The Night They Vanished, page 29
“This is all my fault,” I whisper.
“No,” Adam says. “Don’t you dare say that—do not think that for a second.”
“But it is. Everything he’s done—even hacking your website. My fault.”
I never thought about—never considered for a second—Jacob’s family, particularly his kid brother. I never met him. Jacob vaguely mentioned a brother a couple of times, but I don’t even think he gave me his name. I knew Jacob’s parents had died, one more tragedy to add to the list, but did I even remember he had a brother then? It was only when DC Norton mentioned his surname that I remembered.
God. What happened to him in the years between Jacob’s death and now? He must have been younger than Sasha when his parents died, so he’d lost his entire family in the space of two years. Didn’t he have other relatives? Carrie said he was fostered, so he must have ended up in the care system. What happened to him in his life to lead him to where he is now—just out of prison, a murderer and now a kidnapper? Is this really all down to me?
I close my eyes. No. I have to stop this. I was a kid myself when I met Jacob. I was fourteen, for God’s sake; I couldn’t possibly have foreseen the consequences. I met an older boy, already hell-bent on the type of self-destructive nihilistic path that seems impossibly, seedily glamourous to a teenager. The doomed rock star, the tortured, angst-ridden hero. God, he was beautiful. Of course I fell in love, full, headlong first love for the boy who introduced me to parties and sex and drink and drugs. I thought I was finally living. After a stifled, shut-away life with Dad, I thought I’d finally found the life I wanted to live.
He was sixteen when we met. Just turned eighteen when he died.
I open my eyes again. I can’t go down that spiral of guilt and regret again. Not now. I need to stay focused. For Sasha. I call her number again.
“Ethan? I hope you’re listening to these messages. If you let Sasha go, I’ll come to you. I’ll come alone. I won’t tell the police. I’ll get Adam to tell them you didn’t kill Gemma Bentley, that you’re innocent of that… I’ll come alone and we can talk—I’ll tell you everything that happened with Jacob. But, please. Let Sasha go. It’s not her you want.” I pause, hoping he’ll come on the line. “Call me.”
We get in the car and I chew on a nail, trying to work out what to do, where to go, staring down at my phone, willing it to ring, willing Ethan to call me back.
“Hanna, you can’t,” Adam says.
“Yes, I can. And I will. Sasha is my daughter. I’m going to get him to let her go in exchange for me. That’s who he wants—not her. That’s who all this has been aimed at. Maybe he never intended it to end this way, I don’t know. But that’s what I’m going to do.” I stop and take a shaky breath. “But you don’t need to be involved in this anymore. When he calls back—give me my car keys. I’ll go alone. I don’t want you to get hurt.”
“You know I won’t let you go to him alone, even if he calls back and agrees,” Adam says, and I look across at him.
I open my mouth to answer, but then the back door of the car opens, and someone gets in.
“Hello Hanna,” Ethan says.
Chapter 45
I jump when my phone rings again, but hesitate before reaching for it.
“Who is it?” Ethan asks.
“It’s Dee.”
“Answer it, put it on speaker, but don’t say a word about me.”
I put the phone on speaker, and Dee starts talking before I can even say hello. “Hanna? The police have figured out where they think the house in the picture on the website is. They managed to see the edge of one of the hoardings, the edge of a logo. They think it’s on that new housing development, a few miles from Littledean, between West Dean and Barry. The police are on their way there now.”
“End the call,” Ethan whispers and I do.
I take a breath and hold it. Ethan’s in the car with us… If he does have Sasha at the housing estate, the police can go in and get her out and… I frown. Why would he have taken her there?
Behind us Ethan laughs, and I shiver. “Oh dear,” he says. “They’re all racing in the wrong direction, to the wrong site.” He sighs and reaches out a hand. “Switch off your phone and give it to me, Hanna. And Adam, drive around the back of the holiday park, down the lane. You know the way.”
I hear Adam gasp and when I look, he’s staring over at me.
“Ah,” Ethan says. “I think Adam’s just figured out what his connection is in all this.”
“What—what is it?”
“Why don’t you tell her, Adam? But start driving.”
“It’s the story I wrote,” Adam says, going pale. “The article I wrote when I built the website. The one I came here to research… the one about you and Jacob. I called my stupid article ‘A dark house for a dark tourist.’”
“Ty Tywyll,” I say at the same time as him. Dark House, that’s what it translates as. It is—it was—Jacob’s house. Where he grew up. Where he died. Named Dark House because of the way it was hidden away among all the trees, it became the dark house for different reasons after Jacob died.
“It was derelict when I first found it and wrote my article,” Adam says, starting the engine. “When I went back, when I’d built the website and went back to take a photograph of the house that started it all, the building company’s sign was already up. The houses were already gone.”
“And was it worth it?” Ethan says. “Wallowing in the misery of all the victims’ families, parading their pain all over the internet—was it worth it?”
I flinch at his words—I said almost the same thing to Adam. I don’t want to be anywhere near on the same side as Ethan, but I guess, in a way, I am. He blames me and he put my family and my family’s home up on Adam’s website as part of his revenge, but when Adam told me about it… I felt the same as him, that Adam’s site was exploiting others’ misery.
“And you get to slant it any way you want. Oh sure, the facts were there—Jacob’s arrest, his death, my parents’ death—but you made it sound like Jacob was some seedy, junkie pedophile, preying on little, innocent Hanna here…”
“It was never meant to be—”
“What?” Ethan interrupts him. “Never meant to be what?”
“It was never meant to hurt anyone. It was… urban exploration, dark tourism. It’s a hobby. And the website was just a way to make some money.”
“Never meant to hurt anyone? Oh, I get you, Adam, I really, really do. Owen never meant to hurt anyone when he saw that bitch that set me up and got me sent down out running. I never meant to hurt anyone when I went to see her fucking sister, because she would not leave me alone.”
Owen? The hit-and-run was Owen? Oh God, it’s so much worse… Does Owen have Sasha now? Owen with his anger issues and his festering hatred of me and my family?
Ethan’s in the back seat, sitting in the middle behind us both, not wearing a seat belt. I watch Adam’s knuckles whiten on the steering wheel and wonder if he’s planning to swerve off the road, deliberately crash the car. But we’re not wearing seat belts either, and he’s just as likely to kill himself and me, leaving Ethan to escape and go after Sasha. Plus, I’m not sure I could find my way there on my own, on foot, if Adam and Ethan were injured. If I leave Ethan dead or unconscious and he’s got Sasha locked up somewhere, if he’s still lying to us, she could die before the police find her.
I’m tempted, though. Tempted to try for the wheel myself—particularly when Ethan starts talking again.
“Did she tell you she was stalking her ex-boyfriend?” he says to Adam.
I clench my fists.
“Pull over here,” Ethan says, pointing between us to a lay-by that’s tucked away among towering trees.
“Yes,” he says, in the most casual tone as Adam stops the car. “She found out he was cheating on her, and for revenge, she decided to become a psycho stalker.” He leans right over, takes the keys out of the ignition, and puts them in his pocket. “Our dear Hanna deliberately keyed his new girlfriend’s car, and she badmouthed him to his boss, nearly got him fired by pretending he was abusive.” He laughs. “It was actually funny—there I was, following her and she was stalking her ex. We were like a stalker chain. Her ex was very happy to share all this with me.”
Oh, he makes it sound so much worse than it was. The damage to Liam’s new girlfriend’s car, okay, that was temper, spur of the moment. I’d just caught them together, for God’s sake, and that cow was so smug about it, and her car was right outside…
As to the rest—I was not lying about him being abusive. He had his hands around my throat. I was outside his flat and he came storming down, dragged me out of my car…
I don’t like that part of myself. It was a darker, out-of-control Hanna. It reminded me of the girl I used to be. And I stopped myself, after that. I realized, as I got home that night with bruises around my throat, what I was in danger of becoming. I phoned Dee. I used Dee as my twelve-step program, I confessed my sins and sorted myself out.
I was lucky, I know I was, that Liam didn’t go to the police. Maybe his burst of temper, when he pulled me from the car, prevented him, because I had as much reason to go to the police as he did.
But this is not the time or the place to try to explain myself to Adam. That’s what Ethan wants, him condemning me, me condemning him. For now, we need to stay calm. We need to save Sasha. I swallow. And I need to make sure Adam gets out of this alive. It’s the first time I acknowledge that I might not.
But again—now is not the time to think about that, or I’ll spiral into panic.
“Get out of the car,” Ethan says. Both Adam and I obey. My muscles feel stiff, like I’ve been in the car for hours. I think it’s just that every part of me was tense the entire time we were on the road.
He leads us through a gate into a field. We skirt the edges, walking across to another gate that lets out onto a narrow lane. There is no sign of traffic as we turn left and start walking again. I know where we are now. Where we left the car, the field, it threw me for a while, but I know this lane, I’ve walked this lane many times. It’s the lane that’s barely more than a track that leads from the back of the holiday park down to the beach. It’s a public road, but so narrow and treacherous with potholes that no one ever uses it except for the occasional tractor. Dee and I used to think of it as our private road to the beach. None of the tourists from the caravans ever came this way. And later, I’d walk this way to meet Jacob.
“Look what they’ve done to it,” Ethan says as we reach the building site.
I don’t recognize it at all. Jacob’s old house was one of four crumbling old cottages on a couple of acres at the top of the hill, surrounded by trees with panoramic sea-views down through the valley. They’ve torn them and all the trees down for this: a tiny development of a couple of dozen houses, all big, all detached. I can see why the police are currently haring off to the wrong place. I know the development Dee was talking about—the massive one on the other side of town, the two- and three-beds.
It’s the same construction company. I guess that’s where the confusion has arisen. This one is small, top-of-the-range, sea-view palaces, separated from the herd by about five miles.
“The police are on their way to the wrong place,” Ethan says. He pulls my phone out of his pocket and smiles. “They can’t trace it while it’s off, but just in case…” He drops my phone and stamps on it.
“This place was beautiful,” Ethan says. “And look what they’ve done. The only legacy left is Adam’s fucking story where he took my family’s personal tragedy and made it public. Of course, no one wanted to buy such a tragic house, did they? Doubly so after your article, Adam. It got picked up and quoted by the local paper and that was enough. No one wanted to live next to it, so all the cottages emptied, and no one would buy them, so we all had to accept crappy offers from a construction company. Your fault again, Adam. And yours, of course, Hanna, for starting it all in the first place. So many lives ruined because of you two.”
It is sad. Jacob’s cottage and its neighbors always looked like they were part of the landscape, tucked in a huddle three-quarters of the way down the hill. They fitted. This small group of new-builds is going to look all wrong.
Ethan stops outside one of the unfinished houses and turns to face us. It’s the first time I’ve actually looked at him since he got into Adam’s car. He stands in the doorway of the house with a big smile on his face, like a host greeting guests arriving for a dinner party. I stare at him, this stranger who’s been doing his best to destroy my life. I stare and I try to find some of Jacob in the bones of his face. All those years I spent going out with Jacob replacements, and it never occurred to me there was a real one out there in the world.
There is something there. Ethan has different coloring, but close up there’s something familiar in the shape of his face, in his smile. Maybe it was more visible when he was younger, but Jacob got frozen permanently at eighteen so I can only speculate how his face might have changed in the last fifteen years. Would my angsty indie boy have polished himself up, cut his hair, worn a suit? Would he have developed frown lines or laughter lines? Let the bleach grow out of his hair and maybe a first gray hair grow in? His dad’s hair had been almost entirely silver the couple of times I met him and he was only in his late thirties.
“Please, both of you, come on in.” He turns and gestures up the hallway.
I take a deep breath, step past him, and let the house swallow me up.
Chapter 46
Sasha is sitting huddled in the corner of what will eventually be the living room when the house is finished. It’s difficult to see when the only light is from the small flashlight Ethan is holding, but she doesn’t seem hurt in any way.
She starts to get up when I walk in ahead of Ethan, but stops and freezes when he enters.
“Well, this is nice, isn’t it?” Ethan says, putting the torch down on the ground. “A family reunion.”
I flinch and Ethan must notice because he turns to me. “Yes, Sasha seemed as ignorant as me about that family connection when she told me you were her mother.” He glances at Sasha and pulls a knife out of his pocket. I gasp as he goes over to her, and Adam grabs me as I lunge forward. But Ethan just leans down and hauls her to her feet with the hand not holding the knife.
He turns his back on me to face Sasha. I tense, thinking I could throw myself at him, try to tackle him to the ground to give the others a chance to get out. I’m on the balls of my feet when Ethan moves slightly, and I see he still has that knife in his hand. I hesitate and the moment is lost because Ethan shifts so I am in his eyeline as well.
“All these years. All those fucking awful, lonely years. Turns out I did have family left after all. Turns out I didn’t have to be alone at all.” He stops and shakes his head. “It’s not your fault, of course, Sasha. You didn’t know either. Hanna has been lying to you her whole life. About being your mother, about who your father is and what happened to him. I guess the reason she doesn’t want you to know is because then she’d have to confess that she killed him, and that’s not something any mother wants to tell their child.”
“He’s lying,” I say, looking only at Sasha as I say it. “I’m sorry, Sasha—and Ethan, I’m sorry, I really am, but Jacob killed himself. You know this, Ethan. He committed suicide.”
“Because of you. Because of what you did. You had him arrested,” Ethan screams at me and my stomach lurches. “You had him arrested for rape.”
I hear a noise and from the corner of my eye, I see Adam sidling across, behind and out of sight of Ethan.
“What do you think that did to him? To our family?” Ethan says. “And you say you loved him? The police came to our door and dragged him off, put him in handcuffs and in the back of a police car in full view of everyone.”
“I’m sorry,” I say, not taking my eyes off the knife in his hand. What does Adam think he’s doing? He knows Ethan has a knife. “I never—”
“You never what? Never lied to the police? But you did. It wasn’t rape. Don’t you dare try to tell me it was. He was your boyfriend.”
“I didn’t go to the police.” I take a deep breath. “It was my dad.”
Sasha gasps and I wince. I know the truth is going to hurt her, but I have to try to deflect Ethan’s rage—just long enough for the police to get here, just long enough to take his attention away from my daughter.
“I told my father I was pregnant, and he went to the police, because I was still underage and Jacob had just turned eighteen.”
“Enough,” Ethan yells and I jump. “Get over there. You too, Adam,” he adds, swinging around to where Adam is hovering in the shadows.
“I don’t think you’ve met Adam, have you, Sasha?” he says, when we’re all gathered together. “Hanna’s latest candidate for your new stepfather. Adam here is like the worst of tabloid journalists, exploiting people’s misery for his own financial gain.”
“That’s not true,” Adam says.
“Really? Your oh-so-charming website—do you think the surviving family members of the murders you describe like having their homes and the crimes that happened there plastered all over the internet for entertainment?”
Adam says nothing and Ethan laughs. “Do you know how I felt when I came across that article you wrote—about my brother? My parents’ deaths? How do you think I felt when you were congratulating yourself on exploiting my family’s deaths to make money?”
“It’s—”
“It’s what? Already a thing? Already an industry? Oh, it’s okay for me to photograph the murder victim and stick it online because everyone else is doing it? Fuck the family, right? Fuck the shell-shocked, grieving survivors; let’s make some money.”
He turns to me. “I suppose he told you he liked you? Told you it was your smile or your pretty blue eyes that attracted him?” He steps closer to me and my attention flickers from his face to the knife in his hand.
