Some people will see it as running away but what do they know of all she’s been through? A day can feel like a year. The minutes vibrate like dying wasps. Even the seconds are shuddering, giving up as they fizzle towards a strange, unnatural calm – as if petrifaction is taking place. This might be running away yet it is so much more than that.
She waits at the baggage carousel which is sparsely dotted with business-style cases, the type that resemble a shoe box on wheels. Executive luggage going round and round in La Rochelle arrivals. It’s a strange hangar-like space, which in August throngs with pink Britons hauling folded prams off the rubber belt, sweating mothers and fathers carrying toddlers and more weight than they’d like, burgundy passports at the ready. She and Ian had been among them, all those years ago. Rollo in tears over something or other, wanting to ride in the trolley perhaps; Edie perched on the metal edge of the carousel reading, as usual. Ian scanning the belt through the jostling crowd for their motley collection of bags. But this is January, blown about by rough winds and only a smattering of passengers – the odd French businessman, eager to get outside and light a Gauloise.
The sky is filled with voluminous cloud which seem to boil up over the flat Vendée countryside. She drives under a canopy of trees, out of Fontenay-le-Comte, the roads smooth and empty. This is a spacious country. She is relieved to be away from tight little England and the reporting of Ian’s arrest. Soon there would be the prying do-gooders; friends letting out the rope. Yes, it is a relief to be in this empty land where no one knows who she is, much less cares about the depravities of her husband. Former husband, she should begin to think of him but can’t. She should have known, that’s what she returns to again and again: she should have known. When DS Bradshaw rang on her door last night, Miriam experienced the slowing of time, like déjà vu. The detective stepping inside the front door, saying Ian had been arrested on suspicion of murder, seemed like a repetition of an event which had already happened, time on a loop, elongated like a stretched rubber band. She nodded, giving the outward appearance of having taken in what DS Bradshaw was telling her, but Miriam felt as if she were below the surface – perhaps of a lake – the sounds slow and lugubrious. Thoughts not keeping pace, quite.
She went to Ian’s study, felt about in the desk drawer for the Nokia phone, the one with the child’s pirate stickers all over it, which should have rung alarm bells when she first discovered it but didn’t, she supposed, because Miriam had silenced them. You hear what you want to hear. See what you want to see. The phone wasn’t there, of course. She felt about, instead, for keys to the safety deposit box they kept behind the books in the lounge. You could always find the green metal box behind Gray’s Anatomy.
‘Are you all right?’ DS Bradshaw asked, watching her with a look of intense concern. ‘You seem … calm. Can I help you with something?’ she said, confused as to what Miriam was doing pulling books from the shelves.
At last, she unlocked the box and there it was – the phone, among some foreign currency and a Rolex given to Ian by the Sultan of Brunei. He hadn’t tried very hard to hide it.
‘I imagine you’ll be needing this,’ Miriam said, handing the phone to the detective.
‘Thank you,’ she said.
‘Is it the boy’s?’ Miriam asked.
‘I don’t know. Possibly.’ DS Bradshaw studied Miriam’s face, then added, ‘There’s something else I need to talk to you about.’
The detective told Miriam she thought Edith was alive – ‘I don’t say that lightly, Lady Hind’ – that she may have been smuggled to France by a man called Abdul-Ghani Khalil.
‘The Tilbury Docks case, the murder,’ Miriam said.
The detective said she thought Edith had been put in contact with Khalil by Tony Wright; that the phone calls between Edith and Wright had been to establish a pick-up point on one of the motorways outside Huntingdon. Wright would have known how to avoid the CCTV cameras; Khalil would have known how to get her across the border without detection.
‘But why?’ Miriam asked.
‘People want to disappear all the time. Commonest thing there is. Can you think of somewhere in France she might have gone? To hide?’
Miriam’s mind felt about among her memories, like her hand patting in the central desk drawer, as she processed the idea. ‘Possibly. I don’t know.’
‘I need you to give me a list of places she would know – places you’ve been on holiday where there might be a connection for Edith – so that we can inform Interpol.’
‘Let me go,’ Miriam blurted, and she held the detective’s gaze as intensely as she was able. ‘Let me go, please.’
‘I’m sorry, I—’