CHAPTER 12
Simone drives and drives, knowing she has to cross the border but with no idea how.
She takes each problem course by course, like elements of a large tasting-menu meal she has to cook and assemble on schedule.
She has the benefit of stress hormones and maternal instinct, which fire her like a rocket up the highway, make her brain five hundred per cent productive.
She also has the advantage of the chef mind, wired to multitask under pressure.
Her hands are at ten and two on the wheel, body still, mind racing.
She thinks it through as the road spins out in front of her, as plain and straight as an airport runway.
Weird trees line the road, no other cars. She could be on another planet.
Visas. She and Damien went to Florida once and then on to Cancún, and she only needed a passport. So that’s that. She doesn’t need one.
Next: concealing the items.
She needs to be inconspicuous. And maybe she is; no doubt this is why she has been chosen.
Have they been targeted, as a result of their restaurant money, perhaps?
Or is it bad luck? She, a British tourist, in an ordinary rental car, no criminal history.
Nevertheless, she needs to ensure she won’t be searched. She needs to blend in.
She does one mile, ten, twenty. By thirty, she’s panicking, but a new text appears. A new location. One where tourist buses leave for Mexico.
Simone gets out of her car in a dusty car park. It’s fifteen minutes from the border. Tourist buses are anonymous, hiding in plain sight, holidaymakers less likely to be searched. But even if they are, nobody would be able to trace a bag back to her.
There is only one company, called Mexican Day Tours.
The coach stops at Nueva Rosita at eight o’clock in the morning: a six-hour journey, taken overnight, leaving the day to explore the Mexican town.
It sounds like hell to Simone, even without the burning fear, though Lucy would like it.
She would find enjoyment in the different scenery, different people, and would easily be able to sleep on a coach.
Tourists go on from Nueva Rosita to Múzquiz, to see the architecture, the gardens and the town squares.
Some visit a stargazing point – there are camping pods – to sleep out and see the Milky Way.
But Simone won’t.
It’s late, way after eleven o’clock, and the air is cooling, though different to England, the breeze sharp but brief, as crisp as sparkling apple juice that bursts through the mouth then leaves immediately.
Simone closes her car door and feels a longing for Lucy so strong it almost knocks her off her feet.
She must be so scared being held by these people who don’t want the best for her.
She sighs as she crosses to the coaches.
A man tells her they’re all fully booked and Simone feels a flare of irritation that the kidnappers have directed her but left her to sort out the details.
Nevertheless, Simone’s able to do something she often does very well, has done her whole life from her first job to becoming an accidental chef: blag.
They opened the restaurant with virtually no experience, and, to nobody’s surprise, it made a loss for twenty straight months, burning through the HSBC loan and then some.
In debt and badly reviewed, Simone hired a new chef called Timeo – his mother was French – who started making more simplistic dishes done well; he’d trained with Glynn Purnell.
Intrigued, Simone had started to spend more time in the kitchen and less front of house.
She’d just shape vegetables in the beginning, enjoying the meditative quality of it, forgetting the mounting bills.
Then she started to cook alongside Timeo.
At first, just good meat cooked well, enough seasoning but not too much.
She started reading about food, about taste buds, about salt, sour, bitter, sweet, umami.
Simone became, much to her surprise, obsessed with cooking, but it was something deeper, too.
Something that had begun its life when she’d started making every meal after she was removed from her parents.
A way to take care of herself. Simple things, like beans on toast, but she made them on the hob, not in the microwave, to cook them into delicious sludge. Baked potatoes, made crispy in an oven.
But it had bloomed at the restaurant: when bad news came – increased prices, snobby customers – she started to cook to calm herself down. Flares of irritation became flame-grilled steaks and burnished crème br?lées. Good days became butter-soft mashed potato.
The food with Timeo in time grew more complex: liver parfait, toasted grains for crunch, red wine jus. And then she’d started to make her own suggestions, and that’s when The Times reviewed it. Reviewed her meals.
A double-page spread on Dishes, its menu and – Damien loved to remind her – the charming husband and wife behind it.
She will remember that Saturday for the rest of her life, paper spread over the reception desk, the afternoon light hitting it, giddily explaining to customers that they were the owners and look at this review!
Bookings soared, and last February they think they were visited by the ever-elusive Michelin Guide inspector – solo diner, ordered the wine flight, had a notebook and HB pencil – though they’re still waiting to hear if they got the Michelin star.
She assesses the texts again now even though she could recite them by heart, wanting, suddenly, to go away and pummel dough instead of blagging her way on to a tourist coach.
She can’t seem to look directly at the tasks beyond this one, in the same way you couldn’t do your tax return in a burning building no matter how overdue it was. Simone’s brain has neatly prioritized her disasters, and getting into Mexico is item number one.
She takes a breath; it begins. She walks up to another tour operator who is sporting what Lucy would describe as a lockdown haircut, and speaks: ‘Hi – I hope you can help me. I booked a place on a tour but I can’t seem to find which one.
It’s Simone Seaborn.’ No point concealing her name and identity; she needs to use her passport.
The only aim is not to get caught with the items, whatever they are.
There are four coaches lined up, engines running quietly, exhausts adding to the dust and the heat, being boarded by sleepy tourists.
Mostly older people, the occasional family, snoozing children with dangling legs held close to their parents’ bodies.
Simone watches one blonde child in particular for several moments as she stands in front of the man who checks her name on a clipboard.
‘Nothing here,’ he says in a crisp American accent after scanning several sheets of paper twice; the coaches must shuttle back and forth across the border all day long, and Simone, in the worst panic of her life, finds a comfort in this.
Besides, she won’t get caught because she is a good person. She is. She’s even paid for parking here. Absurd but true.
‘No record,’ the man says again to her.
‘I’ve booked online.’
He gestures to the clipboard. ‘Site says you didn’t.’ A lock of unevenly cut hair falls into his eyes, and he shakes his head like a dog.
‘Please. Do you have any space at all?’ she asks, thinking of giving some made-up detail about why she must go to Mexico today, but then stops herself; people telling the truth divulge no more than is necessary.
He sighs. ‘Got the email confirmation?’
Simone gets out her phone.
She brings up her email and begins to search for something that has never existed.
At the top, her phone says AT&T, not EE like at home.
It populates with texts. Luan, asking if Damien’s arrived yet.
The man watches her, and Simone suddenly feels suspicion in his gaze.
She pretends to be confused by her email.
It’s a performance for one person who matters in the way that eyewitnesses do.
‘Oh yeah, wait, it’s on my husband’s email,’ she says casually. ‘I could ring him but he’s in England – he’s asleep and won’t answer. Look,’ she says, ‘do you have any spaces? It’s just me. I need to get to Nueva Rosita.’
The man is standing next to one of the coaches, which is puffing out heat. The sides of the coach, up to about four feet, are brown with dust. A couple of American tourists board it, muttering about delays.
The operator sighs and begins typing into an iPad he gets out of a satchel.
He flicks his gaze to her. ‘All right. You’ll be on this one. When will you return?’
‘Tomorrow night,’ she tells him, and he nods. She gives him her full name again, and she pays for the coach in cash.
He barely glances at her as she ascends the steps of the coach, the vehicle’s suspension swaying slightly underneath her. But just as she reaches the top, something makes her turn and look at him. Their eyes lock, and he is looking at her closely. ‘So just twenty-four hours?’ he calls after her.
‘Yes,’ she says. ‘Just a day trip. No luggage.’
‘OK – coach leaves at seven in the evening from there,’ he says with a shrug.
Something in the deliberate lightness of his tone makes her glance at him, but he busies himself with his lists of names.
She gets her phone out and finds the message from Luan.
She replies saying everything is fine, that the business opportunity for Damien was too good for him to pass up.
And then she’s on the coach. Old-fashioned patterned-velvet-covered seats, air conditioning, a pillow on each seat as a token gesture towards sleep, a black cupboard containing a chemical toilet in the centre that smells of urinals, a couple of small families, a handful of pensioners, and her, the almost-criminal.