Bring Me Back

by B. A. Paris

  ‘Try the year of the ceremony, just the year,’ Tony suggests. ‘2013. People tend to use years, not actual dates.’

  I tag 2013 onto PharosHill.

  ‘Oh my God,’ breathes Ruby. ‘It’s worked!’

  ‘It’s almost as if she wanted you to be able to access her emails,’ Harry remarks. He lapses into silence and stares at the screen. Because the inbox contains only messages from me.

  My heart thumps dully in my chest. I don’t want to open the sent messages but I know that I have to. I click on the box, praying it will be empty. But there they are, in all their glory, each and every one of Layla’s messages to me.

  The silence in the room is absolute.

  I run a hand through my hair. ‘Fuck.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Finn,’ Ruby says quietly.

  I look at the screen again. ‘No. This isn’t the Ellen I know. She’s one of the sanest people I’ve ever come across.’ I twist in the chair, search out Harry. ‘You know her, Harry. Do you think she could do something like this?’

  ‘Not really, no,’ he admits. ‘But how well did we actually know her? She had a troubled past, losing her mother, then Layla, then her father. Who knows how that affected her?’

  ‘We already worked out that whoever was behind the dolls and the emails was unbalanced,’ Ruby reminds me.

  ‘Yes, but to do something like this? I mean, why?’

  ‘I don’t know – revenge for Layla’s disappearance?’

  ‘Could be,’ Tony says. ‘In a warped kind of way. As in – you were responsible for her losing her sister.’

  ‘But I paid the price!’ I say, furious. ‘I already paid the price! Why make me go through it all again?’

  ‘To test you?’ Ruby says.

  ‘We’ll be in the kitchen.’ Harry puts a hand on my shoulder. They leave and I sit there in the office of a woman who in the space of a few minutes has become a complete stranger.

  It’s a struggle to put aside my emotions but I don’t want them to cloud my judgement. I look at the emails again, thinking about what Harry said, about Ellen choosing a password that was easy to crack, as if she wanted me to find them. Because otherwise, she would have deleted them before she left. It’s why she unplugged her computer, to get me to look. So if she wanted me to find them, why? Because she was proud of what she’d done and wanted me to know how clever she’d been? Or out of kindness, so that I wouldn’t be left hanging? Was that why she left the doll on the landing upstairs, which led to me discovering the dolls in the chest? It seems she wanted me to know it was her all along.

  Hopelessness hits me in the gut like a physical force. It’s hard enough to accept not only that the relative happiness I’d found with Ellen has gone, but that it was based on a lie. If Ellen had wanted to hurt me, there’s no better way she could have chosen. And that’s hard too, because it doesn’t equate with the Ellen I knew. We had lived and loved together for a little over a year, just as I had lived with and loved Layla for a little over a year. Is it significant that I was with each sister for approximately the same amount of time? Was that the real timing issue? We – Tony, Harry, Ruby and I – presumed that it was the wedding announcement that had triggered the beginning of the ‘Layla is alive’ campaign. Maybe the two were linked – once Ellen had got me to propose to her, it was time to wind up our relationship. Even though she had in a way manipulated it, had she seen my marriage proposal as a betrayal of her sister? It would mean that our whole relationship had been some kind of test, and one I’d failed miserably. But to be that loyal to a sister, to go to such lengths, seems extraordinary.

  A flash of anger ignites in my brain. I need to find Ellen. So where has she gone? Abroad? Not if she has Peggy with her. To the cottage in St Mary’s? Or somewhere else, somewhere she thinks I won’t be able to find her? If she left as soon as I went tearing off to St Mary’s, she could be halfway up the country by now. She wouldn’t have gone south, it wouldn’t be far enough away. She must have had a destination in mind, she wouldn’t be driving around aimlessly, not in the middle of the night. Is she in a hotel, sleeping the sleep of an innocent while I’m condemned to hell? On impulse, I pull her keyboard towards me and bring up her search history, hoping to find a link to Booking.com or some other accommodation website. There isn’t, but there’s a link to a CalMac Ferries website. I open it quickly and find they run services between the mainland and the Scottish Isles. And when I look further, I find the timetable for services between Ullapool and Stornoway, on Lewis.

  ‘Harry!’ I yell.

  ‘You OK?’ he asks, coming through in a hurry.

  ‘What’s the quickest way of getting to Lewis?’ I ask urgently. ‘Is there a flight or something?’

  ‘I have no idea. I don’t even know if there’s an airport on Lewis. Why do you want to go there?’

  ‘Because that’s where Ellen’s gone. She was looking up the ferry crossings, so she’ll have driven up, or got the train part of the way. But there has to be a quicker way.’ I go onto Google and type in: flights to Lewis. ‘Yes – there’s an airport at Stornoway. I can fly to Glasgow and take another plane from there.’

  I start looking up flights, aware of Harry hovering uncertainly behind me.

  ‘What time is it now?’ I ask. ‘There’s a flight that leaves for Glasgow from Birmingham at eleven forty – can I make it?’

  ‘Maybe,’ Harry says reluctantly. ‘It’s only eight thirty. But even if Ellen is there, are you sure it’s a good idea to go charging up to see her?’

  ‘Definitely! I need to speak to her, I want to know why, why she set up this whole charade to make me believe Layla was alive. I want to ask her how she could be so damn cruel!’

  ‘So why not wait a few days? There’s no rush, is there? Why don’t we see what Tony says?’

  ‘No.’ I shake my head vehemently. I turn my attention back to the screen. ‘If I don’t make the Glasgow flight there’s another at twelve forty, to Edinburgh.’

  ‘You might not get a ticket for today,’ Harry warns, as if he’s hoping I won’t.

  ‘Then I’ll charter a plane,’ I say fiercely. ‘I’m going, Harry, and nobody is going to stop me.’

  ‘Then I’ll come with you.’

  ‘No – hold on, there’s a ticket for the Glasgow flight, just let me get it.’ It takes a while to complete the transaction and when I’ve finished, I raise my head and find him watching me. ‘Thanks, Harry, but I’m going on my own.’

  ‘Then at least let me drive you to the airport.’

  I hesitate, then realise I’m too wound up to drive. ‘Thanks. But we can’t tell Ruby and Tony where I’m going, OK?’

  The look of resignation on his face tells me he was hoping they’d be able to dissuade me but he nods his agreement. We go through to the kitchen where Ruby and Tony are sitting, their hands clasped around mugs of hot coffee, as if bracing themselves for the coming storm.

  ‘Good idea,’ Ruby says encouragingly, when we tell her we’re going for a drive to clear our heads, and Harry and I both know she’ll kill him when she finds out the truth.

  I don’t even take a change of clothes with me. I don’t intend staying on Lewis. I’m going for one reason, and one reason only.

  FIFTY-SEVEN

  Finn

  It takes just over an hour to get to the airport and I use the time to work out the whereabouts of Ellen’s house on Lewis. I know it’s along the Pentland Road and I remember Layla telling me that when they were young, whenever she and Ellen went on walks with their mother, they would stop to run sticks along a cattle-grid just below their house. She also mentioned a loch nearby, so using Google Maps I try and locate roughly where the house might be. It isn’t easy because the Pentland Road splits in two at one point, but somewhere along the left-hand turn I eventually find a cattle-grid, a loch and a stone house all within close proximity of each other.

  Harry wants to come into the airport with me but I persuade him to go back to the others.

  �
��Be careful,’ he says, giving me a man-hug. He keeps his tone neutral but the warning is there and I know it’s not me he’s worried about.

  I nearly go mad on the journey. Stuck on a plane, then at Glasgow Airport, then on another flight, all I can think is that Layla isn’t back, that she never was, that I’ll never see her again. The words go round in my head – Layla isn’t back, she never was, I’ll never see her again – building on the anger I feel towards Ellen. When I finally land in Stornoway, and find driving rain sweeping across the airfield and a mean wind whipping itself into a frenzy, my mood, already black, becomes darker still.

  It’s another frustrating hour before I’m driving through the small village of Marybank towards the Pentland Road. My fault. I should have thought to organise a hire car on the way to the airport instead of expecting to pick one up the moment I arrived. The landscape, which at first is dotted with sheep and low-slung white stone houses, soon becomes bleak and unforgiving, an endless expanse of peat bogs with nothing to provide relief for the eye save the distant hills, brooding and menacing, mottled with bare rock. The fact that I don’t pass a single vehicle only lends to the feeling that I’m driving into the back of beyond, to the end of the earth.

  My mind keeps going back to the keys. There’s something that isn’t adding up. If Layla had wanted Ellen to have a set, in case she wanted to come to St Mary’s at a time when we weren’t there, she would have told me. There was no reason for her not to; she would have known I wouldn’t mind. So it’s more plausible that Ellen has only had Layla’s set of keys since Layla disappeared. Did Layla send them to her after she disappeared from the parking lot? Or – and now my heart starts racing – did Layla give them to her in person?

  The car skews to the left as I momentarily lose control, distracted at the implications behind my last thought – that sometime after Layla disappeared, she and Ellen met up. Is that why Ellen never questioned me about what happened that night, because she already knew? Why she never speculated about where Layla might be, if she had been kidnapped, if she was dead or alive, because she knew? I had put it down to a sensitivity for my feelings – but could her reserve have been for a darker, secret reason? Had Layla somehow made her way back to Lewis after she disappeared from the picnic area? Is that why Ellen has brought me here, why she left the link to CalMac ferries on her computer, because this is where Layla is?

  It’s a struggle to exercise caution, to not get carried away. I remind myself of all Ellen has done, her subterfuge, her secrets, her lies. Isn’t this what she’s wanted me to believe all along, that Layla is alive? But whatever the truth is, I’m certain Ellen knows more about Layla’s disappearance than I could ever have imagined.

  The road becomes a single-track lane and each jolt, each bump, fuels the fury that has been steadily building inside me since I saw my emails to Layla on Ellen’s computer. Through the rain, my eyes pick out the inky waters of a loch to my left, black reeds jutting through its surface like a three-day growth and I reduce my speed, searching for a cattle grid. Seconds later, my wheels find it, jarring my concentration. I pull in on the other side of the grid. As I get out of the car, adrenalin courses through me.

  I look around, shielding my eyes from the rain. Fifty yards or so ahead, on a hill to my right, there’s an old stone house with a corrugated roof, reddish in places with years-old rust. Even at this distance, I can see it’s deserted. I make my way along the road and up the rough footpath to the house anyway, my shoulders hunched against the foul weather. I’d given no thought to rain when I’d thrown a thin jumper on over my T-shirt as I left for the airport, and I’m already soaked through. As I approach the cottage, the feeling that I’ve come to the wrong place deepens; there’s no sign of life, no light at a window. I realise that there’s no trace of Ellen’s car – the logical place to park it would have been where I parked mine, by the cattle grid – and it occurs to me that the link to CalMac Ferries might be another of her ruses, a trick to deter me from finding her true destination. Overcome with frustration, I give a cry of pure rage.

  Something – a sound – stops me in my tracks. It comes again – a small bark.

  ‘Peggy!’ I call. The door to the house, slightly ajar – I can see that now – is nudged open and Peggy comes lumbering towards me.

  ‘Peggy!’ I crouch down so that she can lick my face, telling her she’s beautiful, that I’ve missed her because, somewhere deep in my heart, Peggy has always represented Layla.

  Layla. ‘Where’s Ellen, Peggy?’ I ask. She nuzzles my face a last time then squirms from my grasp.

  I follow her into the house. The first thing I notice is how cold it is. There’s a room to the right and through the open doorway I see Ellen huddled on a sofa, a blanket drawn up around her. She must have heard me arriving, she must have heard Peggy bark, she must know I’m here, yet she doesn’t move. After a moment, she raises her head, as if only just aware of my presence, and the look of delight on her face – that she has succeeded in dragging me all the way to Lewis – infuriates me.

  I take a step towards her.

  ‘You came,’ she says, her voice shaking with cold. Or maybe nerves.

  ‘How could you, Ellen?’ I ask harshly, aware that Peggy has curled up at Ellen’s feet. Another betrayal. ‘How could you be so cruel?’

  Her face, so full of expectancy, sags, and I feel a savage pleasure that she has underestimated me.

  ‘I thought . . . ’ she falters.

  ‘What?’ I snarl.

  ‘That you’d come to bring me back.’

  ‘Bring you back?’ I look at her uncomprehendingly. ‘To where?’ She stares back at me, a blank expression on her face. ‘Simonsbridge?’ She drops her head – was that a nod? ‘I haven’t come to bring you back, I don’t want you back. Not after what you’ve done.’ She flinches at my anger. ‘Why did you do it, Ellen? We were happy, weren’t we? We were going to get married, for God’s sake! Why wasn’t that enough for you?’

  ‘Because you didn’t love me, not like you loved Layla.’

  I ignore the hopelessness in her voice and take another step towards her. ‘I could never love you like I loved Layla,’ I say, looming over her. ‘Why did you have to make me think Layla was alive? I might have been able to forgive you anything, but not that. Not making me believe Layla was alive.’

  ‘Layla is alive,’ she whispers.

  My heart thuds. ‘So where is she?’

  Ellen takes her hand from under the blanket and raises it to her head. ‘Here,’ she says, tapping the side of it.

  I give a harsh laugh. ‘You’re mad.’ I reach down and grab her shoulders, bring my face closer to hers. ‘Tell me, Ellen – how did you get Layla’s keys?’ She doesn’t answer, so I give her a shake. ‘How did you get Layla’s keys?’ I repeat, louder this time.

  ‘She gave them to me.’

  ‘When?’ I bark. ‘Before she disappeared or after?’

  ‘After.’

  ‘Did she come to Lewis, Ellen? Did Layla come to Lewis?’

  Her eyes brim with tears. ‘Yes,’ she whispers.

  My breath comes juddering out of me. Be careful, a voice warns. Remember, she lies.

  ‘So how did she get here? How did she get from France to here?’

  That blank look again. I’m still gripping her shoulders so I lift her to her feet. She stumbles against me and I have to stop myself from pushing her away.

  ‘Answer me, Ellen! How did Layla get to Lewis from France?’

  ‘A lady took her.’ Her voice trembles. ‘Then she hid in a caravan, then she got a lift, then she got the ferry, then she walked.’

  ‘You’re lying! There was no lady!’

  ‘Yes.’ Ellen nods her head. ‘The driver of the car.’

  ‘It was a man!’

  ‘No, no.’ Another vigorous shake of her head. ‘It was a lady.’

  I stare down at her. Could she be right, is that why the police never found him?

  ‘So if Layla came to Lewi
s,’ I say, moving on, ‘why didn’t the police find her?’

  A crafty look comes over her face. ‘She hid.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Here.’

  ‘Why? Why did she hide?’

  ‘So he wouldn’t find her.’

  ‘Who?’ I cry, suddenly afraid.

  ‘Him.’ I wait. ‘Our father.’

  Not me then. I look hard at her, barely recognising her, wondering if she’s mad, or just very clever.

  ‘How long did she stay hiding?’

  Ellen smiles at this. ‘Forever.’

  There’s something about the smile that chills me. ‘Is Layla dead, Ellen?’

  She makes a noise, half-laugh, half-sob. ‘Almost.’

  A terrible dread takes hold of me. ‘Where’s Layla, Ellen?’

  Her eyes dart towards the door and before I can stop her, she wrenches herself from my grasp and runs from the room.

  ‘Ellen!’ The roar in my voice matches the roaring in my ears. I tear after her. ‘Ellen!’

  Dusk has arrived, dragging a dark sky behind it. The wind whips my face as I follow her, the ground soft beneath my feet. I catch up with her by a stone wall, grabbing her arm, pulling her back towards me, spinning her round to face me.

  ‘Where’s Layla?’ I yell, aware of Peggy behind me, growling, something she never does. ‘Tell me where she is!’ I’m shaking her so hard she can’t answer but I can’t stop, I can’t stop the rage, because somewhere inside me, I want to kill her. ‘Where is Layla?’

  ‘Don’t, Finn!’ she screams. Something in her voice stops me in mid-shake. I push her blindly away from me. She cries out, I hear a thud – no, not a thud, a crack, the sound of a skull on stone. I can’t see, there’s too much mist, not in the air, in my eyes. I lift my face to the sky, letting the rain wash it away, my breath juddering in and out of me, fighting for control. I claw my way back, lower my head, open my eyes. They come into focus and fall on Ellen, lying motionless on the ground. My heart leaps in fear.

  ‘Ellen!’ I crouch on the ground beside her, bend my body over her, protecting her from the elements. ‘Ellen!’