CHAPTER 5
It is only in her reaction to Damien’s statement that Simone finds any clarity. Horror. Dread. Revulsion. We can’t. They said they would kill her.
‘Obviously they’ve told you not to tell the police. They’re criminals. But the authorities are trained to …’
Simone hesitates. They shouldn’t have come here. They shouldn’t have come so far from home. They should have known that anything could happen.
‘I …’
They both wait, neither quite ready to outrightly disagree with the other.
‘They will want money,’ Damien says. ‘They must know about the business?’ Simone winces.
Surely not? Their restaurant might finally be profitable, but some months they often still make close to cost. A rainy January, a football tournament, a rise in business rates – they are only ever a month or two away from hardship again.
They are not rich. Maybe they are. But they are not high-profile rich.
They are still people who have to choose between nice things, even if those things are nice cars or nice holidays.
But what if someone thinks they are? What if this is a targeted kidnap? What if Lucy’s put every detail of this lodge on Snapchat, or somewhere else Simone doesn’t understand?
‘I don’t know,’ she says.
‘There’s no way we can get big money,’ Damien says.
‘We could,’ Simone says, thinking, of course they could. A loan, credit cards, liquidate the business, sell the fucking house. There is no can’t when it comes to your child’s life.
‘We have to tell the police,’ he says again.
But the sentiment is wrong: there is no we.
It is she, me, alone in the desert in Texas, the responsibility of bringing her daughter back hers, and hers alone.
Does she think this because he is five thousand miles away, or because she is the mother? She isn’t sure.
She reaches out a hand to touch the tiny frosted window above the sink, no bigger than a cat flap, beyond it a distorted palette of vivid sand and blue. The pane is cool and dry, dusty underneath her fingertips. If anybody were looking, it would appear like a cry for help.
She pauses, panicked. ‘I don’t know what to do,’ she tells him. The simple truth.
‘The police will be able to …’ He hesitates. ‘They will be able to find them. Get her out safely, better than you can. They won’t kill her. They want money.’
Simone holds the flip phone in her palm and stares again at the message.
What was amorphous crystallizes in the air, a slow drip of water that becomes an icicle, hard and taut in its forming.
She doesn’t think she agrees with Damien, the thought a shard of ice like a dagger.
She thinks she might really want to obey the text.
The only thing that frightens her more than this thought is the notion that she might be in that lay-by tonight, alone.
‘I think we should tell the police. Now. And that way they will go.’ That diplomatic we again.
Simone closes her eyes. ‘They said they will kill her,’ she whispers.
Damien is silent.
She doesn’t say anything further. How could she take the risk of defying them? Sometimes, aren’t the stakes just too high?
‘Simone?’ Damien says.
‘Get here,’ she tells him, a non-answer. ‘Let me know when your flight is.’ He tells her he will. They say nothing further about what she will do next. I don’t know what they will do to me if you don’t. Lucy’s words echo in her mind.
Simone hangs up then dials and deletes the numbers again.
911. She stares at the swirling shape of the nine, the stick ones.
If she were to press Call, she knows what would happen.
She’d sit right here, on the bathroom floor, while a team of people whose nine-to-five is police work would step in.
People who’d try and fail, would go home after their shift and tell their partners they’d had a bad day, but it wouldn’t compare to hers.
Simone doesn’t trust people who are at work. She trusts people who are all-in.
Maybe it comes from childhood. The second a kindly teacher phoned in her parents’ behaviour, the wheels of the authorities had begun to turn, and Simone had become a social services case number.
She remembers vividly a meeting, once she was placed into care, where a case worker said to her, ‘Child of drug addicts, right?’ then ticked a box, just like that.
She’s only been asked to do one thing, and that’s not to contact the police.
How could she? Simone stares at her shaking thumb and thinks she is incapable of pressing Call.
No one pokes a hornet’s nest when their child is nearby.
At least, not her. She knows her childhood has impacted her parenting of Lucy, but she’s only ever wanted to protect her daughter from pain.
The numbers 911 are deleted once more.