CHAPTER 19
Simone has rushed to the toilet to be sick after more than forty hours of sustained fear.
She is retching over the sink, the door swinging open.
She closes it with a thunk and tries to calm her breathing.
Her upper lip is sweating, her head, the backs of her knees.
She runs a hand through her hair and it comes away wet.
She can’t do this. There is too much at stake.
It is too much for one woman and she misses Damien and Lucy with a ferocity that makes her heave again.
They’re going to find her out. Of course they are.
Of course they will search every vehicle.
It takes five minutes. Why wouldn’t they search a coach from a known region of cocaine smuggling? She’s been so stupid.
Lucy is going to be murdered. Maybe she already has been, and Simone will never hear her voice again, touch her soft skin, twirl her hair last thing at night on the landing while Lucy says, ‘Get off, you’re so weird!’
She stands there, her hands braced on the metal sink, staring into the dark eye of the plughole, trying to calm down. Eventually, as it always does, adrenaline ebbs away a little, her shoulders drop and reality clicks back into place. A real, true panic attack.
‘You OK there?’ a voice says. And it’s the man, the British man from the trip out. He’s on the return trip, too, and here he is, hovering outside the toilet.
‘Fine,’ Simone says dully.
‘Something you ate?’
‘No, no,’ Simone says, but then corrects herself; food poisoning is a much better explanation than the truth. ‘Yeah. Maybe.’
‘I got the same one time in Mexico,’ he says, but he comes to the gap in the door and holds Simone’s gaze a little longer than is necessary.
Simone lets the conversation peter out, uncomfortable with a man loitering outside the toilet, and eventually he moves away, back to his seat, where he opens a phone and begins typing frantically on it.
Simone pushes the door open further and stares out. Damage control: have they searched her bag?
Michaela is still at the front, talking in a quiet voice to the driver.
She turns, raising a hand to somebody outside, then says something else into her radio. ‘Coming, over,’ Simone catches. ‘Got an illegal on coach 702.’
Illegal. Illegal. Simone knows that this is not to do with her, but the adrenaline is too high to think straight. Michaela walks slowly off the coach, the moment drawing out like an exhaled breath.
And that’s it. If the sniffer dogs did alert, Michaela got distracted, but maybe they didn’t at all. Maybe they were barking at something else. Maybe it was all nothing: a routine search, called off.
Simone can hardly believe it.
The driver starts the engine, Michaela gone, just gone, some other poor person in the hands of the justice system, not her, and they’re crossing a wide bridge, skies high above them, upended soup bowls of darkness and stars, the blue and red lights of the police cars flashing intermittently, but not for her, and she’s done it, the drugs are safe in the coach, and she’s as high as if she’s taken the whole lot herself.