Page 71 of The Friend Request

Wrapped around the brick, held in place with an elastic band, is a note. Block capitals this time. Black marker.

COME TO OUR OLD SCHOOL TOMORROW NIGHT. ALONE. NO POLICE.

YOUR CHILD’S LIFE DEPENDS ON IT.

I read it once, then again. The cold from the broken window is on my face, my hands, and my neck, and I can feel it all the way through to my spine.

Your child’s life depends on it.

Olivia.

He came back to ram the message home.

My hands shake so badly the paper rattles. I put the brick down on the coffee table, hold the note in both hands, and stare at it. My vision blurs, clears, and blurs again. I read it one more time – your child’s life depends on it – and the words hit something deep inside me, somewhere below the fear and the shock, somewhere where the only thing that exists is my daughter’s face and my daughter’s voice and the fierce, animal certainty that I would walk into fire for her without thinking twice.

Our old school. He means the school in Keynsham. The school where Ross and I met, where we kissed in the library, where we climbed through the window after hours and sat in the dark and told each other things we’d never told anyone. Our school. He’s calling me back to where it started.

Tomorrow night. Alone. No police.

I fold the note, put it in my pocket, and stand in the middle of the ruined sitting room with glass under my boots and cold air on my face, and I know – with a certainty that sits in my chest like iron – that I’m going.

I don’t care what it costs. I don’t care what he wants, or what he’s planning, or what’s waiting for me in that building after dark.

He put my daughter’s name on that paper.

And that’s the last thing he should have done.

Chapter Thirty-Three

I don’t remember picking up the keys. I must have done it – they’re in my hand, Jeff’s keys, the fob with the frayed leather strap and the scratched Land Rover badge – but the space between standing in the sitting room reading that note and running across the dark yard towards the hill is a blank. My brain has done something to the sequence. It’s cut out the middle, the part where I made the decision, found my coat, and unlocked the front door.

I run.

I’ve never run like this. Not in a gym, not for a bus, not the panicked sprint to the school gate when I was late for a pickup and Olivia was the last child standing in the playground with her teacher. This is different. This is legs and lungs and the hammering certainty that if I slow down, if I stop, if I trip on this hill in the dark and go down, something terrible will reach me before I can get up again.

The ridge is invisible. I know it’s there because I’ve walked it every day for a week, but there’s no moon, the cloud is low, and the ground is just black – black grass, black mud, black stone. I’m running blind, one hand stretched out in front of me like a child in a dark room, the other clenched around the keys. My boot hits a rock, and I stumble, catch myself, keep going. My breathing is ragged and too loud. I can hear it bouncing off the hillside, and I think: Can he hear me? Has he really left, or is he watching me from the dark the way he watched from the ridge the other night, a shape against the sky, patient and still?

I don’t look back. I can’t. If I look back, I’ll stop. If I stop, I’ll fall, and if I fall, I won’t get up.

The ground levels out at the top, and I know I’m on the ridge because the wind hits me full in the face. I turn left and follow the line of it, gasping. The valley drops away on the other side, and somewhere below me is Jeff’s farmhouse with its grey walls, its chimney, and its sleeping collie. I run down the slope towards it with my arms out for balance, my ankles turning on the tussocks, and my heart beating so hard it feels like it’s trying to leave my body.

The yard. The gate. The Land Rover, parked where I left it this afternoon. I get the driver’s door open, throw myself into the seat, shove the key into the ignition, and twist it. The engine coughs once, twice, and catches. The headlights blaze on, the yard fills with white light, and I can see the gate and the wall and the track leading away towards the lane. I slam the car into reverse and swing out of the yard so fast the wing mirror clips the gatepost and something cracks.

I don’t care. I’m moving. I’m off the hill and on to the lane, and the Land Rover is lurching through the dark with its dodgy clutch and its rattling dashboard. I’m gripping the wheel so hard my fingers have gone numb, and the headlights carve a tunnel through the blackness. The hedgerows fly past, and I don’t know what speed I’m doing and I don’t check.

The lanes twist. I take a corner too fast, and the back end slides on the wet surface. For one horrible second the hedgerow rushes towards the windscreen, then the tyres catch and I’m straight again. My breath is coming in short, hard sobs that I can’t control and don’t try to. The Land Rover’s heater is blasting cold air because I haven’t thumped the dashboard the way Jeff told me to. My hands are numb against the wheel, my coat is soaked from the hill, and my boots are caked with mud. I can feel the note in my pocket, folded tight, pressing on my thigh like a second heartbeat.

Your child’s life depends on it.

I drive past darkened farmhouses, closed gates, and sleeping fields. The lanes widen slowly into B-roads and the B-roads find an A-road, and suddenly there are catseyes and white lines and the occasional pair of headlights coming the other way. Each one makes me flinch because I don’t know what car he drives. I don’t know what he was driving tonight, I didn’t see it, I only heard it, and every vehicle that passes could be him circling back to finish what he started.

The dashboard clock says twenty past eleven. I’ve been driving for nearly forty minutes and I keep glancing at my phone, willing the signal bar to climb, but there’s nothing. One bar flickers and dies. Nothing again. The road rises and dips, and I pass through a village – street lights, a pub, a phone box, a sign I can’t read at this speed – and then out the other side and into darkness again.

Then, on a long, straight stretch of dual carriageway, the phone lights up.

One, then two, then three bars of signal – and before I can reach for it, the screen explodes. Notification after notification, stacking up so fast the phone vibrates continuously on the seat, a low, angry buzz like something alive. I grab it with my left hand and hold it up, and the screen is full.

Missed calls. Seven of them. All from Alex.