Why Don't You Come for Me?

by Diane Janes

  Seven minutes to midnight. It was very hard to think positively of her errand, to have faith that Lauren was waiting for her just up the hill. She tried to spur herself on with this hope, but it was difficult to believe in it. Suppose it was a trap. Did the kidnapper perceive some kind of added safety in disposing of her? If he did, then he had chosen an excellent spot to bring his scheme to fruition. There was no one to see or hear anything. It was miles to the nearest habitation – or if not miles, then at least too far away to summon aid by running or screaming. And there was the lake, deep, dark and cold, big enough to swallow a multitude of evidence. The sound of the water seemed to grow louder when she thought of it in that way, turning into a greedy gulping monster which awaited its prey, far removed from the glittering place of enchantment which was Windermere on a sunny day.

  She glanced down at her watch again. The moment had come when she must leave the comparatively safe vicinity of the car and walk up the path. She closed the door and switched on her torch as the courtesy light went out. When she pressed the button on the key fob, the car’s locking mechanism made a dull clunk while the hazard lights sent out a flash of orange, which briefly illuminated the surrounding area before fading slowly until the car became just another lump in the darkness. She stood listening for a moment, but the effects of wind on land and water were producing more than enough noise to camouflage the movements of any stalker.

  Jo picked her way along the path, her feet sliding in the mud. There was no other sign of life, nothing to give away whoever watched and waited above or behind her. She reached the stone staircase and began to climb it, step by cautious step. Was she being watched, or were they yet to arrive? Perhaps they were timing it for midnight precisely. She didn’t risk shining her torch on her watch again. That would have meant pausing on the steps, and if she stopped she could not be sure that her legs would obey her and recommence the climb. She had to do it. She reminded herself of how often she had said that she would lay down her life if she could only rescue Lauren. Well, maybe that time had come. Maybe this was the test.

  When she reached the top she had to stop and get her breath back. The surrounding darkness seemed to pulse with menace, but she gradually realized that it was no more than her own blood pumping in her ears. The place was deserted. She could feel the emptiness, without even having to shine her torch behind the mock castle wall or through the gaping voids in the stonework. She checked her watch again. Two minutes to midnight. Would it be better to wait out here in the open, or maybe go through the arch and sit on the flat sill of the window, where the little anteroom had once been? She remained rooted to the spot.

  One minute to midnight. For a moment she thought she heard someone coming along the narrow path from Claife Heights, but it was only the wind stirring small branches. She was shaking like a leaf herself. Wherever she shone the torch it wavered like a will-o’-the-wisp. She put her wrist within the arc of light again, but the second hand was crawling at only a fraction of its normal speed. She must not keep looking at her watch. She had to stay alert for any other movements, anything at all which might indicate the presence of another human being, but as each second passed, the weight of disbelief became heavier. No one was going to come.

  She gave in to the impulse and checked again. One minute past midnight. ‘Lauren,’ she called softly. ‘Lauren.’ She raised her voice slightly. As if in response, the rain began to fall again, the sound of it approaching through the treetops like the advance of a phantom army, reaching and enveloping her as it headed north up the lake. Spots clinging to her eyelashes, blurring the bright pinprick which denoted a single light still burning in Storrs Park. With the rain came a denser sensation of cold and despair. There must be a message – some clue as to what she was expected to do next. She began to search frantically, shining her torch everywhere, kneeling on the wet ground and scrabbling among the loose stones and last year’s dead leaves, but in the end she had to give in. There was no sign, cryptic or otherwise. Someone must be coming in person, they must be. She waited in the rain for more than an hour, but in her heart she had always known that no one would come.

  Only when she eventually began her descent did Jo allow herself to acknowledge the depth of her fear. The wind was whipping into an angry frenzy now. If a branch came down in the dark she would have no warning. She almost missed her footing on the steps, slipping and hurting the hand she put out to save herself when it encountered a razor-sharp lip of rock. Emerging at last on to the car park, she was so disorientated that for a moment she shone her torch in completely the wrong direction and failed to spot her car. When the pale beam found the vehicle’s outline she ran towards it with a sob, scrambling into the driver’s seat without stopping to change out of her boots. The thought of staying there a moment longer was unendurable.

  She normally never drove in her hiking boots. The soles were too thick to get a proper feel on the pedals. The car shot backwards when she put it into reverse, made uncertain progress into the road, then scraped along the stone wall as she misjudged the weight of her foot on the gas at the first bend. Sod it, sod it! She would never make it home in one piece if she carried on like this. She pulled into the first turning and stopped to change her footwear. There was hardly going to be a problem about blocking the junction at this time of night.

  The drive home seemed to take much longer than the outward journey had done. She became disorientated and lost confidence in her route. The lanes all looked the same, twisting and turning between dry-stone walls which were unfamiliar in the loom of her headlamps, meandering on for ever. When she crossed Easter Bridge and saw The Hideaway’s outside lights glimmering among the trees, she began to cry with relief. As she turned into her own drive, she noticed that on the opposite side of the lane a single lamp was also burning above the front door of The Old Forge.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  ‘I won’t be around next week,’ Sean informed Harry, as he deftly controlled his joypad so that his onscreen character leaped from one rooftop to another.

  ‘Why not?’ Harry’s eyes never left the screen.

  ‘I’m going down to stay at my mum’s for a few days.’

  Harry grunted in response, still concentrating on the game.

  ‘Will you look after my knife while I’m away? I don’t want to leave it here, in case she starts looking for it again, but I don’t want to take it in my bag in case my mum starts mucking about in there, looking for washing and stuff.’

  ‘Yeah, OK.’ Harry tried to sound casual, although he was dubious about where he might hide a large knife at The Hollies, which would guarantee that his mother did not come across it. He had been uneasy about the knife, ever since Sean had shown it to him at the beginning of the summer holidays. His parents would have an absolute fit if they thought he was messing around with knives.

  ‘I’ll get it down to yours just before I go. She’s been so bad lately that I’m sleeping with it under my pillow.’

  ‘Why? What’s been going down?’

  ‘She’s been, like, totally weird and jumpy, and last night she went out somewhere in the car and didn’t come back for hours. When she finally did come back around two o’clock, I heard her running up the stairs and crying in her room, like she was hysterical. She’s a fruitcake, there’s no doubt about it. She’s been worked up about something for days now. It’s scaring the shit out of me.’

  ‘Would you really go for her? With the knife?’

  ‘Survival of the fittest. One false move and I’ll have her. I figure I’ve got to get in first.’ Sean paused to concentrate while his character fought of a trio of zombies. ‘Otherwise I’m dead – game over.’

  While this conversation was going on upstairs, Jo was out on the drive surveying the damage to her car. Marcus would be back tomorrow, so there was no chance of getting it fixed before he noticed. She would have to explain it somehow or other, but she was determined not to tell him about the postcard or her abortive trip to Claife Station. Although the r
endezvous had not turned out as she had hoped, she could not be certain that it was over. Yes, she was safely back home, but had she been released from the embargo on communicating the facts of the visit to anyone else? She thought not. The important thing was to wait and watch in readiness for the next sign. The abductor would make contact again, she was convinced of it, and the next communication would surely be as confidential as the last, so she did not want to have Marcus on the alert and looking out for things. At least her being at home all the time considerably reduced the chances of Marcus intercepting any communication when it arrived.

  It had been something of a shock to realize that she no longer perceived Marcus as being on the same side. Where once he had given her confidence, now he undermined her with his constant hints about seeing the doctor and his refusal to let her return to work. She knew she could not trust him to go along with what she wanted, or do what was best for Lauren. He might well have insisted on informing the police about the Claife Station excursion. She was just considering this when a footfall on the drive startled her. It was Gilda, approaching with something in an outstretched hand. For a split second she thought it was a postcard, with the photo of Lauren uppermost, but then she saw it was a leaflet about the Liberal Democrats, and managed to stifle the cry which had risen to her lips.

  ‘I’m sorry – did I startle you?’ When Jo did not immediately respond Gilda added, ‘Would you prefer me to pop this through the door, or can you take it now?’

  Jo made a supreme effort and pulled herself together. ‘I’ll take it,’ she said firmly, holding her hand out so that Gilda was obliged to step forward and hand it over. ‘Although I’m afraid I probably won’t read it. I’m not really interested in politics.’

  ‘Oh, we should all be interested,’ said Gilda. ‘Especially women. My mother drummed it into me that women died campaigning to get us the vote – we ought never to take it for granted. She had a spinster aunt who was a suffragette. Of course your mother probably didn’t have time for politics.’

  Jo thought that if Gilda had actually said ‘because she was too busy murdering your father’, she could scarcely have made her meaning plainer.

  ‘Had a bit of a prang?’ Gilda continued. ‘I suppose it’s easily done. Especially round these narrow lanes.’ Jo had the leaflet in her hand now, but Gilda appeared in no hurry to leave, inclining her head to take a better look at the damaged car. ‘How did you do it?’

  ‘My foot slipped on the pedal and the road was wet.’

  ‘Dearie, dearie me. Was this last night? I happened to be up late, so I saw you coming home.’

  ‘Why were you up so late?’

  ‘I sat up watching a film and fell asleep in the chair. I’d just gone upstairs and was drawing my bedroom curtains when I saw your car turning on to the drive. I wonder where Jo has been at this time of night, I said to myself.’

  Jo said nothing. She transferred the Lib Dem leaflet from one hand to the other and back.

  ‘That business at Mrs Perry’s …’ Gilda paused.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘I’m sorry about that. It didn’t occur to me that they wouldn’t have known about your little girl – what was her name?’

  ‘Lauren.’

  ‘Lauren,’ Gilda repeated as if trying it out on her tongue. ‘I assumed everyone would know. You would think at the very least that they would have recognized you from the papers. The story comes back round again every so often when other children go missing.’

  ‘Well, they know now.’

  ‘I’m sure it would have come out. You can’t keep things quiet in a little place like this.’

  Jo considered retorting that she had managed to keep it quiet until then, but she reined herself in, saying instead, ‘Gilda … how much did you tell them?’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘About me?’

  ‘I don’t know that much about you to tell them. I didn’t tell them what you did to me at school, if that’s what you’re asking.’ Gilda’s expression had hardened and her voice grown cold.

  ‘I didn’t meant that.’

  ‘I don’t suppose you did.’

  ‘I’m sorry about all that. I was very young and stupid, and I should never have got involved.’

  Gilda’s face twisted into an expression which suggested that she had just eaten something unpleasant and was trying not to vomit it back. She stood for a moment, gripping her leaflets, before turning abruptly and walking away.

  Jo watched her go before she too turned away, pausing briefly on her way back to the house in order to consign Gilda’s leaflet to the paper recycling bin. Why had Gilda been up so late? Had it been to observe her returning from Claife Station? After a moment or two she called up the stairs, ‘Lunch in about twenty minutes – fish fingers, beans and chips. Are you staying, Harry?’

  When Harry shouted back an affirmative, she set about preparing the meal, laying everything out for them to sit and eat at the kitchen table, something she insisted on when Sean subsequently wanted to carry their food upstairs.

  ‘So,’ she said brightly, affecting to be busy at the sink while they settled down to eat, ‘are you seeing much of that new girl – Becky – who’s moved in across the road?’

  ‘Not much.’

  ‘I think she plays with your sister, doesn’t she, Harry?’ Jo pursued.

  ‘Yeah. Most days.’

  ‘I wonder what happened to her father.’ When neither boy responded, Jo put it more directly. ‘Has she ever mentioned what happened to him?’

  ‘He was killed in a car accident,’ Harry volunteered. ‘Or maybe a plane crash.’

  ‘Why are you so interested in her anyway?’ asked Sean.

  ‘Oh – no reason. Just making conversation. Her mother came here just now, delivering leaflets.’

  ‘Then why didn’t you ask her?’

  By the time Marcus returned next day, she had fabricated a story about the car close enough to the truth, but altering the time of the accident by several hours, and saying nothing about her real reason for being in the vicinity.

  ‘That’s a nasty bend above the ferry,’ was his only comment. ‘It’s lucky there was no one close behind, or they might have gone into the back of you.’

  A little later he asked, ‘You haven’t been to the doctor, have you?’

  ‘No. What for?’

  ‘I thought, you know, maybe you had hurt yourself when the car went into the wall.’

  ‘No, I was fine. The only damage was to the car.’

  ‘You haven’t been to see him about your nerves? He hasn’t given you to take?’

  ‘No. Now what are you saying? That you think I went into the wall because I’m on something?’

  ‘Of course not.’ He laughed and quickly turned his attention to the TV guide, remarking a moment or two later that BBC4 were showing a documentary about elephants that evening. ‘It sounds interesting,’ he said. ‘I think I’d like to have a look at it.’ In fact he had been wondering if she was on something. Her eyes seemed unusually bright, and she was so restless, scarcely able to sit still. Maybe it was just that she needed to be on something. The situation was getting away from him. At one time Jo would have accepted his advice without question: he had been mentor, lover, friend. But looking back, he could see now that he had only been in the driving seat because she had been a willing passenger. Now it was not just that she was travelling separately; they weren’t even going in the same direction any more. Sooner or later there was going to be a collision.

  He scarcely liked to admit to himself how glad he was that Sean was going to stay with his ex-wife for a few days. He was very conscious that Sean was uncomfortable with Jo’s increasingly erratic behaviour, and it troubled him that, having agreed to take Sean on with the best of intentions, he might have let his boy down. There never seemed to be enough time to get to know him properly, particularly now that he, Marcus, was away more often than he was at home. In a real partnership these absences would not matter. T
welve months ago he had been encouraged by Jo’s assertions that she welcomed the arrival of his son, and would do her best to make a good home for him, but the reality was that her relationship with Sean had never progressed much beyond the uneasy provision of meals and a laundry service. Marcus was forced to acknowledge to himself that it might have been better for Sean in the long run if, rather than actively encouraging him to come and live up here, he had persuaded him to try and make a go of it with his mother, stepfather and the new baby. Had he encouraged Sean for selfish reasons? Of course he had wanted to spend more time with him, to do the lads-and-dads things which his divorce had mostly denied them. But could it also have been to score a point against the ex-wife, who had hurt him and yet managed to keep their child?

  He half wondered whether losing Sean to his first wife, while nothing like so traumatic or painful as the loss which Jo had sustained, had been among the factors which forged the original bond between them. Maybe his getting Sean back – a resolution which, if he was being realistic, was never going to happen for her with Lauren – had helped to fuel her breakdown. Breakdown: the word which so accurately described the condition towards which both Jo’s mental state and their own relationship was teetering.

  Without the tours – and heaven knows, she couldn’t be trusted with them at the moment – he was aware that she had very little in her life. He tried to suggest things she could do, because he knew that she was in perpetual need of distraction from the tragedy she carried with her every day, but at the moment there seemed to be nothing much she was prepared to interest herself in apart from perhaps her drawing. His eye fell on her sketch book, which had been left lying on a chair near the sitting-room door. She never liked him to look at her work, but since she was out of the room for a moment, it could not do any harm. He reached across and began to flick through the book.