Hostage by Clare Mackintosh
FORTY-TWO
5 A.M. | ADAM
I’ve fucked up. Again. Just when it didn’t seem possible that things could get any worse, that I could do any more damage to my family—to myself—than I’ve already done, I fuck up even worse.
“Is Becca coming back?” Sophia’s sitting up, her voice steadier now. She’s far from her usual self, but who could be themselves, down here?
“No, pumpkin, I don’t think she’ll be back.” Shit, shit, shit. I’m cursing myself for shooting my mouth off. I wanted to frighten Becca, sure. I wanted to show her she’d be easy to find so she’d come to her senses and let us out. And it felt good, that I was back on top of my game, doing my job, the way it felt before my head was full of debt and my failing marriage. I caught a glimpse of the old me, and I let my mouth run off, and now I’ve made it worse…far, far worse.
I wonder where she’s run to. She might have a car, parked out of sight. She told us she didn’t drive, but she told us a lot of things. I picture her getting home, letting herself into her parents’ house, and creeping up the stairs. Lying on top of the covers, fully clothed, waiting for her pulse to subside.
Maybe she’s not such a kid as I think. Maybe she doesn’t live at home. Tesco could have been a holiday job, a temporary fix—a cover story even. I imagine her in her own place—some squalid room in a shared house—throwing meager possessions into a rucksack. Where will she go next? Where do these people go, these professional protestors? I remember reading about some corporate bigwig so incensed by the European referendum that he jacked it all in and moved down to London. Sold all his possessions, sofa-surfed with friends, and spent the next three years shouting into a megaphone outside the Houses of Parliament.
I don’t understand it. I get that people feel passionate about certain causes, that they want to see justice done—I wouldn’t be a police officer if I didn’t care about putting things right. But these people dedicate their lives to their beliefs; they go to prison for them.
The hijackers on Mina’s plane must know they’re going to die. They’re taking hundreds of people with them, and presumably they’re okay with that—a small battle lost in the midst of a war. I can’t imagine what I could ever feel so passionately about.
Yes, I can.
Sophia.
I would fight for Sophia. I will fight for her.
But how? I’ve pulled at my cuffs so hard, there’s no skin left around my wrists, and the pipe on the wall isn’t budging. If I could get myself free, I could break down the door at the top of the steps, it would be easy…
A news bulletin breaks into the playlist, and I feel Sophia tense, as I do the same. Please, I beg silently. Don’t let it be this way that she hears she’s lost her mother.
We’ve just this moment had an update on Flight 79. TheTelegraph’s travel editor, Alice Davanti, has released a first-person exclusive of scenes inside the hijacked aircraft.
I’m so flooded with relief that the plane hasn’t crashed that I miss the first few words of Davanti’s statement, my focus snapping back when I hear Mina’s name.
“Mummy!”
…many people will condemn her for putting her own family’s safety above the lives of the hundreds of passengers on Flight 79. As I write this, I am surrounded by parents, grandparents, children. The families of these passengers will no doubt struggle to understand why their loved ones’ lives should be worth less than that of one woman’s child.
The radio cuts back to the presenter, who promises more on this very soon, and Sophia struggles to sit up.
“Daddy, what’s that woman saying about Mummy?”
Rage surges through my veins. I am not putting this on Sophia. I won’t let her feel guilty; I won’t let her think badly of her mother, when Mina did what any parent I know would have done.
“She’s saying—” I stop, just long enough that what follows isn’t swallowed by a sob. “She’s saying Mummy loves you more than anything else in the whole world.”
The sound of a car engine cuts through the night air. The farm track doesn’t lead anywhere: no one comes down here unless they live here, and no one lives here except us, Mo, and the woman who comes a few weekends a year. Is the car hers? Why would she arrive at this hour? I’ve lost track of time, but it can’t be far off dawn now.
For a second, I feel a rush of hope. Perhaps Becca had a change of heart. Maybe my words struck home and she realized the police would catch up with her sooner or later, so she—
Except that the engine I can hear isn’t diesel, which means it’s unlikely to be a police car.
Becca’s parents? Or one of the other activists perhaps. If they’ve come to move us somewhere they think will be safer, we’ll have a chance to escape. They’ll have to release one of my hands to free the cuffs from the pipes. I need to be ready. I picture myself swinging at whoever comes—right hook, left hook, whichever is freed first—knocking them out cold and pulling Sophia up the steps, into the kitchen, through the hall, and out.
There are footsteps outside. Quiet ones. Careful, thoughtful. Pacing the width of the house. Peering into windows maybe, to make sure no one’s in, that it’s just us, locked in the cellar. No one to hear us scream.
Where will we go when we escape?
Becca used my car keys to get the EpiPen. If she dropped them back where they were, I can snatch them up as we run through the house, drive to the central police station—where I work—where teams operate around the clock.
But she could have put them anywhere. She might even still have them, stuffed in a pocket. Hunting for them could cost valuable time. Better to run. The back door, perhaps, where they won’t be expecting. Over the fence and across the park, where we can’t be followed in a car. Maybe that’s the best way to go anyway: not waste time looking for keys. Just get out.
I start flexing the fingers on each hand. They’ve been held in this position for hours now, and I can hardly feel the tips of each one. I straighten, then curl each in turn, and slowly the numbness becomes the tingle of pins and needles. I roll my shoulders—backward, then forward—flex, then point my toes, pull my knees up to my chest.
“What are you doing, Daddy?”
“Exercising. Want to join me?”
Sophia shuffles her bottom so her back is against the wall. She puts her hands behind her back, into invisible cuffs, and together we lift our legs and tilt our heads from side to side. In her haste, Becca didn’t replace the paving stone over the entrance to the coal chute, and I’m grateful for the light from the porch and for the breeze, despite the cold. The air down here feels stale and overused, and even though I know it couldn’t have been airtight before, it still felt as though we could run out.
“Now we’re going to make a sort of triangle, okay? Move your bottom forward, that’s it, then straighten your legs and lift them up, and see if you can touch your toes. Keep your back straight—that’s it.” I form two sides of my triangle, while Sophia forms three, and my heart bursts with love for her. “That’s brilliant. How long can you hold—”
We look at each other, startled, as the strains of the doorbell die away.
“Someone’s at the door.”
“I know, sweetheart.”
“We need to answer it.”
Why are they ringing the doorbell? Something doesn’t feel right. If Becca’s gone to the others for help—or even if she’d had a crisis of conscience—they’d know where we were. We’re hardly likely to answer the door, are we?
Who is it?
The question is answered in the very next beat, with a thump on the door that reverberates through the house.
“Open up, Holbrook!”
Sophia looks at me, recognition of her surname lighting up her face. I shake my head in warning, whisper a shhh, while I figure out what’s happening, although the lurch of my stomach has already told me.
The loan shark.
He hammers on the door. “I know you’re in there. I can hear the radio.”
“Daddy!” Sophia scrambles to her knees and shakes my shoulder. “Shout! Someone’s here. They can rescue us!”
“Sweetheart, that man won’t rescue us. He’ll—” What? Leave us? Beat me up? Hurt Sophia? It’s too horrific to imagine.
It started with text messages—your payment is overdue—then evolved to WhatsApp photos of my car, the house, Sophia’s nursery. I tried my best to make the payments, but it was so hard when Mina didn’t know—couldn’t know—what I needed the money for.
“There’s hardly anything in the joint account,” she’d say. “Can you stick in a couple of hundred?” She’d do the same, and I’d sweat for a couple of days, pretending I’d forgotten whenever she asked, then taking out yet another credit card. I earned more than her. We’d worked out a system, in the beginning, when we took out our first mortgage, that meant each of us contributed the same proportion of our salary toward joint bills. Aren’t we grown-up? we joked.
The first visit came six months after the WhatsApp photos started. I walked out of work, and as I turned toward the bus stop for the park and ride, I became aware of someone watching me. A man in a black bomber jacket, like a nightclub bouncer, raised a hand in something far from a wave. A warning. I know where you work. I know you’re a copper.
You’d think sorting out trouble would be easy when you’re a police officer. I know all the right people, all the right laws, right?
Wrong.
Debt—particularly the sort of debt I have, without contracts and credit checks—puts coppers at risk. It makes us ripe for corruption, vulnerable to approaches from the underworld. It makes us beholden to the very people we should be arresting. Getting myself in the shit isn’t a disciplinary offense, but not telling the bosses about it is.
After that, they didn’t hold back. I’d look in the rearview mirror and see one of them following me; I’d hear their footsteps as I walked through the alley to the bus stop. There were three of them—three that I saw anyway—and they never did anything, just raised a hand, then turned off. It was a message, that was all. We know who you are, who your family is, where you live, where you work.
It’s not in a loan shark’s interest for you to pay off your debt too fast. Far better for you to rack up the loan, every day another hundred quid, until there’s no way you can pay it. And all the time, their scare tactics are paying off. Six months down the line, I would have done anything. Almost anything.
“I need you to do a little job for me,” the voice down the phone had said.
“What sort of job?”
“One of my boys is up for something he never did. I need you to disappear the evidence.” The voice was low and gruff. Was it the same man who gave me the money? Standing in a stairwell in the roughest part of the roughest estate? Could have been.
“I can’t do that.” Sweat trickled down my forehead.
That was the day they threatened Katya. They could have beaten me up, but instead they followed Katya and Sophia. They knew it would have more of an effect than a black eye or a broken nose.
“He said you owe him money,” Katya said afterward, when she’d stopped crying and I’d finally convinced Sophia that the bad men had gone and wouldn’t be back. “Lots of money.”
“I do.”
“Then how you know he not come back?”
“I don’t.”
She was too frightened to stay. I told Sophia it was nothing, told her not to tell Mummy because she might be worried, and we don’t want to worry her, do we? and hated myself for doing it.
Three days later, the same man rang.
“I’m outside your house, Holbrook. You got my money?”
“I’m getting it. I told you.” I was at work, in the CID office, waiting for someone’s brief to tell them to go no comment.
“Getting it ain’t got it.”
He didn’t answer. Instead, I heard the unmistakable sound of a lighter. The hiss of gas, the click of the flint. I snatched the keys to a pool car and ran, calling Mina again and again as I drove to the house. She didn’t pick up.
When I got there, my heart pounding, the house was in darkness. I couldn’t smell smoke, couldn’t see the flicker of fire—had it been an empty threat?
The light went on in the bedroom window, and I called Mina’s mobile again. I had to know she and Sophia were okay. She canceled the call, and I stood on the farm track, wondering if I should go back to work.
But what if the threat hadn’t been empty?
She opened the door as I was walking up the path. No fire. Only Mina—suspicious, angry, unharmed—and a doormat soaked in petrol.
“Holbrook! If you’re in there, open the fucking door.” More hammering.
“Daddy,” Sophia whispers now. “Is it the bad man again?”
“I think so.”
“You were told midnight! Have you got it or not?”
Her face crumples, a tremor seizing her upper body. As long as I live, I will never forgive myself for putting her through this.
“I’ll take that as a no, then,” the man yells.
“We need to be quiet, sweetheart. He mustn’t know we’re in here.”
She nods, and I ache to put my arms around her. These bloody handcuffs. Again and again, I pull against the pipes, glad of the blood, of the pain, because it’s no less than I deserve.
The sound of an engine makes me stop. I look at Sophia. Was that it? Has he really given up so easily?
“I think he’s leav—” I start, but something catches in my nostrils, an acrid smell that fills me with fear and makes me pull at my handcuffs again.
Smoke. I can smell smoke.
The house is on fire.