Simone opens it, then sucks a breath in.
Bars wrapped in brown paper: it’s drugs. As she suspected, but somehow still shocking to see.
She reaches to touch one of the bars, then picks it up. It’s weighty in her palm, compact and heavy, cool, like a weapon, the wrapping tight. It’s cocaine; she’s sadly expert in that, even though she’s never seen blocks like this. Colombian cocaine, she supposes.
Each package says it is a kilogram, written on the side, but that doesn’t mean much to her. But even she can see that this full, weighty bag has got to be worth a million dollars or more. She sits back, just staring at its contents.
Each bar is covered in brown parcel paper, wrapped tightwith shiny gaffer tape. A sticker on the top of each one bears a pornographic photograph: a naked woman, bent over, the view from behind. Faceless. Something about this unsettles Simone more than the drugs. The casual misogyny. That women are for sex or for shipping drugs around. That she, too, is a pawn in this machine, so totally, vulnerably disposable.
And so is Lucy.
After putting the bar back into the bag, she goes to the sink, turns the tap and splashes her hands in the water. There’s an old liver-spotted mirror behind it. She looks at herself, thinking about the trail of evidence she’s left behind. There’s too much of it; so much is already done. If anybody ever suspects Simone, it is over for her.
Simone submerges her hands in the water as it heats up, scorching her skin, and she thinks about who will transport these drugs after her, who will distribute them, who will buy them, who will take them, and who will die from them, too. Whose children will suffer like she did.
In the old mirror, she avoids eye contact now with herself. She doesn’t want to look again. She doesn’t want to take on the identity of somebody who has done this. She of all people.
She picks up the bag, slings it over her shoulder and ducks out, under the roller shutter door, into the floodlit sun. As she looks behind her, she sees a little vent on the front of the building that she missed before begin to steam, from the hot water she used, piping out into the sky for everyone to see.
CHAPTER 17
Less than five minutes after she leaves, she hears them: sirens. They sound almost the same as back home, but not quite. A universal noise signalling danger, for bad people and bad things, accidents, fires and criminals.
She’s by the side of the road, in plain sight, bag hoisted unnaturally over her shoulders. It’s too large, a man’s sports bag really, and she is conspicuous, a woman alone on a day trip to nowhere.
Sweat begins to gather on her lower back, underneath the bag containing a million dollars’ worth of Colombian cocaine.
The heat fires up panic; she’d get life in prison.
Or worse. Prison might be the safest place for her if she doesn’t get this bag across the border.
She picks up her pace. Her limbs are suddenly heavy and cumbersome, her feet weighed down by her trainers, the bag digging into her shoulders.
She begins to walk faster. The sirens are getting nearer and she won’t be able to get Lucy. She looks around hurriedly. She could go back, into the garage, but if the police are for her, they might know about the location … They might know everything.
She clutches the burner phone in her palm, her own iPhone and Lucy’s in the back pockets of her shorts, and she begins to pace as quickly as possible.
The sirens rise behind her and the bag flaps and thudsagainst her back. She goes for two minutes, three, the sirens become louder and louder and now she knows they are on the same road as her, coming right up behind her.
She risks a glance. It’s a blue car,POLICíA FEDERALwritten on the side. Two officers inside wearing sunglasses. She immediately slows right down, out of breath, trying to look casual, doesn’t turn around again.
Just as her shoulders are up and braced, ready to hand the bag over with an explanation and a prayer, the car passes her, speeding to someone else, some other disaster, and Simone watches it go and then stops dead, only sensing the near miss, truly, now that it has gone.
She puts her hands on her knees, leans over, and her breathing steadies. She straightens up again, trying to gather her thoughts and make a plan.
She checks her phone; she’s a long walk from the coach, but it doesn’t depart until the evening. She’s got to go somewhere – not here, out in plain view on the streets. Somewhere else. She needs to rest. She needs to hide.
Simone arrives in the centre of Nueva Rosita. She is going to do some shopping. Partially to look and act naturally, and partially to justify the presence of an extra bag she can put in the back of the coach along with the damning sports bag.
The tiredness ebbs and flows, and right now it’s abated, and Simone feels a burst of something like positivity. She’s always been resourceful. After the teacher sounded the alarm on her parents’ drug use, she was taken into care, then quickly placed with a foster family who were – for reasons she doesn’t understand, looking back – at best ambivalent about her.
She had a monthly visit from a social worker, weekly meet-ups with her parents in Costa Coffee (their hands, if themeetings were in the mornings, were still shaking), and the distinct impression that none of them really, truly cared about her. She told the social worker that her parents were disengaged, still using, and the woman simply wrote it down on a pad of paper.
She moved out of the foster placement at seventeen, after an argument in which the mother called hertoo opinionated. She left her a goodbye note on the counter that said only,How’s this for an opinion?
She found a flat in one of the poorest areas of London and signed on for benefits even though she didn’t want to. And on the first day, aged seventeen and one month, she had looked around at the bare plaster walls, one window boarded up, noisy neighbours, and thought:I cannot, cannot stay here.
It was the year 1999, the height of the dot-com boom, and so Simone did the best she could: she got two jobs. The first manning start-up bingo chat rooms, the second copywriting for a high-end beauty brand. She had to work from the Hackney library at first (no computer), but, eventually, she had enough for a shitty desktop computer.
