CHAPTER 10
What three words location: Mechanism. Ill. Familial.
Simone stares at this jumbled sentence, hoping that they are evidence she is dreaming. She pinches her arm and feels it. She blinks down at the phone, thinking, and it’s exactly then that she realizes the meaning of the message.
What Three Words is an app. She knows this because Dishes uses it to show its location on their website. Every three-metre square of the world has been logged using three-word combinations, giving much more accurate whereabouts than maps.
The kidnappers want her to go to a precise location. Something begins to rumble in the distant depths of Simone’s mind.
Next message: Collect bag from storage unit.
She scrolls hastily on the new flip phone, and sees the What Three Words app is already installed.
She types the words in and lets it load.
Mechanism. Ill. Familial. Familial. Simone lets out a dark huff of ironic displeasure. It is a remote location in Nueva Rosita, Mexico, several hours over the border.
There is a hot, torrid current in Simone’s blood. Her daughter isn’t kidnapped: she’s bait.
Simone has to go to Mexico. And in Mexico, she has to do something. A bag sits somewhere several hundred miles away, waiting for her. She stands there, alone on a dusty roadside, as she puts the pieces together.
It will have something illegal in it. They want her to do a run across the Mexican border, concealing something, to get her daughter back. Simone can barely breathe. What’s in the bag? Drugs? Arms? Worse? She can’t imagine.
Simone gets back into her car and looks down at the flip phone, hoping the instructions might have changed, but the texts stay there, blinking up at her.
This flip phone has apps, but otherwise is only functional.
It reminds Simone of a time right before smart phones, electronic khaki green screens, the text blocky and grey, the keypad numbers only, pressing multiple times for letters.
She and Damien had these phones. They fell in love over these phones, love letters in text-speak for economy, 160-character limit.
Simone could still type a muscle-memory text out on those numberpads, she’s sure of it.
Damien called her Sim1. (Unlike some men, he communicated easily and directly on text; he told her after their second date that he wanted children and ‘no messing around’.)
She places the phone now on the passenger seat, next to her own phone, which is still switched off.
What is she going to do? She can’t do this. Her car … Her number plate. Does she even have a visa to get into Mexico? How would she conceal the …? Get them across …?
The impossibilities cloud in her mind, and Simone thinks she might just call the police, call anyone except sit here and face this choice alone.
Guns. Diamonds. What could it be?
Drugs, drugs, drugs, the evil of drugs.
Borders.
Sniffer dogs.
Customs.
Passport control.
Simone has no idea how to do this, none at all. She is not cut out for this. She is barely cut out for what she’s already done; she feels she has taken ten years off her life just to get here.
But then the second video on the second flip phone arrives.
The room is the same, but now the light’s changed. It’s darker around her daughter, but the bulb glows brighter in contrast, a halo upon her blonde hair. Her neck is rigid, with fear or perhaps instruction, Simone isn’t sure. She looks slimmer, though this isn’t possible and Simone knows it.
Lucy speaks: ‘I know what you’ve been asked to do. And I’m safe. I’m OK. But … please just do it. Please do whatever they say in order to free me. It’s the only way. Please don’t tell the police. Please don’t tell anyone, Mum.’
The video cuts there, a complete stop.
Simone sucks a breath in.
Then she plays it again, and again, searching. Searching for some hidden phrase. Surely her daughter ought to be able to insert something, a clue. That they are not serious, that they won’t harm her, that if Simone refuses, they might simply let her go.
She watches it five times, but there is nothing.
Lucy is clearly being directed very precisely by her kidnapper.
The message is straightforward and clear: Do what is asked of you.
Lucy isn’t acting. Simone knows Lucy’s acting.
Skilled as it is, it isn’t like this. Simone has always known what Lucy is thinking, knew what her cries meant, her jumbled toddler words.
Even now, she can finish her sentences. Nobody else can.
Simone blinks, stares, watches it again. This time, she can’t see the wallpaper; there are no tells about the room at all.
She sets the phone down.
Her daughter is pleading with her. She is telling her not to talk to the police. She is, so far, still alive.
And therefore Simone has no choice. She has been right not to press Call on 911.
She tries to put herself in the mind of an organized criminal.
If Simone transports the items, whatever they are, then she, too, is a criminal.
But if she doesn’t, are they likely to release Lucy?
No. She’s a witness to a crime, as is Simone.
There’s a risk to the kidnappers that they will whistle-blow.
What do violent criminals do to people who know their secrets? They don’t release their witnesses; they kill them, just like they said.
But … what if? This is what her rational brain asks. What if they have killed her already, pre-recorded her pleas? What if they kill her after this anyway? What if Simone doesn’t get the items across the border, goes to prison?
She meets her eyes in the rear-view mirror. Tired-looking, sunken and stressed, but there’s Lucy in their blueness.
And now, looking at herself, she corrects her thoughts.
This is her rational brain. The one that says: Get your daughter.
She became this second self, the mother, the moment Lucy was born, and she’s stayed this way.
Simone was one of those women who really did fall head over heels in the labour suite, entering not only the most important relationship of her life but sharpening her personality, too.
Things became threats to her baby that would not otherwise be: rough children in the park, passing cars that splashed them on London streets.
Simone, who needed no encouragement to rage a little bit, almost enjoyed scowling at other people.
She is sure her hormones didn’t restabilize until Lucy was five.
She watches the video again. Please don’t tell the police. Please don’t tell anyone.
She puts the nearest border crossing into the flip phone. It’s an hour away. She turns the key in the ignition and drives.