6
Friday, 13 January 2017
London, 1 p.m.
The number you have dialled is no longer in service.
‘Any luck?’ Lucy Vaughan asks her.
‘No.’ She needs to get rid of this woman with her fake emails and fantasies about owning someone else’s home. Should she call the police straight away? Or wait till she’s located Bram, so they can tackle this outrageous invasion together? And now that so much of the Vaughans’ furniture is installed, do they qualify for squatters’ rights? Are they, technically, occupiers?
The questions have no answers. They feel as unreal as the images in front of her eyes. The whole experience is hallucinatory, not to be trusted.
She tries Bram a second time. A third.
The number you have dialled is no longer in service.
She can’t even leave him a voicemail. ‘Where the hell is he?’
Lucy watches, her own phone in her hand. ‘You have two children, don’t you? Could he be with them?’
‘No, they’re in school.’ How does Lucy know things about her when she didn’t know Lucy even existed until a few minutes ago?
Mum, she thinks. She’ll ask her to pick up the boys from school and take them back to her place. They can’t come here, they’d be distraught to find their bedrooms gutted, their precious possessions spirited away.
Spirited away where? Owning the house might be this stranger’s delusion (she continues to cling to the notion of a practical joke), but its rightful contents are starkly, incontrovertibly missing. Someone has physically removed them.
This is when it occurs – not a thought so much as an unleashing, a surge of foreboding that breaks into consciousness in the form of full-blown terror: if her property could vanish during her two-day absence, could her children? ‘Oh my God,’ she says. ‘Please, no, please . . .’ With trembling hands, she scrolls through her phone contacts.
‘What is it?’ Lucy asks, agitated. ‘What’s happened? Who are you calling?’
‘My children’s school. I have to— Oh, Mrs Emery! This is Fi Lawson. My son Harry is in Year Three and Leo in Year Four.’
‘Of course, how are you, Mrs—’ begins the school secretary, but Fi interrupts.
‘I need you to check on them for me – urgently.’
‘Check on them? I’m not sure I understand.’
‘Can you just make sure they’re where they should be? In their classrooms or the playground, wherever. It’s really important.’
Mrs Emery hesitates. ‘Well, Year Four will be in the lunch hall, I think—’
‘Please!’ Stronger than a wail: a shriek, offensive enough to cause Lucy to flinch. ‘I don’t care where it is, just check they’re there!’
There’s a shocked pause, then, ‘Would you mind holding a moment . . .?’
Fi strains to follow a background exchange between Mrs Emery and a colleague, ten or so agonizing seconds of low-voiced back and forth, and then Mrs Emery comes back on the line. ‘I’m sorry, Mrs Lawson, but I’ve just been told your boys aren’t actually here.’
‘What?’ Instantly, a terrible smacking starts up in her ribcage and her stomach threatens to empty itself.
‘They’re not in school today.’
‘Where are they then?’
‘Well, with their father, as far as we’re aware. Look, I’m going to put you through to the head . . .’
She is shaking now, the convulsions out of rhythm with the heart-smacking. She is a machine that has lost control of its functions.
‘Mrs Lawson? Sarah Bottomley here. I can assure you there’s absolutely nothing for you to worry about.’ The head teacher of Alder Rise Primary has a bracing manner, confident of order at all times, with just the subtlest sense of offence at Fi’s current suggestion of disorder. ‘Your husband requested permission to take the boys out of school for the day and I agreed to give it. Their absence is fully authorized.’
‘Why?’ Fi cries. ‘Why did he take them out of school? And why would you agree to that?’
‘Pupils are taken out of school for all sorts of reasons. In this case, it was to do with pick-up being difficult, what with neither of you being in London today.’
Neither of you? Bram was supposed to be here, in this house, two streets from the school! ‘No, no, that’s wrong. I’ve been away, but Bram has been working from home.’
The home that continues to be stocked with a stranger’s belongings.
‘Is there a chance you might have got your dates muddled?’ Mrs Bottomley suggests. ‘When I spoke with your husband a few days ago, I got the impression you knew all about the request.’
‘I knew nothing. Nothing.’ This is followed by a ghastly animal wail and it is only when Lucy takes the phone from her that Fi understands she has become too unmanageable to be allowed to continue.
‘Hello?’ Lucy says. ‘I’m a friend of Mrs Lawson’s. Of course, yes, leave this with us, we’ll try to track down the boys’ father. I’m sure it’s just a case of crossed wires and the children are quite safe. Mrs Lawson has had a bit of a shock and isn’t herself. Yes, we’ll let you know as soon as we locate them.’
As the call ends, Fi attempts to seize back her phone, but Lucy resists. ‘Would it be best if I tried your husband for you?’ she asks mildly.
‘No, it wouldn’t. This is nothing to do with you,’ Fi snaps. ‘You shouldn’t be here! Give me my phone and get out of my house!’
‘I really think you should sit down and take a deep breath.’ As Lucy pulls out a chair for her at the kitchen table, the dynamic is one of patient–nurse. ‘I’ll make you a cup of tea.’
‘I don’t want tea, for God’s sake!’ Her phone returned to her, Fi tries Bram again – The number you have dialled is no longer in service – before placing it face down on the table. Something horrific is taking place, she thinks. Knows. Knows in her bones. This confusion with the house, this brazen Lucy woman, is only a part of it: something has happened to Bram and the boys. Something very bad.
And in that instant, her waking nightmare becomes something so terrifying it has no name.
Geneva, 2 p.m.
Already he hates the room. Hates the hotel. Hates what little he’s seen and heard of this city. A plane screams in from the east, more ear-splitting than the rest, and he braces himself for shattered glass. Maybe that’s what it’s going to take, he thinks, to allow his disaster to shrink. Something as earth-shattering – literally – as a plane crash.
It’s not the first time today he’s thought like this. When his own plane approached the city that morning, he had had the distinct idea that it wouldn’t matter if the landing gear failed, if the belly of the thing split open on the tarmac and spilled him from its wounds. He would not have objected to dying that way. Despicably, given the two hundred fellow passengers he was prepared to take with him, he prayed for it.
Of course, the plane landed smoothly, his the only body clenched in agony. He alone pleading with the gods for a reversal of fortune that can never be granted.
Really, he should have known that escape was only prison by another name.