by Claire Moss
Jazzy went through his nightly ritual of locking up – back gate, back door, downstairs windows, front door – and went upstairs, trying to minimise the creaking of the stair treads. Girls Ayanna’s age needed their sleep, and after today she would need it more than usual. As he crept past the study, he noticed the light was still on. For a second he hesitated outside the door, uncertain whether he should knock, go in to check she was OK, offer some sort of comfort. He was aware as he stood there that she had probably heard him come up the stairs, could probably see his shadow outside the door. He imagined her crouching on the fold-out bed, scared out of her wits that he was going to come in and try it on with her, this old, flabby guy, unable to control himself in the presence of a pretty young girl. Jazzy slipped away as quietly as he could and into the sanctuary of his and Petra’s room. Christ, he thought as he undressed and got into bed, he had at least thought that one of the benefits of being a married father in his thirties was that he no longer needed to worry about what women did and did not want from him.
Jazzy did not expect to fall asleep. He had texted Simone as he lay in bed: Are you OK? Don’t tell me where you are if you don’t want to. Don’t tell me what’s going on. Just tell me that you’re OK. And then, after a second’s hesitation, he added: Love you. X. Simone would know what he meant. But then he must have fallen asleep, because now he was being woken up.
At first he thought it was Rory. He was standing at the bedroom door, about to head into Rory’s room, when he remembered there was no baby in this house tonight. He picked his phone up from the top of the chest of drawers, hoping it had been a reply from Simone that had jerked him from the inky, black sleep. There were no messages. Jazzy padded back over to the bed and sat on its edge, rubbing his face with the flat of his hands. He lay back across the bed, his feet still touching the floor, and could feel himself sinking back down into the blackness when he heard a noise. Jerking to his feet, he stubbed a toe hard into the carpet and forced himself to stifle a groan. He could hear Ayanna stirring on the other side of the partition wall, but he was sure the noise had not come from her room. Standing in a half-crouch behind the bedroom door, he waited to see if he would hear it again. And there it was: a door closing – the dining room door, he thought. There was someone downstairs.
At the same moment as he opened his bedroom door, Ayanna opened hers. She was still wearing the same clothes as yesterday. Well, of course she was, Jazzy realised. She had not exactly come prepared with an overnight bag. Why had he not offered her something of Petra’s to sleep in? Why did he never think of these things until it was too late?
‘I heard a noise,’ she whispered. Her eyes were huge in her small, round face.
He nodded, very aware that he was wearing only shorts and a T-shirt, with no underwear.
‘It sounded like a cat,’ she said. ‘Have you got a cat?’
He shook his head. Now was not a time for comforting lies. ‘There’s someone downstairs,’ he said. ‘There’s someone in the house.’
Jazzy had asked Ayanna four times to go back into her room while he went downstairs to investigate, and four times she refused. Amongst all the other more pressing worries at that moment, the thing that he found bothering him the most was his utter inability to get this girl to do as she was told. Petra had been right all along; he was destined always to play the good cop role in their parenting two-hander. And he was beginning to rethink his longing for a feisty little daughter.
In the end he had compromised – if that was the word – by insisting on going down the stairs ahead of her. He had taken a heavy ceramic vase, about twenty-five centimetres high and weighing the same as a family-sized bag of jacket potatoes from the bedroom windowsill and was wielding it by the neck with his right hand, his left arm spread uselessly behind him in some sort of gesture of protection towards Ayanna. She, being as he now realised infinitely more resourceful and quick-witted than he could ever hope to be, had grabbed a tiny but wickedly sharp pair of nail scissors from the bathroom shelf, which were now concealed in her right fist.
The bottom floor when they got to it was silent now but some sixth sense, sharpened by the proximity of danger, told Jazzy that it was colder down there than it ought to have been. Out of the corner of his eye he could tell that the front door was shut, so he crept into the lounge to check the windows. There was nobody there and no windows open. Nothing appeared to have been disturbed. The TV remote control was still on the arm of the chair where he had sat with it, his empty beer bottle still forming a ring mark on the side table. He padded back out into the hall, Ayanna following his every step as though tied to him by a very short piece of elastic. Again, nothing obvious had been disturbed, but again Jazzy felt that mysterious stream of freezing air coming from somewhere around him. He headed towards the dining room and kitchen, which he and Petra had knocked through to form one big room during their first year in the house, as was compulsory for all young couples, back in those heady days when young couples could actually afford their own house. He felt sure he would see the back door ajar, but instead he felt warmer as he moved away from the hall. The back door and all the windows were closed. The kitchen looked the same as it did when he went to bed, which is to say it looked a mess. The dining table was still covered with plates of toast crumbs. He was beginning to wonder hopefully if they had both been mistaken, if what they had heard had been nothing more than a stress-induced shared hallucination, that they were simply winding each other up into a frenzy of panic over a gust of wind or the vibrations of a passing taxi. Or, he realised, the other possibility was that someone was hiding here, in the house, waiting for them to give up and go back to bed. Perhaps they were already upstairs, having sneaked up there while he gormlessly shuffled about the ground floor in his underwear.
He picked up his phone from where it was charging on the kitchen worktop and turned to Ayanna to tell her to unlock the back door and wait next to it while he tried to conduct a proper search. His heart was hammering and he was not sure if he was shivering with cold or with fear, but he knew he had to do this, and that he could not let Ayanna hover at his side while he did it. But she was not looking at him. She was looking at the dining room table. ‘What’s that?’ she said.
She was pointing at a pair of folded newspapers – one a national broadsheet and one a local tabloid. It was too dark to read the headlines on them. On top of them was a piece of unlined paper with a handwritten message on it. The reality began to dawn on Jazzy. Those things had not been on that table when he had gone to bed. As he moved towards the papers, he could see down the hallway and he realised where the source of the cold air was. The whole of the door handle and lock from the front door had been removed, leaving a rectangular hole for the chill to blow through.
Chapter Seventeen
As Simone ran out of the station, she was blind, deaf, so oblivious to her surroundings, so intent purely on getting far away from the man, she almost ran in front of a moving car. The shock brought her to her senses and she stopped, leaning over and holding her knees, trying to draw breath. She looked up and saw across the road, in the same stop where her bus from Kielder had dropped her off such a short time ago, a bus so small that it was more like a large taxi. The sign above its windscreen said ‘Newcastle Central Station’. As she watched, the vehicle shuddered to life and the driver put the headlights on, preparing to pull away. Not allowing herself time to think about it, she ran across the road and climbed on, gasping out her destination to the driver and thrusting a twenty-pound note for the fare.
‘Can’t change that, pet,’ he said, shaking his head.
‘Fine,’ she retorted. ‘Don’t worry about it. Keep it.’ Money had ceased to matter. Everything had ceased to matter.
Almost immediately the driver indicated and pulled away. The other passengers, an elderly woman with bags of shopping and a skinny young girl with clothes woefully unsuitable for the weather and a pair of oversized headphones were sitting near the driver so she took a
seat further back, but there were still only a couple of metres between them all. Simone felt entirely safe here, enclosed in this warm, diesel-ly bubble. She wanted to stay inside it forever, to keep moving, to stay in transit so that whatever it was that was waiting for her on the outside would never matter. Gradually, as they moved out of town and into the black anonymity of the countryside, she felt herself relax, the rattle of her heart slowing and her stomach beginning to settle. At one point it emitted a loud gurgle and she realised she had not eaten since the greasy pub breakfast that morning.
When they eventually arrived in Newcastle, it was as though into another world. It had only been two days since Simone had been among the infinitely brighter lights and more frenetic pace of a much bigger city, but it was a shock after the empty back roads and gentle voices of the rural north country to be thrust into so much activity and sensation. She descended from the bus as if in a daze and followed the crowds unthinkingly into the station’s entrance hall. She drifted towards the arrivals and departures boards, then jerked once more into panicky readiness as she saw that a south-bound train was due to leave in four minutes. She ran to the platform and jumped on, reasoning that she would buy a ticket from the conductor once the train had started moving. It seemed more important now to keep moving, to continue on her homeward trajectory than to worry about the fact that the ticket she bought on the train would almost certainly set her back well in excess of a hundred pounds.
She got into the nearest carriage and sat down. It was the day’s penultimate train to Kings Cross and there were only a handful of other passengers, but it gradually dawned on Simone that this compartment was more sparsely populated than even a normal evening train. It did not seem to have enough seats, there was too much space between the passengers, everyone had their own table with a little lamp on it, and everyone else was wearing a suit and tapping half-heartedly at a laptop or a tablet. She was in first class. She could easily get up and move; it was unlikely that there would be no seats anywhere in standard class, but she found that she could not. First class was clean and safe and quiet. Nobody had looked up when she got on, or wrinkled their nose at her lack of business attire or modern communications equipment. Eye contact was something that people travelled first class in order to avoid. If she stayed here she could stretch out her legs and eat some proper food and nobody would bother her, there would be no teenagers playing music or smelly old men drinking special brew or people with enormous suitcases grazing her ankles as they went by. She did not have the slightest idea what she was running from as she returned to London, or what might be waiting for her when she got there. She needed these few hours before she found out to be pleasant ones.
Almost as soon as the train pulled away, she was served up with some watery chicken casserole and a glass of cheap red, both of which she consumed gratefully, hardly tasting them. As soon as she had finished, Simone looked up to try and catch the eye of the waiter/ticket inspector who had disappeared into another carriage. For the best part of two hundred quid, she definitely wanted pudding. Just then the door at the end of the carriage hissed and slid open, but it was not the waiter. It was the man from Hexham station, the man, she was sure, from Rory’s nursery. He looked exactly as Jazzy had described him on the phone. And he was walking straight towards her.
She was sitting alone at a table for two, and the man stopped just in front of her, his looming presence and cheap imitation leather jacket seeming absurd in the refined air of first class. ‘Hello, Simone,’ he said slowly. ‘Fancy seeing you here.’ His voice was surprisingly high-pitched, a horrible, south London whine.
A woman at the next table, whose gaze had switched between her casserole and her iPad for the whole of the journey so far, looked up sharply at the sound of such tones in her carriage.
‘Hi,’ Simone said stupidly. She felt utterly vulnerable, sitting beneath him like this, so she stood up in the cramped space between her seat and the table. ‘Who are you?’
‘You don’t need to know that, sweetheart. But don’t worry, I’m not here to hurt you. I’m just here to make sure you get home safe.’ The word safe had never been made to sound so threatening, Simone thought.
‘What?’ Simone felt fury overtake her, anger that she had managed to keep suppressed for all this time. Anger at Mack, for bringing her on this stupid chase in the first place, anger at whoever it was that had caused him to run away from her, anger at Jazzy for being in London when he should have been here, with her, protecting her instead of Ayanna, and most of all, anger at this horrible mound of muscle breathing through his mouth and exuding low-rent menace. ‘Who are you?’ she said again, this time with much more feeling, ‘And what fucking business is it of yours how I get home? Leave me alone!’
She was surprised to find that this man did not frighten her now she was seeing him close up. True, he was huge, and true, he was so meaty that even his ears had a dense, sausagey quality. True also, that his haircut and clothes and demeanour did not speak of someone who worked in one of the caring professions. But behind the physical presence, there seemed to be very little substance. The blankness behind the man’s eyes reminded Simone of a mistreated zoo animal, the kind that would one day turn on its keepers and maim them for life. His accent, his style, his drawled threats, like dialogue stolen from a 1990s cockney gangster film, all screamed ‘Keith’, and Simone was sure that this man must have some connection with Keith, but strangely that did not frighten her either. If this guy was the best that Keith could do, then Keith did not scare her. And she felt certain now that Keith could not be the thing that had scared Mack either, that Keith could not be the reason that he had run away.
‘Let’s just say,’ the man drawled, ‘that I’m a well-wisher. I don’t want to see you come to any harm. Nice young lady like you, chasing up and down the country after some bloke like this. It ain’t right. I’m here to escort you home. Make sure nothing, you know, happens to you.’
The woman across the aisle was now staring openly. Had she been twenty years younger, she would probably have been filming the whole episode on her phone.
‘How do you know what I’m doing?’ Simone snapped. ‘I’m visiting my family,’ she said, remembering the lie she had fed to Jazzy. ‘I’m not even going to London tonight.’
Simone could see the thought process labouring behind the man’s dull eyes, but was unsure whether he had managed to process the significance of this remark. ‘Yes you are,’ he said eventually. ‘You need to get back home where you belong, and you need to stay there. I think I’ll just have a little seat here, keep an eye on you and make sure you behave yourself.’ He gave a leery wink at Simone. ‘Don’t mind me, love. If you want to have a little snooze, that’s fine by me. You just relax and I’ll wake you up when it’s our stop.’
He sat down heavily on the seat across the table from Simone. The woman with the iPad shot him a look of open disgust and moved her belongings as far away from him as she could, before turning and attempting to engage Simone in eye contact. Simone kept her eyes trained on the table, her mind racing. The man’s great bulk had effectively hemmed her in. She would have to lift her legs over his to move, and she knew she would never have the strength to push him out of her way. The man shifted around in his chair, cleared his throat in an ostentatiously phlegmy manner, then stuck both feet farther across into Simone’s side and unfolded a copy of the Racing Post from his coat pocket. The train announcer’s voice came over the Tannoy, announcing the next station in a few minutes’ time: Darlington. Simone knew it was a biggish station with more than one entrance and exit. If she could somehow get off there, then she stood a reasonable chance of ditching this lunatic. She had noticed at Newcastle that there was another train to London running that night, an hour or so behind this one. If she could manage to get off the train without this man following her, she could still be home by midnight. She would be far quicker than him. If she could get out from behind this table, then she could be off the train by the time he had h
auled his lumbering bulk out of the seat. Slowly she reached one hand under the table to grab her rucksack as she felt the train beginning to slow down, drawing her ankles under her chair.
The movement of Simone’s arm must have caught his attention because he looked up casually from his Racing Post and shook his head slowly. ‘No, darling. Don’t bother, eh? All that’s going to happen is I’m going to follow you, and I’ll end up chasing you round bloody – where are we again?’ He peered theatrically out the window as the station lights came into view. ‘Around bloody Darlington at nine o’clock at bloody night, then we’ll both end up back on the same train again tomorrow, both looking a bit the worse for wear, won’t we? Keep your seat, love. Don’t bother,’ he leaned across the aisle towards her and lowered his voice. ‘It ain’t worth it.’
Simone fixed him with the steeliest stare she could summon and slowly moved her arm back onto the table.
‘I mean,’ the man continued, ‘none of it’s worth it. Not even Joe Mackinlay. Especially Joe Mackinlay. Trust me, darling. A girl like you could do much better. What you need to do now is go home, find a nice new fella and forget all about him. He’s trouble.’ The man’s words sounded sincere; there was real venom in the way he delivered his last sentence, and Simone felt a shiver of doubt run through her. Trouble was certainly what Mack had landed her in this time.
The woman across the aisle’s eyes were wide and she was shifting in her seat as though she felt she ought to do something, but she was not sure what. Her hand twitched towards her phone.