Eeny Meeny

105

It was 6.30 a.m. and the sun refused to rise. A thick, dank fog hugged Southampton – the perfect embodiment of Helen’s mood. She slammed the front door shut behind her, mounted her bike and raced off towards the city centre, gunning the throttle unnecessarily hard.

Another thirty-six hours had passed and still no news. No, that wasn’t true, there’d been plenty of ‘news’, but none that had been helpful. Ever since she’d left Emilia, Helen had been kicking herself, fearing she’d made a bad mistake. She hadn’t really had much choice, the press had to be informed, but still she had only made things worse. She had met Emilia late at night, so the following morning’s story was sensational, but light on the details. Today’s offering from the Evening News promised to be a rather different affair.

A copy of the paper was lying on Helen’s desk when she arrived. A member of the team being helpful or someone making a point? Helen skipped the lurid headline and went straight to the detail on the inner pages. It was awful. Torture porn in all but name. In exhaustive and prurient detail, they took their readers through the various stages of starvation and dehydration, speculating on which officer would hold out longer and what were the possible causes of death. For the cloth-headed reader, they even had a helpful graphic – a schedule of physical and mental decline – outlining how Charlie and Mark would feel on Day One. And Day Two. Three. Four. Five. A big question hung over the days beyond, but it only meant one thing.

Buried in amongst all the prurience was a police hotline, the alleged point of the exhaustive coverage. Predictably it had been ringing off the hook. The sense of excitement generated by this extraordinary story ensured that. The majority of the calls were desperate, attention-seeking stuff – it made Helen seethe with anger.

When she sat down with Charlie’s boyfriend and with Mark’s parents, Helen had little solace to offer them. The sensational reports in the Evening News had made them frantic with worry and they vented their anger on Helen. She’d had to be frank with them about their loved ones’ chances of survival, whilst promising to do everything possible to bring them home. They were shell-shocked, couldn’t really take it in, as if this were some grim nightmare from which they’d soon wake.

Helen was desperate to give them something, some good news to end their misery, but there was no point lying. She knew Mark and Charlie would be strong, but no one had seen hide or hair of them for almost a week now. Who knew what state they were in? Or how long they could hold out? Everybody’s human after all.

The clock was ticking now and every minute counted.