Jack didn’t exactly rub his hands together, but Tom could feel his pleasure. He had a puzzle to solve, and he was loving every moment of it. Perhaps he and his brother weren’t so different after all. They had a shared obsession with unravelling tangled webs, even if their methodologies were somewhat different.
Tom felt a rising sense of excitement. He knew Jack was going to find something. The only problem was, he didn’t know what he would be able to do with it. The information would be illegally obtained. He had no means of passing it on.
Rules were there for a purpose, but sometimes Tom felt the urge to break them.
‘Got it!’ Jack shouted.
55
The woman Hannah now knew to be Rosa – the woman with whom she had spent the last four months of her life, and about whom she had known nothing until a few hours ago – sat on the end of Hannah’s bed, her knees drawn up tight to her chest, her whole body trembling. It had been nearly twenty-four hours since they had been given anything to eat or drink, and they had no idea why they were being left alone.
Since the early bouts of sickness, Rosa’s system seemed to be reacting better than Hannah’s, although for months she had seemed weak and on the point of giving up.
‘They were ready to let me go,’ she told Hannah, who was lying down, curled up tightly, trying hard to stop the attacks of nausea. ‘Whatever they gave me didn’t calm me down, it made me depressed, which meant I was no use to them. The doctor changed my meds – I don’t know what to – and I felt more and more as if all I wanted was to die. He said he would help me when the time came, like he’d helped the others before.’
‘How many others?
‘There have been a couple since I’ve been here, but the doctor doesn’t seem to want to let anyone go until there’s a replacement. Who would clean for them then?’
Hannah felt the anxiety well up inside her again, and told herself it was only a withdrawal symptom. ‘To think that when they went away on holiday, I was scared they wouldn’t come back. I thought I needed them to protect me, to keep me safe. I was glad when they came back.’
Rosa gave a shaky laugh. ‘Clever Thea, making all our meals in advance. And providing a big supply of her so-called “vitamins” to keep us healthy.’
Hannah realised that Thea and the doctor had been sure they would not escape from the cellar while they were away. Even if she and Rosa hadn’t eaten the food or taken the drugs, they would still have been locked in. Nobody knew that Hannah had worked out which keys to press to open the door to their prison.
Oh God, why couldn’t she remember the code? She wrapped her arms around her head and sobbed.
Rosa seemed to be trying to control the shaking of her own voice. ‘Keep talking to me, Hannah. Distract yourself. It’s going to be hell, but you will get through it. We will get through it.’
But both of them knew that unless Thea or the doctor came, they would eventually die of starvation. Why hadn’t they come?
Hannah forced herself to do what Rosa said and began to describe the sequence of events that had brought her here – the mindfulness retreat, the visits to Thea for reassurance, and then the stealing of the baby.
‘I brought the baby here. I was going to keep him. It was all over the news that I had stolen Albie, and Thea said she had to prise him from my arms and take him away. She left him outside a hospital so someone would find him and I wouldn’t be arrested.’
Her voice caught on a sob of disbelief that she had done something so dreadful.
Rosa was quiet for a moment. ‘Do you remember taking him – bringing him here?’ she asked finally.
‘No. That’s what was so awful about it. I’ve tried and tried to remember, but there’s nothing there. What about you?’
‘I came here to care for Thea. She’d had a fall and had broken her hip. I felt sorry for her. Her sister had been looking after her, but she had become unwell so I was brought in to take over. I moved in, and it was fine because I’d just split with my husband and wanted to escape from the world.’
Both women were quiet for a moment, then Hannah lifted her head and groaned. ‘I think I’m going to be sick again.’
‘Keep talking.’
‘I can’t.’
Rosa shuffled around, trying to get comfortable. ‘Okay, I’ll talk then. I’d been here for about a week. I’d never seen the sister, but I thought she was somewhere in the house. I heard someone crying one day. I was going to ask Thea about it, but she wasn’t having a good day. That night I was up in my room – I was sleeping in the main part of the house then – when I heard shouting and screaming. I rushed down the stairs, but the door at the bottom was locked. They’d locked me in.’
Hannah gasped. ‘What were they saying?’
‘A woman whose voice I’d never heard before was shouting, “I need to see him. He wouldn’t leave me. Vincent wouldn’t do that to me.” Or something like that. Anyway, she said she was going home. Then I heard the doctor’s voice – very deep. I couldn’t hear what he said, just a sort of growl. But she screamed at him. Something about how she didn’t need to be given anything to calm herself; she just needed to see Vincent.’
‘And you think she was Thea’s sister?’
‘I assumed so, but I didn’t care about their problems. I was so angry about the locked door that I decided to resign the next day. Thea was in a terrible state, though. She was almost hysterical and wouldn’t tell me what was the matter.’
Rosa rested her forehead on her raised knees and clasped her hands behind her neck. Hannah could see that the effort of talking was draining her already depleted energy, but after a moment, with a determined groan, she carried on.
‘I tried to calm her. She thanked me and said my voice reminded her of her sister’s. It made her feel better. Then the doctor came in with a drink. She threw it at him and asked if he was trying to kill her. When he left, I said I would make her a hot drink myself, and she said, “Thank you, Judith.” It was the first time she called me that.’
Hannah lifted her hands to wipe the tears from her face. ‘I think Judith was her sister’s name,’ she said, remembering the photograph.
Rosa stared at her. ‘Oh God, it all makes sense now. Judith left, so we each in turn became some kind of surrogate. They didn’t want her to go; they probably thought she was going to look after them into their old age.’
‘And so that became our job,’ Hannah whispered. Suddenly her whole body shook violently, and she didn’t know if this was a withdrawal symptom or was caused by revulsion at what her life had become.
‘I tried to get away,’ Rosa said, her voice distant as if she was remembering the pain of that time. ‘I told the doctor I was leaving. He begged me to stay until Thea was fully recovered. He said he couldn’t manage, but I knew she was nearly better – she was able to walk by then – so I said I was sorry. I had to go. I would leave at the end of the week.’ Rosa paused. ‘I never made it to the end of the week.’
‘What happened?’ Hannah asked.
Rosa pulled the blanket she had brought from her own room more tightly around her shoulders, and Hannah could see how much the memory distressed her.
‘I had a drink with the doctor the following night. I was sure I’d only had one, but next thing I knew it was morning. Thea was sitting by my bed. She told me I’d run off the night before – packed and left. The doctor had gone after me because I’d had too much to drink and he was worried. He’d found my car in a ditch just down the road. I was slumped over the wheel. He managed to get me out, drove me home and then walked back for my car.’
Hannah could see tears running down Rosa’s face. Maybe she shouldn’t ask any more questions, but she was scared of the silence. Without the sound of Rosa’s voice, she would be lost to her own thoughts. She was about to ask a question when Rosa started to speak again.
‘That morning they learned on the radio that someone – a woman – had been knocked down close to where he’d found me. She was dead, and I
had been drinking. The doctor hadn’t seen the body, but he was implicated because he’d helped me. They said they would hide me until it all blew over. And they brought me down here.’
Hannah propped herself up on one elbow, the nausea abating a little. ‘And you remember nothing?’
Rosa was sobbing now, her thin shoulders shaking. She wiped away the tears with the edge of the blanket.
‘No, but that doesn’t mean it didn’t happen. I can’t live like this any more, Hannah. I’ve been ready to die for weeks now. The doctor was going to help me. I didn’t think I had anything left to live for. Do you know how tragic that feels?’
Hannah knew exactly how Rosa felt. ‘Maybe the drugs make us do terrible things. Maybe that’s why I abducted little Albie.’
Rosa shook her head.
‘Maybe. But there’s something not right about what Thea told you. She said she’d left the baby outside a hospital, didn’t she?’
Hannah nodded, puzzled by why that was bothering Rosa.
‘That must be a lie. She would have been caught on CCTV if she was anywhere near a hospital. The police would have traced her.’
‘I don’t understand what you’re saying.’ Hannah’s heart was pumping and the nausea came rushing back. ‘Tell me, Rosa.’
‘I’m saying that Thea lied to you. Whether you abducted that child or not, she didn’t return him the way she said she did.’
Hannah pushed herself upright and swung her legs over the side of the bed. She was going to be sick. What had Thea done with Albie?
56
‘I don’t remember anyone called that,’ Nathan said as he read the name Jack was pointing at on the screen.
By now they were all crowding around the laptop, looking at the list Jack had summoned from somewhere.
‘But it’s too much of a coincidence that she was in both places,’ Jack said. ‘She’s on the list for the mindfulness retreat, and she was on one of the boat trips in Myanmar. Tom doesn’t believe in coincidences, do you, Tom?’ He didn’t respond. ‘She has to be the person that Hannah met, surely?’
‘But there was only one woman from this part of the world travelling on her own. And she was called Callie. She’s the one I told you about,’ said Nathan. ‘I tried to get to know her, but like I said earlier, there was something odd about her. I think I scared her.’
‘Well Dorothea Atwell wasn’t on her own, that’s true. Are you sure you don’t remember her?’
Nathan frowned. ‘We didn’t share surnames, but wait a minute. When you said the name out loud, it rang a bell that didn’t chime when I read it on screen. Dorothea could easily be shortened to Thea, couldn’t it? Who was she travelling with?’
‘Dr Garrick Atwell. Does that help?’
For once Nathan’s face betrayed a flicker of emotion. ‘Yes!’ But his moment of euphoria didn’t last. ‘Bloody stupid idea, though. They were both about a hundred and three, and in her letter Hannah was talking about going off on holiday with this woman she’d met. How likely is that!’
‘I don’t think you should dismiss the idea, Nathan,’ Tom said. ‘If Hannah was feeling particularly vulnerable, she may have seen this woman as a maternal figure – someone she could trust.’
‘If Hannah saw Dorothea as a supportive older woman, she might have at least told her where she was planning on going,’ Jack said as Tom walked back towards the kitchen island. ‘Can you have someone go out and talk to her, Tom?’
‘Not easily, no. How can I say I got her name? She hasn’t done anything wrong, and even if I could dream up an excuse, I’m not going to be able to get anyone to go tonight. The problem is that I have no official means of knowing about this woman.’
Both Jack and Nathan were looking at him, clearly waiting for him to come up with a solution.
‘Look, there’s one thing we could do. If Nathan were to tell me that he had paid someone to check out Hannah’s movements, friends, et cetera, and that Dorothea Atwell’s name had cropped up as a possible contact, I could register it as intelligence, and it would get into the system officially. Maybe someone from the missing-persons team would then be persuaded to have a word with the Atwells. Would that do?’
Jack stood up abruptly from the table, closed Hannah’s laptop and stuck it under his arm. ‘And how long is that going to take? Come on, Nathan. We don’t need the Greater Manchester Police to do this for us. We can just knock on the door and say that Hannah mentioned this Dorothea woman in a letter to her brother.’
‘Jack, you don’t even know where she lives,’ Tom said, earning himself a derisory look as Jack held up his mobile, which was showing a map that no doubt featured the precise location of Dorothea Atwell’s home.
‘Come on,’ Jack said again. ‘Let’s go and have a chat with this lady. You drive, Nathan, and I’ll continue to search Hannah’s computer for information.’
‘Hang on, the pair of you,’ Tom said, feeling as if he was talking to a couple of teenage boys off on some escapade. ‘First of all, she’s met you before, Nathan. If she knows anything about Hannah, she’s going to find it very odd you turning up on her doorstep if you never mentioned your sister when you met on the boat.’
Nathan looked at Jack and raised his eyebrows. ‘He has a point.’
‘Okay. I’ll ask the questions. You can wait in the car,’ Jack said, already walking towards the hall.
Tom threw his papers down on the worktop. ‘Listen, you can’t go charging in there like Batman and bloody Robin,’ he said, the exasperation clear in his voice. ‘This is an elderly couple, one of whom very probably met Hannah on the retreat. And if this lady does know anything at all about where she might have gone, you’re just going to scare her if you don’t ask the right questions. And as for you, Jack, you shouldn’t be showing your face anywhere. What happens if they complain about you and there’s an investigation? I know you’re sick of being dead, but don’t blow it now in a burst of ill-conceived enthusiasm.’
Jack looked at Tom for about ten seconds. ‘Point taken, little brother. We’ll just go and check the place out, shall we, Nathan? And perhaps on the way we can think up a story to get you through the front door. I’ll keep to the bushes.’ He smiled at Tom, whose heart sank.
He had a feeling this was all going to go horribly wrong.
57
I’ve spent most of the day in the car park of a cemetery. It seemed appropriate somehow. The day has never grown fully light. Thick dark clouds have been scudding across the sky, the wind scattering dead leaves that scratch against my windscreen. I huddle down in my coat, not wanting to use up all my fuel but for some reason unwilling to drive as far away from Manchester as possible.
One thought keeps jostling its way to the front of my mind. There are still two women in that cellar. They can’t be left to the life that Thea and the doctor have planned for them – the domestic slavery, the weird games of trust. I may not have a clue how to solve my own problems, but thinking of them distracts me for a while.
I had persuaded myself that Hannah didn’t abduct a baby, but I realise now that my conviction allowed me also to believe that I didn’t kill Ian, and I was wrong about that. So if I make an anonymous call to the police about Hannah, will I be committing her to a life in prison for kidnap or will I be freeing her from Thea and Garrick?
And what about the other woman who was in the cellar with us – the one whose name I never discovered? What is her story?
I have a momentary flashback of the man who came to the house – the man called Vincent who shouted at Thea. He had wanted to see Judith. If she wasn’t one of the women in the basement with me, then who was she – and more to the point, where was she? I had lived upstairs in that house for days, and I had never seen or heard anyone else.
I know that by thinking of the other women I am merely putting off the moment when I have to make a choice, but I can’t run from the police forever. I have nowhere to hide. I haven’t eaten and I can’t bring myself to steal food.
After a day of hunger, cold, and confusion about what is best for me and for the other women, I know I am out of options. My eyes are dry – there are no more tears – and with a sense of hopelessness I finally accept that I must hand myself in. I am not a hardened criminal and have no idea where to get money, a passport or anything else I would need to start a new life.
I shudder at the thought that if I don’t do this, I might reach a point of desperation where I feel I have no alternative but to go back to Thea and the doctor. Then I think of the horror of last night – the setting, the staging, the ritualistic quality of it all. It felt like a seduction scene, but I know it wasn’t. It was the request that I should wash him, the suggestion that it was some bizarre act of trust. Most of all, though, it was the doctor’s words: ‘Tomorrow it will be your turn.’
I put the car into gear. I’m going to drive to the police station, and then I’m going to work up the courage to go in.
58
In the end Becky didn’t have to call Tom; he called her.
‘It’s your day off, boss. You should take it easy. There’s nothing that won’t keep.’
‘I’m sure there’s not, but I’m feeling guilty at leaving you to it,’ Tom said. ‘I wouldn’t have come home this afternoon if there hadn’t been something personal I needed to deal with.’
Becky knew there was no point asking what it was. He wouldn’t tell her.
‘All okay now?’ she asked instead.
‘Not really, no. Tell me what’s been going on there.’
She didn’t like the sound of that. ‘It’s nothing to do with Lucy, is it?’
Becky had developed a good relationship with Tom’s daughter over the years and had occasionally taken her into Manchester when she wanted female company on a shopping trip. Louisa would no doubt be fulfilling that role now, and Becky missed the girl.
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