by Jane Johnson
“I’m in, ah, Withybush General, in…uh…Haverfordwest. Sounds like something out of The Hobbit, doesn’t it?”
“Where’s Luke?” Kate enunciated with furious care.
“Sorry, sorry, trying to remember. Luke, yes, Luke. James took him. He just turned up on the doorstep. I think, I think, yes…his mother must have phoned him after she saw Luke. That’s right. She said he looks the spitting image of his dad at that age. She cried, you know. Said she hadn’t known he had a son. Thought it was a daughter, but maybe her memory wasn’t very good anymore.”
Kate took deep breaths. “James has got Luke?”
“Yes.”
“And that would have been the day before yesterday?”
A silence at the other end of the line. “Really? God, didn’t realize I’d been so out of it for so long. Oh, Kate—”
“What the hell happened?”
“I went to Porth Clais, to that cottage you described. You know, the one you said James was standing outside as a little boy. I went there to look for his mother. But the cottage was empty, holiday let now, or something. Anyway, I asked around. God, this is making my brain hurt. Sorry, sorry, bear with me. I asked around in St. David’s if they knew anyone who lived at that cottage and some old dear in the grocer’s said, ‘Do you mean Margaret Hyde?’ And I said I wasn’t sure of her name, but she’d be around eighty now, and had a son called James, who was fifty-something, and the old woman clutched my arm and said, ‘That’ll be Maggie. She moved to Haverfordwest twenty-odd years back when her knees give her trouble and she couldn’t do the walk anymore. You give her my love when you see her, tell her Olive asked after her, won’t you?’”
“His mother’s still alive?” But all this time James had said she was dead. What a thing to lie about. She felt faint as the reality of the situation began to sink in. Her husband—the man who had tricked her, lied to her, raped her—had somehow found Jess and taken Luke. She realized Jess was still rambling.
“I’m sure you’d have been a lot better at this than me, data analyst versus designer and all that, but I found her in the end. Age Concern, or was it the council—”
“Jess! Just tell me where Luke is! Where did James take him? Can you please focus?”
Her sister apologized again. “I’m sure it’s the drugs, making me like this. Unless it was the punch.”
“The…punch?”
“He punched me. James punched me. Right in the mouth. I lost three teeth. The doctors said it was lucky I didn’t choke on them and die.”
“What?”
“I said, the doctors said—”
“James hit you in the mouth? Jesus, the, the fucker!”
Jess let out a rough guffaw. “That’s right. He is! A fucker. That’s why I’m here, in hospital, in Haverfordwest. On—what is it? Sunday? Yes, Sunday. With concussion. So on Friday, two days ago, I found his mum and turned up on her doorstep with Luke, and when she saw him, she burst into tears and said, “How did you do that? Bring my lovely little James back to me before he fell into sin?” Then she sort of shook her head a lot and said, ‘No, no, that can’t be right. You can’t turn back time, can you?’ And I said, no, you couldn’t, but was she James’s mother, and was she called Hyde or Foxley? And she said she didn’t know anyone named Foxley, but that yes, she was a Hyde. Maggie Hyde. I gave her the old woman’s greeting—Olive, wasn’t it—”
“I don’t care about that,” Kate interrupted impatiently. “Tell me about James turning up and taking Luke.”
There was a long pause at the other end, then the sound of a muted conversation. Kate thought she heard a man’s voice, then at last Jess came back on the line.
“Apparently, no permanent damage a good cosmetic dentist can’t fix. Lucky not to have broken my jaw and swallowed my molars! They’re just going to run a couple more tests, then I can be discharged.”
“I’m coming back—don’t go anywhere! I’ll get the next flight—well, train to Madrid, then a flight—”
“Stop, stop! There’s no point in you coming here. James is coming to you! To Spain! Sorry. He made me tell him.”
Kate felt faint. “Before he hit you?”
“Yes.”
“What did you tell him? What did he do to you?”
“Just that you were in Granada, working at a bar. Nothing else—well, I didn’t know anything else. He, uh, tortured it out of me, I suppose.”
“Tortured you?” Kate’s outrage brought Abdou to her side.
“Ah, yes, I remember now. I’d better tell that police chap, whatever his name was. William something. No, Williams, that was it. DI Williams. I filed assault charges, actual bodily harm, or was it grievous? I can’t remember the difference. They took DNA and everything. It was fascinating. But I’d forgotten the abduction and stuff.”
“He abducted you?”
“He stuck me in the boot of his car. Sounds ridiculous, doesn’t it? Like something on TV. Yes, that’s right. Must have been before he punched me. Or was it after? It’s all a bit hazy.”
“Anyway—”
“Anyway. He tied me to a chair in this house and burned me.”
“What do you mean, burned you?”
“Oh hey, yes, that’s why I’ve got a bandage on my arm!” Jess sounded bizarrely pleased to have solved this mystery. “He burned me with a cigarette.”
“But James doesn’t smoke,” Kate said feebly.
“You don’t have to smoke to buy a packet of ciggies and a lighter, do you? It doesn’t say ‘DO NOT TORTURE ANYONE WITH THESE’ on the packet: they just show photos of the damage they can do to your own lungs and mouth and stuff…”
“My God, Jess. How many times did he burn you?”
“Three, four? No, two. Only two. I would have held out longer if I could have. But Jesus, it hurt. And he laughed.”
“He laughed?”
“I could tell he was enjoying it. But he was enraged when he got the answer out of me. Shouted something about Arabs or infidels or something, couldn’t quite make out what he was on about. And he called you a lot of names, and that was when I told him you’d probably run off because he was so weird in bed. You know, that thing you told me. Sorry, shouldn’t have done that, I just wanted to hurt him back in some way. So then he hit me.”
“Where was Luke when all this was going on? He didn’t see, did he? Tell me he didn’t,” Kate pleaded.
“James left him with his mother, said he’d be back. She was the one took me to hospital after James had gone with Luke. She must have made him tell her where I was. I was in a right state: had pissed myself, blood all down my front. I think she thought he’d killed me when she saw me: she was crying and mumbling, ‘Not again, not again,’ or something.”
“Not again?” Kate sat bolt upright. “Christ, Jess: do you think he killed his first wife? Ingrid, or whatever her name was? The one who fell off the cliff?”
A pause. “Well, I don’t know. I’d forgotten about that.” Voices again, then a rustle as if Jess was moving. “Got to go, Sis, more tests before they’ll let me out of here. Aren’t you proud of me for remembering this number?” And just like that, she was gone, leaving Kate staring at the phone.
“Is she all right?”
Abdou’s voice jolted her. It wasn’t that she’d forgotten he was there—he hadn’t left since James’s terrible call—but he’d done his best to be as unobtrusive as it was possible to be in such a small apartment.
“He hit her! And burned her arm with a lit cigarette, to find out where I was. He could have killed her. He may have killed someone else. My little boy, he’s with a…a torturer, maybe a murderer! The bastard. The utter, fucking bastard!” Kate swore viciously.
Abdou did not touch her, just sat on the chair opposite, hands between his knees, his expression stern, and waited until she stopped. Then he said, “What did she tell him about where you are?”
“That I was in Granada, working in a bar.”
“Except that you’re not anymore.�
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“Thank heaven for that. The idea of him teaming up with Jimena is too hellish for words. But Jimena has this address. It’s on my records.”
Abdou blinked. “Then you come to my place. There’s not much room, but I can sleep on the floor. It’s no problem.”
She grimaced. “You’re really kind. But that’s not the point. I have to see Luke. I have to save Luke. That means I have to see James.”
For a whole day after James’s phone call Kate had stamped around, furious, banging things about, swearing, fighting back tears, muttering “Bastard, bastard” over and over. Not once did she cry, which surprised her when she suddenly realized it. She didn’t feel like crying: she felt alternately terrified and murderous. For his part, Abdou had pottered around her little kitchen, gone out to fetch supplies from the supermercado on the hill, made a stew that she had been unable to taste, though she’d dutifully swallowed some of it under his watchful eye. The next morning, after a restless night, she snapped awake, to a world in which James had stolen her son and punched the lights out of her sister and burned her deliberately, slowly and with pleasure, with a lit cigarette. She remembered, abruptly, the sensation of sharp pain she’d experienced in the back streets of the Albayzín that night when Abdou kissed her. It must have been at exactly the time James had been torturing her twin. And now he was on his way to Granada.
“At least there are no direct flights,” Abdou had pointed out.
“What difference does it make?”
“It will slow him down a bit, give us time to think.”
“Not us—me.”
He looked hurt. “I can’t let you face him on your own. He hit your sister, burned her arm.”
“He’s done worse than that,” Kate said fiercely.
“Worse?” His face had gone very still. Then he looked at her arms.
“No,” she said hurriedly, “that was me. Because of him, but he didn’t do that to me, not directly.”
“You don’t have to tell me if it is too hard. I have no right to ask.”
“You told me your hard story.” She hesitated. “Forgive me, but there’s so much I don’t know about your culture. In some places in the world there’s no such crime as a man raping his wife: it’s regarded as his right.”
“Rape is rape,” Abdou said stonily. “An act of violence is an act of violence, no matter who does it.”
Kate nodded. “Yes. Yes, it is.”
“He raped you?”
“On our wedding night, and then every night till I ran away. The first time he made a strange ceremony of it, as if he were some kind of priest and I was a virgin to be deflowered. It was disgusting.” She lowered her head so that she didn’t have to see his horrified expression. She was repulsing him, she knew, but the story had to be told. Fiercely, she drove herself on, keeping her recital short and brutal, much like the act itself. “He tied my hands to the bed and kept grunting, ‘Mine, mine, mine’—as if it was all about him, and telling me he was making a son.”
There was a long silence. Then Abdou said, “And you did.”
“Yes. Luke. I can’t really explain why I called him that, except that I knew Luke was the patron saint of artists and doctors. I think I was inspired by the foot.”
Abdou frowned. “The foot?”
“The first thing James gave me: it was an artificial leg, made in Morocco or somewhere, but even though it was a prosthetic it must have been really beautiful when it was first made. Someone took such care in creating it—carving it with beautiful little arabesques and geometric patterns, just like some of the pillars and plaques in the Alhambra; and then they covered it with gold.”
Abdou smiled. “A rich one-legged man.”
“Or someone who loved him very much. I liked the idea of that, and the name just seemed right at the time, Luke. And now I can’t even picture my own son. He’s two years old. I haven’t seen him in nearly fifteen months. I haven’t seen how he has grown…” Only now did her face crumple.
“Don’t. You saved yourself, at least. If you hadn’t run, he’d have you both.”
“But what if he hurts Luke?”
“Why would he do that? He hurt Jess to get to you.”
“I’m going to make him give Luke back, to me or Jess.”
“And if he won’t?”
She looked pained. “Honestly? I don’t know.”
“Call the poli. Tell them what you’ve told me.”
Kate shook her head. “I can’t.” She remembered the way the policeman had smirked at the sight of the condoms in her handbag. “I just can’t. Besides, they have me in their records as Jessica Fordham. I’ve already lied to them: they won’t believe a word I say. And James is so plausible.”
Abdou held her gaze for a long moment, then shook his head. “He’s hardly gone to these lengths to calmly hand your boy over to you and fly home. I can’t stop you meeting him, Kate—that’s your choice, and I understand it—but make sure you do it in a public place where I can keep an eye on you.”
“You’re a kind, lovely man, Abdelkarim” was all she would say.
When her phone rang that evening, she answered it with preternatural calmness as Abdou watched with a grim expression. “Hello, James. Yes…Yes, I’ll meet you. Where?” She wrote it down. “At two tomorrow? I will be there. And Luke too?”
A pause.
“Good.”
Another pause.
“I’ll see you both tomorrow. Tell Luke his mummy sends her love.”
Pause.
“All right, I’ll bloody well tell him myself. Tomorrow.”
So this was it. The worst had happened. She felt as if she stood in the eye of a storm, here in the heart of Granada.
The next day, Kate walked out into the Albayzín feeling as though she was going to the scaffold or to the stake. The sun beat down on her, the walls of the narrow streets of the city channelling the heat like a furnace: it had turned out to be the hottest day of the year. Rounding a corner to take a steep alley down the hill, she disturbed a cloud of bluebottles that had alighted on a fresh dog turd pressed into the pebble mosaic paving the alley. One of them touched her face as she passed and she batted it away in disgust: stepping forward, she was assailed by an awful stench that wasn’t quite what she’d expected, and when she looked down, she realized it was not in fact a turd but a dead rat lying there, its yellow teeth exposed in a last gasp, its guts exploded over the cobbles. Farther down toward the Plaza Nueva, an orange cat streaked across her path, pursued by a small dog. Or was it a fox? It was gone, down steep steps, through a broken door into a courtyard, before she could tell.
Joining one of the wider streets that ran down to the Plaza Nueva, she had to step out of the way of a scooter and barked her shin on one of the little iron bollards that lined the pavement. “Ow!” It was her own fault: she’d been striding along in a sort of suppressed fury, her eyes trained ahead, not down. Such strangely shaped little bollards they were, too, like unexploded hand grenades. Oh. In all the months she had been here she had never really looked at them, but now she saw that they were actually pomegranates, the symbol of Granada. And then she realized, Granada—grenade: the words shared the same root, the many-seeded fruit suggesting the fragmenting device. Why had she never made that connection before? The thought struck her so forcibly it stopped her dead.
Then she decided: None of these signs is good. She almost turned back, but the furnace of the anger burning inside her drove her on. She had to be strong for her boy.
In all the time Kate had been in Granada she had not once set foot in either its great cathedral or the royal chapel. Having been forced into the Catholic faith, she felt nothing but distaste for its grandiose statements in stone, and for its dark and bloody history. But she knew where the cathedral was: you could hardly miss it, the great, hulking buttressed monster, squatting self-importantly in the centre of town.
As she turned the corner into Calle Oficios bells rang out, loudly discordant, overhead. It was tw
o o’clock…
“Kate.”
The voice came from behind her. She turned. He was just a shadow, a dark shape in the powerful sunlight, his form dense and silhouetted, and that alone was so suddenly terrifying that she almost screamed. But then he took a step forward and light fell from a different angle and she looked down and saw her son—Luke—the way she had never seen him in her life: a proper little boy in red dungarees with a long-sleeved blue T-shirt underneath, his golden hair glowing like a halo. She felt a huge and reassuring wave of love for him, in the same instant as she thought: He must be boiling in that outfit, in this heat—which in turn transmuted itself into fresh fury against her husband. She fought the urge to rage at him and went down on one knee, concentrating all her mental energy on the toddler. “Luke, darling, are you all right? You look very hot.”
He eyed her warily. Then he turned away, and buried his head against his father’s trousers. Kate felt a physical pain, like a shard of hot iron inside her, and when she glanced up, James was smiling triumphantly, one hand possessively on Luke’s head.
“He doesn’t even know who you are.”
He said it gloatingly, enjoying her pain. Then the splayed fingers twisted, forcing Luke’s head to face her.
“This is your mummy. Take a good look at her. You haven’t seen her in—what is it, darling, eighteen months? Or maybe you left right after the birth? Anyway, it’s no surprise you don’t recognize her. Have a good look. Go on. Look at the woman who ran away and dumped you like a bag of old rubbish. She flew away to the sun to have a lovely time without you. Because she’s a terrible mother, a terrible wife, an unnatural woman. She has no concept of duty or decency, no regard for God’s law or the natural order of things. She’s a harlot and an unbeliever and we’re here to make her repent her ways.”
Luke struggled against his father’s grip, his face reddening and crumpled.
“Stop it, James, for God’s sake stop! Can’t you see you’re scaring him? Luke, sweetheart, I’m so sorry you’re frightened. But everything is going to be o—”