The Captive

by Deborah O'Connor

  Her hand went to her belly. From everything she’d read she knew that at this stage the baby would be fine, that it was too small for the impact to have caused it harm, and yet her instinct told her she’d be wrong to try to scale the fence, and possibly fall, again.

  Brushing the frost from her knees, she was revisiting the Maraschino option when she noticed her tumble had dislodged the gates. There’d been more give in the chain than she’d realised and the force of her fall had shoved the right side open, creating a tiny gap.

  She got down on the floor, took off her rucksack and threaded her arms and then her head and shoulders through the opening. Then she reached for her bag.

  She was in.

  The mansion lay ahead, dishevelled and rotting.

  She got to her feet and jogged down the drive and round the back to the basement.

  The steps that led down to the door were smeared with ice and so she broached them with care, but on the second step down her foot went out from under her. Flailing, her right hand collided with an old hanging basket and she grabbed it, her shoulder slamming hard against the brick. Breath ragged, she kept hold of it and slid down the wall until she reached a sitting position. Not wanting to risk another fall, she navigated the final few steps on her bottom.

  The cold had made the door stiff and she had to shove her shoulder hard against it to get it open. She paused on the threshold, listening for any sound that might indicate she had been followed; then, closing the door behind her, she went inside.

  The laundry room was dank, the air spored with dust. Something ran across her foot and she jumped. Then she laughed, her heart skittish against her ribs.

  She got out her torch and turned it on. Light poled through the black, revealing a cupboard door swollen with moisture lolling from its hinges. A takeaway menu curled on the noticeboard. She followed the beam down the hall, past the chlorine reek of the pump room, toward the garage.

  ‘Jem?’ she said quietly and then, when there was no response, a little louder. ‘Jem?’

  Maybe he was hiding?

  It would be the sensible thing to do, keep out of sight until he knew for sure it was her.

  She opened the door into the garage and swung her torch around. The cars sat in their row, stately and silent. She licked her lips and felt grit, coarse as sand.

  ‘Jem?’ She strained her eyes and ears for any sign of him. ‘It’s me, Hannah.’

  Maybe he was still trying to make his way across the ice? There was no knowing how long that would take.

  She decided to head up to the first floor. The master bedroom overlooked the garden. She’d watch and wait for him to appear.

  Her torch led the way, the beam dancing across bulging walls and piles of debris, to the entrance hall and the winding staircase, blanketed with ferns. At night the foliage looked black, the furled leaves like tentacles, reaching. She edged her way up the stairs, the plants hushing around her knees. A frond tickled her cheek and she recoiled as if slapped.

  In the bedroom she kicked her way through the pigeon bones and over to the window. The top pane was cracked and had a small hole in the bottom corner. She searched the dark below for movement but there was nothing.

  Where was he?

  Across the pond she sought out her house in among the others and saw that the guards had turned on all the lights. The curtains were open, the windows vacant holes.

  Five minutes passed, then ten.

  She’d just started to consider the possibility that the guards had spotted him on the ice and made pursuit when there was a beep.

  A message on her pay-as-you-go.

  Jem.

  It was like someone had taken a bat to the back of her knees. He was OK, just delayed. Maybe a passer-by had seen him and he’d had to hide out in the reeds until they were gone?

  She reached inside the backpack for the phone and her hand bashed against something sharp, a corner, hard and metallic. She opened the bag a little wider. Sitting on top of her things was a silver rectangle. The size of a paperback, it had white stickers printed with barcodes stuck to its outside. A hard drive of some kind? She delved deeper, searching for the phone, and landed on a jumper and a pair of jeans. Jem’s clothes.

  She’d picked up the wrong bag. Their packs were identical and so till now she’d had no idea. She looked again at the metal drive. She’d watched Jem place everything inside his bag, so when had this found its way inside?

  Finally, she located the phone, Jem’s phone, and read the text.

  Don’t worry. I have it.

  She read it twice more, trying to make sense of the words.

  ‘Have it.’ Have what?

  She clicked on the message and opened it full screen to reply. It was then she saw that this message was a follow-on from an earlier text sent by the same number.

  I’ll be there. See you in a couple of hours.

  Her gut knew it first, that same ancient part of her nervous system that made her cross the street long before she heard the footsteps of a man walking too close for comfort.

  She scrolled back up to the top of the conversation, to the first message in the sequence.

  It’s on. Leaving now. Cobham services, Esso forecourt. Remember, stay out of sight. I’ll find you.

  Sent 4.16 p.m.

  4.16 p.m., a few minutes before they’d been about to leave. Jem must have written it when he went upstairs to use the toilet.

  She looked again at the overgrown garden. The wind was getting up and with it came the odd flake of snow, sludgy and deformed.

  Jem wasn’t delayed. He hadn’t been caught.

  He wasn’t coming.

  Their relationship had been a ruse all along. A means of escape. A way for him to break out and take this hard drive, or whatever it was, with him.

  She knew she should feel betrayed, that she should be angry at him and his lies, but right now in this moment, more than anything else, she felt sorry for him. Sad that he was the kind of person who felt able to do this to her, to their baby.

  She turned off the torch and let the darkness cover her like a blanket. Outside, the pond glowed with reflected light. A sickly beacon; she couldn’t tell if it was calling her home or warning her to stay away.

  The snow was thickening, the sky a blurry mess. She poked a finger through the broken pane and caught the fattest flake she could. It was pure white but when she placed it on her tongue it fizzed like ash, dirty and grey.

  Jem

  The interesting thing about watching a magic trick is that you’re agreeing to be deceived. You agree even though you don’t really know when and where the deception might take place.

  From the moment I was found guilty I began to plan. To plot. I had one goal: to access the money in time to donate it to the Tarkers and hopefully save Lucas’s life.

  Whatever it took to make this happen, I’d do it.

  And so, from the minute I arrived at the house I started stealing – from the guards, from Mr Dalgliesh, even Hannah – taking anything I could because I knew that even the most random of objects might come in useful later, that I could use them to create opportunities.

  I learned about the trick with the magnet while I was in the Holding Centre. If you placed it in a particular spot on the cell side of the door it would stop the electronic lock from functioning. But, as all those convicts would lament, you could use magnets all you liked; to get out you still needed the manual key. And even then, the electric fence made escape impossible.

  But I didn’t want to escape. What I wanted was inside the house.

  If you don’t know something is a magic trick, if you don’t consent to the deception, then what is it?

  I told Hannah about the call I overheard, the things her husband said, because I wanted to plant a seed of doubt. To make her drop her guard, just a little.

  Uncertain people are easier to manipulate.

  But then, as time passed things changed.

  There were moments when I wondered if I should t
ell her the truth about what happened that night, if I should admit to what I did.

  I always decided against it.

  At first it was because I didn’t know if I should trust her; later it was because I wanted her to continue to trust me. That’s the thing with lying. If you do it for too long you reach a stage where it becomes impossible to turn the ship round. If I’d confided in Hannah, told her the truth about what was really going on, she might have changed her mind, turned her back on me. And so I made my peace with the deceit and held on to the notion that what she didn’t know couldn’t hurt her.

  Or me.

  Misdirection is the art of drawing your attention to one thing in order to ensure you are unaware of something else. It’s about making you relax at a key moment, guiding you to look in the wrong place at the right time or the right place at the wrong time.

  The clock was ticking and so the very first time Alina came to visit she made sure to carry things on her person she knew would be confiscated. The magnet I needed was inside a lipstick and when she knocked over the tray at the end of our session, she waited till Mr Dalgliesh was distracted and kicked it across the floor to the cell. It hit the bottom of the bars and I reached through and grabbed it. Mr Dalgliesh was none the wiser.

  Once I had the magnet and could prevent the door from being locked electronically, I set my sights on the manual key.

  I soon learned that Hannah rarely returned it to its hook straightaway; instead she’d slip it inside a pocket, only coming across it again later. The spare she kept in a tin on the windowsill.

  To take the key from her unnoticed I needed bait. Something to move her attention elsewhere for a second. I’d stolen her engagement ring within minutes of my arrival and so I just had to wait for the right moment, to be ready.

  That afternoon she was flustered, her mind elsewhere. I took my chance. I attached the magnet to the door, preventing her from locking it electronically, and then as soon as she turned the manual key and placed it in her front pocket, I tossed the ring at her feet. When she bent down to retrieve it I reached through the bars, dipped my hand into her dress and stole the key.

  That night, while she was in bed, I unlocked the cell door, replaced the master on the hook (so that when she looked at it, she’d presume she put it there herself) and took the spare from the tin. There was a risk she might go there and find it empty, I knew that, but it was one I was willing to take.

  After that, I could explore the house at my leisure.

  Mr Tarker was an expert illusionist. Hannah is an illusionist too, in her own way. She takes eggs, flour, butter and sugar and turns them into something else entirely. Planets, buildings, animals, people. Love is another kind of illusion. Often, it’s hard to know when it’s real and when it’s something else entirely.

  I kept the key on me at all times – when I slept, when I showered, during my outside time – buried deep inside a pocket. Most days I roamed around the house no problem, but there were a couple of occasions when I almost got caught. One night, Hannah came down to the living room for something long after I thought she was asleep and I had to hide behind the door. Then there was the time she saw me from across the pond and thought she had an intruder.

  She did, in a way.

  One evening, in my haste to get back to the cell, I knocked her wedding picture and it fell. The glass cracked. I was so scared Hannah would realise, that she’d figure out how it happened, that the game would be up.

  After searching for weeks, there was still no sign of my brown paper custody bag. I tried edging around the subject with Hannah, encouraging her to tell me where she’d stored it, but whenever I pushed too hard she got suspicious and shut down.

  Time was running out.

  I used my phone allowance to call the hospital ward. Who I got on the line varied, as did how long they stayed talking once they realised the caller wasn’t going to say anything, but I was sometimes rewarded with the odd snippet: Lucas’s voice in the background, asking Mr Tarker about the Chelsea score or thanking the nurse for bringing his meds.

  The day I heard Hannah scream, I didn’t know what to do. If I came out of the cell I’d give myself away but if I stayed put . . .

  In the end I told myself it was worth the risk, that I was only doing it to win her trust, to get her on side, that it would help toward my end goal.

  That’s what I told myself. Didn’t mean it was true.

  What does it take to hold a knife in your hand and drive it into another person’s body over and over? The sheer physicality of it. How do you know if you have it in you? Or do you only find out in the moment, when the other person is standing in front of you, the blade a weight in your palm?

  The morning Hannah discovered my stash under the mattress I had to change my story, to offer her another version of the truth.

  Truth.

  When the police arrived in the bar that day I thought they were there to arrest me for the stolen bitcoin, that Monty had figured out it was me and called it in. I panicked. The drive was still stored with my things in Brixton, but the PIN and the fob were in my pocket. After the mix-up with the travelcard and the policeman I’d bought a cheap turquoise keyring, ceramic with a screw-off metal top. It had a compartment in which I’d rolled and stored the PIN.

  Not wanting to be caught red-handed, I dropped the fob into one of the tiny wooden haberdashery drawers in the bar’s window display, pushed it shut and was about to do the same with the keyring when I felt a hand on my shoulder. The next thing I knew my arms were being roughed behind me, my wrists cuffed.

  In the police car on the way to the station my rational brain had kicked in. Of course they hadn’t been there because of the stolen bitcoin; there was no way Monty would have alerted them. But by then it was too late.

  At the station any possessions I had on my person were removed, logged and placed in a sealed paper bag. A bag that went on to reside somewhere in Hannah’s house.

  When Alina came to visit me at the Holding Centre I did ask if she could get the keyring for me. Once I and the bag were transferred to Hannah’s house all it would take was a simple burglary, a trip to the bar and a visit to Brixton and she could bring the three elements together, access the money and hey presto.

  She refused.

  And so, together we came up with another plan.

  I would find a way out of the cell, locate the custody bag and the keyring inside and then the next time she came to visit I’d pass it to her.

  It was already tricky, unlikely to work. Then everything started to go wrong. To get complicated in ways I had never imagined.

  To be a good pickpocket, to be good at misdirection, you need to know when the shift in interest occurs; better yet, you should control this shift.

  That day with Pru. I could have swum her back to shore, turned round and got right back in that water. I know Hannah thought that was what I might do. But she didn’t know about the PIN and the hard drive, the fact they were now under the same roof, her roof. That I had no choice but to return.

  Alina had bailed on me. Lucas was getting sicker.

  Everything seemed hopeless – and then, she kissed me.

  Hannah

  There was only one person who might be able to help her out of this mess. If he wasn’t at the station she’d leave a message, ask him to call her on this number. She used the smartphone to search for the Scotland Yard switchboard. As it was, she was put through without fuss.

  ‘Rupert.’ She stopped, not sure how to explain. Should she start with the fact she and Jem had been in a relationship, that he’d played her like a fool or that she was facing ten years in a civic centre cell? ‘Jem,’ she said, deciding to start with the here and now. ‘He’s gone.’

  She wondered about Jem’s original plan, before they were derailed by the weather and Pru’s fall. Would he have abandoned her as soon as they were across the pond, or would he have waited till they’d got to the Esso service station and ditched her there?

 
; ‘Are you hurt?’ said Rupert. In the background she could hear the trill of phones and the spike of laughter, like someone had just revealed the punchline to a joke. ‘How did he get out?’ There was a low rumble, like a chair being pushed back. Hannah imagined him on his feet, ready to run.

  ‘I helped him.’ Saying it out loud, Hannah cringed with shame. ‘I’m in Queen’s Crescent. He was supposed to meet me here.’ The hurt was like a stone at the back of her throat. She tried to swallow it down.

  ‘What? Why?’ and then, as his brain caught up, ‘You let him go?’

  Hannah considered telling him about their relationship but she didn’t know how. That story would have to wait.

  ‘He didn’t do it, he didn’t kill John.’ Despite everything, Jem’s innocence was the one thing of which she was still certain. ‘There’s proof.’

  A huff of air.

  ‘Not this again.’

  ‘There are witnesses, people who say it was a gang that had John killed. The Heppels. I know you don’t want to believe it, but John was taking money from them, bribes. Somehow it all backfired and he ended up dead. It seems to be mixed up with the suicide of another officer, an undercover, but I’ve yet to figure out how or why.’

  Silence.