The Long Fall

by Crouch, Julia

  Mark knelt in front of her and held her chin, forcing her to look him in the eye. ‘You damn well will pay it back, or I’ll expose you as the woman who stole from the charity she ran. I will publicly disown you and I will drag you and that – that – monster downstairs down with you. Who knows, you two might even end up having fun together in Prisoner Cell Block H.’

  Kate tried desperately to assemble her options. She could still come clean, tell him the entire truth. But even though he had managed to spin an entirely improbable case out of a few random, devastating discoveries, she couldn’t imagine he would buy the actual facts. She grasped at the only straw still available to her: the partial truth.

  ‘I’m being blackmailed,’ she said. ‘If I don’t pay this man Stephen Smith money, he’s going to harm Tilly.’

  ‘Dragging our daughter into it? How low can you go?’ With a sneer of disgust, Mark pushed her down, so she tumbled to the floor. He jumped to his feet and moved away from her, knotting his fists together as if he were holding himself back from striking her. ‘Tilly? Who posted a picture of herself on Facebook just two hours ago, looking relaxed, happy and tanned?’

  ‘Did she?’ Kate’s heart leaped, relief strangely intruding into her torment. ‘Oh, thank God.’

  ‘Very good, Kate,’ Mark said, folding his arms and looking at her. ‘Good acting.’

  She knelt back up to face him. ‘He hasn’t got to her yet, but he will if I don’t pay up.’

  ‘Oh, don’t give me this, Kate. Why on earth would this “Stephen Smith” want to blackmail you?’

  It was the question she couldn’t answer. ‘He knows how wealthy we are.’

  ‘How wealthy I am, you mean.’

  ‘You’ve always said we share everything.’

  Mark squatted so that his eyes – these new, cold eyes full of hate and hurt – were level with hers. ‘Not any more, we don’t. And if your bullshit story were to stun us all and be the truth, then why did he come to you and not me? He’d know that you’re just the little wifey, no real clout. Lots of men in my position don’t allow their wives access to any of their money. I was a fool to have been so trusting with you.’

  ‘It was the Face of Kindness . . .’

  This was too much for him. He lunged forward and grabbed her face so hard that she tasted blood where her teeth cut into the insides of her cheeks.

  ‘Now you’re really clutching at straws, Kate. Face of Kindness? Face of Betrayal more like.’ As if afraid of what he might do to her, he pushed her away again and moved towards the door. ‘I give you one week to get the money back to me.’

  She scrambled to her feet. ‘Where are you going?’

  He turned and looked at her. ‘A hotel.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘A hotel. Right now, Kate, I can’t bear the sight of you.’

  And he left, slamming the office door behind him, leaving her ears ringing with the sound.

  She stood in the middle of the room. For the second time in her life, her world was in tatters, everything drained away. And would Mark talk to Tilly? Would she lose her as well?

  Tilly. He said she had posted on Facebook.

  She fell across the floor to her desk and logged in to her computer account. Mark had been using guest access to look at their money, which meant that he hadn’t been able to see the emails between her and Jake, the record of Skype calls, the YouTube link.

  Perhaps it might have been better if he had, though. Things between them couldn’t be any worse.

  She opened Facebook. Noticing that she had no messages in reply to those she had sent to Tilly and to Jake’s pseudonym, she clicked straight onto Tilly’s wall. There, indeed, was a beautiful photograph of her, standing on the deck of a ferry. Mark was right. She looked entirely happy. Behind her was a long concrete harbour wall from which rose two gigantic soaring metal fretwork wings which, because of the angle of the photo, looked like they were attached to Tilly’s shoulders. On the wall, painted large, was the word Ικαρíα – Greek for Ikaria.

  So she had arrived. Kate clasped her hands in front of her and prayed to a God she dare not believe in that her daughter would be safe.

  Then the thought struck her.

  Who the hell had taken that photograph?

  Twenty

  Eventually, Kate stepped wearily down the stairs to face Beattie, who was still sitting on the sofa. The smell of cigarettes hung heavily in the air, but Kate was beyond caring.

  ‘Mark left,’ Beattie said, gesturing to the empty space where his bags once stood. ‘He didn’t say a word to me, but he wasn’t happy.’

  Kate nodded and sat next to her. ‘I owe you an explanation,’ she said, and she told her about Jake’s further demands, that he knew where Tilly was, and that she had pawned her jewellery and borrowed the money from the charity.

  ‘But that’s a terrible thing to do,’ Beattie said, putting her hands over her mouth.

  ‘You’re not going to start judging me too, are you?’ Kate said. ‘You’re the only person I’ve got left in the world and you’re judging me.’

  ‘Oh, I’m not, honey.’ Beattie put her hand on Kate’s knee. ‘I know you’ve been under a lot of pressure. It just must have been hideous for you. I wish you would have told me what was going on.’

  ‘I didn’t want to scare you or upset you. You’ve been through so much.’

  ‘Oh, but look at what you’ve had to do all on your own, when I could have supported you.’ She ran her hand down Kate’s hair. ‘You’ve been so brave.’

  Kate edged away from Beattie’s touch. ‘And Tilly’s posted this photo on Facebook and I think one of Jake’s “friends” may have taken it. What if he’s got Tilly? I’m still two million down and don’t have an idea what to do.’

  Beattie looked around at the walls. ‘Could you sell a couple of these god-awful pictures?’

  ‘I can’t rip Mark off any more. He’ll go ballistic.’

  ‘Sounded like he already has.’

  ‘God, could you hear him from down here?’

  Beattie nodded. ‘And I could hear what he was accusing us of.’

  The two women looked at each other and then, absurdly, they both started to laugh. They laughed until the tears rolled down their faces, until Kate thought she might be doing her heart some damage.

  When it was all over, and they were lying, splayed at different angles across the sofa, Kate looked at Beattie. It was as if the hilarity had completely sobered her.

  ‘I need to talk to Jake. Fast.’

  Twenty-one

  ‘But it’s all I can manage,’ Kate said, trying to chase the whine from her voice.

  Jake sat immobile, his blue, blue eyes regarding her like a monitor lizard viewing its prey. Again, the wall behind him seemed to have changed. This time it was pale and there was a pair of long curtains in the middle, presumably masking some sort of French windows. He was moving himself and his equipment around an awful lot.

  ‘Like I said, it’s not enough,’ he said, wheezing through his breathing machine. ‘Poor little Tilly. She’s so happy at the moment, I hear.’

  ‘Please,’ Kate said. She pressed her right fist into her other palm, grinding it around in the bones of her hand, half praying, half stabbing. ‘Haven’t you got enough to be going on with? Can’t I have a bit longer?’

  ‘No,’ Jake said, and the screen went blank as he disconnected himself.

  ‘The bastard,’ Beattie said from the doorway, making Kate jump.

  ‘I don’t know what to do now,’ Kate said, sitting back in the chair, her eyebrows high on her forehead, her eyes round with disbelief. Could anything else go wrong?

  ‘Are you sure he’s got Tilly?’ Beattie said, looking as agonised as Kate felt. The only good thing left in the world was that she was there to share her pain.

  ‘I don’t know. I don’t know anything.’

  ‘You’ve got to find out, honey. Perhaps he’s just making idle threats.’

  ‘He doesn’t ma
ke idle threats. You of all people should know that.’

  ‘Has she been in touch?’

  ‘I’ll check again.’ Kate turned again to her computer and pulled up Facebook. Frowning, she typed and clicked, typed and clicked. ‘What’s going on?’

  ‘What?’ Beattie said, peering over her shoulder.

  ‘She’s not there. My Tilly Barratt isn’t there any more.’

  ‘No!’

  ‘She’d never shut her profile down. Facebook is her lifeline.’

  ‘You’ve got a message, look,’ Beattie said, pointing at the screen.

  Kate clicked on it. ‘Stephen Smith’ had accepted her friend request. He had also sent her a private message.

  Dear ‘Kate’, it said.

  Poor Tilly has dropped her iPad and it’s all cracked and not working. I thought it better, in view of your concerns for her safety, that she removed her profile altogether. She didn’t buy the line about kidnappers, though. She wondered what sort of mug you took her for, or words to that effect. Anyway, she is safe and well and in my good care and control, but she won’t be any of those things by the end of the week unless you give me my missing cash. Or items to the value of. Then I can hand Tilly back to you, and all the nastiness can be forgotten.

  All my love

  ‘Stephen’

  Kate looked up at Beattie, who was still reading, her lips moving as her eyes grazed over Jake’s words.

  ‘It sounds like he’s out there,’ she said at last when she had finished.

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Ikaria.’

  ‘But how can that be possible?’ Kate thought about the changing backgrounds of the rooms Jake had been in recently. ‘He couldn’t make that journey with all his breathing equipment and big wheelchair and everything, could he?’

  Beattie shrugged. ‘He is a force of nature.’

  ‘And how could he harm Tilly, the state he’s in?’ Kate went on. ‘I’ve got to go out there, haven’t I? Buy my daughter back from him, or whoever’s got her out there. But how? I’ve got nothing left.’

  ‘How about that red and orange painting in your bedroom?’

  ‘The Rothko?’ Kate knew it was worth at least what Jake wanted – if not more. And, on a purely practical level, it was small enough to take on a plane.

  ‘If that’s what it is.’

  It would, as she’d already told Beattie, send Mark ballistic.

  But, actually, what did that matter now? She had lost him, as far as she could see, completely and forever. So she might as well be hung for a sheep as for a lamb. It could end up with her being charged with theft and imprisoned, which would probably mean her full identity would be outed. But at least Tilly would be safe, and that was the most important thing in the world to Kate, more important than her reputation, her freedom, or her life.

  She turned to her computer and typed a message to ‘Stephen Smith’: I’m coming. Where do I find Tilly?

  The reply came almost instantly: Use your brain, Emma. And come alone. Ditch the bitch.

  Twenty-two

  In her desperation to get to Greece more quickly, Kate was through security at Gatwick two hours before her flight was due to leave. She spent the time in duty free, covering herself in perfume trials and availing herself of enough free tots of hideously sweetened and artificially vanilla-flavoured whisky-based drinks to give her Dutch courage, but not so many as to make her lose her head and mislay her small portfolio containing the Rothko and the old map of Ikaria, which she had retrieved from among her 1980 journals.

  When she pulled the tattered volumes from their hiding place under her office floor, she had once again sat with them in her hands, bracing herself to open them. It would have been useful to reread the sections she had written while on the island, just to refresh her memory of the geography. But, once again, she couldn’t face looking at the words of the girl who had landed her in all this. In any case, she told herself, there was no need to look it up: every detail was still laser-etched on her mind.

  The hypnotist she had consulted to help with her fear of flying for Africa taught her a breathing trick to put herself to sleep for the dreaded take-off and landing. But, with her current state of mind, it failed to work, so she endured a gut-wrenching half-hour as the plane slowly taxied to its take-off point, and another ten minutes of hell as the plane rose steeply past the airport car parks and into the thick and bumpy English cloud. But then cabin service came round and, with the portfolio tucked safely underneath her feet, she ordered two little bottles of gin and one tonic. On top of the free flavoured whisky and a couple of pills it was enough. The plane sliced through the sky over the Thames Estuary, and, despite her high levels of stress, she managed to fall asleep in a Jo Malone-scented alcoholic cocoon. She only came back to her senses over the sand-fringed islands off the Croatian coast.

  But by the time she had endured the landing at Athens airport, she was itching with it all again. She was desperate to get to Ikaria. She could have jumped in a taxi to Piraeus and taken the night boat. But if she waited for the plane that left the following day, she would arrive sooner. If things had been different, if she hadn’t fucked everything up with Mark, if she had done it better and been honest with him, they might have arrived together and he would have chartered a small plane to get them out there immediately.

  She pulled herself together. If she had been honest with Mark, she wouldn’t be in this situation at all.

  Over the long hours of the night before her flight, she tried to contact Mark four times, in an attempt to tell him – somehow – what she was doing. But she couldn’t get through. Like Tilly’s Facebook profile, his number was suddenly unavailable. She wasn’t even able to text or leave a message.

  ‘What’s going on?’ she had asked Beattie, holding her phone to her ear as they sat up into the small hours, emptying three bottles of wine.

  ‘Perhaps he’s blocked you?’ Beattie said, shrugging.

  So Kate was doing this whole thing on her own. Apart from Beattie, who was back in Battersea, manning the phones in case of emergencies, her meagre network of friends and contacts and support had evaporated completely.

  She used her one remaining solvent credit card to pay for a room in the Sofitel, just a short, sweltering walk across the road from the airport. As she wove her way through murderously fast yellow taxis plying their trade outside arrivals, she registered the undeniably magnificent feel of the Greek sun on her face. The sparkling quality of the light, too, even in the aviation-fuelled atmosphere of the airport, was like nothing found in London.

  To economise, once she had checked into her room and realised how much the mini-bar was going to cost, she went back to the airport to buy a cheap bottle of wine from a shop selling Greek specialities to departing tourists. She looked at a stall selling various dehydrated-looking sandwiches and decided against them. In any case, she was still full from the Nando’s blowout the evening before.

  The only thing she needed to concentrate on was the safety of her daughter.

  She quickly drank the entire bottle of what turned out to be an astringent yet syrupy wine and, with the help of a couple more pills, managed to find two or three hours of restless sleep in her airless room with its locked-shut windows. So efficient was the soundproofing that, instead of jets landing and taking off on the runways outside, what distracted her all night was the empty, tinnitus silence in her post-flight ears.

  She felt terrible the next morning in the domestic departures lounge. The heat haze over the runway just made her feel even dizzier, and her fellow travellers – who, from their neighbourly chattering, she took to be islanders returning home after visiting the mainland – made her feel all the more lonely and isolated. Only one other passenger sat alone like her – a youngish man with, she noticed, an American passport. Scruffy, slightly overweight and in dark glasses, but for the passport he could have passed for a Greek. Kate strongly suspected that he could be one of Jake’s contacts, so she kept well away from him, whil
e also holding him in her sights at all times. She clutched her portfolio as if it were her baby, which, in a way, it was.

  There was a coffee counter at the gate from which her plane was due to depart. After debating with herself, Kate finally bought a Greek coffee. A metrio – she remembered the word – a medium. Powdery and sweet, it had the power to make her feel like she was eighteen again. But not in a good way.

  It was only when the airport bus had transported her and her twenty fellow travellers to the far end of the airport, past all the 747s and jet-powered planes, that she realised that the aircraft flying them fifty minutes across to the eastern Aegean was, frighteningly, almost toy-like in its proportions.

  The bus drew up beside the propeller-driven plane and Kate’s knees nearly buckled as she and her fellow passengers were guided across the tarmac in a genial but lackadaisical fashion. The worst of it was that, when she took her seat, she discovered that it was right up against the delicate, whirring blades that somehow – she didn’t like to dwell on the details – would be carrying her up into the blue, blue, blue sky. But this unnerving thought was far outweighed by the fact that, sitting directly across the aisle from her, was the scruffy young American.

  As the plane headed out across the sea, she didn’t feel as nervous as she had thought she might. Perhaps it was because they were flying so low that she could easily pick out the waves and fishing boats beneath her. More likely, though, it was because she was on the last stage of her journey to save her daughter. The sense of purpose fortified her, while at the same time the tangible danger and urgency of Tilly’s situation put the threat of being involved in a highly unlikely, hypothetical air crash into stark proportion.

  So she turned her worry towards the American, who, she thought, was staring at her when she wasn’t looking. At any rate, she felt observed by him, and, she had to remind herself, it wouldn’t be because he found a haggard fifty-year-old woman attractive.