So she lied. And then her lie was exposed. She panicked. That’s the truth of it. Cracked under cross-examination. She winces as she recalls it. She wishes she could go back, and hold her own, not rise to the barrister insinuating Jamie didn’t value his own life, that he just lay there like a victim. If she had held her own, her evidence wouldn’t quite have made sense, but that would be better than this. Two killers released. It’s wrong. She just knows it, deep inside her. She made out to Harry that she regrets it, but she doesn’t. She knows she’s right.
It’s all bound up with Waste Not, for Zara. She saw the attitude to homeless people all the time. Commuters walking past them, not offering a ‘yes’ or a ‘no’ to a Big Issue request: just silence. People saying, ‘You shouldn’t give them money, they’ll spend it on drugs.’ And some of them would. But Jamie would spend it on something to keep him warm, a hot drink. Anna would spend it on dog food. There is as much variety in homeless people as there is in life. But nobody can see it.
If there is a God who observes who does and doesn’t step on paving cracks – one of Zara’s very first worries – or think good thoughts, he would recognize that those footballers were in the wrong. Because they were. She reached Jamie after Luke and his friend had left. He smelled of blood and urine. The blood didn’t smell like iron. It smelled like meat. That sickly-sweet smell of the butcher’s. A lime tang of urine underneath that. And at least Luke served some time. At least there is that.
When she told the police that Jamie must have wet himself in fear, they said, ‘Yes, or he didn’t have access to bathrooms.’
But Jamie never usually smelled. He wasn’t an alcoholic and he didn’t piss himself, she had said forcefully, but nobody believed her.
This is what she is thinking about as the sunlight dapples the pavement in front of her. That she wasn’t in the wrong. She wasn’t.
And now she knows it.
The high street is cold with frost. The sky blue above her. There is a car idling next to her, coasting along the street. People have started doing their Christmas shopping already. A couple walk along with Starbucks red cups.
The car slows even further. Zara slows, too, looking at it. There is something strange about it. It’s not … it’s not coasting. It’s going to stop right next to her. The wheels are aligning with the kerb.
The front passenger’s window rolls down slowly. Inch by inch. Zara can’t move away. She’s frozen. She can’t do anything except watch as, little by little, a man in a balaclava is revealed. He reaches a gloved hand towards her right arm and pulls her towards the car. Her side slams against it.
And this is it, and this is it, this is it. She is in true and proper danger. She thinks, suddenly, of her mum and Aidan, of the phone call they will receive.
‘So, Girl A,’ the man in the balaclava says, his breath hot and physical, both a noise and a sensation, right next to her ear. ‘We said we’d make you pay,’ he continues. ‘Guess how much it cost to get your name? Hardly anything. Just a bit of courtroom incompetence.’ He laughs, a cruel laugh, his mouth opening just slightly behind the black wool.
She is sweating and trying to move away, trying to reach into her pocket for her phone, but the man pulls tighter. She tries to reach around her back with the other hand, but he grasps that, too.
‘Get in,’ he says.
Zara looks into his eyes – brown and cruel – and opens her mouth. ‘Help,’ she shouts at passers-by, as loudly as she can. ‘Help me.’
A woman carrying a paper bag from a bakery starts, shocked, but walks on. A cluster of kids at the bus stop look curiously at her. Everyone has noticed but, for this second, and the next, nobody has decided to step up and help.
‘Somebody!’ Zara screams. His grip tightens on her. He is going to try and pull her into the car with him. He is going to threaten her. He is going to say he has a knife or a gun and she needs to be quiet and get in the car or he will hurt her. Her entire body is trembling.
He is holding her fast to the car, but she is thrashing around, screaming.
A man straightening a sandwich board outside a café stops and stares. ‘Hey,’ he says. ‘What the fuck are you doing?’ He runs towards them, and he is pulling her away from the car, and the man in the balaclava releases her, and she is crying and snot is running out of her nose, and she is saying thank you, over and over, to him, the café man. The car window goes up, and the car revs its engine and speeds away.
‘No number plate,’ the man says sadly to her. ‘They probably wanted your purse. Or your phone. Thieves.’
‘Yeah,’ Zara says. Her heart is still pounding. But something else is settling around her. After the adrenaline, the fear, and the relief that she is safe. A realization. It was them. The club. They know her. They know what she looks like. Her eyes dart around the street.
‘Nobody else did anything,’ the man says, looking around them.
Zara looks at him closely. He’s wearing a red bobble hat. He has a dark beard. Big cheeks. Looks friendly.
‘That’s London for you,’ he adds. ‘Full of cowards.’
‘I need to get home,’ Zara says. ‘Sorry.’ Her voice catches, and he reaches to clasp her shoulder, but it makes her flinch.
‘You should tell the police. It was a silver Mercedes, the new type,’ the man says. ‘Let me … let me walk you?’
‘No, I’ll call my mum. Really,’ Zara says. Her entire body is trembling like it does in the cold. She needs to go. She needs to go home to safety. They have found her.
8
Lauren
Islington, London
‘Where are you?’ Lauren says, the second her phone rings and she sees it’s Zara. ‘You’ve been ages.’
‘Someone just grabbed me,’ Zara says.
Blood flashes up Lauren’s body, hot and then freezing. ‘What?’
‘They tried to get me into a car. It was them,’ Zara says, her voice full of tears. ‘The people. The footballers.’
‘Jesus Christ,’ Lauren says, and her voice must be shrill, because Aidan’s head snaps up. ‘Where are you? Are you okay?’
‘I’m fine, I’m fine,’ Zara says. ‘But can you come and get me? I’m on the high street. By the bus stops. Please be quick.’
‘Coming,’ Lauren says, car keys already in her hand. She would send an air ambulance, a police car, the cavalry. ‘Are you alone?’
‘No, a man – a man helped me. We’re outside his café. Please come,’ Zara says, her voice watery and scared-sounding.
Still on the phone, she motions to Aidan, who follows. As she does it, she realizes. This moment, here in the sunlit kitchen with her husband and her dog, this is the moment. Everything has changed. Turned on a dime. She stares at her hand on the door handle, wedding rings catching the sun.
Nothing will ever be the same again.
Lauren has never been so angry in her life.
Zara is home. And they have called Harry, and the police. Aidan didn’t have to insist, as he often does. There was no debate over whether it was serious. Lauren stabbed the numbers into the keypad of her phone, her entire arm tense with rage. How fucking dare they.