How to Disappear

by Gillian McAllister

The screen is black at first, but then their security light clicks on, lighting everything from total darkness to grey and white. There’s their driveway. There are their bins. The blackness of the mountains beyond, out of sight. Slowly, a figure looms into view. It’s a man. Lauren’s chest sparks with anxiety.

  He’s tall, in a baseball cap that obscures his face, and tracksuit bottoms. He walks slowly up their drive, his eyes to the ground, one hand in his pocket. And then he raises his gaze, his face bleached of features by the security light, and all she can see is that he’s slowly scanning the upper windows of their house. After a minute, he seems to see what he’s looking for, turns around, and disappears down the drive.

  She rushes to the window, draws up the blind, and stares out. The light’s gone off. Should she go out? She stares and stares. No. She can’t. She’s all alone.

  She gets her phone and opens the app again and rewatches the footage.

  As she watches the stranger leave, there is just something about his walk that is familiar to her. Something about it that seems a little like Jon’s.

  51

  Aidan

  Shepherd’s Bush, London

  Eleven days to go

  Aidan wakes in the middle of the night. He’s on the sofa. The television is still on. Maybe that’s what woke him. A half-drunk cup of tea is at his feet. He reaches to touch it. The ceramic mug is chilled. It must be the early hours.

  A rerun of Countdown is playing. The numbers round. 100, 25, 6, 7, 3 and 2. Target: 596. His mind immediately starts whirring before he even consciously realizes it. One hundred minus three times six …

  He blinks. The clock says almost midnight. He would’ve said four a.m.

  Seven times two is fourteen, and add it on.

  If he can solve that, he can solve this.

  He stares at the television and thinks about Lottie and the Find Girl A meeting.

  He knows they went to Truro. He knows they found two elderly people. The hospital had been converted to flats, and Google Street View hadn’t caught up. He can’t let himself think about that or he will be eaten up by guilt. They didn’t harm them. They didn’t harm them. They only frightened them.

  What he doesn’t know is what is going to happen next. Now that they know he set them up. He was buying time, but they moved so fast, faster than he expected, and now he’s running out.

  He logs on to his computer and sends Lottie an email. Subject: Truro.

  Can’t sleep, he writes. Keep thinking about Truro. I know you couldn’t get anything on them. That it’s better to wait and see through our plan. But I’m so worried it isn’t going to work. That they will find L&Z first.

  He’s surprised when she replies straight away.

  I know, she says. I lose sleep over it, too. But the nice guys don’t finish last. They finish first, in the long game. And that is what we’re playing.

  Sleep leaves him like a blanket falling away from his shoulders and tears fill his eyes. Crying at an email from a fucking police officer, what has his life come to?

  ‘Five nine six,’ both contestants confirm on the television, and he switches it off. It must have been easy.

  He reaches to check his burner phone.

  Thirty-nine notifications on Telegram, beginning at seven thirty. Jesus, what’s the matter with him? He never sleeps so early. He sits up and rubs at his face. His arms are covered in goosebumps.

  The app directs him to the first unread message, but he scrolls down quickly, wanting to read the conclusion first.

  Stomach acid burns his throat as he reads the final message. Outside the house. Going in.

  Aidan’s fist is to his mouth. His hand is shaking so much that his lip is being rammed into his new teeth.

  He is sitting on the sofa, his feet on the carpet. The messages are time-stamped an hour ago. It will be too late, whatever he does. He can’t see. His eyes are misted over with tears, that fist trembling, trembling, trembling against his teeth.

  He will read them all and then he will call the police.

  He dashes the tears away and wipes his hands on the fabric of the sofa.

  7.31 p.m. Kevin: We’ve found them. Up north. Finn did a reverse-image search and found Lauren on a nursery website uploaded yesterday. @James Thomas ur scrapers aren’t performing well enough. Seven of us are going up there now. Anyone else free is welcome to come.

  Aidan’s heart is in his throat. Of course. He’s been so fucking stupid. A dumbo. He was so concerned with faking his own scraper results, he never ran a real one. He could have, and then told Lauren to get anything taken down that showed her. He has been so stupid. And it has cost him everything.

  8.07 p.m. Mr G: Sorry not free but wishing you luck hope she gets what she deserves.

  8.20 p.m. Shaun: We are free, three of us here, we’ll come to you.

  8.20 p.m. Kevin: Message me separately m8.

  9.10 p.m. Kevin: Just in the back of a van now.

  9.21 p.m. Kevin: Speeding on up the motorway.

  On and on it goes. Kevin narrating on his own vigilante mission. Aidan’s stomach muscles are so tense he feels sick. He scrolls past the messages. Logistics. The journey. Describing what they’re going to do to them to silence Zara. They have a knife, a hammer. They’re going to barge the door open. Lauren and Zara will be sleeping, and they will surprise them.

  At 11.24 p.m., Kevin sent a photograph. His hand, black gloved fingers clutching a knife. It’s a proper knife, a knuckle-duster knife with four round finger holes. It’s not a kitchen knife. It is a knife for stabbing. The blade double-edged, so sharp Aidan can barely look at it.

  Aidan scrolls to the last message again.

  Outside the house. Going in.

  Lauren might be hiding. Please let her be hiding. He can’t call her.

  He exits the app and calls 999.

  ‘Please help me,’ is the first thing he says to them.

  52

  Lauren

  Coniston, the Lake District

  Six weeks gone

  Lauren is sitting cross-legged in front of the boiler, the evening after Zara was at the sleepover. She is thinking about last night’s video footage. She hasn’t told anybody. Aidan would freak out. She can’t trust Jon. So who should she tell? The police? And what? It probably wasn’t him.

  She fiddles with a joint she has discovered inside the boiler. If it wasn’t Jon, then she should definitely tell Jon that somebody showed up on the camera.

  She has been in this loop for hours.

  The joint feels loose, and it tightens as she messes with it. She opens YouTube and follows a tutorial led by a man called Oleh who tells her how to tighten it fully.

  Telling people good news is the absolute pleasure of good news, she is thinking. ‘I fixed the boiler!’ she would say to Aidan, and he would high-five her, and consider her brilliant, a genius, a strong and confident woman. An audience is life, to Lauren.

  Anyway. It’s after eleven o’clock. The house is double-locked. Zara is already in bed, exhausted from the sleepover last night, and Lauren might just have fixed the boiler.

  She releases the taps and the bath runs easily, the hot water lasting and lasting. An inch, three inches, half a foot of hot water. Lauren stares at it in shock. The vapour rises, a miniature water cycle there in her bathroom. Lauren thinks she’s never seen something quite as beautiful.

  She puts both of her phones on the chair in the bedroom. She used to entertain herself in the bath. Podcasts. YouTube. The Coronation Street omnibus, much to Aidan’s dry amusement. But tonight, she wants nothing in here. Just this pure, steaming water and herself. Lauren, not Lindsey. She takes her cardigan off. Goosebumps appear over her arms. Next go her jeans, her vest top, her underwear. And then – bliss. Her feet are in, turning red with the water’s hot kiss. The rest of her body in the cold air. The exquisite contrast of it, like a July sun in December.

  Something jolts her body. It’s the door. She stares out at the landing, frowning. She is the sort
of person who will dash to open the door, who will welcome an evening visitor ‘just dropping by’. Aidan hated it – would put his coat on, pretend to be going out – but she’d open a bottle of wine in the kitchen, light candles, tidy up around them. ‘No, no, stay!’ she’d say.

  But who could be knocking on the door? They don’t know anyone. They are completely alone. Zara is reading in her bed. She’s probably asleep now. Lauren thinks of the man on the footage last night and, suddenly, the bath feels as cold as it used to run.

  Her heartbeat speeds up. It begins whooshing in her ears, as she stands there, naked and vulnerable, the responsible adult who has to decide whether to go downstairs and see.

  There it is again. It’s definitely a knock. A muffled sort of sound, maybe a gloved hand. Three cordial thumps.

  She wraps a dressing gown around her, walks to the top of the stairs and tries to look down without being seen. The frosted glass is dark, unwilling to reveal the identity of the form standing behind it.

  Lauren peers over the bannister. Shit. How is she supposed to know what to do? There’s danger everywhere, it feels like to her. She sees the form shift outside, an unknown face looking right at her. She wants to reverse back up the stairs and hide under the beds, in the wardrobes. Call 999, wake Zara, smuggle her out the back. She remembers that knife-wielding yob in their garden in Islington and freezes in terror, just staring at the door. This could be it. The figure raises a hand. It’s all black. Black arm, black glove. It’s waving at her. Tears build in Lauren’s throat. She’s never been so terrified in her life.

  Would somebody really dangerous knock? Would they wave? She tries to reason with herself.

  Maybe, she thinks, if they were an enemy pretending to be a friend.

  She finds her phone and opens the Ring app.

  Jon appears very clearly outside the door, framed in the screen on the app.

  She stands still. It’s him. Should she answer?

  What if he is protecting her from something?

  ‘It’s me,’ he says, a hand through the letter box to hold it open.

  ‘It’s so late,’ Lauren says back.

  ‘I know – you need to open the door.’

  Lauren stands in the hallway, frozen. ‘Why?’ she says eventually, wrapping her dressing gown around herself. Her feet leave damp impressions on the carpet.

  ‘There’s been a breach. You’re in danger. You need to come.’

  Lauren is frozen by fear.

  ‘Look, I …’ she says. She’d rather risk it. Would rather stay here than go with him. ‘No,’ she says. ‘I … no.’ But what if he’s right?

  ‘What?’ Jon says in exasperation. He keeps his hand in the letter box so it doesn’t close.

  Lauren stares at it, a small chrome rectangle quivering in the night.

  ‘What’s going on?’

  Something about his low tone invites her confidence. The safety of the door between them. That he isn’t forcing his way in.

  Everything builds up inside her. Aidan, Zara, that she nearly had her bloody bath and didn’t get it, her doubts about him. It all mounts up and spills over. She is unable to keep secrets inside where they belong. Not when she has to lie all day long, too.

  ‘I’m not sure if you are who you say you are,’ she says.

  ‘What?’

  ‘I’m not sure you’re … good.’

  ‘What do you want? To see my ID? Call my boss?’ he says. He sounds half aghast, half amused.

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘What’s this about?’

  ‘You had a Holloway shirt in your car,’ she says in a rush. ‘And you came up on the app – someone that looked like you was outside our house last night …’

  The letter box sighs. ‘Right,’ Jon says softly. ‘I see. Are you going to let me in?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘It’s a Boca Juniors kit,’ he says in a resigned tone. ‘I play five-a-side in it. Is that alright? Sacha got it for me. Blue and yellow. But not Holloway.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘Do you want me to go and get it?’

  ‘No …’ She pauses. ‘And the camera?’ she says.

  ‘It was me. Off duty. I was making sure you were safe. You left the windows open a few nights before. I wanted to check you hadn’t again.’

  ‘You could have messaged.’

  ‘I just wanted to check. Couldn’t sleep, woke in the night worrying. I couldn’t text in the small hours. I just wanted to know,’ he says. His voice becomes urgent. ‘I can’t tell you how much you need to come with me now. What do you want – do you want to see my official protection service pass?’

  Lauren hesitates, her hand on the doorknob, then opens it. She can’t – she can’t keep this up. This hyper-vigilance. She’s got to trust somebody, in all this. He’s had so many opportunities alone with them. She feels he’s telling the truth, out there in the cold on the other side of her letter box. She thinks she knows him to be good. She believes him.

  ‘What’s happened?’ she says as she opens the door, relief rushing through her like white rapids.

  ‘A concerned family member has reported that the group has this address,’ Jon says, his cheeks white from the cold, his eyes darting left and right. ‘They’re on their way. We have a team here who’ll do a sweep and remove any evidence that you’ve been living here. But you guys need to come. Now.’

  ‘What? Shit.’ Lauren says, wrapping her dressing gown around herself.

  The panic dissipates, as is often the case during a real emergency. She takes the stairs two at a time, ready to wake Zara.

  When they’re in the car, later, having thrown as many of their things together as they could, she turns to Jon and says, ‘Thank you for understanding. Earlier.’

  ‘It’s fine,’ Jon says. ‘In fact, I’m glad you asked. Means I’ve trained you well to be suspicious.’ He gives a tight little smile.

  They’re travelling east.

  They were found by a bot performing reverse Google Image searches. An old photo of Lauren compared with the latest one on the nursery website. The group systematically went through each hit until they found them. Then they rang the nursery, pretending to be her ex-husband, and asked for her address, said it was a family emergency. Eventually, when they said it was life or death, the nursery gave it. They didn’t know any better. They didn’t know not to.

  Lauren has been told off for allowing a photograph of herself online. There was a cold, serious fury behind Jon’s words. The near miss was very near. But hopefully the police will catch them, Jon said.

  Zara is in the back, in her bed wear – shorts and a T-shirt. She didn’t change her clothes. Just packed slowly and shivered on the driveway while Jon put their cases into the boot, then resumed reading The Time Traveler’s Wife in the car, legs like Bambi’s across the back seat. When she looks at Lauren in the mirror, her expression looks weirdly guilty. Lauren would know Zara’s guilt anywhere, has parented it for a decade and a half. But why she is feeling guilty now, Lauren doesn’t know.

  ‘There are to be no selfies, no website photos, no online footprint of any kind in the new location,’ Jon continues.

  ‘Whatever,’ Zara says. ‘They’ll find us eventually anyway.’

  ‘Zara,’ Lauren says, turning around in the passenger seat to glare at her daughter in shock.

  ‘They will,’ Zara says, with a shrug. ‘We may as well just accept it.’

  ‘Accept what?’

  ‘That it’s over.’ She stares insolently out of the window. There is something about the set of her shoulders. She’s a ball of teenager anger.

  ‘An attitude like that won’t help anyone,’ Jon says.

  Zara’s eyes widen, then close.

  Good, Lauren thinks. Go to sleep. ‘You know Sacha,’ she says quietly, looking across at Jon, ‘who got you the blue and yellow kit …’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What happened to her?’

  The tail end of autumn goes on outside. Leaves cat
ch on the windscreen. The trees are spindles by the side of the road.

  ‘We were both police,’ he says, with a sad smile. ‘And she was killed on duty.’

  Lauren stares at his profile in the dimness of the car.

  ‘By a burglar who she didn’t realize was armed,’ he continues. ‘I drove straight to her – I was on duty, too, in a different part of the city – but I got there too late.’ He stops talking but his hands don’t. He rubs at his nose, then seems to want to go on, but turns his hands over, a gesture of defeat, before replacing them on the wheel. It’s pointless to keep analysing it, his gesture says.

  As Lauren slips into sleep again, she thinks of Jon. He left the police along with his sister, and, unable to protect her, he protects others, instead.

  Lauren wakes in the passenger seat. Jon’s got the heat up high and her cheeks feel tight with it.

  She stares at the rain running down the car windows. Black skies, street lights blurred with drizzle. Lauren misses the bath she almost had.

  ‘We’re going to start experimenting with plants,’ Jon says quietly to Lauren.

  ‘Plants?’ Lauren almost laughs.

  ‘We’re going to set up some profiles on social media that the group might think are you. Silly errors. We’ll have you “like” Facebook groups that Lauren liked, request to add old family members, and so on.’

  ‘But won’t my family think …’

  Jon shrugs, and Lauren supposes he means it’s collateral. More damage, more feelings hurt. More confusion, more family drama, more angst.

  ‘Okay,’ she says.

  ‘We’ll upload a photo of you to some of them. Make your location clear. We can use twenty or thirty. It will help. We’ve had some success with them with other clients. So we’ll try that.’

  Clients, Lauren thinks bitterly. Like they’re paying for a personal shopping service, not being kept alive.

  ‘Will they work?’

  ‘Hope so,’ Jon says.

  Yes. They will try that. It doesn’t matter that the first thing – the original witness protection – didn’t work. It doesn’t matter that they are on to the next, like a second round of chemotherapy after an unsuccessful first. It doesn’t mean everything will stop working one day, that they will be found and killed. It doesn’t, it doesn’t, it doesn’t.