They lower me onto the ambulance stretcher. More wails, more sirens. They’re all coming, coming for me.

Chapter Thirty-Two

THIRTY-TWO

THE CLOCK TICKS on the pale grey wall in the boardroom of the Richmond police station. It’s 4 am, and every minute that passes by means the chance of July coming home alive drops. Gabe goes to the watercooler and fills three plastic cups, bringing them over and handing one to me and one to Evan.

They treated me in the back of the ambulance before they would let me go with Gabe back to the police station.

They were insisting I go to the hospital, for smoke inhalation, but I refused. When the flames came closer, I was only thinking about survival, but now I’m thinking about July. I can’t let Cormac win. We’ve got to find her. We need to do something.

Gabe hadn’t called the police. Instead he called Simms directly and explained the situation. Simms’s team had triangulated the approximate area of the house based on the clues they overheard and the mobile phone towers my phone had pinged. Then they had emergency vehicles patrolling the area, until one noticed a white Toyota racing out of a dead-end street. Then, as they got closer, they noticed the smoke.

‘They’ve still not managed to make contact with him,’ Gabe says, with resignation in his voice. The door opens and Simms is there.

‘Come on through to an interview room,’ he says.

We follow him down the hall, passing other cops, coming and going, all moving so quickly as though their kinetic energy alone might conjure July.

‘Alright,’ Simms says, closing the door behind him. He sits down across from us at the table. ‘Time is of the essence, so you’re going to run me through what happened tonight, the car he was driving, where he lives, what time you noticed your daughter missing.’

I recount everything I remember from the night and he keeps me on point, cutting me off when my thoughts meander or I begin to speculate.

‘Just the pure facts,’ he says. Gabe holds my hand in both of his and there’s another cop in the room with us, making notes on a yellow pad.

Finally, when he has extracted all the information from me he can, he says, ‘Okay, we’ve got police searching for the car, the plates have been sent to every cop in the state and we will continue to attempt to make contact with both Nathan and Xanthe Schultz. But our main priority is to find your daughter. Now I need you to think, Margot. Think deeply about Xanthe and Nathan. Was there anything at all that might help us find where they’ve taken July?’