Lost (33 page)

The weight of the trunk is keeping it closed until we hit a pothole, when it tries to jump open. I raise my head and try to peer through the narrow gap. The only thing visible is the light gray tarmac and occasional flashes of headlights.

Through the earpiece I can monitor Aleksei and the Russian. The BMW has been discounted. Now they're heading toward Kilburn, relying solely on the signal from the diamonds.

Rol ing onto my back, I keep one hand on the lid of the trunk and feel along the inside wal s until I locate the internal light. The bulb feels smooth in my fingertips and I twist it free from the socket.

Several times the car stops and does a U-turn. Either Rachel is lost or they're stil making her jump through hoops. She's driving faster now. The streets are emptier.

The car crosses a speed hump and suddenly stops. Is this it? I slide my gun from its holster and cradle it on my chest.

“Hey, Lady, you want to slow down. I almost took you for a joyrider.” It is a man's voice. He might be a security guard with too much time on his hands. “Are you lost?”

“No. I'm looking for a . . . for a friend's house.”

“I wouldn't recommend you hang around here, Lady. Best you head back the way you came.”

“You don't understand. I have to keep going.”

I can almost hear him chewing this over as if he wants to phone a friend before making a decision. “Maybe I didn't make myself clear,” he drawls.

“But I have to—”

“Keep your hands where I can see them,” he says. He's walking around the car, kicking at the tires.

“Please, let me go.”

“And what's the big hurry? You in some sort of trouble?”

A wind has come up. Corrugated iron flaps on the ground and I can hear a dog barking. When the man reaches the rear of the car he notices the trunk is popped off its latch.

His fingers hook under the lid.

As it opens, I slide my gun through the opening and press it into his groin. His jaw drops open and helps him take a deep breath.

“You are jeopardizing a police undercover operation,” I hiss. “Back away from the car and let the lady go.” He blinks several times and nods, before slowly lowering the trunk. As the car pul s away I see his hand raised as if holding a salute.

Moving quickly again, we appear to be circling an industrial estate. Rachel is looking for something. She pul s off the road onto rough ground and stops, kil ing the engine.

In the sudden silence I can hear her voice but only one side of the conversation. “I can't see any traffic cone,” she says. “No, I can't see it.” She's growing desperate. “It's just a vacant lot . . . Wait! I see it now.”

The door opens. I feel the car gently rock. I don't want her leaving. She has to stay close to me. There is no time to weigh my options. Hopeful y, Aleksei and the Russian wil have caught up with us and are holding their position.

Easing open the trunk, I rol over the lip and land heavily on the ground, using the momentum to spin away from the light. Then I lie dead stil with my face pressed against loose gravel and mud.

Lifting my head I spy Rachel in the beam of the headlights. Ahead of her is a discarded industrial freezer standing upright in the middle of an empty lot. The stainless steel door is pitted and dented by stones, but stil reflects the light. Sitting on top of it is an orange traffic cone.

Rachel walks toward it, stumbling over the broken bricks and rubble. Her jeans snag on a coil of barbed wire, half buried in the ground. She twists her leg free.

She's there now, standing in front of the freezer. It's almost as tal as she is. Reaching forward, she grips the handle and pul s open the door. A child's body tumbles forward.

Smal . Almost liquid. Rachel's arms instinctively reach out and her mouth opens in a silent scream.

I'm on my feet and running toward her. It's the longest forty yards—a horizontal Everest—crossed with my arms pumping and my stomach in my boots. Rachel is on her knees cradling the body. I grab her around her waist and lift her. She's adrenaline light. There's nothing of her. A cloth head lol s backward from her arms, with crosses for eyes and tufts of wool for hair. It's a child-size rag dol with a beige torso and beige limbs and a knobbly bald face, al swol en and worn.

“Listen to me, Rachel. It's not Mickey. It's just a dol . Look! See!”

She has a strange, almost serene look on her face. Only her eyelids are moving of their own accord. Slowly, I pry her fingers loose from the dol and lean her head against my chest.

A note is tied around the dol 's neck, threaded with the same blue wool as the hair. Each letter is smeared dark red. I pray to God that it's paint.

Four words—written in capitals: THIS COULD BE HER!

Wrapping my jacket around Rachel, I lead her slowly back to the car and sit her inside. She hasn't uttered a sound. Nor does she respond to my voice. Instead she stares straight ahead at a point in the distance or in the future, a hundred yards or a hundred years from here and now.

I pick up the cel phone on the front seat. Silence. Inside my head I scream in frustration.

They'll call back
, I tel myself.
Sit tight. Wait
.

Sliding onto the seat beside Rachel, I take her pulse and tug my jacket tighter around her shoulders. She needs a doctor. I should cal this off now.

“What happened?” she asks, regaining some hold on reality.

“They hung up.”

“But they'l cal back?”

I don't know how to answer her. “I'm cal ing an ambulance.”

“No!”

It's amazing! Although deep in shock there is stil one pure, undamaged, functioning brain cel working inside her. It's like the queen bee of brain cel s, being guarded by the hive

. . . and it's buzzing now.

“If they have Mickey they'l cal back,” she says. The statement is so forceful and clear that I can't help doing as she says.

“OK. We wait.”

She nods and wipes her nose with my sleeve. The headlights stil pour white light in a path across the weeds and debris. I can just make out a line of trees, bruised purple against the ambient light.

We messed up. What else could we have done? I glance across at Rachel. Her lips are blue and trembling. With her arms hanging loosely by her sides, it seems only her skeleton is keeping her upright.

The silence amplifies the distant traffic noise . . . and then the phone!

Rachel doesn't flinch. Her mind has gone somewhere safer. I glance at the square glowing screen and take the cal .

“Mrs. Carlyle?”

“She's not available.”

I could finish a book in the pause.

“Where is she?” The voice is stil distorted.

“Mrs. Carlyle is in no condition to talk. You'l have to talk to me.”

“You're a policeman.”

“It doesn't matter who I am. We can end this now. A straight exchange—the diamonds for the girl.”

There is another long pause.

“I have the ransom. It's right here. Either you deal with me or you walk away.”

“The girl dies.”

“Fine! I think she's dead already. Prove me wrong.”

The screen goes blank. He's hung up.

27

The door in my mind is suddenly sucked closed. A feeling of desperation replaces it, along with the sound of the wind. Joe is kneeling over me. We gaze at each other.

“I remember.”

“Just lie stil .”

“But I remember.”

“There's an ambulance coming. Stay calm. I think you just fainted.”

Around us the police divers are dragging air tanks from the Zodiacs and dropping them on the dock. The sound reverberates through my spine. Navigation lights have appeared on the water and the towers of Canary Wharf look like vertical cities.

Joe was right al along. If I kept gathering details and fol owing the trail, something would eventual y trigger my memories and the trickle would become a torrent.

I take a sip of water from a plastic bottle and try to sit up. He lets me lean on his shoulder. Somewhere overhead I see a passenger jet on its final approach to Heathrow.

An ambulance officer kneels next to me.

“Any chest pains?”

“No.”

“Shortness of breath?”

“No.”

The guy has a real y thick mustache and pizza breath. I recognize him from somewhere. His fingers are undoing the buttons of my shirt.

“I'm just going to check your heart rate,” he says.

My hands shoot out and grip him by the wrist. His eyes widen and he gets a strange look on his face. Slowly, he shifts his gaze to my leg and then to the river.

“I remember you,” I tel him.

“That's impossible. You were unconscious.”

I'm stil holding his wrist, squeezing it hard. “You saved my life.”

“I didn't think you'd make it.”

“Put paddles on my chest and I'l rip your heart out.”

He nods and laughs nervously.

I take a belt of oxygen from a mask, while he takes my blood pressure. The clatter and crash of remembering has ceased for a moment like a held breath. I don't know if I should exhale.

In the spotlights I can see the Thames sliding across the rocks like a black tide. “New Boy” Dave has sealed off the dock with crime-scene tape. The divers are coming back in the morning to continue searching. How many more secrets lie in the silt?

“Let's go home,” says Joe.

I don't answer him but I can feel my head shaking from side to side. I'm so close to remembering it al . I have to keep going. It can't wait for another day or be slept on overnight.

Joe cal s Julianne and tel s her he'l be home late. Her secondhand voice sounds tinny through the cel phone. It's a voice from the kitchen. She has children to feed. We have a child to find.

On the drive away from the river, I tel Joe about what I've remembered—describing the phone cal s, the rag dol and the cold finality of the last phone cal . Everything had a meaning, a function; a place in the pattern, the diamonds, the tracking devices, the pizza box . . .

We park on the same plot of waste ground, opposite the abandoned industrial freezer. Headlights reflect from the pitted silver door. The rag dol has gone but the witch's hat traffic cone lies among the weeds.

I get out of the car and move gingerly toward the freezer. Joe does his royal consort trick of walking four paces behind me. He's wearing a crumpled-looking linen jacket as if he's going on safari.

“Where was Rachel?”

“She stayed with the car. She couldn't go on.”

“What happened next?”

I rack my brains, trying to trigger the memories again.

“He must have cal ed back. The man who hung up the phone—he cal ed again.”

“What did he say?”

“I don't know. I can't remember. Wait!”

I look down at my clothes. “He wanted me to take my shoes off, but I didn't do it. I figured he couldn't be watching me—not al this time. He told me to walk straight ahead, past the freezer.”

I'm moving as I talk. Ahead of us is a wire fence and beyond that the Bakerloo line. “I heard a young girl crying on the phone.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes, in the background.”

The glow of the headlights is fainter now as we move farther from Joe's car. My eyes grow accustomed to the dark but my mind plays tricks. I keep seeing figures in the shadows, crouching in hol ows and hiding behind trees.

The purple sky has no stars. That's one of the things I miss about living in the country—the stars and the silence and the frost on winter mornings like a freshly laundered sheet.

“There is a chain-link fence up ahead. I turned left and fol owed it until I reached the footbridge. He was giving me instructions on the phone.”

“You didn't recognize his voice?”

“No.”

The fence appears, dividing the darkness into black diamonds with silver frames. We turn and fol ow it to an arched footbridge above the railway line. A generator rumbles and repair crews are working beneath spotlights.

In the middle of the footbridge, I peer over the side at the silver ribbons curving to the north. “I can't remember what happened next.”

“Did you drop the ransom off the bridge?”

“No. This is where the phone rang again. I was traveling too slowly. They were tracking me. The cel phone must have had a GPS device. Someone was sitting in front of a computer screen plotting my exact position.”

We both peer down at the tracks as though looking for the answer. The breeze carries the smel of burning coal and detergent. I can't hear the voice in my head anymore.

“Give it time,” says Joe.

“No. I can't give it any more. I
have
to remember.”

He takes out his cel phone and punches a number. My pocket vibrates. I flip it open and he turns away from me.

“Why have you stopped? KEEP MOVING! I told you where to go.”

The knowledge rises up and breaks soundlessly through the surface. Joe has done it again—helped me to go back.

“Wil Mickey be there?” I yel into the phone.

“Shut up and keep moving!”

Where? It's close by. The parking lot on the far side of the station! Move!

Running now, I quickly descend the stairs. Joe has trouble keeping up. I can barely see where I'm going but I remember the path. It curves alongside the railway line, above the cutting. Rigid steel gantries flank the tracks carrying the overhead wires.