Before You Were Gone

by Sheila Bugler

  ‘Are you okay?’ Emer asked. Maeve seemed tense, and she looked as if she wanted to scratch Kitty’s eyes out.

  ‘Of course I’m not okay,’ Maeve said. ‘You can’t be okay, either. This is… this is fucked up.’ She looked at Kitty. ‘You know why I’m here. Do you know what happened to her?’

  ‘Yes,’ Kitty whispered.

  ‘Jesus. Oh Jesus. Okay. Emer, do you mind if I do this alone?’

  ‘If that’s what you want,’ Emer said. ‘Of course. Kitty, is that okay with you?’

  In truth, she was relieved not to have to listen to it again. Once had been more than enough. So, when Kitty said she was happy to speak to Maeve by herself, Emer told them to call her when they were ready and she got out of there as quickly as she could.

  Outside, a milky sun was just visible behind a layer of pale grey clouds. Walking through the grounds, Emer found a gate that led to the open countryside at the back of the hotel. She spent the next hour tramping across the rolling green Sussex hills, giving her mind the time it needed to process everything Kitty had told her.

  There were too many gaps, more than she’d realised. She started making a list of all the questions she had, but she couldn’t focus, jumping from one piece of information to another, trying to make sense of the incomprehensible.

  It was a lonely feeling, realising the only family you’d ever known weren’t who you thought they were. She could feel the self-pity creeping up on her and it was tempting – so tempting – to give in to it. How easy it would be to blame everyone else for the mess she’d made of her life. Her parents, Kitty, Robert – they’d all deceived her in different ways. But she’d done a pretty good job of deceiving herself, too. Convincing herself that all the problems in her life were because of what had happened to Kitty. Refusing to take any responsibility for her own actions, constantly – tediously – laying the blame elsewhere.

  Because of that, she’d lost the best thing that had ever happened to her. Nikki’s absence was a constant ache in her chest. An ache, she realised now, she wouldn’t be able to live with. When this was all over, she was going to do whatever it took to get Nikki back. She could do it. She would do it, because she’d already lost too much. A lot of that had been outside her control, but not this. If she lost Nikki for good, she would only ever have herself to blame.

  She’d done a circular walk and could see the hotel ahead of her in the valley below. She wondered how the conversation was going. At one level, Maeve would be relieved to finally know the truth. But what good, Emer wondered, was the truth to her now? Lucy’s disappearance had destroyed Maeve’s family. Her father’s reputation had never recovered from the cloud of suspicion that hung over him. Her family had had to move to a new town and do what they could to start their lives over. Both her parents had died without knowing what had happened to their oldest child.

  As Emer was thinking about this, she remembered something: Maeve sitting across from her in the bar that afternoon in Galway, telling Emer what she’d do if she ever found the person responsible for what had happened to her family.

  Emer speeded up, walking faster and faster until, by the time she reached the grounds of the hotel, she was running. There was no sign of Kitty or Maeve in the bar. She checked the toilets and the smoking area outside. Nothing. And when she dialled their numbers, both calls went straight to voicemail.

  ‘Can I help you?’

  She looked around, saw the man working behind the reception desk was speaking to her.

  ‘I’ve lost my friend,’ she said. ‘Her name’s Maeve Ryan. She’s staying here, but I don’t know what room she’s in.’

  ‘I can’t give you her room number,’ the man said. ‘But I can look it up and call the room, tell her you’re here.’

  ‘Would you mind?’ Emer said. ‘That would be brilliant. Thank you.’

  It felt like an age for him to check the computer in front of him. Emer had to resist the urge to swing the screen around and look for herself. How long could it take to find someone’s room number?

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, eventually. ‘Could you repeat your friend’s name?’

  ‘Maeve Ryan,’ Emer said. ‘Maeve is spelt M-A-E-V-E.’

  He tapped something else into the keyboard while he looked at the screen, frowning.

  ‘We don’t have anyone with that name staying here,’ he said.

  ‘That’s not possible,’ Emer said. ‘I was with her here earlier.’

  The man didn’t say anything, clearly waiting for Emer to accept that there was no Maeve staying at the hotel.

  Emer ran outside to check the car park. Maeve’s hire car was still there. So was Kitty’s car. Which meant wherever they’d gone, they hadn’t gone far.

  Back in the bar, she scanned the faces again, certain they had to be here and she’d missed them. But they weren’t there. Ignoring the shouts from the guy on reception, she ran up the stairs that led to the higher floors.

  She ran along the corridors, shouting Kitty’s name. But it was like history repeating itself. Kitty was gone, almost as if she’d never been here at all.

  Forty-three

  Dee couldn’t breathe. The walls were closing in on her. She couldn’t see them, but she could feel the space around her getting smaller as the walls edged towards her. It was impossibly dark. A blanket of pitch black that crept down her throat, blocking her airways until she knew she would die. No. She couldn’t die. She wouldn’t die. She had to focus. Stay calm. Breathe. She tried to suck air in, but nothing happened. Flares of panic shot through her. She was cold. Too cold. Her teeth were chattering, her body shaking. The darkness was inside her now. Crawling into her lungs and pushing its way inside her brain, blocking out all her thoughts and memories, consuming her. She would die in this place and it would take days, months, years before anyone found her body.

  Then, just as suddenly, it was over. She was still here, trapped in the freezing darkness, but she was breathing again. Cool air was rushing into her lungs, the roaring inside her head was subsiding, and the burning sensation at the back of her throat was easing.

  She wrapped her arms around her body, doing all she could to warm herself, but it wasn’t enough. Space was the problem. Or, more specifically, lack of space. She couldn’t stand because the roof was too low. She’d tried moving about in a semi-crouch, until the pain in her back and neck became unbearable. Since then, she’d sat here, in the darkness, trying to think of a way to get out of here.

  He’d fooled her. Classic politician. Full of empty charm and bullshit. He wasn’t here for Emer. He was here to finish off whatever he’d started in Ireland twenty-three years ago. He was here for Kitty.

  Foolishly, she’d left her phone in the car. She doubted she’d get a signal in here, but at least she’d be able to use the torch to check there were no rats or other creatures hiding in the corners waiting to pounce. Instead, she had to sit here in the dark, ignoring the scratching sounds she heard every now and then. Trying not to imagine what could be making them.

  Breathe. She had to remember to breathe. In and out. Slowly. She’d started practising mindfulness a few months ago. Hadn’t kept it up, but she tried now to remember the basics. Counting her breaths, feeling the rise and fall inside her body.

  Her face. He’d cut her face. She’d been bleeding. She touched her cheek now and felt the scab. It was huge. Maybe it wasn’t as bad as it felt. Scarface. Stupid, macho film full of noise and hysterical acting. She’d hated it. One of her ex-husband’s favourites. Billy Morrison. Her first love. Until he stopped being someone she loved and became a man she barely recognised. Bloated and angry and sad.

  Breathe. Focus. Thoughts were clouds that came and went. She closed her eyes, found it helped not to be looking at the darkness. She continued breathing. In and out. One, two, three. Counting the breaths. Bringing her mind back to the breathing.

  She was in control again. The panic had been replaced with something else. Strength. She opened her eyes, and this time s
he didn’t see the darkness. Instead, she saw the tiny cracks of light coming through the gap at the top of the door.

  She wasn’t going to die. Not today, not any time soon. She was going to find a way out of here. And when she did, she was going to find the bastard who’d cut her face and locked her in here, and she was going to make him pay for what he’d done to her.

  Forty-four

  Someone was crying. Kitty wanted to find them and comfort them. But when she tried to move, she couldn’t. She was lying on her side, looking at furniture she didn’t recognise. A throbbing pain at the back of her head made it difficult to concentrate. Something was badly wrong. Her hands had been pulled behind her back, her wrists bound together. When she tried to move them, the ties cut into her skin.

  She wanted to call for help, but thick material had been stuffed into her mouth. When she tried to spit it out, she couldn’t. Panicked, she started struggling, pulling against her ties, screaming into the material inside her mouth.

  A face appeared in her line of vision, triggering the flicker of a memory and a surge of fear. She was in a hotel bedroom. Maeve’s room. She’d told Kitty she didn’t want to talk in a public area. Kitty had understood. Was glad, in fact, because she’d known what she was going to tell Maeve would be painful. So they’d come here instead.

  ‘How could you have kept it to yourself all these years?’ Maeve was crying. Tears running unchecked down her cheeks. Her face so close Kitty could feel the heat of her breath. She twisted her head, trying to get away from Maeve’s grief and anger, but Maeve grabbed her chin, forcing Kitty to look at her.

  ‘You weren’t there. You didn’t see what it did to my family. It destroyed us. Can you imagine? Can you? My parents never got over it. My father… do you know that everyone assumed he’d killed her? They thought he’d killed his own child. It wasn’t enough to have to deal with the grief of losing her, never knowing where she’d gone or what had happened to her. My parents had to cope with all those rumours as well. We had to leave Ballincarraig altogether. Leave the only home I’d ever known, the only friends I’d ever had.

  ‘They imagined the worst, you know. My mother would wake up screaming. I’d hear her. Screaming in the middle of the night before rushing into the bathroom to throw up. The grief ate into her, month after month, year after year. She died never knowing what had happened. And all the time… all this time, you knew and you could have changed everything. But you didn’t, did you?’

  Maeve stopped speaking. Her face disappeared as she moved to another part of the room. Kitty looked around, trying to see what Maeve was doing. But Maeve had disappeared.

  She’d shown no reaction at all when Kitty first told her.

  ‘Are you okay?’ Kitty had asked. Maeve hadn’t responded, and then… what? Kitty had gone to switch the kettle on. Tea, she’d thought. Tea is what she needs. She might have even said it aloud, she couldn’t remember. She couldn’t remember anything after that moment.

  She’d been hit. On the back of her head where the pain was worst. Had Maeve hit her? Or was someone else here too? The question sent shockwaves of panic surging through her body. The slamming sounds from the bathroom were getting louder and more frequent. Maeve was saying something. Repeating the same words, over and over.

  ‘Do it, do it, do it.’

  Kitty fought to pull her wrists and ankles free, but all she succeeded in doing was cutting her skin until she bled. It felt like she’d been tied up with wire or cable ties.

  ‘Kitty!’

  She was hallucinating. Had to be. Thought she’d heard Emer. A memory. That’s all it was. A memory from that night, all those years ago, when she was running down the hotel corridor and Emer was running after her.

  ‘Kitty!’

  No. Not hallucinating. This was real. Emer was outside the room. Kitty struggled harder, her screams muffled and inaudible behind the towel in her mouth.

  ‘Shut the fuck up!’

  Maeve. Not Emer. Leaning over her again.

  She had a pillow. Holding it up for Kitty to see.

  ‘I’m going to kill you.’

  Kitty shook her head, struggled harder. Outside the door, Emer’s voice faded and disappeared as Maeve rolled Kitty onto her back and the pillow came down. Blackness and unbearable pressure. She couldn’t breathe. Her lungs screaming for air as she bucked and thrashed and did everything she could to push back. But Maeve pushed harder, the pillow pressing down on her face. A flare of pain across her chest. Her heart was beating too fast, trying to keep her body going. Blue and white dots danced toward her through the darkness.

  The dots faded and so did the darkness, until there was nothing left.

  Forty-five

  Dee didn’t have a phone in her bag, but she had a nail file. Not a fancy Leighton Denny crystal nail file like the one Louise had. A bog-standard metal file with a pointed edge to it. An edge that fitted perfectly into the old-fashioned lock on the heavy wooden door. Now, all she had to do was get the stupid thing to twist and unlock the door so she could get the hell out of here.

  She didn’t know how long she’d been in here, but she was pretty sure it felt longer than it actually had been. Anger kept her focused. Each time her arm started to ache from the length of time she’d spent trying to unlock the door, and the voices started inside her head, telling her it was pointless and she was never going to get out of here, she would picture Robert O’Brien’s face when he was arrested for murder and whatever other crimes he’d committed.

  While she worked on the lock, Dee went back over everything she knew about Lucy Ryan and Kitty Doran, trying to piece together the different bits of information into a single narrative. She knew for certain now that Robert O’Brien had played a role in whatever happened to both girls. And he was doing his best to make sure no one else found out what he’d done.

  That’s why he was here. To cover his tracks. Or someone else’s? A line from Shay Flaherty’s email lodged in Dee’s head:

  Robert is devoted to Ursula.

  Ursula who, according to her daughter, was a deeply unpleasant woman. In 1997, when Lucy disappeared and Kitty supposedly drowned, Ursula had been working as Robert’s PA. So Ursula and Robert were in this together. Lucy Ryan and Kitty Doran had seen something they shouldn’t have. Maybe both girls were meant to have been killed, but Ursula couldn’t face killing her own daughter. So she’d sneaked Kitty out of the country and given her a new identity. A plan which had worked perfectly until Emer spotted her sister on the London Underground earlier this summer.

  Dee wondered if Robert O’Brien knew Kitty hadn’t drowned that afternoon. If he didn’t, if he’d spent all these years believing Kitty was dead, that would explain why he’d offered to help Emer find out about the girl she’d seen on the Tube. It would have come as a shock to realise his wife had been lying to him all this time. More of a shock to discover that the one person with the power to topple his political career was still out there.

  So he’d hired someone to contact Dee and get her to do his dirty work for him. And once he’d learned the truth – that Kitty was still alive – he’d come to London to finish off what he’d started twenty-three years ago. He was going to get rid of Kitty, and anyone else who knew she was still alive. Starting with Michael Holden.

  There were still gaps in what she knew, but Dee was getting closer to the truth. She could feel it. Now, all she needed to do was get out of here and find out the rest of it. She jiggled the nail file some more, twisting it one way, then the other. Several times, she thought she’d done it. The file caught the lock at just the right angle and, with soaring spirits, she would twist it a tiny bit harder. But the lock wouldn’t budge.

  ‘God damn you, stupid door.’

  She slammed the door with her fists, shouting for someone to come and let her out. But there was no one out there and, after a while, she stopped shouting. The urge to slump onto the ground and simply give up was strong. But she wasn’t going to do that. Besides, it wasn’t as if
she was never going to be found. Sooner or later, someone would notice she was missing. And her car was parked on the road outside the house. It wouldn’t take a genius to work out where she was.

  Except that could take days. The only people who would notice she was gone were Louise and Ella. Louise was going on holiday tomorrow, and Ella was moving to the other side of the bloody world in four days’ time. Which meant Dee couldn’t sit around waiting to be found. She had to get out before then.

  Grabbing hold of the plastic handle on the nail file, she twisted with all her force. A snapping sound and the resistance she’d encountered every other time she’d tried disappeared. She thought she’d done it, that she’d finally managed to twist open the lock. But when she lifted her hand, she realised the sound she’d heard wasn’t the lock opening. It was the sound of the nail file snapping in two, leaving the plastic handle trapped between Dee’s fingers, and the metal part of the file stuck in the lock.

  Forty-six

  Back outside the hotel, Emer called the Cavendish Hotel and asked to be put through to Room 204. Thankfully, she’d noted the room number when she’d been at the hotel earlier. She hoped Fiona was still there. If she wasn’t, Emer had no way of contacting her. At first she thought Fiona wasn’t going to answer, but after the eighth ring someone picked up.

  ‘Hello?’

  ‘Fiona, thank God. It’s Emer.’

  ‘Has something happened?’

  ‘Kitty’s disappeared.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ Fiona said. ‘How can she have disappeared? I thought you were with her.’

  ‘I left her with Maeve, and when I came back to the hotel, I couldn’t find them. Maeve never checked into the hotel. I’ve no idea why. Her car’s still here, though. So is Kitty’s car. Unless they got a taxi, they haven’t gone far.’

  She’d walked around the grounds, checking everywhere for any sign of Kitty and Maeve.