by S. E. Lynes
She drives carefully, against all instinct, twenty miles per hour, no more. Round the corner, at the common, she swerves into the kerb and parks. She checks her watch: it is just over forty minutes since she left the flat. She calls Toni, who answers after one ring.
‘Bridge?’
‘I’ve got her. I’ve got her, Tones. She’s OK. She’s OK.’
Her sister is weeping. Bridget can’t bear the sound.
‘Did you call the police?’
‘No, I—’
‘Good. Well don’t. I’ve got her now and she’s OK. Stay there, sis. I’m coming home.’
Bridget drives as carefully as she can, hits the end of her road just as the hour is up. At the back of the flat, she parks and pulls up the handbrake. She needs to get out, get out now, but she can’t. She has driven all this way, but now that she is here, she cannot send the command to her legs. Her hands are shaking. She swipes her phone screen and calls Toni.
‘We’re home,’ she says. ‘Stay there. I’ll bring her to you.’
She opens the van door and swings her legs over the side, winces at the pain in the back of her thigh. The gravel blurs and redefines itself. Her head spins. It takes her a few seconds to compose herself enough to jump down. When she does, the gravel crunches under the thick soles of her boots. She winces in pain.
She limps to the back of the van and opens it up. Rosie’s eyes are open, sky blue and wide with fright. She gives a muffled cry. She is lying at the edge, where Bridget laid her. Bridget climbs into the van and tears the tape from her niece’s mouth.
‘Emily!’ Rosie cries out as if in terror and bursts into tears.
‘It’s not Emily, my love – it’s me. It’s your auntie Bridge. Oh mate, you’re awake. Oh God, babe, I’m so sorry. You must have been terrified. You’ve had a shock, that’s all. It’s Auntie Bridge, lovey, oh my precious darling, my darling, darling girl.’ Bridget holds her tight, checks herself against squeezing too hard.
Rosie sinks her head into Bridget’s chest. They are both crying now.
‘You’re safe, my love. Hey, Rosie? Listen to me, yeah? You’re safe. Auntie Bridget’s got you. We’re home.’
Rosie does not, cannot stop crying. She is gasping for air, her head nodding, her shoulders shuddering with the force of her sobs.
‘It’s OK; it’s OK, my love. You’re safe. You’re safe, you’re safe, you’re safe.’ Bridge edges one arm away from the child. ‘Rosie. Honey. Do you think you can hold out your hands, my love? I want to get this tape off you. I had no time to… we had to get away. Can you do that for me, angel? Can you hold out your wrists?’
Toni mustn’t see the tape. There’s nothing here that she won’t find out, but seeing the tape would just be one more indelible image she would have to somehow block. Along with all the others.
But Rosie won’t move her head from Bridget’s chest.
‘Rosie? Rosie?’ Shit. It is Toni, out in the car park. Her voice is getting louder, nearer. ‘Rosie? Lovey?’ She appears then from behind the door of the van. At the sight of her daughter, her brown eyes widen. ‘Oh my God! Oh my God, Rosie, baby, my baby, oh…’
There is nothing Bridget can do now to protect her sister from even this small part of the truth. Thank God she didn’t see that house, that man, smell that horrible musty lavender smell. Thank God at least for that.
With what remains of her strength, Bridget fireman-lifts her niece onto her shoulder.
‘Let’s get you inside,’ she says. ‘Let’s cut you free.’
She carries Rosie into the lounge and uncurls her onto the sofa. She is whimpering. She smells of oil from the van and, Bridget realises with flashing fury, of urine.
‘Come on then, Squirt,’ she says softly. ‘Let’s get this tape off you, eh?’
Toni is beside her, sobs punctuated by sniffs. Bridget turns to her. ‘Tones, go and grab the scissors will you? I don’t think I can peel this stuff off with my hands.’
Toni doesn’t move. Her eyes are round and red.
‘Second thoughts,’ Bridget says, ‘you stay with Rosie. I’ll go and get the scissors.’
She dashes to the kitchen and comes back to find Toni stroking Rosie’s hair. Rosie is still crying but more softly now. Her teeth are chattering.
‘Here.’ Bridget hands the scissors to her sister. ‘I’ll go and run a bath, put some salt in, yeah? I’ll bring a blanket.’
Toni sniffs, nods.
The water runs. The bathroom clouds. Bridget grabs Rosie’s duvet, returns to the living room and arranges it over her niece. Leaving them, she goes back to the bathroom and sits on the loo seat in the steam. She can hear her sister trying to soothe Rosie but no sound yet from the girl. When the bath is ready, she tests it with her arm. Not too hot but hopefully hot enough to take away the shakes.
Rosie is still on the sofa. She is not crying, not really; the sound is more like a distressed animal, a puppy or a bird, a high, repetitive keening, beyond words and terrible to hear.
‘Bath’s ready,’ Bridget says helplessly. ‘Do you think you can walk, Rosie my love?’
Rosie nods. Toni has cut the tape and peeled it away. Rosie’s wrists are red. With one hand resting on her mother’s shoulder, she stands slowly, testing her legs, then bursts into tears again. This is too big, too much. They should call the police – Bridget knows it. But not now, not yet, not until she’s spoken to Toni, told her about… Oh God, what a mess.
‘Do you want me to carry you, love?’ Bridget asks.
Rosie shakes her head, no, but says nothing. She puts one foot out, then drags the other to join it, repeating this along the hallway with slow, agonising progress until she reaches the bathroom, where she stops, one hand on the door frame. She looks smaller, as if she has lost stones in weight. Her collarbone stands sharp above her slash-neck T-shirt. The T-shirt she decided on this morning, when she thought she was heading out to her first date.
This morning – a lifetime ago.
Toni asks, ‘Do you want me to come in with you, hon?’
Rosie nods. She is mute with shock, shaking violently, her teeth chattering. Bridget wonders how long it will be before she can speak, before they know exactly what happened, the extent of the damage. She was clothed. That has to mean something.
Toni follows Rosie into the bathroom. Bridget catches her sister’s eye, no more than a second, before the door closes. She presses her palm to the white wood panel and closes her eyes. After a moment, she goes into the kitchen and reaches for the whisky bottle.
* * *
The sound of swilling water reaches the silent kitchen. Her sister’s soothing voice trails down the hallway, her nurse’s voice, the same one she uses when Rosie is sick. Bridget can’t hear Rosie crying any more, guesses she must have stopped, hopes she is calmed by the heat, the salt, the caring lilt of her mother’s soft words. It’s not fair, she thinks only now. They’ve already been through enough to last any family a lifetime. She doesn’t mind for herself, but Toni and Rosie have done nothing wrong. When Rosie goes to bed, Bridget and her sister will talk, then they will call the police. It is unavoidable now.
The whisky burns her throat but her hands have stopped shaking. She thinks about a cigarette but can’t seem to get up from her chair. Outside the sun has begun its descent towards the back of the garages. She checks her watch: 2.48 p.m. My God, it is still daytime. The thought is inconceivable. She has had nothing since her espresso this morning. She should be hungry, but she is not – something is bothering her. Surely all that matters is that Rosie is safe? Yes, there is a man dead, in his home, waiting for someone to find him. But there is something else, something niggling away at her. Something that has to do with the fact that the sun has not yet set. The last two hours play out like a dream. Suspicion, discovery, the trace, the rescue.
It was so easy.
Was it too easy? And that guy. He looked like he’d never seen the sun. His house was straight from the seventies, no sign of anything more technol
ogical than a transistor radio. Something…
‘She’s in bed.’ Toni has appeared at the kitchen door, joins her now at the kitchen table.
‘Has she spoken?’
Toni shakes her head. ‘She muttered something about Emily as she drifted off. I think she was worried about the audition notes. Emily was meant to be popping them over today. The mind’s a funny thing, isn’t it?’
‘She called me Emily when I opened the van door.’
‘Shock, isn’t it? Poor thing.’ Toni takes Bridget’s glass. ‘I guess we’ll have to call the police now.’
‘No,’ Bridget says. ‘I killed him, Tones.’ She blinks back the maddening surge of tears that pools in the rims of her eyes.
Toni nods, once. ‘How?’
‘He had a gun. I kicked it out of his hands and I—’
‘You shot him?’
‘In the chest. After I’d kicked his head in. After I’d broken one of his arms. After I’d broken his jaw. He was defenceless and I killed him. Rosie’s boots are still there. I saw them by the door. I’m going down, Tones. I’m going to prison.’
‘Don’t say that.’ Toni reaches for the bottle. Bridget stands and grabs another glass, into which Toni empties the last of the whisky. She takes a slug. ‘Death is better than he deserved.’
‘Looked like he hadn’t been out in years. Grey skin, you know? And he had that funny smell – neglect, dirty clothes. The house was a wreck. The front door was practically sealed. It was weird: you couldn’t imagine him using a computer to send an email, let alone coming up with a fake profile. He looked like he’d arrived in a time machine, do you know what I mean? Oh God, I could have left it like that, I could have left him, but he had the gun. He was going to shoot me.’
‘You won’t go down, Bridge. It was self-defence. No jury in the land would send you down for killing the man who took your niece.’
‘It won’t look like that. Oh God.’ Bridget covers her forehead with her hand. A moment later, she feels Toni’s arm around her shoulders.
‘Hey. You won’t go to jail. Anyone would have done the same.’
‘I kicked the gun out of his hands, Tones. I kicked him in the head. I picked up the gun and shot him when he was already down. He was old – did I say that? I killed him. What are we going to do?’
‘We’ll tell the truth. We’ll go to the police before they get to us.’
‘But what about the pact?’ Bridget sits upright and meets her sister’s eye.
Toni breaks first, looks away. ‘Where was Rosie?’
‘On the bed upstairs. Taped like that, like you saw, and across her mouth.’
Toni sips her whisky but says nothing.
‘He hadn’t taken off her clothes. He hadn’t done anything to her, I don’t think. And she was drugged, completely out of it. She won’t remember being taken up there…’
‘She was drugged?’ Toni’s voice rises in panic. ‘You didn’t say.’
‘I haven’t had the chance. I’m telling you now. That’s why she could barely walk. Or speak.’
‘I thought that was shock.’
‘Well, yes. But she was out cold when I found her. I had to carry her to the van. There was no time to do anything else.’
‘Do you know what he gave her?’
‘No idea. Some kind of barbiturate, I would imagine. But she’s safe now. She’ll sleep it off. If she was going to go unconscious, she’d have done it by now.’ Bridget circles her whisky in its glass, watches the light catch in the amber. ‘I killed him, Tones. They’ll find my prints on the gun. What are we going to do? Tones? Toni?’
But Toni is already at the kitchen door. She is heading down the hall, calling for her daughter. Bridget hears Rosie’s bedroom door open, then silence, then:
‘Bridge! Bridget! Oh my God, call an ambulance.’
Bridget runs to Rosie’s room, digging her phone from her back pocket. Toni is leaning over her daughter, her ear to Rosie’s mouth.
‘She won’t wake up, Bridge. I didn’t know she’d been drugged, I just thought she was in shock. Bridge, she’s unconscious. Call 999. Call 999 now.’
Fifty-Five
Toni
I know I said Auntie Bridge wasn’t allowed in the ambulance, and that’s true, she wasn’t, but the truth is, I didn’t let her come with us. What I mean is, I decided before the paramedics got there that she would not come.
While we waited for the ambulance, I sat by your bedside and stroked your damp hair. We heard the wail of the sirens in the road but we stayed with you, both of us preternaturally still. And what was odd, there in the eye of the storm, you unconscious right in front of me, was that I was suffused with a strange calm. I knew you’d be all right. I don’t know how to explain it any better than that: I knew it. You were breathing, the paramedics were on the way – you would be all right.
I made myself meet your auntie Bridget’s eye.
‘You stay here,’ I said. ‘I’ll go with her.’
And, oh, Rosie, her face creased in confusion, as if she didn’t understand what I was saying.
‘Don’t be daft,’ she said, but her voice shrank with doubt. ‘I’m coming with you.’
‘Please,’ I said. Having her look at me like that, well, it was… it was hard, Rosie. I felt like I was blocking her out. Which I suppose I was.
‘Let me do this, sis,’ was all I could think to say. ‘Let me be useful, for once. Please. I speak their language; I know what to tell them. You can come for us later with the van, save us having to come back in an ambulance, OK?’
She was standing on the other side of your bed. She kicked at the bottom of the bedpost and didn’t meet my eye.
‘If that’s what you want,’ she said, eyes still on the floor.
The sirens grew loud, stopped. The ambulance light came through the front-door window. Through your half-open bedroom door I could see it flashing blue on the hall ceiling. We had a few more seconds. I tried to keep my mind straight.
‘Maybe grab a change of clothes for her?’ I said.
‘Sure. I’ll make some sandwiches or something, yeah? And a flask, in case you end up being there a long time.’
Outside, an ambulance door slammed. Bridge turned away and made for the hallway.
‘Bridge?’
She stopped at the door to your room and looked back at me.
‘We’ll talk about what to do later, OK?’ I said. ‘I won’t call the police is what I’m saying. I won’t say anything until we see where we’re up to.’
She nodded, met my eye. ‘OK.’
‘I’ll text Emily and let her know. Only what she needs to obviously.’
‘Right you are.’
She went to open the front door. Seconds later, the bustle in the hallway, your auntie reappearing, pushed aside then by the brisk-moving high-vis uniforms of the paramedics. I recognised one of them.
‘Ted,’ I said.
‘Hiya,’ he replied, his face a mix of concentration and recognition. ‘Toni, isn’t it?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘This is my daughter, Rosie. We’ve had… she’s taken something.’
Wordlessly, your auntie Bridge left us. There was much more I wanted to say to her, but there was no time.
Ted and the other paramedic, a woman called Sandra or Sandy, I think, put you on a stretcher. I followed them outside, stopped at our front door and called back into the house:
‘Bridge?’
Bridget appeared in the hall and gave me a sad and loving smile. ‘What now, woman?’
I laughed, despite everything, or maybe because of everything. My eyes stung, blurred, and then she was there, her fingertips touching mine.
‘We’ll be all right,’ I whispered.
‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘Go.’
* * *
I must have answered questions while we were still in the house, must have done that while they were running vital checks, but I have no memory of it. I know they put you on the stretcher in the flat and that by the
time I was inside the ambulance, Ted had put an oxygen mask on your face.
The woman went to the front and started the engine while Ted shut the back doors. He asked me all the right questions: what had you taken, how long ago, had you had any alcohol. He hooked you up to a saline drip.
‘So diazepam you say? Just that?’
‘The truth is, I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I know she’s taken diazepam – I have that in the house for my back – but she could have taken anything before that, I don’t know how many, or if she’s taken other stuff.’
And there it is, Rosie: the Judas kiss. Ted’s grey-blue eyes staring into mine like judgement itself while I betrayed you. While I let them think you’d taken an overdose. I betrayed you, to save your auntie Bridge, to save myself, but to save you too, my darling. I didn’t know what you’d had, apart from the diazepam that I’d given you, and that was the truth. It was the bottom line. It was what was necessary, all that was necessary, to save your life. I had to be sure they would run all the tests that they would usually run in the case of unknown substance abuse – even if that meant suicide attempt or overdose being written on your medical records. The whole truth was that you had been kidnapped and that your auntie Bridget had killed a man saving you, but the only truth they needed was that you had taken some unknown combination of barbiturates. The rest was irrelevant. I had pushed your auntie away so that I could do that – tell that half-truth. I’ll admit that I didn’t want her to know I’d given you my diazepam, but I swear it was also because I knew she’d give herself up to save you. And that wasn’t necessary. Besides, we needed her more than they needed to know the whole story.
Didn’t we? Didn’t we, Rosie?
You can’t answer, my love. And you couldn’t answer then. You were not able to contradict me and I took advantage, and there’s nothing I can do, nothing I can ever do, to reverse that. All I can do is wait for you to wake up and tell you I’m sorry. And I am sorry, Rosie, my darling girl. I am so sorry.