I stop. Behind me, the automatic doors open and shut, sensing I’ve not moved.
I know. I know what those postcards were telling me. It was there, all the time, under my nose: you just have to read them properly. It’s so simple I hear myself laugh out loud, then stop, shocked at myself.
No wonder I couldn’t see it. Sophie was never into crosswords, word games, all that stuff I liked. She was visual, she loved art, her drawing. And that’s how she’s been trying to communicate with me, even now.
Sophie wasn’t just doodling flowers on her messages home. Oh, she was, but that’s not all they are.
I know them. I know what they are now.
Stylised and symmetrical, they’re not much like real roses. But that’s because she’s not drawing roses, but carvings of roses, the kind you might see etched into antique stonework. Pretty, carved stone roses that might run round the sides of a big Victorian mansion house, say, with a little ruff inside of each one, the sort of detail we don’t bother to build into our homes nowadays.
Slowly I break into a jog, heading to my car, then pick up my pace. Because I recognise them now – I am absolutely certain where I saw them.
I was outside Parklands. Sophie’s been drawing the roses that cover Parklands, sending me the house’s motif. I bet you’d find roses inside that place, too – inside Parklands, the house where Nancy grew up.
Because Nancy was always the answer.
37
SOPHIE
There was nothing I could do, not at first. I couldn’t see any way out: I just had to get through it, I told myself, wait it out. I didn’t let myself think about what I was waiting for. I couldn’t break down. If I lost control … something told me that would be a bad idea. I just had to wait, for an opportunity. Be patient.
And then one day, that first winter, the opportunity came: he said it was time for another postcard.
The first one had been my idea, something we’d discussed before I went. We’d been planning how we could be together, without people coming after us. We never used the word police.
‘I just need to get a message home, don’t I?’ It seemed so simple to me. ‘So they don’t worry.’
‘How?’ We’d been in his car as usual, he’d picked me up to snatch some minutes together. It was easier than you’d think, when no one’s looking to catch you.
‘Well, I could phone.’
‘They’d trace it. You couldn’t phone home, not straight after anyway. There’ll be too much attention.’
I felt silly. ‘A letter then,’ I said. ‘In my handwriting, so they know it’s real.’
He was silent, so I knew he was thinking about it.
But I didn’t like it when he showed me the postcards. It must have been a fortnight into me being here. Still the early days. Even then, they didn’t sit right. I don’t know where he’d got them, he must ordered them off some collectors’ website or something. They were so anonymous. Spain! read the one on the top.
So this is where they might think I was, sunning myself on sandy beaches? It seemed like such a slap in the face, for everyone I’d left behind.
‘There’re a lot of them,’ I remember saying, uncertainly. He was wearing plastic gloves, so he didn’t get his fingerprints on them. The hair on his wrists showed through the rubber. I didn’t want to look at it for some reason. It made it all too real, silly as that sounds – given how far things had already gone.
But I did it, as we’d agreed. I wrote the message he told me to say, word by word – ‘We can’t take any risks, or let any detail slip, you need to say exactly what I want’ – then signed my name, with my little daisy flower as normal. It was such a short, cold little message, I couldn’t imagine what Mum would think.
I hoped she wouldn’t worry too much.
I didn’t know he’d ask me to do it again. The days were so short by then, we must have been well into winter. I couldn’t quite believe I was still in there, if I actually let myself consider how much time was passing. I didn’t know what was happening outside, and he didn’t tell me – or wouldn’t tell me.
Like before, he dictated it to me.
‘You know,’ I said, ‘I’m not sure that’s a word I’d use.’ Because I’d thought about this, in case he said I had to do it again. I’d had a lot of time to think.
I was going to send a little message of my own somehow. With the first letter of each line, I’d spell out a word down the side of the card: Help. Or maybe SOS. Whatever I could get past him, I wasn’t sure. So I kept making mistakes – not all of them deliberate – trying to get in the odd word that I’d chosen. But he would just make me start again, and he was getting frustrated. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said, tears in my eyes. ‘I keep getting it wrong.’ I wasn’t just acting. These postcards, these messages home – they scared me, hiding our tracks even more. How would they ever find me?
But he was getting angry, which was worse. Which is why, in the end, I did what he said. I wrote down just what he wanted, his bland, careful message.
‘Is that all of it?’ I said, about to sign it. I was cross-legged on the mattress, writing propped on a book. And it was then that I saw it, one of the little flowers on the wall panelling behind his head, where he was sitting on the sofa. I’d always liked them. I just drew it, the rose, with its little inner frill of petals, instead of my usual daisy. It was a quick sketch, little more than a doodle.
My stomach fluttered and squeezed as I handed the card over to him.
He didn’t say a thing. He read it carefully, holding it in his gloved hand. I hadn’t taken much of a risk, really. ‘It’ll do,’ he said, slipping it in his jacket pocket, before he left.
‘We’re going to be OK, aren’t we,’ I whispered in Teddy’s ear, after he’d gone. ‘We are, we are, we are.’ For the first time in ages, I felt full of lightness.
Of course, nothing happened. No one came. But it made me feel good to know that I was doing something that he didn’t know about.
So the next time, I did it again, and the next, copying just how they were carved on the wall: the rounded, identical flowers running around the room in a row, their petals arranged in their centres, so they looked like double rosettes.
I didn’t really dare hope it would do anything. And the longer I stayed here, the harder it got to imagine that anyone was even looking for me. Who’d even recognise them? I knew no one came round here any more, that much was obvious. I felt like someone in a fairytale, leaving a trail of breadcrumbs that the mice gobble up. But it stopped me despairing, every time he made me send one of those postcards home, lying that I was OK.
And it was more than that: I was doing something he didn’t know about. Rebelling. It was like using a little muscle, that I hadn’t tried for a long time. Practice, maybe. I’m still not sure for what.
38
KATE
I’ll find a window. They can’t be that secure, it’s just wood, old now, warped by rain and heat. I’ll get a hammer if I have to. But first I try the main door to make sure I’m right.
With a trembling finger, I trace the outline of one carved flower: there they are, like I thought: roses. A whole arch of them, dozens, if not a hundred of these stylised flower motifs carved into the stone at Parklands.
Just like on her postcards home.
Sophie put her signature daisy on the first one, just like she always did. When she started changing them, I didn’t understand.
But now I see the roses clearly, understanding her message at last. They’re stamped in the brickwork of the building, too, marching round the boarded-up windows, matching the tiles under my feet; a riot of geometric blooms, everywhere, now that I know. I know they will be inside, too.
I don’t have time to stop, fear urging me on. I push against the double doors with my shoulder, hard. They’re solid, but these hinges are old, metal could rust – the right door gives, just a little. Not that much, but …