When I woke up on the Thursday morning, all was quiet in the flat. Lisa was still sound asleep and I didn’t like to disturb her. The events of the previous evening came rushing back and all my muscles tensed rigid with fear. He had almost killed me on that cliff top and then said he wanted me for just one more day, so it sounded as though today was going to be the day I died. This was it. My last day on earth.
When would he do it? As soon as he got up? Or would he want to rape us again first? I decided he would probably wait till after dark so that no one saw him. That gave us a few more hours to live – and it gave him a few more hours to do those disgusting things to us. Although Lisa had also been in the bedroom with him now, I was still getting the brunt of it. It was just my bad luck that I was so much bigger.
My cheeks burned when I remembered Lisa walking in on us at his mum and dad’s house. I’d felt ashamed for her to see me like that, as though I was doing something wrong. Would Lisa have thought that I was going along with it and letting him do those things instead of fighting back? I didn’t want to do them, but I was so petrified when I was on my own with him that I did whatever he wanted me to. The panic when he put his hand over my mouth and nose was so intense that I was sure I was going to suffocate or have an asthma attack. I let him move me into all the different positions he wanted and I just closed my eyes and gritted my teeth. The pain had been worse than ever and it had felt different, deeper. I was pretty sure he had succeeded in getting inside me and that made me feel sick to my stomach. I knew in my heart of hearts that I was only doing what I had to do to survive but it was humiliating that Lisa had seen me like that. I remembered the shock and disbelief on her face and blushed even deeper.
We had been so stupid and naive all along. If only I had run away back in Cornfield Terrace and hammered on doors until someone came out to help. Even if he had driven off with Lisa in the boot I could have memorised his car number plate and then the police would have found him quickly. Or we could both have run away while he was in the chip shop. It seemed crazy now that we hadn’t done that. I could even have started screaming and tried to run away in the underground car park or at his mum and dad’s house, if I had dared. All the time I’d just believed that if we behaved ourselves and co-operated that he would take us home when he’d finished with us. We gave him the benefit of the doubt and it looked as though that would be our downfall.
There was a great big lump in my throat and I wanted to cry but the tears wouldn’t come. I’ve never been one for crying. There have been so many bad things in my life right from the start that I just decided I had to get on with it and not make a fuss every single time. There were the days when I was taken away from Mum as a little kid and put into all those foster homes; the times when my hopes of going back to her were raised and then dashed; the friends I left behind with each change of foster parents; and then all the mind games that Bert played on me, making me feel as though I was dirty and worthless. If I’d cried about all that, I’d have had no tears left.
The only time I cried a lot was the year after Mum died. My head was full of memories of the good times I’d had with her when we were two girls together, just having fun and cuddles, and it felt unbearable that we would never do that again. When she was clean of drink and drugs, I thought she was the best mum in the world. In the mornings we used to cuddle up on the sofa and watch The Big Breakfast on TV together. If it was winter, she’d bring through the quilt from her bed to wrap around us. Every time the story on the news changed, they used to change the background colour behind the presenter’s head and Mum and I would sit there guessing what the next colour would be: ‘Orange!’ ‘Green!’ ‘Pink!’ ‘Blue!’ If I got it right, she’d give me a prize of a chocolate from the bowl on the coffee table.
There was a grocer’s shop just across the road where you could buy things by the scoop instead of having to get a whole boxful. We’d go over there and buy a couple of scoops of cornflakes and a scoop of banana milkshake powder, then we’d go home and have milkshakes with our cereal. That was a real treat.
She’d chat to me as if I was her best friend rather than her small daughter. She’d discuss her boyfriends with me, or tell me where she’d been the night before and who was there, and she’d paint my nails in pretty shades of pink and give me a spray of perfume. I just loved our girly moments.
Even in the evenings when she was drunk or stoned, if she didn’t have a boyfriend there, she’d let me cuddle up on the sofa and watch grown-up films with her. I never wanted to stay in my bed so I’d come creeping out asking if I could stay up a bit longer and she’d grin and say ‘Alright then’. She always told me I was her favourite of all her children, and her best friend in the world.
Mum had five kids altogether – Carol who was about twenty when I was born, Alan who was about sixteen, Rose who was about ten and another brother whose name I don’t know, who I’ve never met. None of them lived with us when I was growing up, because Mum was actually in prison for shoplifting when she found out she was pregnant with me. That makes her sound like a bad person, but in fact she just had an illness that she couldn’t recover from and that finally killed her: the illness of addiction.
She and my dad were only together for a couple of months. It was a relationship based solely on drugs and they hated each other afterwards to the extent that they couldn’t be in the same room as each other. I never like to talk to Dad about my mum because he has such a low opinion of her, but to me she was the only mum I knew and I cherish all the good memories I have.
Auntie Vera was lovely to me the whole time I stayed in their house, like a surrogate mother in many ways. In the last year I was at hers, when my emotions about Mum dying finally spilled out, I tried to hide it from Dad because I knew how much he hated her – but I think he knew anyway. That Christmas of 1997, I really wanted a doll called Baby Lulu that I’d seen on the telly. If you bounced her on your knee, she laughed and cried and even breathed – but she cost sixty whole pounds.
Auntie Vera sat me down and told me that it was the most popular toy that Christmas and she was really sorry but it had sold out so they wouldn’t be able to get me one. Dad arrived on Christmas Eve to stay for the holidays and he said, ‘I’ve got you a present but I’m afraid I couldn’t get you that doll you wanted. Sorry!’ But when I woke up on Christmas morning Dad handed me a big box and I ripped the paper off and there was Baby Lulu inside! I think he’d had to trek round every single toyshop in London looking for it. It was my best Christmas ever.
I hadn’t played with Baby Lulu for a while now. She was still sitting in my room along with all my teddies, but I had cut her hair short and given her a few hand-drawn tattoos and made some crazy clothes for her, so she looked quite different than she had when she came out of the box. I thought about my bedroom at home and all my toys waiting there. Who would get them if I were killed? What would Dad do with them?
Another thought occurred to me. What if Alan didn’t kill us but just kept us there as his prisoners to have sex with? After a while everyone would think we were dead and they would stop looking for us and we’d be stuck in that disgusting flat for ever, day after day, doing what he wanted us to do. Was this what my life was going to be like from now on?
I suddenly realised I hadn’t heard him moving around that morning, then remembered that he said he was picking his parents up from the airport. Could he have gone away and left us on our own? Or was he back already and sleeping next door? I didn’t dare get up to go and check. Lisa stirred slightly and I hissed her name.
‘Whadisit?’ she murmured, and I could see there was a moment when she woke up before she remembered where we were. She was just thinking she was having a sleepover at mine or something until the terrible truth came back to her. She lifted her head and looked around the dingy, depressing room. ‘Where is he?’
‘I don’t know if he’s here. I can’t hear him.’
‘I’ve got to go for a wee so I’ll find out.’
She slipped out of bed then tiptoed out the door into the hall. I waited for a few seconds then I heard the loo being flushed and Lisa’s head appeared.
‘He’s not here. The bedroom door is open a crack and I can’t see him.’
I got up and pulled the t-shirt down to my knees. ‘Shall we have a look around in case we can find anything to help us escape?’
The first thing I did was to check the front door but it was firmly locked and the handle was missing on the inside. There was no way we could have opened it. Then I peeped into his bedroom and had a look at the clock: it was just before eight o’clock. I didn’t stay in there for long though because that room gave me the shudders. Next I decided to look in the office because he seemed to have lots of papers in there, and I also thought that if there was a phone in the house, surely it would be in there. Lisa came with me and we started sifting through all the bits of paper that covered every surface.
The first thing I noticed was that there were lots of pictures of children that looked as though they had been torn out of magazines. Then Lisa showed me the maps she had seen the day before and we noticed that he had marked on them where the schools were in each area – it was creepy to look at it. And then I caught my breath as I came across something that seemed to be about torture. I couldn’t read very well so I handed it to Lisa.
‘It’s a list of children and things that were done to them. Oh, it’s disgusting!’ she cried and dropped it on the floor.
‘Do you think he tortured them?’
‘I don’t know.’
We looked at each other. ‘Maybe we should try to leave this place the way it was so he doesn’t know we’ve been in here?’ I suggested. So far he had been very calm and quiet when he spoke to us and I didn’t want to see what he would be like if he got angry.
We tidied up as best we could then crept back into the sitting room and climbed into bed.
‘Do you think he’s had lots of other children here before us?’ Lisa asked.
I shrugged. If he had, where were they? What had happened to them? They must be dead because if they were still alive they would have told the police and he would be locked up in jail.
‘What if he doesn’t come back?’ Lisa continued. ‘He might just leave us locked in here until we die of starvation.’
‘If he’s not back by the time it starts to get dark, we have to try and escape,’ I said. ‘Maybe we could tie sheets together and hang them out of the window and climb down to the roof below, then we could shout out until someone saw us.’
We looked up at the window trying to imagine this but it was tiny – only about the size of a picture frame – and quite high up. There was nowhere to tie a sheet onto and it was just too far to fall on the other side.
‘Or we could lean out the window and start shouting really loudly,’ Lisa suggested.
‘What about the man next door?’ Neither of us was willing to take the risk of falling into another man’s hands. Even though he’d lied to us, we believed Alan when he said his neighbour was worse than him. After all, Alan had showed us that bad men who wanted to hurt little girls really did exist. Why shouldn’t there be another one living in the same squalid way as Alan himself? I shuddered to think what ‘worse’ might be like.
‘You never know – he might take us home today?’ Lisa suggested in a quiet voice.
I didn’t want to say anything to upset her but I didn’t believe that any more. He had no intention of letting us go. Either we escaped or he would kill us: that’s all I believed now. I felt so depressed that it was too much effort to speak. I wriggled down under the covers and turned my face to the wall.
We were glad we’d got back into bed when we did because soon afterwards we heard the key in the lock and Alan came back into the flat. He locked the door behind him and we both pretended to be asleep when he looked into the sitting room. He went into the office and we heard some things being moved around. We could hear him muttering to himself and he seemed a bit agitated. My stomach twisted into a tight knot, wondering what he was going to do with us next.
Next time he came into the sitting room, he pushed the door open with a clatter and said ‘Time to get up, girls!’ as he walked over and pulled back the curtains. Grey January light flooded in. ‘Let’s see what they’re saying about you on the news this morning.’
He switched on the television and crouched on the floor in front of it. Lisa and I got up and walked over to the sofa so we could see the screen, desperate to find out what was going on. What were our parents doing? Were the police still looking for us up in London?
There were lots of other news stories first but then it came round to nine o’clock and we were the headline news. They were still using the same photos, but the words they were saying filled me with horror. ‘Hopes are fading of finding the missing girls alive after forty-eight hours have passed since they disappeared on their way to school. There have been no new sightings since the initial reports that they had been seen in London and detectives say that their leads are drying up.’
I stared at the screen open-mouthed. It had only been two days since we were kidnapped. How could they give up after two days?
Then my dad’s face came on the screen. His skin was as white as a sheet and his eyes had a horrible haunted look. When he spoke, he stumbled a bit over the words. ‘I hope she is somewhere safe and warm,’ he said. ‘If some misguided person is looking after her, all I have to say to you is please send her home.’ His voice cracked at the end of the sentence.
I looked at Alan to see if he was listening but he didn’t seem to care. Then I looked back at my dad’s face and I realised something awful. He thought I was dead already. I could tell from his expression. He’d given up hope. I covered my face with my hands and felt cold all over. My skin tightened and I started to shiver.
For me, it was the lowest point yet.
The newsreader moved on to the next story and Alan looked round at us with a strange expression. ‘They’re not even looking for you any more,’ he said. ‘They don’t even care about you.’
‘They do so!’ Lisa cried. ‘You wait and see.’
I didn’t say anything. I just couldn’t get the image of my dad’s face out of my head. He looked old and tired and heartbroken. He looked as though his whole world had fallen apart.
Charlene was really upset after seeing her dad doing an appeal on the telly. As soon as Alan left the room, she whispered to me, ‘He thinks I’m dead.’
Deep down I had to agree with her that his face looked grief-stricken, but I tried to reassure her. ‘He wouldn’t be making an appeal like that if he’d given up hope. He’s still trying to find us. That’s why he did it.’
I wondered why my mum and dad hadn’t done this appeal with him. Maybe they really had given up hope. Keith seemed to think we were staying with someone, and I could see why he would think that because it was January. The nights were freezing so we would never have survived the cold if we were sleeping outside. Did they still think we had run away? Who on earth had started that rumour? None of my close friends would have said anything so stupid.
The police had obviously gone to school and asked if anyone had any idea where we might have gone. I guessed that someone who didn’t know Charlene and me very well but who wanted to feel important must have come forward and made up that story about Charlene’s mum’s grave. It was such a stupid thing to do because it had made the police look for us in London instead of closer to home. No one would ever find us here in a block of flats in the middle of Eastbourne. Since we’d been there, we hadn’t heard another soul in the building – not even a postman delivering mail in the morning. It seemed completely deserted.
It was a horrible and depressing flat, with its small boxy rooms leading off a long gloomy corridor, the lack of windows and the pervading smell of cabbagey damp. Everywhere was grimy with deeply ingrained dirt, as though it hadn’t been cleaned for years. Probably some of the dirt came from the people who lived there before Alan. I tried not to touch the walls and I always rinsed out the glass thoroughly before I had a glass of water. The kitchen surfaces felt sticky with grease and the bath was stained yellow, while fungus was growing on the ceiling up above it.
Alan was grimy as well. His fingers were brown with nicotine, his teeth were a brownish-yellow, and although he had bathed twice since we’d been there, he still had a nasty smell about him, the aroma of stale tobacco and stale sweat mixed together. I loved to be clean and I hated mess and dirt, so I found it particularly disgusting to breathe in the air around him.
Charlene and I sat on the sofa, dressed only in our over-sized white t-shirts, and watched the Trisha show that morning. There was a story about a man who had been having an affair behind his wife’s back and she was trying to decide whether to forgive him or not. The audience were booing and hissing at him and not really giving him a chance to speak. I knew my mum watched that show and I wondered if she was watching it that morning. Was this really how she spent her time while we were at school? I supposed that with a young baby, she had to be around the house a lot because the baby needed naps, but I didn’t know how she could stand to watch shows like that. I might be only ten, but I could see how dumb the people were. Surely if you had a problem in your marriage, going on a TV show was one of the worst possible ways of trying to fix it?
Alan was bustling around that morning. He seemed to be worried about something because he was pacing from room to room and muttering under his breath. On previous mornings he had sat down to chat to us and tried to be friendly but there was obviously something on his mind that day. Was it because his parents were back from their trip now? Or was it something on the television that we hadn’t noticed? Charlene and I were very wary whenever he came into the room. We didn’t move from the sofa or ask him any questions – instead we tried to keep quiet and not come to his attention. I had the distinct impression that he might be close to cracking and that frightened me. Was he building up the courage to kill us later? Was he trying to decide how to do it?
He popped his head round the door. ‘Lisa, could you come with me?’ he asked.
I don’t know where I got the courage from but I said, ‘No, I don’t want to.’
‘I just need to talk to you. It’s important.’
I shook my head and stared at my lap.
‘Come on, Lisa. Don’t keep me waiting.’
‘You can talk to me here,’ I said. ‘I don’t want to come to the bedroom with you.’
He glared at me for a minute, as if trying to decide whether to drag me through anyway, then he gave a sigh of exasperation and stomped off down the hall. I made a face at Charlene – a mixture of amazement that I’d refused him like that, and fear about what would happen next. We didn’t talk about it, though. We just sat in silence, not wanting to give Alan an excuse to come back into the room and tell us off. He seemed very unpredictable and unapproachable that morning.
Trisha finished and then it was This Morning. I was watching it but without seeing anything because my mind was buzzing with worrying about our situation and what we were going to do.
I wondered if my dad would make another appeal, as Keith had. He would hate being the centre of attention in a room with lots of people pointing cameras at him. My dad was a very private person who didn’t want anyone else knowing his business. He was a real homebody, just going out to do his work during the day and staying at home in the evenings. Mum was the one who liked going out to clubs and pubs with her friends and Dad would babysit for us. At weekends, he stayed at home and worked in the garden. He didn’t have many friends; I couldn’t think of anyone who visited him. All the visitors to the house were for Mum.
But when he was in a good mood, there was a quietly wacky side to my dad. He was very tall and lanky and sometimes he would make us laugh by swinging between the kitchen units, resting his weight on his arms and looking like an orang-utan. He was so gangly that it always made me giggle.
I knew I was Dad’s favourite. Both James and Christine got into trouble at school and played up at home and I was the good little girl of the family who had never caused him any worry – until now.
I wished with all my heart that I were back at home, sitting on the big white furry rug in front of the fire while Dad sat in his armchair and we all watched a video together. It was my favourite place to snuggle up in the evening. Dad would tell me off for hogging all the heat, but in a jokey kind of a way that I knew he didn’t mean. We’d have lots of snacks laid out – sweets and crisps and juice – to munch during the film. It was just cosy and normal.
Suddenly the door burst open and Alan came in. ‘Charlene, come with me,’ he ordered, in a voice that didn’t allow for any arguments.
She looked round at me.
‘Now!’ he said. ‘Come on, I haven’t got all day.’ He took a step towards her as if he was going to pull her up and drag her through to the bedroom.
She stood up slowly and glanced round at me one more time. I gave her a sympathetic look but what could I do? Maybe he just wanted to talk, as he’d said to me. I tried to convince myself of this as she followed him down the corridor, her feet dragging.
I sat on the sofa, overcome with guilt that once again he was taking her and not me. It was so unfair. Of course, part of me was very relieved and that made the guilt worse. I had so many emotions all mixed up together that I couldn’t think straight. I strained my ears to listen for any noise from the bedroom but I couldn’t hear anything over the sound of the television.
I felt utterly miserable sitting there, as though I had let Charlene down somehow. It was curious because on the outside, she was always the more confident of the two of us, the one who was the leader and made the decisions about what we were going to do next, but in the flat here she seemed subdued and defeated. It was hardly surprising that she was terrified after he dangled her over the cliff edge like that. She was probably still in shock.
After a while, I got up and tiptoed through to the kitchen to get a glass of water. There was silence in the bedroom as I passed the door and I hoped that was a good sign. I hoped that meant he was just looking at her or something, but not raping her.
They were gone for a long time. This Morning finished and there was a talk show with people I didn’t recognise. I got up and pressed the button on the set to flick through the channels, because there was no remote control. On one channel they were showing Keith’s appeal again so I watched it once more. He stumbled over his words, looking very pale, as if he hadn’t slept. I got the impression someone had told him what to say instead of letting him talk in his own words. I could see why Charlene thought it looked as though he had given up hope, but I reasoned that the police must still be looking for us. You don’t give up after two days. I was sure I could remember seeing appeals on the telly for people who had been missing for a week or more.
I sat down and watched the rest of the news programme without really seeing it. All the time I was racking my brains, trying to come up with a solution to our problem. If Granddad were there, what would he advise me to do? Or what would Mr Okrainetz say? I tried to picture all the cleverest people I knew and imagine what they might suggest but nothing new came to me. We needed a plan. I got up and had another look out of the tiny window but I couldn’t see how I would open it and, even if I could, there was no way down. It was just too far to the shop roof. Could anyone see me from down below on the street? I could make out a few figures a long way off but none of them looked up. I stood at the window for ages and didn’t hear Charlene and Alan emerging from the bedroom and coming down the hall.
‘What are you doing?’ he snapped at me. ‘Come away from the window.’
Charlene crept over to the sofa and sat down carefully. I walked over and sat down beside her.
‘It’s your turn now,’ Alan told me firmly. ‘Come on.’
I looked at Charlene and she wouldn’t meet my eye.
‘Come on, Lisa. Now.’ He stood waiting by the door. I considered saying no again, as I had done before, but the expression on his face didn’t look as though he was willing to back down. It wouldn’t be fair for me to say no because maybe he’d take Charlene back in again instead of me.
Feeling sick to my stomach, I stood up and walked across to him, then down the corridor to his dark little prison cell of a bedroom.