Levodopa is the gold standard treatment for Parkinson’s. It’s supposed to reduce the tremors and stop the sudden frozen moments when my body locks up, unable to move.
My movements are becoming steadier. I can hold the glass of water to take another drink.
‘I want to go back inside.’
‘Can’t do that,’ he says. ‘Your wife doesn’t want you around.’
‘She doesn’t know what she’s saying.’
‘She looked pretty sure to me.’
Words, my best weapons, have suddenly deserted me. I look past Monk and see Julianne wearing an overcoat, being led towards a police car. Veronica Cray is with her.
Monk lets me get as far as the gate.
‘Where are you going?’ I shout.
‘To the station,’ says the DI.
‘I want to come.’
‘You should stay here.’
‘Let me talk to Julianne.’
‘She doesn’t want to talk to you just now.’
Julianne has ducked into the back seat of the car. She tucks her coat under her thighs before the door closes. I call her name, but she doesn’t respond. The engine starts.
I watch them leave. They’re wrong. Every fibre of my being says they’re wrong. I know Gideon Tyler. I know his mind. He’s going to destroy Julianne. It doesn’t matter that she’s the strongest, most compassionate, intelligent woman I’ve ever known. That’s what he preys upon. The more she feels, the more he’s going to damage her.
The rest of the cars are leaving. Monk is going to stay. I follow him back to the cottage and sit at the table as he makes me a cup of tea and collects phone numbers for Julianne’s family and mine. Imogen and Emma should stay somewhere else tonight. My parents are closest. Julianne’s parents are saner. Monk sorts it out.
Meanwhile, I sit at the kitchen table with my eyes closed, picturing Charlie’s face, her lop-sided smile, her pale eyes, the tiny scar on her forehead where she fell from a tree at age four.
I take a deep breath and call Ruiz. A crowd roars in the background. He’s watching a rugby match.
‘What’s up?’
‘It’s Charlie. He’s taken Charlie.’
‘Who? Tyler?’
‘Yes.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘He called Julianne. I talked to Charlie.’
I explain about finding Charlie’s bike and the phone calls. As I tell the story, I can hear Ruiz walking away from the crowd, finding somewhere quieter.
‘What do you want to do?’ he asks.
‘I don’t know,’ I croak. ‘We have to get her back.’
‘I’m on my way.’
The calls ends and I stare at the phone, willing it to ring. I want to hear Charlie’s voice. I try to think of the last words she said to me, the ones before Gideon took her. She told me a joke about a woman on a bus. I can’t remember the punchline but she laughed and laughed.
Someone is ringing the front doorbell. Monk answers it. The vicar has come to offer his support. I’ve only met him once, soon after we moved to Wellow. He invited us to attend a Sunday service, which still hasn’t happened. I wish I could remember his name.
‘I thought you might want to pray,’ he says softly.
‘I’m not a believer.’
‘That’s all right.’
He takes a step forward and gets down on his knees, crossing himself. I look at Monk, who looks back at me, unsure of what to do.
The vicar has lowered his head, clasping his hands.
‘Dear Lord, I ask you to look after young Charlotte O’Loughlin and bring her home safely to her family…’
Without thinking, I find myself on my knees next to him, lowering my head. Sometimes prayer is less about words than pure emotion.
57
When a man has nothing to call his own, he finds ways of acquiring other men’s possessions.
This house is an example. The Arab businessman is still away, gone south for the winter like a migrating bird. A housekeeper opens the place up when he’s due back, fluffing up the pillows and airing the rooms. There’s also a gardener who comes in twice a week during the summer, but only once a month now because the grass has stopped growing and the leaves have been raked into moulding drifts.
The house is as I remember, tall and ungainly with a turret room overlooking the bridge. A weathervane faces permanently east. The curtains are drawn. Windows and doors are secured.
The garden is soggy and smells of decay. A rope swing is broken, frayed at one end, dangling halfway between a branch and the ground. I cross beneath it, skirting the garden furniture, and stand before a wooden shed. The door is padlocked. Crouching on my haunches, I press a pick into the keyhole and feel it bounce over the pins. The first lock I ever learned to pick was like this one. I practiced for hours sitting in front of the TV.
The barrel turns. I unhook the padlock from the latch and pull the door open, letting light leak across the dirt floor. Metal shelves hold plastic flowerpots, seed trays and old paint tins. Garden tools stand in the corner. A ride-on lawnmower is parked at the centre.
I step back and look at the dimensions of the shed. There’s just enough room for me to stand. Then I start clearing the metal shelves and wrestling them to one side. I roll the lawn mower onto the grass and begin moving the paint cans and bags of fertiliser to the garage.
The back wall of the shed is now clear. I take a pickaxe and swing it at the floor. The compacted earth breaks into a jagged jigsaw of dried mud. I swing the pick again and again, pausing occasionally to shovel the soil away. After an hour I stop and rest, crouching and holding my forehead to the handle of the spade. I drink from the hosepipe outside. The hole in the floor is ten inches deep and almost as long as the wall. It’s long enough to fit the sheet of plasterboard I found in the garage. I want to make it deeper.
Setting to work again, I carry buckets of earth to the end of the garden and hide the soil amid the compost heap. I am ready to build the box now. The sun is dropping through the branches of the trees. Perhaps I should check on the girl.
Inside the house, in a second floor bedroom, she is lying on an iron-framed bed with a bare mattress. Dressed in a striped top, a cardigan, jeans and sneakers, she is curled up in a ball, trying to make herself invisible.
She cannot see me- her eyes are taped. Her hands are secured behind her back with white plastic ties and her feet are chained together with just enough width to allow her to hobble. She cannot go far. A noose is looped around her neck, tied off on a radiator, with just enough slack to allow her to reach a small bathroom with a sink and toilet. She doesn’t realise it yet. Like a blind kitten she clings to the softness of the bed, unwilling to explore.
She speaks.
‘Hello? Is anyone there?’
She listens.
‘Hello… anyone… can you hear me?’
Louder this time: ‘HELP! PLEASE HELP! HELP!’
I press record. The tape turns. Scream, little one, scream as loud as you can.
A small lamp throws light across the room but not as far as my corner. She tests the bindings on her wrists, twisting her shoulders to the left and right, trying to slide her hands free. The plastic ties are cutting into her skin.
Her head hits the wall. She turns on her back, raising her legs and kicks both feet at once against the wood panelling. The whole house seems to shake. She kicks again and again, full of fear and frustration.
She arches backwards, bending her spine, forming a bridge between her shoulders and her feet. Raising her legs in the air in a half shoulder stand, she pivots at the waist, dropping her knees to her chest and then further until they touch the bed on either side of her head. She has folded herself into a ball. Now she slides her bound wrists past the small of her back, over her hips and under her backside. Surely she’s going to dislocate something.
Her hands squeeze past her feet and she can unfurl her legs again. How clever! Her hands are now in front of her instead of behind. She pulls off her tape blindfold and turns towards the lamp. She still cannot see me in my dark corner.