Baptism Page 3

  As George showered, he enjoyed rinsing away the sticky glaze of sweat coating his skin. It was close half past by now, had to be. Time to wake the family. He pulled a towel around his waist, squeezed some toothpaste onto his toothbrush, and started on his teeth as he made his way back toward the bedroom.

  “I thought you were going to wake me,” said Maggie as he appeared in the doorway.

  “I am waking you,” he said with a mouth full of white foam. “That’s what I’m doing now.”

  “Well there’s no need because I’m already awake.”

  “So why are you chewing me out for not waking you?”

  “I’m just teasing.” That tone of voice. She was in a good mood. He liked it when she was happy.

  “What time is it?”

  “About twenty past seven.”

  She yawned and stretched out her arms. George smiled at her and she smiled back. He was just about to say something affectionate, something about how she looked nice with her new hair—and she did, the short bob suited her—when she said, “God, you look rough.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Don’t mention it.”

  George turned back toward the door.

  Maggie said, “Can you wake Sophie and Benji?”

  He grunted yes as he headed back toward the landing.

  Sophie was fast asleep. George watched her for a moment, hoping that the sound of him brushing his teeth would bring her around, but she didn’t stir. She was lying on her side sucking her thumb, her dark brown hair—the same color as her mother’s—lay across her tiny pixie face. She looked so helpless. Her future lay in his hands, and as much as he wanted the best for her in all things, the best wasn’t always possible on the salary of a London Underground train driver. He reached down and rubbed her back. Her eyes opened and she frowned at him for a moment, squinting into the light. “Hello, little one. Have you had a nice sleep?” The question was phrased in that tone of voice that he reserved for his children only. It was a high-pitched version of his normal voice and it made him cringe when he heard himself talking like that on family videos. Seeing himself on them was bad enough.

  “It’s hot, Daddy,” she said.

  “It is, darling, it’s very hot.” He lowered the tone so it was more like his normal voice, his Maggie voice, as opposed to the more macho, guttural one he used with colleagues at work. Lifting Sophie out of bed, he gave her a squeeze before setting her down on the carpet, where she tottered a little sleepily and yawned.

  Ben was already awake, playing with his Action Man as George entered his room and said, “Morning, fella.”

  After a series of energetic vocal simulations of gunfire and explosions, Ben said, “Morning,” and proceeded to question George about the pros and cons of machine guns as though they were already mid-conversation on that very topic.

  “Is it my birthday today?” Ben asked as George tried to steer him from the battlefield into the bathroom.

  “It’s tomorrow,” said George. “And where are we going, fella?”

  “Mr. Pieces!” He shouted it and Sophie joined in, the two of them running and jumping as they cheered and sang out, “Mr. Pieces! Mr. Pieces!”

  Mr. Pieces was in reality a restaurant called Mr. Pizza, but Ben had mispronounced it when he was little and forever more it was known as Mr. Pieces in the Wakeham household. Mr. Pieces was a family favorite.

  Having corralled his two children in the bathroom, George supervised Ben’s morning wash—“Dad? If you shot a man a hundred times, would he die?”—and helped Sophie sponge her face and clean her teeth. While Ben pulled on his jeans and a Spiderman T-shirt, George brushed Sophie’s hair and dressed her in the clothes Maggie had left out on the chest of drawers outside the bathroom: a pair of pink jeans with a flower patch on the knee and a stripy top. To save time, he carried Sophie down the stairs behind Ben, whose stream of consciousness had re-routed from machine guns to breakfast cereal. When George arrived in the kitchen doorway, however, Sophie still in his arms, Maggie’s face collapsed into an expression of annoyance.

  “George, it’s about a thousand degrees out there and you’ve put her in long sleeves.”

  “Well that’s what was on the chest of drawers.”

  “Leave it to me.” She said it with that long-suffering tone as though he was forever dressing his children in inappropriately warm clothes on hot days. George looked at Sophie and Ben and rolled his eyes as Maggie made her way back upstairs.

  “Silly Daddy, eh?”

  “Silly Daddy,” mimicked Sophie, grinning.

  George watched Ben and Sophie sitting at the kitchen table and even though he had kissed them both earlier, felt compelled to bury his nose and lips in their hair and kiss them again, relishing the smell of them, a smell somewhere between honey and freshly baked biscuits with just a hint of shampoo. God, he loved that smell.

  Sitting on the work surface next to the microwave oven was Sophie’s favorite doll, Poppy.

  “Look! Here’s Poppy Doll. Look, Poppy’s saying hello. ‘Hello Sophie!’ she says. ‘Hello Sophie!’” He was back to the high-pitched voice again. Sophie took the doll and gave it a squeeze as Maggie returned and George beat a hasty retreat, grabbing his bag from the banister rail and making for the front door. Turning back to the kitchen, he waved to Ben and Sophie, said, “Bye bye!”—high-pitched—and then back to his normal voice for Maggie: “See you later.”

  He blew her a kiss and she kissed the air and smiled. George closed the door and hurried off along the pavement. As he climbed into the car, put his bag on the passenger seat and was about to put the key in the ignition, he heard an unfamiliar ringtone nearby. He reached into his pocket for his phone. Perhaps Sophie had accidentally reprogrammed the ringtone from the opening bars of “Train in Vain” by the Clash that he had uploaded to it a couple of weeks before. He had always loved that track. When he took his phone out of his pocket, however, the screen was dark. Then he realized that the ringtone was coming from the glove compartment. He snatched it open and there was a cell phone—a much higher specification model than his—along with a wireless headset. As he picked up the phone, he looked at the name of the caller on the screen: Maggie. His Maggie? What did it mean? His wife was calling this phone—a phone that wasn’t his.

  And then it occurred to him: Maggie must be having an affair and her secret lover had left his phone in the car and now she thought she was calling him. It had to be that. She had been caught red-handed and he wanted her to know it. He pressed the Call Answer button and held the phone to his ear.

  “Maggie?”

  “Look at the window, George . . . of the house . . . look at the window.” Her voice sounded weird, like she’d been crying. Maybe she’d realized her mistake, a mistake of marriage-wrecking proportions. He looked at the window. Perhaps he was wrong about the affair. Maybe she was going to wave to him? Or maybe Sophie and Ben were. But why? They didn’t normally, and why the strange phone in the glove compartment?

  Suddenly a man stepped into view in the living room window, a slim man dressed all in black, wearing a balaclava. With one hand, he held Sophie, crying and struggling, and with the other, he held a gun to her head.

  7:45 AM

  Inside 14 Highfield Road, South Wimbledon

  Any lingering doubts that perhaps today was a practice run had been dispelled when Tommy had opened the back door of the house and they had made their way inside. Tommy behaved as though he had done this a thousand times before. He didn’t even seem to be nervous. Simeon, on the other hand, felt sick as he pressed his gun into the woman’s back as Tommy explained what she was to say into the phone.

  “Please don’t hurt them,” the woman had shouted when Tommy approached the children.

  “Keep quiet and everything will be fine.” Simeon felt as though he was reciting lines from a script. He had no idea whether anything would ever be fine again. There were times in the past few weeks when it felt as though Tommy and Belle’s plans were fantasy. That wasn
’t to say that the two of them weren’t serious and meticulous about everything but, as with the po-faced religious observance at Madoc Farm, it felt as though they were all involved in something that wasn’t real, something make-believe. Obsessing over every minor detail was something that Tommy and Belle clearly relished. But Simeon had suspected that when all the strategizing was at an end, they might then start preparing for another hypothetical attack. As though that was how they liked to amuse themselves during the long boring nights. The events of that morning, however, had proved him spectacularly wrong.

  Tommy scooped up the little girl with one arm and pointed his gun at her head. Simeon pushed the gun into the woman’s back, her cue to tell her husband on the phone to look at the window where Tommy stood. It was an audacious way of ensuring the train driver’s compliance. What if someone had been driving or walking past the house and had seen what was going on? But they didn’t. If Tommy could do this and get away with it so easily, Simeon was in no doubt that he could do everything else that he had planned.

  7:46 AM

  Highfield Road, South Wimbledon

  It felt like a vent had opened up in the quiet suburban facade, allowing George Wakeham a glimpse of hell. But just as soon as the image was branded on his memory, the man holding Sophie stepped away from the window.

  “Maggie! What the fuck is going on?” On the phone, he could hear Sophie and Ben crying.

  “Don’t get out of the car!” Maggie screamed so hard it hurt his eardrum. George had the door halfway open already. He slammed it shut. “If you get out of the car they’ll kill us.”

  “What do they want?”

  No reply.

  He heard Maggie talking to Sophie. She said, “You’re all right now. You’re all right, Mummy’s got you.”

  “Maggie!”

  “George, I’ve got to read something to you.” Her voice was trembling. “You have to listen to it very carefully, okay?”

  “Okay.”

  “Unless you do exactly as instructed, the three of us will be killed. Any attempt to raise the alarm will result in us being killed. Any attempt to deviate from the implicit nature of any instructions given to you, however minor, will result in us being killed. Do you understand?”

  He couldn’t speak. His mouth was devoid of saliva and he felt sick.

  “Do you understand? George!”

  “Yes, yes.”

  “You must take the headset that is with the mobile phone. Can you see it?”

  “Yes.”

  “It has an on/off switch on the side. Put on the headset and turn it on. Do it now.”

  George picked up the headset. With shaking fingers he found the switch, flicked it on, and hooked the earpiece around his ear.

  “Can you hear me?” asked Maggie.

  “Yes, I can hear you.”

  “You must keep the headset on at all times and keep this line open until you are instructed to do otherwise. Have you got that?”

  “Yes.”

  Norman, a bespectacled oddball of a man who lived with his mother at the Bates Motel, as George and Maggie called the house, stepped out from behind his brown front door and made his way along the street. Maybe George could communicate with Norman and have him raise the alarm? Maybe he could write something on a piece of paper and hold it up? Norman saw him in the car and waved.

  George looked away as though he hadn’t seen. Trying to raise the alarm was a stupid idea. It would never work.

  But Norman had stopped almost level with the front window of George and Maggie’s house. George gestured to the mobile phone to show Norman he was on a call.

  “George? You’re not trying to do anything are you?” Maggie sounded desperate. “You’re not trying to signal to anyone are you?”

  “No.”

  Still Norman stood there. George looked away.

  “Then why can they see a man on the pavement looking at you?”

  “He’s just going.” But he wasn’t. Norman was watching him.

  “George! For God’s sake! They’ve got a gun against Ben’s head!”

  In the background, he could hear Ben shout, “Mummy!” George had to do something, anything. So he held up two fingers to Norman, flicked a “V” at him and mouthed, “Fuck off,” as unmistakably as he could muster. Norman frowned and blinked a few times, bemused. He went to say something but thought better of it and walked away.

  “Tell them he’s going away,” said George.

  “Christ, George, okay, okay.”

  “Maggie, I want to speak to them.”

  Pause.

  “They won’t allow it, all communication must come through me. Now you must continue with your day, exactly as normal. You must go to work and you must keep the headset on with the line open until instructed otherwise.”

  “Maggie, ask them what they want.”

  “They can hear you. They’re listening.”

  “So? So what is it? What’s this all about?”

  Dead air for a moment and then: “They say that you’ll find out everything in due course but now you should do as you are told.”

  “In that case I want them to know that I will do whatever they want, on the condition that they don’t harm you or the children in any way.”

  “They can hear you, they want you to know that they agree but you must now proceed as you would on any other day and they want you to know that they will be watching you and listening to you at all times. If you do anything . . .”

  “I know, I know, you’ll be . . . I know.”

  “George, you’d better get going.”

  He started the car and set off, his foot trembling against the accelerator pedal. As he drove past his house, he looked into the living room. There was no one there but he could just make out Sophie’s doll, Poppy, on the arm of the sofa.

  As he pulled out into the traffic on the main road, his eyes filled with tears and he listened intently to the faint hiss from the headset during the ten-minute journey to the depot. When he pulled up at traffic lights and pedestrian crossings, he watched people as they went about their business, oblivious to the horror in which he was cocooned. Could he signal to one of them? Could any one of them become his family’s savior? The answers to these and every question he might ask of himself regarding possible solutions to his predicament went unanswered. Any attempt to raise the alarm, to alert the world to his situation was a potential reason for his family to be harmed. Such was his fear and dread that turning the car into the parking lot at Morden, he retched.

  “Maggie?”

  “Yes?”

  “Is everything all right?”

  “George . . .” She was cut short and he could hear a man muttering something. He couldn’t make out what he was saying. George felt the need to keep speaking, to say anything.

  “I’m at the depot.”

  “George, listen to me.” There was an intimacy to the way she spoke that George hadn’t heard in a long time. “You’ve got to keep quiet. Please. Don’t speak unless you really need to.”

  “Okay, I just want you to know that I love you.” He needed to say it. It made him feel better.

  No reply, just the hum of the open line. How long did they intend to utilize this communication channel? It was all well and good above ground but if they wanted to talk to him once he was in the tube tunnel then they would need to use some other method. They had to have thought of that, hadn’t they?

  Parked up in the station lot, he took his bag from the passenger seat. Holding the mobile phone in his hand, he climbed out, locked the car, and walked toward the depot building with his head down.

  “Hi, George!” Panic stabbed him. He looked up. It was Louisa. She worked in the cafeteria. They had developed a friendship over the past couple of years. George found her attractive, and sometimes he couldn’t help but fantasize about how things might be if he was about ten years younger and unmarried. Louisa smiled at him, the sort of smile that, until today, had the ability to make him blush. Now, he f
elt nothing.

  “Hi, Louisa. How are you?”

  “Fine, thanks,” she replied. “You?”

  “Yeah, I’m good.” My wife and children are being held hostage by an armed gang was what he wanted to say. He didn’t; he couldn’t.

  It was still early but already the heat was in the high seventies. Louisa looked as cool and fragrant as ever but George could feel the perspiration forming on his upper body.

  Louisa fell in beside him as they climbed up the steps and in through the front door of the depot. His conversations with Louisa usually followed a certain pattern. He would tell her some anecdote, try and make her laugh. Impossible now but he knew he had to say something.

  “Another hot one.” It was all he could think of.

  But she didn’t get to reply as Neville, a fellow driver, a big ungainly Scot who prided himself on his irreverent humor, came bounding down the corridor with a big grin on his face. He and George were friends. They sometimes went for a beer together after work.

  “Georgie-boy! Finally embraced the new technology, I see!” He pointed at the headset George was wearing. Neville had only recently joked about George’s phone being not just last year’s model but last century’s.

  “Yeah, I thought it was time I took the plunge.”

  “Give us a look then.” Neville held out his hand.

  “Neville, I’m speaking to someone.”

  As soon as he said it, he realized how ridiculous it would sound to Louisa, who was smiling, preparing herself to enjoy Neville’s good-humored ribbing of “George the technophobe.” She looked confused. They had just walked across the parking lot and George had made no indication that he was on a call.

  “Come on,” said Neville. “You can still talk, I just want to have a look at the handset.” He made another grab for the phone.

  “Just fucking leave it!”

  The ferocity of George’s response was glaringly inappropriate to those who didn’t understand his unique predicament. Louisa was taken aback. She muttered, “I’ll see you later,” and hurried off.