‘And so you got in,’ Clara said.
He glanced at her. ‘Believe me, I have regretted it every minute of every day since. I was fucking stupid. It was pure impulse, spur of the moment.’ He shrugged. ‘I just thought, fuck it, why not?’
‘Christ, Luke!’
‘I know. I know. She had a bottle of that whisky I like on the passenger seat, and I was really surprised, because not many people know about it, and it’s my favourite. But anyway, when I mentioned how much I liked it she asked if I wanted a bit, and it had been a long day so I took a few swigs while we chatted … The next thing I knew, I woke up in a pitch-black car park in the middle of fucking nowhere.’
‘The Downs.’
‘Right.’ He stopped talking and she heard his breath catch in distress. ‘My wrists and ankles were bound. She had a knife. Told me to get out of the car and when I wouldn’t she cut me, said she’d do far worse if I didn’t do as I was told. I was still so groggy and confused … she got me out of the car and there was another one parked a few feet away, she loosened the rope around my ankles just enough so I could shuffle and told me to get in it and we started driving again.’
‘And you drove back to London?’ Clara frowned. ‘Why did she do that?’
‘To confuse the police, I guess.’
Clara tried to imagine how it must have felt to have been in that car, how terrified he must have been. As if reading her thoughts, Luke said, ‘I was scared witless. It was surreal, waking up like that, I thought it was a joke, a prank, you know? And then she cut me, and I suddenly realized I was in big fucking trouble, that she was completely off her head. The drive back to London, I kept drifting in and out of consciousness as she started talking about my dad, about Emily, but none of it made sense. I realized she was the one who’d been sending me the emails and photos, and the more she talked, the more crazy I realized she was, and the more it dawned on me what deep shit I was in.
‘I still thought I’d be OK, though.’ He laughed bitterly. ‘I mean, I’m tall and fit, you know? I thought she’d take her eye off the ball and I’d escape somehow, I always am all right, aren’t I? I thought I’d get out of this OK in the end. But when we got back to London we pulled up in the car park outside her building, she had the knife, kept prodding me with it ’til I was bleeding all over, she’d gagged me so I couldn’t shout out, and then she made me get out of the car. When she opened the back door to the building and told me to go inside, I thought no fucking way, so I didn’t move.’
‘And then what?’ Clara asked.
‘She told me Emily was inside. That my sister was waiting for me in there. It was all so crazy, but in my weird, drugged-up state I kind of thought it might be true.’ He shook his head as he remembered. ‘And I was still so certain that I’d be able to knock her out or something, so I thought, OK, I’ll go along with it, see if she really does know anything about Emily. I’d wondered for twenty years what had happened to her and here was this nutter saying she knew something. I thought I’d still be able to get out later, she was only one skinny woman, after all. I don’t know, I was too cocky, too curious.’
‘So you went in?’
He nodded. ‘My legs were still loosely bound so I couldn’t kick but I could shuffle, so, yeah, I walked in.’ He ran his hand over his face as he remembered. ‘Fucking idiot that I am.’
Luke told her how Hannah had pushed him into a pitch-black room, how he’d fallen to the floor and she’d locked the door. As he reached this part of his story he had to choke back his tears. ‘She didn’t come back for two days. I just had to lie there, waiting. Pissing myself, not eating or drinking.’ Angrily he swiped his tears away, his face burning at the memory. ‘She barely gave me any food or drink, I was always tied up, so I couldn’t even go to the toilet without her help.’
‘Oh, Luke.’
‘I still dream about it,’ he said. ‘I dream about it all the time. Waking up in that car, the knife, that fucking room. I have flashbacks every day.’ His voice broke and he began to cry. ‘I don’t think it’ll stop. I don’t think it’ll ever stop, Clara.’
She’d put her arms around him then and they’d stood for a long time, her holding him as he cried, the feel and smell and touch of him so familiar she had to fight hard not to give in to the sudden longing she felt.
‘You could have died,’ Luke said. ‘She took my keys. I didn’t know she was going to go to the flat and look for those pictures of Emily. I don’t even know how she knew they were there.’
‘What did she want with them?’ Clara asked.
Luke shrugged. ‘I guess she wanted to make sure you didn’t twig she wasn’t Emily. Or else … I don’t know, she seemed kind of obsessed with her, maybe she just wanted to destroy them, fuck knows what was going on in her head. She came back saying she couldn’t find them, that if I didn’t tell her exactly where they were, she’d burn the place down. So I told her they were in the filing cabinet, but she said she’d looked and they weren’t.’ He shook his head. ‘And then she went back and set fire to the flat.’ His face crumpled, ‘She came back that night stinking of smoke, crowing over what she’d done, I was so fucking scared that you’d been killed.’
‘They had slipped behind the drawer,’ Clara told him, ‘I found them by accident.’ She stared at him. ‘But I don’t understand why you never showed them to me.’
‘I rescued them from the house when Emily first disappeared, when Mum was hiding every last one of them away. I wanted to save them for myself. I never looked at them though, I couldn’t bear to. Her going missing was the worst thing that had ever happened to me. It was too painful to look at them, so I put them away out of sight.’
A soft breeze swept across the fields, and they walked on until they reached a stile where they sat for a while, looking out across the meadow. The hazy sky was streaked pink and gold as the day faded into twilight. It was perfectly still, perfectly silent, the smell of the earth and grass filling her nostrils, the dying sun warm on her skin. She would miss this place.
‘How are your parents doing?’ she asked.
For a while he carried on gazing up at the sky, but at last he said, ‘Dad’s moved out. Mum, unsurprisingly, doesn’t want anything to do with him since all those other students came out of the woodwork.’
Clara nodded. ‘I’m so sorry,’ she said.
He was silent for a while. ‘What my mum’s had to put up with from him, lying and covering for him for so many years. I hate him for what he put her through.’
‘I know,’ Clara murmured. Uneasily though her thoughts returned to that night in Hannah’s horrible flat, to when Hannah had accused Rose of her mother’s murder. She had seen it, just for a second, Rose’s reaction, the flicker of guilt in her eyes, gone almost before it was there. She glanced back at Luke and firmly pushed the thought away.
Suddenly he took hold of her hand. ‘I love you, Clara,’ he said desperately. ‘I love you so much. Please don’t leave me, I can’t get through this without you.’
‘Why on earth would you want to stay with me, Luke,’ she said, ‘when I was clearly never enough? When you slept with Sadie behind my back?’
‘But you are enough!’ he cried. ‘I don’t know, I can’t explain it … Clara, I’ve always known that I’m a selfish idiot, that I do the wrong thing, that I hurt people. And then there you were, always so good, so decent and honest, and I wanted to be like you. I thought maybe I could learn to be a better person if I was with you. Sadie was a mistake, a stupid one-off mistake. Please, Clara, give me another chance.’
‘But it wasn’t one-off!’ she said.
‘I slept with her once, I swear, Clara. I know that doesn’t make it OK, but it was a terrible, stupid mistake that I regretted immediately.’