One of the distant neighbours comes out, making his way to his car, an old-fashioned cigar in his hand.
Lucy arrives after several moments from the opposite direction, slightly out of breath.
‘What’s Moody like?’
‘Smart.’
‘Does he know? Can we ask him for advice?’
‘I don’t know. I don’t know yet.’ She agrees with Lucy. They have to do it. They have a duty to escape their situation. She’s just too afraid to take the gamble right now. ‘Let’s just … let’s just sleep a night,’ she adds. It comes out part sentence, part sigh. She can’t deal with it right now. Right now, she needs only immediate things. She can hardly believe she has access to them. A shower. Shops just down the road. A bed, a bed, a bed. And, so far, nobody knows for sure. Not yet. Sweet anonymity, let the future be damned.
They head into the living room. She will shower, and then she will cook. And then, later, later, she will deal with Moody, the future and everything else.
But first, she needs to ask Lucy what she was searching for. ‘What is this Google search about?’ she asks.
Lucy holds the phone, standing by the leather sofa, reading. And to her credit, her face doesn’t change at all. Simone scrutinizes her daughter the actor, and waits.
‘Oh yeah, just looking for stories about kidnaps.’
‘Torture kidnapper?’ Simone says. ‘That makes no sense.’
‘I was googling loads of things. I thought I might find an account from a victim.’ Her tone is light, a politician evading a question.
She meets Simone’s gaze, her eyes clear. There is just the slightest of challenge around her chin, and Simone knows to tread carefully.
‘If it wasn’t that,’ Simone says delicately, ‘you could tell me.’
‘It was that.’
‘Hmm. Did you … did you want to find them to …?’ Simone asks, and it comes out as almost a whisper. ‘It doesn’t make any sense that you’d google that to find stories of kidnap. Sorry. But it doesn’t.’
‘Oh sure, I desire to torture the person who manhandled me.’ Her tone is dangerous.
Simone immediately takes a step back. She can’t argue with her like this, not now. She can’t accuse her of anything, not with everything … and now she’s played the card. If there is anything to hide, Lucy will surely delete her search history again. She shouldn’t have asked her. A stupid move.
‘I didn’t think that,’ she lies.
Lucy – predictably – flounces off to a bedroom off the hallway. As she closes the door, Simone remembers the lodge and shudders; she wishes this weren’t a bungalow. She scoffs at herself. As if stairs could have saved them.
The bliss of a hot shower. Scorching. The dial is digital, and Simone turns it up with a beeping button to 102, 104, 106. That is as high as it goes. The droplets feel as though they pierce her skin; she’s not felt pleasure like it.
Shampoo. Conditioner that slides like silk between her fingers. She looks up and hopes the water doesn’t run out, no, doesn’t care, because Lucy has showered before her, andshe’s here and the conditioner smells of orange blossom and they’re alive.
She has to turn it off eventually. There’s a robe – her dirty clothes can stay on the floor. She might even wash them.
Once she’s dressed in other clothes, she cooks. They haven’t been to a shop yet, so she uses what’s here. There are eggs, but she doesn’t touch them, thinking about the omelettes she made right before everything changed forever. Instead, she cooks a simple soup using vegetables she finds in a drawer inside a dark little cupboard. Peeling, chopping, stirring, reducing and reducing and reducing, salt, more salt, more salt than you think you’d need, pepper.
She stirs and stirs, and tries not to think how many meals she has left to eat, before she is incarcerated or killed. Everyone has a finite number of meals left, but Simone’s must surely be less than others’.
The name of the man Simone murdered is Jon-Paul Delves. He was a delivery driver from San Angelo, Texas, and is not a known criminal, according to the news playing out quietly on Moody’s television.
‘So it was either his first run as a messenger, or he was so good he never got caught,’ Lucy says flatly, sitting on the sofa. Simone has the phone, to prevent Lucy from googling herself and seeing Damien.
Simone sits back. ‘It’s a blow,’ she says. ‘Maybe Moody can connect him to the British man.’ She has to be brave enough to do this. It’s why they’re here. Really, what does it matter that the town is so small?
‘Exactly.’
Simone can’t stop looking at photographs of him. A smiling, living breathing man,survived by a wife and a child, say the papers. A painful squeeze of her chest every time shereads that line which, for some masochistic reason, she goes over and over. Gone, now, a delivery driver from San Angelo, consigned to the heavens forever, because of her. Simone stares down at her hand in her lap, the one that fired the gun. Then across at Lucy: her reason for doing so.
