Hostage by Clare Mackintosh
FIVE
3 P.M. | ADAM
My meeting with DI Butler shot my concentration for the rest of the day, making every statement take twice as long as it should have done.
“Are you alright?” My first witness looked at the scrawl my shaking hand had produced and cocked her head to the side in concern.
I made light of it—“I think that’s my line”—but I could see her throwing nervous glances at the paper as I added to her statement, and when I read it back, there were so many errors that I started again. My silent phone logged twenty-seven missed calls, the voicemail icon flashing red. How long does it take to pull an itemized phone bill? How long for Butler to scan the pages, to see the same number again and again, the digits in the far column running higher and higher. How long to end a career that took twenty years to build?
I’m late leaving the office, circling town twice in the hope of a parking space, before giving up and taking the car home. The wasted time means I have to run to pick up Sophia, snow clumping around my boots and slowing me down. I cut through the churchyard in defiance of the signs, and I pass a bunch of women coming the other way, their kids clutching paintings. Crap. They send the kids to after-school club if you’re late and charge you a fiver for the privilege, even if you pick up five minutes later. It might not sound a lot, but right now, it’s more than I’ve got.
I skid through the gate at nine minutes past.
“Mr. Holbrook.” Miss Jessop frowns, no doubt working out how to tell me I need to cough up. “Sophia’s already been collected, I’m afraid.”
“By who?” Not by Mina; her flight left before noon.
“Becca. Your babysitter,” she adds, as though I might have forgotten. “Did Mrs. Holbrook not tell you?” I can see her storing the gossip away for the staff room. Things must be really bad between Sophia’s parents. I don’t think they’re even talking now…
“Yes, she did. I just forgot. Thanks.” I force myself to smile, even though I’m furious with Mina for making me look like an idiot.
I sprint down toward the high street, catching up with them on the corner where the police station is. I slow to a walk. Sophia’s hair—so dark and curly that people see a resemblance to Mina that can’t possibly exist—explodes from beneath her woolly hat and bounces on the shoulders of her bright-red duffle coat, the plaits Mina always does over breakfast no doubt torn out by lunchtime. She’s looking down as she walks, finding the patches of untouched snow between the well-trodden slush so she can sink her boots into them. “Hey, Sophia.”
She turns around. Her smile’s unguarded at first, then a wariness creeps over her face. I hate myself for putting it there.
“Hi, Daddy.”
“Hi, Adam.”
“Alright, Becca? How come you’re here? I told Mina I was leaving work early today.”
She shrugs. “I just got a text. I don’t normally babysit two nights in a row, but it’s an expensive time of year, isn’t it, what with Christmas presents and then New Year’s Eve. The Bull’s doing this thing where it’s twenty quid to get in, then there’s drinks, and if we want to go on after…”
I tune out as we start walking home. Sophia dances around, a fish on Becca’s line. I reach toward her other glove, but she thrusts her hand into her pocket, and I bite the inside of my cheek till I taste iron.
Bloody Mina. I told her I’d pick up Sophia. I texted her, for God’s sake—put it in black and white. I can’t send Becca away now without giving her some cash—not if she was expecting to be paid until I got back from work.
“Veg shop,” Sophia says. “Sainsbury’s.”
It’s typical of Mina. She bangs on about how I need to do my fair share, then she pulls a stunt like this and makes a tit of me.
“Now the butcher. Ugh. Now the ’state agent where they—”
“Sell houses, yes, we know. For God’s sake, Sophia!”
I feel Becca’s eyes on me as Sophia falls silent.
Easy to be a perfect parent when you don’t have kids, when their strange little quirks are endearing instead of infuriating. Maybe if Becca had to listen to Sophia narrate her journey to school a thousand times or heard Mina reciting Goodnight Moon every bloody night for five years, she’d get it.
Mina won’t look at her phone till she lands, but all this frustration inside me needs somewhere to go, so I take out mine. She reckons I’m the one not communicating, when she can’t even sort out the simple logistics of who’s picking up our—
I stare at my screen, at the message thread I’ve opened in preparation for giving Mina both barrels.
No need for a babysitter. I’ve sorted an early finish tomorrow, so I can
My message lies unfinished. I have a sudden memory of the call from Custody, of thrusting my phone back into my pocket yesterday afternoon, because my suspect’s brief was finally ready for disclosure.
I thought I’d sent it.
I was sure I’d sent it.
Heat rushes through me, remorse a close cousin of anger, the way it always has been. This has only happened because Mina won’t answer her phone to me now, insists on me texting. Or emailing. Emailing! Who emails their wife, for God’s sake?
It’s easier.
Easier on whom? Not me, that’s for sure. She can’t bear even to hear my voice, can she? She’d rather keep me at the end of an email, where she can pretend I’m just some administrative headache she has to deal with for Sophia’s sake.
“Stay, then,” I tell Becca, and even I can hear the bitterness in my voice. I swallow it. “Fix Sophia’s tea, maybe? She’d like that.”
She hesitates, then shrugs. “Cool.”
Is that what Mina would have done? Or would she tell me I’m wasting money we don’t have? There was a time when I couldn’t put a foot wrong in Mina’s eyes. Now I can’t do anything right.
Liar.
Cheat.
Not fit to be a father.
The worst of it is that she’s right. I am a liar. I am a cheat. She can’t hate me any more than I hate myself, can’t know that just catching a glimpse of myself in the mirror makes me sick with disgust. How did it come to this?
Butler probably has that phone bill already. She’ll have been through it with a highlighter, reading between the lines. Coloring in the end of my career.
What will I do? Being a copper isn’t like most other jobs; you don’t do it then move on, as if you worked in a bar or tried your hand at retail. It’s like teaching or being a doctor. It’s part of you. And I’m going to lose it all.
Ex-husband, ex-father, ex-copper. Things couldn’t get much worse.
As we come to the edge of town, Sophia pulls free from Becca’s hand. It’s snowing again, and her wellies leave tiny footprints on the path. She takes the corner twenty yards ahead of us, and I call her name, but she giggles and runs faster.
“Race!”
I break into a jog. Around the corner, the street’s empty. Gray slush from the road has spattered the pavements, and I search for the right-sized prints. “Sophia!”
“Chill. She’s playing hide-and-seek,” Becca says, several yards behind me. “Oh no!” she calls, pantomime-loud. “Where could Sophia be?” She grins at me, but I’m not playing.
“Sophia!”
A car passes us, and I look inside, clock the number plate, the driver, the direction of travel. It takes seconds to snatch a child. Minutes to make them disappear.
“Sophia!” I break into a run. “Come out right now. This isn’t funny.”
“She won’t come out if she thinks you’re cross with her,” Becca hisses after me, then calls out in that singsong voice: “I can’t see her anywhere!”
I stop so abruptly, I almost lose my footing. “Please don’t tell me how to parent my own child.” I turn in a circle, scanning the street. Where is she?
During any police investigation involving a kid, there’s a moment when you think: What if this were my child? What would I do? How would it feel? Only a moment, though; if you let it go on for any longer than that, you’d never get the job done.
The moment is already a minute.
“Sophia!” So loud the sound rasps in my throat and I have to cough to clear it.
“It’s no good.” Becca heaves a melodramatic sigh. “We’ll have to go home without her.”
“No!” Sophia pops out from behind a wheelie bin and barrels into Becca. “I’m here!”
“Oh my goodness, you were hiding! I thought you’d vanished into thin air!”
Blood roars in my ears as I bend down, grabbing Sophia’s arm and pulling her to me. “Don’t ever do that again, do you hear? Anything could have happened.”
“She was just playing—”
I cut Becca dead with a glare and make Sophia look at me. Her bottom lip wobbles.
“Sorry, Daddy.”
My face feels hot, a sharp pricking behind my eyes. Slowly, my heart rate returns to normal. I give Sophia a quick smile. Release her arm and tweak her hat straight. “You scared me, Soph.”
She looks at me, dark eyes holding mine for so long, it’s as if she knows all my secrets. “Daddies don’t get scared.”
“Everyone gets scared sometimes,” I say lightly. She lets me hold her hand the rest of the way home, and I wonder if she knows how much it means to me. I catch Becca looking at me, her eyebrows alone somehow managing to convey that she thinks I overreacted. She doesn’t say so, of course. Not like Mina would. You’re such a doom merchant, she says. Always convinced the worst is going to happen.
Guilty as charged. But that’s because it so often does.
“Mummy’s on a plane,” Sophia says as I help her out of her wellies. I bang them together and leave them on the doormat, along with the boots I wear for work. Our house—2 Farm Cottages—is the middle one of three terraced houses that once belonged to the farm a mile farther out.
“That’s right.”
All three cottages have gardens that back on to a park where there are huge oak trees and a path that forms a figure of eight. In one half of the eight is a children’s playground and in the other a small lake, complete with a tiny island with a duck house. There’s a wildflower meadow that’s a riot of foxgloves and cornflowers in the summer, with a path Sophia loves to run through.
“She’s going to be on a plane for twenty hours, then she’s coming home again, and that’ll take twenty hours too, but she’ll stay in a hotel in between.”
“That’s right.”
“Clever girl,” Becca says, looking at her phone.
“It’s a Boeing triple seven, and it’s got three hundred and fifty-three people on it.”
“Yes.” Mummy, Mummy, always Mummy…
“Where is she?”
I count to five and summon my patience. “You just told me where she is. She’s on a plane.”
“Yes, but where ’zackly?”
Are there other men who feel the way I do? Other men whose children only ever want to be with their mums? Are there other dads who constantly feel like the consolation prize, no matter how hard they try? I guess I’ll never know, because finding out would mean telling someone how shit it feels when your daughter only ever wants someone else.
I get out my phone and bring up the tracking app beloved by plane spotters and far-flung family. “Mummy is…” I wait for the app to load Mina’s plane. “Here.”
“Bell-are-us.”
“Roos. Like in goose. Belarus.”
Sophia repeats it, studying the word on the screen, and I know she’ll remember for next time. She never forgets anything.
“Nostrovia,” Becca says.
“You what?”
She wanders into the kitchen, leaving her wellies in a puddle on the tiles. “It’s Russian for cheers.”
I move her boots to the mat and look at the blinking dot on my phone that represents Mina at thirty-five thousand feet. Soon, the blinking dot will move across Russia’s airspace, and then Kazakhstan’s, and then China’s. Finally, it’ll cross the Philippines, then Indonesia, and then, before Sophia and I wake up, she’ll have crossed Australia and landed in Sydney.
“Twenty hours,” I’d said when Mina told me she was going. “That’s a hell of a shift.”
“I don’t run the airline, Adam.”
I left a beat of silence before I spoke again, refusing to rise to the argument she was trying to start. “Still, it’ll be nice to have a few days in Sydney at this time of year.”
“It’s not a holiday!”
I’d given up. We were standing outside school—a handover of Elephant, who’d been inadvertently left behind that morning. Sophia had thrown her arms around Mina, then nodded at me as if we’d met once at a networking conference: And what is it you do again? I’d been granted a few hours with my daughter, with strict instruction to return her by six.
Mina had kept picking. “Stop trying to make me feel guilty, Adam. This is my job.”
“I know, I—”
“It’s not like I have a choice.” She’d flushed with anger, making a show of buttoning Sophia’s coat. I could see her taking deep, controlled breaths, and when she straightened, you’d never have known anything was wrong.
“I’ll miss you,” I said softly. I wondered if I’d overstepped the mark, but her eyes glistened. She turned away, perhaps hoping I hadn’t seen.
“It’s just like any other flight.”
Twenty hours, though.
The fevered expectation around this flight has gone on for two years. Perhaps I’ve noticed it more simply because Mina works for them, but World Airlines has been there at every turn. TV adverts, showing the smooth action of the flat beds in business class and the stretched-out legs of passengers in economy. Interviews with the pilots who worked the test flights, and nostalgic comparisons with the fifty-five-hour “Kangaroo route” they ran in the 1940s, which stopped in six countries en route.
“In 1903,” Yusuf Dindar had said a couple of days ago, on the BBC Breakfast sofa, “the Wright brothers defied gravity with the first sustained flight of an engine-powered aircraft. More than a hundred years later, we have the capability to keep one hundred and fifty tons of metal in the air for twenty continuous hours.” He leaned back, a confident arm across the back of the sofa, and smiled. “The Earth’s forces are strong, but we’ve proved we are stronger. We’ve beaten nature.”
A chill runs across the back of my neck now as I remember his look of supreme confidence. I don’t doubt he has the best team, the best planes. But nature can swallow a town, fell skyscrapers, slide entire coastlines into the ocean…
I snap myself out of the worst-case-scenario loop playing in my head. Mina’s right: I’m a doom merchant. They’ve tested this flight three times. They’ve got the whole world watching. Their reputation, not to mention the safety of hundreds of lives, is at stake.
Nothing will go wrong.