CHAPTER 24
By the side of the road, a man lies dying.
Simone steadies Lucy and leans her backwards against the boot. She scans her daughter’s body, but she knows by the way she is moving that she is OK. Damaged. Terrified. But OK.
‘Are you –’
‘I am now,’ Lucy says.
The boot is unclean but lined with something waterproof and disposable.
Simone gulps, wondering if he was intending to kill her.
Lucy’s eyes fill and spill over, silent little tears, legs shaking like Bambi, same height as Simone exactly.
Simone embraces her again, cheek to cheek, both wet with tears but they don’t care.
‘You got me.’
‘I got you,’ Simone says into her hair, her voice hoarse. ‘I got you.’ She touches Lucy’s forehead, marvelling that she is here, alive, and thinks that she could stay here forever. Forget the dying man, forget the cocaine.
‘Did you kill him?’
‘I don’t know. I think so,’ Simone says, and Lucy leans back slightly, looking at her mother’s face. Then she puts it back, her cheek resting once again against Simone’s.
‘You shot him.’
‘Yes.’
‘How did you find me?’
‘I would’ve done anything,’ Simone says, avoiding the question, and suddenly they’re in the afterworld.
She has no idea what to tell Lucy. She didn’t think beyond this point.
She realizes that, despite everything, she did not expect to get her daughter back alive. She could gasp with the thought of it.
‘Why was he …?’ Lucy asks, but she doesn’t finish her sentence. Too much has happened; there’s simply too much to say.
Her daughter is an adult. She has been through an awful adult experience.
Simone will have to tell her what she has done to get her back, if she doesn’t already know.
Did she hint at it in the proof of life video?
She can’t keep it from her forever, anyway.
They need to call Damien, they need to call an ambulance, they need to …
Simone decides that the most important thing is damage limitation.
Save the kidnapper if possible. She is a good person; she is no killer.
She turns her gaze to him while still holding Lucy.
He is on his front, in the beam of his headlights, now completely motionless.
She stares for a second or two, watching for breathing.
She tries to bring to mind the little law she knows. Was this self-defence, protecting another? She thinks it must be. The situation they are in, what she did … it was what anybody would do. There must be legal protection for her.
‘Is he …?’ Lucy says. She’s tall and willowy in the night, her legs bronzed. To Simone, she has never been more beautiful. She can’t stop staring at her.
‘It’s nice not to be alone,’ Lucy tells her mother, and Simone understands this sentiment entirely. Forty hours of high-octane choices, and here they are: together. Simone, who spent so much of her childhood alone, never wanted the same for Lucy.
She puts the gun on the roof of the car, and they walk hesitantly over to the man. The blood at first is not noticeable, the flow stopped. The dark clothes and kaleidoscope-patterned ground from the headlights obscure it, but then it appears the more she looks, spongy and sodden.
Simone gulps. ‘We need to get him help,’ she tells her daughter.
‘Yes.’ Lucy nods, and Simone is glad: neither of them is a monster. They are victims, forced into circumstances by this man lying before them who chose to take a woman and send a ransom.
‘OK,’ Simone says, her breathing quick. She can feel her nostrils flaring with the effort. Panic – quelled by finding Lucy – begins to rise again. ‘We need to call 911.’