The Last Winter of Dani Lancing: A Novel (21 page)

Monday, October 25, 2010

Patty gets up at 4 a.m. and grabs a bucket of mud from the garden. She smears it all over the car, making sure to obscure the number plate. Then she gets dressed in clothes from the back of her wardrobe
that she hasn’t worn in years. They come from an era when she had curves and filled them—perfectly, according to Jim. Now they hang like tents. She should have given them to charity but they have a sentimental pull. The old life.

She completes the ensemble with a scarf, hat and sunglasses. In the mirror she cannot recognize herself. Then she drives to Heathrow.

She arrives at 6:30 a.m. and parks in the long-stay car park. She reasons that if he uses it often he must know exactly where the shuttle picks up passengers, so parks close to that. The spot is directly below a CCTV camera, which she hopes will make it harder to view her. It’s all automated so there is no actual person in the car park to notice that she’s just waiting. Only cameras, like so much of England now.

She gets out of the car and goes into a dumbshow, looking angrily at the car and then opening the bonnet. She swears, stamps her foot and then calls someone on her phone. If a security guard shows up she’ll tell them she’s broken down and is waiting for the RAC.

Then she gets back inside and settles down to wait for Duncan Cobhurn.

She has almost given up hope when, finally, at 7:45 he arrives. He speeds into a spot and leaps out looking flustered. He grabs a pull-along suitcase from the backseat and runs to the shuttle stop. Her heart is pounding. She hasn’t thought about what to do now. She can see the shuttle come through the gate and make its way slowly to the stop. Should she get on the shuttle too? She’s paralyzed. She watches him jump on the little bus, which then trundles away to the terminal. Once it’s out of sight, she opens her car door, swings her head out and vomits violently.

Thursday-Friday, December 16–17, 2010

She takes a train out to a town she’s never been to before. She carries only cash with her; no cards, no ID. She doesn’t use her Oyster card. In charity shops she buys two outfits. She also gets a pair of large sunglasses, a hat and a wig. In a pharmacy she buys a bright lipstick, a shade she would not normally be seen dead in. At a hardware store she adds two rolls of gaffer tape and a small rubber ball.

She finds a park that has a public toilet that’s reasonably clean and has no attendant. Inside she changes into one of the suits and, in the cracked mirror, applies the lipstick. The sunglasses and hat complete her transformation. She rides a bus out to an address she’d found the previous day in
Loot
. There, from a very friendly but highly suspect man called Dave, she buys a car for cash. No log book—no questions. She drives the car home and parks it in her garage. Her own car is parked on the street. She does the trick with the mud again until it is impossible to see even the make of car. Then she showers and dresses in the second outfit. She takes the Tube out to Amersham, reasonably close to the airport but not right there. She walks to the hotel she’s chosen. She has stayed there three times already, each time checking in as Joyce Adams and paying the bill with cash. She pays for three nights, telling the bored clerk she’s on business and is eight time zones out—she does not want anyone disturbing her so she can sleep. No room service, no cleaning. She needs nothing.

In the room she sits and watches TV for two hours. After that she turns off the TV and leaves the room as quietly as possible. She places the
DO NOT DISTURB
sign on the door and takes the lift down to the parking area. She saunters through as if her car is just at the end of the row … but walks all the way out to the street.
She sees no one. From there she walks back to the Tube station and retraces her steps home. She gets back at midnight as Friday slides into being. Today is the day. She does not sleep.

At 8 a.m. it is time for her to get ready. She dresses in the second outfit she bought yesterday. She puts on the wig and threads the sunglasses into it, then applies the unnaturally bright lipstick and looks in the mirror. A stranger stares out. She logs onto the Heathrow site to see the flight arriving from Lisbon at 11:40 a.m. It’s in the air but the weather report is poor and deteriorating. She opens her bag and checks the contents: money in Ziploc bag, the hypodermic and drug vial, the tape, the ball, a long knife. In the hall is a folded wheelchair to put in the car. It is time to go.

It cost £500 to have the CCTV put out of action in the long-term car park. That had been Patty’s main concern right from that first morning she watched Cobhurn get on the shuttle. She had known then that, with luck, the long-term parking was where she would kidnap him from. She had to put herself in the mind of the police. Once Cobhurn was reported missing they would retrace his steps. They would find that he landed and took the shuttle, and they were bound to look at CCTV footage from the car park. She called someone on a London paper; she’d known him years before when he was just a cub reporter. Now he runs the crime desk. She asked him for a snitch, pretended to be working on a book of true crime. He gave her a name and that name gave her another. After five degrees of separation Patty had some kid who had twelve ASBOs ranging from tagging his school gym to exploding garden gnomes in the local shopping mall. She left his money and instructions in a
Hello Kitty bag on a park swing, a few days before she planned to kidnap Cobhurn. At 10 p.m. on Thursday, December 16, he shot the head off every camera in the car park. Money well spent.

She arrives at 10:30 a.m. and as she waits the first snow begins. She watches the flakes—their beauty mesmerizes her and yet she curses them. As the storm thickens she realizes that very few planes are landing. She had not factored in God.

After two hours of sitting she cannot stay in the car any longer and gets out, feeling the snow crunch beneath her feet.

“There is something very Zen about watching snowflakes tumble through space as you turn to ice yourself,” she thinks, slowly accepting the idea that he will not be arriving—that his plane had been grounded somewhere or redirected to another airport.

“If I have to wait I will.” She knows she must get him. And something keeps her there, in that cold parking lot, until the sounds of the shuttle break the dead silence.

She sees him alight and struggle forward with his golf clubs and little pull-along case. She steals back to her car; it must be timed perfectly. He waddles forward, dragging his case and bouncing the club bag. Finally he gets to his car and throws his bags down in anger as he realizes what has happened. She must time this just right. She knows that. She eases out of her parking space and slowly moves toward him just pulling alongside as he gets out his phone. She winds her window down and shouts:

“Are you okay?”

He looks over at her; she can see he’s shaking with cold and anger. “Some fuckers have slashed my tires.”

“Bastards. Kids today see something they want—a beautiful car—and they just have to wreck it.” She nods sadly.

“If I could get my hands on ’em, I’d wring their fucking necks.”

Patty smiles. “Do you want a lift back to the terminal? You could get security to call a repair truck or something.”

He starts to shake his head but stops. Wind whisks freezing flakes into his face and he looks down at what he’s wearing.

“Yeah.” He nods. “Thank you. Yeah.”

Patty gives him her most dazzling smile, then flips open the boot. He walks around to it and throws his bag and clubs in.

“Be careful of the wheelchair,” she shouts back to him.

He closes the boot and gets in beside her.

“I really do ap—”

“Seat belt, please,” she interrupts.

And as he reaches over to find it, she slides the hypodermic into his neck. He jerks away, but not far enough and she manages to push the plunger all the way home. He looks at her, incredulous, his lips try to form a word, an expletive—
fuckers
—but the syllables crumble, soundless, and then he does too.

She shoves him back in the seat and clips the belt. Done.

Her first stop is a dumpster she’d noticed on the drive there. She puts gloves on and then pulls out his case and clubs and throws them inside. She slides him out of his jacket and throws that in too, including his wallet and ID. Then she drives directly to the hotel, parking in the deepest recess of the underground car park. There is nobody else about. She walks to the back of the car and takes out the wheelchair. She unfolds it, and then, with every ounce of her strength, manages to maneuver his body into it and strap him in. She wheels him to the service lift and they go up to level two. Her room is close to the lift. She has the key ready. Luck is with her; there is no one around. She opens the door and wheels him in.

She looks around at the room. It is exactly as she left it the night
before. No one has been in. She turns on the TV and then turns to the man in the wheelchair. The man she has abducted.

From her bag she pulls one of the thick rolls of gaffer tape. She pulls at it and it makes a sound like fabric ripping—she loves that sound. Then she begins to wind the tape around him, like a snake coiling its prey.