Hostage by Clare Mackintosh
THIRTY-NINE
4 A.M. | ADAM
Mina’s voice is beautiful. She speaks in the luxurious way that linguists often do, their words velvety with the knowledge of the path each phrase has taken. She considers English her first language, having lived here her whole life, but it is interchangeable with French—the language her parents spoke at home. She claims not to speak Arabic, although she can understand it, but every now and then, she’ll slip in a word or two that just doesn’t translate into English.
“Everything translates,” I said. It was pre-Sophia. Pre-marriage.
“Ishq,” she countered without a beat.
“What does that mean?”
“Love, only—”
“See—it does translate!”
“—it’s so much more than that. Ishq is your greatest passion, your other half. The word for ivy comes from the same root. Ishq is a love so great, you cling to each other.” She smiled at me. “Ishq is what we have.”
Ishq, I think when I hear Mina’s voice through the answerphone. Not confident now—not rich and velvety—but thin and scared, tears thickening her words and blurring them into one rapid, terrified note.
“Tell her she’s brave and beautiful and clever and that I’m in awe of her every single day.”
Her words play over a jarring bed of Mariah Carey. All I want for Christmas is…
“And—I love you too.”
The knot in my chest twists tighter. There’s never been anyone but Mina. Girlfriends, yes, before I met her, but the moment I did, the memory of them melted so far away, I struggled to name them. I’d been waiting, that’s all. Waiting for Mina.
Sophia lies on the floor, her head on my lap and my eyes fixed on the barely there flutter of a pulse in her neck. A gentle rasp accompanies each shallow breath, her face so swollen as to be unrecognizable. I want so badly to hold her, to trace her features, to cup her cheeks in my hands.
“Is she okay?”
Even through the coal chute, I can hear the panic in Becca’s voice. I want to tell her, No, she’s not okay. I want to let her think that she killed her, want her to go through just one-hundredth of the pain I went through, watching my daughter have an anaphylactic attack. Instead, I let the silence speak for me, my focus fixed on Sophia’s closed eyes, on the weight of her body on my lap. The skin on my wrists is rubbed raw from my efforts to pull myself free, sweat and blood sticking dirt to my fingers.
“I thought you’d check.” Becca’s voice bounces off the metal-lined walls of the chute. “You normally check!”
Six feet below, I watch the drug take hold, and I send up a silent prayer as Sophia’s body rejects the poison almost as swiftly as she ingested it. Light from the front of the house spills down the chute to puddle on the floor by my outstretched feet.
“It was practically pitch-black!” I yelled back. “We were starving. These are not normal circumstances!” My own voice bounces back at me. Sophia takes a sudden, huge breath, letting it out in a sob that tears my heart in two. I could have lost her. I might still lose her.
“I’m going to make sure you know what it’s like to be locked up.” My face is upturned toward the beam of light, and it’s as though I’m shouting to the gods; gods who strike indiscriminately, who punish a child who’s done nothing to deserve their wrath. “I’ll pull every string I can to get you the maximum possible sentence.”
“The planet is dying because of people like Mina.”
“You’re insane. Mina has nothing to do with climate—”
“She has everything to do with it! If all the pilots and cabin crew stopped work—”
“There would be others to take their place!”
“—the planes couldn’t fly, and if the planes couldn’t fly, the ice caps wouldn’t melt. Don’t you see? It isn’t too late to redress the balance. That’s what’s so awful: we know the damage aviation is doing, yet we keep doing it. It’s like being diagnosed with lung cancer but continuing to smoke!”
There’s a quality to Becca’s voice that scares me. It’s the sort of tremor I’ve heard in street preachers or door-to-door fanatics. It’s a fervor that tells me she really believes what she’s saying. And if she really believes it, what else is she capable of?
“Don’t you see that you’re being manipulated? Whoever’s pulling the strings isn’t the one facing prison. They don’t care about you; they’ve set you up to take the rap. You’re cannon fodder, Becca, nothing more—a pawn in someone else’s game. You’ve been brainwashed.”
“You’re wrong. You don’t know what they’re like.”
“What who is like?”
For a second, I think she’s going to give me a name, but she swallows the word. “Our leader.”
Our leader, as if it’s some kind of cult.
“Do you know what they do to people like you in prison? People who hurt children?”
I wait, long enough for the thought to take root. I think of the times I’ve sat across an interview table from muggers, murderers, rapists, and how—no matter how awful their crimes, how much I’ve been sickened by their actions—I have never before felt the way I feel now. Never before felt my muscles tense with the urge to fight, never before wanted to pin someone down and make them pay. Never before wanted to kill someone.
But then, never before has anyone threatened my daughter’s life. My wife’s. I try to imagine what’s happening on board Flight 79, but all that fills my head is the image of a plane crashing into a building. It plays on a loop: fire and screaming and twisted metal.
“How can I go to prison,” Becca says, “when no one even knows I exist?” There’s a mocking tone to her voice that serves only to enrage me more, and I feel fresh blood trickle to my fingers as I wrench my wrists against metal.
“We’ll find you. I’ll find you.”
“You don’t even know my real name.”
Sophia’s breathing is more even now, and as she slips into sleep—exhausted by the anaphylaxis—I find a clarity previously clouded by fear that she might die. I switch off the hijack disaster movie playing in my head, and I remember who I am, what I’m good at.
“Your mother drives a red Mini Cooper with a pom-pom hanging from the rearview mirror.”
The silence that follows turns my speculation into fact, the win giving me courage. I’d just clocked off when I saw Becca at Tesco. I’d promised Mina—promised myself—I’d go straight home, but the urge to gamble was too strong, and I found myself driving in the opposite direction, toward the hypermarket on the outskirts of the next town, where I was less likely to bump into someone I knew. I had a pocketful of loose change, and somehow that made it okay. What was a scratch card, really? Thousands of people bought scratch cards. I wouldn’t log on to my online account, I wouldn’t spend more than a tenner, wouldn’t buy again if I lost the first time…
So many promises, so many deals with myself.
Was this how an alcoholic felt? I wondered. It’s okay if I have a beer—a beer’s not vodka. It’s okay if it’s a half—a half’s not a pint. It’s okay if I’m with friends, if it’s after five, if the day has a Y in it…
I emptied my pocket on the counter, not meeting the cashier’s eye in case he saw right through me, and I sat in my car, thirty miles from home, scratching the silver foil from seven worthless cards. The first step is acknowledging you have a problem, everyone says. Only no one tells you what the second step is.
If I’d gone straight home, I’d have missed her. But I sat in the car for a minute or two, fighting the sweat that prickled my skin, the guilt, the shame, the desire for more. I found a quid in the glove box, a bunch of twenty-pence pieces in the defunct ashtray, waiting for a parking meter. Cobbling together enough for two more cards, I got out of the car, hating myself but doing it anyway. I’d get different ones this time. The Match 3 Tripler ones. I’d judge the queues, try and get a different cashier. If I got the same one, I’d give a rueful smile. The missus said I got the wrong ones, I’d say. Let him think I was henpecked. Better that than the truth. I passed Becca on my way in. She was looking at her phone, walking toward a car parked in the disabled bay. The woman in the driver’s seat had the same neat nose, the same curve in her top lip. Sister, I thought at first, then I clocked the gray roots above the blond, the lines around the mouth. I looked away, not wanting to get into conversation, not wanting to do anything but win something, anything, to justify my actions.
“What are you talking about?” Becca says now, but it’s too late. Her pause told me everything. I close my eyes, put myself back in that covered walkway that runs from the store into the car park. Becca didn’t see me—wasn’t looking—and she walked right past me and into her mum’s car. I wasn’t concentrating—didn’t care, only cared about the scratch cards, about how if I won a fiver on Match 3 Tripler, I’d only be four quid down—but a bit of me was still in work mode. A bit of me is always in work mode. I remember her hair was tied back—she’d worn it loose the couple of times she’d sat for us—and she had a zip-up hoodie with some kind of logo on the breast. Dark jeans.
No—not jeans. Trousers. Navy-blue trousers. What kind of teenager wears navy-blue trousers? Something slots into place. Becca calling Mina out of the blue; Mina being so grateful, she didn’t question it.
She’s a friend of Katya’s—they used to work together. Apparently Katya told her we might be looking for someone to take care of Sophia after school.
“You work at Tesco,” I say.
If I’m wrong, I’ve lost. No more upper hand, no more bargaining power.
She says nothing.
I’m right.
“So even if you’ve given them a false name and address, it’ll be a simple matter for me to request the CCTV from the supermarket and get your mum’s registration number. I expect you’ll be on the electoral roll there, won’t you?” I keep talking, faster and faster, gaining in confidence, falling back into the job I do day in, day out. “That’ll give us your full name and date of birth. Oh, and of course, we’ll have a record of when you’ve been in our property, so I’ll get our broadband supplier to provide me with the details of all devices logged in at the relevant times.”
It fits me like a second skin. Investigator. Father. The two halves of my self merging in the most awful way but in the most perfect way too. And in that second, I know that we’ll get out of here, and I’ll track down Becca—whoever she really is—and I’ll make her pay. Not with the fists that itch to be used but with the bread and butter of my working life.
The sound of running feet interrupts my thoughts.
“Becca?”
There’s a sound from inside the house now. I see a flicker of shadow across the strip of light beneath the cellar door as she passes it—one way, then back again. I call her name, over and over, knowing I’ve pushed her too far but hoping it’s not too late. The front door slams, feet running down the path. I hear the swing of the gate and the metallic clatter as it swings back into place, then the sound of trainers on tarmac growing fainter and fainter until they disappear altogether.
I listen for sounds within the house and hear only the house itself. The water pipes creaking; the gutters dripping as the snow melts; the low hum of the fridge.
Sophia stirs. She opens her eyes, still narrow from the swelling, and runs a tongue over her chapped lips. “Where’s Becca?”
“She’s gone.”
I pull at my handcuffs. Becca’s gone.
And nobody knows we’re here.