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“Shall we talk about salary before either of us go ahead?” I folded the blueberry muffin wrapper into a tiny triangle and nodded. “I’m offering a hundred and fifty pounds a week. Would that be alright?”
I’d known it was too good to be true. I did the math, but I couldn’t stay in a youth hostel forever and with a room in a house costing around a hundred and twenty pounds a week, it would only leave me thirty pounds for food, transportation, and any essentials I needed. But I didn’t want to turn it down. Maybe I could work other jobs in around this one. Or make her apartment so clean, and make her such lovely meals, that she’d give me a raise.
“Yes, that would be fine,” I said. “Thank you. You won’t regret it, I promise.”
“Great! Then perhaps you can come back with me now and I’ll show you your room. I’d rather you saw it before you move in, in case you don’t like it.”
I stared at her, not sure I’d understood correctly. “It’s a live-in job?”
“Yes. I hope that’s not a problem?”
“No, no, it’s not a problem at all.”
“Shall we say a month’s trial period? When can you start?”
Tears flooded my eyes. “Now,” I said, blinking them away. “I could start now.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
PRESENT
How long have I been here? I’ve lost any sense of time, I don’t know whether it’s night or day. I hold my breath, listening for the slightest sound. There’s only silence, and the thought that I’ve been abandoned here makes my heart race.
I force myself to remain calm. They brought me food, they’ve given me a bathroom, they wouldn’t have gone to the trouble if they intended to leave me to die. The thought of food brings back the taste of the porridge I’d eaten. Was that breakfast?
In the silence, a mosaic of images flit through my mind. I see myself as a seven-year-old, in the cemetery in Paris, watching my mother’s coffin, stripped of its garnish of lilies and roses, being lowered slowly into the ground, then as a nine-year-old, arriving in England with my father, moving into the house with the brown door, two streets away from where my English grandmother lived. I see myself two years later, at her funeral, and three years ago, at Papa’s. There are more memories clamoring for attention, of others loved and lost, but I push them away before the tears can come. They are too recent, and my grief still too raw. If I think of them, I’ll break. And I can’t break, not here, not now.
I turn restlessly on my mattress, lie with my face to the wall. Has anyone noticed yet that Ned is missing? Carl will have, if he isn’t involved in our abduction. He reports to Ned at eight each morning; if he can’t find him, he’ll know something is wrong. But if he is involved in our abduction, if he’s one of the men holding us here, no one will notice that we’re missing for hours, maybe longer.
My sigh fills the darkness. This isn’t even about me, it’s about Ned, about who he is, Ned Hawthorpe, the son of billionaire philanthropist Jethro Hawthorpe, founder of the Hawthorpe Foundation. I am nobody. I don’t know why they didn’t kill me straight off. If they had, it would have served as a warning that they were serious—me dead, Ned taken. But if this is a kidnapping, not a payback killing, maybe they think they can demand a higher ransom for the two of us. They can’t know that Jethro Hawthorpe won’t pay a penny to get me back. And there’s no one else who would.
For the first time, I’m glad my parents aren’t alive. I’d hate for them to be worried about me, to not know where I am. My throat swells at the thought of Papa seeing what I’ve become, a prisoner in a pitch-black room. Three weeks ago, my life was perfect. I had an apartment, a job, friends. Friends. A rush of tears makes me almost choke. I fight against it, taking deep, shaky breaths. If I’m to survive here, I have to block out the last few days. I try to find a positive, something to make me not give up, not lie here and weep. Carolyn. I still have Carolyn.
I raise a hand, trace the wall with my fingers. I’m still confused about why she didn’t come to Ned’s house after the press interview, demanding to see me. I’d been so sure she would, so sure she’d understood the position I was in.I don’t believe you!she’d shouted, pointing at her phone. But maybe she had changed her mind, believed the narrative spun by Ned.
It’s another reason why I need to get out of here, and I will escape. I need to explain to Carolyn why I did what I did. That I only had a moment to decide. That if I could turn the clock back, I would. Because then none of this would have happened.
I hear the key turn in the lock and my heart starts racing again. I lie very still as he crosses the room toward me. He puts something on the floor, there’s a scrape of something else, and then he leaves without a word.
I sit up, feel around with my hand, find a tray, feel a little bit more, and find what feels like a long bread roll and an apple. This is a new tray—I tap around the floor with my hand—the old one with the porridge bowl is gone. That must have been the scrape that I heard, him picking it up. I smell tomato and pause. I like tomato but I don’t really want to eat the sandwich without knowing what’s inside. I’m about to start deconstructing it to try and work out its contents when I realize that if I take my tray to the bathroom, I’ll be able to see what’s on it.
I move from my mattress and crawl along the floor, pushing the tray in front of me. I open the bathroom door, maneuver the tray around it, push it inside. Standing, I step into the bathroom and shuffle around to face the door; on the tiny floor space, there’s barely enough room for both the tray and my feet. I pull the door closed, slide the bolt into place, and the light comes on. I crouch down clumsily and pick up the bread roll, which is sitting on a sheet of white kitchen paper. The bread is brown, the filling cheese and tomato, and it looks freshly made.
The apple is green and there’s also a white plastic cup. And, set along the edge of the tray, a small bar of chocolate.
My spirits lift at the sight of the chocolate. It seems a kind gesture, an effort to give me something nice. But it could be a trap, a ploy to win me over. I harden my resolve. They have abducted me, and I am their prisoner. The chocolate doesn’t change anything.
CHAPTER NINE
PRESENT
Another meal is brought, by the same man or a different one, it’s hard to tell when I can only sense him, not see him.
“Thank you,” I say. But he doesn’t answer.
I’m not sure if my last meal—the cheese and tomato sandwich—was lunch or dinner. I ended up pushing the tray back to my corner and ate sitting on my mattress, because I’d rather eat in the dark than sitting on a toilet. I fell asleep soon after and when I woke, it seemed like a long time had passed. So maybe I’ve slept through the night.
I pull the tray toward me, feel with my right hand. There’s a bowl. I lift it to my nose; it smells like porridge. I dip my finger in to taste; it is porridge. So, unless they intend to feed us porridge in the evening as well as in the morning, this is probably day two. I’ll need to keep track of the days; Ned and I were taken in the early hours of Saturday, the seventeenth of August, so today is Sunday the eighteenth.
