24 Hours: An intense, suspenseful psychological thriller (17 page)

I
didn’t think
I cared about Mal, not really. I had pushed thoughts of what I felt as far away possible. It felt as if he had just appeared in my life and, if anything, it was me who had used him: for reassurance, for comfort. Only when Suzanne left the café that day, with a sort of rueful but satisfied apology, a twist of that downward-turned mouth, and I sat, staring at the wall, at the clock, at nothing much else except the waitress bustling up and down for a good ten minutes, I realised that I’d been wrong. On top of the shock of Suzanne’s revelation, the sense of disappointment seemed doubly huge. Feelings that I’d been hiding from myself began to unravel until there was just me left, revealed and afraid. It seemed, in hindsight, that I had hoped for more from this man – whilst he, apparently, had felt nothing other than a worrying and rather warped hatred.

Blindly I paid for my drink and walked back to the office. At reception, Maeve handed me my messages; there was, unusually, one from Sid.

‘Something about school holidays?’ she said helpfully. ‘Nightmare, the holidays and childcare, aren’t they?’

‘Thanks,’ I took the slip of paper from her and went into my office. Closing the door firmly behind me, I leant against it.

Now what?

I had about ten minutes until my next appointment. Putting Sid to one side, I rang Emily. She was in a meeting apparently.

I contemplated ringing the police; I even picked up the receiver to do so – but what would I say about Mal? ‘
Please officer, a man I slept with once apparently followed me to live in North London and hates me because I once counselled him and his wife briefly and then they split up? No, he’s never demonstrated any threatening behaviour towards me.
’

Without thinking about it too hard, I picked up the phone and rang Sid. A woman answered, taking me aback, even though I knew who it was.

‘Put Sid on, please,’ I said. Why bother with niceties? She certainly didn’t.

There was a pause, a sucked-in breath. I saw Jolie sitting in the gallery window in diaphanous lace at one of Sid’s opening nights after she’d had an ‘altercation’ with her manager outside on the fire escape. I couldn’t remember which exhibition exactly, but it might have been the ‘Madonna Eats Eve’ series. I saw her crying, piteously but prettily, into her Apple Martini, upstaging even the half-naked waitresses in their Vivienne Westwood fig-leaves. I saw Sid standing over the pretty singer, led there by Randolph.
Placed
there by Randolph, who smirked at me across the room as if he’d just won something. Her gallant protectors. Somehow, despite the tears, Jolie’s mascara never ran, her kohl-rimmed eyes never smudged.

She knew what she was doing.

I saw the photos the next day in the Londoner’s Diary, engineered no doubt by Sid’s conniving agent – ‘
YBA comforts soul sensation after boyfriend fracas
’. But most vividly, I saw her meet my eye over my husband’s suede-jacketed shoulder, her lovely face rather too near his tousled curls. No glimmer of embarrassment in the cool, appraising gaze that met mine – only certainty of action. Then she smiled at me, exquisite, gracious; kindly bestowing her beauty on me.

And I suppose I relinquished him. I was beyond fight by that point.

I
was
the fight.

‘Hi, darling,’ Jolie changed tack now, wrong-footing me. ‘How are you? I’ve been meaning to get in touch about the gorgeous Pol.’ My heart beat faster at her gall. She began to say something else, but I didn’t let her finish.

‘I need to talk to my husband. Now.’

‘Ex-husband,’ Jolie corrected, pleasantly.

‘Husband, actually,’ I corrected her back. ‘Now. Please.’

There was a silence.

‘Of course,’ she maintained the grace.

A muffled conversation in the background, a noise I couldn’t determine followed by what might have been a door slamming.

‘Hello?’ Sid, unusually, sounded tentative.

‘It’s me.’

Pause.

‘Hi.’

Nothing more.

‘I need to see you.’

‘Right. Well, when I pick Polly up tomorrow—’

‘Now.’

‘Now?’

‘Yes. Right now.’

I was surprised by my own nerve. To his credit, he didn’t argue.

‘Okay.’

I told him when to come and then I did something I had not done since he’d pushed me down the stairs outside. I cancelled all my afternoon appointments, called my mother and asked her to collect Polly from school. Then I went home ‘sick’.

I didn’t really want Sid to come to the house. I didn’t know exactly where he sat yet in the frame of my new life, and so he couldn’t slot back into the old one yet. But I couldn’t see another option right now. Overwhelmed by the events of the morning, I needed to be somewhere I felt safe, and that was home. So at home we met.

T
he things
that hurt us most are perhaps the things we understand least. For a long time, years even, I could not understand the hold Sid had on me – and so I could not escape it, no matter the damage it caused.

Then my father died. It only served to open up some great wound in me, and slowly, things fell apart, until one morning I arrived at work exhausted after a midnight fight with Sid, scratches visible on my face.

That weekend, my mentor Bev took Polly and me away for a night, to her house by the bleak shoreline in Kent. It was unorthodox, but she was an unorthodox woman and I revered her rather.

In the windswept garden Polly played with the border terrier whilst Bev and I sat wrapped in shawls on the garden bench; the sea beyond the old wall. We drank tea and she began to gently unravel the similarities between my father’s behaviour to my mother, and my own husband’s.

‘Sometimes, Laurie,’ she was incredibly gentle. ‘Sometimes, you know, people are unable to change.’

‘I know,’ I said miserably.

‘Do you? Really look at him, sweetheart. He may not change because he simply can’t. It doesn’t mean he doesn’t love you, but it might mean he keeps on hurting you.’ She pointed at my face. ‘In all ways.’

And I suppose it was only acknowledging what I’d always feared: that the damage done to him was scored so incredibly deep there was no undoing it. For all the kindness and the understanding I showed him, it didn’t make it better, it didn’t make it go away. He still had nightmares at least once a week, thirty years on; the pills worked less and less. He couldn’t unbutton himself, he couldn’t share his hurt, he kept it all locked tight, tight, tight inside – except on the days when it came out like crackling malevolent energy; when it came out physically.

And so I forgave him: because I thought he couldn’t help it. Time and again I forgave him; but all it did was make things worse.

As did this sojourn with Bev: it just made things worse at home, inflaming Sid’s anger because I’d gone away without him. But mostly Sid was angry because he knew things couldn’t continue this way, stretched to snapping point.

And gradually I understood it all better: maybe it didn’t hurt any less, but I saw, eventually, maybe it wasn’t me who caused everything to go wrong. It wasn’t me who was the letdown … the failure. I didn’t deserve to keep getting hurt.

I
should never have got
the vodka out. Of course I shouldn’t, but I did; and by the time Sid arrived, I was half-cut and tearful.

‘What’s going on?’ he looked tired and haunted and still unfortunately, to me, rather beautiful. When the fuck was the hold going to break?

I stood in the kitchen and watched him smoke out on the patio, next to the frog statue he’d made with Polly, painted the most lurid green, and I started to cry and once I’d started I found I couldn’t stop.

I didn’t want to stop.

I couldn’t be strong all the time. It was impossible. I couldn’t make the right decisions all the time. I tried so hard; so bloody, bloody hard, but it was impossible to know that what I was doing was right.

And I had started, very slowly to trust Mal, and he was no better than the rest; he was no better – in fact he was, apparently, worse. He had lied to me; he had gone so far as to stalk me, and now I was even more bewildered and, frankly, utterly freaked out.

‘Why are you crying?’ Sid was terse; never good with tears.

‘Because,’ I sat on the step and blew my nose loudly. ‘Because everything is so unutterably shit.’

‘It didn’t have to be,’ he blew a smoke-ring. We watched the perfect O float skywards. ‘It doesn’t have to be.’

‘What do you mean?’ I said. I dried my eyes on my t-shirt.

He muttered something I couldn’t hear.

‘What?’ I shook my head at him.

‘You know what I mean.’

‘Don’t talk in riddles, Sid.’

He chucked his cigarette in the flowerbed and stood over me, blotting out the weak sun. I looked up at him, and I felt a sense of longing I could never express.

He put his hand out; I regarded it for a moment. The thin fingers, the ever-present paint beneath the nails, scored into the very lines of his palms. The old tattoo he’d carved out himself with a maths compass when he was fourteen, running below one thumb; the name of some long-forgotten girl called Nikki who’d broken his teenage heart.

A heart already smashed by his parents’ neglect.

I took his hand. He pulled me up so we were facing, and, more drunk than I’d realised, I depended on his grasp to stand straight. We stared at each other. His eyes, the cloudy green I knew so well, were opaque, but still I tried to read them like I’d tried a thousand times before.

I saw pain and self-doubt. Only ever pain in Sid’s eyes, really. He could not seem to step over his past.

‘Sid,’ I said quietly.

‘What?’ he ducked his head nearer mine.

‘This is a really, really bad idea, I—’

‘Shh, Laurie. You talk too much.’

He kissed me. Of course he did; that was what I had wanted – but for a moment I did not return the kiss. I felt his mouth against mine and he tasted of cigarettes and coffee; he smelt of turps and oil paint and Sid, and so …

And so, I succumbed. I fell easily into the abyss of longing and familiarity and cool clean feeling that was an illusion; was only to do with the cool clean vodka.

I kissed him back. I wrapped my arms around him, stuck my cold hands into his thick hair. Breathed in the smell of him; a smell lodged deep in my memory, my synapses, in the cupboards where he’d thrown his clothes, in the coat-rack and the duvets, in the very air of the house.

In my broken heart.

We stood entwined on the back step, clutching on to one another. Just like I had dreamt.

And then we went upstairs to bed.

And that was that.

Afterwards, we slept a little. We slept, until the frantic knocking at the door two hours later.

E
verything speeds up
, rather as if I am in some animated toy town. I sit for a moment on Linda and Stan’s sofa and, having imparted this latest news about the car, they melt away.

I jump as my phone rings. Mum! Thank God. I scrabble for it.

But it’s just Sid.

‘Sid, someone has taken my mum and Polly somewhere.’ I do not mention Mal at this point. It will only be a thorn to needle Sid more, and I can’t risk aggravating him further.

‘What do you mean,
somewhere
?’

‘Some man picked them up from my mum’s house … and I don’t know who.’ I have an image of every man I know standing in a line. But mostly, I think of Mal. ‘Do you?’

‘No,’ he says urgently. ‘Where are you now?’

‘At my mum’s neighbour’s.’

‘I’ll come and get you. Just don’t do a fucking runner this time.’

‘No, Sid,’ I say as equably as I can in the circumstance. ‘I fucking won’t.’

And now, as I hang up from Sid, I will call the police, and the police will have to act, now there are other witnesses to Polly’s disappearance; it won’t matter now if they think I am mad, because Linda and Stan saw my daughter being taken away.

From upstairs, I hear heated words – and I look up from the phone, and the television comes into focus. Forest Lodge is on the screen, in all its glory before it was burnt down last night, and then I see pictures, like snapshots, of two men and an Asian woman – and then Emily. I stare at her; I recognise it as her graduation photo – it’s really old, and she is laughing uproariously at something, chandelier earrings swinging madly; looking past the camera at something behind the photographer. And then there is me. God only knows where they got it from; I look frightened and slightly wild, my eyes too big for my face, my hair twisted up in a severe and unusual style that took a hairdresser and a lot of lacquer to achieve, and I think it must be from the Royal Academy Gala dinner. They’ve cut Sid out of the picture; his suited shoulder is just visible.

Hands shaking, I fumble around for Linda’s remote control, neatly labelled ‘
Telly
’ in red biro, and turn the volume up. The newsreader is saying:

‘
Laurie Smith is now wanted for questioning in connection with the death of thirty-six-year-old Emily Southern. Smith absconded from the Royal Hospital in Devon this morning, where survivors were taken some hours after the fire broke out. Police believe the fire was started either in or near the women’s room, and that Smith may have some knowledge of this.
’

A cold clutch of fear: are they joking?
I had some
knowledge
? I
absconded
?

From the sound of the argument breaking out above me, Linda and Stan may just have heard the same news report.

Incongruous, my first thought: thank God that Pam Southern knows now about Emily and I don’t have to tell her.

But my cover is irrefutably blown – although of course Sid already knows I am alive. But if it was Sid who came to Forest Lodge, why has a man fitting Mal’s description taken Polly and my mother?

And it only gets worse as fingers are being pointed. I have to stay free; I have to find Polly …

And upstairs, Linda’s hand is probably hovering above her telephone, itching to call the police …

It is time to go. And there is only one place I need to be now.

I
n the distance
sirens wail as I slip out of the front door. I cast a last look next door at my mother’s house, but it’s still desolate; clad in darkness.

And so I run. I summon the little energy I have left, and I jog down the neat little roads, through the back of the cul-de-sac where the kids in Arsenal tops kick footballs against the wall, towards the high street, where there is light and people and the smell of kebabs and diesel fumes; I run until I am gasping for breath. From a neon-signed cubby-hole, I get a minicab driven by a blank-faced African who chews twigs of khat, and he takes me to Mal’s neat terrace, to the flat he rents across the park from Polly’s school, and I pay for it with money that the mole-like Linda lent me – before she thought I was an arsonist.

When I arrive at Mal’s, his basement flat is in darkness, but I don’t care. I am almost rabid with rage. I stumble through the shadows in the front garden and down to the door, but of course no one answers. I peer through the front window, through the wicker blinds, and I think I see a light, filtering through from what must be the hallway. Behind me I think I see something move, but when I turn there is only a great holly bush looming lethally over the ramshackle fence. Back at the front door, I ring again and again, banging the letterbox, and then I realise that of course if Polly is in there, if my mother is being held hostage, well, he’s not going to answer the bloody door, is he?

I look around the front garden, scrabble around on the path until I find half an old brick, artfully arranged as edging on the motley flowerbed. I pick it up and then, before I hurl it as I am about to, I stop and take my hoodie off. I wrap the brick in it and I put it through the window. As quietly as I can – but I am hardly expert at these things. Hardly expert, just frantic with worry and exhaustion and grief. And I think Saul would know what do, and I wish fervently that he was here now.

A light snaps on upstairs. A nosey neighbour who has not helped my child or parent escape. Fury bubbles up inside.

I start to pick the jagged glass away from the windowpane, and a cat appears noiselessly behind me on the wall and I jump and slice my finger, but apparently I am oblivious to pain.

A siren nears; the sound of tyres taking the corner too fast.

A ghostly blue light flickers round the road, bouncing off the windows opposite, and I hear two doors slam, and then another car pulls up behind the first vehicle; a slamming door again. Another figure behind the police, who saunter across the road towards me now.

Mal.

‘Laurie!’ he practically shouts, looming up behind the policewoman headed my way. And I don’t know who is more shocked now, me or him.

‘Don’t sound so surprised,’ I glower at him over the woman’s shoulder. ‘I thought you were in America?’

‘You know this person?’ the WPC asks Mal wearily, as if she’s seen this very situation hundred times before.

‘Officer,’ I say as clearly as I can for someone teetering on the brink. ‘I’m very relieved to see you. I have reason to believe this man has abducted my daughter.’

‘What?’ Mal emits a hollow kind of laugh. ‘What the hell are you talking about? I’ve just landed at Gatwick.’

‘Really?’ I arch an eyebrow in disbelief.

‘Yeah, really. I’ve been in Geneva at a conference, on the way back from the States. Fifty of the world’s dullest IT nerds can vouch for me.’

‘Really, madam?’ the WPC takes off her hat, smooths her cropped hair with one hand as she considers me. ‘And what leads you to believe that?’

‘Where’s your suitcase?’ I say to Mal. I am like Sherlock Holmes; I just need a Watson. A Watson would be good.

‘In the car.’ Mal puts his carrier bag down, bottles clanking, and unlocks his front door. ‘You are very welcome to come in and look.’ He motions down the hall with a theatrical gesture.

I’m slightly thrown by his complacency.

‘It’s a double bluff,’ I try to say, but I’m not sure my words are clear to anyone but me. They sound odd, like they are being spoken through a mouthful of sawdust. I am so tired I’m not sure how much longer I can physically stand, and people’s faces are starting to morph strangely as I look at them.

‘And your name is?’ the officer asks me. And then I feel like I’m going down a tunnel very fast.

Mal steps forwards and catches me before I fall. His suit sleeve is scratchy against my face.

‘She hasn’t been well,’ he says quickly. ‘I can take care of her. Please. Don’t worry.’

The policewoman surveys us warily. I think of the newsreader in Linda’s sitting-room. I think of the injunctions previously threatened against me. If I tell them who I really am, will they arrest me? If they arrest me, I will never get Polly back safely.

I cannot take the risk.

The male police officer steps forward. ‘If you don’t mind, sir, we will just take a quick look inside.’

‘Sure,’ Mal moves aside to let him pass. ‘Be my guest.’

He sits me on the front step with my head between my legs, gulping air. I don’t feel very well at all; I can’t think straight; I can’t work out where the danger is coming from anymore. I am aware of Mal hovering above me. From the corner of my eye, I can see his big hand, the sandy hairs on the back, a tiny scratch near his ring finger. I hear him yawn.

The police return; obviously, they’ve found nothing.

‘Do you want to make a complaint?’ the WPC mutters to Mal, indicating the broken window. Mal retrieves my hoodie from the floor, shakes the glass off. Tiny shards patter; glitter on the path.

‘No. It’s fine. Really.’

I start to say something.

I see the look in the woman’s guarded gaze: I see the filter she views me through. Another strange domestic that they would rather not be bothered with.

I stop.

‘Are you all right, madam?’ the woman asks me.

I nod.

‘Well, if you’re sure …’

I nod again. ‘I’m sure. Thank you.’

Mal helps me stand, propels me gently towards his door now.

‘Sorry,’ I say uselessly, because I am. About everything.

They leave.

Sorry that Polly is not here; sorry that I can’t go with them, that I can’t sit in the back of the car and sleep and wake and find everything is back to normal; sorry I can’t ask for their help. Sorry that I must press on until I find Polly.

I walk before Mal into the innocuous magnolia hallway, and my phone bleeps. I imagine it will be Sid. But it’s not.

The anonymous message just reads
GIVE UP
.

I switch it off. I will give up nothing.

Mal retrieves his duty-free bag, shuts the door behind us. He turns and leans on it; looks down at me.

‘Laurie,’ he says, and fear rears again as I read anger on his face. ‘What the fucking hell is going on?’