CHAPTER 27
It’s four o’clock in the morning and Simone is once again awake, this time doing ninety miles per hour on a freeway while Lucy shivers next to her. She keeps checking she’s really there. That her limbs are solid.
She doesn’t have any shoes on, and something about this is bothering Simone. She rummages around on the back seats, finds Lucy’s Crocs she hastily threw in the car, and hands them to her.
Either they have got away, or the Buick is lagging strategically behind them.
The road is empty up ahead, pierced with white-hot street lights but nothing else. No vehicles anywhere.
‘It’s four hours to Del Rio Airport,’ Lucy says in a low voice.
Simone can’t yet respond. There is too much, a vast desert of things to decide and discuss. They need to call Damien. They need to talk about everything that’s happened. What Simone truly had to do. What Lucy endured.
They need to decide if they’re really running.
Simone pushes her foot all the way to the floor.
‘We can’t drive so madly we get pulled over.’ Lucy darts a glance at Simone, who concedes she’s right, and takes her foot off the accelerator just slightly.
‘We need to call Dad.’
‘I know.’
Simone gestures to her phone. ‘Call him.’ And, among everything, this is the most important: to tell her husband his daughter is safe.
‘What do I tell him?’
‘That you’re fine and to meet us at the airport now,’ Simone says, eyes on the horizon.
Lucy presses Call and she hears Damien bark out a ‘Hello?’
‘It’s me,’ Lucy says to him, and Simone could relive that shocked, stunned, happy silence forever.
‘You’re OK,’ Damien says to her, his voice shaking, high with relief.
‘I’m OK,’ Lucy answers, then relays the instructions to him. And, the whole time, Damien is interrupting, saying, ‘You’re really here? You’re really OK?’ and Simone can’t bear to tell him the rest of it. That somebody is dead. That they’re fleeing. Are they fleeing?
She will, but not yet, not yet – just let them have this moment, a bright star in an otherwise dark sky: just one.
Lucy lapses into silence, and Simone feels the panic and adrenaline burning through her body. She tries to breathe. She’s killed a man. She’s left the scene. This will be the truth forever, no matter what happens next. She blinks, her eyes wet.
‘I can still smell him on me,’ Lucy says. And this – this is what Simone needs to hear. She needs to hear and hold her daughter’s trauma for her.
Everything else can wait. She needs to hear this, hear Lucy out, and make sure that she is safe. ‘What did he do to you?’ Simone says, thinking, Please nothing awful, please.
‘Just him,’ Lucy continues, a monologue that must have been waiting for release for two straight days. ‘He smelled of aftershave. Really distinctive smell. Lemony. When he grabbed me and took me.’
‘I …’
‘Gloved hand. Leather. Couldn’t even make a noise. He was so strong.’
And something, against all instincts, relaxes in Simone – there was no noise.
What woke her that morning might have been maternal instinct, still in good and working order.
‘I woke,’ Simone says. ‘At four o’clock in the morning.
’ They both glance at the clock now. ‘I wish I had woken properly. I stirred. If only I …’
‘I don’t know what time it was,’ Lucy says. ‘Didn’t have time to know; his hand across my mouth woke me. Then he dragged me out of bed.’
‘You must’ve been terrified,’ Simone says, though it sounds trite.
‘It’s weird,’ Lucy says, her tone surprisingly reflective.
They join a wider highway, and Lucy’s features are thrown around and distorted by new street lights, orange and dim.
‘I had no idea what was happening,’ she says.
‘I smelled him. His aftershave, then the leather of his gloves before I noticed anything else. Before I was really awake. Then he picked me up. I started struggling. Snagged my hair on the door. Stupid, but I always thought I might be able to escape that kind of thing, you know? Whenever I saw it on TV or I imagined it,’ Lucy says.
Her voice, as she begins really talking, is hoarse, from lack of water or something worse – screaming?
‘I’m so sorry,’ Simone tells her.
‘He put a bag over my head. He was so strong. So strong. Then he just, like, put me in the car, sort of threw me in the boot, like he does this all the time – he probably does – and I tried to scrabble out, I was screaming, but he taped up my mouth under the hood. Then he just held all my limbs with his arms across them, tied me with rope that he had there. Then I went mad calm. Like, this eerie stillness. Was just making plans.’
‘Plans?’
‘How I’d get out.’ She pauses. ‘How to call someone. And wondering if he might rape or traffic me.’
‘Did he say anything?’ Simone asks, her voice a sad wet sponge. ‘Do you know how he … why he …?’
‘No. I know nothing. That’s the thing.’ Lucy bites her lip and looks over at Simone. ‘He never once spoke naturally.’
‘Not once?’
‘Never. I have no idea who he is. He never said a word without distorting his voice. And most of the time, he made no sounds at all.’
Simone shivers. How sinister, to be so silently kidnapped.
‘I may as well have been – I don’t know – like, an object, and him a courier.’
Simone winces. Lucy has always been eloquent, but especially so now. God, she wishes she knew what to say back, to make it better, or at least to stop it from getting worse, the way you run a burn under cold water to prevent it from infiltrating the deeper layers of skin.
Drive.
Just drive. That is what she needs to do to stop it spreading. Get them out of here. Let the ordeal end now, force it into the past. Don’t add an arrest to it.
‘He bound my wrists but not my legs. I tried to scream but you really can only make such small sounds through your nose. I’d read this article, years ago, about kicking through the brake lights, but do you have any idea how hard that actually is to do?
After a bit, he beeped his horn, incessantly, to get me to stop.
Guess anyone else just thought he had road rage. ’
‘Where did he take you?’ Simone says, taking a slip road. For the first time, she sees the airport signposted. Home.
‘I don’t know. It was about a ten-minute journey, that’s all I know.
It had a big boot, the car. Was quiet. I was making stupid plans the whole way, like kicking him the second he opened the boot.
And then we reached – somewhere. He opened the boot, but of course he held me down as soon as he had.
I have no idea where it was. I was just shocked.
I wasn’t even scared,’ she says. ‘It was so weird. You know when you’re just so stunned by something and it repeats and repeats on you, but you feel nothing? ’
‘I really do,’ Simone says, and something in her wants to make Lucy know she, too, felt as Lucy did, but you can’t; it would sound selfish and insincere. Lucy will only know this to be true if she has children of her own.
‘He carried me in somewhere and sat me on the floor,’ she says. ‘Then he passed me a phone, and that read out instructions to me while I was blindfolded. Did you … see the video?’
‘Yes.’
‘He started the recording, then loosened the rope from my wrists. Once he was out of the room, the phone read out instructions for me to take off my own hood and tape. I never saw him.’ It is here that Simone truly thinks they have done the only thing they could in leaving.
‘He’s untraceable,’ she says calmly, though she doesn’t feel it.
‘Yes. And I just sat there. Obedient. Thinking, well, at least I’m still alive.
I probably had that thought once a minute for hours and hours,’ she says.
‘I’m still here. He hasn’t killed me yet.
And the longer it went on, the better it got.
Like, I mean, sort of.’ A dark laugh. ‘I kept imagining him calling you, you and Dad calling the police –’ Simone breathes deeply – ‘and then you’d be coming to rescue me.
We did the video, I had to put the tape and hood back on, and he came in then to do my wrists.
But I was still alive, and I knew, for a while anyway, the more time that passed, the more likely it was that you’d come. ’
‘Was it only ever just him?’
‘Yep. Except, just once, he had a visitor. Turned up at the door. I heard a knock, somewhere distant, a floor above me maybe, then her voice.’
‘A woman?’
‘She didn’t know I was there.’
‘But you didn’t hear his voice?’
‘No. Only her, calling to him.’
‘Did it seem like a normal house to you?’
Lucy pulls her bottom lip in, thinking. ‘Yes, maybe. I got a look at the room when I did the video. It was a plain box-type room. Wooden floors, wallpaper. A little camp bed – I didn’t sleep – and a desk chair.’
‘Wallpaper? Flowers?’
‘Yes.’
‘Anything else? A window?’
‘No. No window. The door to the room was made of cheap wood. That’s all I got.’
‘Tell me about the woman.’
‘When she was there, on the second afternoon, the blindfold was a little loose. I worked it off on the bedpost. I put my eye to the gap between the door and the door frame, and I could look out on to a corridor, a hallway really. It had his shoes in it, brown flip-flops. Carpet. Nothing else. But then she walked past, just once. I had the tape on, so I couldn’t make a noise, of course, but I banged on the door, and she swivelled her head to look.
I just got one glimpse of her through the gap.
I had my face pressed right up to it, so I saw her. Dark hair, big eyes.’
‘You’d recognize her?’
‘Yes,’ Lucy says, somewhat carefully. ‘I think I would. She definitely heard the noise, though probably didn’t see me.
Then she rushed back into the main bit of the house, and I heard her go.
But then – OK,’ Lucy says, ‘she called up to him, said, “Am I your daughter, or what?” I think she was mocking him.’
‘She’s his daughter,’ Simone breathes, incredulous that a kidnapper of girls could have one himself.
‘Right.’
‘I see.’