24 Hours: An intense, suspenseful psychological thriller (12 page)

‘He was so angry with me. Because I left him. Because I took our daughter.’

Emily was inside.

I think I might be sick. I sit up, open the window. I hear Emily’s voice on the wind outside.

‘Do you mind,’ I whisper, the cold night air lashing my face. ‘Do you mind if we leave it for now?’

‘Course,’ Saul says, and turns the radio up.

We are in Kent now, just below London, about to turn up towards the capital, I presume. My knowledge of this part of the world is extremely hazy. I see a sign for the Channel Tunnel.

I have an idea.

‘Saul,’ I say, excited. ‘Could we go to Ashford? To the station? We can’t be far. It’d be quicker than going into central London, wouldn’t it?’

I can meet the Eurostar. I can be with Polly.

‘Course,’ he shrugs. ‘No skin off my knob.’

Not long now. I shut the window and close my eyes again. The grief is numbing.

I dream of Emily.

I
was woken late
on Sunday morning by an incessant ringing on the doorbell.

After Emily and Polly had left for Lincolnshire, I had closed the door behind them and locked it. I hadn’t gone out; I hadn’t talked to anyone for over twenty-four hours. Never healthy, actually, to lock yourself away, not really. I certainly told my clients that all the time. But it was definitely easiest, given my frame of mind. My own words bored me, on the rare occasions when they spooled out of me; and I didn’t want my own pain reflected back at me in anyone’s concerned expression.

Heading down the stairs, I caught sight of myself in the hall mirror. I hadn’t brushed my hair since I got back from the pub on Friday and my eyes were bruised and puffy with too much sleep, my pyjamas old and scruffy. I looked exactly like I felt.

Tentatively I opened the door.

‘Oh, I’m so glad you’re in,’ the woman looked relieved. ‘Laurie, isn’t it?’

I don’t know whom I’d expected to see, but it certainly wasn’t my elderly neighbour, peering anxiously up the hallway behind me.

‘Yes,’ I agreed. ‘Mrs …’ I blanked. ‘Sorry, I can’t …’

‘Henderson. Margaret.’

‘Mrs Henderson.’ Something visceral shunted me as I remembered a moment I’d tried hard to bury. ‘Is everything all right?’

I hadn’t seen her in a while. Deliberately, I acknowledged to myself now. I had avoided her as best I could.

‘I’m not sure.’ She looked behind her rather nervously. I could sense that she wanted to come in, but I resisted, hand firmly on the door-jamb.

‘What’s wrong?’

It felt awkward in the extreme. Above all else, I remembered that which I wanted to forget.

‘I don’t want you to think that I’m prying—’

‘But?’ Too late, I realised that I’d snapped at her.

‘But. I just wanted to check. Your … your husband,’ she trailed off miserably. She had a soft burr about her voice; maybe the West Country somewhere.

‘Sid? What about him?’

‘I thought … he did move out, didn’t he? I remember seeing him, loading things up. A while back.’ She met my eye, she ploughed on anyway. ‘A van, I think?’

I rather admired her valour.

‘Some time ago,’ I nodded bleakly. ‘Yes.’

‘Only I thought … I thought I saw him. Yesterday.’

‘Well, you might have done. He comes to get Polly.’

‘Oh,’ she blinked at me. ‘You let him see your daughter?’

My hand clutched the door tighter. She blinked again, as if debating whether she’d overstepped a mark.

‘Why would I not let him see her?’ I bit back my retort; I must be polite. She meant no harm, I was aware. She had seen something that had troubled her, that was all.

‘Because …’ her hands fluttered helplessly. ‘Because of what happened.’

I had a flash of myself as I would rather forget. A flash of the person this woman standing in front of me
thought
I was; of what she
thought
she’d seen. I drew myself up a little, met her gaze. Her eyes were kind; watery, the faded blue of denim.

‘Mrs Henderson—’

‘Margaret.’

‘Margaret. I understand your concerns; it was an …’ I searched for a word. ‘An
unfortunate
incident, and I’m very sorry you had to witness it. But it was a one-off, and I am fine, really, and I would never let Polly go somewhere I thought she might be in any …’

I couldn’t say the word. I just couldn’t quite countenance it.

‘Danger,’ she finished for me.

‘Yes,’ I nodded affirmation, holding the door-frame so hard that my fingers felt numb. ‘Anyway, I must get on. As you can see,’ I glanced down at my unkempt self, ‘I’m not really ready for the day.’

‘Of course.’ What was she thinking now, though? Single mother, abandoned by husband, lets herself go? ‘I’ll let you go. It’s just … I wanted to say too, I do …’ she glanced up into the far corner of my cobwebby porch; choosing words; looking for ghosts. ‘I am not sorry I witnessed it. I am only sorry for you. And not … not in a patronising way.’ We gazed at one another. ‘Because I … I do, well, I have some understanding.’

She reached out and patted my hand, still clutching on to the door for dear life. To my horror, I felt my eyes fill.

‘You’d better go inside, Laurie, dear. Before you catch your death.’

She walked down the porch stairs.

‘Mrs … Margaret…’ I said.

She turned.

‘If you do see …’ I cleared my throat. ‘If you do see Sid at a funny time of the day or night, you could … you could let me know?’

‘Of course,’ she nodded. ‘Of course I will.’

‘I’ll drop my numbers round later.’

Inside the house, I leant on the closed door, and the tears I had tried so hard to hide spilt down my face unchecked. I cried until I could hardly breathe, and still I couldn’t stop.

J
ust after I got married
, before the pain began in earnest, I went to see my father. My father, the charmer. Oh, he had everyone wrapped round his little finger, my pa. Self-made money, get-rich-quick schemes that finally worked. Irish blarney, stories to listen to all night; gold fillings, silk handkerchiefs in suit pockets; the looks and ease of a debonair gentleman – with the spine of a degenerate; a shell-less mollusc.

My mother. Small, dear, worrying. Anxious, cake-baking, making time for the sick and old of her small community, giving up her accounts job at the local brewery at my father’s behest. So people wouldn’t think she had to work. So people wouldn’t see beneath the surface. A little naïve perhaps, my mother; never any soul-searching. Hiding her misery so damn convincingly to outsiders. But flattened long ago. Deadened.

In the end, he left her anyway, despite all her acquiescence; ran off with his business partner’s twenty-five-year-old daughter. Frankly, it was a relief. It didn’t last, but the family disbanded anyway; not before time, probably. My older brother had already gone; had had enough by sixteen. He couldn’t help our mother, he realised, because she wouldn’t be helped. He left home, crossed the globe to Sydney; never returned.

Pregnant with Polly, nauseous and swollen with hormones and baby, one sunny day in September I caught a train and went to see my father in Tunbridge Wells.

I wanted to ask why he had refused to come to the wedding. Was it deliberate? Had he tried to spoil my day?

But he wouldn’t play ball. He wouldn’t answer anything, he almost refused to talk at all. We sat in awkward silence over a cup of Nescafé and some stale, softening brandy snaps, and then I caught the train home again. He never even met Polly.

Before he died, last year, he came to see me one last time, looking horribly old. Then he wrote me a letter.

It was the hardest letter I had ever had to read. He admitted why he hadn’t come. He admitted what he’d done; his shame. Trying to make amends.

Too late.

Finally it made sense. Finally I understood myself. My own patterns. The things I’d thought I’d heard as a child, cringing in the midnight shadows. I put the letter away. At first, I thought maybe I should show my mother, but I wasn’t sure she could bear it, so I put it at the back of my desk drawer and waited for the right time. It never came.

They were still there; my father’s scars. In me. They always had been.

A
fter Mrs Henderson’s visit
, when I stopped crying, I went and got in the shower, and afterwards, I picked up the phone and resolutely made a call that I’d been debating for a bit. I saw myself at seventeen, laughing, with Emily, matching peroxide hair, cut-off dungarees and long beads, dancing, drinking, with our friends in the local pub. Happy. Happier. Not exactly carefree, but not far off.

I would not keep being this victim I didn’t recognise.

I got dressed, and dried my hair; I needed to regain some control. I put on mascara and a spray of perfume. I went downstairs and finished the coffee from yesterday – and then I found the emergency vodka at the back of the food cupboard. I poured a small one and drank it in one. I topped it up.

I would not chastise myself any more.

All these things we fight, and yet, it’s impossible always to do everything exactly right. It’s just life.

The doorbell rang again. This time I knew who it would be.

T
he next time I wake
, we have stopped again, and everything is definitely not all right.

At first I think, thank God, we must have reached Ashford Station, and I grope around blindly, to sit, looking for the lights – but actually we are in darkness. Saul holds his phone clamped to his pierced ear, the other hand to his mouth as he chews ferociously on that ragged thumbnail. His window is slightly open, and I can hear a strange screeching; can smell something new. It takes me a minute or two to realise it’s the tang of the ocean.

This is not good. Why are we by the sea? I squint at the clock. We should definitely be in Ashford by now.

Saul is trying to speak, but someone is shouting at him down the phone. It’s a girl’s voice, and she sounds hysterical.

‘Janie,’ he keeps saying, ‘shush, love,’ but Janie, whoever she is, isn’t listening. She is shouting.

‘Janie …’ he says again, but another tirade begins. Despite it, I am struck by the tenderness in his voice.

Eventually the tirade ends. Then, nothing. She has hung up, apparently. Saul looks like he is about to smash the mobile against the dashboard.

‘Saul,’ I say urgently. ‘What’s going on? Where are we? You said—’

‘Shut up,’ he holds a hand up. I think for a moment he’s going to hit me, and I duck. Then I realise he’s listening.

In the distance I hear another sound, a noise that sickens me. It is the roar of an engine that is getting nearer.

Saul has sold me out. I start to scrabble at the door, my fingernails catching on the leather, but he reaches over and stops me.

‘Don’t,’ he hisses. ‘For fuck’s sake, stay inside the car.’

‘Why?’ I say. My voice is a cracked whisper.

‘Just do it.’

‘Did you tell them where I was?’ I say.

‘Who?’ his frown deepens. ‘Tell who? I don’t know what you’re on about.’

Light floods the windscreen.

‘Fuck.’ He pushes me down so I am slumped, half double, in the passenger seat. ‘Stay there. Don’t let them see you.’

I am convinced he’s done some deal; that he’s told them where I am. But he doesn’t know anything about me, not really, so how could he? I’ve never mentioned my surname, or Sid’s name, even …

‘Where are we?’ I struggle to get up.

He bends near me. ‘Laurie, please. Stay there. I don’t want these nutters to see you.’ He opens his car door. ‘The key’s in the ignition. If I don’t come back, just fucking drive.’ He looks down again. ‘You can drive, can’t you?’

I nod stupidly. He gets out. He looks down at me and gives me half a shaky wink.

‘Saul,’ I say, grabbing for his coat sleeve, but the shingle is already crunching beneath his foot as he heads towards the light.

He has gone.

I
t’s
the noise I can’t bear. The crunch of shingle beneath boot; the crunch of bone.

I fumble at the door; I almost fall out of the car.

It’s hard to make things out on this dark beach, but I know that Saul is on his knees. A smaller wiry man stands above him, a dark figure sits on the back of the bike whose engine still runs. The figure seems to be examining its nails.

The hiss and slap of the waves hitting land; the sucking of the sea as it pulls back out.

I see the wiry man take a run at Saul.

‘Stop!’ I scream. The figure on the bike looks up. The short man stops in surprise. Saul looks towards me, his face a pale bloodied disc in the darkness.

‘Laurie,’ he says, wearily. ‘Fuck off.’

‘Yeah,’ the short man laughs derisively. He is not wiry, I see now, but more like a barrel; shaggy, moustached. He spits at my feet. ‘Why don’t you fuck off, Lau-
rie
?’

‘What has he done?’ I stand my ground. The stench of rotten fish floats on the breeze.

‘What hasn’t he done?’ Barrel Man snorts. His hands are laden with silver skull-rings that glint in the darkness.

‘Can I … please, I … let me help,’ I plead. ‘How can I help?’

The man eyes me.

‘Have you got ten grand?’ he says, and spits again. ‘Laurie Van.’

Funny guy
. ‘Why?’ I ask.

‘Have you got ten grand?’

‘Not here, no.’ I try to laugh, although I’ve rarely felt more like screaming. Anything, though, to diffuse the tension

The man stares at me and then walks backwards. It is very measured walking. He is going to take a running jump at Saul’s head, I can sense it. Why doesn’t he get up?
Get up, Saul
.

‘But I can get it,’ I shout. ‘The money. I can get it.’

The man glares at me as if it is the wrong answer. ‘You must be desperate,’ he says.

‘Desperate?’ I think of Polly.

‘To save him.’

I look at Saul.

‘Yes,’ I say clearly. ‘I am desperate to save him.’

‘Fuck,’ the man says. ‘He must be good in bed.’

I don’t respond.

‘You, pal,’ the man says, derisively, ‘you’ve got one fucking useless bint round your neck like a dead weight, and one desperate to save you.’ He glances at the figure on the bike. ‘Women. All whores or madonnas.’

God
. So tired, this cliché. So over-used.

The woman on the bike looks away; Saul looks up. I cannot read his exact expression, but I think it is one of dereliction. He has given up.

But I have not, I realise. I will not give up.

I feel a flush of my own chemical relief, a wave I can ride for a while at least.

‘What do you need?’ I ask the man.

‘The money.’

‘I don’t have it here, obviously. What can I give you now? To mark my word?’

‘Your word?’ he sneers. ‘This isn’t a fucking gentleman’s club.’

‘I know,’ I can feel myself shaking with adrenaline. Who do I think I am? Lara Croft? Lisbeth Salander? ‘But I want to show you I mean it. What can I give you?’

‘Yourself?’ he scoffs.

The figure on the bike stiffens.

I think frantically. I have nothing. No – I have one thing: the ring. I have been saving it for the real emergency. But they are all bleeding into one now. Get out of this situation and I can get to my daughter, that’s all I know.

‘My ring?’ I slip it off. Maybe it’s time it went to someone else. It has brought me no luck whatsoever. ‘Take my ring.’

‘Laurie,’ Saul says. ‘It’s not your fight.’

‘Saul,’ I say. ‘Get up. Please.’

I hold the ring out to the man. Saul pulls my hand back.

‘I won’t let you.’

‘You haven’t got much choice,’ Barrel Man says. ‘I’d let Mrs Lorry-driver help you, sonny boy.’

He holds his hand out for the ring. I try to step forward, but Saul is still restraining me, although his grasp is less certain than before.

‘Saul,’ I whisper. ‘Who was on the phone?’

He won’t look at me. Blood trickles down his face; his lip is split, the piercing has come out.

I shake myself free and walk up to the man. He stinks of old sweat. I hold out the ring. ‘This ring is very expensive,’ I say. ‘It’s worth at least five grand alone. More, probably.’

‘Yeah, right,’ the man says. ‘And I’m Charlie’s aunt.’

‘I’m sure Charlie is very proud,’ it’s out before I think too hard. He stares. My stomach swoops. ‘And it is, actually. It was handmade for me.’

‘Aren’t you the lucky one,’ the figure on the bike says, through her helmet. She sniffs her displeasure.

The man takes the ring, sparks his cigarette lighter to examine it. I watch the translucent stones glint blue beneath the flame. The flame goes out; the colours disappear. He pockets the ring.

I take Saul’s hand. ‘So, we can go now,’ I say.

It’s not a question.

The man does not stop us, though I expect him to.

Saul limping beside me, I walk towards the car.