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She thinks of November’s words again. Of her urgent voice, Please, don’t do anything about this until you’ve spoken to the police.
But Hugh was safe, she wants to wail. Hugh was the one person I could rely on. Hugh was there.
And then suddenly, Hannah knows.
She sees the whole picture, clearly, spread out in front of her with an awful crystalline clarity, the picture she has struggled to see, to remember, for so many years.
She sees the open door.
She sees April, sprawled across the rug, her skin still blotched with terra-cotta makeup.
She hears her own screams, hears Hugh’s feet on the stairs, watches as he runs to April, presses his fingers to her pulse.
She sees him, crouched over April, desperately administering heart compressions. Go, she hears him gasp. Hannah, for God’s sake go and find someone.
She has been so, so stupid.
And now she is locked in a car with a killer, her unborn child in her belly, and a broken phone.
But she is not going to die.
Turning her head as if to look out the window, Hannah glances casually at the passenger-side lock. It’s down. She could try the handle anyway, but somehow she doubts Hugh will have overlooked that, and if she tries it, and it doesn’t work, Hugh will know. Her best bet, she thinks, is to play along. Lull Hugh into a false sense of security until…
But she can’t think about that. There has to be an opening, an opportunity, something she can take advantage of. She is not going to die here, and she is not going to let her child die with her. Think, Hannah, think.
What does she have on her that she could defend herself with, if it came to it? Not even her keys, she realizes with a kind of nausea at her own stupidity. Nothing. She has no bag, no purse. She’s not even wearing proper shoes to run for it—even if she, six months pregnant, could outrun Hugh’s long, lean cricketer’s legs.
She has nothing but a broken mobile phone.
The thought snags, catching at some memory at the back of her mind. It’s a memory of Hugh asking casually, And what about your phone—is there any way he could be tracking you?
She thought he was protecting her from Will, but now she realizes—he was protecting himself. Even then, he was thinking ahead, to this moment in the darkness as he drives her to an unknown destination, making sure that her phone could not be tracked. He has turned off his own, and the satnav.
She had shown him her broken phone, and Hugh—Hugh had nodded and accepted it. But it wasn’t quite true. Her phone screen is broken, but the phone itself is not—it functioned fine when she tried to pay the taxi driver. And Hugh doesn’t know this, which is a tiny, tiny advantage in her favor. It’s the one piece of information she has that Hugh does not. But how can she use it without a working screen, and more to the point, how can she do so without alerting Hugh?
Her hand goes into the pocket of the borrowed jacket, tracing the hard, familiar shape of it, running her fingers over the buttons, feeling the shattered glass.
Some phones have a way of calling the police from the lock screen, she knows that. She saw a video on Twitter once, a woman showing you how to activate it on an iPhone. You had to press the side button and one of the volume buttons. Or was it the power button? Whichever one it was, the phone autodialed the emergency services without the user having to do anything else. But in the video, the phone let out a loud siren as it called the police. Hannah could turn down the volume, but she has no way of knowing whether the siren overrides the volume setting. If it’s some kind of deliberate safety feature, a warning to the user that they’ve dialed 999, then it would make sense to have it sound no matter what.
Should she risk it?
She glances over at Hugh. He’s staring at the road ahead, not showing any uneasiness.
If she calls the police and her phone lets out a siren call, Hugh will know she has a working phone, and he will find some way to dispose of it, she’s sure of that now.
No, she can’t use that feature.
Oh God, if only Hugh had been right. If only Will were tracking her. She shuts her eyes, imagining Will roaring up behind the car on his motorbike, forcing Hugh to a stop, and a lump forms in her throat, almost choking her. But she cannot cry—if she does, she will never stop, and Will isn’t coming; she is going to have to rescue herself from this.
But Will… Will is the one person she could call.
A sudden shiver runs through her.
“Are you cold?” Hugh asks conversationally.
She shakes her head.
“No, it was nothing, just a goose on my grave.”
