~
I’ve never experienced a panic like the one that takes hold of me now. It spreads through my whole body as if I’ve just plunged into a lake of icy-cold water. My baby! He’s taken my baby!
I force myself to concentrate on my breathing. I don’t know where Chloe is, but I do know that Alex would never harm her. I block out the voice that reminds me he drugged her. I have to believe he wouldn’t hurt her, even to hurt me. I have to get out of here. I have to find my baby!
I hear the landline ring. I recall the phone calls to the house when the caller remained silent. On one occasion Alex was there, but he could have rung using his mobile without me noticing. I’d rejected that idea at the time. Now I’m not so sure. Is he messing with my head?
Hearing the phone reminds me that I was supposed to ring Julie back. She’ll leave me messages on my mobile to ask why I haven’t confirmed dates, but she’s more likely to be annoyed than worried. And I haven’t replied to any of Nikki’s messages. That in itself sends a message. But not the one I want her to get. She’ll think I’m ignoring her and give up on me. I need to send her an SOS. As for Hannah, she and I have barely been in touch since she cut my hair. If she does contact me and I don’t answer, she might be disappointed, but she won’t find it strange. And Dad has other things on his mind. I should call him, not the other way round.
No one will miss me. Not anytime soon, anyway.
Crying out in frustration, I pull against my restraints. At first I think it’s my imagination. Or wishful thinking. But then I twist my left hand. No, it’s definitely loose. The cuff on my left hand is loose! Alex hasn’t tightened it as much as usual. Trying in vain to shut out the pain and pulling hard, I attempt to free my hand.
In the end, with my wrist and hand throbbing, I’m ready to admit defeat. One last try – I pull with all my might. It hurts so much that I howl. But it works! I’ve managed to pull my left hand out of the handcuffs.
Immediately, I roll over and start to work on my right hand. But this time I really do have to give up. I can’t undo the cuff. I can’t even loosen it.
Even though the curtains are drawn, it has got a little lighter, and from my position on my right side, I’m facing the cot. I stare at the empty mattress. My eyes fill with tears. Then my gaze is drawn to something underneath the cot. I’m not sure what it is at first. I blink away the tears and look again. It’s the broken mobile.
With my right hand still handcuffed, I roll off the bed onto the floor. Stretching out as far as I can, I can almost reach the broken bits of wood with my feet. Almost. I stretch further, my wrist pulling against its metal restraint. Using my toes, I manage to roll a stick of wood towards me. Then I grab it with my feet. When I’m holding it in my left hand, I allow myself a few seconds to catch my breath.
Getting back on the bed is harder than rolling off. When I’m lying back in position, I hide the stick under my bottom. Now all I have to do is wait. I practise my movements. When I hear Alex, I’ll put my left hand back up above my head so that it looks like I’m still cuffed to the bed. I’ll have to wait until he has taken out the key to the handcuffs before I make a move. If he goes for my right hand first, I can wait until he frees it. If he goes for my left hand, I’ll have to go for the stick and hope I can get the key off him and unlock the right cuff myself.
I’m going to aim for his eye. I’m hoping that I can hurt him enough so that I can get past him and down the stairs. My car keys are on the hook by the front door.
I try to stay focused and replay my escape plan through my mind. But something is troubling me. I turn my head towards the empty cot. Why did he take Chloe away? For the past few days, he has fed her and changed her in here in the morning. He hasn’t given me any breakfast this morning. He hasn’t even pulled back the curtains. Why the change in routine?
And then I remember Alex’s words when I wanted to go to Somerset to be with Dad. At the end of next week, I’m away on business for a few days.
He’s not coming back. He’s going to leave me here. How many days? The reality of my situation soon sinks in. I’m going to die. I’m going to starve to death. Tears flow down my face as images of my daughter stream through my head.
Then I hear it. Footsteps coming up the stairs. I assumed Alex had left. Has he been in the house all this time? I push the fingers of my left hand through the cuff.
I’m ready. As ready as I’ll ever be.
I hear the door to the master bedroom close and then footsteps going back down the stairs.
‘No!’ I scream. ‘No! No! Alex! Don’t leave me! Come back!’
I’m hysterical, banging my head against the pillow repeatedly and pulling at the cuffs. When I see the handle of the door turn downwards, it takes all the mental and physical strength I can muster to refocus on my plan.
I stare in disbelief as the door opens. It’s not Alex. It’s Nikki.
Initially, I’m overcome with relief, but then a thought strikes me. What is she doing here? Is she in cahoots with Alex?
‘Kaitlyn!’ She looks horrified. ‘Oh dear God!’ She comes over to the bed and sits down next to me. ‘Let’s get you out of here,’ she says. ‘Any idea where the key is?’
I can’t seem to say anything. I shake my head.
‘OK. Well, it looks like a novelty toy,’ she says. ‘It shouldn’t be too difficult.’ She’s trying to be reassuring, but I can hear the panic in her voice. ‘I’ll be right back.’
She comes back a minute or so later with bolt cutters without having needed to ask where Alex’s toolkit is. In seconds, I’m free. I can’t quite believe it and at first I don’t move from the bed. Then sitting up, I fling my arms around Nikki, all traces of animosity and mistrust towards her gone.
Nikki studies my face. ‘What has he done to you? He hit you, didn’t he?’
‘Yes, but I’m OK. Chloe! He’s taken Chloe!’ I shout, leaping up. ‘I have to fetch her!’
‘Any idea where she might be?’
Yes, but I can’t seem to get the message from my brain to my mouth in order to answer. Nikki is still talking and her voice becomes deafening. It’s as if she’s standing right next to me, shouting at me through a loudspeaker turned up to full volume. And yet I can’t make sense of a single word she’s saying. She’s speaking a foreign language, one I don’t understand. The ground starts to shake and I’m thrown off-balance. Nikki catches me and helps me sit down. Her perfume is heady and it’s making me dizzy. The light in this room is too bright and I can’t see.
Everything comes rushing at me at once, bombarding my body with a sensory overload. I want to cover my ears with my hands, but I can’t move. The screaming, the sound of Nikki’s voice and the lights all blur into each other and I feel as if I’m stuck on a sickening rollercoaster ride or inside a pinball machine. I want to press pause, stop the world and get off or get out.
When the floor becomes stable underneath me and the room stops spinning, Nikki is sitting next to me, holding me. The screaming stops, too, and I realise it was me all along.
Now when Nikki speaks, it’s softer. ‘Are you all right?’
I nod. She gets up and disappears along the landing. Then she’s back, holding out a plastic beaker of water from the bathroom. My hands are shaking so badly that I need both of them to take it.
‘I’m going to call the police,’ Nikki says.
‘No, don’t do that,’ I plead. ‘Not yet. I have to find Chloe first. And then I need to get out of here. I want to be with my family.’
‘In that case, can you stand up?’ she asks when I’ve taken a sip of water. I nod and she helps me to my feet. ‘I think we should get out of here,’ she says, ‘before he comes back.’
‘He said he’d be gone for a few days,’ I say. My voice is almost inaudible, even to me.
‘Let’s not take any chances. Where should we look for Chloe?’
‘At my mother-in-law’s.’ My brain is thinking with a lot more lucidity now. ‘It’s the only place I can think of. There’s nowhere else she can be.’ I sound more certain than I feel.
My suitcases and bags are on the floor of the master bedroom where I left them, with Chloe’s and my clothes still packed inside, ready for us to leave Alex. Nikki and I haul the luggage down the stairs. I take my car keys off the hook in the hall, but Nikki holds out her hand.
‘Leave the keys,’ she says. ‘We’ll go in my car. You’re in no state to drive.’
‘But I was hoping to drive to my dad’s once I’ve got Chloe.’ If I get Chloe.
‘I still think you should go to the police afterwards,’ Nikki says, raising an over-pruned eyebrow at me.
Nikki’s right, but I really need to be with my family. ‘Listen, if Chloe isn’t at Sandy’s house …’ I trail off and swallow. That eventuality doesn’t bear thinking about. ‘… We’ll call the police immediately. Otherwise, I’ll go to the police station in Minehead as soon as I get to my dad’s. I promise.’
‘OK. I’ll take you to your dad’s house, then.’
‘You can’t drive to Somerset.’
‘Why not?’
‘It’s too far. You can’t drive all that way.’
‘On the contrary,’ says Nikki, ‘It’s the very least I can do.’
She wriggles the fingers of her outstretched hand and I put my car keys in her palm. She hangs them back on the hook. Nikki has parked her mum’s grey hatchback in the driveway and we load the cases and bags into it.
While we’re doing this, Nikki fires questions at me and I answer them, filling her in on how I ended up confined to the nursery with a swollen face.
‘Why did you come here?’ I ask Nikki as we’re getting into the car, suddenly suspicious. ‘Did you know Alex was keeping me captive?’
‘No. I had no idea,’ she replies. ‘I wanted to see you and I’ve – well, I’ve driven past a number of times, but I hadn’t seen you leave the house for a few days. I thought you were away, actually, but I wanted to make sure.’
I’m not sure I believe her, and I’m more convinced than ever that it was Nikki driving past in her mum’s car that day. She was spying on Alex and me, I know that now, but I’m very glad she was. Otherwise I’d still be stuck in the nursery.
‘How did you get into the house?’
She slides her hips forwards in her seat, pushes her hand into the pocket of her black pencil skirt and takes out a key. ‘He never asked me to give it back,’ she says. I look into the palm of her hand. The front door key. ‘I let myself in.’
As Nikki turns the car round, I take one last look at the Old Vicarage. This remote, desolate house that has sadness and despair seeping out of every wall inside. Ironically, from the outside it looks less austere than when I arrived. The creeper, which appeared barren in February, now bears leaves that lend it the illusion of life and hope. This house was the setting for my dreams of a happy family but it became the setting for my nightmares as my home turned into my prison. That was a gradual process. I was trapped long before Alex handcuffed me to the bed.
Nikki pulls out of the driveway. She has left the gate open and she doesn’t stop to close it. As I get another whiff of her perfume, a memory stirs. Alex breaking out in hives from head to toe the day I was convinced someone had been in the house.
‘You switched Alex’s shampoo in the bottles in the shower,’ I say, giving her a sidelong glance.
‘I knew he was allergic,’ she admits, keeping her eyes on the road.
‘It made him blotchy all over his body.’
I imagine in other circumstances, we might laugh about this as two scorned women whose man has had a taste of comeuppance. But Nikki shows no sign of amusement. In fact, she doesn’t react at all, and I know she’s thinking of Chloe right now, as I am. She turns left without asking for directions. She knows the way. She must have been to Sandy’s house several times before now. After all, Sandy almost became her mother-in-law instead of mine.
‘How did you know?’ she asks.
‘Your perfume. I smelt it in the house that day.’
For a moment, Nikki doesn’t speak. Then she says, ‘It’s aftershave, actually. I bought it for Alex. He wore it once. That’s how I know he’s allergic. I really like the fragrance, so I wear it sometimes. It sort of reminded me of him at first, after … well, after he ended our relationship.’
‘When was that exactly?’ I ask.
She takes her eyes off the road for a second and looks me in the eye. ‘At the end of January. I came home from work one day to discover he’d packed up my things. He broke off our engagement, demanded I give him the ring back and then asked me to leave.’ For once, her voice contains no hint of honey; it is flat and cold. ‘I didn’t see it coming and I didn’t get an explanation.’
She takes a deep breath and then continues, ‘I lost all our mutual friends. I’ve no idea what he told them, but they wouldn’t speak to me. I had to pack in the triathlon club.’
So those are her medals in the box in the peach room. And that’s why she’s such a good swimmer. She was a triathlete. It’s probably how she met Alex, too, through sport. For the first time, I see Nikki’s point of view. I understand what I did to her. I stole her fiancé. She was engaged to Alex, who discarded her and threw her out of the house when I came up to the Lake District to live with him.
I also realise Alex waited until the very last minute before he got Nikki out of the picture. He’d known for several weeks I was pregnant, and yet it sounds like Nikki lived at the Old Vicarage until a few days before I moved in. Perhaps he was boxing up her stuff the very weekend I arrived. I drove all the way up here by myself, as he’d offered to come down by train and share the driving with me, but he let me down at the last minute.
‘And you found out about me the day you saw us out walking?’
Nikki nods. ‘I could see you were pregnant and I put two and two together.’
This time she doesn’t look at me, but I can see that her eyes are glistening with tears.
Talking to Nikki has kept me from going out of my mind with panic about Chloe. But when neither of us speaks, my baby spills into my thoughts and heart again. I’ve been telling myself that she’s in good hands at her grandmother’s. Now, though, as Nikki pulls up in front of Sandy’s house, I can feel my anxiety levels soaring. What if she’s not here?
I’ve leapt out of the car and raced up the path to Sandy’s front door before Nikki has even parked. I hammer on the door. When there’s no answer, I pound my fists against the frosted glass. But the door remains closed.
I hear Nikki behind me.
‘She’s not here,’ I say.
‘That doesn’t mean Chloe’s not with Sandy,’ Nikki points out. ‘Is there a play area or a park near here they could have gone to? Have you got her mobile number?’
Sandy’s phone number is in the memory of my mobile. I didn’t think to look for my phone before we left. I’ve got my handbag with my purse in it, hopefully, but no phone. I shake my head.
‘Have you got her number by any chance?’
‘No. I deleted it.’
Just then, I catch sight of Sandy over Nikki’s shoulder. She’s pushing Chloe’s pram towards us, but she hasn’t seen us yet. I push past Nikki, and sprint towards my mother-in-law. She stops in her tracks. I can see I’ve startled her.
‘What on earth is wrong, my dear?’ she asks, recovering from her shock. ‘What has happened to your face?’
‘Is Chloe OK? Let me see Chloe!’
Without answering either of her questions, I push her out of the way more roughly than I mean to and she wobbles on her inappropriate shoes as I reach into the pram. As I take Chloe into my arms, I feel myself smile. It hurts, not just because of the split lip and the bruise on my cheek, but because my muscles are no longer used to stretching my mouth upwards. But a split second later, hunched around Chloe’s tiny frame, my body starts shaking with long, racking sobs. Tears of relief.
‘What’s wrong?’ Sandy repeats, her strident voice faltering this time. I glance at my mother-in-law and see she has spotted Nikki, who is walking towards her. ‘Nicola,’ Sandy says, nodding at her. If she’s puzzled, she’s hiding it well. She sounds curt rather than confused.
‘How’s your father?’ Sandy tries again, turning to me.
This is a question I can answer. I try to get a grip, and politely, I reply. ‘He’s, well … he’s been better, I suppose. I think he’s devastated at the idea of having his dog put down.’ I see Nikki flinch out of the corner of my eye. She would hate that idea too, of course, being a dog lover.
‘I meant, has he recovered from his stroke?’
‘Oh, yes.’ I frown. ‘A while ago now.’
‘But I thought …’ Sandy breaks off. It’s clear to me that she’s not going to say any more.
‘Did Alex tell you that’s where I was? At my dad’s house?’
Sandy pushes a strand of grey hair behind her ears. ‘Alex … Did Alex …?’
She’s looking at my face, but she can’t bring herself to ask. I feel inexplicably angry with her all of a sudden as if she’s somehow responsible for what her son has done to me.
‘Your son kept me prisoner – for several days – after beating me and threatening to take Chloe away from me,’ I inform her. My mother-in-law casts her eyes downwards. My words have hit her like a slap in the face.
‘Alexander asked me to look after Chloe until his return,’ she says, and for a moment I think she’s going to refuse to give me my daughter. But then she adds, ‘He’s due back on Friday.’ Friday! That’s three days! I would have spent another three days and nights in that nursery with no food!
‘Do you know where he’s gone?’ Nikki asks.
‘No,’ she says. ‘He doesn’t like me to pry. I only know he’s away on business.’ She pauses, then asks, ‘Are you going to the police?’
I scrutinise her, trying to work out if she’s going to plead with me not to. ‘Yes, I have to.’
My mother-in-law nods. ‘He rings me every day,’ she says. ‘I’ll pretend Chloe is still here, to make sure he does come back on Friday.’
For a few seconds, I’m stunned. Then holding Chloe in one arm, I place my other arm on Sandy’s shoulder. ‘Why would you do that?’
She lets out a weary sigh, the lament of a mother who suffered for years in a marriage to someone evil and who knows she didn’t manage to eradicate his evil from her own child.
‘He pushed me,’ she says.
At first I think she means that Alex has made her do something she didn’t want to.
‘Pushed you to do what?’ I breathe, not sure that I really want to know.
She shakes her head almost imperceptibly and just when I think she isn’t going to say another word, she continues. ‘We had an argument. Over something inconsequential.’ She waves her hand dismissively. ‘He was angry with me. So he pushed me and I fell down my own front doorstep. That’s how I sprained my ankle.’
‘I’m so sorry, Sandy,’ I say.
‘It was deliberate,’ my mother-in-law continues. ‘He had this malevolent gleam in his eyes.’
Sandy reaches out and gently touches my face. ‘Go now, both of you.’ She lowers her voice and I only just make out her words. ‘Kaitlyn, make sure the police find him before he finds you.’