Dark Place to Hide (34 page)

It is time to go. But she’d love to come back later.

Clara goes over to the door and turns the handle. It’s stuck. She rattles it and pulls and pushes, but it’s jammed.

All of a sudden she wants to be at home. She’s enjoyed playing farms and making up stories about the people in the dolls’ house moving into their new house. She’s liked the food and hiding away in this secret place – wherever it is – but it’s time to go. She wants to feel the softness of her mother’s apron, breathe in the café smell of baked beans on toast, let the taste of
hot butter melt on her tongue. It seems a while since she’s seen her mother and Clara knows she’ll be worried. ‘But it’s not my fault,’ she says, pulling at the doorknob again. The brass fastening judders and moves a tiny bit, but the door itself stays solid and firmly in place. This isn’t right. How did she get in here? The moment is misty. It’s like she woke up here a long time ago.

She looks around the walls for another way in or out; a broken panel, a tumble of bricks – some entrance that no one knows about, but that she’d manage to squeeze through – like she always did. She can’t find any such gaps; the walls are all flat and smooth.

Then she remembers something. It makes her feel cold and sick. It makes the back of her knees go juicy and her palms damp like boiling flannels. She thought he was a wizard – he said he was. The Wizard of Oz – the kind magician who grants wishes – but he turned out to be nothing but the big bad wolf.

‘My,’ Clara says, picking up a pretend basket and pointing her toes. ‘What big ears you have, Grandma…’

‘All the better to hear you with, my child,’ she continues in a snarly voice, playing both parts.

‘Grandma, what big eyes you have!’

‘All the better to see you with, my dearest.’

Clara makes her voice rise up high. ‘Goodness me – just look at those large hands!’

‘All the better to hug you with, my little one.’

‘Oh, that mouth, Grandma. What big, spikey, ENORMOUS teeth you have!’

‘All the better to EAT you with!’

Clara stops there. She doesn’t want to think about what happened next. The wolf said it was a secret. He said if she told anyone, if she dared to breathe a word of what he did, he’d make sure her mother didn’t get well. He said he would put poison in the medicine she took. All Clara had to do was keep the secret and not tell anyone about him.

The wolf tricked her and Clara hates him. More than once he has taken her to hidden places or told her to wait for him in the woods. She doesn’t want her mother to get worse and die, so she has to do what he says. But she hopes he gets chopped into little pieces by the man who cuts down trees in the forest – just like in the story.

She thinks about the toys and the food instead. Everything has been left here. By the wolf? She’ll have to wait for him to come back. She likes adventures in new hiding places and she’s brave, but when she thinks about the wolf, her knees turn into jelly trifle.

She pulls a cushion against the wall and sits with her knees up. She can’t get comfy, so, pretending she’s a bird, she makes a little nest using blankets and old sofa cushions. Clara wonders if she can get a message through to her mother by saying the words out loud while holding a picture of her mother in her mind. Will she hear it? She’s never heard of such a thing, except there are things like telephones and radios and people talking inside the television, so it might work. She tries it anyway: ‘Mummy, don’t worry. I’m visiting Grandma in the forest with my basket of bread and wine and we’re having a nice chat. I’ll be home soon.’

Night-time pulls her eyelids shut like blinds, and shortly afterwards, she falls asleep.

20 August - 21
^st
day missing

The rain batters the roof of the car as we stop at traffic lights. Tara is losing patience. She wants to know who we’re looking for, who the culprit is.

‘If you know who it is, why don’t we go to his house?’

‘Not yet. Our abductor has thought this through. Clara won’t be locked in a cellar or a shed; wherever she’s hidden, it will be set up to look like an accident. He will have manufactured the scene – somewhere dangerous or unstable – so it looks like she crawled inside of her own accord.’ I recall the smile twisting his face when I saw him at the window – he wasn’t scared. ‘Whatever he’s done, it’s going to look like the sad outcome of a curious little girl exploring a hidden, forbidden place.’ I flick the next page of the map over so fiercely, I almost tear it out. I rile at myself.
Come on. Where would he hide her?

I instruct Tara to pull off the B-roads onto back-roads and narrow tracks. We’ve already been out of the car to explore a tumbled-down church, an old ice-cream van, a lean-to and an abandoned tractor. Neither of us has an umbrella. Tara, at least, has a hood on the nylon cagoule she’s pulled on that she happened to have in the car. Nevertheless, her hair hangs like short daggers, dripping down her cheeks. The rain is warm and would be refreshing if only we could stay out in it then get dry later. As it is, my feet are squelchy in my sandals, the car seats are soaked, the map is crinkling. Thunder rolls over from the east and I stop to wonder if Clara, wherever she may be, will find the rumbling scary or exhilarating.

We drive for miles, up and down small lanes, before taking off on foot across fields towards more abandoned buildings – barns, an old milking parlour, a petrol station, a hut.

On the way back to the car, Tara breaks the regular splosh of our footsteps with an unexpected statement. ‘Diane told me you go and hide in the chicken hut in your garden sometimes.’ She turns back to the last place we’ve been to indicate where the comment comes from.

‘Did she?’ I laugh, knowing that not long ago I would have done no such thing. Before my breakthrough in the prison cell the issue of retreating to the chicken coop had been a serious cause for concern – now it feels like something way back in my past. ‘Did she tell you why?’

‘Yeah. Sort of. She said it’s because you’ve got anger issues. It’s like a man-cave.’ Unlike Alexa, Tara has a way of digging into my private life that makes me feel I’m in safe hands.

‘Yes, it’s true. But I had a bit of a revelation when I was arrested.’

She looks intrigued. ‘What happened?’

‘Dee has always tried to convince me that it wasn’t my fault my father left when I was a kid.’ She slips into step beside me and links her arm through mine. ‘I knew what she meant, but I never really felt it
here
.’ I tap my chest with my fist. ‘The penny dropped while I was stewing for hours at the police station. Solitude makes you think! Somehow, I don’t feel responsible for my dad leaving any more. It was
his
choice. I don’t need to turn the anger in on myself now.’

‘Wow – that’s brilliant!’ She claps her hands together. ‘So – the visits to the chicken hut are numbered?’

‘It’s called a chicken
coop
.’ I grin and she nudges me affectionately. ‘We’ll see,’ I say. ‘Probably not.’

‘Dee will be pleased,’ she says and with the mention of her name again, we fall quiet.

We take the road down to the south coast and pull up as close as we can get to a lighthouse I’ve spotted on the map. It looks like the Leaning Tower of Pisa, sitting on rocks, toppling towards the water. We clamber over chunks of turf that indicate there’s been a recent landslide and hold up the barbed wire for each other to climb through. We ignore the notice which says that trespassers will be prosecuted and the council won’t accept any responsibility for our injuries.

The front door is boarded up and broken scaffolding that once held up part of the side now hangs loose.

‘Be careful,’ I warn Tara. ‘This looks like it could collapse any minute.’

We pull away the planks criss-crossed over the entrance and clamber inside. The walls are scaly and green with algae as if the seawater has climbed in and swirled all the way up to the top. An iron spiral staircase curls around a central hub, which forms the base for the huge lamps at the top. We go up the stairs, but are blocked by chunks of concrete and broken glass. It’s narrow at that point and velvet lichen lapping across the slabs indicates that nothing has been moved for months. We return to the ground floor; there’s nowhere to hide, the place is empty.

Replacing the planks as best we can, we take off along the shale and check under several upturned boats. Tara suggests the caves and we wander inside one small inlet in the rock, before I change my mind.

‘Hang on – this is too accessible – it’s out in the open. She’ll be somewhere enclosed, where she can’t be discovered. Let’s get back in the car again.’

I daren’t close my eyes any more. When I shut them the noise fills my ears. It takes me a while to realise it’s my own breathing filling my head. It doesn’t feel right. It sounds like a ruptured engine – laboured and rasping; the sound of a creature that doesn’t have long to live. That scares me more than anything. Life is oozing out of me and I feel like I’m crossing over – like the grim reaper is making his way towards me and I have nowhere to hide.

I can no longer tell if I’m asleep or awake – dead or alive. Every moment feels the same: empty, desolate, flooded in darkness. Where are you, Harper? Why don’t you come for me? You’re an expert at solving crimes – why haven’t you worked out this one? Has everyone forgotten me? When death finally claims me, I will let him take me – he’s already been inside my head for a while now, making himself at home.

There is silence – no breathing at all – then I catch up with snatches of air through my nostrils. I don’t feel good. I’m shivering again – on the outside my skin is cold and wet, but on the inside I’m a furnace. I need a doctor. The back of my head is peeled raw where I’ve tossed it back and forth on the rough wood during my sleep. Is he poisoning me, now? Is that what this is? I’ve lost all the strength I had left for that one tiny moment when he might have been off-guard. It’s too late now. I waited and waited, but time has run out.

Behind my eyes it is thick and black – a barren night sky without any stars. My feet are numb, as though they are already lost to me. I am slowly sinking – gradually slipping inside a grave. Sinking, sliding, going under… You’re not coming are you, Harper? I’m not going to get the chance to say goodbye.

Clara wakes up. She can tell she’s been in the same place a long time. All the food is gone. She tips up the carton of juice – two drops fall on her tongue. She’s thoroughly miserable now and her cheeks are raw with crying. She shouts out. Calls for her mother. Silence creeps around her like a deadly gas. More than anything she wants to go home. This isn’t fun anymore. She shakes the door handle again. She wants the game to stop.

She has no energy, is parched and listless. Her mouth feels like the floor of a rabbit hutch. It’s like her throat is a fist, gradually closing up altogether and giving her a little whistling sound as she breathes. She’s had a headache for as long as she can remember, and she’s dizzy and disoriented when she moves. Having to pee in the corner makes her feel dirty.

Clara sleeps, wakes a while, then drifts away again. Her limbs feel like they have weights on them. It’s been dark, then light, then dark again, but she has no real sense of the passing of time. She’s lost a part of herself; the part that puts ideas in her mind one after the other. Her head doesn’t feel like it belongs to her any more.

She’s too tired to reach out for the carton of juice to check if there’s anything left. She knows there won’t be a drop, but sometimes magic happens.

There’s a click at the door. She’s lying on the cushions in the centre of the room. Even if she wanted to, she couldn’t move. She can barely open one eye.

She sees him filling the hole at the doorway. The wolf.

He stares at her, doesn’t say a word. There’s no tray with cakes and lemonade. He doesn’t do that anymore. He just watches her for a few moments. There are a bundle of black bin bags under his arm and he starts tipping the toys and games inside. It’s as though it’s all over. Then she hears the door close and the bolt clicks back into place.

20 August

‘How far are we going?’ says Tara, handing me the dregs of a bag of salt and vinegar crisps. We’ve covered another ten miles, stopping every time we spot anywhere that looks unoccupied. ‘Shouldn’t we just go to this bloke’s house and see what we can find. You could use your dodgy keys.’

I consider it. ‘Let’s give it another half an hour, then we’ll get some lunch and regroup.’

Tara gives me a tight smile and we carry on across the next T-junction.

‘It says on the map, there’s a windmill on the right, but I can’t see it.’ I look at the page, then into the distance again. ‘Take a right here.’ I’m late giving the instructions and Tara tuts as she grazes the muddy verge.

‘Sorry,’ I mutter.

I follow the map, taking us down a steep, overgrown track that looks like it’s a dead end. We brought several bottles of water with us in the hope of finding Clara, and I tuck one into my pocket before we pull up outside a farm gate and carry on, on foot. It’s stopped raining, but that’s no comfort, because it looks like it will start again any moment.

Behind thick trees, there’s a clearing with piles of bricks to one side and a dilapidated windmill in the centre. There are no sails left, just a stone cone with small square windows, like buttons, up the front. On the door is a red sign:
Dangerous Building – Do Not Enter.
It’s locked. I fish around in my pockets for my set of skeleton keys; they haven’t let me down yet.

The ground floor is a mess, with a grindstone lying abandoned to one side of the central spindle shaft and another in pieces on top of it. There are torn sacks, ladders with rungs missing, smashed barrels and planks of wood that are black with fire. It looks as if the place has been ransacked. I take the lead, up the narrow flight of wooden steps to the first floor. Wooden cogwheels are strewn about the place and the rickety floor creaks under our weight. There’s nowhere to hide here and no sign of recent habitation. There’s one more floor to go; the steps are steep and I tell Tara to stay where she is. When I get to the next landing, there’s a narrow platform and a door. It’s locked. Outside are three wheelbarrows stacked with blocks of rubble. I try a couple of keys until I find the best fit and push the door open.