by Potter, John
Invested in distracting him, her mouth forming the same word over and over; run, run, run. He looked across at the child, now just the bundled blanket. He looked over his shoulder and to the child standing behind him, wide-eyed and rigid against the wall, next to the opening. Seeing his attention fix on her jolted her, and she scrambled out through the gap and disappeared into the garage.
Sarah immediately locked her legs around him and hung onto his body, trying to pull him down. But it was futile. He prised her loose and did what he should have done already. He brought his hand down hard across her face, but even then he pulled back from the blow. She lay motionless, a sudden peace. He spent a moment studying her, wondering and then he heard the child sobbing, frustrated as she tried to open the front door, the noise fading as she disappeared through the living room and nearer the keys, although what were the chances she would find or even reach them? He propelled himself backwards, through the opening and across the garage.
As soon as he disappeared Sarah started after him, blinking at the garage light, her face throbbing, adrenalin causing her to stand unbalanced and fall sideways, glancing painfully off the workbench. The girl screeched somewhere inside the house.
She ran through the garage and hall, living room and into the dining room. She ignored Simon with his back to her, bearing down on the girl now desperately trying to open the patio door. She focused only on finding a phone, she had seen one, was almost ready to sprint up the stairs when her eyes set on the bureau.
The girl turned to face Simon, backing against the patio door, sniffing and looking at Simon then past him to Sarah as she plucked the phone from its charger and stepped into the living room. She turned her back to him, hunched protectively as she pressed the green dial button, a tone as Simon rounded on her, not daring to look, sensing him loom, fingers pressing 999 as quickly and carefully as they dared. Knowing he was almost on her as she bowled the handset underarm through the living room, skimming across the carpet, through the door into the hallway, coming to rest by the boots and shoes. The orange screen lit up. She turned to face him but he crashed through her, pushing her down and away with his arm, catching her ribs with his rising knee, jarring her teeth and cutting her lip. She tasted blood as she rolled to her feet and ran straight back into the dining room, hearing him now in the hall.
The girl stood petrified. Sarah shouted for her to move as she gave her attention to the wooden chair. The girl jumped to the kitchen entrance. The chair sat in its place beside the bureau, the chair she had been tied to. She picked it up and spun like a hammer thrower, sweeping the chair around and into the glass of the patio door. The force made the door judder and a crack, the chair breaking apart in her hands, the momentum taking her around and despairing. She faced the door and kicked at it with the ball of her foot. The glass flexed but remained as it had. And then Simon filled the dining room doorway. She heard him and turned to face him, bending down and picking up a length of broken chair from the floor. She said to Andrea, in a low voice, ‘Upstairs.’ And then she ran at him.
Simon was not sure what to expect next, this certainly was not it. She came at him fast in a shallow arc, like a gymnast it occurred to him as she took a final stride and leapt straight at him. And she hit him hard. It was like catching a forty-five kilo medicine ball fired from a machine, he did it but it unbalanced him. He staggered back with Sarah’s legs like clamps around him, jamming the length of chair across his throat, forcing him to take another step back and down onto one knee.
Andrea watched her ride Simon to the ground. Sarah had drilled her, what she should do. Try the front door, quick places to look for keys, the patio door and if they both failed run upstairs, open a window and scream. Sarah had repeated that over and over, first as she eased the screws from the bookshelf and then as she scratched away at the glass bowl. It had scared Andrea, Sarah’s determination. At the same she realised everything Sarah was doing was for her, just as the fury Sarah invested in the fight scared her too. But then Andrea had no understanding of the consequences of failure. She flinched as Simon plucked Sarah off him and tossed her aside. Then she ran, three rapid steps onto the landing and then up the main flight.
Sarah’s shoulder took the brunt of the impact as she hit the wall below the living room window, immediately turning as Simon struggled to his feet, staring at her incredulously before bounding up the stairs after Andrea.
Sarah ran straight into the kitchen. She had not been here before. It was square and minimal, small because part of it was the hidden room. She flung open drawers, looking for keys while grabbing at anything remotely sharp. Her hands smeared blood across everything she touched. Her eyes lit upon a knife rack and she immediately discarded everything else. She heard Andrea squealing upstairs, sounds that in any other house might be of joy if not for the terror permeating the noise. Sarah’s short list of options were being crossed off in rapid succession.
That Simon would come for the girl had seemed inevitable. When he did, she knew it would not be the gentle Simon who had studiously cleaned her wounds. It would be the addict she would face, full of need. She could not let him take Andrea then, any more than she would let him take her now. Right now she needed him to come into the kitchen. She reached across to the knife rack and pulled out a paring knife, a boning knife and then a large carving knife, laying them beside each other on the counter as his heavy footsteps descended the stairs.
And then he appeared just beyond the kitchen doorway, breathing heavily and working hard to control it. He looked at her and she at him, the white cotton of his T-shirt rising with each deep breath, a wide band of blood stretching down his right side and soaking into his trousers. He held the girl under his left arm like a rolled length of carpet, her hair hanging down, mewling, long streaks of blood on his arm that reflected the light.
‘Put her down,’ Sarah said.
He gave her that same incredulous look. ‘Be reasonable, Sarah, what are you really going to accomplish here? The doors are all locked and so are the windows. It’s midnight. If you could stick your head outside and scream everyone will think you’re a pissed-up kid. Nobody’s going to care.’
‘Then you should let me try.’
He smiled and took a step towards the kitchen.
‘Put her down,’ she repeated, pulling the paring knife from the counter, holding it loose at her side.
He shook his head. ‘What’re you going to do with that? You’re more likely to hurt the girl.’
She flicked her wrist and the knife spun towards his bare feet, causing him to hop backwards as it clattered over the kitchen floor and into the dining room.
She reached across to the counter and held the boning knife in the same way, loose at her side.
‘Put her down. In the dining room, anywhere. Just somewhere she can’t see.’
Now he looked at her confused. She didn’t wait for his reply.
‘I know we’re not going anywhere, it’s not about that now. But you’re not having her, not as long as I have a single breath in me. Put her down, I have something I want to show you.’
And she doubted even that. He had not once shown the slightest interest in her. He had saved her from Hakan, she was sure of that now. Everything now focused on why he had done that. She was down to her last option, not least because of all the shadowed doors it might open. It came down to one simple fact. Almost all the men who had ever seen her naked subsequently turned all kinds of stupid.
Simon gently swung Andrea down and walked her unprotesting to the other side of the door, away from the kitchen. His attention was now fully on Sarah.
She kept her eyes on him, moving her free hand to the top button of her shirt, unfastening it, then moving down as she released each button, leaving smudges of blood on the white fabric as it parted. She pulled open her shirt and shrugged the material from her shoulders, now standing in just her jeans with the shirt hanging by her waist, her torso lean and flat.
She saw it in Simon’s eyes, a
widening of his pupils, a dark intent that shifted across his face. He took a step towards her without knowing why, his features shaped by need. He saw her now.
She let the material fall over her wrists to the floor and Simon took another step and then another, now standing in front of her, his eyes on hers. He reached down to her hand and the knife, encircling her wrist and holding it firm. She looked defiantly up at him as he cupped her face in his free hand and ran his thumb across her cheek, then his fingers down her neck and over her shoulders and down her arm, the skin of his palm hard and warm. Gliding around her waist and then up over her ribs and across her chest, his fingers each in turn catching on a nipple. Then back to her neck and face. His brown eyes fixed on hers all the time.
She busily rehearsed in her mind what she would do, imagining the distance from her left arm to the kitchen counter, then to the carving knife. She pictured it, rehearsed the movement while working to veil her intentions, barely aware as he tenderly brushed her hair from her face. She closed her eyes, threw out her arm, closing her fingers around the handle, awkwardly but enough that she had a grip. She turned her wrist and the blade as she punched inwards with all her strength. The blade travelled three inches before his hand clamped around her forearm. She opened her eyes. He was still looking down at her.
He said, ‘You’re all kinds of resourceful.’
She looked insolently back at him, but inside she was already running from the consequences.
‘You can’t touch her,’ she said.
‘I’m not going to.’ He raised her wrists as he had before, hands supine. He took both knives and leaned across her, pushing them back into the rack. ‘I’m going to take her back.’
She watched as he stepped backwards out of the kitchen. She could feel goosebumps climbing her stomach and arms. She bent down and picked up her shirt as he picked up Andrea.
She listened to him walk through the living room, the house silent now, her throat sore, all of her sore. She pulled on her shirt and re-fastened the top button, flaring out the bottom, exposing her stomach and a narrowing stretch of skin to her chest.
From behind her she heard the sound of heavy concrete moving. She leaned over the work surface and examined the wall. It was relatively newly decorated, the cupboards above fairly modern. There were two of them. She pulled one open, seeing two shelves of stacked tupperware. She studied the door for a second and then on a whim pressed her palm against the inside, wincing at the pain of pushing it flat, putting pressure on her fingertips. A palm print in her congealing blood and the imprint of a thumb and four fingers. She closed the cupboard as she heard him pad back through the house.
He appeared in the doorway, holding the remains of the glass bowl and the bloody shards of glass in his hands. ‘That’s the problem with the light in the room fixed,’ he said, looking at her in amusement. ‘The bulb somehow managed to unscrew itself.’ He placed the fragments of glass onto the draining board. ‘How did you break that?’
She looked at the glass and replied, ‘With considerable difficulty.’
‘How?’ he persisted.
‘I used a screw from the bookshelf to cut the glass like cutting tiles. Then it was a matter of breaking the glass along the fracture, which was very difficult.’
He shook his head and held out his left hand for her. She could see the cut still bleeding along his wrist and forearm. She had been a split second from making a much deeper cut across his throat, then her world might have been a little different.
‘The girl is off limits,’ she stated.
He looked back at her but said nothing. She let him wait a second then stepped forward and took his hand, allowing him to lead her up the stairs.
FIFTY
Adam turned off the promenade and drove inland, the small green globe on his laptop refusing to show an internet connection. After a few junctions he turned parallel to the coastline, the late night streets empty save for occasional groups moving at a disjointed crawl. He passed a white sign with black lettering and into Grimsby, past a dormant school and then a square centred by grass, a row of shuttered shops and a glowing takeaway. The globe flashed and then stayed solid. He had a connection but carried on, looking for a stronger signal, but the globe blinked off. So he reversed back to the square and flicked off the headlights.
He searched for his copy of Simon’s address, aware of the BBC Homepage slowly loading on the laptop. When he looked at the screen a young girl’s face stared back at him, at the top of the screen the headline Child kidnapped from High Street. He clicked the link and the same picture appeared amid text, then a stock photo of Hambury on a busy day. He picked out partial sentences from the text as he paged down to an image of a green Rover, the number plate blanked, then another of a burnt-out car. The sequence of images led him to think the car was the Rover. And then he froze, giving a despairing groan as he read the text. It was not the Rover. It was the charred remains of Sarah’s silver Toyota. Oh God! His first news of her in over a day, it weighed him heavy in the seat.
Adam sat motionless for a long time, just staring at the burnt remains of Sarah’s car, fearful of reading more for what it might tell him of her fate. He only moved when the screen blanked, stretching out a finger and tapping a key. The screen blinked on. He moved to the top and started reading, sighing with relief when there was no mention of anything inside the car.
Once he had reduced the article to the bare facts there was very little detail. The when and where, a brief background of Andrea Scott and why she was in Hambury, a brief mention of parents, the fact that they were estranged but with neither mentioned by name, a short summary on the idyllic market town of Hambury. Sarah was mentioned indirectly as an alleged eyewitness who was also missing. The phrasing made it sound as though there was an unspoken implication.
He typed keywords into a search engine and found almost identical stories featured on all the tabloids and news sites, the opening gambits to a big story but no detail to create sensation. Their main thrust was the shock of a child kidnapped from a busy high street, then of the eyewitness now missing, the same unspoken implication. The light in the car shifted as he moved from site to site, soaking up every word.
Adam’s first impulse when he finished reading was to find Brian. He immediately checked that thought. The fact that Andrea’s kidnapping was now news changed nothing. Brian was already checking Simon’s address. If Adam could tie Simon Thompson to that address online, there was potential to access a lot of data. He spent a moment thinking where he should start and then his fingers danced, images and text moving up and down the screen as his eyes scanned the page.
In ten minutes he had a myriad of Simon Thompsons cross-referenced to the east coast but none he could match to the address. His fingers hovered as he deliberated and then danced again, logging into his company’s web portal, his determination and sense of urgency ploughing him past any reservations. It gave him an instant hit. The address Brian was checking was Simon’s last registered place of residence. Adam searched through the DVLA, electoral roll, insurance and school records. He even ran a credit check against Simon and the address, returning a fail because Simon had no credit history.
When he was done Adam had gathered a lot of information without knowing much at all. He knew Simon’s education had finished at sixteen, when he had been immediately employed by Thompson Deep Sea as a crew hand and then a watch captain, relief skipper and charter skipper. Simon had no police record, not even a speeding fine. He had a driving licence but was not listed as ever owning a car. He was not married and there were no registered dependants.
Adam felt deflated and conflicted. He had at least confirmed the address was Simon’s. The right thing for Adam now was to ring Boer but he was in no hurry to talk to him. He sent Boer a voicemail, summarising Peterborough and what they found there, confirming the address in Cleethorpes was Simon’s.
He still felt restless, as if there was more he could do with the information he had. He tapped a finge
r against the laptop and flicked back through the data. He had Simon’s childhood address from his school records. It was local. He searched for the address and watched wide-eyed as the map loaded on the screen.
By his reckoning he had driven past Simon’s childhood home twice in the last hour. It was the large pub right on the sea front. Another search pulled up the pub’s website, a brochure page of soft lighting and smiling faces. He deliberated, drumming his fingers lightly on the keyboard. He set the laptop on the passenger seat, switched on the headlights and turned the car.
Minutes later he was parked at the back of the pub. A low wall skirted the perimeter of the car park, the long drop to wet sand guarded by a metal railing. A view out to the North Sea Simon had spent his childhood looking over. Adam pushed the laptop under the passenger seat and walked across the car park towards the pub, passing people filing in the opposite direction.
FIFTY-ONE
From the stairs Simon ushered Sarah into the bathroom and left her there, heading into his bedroom and carefully pulling off his T-shirt. He listened to the bathroom door close and the lock slide as he twisted sideways in front of the mirror. He carefully pushed at the skin, the wound jagged across his ribs. He saw pink flesh, a glimpse of muscle and bone immediately blotted by dark red.
He pressed the T-shirt against his side and deliberated. He was reluctant to stitch the wound but it was deep. With three months at sea ahead of him he could not afford an infection. He hesitated, then pulled a wooden box from a shelf and took a reel of nylon and a short bowed needle from the box. He fetched the whiskey and used it to rinse his hands, smiling to himself as he tipped a measure into his hand cupped under the wound, methodically rubbing the alcohol into the exposed flesh and the skin around it. His eyes pinched closed as he waited for the stinging to abate.
The toilet flushed as he disinfected the thread and then the needle, his ears straining for any sound as he plucked at his flesh and progressively pulled it closed. He heard a tap run and then only the dull drone of the bathroom extractor.