‘How? You can’t find any evidence of the kidnapper. Max was a red herring. Jon-Paul Delves is a cipher.’
‘Let me try harder.’
‘I said I’d cooperate with them.’ She gestures to him with the tea. ‘This isn’t that.’
‘Cooperation is not giving up every single one of your human rights. Sacrifice feels good until you have to live it.’
Simone winces at the truth of this statement. ‘But I can’t risk it,’ she says, her eyes wet, desperate and sad. ‘I can’t risk them going back on the deal. Nobody believes … nobody believes us. I can’t gamble that on a fucking jury. Twelve random people who might send Lucy down?’
Moody just looks at her, saying nothing, pencil still moving.
‘What would she get?’ Simone asks.
‘I’d argue that she was merely shooti–’
‘What would she get if they charged her right now and she was convicted?’
Moody answers sadly: ‘A decade.’
Her head sinks downwards. She looks at him. ‘You have kids?’
Moody silently holds up two fingers.
‘Girls or boys?’ she asks him.
‘Two girls.’ His voice as quiet as distant thunder.
‘Would you spin the roulette wheel, if this were you? The drugs drop, buying the gun, the shootings …’
After several seconds, Moody shakes his head, and really, that’s all he needs to say, but he adds, ‘I get your point.’
‘Hard to ever know if you’re doing the right thing, as a parent, isn’t it?’ she says.
‘Do Lucy and Damien need a place to stay?’
‘They’re in a motel, in Terlingua.’
‘They can have my place again. OK? Why don’t you tell me everything you know from that night, again.’
‘There’s nothing new.’
‘It might help to go over it.’ He holds his hands up. ‘Off record. Parent to parent, no lawyers in sight.’
So Simone tells him. The singing school – he wants her to linger over this. The concertina door. The four o’clock wake. The flip phone, the ransom, the border, the bag, the sirens, the missing kilogram. And, as she speaks, details peppering the story like a seasoning, she suddenly thinks that nobody, nobody, could ever think that she was lying. She doesn’t know what to do with this thought, so she simply puts it to one side.
Moody waits for a full ten seconds, once she has finished, evidently choosing his words carefully. ‘You did the right thing,’ he tells her. Then looks at her. ‘Every single step.’
‘Would you have done it, too?’
‘Yes. And you got your kid out alive.’
‘She deserves to stay free,’ Simone says. She’s still pleasantly cold in the meeting room, the tea lightly steaming the very tip of her nose like that first cup on an autumn morning.
‘At great cost to you.’
‘That’s parenthood.’
Moody doesn’t answer her for a little while. Instead, he upends his pencil again and again, and they drink their tea, Simone thinking of twenty to forty years and Moody perhaps thinking of how to persuade her to take it all to trial, which is why it surprises her when he says: ‘I can’t think of a better mother than you, right now.’
