She risked another look at Frank; he was still clutching the child, muttering reassuring nonsense into his ear. Cindy stood on the quay, watching them rock back and forth in the snow. The Frank she knew had been utterly consumed by delirium, preoccupied by Jake’s implausible return. She towered over him, their roles momentarily reversed, but he appeared unconcerned, as though Cindy had become of peripheral interest, which she suspected had been the case all along.
She found herself trembling, the situation suddenly more complex than she’d anticipated. Time was passing quicker than she would have liked, and she felt the weight of each of her options stacking up against her. Would she be able to kick Frank off the quay and into the lake before he had a chance to react? She thought it was a possibility; could even see herself placing her foot against his chest and pushing him into the water.
But what then? Both she and Philip still had their hands bound by the cable ties, and the boy was tied to the rail of the quay. Would she be able to free them both before Frank—wet and raging—hauled himself out of the lake? She doubted that she could; she had nothing on hand—nothing with which she could improvise, either—and the cable ties would be practically impossible to break. She also had to take into account the fact that Frank had Philip in a tight embrace and would be unlikely to release him. If Frank went into the water, there was a strong likelihood that Philip would follow; if not into the lake itself, then certainly into a predicament she would be keen to avoid. Worst-case scenario: he could be left hanging from the rail of the jetty, tethered by the collar and leash, swinging to his death on the dock. Cindy shivered at the mere thought of it. No; targeting Frank was not a viable option. Not while there could be collateral damage to the kid.
She quickly ran through her diminishing list of alternatives, and when she next glanced down at him, Frank was slowly rising to his feet. He reached out and took hold of the choke chain that dangled from Cindy’s throat.
“We’ll have breakfast inside,” he said. “It’s a little too cold out here and Jake’s not feeling up to it. You okay with that, Cind?”
She said nothing; just stared at the silver chain in Frank’s hand and felt herself go numb as the opportunities she had considered slid away.
* * *
“I’m sorry, Philip,” she said. “I froze. I should have done something. I just didn’t know what to do for the best.”
They had been ushered back to the cottage through the snow and returned to the bedroom. Frank had seemed distracted. His gaze, when Cindy glanced over her shoulder at him, was remote. He appeared disinterested in her and said very little as he guided them back to the room. Philip had been reattached to the pipe and Cindy had been secured to the bed. Frank had taken off the leash and the choke chain but had left the red and yellow collars fastened around their throats. He had then left them without saying another word.
Cindy turned her head towards the boy. “Are you feeling alright? Your eyes still look sore.”
Philip tried to smile but it was mangled by the painted replica around his mouth. His eye sockets were puffy and inflamed; the top of his face where the aerosol had been trained looked tender, as though it had been carelessly burned by the sun.
“I’m okay,” he said. “Everything was blurry for a while, but it’s getting better. The stinging’s not so bad anymore.” He paused and waited until she was looking directly at him. “Don’t worry about what happened. There wasn’t much you could have done. You were tied up. We both were.”
Though his logic appeared heartfelt, Cindy knew that Philip wasn’t aware of the full story; perhaps if he realized exactly how much freedom she’d been inadvertently afforded, he wouldn’t be quite so quick to forgive.
“Even so,” she said, “I had a chance to do something and I failed to take it. Another opening might not come along for days.”
“It won’t be that long. He kept talking to me the whole time. When he looked at me, it was as if I wasn’t even there. I don’t think he knows what’s going on.”
Cindy lay still, considering Philip’s observation. For a young kid, he had the remarkable knack of capturing Frank’s complex disposition in only a handful of words, painting the simplest of pictures to lay bare the mechanics of something considerably more profound.
“He knows enough,” she said. “That’s part of the problem. He’s still in there.”
“What should we do?”
Cindy smiled at him through gritted teeth. “What else can we do?” she said. “We wait until he makes a mistake.”
* * *
Frank was sitting at the kitchen table, staring at Cindy and Jake. They were seated across from him eating their lunch. They glanced up occasionally and looked at one another. Cindy stuck out her tongue and smiled; Jake copied her and nibbled at his sandwich. Frank wondered why he could see right through them to the grubby kitchen walls beyond and then realized it didn’t really matter. Sometimes the world played strange tricks on you if you weren’t concentrating properly. It could bless and curse you in the same breath and think nothing of it; it could heal you at dawn and then by dusk it could tear you apart. This was how the world worked; you were constantly tested. It left its mark whether you liked it or not.
He heard a noise in one of the rooms upstairs and tried to remember what it was. He thought it was something important, but he couldn’t quite bring it into focus. It couldn’t be Cindy and Jake because they were sitting here at the kitchen table with him. They’d been together all morning since Frank had woken them with tea and juice in bed. He loved these lazy mornings where they could luxuriate in each other’s company. Jake had scampered into their room and climbed into bed with them. He had looked out of the window and told his parents a story about a crow named Jake that had been unable to find its way home. The poor crow had flown around and around the same lake a hundred times before the daddy crow came and saved it. Cindy said those kind of things didn’t happen in real life, but Frank had silenced her with a look and told Jake that he thought his tale was one of the most charming he’d ever heard. All stories should have a happy ending, he said. Otherwise what was the point?
He had drifted downstairs after that and started frying bacon and sausage in a large pan, while Cindy and Jake got dressed. The smell of the sizzling meat had soon brought them scurrying into the kitchen and now they sat in the morning sunshine eating bacon and sausage sandwiches dripping with brown sauce. Frank wouldn’t have been able to invent a more perfect tableau if he tried.
He stared at his wife and son and thought they had never looked more beautiful; the sunlight filtered through them, making them seem ghostly, and Frank tried again to remember why that might be important. They appeared pixelated, as though they were composed of millions of tiny colored dots, wavering in the air like defective versions of the real thing. The reproduction was incomplete, the covenant imperfect, but if Frank was concerned by how cleanly the light passed through Cindy’s eyes, he was unable to identify why. In an instant, any doubt he might have entertained had been dismissed. There were no flaws in his family, and never had been. He was the luckiest man in the world.
“What shall we do after breakfast?” he said. “I’m open to anything.”
Jake was luminous, his image strong enough in Frank’s mind to burn bright, almost blinding him. Occasionally he flickered like a dream; he blew across the kitchen table like a shower of rain, a memory made real, a smiling child present only in his afflicted father’s head.
—Let’s go swimming! he said. You can be a shark again, Daddy.
Frank smiled. The last time they had gone into the water it had been bitterly cold. He had raised his hand like a fin and swum up on Jake like the shark in Jaws. The boy had squealed until his face had turned puce. Frank thought he might actually have peed in his pants, and Cindy had told them to stop making so much ungodly noise.
“Maybe we could do something else, Jakey. Something we haven’t done before.”
Jake looked disappointed. Like what?
“How about we blow up the dinghy and take a trip out to one of the islands in the middle of the lake?”
That sounds like fun, Jake, Cindy said.
The child was grinning; his image looked marginally more substantial, as though it was feeding off the intensity of Frank’s constructed reality, the boy gaining in definition as the fantasy expanded.
We could take a picnic, he said.
“I guess we could manage that. Think you could rustle up a few goodies, Cind?”
I don’t see why not. Anything in particular?
Chorizo and cheese sandwiches! Jake said. They had recently become his favorite combination. Cindy always made sure she had a good stock of both in the fridge.
“No sneaking up on the ducks today,” Frank said, smiling. “They’ll smell you a mile away, Jakey! Every breath will be like an alarm call.”
That reminds me, Cindy said. Mints.
Jake looked concerned. –Is that true, Daddy? Will I really scare away the ducks?
“I doubt it, son. They probably like chorizo and cheese just as much as you. Doesn’t everyone?”
This seemed to reassure Jake and he sat back in his chair and polished off his food. A silence descended on the table and Frank closed his eyes, shocked by how perfectly natural it felt. He had forgotten how intimate this kind of silence could be; a drawing together of common experience and shared affection, an awareness of nothing and everything in an instant. It made him feel strangely melancholic, as though he had been granted brief access to a higher understanding. His throat felt dry and he could hear the rhythmic beating of his own heart; he felt something at the center give way.
He opened his eyes and was saddened to discover that Jake and Cindy had gone. The kitchen was empty; the only sound he could hear was the atonal hum in his own head. The warm glow he had felt as the three of them had discussed their plans for the morning had evaporated. In its place was an unfamiliar stretch of open ground that he knew he’d never be able to navigate; not on his own, at least. Not without his wife and son by his side.
He leaned across the table and buried his head in his hands. When he thought about his family, he often felt conflicted. He wanted to do his best by them, but somewhere along the way he had lost sight of his responsibilities; had become more distant as the logic of his own ambition clouded over, his fate sealed as he spent less and less time looking after his son. Was this why Jake had gone missing? Because he had been too preoccupied with his own interests? It had happened on his watch, after all; he should have been paying attention, monitoring his every move. Hadn’t he and Cindy discussed that very matter to ensure that the boy was never left alone? Wasn’t it the parents’ responsibility to preempt their child’s every gesture? To guard against the worst that the world might seek to inflict.
He shook his head and stared around the empty kitchen. None of that mattered anymore. Jake was back; Cindy too. And all three of them would learn from their mistakes. His obligation was clear. He had a duty of care to his family, a commitment he was determined to honor. He had legitimate reasons for wanting to do so, but they were reasons that even Frank was only half aware of, as though he had no concept of how his future might be defined by his past.
He listened to the dull whine echoing in his head and tried to make sense of what it was telling him to do. If there was sense to be had in it, then it was beyond Frank’s ability to decode, and he released a long, frustrated scream that ricocheted around the cottage. Whatever was welling up in his head—that black clot of memory that he had suppressed for so long−it was proving difficult to deliver. There was something there; he could feel it. He just didn’t trust himself to draw back the veil that had kept it hidden for so many years.
Daddy?
Frank turned towards the voice and saw Jake standing by the back door.
He was indistinct and as flat as glass, as though the burden of sustaining him had become too much for one man to bear; even Frank could sense his strength ebbing away. He watched Jake’s outline flicker against the snowy backdrop of the distant hills and felt the last bright thread of reality slowly bleed away into the sunlit corners of the room. He stared in silence at his son.
I love you, Daddy.
Frank looked on, frozen to the spot, as a dark-haired adult hand appeared in the doorway. Jake reached out to take it; his hand was enclosed. Frank watched, mesmerized, his heart pounding. A second longer and he thought the torment might consume him; only the desire to see his son one last time gave him the strength he needed to momentarily dispel the pain.
Bye bye, Daddy.
Jake smiled and the dark-haired hand withdrew, leading the flickering child into the ether.
Frank sank to his knees on the kitchen floor, staring at the empty space into which his son had disappeared. He let himself weep. He stayed like that until it started to grow dark. He might have slept and dreamed himself a new life where his family were returned to him. When he awoke, he remembered his son’s smile. It was like a settling of everything that had happened in the last ten months, and he held on to Jake’s smile as though it could carry him into a new place, a brighter place, where the warmth of his family would redeem him.
This was all he had left. The cottage; his wife; his son. He would draw from them one last smile while he still had the chance. He would not be robbed of the opportunity, no matter how painful things had become.
He stumbled to his feet and glanced around the darkened kitchen. It felt cold and unfamiliar, an increasing irrelevance in a world whose reach seemed to be growing narrower as Frank tumbled further and further into his private kingdom; a territory from which a part of him knew he’d never have the will to return.
He moved towards the stairs and listened again to that low whine unravelling inside his head. His resolve hardened. He could see the path to the kingdom; it was emerging through the gray fog. He would be forced to walk it alone.
* * *
As Haft drove, he watched the skyline darken and the roads grow heavy with snow. He had turned the Ford’s heating to its highest setting, and the interior of the car was like a blast furnace. He didn’t like the cold; never had. Having to search for the boy in such unpleasant conditions annoyed him. The landscape ahead had been transformed into a featureless range of white. It made Haft feel uncomfortable; ambiguity always did. He liked to know exactly what he was dealing with in any given situation. Masks of any kind, disguises that rearranged the surface appearance, left him with a sour taste in his mouth. There was nothing he liked more than digging beneath the dirt to see what soft creature inhabited the darkness below.
He drove on, retracing the route from memory. Bodmin Moor was still some distance away and it occurred to him that the weather could well force him off the road. He had already been reduced to driving at forty-five miles an hour and he suspected that before long that speed would have to fall again if the conditions continued to deteriorate. He gritted his teeth and accelerated a fraction while he still could. The longer it took him to reach the boy, the greater the number of variables he’d have to explore. He knew from past experience that working within a narrow time frame was everything. The more hours it took, the worse things got. It was the one rule over which he had little or no control; everything else he could usually crush.
He stared again at the photograph of the family, the three of them looking utterly happy with the cottage and the woodland stretching out behind them. He had positioned the image on the front of the dashboard, tucked behind the dials of the radio cassette. The warm air from the heater made it dance.
He gazed at the family, still unable to piece together the chain of events that had somehow assimilated Philip Rymer. What had happened to them, he wondered? Why was he now pursuing this perfect family halfway across the country to retrieve a kidnapped child? The logic behind it eluded him. All he knew—and he was confident in this, if nothing else—was that if he found the family, he would find Lionel Rymer’s son; and that was really all he needed for
this particular equation to make sense.
He peered through the windshield and cursed as the snow grew heavier, falling in large, dense flakes. Much more of this and he’d have to pull over. He could feel the Ford straining for traction and he dropped his speed down to forty. The one bonus was that the snow had driven nearly everyone else indoors; only the desperate and the foolish were left to negotiate the slick roads, and it occurred to Haft as the Ford slid across the carriageway that he might just be both. He looked in his mirror and then stared directly ahead and realized that there were only a handful of other cars on the road. He took his foot off the accelerator and dropped to thirty-five. Any slower and he’d call it a night. Start again in the morning, after the gritters and the snowplows had cleared the highway.
His thoughts turned to Lionel Rymer and how he must be feeling, knowing that the safety of his son was in the hands of the one man over whom he had little influence. Rymer was a complicated fellow; an astute businessman, certainly, but a man more accustomed to nights of fine wine and heavy dining than he was trying to manage his emotional response to something like this. Haft tried to imagine what Rymer might be doing right now, but found the task almost impossible. The man was so far removed from Haft’s own experience it was like trying to recreate the fragments of a dream.
He considered for a moment what Rymer might do if he failed to find his son. How would the man react? In Rymer’s tiered response system, what, or who, would be unleashed on the family after Haft? He smiled as he drove; it occurred to him that he might very well represent Rymer’s last expedient. The final menace to be cast at the enemy; the ultimate enforcer.
He muttered another curse and laughed at the irony of it: the ultimate enforcer was about to be brought down by a little snow. He dropped to twenty-five miles an hour and turned the wipers to full speed. He hoped to God that Rymer had someone else in reserve. His odds were shortening by the minute and he felt a sense of unease as he drove. Unless the snow began to abate, the chances of him reaching the lake before morning were slim.
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