About the Author

Gillian McAllister is the Sunday Times and New York Times bestselling author of nine stand-alone novels. Her books have been selected for the Radio 2 Book Club, Reese’s Book Club and the Richard & Judy Book Club. Her previous novel, Wrong Place Wrong Time, was a Waterstones Thriller of the Month and was shortlisted for The British Book Awards Crime & Thriller Book of the Year and the Theakston Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year. Gillian’s books are published in thirty-eight languages.

Also by Gillian McAllister

Everything but the Truth

Anything You Do Say

No Further Questions

The Evidence Against You

How to Disappear

That Night

Wrong Place Wrong Time

Just Another Missing Person

Famous Last Words

Gillian McAllister

CALLER UNKNOWN

For Lia, who taught me how to be a mother

Part I

THE RANSOM

CHAPTER 1

Simone

Your children are only ever on loan to you. Simone glimpsed this phrase last month on a billboard in London advertising a film and then spent the rest of the day arguing in her head with it. Of course that isn’t correct, she had thought. If you do it right, your children are yours forever.

But it has plagued her in the way things sometimes do when they contain an uncomfortable truth. And so Simone is thinking of that billboard once again now as she sits cross-legged on a motionless baggage carousel in Del Rio Airport, Texas, waiting to go and meet her daughter, Lucy, who’s spent the summer here.

Everybody else’s cases have come and gone. Simone’s is, a jaded attendant told her, ‘Probably somewhere here, but honestly? Could be on the moon,’ and Simone had to do something she only recently learned at the age of forty-three: hold her tongue.

She opens a note buried deep in her phone – she’d be mortified if anybody ever found it – on which she has written the days of August to cross off. Just a simple list, no app or fanfare.

1 August – X

2 August – X

And now it’s the thirty-first, and she ought to be seeing Lucy right now, except Simone’s flight was delayed three times over, she arrived in Atlanta late, missed the connection. And her bag is on the moon, and it is ten past ten at night, the airport sleeping. The only person around is a porter cleaning the floor back and forth in rhythmic strokes. She sends Lucy a text: Landed late! I think I should just grab an airport hotel?

Her phone rings immediately. ‘The lodge is remote check-in,’ Lucy says the second Simone answers. This is how they begin conversations: in the middle. They end them there, too, their sentences understood and finished by the other. They have always been this way, right from when Lucy learned to talk.

‘That will be so late for you,’ Simone says, thinking painfully of her phone note ticking into September but hiding it, ‘just come tomorrow. Get some sleep. I don’t even have my bag yet; it’s lost somewhere,’ she adds. She pauses, listening. ‘What is that?’

‘Fargo.’

‘Movie or series?’

‘Movie,’ Lucy says, just a note of disparagement in her voice. Simone’s daughter, aspiring actor, is never not watching something she would call seminal, always with the same battered brown notebook and pen out. Lucy continues: ‘Airbnb don’t care when you check in,’ and Simone hears the movie go off, motion begin in her daughter’s voice, footsteps, doors closing. ‘Besides, it’s only ten or whatever.’ A pause. ‘Has it been a nightmare? I feel so bad if it’s been …’

‘No,’ Simone lies. ‘Just sitting around waiting. Not half as boring as Fargo.’

‘Touché! It’s supposed to be boring. Because it reflects the bleakness of – No,’ Lucy says, and Simone can just see the hand her daughter is holding up. ‘We’ll talk Fargo later. Go find that bag.’ A pause. ‘And I’m sorry,’ she says. ‘I appreciate you coming.’

Simone smiles into the phone; her daughter shows only her this vulnerability. She cares, very much in fact, and is afraid to show it.

‘They have no idea where it is. Said it could be on the moon.’

‘How stupid. Demand they go to the moon.’

Simone lets a laugh out. Lucy is so like Simone was years and years and years ago, full of verve and offbeat obsessions and humour and (sometimes) explosions of temper. Life and Damien and running a restaurant mellowed Simone out, but nevertheless something about this similarity fills her with happiness. She always figured her own messy childhood made her the way she is, but not so: Lucy’s childhood has been charmed, and look.

‘Anyway, I’m getting a cab now,’ Lucy says.

Simone notes the half-American lexicon, cab, born out of a summer spent over here. Or maybe she’s always said ‘cab’, and Simone just hadn’t noticed until now. ‘Let’s do it,’ she says.

‘I’ll see you at the lodge, and I’ll stop, and get you food?’

‘No need,’ Simone says, thinking how Lucy is a kinder teen than most, and they hang up. Just then, like a sign, the carousel starts up again, juddering Simone to standing, but no bags come.

She looks for the porter, but he’s gone. She stands around, watching the conveyor belt deliver no bags to no people, then wanders to a nearby vending machine. She’s just pondering the American snack selection – mediocre, but why do things always seem more exciting when purchased overseas? – when a lone employee drifts by with an overstuffed burrito in one hand. She knows just from looking that despite its arrogantly large size, it is bland, the tortilla completely unbrowned, for starters. ‘I’m sorry,’ she says to him. ‘I’ve lost my case, I bet you can’t help, but …’

‘I’m Border Patrol,’ he says, but he does so apologetically.

‘I’m going to meet my daughter – God, I just want to get there. I’m so late already. I’ve missed her so much,’ she garbles.

‘Let me see what I can do,’ he says. He brings a radio out, says through the burrito, ‘You’re meeting tonight?’

‘Supposed to be. We have remote check-in. Please, please try to find the luggage.’

Another bite of the burrito, a kind smile around flapping tortilla. ‘Hang on,’ he says. He speaks quietly into the radio. ‘Lost luggage, flight …’ She holds out her ticket. ‘FR1839,’ he says.

He signals a hand up to her to wait, then walks away. Simone watches him leave. He scratches his behind lazily as he goes, and Simone thinks she is never getting that luggage.

She waits again by the baggage claim. Twenty minutes later, to her surprise, he arrives with her case wheeling behind him. ‘Almost ended up in another hold,’ he says with a rueful shrug. ‘Who knows what they’re thinking in this place.’

She thanks him, grabs the bag, putting an imaginary X next to 31 August: the day is almost done. Soon, she will get to press her cheek to Lucy’s. Not for long. And not as often as she wants to. But she still gets to do it for now.

Lucy has sent her a pin on a map. Like most things in Texas, there doesn’t appear to be much near to it, but Simone will be there before midnight.

Simone slides into the hire car and tries to get to grips with the controls. The parking button is on her right, not her left. She tests the pedals, the car jerks. She leaves, drives on the left, then remembers and swerves.

She turns on the radio and fiddles with the controls, trying to find a station that will keep her awake. Different accents, different songs. She lands on country, and, suddenly, she is here, and she is excited. A strumming guitar plays out across the airwaves, and, as it often does, Simone’s mind turns to daydreams of food. Cooking outside on the fire just as it starts to get dark, huge steaks, warm, smoking tomatoes, and Lucy. Two weeks of just her and Lucy.

After a while, she dictates a text to Damien: ‘You awake? I’ve landed, and am driving.’ It’s five thirty there, but Damien is an early riser, the sort of person who is organized enough to go to bed on time.

Aah, he replies, I’d love to chat, but we’re in crisis over non-delivered fish!

‘Where is it?’ Simone dictates into her phone.

On route!!! Don’t worry! he replies, and Simone wants to tell him that it’s en route, and that she will worry. About him, about the fish, the lot of it. She thinks of the back corridor in their restaurant where the fresh produce is delivered, perhaps her favourite place on earth. Nothing special to look at. Just a poured-cement floor, two worn stone steps, a pink back door. But every morning she takes a builder’s tea out there – teabag left in, no sugar, drop of milk – and sits and watches the fresh food come in, the day’s potential.

‘If it’s late, make sure to smell it,’ she tells Damien. ‘It should all be odourless.’

Any other co-owner – and husband – might bristle at this, but Damien doesn’t, isn’t like that. :) he sends (‘smiley face’ reads the car’s dictation), and so Simone can’t help herself and adds, ‘And touch your hand to it – check it’s properly cold.’

He calls her, now. ‘Hey,’ he says, a long drawl as slow-moving and considered as he is.

In the background, she can hear him quietly pottering. She’s worked with him for long enough to know what he will be doing: sorting the kitchen so the day runs smoothly. Prepping the vegetable station. At night he washes the pots from the cooking chaos – usually hers – and sweeps crumbs off counters into the palm of his hand.

‘I’m almost at the lodge,’ she says through the hands-free.

‘Say hi to her from me. Tell her I’ve downloaded Citizen Kane to watch when she’s back,’ he says. And Simone is struck, suddenly, that in the mother/daughter bond, she sometimes forgets him, that the father/daughter relationship is just as important. Is almost as important?

‘I will, of course,’ she says. Simone knows that Lucy has already watched Citizen Kane, but she also knows that she will be kind enough to lie about it.

‘I don’t know how you do these long shifts. I’ve done one and feel like my legs are going to fall off,’ Damien remarks.

‘Cooking keeps you very fit. Offsets the calories from tasting.’

‘Anyway,’ he says. ‘Citizen Kane, tell her.’

‘She will like that.’

‘Do you know, I’ve never seen it,’ he says, and she hears their cat, George, meow in the background. Almost twenty years old, they had him before Lucy, before they opened the restaurant. Old and decrepit, he’s moved with them multiple times across London, the houses and the mortgages getting larger, George getting slimmer and slower. Now he sits in a bay window all day in their Victorian house; the first thing any of them sees when they come home. Of course, every day Lucy says she thinks this is the day he’s died there, something which Damien doesn’t find funny at all but Simone kind of does, but, so far, he’s in great health.

‘Good luck with your second shift. Most chefs would’ve had a lie-in.’

‘I’m better busy,’ he tells her; he feels no qualms about missing her, nor saying it. ‘Fourteen days to go.’

Simone feels a lurch of longing for him, her calm husband, the restaurant, that bay window, their old cat, and something else, too. All this driving on the right side of the road, the late hour … there is something unsettling about it.

She turns off the highway, the slip road on the right – there’s no one around, and she has to tell herself she isn’t simply driving up it the wrong way – and on to roads that get narrower and narrower until they’re just tracks covered by a lattice of late-summer trees, the scenery only headlights, fluttering moths in their twin beams, and Simone, her face reflected twice in the passenger and driver windows. She can see Lucy’s exact features lurking beneath hers; under the veneer of age.

And here it is, their lodge: a squat wooden building that sits with a handful of others on a wide, dusty street. It overlooks the mountains in Fort Davis, Lucy told her when she sent the booking confirmation. There are cabins with pine porches, craggy rocks, big bonsai-style trees all around, and not much more that Simone can see, such a contrast to built-up London. She stops and cups her hands around her face, looking out of the driver’s-side window. It’s so silent, the other lodges perhaps unoccupied: windows as blank as closed eyes, no cars around, security lights off.

Lucy spent a week here at Easter – Simone counted down then, too – at a spring camp that she wanted to come back to for longer this summer. She can see now why Lucy likes the landscape. It’s wild and different, just like her.

Simone knows she ought not to be counting down. She cooks, she goes to a book club, she does yoga. Having an older child means she has her life back. But the reality, at the end of each busy day, is simply that Simone has loved being a parent, more than anything ever.

As she ascends the creaking porch steps, she feels it: a kind of trepidation, unusual for Simone, who has fended for herself her entire life. She ignores it, finds the code Lucy sent, types it in, then wrenches a screen door that doesn’t feel techy at all. As she steps in, she suddenly misses Damien’s protective, bearlike frame with a real yen. Simone becomes too cynical when she’s alone for too long, getting pissed off about people’s flavourless burritos and her own lost luggage. He calms her; they ought to have made a trip out of it. She ought to have told him they could both leave the restaurant, but she hadn’t realized how much she’d want him here. Anyway, isn’t it always after the fact that you know how you truly feel? It is for Simone, anyway.

It’s warm and dark inside the lodge, so warm Simone – who feels the cold – is immediately looking forward to sleeping cocooned up in it, feet tucked into the end of the duvet. There are cheaply panelled walls everywhere, beds with old-fashioned covers, second-hand books on windowsills. That curious holiday feeling descends: footsteps echoing around unfamiliar rooms, searching for light switches and which cupboard contains the mugs.

She will cook while she waits for Lucy, who’s now five minutes away. The kitchen is perfunctory but fine. Blunt knives, an electric hob with a coating of something on it, but there is milk and a bowl full of eggs.

She cracks one open, checks it’s still good, and starts to make two three-egg omelettes. A stocking-filler of a meal, comfort food. As she begins, she can feel her body relaxing, limbs becoming soft and tender. In the unfamiliarity of an empty lodge in Texas, she is home, here, bent over the cheap hob with the stuck-on something. Hot butter bubbling strawberry-blonde at its edges, eggs, (cheap table) salt and dusty cayenne pepper from the back of a cupboard. She makes them baveuse, runny in the middle, no colour and no crease. The proper way, the French way, the way people may say is pretentious but Simone knows to be simply correct. She sets them on two plates, steaming hot and beautifully yellow.

Headlights outside illuminate the street with a quick wink, a flash of the mountains, and then an engine begins to idle, and the countdown is over. Simone checks her watch: just after midnight on 1 September. It’s the longest time they have ever been apart. Five weeks and three days. And then Simone is out on the wooden porch, rushing so much she starts the swing seat moving in her wake, and there she is: her daughter. Shorts, T-shirt, tennis socks pulled up to her calves, Crocs. Enviably cool Lucy.

She is getting her bag out of the boot of the cab, and she looks different. Is she taller? Surely not some late growth spurt, just confidence. Long, tanned limbs, new clothes that Simone has never laundered, never folded or ironed, not that this ought to matter but does. Dirty-blonde hair now sun-streaked. But the rest is the same, the strong nose they both share, the sardonic smile that’s hard to win for most people, the fine bones: clavicles, the tips of her shoulders, slim wrists. Lucy’s never eaten enough.

The taxi driver gets out and begins to help Lucy with her bag. He is in leathers, like a motorcyclist, which creak and strain as he moves.

‘Hey, thanks,’ Lucy says to him, taking the case. She tips him, a seamless transaction, palm to palm, and he thanks her. Simone watches this play out: her daughter, the adult.

‘Ah, it’s this part,’ the driver says, gesturing around him. ‘I thought it was. People are always pulled over for speeding just here, where it goes from an eighty to a fifty. This your mom?’ he asks. Simone sometimes forgets how obvious their likeness is.

‘Mother-and-daughter holiday. Camping,’ Lucy says. ‘Tomorrow.’

‘Can’t stand camping,’ he tells her.

Lucy smiles, cocks her head. ‘Why?’ The actor in Lucy is interested in people. She will talk, later, to Simone about his mannerisms, imitate them perfectly.

‘Feel the cold!’ he replies. ‘At night in the desert. Anyway, howdy. You be safe now.’ At this he glances at Lucy for just a beat.

‘I made omelettes,’ Simone says to Lucy as he gets back into the car. ‘Midnight snack.’

‘Good. The singing prison was not interested in feeding its inmates nice food,’ Lucy says, letting her bag fall from her shoulder in the hallway. She’s been at what she calls this singing prison for the final week of her summer, after camp. She has an unconditional offer to join RADA in the autumn, but the letter contained an advisory that she needed to learn to sing. Simone was going to come over a week earlier, but Lucy pushed it back when she found what she called an old-school Southern lady called Bea who she said could teach anybody how to sing. Simone had tried not to feel pushed out, knew it wasn’t reasonable to.

The taxi leaves, clouds of dust around its wheels, and the engine fades to nothing, and, suddenly, they are totally alone.

Lucy brushes past Simone to get the omelette. And, no, they’re still exactly the same height.

Simone can’t hug her – Lucy will balk – but she reaches for her hand instead, fingers that used to be fat and jelly-baby-like, that curled around Simone’s thumb in a maternity ward surely only yesterday, and squeezes. Lucy squeezes back before releasing her, and Simone explodes into a puff of multiple Xs, thirty-eight of them representing thirty-eight days, as she is back, whole, with her daughter. A cracked egg, repaired.

Half past midnight, and they’re both cross-legged on one of the beds. ‘The thing was that on the very first night, after we’d finished around the piano, Bea says she’s going to take our phones off us, says she will lock them up.’ Lucy then enacts a perfect Southern American impression: ‘Even vocal cords need nine hours’ sleep.’ A pause. ‘One of the other singers there was forty.’

‘God,’ Simone says.

‘Anyway, clearly, she’s just made it up because she realizes right then that she doesn’t have anywhere to lock the phones. Right?’

‘Right.’

‘So she collects them all up and she puts them in her car. Absurd. Then she has to go through with that every night. Ten tone-deaf singers’ phones into the boot. She said she could teach anyone, but she’s clearly never taught a soul in her life.’

Laughter burbles up in Simone, and she thinks several things simultaneously: God, I have missed you, and Please never leave me again, and Please don’t move away and only invite me to sit in the audience of the plays you’re going to star in.

‘Where did you even find her?’

‘She’s the aunt of someone at camp. I know.’ She holds up a hand. ‘And then she wants us to reflect on the day. That’s the point of it. Singing all day, evenings thinking about singing, watching wacky musicals where people with mad eyes sing their thoughts to no one.’ Simone stifles a laugh. ‘So we do that, we’re all in the living room or whatever. And guess what she’s doing? She’s on her phone. Every night.’

Simone can see where this is going. Lucy shifts position, the soft mattress undulating, and says, ‘So I go, “How come you can have your phone and ours are contraband?”’ A pause while she gulps tea – Lucy drinks tea at all hours of the day, never seems to have any problem sleeping. ‘And she tells me, “An attitude like that is why you can’t sing.”’ At this, Lucy throws her head back and laughs.

‘And are you still tone-deaf? Bad attitude and all?’

‘Absolutely.’ Lucy sings the word, and she is; she hits a perfectly strangled note. ‘I mean, they’re phones. We’re on TikTok and our emails, not sitting on PornHub all night, screeching out our vocal cords.’

Lucy covers the top of her shaking tea with a hand as they laugh. ‘God, it’s so nice and warm in here. We’re going to have such great sleeps.’

‘I thought the same.’ Simone smiles, then adds thoughtfully, ‘I mean, you don’t know no one was on PornHub. Just because you weren’t.’

‘Maybe Bea was.’ She pauses. ‘Porn in D major.’

Simone shifts on the bed, so happy. She is so tired she feels seasick, but she doesn’t care. ‘Did you enjoy it at all?’ she asks.

Lucy makes a face in response. ‘No.’

‘Well, you’re in tune now,’ she lies. ‘It’s done.’

‘We ought to go to bed.’

Beyond the lodge, crickets shiver the air like maracas. Outside, there is only the alien desert landscape. No lights around as far as they can see, the distant sound of the main road if you listen carefully, though it’s a mile away.

‘Is there even anyone else staying here?’ Simone says as they drift out together into the hallway.

Lucy presses her face to the door. ‘I really don’t think there is. Which is just the way I want it after living with nine singers.’

‘I can imagine. Right – sleep. And then tomorrow, we camp,’ Simone says. ‘Silently. No singing.’

‘Deal.’

Simone tries to pull the front door shut. It’s a screen door, flimsy, and bounces back. She must have broken it. It had a code to enter, but now hangs loose. Unless it always did, and the code did nothing? She can’t remember. ‘Huh,’ she says, as she tries again. It has a catch on one side, a wooden frame and plastic translucent windows, but it won’t connect.

‘Well,’ Lucy says, looking at it. She tries to ram it over the catch, but it clatters and rebounds regardless. ‘It’s fine.’

‘Hmm,’ Simone says, wincing as her daughter pulls it roughly; they are about to end up with no door at all.

‘Once we’re camping, our tent won’t lock either,’ Lucy says with a shrug, leaving the door reverberating with her effort. ‘It’s fine,’ she says again, and lets it hang an inch from the catch.

‘True,’ Simone concedes.

‘But we will get loads of bugs in. There are these ones called stink bugs,’ she says, fiddling with the door. ‘One of the singers – the forty-year-old – was obsessed with them to the point of insanity. Thought they’d travel home with her on her luggage.’ She hesitates. ‘It does get pretty cold in the early hours, but –’ She looks at a box of blankets at their feet.

‘Exactly,’ Simone agrees, and Lucy picks one up, sniffs it, and makes a face. A car begins to hum outside in the distance, then sweeps on by after several moments, lights white, then red. They watch it silently for several seconds, then Lucy indicates the room they were just sitting in. ‘You want that one? I’ll have this one.’ She points across the hallway.

And then she wordlessly places her elbow on her mother’s shoulder, and stands there leaning, a kind of half hug. Simone rests her head against her daughter’s. And the distance between them that began this spring and continued into the summer has closed, just slightly. Simone almost asks Lucy about it, but then stops herself, knowing better.

They part ways. Simone watches Lucy start sorting, taking wrinkled clothes out of her messy suitcase and putting them on the bed. Lucy pauses, hands on her hips, unaware Simone is still watching, and lets out a small sigh, just one. The softest, most delicate rise and fall of her shoulders, so slight Simone could have imagined it, and Simone finds herself wondering how the summer really was, beyond the bravado. But Lucy is unlikely to say. Simone watches her retreat into the bathroom, the light flickering on and humming. After several moments, she comes back out and looks at Simone.

‘You coming out here,’ she says, then swallows. ‘It means a lot to me. Thanks for doing it.’ Her voice is thick and textured. ‘I chose this lodge as I thought you’d like the fruit trees outside.’

Simone nods, smiles, touched, then Lucy closes the door and disappears once more. There’s that parental loan again.

A black room, nothingness, a jolt into consciousness, and Simone is awake and floating contextless as her brain tries to work things out. Where is she? Who’s with her? It comes back to her piecemeal. Texas. Lucy. The lodge. As she stares, items come into view in the blackness. The far corner of the bed, mussed-up blanket dripping off the end. The bedroom door with the large brass knob reflecting just a tiny square of light from somewhere.

An old-fashioned clock radio with faded red numbers says it’s 4:02, three hours after they went to bed. Simone can feel her eyes closing again in the warmth. The bed is deliciously soft, a soufflé of a mattress, the room so still and dark. How pleasant to fall back to sleep when jet lag might otherwise have kept her awake. She lets it come, lets go of the obligations: to check in on whether the fish arrived, to see how Damien is, to call out for Lucy. As sleep pulls her under, her mind unconsciously runs over memories. Outdoor date night with Damien, started in the pandemic, continued weekly since. Walks, strawberry picking, ice skating. George the cat curled like a cinnamon bun on their four-poster bed – Simone bought it the day The Times wrote up their restaurant, second-hand from eBay but still. And Lucy, too: her daughter’s monologue as Lady Macbeth earlier in the year, spotlit and striking with her red hands that Simone knew to be covered in tomato puree but forgot because she was so good.

As the memories come, her body slows and she lets her guard, always up, go down. The world becomes dreamlike, Simone unsure what’s real and what isn’t. The crickets outside. An unusual noise … is it a wave outside she can hear? No, they’re not near the ocean. Or is it a sigh, a cry, or is it a swell of sleep just coming over her head? She doesn’t know, can’t know, and then she’s gone.

Seven thirty-one according to the red numbers. Wow. Simone did not expect to have such a good night’s sleep. She lets her breath out, still lying on her back. A slow-spinning ceiling fan above rotates lazily. The light here is different. Clear and angular rather than England’s haze, everything sharply outlined by nature as artist.

It’s so quiet. Simone sits up, goose pimples covering her shoulders. That’s right: the concertina door in the hallway wouldn’t close. That’s why she can smell outside air, fresh but burning up already, like a just-lit oven.

Her suitcase is on the floor, splayed open where she left it, same as she knows Lucy’s will be. All she did last night was get out her toothbrush. She pulls a cardigan on over her pyjamas and crosses the hallway. Lucy is very quiet, she thinks, and there it begins: a humming kind of nervousness she isn’t used to feeling.

The cabin is on one floor, four rooms: two bedrooms, a bathroom and a living room/kitchen-diner. Long, flat rectangular windows reveal snatched lit-up glimpses of the vista of the desert. Lucy chose this place for them, said the location was good, the rates cheap.

Simone walks into Lucy’s room. It’s empty. Her suitcase lies open and filleted, exactly as Simone expected. She turns and heads back into the hallway and through to the kitchen. A pan, two plates, two knives, two forks, all from the omelettes, and one mug from Lucy’s bedtime tea. Cracked eggs and a teabag in the bin. But nothing else. No signs of life.

She checks the bathroom, the back garden, but she knows, somehow, that Lucy isn’t in the lodge. The specific way the air feels in an empty house: the quiet, some sort of dormant feeling, the echo of one’s thoughts? She doesn’t know. Only that she is alone, and wasn’t expecting to be.

‘Lucy?’ she calls aloud out back. The heat of the day shimmers outside in zigzags above the other cabins. The small shared pool is flat and blue, undisturbed save for a few flies littering its surface. Nothing. Crickets, literally, fruit trees, and the air as warm as an exhalation, clammy against her skin.

She turns around, wondering if she’s missed something, some detail, some other room, some piece of information, maybe Lucy had plans this morning that she’s forgotten …

She touches the kettle, absent-mindedly feeling for warmth: nothing. Lucy always has tea first thing. The shower is unused, cubicle dry, no steam, towels still folded on three shelves.

It’s as if she was never here.

Maybe she’s headed out for breakfast things? Simone peers through the front window, the desert a still and unforgiving backdrop. But Lucy would never head out for breakfast things. Simone would, Lucy wouldn’t. If left to her own devices, Lucy would eat a dry piece of bread for breakfast, just to get it done. In this situation she would wait for Simone to wake up and make something nice.

‘Lucy?’ she calls again. Nothing.

In the hallway, the concertina door catches her eye. It is open more than she remembers. An odd amount. Not enough to walk comfortably through. But definitely not how they left it last night, is it? She can’t quite remember. Lucy did it. Look, well, obviously she’s out, so she’s gone out of that door, Simone tells herself, in a particularly stern voice she invented in childhood in order to cope with the way her parents were.

She wrenches the door open fully. It squeaks along the wooden floor. She walks outside, on to the porch, descends the steps, and looks around. Nothing. No sign she’s left, but no sign she hasn’t, either. Simone’s hire car, nothing else. Terracotta tiles hot underneath her feet, even at this hour, none of England’s dew. Craggy plants, patchy grass. She ventures further, stands barefoot on the dusty road, no markings, and stares. It’s miles long, straight and totally empty. The sandy gravel is tinged red. It could be the sunrise; it could be just the way it is, Mars-like and eerie. Where would Lucy even be? You can’t walk anywhere around here.

Her thoughts begin to shift from pragmatic to panicked. She gets her phone and dials. An international calling code that Simone has become used to this summer but still dislikes. It’s different. Everything here is different.

Voicemail.

She texts. Two ticks. She pauses, watching, but nothing. It doesn’t get read.

That is when the confusion and worry morph into something else, a desert flower that explodes suddenly and unnaturally into bloom.

Is her daughter missing? Or is she merely out, will return in ten minutes with a bag of American cinnamon rolls? Simone can almost feel the earth moving, turning on a dime. She calls Lucy again but, this time, she hears something. She pulls her own phone away from her ear, cocks her head, walks into Lucy’s room.

Where is it coming from? A muffled and rhythmic vibration, a phone on a soft surface. She palms the sheet and discovers two things: Lucy’s mobile, ringing quietly at the foot of the bed, and that the sheets are cold.

Simone’s back begins to prickle with fear. And then, before she can fully digest it, she sees something else: Lucy’s shoes. The Crocs she was in last night. Simone looks at them, blinking. She doesn’t understand. No. Maybe she … Does she … She curses not knowing her daughter’s entire wardrobe right now. She is her mother. She ought to know how many pairs of shoes she has. She ought to still be doing her laundry. They’ve separated too early. This is the feeling Simone has all the time, the heartbreak that sits at the centre of parenthood: if Lucy’s independence is so natural, then how come it feels so wrong?

Why would she not take her phone? Even if she was just going … No. There’s nowhere Lucy doesn’t take her phone. She was balking about it being locked away from her, after all.

Lucy’s mobile prompts her for a passcode she doesn’t know. Six digits. She tries her date of birth – 310308 – but it fails. Two attempts remaining.

Simone spins around. Stupid questions fill her mind. How long does it take a bedsheet to return to a cool temperature after being slept in? How many pairs of shoes does somebody bring camping – surely more than one? And more than just Crocs?

Maybe she left something at Bea’s. But that’s miles away, not walking distance. Would she have called another cab? Left her phone here?

Simone stands there, her hands on her hips in her daughter’s room, and she lets herself feel it. Creeping monstrous fingers reaching towards her. Dark storm-cloud maternal instinct telling her: a hurricane is coming. Watch out.

Simone would say that nothing like this has ever happened to her before, but is that quite right? No, it isn’t, she thinks, doing a thorough walk around the pool, looking – absurdly – under sunloungers, and wondering at what point she calls someone. Damien. The police.

No. This feels familiar. It feels this way, Simone realizes, peering into a little shed to the left of the pool, because you never forget your near misses. That time Lucy ran off in Sainsbury’s when she was two and a half and Simone couldn’t find her for over three minutes. When Damien slammed on the brakes on the motorway, and Simone watched the car behind them fail to realize, and then do so just in time. The near misses are almost-lived experiences, the beginnings of tragedies that just do not quite, by luck, take off, like a single spark that sometimes causes a wildfire and sometimes doesn’t. These are what Simone remembers. This is what she hopes this will be. A near miss. An ember that might catch but doesn’t, no rhyme or reason to it, a grim reaper simply passing them by, unacknowledged.

It’s been half an hour. If by ten past eight nothing has happened, she will ring Damien. She puts a hand to the back of her head. It reminds her of him, is something he does to her sometimes during stressful times. He cups the back of her head soberly, absent-mindedly, with his huge hand, like a priest.

She heads outside again, where the sun heats her skin with a fierce pressure, like somebody has their hands all over her body. Next door, she climbs the porch steps and knocks, but there’s nothing. No answer, either, from the cabin opposite that. They are all empty; faceless houses around a deserted pool. A red life ring sits next to that and Simone stares at it, completely alone in the wilderness, thinking the worst.

Back in, through the hallway, and what she sees stops her dead.

CHAPTER 2

Hair. It’s hair, a real, proper knot of hair, on that broken front door. Simone reaches to touch it; she would know it anywhere. The precise thickness, colour, texture. It’s her daughter’s hair. So much of it, it would have caused such pain to come out.

She pulls gently and the clump comes away. She studies it, a soft curl sitting in her palm, and thinks that this is … that an injury has caused this.

Maybe it isn’t her hair. Maybe it was an accident. Lucy hurrying to – to where? Back into the bedroom, and she starts to go through their family WhatsApp, set up by Damien, who sends earnest memes Lucy ignores but that Simone likes. She makes notes of anybody Lucy’s mentioned this summer. Within moments, she has a set of names scrawled in shaky handwriting on a piece of paper she found on the kitchen table. People’s names, but no numbers. They exist on Lucy’s locked phone. They’re strangers to her; Lucy’s summer friends. Gone are the days of play dates and parents’ contact details.

And then she hears it: a beep. Simone bolts upright, grabbing for Lucy’s phone, but it isn’t that one. That one is still and dark, and this one is making a different sound. Tinny. Old-fashioned, a Nokia-type noise.

It beeps again, ringing, and her hand finds it instinctively, sliding underneath the pillow, the other going to her mouth, and there it is, buzzing softly in her palm like an insect.

Simone goes completely still as she holds it. A basic but modern flip phone with apps, its display contained in a window on the front showing CALLER UNKNOWN.

Simone breathes out. Please be a boy. Drug dealing. Anything. Please just come back, and be as bad as you like, she thinks, as she opens the phone like a clamshell.

‘Hello?’ she answers. Pulse racing.

‘Check messages,’ says a distorted voice.

‘Check messages?’ Simone repeats. ‘What messages?’

A pause – distinct, human breathing – then they hang up.

Simone stares at the phone.

‘What the fuck is this?’ she whispers to nobody.

Sure enough, a new noise. 1 message received, the phone says, again from UNKNOWN. Simone knows this is the moment that is going to change her life forever, and she presses Open and holds her breath. It takes a few seconds to load, two, three, four, and there it is.

CHAPTER 3

UNKNOWN: We have your daughter.

Simone is going to faint. She can’t breathe. She forces herself to read the rest of the message. Do not tell the police. Lucy is safe for now. If you go to the police, we will kill her. Meet outside Sacred Heart of Jesus Catholic Church, Shafter, TX 79843. 9:00 tonight CDT. Be prepared to do a deal.

Simone gapes at it. This cannot be … She is half aware she is clutching at her chest. ‘Oh my God, oh my God,’ she is saying, over and over. The hair. The hair.

This must be a nightmare. She’s still asleep, jet-lagged. She stands up, looks down at her body. Another technique she learned years ago, when the restaurant was ailing and the stress dreams began. Stare hard at your surroundings, observe them and their logical place in the world. A clock on the wall that says ten past eight. Her bare feet on the wooden floor with its uneven joins. The door to the bedroom, its angular edge. Everything is so clear.

This is no dream.

This is real.

Read it again. Just read it again.

Her hands shake, the text dancing and blurring into surreality. Her mouth goes wet and she keeps swallowing; she might be sick.

No, think, she tells herself in the stern voice. Think. If anyone is equipped to deal with this, it’s you.

Fingers sweaty, she tries to call the unknown number, but the option is greyed out.

‘I can’t work this fucking phone!’ she shouts, even though there is no one around to hear her.

This must be a prank. She’s on a reality TV show. Lucy’s lost her head, has faked a kidnap. No! Maybe it’s part of some method acting. Simone’s shoulders sag. That’ll be it. But the reassurance is false, gossamer-thin. Simone is no idiot, so it doesn’t last even a few seconds.

Maybe it’s deep-faked. Designed to elicit money, after which Lucy will be revealed to be just outside, where she’s been waiting all along.

Another message comes in, destroying the gossamer entirely.

It’s a video. The message accompanying it reads: Proof of life.

Simone presses Play.

CHAPTER 4

It opens with a dim corner of a room. A bulb hanging in the centre, which flares sunspots into the low-quality camera lens. A figure on the floor in the corner. Waves of unreality keep breaking over Simone. She’s rocking as she stands there, hanging on now to the door frame like she’s surviving an earthquake. This can’t be, this can’t be, this can’t be. Her brain is trying to make sense of something that isn’t. That doesn’t – they will kill her –

On the video, Lucy looks up. Blurry, grainy, but unmistakably her. Her wrists appear to be bound behind her back. Legs free, face and head free.

‘I’m Lucy Seaborn,’ her daughter says. And it’s her face and her full and rounded voice that projects so effortlessly. Her exact cadence, accent, nose, eyes, everything. She has her shoulders back against a plain wall, a result of her bound wrists. Legs tucked up in front of her. She’s wearing what she was yesterday: shorts and a white T-shirt. Simone touches the screen, her daughter’s blonde hair – the hair, the hair – bony shoulders … ‘I’m safe and have food and water,’ she says, though her voice catches on the last two words. ‘Please do what they say. I don’t know what they will do to me if you don’t.’ The rush of white-noise panic continues in Simone’s ears, her brain’s futile suggestions and explanations ended and grim acceptance kicking in.

Simone watches it again, hoping to spot some clue. And she does, but it doesn’t appear to mean anything: at the very edge of the frame, on the floor, are the distinctive spokes of a desk chair. She pauses, plays again. There’s wallpaper. She can’t zoom in, but she can see there are flowers on it. This isn’t some cave somewhere: it’s an ordinary room in somebody’s house. Simone isn’t sure whether or not this makes it worse.

As incongruity settles over her, Simone finds herself thinking something that maybe every parent has, or maybe it’s just her. She is ashamed to admit it. That she doesn’t want Lucy to move out, ever – to move on. And why? Because ever since she gave birth to Lucy, took her temperature when ill, stopped her running into the street, hovered with her hands underneath her while on climbing frames, she was doing so because she feared that she might lose her. And look: she was right.

Simone tries to think.

She watches the video a torturous number of times, then reads the message again. It says not to call the police. It says they will kill her. She tries, unsuccessfully again, to unlock Lucy’s phone. She needs to access her contacts, the people she’s been with all summer whose numbers she doesn’t have, but she can’t. Two more failed passcode attempts, and with a scream of frustration, she’s locked out for half an hour.

She closes the front and back doors, gets out her own phone, paces to the bathroom, irrationally hiding, closes that door too, and presses the numbers 911. Slow beeps. But she doesn’t press Call. How could she? Her thumb shakes as it hovers over the green button. She can’t do it. She can’t.

Simone rereads the message again, but it doesn’t say she can’t tell anybody else, only not to tell the police. So instead, she dials one of the only people in the world she truly trusts: Damien.

The call connects on the fourth ring.

‘Howdy, partner, how’s Texas?!’ he says. In the background, the specific sounds of the restaurant during lunchtime service. The other chefs talking in low voices, chopping, doors opening and closing. Somewhere one of them, Timeo she thinks, swears.

‘Damien,’ Simone says, wishing now that she’d collected herself. She had no choice about how and when this information was given to her, but she could have protected him.

‘What?’ he says, and, whereas Simone would be immediately suspicious, Damien’s voice is high and light; he is dimly aware bad things may happen, but only to other people.

‘Lucy’s been taken,’ she says.

‘What? Taken where?’

Simone inhales slowly. The bathroom smells of cool air and cheap shower gel. ‘We got to the cabin last night, went to sleep, and this morning when I woke up she’d gone. There’s a new phone in her bed with an automated – I think? – call and then message saying someone’s got her, with a video of her bound, sitting down. She tells me she doesn’t know what they will do if I don’t comply. They say she is safe “for now”.’ She gulps. ‘They say if I call the police, they will kill her. They say, “Be prepared to do a deal.” A deal? They mean a fucking ransom. I don’t – I don’t know – I don’t know if it’s real, but she isn’t here … I don’t know what to do. But the authorities – they could tell me if the video is faked.’ Despite her pause, it still comes out garbled.

Damien is silent, and Simone’s mind uses this time to betray her by connecting two awful ugly truths.

Something woke her at four o’clock in the morning, which she ignored.

That something was her daughter being taken.

And Simone simply went back to sleep, tired and selfish. She got her six hours’ sleep while Lucy suffered.

She can barely hear Damien’s response when it comes. ‘What?’ he is saying. ‘What do you mean, taken? A ransom?’

She explains again, this time more slowly, staring at the glass shower bricks. She tells him about the hair and is made more anxious by his gasp.

‘Where is she?’ he asks, nonsensically.

‘I don’t know. They’re … They told me to meet them at a lay-by tonight. By a church. I don’t know,’ she says again, and, somehow, somewhere deep in her mind, she had thought that telling Damien this, and unburdening herself, might help. But the problem isn’t halved in the sharing. It is actually doubled. Two hearts are now broken. Two minds are panicking.

‘Take a photo of the text and send it to me. Forward me the video. Did you call the number back?’

‘It’s anonymous. It all is.’

‘Send over what you have.’

‘No – I can’t … I don’t want anything written down,’ she tells him, and this is the first hint, to Simone, that she is thinking about doing precisely what these people tell her to.

‘But … you’re in Texas,’ Damien says, still processing the facts. ‘You’re not in – I don’t know! Colombia! Took her how? Where were you?’ he says, and within this Simone uncovers an accusation like turning over a stone and finding cockroaches. Damien’s never been like this. Never raises his voice. His careful, slow tidying up of her restaurant’s mess never thrown in her face. She thinks about a recent outdoor date night, walking through Hyde Park at sunset, and wonders if the events here, now, will fracture them forever.

‘I don’t know,’ she tells him. ‘I was asleep. But … I woke,’ she says. ‘I woke and – I don’t know what woke me and I went back to sleep.’ She says it because she needs to. She says it because the guilt is heavy on her shoulders. She says it because it is Damien, and she has learned to tell him, and only him, the truth. Nobody else gets all of Simone.

‘Oh,’ he says, and the syllable is sympathetic. ‘No,’ he says now. ‘You weren’t to … Anyone would’ve done the same thing. I would,’ he adds earnestly, so kindly, in the face of such awful consequences.

‘I know,’ Simone says, and she presses her ear right into the phone. She thinks, for just a moment, that she might cry, but finds she can’t. The panic and fear are too much, they’ve burned off all the other emotions. ‘Thank you,’ she adds, her voice choked with tears that don’t exist. ‘They say nine o’clock, tonight.’

‘I’ll get a flight,’ Damien says.

‘This seems – She might just walk in. It might be fake.’

‘I’ll fly out.’

‘OK,’ she says dully. She blinks, looking at a basket of cheap toiletries sitting next to the shower, resting on the small wall of glass bricks. ‘What do I …?’ She thinks how many hours and hours it will be until he gets here, maybe even days.

‘What did you mean?’ Damien asks suddenly. ‘About writing things down?’

‘They might know if I send a photo of the text.’

‘Right,’ he replies, and he is clearly thinking deeply, the silence as full-bodied as a mouthful of chicken soup. Damien is somebody who is able to say what he feels but do so considerately. He is not chaotic. He would never lash out, fire off half-formed thoughts, nor keep his intentions secret, either.

‘You don’t want there to be any evidence.’

‘Yes. I think so. I don’t know.’

‘Simone,’ he says, several seconds later. He does this often, uses her name, and she has always found something romantic in it, rather than formal.

‘Damien.’

‘We have to tell the police,’ he says. ‘About a kidnap.’

CHAPTER 5

It is only in her reaction to Damien’s statement that Simone finds any clarity. Horror. Dread. Revulsion. We can’t. They said they would kill her.

Simone stares at the shower again, sitting on the lid of the toilet, and the world feels much murkier than those rough-cut glass bricks. ‘I tried to dial 911 … but I just couldn’t. I can’t bring myself to do the one thing they say not to. They said –’

‘Obviously they’ve told you not to tell the police. They’re criminals. But the authorities are trained to …’

Simone hesitates. They shouldn’t have come here. They shouldn’t have come so far from home. They should have known that anything could happen.

‘I …’

They both wait, neither quite ready to outrightly disagree with the other.

‘They will want money,’ Damien says. ‘They must know about the business?’ Simone winces. Surely not? Their restaurant might finally be profitable, but some months they often still make close to cost. A rainy January, a football tournament, a rise in business rates – they are only ever a month or two away from hardship again. They are not rich. Maybe they are. But they are not high-profile rich. They are still people who have to choose between nice things, even if those things are nice cars or nice holidays.

But what if someone thinks they are? What if this is a targeted kidnap? What if Lucy’s put every detail of this lodge on Snapchat, or somewhere else Simone doesn’t understand?

‘I don’t know,’ she says.

‘There’s no way we can get big money,’ Damien says.

‘We could,’ Simone says, thinking, of course they could. A loan, credit cards, liquidate the business, sell the fucking house. There is no can’t when it comes to your child’s life.

‘We have to tell the police,’ he says again. But the sentiment is wrong: there is no we. It is she, me, alone in the desert in Texas, the responsibility of bringing her daughter back hers, and hers alone. Does she think this because he is five thousand miles away, or because she is the mother? She isn’t sure.

She reaches out a hand to touch the tiny frosted window above the sink, no bigger than a cat flap, beyond it a distorted palette of vivid sand and blue. The pane is cool and dry, dusty underneath her fingertips. If anybody were looking, it would appear like a cry for help.

She pauses, panicked. ‘I don’t know what to do,’ she tells him. The simple truth.

‘The police will be able to …’ He hesitates. ‘They will be able to find them. Get her out safely, better than you can. They won’t kill her. They want money.’

Simone holds the flip phone in her palm and stares again at the message. What was amorphous crystallizes in the air, a slow drip of water that becomes an icicle, hard and taut in its forming. She doesn’t think she agrees with Damien, the thought a shard of ice like a dagger. She thinks she might really want to obey the text. The only thing that frightens her more than this thought is the notion that she might be in that lay-by tonight, alone.

‘I think we should tell the police. Now. And that way they will go.’ That diplomatic we again.

Simone closes her eyes. ‘They said they will kill her,’ she whispers.

Damien is silent.

She doesn’t say anything further. How could she take the risk of defying them? Sometimes, aren’t the stakes just too high?

‘Simone?’ Damien says.

‘Get here,’ she tells him, a non-answer. ‘Let me know when your flight is.’ He tells her he will. They say nothing further about what she will do next. I don’t know what they will do to me if you don’t. Lucy’s words echo in her mind.

Simone hangs up then dials and deletes the numbers again. 911. She stares at the swirling shape of the nine, the stick ones. If she were to press Call, she knows what would happen. She’d sit right here, on the bathroom floor, while a team of people whose nine-to-five is police work would step in. People who’d try and fail, would go home after their shift and tell their partners they’d had a bad day, but it wouldn’t compare to hers. Simone doesn’t trust people who are at work. She trusts people who are all-in.

Maybe it comes from childhood. The second a kindly teacher phoned in her parents’ behaviour, the wheels of the authorities had begun to turn, and Simone had become a social services case number. She remembers vividly a meeting, once she was placed into care, where a case worker said to her, ‘Child of drug addicts, right?’ then ticked a box, just like that.

She’s only been asked to do one thing, and that’s not to contact the police. How could she? Simone stares at her shaking thumb and thinks she is incapable of pressing Call. No one pokes a hornet’s nest when their child is nearby. At least, not her. She knows her childhood has impacted her parenting of Lucy, but she’s only ever wanted to protect her daughter from pain.

The numbers 911 are deleted once more.

CHAPTER 6

Sometimes, fleetingly, there have been moments for Simone where the responsibility and love of motherhood has felt just too much. Times when she expected more of herself. Small things, things women berate themselves for: when she thought Lucy might fall from a climbing frame at the park and Simone was too far away to help, when she had a fever of over forty. Both times, Simone simply wanted to turn away, to run. She’s never told anyone this, thought they might judge her, which is exactly – she knows rationally – how these thoughts continue to hold power.

She can’t absent herself, now, and instead chooses panicked fervour. If she can find Lucy, she won’t have to make a decision about the text. She crosses to the traitorous screen door – if only, if only – and looks at it.

How did a kidnapper know only their lodge was occupied, and nobody else’s? Was it so obvious the door was open? Or was the door deliberately …? How did her hair …? Did they drag her …? Simone cannot complete the thoughts. She stands there, frozen in the hallway, Damien’s words echoing in her mind.

Were they targeted? Have these people researched her and Lucy – followed them? She traces a hand down the wall, shivering, not wanting to know the answers.

A noise just down the street distracts her. A vehicle, maybe two. Simone sprints to the front window in the living area, her fingertips on the windowsill like a child’s.

It’s the police.

Or, rather, it is one cop, now standing by the side of the road, flashing a warrant badge to a man he’s pulled over. He’s in uniform that, despite everything, Simone finds herself thinking he’s spent too much time ironing: two perfect creases down the front of each blue leg.

‘I think not,’ the officer says acerbically to the person he’s pulled over. He has a broad Southern accent, tanned skin. A bald spot at the back of his head that shines with sweat.

‘It was,’ the other man says, his hands up in protest. ‘Must have just changed.’

‘It’s been a fifty for five years,’ the police officer replies flatly.

He perhaps senses Simone watching, because he looks over and catches her eye through the window. She immediately takes two steps backwards, but he maintains his gaze. A smile: straight white teeth. He holds a finger up to the driver he’s just pulled over, touches his shoulder, then begins to walk towards Simone’s lodge. Simone feels fear draining out of her, like somebody has sucked her blood.

Three knocks.

She is a stone statue in the hallway. Do not tell the police.

If you go to the police, we will kill her.

‘You OK there?’ he calls out to her, clearly having radar for people in distress.

And this is the moment. She is eye to eye with a cop. A handful of words and everything would change. Authorities, resources, instructions, help. Simone opens her mouth to answer him.

‘Yes, yes,’ she says, the lies tumbling easily out of her mouth. She’s too frightened to tell the truth. That’s simply how it is. There is too much on the line. ‘Just … here with my daughter.’

She wonders if she will look back on this moment in a hallway with the concertina door that had her daughter’s pulled hair around it and regret it.

‘Vacation?’ he asks, fiddling with the neat collar of his uniform. As he does so, he skews the neckline, revealing creases: he’s only ironed the visible parts, which endears him to her suddenly.

‘Yeah.’

He turns, raising a hand behind his back to her in a wave. Right until he leaves the threshold, she is telling herself that it isn’t too late to ask for help. To shout it out to him.

But then she hears him finish reprimanding the speeding driver, and, a few moments later, drive off himself. She stays in the hallway just listening and waiting until everything is quiet again. And, looking at the welcome mat, the cheap laminate floor and open door, Simone wonders if she could turn up there tonight and do whatever it is they ask. If she could be brave enough to do it.

She has always done precisely what her gut told her to, but, really, when it comes down to it, she can’t think of a parent who wouldn’t do that. Except, evidently, Damien. This thought lands fully formed and horrifying, like a splatter of blood on her face.

CHAPTER 7

The Dishes business account springs to life on the laptop on the kitchen table and Simone finds herself looking into it. Just to see what they’ve got. Nothing more than that. She isn’t necessarily going to go to meet these people. She just needs to know if she can.

The wooden table is rickety and the laptop moves around as she navigates the bank account. All around her is a silence so deep it throbs her ears. She has less than twelve hours in which to be prepared to do a deal. And isn’t she preparing? Isn’t that all this is?

That the money belongs to her anyway crosses her mind, which is an unfair thought to have, but one she feels regardless. The restaurant is almost as much a part of her as Lucy is. Damien might do the books and the HR, but Simone does the cooking, and what else matters without that?

Damien will see any withdrawals, but Simone’s nerves are on a high boiling panic, and she no longer cares. Or, rather, can’t even bring herself to consider it. A disagreement with five thousand miles between them is less urgent than her other, immediate, problems.

She and Damien met when they were both twenty-four, a few days before Christmas: he at a forced networking event, she serving him at the bar she worked in called After Midnight, which had a red awning and fairy lights in the windows year-round.

They’d both worked for other people for several years, Damien in HR in a law firm. He was Oxbridge educated, straight As and a straight-cut suit that strained at the shoulders; Damien is six-five and broad.

Simone had been making a cocktail for a lawyer so rude he addressed her as ‘You!’ and then added, ‘I need a drink.’ Simone, who had encountered many lawyers during the social-work proceedings against her parents, hadn’t been particularly surprised. She had struggled not to tell him to go fuck himself, but she needed the job and the money. Instead, she made the cocktail so outrageously beautiful that he had been forced to tip her.

It was six o’clock, long dark and deep into December. The time of year that is romanticized but actually bleak: constant illness, tiredness, everybody pissed off with the admin of Christmas. Simone had been living in a flat in Clapham Junction with two workaholic junior doctors who were rarely home and used to practise injecting oranges with saline solution when they were. She had nowhere better to be than work on the last Thursday before Christmas, but she absolutely did not want to be there, either.

Damien was next in line at the bar. Drinks were on his law firm, but he had a lemonade. He didn’t drink, never has, doesn’t like the taste or the sensation, or how people get casually addicted to things, he says, something Simone has always greatly admired about him, for obvious reasons.

‘What do you do – law?’ she’d said, as she had filled his glass up with lemonade on draught that came out so frothy it looked like a jacuzzi.

He had waved a hand, like it was irrelevant. ‘Send emails.’

He was huge – Simone later found out he’d had that suit of his custom made, and it still didn’t fit – with dark hair, dark eyes, a dark beard, said that he worked in HR because he liked people and talking. Simone, who didn’t then like people at all, had stared at him for several beats after he had told her this.

‘What about you? This?’ he had said, his tone not disparaging.

‘This,’ she’d said. ‘But I want to do something better.’

‘What sort of thing?’

‘I don’t know.’ The place was so packed with suits that Damien had to lean right over the bar to hear her. ‘But something. Not this.’

Simone had left school at fourteen when social services finally stepped in about her parents’ habits. She had not a single qualification and had failed, too, to ‘work her way up’ in the way one is apparently supposed to do in order to turn around that sort of bad luck.

But, at the time she met Damien, she had just created and sold a website for ten thousand pounds. It had been the beginning of something, for Simone. She’d always known she could be entrepreneurial. She’d had an idea for a dating website, Fruitful, focused on men and women who wanted to meet somebody in order to have a family. Everybody had said it wouldn’t work because it would have more women than men on it, but that hadn’t borne out. When she had sold it, it had been the first time it had felt like this was how things were supposed to be for her. Not a dead-end job. Not bar work. Something else.

They used that money, much, much later, to seed the restaurant.

‘I’m supposed to be exchanging business cards with people,’ Damien had said. ‘Want one?’ And this was – and is – how Damien played things: open and clear. But something else, too, perhaps naivety: the optimism of somebody who had never been rejected.

He slid it across the bar before she could say anything.

Damien Seaborn. She liked a man with an interesting surname. She didn’t give him her own number, but she tucked the business card into the pocket of her apron and, much later that night, remembered to take it out.

‘Do you ever think,’ Damien had said, outside, after last orders, three lemonades later, ‘like, if teenage me could see me now …’ he paused, and Simone had thought he was about to say something self-aggrandizing, but he didn’t, ‘he’d think, God, what are you doing? Rotting at a desk.’

A sigh of deep, satisfied understanding had rushed out of Simone, swirling in the damp, cold December air. A potted Christmas tree sat just to Damien’s left, its lights hazy in the mist.

‘I really do understand that,’ she said.

‘Nice to meet somebody who does. Most people just pretend to love their jobs.’

‘Not me.’ And there, by the Christmas tree, she thought she hadn’t just found her husband. She had found a real, true friend.

They moved in together quickly. Most Mondays, he had said to her that he didn’t want to go to work, that HR was more about inhuman relations than human. Most Wednesdays, he texted her, saying, Hump day – we’re wasting our lives!!

It was after they had Lucy that they left the rat race. Used Simone’s seed fund, ring-fenced in a locked saver and topped up by an enormous loan from HSBC. They opened a restaurant despite having almost no experience in it. They wanted to do something tangible, something that mattered. Not emails. Damien said he wanted to give people an experience, eating in their restaurant, a line Simone had loved so much she had stolen it and repeated it as her own to other people.

Damien knew how to run a business. Simone knew how to make a good cocktail, but that was it.

And then she learned to cook alongside their hired chef. And that led to the review in The Times that changed everything.

That first Monday, in charge of Dishes, Damien had turned to her and said, ‘I am looking forward to going in, you know.’

There’s five and a half thousand in the business bank now, and bills to pay. Simone didn’t bring the company debit card with her. Damien has it. She risks a text to him, not caring about the consequences. Can you access the business account?

She looks at the screen, wondering if she could transfer it somewhere. She has four thousand dollars with her, cash, for camping supplies and for the campsites. Luxurious, but they wanted it to be.

But it won’t be enough for a ransom.

As she’s thinking this, the burner phone beeps. It creates a physical reaction in Simone’s body, a wrecking ball through her nervous system.

Bring nothing and bring no one. You will be checked. No police. Or else: bang.

Simone stares at the phone. Bang. She can’t think straight. Nobody could. But what do they mean, bring nothing? What deal is to be done if not financial?

She touches the keypad on her own phone, but, this time, doesn’t even dial 911 and delete the numbers, because Damien calls. ‘I’ve got a flight,’ he tells her when she picks up. ‘I’m at Heathrow. Just about made it. Getting the ESTA now. You can apply for some last-minute one.’

‘OK.’

‘It has a connection in New York. Late tonight. Then on to you.’

‘Right,’ Simone says woodenly. For the first time in two decades, she doesn’t know what to say to her husband. And then he asks it: the question that changes everything.

CHAPTER 8

‘What did the police say?’ he asks.

Simone has to hold on to the table. He thinks she called the police. She didn’t say she was going to, did she? No, he simply said that she ought to. And now he evidently doesn’t even think it’s a possibility that she decided not to call them. But how could he? How could she have told the police when that threat was levelled?

Simone stares at the cheap table. Peeling wood veneer, grime at its edges. She starts, several times, to tell him exactly what she thinks, but keeps stopping. Eventually, she settles on a straight bat: ‘I haven’t called them.’ A pause, and then she adds: ‘Yet.’

A beat. ‘What?’ he says, and he’s stunned.

‘The message says not to. They will kill her.’

‘Yes – but –’

‘Damien, they’ve – I’m so scared. I’m so fucking scared of what they will do. So I haven’t done it yet – I haven’t … I physically haven’t been able to.’

‘Are you kidding me?’ he barks, surprising her with a lack of sympathy.

‘No. I’m – Damien. They will kill her.’

‘Simone?’

‘It doesn’t –’

‘Call. The. Police,’ he says. ‘What the fuck are you thinking?’

‘What the fuck I am thinking is about getting Lucy back, and doing everything in my power to do so,’ Simone says. A quick slice of temper, like a cat lashing out. ‘Alive. He said he’d kill her.’

‘Am I not trying to do that?’

‘Are you?’

‘Not everyone is out to get you. How about we decide to trust the police?’

Simone, hurt, says nothing to this, and perhaps her silence incenses him, because he adds a damning sentence, something dredged up from their marital past, so old it is decrepit and crumbling, like an item from a sunken shipwreck. ‘She is not only your baby.’

Simone casts her eyes downwards. When Lucy was three months old, Damien had taken her out in the car, pulled out in front of somebody, and they got hit. It wasn’t serious. A rear shunt. Lucy hadn’t even cried. But in the panic when he called her, Simone had said, ‘She’s my baby – how could you?’ That sentence has echoed its way down the years of their marriage the way things often do, something he refers to occasionally, wants to talk about late at night sometimes. He’s never been unfair with it. More a sad kind of curiosity. When you said …

‘Don’t go there,’ she says now, tightly, thinking that on that day he had taken Lucy out because Simone had done three night feeds and an entire day while he had worked. She was supposed to be grateful for getting a break from Lucy, when his entire life had been one. That’s the way it had been for them. Her reaction had been born out of maternal instinct but also from womanhood – Simone had been, like so many before her, at the end of her tether.

‘I just don’t know what to do. She needs me.’ She imagines Lucy being taken to the lay-by expecting a handover and nobody coming. She imagines a police shoot-out. She imagines a death. She pauses, thinking if Damien is not censoring himself, then fuck it. ‘How can you not even consider going?’

‘Our daughter has been kidnapped. By criminals.’ A breath, and then he levels the only threat he’s ever made in over twenty years of marriage: ‘The police deal with criminals, not us. Call them – or I will.’

Simone stands up in shock, catching the corner of the laptop, which judders on the table. Nobody can call them. The kidnappers will kill her daughter if they do. Or they might, and Simone is not going to spin the roulette wheel on even the remotest risk.

And so she, therefore, is forced to lie to him. For the first time in their relationship. She tells herself it isn’t a proper outright lie. It’s just that she’s still deciding. ‘I’ll do it,’ she says. ‘OK. I’ll do it.’

‘Promise?’

‘I will,’ she says. ‘I’ll do it.’

‘OK. I need to turn my phone off now, but – promise me …’

‘I promise,’ she says softly, and she can’t understand it, how he can’t hear and feel the lie, a pressure on the airwaves between them that shivers and throbs her ears. Simone thinks that if he were here, he’d be able to tell from her eyes, her body, but he isn’t, and he can’t, or doesn’t want to, anyway.

‘By the time I land –’ he starts, and Simone knows the rest of his sentence.

It will be after nine o’clock. The meeting time.

It’s eleven. It’s noon, and Simone hasn’t called the police. She is not procrastinating. She knows what she is doing: she is making a decision by not making one, only she can’t even admit it to herself.

Time seems to speed up now Damien is somewhere in the sky, no doubt thinking that Simone is being supported by the authorities. In reality, she is preparing alone for something she is too afraid to admit is happening. She is chucking their suitcases in the car; whatever happens later, they can’t return to this lodge. She is reading and rereading the messages. And she is also dialling 911 and then deleting the numbers, again and again and again.

Someplace else, Lucy is sitting on the floor, in the video Simone’s watched a hundred times, reassuring her mother that she is OK.

It’s three, it’s four, it’s five, and Simone admits to herself that she will go to the lay-by. Just to see. She can call the police on the way. She will call when there if something happens. It’s five thirty, and she’s leaving the lodge. But, really, Simone knows what she is doing: she is going to rescue her daughter.

Simone is driving downtown, into Fort Davis, and Lucy is being treated well, Lucy is eating, Lucy isn’t in danger.

Damien is in the air by now, no WiFi, and is mercifully silent, leaving Simone free to do what she has to. Simone is taking the highway. Her daughter’s arms that, for years, Simone rubbed Aveeno moisturizer into, are bound at their wrists, and it’s six o’clock, and three hours’ time is really not very long. The sun is dropping fast like a falling fireball, it’ll be getting dark soon, and Damien is shooting through the sky, and Simone knows if she doesn’t get her daughter back, she will lose her husband, too.

CHAPTER 9

Simone is driving, their possessions in the boot, Lucy’s four-man tent, too. Everything they had. On the passenger seat she has the burner phone and their two mobiles.

The lay-by is over an hour away and she will be early; she wanted leeway. She has the accelerator pressed firmly downwards, fuel burning. Luan, Damien’s sister who works at Dishes with them, has texted. All OK? Damien said there is some business opportunity in Texas and he’s coming out?!!

Luan is Simone’s best friend. She is smart, so this won’t wash with her. When Simone first met Damien’s family, she remembers thinking that his parents and sibling were so very normal. They all lived near to each other. Simone was introduced to them, and had thought: Oh. So this is what family is supposed to be like.

Sure enough, Damien has told a healthy, appropriate and boundaried lie that explains his absence but doesn’t reveal the true reasons for it. He might want to tell the police, but he has understood the kidnappers want discretion. Simone likes to see this, this evidence of her husband continuing to be his consistent, sensible self while she is in turmoil.

Simone doesn’t reply to the text; she doesn’t know what to say that won’t make Luan ask more questions. She doesn’t have time to think too much about it, though, because the lay-by is up ahead.

Simone arrives next to the church, body and mind boiled in adrenaline so rich her nerves feel steeped in it, like they will never be the same.

It’s a large, dusty area off a wide, sweeping highway, craggy mountains in the background, their peaks the colour and texture of old bones. Dead vegetation rots on either side of the road. The church stands just a few yards back, a white, blocky building with two boarded-up windows, and she can make out an ancient-looking padlock on the door.

The sun has fully set now, a pale strip of sky to the west hints at where it once was, but there’s nothing else. Only her, the desert, the sky, and God, she supposes.

On the top of the church rests a simple white cross on the roof that Simone knows to be a Latin crux immissa, the type with the long vertical bar. Her parents, before the alcohol got them, then the occasional cocaine, then the heroin, had lived in a converted rectory. One of Simone’s worst memories, aged fourteen, is finding a small, clear bag of cocaine hidden in the confession box that sat by their front door.

Simone has only drunk once in her entire adult life as a result. It was recently actually, after Lucy’s leavers’ ball while waiting for her and her friends to arrive. Simone had sampled some of the red wine that paired with the wood pigeon she’d cooked. She’d sat out there at the back of Dishes with Damien, her fellow teetotaller, and they’d raised a glass. It had been the first time alcohol hadn’t felt dangerous to her. Damien poured it, sloshing in the colour of liquid redcurrants, and it had felt – pleasantly – like nothing. Just a toast to their adult flying the nest. An understanding of the pairing notes on her tongue. And a moment with her business partner, but more importantly her husband.

‘Maybe your twenty years of functional family has healed me,’ she’d said genuinely to him. It had taken Simone at least a decade to learn to speak her feelings without being self-conscious, and she was healed even more by Damien’s response: a soft clink of his glass to hers and a strong arm around her shoulders. Otherwise, unconditionally accepted silence.

They’d been interrupted then by some drama, Luan at front of house had double-booked – embarrassing and unusual – and they’d gone back to being business partners once more, Damien methodically going through the booking system, Simone rearranging that night’s seating plan.

But, later that evening, as all of Lucy’s friends arrived for the dinner, they’d felt closer, somehow. Husband and wife. Those shared drinks that didn’t unlock a monstrous part of her personality, that didn’t lead to Saturday cocaine in bathrooms, that didn’t result in addiction. Just a nice moment with nice Damien, that’s all.

She turns her eyes away from that white cross, switches the engine off and gazes around her. It’s a place to commit a crime, that’s for sure. No houses, church long abandoned. Not even any street lights. She hasn’t seen another car in over half an hour. No CCTV.

She takes five steadying breaths, then turns her iPhone off in case it rings. She can’t think when Damien will land, but it must be soon, and she needs focus and calm.

She’s twenty-two minutes early, and she opens the flip phone, waiting. She stops thinking at quarter to nine, not caring at ten to. She is an Olympic runner on the starting blocks, an astronaut about to launch, a labouring woman, and, by nine, there is only her intent, the Texan darkness, and Lucy, somewhere out there, relying solely on her.

At one minute past the flip phone beeps, and she opens it mechanically.

Welcome, it says, and Simone’s teeth begin to chatter. Now dispose of this phone. There is a dumpster 500 yards down the street, at the intersection between fourth and fifth. Destroy it first. I’ll be watching.

Simone’s hands are shaking as she reads and rereads it. She exhales a hot puff of air and opens the door with a crack. It’s the wrong side of the car, driven on the wrong side of the road. Everything is upside down. Her legs feel shaky and insubstantial, dreamlike legs.

Outside, it’s deserted, air as black as soot. Simone is too afraid to use the torch on her phone, so instead stumbles her way up the lay-by. The desert has retained the heat of the day, and clouds of unseen soft insects flit around her as she moves through the darkness.

The highway is as straight as if measured by a ruler. Simone can’t help but stare at it, the unfamiliar yellow road markings, the vastness of Texas’s skies and landscapes.

The bin is easy to find, a municipal container at the edge of the lay-by, cigarette butts in a metal container on the top, a letter-box-sized opening underneath.

Simone shivers in the warm air as she holds the phone up for someone invisible and unseen to witness, then puts it on the floor and stamps on it several times, until the casing breaks and the display says INSERT SIM.

She drops it into the bin. Half a second, then a loud thud at the bottom.

Her back prickles, thinking that this person, this person who has her daughter, is watching her right now, making sure she complies. And if she doesn’t, he could take her, too.

She can do nothing except obey completely.

Several moments pass, then she hears ringing. Confused, she looks at the bin, but it’s in darkness. The only other thing here is a silent payphone, SOS emblazoned across the top. Save our souls. Simone wishes she could use it.

She follows a white light beaming up intermittently somewhere else, and discovers a second new phone in the undergrowth off the lay-by, nestled between two rocks.

She answers it.

‘Put your hands in the air. Walk twenty paces back and forward until I text and tell you to stop,’ an automated voice says, and then disconnects.

One, two, three paces this way, she reaches twenty, then turns back, thinking that soon she is going to get her daughter back, and all this fear will have been worth it.

The ground is dusty, kicking up monochrome clouds in the dimness. Fine powder coats her legs, the skin on her hands. It smells arid, settles on her tongue, the chalky taste of those early days when she and Damien decorated the restaurant together. Damien put on a playlist while they sanded and painted. Simone remembers telling him that he had awful taste in music but was good at edging. He told her she was the opposite. In the end, she selected the best indie music and he finished the room.

Twenty paces.

Thirty.

After two laps, the phone beeps. This time it’s a text.

To get your daughter back … it begins.

And it isn’t money. It isn’t a ransom.

It’s instructions. Simone is to complete a task.

CHAPTER 10

What three words location: Mechanism. Ill. Familial.

Simone stares at this jumbled sentence, hoping that they are evidence she is dreaming. She pinches her arm and feels it. She blinks down at the phone, thinking, and it’s exactly then that she realizes the meaning of the message.

What Three Words is an app. She knows this because Dishes uses it to show its location on their website. Every three-metre square of the world has been logged using three-word combinations, giving much more accurate whereabouts than maps.

The kidnappers want her to go to a precise location. Something begins to rumble in the distant depths of Simone’s mind.

Next message: Collect bag from storage unit.

She scrolls hastily on the new flip phone, and sees the What Three Words app is already installed.

She types the words in and lets it load.

Mechanism. Ill. Familial. Familial. Simone lets out a dark huff of ironic displeasure. It is a remote location in Nueva Rosita, Mexico, several hours over the border.

There is a hot, torrid current in Simone’s blood. Her daughter isn’t kidnapped: she’s bait.

Simone has to go to Mexico. And in Mexico, she has to do something. A bag sits somewhere several hundred miles away, waiting for her. She stands there, alone on a dusty roadside, as she puts the pieces together.

It will have something illegal in it. They want her to do a run across the Mexican border, concealing something, to get her daughter back. Simone can barely breathe. What’s in the bag? Drugs? Arms? Worse? She can’t imagine.

Simone gets back into her car and looks down at the flip phone, hoping the instructions might have changed, but the texts stay there, blinking up at her. This flip phone has apps, but otherwise is only functional. It reminds Simone of a time right before smart phones, electronic khaki green screens, the text blocky and grey, the keypad numbers only, pressing multiple times for letters. She and Damien had these phones. They fell in love over these phones, love letters in text-speak for economy, 160-character limit. Simone could still type a muscle-memory text out on those numberpads, she’s sure of it. Damien called her Sim1. (Unlike some men, he communicated easily and directly on text; he told her after their second date that he wanted children and ‘no messing around’.)

She places the phone now on the passenger seat, next to her own phone, which is still switched off.

What is she going to do? She can’t do this. Her car … Her number plate. Does she even have a visa to get into Mexico? How would she conceal the …? Get them across …?

The impossibilities cloud in her mind, and Simone thinks she might just call the police, call anyone except sit here and face this choice alone.

Guns. Diamonds. What could it be?

Drugs, drugs, drugs, the evil of drugs.

Borders.

Sniffer dogs.

Customs.

Passport control.

Simone has no idea how to do this, none at all. She is not cut out for this. She is barely cut out for what she’s already done; she feels she has taken ten years off her life just to get here.

But then the second video on the second flip phone arrives.

The room is the same, but now the light’s changed. It’s darker around her daughter, but the bulb glows brighter in contrast, a halo upon her blonde hair. Her neck is rigid, with fear or perhaps instruction, Simone isn’t sure. She looks slimmer, though this isn’t possible and Simone knows it.

Lucy speaks: ‘I know what you’ve been asked to do. And I’m safe. I’m OK. But … please just do it. Please do whatever they say in order to free me. It’s the only way. Please don’t tell the police. Please don’t tell anyone, Mum.’

The video cuts there, a complete stop.

Simone sucks a breath in.

Then she plays it again, and again, searching. Searching for some hidden phrase. Surely her daughter ought to be able to insert something, a clue. That they are not serious, that they won’t harm her, that if Simone refuses, they might simply let her go.

She watches it five times, but there is nothing. Lucy is clearly being directed very precisely by her kidnapper. The message is straightforward and clear: Do what is asked of you. Lucy isn’t acting. Simone knows Lucy’s acting. Skilled as it is, it isn’t like this. Simone has always known what Lucy is thinking, knew what her cries meant, her jumbled toddler words. Even now, she can finish her sentences. Nobody else can.

Simone blinks, stares, watches it again. This time, she can’t see the wallpaper; there are no tells about the room at all.

She sets the phone down.

Her daughter is pleading with her. She is telling her not to talk to the police. She is, so far, still alive.

And therefore Simone has no choice. She has been right not to press Call on 911.

She tries to put herself in the mind of an organized criminal. If Simone transports the items, whatever they are, then she, too, is a criminal. But if she doesn’t, are they likely to release Lucy? No. She’s a witness to a crime, as is Simone. There’s a risk to the kidnappers that they will whistle-blow.

What do violent criminals do to people who know their secrets? They don’t release their witnesses; they kill them, just like they said.

But … what if? This is what her rational brain asks. What if they have killed her already, pre-recorded her pleas? What if they kill her after this anyway? What if Simone doesn’t get the items across the border, goes to prison?

She meets her eyes in the rear-view mirror. Tired-looking, sunken and stressed, but there’s Lucy in their blueness.

And now, looking at herself, she corrects her thoughts. This is her rational brain. The one that says: Get your daughter. She became this second self, the mother, the moment Lucy was born, and she’s stayed this way. Simone was one of those women who really did fall head over heels in the labour suite, entering not only the most important relationship of her life but sharpening her personality, too. Things became threats to her baby that would not otherwise be: rough children in the park, passing cars that splashed them on London streets. Simone, who needed no encouragement to rage a little bit, almost enjoyed scowling at other people. She is sure her hormones didn’t restabilize until Lucy was five.

She watches the video again. Please don’t tell the police. Please don’t tell anyone.

She puts the nearest border crossing into the flip phone. It’s an hour away. She turns the key in the ignition and drives.

CHAPTER 11

Simone is on the highway, and her phone is switched on and immediately ringing. She leans across to get it, where it skitters away from her hand on the dashboard like a beetle with the slight movement of the car. She grabs it, and there on the display it says Damien.

He’s landed. She pulls the car over.

It somehow does not feel strange for Simone to be dealing with this alone. She recalls a very specific moment when she was taken into care and had started her periods. She’d realized, then, vibrant blood in her underwear in a dingy bathroom, that no one was coming to help her. That the staff at the first children’s home wouldn’t, and nor would the foster family that followed. It was up to Simone. Jaw set, she’d bought pads, decided she didn’t like them, switched to tampons. She still uses the cheap brand she chose then, the first one she picked up. Nevertheless, she can’t not answer the phone. She can’t be that person. She might be somebody who is driving recklessly across a strange country in pursuit of her daughter and against her husband’s wishes, but she isn’t that person, the kind who can go dark on a husband who is desperately searching, too, for answers.

‘Are the police involved?’ Damien says.

In the background, she hears the airport: final boarding calls, beeping, laughter, suitcases being dragged. Something in that bright, lit-up normality makes Simone, alone on a desert highway in the Texan twilight, yearn. If only. If only they hadn’t come, got a different flight, chosen a different lodge …

‘Damien, I went.’

‘What?’ he says, his voice cold. ‘Is Lucy there?’

‘No. They want me to – to do something else.’

‘What? Where is she? Where are you? Where are the police?’

‘I came alone.’

Damien responds to this with a resounding silence.

‘You didn’t tell them,’ he says finally.

‘Not yet,’ she says, and she knows there is disingenuous misdirection in this statement. She winces. ‘I had no choice.’

‘What are you doing?’ he says, his voice low, the question so broad and loaded, she finds she doesn’t know how to answer it.

‘I …’

‘What do they want you to do?’

‘They want me to go to Mexico,’ she says, not wanting to incriminate him but not wanting to lie, either.

‘Mexico?’ Damien replies, evidently stunned. ‘What?’

‘The next instructions are in Mexico. I …’ She is about to say she can’t say any more than that, but that would invite more questions. She can’t let him get caught up in this. If she doesn’t manage it, she can’t leave Lucy with no parents at all, both in prison.

‘This is fucking ludicrous. A wild goose chase. I’ll call the police.’

‘Don’t – Damien. I’ve got to do it.’

‘Simone.’ To Simone’s horror, his voice begins to clog with tears. ‘You promised that you were going to.’ Another pause, then he adds: ‘I trusted that you were going to.’

‘I’m going to get her back.’

‘The police help with missing people. With kidnaps. Single, vulnerable women don’t. Why are they sending you there?’

Simone blinks, touched that he cares so much for her own safety as well as Lucy’s – something she hasn’t once considered. Wondering, too, if the single is pointed. ‘I can’t tell you.’

Damien leaves another dangerous silence.

‘You would really have defied that note? If you were here?’ she presses him.

Damien answers without sounding barbed. ‘They always say not to tell the police.’ The background noise suddenly disappears, then a soft-close sound; he’s found a quiet corner, maybe. ‘Simone.’ It’s a full sentence.

‘How do you know they always say not to tell the police? What do you even mean – on TV?’

‘The authorities would want to get her back,’ he says. ‘We’re not …’ The line breaks up then, and Simone temporarily loses him. ‘… everyone is on the same side.’ Simone finds herself thinking how naive. Another bad thought. Damien had a charmed upbringing with his beautiful siblings and his beautiful parents in a huge four-bedroom house in Tottenham. He has never had any reason to disbelieve anybody. Nobody drank too much, nobody had to be woken up by their ten-year-old daughter who was missing school. Nobody hid syringes in their underwear drawers.

‘The police don’t want to pay ransoms because they don’t want more ransoms,’ she tells him. ‘We are not on the same side. They said they would kill her.’

She closes her eyes. Marrying him, marrying into his family, she almost became one of them. She laughs every day with his sister. She misses it all suddenly. She misses life before this. It’s the first time she’s felt homesick or felt anything besides fear since Lucy was taken.

‘I couldn’t receive that message and not do what it says,’ she tells him. ‘I’m sorry – I know that is wrong. I’d hate me, too. But I couldn’t. I couldn’t, I couldn’t. I’ve got new instructions, now, and I’m going to follow them.’

Damien pauses again, this time for even longer. ‘You won’t tell me what.’

‘It’s better you don’t know. Listen. You would’ve called the police against my wishes if you had known,’ she tells him.

‘Well, I haven’t,’ Damien says simply, eventually, and Simone finds she can’t argue with that.

‘I’m going to get her back,’ she tells him. And she hears the damning silence, his hurt and betrayal folded up within it, but she can’t listen to it. She needs to get back to that focal point on the horizon: her daughter. ‘If you call them now, you will ruin it.’

Damien sighs, and Simone wonders if he will.

‘Is there anything I could say that would change your mind?’ he says with a kind of mournful sadness.

‘No.’

‘Right then,’ he says, downbeat. ‘Go get your baby,’ he says, his words spiteful, but his voice soft and sad, not mean.

‘She’s our baby,’ Simone says.

‘You have made it clear from day one that she is yours,’ Damien says, and here is the red flag, waving starkly in front of Simone, who can’t help but charge at it.

‘Damien,’ she says, a note of warning in her voice.

‘What? No, no, you go and rescue her yourself,’ he says. ‘You make the parenting decisions yourself. You’re in charge; you’re the CEO of her, the mother.’

Simone, stunned, does the only thing she knows how to do: speak the stark and painful truth. ‘Women love their children more than men do,’ she tells him. ‘Everyone knows this.’ And, as she utters this sentiment, something she has felt for years but never spoken aloud, the world seems to change slightly.

‘How can you say that to me?’ he says.

‘I reorganized my whole life around her,’ she says plainly. And she did. She grew her. She fed her with fluids from her own body. She cried when she did, she got up in the night, she left work early, missed opportunities, nights out, the lot. For the first few years, Damien alone ran the restaurant and Simone had Lucy. He would arrive home after lunch service and leave again before dinner, miss Lucy’s bedtime every night. He doesn’t know how many thousand moments he missed. Stories and fights over tooth brushing and cups of warm milk and sizing up a sleep sack. He missed it. After Lucy was asleep, Simone would sit alone sometimes and think about this, feeling an odd mix of superiority and martyrdom.

‘You’d better get her back,’ he says, and this time it is spiteful. ‘I’m getting the connecting flight now. I’ll be in Texas soon. And don’t worry. I won’t call the police. I would not betray you.’

He cuts the call without saying anything further. Simone is reverberating with hurt and rage and the kind of cleansed but purged feeling that comes with having spoken an ugly truth. Damien is unspeakably disappointed with her. And Simone knows, somewhere deep inside her, that everything that happens from this moment will now be on her shoulders. If they had told the police, it would have been on Damien’s. But they’ve gone with her. A single decision. A single moment. A single truth spoken. And everything that stems from it.

CHAPTER 12

Simone drives and drives, knowing she has to cross the border but with no idea how.

She takes each problem course by course, like elements of a large tasting-menu meal she has to cook and assemble on schedule. She has the benefit of stress hormones and maternal instinct, which fire her like a rocket up the highway, make her brain five hundred per cent productive. She also has the advantage of the chef mind, wired to multitask under pressure. Her hands are at ten and two on the wheel, body still, mind racing. She thinks it through as the road spins out in front of her, as plain and straight as an airport runway. Weird trees line the road, no other cars. She could be on another planet.

Visas. She and Damien went to Florida once and then on to Cancún, and she only needed a passport. So that’s that. She doesn’t need one.

Next: concealing the items.

She needs to be inconspicuous. And maybe she is; no doubt this is why she has been chosen. Have they been targeted, as a result of their restaurant money, perhaps? Or is it bad luck? She, a British tourist, in an ordinary rental car, no criminal history. Nevertheless, she needs to ensure she won’t be searched. She needs to blend in.

She does one mile, ten, twenty. By thirty, she’s panicking, but a new text appears. A new location. One where tourist buses leave for Mexico.

Simone gets out of her car in a dusty car park. It’s fifteen minutes from the border. Tourist buses are anonymous, hiding in plain sight, holidaymakers less likely to be searched. But even if they are, nobody would be able to trace a bag back to her.

There is only one company, called Mexican Day Tours. The coach stops at Nueva Rosita at eight o’clock in the morning: a six-hour journey, taken overnight, leaving the day to explore the Mexican town. It sounds like hell to Simone, even without the burning fear, though Lucy would like it. She would find enjoyment in the different scenery, different people, and would easily be able to sleep on a coach. Tourists go on from Nueva Rosita to Múzquiz, to see the architecture, the gardens and the town squares. Some visit a stargazing point – there are camping pods – to sleep out and see the Milky Way.

But Simone won’t.

It’s late, way after eleven o’clock, and the air is cooling, though different to England, the breeze sharp but brief, as crisp as sparkling apple juice that bursts through the mouth then leaves immediately. Simone closes her car door and feels a longing for Lucy so strong it almost knocks her off her feet. She must be so scared being held by these people who don’t want the best for her.

She sighs as she crosses to the coaches. A man tells her they’re all fully booked and Simone feels a flare of irritation that the kidnappers have directed her but left her to sort out the details. Nevertheless, Simone’s able to do something she often does very well, has done her whole life from her first job to becoming an accidental chef: blag.

They opened the restaurant with virtually no experience, and, to nobody’s surprise, it made a loss for twenty straight months, burning through the HSBC loan and then some. In debt and badly reviewed, Simone hired a new chef called Timeo – his mother was French – who started making more simplistic dishes done well; he’d trained with Glynn Purnell.

Intrigued, Simone had started to spend more time in the kitchen and less front of house. She’d just shape vegetables in the beginning, enjoying the meditative quality of it, forgetting the mounting bills. Then she started to cook alongside Timeo. At first, just good meat cooked well, enough seasoning but not too much. She started reading about food, about taste buds, about salt, sour, bitter, sweet, umami. Simone became, much to her surprise, obsessed with cooking, but it was something deeper, too. Something that had begun its life when she’d started making every meal after she was removed from her parents. A way to take care of herself. Simple things, like beans on toast, but she made them on the hob, not in the microwave, to cook them into delicious sludge. Baked potatoes, made crispy in an oven.

But it had bloomed at the restaurant: when bad news came – increased prices, snobby customers – she started to cook to calm herself down. Flares of irritation became flame-grilled steaks and burnished crème brûlées. Good days became butter-soft mashed potato.

The food with Timeo in time grew more complex: liver parfait, toasted grains for crunch, red wine jus. And then she’d started to make her own suggestions, and that’s when The Times reviewed it. Reviewed her meals.

A double-page spread on Dishes, its menu and – Damien loved to remind her – the charming husband and wife behind it. She will remember that Saturday for the rest of her life, paper spread over the reception desk, the afternoon light hitting it, giddily explaining to customers that they were the owners and look at this review!

Bookings soared, and last February they think they were visited by the ever-elusive Michelin Guide inspector – solo diner, ordered the wine flight, had a notebook and HB pencil – though they’re still waiting to hear if they got the Michelin star.

She assesses the texts again now even though she could recite them by heart, wanting, suddenly, to go away and pummel dough instead of blagging her way on to a tourist coach.

She can’t seem to look directly at the tasks beyond this one, in the same way you couldn’t do your tax return in a burning building no matter how overdue it was. Simone’s brain has neatly prioritized her disasters, and getting into Mexico is item number one.

She takes a breath; it begins. She walks up to another tour operator who is sporting what Lucy would describe as a lockdown haircut, and speaks: ‘Hi – I hope you can help me. I booked a place on a tour but I can’t seem to find which one. It’s Simone Seaborn.’ No point concealing her name and identity; she needs to use her passport. The only aim is not to get caught with the items, whatever they are.

There are four coaches lined up, engines running quietly, exhausts adding to the dust and the heat, being boarded by sleepy tourists. Mostly older people, the occasional family, snoozing children with dangling legs held close to their parents’ bodies. Simone watches one blonde child in particular for several moments as she stands in front of the man who checks her name on a clipboard.

‘Nothing here,’ he says in a crisp American accent after scanning several sheets of paper twice; the coaches must shuttle back and forth across the border all day long, and Simone, in the worst panic of her life, finds a comfort in this.

Besides, she won’t get caught because she is a good person. She is. She’s even paid for parking here. Absurd but true.

‘No record,’ the man says again to her.

‘I’ve booked online.’

He gestures to the clipboard. ‘Site says you didn’t.’ A lock of unevenly cut hair falls into his eyes, and he shakes his head like a dog.

‘Please. Do you have any space at all?’ she asks, thinking of giving some made-up detail about why she must go to Mexico today, but then stops herself; people telling the truth divulge no more than is necessary.

He sighs. ‘Got the email confirmation?’

Simone gets out her phone.

She brings up her email and begins to search for something that has never existed. At the top, her phone says AT&T, not EE like at home. It populates with texts. Luan, asking if Damien’s arrived yet. The man watches her, and Simone suddenly feels suspicion in his gaze. She pretends to be confused by her email. It’s a performance for one person who matters in the way that eyewitnesses do.

‘Oh yeah, wait, it’s on my husband’s email,’ she says casually. ‘I could ring him but he’s in England – he’s asleep and won’t answer. Look,’ she says, ‘do you have any spaces? It’s just me. I need to get to Nueva Rosita.’

The man is standing next to one of the coaches, which is puffing out heat. The sides of the coach, up to about four feet, are brown with dust. A couple of American tourists board it, muttering about delays.

The operator sighs and begins typing into an iPad he gets out of a satchel.

He flicks his gaze to her. ‘All right. You’ll be on this one. When will you return?’

‘Tomorrow night,’ she tells him, and he nods. She gives him her full name again, and she pays for the coach in cash.

He barely glances at her as she ascends the steps of the coach, the vehicle’s suspension swaying slightly underneath her. But just as she reaches the top, something makes her turn and look at him. Their eyes lock, and he is looking at her closely. ‘So just twenty-four hours?’ he calls after her.

‘Yes,’ she says. ‘Just a day trip. No luggage.’

‘OK – coach leaves at seven in the evening from there,’ he says with a shrug.

Something in the deliberate lightness of his tone makes her glance at him, but he busies himself with his lists of names.

She gets her phone out and finds the message from Luan. She replies saying everything is fine, that the business opportunity for Damien was too good for him to pass up. And then she’s on the coach. Old-fashioned patterned-velvet-covered seats, air conditioning, a pillow on each seat as a token gesture towards sleep, a black cupboard containing a chemical toilet in the centre that smells of urinals, a couple of small families, a handful of pensioners, and her, the almost-criminal.

CHAPTER 13

Simone sees from the collection of missed calls and texts that Damien has now boarded a new flight. She sighs. If she is arrested at the border, it’s better he knew nothing, and clearly he has decided to get to Texas as soon as possible anyway.

Still, she traces a finger across his messages – Where are you? – and feels a sympathetic lurch right in her gut. She replies with only two words: I’m safe. The turmoil he must be going through. What would she do if she were him? She would be seething, she thinks. She’d fly to Texas and she would probably tell the police. Would she? If she knew it might jeopardize the rescue? She doesn’t know. What she does know is she’d give him hell.

Simone leans her head against the window and looks up and out into the blackness. The air con switches off and a heater begins to exhale. She draws her legs up to her chest on her little two-seater, near to the back, and puts her chin on her knees like she did while she was a child. She listens to the sound of quiet breathing around her, tinny noises from headphones, the crinkle of a newspaper in one tourist’s hands. The coach doesn’t leave for a very long time, and Simone sits there, her body as small as possible, and thinks about Lucy. When it departs, it lurches this way and that with little jolts, and Simone could almost sleep but doesn’t.

She puts a palm on the window instead and thinks that, somewhere, Lucy might have her own hand out, too, reaching for her mother. I’m coming, she thinks. I’m coming, and I’m doing everything I’ve been told to.

A soft clear of a throat in front of her, and a man turns around to look at Simone. ‘Hard to sleep on these things, isn’t it?’ he says. Simone is surprised to note his accent is also British.

‘You’re English?’ she asks him. She can see only a slice of his face through the gap between the seats. Brown eyes, hair that’s gone fully grey.

‘Yes – Manchester,’ he replies. ‘You?’

‘London.’

‘Over for long?’

Simone turns away from him, a friendly man who probably means no harm, but Simone’s system is on overdrive. ‘Not long,’ she says faintly, hoping it’s the truth.

‘Funny place for a vacation, Texas,’ the man remarks. Vacation. The word is dissonant to Simone. A British person wouldn’t use it. There’s suspicion everywhere, but it makes Simone stop talking.

The man seems to get the message and turns away too.

The coach begins to slow, brightness up ahead. They must be at the border crossing; a sign says DEL RIO.

Wide, flat highways become dotted with the unreality of floodlights, official-looking buildings and gantries. Traffic filters off into designated lanes and locations, and Simone watches, blinking in the sudden glare, trying to glean whatever information she can; her outbound trip is less loaded than inbound, and she needs to use it to learn what she can about the crossings.

They join a queue along a suspended freeway. It’s busy, even though it’s night-time. At their booth there are three Border Patrol officers who sit in hatches, checking passports. Two of the three vehicles in front of them are pulled away from the road and searched; each takes less than five minutes, and all Simone can see is an officer getting on and then off and thinks about her odds: 66.6 per cent.

Eventually, their coach reaches the hatch, their driver says something in a low voice, and they are pulled over, too, off the freeway and into a side road.

Simone cannot – cannot – comprehend that on the way back she will have something illegal with her. And maybe the security will be different coming from Mexico into America. Maybe it will be worse. Maybe it is better not to know.

It’s certainly easier not to think about it now. About the fact that it might be drugs. About what drugs mean to her.

‘All tourists?’ one of the Border Patrol officers says, walking up the three steps at the front of the coach. Simone wilts like a dead flower at the back, trying to turn invisible, then has to forcefully stop herself. No. Act naturally. Don’t arouse suspicion now, long before you’re actually suspicious. She briefly wonders if she has yet committed a crime, and she tells herself that she hasn’t. There’s something good about that, something edifying. Like proof she hasn’t changed.

‘Yes,’ the coach driver says, a man wearing sunglasses even though it’s dark.

‘Passports,’ the officer says, then walks down the aisle slowly, Simone trembles and shows hers. She can hear every minute thing happening. The hum of the fan in the tiny toilet. The officer’s boots sticking on linoleum.

She holds her passport out, and he flicks his gaze to hers, eye contact fleeting. He nods, turns and departs, and that’s all. That’s all. If the luggage bay at the rear of the coach was searched, she doesn’t know about it. It was mercifully quick. Maybe she will get away with it. She tries to imagine it: arriving back with whatever is in the bag. Then getting Lucy back. Then leaving Texas, leaving America, and never returning.

The officer leaves. The coach departs again with a squeak of a handbrake. An elderly couple across the aisle from Simone lurch slightly in their seats, unprepared.

Back on to the highway, this time in Mexico. Funny, the day she was taken from her parents by a social worker waiting outside her school kind of felt like this one. Unfamiliar roads, no idea of what’s next.

And that’s that. From one country to another. They leave the brightly lit crossing and head on to a road with no street lights. The coach illuminates a small patch in front of them, but everything else is just darkness. They could be anywhere.

Each seat has a small reading light. They create miniature tableaux of people: normal people. Holidaymakers. Couples. The family, right at the front, with the toddler. Simone’s heart turns over as she looks at them.

Right after her RADA audition, Lucy arrived in their kitchen and put her elbows on the counter, rocking slightly on her feet as though in character. Simone, preparing coffee at a Tassimo machine that Damien had bought her as an extremely misguided Christmas present and which she felt she had to use, watched her, wary; she could tell news of some kind was coming.

‘The singing probably is a real sticking point,’ Lucy said. She dropped her head, then looked right at Simone again.

‘Yeah. But you don’t even want to be a singer.’

‘They have this thing about all-rounders.’

‘Like wanting a chef who can chop but also, I don’t know …’ Simone said, distracted by espresso spluttering everywhere.

‘Swallow knives,’ Lucy finished with a laugh.

‘Right!’

‘If they do offer, though,’ she said, her voice slow and low, ‘I think I will probably live here.’

The espresso finished, and, suddenly, the kitchen was silent. Simone perhaps shouldn’t have been surprised, but was.

She didn’t know what to do, so, delight running through her veins, and not wanting to show it, she added cold milk to the espresso.

‘Don’t you want to steam that?’ Lucy said flatly.

‘Because it’s so convenient to stay home?’ she asked her. Dishes was three doors down from RADA. She poured the coffee away, started again.

‘Yes and no,’ Lucy said.

‘Has something happened?’

‘Call it a loss of confidence,’ Lucy said lightly.

Simone watched her daughter closely. She was taking the Tassimo pods and stacking them on the kitchen counter, where they kept toppling.

‘A loss of confidence?’

‘Just don’t fancy living out. I mean,’ she said, then gestured to their sunlit kitchen: Velux blinds, bifold doors, brass fittings. Their eyes met again, and Simone wonders now if she pretended easily enough. But, beneath that, she wonders why Lucy suddenly wanted to stay so close to home. She’d already chosen a hall of residence at RADA, then intended to cancel it. Simone had asked her a few times for her reasoning. Was it wanting to be close to the restaurant? Was it a preference for their Victorian townhouse, not halls? But now, in the light of everything that’s happened since, it suddenly feels sinister. Lucy wanted to stay close to home: why?

She sits there, knees drawn to her chest, thinking dark thoughts.

She doesn’t sleep but, nevertheless, suddenly it’s 4:02 in the morning. This is the precise time that Lucy was taken, or, at least, Simone thinks so. Motherhood always plays out in the small hours. Night feeds, waiting up for teenagers, the lot. Now fear flashes over her in fine needles of regret. A betrayal by her. How can she not have woken properly? Lucy won’t have gone quietly, would be harder to kidnap than some people. Would’ve kicked and screamed, Simone is sure of it. Adrenaline fires into her system. Twenty-four hours post. It’s a physical reaction.

The softly rumbling coach jiggles her head to her knees and she lets it, trying to shake the thoughts out.

But, still, the mind won’t let her forget or think nothing. It all plays out, the version where she woke up and stopped it. The version where she told the police.

No, she tells herself. Get a grip. You’re here, and these are the cards you have been dealt. All we can do in life is choose to play them as best as we can.

But, for once, she doesn’t believe it. Something deep and wise is telling her that she cannot just do this one thing and have that be the end of it, but she isn’t ready to listen, can’t, not yet, not yet.

Hour five, six, into Simone’s time on the coach, and something begins to happen. Her body starts to power down. Sleep comes eventually for even those who fight it.

She leans her head back against the window and lets the black scenery whizz by and she thinks of her daughter and how scared she must be. Of her husband, flying solo, terrified. A few tears begin there, alone on a coach in the middle of fucking nowhere, and Simone lets them roll down her face like English raindrops.

CHAPTER 14

Daybreak in Mexico. Simone slept for twenty minutes, but it is the only respite from her mind that she has had since Lucy was taken, and therefore it really, truly does feel like the next day. The sky outside the coach is ballet-shoe pink. It ought to be beautiful, but to Simone it is eerie: Lucy’s captivity is ongoing, Simone’s task still hours ahead of her, the risks mind-boggling.

The scenery has slid from Texan desert to Mexican, which is subtly different. The roads are huge and empty, but old houses have begun to populate them. Now they’re on a tree-lined street, yellow square buildings with flat roofs, old-fashioned cables up ahead that sag like skipping ropes. Graffiti in Spanish, half-finished building works, a playground by the side of the road, pink and yellow slides with their legs in dust.

Simone feels a longing for something she cannot name. Perhaps for home. Perhaps for what this trip is for other people. Perhaps just for Lucy, that feeling of wanting to cup her face. To listen to her. Lucy would look at those sagging phone lines and say, ‘God, I hope that’s not the broadband!’ but she would also find interest, like Simone, in that playground, and the lives that visit it. Simone thinks perhaps this is some coping mechanism, to bring her daughter to mind, to do so repeatedly and obsessively. Lucy would notice this. Lucy would say that. Simone is ashamed to admit that she has spent all summer doing it.

The coach empties them in the centre of Nueva Rosita, an industrial town in North Mexico. Some of the tourists head off to another coach taking them to the tourist sites. Some people stay here, heading into a hotel called Rosa De Oro, to see the history of the mines, the hotels designed to capture the tourists passing through with their pools and spas.

The sky is now a bright blue behind the hotel, four palm trees poking out up over the roof. Simone checks her phone, then the flip phone, then Lucy’s phone. Her limbs are stiff from panic, sitting on a coach and lack of sleep, and she stretches there, in the dreamlike Mexican sun.

She’s several miles from the What Three Words location, and she begins to walk because she doesn’t know what else to do. She could call a taxi, but she wants as little recognizability and involvement from other people as possible. She wants to be alone, at least looking like a tourist if not acting like one. If she hails an Uber there, then takes an Uber back with a bag, she creates a chain of evidence. So far, the only concrete facts are that she entered Mexico and walked. So be it.

She passes palm trees, burnt-out trash cans, warehouses, more palm trees, buildings that look abandoned, graffiti, yet more palm trees and warehouses. On and on she walks, her back hot, her eyes focused on the horizon up ahead, trying to keep her mind blank.

Her phone rings. It’s Damien. He’s landed. Here they are, surreally traversing time and space, barely meeting, their lives intersecting on two phones like a brief kiss. Damien from the UK to New York to Texas. Simone from Texas to Mexico and back, hopefully.

‘Hi,’ she answers, not knowing what else to say.

‘Is she safe? Did you get her?’

Simone pauses. ‘They’ve asked me to do something here,’ she says, hesitating on the detail. She walks along the side of the road, past petrol stations and plants growing through cracks in concrete, wondering how best to keep him safe. ‘So I am.’

‘Do what?’ he says.

‘It’s better that you don’t know,’ she says in a low voice. ‘I’m going to be back tonight to meet them and get her. Please don’t do anything until then.’

‘What are you doing?’

‘If this goes wrong, Dame, I … I don’t want you to know,’ she tells him.

‘This is ridiculous,’ he says. ‘Where is Lucy?’

‘The kidnapper has her. He has asked me to complete a task.’ She drops her voice even though she’s totally alone. A pause while Damien takes this in. And then he surprises her. Her husband who finds it easy to forgive. The heat of the dispute has run out.

‘I want to come to you. I’m here. Let me help.’ Worried tones are back in his voice like minor chords, and Simone can’t bear to listen to them.

‘What are you doing?’

‘That really is better not said aloud.’

‘Fucking hell, Simone.’ A pause. ‘You …’

‘I what?’ Simone replies, spoiling for another argument.

‘You always do things alone,’ he finishes quietly with a deadened truth that could shatter Simone’s heart. Yes, she wants to tell him. Yes, since my parents let me down, yes, yes, yes, I was forged this way, unfortunately. She thinks of night after night in foster care, reading books from the library she went to alone, with the card she took out in her own name – the librarian had to put N/A for ‘parent’ – and thinks, Is it any wonder?

‘I know. I’m sorry,’ she says, and she almost, almost tells him a kind lie, almost passes him a perfectly formed package, a compromise, almost tells him she wishes she had told the police, but, so far, she doesn’t. ‘I’ll call you when I know anything, OK?’ she says. ‘Believe me, I am trying to help everyone. I’m trying to help you,’ she tells him. ‘But … thank you.’ Her voice chokes. ‘I don’t feel alone, actually, knowing that you’re here.’

‘I am here,’ he says. ‘I can …’ He pauses too, and Simone wonders if there are tears in his eyes as well as hers. ‘If you need me,’ he says, both an incomplete and complete sentence. And then he finishes it. ‘If you need me, I will be there. Any time. Any place,’ he says, and he is crying properly now, and so is Simone. She drops to a crouch by the side of the road, one hand on the phone, one hand a balled and dusty fist at her eye, rubbing furiously, thinking, Fuck that man who took Lucy and ruined everything, fuck the bad luck, fuck it all.

CHAPTER 15

Sometimes when in a crisis, Simone finds comfort in things that are precise and useful. What Three Words is just that; it tells her exactly where the bag is.

The sun is momentarily behind a rare cloud, the light matt and milky, and Simone is glad of the break from the searing heat as she stares at the run-down premises she’s about to enter.

It looks like a garage, one storey. Plants creep slowly around the building, strangling the roof. Plants she doesn’t recognize, hardy leaves, dry, that remind her of where she is.

Apparently, the bag sits towards the back of this building.

The only way in is a roller shutter door, which is open about a foot at the bottom. Simone stares at it like it is a spider she is afraid to catch. It’s so dark inside the garage that nothing is revealed to her by looking, even when she ducks down and peers in at the complete obsidian blackness.

She can’t go in there. That is what she thinks, looking at it. Who knows what could be waiting in there for her? These are criminals. Professional kidnappers. They could be setting her up. They could be undercover police. She could be killed. If she went inside, the shutter door could drop, trapping her. She kneels down again on the street and gets the torch out on her phone, but it seems only to illuminate objects she can’t make out and swirling dust. She tries to wrench up the roller shutter to reveal more, but it won’t move.

She sits back on her heels and wonders if she will look back on this moment, the beat before she headed on in there, in trauma. She wonders if she will ever talk about it to Damien, to a therapist. To the police.

Simone doesn’t usually put things off, but she does right now, her whole body alert. She can’t go in there. It is as claustrophobic to her as a coffin.

She walks a little loop around the garage. There’s a brick section to the side, which she runs a hand along. It comes away grubby, the surface already hot in the morning sun. A small green door forms the entrance to the adjoining garage, and she peers in the window at the top of it, but it’s too dirty to see anything. She wipes it and reveals a lean-to full of gardening equipment. A lawn mower, a pair of shears, two containers full of some sort of mulch. She steps back after several moments.

She’s got to go in. She’s come this far; she has to complete her task. She tries the shutter door again, but it won’t move, even when she uses both hands and all her body weight, and rages at that horrible kidnapper who chose two small women as his targets.

She checks behind her, looking for any clue, anything, but there’s nothing, only cracked, uncared-for pavements, cat’s cradles of overhead power cables, a steel trash can down the street and houses with satellite dishes next to their front doors.

She’s got to do it. She takes a breath, starts crawling in, leaving the sunlight behind and heading straight into the darkness, and it is as though somebody has turned her eyes off but has dialled up her other senses. The distant sound of traffic. A smell: metallic, fresh. A dripping. Simone stands up in the darkness, waiting for her sight to adjust, alone.

CHAPTER 16

Half the room is in total darkness, the bottom half in bright, white-hot light. Simone can see the concrete floor, her own legs, and nothing else. She waits, trembling, thinking that anybody could be standing in here with her. A drugs baron. The mafia. A hitman, hiding in the shadows with a sniper gun.

Shapes emerge slowly, blocky and large, the detail filling in late. A table, perhaps, then clarity: a workbench. A stainless-steel sink along the back wall, not unlike those at the restaurant. An old fridge, a few toolboxes and, there at the very back, a rifle, hanging still and silently by itself. Simone’s breath catches as she sees it. Maybe they’re normal here, but to her it’s an omen, both that she’s in the right place but also in danger. For the first time, she wishes she had a gun herself.

She turns in a slow circle. Sure enough, the bag really is to the back of the garage, right in the very corner, tucked away in the darkest point of the room.

A sports bag. She didn’t think this through; how is she going to get that back? She will have to sneak it on to the coach, but she came with no luggage … and she specifically said she didn’t have any. She winces and wishes she’d brought a rucksack to transfer the items into, but, really, who could be thinking straight to have done that?

A noise outside, a flutter, only a bird, but it still makes her jump. This garage wasn’t locked. Nobody would store anything of value in an unlocked garage, so it must mean it’s being watched; she’s being watched.

She hesitates, then goes to the back of the room, kneels down almost reverentially in front of the bag. She looks up and around, above and behind her, but there isn’t any CCTV that she can see.

Finally, the moment. What is in this bag?

Really, it doesn’t matter what is inside. She will take whatever it is to get Lucy back. She stops, her fingertips on the zip. The bag is new; it has the rubbery smell of sports equipment.

Somehow, it does matter what it is. She needs to know the risk she is taking. Don’t they expect her to check?

Another glance, this time at the bright underside of the door. She expects to see legs, shoes, men coming for her, but there’s nothing, no one, not yet anyway.

She undoes the bag, zip sliding easily, and, for just a few seconds longer, this is Schrödinger’s sports bag; its contents could be anything. Identities. Passports. Money. Guns. Anything. Until she knows.

Simone opens it, then sucks a breath in.

Bars wrapped in brown paper: it’s drugs. As she suspected, but somehow still shocking to see.

She reaches to touch one of the bars, then picks it up. It’s weighty in her palm, compact and heavy, cool, like a weapon, the wrapping tight. It’s cocaine; she’s sadly expert in that, even though she’s never seen blocks like this. Colombian cocaine, she supposes.

Each package says it is a kilogram, written on the side, but that doesn’t mean much to her. But even she can see that this full, weighty bag has got to be worth a million dollars or more. She sits back, just staring at its contents.

Each bar is covered in brown parcel paper, wrapped tight with shiny gaffer tape. A sticker on the top of each one bears a pornographic photograph: a naked woman, bent over, the view from behind. Faceless. Something about this unsettles Simone more than the drugs. The casual misogyny. That women are for sex or for shipping drugs around. That she, too, is a pawn in this machine, so totally, vulnerably disposable.

And so is Lucy.

After putting the bar back into the bag, she goes to the sink, turns the tap and splashes her hands in the water. There’s an old liver-spotted mirror behind it. She looks at herself, thinking about the trail of evidence she’s left behind. There’s too much of it; so much is already done. If anybody ever suspects Simone, it is over for her.

Simone submerges her hands in the water as it heats up, scorching her skin, and she thinks about who will transport these drugs after her, who will distribute them, who will buy them, who will take them, and who will die from them, too. Whose children will suffer like she did.

In the old mirror, she avoids eye contact now with herself. She doesn’t want to look again. She doesn’t want to take on the identity of somebody who has done this. She of all people.

She picks up the bag, slings it over her shoulder and ducks out, under the roller shutter door, into the floodlit sun. As she looks behind her, she sees a little vent on the front of the building that she missed before begin to steam, from the hot water she used, piping out into the sky for everyone to see.

CHAPTER 17

Less than five minutes after she leaves, she hears them: sirens. They sound almost the same as back home, but not quite. A universal noise signalling danger, for bad people and bad things, accidents, fires and criminals.

She’s by the side of the road, in plain sight, bag hoisted unnaturally over her shoulders. It’s too large, a man’s sports bag really, and she is conspicuous, a woman alone on a day trip to nowhere.

Sweat begins to gather on her lower back, underneath the bag containing a million dollars’ worth of Colombian cocaine.

The heat fires up panic; she’d get life in prison.

Or worse. Prison might be the safest place for her if she doesn’t get this bag across the border.

She picks up her pace. Her limbs are suddenly heavy and cumbersome, her feet weighed down by her trainers, the bag digging into her shoulders.

She begins to walk faster. The sirens are getting nearer and she won’t be able to get Lucy. She looks around hurriedly. She could go back, into the garage, but if the police are for her, they might know about the location … They might know everything.

She clutches the burner phone in her palm, her own iPhone and Lucy’s in the back pockets of her shorts, and she begins to pace as quickly as possible.

The sirens rise behind her and the bag flaps and thuds against her back. She goes for two minutes, three, the sirens become louder and louder and now she knows they are on the same road as her, coming right up behind her.

She risks a glance. It’s a blue car, POLICÍA FEDERAL written on the side. Two officers inside wearing sunglasses. She immediately slows right down, out of breath, trying to look casual, doesn’t turn around again.

Just as her shoulders are up and braced, ready to hand the bag over with an explanation and a prayer, the car passes her, speeding to someone else, some other disaster, and Simone watches it go and then stops dead, only sensing the near miss, truly, now that it has gone.

She puts her hands on her knees, leans over, and her breathing steadies. She straightens up again, trying to gather her thoughts and make a plan.

She checks her phone; she’s a long walk from the coach, but it doesn’t depart until the evening. She’s got to go somewhere – not here, out in plain view on the streets. Somewhere else. She needs to rest. She needs to hide.

Simone arrives in the centre of Nueva Rosita. She is going to do some shopping. Partially to look and act naturally, and partially to justify the presence of an extra bag she can put in the back of the coach along with the damning sports bag.

The tiredness ebbs and flows, and right now it’s abated, and Simone feels a burst of something like positivity. She’s always been resourceful. After the teacher sounded the alarm on her parents’ drug use, she was taken into care, then quickly placed with a foster family who were – for reasons she doesn’t understand, looking back – at best ambivalent about her.

She had a monthly visit from a social worker, weekly meet-ups with her parents in Costa Coffee (their hands, if the meetings were in the mornings, were still shaking), and the distinct impression that none of them really, truly cared about her. She told the social worker that her parents were disengaged, still using, and the woman simply wrote it down on a pad of paper.

She moved out of the foster placement at seventeen, after an argument in which the mother called her too opinionated. She left her a goodbye note on the counter that said only, How’s this for an opinion?

She found a flat in one of the poorest areas of London and signed on for benefits even though she didn’t want to. And on the first day, aged seventeen and one month, she had looked around at the bare plaster walls, one window boarded up, noisy neighbours, and thought: I cannot, cannot stay here.

It was the year 1999, the height of the dot-com boom, and so Simone did the best she could: she got two jobs. The first manning start-up bingo chat rooms, the second copywriting for a high-end beauty brand. She had to work from the Hackney library at first (no computer), but, eventually, she had enough for a shitty desktop computer.

She did both jobs simultaneously, one from nine in the morning until two o’clock in the afternoon, the other from two in the afternoon until eight at night. One desktop computer open on a fold-out table in her bedroom, containing the work from two jobs. After a while, she bought a second screen to avoid confusing them. Nobody ever found out. She was productive enough in short hours, and didn’t mind the lack of free time.

She left that flat after less than a year, and those two jobs paid for rent on a place of her own for the next five years, until she got tired and longed for just one job: the job behind the bar, where she met Damien.

She feels the same now, that same thing that looks like, appears like, ardent resourcefulness but is actually masking desperation.

Back in Nueva Rosita, she finds a strip mall. A gym, a bank, a restaurant and a supermarket line a wide road opposite a park. The shop sign reads SORIANA LOS PINOS, and Simone heads inside, thinking of those long-gone two-job days. They prepared her well for a busy career, then the days in kitchens somehow, in turn, prepared her well for this. Her body is hardy. She isn’t sure her mind is, but everybody always said it was. The social worker, when she did her final visit to Simone’s new house in Camden, praised her for leaving the flat, for getting out of the benefits system. ‘And all by yourself, too,’ she had said. What she didn’t realize was that she was really congratulating Simone on thinking nobody in the world gave a shit about her. Fending for yourself at eighteen ought not to be praised, Simone thought. Lucy’s that age now, and the thought of her balancing up two incomes causes Simone physical pain.

The supermarket is a red-and-white building, branded on the outside with COCA-COLA on painted bricks, a small and shabby awning up ahead. There’s accommodation above it with wrought-iron balconies and an old metal basketball hoop hanging half off the wall.

Inside, she tries not to think about how many CCTV cameras she might have passed by after getting the bag. She tells herself that if people have begun to scrutinize footage, it’s all over anyway. She isn’t trying to convince anybody she is innocent; she is trying to have nobody suspect her in the first place.

She wanders the aisles slowly, unable – even in this nightmare – to avoid looking at the interesting foods. She has hours to kill, anyway, she thinks, and nowhere to go. She will just look. Tortilla maseca – just-add-water dough made from ground corn, in little plastic packets. She buys two. Prickly pear cactus in slices. Dried chillies, their skin as thin as Christmas party hats. A comal, a round griddle pan. Basics, too: bread and brioche and fruit and water.

She runs a hand over the fruit and vegetables, bright, jewel-toned colours. Goes to gaze at the fish counter, just for interest. Red snapper, she thinks that is, and octopus. And lobsters, of course; they’re alive in a tank at the back. She watches them walking lazily along the bottom, antennae rising and falling.

Simone can’t cook lobsters any more. It’s the only thing she avoids entirely other than alcohol. During her unofficial training with Timeo, he made lobster linguine often. Most chefs cook lobsters alive to minimize bacteria, their bodies held straight and tied to a spoon to make carving easier. There’s a unique brutality to it, but that isn’t what did it for Simone. She had always heard that lobsters squealed when you put them in the pot, but the reason Simone won’t cook them is because the truth is worse than that: they tap the lid, insistently, helplessly, a little claw on glass. Simone saw it happen only once, then took them off the menu. ‘Why?’ Timeo had said, and she had replied that nobody wanted to eat lobster, they just wanted to order it and say they’d had it. A lie, but something that sounded true, and which Timeo had laughed at.

She leaves the fish counter and continues to browse. Even though she’s doing it to disguise her illegal activities, she is heartened to find food still has the same effect it always does on her: it soothes her. Maybe this will work. Maybe she will be home, in England, with Lucy and Damien, cooking these things one day soon.

At the till, she accepts a plastic carrier bag and bundles the items into it. It isn’t perfect, but it will help to make the sports bag less conspicuous. She walks and walks for the rest of the afternoon. She eats the cactus – surprisingly good, lemony, slimy like okra – and some real tortilla chips. And she walks and walks and walks.

Eventually, she finds herself at a graveyard called Panteón de Cloete, on an unnamed road. A cemetery feels fitting, and Simone wanders with her carrier bag and her awful, criminal sports bag underneath the hot sun. She hasn’t slept. She hasn’t eaten much. She’s exhausted in both senses: bone tired but also emptied, physically exhausted of some anxiety or perhaps the initial fire she had at the very beginning. Her body is heavy, her eyes are gritty, and she ascends a brief dusty hill, not really knowing or caring why.

It is beautiful. Set against a Mexican canyon, an expanse of graves, all white or pale stone. Crypts with statues and crosses abut and overlap each other like crooked teeth. Figurines stand, frozen in time, some damaged and beaten by weather. There are trinkets and dried flowers and poems written in Spanish. Simone wanders around, then finds shade in a little gazebo. It’s bright white, benches inside covered with old and rotting outdoor cushions. She sits on the bench in the open air and closes her eyes, unsafe but not caring. She keeps the bag on her back; she can’t risk it being taken.

She eats four chocolate brioche buns, three oranges, and drinks two litres of water. She stretches her legs out. She rests her head eventually on the bag, and, within seconds, she can feel sleep coming for her. As she is pulled under, she thinks that she can’t sleep, no, bad things will happen, but she has to. She tells herself, in the hot shade, the bench hard underneath her, that it is safe to sleep here – the dead are, after all.

A lizard wakes Simone, skittering across her legs and disappearing behind the wall. She startles, then checks the time: three hours have passed, the sun having moved around, shining through the gazebo and on to her stiff body. Half her face is tight with sunburn. She stretches and tries to calm the rising adrenaline. Both bags are still here, sports bag behind her head, and maybe it was stupid to sleep, but she couldn’t help it.

She stands and stretches, then begins walking once more, heading off to her fate: getting a million dollars’ worth of Colombian cocaine into America. As she walks, the bag’s zip keeps coming loose, just an inch or two, and she keeps doing it back up.

When she arrives back at the pickup point, the coach is standing like a sentient being in the dusty car park it emptied them into this morning at sunrise, now nearly sunset. The only difference is Simone is worth a lot more than she was, but she feels like she is worth absolutely nothing; she’s a sell-out, a despicable criminal, a drug-dealing loser.

Plenty of the tourists are holding bags, and she joins the queue to add hers to the luggage. It’s still hot out, the air dry as kindling.

It’s quarter to seven, her limbs stiff from sleeping, her face pink with sunburn. There are three people in front of her, and she watches them put their bags into the empty luggage area above the exhaust, the driver standing nearby but not watching closely. She wonders how common what she is doing is. To justify that she’s only added a minuscule amount to the total cocaine circulating in a vast underground industry. To feed addicts who will buy it and harm themselves, and those who love them.

Her turn, and she heaves the bag into the back with a conspicuous thump. As she does so, she thinks about that open zip.

She puts the carrier bag slightly away from the sports bag. She needs anonymity. She is doomed if they begin to investigate the bag: her DNA is surely on it and there has got to be CCTV somewhere of her carrying it. All her subterfuge is ill-thought-through, easily discoverable. She is a child hiding behind a curtain, expecting not to be discovered. Nevertheless, all she can do is hope, so she moves her food away from it, separating her goods from the drugs.

She intended to turn around and see if anybody noticed which bag was hers, but she doesn’t. It gives more away to glance over her shoulder, to lock eyes with the coach operator or anybody else.

The engine is already running, and the exhaust heats and blackens her legs as she moves away from it. She stares at that bag, full of cocaine, from several feet away. She thinks about the people in the graveyard and wonders how many of them died directly or indirectly because of drugs imported from South America. She glances around at her companions and wonders if any of them are involved with drugs, too. She doubts it; nobody would be as foolish as her.

She boards the coach and she wonders, when she next touches those drugs, what will have happened, who she will be.

Four hours in, five. The border looms ever closer and, with it, Simone’s fate.

What next? Where do the drugs go? How does she get her daughter? How do they hand her over? What if they have killed her and it’s all been for nothing? Has she fallen into a trap? Become a drugs courier, a foot soldier for a gang that she will forever owe? What if they want more? What if they demand that she do it again? What if she is arrested at the border and Lucy is murdered?

The questions her brain requires her to answer go on and on.

Simone can only hope that this is a real, true ransom, that the value is drugs. The quid pro quo is Lucy’s freedom.

By midnight, they’re closing in on Del Rio once again from the other side. Simone checks the flip phone but there is nothing. No confirmation she’s collected the bag, and the texts still come from Unknown, so she can’t call them back.

Progress as they approach the crossing is slower and perhaps seems more formal. The officers are in different uniforms, green with US BORDER PATROL written in yellow, with armed police pacing among them.

One of the officers is absent-mindedly stroking the length of his gun, a grotesque and uniquely masculine move, and Simone watches him, thinking of the power he holds.

The coach driver pulls into a lay-by where they idle for several moments before moving off again and joining a queue. Simone’s hands begin to sweat. The flip phone tumbles out of her grasp. What if they check that, see the instructions?

She is in the very centre of the coach, at a window seat, and suddenly she wants to disappear again. To pretend to be asleep, to get right under the seats and hide. To go into the toilet and refuse to come out.

To confess.

She picks the phone up and squeezes her eyes shut instead. Fuck the kidnapper. Fuck the ransom. Fuck her own stupid, tired body and mind that didn’t wake up when her child needed her; her maternal instinct unpractised due to the passage of time.

The drugs are somewhere directly underneath her, and she swears she can feel them burning upwards, a volcano popping ferociously, about to blow. A hot coal pulsing and glowing for everybody to see.

They pull to a complete stop and one of the older people sighs. ‘Takes forever going back,’ he says, American accent, irritated tone. He’s alone, and speaking to nobody in particular, and everybody ignores him. Simone wants to clutch at his clothes, ask him how often they’re searched, ask him to ship the drugs instead of her, please, oh please, but she doesn’t.

The driver stands up, the coach’s suspension creaking with the movement. A female Border Patrol officer gets on, exactly the same as before, but this time tasked with protecting America and not Mexico, and says, ‘Passports,’ authoritative and loud, uniform on, an official of the state, and, suddenly, it’s time. Just don’t kill Lucy, she is thinking, panicked. Take me, but give the drugs to the kidnapper, and get Lucy.

The officer is next to her, now; she’s tall and broad, staring down, making a hand-it-over kind of gesture, and Simone holds up her passport. She’s in a green uniform, gun in holster, but has on a cowboy hat, something Lucy would find absurd and wonderful and so very Texan, and there is still a little glimmer of her humour in the dead of this awful, awful nightmare.

Simone’s entire body tenses as the officer looks at her passport, and then at her, thinking of the questions she filled in on her ESTA. Where she was intending to stay, that she’d never been arrested before, never stayed longer than her visa anywhere, had never shipped drugs nor been convicted for drugs offences. Questions she and Lucy had WhatsApped about in the family group, laughed at, thought over the top. Lucy had created a poll, saying ‘Have you ever beheaded somebody? Yes, No, Maybe,’ and Damien, so earnest, had voted No.

And does Simone imagine something passing across this officer’s features, now, virtually unseen? Does she have radar for nervous people, for people making single day trips?

‘A Brit?’ she says conversationally.

‘Right, visiting from London.’

‘Seeing family and friends?’ she says, passing her passport back to her. Her name badge says MICHAELA.

‘My daughter. She stayed in Texas. Mexico just – by myself.’

‘Nice. I have a daughter, just one,’ she replies, rubbing briefly at her eyes. She must be in her fifties, looks tired, no doubt working long hours for not much money, hair grey under the hat. ‘She’s twenty.’ She laughs under her breath. ‘Wants to be a –’ she clicks her fingers, trying to remember the word – ‘a space psychologist – isn’t that weird?’

‘That is so weird,’ Simone says, thinking Lucy would just love this. She’d ask all sorts of questions.

‘Yeah. It’s still all just psychology, so she tells me,’ she drawls.

‘Still. Impressive job.’

‘Well, apparently astronauts are prone to mental health issues from the isolation. So the training is all about that – solitude,’ she says. ‘Anyway, here’s me going on and on. Enjoy the rest of your trip.’

‘I will.’ Then, just as she’s leaving, Michaela turns back to her, and Simone thinks maybe she has had some sort of psychology training herself, because she says, ‘Are you, you know … you’re all right?’

‘Oh yes,’ Simone answers, her body vibrating with anxiety. The officer waits, seemingly, for more information, so Simone gives it, as close to honesty as she can get. ‘Just miss my daughter, you know? Anyway, I’m almost with her. I shouldn’t have gone on the day trip. It was tedious,’ she says, something Old Simone might easily have said.

Michaela throws her head back, laughs and catches her hat as it begins to slide off. ‘Ain’t that the truth.’

‘Right.’

‘Hard being apart from them,’ she adds sympathetically, and for just a beat, Simone wonders if she could tell her, this woman. Turn a blind eye; my daughter’s life is at risk.

But the moment passes, and Michaela then touches her hand to Simone’s shoulder, just like that. And Simone could weep with it. This interaction, her kindness, her understanding.

And Simone is a criminal, a fraud, but this woman has allowed her to be simply a mother missing her kid.

‘Thank you,’ Simone says, and Michaela removes her hand with the lightest, kindest brush, a mother’s touch.

She turns to leave again just as a distant sound registers itself. At first, Simone ignores it. It’s a common sound, one she hears all the time, and it takes a few repetitions for her tired, stressed brain to register it: it’s a dog barking.

A sniffer dog.

CHAPTER 18

Simone doesn’t react; she’s an animal too, trained to survive by – sometimes – doing nothing, by playing dead.

The officer turns her mouth down, looking uninterested, likely with no idea what Simone has brought on to the coach, but perhaps also knowing exactly what’s going on and having sent a sniffer dog to deal with it.

Panic fires missiles around Simone’s nervous system.

She stretches her arms above her head, fakes a yawn and uses the opportunity to look around. And there they are: two German shepherds just across the way, heads tilted to the side, fur glossy under the powerful white lights in the night. Simone’s entire body begins to sweat even though the coach door is open, piping in the cooling desert air.

How far can they smell? Should she have disguised the drugs’ smell somehow?

Simone closes her eyes. It’s hardly a lot of cocaine at all in the grand scheme, she tells the universe. Handfuls, nothing more, and they’re the price of her daughter’s life, and perhaps her own. Can’t the officers just let her do it? There must be some that gets through here every single day. There just must.

The sniffer dogs could be routine. Maybe her packages are taped up so well to contain the smell. Simone thinks with a flash of the one she took out. No. She didn’t unwrap it. Stop thinking this way.

Maybe Lucy is already dead. Maybe Damien is here, has told the police, has rescued her, and Simone is about to be arrested, all for nothing. An almost infinite number of possibilities play out around her, the scenarios swirling on to the coach with the border police methodically checking passports and the sniffer dogs just out there, trained to detect the items she has.

Michaela the officer moves towards the front of the coach and addresses everyone. ‘Anything to declare?’ Why is she saying this? They weren’t asked this crossing into Mexico. And, for some stupid reason, Simone hesitates, like a woman in the congregation at a wedding standing up to say the couple shouldn’t marry. She has to tell herself not to, that it is a delusion that confessing now would spare her.

It’s something about the official nature of it. International laws and borders and Interpol and ‘nothing to declare’ and guns and the threat of prison. Something about being alone. Something about it being night. Something about being displaced here, in nightmare Texas.

Nobody says anything. Michaela hesitates, then turns to the driver, talking in a low voice. Time is on slow, and Simone knows she is tense, her shoulders up, gaping, but she can no longer hide it. Her body is vibrating, a plucked violin string, her knees jangling up and down.

She hears the words luggage check move from Michaela to the driver and she’s going to be sick, she’s going to faint, she’s going to die. Lucy is going to die. Then Simone has a thought so painful, so brutal, and so true it is hard to look at: if Lucy is murdered, Simone will kill herself. She simply will.

The Border Patrol colleague’s radio blares, joined-up words that could be English, could be Spanish, Simone can’t tell. The crackling static, the panic, and one of the dogs is barking again, a singular sound that echoes around the crossing, and do they bark to alert, or is it just random, and shouldn’t they be better trained than that if so? Simone is floating up outside her body; she isn’t here, she isn’t here, she isn’t here.

She remains in the dead centre of the coach, the luggage glowing radioactive underneath her, her heart beating, her lungs breathing, but otherwise she is gone. Someplace else, where none of this is happening.

And all she can think, as the net closes in, is: will Lucy at least know she tried?

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.

CHAPTER 20

You’re back across the border. Bag secured?

Off the coach, Simone turns in a slow circle. Somebody knows she is here. Somebody is watching her. The British man files off the coach, too.

And then the text becomes green, and a Reply button is visible.

Yes, she replies, without thinking. Is my daughter alive?

Go to the original meeting place. Destroy this phone then put it in the trash.

No answer on Lucy. Simone closes her eyes, rushes across the car park, opens her car and is safely inside before she cries. She cries out of relief that she made it, out of nervous energy, out of fear for Lucy.

She’s done everything they have asked for. She must be only moments away from her daughter. She will hand her half of the bargain over, and she will, in return, get something back that is priceless.

As Simone drives back, she is distracted by something on this side of the road that she didn’t see on the way: a collection of buildings, a kind of strip mall, clear white blocks against the sky, anachronistic-looking palm trees around them.

And, within them, as casual as a post office: a gun shop, lit up, open twenty-four hours. Simone’s going too fast to do anything about it, so she passes it, but then finds her foot leaving the accelerator without her permission, a physical enactment of her thought processes, the car slowing in response. The empty highway, the straight horizon ahead, and she slows and slows and slows and then stops, thinking of that hanging rifle in the garage in Mexico. Thinking of how she wished she had her own to face whatever is coming up for her.

Isn’t it sensible to arm herself? She is about to meet criminals, kidnappers. She, a woman who is small of stature, who is vulnerable, who wants her daughter back. She could level the playing field. Have a gun, let them know she has a gun. Show up with the gun.

Having a gun might save her daughter’s life.

She’s stopped now on the highway, skewed across it. She looks up at the sky, trying to find some sort of answer from the universe. But all she sees are stars. There, in a stationary car, Simone stares. More stars come out the longer she looks, until the sky is sugared with them, a great arc clustering together like a fractured vase repaired. She’s never seen so many, nor any so vivid, but she has no idea what they might mean. Buy a weapon, as a law-abiding woman who would never hurt anyone unless she had no choice? Or drive on, and regret going in exposed, soft-bodied, alone and female?

She sighs, but Simone can’t stargaze or navel-gaze here. Maybe it’s because she’s lost too much in her life. Or maybe it’s just being a mother. She doesn’t know, and doesn’t care, either. She’s got to move. She is in danger, or, rather, her daughter is, but it amounts to the same thing: do anything, at any cost, to get her back.

The shop calls itself Guns Here. She will just look inside; she probably can’t even buy anything as a tourist. That is the line she tells herself, like a politician who begins to believe their own spin.

It’s a pale-coloured prefab building; looks like it might sell office supplies or furniture, double-height and bland. A neon sign in the window simply reads GUNS – OPEN in red, lit-up letters. Automatic doors, bollards outside, plate-glass windows. The only thing that is unusual is, of course, the guns. Simone feels a repulsed kind of fascination as she looks at them. They’re on display in those windows, rows and rows and rows of them sitting like cakes in a bakery, only black and metal and deadly. She places a hand on the warm glass, and as she does so she sees that it’s been recently broken in the bottom-left corner, a spider’s web of pieces not yet repaired.

She hesitates, but only for a second and enters. And, as she does so, she sees the other sign in the window, this one handwritten: Private Seller – No Background Checks Necessary for anybody, and that is the precise moment that Simone knows she is going to leave with a gun.

CHAPTER 21

The place is empty, and the first thing Simone smells when she enters is metal. The metal of car mechanics’ garages. The metal of blacksmiths’ forges. And the metal, too, of blood. She finds herself wondering, in a dark recess of her mind, under what circumstances most people come here, and whether that’s why the opening hours are 24/7. Standing directly in front of the door is a standalone ATM. The type that might, in England at least, charge a withdrawal fee or eat your card. Simone flicks her gaze to the pistols, clocks the price and gets out her debit card. She doesn’t want a gun transaction on it, and paying in cash is the next best thing, even though the ATM is right in the shop. She isn’t hiding it from the police, she tells herself, but doesn’t believe the lie.

She navigates the screen, selects choose own amount and types $2,000. Declined. Tries $1,000. It accepts it and spits the bills out, as worn and papery as an old man’s handshake.

She walks a slow, scared loop around the shop. A large and crumpled American flag dresses the back wall. An employee – no more than twenty-five – stands behind the counter. After a second, she realizes he’s playing a game on his phone that as she gets closer to him reveals itself to be Pokémon.

She takes a steadying breath. ‘A pistol, please,’ she says, like she’s ordering a cappuccino. The employee glances up, meets her eyes, then nods.

‘Type?’ he says, one word, upspeak at its end.

‘I … don’t know,’ she says, wondering if she should have disguised her accent, but it’s too late now. The man – name badge KYLE – doesn’t seem to care at all. He rubs at his face, turns away from her and begins to open cabinets with a set of keys attached to his belt. His phone lies on the counter, tinkling absurdly with Pokémon music.

He’s wearing a black Guns Here T-shirt, but creeping up from the back of his neck is a tattoo, wolves, and Simone studies them, wondering if she will remember this. He’s sunburnt, and she finds herself thinking how come he ended up here, what he wants to do for a living, where his mother is.

From the cupboards he gets out five guns, which he lines up on the glass cabinet in front of her. Simone is reminded absurdly of her engagement to Damien. Never people to obey tradition, they agreed to get married one Tuesday night in front of The Great British Bake Off, bare feet together under a blanket on the sofa, and the next day went ring shopping, velvet boxes lined up just like this.

The guns are all large-palm-sized. Simone reaches out because she feels she is supposed to, though really she is frightened of them. The metal is cool, the ridges deep. She fingers the very tip of one, its power and violence.

Still the computer game muzak plays. ‘Sorry,’ Kyle says, following her gaze to his phone. ‘I lose my place if I quit now.’

‘Sure.’

The gun is $600. She must be imagining the look of concern that crosses Kyle’s young features as she handles it; he sells guns all day long, why would he care? But, nevertheless, she sees it.

‘Do you know how to use it?’ he says, adjusting his T-shirt at the neck; the sunburn is bothering him.

‘Sure,’ she says, thinking that she doesn’t want to know, certainly doesn’t want a lesson. All she needs is a threat, protection.

Perhaps Kyle doesn’t believe her, because he gets the gun out and pulls at the magazine. He lays out five gold bullets from the box on to the top of the glass and stands them upright like pawns in a chess game.

He checks it’s empty, tugging roughly at the mechanism. The noise startles Simone, her shoulders go up, fear flashing across her chest, but she tries not to react. Maybe she isn’t tough. Maybe she’s never been truly tested before. He could just load it and shoot her right now, she is thinking. She summons again the voice in her head, the parental-replacement voice. You can do this, it tells her. In fact, you have got to do this.

It works. Kyle takes two bullets and inserts them into the magazine, the same way you would an AA battery, and once again Simone is calm and focused. ‘That’s two rounds,’ he tells her. ‘Two shots.’

‘OK.’

‘Safety catch on. A trigger guard. Not all of them have one, but this one does.’ He points to a catch as the tinny music swells, and she nods. ‘Magazine in.’ He pushes it in, metal on metal. ‘Then, before you shoot, you rack the slide.’ It makes a noise like a stapler, but this time, Simone doesn’t react. ‘OK?’

‘OK.’

‘The round is in the chamber. All you need to do is take the guard off. So if you’re at the range, you’re shooting; you leave the range, you put the guard back on,’ he tells her, his voice now bored, his hands moving automatically over the gun, the prattle of a safety talk he’s given thousands of times.

The range. So this is what it’s like. This is what happens. People shoot safe things for fun. That they do other things, too, remains unsaid.

‘Shall I reverse all that, or leave it?’ he asks her. Eye contact again, this time as loaded as that magazine chamber. It clicks into place in just the same way, mechanical, powerful, fixed.

Simone tells herself she doesn’t want to have to go through all that again, that she doesn’t understand how the magazine might slot in, that she didn’t watch closely enough, but she is good at paying attention to things that are important to her and she did. This time, she looks directly into the lie, like that sugary, starry abyss outside and upwards, and thinks it; she wants that gun loaded.

‘Leave it as is,’ she says quietly, and Kyle nods in some sort of understanding, putting the gun as carefully into the box as if it is a living, breathing animal.

The lay-by feels like somewhere she visited a year ago, not yesterday. She kills the engine and it is immediately silent. Late, no traffic, the church still shut up but somehow watchful, that cross looking down at her, and Simone finds herself wondering whether or not God would be on her side. She’s damaged many lives to save just one, but wouldn’t everyone?

In the boot of her car are the drugs and all the cash she has, the gun on the passenger seat, the flip phone in her hand. She gets out of the car now and, exactly as instructed, she destroys the phone, stamping on it in the dust, the front smashed, battery acid leaking, then bins it.

She leans against the car, and now she waits. Then she hesitates, ducks back inside and grabs the gun, putting it down the back of her shorts because she’s seen that in movies and it seems like a good place to hide it, even though it’s cold and uncomfortable against her spine.

And there she is. In a lay-by in Texas by herself, waiting for her daughter to come, her car full of drugs worth God knows how much.

She wants to be outside for this part. She wants to be out of the car, vulnerable and ready, ready to give herself over to the universe. To spread her arms wide and say, I’m here, I’m at risk, for my daughter. I’ve done every single thing that was asked of me, to the letter, and now I need her back.

Both times she has been here, nobody has driven in either direction along this highway; the kidnapper knows what he is doing. The dirty road underneath Simone’s trainers is still hot from the day, and, this time, she can smell Texas. It’s different from Mexico, drier and harsher. Up above, the stars are out, handfuls of cocaine thrown upwards and stuck.

She holds her phone close to her body, turns it on, and sends Damien a single message.

I’ve completed a transaction and now I’m here. I hope we’re home free x

She stares at it for several seconds before she presses Send.

She turns the phone off again, pockets it and looks down at the deep, dark road. The lights of some town or other are in the distance, a mini constellation on land.

She stares at it, willing something to happen, and it does finally: two headlights, two sunbeams on the horizon, coming straight for her.

She touches the gun again, removes it from her waistband and holds it in her hand this time, like making a slow and tentative acquaintanceship, the way you might extend a hand to a frightened animal. In the darkness, she brings the gun close to her face and studies the tip. It’s round and smooth, as taboo as a naked body or a corpse.

She stares at the gun in her hand, its metal skin warmed to body temperature. She doesn’t care what happens next, so long as Lucy survives. That’s the reality; this, to Simone, is maternal sacrifice, in all its blistering-hot metal gunfire.

CHAPTER 22

The night air is cooling quickly now, like somebody blowing on her hairline. The car is slow-creeping, some sort of electric kind, as quiet as a cat.

It is a few hundred yards away, then one hundred, then fifty. The windows are blacked-out, no number plates. Simone walks on jelly legs around to the boot of the car and demonstrably gets out the sports bag.

The car swings into the lay-by and stops, its engine still running.

A handful of seconds tick by, scattering like stray sand from an hourglass. Simone tilts her head, assessing the car and waiting quietly, obediently. She’s come too far to make a mistake now.

And then. A click in the night, and slowly a form emerges from the driver’s-side door.

And here he is: her daughter’s kidnapper.

Simone can make no guess as to his age. He’s all in black – slim but strong-looking, athletic rather than bulky – and has on a balaclava, leaving only his eyes and a small slit for his mouth. In his left hand is a gun, held confidently down at his side like a one-armed bandit. Her own is back in her shorts, uncomfortable and comforting all at once.

He walks several feet towards her and suddenly they are almost at touching distance. His eyes are blue, like hers, like Lucy’s, and their gazes lock, for just a beat saying nothing.

‘Bag,’ he says. His accent is American.

The gun becomes hot against her skin.

Evidently, her hesitation is not acceptable, because the kidnapper gestures, frustrated, with the gun, and says again, ‘Bag!’

She hurriedly swings it over to him. He takes it wordlessly.

And that’s when she sees it. The zip is open. It must be faulty, opening for the second time like that. She closed it. She definitely did. She stares at it and she sees she’s right: the teeth aren’t meeting. The zip is broken.

He opens it with one hand, roughly, without noticing; this is routine to him. ‘Stay there!’ he shouts at her, gesturing with the gun, even though she wasn’t moving.

He throws the bag on to the roof of his car and begins to pull out and stack the blocks deftly, quickly, the way somebody would count poker chips or banknotes. He peels off one of the stickers, parts the brown paper. Simone is unable to look away, fascinated. Underneath is cling film, and he reaches into the pocket of his dark trousers and takes out a penknife, making a slit. He pushes a finger in. It comes out with the tip bright white in the night. He rubs it between finger and thumb, looking closely. He seems to be satisfied, then touches it to his gums, throws his head back, and says, ‘Oh,’ in some kind of pleasure.

Simone desperately wants to run away, to leave this horrible spectacle, but she can’t.

Quality checked, he begins to count. After several seconds, he turns to Simone, and his eyes look different. ‘Not enough here,’ he says simply.

‘What?’

‘It was six kilograms. Not five. You were told to collect it all.’

Simone goes hot. She meets his eyes, panicked. ‘I’ve brought everything that was there,’ she tells him. ‘I picked up the bag and brought it here.’

‘Instructions were six. This is five.’

‘There were only five there,’ she says, and as she tells him this, she realizes with a crushing sensation what has happened. The bag zip. Something must have fallen when she was running from the sirens, or in the coach. Or anywhere.

‘Where’s the extra kilogram?’ he says, advancing towards her. An infinitesimal movement of his hand, and now his finger is on the trigger, maybe consciously, maybe not. ‘Where the fuck’s the extra kilo?’ he screams, coming right up to her, putting one sinewy, strong hand on her left shoulder.

‘I don’t know! I brought everything,’ she cries.

‘I don’t do deals with people who take a kilo for themselves.’

‘No. No. I think it fell from the bag – I’m so sorry, I can –’

‘No drugs, no exchange,’ he says simply, his head cocked.

‘I can pay the difference,’ she says, though she has no idea if this is true.

‘No deal for people who fucking steal from me!’ he shouts, still so close to her that she can smell his breath: stale, a tang of alcohol underneath it. ‘Don’t you think this is a supply chain? That I have somebody I have to account to for the loss?’

Simone is so scared she can’t think straight, but some wise part of her brain is still running her eyes over his features, trying to get as many identifying factors as possible. Nondescript clothes. Slim legs. Trousers that rustle slightly, some sort of waterproof fabric. Blue eyes, but that’s it. Simone should never have dealt directly with this man. He is mad. He is a criminal. He is a kidnapper. He could be a killer. What has she done?

He walks several paces away.

The windows of his car are totally opaque. She wonders now if she’s making eye contact with somebody in there who she can’t herself see. She peers at the window, the sensation eerie. Is she looking at another criminal? At Lucy?

‘No drugs, no deal,’ he says again, heading back to the driver’s side. And Simone’s chest is ablaze with panic.

‘But you said –’

‘No drugs, no deal.’

‘I got the bag. I took exactly what was there,’ she gabbles. ‘Surely you can – verify that with someone? Why would I take something?’

‘For yourself.’

‘I took drugs across the border to get her back!’ Simone shouts. ‘Why would I steal? I don’t want drugs. I want her.’

‘I was expecting six kilograms. My instructions are to sell on six kilograms,’ he says, his voice as hard as steel. ‘I can’t make a loss.’ And then he points the gun upwards and fires a bullet into the night with a crack so loud it is like fireworks. Simone is momentarily stunned, then ducks, hands over her head, braced, but nothing happens. And then he turns to her and smiles wolfishly, straight, pointy teeth, the noise still echoing around the desert and the mountains like thunder.

Then he speaks, as though nothing has happened: ‘Deal’s over. Time’s up.’

‘I’ll pay – I’ll pay for whatever is missing,’ she pleads desperately. ‘Street value, whatever it takes. I’ll do another run.’

‘We don’t deal with criminals,’ he says, and, somewhere, Lucy is absolutely gasping at this irony.

And that’s when it happens. As though the conceptualization of her daughter’s personality has brought her into being.

A tap. Simone’s eyes go towards it immediately, scanning urgently. Where is that …? Another tap.

It’s coming from the rear window above the boot. It is blacked-out, whatever it is unseen, but unmistakable in the quiet, tense night.

It must be Lucy. It must. She’s alive.

‘No deal,’ the man says again, turning away fully. If he heard it, he isn’t showing it. And then he motions as if he is about to get back into the driver’s seat, and the taps continue. Insistent and true. And in some dark recess of Simone’s mind, she thinks of the lobsters tapping on the undersides of lids, desperate to survive. And her daughter is very likely in that boot and this man is very likely about to drive off with her because of some fucking drugs war, and then she will be gone again, lost, and it is these thoughts that spring Simone into an action that maybe she’s been headed for this entire time.

The man has his back to her, his hand on the door handle, and for a few seconds everything seems to stutter, like the globe stops orbiting, then restarts again.

The taps become an insistent thump, the deadened noise of a fist against toughened glass, and the man goes completely still.

Then he wrenches the door open, keys in his hand, and he’s going to leave with her.

Simone is no longer merely a person, a woman. She is only a mother. She is only a single decision. The man morphs, too, his slim back merely a target.

Another tap on the boot. Her daughter. Everything is in fine detail, the star-spangled sky, the fanning headlights of his car, the desert and the kidnapper’s silhouetted form and her, a mother with a gun.

She bought the gun. She came prepared to do this.

She reaches behind her back, into her shorts. Her hand connects with the gun like fitting into a glove. The contours of the metal are more familiar than they ought to be, like this moment has been invented for her, made just for her.

The man stoops to get into the car, one hand on the roof, then notices her, and moves around to the front. She starts off towards him. The level of detail she can see is granular, microscopic. She can hear each individual cicada. See the tyre tracks in the gravel, interlaced lattices. See those pinprick lights in the distance. The eddies and swirls of dust. The all-in-black man. Hear the tap-tap on the window in the boot.

Simone aims the gun, both hands around its base, cocks it the way Kyle showed her, then takes a breath, the slowest and fastest of her life, the breath before absolutely everything – everything – changes.

Warm trigger. Hands steady. Tap-tap-tap. A crack.

She thinks for a moment that she missed, but then his gloved hand goes to his back, as if swatting a fly, and he begins to stagger, the bullet hole invisible but devastating. And, it turns out, the ransom wasn’t cash. It wasn’t even drugs. It was a life. His. For Lucy’s.

CHAPTER 23

The world explodes back into noise and colour and action. Simone watches the kidnapper fall, backdropped by the striated desert horizon. She rushes instinctively to him and from his wound rushes a red Trevi Fountain of blood in rhythmic spurts. Her hand goes to her mouth, horrified. He is face down but still alive, a guttural, bubbling, frothy moan coming from his mouth.

And right there, Simone feels another decision present itself, one she makes without any thought at all. She turns away from the kidnapper and towards her daughter, the odyssey over.

She rushes to the boot and begins to fumble with the catch. Please be her. Please don’t be another criminal. Please don’t let there be anybody else hiding out in the back, in the footwells.

The car’s engine is still running, and the boot pops with a single click. With a whirring noise, it begins to rise like a helium balloon. And there she is. Lucy, gagged with dusty gaffer tape, perhaps formerly bound, red stripes across her wrists. No shoes, dirty feet. But it’s her, it’s her, it’s Lucy, and she is alive.

‘Oh my God,’ Simone says, and she dips her head over the boot, her hands around her daughter’s, and she gently tugs at the tape and the blindfold, and as Lucy’s eyes open, they become wet and make contact with Simone’s, blue on blue.

Simone reaches down into the boot, same as she did into Lucy’s cot a thousand times. The baby memories storm around her like a tree shaking its leaves off. Morning after morning after morning, Lucy aged one, two, three, then in a big bed, then no longer needing help with getting up.

Sure enough, Lucy puts her own arms up, hands like blinking starfish, just like way back when, and Simone lifts her, even though they weigh almost the same now, and brings her to her chest. Her soft skin, her warm body, it folds into Simone like baking mix, and now, once more, they are one.

And Lucy repeats two words only: ‘You came. You came.’

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.’

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.

The buttons have fingertip-shaped recesses. She touches their smooth divots as she dials 911 – finally – and then the call connects.

‘911, what’s your emergency?’ a woman says. Her accent is Southern American, vowels bending and stretching.

‘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.

CHAPTER 26

A slow-moving vehicle is approaching them from behind.

Simone squints at it, and the first thing she notices is that it has a personalized plate.

It isn’t an ambulance.

It’s a dark, expensive Buick-type vehicle, five hundred yards away, now four hundred, and Simone’s mind is going faster than it.

The kidnapper knew exactly what she was doing and when.

He was communicating with her on the flip phones.

Simone palms her hands over the man’s trousers, into pockets. No phones.

Realization hits her with a simple thud.

She’s been so foolish. Of course this dead man isn’t the kidnapper. Of course he won’t have conducted the handover. He will have sent a messenger, who she has just killed.

Lucy must realize the same, because she turns to Simone, who shields her eyes in the glare of the Buick’s LED headlights, while Lucy speaks.

‘He doesn’t work alone,’ she says, her speech hurried, the words tripping over each other. ‘He handed me to him. I heard him – this man –’ she points frantically to the body – ‘he thanked the kidnapper for me. He’ll kill us. The kidnapper will kill us!’ she shouts. ‘We’ve killed his man.’

And in the chaos and the furore of the killing and the rescue, even while trying to gather evidence, they didn’t have enough time to discuss everything. Naturally, Lucy still has knowledge Simone doesn’t.

Simone can only nod.

The car continues its approach, as silent and stealthy as a panther.

And now here the real kidnapper is, come to check on progress, or perhaps was watching the entire exchange, heard the gunshots.

‘We’ve got to go!’ Lucy says, and now they’re running to their car.

They’re leaving the drugs, but what else are they supposed to do? Simone can’t take them. It would look immeasurably worse if she took them. They will be worth millions of dollars to the kidnapper. He’s too much of an enemy already.

It’s a situation with only two bad outcomes. Simone must simply choose the least worst, and she isn’t adding theft to her crimes.

He’s too close to them. He comes into the lay-by, and a single window rolls down, a hand emerging from it like a spider.

And that’s when Lucy does it. Simone has a constellation of thoughts all at once, firing neurons in different directions. Is Lucy going to – Is this because she saw Simone doing – Yes, she is.

Lucy takes the gun from the roof of their car and aims at the wheels of the Buick. To stop it, to buy them time.

The shot Lucy fires halts the Buick as intended.

They both stare at it, speechless with fear.

And then they’re at their car.

‘Go, we’ve got to go,’ Lucy yells.

And Simone is getting inside, gunning the engine, only actions to protect her daughter, no longer thoughts.

And then they’re in and then they’re driving, ten, twenty, thirty miles an hour, forty, fifty, and the Buick hasn’t yet followed them.

They’re on the highway and they glance at each other as Simone burns the accelerator.

‘He will be checking if he’s alive,’ Lucy says. ‘I wanted to – to slow him.’

Simone pauses. She doesn’t know what to say. In the end, she simply replies, ‘I know.’

‘He would’ve killed us.’

‘I know.’

Simone closes her eyes for just a beat.

She turns to look at Lucy, light and shade flaring across her features as Simone drives. ‘We ought to go straight to the police, now.’

‘Yes,’ Lucy says.

‘What does this look like?’ Simone says, and she almost whispers it, there in a quiet car that fires through the night like a silent rocket. ‘We’ve shot – we’ve shot twice. And we’ve left.’

‘No, but – we …’

‘There isn’t any evidence you were kidnapped.’

Lucy’s eyes widen, and she shifts uncomfortably in the seat. ‘I beg to differ.’

But Simone is too panicked to parent well. The pieces of their version of events are falling all around her. It makes her reveal too much to Lucy and insensitively. ‘I destroyed the ransoms. I told someone there was a business opportunity.’

‘Was there?’ Lucy asks, confused.

‘I trafficked drugs to get you,’ she tells her. Lucy goes still on the passenger seat, and Simone is glad she didn’t add that the kidnapper threatened to kill Lucy. She doesn’t need to know how close she might’ve come to death. ‘I brought cocaine in from Mexico. That’s what I was trying to bury. And then I killed a man.’ Simone pauses. ‘What does that look like?’

Lucy says nothing for several moments, stunned. ‘I didn’t know my proof of life video was – he passed me a script to read. I didn’t know you were asked to do that. But I was kidnapped. I can tell the police that.’

‘Could you identify him?’

‘No. He put a hood on me before I saw him. But I can tell them that it happened.’

‘The sheriff specifically said people blame kidnaps around here. They say they were forced to commit crimes.’

‘But we were.’

‘We could leave,’ Simone tells her. ‘Refuse to take the risk of not being believed. We’d be charged with … murder, drugs offences.’ She doesn’t add Lucy’s own ill-advised shooting, nor that they have already left the scene, which makes it so much worse for them.

‘I know.’

‘No one knows it was us. We didn’t say our names. We used the payphone, not our mobiles,’ Simone tells her; they were unknown callers. She checks the rear-view mirror. There’s nobody, just empty highway. ‘Did the kidnapper ever use your name?’

Lucy blinks, tucks her legs up underneath her, thinking. ‘No,’ she answers eventually. ‘No, he didn’t.’

‘Did you think he might know who you are?’

‘I don’t know. But he didn’t use my name. All his demands were notes or using a distorted voice thing. He would untie me, briefly, so I could take my blindfold off myself. So I never saw him. I didn’t know him, and I think he didn’t know me.’

Simone nods, her jaw set. They might be able to get away. She would’ve told the police when it was just her. But now it’s Lucy, too. A second shooting at a second car.

Here is another hand dealt, a shitty one full of low cards, but they have to play it as best they can. Two poor options sit in front of them: stay, and risk an arrest and trial for multiple offences, or go, now. The kidnapper let himself into an anonymous lodge. That is what she thinks.

And maybe he was able to track Simone on the flip phones, but she doesn’t think he knows her name. He never used it. Simone wonders if she’s kidding herself, but she thinks of the trauma of Lucy going to trial over this, and she can’t, she can’t. What are they supposed to do, except try to run?

‘What do you think would happen?’ Lucy asks.

‘I think they’d arrest me for cocaine supply and murder.’ Simone once again omits Lucy’s crime.

‘Go to the airport,’ Lucy says. ‘Go. Now.’

Part II

TWO FUGITIVES

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.’

‘And, when she said that to him, her voice changed,’ Lucy continues. ‘Softened. You know? The way it does with relatives.’

Simone’s eyes are wet. She’s so wise, her daughter, but she’s also experienced something so awful. Lucy scoots closer and places her hand over her mother’s. Simone blinks. ‘I told him, at one point, that I was thirsty, and he came into the room and took my cup away, didn’t bring it back.’

Simone feels like she’s been slapped. ‘That’s …’

‘She said to him, the daughter, she said that she had to get back to her house, but that she’d be sure to stay inside.’

‘Huh. That’s weird,’ Simone says. ‘That was the second day?’

‘Right. The first he left me blindfolded there on the floor all day, apart from when he made me film the video. No food,’ she says. ‘I couldn’t have eaten even if he had offered.’

‘I see.’

‘And then I was allowed on this horrible old bed. Mattress like a block of wood. And then, the next day, evening, he must have known I’d got the blindfold off because he gets the phone to read out that I have to face the wall with my eyes closed before he comes in. He put me in the car again. I couldn’t hear any street noise; no neighbours I’m guessing. Some of the shock and the adrenaline or whatever had worn off by then. And I did think: Is he taking me somewhere to die? And it’s weird but – when you’re in it … you don’t feel the fear. You just start to face it. He took me to – somewhere, and then handed me over to someone else, someone who felt taller, who then drove me to you.’

Simone nods, but, inside, her spirit is crushed. They will never be able to find or identify this man, this criminal mastermind, and Lucy will never be the same again.

‘And I just thought, Well, at least it’ll be quick. He’d shoot me. I don’t know,’ Lucy says, her shoulders rising and then falling so slowly Simone wonders if it’s more of a breath than a sigh or a shrug.

‘And then you came,’ she says suddenly to Simone, looking directly at her.

‘I came.’

‘I can’t believe I shot at that car.’

‘I know.’

‘I can’t believe I hit it. I didn’t even know how to …’ She looks at Simone and, once again, they are thinking exactly the same thing. Simone didn’t even know she knew how to do it, either.

‘How did they …? Why did the handover go wrong?’ Lucy asks.

Simone takes a breath. She will tell her the truth in the most straightforward of terms, but nothing more. And then, after this, they must think this through; they must think about what it is they’re trying to do.

‘They said it wasn’t the right amount of drugs. I think one fell out when I was running … I heard sirens. In Mexico.’

And although Simone is explaining herself, she can’t help but think how foolish she has been. How she unthinkingly complied. Destroyed the flip phones. Put them in rubbish bins. Crossed the border. Should anything ever have gone wrong, the kidnapper was covered. Untraceable. Obviously, this was his entire plan.

‘Do you think we’re going to get away?’ Lucy asks, her voice quiet, the question almost downbeat, rhetorical. Then: ‘Don’t answer that.’

She pauses. She gazes at the horizon, leaving Lucy to process her thoughts by herself, and she finally has some time to consider what they are trying to do. The ambulance will get to the body; will anyone connect it to them? Maybe not. Their DNA isn’t in a database. There’s no CCTV around there; the location no doubt deliberately chosen for that reason.

Nobody knows it was them. The 911 call was anonymous. Simone blinks, wondering whether she said anything that would give a clue to their identities, other than their British accents. They are suddenly on the run without meaning to be. The decision presented itself and they ran without thinking.

She doesn’t let up on the accelerator, though she is thinking perhaps she should. At what point are you running, and at what point are you on the run?

The only person who might know who they are is the kidnapper. And if he does, it’s all over for them. He could tell the police, even anonymously, that it was them.

But does he? Their passports were lying around in the lodge, but not disturbed, she thinks. The hire car was in her name, but would he be able to trace it, even if he saw the registration plate when watching her?

If they’re going to really try this, then they need to get home, now, as soon as possible, be free.

‘You don’t think he knows our names?’ Simone asks again.

‘No. Unless …’

‘Unless what?’

‘Unless the lodge was targeted. The door that wouldn’t lock …’ Lucy says, and Simone nods, her heart sinking. It can’t be a coincidence. Can it? But does that mean he knows their identities? Does it mean the police would know it’s them? Surely the kidnapper wouldn’t want to tell the police anything …

Simone guns the engine. ‘Do you think Dad understood the urgency to meet us at the airport?’

‘Yes,’ Lucy says. ‘Yes, I think so.’

She wishes Lucy could drive so she could pull over, concentrate on working everything through in her mind, but she can’t. Time is of the essence.

The road is black, bending and unspooling behind them like they’re on a spinning record. Canyons on the left, vast desert on the right, and Simone thinks about who the kidnapper might be, and what he might know about them, this man who executed every step of their downfall. Maybe she should have listened to Damien and told the police. The kidnapper was smarter than she was. She had no real idea she was destroying evidence, setting herself up.

But then she might not have got Lucy back.

‘You know when you decided to come,’ Lucy says, maybe thinking similar things to Simone, ‘did you ever think you might not? You do so much for me … I feel so bad.’

‘No,’ Simone says immediately and passionately. ‘I’d do anything.’

‘How did you decide?’

Simone reaches across the handbrake to touch Lucy, just gently, along her shoulders. ‘There was no decision. From the moment I got the text,’ she says, ‘I was coming.’

Simone looks at her daughter, and is glad Lucy doesn’t know what Damien thought, that there was any dispute at all. No child deserves to know there was indecision like that.

‘So you came armed, for the handover,’ Lucy says, and she nods, as though this were completely expected and normal, and Simone wonders if she might be traumatized, after all.

CHAPTER 28

They’re two hours from the airport when Lucy falls asleep, startling occasionally as she slides into dreams. She begins to mutter, just slightly, at one point. Saying, ‘I will take you,’ perhaps reliving the kidnapping. Simone isn’t sure.

It’s probably the first time Lucy has closed her eyes since she was taken, and something in Simone relaxes suddenly and satisfyingly like snapped elastic as her daughter’s breathing eventually steadies and the muttering stops. She lets out an exhale herself, her shoulders dropping, jaw unclenching, the tight ball of wool in her stomach tugged and unravelled. They’re far from danger, they’re far from free, and yet: they’re alive.

She grabs for the phone, shamefully not dropping her speed even a little, and sees that Damien is on his way to the airport, too, scant on details: Coming, he has written. Del Rio DRT. The precision of the airport code. Her reliable husband, her friend.

She drives and drives and drives, spends the next half an hour telling herself truths that tangle like intersections and feel like lies. They are not on the run. They are victims. They are not perpetrators. She will not let the kidnapper’s version of events become her own.

The world looks the same, but isn’t, not any longer. Normal life as Simone knew it ended several days prior: when she was pissed off with her lost baggage, the late hour, desperate to see Lucy. She aches for it, those moments when she was just Simone the mother, the wife, the chef, internally criticizing people’s burritos in airports and feeling jet-lagged. Nothing more, nothing less.

As she navigates the highways, burning panic simmers off, reducing and reducing to something concentrated but more manageable. Five minutes later, her phone beeps. It’s Damien, asking her to call him. Anxiety shimmers over her skin. What now?

She drives a little further, then sees a petrol station up ahead. It has a small shop with a night hatch still open, and a scrap car yard. Simone pulls into the forecourt and brakes hastily. Still Lucy sleeps. She manoeuvres the car away from CCTV, into the darkness of the shadows.

Damien doesn’t answer the phone. Confused, Simone tries him again. This time, it diverts to voicemail after two rings.

She parks up, gets out of the car to find better signal, but doesn’t walk away; of course she doesn’t. Instead, she leans against the warm car and tries him again, her eyes never leaving Lucy’s moonlit sleeping form.

Two more calls. Both go immediately to voicemail. And somewhere deep inside, Simone knows that something has shifted again. The moments feel the same, they feel recognizable in some way, like punctuation. The instant Lucy was taken. The ransom. The shooting.

And now this.

A WhatsApp alert arrives: Damien has turned on disappearing messages.

Simone frowns. What? Disappearing messages? Fear presses a plunger hard into her stomach.

Damien begins typing.

Can’t speak. Check the news.

Message deleted.

‘What?’ Simone whispers to no one, her mouth dry.

She tries to breathe, to not let the panic back in. She glances up at the shop. It looks empty, the cashier maybe in the back. Not a single car passes. There’s silence. Lucy’s head is lolling, unaware, part of her chin shining silver with drool.

She takes a breath, then googles Texas news. And it’s there.

THIS IS A BREAKING NEWS STORY THAT WILL BE UPDATED AS SOON AS WE HAVE MORE INFORMATION a disclaimer reads at the top in red and white.

DOUBLE SHOOTING IN SHAFTER says the headline. Simone scans the article, frantic.

A MAN was shot dead only hours ago in a rest stop in Shafter, Presidio County. Dashcam footage has been handed in. Police are urgently trying to find two women who match the stills taken below.

Simone’s hands begin to shake. Her entire body goes hot.

There was a camera.

CHAPTER 29

There are two images: Simone, alone, holding the gun, her teeth gritted, her eyes scrunched at their corners but open and staring. Her body is rigid and strong-looking, the gun held straight out in front of her in both hands.

She stares at it, repulsed. She has killed a man, barely processed it. And that moment, that moment that felt so right to her as she protected her daughter at all costs, was actually this: ugly and brutal. She’s the monster. Of everyone in this awful cast, she’s the killer.

The second photograph is Simone and Lucy, standing by the bleeding body, the gun visible on the top of the car.

The back of the car is out of the frame. The reality dawns on Simone like a hangover. The kidnap has not been captured. Only the shooting. The man getting out. Then Simone moving towards him, firing at him in plain sight. Nothing of the boot, Lucy, the handover.

But wait.

DOUBLE SHOOTING says the headline, and Simone scrolls down frantically, dread pulsing through her.

A second bullet was fired at a police officer on a surveillance job who arrived at the scene after hearing the first shot. Although he was in an unmarked car, he was in uniform when he started to exit his vehicle and the second woman shot at him.

The officer in question sustained an injury to his lower leg.

A police officer was in the Buick Lucy shot at. And she got him. He must have been getting out right as she fired. She remembers the hand that they saw emerging. But Lucy didn’t know he was a cop. She didn’t.

Lucy has shot a police officer.

Simone has murdered a man.

And there is no evidence, anywhere, of why.

In the photographs is her hire car, this hire car, skewed in front of the messenger’s car, its registration as clear as day. If they haven’t got their names from the photographs, they will be able to get them in minutes from the hire company.

Hence Damien’s oblique message.

They have him.

They know.

They’re probably interviewing him right now. He’s taken the world’s biggest risk telling her anything at all.

And all the while, the Buick wasn’t the kidnapper; it was the police. She can hardly bear to think it, but they ran for no reason. They ran because of the appearance of the car, and the hand, and simple good old-fashioned fear. The panic that they wouldn’t be believed.

The articles’ contents begin to blur together. A large shipment of cocaine was found near the body; an attempt to bury and hide its contents had been made … An as-yet-to-be-identified body discovered by the side of the road in Texas … TWO WOMEN IN DRUG DEAL GONE WRONG … Mexican border drugs transaction results in murder and second attempted murder of an officer who was sure to have witnessed the transaction …

She stands there, refreshing the page. And there it is.

Simone and Lucy Seaborn have been named as the suspects in a murder and a second shooting committed only hours ago by …

Simone wants to lie down, suddenly, right there on the warm tarmac of the forecourt. She wants to flatten herself on the boot of the car and never get up again.

They can’t go to the airport.

The police want them for murder.

Are they going to hand themselves in? Simone stares into the bright lights of the petrol station, but she isn’t thinking, not any more. The adrenaline has worn itself out. So many decisions made, all bad ones. The road is still so quiet, and Simone finds an air of unbelievability about it, that anything significant could be happening, out there in the silence and the stillness. She could simply close the web pages and unknow it, just for a second.

The world may be quiet, but this doesn’t mean that the police are not on their way. Simone shivers with the thought.

They have got to disappear. If they aren’t going to tell the police the truth – and be believed – then they have got to vanish. Haven’t they?

Shouldn’t they go back?

She puts her head into her hands, trying to think. She calls Damien one more time, but he doesn’t answer, probably can’t. Is likely in some police interviewing suite somewhere.

She thinks how his sudden appearance looks. He flew out here with no warning, told Luan it was a business transaction. It looks like Simone found an opportunity. The text she sent to him about their business bank account. She remembers it with a dull thud. The only thing she put in writing, right before she went to Mexico.

It looks like she wanted him, their business accountant, out here to deposit money.

Money she made from a drugs transaction.

How could they all have been so stupid – and so very unlucky?

It’s decision time. That is what her inner voice tells her. Yet again. Another decision, another impossible choice.

Simone creeps into the silent car, thinking of the cashier, who could come out of the back room at any moment.

She waits for several seconds, listening to Lucy’s even breathing, as deep and as soft as winter snow, the way she has a thousand times before.

‘Lucy,’ Simone says in a low voice. She’s on the right, Simone the left, the driver’s and passenger’s seats inverted, like the world they find themselves in.

‘Huh?’ Lucy startles awake, part of her brain still on alert. Simone feels her heart drop in sympathy as she bypasses stirring and goes straight to bright, shining terror.

‘It’s OK – it’s OK,’ Simone soothes, ‘you’re here with me.’

‘What’s happening?’ Lucy asks immediately, her eyes wide open, sitting upright. A film of sweat covers her top lip. ‘Have we got to the airport?’

‘Not yet,’ Simone answers. Then takes a breath. Then another. ‘Look,’ she says, ‘we need a change of plan.’

She can’t keep this from Lucy.

And so she wordlessly shows Lucy the news, and what looks – to the rest of the world – like the truth.

CHAPTER 30

The Kidnapper

Do you know those people who get obsessed with things? That’s me. Most recently, it was having the same thing for lunch (pulled-pork sandwiches), but before that it was teaching myself the piano from YouTube, and before that it was Peloton (how unedifying).

Anyway, that’s the context, I guess. Today, I am obsessing over what to do in the aftermath.

A man shot by the side of the road. Two people, escaped.

And one person, me, seeking revenge.

The decision is made: I have to find her.

And then, well, after all, kidnapping’s easy if you obsess over it.

CHAPTER 31

Simone

Lucy looks at Simone. ‘I shot a cop.’

‘You didn’t mean to. You shot … you shot at him.’

‘I didn’t mean to. I didn’t see it was a police officer. Why are they saying I did?’ She pauses, then, different emotions flickering across her features.

‘He was a cop.’

‘What if he was there because he was in on it?’ Lucy asks, her gaze direct. ‘What if he was there because he was checking on how it went?’ Another pause. ‘The sheriff. He was immediately suspicious … don’t you think?’

‘You think the kidnapper’s in with the police – all of them?’

‘I don’t know. I don’t know,’ Lucy says, raking her hair back so her forehead strains. ‘I just got – I thought I was fucking dead and now – now this. How can we trust anyone?’ she says, turning to her mother.

‘I don’t know.’

‘We’ve got to get out of here,’ Lucy says, looking around. ‘They know our names.’

‘We can’t run.’

‘We already have.’ A pointed stare, tinged with irritation.

‘We can’t go to the airport, Luce,’ Simone says softly as the wind whips around them. The car gently shakes and rocks with it. It’s so surprising to feel such strong gusts in the heat. ‘Our passports will be on a no-fly list. Our faces and names are on the news.’

Lucy stares down at her feet, then up at the sky, makes a kind of futile gesture. Her eyes are shining, which she tries to hide. ‘We can’t go to the police. We look so guilty. And we don’t know if he works with the police. The kidnapper could be police.’

It’s too late. That is what Simone finds herself thinking; it’s too late to hand themselves in, now that they have run, now that the story has broken.

But she hesitates, there in the petrol station with her daughter, standing just in the shadow of the bright lights. There is no taking this back. Might they be able to persuade a police officer, a judge, a jury …? They would have Lucy’s account, though it contains no evidence. Never even heard his voice.

‘We cannot hand ourselves in,’ Lucy says, once again speaking Simone’s mind. ‘It’s Texas,’ she says. ‘It’s drugs. It’s murder.’ Her hands are shaking.

Their eyes meet. ‘I …’ Simone says, thinking of everything Lucy’s endured.

‘It’s – it’s Texas,’ Lucy says again, with a meaning Simone is missing. Until Lucy spells it out for her. ‘They have the death penalty.’

Simone closes her eyes.

Lucy makes a panicked grab for the phone and starts looking at the articles, showing one after another after another to Simone. ‘Look,’ she is saying. ‘Look at how their minds are made up about us. I didn’t even …’ she chokes out. ‘I shot at the car, not him.’

‘I know,’ Simone says. The us is correct. Simone has committed the more serious crimes, but only just. Lucy would get time for shooting at a police officer and then leaving the scene. Probably almost as much as Simone. Or Simone might get no time at all, instead put to her death.

They are both wanted.

‘We don’t need to hand ourselves in or go on the run,’ Lucy says, and Simone’s head snaps up, looking at her daughter. In the glare of the forecourt, her eyes look strange, wild and impassioned. ‘We could just – lie low, get our case together,’ she says, and Simone latches on to this in the way one does when a situation is hopeless. ‘Get everything straight. What happened, find what evidence we can, what we can prove, to demonstrate to the police what happened to us. Then, when we’ve got all that, tell different police. A few towns away. Just in case,’ she says.

‘His DNA will be on you now,’ Simone tells her. ‘If we leave, we lose that.’

‘They’ll say it doesn’t prove anything. Could be from anywhere. Could have been in the taxi before me.’

‘I know.’

And that’s all it takes: a nod from Lucy, and then Simone nods, too, their heads bobbing in unison, one the parent, one the child, out there in the tiniest patch of civilization in the vast, vast desert. One believing absolutely that they will figure this out, one pretending, or maybe that’s both of them, Simone can’t tell.

CHAPTER 32

‘There’s a town, Terlingua. It’s far enough away to have different police, in case any are in business with the kidnapper, but near enough to get to. There were day trips there from camp all the time. People came back with all sorts,’ Lucy tells her, once they’re back in the car. ‘We ought to head for there. I think it’s pretty big. We’ll be able to hide in plain sight. I’m pretty sure there are motels there that would take us without ID.’ She pauses. ‘We need to get rid of our phones,’ she says.

‘Yes. They’re tied to us.’

‘They know we’re in this car.’

‘I know,’ Simone says. She has been thinking about this, wondering what to do, but now she has a plan. Some survivalist tendency from her adolescence is rearing up within her, bringing with it memories. She got ahead of the dot-com boom by leaning into technology, something she’s never once regretted – every job uses it, even cooking: the precision of vacuum-sealing vegetables, then cooking them in a water bath – and now she knows what their vulnerabilities will be: the phones and the hire car. Lucy’s come to the same conclusion by virtue only of being young and raised on a diet of smartphones and YouTube.

‘I think we get as far as we can get, then ditch it,’ Simone tells her. ‘We can’t now, in the desert.’

‘No. OK.’ Lucy fiddles with the glovebox.

And neither of them is talking timescales. Maybe they can’t, maybe they don’t know, or maybe they simply can’t bear to. Simone’s never done denial, but perhaps she is, tonight. And what eighteen-year-old would be able to unpick feelings and decisions this complex?

‘It wasn’t much of a holiday,’ Lucy tells her in the quiet car, and the sentiment is so darkly funny that Simone can’t help but let out a little bark of laughter.

‘No.’

‘I have had better.’ A pause, then she adds, ‘God – I’m sorry. It’s easier to joke than to cry.’ And Simone’s heart flips over in sadness.

‘We will have better,’ Simone says, and she’s shocked to find it feels like a platitude. The things they may be missing out on seem to play out in front of them. Holidays, Lucy going to RADA, going home? Simone cannot bear to look at them, can’t yet face reality. She can’t be thinking that none of this will happen, that their lives as they knew them are over. It’s too painful, too raw and too shocking. They will get home. They will. And if they don’t, she wants to look when it isn’t a gaping, bleeding wound but instead a scar. Maybe she can spare herself from the pain that way; she did so with her parents.

She never cried about them. Not when social services made the order and she went to live with the foster family. Not when she had her first stilted and supervised contact with her parents in the Costa with automatic doors that blew the rain inside every few minutes. Weekly meetings soon became monthly, and the reason became clear: her parents perceived it was her fault. She had embarrassed them, a relative once said, by being taken into care; it was so dramatic. They stopped speaking eventually. They lost touch. Then, years later, her father got ill, and it was Damien who opened the wound for her, sitting on a little rope swing at a National Trust property two hours after her father’s funeral.

‘If you were an addict and you had to apologize to Lucy, what would you say?’ he asked plainly. They’d walked and walked afterwards, ended up there without plans.

Simone closed her eyes. ‘I can’t …’

‘Just one sentence.’

She looked at him, then, at his open face. They should have been back at the restaurant, she’d said. It had been back in the time when it was a resounding failure and they were needed at all times to keep it afloat. But, there in the little clearing, it felt like it had never existed.

Simone expected to speak a cliché, to say she was sorry, but she didn’t.

‘I’d say it’s never the child’s fault,’ she said in a small voice, and that had been all it had taken. Damien had joined her on the rope swing and they’d twirled and glided there in the dappled sunlight, Simone crying on and off, Damien saying nothing with his words and everything with his arms around her.

‘We’ll go on another trip,’ Simone repeats now. ‘None of this is your fault, Luce.’

‘And Mum – it isn’t yours,’ Lucy says simply, and Simone leaves it there.

‘I need to …’ Simone says, and she eases herself out of the car, gesturing again to her phone. ‘Dad.’

Lucy nods, her eyes wet and scared.

Damien doesn’t answer what Simone can’t bear to think might be the last contact between them for a while, and Simone isn’t surprised; he can’t.

Only, this time, she leaves a voicemail. ‘I …’ she says, wondering if this will incriminate him, or her, or everyone, but not able to leave without some words. She can’t say she will try to contact him – his phone will be being watched. She can’t think about how impossible it all is.

But they will go home again. Of course they will. They’re just – figuring it out, for now. Buying time on credit, on overdrafts, on high-interest loans. So she says the only thing she feels she can: ‘I … God, Damien. I love you. I can’t wait for us all to be together again. I wish none of this had ever happened.’

There’s nothing else left to say. She can’t give a clue to her whereabouts, and neither can she implicate him. All she can do is speak from the heart. ‘I’m wishing we could be with you,’ she says. ‘Always.’

This is a see you later. That’s all.

It has to be.

She presses End Call even though it feels unsatisfying, incomplete. But she needed Damien to know she loves him.

She stares up again at the American sky and she thinks about her plan, as flimsy as those stars made of gas and heat.

The first step is to buy a phone that isn’t connected to them, so that they can keep an eye on the news.

The second step is the scrapyard. They’ve got to get a different car.

CHAPTER 33

Simone instructs Lucy to stay by the car while she goes into the shop. They’re less conspicuous apart, though Lucy being in the car alone is making Simone uncomfortable as she rushes around the aisles. She hesitates every few seconds, peering out.

American petrol stations are different from those in the UK. The far wall is fake brick, lined with vending machines. The rest of the shop is huge but sort of quaint, linoleum floor made to look like distressed wood. It sells almost everything you can think of in small quantities at high prices. Less of the UK focus on the practical, and more on pleasure. Simone could linger for hours here at the SUGARED NUTS/DIPPIN’ DOTS aisle, but doesn’t. Still, she catches glimpses of things as she makes her way around the shop: red Texas T-shirts, peanut butter, jalapeño popcorn, cowboy hats, candyfloss in buckets.

At the end of a small aisle is a display of Motorola phones, and she buys one in cash, forty dollars, looking away from the cashier. She makes sure it has internet, GPS, is a usable smartphone, but not so smart it will reveal their location to apps that don’t ask permission.

Back out to the car. ‘Leave the phones here but switched on,’ Simone says in a low voice through the window. Another bin, another roadside, but this time, they don’t destroy them. Simone wants them to be traced, for people to think they are hiding here, at least for a little while.

They drop down with two distinct thuds. To the authorities, Simone and Lucy’s movements will terminate here, and, together with the CCTV she’s just been captured on in the shop, the police will search here for them, especially as Simone avoided the hire car being caught on CCTV in the petrol station. It doesn’t buy them anything except time, but that’s enough for now.

Simone approaches the scrapyard. It’s unmanned, cars abandoned on a rocky forecourt, no CCTV. She only hopes she can persuade somebody to sell her a car. She walks a loop around them, desperately trying a handle or two, wondering how she ended up here. If someone looks and acts like a criminal, are they?

Back into the shop. ‘Isn’t the car place open?’ she asks.

‘No,’ the assistant says, his tone disparaging. A pointed glance at a clock above him.

Simone stares at it for just a few seconds, watches the hands slow-moving around its face.

‘When will it open?’

‘Nine, like most things,’ he replies.

They can’t spare the time.

‘You can’t sell me one of those cars?’ she asks desperately. Simone is good at getting things, at persuading people, but it’s a lost cause today; she knows it is. He will remember her. He will tell the police what car he sold them.

‘No, guy’s due in at nine,’ he repeats. ‘He’s got the keys.’

On the spur of the moment, Simone buys black tape. It isn’t what she wants to do. It isn’t even really a quick fix, but it’s something. She hides it in her shorts as she leaves.

She stands back in front of the car, which still remains in the shadows, away from CCTV, and looks out at the wide expanse of the desert. They can’t go anywhere on foot. They can’t steal a car – how would they? All they have is the hire car, and all they can do is disguise it as well as possible.

Simone bends in front of the number plates, insects acrobatic in the headlights’ beams, and rips the tape, adding a single black block to an F to make it an E. It’s simple. It won’t buy them forever, but they might be able to get to Terlingua without triggering number plate recognition. She does the same at the rear.

She gets back in the car, and asks Lucy where Terlingua is.

‘It’s back in the direction we’ve come from,’ Lucy answers. ‘The coaches from camp went there all the time. Took a few hours.’

It’s a risk, but all misdirects are.

Simone’s hope is that the authorities will assume a straight line from the shooting, through this petrol station, and onwards to Albuquerque. Meantime, they double back on themselves, their car not triggering ANPR. They left the phones here, but no one will expect them to go backwards. It’s a bodged plan, but it’s still a plan.

They drive. A car appears in the distance but passes them normally. Inside is a man in sunglasses even though it’s dark. Simone thinks it could be him. Anybody could be him. They know nothing about him.

She leans back and accelerates, dreaming of a little dodgy motel in Terlingua, anywhere with four walls and a window they can shut the curtains against, just for a little while. It sounds so ridiculous to Simone that she can’t help but say, ‘Well, here’s to hiding from the law.’

Lucy cracks a grim smile, but then her face sets into seriousness quickly after it. ‘And who knows who else,’ she says softly.

CHAPTER 34

Lucy dozes as they drive towards Terlingua in the murky end-of-night hours, and Simone wonders what her daughter is thinking. Has she yet grasped the magnitude of what has happened to them? Is she dreaming of Damien, whose name Simone doesn’t want to speak, in case it brings to life everything they might have lost? Will they ever see him again?

Simone gulps as she thinks it. She, aged forty-three, can’t think about it, so how can she expect the teenaged brain to? Lucy is still years off full maturity, whatever the world thinks. Simone knows herself that she took until at least thirty to grow up.

She lets a sigh out as she thinks of herself that age, one child in. They’d always thought they’d have a second but, every time Damien had brought it up, Simone found she couldn’t bear to. When it came to it, she simply couldn’t do it, however much of a failure that made her.

But something else had happened, too. The love for Lucy had become loaded. An only child carries a high burden; they are everything to their parents, and don’t even know it.

Lucy turns and looks directly at Simone, interrupting her reverie, and something seems to happen as their eyes connect. Lucy cannot know Simone was thinking about the indecision that blighted – for Simone – much of Lucy’s childhood. And yet Lucy looks suddenly mournful. Troubled. It’s … something. Simone looks closely at her.

But that is when they hear it: a noise, as clear as anything. Sirens.

Faint at first, but nevertheless there. She and Lucy lock eyes again.

‘Shit,’ Lucy says.

‘Yep.’

‘I thought the tape – the number plate – shit, shit, shit,’ Lucy says again, and Simone can see the emotion building in her daughter. Too much trauma stacking on top of trauma.

‘Don’t worry,’ she says, staying deliberately, and falsely, calm. ‘They won’t be for us.’

‘Fuck,’ Lucy says, fiddling with her seat belt, tugging at her hair. The sirens are getting louder. ‘If the kidnapper is working with the police, won’t he be …? It could be …’

Simone can’t bear the panic in her daughter’s voice, sees something looming up ahead, and swerves without thinking.

‘What are you doing?’ Lucy says.

It’s an abandoned building by the side of the road, and Simone thinks it might have been sent from God himself, the parallels with Mexico apparent: sirens, empty buildings, maybe saying that last time she got away with it, but this time she won’t.

It’s large, a shutter door at half mast, just like the place she found the bag in, seemingly abandoned.

‘There,’ Simone says. ‘Fast. Now.’

Louder and louder the sirens get, multiple noises within the red shift, and Lucy is so smart, so quick, she is out of the car and wrenching up the roller immediately.

Simone drives into the garage, and Lucy brings the door down and gets back in the car. They sit for several moments, just waiting, and then the sirens come, and then the sirens fade, and they are alone again, undiscovered, for now, once more.

CHAPTER 35

‘They were probably for us,’ Simone says dully.

‘Yes,’ Lucy agrees tightly.

‘We’ve got to leave the car,’ Simone says, sitting there in deafening silence. She knew it was a risk to take it, but what other choice did they have? They couldn’t simply walk out into hundreds of miles of desert.

Only, of course, now, they’ll have to.

The Terlingua dream dies a death, there in an abandoned garage, like everything. The net is closing in. Simone doesn’t know how long they can keep running for.

All they can hope for is some time: time for the car to be discovered, time for them to get somewhere, to do something, to gather evidence, to make a plan, whatever that might be. To talk to the police in another municipality. To find a lawyer. To find help.

‘We should have left the car and got a cab,’ Lucy says flatly, and her voice contains some blame within it. Simone knows where this is heading, but she doesn’t try to divert it this time. Lucy’s anger, today, is fair enough, even though Simone has spent the last four years trying to teach Lucy to control her hot-headed tendencies or at the very least use them for good. But only recently, after Lucy told a cat-calling bricklayer to suck his own dick, Simone had found herself thinking, OK, is a female temper so bad, these days?

‘Our faces are on the news,’ she tells her daughter.

‘Only just now, and only local. No jaded Uber driver would’ve noticed or cared,’ Lucy says, her tone acerbic, and Simone wonders if she truly believes this, or whether she’s just arguing the toss because they’re stressed and tired and running.

Beyond the garage is highway, stars and desert. They are in the real, true wilderness. With no car – this is … this is mad. They might as well just sit here and wait for their arrest, or their capture by a criminal kidnapper.

‘This is,’ Lucy says, her voice rising as she speaks exactly what Simone’s been thinking, ‘this is mad!’ And here it comes: the explosion. Today’s arrives in the form of a single punch to the dashboard. ‘Fucking fucked up.’

‘I know,’ Simone says.

‘What the fuck are we going to do?’ Lucy says. Simone doesn’t bother to admonish the swearing. ‘We’re – just … they’re after us.’

‘I don’t know. I don’t know,’ Simone says.

‘This is an actual nightmare.’

‘I know. Let me think.’ Simone puts her head into her hands.

But she’s out of ideas. She ought to gun the engine, just drive, drive to the police station and go down for life, worse, but she doesn’t.

When she opens her eyes, and looks at her daughter, there’s an enigmatic expression on her face.

‘What?’ Simone asks her.

‘Terlingua is a few days away on foot. It’s a straight line, south. I’ve seen it on maps when people from camp went hiking.’

‘Right …?’

‘And we have the tent. We were going to camp anyway,’ Lucy says feebly, her voice imbued with the sad and specific tone people get when they try to make the best of a bad situation.

‘I mean, I don’t know, Luce. We weren’t going to camp by the side of a road.’

‘Desert’s desert.’

They were going to go shopping for everything. They were going to go to a proper campsite, hike every day. Make s’mores, Lucy said, and Simone had said, ‘What exactly are they?’ and Lucy had said, ‘A cultural rite of passage. Don’t worry about the ingredients, nor the Michelin Guide presentation.’

She locks eyes with Lucy now. ‘OK. We need to leave the car. So. OK. We have no choice.’

They get out. Their footsteps echo in the garage. The floor is pristine but hastily painted, the edges grey and bubbling. Simone wonders whose this is, who pays the rent on it, why they leave it open, but there isn’t any time to think. They have to get as far as possible on foot.

‘They might know we’re heading to Terlingua now,’ Simone says. ‘If that police car was for us.’

‘We can’t get anywhere else,’ Lucy says. ‘Everywhere is so far apart. We have, like, what, a few days’ worth of food?’

Simone nods.

Together, they walk around to the boot and begin gathering everything. They have about half of what they planned to get. All the gear: the tent, rolled-up foam mattresses they strap on to their backs. A little lantern. Matches. They have non-perishable food Simone instructed Lucy to buy: cans of tomatoes, tinned sausages, bread, and what she bought in Mexico, but none of the luxuries they intended to add.

‘What’s this?’ Lucy asks, indicating the bag from the Mexican superstore, which Simone can’t stand to look at.

She waves a hand. ‘Mexican food,’ she says, ‘we can pack it.’ She scans over what they have. It’s a week’s worth of food, and a few days of bottled water, if they’re careful. It’s crappy sustenance – and no salt, something Simone is deeply ashamed to admit bothers her, but it does – but it will be OK for a short while in the desert while they … while they what?

The bags weigh heavy on their shoulders, digging in painfully. But Simone is glad of their heft; it means they have food and water.

They close the boot, leaving the keys on the top of the car.

Simone is struck by the strange notion that she will probably never see this hire car again. It doesn’t matter. It isn’t hers. But there is a finality to it, like when you leave a hotel you loved but know you will never return to.

Because something is insistent in her brain. What is the plan? it asks. Her entire life, she’s had a plan, even if it wasn’t working.

But now Simone has nothing. In the strangely sterile garage, she looks at her daughter readjusting her rucksack, taking out five bottles of Evian and putting them back in differently in an attempt to make it more comfortable.

She closes the shutter door to hide the car – thank God, thank God, it closes fully – and then they’re on foot.

They cross the highway, and Lucy indicates the vast expanse of desert in front of them. It occurs to Simone that, soon, they won’t know the time. Her Apple Watch is dead. They have the new flip phone, but it won’t last long with no charger, though it’s currently off and inactive. ‘There are campsites and things,’ Lucy says, ‘dotted around in the desert. Some might be empty? If we go this way, I think it’ll take us into Big Bend National Park, then through that to Terlingua on the other side of it,’ she says, and something about her tone makes Simone look at her as they cross the deserted highway, desert bugs biting at their legs, air finally cold, swirling around them, making them shiver. Simone looks up at the sky. It has become a lot colder while they have been driving and panicking and rushing. It concerns her, this environment. Going on the run in the desert is not the same as going camping; you can leave one of those situations, and not the other.

They’re conspicuous, the two of them, their faces on the news.

‘I’m sorry about losing my temper. I’m such a loser,’ Lucy says. ‘This is just –’

‘You’re not a loser.’

‘Did you ever use to hit stuff?’ Lucy says, though she knows the answer.

‘Sometimes. Printers. The odd car dashboard, too.’ Simone no longer feels shame about this. These facets of being human that most people experience. The only thing is, most people don’t tell each other about them. That’s all. But they’re still happening.

‘But you have addict parents!’

‘Well.’

‘Did you feel like a loser?’

‘All the time,’ Simone says, reaching to touch her daughter’s head. ‘All the time.’ She pauses. ‘It’s very bad luck, inheriting my nature,’ she tells her, her voice thick, there, in the middle of nowhere.

‘I know. I could’ve been more like Dad, not even caring when people insult him.’

Simone laughs softly. ‘I think you are a little like Dad.’

‘Yeah?’

‘Very lovely. Very kind.’

They lapse into silence for a few seconds.

‘It’s good you know that Terlingua is nearby,’ Simone tells her.

‘Yeah,’ Lucy says. ‘I know a bit. Been here all summer, plus Easter.’ She shrugs then and a glimmer of old Lucy appears. ‘It’s a shame Texas will always remind me of this, because it’s beautiful,’ she says, throwing her mother a look, and Simone could cry.

CHAPTER 36

They walk for two hours before exhaustion sets in, the wind picks up, and Simone is actually, genuinely frozen. Twice she hears imagined footsteps behind them, whips around, expecting to find someone but doesn’t. There’s nothing and no one, and, in a way, that’s worse. Simone and Lucy have many enemies, and Mother Nature has now become one of them.

She is putting off thinking, instead simply walking, one foot in front of the other, which reminds her perversely of the way it’s easy to do this, thinking you will truly begin your life when the next thing is done, when the house renovation is finished, when the restaurant earns its Michelin star. The next, the next …

Lucy herself reminded Simone of this just recently, last year, on holiday in Italy. Their luggage got lost. They had nothing. They laughed about it in the car from the airport, and Simone had relaxed into the driver’s seat, Lucy in the front – claiming car sickness but Simone suspected simply wanting conversation – Damien in the back, on his phone, choosing music Lucy called insipid. Simone had thought that she was looking forward to their holiday starting. She’d said this to Lucy, who’d poked fun at her: ‘I hate to break it to you, but it’s started! C’est la vie!’

‘That’s French.’

‘I know. It was metaphorical.’

‘Metaphorical French,’ Damien said from the back.

It was late when they got to Venice, but they were grimy from travel and showered anyway. ‘Oh no,’ Lucy said, as she emerged wearing a towel. ‘Noooo.’

‘What?’

‘No hairbrush.’

‘No!’ Simone had said back. Their hair was washed, wet now, with nothing to brush it with, lost luggage more of a pain than they’d thought.

They’d used a fork, in the end, laughing together in the kitchen as they groomed each other like chimps and Damien watched on. Laughter was better with a willing audience, and he was always that, easy to make laugh. As they’d held each other’s hair to stop the strands breaking too much, giggling, Simone had thought that she was looking forward to the holiday truly beginning the next day.

The following morning, hair like straw, they headed out to an Italian supermarket, bought a hairbrush each, which Simone still owns. It’s a crappy one, loses its bristles too easily, but it has nice memories.

But, looking back, the best bits of the holiday were those parts before it truly began. The car ride, the fork, the supermarket.

That was how it always was; maybe it’s that way for everyone. Without the luxury of impending disaster, when time was spun out in front of them, endless.

And now, something completely different. They are forced, through fear, into a kind of burning mindfulness. There is only now. Tomorrow isn’t promised. Simone wouldn’t even give the odds as fifty-fifty.

The police probably won’t have found the car yet. They won’t know in which direction they have walked. She hopes the water will last. They have five large bottles each. It would’ve been enough if they were filling up at a campsite, but how can they?

They have a torch with them, but it would be stupid to use it, so instead they trudge into the desert. Underfoot is pale dust, illuminated to white in the moonlight, which crackles like shingle, then reduces to powder that makes Simone think of the cocaine. Plants she doesn’t recognize, dead-looking shrubs that cut her legs, their twigs bare and spindly like winter trees. They aren’t cacti – more rough, spiked shrubs, things that grow out of shingle, of sand. Things that grow where nothing will survive, things that creak in the wind.

And, up above, stars. An abundance of them, like the entire universe has gathered up above here, and only here, a smokescreen of a sky. There must be two million out there, a messy scatter, a rip revealing diamonds like a seam she could mine, if only she could get to it.

Simone finds a dizzying perspective in it. They’re just humans on a rock. There might be other life out there. Their suffering seems to matter less as she looks.

‘God,’ Lucy says, out of breath.

They must have walked maybe six miles. Simone’s bones ache with exhaustion.

‘How far exactly is Terlingua?’

Lucy makes a face, screwing her nose up, and Simone hates that she is having to rely on her daughter in this way. They could use the new flip phone to look, but she’s afraid to right now. It’s simple, probably not tracking their every move across internet apps, but it might have GPS.

‘Maybe thirty miles …?’ Lucy answers. ‘Three days’ walking maybe? My eyelids feel like they’re trying to close. I’m so tired.’

‘Right. I think we need to pitch the tent,’ Simone says. ‘Start again tomorrow morning.’

‘It is tomorrow morning,’ Lucy says, indicating the sky behind them, very slightly beginning to lighten, but she nods, Simone thinks gratefully. They’ve walked right through the small hours and into the morning. The ground hasn’t become any softer, they haven’t found anywhere to shelter from the wind, or hide from the police, but they need to close their eyes, just for a little while. The last sleep she had was in the gazebo with the drugs. The time before that was her six hours that she thinks she might have to pay for forever.

They need to talk to each other. They need to work things out. They need to decide what risks to take, and why, and when. But, first, they need to sleep.

As they unfold the tent from Simone’s backpack, she is struck suddenly by the certainty that it is easier to hide in a city than the wilderness. They’re so obvious here with their pitched blue tent in this vast, open space. If anyone sees them, they are done. There’s nowhere to conceal themselves. Like trying to play hide-and-seek on a beach.

Simone purses her lips to stop herself from saying this, the way she has hundreds of times in parenthood. It isn’t appropriate.

Next to her, Lucy jumps. ‘That was something!’ she says, dancing from foot to foot. In the near darkness, her features are fuzzy, pale limbs, blonde hair, everything else vague. Simone can’t wait for more daylight, whatever it might bring. ‘Maybe a snake?’ Lucy says, kicking a foot out.

‘No, it won’t be a snake,’ Simone says, but it’s a platitude; it could easily be a snake. Spiders, lizards, bears, anything. She shivers.

‘Jesus,’ Lucy says. ‘I guess it doesn’t matter where we pitch it; it’s all the same open space.’ She gestures into the gloom. ‘There’s a canyon somewhere, but …’ Another hopeless hand thrown out. It could be miles away. It could be in a different direction entirely.

Lucy opens Simone’s rucksack while it’s still on her back and begins getting the tent pegs out. The wind has picked up, whipping their hair around their faces. In close proximity, Simone sees goosepimples on Lucy’s arms.

Simone takes the tent poles and begins trying to knock them into ground so hard it may as well be made of steel. As she makes botched attempts, she uses the quiet time to think of options. Anything.

One tent peg.

Get legal advice.

Another.

Talk to the police the next town over.

Another.

Contact Damien.

Another.

Get out of the country.

Another.

Hide.

The solutions keep coming from Simone’s brain in the way they always have, but she doesn’t buy into any of them. Each is so flawed as to be impossible. They can’t go to trial, not now. They can’t contact Damien – he’d be arrested along with them. They can’t leave the country.

They can’t hide forever. Ten bottles of water. Ten.

She is ashamed to find tears in her eyes as she hammers. Each peg goes less than a centimetre in, the ground cracking, poles wobbling, but it will have to do.

Pegs done, she begins to erect the tent, while Lucy looks busy but isn’t helping. One side of the tent rises up like a flag on a pole as Simone’s brain continues to whir.

Wait it out.

The next side of the tent.

Prove the kidnap.

She unrolls the foam mattresses Lucy borrowed from somebody at camp.

Find the kidnapper.

Find the kidnapper.

This is surely the answer, but isn’t it impossible?

‘You OK?’ Lucy asks her, looking closely.

‘Mm-hm.’

‘Your eyes are wet.’

‘It’s just the wind,’ Simone tells her.

‘Leave this to me,’ Lucy says. ‘Sorry, I was being useless.’

And then she makes Simone’s bed up, as nice as she can get it with the things they have.

CHAPTER 37

They get inside the tent and stand in the very centre of it together, both five feet nothing, eyes level.

‘Jesus,’ Lucy says. ‘It’s not very roomy. Why were we doing this again?’ A tiny smile.

‘A fun trip, to connect with nature,’ Simone answers.

‘Two hours in, we’d google Airbnb, check into one with a hot tub,’ Lucy says, voice wistful.

‘I know,’ Simone says, thinking the last time she shared a bedroom with her child was a long time ago, but she isn’t going to let her out of her sight now.

Airbnb. This springs Simone into action. She gets out the flip phone she bought. No Network is emblazoned across the screen. Simone thinks of everything she could access on here if it had signal. She could find out what the police know. She could find out what the victim was called, which might lead her to the kidnapper himself.

Nevertheless, Simone drafts an anonymous enquiry on Airbnb ready to send to the lodge, saying she wants to book but asking if they have any CCTV as she is security conscious. She will sound suspicious, but she is trying not to care about the risks being taken, her own traceability. It might simply be a race against time: that she gets answers before the police do. She closes the phone again. She’ll send it when she has signal.

Lucy sits down on one of the rolled-out yellow mattresses. She gets into a sleeping bag, pulls it up to her thighs. She takes the matches out and, before Simone can stop her, strikes one against the box. It hisses and flares, illuminating her face from the centre outwards, rippling golden water across her features. She carefully lights a miniature oil lamp they have. It won’t last long – they didn’t bring spare oil – and Simone doesn’t think they should have it on in case somebody is actually passing in this wilderness, but she lets Lucy do it anyway. She will let her fall asleep to light. Perhaps she needs to. Sometimes, certain risks are worth taking, because they allow you to avoid the darkness of the mind.

Lucy pulls the sleeping bag right up to her chin, now. She lies on her back and untangles her hair from a scrunchie, then gets up and begins rooting around. ‘No hairbrush,’ she tells her mother. ‘I had one at singing prison. I don’t know where it’s gone.’

The word prison hangs stark in the air between them. Simone ignores it, getting into her own sleeping bag, which is as cold and as crinkly as a winter coat against her skin.

‘You must’ve brought it,’ Simone says absent-mindedly while the wind rages around their tent, rippling it and pulling it. Her hands are so frozen they feel clumsy, the tip of her nose is freezing. She has no idea how they are ever going to sleep.

‘No,’ Lucy says, pulling at their possessions, spreading them slowly around the tent. Food, water bottles, a couple of changes of clothes.

‘We’ll have to Venice it,’ Lucy says, flashing a grin at Simone.

‘Do we have a fork?’

‘Yeah, we have those little wooden ones,’ Lucy says, and she locates one and begins to drag it through her hair, grimacing in good humour as it pulls. And Simone feels a mix of emotions too complex to even begin to unpick. Lucy’s hair was shorter on that holiday. She was younger then, obviously, different, enduring the constant, ongoing metamorphosis that is growing up. She still needed help sometimes then to prepare meals, with homework … Slowly, slowly, she lost that. She grew taller, her hair grew longer, the umbilical cord that once joined them so physically, so obviously, was gossamer-thin. That’s parenthood. They begin as part of you, and they end up so far away from you, you begin to wonder if any of it ever happened.

‘You didn’t … make any enemies, at singing prison, did you?’ Simone asks, the thought having just occurred to her.

‘Plenty,’ Lucy says. ‘Everyone who heard me sing, for starters.’

‘No, really.’

‘No!’ Lucy says. ‘Oh yeah, I happened to befriend a drugs baron, and hadn’t said until you asked that exact question. Jesus, this isn’t Reservoir Dogs.’

‘Another boring movie.’

‘Not so. Every single scene is an example of dialogue perfection.’

‘What about at camp?’

‘Really not. Camp’s full of good girls.’

Simone pauses, thinking. ‘Do you want to talk about him again? Before you sleep?’ she asks gently. Partly out of care and partly out of curiosity, but also because she is looking for solutions. She hopes a salient detail might reveal itself. Some clue, the way it might in the movies Lucy watches. A tattoo, a piece of jewellery. Something about his daughter. A location. A number plate. She is kidding herself, she knows it, but if they could find the kidnapper, they could somehow prove that this is what he does – couldn’t they?

‘OK,’ Lucy says. She sighs. ‘I want to talk about Dad …’ she says, but her voice trails off.

‘I know.’

‘Will he be in Texas? With the police?’

‘I think so,’ Simone says.

‘God,’ Lucy says, but perhaps the topic is too enormous, because she lies back and begins to talk, as requested, about the kidnap. ‘The lemon smell. The gloved hand. He – he manoeuvred me into position.’

Simone stares at her daughter’s prone form, the oil lamp burning next to her, casting the tent in a golden glow. Half of Lucy’s face is lit, half dark. ‘He didn’t … It wasn’t – sexual?’

‘No. No.’

Outside, the very early morning is still dark and porous. Simone knows they will be silhouetted from outside, a little shadow play for the world to see. She needs to blow out the flame, but she wants to wait for Lucy to wind down, relax, for her breathing to slow.

‘Anything else?’

‘The messenger’s voice I did hear. I was passed into his arms, and he found it easier to hold my weight, and I felt higher up, so I’d say the kidnapper is a smaller man than the man you … than the messenger. But still – large and strong enough to kidnap me in the first place.’ And this is it: information. It’s their most vital commodity, more important than their food, their water, their shelter in their tent.

‘What kind of car was it?’ Simone asks, figuring they will release the name of the dead man soon enough, and wondering if that will lead them to the kidnapper.

‘Hmm,’ Lucy says, sleepy. ‘Not sure.’ A pause. ‘Will you watch me to sleep?’ she asks, something she’s never once said. Lucy was an independent child, said, ‘Go away, Mummy,’ at her first school drop-off.

‘Of course,’ Simone answers. ‘Do you know, the police came, after you were taken. A traffic cop, by the street.’

‘Huh? Oh really?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Do you wish you’d called out to him – got help?’

‘No,’ Simone says honestly. ‘Because that might’ve meant I wouldn’t have you.’

‘Mmm,’ Lucy says, and she is sliding into sleep. Simone leans over and blows out the oil lamp, plunging them into a darkness so thick it is more like blindness.

She holds her breath, waiting for their tent to be ripped open at any moment by an anonymous, voiceless kidnapper. Or, worse, unzipped slowly and gleefully by somebody who gets off on taking women.

All around is silence. Before sleep comes for Simone, she entwines her hand around Lucy’s, which is already slack with slumber, powdery with desert dust. She can’t not be touching her. She would wake if somebody tried to take her, this way, mother and daughter, joined still.

CHAPTER 38

Simone wakes to bright daylight, the sun high, the tent neon blue with it, and she enjoys one, two, three delicious beats before she remembers. The first clue is Lucy’s hand in hers. She’s OK: Simone’s unconscious mind was checking on her before her conscious mind caught up. And the next thing she thinks of isn’t the ransom, the drugs; it’s that she, Simone, is a killer. It comes back to her in broken fragments.

She stares down at her own hands. The hands of a murderer. In all of it, she has thought of this least.

A man who was previously healthy is now dead. A man who was once a baby in the crook of somebody’s elbow, a toddler bending over to inspect insects, a schoolkid, a seven-year-old, telling stories to his mother. She can hardly picture the moment it happened. Simone always thought time slowed down in disasters, but for her it sped up, on warp, holding the gun, the man stumbling. The blood. The ricochet echoing around the desert.

Simone rolls on to her stomach. She wants to offload to Damien. She wants an outdoor date night with him. She wants to walk and talk. She wants to chop vegetables while he goes through bookings. She wants to gossip about how expensive their guests’ handbags are while he tries everything she’s cooking, burns his fingers and says he doesn’t care.

Lucy’s eyelashes fan semicircles across her cheeks, her breathing steady. Simone hopes it’s a good sign that her daughter has been able to sleep this first night, even though the ground is hard, the wind high.

She gets to her feet and unzips the tent. It sounds like a klaxon in the quiet, though Lucy doesn’t stir.

She escapes clumsily through the flap at the bottom. She spins in a slow circle. There’s no one around. They could be on Mars, the moon. There could’ve been an apocalypse. No contact, no newspapers. She thinks of the restaurant back home, the buzz of it. In her mind, she traces herself through that back corridor, to her step where she waits for the fresh produce.

She’s taking delivery of the fish, first thing. She’s the only one there. It comes in from Margate, scentless, fresh and cool. The polystyrene boxes. The slippery fat bodies. She is here, she is happy. She is about to start cooking. She’s making potatoes flavoured with lime. She’s got the balance of salty and sweet and sour just right. They’re steaming hot, a sprinkle of lime rind on the top. And, soon, all this input, the attention to detail, it’s going to pay off, and they’re going to get that Michelin star.

There’s a flat rock near the tent, and she sits on it and watches the horizon lines.

She can’t believe they haven’t been found. She can’t believe that, two months ago, her only looming problem was empty-nest syndrome, which inverted itself when Lucy said she didn’t want to leave. It was uncharacteristic, and bothering Simone on multiple, complicated levels, the way things often do in parenting.

‘I’m surprised you don’t want to, you know,’ Simone had said. They had been sitting in the kitchen at Dishes, in the quiet time after the lunch service and before the evening. Simone was spatchcocking chickens, watching Lucy take a bite out of an offensive shop-bought sandwich.

‘What?’

‘Spread your wings,’ Simone had said delicately. ‘Live out.’

‘I’ve been spatchcocked.’

‘Be serious.’

‘We’re fifteen minutes from RADA. I’ll spread my wings in bed,’ Lucy said. ‘I can get up at eight forty-five for classes.’

‘Hmm.’ Simone had busied herself with the brutal chicken work – they were catering for a cricket match later that evening, had hundreds of them to do, but all through the evening she kept thinking of it, how off it had seemed for Lucy.

That night, Simone brought her home a chicken with a pea salad and pea purée. She’d handed it to Lucy, who immediately set it on a plate and started eating it. She regularly ate two small dinners, one at six o’clock, one when Simone got home at midnight, and never gained an ounce because she usually forgot lunch and breakfast.

‘So you’re not even going to put in for –’ Simone had started.

‘Nah. Halls are so horrible, too. Shared showers.’ Lucy made a face.

Simone had hesitated. The thing was, she didn’t want Lucy to go, either. She was saying the right things, but not thinking them. Simone had found it difficult when Lucy had stopped breastfeeding – just refused one day, and never asked again – and when she didn’t want to hold Simone’s hand any more. Simone had hated it when she had lost her toddler pot belly, when she learned to put her shoes on herself.

Was it because Lucy was an only child, was it because Simone was somehow over the top compared to other mothers (to other people)? She wasn’t sure. Everyone feels different from others in their own mind, she supposes, but this felt somehow primal to her. A melancholia. To Simone, parental love is so very close to sadness. You are given the love of your life and then, slowly, over a twenty-year period, you have to watch them fucking leave you. She once said this to Damien, who had looked confused and said, ‘But that’s the whole point!’ She’d never spoken to anybody else about it. Everybody seemed fine with it, celebrating milestones met and school years passed through. Simone never took a single September first-day-of-school photograph of Lucy by their front door; she couldn’t bear to think of parenthood rushing by that fast, like lightning. A life phase made of cuddles and lunchboxes and Tommee Tippee and Crayola and rice cakes and stickers, snuffed out suddenly one day like a death, when they leave.

Nevertheless, Simone knew that good parenting required her to find out what was going on. Lucy ought to want to live out. To play loud music late at night, to have sex with strangers, if she wanted to – Lucy is, Simone is fairly sure, a virgin, deeming most of the boys in her school ‘either hooligans or, worse, wannabe poets’ – but Lucy doesn’t want to.

‘Is this …?’ Simone started to say delicately. ‘Is that all it is, then? You want convenience?’

Lucy shrugged. ‘I suppose so,’ she had said, putting too much chicken in her mouth to talk any further. Simone waited for her to chew and swallow, but no more information came. Instead, she turned on the television, flicked to something, Taskmaster or something like that, but when Simone checked her phone, then looked discreetly at Lucy, she hadn’t been watching it, her eyes glassily looking to the floor.

And now it is likely irrelevant, all that navel-gazing, untangling her wants from Lucy’s. They’re here, together, no future, no phases passing them by, and Simone couldn’t feel worse about it, but also, is part of her just slightly relieved that Lucy cannot leave her? The paradox of motherhood.

Sleep is lost to her now.

And so Simone sits there and thinks some more. She runs through her tiny and stupid list of possible solutions, discounting them all once again. Getting a lawyer, handing themselves in, staying hidden. The possibilities circle until she is tired of them.

She thinks about the moment she shot the stranger. She thinks about the pink fuzzy marks the gaffer tape left on Lucy’s mouth. She thinks of the bag full of cocaine.

‘I think it’s actually a renowned stargazing point,’ Lucy says, startling Simone. ‘And I’m so entitled I forgot to even look.’

Simone turns in surprise. ‘Is it?’ Lucy’s hair is mussed-up candyfloss around a scrunchie. ‘Nice hair,’ she adds.

‘The fork has done more harm than good.’

There, in their timeless universe, Lucy sits down close to Simone’s body. Her flour-bag baby, grown up. She rests her head against Simone’s.

‘I dreamed of him,’ Lucy says. ‘The hand.’

‘I’m so sorry.’

‘A better woman could have escaped. In the dream I tried harder.’

‘No, they couldn’t.’

Simone allows the conversation to lapse, but after a few moments, it’s time to address it.

‘We need a plan,’ she says delicately. ‘At least for the next while.’

‘I know.’

‘I’ve been kicking it around in my mind.’

‘Come up with anything?’ Lucy says, still leaning her body against her mother’s.

‘Nothing good.’

‘The only option is exoneration,’ Lucy says, her voice so deep and full and theatrical that it carries with it an authority, too. She says nothing more for several seconds, then: ‘Until we can prove our innocence, we need to stay hidden.’

Simone waits a beat, nodding slowly. Exoneration. ‘How will we prove it?’

‘I don’t know.’ She flicks her gaze to Simone’s. ‘But what I do know is that everything that stems from it is explained by it.’

‘I’ve got a message ready to send to Airbnb about CCTV at the lodge …’ Simone thinks. ‘And we could try to find the phones he communicated with me on.’

Lucy pauses. ‘We need help,’ she says softly. ‘We need to get help.’

‘What do you mean?’ says Simone, invisible fingers walking their way up her spine.

Lucy leans away from Simone and takes her hair out of the scrunchie. ‘We know some things about him. He is probably involved with drugs. He has a daughter who I might recognize if I saw her. He had a messenger whose name will likely be released soon. I think we find him. And if necessary, we get the authorities to help us find him. Police in Terlingua. Police that aren’t his police.’

‘I’m really not sure he’s … We don’t know he’s in with the police.’

‘I know. But –’

‘Hand ourselves in?’ Simone says.

‘Wouldn’t a lawyer help us? Or the embassy?’

‘The embassy. Hmm.’ Simone thinks about it. ‘We’d still have to confess, to the embassy. To get their help.’ She looks at Lucy. She can’t allow her to do it. She would still be arrested.

‘I know. But a lawyer – we could build a case with him –’

‘Or her,’ Simone is unable to stop herself adding.

‘Or her. He or she would be truly on our side. So that if we …’ Lucy can’t even speak the words. Her hands are shaking as she messes with her hair. ‘So that we have the evidence we need if we do go to – to more sympathetic police.’

‘Get a lawyer to help us find him, then take our case to the police,’ Simone clarifies.

‘Yes.’

Simone nods slowly. Her daughter is so smart. And she is right: they do know some things about him. The information they have is not insignificant. Perhaps they could find him. But then what?

‘But what would you do if you found him? How would we prove it, even if we did get to him?’

Lucy raises her head, meets Simone’s eyes in the bright sunlight, and Simone thinks again about how this must have changed her daughter. Lucy shrugs, saying nothing, but it’s loaded, an exercising of her right to silence rather than an I don’t know.

Simone shivers.

Now that Lucy is up, she can at least cook. She wants something to do while this conversation plays out, while she thinks. They have mackerel in oil in a tin. Simone deliberately got Lucy to buy things that could hold their own, flavour-wise. She places a small double-folded square of kitchen towel that she brought specially on top. She uses the matches to set fire to the towel, then puts it down on the desert ground and watches it carefully in the white morning light. The towel catches light fully, curling black and grey at the edges. The flames whip upwards, air shimmering around them, and then as the towel begins to smoulder, she knows that the oil will start to smoke and heat the fish. They will have it in ten minutes on dry bread, and it’ll be delicious. No salt needed.

‘Let’s say we do find someone willing to help us, and they also find him. How do we …?’ Simone asks softly, and she isn’t being difficult, and it isn’t rhetorical. Nevertheless, something flashes across Lucy’s features, as quick as light flickering. You might miss it if you weren’t looking closely. Something about the eyes. It’s more than defiance.

Simone stands and looks at the mackerel. It’s almost done. The ground underneath is scorched black with it. The sky around them is wide, clouds thin and golden, their edges scalloped.

‘That person could investigate him,’ Lucy answers. She’s perfectly rational. ‘After all, if he’s done it once, he will probably do it again.’

‘I agree.’ Simone breathes. ‘That’s so smart.’

‘It’s the only option. There are no other good ones,’ Lucy says darkly. ‘We can’t hand ourselves in now. Go to trial.’

‘No.’

‘Although you might get proper cups of tea in prison.’

Simone lets out a laugh. She pokes the mackerel. The oil sizzles; it’s almost done. ‘Cons: prison,’ she says, and her tone is deliberately light-hearted, but internally she is thinking that she’d take this if it were only her. But it isn’t, it’s Lucy, too, and Lucy shot a police officer. They would throw the book at her.

‘Agree,’ Lucy says. ‘Possibility two, we are never found and we become feral desert animals. Pros: no prison.’

‘Cons: no hairbrushes, either. Can you get the bread?’

‘Where is it?’ Lucy says, turning around.

‘We don’t exactly have a pantry. It’s in the tent, obviously.’

Simone empties half the tin into a plastic bowl. She dabs a finger in, tastes the oil: perfection. Hot, salty, a kick at the back of the tongue.

Lucy is still on the rock. ‘Possibility three. We explain what happened. Exonerate ourselves. Find evidence. Pros: no prison. Cons: impossible.’

‘Seems it.’ Lucy still hasn’t moved. ‘Shall I get the bread?’

‘No, no, sorry,’ Lucy says, and heads into the tent. ‘I’m sorry, I am trying to solve wider problems than bread, but I know I’m not helping.’

Simone hands her the bowl once she has emerged. Lucy tries it, tips her head back, and lets out a small sigh of pleasure. ‘Perfect. Perfect sardines.’

‘It’s mackerel!’

‘Oh.’

They have no more options to discuss. Therefore, Lucy has spoken the truth, predicted the future. She has said what is going to happen, only they don’t know which.

They lapse into silence, eating and watching the desert gilded with light. The flat horizon, miles away. The white dust, grey wrinkled trees and their sharp shadows. The clarity of the sun and the ombre blue sky.

Simone knows that in an hour or two she will be too hot, but, for now, after a cold desert night, she is looking forward to the molten, fierce sun heating up in that way that you do on the first day of spring.

‘I’d love a tea,’ Lucy says.

‘Builder’s,’ Simone answers. ‘Strong. No sugar.’

‘Teardrop of milk,’ Lucy finishes. ‘That feeling of the tannin on your tongue.’

‘Are you sure you’re not a foodie?’ Simone says lightly.

‘Very.’ She looks directly at Simone, then, the morning haze blushing her skin.

The sun warms Simone’s shoulders, and she is a stack of pancakes with a knob of yellow butter running down her. She closes her eyes and tilts her face to it. It feels delicious, and she momentarily forgets everything, but as she begins to sweat, she realizes it: the bottles of water they have are not going to be enough in the heat, which is already beginning. The campsites have water fountains, but they’re far from one of those, alone out here.

She wilfully forgets this and pretends, instead, that she is on holiday. Somewhere all-inclusive, somewhere hot. Somewhere with unlimited food and drink, even the cheap kind, with scalding, steaming showers. With a paperback by her side, with Damien …

She thinks of him and how they work. Of his neat booking notebook, of her kitchen chaos. The way the three of them often eat leftovers together and Damien never finishes his because he’s tired and wants to go to bed. She misses him now, misses sliding into bed next to already-sleeping him. Misses the way he disarms both Lucy and Simone, tells whichever of them is angry he is happy to talk but in quiet voices.

She opens her eyes and Lucy is looking at her. Lucy tilts her chin up. ‘He needs to be brought to justice.’

And maybe it’s just the weird morning, the cold night wasteland, waking up to a pink-lemonade dawn with no future. Maybe it’s shock, trauma, sleep deprivation. Maybe it’s just that there’s no distractions, but Simone begins to feel a prescient sort of stirring in her body. That something will change and soon. That they have just set in motion something larger than only themselves, mother and daughter against the desert sky.

They set off after finishing the mackerel, the tent packed up. They might do ten miles today, maybe more, close in on Terlingua, on safety.

‘In the room was this low noise, like a fan next door,’ Lucy says. Her voice, trained by acting classes, carries easily even on the winds of the desert. ‘I spent so long listening to it with these thoughts going around my head like, I’ve been kidnapped. For the rest of my life, I will be able to say that I have been kidnapped.’

‘How did you pass the time?’

‘I didn’t. It went so slowly. Contextless. No time. Just the air-con noise and me. I recited Samuel Beckett plays in my head. It was scary, but mostly it was actually lonely. The world felt too bright after … after you got me, no blindfold.’

‘I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.’

‘I could only tell if it was night or day by meals. You just can’t keep track of time with no marker at all. And he was so quiet. No speaking, but also light on his feet, like a dancer. He brought me things and I didn’t hear the door open.’

‘You did all the right things,’ Simone says. ‘You got out.’

‘Yeah. Guess so.’

‘Do you ever think it might be someone we know? Someone who thinks we have money from the restaurant, or the means to ship drugs, or … I don’t know, someone from my past?’ Simone asks, thinking that her parents had problems with addiction but they were not bad. They did not make nefarious connections.

‘But why would anybody … I mean, someone from the restaurant, like, why would they ever think you’d be a good target for drugs shipping?’

‘I mean, in a way, I was. I did it. And so many people knew about the trip,’ Simone says. She’d spent the whole summer telling punters about Lucy, and when Simone was going. ‘It’s impossible to narrow down.’

‘Maybe it’s the lodge. I don’t know,’ Lucy says. ‘Maybe someone was watching it.’

‘Can you think of any reason why we might have become a target?’

‘No,’ Lucy says.

‘You’ve been to Texas twice this year … anyone you confided in? Ask you strange things?’

‘Honestly, the Easter camp was full of do-gooders. Singing camp was just – just singers. I can’t think of a single strange moment,’ Lucy says, in such a way that Simone knows the topic, temporarily open, is now closed.

By noon, it’s so hot that Simone wishes it were freezing again. They would never otherwise have spent an entire morning walking with no break, and they’re two bottles of water down. Of ten.

All around them is a flat vista. Mountains in the very distance. Nothing left and right except blinding sun, dried shrubs and dust. She can see the horizon in every single direction.

There is nowhere to hide from the sun in the desert. No shade, morning clouds burned off quickly and easily, only the occasional large tree or boulder to duck behind, but it’s hardly any cooler when they do. They have one tube of sunscreen. It’ll run out within days, the water sooner. They need to walk further and drink less, but the thirst is insatiable, a physical sensation at the back of Simone’s throat. As she lets Lucy drink but tries to limit her own consumption, she begins to fantasize about the cold and the wet. Sticking her tongue out to taste sleety cold rain or snow. A perfectly chilled lemonade from the back of the fridge …

The sun is almost vertical above them when the flip phone makes a sound in Simone’s pocket. She startles, not used to noise in the deathly quiet desert, thinking everything is threats that might come from anywhere: storms, wild animals, kidnappers, police. Lucy is up ahead; she hasn’t heard it.

Network Connected.

They’ve been in the desert for less than twenty-four hours, but it feels like days. But now the world sits once more at her fingertips – Network Connected – and Simone begins typing immediately.

She sends the Airbnb enquiry. The next thing she does is google the Shafter waste management schedule, even though it would be so dangerous and stupid to return there. Nevertheless, her heart seems to deflate when she sees that it’s every week, and today. Those other burner phones will have been taken off this morning to some landfill.

And now to the news. Their names. She is walking as she types, stumbling over larger rocks that she doesn’t see.

Simone Seaborn. Lucy Seaborn. She knows before she finishes writing their names that she will find information she doesn’t currently have.

She presses Enter. Google takes a while to process and load, the signal sketchy, and then, suddenly, there it is, the first headline:

HUSBAND OF FUGITIVE WIFE SPEAKS OUT.

CHAPTER 39

Simone’s back shivers deeply, her spine a centipede. Lucy is striding ahead in the way that she does. Her rucksack on her back, hands holding the straps on her shoulders, sipping constantly at water, head perfectly upright. She still hasn’t noticed Simone using the phone, and thank God for that.

‘I’m going for a wee,’ Simone calls out, and Lucy throws out a hand behind her head in acknowledgement, but doesn’t really slow her steps. Simone will catch up. You can’t lose each other in a place where you can see two miles in every direction, where the only thing obscuring the view is the curvature of the Earth.

Simone heads behind a rock, the air above it quivering hot with sun, and opens the article in the shade. She will have only a few minutes.

DAMIEN SEABORN, 43, ORIGINALLY FROM LONDON, has today spoken out about his wife and daughter, believed to be on the run following a drugs exchange gone wrong.

Simone Seaborn, also 43, was captured on dashcam footage in a dispute with a local man, which ended in his brutal murder. Simone and her daughter Lucy, 18, quickly left the scene, leaving a bag full of cocaine behind, but not before Lucy shot at a nearby police car. County police say they are at large.

Husband and father Damien today hosted a press conference pleading for their safe return. He tells the world that this was not a drugs trade. Their daughter was kidnapped, and his wife received a ransom request from an organized crime gang operating in Texas.

‘Please, please come back – facing the consequences is the only solution,’ he told the world. ‘I know none of this is your fault, but …’

When Andrew Wilson, from the Sun, asked him if he supported his wife’s actions, he replied, ‘Absolutely not. She has shot and killed a man, and has taken from me our daughter in reckless circumstances. Kidnap or no kidnap, she took the law into her own hands.’

Simone lets her arm fall to her side, the phone held loosely in her hand. She leans back against the rock, her head warm with the heat of it. She can’t breathe. She can’t think straight. What the fuck? Damien?

This is the third worst moment of her life. The first is the ransom. The second is the moment she had to shoot a man to save her daughter. And the third is this, except that this one feels like a true, pure and undistilled form of heartbreak. Damien, her safe space, her forever ally, her friend; her birth family a shitty hand, the second a full house. And they’re now divided because of a marital dispute they had in the most awful, most stressful of circumstances.

She stares out at the unforgiving landscape. Almost all blue-velvet summer sky, the moon-like desert a mere strip along the bottom.

How could he?

But has he?

Something in her doesn’t believe this. That he could, that he would …

She folds the phone back into a small and sad pebble. She’s got to get on. Lucy will notice soon. While she walks, she can think.

She was the sensible one, Damien the reckless. If she had done what he’d recommended, their daughter would be dead. Simone knows it the way she knows she is in Texas, that the sun is shining, that the sky is blue.

But Simone also knows Damien.

He hasn’t done it. That is the thought that underpins this. He – so reasonable, so considered – would not spill his heart out to the media.

Something else is going on. She looks up at that blue sky. She knows it.

The rest of the articles blur together. Her staff being stopped by journalists outside Dishes. Timeo looking tired, dishevelled, holding a hand up to his face to avoid photographs on smartphones. Somebody called Josephine from Lucy’s camp speaking out, saying she was ‘a nice girl, but thought the rules didn’t apply to her.’

Lucy stops up ahead and looks around for Simone.

‘How dehydrated, on a scale of clear wee to a small brown cube of piss?’ she calls.

‘About a six,’ Simone says, putting the phone away. Lucy doesn’t need to know about any of this.

‘Not bad,’ Lucy replies, her voice high and cheerful, and Simone can’t bear to crush it, her spirit.

Simone has hardy feet from the last few years in kitchens that never hurt, but they are now sore and aching in her battered trainers. Lucy’s back is red raw, even with suncream, and she has pulled out her cardigan and put it around her shoulders despite it being forty degrees. Since adding the layer, she’s drinking even more.

All they do is walk, not speaking. Lucy drinks gallons, sometimes pouring a little over her chest. Simone drinks nothing.

An hour later, she turns the phone on, and there is internet signal once more. Simone has had time to think, and, this time, she walks and types in the restaurant’s Instagram handle. Only she and Damien have the login.

A pinned post reads STILL OPEN FOR BUSINESS, which is damning in itself but, after that, something else. A new photo, a fish, not unusual – they are always showcasing dishes – but it’s not on their menu, and neither is it displayed on Dishes’ crockery. Simone tilts her head this way and that, trying to work it out in the glare of the sun. It’s a fish still with the head on, something like sour cream dotted in four blobs around it. They don’t serve it, and she doesn’t know which fish it is. It’s kippered to a deep red. It looks more like an image that’s been downloaded than created by Dishes.

Simone checks the restaurant’s inbox. It’s full of people tagging it in their posts, speculating about the owners, the news stories. Damien has set up an auto-reply, which Simone winces at. We’re getting a lot of traffic at the moment to this site. If you’d like to book a table please call …

Halfway down the message inbox the restaurant has messaged itself the post of the fish. It’s the only message between Dishes and itself, a strange tautology. She stares at it, but then Lucy interrupts her, and she closes it down once more.

Late afternoon, and they’re hungry. Simone doesn’t want to stop to cook again, but Lucy forces the issue at what must be four o’clock.

Simone makes them sandwiches but they continue.

Into the evening, and at first Simone thought it was her imagination that the walk was easier. She dismissed it as a kind of delirium, but, after a while, she asks Lucy.

‘I think it does go downhill because of the Rio Grande,’ she replies. ‘That runs along the entire bottom of Big Bend. It forms the border with Mexico.’

Simone nods. Relief floods her system. Lower ground might mean water, and water might mean time.

Sure enough, around eight o’clock, a small groove in the land becomes a tiny, wet tributary, then widens to a stream, then even broader. Simone gladly fills their bottles up with it, doesn’t even think to complain about the extra weight. The water runs down the back of her throat. It’s warm, but it’s glassy and satisfying, too.

‘We could find a softer spot, I think, for tonight. Then we should hit Terlingua tomorrow afternoon or evening,’ Lucy replies.

Simone can’t help but notice some simplicity here: the surety that tomorrow will come, that they are not on borrowed time.

They find a patch of grass right by the stream as the sun sinks. Lucy begins to put the tent up while they still have some light, and Simone pats the ground. It’s slightly damp, its surface spongy, and it reminds Simone of England so suddenly and so ferociously that she has to turn away from Lucy as she unrolls a sleeping bag.

She thinks of that one time early on in her schooling with Timeo when she thought it looked so green and so verdant outside on the school run in May that she went home and made a warm green bean salad, a kind of foodie pathetic fallacy. They’d eaten it in the garden, under the awning, watching the drizzle glisten the plants and scent the lawn. It had been the very beginning of summer, where the weather might still be cold but has promise. Later, she’d told Timeo, and he’d said, ‘I’m afraid you are a cook now.’ They’d added the green bean salad to the menu that spring, and Simone is pretty sure the Michelin Guide inspector the following February ordered it. Her humble salad, pulled from her mind by something she had never before associated with food: creativity.

‘Is it mad to rip up a load of grass and use it as a pillow?’ Lucy asks, her hands on her hips, surveying the ground outside the tent. The stream is wide here, and deep, and rushes pleasantly past. It’s nice to hear a noise that isn’t them, or the relentless desert night-time winds.

‘Yes.’

‘What do you think Dad is doing?’ she asks suddenly.

‘I don’t know,’ Simone replies, looking wistfully into the darkening blue air, thinking about the news articles and press conferences.

What would she be doing? She knows she wouldn’t be talking to the media, but what would she be doing? If Damien had rescued their daughter but had sacrificed everything else? She tries to tell herself that she’d appreciate it, that she would respect his decision, that he got her back alive. But she knows that she’d be steaming mad. That he’d rescued Lucy but in doing so would be keeping Simone from her.

‘What would you do?’ Simone asks her daughter softly. ‘In his shoes.’

Lucy thinks about this for so long that Simone begins to wonder if she heard her.

Simone begins getting out the bag of vegetables and potatoes she brought. First, she gets a fire going easily, with sticks and matches and the same watchfulness that cooking requires, the sort of activity that is suited to busy minds, minds that need at least part of them to be absorbed by something else. With water now in abundance, she fills a pot and brings it to boil, watching the flames leap underneath it. And the smell. Smoked wood. The smell of England in January, of walks by country cottages with open fires, of real-ale pubs with fifteenth-century beams up above. A distinctive chalky, wintery smell. She wishes she could bottle it.

‘I’d come,’ Lucy says simply. And here they are, arrived at the topic that they have so far avoided with other tasks: survival, running, staying hidden. Sometimes traumas are so great it takes you several days to truly witness their fallout. ‘We can’t go to him.’

‘No.’

‘So I’d come and find us.’

‘How?’

‘I don’t know. Otherwise,’ Lucy says, talking around the topic, delving into it using a different perspective, ‘I would never see my wife and kid again.’ She looks away at this, into the distance.

The sun has now long set, the stars are beginning to pop out, the sky a bruised purple. Simone wonders idly how often there are extreme weather events here. Storms or hurricanes or even vast numbers of tumbleweeds blowing in. She thinks about bears and snakes. She thinks about these things to avoid thinking about the real, true tragedy: a family torn in two. By Simone? By a kidnapper? She’s no longer sure.

‘Yeah,’ Simone says, choked up. Lucy doesn’t need to know anything yet. She knows too much, has seen too much, already.

‘I mean, wouldn’t you?’ Lucy presses.

‘Yeah, I would,’ she tells her daughter, then adds: ‘At any cost.’

The water is boiling, crystals forming quickly, and Simone is pleased and relieved to see them: salt. She didn’t expect much from a stream, thought she’d have to extract calcium first, but, no, here they are. Salt crystals and all the flavour they bring with them. She begins to pluck them out, carefully, burning her fingers, but she doesn’t mind. She lays them on paper towels to dry out, then takes some tin foil and wraps the potatoes in them.

They will take half an hour to cook.

‘This is nice,’ Lucy says, later. ‘Reminds me of another time.’

‘Home?’

‘No,’ she says. ‘Not really. A time before. When cooking was cooking.’ At this sentiment, she meets Simone’s gaze in the gloaming. Simone can only see the whites of her eyes, the shape of her face. The rest Simone fills in from a hundred thousand memories.

‘When cooking was cooking,’ she says softly, thinking, privately, Well, what does this mean? But Lucy can’t be pressed. Simone simply waits.

‘I don’t mean the restaurant,’ she says. ‘I mean –’ she pauses – ‘what do I mean?’ And then she laughs. ‘When things were simpler,’ she says eventually, looking directly at Simone, and Simone is struck, suddenly, by the notion that perhaps her daughter is hiding something.

‘Things are about as complicated as it’s possible to be,’ Simone says.

‘Yeah. I know.’

‘Is there something else complicated going on?’ Simone asks.

‘No,’ Lucy says, but she projects her voice. It’s too confident, too dismissive; she’s acting.

Hot, tender salty potatoes, insides fluffy. They eat with their hands. There’s a simplicity to the food that Simone, too, finds she has missed. When cooking was cooking.

‘Had things become complicated before Texas?’ she presses.

‘Maybe …’ Lucy answers.

‘Why?’ Simone cocks her head.

‘I don’t know. Eighteen is … on the precipice, isn’t it?’

‘Right,’ Simone says, thinking she doesn’t know at all what eighteen is, actually. Eighteen, for her, was survival, but she would never tell Lucy the full extent of that.

‘Do you have complicated feelings about being eighteen?’ Simone probes.

Lucy nods emphatically while swallowing. ‘For sure. How did you get these so salty?’

‘I made salt,’ Simone says. ‘Didn’t you see – the pan? The salt crystals forming?’

‘I wasn’t sure what you were doing,’ Lucy says. A beat. ‘I was thinking about Dad, when I should have been helping.’

‘What’s complicated about being eighteen?’ Simone asks, wanting to return to this, then raises her palms. ‘Open question. Obviously, lots of things.’

It’s beginning to get cold, now, but it’s still the sweet spot between fierce heat and freezing weather. It’s windier tonight, and Lucy puts her hair up after several moments of being irritated with it sticking to her food and face. By them, the stream tinkles and flows.

‘I’m going to need another fork,’ she jokes.

Simone waits.

‘Are you accusing me of having got us into this situation?’ Lucy asks, and it’s such a leap, a fallacy of logic, that Simone automatically thinks, I wasn’t, but I might now.

‘What?’ she says.

‘Because I didn’t.’

‘I didn’t accuse you of anything.’ Simone keeps her voice level, her mind cycling. Why would Lucy jump to that conclusion?

‘We’re in this together, I thought,’ Simone continues. ‘What makes you think I was accusing you?’

‘I didn’t. Sorry. I’m just stressed. This life is not for me!’ she says. ‘Maybe I will just inherit Dishes after all and be a nepo baby.’

‘No chance. You don’t even recognize salt.’

And that’s the conversation gone, skirted once more. Simone understands it, has spent much of her life hiding her true feelings from everybody except Damien. But this is the distance Simone keeps encountering. Lucy making veiled references to something. Lucy not telling her why she doesn’t want to move out. Lucy being defensive, thinking Simone was accusing her. Simone shivers with something like nervousness. When you’re running together, you have to trust each other – and does she?

‘It feels like there’s no hope of a way out at all, ever,’ Lucy says.

‘I know.’

Lucy pauses. ‘I’m depressed now.’

‘Me too.’

‘Let’s, I don’t know, rescue it.’

‘Rescue what?’

‘Save the day. The mood. Look,’ she says, holding out a hand to her mother in the gloom. ‘Let’s go in the stream.’ Less a stream, more a river, here on the flat ground. It’s maybe four feet deep and flowing. ‘Save the day. It means, no matter how crappy your day’s been, you do one nice thing at the end of it.’

‘Sure,’ Simone says agreeably; it’s not that cold yet. This is the sort of parent she is, always wanted to be, the kind of person who says yes almost always but means it when she says no. Fun times and boundaries. Simone only ever wanted to be perfect.

Lucy takes her top and shorts off, and Simone joins her. And the water is chilly, and they don’t have any towels, and now maybe they will be too cold overnight, but – oh. It feels delicious. The water is the temperature of a still winter morning, swirling, small variations detectable, almost warm and almost freezing entwining together. The iciest parts touch and soothe Simone’s sunburn. She floats and thinks nothing, for once. Not about missing Damien, or their ancient cat in the bay window, or Dishes.

‘God, this is nice,’ Lucy says, her head tilted back, her face a grey moon in the water. Her limbs swill, the occasional foot hitting foot, and Simone thinks of how her daughter once swam inside her, in the amniotic fluid, and her heart seems to turn over in nostalgia and sadness and something else, too.

‘I can’t remember any of our list, now,’ Lucy says. ‘But this feels like a pro.’

‘Maybe,’ Simone says.

‘It’ll blow over,’ Lucy says. Perhaps she can’t yet see the scale of their problems. Simone is not minded to tell her; there’s time for her to get there, to realize. There’s time for a solution.

A pause. ‘Do you think Dad is trying to find us?’ she asks, returning to Damien once more.

‘Yes, definitely,’ Simone lies.

‘Maybe he’s trying to find the kidnapper, too.’

Simone moves closer to her, and sees Lucy’s expression is open and true.

‘When you said bring him to justice, what did you mean?’ Simone asks.

‘He’s ruined our lives,’ Lucy snaps, and it’s clear that Lucy knows exactly what the score is, that their old existence is gone, that she just manages to compartmentalize it most of the time. ‘It’s like I imagined it. We have so little evidence.’

‘No, you didn’t imagine it. I was there,’ Simone says.

‘He was – his hand … that first journey in his car. Then in his arms again, he handled me so roughly as we went in the door to his house. I heard a key turn, a big one, maybe.’

Simone listens, hoping that if Lucy keeps recounting the events, details will begin to emerge that will help them. That voice, Lucy’s voice, throaty and rich and full. It drifts up into the heavens. And even though it has within it some pain, it is also ambitious and feisty and real. Simone could listen to Lucy forever. She would see a one-woman play of her that lasted a lifetime.

‘I’m going to wash my hair,’ Lucy says, drifting to the edge of the stream.

‘No – it will make it so much more tangled,’ Simone says.

‘I can’t resist. It’s so dirty.’

She gets out, a darting white silhouette in the night. Simone cannot resist either. It feels so good to dunk her head, to slough off the grease, the sweat, the tang of adrenaline. She submerges fully under, opens her eyes, staring at the rocks and the silt in the darkness.

She pops up, and Lucy is returning with a shampoo and – ludicrously – an intensive conditioner.

‘This will help get the fork through it!’ she tells Simone.

‘A leave-in conditioner.’

‘Great hair is always a must,’ Lucy says lightly.

They stay with it on for ten minutes, fifteen, talking about small topics, how the restaurant might be doing, what Terlingua is like, if George the cat is wondering why Damien left, too, until Simone’s teeth begin to chatter. ‘It’s so cold I can’t feel my body,’ Simone says, washing off the conditioner with a satisfying oily slick.

‘Do a little wee – warm yourself up, I have!’

‘You haven’t!’ Simone exclaims.

‘I most definitely have.’

‘I’m out now,’ Simone says with a laugh. ‘But thank you. That was the best moment of my day.’

They get dressed and Simone thinks that actually, perversely, that might have been one of the best moments of her entire life, here, in the wilderness of right and wrong, fugitives, but together. And then she sees that Lucy has made the bed for her again.

‘Tell me something,’ Lucy says, sitting in the tent, the soft patter of their hair dripping. ‘Just one thing. One weird thing about your trip. From leaving the UK, to losing me, to rescuing me. Tell me something that could be a clue.’

Simone pauses, thinking. The baggage claim, the hire car, the drive to the lodge. The kidnap, the ransom. Border Patrol. The bag in the empty garage.

Nothing stands out, until one thing does. The relaxation, the swimming. It’s broken something open. All this time, Simone had been asking Lucy about the kidnapping, but they hadn’t focused on what Simone might know, too.

‘There was a man on the coach to and from Mexico,’ she says. ‘He checked if I was OK. There was just something slightly weird about it. I don’t know. Overly familiar.’

‘Describe him.’

‘Grey hair. Fifties.’

Lucy’s gaze lands on her mother’s in the almost black air. Simone can only see the whites of her eyes and her outline, but her stare is lucid and clear. And then she asks a question which changes everything. ‘He wasn’t British, was he?’

CHAPTER 40

‘A British man came to camp on one of the days. I don’t know why. He just spoke to the owners, then left, but I overheard him,’ Lucy is gabbling, and Simone is excited.

‘Manchester accent?’ she asks.

‘I … Northern, I think,’ Lucy says, and she’s still talking quickly, does a great impression of him that matches Simone’s memory. ‘What if they were the same person?’ she asks. ‘Both British, both grey hair. Describe him, describe him more. Damn, I wish I’d got his fucking name!’

‘Me too.’

But there is an agony in Lucy’s buoyancy, because Simone simply doesn’t know. The north of England is a big place. It could be nothing. How cruel that Simone has met one man, and Lucy potentially another, and they cannot step into each other’s minds to see if they are the same. ‘Uhh.’ Simone tries to think. ‘Possibly he had quite distinctive bone structure? Sort of round apples to his cheeks?’

‘I’m sure this man did, too. Did he have quite wiry hair?’

‘Maybe,’ Simone answers.

‘Let’s think, let’s think,’ Lucy says, sitting forward. Her skin is luminous in the moonlight filtered through their tent. ‘Anything else? What was he wearing?’

‘I can’t think. I can’t remember,’ Simone says, and this is only partially true. Because Simone is also thinking of something else; she is one step ahead of Lucy. She is thinking of the ramifications of this discovery, hidden deep in both their memories. Of what it could mean if it’s true. ‘If this person was at your camp and on my trip …’ she says.

‘Yeah?’

‘He was on the coach, keeping an eye on me … I was told to get a coach from a particular location,’ Simone says. Then she pauses, looking at her daughter, wondering how to ask it. ‘Lucy,’ she says quietly.

‘Hmm?’

‘Couldn’t it be him? He paid someone to guard you, and came on my coach?’

‘It could.’

‘And he’s British. Maybe he was distorting his voice because it’s so distinctive. We’d remember. We’d figure it out and put it together.’

‘Someone at camp, assessing candidates for kidnaps,’ Simone says, after a beat. ‘Then on the coach, checking that their candidates did what they were told.’

‘Camp. It’s the perfect solution, isn’t it? Kids filter through. Parents often coming to meet them, who’d do anything for them.’

‘Right.’ A beat. ‘It’s odd that he’s British. You definitely didn’t recognize him?’

‘No. You?’

‘No. Not at all.’

Lucy pauses, stumped. ‘We don’t even know enough to google,’ she says.

‘No name, no …’

‘Nothing.’

‘Pass me the phone,’ Lucy says, and as Simone does so she watches interestedly as Lucy clearly knows her way around a Motorola that she’s never encountered before. ‘Now we know something, we need to find someone who can help us. If we find him, all we need to do is prove what he did. There must be some footage, some evidence, of him on that coach, anything! We can’t ask, but someone could ask someone in passport control who crossed the border, couldn’t they?’

‘Maybe.’

‘Did you contact Airbnb?’ Lucy says. ‘There’s a reply.’

‘Yes. Earlier,’ Simone says, feeling slightly sheepish, though Lucy doesn’t seem to notice any secret keeping.

‘It doesn’t tell you. You have to go to the website. Look,’ she says, holding the message up. It says: No CCTV.

Simone sighs. ‘Damn.’

‘Should we ask if there ever was any?’

‘No. That would be too obvious. I’m surprised it’s even still being listed.’

‘Anyway. The only way out is through,’ Lucy replies, and begins typing. ‘We now know something. We’re going to get help. A lawyer can definitely help us to find him.’

Simone hesitates, worried. Just worried – about everything. About paper trails, about police, about Damien, about Lucy seeing the news, too, and, of course, that the British man isn’t their target.

But she agrees, and lets her do it.

Lucy types again for several moments, then flashes the phone at Simone, her eyebrows raised. ‘There’s a lawyer in Terlingua called James Moody who specializes in wrongful convictions.’

‘Moody.’

‘Right? A hero’s name.’

She pauses then, scrolling again, just as Simone is considering it. ‘Look at this,’ Lucy continues, holding the phone up. ‘He says if you have been convicted of a crime you didn’t commit, to come to him, and in some cases he will work for free. We can tell him about the man. Everything we know about him. Surely a lawyer will be able to find out who was on a coach and what they were called.’

‘Is he …? Can he not hand us in?’ Simone asks, and Lucy shrugs.

‘Or should we not hand ourselves in now, and make the police find him?’ Simone continues, cringing at seeking answers from her daughter.

‘No, that is the exact wrong order to do things in. We get a lawyer, we find him, then we go to the police. Look! Oh my God, this is a sign!’ Lucy says, showing Simone the phone again.

On Moody’s website there is a small symbol towards the bottom that says: My Other Site: See My Rentals Here.

‘This could not be more perfect,’ Lucy says. ‘A lawyer with an interest in wrongful convictions and a house to rent. Let me make an enquiry. I’ll use a fake name.’

‘Fine,’ Simone replies, and Lucy types some more, then shows her the house she’s enquired about.

It’s a salmon-pink two-bed short-term rental, rolling week by week. Doesn’t state he requires ID.

‘We could get some advice from him, then, if he thinks we would get off, or if we find this man, we contact the local police there. In Terlingua.’

Simone shivers. She gets that feeling again. A prickling kind of unease. Something about this next phase, their lack of options … How do you prove a crime, even if you find the perpetrator? The man is so unlikely to have left any evidence, was meticulous not to.

‘We can’t stay on the run forever,’ she says by way of an answer, even though she knows that it isn’t.

‘No.’

‘But I can’t imagine handing ourselves in.’

‘I know.’

Later, Simone lies in her crispy sleeping bag, just thinking. Hoping that this British man is a breakthrough, and musing, too, on Damien. And maybe it’s because she’s been cooking. Maybe it’s because they have some forward momentum. She doesn’t know why, but she suddenly realizes what that Instagram post is.

Damien is telling her something. All is not as it seems. It’s a herring, smoked red.

Once Lucy is asleep, she reopens Instagram and uses the restaurant account to reply to its own message. She sends a few simple words that could be anodyne: Can I book an outdoor date? To anyone reading, it’ll look like an Instagram glitch maybe, an enquiry gone wrong.

But Damien will know what it means. Their walks outside, their picnics. Their outdoor dates that they started in the pandemic.

It’s read immediately, possibly by Simone herself; she can’t work it out. Messaging your own account is confusing.

Then typing. This time not Simone’s.

Delete your message comes back after only a few seconds. Simone blinks. A second line comes. We need to talk on here privately when nobody is looking. I’ll write back when I can.

Simone feels a flash of surprise and longing as she reads the messages. Her husband is communicating illicitly with her. Red herrings and all. Soon, she will tell him about the British man, and they will be on their way to answers.

CHAPTER 41

Four o’clock in the morning and Simone surfaces from sleep, her arms reaching for Lucy. Simone was dreaming that Lucy was a baby, and she had rolled over on to her. She used to have the most horrendous dreams the baby was in the bed. She’d forgotten until now. She’s sweating, panicked, and she reaches to check and triple-check that Lucy is alive, adult and breathing.

Then she sighs to dispel the adrenaline and begins to make a plan. What exactly did the British man say to her? She tries to remember every word of it, but the peace of their evening and the swim in the stream has gone, and the usual roving morning dread begins. No. They can’t. They’re on the run …

Simone rolls on to her stomach, then picks up the phone. And he’s messaged. The same account, messaging itself and each other.

It’s me, D, he has sent. We need to delete these communications. Everything is being monitored. I’ve bought a phone while pretending I needed essentials from Target and put the login on it. I’m pretending to the media and the police to be angry with you so they will leave me alone. And then I can come for you.

And then, before she even has to ask for it, he’s sent a selfie, of him alone in some hotel room somewhere.

Simone lets a gasp out as she reads, lying there in her cold sleeping bag on her stomach. Her husband. Not a betrayer. A smart man who thinks before he acts. Who has concocted a plan to – to what? To help them, she guesses.

You’re there, she replies. You’re there and you’re not angry x

Evidently, he’s still online. I’m so sorry I had to talk to the press, he types, and Simone is dismayed to note he doesn’t deny his anger.

What do the police think? she asks.

The dots bounce for several minutes as Damien types. And then he delivers the truth.

It’s not good here. They think restaurant in trouble and you joined Lucy in order to ship drugs. Think camping was a ruse. A cop called by the lodge and you told him you and Lucy were there after the kidnap (?) so they think the kidnap totally fabricated.

Simone types back: I didn’t want to tell the police! Because of what the kidnapper said!

She sits up. The sleeping bag slides from her body, leaving her even colder, but she doesn’t care. Everything is against them.

I know, Damien types. That cop was working somewhere else the night of the kidnap. On some shift they were talking about. He seems gutted he missed it. I’ve been trying to suggest things to the police without arousing suspicion. The guy Lucy shot at was with his wife; he heard the shot and radioed it in immediately, so he’s discounted too. Tbh he doesn’t look guilty.

Something sad and small sinks within Simone, a kind of humiliation. Neither cop was in on it. They acted so foolishly, so rashly.

But it might mean their suspect is the right one.

Damien, she types, Lucy and I both encountered a British man, me on the coach from Mexico, her at camp. He needs looking into. Grey hair. Mid-fifties. From Manchester. Can you do it?

?? Damien replies.

Can you try and find out who was on the coach? Somehow? It feels too much of a coincidence that Lucy and I both encountered him – seems suspicious.

You think he’s in on it all?

I don’t know.

How would you prove it if you did find him?

I don’t know, Simone replies. It’s such a moon shot. She can see it now.

Do my best, he writes.

She watches him type and stop, type and stop – her husband, to whom the final thing she said was that she loved their daughter more than he did.

But then Damien types again. And it’s a clue: Someone else told the police they saw you at the border? Together? It’s been a big part of the evidence against you. Could it be him?

OMG. Yes? Find out who said it?

They don’t let me be privy to much. But I’ll try.

She lies back down. It must be him.

But I would say the police are asking really leading questions like ‘Did you see a woman and her daughter?’ They’re just intent on getting someone for the shooting and proving you’re lying. So they’re trying to get people to say things, Damien continues.

Simone sighs, a deep sigh that comes from a victim who everybody thinks is a perpetrator. I’m sorry. For what I said, she types to him.

Damien begins to reply, then stops.

Nothing comes back. She types to Damien. What’s your plan? What should ours be?

Leave it with me. I’m working on it. Talk tomorrow, sometime. And she thinks, suddenly, of the risks he’s taken so far. Different risks from her, but important ones, too: deceiving the police. Working with her. Is it an olive branch? It must be. Simone, prone to extreme thinking, tries to remind herself that there is a vast wasteland between enemies and lovers.

Where shall I say you are? he asks. It isn’t a direct question. Sensibly, he’s only – at the moment – actually asking where she isn’t.

Send them to a major city, she says. And then: Is the restaurant OK? I liked your herring.

Staff a bit besieged, but OK. Bookings soaring lol.

Lol.

And they log off.

What must this look like? Hundreds of bookings, the staff being scrutinized by the press. Lucy’s camp mates speaking out. The photos of them by the side of the road with the gun … but she’s completely removed from it here in the desert.

She blinks. Then the messages disappear right in front of her. Damien’s tidying up again, like he always has. She feels a rush of gratitude for him, her husband out there, trying to help. She relaxes slightly, feeling less alone than before.

Simone passes the next hour browsing the internet in a spiral of self-loathing. Stories about the restaurant – a waitress she once had to get rid of has told the Mirror that Simone was a control freak – and social media speculating on where they are. The BBC has covered it, a photograph of Dishes as the lead story, the gold sign on the door that she ordered from Etsy front and centre of a breaking news story. And then someone writing on Facebook who went to school with her, saying she was always going to turn out rough. Simone closes her eyes, and lets sleep come for her.

She only gets an hour before the next disaster.

CHAPTER 42

Six o’clock in the morning and something feels different. Something feels off.

Sharp gravel cuts into Simone’s sternum. The grass is patchy, still uncomfortable. Lucy did indeed grab huge handfuls of it, strewing them to make a pillow. They’ve gone everywhere, are drying and becoming paler. Simone smiles at them. What a stupid thing to do. It can’t have been comfortable.

She reaches for the flip phone, but it isn’t where she left it. Her hand scrabbles around, panicking, until she sees it over by Lucy. Huh. Has Lucy taken it? Been on it?

Just as she starts to wonder, she realizes what woke her. It’s lights. Her whole body goes still. Wide, conical-shaped beams are moving this way and that. Whoever it is must be moving closer because now the tent illuminates with them, the brightest daytime blue. Then darkness again. Then light.

Lucy must sense it too, because her eyes pop open. She throws an elbow across her forehead, squinting. ‘Huh?’ she says.

‘Shh.’

Wordlessly, Simone points upwards as the laser show continues and they must confront an awful truth: they have been found. Nobody would be this quiet. Tourists wouldn’t. Other campers wouldn’t. Only police would. Only people looking, searching earnestly for people who don’t want to be discovered.

They will be surrounding the tent, human beings paid to find and incarcerate people like them. Or maybe it’s the kidnapper. An ordinary-looking British man come for them with some unknown power.

‘Fuck,’ Lucy says.

‘We need to come out,’ Simone says, thinking of the news, thinking what she knows about the police here, thinking about Damien, and the risks they have taken. Have they found their messages? Then traced her? ‘We need to give ourselves up.’ And as she says this sentence, she is surprised to find a strange, shameful truth at the bottom of it, as solid as the bedrock underneath the stream they swam in last night: relief. That the fight is over, a different one beginning, but one that doesn’t involve so much anxiety, so much planning, so much fear.

But no. This is where she stops herself. The relief is false, her brain’s own laser show sent to distract her. Of course she cannot allow her daughter to go to prison. They must find their assailant, then go to the authorities. Damien himself said the police only want a conviction, not necessarily the right one.

‘Wait.’ Lucy reaches a hand down to touch Simone’s. ‘It’s above us. Look.’ She points up, and she’s right. The lights are not coming from the ground.

Simone blinks, then nods, thinking. But it isn’t a helicopter, not in the silence.

‘It’s a drone,’ Lucy says softly.

So maybe they haven’t been found, not yet. A computer is methodically searching the desert, will feed its information back to the police, so they will be found soon.

When it comes to it, there is no decision. None at all. Lucy cannot go to prison. So, unless they are being arrested, on they go. They will prolong this half-life of living hand to mouth, eating salted potatoes, brushing their hair with forks, drinking from streams, because it is better than the alternative. They will try to get to Terlingua, find somebody to help them. Either they are about to solve it, or they will get found.

They need to collapse and move the tent. Its blue form is too obvious.

Simone inches out first, peeling the zip downwards as slowly and as quietly as she can. Her unbrushed hair has dried stiffly into a ponytail. It feels wiry. Sea-salt hair. Her skin is coarse, too, from too much sun. They’ve run out of the suncream.

Outside, it’s easy to see the drone blinking up ahead. An indistinct shape, an alien spaceship, one single beam coming down as though from heaven. As she peers out, it blinds her, winking once, twice, and Simone thinks they might be too late. Lucy gets out and unpins the tent and begins to drag it to a large boulder, her movements hurried but deft.

‘We need to get out of the footage,’ Lucy says.

‘We need to get the tent down.’

They stand flat against a rock, not moving, just waiting for the drone to pass. It will surely reveal their location to the police. It’s just a matter of how much time they have.

The drone hasn’t slowed at all, is still making its distant kind of whirring, and Simone tells herself it isn’t the police. It’s a wildlife tracker or something else she doesn’t understand.

It moves on after ten minutes, zigzagging to a new part of the desert. It lights up the ground in white spots. Simone watches it pass, an AI tool sent to report on them.

They leave it a while, until it’s totally out of sight, and inch away from the tent, silently beginning to move again, limbs and muscles too tired, but they have to go, regardless. Back in the night air, they’re barely visible to one another, clothes too dark to see, their limbs fuzzy white bones as they walk, and Simone finds for just a second – just one – she misses the light of the drone. Of action, of authority. Of an ending.

Simone hasn’t yet told Lucy about Damien’s messages. She doesn’t want to worry her daughter, nor get her hopes up. She is thinking this as Lucy speaks.

‘If it was them, they will know we are going to Terlingua.’

‘I know,’ Simone says. ‘But there’s nowhere else, right?’

‘No. We could go two hundred miles east, hit somewhere else, but they’ll find us before we get there.’

‘OK,’ Simone says softly, sadly. And she doesn’t add that they don’t have that much time. It isn’t just the police. Their bags are so much lighter. They got more water from the stream but no more food.

They will die out here, the land unforgiving. They can’t forage. They can’t shelter. And there isn’t time.

‘Terlingua is big enough to disappear in?’ Simone checks again. Lucy has gone so brown in the sun, her hair much lighter. Rather than obscuring her, it makes her look even more like herself, somehow. They’re so conspicuous. Simone can’t imagine arriving in Terlingua together. A blonde British mother and daughter on the run.

‘Definitely.’

They walk and walk into the bleaching dawn, and an hour in, as if on cue, the flip phone Simone left on this time lights up with signal once more. A small E in the top right-hand corner of the screen. The lowest form of signal, but a blink of civilization nevertheless.

Simone immediately experiences the unedifying mix of curiosity, horror and panic as she opens it. For the news stories. That her conversation with Damien might have been rumbled. That she might read of his arrest, hers imminent.

The pages populate painfully slowly. Her own name brings up a depressing army of results. 1 of 100,000, says Google, and she flicks to the news tab – another two minutes for it to load – and then to the first story.

MOTHER AND DAUGHTER STILL WANTED, it says. The press has found a better photo of them now than the stills from the dashcam footage. It loads slowly, a stripe at a time like an old-fashioned printer. By the time the top half has filled, Simone knows which photo it is. She took it. A selfie outside Dishes, their cheeks close together in the way that Simone likes but is rarely permitted, the white front of the restaurant backlit behind them.

What the newspapers don’t know, of course, is the story behind it. This was the day, Simone thinks, that the Michelin Guide inspector visited. The process is secretive, even to her. You can’t apply. There is no online form to fill in. They simply have to get wind of you, that you are cooking great innovative food, that your service is at least consistent, if not impeccable, and then you wait for them to come. Simone, an untrained chef who’d opened a restaurant on a whim and then fallen in love with food, thought it would never happen.

It would change everything. The restaurant business is not a model anybody would invent and seek to replicate if they were to start from scratch. The cost of fresh ingredients rocketing, the rent, the business rates, the wages. Dishes is regularly written about in the press – the Mail recently featured Simone in her home, headline THE ACCIDENTAL CHEF, which Lucy said sounded like a Netflix series, ‘And not a good one’ – but, even so, the bank account is woeful. So woeful the police suspect a drugs run as the ludicrous solution. The star would change everything. The selfie commemorated that.

‘Do you think you’ll get it?’ Lucy had said. Simone remembers perfectly this February night. It had been unseasonably warm, the first T-shirt day of the year. Lucy had called by after school, coming in the pink door, wandering into the kitchen wearing her trademark Crocs and socks, rucksack slung over one shoulder. Her hair had been messy, in a ponytail that flopped right over her head.

‘No,’ Simone had said, a natural impulse, self-protection, all that old stuff. She couldn’t look at it. She wanted it so badly.

Lucy had gazed around the kitchen. It was perfunctory but tired, money so tight that Simone sometimes scrimped on things that weren’t food. Cheap dishwasher tablets, using cloths until they fell into shreds like tagliatelle. ‘I think you’ll get it,’ Lucy said with the kind of conviction that comes from privilege, but in a good way, a nice way. It healed something within Simone to raise somebody who might, by others, be considered entitled. Better to be spoilt than neglected.

‘I doubt that,’ she’d said.

She scrolls down the articles now.

POLICE SEARCH TEAM REACHES HOUSTON IN HUNT FOR FUGITIVE MOM AND DAUGHTER, says the headline.

She scrolls down, trying to close pop-up ads. There’s a photograph of two county police and next to them is Damien. Doing exactly what they agreed.

Simone can’t help but admire the brazenness of it. Her husband, huge form, dark beard, kind gaze. Wearing a T-shirt she washed last week, one she remembers buying him for Christmas.

There he is, helping the search while messaging her on the side. His punishment might end up worse than hers.

A pixellated box below the article suddenly becomes the still of a video, and Simone is horrified to realize it’s also of him.

It loads agonizingly slowly. One second of speech, then two. Simone pauses it, lets it buffer on the poor desert connection, then plays it. It’s of a reporter asking Damien questions.

‘And do you have any idea where your wife and child are?’

‘No, none,’ Damien says. He’s blurred, the video lo-fi, but Simone can fill in the details: the set, tight, rueful smile, the self-conscious shrug.

‘And I’m gathering you’d never think she could do such a thing?’

And there’s a beat. Just one. No one would be able to spot it except Simone, but she knows it’s there, that it isn’t the video buffering. ‘No,’ Damien says, after that infinitesimal pause, the one that Simone knows means actually, yes, the one that also means that although Damien must put a front on to the press, some things he says are other types of lies, too. Kind lies, ones that hide marital dissatisfaction. The thought makes Simone wince.

She googles stupid, flimsy things instead. How to find someone who you can only describe. How to find someone from a coach or holiday. All the solutions are things unavailable to Simone, like sending a tweet, says one website.

Lucy turns to look at Simone, and she’s pointing to an impossibly small something on the horizon that could be a mirage. A tiny toy town of structures.

‘That’s Terlingua!’ she shouts to her mother.

‘I can hardly see it,’ Simone calls back weakly.

‘Old eyes!’ Lucy says. She begins walking backwards, the sign for the town behind her. Her arms are spread wide, and she’s jubilant. To her, they have made it. To her, everything is going to plan. They have found their suspect and now they are going to seek out Moody. It’s simple in that way things are sometimes when all that has happened is a downwards trajectory has momentarily righted itself, leading to an artificial high. For the young and naive, anyway. Simone goes to close the phone, but that’s when she remembers last night. Lucy had it. What was she looking at? She searches the history – but it’s gone.

Does the burner phone clear it? Or did Lucy?

CHAPTER 43

The sign is red retro font on cracked cream which says: TERLINGUA: GHOSTOWN.

Simone’s amazed they made it here at all. Lucy’s navigated them seamlessly. Imagine, they can stay somewhere with an actual roof. Imagine, they can sleep in a real bed. Eat real food. Are they risking capture to do so? Maybe. But something some people don’t realize is that doing nothing is also sometimes a risk, and often the biggest one: of complacency.

Simone stares up at the sign for a moment, her hands on her hips, thinking about the phone’s missing internet history. But she can’t ask Lucy. It’s an accusation when it could easily be a tech error.

Lucy stands right underneath the sign; it’s at least six feet off the floor. It looks from the outside like a tourist photo, Lucy leaning a slender arm against the wood.

And then she sees the writing under the sign. POPULATION 180.

One hundred and eighty people?

Simone’s mind goes into overdrive. One hundred and eighty people is – nothing. This is a ghost town. They will stick out more than they would anywhere else. It’s the worst place to have come. As difficult to hide in as the desert, but with one hundred and eighty witnesses.

She gazes down the street and she’s half amazed the police don’t swarm right for them.

The Terlingua high street is that only in name: a collection of spaced apart and squat buildings, their bottoms sandy. A small shop built from rough stone with a hand-painted sign reading TERLINGUA TRADING COMPANY and a wraparound porch. A motel, sign in both English and Spanish, with benches outside made from tree logs and clusters of stools and high tables sitting in the dust. A bar with proper old-fashioned saloon doors, with some sort of office above it. High above them the skies are holiday blue, the desert sand near to white. It is a wilderness, a one-horse town.

It is no place to hide.

Simone feels frozen, first with confusion and then with indecision. Lucy led them here and, clearly, was mistaken.

‘This is …’ Simone says slowly, determined to say the right thing to Lucy, of acting with careful empathy for the traumatized brain, prone to irrationality.

‘This is a lot fucking smaller than I thought,’ Lucy agrees.

‘This place is tiny. How … how could you think it was huge?’ she asks, and it sounds like an accusation.

‘Well, sorry,’ Lucy says sharply, ‘for making a mistake.’

‘Population one hundred and eighty!’ Simone says. ‘That’s one hundred and eighty people that might hand us in.’

‘I’m sorry – I got it wrong.’

‘I mean,’ Simone says, ‘didn’t you google it?’

‘No,’ Lucy says, and Simone thinks again of the deleted history.

And the adrenaline and the ongoing poor sleep and terrible food and acute stress make Simone say it. ‘Did you want us to be found before we have a chance to get advice and contact the police on our terms?’

Lucy’s reaction ought to be one of anger, but it isn’t. She blushes deeply, blood red, a tide of it creeping up her neck. ‘Obviously not,’ she says tightly, sadly, and there’s something else there, too.

Simone stops. ‘What?’ she says softly.

‘What do you mean, what?’ Lucy snaps.

‘I mean, it would be OK if you felt that.’

‘I don’t want us to be found. I’m not fucking mental,’ Lucy says, toeing the ground. A pause, then the apology that always comes. ‘Sorry. I meant what I said. Get advice. Find the British man. And then tell the police. I thought Terlingua was bigger, that’s all.’

‘Why do you look so sad?’

Lucy flaps her arms around her. ‘Because,’ she says, ‘this.’ Her eyes to Simone’s. ‘I know you don’t believe in this plan.’

She isn’t wrong; Simone just didn’t realize she had guessed this. ‘I just … I don’t know if, when we find him, what we will … It feels a long shot, is all, to prove the kidnap. And we’re now so easy to find.’

‘Look, it’s fine. I should have googled it. I’m an idiot.’

‘We both are, then. I …’ Simone replies.

Lucy catches Simone’s eye finally. ‘If we do tell the police, what would I get?’

‘I don’t know,’ Simone says quietly.

‘Say if the kidnapper is in league with the police, the unknown guy I shot at, or your traffic cop. They could completely stitch us up.’

‘I know. Look, let’s … let’s talk about the lawyer, then the rest. We … let’s just get settled here without being seen.’ Simone looks around them. ‘Where is the place we’re staying?’

‘It’s a little out of the way,’ Lucy tells her. In the distance, between two houses, a horse meanders. It doesn’t have a rider, nor is it confined to any sort of paddock. Simone watches it. They have landed straight in a western. ‘God. When people from camp came here, I – I thought it was this huge, huge town,’ Lucy says, then adds feebly: ‘They made it out to be. Maybe it is for around here.’

Simone thanks God the police think they’re in Houston; they must think nobody would be foolish enough to hide here. Maybe they’ve got time to get out of here.

‘Did the people from camp definitely come here?’ she asks and, suddenly, she lands on a fear so horrible, she can’t believe they missed it.

‘Yeah.’

‘The British man could easily know we’re in Terlingua,’ Simone says, panicking. ‘Does he know people at camp recommended it to you?’

‘No,’ Lucy says sharply, immediately. ‘He visited just once. I never even spoke to him.’

‘Who did people say he was?’

‘They didn’t. He just turned up. Maybe he knew one of the camp leaders. I don’t know … I remembered him because it was odd and sort of unexplained. Then he left.’

And the way Lucy says it, it is as though the topic is closed now, once again.

‘I think because it’s near Big Bend there will be tourists,’ Lucy says. ‘It might not be populated, but it might attract tourists. The stargazing points and all that. So there will be people to hide among.’

It’s enough to momentarily quell Simone’s panic. Yes, they are tourists. Two hikers here to walk and to camp. It isn’t so far from the truth.

‘We’ll stay a night,’ she says. They need rest and sleep and proper food. ‘Then we’ll – I don’t know,’ she says, ‘but –’

‘We’ll instruct Moody.’

‘Yes. Yes, I said yes. We’ll meet him and see what he’s like.’

They set off along the high street and Simone could not feel more conspicuous. It’s the middle of the afternoon, no traffic, no more horses, either, but as they walk they begin to see people here and there, each one carrying with them a percentage chance that they will recognize Simone and Lucy. Dust kicks up around them as they go, a world in some sort of old-fashioned sepia. The windows tinted, the plants and shrubs brown, too.

The buildings have creaking wooden signs – COFFEE HERE – and frames. There are several ranches in the distance. A second bar, down the street there, with a red flag with a skull and crossbones on it, and what looks like a paddock outside it; maybe the horse has escaped from there. Simone blinks. They could be in 1950. They could be in 1850. In the distance, a man with a cowboy hat on wanders slowly.

Simone glances upwards. Lucy looks, too, at a little office they pass. It has in the window a handwritten sign that reads simply: BOUNTY HUNTER.

Their eyes meet. ‘God,’ Lucy says.

‘At least we do look a little different to the photos, even now,’ she says. Lucy’s lost water weight in her face. But she also looks suspiciously rough around the edges: the grooves of her fingernails are slightly dirtied, her hair tangled at the ends. But nobody observes as closely as mothers.

‘How do I look?’ Simone says, and she stops, Lucy scrutinizing her. They’re standing by the side of the road, now in the shade of a motel. It casts rectangular shadows over their eyes, and Simone is glad of them. Funny the luxuries you miss: sunglasses, shadows, clouds, water, salt, hairbrushes. The list goes on.

‘Normal,’ Lucy says. Simone’s hair is raked back into a bobble. Her clothes aren’t really dirty. She trusts her daughter, that she doesn’t look like somebody on the run, whatever that is. ‘Well, haggard, but normal haggard.’

‘Ha, thanks.’

‘Ageing hides a lot of your sins.’

‘This is it, then,’ Simone says. ‘Let’s walk. Take me to the house.’

They step out from the shade and into the blazing sunlight. Simone looks up, checking for CCTV, and she wonders if there will be a time in the future when she doesn’t do this.

Lucy directs them along the high street and then they make their way into the suburbs. Caravans, abandoned vehicles, more horses. The roads are still wide and sandy, houses dotted up right to the dry hills, skies huge and open.

In the distance there are a handful of white domes. ‘Stargazing,’ Lucy says, catching Simone looking. ‘See? Tourists.’

‘Hmm. I don’t have a good feeling about this place.’

‘We always have the tent,’ Lucy says, but they can’t live in the tent forever. And although she thinks this, Simone still hesitates, protective of Lucy but also of their tentative two-day survival, so far. It seems crazy to change something.

‘It’s that one,’ Lucy says after half an hour, as they turn on to yet another wide, dusty street that is poorly defined, sandy at the edges, the sort of road you might find near a beach, where path and coast merge.

Lucy indicates a pink house, a bungalow, sides stained with water damage, roof cracked, though the rest of it looks in good order. A sturdy front door with no window, shutters on the windows … Simone looks at this place differently; she is looking for a bunker, a safe house.

Moody’s house. A lawyer’s house. A good place to hide, and an even better place to work out if its owner is trustworthy.

It has a wraparound porch: Simone’s always wanted to cook on one, but she won’t here. Her eyes linger on it. Oh, there’s a proper gas barbecue …

She hesitates for a moment, wondering if it’s better to leave Lucy out here alone or take her in with her, into the unknown. ‘Stay there,’ she says eventually. ‘We don’t know if someone might be in there. Better for just me to go.’

‘We said it was just you on the booking,’ Lucy agrees.

‘Do I need a code or anything?’

Lucy shakes her head. ‘Key under the mat,’ she says, and Simone winces, wondering if anything will ever feel secure enough again.

‘If somebody comes up to you, yell for me,’ she tells her daughter, and Lucy doesn’t scoff, despite the retort being easy. The streets are deserted, the houses not at all close together. There could be nobody for miles.

She merely nods instead, and Simone misses her mocking teen, this new adult, changed by circumstances and trauma. ‘It was obvious we were going to come here,’ she says suddenly to Simone. ‘The drone – it’s the nearest town to where we were.’

‘I know.’

‘So how come no one is here waiting for us?’

‘I don’t know,’ Simone lies. She wants to tell Lucy not to worry, that the police think they’re in Houston, but can’t, because it will involve telling her about her contact with Damien, something she’s not yet going to do, not until she has a concrete plan formed with him. And even knowing this would not explain it fully. Police must be on their way here. They just must.

‘Head in,’ Lucy says. She waves an arm. ‘I’m just – I don’t know – worrying.’ Another pause. ‘You shouldn’t use your accent.’

‘I’m no good at accents.’

‘Just pretend you’re on Friends or something,’ Lucy says, like it’s that easy.

‘They will work it out.’

‘They won’t. Loads of people have weird accents. Don’t overthink it.’

‘Fine. I’ll go in. I’ll talk American. As best I can.’

Lucy nods, then says ‘Go get ’em’ in perfect Texan.

The lodge is called Equity. The key is indeed underneath a mat that says both Welcome and Bienvenido. She inches it out, a surprisingly large silver one, weighty in her palm like it might match a period property.

She slides it into the lock, eases open the door and steps inside.

CHAPTER 44

The Kidnapper

I’m almost sure she’s in Terlingua.

Someone like me shouldn’t be out in the daylight, but I am here, at the very beginning of my search for her, my new obsession. I walk along the bleached road, past the theatre, past the motel. It will be manual work, but it will be worth it if I find her. Or, rather, if I find her again.

It is easiest when the emotion is taken out of these things, so here is a list of things that I know:

- She is likely to be in Terlingua.

- What she looks like (obviously).

I have no other information, so I have been forced into good old-fashioned trial and error: watching houses and seeing who comes out of them. These people, with their varied lives and clothes and cars and jobs and habits, they have no idea they’re being watched by me, across the street, usually in plain sight.

I earmark four houses today. They are set way back from the road and from each other. These ones stand opposite a run-down cafe and a church, and I take a slow stroll down the street and begin to watch.

One is occupied, a car outside it, and I stand, ostensibly casual. I can pass for a lost tourist, looking this way and that. There’s movement within, but it doesn’t take long to work out that it’s a man. I flick my eyes down again, and walk on by, moving on to the next houses.

The other three look unoccupied, which makes sense in the middle of the day. I walk around the side of one, nevertheless, and to the back, peering in, my hands cupped around my face, thinking that somebody could be in there, that I’d never usually behave this recklessly, but I suppose it’s a kind of desperation.

I have to find her. And she’s got to pay the price.

There are a couple of clues in two of the houses – a pair of men’s trousers slung on the door of a washing machine out the back, and a man’s watch on the arm of a sofa – so I discount them, but earmark the fourth to revisit on the plan I have made of every house in Terlingua.

It won’t be long before she is mine.

CHAPTER 45

Simone

Simone’s eyes adjust slowly inside, the world blue-grey from the blinding sun, and some ancient part of her brain begins to signal danger.

Is it because her daughter was kidnapped, or is it because the house doesn’t feel empty that she is terrified? She gazes around her, the sunspots in her vision gradually disappearing.

She is in a spacious mid-century hallway containing a dark-wood drinks cart with glass carafes sitting on the top of it. Bookshelves that divide the room. The first one Simone sees is a textbook titled Innocent. She allows her eyes to linger on it.

It’s warm in here, lit from the day’s sun. She walks into the living room, her footsteps sounding too loud. She spins in a slow circle.

A brown-leather chesterfield sofa. A record player. Simone tickles the surfaces with her fingertips, thinking about strangers hiding behind the curtains, just their shoes visible, about police creeping to surround the bungalow, about the kidnapper coming back, angry his man was killed …

She heads into the first bedroom, checking it’s empty. A wardrobe lines the back wall, and Simone stands in front of it, takes three breaths, then opens the doors. Coat hangers swing and dance with the movement, but there’s nobody here.

The bathroom next. No breaths this time. Simone simply rips back the shower curtain, expecting a crouched man, somebody with a gun, but there’s nothing.

As she finishes her search, she relaxes, and that is when she hears it: the record player. Music. Something old and country. A warbling male voice singing about heartbreak.

Simone freezes in the hallway, by the absurd drinks cart, thinking that they have too many enemies, and wondering which one this is.

She brings herself to look into the living room, and there, with his back to her, fiddling with the needle of the player, is a tall, slim figure carrying a hat under his arm. Perhaps he senses her gaze, because he turns to look at her.

After a beat, he walks towards her, his movements deft and somehow balletic: slim wrists, long limbs, a bent neck like a swan. Simone stares at him, rigid with fear and – again – relief, too. The same relief she felt at the drone. Let him kill her, let him arrest her, only let Lucy be free.

He extends his hand, and he says, ‘Sorry – I own the place. Sorry. Hi. I’m James Moody.’

Simone blinks, her entire nervous system alive like the national grid.

It’s Moody himself. The lawyer. The person they might entrust to help them, only he doesn’t yet know it.

‘Oh,’ she says.

‘And, perfect,’ he tells her. ‘You’re already here. Sorry – I put some papers on the player and it set it off. Temperamental.’

‘I was just checking in,’ Simone says, feigning an American accent.

‘Big place to stay for just you,’ he remarks mildly.

‘Right,’ she says faintly, thinking she can hardly tell him he’s the only person who can give legal advice to criminals, or who doesn’t require ID.

He’s lanky, with grown-out hair that possibly used to be neat but is no longer. Outdoorsy hair. He’s in maybe his early fifties. He looks relaxed, easy. Simone tells herself to drop her shoulders.

She thinks she can see him working something out. His eyes move intelligently across her features.

Simone pauses. She doesn’t know what Lucy put on the bloody form. God, she’s left her unprepared. Simone finds the notion that she is entirely reliant on Lucy’s version of events suddenly eerie. Her deleted internet history, the kidnap, the British person at camp, arriving here, in a place she described as a town but which is really a hamlet …

‘OK, great,’ he says. ‘Let’s do formalities, which I always forget. Where are you from?’

Simone feels a great wheel of dread and sadness wrench inside her, steering her like a ship towards home. Towards stupid British things like the Post Office and Sunday trading hours and traffic wardens and trains that never run on time. At beach days spoilt by shitty weather and rainbow windbreakers and people with clipped accents and attitudes, at the grungy Goodge Street Tube station opposite the restaurant, at how she will never get back to it – she will – she can’t –

‘Midwest,’ she answers randomly, hoping the accent matches. She knows she isn’t speaking in a New York accent, but that’s about all she can tell.

‘Super. I own the law firm just down the street, Moody Law. So if you need anything while you’re staying, I’ll probably be there.’ He scrawls his number down on the back of a form and gives it to her. Simone can only hope he will forget more formal paperwork.

‘I will.’

‘You look delighted by the prospect.’ He smiles. Two dimples, then accurately assesses her reaction. ‘Not a fan of lawyers?’

‘Is anyone?’ she asks. She thinks of her parents’ social work proceedings conducted by a poker-faced solicitor who wrote their heartbreak into turgid letters, and thinks that most of them are just trying to make a fat fee, anyway.

‘Not really. Is it a week that you’re here?’

‘Yes, thank you.’

‘Great. If I can just get a signature. I was going to leave this here,’ he says, taking another form out of his pocket, neatly folded into four, ‘or email it, but you didn’t leave me an email address … Is it just you staying?’

‘Yes,’ she says, wondering if this is another stupid lie, but it’s what Lucy put on the web form. Lucy is right out the front and Moody will see her, or already has, but they said one person, and now Simone is doing a fake scrawl that disguises the fact that she doesn’t know which name Lucy put on the website. Panic and survival have made them disorganized.

‘Just ID to go,’ he says, and Simone’s stomach plummets down a lift shaft right to the basement. ‘Sorry – I usually do this all remotely, but no email …’ he says again.

‘Must’ve left it off the form.’

‘Right.’

‘It’s been … a horrible afternoon,’ Simone says. And, God, she wants Lucy here, the trained actor. She’s surprised, though, seconds later, when real, genuine tears spring up in her eyes. For Simone, today, this afternoon, it isn’t hard to cry. The reasons are just not the same. ‘I know you need to tick your boxes,’ she says, ‘but it’s been a crappy day, to be honest.’ The accent isn’t holding, feels flimsy, the use of the American word crappy the only saving grace.

‘Oh,’ Moody says, tilting his head slightly to one side. He’s wearing glasses with large fashionable frames. They catch the light from outside and blanch to white periodically.

He seems to study her for just a beat or two. And then his entire body goes still. It’s infinitesimal. He covers it up quickly, a trained lawyer, but Simone sees it. He clears his throat.

And there is the moment. Eyes locked. His face becomes expressionless, like a shutter closing on it. The only thing he does is run a hand through his hair.

And then it’s gone, the moment stopped abruptly like his record player.

‘I’m not the box-ticking type,’ he answers, his tone mild.

‘No?’ she says.

‘No.’

As they move towards the front door, she raises her voice, hoping Lucy will hear. ‘Anyway, I’ll be in touch.’

They step out on to the porch. Lucy is nowhere to be seen, and Simone at first relaxes, thinking she must have heard them and hidden, but then tenses, thinking she has been taken, or found.

Moody looks at her. ‘Enjoy your stay, and swing by any time to the firm.’ Tone light.

Oh, he definitely knows.

‘I will,’ she says, her voice strained, thinking of the things she was looking forward to. The beds. The showers. And thinking that they will have to make a run for it, from here, tomorrow. Because Terlingua is far too small, but also because she thinks Moody is far too smart. And, after all their plans, she thinks she’s too scared to confess to anybody at all.

‘Hope you like the house,’ he tells her. ‘It’s good for relaxing and hibernating.’

And something about this exchange brings more tears to her eyes.

Is she ever going to have a normal conversation again? She doesn’t think so. How can she? She can’t quite pull at the thread of these thoughts. The thread of what the future may hold. For the medium term. For the long term.

‘See you soon,’ Moody says. He jerks a thumb behind him, as he steps off the porch and heads behind the house. ‘I’m your neighbour, live just over there,’ he says, pointing behind their house. ‘Don’t be a stranger.’

Simone watches him go, brown hills in the deep background, and waits for Lucy, wherever she is. Luckily, Moody’s house does not directly overlook theirs. It’s surrounded by tall trees and some stone structures. They still have their privacy, if you can call it that.

She opens the flip phone.

Lucy’s been googling, the history not deleted this time. She’s been searching for kidnaps in the local area, people convicted for drugs offences – there are thousands – but she hasn’t googled herself. Her search terms are littered with typos as per Lucy, who acts and types fast: pr8vate investigtors, Terlingua, kidnappers in tx, British kidnappers, victims of kjdnap tx, convicted drugs offendrs, Fort Davs.

Simone sighs.

And then she sees it, another search. Torture kidnapper.

Simone blinks, wondering if she’s misread it in the fierce sun. Hoping she has. Torture kidnapper …? Did Lucy want to torture the kidnapper? Did the kidnapper torture her?

CHAPTER 46

One of the distant neighbours comes out, making his way to his car, an old-fashioned cigar in his hand.

Lucy arrives after several moments from the opposite direction, slightly out of breath.

‘What’s Moody like?’

‘Smart.’

‘Does he know? Can we ask him for advice?’

‘I don’t know. I don’t know yet.’ She agrees with Lucy. They have to do it. They have a duty to escape their situation. She’s just too afraid to take the gamble right now. ‘Let’s just … let’s just sleep a night,’ she adds. It comes out part sentence, part sigh. She can’t deal with it right now. Right now, she needs only immediate things. She can hardly believe she has access to them. A shower. Shops just down the road. A bed, a bed, a bed. And, so far, nobody knows for sure. Not yet. Sweet anonymity, let the future be damned.

They head into the living room. She will shower, and then she will cook. And then, later, later, she will deal with Moody, the future and everything else.

But first, she needs to ask Lucy what she was searching for. ‘What is this Google search about?’ she asks.

Lucy holds the phone, standing by the leather sofa, reading. And to her credit, her face doesn’t change at all. Simone scrutinizes her daughter the actor, and waits.

‘Oh yeah, just looking for stories about kidnaps.’

‘Torture kidnapper?’ Simone says. ‘That makes no sense.’

‘I was googling loads of things. I thought I might find an account from a victim.’ Her tone is light, a politician evading a question.

She meets Simone’s gaze, her eyes clear. There is just the slightest of challenge around her chin, and Simone knows to tread carefully.

‘If it wasn’t that,’ Simone says delicately, ‘you could tell me.’

‘It was that.’

‘Hmm. Did you … did you want to find them to …?’ Simone asks, and it comes out as almost a whisper. ‘It doesn’t make any sense that you’d google that to find stories of kidnap. Sorry. But it doesn’t.’

‘Oh sure, I desire to torture the person who manhandled me.’ Her tone is dangerous.

Simone immediately takes a step back. She can’t argue with her like this, not now. She can’t accuse her of anything, not with everything … and now she’s played the card. If there is anything to hide, Lucy will surely delete her search history again. She shouldn’t have asked her. A stupid move.

‘I didn’t think that,’ she lies.

Lucy – predictably – flounces off to a bedroom off the hallway. As she closes the door, Simone remembers the lodge and shudders; she wishes this weren’t a bungalow. She scoffs at herself. As if stairs could have saved them.

The bliss of a hot shower. Scorching. The dial is digital, and Simone turns it up with a beeping button to 102, 104, 106. That is as high as it goes. The droplets feel as though they pierce her skin; she’s not felt pleasure like it.

Shampoo. Conditioner that slides like silk between her fingers. She looks up and hopes the water doesn’t run out, no, doesn’t care, because Lucy has showered before her, and she’s here and the conditioner smells of orange blossom and they’re alive.

She has to turn it off eventually. There’s a robe – her dirty clothes can stay on the floor. She might even wash them.

Once she’s dressed in other clothes, she cooks. They haven’t been to a shop yet, so she uses what’s here. There are eggs, but she doesn’t touch them, thinking about the omelettes she made right before everything changed forever. Instead, she cooks a simple soup using vegetables she finds in a drawer inside a dark little cupboard. Peeling, chopping, stirring, reducing and reducing and reducing, salt, more salt, more salt than you think you’d need, pepper.

She stirs and stirs, and tries not to think how many meals she has left to eat, before she is incarcerated or killed. Everyone has a finite number of meals left, but Simone’s must surely be less than others’.

The name of the man Simone murdered is Jon-Paul Delves. He was a delivery driver from San Angelo, Texas, and is not a known criminal, according to the news playing out quietly on Moody’s television.

‘So it was either his first run as a messenger, or he was so good he never got caught,’ Lucy says flatly, sitting on the sofa. Simone has the phone, to prevent Lucy from googling herself and seeing Damien.

Simone sits back. ‘It’s a blow,’ she says. ‘Maybe Moody can connect him to the British man.’ She has to be brave enough to do this. It’s why they’re here. Really, what does it matter that the town is so small?

‘Exactly.’

Simone can’t stop looking at photographs of him. A smiling, living breathing man, survived by a wife and a child, say the papers. A painful squeeze of her chest every time she reads that line which, for some masochistic reason, she goes over and over. Gone, now, a delivery driver from San Angelo, consigned to the heavens forever, because of her. Simone stares down at her hand in her lap, the one that fired the gun. Then across at Lucy: her reason for doing so.

‘I’m sure he was a criminal,’ Lucy says softly. ‘Nobody who’s a good person drives a bound and gagged woman around.’

‘Mmm,’ Simone answers, close to tears. For Jon-Paul, for themselves, for the rental they find themselves hiding in. At least she can message Damien. It hangs brightly up ahead like the moon: contact with her husband.

Lucy is sitting cross-legged on the sofa in a dressing gown. Hair wrapped in a towel, skin shining clean. It was only a handful of days in the desert, but it doesn’t feel that way. It feels like months. Lucy’s skin is burnished an unnatural pink, her hairline white, and Simone winces at the damage done.

Simone hands her the soup, with bread and salted butter. Lucy dips and takes a bite. ‘Man.’

‘Nice?’

‘Very.’

‘What would you have made if I weren’t here?’

‘Fuck all. Dry bread,’ Lucy replies. ‘Might’ve risked a delivery from the Bar and Grill.’

The lights in the living room are dim. Turquoise lamps dotted around, brass bases. The big leather sofa, then two chairs, bright orange velvet, each with a dark blue cushion. There are shutters which they have closed. It’s a nice house. They’re lucky. It’s two hundred a week. Terlingua is cheap, but their money will still run out in a matter of months, more if they pay for legal advice.

It’s windy outside as the night descends. It rattles the shutters. The porch creaks with it.

They lapse into silence.

‘It’s so weird thinking it might’ve been somebody British. Somebody we know?’ Lucy tells Simone. ‘Details keep coming to me. I wonder if I – I don’t know. Disassociated or something. I remember walking laps of the little room I was in, hundreds of them. I remember, blindfolded, feeling every wall, the hinges of the door, for an escape. I remember banging and banging on the door.’

‘Did you sleep?’

‘No. Not really.’ A sniff. ‘He probably thought I was mental.’ She pauses. ‘It’s too much of a coincidence not to be this British man – that we both saw him, but also that he disguised his voice during my captivity. It’s a distinctive accent.’

‘Maybe.’

‘I miss Dad.’ Lucy says it out of nowhere, and Simone’s hand flutters to her chest. She misses Damien too, but this is nothing compared to what Lucy is going through. She’s lost her father, at least temporarily. Simone looks closely at her face as she stands and puts the soup bowl on the table, then sits back down. Her feet are white, sock marks pale, legs brown from the shins up.

‘I’m so sorry, Luce,’ she says, thinking she still can’t tell her. It’s too dangerous. Lucy would message him herself, call him, demand he come.

‘You know, I’ve been thinking, just one more day, just one more, then we’ll figure it out, it’ll blow over, yadda yadda. Just – just – just,’ Lucy says, ‘and, right now, in the shower, I thought, how long’s it going to be?’

Simone reaches out a hand to Lucy, which she doesn’t take. So she does know. She is aware of the magnitude of the situation they find themselves in. She isn’t as naive as she seems.

‘Not long,’ Simone says. They need help. That is what she is thinking. And they’re staying in a house owned by a lawyer; they’ve got to go for it.

‘I just …’ And to her surprise, Lucy begins to cry. Bottom lip going first, then her whole face trembling. She scoots over and curls up in her mother’s lap. She is twice the size as the last time she did it. ‘Do you miss him?’ she asks. ‘I’m worried about you.’

‘I’m fine. Don’t worry about me. But we’ll tell Moody. First thing,’ Simone says thickly.

‘Shall we save the day?’ Lucy asks her then, standing.

‘Sure. How? What’s the best thing we can do right now?’

‘Hot chocolates,’ Lucy says with a grin.

Simone smiles back. ‘Only one thing for it, huh?’

‘I think anyone would have a nice drink in this situation.’ She pauses. ‘Might even add rum to mine.’

‘Coming up,’ Simone says, finding milk, seventy per cent dark chocolate in the pantry, rum on the drinks cart. She heats the milk on a gas hob, flames blue and deliciously responsive, grates in the chocolate slowly, watching it disintegrate to oily cocoa in the milk.

She doesn’t add any rum to hers, but she lets Lucy have some, though cooks most of it off.

Lucy clinks her mug to her mother’s, there on the sofa in their pyjamas. ‘Here’s to saving the day. And to having mattresses. Are you really OK?’

‘Yes. And guess what?’

‘What?’

‘There’s a comb in the bathroom.’

‘Yesssssss!’ Lucy shouts.

They go to bed a little later. The moonlight is a clear flashbulb in the bedroom. Simone shuts it out. After less than five minutes in separate rooms, Lucy joins her, and Simone holds her hand as they fall asleep.

CHAPTER 47

Four o’clock in the morning. Simone wakes from sleep, having dreamed about that time years ago when Lucy ran off in Sainsbury’s and Simone thought she would expire from anxiety. In her dream, though, she doesn’t find her. She heads down aisles blocked by other people, the police attend, and, at the end, she rushes clean out on to the street and screams. Four o’clock seems to have embedded itself in some maternal cave in Simone’s mind, like her brain is telling her, in the small hours of every day, what she almost lost.

Her next thought is Moody. A confession will be issued to him today. Maybe he will help, but maybe he will hand them over.

She heads to Instagram, where a message is already waiting.

I need to come and join you, Damien has written. Anxiety fires at Simone. He has a plan. The police are asking lots of questions and following me a lot. I know what we need to do. If I know where you are, I can jump on an opportunity if it comes. Then we can figure things out together. Where are you?

Prove it’s you, Simone replies simply.

I met you by a Christmas tree, he says, which makes her smile wanly.

Simone hesitates, hesitates again, her fingers and thumbs skating over the keys and then deleting. And then she sends it to him, her husband.

Terlingua.

Simone picks up the charging phone again two hours later, unable to get back to sleep. She googles herself again, and sees it.

Uploaded only three minutes prior, it’s bittersweet, as bitter as lemons and as sweet as sugar in Earl Grey tea. Simone sits there with unshed tears in her eyes. Tears of pride, happiness, sadness.

DISHES AWARDED MICHELIN STAR.

CHAPTER 48

Simone hasn’t told anybody – Lucy, then – about Dishes. She has pushed it down in the way she knows best. The same place everything went once. School achievements, friendship dramas, emotional pain. Until she met Damien, who forced it out of her.

They are outside Moody’s office together at lunchtime. He said she should drop by any time, but Simone still wonders if he meant it. But, more than that, she wonders if seeking his advice is truly the right next step. So far, her instincts have kept them hidden.

It’s a stone building, like almost all of them, two storeys, somewhat asymmetric, or maybe it’s just falling down. MOODY LAW is written on a wooden sign above the door that leads directly to the stairs, and Lucy touches Simone’s elbow right as they’re about to go up. The stairs are municipal, brown carpets with metal nosings. A handrail, a door at the top propped open with a wooden wedge, and standing in its frame, waiting for somebody – them? – is Moody, legs long, arms folded, glasses.

He steps aside wordlessly, not looking at all surprised by Simone appearing, and with Lucy, too, even though she said she was alone. They squeeze past him and into an office.

Inside, Simone takes a steadying breath. The office is cluttered, papers everywhere. A fan whirs in the corner, disturbing pages of notebooks that drift up and down like birds’ wings. Perhaps demonstrably, Moody closes the door, the handle clicking behind them. Then he crosses to the windows and closes two brown shutters.

Finally, he turns to them.

Just before Simone is about to ask him about confidentiality, he says to them, ‘Even fugitives need a defence lawyer eventually.’

On Moody’s desk is an old-school notebook and pen – he says he doesn’t like computers – with the word KIDNAPPING written in the centre. He’s drawn several arrows coming off it where he is writing down the evidence they have. He’s listened intently to their story from beginning to end. ‘You did nothing wrong’ was the first thing he said to them, mostly to Lucy.

He is now upending the pen rhythmically, clearly thinking.

‘For how long did you know it was us?’ Simone asks, feeling a strange combination of trepidation and relief.

‘Followed the story on the news,’ he replies. ‘Suspected it was you when you arrived – and then you spoke, and that’s when I knew. Your Midwest is woeful.’

‘Well, I’m pleased,’ Lucy says assertively. She’s sitting opposite him on the other chair. ‘What we need to do is find him.’ She goes on to tell Moody everything they know about the British man.

Moody holds a hand up. ‘Let me …’ he says. ‘Let me think this through. Properly.’ Simone is glad of this, his thoughtfulness. Of the Innocent book on his shelves. They have to trust him.

He says nothing for several moments, occasionally jotting things down on the notepad. ‘You’ve no idea on name. Just basic looks, accent, that he was from Manchester.’

‘Yes.’

‘How curious. And you have no idea if this might be someone back home? A disgruntled someone, anyone?’

‘No, really, no idea. Neither of us recognize him.’

‘And as to the police – they’re not wrong that duress is a common defence, but kidnappings aren’t usually mentioned,’ Moody continues.

‘Huh.’

He settles his gaze on Lucy. ‘On this pad, write down absolutely everything you know and remember from the kidnapping. No detail too small.’

Lucy takes it and begins scribbling, the scratch of the pen the only noise other than the fan. ‘Why do you believe us?’ Simone asks him.

‘No previous, here for a vacation. A rest stop is not where one would usually do a drug deal, if it were a simple cash/cocaine deal. Anyone could see. They could see a kidnapping, too, but they’re usually so eager for a quick getaway with unpredictable hostages that they are prepared to sacrifice visibility for convenience. I can’t see why you’d do that for a straight drug drop. You do not have –’ a small exhale that sounds half amused – ‘the typical profile of drug traffickers. So what I’m most focused on is getting rid of the doubt that there was a kidnapping – that is, the cop’s evidence, at the lodge, and the person on the coach who says they saw you together. If we can find the kidnapper, even better.’ He slides a new notebook over to Simone. ‘Please make a list of everyone on that coach for me. Anything you recall about him that you haven’t said, too. Or anybody else you may suspect.’

‘I will,’ Simone says, taking a pen. On it, she begins to write down anybody she suspects. The cop who she lied to. Lucy’s taxi driver.

‘I assume this is a business model where people who are likely to be searched at border crossings choose people who are not, to transport their drugs,’ Moody remarks, as they’re writing. ‘It surprises me that the kidnapper would therefore get on the coach.’

‘That is such a good point,’ Simone says, getting a feeling, one that says this is the wrong direction, that they’re not looking for the right person.

‘Do you think a jury would believe us?’ Lucy asks. ‘If we can’t find him?’

‘That’s a hell of a question.’

‘Care to provide a hell of an answer?’ Lucy says lightly, which Simone both winces and smiles at.

Moody’s eyes go to Lucy. ‘With a normal lawyer, fifty-fifty. With me, better. But we should be able to find someone who was on a very specific coach.’

Lucy gasps at his odds. She looks at Simone. But they simply can’t spin the roulette wheel on this, can they? Simone would if it were just her, but it’s Lucy, too.

‘But the thing is,’ Simone says, ‘even if we find him … what are we going to do? Hope he does it again? I can’t imagine there will be proof of Lucy’s kidnap. Every ransom instruction was destroyed. The only evidence is a call from a number that was blocked. He was careful not to even speak to Lucy.’

Moody gives her a look that Simone can’t easily decipher. The understanding of the risk, maybe. Or is it something else? He lets his face drop again after a couple of seconds, back to expressionless, and she thinks of the magnitude of the trust they’ve placed in him.

Sunlight winks its way around the shutters. Moody holds her gaze.

‘Those odds are not good enough,’ she says.

‘More than fifty-fifty and we’d be free,’ Lucy says, but she doesn’t know what she’d get, Simone is thinking. She desperately wants to ask Moody what Lucy, specifically, would be looking at, but can’t.

‘Let me investigate it, properly,’ Moody tells them. ‘Let me think about what you’ve told me, and the evidence, and let me try.’

‘Why do you want to help us?’ Simone asks.

He gazes at her. His stare is almost hypnotic. ‘I like to help the innocent.’

‘And, presumably, the guilty.’

‘OK, if we’re going to talk about the rule of law.’ He rolls his eyes, then stops himself. ‘Anyway,’ he adds, ‘you don’t get many interesting cases in a place like this, and I’m bored.’

‘Bored?’

‘You don’t become a lawyer to do paddock ownership land transactions all the time. Give me a few days.’ Moody runs a palm over his mouth. ‘And lie low – while you’re here. It’s a small place. I had already worked it out. Don’t try your accent on anyone else. OK?’

‘OK,’ Simone says. ‘We can pay you – we have cash.’

Moody raises his hand in a dismissive wave. ‘Pay me after I’ve helped you. Until then, pro bono.’

‘No –’

‘No argument.’ He gets to his feet. ‘And … I’m really sorry,’ he says, taking the notepads. ‘For what happened to you. I have no doubt it occurred like you said.’

He lets them out, into a hot pool of afternoon sunlight. It’s silent out here. He turns to them, his hair catching the light, and meets Simone’s eyes. ‘I’ll be in touch. Let’s go find him.’

Simone wakes at four o’clock once again the following morning, this time from a dream Lucy’s toddler hand has slipped from hers on a train platform. Simone shouted after her, but no sound came out.

As she comes to, she thinks that, one day, Lucy will live without Simone. She will get up every morning without her, go to bed every morning without her and, oh, how does any parent ever cope with this?

Damien hasn’t messaged her. Simone types hello, then waits five minutes, ten, but there’s nothing today. She waits an hour, then two, then sleep comes for her again, as traitorous as ever, a human need that can’t be fought, no matter how much you want to stay awake, no matter who needs you. When she wakes again at eight, he still hasn’t replied. She checks the news, just in case he’s been found, but there’s nothing new today.

CHAPTER 49

Later that morning, they have stumbled upon a compromise between Lucy staying alone in the pink house (Simone wouldn’t allow) and Lucy coming into the shop (they both thought foolish). Simone will go and buy food, Lucy will linger outside, and then they will get to do what everybody needs to do when stressed: eat carbohydrates.

They walk the streets together quickly, and Simone is thinking about Dishes. A weird mix of pain and pride rises up through her. A Michelin star. Everything she ever wanted. Of course, the article went on to say, awarded to a fugitive, subject to revocation. But it doesn’t matter. She doesn’t, any longer, care about the increased footfall, the profits; she cares only that the food was good enough, unusual enough, interesting enough. Her food. Her restaurant, her service, her decor. Her inventions. Her warm green bean fucking salad.

But she won’t be there to see it. Might never. In the relentless, hot-oil sun, her eyes burn as she tells Lucy to stay close by.

The tiny Terlinguan supermarket – called the General Store – has an old-fashioned vibe, and Simone finds a thrill and romance in this. Linoleum floors, wire racks, mess everywhere and, oh, she could linger here, smelling the different citrus notes in their oranges and poking through that 1995 ice-cream freezer over there with the sideways-sliding lid.

She can feel it, the pull of home, of their old life, of Damien. She wonders what he’s doing, why he isn’t messaging; it’ll be so long before he shakes any surveillance off. And even if he does, then what?

In a hurry, she buys basic groceries, nothing memorable, though she can’t help but notice several things. The smell is different. Nothing like the sanitized Sainsbury’s at home. This is warmer, the air spicy but also stale. The shelves are dusty. They have surprisingly good salt, and she buys it. Will crush it over marinating meat soon.

She tries to hide her face at the checkout. She doesn’t speak. She doesn’t count the dollars, just puts a clutch of them into an anonymous palm that is outstretched. She doesn’t buy some cream she sees even though it’s locally churned and she’s interested.

Instead, she leaves quickly, to find Lucy outside, all the while wondering if it will always feel this way, like walking around with an unexploded bomb, a neon sign above her head, the Sword of Damocles, swinging softly above her, just waiting to fall.

CHAPTER 50

The Kidnapper

Central Terlingua – if you can really even call it that – and the search for her continues. I’m near the (few) shops and two bars that couldn’t look more different: one with open sides and cheap white plastic tables, the other wooden, a latticed walkway made from logs, a turquoise-painted sign that says BAR AND GRILL/SINCE 1979.

There are a handful of people around, and I scan each face hurriedly as they move in and out of the buildings.

A group of men in walking gear, one with binoculars (how useful they might be). A couple emerging from the first bar, carrying takeout drinks in plastic cups with straws. A man in a cowboy hat with a tiny dog that shouldn’t be out in this heat.

I stand under the shade of an awning, across the street from them, just watching. Watching for anybody young and female, thinking that she has no idea that I’m here, that she’s vulnerable to me. I’m already at an advantage.

Maybe she’s good at hiding, I find myself thinking. Maybe she knows to hide well.

I see a woman, eventually, emerging from a side street. Ponytail. Baseball cap. Shorts and T-shirt. Bronzed skin. Shoes that kick up the dust as she goes. She doesn’t look behind her as she leaves, me pursuing her.

But then – I lose her. She dips into an alley and doesn’t come out. By the time I’m in, she’s gone. Out the other end, or into a building somewhere, I don’t know.

I’ll try again tomorrow.

CHAPTER 51

Simone

Back up the street, Lucy is waiting for her exactly where she left her, by an orange triangular road sign that tells Simone once again that she is not in England.

Lucy grabs for the carrier bag, excited, and a swell of people arrive, heading into the shop. Tourists, perhaps – walking gear, a cloud of cigarette smoke that smells like British beer gardens – and Simone and Lucy head down a rare side street between the General Store and a small apartment building, both of them relaxing once in the alley, unseen in its dimness.

‘I just spotted this alley – I hid in it while you shopped. What’re you going to cook?’ Lucy asks, poking through the bag.

‘Chicken,’ Simone says immediately. ‘Roasted.’ It’s cheap. You can do so much with a whole chicken.

Even tinier alleyways head off theirs like tributaries, and it’s interesting here, among the backs of buildings. With extractor fans, old refrigerators, general junk. It’s a run-down sort of place, graffiti, cigarette butts, and they head to Moody’s via a back way, past a fire-exit door pumping out smells of greasy food. There is not much worse than a bar and grill.

Their guards are down. They’ve been to the shops; they’ve seen a lawyer. They have momentum.

But as soon as they let themselves in, Simone knows. A shadow is cast right across the back garden; she can see it from the hallway as they look through the house to the yard. Simone stops. Lucy hasn’t noticed; she is talking loudly about a movie she saw last year.

Simone can do nothing but silently point. They stand there together, next to the drinks cart, and their hands naturally reach for the other’s.

The shadow shifts.

And is it the police, is it the kidnapper, is it somebody who wants harm for them? Simone’s heart pulsates in her ears, and then the shadow’s legs move, and it steps into full view.

And it isn’t the police.

And it isn’t the kidnapper.

CHAPTER 52

It’s him. It’s Damien. Her bear of a husband, here, less than forty-eight hours after she told him where they were. In their bright-and-dark garden in Terlingua.

Simone gapes. Lucy is staring at her father like she hasn’t seen him in years.

‘Damien,’ Simone says, her body flashing with heat. He looks the same as ever. Huge. Nice eyes that crease at their corners, in clothes that are so familiar that Simone’s heart begins to ache. His faded T-shirt with the stag logo on the pocket. Those jeans he’s had for at least twenty years, which he says are his most comfortable. He’s here. She wants to reach out to touch him, to feel the cotton of his clothes.

She unlocks the door and lets him in. ‘I was walking the streets and I saw you leave, but I thought I’d wait here, in private,’ he says. He moves towards her, his body language hesitant. A silence breaks between them.

‘I didn’t want to say anything.’ Simone directs this to Lucy. ‘But we spoke.’

‘Once you told me the place, I couldn’t not come,’ Damien adds.

‘How did you tell him?’ Lucy says.

‘Instagram.’

‘Fucking Instagram!’ Lucy says. ‘Cops too old to check it?’

‘Something like that. You weren’t followed?’ Simone asks Damien.

‘No.’

And there is more to say, and plans to make, but, for now, he is here. Her body is responding to him, her husband. He reaches towards her, one arm around her waist, one draped across Lucy’s shoulders. And they are together, here, still in dusty, bleak Texas, but he is here, her home. Her England, come.

Lucy is looking at her father and he reaches to touch her again, just once, as though he can’t believe it’s her.

‘You came,’ Lucy says to him.

‘I came.’

He glances at Simone. ‘There was a single opportunity,’ he says. ‘After you told me where you were.’ He switches to Lucy. ‘I’ve been telling the police how mad I am about it all. They didn’t stop surveillance, but I think they did relax their guard. The police left my hotel for an hour, went to lunch or something. I couldn’t stop thinking about how I knew where you were. I had the opportunity. Not much press outside; they’re losing interest. I got in a cab. I went to the nearest town, not in this direction, then got another cab. Then got out all the cash I could. Then another cab. Then a fourth for good measure.’

Damien can’t seem to stop looking at his daughter as he is saying this and, after a few moments, he holds Lucy to him, and Simone sees truly for the first time his own pain and relief, and not just hers. It’s the wrong time for her to demand proof he wasn’t followed. To worry that he was, that police are about to descend on them.

‘They will be looking for me,’ Damien says, reading Simone’s mind, still holding Lucy. He talks at Simone over her shoulder.

‘I know,’ she says softly.

It’s cool in the kitchen and Simone could close her eyes and pretend the shade is England’s sun.

And even though he is still talking, Simone is no longer listening. He is here. She lets the worry ebb away. She sometimes has to remind herself that good things in life do not come with a price, that she won’t have to pay for happiness with disaster, and maybe this is one such time. Even just for now. He is here. It is no longer only on her.

She looks at Damien standing there and feels a rush of something. The unsaid. That awful row they had. The separation. The voicemail she left him. The risks she took, with their daughter. It’s at this point that she notices that Damien is avoiding eye contact with her; in spite of their joy, their relationship has been changed by what’s been said. She can tell.

She tries to forget it. Their marriage, their family, is in front of them once more, where previously their future had been amputated by Lucy’s kidnapper. She doesn’t know what it looks like yet, but they have survived this far. Something unexpectedly delicious rises up through Simone, something she hasn’t felt for days and days: optimism.

Part III

THREE FUGITIVES

CHAPTER 53

Tomorrow, at four o’clock in the morning, when she inevitably wakes, Simone and Damien will be in bed together. She wonders if she won’t wake, or have nightmares, if she will sleep through the night for the first time since. At the pink house, two has become three, and Simone’s shoulders have dropped, her body feeling relaxed and limber. She is aware in some part of her that this might be a false victory, but as she cooks a whole chicken in Moody’s kitchen, she finds she doesn’t care.

Lucy tells Damien about the kidnap while Simone makes stuffing. She tells him everything, painful, small details she hasn’t told Simone. That she lay down on the little camp bed, awake, for eight hours straight overnight. That she tried to design a routine to stay sane in case she was held there for weeks.

Lucy goes for a bath – she takes two cups of tea in there with her, saying she will be two hours – and Simone and Damien risk sitting out back, looking at Moody’s trees while the chicken roasts, slumping in the two padded chairs that overlook the desert but are well hidden within the huge porch.

It’s the first time they have been alone. Parents are used to waiting to have significant conversations once their offspring are out of the way and, in some ways, this is no different.

The desert beyond their porch is spindly, decrepit, but attractive, too, the way weeds can be if you didn’t know what they were. In the distance, a couple of horses and their riders amble up one of the hills. Otherwise, there’s nobody around at all. It’s the only time they’ve been away together since Dishes opened.

Damien is chewing gum, and the air is intermittently scented with sugar and mint as he speaks.

‘So,’ he says. He left most of his things at the hotel he stayed at when the police interviewed him, then travelled light. He has only himself.

But Simone finds she doesn’t want to talk; she just wants to be, right here, in the moment. They have so many problems. It’s impossible to solve them all.

She looks out to the horizon, the sky swallowing up the gobstopper of the sun for another day, and thinks that it’s a sort of strange and beautiful way to live. A mindfulness not accessible at home.

‘So,’ she replies reluctantly.

Damien looks down at his glass. It’s lemonade, ice cubes that bob and clink the only noise. ‘We have some things to say.’

Simone wants desperately to avoid it, but can’t.

‘Yeah,’ she says instead. He will have to extract it out of her. The truth is, she isn’t sorry. She got their daughter back alive. She did mean what she said, even though she both wishes she didn’t and wishes she hadn’t felt the need to say it. It’s windy again today in the desert, and it ruffles Damien’s hair back from his forehead. The bathroom is at the back of the house, too, and through the open window, Simone hears the sloshing of water. She reaches up to close it. ‘I’m amazed it worked,’ Simone says. ‘Beyond amazed. You’re here.’

‘Can we talk about our row?’

‘I am sorry I said such an ugly thing to you.’

‘Did you mean it?’ he asks, his tone mild.

‘I shouldn’t have said it.’

‘That’s not what I asked.’

‘Maybe we love her differently,’ Simone answers.

A soft laugh. ‘So you did mean it.’

Simone turns her mouth down. ‘A taboo exploded out of me at the wrong time, but …’

‘Yes.’

‘Kind of. Yes.’

‘Look, I can have my feelings hurt by you but still be here, still want to be here, with you,’ he says, and he scoots his chair closer to hers. Their knees touch, and Simone is strangely nervous, the happy nerves of first dates, but feeling grateful, too, for that quality of his that is hard to find: emotional maturity. ‘I didn’t want to say this online,’ he says, waving a hand. And then he looks at her, and Simone thinks, Please, please, please don’t say that I did the wrong thing. Please don’t ask me about buying a gun. Trafficking drugs. She can’t deal with anybody’s judgement right now, but much less from him, a man who has always unconditionally accepted her.

‘Well,’ he says. ‘Just this. Thank God it was you who got the ransom and not me. I might’ve told the police, and then we might not’ve got her back.’

And Simone closes her eyes. Those beautiful words that must be so hard for him to say but that mean so much to her. She did the right thing, even though they ended up here, in a one-horse town in Texas, the three of them on the run.

‘Thank you,’ she says, her voice thick. ‘Thank you.’ She clears her throat, and he passes her his lemonade wordlessly. Something about this gesture touches her as she sips it. ‘Thank you,’ she says again.

Simone’s body begins to unwind slowly as they sit there, together. Adrenaline she has become accustomed to feeling begins to stop burning.

And then she starts to talk. Every moment, from the beginning to the end. And the thing she actually wants to linger on is the shooting. That man, survived by a wife and child, taken by her. It’s been waiting there, the images boxed up in her mind to tell somebody safe, someone who is not her child. She tells him about the blood and the feel of the handgun, the body, losing the pulse, their panicked phone call. All the while, Damien holds her hands and doesn’t ask any questions, just lets her talk. Just listens.

‘I wake at four every morning. The time she was taken. I dream of her disappearing.’

‘Understandable,’ he says, later. ‘I wouldn’t even have woken … so you’re a better parent than me.’ It’s an olive branch, Simone thinks, offered there in the desert.

Then he tells her, ‘The police, they … I don’t know. From the sheriff’s call, they seemed to take against you.’

‘You know about that call?’

‘Uh-huh,’ he says calmly. ‘They told me everything. They interviewed the cop who you lied to. He said he felt sure Lucy was there.’

‘But why?’

‘Said you seemed too calm,’ he replies, and Simone cringes. Her ability to mask in situations where she’s under pressure, taught to her by a shitty childhood. Now the unravelling of a great adulthood. ‘Said Lucy’s things were all around. Said he didn’t notice a broken door.’

‘Did they go back there?’

‘Don’t know. He’s a key witness for them. They checked the ANPR footage of your car, but it’s blurry. Just saw it driving to the border. You can’t tell if Lucy is inside or not. Then someone – whoever, the British man, maybe – said you weren’t alone on the coach. Then the call to the sheriff – they think it was some sort of bluff. Drugs drop gone wrong – you needed to invent a story.’

‘We didn’t call the sheriff. The operator put us through to him. We called a fucking ambulance.’

‘Oh,’ Damien says. ‘I guess, the thing is …’ A hesitation. ‘I guess to the police maybe it felt like there was such public interest in this story that they didn’t want to listen to you, I suppose,’ he says, his tone low. ‘They were looking for a perpetrator, like they always are. It’s easier to assume that’s you. Everyone believed the headline, so they forged on with it.’

‘So they don’t care to investigate it,’ Simone says, her tone deadpan. ‘They just want a conviction.’

‘Yeah.’

‘How stupid.’

‘No. I know,’ Damien soothes. ‘I know.’

‘Is it me they want, mostly?’ Simone asks him.

Damien waves a hand, but it’s exaggerated, the sort of thing you do when keen to move the conversation on, away from this topic. She looks at him closely. He stands and double-checks the window is closed even though he saw her do it. He’s buying time, thinking.

She isn’t usually opposed to this. Damien fills the gaps in their marriage with thought and careful planning. Simone drives the rest forward with action. It is how they have always worked. Her messy cooking, his quiet tidying up. She always reinventing the menu, he wanting to stay the same.

‘They want you for murder and drugs crimes, but Lucy is a full accessory, plus wanted in her own right for shooting at the Buick, which they have interpreted as an attempted homicide on a cop,’ he says in the end softly, turning to her.

‘Do you know what we would get?’ Simone asks, without thought, and if Damien knows, he says that he doesn’t; he’s always sparing her.

He looks at her. ‘They asked me over and over about our phone calls. I told them everything I knew about the kidnap, about your description of it. They said it’s a very common defence to any crime around here: say you were forced to do it by organized criminals.’

‘But that’s! That’s –’

‘I know,’ he interrupts. ‘Mad. And unfair.’

‘Sometimes, the rare thing does happen.’

‘Yep.’

‘Lucy’s account of it is so visceral …’

‘She’s a trained actor. The police are well aware.’

‘So. Fucking. What.’

‘I have missed your swearing.’

‘Believe me, it’s been ongoing.’

His voice turns delicate. ‘This doesn’t mean a court would convict.’

‘Hmm.’

‘The business opportunity text from me really wasn’t helpful. And they grabbed on to how you recently also sent some other texts about the restaurant’s overdraft to Luan.’

‘August was a bad month. Wet. They think you flew out to make money to put in our account? Because of the text I sent to you about you having access to our bank?’

‘Yes.’

‘Do they think you’re an accessory?’

‘I’m not sure. They didn’t caution me.’

‘It’s mental. As if the solution to a restaurant ailing is a drugs drop!’

‘I know. I think they thought you were offered an opportunity, somehow, so flew out.’

‘Did you see the news about the star?’ she asks, and is surprised that, at this above all else, she loses it, her face crumpling up like a child’s while Damien holds her and tells her that he did.

They lapse into silence. ‘Do you think we should hand ourselves in?’ she asks quietly.

Damien pauses for so long that Simone leans back in his arms to look at him.

‘No,’ he says, but it doesn’t sound exactly like a refusal to Simone. Then he adds, ‘Don’t ask me that.’

The breeze begins to cool rapidly the way that it does here. Simone leans into it, but Damien is looking at her strangely.

‘What?’ she asks him.

‘I’ve been thinking about the best thing to do,’ Damien says, and it is precisely at this moment that Simone realizes he isn’t only here because he wanted to join them. He is here because he has made a plan for them. Sure enough, he finishes this with: ‘I’ve got an idea.’

CHAPTER 54

‘You can buy an identity,’ Damien says simply. He places his glass down on the decking at his bare feet, then darts a cautious glance at the bathroom window and at the horizon beyond them.

‘An identity,’ Simone says, staring at the ring of condensation that begins to form around the glass in the heat.

‘A false identity. And then settle somewhere. Somewhere people aren’t looking.’

The world around them seems to stop, for just a moment, for Simone and Damien only. The wind lets up, the ice cubes in his glass stop moving. The desert holds its breath.

‘Right,’ Simone says softly, to buy thinking time. In all her rumination with Lucy, this solution – hiding forever, but intentionally – did not really come up. And she supposes that was because Damien wasn’t with them, so it wasn’t available to them, but … it seems so obvious now, but something else, too. Something painful, something that feels like grief.

They have so much still to figure out. They have to find the man. But here is a solution that feels more viable. Perhaps the answer was not to find the kidnapper, nor to hand themselves in, nor exoneration, either – the answer was to disappear.

‘I see,’ she says.

‘You don’t think?’ Damien asks, the question open and curious. ‘There’s a guy – on the dark web. Near to Galveston Port. You go to see him, get an identity, then get a boat.’

‘How’d you know that?’

‘On my burner phone. Private browsing.’

‘We’ve spoken to a lawyer here, he owns this place too, to get his help to try and prove it, to find him. Let’s do that first,’ she says decisively.

‘Did you? You told him everything?’ Damien says, and Simone is surprised to see that he clearly thinks this is risky, riskier than buying falsified documents from a stranger.

Another row brews on the horizon. How come Simone and Damien never differed this much before, even though they are so different?

‘No! I didn’t tell Moody for a full day. I wanted to check him out, make sure no cops came for us here.’

‘Fine, whatever. But even if he finds him, you’ll still have to roll the dice in court.’

‘Hmm.’

‘Forget confessing, and hope the lawyer stays quiet. The guy in Galveston does false passports,’ Damien says, talking in the fast way somebody does when they have held information inside, alone, for too long. ‘With an actual passport, we could get to somewhere like the Bahamas.’

The Bahamas. Simone winces painfully; they spent their honeymoon there. He doesn’t acknowledge this, and maybe it’s too much for him to do so, concentrating instead on the aftermath of getting their daughter back from circumstance and fate’s clutches.

‘Somewhere like the Bahamas, or there?’ she asks, wondering how fully formed this plan is.

‘Just a suggestion. Nothing set in stone.’ Simone meets his eyes. ‘Get a rental. Get jobs,’ he throws out.

‘But.’

‘I know.’

‘That would be … you’re saying forever?’

Damien says nothing. A small shrug. A huge hand on her knee. A sip of his lemonade. And, despite everything, Simone thinks of Dishes, of the back corridor, of the Michelin star plaque she might never see.

‘How do you know Moody’s who he says he is?’ he asks.

‘I don’t, I guess.’

Their voices are hushed in the Texan sunset, and Damien keeps checking the horizon for people, for police, she guesses.

‘You seem, I don’t know,’ he says, ‘pessimistic?’

‘Of course I am,’ she answers. ‘It’s a solution. But it’s not perfect. And we have something to unlock with Moody first.’

The breeze fades as they sit together. Her heart wrenches painfully as she thinks of Luan and the restaurant and her friends. But not as painfully as if she had to stay away from him. She tries to change her mindset. A trade has been done. She got Lucy back. She got Damien. This is the price. It isn’t so bad.

But it feels it. Because two weeks ago, none of these were choices at all. These are grim decisions, made of the same rocks and hard places as the Lone Star desert, and Simone doesn’t want to be making them.

Music begins playing somewhere. Simone startles, shocked, then cocks an ear, listening. She tells herself that when they are caught, it will be stealthy. A surprise. Not like this. This music is a distant neighbour somewhere, a guitar strumming out in the lazy evening.

If. If they are caught, she corrects herself, and Simone finds that curious relief again at the thought of it.

‘It’s Oasis,’ Damien says quietly.

And it is. It’s fucking ‘Wonderwall’. Could there be anything more quintessentially British?

‘Huh,’ she says softly. ‘Listen to that.’ A foreign breeze that makes the breath hitch in Simone’s throat. She couldn’t miss England more. Back home now, first week of September, it will already be coat weather, unpredictable rain/sun/hail mix. Cold and flu season already. Quality Street in the shops. New-school-year photographs on Facebook.

And, finally, she can turn and look directly at the sadness. Damien thinks they are never going home again. In fact, he intends it.

England comes to her in flashes. Hanging washing on the line and dashing out to get it in during summer mizzle, soft rain like pine needles on skin. Cobbled streets and fish and chip shops and the way nobody speaks to anybody on the Tube. Can it really be true that she may never again see Heathrow Airport or the white cliffs of Dover or hand over a five-pound note in a tiny corner shop selling Tunnock’s Teacakes? But what’s the alternative? Isn’t this – all this – about making the best of a bad situation?

‘We can vanish with new identities. And foreign police won’t be looking for us as much. If we can be together … we can start over,’ he says. ‘We can get a boat. We just need to get the passports first.’

‘Starting over,’ she echoes, her tone maudlin.

‘A rescue boat.’ He spreads his arms wide, then lets them fall, the gesture meaning, I’m here. I came.

She thinks of those English rains, her restaurant, that corridor with the pink door out back where she used to sit and think. Well, she tells herself, there will be rain in the Bahamas. There will be other restaurants. She’d have to be a pot washer, blend into the background. Couldn’t be a chef.

But, first, they have to try one thing.

‘Let’s see if Moody finds the man. If not,’ she says, then leaves the rest unsaid.

Damien nods, saying nothing too, and Simone thinks only of Lucy, that most high profile of careers planned. Dashed, for now, at the start of her life, the very end of her childhood. What should be a beginning is turning into something else, some kind of grief.

Later, Lucy emerges from the bathroom. Her hair steams as she steps outside in pyjamas. ‘What’s going on?’ she asks. She gestures to a DVD she’s holding. ‘Moody owns Taxi Driver. Never seen it. What are you guys talking about?’ She smells of synthetic coconuts, hair in a dark blonde wet knot on the top of her head.

Simone meets Damien’s eyes, and Lucy’s voice gets louder: ‘No, no – no exchanging glances. What are you discussing?’

‘The future,’ Damien says, slightly lamely.

‘What of it?’

Another glance, and Lucy explodes. ‘There are actually three adults here, not two adults and a child.’

Simone goes to guffaw at this, but thinks better of it, not wanting to anger her daughter but also experiencing the curious cognitive dissonance of your child being correct in an argument.

Damien looks at Lucy, takes a breath, and Simone knows that he is going to explain. It’s the best course of action – Lucy is usually nothing if not straightforward – but Simone still winces. Damien is too open, and sometimes at the cost of diplomacy. They’ve agreed to try Moody first.

‘I thought …’ he begins, and Simone is glad of the singular pronoun, ‘we would try and buy identities,’ he tells Lucy. ‘Try and settle somewhere.’

Lucy stops, second cup of tea half drunk, saying nothing. Her entire body has gone slow and watchful, and Simone knows precisely what this means. ‘Huh?’ she says to Damien.

‘If Moody can’t come up with the British man,’ Simone says, the notion of involving Moody a vital step. It’s impossible for her to communicate to her husband that their daughter has not yet understood the magnitude of their situation, not in the full, complete way that adults do. They haven’t had enough time together for Damien to realize the nuance of this. To him, it’s obvious: they can’t hand themselves in, finding the man and proving the kidnap is a long shot, they can’t fly home, therefore they must stay here, but it is very much not obvious to Lucy. She’s been half in denial, half on a wing and a prayer that something might change.

Simone studies her pyjama-clad daughter, wondering if she knows that they can never fly again, that their passports will be marked forever. That, even once their faces fade from the news, their names will be on watch lists for good.

‘We think it’s the best solution of a bad bunch, if Moody doesn’t find anything.’

‘What is?’ Lucy says, and her tone is careful, but Simone knows that, actually, it’s careful in the same way you handle a grenade that you intend on throwing.

‘We haven’t been talking much about the future,’ Simone tells Damien, a warning tone in her own voice.

‘What?’

‘We’ve been just getting through the days actually,’ Lucy throws at him, not unfairly. ‘You know, running from violent men, surviving in forty-degree heat.’ She pauses. She looks out of breath, her cheeks red. ‘Trying not to remember the various horrendous moments of being taken from my bed, shoved in car boots. Do you know that, on the first night, I actually prayed to fucking God? On my knees and everything.’

‘I’m so sorry,’ Simone says to her daughter, who she knows has always been an ardent atheist.

‘Do you know that I worry I conjured something with my monologues that led to the killing? Out, damned spot. Out!’

‘I didn’t know that,’ Simone replies. Lucy’s a perfect Lady Macbeth, even in that singular line. An accessory to murder.

‘What do you mean, buy identities? And then what?’ Lucy continues. It’s a tirade of angry questions.

‘The best solution if everything else fails seems to me to try and settle somewhere. Now that we’re all together,’ Damien replies calmly.

‘What?’ Lucy splutters, and Simone is panicking. This is what happens when an outsider joins a group, one who doesn’t know the current state of affairs.

‘The best solution is to find the kidnapper and prove what he did to us,’ Lucy says, her tone so icy it practically frosts the hot air between them. Simone gets to her feet, bitter with the irony that family arguments and parenting dilemmas have followed them to Texas. ‘The price is too high not to try.’

‘Moody is not going to help. Even if he finds him, how do you think you’re going to prove the kidnap?’ he asks, and Simone thinks he’s genuinely asking in the way that he does, but he’s chosen the wrong words if so. For this is the true dispute. Clearly, Damien thinks using Moody is pointless. Are they really prepared to go to trial on this, even if they find this British man?

‘I don’t know, but isn’t that the most obvious way out of this?’

‘What would you do if you could?’

Lucy finally answers this question. ‘Tell the police about him? Get them to search his house? Find the – the things?’ Lucy says, her voice rising in pitch. ‘The shitty old bed, the cutlery he gave me with dinner that had other people’s old food on it, the bucket I had to piss in and pass to him?’

Simone gasps. ‘I didn’t know about that.’

‘What did you think I did?’ Lucy asks.

‘I didn’t …’

Lucy just slow blinks at her parents. Simone can see her heart flickering in the hollow between her collarbones; a butterfly held cupped in a palm. And she thinks of her googling torture and she can’t believe she doubted her daughter’s account of it. Her kidnap, here it is, in all its ghoulish detail.

‘Look,’ she says, reaching out to her daughter, and, to Simone’s surprise, all Lucy’s bluster leaves her, and she reaches, grasping, for Simone.

‘It’s … He’s ruined … I can still smell him on me!’ she says, right into Simone’s neck. And then: ‘I’m pretending. I’m pretending. I’m always pretending to be fine.’

Simone holds her daughter as she sobs, looking at Damien and trying not to be angry. To think she was suspicious of Lucy, wondering how well she was acting, if she was withholding information. And all the time the acting was this: pretending to be fine.

Simone, Damien and Lucy stand there on the porch together. Simone rubs Lucy’s back. Damien does nothing.

‘Are you saying we stay in the US forever?’ Lucy asks Damien quietly, after several moments. ‘Are you saying you think using Moody is hopeless?’

And, to Simone’s shame, he does what Damien almost never does: he fudges it. Maybe he’s out of practice, maybe these topics are too big for him. Maybe he really, simply means it, but he chooses to answer with: ‘Forever is a big word.’

There are little stone houses on the horizon, clouds that are three-dimensional with fluff, a sky that never ends.

Lucy speaks. ‘The truth is always possible to prove. Moody thinks so.’

‘We’ll see what he comes up with, but I wanted you to know the plan.’

‘No you didn’t. You wanted to change my plans to yours. What a bum fucking deal, and you won’t even be honest about it.’

Lucy paces away from them. She leans her hands on the wooden porch, then reaches out to touch the spines of a huge cactus. A single prick on her fingertip, the skin yielding, a drop of blood, and Lucy looks, for just one moment, dangerous.

CHAPTER 55

The Kidnapper

I head out to one of the two Terlinguan bars, late. It’s full of smoke – normal rules need not apply, I guess – and surprisingly rammed for such a small town. It’s hard to know where all the people have come from; there must be fifty here, a large percentage of the population. It’s excellent for me. I’m looking for a single face in a small crowd. Easy.

An old jukebox plays Tim McGraw in the corner, and a load of middle-aged people shuffle embarrassingly on a dance floor. Smoke curls upwards and dances by the ceiling lights. People down cocktails and beers. There are cowboy hats and men with moustaches and women with high heels on – funny, you hardly see those any more – but not her.

I head towards the women’s room. It’s – sadly – the place to be for this sort of job. I pretend to study a poster on the wall advertising a tribute act coming here next month, hoping I won’t still be here then on this thankless errand, and listen. There are two women swapping lipsticks or something. Another with hunched, suspicious body language leaves out of a side door just as I arrive. I don’t see her face, and it’s too obvious to follow her.

It’s enough of a thrill to think that she might just be here. Everyone cuts loose sometimes, don’t they? Especially young women. Guard down, dancing, drinking, sharing lipsticks and secrets, inhibitions lost.

People come and go, and this is fucking perfect. I could sit here, down a drink, and just sink into this, but I don’t. I can’t stay long – one will get something of a reputation hanging around near the bathrooms – and so I let myself check off twenty women and then begin to leave.

Just as I do so, somebody cuts in front of me. Similar body language to her and the right colour hair, too. I quickly realize that it isn’t her, but I follow her for a while anyway – just for practice.

CHAPTER 56

Simone

Simone is showering when she hears a door open. Her entire body flashes there, under the heat, and she gets out, hoping it’s Damien, hoping it’s nothing.

It’s Lucy. Fully clothed, coming in the front door. Simone stares at her, confused. And as she does so, she can’t help but think there might have been a near miss. Lucy’s expression is slightly frantic.

‘Where have you been?’ she asks her.

‘Walking.’

‘Why? Where? It’s not safe out.’

‘I think the worst has happened, don’t you?’ Lucy says, her tone acerbic.

Simone winces. Ouch. She has never once considered this angle. That maybe Lucy might feel she doesn’t have anything to lose.

‘I’m sorry. I didn’t – I know you need time to walk and breathe.’ Simone spreads her arms wide. ‘I’m sorry. Just … you weren’t followed? No one saw?’

‘No.’

‘I know it’s hard,’ she says.

‘So we’re on the run forever and we’re never walking alone forever, too, right?’ Lucy asks, her head cocked.

‘We didn’t say that exactly – we’re still waiting to hear from Moody.’

Lucy sighs, then, a gust of air, and Simone catches it on her breath: wine. Their eyes meet, and Simone knows Lucy knows she has smelled it. And maybe it’s the legacy of her parents, maybe it’s just fear, but Simone throws her arms up in the air and says, ‘How could you jeopardize us by going out to a fucking bar? Are you not thinking straight?’

Lucy’s body freezes. ‘I haven’t been to a bar,’ she says immediately, and, God, Simone is long enough in the tooth to recognize that lie, an immediate, flat, toneless denial.

‘I can smell alcohol,’ Simone says. She doesn’t add the unsaid: that she is a pro at this. In the kitchen, Damien clatters about, oblivious or perhaps abdicating. Simone doesn’t tell Lucy that she’s pretty sure it is white wine, probably Pinot Grigio and dry. Simone’s nose is at least half her work skill, and it’s well trained.

‘Not mine,’ Lucy says, and, suddenly, Simone simply cannot be bothered.

She walks off into the bedroom, leaving Lucy there. Fuck her, Simone thinks recklessly. And, this time, it isn’t trauma talking, just fear.

Lucy comes to stand at Simone’s door, saying nothing. Arms folded, one foot crossed over the other, just looking at her. The Venn diagram of mother and daughter is not yet two circles, not yet entirely separate. There is still the sliver of overlap where they finish each other’s thoughts. Simone therefore knows this stance to be an apology. Something in her yields. If she were in Lucy’s position, eighteen and on the run, might she sneak out, too? Probably. Her brain is not formed yet into its adult state. Less than two weeks ago, she was kidnapped.

Her poor daughter. Her high-schooling beset by a pandemic, and then her approaching freedom curtailed by this. What does the future truly hold for them? Living in the Bahamas on cash-in-hand jobs until somehow the charges become spent or forgotten, which is probably never going to happen?

‘It was just a glass,’ Lucy says quietly. ‘It was … just one glass. I felt I needed it. Gave off over-twenty-one energy and got served. Maybe no one really cares around here.’

‘I do really understand needing it. To cope,’ Simone says.

‘But in the bar … I don’t know. It was horrible, actually,’ she says. ‘I felt like I was being watched.’

‘And were you?’

‘I don’t know,’ Lucy answers. She drops her gaze. ‘I’m sorry. For going. For sneaking out.’

‘It’s understandable,’ Simone says.

‘I am desperately hoping Moody comes through for us.’ Lucy goes to say something else, maybe, then hesitates, and then stops. ‘I was there, just sipping a wine. Just … mind racing,’ she adds simply again, with a little shrug. She’s in a vest top, and one of the straps falls down past her shoulder as she moves. That skin Simone used to bathe. That skin that used to stick against her own, skin to skin, mother and baby.

‘I know,’ Simone says thickly, ignoring a guilty and persistent thought that is bubbling up within her: at least, if they are on the run, Lucy is not leaving her. What an awful thought, Simone admonishes herself, but she can’t help it. She wishes she could have paused time fifteen years ago. When Lucy still reached up vertically to hold her hand, when she earnestly told Simone things she already knew, like the colour of the sky. But it’s gone. That particular Lucy gone. Parenthood, what a bum fucking deal, as Lucy would say.

‘If I found the kidnapper, you know, I think I might kill him,’ Lucy says suddenly, with just the slightest tremor in her voice that brushes Simone’s nerve endings like a feather.

Simone freezes. She runs her eyes over her daughter’s face, and there isn’t a trace of dark humour. ‘That wouldn’t help anything,’ she says slowly, ignoring the prescient feeling as it returns once more.

Lucy nods, then says: ‘Save the day?’

‘I’m not cooking,’ Simone says with a smile.

‘Saving the day doesn’t have to be cooking. It can be anything leisurely that makes the time right before you go to sleep better. A tiny thing to say, OK, today was trash, but at least I did this one thing.’

‘Got it.’

Lucy turns on the television in the bedroom, navigates the apps and finds an old episode of Gilmore Girls, their favourite. They get into the bed together and watch it in companionable silence.

Partway through, Simone reaches to touch her daughter’s shoulder. Lucy leans against her, and – Simone could swear it – she feels baby soft, again, once more. Skin on skin.

It’s much later, after midnight, when Damien shows her the news. MOST WANTED states the headline.

DAMIEN SEABORN ALSO MISSING

IN A TWIST in the British mother/daughter fugitive story, husband and father Damien Seaborn is now missing. Police suspect him to have joined his wife and daughter in shock on-the-run move.

Houston FBI Special Agent Fiona Blakemore and Fort Davis Police Chief Michael Holmes have today announced a reward of up to $20,000 for information leading to the arrest and conviction of Damien, Simone and Lucy Seaborn.

The article goes on to rehash events they already know about, and Simone closes it, then stares at her husband.

‘A reward,’ he says. ‘It’s so much easier to find three people than two. We’re so distinctive as a three. And now the general public will be motivated to do it, too. We’ve got to get out of here. We’ve got to have a plan to get out of here. Once I got to Terlingua, Simone, you were easy to find.’

‘I promised Lucy we’d see it through with Moody.’

‘Look.’ Damien sighs. ‘Let’s try and get the identities. You just send the guy a message. With photos.’

‘That’s such a risk.’

‘Everything’s a risk,’ Damien says tightly. Simone looks at her patient husband in surprise. Their relationship creaks and strains under the weight of their crimes.

‘Let’s just … take the photos. Tomorrow,’ he says. ‘We don’t have to send them.’

And Simone supposes that this is how it goes. The slippery criminal slope.

Damien rubs at his forehead. He starts to pull his T-shirt off, then stops halfway through. ‘God,’ he says. ‘It’s unbelievable. These will be for false identities. False IDs. Us!’

‘I kind of can’t believe you’ve even researched this,’ she says. He stands there and looks at her, his expression hurt. ‘In order to be with us.’

‘Of course I have.’

‘But …’

‘I would never want to be anywhere else,’ he says. ‘Despite –’ He pauses, appearing to stop himself.

‘Despite what?’

‘Despite everything,’ he says, but it’s clearly a lie. His Adam’s apple bobs up and down in a hard swallow.

‘What did you really mean?’

‘Despite our argument,’ he says quietly.

‘OK,’ she whispers, and she thinks about how she went from her maiden name to Seaborn, and now, with him, will be called something else entirely.

They move around each other, husband and wife in this most domestic of scenes, removing their clothes for bed, knowing that, together, they’re about to enter some other place. An underworld that neither of them is prepared for or understands.

CHAPTER 57

They haven’t taken the photographs, and they haven’t yet contacted the identity seller, though Simone has looked at his profile on the dark web browser Damien showed her. The blocky text, the strange skull-and-crossbones emojis, the clear criminality of it. She wordlessly handed his phone back to him, and he didn’t press the matter.

They lie low, not wanting to leave the house, and chasing information from Moody. It’s a stalemate. Simone cannot bear to break Lucy’s heart by leaving without trying to find the British man.

They take showers; they sleep in. They read Moody’s vast collection of novels that line the walls, old American fiction mostly. One John Grisham, evidently discarded halfway through – the spine bent to the midpoint, then pristine. One evening, Simone reads a reply from Moody, who says he’s still following leads on the man. She tells herself it’s still hopeful, though wonders if she’s delusional: they all know they are on borrowed time here.

In the evenings, they burn through his movie collection – westerns, Golden Age mysteries, cult classics. Lucy pontificates about extreme close-ups and how the post-production in Everything Everywhere All at Once was done in somebody’s bedroom. Simone and Damien pretend to listen.

Somehow, the police don’t come. They check the news once a day, and the stories gradually begin to dwindle. Dishes keeps its Michelin star, for now. Timeo tells the Daily Mail she’s the best boss he ever had. The comments section of the article is unfair. You deal drugs, you expect consequences, one person says, while another adds, Bet they’re escaping to Panama to live the high life.

CHAPTER 58

The Kidnapper

Something about this particular squat little building makes me look twice. What is it? Shutters closed, but it’s evening, so that’s not unusual. No car. I pause, just staring up at it, thinking. What is it?

That’s it: every single shutter is closed. Living room, kitchen, bathroom, bedrooms. And yet – people are there. The lights behind them are on: I can see stripes of brightness here and there, around the edges of the blinds and between the occasional uneven slat.

But every single one is closed.

Maybe someone in there is trying to keep the heat out, maybe not. Something about it just looks a little dodgy to me, which is precisely the sort of thing I’m looking for.

I stand outside for several moments, watching for movement. Nothing. I creep closer, edging around the brickwork, hidden in Texan shadows, just waiting. Everything is worth a shot, so I start at the back of the little building, looking for a way in. Patio doors front the porch. They’re locked, even though its inhabitants are not yet in bed, the metal spoke across. I look at it, interested. Very safety conscious …

I walk a slow circle of the house. No side windows are open a crack, nothing.

And then, as I’m standing there, the blinds at the patio doors open, and somebody pulls them back. They leave the lights off as they do so, then open the door.

It swings slightly on the breeze. I pause, but nobody comes out. I stand there, just staring, at this tantalizingly open space that I could simply walk into, as silent as a shark darting here and there, unseen, in the darkness of the water.

But it’s better to wait. I have to be sure it’s her.

Ten minutes later, a hand. A female hand, I think (it’s small), but I don’t see more than that. It pulls the door shut, its owner staying in the shadows, while I stand there, just watching and thinking that this must be the house: shut up, secluded, strange behaviour. And inhabited by a female.

The thing about a kidnapping is that the target has to be the right person, of course, but also the timing has to be exactly correct. And, quite frankly, I am running out of it. I therefore need to be totally ready.

That is how I find myself buying supplies, the right supplies. Things I don’t have here. I haven’t yet definitely found her, but I can at least be prepared for when I do.

What calls itself a hardware store is off the beaten track in Terlingua. It sells everything I might need and is open a little into the evenings, the way things are here unofficially.

I put two stiff blue ropes into a wire basket, bound into a figure of eight. Duct tape comes next. I stare down at them, then add some other things, things to disguise what it looks like. A roller for paint, a set of coat hooks. Whatever. I pay in cash, don’t look at the cashier’s face, in the hope that she doesn’t look at mine.

I leave carrying my big paper bag full of stuff. I go via the suspicious little house, just to look in.

I stand there for half an hour and, suddenly, I hear a voice. High and clear. My whole body startles. The voice. It’s her.

It’s so loud, so close: are those windows single-glazed?

I stand up, move around to the front again. There’s no boundary, no plot of land. None of them have it here. Just houses picked up and put down on dust, no fences, no driveways, cars abandoned wherever.

I can’t make out individual words, but I can hear that it is her. I’m so sure of it. I stand there outside her house as darkness falls. A light pops on in the kitchen, a few hours pass, then it pops off. Another goes on then, at the front of the house: a bedroom. I see one shadow dart and move at the edge of the shutters. She’s sleeping alone.

CHAPTER 59

Four o’clock in the morning. Simone stirs, then comes to, dreaming of Lucy standing at the top of a tall building, teetering on the edge. Simone reaches to save her but misses.

The world outside stripes with headlights, and Simone sits up, terrified, but the car fades into the distance. She wonders if they are simply circling her, these near misses. The drone. Soon, they will come for her, to restore the natural order of things. She took one life. Somebody must take hers.

She looks in on Lucy’s room. Her breathing is regular and deep.

Some feeling emerges now, one of those emotions that can only surface in the sea-blue night air, because it brings truth with it. The kind of thing you are not ready to admit in the light of the day, things the sunlight shines too harshly on.

Are they doing the right thing? Simone pushes the question down.

She goes into the kitchen, the tiles cool underneath her feet. The dishwasher shows FINISHED on its digital display, and Simone opens the door and lets the steam swirl around her bare legs. Her eyes close. She could be back there, in the kitchen, just after closing. Pots washed, stainless-steel sides wiped down. The hum of the fridges. Leftovers packaged in a white cardboard box to be taken and eaten at home – or more often sitting at traffic lights, unable to resist. This is her life. This was her life.

She checks the phone, and sees with shock that Moody sent a text just after midnight. Fear and something else plunge through her, optimism and anxiety entwined. She opens it:

A cop friend has told me this: the British man on the bus has already been interviewed as a witness. He is a man named Max Pearson. He was an inspector at the camp – has been one for twenty years – then when he visited, he says one of Lucy’s camp mates recommended the trip to him to stargaze at Nueva Rosita. The night of the kidnapping he was inspecting another camp, with multiple alibis. He is, I’m afraid to say, squeaky clean. British thing a coincidence.

Simone grips the table. Her insides are plunging downwards. It isn’t him.

It isn’t him.

But this man – is he the same man who told the police Simone and Lucy were on the coach? She frantically types that back to Moody, who, awake, tells her they aren’t sure who it is who said that.

But who is the kidnapper, then? They have chased him down, this red herring, and for nothing.

Simone thinks she’s going to be sick.

Only a few moments later, Lucy appears, looking sleep straggled. Is it Simone’s imagination, or does she seem much too thin? Taken from her bed, bound and gagged, whole life displaced, subsisting on next to nothing while on the run. It wouldn’t be surprising, but Simone doesn’t like to see it. Lucy waves a hand in acknowledgement and makes a tea. She looks like meat. Rack of ribs. Butterfly-wing shoulder blades.

‘Something woke me.’

‘It was probably me, checking on you,’ Simone tells her. She takes a breath. ‘Look, Moody has messaged.’

‘And?’

‘The kidnapper isn’t the British man,’ Simone says gently. She relays the rest of Moody’s information to Lucy.

‘What? No?’ Lucy says, her face stricken. ‘Please say no?’

‘I’m really sorry. He might still try to look for him. For the kidnapper.’

Lucy says nothing, turning away from Simone. They stand together in silence, then after the longest time, Lucy speaks into the dim air. ‘I feel like a fool. We went haring after that lead.’

‘I know.’

Another long, bloated pause. A sad pause. ‘We’ve got to go, haven’t we?’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘If we ever get to the Bahamas, what are we going to do?’

It’s a resigned and disappointed question that cracks Simone’s heart open. They’re going. Their future sealed.

The room seems to change with the knowledge.

Her daughter is accepting this is the next step. Moody, once a bright optimistic star on the horizon, is slowly dying. He has only the tools available to him. He can’t change the facts. He can’t make a random person a criminal, even though that is precisely what happened to Simone herself.

‘I don’t know. Let things die down. Begin to live more normally …’

‘Do you think I’ll still be able to act?’

Simone regards her daughter across the table. The kitchen has begun, over the last few days, to smell like home – that is to say, like nothing. They have stopped noticing it. It’s the longest place they have stayed since the kidnap.

The answer, Simone knows, is no. And she’s pretty sure Lucy knows it, too. She tries dark humour. ‘Well, it’s a stepping stone, isn’t it? Not much difference between notoriety and fame.’

Luckily, the joke lands. ‘Ha,’ Lucy says. ‘Well.’

‘You’ll be a hero. You survived a kidnap,’ Simone says softly, sadly.

‘Yeah,’ Lucy replies. She lifts her chin. ‘I don’t know why, but I feel sure I will attend RADA. One day.’

‘You never know. Instinct counts for a lot.’

‘You can eat Caribbean rum cake in the Bahamas. Don’t you like that?’ And it’s this grasping, juvenile kindness that makes Simone cry.

‘I do. Hard to find with no alcohol,’ she says, covering up her tears.

‘Can you make me something?’ Lucy says, smiling slightly, her hand to her chin, elbow sliding along the table. It’s a childlike pose, something from the deep past.

‘Anything,’ Simone says.

‘Meringue.’

‘An excellent choice.’ Simone rises to her feet, finds the eggs. She separates them deftly, fat round button yolks into a pot to save for omelettes – despite the last time she made them, she still can’t resist them – whites slinked into a bowl, beaten by hand the old-fashioned way. Good cooking should be painful on the muscles. She gets them quickly to fluffy, as cotton-like as the clouds outside, puts the oven on super low.

‘Why didn’t you want to live out at drama school?’ Simone asks. ‘Can you tell me?’ They have less to lose now. Moody’s text has sealed their bleak future, and Simone feels able to ask.

Lucy looks directly at Simone, and, for just a fleeting second, she sees Damien. Something about the open expression. ‘Honestly …?’ she says, just the slightest lilt of a question in her voice.

‘Yes, honestly! Of course, honestly.’

‘Because …’

‘Go on.’

‘Do you remember my high-school leavers’?’

‘Yes?’ Simone answers, confused. They’d opened Dishes up to everyone, Lucy’s friends, their friends.

‘I keep thinking about something.’

‘What’s that?’ Simone asks, and she knows, somehow, that Lucy is going to say something that will nudge the foundations of their relationship.

‘You were at the little back corridor in Dishes with Dad. Sitting on the step you like. And you – you had a drink.’

‘Yes,’ Simone answers. Her only drink in twenty years. Those two sips with Damien, and they’d thrown the rest away.

‘You had a drink. On my final day of school.’

‘I don’t follow,’ Simone says.

‘I was – God. OK.’ Lucy takes a breath. ‘I was worried that, you know how you always say I’m your … what’s that thing?’

‘Raison d’être,’ Simone says with a smile.

‘Right. And then you’re sitting there drinking on the final day of – of something.’

‘Oh,’ Simone says in a small voice. How strange the parent–child relationship is. That Simone can view something so simply, with her daughter witnessing it, unseen, taking something so complex from it. ‘No, no, no. I was trying it for a recipe. And a little toast to you. It was nothing. Hated it. I had two mouthfuls!’

‘Oh.’ Lucy pauses, gazing into the middle distance. ‘But.’

‘What?’

‘I didn’t want to leave you, OK?’ Lucy tells her. ‘I didn’t want to … leave us, I suppose.’

‘Why not?’

‘Just didn’t want to.’

‘You’re kind of supposed to want to,’ Simone says delicately, marvelling that Lucy felt the same as she did, her shameful secret. ‘You didn’t want to leave me because you didn’t want to leave me, or because you didn’t want me to be without you?’

It’s a nuanced question, and Simone watches Lucy comprehend it. ‘Yeah,’ she says. ‘I guess, both. Worried when I saw the drink that I’m some sort of – linchpin, I suppose.’

‘Ah. I see,’ Simone answers. ‘I can see how you’d think that.’ She pauses, thinking. ‘The plight of the only child. You thought I’d fall apart without you.’

‘Right,’ Lucy says, a quick smile. ‘Loved too much.’

‘You can never love anybody too much.’

‘I just thought of all the things we wouldn’t do. You bringing leftovers home for no one. I didn’t want to do it yet.’

‘Right,’ Simone says softly, thinking. ‘You think I need you in order to be stable and happy. And sober?’

‘Well, yeah,’ Lucy answers.

‘Not so. I’m not an addict. Lucy, I can’t tell you that enough.’

‘But you will be so sad without me.’

And Simone closes her eyes, now, against this statement. For all her careful parenting, for all the books she read and the reactions she controlled and tried not to have, still, it got her in the Achilles’ heel.

‘God, Lucy,’ she tells her, and though she wants to say, Yes! I don’t want you to go! The meaning of my whole life has been you! For almost twenty years! she doesn’t. She says instead, ‘I would always want you to go and live your absolute best life. It makes me so, so happy that you would do that. Happier, actually, than if you stayed.’

‘Thank you for saying that,’ Lucy says.

And it isn’t a lie. It’s just that both things are true: the pleasure/pain of parenthood. ‘I’m here. I love you. You are my raison d’être, but I have many of them. You never need to worry about me.’

‘The drink was nothing?’ Lucy checks.

‘No!’ Simone says.

‘It’s like –’ Lucy appears to be trying to find the words – ‘parents have to let their children go?’ As she says this, her eyes lock on to Simone’s. A beat. ‘You know?’ she adds softly.

‘I know,’ Simone replies, her mind whirring. But what does Lucy truly mean, here? Such a strange and direct statement. Simone wonders if she doesn’t know, or isn’t ready to know, even here, in the blue hour of four o’clock in the morning.

Later, Simone goes back to bed. Lucy lets herself out on to the porch. This time, Simone doesn’t stop her.

They wake up to the smell of meringue, which feels a little like home. Simone does her best to forget what Lucy said. What Lucy meant, what she could possibly mean. And how she could do it. Parents have to let their children go.

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.

CHAPTER 61

‘I’m not taking a photo,’ Lucy says flatly.

‘We need to leave, as soon as possible,’ Simone says. It’s not even half an hour after the police ceased their search, and nobody has yet come back for them. ‘Someone knows we’re here. We have to get out of here.’ As she says it, Damien is gathering up their things. Socks, books, glasses, shoes. He’s carrying them around nonsensically in the way people do when they want to feel busy.

‘Just take the photograph,’ Damien adds.

Lucy’s face pales.

‘But Moody said …?’

‘Moody’s house is being searched,’ Damien says shortly. ‘That doesn’t look great for him.’

‘I don’t know,’ Simone argues. But, resigned, she begins to pick up their things, too.

‘He was right about Max,’ Lucy argues. ‘I googled him. Therefore isn’t he straight? And if he has handed us in, why has no one come?’

‘This is not the time to take chances. Whether or not they know we are here, or just that we’re in Terlingua, we have to go as soon as possible.’

Lucy looks at Simone, the way she used to when she was a toddler who would play one parent off against the other, and Simone nods sadly. Really, it’s foolish to stay here another minute, but the police not returning has reassured her enough to stay until they can leave prepared. Besides, where else can they go right now?

To her surprise, Lucy stands silently against a blank white wall in Moody’s house, her mouth a low, flat line, her expression heartbroken but silent. Damien realizes her intent, and gets the phone to use as a camera. Just out of shot is a photograph of the sky that perhaps Moody has taken, featuring the Texas clouds that look like meringues.

Dark clothes, Lucy’s hair glowing almost white against tanned skin. Damien takes the photos, and then Simone flicks through them. She logs on to the email account Damien got from the dark web, ready to send them, standing there by her husband and daughter in the hallway.

It’s funny that, sometimes, the risk has been taken but the results take time to materialize. Simone carefully rereads the instructions. Upload documents as a draft to an email account. They’re not to send it. The person providing identities will then log on, download the attachments to the draft, without leaving evidence of a sent or received item on any server.

Payment is cash on collection. The identities will be ready within twelve hours, available to pick up at the port. The less Simone thinks about where they have come from, the better. Are their photos to be attached to the dead, the murdered, or just the fabricated?

As she uploads their photographs in miniature, that feeling: settles over her again, the futuristic, unreal feeling: the photos look like mugshots.

CHAPTER 62

The identities will be ready to pick up at the port at Galveston the next afternoon. They’re given a locker number on a draft email, a time and a code. Attached to the email is a photograph of their documents. Their images, new names. They’re to pay for them only on pickup. They’re in too deep to even contemplate the possibility that it’s a scam.

With no time to lose, they reserve tickets on a boat to the Bahamas. Only a cruise ship will take them direct, but it’ll have to do. They leave straight away. They have no idea if the identities will work, but they can’t stay here. Terlingua is more dangerous than anywhere.

Damien is asleep in the back of an empty coach at three thirty in the morning and Simone and Lucy sit bunched up next to him, hoping the driver doesn’t watch the news, isn’t good with faces … They have gone for disguises; Lucy wearing a woolly hat they found in Moody’s wardrobe, justified by the night-time desert chill, Simone wearing a pair of Damien’s reading glasses that magnify everything but make her face look slightly different. It’s the best they can do.

Simone is surprised to note that this does feel, in some ways, like a holiday, like her body remembers the holiday-specific things: the rumble of an early coach stopping briefly in Terlingua centre, suitcases dragged on ground. Simone wonders if they will ever holiday again, but finds she can’t engage the thoughts. They’re like repelling magnets, pushing this way and that, persuading her to look anywhere but directly at the future.

They have run out of viable options; instead they are chasing down a dream that seems to get further and further away, a desert mirage.

This thought bleeds seamlessly into another. Simone is thinking of Lucy in the kitchen. The moody blue light. The ominous, melancholic night they discovered the British man wasn’t the kidnapper. Lucy’s gaze.

Parents have to let their children go.

It is still dark outside. Cicadas, crickets, biting wind. Inside the coach it’s warm. Lucy leans her head on Simone’s shoulder, mock tired, but then leaves it there. Her face is tilted up to her mother’s in the blackness, the expression on it contemplative.

‘You OK?’

‘You know, I think I am,’ Lucy says in a slight whisper, even though the driver can’t hear. He’s looking ahead, his back straight. He’s uninterested at most, ignorant at worst. Next to them, Damien’s breathing deepens. The coach has nobody else on it yet.

They hit a small town, they’re not sure which one, but it has street lights that illuminate Lucy’s face. They’re many hours from the port still, and Simone suddenly wishes with a weird ferocity that she was like Damien. Simple. Optimistic. Able to be flexible about life changes and to sleep on a bus taking them to an illegal border crossing. She thinks of her coach trip spent shaking in the back, and grimaces.

‘I’m really OK,’ Lucy says.

And, right at this moment, Simone realizes something deep and true about her daughter: she’s really good at acting, perhaps even to herself, which is otherwise known as denial.

‘Are you?’ she probes.

‘It’s the best of a bad situation, isn’t it?’ Lucy answers. ‘Hopefully the documents will be sound. Hopefully we will get them and get the boat.’

Simone sighs. It’s such a long shot. These elusive identities. The protracted journey for possibly nothing. If the identities aren’t sound, they have absolutely nowhere to go.

But they can’t stay in Terlingua, either.

‘Can I ask you something? I’ve been thinking – since the meringue … what did you mean about letting you go?’ Simone asks, speaking aloud the question that has been on her mind rather than worry about the identities, their endless failed plans.

Lucy looks at Simone, and something wordless seems to pass between them. ‘What?’ Simone says, softly, in a whisper.

‘Nothing,’ Lucy says. ‘I didn’t mean anything by it.’

‘Did you mean to RADA – our talk about you moving out?’

‘Sure,’ Lucy says. But her eyes say differently.

CHAPTER 63

Galveston Port looms into view. It took so long, almost all their cash now gone, the rest to be spent on the identities and the cruise ship tickets they reserved, but it’s worth it because it kept the number of people who saw them low. They didn’t need to fly, or go through a train station terminal. And here they are.

The port is industrial, huge ships everywhere, slow-moving triangles that throw around light and shade as they block the sun with their mass. A port is a port, and Simone could almost pretend she’s in England; gone is the sandstone of the desert, replaced with blue and white and grey. There’s moisture in the air. Not rain, only sea, but still. And suddenly, it’s no longer just the three of them, a little pink house and the brown and red of the desert. They’re here. Between them and freedom stand just documents and one official.

‘The identities are in lockers in that storage unit,’ Damien says, pointing to a large prefab building a little way from the other units at the port that has a sign above it saying STORAGE 4U. He lopes off without saying anything further, leaving Simone and Lucy, teeth chattering with nerves, waiting.

Five minutes go by, then ten. Simone and Lucy stay where they are, their hair enmeshing in the strong breeze, saying nothing, merely watching the door to the storage units steadfastly remain closed, hoping that the illegal service they have purchased is – ironically – not a scam.

‘How can someone exist online selling things that are just so illegal?’ Lucy says simply. ‘He was easy to find.’

‘I know.’

Simone, watching nothing happen at the automatic doors, agrees entirely. How could they trust a stranger on the internet? How could they take such an enormous risk?

How did they run so easily out of options?

But then, as unceremoniously as he went in, Damien emerges, carrying a brown envelope. He is seemingly safe and free.

He gestures for them to cross the road to reach him and they head into a sheltered alleyway.

‘All fine,’ he says tightly, looking around him for CCTV, then handing out the documents. They can’t be the only people buying identities here, but it feels so. Damien wordlessly hands Simone hers. As she checks it, she remembers reading somewhere that this is a federal offence, but the fear doesn’t seem to hit like it once would have. Sometimes, you’ve just done too much to care any more about the collateral.

‘How did you pay him?’ she asks him, once she’s looked at her identity. An anodyne name, Sarah, against Simone’s own face. She could never be a Sarah, she finds herself thinking; she’s had a name unusual enough that she’s never met another her entire adult life. ‘A man met me by the locker. Was expecting me. Said nothing except the price.’

Simone nods, glad her husband dealt with it and not her. She shudders there in the cold shade of the buildings with the ocean salt in her hair. She turns and looks over her shoulder, just once, imagining tens of police gathering to arrest three fools, but there’s no one. There is nobody except the bustle of tourists. Nothing out of the ordinary.

And, just like that, for a fee, Simone, Damien and Lucy have become different people.

‘The passport check is in that building over there, before the ship,’ Damien tells them, his tone wooden, and Simone wonders if he’s optimistic, if he’s nervous, or if he’s just pretending, too.

CHAPTER 64

The border office is maybe five hundred yards away. A large brown building with two arching doorways. There’s something ersatz about it, like they’re in a theme park or a miniature village. It’s made to look official but somehow is not. Maybe Simone’s brain is simply playing tricks on her; wishful thinking.

They lug their belongings with them, and walk across the sweeping, expansive port. Tourists dash here and there, shuttle buses, people dragging luggage. It’s similar to but different from Simone’s trip to Mexico, and she winces as she remembers that. Before she became a killer, and before she became a fugitive, too.

That was their beginning and maybe this is their end, or maybe this is their new beginning. Simone doesn’t know. Her entire body is fizzing with adrenaline as she walks. How has nobody arrested them? The breeze is cooler here, briny and fresh, and she thinks that if these are their final moments, then at least they’ve seen the sea.

They’re almost at the entrance. There are two officers standing outside it, each holding what looks like a machine gun. Lucy gives Simone a sidelong glance and it’s full of fear. Simone reaches for her hand but says nothing, thinking how identifiable they are, how slim they have become, two rangy women forced to flee. Simone suddenly experiences real rage at the kidnapper, at the entitlement of taking a sleeping form from her bed, gloved hand to her mouth. Lucy as object, to bait Simone with.

They split up, walk in and join separate queues.

Green swirled carpets, burgundy rope queue dividers, the smell of polish in the air. It’s quiet, the officials’ voices muted, everyone being checked and stamped through, nobody impatient, generally respectful.

There are four people ahead of Simone, and the wait time on a black and red electronic display board says six minutes, the longest of her life.

CHAPTER 65

‘ID,’ the man behind the counter says. A thick glass screen separates them, with a letter-box-sized gap at the bottom.

She slides the passport under that she’s only owned for fifteen minutes, and sees, two queues away, Lucy doing the same with the other guy, Damien waiting in another one, and everything slows down and speeds up all at once. The official has a name badge on which says PETER M. He has a dimple in his chin and smart eyes that won’t miss anything.

He flicks his gaze to her, and Simone wishes she could read minds. Is he thinking that she’s a fugitive and they’re about to be arrested? Or is he thinking that this is nothing, just yet another person who is crossing the border? She can’t tell, and maybe she will never know. Does their entire future depend on how much this guy watches the national news?

‘Reason for visit?’ he asks her.

‘Vacation,’ she drawls, thinking, Midwest woeful, and then – maybe it’s her imagination – but she hears Lucy say the exact same thing to her official, too.

‘Perfect,’ he says, stress on the last syllable, one last glance at her, but she doesn’t read any suspicion.

And then he slides the identity back to her, and he hasn’t even done anything with it, and don’t they have digital holograms these days? And then Lucy’s through too, and then they’re going through the building and out the back, waiting for a boat called Sunshine One. Damien is spat out only seconds later, and they stand there on the tarmac, still hot from the sun, and think that this surely can’t be it.

The clouds will soon begin to striate in the west. Their journey took a long time, from the middle of the night to the afternoon, and Simone turns and looks at them. The sky, the fresh breeze. They’re here, and they’re OK, their family, still together.

‘I can’t believe it,’ Lucy says, and she sounds giddy. And Simone ought to be, but something is stopping her. Their old life has ended, here, in a clean blue crossing at the very edge of America.

‘God,’ Damien says, and she’s aware that they’re talking too loudly, acting weirdly, have come back together too quickly, but they can’t help it. ‘We did it.’ He pauses. ‘We can get a proper rental.’ He turns to Simone. ‘You can cook again. Properly cook. You can …’ he says, looking at Lucy.

‘Yes, yes,’ she is saying to Damien.

But Simone sees through it. If she could solve it for her daughter, she would. Lucy’s heart is broken by going to the Bahamas, and she’s kind enough to lie to Damien about it, the same way she can lie to Simone.

‘It’ll be OK,’ Simone says. ‘It’ll start to feel OK,’ she adds, and Lucy nods, her expression grateful and sad, all at once.

CHAPTER 66

The ship is large but not enormous, and they’re let on and allocated two cabins. They are distracted by exploring them, looking out to open waters, and therefore Simone doesn’t realize for some while that the departure time has been and gone, and they’re still moored.

A delay with signalling, or something, says an electronic announcement board in a carpeted corridor. She is trying not to worry the longer it goes on.

Their cabin is like a hotel room. Simone’s never been on a cruise, and to have such opulence in these circumstances feels somewhat distasteful. A white bed with a blue trim, a window seat looking out to the water, a new world of blue, sun the colour of the desert. The sky a feathered watercolour with clouds at the edges. Damien is in the adjoining room, and Simone is still triggered by this: an open door, an empty bed.

She hears a laugh escape from Damien, and then Lucy, breathes a sigh of relief and tries self-talk. It’s fine. This is fine. It was always going to be nerve-racking. It was always going to be hard. She sits down in the window seat and watches the lights of the port.

Lucy comes into her room. ‘We leaving soon or what?’ she says, but there isn’t any anxiety there.

‘I’m sure it’s just a standard delay,’ Simone says, and Lucy sits next to her, there by the little round window. The longer it takes, the more Simone relaxes into it. Surely if it were about them, they’d come and find them in their cabin, or wouldn’t have let them through passport control. There would be a tannoy announcement. Police. But something is brewing in the back of Simone’s mind …

Damien arrives, sits on the bed, and he continues a conversation evidently already started with Lucy. ‘It was a fiver.’

‘No, it was so not,’ Lucy is saying to Damien. She addresses Simone: ‘When we saw Barbie and Oppenheimer it was over fifty quid, right?’

‘It was five quid,’ Damien repeats.

‘What decade are you in?’ Lucy says. ‘You can’t even get a coffee for a fiver.’

Simone remembers this well. The three of them had gone. It had cost a fortune, but it had been worth it. Something from the before, simple times. A cinema trip where they’d argued over where to eat in the hour between the two films.

‘Simone,’ Damien says, turning to her, ‘didn’t we get in cheap, to celebrate the royal wedding or something?’

This sets Lucy off. ‘The royal wedding was about a decade before that!’ she says. ‘Are you of sound mind? Why would they offer tickets to Oppenheimer to celebrate Princess Kate!’

‘All right, I’m mixing up my decades.’ Damien grins benignly, sits back on the bed and crosses his arms. ‘Old person memory, then,’ he says.

‘One hundred per cent,’ Lucy says. ‘Old Boomer.’

Simone watches them for just a few seconds, father and daughter. You have to squint to see any resemblance at all from Damien’s dark features to Lucy’s light, but they’re there if you look. The way they hold themselves, the beginnings of their smiles. Simone still, nevertheless, finds it hard to understand how their DNA has mixed fifty-fifty when Lucy looks like ninety per cent her.

Lucy is laughing at something else and Simone feels a heaviness in her chest as she watches her daughter, who thinks that she is free but isn’t.

And that’s what is bothering her: the paradox of it. The entire reason they are on the run is to keep Lucy free. Simone, too, but mostly Lucy.

But isn’t their daughter, really, in a kind of prison, anyway? She is on the run with only her parents, her future lost, her home long gone. How is this not incarceration, anyway, for Lucy?

They still haven’t left, and other guests are beginning to murmur about it. Simone hears snatches of it as people pass their cabins. The world is still in greyscale beyond the porthole window, October’s fingers inching ever closer, spinning the globe to lengthen the nights. She shivers, even though it isn’t cold.

She crosses the room, exits it on to the deck where the wind whips her hair, looking again at the port’s bright lights. It’s descending from afternoon to dinner time. Funny: Simone still thinks of hours in meal times. Damien is already out there, his hands on the railings, looking into the distance. Maybe they ought to be in the cabin, she thinks, but she wants to be outside, with her husband and the expanse of sea and sky and perceived freedom. The flip phone begins to ring in her hand; she’s surprised to see it’s Moody’s number. On an impulse, she throws it into the sea. They need to be themselves, their new selves. Untraceable back to anyone. Especially him.

‘Good idea,’ Damien says, looking at where the phone was. It’s sunk into the depths, but something about it feels eerily symbolic to Simone. ‘Do you know,’ he says, ‘if you ignore the palm trees, it might be England.’

Simone squints at it, but just the word England is painful for her to hear. She stares at the port. It’s enormous. ‘Hmm.’ She turns to him.

‘We could even set up a little food van,’ Damien says, ‘something low-key, but still cooking.’ Perhaps he feels he must be the voice of optimism, his face into her neck in the wind, and Simone is so, so glad that he managed to be with them. She closes her eyes. Maybe she is just exhausted. Maybe these thoughts are just tiredness, the tail end of adrenaline leaving her body. The identities, the delay, how far they have been running, all the way from Fort Davis to the coast.

And that’s when it happens. The lights. So sudden they blanch her closed eyelids.

Damien’s body stiffens behind hers, his arms unintentionally tightening uncomfortably across her body. There they are. Torches, high-vis: four police, then eight, then more and more, multiplying exponentially like a virus. They’re on the deck beneath them like invaders, pointing their beams up and down so much that they strobe the sea air around Simone and Damien.

They both hear it: an American accent. ‘Police!’

‘What’s with the delays?’ somebody asks.

‘We have to remove somebody – just getting to their cabin,’ he says, and that is the moment Simone knows it’s over. She and Damien don’t say anything to each other, instead just stay there, husband and wife alone, together, at the edge of the world, his arms tight around her, as the realization hits: they have been corralled on to the ship. Three criminals, caught. It’s the perfect place to hold them until arrest. Nowhere to run or to hide. A bobbing ship about to depart.

All they can do is wait. There’s nothing to say, anyway. They just look at the straight horizon together, two people in love, divided over a ransom but brought together by it, too, in a bid to stay free.

And then Damien speaks: a secret he’s kept all this time.

CHAPTER 67

Damien does that thing he sometimes does where he cups the back of Simone’s head in his huge palm.

Eventually, he seems to come to some decision, there on the deck as the boat swarms with police sent to capture them, to take their family and tear them apart. ‘Simone,’ he says. His voice is hot against the nape of her neck. It is warm and intimate in contrast to the cold and chilled sea air.

‘What?’ she says, her voice full of trepidation.

He takes a breath, exhales slowly, this time through his nose. It’s cooler, dizzying against her neck. He’s done it thousands of times, her husband, but never like this. Their intimacy now feels awful, loaded, dangerous.

‘I should have said this before, but I didn’t want to tell you until I had to.’

‘Tell me what?’

‘Do you remember, a while back, you asked me what I knew, from the time I spent with the police?’

‘Yes,’ Simone says, and the officers are moving down the deck, towards the stairs. They don’t have much time.

‘You were right to ask me. I do know something,’ he tells her, his voice low. He’s still behind her, speaking directly into her ear. He covers her hands with his. She turns within the circle of his arms to face him.

‘There is a reason I didn’t tell you,’ he tells her. ‘It’s – I didn’t want to.’ A pause. ‘I didn’t want to have to.’

Simone merely stops still, horrified and waiting for him to finish.

‘They always said, in the briefings and in the interviews with me, that if you handed yourself in and pleaded guilty to every count, then they would spare Lucy her charge of wounding the police officer,’ he tells her. ‘I can’t – I can’t let you not know this –’ his eyes to the police – ‘now.’

Simone blinks at him, her eyes wet, and everything falls into place. ‘No trial,’ she says softly. ‘Just guilt and – and then prison.’

‘Yes,’ he says, in a sad whisper.

She turns away from Damien, stares out to sea, and then, there with the swirling sky and the crisp, salty air, everything Lucy said to her last night coalesces into one single thought. Parenthood isn’t just loving your child; it is sacrifice.

Lucy wants to be free. She told her as much. Maybe she didn’t know that Simone could make it happen, but she requested that she try. Parents have to let their children go.

Lucy wants to move away from Simone, she always did, to RADA, only she didn’t know how to say. And she wants freedom now, too. And this is what Simone should be fostering: not only love, but independence, too. An eighteen-year-old needs her liberty more than she needs her mother. This is the truth; it just is. And if they’re on the run, Lucy does not have her freedom.

Lucy doesn’t want to live in the Bahamas. And now Simone has a way to give her freedom.

Here’s the answer to the conundrum. It isn’t finding the kidnapper. It isn’t going to trial at all, and hoping to find a defence or get off. It’s this, a simple this: parental self-sacrifice. It always was. It would’ve broken Simone’s heart when Lucy moved out, but it would’ve been the right thing to do. And this is a mere extension of that.

She has got to hand herself in. She should have done so weeks ago.

Simone’s body goes into shock. She hums with it, a guitar string plucked and left to shiver. She’s going to go to prison.

Damien’s face is full of regret and sympathy, and maybe she is nodding, maybe she just thinks she is. He reaches one of his huge hands out, cups her chin gently. ‘I didn’t want to tell you if there was a possibility we could still make it work.’

‘I know that,’ she says softly. ‘I appreciate that.’

‘You don’t have to do it,’ he tells her. ‘I don’t know what I would do.’ She meets his eyes. It’s a lie, but a kind one. He would do exactly what she’s going to do. They might not have agreed on the ransom, but on this they are aligned: sacrifice yourself. Spare Lucy. It’s no decision at all.

‘You would do it,’ Simone says. Her eyes to his. ‘You love her equally to me.’ It’s an apology, for what she said in Fort Davis. Too late, no doubt.

Damien lowers his head in acknowledgement of it, the circumstances too sad to discuss it.

‘The reality,’ Simone says, landing on a firm and concrete truth as steady as the land they almost sailed away from, ‘is that parents love their children more than children love their parents.’

‘True enough.’ Damien smiles sadly.

‘It’s almost like unrequited love. You give it all and then they go away.’

‘They take it with them,’ Damien replies simply. One of the truest sentiments Simone has ever heard.

The police are on their deck, now. Searchlights everywhere.

Right before the police reach them, Lucy does. She’s been to the shop, is carrying something with her. ‘What’s going on?’ she says, her eyes everywhere.

In her hands is a Caribbean rum cake, the one Simone likes. On the side it says ALCOHOL FREE.

Simone crosses to Lucy and grabs her wrists urgently. The cake topples to the deck. ‘The police are here.’ They have so little time; she has to be clear. ‘They’re here for us and they’re going to take me,’ she says. ‘I am going to say it was all me – OK?’ She makes the plea bargain sound simpler than it really is. ‘So they won’t arrest you.’

‘No!’ Lucy shouts.

But Simone has to do it. Lucy will recover. And she will be free.

Simone is suddenly reminded of when Lucy was a toddler, and the smallest things were traumas. Being dropped off at nursery. Falling into mud. Those same eyes shone up at her in the exact same way they do now, like, Please fix this. Mummy, please fix this. And she always could; they were things that were so simple to correct.

‘You’ll have Dad. And you can go to RADA – and …’ Simone says, but her voice is cracking, a symptom of a broken heart, and she stops pretending as the police close in, and begins to cry. As Lucy does, too, the police raise their guns and say, ‘Can you confirm you are Simone Seaborn?’ She nods mutely, there on the boat in a sea of blue. And Lucy’s hands are still in hers.

‘No,’ Lucy says. ‘No. Don’t do it. Please don’t do it.’

‘I have to – but, listen,’ Simone says, and are the police encroaching slowly because they can see the parting of mother and daughter, or is everything just in slow motion anyway? ‘This is the last time for a while that we’re going to get to speak privately,’ she tells Lucy. ‘I want you to know – I don’t regret it. Any of it. It was worth it all for you.’

Lucy holds her hands, and Damien comes forward, too, their family a daisy chain. There is no one Simone would rather leave Lucy with than her father. Her protector, her stable influence, their rock.

‘And it might – it might …’ Simone’s voice is choked. ‘It might be a while. But you will be OK.’

‘I won’t.’

‘You will,’ she says, and then the grace period is over. The police close in.

‘We have reason to believe that you are Simone Seaborn, that, on the second of September you did shoot and kill …’ they continue. ‘You have the right to remain silent …’

Lucy stares, and Simone feels no regret.

Lucy was taken from Simone in the beginning when she was kidnapped, and now, actually, it is Simone being taken from Lucy. And that’s better. That is the natural order. The parent always leaves first. Simone just didn’t think it would be this soon, so soon. They didn’t get enough time together. But doesn’t every parent always think that?

CHAPTER 68

The Kidnapper

The little house is empty, shutters now open, no possessions inside. Maybe it wasn’t her, maybe I missed my opportunity.

I’m leaving now, rope and tape tucked away in the bottom of a bag. And, of course, everything has changed. I think this as I sit and watch the story repeat over and over on the news on my phone in a cab – MOTHER, FATHER AND DAUGHTER CAUGHT; MOTHER IN POLICE CUSTODY. DAUGHTER REMAINS FREE. Suddenly, it seems like everything has fallen apart.

I cross my legs at the ankles and contemplate it. I was almost ready. I was sure I had her in my sights. And now this.

It’s time to make a new plan. But wait, I think, watching the flickering images play out on the phone, maybe it’s easier like this. There’s no one to get in the way of my plans; no one watching. MOTHER IN POLICE CUSTODY.

It’ll be easier to take her by myself.

DAUGHTER REMAINS FREE.

Part IV

THE PRISONER

CHAPTER 69

Simone

At four o’clock this morning, Simone wakes from a dream that it is Lucy in jail, instead, locked up away from Simone, inexplicably bound and gagged and mute.

Simone then does nothing for the following twelve hours – so jarring in the era of Netflix and Kindle and iPhones – until (absurdly) four o’clock in the afternoon, when dinner is served.

There is no lingering over mains late at night here. Tuesday is pizza day in jail, and the pizzas are loaded on to plastic plates in the canteen, their cheesy ends dipping like Salvador Dalí clocks.

If Simone were lying, she would say that the pizzas may be disgusting but the inmates are worse. But, actually, Simone finds nothing more offensive than soggy pizza dough and sprayed-on cheese, a fact she finds somewhat unedifying but is nevertheless true.

Pizza on plate, she squeezes past a couple of women standing together, talking behind their hands, and sits nearest to a guard. Probably wimp-like behaviour, but she doesn’t care.

She is alone at a bolted-down table. The floor is a bright yellow linoleum, the walls blue. A kind of overly compensated cheerful, the same found in children’s hospitals and contact centres back home.

Nearby, voices rise, over the last serving maybe. Simone registers it dimly, keeps her head down, doing what she feels is most sensible in this situation: she eats the pizza, looks uninterested, makes her body smaller. One woman pushes the other, and Simone doesn’t look at the guard or tell on anyone. Instead, she acts as if it is not happening at all.

One slice of pizza is all she can manage, the cheese, tomato and bread flopping in her mouth like a second tongue. This is her first Tuesday in here. She is on – what the UK would call – remand, awaiting a court hearing, and it is crazy, to Simone, to contemplate that this is the first Tuesday of an almost infinite number. Thousands of them, surely, thousands of pizza days stacking up ahead of her. One day, she wonders if she will stop counting, and just kind of sink into it with acceptance. But only five days ago she was on a boat with her family, and now she is here.

Simone likes the canteen because it has windows, although they’re way up high, at the edges of a vaulted ceiling. Even so, they have bars on them, running vertically. She also likes it because, in the windows, she can see herself – there are no mirrors in county jail.

She stares upwards at her reflection. Her jumpsuit is black and white stripes, an awful, clown-like outfit that, perversely, means she is normal risk. Green means increased. Simone avoids those inmates the most. Beat-up trainers, one size too big, from a jail locker. Unbranded used-to-be-white socks. She keeps both on right until she goes to bed because her cell smells of urine and she can’t bear the thought of walking on old wee.

Texan skies are a burst of unreal blue beyond the windows, and it’s funny, she really does live here now, in Texas. This shitty canteen with its nailed-down furniture and plastic cutlery is her home.

After dinner, she lies on her bed in her cell that is always five degrees too hot, doing nothing, waiting for nothing. No visiting hours until tomorrow. Lucy and Damien remain in America, for now, staying back in Terlingua, too far away for her liking, but what does it really matter? She wonders if they’re looking at the big blue sky, too.

And she can’t help but think something that bothered her less on the outside. That, while she is in here, imprisoned, he is still out there. The anonymous kidnapper, the wrongdoer. Walking free.

‘Somebody here to see you, Simone,’ a guard says to her while she lies on her bed, making eggs Benedict in her mind.

‘Who?’ she asks immediately. ‘It isn’t visiting hours?’

‘Lawyer,’ he says.

‘I refused legal advice.’ Her statement is downbeat and factual, comes from a place of fear. Only total compliance, in Simone’s mind, will keep Lucy free. Simone’s arraignment is in three days’ time, when she has told the police she will plead guilty to all charges as part of the ongoing bargain to give Lucy total immunity. They set it for then so that the judge can receive her plea and sentence her all in one. She took the blame for everything she could. Even the identities. It’s better for Lucy to have one parent free.

It’ll be life, she’s pretty sure.

She can’t get legal advice.

She sits up on the edge of her little bed now, mattress not hard but instead overly soft, so soft it sags into the springs of the bed frame which dig into her back in the night.

‘He’s in a meeting room,’ he says, and then he makes a gesture towards the heavy metal door with the hatch in it, for her to come.

‘Will anyone know about it?’

‘I do, but don’t worry about that,’ he tells her. Simone likes this guard. Straight-talking, knows her name. Seems to be a human being beyond a jailer, has tattoos of his kids’ names; she once overheard him say he was craving a Burger King.

‘Anyone else?’

‘Nah. Privileged. You want to speak to him or not?’ he asks.

And, out of intrigue, out of loneliness, and out of having absolutely nothing fucking better to do, Simone follows him out.

And there, in a meeting room so different from her cell it feels like civilization, is Moody.

‘It’s you,’ she says to him. The meeting room is air conditioned, and it’s bliss. The chilled, stale air on her wrists, the back of her neck. She wishes she could sleep here, in the quiet and the cool, the exact opposite of the cells. Blue carpet, dark-wood furniture, two telephones and everyday objects that are now contraband, notepads and pens, things Simone can’t resist running her fingers over.

He has nothing with him. No phone. No file. Nothing, just himself, too-big suit, long legs tucked back underneath his chair, floppy hair, glasses, eyes on hers.

Simone is surprised to find herself emotional. James Moody. A lawyer – of all things – who has likely betrayed her trust.

‘Why on earth are you pleading guilty?’ he says to her. No introduction, no response to it’s you. Just this.

‘It’s nothing to do with you,’ she tells him coldly.

‘Excuse me?’ he says, tone light.

‘No one knew we were in Terlingua except you. They searched your house.’

‘A drone discovered you heading there. The police searched every last place in Terlingua, including mine. I told them I’d checked my rental the hour before, that it was locked and empty. They believed me, so they didn’t come for you.’

‘Oh,’ Simone says, voice small.

‘You disappeared. When I started to ask around, I found out you’d bought identities off a honeytrapper, who waited for you to finish the transaction, then told the police when you’d boarded the boat.’

‘Oh,’ she says again. ‘It was the dark web guy.’

‘Yes.’

‘We had to go.’

‘I get that,’ he says. ‘But why are you pleading guilty?’

Simone hesitates, but she thinks he’s trustworthy. The police did search his house, and they didn’t come back for them. And the information he passed them about Max had been accurate. ‘The police said they wouldn’t prosecute Lucy if I did, for the shooting at the Buick. And you had come up with nothing …’

‘In only a few days! Law, when it works, is a long game.’

‘It’s all about Lucy.’

He pauses, evidently with lots to say, grabs a pencil from the pot on the next table and begins upending it, rubber then the tip, rubber then the tip.

Simone is distracted by the fact that, on the table, are two cups of tea. Polystyrene cups, but tea, nevertheless. Builder’s tea, the colour of brick dust. Simone can almost taste the tannin.

Moody catches her looking. ‘Brits really do love their tea, huh?’

‘Yes.’ She stops, thinking that it really wasn’t him. Why else would he be here, trying to help her? ‘The food in here is awful. Awful pizzas.’

‘I bet.’ A pause. ‘You weren’t lying when you said you didn’t like lawyers.’

‘I had a bad experience.’

He inclines his head, takes a sip of his tea, passing her hers. ‘Oh?’

‘Parents were crap parents,’ she says. ‘It got nasty with lawyers.’

‘Ah.’

As she sits down, the jumpsuit strains at her hips, even though she’s lost weight already through not eating floppy pizzas and bread so oily it leaves stains on her fingers.

‘They didn’t charge Damien, then?’

‘No. Minor dishonest offences, anyway,’ she tells him. ‘I took it all for the main ones. Same with Lucy.’

‘Well.’

‘Well, what?’

‘It isn’t too late,’ he says.

‘Yes it is,’ Simone says, nodding firmly. ‘I’ve done a deal. If I went back on it, went to trial, they would go after her, too.’

Moody makes a face, his lips moving downwards in a kind of grimace, then just looks at her, saying nothing for a while. He begins to upend the pencil again, evidently thinking. ‘You’re sure about that decision?’ he asks her. ‘That’s why I’m here: to make sure.’

‘Yes, I am.’

‘It’s a hell of a decision.’

‘But the right one.’

‘What if you both went to trial and I got you both off?’ he says lightly.

‘I’m not willing to gamble that,’ Simone says, and, truly, would anybody be?

‘Do you know what you’re gambling here, Simone? What they will sentence you to, in just a few days’ time, if you go ahead?’

‘No. And I don’t want to know,’ she says quickly. And, to her surprise, he just tells her, against her will, straight up.

‘They have charged you with murder; you just escaped capital murder,’ he tells her, his gaze direct. ‘With everything, you’d be looking at twenty to forty years.’

Simone is too shocked to say anything except a sarcastic-sounding ‘That is a lot of Tuesday pizzas.’

Moody gives her a grim laugh, but she isn’t listening, not really. Instead, she is thinking twenty to forty years. How dare he tell her? She didn’t want to know. And now she does, she can’t conceptualize it. It’s an unfathomable amount of time.

‘Twenty to forty,’ she repeats.

Twenty or forty multiplied by three hundred and sixty-five. The maths is stupid, dizzying, though easy for her from scaling up ingredients. Seven thousand to fourteen thousand days? And she’s done five days, all aching fucking five of them.

Perhaps as consolation, Moody pushes the tea again towards her. She takes a sip and, oh, that is wonderful. Proper tea, not the canteen stuff she has every morning, the colour of an ashtray and tasting about the same, made with UHT milk and careless brewing. This is rich and full-bodied, malty, balanced on the tongue. Hot but not scalding. Simone could write a tea guide like people do for wine, right at this moment. ‘That’s nice,’ she says feebly to Moody.

‘You like cooking?’ he asks. ‘You have a restaurant?’

‘Yeah.’

‘I’m partial to food myself.’

‘I could tell,’ she answers. ‘Nice spices, and nice knives, too, in your kitchen.’

‘I got them to use proper milk here … for the chef.’

‘Right.’ Simone pauses, then adds: ‘Lucy will be nearly forty to sixty years old.’

The unspoken passes between them: Simone herself might not make it out of here. She will be more like sixty to eighty. Eighty.

‘If you let me represent you, I could get it down,’ he tells her. ‘I could get you off.’

‘How? You can’t find any evidence of the kidnapper. Max was a red herring. Jon-Paul Delves is a cipher.’

‘Let me try harder.’

‘I said I’d cooperate with them.’ She gestures to him with the tea. ‘This isn’t that.’

‘Cooperation is not giving up every single one of your human rights. Sacrifice feels good until you have to live it.’

Simone winces at the truth of this statement. ‘But I can’t risk it,’ she says, her eyes wet, desperate and sad. ‘I can’t risk them going back on the deal. Nobody believes … nobody believes us. I can’t gamble that on a fucking jury. Twelve random people who might send Lucy down?’

Moody just looks at her, saying nothing, pencil still moving.

‘What would she get?’ Simone asks.

‘I’d argue that she was merely shooti–’

‘What would she get if they charged her right now and she was convicted?’

Moody answers sadly: ‘A decade.’

Her head sinks downwards. She looks at him. ‘You have kids?’

Moody silently holds up two fingers.

‘Girls or boys?’ she asks him.

‘Two girls.’ His voice as quiet as distant thunder.

‘Would you spin the roulette wheel, if this were you? The drugs drop, buying the gun, the shootings …’

After several seconds, Moody shakes his head, and really, that’s all he needs to say, but he adds, ‘I get your point.’

‘Hard to ever know if you’re doing the right thing, as a parent, isn’t it?’ she says.

‘Do Lucy and Damien need a place to stay?’

‘They’re in a motel, in Terlingua.’

‘They can have my place again. OK? Why don’t you tell me everything you know from that night, again.’

‘There’s nothing new.’

‘It might help to go over it.’ He holds his hands up. ‘Off record. Parent to parent, no lawyers in sight.’

So Simone tells him. The singing school – he wants her to linger over this. The concertina door. The four o’clock wake. The flip phone, the ransom, the border, the bag, the sirens, the missing kilogram. And, as she speaks, details peppering the story like a seasoning, she suddenly thinks that nobody, nobody, could ever think that she was lying. She doesn’t know what to do with this thought, so she simply puts it to one side.

Moody waits for a full ten seconds, once she has finished, evidently choosing his words carefully. ‘You did the right thing,’ he tells her. Then looks at her. ‘Every single step.’

‘Would you have done it, too?’

‘Yes. And you got your kid out alive.’

‘She deserves to stay free,’ Simone says. She’s still pleasantly cold in the meeting room, the tea lightly steaming the very tip of her nose like that first cup on an autumn morning.

‘At great cost to you.’

‘That’s parenthood.’

Moody doesn’t answer her for a little while. Instead, he upends his pencil again and again, and they drink their tea, Simone thinking of twenty to forty years and Moody perhaps thinking of how to persuade her to take it all to trial, which is why it surprises her when he says: ‘I can’t think of a better mother than you, right now.’

And, somehow, this near stranger has said exactly the right thing, the only thing that could make her feel even slightly better. Before he leaves, he gets her a second tea, has to argue with the guard to do it, and they sit in silence while she drinks it.

CHAPTER 70

The Kidnapper

Everybody is back in Terlingua and so I, too, am back to the little house I suspected all along. I stake it out four times a day. It’s easier to do it now, though it remains a shut-up mystery.

Still, obsession yields results, so I set up a proper schedule so I will soon have every single hour covered. She has got to come out some time.

Morning, afternoon, evening and then night. But there’s no movement, even though the lights go on and off. This time, I have the things with me. The tape, the ropes, they’re in a bag on my back. If I see her, she’s mine. Forget overpreparation, underpreparation is a risk, too.

I sit cross-legged in the dirt at two o’clock in the morning, hips aching, hands filthy from leaning back on them, just watching for any kind of flicker within.

There’s always nothing until there’s something. Sure enough, when I return at six o’clock in the morning, she is just leaving in a taxi that pulls off as I walk by. This spurs me to act. I risk a call to the county appraiser’s office, something I don’t want to do for obvious reasons. They answer, and I give false details of my own, but a nearby address. Say I’m a neighbour, the tenant is problematic and I suspect they’re up to no good. They don’t know who the tenant is, say it’s not on the records as let. They will find out who the landlord is and call me back.

Tomorrow, I will come back and stay the night. Two until six. People are creatures of routine and habit, after all. Let’s see.

CHAPTER 71

Simone

Next to a No Smoking sign, an inmate in the yard is pretending to light up. Simone watches her for several seconds, fascinated. Imaginary cigarette held between thumb and index finger, the way you’d hold a roll-up you treasured, not a mass-produced cigarette. She brings it – nothing – to her mouth, sucks her cheeks in, then blows out.

Simone’s arraignment and sentencing is in only two days, and therefore it is also in two days’ time that she will likely leave this jail for a prison, but all she is doing is nothing, just watching the non-smoker, also doing nothing, smoking nothing.

‘Been forced to quit,’ she tells Simone, ‘so I’m pretending.’ She pauses. ‘No nicotine patches allowed.’

‘I’m sorry,’ Simone says, then offers up, ‘if it helps, I’m being forced to quit nice food.’

The woman lets out a little laugh. ‘Aren’t we all? Nice food and human rights. Natch.’

She comes over to Simone with a hand outstretched. Simone finds she doesn’t want to shake it but does so anyway, hoping none of the nearby guards will accuse her of anything. ‘Victoria,’ the woman says.

‘Simone.’

‘Nice name. Too nice for a murderer,’ she says, but her tone is light, without any loaded quality at all, and Simone supposes that maybe this passes for small talk. Is it a film-and-TV myth that you never ask what someone is in for? She doesn’t know, but somehow Victoria is fully aware of Simone’s crime.

‘Well, not everyone’s story is as obvious as it seems,’ Simone says.

She tilts her head back and looks into the high blue sky. Just at the very edges, she can see trees, unfamiliar, cactus-like, and she finds herself thinking that it ought not to matter what country she is in, but that it does. The yard is as dusty as the desert she and Lucy slept in, the clouds feather and down, the chain-link fences hot underneath her fingertips. Sunscreen is allowed in jail here, and Simone bets it isn’t in England.

There’s a watchtower in the centre of the yard, its walls surrounded by barbed wire. A guard sits at the top, looking out, and Simone shields her eyes against the fierce, hot sun, even into the autumn, and tries to get a glimpse of his face. An aeroplane begins to pass, somewhere distant, taking free people from place to place.

Most of the inmates are playing basketball, something that at first seems like fun but seems more volatile the longer you look.

‘My trial is in six months. Been here six already,’ Victoria says. She flicks imaginary ash off the end of the cigarette. ‘Backlog due to Covid.’

Victoria looks directly at Simone. She has pale skin, ginger hair, near perfect features. Her hair is recently cut, blunt ends, and Simone finds herself thinking how life must go on, even in jail, somehow. Haircuts and sunscreen and dental procedures and who knows what else, the bits that purport to make up a life.

‘I’m being sentenced soon.’

Victoria locks her eyes to Simone’s in surprise. ‘Pleading guilty?’

‘Yeah.’

‘To murder? Aren’t you the one with the kidnapping?’ she asks, and Simone wonders how word travels so fast when this has never once been offered up by Simone as a defence since her arrest.

‘That’s me. Did a deal with the state,’ she says tightly.

‘The worst people to do a trade with.’ Victoria makes a gesture then, upwards to the barbed wire, to the unhappy women playing basketball as some kind of attempt at recreation, to the open skies that are available to everybody but them.

‘Well, sometimes you don’t have a choice.’

Victoria turns her mouth down at that in a kind of tacit agreement, nods, and throws her ‘cigarette’ on to the ground where she stubs it out.

‘And your guy – your daughter’s kidnapper …’

Simone raises her eyebrows.

‘One of the other inmates told me. We always google new people.’

‘On …?’

‘People on the outside do it for us,’ she tells her. ‘It’s more fun than basketball.’

‘Right.’

‘Your kidnapper is still at large, then? Just carrying on kidnapping?’

‘You believe me?’

‘Of course,’ Victoria tells her. She smiles grimly. ‘Why would you traffic drugs?’

‘Right.’

‘So he’s just – free? You don’t know who he is?’

‘Right. Some anonymous person, somewhere out there.’

‘Who never gets caught.’ She raises her eyes again to the barbed wire, the watchtower. ‘If somebody is getting away with something, I’d always look on the inside.’ She brings an imaginary lighter out of her pocket and pulls down on an invisible metal barrel. Simone can almost hear the rasp of it, see the flame dancing invisibly there in the white sun. ‘I always smoked them in twos,’ she explains. ‘Anyway, guess you’ve made your mind up.’ She meets Simone’s eyes again. ‘But I wanted to say, I’d vote not guilty, if I were on your jury.’

‘I’m not having a trial,’ Simone says.

But while it is all these words that reverberate in Simone’s brain for the next hour, it’s these in particular that are the loudest. I’d always look on the inside.

Who, on the inside, knew where they were going to be? Somebody they have overlooked?

Simone requests a phone call as soon as she can after this, and is granted one because it is telephone night. Moody calls her back, and she’s allowed to take it in a crowded and horrible anteroom that grandly calls itself the Communications Hub. It consists of white-painted breeze-block walls, a black-painted floor and the stale smell of cooked onions in the air. Along the left are four hooded telephone booths, old-fashioned payphones that remind Simone of the worst night of her life the second she touches the handset. The screen reads CALLER UNKNOWN.

‘There are no other victims of kidnap who have come forward. And there is nobody in the area who used to traffic drugs and got convicted for it and ended up on a watch list,’ Moody tells her. ‘As we know.’

‘… Right,’ Simone says. ‘I was talking to somebody in here. She said, if the kidnapper has evaded getting caught, what if it’s somebody on the inside? I know we discounted the police, but …’

Moody is silent for a little while after she says this. So much so that Simone checks the line is still connected. ‘It could be somebody in control of the situation,’ he answers eventually. Then he says two words to her: ‘Border Patrol.’

Simone blinks. ‘A border official at the airport knew I was meeting Lucy,’ Simone says. ‘I told him. He was helping me to find my suitcase …’

‘He ask any questions?’

‘My flight number. I told him I was staying with Lucy …’

‘How long did your luggage take?’

‘A little while,’ Simone says softly. ‘Half an hour, maybe.’

‘Long enough to give someone advance notice to go and break a door while no one was there.’

The remote check-in. She’d told him that, too. Could it be?

Moody pauses again, and Simone hears paper crinkling. ‘Leave it with me,’ he tells her. Then adds: ‘Just – Yes. Leave it with me.’

Not even three hours later, a bored guard gets Simone. ‘Another call for you. Lawyer says it’s urgent, that we gotta comply, apparently,’ he tells her, and Simone trails him down corridors with doors that double-lock and bolt. Nobody else is out of their cells. It’s the early evening, the jail quiet, and something about it feels almost like Dishes after hours. Dim light, tidy surfaces, soft-close doors. The Communications Hub is empty, dark, the only illumination from an office room next door that shines a yellow rectangle on to the polished black floor. One phone has its receiver on the top, and Simone takes it, heart pounding, while a guard pretends not to listen.

‘Simone, how sure is Lucy that the kidnapper is male?’ Moody asks.

CHAPTER 72

Simone glances around her. ‘Go on.’

‘The reason Max had an alibi is that he doesn’t do the kidnappings, but he does feed them the victims,’ Moody explains. ‘You were half right with your theory about the camp. But you missed a piece.’

Simone closes her eyes. So the British man was involved. Primed to send the names of kids whose parents were arriving to somebody even worse than him.

‘A Border Patrol officer named Michaela worked the Mexican border but lives in Fort Davis.’

At this, Simone takes a breath. Michaela. Michaela in the cowboy hat.

Michaela, who was female, but tall and broad … enough to kidnap?

The kidnapper, who always obscured their voice, their appearance …

Moody pauses. ‘That’s your woman.’

Michaela, who actually asked if Simone was all right at the border. A cruel double bluff.

Moody continues, ‘Michaela is Max’s cousin. She recently bought a Porsche. Unusual for someone of her vocation. On the day you arrived, a police friend who got her phone records for me just now tells me Michaela received a call from a phone registered to somebody else in Border Patrol, who works in the airport you flew into,’ Moody says. ‘Named Danny. I’ve been pulling every lever to find stuff out.’

The man with the burrito in the airport.

‘Two hours later, Michaela buys a different phone. A contact I have at Buc-ee’s tells me she often does so. Jon-Paul Delves is seen there on CCTV, meeting her and then leaving. Then, according to number plate recognition, Michaela drives underneath two gantries that are on the way to the lodge. Photos so clear I could see her lemon air freshener dangling in her car.’

Simone closes her eyes. It makes sense. Max selected candidates from camp. Then, when Michaela knew a parent was arriving, she used a contact, Danny, in the airport to get information from their ESTA. Then she, ostensibly a nice officer on the coach, the one with the daughter – just like the kidnapper – training to be a space psychologist, let the parents through the border despite the sniffer dogs’ alerts. It’s so obvious.

The entire time, Max was on the coach and it was probably him who told the police that Lucy and Simone were seen together on it, to discredit them. But he wasn’t the kidnapper, so had an alibi.

It’s so, so obvious now.

It worked so seamlessly for them. A chain-link of crimes, undetected when viewed in isolation.

‘What’s her surname?’ she asks. ‘Michaela?’

‘Wyatt.’

‘Michaela Wyatt.’ And, just like that, a mystery is solved. The Border Patrol officer. All that anxiety of transporting the drugs was for nothing. She was being instructed to do it by the very person who would ensure that she could. She directed Simone so precisely, timed it so she would be checked by her on her shift. Of course she did.

Michaela had spoken to her at the height of her panic, and she had told her about her daughter while knowing Simone’s was held captive – and alone – back at her house. Then she handed Lucy over to Jon-Paul Delves. He was a criminal for hire, nothing more, nothing less. A nefarious, immoral person who would deliver Lucy once he had her.

Before that, Michaela had taken Lucy from her bed. Gloved hand and all. The lemon smell came from the air freshener in her car; even Simone’s nose had no chance of smelling that on her when she’d been at work all day. And if anyone else had searched Simone, Michaela had covered her tracks so well that she simply would’ve watched on as Simone was arrested.

There would never have been any point in telling the police, she supposes. The whole thing was too organized. She could do nothing except engage with it. A small shard of relief: she was right to answer the ransom.

She was right. She couldn’t have done anything differently.

She says to Moody: ‘Thank you.’ The handset is warm from her body heat and relief, humming, too, with a kind of optimism that Simone doesn’t trust.

‘You’re welcome,’ Moody replies. ‘It was you who figured it out, anyway.’ He pauses, and Simone waits. ‘I’ve got a tail on her, following her. But, and I hate to say this, she’s retired from Border Patrol. I suspect maybe she gave up because of what happened with you and Jon-Paul. Too high profile.’

Disappointment floods Simone’s body. ‘And the hearing is in two days.’

‘We could cancel that. Adduce it at trial.’

‘She’s left, Moody! Our only chance was to catch her doing it. She’s not going to confess.’

‘I know.’ A beat. ‘I know.’

‘I can’t go to trial on that.’ She pauses, the excitement dying. ‘In the witness box, she’ll just lie. I can’t risk it on someone who will have covered every base. She will have hundreds of colleagues who will vouch for her. It’s all been done on burner phones. She doesn’t even sell the drugs herself … She’s left the force.’

‘You could take the risk. Reject the plea, go to trial.’

‘I can’t, Moody. I can’t risk it for Lucy. A decade,’ she repeats back to him. ‘A decade.’

The kidnapper: a mother of a daughter. The symmetry, the irony, isn’t lost on Simone. Who better to ransom a mother than one herself, who knew what women are made of?

Visiting hours the next day, now the day before Simone’s arraignment and guilty plea, and they’re in the side rooms. Sometimes, visiting hours take place in the main Visitors’ Centre, sometimes here, cubbyholes with glass screens and telephones. There seems to be no reason why it’s sometimes one thing and sometimes another, like many things in jail. The same reason breakfast is served at five thirty in the morning.

There has not been a single effort to make the cubbyhole anything less than completely depressing. Nothing on the walls. Despite the lack of physical contact, Lucy is still body-scanned on the way in. She sits down on a plastic blue chair and looks at her mother.

Lucy is likely ageing underneath the surface. Simone might not even notice it, until so much time has passed that she has grey hair and wrinkles and so, today, she scrutinizes her for changes.

She is wearing a cornflower-blue top that Simone doesn’t recognize. She’s gained back the weight she lost. Nothing else.

Lucy rubs at her eyes. ‘How are you?’ she says into the phone. The screen distorts her, just slightly, reminding Simone that they are not quite seeing each other in person.

Perhaps it is Simone’s imagination, but she is almost always marked very precisely by a guard, and wonders if this is because she has drugs offences on her records. One passes by now, walking heel to toe, a slow lap, listening in on their intimate communications in the way the law entitles him to do.

‘How’s the house?’ she asks Lucy.

‘It weirdly feels like home,’ Lucy says. ‘That little pink house. It’s OK. It was nice to hear from Moody.’ Simone had used her phone call after Moody left to explain to Lucy that it hadn’t been him who had betrayed them. A beat. ‘You’d hate what Dad is cooking.’

‘It can’t be as bad as here,’ Simone says drily, and Lucy lets out laughter that sounds for a second just like a child’s.

‘I’d agree there. But it’s really awful. We had scrambled eggs this morning in the shape of a square box.’

‘God, is he microwaving them?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Tell him to fry them in a pan, for God’s sake.’

‘I will.’

‘But is it – is it nice, no longer hiding?’

‘It is nice,’ Lucy says carefully, but doesn’t add any more than that. ‘What news from here?’ she asks.

Simone steels herself, takes a breath. ‘Well, Moody thinks he has found your kidnapper. He thinks it’s a woman.’

‘What?’ Lucy says slowly, her voice audible only down the phone but her expression of guarded horror playing out right in front of Simone. But then her face changes. ‘It could be a woman,’ she says simply. ‘Yes. No voice. Yes. Strong, tall, but not necessarily male. You just imagine it is.’

‘Right.’

‘How old?’

‘Fifties.’

‘She’s a perfect kidnapper, in a way: someone who can hide in plain sight. A middle-aged woman. No one looks at old women.’

Lucy’s not wrong, but, nevertheless, throws Simone a tiny self-conscious grin. ‘Sorry.’

Simone laughs softly, and she tells Lucy what Moody told her.

‘So Max chose us, then she did it, with help from the other guy?’

‘Seems so. That other guy works the airport; I spoke to him briefly. Enough – unfortunately – to tell him we were staying together, enough for him to know how much I love you.’

‘Oh,’ Lucy says, her mouth round with surprise. ‘You told him that?’

‘Said I had missed you so much. I tell everyone. It’s obvious, too, without me saying …’

Lucy gives her a sad half-smile through the glass. ‘And the rest is bum luck,’ she says, her voice melancholic. ‘That you dropped one of the bars of drugs.’

‘Exactly. I think so.’

‘What’s her name?’

‘Michaela Wyatt.’

‘So that’s her,’ Lucy says slowly. ‘The person we tried so hard for so long to find.’ Another pause. ‘She was there all along, at the border, assisting you.’ She fiddles with nothing, just the table – there’s nothing in there, not her phone or a set of keys or anything. ‘We now know who she is, the spectre over all this. A woman.’

‘I know.’

‘What was she like?’

‘Cowboy hat. Seemed benign enough.’

‘All that time. You’d met her, too.’

‘I know.’

‘God,’ Lucy says, and they lapse into silence. One more visiting hours tomorrow, before her sentencing, then after that … between twenty and forty. Between twenty and forty. The thought throbs in Simone’s ears like a bass beat. But she knows this is the right thing to do.

‘And now she’s retired, Moody tells me,’ Simone relays to Lucy, whose shoulders drop.

‘So she’s no longer doing it.’

‘Right.’

‘With no evidence she ever did.’

‘… Right.’

‘If you went to trial, she’d deny it on the stand, wouldn’t she? And what jury would believe it was a woman?’

‘Yes. And have her colleagues and Max say it’s preposterous. There’s zero evidence anyone at camp was ever kidnapped. God knows how many were – they’re always told not to tell. It could be hundreds. It could be just a few. No one will admit to shipping drugs.’

Lucy shrugs, and the gesture is so inadequate that both of them smile grimly. Simone has depressed even Lucy with her resolution, with her botched saving of the day.

‘How long do you think you will stay?’ Simone asks, finally saying it. ‘After.’

‘Forever,’ Lucy says. She meets Simone’s eyes and gives a kind of enigmatic smile. Simone can’t read it. It is both self-conscious but also knowing.

‘No – that’s not the idea!’ Simone says. ‘You’re going home.’

‘I can’t leave you here,’ Lucy says. Somehow, the plastic phone, the glass screen, it makes this more self-conscious, not less. Simone doesn’t feel one step removed; she feels on display.

‘I want you to be truly free. Go to RADA. Anything,’ Simone tells her, but Lucy just shrugs again.

A beep sounds: five minutes left. A kind of toddler timer set for inmates, to attempt to cut down on tantrums. Simone heaves a sigh. This is it until tomorrow, and she can’t even hug her. Back to her cell, to lie on the shitty bed, the too-soft mattress, her view of her stainless-steel toilet that looks like a loo from an aeroplane. Another day done of fourteen thousand.

They don’t say much of anything for the remaining five minutes. Perhaps each is thinking of the kidnapper, some career criminal in Border Patrol, perhaps not. Perhaps they’re both thinking how close to the truth they got with Max. But they just sit there, two solid weights opposite each other, separated by a screen, but, otherwise, just as before. They have shared a space a thousand times, a tent, a car, a sofa. Companionable silence. Simone is grateful for it.

‘Save the day?’ Lucy says, just as she stands to leave.

‘How?’

‘I’m going to sing at the top of my lungs on the way home – the Uber driver can stuff it,’ she tells her. ‘I’m going to sing … what’s the cheesiest song you can think of?’

‘Uh …’ Simone pauses, a hand to the phone, then stands, puts it to the glass the way she did in the coach way back when, to Mexico. Don’t go, she is thinking, the same refrain as always, a minor chord set for the song of motherhood. I’ve let you go, it’s the right thing to do, but please don’t leave me. It’s exaggerated, for Simone, the separation, but it’s still natural, too, to reach this point: the empty nest. Hers is a jail cell, that’s all.

‘The cheesiest, most rubbish song,’ Lucy says, and she comes towards the glass screen, too, matching her palm to Simone’s. Both leave sweaty smears – the heat of jail and the nervous energy of hundreds of inmates. ‘“MMMBop”,’ Lucy eventually says, and Simone breaks into a smile.

‘Deal. I’ll sing “MMMBop” in my cell.’

‘You’ll be in the green overalls before you know it.’

CHAPTER 73

The Kidnapper

Outside the house again, the next morning, and it was the right one. I knew it was. Found through chance or, actually, through hard work and stone-cold obsession. I didn’t know if it was, for so long, but now I do. Because here I am, holding a piece of paper containing confirmation it is her.

I have the rope and the tape, and am standing here, the daughter out, even though it’s the morning. I missed her again, even though I got up in the middle of the night to come.

I walk to the front door, cold in a skirt, the heat having left the day, and I think I’m going to have to break in, but there’s a spare key on the ledge above the door.

It’s easy. It’s so easy to sneak in, to feel my way into the still dark morning hallway, which smells of coffee and girls’ shampoo, and wait. I cast about, looking for a good place. Dark-wood stairs with a striped runner on them. A hall table collecting post. Kitchen at the back, two bedrooms off to the side. And, next to one of them, a storage cupboard, warm from a boiler. I get in there, next to the towels and the bedding, and I wait for her to come home.

CHAPTER 74

Simone

It’s the day of Simone’s arraignment, which is at two o’clock. She wakes up with curdled guts, has diarrhoea immediately on the aeroplane toilet the second her eyes open. The cell smells bad afterwards. She tells herself later, as she showers under a tepid communal water spout, that twenty or forty are just the same, really. That no one can count down twenty years. But she doesn’t believe it.

Visiting hours at ten o’clock, and today is Lucy’s day, not Damien’s: Lucy negotiated two days to his one, said she needed to see Simone more than he did. Simone still has wet hair as she walks down to – today – the main Visitors’ Centre.

Well, good. There will be no screen separating them, no phone handset to speak into. They aren’t permitted to touch, but they are permitted to just be, across a table from one another. Simone can close her eyes and pretend it’s someplace else. It doesn’t smell or feel like home, but it feels like something. A meeting place. An exam hall. Not a jail, not necessarily, jumpsuit notwithstanding. Besides, she can’t see herself. She sits on her hands, to hide the striped fabric from herself, and looks, instead, at the empty chair in front of her.

Lucy isn’t there yet, but Simone is distracted momentarily by what she is quite sure is a drugs exchange. A visitor, female, messing with something in the palm of her hand. Both visitor and prisoner have their eyes on it; it’s so obvious, and Simone wonders if she would always have known this or if this has come from some awful forced life experience. Maybe it isn’t drugs, she tells herself. Maybe she only thinks it is because she herself carried drugs. She loses sleep, sometimes, about where those brown-paper bars went, and whose lives they affected. Did the police take them, or …?

Lucy is late. Or Lucy isn’t here yet. Simone looks at the clock. It’s five past ten, then ten past. Lucy’s never once been late. This is the last chance for Simone to see her in this jail before she is sentenced, moved elsewhere, and everything begins from there, a water wheel that gets going slowly and then races. Lucy will move back to England eventually. They will keep in touch by letter. And, after that, just time.

Maybe it was Damien’s turn? Or Lucy thought it was, mistaken?

No. They had said.

And an eerie feeling settles across her. Maybe it’s just that she’s cold, hair wet against her neck from the shower. Maybe she’s getting sick. But it feels like something else: that ever-present ubiquitous thing. Maternal instinct.

Where is she?

Quarter past ten, twenty past. Soon, she has been sitting there for a full hour, and visiting time is over. Nobody checks in with her, or says anything, and so Simone leaves reluctantly at eleven, walking past the friendly guard who told her about Moody. ‘Hi,’ she says. ‘Is there any way I can make a call?’

‘No,’ he answers, as simple as that. ‘Not until telephone night.’ This is how things are referred to in jail: pizza night, telephone night, visiting hours, yard time. Things that don’t need names are given names, nominalized, to participate in the farce that structure can be created out of wasted lives.

‘No – it’s just, my daughter didn’t show, and …’

‘Whatever the reason, if I let you, I have to let everyone, and then my life is hell,’ he says, the jaded tone of voice of somebody on the receiving end of unreasonable requests all the time.

‘Well, can you get a message to someone?’ she asks him. ‘It’s urgent.’

‘You have to put a request in formally.’

‘Isn’t that what I’m doing?’ she asks, and he turns his eyes to her then, and she shrinks back, thinking anything she does now could add time, more and more and more of it. ‘Sorry,’ she tells him. ‘I’m just worried. I’m really worried about my daughter,’ and as she says it, she realizes how true it is. Lucy is so identifiable now, still in hiding but for different reasons, for media reasons. She’s gone from being anonymous to being infamous.

‘Why?’

‘Didn’t show for visiting hours. I need to tell someone. I need to contact her dad and see if she’s OK.’

‘Yeah,’ he says, a long, drawn-out, prevaricating noise. ‘All right,’ he says. ‘Let me see what I can do.’

‘I’m due in court soon. Please do it quickly.’

‘Lady, I’m going as fast as I can,’ he says, his tone jovial. He has misunderstood. Perhaps inmates regularly have these sorts of dramas, but Simone doesn’t.

‘The hearing is at two.’

‘Well, I’m sure you’ll see her then,’ he tells her, and Simone has no phone, no way of contacting a soul until then, the arraignment and sentencing, when the rest of her life is supposed to begin. Or end, depending on which way you look at it.

Simone is moved like an animal from cell to corridor to prison van with just the briefest flash, in between, of outside air. Hot, blinding, but fresh, too, like downing a glass of homemade lemonade. There has been no word from the guard.

She and four other women are being taken to court for their hearings, but all Simone can think about is Lucy. All she wants to do is find Moody and get him to call her.

Their transport looks like a regular coach except that all its passengers are handcuffed. The shades are down except on only one window, at the back, which is a perfect blue square.

Something about it feels to Simone like a cruel amalgamation of everything: the coach to Mexico, Lucy’s bound wrists, the lot. She stares down at her hands. She’d never seen a pair of handcuffs until these past few weeks, and now she’s familiar with them. The way the metal rests on her skin, firm and cool at first and then warm. The link in the middle. The way they open, when permitted, like a hook.

The coach doesn’t rumble like in the UK. Electric engine, smooth roads, no potholes or rain-cracked pavements.

The journey isn’t long, twenty minutes, and Simone ought to feel more nervous than she does, but instead she feels a kind of resigned something. Pessimism? She isn’t sure. Mostly, worry for Lucy.

The courthouse looms into view, huge and white and stately, lawn so neon green and tidy it looks fake, and they pass it and head to the rear.

They’re processed through an entrance exclusively for criminals, not something Simone would’ve disagreed with in principle, but which she finds offensive now, as though they think they might start brawling if they walk through the coffee-scented foyer with the things that they miss: nice drinks, sure, but also people, perfume, fashion, overheard gossip. Things that don’t seem important but are.

Her handcuffs are opened and she is attached to a security guard who smells of Lynx Africa and burgers. They walk in through a 1960s-style door that looks so unexpectedly British in the clean lines of the Texan architecture that Simone wants to linger there, tethered to a man she’s never met. The bottom half is wooden, the top threaded glass, squares like graph paper. Vintage Britain, like every single comprehensive school she’s ever seen, every council leisure centre, every back office and every church hall she took Lucy to when she was a toddler and they went to stay and plays.

She stares at that door as the guard opens it for them, she slides in, and then it’s gone, and everything is American again: polished floors, sweeping corridors, the accents.

She’s led to a new cell with open bars, and Simone is embarrassed and ashamed to observe that she feels a small note of pleasure at this, like a perfect chord played. The toilet is in a different place. No bed – just a long, wooden bench. Simone reaches out and touches the cool iron of the bars. There are people passing, staff. There are smells here, civilized smells, not the smells of jail – stale sweat, urine, old dinners, floppy pizzas – but instead laundry detergent, and proper wood polish, and the light, the light.

The guard leaves, and it isn’t long until Moody arrives, looking dishevelled and grumpy. The first thing he says is, ‘Is there anything I can do to change your mind?’ but Simone quickly displaces this with her own question.

‘Is Lucy here? Have you seen her? She missed visiting.’

‘I haven’t seen her.’

‘Can you go and look? Is Damien here?’

Moody holds her gaze for a second, checks his watch, then leaves the cell without saying anything else.

CHAPTER 75

The Kidnapper

She arrives back just after nine o’clock in the morning. I’ve been hiding, crouched at first, then sitting cross-legged, then reclining with my back against a neat stack of towels, for hours.

It’s a relief to finally hear the front door. A soft click, and she’s talking.

‘It’s fine, it’s fine, it’s fine,’ she mutters under her breath; she is talking to herself. Through the crack in the door, like all those weeks ago, I see her. Hair tied up, pale skin, today carrying a lever arch file and a Stanley cup.

She stops dead in the hallway, as though she knows somebody is here, or else perhaps this is something she routinely does. I watch her make slow progress through to the kitchen, putting a rucksack down carefully but in the doorway; she’s spooked.

She seems to relax after a few moments and starts to make a hot drink, possibly tea, I’m not sure. And this is my moment.

Another glance through the crack; it is absolutely, definitely her.

I step out of the cupboard, holding my rope. She hears the noise, and instead of startling, her body goes completely still. I hold my breath as she freezes, then turns to me in slow motion. Her shoulders are up, her eyes round with fear that I am – that someone is – here in her space, that she had no idea.

Our eyes meet.

And then recognition flashes, as fast as headlights.

Earlier, I learned that Michaela Wyatt owns this house. And that, therefore, this is her daughter, who I have been searching for.

‘Lucy,’ she says softly, her voice all feathers. ‘Lucy Seaborn.’

I reply: ‘It’s me.’

Part V

THE KIDNAPPER

CHAPTER 76

The Kidnapper

‘I’m sorry,’ I say again, gesturing pointlessly to the rope, the tape. I advance towards her, and she backs away. ‘I’m sorry I have to …’

Here she is, in the flesh, the person I have been searching for all this time: the kidnapper’s daughter. In the end, it was the only way. I realized early on what I’d have to do. The second we decided to run, I directed us to Terlingua – I’d overheard the daughter say she lived there, though I never told Mum that fact; I knew she’d stop me from doing this. It’s easy to act when you’ve been taught how.

I saw her through the crack in the door, and I knew I’d find her again, if only I looked hard enough.

I had the right house, but it was easy to check once Mum told me the kidnapper’s name. Michaela, the Border Patrol officer. Michaela, the owner of this house.

She owns it, and her daughter lives in it, evidently in fear, as she leaves the shutters closed and only goes out at nightfall. All I had to do was come back here, once we got back to Terlingua after Mum’s arrest, and do the deed. I had no idea the kidnapper was a woman, but, to me, it changes nothing.

It’s old-fashioned inside. A stone kitchen, fluorescent light up ahead littered with flies. The shutters make the place feel smaller, keep the morning out. A coffee machine steams on the counter, puffing plumes under the cupboards.

I take a breath. It’s time to use the kidnapper’s only Achilles’ heel, and it’s time to save my mother. And then, in that tired kitchen in Terlingua, she does the thing that I would never expect. She nods, like: OK, I get it. And also: I knew this would come. And also: understanding. She knows more than perhaps I’d counted on.

‘I saw you on the news,’ she says. But her face changes, a micro-emotion passing over it.

And suddenly, I think she doesn’t only watch the news. She knows precisely her mother’s involvement in it.

‘She …’ she says, and with a single syllable, I know that she knows everything. Exactly who I am, exactly what her mother does, and possibly even what I want. She waits a beat, then very deliberately, she raises her right hand, which contains a set of keys I didn’t know she was still holding. One sharp key held between index and middle finger. It’s something I recognize as such a mark of femalehood I almost have to look away. I know the exact feel of it, and the fear that predicates it. And here I am, causing it.

Then, to my surprise, she puts the keys down on the counter. ‘You’re here about her,’ she tells me.

‘Your mother,’ I reply.

The fluorescent light above us is off, only silvery glare coming in through the gaps around the shutters, hitting a couple of glasses sitting on a draining board but not much else; her face is shadowy.

And then she says it. The thing that changes everything. She steps forward, towards me, not afraid at all.

‘You want her to confess,’ she tells me. ‘You’re going to take me.’

I blink, surprised to find my eyes wet. When it comes down to it, I have almost no plan. I was meticulous in finding her. There was nowhere I didn’t look. But now I’m here, and I thought I’d take her through threats, through surprise. But I can’t. That isn’t me.

‘I’m sorry,’ I say, ‘I have to …’ I walk towards her with no idea what’s next.

‘No.’ She holds out a hand, and that’s when she says it. ‘I want her in prison, too. Always have.’ She reaches towards me. ‘Take me, and ransom her. But I’ll help you – let’s stage it.’

She – Andrea’s – legs are bound at the ankles with blue rope which – regretfully – leaves a mark. Her wrists, too. She’s tied to a chair we brought in the car with us, driving several miles from her house to some unidentifiable part of the desert.

‘Blindfold,’ I say, drawing it between my fingers softly, so softly it doesn’t scare her. The cotton material is new, tough and thick.

The tape comes next. The worst part. It was so painful ripping it off. ‘I’m sorry,’ I tell her, as I cut a small piece off.

‘It’s really fine.’

I pass it to her and she pats it into place, now mute. She does it so gently, so carefully, it moves me. A hand, her mother’s hand, was clamped to my mouth, that first night.

I look at her, sitting there, slim and slender in the chair, then take a photo, and get ready to send it.

How strange and otherworldly it is to be on the other side of it. To do the things the kidnapper did to me, only with different intent, and with my victim without fear. Really, it’s totally different. It occurs to me that I probably never would have been able to do it if she hadn’t complied. I just thought I could. There’s a difference between good people and bad people; there just is. I think so, anyway.

‘No,’ Andrea answers me, sitting casually in the dust of the desert. ‘She’s always been this way, but she’s getting worse. She’s so good at it that nobody knows it. She just wants money. Always wants more and more of it, no matter how much she’s got. She roped her cousin in, too. Then a friend.’

We’re together, by the roadside, two women who – it turns out – were born just three months apart.

‘That’s awful,’ I tell her, a hand outstretched, which she grasps.

‘Yeah. I know. I mean, she was dealing, always dealing. I didn’t know what for years. Dad died when I was a teenager – heart attack – and she got more cunning after that.’ Andrea pauses here, crosses her legs in front of her. ‘I moved out eventually, couldn’t cope with it. She made me go to the little house in Terlingua, said nowhere else was safe because of her dealings. That’s how she refers to them.’

‘So she knows you know.’

‘Oh yes. And she’s not wrong, either. I’ve been followed, sent threatening texts. She has so many enemies. It’s better for me to stay shut away in the day – studying. Psychology.’

‘Do you think your enemies are people she’s kidnapped, made to do things and released?’

‘Maybe. I don’t know. They could easily be her wingmen, part of the supply chain. In the end I kind of started to just disengage, you know?’ She pauses. ‘But she’s trying to keep me safe.’ Another beat. ‘She cares about me in her own way.’

‘You were waiting for somebody to come forward.’

‘Yeah.’

‘Does it … Does she not consider the fear she engenders in people? As a woman?’

Andrea scoffs. ‘No. All the time, I was thinking about how I could get her to stop. But I was the only one who ever knew, so I couldn’t hand her over. She’d know it was me.’

Texas blisters, still, in the autumn heat beyond us. Another abandoned highway, another crime, I guess, though this one is ethical. It’s win-win for both of us, though I’m surprised Andrea saw it like that immediately.

‘So the thing is,’ she says, ‘this gives me an out, too.’

‘Yeah?’

‘By the time I had moved out, she had taken three women, in total; the ransom was the drugs deal. You’re the fourth, as far as I know. I’ve been mostly living out here, but I went by her place when she had you. She was weird about it, and right away I knew she had someone. It was chilling. She never keeps them long. The people ransomed always do what she wants. It’s just a business model. Before the kidnaps was just old-fashioned drugs.’

‘Is it often parents and children?’

‘It’s always loved ones, that’s all,’ she says sadly. ‘It’s always women she takes, from camps.’

‘I heard you tell her you were going back to Terlingua, and there just aren’t that many houses around here. As soon as we made a run for it, I started steering us in this direction. I knew deep down that this was the only way to fix it, though I had hoped I wouldn’t have to resort to it. We tried other stuff,’ I tell her. ‘We tried finding her in other ways. We had a lawyer look, too, but we were searching for a man. Then in Terlingua I started searching for you in earnest. I googled stuff, too. I googled Torture kidnapper to see if I could torture her into confessing. I was trying to find out if it would work, if somebody who kidnapped would offer a confession under the right circumstances. Under duress. In my case, if their daughter was kidnapped.’

‘Well. She’s good at hiding. As, I guess, am I.’

‘Did you ever want to tell anyone?’

She shades her eyes with a slim hand. ‘Obviously,’ she says. ‘The three before you – it’s awful to witness. But it’s a whole web of people. Her cousin does the scouting. Someone at the airport gathers information on their stay. Mom gets the drugs over. But then someone else distributes, too.’ And then she looks at me. ‘Which is why your plan is perfect. She’s the snitch, not me, or you. It’s brilliant. No one makes a single enemy except her. Even if you did have to scare me at first.’

‘Ha.’

And then, together, away from the house, we compose the ransom. Not dissimilar to the one that started it all.

I have your daughter, I write to her on the burner phone, obscuring the number so it simply reads CALLER UNKNOWN, just like hers did. Your instructions are clear. Confess in the arraignment of The State vs Simone Seaborn, Jeff Davis County Courthouse, your exact involvement in Lucy Seaborn’s kidnap together with your associates’. So long as you do this, your daughter will be freed.

A sigh escapes my body as I watch for several seconds, waiting to hear from her.

And then she replies, like the pro she is: Send me proof of life.

So we send the video we already made, of Andrea bound and gagged, while we sit out in the desert, together, both of us free. She, like me, is an excellent actor, and I knew from the first take that her mother would do it, just like mine did.

I’m outside the courthouse, later, when I see a woman arrive. I’m right by two security guards in the shadows of the building, standing on some steps that lead to basement rooms. I’m unseen. Feeling safe but ready.

As she breezes past me, I smell them. Lemons from her car air freshener: it’s her.

She’s wearing a cowboy hat and loose linen clothes. Under the brim, her eyebrows flicker and rise in stress. She looks down at her phone again. She hasn’t seen me. And, finally, I hold the cards. I have the thing most precious to her. Or, rather, she thinks I do.

But then, as she looks at her phone, I see such a familiar expression cross her features, it stops me right there and has me unable to look away. It’s the same expression I’ve seen on Mum’s face a hundred thousand times. Love and concern, comingled, their ingredients combined so well you can’t distinguish them from one another. I stare at her for just a few seconds, this parent who loves her child so much.

She doesn’t turn to me. She hasn’t seen me. And, anyway, I’m safe. There are people all around. Law enforcement. Police. Judges. Lawyers. Even though, in the end, it took a vigilante to sort it.

She ascends the steps, this ordinary woman who is prepared to do violent and amoral things, who I may dream about for the rest of my life, and heads inside.

I watch her go and, do you know what? She seems like nothing to me. A woman who loves her daughter, like all parents – the bare minimum – but is much less than that. A criminal, a woman driven by greed. Somebody without morals or scruples. Somebody so sad and insignificant, I don’t want her impact on my life any more. I take a breath. Maybe I can stop that. Maybe this is healing.

‘Where’s Courtroom One?’ I hear her ask somebody, just in the foyer. I can hardly stand to listen, my breath held as she goes inside. Instead, I walk a slow lap of the building. It’s both stately and somehow false, too, the outside too white, the sky so vivid; a felt-tip blue. I keep walking, around to the side, then the back, the panicked and purposeful strides reminding me of the desert, of the journey we started in Texas and ended here, still in Texas but someplace different, too. On the right side of the law, then the wrong, then the right again.

Halfway around, towards the back, I catch a glimpse of a window. It’s mullioned, old-style, stands out in the modern architecture, and something in me knows it’s the right window before I can really check it, before I see the crest and the judge and the jury. I take ten steps back, twenty, on to the neat lawns separated off by little swinging ropes that I have to step over, and then I can see inside.

And – I swear it – I see the exact second it happens. Michaela, in the witness box, hat off, her expression full of regret. I stare and stare at her.

And then – just across – there’s Mum in the dock, looking straight ahead, her shoulders braced, ready to serve life or near life in prison for me.

The moment comes. I see the precise second it happens. Michaela stops speaking, and Mum’s head hits her chest in both relief and disbelief. The instant she learns it: that she is free.

My gaze goes back to Michaela.

Fuck you, I think.

Fuck. You.

Part VI

HOME

CHAPTER 77

Simone

Four o’clock in the morning, and Simone does not dream, because she is awake, and everything is a novelty to her.

They have flown into Birmingham because it was the first flight available once the paperwork was cleared and their passports were taken off the watch lists.

There are so many things Simone hadn’t thought about – that her car was in Heathrow all this time, and that it was taken off and pulverized after her arrest. Clamped and then destroyed. The restaurant, run by their staff and not them. Their house, left empty for much longer than planned. How strange it is, the way the justice system catches you, like a grabber toy in an arcade, then releases you once more, too.

The baggage claim is no longer humdrum. They have the freedom to walk wherever they want, without being fugitives, and without being incarcerated. To get a coffee while they wait for their cases – late, again! – full-fat milk, smoky-bitter espresso. The knowledge that they aren’t being watched, that they will get through passport control.

Outside, once they have their cases, there it is: that cold English air. It’s October, the breeze sugar-frosted. It stings her cheeks; she can feel it turning them red and tight. She doesn’t have a coat, doesn’t have anything useful.

As they step out, it begins to rain, sudden and fast. Damien tries to hail a taxi with one hand, pulling the back of his coat over his head with the other. Nevertheless, it drives off, probably already taken.

‘Nice to be back in England,’ Lucy calls through the shower, which has quickly become torrential.

‘What a nice holiday,’ Simone replies, and Lucy throws her head back and laughs as they wait for the taxi, water splashing around their ankles. And, right here, in the autumn air, Simone could freeze time. Her daughter, the genius. She had no idea she was so clever. That she knew more about Michaela’s daughter than she let on, that she knew she was in Terlingua. As soon as it became clear they were running, Lucy formulated the plan that ended in Terlingua: she would find the daughter herself, and take her. She’d been right not to tell Simone. She would’ve talked her out of taking a criminal’s child, but what does she know? She didn’t even have to do it in the end.

They shelter in a shuttle bus stop, the three of them in a short-stay car park in the rain, lights of traffic red and white in the distance. Simone doesn’t think she’s ever been anywhere more beautiful.

‘Let me call one,’ Damien says, raising his phone to his ear. ‘It’s stupid there aren’t any circulating, even at night.’

He walks off and dials. The rain hammers on the top of the shelter, but they’re still getting wet from it being carried in on the wind. Simone watches him for just a moment. The second she was released, in the foyer of the courtroom, he said something to her, holding her hands. Something surprising, and something true.

‘I think you were right,’ he said.

Simone knew immediately what he meant, but pressed him for more information anyway. ‘Yes?’

‘What you said about men and women, and their children,’ he explained, still holding her hands, their fingers interlaced. ‘I watched you walk into a sea of lights, for her. And I thought, Simone loves Lucy in a different way to me. The same way I felt after I watched you give birth to her.’

‘The thing is,’ Simone said, having been thinking about this too, ‘is that it is different. Lucy’s pain is my pain, and all that hormonal stuff. But, actually, my love for her stifled her, too.’

‘No.’

‘It did,’ Simone says, withdrawing a hand and putting it on her chest. The giddiness of her release has given her clarity; she would never worry about anything again now that she was free. Normal life had been taken from her, and here it was again, passed back. A near miss. ‘The thing is, children need different kinds of love. Mine and yours. Together, they are potent.’

‘Did you know it was going to work?’ Simone asks Lucy now.

‘No. Not at all,’ Lucy answers, though they have talked about this all night, all day, and for all their flight, too. ‘I was trying everything. I just kept this one solution to myself.’

‘Well,’ Simone says, ‘you did, in fact, do it all by yourself. You didn’t need me.’

And Lucy darts her a little glance then, under the glare of the car park lights. ‘Huh,’ she says, smiling slightly.

‘… What?’ Simone prompts.

‘Well, I did,’ Lucy says. She lets a clouded breath out. Beyond them, Damien tells a taxi driver their location. ‘But only your daughter would do that.’

Lucy leans back against the glass, smiling, and Simone says nothing, doesn’t need to, a huge bubble of joy in her chest. This is parenthood, too. Setting them up to leave, but setting them up well, with the best pieces of you. She’s just caught the end of her childhood, her babyhood, right here, a butterfly ensconced in her palm that she is too afraid to grasp too tightly, else she will crush it.

In the taxi that eventually arrives, Radio 4 is on low and the heaters high. Simone could weep at the British voices, and what her daughter just told her. She leaves the window open and Birmingham whips its cold, dark winds around them. Simone doesn’t think she’s ever felt something so delicious as they speed through the night. Crisp air and curries and exhaust fumes and England.

When they get out, to their house in London, it’s still raining, but it is Lucy, not Simone, who tilts her head back and lets the droplets fall on her face.

CHAPTER 78

Two days later, mother and daughter holding two boxes of Dishes leftovers walk through their front door. Dishes kept its Michelin star, and Simone returned to the kitchen yesterday. Lucy is taking up her place at RADA next week, living in halls – somehow. She hardly lost any time at all, despite their period in Texas feeling endless. They returned to England almost as if they’d never left. Changed, but only internally. Next week, Moody is flying over to sample their menu. Pro bono.

Damien is in bed already, the house shut up and dark but warm.

‘I’m going straight to bed,’ says Lucy. ‘I’m going to have the leftovers for breakfast.’

‘It’s beef carpaccio!’

‘Even better. With builder’s tea in the morning,’ Lucy says.

‘Night,’ Simone says, there in the kitchen, the tiles cool beneath her feet. Somewhere one of their windows is open, blowing through October air, but they won’t close it. Simone doesn’t feel any fear. Maybe because the air is cold and smoked and damp, not dry and hot and Texan, maybe because it’s their house, and nothing wicked ever happened here. Maybe it’s just that they have had all the bad luck possible. Or maybe it’s because they are free, because they are safe.

‘Sleep well,’ Lucy tells her, and then she leans forward, just slightly, places her hand around her mother’s wrist, then leaves.

And Simone nods, saying nothing in response. Not needing to. Simone turns left at the top of the stairs and Lucy right, to her old childhood bedroom covered in film posters with curling edges, held up by old Blu-Tack. She closes the door softly behind her, one click, and Simone thinks that, in a few short days, she will be gone. Starting RADA late, but allowed to – mitigating circumstances – and rightly so. Simone watches the closed door for several moments, until the strip of light underneath it goes from bright yellow to a dim orange, and then, finally, to black.

CHAPTER 79

Four o’clock in the morning, again, and Simone wakes from a dream that Lucy is leaving, but differently so. Leaving for the start of her adult life, the final grasp of her hand around Simone’s wrist, a slow pulling away, then their fingertips still just touching. And it’s funny, Simone doesn’t know the exact moment they part; her daughter’s hand is still imprinted on hers, like a phantom limb that will never truly leave.

She’s awake now, blinking into consciousness, and there’s a form standing in the bedroom doorway. Simone jolts and sits up immediately. She almost rouses Damien, but stops herself.

She stares for just a second, wondering if it’s some sort of sleep paralysis, a waking dream or something else.

‘Hello?’ she calls out, but, somehow, she knows not to be afraid.

‘It’s me,’ Lucy says. ‘Sorry.’ In her hand she has both boxes of leftovers.

‘What’s up?’ Simone says, reaching her arms out to her daughter without thought. Lucy comes towards her and Simone blows a breath out, lets her shoulders relax and sink downwards.

Lucy comes closer. Her body is warm, hair mussed, and for a second – just one – Simone thinks it must be deep in history, and she’s here with a two-year-old who pads across the landing most nights at this hour, and gets into bed with her parents. But it isn’t. It’s now, and Lucy is here, adult her, hair almost white blonde in the moonlight. Eyes looking at her mother. Simone hesitates, wondering if she’s OK, wondering if she’s about to say something.

It’s cold – that open window – and Simone draws the duvet more tightly around her goose-fleshed arms.

‘I can’t sleep,’ Lucy whispers, and Simone wordlessly gets out of bed.

‘Well, let’s save the day,’ she replies.

They go downstairs where they open the boxes. Lucy holds a strand of beef up. Simone knows precisely how it will taste: tender and salted and melting, and she opens her own box, there in the living room, with her daughter.

‘Four o’clock,’ Lucy says.

‘I know.’

‘Wonder if I will ever sleep well again.’

‘You wake too?’

‘Often. Lie with my eyes closed.’

‘You will sleep again,’ Simone murmurs. She knows she will.

After a while, they make themselves hot chocolates in the kitchen or, rather, Simone makes them. She does so the correct way, the way she wanted to back at Moody’s. Milk and cream simmered slowly on the stove. Two vanilla pods, seeds scraped out, pods in the milk, too, for good measure. She chops some chocolate roughly by hand then whisks it in. ‘Rum?’ she asks lightly.

‘No,’ Lucy says. ‘Though it might help me sleep.’

Simone shrugs.

They sit in the living room for another hour, cups held in their laps, dipping beef carpaccio in soured cream, making small talk, watching some silly Netflix reality something which Lucy starts to laugh at, saying there’s so much staged television these days that there are hardly any roles left for actors. Simone wonders if she will make it. She wonders what ‘making it’ truly is, anyway. Surely they have. George the cat sleeps in his bay window, fed twice daily by Luan until then.

After five thirty, Lucy turns to her, blinks, just once, and says she’s sleepy. Simone considers how many more goodnights there will be. Surely, once she moves out, only a handful, here, in person. Birthdays, Christmases … but Simone doesn’t resent it, is no longer afraid of it, either. This is the next phase of parenthood, that is all.

Lucy’s life is just beginning, and Simone is moving into the autumn of hers. This is the natural way. This is the right way. She’s on loan, remember?

They head upstairs together. On the landing, just like before, but the light is different.

Lucy turns to her mother. ‘Can I …?’ she says. And she hesitates, perhaps embarrassed, perhaps something else. Her body is very still. She still has chocolate around her lips. ‘Can I sleep in with you?’ she says, a slim hand self-consciously in her hair.

‘Of course,’ Simone answers. They head to the spare room together.

‘Sometimes you just need your mum to help you to sleep,’ Lucy says. ‘Should pitch the tent,’ she jokes.

‘That’s long gone,’ Simone tells her daughter.

In the spare room, moonlight slants inward. A smattering of stars are out. Not as many as were visible in Texas, but they’re still there, regardless. As if reading her mind, Lucy rests her fingertips on the windowsill next to Simone’s and they look out together, saying nothing.

‘Anyway,’ Lucy says, turning away from the window and getting into bed. ‘Just for tonight,’ she murmurs, close to sleep already, her body full of the dopamine and tryptophan in the food that Simone made. ‘Thank you for the leftovers.’

‘Always.’

‘They were what gave me the idea – for save the day – in the desert. We’d been doing it all along,’ Lucy says, sleepy.

Simone is too touched to reply.

They say you never know when the last time you hold your child might be, before they grow out of it. But, Simone thinks, as she climbs into bed next to her daughter and feels her warmth, smells her sunshine hair, that she does know, and it’s all the sweeter for it. This is it. The final time. After this, Lucy will leave and grow and spread her wings.

Simone closes her eyes. So be it.

And even though Lucy’s still leaving, even though Simone must let her go, it doesn’t feel this way. It feels a little like the real truth: if you let your kids go, they come back to you. In a different way, maybe, but they will come back. They are still yours. On loan, but forever.

Acknowledgements

This book came to me in one gulp – the heat, the desert, a mother holding a gun – and my thanks go as always to those who let me be completely creatively free: Felicity Blunt, Lucy Morris, Maxine Hitchcock, Danielle Dieterich and Emily Krump. My huge thanks, too, to the wider teams at those places: Tanja and Katie in foreign rights at Curtis Brown, Jason Richman at UTA who continues to slay as my film agent, and the many tens of people in marketing, publicity and editorial at both Penguin Michael Joseph and William Morrow HarperCollins.

I owe a real debt to many people who made this book spring to life. Glynn Purnell for his ongoing advice on food (I, a person who regularly eats a ham sandwich on dry bread for lunch, needed a crash course in food, and he delivered), Neil Greenough always for his police advice, Russell Pecot for his many detailed emails and photos of the Big Bend area where Simone and Lucy camp, Martin Richards (my hostage negotiator for Famous Last Words!) for his help on tiger kidnappings, Mark Pryor for his knowledge about Texan law, and Marina Koren for putting us in touch. I’d also like to thank Trina @breatheintransformation for her Save the Day.

Most of all, I owe everything to my readers, who devour my books, who dog-ear my pages, who stay up late, who leak my titles they found on Amazon, who borrow from libraries and recommend and talk about them. None of this is possible without readers.

All writers need people who prop them up, for our mindset is usually obsessive. For me, this is my father; my friends Lia, Holly, Lucy and Beth; Dana, who keeps my life running; Dave and our boy, the light of my life, my Lucy, my everything. I’d shoot a million kidnappers for you. (But if I am ever arrested, I’ll go no comment.)

Read on for a sneak preview of Gillian McAllister’s next novel, coming 2027 …

1

The Husband

Now

It was just after eight at night, and I was finally alone in the bookshop where I worked. Or so I thought.

I was supposed to be tidying the children’s fiction section, but I was actually measuring myself against a giraffe height chart to combat a thought that had been following me around all day: I was sure I had always been six feet, but my colleague and friend Jacha had said earlier, ‘What’re you, about five-eight?’

On the chart, I was coming in at five-ten, a fact I found strangely humiliating. Either I was shrinking, aged thirty-three, or had always been wrong.

But that’s when I sensed it. A feeling that I was not, actually, alone. It pulled me away from the sort of behaviours you get embroiled in when you work mostly by yourself (or with other bookworms who also tend not to behave completely normally). I turned in a slow circle. The shop was silent, and looked as it usually did: tired green carpets, clutter by the tills. It smelled of hoovering and the dry chalk scent new books have when they first come in.

I couldn’t account for why I felt it, only that I did.

Out front were mullioned windows and, beyond those, the mist that had been clinging to the buildings and pollarded trees of London all autumn, the world near-permanently disappeared from the shoulders up, tops of buildings absent. The only other thing I could see was my own (stumpy) reflection, framed perfectly in one of the panes.

No, it was all fine. It was time to go home, was all, to stop imagining supernatural novels come to life. I got the keys and my rucksack from the back. In the shared courtyard behind the staff room, a gust caught, scattering some dried and crispy leaves into an elegant swirl, like a cat turning in circles before settling. That space actually had its own address, grandly called itself Piazza One, but really it was a square of concrete at the back of my shop (which was not my shop at all, but felt like it was). It was shared with a café that sold only instant tea and coffee and a hairdresser’s containing two bald, smoking barbers who sat outside a lot and discussed Olaplex hair oil.

I headed to the front and opened the door. Outside was Dickensian: the streets cobbled, the lamps ornate. The air was close to frozen and the mist held the autumnal scent of a lifelong smoker’s house.

That’s when I heard it: heavy footsteps. The careful, crunching setting down of boots on uneven ground.

The mist was too thick to make anything out. My car was only ten feet away – taking advantage of the on-street parking for businesses – but I couldn’t really see it. I found myself shivering, partly from cold, partly something else. Fear.

‘All right mate,’ a voice said right by me. A flash of adrenaline rippled in my stomach like a stone dropped in water. I turned, phone and keys in hand. The stranger who was about to insert himself into my life was huge (definitely over six feet on the giraffe chart), reasonably old, and wearing a dark blue gilet, his hands in its front pockets. His weight was rocked back in the way some men did when they wanted to look even bigger. ‘Have you got a second?’ His accent – cut-glass, PPE at Oxbridge – didn’t match his appearance, his big neck, his grey sideburns. He was late fifties, maybe even sixty. Crooked teeth. Grey beard. Wise eyes.

‘What for?’

And then he stepped closer to me. ‘Can I borrow your phone?’ he asked. ‘Mine’s out of charge, I owe my wife a text.’

I hesitated. Sophie would immediately tell this guy to get lost. ‘This is London!’ she’d say to me. ‘Don’t be stupid.’

‘Ah, sorry, I’m er … late myself,’ I said to him.

This guy looked incongruous outside a bookshop. He was the sort of man you’d find at a football match – no, rugby actually, drinking Guinness, nothing like the lanky and somewhat unkempt booksellers I worked with.

‘Please, mate, there’s no one else around.’ He took a blank phone out of his pocket, pressed the side button to show me it was dead.

‘No, I …’ I said.

He took a step back. ‘Sorry, sorry, I wouldn’t ask if I wasn’t desperate.’

‘I know – it’s just …’ I gestured uselessly towards inner London, saying something without actually saying it.

‘No, it’s OK, I’ll ask someone else.’ Two steps away, then he stopped. ‘Unless …’ he threw these words over his shoulder. ‘Could you text her, if I gave you the number? Please, we’ve got our grandkid with us, mate. Need to let her know where I am, I’m missing bedtime.’

On his left hand was a wedding ring, present and correct. How dangerous could a granddad be? All right: I could send a simple text for him. ‘OK,’ I relented. ‘Number?’

Just at that moment, a message came in from Sophie. I’ll be on the one passing through in ten mins, she’d sent, eighth carriage down. Catch me if you can! We found romanticism in trying to get on the same Tube. Even when we timed it, it always felt like the most fortuitous, dumb luck that we had landed on the same carriage, or maybe that was just being in love.

I’ve got the car!! I replied to her, typing quickly.

That is insanely lazy and I admire it, came right back.

I smiled the private smile of a lover, then brought up a new message. The man took a step towards me and, suddenly, he was right by my shoulder. ‘07 …’ he started, but that was as far as he got before everything changed.

Another man emerged from nowhere, and then, before I had processed any of it, they had me. The phone was batted out of my hand, my keys, too, metal landing on pavement ringing out like a breaking window.

The first guy was using the keys to open my car, the amber lights two orange sunsets in the mist, and then the other man, younger, taller and leaner, had the boot open, and one had his arms around my body, the other around my legs, and then I was in. The whole thing took five seconds, from writing 07 to being flat on my back in the boot of my own car.

There was nothing I could have done. Their strength was almost balletic. They knew to pull my upper arms close to my body. They knew how to tip me into a boot, and how to get it closed before I could sit up.

While my wife got on a Tube to meet me at our house where I wouldn’t show up, I was captive, among paperbacks and a coat I hadn’t seen since the spring. Then they shut me in, and things went completely black and, absurdly, I was thinking only that I wished I hadn’t had a McDonald’s Egg McMuffin that morning and left the gross wrapper in the front.

Another five seconds, and then these men, these strangers, were driving.

‘What?’ I said, though it was more of a scream. ‘What the fuck?’

My spine was bent awkwardly, no space to turn. I had no phone. All I had were racing thoughts about kicking out tail lights and stupid viral threads I’d seen on how to escape car boots by using some hidden unlocking device. But where was that? I tried to sit up, but there wasn’t space. I was a turtle on my back, an idiot who trusted that a stranger was who he said he was.

The boot was completely impenetrable. No parcel shelf, nothing. I felt in the dark with both hands, flailing like a caught fish on a hook, my body bucking in fear. I closed my eyes so the air felt less black. What was I supposed to do?

I slotted a foot into a small gap where I thought the tail light might be (but who knew, really? Not me) and began to kick. Absolutely nothing happened at all. I found the other one with my hand and, there in the murkiness, began to punch so hard my hand was throbbing within seconds.

Nobody told me to stop. I couldn’t hear them talking at all. It was like being in an aeroplane, a confined space low and close to the rumble of the engine.

These things did not happen to me. Kidnappings. Being held in boots of cars! I almost laughed, there in the dark, maniacal and bizarre, like something from the boysy novels I sometimes sold men who pretended that Catch-22 was their favourite book.

What was I supposed to be thinking – something profound, something about survival? But I wasn’t. Instead I was thinking only: who were they? What did they want? Why didn’t they just steal the car, if it was that?

I opened my eyes. Still complete darkness. I pushed upwards, but nothing happened, and all it did was make me think of coffin lids and begin to panic again.

‘Who are you?’ I screamed, bashing at the sides of the car so hard I must have wounded myself. Nobody answered. Adrenaline masked the pain, but one of my knuckles was wet.

The car was being driven carefully, a fact I actually found sinister. These organized criminals knew not to trigger speeding cameras and police attention. Detached, I wondered where it would be that they eventually killed me.

No. Don’t be pessimistic. Think. Were they talking to each other? Could I hear anything? Was there anything distinctive coming up in London that I could pinpoint, to know where I was going?

But the world was silent around me in my little black box that absolutely nobody knew I was inside. Sophie was on the Northern line, expecting me at home. How long would she give it before she called the police? Hours, surely. Nobody would have seen anything outside a postage-stamp bookshop in the mist: I had disappeared completely.

The roads were indistinct. Pauses, left turns, right turns, perhaps a roundabout. One set of sirens, so distant I might’ve imagined them. I thought suddenly of Jacha. He was a proper man. He’d figure a way out of this easily, some spare-tyre trick that would enable him to hang on the underneath of the car, then jump off, to safety.

Just as I was thinking these stupid, mental and useless things, we slowed way, way down. The crawl and shiver of near-stationary traffic, of somebody studying buildings to find their way, of the almost-over journey. I held my breath. The hairs along my body stood up. I hadn’t been in the car even ten minutes.

Then we stopped completely, the soft tick of an indicator somewhere next to my head. A pause, a lurch to the left, up a small slope, then downhill, slowly, slowly, slowly, and it became clear: we were going underground.

The engine was off. I didn’t know if I wanted them to let me out or leave me alone completely. I shut my eyes so tightly it hurt my cheeks. I brought a balled fist to my mouth, about to cry. For a second, I wanted my long-dead mother so viscerally, it hurt my chest.

A pop, a click, and the boot yawned its mouth open, revealing fluorescent lights, a concrete multistorey car park ceiling, and the two heads of the men, looking in and down at me. They hadn’t covered their faces. I would be able to identify them so easily, and it was that thought that made me conclude that they did intend to kill me, these criminals who had transported me across London like I was stolen goods.

‘What the fuck is going on?’ I shouted. I wasn’t bound or gagged, and I sat up and immediately tried to get out.

‘Hello, Matt,’ said the second guy.

They knew my name.

‘Come with us,’ the older guy said, that politician’s accent. Together, they grabbed either side of me, right around each of my shoulders, and wrestled me out of the boot. I was kicking my legs, I was screaming, but it didn’t make any difference. Singularly, they were each stronger than me (I was a man who read Jane Austen all day and ate doughnuts for lunch from a coffee hatch nearby) and together they were unstoppable. They took me away from my car, and I was dragged half-walking over the concrete towards a set of automatic doors. All I gleaned was that it was a completely empty car park. Unidentifiable, no sign of shops or civilization. Just rows and rows of vacant spaces, no clear entrance or exit, no daylight, the only sound the struggle I was trying to create.

‘I’m going to call the police the second I can,’ I shouted, writhing against them, while they ignored me, implacable them.

The automatic doors opened for us like they were sentient, and across them like a frieze was a pattern: blue and white squares. Something municipal about it, something official. I had only a second to look at it before we moved on. I couldn’t place it …

‘Let me go,’ I screamed, while they did nothing, just walked with me, their grip on my arms vice-like. The first man was big and burly, wiry hair turning white at his temples and merging with his beard. The second was angular and clean-shaven. High cheekbones, slim wrists. He might not have been thirty. My brain uselessly recalled some villains in some Roald Dahl book – Fantastic Mr Fox, was it? One lean …

They were propelling me into a small, abandoned foyer containing a set of bare concrete stairs with a black handrail, and a service lift. I stared at them as they pressed the button to take us up. The lift opened immediately. They didn’t let go, didn’t loosen their grip at all as I trembled beneath their hands and ineptly wondered if I might wet myself in fear.

It was a sealed box of a lift, unfinished floor, bare walls, a small metal plate bearing the numbers one to nine. I stared around with that curious feeling that sets in just before panic. The second guy reached out to press 8, his slim arm across my body, the other free. He found keeping me still so easy.

The lift began to rise upwards, the two men still holding one of my arms each, and then drifted to a slow settle at the top.

On the wall behind the bigger man a sign was affixed. I strained to look at it. This is a protected site under Section 128 of the Serious Organised Crime and Police Act 2005. Trespass on this site is a criminal offence.

What? Where was I? What kind of site was protected? Protected from – what?

The doors opened onto a nondescript foyer, translucent glass meeting-room doors ahead of us, and right in front of that, everything finally revealed itself.

These men were not criminals: quite the opposite.

A huge fuck-off sign on the wall, crest and everything, said:

MI5 | SECURITY SERVICES | THAMES HOUSE

THIS IS JUST THE BEGINNING

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First published by Penguin Michael Joseph in 2026

Copyright © Gillian McAllister, 2026

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ISBN: 978-1-405-95726-7

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Table of Contents

About the Author

By the Same Author

Title Page

Dedication

PART I: The Ransom

CHAPTER 1: Simone

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 5

CHAPTER 6

CHAPTER 7

CHAPTER 8

CHAPTER 9

CHAPTER 10

CHAPTER 11

CHAPTER 12

CHAPTER 13

CHAPTER 14

CHAPTER 15

CHAPTER 16

CHAPTER 17

CHAPTER 18

CHAPTER 19

CHAPTER 20

CHAPTER 21

CHAPTER 22

CHAPTER 23

CHAPTER 24

CHAPTER 25

CHAPTER 26

PART II: Two Fugitives

CHAPTER 27

CHAPTER 28

CHAPTER 29

CHAPTER 30: The Kidnapper

CHAPTER 31: Simone

CHAPTER 32

CHAPTER 33

CHAPTER 34

CHAPTER 35

CHAPTER 36

CHAPTER 37

CHAPTER 38

CHAPTER 39

CHAPTER 40

CHAPTER 41

CHAPTER 42

CHAPTER 43

CHAPTER 44: The Kidnapper

CHAPTER 45: Simone

CHAPTER 46

CHAPTER 47

CHAPTER 48

CHAPTER 49

CHAPTER 50: The Kidnapper

CHAPTER 51: Simone

CHAPTER 52

PART III: Three Fugitives

CHAPTER 53

CHAPTER 54

CHAPTER 55: The Kidnapper

CHAPTER 56: Simone

CHAPTER 57

CHAPTER 58: The Kidnapper

CHAPTER 59

CHAPTER 60

CHAPTER 61

CHAPTER 62

CHAPTER 63

CHAPTER 64

CHAPTER 65

CHAPTER 66

CHAPTER 67

CHAPTER 68: The Kidnapper

PART IV: The Prisoner

CHAPTER 69: Simone

CHAPTER 70: The Kidnapper

CHAPTER 71: Simone

CHAPTER 72

CHAPTER 73: The Kidnapper

CHAPTER 74: Simone

CHAPTER 75: The Kidnapper

PART V: The Kidnapper

CHAPTER 76: The Kidnapper

PART VI: Home

CHAPTER 77: Simone

CHAPTER 78

CHAPTER 79

Acknowledgements

Read More

Copyright