Seven Days. Alex Lake

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       Wynne

       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

       Saturday, 16 June 2018

       Seven Days to Go

      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 pointed at her son. At his son.

      Give him to me, he said.

      Why? she replied.

       Just give him to me.

       No.

       I want to show him the world. I’ll bring him back later.

      She refused again.

       It’s his birthday. I’ll get him ice cream. Take him to a park. Think of what you’re denying him.

      She knew it was close to his birthday. At that point, the calendar was missing a few days here and there, but back then she hadn’t thought it mattered.

      And it would be nice for him to have a treat. So she agreed.

      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.

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