‘You wouldn’t take your medicine,’ she says.
It dawns on me then. She’d put something in the apple juice. She tried to kill me.
‘Just let me go,’ I say, a pathetic hail-Mary pass. ‘If you leave now you can get away.’
‘I gave your child away.’ Water runs down her nose, splashes across her lips as she speaks.
I lunge for her now, but she holds out the knife, stopping me in my tracks.
‘Where’s Gina?’
Amy just smiles. ‘She’s with a friend.’
I don’t know what that means but it makes me sick to my stomach. Without the fear and rage running through me I’d probably lean over and puke. Instead I make an attempt at grabbing her wrist, trying to wrestle the knife from her hand. She twists away from me, slices the knife against my top. It rips the fabric but barely grazes the skin.
‘You’re not well, Amy. You’ve got a concussion, did you know that? Your movement is wobbly. Your skin is white. I think you’ve lost a lot of blood.’
She blinks, positions herself between me and the cage door. Below, the water gathers in puddles. The electric lights dim. The smartphone sits in water.
‘I’m fine,’ she says. She tries again to slash me with the knife, but this time I manage to grab her wrist while slicing her hand with the sharp porcelain. We both cry out at the same time, her from the wound, me from holding that sharp ceramic shiv. She drops the knife to the pooling flood water below. I take the opportunity to push past her out of the cage door, when above us there’s an almighty groaning sound followed by a crash. In a split second, I realise that the roof of the building has collapsed. Rubble begins tumbling down the stairs and into the cellar. Parts of the vaulted ceiling begin to fall from the weight of the debris above. One of the electric lights is smashed. A chunk of plaster hits the top of the cage.
I hurry out of the cage, but the water is rising, now above my ankles. Amy collides with me from behind, shoving me to the ground. My face hits the dirty water and she holds it there. Slippery hands clutch my hair and face as I try to pry them away. My lungs burn from holding my breath. I want to gasp, but I know that I’ll breathe water into my lungs.
My fingernails dig deep into flesh and finally she lets go. I pull my head out of the water and take in a deep breath.
‘There’s nowhere to go,’ she says. ‘The stairs are blocked.’
I wipe water from my eyes and examine the damage of the collapsed roof. Amy’s right. Even if I stop her, I’ll still have to fight my way through the debris to escape the building. I don’t know the extent of the damage above us.
I sit down in the water and Amy watches silently.
‘Giving up so soon, Price?’
‘No,’ I say. ‘I’m thinking.’ I pause for a moment. ‘The police –’
‘I think they’re busy, Emma,’ she says.
‘If I die, you do too,’ I remind her. ‘If I can’t get out, neither can you.’
She shrugs.
I ignore her and make my way towards the stairs. We still have some light, but it’s dim, and making my way around the fallen debris is tricky. Water obscures most of it, and I find myself tripping on the stones underfoot.
Halfway to the stairs, the last light is knocked out by falling debris. A wave of water comes gushing down. I crawl through the dark. From somewhere in the darkness, Amy’s hands pull at my ankles, but I kick back and don’t feel them on me again.
Very little light filters down from the stairs, which is a bad sign. I move up a step and start removing old bricks, bits of wood, heavy chunks of plaster. Streams of dirty water wash over my arms as I work. I look at the sheer amount of time it’s going to take to get out, and I’m not sure I’m going to make it. But I keep going anyway.
Chapter Fifty
AIDEN
A rumble of thunder reverberates through the woods. A moment later, there’s another roar, and then the noise stops. We all halt in our tracks and turn to one another, rain dribbling down our noses.
‘What was that?’ Dad shouts above the downpour. ‘It sounded like thunder, but . . . I don’t know.’
The silence doesn’t last for long. There’s a third, low grumble followed by cracking and smashing, like someone is demolishing a building. Why would someone be demolishing a building in the middle of the woods?
And then it dawns on me.
Dad is the first to move. I break into a sprint, passing him and continuing on in the direction of the din. Behind me, Dad shouts something about calling the police. I yank back my hood so that I can see better. My feet slide out from underneath me and I fall into the muddy water. But I heave myself up, yanking my hands from the sucking mud. The wet ground tugs at my boots but luckily they aren’t pulled all the way off. Still, it slows me down, and the delay feels agonising. I need to get there. I need to help them. What if . . .?
A root trips me and I tumble, jarring my shoulder against a tree. Every expletive Hugh ever yelled at me in the bunker runs through my mind as I stumble forward, ignoring the jolt of pain in my shoulder. The pain doesn’t matter. Nothing matters except getting to that tumbling building because it just might be the place where Amy is keeping Mum.
When I hit a patch of harder ground, I start sprinting again, dodging through the trees until I find myself on a dirt track. Now I know I’m almost there. This track must lead to something. It’s big enough for a car to drive down it. Sure enough the building comes into sight and I force my legs to keep going, despite the shock of what I’m seeing.
The chapel is broken in the middle. Two gables stand at either end with the roof almost completely collapsed. Panic makes my heart thud as I cross the track towards the sagging church. I yank open the door and fly into the wreckage.
And then I drop to my knees because I don’t know where to start.
‘Aiden?’
Josie jogs into the chapel. Her eyes roam over the rubble, broken bits of ceiling and rafters, and lifts a hand to her mouth. I know what she’s thinking. She thinks Mum’s dead, that this is the end, but I refuse to believe it. I climb back to my feet.
‘She must be in here,’ I say, and begin picking my way through the stones.
But Josie grabs my elbow. ‘Wait. We could make it worse. We need to wait for the emergency services to decide how to proceed.’
I shake my head to tell her I can’t stop. That I’m too close to finding them at last. But her words give me pause. What if she’s right? I could dislodge the wrong stone that happens to crush my mother. My breath catches and frustrated tears of pain well in my eyes.
‘Come on,’ she says gently, leading me away.
I follow her closer to the door but can’t seem to leave. ‘What if she’s underneath all of this? What if she can’t breathe?’
‘We wouldn’t be able to help her.’
‘No,’ I mumble, mostly to myself. I was alone once, and I thought I would die alone without breathing in fresh air again. If I leave this place, she’ll be alone, too. I can’t let that happen. ‘MUM!’ My throat is raw as I shout her name. I climb over some fallen stones, not stepping too far into the middle of the building, where I can see the floor has caved in.
‘EMMA!’ Josie shouts, following me slowly, her hand close to my coat, ready to catch me if I fall.
There are muddy puddles of water everywhere. I bend down and put my ear to the rubble. Nothing. I move, going over the entire floor, picking my way gently, feeling for anything unstable. We call out and we listen.
Dad hurries into the building while we’re going through this process. Eventually the rain begins to calm down to a gentler patter. We shout. We listen. Nothing.
‘I’ve called the emergency services,’ Dad says. Then he follows up with. ‘Oh Jesus Christ. Oh, Emma, no.’
I tell him to be quiet and call her name again.
The chapel breathes, but there’s no other sound, nothing human. Whenever I turn to face Josie, she has a grim frown on her face, one that suggests she’s beginnin
g to lose hope. I can almost see her thoughts counting down until she thinks it might be an appropriate time for her to tell me to leave.
Sure enough, she says quietly, ‘Aiden . . .’
But I shake my head. ‘I can’t leave.’
I glance up at the opened roof. The building seems more stable now that the rain has turned into a fine drizzle, but it’s still possible that more could fall. I look back down at the rubble. Hugh would keep his captive in a basement, wouldn’t he? In a cage like the one I was in. Did Amy use the same framework? Could the cage have inadvertently saved her?
‘We’re not doing much to help here,’ Josie continues.
‘Five more minutes.’
She purses her lips, but she nods, and we all call her name another couple of times, and yet again the building breathes and creaks but there are no other sounds. Until . . . A cough. So quiet I can barely hear it. Followed by more coughing.
I make my way over to the back of the chapel, on the left next to the outer wall. I kneel down, press my ear to the rubble. I hear it. I hear the coughing, and my heart leaps into my mouth.
‘Over here!’ I shout, and Josie and Dad hurry to where I’m kneeling on the ground. Slowly, gently, we begin to move the bricks and debris, scoop away the build-up of broken plaster, until a hole forms. ‘Mum?’
We wait. Dad passes me a torch and I shine it down into the hole.
Nothing.
Then another cough, followed by the tiniest glimpse of wiggling fingers coming through the debris.
We keep going, until we find an arm, an elbow, a face. I stagger back. Amy. Awake. Covered in slime.
Dad pulls me away from her before I do something I regret.
‘Where is she?’ I yell. ‘Where’s Mum?’
Somehow Amy pulls herself from the hole. There’s blood all over her face, her eyes barely seem to focus on us, but she still pulls herself out from the debris while we stand there in a state of shock.
‘No.’ I fight against Dad as he holds me steady. ‘You don’t get to live while she dies.’
Amy coughs up some sort of brown sludge and staggers away from us, her body wobbling from side to side. It’s Josie who takes hold of Amy’s arm and holds her still.
Dad and I begin to move more of the debris. I work methodically, so focussed on my task that I barely even notice the emergency services finally begin to arrive.
Chapter Fifty-One
Aiden
There’s a roaring in my ears and the world sounds as though it’s all underwater. I watch a paramedic and a police officer lead Amy away. I try not to look at her as someone else guides me away from the crumbling building. ‘It isn’t safe,’ they’re saying to me. I protest at first, but I leave with them eventually.
‘But, Mum. She’s under there. She’s trapped.’
Dad puts an arm over my shoulder.
‘They’re looking for her, mate,’ he says. His eyes are wet. There’s dust and debris in his hair.
I glance around at all the men covered in dust, and it dawns on me that things have been happening at a much faster pace than I’d realised in my confusion. The fire department are here searching for mum in the wreckage, and DCI Stevenson is striding around in the background with a worried expression on his face.
The rain finally stops, and Dad sits down on a flat rock close to the chapel. Sunset comes and goes. Floodlights are constructed around the ruins. I wrap my arms across my body. Someone comes over to me with a takeaway cup filled with tea, before handing one to Dad.
‘Do you think they’ll find her?’ I ask quietly.
Dad rearranges his weight and works his jaw. ‘Yes, I think they’ll find her.’
‘But you’re not sure if she’ll be alive?’
‘We found Amy alive,’ he says. He smiles, but it’s a smile that doesn’t reach his eyes. I’m getting better at recognising those, but it just makes me sad.
‘She’s dead,’ I say.
He shakes his head. ‘Don’t talk like that.’
‘No, it’s true. She’s dead, I know she is. This is how the world works. You start to feel happy and then something comes along to take it all away. I was happy before Hugh took me. Then I started to be happy before Amy took Gina and Mum. So, she’s dead. I know it.’
‘Aiden, stop.’ Dad runs his hand over his face. ‘Please. There’s always hope. Always.’
I want to punch something. The rock, one of the trees, anything.
‘Did you feel that hope when you found Gina? You did, didn’t you?’
‘Yes,’ I say, ‘and that’s exactly why Mum’s dead. Because I was happy for a moment and now the world is going to take it all away again.’
Dad puts an arm over my shoulder and for once I don’t move away. I just leave it there. I’m numb all over. Hollowed out and bone tired. Part of me wants to leave but I stay and watch the firefighters work. I just sit here and stare. I’m still sitting, feeling useless, when there’s a shout from inside the church.
I drop the tea onto the grass below and hurry towards the shout, somehow ending up lost among a group of taller men. But I push through to the front just in time to see some of the searchers lifting what appears to be a long, dust-covered sack. It’s only when the dust sloughs off that I see the features of a person. Mum. One of the men lifts her into his arms, where she lays, limp and lifeless.
Chapter Fifty-Two
AIDEN
In my darkest moments, the idea of giving up on life and love seems blissfully easily. The lifeless lump pulled from the dust and stones turned out to be alive, but only just. They took Mum to hospital and now it’s three days later and she’s still sleeping. In the days that followed the rescue, I became accustomed to hospital lights once more. It reminds me of the time I lived here for a while, after I escaped, locked inside my own mind. Mum is locked inside her mind, too. She can’t speak either. She can’t open her eyes or eat. She’s unconscious, induced by the doctors, in order to allow her brain to heal. When the church collapsed, she was hit by the debris and suffered a brain injury.
There has been a meticulous process of unearthing and uncovering information since the day the chapel collapsed. Amy Perry is still in hospital following her own concussion. She’s in police custody for the kidnap. She didn’t take Gina for money or revenge; she took her as a way to lure my mother into her trap. But she used Faith’s obsession with me in her favour, promising Faith that if she had Gina, I would follow, and somehow we’d all be a happy family without my mother around. Faith was so psychologically damaged after a traumatic childhood that she believed it.
I can’t stop thinking about Faith and Amy, and why they did what they did. Whether they thought they would win, or if they didn’t care if they lost. How did either of them think this wouldn’t end with either their own death or an arrest? Or was that the point? That they truly cared so little for their own lives?
And I can’t stop thinking about who I am and how I fit into this mess. Because I relate to that kind of reasoning. Sometimes I want to give up. I could happily let darkness win, drown in my anger and bitterness that all of this happened to me. I can’t shake the idea that the world is punishing me, even though I don’t know why. But now I know not to give in to those thoughts, because there’s an alternative.
A girl, stolen from her family, younger than I was when I was taken, still knew how to call for help. I was a resilient child like Gina once; I can be again.
‘When will Mummy wake up?’ Gina asks. She and I are staying at Dad’s until Mum gets better, but every day we end up coming here and she asks me the same question.
‘I don’t know,’ I reply. ‘When the doctors think she’s better.’
Ginny places her little hand on top of Mum’s paper-thin skin. I’ve never seen my mum so fragile.
‘I want to tell her I’m OK,’ she says softly.
‘She knows.’
One day either Mum or I will have to explain to Gina why she was taken and what it all meant. I don’t want
to think about that, about the emotional toll it will take on her. But one thing I know about my little sister is that she’s tough enough to cope. The women in my family are more resilient than any other people I know. Everyone tells me that I’m the survivor, but I don’t feel like I even compare.
A few hours later, I take her to get some food and bump into DCI Stevenson, here to visit Mum.
‘I wanted to let you know a little more about the case,’ he says as we settle down with coffees in the canteen. I dropped Gina off at the creche on the way there. ‘You were right. Hugh bought the land owned by Faith’s father, using cash. I had the Clements’s house searched and found indecent images of children on a computer that I think belonged to Faith’s father.’
The words still shock me, even after what I’ve been through. They still make me feel cold all over.
‘Hugh Barratt and Clive Clements were persistently evil men, with a disease,’ Stevenson says. ‘They used their money and influence to do whatever they wanted to do. And I think Hugh was the kind of man to attract people like him. Maybe that’s why Jake found his way to Bishoptown.’ He taps the tabletop with his fingernail. ‘But this isn’t what the world is like. They’re a tiny percentage. Tiny.’
‘It doesn’t feel like that anymore,’ I say, and the bitterness creeps into my voice before I can stop it.
Stevenson nods slowly. ‘I know why you feel like that. But I promise you, things are going to get better now.’ There must be something hard in my expression, because he continues. ‘Words are empty, aren’t they? I’m sorry about how everything other people say sounds like platitudes. I’m sorry that this happened to you and your family. I like to think I know you all a bit better now. You’re a good lad. Your sister is another good kid. And your mum, well, she’s the best fighter I know, and stubborn too. You’re surrounded by the best people.’
I nod my head. ‘In my therapy sessions, we talk about how words heal. I don’t think words are empty.’
Stolen Girl Page 25
