CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
PRESENT
There are voices in the basement. I move the mattress and lie on my stomach to listen.
“… wasn’t a clever move on your part.”
“She deserved it. Stupid bitch.” Ned’s voice.
“It’s set us back several days. We needed that recording.” A pause. “So, what are we going to do, Ned? Your dad’s not paying up and your wife won’t beg for your life. Seems nobody cares if you live or die.”
“Kill her.”
“Your wife?”
“Yes. Kill her and deliver the body to my father. He’ll pay up then.”
“I’m not so sure. After all, what is she to him? Better to send him something of yours, an ear or a finger.”
“I think that would be a mistake.”
“I’m sure you do.” The voice is mocking, amused. “I’ll be back, Ned. And who knows, maybe I’ll have a knife with me.”
I lie there, furious. How dare he tell them to kill me?
Jumping to my feet, I begin thumping on the wall above where he’s being held. I want to infuriate him, I want him to be crazy with rage, I want him to know what it is to be at the mercy of someone else, to be unable to stop something from happening.
It seems that Ned is at the end of his tether too. He reacts quickly and violently to the thumping.
“Shut up!” he screams from below.
But I don’t stop. His anger drives me on, I feed off it, so that when my arms are tired and my fists bruised, I use my body, throwing myself against the wall repeatedly, using each of my shoulders in turn. I don’t stop until, exhausted, I collapse onto the mattress—and then, when I feel I’ve waited long enough to lull him into a false sense of security, I devise a new torture, and begin a slow, evenly spaced thump against the wall with the heel of each foot in turn—thump-thump, thump-thump, thump-thump. It feels so good.
When the man comes with my tray, I’m still thump-thumping my heels against the wall, and Ned, hoarse from shouting, is weeping uncontrollably. I don’t stop as he crosses the room and places my tray on the floor, and when he leaves, without the slightest indication that he has witnessed anything out of the ordinary, I retaliate with a drumroll of fury, acknowledging that the thumping hadn’t only been for Ned. During all those hours, I’d been expecting one of the men to burst into the room and make me stop the incessant noise. But no one had come; either they were in a different part of the house where the noise didn’t affect them, or they were happy to let me continue enraging Ned.
I bring my feet down from the wall, hating my invisibility, hating again my inability to provoke a reaction in them, in him. My heels are throbbing, I imagine them red and blistered, like when I walk too long in heels. An image pushes its way into my mind, red high-heeled shoes, scrabbling uselessly on a wooden floor. I rush to blank it out, but it stays, and a solitary tear glides down my cheek.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
PAST
Ned called me; the press was waiting for us at the gates. It was five days since we’d arrived back from Vegas and I still hadn’t been able to leave the house.
Ned always had an excuse as to why I couldn’t. I never saw him during the day, only in the evening for dinner. I didn’t mind making it, I’d always enjoyed cooking and it gave me something to do.
Ned was waiting in the hall below and as I walked down the marble staircase, he ran a critical eye over me. I was wearing a pink sleeveless dress and my hair hung loose around my shoulders. He nodded approvingly, took an engagement ring from his pocket.
“Here,” he said, taking my hand and sliding it on my finger, next to the gold wedding band that I only usually wore when I went down to dinner. I hadn’t at first, I couldn’t bear to see it on my finger. But when Ned saw me without it the first evening, he’d made me go back and fetch it.
I shuddered internally at his touch, automatically thinking of Justine. She would know by now that I had married Ned and would see it as a terrible betrayal. If only I could see her, see Carolyn, explain to them what had happened. I’d hoped that Carolyn might call me back on Ned’s phone but so far, there hadn’t been anything and I was scared that she couldn’t bring herself to speak to me.
There had been so many times when I’d wanted to ask Ned about Justine, ask him if her interview with Ophélie Tessier had gone well. But an inner voice—the same inner voice that told me to be very, very careful, that I didn’t know the true nature of the man I’d allowed myself to be caught up with—warned me not to.