I run to the front door and wrench it open to find Leah, red-faced, panting, hurling herself into the hall, and slamming the big front door shut behind her. She lets out a huge sigh and doubles over, hands on her knees from the exertion of running.
The first shot of adrenaline is already thrumming in my chest, my legs, my fists, the need to protect my eldest child and deal with any threat.
“What’s the matter?” I put my hands on her thin shoulders, the straps of her school backpack cinched tight. She is shaking with fear. “Leah, are you OK? What happened?”
It takes her a moment to gather enough breath to speak and her voice, when it finally comes, is broken by a sob.
“Someone was following me.” She’s still gasping, pulling in great shuddering breaths. “Someone in a car followed me home.”
32
“Are you hurt?” I study my daughter for any signs of injury. It’s rare to see her so upset and I feel a flare of rage at those responsible. “Are you all right?”
“I’m OK,” she says. The tears are coming now, fear giving way to shock. “I’m all right, I ran, they didn’t catch me.”
I look out the window onto the drive. “What sort of car, Leah? Did you get a good look?”
She gasps out a few words of description. A long car, gray, dirty, old. A foreign make but she doesn’t know which one.
“Stay here.” I grab my phone from the hall table. “Lock the door behind me and don’t let anyone in but me, OK? No one else.”
She nods and I wrench the door open, running down my drive toward the street. Adrenaline is racing hard through me now, obliterating rational thought, and leaving only the animal desire to confront the threat, to deal with it, to meet it with as much force as was needed to make sure they never came here again.Fight or flight. Small stones from the drive jab painfully through my socks, but I barely register the discomfort.
I run into the middle of the street, eyes scanning left, right, left again in search of a gray car. There’s little traffic on the estate at this time of day, just a few cars going through the junction further down the hill.Think. Access to the Park estate was controlled and only a couple of roads to the north and one to theeast would be open at this time of day. I turn left and sprint up the middle of the street toward the roundabout that would take a driver north up to Derby Road, checking every car I can see.
A black Audi going too fast into the junction has to brake to avoid me, honking and swerving rather more dramatically than necessary. I ignore the driver, scanning the three roads leading away from here but there is no gray car that I can see. I run back to the top of my drive and stop, check the front door is still safely shut, then squint into the sun toward the junction at the far end.
There.
A gunmetal-gray Volvo is pulled tight to the curb, front window down, a ghost of vapor rising from the exhaust.
“Hey!” I move toward it, breaking into a run.See how you like being pursued, you bastard. “Hey you!”
When I’m still twenty meters away, the Volvo pulls away from the curb and accelerates into the street, engine revving hard, automatic transmission climbing quickly through the gears. I run faster, my lungs starting to burn.
“Stop!” The car’s back window is opaque with grime and a layer of dirt obscures half the number plate. The first four characters look likeFP55or maybeFP58but the rest is buried beneath a film of crusted-on mud. The Volvo continues to accelerate and a split-second glimpse of the wing mirror reveals a flash of dark hair and sunglasses. But it’s too quick to tell whether it’s male or female.
I shout again, legs and arms pumping as I sprint barefoot down the street. “Stop!”
A van brakes sharply to avoid a collision with the Volvo as it roars through the crossroads without stopping, heading right upthe center of the wide road to increase the distance between us. Finally, I remember the phone in my hand and try to unlock it and select the camera while I’m still running, stopping to snap a shaky picture as the Volvo pulls farther away. It disappears around a bend in the road, and is gone.
I stop, hands on my knees, chest heaving as I pant for breath.
All three kids have their faces up against the bay window when I walk back up the drive. Leah has picked Daisy up and is holding her on her hip as she opens the front door.
I make sure the door is double-locked again before pulling my oldest child into a hug.
“You sure you’re OK?”
She nods. “Just… yeah. I’m all right. It was horrible.”
Jess calls straight back when I text her, and I spend a few minutes reassuring her that our eldest daughter is shaken but OK. Leah is mature for her age and has always been so good with her brother and sister that I sometimes forgot she’s still only sixteen, still a child herself. I’d rather her siblings didn’t hear all the details but they both refuse to leave their big sister’s side, so we sit together in the kitchen while Leah explains what happened.
She had first seen the car outside school this morning, she says. Her friend Liv had made a comment because it was parked on the yellow zigzag lines near the school gates, where parents were always getting named and shamed by the headteacher for stopping to drop off or pick up. Then she saw the Volvo again at the end of the school day, when she was waiting at the bus stop on Aspley Lane. She normally got the bus home with a friend but today she’d been on her own.
The car was there again when she got off the bus in the middle of the city, she says in a shaky voice.
“It was just waiting across the road,” Leah says. “I got off the bus on Angel Row, and it was in a taxi stop, just sitting there. It looked out of place because all the rest were black cabs. I started walking my usual way home and thought it’d be OK because it’s the middle of town and there were loads of people around, right? Then like ten minutes later, I’m coming up through Castle Gate and I thought he was gone, thought I was OK because I was properly back in The Park. But I’m coming down the hill and I saw it again on a side street as I came past, just sitting there with the engine running.” She wipes a tear away. “I just freaked, I panicked, thought I was never going to get home. I was thinking about that thing I saw on Netflix the other week about that girl who got abducted off the street and…” She tails off, suddenly aware of her two younger siblings staring at her, wide-eyed. “And so I just started running, and ran all the way home from there.”
