OMG. Yes? Find out who said it?
They don’t let me be privy to much. But I’ll try.
She lies back down. It must be him.
But I would say the police are asking really leading questions like ‘Did you see a woman and her daughter?’ They’re just intent on getting someone for the shooting and proving you’re lying.So they’re trying to get people to say things, Damien continues.
Simone sighs, a deep sigh that comes from a victim who everybody thinks is a perpetrator.I’m sorry. For what I said, she types to him.
Damien begins to reply, then stops.
Nothing comes back. She types to Damien.What’s your plan? What should ours be?
Leave it with me.I’m working on it. Talk tomorrow, sometime.And she thinks, suddenly, of the risks he’s taken so far. Different risks from her, but important ones, too: deceiving the police. Working with her. Is it an olive branch? It must be. Simone, prone to extreme thinking, tries to remind herself that there is a vast wasteland between enemies and lovers.
Where shall I say you are?he asks. It isn’t a direct question. Sensibly, he’s only – at the moment – actually asking where she isn’t.
Send them to a major city, she says. And then:Is the restaurant OK? I liked your herring.
Staff a bit besieged, but OK. Bookings soaring lol.
Lol.
And they log off.
What must this look like? Hundreds of bookings, the staff being scrutinized by the press. Lucy’s camp mates speaking out. The photos of them by the side of the road with the gun … but she’s completely removed from it here in the desert.
She blinks. Then the messages disappear right in front of her. Damien’s tidying up again, like he always has. She feels a rush of gratitude for him, her husband out there, trying to help. She relaxes slightly, feeling less alone than before.
Simone passes the next hour browsing the internet in a spiral of self-loathing. Stories about the restaurant – a waitress she once had to get rid of has told theMirrorthat Simone wasa control freak– and social media speculating on where they are. The BBC has covered it, a photograph of Dishes as the lead story, the gold sign on the door that she ordered from Etsy front and centre of a breaking news story. And then someone writing on Facebook who went to school with her, saying she wasalways going to turn out rough. Simone closes her eyes, and lets sleep come for her.
She only gets an hour before the next disaster.
CHAPTER 42
Six o’clock in the morning and something feels different. Something feels off.
Sharp gravel cuts into Simone’s sternum. The grass is patchy, still uncomfortable. Lucy did indeed grab huge handfuls of it, strewing them to make a pillow. They’ve gone everywhere, are drying and becoming paler. Simone smiles at them. What a stupid thing to do. It can’t have been comfortable.
She reaches for the flip phone, but it isn’t where she left it. Her hand scrabbles around, panicking, until she sees it over by Lucy. Huh. Has Lucy taken it? Been on it?
Just as she starts to wonder, she realizes what woke her. It’s lights. Her whole body goes still. Wide, conical-shaped beams are moving this way and that. Whoever it is must be moving closer because now the tent illuminates with them, the brightest daytime blue. Then darkness again. Then light.
Lucy must sense it too, because her eyes pop open. She throws an elbow across her forehead, squinting. ‘Huh?’ she says.
‘Shh.’
Wordlessly, Simone points upwards as the laser show continues and they must confront an awful truth: they have been found. Nobody would be this quiet. Tourists wouldn’t. Other campers wouldn’t. Only police would. Only people looking, searching earnestly for people who don’t want to be discovered.
They will be surrounding the tent, human beings paid tofind and incarcerate people like them. Or maybe it’s the kidnapper. An ordinary-looking British man come for them with some unknown power.
‘Fuck,’ Lucy says.
‘We need to come out,’ Simone says, thinking of the news, thinking what she knows about the police here, thinking about Damien, and the risks they have taken. Have they found their messages? Then traced her? ‘We need to give ourselves up.’ And as she says this sentence, she is surprised to find a strange, shameful truth at the bottom of it, as solid as the bedrock underneath the stream they swam in last night: relief. That the fight is over, a different one beginning, but one that doesn’t involve so much anxiety, so much planning, so much fear.
But no. This is where she stops herself. The relief is false, her brain’s own laser show sent to distract her. Of course she cannot allow her daughter to go to prison. They must find their assailant, then go to the authorities. Damien himself said the police only wantaconviction, not necessarily the right one.
‘Wait.’ Lucy reaches a hand down to touch Simone’s. ‘It’s above us. Look.’ She points up, and she’s right. The lights are not coming from the ground.
