24 Hours: An intense, suspenseful psychological thriller by Claire Seeber Page B

again. ‘Is your mum, like, bad news?’
    ‘No,’ I actually smile. My bustling little mother, efficient and endlessly kind. I would trust no one with Polly to the degree I trust my mother. ‘My mum’s great. It’s … it’s someone else I’m worried about. Getting there first.’
    ‘Right.’ He doesn’t ask any more questions and it doesn’t surprise me. He looks like he understands hardship, this boy; complicated, dysfunctional situations. He has a long scar on his head that runs livid through the crew-cut; tough-looking, maybe, but with an air of something I can’t describe. A kind of weary acceptance. The expression ‘old beyond his years’ comes to mind.
    What has he seen, I wonder, in his short life?
    The Tannoy announces a ‘ brief delay whilst we check what the problem is ’. I taste my own blood on my tongue again.
    The boy, who on second glance is older than he first looked, holds his tattooed hand out.
    ‘Saul.’
    ‘Laurie.’
    I estimate his age: about nineteen or twenty, probably.
    ‘Where are you going?’
    ‘London.’
    ‘Me too. The streets are paved with gold, ain’t they?’ he regards me gravely, but I see he is joking.
    The Tannoy crackles into life again. The sun has set. It is almost completely dark outside, there is nothing to see now but hedgerows.
    I look out at them and I have a sudden flash of my first holiday with Sid. Holiday might be too grand, in fact; it was more of a camping trip. Sid wanted to paint the sea; I bought us a tent. We were broke but, a few months after we’d met, already inseparable, contemplating a move to Cornwall. A tent seemed romantic. But we arrived on the campsite late because we’d got lost down Norfolk’s narrow lanes, following the first real row we ever had. Sid had shouted at me about my map reading, and I’d shouted back at his loss of humour, and then I cried and he kissed me to say sorry. By the time we put the tent up it was dark and neither of us really had a clue what we were doing, but accompanied by a bottle of red wine and some whisky it seemed quite simple. We sat in front of our funny little stove and cooked baked beans and then we went to bed. When we got up in the morning it had rained so hard the tent was practically floating and we were soaked because we hadn’t put the ground sheet down properly. Then Sid, wringing wet and foul-tempered, had a fit about the campsite.
    ‘It’s so ugly,’ he kept saying, marching back and forwards in outrage, ‘this bloody campsite – and I hate the bloody hedgerows. I’m all boxed in. I can’t breathe. And where’s the fucking sea?’
    He was so irate about the hedgerows, stomping about in his boxer shorts and his unlaced boots, with his hair all up on end and his sweatshirt on inside out that I started to laugh, and it was one of those Sid moments which could have gone either way, as he glared down at me and I managed to stifle the laughter, just about, until he put both feet in one leg of his jeans and promptly fell over backwards. And then I laughed till I cried and although he debated shouting even louder, eventually he saw the funny side and laughed too. Then we took down the tent, and along with a tiny, delicate animal skull that I’d found in the grass, we shoved everything into Sid’s bashed-up old Mini. We found a room in a B&B on a farm on a hill overlooking the sea, and when it rained for most of the weekend we didn’t care because we just stayed in bed, ate cheese and chocolate biscuits and made love, though Sid made me put the animal skull in the cupboard before he would touch me.
    Sid refused to ever go back to Norfolk, but he did find the sea in the end.
    The Tannoy crackles into life.
    ‘ I regret to inform you we may be held here for some time due to suspected damage on the track ahead .’
    Trapped.
    Oh God. For the first time today, but perhaps inevitably, tears spring to my burning eyes.
    ‘Laurie,’ the boy looks at me. ‘Is that your name?’
    ‘Yes,’