‘How dare you come in here and judge me?’ Peggy said angrily, her face growing very flushed.
‘I dare because at any moment we could get the worst news in the whole world. That is, that our daughters are dead,’ Kim said, looking hard at the other woman. ‘I could bet that you would’ve sold your own soul if it would’ve saved your other daughter. Am I right?’
Peggy nodded.
‘Right then, I want you to get up off your arse now, to remember that Lotte is a gift from God, just as your Fleur was, and that a mother’s role is to protect and nurture.’
‘But…’ Peggy began.
Kim waved her hands to interrupt her. ‘What went on between you and Lotte can end here right now if you want it to. Just come with us and join the search.’
‘But it’s nearly two. By the time we get to Chichester the day will be almost over.’
Kim looked exasperated. ‘If your husband was to keel over with a heart attack, would you say, “He’s close on sixty so it isn’t worth getting help”?’
‘Of course not,’ Peggy said indignantly.
‘Well, we can be in Chichester in forty minutes, and it doesn’t get dark till late. Evenings are a good time to knock on doors, people are home from work. And there’s those four young men who’ve taken time off from work to hunt for the girls. Don’t you think they’d expect us to help?’
Clarke smiled at Ted. He was proud of his wife for bullying Lotte’s mother. Maybe if someone had spoken to her like that when she lost her other daughter, she wouldn’t have turned against the second child. But then, Kim had always been hot-headed and pushy, and Dale was just like her.
‘I don’t like the way you speak to me,’ Peggy said, folding her arms across her chest in a way that reminded him of Les Dawson the comedian, who used to impersonate gossiping women. ‘You’ve got some nerve coming in here throwing your weight around and telling us what we should do.’
‘Yes, I know,’ Kim said blithely. ‘My Dale is just like me too. But do you know what? Your Lotte made her a nicer person. She made her care for other people, she made her gentler, more thoughtful. As she’s my daughter I’d still have laid my life on the line for her, even if she’d remained selfish, opinionated and careless. But I’ve got a huge debt of gratitude to your Lotte, even though I’ve never met her, so I believe that entitles me to make her parents do the right thing by her.’
Clarke saw Peggy was wavering now. He guessed Ted had wanted to do the right thing from when they first arrived, but he was too weak to speak out. Kim obviously thought this too for she was now looking straight at the man.
‘Come on, Ted, are you a man or a mouse?’ she asked. ‘We’ve had no opinion from you yet. Do you think we should all join the search in Chichester?’
Ted opened his mouth but no words came out. Perhaps he was afraid of upsetting his wife. But Carrina moved over to him and slipped her hand into his, looking up at him.
‘Of course you want to look for her,’ she said softly. ‘You’ve been dying to go since she was first captured, haven’t you?’
Carrina had always been the most sensitive of their children, and Clarke saw that her instinct was sound. Putting her small hand in his was a masterstroke, for with all the old memories of both his daughters that would evoke, he’d be unable to say no.
‘Yes,’ he mumbled. But then his head came up and he looked at his wife. ‘Yes, I’ve been wanting to search for her,’ he said firmly.
Clarke looked back at Peggy. Clearly stunned that her husband had defied her, she was staring at him as if waiting for an explanation.
‘So we’re all going now?’ Kim said, perhaps wishing to move things on a bit. ‘Better get some comfy shoes on.’
Peggy’s eyes suddenly filled with tears. ‘I should have had help when Fleur died,’ she blurted out. ‘Nowadays they give people counselling, but I got nothing. I didn’t understand what I was feeling and I had nobody to talk to about it.’
Kim took a couple of steps towards her. ‘It must have been hideous. Losing a child is the worst thing that can happen to a mother. I’m sure if it happened to me I’d have gone right off the rails. But it isn’t too late to talk about it and get it out of your system, Peggy.’
‘It might be too late to explain to Lotte,’ Peggy said brokenly. ‘The police told me she’d had a baby. That’s our grandchild! But where is it? What happened, and what’s going to happen now?’
Chapter Fifteen
Lotte lay back on the bed, watching Dale struggling hopelessly as she tried to get through the tiny window.
They had pushed the wardrobe beneath it, climbed up and smashed all the glass out with a shoe on their first day here, and took turns to shout out in the hope that someone nearby would hear them. Unfortunately the window was right down at ground level outside and tucked away in a kind of alcove, so the sound probably didn’t carry very well from there. Lotte had also tried to climb out in the last few days of her previous imprisonment in the basement room, but failed. Dale wouldn’t listen, though.
‘They say if you can get your head through a hole the rest of your body can go through it too,’ she kept saying to Lotte. But each time she stuck her head through and then tried to get her shoulders after it, she became stuck and had to withdraw, tears of frustration running down her cheeks. She had tried to push Lotte through too, for she was smaller, but it didn’t work.
Lotte had given up on trying to stop Dale wearing herself out fruitlessly because she remembered that during her last five days here without food, she hadn’t been rational either.
When she wasn’t doing exactly what Dale was doing, she was crouched at the top of the stairs, kitchen knife in hand, waiting for either Fern or Howard to come in so she could stab them. She had been frozen with cold and weak with hunger, yet that was nowhere near as important to her as the loss of her baby and desire for revenge.
Fern and Howard went out a great deal during those five days, but when they were in they were strangely silent. There was no more shouting from Fern, no banging around, no cooking smells, not even the sound of the radio or television. Lotte would have seen this silence as grief if it had been their own baby, or they’d been devoted foster parents, but she knew they had no hearts and therefore they were just quiet because they were considering their next move.
At first she thought their intention was to leave her here to starve to death, but after a while it occurred to her that the house was far too valuable to them for that. They wouldn’t just walk away and leave it; apart from losing the money, eventually their crime would be discovered. So it seemed most likely that their plan was to weaken her sufficiently so that they could move her to kill her and dispose of her body elsewhere, perhaps along with the baby’s.
Back then Lotte had no real hope of rescue. Instead, she told herself that they would have to come down to get her at some stage, and that would give her a slim chance of escape.
But this time round, she really did believe rescue was likely. For one thing, the minute she and Dale were reported missing the police would have gone into overdrive to find them. Dale’s parents, along with Scott, Adam and Simon, would all be making waves around Brighton and that might prompt someone who had seen something to come forward. Maybe the two men who brought them here were local, and perhaps they had no idea what they were getting into, not until they read about the abduction in the papers. So they just might feel bad about what they’d done and go to the police.
But even if no one came forward, by now the police must have discovered the American Ramsdens were here in England as Mr and Mrs Gullick, and that would surely lead on to finding this house.
Lotte looked up at Dale and saw she was yet again attempting to get her shoulders through the window. ‘Please come down now, Dale, you’ll just wear yourself out,’ she pleaded. ‘Shout by all means, but by now you should’ve accepted it isn’t possible to climb out. Save your strength for when they come back to get us.’
‘They aren’t coming back, the
y’ve left us here to die,’ Dale sobbed, kneeling down on the top of the wardrobe. She suddenly slumped forward till her head met her knees, and made a horrible wailing sound. ‘How long can we last without food?’
‘For weeks, as long as you drink water,’ Lotte replied. ‘But it won’t come to that. They’ll do something about us long before. And we’ll be ready for them.’
‘How can we fight them?’ Dale wailed. ‘They were big hefty guys, we haven’t even got anything to use as a weapon.’
‘We have. Just get down off that wardrobe and I’ll show you,’ Lotte said.
Dale turned to look at her friend with bleak eyes. She wiped them with the back of her hand, then carefully lowered herself to the chair by the wardrobe. ‘Go on then,’ she said, once she was down on the floor again.
Lotte got off the bed and went over to the wardrobe, lifting one end of it. ‘Hold it for me,’ she ordered, and once Dale had a firm grip on it, she fished beneath it and appeared to be scratching at something with her nails.
‘What is it?’ Dale asked in bewilderment. ‘Be quick, this is heavy!’
‘You can put it down now,’ Lotte said as she withdrew her hand from beneath the wardrobe. ‘I stuck this up there with elastoplast when I was in here before.’ She held out a Stanley knife.
Dale’s eyes widened. ‘Christ almighty!’ she exclaimed.
‘I got it just before I had the baby. Howard had been doing some little job in the kitchen and I saw this at the top of his tool box. I nicked it when he turned away. I really wanted a chisel to dig out the screws on the door, but this was better than nothing. And we could do those men a real injury with it.’
‘Maybe one of them,’ Dale said, squirming at the thought of attacking anyone with a Stanley knife. ‘But not both of them!’
‘We can work on that,’ Lotte said. ‘One idea I’ve had is that I could pretend to be out cold on the bed when they come for us, while you hide in the bathroom. When the man bends over me, I stab him, then leap up to get the other one, and you come running out of the bathroom to help too.’
Dale shook her head doubtfully. ‘You might be able to slash his face with the knife, but I can’t see that stopping him, not with another man there to help him. They’d soon overpower us. Tell me what happened when they came for you before. Maybe that will give us another idea!’
‘I was groggy. I guess once you get beyond the hunger pains, you become apathetic, because I hadn’t even attempted to get out of bed that day. Anyway, suddenly Howard and Fern were coming down the stairs and telling me to get dressed because we were going out.’
Looking back at that period of her captivity, Lotte found it very odd that on that particular day as Fern and Howard came bursting into the basement, she was huddled under the bedcovers and didn’t want to move. Yet right up till the day before, her sole motivation had been to get out of that room, whatever it took, and to wreak revenge on Fern and Howard.
‘I said, get up and get dressed,’ Fern repeated more sharply, and Lotte noticed then that she was wearing jeans and a thick Arran sweater. The only time she’d ever seen Fern in jeans was when she went sailing, and although Lotte’s mind was fuzzy with hunger, it registered that they were intending to take her out to sea to drown her.
Terror cleared her mind enough to realize that by acting like she was sick, unsteady on her feet and a little vacant, they just might be lured into complacency.
‘I don’t feel very well,’ she said, speaking very slowly and lifting her head from the pillow even slower. ‘Can’t I just stay here?’
‘No, you can’t,’ Fern snapped at her.
‘How is the baby?’ Lotte asked, spinning out the question as if she could barely speak.
She saw the couple exchange glances and felt their unease. ‘Come on, get up,’ Fern said curtly.
It wasn’t difficult to play dopey and stagger around the floor like a badly coordinated six-year-old. She wanted them to feel unable to leave to let her dress in case she fell back into bed, yet irritated enough not to watch her very closely.
‘Naughty! You mustn’t watch me dress,’ she said, shaking a finger at Howard as she dropped her pyjamas trousers to the floor. She had knickers beneath them, but the jacket was so long he wouldn’t know that.
He turned his back on her, and Lotte could feel Fern’s growing exasperation as she took for ever to put on her dress and button it up.
‘Must clean my teeth,’ Lotte said once she’d added a cardigan. She disappeared into the bathroom, ran the tap to hide any suspicious sounds, then retrieved the kitchen knife from its hiding place tucked into the willow stems beneath the laundry basket. She wrapped a tissue round it and slipped it into the pocket of her dress, then noisily cleaned her teeth.
By the time she was ready to leave the basement, Lotte’s earlier grogginess had gone completely. She knew it was a certainty that the couple intended to kill her, and that they would succeed if she didn’t find the courage and strength to fight them. She felt so weak from being starved, and her arms and legs ached as if she had a bad dose of flu, so all she could hope for was that if she continued to act dopey and unsuspecting, they would relax their usual vigilance.
Until she got to the top of the basement stairs she had imagined it was mid-morning, but the murky light coming through the hall window told her it was early evening and dusk outside. That made her even more frightened because it sort of confirmed they really were intending to dispose of her that night.
‘Can I have a cup of tea?’ she asked, anxious to act untroubled. ‘And a sandwich?’
‘You can have some milk and a couple of biscuits, just to tide you over,’ Fern said. She sounded almost kindly, and when Lotte turned to look at her, the woman’s expression was relaxed, ever affectionate towards her.
Such insincerity when she’d taken her child and allowed it to die, and was now intending to kill Lotte too, was almost too much to bear. ‘That would be nice,’ she replied, forcing an innocent, trusting smile as her hand ran over the lump of the knife against her hip.
It was odd to see Fern without her usual perfect makeup and not a hair out of place. Her face looked grey and careworn, her hair decidedly ratty. But the dirt and mess in the kitchen was far more shocking. The work surfaces were strewn with takeaway food cartons, unwashed dishes, cups and glasses, and the tiled floor was filthy. It was proof that all their plans had fallen apart, and maybe they were even unravelling mentally too, for she’d never seen the kitchen looking anything less than gleaming before.
Fern took a clean glass from one of the wall cupboards, then went over to the fridge to get the milk. Lotte moved closer to her, at the same time glancing back at Howard.
He was just outside the kitchen, looking intently at a little booklet with a blue cover. He wasn’t watching her or his wife at all.
The fridge was a tall one, the bottom half a freezer, and Fern was reaching for a bottle of milk just above shoulder height. All at once Lotte saw a chance. It wasn’t the kind of moment she’d hoped for, but it might be the only one she’d get, so she slid her hand into her pocket, scraping the knife blade free of the tissue paper against her hip as she drew it out.
Fern still had her back to Lotte, filling the glass from the bottle with the fridge door still open. She put the bottle back on the shelf and as she began to turn to give the glass of milk to Lotte she gave the fridge door a little push with her shoulder to shut it.
‘Just what I wanted,’ Lotte said. Bringing her left hand up as if to take the milk, she held the knife in her right hand, and as Fern turned her body fully to pass over the glass, Lotte leapt forward, plunging the knife into her chest with all the force she could muster.
The knife did not go in smoothly. There was resistance, as if she’d struck bone, and an odd sort of scraping noise before Fern’s surprised shriek drowned it and the glass of milk clattered to the floor. Fern staggered backwards towards the sink under the window, the knife embedded in her chest. Blood was seeping out, stain
ing her cream sweater.
Howard rushed to his wife. ‘What have you done?’ he yelled at Lotte.
Lotte was unable to move, transfixed with horror that she’d actually stabbed another human being. It was only when Fern’s voice rasped out, demanding that Howard must get Lotte, that she came to her senses.
The table was between her and them, and Lotte looked around wildly for another weapon, but there was nothing suitable within reach. Howard was coming round the table, his thin face grim with determination and hatred. Lotte dodged the other way, picked up a used coffee pot and threw it at him. It caught him on the forehead, making him lurch back, and the still-warm coffee ran down his face.
‘You bitch,’ he yelled as he wiped away coffee grounds from his face, and came after her looking even more savage now.
She dodged him several more times, going to the right when he went to the left, then to the left when he went right. She was trying to give herself thinking time, for Fern had pulled the knife out of her chest and was holding on to the wound, with blood coming through her fingers. She was swaying, and maybe in a few minutes she’d pass out or even die.
‘See to her, you bastard,’ Lotte hissed at him, willing him to obey her and give her the chance to get out through the front door.
‘You won’t get away,’ Howard threw back at her. ‘I’ve got the keys.’
Fern didn’t just keel over as Lotte had always imagined anyone mortally wounded would do. She just slowly sank down on to a chair. ‘Help me, honey,’ she bleated out, her face drained of all colour. ‘Help me!’
‘Help you?’ Lotte roared back at her. ‘You’ve put me through hell, stolen my baby and let it die, and intended to kill me too! I want you to die!’
Howard stopped trying to catch Lotte and ran to his wife, helping her down on to the kitchen floor. Lotte ran for the front door, but as expected it was locked and the key missing. She ran to the back door but that was the same, then into the lounge to try the windows. They too were locked as they always were. She picked up a heavy candlestick on the mantelpiece and struck the window with it, but amazingly, the glass didn’t break.