‘No!’ he says, his voice full of laughter and sunshine. ‘They’ve been in the Lake District all this time.’
‘She sent you a selfie with her address on it,’ Poppy says. ‘In the taxi.’
‘What?’ Aidan shouts. She can hear him scrambling for his burner phone to check. ‘No,’ he says. ‘No, no, no.’
She sits up on the garden chair like a rabbit who’s heard gunshots.
She has sent people to murder her stepsister and stepmother. She has sentenced them to death. She is so angry at herself, she could kick the wall. Stupid, selfish Poppy Madison.
The reality is so awful that Poppy is not defensive. She doesn’t explain herself. She doesn’t say anything at all, except, ‘They’ve gone there. After them. I gave them their street address.’ Now she has said it, it sounds mad. She wants to explain about the blade. About the feeling of it nudging her neck muscles out of the way. Of the balaclava man’s hot breath at her ear, of the survival instinct it is impossible to suppress, but she doesn’t. There’s no time, anyway. And it’s pointless. It’s so pointless in the face of everything. She stares up at the house and – it feels like – into the past, before everything changed.
‘Okay,’ he says, sounding like a robot. ‘I have to get off the line now, Pops, and I need to call 999. You take care and I’ll be in touch soon, sweetheart, okay?’
70
Aidan
The M1, northbound
Tomorrow
Poppy. A rage bubbles up through him.
He calls Lottie. She gasps, and that sound is the worst thing to him: confirmation of her worry. She tells him she will personally ensure the police in York send a team to Lauren’s address. Two Sunshine Drive. It’s right there in the background of the selfie, just like Poppy said it was. If only he had looked more closely, like he had when she sent him photos in the early weeks. If only Poppy had told him. If only, if only, if only.
Next, he calls 999. The operator seems perplexed by the backstory, the vast context, the crossed wires, but says they will dispatch somebody. Then, and only then, he calls Lauren. Her burner phone rings out. He closes his eyes. She’s doing exactly what she should: being good. Fuck’s sake. His hands form fists by his side. He needs a private plane. A helicopter. To be able to teleport. To go back in time.
Desperate, he calls the protection service. He has to google their number, reaches a hotline. He presses ‘four’ for other enquiries and waits. He tells the operator, Sophie, their backstory.
‘Two Sunshine Drive,’ she reads out. ‘We’ll be sure to get in touch should we have any news from there. Thank you, Aidan.’
‘Will you do it right away?’ he says.
A frown communicates its way down the phone line in her tone of voice. ‘I’m surprised you know so much about the group’s intentions – and your wife’s location,’ she says.
‘You need to be going now. Dispatching someone. They’ve found them. Look, I need her number. She was called Lauren Starling, please look her up on your systems and give me her number.’ God, how come he doesn’t know her new name?
‘There is no way I can reveal the telephone number or any contact details of somebody who is in protection,’ she says. ‘But rest assured, we will look into this for you.’
Aidan feels his face fill with blood. Hot, red rage. ‘Am I speaking to a human or a fucking automated machine?’ he shouts, louder than he’s ever shouted before. And then he presses the big, angry red ‘end call’ button, then throws his phone across the room.
He might be too late. He might already be too late.
Maybe Lauren isn’t not answering because she’s being good, but because she’s … he can’t bear to think about it. She’s hiding. She’s bound and gagged. She’s got a gun to her temple. She’s dead. She’s dead, she’s dead, she’s dead.
He kicks the wall furiously, then throws the coffee machine on to the floor. Its fucking stupid plastic parts skid everywhere like kids’ toys, and he kicks those, too. It’s all his fucking fault. In trying to protect his family, he has condemned them, sentenced them to death. If he had never been in touch with Lauren, Poppy would never have seen.
He can’t stand here and do nothing, waiting for the protection service to call Lauren’s other phone that – even now, even fucking now! – he’s not allowed the number of. Waiting for the York police. Waiting for Lottie. Waiting for a train, buying a ticket. He can’t wait any longer. He leaves his flat and gets in his car.
He takes the roads too fast, his foot to the floor on the motorway. He will be too late, he knows, but he doesn’t care, not any more. He might be too late, but he will be there.
With his wife. Where he belongs. Where he has always belonged.
71
Lauren
York, Yorkshire
Tomorrow
At first, Lauren thinks she awakes to cooking.
Aidan?
She is still in the before, where they live in Islington, where they have trained themselves to sleep through the sounds of London’s sirens, where Aidan makes cooked breakfasts.
No, they’re in the Lake District.
No. They’re in York.
But they’re okay. They’re happier. It’s taken a while, but they’re happier.
She thinks of something she could do today. The sort of things she hasn’t done for a while. She could go out and buy chrysanthemums. Late autumn flowers. Put a couple of bunches around the house. It’s a small thing, but it’s a start. Buy a couple of Christmas presents for Zara.
But who’s cooking?
She turns over, sniffs the air, then drifts back into her dream. She’s hot. She dreams of ovens and sunshine and hot baths. Sweat vaporizes between her skin and the duvet. She’s naked, she still sleeps naked, the way she always has, since Aidan.
She turns over a couple of times, then accepts that she’s waking up.
She opens her eyes, expecting a dim room, hazy in the early morning light. But it isn’t gloomy or dark. It is orange. It’s orange just at the edges, around the door frame. Like the wood is shining. She tilts her head, studying it. Is the sun up already? But no, it’s dark out of the window.
The realization sweeps over her like she has walked into a cold fog. Her entire body freezes in terror.
That’s not the sun. Nobody’s cooking.
Their house is on fire.
The bathroom is a bonfire at the end of the hallway. It is so enormous and hot that it has eaten the door. The walls are burning and embers are being spat out on to the stairs. The air itself seems to be on fire, hot little dust motes and pops and flashes. There’s no way out. There’s no way through. Lauren can easily see that it’s already spread to Zara’s room. Black smoke hangs over everything. Lauren’s throat is hot and sore with it.
Somewhere, though she is hardly aware of it, a smoke alarm sirens out, their family’s swan song. She runs, still naked, back into her room and grabs her phone. She dials 999. They tell her to plug the gaps in her door frame with towels, with wet clothes. Anything she can find. They will be there soon. They ask her who else is in the house, and she tells them Zara.
She hasn’t forgotten their new names. It isn’t a slip of the tongue. She doesn’t care any more. Because she knows this is them, that they have come for them. And she knows, too, that they will have thought this through: they have managed to find two people in witness protection. They will ensure they kill them.
She’s told to ‘stay put’ by the 999 operator. She tells them she will. They ask if she wants to stay on the line, and she says that she doesn’t. She wonders if the operator will think about her, later tonight, when he goes home and tells his partner that he couldn’t help a woman who died in a fire with her daughter. She wonders about the stories the papers will run. About the Find Girl A group and how many different methods the department for person protection tried, and how none of them worked. She wonders if they will recover the burner phones or trace her stupid letter to Hannah and conclude that her breache
s led the group to them. She thinks of the text the other night, the selfie to Aidan, and thinks maybe they did.
She thinks about Hannah as she pulls on a dressing gown. She thinks about the niece or nephew that she will never meet. First steps, first day of school, first Christmas play. Bouncing a fat baby on her knees on its first birthday.
She fumbles with the hot door handle to Zara’s bedroom. Her grip slips on it, and it brands her hand, a large blister forming immediately. She thinks about how they never had a true, fair shot at this, not from the moment Zara stood in that playing field over a year ago and saw the murder. Because it was a murder. Maybe not of Jamie, but of them. Of Lauren and Zara. They are being murdered, here, in York, by the people who say they are innocent.
She takes one last look behind her at her room. She could ease open the window. She could fit right out, in her dressing gown. Save herself.
But this isn’t what parenthood means to Lauren. It never has been. She has put Zara before herself for Zara’s entire life. Sleep sacrificed. No drinks out. Lovely handbags replaced with changing bags. Her breasts sucked and saggy. Her stomach distended. Her conversation poor, limited to whether Zara enjoyed bananas and the dry skin she used to get on her feet that they couldn’t get to clear up. She’s done school plays when she should have been working. Carried her when her arms were aching with the effort. Shared plates of food with her. Shared beds. Shared Aidan. Shared a life, up here in York. Given up everything to keep her safe.
She wrenches open the door. A wall of heat hits her. She feels her skin curling as she steps into it. But she can’t give up. She must save Zara. She must find Girl A, her precious Girl A. She must find her, and save her, though she knows she can’t, though she knows she is dying here.
She takes one step, two, into the flames. It doesn’t hurt, not immediately. She is existing in the moment between injury and pain, just a few seconds, just a few seconds more.
Zara is sleeping on her back, in that way she always did, one arm flung above her head. Lauren reaches for her. She shakes her shoulder, but she doesn’t move. She’s not sleeping, Lauren realizes. She’s unconscious.
Lauren’s skin is burning and blistering now. She coughs into her hand, and her palm comes away black. The door frame behind her has been subsumed into flames. There’s no way out. She puts a palm to the window, and the glass feels molten. She comes away scorched.
The die was cast right from the beginning. They had no chance. Lauren is tired as she thinks of it. Her eyes are heavy, like she’s been injected with a general anaesthetic. She can’t keep them open. Leaden limbs. Black coughs. Burnt hands. She kneels on the bed next to Zara, then lies down next to her, her body curling protectively around Zara’s like it has a thousand times before.
She closes her eyes, just for a second. She’ll get her strength back. Her breathing is becoming laboured, burnt breaths coming in little gasps.
She closes her eyes for a moment longer. She needs to get Zara out. She needs to keep her … keep her safe.
Her body relaxes into unconsciousness. It’s a tidal wave she can’t fight. Her skin becomes even hotter, as the flames burst into the room.
For a second she feels pain. And then she feels nothing except love. Motherly love.
72
Aidan
A lay-by, the A1, northbound
Today
Aidan’s phone jolts him from his intense, angry thoughts. He’s been driving too fast, zigzagging across the traffic. Doing eighty, ninety, one hundred miles per hour. It’s late. There’s not much traffic. Just the blur of taillights in the distance. It feels good to be doing something. He will just drive and, for sure, something will await him, but, for now, he doesn’t know what. He is changing gear fluidly. Spotting things up ahead in good time and dodging them. He is not human, not thinking, merely a predatory animal on the chase.
But now his phone is ringing. He drives too quickly into a lay-by off an A-road outside York, wanting to concentrate. His tyres kick up gravel as he tries to stop. He comes to a finish near to a shut-up lorry that apparently usually serves tea, coffee, hot chocolate + kebabs!!!
He takes his phone and answers.
‘Aidan, it’s Jon, from the department for protection here.’
‘Hello,’ Aidan says. ‘I’m on my way up to York, I’m almost here.’
‘I thought so,’ Jon says.
Aidan doesn’t ask how he knows.
‘I can explain what’s gone on. Are you there?’ Aidan says. ‘In York?’
‘Come to … come to the hospital, okay Aidan? York Hospital? I’ll meet you there. A&E.’
‘Okay. Are they … are they okay?’ Aidan says, wishing he was looking at Jon, now, that he could gather clues and pick over them. But he isn’t.
There is nothing. Just the black night all around him, cars whizzing by, a shut-up van in front of him.
‘Come to the hospital. A&E. I’ll see you there.’
The fluorescent strip lights are too bright for the small hours. They cast Jon’s skin in a kind of yellow glow. Sick-looking, jaundiced. Eerie. Aidan is relieved when he is led into a side room. Dimly lit. Two pink sofas, not quite enough to seat three people, too large for two. Old-fashioned lampshades, also pink. Pull cords that are segmented, string and white plastic beads. Aidan stares at them.
‘Where are they?’
‘Aidan, sit down.’
‘Where are they?’
‘The Find Girl A group found out Lauren and Zara’s newest address a few hours ago,’ Jon says, reaching out to press Aidan’s shoulder so that he sits.
There’s a box of tissues on the brown table in front of them. Jon nudges it towards Aidan with his foot – unconsciously, Aidan thinks – as he crosses his legs. He’s put on a suit with trainers. Dressed in haste, illogically: Aidan hopes it means he cares.
‘Yes. I know. I … me and Lauren … we –’ Aidan says.
Jon holds up a hand that seems to silence Aidan with no effort at all. The words simply stop like a tap turned off.
‘A 999 call was made by Lauren at ten o’clock tonight.’ Jon leans forwards, elbows on his thighs. Feet in those trainers turned slightly outwards. ‘You also made one at almost exactly the same time.’
Aidan’s mouth twists with the irony of it. Apart but together. Separated and alone but connected, too. By telephones and shared goals and by love.
‘A fire engine, ambulance and police were dispatched as soon as possible.’
Aidan stares at the pull cords and wonders at all Jon’s detail. He knows rationally that this conversation is groundwork. Procedures were followed. We did everything we could. Liability disclaiming. And yet. And yet. There is hope. Now. Still.
‘They attended on the scene and a fire had taken over the whole of the house.’ Jon rubs his hand across his chin. The beginnings of ginger stubble are poking through.
Aidan braces himself as Jon reaches the point. He knows, but he is still staring at the speck of hope. As tiny as those segments on the pull cords. Maybe it won’t be both of them. Maybe they are merely injured. Maybe, maybe, maybe.
‘Two bodies were recovered from the scene. We believe them to be Lauren and Zara. We are so very sorry, Aidan, that this has failed: that we have failed you. We will be undertaking a thorough investigation …’
Jon’s sentence continues as Aidan’s world ends. One world streaming out into the room in front of them like ribbons, one cut off, amputated. Stopped. And it’s all over.
Aidan’s hands are shaking as he brings them to his mouth. His face is wet with tears and drool and snot. He doesn’t care. They are gone. His beautiful wife and stepchild. They are gone. He did everything he could to save them. He thinks about fire and flames and heat and his babies, his most precious people, the loves of his life, burning, incinerating, dying, ending, right there in the smoke, being cremated, before he could say goodbye.
LATER
* * *
73
Aidan
Isl
ington, London
February, the following year
After the funerals, and after the arrests, and after fucking Christmas, which cycled around even though it was inappropriate, wrong, it is February, and Aidan is standing with Bill Gates outside the Old Bailey.
Zara’s evidence will be read out posthumously, at the trial of the players, coaches and members of Holloway FC for the murder and abuse of many homeless people.
The double murder of Zara and Lauren was dropped by the Crown Prosecution Service three weeks ago. Aidan took the call, said he understood, then excused himself to go into the work toilets to be sick.
The entrapment meeting never happened, of course. The fire – a home-made firebomb posted through Lauren’s letter box – was so ‘successful’, as the police put it, there wasn’t enough evidence as to who started it. Each group member gave the others alibis, and, in the aftermath of the fire, they ditched their burner phones. The forensics were poor because of the intensity of the flames, and, on one bleak early January day, Aidan got the call to say there would be no prosecutions.
The department said they would concentrate on the wider conspiracy, with Zara’s evidence read out to the court. She had given many statements in writing over the course of her weeks in protection, by email, unknown to anybody.
Zara’s statements would be given more weight, not less, Aidan discovered. A small and poignant piece of law: that the dying have less reason to lie. And Zara knew she would be found, eventually, because of what she knew. She kept reams of notes about it: about what she feared was coming for her, and about what she knew.
She is the only person in the world who could connect the murder of Jamie, where she heard the motto shouted, to the murder of Bertha, where Anna – who won’t testify – heard it. She is the key that unlocks the dates of attacks on homeless people occurring on footballers’ birthdays. Zara is at the centre of the cover-up.
How to Disappear Page 33
