‘You must’ve been terrified,’ Simone says, though it sounds trite.
‘It’s weird,’ Lucy says, her tone surprisingly reflective.
They join a wider highway, and Lucy’s features are thrown around and distorted by new street lights, orange and dim.
‘I had no idea what was happening,’ she says. ‘I smelled him. His aftershave, then the leather of his gloves before I noticed anything else. Before I was really awake. Then he picked me up. I started struggling. Snagged my hair on the door. Stupid, but I always thought I might be able to escape that kind of thing, you know? Whenever I saw it on TV or I imagined it,’ Lucy says. Her voice, as she begins really talking, is hoarse, from lack of water or something worse – screaming?
‘I’m so sorry,’ Simone tells her.
‘He put a bag over my head. He was so strong. So strong. Then he just, like, put me in the car, sort of threw me in the boot, like he does this all the time – he probably does – and I tried to scrabble out, I was screaming, but he taped up my mouth under the hood. Then he just held all my limbs with his arms across them, tied me with rope that he hadthere. Then I went mad calm. Like, this eerie stillness. Was just making plans.’
‘Plans?’
‘How I’d get out.’ She pauses. ‘How to call someone. And wondering if he might rape or traffic me.’
‘Did he say anything?’ Simone asks, her voice a sad wet sponge. ‘Do you know how he … why he …?’
‘No. I know nothing. That’s the thing.’ Lucy bites her lip and looks over at Simone. ‘He never once spoke naturally.’
‘Not once?’
‘Never. I have no idea who he is. He never said a word without distorting his voice. And most of the time, he made no sounds at all.’
Simone shivers. How sinister, to be so silently kidnapped.
‘I may as well have been – I don’t know – like, an object, and him a courier.’
Simone winces. Lucy has always been eloquent, but especially so now. God, she wishes she knew what to say back, to make it better, or at least to stop it from getting worse, the way you run a burn under cold water to prevent it from infiltrating the deeper layers of skin.
Drive.
Just drive. That is what she needs to do to stop it spreading. Get them out of here. Let the ordeal end now, force it into the past. Don’t add an arrest to it.
‘He bound my wrists but not my legs. I tried to scream but you really can only make such small sounds through your nose. I’d read this article, years ago, about kicking through the brake lights, but do you have any idea how hard that actually is to do? After a bit, he beeped his horn, incessantly, to get me to stop. Guess anyone else just thought he had road rage.’
‘Where did he take you?’ Simone says, taking a slip road. For the first time, she sees the airport signposted. Home.
‘I don’t know. It was about a ten-minute journey, that’s all I know. It had a big boot, the car. Was quiet. I was making stupid plans the whole way, like kicking him the second he opened the boot. And then we reached – somewhere. He opened the boot, but of course he held me down as soon as he had. I have no idea where it was. I was just shocked. I wasn’t even scared,’ she says. ‘It was so weird. You know when you’re just so stunned by something and it repeats and repeats on you, but you feel nothing?’
‘I really do,’ Simone says, and something in her wants to make Lucy know she, too, felt as Lucy did, but you can’t; it would sound selfish and insincere. Lucy will only know this to be true if she has children of her own.
‘He carried me in somewhere and sat me on the floor,’ she says. ‘Then he passed me a phone, and that read out instructions to me while I was blindfolded. Did you … see the video?’
‘Yes.’
‘He started the recording, then loosened the rope from my wrists. Once he was out of the room, the phone read out instructions for me to take off my own hood and tape. I never saw him.’ It is here that Simone truly thinks they have done the only thing they could in leaving.
‘He’s untraceable,’ she says calmly, though she doesn’t feel it.
‘Yes. And I just sat there. Obedient. Thinking,well, at least I’m still alive. I probably had that thought once a minute for hours and hours,’ she says. ‘I’m still here. He hasn’t killed me yet.And the longer it went on, the better it got. Like, I mean, sort of.’ A dark laugh. ‘I kept imagining him calling you, you and Dad calling the police –’ Simone breathes deeply – ‘and then you’d be coming to rescue me. We did the video, I had to put the tape and hood back on, and he came in then to do my wrists. But I was still alive, and I knew, for a while anyway, the more time that passed, the more likely it was that you’d come.’
‘Was it only ever just him?’
‘Yep. Except, just once, he had a visitor. Turned up at the door. I heard a knock, somewhere distant, a floor above me maybe, then her voice.’
‘A woman?’
‘She didn’t know I was there.’
