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It’s Monday, or so the ghoul said. Perhaps by now it’s Tuesday. If so, she’s been here three full days, with only a bite of chocolate brownie and a bowl of Peppa Pig spaghetti to sustain her. No wonder she feels faint. Whenever she moves her head, the cell takes a moment to catch up.
Before indecision can paralyse her Elissa breaks open the banana chips and scoffs the lot. Afterwards, she digs out the chocolate brownie and takes two huge bites. She’s tempted to eat the whole thing before the ghoul can confiscate itagain. Instead, she seals what remains inside the wrapper and reaches under her dress, tucking the package into her underwear.
Monday, or possibly Tuesday.
Which means her mum has endured hell for at least forty-eight hours, possibly seventy-two. Will her dad know by now? Doubtless, Lena Mirzoyan will have tried to contact him, not out of any hope of support but out of a deep sense of duty. Hopefully, he’ll be tucked away somewhere unreachable, unaware of current events. Because if he does know, he won’t waste the opportunity to blame Lena. His motivation won’t be concern for Elissa, only for the pain he can cause, the havoc he can wreak.
She tries to imagine what’s happening at home. Will her grandparents have driven down from Birmingham? Will they be sitting on the sofa beside their daughter while a police officer updates them on the search?
There are no leads, Ms Mirzoyan. I’m afraid your girl isn’t coming back.
She thinks about her normal weekday routine. On Mondays, her mum doesn’t finish work until six, so after school Elissa goes across the street to Mrs McCluskey. The Irishwoman doesn’t really like kids, but she likes the money she gets for two hours’ childcare, which she feeds into an online casino while Elissa plays chess.
On Tuesdays, Elissa visits Lasse Haagensen, the Danish grandmaster who runs the school chess club. Although there’s a small fee for the Wednesday club, Lasse doesn’t charge anything for Elissa’s one-on-one time. She used to think it was because he liked her mum. These days, she’s not so sure. Lasse’s flat is weird but cool, full of interesting ephemera. He’s an obsessive collector – everything from Victorian mustard spoons to vintage Garbage Pail Kids stickers. Mainly, he collects chess sets. Elissa has played with most ofthem: delicate pieces sculpted from rare woods, marble or bone; chunkier designs forged from bronze or aluminium; themed sets featuring characters fromStar Trek,The Lord of the Rings,Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland; and her favourite set of all – a reproduction collection of Lewis chessmen carved from walrus ivory.
Most grandmasters eschew anything but the most basic Staunton designs, believing that even a milliwatt of brainpower wasted on piece identification will negatively affect their game. Lasse doesn’t share that concern, which makes him much more fun than other GMs Elissa’s met. The only set she won’t use features the cast fromThe Silence of the Lambs, with Clarice Starling as the white queen and Hannibal Lecter as her opposite number.
Lasse showed her that movie once, mainly to point out a blooper: when Clarice visits a pair of chess-playing entomologists, their board is set up wrong, with a black square in the near right-hand corner instead of a white one. Then again, the scientists were using beetles for chess pieces, so the wholethingwas pretty left-field.
Before the ghoul drugged her with the Peppa Pig spaghetti, she’d been archiving her recollections of Wide Boys – one drawer for Andrea and one for the threebodachs. Now, it’s time to fast-forward to the tournament itself and see if anything there can offer clues. If not, she’ll switch direction and journey further back.
Of course, it’s likely the ghoul snatched her purely at random, but even then this exercise could prove useful, because it’s in the car park of the Marshall Court Hotel that she was abducted.Thosememories might be the most important of all. A tiny detail, a half-forgotten snippet, might give her vital leverage.
Closing her eyes, she transports herself three days into the past.
III
The man had had hairy wrists that disappeared into frayed cuffs, but his face, just like thebodachs’in Wide Boys, remains frustratingly opaque.
‘Got your ticket?’ he’d asked, prompting Elissa to fetch it from the car. And, just before that: ‘I’d have said you deserve amuchlarger fan club.’
The white van had arrived by then. She remembers looking at the bumper and seeing the grinning skull smoking a cigarette, along with that single word in bold gothic script:CHILLAX.
When she’d opened the Fiesta’s passenger door, the van had rocked on its springs. Horrible to think it must have been the ghoul, shifting position for a better look. On the van’s bumper she’d spotted a cluster of tiny impact dents.
It’s all she can remember.
Back in the hotel, she’d presented her ticket. The man with skinny wrists had said something, making her wonder at his meaning.
‘Disaster averted.’
In hindsight, those words feel like a sarcastic precursor to what followed, but she mustn’t impart meaning where none exists. Looking back,everythinganyone said or did that day – Andrea at Wide Boys, the threebodachcustomers, the man at registration – seems prescient. But her abduction can’t have been a mass conspiracy. Not all those people are complicit.
Skipping forward to the tournament, Elissa recalls her competitors. There was Bhavya Narayan, the smiling Hindu girl with the Hanuman statuette. After the match, Bhavya’sparents had given Elissa a bag of home-made banana chips. The idea that they kidnapped her is farcical.
Her next opponent was Amy Rhodes. Amy’s parents had been as horrible as their daughter, but they patently weren’t kidnappers. After Amy had come Ivy May, with Coke-bottle glasses and a Peppa Pig mascot. There had been nothing noteworthy in that encounter, either. With a sigh, Elissa opens two more drawers in her mental chessboard. Into A8 goes the man with the hairy wrists. Into B8 she loads Bhavya Narayan, Amy Rhodes and Ivy May.
Elissa rolls the drawers shut. Then she opens C8. The darkness it reveals is particularly unsettling, because this is where she’ll house her memories of the abduction itself. She’s just about to start the process when she hears muted sounds of commotion outside the door.
IV
Blowing out the candle, Elissa lies down and closes her eyes. Even though it’s futile, the instinct to feign sleep is irresistible. Since the ghoul’s last visit, she’s avoided thinking about what was printed on his whiteboard. If she speaks those words on camera, the pain she’ll cause is unthinkable.
But if she refuses, what then?
She recalls the darkish stain on the floor – what she believes is the last evidence of Bryony, an earlier resident of this cell.
The door squeals open.