Someone to Watch Over Me (32 page)

‘Molly? Max?'

Her words echoed round the empty house, and again she had that sense of prickling dread. There was a sudden noise from above and she switched her torch on, the beam picking out a pair of cat's eyes staring at her from the top of the stairs. Carrie started up the stairs and the cat disappeared with a low whimpering mew. She felt around the wall of the first room and switched on the light to reveal what was clearly a boy's room. A half-finished Lego model stood on the desk and there was a line of small cars crossing the carpet. The bed with its
SpongeBob
duvet had been made, but then disturbed, the corner of the duvet pulled back. It was instinct that made Carrie reach under the pillow and feel around. This was where Charlie used to leave messages for her. Unable yet to write anything but his name and very basic sentences, he often used to draw pictures as a way of explaining to her how he was feeling. She had kept many of his drawings of smiling Charlie and snarling Charlie and Charlie with teardrops as big as pears sliding down his face. Carrie found a small piece of folded paper under the pillow. She opened it up and read the hastily scrawled words.

My Dad is taking us. He hurt my Mum. Please help us. Max

Carrie let herself out of the house through the front door and got into her car. She rang the police straight away, worried that ringing 999 might not be appropriate, and yet not knowing what else to do. She spent some time explaining what had happened and then was passed to another person and had to explain the same information all over again.

‘I really think something needs to be done now. I think it's urgent,' said Carrie, trying to communicate her unease to the police officer, who seemed to be more concerned with establishing her exact relationship with the people who lived at the address she had given him than providing her with the reassurance she was looking for. It was not surprising that the copper was confused; she would be too if someone rang up and told her they were following a hunch that had come via a message from a medium.

‘We are aware of a potential situation at that address already, Mrs Hudson,' said the third police person she was put through to. ‘We have already received a report of two missing persons from a neighbour of Mrs Reardon's. The matter's in hand.'

Carrie agreed to come into the station on her return to Cambridge. Still feeling anxious, but unable to think what she could usefully do, she set off back. The night had fallen suddenly and she had to use all her concentration to navigate the narrow road, the rain having made the surface of the road even muddier than it had been on the way there. Her tyres were sliding perilously near the edge of the water. Some movement on the periphery of her vision made her look in her rear view mirror. She caught a glimpse of a man standing quite still in the middle of the road, staring ahead, and then her car moved forward and the road went dark and she could no longer see anything at all.

It was around midday when Molly heard him arrive. He looked more unkempt than he had done before. The bottoms of his trousers were muddy and he had taken off his hat to reveal long dirty hair. He smelt of wet fur and damp earth. She wouldn't have recognised him now as her husband, as anyone she had ever known. He had become utterly alien to her now, another species. Max stared wide-eyed at his father. His breathing was laboured and he was too weak to do anything other than stay lying across her.

‘Rupert, we are losing him. Do what you like to me, but please, let him go.' Molly gently pushed Max aside and got up. It took all of her strength not to reveal her fear to him.

‘Please. Just open the door.' She approached Rupert as she would a wild creature. She moved slowly and then took hold of his arm in entreaty, but he shrugged her off and went towards Max. The boy looked at him, unmoving.

‘We threw the eel away,' said Max, ‘but I can still smell it.'

Rupert bent down and picked the boy up. He walked over to one of the large tanks in the centre of the room and opened the hinged door. Molly lunged at him, attaching herself to his back, digging her hands into his neck and biting him as hard as she could. Rupert barely acknowledged the pain. Batting her off, he slid an unresisting Max inside the drum and shut the door.

‘No. Rupert no! He won't be able to breathe.' Molly screamed in panic, feeling what was left of her control slipping away.

Molly clutched him around the bottoms of his legs, trying to get the scythe from under her shirt, wrestling with the fastening. She couldn't get it free. He grabbed a handful of her hair and pulled her towards the other drum. Molly fought hard, feeling a great clump of her hair rip itself from her scalp as he dragged her along.
He opened the second drum and began to push her in
to it. Molly held on to the metal rim resisting his attempts to put her inside. She kicked out towards him, making enough contact with his stomach to cause him to move back, winded, but it was as if he was oblivious to all obstacles. His eyes were blank. He felt as immovable as the flank of a large mammal. It was as if the man had gone and been replaced by this implacable being. All of him had become terrifyingly focused in this fierce, blind strength. He pushed her inside and then everything went black as the heavy metal door shut and she heard the metal slot slip into place. For a moment she panicked, feeling the space tight around her, her legs bent slightly against the end of the barrel. Time moved slowly and she could feel her breath ragged in the back of her throat. This is the last thing I'm going to feel, before I die, she thought, and then Max, oh Max. She turned her head and saw a series of holes the size of small coins at the side of the metal drum, through which came the faint traces of light. She put her mouth to the holes, breathing as if she had just surfaced from water.

‘Max!' shouted Molly through the holes. ‘Max, breathe through the holes. Breathe, Max.'

She stopped moving to listen, but there was no response and so she shouted again. She wriggled round onto her other side and managed this time to tear at the plastic ribbon holding the scythe in place. She knocked the wooden handle of the tool as hard as she could against the top of the drum. She stopped and listened, but there was still no response so she knocked again. Her body was icy cold and she was weeping uncontrollably, but she kept banging on the ceiling of her circular prison. She stopped again and listened. With a great leap of joy, she could just make out a gentle tapping noise coming from Max's direction.

At the police station Carrie got the impression they didn't quite know what to make of her story. They asked her again and again how it was that she had ended up in that place if it was true that she really didn't know Molly and Max, other than the brief sighting she had had of them on a beach three years ago, and one recent conversation with them in her shop. Every time she repeated her story it felt more ludicrous. The policeman who had been there the day she and Damian had looked at those terrible photographs was kind, going out to get her a cup of tea, hot and sweet and in a proper mug. She wondered where he was now, that child in the photographs, and whether he had found his way home. The world seemed to be full of lost children and Carrie felt a sudden sharp grief for all of them. For her Charlie, and this boy Max, and that other boy with his tight little fists.

When Carrie finally got back to her house, she found the place cold and cheerless and she shivered as she put on the heating and closed the curtains. Although she knew that there was nothing else she could do she still felt restless. She thought about ringing Simon to find out if Charlie had come through to him again, but changed her mind. The police had been given all the information available to her and it was up to them now to find out what had happened to Molly and Max. She had done her bit. Her stomach growled. She tried to remember the last time she had eaten and realised that it was probably the midnight breakfast that Oliver had made for her. Despite what had happened this morning, she felt a wave of longing for him. He might be a bastard, but he knew how to make the world go away and she could certainly do with a bit of that at the moment. She put some slices of cheese on toast under the grill and more for form's sake than any real desire, chopped up a green pepper with some cucumber and a splash of olive oil. She ate her hastily prepared meal in front of
EastEnders
and then went upstairs to run herself a bath.

She was lying in a bath of fast-cooling water, too tired to get herself out, when she heard the doorbell. She got out hastily, pulling her dressing gown on without drying herself, and dripped all the way down the stairs. Oliver was standing on the doorstep.

‘Hello Carrie, can I come in?' he asked.

Carrie hesitated. ‘I'm really tired, Oliver,' she said. ‘I've had a bit of a day …'

‘Please. I want to know why you left my house so suddenly,' he said.

‘Are you telling me you really don't know?' said Carrie, reluctantly, opening the door wider to let him in.

‘I have an idea,' said Oliver. ‘But that's what I want to talk about.'

Carrie led him into the front room and rather ungraciously offered him a drink.

‘A glass of wine would be great,' he said, sitting down on the revamped sofa.

Carrie poured two glasses and then went to sit away from him on the armchair by the fireplace. She didn't bother to light the fire. She didn't want him to think that she was in any way interested in having him stay longer than absolutely necessary. She would hear what the lying scumbag had to say and then he could go.

‘I expect you saw the clothes around the house and jumped to a conclusion,' said Oliver.

‘Yes. The conclusion that four hours after I had left your bed this morning, another woman came round and took her very expensive slip off in your front room,' said Carrie, wishing she hadn't mentioned that she thought the slip looked expensive. It suggested too close a scrutiny of the offending object. ‘And then followed that by discarding her fairly sluttish heels on your floor,' she went on.

‘I can see how it must have looked,' said Olive. ‘But I didn't sleep with her.'

‘Right. So what
did
you do with her?' asked Carrie. ‘A spot of wrestling? Some gardening perhaps?'

‘Jasmine is an ex-girlfriend. She has a rather … chaotic life, sometimes she ends up at my house, sleeping it off; in this case not in her underwear but in some pyjamas I lent her.'

‘What's the longest relationship you've had with anyone?' asked Carrie.

Oliver took a sip of his wine and looked away from Carrie.

‘My life hasn't exactly been conducive to long-term relationships,' he said. ‘I've travelled a lot. Not really met anyone I wanted to stick with or who wanted to stick with me.'

‘What would make you want to stick with someone?' asked Carrie.

‘I don't know. I think I'll know it when I see it. Maybe,' said Oliver.

Carrie went over to sit beside him.

‘I just can't afford to start something that's going to hurt me, Oliver. I haven't got the strength. I want something right and good. Something sustaining,' she said, feeling the pull of him despite herself and the careful way she was sitting apart from him.

‘I don't think I fit the job description,' said Oliver. ‘In my parents' house George's room is still exactly as it was the day he left it. I mean every detail, down to the clothes on the bed, his scuffed shoes on the carpet. He is still the bit of them that they thought the most precious. I did that to them. I don't mean to, but I cause harm.'

‘I don't know your parents,' said Carrie. ‘But I would lay money that they don't think the way you are describing.'

‘I don't know,' said Oliver. ‘I just know I can never make it better for them.'

‘It's not your job to make it better for them. They have to find a way of doing that for themselves,' said Carrie.

‘I like you, Carrie,' said Oliver. ‘
Really
like you. I'd like us to be together, but I can't tell you it will work out. My track record isn't exactly impressive.'

Carrie looked at him for a moment. She wanted to throw herself into his arms and allow herself to be carried upstairs to bed, but she knew that being with Oliver would open her up to the possibility of more pain and she didn't think she was equipped to deal with it.

‘I can't,' said Carrie. ‘I can't take the chance.' Carrie put her glass on the floor and stood up.

‘I'm sorry, Oliver,' she said, and was surprised by the regret she saw in his face.

As he left, Oliver stroked her cheek with one finger. Afterwards as she lay in bed, she thought she could still feel where he had touched her.

Carrie woke the next morning to see Pam standing at the end of her bed, surveying her. Her mother pulled open the curtains to reveal a bright blue sky and roofs iced with frost, then settled herself on the end of the bed.

‘You sleep on your side with your arms stretched out,' Pam said. ‘That means you are what sleep specialists call a yearner, someone with an open nature but who is prone to suspicion.'

‘I yearn to be left alone by my mother,' said Carrie, rolling over and burying her face in her pillow.

‘Listen Carrie, Simon's downstairs. He's had another message. I think you should come down,' said Pam, stroking her daughter's head and getting to her feet. Carrie felt a sinking sense of dread. This thing wasn't going to leave her alone after all. Still half asleep, she got up and followed her mother downstairs.

Simon was sitting at the kitchen table with a cup of tea. Carrie noted that Pam can hardly have been in a hurry to come upstairs to wake her if she had taken the time to make him a drink. Her suspicions about her mother's intentions were confirmed when she saw Pam put an almost proprietorial hand on the back of the chair Simon was sitting on. He looked up as she came into the room.