“Imagine Mum saying that when we called her name,” Ree once said. “‘No, not Sal.’ ‘No, not Mum.’ It’d just never happen, would it?”
Of course it wouldn’t.You can’t do that when you’re Lester, thinks Sally,not if you want your loved ones to be properly looked after and your life to run smoothly.
“So, about our phones…” Tobes says tentatively.
Corinne turns off the music. “Yes, young man?”
“You’re going to bring us the burners tomorrow, you said. What time?”
Sally winces at how cheeky it sounds. Though Corinne did promise, as Ree and Tobes reluctantly went upstairs to lay downtheir iPhones in bedside-table drawers. She made the offer and seemed to mean it.
“I’ve got someone lined up to sort it out first thing tomorrow,” she says. “Don’t worry. In less than twenty-four hours, you’ll be logged back into all your TikToks and Snapchats, and the phones won’t be traceable to you.”
“Twenty-four hours?” says Ree. “My friends’ll think I’ve died.”
“No, ’cause you’ve told them,” Tobes reminds her. Before leaving home, they both notified their key people that they were about to be without internet access for a while.
“Yeah, but they won’t think I meant a wholeday.” Ree sounds slightly awestruck as she contemplates the endlessness of her social deprivation.An entire rotation of the earth around the sun, can you imagine?
“Long,” agrees Toby in a somber tone.
How many minutes, or hours, before Tess Gavey hears that both Ree and Toby Lambert have gone and are temporarily unreachable?Sally wonders. Young people seem to know everything about each other’s every movement these days.
Mark says, “The leaving of the phones was ridiculous. And getting burner phones, like we’re drug dealers or something. As if anyone’s going to try and trace—”
“You promised not to grumble.” Sally cuts him off. It had been a strict condition of his coming too. “As I’ve explained,” she goes on in a formal tone, “it’s not that I think Cambridgeshire Police are going to be putting together a squad of their finest detectives to trace our phones anytime soon. But I’ll sleep better if I know they’d fail if, by some remote chance, they decided to try. I also wouldn’tput anything past Lesley Gavey. She could hire detectives to find us. She could—”
“That’s ridiculous,” Mark murmurs.
“Dad, you’re breaking your promise,” Ree tells him.
“All right, I’ll shut up.” He doesn’t sound happy about it. “But, look, at some stage I need to be allowed to ask the questions that—”
“What work do you do, Mark?” Corinne asks cheerfully. “You’re some kind of accountant, right?”
“Regional sales manager for Croft and Bower,” he says after a long pause. He wants her to know that he’s noticed the deliberate hijacking of his unfinished sentence.
“Who do what?”
“We sell roofing materials. Fascias, soffits, guttering, stuff like that.”
“Right,” says Corinne. “And Sally, you’re a…something at Quy Mill Hotel, aren’t you?”
“I work for the events team. Just part time, though. Three days a week.”
“Do you like it?”
“I like my colleagues more than the work.” Sally agrees with Ree about jobs: Who on earth would do paid work if they could afford not to? “Most of all, I love the drive there and back.”
“I wish I could tell you she’s joking,” says Ree.
“That’s my favorite bit,” says Sally. “What’s wrong with that? I start at eleven and finish at three, and the traffic’s almost nonexistent between Swaffham Tilney and Stow-cum-Quy at those times. I love driving on the almost empty road. It’s like a kind of ribbonroller-coaster, between tall hedges and grass verges on either side. And then—”
“I think you’ve made your point, Mum.” Ree sighs. “Also, the road’s flat. Roller coasters are the opposite of flat.”
“Yeah, but when you whizz along really fast…which I know I shouldn’t, but I sometimes do. It’s just so beautiful. All the fields: green, brown, yellow. When the sun’s shining, there’s no more stunning landscape—”
“—than a boring brown field with absolutely no distinguishing features, next to a B road,” Ree deadpans. “Right. Course there isn’t.”
