And if it wasn’t, I really didn’t know how I’d cope or—

  ‘Abi?’ a voice whispered, from the other side of the cubicle door.

  Saturday Evening

  6.33 p.m.

  It was quiet in the kitchen until Samantha’s father cleared his throat and drew himself upright in his chair.

  ‘What about this thug and the woman who threatened you?’ he asked. ‘Did you recognize either of them? Had you seen them before?’

  ‘Not the woman,’ Samantha said. ‘The man followed me once.’

  ‘You don’t know their names? Anything identifiable about them? Anything they might have said that—’

  ‘Are you recording this?’ Samantha asked, suddenly.

  ‘What?’ Samantha’s father looked genuinely shocked.

  ‘Are you recording this? On your phone?’

  ‘Why would I—?’

  ‘Because I’m worried you’re going to go to the police, Dad. And I really need you to understand that you absolutely can’t do that. They can’t protect us from these people. Nobody can. The only thing that can save us is paying them off and getting them out of our lives for good. Because I promise you, I know how dangerous they are.’

  ‘Quite,’ her father said, and she watched with a sudden tremor of disquiet as he reached across to take her mother’s hand. ‘Which is why you can have the money – our money – but only provided you and Lila stay safely here with us.’

  17

  I froze. The cubicle seemed to shrink around me.

  ‘Ben?’

  ‘Yeah, it’s me,’ he whispered.

  ‘What are you doing in here?

  ‘I need to talk to you.’

  I looked at the test stick. It seemed to throb and haze in my vision.

  ‘Can it wait?’

  ‘Not really.’

  ‘This is the ladies’ bathroom, Ben.’

  I was stalling, looking between the stick and the back of the door, tears pooling in my eyes.

  I hadn’t told Ben yet. He didn’t know.

  This was what I’d planned to talk to him about in the car. I would have told him at the hotel if I could have. That was why I’d taken the test in the first place. But then he’d got the call from his office, and he’d told me he was going to have to work, and, well, it had rocked me, scared me, upset me, if I was honest.

  So I’d held off. I’d told myself I was waiting for the right time, and now I was having to reckon with all my hopes and fears alone.

  I didn’t want to lose this baby. I didn’t want to lose Ben or myself if I did.

  A thousand thoughts raced through my mind all at once.

  How would I tell Ben and how might he react? Would he be elated and sweep me into his arms, tell me how much he loved me? Or would I detect a thread of worry in his eyes? Because that’s what frightened me most right now. I needed Ben to be strong for both of us. I needed him to be able to tell me it was going to be OK this time. I needed to believe it, somehow.

  ‘I know it’s the ladies’ bathroom,’ Ben said in a low whisper. ‘I didn’t want them to see us talking. Something seriously weird is going on.’

  I stilled.

  The air around me seemed to throb and hum.

  Ben must have picked up on some of the same things as me. He got how strangely Paul and Samantha were acting.

  ‘Are you nearly done?’ he asked. ‘I’m getting really freaked out here, Abi.’

  ‘One second.’

  I stood and pulled up my underwear and leggings – the waistband of my leggings was tighter than it used to be – then used the cover of the flush to return the test stick to my bag.

  When I opened the door, Ben was cupping both hands to the back of his neck, shaking his head. ‘I’m really sorry. I messed up. I shouldn’t have offered them a lift.’

  ‘You wanted to help them.’

  I adjusted the strap of my handbag over my shoulder, feeling painfully aware of the test stick inside, how my heartbeat was fluttering, thinking of the infant growing inside me – the secret between us – and how desperately I wanted to tell Ben and not tell him all at the same time.

  ‘And I think maybe Samantha does need help,’ I said.

  Crossing to the sinks, I washed my hands with soap and water, searching my face in the mirror, conscious of the flush to my cheeks, the secret in my eyes.

  ‘I think she’s the weird one,’ Ben said. ‘When I was filling up the car just now, I was standing right next to her, and she sort of covered up her face with her hand.’

  Because she was trying to discourage you from talking to her, I thought suddenly. Because she was probably scared about Paul seeing her talking to you.

  I placed my hands under the dryer for a few seconds, the noise blasting into the room. Once the machine had fallen silent again, I turned to him and said, ‘She was sending me signals when I was driving.’

  ‘What?’

  I explained about the way Samantha had held my gaze and blinked. How she’d done it slowly, deliberately.

  ‘Are you serious?’

  ‘It couldn’t have been a coincidence, Ben. It happened too many times.’

  ‘OK.’ He gazed at the door to the bathroom, giving off a fidgety energy, and when he looked back I saw him hesitate. ‘There’s something else.’

  I looked at him and waited. Whatever it was, he was reluctant to tell me.

  ‘The baby car seat. It’s empty.’

  Saturday Evening

  6.35 p.m.

  For a second, Samantha’s whole world stopped spinning.

  A great sucking fear invaded her chest.

  She and Lila couldn’t stay with her parents. There was simply no way she could do that.

  Now, please, give me my baby back.

  Except the woman who had invaded their home hadn’t given Lila back.

  She’d risen from the kitchen table with her instead. And meanwhile, she’d nodded to the man in the dinner jacket, who’d stepped behind Paul quickly, wrapped a tea towel around his throat and pulled hard on both ends.

  Paul had shot up from his chair in terror. His cheeks and eyes had bulged. He’d croaked and wheezed.

  And the woman holding Lila had simply turned and paced out of the room without looking back.

  ‘No!’ Samantha had shrieked. ‘Lila!’

  Somehow, she was standing – much too slowly – until suddenly she was shunted sideways across the room, toppling backwards over her chair, slamming painfully into the glass patio doors at her side.

  The man had kicked her, but Samantha was up again immediately, screaming, shrieking, tripping over the fallen chair in her desperation to go after the woman, which is when the man had swept Paul’s legs away, holding him by the tea towel like a noose, blocking Samantha by dragging a gasping Paul backwards towards the door into the hallway in front of her.

  Samantha didn’t know how he’d got the knife in his hand so fast. It was the same knife he’d used to scrape butter on his toast. But now the knife blade was pressed against Paul’s face, near his eye, and the man was dragging him viciously, Paul’s heels scrabbling on the floor for purchase, his fingers scratching at the tea towel, and Lila was gone, gone, gone.

  ‘No! Don’t do this! You can’t!’

  ‘Remember, no police,’ the man in the dinner jacket told her. ‘If you contact the police, or tell anyone who contacts the police, she dies. You get us our money and you get your baby back, understand?’

  Samantha had started to shake, her whole body spasming uncontrollably. And, God help her, she’d crashed to her knees, her strength suddenly evading her, and time had seemed to flutter and fray, her vision blurring, flickering, then blacking out.

  The man was there one second.

  Gone the next.

  Paul was sprawled on the floor and croaking terribly.

  There was a searing pain in Samantha’s head.

  By the time she’d got to her feet and stumbled past Paul and rushed outside, she was only fast enough to hear car doors slamming and to see the tail end of an SUV tearing away.

  That had been five days ago.

  The five most endless, haunting, harrowing days of her life.

  18

  The room began a slow spin behind Ben. A sickly taste coated the back of my throat.

  ‘I don’t understand. How can it be empty?’

  ‘I don’t understand, either.’

  ‘But when you say empty . . .?’

  ‘There’s no baby, Abi.’

  I stared at him. My palms were sweating. I could feel a faint whistling in my head.

  There’s no baby.

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Pretty sure. I looked inside when I was filling up with petrol. I could see in the back, under the lights. There was a blanket but no baby.’

  ‘Maybe the baby had moved up under her blanket?’ I suggested.

  ‘No, I don’t think so.’

  ‘Could Samantha have taken her out?’

  ‘She hadn’t. I would have noticed.’

  I stared at Ben some more. My nausea was intensifying, my stomach tightening and contracting. I thought for a moment of rushing to a cubicle, dropping to my knees.

  ‘But how would they—? Why—?’

  ‘I don’t know. It’s crazy. Maybe they’re crazy.’

  But was it possible? Really possible?

  My head pounded.

  I’d never actually seen Lila because I hadn’t wanted to see Lila. The hood had been up on the car seat. The muslin had been draped over the front. And I’d done everything I could to keep my distance.

  But if there was a smell . . .

  I closed my eyes as it hit me.

  Oh, God.

  Was Samantha contending with a terrible loss of her own? Could that explain her distress and the tension between her and Paul? Maybe it even explained Paul’s confusion over what they needed for the baby.

  Because they didn’t really need anything for the baby.

  Perhaps that also explained the reason for their brief visit to her parents. It could be Samantha hadn’t been able to bear staying with them for long.

  And then, on top of everything else, their car had broken down.

  My heart ached for Samantha. If I was right, I knew something of what she was feeling. I could perhaps even understand why she could have been lying to herself, and why Paul might have gone along with it.

  ‘There’s another thing,’ Ben said.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Paul. When I came into the shop just now, he was disappearing into a back room with the guy behind the counter.’

  Saturday Evening

  6.37 p.m.

  Samantha hadn’t slept. She’d barely eaten. Everything she did, thought, said, revolved around the obsession of getting Lila back alive.

  The pressure had been unbearable, the worry overwhelming. She knew, of course, that on some level her psyche had simply snapped, she’d suffered a psychotic break, she was disassociating, something.

  Maybe it had happened when she’d collapsed to her knees in her kitchen and blacked out. Maybe it had been during the awful, wrenching hours that had come after the SUV had sped away from their house with their daughter inside. But at some point, the crisis had reached fever pitch, the scales had been tipped, and denial had swept in.

  Because the only way Samantha could cope, and then just barely, was to pretend to herself that Lila was still with them. To see her in her car seat, hold her in her arms, feed her, change her, care for her, talk to her, sing to her. To convince herself Lila was there.

  With each agonizing hour that had passed, the denial had got deeper and more ingrained, and she’d watched as Paul’s concern for her had grown. She hadn’t missed the pained looks he’d given her when she’d talked as if Lila was still with them in the car park outside the hotel, or his unease when she’d insisted on taking Lila’s changing bag and baby car seat with her to the family room in the motorway services, or how troubled he’d seemed when she’d asked if they could take Lila to the beach. She was aware that he’d indulged her. She understood he was walking on eggshells around her. She suspected he was scared of what might happen to her if he didn’t, and she also knew she was very, very close to coming completely undone.

  Even now, in a part of her mind that she kept carefully cocooned, Samantha could convince herself that Lila really was safe with Paul while she talked with her parents. And at the same time, in another, more traumatized part of her mind, she also understood that they couldn’t possibly get Lila back from the monsters who’d snatched her without the two hundred and fifty thousand pounds in cash they were demanding.

  This had gone beyond an intimidation campaign. It was now a kidnapping for ransom.

  And in her despair, Samantha also understood one last thing.

  Without the money she’d begged her parents for, there was no possible way she could get Lila back.

  19

  ‘That doesn’t necessarily mean anything,’ I said. ‘Paul could have been asking for something that wasn’t on the shelves.’

  ‘Then why would he need to go into the back room, too?’

  I tuned out for a moment. It was difficult to focus on what Ben was saying because I was still looping on the idea that they didn’t have a baby with them. It was so shocking and disturbing and . . . weird.

  But then I remembered how stressed and edgy Paul had seemed as we’d walked across the forecourt. How uncomfortable he’d made me feel.

  Paul had watched me until I’d entered the toilets, and Ben had followed me in not too long afterwards. For Ben to have seen Paul going into the back room, that suggested Paul must have moved almost as soon as I was out of his sight.

  He didn’t want anyone to see what he was up to.

  Why?

  None of this made sense. It was all too much.

  ‘It looked properly shifty, Abi.’

  ‘What do you think he was doing?’

  ‘I have no clue. Maybe he was having trouble paying for our fuel. Maybe his card got declined.’

  ‘He was going to pay cash. I saw it.’

  But I hadn’t seen a lot of cash. Maybe fifty or sixty pounds. Was it possible Paul was short of money? That didn’t seem likely, but if they could lie about having a baby with them, they could lie about anything.

  ‘Maybe it had something to do with their hire car,’ Ben said.

  ‘Like, what?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  I thought about it some more, struggling to wrap my head around everything. ‘Could he have been asking for the details for a local taxi firm or a hotel? Perhaps they don’t want us driving them home, after all.’

  Perhaps Paul didn’t want us driving them.

  Ben shrugged. ‘They seemed OK with it before.’

  ‘Unless Paul saw Samantha signalling to me. He could have changed his mind if he thought we were worried about her. Or maybe he’s worried about us discovering the car seat is empty. Perhaps he’s worried about us upsetting Samantha.’

  Ben tipped his head from side to side, as if he wasn’t convinced. ‘But they were both kind of funny about us stopping. And he did say they’d had doubts about getting into the car with us.’

  I eyed the door for a moment, wondering what Paul was up to right now. I hated the idea that Samantha was distressed, or in trouble, but at the same time a selfish part of me really didn’t want to get drawn into whatever was going on between them.

  We had our own issues to contend with. At some point soon, I was going to have to be brave and tell Ben that I was pregnant. Not here. Not now. But I was going to need to explain how hurt I’d been by how he’d thrown himself into his work lately, and how afraid I was that I couldn’t rely on him.

  Especially if something went wrong with my pregnancy.

  Especially if . . .

  My mind turned to Samantha again, sitting alone in my car with an empty baby seat beside her, and I knew we couldn’t sit this one out.

  ‘I should go back outside,’ I said, pushing away my doubts and reservations. ‘See if I can talk to Samantha while Paul is busy. See if I can help.’

  ‘You don’t think maybe we should leave it?’

  ‘We can’t, Ben. I’m really worried about her. I think she’s in a really bad place.’

  He nodded reluctantly. I knew Ben understood that, too. I think he just hadn’t wanted to face up to it yet.

  ‘I don’t like the idea that she’s scared,’ he said. ‘If she was blinking at you, she didn’t want Paul to know.’

  I surprised him then by stepping closer and pulling him into a hug, squeezing him tight, pressing my face into his neck. He tensed for a second before relaxing into it.

  ‘OK?’ he asked me, rubbing my back.

  I nodded quickly, aware of a small ball of heat in my belly that I knew I could just be imagining but that suddenly felt so real.

  ‘I love you,’ I whispered.

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Do you love me?’

  A twinge inside me as I leaned back and searched his face.

  ‘Of course I do. You know I do, Abi. And, listen, I know things haven’t been great for a while and a lot of that is my fault. You said we needed to talk, and we do.’

  ‘Yes, but later, OK?’

  I touched his cheek, then crossed to the door. After opening it cautiously, I stuck my head out to check if the coast was clear. If Paul was waiting – if he was dangerous or volatile in any way – I didn’t want him to know that Ben had been talking to me or to question what we might have been discussing.

  But the corridor was empty, silent.

  No. It’s fine. You’re fine. You can do this.

  Pushing down against my nerves, I beckoned Ben out after me into the main shop. It looked completely deserted, too. Hurrying between the aisles, clamping my handbag against my side, I focused my attention on a plain grey door behind the counter that was slightly ajar. A sign above it read ‘Staff only’.

  I was almost at the counter and the exit when I glanced outside and immediately pulled up short, straightening my arm to stop Ben.

 

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