‘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 inthrough 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 arepeoplepassing, 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 thereanythingI 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.
