I knew Alan was playing mind games with us when he tried to sound all nice and reasonable as though he was our friend. He kept telling us how lucky we were to be with him because other men wouldn’t be nearly as good to us as he was being. He kept up his line that it was our parents’ fault that we were still there because they refused to pay the ransom, but I didn’t believe that for a minute. He had moments when he seemed to expect us to feel sorry for him because he found it hard to cope, especially while his parents were away. I didn’t buy any of this, but nevertheless, when he told us to have a bath because he was taking us home later, I was over the moon. Thank you, God, I was thinking to myself. Thank you.
He let Lisa and me go into the bathroom on our own, and I had a wee for the first time since we’d been there. I couldn’t have done it with him watching. We got into the bath, chatting away in our excitement and even shrieking with laughter, until he put his head round the door and told us we’d better be quiet or the man next door might hear us. Even then we carried on chatting more quietly, speculating about what our friends would say when we got back to school, and what our parents would say and what they would have been doing while we were missing.
When we got out of the bath, he brought us our school clothes and shoes and coats and our school bags, and we got dressed and ready. He told us we had to wait until it was dark outside so we kept glancing at the window as the light gradually faded. I remember Countdown came on the telly and I knew it was usually on when we got home from school. We watched that, trying to think of the words along with the competitors.
We hadn’t had anything to eat that day and I realised I was beginning to feel hungry. Before that my stomach had been too knotted up with fear to think about food. I wondered where he would drop us off. As long as it was somewhere in Hastings, we would be able to find our way home. Lisa knew the town back to front because she had lived there all her life.
Countdown finished and something else came on. Alan came into the room and turned the telly to another channel and sat down on the floor to watch with us. Suddenly, there was a newsflash and our pictures appeared on the screen.
‘The parents of Charlene Lunnon and Lisa Hoodless, the two Hastings schoolgirls who’ve been missing since yesterday morning, have been making an appeal for their safe return.’
I looked at Lisa and grinned quickly. On the screen, it showed my dad and Philomena alongside Lisa’s mum and dad sitting behind a long table with all these microphones in front of them. It was wonderful to see them but they all looked solemn and unhappy.
My dad did most of the talking. He said, ‘Please come home, Charlene. If you’re staying away because you’re scared or whatever it is, there’s nothing to be scared of. No one’s going to get angry with you. Just come home.’
Lisa’s dad spoke next and said much the same thing, asking Lisa to come back and not to worry about being in trouble.
‘Look at you two,’ Alan said almost proudly. ‘You’re all famous now with your pictures on the telly.’ It was as though he thought we should be grateful to him.
Lisa and I just looked at each other. She waited for the news item to finish then asked, ‘Why doesn’t it say anything about us being kidnapped?’
‘The police have probably told them not to mention that,’ he said quickly.
‘But they think we’ve run away,’ she persisted.
‘They’re just saying that. It’s the way these things work.’
I felt very emotional after seeing my dad’s face and hearing his voice. He looked as though he hadn’t slept at all and he sounded like he was on the verge of tears. I just wanted to give him a big hug. I couldn’t wait to see him.
‘You haven’t phoned them, have you?’ Lisa accused him again.
‘Look, it doesn’t matter if I’m taking you home anyway,’ he said, and that shut us up.
When the news had finished, he went out of the room and came back carrying the sports bag and bin liners we had been brought up to the flat in.
‘Lisa, you first,’ he said, beckoning for her to get inside the sports bag.
‘Can’t I just walk down?’ she asked. ‘I promise I won’t run away. Why would I do that when you’re letting us go anyway?’
‘I can’t risk anyone from round here seeing you. If you want me to let you go, you’ll have to do it my way.’
Sighing, Lisa climbed into the bag and scrunched herself up small so that he could zip the top.
‘I’ll be back in two minutes,’ he told me. ‘Get the bin liners on so you’re ready.’
I felt silly climbing inside the black bags but I found the place where he had made holes for my nose and eyes before and put that bit over my face. If anyone had seen me like that, it would have seemed very suspicious. I was glad I wasn’t scrunched up in the sports bag though; that looked really uncomfortable.
I heard him unlocking the door and he led me out onto the landing then locked the flat behind us. No one was in sight up and down the corridor but I could hear voices somewhere and I shivered, hoping it wasn’t the man next door.
‘Quick! Run!’ he cried, gripping my hand tightly and pulling me along to the stairs. We hurried down, round and round in circles from one landing to the next, until we reached the underground car park, then he peeled off the bin liners before he opened the boot and bundled me inside next to Lisa. He handed me a little torch so that it wouldn’t be pitch black inside and I switched it on straight away.
‘We’re going home!’ Lisa whispered to me gleefully and I gave her a quick hug.
We felt the car moving up the ramp out of the car park and turning onto the street outside, and we were both silent as he drove along. Lisa had said that Eastbourne was less than half an hour away from Hastings but it was hard to estimate the time. It seemed as though we hadn’t been driving for very long when suddenly he stopped the car and came round to open the boot.
‘Quick, get out!’ he hissed. ‘Get in the back seat.’
We were in a dark alley but I could see a road with cars passing just a little further down. It occurred to me that this was an opportunity to make a run for it, but as soon as I thought that, I dismissed the idea. He was just about to take us home anyway so what was the point? Lisa and I got in the back seat, as he instructed. He got back in and drove round the corner to a main road, and pulled up in a badly lit patch.
‘I thought I should feed you before I drop you off. There’s a chip shop across the road. Do you fancy some fish and chips?’
I looked at Lisa. ‘Sausage and chips, please,’ she said.
‘What about you?’ he asked me.
‘The same,’ I muttered.
‘I’ll be back in a moment,’ he said. ‘Don’t even think about trying to get out because this is a bad neighbourhood and you would end up with someone who would be really rough with you, not like me.’ Before he went, he pushed down the buttons to lock the doors.
I glanced along the street after him and I could see people passing by just ten feet away. Should we run out and ask them for help? Or would they kidnap us as well? Alan crossed the road and went into a chip shop on the other side.
Just then, Lisa noticed a newspaper on the front seat. ‘Look, that’s our picture!’ she said. She reached over to pick it up. The headline read ‘Where are they?’ in great big letters and the story about us being missing took up nearly the whole of the front page. We read it excitedly.
‘There are three hundred policemen looking for us and the army as well, including fifty Gurkhas!’ Lisa exclaimed. ‘What’s a Gurkha?’
I wasn’t sure but I thought it was some kind of special force like the SAS. ‘That’s amazing they’ve got so many people,’ I said. I looked around. A mother was pushing a pram past the end of the alley. Lisa looked as well.
‘Do you think we should just get out of here and go and ask someone for help?’ she suggested.
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘We don’t really know where we are and we might end up with someone worse than him.’
‘At least he’s taking us home now,’ she said.
‘Yeah.’ There was a shadow of doubt in my head. Were we doing the right thing or should we run away, like the French girl he told us about who had thrown her bag at him and fled? Suddenly the world outside the car looked just as frightening as our predicament. I believed him when he said that it wasn’t a nice neighbourhood and we could get into more trouble here. We didn’t want to get out of the frying pan and into the fire, after all. We would stay here as he’d said, I decided. If we just waited patiently, we could eat our sausage and chips then he would drop us off somewhere near our house.
Lisa and I looked at each other, and I could read the same doubt in her eyes. Were we doing the right thing? We glanced across the road and saw him looking out of the chip shop towards us. If we tried to run while he was watching, he could easily catch us. We caught eyes again and hesitated. She pulled up the knob and unlocked the door, just to check whether she could, then quickly locked it again as though she was nervous that he might come back and find it unlocked. We looked at each other, both wondering the same thing. What should we do?
We hesitated too long because the next time I turned to look, he was striding back across the road towards us holding bulky packets of sausage and chips. He’d put vinegar on them and I could smell its sharpness alongside the cloying smell of chip fat as soon as he opened the door.
‘Here you go, girls,’ he said. ‘Grub’s up.’
He passed us our food and got into the front seat with his meal and we all started eating. I suddenly felt sick and lost my appetite. He noticed the newspaper on Lisa’s lap. ‘Did you see you’re in the paper? Everyone’s looking for you now,’ he told us.
I chewed the corner of a chip and the grease turned my stomach. I could see that Lisa wasn’t eating much of hers either.
‘Come on. Don’t waste good food,’ he urged.
‘I’m not really hungry,’ Lisa said.
‘Me neither,’ I agreed. I was just thinking that if I got home soon I could have any food I wanted and it wouldn’t be all rancid and greasy like this.
When he finished his own meal, he took our packages away from us and ate the sausages we’d left before getting out of the car and throwing the chips on top of some black plastic bin bags lying on the pavement.
He set off again and we sat back, looking out at the lights that flashed past us, blurred against the night sky.
‘We’re going the wrong way,’ Lisa said suddenly. ‘That sign was for Brighton, not Hastings.’
‘It’s a short cut I know,’ he said.
Soon after, he turned off the well-lit main street into a narrower road that didn’t have any houses on it.
‘Where are we going?’ Lisa asked, but he didn’t answer. ‘This isn’t the way.’
‘Damn!’ he exclaimed. ‘I seem to be going round in circles. I think I’m lost.’
‘Just drop us off anywhere,’ Lisa told him.
‘Maybe it’s this way,’ he said, and he took a sharp left turn. Soon after that he took another left and I got a sneaking suspicion that we really were going round in circles but I didn’t like to say anything to Lisa.
‘We’re definitely lost,’ he said again. ‘That was a wrong turn.’
‘Please can we get out now?’ Lisa pleaded, but he ignored her.
A little knot of panic was tightening inside me. I didn’t care where he let us out, I just wanted it to be soon. I could feel fear growing inside me. What was I doing in this strange man’s car in the darkness, looking out at a place I didn’t know, far from my home and my family? I’d been away for two days now; another night was coming. What was Alan planning to do with us? I was sure now that he wasn’t taking us home.
It was totally black outside and we couldn’t see any streetlamps at all. I was angry and frustrated with myself. Why hadn’t we jumped out of the car at the chip shop? Why had I trusted him when he’d lied to us at every turn so far?
My fear level rose even higher as he turned off the road and I realised he was driving on grass. Were we going across a field?
‘I need a wee,’ Lisa said. ‘Stop the car. I need to get out.’
I wasn’t sure if she was trying to think of an excuse to get away or if she really needed a wee, but he pulled up and opened the back door to let her get out of the car.
‘There’s a bush right there,’ he said. ‘Go and have your wee.’ He looked at me. ‘Why don’t you get out and stretch your legs?’ he suggested.
I got out of the car because I didn’t want to be left on my own with him, and that’s when I realised that the sea was right in front of us. There was mushy grass underfoot and a cliff edge and then sea stretching right out to the horizon.
‘Where are we?’ I asked, looking round for Lisa. My voice was very shaky.
‘Come and look,’ he said, grabbing my jumper and pulling me over towards the cliff edge. It was very windy that night and I could hear the waves crashing hard onto the stones below. I couldn’t see very well but I knew we were right on the edge of the cliff and I was petrified. What if a gust of wind blew us over? We were too close to the edge but he was standing right behind me so I couldn’t back away.
Suddenly he gave me a sharp push and I lost my footing. Stones slid away under my feet and clattered over the edge into thin air, and I would have fallen after them if he hadn’t been hanging on tightly to my jumper. He yanked me back again and I sank down onto the grass, my heart beating harder than it had ever done in my life before.
I was panting heavily and my chest felt tight as though I was going to have an asthma attack. I wished I had an inhaler with me. I was gasping for every breath. The whole incident had only taken about five seconds but I knew he could easily have let go and I would be dead now. Did he plan to kill us? Was that what he was going to do next?
As if reading my mind, he told me quietly, ‘No, I think I’m going to keep you for one more day.’
I couldn’t speak. The breath had been knocked right out of me. I’ve never been as scared as I was sitting there in the blackness with a huge drop down to the sea right in front of me. I crawled further up the grass, trying to get out of danger, scared that the cliff edge could crumble beneath me.
The man was pacing around muttering to himself. I heard him say something to Lisa and she came running over. ‘Are you alright?’
‘He’s going to kill us,’ I gasped, finding it hard to speak. ‘He just nearly killed me!’
‘Oh my God!’ she breathed, crouching down and clutching my shoulder. ‘Did he say that?’
‘Back in the car, girls,’ he commanded, and his tone was harsh again now, not friendly as it had been at the chip shop. ‘No more talking.’
He opened the boot, grabbed hold of us and pushed Lisa and then me inside before slamming the lid. The thought occurred to me that he might just roll the whole car off the cliff. Was that his plan? I could hardly breathe as I waited to see what would happen next, and my chest felt as though it had a tight band strapped all around it. There was a loud drumming sound in my ears and my cheeks were burning.
‘What’s he doing?’ Lisa whispered and I could hear the terror in her voice.
For a while, nothing happened. He was just sitting in the driver’s seat, as if trying to make a decision.
‘Please, God, help us,’ I whispered back, and we clung to each other. Her fingers were digging into my arm.
The car started and we felt it begin to move. I held my breath, waiting to see if the ground would disappear beneath us and we would be hurtling off the cliff edge into the sea below. The tyres rolled over grass and then I felt a bump and could sense from the vibrations that we were driving on the road again. I breathed out with a big sigh.
There was no doubt in my mind that he had almost killed me out there on the cliff edge. He’d been thinking about it and had changed his mind at the last minute. But he’d said he only wanted us for another day. I supposed that meant he would kill us after that. Unless some miracle happened before then, I only had twenty-four hours left to live.
It was on that cliff edge that everything changed. I realised in a flash that he had lied to us about letting us go. He had no intention of taking us home because no matter how much we promised him otherwise, he knew we would go to the police. He wasn’t going to set us free.
I didn’t see him nearly pushing Charlene over the edge but when I had finished having a wee, I came out from behind a bush and he grabbed me and hustled me over to a spot where I could see the sea stretching to the horizon right in front of me. Two more steps and we would both have gone over. It felt very high up and I was terrified.
‘Where’s Charlene?’ I asked, scared that he might have pushed her already.
‘She’s over there,’ he said, and shoved me in the direction of where she sat panting on the ground.
When I crouched down beside her, she whispered, ‘He’s going to kill us. He just nearly killed me,’ and my heart leapt into my mouth.
I looked around to see if I could see any lights at all. If a car had driven past, I would have rushed out in front of it and flagged it down. If only I could see a house somewhere, or a person walking a dog – but there was nothing. Just the sound of the wind gusting past and the waves crashing onto the shore below and a black sky above.
Where on earth were we? We were obviously on a very high cliff edge, but there were quite a few of these around Eastbourne. I didn’t recognise the place in the dark.
He walked up and down for a while then he hustled us back into the boot of the car and we hugged each other tightly. What was he going to do now? Was he going to take us somewhere else to kill us?
I’d never known anyone who had died. My nan is quite religious and she always told me that when you die you go to heaven and meet up with all your friends and family members up there when they die as well, so death sounded quite nice in a way. But I knew absolutely that I didn’t want to die. I would still rather go home and get beaten up by my brother and have my clothes stolen by my sister and do science lessons at school – anything, really, just as long as I could live.
But now I knew our kidnapper for what he really was: a liar, who wasn’t going to take us home ever. He’d never spoken to our parents, I was sure about that, and he didn’t want a ransom for us. He was a horrible, pathetic man, who one minute was begging us to be his friends and trying to make us feel sorry for him, and the next ordering us about and threatening us. He wanted to rape us and when he got fed up with that, he’d probably kill us.
We both lay in the back of the car in shock. Charlene was breathing in funny little gasps. Our dreams of going home were shattered. We had let ourselves truly believe that we were on our way back to our families, and were happily looking forward to bursting in the front door of our houses and shouting ‘Hello! I’m back!’ Now we had to face the fact that we were with a madman who wasn’t going to let us go. It was a huge blow, and we just lay in that boot trembling and hugging each other, neither of us able to speak.
We weren’t driving for long this time – maybe ten or fifteen minutes – when we felt him pull the car off the road. When he opened the boot, I saw that we were in the garage at his parents’ house again. We didn’t want to let go of each other but he grabbed my arm and pulled me up.
‘Stay there!’ he told Charlene as he pushed me into the sports bag.
‘What are you going to do with us?’ I asked, but he didn’t answer me. His mood had changed and he seemed unpredictable and dangerous. He zipped up the top of the bag and carried me out of the garage and into the house.
Once we were inside he took me into a sitting room at the front of the house. He let me climb out of the bag and sit on the sofa, then he put the television on.
‘Don’t move a muscle,’ he said. ‘I’ll be back in a moment.’
I looked around the room. Like the other room I’d been in at the back of the house, it was obviously an old person’s room, with old-fashioned ornaments and pictures, and dark brownish-coloured furniture and a swirly-patterned carpet. I heard him come back into the house and Charlene was with him because he said ‘this way’ as he led her down the corridor. They seemed to be going into the room I’d been in before. I realised it was only yesterday we’d been there but so much had happened since then that it seemed like a lifetime ago.
I huddled up to the back of the sofa, shaking and terrified. I didn’t even consider trying to look out the window or search for a telephone. All I could think about was the method he might use to kill us. Would he get a knife and stab us? Or maybe strangle us with his bare hands? Or did he plan to take us back to that cliff and push us over? Whatever he did, I hoped it would be quick and that it wouldn’t hurt too much. Was he planning to kill us now, in this house? Charlene had said he was going to keep us for another day but it was clear that we couldn’t trust him. He had lied and lied and lied to us right from the word go.
The film on television was about two old women who were sisters, and one of them was so jealous of the other that she went crazy and tied her sister to a kind of platform with her legs and arms pulled wide in a star shape. Then she got a chainsaw and set it running so the jagged blade was going round and round and she began cutting up through the wood between her sister’s legs. Her sister screamed and screamed in agony as the blade cut her in two and there was blood spraying everywhere, but the jealous one kept laughing with a hideous cackle. I couldn’t stop watching but my head was pounding and my mouth was dry. Afterwards, the jealous sister buried the cut-up body in the snow outside. It was just horrible. I’d never seen a film like that before and couldn’t believe anyone would want to watch such things. It was doubly horrible for me as I sat there wondering how Alan was going to murder us. For the first time in my life, I realised that night how much true evil there is in the world.
Suddenly I heard Charlene screaming, and it was definitely a scream of pain. I only hesitated for a split-second before I jumped off the sofa and ran down the hall to the back room.
When I threw the door open, I didn’t understand what I was seeing at first. Charlene was naked and kneeling on all fours on the floor. Alan still had his shirt on but he’d pulled down his trousers and he was ramming his willy at her from behind. She turned round to look at me, and the expression on her face was so appalled and embarrassed that I backed away towards the door and looked the other way.
‘What are you doing?’ I shouted at him. ‘You promised you wouldn’t do that any more. You broke your promise and you’re a liar and I hate you!’ I just kept shouting at him until he stood up and came towards me.
‘Be quiet,’ he ordered. ‘You’ll waken the neighbours and they’re bad people. They would do awful things to you.’
‘You’re a bad person and you’re doing awful things to us,’ I accused him. ‘Just stop it and let us go. You said you would. You promised.’
I felt like crying but I managed to stop myself by focusing on my anger. He looked at me for a minute then he looked back at Charlene, still on her knees there and peering down at the floor.
‘Alright, we’d better go then,’ he said. ‘Get dressed,’ he ordered Charlene. ‘And you’ – he looked at me – ‘get in the bag.’
I thought about refusing but any courage I’d been feeling a minute ago had completely evaporated. I’d had my victory making him stop trying to rape Charlene and I knew I wasn’t going to get any more. He took a step towards me and the look in his eyes was cold and cruel. I thought he was going to hit me so I turned and ran back to the front room and stepped into the bag again. He followed me in and zipped up the top, then went back to say something I couldn’t hear to Charlene before he carried me outside to the car.
Had I made him mad? Would he take us back to the cliff again and push us over? I decided that if he let us out of the car on the cliff top I would just run off into the dark as fast as I could. I’d tell Charlene to do the same at the next opportunity we got. We should have done it when we were sitting outside the chip shop. How trusting we had been, thinking he would just buy us dinner and take us back home! We wouldn’t fall for his tricks any more. He wasn’t someone we could trust, he was a criminal who had been in jail and who had kidnapped other children as well as us.
He brought Charlene out to the car and she wouldn’t meet my eye as she climbed in. I waited until he started the engine and began to reverse out, then I whispered to her: ‘The next time we get a chance, we have to make a run for it. Both of us. If we go in different directions, he won’t be able to catch us both and we should just keep running until we find someone who can get help. OK?’
‘OK,’ she said quietly.
‘Even if he takes us back to the cliff edge and it’s really dark, just run away in the other direction from the sea and you’ll come to a house or a hotel before long.’
‘Alright.’
I found her hand and squeezed it. I heard her sniff and wondered if she was crying but didn’t like to ask. Charlene hardly ever cried. I was the crier of the two of us, so that made it even more sad when she did cry.
We lay in silence for the rest of the journey. I was planning what I would say if I ran away and knocked on someone’s door. There wouldn’t be time for a long explanation. I decided I would just say, ‘I’m one of the missing girls. Please call the police!’ I rehearsed it in my head and thought that would work. It sounded urgent enough.
Soon we felt the car take a right turn and head downhill, and I was pretty sure I knew where we were. It sounded like the underground car park again. Would there be a chance to run when he opened the boot?
But there wasn’t. He just grabbed my sleeve and pulled me out first then slammed down the lid on Charlene. I wriggled to try to loosen his grip but he grasped me firmly and pushed me down into the sports bag before carrying me up the stairs to his flat. He took me into the sitting room and let me out, then told me sternly not to move until he brought Charlene upstairs.
I heard him locking the door behind him, but as soon as I judged he had gone, I got up and went out to the hall to check. That’s when I noticed that the door handle had been removed from the inside. There was nothing I could hold onto to try and pull the door open. I slipped my fingers into the hole where it should have been and yanked it with all my strength but it was firmly locked. I ran through to the sitting-room window. I couldn’t see anyone on the street outside and there were no cars going past. It felt like the early hours of the morning but it must have late evening. I ran into the bedroom to try and check the window there but then I reckoned that I didn’t have any time left before he arrived back at the flat, so I had no choice but to go back and sit quietly on the sofa.
When he came in with Charlene, he said, ‘It’s late, girls. Why don’t you sleep on the bed tonight?’ He pointed at the single bed in the corner. ‘You’ll be comfier there. I’ve got to go and pick up my parents from the airport in a while but I’ll be back before you wake up. If you’re thinking of trying to escape, just remember about the man next door and what he would do to you. OK?’
He picked up the quilt and arranged it on the bed, then put a cushion at either end for us to use as pillows. He beckoned us over and we just obeyed. First of all he made us strip off our school clothes and put on those big white t-shirts again then we climbed into the bed in a top-to-tail position.
‘Sleep tight, don’t let the bedbugs bite,’ he said before he left the room and switched the light off.
Neither of us spoke. We were shattered from the events of the past few hours and I know that I fell asleep really quickly. My brain had had enough and couldn’t cope with any more. I needed the blankness of sleep.