by Nicci Cloke
‘Aiden!’ Scobie hurries after me. ‘We need to call the police. We need to think about what this means. Where would he have taken Lizzie? Where would he go, Aiden?’
I close my eyes. ‘I don’t know, okay?’ I throw my phone down, and bang my hand against the radiator. It starts its tapping again and I feel like kicking it.
‘That’s a weird noise,’ Scobie says, looking at it.
I shrug wildly. ‘Air in the pipes or something. Who the hell cares –’
Scobie takes a step closer to the radiator. ‘Trapped air doesn’t sound like that. When did it start?’
‘I don’t know,’ I say, exasperated, spinning, because why are we talking about Kevin’s central heating right now, when we’re accusing him of – I can’t even start to comprehend what we’re accusing him of. ‘A week ago, maybe two?’
And then I look at Scobie.
Scobie looks at me.
And we both run for the basement door.
THE BASEMENT HAS two sets of bright, white striplights set into its ceiling, which flicker on as we hurtle down the stairs. There are boxes stacked everywhere and old furniture pushed into corners, ghostly under dustsheets. White metal shelves have been screwed onto the walls with brackets and these are filled with folders and documents boxes, most of them dated from the Nineties – all the newer ones are up in Kevin’s office.
The banging is louder down here.
Much louder.
‘Where’s the boiler?’ Scobie yells, but I’m already heading for it, kicking over a stack of old tech journals on my way. I know exactly where it is because two summers ago, Kevin and I tried brewing our own beer, and the boiler cupboard was the warmest place in the house, good for the yeast. It’s less of a cupboard, more of a utility room, with shelves for sheets and space for a washer/dryer, but Mum didn’t like coming down here all the time because basements creep her out, so she had it moved up to the kitchen. The boiler room is tucked away in the left corner of the basement, under the stairs.
The boiler room door is padlocked. Twice.
‘Keys?’ Scobie yells, but I don’t bother looking. I just pick up a set of hedge clippers and start smashing the locks. I hold the clippers like a baseball bat and I bring them down over my head, again and again, and at some point, I realise I’m yelling, screaming, a noise that sounds like someone else is making it. My hands start to bleed and one of the locks snaps, just a little, just enough. It falls, and I move on to the next one. I know but I don’t know that Scobie is somewhere beside me, throwing stuff off the shelves, crying. Maybe it’s me who’s crying. Maybe it’s both of us.
In slow motion, I see it splinter.
One – a chunk of metal flies out.
Two – the curve of the lock snaps in two.
I could reach out and tug it off now but I don’t.
Three – the broken lock flies off and hits the wall, taking a chunk of plaster with it.
I drop the clippers to the floor with a clang, and with my bruised and cut hands I try to flick open the plates where the padlocks have been. My hands are shaking and they leave smears of blood on the door and the frame, and Scobie is next to me now, helping, and between us we pull the door open –
And she’s there. Lizzie.
Lizzie.
Her hands are cuffed behind her back and she’s crouching beside the boiler, bending so that she can clunk the cuffs against the pipe. She’s dressed in a filthy t-shirt, a grey cloth bag over her head. When I stumble in and pull it off, she’s gagged too. Her face is pale and her hair is dirty. Her eyes are pink and swollen and bruised, and when she blinks against the sudden light and sees it’s me, they widen and then she starts to cry. Behind me, Scobie makes a noise that could be a shout or could be retching, then I hear him yelling at my phone, staggering around trying to find a signal.
‘Aiden?’
It’s a girl’s voice, and at first I think it’s Lizzie but she’s still gagged, still looking up at me, crying, sagging against the arm I’ve put out to steady her. The sound has come from behind me. I spin round, expecting to see my mum.
But it’s Marnie.
Marnie, standing at the bottom of the stairs.
Marnie, holding a knife.
WE STAND AND look at each other, me and Marnie, that long, wide knife from the block upstairs in the kitchen clutched in her hand.
‘What are you doing?’ I say, and then I think: he would have needed help. To do all this. Someone helped him.
Marnie looks down at the knife in her hand. ‘I heard the banging – I thought –’
But then her eyes fall on Lizzie, who has edged herself back into a corner, under the shelves of sheets, shivering. Marnie pushes past me and rips the silver tape off her mouth, the cotton gag spilling out. She pulls Lizzie to her, and then Lizzie is crying, and Marnie is crying.
We’re all crying.
I try to get closer, try to reach Lizzie, but when I do, Marnie thrusts the knife at me, her hand shaking. ‘Stay away, Aiden. Stay away.’
‘Marnie –’ My voice trembles. ‘It wasn’t me. It was him, it was Kevin.’
At the sound of his name, she falters. Something dawns on her face, and she looks up at me, tears still spilling down her cheeks. She clutches Lizzie tighter. ‘Oh, Aiden.’
‘What?’ I ask, and I think of the way she suddenly appeared at the bottom of the stairs, the panic on her face. ‘Marnie, what is it?’
‘Oh, Aiden,’ she says again. ‘That’s why I came. I’m so sorry. There’s been an accident.’
The dual carriageway, just outside of town. Over a hundred miles per hour. Straight into the central barrier. I listen to the specifics as they fumble their way out of Marnie’s mouth, as she cries and holds Lizzie and, somewhere behind us, Scobie throws up into one of Kevin’s box files.
And then I’m running, up the basement stairs, through the house, out onto the pavement, just as an ambulance and a police car screech down the street. I keep running.
Mum.
AT THE HOSPITAL, they fill in the rest of the story. How Kevin’s car lurched onto the motorway at just after seven, just after I’d driven to Deacon’s house.
He panicked, the newspapers will write in the coming days. Attempting to leave the country, they’ll speculate. He lost control of the car, the police report will conclude. Later, some of the papers will start to wonder if that is actually true, or if he was, as they put it, ‘looking for the final escape’ and taking my mother with him. The central reservation just before the Abbots Grey exit will remain crushed at the point of impact for three weeks before it is replaced.
But, for now, all they can tell me are the facts. He was driving too fast. The car left the road and hit the barrier, leaving both driver and passenger fighting for their lives. Police wait outside his hospital room. More police crawl through his house, our home, like ants, bagging items, photographing the basement.
I sit in a plastic chair in a hospital corridor, and I think of the man who wanted to be my dad. I think of what he has taken from me.
They lie in separate wards, separate beds, my mum and her husband.
The good news, delivered to me at just after four-thirty in the morning, is that she will make it.
The bad news is that he will too.
The most important thing I learn while I’m sitting there is that Lizzie is stable. Lizzie is okay.
It’s time to rebuild the things that have been broken.
LIZZIE
THE FIRST, SECOND and third times I try to open my eyes, it’s almost impossible. I feel like there’s something heavy all over me, like my arms and legs have been turned to stone. My mouth is sticky and cotton-wool dry and my throat feels raw. I manage to lift my eyelids once, twice – a slice of white light, a flash of speckled ceiling tile – and then they crash back down again.
I drift in and out of sleep; there’s a constant hushing, a faraway beep. There are voices but the words they say don’t often make sense.
Kidney functio
n critical…
… need to get those glucose levels up…
…CT results back… evidence of a cranial bleed… Severe disorientation…
And then I start dreaming. I start remembering. Trays of food pushed towards me. Tape pulled off my mouth, skin on fire. Tape smoothed across my mouth. A needle in my arm. Sleep. Sleep. A face that’s not a face – a mask. An animal? Plastic features, grinning mouth. I scream. I sleep. I can’t see his face but I know him; I know that I know him. His face. His face looming in front of me. His name out of my reach.
My name out of reach.
Where has my name gone?
I wake again, and this time I can see the needle in my arm. No – a different needle. This needle attaches to a tube, which attaches to a bag that hangs over me. I can see more wires stuck to me with small circles, wires that lead to machines that sketch out the rate at which I’m living.
Am I living?
I start to remember more. I remember that cold, quiet street; I remember his hand on my shoulder. I remember the way the pavement sparkled as we walked, and the terrible sound I made as I met it.
And then nothing.
And then that room. Waking up to total darkness – but no, not darkness. Plastic. All around me, covering me. Fear. Panic. Scrabbling at the plastic, gasping for breath, pushing it away. Screaming. Screaming.
His face. His panic.
You were dead, he said, again and again, as if he could make it true.
Am I dead now?
Sleep. Sleep again.
Lizzie.
‘Lizzie.’
I open my eyes for the fourth time and a boy is sitting next to my bed. Holding my hand. I remember his face.
He is the boy who saved me.
‘You’re awake,’ he says, and he squeezes my hand.
‘You saved me,’ I say. My voice comes out scratchy.
He smiles, but it’s a weird smile – it doesn’t reach all the way to his eyes.
‘We don’t have long,’ he says, looking over his shoulder at the door. ‘Nobody knows I’m here.’
‘Are you okay?’ He doesn’t look okay. He’s pale, dark shadows under his eyes. He’s bruised, too – his eye and his lip puffy and blood-crusted. He can’t stop glancing towards the door.
But then he looks at me again. He becomes still.
‘Are you okay?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Lizzie, I’m so sorry this happened to you.’ He puts his face down towards my hand, rests his forehead against it. I don’t know what his name is. How does he know my name? Is that my name?
‘Shh,’ I say. ‘Shh. You saved me.’
He looks up at me. ‘You remember that?’
‘I’m remembering,’ I say, although I don’t know whether this is true. Whether any of this is true.
His head jerks towards the door. ‘Listen.’ He wraps our hands in his other hand. ‘I shouldn’t be here. I just wanted to see you. I wanted to make sure you were okay.’
I nod, even though the dots at the edges of my vision are joining up now, darkness closing in. The boy notices straight away.
‘You should sleep,’ he says, and he brings my fingers towards his face and kisses them. ‘We’ll talk soon, okay?’
I’m trying to keep my eyes open but they keep drifting shut. I’m wondering if this is real or if I’m dreaming again. His fingers slip out of mine and I feel as though I’m floating away.
‘Wait –’ I force myself to open my eyes one more time. ‘Were we – are we… friends?’
My eyes are closed and his voice is far away and comes to me just as the dark falls. But I hear it clearly anyway.
‘Of course,’ he says, his fingers grazing mine again. ‘Lizzie, me and you will always be friends.’
THINGS COME BACK, but they come back slowly, and sometimes they come back wrong. I can’t tell the difference between dream and memory, and I get muddled over people’s names, what they mean to me. The doctors tell my parents and the police to be patient; they explain that repressing painful memories is normal in a situation like this. They say this is common, given what I’ve been through.
Nobody thinks to actually sit down and explain to me what I’ve been through.
I remember him first. Aiden. I remember his face looking down at me in the basement, but I also remember standing on a stage with him, I remember lying in a meadow and looking up at his face, the sky blue behind him. These thoughts make me feel warm and safe. Happy.
He visits me once more. It’s dark outside, and when he’s gone, I wonder if I dreamed him. He holds my hand and he tells me I’m getting better, that I’m going to be okay. He tells me that the man who did this to me is going to be punished. He says he will protect me.
And then, one day, I start to remember. Properly. It floods back; it makes me sick. I hold the edge of my bed and I remember everything.
I remember that day, going to London.
I remember who that man is, I remember what he did to me.
I hit the buzzer next to my bed and when the nurse comes running in, I ask for the detective, the one with the scary grey eyes. Hunter.
DCI Hunter sits in a chair beside my bed. He listens to me as I tell him everything; about how Hal called me, how Hal stood me up, and how Kevin was there. How he bought me my drink, how he walked me to his car. How he pushed me. The sound of my head splitting open, the way the stars turned to darkness.
‘If Hal had just shown up,’ I say, my voice shaking, the thought just occurring to me, ‘none of this would’ve happened.’
‘Lizzie,’ he says, his voice gentle. ‘Hal didn’t make that call. Kevin did. There isn’t a Hal. There never was.’
I close my eyes, try to process this. I can’t make sense of it. ‘But why would Kevin call me?’
Hunter sighs. ‘He claims he wanted to repair the relationship between you and Aiden.’
I feel sick, remembering the way he put on gloves as he walked, the way he looked at me as I fell. ‘He thought he’d killed me.’
‘Yes. He claims he panicked. Lizzie, I need to ask you – why did he push you? Did you argue? This is really important. This is what any trial will focus on: whether it was an accident or whether he intended to hurt you.’
‘He wrapped me up in plastic,’ I say, and I start to cry. ‘He hid me in his basement.’
‘I know.’ He puts an awkward hand on my shoulder.
I stop crying suddenly, what he said before finally sinking in. ‘So Hal was never real? It was always Kevin?’
Hunter looks down at the floor. ‘No. Not exactly. When Kevin called you, he pretended to be Hal. He knew about your relationship with Hal, he had access to those messages. But he wasn’t the one who sent them.’
‘Then who was?’
Hunter looks up at me, and then he does a funny thing: he reaches out and holds my hand.
‘I’m sorry,’ he says. ‘This isn’t going to be easy to hear.’
Extract from Hertfordshire local newspaper, Abbots Grey Evening News:
Local businessman Kevin Cooper appeared in court today for the third day of his high-profile trial. Cooper, 45, is accused of the abduction of schoolgirl Lizzie Summersall last October.
The court has heard that Summersall was lured to a pub in North London, thinking that she would be meeting a boy she had met online. In fact, the meeting had been arranged by Cooper, whose defence team say was trying to repair the damaged relationship between Summersall and her ex-boyfriend Aiden Kendrick, Cooper’s stepson. An altercation followed, during which Summersall sustained a serious head injury.
The prosecution state that Cooper, mistakenly believing Summersall to be dead, then placed her in the boot of his car and drove home to his £2 million home in Abbots Grey where he concealed her body. On discovering Summersall was in fact alive but unconscious, he proceeded to keep her prisoner in a ‘calculated and sickening’ plot. They pointed to evidence that Cooper’s multi-million-pound technology empire had developed secur
ity software ‘TrueFace’ for sites such as Facebook, and suggested that the media attention surrounding Lizzie’s disappearance presented ‘an ideal business opportunity’ for Cooper.
Deborah Grant QC, defending Cooper, said that although he had made a ‘monumental error in judgement’ when attempting to conceal Summersall’s body, it was ‘an error made in a moment of pure panic, and a decision which sent him, regrettably, spiralling into a situation far beyond his control’. She said that Cooper was ‘an honest man, a good man, who was just trying to protect his family, and, in doing so, made a terrible mistake.’ She also accused Miss Summersall, who appeared in court to give evidence after several months of therapy and treatment for memory loss, of being ‘a fantasist, an attention-seeker, and an extremely talented actress’.
The trial continues.
Extract from national tabloid newspaper, The Shot:
LOLITA LIZZIE MADE PLAY FOR BOYFRIEND’S DAD!
The jury at the trial of internet millionaire Kevin Cooper has heard that the schoolgirl he abducted, Lizzie Summersall, made sexual advances towards him. Cooper’s defence team say that Lizzie, 16, attempted to lure him into bed in an attempt to get revenge on her ex-boyfriend and Cooper’s stepson, Aiden Kendrick. Summersall had quite the summer, having ‘sexual relationships with strangers’ and ‘getting so drunk she’d forget what she was doing’, Deborah Grant, Cooper’s lawyer, claimed. She suggests Cooper was trying to defend himself from an intoxicated Summersall when she slipped and knocked herself unconscious.
Comment left on article on online news site, The Daily Verdict:
Frankly, this is disgusting. We’re talking about a teenage girl here, and he’s a middle-aged man! Of course he wasn’t defending himself! FFS. The fact that any jury is even considering that as an argument makes me sick.
Also, helloooo? The clothes? That guy who worked for him has admitted that Cooper got him to dump her clothes in the park (and he messed it up by folding them, LMAO), and made him sign some non-disclosure agreement and paid him off. Hardly the work of a man in a state of panic, is it? Sounds pretty cool and collected to me.
