Stepping into the room, I slid to the floor behind one of the doors, drew my knees up around my chest and curled myself into a ball, expecting his hands to reach down and grab me at any moment. The suspense was terrible and the thought that he might decide not to find me until it suited him made me regret ever having left the relative safety of the bedroom.
‘Where are you, Grace?’ His voice came from somewhere out in the hall and his soft sing-song tone only added to my terror. In the silence, I heard him sniffing the air. ‘Hmm, I do so love the smell of fear,’ he breathed. His feet padded across the hall and, when they got nearer, I shrank back against the wall. They stopped and, as I strained my ears, trying to work out where he was, I felt his breath on my cheek.
‘Boo!’ he whispered.
As I burst into tears of relief that my ordeal was over, he roared with laughter. A whirring sound heralded the beginnings of daylight filtering into the room and, raising my head, I saw Jack holding a remote control in his hand.
‘Steel shutters,’ he explained. ‘Every window on the ground floor has been fitted with them. Even if you happen, by some miracle, to find a way out of your room while I’m at work, you certainly won’t find a way out of the house.’
‘Let me go, Jack,’ I begged. ‘Please, just let me go.’
‘Why would I do that? In fact, I think I’m going to enjoy having you here, especially if you continue trying to escape. At least you’ll keep me amused until Millie comes to live with us.’ He paused. ‘You know, I was almost beginning to regret not arranging for her to move in as soon as we came back from our honeymoon. Just think—she could have been arriving at any moment.’
I drew in my breath sharply.
‘Do you really think I’m going to let Millie come anywhere near this house?’ I cried. ‘Or you anywhere near her?’
‘I seem to remember having this conversation with you in Thailand,’ he said, sounding bored. ‘The sooner you accept that the wheels are already in motion and that there is nothing you can do to stop them the better it will be for you. There is no escape—you’re mine now.’
‘I can’t believe you think you’re going to get away with it! You can’t keep me hidden away forever, you know. What about my friends, our friends? Aren’t we meant to be having dinner with Moira and Giles when we return the car to them?’
‘I shall tell them exactly what I intend to tell Millie’s school—it will now be four weeks until you see her, by the way—which is that you picked up a nasty bug in Thailand and are indisposed. And, when I do eventually allow you to see Millie again, I will watch your every move and listen to every word. Should you try to inform anyone of what is going on, you and Millie will both pay. As for your friends, well, you’re not really going to have time for them now that you’re so happily married and, when you no longer reply to their emails, they’ll forget all about you. It will be a gradual thing, of course. I’ll let you maintain contact for a while, but I’ll vet your emails before you send them just in case you try to alert anyone to your situation.’ He paused. ‘But I can’t imagine you would be so foolish.’
Until that point, I had never doubted that I would be able to escape from him, or at least tell someone that I was being held prisoner, but there was something about the matter-of-fact way he spoke that was chilling. His absolute certainty that everything would pan out exactly as he had planned made me, for the first time, doubt my ability to outwit him. As he escorted me back to my bedroom, telling me that I would get no food until the following day, all I could think about was what he had done to Molly and what he would do to me if I tried to get away from him again. I couldn’t afford to risk not seeing Millie for yet another week and the thought of her disappointment when I didn’t turn up for the next few Sundays made me feel even more wretched than I already felt.
It was the hunger pains I was experiencing that gave me the idea of pretending I had appendicitis so that Jack would have no choice but to take me to hospital, where I felt I’d be able to get someone to listen to me. When he eventually brought me food the next day, as he had promised he would, it was already late evening, so I hadn’t had anything to eat for over forty-eight hours. It was hard not to eat much of what he’d brought me and, as I clutched my stomach and moaned that it hurt, I was grateful for the cramps that made my pain more genuine.