Lie down with lions - Ken Follett [164]
Then he was gone.
I killed him, she thought.
At first she felt a kind of wild elation. He had tried to capture her and imprison her and make her a slave. He had hunted her like an animal. He had betrayed her and beaten her. Now she had killed him.
Then she was overcome by grief. She sat on the deck and sobbed. Chantal began to cry too, and Jane rocked her baby as they wept together.
She did not know how long she stayed there. Eventually she got to her feet and went forward to stand beside the pilot’s seat.
“Are you all right?” Ellis shouted.
She nodded and tried a weak smile.
Ellis smiled back, pointed to a gauge and yelled: “Look—full tanks!”
She kissed his cheek. One day she would tell him she had shot Jean-Pierre, but not now. “How far to the border?” she asked.
“Less than an hour. And they can’t send anybody after us because we have their radio.”
Jane looked through the windscreen. Directly ahead, she could see the white-peaked mountains she would have had to climb. I don’t think I could have done it, she said to herself. I think I would have lain down in the snow and died.
Ellis had a wistful expression on his face.
“What are you thinking about?” she asked.
“I was thinking how much I’d like a roast beef sandwich with lettuce and tomato and mayonnaise on whole wheat bread,” he said, and Jane smiled.
Chantal stirred and cried. Ellis took a hand off the controls and touched her pink cheek. “She’s hungry,” he said.
“I’ll go back and take care of her,” said Jane. She returned to the passenger cabin and sat on the bench. She unbuttoned her coat and her shirt, and fed her baby as the helicopter flew on into the rising sun.
PART III
1983
CHAPTER TWENTY
Jane felt pleased as she walked down the suburban driveway and climbed into the passenger seat of Ellis’s car. It had been a successful afternoon. The pizzas had been good, and Petal had loved Flashdance. Ellis had been very tense about introducing his daughter to his girlfriend, but Petal had been thrilled by eight-month-old Chantal, and everything had been easy. Ellis had felt so good about it that he had suggested, when they dropped Petal off, that Jane walk up the drive with him and say hello to Gill. Gill had invited them in, and had cooed over Chantal, so Jane had got to know his ex-wife as well as his daughter, and all in one afternoon.
Ellis—Jane could not get used to the fact that his name was John, and she had decided always to call him Ellis—put Chantal on the backseat and got into the car beside Jane. “Well, what do you think?” he asked as they pulled away.
“You didn’t tell me she was pretty,” Jane said.
“Petal is pretty?”
“I meant Gill,” said Jane with a laugh.
“Yes, she’s pretty.”
“They’re fine people and they don’t deserve to be mixed up with someone like you.”
She was joking, but Ellis nodded somberly.
Jane leaned over and touched his thigh. “I didn’t mean it,” she said.
“It’s true, though.”
They drove on in silence for a while. It was six months to the day since they had escaped from Afghanistan. Now and again Jane would burst into tears for no apparent reason, but she no longer had nightmares in which she shot Jean-Pierre again and again. Nobody but she and Ellis knew what had happened—Ellis had even lied to his superiors about how Jean-Pierre died—and Jane had decided she would tell Chantal that her daddy died in Afghanistan in the war: no more than that.
Instead of heading back to the city, Ellis took a series of backstreets and eventually parked next to a vacant lot overlooking the water.
“What are we going to do here?” said Jane. “Neck?”
“If you like. But I want to talk.”
“Okay.”
“It was a good day.”
“Yes.”
“Petal was more relaxed with me today than she has ever been.”
“I wonder why.”
“I have a theory,” said Ellis. “It’s because of you and Chantal. Now that I’m part of a family, I’m no longer a threat to her home and her stability. I think that’s it,