CHAPTER 25
The phones are in Simone’s car, and she starts walking back towards them.
‘Use that,’ Lucy says, indicating the grey payphone with the bright yellow handle, the one with SOS written above it.
It’s right there, waiting for them, a clear signal, no money needed, and Simone lifts the handset hastily, wondering if they will be too late to save him.
She didn’t want to kill him. She only wanted her daughter back.
‘We … I … there’s a man who’s been injured by the side of the road,’ Simone tells her. ‘There’s been an accident.’ Even dimly, here in this surreal place, Simone recognizes the passive language she’s using, defensive language.
The call handler steps into action with a proactive and loud ‘OK. Is he breathing? What was the nature of the accident?’
‘He was – he was shot,’ Simone says. As she says the words, her own accent sounding clipped and remote next to the American drawl, she can’t believe that they’re true.
But they must be. Maybe it’s still four o’clock in the morning, she finds herself thinking.
Or maybe she’s about to wake, two days ago, for their holiday.
‘And where’s the shooter now?’
Simone hesitates. She meets Lucy’s gaze but she gives nothing away.
The marks are still on her wrists. Her eyes are wet.
She’s trembling, just slightly. You have to really look for it, but you can see it once you notice: loose strands of her hair vibrating, her lower lip chattering like she’s cold, a blurring around the edges of her body.
Simone can only think of this, despite the magnitude of the question being posed to her.
Then, infinitesimally, Lucy shakes her head, and Simone has a reaction to this.
One she can’t name, but it’s a strong one.
Simone isn’t dishonest, and neither is she a coward.
She plays a straight bat. She dealt directly with a kidnapper.
And now she must deal directly with the law, not hide from it, not lie to it.
She takes the stinging nettle from her past, let down by paperwork and people not doing their jobs passionately enough, and grasps it.
‘It was me,’ Simone says, and, next to her, Lucy’s eyes widen. ‘He took my daughter – he kidnapped her. We – it was a handover,’ she says.
‘Is your daughter there?’
‘Yes.’
‘Is she safe?’
‘Yes.’
‘OK – please get down level with the man. Is he breathing, can you tell me?’
Simone gestures frantically to Lucy, but she steps back, waving her hands at Simone; she doesn’t want to be near to him. ‘Just come,’ Simone says to the operator, tears gathering in her throat. She’s done this to him.
‘I’ll dispatch an EMS. Emergency Medical Services.’
She leaves the phone hanging, rolls the kidnapper on to his back and begins to check his airways, leaning her ear down by his mouth as instructed.
There’s too much blood.
Lucy grabs the phone. ‘Please, please send them quickly,’ she says into the handset. Then she listens intently, for just a second, while Simone tries to stem the bleeding, to try and find a pulse. She thinks she can feel one, a faint, dull heartbeat.
‘Well,’ Lucy says, then adds: ‘Hang on.’ She gestures to Simone with it. ‘They want you back on.’
‘Huh?’ Simone takes the phone.
‘Let me transfer you to the sheriff now,’ the operator is saying, ‘who deals with dispatching the local police.’
Simone blinks. Everything works differently here. The roads are different, the cars are different and so, too, are the police.
The line goes dead, then clicks, rings twice, and a male voice answers while Simone surveys the body. The man. The body. ‘Emergency dispatch.’
Simone tells him the exact same thing she told the handler. ‘Who’s there now?’ he asks.
‘The man, the kidnapper. And me and my daughter.’
‘You tell me he had your daughter?’ he asks.
‘Yes.’
‘That’s how you got her back, then? You shot at him?’
‘Yes,’ she says.
‘He tried to take her while you were there?’ he says in the same accent as the handler.
Simone sighs at his misunderstanding, looking at the highway, the church, the gun.
‘He took her yesterday, then sent an anonymous message.’
A pause. ‘A kidnap,’ he states. ‘So he sent a ransom.’
‘Yes.’
‘He wanted money? Look,’ the sheriff adds, perhaps defensively. ‘I just have to get the story straight before I come down there.’
‘He …’ Simone looks around. The bag is right there, full of cocaine. She could hide it, she could put it in the rubbish bin just down there, but could she? Should she?
‘He … he asked me to meet him to get her back.’ Simone is no liar but, when it comes to it, she finds she can’t say it. Something about the drugs is so very illegal, crossing the border, the value of them … she wants the sheriff here. Wants to explain it to him in person.
She might want a lawyer. She told the truth too quickly about the shooting. She’s always been the same. But now the only witness is possibly dead.
She avoids the question. ‘We met up and he was – he was violent. Things escalated,’ Simone answers. Next to her is the bag of cocaine. She can’t hide it. But neither can she mention it.
‘Right,’ he says. ‘OK, well, we’re attending.
Stand by,’ he says. And there’s a beat. A loaded beat, and just as Simone begins to wonder if it’s full of doubt, he seems to confirm it.
‘But I got to say, you’re talking about duress, right?
You were forced to act. It’s a defence to any crime, and people know it.
We get that a lot. I was forced to, I was threatened, when it’s all made up.
I’m not saying you have,’ he tells her. ‘But … if this was just a hit-and-run, a disagreement by the side of the road, say now.’
Simone’s blood turns hot, throbbing like a wound. What is she supposed to do now? She will look impossibly guilty.
‘If this is just a dispute …’ he says.
‘No,’ she replies, her eyes on the cocaine. ‘Just the kidnap.’
She dry swallows. How will this look? Maybe they could get rid of it. Drive it somewhere. Bury it. No. She will explain fully when he arrives. ‘You gather your evidence, right, about the kidnap? And we’ll talk.’
‘OK,’ she says meekly.
You gather your evidence, right?
Something dark is descending around Simone.
Evidence.
Evidence.
Evidence.
She is ringing off, taking off her T-shirt, balling it up, holding it right against the hole left by the bullet to try and save the man who ruined them.
But, inside, she is thinking. She is thinking what the police are likely to believe.
She reaches once again for the kidnapper’s pulse. What was a soft flickering before is harder to find. She digs around in his neck. It’s fleshy and warm, but there’s nothing. She presses harder and harder, desperate to feel it. But it’s gone.
Simone sits back. She is a murderer.
And she looks like a murderer.
The phone, containing the first ransom: destroyed.
The only witness, Lucy: blindfolded, with no idea who did it to her. Simone believes her, but would anyone else?
The trip to Mexico, captured, logged. She used her own name, bag collected.
The drugs: sitting there, with no evidence of a demand.
‘Do you think this man has a criminal record?’ she says urgently to Lucy.
‘I – I don’t know,’ she answers.
‘Can you … Keep this on the bleeding,’ she tells her, then stands. She goes to get the bag, kneels on the ground and begins trying to dig with her hand, then the toe of her trainer.
‘What are you doing?’ Lucy says.
‘I can’t – I can’t,’ Simone replies. ‘We need to hide this.’
‘What is it?’
‘Just … we need to …’
‘What are you doing? What is it?’
‘Do you remember anything – anything useful at all that you can tell the police?’ Simone asks urgently.
‘I – he took me … I never saw him. He took me somewhere. I don’t know where. I can tell them, though. I can tell them!’
‘Yes,’ Simone says. ‘Yes, we can both tell them what happened.’
‘You came out to holiday with me!’ Lucy says. ‘They won’t think …’
‘I know,’ Simone replies. Still frantically digging, while Lucy looks on, alarmed and confused, but the ground won’t give.
And she is still thinking how it seems.
The lie Damien told to Luan, a business opportunity in Texas. Drugs. The way Simone backed him up on it, in writing, on a message to Luan that will have been saved on some cloud forever.
The next message to Damien: the transaction has been completed. The second phone, stamped on by her and binned.
The victim: killed by Simone in cold blood.
A murder confession on a roadside payphone.
The drugs. They’re on the ground by the man. Possibly millions of pounds’ worth of cocaine.
No CCTV out here.
No witnesses. Only Lucy.
She’d told the police officer outside the lodge that she was with her daughter.
The ransom that told her not to tell anyone is destroyed.
She never even mentioned it in writing to Damien; she was too afraid to, because of what she had been told to do.
What a fool.
And then, before she can even process this, the second thing happens.