The Hoax

by Paul Clayton

  Things seemed to have become easier with her baby inside her. No doubt Craig was worried about harming the unborn child, so lashed out less with his fists and more with his tongue. Often he would try to make amends, holding out his arms and enveloping her in a hug. She flinched as he stepped towards her, never sure he wasn’t going to grab her by the throat.

  ‘I’m sorry, Lottie. Darling, I’m sorry. It’s not my fault. I can’t help it. I’m tired and sometimes it just happens.’ For a while she believed him.

  She’d been home from the hospital for seven weeks when he hit her again. He hit her because the new baby was wailing and she couldn’t stop it. He walked out and stayed away for two days, stayed at his mother’s, most likely. And that was his mistake. The empty house showed her how things could be, how she could be alone with the children. She knew it was her job to look after them, to nurture them and to give them every conceivable chance, and she couldn’t do that if she lived in fear.

  It took her a year to organise, talking to people, making phone calls, getting help and plucking up the courage. And now she’d done it. Here was the rest of her life. And she was going to play it by her rules.

  Chapter Forty-Eight

  The laptop sat on the table between Frankie, Mrs Soyinka and Mr Pravasana. Mr Pravasana clicked on an email. ‘Did you ever check where these mails were coming from, Ms Baxter?’

  Frankie had driven all the way home to collect the laptop. When she returned to the car park by the cinema, she saw she’d lost the parking place she’d paid for. Driving round to the high street, she found a parking bay two doors down from the office and ran back in to dump her bag on Mrs Soyinka’s desk.

  The man in the photograph was now waiting next to Mrs Soyinka. Once he’d introduced himself, Derek Pravasana wasted no time at all booting up the laptop and logging into Frankie’s email account.

  ‘If you click on the email address, you can see where it’s actually come from. Although it does read victoria.adams@langleycc.com, that’s what tells you this office didn’t send it.’

  ‘I don’t understand.’ Frankie’s patience was wearing wafer thin.

  Mr Pravasana took great delight in explaining at length. ‘We are dot gov dot uk,’ he went on. ‘We are not a dotcom address. This is somebody pretending to be us, or spoofing, as it’s known. They’ve set up a fake email domain called Langley CC. I presume they hoped you would think that stands for Child Care. Then they created different email addresses for these people who have contacted you – Victoria Adams, Siobhan Fahey, Sheila Fergusson.’

  He paused for a moment to check that Frankie was taking it all in. ‘Mrs Soyinka is right. Victoria Adams doesn’t work here. Neither do any of these other people. Because you didn’t think it strange that you never met any of them, someone was able to mail you and deceive you into coming here today.’

  Frankie drew in a short sharp breath and exhaled noisily. Don’t patronise me, she thought, looking back at Mr Pravasana. ‘Cora Walsh is an actual person. I met her just over a year ago. She exists, and she knew all about the job. I’ve met her on numerous occasions. She’s not a figment of my imagination.’

  ‘This job is a figment of somebody’s imagination,’ sighed Mrs Soyinka. ‘It’s the first day back after Christmas, and we’ve been dealing with this for over three hours.’

  Mr Pravasana closed the laptop. ‘I have all the files I need, Mrs Baxter. This is a case of fraud, and your friend Cora Walsh is involved somehow. I shall be reporting it to our IT security department, but it doesn’t look as if there has been any violation of our own files. Someone’s conned you. I’m very sorry but there’s nothing we can do.’

  ‘And that’s it, is it?’ Frankie spat out her words. ‘Do you know how long I’ve been looking forward to this? Telling the kids our lives can change? Working out how I’m going to spend the money and give myself a bit of security for once? Then I walk in here, there’s no job and you tell me there’s nothing you can do.’

  ‘I’m afraid so.’

  ‘This isn’t fair. Why would someone do this?’ She picked up the papers and stuffed them back into her bag. Grabbing the laptop, she kicked out at the chair she’d spent most of the morning sitting on waiting for someone to tell her there really was a job and that this was all a nightmare.

  Lewis jumped to his feet and Mr Pravasana took a step towards her. ‘Now Mrs Baxter, it’s not our fault. There’s no need for that kind of behaviour.’

  ‘It makes me feel better,’ said Frankie. She swung her arm across Mrs Soyinka’s desk, sweeping the contents to the floor.

  ‘I can’t begin to understand how you feel.’ Mrs Soyinka stood calm and still, ignoring the stationery around her feet. ‘Someone’s played a cruel trick on you. At the moment you want to get back at them. I do understand that. You want to make sure they get the punishment they deserve. How about you go home and have a cup of tea? I promise you, we are going to look into this. I’m going to call you tomorrow if we find out anything.’

  Mr Pravasana made an attempt to speak, but Mrs Soyinka held up her hand to silence him. ‘And that’s my promise because what’s happened here is horrible.’ She unleashed her widest smile.

  Frankie hugged the laptop to her chest. ‘Thank you.’ She walked out through the door to the car. A traffic warden stood on the pavement next to it, tearing off a ticket ready to place under her windscreen wiper. ‘Excuse me,’ she exclaimed as she strode over to him. ’I’ve only been here forty-five minutes.’

  ‘It’s not the time, love. You don’t have a blue badge and this is a disabled bay.’

  It was at that moment that Frankie threw the laptop through the childcare office window.

  Chapter Forty-Nine

  She knew what the little blue canister was as soon as she found it. She’d seen them on picnic outings as a small child. Little blue bottles of gas for the picnic stove that cooked sausages and made tea on damp summer afternoons in a lay-by.

  Little Girl couldn’t work out why they would conceal a single canister of picnic gas at the back of a cupboard in the kitchen. She simply knew that it might help in some way. Picking it up, she took it and stashed it at the back of her wardrobe. Would Eric or Marta notice it was missing? Days passed by and no one mentioned it.

  Each day, during the time she was alone, she became a little braver in her exploration. On certain mornings, she woke to find a woman cleaning the villa. The woman wore a veil across her face and Little Girl could see her eyes peeking at her across the room. At first she was afraid and kept clear of her but one morning she decided to say hello.

  She was sure the woman’s eyes were smiling but, when she introduced herself, they widened as if in terror. The woman turned away and proceeded to dust and clean. Going back into her room, Little Girl left the door ajar and watched her work. After a while, the woman moved into the kitchen. Little Girl changed position so she could still see what the woman was doing.

  The woman took a bunch of keys from her bag and unlocked the only room Little Girl had never been able to gain access to. A few moments later she came out, locked the door and put the keys back in her bag. From then on, Little Girl made sure she always said hello to the woman. Sometimes she didn’t turn up and it was ten days or so before Little Girl had a chance to see her.

  The night-time visitors showed up at weekends. On those days, Eric and Marta were in the house. There was only the briefest conversation between them – Eric was especially silent. Marta smiled at Little Girl and sometimes brought her an iced drink if she was in the garden in the afternoon. It was Marta who went into her room after she had woken up, stripped the stained sheets from the bed and prepared it afresh for another night.

  The woman who cleaned never did this; she never went into Little Girl’s room. Little Girl was sure she had been told to stay away.

  The solitude and physical pain produced an apathy that Little Girl fought to keep
at bay. She knew any chance of changing her situation relied on not floating around the house in a stupor.

  One morning she woke early. There had been no visitors the night before, so she was alert and wide-eyed.

  The woman was out on the terrace, wiping down chairs and tables and scrubbing the tiled floor. Little Girl walked into the kitchen to make breakfast. There, on the kitchen island, the woman’s bag was lying open. Little Girl saw the bunch of keys with the key for the cupboard. She had no idea what might be in it but she had to try and find out.

  Checking that the woman was still busy on the terrace, she picked up the keys and crossed to the cupboard door. She put the first key that came to hand into the lock. No luck. She tried a second, but that didn’t open the door. The fifth key she tried turned and the lock clicked.

  The room turned out to be a large pantry. On one side shelves were piled high with pans, plates and dishes, and on the other, oils, vinegars and packets of staples. Little Girl thought it odd; Eric and Marta never cooked and she couldn’t understand why they would need a room such as this. Someone delivered their meals and the food in the massive double door refrigerator was basic stuff such as cheese, fruit and salads.

  These pans and plates looked as though they had come from an old-fashioned Victorian scullery in a picture book: heavy cast-iron frying pans, copper-bottomed saucepans. Little Girl’s eyes alighted upon a shiny old pressure cooker at the far end of the bottom shelf, the sort that her mother had steamed puddings in for her.

  She wasn’t sure why, but she knew that she needed to keep the key to this room. She tiptoed back into the kitchen. The woman was still washing the terrace. Little Girl took the key from the ring, slipped it into her pocket, and placed the rest of the bunch back where she had found them. She made herself a cup of coffee and some toast, picked up a magazine and sat on one of the sofas to keep an eye on what the woman was up to.

  Having cleaned the terrace, the woman came back inside, averting her eyes. Little Girl looked up from the magazine and smiled and the woman’s eyes flickered. She disappeared into the room off the main hallway that served as an office.

  Little Girl finished her coffee and put her cup in the sink. She stood near the bag on the kitchen counter. The keys were now lying at the top of it, in plain view. The woman came out of the office and, as she picked up the bag, they fell to the floor. The woman looked at Little Girl and made a sound from behind her veil.

  Little Girl bent down, picked up the keys and held them out. The woman took them and put them in her bag. A smile filled her eyes and she left the house.

  Little Girl stared at the cupboard door. She needed to think a little more. Often, on nights when there were no visitors, Eric spent the evening in the office and Marta retired to bed early. When Little Girl had first arrived, Marta had accompanied her as she settled into bed, but lately she’d taken to looking round the door and then locking it without a word. Some nights Little Girl fell asleep before Marta did this and the couple left her undisturbed until the morning.

  It took a week to formulate the plan. As it fell into place, it filled Little Girl with panic, so she tried to think of it as a mischievous thing a child might do. If they kept her confined, then this was how she should behave. Her passiveness when the visitors came was not something she could continue forever. Somehow she would show that she could fight.

  The following Friday there were no visitors. Little Girl said goodnight and retired to her bedroom. She dressed in a pair of jeans and a dark T-shirt. Opening the bedroom door, she saw Marta sitting out on the terrace enjoying a glass of wine and the last of the day’s sunshine.

  Little Girl grabbed a heap of clothes from the wardrobe and packed them under the duvet to resemble her sleeping self. It wasn’t very convincing, but it would have to do. She put the gas canister into her bag, slipped out of the bedroom and crossed the kitchen. Opening the cupboard, she stepped inside, locked the door and sat down in the blackness to wait. At any moment she expected to hear someone call her name. What if this was the night that Marta didn’t just peep through the bedroom door but called in for a bedtime kiss?

  Minutes ticked by, and Little Girl dozed a little with her back pressed against the lower shelf. Unsure as to when she could safely unlock the door and step out into the kitchen, she waited until her watch showed it was a little after two in the morning. Fumbling with the key, her fingers rigid on the metal to muffle even the slightest noise, she knelt in front of the door and turned the key in the lock. Through the tiniest of cracks, she saw that the lounge was dark. There was no light coming from Erica and Marta’s bedroom. She waited, holding her breath, to see if anything moved.

  Slipping back into the pantry, Little Girl picked up the metal pressure cooker from the shelf and put it on the front ring of the big gas stove. She placed the canister in the centre of the pressure cooker, then returned to the storeroom to collect an enormous bottle of cooking oil. Listening for any sounds in the rest of the house, she slowly filled the pressure cooker. The glug of oil as it dropped into the pan seemed to echo around the space and call out for attention.

  She placed the empty bottle at the side of the stove. Remembering how her mother prepared bland stews and pungent soups, she placed the lid on the pressure cooker and twisted it until it engaged, then took the heaviest of the weights for the cooker’s lid and fastened it onto the valve.

  It took her two attempts to light the blue flames under the pan. As they flickered, they cast a weird glow across the kitchen. Little Girl looked at the pan, hoping she had got it right and the oil was starting to heat, then tiptoed into the front office as quickly as she could.

  The last time she’d seen her passport, it was in the top drawer on the right-hand side. ‘Let it still be there, please!’ she prayed. She slid open the drawer. Night streamed through the window and it was hard to see the contents in the half-light, but finally she pulled out the little book she’d held in her hand on the flight so many months ago.

  She looked around. Two letters addressed to Eric lay on the desk. She pushed them into her pocket with the passport and stepped into the hallway. The pan was hissing on the stove like some strange predator. She moved to the terrace doors and wrestled with the handle, but they didn’t move. The hissing of the pan built in volume. She went back into the office and shut the door behind her. Here, too, the window was locked.

  Her heart sank. She’d hadn’t thought about what to do when the pan exploded. In her fear-filled planning, she’d thought she would hide at the end of the garden or by a door, and hope that people would arrive after the blast. Now, here she was in Eric’s office by the window, holding on to a desk chair, waiting for what she was certain would be a disappointment.

  She heard the hiss and noise from the pan as though gas were filling the room. She tightened her grip on the chair and lifted it from the floor.

  When it came, the explosion was anything but disappointing. A huge tight fist of red flame filled the house. The office window shattered. Little Girl flung the chair aside and threw herself through it, propelled by the intense heat. The air filled with smoke and fire and the pungent smell of oil.

  She clambered into the front garden as flame and glass and stone and wood rained down around her. She crawled towards the road and tried to stumble to her feet; as she did, she felt another enormous explosion at her back which flung her down onto the stone kerb, cutting her knees and smacking her hands onto the tarmac. A wave of excoriating heat passed over her face and she screamed with pain.

  Rolling onto the side of the curb, she looked back at the villa. Whatever had exploded, it wasn’t only the primitive device she’d placed on the stove. Flames now licked around the entire place, and a thick dark pall of smoke was seeping out of the windows and through the roof.

  She thought of her doll’s birthday party, the little figures burning away. She heard her mother’s screams and her own laughter. She knew Eric
and Marta were in the flames. As she clutched her face in pain, she started to laugh once more.

  Chapter Fifty

  Frankie was discharged from the police station just before six o’clock. It had been a long afternoon, tearful, frustrating and, above all, puzzling. The traffic warden had carried out an heroic attempt to arrest her after she’d thrown the laptop through the window but she had resisted. She would have been able to get into the car and drive away were it not for the traffic warden spotting the rare sight of two constables out on patrol on the high street.

  Within half an hour, Frankie was in the back of a police van heading down to the station. The last thing she saw as she looked out of the window was the self-satisfied traffic warden fixing a ticket to her car.

  The desk sergeant looked familiar. ‘You’ll be wanting to book a room here,’ said Sergeant Chescoe.

  Frankie gave him a weak grin. ‘Suppose there’s no point in me saying this is not my fault?’

  ‘You’re right.’ Chescoe turned to his computer screen. ‘Now stand on that white line while PC Crocker and I get you booked in.’

  PC Crocker, the taller of the two constables who’d arrested her, who to Frankie’s eyes looked like an effeminate version of Stephen Merchant, stepped up to the counter and gave details of the time and nature of the offence.

  Frankie practised her breathing. In … One, two, three, four. And out. It seemed to help. She managed to stay silent, only speaking when requested to answer the sergeant’s questions.

  ‘You’re lucky, Mrs Baxter. Your friend DS Webb is on this afternoon. I’m afraid we’ve got to put you in a cell for a while until he’s free to interview you. After that, it should all be pretty straightforward – providing you behave.’ He added particular weight to the last three words.