‘What do they want you to do?’
‘They want me to go to Mexico,’ she says, not wanting to incriminate him but not wanting to lie, either.
‘Mexico?’ Damien replies, evidently stunned. ‘What?’
‘The next instructions are in Mexico. I …’ She is about to say she can’t say any more than that, but that would invite more questions. She can’t let him get caught up in this. If she doesn’t manage it, she can’t leave Lucy with no parents at all, both in prison.
‘This is fucking ludicrous. A wild goose chase.I’llcall the police.’
‘Don’t – Damien. I’ve got to do it.’
‘Simone.’ To Simone’s horror, his voice begins to clog with tears. ‘Youpromisedthat you were going to.’ Another pause, then he adds: ‘I trusted that you were going to.’
‘I’m going to get her back.’
‘The police help with missing people. With kidnaps. Single, vulnerable women don’t. Why are they sending you there?’
Simone blinks, touched that he cares so much for her own safety as well as Lucy’s – something she hasn’t once considered. Wondering, too, if thesingleis pointed. ‘I can’t tell you.’
Damien leaves another dangerous silence.
‘You would really have defied that note? If you were here?’ she presses him.
Damien answers without sounding barbed. ‘They always say not to tell the police.’ The background noise suddenly disappears, then a soft-close sound; he’s found a quiet corner, maybe. ‘Simone.’ It’s a full sentence.
‘How do you knowthey always say not to tell the police? What do you even mean – on TV?’
‘The authorities would want to get her back,’ he says. ‘We’re not …’ The line breaks up then, and Simone temporarily loses him. ‘… everyone is on the same side.’ Simone finds herself thinking how naive. Another bad thought. Damien had a charmed upbringing with his beautiful siblings and his beautiful parents in a huge four-bedroom house in Tottenham. He has never had any reason to disbelieve anybody. Nobody drank too much, nobody had to be woken up by their ten-year-old daughter who was missing school. Nobody hid syringes in their underwear drawers.
‘The police don’t want to pay ransoms because they don’t want more ransoms,’ she tells him. ‘We are not on the same side. They said they would kill her.’
She closes her eyes. Marrying him, marrying into his family, she almost became one of them. She laughs every day with his sister. She misses it all suddenly. She misses life before this. It’s the first time she’s felt homesick or felt anything besides fear since Lucy was taken.
‘I couldn’t receive that message and not do what it says,’ she tells him. ‘I’m sorry – I know that is wrong. I’d hate me,too. But I couldn’t. I couldn’t, I couldn’t. I’ve got new instructions, now, and I’m going to follow them.’
Damien pauses again, this time for even longer. ‘You won’t tell me what.’
‘It’s better you don’t know. Listen. You would’ve called the police against my wishes if you had known,’ she tells him.
‘Well, I haven’t,’ Damien says simply, eventually, and Simone finds she can’t argue with that.
‘I’m going to get her back,’ she tells him. And she hears the damning silence, his hurt and betrayal folded up within it, but she can’t listen to it. She needs to get back to that focal point on the horizon: her daughter. ‘If you call them now, you will ruin it.’
Damien sighs, and Simone wonders if he will.
‘Is there anything I could say that would change your mind?’ he says with a kind of mournful sadness.
‘No.’
‘Right then,’ he says, downbeat. ‘Go get your baby,’ he says, his words spiteful, but his voice soft and sad, not mean.
‘She’s our baby,’ Simone says.
‘You have made it clear from day one that she is yours,’ Damien says, and here is the red flag, waving starkly in front of Simone, who can’t help but charge at it.
‘Damien,’ she says, a note of warning in her voice.
‘What? No, no, you go and rescue her yourself,’ he says. ‘You make the parenting decisions yourself. You’re in charge; you’re the CEO of her, the mother.’
