silence and thinking about the kids. She had noticed both Samantha’s and Jamie’s lights had been on so she’d need to have words with Stefan again. He was great for them, but he didn’t practise quite the same discipline a parent might.
Tomorrow she would interview Harrison’s parents and afterwards take the rest of the day off, God only knows she deserved it. She would pick the children up from school and go for a pizza and enjoy some quality time with them. It would give Stefan a rest too.
Key in lock and she opened the door to blazing lights everywhere. They must all be playing some game that took in the whole house. She sighed at the thought of the mess.
‘Kids! I’m home!’
She dropped her car keys on the table in the hall and went into the lounge where Stefan sat on a kitchen chair in the middle of the room. He must be taking part in the game, she thought, because he didn’t move, he just sat still, like a statue, staring ahead. His eyes widened, but he couldn’t say anything due to the parcel tape wrapped around the lower part of his face.
Then something hit Savage from behind, knocking her to the floor and sending the room tumbling over and over, the light in the centre spiralling round and fading to stars. A haze rose in front of her eyes with strange floaters swimming across a checkerboard of grey and white. She groaned and moved her hand to touch the back of her head. Wet. Sticky. She felt a sudden heaving in her stomach, the nausea blotting out the pain from her head, and then she vomited through her mouth and nose, coughing and spluttering sick.
Now someone had her arms and was pinning them behind her. A zipping sound came as her wrists were yanked together and some sort of binding cut her flesh and secured her hands.
Footsteps moved away, out of the room and a few moments later returned, something being dragged.
The person lifted her now, up and onto another one of the kitchen chairs. Then the sound of tape being stripped from a roll. Not across her mouth, but round and round her body, holding her against the back of the chair.
Then he moved round to her front.
Harrison.
He appeared calm, almost normal. Apart from those eyes. They didn’t look normal. They darted back and forth between Savage and Stefan, to the door, to Stefan’s baseball bat lying on the floor, to the blood on the carpet where she had fallen, back to Savage.
She spat saliva and vomit and tried to breath slowly, to stay calm. She looked at Stefan. He didn’t seem hurt, but he had certainly been immobilised. A cable tie secured his arms behind the back of the chair and his legs had been bound with parcel tape too. He rolled his eyes at Savage, glancing sideways, indicating something. She couldn’t understand what he meant, but it gave her a glimmer of hope.
Harrison dashed out of the room and the sound of him bounding up the stairs made Savage shiver to her very core.
The kids.
She heard them coming down and he marched them into the room, their faces stained with tears. Their hands had been bound in front of them with cable ties.
‘Mummy!’ They ran across to her, but before they got near Harrison was shouting.
‘Sit down on the fucking sofa!’
Jamie and Samantha cowered before him. He shoved them across the room and bundled them onto the sofa.
‘Stay there!’
‘Matthew, please. We can work this out, we-’
‘Shut the fuck up!’
He didn’t look normal now. Anything but. His hands shook and lips trembled as he muttered to himself.
‘You had to meddle, had to nose, had to interfere.’
‘That is my job,’ Savage said in a low voice, surprised at her calmness.
‘Your job. My Emma. Gone.’
Who was Emma? Savage had no idea. The name must be one of Harrison’s made up ones, like he used Trinny for Kelly.
‘Just let the children go. Please.’
‘Younger,’ he said. ‘Lucy was right.’
Stefan shifted on his seat. Savage reckoned he’d heard something. Then she heard the engine too. A motorbike. The gravel crunching, the bike stopping, the ignition off.
Harrison cocked his head on one side. He marched across to Savage, the roll of parcel tape in his hands. He pulled off a length and wrapped the tape around Savage’s mouth.
‘One word, one squeak.’ He glared at the children and drew his hand across his throat.
The doorbell rang and Harrison scuttled out of the room and into the hallway, shutting the door behind him.
Jamie jumped down off the sofa and ran across to the big old oak bureau. Savage made a noise and shook her head. Jamie glanced over but ignored her. He was struggling to open the bottom drawer with his hands tied. In the hall Savage could hear Harrison talking to a pizza delivery man. She saw Stefan nod a confirmation. He must have ordered a takeout earlier, to arrive after he had put the children to bed.
Jamie had opened the drawer now and was rummaging in an Airfix box. The box contained a kit he had been working on with Pete months ago, an air-sea rescue helicopter. Then he was putting the kit away and pushing the drawer shut. Coming over to Savage with a craft knife in his hand.
Savage nodded and Jamie rushed across. He went round behind her and placed the knife in Savage’s hands. Next he moved round to her front and laid his head on her lap. Savage heard the motorbike start up and then the living room door opened. Harrison stood with a grin on his face and a pizza box in his hands.
The grin vanished when he spotted Jamie kneeling at her feet and he dropped the box and leapt across the room in a second, lashing out at Jamie and kicking him hard in the ribs. Jamie screamed and collapsed in a ball where he lay still, a soft sobbing noise coming from him.
‘Don’t move again or I’ll kill you!’ Harrison yelled.
He moved over to Savage, ripped the parcel tape from her face and retrieved the pizza box and went and sat on the sofa next to Samantha. She cowered away. Out came a triangle of pizza and Harrison munched on the slice, chewing each mouthful over and over and staring into nothing, distracted, distant.
Savage manoeuvred the knife, adjusting her grip so the blade touched her fingers, trying to place the sharp edge against the cable tie. She moved the knife, sawing up and down, careful not to drop it.
‘My mother used to buy second-hand school clothes for me,’ Harrison said. His voice calm and passive with no trace of the anger from a moment ago. ‘She didn’t need to because we had plenty of money, but she did. They had stains on or they were faded or ripped. Preloved, she called them. The boys at school used to tease me about it. They said I wasn’t even that. They were right. I was dirty and used. My father told me so each time he fucked me.’
Savage jerked the knife now, picking at the hard plastic while trying to keep her shoulders still and her expression calm as Harrison continued his rant.
‘My good friend Lucy informed me that younger is better. All the older ones are dirty these days. That is the way of the world. Squalid. Used. We have abused the soil and abused ourselves and now there is nothing clean left. We have been stained by our very existence. Everyone is doing it, existing I mean, and no one clears up the results. Shit, spunk, spew. That is what we are walking around in. Soon it will be up around our nostrils and we will have to recycle the stuff orally. Maybe then people will understand what we have become.’
Harrison put the pizza box to one side, shook his head and smiled.
‘Listen to me. I sound like Mitchell and look what happened to him.’
‘You went to Mitchell’s parties,’ Savage said. ‘You took pictures. You enjoyed yourself. Seems to me like you are part of the problem, not part of the solution.’
‘No! I only attended to observe.’ Harrison spat the sentence out. ‘Mitchell was sick, but he made me realise that you could get away with things.’
‘But you haven’t got away with anything. We know about Kelly. We know about the other girls.’
‘Kelly was an accident. Believe me the last thing I wanted was for her to die. That was Forester’s fault for
