Five Parks

by Ross McGuinness

  Harding wants me to lead her.

  ‘Then can you explain why your two housemates would tell us they have heard you go in and out of your bedroom and the front door of the flat numerous times in the past few days?’

  I can’t explain that. And I don’t want to try.

  ‘Your housemates were very helpful, let us in to search your flat. We found your laptop in your bedroom, yet you maintain your captor was using it on the other side of your prison cell to control your own computer.’

  ‘I don’t know that. It is just a theory. He had access to my blog and my emails. All of that was on my laptop.’

  I didn’t want to jump in for fear of giving Harding any more ammunition, but I need to defend myself.

  ‘I’m just struggling to comprehend how you can be going in and out of your flat while you’re also being held prisoner in some kind of makeshift dungeon. But there is one explanation.’

  Harding pauses and stares at me, waiting for some kind of tell. All I can give her is a blank open-mouthed expression, for I have no clue what she is insinuating. Impatient now, she doesn’t wait too long.

  ‘The hatch . . . between your so-called prison cell and the outside world. . . there is no lock on it. The trapdoor opens from both sides. It takes a fair old tug from the top side because the carpet sticks between the cracks, but it is doable. I know it is doable because I did it myself.’

  She lies. When Phillips came to kill me, the table titled upwards and backwards, grafted into the top of the hatch. Before I even knew there was a hatch, I tried as hard as I could to pull the table out of the ground – it didn’t budge. She is trying to trick me.

  ‘You could have checked out any time, Suzanne. And I think you did.’

  I try to change the subject. But I end up losing my cool. I should be free. I shouldn’t be here.

  ‘I need to see my blog. You have to show it to me. And can’t you take off these fucking handcuffs?’

  Harding does her worst mock-offended face.

  ‘You cannot use abusive language to a police officer, Suzanne. Don’t worry, someone is on their way to unlock the handcuffs – and bring you that water. But as for your blog? Forget it. Five Parks has been taken offline. We are investigating a kidnapping, and we cannot have all the evidence out there for the public to peruse. Although, to be honest, they’ll find some way to see it.’

  Finally, she recognises that I was kidnapped. I should have lost my temper earlier.

  ‘Kidnapping is a very serious offence. You can go to prison for at least eight years if found guilty.’

  Eight years won’t be enough for Phillips. Part of me wishes he had died in that outer room. I should be ashamed of myself for thinking such a thing, but I’m not.

  ‘Miles Phillips was in a bad way when we found him,’ continues Harding. She keeps coming back to this.

  ‘He was bloody and beaten and in some kind of altered state. We’re waiting on the results of tests from the hospital, but we’re pretty confident he was on some kind of drug. Rohypnol, most likely.’

  She’s toying with me. This cannot be true.

  ‘You wrote in your notepad that he had a knife tucked in his waist. We didn’t find one. After we found him, he was in and out of consciousness, as I said. But when he was conscious, he managed to tell us a few interesting things. Do you want to hear them?’

  No. No I do not. Whatever poison came out of his mouth would have been designed to torture me further.

  ‘He told us about the kidnapping, except his version was a little different from yours, Suzanne. He told us you kidnapped him.’

  Harding takes her hands of the table, leans back in her chair and watches, like she’s just completed some video game after a marathon session and is intrigued by what will play out on the end screen. I am her game.

  It’s not the fact that Phillips told them I was the kidnapper that frightens and disturbs me, it’s the notion that they believe him. The room isn’t cold any more. It’s gone back to something more akin to the temperature level in my old cell. Any goosebumps that bubbled in my arms are dead. I realise it is not safe for me to say another word in here. I just have to ride it out. I close my face down. No more smiles, no more nods, no more nothing. Harding accepts the silence and leans forward.

  ‘Eight years, Suzanne. Eight years. But what you do now can alter that. You tell me everything and we can work something out, keep your sentence low – but if you stonewall me and go down the not guilty route, you could be spending the next large chunk of your life in a prison.’

  She’s dropped a bit of her stern act. I think she’s actually trying to give me some good advice. But I keep myself bottled up. Harding lowers her words into whispers.

  ‘He remembers, Suzanne. He remembers seeing you fall on the grass in the park, thinking something was wrong with you. He said he felt woozy and light-headed too. He remembers picking you up and taking you to his car to bring you to the hospital. And he remembers you moving him into the passenger seat, right before he blacked out. There wasn’t anything wrong with you, was there? You slipped something in his coffee and then pretended you had been drugged, and when he started to feel the effects, after he had taken you to his car, you pounced.

  ‘You had the whole thing planned out. You knew about the Gaumont. You had been in there before, knew the place was only occupied on Wednesdays and Sundays. You knew you could get in there at the back of the building. You drove Miles there and walked him through a series of exit doors – he remembers the two of you walking together, you holding him up – and then you put him in a room. Not the room above the hatch, but the room in the middle of the corridor outside the old recording studio. You wrote about it in your notepad, remember? A room with a single naked bulb and a chair and some rope and some masking tape, a room for torture. A room even smaller than yours. Yes, you went up in your room too and started writing your blog posts, but you were writing a lie, it was all an act. Every single blog post. You played the part of the victim and the kidnapper in your writing. But you weren’t the victim, you were the captor. And you kept Miles close by, beating him and drugging him. He said you wore a black mask and even wore his own aftershave when torturing him. You later dressed him in black to make it look like he was your captor. You kidnapped him and tried to make it look like he had taken you.

  ‘And it was all because he was about to expose you for the liar that you are. You knew the exposé in the Daily Herald was coming, that’s why you arranged to meet him at Gladstone Park. We have the emails, Suzanne. The email you sent to Miles asking him to meet you at Gladstone, where you carried out the kidnapping. You even told him to bring his car. And we have the email you sent to Nick Hatcher at the Herald, asking him not to print the story.

  ‘After you’d stashed Miles away, you went up to your own little room and pretended you were the victim. You hated that he was going to expose all your lies but you also hated him because you had fallen for him and he had let you down – he was just like all the rest.

  ‘And you wanted to make your little blog exciting again. The readership was tailing off – after the Herald dropped your column, no one was interested in your dating life any more. And you couldn’t bear it. So you wrote in your own voice and that of your captor’s in a bid to put Five Parks back in the spotlight. Well, it worked. But who knows what’s real? Did your dates happen the way you say they did? You seem to make them up at random – in your notepad you write about a Date one and a half that you’ve never mentioned before – you’ve lost track of your lies. And what kind of kidnapper lets their victim have a laptop to supply clues to their whereabouts to the outside world? It just doesn’t ring true. Just another lie on the pile, Suzanne. Everyone we’ve interviewed about you has told us you will lie to get what you want.’

  Harding bangs her fist on the open newspaper again, a sign of her switch from bad cop back to good cop.

  ‘But I can help you. Tell me everything and I can make sure you receive the minimum punishment. I
can make it easier for you.’

  I won’t cry in front of this bitch, I promise myself. I won’t break down. It’s not safe for me to speak, but there is something I have to say. I look up to the dazzling lights, clear my throat, pinch blossoming tears with my eyelids and then come back down to Harding a different person.

  ‘I know my rights. You haven’t read them to me. There is no tape recorder in here. This is not a formal police interview. If you want me to answer questions, I want a solicitor. If you’re going to charge me with something, do it. But if not, let me go.’

  Harding leans forward this time, not backwards. Her perfume is overpowering, her eyes burning.

  ‘Don’t worry. I fully intend to charge you. I’ve indulged you with your notepad bullshit because Phillips is in surgery, but as soon as he comes out and gives us an official statement, you will be back in here. And you can bring as many solicitors as you like, they’re not going to be able to help you.’

  ‘I only want one solicitor,’ I say, the crack in my voice audible to both of us. ‘I want Michael Reynolds.’

  This time Harding does lean back and lets out a laugh. It’s genuine, like she never thought in a million years she could find something funny in this room with me.

  ‘The duty solicitor will have to do tonight. He’s on his way, actually. Your friend Michael is busy. Just like your friend Sylvie. We’re interviewing them now. They ran into the theatre after they found you. Michael ran in there to confront Miles, believing him to be your kidnapper having read your blog. But he didn’t like what he saw when he got there. Miles was found in a much worse state than you, Suzanne. Your friends are like me. They want answers too.’

  Her chair scrapes the floor as she kicks it back. Harding stands over me, leans in and looks me in the eye. She goes for her jacket pocket and when her hand comes back out as a fist, for a split second I prepare to be punched in the face. Instead, she slips her hands between mine, inserts a small key into the cuffs and frees my wrists. The handcuffs fall with a sad pathetic plonk on to the table.

  Harding puts the key back in her jacket pocket and throws me a wink.

  ‘Don’t go too far, Suzanne. We’re going to be talking again very soon.’

  I hide my head in my free hands and wait for Harding to slam the door. So much of what she has said spirals around inside me that I cannot think straight. But in the end, after a minute or two of deep breathing, I steady myself, find some temporary composure. When I do, only one thought is left to electrify me.

  I don’t need to see Five Parks any more.

  45

  ‘You stink of piss.’

  That was the first thing my best friend said to me outside the station. Sylvie and Michael were waiting for me when I came out, just as they had been when I crawled through glass.

  ‘Don’t worry, it’s mine,’ I said into Sylvie’s neck as she hugged me. She didn’t care about the smell.

  ‘Good to see you too. Thank you for finding me,’ I whispered.

  ‘Shut up – you found us. And anyway, it was Michael who solved most of your clues.’

  Michael gave us a few precious seconds together then offered his own embrace, a more stilted version of Sylvie’s hug.

  ‘I’m so glad you’re okay, Suze,’ he said. ‘We thought we’d lost you.’

  Sylvie held my hand as we walked around the corner to Michael’s car. London bleated its last dying noises, and the clock inside Michael’s Volkswagen Golf read 11:47pm. Tuesday. Sylvie offered me the passenger side, but I wanted the relative solitude of the back seat; I still wasn’t used to company, even that of the two people in the world that mean the most. It struck me that I’d been in Michael’s car so many times while we were together, and yet I had never sat in the back. I didn’t belong in the front any more. We were finished. That last time I’d been in the back seat of a car had been on Saturday, when Phillips looked down on me before slamming me in shut.

  Miles Phillips. A name I didn’t know this time last week. A name that had changed everything. Phillips tortured me in that room, and now I’m out of it, he is still in control. It’s clear from Harding’s accusations that Phillips is framing me. He had everything worked out. And now I must confront him.

  When Michael and Sylvie close their doors, the sound groaned out of me.

  ‘I want to go to the Royal Free.’

  Sylvie glanced at Michael across the car, as if she had been expecting my demand – as if they both had. But Michael didn’t even turn around to address me.

  ‘Suze, I don’t think that’s a good idea.’

  ‘Why not?’

  The question was on my lips, but it was uttered by Sylvie. Michael let out a long sigh and thought to himself for a few seconds.

  ‘I take it you want to go there because Harding told you that’s where he is,’ said Michael. He knows Harding because she interviewed him too. And Sylvie. He turns around the headrest to face me.

  ‘Suze, why do you think she told you where he is? She wants to see what you’ll do. It’s a test. She wants you to breach your conditions.’

  Harding was right. Even though I demanded to speak to Michael, the duty solicitor did the job. When he arrived, he advised me not to answer any more questions and he got me out of there, albeit on police bail. They want to charge me with kidnapping – they just haven’t gathered the evidence yet. But while they are waiting to do that, I am not allowed to ‘interfere’ with Miles Phillips. He won’t want to interfere with me again, not after I put him in the hospital.

  Harding might not have got hers, but I need my own answers. I want to know why Phillips is doing this. If I can stand over his hospital bed and get him to talk, maybe he will also talk to the police, tell them the truth and clear my name. Or maybe I’ll stand over his hospital bed and decide to throttle him. I just don’t know. I had my chance to kill him, and I didn’t take it. And now the police think I am the captor, not the victim.

  ‘The best thing you can do is stay away,’ said Michael.

  But I wouldn’t take no for an answer.

  ‘I’m going to find him. Either you take me or I go alone.’

  ‘The only place I’m taking you is home,’ said Michael, starting up the engine like a gruff parent dealing with an unruly child during a camping trip.

  ‘I don’t want to go home,’ I said. ‘The police have been there, gone through all my stuff, might still be there.’

  ‘I know that,’ said Michael. ‘I didn’t mean your home. I meant mine.’

  The car was already drifting into the streetlights of Paddington.

  ‘Let me out,’ I said. ‘I’m going to the hospital.’

  ‘For fuck sake,’ said Michael, letting me get to him. It was just like old times.

  ‘Just do this one thing for me and then you never have to help me or see me again,’ I said. I was fed up of being controlled, told what I could and couldn’t do.

  In the end it was Sylvie who rescued Michael from his rising anger and deflated the situation. Leaning into the back seat, she assuaged me.

  ‘Let’s get you back to Michael’s and you can clean yourself up, eh? Then we can discuss what to do. You can’t just barge into a hospital reeking of piss. Although, mind you, that might help you fit in.’

  I said nothing and smiled at Sylvie. At least she is on my side. As for Michael, I’m not so sure.

  *

  Hot water. Heaven. I always loved Michael’s bathroom. I’m a sucker for a walk-in shower. I used to go in here first on lazy Sunday lunchtimes, then wait for him to follow. I think of his mouth at my neck and his hands around my breasts as the steam rises. I had that so many times I took it for granted, thought it would last forever. But I ruined everything. The only consolation now is I can run the water to its hottest heat. Michael liked the temperature a bit cooler.

  ‘Don’t go too far, Suzanne. We’re going to be talking again very soon.’

  Harding’s words swirl around me between the steam. She will come for me, armed with Phi
llips’ lies. But what else does she have for ammunition? She told me about my laptop, the unlocked hatch, but she will need something other than his statement. I am scared of what Michael told her in his interview. I am scared that he saw Phillips – bloody and battered – and believes his story. He has brought me back to his flat in Islington – our old flat in Islington – but he has brought Sylvie with him. I fear he doesn’t want to be alone with me. He has been cold with me since the police station. He won’t let me face Phillips again.

  I have to get to him first. Make him change his mind. It is far too late for him to talk to Harding tonight, but once the sun comes up she will chase down her witness and snatch the words she needs to bring me back to be charged. I cannot let that happen.

  My body clean, I limp out of the shower and resolve to rid my mouth of the rancid rat-stink that has resided there for the past few days. Meticulous to a fault, Michael always kept a few new plastic toothbrushes in the slide drawer under the bathroom sink, back-up in case he hosted impromptu guests or his electric one packed in. He hasn’t changed. I pick up the first toothbrush I spot, a bright pink number, and go to rip it from its packet – but it’s already been opened, and the head is wet. This toothbrush has been used recently. I flick the switch on Michael’s electric toothbrush in its slot above the sink and it buzzes to life. No problem there. Michael has had a recent guest. I picture Jessica, waltzing in and out of my old shower, and then I picture Michael in there behind her, cupping her breasts and kissing her neck, fucking her up against the tiled wall. I snap myself back to reality and snap a different toothbrush – lime green – from its unopened packaging, and get cracking.

  The notepad from the police station is sitting on the tip of the duvet in Michael’s spare bedroom when I get out of the bathroom. I keep writing. Harding has pulled the plug on Five Parks, but I’ve recorded everything that’s happened since Phillips came through the hatch, and I am determined to publish it somewhere once it makes sense. My readers need to see the end of my story.