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chapter 31
alex
A wave of nausea hits me and I shout to the embassy driver to pull over. He picks up the urgency in my voice and immediately swerves to the side of the Washington motorway, ignoring the furious sound of horns from the vehicles around us as he cuts across three lanes of busy rush-hour traffic.
I leap out of the car and rush to the verge, my hands on my knees as I bend over and retch into the blackened, polluted grass.
Gina Torres touches my shoulder. ‘It might be good news,’ she says. ‘We don’t know yet.’
I jerk away. ‘So you’ve said.’
‘Alexa, I realise how hard this—’
‘Don’t tell me that,’ I say fiercely. ‘You turn up and tell me I have to get on a plane to Washingtonright now, but you can’t tell me why! You’ve got no idea what’s waiting for me when I get to the embassy. A video of my daughter in a basement? Pictures of her rotting corpse in the woods? How can you tell me youdon’t know? What am I supposed to do with that?’
‘I understand how you feel,’ Torres says.
‘You can’t possibly—’
‘My son disappeared four years ago.’
I wipe my mouth with the back of my hand. My throat israw with stomach acid. I feel nauseous still, but there is nothing left in me but bile.
‘He was competing in a swim meet in Jacksonville,’ Torres says, her voice steady. ‘He’s a really good swimmer, he’s been on the school swim team since third grade. Fourteen kids got on the school bus, but only thirteen kids came home. The coach didn’t do a head count before they left, so nobody realised he was missing. He was at his dad’s that week, and my ex assumed there’d been a screw-up and I’d collected Nicolás from the meet myself. No one raised the alarm till next morning.’
Four years. I can’t even imagine.
In four years, Lottie will be nearly eight. Old enough to read and write, go to Brownies, ride a bike. I can’t get my head aroundfour years. The only way I manage to keep going is to focus on getting through the next hour without her. And then the hour after that. I can’t think about tomorrow, or next week. I don’t know how Torres is still standing.
‘How old was he?’ I ask.
‘Twelve. He’s sixteen now.’
I don’t sayI’m sorryor tell herhow awfulthis is. I give her the only thing I can: the present tense. ‘What is he like?’ I ask.
She smiles. ‘He has so much energy. I mean, he’s never still, not for a second. When he was little, we used to make him stand in the corner when he was naughty, and man, it used to chap his ass. He can be real hard on himself, too. He struggles with math and when he does his homework, he’ll snap pencils, the dining room ends up covered in broken pencils. He’ll say, what’s the point, Mom? Why do I got to learn about fractions? Whoever ate five-eighths of an orange?’
We’re members of a club no one ever wants to join. Everything looks different where we are: there’s a shadowthat covers the world. Losing a child – in the most literal, unbearable sense – changes you in ways you’d never have believed possible.
We are living every parent’s worst fear. Their nightmare is our story.
The driver sits on his horn and leans out of the window. ‘Hey! You coming?’
A lorry whooshes past, rocking our vehicle as we get back in. We cross the Potomac river and turn onto Massachusetts Avenue, where half-a-dozen national embassies are located. The car pulls up opposite an attractive red-brick building behind high railings.
Darius James gets out of the car and speaks to the security guard on the gate, and after a few minutes’ wait, we are all ushered inside.
I’m shaking so hard Torres has to sign my name for me in the visitors’ log. Lottie isn’t here; if there was a live child waiting for me, the faces around me wouldn’t look like this.
A secretary shows us into a small sitting room on the third floor and offers us coffee, which I decline. I feel like I’m going to be sick again. Gina Torres takes my hand as we sit together on the yellow sofa and this time I don’t pull away.
The door opens again. The man who enters looks even younger than me. ‘David Pitt,’ he says, shaking my hand. ‘I’m with the National Crime Agency in the UK. I’m so sorry to put you through this.’
‘Have you found her?’
‘The Italian police have received a call,’ Pitt says, mercifully dispensing with any more preamble. ‘From a Serbian mobile phone. A man identifying himself only as Radomir says he has information on Lottie, but he insists he’ll only speak to you. I have to warn you, it could well be a hoax. But we’ve conferred with the Italian and Serbian police and, for reasons I’m notgoing to go into now, both forces have concluded this could be genuine.’
The room swims. They must be fairly confident or they wouldn’t have brought me all the way to Washington. This could be … oh, God, this could be the break we’ve been waiting for.
