The Quality of Silence (21 page)

The threatening emails and the tanker driver chasing them frightened her, yes, but also gave weight to her belief that he was alive because someone didn’t want her to reach him.

She would get Ruby to Coldfoot and ask Coby to look after her and then she would go on alone to find him. If the men there tried to prevent her from leaving then she’d just have to fight her way out.

She put the truck into gear and checked her driving mirror before turning the truck around. Glaring headlights behind them dazzled her, momentarily blinding her. The tanker was right behind them, headlights on full beam. She was forced to accelerate out of the turning place so he wouldn’t ram them and they were still going north.

She just needed to get far enough ahead of him to turn, because surely there would be another place that would be wide enough.

But even if she did turn around, she’d have to pass him going the other way. He was dangerously violent towards them, she knew that now. He’d force them off the side of the road and they were in the mountains, a sheer drop on one side.

She quickly took Ruby’s hand and squeezed it before reaching for the CB.

‘Coby, are you there?’

‘Yasmin, good hearin’ your voice. You headin’ to Coldfoot now?’

‘I couldn’t turn round. A tanker tried to ram the truck when I slowed to turn around.‘

‘Jesus.’

‘He’s been following me for miles. Can you get the police?’

‘Sure. You just hold on, OK? The police’ll come through on this channel.’

She looked in her driver’s mirror. The tanker had dipped his bright lights and stopped. He must be listening in to this. He wouldn’t want the police to find him so close to her.

It meant that she too could stop the truck, and for a moment the relief of not driving was overwhelming.

‘I’m sorry, Mummy,’ Ruby said ‘I didn’t mean it.’

Yasmin knew that Ruby had been terrified by the tanker and marvelled at the strength she had still to be kind. She also knew that Ruby had meant it.

She remembered telling Adeeb that Ruby would be lost without her father, and it had startled her when she’d said it, the truth of it hitting her as if this knowledge had come from someone else, not there inside her all the time. Lost without her father, yes. Devastated. Bereft. Yes to all of those terrible things. But not alone.

A man’s voice came onto the CB. ‘Mrs Alfredson? It’s Lieutenant Reeve.’

She remembered him from Fairbanks. As soon as Coby mentioned her, the call must have gone to him.

‘You’re out on the Dalton?’ he asked, sounding appalled.

‘Yes.’

‘Where’s your child, Mrs Alfredson?’

‘She’s with me.’

The tanker driver would be listening. If it was Silesian Stennet he already knew Ruby was with her, but another man might not. Would it stop him being violent? Or maybe he’d exploit their vulnerability.

There was silence on the CB. She imagined people listening to this and their horror towards her and she felt it towards herself. What kind of mother endangered her child like this?

‘I have been told that someone tried to ram you?’ Lieutenant Reeve said.

‘He was trying to stop us turning around. He’s been following us for about a hundred miles, maybe all the way from Fairbanks.’

‘Are you drivin’ Azizi’s rig?’ another voice said, that she thought she recognised.

‘Yes. He—’

The man interrupted. ‘I’m at MP 174, headin’ south? Passed Azizi’s rig ’bout thirty miles back. There’s nobody behind this lady.’

She was sure he was the same man who’d asked her if she had a gun.

‘Drove another twenty minutes before I saw another rig headin’ north,’ the man continued. ‘And that was a truck not a tanker. Like I said, there ain’t nobody behind her.’

‘You’re lying,’ she said. ‘It’s you, isn’t it? Driving the tanker with blue headlights. Going north, not south. Right behind me.’

‘Hey, don’t go gettin’ delusional with me, lady.’

Lieutenant Reeve came on again. ‘Here’s what we’re going to do, Mrs Alfredson. You are going to try to find someplace safe to stop while we send a rescue helicopter to come and get you both. OK?’

He was talking to her very calmly, self-consciously reasonable, like you would try to talk someone down from a ledge, she imagined.

‘Yes.’

She wanted to tell him about the emails and the possible land grab and Silesian Stennet, but at the moment she had no credibility – a bereaved madwoman, who stole a truck, endangered her child and imagined a tanker chasing her down.

But when their helicopter flew over the Dalton, they’d see
there was a tanker behind her. Then they would know that he’d lied. They’d have to listen to her. And she would persuade them that Matt was alive, that he most probably knew something about Anaktue, which was why someone was trying to prevent her from reaching him.

Behind them, the blue lights were getting larger as he moved closer. The road ahead was two lanes and straight for a few hundred metres, not wide enough to turn a massive tanker but wide enough for him to overtake. And if he did that, he’d make out that he’d never been behind her.

She started driving again, keeping ahead of him through the squalling snow.

She just had to keep ahead until the police arrived. The huge wipers were scraping the thick swarms of flakes off the windscreen as they hit it but only just giving her space to see.

They reached a narrow steep stretch of road, winding round the mountainside. There wasn’t room for the tanker to pass them here, so she slowed down and stopped. The tanker driver was forced to stop behind them. This was how she’d wait it out till the police came. In front of them, she saw two small spruce trees, bent sideways by the wind.

‘It’s all my fault,’ Ruby said. ‘I went to sleep.’

‘Nothing’s your fault.’

‘But if I’d woken you up we would have got away from the man behind us, we’d have got nearer to Daddy.’

‘It made no difference.’

Ruby shook her head.

‘I promise you. No difference at all.’

Yasmin hadn’t realised till this appalling journey how kind Ruby was towards her and now here she was taking the blame on herself when all of it – everything – was entirely Yasmin’s fault.

Lieutenant Reeve came onto the CB. ‘I’ve spoken to our rescue team. I’m sorry but it’s impossible for a helicopter to fly in these weather conditions.’

Yasmin immediately started driving, knowing that the tanker driver, listening to this, would come after them now.

‘Even if they could get to you, and that’s doubtful,’ Lieutenant Reeve continued, ‘we couldn’t risk having you and your daughter in a helicopter in these winds. They are gusting at up to fifty miles an hour, and look set to get worse. Hurricane force. You’d be safer waiting out the storm in your cab.’

‘A helicopter went out to look for survivors of Anaktue,’ Yasmin said. ‘Even though there was a storm—’

‘The winds weren’t as strong. It was risky to fly but not suicidal. That’s simply is not the case today; the storm is set to get far worse.’

‘There is a tanker, with blue headlights, right behind us. Trying to ram us off the road. Please, you need to believe me.’

‘We checked. None of the haulage companies have anyone out there. Their drivers are waiting it out at Deadhorse, Fairbanks or Coldfoot. No one else is driving in these conditions. We’ll come and get you as soon as it’s possible.’

The blue lights remained the same size in the darkness, so he was keeping pace with them. Maybe she could try and outrun him. But the road was steep and windy and treacherous and the snow was getting heavier.

We’re going very very slowly because it’s hard to see through the snow and the man behind us is going very very slowly too. Like he’s hunting us in slow motion, but he’s still hunting us.

There’s a sign: farthest north spruce tree – do not cut. Next to it is a dead tree, all white with snow and ice, like it’s made of tiny bones. The furthest north alive tree was probably miles and miles ago.

In her mirror, Yasmin saw the tanker’s blue lights move suddenly to one side before becoming centred again. He must have skidded. Perhaps he hadn’t stopped to put on snow chains. Perhaps he would just skid over the goddam mountainside and be gone. Or, not as good, he’d have to stop and put on snow chains and would be as ham-fisted at it as she’d been and would take an hour and they’d get far ahead of him.

Through the snow she glimpsed the road marker MP 242. She knew from Adeeb’s map that they would soon be approaching the Atigun Pass, the highest mountain pass in Alaska. On the other side of it lay the immense north slope coastal tundra, stretching to the Arctic Ocean.

The dense darkness and snow were punctured only by her headlights and behind them the blue lights of the tanker. But she felt her guilt following her in the darkness too, for putting Ruby in such danger, and behind that guilt another quieter culpability:
‘I’ll be alone.’

Chapter 15

The wind was blowing the snow horizontally at the windscreen, their truck pummelling its way through. Yasmin couldn’t see the sides of the road, relying on the delineators reflecting a brief orange flash to guide her. She felt their huge truck tilt in the building wind.

She had turned off the CB after her conversation with Lieutenant Reeve and didn’t put it on again; she didn’t want to hear the tanker driver’s voice, though she longed to hear Coby’s, a man she’d never met and most likely never would.

The visibility was so bad that she didn’t how close the tanker was behind them. It had been half an hour since she’d been able to see his headlights.

The tanker man is hiding in the snow and dark behind us but we don’t know where.

Mum stops the truck. She asks me to get Mr Azizi’s bright orange tunic-thing, which is in a compartment in my door. It’s like the one she makes me wear on my bicycle. Mr Azizi wore it when he was sorting out the truck in Fairbanks.

She drives us towards the edge of the road, right by the drop, and opens the window. The truck sways, like the wind’s got its fingers through the open window and snow blows in, loads and loads of it, and lands on Mum’s lap, really fast, like if she left the window open for too long she’d be covered in snow and turned into a snow-woman.

Mum throws the bright orange tunic out of the window, and the wind grabs it from her and whirls it away and then she asks me to get clothes out of Mr Azizi’s suitcase and I do and she throws them out too. But she doesn’t throw out his parka, probably because arctic parkas are super-expensive, then she quickly closes the windows. We’ve been looking out for the blue lights but we still can’t see him.

Mum reverses us away from the edge of the mountain and then we go forwards again, right up to the drop. Then she does it again and I feel a bit sick. She says she needs our tracks to be really deep so that the snow won’t fill them in.

She was a mother who’d changed fairy tales, editing out psychotic stepmothers; who didn’t allow Ruby to watch anything above a PG, and now here she was telling Ruby how the tanker man would see the clothes and their tracks and think that they’d gone over the edge. And the terrible thing was that this was the only comfort she could offer her.

‘But he’ll see our tracks when we drive away,’ Ruby said.

‘No, because they won’t be so deep and the snow will soon fill them up.’

‘But the wind might blow the orange thing and the clothes down the mountain.’

‘That would be OK.’

Because then the man would think they were dead and that was a good thing. Whatever happened to them, she knew that this journey would always mark for her the end of Ruby’s childhood.

The road is so steep; sometimes on one side you can see mountains like giant horses rearing up, right next to you, like they’re going to smash their hooves into you. On the other side, there’s just black, and that’s even scarier because we could drop right off the edge of the mountain.

Mr Azizi told me that the Atigun Pass is a quarter of a mile high. He told me that when he didn’t know we’d be driving on it. Or that there would be a snowstorm and a man chasing us. I don’t think he’d have told me that if he’d known. There are barriers at the sides of the road which Mum says are to stop you going over the edge, but I just caught a glimpse of one and it looks a bit flimsy. I don’t think it would stop a truck like ours with a whole house on it.

Sometimes you see a small sign in our headlights, and it’s just an arrow pointing right or pointing left and that means Mum knows to turn the steering wheel otherwise we might just drive off into the sky and we’d fall for a quarter of a mile. I don’t know how long that would take.

There was so much snow falling on them that it felt like it was smothering them. Yasmin could only just catch glimpses of the delineator posts on the edge of the road and panicked that the delineator glinting on her right should be on her left and she was driving them off the road and the barrier would give way and they’d go over the edge. Unsure what was ground or sky, left or right, not knowing if it was night or day, her physical disorientation in the darkness and snow crept into her mind, so there were moments when she no longer knew who or what she was running from. Perhaps the blue lights following them unseen in the dark were a phantom, her terror for Matt hunting her down. But that couldn’t be right, because it was her guilt and failure as Ruby’s mother that was stalking her. And she couldn’t turn round and face either, not yet, not till she’d got Ruby safely over the mountain.