Because everything they want to keep secret is hidden inside your boyfriend’s brain, he thought. ‘The government will have planned ahead for it, won’t they? We won’t be blackmailed.’
‘I hope so. The hackers inflicted so much damage with those driverless cars. One of the teachers at work lost control of her Mini and it drove into a traffic light. She got whiplash.’
Try being hit by a lorry and losing your legs, then bleeding to death like my friends did, he wanted to reply, but held his tongue.
He waited until Alix was in the shower before he returned to ReadWell. There were no updates from Ariel or any of the others, so he added his own.
@Bassanio: Julius Caesar sounds like a good read. Thanks for the tip.
Charlie was going to remain where he was. But as with everything that was supposed to scare him, he had no fear of the future. Instead, he pledged to push himself as far as possible in the pursuit of understanding who he was now.
Chapter 50
SINÉAD, NORTHAMPTONSHIRE
‘Northampton – five miles,’ read the electronic road sign ahead.
Sinéad checked her speedometer – she was still below the limit. She had been showing caution for the last 438 miles by using only B-roads because motorways and super-highways contained too many speed cameras and number-plate-recognition systems. This way, she hoped to avoid the police and reach her safe-house destination as quickly as possible following the Kinsmen recall message. But it also meant her journey from Scotland to the Midlands had taken over fifteen hours. Only when the tiredness became all too consuming had she come to a halt in the dark corner of a supermarket car park and slept just long enough to recharge her batteries.
When she awoke, she thought of Doon and how she must be feeling today. Sinéad realised she had been caught in the moment when she had told her about Doon’s daughter’s murder. She had thought the truth would set Doon free, but it hadn’t. It had released her from one prison, only to lock her up in a second.
Sinéad reflected on how she had felt on learning through implanted data that her parents’ death in the Mumbai tsunami was as a result of fracking, covered up by theBritish government. Greed and industry had killed them, not an underwater earthquake. There would be no prosecutions, and fracking continued in the same region. The information left her furious but powerless because under the terms of the programme, there was nothing she could do about what she knew. Now Sinéad understood that she had put Doon in the same position she had been in. It had been a terrible error in judgement and part of her was relieved there was a recall. Perhaps she wasn’t cut out for this second life. But it was going to get a lot tougher before it got better.
She pulled at an eyelash as she drove and its needle-sharp sting as the root came to the surface brought her a moment of relief. When it faded, she repeated the action, as she had done frequently over the last few hours. Each eyelash was carefully placed on her thigh to form a semicircle.
Sinéad glanced in the rear-view mirror at her sleeping passenger and took a deep breath. She knew that she was in trouble. But there was no doubt in her mind that she had done the right thing in kidnapping baby Taylor.
SINÉAD, EDZELL, SCOTLAND
Yesterday, a shocked Sinéad had been coming to terms with the prospect of her new life reaching a premature end. The recall message had taken her by surprise, but she hadn’t questioned it. And she knew that she must leave as soon as possible. But there were two stops she wanted to make before leaving Edzell behind.
The first had been a symbolic gesture. She had travelled on foot to the same part of the river Esk where she had previously cast five bottled letters downstream. She was finally ready to allow the sixth letter to set sail, and it wasthe most important one. Sinéad had written it to her daughter Lilly. It was a heartfelt apology for failing to be the mother her child had deserved. It had taken an age to complete, each word hurting like a punch to the stomach as she recalled every minute of the night she found her baby dead. Teary eyed, she knelt upon the grassy bank before letting go of the bottle, along with her guilt. She would never forget the precious weeks spent enraptured by her much wanted child. But it was time to forgive herself for what she had done.
She heard a splash as she stood up and realised her phone had fallen from her pocket and into the water. She quickly grabbed it, dried it on her sleeve and turned it on. Nothing happened. ‘Damn it,’ she snapped. It meant she couldn’t check the boards to see how many other Minders were readying themselves to leave.
Sinéad parked on the roadside, adjacent to the last house in the village, for her second stop. Gail’s red car was the only vehicle on the driveway, suggesting Anthony wasn’t there. The house was located a distance away from its neighbours on the only road in and out of Edzell; Sinéad wondered if it was coincidence that they were too far from their neighbours to hear the domestic violence under its roof.
Sinéad remained in her vehicle as she rehearsed how to approach Gail. After the Doon debacle, she paused to consider whether it might be wiser to climb back into her car and leave. But she owed it to her friend to try to make her see that she was better off without Anthony. Sinéad had the finances at her disposal to help Gail to relocate and live a life without oppression. She gathered herself and left the car.
Baby Taylor’s shrill cries caught her attention as she approached the front door. Sinéad peered through the lounge window and spotted the infant strapped in her car seat and placed precariously on a narrow coffee table. Shewatched and waited and the time taken between the cries and her mother’s appearance was so long that Sinéad questioned whether Taylor was actually alone in the house. The child’s face was red and crumpled as a long-buried urge inside Sinéad began pulling at her, an overwhelming need to pacify the baby, to comfort her, to feel her head resting on her collar bone and her warm milky breath connecting with her neck.
Eventually Gail appeared and Sinéad backed away from the window. As she turned her head, however, there was a second scream, a long and persistent one, but this time coming from an adult. Her attention returned to the lounge where Gail was hunched over her daughter, back arched, shoulders forward and mouth wide open, bellowing at the terrified tot.
Sinéad craned her neck, convinced her eyes were deceiving her. They weren’t. Instead of comforting Taylor, Gail was taunting her, pushing her face ever closer to the infant and screaming in time with her. Then she raised both her hands and slammed her fists hard against the sides of the car seat, heightening the baby’s agitation. ‘Shut the fuck up!’ she yelled. ‘Just shut the fuck up!’ Not surprisingly, the frightened baby cried louder until, to Sinéad’s horror, Gail slapped the child’s face. Then she stormed out of the room, slamming the door shut behind her. Moments later, music blasted from a room upstairs.
Sinéad released a breath she hadn’t realised she’d been holding. How had she gotten her friend so wrong? Either Gail was well skilled at hiding her true self or Sinéad had only seen what she’d wanted to see. She had long suspected postnatal depression might be the cause of the disconnect between mother and child, but PND did not make mothers violent and neglectful. Then she recalled the conversation in which Gail defended her husband and blamed herself for the problems in their marriage. Sinéad had been all too willing to cast Anthony as the villain, not his wife. Whatif Gail had been the one to slap him, not the other way around?
But there was someone she needed to prioritise above the mess of that couple’s relationship. Taylor. And there was no way on earth that Sinéad was going to leave a vulnerable baby inside that house a second longer.
She would not let two children down in her lifetime.
Without considering the consequences, heart pounding in her throat, Sinéad made her way along the side of the building, unlatched the gate and quietly opened the kitchen door. Upstairs, the music boomed, she assumed to drown out Taylor’s continuing wails. Inside the lounge she gently picked up the baby in her car seat, and caught the odour of a full nappy Gail had failed to change. Then Sinéad hurried into the kitchen, grabbed a bag of nappies from the kitchen side and raced back to her car, where she buckled Taylor into the back seat and began to drive.
She was breathless for the entire journey south through the village until she passed under the Dalhousie Arch, marking her departure from Edzell. Only when she reached the English and Scottish border three hours later did she begin to breathe properly again.
There had been many stops on their journey to change nappies and purchase wet wipes and auto-heated formula. Years had passed since Sinéad last nursed a baby and as she held Taylor in the crook of her arm and fed her with fluttering hands, black-and-white memories of Lilly returned in waves. They began with the moments after discovering she had died; her greyness and how cold her head felt as she’d stroked her wisps of hair and begged her to come back to life.
But now as Taylor drank, the colour returned to Sinéad’s recollections. She remembered Lilly’s red rosebud lips, the twitch of her pink button nose as she suckled, the blondness of her eyelashes and the gentle, random leg kicks andflicks of her wrists. Instead of recalling the baby she lost, she thought of the one she had cherished.
