Footsteps on the stairs. Was somebody else coming up or was Hélène finally going down? He waited, listening at the door. Kite’s whole future seemed to depend on the next few moments. He was sure that she had gone, yet he needed to be certain. He kept listening out but there was no further sound.
At last he made his decision. He flushed the toilet and ran the tap at the sink to make it sound as though he was washing his hands. Kite then opened the door. There was laughter in the garden. Xavier was coming back. Kite remembered what Peele had told him. We think you won’t panic if you find yourself under pressure. Time to prove him right.
Kite went out onto the landing and down to the first floor, leaving the lamp behind. He could neither see nor hear Hélène, but was sure that at least two people were now entering the house.
He had to take the risk. He sprinted back up the stairs, grabbed the lamp, pulled the flex free from the table and waited on the landing, listening out for Hélène. He could hear Xavier laughing somewhere downstairs. Luc was with him. They were making so much noise it was impossible to hear anything else. Kite had no choice. Moving as quickly as he could, he carried the lamp down to the first floor. At the bottom of the stairs he waited again, saw that the coast was clear and hurried across the corridor to his room, closing the door behind him. He dropped the lamp on the bed and sat beside it, breathing hard. He felt as though he had walked through deep mud across a vast open field, exposed and vulnerable. Xavier was bounding up the stairs.
‘Lockie?’
Kite picked up the lamp, put it behind the door and said: ‘Yeah?’ with as much nonchalance as he could summon.
‘You OK? You didn’t come back.’
‘Sorry. Thought I’d lost my headphones.’
‘Ah, OK. We’re going into town. Want to come?’
‘Sure.’
If only he had waited, he could have stayed behind while everyone went to Mougins. Kite put his head in his hands. He again controlled his breathing in the way Peele had taught him: a deep breath in through the nose, holding it for a count of seven, then slowly out through the mouth. ‘Buddhist mumbo-jumbo but it works,’ he had said, turning the doubling dice to sixty-four in yet another backgammon triumph. Kite looked up at the ceiling. He had done it. He had successfully switched the lamps. The sense of achievement, after so many weeks of study and preparation, was exhilarating.
He changed into a pair of trousers and put on a clean T-shirt. Hélène was placing fresh flowers in a vase outside Luc and Rosamund’s bedroom. She had a quick, bustling manner and seemed to have been waiting for him to emerge from his room.
‘There is a toilet just here, sir,’ she said in French, indicating the bathroom door beside them. To Kite’s relief, it was evident that she thought he had simply lost his bearings and wandered into the wrong area of the house.
‘I realise that now,’ he replied. ‘Thank you.’
Seconds later, Xavier emerged from his room.
‘What was that about?’ he asked. Hélène had gone into the empty spare room to close the shutters.
‘Nothing,’ he replied. ‘I was just introducing myself. Let’s go into town.’
37
Isobel heard the car pulling up outside the cottage. For a short, sweet instant she imagined that it was Kite coming home to save her, but then the youngest of the three men, the one with the acne and the narrow chin, stood up and walked towards the door.
‘Who is it?’ Isobel asked him.
The man pressed a finger to his lips and looked at her accusingly, urging her to keep quiet. It had been easy to unsettle and annoy them in this way. From the moment the men had surrounded her outside the house and dragged her back inside, she had known that she would have to resort to manipulations. She had grown up with two older brothers and knew how to deal with men. She was a pregnant woman who had worked in paediatrics for almost six years. She knew that she could feign illness and hysteria, play on their sentimental weakness for their mothers and sisters, make them think that she would lose the baby if they did anything to hurt her.
The baby. Right from the start, Rambo had kept kicking, almost as if he knew that his mother needed support and encouragement. When the oldest of the three thugs had grabbed her and pushed her up against the car, Isobel’s belly had compressed against the metal. Initially, she had feared an abruption, but once she was back inside the house – screaming at them to let her go, calling them every name under the sun, making out that she would die if she didn’t immediately lie down – Rambo had given her a sequence of kicks, almost like an acknowledgement of the brilliance of her performance, and Isobel had felt a wave of relief.
As the day proceeded, she kept up the act. She groaned in pain whenever she moved. She went into the bathroom and came out complaining that she was bleeding and needed to go to hospital. The leader didn’t fall for that, but it didn’t matter. What was important was to keep up the show, to make them feel guilty for what they were doing to her, to make them imagine what it would be like to live the rest of their lives knowing that they had been responsible for the death of a woman and her unborn child. One of the guards, Karim was his name, was kinder and less volatile than the others. She made him fetch pillows, water and food. She sobbed and told him she was in constant pain. He liked football. He had told her that he supported Arsenal. She had
