One wrong turn, p.3
One Wrong Turn, page 3
Because hadn’t it always been too good to be true? And how inappropriate would it look when they showed up in the Mercedes later today?
‘We’re going to be early,’ she said.
‘Better than being late.’
‘I’m just not sure it’s a good idea to get there early.’
Paul ignored her.
‘I was thinking . . .’
‘Yes?’
She plunged. ‘I was thinking we could go to a beach, maybe?’
‘A beach,’ he repeated flatly.
‘For Lila.’
And for a pretence at normality. Even if they both knew they’d be faking. Even if they were both aware it couldn’t last for very long.
It shouldn’t have left her breathless to suggest it, but it did.
‘OK.’ Paul’s expression was troubled as he stared at the motorway ahead of them. ‘We’ll go to a beach.’
5
I pulled Ben to one side while the couple returned to their car for their things. Angling my body away from them, I kept my voice low so they wouldn’t hear me.
‘Are you crazy?’
‘What was I supposed to do?’ he asked me.
‘Literally anything else.’
Ben drew back, crinkling his nose as if I was overreacting, which only made me madder.
Driving on the wrong road in such terrible fog was one thing, but the idea of giving a lift to strangers with a baby . . .
A queasy unease rippled through me. I felt as if I might throw up.
‘Don’t you trust me?’ Ben asked.
‘You just offered a lift to two complete strangers!’
He pulled a face and glanced over to check on the couple. The man had already removed a suitcase from the boot and opened one of the rear doors. He was now leaning his upper body inside, rocking his hips as he grappled with the base for the baby’s car seat. The woman had stepped clear to give him space. A large baby changing bag from an exclusive brand was on the ground next to her.
‘They’re a posh couple with a baby, Abi. It’s not like I offered a lift to a pair of escaped convicts.’
‘We don’t know them.’
‘Then what do you suggest? Do you want to be the one to tell them we’re going to leave them stranded here? It’s freezing. I can barely see past my own hand and nobody else has come along. Imagine if it was us.’
I folded my arms across my stomach, looking off into the murk that concealed the silent road ahead and behind, blinking away the tears that were threatening to come again.
Imagine if it was us.
Just imagine.
‘I wanted to talk to you,’ I said, fighting to keep it together.
‘Then let’s talk.’
‘Not now.’
‘Then after, OK?’ He touched my arm. ‘You don’t have to drive them far. There’s a hospital in Bodmin. That’s twenty minutes, max.’
I peered at the couple again, feeling a coldness spreading through my insides, the shakes starting to come. The man was still battling to release the base of the car seat. I heard him curse.
‘Do you need some help?’ Ben called.
‘No, thank you,’ the woman said, forcing a smile that suggested to me she knew her husband would only get more irritated if Ben became involved.
I looked down at the baby car seat she was holding and for a disabling second it was almost as if I could feel the weight of it myself. Suddenly, the fog that surrounded me seemed to chill by several degrees. Why did they have to have a baby with them? What if she woke when she was in my car?
‘You know why this is a problem,’ I said to Ben.
He met my gaze for a second, but he couldn’t quite hold it, and somehow that was worse.
A little under six months ago, I’d had a miscarriage. My second. We’d been trying for a baby for so long. From really early on in our relationship we’d been so excited to start a family. After the first loss, I’d rallied. I’d tried to stay strong. It hurt, but it happened, I told myself. But after the second loss, I spiralled. It became impossible for me to carry on with my job, caring for other people’s children via the agency I worked for, especially when those children were infants. At least for now, anyway. Maybe for ever. I didn’t know.
‘I get it, OK?’ Ben put an arm around my shoulders, pulling me into his chest, holding me there. ‘But we have to move past this, somehow. We have to do it together.’
Together.
It took everything I had not to push him away.
Did he even hear himself? Did he think I didn’t know that he’d thrown himself into his work after I’d fallen apart?
I thought of all the hours he’d been putting in lately, the times when I’d really needed him to be with me and he hadn’t been there, the moments when I’d cracked and phoned his mobile only for him to decline my calls, telling me later he’d been in meetings or conference calls, pretending none of it had happened after he’d arrived home to the small apartment we shared.
I knew Ben was hurting, too. I got that he was as scared and confused as I was about what had happened, and what it might mean for our future. For us. But that didn’t make it any less painful for me.
‘I don’t want to see the baby,’ I whispered, and my throat felt hot and swollen.
‘Abi . . .’
‘I mean it, Ben.’ I shook off his arm and stepped away from him. ‘I just . . . can’t. I’m going to wait inside the car.’
I walked around to the front, dropping into the driver’s seat and securing my seat belt, returning my phone to my handbag and then hurriedly tidying a few bits of litter from the dash, stuffing them down by my side, staring out into the hanging grey drizzle. My car was a mess. I was a mess. I was still shaking a minute or more later when Ben opened the passenger door and ducked his head to peer in at me.
‘They’re coming,’ he whispered, taking his seat and reaching across for my hand. ‘I promise it will be all right.’
I looked in my side mirror as the man locked their car. Ben gave my hand a squeeze, and I squeezed back, even though there didn’t seem to be any strength in my grip.
Then the man opened my boot and slung their suitcase inside before opening the door behind me.
‘Is it OK if I strap Lila’s car seat in the middle?’ he asked.
‘If it’ll fit,’ Ben told him. ‘It’s a bit cramped back there, so you might have to put it to one side. I’m just going to change the destination on our satnav to the hospital.’
I closed my eyes and tried to pretend I was anywhere else as Ben tapped at the screen and the man lifted the baby car seat inside, then unspooled the middle seat belt and strapped it into position. The clunk-click of the buckle seemed to pass right through me and I could smell a dizzying whiff of baby shampoo and talc.
When I opened my eyes and turned very slightly to glance over my shoulder, I saw that he’d wedged the baby car seat in a bit sideways, and that it was facing backwards with the hood still up, a muslin cloth draped over the sides. That was something, at least. In the dark, on these roads, maybe I could deny this was happening. Maybe I wouldn’t have to think about what it would be like if it was our baby strapped in back there.
‘Almost ready,’ the woman said, rearranging her coat as she squeezed into the seat behind Ben, followed by the man, who just fitted into the space behind me, his knees pressing into my back.
He stuffed the changing bag into the footwell between them and finally they closed their doors with a duo of muted thumps that somehow made me flinch. I looked in my mirror as he took off his glasses and used his sleeve to clean them. After a few seconds, the interior light went out, and their heads and upper bodies became two vague outlines in the dark.
‘Thank you again,’ the woman said, speaking quietly so as not to wake the baby. ‘This is so kind of you. You have no idea how much we appreciate your help.’
Saturday Afternoon
12.06 p.m.
Inside the family bathroom at the motorway services, with the door closed and the lock engaged, Samantha felt trapped and boxed in. She splashed her face with cold water, then patted it dry with paper towels, finally contemplating the woman staring back at her, shocked at how tired and haunted she appeared.
‘Time to go, Lila,’ she whispered. ‘Daddy’s waiting for us.’
Looping the changing bag over her shoulder and scooping Lila up in her car seat, she opened the door and hurried away.
A rush of noise. A sea of faces.
Samantha fixed her gaze on the floor, but it didn’t help.
There were security cameras everywhere. She could feel their lenses pointed at her, aggressively recording her movements.
Would the grainy footage be played back on television news bulletins in the weeks to come, she wondered? Perhaps the stills would be cropped and plastered across the tabloid front pages, like the ones she was passing in the rack in front of the newsagents she was hurrying by now.
No, she told herself. Don’t think that way.
But it was hard.
It had been hard ever since she’d found the first warning.
6
I knew we’d made a mistake the moment I rejoined the road. It was there in the nervous cramping in my stomach, the tacky coolness that swept over my skin, the feeling of dread that pressed down on me like a heavy cloak.
My hand shook as I shifted gear and we slowly picked up speed. I wasn’t ready for this. I couldn’t cope.
There’s a hospital in Bodmin. That’s twenty minutes, max.
My fingers coiled around the steering wheel and I clung on tightly, knowing I was going to live every one of those minutes as if they were an hour, wishing I could stop and change my mind.
Could I?
I looked across at Ben and he smiled back at me reassuringly, then my eyes flitted to the rear-view mirror and in the slight ambient glow from the satnav, I noticed that the man and woman were twisted around in their seats, staring at the road behind us. Then the man spun frontwards, catching me looking, and my heart lurched as I snatched my eyes away.
A hot shiver down my spine.
The expression on his face hadn’t been totally clear but it had seemed almost . . . hostile.
I felt my body go rigid. A greasy unease slipped under my skin.
This time, when I looked at Ben he was busy plugging a charging cable into his phone.
I didn’t want the man to think I’d been spying on them, but at the same time had I really done anything wrong?
Clenching my jaw, I stared at the snatches of road I could see in front of me. I was having difficulty thinking clearly. The fog seemed to have worked its way inside my head, muddling my thoughts. I knew I could just be projecting. I knew I wasn’t in the best of headspaces right now. But something about them felt off in some way.
I hated that we’d missed our turn and stopped for them. I didn’t want these people in my car.
In the past, whenever I’d driven by a hitchhiker holding up a grubby cardboard sign, thumbing a ride, I’d asked myself who could be insane enough to pull over to offer a stranger a lift.
Me, it turned out. Us.
And true, they were a rich, middle-aged couple with a baby who were caught in a fix. The weather conditions tonight were terrible, and we were in rural Cornwall instead of the outskirts of a city. But was it really so different from picking up a lone man with grotty hair and unwashed clothes? These people could be anyone.
‘Isn’t this weather dreadful?’ the woman said, unwinding her scarf from around her neck, removing her hat, smoothing her hair with manicured nails.
I could smell the dampness of her clothes mixed with the cloying, chemical scent of the man’s deodorant. Not that I minded. Anything was better than the fuggy sleep odours of their baby.
I could sense Lila’s presence behind me, radiating outwards. I could imagine how warm she’d be under her blanket. How soft her skin would be to the touch.
Stop it.
Don’t do it to yourself.
‘It’s not good,’ I replied, my voice wobbling as I forced my attention back to the road.
If anything, the visibility seemed to have got even worse since we’d stopped. My eyes were dry and sore. Hunching forwards over the steering wheel, I squinted out into the swirling darkness, feeling intensely aware of the man sitting behind me, the hostile look I thought I’d caught from him, how still and watchful he was being, how he was able to see everything I was doing while I could barely see him at all.
‘My name’s Ben, by the way,’ Ben said. ‘And this is Abi.’
I bit hard on the inside of my mouth, wishing Ben hadn’t told them our names. This wasn’t a dinner party. We didn’t need to introduce ourselves or make small talk.
I got the impression the man must have been thinking along similar lines because he held off for several seconds before responding.
‘Paul,’ he said, with an edge to his voice.
‘Samantha,’ the woman added.
‘Nice to meet you.’
Ben didn’t mean it. It was just one of those things people said. And it wasn’t as if we’d really ‘met’ them anyway. If we were being honest about it, they’d basically guilted us into giving them a lift. They’d as good as manipulated us.
‘And you,’ Samantha replied.
I sneaked a glance at her in the rear-view mirror, carefully avoiding Paul this time. I could barely make out her features in the darkness, but I could see that she was gently squeezing her bandaged hand, as if testing her injury.
‘Does it hurt?’ I asked her.
‘Oh.’ She startled for a second, then found my eyes in the mirror and lowered her hand into her lap. ‘It’s not too bad.’
I wasn’t sure I believed her. I was pretty certain her jaw muscles had bunched when she’d been probing her hand.
Then another thought struck me, and I felt a spike of unease. We only had her word for it that she’d cut herself on the bonnet of her car. Could something else have happened? Might that explain why Paul hadn’t been with her when I’d stopped? Had they had a row that had turned physical or—
‘Do you think you’ll need stitches?’ Ben asked.
‘I hope not.’
I felt sick, my thoughts spiralling, a cascade of unpleasant scenarios filling my head.
Stop it.
Just . . . stop.
It didn’t help that I hadn’t been sleeping well recently. It was late, I was feeling antsy and drained, I had the beginnings of a stress headache, and the journey was going much slower than we’d hoped. At this rate, we might not be home until two or three in the morning and it could be even later if I needed to pull over for a nap.
We should have left earlier, I thought to myself. Or we should have waited until tomorrow morning and set off before dawn, maybe around five.
Ben hadn’t wanted to do that in case he was late to work. He’d agreed to be at the office for nine. And as he’d paid for dinner as part of our hotel room rate, he’d suggested staying on and ‘making the most of things’. That had mostly involved me taking a walk by myself to the nearby harbour, then wandering through some independent shops and visiting a cafe, while Ben had sat huddled over his laptop in our room. Then it had turned out that the hotel restaurant couldn’t seat us until eight-thirty, and service had been slow, and although I’d tried explaining to Ben that I was shattered and didn’t have much of an appetite, he’d pushed for us to finish our meal, saying he wanted to make up for not spending enough time with me during the day.
That was another reason I couldn’t complain too much. Ben had surprised me with our getaway, and he was the one paying for it. Ever since I’d stopped working, I’d been painfully short of cash. I got that he was trying to fix things between us and heal me. I just didn’t know if it could be enough.
‘Do you know these roads?’ Paul asked, bringing me back to the present moment.
I hesitated before answering, wondering if he’d picked up on my nerves, or if he thought I was driving too cautiously in the murky conditions.
‘No,’ I told him.
I didn’t mention that we’d planned to go via Par. I didn’t want to give him any more reasons to doubt my driving ability.
‘You’re not local, then?’
Again, I delayed, not wanting to engage with him on anything too personal. I had a pressing sense we shouldn’t tell Paul anything about us at all.
‘We’ve been on a weekend break,’ Ben said, looking into the back. ‘We were meant to be down here until Sunday afternoon, but we had to leave early. I’ve been called back for work.’
‘Back where?’ Paul asked.
Don’t say it. Don’t—
‘Bristol,’ Ben answered.
A pause.
I glanced into the rear mirror just in time to catch Samantha exchange a shocked look with Paul.
‘Really?’ she said, and I thought I caught a slight tremor in her voice. ‘How strange. Us too.’
Saturday Afternoon
12.09 p.m.
The first warning had been left on the mattress of Lila’s cot, just waiting for Samantha to discover it as she was poised to put Lila down for her nap.
Bustling through the motorway services, anxious to get back to the car, Samantha’s stomach twisted as she remembered the cycle of emotions she’d experienced upon seeing it. At first, she’d been duped by a flicker of mild surprise and miscomprehension. A passing thought that it might be a surprise gift from Paul. Then the blood in her veins had quickly turned to ice and she’d felt for a shocking moment as if someone had grabbed both her ankles and pulled her legs out from under her.
It was a glossy 8 x 10 photograph that showed her pushing Lila in their stylish Scandi buggy through the park earlier that morning, apparently captured with a telephoto lens, then developed and delivered in the hour between when the image had been snapped and she’d returned home.
On the reverse were three words, printed in marker pen.
Show him this.
‘Darling?’
