by Lauren North
There’s a movement from inside – a shuffling noise – and for a moment it feels like Harrie’s entire body is frozen and she’ll never be able to move again.
‘Who’s there?’ a voice shouts.
Harrie takes a final deep breath and steps into the stable without a word, shining the torch straight on to the old dog cage in the corner that she and Elise found last summer when they camped in the field with their dad.
The cage is too small for the man. He can’t stand up or lie down flat.
He cries out when he sees her, the noise strangled and ending in a fit of coughing. ‘Please help me.’
Harrie can’t speak. It’s like she’s swallowed some cardboard and it’s stuck in her throat, blocking the air, blocking her words. The desire to be outside, away from this place, is so intense that she throws the bag within reach of the cage and she runs. His pleading shouts chase her across the field. She moves fast, no longer caring how the mud is squelching against the edges of her shoes or how she’ll explain it to her mum. By the time she reaches the gate, she hears nothing except the drumming of her heart pounding in her ears.
CHAPTER 24
Anna
It’s nine minutes before Harrie returns. Nine minutes when darkness swallows the day. Nine minutes of replaying Harrie’s words over and over, feeling the sting of her spite. My phone is clammy from where I’ve been gripping it. I’ve opened up my contacts to call June three times, and the police five times, but each time I stopped myself.
The front door opens and crashes shut and a moment later Harrie is standing in the doorway of the kitchen, red cheeks, breathless from running, and staring at my face as though waiting for me to react. When I say nothing she rushes towards me, pushes herself into my arms and sobs against my chest.
‘I’m sorry,’ she cries. ‘I didn’t mean any of it. I don’t know why I said it.’
‘I understand,’ I say as I stroke the back of her hair, pulling out a stray leaf and smoothing down the bumps, and for a moment it feels like I’m holding the old Harrie. ‘It’s OK for us to argue sometimes and it’s OK for you to get mad, but you can’t run out of the house like that again. I was so worried about you.’
She nods and wipes her eyes. ‘I won’t.’
‘Where did you go?’
Something in Harrie’s face changes and just like that the barrier is up.
Desperation digs its sharp claws into me. I want to shout. To swear. To scream at her to talk to me, but I can’t risk her turning around and running out of that door again.
‘Take your shoes off and go wash your hands for dinner,’ I say eventually.
She turns away and I catch a sudden whiff of something pungent and rotten. I look down at the kitchen floor and see the smears of thick black mud her trainers have left. It looks like the same mud I found on the kitchen floor four nights ago when I left Harrie alone.
All three girls stay close to the kitchen after dinner, hovering around me, Molly’s and Elise’s voices high and quick. Even Harrie seems to brighten at the prospect of speaking to her dad.
At 6.50 p.m. I open the tablet and place it on the kitchen table, moving the chairs so all four of us can see the screen. Harrie sits down first, then Elise, then Molly on my lap. The minutes pass slowly but no one fidgets or gets up. None of us wants to miss even one precious second of time with him.
Our calls always follow the same format – talking as a family first and listening to Rob tell us about his week. Then he talks to all the children without me, together at first and then individually. The hour he spends with us is gone in the blink of an eye and it’s time to say goodbye. At the end of each call the girls give him a riddle to solve during the week. Something silly that he’ll pretend he doesn’t know and will make us laugh by giving the wrong answers to. Last week he had to answer what has hands but doesn’t clap.
‘I’ve been really thinking about this one and I’ve got it,’ Rob grinned, pinning his arms to his side and roaring at us through the screen. ‘It’s a T-Rex, isn’t it? Little hands that can’t clap.’
The girls howled with laughter.
‘Noooo,’ Harrie all but shouted, loud and boisterous. Was that only a week ago? ‘It’s a clock, Dad. A clock.’
‘A clock and a T-Rex, right?’
My turn with Rob comes later when the girls are in bed. I’ve never told them that Rob and I speak privately. They’d want to stay up and see him again but this time is ours, it’s all I have.
Earlier this week, I didn’t know how I would be able to talk to him, to see his face and not blurt out what happened on Monday. But this thing with Harrie trumps anything going on with us.
The resentment towards him for not being here melts away and I’m desperate to share the burden with him. He’ll have a solution. Something I’ve not thought of that will get through to Harrie, and it’ll work because it always does and then Harrie will be herself again and I can stop this worry from eating me up.
‘What was the riddle we asked him last week?’ Molly asks, looking between us as we wait out the final minutes.
‘What gets wetter the more it dries?’ Elise answers.
‘I can’t remember the answer.’ Molly’s voice has a whine to it. Tiredness and excitement coalescing.
‘A towel,’ Elise whispers as though Rob might hear.
The clock changes. It’s seven p.m. My finger is poised to swipe the screen and accept his call, but nothing happens. Not at seven p.m., or 7.01 p.m., or 7.02 p.m.
Only after another minute passes do we look away from the blank screen.
‘What’s happened, Mummy?’ Molly asks, twisting herself around to look up at me. ‘Why hasn’t Daddy called yet?’
‘It’s only five past,’ Elise says before I get the chance.
‘He’ll call in a minute,’ Harrie whispers.
By ten past seven the excitement seeps out of the room like air from a punctured paddling pool, slow and drooping.
‘Shall we try to call him?’ Elise asks.
‘Good idea.’ I unlock the screen and tap Rob’s name. The rhythmic hum of the outgoing call is the only sound as we wait for him to answer.
He doesn’t.
The girls look at me. Even Harrie, who has barely spoken since our argument, is staring at me with a quiet expectancy, but I’m flailing, lost at sea. In the years Rob has been working in Nigeria, he has never missed a seven p.m. Sunday call. He’s never been late. He’s never forgotten. Never. Until today. When I need him more than ever.
I close my eyes and picture a motorboat filled with men, guns slung over their shoulders, bandanas covering their faces. I know from my late-night Google searches how easily these criminal gangs can board the rigs and take control. A quick pay-off to the right guard is all it takes and my husband is theirs to ransom back to the British government.
What if he’s hurt?
What if he’s dead?
Molly moves on my lap, her shoulders shaking, her hands covering her face. ‘I miss Daddy,’ she wails. The sound, the pain of my daughter, snaps me out of my own anxiety and I paste on my cheeriest smile and hug her tight with one hand, and reach the other one out to Elise, who isn’t crying but looks as though she might.
‘Hey, hey, hey,’ I coo. ‘There’s nothing to be upset about. It’s probably a storm messing with their internet connection or he’s been called into an emergency. We’ll take the iPad upstairs with us and read some stories and maybe he’ll call later, or tomorrow.’
‘Is Dad OK?’ Harrie asks.
I search my daughter’s face for any sign of her earlier anger, the hate I saw flashing in her eyes, but it’s gone and she is frowning and rubbing her hands up and down her knees as though she’s bruised them.
‘Yes, I’m sure he is,’ I say, hoping it’s not a lie. ‘There are a hundred simple explanations for why he’s not called.’
‘Maybe he dropped his phone down the toilet,’ Molly says. Her tears have stopped as quickly as they started and she gives me a
watery smile. ‘Our teacher, Mrs Cole, did that last week.’
‘Exactly.’ I squeeze her tight. ‘Come on, let’s get ready for bed and we’ll see if Daddy calls later.’
‘You have to promise to wake us up if he calls when we’re asleep.’ Elise looks at me, wide puppy eyes.
‘Of course. I promise.’
We traipse upstairs, the bounce gone from our steps. Molly dives on to my bed and snuggles into Rob’s side. Elise lies across the bottom and Harrie takes the floor, pushing herself against the wall and rolling a football around with her bare feet. My shared disappointment for the girls, the worry for Rob, eases a little as I sit on the bed and open the book we’re reading.
I used to read to the girls every night when they were little. Beautiful picture books with rhyming stories I knew off by heart and back to front, but Elise and Harrie have grown up so much. They read their own books and no longer want to listen to the picture books, the three-minute reads, and with the greatest will in the world, I cannot find the time in our evenings to squeeze in chapters and chapters of books.
But when Rob started working in Nigeria and the Sunday calls became part of our lives, the girls needed something afterwards to calm their excitement, to distract them from the blow they felt when their elation died and they remembered that their dad was thousands of miles away and it would be another week before they saw his face again. Listening to a story together has become part of our ritual.
It was Dean who suggested I read the girls The Famous Five, and as I open the book at the right page, I cast my mind back to last week’s chapter.
‘So, George has just been kidnapped by the man in the caravan,’ I say.
‘And Timmy is on their trail,’ Molly says, her words mumbled against the fabric of Bunny, pushed against her face.
I take a breath and start to read, remembering to add the voices and not to go too fast, but even as I read aloud I feel the anxiety twisting and coiling in my mind.
First there was the accident on the road, leaving Harrie and whatever happened to her that night. Then Dean disappeared. He’s been a rock these past months and his disappearance has left a gaping hole. And now Rob hasn’t called. I know these three events aren’t connected. Harrie has never met Dean. Rob is thousands of miles away. But still they knot together in the pit of my stomach.
CHAPTER 25
Anna
It’s late. Two a.m. The nothing hours of the night when the only sound is the rustle of my duvet as I fidget from one position to another.
Why didn’t Rob call?
The question turns over and over in my thoughts like a spin wash that won’t end.
Rob is a good dad. Even three thousand miles away from his children, he is still better than most. He is present in their lives. Always. He writes notes for the children – one each for each day he is away. It could be something silly – a ‘knock knock’ joke; it could be a reminder – help Mum with the tidying; or something profound – in a world where you can be anything, be kind.
Something must be wrong. Rob knows how desperate the girls are to speak to him.
I wish I knew what he was doing out there. I wish I could picture it in my mind the way I can the memories of our relationship. The day we met fourteen years ago. It sounds like a long time, but it doesn’t feel like it. We’ve been married twelve years. Eight years longer than my parents were married for before my dad got sick of Mum’s bitterness and moved to Edinburgh. A new life for him. A new family. Leaving my mother with a child she didn’t want.
Fourteen years have gone by in a flash of babies and toddlers and a baby again, moving, scraping by, school and routines. When I look back at our marriage it feels like we’ve not drawn breath, not stopped to chink our glasses, to look at the beautiful children we’ve made, to enjoy the moment, any moment.
Even our first date – in our pre-marriage, pre-baby days – seems rushed when I look back. Rob and I met on a blind date in London.
My friend Tina was dating Rob’s friend Nicholas and the two cooked up a match. Of course I didn’t know it was a blind date at the time. I was single, living in a shared flat in Soho, a five-minute walk from the boutique website-design agency I worked for. I spent my weekends exploring London and drinking with my friends. Marriage, children, even a boyfriend were not on my horizons, and yet within three years of meeting Rob I had the lot.
I twist the covers around me and turn on to my back, trying to remember the first things we said to each other, but it’s a blur. All I have of the memory is the sitcom-style cheesy way we were brought together, the comedy of our friends cancelling at the very last second and the horror of discovering what Tina and Nicholas had done. I remember laughing a lot that night. I remember the way my stomach flipped when Rob smiled at me and the broad slope of his shoulders, his thick dark hair, eyes that danced with mischief.
Tina and Nicholas emigrated to Australia the year after our wedding. We email back and forth a few times a year and send Christmas cards. I miss Tina but I’m glad she left before our downfall. I never told her what happened to us and I’m glad my humiliation didn’t stretch across the world.
I close my eyes and try to stop thinking, try to sleep. I’m just dozing off when a scream shatters the silence, piercing my thoughts. I leap out of bed and rush into Harrie and Elise’s room.
‘Stop,’ Harrie shouts. ‘Stop, stop, stop.’ She whimpers like an injured animal before sitting up and rubbing her hands on her knees. Her words are incoherent mumbles at first, but then they change. She says a name and it’s crystal clear. ‘Dean,’ she whispers.
My blood runs cold and it hits me – hard and fast. The night of the crash, the night I was stuck on the road and Harrie was alone, is the same night Dean went missing.
CHAPTER 26
The night of the crash, 8.06–8.14 p.m.
Harrie
Harrie covers her ears with the sleeves of her coat and pushes herself further into the corner. The noise of the two men is deafening. Grunting. Hitting. Shouting. She cowers, wishing she could shrink down, down, down like Alice in Wonderland, wishing she’d taken a chance and run out the back door the second the phone was in her pocket.
Too late. She’s stuck. Trapped. Not even hidden. If either of the men turns towards the corner where she’s hiding, they’ll see her.
She thinks of Molly and how only a few years ago she would hide by closing her eyes. I can’t see you, so you can’t see me.
But Harrie’s eyes are open. Wide and frightened. She can only see legs, dancing around each other, kicking out. There is no escape from the sounds they’re making – the punches, the shouts of triumph and pain – like the tennis players on TV when they hit the ball, but louder, so much louder.
She moves her hands from her ears to her mouth, stopping herself from crying out.
For a minute she wonders if it will ever end and then something changes. Something red and wet splats across the floor and Harrie has to bite back a scream as she realizes what it is. Blood.
One of the men starts to shout something. ‘I’ve already texted my brother. He’s—’ But there’s a crash against the worktop and the rest of the words are gone. Harrie doesn’t think he’s fighting back any more, but she can still hear the smack of someone being hit and the grunts of pain that follow.
The sound that comes next makes Harrie’s stomach flip like she’s on a rollercoaster. It’s not a punch. It’s louder. Harder. A thwack of a noise. It’s only as the wine bottle drops to the floor with a crack, sending thick shards of glass sliding across the tiles, that Harrie realizes the man didn’t cry out with pain when the bottle hit him.
And then one of them is on the floor. Two metres away from her. She can see his whole body now through the gaps in the chair legs. His face is covered in blood. More blood than Harrie has ever seen and it’s pouring out of him and into a puddle on the floor.
He’s dead.
Someone is screaming.
She is screaming.
; CHAPTER 27
Monday, five days until Halloween
Anna
The school playground seems noisier today. More shouting, more parents cramming in around me. It’s a fight to wait for the bell to ring and say goodbye to the girls before turning for home.
Maybe it’s me. My lack of sleep after Harrie’s night terror. Hearing Dean’s name on her lips and lying awake for the rest of the night trying to understand why.
Ben races past me with a breathless, ‘Hi Anna,’ followed a moment later by Kat.
‘Hey you,’ she says, appearing beside me and nudging her shoulder against mine. ‘Check me out. I’m here before the bell again. I deserve a medal.’
I smile as I look down at her feet. ‘And no slippers this morning either.’
‘Ah, well, I wore them to the shops the other day by accident and they need a wash. Sometimes I don’t know what’s wrong with me.’
‘Ben looks like he’s shot up recently,’ I say, and we look across the playground to the group of Year Six boys. Ben is jumping on Tyler’s shoulders as though trying to dunk him in a swimming pool.
‘Tell me about it. I feel like I’ve ordered the entire collection of boys’ wear from Next recently, but at least he’s growing at last,’ she adds, humour carrying in her voice. ‘Are you looking forward to today’s meeting?’
I frown, my head so filled with Dean, with Harrie and Rob, that there is nothing else. ‘What meeting?’
Kat tips back her head and laughs. ‘Anna James, is that you in there?’ She taps my forehead as though knocking on a door. ‘The Parish Council meeting at Tracy and Anthony’s house at lunchtime.’
‘Of course. I hadn’t forgotten,’ I lie.
‘I should think not,’ she grins. ‘There’s only room for one forgetful person in this friendship. Anyway, how’s Rob? Are you feeling better now you’ve spoken to him?’