by Darren Young
Laura stepped over the weights and put her head against the breeze block wall the car was parked against, just enough to see the rear wing of the car.
It was scratched. Paintwork was missing.
Her breathing became shallow.
She ran around to the front of the car. The headlight on the passenger side was also broken, as was the orange indicator casing next to it, which was smashed completely. There were deep gashes in the paintwork on the front wing, and when she put her ear against the wall and looked down the side of the car, as best she could with it being so close to the side wall, she saw dents and missing paintwork that stretched from the front wheel arch as far back as the rear one. It looked as if someone had taken to it with a wrecking ball.
Among the damage, she could just make out the tiniest flecks of red paint.
Her stomach tightened as if someone had tied a knot with it. She had to put her hands on her knees and her head down to steady her legs.
After a few moments Laura managed to lift her body back up. Her head was light and her legs swayed as she tried to move. She put her hands on the workbench to steady herself and hot tears began to fall slowly down her cheeks.
She tried to control her breathing.
Her mind was racing, her heart beating so quickly it hurt her chest, and she staggered towards the open door.
As she got to it, a dark shape appeared in the doorway.
It was Robert Grainger.
77 | Laura
Laura opened her eyes but her vision was blurry, everything around her had a fuzzy, unreal feel about it.
She coughed, and the taste in her mouth, sharp and surgical, made her want to be sick. She tried to move her hand to her mouth but it wouldn’t budge. Both of her hands were behind her, and as she pulled them she realised that they were bound together; the more she struggled, the tighter whatever was holding them became.
Laura looked forward, the blur beginning to sharpen at the edges. She could make out a dashboard, a windscreen and a mirror. She was in a car – her father’s car; she recognised the softness of the leather seat – and her legs were tied as well, at the ankles. She instinctively tried to get them free, but this made the bonds tighten around them as well.
She tried to pull herself upwards and forward, but there was another shackle, a bandage that had been put around her neck and the headrest, like a loose-fitting scarf; when she tried to move, it held her head in position, and stopped her moving it more than three or four inches forward. That was enough to see into the rear-view mirror, behind the car and towards the garage door, but there was no movement in the dimly lit space.
She called out but there was no reply.
Laura sat still, trying to think. Her head was throbbing and the smell of the chemical substance used to knock her out reeked throughout the car, so she could only take small intakes of breath. She strained her ears, trying to pick up any sound, and for a while there was nothing at all, but then she heard a faint shuffling and what sounded like a door closing. She turned her head to the right, and looked across to the wing mirror, which gave her a better line of sight to the doorway.
She saw her father come in, backwards. He was dragging something inside, something heavy from what she could make out. She cried out to him but he ignored her and continued what he was doing. Laura couldn’t see any more until he got closer, under the strip-light, and rested his load on the concrete floor.
It was Danni. She was unconscious.
Laura gasped and watched as he stood up, straightened his back and moved away from her motionless body. When he came back, it was with more bandages, and he began binding her wrists and ankles.
‘What are you doing?’ she pleaded, but he worked on as if he she hadn’t made a sound, tightening the bandages with several knots until it was impossible to undo them without a sharp object. Then he lifted Danni up by putting his hands under her armpits and dragged her to the car. He opened the driver’s door.
‘Dad!’
He looked at her, for only the briefest of moments, and then began lifting Danni up on to the driver’s seat. The surgical smell that had begun to slowly leave the car returned with a vengeance and Laura felt vomit in her throat. Robert positioned Danni’s body on the seat and swung her legs in under the steering wheel.
‘Dad. Stop. Please.’
This time, he didn’t look at Laura at all. He took another bandage from his pocket and put it around Danni’s neck, feeding it around the back of the thin, metallic-coated supports that held the headrest in the seat, and tying a knot.
‘Please, Dad.’
Emotionless, he leaned into the car and pushed the key into the ignition and turned it once, and all the dashboard lights came on, a mix of red and orange symbols.
Laura tried to keep as calm as she possibly could. ‘Dad. You don’t have to do this.’
Her father pushed the button to open the electric window behind Danni’s head. He let it go down a fraction and then back up until there was the smallest of gaps, and then went to his tool cupboard at the back of the garage.
Laura strained her neck to see him as he reached up to the top shelf, and when he turned around he was holding a long piece of flexible rubber tubing, tightly coiled.
She struggled in her seat, the bindings around her wrists digging in more as she moved her hands from side to side, hoping to find a way to prise them free. She looked at Danni’s face, peaceful and oblivious, and for the briefest of moments she felt envious.
Then she tried to scream, but the drowsiness from the chloroform made it sound more like a pitiful yelp.
Robert didn’t flinch. He walked to the back of the car and after a few seconds she heard the unmistakable sound of tape being ripped off a roll. Laura watched through the side mirror, tears beginning to slowly trickle down her face, as he came from behind the car and went to the rear window and fed the rubber pipe into the thin gap he had made in the back window.
‘Dad!’
He paused, or at least she thought he did, then walked back behind the car.
‘Why are you doing this?’
‘Doing what?’
The voice was groggy, confused. Laura turned her neck and saw Danni’s eyes opening, blinking rapidly, no doubt encountering the same blurred shapes she had seen a few minutes ago.
‘Danni.’
Danni tried to turn, but the binding around her neck was tighter than Laura’s. She coughed and gagged as the smell and taste of the chloroform invaded her senses.
‘What … ?’ She struggled to free her hands and legs, writhing on the seat, her knees hitting the steering wheel.
‘Don’t. It just makes it worse.’
‘What’s happening?’
Danni was getting her bearings. Her eyes widened as she saw the inside of the car. She turned her neck as much as she could to see Laura in the same predicament as she was and her face seemed to cave in on itself, as if her brain had imploded with an overload of information that made no sense whatsoever.
‘What’s happening?’
Laura turned her head to face her.
She didn’t know what to say.
78 | Danni
Danni struggled desperately in the seat.
She tried to pull her hands apart and slide her left ankle away from the right, but the bindings dug into her skin and got even tighter.
‘I told you it’s no use.’
Laura felt calm. She’d had a little longer to see what was happening but there was also a level of understanding that Danni didn’t yet have. Laura had seen it all unfold; not just this but the email, the threat, the chase, the attack on her mother.
It had all been for her.
‘We lost. I lost.’
‘Lost?’
Danni wriggled, trying to get her knees upwards, on to the seat. She was upset; scared witless but more angry, and Laura saw a wildness in her eyes she hadn’t seen before.
Robert opened the driver’s door. Danni’s eyes widened and she slumped m
omentarily, as if this was yet more new information in a sea of detail that she already couldn’t comprehend, then she heaved her shoulders forward, trying to bite his arm. The noose around her neck stopped her.
He turned the car’s key one extra rotation.
The engine came to life.
Laura took a deep breath.
‘You don’t need to do this, Dad. We can work it out.’
There wasn’t a flicker of emotion on his face. There was sweat, Laura could see it on his brow and smell it; but then he had carried Danni from the house. His face looked exactly as it always did, but she couldn’t recognise anything else about the man. His eyes were lifeless, fixed forward but looking at nothing. Laura knew he didn’t want to see her, look in her eyes; that would make it too real.
‘Robert! Dad! Please!’
The first trace of exhaust fumes reached her nose and she gasped, closing her mouth tightly and looking at her father, or at least the man she’d always thought of as her father. In her head, all she could recall was an article that Kelly had written a few months ago about a local councillor who’d tried and failed to commit suicide. She remembered Kelly telling her that she’d researched and found that more modern car engines were not as effective a method of taking your own life as older models, because of all the EU-imposed emissions regulations. She remembered Kelly holding court and recounting the facts to the rest of the office, and the sidebar to her story that explained how the regulations had saved the man’s life.
If Kelly’s article was accurate, she knew they had a few minutes, maybe as many as seven or eight, before they lost consciousness.
Danni was screaming now.
‘Don’t scream, you’ll take in more fumes.’
Danni stopped and looked at Laura, unable to understand her relative calm demeanour. ‘Why is he doing this?’
Laura realised she still didn’t know.
‘He’s keeping the truth about Jessica hidden.’
Danni heard it but Laura wasn’t sure she understood.
‘What’s that got to do with … ?’
‘Danni, I’m Jessica!’
Laura could see her eyes acknowledge it, but she still made little sense of things. ‘So why did my dad—’
Laura cut her off as she felt her throat begin to fill up with the toxic fumes that were drifting around the car, making their heads feel lighter by the second. ‘This has nothing to do with you or your dad.’
Danni closed her eyes. Laura knew she had realised that she was going to die for nothing. That she wasn’t even connected to Jessica’s disappearance. Laura hoped it would comfort her if her final thoughts were to know that her father hadn’t taken her from a beach and lied to her for more than twenty years.
‘You … ?’
Danni’s head began to slump. Laura felt the drowsiness began to take her too. She lay back in the seat and held her breath. In the side mirror, she saw Robert standing in the doorway.
Watching them die.
She wanted to hate him; but, for a reason she didn’t even know, she couldn’t. She felt sorry for him, and even sorrier for Danni. The other girl had stopped crying and had closed her eyes; Laura suspected she’d accepted what was going to happen and just wanted it over.
Laura knew she might as well do the same.
She took one last look at the man in the door and was about to close her eyes.
Then Robert suddenly lurched forward, stumbling into the garage behind the car. He was staggering, arms flailing at first, and then he put his hands to his face and let out a cry. Laura stretched every muscle in her neck to see what was happening.
In the doorway, she could see Helen.
Robert put a hand on the back of his car to steady himself. Laura saw Helen move towards him. She held something up in the air, red at the top with yellow writing on it: the defence spray. She sprayed Robert in the face again and he screamed out and was trying to walk towards her, his arms out in front like Frankenstein’s monster, trying to feel his way forward.
Laura took the tiniest gasp of air into her lungs and held her breath again.
‘Danni! Hold your breath!’
Laura watched as Helen easily sidestepped her husband’s blind attack. The woman she had always believed was her mother calmly opened the tool cupboard behind her as Robert turned at the door and made another attempt to reach her.
‘Danni!’
Laura watched as Helen brought something down on his head and saw Robert’s body fall to the floor in a heap.
Danni opened her eyes. The car was full of fumes now but suddenly doors were opening, the front one first and then the rear one, and much-needed oxygen raced inside. Laura gulped as much of it as her wide-open mouth could take in.
Helen put the wrench on to the floor, leaned inside the car and turned off its engine. Danni spluttered and coughed, sucking in cleaner air. Helen put her hand in her pocket and took out a small kitchen knife and began cutting the bandages.
‘It’s over,’ was all she said to them.
79 | Helen
‘The police are on their way. If they can get through this snow.’
Helen helped Laura out of the car. Danni was already out and standing behind them, her hands holding on to the tool cupboard as she tried to control her dizziness. She coughed as if she was trying to bring something up, but nothing came.
Beside her, Robert lay unconscious, blood already drying in his greying hair and matting it together. Helen bent down and tied one of the discarded bandages around his ankles. ‘Just to make sure,’ she said, looking at Laura, who was leaning on the car bonnet with both hands until the feeling came back in her legs.
Laura looked around at Helen, and then at Robert’s body on the floor. She wasn’t sure how, but she was calm – certainly calmer than Danni, who was crying again and demanding answers from no one in particular.
Helen was avoiding looking at Laura, and was tying extra knots in the bandages to give her something to focus on.
‘Why?’ Laura said quietly.
Helen stopped what she was doing and looked down.
‘I always wanted a little girl,’ she said in little more than a whisper. ‘Nothing I can say excuses all this but I was in a different place back then. Miscarriage after miscarriage, expensive IVF treatments, but I’d never given up hope. But then they said I couldn’t, that I would never … ’
She looked up, risking a glance at Laura.
‘I don’t know what I was thinking that day. I was supposed to be at the shops, but something drew me to that beach instead. Then I saw you, walking on your own.’
Laura stared at her.
‘I spoke to you. You looked like you were lost. Or maybe I wanted you to be lost, I don’t know, but I talked to you and I held your hand and, something just … well. So I took you.’
‘Just like that?’
Helen nodded.
‘I just shut out everything. I put you in the car, drove off, and next thing I knew we were on the drive and you were asking for the ice-cream I’d promised you.’
Laura sniffed. It sounded so simple the way she said it: more like an oversight than abduction.
‘Your father was … ’
‘My father?’
Danni looked over. Laura stared at Helen and she took a while to answer.
‘Robert was shocked. I don’t think I’ll ever really know what I did to him that day, but he did what he did to protect me. It’s not his fault.’
Laura looked at him, lying on the concrete. ‘He was going to kill me.’
‘He got desperate. He’d tried everything. He tried anything to stop you finding out. He sent the email. Got that boy to threaten you. He never wanted it to come to this.’
Laura looked at the tiny trace of a fading scar on Helen’s face.
‘Did he beat you up?’
Helen looked down. ‘We thought it might work.’
She seemed to wince. Danni snorted behind them and Laura shook her head. ‘You must have known
it might come to this.’
‘At the beginning, we thought something might happen just about every day. We lived in constant fear; didn’t let you out of the house for two years. We moved hundreds of miles away, we lost our accents, got false ID for you. He tried to cover every base. Then … ’
‘Then?’
‘It got easier,’ she continued, head down. ‘People stopped looking for you. They thought you were dead.’
Laura thought about Sandra, sitting in her chair, looking out on to the beach. ‘Not everyone.’
‘That was what we’d dreaded. We’d done so much to keep it hidden, and then that girl went missing and you went to work on the story. We didn’t know what to do, and then you said you were going to see that woman.’
‘That woman happens to be my mother.’
Laura felt a sudden anger rise through her body. She could see Helen was crushed, not caring what happened to herself now, and she couldn’t help feeling sorry for her.
Helen took a deep breath; she looked ashamed. ‘Sorry. Your m-mother,’ Helen stuttered; the words sounded painful for her to say. ‘We couldn’t believe it was happening.’
‘You didn’t try to stop me.’
‘What excuse could we have given for not wanting you to go? And it would only have made you want to even more.’
‘It would.’
‘We just hoped that nothing came of it. That you’d write your story and it would all be forgotten about in a few weeks.’
She turned and looked over at Danni.
‘Then I came forward,’ Danni said flatly.
Helen nodded. ‘We knew you’d not stop after that.’
‘Unless you stopped me.’
‘You’d found your story.’ She looked across, her face ashen. ‘You just didn’t know how much it really was your story.’
Laura closed her eyes.
‘It’s why we never wanted you to be a journalist. We knew that, if you had a job where you were always asking questions, you might ask the right ones eventually. When you wouldn’t give it up, your dad got you a job with David so you were local and we could … ’
