Stolen Girl

by Sarah A. Denzil

  Do the locals know someone is living in this chapel? I know Amy told me it was part of the forestry, but how deep into the woods are we? This kind of building must be rare, and you’d imagine that would mean local people are aware of it. Maybe walkers come out here to explore it. Unless it’s on private land. That was how Hugh came to be in possession of the bunker. Perhaps I’m wrong and I’m in an industrial building in a city. An abandoned factory on some sort of estate. There’s no proof that Amy is telling me the truth, she could be spinning any sort of lie. On and on my thoughts spiral.

  As the day goes on, each breath I take brings a wave of fresh panic. Last night I slept for an hour, maybe two, but each time my claustrophobic nightmares came back to me. I dreamt I was buried alive, and then I woke and realised my nightmare had come true.

  If Gina was here with me, she’d make up funny games to keep us occupied – walking like a penguin around the cage, jumping up and down on the mattress, singing her favourite Disney songs – but all I can do is think about my conversation with Amy. I’d never seen her so at ease. She’d sat calmly and told me her motivations.

  No, I won’t allow myself to fall into this darkness; I grasp hold of one of the fleeting feelings of hope and refuse to let go. I force myself to think about my captor. Amy answered nearly all of my questions, telling me about her enjoyment of power and the way she likes to control people. No matter what she says, I don’t believe she was born a psychopath, like Hugh, but her trauma has whittled away her sense of self until she became someone easily moulded by a psychopath like Hugh. Her tough childhood. The bullying. The abortion. Watching me live the life she longed for, with my loving parents and my strong relationship with Rob. The little girl abandoned by her mother, hurt by her guardians and bullied by her peers wanted nothing more than a family. But Hugh twisted that longing and turned it into an aching to inflict pain and revenge.

  She’s right about one thing. We hate each other so much that either she will kill me, or I will kill her. I don’t intend to die.

  Unless we both die. That’s what she said.

  My blood turns to ice.

  I look at the doll in the corner of the cage. I’d put it there out of the way, so I didn’t have to see it. But now I walk over to the doll, lift it and smash it on the cold, stone floor. Its face splits apart into shards of sharp porcelain. Amy made a huge mistake leaving this doll in the cage with me. Just as I hear footsteps running down the steps, I pick up the largest, sharpest shard of porcelain and tuck it into my jeans pocket.

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  AIDEN

  Early Tuesday morning, I wake up and without Mum, without waking in my own bed, the world is different again. It keeps changing and all I can do is adapt to it. But that isn’t something that comes naturally to me. Not after ten years in the same place, with the same person. It takes me a moment to calm my breathing and heart before I get out of bed. Words can heal. Dr Anderton says this to me a lot. When you feel that the silence is taking hold again, remember that words heal.

  The first thing I do is message Faith.

  ME: Are you up?

  FAITH: Morning! How are you feeling?

  ME: Like I have no control over anything.

  FAITH: That’s not true.

  FAITH: You have more control than you realise.

  I’m not sure what she means by that. But I decided to get a quick shower and come back to my messages later. When I go back to my phone, she’s sent another.

  FAITH: I think it’s time for us to meet.

  FAITH: I have so much I want to say to you.

  ME: It’s not a good time. Mum’s still missing. And Gina.

  FAITH: I know. But I can help you.

  FAITH: I mean, I can help comfort you. I want to hold your hand and tell you everything is going to be OK.

  I close my eyes and lean back on the bed. What did I expect? We couldn’t stay messaging each other forever. We had to meet eventually. But the thought of it makes every muscle in my body tense up.

  ME: Let me think about it. Give me a day or two.

  She replies to tell me that’s fine, and I head downstairs for breakfast. I find Grandma sitting in the doorway between the kitchen and the garden, a cigarette in her mouth. She turns to me and hastily smashes the cigarette into the concrete step below the door. Her other hand is wrapped around a mug. Her smile, I think, is a guilty one.

  ‘Don’t tell Grandad.’

  ‘OK,’ I reply, but I’m not sure why I shouldn’t tell him. Isn’t she allowed to smoke? I thought grown-ups made their own decisions. And then I realise that I’m thinking of myself as a child again. An adult should understand why people do what they do. And an adult should be able to make their own choices, like meeting up with Faith would be my choice.

  ‘Want some breakfast?’

  I shake my head. ‘I’m not hungry.’

  I sit with her for a while as the birds sing in the tree at the bottom of the lawn. The world provides a few moments of peace.

  On the phone with Josie, I realised that I remembered Hugh talking about his plans to build a second bunker for a replacement, just as we’d been speculating. It was that memory I kept trying to pull at, and now it was coming loose. But there was more. I felt like Hugh had given me something important while I was there. Some sort of diagram. Dad and I are planning to go back to the flat in Manchester to see if we can find it. I kept some of my art from the bunker.

  But first we need to speak to DCI Stevenson, who pulls up at the house around nine.

  ‘I’ve organised an interview with the builder who converted the first bunker,’ he tells us.

  Dad, who is awake and dressed now, insists that we go with him. But DCI Stevenson is just as insistent that this is police work. We shouldn’t be involved.

  ‘I’ve been letting you into this investigation much more than I would any other family,’ he says. ‘Too much, probably. But this could cross the line.’

  ‘It’s informal though, isn’t it?’ Dad says.

  ‘Well –’ DCI Stevenson starts.

  ‘I’d like to meet him,’ I say. I want to see the man who built my old home. I want to look him in the eye. I want to know if he knew what he was building.

  Stevenson sighs. No one can say no to the boy from the bunker. ‘I do the talking.’

  We meet him at his current job, and even I can tell that he’s defensive from the beginning. He keeps his arms folded tightly across his chest. There’s a smattering of stubble across his chin, around the same length as the hair on his head. He wears cargo shorts covered in dust and paint, and a grey polo neck on top, ripped at the pocket.

  ‘This is Aiden Price.’ DCI Stevenson gestures to me. ‘The boy who lived in the bunker you made.’

  But the man had already recognised me, I knew that from the expression on his face. It’s one I see people make all the time when I walk down the street. First, it’s confusion, because they know me from somewhere, but they can’t figure out where. Then they either turn red, or stare at their feet. I often wonder if they feel ashamed for following my story, for knowing all about my trauma, about the grisly details.

  This man, however, continues to look me in the eye. He keeps his back straight, face twisted into a grimace. He seems angry.

  ‘I suppose you brought him here to make me feel guilty, did you? I did a job. I didn’t know what it was for. Hugh told me it was going to be converted into some sort of fancy overnight experience for people who like camping.’

  ‘And you weren’t suspicious about that?’ Stevenson asks, as calm and measured as always.

  ‘Why should I be?’ He shuffles his feet, wrinkles his brow.

  ‘Did Hugh ever mention a second project?’ Stevenson asks.

  I ball my hands into fists. Seeing this man, the one who built my old home, makes all the injustice come flooding back. This terrible thing happened to me. It happened in my village, in the place I live, not in some country separated from us by an ocean. It happened to my fa
mily, my mother, my sister. Dad places a hand on my shoulder, and I realise that my breathing is loud, coming out between gritted teeth. The man seems concerned for the first time. Does he think I’m going to attack him?

  ‘I’m not sure I like the idea of him knowing my name.’ He gestures to me.

  ‘Aiden doesn’t know your name,’ Stevenson says. ‘Or where you live.’

  ‘He knows my face.’

  ‘Yes,’ Stevenson admits. ‘He does.’

  That rests for a moment. Then the man says, ‘No. He never asked me back for anything else. But he had plenty of contacts in the business. I knew a few of them.’

  ‘Could you get a list to me?’ Stevenson asks.

  ‘Give me a minute.’

  He comes back with a piece of paper with various male names written on it. DCI Stevenson thanks him and we leave, but I can’t help looking back one more time. It takes a village to raise a child, but in some ways, it also takes a village to help a monster.

  Stevenson drops us off at the B&B before heading back to the station. They have some leads to check. A car on CCTV that could be Amy’s. Various eye-witness testimonies. One teenage boy says that a woman around Amy’s age gave him a note to pass on to a woman who matched Mum’s description. He even described her car.

  The monotonous, relentless stretching of time makes my skin constantly itch, and I can’t make it stop. I can’t sit in a chair for longer than ten minutes. Before we head to Manchester, Dad drives me to Mum’s house, and we search through her things. The police have already done this and found nothing important, but we do it again.

  Nothing.

  It’s late afternoon when Dad parks the car in Mum’s usual parking spot below the Manchester apartment. Inside, everything is as we left it, not particularly tidy, old food in the fridge. Dad offers to clear out the fridge while I find what I came for.

  I leave him with a bin bag as I head to the back of the flat. Inside my old bedroom, I drop to my knees and reach under the bed for a box. There’s nothing particularly precious inside; a bunch of drawings, mostly done with crayon. Some paintings that gradually progress as I get older. A few stuffed toys that Hugh gave me. I used to sleep with them, but I don’t anymore. I know that isn’t what a twenty-year-old man should do. Not that I feel like a man. Books, too. He brought me lots of books and convinced himself that if he was teaching me to read then he was taking care of me.

  Scattering the drawings and paintings around the floor, I allow my eyes to roam from left to right, examining each one as closely as I can. Most of them are based on the imaginary places I created with Mum before I was kidnapped. Seeing them makes me long for a pen and paper. I don’t even know what I could create, but it would be something. It would be a release, to let out the building emotions, because every day a new feeling fights its way through the barrier.

  One by one, I turn the drawings over. Hugh often brought me papers from his office. Discarded plans. Old letterhead. Pages from his notebooks. I turn them over and I kick myself for not thinking about this sooner. Well over a week has gone by since Gina was taken, and I never thought about the old papers he gave me to scribble on? I never considered them as important business papers. They were bits of scrap paper, nothing more. But since talking to Josie, I’ve considered them in a different light.

  There was the day he mentioned the second bunker, when I sat at his feet, drawing. He’d brought me more paper to draw on that day and then rambled on about why they were worthless. They were discarded plans. Discarded, but related to the bunker. I snatch up all the bits of paper and hold them to my chest.

  Back in the kitchen, Dad is staring at my phone. I’d left it on the counter while I went into my bedroom.

  ‘Who’s Faith?’ he asks.

  A weight drops in my stomach. I glance down at my feet. There are no words coming to my rescue, I simply stand there like an idiot.

  ‘Aiden? Tell me who she is.’

  ‘You . . . you shouldn’t look at people’s phones,’ I say.

  ‘I saw the notification on the screen,’ he replies. ‘I saw someone called Faith asking if you were going to meet her.’ He limps towards me. ‘Aiden, what are you doing, mate? You’re talking to a random person on Instagram about Gina and your mum’s disappearance. Don’t you know how bad that is?’

  Heat floods my face. I can’t meet his gaze.

  ‘Did you ever stop and consider the fact that Faith might be Amy?’

  The papers fall from my arms. ‘What? No. That’s not possible.’

  He holds the phone aloft. ‘Are you sure about that? Do you know for certain who this woman is? The profile is anonymous. There’s no photograph. None of her posts are personal. The people she’s ‘friends’ with don’t even seem real.’

  I hold out my hand to take the phone, but he snatches it away.

  ‘I put her name through Google and nothing came up. Nothing at all. Do you know how weird that is?’

  I just shake my head.

  ‘Of course you don’t, because you don’t know how the world works. You don’t know that people can be groomed online. You’re being catfished, Aiden. This person does not exist.’ As he continues talking, his face grows red.

  I lift my arms in confusion. ‘What’s catfish?’

  He sighs. ‘It’s when someone online pretends to be someone else. Grown men pretend to be young women to get people to talk to them. They usually scam them out of money.’

  ‘Faith has never asked me for money!’

  ‘It doesn’t matter, mate. They could be after information. It could be Amy for God’s sake!’

  ‘No. She’s not Amy.’

  ‘You don’t know that!’

  ‘Give me my phone.’ I reach out and try to snatch the phone, but he yanks it away. I could take it by force, but I don’t.

  ‘I’m handing this over to the police,’ he says. ‘They need to see this.’ He glances at the papers in my hands, seeing the crayon, the scrawled pencil. ‘Are they from the bunker?’

  I nod.

  ‘Pick them up. Let’s go.’

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  AMY

  I won’t allow her the space she thinks she deserves. Worming her way underneath my skin, putting ideas in my head, making me feel sorry for her. I won’t allow it.

  She won’t paint me as the victim. No, I’m not that, never that. I’ve known pain and suffering. Loneliness and spite. None of those things have made me who I am. I’m stronger than that. She won’t explain it all away by telling me what I already know. Uncle slapped and kicked. Aunty fussed and smothered. Students teased and bullied. Boys fucked and left. Mum abandoned. None of those things are me. I’m independent, above it all. I’m me because I choose to be me, not because of Hugh.

  ‘What have you done?’ I stare at the broken shards of my precious doll.

  She’s killed my child twice now. First Lily had to die so that Emma wouldn’t find out, and now she’s brutally smashed the doll against the floor. I ball my hands into fists, digging the nails into my palms, trying not to look at Lily’s broken pieces.

  ‘I couldn’t stand it staring at me any longer,’ she says.

  I see that she’s agitated and close to the bars. Her brown eyes are open wide, dashing back and forth from me to the walls, to the steps, to the vaulted ceilings. Was it a mistake to give her food? Something has energised her, but I’m not sure what.

  While Emma prowls the cage, I go back upstairs and remove the tin box from behind the altar. Inside there’s a needle and two vials. I fill the syringe with the sedative and then return to the cellar. There’s no way I can go into the cage with Emma like this.

  ‘Step closer to the bars,’ I say.

  Emma sees the needle straight away. She shakes her head.

  ‘If you want your doll, you need to come inside and get her.’

  She thinks she has the upper hand. Her stance is proud because Emma believes she’s managed to get into my head. But what she doesn’t realise is that I kn
ew this might happen and I’d steeled myself for it. The doll is not Lily, I think to myself. Lily made the point I wanted to make and now her purpose has been fulfilled.

  For the first time since I put this plan into action, my heart thuds against my ribs. If I go in there with her awake, she could overpower me. But I need to collect the shards of porcelain. Any one of them could be a weapon. Unless I starve her out. I could collect Lily’s remains after Emma has died.

  I put the needle down and take a step back. ‘Fine. I can take Lily after you’re dead.’

  A bead of sweat runs down Emma’s right temple. She hurries towards the bars. ‘Are you sure about that? I’ll grind up all the pieces into the stones. This is your child, Amy!’

  I suppress a shudder at her words, refusing to allow her any small victory. She must not know that I care. ‘She’s just a doll.’

  ‘Is she? Isn’t she the symbol of everything I took from you?’

  I can’t help myself, I move closer, running on anger now. ‘Be quiet and die, Emma.’

  Her hand dashes out between the bars, so fast I barely register the movement. Her left hand grasps my arm before her right hand makes a slashing motion. Heat spreads over my skin. Blood seeps from the wound.

  ‘Tell me where my daughter is!’ she demands.

  As I cry out in pain, I manage to move my right hand through the bars and jab the needle into her shoulder. At the same time, Emma slashes the sharp porcelain at my face. I lean away from her, finally yanking my arm out of her grip and staggering away from the bars, shocked by the sudden agonising, throbbing cut. Emma pulls the needle out of her shoulder and stares at it. I’d managed to depress the plunger and the sedative will be working through her bloodstream now. I won.