I Am Watching You(58)
Tony is about to reply when the news presenter announces they are returning to the scene in Spain for a new development. We both turn to the television screen to see the reporter still standing by the police cordon, with her hand up to her ear as if struggling to hear the link from the studio, and then there is a cut to a really shocking image. Full frame.
It is a grainy photograph, as if taken from a distance, but there is no mistaking it. A tall man at the window of a second-floor flat, with a blonde woman.
A gun to her head.
CHAPTER 36
THE FATHER
Henry Ballard was brought up by the kind of parents who believe children bounce. No cotton wool. No fussing. Best way to teach a child to swim is to throw ’em in the deep end. His father’s favourite saying.
It was this extreme faith in the innate resilience of children which saw Henry quite literally bouncing on bales of hay in the trailer behind his dad’s tractor at the age of four, and learning to drive the tractor himself when he was barely twelve.
Looking back now on pictures of his childhood, Henry realises he was lucky not to be on a child protection list. Lines were definitely crossed. And yet? Somehow he and his two sisters not only bounced, but thrived. Apart from a broken leg at the age of eight when a cow kicked back as she left the dairy shed, Henry escaped largely unscathed.
And so, emboldened by a general horror of a ‘nanny state’, Henry approached parenthood himself with a similar, laid-back confidence. They will be fine, he heard himself saying over and over to Barbara as she fussed and fretted over high-factor sun creams and anecdotal evidence about skin cancer risks for ‘outside workers’, as their two daughters ran outside every summer morning, coming indoors only for refuelling.
Farms are dangerous places, Henry, Barbara would say in return while Henry tut-tutted.
You watch too many documentaries, Barbara.
And then little Anna turned five and contracted pneumonia. It started as a standard cough, which Barbara reckoned came from playing in damp hay stored in a side barn, but Henry said she was making too much of it. She’ll be fine.
Only she wasn’t.
The drama peaked with five days in the high dependency unit of the local hospital, including a twenty-four-hour ‘touch and go’ period when, disconcertingly, none of the doctors would look the Ballards in the eye.
Anna, linked by all manner of tubes to bleeping machines, looked unbearably frail as the little screen kept ringing its alarm bell to confirm that her oxygen saturation levels were very poor. The doctors explained each new strategy, including a drug that could make her heart rate race temporarily but would apparently help her lungs.
One step at a time, the consultant said. We fix the lungs, then we sort the heart rate.
Henry is sitting in the lounge now, watching the news as he remembers so vividly sitting in the hospital alongside Anna’s bed, racked with guilt as he watched the figures on those monitors. Feeling helpless. Feeling sorry. Sometimes praying to God but then remembering that he wasn’t really a believer. Had nowhere to turn. No longer confident in the resilience of children. No longer laid-back. Carefree.
And now no longer the same man at all after his daughter, his beautiful Anna, sat beside him in the car that day he drove her to the railway station to catch the train to London. You disgust me, Dad.
Cathy appears at the door, with a large tray sporting their bright red teapot, a jug of milk and mugs. And then, just as she places it on the coffee table in the middle of the room, someone changes the channel again and there is an icicle through Henry’s heart.
The picture at the window. A man – presumably Karl – with the gun to the head of his hostage.
Henry hears a strange sound escape from his own mouth, followed immediately by a much louder, horrific wail from his wife. A sound like that of a wounded animal, followed by fast and almost incoherent babbling.
‘Oh my God. Oh my God. My poor baby. Henry. Henry – look. Oh no, oh no, oh no . . . We need to do something. Oh my God, tell me what we should do.’
She is standing. Then sitting. Then rocking. Then crying. And then standing again and pacing as she talks . . .
‘We need to go there. I need to be there. Henry. Oh my God, I can’t be here. I can’t be in this room.’
The presenter is saying that the photograph, as yet unverified, is being circulated by a European news agency; that the man has now been clearly identified as Karl Preston but there is yet to be official confirmation that his hostage is Anna Ballard.
‘They shouldn’t be showing this.’ Cathy is taking out her phone and strides towards the hall while Henry moves forward to try to console his wife.
‘It’s going to be all right, Barbara.’
‘How can you say that? How can you say that? We need to go, Henry. We need to go to Spain. We can’t be here. I can’t be here.’
By this time, Tim is trying to soothe Jenny, who is also crying. Henry catches Tim’s eye – the young man also in a state of apparent shock.
‘We can’t just go to Spain, love. Not yet. We need to be in touch with what’s happening.’ Henry glances about him. He is thinking that if they are on a plane, they won’t be able to follow the news. He looks finally towards the door, realising that he needs the opinion of the family liaison officer, but she is on the phone still in the hallway.
‘I could take Jenny to Spain if you like. Wait for you there?’ Tim is leaning forward, staring into Henry’s face. ‘Would that help? To at least have someone from the family there?’