The Missing Hours (21 page)

‘Anything?’ The DI sounds tired. Or drunk. I’m hoping it’s the former.

‘Not yet, sir. The search team are still working.’

He sighs noisily. ‘Fine. Update me when you have more.’ He hangs up without a goodbye, and I mutter under my breath, something about grumpy men.

One of the search team waves at us. A woman. I don’t know her name. I detach myself from my position by the wall, move towards her.

‘I don’t know if this is relevant,’ she says, ‘but we found a bunch of paperwork in the bedside cabinet.’

She hands it to me, a sheaf of papers, and turns away. Anxious to get back, to get on. Maybe she has kids of her own to be getting home to.

I carry the paperwork back to Finn, the surface slip-sliding in my gloved hands. Spread it out across the kitchen counter. I spare a glance at Isaac, looking for some kind of reaction, some kind of sign. But there’s nothing. Just the Post-it note squares, getting smaller and smaller.

Finn sorts through the printed pages, and I’m watching, half paying attention, half not. Then I see a flash of colour, an eagle that I have seen before, and my heart rate quickens. I lean across him, pull the slick pamphlet free.

A brochure for the Cole Group.

They are all there, their photographs neat against their names. Ed Cole. Seth Britten. Orla Britten. And Selena Cole. I stare at it, for a moment wonder if I am going crazy, if my fixation on the case is producing hallucinations so that I am seeing these people everywhere I turn. Selena looks younger, although perhaps the truth is that she simply looks less sad. The picture must be an old one, taken before her husband died. She is wearing more make-up, her face fuller, less weighted down by life. I pick up the leaflet.

‘What’s that?’ asks Finn.

I pass it over to him.

He studies it, frowning. ‘Okay.’

‘Don’t you think that’s weird? I mean, seriously. Have you ever heard about the kidnap-and-ransom industry before? Why does Dominic have all this stuff about the Cole Group?’

Finn shrugs. ‘I don’t know. I guess because of Beck Chambers?’

‘I guess.’ Only I don’t guess. It feels off to me. It feels like there’s something here.

Finn is watching me.

‘What else have we got?’ I say, keeping my voice light. Nothing to see here.

He looks away, begins flipping again. But I can’t. I can’t stop staring at the eagle. At the Cole Group. There’s something here. I know there is.

But I don’t know there is at all, do I?

I look at Selena’s picture. There are always cases that hook you. There are always cases that speak to you, pulling themselves out of the pile and grabbing hold of your consciousness. If there are children a similar age to your own, if the circumstances are the same as your own.

Maybe it’s the children. Two little girls. Maybe that’s why I cannot let go of Selena Cole and her disappearance. Why I need to know what took place in those missing hours, even though it feels now that I am the only one who gives a stuff.

Or maybe it’s the other thing.

Selena Cole herself.

Because the thing is, I have a sneaking suspicion that I have a thing about putting people on pedestals, turning the ordinary into heroes.

I watch as Finn reads a printed page, his forehead creased into myriad lines. I am trying to fill in the gaps, supplement my own failings with the success of others. And then, when the successful fail … I look at Selena Cole, wonder why it is that I need this. Why I feel the need to look to others as I wish I could be. Why I simply cannot be enough on my own.

‘There’s more stuff here,’ says Finn. ‘Drug rehab stuff. Dealing with users, that kind of thing.’

I glance over my shoulder at Isaac. He’s stopped with the Post-it now. Is simply staring at the raindrops as they wind their way down the window. ‘Is there any way Isaac could have a drug problem?’ I ask, my voice low.

Finn shrugs. ‘I guess. There’s been no sign of it, though. Fae and Bronwyn both said that Dominic did a lot of work with people on drugs. That he was big into helping them get clean. I think he was trying to get Chambers into treatment.’

‘I wonder how that was for Isaac? Dominic’s attention so clearly caught up elsewhere. And with the affair …’

Finn looks at me, grins. ‘Mysteries of marriage, eh?’

I’ve never forgiven Alex.

I look back at the Cole Group leaflet, my breath catching in my throat at the thought that I have kept at bay for all these years.

I’ve never forgiven Alex for that night.

I turn slightly, look out of the window into the bay. Whitecaps are whipping up now, speckling the grey water. Boats bounce rhythmically, engaged in a beat all their own. He shattered my faith. In him. In myself. Because how could I have been so wrong? How could I have trusted so blindly that he would never hurt me?

And then life moved on, and somehow, without me knowing it, I got whipped into pregnancy and babies and a family and home, and yet still I am held hostage, there on that cold kitchen floor, holding a bottle of Rioja, wanting to die.

Life moved on, leaving me behind.

‘Bunch of stuff here on kidnappings. Newspaper article on Beck Chambers’ kidnapping in Mexico. Looks like Dominic was doing some research.’

I pull in a breath, look away from the dancing sea, back to Finn. I feel dizzy, as unsteady as the boats. Listening to him, yet not listening.

Because I need to get unstuck. I want to get unstuck. And right now, I just don’t know what that means.

‘Maybe,’ says Finn, ‘it would be a good idea to pay a visit to your Selena Cole. Dominic had an interest here, clearly. Maybe they’ll be able to help.’

My stomach leaps. ‘Yes,’ I agree. ‘I think that might be helpful.’

‘Okay, ladies and gents.’ Willa moves towards us, striding like she will take over the world. Spares a second to give my brother a conspiratorial grin. She glances at Isaac, then gestures out into the hall. ‘You wanna come outside.’

She isn’t talking to me. But I go anyway.

‘Right then, I’m afraid to tell you, the place is clean. No blood. No evidence of a struggle. There’s a knife block in the kitchen; the shape of the knives in that would roughly correspond with the wound, but to be honest, they’re so generic as to mean pretty much nothing.’

‘Any knives—’ begins Finn.

‘Nope. No knives missing.’ Willa shrugs. ‘Sorry, guys. Wherever Dominic was killed, it wasn’t here.’

I drum my fingers against my arm. Think of something that I heard a lifetime ago. Or was it only a matter of days? I just don’t know any more.

‘Excuse me,’ I mutter.

I let myself back into the apartment, walk straight towards Isaac. He has made a mountain of torn-up luminous Post-it pieces, is repeatedly sticking his thumb into it to form a valley, then scooping the pieces together again with his palms. The mountain reborn.

I sit down beside him. ‘Isaac. I need you to tell me something.’

He looks at me with murky eyes, reminds me of someone on the wrong end of a bottle of Scotch.

‘Why didn’t you tell anyone? When Dominic didn’t come home that night, why didn’t you call the police? Or Bronwyn? Or … well, anyone?’

He looks down again, pushing his palm flat on to the mound of paper. Shrugs. ‘You get where we were, right? The man I loved. He was cheating on me. He didn’t come home. I assumed he was with someone else.’

I nod slowly, think that the logic is unassailably familiar. And yet …

‘Isaac,’ I say. ‘Is there something you’re not telling us?’

He picks up a single piece of paper, turns it around between his fingers. ‘I’ve told you everything I know.’

A Start in Kidnap and Ransom (continued)

Dr Selena Cole

It changed us, the rescue of my nephew Gabriel. Ed, of course, had seen so many things, had been in danger so many times. But my life was smaller, of the more sheltered variety. That the world was such that kidnap and ransom was a necessary role for someone, anyone, was vaguely shocking to me. And yet …

‘You know,’ said Ed, ‘we could do this.’

We were lying in bed at the time; a relationship that had begun in need had turned into something different. We had returned from Poland, had not left one another’s side since. Ed liked to joke that he had lost a leg, replaced it with me.

‘Where would we even begin?’ I asked.

Ed was a fighter, had spent his entire life pushing himself, taking himself places it seemed impossible for him to go. His leg, learning to live with a body that looked so different to the way it had before, that was simply another challenge to him. You would have thought it would be challenge enough.

‘I know some guys in K and R. They go out to kidnap sites, liaise with the companies, the families, the insurance. Make sure everything runs as it should, that the hostages get to go home. They do what you did with Gabriel. We could do this.’

Life for me was smaller then, more predictable. I had a good job, specialising in post trauma and rehabilitation for returning forces personnel. It would have been no great hardship to simply keep treading along the path I was on. Looking back now, I wonder why I agreed to it, to throwing in my lot with this seemingly insane venture, to go blundering into a world I knew little about. Then I remember that look in Ed’s eye, that hunger, the need to push himself, the need to believe that he could be more than he was then. Just another wounded veteran. It was never a decision, never a choice. It was simply what must come next.

It shouldn’t have been that easy, our start in kidnap and ransom. The community is a closed one, with high, impenetrable walls. And yet strangely, not for us. We both knew people. It is the nature of the beast, when one of you has been a warrior, the other has helped heal them. These men and women, they come home from war and yet still their blood bubbles, fizzing with the need to chase death, to walk beside danger. K&R is a fairly obvious place for them to head.

As it turned out, it was Ed who opened the first door for us. A retired major, Mike Lloyd, a softly spoken man, his voice belying the power hidden beneath. He had been in K&R for ten years, was approaching his seventies, had a wife who missed him, grandchildren who were sprouting up without him. It’s time, he said. I need to be able to sit for a while without the fear of being shot. He looked us up and down, me more than Ed, because I was a young woman, an alien species, high risk in an already high-risk world. Made some private calculations, ones we were never privy to. Then, come with me. I have a job on, leaving tomorrow. Messy thing. Negotiation has been going tits-up for months. I’m going to go down, have a look at it, see if I can do anything to unpick the muddle they’ve made of it. He studied me, the way one would a particularly fascinating breed of butterfly. You might be able to offer something the rest of us can’t.

We left early the next morning. Down, it transpired, was Mali. They had been taken from Bamako. Fourteen men, miners who had come to Mali to make a decent living from a dying industry. Or maybe they came for the adventure of it. Who knows. Fourteen men, from six different countries of origin, working for four different mining companies, all with different insurers.

A clusterfuck, said Mike. There is no other word.

It had been going on for eight months when we arrived. Eight long, exhausting months of captivity, of negotiations that built and built then collapsed. More K&R consultants in one place than you have ever seen, each working to a slightly different rule book, each with different priorities. Governments and insurers and families, all battling one another to ensure that their hostage was the one who walked away. It was breathtaking. In its complexity, in its otherworldliness.

For Ed, this was, instantly, the door to our future. He began reaching out, talking, learning everything he could, so that when it was our turn, when it was about us, we would have the tools we needed.

For me, though, it was something different. Base of operations had been established in the conference room of a local Radisson. After eight months, even the hotel had begun to tire of it. And walking into that room, you could smell it, the despair, the defeat, the knowledge that nothing was going right. It was almost like everyone knew that the hostages would live or die at the will of the kidnappers, our role reduced to mere spectators.

I confess that it made me angry.

I watched for two weeks. I held my tongue for two weeks.

Four different consultants, each asking for different things, each crippling the ability of the others to protect their hostages.

I watched for two weeks. Then I snapped.

I had come from nowhere, I was no one. I knew nothing. And yet fury propelled me. I spent days going back through the recordings, listened to every conversation with the kidnappers, until in the end it seemed that I knew them, that I could get some handle on their wants, on their weak points.

Nearly a month after we arrived, I marched into the control room, handed out printed sheets. This is our new strategy. This is what we are doing. What we are ALL doing. This is how we’re going to get them home.

I remember Ed grinning. Mike nodding quietly to himself.

The hostages were released thirteen days later.

Everyone wants something. And often, what people say they want isn’t what they want at all. You have to study people, allow them to teach you who they are. So that you can find those points at which they are soft, where the need truly lies. Because when you do that, then you get to understand why they do what they do.