The Burning Air (22 page)

43

I
HOPED THAT SOPHIE had not run my battery out, leaving those lights on. Will had the phone in his grip but couldn’t dial the most famous number in the country. His hands slid all over the place as we made our way up the drive. I was about to take the wheel when he dropped the phone, then broke into noisy sobs. “My baby girl, they’ve taken her, she’s got her, why would anyone take her?” He retrieved the phone from the footwell and began to stab at it again.

“Hold it together, Will, can you?” I said. A brilliant new idea came to me. “Look, you keep driving, I’ll make the call. Slow down, will you? No rush if I’m talking.”

I wrestled the handset from Will. It was the same kind as mine, the same one we all had, a touchscreen with a virtual keypad that was slippery with his tears and the sweat from his palm. I pressed 9 three times, making sure he saw me do it, but hung up before the connection was made. “Police, please,” I said. I flipped on the heater to mask the silence on the other end of the phone. “Yes, I’d like to report an abduction, please. Someone’s taken my, uh, my niece, Edie Woods. She’s nine months old.” I paused for a few seconds. “Far Barn, Otter Valley.” I gave the postcode then went quiet for bit. “Yes, I know, but . . . nine o’clock. A white sort of romper thing. She was with a babysitter, a girl called Kerry . . .” I caught myself just in time. “I don’t know her last name. No, they haven’t got a car.” I pulled away from Will, pretending to put my other finger in my ear so that I could concentrate on the call I was taking. Something hove into view before us: it was my car, the headlights still on, and my time was up. I made a show of ending the call with a note of urgency and preemptive thanks just as Will pulled to a halt in front of my car and braked, killing the engine.

“They’re going to go straight to the house,” I said, I calculated: how long would I need? “They said it could be twenty-five minutes, on a night like tonight.” Will was shaking in the driver’s seat. “Will,” I said. “Come on. Rowan and Sophie can give them all the information they need, I reckon. I think we should keep going. Let’s get my car out, we can both cover enough ground.” I handed him back the phone. In his position I would have checked the screen. He put it back in his breast pocket without even glancing at it.

We pushed the car together. Mud and dust flecked Will’s face. I wondered if mine was the same.

“Thanks so much, Matt,” said Will. “Right, no time to waste. If you turn right out of the lane, that’s further into the valley. It’s a dead end, so you can’t get lost. You can cover it and come back in maybe twenty minutes.” The act of righting the car had focused Will. Now, with every word, he distanced himself from the wreck he had been seconds earlier. “I’ll turn left, retrace the route we took back from Ottery.”

I thought fast. The deeper into the valley Will went, the less likely he was to have a phone signal.

“Maybe I should take the Ottery road,” I suggested. “I’ve never done that drive down into the valley. At least if I’m retracing my steps, I’ll have my bearings. Let’s face it, it doesn’t matter if I disappear for hours. But Sophie will want you back at the house, the police will probably want to talk to you.”

Will drummed his fingers on the roof of my car before making his decision.

“You’re right. Good call, mate,” he said. He got behind his own wheel and I followed in the slipstream of his taillights, devil’s eyes in the dark.

Will took the right turn, I made a pretense of taking the left, and, when his lights had dimmed to nothing in my rearview mirror, I did a U-turn, driving back down the lane that led to Far Barn. It was all downhill and even without power or lights I could nudge the car down by taking my foot off the brake. When the lights of the barn came into view, I turned off-road to scoop a curve in the direction of the cottage. I had to turn my sidelights on for this and hoped that no one was out looking yet, that no one would see me. The outline of the cottage was just visible. I engaged the parking brake and took a few seconds to catch up with myself.

All was not yet lost. If they were all still in the barn, if no one had yet gotten to the cottage, if Will did not check his telephone or call the police to chase them up, if he did not return, I could still do this. I closed the car door behind me with the softest of clicks, took my torch and marched toward the cottage with my boyhood self and my mother, an army of three.

ROWAN

44

SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 3, 2013

R
OWAN HAD NEVER known anything like this, not since the pea-soupers of his early childhood. Toby tried to trace a picture on the car window, not understanding that it wasn’t condensation that made the window opaque but the mist outside. Will was tense, hunched behind the wheel in silent concentration. Matt rode in the front passenger seat, evidently in a sulk because Tara had let Sophie take his car. Jake was plugged into his machine in the backseat; a quick tinny rhythm was just audible above the car’s purr. At Rowan’s left side, Leo was slackening into sleep. First had come the uncharacteristic stillness, and then an arm had pressed itself against his and now a hot little head was periodically thudding against his shoulder, mouth relaxing to display teeth still not quite to scale. Rowan raised an arm and put it around Leo’s shoulder. The boy was too old for cuddles, really, but he might not get the chance again. One couldn’t say, anymore, how lovely children were to hold and to be near.

He stared at the blind window and silently congratulated himself on surviving the festival. He had endured the sympathies and condolences and every time someone had paid tribute to Lydia he had nodded and thanked them and swallowed the scream that had been crouching in his throat since Friday. Scenes from that afternoon kept coming back to him; the courage it had taken him to break open the first diary, the heartbreak of revisited memory, and then, in the last book, those four confessional pages written so late into her life. The blue inked loops of her admission had given lie to the values she had preached, the values she—
they
—had instilled in their children. His instinctive reaction had been to tear those pages from the book. He had screwed them up, and then he had hit the bottle in a way he hadn’t done since his undergraduate days. Hours later, his blood still rich with port, the same compulsion that drove him to burn book after book also drove him to retain the incriminating pages, to unscrew and smooth them, to reread and reread until he had committed it all to memory and then thrown them onto the fire. Hadn’t he? The memory of the terrible words curling up and dying on his little pyre had a slightly unreal air about it, like a scene from a late-night film, watched through a doze from an armchair.

Will turned the car into their lane with great care and the headlights cut a tentative swath through the fog. Fifty yards or so later—so hard to gauge distance, with visibility so poor—the brakes were engaged, hard, and from that moment it was shouting and chaos and movement, examining the abandoned car, frantic searching and desperate speculation that continued even once it had been established that they were not there. They might have stayed like that all night had Rowan not commanded them all back into the car. Will took the rest of the drive at speed, the children unrestrained in the backseat. Sophie stood in the doorway with a look on her face that told him something more than a pranged car was the matter. Will was talking to Sophie but her eyes were fixed on Tara’s. She asked her to get the boys to bed, and Tara seemed to extract a world of meaning from that one simple instruction. Rowan was both frightened and impressed by her brisk authority as she plucked Charlie from the sofa, gathered the other children together, and marched them straight up to the bunker. Then Sophie told them, in a whisper that spilled into sobbing the second the bunker door was closed, that Edie and Kerry were missing.

•   •   •

The low points in Rowan’s life all seemed to have been nothing but a rehearsal for the way he felt now. Lydia’s collapse and the cruel, swift loss of her, his parents’ deaths, Felix’s attack; he had thought each one unbearable but now knew he could take them all on the chin, simultaneously, if it would cancel the horrific present. Better to lose his wife a million times, better to watch Felix cry a river of blood, better to stare at his parents’ open graves forever than to see Sophie’s arms hanging helpless and empty like this.

“Daddy?”
she said.

“I’m calling the police,” he said, but when he lifted the receiver there was no dialing tone. He tapped the earpiece, tried again, repeated the movements with increasing panic and a rising sense of impotence. “It isn’t working.”

“I
told you
that!”

Matt, who had gone straight into search mode, reassured them that there were no signs of foul play upstairs and immediately departed to check the rest of the house. The way Matt’s nervous energy manifested itself in physical release only seemed to Rowan to highlight his own paralysis. As if from a distance he heard Will ask how long they’d been gone, and Sophie unable to give them a time. Will called Matt back from the kitchen. “I’ll go and call for help and then I’ll go out in the car and look for them,” he said. “If I give you a lift to the top of the lane, do you think we can get your car out of the ditch and you can take it around and do a separate scout?”

“Of course. Anything, whatever.”

•   •   •

Seconds took hours to pass. In the sitting room, Felix was now enduring Sophie’s hurled accusations like a man in stocks. Eventually she drew breath and he had a chance to speak.

“Isn’t it just as possible, isn’t it actually
more likely
, that someone came and took both of them?”

Rowan looked around the barn.

“Felix, if that’s the case, where are the signs of struggle? You heard Matt, there’s nothing upstairs. You can pick up a little baby and carry her without her permission”—he looked at Sophie—“I’m
sorry
, darling—but you can’t do the same to a grown woman. It really doesn’t look as if anyone else has been here.”

“It doesn’t make any sense,” said Felix. “I’m as confused as you are, I just . . . I
know
Kerry.”

Sophie’s voice grew shriller. Rowan dropped to his knees and gave the phone one more try, shaking the receiver and running his finger along the length of the cord to check for snags in the wire. He found nothing. The old machine had never let them down before. The icy thought sluiced him that this disconnection might be his fault, that he might have failed to write a vital check to the telephone company. He did not remember a red bill, but Lydia had always been the domestic administrator and so much had slipped through his fingers since she had gone. If the delay in calling the police proved crucial, if he were even partly to blame he would never forgive himself, if he bore any responsibility for whatever had happened. . . .

Felix’s voice roused him to action, telling him that he would take the orchard if Rowan did the trenches and beyond.

“Right behind you,” said Rowan. He got to his feet, knees crunching like gravel as he rose. Sophie’s footsteps sounded overhead as she combed empty bedrooms for her lost child.

45

A
S ROWAN SCRAMBLED in the kitchen drawer to match old batteries to older torches, his mind drifted strangely. How useful it would be, he thought, if we had a dog. Dogs could track people through thin air. One saw it all the time, on television. When the children were little they had pestered him constantly for a pet, but the house on Cathedral Terrace had been all wrong, the garden too small, and he knew that he would have been the one to walk the bloody thing every day. If only he had given in. Perhaps having a dog would have become a habit, and they would still have one now. A golden retriever, faithful, friendly, each of their scents implanted in its memory.

But there was no dog, and he could only imagine one for so long before the real narrative toppled his daydream. Felix couldn’t be right that someone had made off with both of them; the conclusion was inescapable that the girl had taken Edie. But why? The path of his thoughts forked in two. In one direction lay the theory that it was in Kerry’s interests to keep Edie safe, to nurture her. He found himself praying that kidnap, in the old-fashioned sense, had been the motive, that soon the demand for money would come and they would pay with everything they had and more. Or perhaps she had taken Edie for her own, to steal, to
raise
. He had read grotesque tales of young women using the birth certificates of dead children and imposing their identities onto abducted babies. How long does it take a child Edie’s age to forget her mother? Six weeks? A year? These thoughts were heartbreaking but preferable to those that paved the other path, a dark trail down which pain was being inflicted, some kind of abuse was occurring. He slammed closed the door on the sickening scenarios in his mind’s eye.

He finally married the right torch to the right battery and cast his eyes to the ceiling. Tara and Jake had certainly been up there long enough to get all three younger boys off to sleep and keep them in the bunker. The baby monitor had been set to Mute, but the flashing green bars showed that the bunker was far from silent. Rowan willed the frantic dancing lights that indicated the tumble of boyish chatter to subside into the slow flickering rise and fall of a mother’s soothing tone. When Tara had settled the children he would have to break the news to her. He steeled himself; Tara loved Edie like a mother, and Jake was more devoted to her than her own brothers were. How could he tell them she was missing? How could he do it? The loose floorboard at the top of the stairs sighed. Rowan was disgusted by the selfish little contraction of relief he felt when it was Sophie.

His daughter’s skin was gray and her eyes were punched far back in her skull. He had never seen her look like this and yet she looked familiar. He winced to realize that she wore her mother’s death mask, that the same changes had occurred in Lydia’s face in her last days. Rowan tried to close an internal door on this image too, but his head was teeming with unwanted thoughts and sickening imaginings and all such doors were straining at their hinges. The best he could do was to drop his eyes from Sophie’s face.

She was holding a piece of paper in her hand. For the briefest fraction of a second he thought it was pages from Lydia’s diary. His heartbeat, already racing, escalated a little more, and did not return to its previous rate even when he saw that the paper was not blue but ivory and the markings were not handwriting but green printed borders framing black type.

“Dad?” said Sophie, thrusting it into his hand. “Dad, is it the same . . . it’s got to be . . . I don’t understand.”

He saw the name before he recognized the nature of the document. It came into sharp focus and then the letters that formed it seemed to expand and come off the paper until they were ten feet high. The torch fell from his hand. The batteries slid out and rolled noisily across the kitchen floor. Rowan sank down into the kitchen chair with such force that something splintered.

“A sister?” said Sophie.

Rowan held the driver’s license to his nose as though its meaning would become clearer at close quarters.

“He was an only child.” Rowan was entirely sure that Kellaway had been alone in the world, no relations at all but that pitiful mother and that strange bachelor—cousin? uncle?—who had accompanied him to the interview.

“How long since we’ve seen this name? I haven’t thought of him for what, fifteen, sixteen years? What could this have to do with
her
taking Edie?” How could Rowan tell her that he had seen it days before, written in her mother’s own hand, without telling her everything? Until he knew what it meant, until he could connect the old nightmare with the current one, he must hold his tongue.

“A
cousin
? A wife?” pressed Sophie. “But then . . . why would he send . . . where’s
he
? What do you think? Dad,
say
something.” Rowan shook his head hard as though by dislodging the wrong ideas the right ones would have space to breathe. “I mean, do you think Felix knows who this is? Who Darcy Kellaway is?”

“I don’t know. We were very careful to keep the details about Kellaway away from him. No way would Felix get involved with someone who was connected with him if he knew what it meant. No, I’m sure he’s as confused as we are. And Sophie, I’m sorry, I don’t know what it means, I can’t begin to know. The police will help us, I’m sure.”

The clock struck midnight.

“Where are they, then?” said Sophie, her voice rising to a screech over the chimes. “Where are the helicopters, the lights, the dogs? Where are the blue lights and the search parties?”

“They’ll be on their way now,” said Rowan. He spoke with conviction but wondered whether that could possibly be true yet. It seemed an eternity but in fact it had been only ten minutes since Will and Matt had driven off together. His mental abacus began to click. It could take up to five minutes to get a reliable telephone signal, another five to have the conversation . . . God knew where the nearest police helicopter was based. Exeter? How long to man it and launch it? The only police station he could think of was on the other side of Ottery—a little cottage station really, glorified security guards, and anyway run off their feet on this, the busiest night of their year. Perhaps they could be summoned immediately but traffic around the town would be gridlocked as people drove home from the festival. On these single-track lanes and in this mist, a squad car couldn’t tear through over the speed limit like they could in a city. So let’s say five to make the call and to be on the safe side twenty to arrive. They could be here in ten minutes, they could be here in fifteen. “They’ll be here by quarter past, I’m sure,” he told Sophie.

Quarter past twelve, the next chime of the clock. Fifteen minutes, nine hundred seconds. A manageable, survivable period of time. During it, he would be able to sustain the belief that the arrival of the police was not an end in itself but simply an end to this, the first stage of the nightmare.

Rowan had compartmentalized time like this since Lydia’s illness. The only way to deal with tragedy was to break it down into tiny units, to put the process into blocks of time: visiting hours, the length of time taken to die, the days between the death and the funeral, the span of the car journey to the crematorium, the chasm of days between her wake and the end of his own life.

Sweat made a second skin of his shirt but he kept his jacket and jersey on, ready for anything.

Sophie began to look under the sofa seat cushions time and again, as if the missing might be hiding there like old coins and finding them was only a question of thoroughness and persistence. Rowan folded the driver’s license in on itself again and again until it was a little wedge. He unfolded it, repeated the action. He counted six halvings, and wondered if it was true, then, that you couldn’t fold any piece of paper more than seven times. He shook his head again, harder this time. Why did his thoughts keep running off like disobedient children?

The baby monitor finally displayed the flatline of silence. The landing sighed again. Now Tara and Jake came down the stairs, so quickly their feet barely made contact. What was
he
doing up? Rowan had presumed he would have been sent to bed with his cousins. But there he was, like his mother still in his coat and boots. Their flushed faces were stricken with terror of the unknown. Rowan almost envied them their ignorance.

“We stayed until they were all settled,” said Tara. “Dad, what the
hell’s
happened? Has there been an accident? Charlie seems fine.”

“Edie’s missing,” said Rowan, flinching in tandem with Sophie. “Along with Kerry. They weren’t here when Sophie got back. Will and Matt have gone to get the police.”

“Oh, no,” said Jake. “Mum!” He looked to his mother but Tara had pulled her sister close and the two women had both begun to speak at once, one murmuring explanations while the other simultaneously offered platitudes. This was what Sophie needed, not her clumsy father with his ineffective attempts at fixing the phone and his inability to explain the Kellaway connection. Tara’s presence made him redundant in the room and freed him up to search.

“Girls, I’m going out to help Felix,” he said.

“I’ll come with you,” said Jake. Rowan panicked: he wanted to be alone, to gather his thoughts in the light of Sophie’s revelation, but more important to talk to Felix alone, whether to extract information or provide it he was not yet sure. He had already forgotten Jake’s presence, his existence. The poor boy had been hopscotching from boy to man to boy all weekend, and Tara now relegated him to the status of a child.

“No, you stay here with us, Jakey. I don’t know what’s happening, I don’t know if you’ll be safe out there.”

“I want to help,” said Jake. “I
need
to help. Grandpa,
tell
her.”

Rowan understood that even at fourteen, Jake was feeling the same masculine urge for action that made his own legs twitch. In the midst of all this hell, he still had room for a surge of pride in his eldest grandson. Shameful, painful to recall that when Jake was born, his alien coloring had given Rowan cause to wonder if he would ever truly be able to think of him as a MacBride.

“The more people looking, the quicker we find them,” said Rowan.

“Jesus, hell, all right,” said Tara. “But stay on our land, OK? Promise me you’ll stay on our land?”

Jake gave one of the smaller torches a whack on the table. It glimmered into life and he followed its slim beam into the garden. Rowan trailed the boy. At the kitchen door he hesitated before turning on his heel. He had to ask.

“Tara, does the name Kellaway mean anything to you?”

Tara’s expression was curious but uncomprehending. She shook her head. He left Sophie to explain it to her sister, heard a mumble from Sophie and then a sharp intake of breath before Tara asked, “What the fuck?”

Rowan wore so many layers that it took a full minute for the outside temperature to register. It was now cold enough to make a baby wake and howl in protest, but where were the cries?

He tried to improvise a strategy. Will and Matt might be out in their cars, but the rest of them had to assume that the missing girls were still close by. Where might they be? Where would
I
hide? Felix had said he would scour the orchard and Jake was already down in the trenches, his torch picking its way through the little maze.

Rowan strode toward the outbuildings. With every step his breathing felt a little easier, although the longed-for clarity of thought seemed as remote as ever. Even Darcy Kellaway’s face in his mind’s eye was an out-of-focus photograph, those teeth the only clear feature, and the threat of his deliberate menace was all the more terrifying for being only partially known. He looked over his shoulder. Already Jake’s torch was in half obscured, the cat’s-eye flash that one would see on a clear night diffused until it was just another light ghost.

Rowan was momentarily unsure where to go. Something had happened to his internal compass; he had lost his true north and the magnet was pulling in the wrong direction. That dog would have made light work of this. If only he had let them have the bloody dog.