The Heatwave by Kate Riordan

Author:Kate Riordan [Riordan, Kate]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781405922630
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2020-04-22T23:00:00+00:00

1978

The trip is Greg’s idea. I’ve never enjoyed camping so I’m reluctant but end up capitulating, mainly, if I’m honest, to deprive Greg of the point against me if I spoil his plan.

We don’t go far – we don’t need to: the forests are only half an hour by car. We’re soon winding up into the green-swathed hills, leaving behind the stifling heat of the open plain below. The pines flank the road, impossibly tall and straight, the canopy a hundred feet up, throwing us into shade for the first time in the journey. I feel myself relax a little – the air streaming in through the windows is not only cool but wonderfully clean. Perhaps, I think, relenting, this wasn’t such a bad notion after all.

I reach forward to turn up the music. It’s the scratchy compilation tape that Greg put together for me – all my favourites squeezed into ninety minutes. It took him hours, not just the recording but the track names written in such neat, tiny capitals, a peace-offering he couldn’t make in any other way. I’ve insisted on playing it all summer, my own olive branch.

‘California Dreamin’’ comes on with its plaintive refrain, the half-kaput speakers of the old Citroën favouring the backing harmonies over the lead vocals, turning them echoey and ethereal as we drive through the cathedral of silent trees.

The campsite is only small, little more than a clearing with a basic shower block and room for about fifty pitches, most of which haven’t been taken. It isn’t high season yet. The afternoon passes uneventfully, with Greg and Élodie heading into the thick of the forest on bikes, while I stay behind to read at the picnic table outside the tent. Dinner, too, is peaceful. The clean air of the hills is so soporific that we are zipped into our sleeping bags by half past nine.

The first I know of it is the high note of a baby’s cry. It’s not a normal cry, but a bright thread of alarm that pierces the dark. Moving lights answer it as people begin to turn on torches. Greg crawls to the end of the tent to open the flap and the smell of smoke seems to roll inside like a choking wave. He scrabbles for our torch.

‘Shit, where is it?’

‘Here. It’s here,’ I say, turning it on and throwing it to him before grabbing a cotton top to cover my nose and mouth. I fumble for my jeans, which are damp and hard to pull on lying down, my heels slipping on the nylon of the sleeping bag.

‘Sylvie,’ Greg says, voice hoarse with sudden fear. ‘Where’s Élodie?’

He points the torch to where her sleeping bag is thrown open, unzipped to the bottom. Her clothes and shoes are gone. She is gone.

‘Oh, God,’ he says, hand raking through his hair. He ducks outside the mouth of the tent. ‘I’ll find her. You get everything into the car.’

From the back of the little campsite, where the trees

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