Michael Robotham - Lost

Easing open the trunk, I roll over the lip and land heavily on the ground, using the momentum to spin away from the light. Then I lie dead still with my face pressed against loose gravel and mud.

Lifting my head I spy Rachel in the beam of the headlights. Ahead of her is a discarded industrial freezer standing upright in the middle of an empty lot. The stainless steel door is pitted and dented by stones, but still reflects the light. Sitting on top of it is an orange traffic cone.

Rachel walks toward it, stumbling over the broken bricks and rubble. Her jeans snag on a coil of barbed wire, half buried in the ground. She twists her leg free.

She's there now, standing in front of the freezer. It's almost as tall as she is. Reaching forward, she grips the handle and pulls open the door. A child's body tumbles forward. Small. Almost liquid. Rachel's arms instinctively reach out and her mouth opens in a silent scream.

I'm on my feet and running toward her. It's the longest forty yards—a horizontal Everest—crossed with my arms pumping and my stomach in my boots. Rachel is on her knees cradling the body. I grab her around her waist and lift her. She's adrenaline light. There's nothing of her. A cloth head lolls backward from her arms, with crosses for eyes and tufts of wool for hair. It's a child-size rag doll with a beige torso and beige limbs and a knobbly bald face, all swollen and worn.

“Listen to me, Rachel. It's not Mickey. It's just a doll. Look! See!”

She has a strange, almost serene look on her face. Only her eyelids are moving of their own accord. Slowly, I pry her fingers loose from the doll and lean her head against my chest.

A note is tied around the doll's neck, threaded with the same blue wool as the hair. Each letter is smeared dark red. I pray to God that it's paint.

Four words—written in capitals: THIS COULD BE HER!

Wrapping my jacket around Rachel, I lead her slowly back to the car and sit her inside. She hasn't uttered a sound. Nor does she respond to my voice. Instead she stares straight ahead at a point in the distance or in the future, a hundred yards or a hundred years from here and now.

I pick up the cell phone on the front seat. Silence. Inside my head I scream in frustration.

They'll call back , I tell myself. Sit tight. Wait .

Sliding onto the seat beside Rachel, I take her pulse and tug my jacket tighter around her shoulders. She needs a doctor. I should call this off now.

“What happened?” she asks, regaining some hold on reality.

“They hung up.”

“But they'll call back?”

I don't know how to answer her. “I'm calling an ambulance.”

“No!”

It's amazing! Although deep in shock there is still one pure, undamaged, functioning brain cell working inside her. It's like the queen bee of brain cells, being guarded by the hive . . . and it's buzzing now.

“If they have Mickey they'll call back,” she says. The statement is so forceful and clear that I can't help doing as she says.

“OK. We wait.”

She nods and wipes her nose with my sleeve. The headlights still pour white light in a path across the weeds and debris. I can just make out a line of trees, bruised purple against the ambient light.

We messed up. What else could we have done? I glance across at Rachel. Her lips are blue and trembling. With her arms hanging loosely by her sides, it seems only her skeleton is keeping her upright.

The silence amplifies the distant traffic noise . . . and then the phone!

Rachel doesn't flinch. Her mind has gone somewhere safer. I glance at the square glowing screen and take the call.

“Mrs. Carlyle?”

“She's not available.”

I could finish a book in the pause.

“Where is she?” The voice is still distorted.

“Mrs. Carlyle is in no condition to talk. You'll have to talk to me.”

“You're a policeman.”

“It doesn't matter who I am. We can end this now. A straight exchange—the diamonds for the girl.”

There is another long pause.

“I have the ransom. It's right here. Either you deal with me or you walk away.”

“The girl dies.”

“Fine! I think she's dead already. Prove me wrong.”

The screen goes blank. He's hung up.

The door in my mind is suddenly sucked closed. A feeling of desperation replaces it, along with the sound of the wind. Joe is kneeling over me. We gaze at each other.

“I remember.”

“Just lie still.”

“But I remember.”

“There's an ambulance coming. Stay calm. I think you just fainted.”

Around us the police divers are dragging air tanks from the Zodiacs and dropping them on the dock. The sound reverberates through my spine. Navigation lights have appeared on the water and the towers of Canary Wharf look like vertical cities.

Joe was right all along. If I kept gathering details and following the trail, something would eventually trigger my memories and the trickle would become a torrent.

I take a sip of water from a plastic bottle and try to sit up. He lets me lean on his shoulder. Somewhere overhead I see a passenger jet on its final approach to Heathrow.

An ambulance officer kneels next to me.

“Any chest pains?”

“No.”

“Shortness of breath?”

“No.”

The guy has a really thick mustache and pizza breath. I recognize him from somewhere. His fingers are undoing the buttons of my shirt.

“I'm just going to check your heart rate,” he says.

My hands shoot out and grip him by the wrist. His eyes widen and he gets a strange look on his face. Slowly, he shifts his gaze to my leg and then to the river.

“I remember you,” I tell him.

“That's impossible. You were unconscious.”

I'm still holding his wrist, squeezing it hard. “You saved my life.”

“I didn't think you'd make it.”

“Put paddles on my chest and I'll rip your heart out.”

He nods and laughs nervously.

I take a belt of oxygen from a mask, while he takes my blood pressure. The clatter and crash of remembering has ceased for a moment like a held breath. I don't know if I should exhale.

In the spotlights I can see the Thames sliding across the rocks like a black tide. “New Boy” Dave has sealed off the dock with crime-scene tape. The divers are coming back in the morning to continue searching. How many more secrets lie in the silt?

“Let's go home,” says Joe.

I don't answer him but I can feel my head shaking from side to side. I'm so close to remembering it all. I have to keep going. It can't wait for another day or be slept on overnight.

Joe calls Julianne and tells her he'll be home late. Her secondhand voice sounds tinny through the cell phone. It's a voice from the kitchen. She has children to feed. We have a child to find.

On the drive away from the river, I tell Joe about what I've remembered—describing the phone calls, the rag doll and the cold finality of the last phone call. Everything had a meaning, a function; a place in the pattern, the diamonds, the tracking devices, the pizza box . . .

We park on the same plot of waste ground, opposite the abandoned industrial freezer. Headlights reflect from the pitted silver door. The rag doll has gone but the witch's hat traffic cone lies among the weeds.

I get out of the car and move gingerly toward the freezer. Joe does his royal consort trick of walking four paces behind me. He's wearing a crumpled-looking linen jacket as if he's going on safari.

“Where was Rachel?”

“She stayed with the car. She couldn't go on.”

“What happened next?”

I rack my brains, trying to trigger the memories again.

“He must have called back. The man who hung up the phone—he called again.”