daughter’s cheek. He felt instead the coldness of the laptop’s screen.
‘You were on the train,’ Leo said. ‘You were taking pictures of us even before we got there?’
Archie was a ball on the floor, his eyes shut once again and his nostrils pressed into the carpet. ‘I was following you,’ he mumbled. ‘You went by train.
Leo scrolled again through the thumbnails, focusing on the images of his family crossing the green.
‘How do I enlarge these?’
Archie did not answer but Leo had worked it out for himself. He double clicked an image, scanned it, closed it again. He checked another, and then another, and then another. There was nothing, no one. He zoomed in, then reset the image. He opened another, zoomed, panned out again. A beard. Anyone with a beard. Anyone who looked even remotely like the man Megan had seen at the—
A face. Masked, almost, by an upturned collar, a beanie pulled low over the eyes. Leo zoomed. He stared. And he heard the voice.
26
This was harder. At least before it had felt like they had been through the worst of it. Their oxygen had been cut off and, after the initial panic, they had submitted to asphyxiating slowly – not without pain but numb to it. Now, waiting, it was like they had been instructed to take a deep breath while someone worked on fixing the supply. They had no idea how long it would take or whether it could even be done. All they knew for certain was that this was their very last gasp.
Leo, for the first time in a while, was attempting sitting. He beat the table, drumming out his fretfulness through his fingertips.
‘Leo.’
Megan was standing beside the sink, her arms around her middle and her back to the room. In front of her was a plastic milk bottle and a mug of half-made tea. Either she had forgotten what she had been doing or she was drawing out the ritual for as long as possible.
‘Leo,’ she repeated. ‘Please.’
Leo, with a glance, settled his fingers. He stared at his flattened hands.
What if he’d fled? He must have known, surely, that they would catch up with him. Somehow, at some point – in this day and age. So if he fled. If he panicked. If he suspected he was running out of time… He would let her go. Wouldn’t he? Surely he would. It was the only rational course of action. He was caught anyway. Why make things worse? Not just worse: intensely, immeasurably so.
‘Leo.’
Even to someone as addled as this… this
‘Leo, you’re…’
And he was that. A lunatic. Someone deranged. Quite what had happened to make him so, Leo could not begin to imagine. It wasn’t rage, this, after all. Or if a mist had descended, it had settled. Low enough to obscure any guiding light but not so dense that the man was unable to plan, to scheme, to act as though—
‘Leo!’
Megan was facing him now across the breakfast bar. Something in her seemed to have shattered. ‘Stop!’ she said. ‘Please! Stop drumming your blasted fingers!’
Leo swallowed. He slid his hands into his lap. Sorry, he tried to say but his throat, his mouth, was gummed dry.
Megan, eyes closed, said it instead. She started to say something more but turned back in silence towards the worktop. She stood facing the sink. She flicked on the kettle. It must have been the third or fourth time she had set it to boil.
Leo studied her. She had on her pyjamas, as well as the jumper that had emerged from her closet on day two: a polo neck, the one she described as her hot-water bottle and only ever wore when she was ill. It was fraying at the joins and two sizes too big, so that the sleeves hung to her knuckles and the shoulders overlapped her arms. Her hair was gathered in a shabby bunch and her skin was sallow and free of make-up – and not just because it was the middle of the night.
Leo swallowed again. He slid back his chair. It scraped on the ceramic-tiled floor and he saw the sound rattle Megan’s spine. She twitched her chin in his direction, then gripped the handle of the kettle, as though impatient for it to steam. Leo touched the chair, the table, the dresser. He moved from one piece of furniture to the next. He closed on Megan’s back and reached his hands towards her shoulders.
‘Don’t.’ Megan stepped away and turned. She pressed herself against the roll of the worktop and wrapped herself tight.
‘Meg.’ Leo took another step and his wife seemed almost to flinch.
‘Don’t,’ she said again. ‘Please.’
It was the please that hurt most.
‘Meg. We need to talk. Don’t you think?’
She did not answer – and her silence, suddenly, was more than Leo could bear. After weeks of this. The skulking, on his part; the passive loathing on hers. Nothing said, everything implied, even through the cold formality of the words they did exchange. No physical contact of any sort, though Leo longed to hold his wife, to be held in turn by her. They had collided, once or twice, in doorways, around corners, and he had caught the scent of her – the warmth of her – only for Megan to bear it briskly away. She had not even unpacked. The case she had filled the day Ellie had been taken lay distended on their daughter’s floor. Her family had returned to their homes – to their beds, anyway, though Megan’s mother was invariably back with them by nine – but Megan herself behaved like a guest: sleeping apart, eating apart, confining herself to narrow corridors of space. Not a guest, then. A prisoner. Someone trapped. And even though Leo had tried everything he dared to free the both of them, she refused to look beyond what in her mind had the inviolability of scripture: that everything that had come to pass – all of it – was Leo’s fault.
‘I didn’t mean for this to happen, you know.’
Plaintive, he was dimly aware, would have been a better tack: healthier, more nourishing, less like gobbling grease to sate a hunger. Yet he could sense his fury gathering, barging its way towards the surface. ‘Is that what you think?’ he heard himself saying. ‘That I meant for this to happen? That this was somehow my plan all along?’
Megan remained silent. Everything about her seemed to tighten.
‘I’m sorry, Meg! I don’t know how many times you want me to say it!’
She watched him. Just stared at him.
‘She’s my daughter too. I want her back too!’
No movement. Nothing. Not a twitch – until he stepped.
Megan slid away, towards the open part of the room. ‘Don’t,’ she said once more.
Don’t. Don’t, don’t, don’t. Leo held up his hands. ‘Fine.’ He backed as far from his wife as the kitchen units would allow. ‘Don’t talk to me. Don’t touch me. Just carry on acting like I don’t exist. Like you’re the only one who’s feeling any pain.’
Megan made a sound. It was difficult to read. Disdain, most likely. Or pity?
‘We need to get past this, Meg. We need to talk about it. Because when they find him. When they find El —’
‘Don’t! Don’t say it!’
Not pity then. Leo felt his chin fall. ‘What? Why not? They’ll find her, Meg! How can they not? One way or…’ He shook his head. He had not meant to start that sentence. ‘The picture,’ he said. ‘It’s all they needed. With the picture they—’
‘Stop it! For God’s sake, Leo! Don’t you think you’ve taunted fate enough!’
‘Fate?’ Leo felt his lip curl. ‘Fate has nothing to do with this!’
