Mark Sennen - Touch

‘I don’t know who he is.’ Trent seemed more confident, as if he had weathered the storm. He repeated the denial several times and neither Savage nor Jackson could persuade him to say anything else on the matter.

Bradley had a smile on her face now, the glee evident. On the desk in front of her a latest model iPhone flashed a little icon on the screen as it recorded Bradley’s own copy of the interview. Savage fancied shoving the phone right in between those big teeth, ramming the hideous pink contraption down her throat until she choked on Trent’s weasel-like words. Instead she decided it was time to move to the back up plan Hardin had proposed.

‘OK, Mr Trent, I think we are finished for now. You are free to leave.’

‘Interview suspended at 12.13 PM,’ Jackson said and proceeded to stop the tapes and remove and seal them up.

‘There’s a bit of a crowd waiting for you outside, but you should be able to get through.’ Savage smiled at Trent and pushed back her chair to get up.

Trent’s face cracked like an egg hit with a spoon and he turned to plead with his brief. Bradley put a hand on his arm to stop him.

‘My client will require an escort away from here.’

‘Oh I don’t think that will be necessary. There are only a few photographers and a couple of hundred students. I have no idea what they are doing to be honest. Something about a paedophile.’

‘Paedophile?’ Trent said. ‘But they…’

‘They?’ Savage said. ‘The girls you mean? Tracy Williams was I believe fourteen. Granted she appeared a whole lot older covered in makeup and wearing a cutesy little skirt. The push up bra helped too, amazing what those things can do. Obviously the press don’t know any of that because we have to shield her identity.’

‘You have to protect my client. You have a duty of care.’ Bradley had picked up the phone, but Savage noticed she hadn’t stopped recording.

‘Calm down, Ms Bradley, of course we do. We will put Mr Trent in a car and take him home. I believe a few people are hanging around Moor Vale as well, but we can put a uniform on the door. For tonight, at least.’

Bradley nodded, but did not comment. Trent stared at his hands on the table, almost as if they did not belong to him. The right hand jerked up and down with little shaking movements until he put the left hand on top.

Savage continued. ‘To be on the safe side we will put out a statement saying Mr Trent cooperated fully with us and has provided some very valuable leads. We will explain that we expect to be making a number of arrests in the next few hours.’

‘No!’ Trent said. ‘I mean I don’t want to go home. I want to go somewhere else. Away from here, away from Plymouth. I need a new identity, I need protection.’

‘This isn’t a movie, Mr Trent, this is real life, and the last time I enquired Devon and Cornwall Police weren’t running a travel agency. Pity really, I could do with a break.’

‘But it’s not safe, they will get me and kill me.’

‘Who exactly, Mr Trent? The mob outside or someone else? We can’t do much about either, I am afraid.’

‘Jesus!’ Trent leant forward and put his head in his hands. He started to hyperventilate and talk to himself. Then he began to sob. Bradley wriggled on her seat and Savage noted she didn’t make any attempt to comfort him. Cold bitch. After a couple of minutes Trent looked up, his eyes glassy and his face white like a blank sheet of paper awaiting a story. Jackson unwrapped a fresh set of tapes and stuck them in the machine.

*

Alice had been in danger of losing track of the days until she hit on the idea of the pips. Every morning she woke to find a tray with fresh fruit and a bottle of water at the door and from the third day she started to secrete apple pips under a corner of the mattress — one for every day. Now she held the little brown seeds in her hand and counted off the days until she arrived at Tuesday. Or Wednesday. She couldn’t quite figure the precise day because she didn’t know how long she had slept at the beginning of the ordeal, but as she put the pips back under the bed she reckoned it was a pretty good guess.

She lay back down on the mattress and yet again tried to work out what the hell was going on. As each day had come and gone she began to think maybe she wasn’t in the hands of some nutter after all. Perhaps she had been kidnapped and was being held to ransom. If so, then the kidnapper had made a big mistake. Since her mum had died Dad had given up his job in Exeter and now taught part-time at the local college. They hadn’t been well off before then, but now they had no money. That was why she had taken the job at the nursery.

Thinking about her mum made Alice cry again, but it also gave her some resolve. Mum had said Alice had to be brave and look after Dad and Alfie, her younger brother, and Alice promised she would. She wasn’t going to let some guy make her renege on that.

She got off the bed and for the umpteenth time took a tour of the room. She touched the wooden shutters and moved on. At first the window had seemed like the obvious way out, but no longer. She had scratched a larger hole in the paint and discovered iron bars set into the stonework on the outside. No way out there. That only left the door. She went over and tried the handle but it was locked, as always. She bent to look through the keyhole expecting to see the opposite wall of the dark corridor she had seen many times before. Nothing. The hole had been blocked up or… the key was still in the lock!

She remembered a trick her Dad had shown her where you slid a piece of paper under the door and pushed the key out from the inside, retrieving the paper with the key on it. She didn’t have any paper, but she did have the tray from her morning delivery. The tray was a single piece of preformed plastic, the sort you got in a cafeteria, and the gap beneath the door measured about two fingers, just enough to allow it to be pushed under. Now she needed something to poke the key with. She racked her brains, listing things in the room she might use. She had gone through everything and was beginning to despair when… fruit to the rescue again: a banana! She grabbed the peel and felt the woody stalk, perfect. The stalk didn’t fit into the keyhole so she whittled away at it with her fingernails until she had trimmed the excess and then pushed it in. The key wasn’t straight in the lock so it didn’t drop out, but after a bit of wiggling and twisting she heard it fall down and clatter onto the tray.

Silence. The only noise the beating of her heart. Thump, thump, thump, thump. No footsteps in the hallway, no sound of anybody coming to investigate. She pulled the tray in, picked up the key and tried it in the lock. Click. She pushed the handle down and opened the door.

The door swung open to reveal a hallway lit by a bare bulb glowing white and hanging from an old, twisted wire. A carpet ran down the centre exposing stained wooden floorboards either side. The carpet was ancient and in an old-fashioned style, coloured deep red with gold swirls in amongst the dirt somewhere, the pile worn and threadbare. A short way along the corridor to the left a door stood half-open. Inside the room a huge roll-top bath sat beneath a window. There was no blind or curtain, just glass with condensation streaming down in rivulets. The bath and a cracked washbasin had antique fittings, the tap on the basin dripping dirty water onto brown stained enamel.

To her right she could see another door, closed this time, and beyond the corridor turned a corner. In front of her stairs led down to either a hallway or a room below. The stairs were steep with the carpet held in place with brass rods and had a wooden banister to the right.

Alice retrieved the duvet from the bed and wrapped it around her. Then she padded out of the room and across to the stairs and began to descend, stopping on each step to listen.