Chapter 33
Chapter Thirty-Three
I don’t remember picking up the keys. I must have done it – they’re in my hand, Jeff’s keys, the fob with the frayed leather strap and the scratched Land Rover badge – but the space between standing in the sitting room reading that note and running across the dark yard towards the hill is a blank.
My brain has done something to the sequence.
It’s cut out the middle, the part where I made the decision, found my coat, and unlocked the front door.
I run.
I’ve never run like this. Not in a gym, not for a bus, not the panicked sprint to the school gate when I was late for a pickup and Olivia was the last child standing in the playground with her teacher.
This is different. This is legs and lungs and the hammering certainty that if I slow down, if I stop, if I trip on this hill in the dark and go down, something terrible will reach me before I can get up again.
The ridge is invisible. I know it’s there because I’ve walked it every day for a week, but there’s no moon, the cloud is low, and the ground is just black – black grass, black mud, black stone.
I’m running blind, one hand stretched out in front of me like a child in a dark room, the other clenched around the keys.
My boot hits a rock, and I stumble, catch myself, keep going.
My breathing is ragged and too loud. I can hear it bouncing off the hillside, and I think: Can he hear me?
Has he really left, or is he watching me from the dark the way he watched from the ridge the other night, a shape against the sky, patient and still?
I don’t look back. I can’t. If I look back, I’ll stop. If I stop, I’ll fall, and if I fall, I won’t get up.
The ground levels out at the top, and I know I’m on the ridge because the wind hits me full in the face.
I turn left and follow the line of it, gasping.
The valley drops away on the other side, and somewhere below me is Jeff’s farmhouse with its grey walls, its chimney, and its sleeping collie.
I run down the slope towards it with my arms out for balance, my ankles turning on the tussocks, and my heart beating so hard it feels like it’s trying to leave my body.
The yard. The gate. The Land Rover, parked where I left it this afternoon.
I get the driver’s door open, throw myself into the seat, shove the key into the ignition, and twist it.
The engine coughs once, twice, and catches.
The headlights blaze on, the yard fills with white light, and I can see the gate and the wall and the track leading away towards the lane.
I slam the car into reverse and swing out of the yard so fast the wing mirror clips the gatepost and something cracks.
I don’t care. I’m moving. I’m off the hill and on to the lane, and the Land Rover is lurching through the dark with its dodgy clutch and its rattling dashboard.
I’m gripping the wheel so hard my fingers have gone numb, and the headlights carve a tunnel through the blackness.
The hedgerows fly past, and I don’t know what speed I’m doing and I don’t check.
The lanes twist. I take a corner too fast, and the back end slides on the wet surface.
For one horrible second the hedgerow rushes towards the windscreen, then the tyres catch and I’m straight again.
My breath is coming in short, hard sobs that I can’t control and don’t try to.
The Land Rover’s heater is blasting cold air because I haven’t thumped the dashboard the way Jeff told me to.
My hands are numb against the wheel, my coat is soaked from the hill, and my boots are caked with mud.
I can feel the note in my pocket, folded tight, pressing on my thigh like a second heartbeat.
Your child’s life depends on it.
I drive past darkened farmhouses, closed gates, and sleeping fields.
The lanes widen slowly into B-roads and the B-roads find an A-road, and suddenly there are catseyes and white lines and the occasional pair of headlights coming the other way.
Each one makes me flinch because I don’t know what car he drives.
I don’t know what he was driving tonight, I didn’t see it, I only heard it, and every vehicle that passes could be him circling back to finish what he started.
The dashboard clock says twenty past eleven.
I’ve been driving for nearly forty minutes and I keep glancing at my phone, willing the signal bar to climb, but there’s nothing.
One bar flickers and dies. Nothing again.
The road rises and dips, and I pass through a village – street lights, a pub, a phone box, a sign I can’t read at this speed – and then out the other side and into darkness again.
Then, on a long, straight stretch of dual carriageway, the phone lights up.
One, then two, then three bars of signal – and before I can reach for it, the screen explodes.
Notification after notification, stacking up so fast the phone vibrates continuously on the seat, a low, angry buzz like something alive.
I grab it with my left hand and hold it up, and the screen is full.
Missed calls. Seven of them. All from Alex.
Text messages. Four, five, six of them. All from Alex.
Kim call me
Kim where are you
Answer your phone
Kim I need you to call me right now
Something has happened
CALL ME
My stomach turns to liquid. I pull over without indicating. I don’t check the mirror, I just wrench the wheel left. The Land Rover mounts the verge and stops at an angle, the engine still running and the headlights pointing into a hedge.
I call him. My thumb slips on the screen twice before I hit the right button, and it rings once, half a ring, and he picks up.
‘Kim—’
‘Alex, I’m coming home. Something happened at the cottage, someone came, someone threw a brick through the window, and there was a note, and I need to—’
‘Kim, stop.’
His voice is wrong. I know it instantly. This isn’t angry Alex, or cold Alex, or hurt Alex. This is something I’ve never heard.
‘Alex, listen to me, the note said—’
‘Olivia is missing.’
The words hit me, and the world stops.
The engine is running, the heater is blowing, and the hedgerow is bright green in the headlights. And none of it is moving because the world has seized, a locked wheel, and I am sitting in the middle of it with the phone pressed to my ear, my mouth open, and no sound coming out.
‘Kim? Kim, are you there?’
‘What do you mean, missing?’ My voice doesn’t sound like mine. It sounds like it’s coming from the back seat, or from outside, or from someone else. ‘She’s with your mum.’
‘She was. She went out this afternoon – said she was meeting a friend, someone she knows from an online group. Mum let her go because she seemed fine, she was happy, she had her phone, she said she’d be back by six.’ He stops.
I can hear him breathing – fast, ragged, not controlled, not measured, not Alex.
‘She didn’t come back by six. She didn’t answer her phone. Mum rang me at seven, and I’ve been calling everyone, everyone, Kim, and nobody has seen her and nobody knows where she went, and her phone is going straight to voicemail—’
‘No,’ I say. ‘No, no, no—’
‘I’ve been trying to reach you for hours. I’ve rung your mobile, I’ve—’
‘There’s no signal, Alex, you know there’s no signal—’
‘I know. I know.’ His voice cracks, like a glass hitting a floor, and the sound of it goes through me because Alex does not crack.
Alex stays level and processes and plans, and right now he is breaking apart on the other end of this phone.
I can hear it happening in real time, and I can’t do anything about it.
I press my hand to my mouth, close my eyes, and try to think, try to make my brain work through the white noise of terror that’s flooding every part of me. The note. The note in my pocket. Your child’s life depends on it.
He took her. He’s taken my daughter. He threw a brick through my window and told me to come to the school, and then he took her, or he’d already taken her, or someone did it for him – I don’t know, I can’t think, my mind keeps crashing into the same wall and bouncing off and crashing again—
‘Alex, listen to me. Don’t call the police.’
Silence. One second of absolute silence.
‘What?’
‘Whatever you do, don’t call the police. Not yet. The note – the note on the brick – it says no police. It says if I—’
‘Kim.’ His voice changes. ‘Kim, what are you talking about? What note?’
‘I told you! He left a note. At the cottage. It says to come to our old school tomorrow night, alone, no police, and if I don’t—’ I can’t finish.
The words are in my mouth, and they taste like metal.
I can’t push them out because saying them makes them real, and they can’t be real, this can’t be happening.
‘Kim.’ Alex is very quiet now. Very still. ‘Our daughter is missing. She’s thirteen years old, and she’s been gone for six hours, and nobody knows where she is.’
‘I know, but the note—’
‘I’ve already called the police.’
The sentence arrives in my chest, a thump from a fist. I open my mouth. Close it. Open it again, and the sound that comes out isn’t a word – it’s just air, punched out of me. The phone is shaking against my ear, and I’m gripping it so tight the case is creaking.
‘They’re on their way now,’ Alex says. ‘I called them an hour ago. I couldn’t reach you. I didn’t know about any note. Our daughter is missing, Kim. What was I supposed to do?’
I can’t answer. He’s right. Of course he’s right. He didn’t know. He didn’t have the note, the brick, the warning. He had a missing child and a wife he couldn’t reach, and the only number that made sense was 999.
But the note said no police.
And now the police are there.
‘I’m coming,’ I say. ‘I’m driving. I’m on the – I don’t know where I am, a dual carriageway, somewhere in Wales still. I’m coming, Alex. I’m coming home.’
‘Drive carefully,’ he says, and his voice breaks again on the second word, and I think: That’s the most Alex thing he’s ever said.
His daughter is gone and his wife is sobbing in a borrowed car and the police are on their way.
And he’s telling me to drive carefully, because even now, even at the end of everything, he can’t stop trying to keep people safe.
‘I love you,’ I say.
‘Just drive,’ he says. ‘Get here.’
The line goes dead.
I sit in the Land Rover on the verge with the engine running, the hedgerow lit up in front of me and my daughter’s name in my mouth, her face behind my eyes. The note in my pocket presses against my thigh. What have I done?
I pull back on to the road.
I drive as fast as the Land Rover will take me.
The miles disappear under the wheels, the darkness rolls past, and somewhere ahead of me – beyond the hills, beyond the border, beyond everything I thought I understood about my life – my daughter is out there in the night.
I don’t know where, and I don’t know with whom, and I don’t know if I’m already too late.
The only thing I know is that this is my fault.
All of it. Every single part of it.
Mine.