He was under the bed, or crouched on the floor beside it. Holding her ankle now with a gloved hand. Tracing the tip of the knife’s blade down the back of her leg, lingering at the heel, making a figure-8 motion with the tip. Then back up the leg, inside her thigh, pricking at the lace trim of her underwear. Alice was trembling with fear, a phrase she’d heard and read many times but had never actually experienced, and she was worried that the involuntary movements of her own body would push her skin into the knife. Now the masked man was tugging on her other leg, then her arm too, pulling her out of the bed, and whispering in her ear. ‘We’re going to play a game.’
With the knife pressed against her neck, the intruder pushed Alice out of the bedroom and down the hall, towards the front door. She made no effort to escape him. She didn’t think she could. She thought, He’s taking me from here. He’s going to kill me. As they passed the doors to her children’s bedrooms – Tommy’s, David’s, the one Nancy and Emer shared – Alice felt as if this masked man had already driven the knife into her chest. They passed the front door and went on into the living room. Why was he bringing her here, to the opposite end of the house from where everyone was sleeping? She thought he was about to rape her.
If she had a hope at this point, it was that that was all that was about to happen. She could at least physically survive that, she reasoned, and learn to live with the memories, somehow, in time. She said a silent prayer that everyone else in the house remained asleep – that everyone else was asleep, that this monster had started whatever this was by coming to her in her bed. The alternative was just too horrific to contemplate.
The house had two bathrooms: the family one by the bedrooms and a smaller one off the kitchen. It was tiny, barely five foot by six, but they’d managed to squeeze in a toilet, a sink and a shower a tad too tight for the adults but sufficient for the kids, enough to ease the stress of school mornings. The masked man opened the door to it with a soft kick and shoved Alice inside. He told her to get on the floor, pointing the knife to the wedge of space between the foot of the toilet bowl and the shower door. Alice dropped to her knees, leaving him standing directly behind her.
There was a blur of movement and a burst of red hot pain: he’d smacked her head, face-first, into the porcelain. Alice, stunned, let out a yelp and toppled over. She felt something slick and soft on her lip – blood – and thought her nose might be broken.
Blankness.
When she opened her eyes, she was half-lying on the floor, looking at the tiles. Her brain felt like it was trying to break free of her skull. Her vision had turned pink: blood was running from the gash in her forehead down into her eyes. Cautiously she raised a hand to assess the damage, but only got halfway. While she’d been stunned by the blow, the intruder had used a length of rope to secure her to the pipe behind the toilet. It was looped around her wrists several times and had been tied off in a series of neat, tight knots.
He was standing in the doorway, making shadows of the hall light. He bent down so he could whisper in her ear, his breath a warm tickle on her skin.
‘Tommy. David. Nancy. Emer.’
Alice got the message. She would behave.
Thinking the real attack was about to start, she braced herself for it. But instead the intruder stepped outside, back into the hall, and closed the door gently behind him. There was a tinkling sound as the key turned in the lock.
It was dark in the bathroom now and she was alone. Was he leaving? How long would she have to stay quiet? What would he do while she did that? How did she know he wouldn’t hurt the kids? Should she cry out now, to alert them? Or would that guarantee that they’d get hurt? What should she do?
Over the next few minutes, the silence in the house grew steadily louder, like the electronic hum of a speaker system set at full volume but playing no music. It mixed with her own beating pulse, the thumping pain in her head. The pain was taking on a shape in her vision, a glow that she was struggling to see around. Or maybe that was because her eyes were swelling. Or maybe it was her nose that was. Alice heard sounds but she wasn’t sure if they were real or, if they were, what had made them. The gentle creak of a door hinge. The brush of a foot on the carpet. A distant clink of glass against something different, maybe wood.
Alice closed her eyes and prayed for the lives of her children.
Shane would tell the Gardaí it was possible he’d been woken by a noise but couldn’t say for sure. What struck him when he did wake was not necessarily the absence of his wife in the bed – she could’ve got up to go to the bathroom as she often did during the night – but the closed bedroom door. Ever since they’d brought a wailing Tommy home from the hospital, it had been left ajar. Shane had lain awake for a minute or two, listening and waiting, before his confusion became concern and forced him out of bed. He discovered the bedroom door locked, the key removed from it. That didn’t make any sense. Part of him wanted to call out for Alice, to find out what the hell was going on, even if he woke the whole house up. Part of him thought doing this would be a comical overreaction.
He remembered Tommy’s mobile phone, and called it with his own which had been charging on his bedside table. When his son told him that his bedroom door was locked too, Shane knew something was terribly wrong. He put on shoes, awkwardly climbed out of his bedroom window and hurried around to the front door of the house. He was planning to let himself in with the spare key they kept under one of the terracotta planters, but he didn’t need it. The front door was open, pulled right back.
Had Alice left the house? Shane scanned the garden, the gravel drive, the road, but there was little to see in the inky blackness. He should get a torch, he thought. There was one in the junk drawer next to the fridge. He went inside and started towards the kitchen, flicking light switches as he went. The air smelled like someone had been making coffee and, indeed, there was a cooling mug of black coffee on the kitchen counter.
Everything about this was odd. Alice took her coffee with milk, only ever drank one cup of it first thing in the morning and would never have used that mug. It was part of a set of four they’d received as a Christmas present, expensive ones, handcrafted by a famous Irish homeware designer, which his wife had classified as ‘too good to use’. They normally sat in one of the glass-fronted cabinets, on display, brought out only for special visitors. Now one was sitting on the kitchen counter, splotchy with coffee stains, still warm in the middle of the night.
But there was something even stranger on the kitchen table: five silver keys, long and slim and simple. The keys for their internal doors. The sight of them set a cold fear coiling like a snake in Shane’s stomach, because he knew what was happening now, he was sure. He called out for Tommy to ring the Gardaí, not caring any more who else he woke.
It was all starting to add up: the front door open, the doors locked from the outside, Alice gone … and Shane a bank manager. He’d been briefed about this. Tiger kidnappings, they called them. A threat to his family, a warning not to contact the Gardaí. No doubt there’d be a phone call any minute, or maybe they’d left him a note with further instructions. Alice was probably in the back of a van somewhere, terrified but physically okay. He’d go into work as normal later in the morning and walk out again with tens of thousands of pounds in cash. Or they’d instruct him to go into work now, before anyone else did, disarm the alarms and clear out the safe for them. Later he’d give the money to a member of the gang and then, soon after, Alice would be returned to their home.