Elle （Past）
ELLE
PAST
“Hey!”
Disturbed by the shout from the street below, I put my book down and moved to the window of the first-floor flat, glad to have something to break the monotony of an afternoon without my boyfriend, Jaz, who’d gone to see a friend. Looking out, I saw a young woman standing on the opposite pavement.
“My phone!” she cried, pointing to farther along the road.
I pushed my head through the open window to get a better look and saw a man on a moped disappearing down the road at high speed.
I was about to call to the woman to tell her I’d come down but she was already running after the moped, calling for it to stop, come back.
Then, realizing the futility of both her actions and her words, she stopped and burst into noisy tears.
She was younger than I’d first thought, a student I guessed, from the way she was dressed, in jeans, sneakers, and tee. I felt bad for her; it wasn’t the first time someone had had their phone snatched by a guy on a moped and it wouldn’t be the last.
I was about to go down and do my good deed for the day, offer her my phone to call someone, when a car screeched to a stop beside the young woman.
“I saw that!” The driver’s window was open and I saw a dark-haired man lean toward the passenger door. “Quick, jump in, we’ll go after him!” He sounded American and I gave a sigh of relief that he had taken over and I could get back to my book.
“Great, thanks!” The young woman dashed the tears from her eyes and began to get in the car.
I suddenly felt uneasy. The car had appeared from nowhere. What if it was a setup, and the guy in the car was an accomplice of the thief on the moped?
I leaned further out of the window, my body prickling with alarm “Hey!” I called. “Wait!”
But the young woman was already in the car. A sense of foreboding coursed through me. “Hey, you!” I shouted louder, addressing the driver. “What are you doing?”
At the sound of my voice, he swiveled his head toward me. I just had time to register the look of irritation on his face before he gunned the engine and roared off down the street.
“Nooo!” My breath whooshed out of me as I pulled myself back through the window, hitting my head on the wooden frame in my haste.
Cursing under my breath, I snatched my phone from the table, ran out of the flat, and took the stairs to the ground floor two at a time.
With a bit of luck, the car would be stuck at the end of the street, waiting for a gap in the traffic before pulling onto the main road.
Spilling through the front door and onto the pavement, I looked to the right.
The car was there, indicating left, but as I ran toward it, it moved forward and disappeared around the corner.
I came to a standstill, my breath coming in short gasps, not quite sure what I’d hoped to achieve by running after the car.
Even if I’d managed to open the passenger door and had yelled at the young woman to get out, she might not have listened.
And if the man had driven off while I was hanging on to the door, I could have fallen under the wheels, or been dragged onto the busy main road.
I walked slowly back to the flat, wondering what I should do.
Maybe it was completely innocent and the man really was a knight in shining armor.
But what if it was something more sinister?
What if I’d just witnessed a kidnapping?
Aware that I was probably wasting their time, I called the police and while I waited for someone to pick up, I sifted through what had happened.
During the whole incident, something had been niggling at me, something to do with the man driving the car.
It took me a moment to realize that I’d seen him before, only a couple of hours earlier, when I’d gone to buy a jar of honey from the local supermarket.
While I was leaving the shop, my head bent over my phone as I messaged Jaz to tell him the washing machine had sprung a leak, I’d walked slap-bang into a guy.
The jar had slipped from my hands and smashed onto the pavement.
“Oh geez,” the man had said, coming to stand beside me as I looked in disbelief at the gooey mess.
He was holding a cup of coffee in his hand and some of it had spilled through the sip-hole onto the lid as a result of me crashing into him.
He raised a hand to his head and scratched absentmindedly at his hair. “I’m sorry.”
“No, it’s totally my fault. I wasn’t looking where I was going.” I looked toward the shop. “I’d better go and see if they’ve got something I can clean it up with.”
“Can I help?”
I’d given him a smile, looking properly at him for the first time. Despite being on the old side, he was seriously good-looking. “No, it’s fine. Thanks,” I’d added, struck by the color of his eyes, which matched the blue shirt he was wearing.
“Right, well, hope your day gets better,” he’d said, moving away.
I was sure it was the same man that had been driving the car the young woman had gotten into.
Doubts about my call to the police set in.
The man I’d bumped into had seemed nice.
What if the police stopped his car and accused him of kidnapping the young woman when he’d only been trying to help?
What if he and the young woman knew each other?
When I thought about it, the woman had gotten into the car without hesitation.
But before I could hang up, my call was answered and to my relief, my worries about what I’d seen were treated with concern.
The responder took details of the young woman (average height, slim build, long blond hair, dressed in pale blue jeans, a white T-shirt, and carrying a black tote bag) who’d climbed so recklessly into a stranger’s (white male, dark, neatly parted hair, pale blue shirt, American accent) car (large, black).
I kicked myself for not having gotten the car’s registration number but as I explained to the responder, everything had happened so fast.
“I think he might be local,” I added. “I saw him in the street earlier today. I live near Waterloo and he was walking along The Cut.”
The responder thanked me for my call and said that it would be looked into.
I tried to put it out of my mind but found it hard to go back to my book because my thoughts kept slipping back to the young woman.
By the time Jaz came home, the need to speak about what I’d witnessed was overwhelming.
But he was full of a new app he was going to design with the friend he’d just seen and wasn’t as invested in the story as I hoped.
“You did everything you could, babe,” he said. “Stop stressing.”
So I’d given a mental shrug and stopped stressing. Best-case scenario, the young woman had been reunited with her phone and was safe and well.
Except that the next morning, when I opened the news app on my phone and saw the headline article, my heart plummeted, then almost stopped. The body of a young woman, as yet unidentified, had been found in a burned-out car, not far from Wimbledon Common.