Chapter 3: The River Takes Everything

"By sunrise Iris Hale will be dead."

She said it standing at the window of Aldous's office with her back to the glass, and Aldous dropped his pen. Vance, who had been staring at the empty inhaler, looked up as if she had thrown something at him.

"Iris, you've been awake for twenty hours."

"That's why I can see it." She kept her voice low, for the door. "Eleanor filed before he collapsed, so the judge is already hers. Somebody emptied his inhaler, so he isn't safe in any building they pay for. If I'm alive they take him. If I'm dead there's nobody to file against."

"And Theo?" Aldous said.

"Theo too."

Nobody breathed.

"Not really," Iris said. "On paper. In the river, in front of the people who matter. You told me my father's trust can't be touched until I'm thirty-five, Mr. Vance. It never said I had to be seen."

Vance said nothing for a long time. Then he took a folded map from the briefcase and put a finger on a bridge. "Kessler Crossing. Sixty feet of water, and it runs fast enough to carry a car out to the estuary before anyone thinks to dive. If an ambulance left the road at five this morning, on Dr. Aldous's transfer order, nobody would wonder why they didn't find two bodies."

"Eleanor's people will follow it," Aldous said. "They watched me sign."

"Good. Let them follow it. Let them watch it go through the rail." Vance's eyes were very bright. "There's a driver I kept out of prison once. He's owed me for years. It goes in empty, with two hospital bracelets and a paper crown on the water."

"The crown stays with me," Iris said. "Everything else they can have."

Aldous rubbed his face with both hands. "I'm a doctor, not a criminal."

"You told me you have a girl his age." She said it gently. "If it was her."

He didn't answer, and that was his answer.

Two sharp knocks came at the door, and all three of them froze.

"Dr. Aldous?" The voice was flat and professional. Brandt, Eleanor's head of security. "Mrs. Hale senior wants the boy moved to Hale Private at five. She's sent a car."

Aldous looked at Iris. Iris nodded once.

"The transfer's already signed," Aldous called, steady as a wall. "Ambulance leaves at five with a nurse and the mother. Policy allows one escort, Mr. Brandt, and it's hers by right."

A long pause, then boots going away down the corridor. Vance let out a breath he had been holding for a minute.

"He'll be on that bridge when it goes in," he said.

"Good," Iris said. "I want one witness who can't lie about what he saw."

*****

Theo was awake when she went back in, propped on the pillow, holding the new inhaler in both hands. Aldous's, full and sealed.

"We're going to play a game, baby." She sat on the edge of the bed. "A hiding game. Everyone's going to think we've gone away, and we have to stay hidden for a long, long time."

"Like hide and seek?"

"Exactly like that. A very big one."

He thought about it, frowning, the way he thought about everything. "Can Biscuit come? He's hiding too."

Biscuit, the grey rabbit with one ear, was lying on Theo's bed at home, three miles away, behind a gate she could never go through again. "Biscuit's already in the bag," Iris said, which wasn't true, and she added it to the list of things she would make true later.

"Will Daddy look for us?"

"Daddy will think we're gone."

"Will he be sad?"

She had told him one lie too many that night already. "Yes. He'll be very sad."

Theo nodded and looked down at the inhaler in his hands.

"Good," he said.

She didn't tell him off. She pulled him against her, and over his head she saw grey light starting at the edge of the blind. In her bag, under a folded handkerchief, there was a small plastic test with two pink lines on it that nobody in the world knew about, not Vance, not Aldous, certainly not Damian. A secret was the one thing Eleanor couldn't freeze.

"Come on," she whispered into his hair. "Let's go be dead."

*****

At twenty-two minutes past five that morning, Damian Hale stood on Kessler Crossing in yesterday's shirt with his shoes unlaced, watching a crane lift a white ambulance out of the black water.

The back doors hung open. The gurney was gone. A diver came up beside it and shook his head, and a young officer climbed the embankment with something small and sodden held in both hands.

A paper crown.

Damian took it from him. The ink had run, and the gold stars Theo had drawn on it that afternoon, one at a time, with his tongue stuck out, had bled into one yellow smear. He stood holding it for a while, and then his knees went and he was on the wet gravel.

"No," he said. "No, no."

"The current's very strong, Mr. Hale." The officer sounded apologetic. "We may not recover them. I'm very sorry."

"She called me five times." He was talking to the crown, to the water. "Five times, and I told her I was in a meeting."

Eleanor's heels sounded behind him on the pavement, not hurrying. "A tragedy. But we ought to talk about the statement for the board before the press gets here."

Damian turned his head slowly, and the officer took a step back from whatever he saw. "Get out of my sight."

"Damian..."

"Get out of my sight." His voice cracked in the middle. Then he faced the river and said, very quietly, the only promise he had left to make. "I'll come home early tonight. I swear. Just, please. I'll come home early."

Fifty yards off, at the end of the bridge, a woman in a camel coat stood at the rail with a phone to her ear. Vivienne Ashgrove did not look like someone at a tragedy. She looked like someone watching a magic trick and trying to work out where the coin had gone.

"No bodies," she said. "Not even a shoe."

She listened.

"Then she isn't dead," she said. "Find her."