CHAPTER 60
‘Another day, pissed away,’ Lucy says sharply at ten o’clock that evening, a cup of tea sloshing as she gestures around them.
She’s been on the porch for some of the evening, then on a walk that Simone tried her best to ignore, then inside again, clearly bored.
Simone walks out of the bedroom and into the kitchen.
Every time Simone sees Lucy, she thinks about what she said. Parents have to let their children go.
They’ve watched four films today while Damien has begun tentative enquiries about the identities. ‘What about tomorrow?’ she continues. ‘I was thinking, sitting in and hiding?’
Simone hesitates, wanting so primitively to meet Lucy’s needs, to tell her to go out shopping, horseback riding, see the sights. But she doesn’t even know about the news, about the reward that has made everything just another turn worse on a wheel that is already wound too tight.
Damien raises his shoulders, reaches and pours some more tea for her. ‘Might add some vodka to it,’ he says, gesturing.
‘Go for it,’ Lucy says, a small laugh escaping her mouth. Then her whole body goes still. ‘What’s that?’
‘What’s what?’ Simone asks.
‘That noise.’
And then the three of them hear it, all at once. A soft talking. Voices: many voices, tinny, through radios or megaphones. Their eyes meet, there in the kitchen, and it is in that precise moment that they know that they have been found.
There’s a shed in Moody’s back garden and they head for it wordlessly, all three of them having the same animalistic survival idea at the same time. The security light blanches; it’ll give them away.
A search has begun in earnest. ‘Police!’ blares out in Texan accents.
The lack of houses and the still weather mean Simone can hear everything from the dingy shed they’re hiding in.
Lucy eases herself down on to the floor, sitting against a wheelbarrow, and Simone wonders if Lucy is somehow more relaxed in captivity than they are, or less so.
She watches her daughter’s legs shake, knees knocking like a cartoon, and decides the latter.
Some muffled shouts. Outside, the security light goes off.
Simone’s eyes adjust to the dimness of the shed. Hanging spades and trowels, a power tool, a workbench. Vintage necklaces of cobwebs hang above them.
‘Open up!’ a police officer shouts. ‘We have intelligence that you’re here.’
But there’s something … She inclines her head to listen.
A muffled line from the police, then more than one set of footsteps, coming round the back of the house. Simone’s stomach clenches painfully, and she wonders if she might be sick, thinking of the last near miss on the coach, when her body betrayed her …
Oh God, their things are everywhere in that house.
An officer begins to circle. Intelligence. Do they actually know they’re here? If so, how?
How much of their stuff is out on display? Is there anything identifiable?
Two footsteps arrive audibly, much nearer to them. They’re a slow prowl, the movements of somebody scanning a space carefully. Another, this time closer. Simone holds her breath.
Three more slow steps. The security light pings on again, and light touches the shed, brightening a rectangular gap that runs all the way round the door. Simone stares at it, illuminating her family in Picasso shapes. If anybody looked in here, they would be obvious. Three living, breathing bodies.
The light goes off.
She finds the courage to shift forwards, silent on her feet. She puts her hands either side of the slit in the door and peers out.
And that’s what she couldn’t put her finger on: their voices were further away than she thought.
Her heart sinks in relief; they’re not in this garden. They’re headed behind their house, to Moody’s house, just beyond theirs.
In the dimness, Damien catches her gaze.
His eyes are grey/white in the gloaming, much of him in shadow.
He inclines his head to the door, throwing her perhaps a questioning look, perhaps a panicked one.
Perhaps a pained one. If the police are going to Moody’s, then surely it means he has handed them over. Their only ally. Intelligence.
And then the footsteps retreat, and, two minutes later, the police are gone.