Leah glances up from her phone again. “What are you doing, Dad?”
“Detour.”
“No,” she says, “I mean, why have you got your hazards on?”
“The engine’s making a funny noise.”
She listens for a moment. “Is it?”
I don’t want to freak her out. “Thought there was a knocking noise in third gear.”
“I can’t hear anything.” She looks over her shoulder at the heavy grille of the pickup truck filling the back window. “That guy’sveryclose and he’s, like, shouting something.”
The pickup truck finally pulls out and overtakes in an angry burst of acceleration, but in the same moment the gray carbehind him turns off to the right, cutting through a line of traffic as my mirror is obscured by the bulk of the pickup passing on my right-hand side.
By the time my mirrors are clear, the street behind me is empty. The gray car is disappearing down a side road onto a housing estate, the tail end just visible for a split second before it’s gone. I’m not even sure it was a Volvo estate after all.
Leah looks at me as if I’m losing the plot. “OK, well, that was weird.”
“You’re right,” I say. “The engine seems all right now.”
“Where evenarewe?”
“Wollaton.” I switch the hazards off and accelerate back up to the speed limit. “Home in ten minutes.”
My daughter shakes her head and we pass the rest of the journey in silence.
At home, she heads straight up to her bedroom and I go into the lounge, peering through the front window at traffic passing on the street. But it’s mid-afternoon and there are very few cars; no gray Volvos in any case.
My phone chirps with a notification on WhatsApp—two messages from Charlie Parish. The first one is a voice note.
“OK,” he says, his recorded voice quick and precise, older sounding than when I’d met him in person. “So, I’ve been playing around with that photo, the one in the memory of the old flip phone? I managed to extract it and download it to my Mac, and I’ve been doing some work on it to enhance the detail, sharpen it up, brighten it, remove the noise and so on. I’ve got some software that uses an AI algorithm for resolution upscaling, which is kind of like filling in the blanks and making it better than the original. Basically, it’s the best software there is.” He pauses, a fewseconds of dead air on the recording. “Anyway, I don’t… quite know what to make of the picture, but have a look and see what you think. Give me or Mum a call back, yeah?”
The second message is an image without a caption. I tap the display to blow it up to full-screen size. It’s recognizable as the blurred picture Jess had discovered on the Motorola on Sunday evening. But whereas before it had been tiny, like looking through frosted glass at something thatmighthave been a hand or a thumb or the side of someone’s face, now it’s bigger and sharper and much clearer, clean lines and distinct shapes.
I pinch the image to blow it up, zooming in closer.
The skin that’s visible is ivory pale, the thin blue line of a vein threading through it. It’s not a hand, not quite. It’s the underside of a wrist—two wrists—one laid on top of the other.
Binding the wrists tightly together is a purple-checked scarf.
Sian
She couldn’t sleep. She’d dropped off for maybe an hour or two after the usual shouting and screaming and door slamming had blown itself out. But in truth she hadn’t really slept properly, deeply, in months—it was hard when she was always listening for Colin’s heavy tread as he crossed the landing, the squeak of her door swinging open, his rough hands reaching for her in the darkness. It was the reason she’d started to go to bed fully clothed, to make it just that little bit more difficult for him at one or two or three o’clock in the morning when he crept out of the main bedroom and came looking for her instead, the air around him thick with the cloying stink of rum and sweat and expectation.
Today, there was another reason for sleeping in her clothes.
Today was going to be different: the first good day in a long time.
Silently, she pulled off the blanket and sat up, swinging her legs out of bed. She unplugged her phone from the charger, bundled up the cable, and stashed it in her backpack. The little Nokia’s cracked screen said it was 4:04 a.m. Still a couple of hours of darkness left. She wouldn’t make the same mistake as last time, or the time before that—she would be long gone before they realized she wasn’t in bed, before the call from the college truancy officer, before either of them emerged in search of a fresh bottle.
Sian crept down the stairs, taking care to avoid the creaky third step from the bottom. She pulled on her Reeboks, the old size fours asfamiliar as a best friend, slid her arms into the sleeves of her denim jacket, and looped her favorite purple-checked scarf once around her neck. Reached for her key on the windowsill and stopped, pulled her hand back when she remembered: she wouldn’t need the key anymore. She wasn’t coming back. She would walk out of this house and by the time the sun came up she’d be on her way to London. To a new life. Any life had to be better than this one.
The only thing she’d miss about this place was currently scratching at the kitchen door. She opened it and Samson blinked up at her with his yellow-gold eyes, winding his way between her legs with his tail held high. Sian knelt down and buried her face in his fluffy tabby fur, kissing the top of his head and whispering her goodbyes. Telling herself not to cry, not now. She found a half-full box of Whiskas amid the chaos of the kitchen table and poured some into his bowl, the tomcat eating and purring at the same time.
Out on the street, the air was frosty with cold and sharp enough to take her breath away. She used the cut-through down past the corner shop, hooked left, and in a few minutes she was out on the footpath beside the A52. She turned right and started walking toward Radcliffe-on-Trent, the little backpack bouncing with every step, her breath steaming in the chill of a dark January morning.
It was too early for the buses to run, and besides, the little spare money she had in the pocket of her jeans was better spent on a bacon cob at the station in town. She would buy it from the kiosk and eat it when the coach left, when she was on her way. There wasn’t much traffic around, but she crossed to the other side and stuck her thumb out anyway at the first sound of an approaching car. It passed her without slowing, headlights blazing on full beam.A second car droned by a minute later, then a speeding lorry that passed so close she was buffeted by a backwash of diesel-tainted pre-dawn air. She pulled the scarf a little closer around her neck and picked up her pace. Sooner or later, someone would stop; some city-bound driver would pull over and give her a lift.
