W
ill felt his face pale, the
blood draining from it. His head seemed light, insubstantial. He read the
message again, scouring it for some clue, some indication that it was a cruel hoax.
He looked to see if he had been ‘bcc’d’, which would make
this spam, sent out to millions. Maybe the Beth subject line was a coincidence.
But there were no such signs. He looked for a ‘signature’ at the
foot of the page. Nothing but junk. His palms were sweating as he turned on his
cell phone.
He scrolled down to B and pressed Beth, the first one to pop up.
Please answer. Please God let me hear her voice
. The phone rang and
rang, with one tone suddenly shorter than the rest: it was diverting to
voicemail.
Hi, you ‘we reached Beth
… He crumpled as he
heard her voice, surrendering as a memory floated into his head. The very first
time he had asked her out, it had been via a message on her answering machine. ‘Unless
it would be wildly inappropriate,’ he had begun, ‘I wondered whether
you’d like to have dinner on Tuesday night.’ ‘Wildly inappropriate’
had been his way of checking that she was single.
‘Hello, this is Beth McCarthy and the answer is no,’ came the
reply, also left via voicemail, ‘it would not be wildly inappropriate for
us to have dinner on Tuesday. In fact, it would be lovely.’ Will had
replayed that message a dozen times when he had first got it. Just as he
replayed it now, in his head.
He stopped the call, his hands now quivering as they punched in the number
of the hospital. ‘Hello, please page Beth Monroe. It’s her husband.
Please.’
Hold-music by Vivaldi; he was begging it to stop, praying for it to be
broken by the sound of someone picking up and for that someone to be Beth.
Please
let me hear her voice
. But the music played on. Eventually: ‘I’m
sorry, sir, there seems to be no response to that page. Is there another doctor
who can help?’
A sudden realization. She might have been gone for hours. Perhaps she had
been snatched from their bedroom in the dead of night. They had spoken just
before twelve her time. Maybe the kidnappers broke in at five? Or six? Or just
now? He was a continent away, fast asleep when he should have been protecting
his wife.
He looked at the email again, his heart shrinking as he saw those words. He
tried to focus, to look at the top of the message, among those strange, garbled
characters. There were some numbers, today’s date and a timestamp which
said 1.37pm, even though that was several hours away. That gave no clue.
Of course, he should call the police. But these people, these bastards,
seemed so adamant — as if they really would not hesitate to kill Beth.
Uttering the word, even if only as a thought in his own head, made him recoil.
He regretted formulating the idea, as if expressing it made it real. He wished
he could take it back.
In a moment of childish need, he realized he wanted his mother. He could
call her — it would only be mid-afternoon in England now — and it
would be such a comfort to hear her voice. But he knew he would not. She would
panic; she might have an anxiety attack. She certainly could not be trusted not
to phone the police, or at least talk to someone who would talk to someone who
would. The simple truth was, she was too far away for him to manage and his
mother was a person who needed managing. (He realized that word was a Beth-ism.
It made sense that she was one of the very few people who knew how to handle
Will’s mother.) He was slowly beginning to see that there was only one person
he could ask, only one person who might know what to do. His hand shook as he
reached for the hotel phone, something telling him this was not a call to be
made on a cell.
‘The office of Judge William Monroe, please.’ A click. ‘Janine,
it’s Will. I need to speak to my father right away.’
Something in his voice cut through all social convention, conveying to his
father’s secretary that this was indeed an emergency. She dispensed with
her usual small talk. She simply cleared out of the way, like a car making room
for an ambulance. I’ll patch you through to his car now.’
A cell
phone
, thought Will, worriedly. He would have to let it pass: more
important now just to get through.
It was a relief to hear his father pick up. The child in him felt glad, like
a boy who persuades his dad to come kill a spider. Good, now an adult was going
to take over. Doing his best to hold his voice steady, he told his father what
had happened, reading the email out slowly, twice.
Monroe Sr’s voice instantly dipped; he did not want to be overheard by
his driver. Even in a whisper his voice had the deep authority that made him
such a presence on the bench.
Now, as he would in court, he asked all the pertinent questions, pressing
his son to tell him everything he could work out about the sender. Finally, he
delivered his ruling.
‘It’s obviously an attempt at extortion. They must know about
Beth’s parents. It’s a classic ransom demand.’
Beth’s parents. He would have to tell them. How would he even utter
the words? ‘I want to call the police,’ said Will.
‘They know how to handle these things.’
‘No, we mustn’t do anything too rash. My understanding is that
kidnappers usually assume the victim’s family will go to the police: they
factor it into their planning. There must be a reason why these people are so
determined to avoid the police being involved.’
‘Of course they don’t want the police to be involved! They’re
fucking kidnappers, Dad!’
‘Will, calm down.’
‘How can I calm down?’ Will could feel his voice about to break.
His eyes were stinging. He did not dare try speaking again.
‘Oh, Will. Listen, we’re going to get through this, I promise.
First, you need to get back here. Immediately. Go to the airport right away.
I’ll meet you off the flight.’
Those five hours in the air were the hardest of Will’s
life. He stared out of the window, his leg oscillating in a nervous tic that
used to strike him during exams. He refused all food and drink, until he noticed
the cabin attendants were eyeing him suspiciously. He did not want them
thinking he was poised to blow up the plane, so he sipped some water. And all
the time he was imagining his beloved Beth. What were they doing to her? He
began to picture her tied to a chair, while some sadist dangled a knife—
It took all his strength to stop such thoughts before they had picked up
speed. His guts were turning over.
How could I not have been there? If only
I had phoned earlier. Maybe she called the cell phone when I was asleep
…
Throughout he held the BlackBerry in the palm of his hand. He hated
everything about this accursed machine. Even to glance at it brought those
chilling words right back. He could see them now, hovering in the air in front
of him:
INVOLVE THE POLICE AND YOU WILL LOSE
HER.
He looked at the device, so small yet now containing so much poison. It was
sleeping: no signal at this height. He kept watching the icon at the top right
that would tell him when it was back within range. As the plane began its descent,
he stole peeks at it. He did not want the flight attendants reminding him that
they had asked that all ‘electronic devices be turned off until the
aircraft has come to a complete stop’.
At last he could see the sparkle of New York City in mid afternoon.
She’s down there
. The bridges, the highways, the flickering
necklaces of light criss-crossing the whole vast metropolis.
She’s
there somewhere
.
He glanced down at the BlackBerry, moist with his own palm-sweat. The icon
had changed; it was back in range. Now the red light was flashing. Will’s
heart began to pound. He looked at the new messages flowing in, each one taking
its place like passengers in a bus queue. Some round-robin cinema listing; an
internal message from work about a lost notebook. There was a news-alert from
the BBC website.
Tributes have been pouring in for the Chancellor of the Exchequer,
Gavin Curtis, found dead this evening, apparently from a drugs overdose. Police
say he was found by a cleaner in his Westminster flat, with an excess of a
sedative drug in his bloodstream. It’s believed that the police are not
looking for anyone else in connection with Mr Curtis’s death …
Will was staring out of the window, just imagining the media frenzy back in
London. He had grown up there: he knew what the British press was like when its
blood was up.
They had been gunning for this guy for days and now they had got their
scalp. Will could not remember the last time a politician had actually topped
himself: when it came to taking responsibility, resignation was usually as far
as they would go, and even that had become pretty rare. This Curtis must have
been guilty as hell.
And then one more message popped into the BlackBerry.
the same hieroglyphic string that refused to reveal itself. Subject:
Beth
.
Will clicked it open.
WE DO NOT WANT MONEY.
‘I
t must be a bluff.’
‘Dad, you’ve said that three times. Tell me, what do you think
we should do? Should we offer them money anyway? What should we fucking do?’
‘Will, I don’t blame you at all, but you must calm down. If we’re
to get Beth back we need to think as clearly as we can.’
That ‘if stopped Will short.
They were in Will and Beth’s apartment. There was no sign of a
break-in; everything was how he had last seen it. Except now a chill seemed to
be coming off the walls and ceilings: the absence of Beth.
‘Let’s think through what we know. We know that their first
priority is that the police not be involved: they said it in their very first
message. We also know that they say it’s not about money. But if this is
not about ransom, why else would they care so much about keeping the police out
of it? They must be bluffing. Let’s think about your email address. Who has
it?’
‘Everyone has it! It’s the same pattern for the whole
Times
staff. Anyone could work it out.’
A phone rang; Will pounced on his, frantically pressing buttons, but the
sound kept coming. Calmly, his father answered his own phone.
Nothing to do
with this
, he mouthed silently, disappearing into another room for a hushed
conversation.
His father was proving no help. The aid he was offering was defiantly of the
masculine variety, practical rather than emotional, and even that was not
getting anywhere. Suddenly Will realized how much he missed his mother. Ever since
he had been with Beth, that sentiment had become rarer and rarer: his wife was
his confidante now. But, for a long while, that role had belonged to his mother.
In England, they had been a team, united by what he suddenly thought of as
their loneliness. In his mother’s version of the story, at least, she and
Will had been abandoned by his father, leaving the two of them to fend for
themselves.
He knew there were alternative accounts, not that his father was in too much
of a hurry to share his. The fate of his parents’ marriage was a
long-running puzzle to Will Monroe.
He was never completely sure what happened.
One version said Monroe Sr had chosen his career over his family: over-work
broke the young marriage. Another theory cited geography: wife was desperate to
return to England, husband was determined to advance through the US legal
system and refused to leave America. Will’s maternal grandmother, a
silver-haired Hampshire lady with a severe expression that frightened the young
boy the first time he saw her, and for years afterwards, once spoke darkly of ‘the
other great passion’ in his father’s life. When he was old enough
to inquire further, his grandmother shrugged it off.
To this day, he did not know if that ‘great passion’ was another
woman or the law.
Will’s own memories offered little help; he was barely seven years old
when his parents began to come apart. He remembered the atmosphere, the gloom
that would descend after his father had stormed out, slamming the door. Or the shock
of finding his mother, red-faced and hoarse after another fierce round of
shouting. He once woke up from sleep to hear his father pleading, ‘I just
want to do what’s right.’ Will had tiptoed out of bed to find a
place where he could watch his parents unseen. He could not understand the
words they were saying but he could feel their force. It was at that moment,
hearing his British mother and American father at full volume, that the seven
year old boy developed a theory: his mummy and daddy could not love each other
because they had different voices.
Once they were back in England, his mother gave few clues as to what had
brought them there. Even raising the topic carried the risk of turning her into
a bitter, ranting woman he hardly recognized and did not like. She would mutter
about how her husband became ‘a different man, utterly different’.
Will remembered one Christmas, his mother speaking in a way which frightened
him; he could not have been much older than thirteen. The detail had faded now,
but one word still leapt out. It was all ‘his’ fault, she kept saying;
‘he’ had changed everything. The intonation made clear that this ‘he’
was a third party, not his father, but Will could never figure out who it was.
His mother was coming off like a paranoid, raving in the streets. Will was
relieved when the storm passed and he was not brave enough to mention it again.
Friends, and his grandmother for that matter, were quick to analyse Will’s
return to the United States after Oxford as a response to all this. He was ‘choosing’
his father over his mother, said some. He was trying to reconcile the two, in
the manner of many children of divorce, with himself as the bridge; that was
another pet explanation. If he subscribed to any theory, which he did not, it
would have been the journalistic one: that Will Monroe Jr went to America to
get to the truth of the story that had shaped his early life.