‘Suppose not. I mean, I’m going this way anyway.’
Chloe’s smile disappeared back into the folds of her jacket, and she turned her head to the window, watching the traffic slow to a crawl at the next approaching roundabout.
‘Busy day ahead?’ she asked, the words muffled.
Alex rolled her eyes. ‘When’s it not? Have you seen my office recently? There’s a backlog of paperwork a foot high on my desk. You know, before I got promoted I used to think South Wales was pretty quiet. Be careful what you wish for, right?’
Her promotion to detective inspector had happened a few years earlier and life was now moving so quickly, in such a relentless rush of activity, that Alex often found herself worrying about the things she feared she might be missing. Her divorce had helped push this fear into a full-blown panic, but rather than stop to let life catch up with her she had pushed ahead, intent on holding on to her workload as the last passenger on a sinking ship clings to the only lifeboat.
‘I think you’d get bored if things were too quiet,’ Chloe said. ‘But if you get a break and you fancy a drink, give me a shout. I’m usually designated driver, but I don’t have a car. We’ll have to bus it.’
Alex smiled. It was a nice thought. They’d managed a night out just after Christmas: one so wild she’d been back home by ten thirty. Chloe was sensible for her age, which suited Alex just fine. She didn’t need to be made to feel any older than she already did.
‘A break,’ Alex said. ‘Just imagine that.’
The station loomed ahead of them, as grey as the sky that formed the backdrop behind it. It stood on a corner in the middle of Pontypridd town centre as though keeping an eye on the local residents, and Alex had often wondered why they couldn’t do something to make the place look a little less hostile, although she imagined colour might have defeated the intended purpose of its existence. It appeared they weren’t there to be cheerful.
The thought of the day that stretched ahead of them pushed her reluctantly from the car. In truth, Chloe had got her right. Not having something to do or somewhere to be gave Alex too much time and space to think about the things that haunted the silent hours of the night when she would lie in her room and find them gathered at the bedside, ready to make sure she hadn’t forgotten them. Perhaps the thought of a pile of paperwork and an afternoon locked in the office wasn’t too unappealing, just for today. She presumed she should make the most of being confined to the realms of the station while she was given the rare opportunity.
Chapter Two
It was late January; the kind of January that holds everything still in its grip, its fingers embedded in the hard ground and its breath staining the air with shivers. She knew all about the cold, despite being indoors. She had been there for days – exactly how long, she couldn’t be too sure – and with every hour, and with every next humiliation inflicted on her, she grew colder in her bones, hoping for death to relieve her.
It occurred to her that no one might have realised she was missing. Moving from friend to friend, from sofa to sofa, had always seemed such a good idea; in fact, it had been her sole method of survival for the previous eighteen months. She couldn’t stay still, which now, bound to this chair, seemed sadly ironic. She could go weeks without speaking to what family she had left, and those ‘friends’ she had stayed with she now realised were nothing of the sort. She didn’t even know them, not really. She had used them; they had used her. She had got what she deserved in the end, she supposed.
Would anyone now notice she was gone?
The only person she had really spoken to about how she was feeling – the only person she had allowed herself to get remotely close to during the past few months – was here, and now there was no getting away from him.
The room was dark, the only window boarded up with thick wooden slats. There were drapes hanging from the walls, black and heavy, but she didn’t know why they were there or what they were hiding. Sometimes, she couldn’t see anything. Her eyelids felt weighed down and when he wasn’t there she would allow herself to close them, though she never slept. She didn’t think she’d slept for days. How long would it take before it sent her into madness?
She had cried at the start. When she’d woken to find herself in that unfamiliar place, tied to a chair by a man whose face she couldn’t see, she had cried, screamed; begged. She had offered him things that repulsed her, but he didn’t seem interested in any of it. He didn’t seem interested in her.
What did he want from her?
It was so difficult to try to piece together the events that had led up to her being here. There were things she remembered, but so many more that she didn’t. She had been to work, that much she remembered. She sometimes shared a taxi home with one of the girls she worked with, but she couldn’t remember anything about the journey home. She couldn’t remember that there’d been a journey.
She was tied to a chair, at her wrists and by her ankles. Her arms were pulled awkwardly behind her, cutting off her circulation. She had tried to squeeze her hands through the tight loops of the ties holding her in place, wear them down against the wooden slats of the seat, but her results had only left her with raw skin and broken hope.
She wasn’t getting out of here alive.
On the first day, the man had cut her nails. She had been left alone for what felt like for ever, her vision blurred by tears and her mind clogged with dark thoughts of the ways that this man might end her life. She tried to kick out, thrusting her hips forward to send the chair tipping to one side, but when she toppled with it she realised she had only made things worse, and she stayed there like that, tied to the chair with her right arm deadening beneath her until her captor made his silent return.
When he came back, he tilted the chair upright, moving it as though she was weightless. She spoke to him, but he refused to reply. When he released her hands from the knotted cable ties, a surge of adrenalin rushed her and she swung an arm at the man, clawing at the dark mask he wore over his face. It was then she felt her life had ended, because it was then she saw him for the first time. Might things have been different had she never seen his face? She would never know.
The realisation of who he was had made her sick. She threw up down the front of her top, chunks of the slop he had fed her some time during the previous evening spattering the cotton and lacing the air with an acidic, rancid tang.
Then the evening came back to her. She remembered seeing him. She remembered how pleased she had been to see him.
Later, as her memory returned in fragments, she remembered accepting a lift from him.