The Night They Vanished, page 28
My phone buzzes and I jump. The relief when I see Sasha’s name on the screen is so great I actually feel faint. I forget everything in that second, and just for that one moment everything is fine and this last week has been nothing but a bad dream…“Oh, thank God!” I say, holding up the phone so Adam can see Sasha’s name. Adam puts his hand over mine before I accept the call.
“It might not be her.”
I swallow and nod before accepting the call. “Sasha?”
“This isn’t Sasha.”
The shock is a punch to the stomach, and the bad dream is reality again. I almost drop the phone and have to fumble for a moment before I press it to my ear.
“Ethan?” I turn to start walking back toward the hotel, thinking, Keep him talking, keep him talking. DC Norton said they’d be able to locate the phone if it’s switched on. If I can just keep him talking…“Where’s Sasha?”
There’s a pause and I stop moving. “She can’t come to the phone at the moment.”
Get the police, I mouth to Adam. He nods and starts back across the road, but freezes as the stranger on Sasha’s phone speaks again, loud enough for him to hear.
“Tell Adam to stay where he is. It won’t be good for Sasha if he takes one more step toward the hotel.”
My insides turn to liquid and Adam and I stare at each other, both frozen in place. He’s watching us. We’re so close. DC Norton is less than a hundred feet away and I daren’t move, daren’t move from the spot we’re standing in. It’s like we’re both standing on live mines, but Sasha is the one who could get blown up if we move. I shouldn’t have come outside… But then, he wouldn’t have called otherwise, would he? If he’s watching, he’s been waiting for me to leave the hotel.
“Where are you?” I ask again, turning my head, trying to figure out where he’s watching from. Does he have Sasha with him now? He could be anywhere, in any of the buildings on this street, hiding in the shadows of the rocks on the beach, sitting in a stationary car.
“What do we do?” Adam mutters, his hand moving toward the phone in his pocket.
“Uh-uh,” the man on the phone says. “Hands away from your pockets, Adam.”
“Okay,” I say. “We won’t go back to the hotel, we won’t call the police. What do you want?”
“I want Adam to put his phone on the ground and then I want the two of you to get in your car and go home.”
“Home? What?”
“You know what home I mean, Hanna. Go home and stay on the line. If you disconnect this call, I’ll assume you’re calling the police and that will be very bad for Sasha. Same thing goes if you mute the call. I want to know you’re still on the line. You have thirty minutes. No police. No stopping on the way. I’ll be with you the whole time.”
“Wait—please. I don’t have enough charge on my phone. It’ll die before we get there and—”
He laughs. “Come on, Hanna. Don’t play with me—one or both of you will have a charger. You can charge the phone as you drive.”
“What do we do?” Adam says again, keeping his voice low.
“We do what he says,” I say, my voice calm, covering the phone so we can’t be heard, but careful not to disconnect. “He’s watching, he has to be. I can’t risk Sasha.”
“Hanna…” Adam pauses and takes a deep breath. He looks back toward the hotel. “The police think this man has murdered two women. We can’t just dump my phone here and drive off to the middle of nowhere. No one will know where we’ve gone. Look where we are. I’ll run. I’ll run back to the hotel, raise the alarm. He’s close enough to see us—they can find him before he gets away and—”
“No. You heard him—if we tell DC Norton and they all come storming out, he could hurt Sasha. And it’s not going to be instant, is it? Even if you run in there screaming, they’ll stop you, ask you questions. And he’ll be gone and so will Sasha.”
“But—”
“No,” I say again, shaking my head. There are tears in my eyes. “Sasha is fourteen, she’s a baby. I refuse to risk her life for mine.”
“Hanna, I know she’s your family, but this is stupid. You have to see that. He’s a murderer,” Adam says.
“You don’t understand.” My voice is a whisper. “Sasha is… I walked away from her before. All I’ve done her entire life is walk away from her. I can’t do it again.” I step closer to him and let my hair fall in front of my face as I whisper the next few words. “They can trace him while the phone’s on. They’re monitoring Sasha’s phone. The police will be able to find him… and Sasha.”
He presses his lips together, looks back toward the hotel again, then back to me. He nods, then gets his phone out of his pocket, holds it up, then puts it on the sea wall behind us.
“Let’s go,” he says. “I’ll drive.”
“I’m sorry,” I say as we run toward my car. “I’m so sorry you’ve been dragged into this.”
“It’s fine,” he says, unlocking the car and getting into the driver’s seat.
It’s not fine, not at all. The worst part is, I can’t even talk to him about it. Not with the third passenger in the car. Ethan hasn’t said anything since giving his instructions, but I can hear him breathing. I plug my phone into the car charger and pray we don’t lose signal at any point on our journey.
“Where are we going?” Adam asks as we pull out and drive away from the hotel.
“Back to Littledean,” I say.
“Very good, Hanna,” Ethan says, sounding amused. “I think you’ve figured out who I am, haven’t you?”
“No,” I say, but I don’t even sound convincing to myself.
“Liar,” he says. “But then, you always were a liar, weren’t you?” There’s a silence, some background noise on the line. I take it off speaker and put it to my ear again, desperate to hear signs of Sasha in the background, some proof she’s still alive and well. I look back at all the cars behind us—are they in one of them?
“It doesn’t matter, anyway,” Ethan says. “If you know who I am, if the police know. We’re almost at the end now.”
“The end?”
“You’ll find out.” Another pause. “Tell Adam to speed up, will you? The clock’s ticking.”
Chapter 43
SASHA—Tuesday 6:30 p.m.
I don’t know how long we’ve been driving. Not long, I don’t think. I tried, at first, to count. I thought, like they do in films, if I knew how long we’d been traveling and I got the chance (somehow) to call for help, I’d be able to give some clue. The van is windowless, so I can’t gather any visual clues. We could be driving inland or further along the coast, west or east. So yeah, I started counting but lost track, because how am I supposed to keep an accurate count in the situation I’m currently in? Ethan dropped that bombshell that apparently he’s my fudging uncle and hasn’t said another word. But it was enough, for a bit, to stop the fear of wetting myself. Beyond the shock of it, there’s also that thing—he won’t hurt me, will he? If I’m family?
I try to remember, then, what Ethan has told me about his family. But there’s nothing—he said he was in care, that’s all. Other than that, he’s never mentioned family and it never occurred to me to ask. And even though I’m currently locked in the back of a van having been actually, literally kidnapped, I still feel bad for not having asked.
I stare at him across the van. He’s looking the other way, a frown on his face. “You never…” It comes out croaky, so I stop and clear my throat. “You never told me you had a brother.”
He looks over at me. “He died when I was a kid. Younger than you.”
“But Hanna couldn’t have… I mean, she was a kid as well, wasn’t she? I worked it out. When I realized she was my mother. She was only a year older than me when she got pregnant.”
“She’s responsible for his death. Owen told me…” He stops, shakes his head. “Owen told me what she did. And then she just walked away, like she walked away from you. It killed my parents as well. The shock of it. They wouldn’t have had that accident if their lives hadn’t been ripped apart by Jacob’s death.”
I open my mouth to ask more, but the van comes to a halt.
I thought, when the doors opened, I’d find myself back at the old holiday park. Back home. But we’re not. Instead, we’re parked by a building site, what looks like a new housing estate. It’s at that creepy stage where half the houses are finished, but the place is too much of a building site for anyone to have moved in yet, so it’s an eerie modern ghost town, empty shells of houses with churned-up mud-pits for gardens.
I wonder if I could make a run for it, but Owen keeps hold of my arm after helping me out of the van, holding on tight as he waits for Ethan to follow. The fear is back, because Owen isn’t family. He hates Hanna and my whole family for whatever he thinks they did to his friend. But after he basically hands me over to Ethan, he gets back in the van.
“That’s it now,” he says in a low voice to Ethan. “No more. We’re done.”
Ethan nods, fingers digging into my arm. “Agreed. We’re even. Just… keep quiet.”
Owen doesn’t look at me as he starts the engine and drives off, leaving me here, alone with Ethan. I wonder if he will keep quiet. Or if this—being a party to kidnapping—will be a step too far for old-boy loyalty.
There’s a tall, padlocked gate barring our entry to the site, but Ethan walks us past the main gates, large enough for all the construction traffic to pass through, to a place around the corner where the fence is lower.
“Over we go,” he says, his tone light, like we’re out on a jaunt. He makes me go first. The gaps in the wire fence are large enough for me to get my feet in, so it’s a fairly easy climb, with a bit of a wobble as I go over the top. I don’t try to run as he follows me over—what am I going to do, play hide-and-seek on a building site? He could have a knife. God—he could have a gun.
I wonder if there’s CCTV on the site. I hope so. Whatever happens tonight, I want him to get caught. He doesn’t make any attempt to keep to the shadows, though, as he leads me through the site, and it makes me think he’s already been here, already sabotaged the CCTV. And shouldn’t there be security lights? Alarms? There are diggers and vans and tools everywhere—there should be a lot of security. It shouldn’t be this easy to break in.
It’s like he reads my mind, or maybe he just looks back as I’m eyeing up the lights that haven’t come on. “Don’t worry, Sash. Or is it don’t get your hopes up? No one knows we’re here.” He pauses. “Other than Owen, and he won’t say anything.”
We walk up what will eventually be a road, but for now is just a muddy track. It twists and comes out by one of the shell-houses, a large detached one with a garage that doesn’t yet have a door. It’s the end house, and looks almost finished other than the windows. Ethan leads us through the mud, right to the front door. It isn’t locked. At first I think that’s so, so wrong, but as we walk in, I realize the house isn’t as finished as it looks from the outside. He leads me to a room at the back, the only one with a door. It has bare plaster walls, wires hanging from holes where I guess electrical sockets will end up. Bare floorboards covered in plastic sheeting to protect them from the mud on builders’ boots. In this room, the window is boarded up rather than just being covered in plastic like the ones at the front.
“Take the frown off, Sash. I can see you trying to figure out where we are, but you won’t. You haven’t been here before, but I have,” Ethan says, turning slowly in a circle, hands held out. “It didn’t look like this then, of course. There wasn’t a whole housing estate. It was just one row of houses.” He looks back at me. “Anyway, make yourself at home. I’ve got to pick up our special guest. I bet she’ll know where we are.”
He walks out and shuts the door behind him, leaving me in darkness. I hear a key in the lock and run over to the door, trying to pull it open before he can lock it, but I’m too late. I look around, my eyes blinking as they try to adjust to the dark. There are gaps in the boards nailed across the window, enough for me to make out the edges of the room, enough for me to see there is no other way out.
Enough for me to see I’m trapped.
Chapter 44
Thedarktourist.com
What about those left behind—the sisters, the brothers, the children, the parents?
HANNA—Tuesday 8:15 p.m.
Do I expect him to be at the holiday park, waiting for me with Sasha? Not expect, no. The person who’s gone to such lengths to torture me through Adam’s website, stalking me and my friends, breaking into my flat, this phone call, this race across Wales—of course he’s not going to make it easy. So, no, I don’t expect to find him waiting, but I still hope.
But, of course, the gates are still padlocked. The construction company who’ve bought the site have now added huge boards all the way round, so I can’t even see in anymore. I test the padlocks, walk all the way round, looking for a way in, while he stays silent on the line. Will anyone have realized we’ve gone yet? Is anyone tracing Ethan’s call or my phone?
“I’m here,” I say, when Adam and I have finished our circuit and get back to the car. “Where are you? Where’s Sasha?”
“So impatient, Hanna. Isn’t it nice to have this time to get to know one another?”
“Please—just tell me Sasha’s okay. Can I speak to her?”
He ignores my question. “It was your tattoo. The thing that made me agree to Owen’s plan to mess with you—the straw that broke the camel’s back, as it were. Before that, I was just going to mess about on the computer—freak out your family. Maybe send you a few messages.”
My tattoo? I look down at my arm, the black stars that disappear under my sleeve.
“I was so angry. I saw you—laughing with your friends over Christmas, not a care in the world—I saw you with that tattoo. How dare you? How dare you carve that reminder of my brother into your arm?”
I grit my teeth. “If I have it lasered off, will you let Sasha go?”
He laughs. “Perhaps if you sliced it off your own skin with a knife.”
“Then give me a knife. I’ll do it. I’ll do it right now.” I ignore Adam’s gasp. Because I would. If Ethan promised to let Sasha go, I’d gouge the damned thing off my arm with a blunt, rusty knife.
“You almost sound convincing there, Hanna. But it doesn’t matter. The tattoo made me angry and when I told them, it mattered to Owen and the others too. And they thought they could use me in their little revenge plan. Especially after they found out your new boyfriend had turned up in town asking questions.” There’s a pause. “Especially after the hatchet job he did on Jacob.”
“What?” I turn to look at Adam, remembering Owen’s… fury outside the police station.
“Did you ever read the story he wrote? Surely you did—it is all about you, after all. What a tragic heroine you were, what a terrible villain Jacob was… It’s his fault that Katie Bentley girl died. His article set me on a path where I got so fucking angry…”
“And Gemma, the hit-and-run? Are you blaming that on Adam too?”
There’s a long pause. “That wasn’t me. You can tell that to the police. I didn’t do it. And I didn’t do the crime I got sent down for either. But this—all this? Your fault. And Adam’s fault. You caused all this.”
I close my eyes, thinking of the hit-and-run—the girl who turned him in—I can’t stop thinking of the details Dee told me, about how hard the car hit, how it mounted the pavement to mow her down… Of course it was him. Who else could it have been? I need to give him reason not to hurt Sasha. He would do it to hurt me, that’s clear. “Please… Ethan.” I take a deep breath. “She’s not my sister. She’s my daughter.”
I can hear him breathing on the line and the silence lasts an eternity. “I know. Sasha told me. Why do you think we are where we are?”
“Ethan… She’s your niece. Please, let her go. She’s your family.”
Nothing. No response. And then he ends the call. No, no, no! I call him back, but it goes to voicemail. As soon as I cut the automated message off, my phone rings again.
“Ethan?”
“No—it’s Dee. Where are you? Where did you go? The police are going nuts here and I couldn’t get through to you—”
“Dee—I can’t talk. He’s got Sasha and—”
“Oh God, oh fuck. Han, I’m so sorry. Where are you? I’m going to come and get you,” Dee says.
“I have my car.”
“I don’t care. You shouldn’t be on your own.”
“I’m not. I’m with Adam.” I take a breath. “He said he didn’t do the hit-and-run. But he basically admitted killing the other sister. And now he’s got Sasha. Oh God, Dee…”
There’s a pause. “There’s something else.”
I frown. “What is it? What’s wrong?”
There’s a too long silence.
“They arrested Liam.”
My heart thuds. “What?”
“We were right. He gave him his key to your flat. Ethan—Liam gave him the key. Ethan turned up at his work’s Christmas party; he told Liam he worked there and Liam was stupid enough to believe him, to start inviting him out with his friends. That’s why he was in the pub that night Seb and I saw Liam. He worked his way in with Liam’s friends, with our friends in the weeks leading up to Christmas and New Year…” She pauses, takes a breath. “He told Liam he knew you. He told him it was you who scratched his girlfriend’s car, that you… that you had a history of stalking. He told him all sorts of things… I told the police it couldn’t be true. But Liam believed it. He told him everything about you and gave him the key.”
I swallow down the hurt and the dread. “I’m at the old house, the old holiday park. I can’t leave. He might call back. I have to go; I need to keep the phone free.”
I end the call and try Sasha’s number again, over and over, but it keeps going to voicemail. I don’t know what to do.
