Lydia tries to coax her to sit down, but Barbara has a faraway, glazed look in her eye.
‘We all have secrets don’t we, Lydia? Kate does, you do, your father does. Even Simon shocked us, didn’t he? I’m not worried that Kate took sexy photos of herself, or went to a wild night club.’
Barbara looks at her daughter properly for the first time since she got home, and her face becomes softer.
‘No matter what you do, or what happens in this life, just know that I adore you, as I adore your father and Kate. Never be unsure about that. I will do everything to protect you.’
Lydia nods, and tries to smile.
She’s not sure what her mother is going through, but it’s obvious she’s trying to make things better.
Barbara takes a deep breath, finishes her tea, and tells Lydia she’s going to the station to get an update on the case.
She’s been trying McCarthy’s phone for the past hour, but he isn’t picking up, and she wants to make sure they are still giving this their full attention.
She’s heard stories about other missing people who are just forgotten by police when they run out of resources to continue searching for them, and she isn’t going to let that happen to them.
Lydia nods in agreement, and offer to cook something for dinner while her mum is out. They haven’t had a family meal since Kate went.
A few minutes later, as she waves Barbara off, and closes the gate behind her, Lydia sees something that makes her jump in shock.
Across the narrow road, by the entrance to the woods is a very strange-looking man.
He is staring straight at her, and looks insane, with huge bulging eyes and a peculiar stance, like he’s in some kind of physical pain that’s making him collapse to one side.
He’s also carrying a plastic bag that looks almost empty, and wearing a dirty green anorak.
Lydia automatically takes a few steps back towards the house when she sees him, and Molly starts to bark.
But, the man doesn’t move, and continues to stare at her blankly.
Lydia tries to keep her eyes on him, but a succession of cars and a large van drive past the gate, obscuring her view.
A few moments, when the traffic clears, he’s somehow made his way across the road to the gate, and is just a few metres away from Lydia.
Lydia takes a sharp intake of breath, and contemplates calling out for help when she sees him pressing his face between the bars of the gate.
No-one has ever looked at her this intensely, or scared her this much.
‘I followed the car here, but I was too afraid to knock.’
The man’s voice is deep, his eyes look her up and down as he speaks, and Lydia can feel every hair on her body standing on edge, and her palms start to sweat.
She’s only about ten feet from the front door, and could easily run inside to call the police.
But, the man speaks again, and this time he says something that catches her attention.
‘Margaret lives here. Doesn’t she?’
At first, Lydia is relieved, thinking this man has simply got the wrong house, and just happens to look scary.
She tells herself that she’s just being paranoid, not thinking straight, and if all this other stuff wasn’t happening, she wouldn’t be scared at all.
But, as soon as that thought leaves her mind, and she’s about to respond to his question, Lydia remembers Ida’s words, only a couple of hours ago.
Was it really a coincidence that she had asked her about someone called Margaret, and now this strange man is asking the same thing?
Lydia suddenly longs to get inside, and tells Molly to follow her.
She shouts to the man that he’s got the wrong house, and no-one called Margaret lives here.
Then, she turns and goes inside, locking and bolting the front door behind her.
She runs upstairs, and goes to the window at the end of the first-floor hall that looks out on to the driveway and road beyond.
From this vantage point, she sees the man walking slowly up the road.
He looks back at the house a few times, as if he knows she’s watching, and Lydia hides so he doesn’t see her.
She’s trembling, and decides to call her dad to see how long he’ll be. He should be on his way home by now.
Brian answers on the second ring, says he took the train, and is just walking from Hampstead station.
He’ll be with her in five minutes.
58
In the cold basement, Kate Stone contemplates her own death.
She feels certain that her captor is waiting for the right time to kill her, or maybe he’s trying to pluck up the courage.
She wonders if she should try to end her own life before he tortures her to death, and has worked out that dehydration could kill her if she doesn’t drink anything for another few days.
It’s already been so long since she’s drunk anything.
It’s been like this since she got here, her mind alternating between thoughts of family, and having faith that they will find her, and will never give up, and thoughts of the police looking for her, and of someone knowing how she got from the club that Friday night to whatever hell-pit she was in now.
But, Kate also finds herself thinking of all the horrific ways he could kill her if she doesn’t get there first.
Her imagination has always been overactive, and she shudders at the thought of knives cutting out her tongue or eyes, blades peeling her skin, or a brutal and horrific rape.
Her mind is constantly thinking about the certainty that she will be murdered, probably in this basement, and she seeks comfort in the thought that maybe if she’s already weakened and sick through undernourishment and cold, she might not feel the pain as much.
Each time he comes into the room, he tells her to be a good girl, to pray, and wait for his command.
He says the time for them is coming soon, and she must be patient and calm, and he reminds her that she has sinned and must do penance.
If Kate asks him a question, it’s like she doesn’t exist. He doesn’t even look at her.
Kate wonders how a person gets like this. This man is twisted, cruel, the closest thing to evil she can imagine.
He brings a plastic container of food once a day, and throws her a bottle of water, but it’s barely enough to sustain a small animal.
Kate has started to feel invisible, and is sure she’s going mad.
She lost track of the number of days spent here after about a week, and it feels like the life that she led before this, and all of the love, fun, and adventure she experienced was never even real.
All she knows now is this dark, lonely, pain-filled nightmare.
59
Brian hasn’t been greeted with such enthusiasm by anyone in years.
Lydia literally runs into his arms when he arrives home, and tells him about the strange man who came to the gate and scared her.
She even manages a little laugh about how paranoid she is these days, and says that she now realises the man was obviously just homeless or mentally unwell.
Brian puts his briefcase down in the usual spot in the hall next to the table, and hangs his coat on the stand next to it.
His daughter has been talking at such a fast pace, that he hasn’t really heard what she’s saying, and he asks her to repeat the story while he makes a cup of tea.
They walk into the kitchen together, and he goes about making the tea while Lydia pops a frozen casserole into the oven.
When she’s done she starts from the start.
‘Basically, about twenty minutes ago, just as I waved mum off, I saw this man staring at the house. He was just looking at me from across the road, and then he came over and started saying that he was looking for Margaret, and did she live here.’
Brian stops what he is doing, and turns to her.
‘What did he look like, Lydia? Have you seen him before?
Her dad looks
very concerned, and Lydia smiles, embarrassed that she’s made him worry about something so small, when he’s obviously devastated about Kate, and going through enough already.
She reassures him that the man left straight away, and she’s never seen him before, either.
Brian sits down, takes a sip of tea, and makes Lydia promise to tell him if she ever sees that man again.
Then, Lydia fills him in about the teacher that Kate was involved with, her own visit to Haven last night, and the iPhone she had handed over to police.
60
Barbara didn’t go to the station like she said she would.
After everything that has happened today, she just needs to breathe and get away from it all.
Her mind has reached capacity, and she knows if she had stayed at home she would have smashed something to pieces.
She arrives at Highgate cemetery feeling like she’s not going to be able to hold it together for much longer.
She parks the car, opens the glove compartment, and pulls out two small brown containers of pills, and puts them into her handbag, then quickly zips it shut, and gets out of the vehicle.
After paying the entrance fee, Barbara tries to get lost at the back of the cemetery, like she’s accidentally done so many times before.
She doesn’t know what she’s going to do with the pills, but moves them from her handbag to her pocket, holding on to them for comfort as she walks.
She thinks about how she has wanted to kill herself many times in her life, but never came close to actually doing anything.
This feels different, though, and her longing to escape is stronger than ever.
The peace of the cemetery is just what she needs to feel more grounded, and after twenty minutes or so, Barbara can breathe again.
She feels her heart rate returning to normal, and the heavy, dragging sensation in her stomach starts to subside, as she focuses on the happy birdsong around her and the gentle swishing of the trees.
This place is famous for its beautiful light. Some of the tombs are cracked, and ivy is growing around them, making the whole place look like a film set for a Halloween movie.
There’s even a black cat roaming around somewhere.
Recently, the days were blending together for Barbara, into a never-ending cycle of worry, panic and regret.
And she can’t speak to anyone about this secret fear she has about what really happened to Kate.
It’s something she can never tell a soul. And the weight of it is tormenting and crushing her.
Barbara think that anyone she told would think she was crazy.
How could anyone ever understand that she knew it was her fault that her daughter was gone?
On the outside, they see a peaceful woman, a doting mother who would do anything for her family, someone who does yoga every morning, and makes her own jam, who hardly ever raises her voice, or says no to anything.
Barbara smiles, nods, and laughs just like a normal person, but on the inside, she knows it’s all an act, and when she is alone, she stares into space, feeling entirely empty and detached.
It is only the connection to the people she loves that is keeping her alive.
And so, she does her best, blends into the background, and lets life grow and thrive around her, believe that the smaller she is, and the bigger everything else, the less she would ruin things.
She keeps quiet, has few opinions that she vocalises about anything, and instead, she mirrors her loved-ones, agrees with whatever they want, and plays the role of wife and mother, beautifully.
She knows that if anyone ever saw the real Barbara Stone, they would see how broken she is.
She feels this broken person is more than likely unlovable and too damaged to deserve the beautiful life she has.
But, when no one knows the real you, life can be incredibly lonely.
Barbara has been running from something for a long time, and there is a darkness that lives in her, that follows her around every day, like a shadow.
This shadow loomed over the twins when they were born. It was at its worst then, and when she sat up at night, nursing those tiny babies, Barbara felt the darkness becoming greater. She imagined crushing them and making it look like an accident.
Sometimes, the dark thoughts came and went in an instant, and she shook them off, and moved on.
But, once or twice, the destructive urges stayed for a few hours, and in those periods, she often felt no empathy.
She felt nothing, except a longing to climb into bed, or better yet, to climb into the ground, and end this ridiculous charade.
She didn’t tell Brian that she had been referred to a psychiatrist, either, too terrified that he would ask questions she couldn’t, answer.
She had always wondered why he had even married her, and felt that if he knew all that there was to know about her, he would be gone.
Brian was the only man she had ever loved, and the only time she felt safe was when she was next to him.
Lying to him, and pretending to be normal would have to be enough.
She couldn’t risk losing him. She guessed that he loved her for being a good mother, for entertaining his colleagues, and for laughing at his bad jokes.
He didn’t love her for who she was underneath that, because he didn’t know that part of her. And that was okay with Barbara.
61
McCarthy and Davies are in a taxi on the way to Matthew Hayman’s house when Julia calls from the office.
After examining the CCTV evidence from the night Kate went missing from Haven, the team have found several segments of footage with a man in a mask that matches Gustav’s description of the man seen with Kate.
The interesting bit is that he was captured on the camera at the back of club, and right at the time when the furniture and props were also being moved out.
This fits with McCarthy’s original suspicions about the equipment removed from the club being used to move Kate out.
He asks Julia to send the footage to him in a zip file so he can watch iton his phone as soon as possible.
They also need to interview everyone that moved furniture in or out that night as soon as possible, and a good source for that information is Tony Briggs.
With McCarthy and Davies away, another member of the team needs to find Briggs today, and go through the footage with him.
McCarthy asks if they have found anyone on the footage that looks like Matthew Hayman, and Julia says they will go through it again with a fine-tooth comb, but so far, Hayman hasn’t shown up.
McCarthy wonders if Matthew Hayman could be the man in the mask.
It has always been more likely that Kate left the club on foot, wearing something covering her head, making it impossible to be identified on the footage, but McCarthy also has to consider the possibility that she was carried out of there; concealed somehow.
If this masked man is the same one that was with Kate, they need to find out what he was doing there.
McCarthy hangs up just as they pull up outside Hayman’s house, and asks the taxi to wait for a few minutes.
If there’s no-one home, the journey might be in vain, and they will need to return to the city, and make another plan.
They open an old rusty gate and walk up the graveled path to Hayman’s front door.
It’s rotten and peeling. In fact, the entire building looks run down and unkempt, and the garden is an overgrown mess of weeds.
They ring the doorbell, but there’s no movement from inside the house, and all of the blinds are shut, too.
The place looks derelict.
McCarthy bangs on the door, and Davies asks if he should try around the back of the house.
His partner nods, telling him to try to get a look inside while he’s back there.
McCarthy bangs loudly on the door again, and calls out Hayman’s name a few times.
Davies shouts out that there’s a car parked around the back that mat
ches the registration number they’ve got for Hayman.
62
Kate can hear movement from the floorboards above her head.
She’s weaker than ever, and hopes her captor is coming to feed her, but she’s also terrified about seeing him again, and worried that maybe this time he will hurt her.
The door opens slowly, and she looks up to see the familiar black boots make their way down the three steps.
He stands across the room and orders her to look at him.
He’s never done this before.
Then, in a matter-of-fact tone, he tells her that the time is nearly up, and soon they will be able to take the next step together.
‘Start praying, Kate’
She looks at him, puzzled, and he stares straight back at her, repeating the words: ‘Start praying.’
Kate bows her head, and with a hoarse and shaky voice that she barely recognises as her own, she begins.
‘Our father, who art in heaven. Hallow’d be thy name...’
63
Matthew Hayman’s front door suddenly opens, just a crack.
‘Hello? Mr Hayman?’
Nobody answer, and whoever opened the door seems to have gone back inside.
McCarthy quietly tells Davies to get back-up there as soon as possible, then he enters the dark house, calling out Hayman’s name.
He edges his way down the hallway, looking for a light switch, and listening for any sort of movement.
Whoever opened the door seems to have disappeared.
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