The Missing Hours (24 page)

Finn looked at me, pursed his lips the way he does when there’s something he wants to say. ‘What makes you say that?’ he asked eventually.

‘The coat. It wasn’t where she said she was. For it to have been where I found it, she’d have had to be a lot further down the riverbank, towards Hereford. Where I found it was a good half-mile away.’

‘So …’

‘So,’ I said. ‘The way I see it, there are two options. Either she walked along the riverbank in a drug-induced haze, shedding the coat as she’s walking.’

‘Which means she was heading away from town.’ Finn glanced back out of the rear window. ‘You can’t get to that part of the riverbank from the road. The only way to access it is to follow the path from Hereford.’

‘Which means she was in Hereford during those missing hours.’

‘Or at least some of them.’

‘Or at least some of them,’ I echoed. ‘And the question then becomes, what was she doing there and how did she find her way there?’

‘Okay,’ said Finn. ‘Let’s call that option A. So option B is …’

‘Option B is that she’s lying to us,’ I said. ‘Option B is that she walked along the riverbank, that she shed her coat somewhere she wouldn’t be seen from the road, so that she would look cold, vulnerable.’

‘Like a victim.’

‘Like a victim. And let’s be honest,’ I said. ‘If anyone knows what a kidnap victim should look like, it’s Selena Cole.’

I pressed the accelerator down harder, too fast for the slick road, the overhanging trees with the deposit of leaves they had left behind.

I didn’t think Selena was lying. I didn’t think she was lying because I didn’t want to think that. I wanted a hero. I winced at the word, at the blissful naivety it implied. There was something about this woman, some kind of glamour. The fact that she had faced tragedy. That she had survived. That she had done something so far outside the common order of things, that she had done it well. That in amongst those things, she was raising two children – two girls – on her own. That she was succeeding in it. That her children loved her. That her children knew that their mother was a success.

It is obvious, when you come right down to it. I saw in this woman what I wanted to see in myself. It made me blind.

We step into the dim hallway, the smell of coffee, toast hanging heavy.

‘Can I get you some tea? Coffee?’ says Selena. Her smile is bright. As bright as my voice is.

I look at her. Really look at her.

She wears jeans, a slouch T-shirt, has her dark hair tucked up into a low bun. You can see her collarbone, the white skin standing proud against the deep navy of her top, the protrusion of it.

Her make-up is done, sparing, clean, and she screams efficiency, capability, calm.

She looks … normal.

Concentrate.

But there is a slight redness to her eyes, around the edges. Her voice has a thickness to it that would be oh so easy to miss. She has been crying. She steps back, waves a calm hand, ushering me in. It shakes, the tiniest of tremors. And it occurs to me that she is afraid of me.

There are voices in the house, low murmurs that drift along the tiled hallway. I strain to hear them. Selena looks at me, smiles.

‘It’s Orla and Seth. They’re in the office. They’ve decided to run the business from here for a couple of days. Just to make sure we’re all okay.’

I glance at Finn, a moment of silent communication.

‘If you’ll excuse me,’ Finn says firmly, ‘I need to have a quick chat with them.’

Selena stands, opens her mouth to ask why, then closes it firmly again, fixes a smile in place and indicates a closed door along the hallway. ‘Help yourself.’

Finn and I share another look, then I too smile, thinking that it is a peculiar kind of madness where we are all pretending that life is light, acting like we are not here to discuss a murder and a vanishing. Selena and I turn in to the living room, allowing Finn to follow the rise and fall of the voices. There are logs burning in the fireplace, the fire spilling out heat into the generously sized room. It wants me to unravel, threatens to soothe me with its spit and crackle. I keep my shoulders pulled up tight. ‘And are you?’ I ask. ‘Okay, that is?’

‘Yes,’ Selena says quietly. ‘We’ll be fine.’

‘The girls?’ I ask. ‘Where are they today?’

‘School. Well, nursery for Tara,’ says Selena. ‘We thought it was important that things started to get back to normal for them.’ She waves me towards a large leather couch. ‘Please. Have a seat.’

I sit carefully, watch as she crosses the room to a wingback chair beside the window, watch as her hand swings out, her fingers grazing a photo in a thick wooden frame. Her husband. Dressed in military uniform. She touches his cheek as she passes, does it without looking. Is she even aware she has done it?

She sits, crossing her legs, and in a flash I am in the psychologist’s office, the client. ‘I’m sorry about the mess.’

There is, in truth, little mess. Just a few toys left heaped beneath the bay window.

‘You have children?’ Selena asks, her smile calm, professional.

I nod. Smile the way you do when you are a parent and someone asks if you have kids. ‘Twin girls.’

‘How old?’

‘They just turned two.’ I think of their hair, identical ponytails, Georgia’s beginning to slip already, the band defeated by her exuberance, her energy.

‘It’s a crazy time.’

I can feel my mouth begin to open, the words waiting, desperate to be said. About how afraid I am, all the time, that they will trip or be pushed, that they will be sad or the cause of another’s sadness, that I will not be enough, that I am split into too many parts to ever be whole to them, that I will fail. I can feel it, the promise of relief waiting just there over the horizon.

Breathe.

I sit up straighter in my chair. Nod towards the heavy-framed picture, the handsome man in his dress blues. Ask a question I already know the answer to. ‘Your husband?’

Selena nods, a flicker of pain crossing her eyes, looks down. I feel the words in me begin to recede. A silence follows, heavy, and I fight the urge to slot words in, fill it up so that it is lighter.

‘He passed away,’ she says finally. ‘Last year.’ She speaks into her lap, looking smaller now, thinner still.

‘I heard. I’m sorry.’

She nods again and the silence rolls back in.

‘It was the attack in Brazil?’ I say, quietly.

She winces, and I feel a stab of guilt, that I have wielded the words as a weapon, designed to destabilise her, throw her off balance so that I may regain mine.

I think she will change the subject. I am expecting her to talk about the weather.

‘I had gone shopping,’ she says. ‘Isn’t that frivolous?’ She is looking out of the window, at the apple tree that overhangs it. ‘We had been in Brasilia for three days. We were due to come home the following day, and I wanted to get the girls presents. So I went shopping.’ Her voice is steady, far away. ‘Ed … he said he wouldn’t come with me. That he was going to have a lie-in. Prepare for the meetings we had that afternoon. He said he wasn’t planning on going to the seminar either. That he was all seminared out. So that’s why at first …’

She takes a deep breath, lets it slowly out. ‘I stopped at this little toy stall, in the Feira dos Importados. It’s … it was beautiful. They had all these wooden toys, exquisitely made, and I remember thinking that I would get something like that, something special. I remember I was holding a wooden Noah’s Ark and thinking of Tara. Then … it was like thunder. Only I knew it wasn’t thunder. Right away I knew what it was. Like I’d been expecting it somehow.’

‘Your husband? He was at the hotel when it happened?’

‘He was at the hotel.’ Selena looks back to the apple tree. ‘He was supposed to be in bed. He was supposed to be relaxing. So for a while, I thought he was okay. They hit the seminar. It was the delegates they were after. Wiped out half of the K and R industry in one fell swoop. How they must have laughed at that. And of course it was chaos there for a while, and people were missing, and no one knew how many. So for a while there was hope.’

‘Ed had gone to the seminar?’

Selena looks at me, then nods. ‘He’d changed his mind. He was there when the attack began.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘Me too.’ Her fingers tie themselves around one another.

‘It must be hard. With the kids, the business.’ I am the therapist now, and I spare a minute to wonder exactly what it is I am doing, where these questions are going.

Selena leans her head against the chair back, her voice quiet, so soft that I can barely hear her. ‘I keep thinking I’ve forgotten something. You know that feeling when you’ve not done something you should have done. And it’s nagging at you, but you can’t quite put your finger on it? It’s like that, all the time. Just this feeling of wrongness. Like the world doesn’t make sense any more without him in it.’

A tear rolls down her cheek.

I look away. Look at the fire. The flames dance, low.

‘A friend of mine, a psychiatrist, Gianni, he says that I need to allow myself this. That I can’t try and force my way through the grief and out the other side.’

I think of Vida Charles, her viper tongue – you know about the psychiatrist, don’t you?

‘Your friend, does he have an opinion on your … amnesia?’

Selena shakes her head. ‘He stopped by, after I came home.’ She looks at me, gives a brief smile. ‘There are advantages to having friends in the mental-health community.’ She shrugs. ‘Gianni, he says trauma. We – Ed and I – have dealt with this kind of thing before: hostage is freed, doesn’t remember what happened. Orla says I shouldn’t worry about it. That it’s over now. But …’

She wipes a neatly folded handkerchief across her cheek. This is my fault. I have cut her with memories so that I can regain control. I think of Alex, think of what it would be like if he were to simply vanish, and I feel my breath stop in my chest.

‘I’m sorry,’ I say again.

Selena smiles slightly. ‘It is what it is. And you can’t give up. You never give up. That’s what Ed always said. No matter how tough life gets, you just keep moving. One foot in front of the other. And no matter how long you have to keep walking in the darkness, if you keep walking, sooner or later you will reach the sun.’

‘Do you believe that?’ I ask.

She looks at me, her gaze steady. ‘What choice do I have? I’m sorry,’ she says. ‘You didn’t come here to talk about this. What did you need to speak to me about?’ She pushes herself upright, looks at me, waiting.

I feel the balance shift again.

‘I need to ask you about Beck.’ I do not need to ask her about Beck. There is nothing left I need to know. But it is a nudge, a move set to destabilise.

‘Beck Chambers?’

I nod.

‘Why?’ Selena asks, leaning forward.

‘His name has come up in an investigation. He worked for you. Is that right?’

‘Yes. For a couple of years.’

‘What was your impression of him?’

She is guarded now. ‘He’s a decent man.’

‘And yet,’ I say, keeping my voice flat, ‘you let him go?’

Selena sinks back into the chair, sighs. ‘Beck has had problems. After his kidnap, his release, he started drinking pretty heavily, started dabbling in drugs. Ed brought him in, helped him sort himself out. But then, after we … after Brazil … Look, the thing is, I wasn’t there. At that time, it was just about me, the girls, surviving. Seth and Orla ran the business, made all the decisions. They said that Beck was showing up smelling of alcohol. That he was no longer reliable. Seth felt he had no choice but to let him go.’

I nod, slowly. ‘Are you afraid of him?’

‘Who? Beck?’ Selena looks at me like I am insane. ‘No. Of course not.’

‘So you’ve never had any concerns about him? Personally, I mean?’

‘No. Why? What’s this about?’

I glance out of the window, the apple tree swaying, its branches clawing against the glass. Think that I could tell her about my thoughts, about the idea of devil’s breath. But I sit and watch the branches and keep my mouth shut. Because I no longer trust her.

‘There was a murder the other night. You might have seen it mentioned on the news. In Cardiff. A solicitor. A lovely guy. I knew him pretty well. Dominic Newell?’

She is staring at me, watching my mouth, although I am almost certain that she can no longer hear the words. She has gone deathly white.

I watch her. ‘Did you know him?’

Selena opens her mouth, closes it.

‘No,’ she says. ‘No, I didn’t know him.’

A Bombing in Brazil

Zachary Ellis

(Originally published in
The Security Journal
, October 2014)

It wasn’t the kind of day for a bombing. The Brasilia sky was too blue, the air too hot. It was day two of the conference – Inside Kidnap & Ransom – a gathering of people from the security and insurance industry. I’d been to these before and they’re busy and quite frankly so-so, some good seminars, some not so good. But I was excited about this one. In particular I was excited about seeing Dr Selena Cole.

I was running late that day. I’ll blame the heat. In truth, I had a hangover, the result of a heavy night catching up with colleagues I hadn’t seen in a while. I walked slowly, movements weighed down by the breathless September heat. The Royal Palace, the conference hotel, is a baroque edifice, all white and sinuous. It stands proudly in the South Hotel Sector, its wide-slung front steps overlooking the expanse of the Monumental Axis. It is also expensive, more than my meagre reporting budget will cover. So every morning I had a walk: ten, fifteen minutes maybe. That morning it was more like twenty minutes. I think about that fact every day.

I have worked in the insurance industry for many years. I crunch the numbers. I try to keep my firm from going bankrupt. I specialise in kidnap-and-ransom insurance. It sounds pretty exciting. The truth is, I still work in insurance.

I remember looking at my watch. I remember that it was 9.05. I had missed the beginning of the first seminar, but that was okay. The one I really wanted to see, the one presented by Dr Selena Cole, wasn’t on until after lunch. I had plenty of time. The seminar was titled ‘Negotiating in a Psychological Way: A New Paradigm for Kidnap and Ransom’. People were saying that she was waking up the industry, changing the way things were done, tightening them up, helping operatives rescue kidnap victims more quickly and (importantly for the insurance companies) cheaply. No surprise then that the Cole Group had been making waves. Started in 2004 by Ed and Selena Cole, it had conducted almost a hundred successful negotiations, reuniting kidnap victims with their families. With their backgrounds in special forces and psychology respectively, it is hardly surprising that they would be able to contribute a thing or two to the world of hostage negotiation.