‘Are you all right?’ Jasmine asked.
‘I’m fine.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘I’m sure.’
‘No one behind?’
Claudia’s heart clenched.
‘Sorry, bad joke. No, don’t check.’
‘I’m driving, I have to.’
Accepting that, Jasmine opened her phone again, and as she began setting up her new social media accounts, Claudia said, ‘No photos.’
‘I know that, but I can look at other people’s, right?’
‘You mean your old friends?’
Jasmine shrugged. ‘I didn’t have so many, and I’m not much interested in what they’re doing. I’m trying to find some students who’re at my new school.’
Since the information about that had been on her old laptop before they’d deleted it, Claudia wondered how much she minded searching for it all over again. Their Internet escape-planner had warned against forwarding anything: if they did it wouldn’t take long to trace it to their replacement devices, and in no time at all their new lives would be over.
They should have done the same as her mother and thrown everything into a lake, but it was too late now.
Had her mother remembered to turn off the tracking feature?
She was bound to have done so. They’d discussed it enough times, and Marcy was anything but stupid. In fact, she was the joint mastermind of this operation, had even come up with the original plan, having no idea at that time how complicated it would be to pull off. But step by step they were getting through it and now, here they were, five months on with some of the most difficult challenges already behind them.
At Reading services Jasmine ran in for coffee while Claudia locked herself in the car and checked her own new phone to make sure there were no messages. Fortunately, there were none – and why would there be when she hadn’t set up any accounts yet? No one apart from Vodafone, Jasmine and her mother had the number. Using Bluetooth, she connected to the car’s hands-free system so that she and Jasmine could listen to one of the audio books or podcasts they’d downloaded in preparation for this journey. Chances were they’d be unable to focus, but the option was there if they wanted it, and setting it up was giving her something to do as she waited.
She didn’t look around to check if she was being watched, she simply told herself that she had no chilling sense of it, which could mean either that she was in denial or that her instincts were working.
No one knocked on the window or parked too close.
At last Jasmine returned with two skinny lattes and a flapjack to share. As soon as the passenger door was closed Claudia hit the locks again and after taking a sip of her coffee she started back to the motorway.
It was shortly before eleven o’clock, when they were passing the turn-off for Cirencester and Chippenham, that Jasmine said, ‘Should we try the radio now?’
Experiencing yet another sickening jolt of nerves, Claudia simply nodded.
As they listened to the headlines she was aware of how tightly she was gripping the wheel. Not that she was expecting to hear anything about their disappearance – it was still far too early for that – or about her failure to appear in court this morning – that might not have been noticed either. It was his name she was listening out for, and when it came with the information that a verdict was expected at any minute, she felt the blood pounding too fast in her heart.
Jasmine turned the radio off and said, ‘We’ll try again at midday.’
They were both subdued now – simply hearing his name was enough to do that to them. Jasmine seemed to revert back to the withdrawn and anxious teenager she’d been before her mother and grandmother had plotted the escape. Claudia was internalizing her fears, doing all sorts of bargains with God and the universe if they would just make sure the jury did the right thing.
Maybe she shouldn’t have brought the attaché case.
‘And so we reach the end of the line,’ Jasmine murmured, coming awake as Claudia finally brought the car to a stop outside the freshly whitewashed Victorian villa that was to be their home for the next few months – possibly longer. It was at the end of a seafront terrace on the busy Promenade, and the apartment they’d leased comprised the entire first floor with three good-sized bedrooms, two bathrooms, and a spacious sitting-cum-dining area with an open-plan kitchen. Its tall sash windows at the front overlooked the windy bay of Kesterly-on-Sea, where a mile-long stretch of sandy beach was hugged by two grassy headlands, and the restless waves provided a playground for surfers, sailors and skiers.
Jasmine was right about it being the end of the line, for the train could go no further than the station at the far end of the Promenade – and access from the motorway was as arduous in parts as it was spectacular in others, as it passed through ever-changing countryside. They’d chosen to come here quite randomly, for their internet search had thrown up many remote towns and hidden villages that could have provided equally good cover, if not better. However, when Marcy had mentioned that she’d come here on holiday a few times as a child, Claudia had allowed that to be the decider. It was the only link they had to the place, which was no link at all really, but Claudia had seen right away how pleased her mother was to agree.
Since their first visit just over six weeks ago, when the three of them had come to check it out, they’d found that it really did have everything they were looking for. They’d wasted no time in contacting an estate agent and by the following day they’d not only managed to secure this flat, they’d also registered with the local authority, and even enrolled Jasmine in the local school to sit her GCSE exams. No references from her previous school had been asked for yet, but Claudia already had a plan for how to handle that when it came up. (Honesty was usually the best policy – and the story she’d concocted was a fair version of it.)
It was as they’d driven back to her mother’s house in the Chew Valley, south of Bristol, that they’d received a call informing them that a completion date for the sale of Claudia’s childhood home had now been set. As requested. it would happen during the week of their planned departure.
Claudia felt more guilt over the loss of that house than she did over anything else, for it was the first and only home her parents had lived in until her father had died.
‘If he were here,’ her mother had argued when Claudia had protested at the suggestion the house should be sold, ‘he’d be doing the exact same thing as I am. You were what mattered to him, and your daughter, and if he knew that selling this place would make you safe he’d have it on the market quicker than you could choose an estate agent.’
Now most of Marcy’s eclectic assortment of furniture, along with much else that had been collected over the years, had been sold with the house, and like Claudia and Jasmine she’d brought only her most precious possessions to Kesterley. However, she had almost three million pounds in her new bank account after cashing in all her other investments, so she could consider herself a wealthy woman by anyone’s standards. And if her small fortune was combined with the profits from the sale of Claudia’s business and the cash in the attaché case in the back of the car – presuming it wasn’t counterfeit – it was fair to say that right now money was the least of their problems.