by Danuta Reah
‘Lucy!’ And he was there, on the other side of the light, on the other side of the roof space, a dark shape like the cut-outs they made at school. If she and Michael could get through, they would be safe. She pushed Michael through the little door in the wall, a secret door, and then they were crawling over flat boards and over a little wall, and there was another secret door in front of them. Lucy pushed Michael. She thought the monster would be coming up the stairs now, coming to the secret door, coming into the roof space behind them, and it would pull her into the darkness and she would never escape. Tamby!
Michael disappeared, blocking the light for a moment and leaving Lucy in the dark, then she was tumbling through the little door herself and there was light from a bedside lamp and she looked round. She was in Sophie’s room in the student house. There was a secret door into the student house. She looked round to find Tamby because she had been so afraid that the monsters had got him, that he was dead for always like Emma and like Sophie. And she saw Michael lying on the floor, and she saw feet in muddy trainers and then she knew, as she looked into his face, as her chest got too tight for her to call out or scream, that the monsters had got her too.
Suzanne woke suddenly from blankness. Her head was swimming and she felt cold and shivery. She tried to focus her mind. She’d fallen asleep. The pills had knocked her out as she sat in the chair. Her mind felt confused and blurred. She was in her study. Something had woken her. She had a vague image in her mind of a voice calling somewhere in the distance: Lucy, Lucy! It must have been a dream. She heard voices in her dreams all the time. It had come from – where? She had heard it close by somewhere, calling. Dreams. Her head spun and she let herself slump back into the chair. Michael and Lucy were playing, that was it. They were in a field, a dark field, and they were playing a tiptoeing, hiding game, and someone was calling them in one of those muted calls, almost a whisper, Lucy! Lucy!
She could hear a creaking noise, a soft thump, and then she was awake again, fighting against the dizziness. She needed to wake up, get back to Jane’s.
A car engine started up outside her window, revving loudly for a few seconds, and then there was a screech of gravel as it pulled away. She heard another screech as it turned at the end of the road. The noise woke her a bit more. She wondered if it had disturbed the children. Michael sometimes got upset if he woke up in a strange place. She checked her watch. It was gone ten-thirty. Jane was looking out for them. It was all right. Jane knew where she was. She would have called her if Michael had woken up.
She stood up, swaying slightly, and carefully negotiated the stairs. It was like being drunk, only not so pleasant – more stupefying than euphoric. It was dark on the upstairs landing. She picked her way down the next flight of stairs, feeling her hands contaminated from contact with the walls, wiping them on her jeans.
Jane’s house was dark. She had expected to have to negotiate an encounter with Joel, but the downstairs lights were off and the rooms were empty. They must have gone to bed. She went through to the kitchen and got herself a glass of water. She was tempted just to pull her clothes off and fall into the bed Jane had made up in the front room, but she needed to check on the children. She didn’t want to carry the smell of smoke into the bedroom with her. She could have a shower – it would only take a minute. She went quietly along to the bathroom. The silence of the house closed around her. It must be the pills making her feel detached and distant, but the house felt empty, deserted.
Her shower woke her up. She listened again as she dried herself and pulled on her dressing gown. The silence worried her now. She could hear the sound of cars on the main road, but inside the house there was nothing, and the house felt dead. She went back along the corridor, the low wattage bulbs on the landing casting a dim light, towards the room where Lucy and Michael were sleeping.
The night light was off. The beds were mounded silhouettes in the darkness, the bedding humped up where each child was sleeping, the pillows … She looked again, trying to see through the darkness. The pillows looked empty, hollowed as though the sleeper had left. She moved into the room, waiting to see the forms of the sleeping children gradually come clear in front of her. But as her eyes became more accustomed to the dark, she could see that the mounded bedding was pushed back from the mattress, the pillows hollowed where the head of each sleeping child had been. But they weren’t there any more.
The children were gone.
The phone lines were busy. It was the first hot night of the summer and people were out enjoying it. It was almost closing time, the first drunk and disorderlies were in the cells, a pub fight had resulted in a stabbing, cars were disappearing from their parking places or sometimes just losing their vital organs. One indignant caller reported the loss of his wallet, his radio and his front offside wheel. A celebration down by the canal basin had resulted in a near drowning, and now there were vandals or something in one of the parks. ‘It was a car,’ the caller insisted, ‘going through the gates of Bingham Park.’ The operator took the details, wondering what kind of priority a bit of illicit driving in the park would have. Probably looking for somewhere quiet to park up for a shag, he reflected. ‘And I managed to get the details,’ the caller went on. ‘Or most of them.’ The operator took down part of a number and a description: metallic. Red. A Corsa or a Punto. He told the caller they’d deal with it, and passed the information through. Someone would have to go and look. But there were a lot of things with higher priority than a bit of fun in Bingham Park. The phones were ringing again. It was going to be a long night.
McCarthy was driving towards Carleton Road. His mind was focused on one thing: keeping Lucy safe. How much Joel Severini knew or didn’t know, the extent of his involvement, all of these were things that needed addressing, but were pushed to the back of his mind by the pressing need to ensure Lucy’s safety. His radio crackled his call sign, and he pulled over and responded. Five minutes later he was outside 12, Carleton Road, where the cars, blue lights flashing, were already pulling up.
Lucy could smell the floor underneath her, damp and sour. She struggled her legs against the stuff that was holding them, but she couldn’t get them free. It was dark. She could feel Michael lying next to her, but he wasn’t moving. She listened. It was still, but there was a dripping sound, and sounds in the distance like cars on the road. It was cold. She was shivering and she couldn’t stop. She felt sick.
It had all been black. He’d covered up her eyes and her mouth and she couldn’t breathe, and he’d carried her and he’d carried Michael and he’d put her down somewhere hard where it smelt of petrol. Then she knew they were in a car, and he was driving them off, and she’d started to cry, but quietly, because he mustn’t know.
She rolled over. There was light coming through a window behind her, but not very much light. She couldn’t see anything in the dark, and there was a smell of dust, like the attic, like the roof, and a smell like old burning, like Suzanne’s house after the fire. There was a draught blowing against her face. And there was the drip, drip, drip like a tap.
Her eyes wanted to cry, but she pushed her hands into them, angry. She was the oldest. She wasn’t going to cry. ‘Michael,’ she whispered. Michael would be frightened and she had to look after him. She was the oldest. He was making noises, breathing in snorts and grunts that would have been funny if they’d been at home, in bed, but it wasn’t funny here. ‘Michael,’ she whispered again, and pushed him with her feet. She felt him move and flop back. The Ash Man had given them sweets. Michael knew better than to take sweets from strangers, but the Ash Man had said ‘Eat them!’ in such an awful voice that Michael had eaten them. They were bright red, and the red had run down Michael’s chin and dripped onto his jersey along with the tears that he was crying, but quietly, because the Ash Man had got hold of Michael’s face and said, ‘Shut up!’ in a whisper that was more frightening than a shout when Michael had cried.
Lucy knew what to do when he had given her the red sweets. It was what
she did when Mum gave her those special pills for vitamins. She pushed her tongue into the high place inside her cheek. She had hidden the sweets and then she spat them out when he wasn’t looking. But Michael hadn’t known to do that.
She heard someone moving in the darkness. He was there! He hadn’t gone. She had to lie still, she had to be quiet. He mustn’t know she hadn’t eaten the sweets. He was talking now, muttering to himself like Mum sometimes did when she was working on a painting, but he sounded angry. She tried to hear what he was saying. ‘… and get rid … keep together … won’t listen, won’t do it right.’ He seemed to be arguing with himself, and that made Lucy frightened.
It was hard to hear properly, because sometimes Michael’s breathing was very loud and then sometimes it was so quiet it was like it wasn’t there. Lucy pushed her fists into her eyes again. Tamby? she said, in her mind. But Tamby wasn’t there any more. You keep out of the way, little Luce, he’d said, and she’d tried, she’d really tried. She was trying now, trying to be brave, but the tears just kept coming and coming and she didn’t know what to do any more. The monsters had got Sophie, and they’d got Emma, and they’d got Tamby, and now they’d got her and Michael.
Stuck in a trap. Like a mouse.
Hazel Austen was standing in the doorway of 12, Carleton Road as McCarthy arrived. ‘We’re checking the house, sir,’ she reported quickly. She directed him upstairs. The house felt like a tomb. Suzanne was sitting on one of the beds, a bed with a child’s quilt designed to look like a racing car. Her arms were wrapped round herself, and her story was an incoherent stream of words about fields and voices. She was hyperventilating, and the more she tried to control her panic, the more incoherent she became. McCarthy sat on the bed beside her. He ignored the quick exchange of glances between Barraclough and Corvin, and put his arm round her, pulling her against him, letting her feel the closeness, stopping the words against his chest. He said meaningless things like ‘It’s OK’ and ‘It’ll be all right’ until the rigidity of shock began to leave her. Then, carefully, he began to ask the questions.
‘I was dreaming,’ she said. ‘I fell asleep next door, upstairs, in the attic. I was going to do some work on that transcript. I wanted …’
McCarthy tightened his arms round her. ‘It’s OK,’ he said again.
‘I woke up. I thought I heard someone calling. Just quietly. Calling Lucy’s name. I wasn’t properly awake. It might have been part of the dream. And then there was a car. In the road. That wasn’t part of the dream. It went off very fast. And I came back and …’ Her voice was starting to waver out of control.
McCarthy was speaking against her hair. He didn’t care if Corvin and Barraclough could hear him or not. ‘You’re doing fine, Suzanne. I need to know a bit more, sweetheart. Just a bit more. Was the door locked when you came back?’
Her hands dug into him as she tried to control her breathing. ‘I don’t … No. No, it wasn’t.’
‘And there was no one here?’ He kept his voice quiet and insistent. Set up a pattern. Question, answer, question, answer.
She shook her head. ‘No.’ As she responded to each question, the picture came clearer. He had some kind of time scale now. She must have been back for about half an hour before she found that the children had gone. He closed his eyes. A lot could happen in half an hour. If the car she had heard was involved, they could be a long way from here by now.
‘Sir?’ One of the search team was in the doorway. McCarthy looked at him. ‘We’ve found something in the attic’ McCarthy gestured impatiently for the man to go on. ‘It’s the trap-door to the roof space. It’s open. You can get into the other houses, both directions.’ The student house, empty and accessible to someone with a key, someone who might want to move between the three houses, Sophie’s room, Jane’s attic and – yes – Suzanne’s study. ‘We found this next door.’ A peacock feather.
Suzanne looked at it. ‘That’s Lucy’s,’ she said.
Suzanne felt a cold isolation, almost an exhilaration as though she was riding through a storm. The storm howled and crashed but, just for the moment, she was protected from it. Just now, just for the moment, it wasn’t touching her. She watched a policewoman talking to the pale, shocked Jane. She listened to the voices around her as they searched Jane’s house, the student house, her house. She heard them talking about Joel. No one knew where Joel was.
She thought about Dave. She must have said something, because the policewoman shook her head. ‘He was out when we tried to contact him. We’ve got someone at the house waiting for him, and we’ve got a call out. We’ll tell him as soon as we can.’ Suzanne returned to her seat by the window. Steve had gone, and she didn’t want to talk to anyone else. She wanted to keep this coldness round her for as long as possible, like the numbness after a physical blow, before the pain hit. Michael would be frightened. If he was still alive, he would be frightened. Her mind split. If he was still alive he would be suffering. If he was dead then it would be over.
Less than two weeks ago, she had run down the stairs from her study, feeling the optimism of the early summer sun and feeling as though, after all, it would all be all right. Her child, her work, her life. And now it was gone, blown away by something that reached out from nowhere and destroyed it. Michael!
If – if – the children were found, if they were safe, Michael would want Dave. Dave was the one he went to, not her. And Carol, he might want Carol who did eggs with faces on. The police were looking for the children, that was what they were there for, that was what they did. Finding Dave was not their first priority. She could feel the cold barrier start to crumble, and she tried to strengthen it by working out where Dave might be. The pubs would be closing now, though some of the places Dave went were slow about drinking-up time, closed the doors for their regulars, their musicians and stand-up comics and other performers, and let the night go on into the small hours. Where might he go? She looked at Jane, who gave her a washed-out smile. ‘Where’s … ?’
Jane shrugged. ‘She’s gone to make tea. Oh, Suzanne …’ There was a blind panic in her eyes that was so unlike Jane, Suzanne couldn’t face it. It was like that day, just ten days ago, when Lucy had gone missing and Emma died. Suzanne had run away then, as well.
She couldn’t do anything to help Jane. There was only one thing she could do. ‘I’ve got to find Dave,’ she said. ‘I’ve got to go and look for him.’ She didn’t wait for Jane’s reply, couldn’t even meet her eyes. She needed to get out of there before Hazel came back and stopped her. They didn’t understand that Michael would need Dave more than anyone, and this was the only thing left she could do for her son.
She checked her pocket. She had her car keys. She’d go and find Dave, for Michael.
They needed a description of the car that Suzanne had heard in Carleton Road shortly after ten o’clock. House after house was empty, the blight of the student ghetto having hit the area some years ago. Barraclough tried five houses before she found someone in. She was lucky. A disgruntled man not only confirmed Suzanne’s story about the car, but had seen someone loading something in the boot. ‘Something big, bundles, something like that,’ he said. He couldn’t describe the man he’d seen, but he was more definite about the car. ‘It was a Punto,’ he said. ‘I used to have one. Red.’ He hadn’t really seen the number plate, but he thought it was an R registration. ‘Drove off like a lunatic,’ he said.
She took the information back to McCarthy who was waiting for feedback on any recent information about cars – stolen or driving erratically – in the city that night. He radioed her information through, and the response was almost instant. A red Punto or Corsa, with an R registration, had been reported driving into Bingham Park at ten-forty-two. No one had followed up the call. It had been listed as low priority.
‘Shepherd Wheel,’ McCarthy said.
19
Suzanne drove away from the city centre. The road was brightly lit, a congested mass of cars and taxis as people spilt out of the pubs l
ooking for the next place to continue their night’s entertainment. They walked three and four abreast, wandering onto the roads, laughing, shouting, pushing each other. These were all young, teens, early twenties; these were not the places Dave would go. Suzanne had tried Dave’s local pubs, but he hadn’t been in. She’d tried two of the town pubs she knew he went to, where he’d played some sessions, and where he met up with friends on his rare free nights. She had hoped that if he wasn’t there, someone would say, Oh, yes, Dave Harrison, he’s gone to … But no one had seen him. Maybe he was home already. Maybe he was listening to a police officer and knowing that, despite his best vigilance, she had let Michael down, let the monsters take him.
A taxi blared its horn at her and flashed its lights as it swerved past. She’d let the lights change. She pulled through on red, swerving to avoid a car coming through the junction the other way. Another angry blast and a finger lifted through the open window. She tried to concentrate. She was coming up to the big roundabout now, the one she always felt tense about negotiating. Tonight she didn’t care. She pulled out and let the other cars get out of her way. She didn’t know what to do. There didn’t seem any point in driving aimlessly round places that Dave may or may not have gone to. She didn’t know any more of his haunts, not these days. She should be back home, waiting. She was heading towards the bottom of Ecclesall Road, the place where she had had her encounter with Lee.
Her mind was beginning to work more clearly now. The numbness of shock was wearing off, and the pain was starting to gnaw at her. Michael! I’m coming! Who had taken the children? Who could want to take Lucy and Michael?
Lucy had gone missing before. Everyone thought that was because Emma had been attacked, but what if whoever had taken Emma had wanted Lucy as well? And Lucy, ever resourceful, had managed to get away. But that person had come back, had watched and waited and chosen the moment. Steve was looking. He must have worked that out as well. And the person who’d taken Michael and Lucy must be the same person who’d broken into her house, killed Ashley and nearly killed her as well. The person who’d killed Emma and Sophie. Knives and mud and flames. The car veered as she gripped the wheel against the pictures of Michael, Lucy …