Five Parks

by Ross McGuinness

  Sylvie took me. Sylvie tortured me. And she did the same to Miles. When he climbed through the hatch and saw I was in there, he was afraid. He was no kidnapper. He had been caged like me. She made him think I had kidnapped him. When we fought in the room, each of us thought we were confronting our captor.

  ‘She took you away from me,’ says Sylvie, her eyes burning through the dark into mine, almost as if Michael was an irrelevance. If I cannot get to him soon, he will be.

  ‘I’d just broken up you and Jessica a month before. I’d earned you. And then Suze breezed into that drinks reception uninvited and took you away from me. Just like she stole Johnny at the start of Five Parks. She knew I liked him – not the way I love you, Michael – but I liked him enough for it to hurt. She didn’t know it, but I was there watching her with him in Queen’s Park, just like I was watching on all the dates, even the last one. Especially the last one. I deserved to be on every one of those dates, didn’t I, Suze?’

  For the first time I know what she’s going to say. What I don’t know is if Michael will be conscious to hear it. His breathing has slowed. She still holds the knife at his throat.

  ‘She couldn’t have done any of it without me, Michael. Because Five Parks was my idea.’

  It’s strange to hear something you’ve always known as truth spoken out loud for the first time, as if the oxygen in the air lends the fact new life. Hardens it.

  ‘You thought my idea was brilliant, didn’t you Suze?’ Sylvie sneers. ‘You told me I should make a go of it, use my PR contacts to make it work. Maybe I should have listened to you. Maybe you should have changed your email password. I read about your plan to start Five Parks with Rob’s help long before you told me. You couldn’t let me have anything, could you? Michael, Johnny, the fucking blog … you took them all.’

  Sylvie runs the knife through Michael’s hair.

  ‘But all I wanted was you, Michael. And yet all you wanted was her. Even when you found out she was making up her features for the paper, even when she was sacked – and even when she whored herself out to the men of London with Five Parks. Even after all that, you still wanted to take her back. I couldn’t let that happen. I needed to show you she was capable of something monstrous. Kidnapping.

  ‘The two of you moved too fast. You were smitten with her from the start, Michael. I tried to change that. I wanted you to see the ugly side of her, so on a night out after you’d been going out a month, I slipped her a roofie. You remember, don’t you? She was a drooling fucking mess, but all you saw was a delicate creature that had just been poisoned – I knew then I would have to try harder. But I also knew for the future that Suze could handle a roofie.’

  She flicks her head to the right, towards the hill and the coffee shop, where she poisoned me for the second time. Rage sears through me and I try to expel it through my knuckles, pressing them as hard as I can into the cool gravel. I should have kept my hands around her neck.

  ‘When you two got engaged, I was running out of time. Lucky for you, Suze, that I read every one of your features in the free paper. And lucky for me, you slipped. Copyright law, that’s what caught you out. You wrote a piece on photo copyright on social media and I recognised the quotes in it, because you’d lifted them from one of Michael’s work groupies – one of that shower of bitches – who’d spouted it a few nights before in the pub. Even worse, you attributed the made-up quotes to someone at the Law Society who didn’t exist. I know because I checked. For the next few weeks, I kept reading and you kept lying.

  ‘I gathered up the evidence and sent it to Jessica. Or rather, Michelle sent it. Michael’s girlfriend before Jessica. You never met her, Suze, but you’d have hated her. A personal trainer with fake tits who was all boobs and no brain. But she was useful to me. Because Jessica thought Michelle broke her and Michael up. All it took was one email. Jessica cheated on Michael, and when she did, I hacked Michelle’s email account and warned Jessica she had to finish things with Michael. And she obeyed. And when you came on the scene, Jessica even tried to help you out. That text you kept writing about? “Beware the ex. Bitch.” Jessica wasn’t threatening you – she was warning you about Michelle. Warning you about me.’

  I dig my knuckles deeper into the dirt.

  ‘Jessica told Michael you lied in your articles, but left it up to him to decide what to do. And he forgave you! So in the end I had to send the evidence to your editor myself. And after you lost your job and Michael, that should have been that.

  ‘I took Michael out a few days later to drown his sorrows, but all he did was whine that he had made a mistake and wanted you back. When he was so drunk he couldn’t stand up, I took him back to his flat and rolled him on to the couch. And then your brother called round, trying to defend your honour or some bullshit. I saw my chance. After I buzzed him up, I stripped to my underwear and opened the door. I wanted him to see how quickly Michael had moved on from his sister. When he saw me, Stephen went mad, pushed past me and tried to pick a fight with Michael, but he didn’t punch your brother, Suze – I gave him the black eye.’

  Stephen didn’t tell me because he didn’t want to hurt me. Didn’t want me to find out my ex-fiancé had shacked up with my best friend within hours of our break-up.

  ‘But Michael still wanted you back, so I had to take you out of the picture completely. Once you stole Five Parks from me, I had to expose your lies. That’s why I got you the column with the Herald. That’s why I staged the fight with Eric after Date #2. That was all an act. I thought if you wrote about what Eric said to you then more details of your past would emerge. But you chose to keep lying, keep hiding your secrets.

  ‘Eric and I go way back. When I needed to split up Michael and Jessica, I used Eric. I put him in a room with her and she couldn’t resist. He was high up in the bank that her and Michael’s firm represented. He reeked of success. She was on the fast track to partnership while Michael trailed in her wake. They couldn’t last together. All I did was give her a little push. Eric was happy to oblige. She wasn’t the first lawyer he’d slept with. I sent her one email pretending to be Michelle, with a picture of her kissing Eric in some late bar. Told her I’d tell her firm she was fucking its clients. She obeyed. Left Michael and their firm too. Jessica saw she had lost, so she folded and went to another table. If only you had done the same, Suze, then I wouldn’t have to do all this.’

  She brings her knifeless hand to her face and wipes away tears in the dark. I lift a gravelly fist from the ground and bring it to my own face, covering my mouth to stop myself from throwing up.

  ‘I didn’t want to have to do this, Suze, but you left me no choice. You shouldn’t have brought Michael into this. All I wanted was to be with Michael. I didn’t want to hurt you – I wanted you to be found. That’s why I gave you all those clues when you were in the room. Michael solved the clues too quickly. He really loved you, Suze. But you will never love him the way I do.’

  I have too many questions and no time to ask them; Michael is going to die.

  A new light flickers on the trees behind the bench, white and orange. I don’t dare take my eyes off Michael in case she makes her move with the knife, but Sylvie cranes her deformed neck upwards and takes in what’s happening behind me, behind the tennis courts, out on the road.

  ‘They’re here. That was fast.’

  The satisfaction drips off her like the blood spilling through Michael’s jeans; the puddle beneath him is thick and black and disgusting.

  Sylvie takes the knife away from Michael, points it at herself and takes a deep breath. I can’t let her do whatever she is planning next.

  ‘Wait! Sylv! Give me the knife. You need my prints on it to pull all this off.’

  I take one knee off the gravel as I say it, hoping she doesn’t notice, and reach into my back pocket.

  Her voice is like ice. It no longer belongs to my best friend.

  ‘Not yet, Suze. A few more things to do first.’

  She spreads her legs and tight
ens her chest for what’s coming, then changes her mind and brings the knife level with Michael’s throat. For a horrible split second I think he is gone, but she reverts to her original plan and turns the blade on herself, letting the knife hover over her hip. I can’t believe she is going to do this. I can’t let her. I slide a bit in the gravel as I push off my back foot and my knee jars into a horrible crack, but I rip my hand from my back pocket – the back pocket of Sylvie’s borrowed jeans – just in time to see the stunned look on her face.

  As I go for my favourite spot – her neck – I hear the clatter of the knife on the wood and then the gravel. I plunge the only weapon available to me into the side of her throat and keep pushing, until both of us spill over the back of the bench. She gargles when she lands on the grass, and I crawl off her and hunt through the gravel for Michael’s belt. I tighten the tourniquet in time to see her emerge from behind the bench. Unsteady, she looks down on the bloody scene she created, like a sleepwalker awaking to find unconscious carnage. But she is not alone. She has picked up a friend. Tucked under her chin, causing the thin trickle of darkness down her neck and on to her white top, is Bob the Builder. She pulls the pin from her throat and examines the front of the badge, the lights from the ambulance her new guide under the shadow of the trees.

  Somehow, I know these are the last words she will ever say to me.

  ‘You lying cunt.’

  She flings the badge at me and Bob the Builder whizzes just past my ear, into a moving ball of bouncing white lights. The paramedics are here, and they are accompanied by police lighting the way with torches. Harding kept her promise. I hold a hand up, the other pushing down on Michael’s wound, and the ambulance staff surround us. When I turn to inspect the back of the bench, Sylvie is gone. Michael nods his head to his right, up the slope by the tennis courts towards the coffee shop. Sylvie is halfway up it, her white top bobbing in the dark.

  ‘Go,’ he says, his eyes opening and closing.

  The paramedics shuffle me to the side, ask me where he’s been stabbed, even though Michael’s soaked jeans give them their answer. I bump into one of the police officers. He is tall and lean, built to run. I point him to Sylvie and he sets off, two of his colleagues in tow. I follow them up the hill, but their long strides and my broken knee combine to open up an unbridgeable gap. By the time I reach the top of the slope in front of the coffee shop, their torches have veered off to the right, past the pond and down another path. This is where I ran to get away from Aaron. I put my head down and follow their lights into the darkness, my knee creaking and my stomach churning.

  At the end of the path, Gladstone Park opens up into its widest point, a large crescent slope that glows green in the day but is now slick black. Down in the distance, there are two small armies of white lights converging on one another. The group furthest away are coming into the park from its bottom entrance, where I was scooped into the back of Miles Phillips’s car. That’s where Sylvie is headed. Harding must be down there, holding one of those waving bright lights.

  I made a pact with her in the interrogation room. I couldn’t write about it in case Sylvie picked up the notepad in Michael’s flat, but I asked Harding to bring her officers to the hospital and to ensure their presence was indiscreet. If I turned up at the hospital, she should take her team after me to Gladstone Park. I didn’t know it would play out like this. I didn’t know Michael would get hurt. I didn’t know my awful hunch about Sylvie would turn into a terrible truth.

  And now I watch Sylvie do what I did; run down the hill through the long reeds towards the railway track. Her bright white top shimmers below me, but the lights on either side are closing in. I fall to my knees, out of breath, at the tipping point of the hill, and almost as if we are two parts of the same voodoo doll, the white top comes crashing down. Sylvie knows now how it feels to drown in those long reeds of grass. My body does what it has wanted to do since Saturday afternoon, and I throw up chunks of former curry. I wipe off the meal’s remnants with my hand and taste Michael’s blood. When I lift my head and look down the hill, the two armies of light march into each other until they are one.

  48

  It wouldn’t go away. And I couldn’t stop staring at it. So I had to run.

  I could see it flitting in and out of the horizon from my seat on the Tube. Sometimes I tried sitting with my back to it, but even then I couldn’t help stealing at least one backwards glance. It was always going to be there, watching me. A constant towering reminder.

  When it was built in the 1930s, it was modelled on the Empire State Building, from which it pilfered its name and its appearance. Eighty years later, the Gaumont State Theatre continues to crash out of the ground and soar above the kebab and charity shops of Kilburn High Road, a tall monster spawned from a crack in the Earth’s crust. I was inside that art deco beast, floundering among the rubble, buried alive.

  For the few weeks after Sylvie’s arrest, I allowed its tower to taunt me as I rattled past it on the Tube. I couldn’t stay in the flat. After a few days holed up inside my bedroom – another prison cell – I started running the gauntlet of journalists at the front door, before realising I could plot a path through the basement flat’s garden out into an alley, away from the prying eyes, the camera clicks and the quick-fire questions.

  For two weeks I slipped out at dawn, lost myself around London then returned at midnight. I walked for miles each day along the city’s canals, my head sweating under a scarf, my eyes blacked out behind sunglasses. I avoided crowded coffee shops and tourist traps. I stayed out of parks. I caught my reflection a few times on the front pages of tabloids when buying a bottle of water in a newsagent’s. I couldn’t eat and I couldn’t sleep. All I could do was walk. I lost about a stone in two weeks. I couldn’t go on like that.

  I went back to Northern Ireland, back to my mum, but after a few days it became clear I couldn’t stay there either. Phones kept ringing and doors kept knocking and my head kept swirling. They wouldn’t leave me alone. Some of them offered me substantial sums to tell my story, but I was sick of living my life in the pages of a newspaper. I ran again. I’m still running.

  I expected Sylvie to put me through the ordeal of a trial, so I was relieved when she pleaded guilty, but I also felt empty. She left me in a new kind of limbo, another darkness.

  It was Michael who had saved me from a real prison cell. Having solved the clues to my whereabouts, he turned up at the Gaumont too soon for Sylvie. She didn’t have time to bury all the evidence.

  After she was arrested in Gladstone Park, the police searched her car. They found black clothing she had worn when in the room with me, a match for the outfit she dressed Miles Phillips in. They also found a lock that had been screwed off the hatch to the room – she had removed it right at the end so Miles could gain access. They found a bottle of aftershave that belonged to him. She had taken it from his car and splashed it on to pretend to be him when in the room with me. They found a strap-on penis she had used for the same purpose.

  The aftershave was the first clue that something didn’t fit. The kidnapper was dripping in it, but Aaron stank up the coffee shop with stale sweat hours earlier – he had spent the previous night in his car, waiting for Rob. Sylvie overdid the aftershave.

  When Phillips stumbled into the room at the end, he was wavering and he was scared. Sylvie had slipped him a final roofie. I was scared too. I’m sorry he broke his leg but I’m not sorry I caused it. That may sound callous, but I had to fight my way out of there. Little did I know we were both victims.

  Faced with the evidence and witness accounts, particularly Michael’s, Sylvie made a deal. She pleaded guilty to kidnapping, and to a reduced charge of grievous bodily harm for stabbing Michael, even though the Crown Prosecution Service had initially pushed for attempted murder. Her guilty pleas helped lessen her sentence to five years in prison.

  After she was arrested in Gladstone Park, the police wouldn’t let me go with Michael in the ambulance to the Royal Free Hos
pital. I was hysterical. Harding calmed me down, took me back to Michael’s flat, and I spent the night there alone. She said he had lost a lot of blood but the paramedics were hopeful he would be okay.

  I was at his bedside in the morning. He had a present for me. My old Dictaphone was coated in his own blood, but it still worked. I’d left it in his flat when we split up. When I asked him to go to Gladstone Park and wait in the bushes, he thought he might need it, perhaps to incriminate me. He thought I’d kidnapped Miles. He taped it under a panel in the bench, then grabbed it before Sylvie stabbed him and clung on to it while he was bleeding. I never did hand it over to the police – a secret recording of Sylvie’s confession would have been inadmissible – but I listened to it downstairs in the hospital canteen that morning and used it to fill in some more pages of my notepad, recounting what had happened in Gladstone that night. When I had finished writing, I went to a different hospital bedside.

  I knew I had to get the notepad into the hands of the one person who could use it to make a difference. I was just lucky I hadn’t killed him.

  Miles Phillips was still out for the count, in a morphine dream, but I sat with him for a few minutes anyway, before leaving the notepad on his pillow. The world didn’t believe a word I wrote. My story would be better off coming from him.

  Miles read my notepad, and, more importantly, he believed me. When he was fit and well again, he wrote about the case – about me, about Sylvie’s lies – he even tracked down and interviewed Jessica and Michelle. As a freelancer, his articles appeared in various newspapers – never in the Daily Herald – but he emailed me their contents before each one was published. He wanted me to approve what he was writing. I didn’t have to change anything.