Chapter 33
Bonnie had been trapped in her room for hours when Lew pulled into the estate where she lived. The back, where Bonnie’s bedroom was, looked out onto long fields of yellow rapeseed. There was no house opposite and no chance of being seen waving madly out of the window, unless the small boy who lived five houses down happened to be flying a drone or the local farmer decided to cut his crop early. Her phone was downstairs in her handbag. The key to the window which was always on the sill was missing, Stephen had taken it as a precaution, presumably. She had tried reasoning with him through the door, calmly, offering to talk things through, even lying that she wouldn’t leave, but he hadn’t answered. He was past responding to anything she might say, she’d decided after a couple of hours so then she’d tried to smash the double-glazed window with a cup then a perfume bottle but it hadn’t worked. She looked around but there was nothing she could have picked up and launched at the glass to smash it; her only hope was to wrest the sink from the wall of her ensuite and try that. She sat on the bed and thought it was ludicrous that she could be trapped in a bedroom with no means of escape. How would she get out if there was a fire? She had to treat this as if it were the same because she was sure as hell she would get out if her life were in immediate danger. She had just started looking for something to help prise out the sink when she heard the front doorbell ring, followed by a tattoo of heavy knocking. She raced to the bedroom door and pressed her ear to it, hearing the muted notes of an exchange of voices. Only postmen, Jehovah’s Witnesses and old Gerald at stupid o’clock on Sunday mornings ever called. Any of them would surely find a woman screaming was cause for further investigation. So she filled up her lungs with as much air as they could take and screamed.
*
Lew had already seen Bonnie’s Vauxhall parked on the drive as he approached the detached house in an estate filled with samey-samey others. The style of the house didn’t fit her at all, he thought. He imagined her in a cottage setting with non-conformist windows and a riot of coloured flowers bursting from crowds of pots and window boxes. He strode up the path and rang the doorbell, following it with a series of staccato knocks that no one on the inside could miss. It was almost immediately opened to the length of the attached security chain by a tall, wiry man with short, thick greying hair and a long, gaunt face. Stephen, her husband, presumably. Something else that didn’t match her.
‘Is this where Bonnie Brookland lives?’ asked Lew.
‘Who wants to know?’ asked the man cautiously.
‘I’m her boss. She didn’t turn in for work today and I . . . I wondered if she was all right.’
Lew’s ear picked up a high-pitched sound, as though he’d inadvertently switched on his phone in his pocket and someone were screaming down the earpiece. A woman’s voice.
‘She’s fine. She’s ill,’ said Stephen paradoxically, closing the door so his face was just a slice of skin and one grey eye.
Help. Help me. Get the police. Was Lew imagining this or could he really hear it?
‘Is there any chance I could have a quick word with her? She’s got a key of mine that I really need,’ he said, thinking on his feet.
More screams. He felt vibrations on the edge of his radar now, as if someone were stamping their feet.
‘I’ll ask her to ring you.’ The door was closing.
Help me. I’m locked in.
Lew’s hand shot out to stop it.
‘There’s someone shouting for help in your house.’
‘Go away,’ said Stephen, putting his full weight against the door, but Lew was younger and, thanks to his post-trauma healthy exercise regime, stronger than he had ever been in his life before. He countered Stephen’s effort with his shoulder, giving it everything he had. Stephen fell back, the door swung fully open as the chain broke. The shouting was louder now and unmistakeably Bonnie’s voice.
Lew strode over Stephen’s prostrate form. ‘Bonnie?’ he shouted, trying to trace the source of her distress call.
‘I’m upstairs.’
Lew took the stairs two at a time and there at the top of them were the door handles bound with figures of eight rope.
‘Bonnie, it’s Lew. Are you all right?’ he asked, deftly unlooping it. He checked behind him for her lunatic husband but there was no sign of him. He threw the rope onto the carpet and opened the door and there stood Bonnie, ashen-faced, her hazel eyes large and shiny with anxiety, her hand holding up a metal nail file as a weapon.
‘Oh Lew.’ She ran to him in relief and his long, strong arms closed around her. She could have stayed there forever, breathing him in, the scent of his unnamed cologne mixed with his warmth.
‘I have to get out of here,’ she said, gulping as if she had been starved of oxygen. She moved out of his hold to pick up her things.
‘What do you need?’
‘The case, the box and the holdall. That’s all I’m taking.’
‘Let me go first,’ he said. ‘You get the bag, I’ll manage the rest.’
Lew tucked the box under his arm and walked tentatively down the stairs, not unconvinced he’d be met at the bottom by Bonnie’s soon to be ex-husband wielding a bread knife. Any man that locked his wife in a house was going to be unpredictable. But Stephen Brookland was slumped at the kitchen table, a cloth pressed to his rapidly swelling cheekbone. He didn’t lift his eyes when Lew walked past him.
‘I need my handbag,’ said Bonnie, darting past Stephen towards a row of hooks on the wall where a line of coats were hung. As Bonnie checked through the contents of her bag, Lew looked at him hunched and pathetic and his lip curled instinctively. He couldn’t imagine anyone more unlikely for her to be married to.
Bonnie took her two coats down from the pegs and lifted her umbrella from the stand. She could have taken more now, but she just wanted to get away.
‘Can I have a minute?’ she said to Lew. ‘Please.’
‘Really?’ Lew said with disbelief. He didn’t want to leave her alone with this brute if he could help it.
‘I won’t be long.’
‘I’ll be just outside the door,’ said Lew, dragging his eyes away from the contemptible creep.
When he had shut the door, Bonnie stood squarely in front of Stephen but his eyes remained downcast, his hand still pressing the cloth against his cheek. He looked old and disgusting and she shuddered at the thought that she was joined to him in marriage. She pulled her wedding ring off her finger and set it on the table in front of him.
‘It didn’t have to be like this, Stephen,’ she said. ‘I don’t want anything from you, just a divorce.’
‘Don’t worry, you won’t be getting anything from me,’ said Stephen, flicking his eyes up towards her for a second. ‘Not a single penny.’
‘Let’s do this quick and painlessly, for both our sakes.’
Then his head rose slowly and she saw a smirk spread across his dry, thin mouth.
‘Quick and painlessly, eh?’
She picked up her things feeling panic wash over her like a cold shower.
‘You’ll be back. There will be no life for you if you don’t, as well you know,’ he went on.
She rounded on him. ‘Stay away from me, Stephen. I mean it or I’ll get the police onto you. You wouldn’t want them calling around here, would you? Setting all the neighbours off talking?’ His respectability was important to him, he would find that excruciating.
But the warning bounced straight off him and that smirk remained, twisting up the side of his mouth. A nasty, rotten, smug smirk that burned itself on her eyeballs so fiercely that she would see it for a long, long time.
‘Call the police, would you? Pass me the phone and I’ll ring them for you.’
She turned quickly, half-running towards the door, slamming it hard behind her, striding down the path away from his voice that was intent on following her.
You know what you did, you bitch, and I’ll make sure everyone knows as well.