“That’s us,” says Francine, almost pleased.
Finally, under the menu selection titled Mother’s Plea, Francine and Leonard find themselves observing a room crowded with journalists and film crews. Two senior policemen, a female community liaison officer, and Nadia Emmerson make their way across the screen to take their places behind a trestle table.
“It’s the mother,” Leonard says, though she is not the woman that he knew. How could she be? It’s eighteen years. What had he seen in her? he wonders. “My God, she’s changed. I’d walk right past her in the street.” But Francine shushes him and edges forward on the futon.
Nadia Emmerson looks dazed. Her face is stained and shiny, stressed and tight with tears and sleeplessness. The liaison officer nods and puts her hand on Nadia’s arm to a salvo of flashes from the cameras. Nadia’s shoulders drop to field a sob. Another salvo catches her. But still she finds enough courage and willpower to start reading her statement and her plea, not looking at the cameras but at the tabletop. “If you are watching this,” she says to Lucy’s kidnappers, “then please don’t think I do not understand why …” But then her throat clogs up with queuing sobs, and try as she might, for awkward moments she cannot summon the breath to continue. The words, written out in capitals on the paper in front of her, are beyond speech. In fact, she does not have the strength to stay a moment more. She stumbles out of the room, to a final, heartless fusillade of flash. The liaison officer has to carry on for her and read the paragraphs in her flat, measured voice, picking up exactly where Lucy’s mother left off: “Mrs. Emmerson says, ‘I do not understand why you have carried out this act. You hope it will stop violence in some way. But you have threatened violence yourself. Against my little girl. She’s only seventeen. I beg you, let my little girl come home.’”
“Well, Birthday Boy, my undeserving Birthday Boy,” Francine says, rising to switch off the screen, then standing at the window to glare at the retreating frost, “what are you going to do?”
“For my birthday?” Leonard sees too late that her eyes are glistening.
“No, you idiot. You selfish bloody idiot. What are you going to do about that?” She throws a cushion at the darkened screen. “What are you going to do for that woman, that mother? Did you hear her at all? Did you look at her? Who gives a damn about your birthday now?”
“What am I supposed to do? You tell me.”
“You might at least pretend to care. That’d be a start.”
“I care. Of course I care.”
“Well, care enough for once to get up off your arse and act on it. What’s happening?” Leonard spreads his hands and shrugs. “My God, to think I found you brave and dangerous when I first saw you in Brighton, at that concert.”
“Please, Frankie, cut it out.”
“What, it’s too painful to hear the truth? You were playing like a madman on that night, like a demon, even. Live. I might not have wanted the recording, but I sure wanted the man. That’s the truth. What I couldn’t guess back then was that the jazz was the only thing about you that wasn’t”—she hesitates—“decaf.”
“Well, that was then,” he says feebly. Her truth has wounded him.
“What’s weird is that you don’t seem to give a damn what people think when you’re playing, at a gig. But when you’re not onstage, that’s all you care about, all that English blush and stutter that you do. Don’t cause a fuss, don’t give offense, don’t make a noise, don’t show it when you’re angry or upset—”
“I’m getting upset now.”
“Well, good.”
“I have to be a demon onstage, no choice,” he says finally, doing his best to miss her point. Decaf? It is a dreadful word. “That’s what a jazzman has to do, to survive the gig.” Jazz is a refuge from a hazardous world, he wants to say. It’s not a hazard in itself. He is not courageous when he’s playing, not mad and not demonic, just less frightened. He’s Lennie Less Frightened, mapping out a landscape of his own making where it is not truly risky to take risks. “It isn’t me. It’s just an act. The music makes me brave.”
“Let’s have some music, then, Captain Braveheart.”
THEY’LL TAKE THE BUZZ 900, Francine’s hybrid runabout. They dare not use the roomier and faster van. They have, she says, quick to enjoy the subterfuge, to keep below the radar. It’s probable that Leonard is still being monitored — his phone, his Internet use and e-mail account, his vehicle, at the very least. Perhaps that’s why he’s not been taken in for questioning despite the flimsy and unsatisfactory explanations he offered for his phone calls to Lucy. The police and NADA might hope he’ll lead them to the girl, the place where she is being kept. It’s possible their house is bugged. It’s possible the van is tagged. But the Buzz is a community pool car, not registered in either of their names. “Let’s go,” she says, “before you duck out of it.” He finishes dressing, though he hasn’t showered yet, or shaved, or even found time to locate his spectacles in the clutter of their bedroom.
They leave their house by the back garden, like burglars, and walk unnoticed through their neighbor’s garden and side gate. There’s no one outside watching them. They walk once round the block, as dawdling as dog walkers, checking for unwanted company, before returning to the car. No stalkers at their backs, so far as they can tell. Still, they have to be discreet and take the country route again, where license-recognition pillars are thinner on the ground and there are no Routeway chargers to register their highway fees and distances. Leonard checks the wing mirrors obsessively at first, but as soon as they have cleared the suburbs and estates there is too much empty road behind them to suggest a shadow. Quite what they’ll do when they reach Lucy’s house — Leonard has retrieved the scrap of card from the Florentine box on which he noted the number and address on Thursday night — and how they’ll get to talk with Nadia Emmerson without being noticed, they are not sure. They’ve not discussed it, actually. They’ll extemporize — one note and one step at a time.
At first, with her husband at the wheel, Francine travels in silence. She is both burdened and elated. Undecided still. Once they have reached the country roads and there is spasmodic scenery — a nagging, undulating screen of protected hedgerows with vaults and cupolas of more distant woods and hills — she brightens up, sits straighter in her seat, breathes less reprovingly. “I’d better use my cell,” she says, and busies herself calling the eight guests for that evening’s birthday dinner party.
“Tell them you’re not well,” mutters Leonard, instantly regretting it. And, then, “Say that I’m not well.”
Francine’s not the sort to tell a lie. Nor is she the sort to break a confidence. “Something problematic has come up we’ve got to fix at once. We’re driving out of town,” she explains, managing to disguise the tension in her voice. “Don’t ask. It’s too embarrassing.”
“That’ll set their tongues wagging,” Leonard says, but does not add what he’s thinking, that sometimes fibs are best. More considerate, for sure.
Francine, convincingly warm and regretful on the phone, is clipped with him again. “Let them wag. So what?” But at least they’re talking now.
“I’m truly sorry about the dinner party,” Leonard says, a touch too stiffly, after he has spent some minutes planning how best to broker peace with his wife now that he has sulked for long enough.
“It’s not important, is it, now?”
“No, but it was kind of you. As usual.”
“A total waste.”
“It was a thoughtful … thought.”
“There’s presents too. And cards,” she says flatly. “You haven’t even opened them.”
“Who gives a damn about my birthday now, you selfish bloody idiot?” he says, risking the mimicry at her expense. “I’ve got another one next year. In fact, I’ve got one booked every year until I’m a hundred and one.”