CHAPTER 8
‘What did the police say?’ he asks.
Simone has to hold on to the table. He thinks she called the police.
She didn’t say she was going to, did she?
No, he simply said that she ought to. And now he evidently doesn’t even think it’s a possibility that she decided not to call them.
But how could he? How could she have told the police when that threat was levelled?
Simone stares at the cheap table. Peeling wood veneer, grime at its edges. She starts, several times, to tell him exactly what she thinks, but keeps stopping. Eventually, she settles on a straight bat: ‘I haven’t called them.’ A pause, and then she adds: ‘Yet.’
A beat. ‘What?’ he says, and he’s stunned.
‘The message says not to. They will kill her.’
‘Yes – but –’
‘Damien, they’ve – I’m so scared. I’m so fucking scared of what they will do. So I haven’t done it yet – I haven’t … I physically haven’t been able to.’
‘Are you kidding me?’ he barks, surprising her with a lack of sympathy.
‘No. I’m – Damien. They will kill her.’
‘Simone?’
‘It doesn’t –’
‘Call. The. Police,’ he says. ‘What the fuck are you thinking?’
‘What the fuck I am thinking is about getting Lucy back, and doing everything in my power to do so,’ Simone says. A quick slice of temper, like a cat lashing out. ‘Alive. He said he’d kill her.’
‘Am I not trying to do that?’
‘Are you?’
‘Not everyone is out to get you. How about we decide to trust the police?’
Simone, hurt, says nothing to this, and perhaps her silence incenses him, because he adds a damning sentence, something dredged up from their marital past, so old it is decrepit and crumbling, like an item from a sunken shipwreck. ‘She is not only your baby.’
Simone casts her eyes downwards. When Lucy was three months old, Damien had taken her out in the car, pulled out in front of somebody, and they got hit.
It wasn’t serious. A rear shunt. Lucy hadn’t even cried.
But in the panic when he called her, Simone had said, ‘She’s my baby – how could you?
’ That sentence has echoed its way down the years of their marriage the way things often do, something he refers to occasionally, wants to talk about late at night sometimes.
He’s never been unfair with it. More a sad kind of curiosity. When you said …
‘Don’t go there,’ she says now, tightly, thinking that on that day he had taken Lucy out because Simone had done three night feeds and an entire day while he had worked.
She was supposed to be grateful for getting a break from Lucy, when his entire life had been one.
That’s the way it had been for them. Her reaction had been born out of maternal instinct but also from womanhood – Simone had been, like so many before her, at the end of her tether.
‘I just don’t know what to do. She needs me.’ She imagines Lucy being taken to the lay-by expecting a handover and nobody coming. She imagines a police shoot-out. She imagines a death. She pauses, thinking if Damien is not censoring himself, then fuck it. ‘How can you not even consider going?’
‘Our daughter has been kidnapped. By criminals.’ A breath, and then he levels the only threat he’s ever made in over twenty years of marriage: ‘The police deal with criminals, not us. Call them – or I will.’
Simone stands up in shock, catching the corner of the laptop, which judders on the table. Nobody can call them. The kidnappers will kill her daughter if they do. Or they might, and Simone is not going to spin the roulette wheel on even the remotest risk.
And so she, therefore, is forced to lie to him. For the first time in their relationship. She tells herself it isn’t a proper outright lie. It’s just that she’s still deciding. ‘I’ll do it,’ she says. ‘OK. I’ll do it.’
‘Promise?’
‘I will,’ she says. ‘I’ll do it.’
‘OK. I need to turn my phone off now, but – promise me …’
‘I promise,’ she says softly, and she can’t understand it, how he can’t hear and feel the lie, a pressure on the airwaves between them that shivers and throbs her ears.
Simone thinks that if he were here, he’d be able to tell from her eyes, her body, but he isn’t, and he can’t, or doesn’t want to, anyway.
‘By the time I land –’ he starts, and Simone knows the rest of his sentence.
It will be after nine o’clock. The meeting time.
It’s eleven. It’s noon, and Simone hasn’t called the police. She is not procrastinating. She knows what she is doing: she is making a decision by not making one, only she can’t even admit it to herself.
Time seems to speed up now Damien is somewhere in the sky, no doubt thinking that Simone is being supported by the authorities.
In reality, she is preparing alone for something she is too afraid to admit is happening.
She is chucking their suitcases in the car; whatever happens later, they can’t return to this lodge.
She is reading and rereading the messages.
And she is also dialling 911 and then deleting the numbers, again and again and again.
Someplace else, Lucy is sitting on the floor, in the video Simone’s watched a hundred times, reassuring her mother that she is OK.
It’s three, it’s four, it’s five, and Simone admits to herself that she will go to the lay-by.
Just to see. She can call the police on the way.
She will call when there if something happens.
It’s five thirty, and she’s leaving the lodge.
But, really, Simone knows what she is doing: she is going to rescue her daughter.
Simone is driving downtown, into Fort Davis, and Lucy is being treated well, Lucy is eating, Lucy isn’t in danger.
Damien is in the air by now, no WiFi, and is mercifully silent, leaving Simone free to do what she has to.
Simone is taking the highway. Her daughter’s arms that, for years, Simone rubbed Aveeno moisturizer into, are bound at their wrists, and it’s six o’clock, and three hours’ time is really not very long.
The sun is dropping fast like a falling fireball, it’ll be getting dark soon, and Damien is shooting through the sky, and Simone knows if she doesn’t get her daughter back, she will lose her husband, too.