his life worn a hat because of the cold.
It’s the stares.
People looking at his head as though they’ve never seen anyone with any kind of injury before. They wouldn’t stare at a guy in a wheelchair like that. They wouldn’t think a woman on crutches was an object of entertainment and ridicule. But give them someone with a bulge in his cranium, and suddenly they’ve got something better than television.
He almost wishes now that he hadn’t bothered going for the ketchup. The sad fuckers always seem to congregate at that mini-market in the evenings, buying their cans of ale and their packets of fags, their meals for one. And there’s always a queue, mainly because the dozy staff don’t seem to give a shit.
But he had to go. Bangers and chips aren’t the same without a huge dollop of ketchup on the side.
He imagines that Harriet will have them cooking now. She said she would, and she always does what she says she’s going to do. As soon as he walks through that door, the aroma of sizzling Cumberlands will assail his nostrils. She’s that reliable. Always has been.
Chicken nuggets for the kids tonight. They like a bit of ketchup too, so that’s another reason for the journey.
He sometimes wonders how things would have turned out if it hadn’t been for the girls. He and Harriet experienced some tough times before that. Losing their jobs, medical treatments, their inability to conceive, depression – sometimes it seemed the whole world was against them. Their love for each other was severely tested.
Malcolm isn’t quite sure whether he believes in God, but the children are certainly a miracle. He found them – or they were revealed to him – at just the right time.
They say the first child is the most difficult. You have no prior experience or knowledge. You have to learn as you go along. Of course, they are talking about natural childbirth, but the same applies here, doesn’t it? In fact it’s worse: there were no books or experts he and Harriet could consult before doing things their way. They could hardly go to a counsellor and say, ‘We’re thinking of having a child. Only it’s someone else’s child, and they won’t be very keen on the idea. What do you recommend?’
He remembers that first abduction vividly. At the time he felt he knew what he was doing, but looking back he can see all the mistakes, all the unnecessary risks.
What did surprise him, though, was how compliant Daisy was – how readily she took his hand to be led away from the sand dunes. Yes, she fought a little at the end when she realised her mother wasn’t in the car park, but for the most part she was so good. It was almost as if she wanted to be with them.
And the difference it has made to Harriet! She is so happy now, so content with life. Poppy is settling in nicely. And Ellie has got a few problems, but she’ll come around. Give her time.
She saw a lot, that girl. Things she wasn’t meant to see. That shouldn’t have happened.
So, he thinks, what was it you were saying about the mistakes with Daisy? Wasn’t this latest adventure the biggest mistake of all? Is it any wonder the police are on your tail?
He turns up the car radio to drown out these dark thoughts.
The police aren’t on my tail. They were just doing their job. Everything is fine. Besides, there aren’t going to be any more abductions now. Three children is enough. We’ve done our bit. Let somebody else share a bit of love if they care enough.
You can all go away and leave us alone now. Let us live our lives in peace.
He feels relieved when he turns onto his road. Sometimes his mind can get into arguments with itself. Now he just wants home and Harriet and the kids and sausages. Normal family life.
His anger resurfaces when he notices a dark car parked directly in front of his house.
He hates it when people park there. Not that he needs the space – he always puts his car on the drive or in the garage – but he still thinks it’s a cheek. It’s not even as if the whole road is full of cars: there’s plenty of room to park elsewhere.
He wonders which neighbour it is, but he’s not going to kick up a fuss. He could do without the extra tension in his life right now. If it becomes a habit, though, the car’s owner might find an extra scratch or two on it.
He turns onto his driveway. Sets the handbrake and turns off the engine. Gets out of the car, ketchup in hand.
At the door, he uses his own key. No point summoning Harriet when she’s busy cooking.
But then he opens the door, and wonders why he can’t smell food.
‘It’s me,’ he announces.
No answer. Something is wrong.
He hears a noise from the kitchen, so he goes straight there. Harriet is at the table, crying.
‘Honey?’ he says. ‘What’s the matter?’
He pulls up a chair next to her, puts the ketchup down on the table.
‘What’s up?’ he asks again.
‘Oh, Malcolm. I don’t know what to do. I’ve messed things up. Promise me you won’t be angry.’
‘What do you mean, messed things up? What have you done?’
‘Don’t be angry with me. Please.’
‘I won’t be angry,’ he says, but already he can feel the stress building inside. ‘Now tell me all about it. Is it the girls? Have they been naughty?’
She shakes her head. ‘No. It’s not their fault. I tried my best, but I’m not very good by myself. I need you here, Malcolm. You deal with these things better than I do.’
Her sobbing increases. Malcolm wants to soothe her, but he also needs to get to the bottom of this. He wishes she would just spit it out.
‘Harriet, what are you talking about? What things?’
‘The . . . the policeman.’
It’s not the word he was expecting, and so it passes through his defences and hits him between the eyes.
‘Policeman? What policeman?’
‘The one who was here earlier, asking about the van. Cody.’
‘Well, what about him?’
‘He came back. While you were out. Malcolm, I tried to stop him. I tried to tell him he needed to speak to you.’
‘Why did he come
back? What did he want?’
‘He said he’d left something here. His identification – something like that. I don’t know if it was true. I think he might have been lying.’
Malcolm thinks back. Tries to remember if the detective took his ID away with him. But it’s all a blur, lost in the mists of his stress at the time.
‘So what happened? What did he ask you?’
‘Nothing, really. I don’t . . . Oh, Malcolm.’
She sobs again. Malcolm grabs her wrist.
‘Harriet, I don’t understand. Why are you so upset? What did Cody do?’
‘He knows. He . . . he went upstairs. I couldn’t stop him. He found them. He found the girls.’
It feels to Malcolm as though his heart stops. What is she saying to him? What has happened to the girls? Why aren’t police swarming all over the house right now?
‘Harriet? What do you mean? Where is Cody now?’
She lifts her gaze. ‘He’s up there.’
Malcolm looks upwards too. His throat and mouth are suddenly parched. ‘He’s upstairs?’ he croaks. ‘With the girls?’
‘Yes,’ Harriet says, beginning to cry again. ‘And I think he’s dead.’
45
‘What do you mean, he’s dead? I only went out for a bloody bottle of ketchup. What the hell’s been going on?’
‘Don’t shout at me, Malcolm. I didn’t know what to do. He found the girls. I had to stop him.’
‘Stop him how? What did you do to him?’
‘I hit him. With the rolling pin.’
‘And now he’s dead? Are you sure?’
‘Yes. I don’t know. There was a lot of blood.’
‘For God’s sake, Harriet. You were a nurse. You of all people should be able to tell a dead person from a live one.’
‘You’re shouting again, Malcolm. Please stop being angry with me.’
He realises this isn’t helping, so he takes a deep breath and counts to five.
‘All right, Harriet. Here’s what we’ll do. We’ll go upstairs, and you can check him over.’
‘But if he’s dead—’
‘We’ll worry about that when we get to it. One step at a time, okay?’
It occurs to Malcolm that it could be more of a problem if the detective is still alive, but he doesn’t mention it.
‘If you say so, Malcolm. Are you still annoyed at me? I didn’t know what to do. I never know what to do when you’re not here.’
‘It’s all right,’ he says. ‘You did the right thing. Now come on. Don’t worry; I’ll be with you all the way.’
He takes her hand, leads her out to the stairs. Starts to ascend. Behind him, Harriet makes small whimpering noises.
When he gets to the landing and sees the locked door, Malcolm wonders if he should have brought a weapon with him. But then if the policeman’s as injured as Harriet says, he’s not going to put up much of a fight.
Malcolm unlocks the door. As he opens it, he hears snivelling from the girls, which provokes more crying from his wife.
The door stops suddenly. Malcolm sees that it has caught against the feet of the prone figure. He steps further into the room to get a better look, pulling Harriet in behind him.
It looks as though the detective hasn’t budged since Harriet assaulted him. The reason Malcolm knows this is the large halo of blood around the man’s head. It has soaked into the carpet. Going to be a hell of a job to get that clean.
He looks at the girls. Daisy and Poppy are hugging each other on the bed, and risking the occasional glance down at the body. Malcolm sighs inwardly. He would have preferred them not to have witnessed this, but what’s done is done.
Ellie, meanwhile, is behaving differently. She is standing over Cody, staring at his bloodied head.
‘Move away, Ellie,’ he tells her. ‘Go on. Move!’
She shuffles backwards, her eyes still locked on the figure.
‘Harriet, take a look at him.’
He realises he hasn’t called her ‘Mummy’, as he usually does in front of the children, but it doesn’t seem the time for niceties.
‘Go on,’ he says. ‘He won’t bite.’
Harriet creeps forward at a snail’s pace. When she reaches the body, Malcolm balls his fists, just in case the bastard is playing dead.
Harriet sinks to her knees, puts two fingers to the side of the man’s neck. Seconds later she looks up.
‘He’s alive. He’s still alive, Malcolm. What do we do?’
All eyes turn on Malcolm. He feels the pressure of their expectation. He thinks, Why is it always me who has to come up with all the answers? Why can’t somebody else make a decision for once?
Because they’d make a cock-up of it, that’s why. Bad decisions are what got us into this mess in the first place.
Malcolm rubs a hand across the top of his head. Feels the bumps and indentations.
And then the man on the floor groans.
He emits a sound like a creaking door, followed by a cough. He tries to raise himself up. Daisy and Poppy crawl back to the far edge of the bed.
Not now, thinks Malcolm. I need more time. We can’t rush into this.
‘Harriet, get one of your syringes. We need to knock him out again.’
‘But Malcolm—’
‘Just do it!’ Realising he is shouting again, he says, ‘Please. Go and get the medicine.’
He puts emphasis on the last word, purely for the benefit of the children. Not that they are likely to believe their parents intend to help this guy – not after one of them just caved his head in.
As Harriet dashes away, Malcolm moves closer to Cody. He looks down on the man as the groans increase in volume.
I could crush him now, thinks Malcolm. I could place my foot on his neck and press until he can no longer breathe. It could even be classed as a mercy killing. The guy looks half dead as it is.
But then he notices the children watching him, waiting to see what he will do next. He thinks about what the murders of Ellie’s parents did to her. And he has already talked about medicine, about helping. He can’t now squash the man like an insect. What kind of lesson would that teach them?
‘Be quiet,’ he tells Cody.
The policeman groans again.
The girls on the bed shrink even further away. Ellie, on the other hand, takes a step closer again, her eyes greedy for the spectacle.
He could be dead soon anyway, thinks Malcolm. I wouldn’t be surprised if he has a fractured skull. Maybe even brain damage. His brain could be swelling up inside his head right now. Just like mine did. Only this lad isn’t going to get the operation he needs.
Malcolm feathers his fingers across his knobbly scalp again. Thinks what would have happened without his operation. His brain getting bigger and bigger inside that confined space, its tissues becoming more and more compressed until . . .
‘Here,’ says Harriet, breathless behind him. ‘I’ve got it. I’ve got it.’
She brandishes a hypodermic as if it contains the secret of eternal youth.
‘Give it to him, then.’
She looks down at the figure, again trying to push himself up from the floor. She seems reluctant to go anywhere near him.
‘Malcolm, I . . .’
Malcolm sinks to his knees, starts to pull up Cody’s sleeve. When Cody brings across his other arm to resist, Malcolm slaps it away.
‘Come on now, Harriet. You can do this. Quickly!’
The command gives Harriet the impetus she needs. She dashes across to join Malcolm, then sinks the needle into Cody’s arm and depresses the plunger.
‘That’s it,’ says Malcolm. ‘See? Wasn’t hard, was it?’
Cody emits a moan, but his voice is fainter now. His eyelids begin to flutter.
And then he’s gone again.
46
Daisy is terrified. For herself and Poppy, but less so for Ellie. Ellie is dealing with this differently: she seems morbidly fascinated by the whole affair.
Daisy knew something was wrong as soon as she heard the bolts being drawn back during Quiet Time. Prior to that, she had detected footsteps on the staircase, and then the bathroom door being closed. She expected that to be followed by the sounds of the toilet flushing, the taps running, the door, and then a journey back down the stairs.
So when she heard the bolts sliding out of their recesses ever so quietly, she feared the worst.
She assumed it was because of Poppy dropping the book. She expected it to be Malcolm or Harriet at the door, sneaking in to warn them not to make any more noise or else the repercussions would be fierce.
But then her mind started playing tricks on her. Nobody had ever come into their bedroom like this before. In the blackness, the slow grinding of the metal bolts scraped along her nerves.
She shuffled off the bed. Poppy’s mattress was occupying the gap between the bed and the wall, so she slid it forward and dragged the other girls down into the space she had created. They remained hidden there, staring fearfully in the direction of the door.
Daisy heard the knob turning. Then the door swung open.
The faint silhouette of the man in the doorway was unfamiliar to Daisy. As she stared at the dark shape she tightened her embrace on the girls. She tried to control her breathing, to keep it inaudible, while praying that the other two would have the sense to do the same.
When he eventually spoke, she tried to use his voice to build a picture of him, but her fears insisted on endowing him with a malicious grin and eyes thirsty for blood.
She kept quiet, knowing that even if this interloper did not wish them harm, Malcolm would.
But then he asked his question. Queried their presence. He sounded concerned, compassionate. She was tempted to answer, to plead for his help, but she knew it would be a dangerous mistake.
And then Poppy took it out of her hands. Snatched away their safety in one breathy word.
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