Chapter 33
As I’m sitting there at the kitchen table the rage is still burning, a bubble of acid at the base of my throat.
But overwhelming the anger there is fear as well, a parent’s darkest fear about how vulnerable a sixteen-year-old girl could be, alone on the streets of the city.
The raw, undiluted fear of harm coming to those I loved most in the world—and the sense that I might be indirectly responsible.
I squeeze her hand across the kitchen table. “Are you sure you’re all right?”
“Yes, Dad.” She takes a sip of orange squash. “You can stop asking me that now.”
“What happened to your keys?” I say.
“Don’t know,” she says. “Thought they were in my bag but I couldn’t look while I was running. Probably up in my room somewhere.”
“Have you still got that alarm in your schoolbag too?”
She nods. Leah had carried an attack alarm in her school backpack—the same type Jess had in her handbag—for the last few years.
The picture I took out on the street is next to useless. There had been no time to zoom in and the Volvo is a blurry gray smudge turning away on the edge of the shot. Nothing discernible of the driver or any markings on the car, let alone any part of the number plate.
Callum has sat close to his big sister the whole time, holding her hand.
“Why was there a man in his car, Leah?” His voice is uncharacteristically quiet. “What was he doing?”
“Don’t know, Cal,” she says, putting an arm around his small shoulders. “But it’s all OK now, isn’t it? Dad’s here, and we’re all fine.”
“Was he trying to… get you?”
“No. Of course not.”
“But you ran.”
“I was just a bit spooked because I kept on seeing the same car, that’s all. But there’s nothing for you to worry about.”
“I would run,” my son says gravely. “I would run so fast.”
She gives him a squeeze. “You’re a good runner, little man.”
“Will he come back?”
“No chance. Dad will put him on the naughty step if he does.” She gives me a meaningful look. “Isn’t that right, Dad?”
“Absolutely,” I say. “And then a policeman will take him away and put him in jail.”
I call 101 and give a description of the incident, a call handler taking down the fragment of the number plate I thought I could make out and advising me to call 999 if the car returns. He says they’ll try to route some more patrols through the area for the next few days.
Despite Leah’s protests, I call her school’s main office next to let them know what happened and give them a description of the car.
She’s been absorbed in her iPhone for the last fifteen minutes and it’s now pinging with new messages from concerned friends every few seconds.
I make her toast with Nutella and she picks at it in between rapid two-thumb typing on her mobile, some of her customary teenage nonchalance starting to return.
It could be a one-off, of course. A coincidence that it just happens to have taken place within days of discovering the secret room, the hidden cameras. Of making a phone call that first brought a stranger to my door.
But I don’t really believe that.
“Leah?” I say. “How about you stay home tomorrow?”
“GCSE revision classes for maths and English. Can’t miss them.”
“How about I pick you up from school?”
She doesn’t look up from her phone. “I’m not nine years old, Dad.”
“Seriously, with what’s happened this afternoon, I don’t like the idea of you getting the bus again tomorrow.”
“Hannah’s back though. I can walk with her again. Her house is only around the corner.”
I shake my head. “Your mum will drop you in the morning and I’ll get you from school at the end of the day.”
“I don’t need—”
“Just for tomorrow, then we’ll see about what to do next week.” I give her a smile. “Or I can take a day off and you can stay home and help me with the decorating.”
She blows out a breath. “Fine.”
Jess gets back early from work and has Leah take her through the whole thing again while I make tea for Callum and Daisy.
Then I get in my car and do slow circuits of the neighborhood, cruising up and down all the nearby streets, looking for the gray Volvo as the last of the daylight fades into dusk.
The lights in The Park are the original gaslights, which are quaint and authentic but don’t throw as much light as regular street lamps.
Instead, they give off a kind of half-hearted glow that accentuates the quiet of empty pavements on wide streets, deep shadows thrown by three-story Victorian houses.
When I get back, Jess gives me a questioning look but I just shake my head.
“I don’t like this,” she says, handing me a glass of wine. “Feels like… I don’t know.”
“What?”
“This house.”
“What do you mean?”
“Secret cameras, a hidden room, the dead bird on our doorstep, some weird guy being paid to come here and try to trick us.” She takes a sip of her own wine. “Now Leah gets followed home from school. We’ve not even been here a week.”
“I know. But we’ll figure it out. I won’t let anything happen to you or the kids.”
“Maybe coming here was a mistake. It’s like there’s…
” She is silent for a long moment. “I don’t know.
I loved this house right from the first time we saw it.
It was our dream home, wasn’t it? I loved the character, the architecture, all the little Victorian quirks of the place.
I loved the area, the sense of history. But now it feels like there’s another side to it. A darker side.”
“You don’t believe in haunted houses.”
“It’s not that. More like, maybe a feeling that something’s just a bit off with it.” She runs a hand through her dark hair. “Like a picture that’s slightly out of focus, and you only realize when you look at it really closely.”
“I know what you mean,” I say. “It’s been pretty hard to settle in.”
“Well I’m nowhere near settled in.” She shakes her head. “If anything, quite the opposite.”
Once we’ve finished our wine and she’s headed upstairs to the bedroom, I take out my phone and bring up the text exchange from yesterday. I type a new message, sending it before I’ve even thought through what I’m going to do next.
I’ll talk to you, but leave my family out of this.
Once it’s gone I write another, deliberating for a moment before I finally press “send.”
By the way I gave your number plate to the police.
The replies come back almost straightaway, three messages dropping in one after the other.
Your daughter is very pretty
You know what we want. And you know how to make this go away
Otherwise this is just the start