“You worked it out on the back of the bathroom door.”
“Yes. I felt I owed it to my dad to do it.”
“I didn’t know that you’d lost your parents until Paul told me. It must have been hard. He said that you ran away to London.”
“I was lucky, I met Carolyn. It could have turned out very differently, though.” I take a breath. “I need to ask you something. The shooting thing. It was horrible. Why did Carl do it? Did you know he was going to pretend to shoot me?”
“No, not to the point where he would fire the gun. He wanted to frighten Ned, show him that he was prepared to kill one of you if he had to. We never expected Ned to actively encourage Carl to kill you, we thought at any moment he would tell Carl to stop, especially once Carl had cocked the barrel. But he didn’t, so Carl fired it into Ned’s mattress.” He pauses. “I couldn’t believe he’d actually fired it, I put my hand over your mouth to—I don’t know—let you know you were still alive, that you hadn’t really been shot, that I was there. It all happened so fast.” Another pause. “We had an argument about it afterward, me and Carl. I’d had enough, I hated what we were doing. It haunts me, what we did, not to Ned, but to you.”
“I survived.”
“You were extraordinary. I expected you to be terrified, but you weren’t.”
“I was, but I was never afraid of you. And I felt safer in that room than I’d ever felt with Ned.”
“I should have done more, I wanted to but—”
He stops, the guilt visible on his face.
“There’s something else that’s been puzzling me. The photo of me on Ned’s Instagram—it was taken at the house in Haven Cliffs, the day we went for lunch with Lukas. I thought Lukas had taken it. But he hadn’t?”
He looks down at the ground. “No, I did. Carl asked me to. His plan, once he had taken Ned—before he decided to take you as well—had always been to make Ned believe nobody was particularly bothered about him being kidnapped, not his parents, nor his wife. He already had a photo of Mrs. Hawthorpe playing tennis, and he wanted to have a photo of you. He was going to taunt Ned with the photo, make out that you were so unconcerned about him that you had accepted an invitation from Lukas to go back to the house in Haven Cliffs. After, when our plans changed and we took you too, that photo came in more useful than we’d imagined, as it gave credence to the story that you and Ned had gone away on a two-week break. All we had to do was upload it to his phone.”
“Does your girlfriend know what you did?”
“I don’t have a girlfriend.”
“There was a woman here the other day. When I locked you in, I thought she’d come and let you out when you didn’t turn up for dinner.”
He smiles. “It’s good to know that you didn’t intend to kill me. That was Mara, our sister. She lives in Dunedin, I live here.” There’s a pause. “I did stay on, you know. In England. I didn’t come running back here as soon as it was over. I even went to Reading, hung around for a few days.”
I stare at him. “You came to Reading?”
“Yes.”
“But—why didn’t you—”
“Come and see you? How could I, when you thought I was dead? How could I, after what we did?”
“Then why come?”
“Because I wanted to make sure you were alright. And I did want to tell you I was still alive, Paul knew that and he said I should write to you. But you seemed okay. I watched you shopping, and you seemed okay.”
I remember the times I had sensed him close, and my throat burns with unshed tears.
“I was never okay.”
“What you said to Carl, at the memorial service for Lina and Justine, the message you gave him, about sleeping on a mattress in a room with a boarded-up window. Was that true?”
It’s too much. Tears begin to leak from my eyes. I wipe them away with my fingers but they keep on coming.
I see him kick the door shut, blocking out the light. And suddenly, I’m back in the house in Haven Cliffs, in the room with the boarded-up window, and my captor is walking toward me in the darkness. I close my eyes, wait to feel his hands on my shoulders—but instead, his arms come around me. And in that moment, a huge weight lifts from my shoulders.
I don’t know how long I stand wrapped in his arms, thinking about him coming to Reading, wondering what might have been if he had had the courage to tell me he was alive.