Pat’s house hadn’t been aired in the best part of a month and it was beginning to smell stale. Mandy gave the lounge, kitchen and dining room a cursory glance before following Lorraine up the staircase. She liked Lorraine; her softly spoken approach was at odds with her masculine appearance, and under different circumstances she’d have tried to match-make her with Kirstin.
Once Mandy had alerted the hospital staff to her missing child, they had contacted the police. A warrant had been issued to search Pat’s home, where they’d found that everything but her clothes and gifts she’d purchased for the baby had been left. Chloe’s house was in a similar state, and their bank accounts had been emptied. Along with the baby, they had vanished into thin air.
Mandy’s worried family insisted she return to stay with them. The tragedy had rebuilt their bridges without need of a word of apology from either side, and they supported her as she anxiously awaited police updates. Together they prayed that Pat or Chloe might develop a conscience and return the baby, but in the month following their disappearance there had been no contact whatsoever. There had been some potential sightings following her appeal in the national newspapers and a televised press conference, but they’d turned out to be false leads.
Mandy had run the full gamut of emotions: from anger towards the hospital for allowing her son to be placed into the hands of those who had no business touching her child, to frustration at the police for failing to develop any fresh leads, to herself for her post-op body not allowing her to become more physically proactive in the search. Her still-tender wound and limited mobility gave her too much time to dwell on the guilt she felt for failing to do the one thing a parent must do – protect their child. No matter how many times her family, Lorraine or doctors tried to convince her she was blameless, Mandy refused to believe them. It was her fault because she’d tried to chase the impossible – the love of a man who could never love her in return – and she’d lost her baby because of it.
‘I want to go to back to her house and look around,’ Mandy had informed Lorraine after much internal deliberation. She wasn’t sure why, but it was something she felt compelled to do. Lorraine wasn’t convinced of the benefits of this to Mandy’s healing, but she had persisted, threatening to go alone if necessary.
Mandy stood in the doorway of Pat’s bedroom. It wasn’t very different to how it’d always been, with the exception of the empty drawers and clothes rails inside her open wardrobe. She made her way into Richard’s room where she’d spent much of her time. Like Pat’s, it had been ransacked by the police who had been hunting for clues. For a moment, it saddened her that her sanctuary had been soiled as part of a criminal investigation.
Stay strong, Mandy told herself, and balled her fists.
Her eyes made their way across the collage of photographs spread across Richard’s wall. Each snapshot of his life had once made her wish they’d found each other earlier. But from what his ex-girlfriend had revealed shortly before Mandy’s accident, Richard wasn’t the man of her dreams. He wasn’t the monogamous type and he had little desire to settle down and have a family of his own. He was a human being, and he was flawed, not a fantasy, and she could see that now.
As her eyes skimmed across the photographs, Mandy went back to one in particular. Richard and Chloe were still children, probably aged around ten, and were on oversized bikes outside a cottage surrounded by rolling green hills and woodland.
Suddenly Mandy felt like someone had woken her with a slap across the face.
‘I know where my baby is!’ she said out loud, and stared Lorraine in the eye. ‘I know where to find him.’
Chapter 92
CHRISTOPHER
Christopher suddenly awoke to the sensation of cold liquid being poured over his head.
He opened his eyes, but everything had a misty haze and he couldn’t make out where he was. The left side of his body ached where the taser gun’s darts had made contact and his whole body stung like he’d fallen onto a bed of nettles. He wasn’t sure if it was the force of his head colliding with the floor that had rendered him unconscious or the 50,000 volts that’d travelled through his body.
As he came to, he was engulfed by a wave of nausea and retched several times before spewing bile down the front of his jumper. He turned his head and spat a foul-tasting mouthful to his side. Blurry images flashed from a television attached to the wall with what sounded like newsreaders recapping the day’s headlines. His eyes finally focused and rested on the familiar figure standing before him, and he recalled what had happened moments before he blacked out. Amy had put a stop to the death of Number Thirty and a halt to his project.
Amy had been here. Which meant that she knew everything.
He looked down towards his wrists and saw two tightly bound ropes securing them to the chair’s arms. He was still in Number Thirty’s kitchen. A pair of handcuffs tightly pinched his ankles.
It was then that he noticed that Amy was still there. He stared at her trainers wrapped in blue plastic bags, moments away from him, then lifted his gaze to her dark jeans and black sweatshirt, then to her face, the balaclava pulled back to her hairline. It looked like a sweatband and in any other situation he would have thought she was preparing to go out for a run. He couldn’t read her expression, but it wasn’t difficult to assume it was not favourable. His pulse quickened.
‘Where’s Number Thirty?’ he asked.
‘Is that what you do? Give them numbers? They have names, you know. They are people.’
‘They were people,’ Christopher corrected and gave a long, sigh-strewn pause. ‘Where is she?’
A look he recognised as shame briefly passed across Amy’s face. ‘She’s in the bedroom. When she answered the door, I pushed my way in, overpowered her and tied her up. Then I locked her in her room and turned her stereo up so she wouldn’t hear us.’
The corners of Christopher’s mouth rose slightly before suppressing what would’ve under ordinary circumstances formulated a smile.
‘Don’t look at me like that, I’m not proud of scaring that poor girl to death. This is something that will stay with her for the rest of her life and, thanks to you, I’m to blame for it.’
‘But you did it all the same. We could’ve made a good team.’
‘It’s better to put her through this than do nothing and have you kill her.’
Christopher shrugged.
‘If I thought you were capable of feeling anything I’d say that it’s disappointment you are trying to hide.’
‘I can feel. I feel things for you.’
Amy let out a forced laugh. ‘No you don’t! You played the part – I’ll give you credit for that, and you played it well – but I was always just a pawn in your sick little game.’
‘Is that what you really think?’
‘What am I supposed to think? My boyfriend is a fucking serial killer! How could you, Chris? How could you?’
‘You are so much more than a pawn.’
‘If that were true, then why didn’t you make an excuse to leave as soon I told you I was a police officer? Why didn’t you just let me go about my life if you cared that much? I was just an extra challenge for you, to see if you could get away with doing this while dating someone in the police.’ She was fighting to hold back tears.