at him, and we both know it. You pretending you know what’s going on is no comfort to me!
‘Simone, I …’ Jazzy looked as though he wanted to apologise but was unsure for what. ‘Look, do you want to know what she said or not?’
‘Of course I bloody do.’
‘Right, well… She didn’t get him the car. She seemed a bit pissed off about that actually. Said she said to Mack, “What, you think just because I’m Somali I’ll be able to get a car nicked for you?” She told him a fake ID was one thing but if he wanted a car he could go and nick it himself, her brother wasn’t going to risk prison for some flash wanker he’d never met.’
Simone could not suppress a shocked giggle. ‘She actually called him a flash wanker?’
Jazzy shrugged. ‘I don’t reckon she did to his face, I just reckon she wishes she had.’
‘But she got him the credit card and passport?’
Jazzy nodded. ‘She got him them. Or her brother did. And a driving licence. And that’s the last she saw of him.’
They looked at each other. Simone’s moussaka was cold and congealed, only one mouthful having made it from the plate. ‘Oh, Christ.’ Simone put her face in her hands. ‘But all that – false passport, false credit card. That’s what people do if they want to disappear. Like, properly disappear. For ever.’
Jazzy was biting the corner of his thumbnail. It made him look, despite the receding hair line and the incipient paunch, like a little boy. ‘Yes,’ he said quietly. ‘I know.’
Simone did not go back to work after lunch. For the first time in the six years she had worked there, she phoned in sick and went home.
When she got to her flat, Mack’s letter was on the table in the communal hall. She waited until she was behind her own front door until she read it though. She barely knew her neighbours and did not want one of their few impressions of her to be formed by them seeing her crouched, weeping by the post table. In tone, the letter was similar to the one Jazzy had shown her, full of pleas for her to take him seriously and guarantees that he had not in fact lost his mind, but all the while implicitly suggesting that he had done just that.
The last paragraph, however, was different, and it was that that finally provoked the tears.
Simone, I meant what I said in that text. I do love you, really, more than anyone I’ve ever met, more than I ever thought I could. I’m just so sorry that I was too chicken to say it to your face and that I’ve waited until now. I love you, I love you, I love you, and please believe me that everything I’m doing right now is because I want to make sure that you’ll be safe and stay safe for ever. I want to come back for you, and I will try to, but in the end it might be better if I don’t. And if that happens, please know that it isn’t because I don’t love you. Please, please, please be careful, do not let anything bad happen to you. I love you.
M
Jessica didn’t know what time it was, only that it was dark. It was often dark here. They were a long way north for one thing – further north than she had ever been before – and it was winter, but also there were so many shadows in these forests. She had gone outside yesterday at midday just to get some air, and she had barely been able to see the rutted mud track beneath her feet. The trees, uniform in their silence and solidity, gave nothing away, standing aloof and impenetrable, the low clouds getting trapped in their highest branches. They let in no light and would let out no sound. If she screamed and cried, begging for help or rescue, if a gun was fired, if the cabin blew up, these trees would hold the sound in, and nobody would ever know what had happened to her.
The baby shifted inside her and pushed its feet up behind her ribs; she sighed and got out of the damp-smelling fold-out bed. This was why she could never sleep. This was why she never knew what time of day it was, whether it was morning or midnight, whether she was hungry because she’d missed breakfast or because she’d missed dinner or because this little creature was sapping her of every ounce of nourishment and she was simply starving bloody hungry all the bloody time.
She stood up and, feeling her feet shrink from the grainy, ice-cold lino, wished for the four-hundredth time that she’d brought her slippers. She wished she’d brought a lot of things. Like a phone, for God’s sake, or her iPad – not that he would have let her use them even if she had. He wouldn’t even switch his own phone on. ‘That’s how people get caught,’ he kept saying.
She waddled to the small hold-all in the corner of the little room and took the small crocheted blanket from the bag she had packed ready to go to the hospital when the baby came. She put the blanket round her shoulders and crept back to bed, tucking her feet under her to try and warm them up.
He had made her bring the bag with the baby things in it, even though he’d kept saying she shouldn’t bring too much stuff. ‘We don’t know how long we might have to be away,’ he had said. She had thought he was mental. Well, obviously she had thought he was mental anyway; what other explanation could there be for what he was doing? But she still had nine weeks to go before her due date. He really was crazy if he thought she would still be in this shack in the woods with him by then.
But now days had passed – maybe a week? She couldn’t tell. All those grey misty mornings that never materialised into a real day, those long, black, wakeful nights wheezing and coughing and trying to get comfortable. All those hours had passed and she was still here.
She could hear sounds now. He was starting to move around in the other room, coughing and shuffling and being conspicuously quiet, as though if he tried not to disturb her in the mornings then that would make up for everything else. For it must be morning, if he was up. Another day, more long hours where nothing happened and still she could not go home. Jessica pulled the baby’s blanket tighter around her shoulders, lay back down and closed her eyes.
‘You know,’ Petra said, ‘there’s one question you haven’t asked.’
Jazzy looked at her and did one long, slow blink. It was already nearly midnight and they had been sitting at the kitchen table having this conversation for four hours. In five and a half hours’ time either the alarm or Rory would wake them up – if they ever got to sleep in the first place. ‘Go on,’ he said. He genuinely hoped that Petra would provide some insight that had thus far escaped him. If anyone could, she could.
‘Well… I hesitate to say it, but how well do you really know this guy? How well do any of you know him, even Simone?’
At first Jazzy thought she must be talking about Keith; he could not shake his suspicion that Keith must be at the root of this somehow, and he had spent a large part of this evening telling Petra so. She could not mean Mack. Because he knew Mack like a brother; he knew everything about him that you could know about another person. They had lived together in Japan for two years, eaten together every evening, slept every night separated only by a wall of paper, ventured out together to karaoke and sushi bars and sento bath houses at weekends. There was nobody in the world who knew Jazzy better than Mack.
‘I mean,’ Petra continued, ‘what do you really know, other
