Mill End Road was narrow and overgrown, a tunnel of dark trees pushing in on all sides. She pulled off on to the grass verge just after number forty and flicked off her headlights.
Her heart was a hand-sized stampede, and every hair, every layer of skin was alive and electric.
She reached down for her phone, propped up in the cupholder, and dialled
999Â .
Two rings and then: ‘Hello, emergency operator, which service do you require?’
‘Police,’ Pip said.
‘I’ll just connect you now.’
‘Hello?’ A different voice came through the line. ‘Police emergency, can I help?’
‘My name is Pippa Fitz-Amobi,’ she said shakily, ‘and I’m from Little Kilton. Please listen carefully. You need to send officers to forty-two Mill End Road in Wendover. Inside is a man named Elliot Ward. Five years ago, Elliot kidnapped a girl called Andie Bell from Kilton and he’s been keeping her in this house. He murdered a boy called Sal Singh. You need to contact DI Richard Hawkins, who led the Andie Bell case, and let him know. I believe Andie is alive and she’s being kept inside. I’m going in now to confront Elliot Ward and I might be in danger. Please send officers quickly.’
‘Hold on, Pippa,’ the voice said. ‘Where are you phoning from now?’ ‘I’m outside the house and I’m about to go in.’
‘OK, stay outside. I’m dispatching officers to your location. Pippa, can you –’
‘I’m going in now,’ Pip said. ‘Please hurry.’ ‘Pippa, do not go inside the house.’
‘I’m sorry, I have to,’ she said.
Pip lowered the phone, the operator’s voice still calling her name, and hung up.
She got out of the car. Crossing from the grass verge on to the driveway down to number forty-two, she saw Elliot’s car parked in front of the small red-brick house. The two downstairs windows glowed, pushing away the thickening darkness.
As she started towards the house a motion sensor flood light picked her up and filled the drive with a garish and blinding white light. She covered her eyes and pushed through, a tree-giant shadow stitched to her feet behind her as she walked towards the front door.
She knocked. Three loud thumps against the door. Something clattered inside. And nothing.
She knocked again, hitting the door over and over with the soft side of her fist.
A light flicked on behind the door and in the now yellow-lit frosted glass she saw a blurred figure walking towards her.
A chain scraped against the door, a sliding lock, and it was pulled open with a damp clacking sound.
Elliot stared at her. Dressed in the same pastel green shirt from school, a pair of dark oven mitts slung over his shoulder.
‘Pip?’ he said in a voice breathy with fear. ‘What are you . . . what are you doing here?’
She looked into his lens-magnified eyes. ‘I’m just . . .’ he said. ‘I’m just . . .’
Pip shook her head. ‘The police are going to be here in about ten minutes,’ she said. ‘You have that time to explain it to me.’ She stepped one foot up over the threshold. ‘Explain it to me so I can help your daughters through this. So the Singhs can finally know the truth after all this time.’
All the blood left Elliot’s face. He staggered back a few steps, colliding into the wall. Then he pressed his fingers into his eyes and blew out all of his air. ‘It’s over,’ he said quietly. ‘It’s finally over.’
‘Time’s running out, Elliot.’ Her voice was much braver than she felt. ‘OK,’ he said. ‘OK, do you want to come in?’
She hesitated, her stomach recoiling inside to push back against her spine. But the police were on their way; she could do this. She had to do this.
‘We’ll leave the front door open, for the police,’ she said, then she followed him in and down the hall, keeping a three-step distance.
He led her right and into a kitchen. There was no furniture in it, none at all, but the counters were laden with food packets and cooking instruments, even a spice rack. There was a small glinting key on the counter beside a packet of dried pasta. Elliot bent to turn off the hob and Pip walked to the other side of the room, putting as much space between them as she could.
‘Stand away from the knives,’ she said. ‘Pip, I’m not going to –’
‘Stand away from them.’
Elliot moved away, stopping by the wall opposite her.
‘She’s here, isn’t she?’ Pip said. ‘Andie’s here and she’s alive?’ ‘Yes.’
She shivered inside her warm coat.
‘You and Andie Bell were seeing each other in March 2012,’ she said. ‘Start at the beginning, Elliot; we don’t have long.’
‘It wasn’t like th-th–’ he stuttered. ‘It . . .’ He moaned and held his head. ‘Elliot!’
He sniffed and straightened. ‘OK,’ he said. ‘It was late February. Andie started . . . paying attention to me at school. I wasn’t teaching her; she didn’t take history. But she’d follow me in the halls and ask me about my day. And, I don’t know, I guess the attention felt . . . nice. I’d been so lonely since Isobel died. And then Andie starts asking to have my phone number.
Nothing had happened at this point, we hadn’t kissed or anything, but she kept asking. I told her that that would be inappropriate. And yet, soon
enough, I found myself in the phone shop, buying another SIM card so I could talk to her and no one would find out. I don’t know why I did it; I suppose it felt like a distraction from missing Isobel. I just wanted someone to talk to. I only put the SIM in at night, so Naomi would never see anything, and we started texting. She was nice to me; let me talk about Isobel and how I worried about Naomi and Cara.’
‘You’re running out of time,’ Pip said coldly.
‘Yes,’ he sniffed, ‘and then Andie started suggesting we meet somewhere outside of school. Like a hotel. I told her absolutely not. But in a moment of madness, a moment of weakness, I found myself booking one. She could be very persuasive. We agreed a time and date, but I had to cancel last minute because Cara had chickenpox. I tried to end it, whatever it was we had at this point, but then she asked again. And I booked the hotel for the next week.’
‘The Ivy House Hotel in Chalfont,’ said Pip.
He nodded. ‘That’s when it happened the first time.’ His voice was quiet with shame. ‘We didn’t stay the night; I couldn’t leave the girls for a whole night. We stayed just a couple of hours.’
‘And you slept with her?’ Elliot didn’t say anything.
‘She was seventeen!’ Pip said. ‘The same age as your daughter. You were a teacher. Andie was vulnerable and you took advantage of that. You were the adult and should have known better.’
‘There’s nothing you can say that will make me more disgusted at myself than I already am. I said it couldn’t happen again and tried to call it off.
Andie wouldn’t let me. She started threatening to turn me in. She interrupted one of my lessons, came over and whispered to me that she’d left a naked picture of herself hidden in the classroom somewhere and that I should find it before someone else did. Trying to scare me. So, I went back
to the Ivy House the next week, because I didn’t know what she’d do if I didn’t. I thought she would tire of whatever this was soon enough.’
He stopped to rub the back of his neck.
‘That was the last time. It only happened twice and then it was the Easter holidays. The girls and I spent a week at Isobel’s parents’ house and, with time away from Kilton, I came to my senses. I messaged Andie and I said it was over and I didn’t care if she turned me in. She texted back, saying that when school started again she was going to ruin me if I didn’t do what she wanted. I didn’t know what she wanted. And then, by complete chance, I had an opportunity to stop her. I found out about Andie cyber-bullying that girl and so I called her dad, as I told you, and said that if her behaviour didn’t improve, I would have to report her and she’d be expelled. Of course Andie knew what it really meant: mutually assured destruction. She could have me arrested and jailed for our relationship, but I could have her expelled and ruin her future. We were at a stalemate and I thought it was over.’
‘So why did you kidnap her on Friday the twentieth of April?’ Pip said.
‘That’s not . . .’ he said. ‘It didn’t happen like that at all. I was home alone and Andie turned up, I think around ten-ish. She was irate, just so angry. She screamed at me, telling me I was sad and disgusting, that she’d only touched me because she needed me to get her a place at Oxford, like I’d helped Sal. She didn’t want him to leave without her. Screaming that she had
to get away from home, away from Kilton because it was killing her. I tried to calm her down but she wouldn’t. And she knew exactly how to hurt me.’
Elliot blinked slowly.
‘Andie ran to my study and started tearing those paintings Isobel made when she was dying, my rainbow ones. She smashed up two of them and I was shouting for her to stop and then she went for my favourite one. And I .
.
. I just pushed her to get her to stop, I wasn’t trying to hurt her. But she fell back and hit her head on my desk. Hard. And,’ he sniffed, ‘she was on the floor and her head was bleeding. She was conscious but confused. I rushed off to get the first-aid kit and when I came back Andie had gone and the front door was open. She hadn’t driven to mine, there was no car in the drive and no sound of one. She walked out and vanished. Her phone was on the floor in the study, she must have dropped it in the scuffle.
‘The next day,’ he continued, ‘I heard from Naomi that Andie was missing. Andie was bleeding and left my house with a head injury and now she was missing. And as the weekend passed I started to panic: I thought I’d killed her. I thought she must have wandered out of my house and then, confused and hurt, got lost somewhere and died from her injuries. That she was lying in a ditch somewhere and it would only be a matter of time until they found her. And when they did there might be evidence on her body that would lead back to me: fibres, fingerprints. I knew the only thing I could do was to give them a stronger suspect to protect myself. To protect my girls. If I got taken away for Andie’s murder, I didn’t think Naomi would survive it.
And Cara was only twelve at the time. I was the only parent they had left.’
‘There’s no time for your excuses,’ Pip said. ‘So then you framed Sal Singh. You knew about the hit-and-run because you’d been reading Naomi’s therapy diaries.’
‘Of course I’d read them,’ he said. ‘I had to make sure my little girl wasn’t thinking of hurting herself.’
‘You made her and her friends take Sal’s alibi away. And then, on the Tuesday?’
‘I called in sick to work and dropped the girls at school. I waited outside and when I saw Sal alone in the car park, I went up to talk to him. He wasn’t coping well with her disappearance. So I suggested that we go back to his house and have a chat about it. I’d planned to do it with a knife from the Singhs’ house. But then I found some sleeping pills in the bathroom, and I decided to take him to the woods; I thought it would be kinder. I didn’t want
his family to find him. We had tea and I gave him the first three pills; said they were for his headache. I convinced him that we should go out in the woods and look for Andie ourselves; that it would help his feeling of helplessness. He trusted me. He didn’t wonder why I was wearing leather gloves inside. I took a plastic bag from their kitchen and we walked out into the woods. I had a penknife, and when we were far enough in I held it up to his neck. Made him swallow more pills.’
Elliot’s voice broke. His eyes filled and a lone tear snaked down his cheek. ‘I said I was helping him, that he wouldn’t be a suspect if it looked like he’d been attacked too. He swallowed a few more and then he started to struggle. I pinned him down and forced him to take more. When he started to get sleepy, I held him and I talked to him about Oxford, about the amazing libraries, the formal hall dinners, how beautiful the city looked in spring.
Just so he would fall asleep thinking about something good. When he was unconscious, I put the bag around his head and held his hand as he died.’
Pip had no pity for this man before her. Eleven years of memories dissolved from him, leaving a stranger standing in the room with her.
‘Then you sent the confession text from Sal’s phone to his dad.’ Elliot nodded, staunching his eyes with the heels of his hands. ‘And Andie’s blood?’
‘It had dried under my desk,’ he said. ‘I’d missed some when I first cleaned, so I placed some of it under his nails with tweezers. And the last thing, I put Andie’s phone in his pocket and I left him there. I didn’t want to kill him. I was trying to save my girls; they’d already been through so much pain. He didn’t deserve to die, but neither did my girls. It was an impossible choice.’
Pip looked up to try to push her tears back in. There was no time to tell him how wrong he was.
‘And then as more days passed,’ Elliot cried, ‘I realized what a grave mistake I’d made. If Andie had died somewhere from her head injury, they
would have found her by now. And then her car turns up and they find blood in the boot; she must have been well enough to drive somewhere after leaving mine. I’d panicked and thought it was fatal when it wasn’t. But it was too late. Sal was already dead and I’d made him the killer. They closed the case and everything settled down.’
‘So how do we get from there to you imprisoning Andie in this house?’ He flinched at the anger behind her words.
‘It was the end of July. I was driving home and I just saw her. Andie was walking on the side of the main road from Wycombe, heading towards Kilton. I pulled over and it was obvious she’d got herself messed up in drugs
. . . that she’d been sleeping rough. She was so skinny and dishevelled.
That’s how it happened. I couldn’t let her return home because if she did, everyone would know Sal had been murdered. Andie was high and disoriented but I pulled over and got her in the car. I explained to her why I couldn’t let her go home but that I would take care of her. I’d just put this place up for sale, so I brought her here and took it off the market.’
‘Where had she been all those months? What happened to her the night she went missing?’ Pip pressed, feeling the minutes escaping from her.
‘She doesn’t remember all the details; I think she was concussed. She says she just wanted to get away from everything. She went to a friend of hers who was involved in drugs and he took her to stay with some people he knew. But she didn’t feel safe there, so she ran away to come home. She doesn’t like talking about that time.’
‘Howie Bowers,’ Pip thought aloud. ‘Where is she, Elliot?’
‘In the loft.’ He looked over at the small key on the counter. ‘We made it nice up there for her. I insulated it, put in plywood walls and proper flooring.
She picked out the wallpaper. There aren’t any windows but we put in lots of lamps. I know you must think I’m a monster, Pip, but I’ve never touched her, not since that last time at the Ivy House. It’s not like that. And she’s not like she was before. She’s a different person; she’s calm and grateful. She has food up there but I come round to cook for her three times during the week, once at the weekend, and let her down to shower. And then we just sit together in her loft, watching TV for a while. She’s never bored.’
‘She’s locked up there and that’s the key?’ Pip pointed to it. Elliot nodded.
And then they heard the sound of wheels crackling on the road outside.
‘When the police interrogate you,’ Pip said, hurrying now, ‘do not tell them about the hit-and-run, about taking Sal’s alibi away. He doesn’t need one when you’ve confessed. And Cara does not deserve to lose her entire family, to be all alone. I’m going to protect Naomi and Cara now.’
The sound of car doors slamming.
‘Maybe I can understand why you did it,’ she said. ‘But you will never be forgiven. You took Sal’s life from him to save your own. You destroyed his family.’
A shout of, ‘Hello, police,’ came from the open front door.
‘The Bells have grieved for five whole years. You threatened me and my family; you broke into my house to scare me.’
‘I’m sorry.’
Heavy footsteps down the hallway. ‘You killed Barney.’
Elliot’s face crumpled. ‘Pip, I don’t know what you’re talking about. I didn’t –’
‘Police,’ the officer said, stepping into the kitchen. The skylights glittered against the rim on his hat. His partner walked in behind, her eyes darting from Elliot to Pip and back, her tightly scraped ponytail flicking as she did.
‘Right, what’s going on here?’ she said.
Pip looked over at Elliot and their eyes met. He straightened up and held out his wrists.
‘You’re here to arrest me for the abduction and false imprisonment of Andie Bell,’ he said, not taking his eyes off her.
‘And the murder of Sal Singh,’ said Pip.
The officers looked at each other for a long moment and one of them nodded. The woman started towards Elliot and the man pressed something on the radio strapped to his shoulder. He moved back out to the hallway to speak into it.
With both their backs turned Pip darted forward and snatched the key from the counter. She ran out into the hall and bounded up the stairs.
‘Hey!’ the male officer shouted after her.
At the top she saw the small white loft hatch in the ceiling. A large padlock was fitted through the catch and a metal ring that was screwed into the wooden frame. A small two-step ladder was placed beneath it.
Pip stepped up and reached, slotting the key into the padlock and letting it fall, clattering loudly to the floor. The policeman was coming up the stairs after her. She twisted the catch and ducked to let the reinforced hatch swing down and open.
Yellow light filled the hole above her. And sounds: dramatic music, explosions and people shouting in American accents. Pip grabbed the loft ladder and pulled it down to the floor just as the officer thundered up the last few steps.
‘Wait,’ he shouted.
Pip stepped up on to it and climbed, her hands clammy and sticky on the metal rungs.
She poked her head up through the hatch and looked around. The room
was lit by several floor lamps and the walls were decorated with a white and black floral design. On one side of the loft there was a mini-fridge with a kettle and a microwave on top, shelves of food and books. There was a fluffy pink rug in the middle of the room and behind it was a large flat- screen TV
that was just being paused. And there she was.
Sitting cross-legged on a single bed piled high with coloured cushions.
Wearing a pair of blue penguin-patterned pyjamas, the same that both Cara and Naomi had. She stared over at Pip, her eyes wide and wild. She looked a little older, a little heavier. Her hair was mousier than it had been before and her skin much paler. She gaped at Pip, the TV remote in her hand and a packet of Jammie Dodger biscuits on her lap.
‘Hi,’ Pip said. ‘I’m Pip.’
‘Hi,’ she said, ‘I’m Andie.’ But she wasn’t.
