‘Well, I’ll tell you in my own good time,’ he said. ‘Meanwhile, why don’t you have a little think about it?’
And with that, the door was shut on her and locked.
It was pitch black. The room must have been a cellar or pantry at one time. It had no window and the floor was stone. Kayley, moving towards the wall to flatten her palms against it and get her bearings, hit her shin on the metal frame of a low camp bed.
She sat down on it, finding a nylon sleeping bag rolled up at its head.
The air was cold and tinged with damp, and the blackness was already getting right into Kayley’s head and poisoning it with every fear she’d ever entertained. She would die here. She would never be found. She would lie in this cellar, and only be found, like the body they’d discovered at Harville Hall, years and years later.
Her sob echoed around the darkness, sounding strange and inhuman to her ears. She got up, pushed back her shoulders and let out the loudest yell her lungs could manage, hoping that the noise of it would drown some of her terror.
It did, but not for long, so she shouted again.
Soon enough she was hoarse and there was no sign of anybody coming to reprieve her, so she lay down on the camp bed and wept.
Time had ceased to have any meaning for her long before the door was unlocked once more and a light entered the room.
The light was all Kayley could see to begin with, but then she heard the clatter of a metal tray on the floor and smelled something like sausages.
‘Dinner,’ said a gruff voice, not Harville’s, and then she was left alone again, but with the lamp this time.
At least it was something. Light and food, things she would normally take for granted, seemed like precious gifts.
She ate the sausages and baked beans and looked around her. There was nothing to see. Brick walls hemming her in on every side, a small grille very high up at the back of the room. Cobwebs. Lots of cobwebs but apparently no spiders. Well, what would they live on, in here?
She picked up the metal tray and weighed it in her hands. If this was a movie, she’d wait behind the door with it until someone came to retrieve the dirty dishes, then clonk them over the head and make a run for it. Could this be a plan? To be honest, the heads of those thugs in the car had looked bullet-proof, let alone able to withstand a half-hearted blow from a girl with a tray.
All the same, she picked it up and stationed herself behind the door.
She gave up when her legs started to ache, and wrapped herself in the sleeping bag.
Lying there in the dim light of the lamp, she thought of her history with Lawrence Harville, cringing as the memories crowded in.
It had all begun at college. She’d left the lecture theatre with a lad off her course she’d clicked with and went to get a coffee, as they usually did.
Ross wasn’t her type and he hadn’t shown any signs of fancying her, but he was a lot posher than the boys she knew from the estate and she was rather flattered to be singled out by him as good friendship material. He was a few years older than her, doing his NVQ in Youth Work after dropping out of Nottingham Uni, and he’d been to a fee-paying school. She loved to quiz him on this, asking him over lattes about whether he’d been a fag or been beaten by old geezers in capes.
‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ he’d laughed back at her. ‘It’s not like that any more. It’s just a school that you pay for. Smaller classes, more extra-curricular activities. No canes and definitely no fagging any more. It helps if you can play rugby though.’
‘Ooh, can you?’
‘Scrum-half for the First XV,’ he said proudly.
She was none the wiser.
‘I was in the netball team once,’ she offered. ‘Got kicked out, though, for smoking at half-time.’
He laughed.
‘You were a rebel.’
‘Oh yes. Weren’t there any girls in your school then?’
He paused to swallow a foamy mouthful.
‘In the sixth form there were,’ he said.
‘We never had one of those. A sixth form. Different world, isn’t it?’