Chapter Twenty-Four
This time Alfie doesn’t get to come home, and I feel relief that he’ll be out of Raven’s reach, for now at least. He’ll be in recovery under Simon’s watch, and that thought eases my anxiety. A portion of my anxiety, anyway.
I race home as soon as I’m able to, desperate to get to Skyla, although I feel completely divided. The need to stay with Alfie, the urge to protect Skyla, it’s overwhelming, but I can’t be in two places at once.
After seeing Raven walking through our house when she wasn’t supposed to be there, it’s left me so uneasy.
Something feels off, and I need to get home, now.
I want to get in, change the locks, strip the bed.
But how can I do that when Raven is in fact Robin?
She is my daughter — my parental responsibility.
I have to accept her. But I don’t want to . . . I can’t.
I examine the results again, my eyes roving every inch of the envelope I’ve stashed in the glovebox of my car.
Is it possible that she did something to the results?
I can’t tell. It all looks so professionally done, and the envelope had been sealed when I’d picked it up, hadn’t it?
I’d been in such a hurry to see the results that my memory is fuzzy.
For the second time in my adult life I feel the need to call my parents, to get them on the phone and tell them, I need you. But I don’t have time. Every second that ticks by somehow makes me, and my family, feel even more in danger.
‘Skyla!’ my voice rips through the house as I barge through the front door, our autumnal wreath falling from the metal hook. Acorns and pine cones clatter to the floor, but I don’t care. I don’t care because there is no answer from Skyla.
Striding through to the lounge, to where I last saw my daughter sinking into the sofa, I can’t help but clutch at my throat when I see the room.
* * *
Maybe to anyone else, the room wouldn’t look out of place.
But I know my daughter, and I know how she’d leave a room.
The first thing I notice is the coffee table, nudged out of its usual position.
The sofa has depressions in it, the fabric creased, pillows scattered.
A hardcover copy of War and Peace, leatherbound and heavy, is tossed to the floorboards.
Open. The edges of the cover crunched. I want to pick it up but stop myself.
Skyla hurled this across the room. She chose the heaviest book she could and used it.
My heart slams in my chest. What did she use it against? Or rather, who?
I’m about to open up my phone, check the security footage, when it rings in my hand.
I’m desperate to see Skyla’s name on the screen, but it’s not.
It’s Carol. I’d completely forgotten about her coming to see me, but I can’t worry about that right now.
I swipe to answer but stay silent. My breathing is heavy down the phone.
‘Bella? Where are you? I’ve just been to the RSPCA and they said you left?’
‘I’m home,’ I say. ‘Carol, I’m so sorry. But something’s wrong. I think something’s happened to Skyla.’
‘Okay,’ she says slowly. ‘It’s okay. I’m coming.’ The phone disconnects before I can respond.
While I wait for Carol to arrive, I open up Life360, but Skyla has left our circle. I cannot see her location, and that sends a wave of fear through me that has me crashing to the floor.
I don’t know much, but I know something is wrong.
Skyla wouldn’t have left like this, the room wouldn’t be out of place, and she wouldn’t be removed from the Life360 app.
Skyla would never have taken herself off that app, not unless she was pushed into doing it.
She knows how much I depend on it to check in on her, to make sure she’s okay.
Much like the night Robin was taken, I start to search, but besides the obvious there are no signs of a struggle that I can see.
I bend to inspect the book, big and heavy enough to knock someone unconscious, perhaps even kill them given its weight .
. . but no. Besides the leather being crumpled from connecting with the floorboards, the book appears untouched.
Whatever Skyla had been aiming for, she’d missed.
Whether that’s a good or a bad thing, I can’t decide.
Next, I load up the security camera footage, but the camera that is usually positioned on the bookshelf has been dislodged. It always sat on top of the copy of War and Peace, and now that’s been pulled out, the camera has fallen.
I stride over to the bookshelf and find the camera on the floor, a tiny little thing, no bigger than my thumb.
Twisting it in my hands, I wonder what it would have captured if it hadn’t been disturbed.
I crush it into the palm of my hand, despising how much we rely on technology.
It is so delicate it could easy break if I just squeezed a little harder, but that won’t solve anything.
I drop it back to the floor and try to make out the last footage it was able to record.
There’s a short clip of Skyla jumping up from the sofa, the back of her knees knocking into the cushions as though she’s trying to step back, away from something.
But I can’t see what she could see. I can’t see what frightened her.
She’s turned towards the arched doorway, speaking to someone, but it’s just out of the camera angle.
I watch as she goes from standing still to breaking out into a sprint. The last thing I see before she grabs the book from the bookshelf is her face, blurry, pixelated, but terrified. Then the footage turns black as the camera falls to the floor, facing into the carpet.
The front door opens, Carol swooping in without knocking.
‘When did you last see her?’ she asks, dumping her handbag down at her feet.
‘At the vets. She went off and spent the day with her grandad and then she came home. She was here, I saw her on the security camera,’ I babble. ‘Something’s really wrong. Raven, she’s dangerous, Carol. She’s going to hurt Skyla, I know it.’
‘I thought you said Raven was your daughter?’ Carol narrows her eyes at me.
‘She is — she is,’ I say, my entire body shaking with fear. ‘But she attacked Alfie. And now, I think she’s taken Skyla.’
I don’t want to sit on the sofa and explain myself right now, but Carol makes me tell her everything. When I’m finished relaying every last strange thing that has happened since Raven arrived, she sighs.
‘We’ve got to think rationally about this,’ she says slowly.
‘Do we, Carol? Do we?’ I pull at my shirt, anything to keep my hands busy. My skin is still tender from the burn, but I pull at that too. I’m furious at myself, knowing I should have told James and DCI Gary Quinn everything sooner, because now, it might be too late.
‘I’m calling the police,’ I say and start dialling.
‘Stop.’ Carol touches my hand with hers, her skin papery thin and full of bulging blue veins.
I yank my hand away, not understanding why she’s stopping me. I furrow my eyebrows at her, my thumbs threatening to hit call.
‘Bella,’ she says calmly, too calmly. ‘If you phone the police, you’ll be arrested. Don’t you see that? You stole someone’s DNA.’
‘That honestly doesn’t even matter to me, Carol.
Right now, my daughter is out there somewhere with a girl who tried to kill my dog, ran me off the road, almost gave Skyla sepsis, stole my lingerie and has been in my head plaguing me for weeks!
’ I press the green call button, but Carol smacks the phone from my hand.
‘What the hell are you doing?’ I demand, scrambling to pick it up, but she kicks it across the room.
‘I won’t see you get sent to jail for this.’ She shakes her head, looming over me.
‘Carol, please. I need to get help for my daughter.’ I start to cry, the exhaustion from everything that has been going on recently finally catching up to me.
‘Let me help you,’ she says. ‘We can find her together before involving any police.’
I think, if I tried, I could tackle Carol, overpower her.
She’s older than me, frailer. But perhaps she’s right.
Calling the police would mean needing to tell them everything if we were to have the best chance of finding Skyla now, and from experience after Robin’s disappearance, they were useless.
I know where Raven lives. I could go there myself without having to tell the police anything, until I need to.
‘Can we take your car?’ I whisper, pushing up from the floor, my phone clutched firmly in my hand.
Carol nods and I follow her, sliding into the passenger seat of her Peugeot. What she doesn’t know is that I open up WhatsApp while she walks ahead of me, and I slip the phone back into my pocket after calling James.
‘Why didn’t you want me to call the police?’ I ask her as we sail down the driveway.
‘I told you. I’m not going to have you arrested for stealing DNA.
’ Her hands grip onto the leather of the steering wheel and it squeaks in her palms. ‘Bella, you’re my best friend.
We both know how shocking the justice system is.
Even if you were just trying to protect your family, the police won’t care about that.
You don’t think that Quinn guy will throw you behind bars the first chance he gets?
That’s all they want. I’m sure they have some sort of quota to reach or something. ’
‘I don’t think they do,’ I say, hoping that James is still listening, that he didn’t just assume I pocket-dialled him and hung up. ‘To get to Raven’s place, take a left up here.’ Pointing to the left, I hold my breath, praying James listened when I told him where Raven’s caravan was a while back.
I try to speak as clearly as possible, worrying about how muffled the conversation might be in my pocket. Carol glances at me as she drives and I wonder if she’s noticed. If it even matters if she has. Is she just protecting me, or is there a reason I feel so edgy around her all of a sudden?
I exhale as she turns left, following my directions.