Lucinda arrived home two minutes ago and disappeared into her house to retrieve her dog. Maria watches the town car slide away, not to return to collect Lucinda until eight-thirty tomorrow morning.
Lucinda will reappear from the house in a few minutes with dog in tow, wellies and puffer coat on.
Maria is nervous, of course, but certain of what she has to do. She lets her eyes sweep down the street to reacquaint herself with the lamppost-mounted CCTV cameras dotting the affluent area. She estimates they will catch her approach to Lucinda’s side of the street, but where she sits now is not covered by the public cameras, nor are any of the private house entrances.
Lucinda’s house has its own private cameras mounted above the gate and door, which appear to activate when the gate sensor is tripped on entry and exit.
Maria has rehearsed the plan in her mind for the last three days. If she keeps her nerve it will work, if there are no surprises it will work. She can’t plan for everything, but if she stays present it might all be fine; that other part of her will come alive and save them both.
Again, she has the advantage, the element of surprise. Odd that she has an advantage now, after a lifetime of having no notable advantages at all, of struggling for everything she’s received, but then life is like that sometimes, she supposes. Or maybe she only has the advantage now because she has struggled so hard and adapted to it?
She shakes off the thought as a deliveryman suddenly pulls up in the bay two down from her own and leaps from his truck, package in hand, heading to another building.
Maria’s hand pauses on the handle of the car. She can’t do what she needs to do with this person here, a potential witness. Maria has not factored this in, an unscheduled delivery, an on-street witness. Lucinda is due to exit the building for her dog walk at any moment. She watches the man ring the house buzzer and wait, shifting the weight of the package in his hands as the tone blips on. They are clearly not in. Maria feels her anger rise.
Just try another house, leave it with someone else, she screams in her mind. But he can’t hear her and is clearly in no rush. Across the street there is movement. Maria’s gaze flies over to catch sight of Lucinda pulling back her large cedar security gate and holding it open for her excitable dog, who yelps and spins in lead-tangling circles as she does so.
“All right, Penny, almost there, sweetie. Come on then,” Maria hears her coo as she too pushes through and closes the gate behind them. Her guard down, a softer, more off-duty version of the woman moments before. “Right. Let’s go, cutie.”
Maria looks back to the delivery driver. He’s still there, oblivious to Lucinda’s existence and to the fact he has so soundly destroyed Maria’s plan. He, having pressed the gate bell, has finally also come to the conclusion that the homeowner is not in and he is now chaotically trying to scribble out a missed-delivery slip while balancing the package with one knee braced against their wall. Work completed, he slots the slip into their mailbox and jogs the package back to his van before slipping in, swigging at a fizzy drink, and speeding off again.
Maria bristles in his disorganized wake. Lucinda is gone. She could follow her on the dog walk but there’s no point, because what she needs is in that house. She’ll have to wait until Lucinda returns. It isn’t a big change to the plan, really, it just feels like one. A snag that has knocked her plan forty-five minutes down the road. But if anything, things might be easier once the light has fallen further. Sure, more people will be home to hear, but witnesses will be less likely to see anything at all. She’ll go ahead with the plan, she decides, in spite of the change of order. She just has to wait a little longer.
—
THREE-QUARTERS OF AN HOUR LATER, almost to the minute, Lucinda rounds the corner at the far end of the street and Maria takes her cue.
To the casual observer it will look completely unconnected, Lucinda’s appearance and Maria slipping from her car and crossing over to Lucinda’s side of the street; just two Londoners going about their daily lives.
Maria’s face will not show up on any CCTV footage when the police finally get around to checking months after Freya reports her missing and flags her flight to London. Maria’s rental car number plate is deliberately out of sight of the cameras, as she intended, her baseball cap down low, her collar up.
For all intents and purposes Maria will never be seen again.
CHAPTER 31
NINA
T he lights flicker on after four hours of darkness and Nina squeezes her eyes tight shut at the sting of it. She blinks the room back into focus and rises to stretch her aching limbs.
She managed to sleep for a large portion of the sensory deprivation period, perhaps three hours, but she had no real concept of time alone in the darkness.
She paced the black in her waking moments, mapping out the room like a woman newly blind, using the edges of things and her own strides as maps and markers. She had water at least; though silent, the tap in the room had collected a few handfuls in its curved catch cup above the drain. She had that, and time to think; much too much time to think.
Standing now she reaches her arms up and stretches out her aching back muscles, too taut from the trauma of hours before. She knows something is coming and she knows she needs food and if she had to put money on it, she’d bet that’s how they’ll get her in the next room. And by God, she has thought a lot about that next room over the last few hours.
With a hydraulic whir the door across the room slowly slides open.
Bathsheba’s voice returns, after so much silence. “Sensory deprivation complete. Please proceed to the vestibule.”
Nina looks beyond the door at the thin vestibule corridor and the other room waiting. She turns back to the door she entered the room from, firmly sealed behind her.
She reminds herself that Joe is coming, he might be here already, he will have alerted someone, help will be on its way. It’s only a matter of time until someone batters down the doors, one after the other, and rescues her. The only reason James’s firm didn’t do so before she arrived was because they didn’t want to damage the property. But if she is clearly in danger no one will think twice. And James will get her messages soon, if he hasn’t already; it will be Monday soon.
People are coming, she tells herself, and she will make it out. And she promises herself that whoever, or whatever, this is and the reasons behind it will be dragged into the light.
If she were to be honest at this very moment, she’d admit that she doesn’t care anymore if any of this was her father’s doing, though she feels a twinge of shame at the thought. She isn’t even interested in the women whom she assumes have been through this house before her. She doesn’t have space in her mind for that right now because she knows what’s coming next. Not exactly, but she knows it will be hard, physically and mentally, and she knows it will be a game designed to test her very limits. And if she keeps going long enough, she will reach those limits.
She has considered her options.
