“I meant, what kind of calling card do we need?”
He dug into his pocket. “This kind,” he said, pulling out some change.
“Seriously?”
“They’re called coins. Like arcade tokens but you can use them to buy all sorts of stuff.”
Samira rolled her eyes as she plucked the money from his palm.
“I know, right?” he said. “Whatever will they think of next?”
Charlotte’s office line went to voice mail, killing the illogical hope that’d crept into Samira’s chest. While Jamie wandered about the shop picking up supplies, Samira set up a new email address for “Janis” and emailed a cryptically banal message to Charlotte’s work and personal addresses. No out-of-office message bounced back.
“I wonder if I can risk logging in to Facebook,” Samira said, as Jamie perched on the desk beside her, chewing on a stick of salami.
“What are you worried about?”
“Our location being tracked.”
“How precisely can they track it? And how quickly? Safe to say Hyland and his goons know you’re in the general vicinity.”
“Good point. I’ll be quick, anyway.”
She felt a pang of loneliness as she logged in.Sorry, Facebook, I need a trial separation, she’d written in her last post, nearly two years ago, so her friends wouldn’t call the authorities when she stopped obsessively posting and commenting.It’s not you—it’s me. I still love you. I just need some time away to reassess our relationship, and find myself.
Charlotte’s page had been updated three days earlier—a selfie of her holding the artwork now stuck to her fridge, her blond hair tied back. “Look what my friend’s little boy drew for me! Sooo cute!” The same message was copied to her other social-media sites. Before that, she’d posted several times a day without fail, mostly about gaming. Never anything to do with her work, of course.
Samira rapped her fingernails on the desk. “No suicide note. No tributes from friends. But if she’s disappeared from the internet, she’s disappeared from the world. Thisisher world. I could risk a call to her father, pretend to be an old friend from university just arrived in London, trying to track her down. Which is pretty much what I am. As far as I know, he still lives in the town Charles Dickens came from. What’s it called?”
“Ask me any question at all about mucus and vomit. Literature, not so much.”
She did a web search. A jumbo jet roared overhead—the fourth since she’d sat down—they had to be near Heathrow. “Rochester, that’s right.” Another search revealed his phone number. “I don’t get why people put their details in the phone book. Anyone can find you.”
“That’s kind of the point. This might surprise you but to regular people the world’s a benign place where people don’t hide in the shadows ready to ambush you.”
“How quaint. That’s my ambition in life—to be an ordinary person living an ordinary life again.”
“Nothing about you is ordinary, Samira.”
“I used to be incredibly ordinary, before this.”
A pause. “I very much doubt that.” He spoke in that dead serious tone that never failed to make her breath catch.
“Oh, believe it,” she said, moving to the phone, cursing her warming cheeks. “I’m still that ordinary person. It’s the circumstances that got weird.”
Charlotte’s father hadn’t heard from her in a week but didn’t sound worried. Charlotte wouldn’t be impressed to discover how readily he gave her cell phone number to a stranger. When Samira tried it, it rang out.
“So what now?” she said, plunking into the passenger seat of the car. “This was supposed to be all over once I made it to Charlotte’s.” She’d imagined herself and Tess leaving Putney in separate directions, Tess to save the day and Samira to hide until it was all over. She was only supposed to be the middleman—middlewoman. “I guess we should ditch the car.”
“I doubt it’ll be discovered missing until the therapists arrive at work tomorrow. And then they’ll have to check security footage, talk to the guards...”
“Oh my God, the cops will begin to put it together—the shutdown at the hospital, the train station... They’ll put out an alert on the car, Hyland’s people will see it, they’ll trace us—”
“Samira!”
She flinched and stared at him. He was as pale as the moon.
“You’re in pain,” she said. “Your arm...”
