Dead Man's Grip

91

Carly, seated in the busy waiting area by boarding gate 47, looked at her watch. Then she stared for a moment at the two British Airways women standing and chatting behind the desk. Occasionally there was a bong, then a brief announcement. Final call for boarding for some other flight. She looked at her watch again. Twenty-two minutes past eight. The flight was due to depart in less than twenty minutes and they hadn’t even started boarding yet. What was going on?

She gripped her handbag and kept her holdall right in front of her. No checked luggage, she did not want any risk of delay at the other end. Her legs kept knocking together. She badly needed a cup of tea and something to eat, but she did not feel able to swallow anything.

She called her mother. She was almost in a worse state than Carly was, blaming herself for having her medical appointment and not picking Tyler up. Then Carly just sat, shaking, raw-eyed, staring around the room at her fellow passengers, and occasionally looking through the emails that were pouring into her iPhone. Mostly work stuff. Questions or information she had requested from clients. Emails from her colleagues. Jokes from a couple of friends who hadn’t yet heard about Tyler. She did not read any of them. All she was interested in was looking to see if, by chance, an email had come in from her son.

Two middle-aged couples sat near her, Americans in a jovial mood, heading to the UK for a golfing holiday. They were talking about golf courses. Hotels. Restaurants. The normality was irritating her. These people were in earnest discussion. Her son had been kidnapped and they were chatting away about long carries and fast greens and some water hazard they’d all had a problem with on their visit last year.

She stood up and moved away, walked up to the desk and asked if the flight was going to be leaving on time. She was told they would be starting boarding in a couple of minutes.

That gave her some small relief. But not much.

She checked Friend Mapper on her phone for the hundredth time since leaving the hotel. But Tyler’s purple dot remained stubbornly in that same place, close to the entrance to Regency Square car park.

Why there? Why are you there?

The screen blurred with her tears. It had been over an hour since she’d spoken to DS Branson. She wondered if she should call him one more time before she got on the plane.

But he had already promised to call the moment he had any news and she was sure he would; he seemed a good communicator. But what if he had been calling and was unable to get through? The flight was about seven hours long. How the hell was she going to be able to sit there for seven hours without news?

She dialled to check her messages, but there were no new ones. Nothing from DS Branson. So she called his mobile number and, to her relief, he answered almost immediately.

‘It’s Carly,’ she said. ‘I’m at Kennedy Airport, about to board. Just thought I’d check in with you.’

‘Right, yeah. You OK?’

‘Just about.’

‘We’ve got your flight times and one of us will be at the gate to meet you when you land.’

His voice sounded strange, as if he was hiding something from her. And he sounded in a hurry.

‘So – no – no news?’

‘Not yet, but we hope to have some for you later. We have just about every police officer in the county looking for Tyler. We’re going to find him.’

‘I had a thought – if there is – you know – any news while I’m up in the air, can you get a message to me via the pilot?’

‘Yes, we can. We can get you an ACARS text message via the cockpit, and most long-haul planes have satellite phones in the cockpit. The moment there’s any news I’ll get it relayed straight to you. OK?’

She thanked him and hung up. As she did so, she heard the boarding announcement. She towed her overnight bag over towards the rear of the rapidly lengthening queue, her insides a solid knot that was getting tighter by the second.

Seven hours.

Seven hours of waiting.

Carly handed over her passport and boarding card for inspection, then walked on in a silent haze, more alone and scared than she’d ever felt in her life.

Suddenly, as she stood in the crush in the aisle of the plane, her phone pinged with an incoming text. Her heart flipped with sudden hope and she looked down eagerly. But to her disappointment it was from the phone company, O2, warning her she was close to her 50 MB overseas data limit.

She deleted it, then found her seat. Or at least the part of it which wasn’t already occupied by the damp, overflowing girth of a perspiring bald man who looked like he weighed uncomfortably north of 500 pounds.

If her day wasn’t already bad enough, the journey from hell had now got even worse. She sat, squashed, her elbows tucked uncomfortably in against her chest, her whole body trembling with fear.

Fear that she might never see her son alive again.