Well, she’d done all she could.
There had always been the possibility that Duncan or Yvonne or Michael would scupper it all by querying why, for example, they needed to leave the car at the house. She’d gone on about why this was necessary, saying that the police might trace it and find them, but she’d just been waiting for someone to go, ‘Maggie, you’re talking shite.’ Because there were plenty ways round that one – keeping to the back roads that wouldn’t have cameras. Changing the number plate. Dumping it somewhere and buying a new second-hand car with cash.
But none of them had the criminal mindset. They hadn’t stopped to think that maybe Maggie was setting it up to look like they hadn’t left at all – or at least, not of their own accord.
And they hadn’t stopped to think why it should be a no-no to withdraw money from their accounts before they left. The idea that the bank would have recorded the numbers on the banknotes was mental. But they’d bought that as well. None of them had rumbled Maggie’s real motivation – that there should be nothing to suggest that their vanishing was premeditated.
Once Nick came under suspicion, of course, there was the risk that Yvonne and Michael would leap to his defence and tell the cops what had really happened. But they hated Nick. They’d surely be happy enough to let him sweat.
She shut the kitchen door behind her and called up the stairs to Duncan: ‘Okay, we’d best get going.’
She’d already persuaded him they should take nothing with them because she wanted ‘a completely fresh start’ with no reminders of their old lives. Duncan had bought that too, so there would be no missing clothes or suitcases to suggest they’d packed up and gone, skipping off into the fucking sunset.
Duncan came downstairs, holding Isla and weeping.
‘What’s Nick going to think? When he comes back to find us gone? He’s going to be so bewildered! So upset!’
So angry.
‘He’ll be fine.’ Maggie put her arms around him. ‘Yvonne and Michael will look after him.’
‘Yvonne has never liked Nick! Oh God! What sort of a father abandons his child? He loves me, I know he does, and I love him, despite everything he’s done. How can I do this to him?’
Fuck.
Maggie took a step back so she could look him in the eye. ‘If he really loved you, would he have tried to kill Isla? Would he have hurt me? He doesn’t care if you’re happy or not, as long as he has you all to himself.’
Isla, as if on cue, looked up at Duncan and smiled, one arm waving about like she was trying to grab his hair. Duncan took her little hand in his and began sobbing again.
Ruthlessly, Maggie said, ‘Nick pushed her pram into the path of a timber lorry. If you hadn’t happened to be there, she would have been crushed to death under its wheels.’
Duncan swiped at his eyes.
‘Our first priority is this wee one. Look at her. Look at her, Duncan. She is completely helpless. She can’t protect herself, so we have to do it for her. Nick’s sixteen. He’s technically an adult. We have to make ourselves safe, make Isla safe, and then we can think about what to do about Nick.’
After a long moment, he nodded.
Thank God, he nodded.
They left the front door unlocked but shut, and walked off across the gravel to the track that led through the trees to the fields. The sun was out, and the air smelt dead nice, all earthy and clean. Where the trees began, Duncan turned and looked back at the house.
‘It’s not forever,’ said Maggie.
Aye, right.
She touched Duncan’s arm and adjusted Isla, who was strapped to her front in the new baby carrier she’d secretly bought, identical to the old one, which she’d left in a cupboard upstairs. There had been no need to bring the car seat, as Duncan, in his typical over-the-top way when it came to Isla, had bought an extra one for Yvonne’s car, ‘Just in case of emergencies’. She wasn’t sure who, apart from Michael and Yvonne, knew about that. Hopefully no one, so when the car seat was found in place in their car, that would be another reason for suspicion that they hadn’t left voluntarily.
As they entered the wood, Maggie’s heart started to hammer and she found herself looking back every few steps. She kept expecting Nick to suddenly appear at her shoulder in that creepy, silent way he had.
But when they reached the fields, she began to relax a bit.
Michael had given his farmhands the day off, pretending that with Yvonne away at the conference he wouldn’t know what to do with himself and wanted to keep busy, so would do their jobs himself. There should be no one in the fields. No one in the farmyard to see them as they got into Yvonne’s car.
She was thinking about that, about their escape, about what would happen next, when a figure stepped from the shadow of an oak tree.
27
Lulu - June 2019
In Langholm, as she approached the garage on the High Street, Lulu decided to pull in and get petrol and something to eat and drink. Maybe the shaking would stop if she had something inside her. And she’d need a full tank of petrol for the drive south. As she stood by the car filling up, she noticed that everything seemed different: the noise of the traffic slowing for some hold-up ahead was drilling through her head, loud and aggressive-seeming; a child that suddenly ran after its mother on the pavement made her heart jump in her chest; the rain on her hair, on the sleeve of her sweatshirt, was somehow malevolent, as if deliberately targeting her, making her, ridiculously, want to cry.
Oh God.
She had to hold it together.
She consciously slowed her breathing, taking a long breath in and then letting it out gradually, gazing across the street at the buildings opposite.
Something, some part of her subconscious, must have kicked in, because suddenly she was focusing on the face of one of the drivers. The man in the small silver car a few vehicles down from the one opposite her . . .
It was Nick.
It was Nick!
If he turned his head just fractionally, he would see her!