And that was what unsettled him.
He could get up, cross the floor of the caravan and open the door. Step out any time he wanted. No one had to do it for him. He didn’t have to wait for special times. He could just get up and do it himself.
But he didn’t. Couldn’t.
Hadn’t.
He looked again at the door. The handle. Both thin metal. Easy to open. One turn. A push. And out.
He kept staring at the door. And felt himself rise to his feet. Like an unseen force was pulling him upright and moving him towards it. Like a horror film zombie in a voodoo trance.
He crossed the floor of the caravan. Reached the door. Put his hand out. Held it over the door handle. Not touching, but he could feel it, sense it. Waves of energy came off it towards his hand. Willed him to grasp it, turn it …
He took his hand away. Let it drop by his side. He couldn’t do it. Not after all this time. Not after …
His hand reached out again. Again he felt that force around his fingers. And again he let his hand drop by his side.
He sighed. Turned. Crossed the caravan again. Was about to sit down when he heard something.
The child crying once more.
Tyrell stopped. Looked round. It was coming from outside. From the house beside the caravan. He hadn’t imagined it. The crying was real.
He turned back towards the door. Held out his hand. Let it drop.
The child kept crying.
He felt something in his mind. Some trigger. Long ago and out of reach of his memory. Something in the fog. It was about a child. A small child. A night-time crying voice. In his head. His heart. Buried deep. Way deep. And every time he wanted to make it stop. Had to find a way to make it stop. To give it rest.
The child kept crying.
He reached out for the handle. His heart was hammering, his legs shaking.
He gripped the handle.
He could feel the blood pumping in his head. Hear it in his ears. It nearly blocked out the child. Nearly, but not quite.
He tightened his grip. Took a deep breath. Another.
Turned the handle.
And stepped outside.
21
Marina couldn’t sleep. Out of all the things that had happened to her that day, this was the least surprising.
The hotel was recently built and virtually deserted. No Good Friday business overnights. Muzak echoed round beige hallways. Marina wondered how somewhere so new could feel so haunted.
She sat on the edge of the bed, perched, ready to jump, unable to relax. She pointed the TV remote, flicked round the channels, looking for news of her daughter, her husband. A comedy panel show she had previously found funny was now just irritating and arch. Flick. A big-budget Hollywood blockbuster with last-second stunt escapes from explosions. Flick. A contemporary musical retelling of Jesus’s crucifixion with stage-school kids pretending to be urban. Flick. The news. She watched, flinching, like she was expecting a punch. Nothing.
She dropped the remote on the bed. Lay back and stared at the ceiling, despair eating her up from inside, and thought about her family.
Until she met Phil, until they had Josephina, she had believed family to be something to escape rather than embrace. The nuns who taught her at school had told her that it was the most important thing a person could have in their life. Marina had sat there, not daring to speak up for fear of being hit again, but thinking: Really? You haven’t met mine, then.
Her father, a lying, bullying, cheating, alcoholic wife-beater who had walked out on the family when she was seven, returning occasionally to spread his particular brand of anguish and upset. Her mother, more punchbag than person. And her two brothers, who, when she had last seen them, seemed to be doing their best to emulate their father’s life and work.
But the nuns, for all their fierce attempts to impart to her a love of Jesus Christ with whatever instrument of punishment the law would allow, physical or otherwise, had at least done one thing right. Spotted her intelligence.
A scholarship had taken her from secondary school in Balsall Heath, Birmingham, to Cambridge, where she studied psychology. Revenge on her father was how she regarded it at the time. Trying to understand why he was the way he was and did what he did. Marina had inherited his dark Italian looks and sometimes, she feared, his temper. At the back of her mind the course might have been a way for her to understand herself. Or how to not turn out like him.
Her mother had died of cancer before she could see her daughter graduate, something Marina always regretted. But she knew in her heart that her mother had been proud of her.
Her brothers less so. The last she had heard of the elder, Lanzo, he was doing time for a string of robberies on petrol stations in Walsall, with no imminent release date.
Her other brother, Alessandro, had contacted her recently. Now living in Jaywick, Essex, he had suggested they go out to dinner. She hadn’t wanted to respond, but Phil, having no siblings of his own, insisted she make the effort.
They met for dinner in the Warehouse, a brasserie in Colchester. As soon as Alessandro entered, Marina knew it was a mistake. He had brought with him a woman who was dressed as if for the late shift in a seedier copy of Spearmint Rhino, and as soon as he found out what Phil did for a living, he cursed him fluently in two languages.
The meal never reached dessert.
Alessandro had phoned a couple of days later and apologised. Said he was under a lot of stress, shouldn’t have said what he did. Wanted her to know he was there for her, his little sister, whatever she needed. Wanted to try again.
Marina had never phoned him back.
Phil and Josephina. That was her family. And she had never felt a stronger need to see them than the one inside her now.
She got up off the bed, fighting back tears, screams. She could see them both in her mind’s eye. Phil, tall, blond and good-looking; Josephina, with her dark curls and wide eyes, taking after her. She wished they were together, wished she could touch them, hold them, tell them what they meant to her. She felt her body start to slip into emotional meltdown once more, knew that wouldn’t help. She fought it. Tried to do something positive, something that would help.
She looked down at her bag. The alien phone stared up at her. She picked it up. Gazed at it. It would be so easy …
No. They might be monitoring it. She looked round the room again. The phone on the bedside table. A beige plastic box. She saw the faces of Phil, of Josephina, and felt how her whole being was aching to see them again. She had to risk it.
She picked up the receiver, punched the button for an outside line. Directory Enquiries.
‘Ipswich General, please.’
She was connected. It rang. Was answered.
‘Yes,’ said Marina, voice small and croaking, trembling. ‘You’ve … Phil Brennan. You’ve got a patient called Phil Brennan. I’d … I’d like … How is he, please?’
She was asked for her name and relationship.
‘I’m … I’m his wife.’ No going back now.
She was asked to wait. Plunged into silence. Her heart hammered louder than the hold music. The nurse came back on.
‘He’s stable,’ she said. ‘Out of surgery and resting.’
‘Oh, thank God … ’
The nurse was about to say something more but seemed distracted by someone else on the end of the phone. ‘Can I … can I just ask you to stay on the line, please?’
Marina slammed the phone down.
No one was going to trace that call.
She tried to sit back on the bed but was humming from the conversation, the contact. She replayed the words in her head. Stable. Out of surgery.