Safe House

by Chris Ewan

  The second key was a little longer. A touch sturdier. And it was distinctive because unlike the garage key it had a series of raised and lowered bits on both sides of the blade. The garage key had a simple circular bow, but the second key had a bow with an angular shape, like the top half of a hexagon. There was an embossed number on one side. I couldn’t recall the number off the top of my head. But I knew there were three letters stamped on the other side, and I could remember those quite clearly.

  ‘You’re sure the key wasn’t there before?’ Rebecca asked me, once I’d finished explaining.

  I thought back to the feel of the key in my hand when Lukas had first thrown it to me. I conjured up the memory of fixing the key in the lock on the garage door. There hadn’t been a choice to make. I hadn’t tried one key, then the other. There’d only been one key.

  ‘I’m sure,’ I said.

  ‘And you think Lena put it there?’

  ‘She was watching me work, so she could have slipped it on to the fob when I was focused on the boiler.’

  ‘Clever.’

  ‘Not really. It took me a long time to notice.’

  ‘But that’s my point. She arranged it so that you took the key away and returned with it without even knowing. I think she was planning to have you take her somewhere. Somewhere specific that was connected to the key.’

  ‘Didn’t exactly work out for her, then, did it?’

  ‘Maybe not. But whoever snatched Lena doesn’t have the key. She must have known she was taking a risk by leaving the cottage. That’s why she wanted you to carry it instead of her.’

  We were driving along the promenade, gliding by the neon lights outside a club-bar, the glass and steel exterior of an offshore bank headquarters, the well-lit interior of a fancy restaurant. We passed a long curving terrace of Victorian townhouses. We passed the ornate Gaiety Theatre, a Chinese restaurant, a fish-and-chip shop.

  I realised I was hungry. I hadn’t eaten for hours. I asked Rebecca to pull over and then I headed inside the steamy chip shop and returned a few minutes later with two paper packages and a pair of plastic forks.

  ‘What the hell is this?’ Rebecca asked, once she’d unwrapped her meal.

  ‘Chips, cheese and gravy,’ I told her. ‘Local speciality.’

  ‘Eugh.’

  ‘Enjoy.’

  I stabbed my fork into a knot of chips covered in thick gravy and melted cheese, then shovelled them into my mouth. Rebecca wasn’t eating. She was too busy pulling a face.

  ‘Trust me,’ I said.

  She curled up her nose and pricked a chip at the very corner of her tray, filmed with the barest smear of gravy. She raised it to her mouth. Hesitated. Then she popped it inside and chewed like she was experimenting with some far-flung tribal dish.

  She swallowed. Shrugged. Ate some more.

  ‘So where did Lena want you to take her?’ Rebecca asked, between mouthfuls. ‘You said you knew.’

  ‘There were three letters inscribed on the key handle. NSC.’

  ‘NSC?’ Rebecca paused with her fork in the air. ‘What’s that? The manufacturer’s logo?’

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘A bank? Maybe the key was to a safety deposit box. Maybe she’d stored something important. Something valuable.’

  I jammed more food into my mouth. Mopped my lips with a napkin. ‘It’s not a bank. I can’t think of a bank over here with the initials NSC. And our accident happened on a Saturday morning. Only a handful of high-street banks are open then. And none of them are the type with safety deposit boxes.’

  ‘Then I give up. Tell me.’

  ‘The National Sports Centre,’ I said. ‘I think it’s a locker key.’

  Chapter Thirty-one

  Lena was lying on her side. One arm was behind her. Her other arm, the one with the swollen wrist, was in front of her face. Her legs were positioned as if she was running. Her right leg was fully extended and her left was bent at the hip and the knee. It wasn’t her natural sleeping position. Someone had arranged her like this. They’d done it so that she wouldn’t roll on to her back and swallow her tongue and choke to death because of the sedative they’d given her.

  The sedative was still in her system. She was sure of that. Her head felt fuzzy, her muscles relaxed. There was a buzzing in her ears and her temples. She could feel a haziness all around her, prickling her skin like a field of static electricity. She recognised the sensation. She’d experienced it before.

  Her mind was conscious long before she was able to move her body. That had happened the last time, too. Something to do with inhibitors in the nervous system. She knew that your body shut down when you went to sleep so that you couldn’t physically act out your dreams. She guessed the sedative had a similar effect.

  It was infuriating. Her neck ached and she wanted to relieve it. She must have drooled while she was unconscious because she could feel cold liquid pressed against her cheek. The arm that was below her was throbbing and tingling all over. The weight of her body had cut off the blood supply.

  She tried to open her eyes. No luck. The muscles wouldn’t respond. Her eyelids felt sticky and rimed with grit.

  She listened for sounds from around her. Heard only the hissing and the pulsing of the blood in her ears.

  She didn’t think she was in the car any more. Whatever she was lying on was cushioned and soft. And there was no sensation of movement. No engine noise.

  She strained her ears for more, and bam, just when she least expected it, her eyes snapped open.

  She was staring at a wall. But it was no ordinary wall. It was covered in some kind of foam material that had been tacked up like tiles. The foam was dark grey and textured in a series of ridges and hollows, like the interior of an egg box.

  She raised her head. Slowly. So slowly.

  The bright pink duvet was beneath her. Beneath the duvet was a floor carpeted in thick rubber underlay.

  She dropped her head back down. Into the pool of cold saliva. Then she summoned her strength and gritted her teeth and flung her rag-doll body around until she was lying flat on her back.

  She let go of a wheezing breath. The foam tiles covered the ceiling, too. They blanketed the entire room. She knew why they were there now. It was the same with the rubber underlay. Soundproofing. In case she screamed for help.

  The tingling was getting worse in her arm. It was intensifying as her blood flowed back through the arteries and flooded the tissue and swamped the nerve endings. She flexed her fingers. Electric charges streaked up her arm. Her fingers were clumsy and weak. She had no grip. No feel.

  There was a single bare bulb in the middle of the ceiling. The bulb was burning brightly, surrounded by a blurred corona. Did that mean it was night-time still? The same day or the next?

  She kicked her legs out straight. Stretched her toes. Her shoes were gone but she was wearing her socks and the rest of her clothes. She tucked her injured wrist in against her chest and sat upright.

  The hissing in her ears and the buzzing in her temples grew worse. The room pitched and lurched in front of her, like she was still on the stupid boat. She ground the heel of her hand into her eye socket. Tried to fight the surge of nausea that washed over her. She felt drowsy as hell but she couldn’t allow it to overcome her. She had to stand up.

  Standing was a battle. She broke it down into stages. First, she struggled on to her knees on the ridged rubber floor. Then she crawled to the far side of the room. The crawling didn’t take long. The room wasn’t large. There was a window in the wall above her. She reached up and grasped the ledge with her good hand. She heaved with her arm and pushed with her legs. Her legs were feeble. They trembled and quaked. She rested her chin on the dusty ledge. Stared out at the view.

  The view was dizzying. Far below her was a sprawling city vista of thousands of lights that extended for many miles towards the darkened horizon. She was up very high, in some kind of tower block. There were matching apartment blocks all around her, made
of dull brown brick and powdered concrete and dirty glass. The towers looked to be around sixty storeys in height. They were shabby and uncared for. Discoloured net curtains hung in the windows. A weather-beaten English flag was stretched between two apartments. There was no way of telling which English city she was in. She could be anywhere.

  Lena calculated that she was perhaps ten storeys below the top of the nearest tower block. The window in front of her was a fixed single pane of glass with no hinged openings. There was a hairline crack in the top left corner. The outside of the glass was covered in some kind of opaque film that was beginning to peel away just above the crack. She guessed the film was there to tint the glass and make it impossible for her to signal for help.

  She rolled around until her buttocks were resting on the window ledge. The only things inside the room were the duvet and the light bulb and the egg-box soundproofing and the rubber underlay.

  There was a door in the middle of the facing wall. It was covered in the grey foam tiles. The tiles had been cut away to fit around the circular door handle.

  Lena pushed off from the windowsill and staggered across the room in her socks. She shook some feeling into her good arm. Then she reached out for the handle.

  She hadn’t expected it to turn. She’d assumed it would be locked. But the handle rotated freely and the door opened inwards and she stepped through into a much larger room.

  ‘Good, you’re up,’ said a voice to her left. ‘You like pizza?’

  Chapter Thirty-two

  Rebecca wanted to head to the sports centre right away, but I told her we couldn’t. For one thing, the keys were back at my place. And for another, it was after 11 p.m. The sports centre would be closed. We’d have to wait until morning.

  So Rebecca decided to drive me home to see the keys for herself. I wasn’t sure what she hoped to find. Maybe she thought I’d overlooked something but I didn’t believe that I had. The garage key was just that – a simple key. I’d told her everything I could about the key branded with the letters NSC. And the plastic fob was a translucent red disc. There was no way it contained anything more. Nothing special about it, whatsoever.

  We were accelerating away from the seafront promenade and climbing up Summer Hill Road when Rebecca said, ‘It’s interesting, don’t you think, that Lena entrusted the key to you?’

  ‘I thought your theory was that Laura had given her my name. That Laura recommended me to her.’

  ‘But remember what Erik told us? He said he’d placed Lena under the care of Lukas and Pieter. That they were looking out for her.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘So if that was the case, why would Lena involve you in the first place? Why wouldn’t she just get Lukas or Pieter to take her to the sports centre? Or better still, why didn’t she stay in the cottage while one of them went to the sports centre on her behalf?’

  I thought about that. ‘I’m not sure,’ I said. ‘But when I first went up to the cottage, I got the impression Lukas was wary of me.’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘Lena told me that they’d been without hot water for days. She said she’d been practically begging Lukas and Pieter to call someone. She made a big deal out of it. Like she couldn’t have called me herself.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘And your suggestion was that the heating system was sabotaged. By Lena. As if it was her only way of getting help. As if maybe Lukas and Pieter weren’t protecting her so much as holding her against her will.’

  I let the idea spin out in my mind. The first thing I recalled was Lena’s attitude when we were riding my motorbike away from the cottage through the rainy tree cover. I remembered how excited she’d been. Giggling. Striking me on the back. As if it was more than a trip for her. Like it was an escape, maybe.

  The second thing I recalled was Lena’s response when I asked if the men in the cottage were her friends. You can call them this, I suppose. Did that mean they weren’t friends? And if not, what did it make them? Enemies? It was hard to believe they were a threat to her. Lena hadn’t behaved as if she was scared and I couldn’t believe they’d have left me alone with her if that was the case. They’d have wanted to be sure she didn’t tell me anything, that she didn’t try to alert me to whatever danger she was in. So not enemies. But not friends, either. Something else entirely. Something in between. Guardians, maybe. Unwanted ones, perhaps. What was it Erik had said when we’d first spoken on the phone? I’d asked him if Pieter and Lukas had told him that Lena had gone for a motorbike ride with me, and he’d replied, No. It was forbidden for her to leave the house.

  ‘Erik lied to us once already,’ Rebecca said. ‘He could easily have done it again.’

  ‘You think everything he said was a lie?’

  Rebecca twisted her lips in thought. ‘Not all of it. I believe he’s Lena’s father. There’s the photograph of him and Lena when she was younger. The jet with the SuperZ symbol. Faking that would be way too elaborate. And I buy the idea of her rebelling against him. Hence her relationship with Alex Tyler.’

  ‘You don’t think she loved Tyler?’

  Rebecca was silent for a moment. ‘Hey, they were planning to get married. So I’d say it’s a given that they were in love. But Erik and Anderson said that they doubted Alex’s motives were so noble when they first got together. That could have worked both ways. Lena would have known when she began the relationship that Erik wouldn’t approve.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘So maybe Erik isn’t so quick to forgive as he was making out. Maybe he’s more interested in protecting himself than Lena.’

  ‘Protecting himself from what?’

  ‘I don’t know just yet. That’s the problem.’

  I sat there in the drowsy warmth of the car, my head propped against the darkened window glass, thinking more about Erik and the things that he’d told us. I couldn’t see where his truths ended and the lies began. I couldn’t get a feel for his real motives. Did he want to find Lena for her sake, or his? Did it matter either way?

  Rebecca slowed for the entrance to Snaefell View and trundled through the gravel to the parking area outside my place. Most of the care home was in darkness. I could see lights on behind the windows of my parents’ quarters and the twilight glow from the safety bulbs in the corridors that connected the residents’ rooms.

  I stepped out of the car. Night chill wormed its way beneath the collar of my shirt. The air smelled like rain and when I glanced up, menacing grey clouds pressed down from above.

  I heard a clunk and saw a flash of orange in the dark. Rebecca had locked her car. I turned and smiled at her, then rooted through my pockets for my house keys and headed towards my door. But I didn’t need my keys. The door was hanging open, revealing a sliver of gloomy hallway beyond.

  Chapter Thirty-three

  ‘What is it?’ Rebecca asked.

  ‘I locked up when I went out,’ I said, in a low voice.

  ‘Could your parents have come in for something?’

  ‘My grandpa, maybe.’

  ‘Does he have a key?’

  I nodded.

  ‘Well, there you go.’

  ‘But there are no lights on inside. And I left Rocky with him tonight. I can’t think why he’d have come over.’

  ‘Maybe he needed something for your dog.’

  I shook my head. ‘Rocky had everything he could have wanted.’

  I could hear Rebecca’s breathing from behind me. It was all I could hear. There was no noise from inside my apartment. No sound whatsoever. But it felt like someone was lying in wait. Lurking in the dark.

  ‘What do you want to do?’ she asked.

  ‘Go in, I guess.’

  ‘Well, here. Take this.’

  She rooted through her backpack, then pressed something into my hand. I glanced down. She’d passed me a small plastic canister, like a travel-size deodorant.

  ‘Pepper spray,’ she explained. ‘Just point and squirt.’

  I swallowed.

  ‘Yo
u want me to go first?’ she whispered.

  I didn’t answer her. It was too tempting to say yes and I couldn’t rely on myself not to do it. I lowered my head and clenched my jaw and reached out and swung the door back hard. It knocked against the wall. A sharp tap in the awful silence. I didn’t mind that. If there was someone up there, I wanted them to know I was coming. I wanted to give them a chance to step out and hold up their hands or yell some kind of warning.

  Amazing how alien my own home suddenly felt. The cupboard under the stairs and the door through to my workshop posed a threat I hadn’t experienced before. Was someone hiding there? Would they lash out if I checked?

  I flicked on the light. Squinted against the sudden glare. Held the chemical spray out in front of my face and moved for the stairs.

  I was very conscious of my arm in the sling. The way it would handicap me if someone rushed me or attacked me at the top. I peered up. Nobody there. I half turned and braced my hip against the wall and used it for support as I climbed.

  Rebecca was following me. Close on my heels. She flicked her wrist and I heard a sudden clatter. Now she was gripping something in her hand. The object was long and slim and made of shiny black steel. A telescopic baton. She must have been carrying it in her backpack. Her bag was on the floor at the bottom of the stairs. I guessed she didn’t want it getting in her way. Or maybe the idea was to trip my intruder up if he managed to get past us.

  I cleared my throat. ‘Is anyone there?’

  Nothing. No answer. I was beginning to relax. To think that maybe I hadn’t locked the door, after all. I remembered that I’d been carrying Rocky’s bed when I’d left. I’d been in a hurry. Maybe I’d simply forgotten.

  There was another light switch at the top of the stairs. I reached for it fast. My kitchen and living room emerged from the black.

  Not my mistake. I hadn’t overlooked the door. Someone had definitely been here.