Why Don’t You Come for Me (14 page)

However, even she had to admit that when they left the cottage there did not appear to be anything to worry about. Harry, Charlotte and Sean were all reclining in various attitudes on the sofas in the sitting room, watching a DVD of an old
Superman
movie. (After years of resistance, television and DVDs had been allowed to infiltrate the Wheatons’ ‘simple holiday home’ – not least because Mrs Wheaton was fed up with missing
Desperate Housewives
.) Little did she realize that as soon as the car was safely out of sight, the Man of Steel had been spewed out of the player in favour of a horror movie, in which a crazed serial killer stalked a party of teenagers who were holed up in an isolated country house. It was not a particularly plausible plot, and the two boys mocked it ceaselessly until Sean eventually said, ‘I’ve got a better one than this, at home. Have you seen
The Terror at French Creek
?’

Ten-year-old Charlotte piped up: ‘Mum won’t like us watching that.’

‘Shut up, short-stack,’ said Harry. ‘You wait here while we go up to Sean’s for some better merchandise.’

‘You’re not supposed to leave me on my own,’ Charlotte protested.

‘So? Who’s going to tell Mum and Dad?’

‘Not me,’ said his sister, quickly.

They left her sitting in front of the television, from which the latest victim’s screams were ringing out in stereo. With her brother gone, Charlotte considered the fact that although Harry had threatened her with serious penalties if she muted, paused, turned off or otherwise interfered with the DVD, he had not said anything about staying in the room with it. She knew that it was a stupid film really, but now the cast had been whittled down to one girl, left all alone in the house with the killer somewhere close to hand, the tension was almost unbearable. Charlotte could not decide which was worse: to stay in the room with the film, or to wait in another room, from which she would undoubtedly still be able to hear the sound effects and that awful music, which always told you when something horrible was about to happen. Maybe she could lock herself in the loo until the boys came back. Then she thought about the faulty bolt, which Dad was always going to screw in more firmly, but never actually got round to fixing. He said it didn’t really matter, because it was only family, and you could always call out and say it was occupied. Much good that would do you, when a maniac with a chain-saw came barging in.

The two boys slouched into The Hideaway just as Jo appeared from the kitchen with a shopping bag on her arm. ‘Hello,’ she said. ‘Where’s Charlotte? I thought you weren’t supposed to leave her on her own.’

‘We’ve just come to fetch something,’ Sean said, not making eye contact.

‘Charlie’s OK on her own for a few minutes,’ said Harry. ‘She’s not a baby.’

‘No, of course not,’ said Jo, half wondering if she ought to interfere, teetering as usual on the tightrope between responsible adult and heavy-handed step-parent. ‘You haven’t forgotten I’m going to Booths for some shopping?’

‘No,’ Sean shouted impatiently from halfway up the stairs. ‘You already told me at least three times. I’ve got my key.’

Up in the bedroom, Sean could not immediately locate the promised DVD. While he hunted through his collection, Harry fidgeted with some Warhammer figures which stood on the bookshelves.

Somewhere below them, the doorbell rang.

‘Ignore it,’ Sean said. ‘It won’t be for me and
she’s
gone out.’

Harry instinctively glanced towards the window, but Sean’s room faced into the trees at the back of the house. Sean had just finished leafing through his wallets of DVDs when the bell rang again – someone was keeping their finger on it far longer than was normal or polite. The sound cut off abruptly when the pressure was removed.

‘It’ll be a delivery man.’ Sean’s tone registered weary resignation. ‘That film’s not here, anyway. I must have lent it to someone or swapped it. Let’s go down.’

They ambled downstairs in no great hurry, but there was no
We tried to deliver
card on the mat, nor any shadow on the half-glazed front door to indicate that someone was still waiting.

‘I didn’t hear anyone drive off, did you?’

‘Bloody hell. It’s like in the film, where there’s no one at the door, and then one of them goes outside and gets grabbed.’

‘Bollocks,’ said Sean, but he opened the front door with elaborate caution. There was no one in sight, and nothing to indicate that anyone had called. The two boys stood in the hall, half serious, half laughing.

‘Do you think she’s really gone?’ Harry asked.

‘Who?’

‘Your stepmother.’

‘I don’t know. You can’t always hear the car from my room because of the double glazing. But why would she want to lure us outside? She’s got her own key – she can come in and get us any time.’

‘That might not fit in with her plan.’

Sean let the front door close. ‘We can check the garage, just to make sure her car’s not in there.’

They approached the door at the other end of the hall as if expecting something to spring out at them, but nothing did. The key was on their side of the lock, but when Sean reached for it Harry whispered, ‘Suppose she’s waiting on the other side?’

‘I’ll get a weapon.’ Sean tiptoed to the cupboard under the stairs and returned with a length of rigid grey plastic tube, which normally formed part of the vacuum cleaner. It was only a lark, after all.

‘What are you going to do?’ asked Harry. ‘Suck her to death?’

Sean worked the key silently in the lock before flinging open the door, but the garage stood silent and empty.

‘Delivery guy, after all,’ Sean said.

As he swung round from the garage door, he misjudged the length of plastic tube in his hand and it caught against Jo’s sketch book, which had been left on the hall table. The pad somersaulted on to the floor, landing face down and open.

Harry, who was nearest and unencumbered, bent down to pick it up, turning it over as he did. A low whistle escaped his lips. ‘Take a look at this.’

Sean came to stand beside him.

‘Whose book is it?’ asked Harry.

‘Hers.’

‘It’s like – porn.’

‘Definitely rated eighteen,’ agreed Sean. ‘But it’s not really porn, is it? It’s torture – three different ways of putting someone to death. I know who it is, too.’

‘You mean, she’s drawn a real person?’

‘It’s Melissa Timpson.’ When Harry looked blank, he added, ‘She’s in the business, with Dad and Jo.’

‘Do you think she’s planning ways of killing this Melissa woman?’

‘Well, that’s what it looks like.’

‘Should we tell someone?’

Sean thought for a moment. ‘We’d have to take the book away and show it to them – then she would know it was us. Better just put it back. Flatten that corner down, where it got creased against the floor. That’s it – now put it exactly where it was.’

Harry positioned the book carefully. ‘I’m not sure which way up it was,’ he said.

‘She probably wouldn’t remember herself. It’s not like she’s expecting us to look at it. No one ever does. It’s her private stuff – her secret sketch book, my dad calls it.’

‘Doesn’t he wonder why it’s a secret?’

‘I don’t think so.’

‘Shouldn’t we look and see if there are pictures of anyone else in there?’

Sean hesitated. If she had gone to Booths, then she wouldn’t be back for ages. ‘You’re right.’ He relinquished the vacuum-cleaner hose and flicked through the pages, but although there were a few oddities among some of the drawings, apart from the page at which the book had fallen open, there was only one other which contained a troubling image; nor was this a scene of violence. It was the back view of a woman looking into a mirror. The figure itself and even the frame of the mirror had been drawn in great detail, but the face reflected in the mirror was blank.

‘That’s creepy,’ said Harry. ‘Do you think she hasn’t finished it, or is it like that on purpose?’

‘I don’t know.’ Sean stared at the drawing for a moment or two before he snapped the book shut and replaced it on the table. ‘Come on. Let’s go.’

‘We could sneak up on Charlie,’ Harry suggested, when they had gone a couple of yards down the drive. ‘She’ll wet herself after seeing that DVD.’

Although he knew it was childish, Sean was perfectly willing to enter into the spirit of the thing. The idea lightened their mood considerably, and they traversed the lane with a level of stealth that would have impressed an SAS recruiter, keeping low behind walls and sprinting across openings, finally arriving slightly breathless alongside the front door of The Hollies, where they flattened themselves against the wall while Harry slid the Yale into the lock and opened the door by inches. They crept into the small square hall, eased the front door closed behind them, then on a nod from Harry they crashed into the sitting room, where the blood-curdling screams intended to terrify Charlotte died on their lips. She was not there. The only sound or movement in the room came from the flat-screen TV, where the titles of the horror movie were scrolling steadily upwards against a background of grim orchestral music. For a moment they stood looking at one another, feeling somewhat foolish.

His sister could easily have gone up to her room or been playing a hiding-and-jumping-out game of her own, but something in the stillness of the house immediately troubled Harry. ‘Charles,’ he shouted. ‘Charlie. Midget Features. Come out, wherever you are.’ When this brought no response, he added, ‘Don’t piss about with me, Charles, or you’ll be sorry.’

Still nothing.

Unnerved by the silence, Harry marched systematically through the house yelling for his sister to reveal herself, while throwing open doors to cupboards scarcely big enough to conceal a well-fed cat, let alone a ten-year-old girl. Sean stood in the hall, watching and listening as the search progressed upstairs. It wasn’t his sister, but he had been made partly responsible because in the general scheme of the arrangements it had been assumed that he – the oldest of the trio – would stay on the premises until Harry’s parents came back.

Harry’s face appeared at the top of the stairs. ‘She’s not here.’

‘You’re kidding. She has to be somewhere. Have you tried the garden?’

‘There’s nowhere to hide. You can see it all from here.’

It was true. The Hollies sat in a small, easily maintained plot. There was a patch of mossy lawn broken up with a few knee-high dwarf conifers and a bird table. There were no outbuildings, and the family parked their Subaru on a patch of gravel at the side.

‘Has she ever pulled anything like this before?’

‘Never. She’s scared of her own shadow. She wouldn’t go off on her own.’

‘Well, she has.’

‘Not by herself,’ Harry repeated. ‘Can’t you see what’s happened?
She’s
taken her – your stepmother. She’s the only person who knew Charlotte was here on her own.’

Sean had never heard Harry use his sister’s given name before. They stood staring at one another, each waiting for the other to say something. At that moment they caught the sound of a car pulling on to the gravel.

‘Shit,’ said Harry. ‘Shit, shit,
shit
.’

John and Suzanne Wheaton were no more or less intuitive than the next couple, but the moment they opened the front door and caught sight of the two boys’ faces, they knew that something was very wrong. In the garbled moments which followed, with everyone talking across everyone else, two things became clear to John. First, that his daughter was missing, second, that the boys were not telling all they knew. His wife, words muffled by a frozen mouth, said they should call the police. There was no landline at the cottage, and mobile reception was far from good; the best place to get a reliable signal was out on the parking area, but at the front door he hesitated. Although he was filled with the cold terror of a parent whose child is unaccounted for, John Wheaton did not want to make a fool of himself with the police.

‘Let’s go through this again,’ he said, as calmly as he could. ‘You two went down to Sean’s house, leaving Charlotte here watching the television.’ At this point he had to raise his hand to silence his wife before continuing. ‘You were only gone about five minutes, but when you came back, Charlotte was missing. You’ve searched the house, but nowhere else.’

‘Where else would she be?’ interrupted his wife. ‘She wouldn’t go wandering off by herself. Charlotte doesn’t do that sort of thing.’

‘You didn’t see anyone else about?’ He focused his gaze squarely on Harry, who hesitated and glanced at Sean. ‘You weren’t playing some sort of game with your sister? Something that went wrong? You have to tell me the truth
now
, Harry. It’s very important. Whatever has happened, you have to tell me before the police get here. Has something happened to Charlotte? I know there’s something you’re not telling me.’

‘It’s about Sean’s stepmother,’ Harry blurted out. ‘We think she might have taken her.’

‘What are you talking about?’ his mother all but screamed. ‘What do you mean?’

‘She knew Charlotte was here on her own because she met us going into Sean’s house. Then she went out, and when we got back here, Charlotte had gone.’ Harry looked desperately from one parent to the other. ‘She’s done it before. She’s killed people before.’

His father grabbed him by the shoulders and brought his face close to Harry’s, squinting directly into his eyes and smelling his breath. ‘Have you been drinking, or sniffing something?’

‘No!’ Harry wrenched himself away. ‘Tell them, Sean.’

Sean felt their eyes burning into him. ‘It’s true,’ he almost choked on the words. ‘She killed a little girl – years ago – nobody knows.’ He felt as if he was going to cry. Letting it all out brought a strange mixture of shame and relief.

‘Oh my God! John, call the police.’ Mrs Wheaton took a step backwards and leaned against the wall for support. She put her hand to her mouth, but her sobs escaped anyway. Harry stared at her, white-faced. Sean had to scrub the sleeve of his sweatshirt across his eyes.

At that moment there was a discreet tap on the door. John Wheaton was nearest, and flung it open to reveal Charlotte standing sheepishly on the step, next to a woman in a pilled body warmer and a shabby, dung-coloured skirt, the hem of which was coming down on one side. Her greying hair was escaping from where it was loosely tied at the back of her head.