Then typing. This time not Simone’s.
Delete your messagecomes back after only a few seconds. Simone blinks. A second line comes.We need to talk on here privately when nobody is looking. I’ll write back when I can.
Simone feels a flash of surprise and longing as she reads the messages. Her husband is communicating illicitly with her. Red herrings and all. Soon, she will tell him about the British man, and they will be on their way to answers.
CHAPTER 41
Four o’clock in the morning and Simone surfaces from sleep, her arms reaching for Lucy. Simone was dreaming that Lucy was a baby, and she had rolled over on to her. She used to have the most horrendous dreams the baby was in the bed. She’d forgotten until now. She’s sweating, panicked, and she reaches to check and triple-check that Lucy is alive, adult and breathing.
Then she sighs to dispel the adrenaline and begins to make a plan. What exactly did the British man say to her? She tries to remember every word of it, but the peace of their evening and the swim in the stream has gone, and the usual roving morning dread begins. No. They can’t. They’re on the run …
Simone rolls on to her stomach, then picks up the phone. And he’s messaged. The same account, messaging itself and each other.
It’s me, D, he has sent.We need to delete these communications. Everything is being monitored. I’ve bought a phone while pretending I needed essentials from Target and put the login on it. I’m pretending to the media and the police to be angry with you so they will leave me alone. And then I can come for you.
And then, before she even has to ask for it, he’s sent a selfie, of him alone in some hotel room somewhere.
Simone lets a gasp out as she reads, lying there in her cold sleeping bag on her stomach. Her husband. Not a betrayer. Asmart man who thinks before he acts. Who has concocted a plan to – to what? To help them, she guesses.
You’re there, she replies.You’re there and you’re not angry x
Evidently, he’s still online.I’m so sorry I had to talk to the press, he types, and Simone is dismayed to note he doesn’t deny his anger.
What do the police think?she asks.
The dots bounce for several minutes as Damien types. And then he delivers the truth.
It’s not good here. They think restaurant in trouble and you joined Lucy in order to ship drugs. Think camping was a ruse. A cop called by the lodge and you told him you and Lucy were there after the kidnap (?) so they think the kidnap totally fabricated.
Simone types back:I didn’t want to tell the police! Because of what the kidnapper said!
She sits up. The sleeping bag slides from her body, leaving her even colder, but she doesn’t care. Everything is against them.
I know, Damien types.That cop was working somewhere else the night of the kidnap. On some shift they were talking about. He seems gutted he missed it. I’ve been trying to suggest things to the police without arousing suspicion. The guy Lucy shot at was with his wife; he heard the shot and radioed it in immediately, so he’s discounted too. Tbh he doesn’t look guilty.
Something sad and small sinks within Simone, a kind of humiliation. Neither cop was in on it. They acted so foolishly, so rashly.
But it might mean their suspect is the right one.
Damien, she types,Lucy and I both encountered a British man, me on the coach from Mexico, her at camp. He needs looking into. Grey hair. Mid-fifties. From Manchester. Can you do it?
??Damien replies.
Can you try and find out who was on the coach? Somehow? It feelstoo much of a coincidence that Lucy and I both encountered him – seems suspicious.
You think he’s in on it all?
I don’t know.
How would you prove it if you did find him?
I don’t know, Simone replies. It’s such a moon shot. She can see it now.
Do my best, he writes.
She watches him type and stop, type and stop – her husband, to whom the final thing she said was that she loved their daughter more than he did.
But then Damien types again. And it’s a clue:Someone else told the police they saw you at the border? Together? It’s been a big part of the evidence against you. Could it be him?
