Free Among the Missing by Morag Joss

round to drive straight ahead, to the outskirts of Inverness. The traffic grew heavier, and it unnerved him. A couple of miles farther, cursing under his breath, he made a complete circuit at another roundabout and headed back the way we had come. At the bridge roundabout, he took us back onto the Inverness road, where he picked up speed. Then he turned back in the same place as before.
    “Car okay?” I asked, and he nodded.
    “I go back to service station now,” he said.
    But when he pulled in, he shook his head and inched past the rows of parked cars. “Too many cars, too many people,” he said. “I don’t stop here.”
    At the far end of the car park, just at the start of the entrance ramp back to the road, a disused track jutted off to the left toward the ground near the bridge, the wrecked and abandoned place I’d seen from the window of the café.
    “More quiet here,” he said, turning the wheel. The track crossed an empty field and then opened out onto a vast stretch of cracked concrete where factories or warehouses had once stood. He stopped the car. We got out into a terrain of piled-up rubbish: lumps of masonry, rustedmetal spars and gutters and old window frames, warped boards, buckled machinery, shattered glass, and heaps of what looked like sodden old clothes. In the distance a man shuffled out from a broken shed clasping what looked like a piece of carpet around his shoulders like a cloak. Without seeing us, he wandered away in the direction of three or four plumes of smoke rising from behind a half-demolished wall.
    “Bad place. Junkies,” Stefan said, glancing in at Anna asleep on the backseat. “Hurry up. Bad place.”
    “Do you want it or not? If you want the car, you have to pay me. Now.”
    “First I need promise. I need favor,” he said. “No, not a favor. For both of us.” His eyes were anxious. “I have to change license plates. It’s okay, I can do, there’s a guy I know. So you don’t tell police the car is stolen straightaway. You report the car later, okay? Wait till I got new plates. Wait till six o’clock.” He looked at his watch, then pointed back to the service station. “Up there you can get the bus. You go in bus to Netherloch, you say you left the car in Netherloch. The bus comes there soon, fifteen minutes.”
    “It’s too cold to wait for a bus. I’m not feeling well. Can’t you drive me to Netherloch?”
    “No,” he said, looking back at his daughter. “You can get bus easy, plenty of time. Bus is warm. Listen—when you get to Netherloch. There is a car park behind the school.”
    I nodded.
    “So cars get taken from there. Stay in town awhile, you can get coffee, food. Wait till six, then I will have new plates. At six o’clock you go to car park, you call police, you say you left the car there all day. Tell them this morning you went to walk, you go along by the water and in the forest and then you get back and car is not there. Okay? You got no car, you have to tell story, explain them something. It’s for both of us. You understand?”
    “Okay.”
    He pulled out the envelope from his jacket. “Two thousand,” he said.
    “Three,” I insisted, numbly. I had no idea what the car was worth, no idea what I was talking about.
    “Two thousand five hundred,” he said, counting it through his fingertips, bill by bill, before I could argue.
    “All right,” I said.
    He handed it over and pointed to the service station again. “Just up there.”
    He smiled. He was anxious for me to go. But some natural courtesy—maybe even a little gratitude because I liked his daughter—prevented him from showing it.
    “All right. Goodbye.”
    In absolute misery, I zipped the money into an inside pocket of my shoulder bag. Just as I was turning to go, I glanced in at the child, lying aslant across the collapsed wad of bedding and beginning to stir from sleep. Seeing her father outside, she pulled herself up and patted on the window with the palms of both hands,