Our Father Who Are Out There...Somewhere

by AJ Taft

  “What if your dad comes here again?”

  “No one’s ever looked after her. You can tell. But she’s been really sweet to me…”

  “You mean after she kidnapped you?”

  “By rights she should hate me because I’ve got everything she’s never had.” Fiona draws breath.

  “She’s…”

  “I’ve been an only child for sixteen years, and now I’ve got a big sister.”

  “Don’t you think you should at least let your dad know you’re safe?”

  “I’m so mad with him. All that stuff about truth. You know what he’s like. He doesn’t trust me at all and I’ve never lied to him.”

  “Everyone deserves a chance to give their side of the story.”

  “I know. But whatever he says, he’s lied to me. My whole life he’s lied to me. I can’t talk to him about it yet. Later maybe, but just not yet. I want to hang out with Lily while I have the chance. You know what’ll happen when Mum finds out; all hell’ll break loose. I want to spend some time with Lily while I can.”

  Stuart leans back against the worktop and folds his arms. “You’ve got it all figured out.”

  “Did I mention we’ve ransomed me for eighty-five thousand pounds?”

  Stuart’s eyes widen. His mouth is still open. He closes it and reaches for the vodka bottle.

  “Try it with cream soda, it’s lovely,” says Fiona.

  Lily comes back to ask for an ashtray, just in time to hear Fiona saying, “I can’t go back. I can’t face any of them.”

  Chapter 20

  The pub where Stuart works is twenty minutes walk from his flat on the outskirts of town. A banner hangs over the door advertising its farmhouse grill. Inside, the polished brasses are almost obliterated by a profusion of garish Christmas decorations. It looks like someone has stood in the centre of the room and hurled tinsel around, until enough of it stuck. Lily ducks to avoid a golden ball that hangs over the doorway.

  Fiona pauses before crossing the threshold. “Wait, how do I look?”

  Lily turns and examines Fiona’s new outfit; skin tight black jeans, that they’d helped her choose from Lancaster market that afternoon, and a pair of ankle boots with a heel, combine to make her legs look even longer. Underneath Stuart’s thick, black donkey jacket, she’s wearing a T-shirt that says ‘Cocaine’ in the Coca Cola logo. Her cheeks are flushed from the cold, and the twenty minutes she spent with the contents of Jo’s make-up bag, have made her eyes seem bigger than ever, emphasized with thick smudged kohl pencil. She’s tied the half a plait into a pony tail at the crown of her head so it doesn’t look too odd. “You look great,” says Lily. Then when she notices Fiona waiting for something more, she adds, “And old.”

  “Easily eighteen,” says Jo, walking past her on her way into the pub. “Just walk like you rule the school.”

  Fiona and Lily follow Jo through the doors. Lily steers Fiona to a corner table by a roaring log fire, while Jo marches up to the bar. Stuart appears almost immediately, in a pair of checked blue trousers and a white jacket. “It’s pretty quiet. I’ll make you the house speciality in a bit,” he says, as he takes a seat next to Fiona on the padded burgundy velvet bench. She reaches for his hand.

  The landlord looks like he’s about to give birth; his hard, round belly protruding under his jumper. “Ah, so this is the girlfriend? I was beginning to think you were a figment of his overactive imagination. How’ve you managed to give your dad the slip?”

  “It’s a long story,” says Fiona.

  “Your secret’s safe with me,” he says tapping the side of his bulbous red nose. He turns to Stuart. “Don’t suppose I’m going to get much work out of you tonight.”

  “It’s all in hand. Just waiting for some orders,” says Stuart pointedly, looking around the empty pub.

  Jo returns from the bar, with four double vodka and cokes, and a pint of lager shandy on a small, circular tin tray. She hands the shandy to Fiona. “Sorry, do you want a drink?” she asks Stuart.

  “No thanks. I’ve got one in the kitchen.”

  “Well, cheers,” says Jo, raising one of her vodkas. Lily and Fiona chink glasses.

  “I’d better look like I’m doing something,” says Stuart. “Is anyone hungry?”

  Jo and Fiona both nod.

  Half an hour later, three plates of home-made steak and kidney pie, with mushy peas and chips that are fatter than the landlord’s fingers, sit in front of them. Gravy oozes from under the crisp, golden pastry.

  “Wow,” says Jo.

  Silence descends on the group while everyone eats. Lily dunks a chip in her gravy and sucks it. Jo is the first to finish.

  “So,” says Jo, wiping her finger around the edge of her plate, licking up the last remnants of gravy. “What happens next?”

  Fiona makes a gesture that says she can’t speak because she’s still chewing. Lily shrugs her shoulders.

  “I think we should ring him tomorrow, and give him the arrangements for dropping the cash,” says Jo.

  “Who’s going to ring him?” asks Lily.

  “Well, it can’t be Stuart, so it’s me or you, Lil.” Jo holds a coin in her fingers. “Want to flip me for it?”

  “I can’t,” says Lily.

  “I can,” says Fiona. The other two stare at her. “If either of you two ring he’s going to guess it’s Lily. There can’t be that many female kidnappers around.”

  “What’s up?” says Stuart, slipping into the seat next to Fiona. He looks at Lily’s untouched plate. “Not your thing?”

  “Not hungry, sorry.”

  “We were just saying who should ring Dad,” says Fiona.

  “I should ring your dad,” Stuart says.

  “You?” says Fiona, at the same time as Jo shakes her head.

  Stuart kisses Fiona’s hair. “I should ring him, because if I hadn’t heard from you, I’d be really worrying by now. I don’t want him getting suspicious I’m involved, and turning up here again. Not after last night.”

  “I didn’t think of that.” Fiona looks to the other two.

  “I’ll come with you,” Jo says. She stands up.

  “What, now?” asks Stuart.

  The three girls all nod simultaneously.

  “What do I say?”

  “Ask him whether he’s heard from me,” says Fiona. “When he says no, worry a bit. ‘Oh no, I wonder where she could be?’ Ask him what the police are doing. Hey, you could offer to go on ‘Crimewatch’. And say you’ll ring him if you hear anything.”

  “What if he tells me about the ransom demand?”

  “Tell him to do exactly what the note says.” Fiona finishes her lager shandy. “Will you get me another drink while you’re up?”

  Stuart shakes his head at her in disbelief, and heads to the payphone outside the men’s toilets. Jo follows him. He turns to her and creases his brow. “Come on,” she says. “Look at it from my point of view. We can’t have you telling him where we are.”

  “Maybe he has the right to know his daughter’s safe.”

  “Maybe you should ask his daughter what she thinks about that.”

  Jo lights a cigarette while Stuart dials the number from memory. Stuart turns his back to Jo as he speaks, but she can hear his every word. “Mr Winterbottom? It’s Stuart, Fiona’s boyfriend.”

  There’s a moment’s pause and then Stuart says, “I was just wondering whether you’d heard anything? I haven’t heard from her.”

  Another pause, a longer one this time. Stuart turns round to face Jo and raises his eyebrows. He speaks into the receiver as he stares at Jo. “She’s back home?” he repeats.

  Jo blows a string of smoke rings and pulls a face.

  “Why hasn’t she rung me?” says Stuart, still looking at Jo.

  He listens to the answer and then says, “Why doesn’t she want to speak to me?”

  Stuart turns back round again to face the wall, his back to Jo, and takes a few steps forward. “I want her to tell me that, please will
you put her on?”

  There’s a much longer pause and then Jo can hear the low hum of the dial tone coming through the receiver. Stuart hangs up and turns round to Jo. “That man has it coming.”

  “What?” Fiona shrieks.

  “That’s what he said.”

  “How dare he?”

  “He’s never liked me,” says Stuart.

  “Who does he think he is?” says Fiona.

  “Ok,” says Jo, returning from the bar and setting another round of drinks down on the table. “Either he knows it’s us and he doesn’t want anyone else to know, or he doesn’t know it’s us but he’s following the spirit of the ransom note and not telling anyone. Both of which are good for us.” She takes her seat between Lily and Stuart. Excitement wells up in her voice. “I think he’s going to pay.”

  “How dare he tell you I don’t want to go out with you anymore.”

  Jo pulls the notebook and pen from her outsize bag and starts scribbling. “How long do you think it would take him to get that kind of money together? What’s reasonable, a week?”

  “Do you really think we can go through with this?” Lily asks. “What if we all end up in prison?”

  “So what?” says Jo. When she sees the look on Lily’s face, she adopts a calmer tone. “He’s not going to press charges. He’s not even going to tell the police about the note. Otherwise why would he tell Stuart she’s at home? Even if he doesn’t want to tell Stuart she’s been kidnapped, he would have said, ‘no I haven’t any idea where she is, it’s all very worrying, blah, blah’. This is going to work.”

  Fiona takes a sip from Lily’s vodka and orange. She nods slowly, “He can’t have told anyone about this other life. I mean people like my headmistress, or the vicar. We go to church together every Sunday. None of those people know he’s a compulsive liar, I didn’t.”

  “What about your mum?”

  “I don’t know. I still can’t believe she knows. How could she live with a man who hasn’t paid any child support? The tabloids would make mincemeat of her if this was to get out.”

  Jo puts down her drink. “I don’t think the Sun is going to be taking up the cause, not unless we agree to go topless.”

  “Honestly, she’s that high profile. You’ve heard of Helena Kennedy?” asks Fiona, her eyebrows raised.

  Lily looks blank as Jo nods. Jo turns to Lily, “You have Lil. She’s that feminist barrister bird.”

  “Well, there’s her, and then there’s mum. I don’t get it. If she does know, she certainly won’t want it getting out and if she doesn’t know, dad won’t want it getting out. She’d kill him. Either way, it works in our favour for getting the money.”

  “So,” Jo presses on, “how long do we give him to get the money together?”

  “Why don’t you ring him and see if he’s got it? That’s the next step,” suggests Stuart. “He might say he knows who you are and he’s not going to pay.” He pauses, then nudges her. “Hey, he might not want you back.”

  “I’ll ring him,” Fiona says. “If he thinks I don’t know who you are, he’s more likely to pay up. If he knows I know about you, it’s game over. He knows I’d never forgive him for lying to me.”

  Lily tears the beer mat in front of her into a hundred little pieces.

  Chapter 21

  “Daddy? Daddy, please help me. Please do as they say. Give them the money or they are going to really hurt me.”

  “I’ve got the money here,” says a deep voice, with a soft Liverpudlian accent. “Just tell me where to drop it.”

  “They’ve already cut my little finger off,” Fiona gasps into the Sellotape dispenser.

  “Tell those bastards I’ll pay a hundred and eighty five thousand, whatever it takes to get my little girl back,” says Jo, wheezing like an old man.

  Lily laughs out loud. Stuart had gone to work by the time Lily and Jo woke up, and they’ve spent the whole morning rehearsing Fiona and Jo’s lines and getting stoned. Lily feels an unaccustomed lightness. Maybe it’s the fact she can turn her head again.

  Jo sits down on the settee and flicks through the notebook. “He gets home early on a Friday. We should ring him at four o’clock at the latest, before your mum gets in.”

  “How do you know he’s home early? Let me see that.” Fiona grabs the notebook from Jo’s hands. She glances at a few pages as Jo flashes Lily a worried look. “You were following us. I had no idea. What’s ‘TIFF’ mean?”

  “That was our, er nickname for you.” Jo tries to grab the book back but Fiona runs behind the settee.

  “What does it stand for?”

  “Er, Teenage Female.”

  “What’s the I for?” Fiona turns another page.

  “What time is it now?” Lily quickly asks.

  Fiona turns another page. “Hey. You’ve got dad down as a headmaster. He’s not the headmaster, he’s only a maths teacher. He isn’t career focussed. Well, that’s what he says. Mum says he lacks ambition and he’s just lazy.”

  Jo stands on the settee and snatches the notebook out of Fiona’s hands. “Right, we’ve only got an hour. Let’s go through it one more time.”

  Fiona groans and resumes pacing.

  They don’t know it but Fiona’s father hasn’t been to work since he got the ransom note yesterday morning. When the note came, he had rung both his school and Fiona’s and told them his daughter was ill and neither of them would be in for the rest of the week. His third phone call had been to the police. He’d told them that a friend of Fiona’s had been in touch and Fiona was with her. He told them he was certain Fiona would come home of her own accord in the next day or so. They had asked him if he wanted them to go and have a word with this friend and he had said no and apologised for troubling them. He figured that even if this wasn’t what he thought it was, he could tell the police he’d been obeying the kidnappers’ orders.

  Ruth, his wife, had stayed at the office the night Fiona went missing; something she often did in the lead up to a big trial. He hadn’t troubled her with the news that her daughter hadn’t come home from school; just as he hadn’t bothered her with the news that the Salvation Army had contacted him a few weeks ago. Nor had he mentioned that over the last couple of weeks, on three separate occasions, he had thought he was being followed by two young women; one with dreadlocks.

  On Thursday morning, yesterday, his fourth phone call had been to his wife. “I just thought you should know Fiona and I have had words and she’s gone to stay with Caroline for a few days.” Caroline was Fiona’s best friend. All Ruth had said, before asking whether the dry cleaning had been delivered, was “Well, that’s been brewing for some time.”

  As he makes himself a cup of tea, he calms himself with the idea that if Fiona has been kidnapped by real kidnappers, he can always claim he didn’t want her to worry. But what real kidnappers demand eighty five thousand pounds?

  David is the one that takes care of Fiona. That’s his job. Ruth hadn’t said anything, but David was pretty sure their marriage had been heading for the divorce courts, until Ruth had found out she was pregnant with Fiona. It had been a difficult two years, just the two of them. Fiona had saved his marriage. Given him a purpose in Ruth’s eyes. He had taken such great care of his wife when she was pregnant, cooking for her, massaging her feet when she got in from work. Ruth was 40 years old when Fiona was born. He had given up his job so that Ruth could return to work less than six weeks after the birth. Admittedly it hadn’t been much of a sacrifice, he was working as a bank clerk at the time, but Ruth had been grateful that there was no impediment to her returning to work.

  He had made himself essential to Ruth’s life. Making sure there was always a warm meal to come home to, no matter what time she finished work, running her warm baths, fetching her drinks, anything so that he could be with his daughter.

  If it had been up to David, he would have spent the next ten years listening to Woman’s Hour and baking bread, but once Fiona had started at school, expectations had been rais
ed. So he had convinced Ruth that he should take a teacher training course, so that they wouldn’t have the problem of what to do with Fiona in the school holidays and after school.

  He sits at his desk in his study and takes out the letter he’s hidden in a pile of school-books. His hand hovers over the receiver for a few seconds before he snatches it up. “Hello. May I please speak to Major Farley-Greystone?”

  The phone goes quiet while the voice at the end goes off in search of the Major. David tries to frame the questions in his mind. ‘Did you speak to (he still doesn’t really know what to call her) a Miss Lily Appleyard? My daughter?’

  ‘How did she take my hurried, unthinking, panic-stricken rejection?’

  ‘Did she sound cross? Cross enough to kidnap my other daughter?’ He replaces the receiver before anyone returns to the phone.

  He opens the suitcase and looks at the neat bundles of money all lined up. It was absurdly easy to get hold of it. He had made one telephone call to their financial advisor and asked if he had any policy that could be cashed in without Ruth knowing. He’d told him he wanted to organise a surprise for Christmas. The financial advisor didn’t even question what on earth he would buy his wife that cost eighty five thousand pounds. Instead he had rung him back five minutes later to tell him they had a couple of bonds that Ruth had bought when they were first married that required only one signature.

  “So, what I just go to the bank and pick it up?”

  “I’ll ring them. They’ll want 24 hours. It should be ready first thing tomorrow morning.”

  So, this morning he had left for work as normal, but gone straight to the main branch of the Nat West, which they’d opened specially for him at 8.30, and picked up the suitcase. Just like that. He’d thought he’d got used to their wealth but when the cashier had handed it to him, he had to fight the urge to say, “It’s not mine you know. This is more than I earn in five years.”

  David looks at the money again. Will this make it all go away? That is the question. If he does as they ask, will she return his beloved daughter, the one he didn’t screw up on, undamaged, unknowing to him and leave his family alone? Ruth won’t be back until late tonight and she’s leaving for London on Sunday morning so if he can just get her through another day, then he has some breathing space. He knows his wife is pleased at this perceived falling out, between father and daughter. She’s been telling him for years that their relationship is too intense.