Stolen (31 page)

Such insincerity when she’d taken her child and allowed it to die, and was now intending to kill Lotte too, was almost too much to bear. ‘That would be nice,’ she replied, forcing an innocent, trusting smile as her hand ran over the lump of the knife against her hip.

It was odd to see Fern without her usual perfect makeup and not a hair out of place. Her face looked grey and careworn, her hair decidedly ratty. But the dirt and mess in the kitchen was far more shocking. The work surfaces were strewn with takeaway food cartons, unwashed dishes, cups and glasses, and the tiled floor was filthy. It was proof that all their plans had fallen apart, and maybe they were even unravelling mentally too, for she’d never seen the kitchen looking anything less than gleaming before.

Fern took a clean glass from one of the wall cupboards, then went over to the fridge to get the milk. Lotte moved closer to her, at the same time glancing back at Howard.

He was just outside the kitchen, looking intently at a little booklet with a blue cover. He wasn’t watching her or his wife at all.

The fridge was a tall one, the bottom half a freezer, and Fern was reaching for a bottle of milk just above shoulder height. All at once Lotte saw a chance. It wasn’t the kind of moment she’d hoped for, but it might be the only one she’d get, so she slid her hand into her pocket, scraping the knife blade free of the tissue paper against her hip as she drew it out.

Fern still had her back to Lotte, filling the glass from the bottle with the fridge door still open. She put the bottle back on the shelf and as she began to turn to give the glass of milk to Lotte she gave the fridge door a little push with her shoulder to shut it.

‘Just what I wanted,’ Lotte said. Bringing her left hand up as if to take the milk, she held the knife in her right hand, and as Fern turned her body fully to pass over the glass, Lotte leapt forward, plunging the knife into her chest with all the force she could muster.

The knife did not go in smoothly. There was resistance, as if she’d struck bone, and an odd sort of scraping noise before Fern’s surprised shriek drowned it and the glass of milk clattered to the floor. Fern staggered backwards towards the sink under the window, the knife embedded in her chest. Blood was seeping out, staining her cream sweater.

Howard rushed to his wife. ‘What have you done?’ he yelled at Lotte.

Lotte was unable to move, transfixed with horror that she’d actually stabbed another human being. It was only when Fern’s voice rasped out, demanding that Howard must get Lotte, that she came to her senses.

The table was between her and them, and Lotte looked around wildly for another weapon, but there was nothing suitable within reach. Howard was coming round the table, his thin face grim with determination and hatred. Lotte dodged the other way, picked up a used coffee pot and threw it at him. It caught him on the forehead, making him lurch back, and the still-warm coffee ran down his face.

‘You bitch,’ he yelled as he wiped away coffee grounds from his face, and came after her looking even more savage now.

She dodged him several more times, going to the right when he went to the left, then to the left when he went right. She was trying to give herself thinking time, for Fern had pulled the knife out of her chest and was holding on to the wound, with blood coming through her fingers. She was swaying, and maybe in a few minutes she’d pass out or even die.

‘See to her, you bastard,’ Lotte hissed at him, willing him to obey her and give her the chance to get out through the front door.

‘You won’t get away,’ Howard threw back at her. ‘I’ve got the keys.’

Fern didn’t just keel over as Lotte had always imagined anyone mortally wounded would do. She just slowly sank down on to a chair. ‘Help me, honey,’ she bleated out, her face drained of all colour. ‘Help me!’

‘Help you?’ Lotte roared back at her. ‘You’ve put me through hell, stolen my baby and let it die, and intended to kill me too! I want you to die!’

Howard stopped trying to catch Lotte and ran to his wife, helping her down on to the kitchen floor. Lotte ran for the front door, but as expected it was locked and the key missing. She ran to the back door but that was the same, then into the lounge to try the windows. They too were locked as they always were. She picked up a heavy candlestick on the mantelpiece and struck the window with it, but amazingly, the glass didn’t break.

She was just backing up to take a run at the window when Howard came in behind her and caught hold of the candlestick in her hand.

‘That’ll do,’ he said. ‘You’ve done enough damage for one night.’

His cheeks were wet with tears and he was shaking, and she surmised that Fern had died.

‘Is she dead?’ She had to have it confirmed.

He nodded and looked so utterly devastated that Lotte felt unable to say anything spiteful.

‘Let me go now,’ she said. ‘If you lock me up again you’ll just be getting in deeper and deeper. I killed her after all, and we can tell the police everything else was Fern’s doing.’

He looked at her long and hard for some time. Lotte could see he was really scared, and that he didn’t know what to do any more. Fern had always been the strong one, the organizer and the boss; Howard’s role had been mainly supportive.

‘I can help you,’ Lotte wheedled. ‘This is awful but we can get out of it if we keep our heads and work together. We have to do something: either ring the police and tell them what happened, or get rid of her body. You can’t leave her lying in the kitchen. And what did you do with the baby’s body?’

He didn’t answer, he couldn’t even look directly at her, and Lotte sensed she was right in thinking that he and Fern had intended to dispose of both her and the baby together tonight.

Just the thought of that made Lotte want to reach out for something heavy and dash his brains out, but even though he was thin he was wiry and much stronger than she was and it could end up with her brains being spilled out.

‘You aren’t a bad man, Howard,’ she said, putting her hands on his arm. ‘I know it was all Fern pushing for this – she was crazy! If you ring the police now I’ll tell them that. We could even say you were away on business for much of the time and didn’t know what was going on.’

All at once his eyes flashed dangerously. ‘It was you who made all this happen,’ he snarled at her. ‘You cast a spell over my Fern and you did your best to drive a wedge between us.’

‘I didn’t,’ Lotte said, her stomach churning with fear because he looked so savage.

‘Oh, but you did,’ he said. ‘You fooled Fern into believing you’d willingly have a baby for us, but you just wanted me, didn’t you?’

‘Want you?’ Lotte couldn’t help but look and sound scornful as the idea was so preposterous. ‘I had to be drugged, starved and kept prisoner before I submitted to you.’

All at once he grabbed her hands and yanked them behind her back. She screamed out and tried to fight him off but his hands were like steel vices. He dragged her by both her hands back to the hall, snatched up a length of rope hanging on a peg by the door, and secured her hands behind her back.

‘Stop screaming or I’ll gag you,’ he said, and pushing her forcefully on to the hall chair, he used another length of rope to tie her ankles.

He left her for just a couple of seconds and came back with a pair of kitchen scissors in his hands. He caught hold of a clump of her hair and cut it, then another and another, going all over her head until her blonde hair lay thick on the floor all around the chair. His breath was rasping as he did so, and it seemed to her that there was some kind of symbolism in this act, though she didn’t understand what.

Lotte was too scared to say anything. She knew by the two ready prepared lengths of rope that he and Fern had planned what they were going to do with her well in advance. But Howard hadn’t expected to have to do it alone; he was clearly completely unbalanced by Fern’s death and the knowledge that now he’d have to get rid of her body too. Lotte decided to remain silent so he didn’t gag her. She might need her voice later.

Once she was secured, Howard went into the kitchen, and although Lotte couldn’t see more than a few feet into the room she heard him pour himself a drink. She guessed it was brandy to calm his nerves – he gulped it down like a man dying of thirst. A little later she heard him open the cupboard by the back door. She guessed by the crackling sound that he was getting out the picnic blanket with a waterproof backing, intending to wrap Fern’s body in it.

In the next ten minutes she heard the glugging of drink, sobbing, sniffing and rustling as he wrapped his wife up. But Lotte’s mind was on how she could undo her hands. She’d seen hundreds of films where rope was cut by a shard of glass, even a rusty nail, but such things didn’t lie around waiting to be discovered. If she tried to shuffle or hop along the passage to find something, Howard would hear her.

She fumbled with the rope and found it wasn’t very tight; she thought with a bit of wriggling she might be able to get free. But it seemed wiser to leave her hands tied until he put her in the car.

When he came back into the hall his eyes were red and puffy from crying. She could smell brandy on his breath and he had blood all over his trousers and shirt.

He looked down at her and his lip curled back like a savage dog’s. ‘We had it all until you came along,’ he snarled at her. ‘I always knew you’d be trouble, but you bewitched her with your wide blue eyes and your little girl looks. I hate you!’

She wanted to hurl abuse back at him, to tell him he was a weak pervert, dominated by a ruthless, cruel woman, but she knew it wasn’t advisable to antagonize him any further.

He gagged her before unlocking the front door and hauled her outside. To her surprise his car wasn’t there, only a big, dark-coloured van. She supposed he must have bought or hired it in the last couple of days because she hadn’t seen it before. It was too dark now to tell the exact colour, or what make of van it was, and when he opened the back doors to shove her in, she could see nothing, but there was a faint smell of fish.

He bundled her in roughly, and slammed the doors. Once he had returned to the house, Lotte tried loosening her hands. But it wasn’t as easy as she’d expected; as she moved one hand the rope just tightened round the other, and now she felt sick with terror because she couldn’t get free.

As her eyes grew used to the darkness she could see a small bundle, around fifteen inches long and six or seven inches thick, near her. Tears sprang up for she knew it was her baby. She’d never been allowed to hold her in her arms and now they were going to share the same grave.

Howard came back then, carrying Fern wrapped up and secured with rope. He put her in a great deal more carefully than he had Lotte and she saw he was still crying.

Just a few minutes after leaving the house the van bumped over rough ground and Lotte realized they must be on the hard, the area above the waterline at West Itchenor where Howard’s boat was moored. Clearly he was planning to load her and Fern on to the boat, then park his van elsewhere. Once the tide had come right in, he would sail out into the harbour and on out to the open sea. She realized then that the little blue book he’d been looking at so intently earlier was the tide times. She was glad then that she’d stabbed the woman he loved, and she hoped he would have a miserable, lonely life and a terrible, painful death. Someone so cold-blooded deserved to suffer. And even if the thought of that didn’t make her any less terrified, it justified her killing Fern.

As she lay there waiting for the moment when he’d come and haul her out on to the boat, it struck her that he was taking a very big risk. It might be dark but it was only about nine in the evening, and people must be about and would see him. But then, she’d never been down here at this time of night, so for all she knew there could be many men loading up their boats for fishing trips and suchlike, and what Howard was doing wouldn’t look suspicious.

The back door of the van was flung open and Lotte was hauled out by her feet and slung over his shoulder, quickly followed by a blanket to hide her and cut off her view. He walked only a few steps over stones, wheezing with the effort, then climbed up four or five steps on to a jetty. Dangling down his back, Lotte could see water between the gaps in the planks, but within a few yards he jumped on to his boat, which rocked beneath them.

She was thrown into the tiny cabin. It was a small drop, no more than three feet, but she banged her head, jarred her whole back, and a pain shot through her elbow.

By the time Howard returned, grunting and wheezing under the weight of Fern who was perhaps three stone heavier than Lotte, she was beside herself with terror, for she’d again attempted to get her hands untied and failed.

Howard eased his wife’s body in with care, stopping to rest and get his breath back. Lotte was so close to Fern on the floor of the cabin that she could smell her blood, mingled with Opium, the perfume she always wore, and it made her feel sick.

Howard went off and briefly came back on board once more, presumably with the baby’s body, but he didn’t put it in the cabin with them. Lotte felt the boat lurch as he jumped off again, and then heard the sound of the van being driven away.

Desperation made her go all out to get free, but even though she almost stripped the skin from the back of her hands pulling them against the rope, she couldn’t release them. She tried to bang her tied feet on the cabin floor in the hope that someone would hear the sound, and she grunted against the gag too, but it was to no avail. The tide was coming in fast, she could hear the slap of waves against the hull, and now she understood the phrase ‘staring death in the face’, for she could see absolutely no way of escape.

It was some time before Howard returned, perhaps an hour, during which Lotte had endured cramp in her legs and pins and needles in her arms and she felt she might suffocate with the gag. He took no more than a cursory look into the cabin, but even so she got a strong whiff of drink and wondered if he’d been into the pub in his bloodstained clothes, or had gone home. He slammed the cabin door and started up the engine.