Playing Nice

I got to the Lamberts’ house, but the BMW wasn’t outside. For a moment I thought I’d simply beaten him to it. But then I realized that was unlikely. Miles must have taken Theo somewhere else.

A shiver ran down my spine. Miles loved his son—adored him. Surely Theo couldn’t actually be in danger?

I stabbed the entry buzzer, then impatiently ran up the steps to the front door. It seemed to take an age for anyone to come. When the door finally opened, I saw why: Lucy was on crutches. One foot was bandaged.

It wasn’t hard to guess what had happened. Miles must have blamed her for their defeat in court. But right at that moment, I had little sympathy for her.

“Oh, Pete,” Lucy began. “How lovely—”

I cut across her. “Where’s Miles?”

“Miles?” She stared at me, confused. “He’s at work.”

“He’s got Theo. In the car.” I gestured at the empty driveway. “He doesn’t usually take the car to work, does he? Think, Lucy. Where could he have taken him?”

She still looked blank. “I don’t know.”

I must have clenched my hands with impatience, because she flinched and said quickly, “They sometimes go to the Heath. To the boating pond. Theo loves the ponds. And the rugby pitches, of course.”

“Thank you.” I ran to my car and started it. Just as I was about to drive off, my phone pinged. I looked down at the screen and saw the name. MILES LAMBERT.

And a message.



But the other one said, Let it be neither mine nor thine, but divide it.

105



   PETE



   I RECOGNIZED IT INSTANTLY, of course. It was from the Old Testament. The woman who said she’d rather go along with Solomon’s judgment, and see the disputed child killed, than give up her claim to it.

The police would never understand what it meant, not without knowing the whole background. But I did. It was a death threat. Perhaps not even a threat—this might be Miles’s way of telling me what he’d already done.

I felt my bones turn to icy water at the realization that Theo could be dying at that very moment.

I don’t know how I drove to the car park beside the Heath. From there you could see how Highgate got its name. Below me, all of London was spread out in one huge, overwhelming vista, from Canary Wharf in the east to Paddington in the west, with St. Paul’s and the Shard in the middle. It was a view that had featured in at least a dozen sappy romantic comedies, and I was desperately scouring it for just one thing.

   A tiny person in jeans and a red hoodie. Perhaps with a tall man in a well-cut suit by his side.

There was nothing. No one on the rugby pitches. And no one at the boating pond. Just a few dog walkers and joggers, braving a blustery wind.

Then I spotted a black BMW in the car park, right at the end of a row. Empty, but it proved they were here.

Think, Pete. Lucy said, “Theo loves the ponds.” Ponds, plural. There were more than half a dozen of them on this side of Hampstead Heath, following the course of some ancient river.

Run, Pete. I set off at a fast pace, but the Heath was vast and I was soon agonizingly short of breath. At the men’s swimming pond I drew a blank. The duck pond and the women’s pond, ditto. Then came a succession of smaller ponds whose names I didn’t know, each one ringed with trees, their surfaces green and shiny with duckweed.

And then, in the smallest pond, right in the middle, so small and still I only just glimpsed it through the trees, I saw a splash of red.

A child’s hoodie.

I hurtled through the soggy, squelching mud toward it.

It was Theo. He was floating facedown in the water. The hood was pulled up over his head, his legs sunk under the mat of green duckweed. I ran into the water, almost tripping as the mud gripped my calves, slowing me further even as I desperately tried to reach him. I knew infant CPR—we’d been trained in it at the NICU. If there was a chance, any chance at all, of pummeling the water and weed out of his lungs and breathing life back into him, I could do it. But every second would be vital.

Please don’t let him be dead. Anything, anything but that.

But in my heart I knew it was useless. He was motionless, his head bobbing only from the ripples caused by me crashing toward him, making the duckweed undulate and break up. He’d clearly been there for some time.

   Under the fluorescent green weed the water was black and noxious, my legs sinking deeper into the silty mud with every yard. I felt breathless, my ears ringing as if I was about to pass out, lactic acid burning in my muscles, my heart thudding in my chest. I was up to my thighs, then my waist, then at last I was close enough to reach out and flip him over—

It was a rugby ball. Inside the red hood, a rugby ball had been placed where Theo’s head would be. A stick, jammed in with it, had kept the rest of the hoodie from sinking. The green weed, obscuring where his legs would be, had done the rest.

I stood there, gulping air, a mixture of relief and fear coursing through me. Relief it wasn’t Theo. And fear, that Miles still had him.

“I wanted you to know.”

I swung around. Miles was standing twenty feet away in the trees, watching me. His face was blank, his tone matter-of-fact.

Of Theo, there was still no sign.

I couldn’t speak. Couldn’t move, in fact, the mud gripping my burning calves like shackles.

“To know what it feels like to lose your son,” Miles continued. “What it’s been like for me, these last weeks. What it’ll be like for you, too, when he dies.”

Theo’s alive. I focused on that, managed to pant, “Where is he? What have you done with him?”

“And die he will,” Miles went on as if I hadn’t spoken. “Next time, it’ll be for real, Pete. Gone forever. No third chances. So that’s the deal I’m offering you.”

“What deal? What are you talking about?”

“Remember how the Bible story goes? Just before the bit I texted you? The real mother says to Solomon, ‘Give her the living child, instead of killing it.’ She’d rather her son was handed to her deadliest rival, the woman she’d dragged through the courts for justice, than see him die. That’s real parenthood, Pete. Putting your own desires second. Sacrificing everything to keep your child safe. Even your own happiness.”

   He looked at me, considering. “But are you really that person, Pete? I mean, you appear to be. You love playing the part, that’s for sure. Doting dad, decent bloke. Unselfish. Principled. Loving. But how genuine is all that, I wonder? Could you really be as self-sacrificing as that mother in the Bible? You should thank me, Pete. I’m giving you a chance to prove you could.”