My head hurts. I open my eyes. The floor is flat and brown. A dirt floor, gritty against my cheek, covered in a slurry of grey and white. Bird droppings, years and years of them. They must have been nesting in here. There is something wet on my bottom lip, warm and metallic.
Nausea wells up from my stomach. Should I shut my eyes, pretend that I am still out? But then I wouldn’t see him coming. No, keep them slitted, like I can hardly open them.
There are feet in front of me now – shiny leather shoes. I can just focus on the tips.
‘I know you’re awake.’ He crouches down and puts a cool hand on the pulse in my wrist. ‘You’re fine, Kate.’ He straightens up, and walks away. ‘Stop it. I mean it.’
My eyes track up now, from his shoes, to what he is holding.
I lift my head, a couple of inches from the floor, then slowly fold myself round and lean against the wall, feeling it rough through my clothes. My face is still throbbing, my cheekbone is hot. I put one hand to it, checking myself.
The knife is silver and vicious. It doesn’t fit in the hand of this man, in his shirt and tie, his smart work clothes.
I keep my eyes on him, but widen my field of vision to take in the rough walls and the dirt floor, the door behind him. It’s cold, a damp chill coming up from the ground, and the bare light overhead is dirty with cobwebs. I’m in an outhouse, not much more than a room with a roof. I’ve seen them in the deer park, buildings from its farming past.
I need to say it out loud now. I want to scream it to the rooftops.
‘It was you.’ My voice is cracked, like I’ve woken from sleep. ‘You had her, all this time.’
He smiles, showing his teeth. ‘Bit late, but you got there in the end’ – the knife moves in his hand, a silver gleam under the light – ‘though I’m afraid it is too late, for you.’
Dr Heath. Nick Heath, here, in front of me. I still can’t compute it. My doctor, the man I told my fears to, who prescribed my pills, gave me an ear, so sympathetic. But now his energy’s different; the mild facade gone, something keyed up and sharp about him. The person underneath finally showing.
And that knife … it’s a kitchen knife, long and sharp. But I know, absolutely, that he would use it.
Unsteadily, I get up, using the wall as a support. The park empties at dusk, even the dog walkers clearing out. He must have left the car nearby, then carried me the short distance to this place.
‘They’re coming, you know,’ I say, some instinct kicking in. ‘They’ll be looking for me, even now. They’ll have noticed, they’ll be worried. You should let me go, we can still sort this out …’ But the panic rises as I remember: even if anyone was looking, we didn’t take my car. He said we should take his.
‘Oh, really? Who’s looking, then? The police?’ He tilts his head, his expression almost sympathetic. I am back in the surgery: him listening to me, his professional face on. ‘Your family? Because I don’t think so, Kate. I don’t think anybody is looking for you.’
Behind him, a faint light is showing under the closed wooden door. The lock’s a simple latch. If I can make it past him – past that knife. Or there’s that smaller one, to my left, standing ajar – no, that must be to another room, or cupboard, I’d just be trapped.
So it’s the door behind him. My whole body is tensing now, ready to run, to fight—
‘Don’t try it.’ He lifts his arm just a little.
I freeze. Keep him talking, I tell myself, play for time. Wait for my moment.
‘They’re going to know though. They’ll work it out, you’re right under their noses. You can’t do – anything to me.’ But my words ring hollow.
‘Oh? But they haven’t worked it out so far, have they?’ he says gently. ‘And I don’t think you’re going to be telling anyone else.’ He looks strangely relaxed now, easier in himself than he normally does.
‘What have you done to Sophie?’
‘When I saw the note you’d left I was a little alarmed, it’s true,’ he continues, like I hadn’t spoken. ‘It was such a rush. Having to move … everything. But it was feeling rather uncomfortable, being close to you. And I was surprised to see you actually inside Parklands; I’d left the front door open, in my hurry. Unlucky.’ He raises his eyebrows. ‘Or lucky, as it turns out. Because here we are.’
‘You don’t need to do anything,’ I say wildly. ‘You don’t need to hurt me. You can go away, start again.’ I’ve got to reach him. ‘You don’t want to hurt me. We’ve always got on well, haven’t we?’
‘Oh, please don’t be stupid, Kate,’ he says, his tone impatient. ‘I know you’re not stupid. It’s not personal. But I can’t go anywhere. I don’t need to go anywhere. I just need to carry on, like I did before.’
Of course. I remember my confusion when I read Sophie’s secret emails: someone was planning to go with her. But everyone she knew was still here. He was still here.
‘Because that’s what you’ve done, all this time – just carried on.’ Hiding in plain sight. Anger rises up in me now. ‘And you’d – what? Visit her? All the time, keeping her locked away, in that horrible room?’
He frowns. ‘It was what we planned, to be together. And, later, it was what had to be done. It was the only way to keep us safe. She was too young to understand that.’
I shake my head, thinking of that lonely attic. ‘Whatever Sophie thought she was going to, you know she didn’t want a prison. You know that.’ And where is she now? Where’s he put her?
‘We were happy,’ he says. ‘But you wouldn’t just let it go.’ His voice grows harsh. ‘It’s your fault, all of this. The postcards home, they weren’t enough. And they were a risk. What if one day I slipped, left a fingerprint, or some tiny trace for investigators. So I let her phone you, in a way that would never be followed back to us. A kindness, to you both, to say goodbye. But you spoiled it. You couldn’t let it go …’
Not a kindness, I think. It was control. You have to be the puppet master, cleverer than everyone else. You could get addicted to that feeling; take risks. I swallow, my mouth is dry. ‘And it was you. In my garden. In my house at night. Because I was getting closer.’
‘The first time, I was … looking. No harm in that. It’s good to be prepared. The second?’ He looks almost gleeful. ‘Let’s just say, there are ways to make things look not quite what they are.’
But I woke up and disturbed him: stopping him. What’s to stop him now?
I start talking again, babbling. ‘You can’t hide this, not this time, they’ll find you. They’ll find me. You can’t—’
‘Can’t I?’
‘No. There’s no way,’ I say. ‘There are all sorts nowadays, the DNA, forensics, they’ll work it out. If you do anything to me …’ I wish I sounded less scared.
‘You’re right,’ he says, so reasonably it silences me. ‘I can’t do it. It’s too big a risk.’
And he pulls something out of his suit pocket, tosses it towards me. Reflexively, I catch it: I can’t quite make sense of the small bottle until I read the name. Kate Harlow.
He says: ‘You’re going to do it.’
‘Where did you get this?’ They look just like mine.
‘I’m a doctor. It’s not hard.’ He nods at the pills in my hands. ‘And you’re going to take them.’
‘What?’
‘It’s a very sad situation. A mother who just couldn’t cope with the loss of her daughter. She’d tried once before, didn’t succeed. This time, however …’
And now I get it: an overdose. But there’ll be no help for me this time, no one to find me and wake me up. ‘You’re deranged. This wouldn’t work—’
He talks over me: ‘A history of erratic behaviour. Medical records that testify to that. A family who will agree, however sad they are, that they, too, have been worried recently. Police concerns, after reported incidents – a trespass, a break-in – but no signs of any intruders. Odd phone calls, to a helpline.’
My head jerks up. ‘That was you. You were calling the charity, from the phone box.’
‘Well I wasn’t going to call from the surgery or my mobile, was I? I needed to know when you were there, when you took your breaks, when your colleague did; when you’d be on your own. Your patterns.’
‘And then you put the helpline advert in Lily’s kitchen.’ I see now. ‘I thought it was her making the calls.’
‘No one was supposed to check those phone records,’ he says reprovingly. Like I’ve broken a rule of the game. ‘It’s supposed to be anonymous, as you well know, and there was no reason to. And I had a special phone for Sophie, of course. But I had to … react, when you started pushing.
‘And it worked better than I could have hoped. The police just thought it was you making the calls. Kate was cracking up again.’ He’s pleased with himself, I can hear it in his voice. Proud.
But his boast tells me something: he’s not infallible. Because he had to change his plan, react to what I was doing. Something small opens up in me. Not hope, not yet; just a glimmer of possibility.
‘So maybe you did cover that up, and they believed you. But you can’t just keep going. You had to do the diary too, didn’t you – get Sophie to write those new entries, once I knew about the pregnancy test. To explain that away and put the blame on her boyfriend. You had to keep covering up your tracks. And I was asking about Lily’s medicine too, they know at the surgery that you’re giving her medicine and you’re related—’
‘I can explain it,’ he says, angry now. ‘They’ll believe me.’ He opens his eyes wide, innocent.
And then I see it: something in the way his blue eyes are placed in that pleasant face.
‘You’re Lily’s son. That’s why you were there, that’s how you knew Nancy. Living in the shadow of the big house that your parents looked after.’
‘No,’ he says, irritated. I wait. ‘Bob was my stepfather. She remarried after my father died.’
‘And you didn’t take his name. So you kept that quiet. What, did you not like to mention it at school, what your parents did?’ I’m guessing, but his mouth tenses. ‘And what about this, now?’ I fill my voice with as much conviction as I can muster. ‘You know this is the end for you. They won’t believe it.’
‘Oh, they’ll believe it.’ He laughs. ‘You’ll be surprised what people will believe.’
He’s so assured, he’s not even worried.
Yes, I think, because you’ve done this before.
Sophie, a runaway who wasn’t a runaway. Now me, a suicide that isn’t a suicide. And—
‘Nancy,’ I say. ‘She didn’t run away either, did she?’ He doesn’t reply. ‘So what did happen? Did you do the same as with Sophie, trick her, hide her somewhere?’ I’m throwing words at him, trying to get him off balance; to get under his skin. The door behind him, it’d be what; eight, nine steps? ‘And then what? Did you get bored of her, decide to get rid of her? To murder her—’
‘No!’ His voice is loud. ‘Shut up.’ His top lip is glistening now, he’s sweating despite the chill. ‘Nancy was an accident. It was her fault – it was all her fault.’
‘How? Because she got pregnant? With Jay’s baby? Is that why you did it? Because the girl you wanted was with someone else. That’s it, isn’t it. She was pregnant with his baby.’
‘It wasn’t his,’ he bursts out.
I stay silent.
‘It was ours. They’d broken up. I comforted her. She didn’t want anyone to know. I understood: we were … different.’ I can imagine: the housekeepers’ boy, still no one you’d notice; Nancy, a teenage princess. Him infatuated, totally. ‘And then she got pregnant. She was so upset, but I knew what to do. We were going to go away, until we were older, until her family couldn’t bully her.’ His mouth twists. ‘We’d even written our notes, decided what we’d say. But she let me down.’ There’s a whining note in his voice now.
‘That night, when we’d planned to go, she came to me. She told me it was fine.’ His voice breaks on the word. ‘She wasn’t pregnant any more, because she’d told her parents. They’d sorted it, that’s what she told me, and now she was going away. It was going to be smoothed over, like nothing had happened.’
‘She was going to boarding school.’ Just like Lily told me.
‘She didn’t even mind. She said she wanted a fresh start. I said, we could still go. We could still be a family. I’d always wanted that. She said it was madness, she was far too young to have a baby. I got angry, I called her – names. And she said she never wanted to be with me, not really. Look at you, she said. Look at me. And then she – she laughed at me.’
The room is very still. I can smell the damp earth.
‘So you lost control,’ I say slowly. I see it now. Not planned. Opportunistic. A teenage boy rejected, reacting in blind fury. ‘What did you do? Did you stab her? Did you hide her?’ Suddenly, rage is filling me; I want to hurt him, like he’s hurt so many people. ‘Is that it? You stabbed her?’
The knife in his hand flashes again, and I shrink back against the wall.
‘She provoked me.’
‘But then why did she leave a runaway note …’ I can see the answer in the sly curve of his mouth: just the hint of a smile. ‘No, you left the note.’ He went into Parklands, into Nancy’s house, and left the note she’d written on her bedspread. That’s what they found, when everyone woke up the next day. ‘But Sophie? Why did you have to do this to her, too?’ There’s despair in my voice. ‘Just to hurt someone?’
‘No. No, this is why I knew people would never understand. It wasn’t to hurt – it was love. When I saw her, I knew. They could have been sisters. She even lived next door to Nancy’s house.’ His voice softens. ‘It was like it was meant to be; my second chance. Our chance – to repair the past.’
So it wasn’t a mistake: Sophie getting pregnant. A baby.
‘But you couldn’t run away with her, this time, you’d have been discovered. You hid her, instead.’
‘No one would have understood. But we were in love.’
‘But you know now, don’t you?’ I have to make him realise. ‘This is the end – it’s over.’
He shakes his head slowly. ‘Not yet. I can fix this. I’ve done it before.’ He points the knife at the bottle in my hand. ‘Because you’re going to take those pills.’
‘I’m not.’ He won’t be able to cover this up, not again, even if I don’t get through this – his skin under my nails, scratches on his face, whatever it takes, I will leave traces that they will find, if something happens to me, leading them to Sophie. ‘You’re not going to cover this up. I won’t do it.’
‘Oh, but you will do it.’ His certainty shakes me. ‘You’ll see.’
He takes a step back, the knife still in his hand, and now he’s beckoning through the smaller door, through to the next room. ‘You can come out now.’
At first I hear nothing. Then the rustling, just faint. The footsteps are slow, tired-sounding.
She walks in.