The world explodes back into noise and colour and action. Simone watches the kidnapper fall, backdropped by the striated desert horizon. She rushes instinctively to him and from his wound rushes a red Trevi Fountain of blood in rhythmic spurts. Her hand goes to her mouth, horrified. He is face down but still alive, a guttural, bubbling, frothy moan coming from his mouth.
And right there, Simone feels another decision present itself, one she makes without any thought at all. She turns away from the kidnapper and towards her daughter, the odyssey over.
She rushes to the boot and begins to fumble with the catch.Please be her. Please don’t be another criminal. Please don’t let there be anybody else hiding out in the back, in the footwells.
The car’s engine is still running, and the boot pops with a single click. With a whirring noise, it begins to rise like a helium balloon. And there she is. Lucy, gagged with dusty gaffer tape, perhaps formerly bound, red stripes across her wrists. No shoes, dirty feet. But it’s her, it’s her, it’s Lucy, and she is alive.
‘Oh my God,’ Simone says, and she dips her head over the boot, her hands around her daughter’s, and she gently tugs at the tape and the blindfold, and as Lucy’s eyes open, they become wet and make contact with Simone’s, blue on blue.
Simone reaches down into the boot, same as she did into Lucy’s cot a thousand times. The baby memories stormaround her like a tree shaking its leaves off. Morning after morning after morning, Lucy aged one, two, three, then in a big bed, then no longer needing help with getting up.
Sure enough, Lucy puts her own arms up, hands like blinking starfish, just like way back when, and Simone lifts her, even though they weigh almost the same now, and brings her to her chest. Her soft skin, her warm body, it folds into Simone like baking mix, and now, once more, they are one.
And Lucy repeats two words only: ‘You came. You came.’
CHAPTER 24
By the side of the road, a man lies dying.
Simone steadies Lucy and leans her backwards against the boot. She scans her daughter’s body, but she knows by the way she is moving that she is OK. Damaged. Terrified. But OK.
‘Are you –’
‘I am now,’ Lucy says.
The boot is unclean but lined with something waterproof and disposable. Simone gulps, wondering if he was intending to kill her. Lucy’s eyes fill and spill over, silent little tears, legs shaking like Bambi, same height as Simone exactly. Simone embraces her again, cheek to cheek, both wet with tears but they don’t care.
‘You got me.’
‘I got you,’ Simone says into her hair, her voice hoarse. ‘I got you.’ She touches Lucy’s forehead, marvelling that she is here, alive, and thinks that she could stay here forever. Forget the dying man, forget the cocaine.
‘Did you kill him?’
‘I don’t know. I think so,’ Simone says, and Lucy leans back slightly, looking at her mother’s face. Then she puts it back, her cheek resting once again against Simone’s.
‘You shot him.’
‘Yes.’
‘How did you find me?’
‘I would’ve done anything,’ Simone says, avoiding thequestion, and suddenly they’re in the afterworld. She has no idea what to tell Lucy. She didn’t think beyond this point. She realizes that, despite everything, she did not expect to get her daughter back alive. She could gasp with the thought of it.
‘Why was he …?’ Lucy asks, but she doesn’t finish her sentence. Too much has happened; there’s simply too much to say.
Her daughter is an adult. She has been through an awful adult experience. Simone will have to tell her what she has done to get her back, if she doesn’t already know. Did she hint at it in the proof of life video? She can’t keep it from her forever, anyway. They need to call Damien, they need to call an ambulance, they need to …
Simone decides that the most important thing is damage limitation. Save the kidnapper if possible. She is a good person; she is no killer. She turns her gaze to him while still holding Lucy. He is on his front, in the beam of his headlights, now completely motionless. She stares for a second or two, watching for breathing.
She tries to bring to mind the little law she knows. Was this self-defence, protecting another? She thinks it must be. The situation they are in, what she did … it was what anybody would do. Theremustbe legal protection for her.
‘Is he …?’ Lucy says. She’s tall and willowy in the night, her legs bronzed. To Simone, she has never been more beautiful. She can’t stop staring at her.
‘It’s nice not to be alone,’ Lucy tells her mother, and Simone understands this sentiment entirely. Forty hours of high-octane choices, and here they are: together. Simone, who spent so much of her childhood alone, never wanted the same for Lucy.
She puts the gun on the roof of the car, and they walk hesitantly over to the man. The blood at first is not noticeable, theflow stopped. The dark clothes and kaleidoscope-patterned ground from the headlights obscure it, but then it appears the more she looks, spongy and sodden.
Simone gulps. ‘We need to get him help,’ she tells her daughter.
