Page 104 of The New House

She laughs. ‘Oh, Millie. No. This wasreward.’

I have no idea what she means: I can’t think straight. My head is throbbing again, and my arm aches unbearably from the pressure and restriction of being raised and cuffed to the water pipe. I shift in an attempt to ease it, and a blinding shaft of pain leaves me breathless and light-headed.

‘I told you,’ Stacey says. ‘You should be proud of Peter. He saw weakness in my son and took advantage of it. He did what he had evolutionarily adapted to do. He was an apex predator – awinner. Natural selection favours winners: it’s what survival of the fittest means.Hewas the one who made me see I couldn’t let Felix leave the cellar just because things were taking longer than we’d planned.’ She shakes her head in admiration. ‘I wish my son was more like him.’

‘He’s not awinner,’ I say. ‘He’s—’

I break off as her words finally sink in.

‘What do you mean, hewasa winner?’ I say slowly. ‘Why do you keep sayingwas?’ Dread seeps like ice through my limbs. ‘Where is he, Stacey?’

‘He’s here,’ she says irritably.

‘Where?’

‘He shouldn’t have interfered,’ she says. ‘I had a plan. But Peter thought he was smarter than me. He thought he could do what he liked and it’d be too late for me to be able to do anything about it. He had no right. This wasmyplan. Felix wasmyhusband.’

Fear coalesces in the pit of my stomach.

‘What have you done?’ I shout, lunging towards her. ‘Where is he, Stacey?’

The handcuff pulls me up short,almost dislocating my shoulder, but I yank against it anyway like a chained dog until the metal cuts deep into my flesh and blood flows warm and sticky over my wrist. ‘Where is he, Stacey?What have you done with my son?’

‘Oh, for God’s sake,’ Stacey says, exasperated, smacking her palm against the freezer. ‘Enough already. I told you, he’sright here.’

‘What d’you mean he’s—’

And then I get it.

‘Oh, dear Jesus. He’sinside.’

She laughs. ‘I didtellyou he was here.’

A howling gale of grief and fury sweeps through me: I want to strangle the woman with my bare hands, I want to gouge out her eyes with my nails and force them down her throat.

It takes every ounce of self-control to hold my rage in check. There’s no point begging or pleading or threatening her: she’s a psychopath, incapable of fear or empathy. My only hope is to appeal to her self-interest: to herego.

If there’s any hope left in a world without my son.

‘Is he dead?’ I ask calmly.

‘I’m not sure,’ she says, glancing down at the freezer and sounding genuinely curious. ‘He was alive when I put him in, but that was an hour ago.’

When I was a young resident at a hospital in London, a five-year-old boy was brought into the Emergency Department. His brother had shut him in the chest freezer in their garage after a quarrel. The boy had been in there for four hours before he was found by his distraught father. Hypothermia had slowed his metabolism and reduced his oxygen usage, which was the only reason he hadn’t suffocated. He had severe frostbite on his fingers and facial extremities – nose, ears – but he survived.

Brain-damaged. Unable to see or hear or walk or talk.

‘Explain it to me, Stacey,’ I say reasonably. ‘Why does it benefit you to do this to him? To us?’

‘I didn’t have a choice,’ she says, sounding almost apologetic. ‘Sooner or later, Peter would have talked about Felix. I could have just left your son down here, and you’d never have known what happened to him, but I thought you deserved better than that. I thought you’d want to be with him.’

‘He’s ten, Stacey. Who’d have believed him?’

‘You,’ she says.

I try not to look at the freezer, try very hard not to think of my son, my child, curled up inside. ‘I have very little credibility with the police where you’re concerned,’ I say. ‘We had a deal before. You could leave the country as you planned. I won’t say anything because that’d just incriminate Peter.’

‘What about Felix?’

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