Lost

the call.

“Mrs. Carlyle?”

“She's not available.”

I could finish a book in the pause.

“Where is she?” The voice is still distorted.

“Mrs. Carlyle is in no condition to talk. You'll have to talk to me.”

“You're a policeman.”

“It doesn't matter who I am. We can end this now. A straight exchange—the diamonds for the girl.”

There is another long pause.

“I have the ransom. It's right here. Either you deal with me or you walk away.”

“The girl dies.”

“Fine! I think she's dead already. Prove me wrong.”

The screen goes blank. He's hung up.

27

The door in my mind is suddenly sucked closed. A feeling of desperation replaces it, along with the sound of the wind. Joe is kneeling over me. We gaze at each other.

“I remember.”

“Just lie still.”

“But I remember.”

“There's an ambulance coming. Stay calm. I think you just fainted.”

Around us the police divers are dragging air tanks from the Zodiacs and dropping them on the dock. The sound reverberates through my spine. Navigation lights have appeared on the water and the towers of Canary Wharf look like vertical cities.

Joe was right all along. If I kept gathering details and following the trail, something would eventually trigger my memories and the trickle would become a torrent.

I take a sip of water from a plastic bottle and try to sit up. He lets me lean on his shoulder. Somewhere overhead I see a passenger jet on its final approach to Heathrow.

An ambulance officer kneels next to me.

“Any chest pains?”

“No.”

“Shortness of breath?”

“No.”

The guy has a really thick mustache and pizza breath. I recognize him from somewhere. His fingers are undoing the buttons of my shirt.

“I'm just going to check your heart rate,” he says.

My hands shoot out and grip him by the wrist. His eyes widen and he gets a strange look on his face. Slowly, he shifts his gaze to my leg and then to the river.

“I remember you,” I tell him.

“That's impossible. You were unconscious.”

I'm still holding his wrist, squeezing it hard. “You saved my life.”

“I didn't think you'd make it.”

“Put paddles on my chest and I'll rip your heart out.”

He nods and laughs nervously.

I take a belt of oxygen from a mask, while he takes my blood pressure. The clatter and crash of remembering has ceased for a moment like a held breath. I don't know if I should exhale.

In the spotlights I can see the Thames sliding across the rocks like a black tide. “New Boy” Dave has sealed off the dock with crime-scene tape. The divers are coming back in the morning to continue searching. How many more secrets lie in the silt?

“Let's go home,” says Joe.

I don't answer him but I can feel my head shaking from side to side. I'm so close to remembering it all. I have to keep going. It can't wait for another day or be slept on overnight.

Joe calls Julianne and tells her he'll be home late. Her secondhand voice sounds tinny through the cell phone. It's a voice from the kitchen. She has children to feed. We have a child to find.

On the drive away from the river, I tell Joe about what I've remembered—describing the phone calls, the rag doll and the cold finality of the last phone call. Everything had a meaning, a function; a place in the pattern, the diamonds, the tracking devices, the pizza box . . .

We park on the same plot of waste ground, opposite the abandoned industrial freezer. Headlights reflect from the pitted silver door. The rag doll has gone but the witch's hat traffic cone lies among the weeds.

I get out of the car and move gingerly toward the freezer. Joe does his royal consort trick of walking four paces behind me. He's wearing a crumpled-looking linen jacket as if he's going on safari.

“Where was Rachel?”

“She stayed with the car. She couldn't go on.”

“What happened next?”

I rack my brains, trying to trigger the memories again.

“He must have called back. The man who hung up the phone—he called again.”

“What did he say?”

“I don't know. I can't remember. Wait!”

I look down at my clothes. “He wanted me to take my shoes off, but I didn't do it. I figured he couldn't be watching me—not all this time. He told me to walk straight ahead, past the freezer.”

I'm moving as I talk. Ahead of us is a wire fence and beyond that the Bakerloo line. “I heard a young girl crying on the phone.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes, in the background.”

The glow of the headlights is fainter now as we move farther from Joe's car. My eyes grow accustomed to the dark but my mind plays tricks. I keep seeing figures in the shadows, crouching in hollows and hiding behind trees.

The purple sky has no stars. That's one of the things I miss about living in the country—the stars and the silence and the frost on winter mornings like a freshly laundered sheet.

“There is a chain-link fence up ahead. I turned left and followed it until I reached the footbridge. He was giving me instructions on the phone.”

“You didn't recognize his voice?”

“No.”

The fence appears, dividing the darkness into black diamonds with silver frames. We turn and follow it to an arched footbridge above the railway line. A generator rumbles and repair crews are working beneath spotlights.

In the middle of the footbridge, I peer over the side at the silver ribbons curving to the north. “I can't remember what happened next.”

“Did you drop the ransom off the bridge?”

“No. This is where the phone rang again. I was traveling too slowly. They were tracking me. The cell phone must have had a GPS device. Someone was sitting in front of a computer screen plotting my exact position.”

We both peer down at the tracks as though looking for the answer. The breeze carries the smell of burning coal and detergent. I can't hear the voice in my head anymore.

“Give it time,” says Joe.

“No. I can't give it any more. I have to remember.”

He takes out his cell phone and punches a number. My pocket vibrates. I flip it open and he turns away from