Stolen

  Howard came down to the basement room in his pyjamas without Fern, carrying a large vodka and orange juice for Lotte. The following morning when she woke she was certain the drink had been laced with a drug. She remembered Howard sitting on the bed talking about how he loved sailing, the first time she’d ever heard him talk about anything with some passion, then it all became hazy. She had a faint recollection of being cuddled and of responding slightly to his caresses but she couldn’t remember anything more.

  She woke later, fumbled for the light switch and found it was half past three in the morning. Howard was gone and she had the telltale stickiness between her legs. She got up at once to wash herself but she was so wobbly on her feet she went back to bed without even climbing the stairs to see if he’d locked the door.

  On one or other of those two attempts, Lotte got pregnant, and she didn’t know whether she was relieved or horrified. It was a relief not to have to submit to Howard any more, and to know they wouldn’t hit her again, but then it was terrifying to know she had a baby growing within her which had been forced upon her.

  Fern was beside herself with joy from the moment the first test was positive, and there were moments when that joy washed over on to Lotte because Fern was so kind and loving towards her. But even with whatever it was they slipped her daily to keep her docile, from time to time outrage bubbled to the surface and Lotte would plot her escape.

  It made sense to pretend she had accepted the situation fully and even felt pleasure at giving Fern and Howard their baby, for that would mean they’d relax their vigilance. But in fact they watched her more closely than ever. On warm, sunny days they’d allow her into the garden, but they stayed with her constantly. She had her meals in the kitchen, she could watch television in the lounge, but they kept the doors and all the windows except the small fanlights locked all the time. Even the telephone was locked into the study and they carried the keys for everything on their person. If they went out she was put back in the basement room.

  They had said originally that they were intending to take her to the States for the birth, but they appeared to have abandoned that plan. Lotte guessed they realized she would make a scene the very minute she was in a public place, and they couldn’t take the risk she might expose their racket.

  Lotte had fully expected that Fern would take her for a medical check-up before long. But the weeks slipped slowly by and Fern still didn’t seek a doctor’s advice. Lotte began to fear that she never would, perhaps for the very same reasons they didn’t dare try to take her to America.

  ‘Shouldn’t I go to a clinic?’ Lotte asked one morning, trying very hard to look as if she had no motive other than checking the baby was healthy and a good size. ‘I mean, I could have high blood pressure or one of those other problems women get.’

  ‘You are doing just fine,’ Fern said. ‘I know a great deal about childbirth. I used to be a nurse.’

  Lotte would tell herself that all she had to do was to keep chatting, laugh, smile and make happy jokes and lull them both into security so they would slip up. But it didn’t happen. They still kept the front door locked, the phone safely in the locked study, and when they went out she had to go down to the basement room.

  Dale stirred on the bed beside Lotte and opened her eyes. ‘Have you heard anyone up there while I’ve been asleep?’ she asked.

  ‘No,’ Lotte sighed. ‘I would’ve woken you up if I had. Go back to sleep – I’m sure they’ll come tomorrow.’

  ‘What will we do then?’ Dale asked, her voice cracking with fear.

  ‘We’ll have to play that by ear,’ Lotte said.

  ‘Have you remembered having the baby?’ Dale asked in little more than a whisper.

  Lotte sighed deeply. ‘Oh yes, Dale. That came back as soon as I was in here again.’

  ‘Can you tell me about it?’ Dale asked, her dark eyes deeply troubled.

  Lotte lay down beside her friend. Remembering what she’d been through had been bad enough, and she really didn’t want to have Dale asking her questions, but now that Dale’s life was in danger she owed it to her to explain what it was all about. ‘I guess I’ll have to,’ she said reluctantly, then, taking a deep breath, blurted out the story of her two nights with Howard.

  ‘The absolute bastard!’ Dale exclaimed. ‘But you were in here all the time you were pregnant? And where did you have the baby?’

  ‘Right here,’ Lotte said. ‘On this bed!’

  Chapter Thirteen

  Lotte remembered that her pregnancy seemed interminable; just long dreary days with little to do and nothing to look forward to. As the months dragged on she felt so apathetic that she eventually even lost the energy to try to outwit Howard and Fern.

  Back in September, once the summer tourists had gone home, they would take her out for walks. Howard would drive them somewhere isolated where they weren’t likely to run into anyone. But he had bought a child’s restraint, a piece of webbing with a wrist band round each end. One went round his wrist, the other round hers.

  After the first two outings, Lotte realized this could be the opportunity she’d been waiting for to get help. So she wrote a letter explaining her plight, asking the recipient to contact the police and come and rescue her. On the next outing she had it tucked into the pocket of her dress and she looked eagerly for someone to pass it to, or somewhere to leave it where it would be found.

  Unfortunately Fern and Howard made sure they didn’t walk near other people. Lotte guessed that even if she said she needed to go to the toilet Fern would check first to see there was no one else in there and check again once she’d come out.

  That day they went to the beach at West Wittering, and as it was grey and chilly there were few other cars parked up. But while they were walking on the beach, the sun came out, and by the time they got back to the car park, there were a lot more cars. Fern and Howard seemed quite relaxed after the bracing walk, and in a moment when they were talking together and not looking at her, Lotte managed to stick her letter against a car’s windscreen.

  Fate was not on Lotte’s side, however. Fern glanced back, saw the envelope she hadn’t noticed earlier and suspected it was Lotte’s work. After she’d retrieved it and read the contents she was absolutely furious, and that evening she ranted and raved at Lotte, demanding to know how she could be so selfish as to run away from them and steal Howard’s baby.

  ‘Me selfish!’ Lotte exclaimed incredulously. ‘It is you who have stolen everything from me. My liberty, and my womb to grow a child I don’t want! You are cold-blooded monsters! If you and Howard wanted a baby to love, you should have gone through legal channels to do so, not hijack someone and keep them prisoner. But what makes me angriest of all about you is that I believed you were kind, decent people. How could I have been that stupid?’

  Fern slapped her hard around the face, and as further punishment Lotte was pushed back into the basement again. They kept her there for a whole week. Her meals were brought to her, she was given books to read, even some embroidery to do, but she wasn’t allowed upstairs or out into the fresh air at all.

  A week of isolation was enough to make Lotte realize she must pretend to be contrite to get through this. She had no chance of escape from the basement, and she needed fresh air and some company to keep her health and sanity too. She cried a bit and told them she was sorry for what she’d done and that it was just because she felt frightened and terribly alone.

  Fern’s attitude would have been laughable under any other circumstances for she seemed to believe that offering money was the cure-all for absolutely everything. She said that as soon as the baby was born they would be taking it back with them to the States and they were going to give Lotte a thousand pounds to start a new life.

  Lotte didn’t want a thousand pounds. She didn’t want to be pregnant either, and steadfastly refused even to consider that the baby growing within her was any part of her. All she wanted was her freedom. But as she got to around the fifth month and she felt
the first tiny movements, like holding a butterfly in her hand, all at once she didn’t feel quite so detached.

  She realized that however repugnant its conception had been, the baby was just a helpless innocent who had to be protected from maniacs like Fern and Howard. Lotte didn’t for one moment envisage keeping the baby herself; she hated its father far too much for that. But if it was humanly possible she intended to see it was placed with the right adoptive parents, and that Fern and Howard went to prison for the crimes they had committed.

  As the pregnancy advanced Lotte would put her hands on her swelling belly, feel the strong movements within and pray silently for divine intervention.

  It was ironic that she chose to find faith at the time Fern and Howard had dropped all pretence of being religious. They no longer had prayers and Howard didn’t read from the Bible. But Lotte had found comfort in praying after the rape, and even if her captors’ recent treatment of her should have made her feel prayer was futile and God a myth, she needed something to hang on to. And in the absence of worried parents looking for her, God was the only being she could call on.

  She asked Him for a miracle, that Fern or Howard would leave the front door keys somewhere where she could grab them; that the police would turn up with a search warrant, or that her captors would suddenly be shocked by the enormity of what they had already done, and intended to do, and just let her go.

  Sadly, Lotte knew she couldn’t count on a miracle. She was terribly afraid of what lay ahead, both the pain of the birth and the rush of natural maternal emotions she guessed would come with it. She suspected too that once the baby was born, she would actually be in mortal danger. Fern might say that if Lotte went to the police with her story, no one would believe her, but she was too intelligent to truly believe that. The only way she and Howard could be sure the true story would never come out was by killing her.

  Somehow Lotte had got to escape.

  Christmas passed like any other day, except Fern made a little more effort with the dinner and drank a lot more than she usually did. Lotte pointedly asked them in the morning if they were going to church – she rarely missed an opportunity to taunt them about their beliefs.

  When they first moved down here Lotte had asked if they were going to attend the local church, but they said the Church of England wasn’t to their liking and that they preferred an Evangelical form of worship. That, as it turned out, was just an excuse not to go to any church, and all that endless praying they’d done on the cruise ship, in London and then here was a facade they hid behind to create a holy, trustworthy image. They didn’t bother to hide behind it now, and it was clear their faith was as non-existent as their morals.

  That was the day Lotte took the kitchen knife. Fern wandered off a little drunkenly as they were washing up, and Lotte seized the moment to grab the newly sharpened knife, wrap it in a tea towel and slide it down the side of her jogging pants. She made the excuse that she needed a lie-down to go down to the basement, then quickly wove the knife into the bottom of the wicker laundry basket.

  They missed the knife on Boxing Day when Howard went to cut up some vegetables, and immediately made a search of the basement. When they failed to find it Lotte felt she’d won her first battle.

  From mid-January until almost the end of February, Lotte only rarely got out of the basement. Howard went away on business for days at a time, and perhaps because Fern was worried by the missing knife, Lotte had to remain locked up. Fern brought meals on a tray, opened the door, dumped the tray on the top step, then quickly locked the door again. Lotte was so big and slow she couldn’t have run up the stairs to overpower Fern even if she’d wanted to, but it did make her worry about what would happen if she went into labour and Howard was still away.

  She woke on 20 February to a nagging ache in her back. As Howard had come home the night before, Fern let her come up to the kitchen for breakfast.

  ‘It could be labour starting,’ Fern said, exchanging glances with Howard. ‘I know you’re not due for a couple more weeks but it often does start with backache.’

  Lotte had some toast and a couple of cups of tea, then went into the lounge to watch television. She was certain she was in labour but she was less certain that Fern knew as much about birthing as she’d claimed. What would happen if there were complications?

  The backache turned to clearly defined and regular contractions around midday. They were five minutes apart and quite mild until two o’clock, when all at once they became far stronger. It was at that point that Fern insisted Lotte went back down to the basement and put on the cotton gown she’d bought for the birth.

  Lotte remembered looking up at the tiny window as she walked around the room trying to ease the contractions, and seeing snowflakes falling. Somehow that seemed like a kind of omen that she was never going to get out of this room, and she became even more scared.

  Fern gave her something to drink a bit later, saying it would help the pain. In fact all it did was make Lotte feel woozy in between contractions; it didn’t dull the pain at all.

  She lost all track of time. It seemed to her that it was now one continuous pain which came in waves of severity from excruciating to so unbearable she thought she would die, and for much of it she was alone. She clung to the bed rail, arching her back up from the mattress to try to alleviate the agony, and felt sweat pouring from her.

  ‘Get me help, you bitch!’ Lotte demanded at one point when Fern did come down the stairs and laid a cool and ineffectual hand on her forehead.

  ‘Now, now,’ Fern said, as if she had nothing worse than a cold. ‘You’ll be fine, just breathe away the pain.’

  A spurt of water coming from Lotte soaked the sheet beneath her.

  ‘Nothing to worry about, that’s just your waters breaking. Things will move on faster now,’ Fern said, stripping off the wet sheet and sliding a clean one beneath her. ‘Soon you’ll get the urge to bear down.’

  Lotte had moments of utter clarity between the terrible pains; she saw Fern’s indifference to her pain and her irritation that it was taking so long. She had tied her normally carefully arranged hair back into a pony-tail, and she wore a white linen apron over her tee-shirt and jogging pants. She spoke in a practised tone as she trotted out her insincere little platitudes, but then she would disappear up the stairs for what was probably only minutes, yet seemed like hours because Lotte was so afraid.

  She swore to herself then that she would make Fern suffer once this was over. The hidden knife might not be as useful now as effective pain control, but it would be if she survived this.

  ‘You should eat something, honey,’ Howard called down the stairs to his wife. ‘It’s after seven and you haven’t had a thing since breakfast.’

  ‘Make me a ham sandwich,’ Fern called back. ‘I’ll be up soon.’

  ‘You go up there again and leave me and I’ll strangle you the first chance I get,’ Lotte snarled at the woman.

  It was at that moment that the need to bear down began, and Fern finally stayed at her post. She had fastened a towel around the bed rail and put the end in Lotte’s hands to pull on as she bore down.

  ‘Push with the contraction,’ she ordered Lotte. ‘Use every bit of the pain and we’ll get the baby out quickly.’

  Lotte was only too anxious for the ordeal to be over, and she pushed with all her might. She was vaguely aware that Howard had come down to the basement and was preparing the Moses basket ready to receive the baby, but he didn’t speak to her.

  She made one long hard push after another, her legs bent, feet pressing hard into the mattress as she gripped the towel with her hands.

  ‘I can see his head,’ Fern announced. ‘He won’t be long now.’

  It was only in those final moments that Lotte saw Fern did have some real experience of midwifery, for she told Lotte when to stop pushing, just to pant as the baby’s head was born. With the next contraction, which was suddenly much milder, Lotte felt the baby’s body slither out of her into Fern’s
hands.

  ‘It’s a little girl,’ Fern said. ‘And honey, she’s a real beauty, just as I knew she’d be.’

  For a short while Lotte forgot all the wrongs this couple had done her, and those that they intended to do in the future. She felt euphoric at delivering her baby safely, that the pain was over, and at the baby’s first lusty cry, tears rolled down her cheeks too.

  She was beautiful, with well-rounded limbs, plump cheeks and the blonde fuzz on her head. Fern wrapped her tightly in a cotton blanket and passed her to Howard who tucked her into her basket with evident pride.

  ‘Can I hold her?’ Lotte asked.

  ‘Later, when I’ve got you all cleaned up and you’ve had a drink and something to eat,’ Fern agreed. ‘But Howard’s going to take her upstairs now. She needs to be kept really warm – it’s a bitter cold night tonight.’

  Lotte was in a kind of warm bubble for the few hours left of the day. Fern washed her, changed the bed, brought her tea, sandwiches and cake, and praised her for her courage. Lotte was exhausted and soon dropped off to sleep.

  The next morning she woke to the sound of the baby crying and instinct made her get out of bed. It was only when she found the door locked that the full implications hit her. She’d given birth and they’d taken the baby away, just as they intended, but somehow being told what would happen hadn’t prepared her in any way for the reality.

  She was bleeding heavily, her insides felt as if they might fall out, and she could hear her baby crying. That wail of distress was touching a nerve in her brain and jangling it but she couldn’t get to her. But she had to, even if she had to break down the door.

  Lotte hammered on the door with all the force she could muster, then went down the stairs to pick up a shoe to make even more noise.

  ‘For God’s sake stop that racket!’ she heard Howard shout. ‘What on earth’s the matter?’