The Horse Dancer, Page 39

  I'm in France, Papa, she told him silently, and it's beautiful. She pictured the old man in the bed, dreaming of the very roads she was travelling now, thinking with satisfaction of what she was about to do. And perhaps hearing his voice, his instruction, she straightened a little, corrected the precise angle of her lower legs, shortened her reins and began to canter, Boo's feet placing themselves rhythmically, elegantly along the grass verge in a manner that, had he seen them, might indeed have made the old man dip his head approvingly.

  Even as a child she had hated lengthy car journeys. She never remembered the cheerful campsites, the caravans by the sea, the fairgrounds and ice-creams or overjoyed relatives that her siblings later recounted. When asked to recall her childhood journeys Natasha remembered only the endless motorways, the miles between exits punctuated by cries of 'Are we nearly there?', her parents bickering in the front seats, the surreptitious kicks and pinches from her sisters, squashed each side of her in the back. She remembered the faint smell of vomit when someone, inevitably, became car sick.

  She was almost thirty years older now, but the dread had never been supplanted by the supposed joy of the open road, the excitement of getting to a new destination. While Mac, during the holidays of their marriage, had loved road trips, stopping where the whim took them, driving all night if he had thought it would be fun, she had wished secretly for an itinerary. The uncertainty of not having a meal and a pre-booked bed to count on disconcerted her; and her suburban outlook, as Mac seemed to see it, made her feel both inadequate and guilty for spoiling his fun. In the last couple of years they had settled - to the satisfaction of neither - on package holidays. She would sit by the pool, reading, trying to disguise the work papers she had smuggled with her, while he paced around the hotel complex, like someone trying to remember where he had left something, and ended up drinking with his new friends at the bar.

  Natasha's credit card had been used, the previous evening, at a French motorway service station. The difficulty, the credit-card operator had advised, was that the transaction had come up simply as 'La Bonne Route, Paris', a description that encompassed seven such places across northern France.

  'Well, I think we should head for the horse place,' Mac had said on the ferry the previous night. They had managed to get the car on to a late-evening crossing. She sat in near-silence, staring out of the glazed window at the dark, churning waters below, and tried to reconcile what she had heard from the credit-card company with what she had believed possible. How could Sarah have crossed the Channel with a horse? How had she managed to get to France? None of it made any sense.

  'What if it's not her?' she said.

  Mac handed her a bottle of water. He rested his feet on the seat beside her and she moved an inch away from them.

  'What do you mean?' He took off the top and drank. 'God, I'm thirsty.' He hadn't shaved, and his chin bore a layer of stubble.

  'What if she sold the card, or it was stolen from her? What if we're following the wrong person?'

  'It's possible, but it'd be a hell of a coincidence for someone else to want to get to France. And, besides, we don't have any other leads, do we?'

  Natasha pointed at the map on the table between them. 'Look at the distances here, Mac. John said a horse could travel thirty or forty miles a day at a push. It would have been tough enough for her to make it to Dover in that time. How could she have got across the Channel with a horse and then have ridden halfway down France? And, look, Saumur's more than three hundred miles from Calais. She hasn't a hope of getting that far.'

  'So what are you saying?'

  She leant back in her seat. 'We should turn round.' Her voice was uncertain. 'Or maybe call the police.'

  Mac shook his head. 'Look, we're committed to a course of action now. I think we should head for Saumur.'

  'But what if we're wrong?'

  'And what if we're not? It makes sense that she'd go there. Her grandfather thinks that's where she's going. Your credit-card says so too.'

  Natasha glanced out of the window. 'I think . . . I think we've got this wrong. We should have called the police yesterday morning. You're right - I didn't want to get them involved because I didn't want all of this out in the open. I admit it. But it's gone beyond that now, Mac. We're supposedly responsible for a fourteen-year-old girl who's lost, possibly in a strange country. I say when we get off the ferry we call the police. It's the responsible thing to do.'

  'No,' he said, adamant. 'The moment we call the police, she loses the horse. She loses everything. No. She's only lost in that we don't know where she is. She may know exactly where she's going. I'm prepared to trust her to be okay.'

  'That's not your decision to make.'

  'I know. But I'll take responsibility if it goes wrong.'

  'I'm her foster-carer too.'

  When Mac's gaze was so direct, it still left her a little flustered. 'You know what? If you'd really wanted to call the police, you would have done it yesterday. You know very well, Tash, that neither of us wants the police involved, even if our reasons are very different.'

  He had never been so decisive about anything when they were married.

  'Anyway, we're here now. We've got an idea where she's headed. I say we drive to the horse place and wait for her there.'

  Hurt made Natasha's voice harder than she had intended. 'And if you're wrong, if she's not safe, if she turns out not to be where we think, you'll be happy to live with that, will you?'

  Since then they had barely spoken. Mac drove the car off the ferry at Calais, and on through the night. He didn't take the autoroute, but the smaller roads, roads on which a horse might travel, peering into the dark as he drove.

  She dozed, and woke to the sound of his voice. He was speaking into his phone, low and insistent. 'It's not that,' he said, and, some time later, 'No, no, sweetheart. I don't think that's a good idea. I know. I know.' Natasha, uncomfortably awake, kept her face turned away, her eyes shut, her breathing determinedly regular, until he rang off. She left it another ten minutes before she yawned ostentatiously. At that point he suggested they pull into a rest stop and grab forty winks. It was after one in the morning, and there was little chance of them finding a hotel. 'We won't sleep long,' he said. 'A couple of hours at most. Then we'll drive on.'

  After the silent tension of the past hour, Natasha was glad to accept. They pulled off the empty road into the car park of a service station, which was partially lit by a solitary sodium light. There were no other cars, and on the other side of a low, straggly hedge, the flat fields of the Somme were mournful in the dark, imbued with the weight of their history. The engine ticked its way to silence.

  They sat awkwardly beside each other, a surreal parody, she thought, of some date, the prelude to a first kiss.

  Mac, perhaps sensing this too, was distant and polite. He offered her the back seat and, with an equally polite thank-you, she had climbed into it, rolled her coat into a pillow and laid her head on it, conscious that in the morning her suit would be even more crumpled than it already was.

  'You want to borrow my jacket? I'm not cold.'

  'No, thank you.'

  He fell asleep, as he had when they were married, like someone stepping off the edge of a cliff. With his seat tilted back, she could see his profile in the half-light, relaxed, his arm tilted across his forehead, and could hear the faint, regular sound of his breathing.

  Natasha did not sleep. She lay in a strange car in a foreign country, her mind racing like the speeding traffic in the distance, thinking about her lost career, a man in London who didn't love her any more, a girl who was out there at that moment, somewhere under the same sky, a web of unhappiness and loneliness, with herself at the centre. She grew chilled, and, regretting Mac's jacket, remembered a boy she had once represented who had slept, for months, in a car park. She had won him the case, had been utterly determined to do so, but she couldn't recall having wondered what it must have been like for him.

  All the while, throug
h the elongated hours, the man with whom she had once hoped to spend her life, the man she had pledged to love, the man with whom, in a parallel universe, she should have been wrapped in a marital bed, listening to their children sleep, shifted and murmured in the front seat, a million miles away. Perhaps wishing, in dreams, for a distant long-legged lover. Natasha lay in the dark and grasped, to her surprise, that divorce was not a finite pain after all.

  'Linda. Natasha.'

  'How's it going? Have you sorted out your . . . family problems?'

  They knew. Conor would have told them everything. Natasha regarded her creased skirt, her now-laddered stockings, painfully visible in the harsh light of morning. 'No. Not yet.'

  'Where are you? When are you back?'

  They had slept for hours, waking shortly after dawn. Mac had reached through the front seats and shaken her shoulder. When she had opened her eyes, confused and disoriented, it had been several seconds before she remembered where she was. A silent, bleary couple of hours' driving later, they had stopped at a service station to freshen up.

  'I'm . . . not sure. It's taking longer than we thought. Can I speak to Ben?'

  'He's out. With Richard.'

  'Richard? Why is he out with Richard?'

  'Did nobody ring you?'

  'No - why?'

  'It's the Perseys. They've settled. Their side approached us this morning and put a new offer on the table. More than she'd expected. And she's agreed timetabled access. God only knows if she'll stick with it, Richard says, but for now they're in agreement.'

  'Thank God.'

  'He's out celebrating with her now. He took Michael Harrington and Ben with him. They're going to the Wolseley for a champagne breakfast. She's a different woman already. I've told Ben to watch himself - she's been eyeing him like a hungry lion eyes a passing wildebeest.'

  Richard hadn't bothered to call. Her fleeting gratitude that the case had been settled satisfactorily evaporated, tempered by the knowledge that she would receive no credit for it. In Richard's eyes she was no longer part of it.

  She knew, in that moment, that she would not be made partner. Not this year. Not, perhaps, for many years. 'Lin?' she said. 'Is . . .' She sighed. 'Oh, never mind.'

  A dull ache penetrated her temple. She stood in the car park of a French service station, in two-day-old clothes, rubbing it while she surveyed the vehicles that passed in a blur. How had she ended up here? Why had she not done what she advised every trainee to do and kept her client at arm's length? How could she not have guessed that the chaos of these children's lives was, in fact, infectious?

  'So, how are you doing?'

  'I'm fine,' she lied.

  'No one here knows quite what to make of this,' Linda said carefully. 'You've held your cards close to your chest.'

  'And now I'm paying for it, right?'

  'There's a view that you could probably have handled things better.'

  Natasha closed her eyes. 'I've got to go, Lin,' she said. 'I'll ring later.'

  Mac was walking back across the car park. This was purgatory, she thought, her career ruined, her private life in tatters, she and her ex-husband destined to be stuck in a small car for the rest of their lives, bickering as they tried to justify the bad decisions they had made.

  'Oh! Natasha! I nearly forgot to tell you. We had a visitor here first thing. You'll never guess who.'

  He had stopped to say something to two older women who had just climbed out of a car. Whatever he said made them laugh, and she could see the broad smile he had not bestowed on her since long before he had moved out. Something in her constricted.

  'Mm?'

  'Ali Ahmadi.'

  Natasha tore her eyes from him. 'What did you just say?'

  'Hah! I knew that would get you. Ali Ahmadi.'

  'But that's not possible! He's on remand. Why has he been let out before the case goes to trial?'

  Linda laughed. 'That kid we read about was a different Ali Ahmadi. Did you know Ahmadi is one of the most common names in Iran? Apparently he's basically your Iranian John Smith. Anyhow, the one you represented came in to tell you he's got a place at sixth-form college and starts in September. Sweet kid. He brought you a bunch of flowers. I've put them in your office.'

  Natasha sat down on a low wall, the phone pressed to her ear. 'But . . .'

  'I know. We should have checked. Who'd have thought there'd be two of them? Nice, though, isn't it? Restores your faith in human nature. I could never quite see him as the violent type. Oh, and I gave him back that little horse pendant we meant to send him. I hope you didn't mind. He was happy to take it.'

  'But - but he lied about the distance he'd travelled. He still caused me to misrepresent his case.'

  'That's exactly what I said to Ben. As the interpreter was in we got the file out and asked her to have another look at the translation notes. And she came across something interesting.'

  Natasha didn't speak.

  'Ali Ahmadi indeed said he'd travelled nine hundred miles in thirteen days, but not that he walked it. That was what we - the interpreter too - all assumed. Before he left, Ben asked him - oh, you wouldn't believe how well his English has come on! Unbelievable! Anyway, Ben asked him how he'd got so far. He explained that he'd walked some of the way, got a lift on a truck for some, and then he held up that little horse. Some of it he'd ridden. Mule or something. But that's the thing - he never lied to you.'

  Natasha lost the thread of whatever else Linda was trying to tell her, where she had put the flowers, when she would call again. She lowered her exhausted head onto her hands and thought about a boy who had held her hands in a heartfelt gesture of thanks, a boy who had travelled nine hundred miles in thirteen days. A boy who had only ever told the truth.

  When she looked up Mac was standing a few feet away, two polystyrene cups in his hands. He glanced away abruptly, as if he might have been staring at her for some time. She shut her phone.

  'Okay,' she said, taking her coffee from him. 'You win. Head for Saumur.'

  She had taken a wrong turning. She stared again at the little map, already worn soft from repeated foldings, which didn't seem to explain why the route that should have taken her past Tours and a few miles to the lairage Thom had booked had somehow led her into a never-ending industrial estate. For some miles she had been travelling roughly alongside a railway line, but as Thom's map didn't show the railway she had little idea if she was heading the right way or not. She had trusted her gut, trusted that at any moment now there would be a sign for Tours, or some other landmark. But it hadn't come, the verdant landscape slowly morphing instead into something reminiscent of the edge of London, a concrete expanse with vast, empty sheds, car parks, huge posters for Monoprix or Super-U, whose corners flapped desolately from their hoardings. Periodically a train would pass in a roar, causing Boo to flinch, and then there was silence, broken occasionally by a passing car.

  The sun had begun to dip in the sky, the temperature dropping, and she was losing confidence as to whether she had correctly judged the direction in which she was moving. She halted, stared again at the map, then at the sky, trying to work out if she was still going south-west or in fact south-east. Clouds had gathered over the sun, making it harder to read the shadows. She was hungry, and regretted not having stopped at one of the friendly-looking markets she had passed through. She had been so impatient to keep moving. And so sure that by now she would have reached the stables.

  The scenery had become bleaker, the buildings blank-eyed, apparently unoccupied for some time. She appeared to be heading into a sidings: the track had split and become more tracks, each with lines of stationary carriages, shuttered and graffitoed, a web of pylons and cables above her. Uneasy, Sarah decided to go back the way she had come. She gave a long, weary sigh and began to turn Boo.

  'Que fais-tu ici?'

  She spun round in the saddle to see five bikes, scramblers and mopeds, two with a passenger riding pillion. A couple wore helmets, the rest bareheaded. Smoking,
hard-eyed. She knew these young men as she had known the boys on her estate.

  'Eh? Que fais-tu ici?'

  She didn't want to speak. She knew her accent would mark her out as English. She turned away from them and walked on, steering Boo to the left. Something told her she couldn't ride through them. She would hope they lost interest and went away.

  'Tu as perdu les vaches, cowboy.'

  Her legs closed involuntarily around Boo's sides. A well-trained horse will detect even the faintest tension in its rider, and this movement, with the slightest increase in pressure on the reins, caught Boo's attention.

  'He!'

  One roared past. She could hear the others behind her, catcalling, talking to each other. Her face impassive, she rode on, realising she had no way of knowing if she was walking into a dead end. The industrial estate was enormous, comprising warehouse-size buildings and deserted car parks. Graffiti scrawled in red and black on the walls told of the lack of activity, perhaps of hope.

  'He! J'ai parle a toi!'

  She heard a motorbike being revved up, and her heart thumped.

  'Eh! J'ai parle a toi! Putain!'

  'Allez-vous en,' she said, trying to sound more confident than she felt. Go away.

  They began to laugh. 'Allez-vous en!' one catcalled, mimicking her voice.

  Dark was encroaching now, Sarah began to trot. She sat very upright and heard the motorbikes skidding and revving behind her. There were more lights up ahead. If she could get back on to a main road they would have to leave her alone.

  'Putain! Pourquoi tu te prends?'

  One of the bikes had come up next to her, then dropped back. She felt her horse tense, his ears flicking, waiting for a signal not yet given. She rested her hand on his neck, gleaning comfort from him, trying to keep from him her rising panic. They'll go in a moment, she told him silently. They'll get bored and leave us alone. But the bike skidded in front of her. Boo stopped abruptly, his haunches dropping, his head shooting up into the air. Two more bikes swung round so that three were now facing her. Her scarf was up around her face, her hat jammed over her eyes.

  Someone threw a cigarette on to the ground. She sat very still, one hand unconsciously stroking Boo's shoulder.

  'Putain! Tu ne sais pas qu'il est impoli d'ignorer quelqu'un?' The youth had a north African appearance. He cocked his head at her.