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‘Where the hell have you been?’
‘This is Beth,’ he said, gesturing to the small figure standing by his left leg. ‘Only at the moment we are pretending she is Matt. She’s very good at pretending.’
‘Hi, Beth!’ Maggie said, taking in the short hair, red football shirt, jeans and trainers. ‘We’ve met, of course.’
‘Matt,’ the child said firmly. ‘My name is Matt.’
A mobile phone rang. Sam swore.
‘It’s mine,’ Maggie said. It was the phone from her father’s flat. That could only be bad. ‘Who’s calling?’ she said.
‘Is Sam there?’ It was a woman’s voice.
‘Who’s Sam?’
‘Don’t play silly buggers, Maggie,’ the voice said. Sharp and determined. ‘We’ve got your father with us.’
Her stomach somersaulted wildly. Even though she had known this call would come sooner or later, she felt the fear rip through her body. ‘I want to speak to him,’ she replied as calmly as she could.
‘And I want to speak to Sam.’ The woman spoke with an Irish accent, strong and angular, definitely not the soft brogue of popular myth.
‘You first,’ Maggie said, trying to sound more resolute than she felt. ‘Or I hang up.’
There was a long pause. Maggie could feel her heart thumping like a drum. Then she heard a male voice. ‘Ciao, Maggie.’
‘Dad! Are you alright?’
‘Arrivederci!’ And her father giggled like a child who has overdosed on coca cola.
The woman took over. ‘Seems like he doesn’t want to talk anymore. So let me speak to Sam.’
Sam grabbed the phone and moved away from Maggie, turning his back as if afraid she might try and snatch it back. ‘Who the fuck are you?’
There was a laugh. ‘No need to be aggressive, Sam. I just want us to meet up and have a chat.’
‘Is that what you said to Ellie? Let’s have a chat.’
‘Where exactly are you?’ the voice said.
‘Can’t you tell, with all your bloody gadgetry?’
‘Don’t lose your temper with me, Sam, not if you want Maggie to see her father again. I’d like to arrange an exchange.’
‘Yeah, I bet you would!’
‘I will hand over her father if she hands over you.’
‘You must think we were born yesterday.’
Sam glanced across at Maggie as he said this. His face was rigid. His eyes seemed to recede deep within his face. She recognised the look from old. She opened her mouth. She wanted to warn him not to say or do anything rash or stupid, but she was too late. He was holding the mobile away from himself at full stretch and was staring at it as if searching for enlightenment. Then he dropped it on the ground and jabbed the heel of his Doc Marten hard onto it. Once, twice, three times.
* * *
Beth kept her hands over her ears and pretended she couldn’t hear them. She was in the back of the car. Sam and the woman were in front. The woman was driving. She had one hand on the steering wheel while she waved the other one around as if she had a crab attached to one of her fingers and was trying to shake it off. She was screaming at Sam. Sam wasn’t shouting back, though he was talking pretty loudly. He kept telling the woman, ‘Stop shouting and calm down,’ but Beth could see that the woman had no intention of doing either of those things. The woman was angry. She was really worried about her father. Beth felt sorry for her.
‘They’ll kill him!’ the woman sobbed. ‘If they can’t contact me, they’ll kill him. They said so. They said if I turned off my mobile even, they’d kill him. And what do you do? You bloody well smash it with your hobnail boots!’
Beth lifted her hands away from her ears a little, so that she could hear better. The woman wasn’t going to hurt Sam, she was pretty sure of that. She wasn’t shouting quite as loudly now and her hand was tugging at her hair, not waving in the air.
