Carla had been back to Will’s office since the miscarriage, but as she waited in its silence it seemed alien to her. She felt like an intruder in someone else’s reality. There’d been emotional upheavals in both their pasts, but nothing that was so determinately the product of malice. The idea that another human would want to snatch Libby and use her terror as a weapon jarred with everything she’d ever experienced. She thought of whoever had Libby formulating their plan while they were oblivious, prowling the fringes of their lives in preparation for this morning.
It had to be money. Please let it be money. They were wealthy; they could pay. She told herself that this happening was maybe even inevitable. If they’d been determined to take Libby there would always have been an opportunity for them to do so, however close by she and Will had kept her.
What if they’d had the cameras fitted earlier? Will had suggested it a couple of years before, but she’d been against it. She’d firmly believed they didn’t need them; that by having them would draw unwanted attention. He’d only just managed to persuade her after the bonfire incident. Nobody would have been able to get onto their property and take photographs through the windows if they’d had the surveillance in place. But would that have stopped them kidnapping Libby when she was away from their protection?
Her thoughts returned to her conversation about consequences with Will the night before. She’d told him Libby could make her own decisions; that she had to set her own life on course. She hadn’t told him she’d been just as afraid for her as he was.
Ever since she’d met Will at university they’d never compromised their trust. Had she done that by concealing her reservations? Was this her punishment?
She delicately seated herself in Will’s cool swivel chair. The plush calm of her surroundings accentuated the feeling that she was in exactly the wrong place. She looked through the smoked glass windows at Will’s impressive vista of the South Bank. It was this success that had imprisoned their daughter. But why no ransom? Was this retribution for something Ingram had done? Did Will know what it was and was withholding from her? She doubted it. But hundreds of decisions were made every day on his behalf. Had a contravention by the company been the trigger? Libby had been taken in territory it had a significant attachment to.
Carla considered the private struggle she’d initiated on behalf of the residents of Hanworth. She knew why she’d taken it on and with even more resolve after losing the baby. Did her heightened sense of injustice mean she’d now lose her only other child because of it?
Outside the window the temperature was rising, but Carla shivered and rubbed the backs of her arms.
Will only seated himself when the steward told him they were rolling out onto the runway. He’d brought his laptop and an overnight bag. If he needed anything else he could buy it in Florida. How long was he expected to be there?
He felt utterly useless, like his body had no physical means to express the turmoil inside him. He needed to shout, injure his fist against a wall and release the build up of negative energy.
He had to centre himself and remember Libby needed him collected. But he couldn’t prise away the image of her gagged. Why had he let Libby talk him into agreeing to the trip? She was barely eighteen. He could still vividly recall his emotions when Carla had first presented her in school uniform. She looked like she was playing dressing up, not ready to leave the protection of home.
Whatever they wanted from him, however much it was, he’d pay. Yesterday evening he’d been anticipating hugging his daughter tight, just to have her back from her travels. Now it was something he’d exchange his life for.
That morning he had no choice but to fly away from her. He just had to hope that whatever reasons were behind the journey could lead him to her return, the only conclusion he could consider. He belted himself in for take-off and, as the wheels broke contact with the runway, he briefly wondered when or if he would be coming back.
Her first conscious thought was that her eyes were on fire. She tried to open them, but something pinned her eyelids down. She heaved them apart, but everything was black. She heard her own exclamation of panic inside her head, tasted white spirit on her tongue and the ache of her facial muscles around whatever plugged her mouth. She bit down, heard fibres squeak against her teeth. Fear could only tense her constrained body. She couldn’t move her arms or legs and when she turned her head the motion seemed delayed.
Drugged. She remembered the needle in her arm and waited for the events that preceded it to re-present themselves. Nothing came but an echo, the reverberation of something horrible she didn’t want to remember.
Her name was Libby Frost. Where had she been before here? Where was she now? All around her a frenzied screeching amplified her hysteria.
Whatever was burning her eyes permeated her nostrils as well, raw and cold inside them, burning its way through the skin there. Was it petrol she could smell? Was that what was soaked into the material in her mouth? She tried to expel the bulk weighing down her tongue, but it met resistance at her lips. Something was tightly covering her whole face. She could feel a weight against her throat, the tension of some binding that made it hurt to swallow. Under the acidic aroma she could detect the vague scent of her coconut sun block.
She cried out and the familiarity of her own voice brought more of herself streaming back. Pregnant. She was pregnant and she’d been drugged and tied up.
Her arms were secured behind her and she couldn’t move her fingers, didn’t have any sensation that her hands were still at the ends of her wrists. She couldn’t get a sense of which way her head was swinging. Her erratic breaths heated the mask of sweat clinging to her face and her lungs ached as they tried to draw in oxygen.
“I can’t breathe! Untie me! I’m suffocating!”
The words formed in her brain, but were incoherent as they struggled to escape her obstructed mouth. They vibrated in her skull and through the burn in her nostrils. She could feel warm tears flowing constantly down her face.
But the sensation she experienced more vividly than anything else was at the nape of her neck, a warm buzz telling her somebody nearby was watching her.
Once in the air, Will told the steward he didn’t want any meals, only black coffee. Then he plugged the laptop into the power point. He opened the website. There was no new message on the page, but as his eyes roved the area at the bottom of the screen, he realised he could move along the row of houses with the cursor. The buildings weren’t figurative, but photo images of real properties cut out and pasted next to each other. There was no consistency in size; they’d been assembled like cuttings from a scrapbook.
The row moved left to right and when he reached the far end of it, he recognised Easton Grey. The picture of his home was spliced next to two more unassuming houses. A red outline appeared around the image when he rested the cursor on it. He clicked it and found himself back on the page of furtive snaps taken of the interior he’d seen earlier. He hit HOME, returned to the row and tried to click on the house that preceded his. No red outline appeared so he tried the one before it. Same again.
He worked his way back through the row to the opposite end, but none of them were active. What purpose did it have? Why not make demands via phone or text?
CHAPTER SEVEN
Tam had nearly finished deliveries for the day and leaned against the back of the stationary tuk-tuk to finish his cigarette. The motor of the three-wheel taxi had been switched off so he knew he was safe from the sudden belches of oily smoke it occasionally emitted from its exhaust. He sucked the last harsh lungful through the filter and crushed the cigarette under his sandal.
He’d climbed out of the sidecar because his buttocks had gone to sleep for the fourth time that afternoon. He jogged on the spot a few times to get the blood flowing back into them and then rubbed his palm over the sheen of sweat on his shaved scalp. He’d spent Saturday as he usually did, straddling the unsecured wooden bench in the cage welded to the bike. It slid about
as they took every corner.
In the morning the cage was full of cooking oil drums, but he’d just helped roll the last one into the corrugated kitchen of one of the many street vendors they delivered to in time for the Sungai Dua night market. Tam looked down the length of the baking main road. It was still deserted, but by 7pm in the evening both sides of it would be full of stalls selling DVDs, handbags and food to a centipede of the rich and hungry.
He examined the black index fingernail of his right hand. A barrel of oil had rolled backwards from a ramp and crushed it last week and although he’d already pricked the pus out of it the nail still refused to fall off. He sucked on it in an attempt to get the blood flowing there as well.
Then he heard the girl scream. Tam slid his finger from his mouth and leaned round the tuk-tuk to see if there was any commotion further down the street. The market area was empty. There was an older white couple, tall and wide, walking arm in arm. No other tourists here yet.
Tam returned to his position between the two vehicles parked outside the Eastern Wish. He gripped the bars of the sidecar and leaned against it, tensing his numb buttocks tight in his shorts. It wasn’t a long journey home, but long enough.
The scream came again and this time Tam froze to listen. It hadn’t come from the street. He looked to the cafe where they’d just delivered. Beads still swung in the doorway where his father had entered and he could hear the sound of a low conversation. He was positive it hadn’t come from through there though. The girl’s voice had seemed small, like the echo of someone far away.
His eyes rose to the storeys above. The noise of duelling TVs emerged from open windows. Was that what he’d heard? His gaze descended to pavement level. There was a grille set into the bottom of the chipped, mushroom-coloured wall. He held his breath and listened.
“Tam!”
He turned to find his father already cocking his leg over the bike. He immediately jumped back into the sidecar and seated himself on the bench. He knew better than to delay him. Grasping the bars of the cage he braced himself for the ride home to their estate on the edge of Taman Lip Sin. At least in the morning the oil drums stopped him from being thrown around. He was about to get gut ache from straining to stay upright. He looked back at the grill in the wall, but the sound of the bike’s engine being stamped to life would have drowned out any further sounds that came from it, if that’s where they’d come from.
He thought about telling his father about what he’d heard. But Tam had already been scolded for his imagination. His nightmares woke his parents on a regular basis. Why would anyone believe the word of a six-year-old? The bike pulled away and then turned in the middle of the street. Tam’s eyes followed the grille until it disappeared behind the stationary taxi.
Will kept the laptop switched on and started to fill up on black coffee. Adrenaline had briefly waned and his body felt suddenly exhausted. Anxiety buffeted his empty stomach. He got up from his seat, walked around, sat back down and repeated the cycle.
It was when he refreshed the page for the umpteenth time that a photo appeared.
Above the row of houses was an image of Libby naked. A graphic representation of what was happening to her while he was thousands of feet in the air. She wasn’t bound, but was obviously drugged. She was lying across a dirty blue mattress, utterly insensible, her eyes rolled back in her head and her lips sticky with soured spittle.
He gripped the laptop screen by its corners; like it was a steering wheel and everything would crash if he didn’t hold it steady. There were words below the picture. Even as he tried to read them his brain echoed the detail of what was just above his line of sight – Libby’s modesty dismissed and her physical self callously displayed. It was worse than the photo of her bound.
INVITATION
A CELEBRATION OF LIFE
BUT YOUR DAUGHTER WILL ONLY MAKE IT IF YOU CAN
FIND THE PERFECT PARTY OUTFIT TO DRESS HER
YOU CAN COLLECT ONE PIECE OF IT IN EACH HOME
GO TO THE FIRST
Will moved his cursor to the left of the screen and the row moved until he was looking at the first cut out. It was the facade of a grandiose, mock colonial property with arched fanlights above the windows and doors. The front entrance was a mosaic of glass. Above it was another message.
THIS NEIGHBOURHOOD ISN’T REAL BUT THE HOMES AND
PEOPLE WHO INHABIT THEM ARE
CAN YOU GUESS WHAT THEY ALL HAVE IN COMMON?
CLICK ON NUMBER ONE
IT’S TOO LATE FOR THEM BUT YOU’LL STILL NEED TO FIND
YOUR DAUGHTER’S BEADED BRACELET
DAD HAS IT
GO THERE BEFORE THE COPS
WEAR GLOVES – IT’S A CRIME SCENE
MAYBE YOU’LL GET TO THE NEXT HOUSE BEFORE I DO
Will briefly hovered the cursor over the second house, but no red outline appeared. He put it over the first again. Not only did it light up red, but a white box appeared with an address inside it.
1815 North Vine Street,
Highway 193,
Kissimmee,
Florida,
347610
He clicked on the activated house and another page of snapshots opened like the ones that had been taken in Easton Grey. There were interior pictures of its downstairs living areas, fitness room, covered lanai and vast island kitchen. But there was one repellent difference; in the middle photo of the lounge the family were seated along a couch. Mother, father, sister and brother; Will couldn’t see their faces. The palms of their hands had been attached to them by black tape.
They looked like a grotesque parody of the wise monkeys. Dried blood darkened their skin and their intestines hung jagged from their bellies, flesh hacked and splayed open. He registered coloured beads at the father’s wrist.
As caffeine and bile pumped up his throat, a removed voice told him he should prepare never to see Libby again.
Nissa walked into Will’s office with the deadpan features of someone who believed they were quite alone. “Jesus!”
Carla rose from her position in front of the computer. “I’m sorry.” Carla had felt so isolated since she’d got to the eighth floor, but now having to present an exterior of normality for someone else was the last thing she wanted to do. “I didn’t mean to startle you.” She didn’t elaborate further and realised it made her look as if she didn’t have any business there. She’d been away for so long it was probably odd finding her at Will’s desk, particularly so early in the morning. She hovered between standing up and sitting down.
Nissa studied Carla through her slim, rimless glasses, the edge of a concerned frown dipping into the magnification. “Is everything all right?” Her Northern Irish inflection made it sound as if she wouldn’t believe her even if she said it was.
Carla opened her mouth to reassure her, but the words stalled. Momentum built behind them, the anxiety inside about to burst from her. She had to confide in someone. “Fine.”
Nissa cocked her head to one side; her jagged fringe of wheat blonde hair covering one half of her face. “I thought you and Will were off to…” She stopped herself suddenly.
Had Will planned a surprise anniversary getaway for the three of them? If he had, Nissa would have made all the arrangements. “Change of plan; I need to work. Water Aid Alliance has officially annexed my love life.” She surprised herself with the speed of the lie.
It briefly disarmed Nissa, however, and a smirk broke through the bewilderment on her face. She was Will’s long term PA and was meant to know his itinerary inside out. Will had told Carla she was manning the telephones for the Remada op while he was away, but Carla knew her unexpected presence would be an affront to her. Will’s office was Nissa’s domain.
Nissa was five foot eight, but still wore precipitous heels that necessitated her ducking through most doorways. She was slim, intense and almost anaemically pale. She was also a decade younger than Carla. Her only concession to cosmetics was the carmine lipstick she wore which drained the last of
the colour from her complexion. She’d worked for Will at home and abroad.
“Thought I’d get an early start. We’re having security cameras fitted at home and it’s a nightmare trying to work there.”
“So Will is…”
“At home, supervising. He got the short straw.”
Nissa nodded uncertainly, but picked up on Carla’s desire to have the conversation over with. “Fresh coffee?”
“No thanks.” Although caffeine sounded like a good idea she hadn’t been able to swallow one mouthful of the cup she’d made herself earlier.
“Just give me a shout if you need anything, Mrs Frost.” Nissa made for the door.
Carla had given up on trying to get Nissa to address her by her first name like she did Will. She assumed it was Nissa’s way of distinguishing their different roles. “Wait.” A thought occurred to her. “I may need you to pull some files for me.”
“Sure.”
Another thought. “And can you arrange to have the dogs picked up from the house and taken to the kennels in Hounslow.”
Nissa frowned.
“I’ll give you the number.”
“I have that…But can’t Will…”
Of course, she’d just said that Will was at home. “No. Will has to make a trip. He’ll be leaving soon.” Carla watched Nissa trying to slot the misinformation together in her head. She’d also told her that Will was supervising the installation of the security cameras.
“Sorry, Mrs Frost… I don’t mean to ruin any surprises, but is Will not taking you and Libby to Cawley Manor?”
So, a surprise trip had been planned. “No. He has had to make an alternative business trip.”
Scare Me Page 4