‘Georgia brought me up to speed on what happened yesterday,’ Abby whispers as she sets down her medical kit near Mrs Neill’s bed. ‘We’ll call you if there’s any change.’
I practically fly down the footpath, feel like vaulting the fence. Want to grab the steering wheel out of the bus driver’s nicotine-stained fingers so that we ignore all the stops, all the angry people, and reach the city faster. Because Luc’s got it so right. He can’t find me, and I’ve had a lousy time of finding him, but Ryan Daley’s mortal. He has a physical body and a physical location. I’ve touched the guy, broken bread with him, called his cell phone, even stayed at his home. Met his parents, for Christ’s sake, and his bitch of an ex-girlfriend. He lives in a small town called Paradise, on a coastline somewhere; the ugliest place you’re ever likely to see, a complete misnomer. But that’s the point: there can’t be too many places like it. I know I can find it again.
Luc, on the other hand, I’ve never seen outside the realms of sleep this century or the last. I’ve lost count of how many years it’s been since we were in the same place together, flesh and spirit. I’ve never been able to track him down, not even after all this time, not even after all the hints he keeps dropping like crumbs from a benevolent god. Until I began to fathom what had happened to me, I’d taken Luc for a figment of my diseased imagination, a recurring dream, a vision of glory sent to blight my rest.
Though there are still holes in my recall big enough to steer a whole fleet of cruise ships through, maybe some things are finally beginning to . . . stick. Because something happened to me last night. Whatever it is that keeps me this way — caged inside another; doomed to play the ghost-in-the-machine — something changed when I saw Ryan Daley again in my dreams.
And what’s more, none of the Eight, not even Luc himself, has any idea of the extent to which I’m back.
I’m feeling something I haven’t felt in a long time. Hope so raw, it’s akin to pain.
Lela’s boss, Mr Dymovsky, is back behind the till this morning and I nod in his direction before throwing myself into the breakfast rush. I’m snappier than usual as I bag the orders and shovel them out in a steady stream; even Reggie’s in awe of the way I’m handling the jerks and losers, the downtrodden women and born-to- rule types that filter in here looking for sustenance.
Maybe I’m overdoing it, allowing too much of my own personality to shine through, because Mr Dymovsky says shrewdly in his Russian-accented English, ‘Maybe you forget to take care of yourself. Something about you, about your face, looks different, I think? Thinner, maybe. Sharper. You up to this? Because if you not, I find another girl to do the job, okay? Because we no need another Reggie here. One Reggie, she’s plenty.’
He’s a perceptive man, Dmitri Dymovsky, which you’d never know if you simply took him at face value. Because who would ever wear a cartoon tie with a striped, short-sleeved shirt? And the way he’s tucked both into the waistband of a pair of tight brown slacks gives him the rear profile of a boiled egg. He has wispy grey hair that seems to be trying to float off his head, a thin moustache, and big pouches under his pale blue eyes. He might be anywhere between fifty-five and seventy-five. He looks like a kind fool, put upon from many and diverse angles. But to misjudge him would be a mistake. I like him.
‘Sorry, Mr Dymovsky,’ I say as I slap together bacon and egg rolls with lettuce, bacon and egg rolls with cheese, bacon and egg rolls hold the barbecue sauce. ‘I’ll tone it down.’
‘Good girl,’ he says mildly. ‘Oh and Lela, next time wear black, okay?’
I nod like I mean it, but I’ve got one eye on the door the whole time waiting for Ranald to arrive.
Mr Dymovsky puts on a battered straw fedora, lifts it in our direction, then heads out to the market to do his weekly shop for bargain tomatoes, smallgoods, cheese, lettuce and fruit by the boxload.
At 10.42, like clockwork, Ranald’s batting aside the sticky plastic curtain and practically falling through the front door with his laptop bag, toobig suit jacket and his serious expression. It’s 10.45 on the dot by the time he sets up his computer and Cecilia’s sliding the first heart-starter of the day his way. Time for me to get what I came for: information.
When I walk up to his table, Ranald closes the window he’s working on and smiles. ‘Did you want me to find out more about Carmen Zappacosta for you?’
I shake my head. ‘The focus of my enquiry has shifted slightly. I need to find Ryan Daley, the brother of one of the abductees. I need to contact him in real time but all I have is a mobile number and no country code. Find him for me and I’ll be in your debt forever.’
‘You mean that?’ Ranald says, surprise and eagerness warring in his expression. ‘I’m going to hold you to it — dinner and a movie, if I get you what you want.’
‘Deal,’ I shoot back, not intending to stick around long enough to have to go through with anything. This time it’s about me. It’s my time now, and if I have to climb over the bodies of lovelorn IT guys to get the answers I’m seeking, then so be it.
Ranald types Ryan’s name straight into the search engine and gets ten pages of search results. He shakes his head, unprepared to wade through random fishing blogs and heavy metal’s all-time greatest hits lists generated by schmucks called Ryan Daley.
‘Let’s narrow it down a little more,’ he says. ‘Mobile number?’
I give it to him, and feel a jolt when my eyes settle on the first item that comes up on the first page of new search results.
‘What is that?’ I breathe, leaning in closer to the screen and running my finger along the string of letters and numbers beneath Ryan’s name and mobile number.
Ranald’s voice is dismissive. ‘It’s the URL for his page on a social networking website for show ponies, fake friends and stalkers. How do you know this guy again?’
I almost can’t speak for the sudden rapid pounding of Lela’s heart in my ears. ‘Someone I lost contact with. An old friend that I’ve been meaning to look up for a long time but the whole Carmen thing flared up. He should be a lot more . . . receptive to contact from me now.’
Ranald’s looking at me suspiciously.
‘That’s why I needed the background info you dug up the other day,’ I say hastily. ‘I had to know if I had the right guy, and I do. Can you . . . click on this?’
‘Sure,’ he says, lips pursed as if the action is distasteful.
A web page fills the screen almost instantly, with a heart-stopping photo of Ryan in the top left corner. It’s a moody black and white shot, and he’s looking away from the camera, but I’d know the planes of his face, the curve of his mouth, that fall of black hair, anywhere.
Just seeing him again like this brings back the sound of his voice, the way he holds a steering wheel, the way I wanted to hold his hand but didn’t trust myself to, because me getting involved with someone like him — where would it lead?
The page asks politely if I would like to add Ryan Daley as a friend or send Ryan Daley a message. I feel a surge of that sea that I carry around inside.
‘You found him,’ I say, placing my hands on Ranald’s shoulders in gratitude. ‘You found him.’
My defences are down, as they always seem to be where Ryan is involved. So I’m unprepared when Ranald takes his hands off the keyboard and places them over mine where they rest on his shoulders. Before I have the sense to rip my hands away, I see, I see — — a dead bird nailed to a tree by its wings.
Small, shrieking rodents set alight in their cages.
A battered cat strung up by its tail, a crossbow bolt through its ravaged body —
I break contact abruptly and the images of those small, tortured creatures leave me and I can no longer smell the winter air, the scent of smoke and accelerant, feel the dry crunch of leaf litter and gravel under my feet. His feet.
‘Jesus God, Ranald,’ I say raggedly. ‘Don’t ever touch me again.’
I’m shaking, but he doesn’t need to know why. Nor do I need to know why he carries such things around in his head, like surface scum. I hate being touched; but this? This was something else altogether. I feel . . . dirty for witnessing something I was never supposed to see.
‘I’m sorry,’ Ranald says, crossing his arms and blinking rapidly. ‘I don’t know why I did that. I hope you didn’t take it the wrong way.’
For a moment, I think he’s talking about the atrocities he carried out when he was a boy. They were wrong. What other way could I take them? But then I realise he’s talking about grabbing hold of Lela’s hands, and the tenderness of that act belies the things I saw inside his mind. Maybe he’s changed. Maybe that’s what boys do —
