black BMW in the car park, right at the end of a row. Empty, but it proved they were here.
Think, Pete. Lucy said, “Theo loves the ponds.” Ponds, plural. There were more than half a dozen of them on this side of Hampstead Heath, following the course of some ancient river.
Run, Pete. I set off at a fast pace, but the Heath was vast and I was soon agonizingly short of breath. At the men’s swimming pond I drew a blank. The duck pond and the women’s pond, ditto. Then came a succession of smaller ponds whose names I didn’t know, each one ringed with trees, their surfaces green and shiny with duckweed.
And then, in the smallest pond, right in the middle, so small and still I only just glimpsed it through the trees, I saw a splash of red.
A child’s hoodie.
I hurtled through the soggy, squelching mud toward it.
It was Theo. He was floating facedown in the water. The hood was pulled up over his head, his legs sunk under the mat of green duckweed. I ran into the water, almost tripping as the mud gripped my calves, slowing me further even as I desperately tried to reach him. I knew infant CPR—we’d been trained in it at the NICU. If there was a chance, any chance at all, of pummeling the water and weed out of his lungs and breathing life back into him, I could do it. But every second would be vital.
Please don’t let him be dead. Anything, anything but that.
But in my heart I knew it was useless. He was motionless, his head bobbing only from the ripples caused by me crashing toward him, making the duckweed undulate and break up. He’d clearly been there for some time.
Under the fluorescent green weed the water was black and noxious, my legs sinking deeper into the silty mud with every yard. I felt breathless, my ears ringing as if I was about to pass out, lactic acid burning in my muscles, my heart thudding in my chest. I was up to my thighs, then my waist, then at last I was close enough to reach out and flip him over—
It was a rugby ball. Inside the red hood, a rugby ball had been placed where Theo’s head would be. A stick, jammed in with it, had kept the rest of the hoodie from sinking. The green weed, obscuring where his legs would be, had done the rest.
I stood there, gulping air, a mixture of relief and fear coursing through me. Relief it wasn’t Theo. And fear, that Miles still had him.
“I wanted you to know.”
I swung around. Miles was standing twenty feet away in the trees, watching me. His face was blank, his tone matter-of-fact.
Of Theo, there was still no sign.
I couldn’t speak. Couldn’t move, in fact, the mud gripping my burning calves like shackles.
“To know what it feels like to lose your son,” Miles continued. “What it’s been like for me, these last weeks. What it’ll be like for you, too, when he dies.”
Theo’s alive. I focused on that, managed to pant, “Where is he? What have you done with him?”
“And die he will,” Miles went on as if I hadn’t spoken. “Next time, it’ll be for real, Pete. Gone forever. No third chances. So that’s the deal I’m offering you.”
“What deal? What are you talking about?”
“Remember how the Bible story goes? Just before the bit I texted you? The real mother says to Solomon, ‘Give her the living child, instead of killing it.’ She’d rather her son was handed to her deadliest rival, the woman she’d dragged through the courts for justice, than see him die. That’s real parenthood, Pete. Putting your own desires second. Sacrificing everything to keep your child safe. Even your own happiness.”
He looked at me, considering. “But are you really that person, Pete? I mean, you appear to be. You love playing the part, that’s for sure. Doting dad, decent bloke. Unselfish. Principled. Loving. But how genuine is all that, I wonder? Could you really be as self-sacrificing as that mother in the Bible? You should thank me, Pete. I’m giving you a chance to prove you could.”
“You’re mad,” I said disbelievingly. “Completely mad, if you think I’d ever agree to that.”
Miles folded his arms. “Give him up voluntarily, or he dies. Don’t doubt me, Pete. Don’t think I couldn’t do it.”
“Oh, I know what you’re capable of,” I said harshly. “I spoke to Murdo McAllister.”