Hostage by Clare Mackintosh

THIRTY-SEVEN

3 A.M. | ADAM

“Shall we do some baking together when all this is over?” I’m talking with my mouth full, but I figure normal rules don’t apply when you’re trying to distract your five-year-old daughter from the fact that you’re locked in a cellar, at the mercy of an increasingly unstable maniac.

After Becca closed the coal chute, I heard her running back into the house, slamming the door like the teenager she’d pretended to be. She is moving about the house now, pacing this way and that, and I feel a charge in the air that makes me fearful of what she might do next.

“Daddies don’t do baking.” The words are indistinct, as though she’s about to cry, and I wonder if I’ve said the wrong thing—reminded her of Mina perhaps.

“Lots of daddies do baking. And I’m sure I could give it a go. Not dandelions, though—yuck. Silly Becca. Who wants to eat weeds?” The more I try to make Sophia smile, the quieter she becomes. She puts her hands to her face.

“Daddy!” It’s barely a whisper, choked with emotion.

“We’ll see Mummy soon, pumpkin. I promise.” My own voice breaks at what feels too much like a lie. It must be possible, surely; there must be a chance that she’ll get out of this alive. I can’t bear the thought of losing her.

“Da—” Sophia’s fingers flutter around the front of her throat, and I suddenly realize it’s not emotion in her voice, it’s panic. Her eyes widen, she shakes her head, and I can see her lips swelling, as though she’s been stung by a bee. Elephant falls to the floor beside her.

“What was in your sandwich?”

Again, louder, because she’s frozen, terrified eyes locked on mine. “Sophia, what was in your sandwich? Let me taste it—now!” I pull at my handcuffs as though they might have magically unlocked.

Sophia scrambles for the crusts she’s stacked neatly on the floor, and they’ve barely touched my lips before I can smell it, taste it.

Peanut butter.

“We shouldn’t even have it in the house,” Mina had said when we got back from the doctor’s, three-year-old Sophia blissfully unaware of the potentially fatal diagnosis she’d just been given.

“Her allergy isn’t that bad.” There were some people, the doctor told us, who couldn’t be within ten feet of a nut, who could feel their lips swelling the second a packet was ripped open in the pub.

“But what if she opens it? She’s too young to understand the difference between a spread she can have and a spread she can’t.”

“I’ll keep it on top of the fridge. She won’t even see it.” Peanut butter was my guilty pleasure, spooned from the jar before a long run or smeared on toast on a Sunday morning.

Since her diagnosis, Sophia’s only had one allergic reaction, when a thoughtless parent at a coffee morning gave her a biscuit without checking with Mina.

“It was terrifying,” Mina said afterward. She shook her head as if there were a fly trapped inside. “I used the pen, and I suddenly thought, What if it doesn’t work? You know—we have these pens, and you just assume they work, but what if we’ve got a rogue one? An off day at the factory. The one duff pen.”

“But it did work,” I reminded her, because her words were racing as though she’d forgotten that Sophia was banging pans around her toy kitchen, the excitement of the day already forgotten.

“Yes, but—”

I moved to hold her, physically stemming her panic. “It worked.”

As Sophia got older, she knew not to take food from anyone but us. She got used to taking a packed lunch on days out, learned to ask at parties if the cake contained nuts. We relaxed. Became complacent. But the peanut butter jar stayed on top of the fridge, safely out of Sophia’s reach.

“Stay calm. Try and breathe slowly.”

She’s hardly breathing at all. I know that her chest will be tight, as though someone’s sitting on it, her throat swelling so that every intake of air is forced. She moves her lips, but no sound comes out. Her eyelids have already puffed up, closing her eyes to narrow slits.

“Becca!” If I shouted loudly for our food, it’s nothing compared to how I shout now. I get on my knees, as though the tiny increase in height will carry the sound farther, and bang my handcuffs against the metal pipe again and again and again. “Help!”

It can take anything from a few minutes to a few hours to die from an anaphylactic attack. The first time it happened, we drove her straight to the GP, where we were rushed past the queue to an efficient doctor who whipped out an EpiPen and dialed 999 at the same time. We were given our own pen at the hospital.

“What happens if she doesn’t have the epinephrine? How bad would the reaction be?”

“Impossible to say. Let’s not find out the hard way.” The doctor was young and thoughtful, empathy in her eyes. “Best to get a spare pen.”

We have five in total. One at school, one in Sophia’s school bag, one in Mina’s handbag, one in my car, and one in the kitchen drawer along with spare keys and loose batteries and three-year-old toys from McDonald’s Happy Meals.

“Help!”

In the kitchen, the radio snaps off midway through “Fairy Tale of New York.”

I don’t wait for Becca to call out.

“I need Sophia’s EpiPen. You gave her nuts, you stupid, stupid—”

“I gave you nuts! There wasn’t enough cheese, so I—”

“Quickly! There’s no time. She could die, Becca!” I regret my words the second I see Sophia’s face, swollen and panicked and now fighting for what little breath she’s managing to find. “It’s not true, sweetheart,” I add in a low voice. “I just said it because we really need your pen.”

There’s noise upstairs. I hear a clatter of keys, and I picture the contents of the kitchen drawer spilled on the floor. I yank at my handcuffs, fear and frustration lending strength to my stiff arms. What will I do if Sophia stops breathing? If her heart stops?

“Hurry!”

“I can’t find it!”

Mina must have moved it. I feel an unjust spike of anger that she didn’t tell me, that we didn’t talk about it, say, I was thinking it might be better to keep it in the hall, in the bathroom, in the cupboard.

“In Sophia’s school bag!” I yell.

Becca makes a sound that’s midway between a sob and a scream. “It isn’t there! It’s on the plane. I took it last night when I babysat. I was just told to leave it by a bench in the park and someone would pick it up.”

“It’s wh—” This is no time for questions. “My car!” Sophia makes a strangled sound that might be Daddy, and my arms yank instinctively against my restraints as they try to reach for her. “In the glove box!” I’m hoarse from shouting, but I can hear Becca’s footsteps running outside, I hear the beep of my central locking and a car door opening.

“It’s okay. It’ll be okay, sweetheart.”

More feet, then the scraping sound as the paving slab is shifted from the entrance to the coal chute, and a clatter as the pen slides down into the cellar.

“Pick it up, pumpkin. Take off the cap. That’s it, just drop that. Now straight into your thigh.”

Sophia looks at me, not moving, tears falling down her swollen face.

“Come on, sweetheart. I can’t do it for you. See that Action Man on your pajamas? There. The one above your knee—higher, higher, there. Stab it, then keep the pen there till I tell you to move.”

I know my daughter is brave. She doesn’t cry when she scrapes a knee or wakes in the night with a fever. She’s fearless at the playground, hanging upside down and running across to try the “big slide.” But I didn’t know quite how brave until I see her lift her hand, fist wrapped around the EpiPen, and plunge it into her own thigh. I choke back a sob, scan her face for signs that she’s going to be okay, but her face is still swelling, and she’s gasping for breath. Her fist’s clamped tightly around the EpiPen, and I can’t see if she’s done it properly. I don’t know if the pen’s worked, if the needle’s in the right place.

I don’t know if it’s enough to save her.