Chloe felt the disapproval in his voice. ‘Oh yes. Sorry. Sorry. I don’t want to take up much of his time.’ Again, she wondered why the symbolism meant so much to Shawn that he’d want to meet her in a freezing cold grotto in the middle of February, in the dark. And she hadn’t seen Pete reading any texts . . . She looked sideways at him.
‘One other thing,’ he said, as she climbed out of the front seat. He held out his hand, palm up. ‘You’re going to need to leave your phone in the car. Shawn’s got a strict rule about that, in case anyone tries to sneak a photo.’
‘Oh.’ Chloe’s prickles of unease increased. ‘I’ll turn it off, I promise.’
Pete shook his head. ‘Just leave it here, love, it’ll be fine. Look, I’ll put it in the glove compartment. It’ll be completely safe.’
She reluctantly handed it over, noticing that her heart rate had rocketed. Perhaps it was just excitement at being about to meet Shawn.
Was she about to meet Shawn?
Pete locked the phone into the car and hoisted the backpack onto his shoulder. That was bothering her too. Where had that come from and what was in it?
‘What’s in there?’ she asked.
He glared at her, not friendly anymore. ‘Stuff for Shawn. None of your business. Come on, then, we haven’t got all day.’
Chloe suddenly thought she was going to be sick. Her teeth chattering, she followed him as he walked away from the house, down a gravel path that curved away behind some tall forbidding trees in the house’s grounds. It was very cold, and getting dark. There was no sound anywhere apart from a distant rumble of traffic and then the sudden shrill bark of a fox.
Was it a fox? Her ears must be playing tricks on her, she thought. It sounded like a girl crying.
She forced herself to remember Shawn’s sweet messages on the forum. She was just being silly, going overboard on the ‘stranger-danger’ paranoia.
But something did not feel right. Always trust your instincts, Chloe, she heard her mother whisper.
Crunching along the gravel path in almost complete darkness behind Pete, Chloe dithered. For some reason she could not get the image out of her head of Rose Sharp, plump and freckled in the blown-up school photograph propped on the table at the vigil, nor of the wrapped-up poster in a tube that Jess had got her for her birthday. She imagined Jess’s fingers struggling with Sellotape as she put the garish gift wrap around it, the fingers that only days later were stilled forever, stripped of the cheap H&M gilt rings that were now probably in an evidence bag somewhere.
She stopped. Pete noticed, and turned.
‘Uh, sorry,’ she began, clutching her handbag closer to herself. ‘Bit of a nightmare, but I’m not feeling very well. I think I’m going to have to go home and meet Shawn another time. Can you apologise to him for me? You don’t have to give me a lift home or anything, just give me my phone back, and I’ll find my own way . . .’
The expression on his face was like nothing Chloe had ever seen before. He looked furious. ‘You can’t do that. Shawn’s gone to a lot of effort over this. He’s expecting you.’
Tears rushed into Chloe’s eyes. She hated making people cross and upset, and the thought of pissing off Shawn Barrett was unbearable. ‘I know, but’ – she never normally used her leukaemia as an excuse, apart from to get out of tidying her room, but it was all she could think of – ‘I’m sure he’d understand. He knows that I was really ill last year, he visited me in hospital, and I’m still not right . . .’
Pete put down the black backpack and walked up to her so that his face was mere inches away from hers. In the gloom, his eyes looked huge and black, demonic.
Oh shit, thought Chloe. The fox shriek came again, louder this time, and it spurred her into action. She turned to run, but his left arm had shot out and grabbed her biceps, squeezing it tight. She tried to shake it off, staring down at it in horror and pain, which made her not notice his right fist – until it connected with her collarbone in a sickening pistol-crack that sent agony flooding around her chest, up her neck and cascading down all her ribs.
She passed out.
When she awoke, the first thing she was aware of was being in a very cold and dark place, leaning against a wall that seemed to have been wallpapered with sharp stones that stuck into her back. The fox was still shrieking. It sounded so loud now that she thought it must be in there with her.
She opened her eyes to try to see it and threw up all over herself, causing the already sharp pain in her shoulder to intensify and amplify, so intense that she saw it as scarlet ribbons in her vision lighting up the darkness. She tried to lift a hand to wipe her mouth, but found she couldn’t – her arms were handcuffed together behind her body. She tried to move her legs, but they were bound together with what looked like rope.
Chloe groaned, in too much pain to properly cry out. She was a moron. Of course Pete wasn’t Shawn’s chauffeur. Of course it hadn’t really been Shawn Barrett messaging her . . . Oh God.
‘I’m going to die,’ she whispered.
Then, to her complete shock, the fox cry stopped and the fox spoke to her, a voice coming out of the darkness. ‘I thought you were already dead.’
She was hallucinating; she must be. This was some kind of horrific nightmare. But the stones sticking into her back and head and the pain in her chest told her that she couldn’t be.
She wailed, peering into the thick black air, trying to see the source of the voice. ‘Who are you? You’re a fox!’
The voice came back, more thickly. ‘I ain’t no fox, what are you on about? My name’s Jade, and he’s got me locked up in here too.’
‘Jade? Not Jade as in Jade and Kai?’
There was a faint snort. ‘Don’t talk to me about that twat.’
‘Oh my God, Jade, it’s me, Chloe Hedges. F-U-Cancer. Where the fuck are we? What’s going on? I came to meet Shawn.’
‘Oh, babe, so did I! I got a text at this party last night. Shawn was there and he said he’d seen me and thought I was gorgeous. Asked me to meet him at this place down on the Thames called Platt’s Eyot. Shawn, I mean the bloke pretending to be him, said he had a houseboat and was going to meet me there.’
How stupid and naïve, Chloe thought, then stopped herself. She had been just as stupid, hadn’t she? They had both allowed their desperation, the years of fantasy about meeting Shawn, to blind them to danger. Exactly the same thing must have happened to Rose and Jess.
Jade’s words tumbled out. ‘So I was, like, waiting there, on the edge of the car park, looking around coz there was no sign of him and the whole place was deserted coz it was pissing down with rain, and I got my phone out to Snapchat who I thought was Shawn and he came up behind me and grabbed me, stuck a knife in my back and told me if I cried out, I was dead.’
Chloe could hear Jade panting, seemingly drained by the memory and the torrent of words.
‘It’s only just struck me, but I’m sure I’ve seen him before,’ Chloe said. ‘There’s something familiar about him.’
Jade didn’t respond. What did it matter, anyway? He had them now, and all that mattered was whether he let them live. Or if they would die here.
‘You handcuffed too?’ Chloe asked.
‘Yeah, and my feet are tied to some weird sort of stone bench thing. I can’t move. My legs have gone dead. Everything’s numb.’ Jade started to cry again.
‘I think I know why we’re here. Why he chose us, and Rose and Jess.’
‘What? Why?’
‘The StoryPad thing. It has to be that. It’s the only thing that connects the four of us.’
‘Oh shit oh shit oh shit.’ Chloe could almost hear Jade’s brain whirring in the darkness. ‘That’s why he brought us here.’