Hide and Seek, page 20
“It’s the law.”
“Well, it’s wrong.” She moved her hands on the bar, trying to get a better grip. It was old and rusty, the surface pitted with corrosion, and it rattled as she pulled on it. “But I want to leave now. I want us both to leave. I keep telling John it’s too dangerous to stay.” John. She must have seen the shock on my face. “He’s not evil, Jess. He really loves me.”
“He’s your teacher.”
“I know that.”
“And he’s keeping you here. No one knows where you are, Gilly. Everyone is worried. Your dad is beside himself.”
She took a moment before replying. “And Mum?”
“Absolutely. She is too.” A white lie. In her own way, she probably was.
“She hit me, you know. She threw a mug of coffee at me, because she was angry with me. That’s how I got this cut on my cheek.”
Which explained the bloody tissues in her room and the coffee stain on the wall, I thought.
“That’s why I had to leave. I’d had enough.” Gilly shut her eyes briefly. “This has all been a huge mistake.”
“Kidnapping you? Locking you up here? It’s a bit more than a mistake.”
“John didn’t mean any harm. He just loves me.” She shrugged. “I know it’s hard to believe.”
What I believed was that Gilly had decided to take Lowell’s side—that she couldn’t or wouldn’t see that he was abusing his position of trust and putting her in danger. “I believe he cares enough about you to risk everything. But does he care enough to let you go? It’s too dangerous to stay here, Gilly. The tide is rising, and—”
“John says it will be fine. John says I need to trust him. The cottage has been here for a long time; we’ll be OK.”
I opened my mouth to answer her—and gasped as two arms went around me, holding me tightly, pinning mine to my sides. “What the—?”
“Stupid girl,” Mr. Lowell breathed in my ear.
“You shouldn’t have tried to interfere.” It was Gilly who said it. She was looking out of the window and her eyes were cold.
“Let go of me.” I tried to struggle. “Leave me alone.”
“You’ll tell them where we are.” Gilly looked at Mr. Lowell. “Bring her inside. Then we can decide what to do with her.”
I blinked. “But, Gilly—”
She slammed the window on me without acknowledging that I’d even spoken.
“Come on.”
“Let go.” I kicked and wriggled, making Mr. Lowell grunt with effort as he dragged me to the door. I didn’t help him, but I couldn’t stop him, no matter how hard I tried. He shoved me up against the building with one hand while he opened the door with the other. I hit it at an awkward angle. The door frame caught me high on one cheek and across my mouth, and I tasted blood.
“Sorry.” He actually sounded it, and I felt a flicker of hope that soon dimmed and died. Before I could suggest he let me go, he pushed me through the doorway, and I sprawled on the floor, on tiles that were gritty with sand and sticky from salt. I was in the small kitchen at the back of the main room, I realized, with the bedroom overhead in a kind of gallery. The ceiling was low and the kitchen itself was dark, but at least the water wasn’t coming through the floor where I was lying. Over by the door it surged up through the cracks with every wave.
For a moment no one said anything. Then Mr. Lowell slammed the door and locked it. “Well? What now?”
“I don’t know. Let me think.” Gilly padded up and down, her feet whispering on the floorboards. “We need to get out of here.”
“With her?”
Gilly looked down at me. “She’ll slow us up. Leave her here.”
I sat up gingerly, my head ringing. I couldn’t understand how Will and Ryan had been able to stand up and talk after hitting one another. I was reeling after one blow to the face. “I came here to help you.”
“I didn’t want your help. I don’t want it. That’s so typical of you, Jess, trying to be a do-gooder, blundering in where you’re not wanted. Just like at the party.”
“I didn’t know what was going on.”
“But it didn’t stop you interfering,” she flashed. “And then everyone was talking about me. Speculating. And I had to get rid of Nessa again, because she tried to worm her way back into my life, and bloody Max was hanging around, hoping I’d confide in him and be stupid enough to let him get close to me a second time. As if I would be interested.”
“He’s been arrested,” I said. “For kidnapping you.”
Gilly laughed. “Poor old Max. I bet he’s feeling sorry for himself.”
“Justifiably.” I glanced sideways at Mr. Lowell. “Why did you call him before you disappeared?”
“I needed to get away and I knew he’d help me. I’d had enough of my mother. I tried to make it look as if she’d taken an overdose of her sleeping pills but she didn’t drink enough of the coffee. She got angry instead, and she threw it at me.” She shot a look at Lowell through her eyelashes. “I didn’t want John to have to get involved, but I needed to get away before she woke up and worked out what I’d done. She’d have noticed all her pills were gone and then she would have killed me. I’m not exaggerating. It was her or me. Of course Max let me down.”
“He tried,” I said. “He did his best. He just got there a bit late.”
She rolled her eyes. “Typical.”
“I can understand you cutting Max off. He wasn’t a great boyfriend and he was a terrible ex. But why was Nessa so bad?”
Gilly wouldn’t look at me. “She was too intense. She wanted to know everything I was thinking, all the time.”
“She was worried about you.” Quite rightly, as it turned out.
“She wanted to own me.”
“That’s not true,” I said. “She cared about you.”
“In all the wrong ways. She just wanted to take advantage of Gilly,” Lowell said. “She had her own agenda.”
I turned to look at John Lowell properly. “Is that what you told her?”
“It’s the truth,” he said quietly.
“It’s really not. And what about your agenda? What about picking on a vulnerable girl and persuading her to trust you? What about making her lie to her friends and family?”
“I didn’t plan any of this.” He glanced at Gilly and smiled. “I fell in love. So did she.”
“I was the one who seduced him.” Gilly sounded defiant. She padded past me and wound her arms around Lowell’s neck, pressing her body against him. “He couldn’t resist me.”
“You were scared. You wrote that in your diary.”
“I was scared that he would leave me. I was scared he’d go to prison.”
“He should go to prison,” I said. “He deserves to.”
“It’s no one’s business but ours. We know how we feel,” Gilly said coldly.
Lowell turned his head and kissed her, his tongue probing her mouth, and I felt like throwing up. It wasn’t just the unwanted public display of affection. It was fear. Apart, Gilly and John Lowell had been weak, damaged people. Together they were dangerous, egging each other on, wrapped up in one another to the exclusion of everything else. And I didn’t believe that Gilly was the one who was really in charge. Lowell wasn’t saying much but he was watching her, and listening closely. I felt as if she was really speaking to him, not me, to prove that she thought the way he did. He’d filled her head with doubt and hatred for the people who loved her, and made her think it was her own choice to push them away.
“OK. I get it,” I said. “It’s true love and she made a move on you and there was nothing you could do about it. What are you going to do now? Do you know the whole country is looking for Gilly? Do you know how much trouble you’re in?”
“Don’t listen to her.” Gilly turned Lowell’s face to hers, using both hands. “She’s trying to freak you out.”
“She’s right, though. You’ve no idea. There were hundreds of people looking for you yesterday.”
“They’ll forget.”
I laughed. “How long are you planning to stay here? Weeks? Months? Did you even think this through?”
Gilly bit her lip. “It wasn’t supposed to happen this way.”
“We’ll work it out,” Lowell said. “Don’t listen to her.”
Gilly turned to answer, but whatever she said was drowned out by a wave that battered the front of the cottage. The furniture that was piled up against the door shifted, pushed back by the force of the water that sprayed in as if it was gushing out of a fire hydrant.
“We need to get out of here.” Gilly looked at me. “What do we do with her?”
“Tie her up.” Lowell went over to a drawer in the kitchen and pulled out a rope. “The clothesline should do.”
“Why do you need to tie me up?” I got to my feet and backed away from them. I fetched up against the stairs—little more than a ladder, really, that ran up to the gallery above.
“Because we don’t want you chasing after us. We don’t want you interfering in our business.” Mr. Lowell smiled at me and I felt completely chilled. “You’ve been very rude about me, Jess. And very rude to Gilly. You can’t expect me to ignore that.”
Gilly looked at him adoringly, but there was the tiniest hint of doubt in her eyes. “I love you.”
“I love you too.” He started to move toward me and Gilly grabbed hold of his arm.
“Do we—do we have to do it this way? Can’t we let her go?”
“It’s so like you to be forgiving,” he said, patting her arm. “But there’s a time for forgiveness and a time for punishment. Trust me, I know what to do.”
Another wave hit the cottage, and I felt the force of it travel through the old wood, shivering under my feet, and against my hand as I braced it on the wall.
“This building can’t stand much more,” Gilly said. “Let’s go and find the car. We need to go somewhere else. Anywhere. It doesn’t matter where we go.”
“But, Gilly—” said Mr. Lowell.
“If we stay here, we die. And I’d rather die than lose you, but I haven’t lost you yet.” She kissed him again, and I took the opportunity to duck into the kitchen, making for the back door. Not that I stood a chance of reaching it without being noticed.
“Where do you think you’re going?” Lowell caught hold of my hair and yanked me back to the stairs. I struggled, but Lowell was too strong and too quick. Gilly held my hands through the treads of the ladder and Lowell lashed the clothesline around them, so tightly that my wrists started to ache almost immediately.
“You can’t do this to me,” I said, desperate.
“We already have.” Gilly turned to Lowell. “The key, John.”
He took it out of his pocket. “We wouldn’t want to leave the door unlocked.”
“No, we wouldn’t.” Gilly flashed a triumphant grin at me. “Bet you wish you’d minded your own business now.”
Anger flared, drowning out the fear for a moment. “I’m certainly wondering why I bothered.”
She led the way to the side door, which Lowell unlocked. The two of them stepped out into the night, heads bent against the wind, and Lowell slammed the door. I heard the key scrape in the lock, and then nothing but the keening of the wind, like hundreds of ghosts crying a warning I didn’t need to hear.
I already knew I was in trouble.
23
First things first. I twisted to see my watch. Still half an hour until high tide. Which meant that the storm was only going to get worse for the next half-hour, and there was basically no chance the cottage was going to survive without serious damage.
Which meant I had to get out of there. I didn’t want to think about how long it would take Will to call his dad, or whether he would come back. There was every chance he would run straight into Gilly and John Lowell on his way back to me, and every chance that he’d try to stop them. And he didn’t know any more than I had that Gilly was the dangerous one. I could imagine him tackling Lowell and getting blindsided by Gilly.
I could imagine them hurting him.
I put the tearing anxiety about Will to one side. There was nothing I could do to help him while I was trapped myself, and there was no point in waiting to be rescued. It was up to me to free myself.
I looked at the ladder first. The rest of the cottage was little more than a shack, but the ladder was new, made of solid wood reinforced with steel treads.
Luckily I wasn’t depending on the ladder to be old and rickety. On my side trip into the kitchen, when Gilly and Lowell thought I was trying to get to the door, I’d managed to pocket a small rusty knife from the drawer she’d left hanging open. I’d slid it into the pocket of my jeans before Gilly grabbed me.
So all I had to do was get it out.
The next couple of minutes were not elegant, involving me struggling and swearing as I tried to contort myself in order to reach the knife handle. Lowell had tied my hands in front of my face, high up, so I had to climb up the lower treads of the ladder to reach my pocket, and as my hands went numb, they became increasingly clumsy. I was terrified of dropping the knife—I’d never be able to pick it up again if it fell on the floor. Slowly, painfully, I drew it out of my pocket, holding it in my left hand because the rope was slightly looser on that side and that hand had more feeling in it. With extreme care, I slid the blade under the edge of the rope and began to saw at it. Another bit of luck: it was a very old piece of rope and the plastic threads sheared easily under the pressure of the knife. I caught myself with the point of the blade a few times, cutting my skin, though I barely felt it. The cottage was like an icebox, but I was sweating.
Halfway through … two thirds of the way … I started to try to pull against the rope, hoping it would give way, but it was stubborn. The waves thundered against the walls, louder than anything I’d ever heard, and the knife slipped again, and I redoubled my efforts, sobbing under my breath, and at long last the few final strands parted. I yanked my hands free, careless of the rope burning my skin, and took a couple of precious moments to flex my fingers, letting the blood flow out of my hands again. They were stiff and almost useless as they were, and I needed them to work.
The door at the front of the cottage gave a loud, ominous creak under the weight of water pressing on it, and I ran to the side door Lowell had locked. I was hoping it was the kind with a latch that could open it from the inside, but of course it wasn’t, and no matter how I had tugged on it, I couldn’t even rattle it in the frame. I turned out the kitchen drawers looking for a spare set of keys, but of course there wasn’t one—I hadn’t expected there would be. That would be too easy. Leaving the jumble of cutlery and random clutter on the counter, I turned my attention to the windows, trying one after another, but they had been painted shut many times and it would have taken hours with a chisel to force them open. I didn’t have either.
Which left the bathroom window. I ran in, hitting the light switch as I went. Nothing happened, and behind me the living room went dark. I paused to listen, and realized that the hum of the generator had stopped. So I could barely see, as well as everything else. Terrific.
I had to clamber onto the bath to open the window, just as Gilly had. It went halfway up and jammed. But I remembered Gilly’s face looking through it; I knew it could open wider, and I was determined it would. Behind me, a crash was the sofa floating loose from the pile of furniture by the door. It was rattan, and it swung around the living room on the surging water like a mine, colliding with heavier pieces of furniture. I was glad I had the bath to stand on because the water was slopping around the bathroom floor too. I worked harder on the window, and was rewarded with a shriek as the sash shot up the last few inches.
Which left me free, except for the metal bar that ran across the middle of the window, a deterrent to thieves—who would have had to be desperate to even think of burgling that shack. I rattled the bar, and shoved it, and jumped down from the bath to splash through the ankle-high water, hoping to see something solid to hit it with. I found an old plank, rough to the touch and slippery with seawater, and wedged it into place, and it promptly broke. I couldn’t move the bar in the least, even though I remembered it was rusty and old. I just couldn’t get the right angle, no matter how hard I tried, and it was wet from the rain and I started to cry. It was possible that I might be able to weather the storm in the bathroom, that I could get high enough to stay clear of the water, assuming the whole cottage didn’t fall down on my head. But I wanted to get out, and I was so close to being free.
A shout in the distance made me jump. It sounded a lot like my name.
“Over here!” I held onto the bar again, this time for support as I yelled, “Hey! Over here!”
I saw a powerful flashlight bobbing in the blackness, and strained to pick out the person holding it, dark against the darkness. And another flashlight, this one reflecting yellow on a high-vis jacket. Light from the second torch briefly caught the first person, who was well ahead, and I recognized Will’s dark head. Will and—I squinted—his father. Will was about ten meters away, high up on the next dune, battling against the wind as he ran along the top, his dad behind him. I stared for a little while, trying to work out what they were doing and why they hadn’t come to get me—until I realized what was wrong. While I’d been trying to free myself, the water had swept in around the cottage, and now it was making a very effective moat.
Will got to the point closest to the window, where it was still possible to stand on dry ground, and half ran, half skidded down the side of the dune. He dug his foot in at the last moment, his arms windmilling as he tried to stop himself tipping into the water. He regained his balance at last and shone his flashlight at the window. “Are you OK?” He had to shout over the sound of the water and the wind.
“I’ve been better.” I tried to keep the quavering self-pity to a minimum as I shielded my eyes from the beam. I was trying to keep some of the night vision I’d built up. “I can’t actually get out.”
Will looked along the side of the building. “That door…”
“Locked.”
Dan jogged down more sedately and stood beside Will, looking ridiculously like him—a little broader, a little more solid, a little grayer. A lot more irate, obviously. “Where’s the key?”
