Saturday, 23 June 2018: Evening
Maggie
Wynne
PC Oliver Reid
Maggie
PC Oliver Reid
Maggie
Maggie
Maggie
Martin
Epilogue: Six months later
Read on for a sneak preview of Alex Lake’s new novel
Acknowledgements
Keep Reading …
About the Author
Also by Alex Lake
About the Publisher
Suddenly it was so close.
Max’s birthday – his third birthday, the one that counted – was right below the date she had just crossed out.
| S | Su | M | Tu | W | Th | F |
| 1 | ||||||
| 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 |
| 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 |
| 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 |
| 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 |
| 30 |
Which meant it was one week until the twenty-third of June.
Seven days away. That was all. Seven more days until it happened. She had been trying to ignore it, but seeing it there, the very next Saturday, made that impossible.
It was a wonder she had the calendar at all. She had started keeping it on the fifth day after she had been locked in this basement. If she hadn’t, there was no doubt she would have completely lost track of how long she’d been held captive. There had been times – terrible, terrible times – when she had been unable to record the passing days and weeks as accurately as she would have liked. But as it was, she knew more or less how much time had passed, how many years – eleven, soon to be twelve – since she had seen her parents and brother and older cousin, Anne, who she had been on the way to meet when she made the mistake of speaking to the man in the car that slowed to a stop next to her.
When she’d started the calendar, she’d had no idea that more than a decade later she would still be using it. She’d expected – foolishly, as it turned out – to be back with her family and friends well before this much time had gone by, although even after five days she was starting to understand that this might be something that lasted longer than she could have ever anticipated. She was glad she had the calendar though, glad she had asked for some paper and a pencil – the pencil was a short, yellow one from Ikea, she recalled – and sketched out a calendar in tiny figures on one side. It was her only link to the outside world. Even though it was not totally accurate, on the days she thought were the birthdays and anniversaries of her friends and relatives, she imagined them having parties and opening presents, and in doing so, she felt, in a way, that she was with them.
Since Max was born, the calendar had assumed a new importance; she’d become obsessed with ensuring it was accurate. Her son – named after the boy in Where the Wild Things Are, because the storybook Max was able to escape his room through a magic door and travel to the island where the Wild Things lived, and freedom was something she longed for her little boy to experience – had been born on 23 June 2015. And ever since that day she’d had one dread eye on his third birthday.
On the day her first son, Seb, turned three, the door to the basement had opened and he – the man whose name she still did not know and whom she thought of only as ‘the man’ – had come in. Unsmiling, as usual, but with a nervousness which was new.
He had said it was time Seb left. Time to let him go.
But not her. She was staying here.
She did not believe the man. What would he do with Seb? How would he explain the sudden appearance of a three-year-old in his life?
He was not going to set him free at all.
So she refused, but the man took him anyway. Quickly, and brutally. She barely had time to resist.
It was the last time she saw her firstborn. The next time the man came to the room he was alone.
She asked for Seb hundreds – thousands, maybe – of times, but he just shook his head, refusing to say where her boy was. Once, he told her, Don’t worry, he’s safe, but she didn’t believe it. If a three-year-old boy had suddenly appeared in his life, people would have asked where the child came from, who the mother was. There was no way he wanted those questions, so she thought she knew what had happened.
The man had made the problem disappear.
He’d taken her little boy and killed him, then disposed of his body somewhere it would never be found.
Beside herself with grief, she’d lost weight – a lot of weight, enough that her skin grew loose and she could almost see the shape of the bones in her arms and legs – but it didn’t stop the man coming to the basement and gesturing to the bed in the corner with that curt little nod of his, then waiting for her to lie down and undress before he lay on top of her and did what he did while she closed her eyes and waited for it to be over and for him to be back upstairs in his house where she didn’t have to look at him.
And, of course, the thing she had feared most came to pass. Another child. She
