‘Sure,’ Tom says easily, lying back against her. A blade of grass tickles her ear. Clouds pass above them as they lie there, relaxed in the hazy summer sun, not speaking, not needing to.
After a while, she rolls on to her stomach and looks at him. ‘I miss Paul,’ she says.
‘Me too.’ The sun passes behind the cloud, just for a second, reminding Cathy she’s here, in England, not there, where the sun blazed, baking the body they buried. ‘He’ll be here in a bit,’ Tom says. His words convey misunderstanding, but his eyes don’t.
‘I miss living with Paul,’ she says explicitly. ‘With a kid.’ She thinks of the dinosaur mural she painted across the wardrobes in her spare room that she’s left there. Of how Paul rushed up the stairs to see it every time he visited. How she hopes it will never be painted over.
‘I know.’ Tom sits up and eats a strawberry, evidently thinking. Soon, he will come to a decision in that slow, careful way of his.
‘There they are,’ Cathy says. Frannie is in the distance, hair piled on her head, sunglasses over her eyes, Paul’s hand in hers. He’s over half her height now, a child more than a baby, and Cathy’s heart rolls over as he comes into view.
‘Oh no, we’ve got double strawberries,’ Frannie says when she reaches them. She gives Cathy a hug.
‘You can never have too many strawberries,’ Cathy says, gesturing to the pile. ‘We have doughnuts too.’
‘Good.’ Frannie takes one out of the packet and halves it to share with Paul.
She sits down on the blanket, cross-legged, her maxi dress spreading taut across her leg. Paul keeps his hand in hers. He now has knuckles instead of dimples. ‘Cheers,’ she says, raising a glass. ‘I saw Lydia, just then,’ she adds conversationally.
‘Did you – where?’
Frannie licks the sugar off her lips and jerks her thumb behind her. ‘Down there. With her baby.’
‘The father is some guy she worked with,’ Cathy says.
Frannie chews while thinking, swallows, then says nothing for another minute more. ‘I mean –’ she says.
‘I know,’ Cathy says. Tom frowns, not following, but he wouldn’t be able to. Frannie, Cathy and Joe have always been able to communicate in this way.
Frannie’s and Cathy’s eyes meet. Lydia wasn’t Joe’s family. Not really. Not in this way, this primal way where love is unconditional. Where crimes are forgiven and covered up for each other, no questions asked. You can’t invent that. You can’t manufacture it. It just is.
They go back to Frannie’s cottage after their picnic.
The evening has turned dank, even though it’s the height of summer. The sky is pale and gloomy. The sunset will turn it white to grey to black, no colour to it. It’s strange for Cathy to be back at the cottage. Joe’s was sold recently, and hers too. She lives with Tom now, works at a different practice. The space is nice. The space to be herself, to forget, to move on, to let her sister and brother be each other’s favourites if they want to. It’s a shame their parents thought Cathy betrayed Joe, but she finds she has a new freedom without them.
Cathy goes to Frannie’s fridge while she and Tom sit at her large table, where a thousand things went wrong before. She watches them for a moment, the garden a blaze of flowers behind them. You’d never know.
She gets out a bottle of wine and some sparkling water and mixes spritzers.
As she’s making them, listening to the chit-chat of Frannie and Tom, to Paul’s constant dinosaur commentary, she sees something poking out from underneath a bottle of merlot.
It’s a calendar, the kind you get for Christmas, notecards in a stack that you rip off. It’s ripped to today’s date, 21 June. Each day is neatly crossed off with red pen. At the end of the month, on the 30th, in Frannie’s handwriting, something is written: 6,112 days left. Cathy does the maths quickly and easily. It’s the remaining time on Joe’s sentence. She flicks to July: 6,081 at the end of that month.
She stares at it, tears filling her eyes. At this evidence, here, of her sister’s longing, her sister’s guilt, her sister’s love. Life will resume, for Frannie, when he’s out.
She reaches for the pen that’s lying nearby and crosses off today, for Joe, for her sister, for her family.
It’s not so long. They can wait.
Acknowledgements
I am unable to stick to a brief, and so, before I write out my acknowledgements, I want to tell a small story.
It was a cloudy, close day in July 2020. I was standing outside the vets’ (there is a reason this book is about a vets’ and that is probably because it is one of the few places I have been to in 2020!). My retriever, Wendy, had jumped into a pond and taken a few gulps of what I now knew to be poisonous blue-green algae. I was waiting – outside, as per pandemic life – to be told if she would recover, and waiting to see how my book How to Disappear had sold. To be honest, I am not ashamed to say that both were of equal importance to me. That is the writer’s life: you care so very much.
I kid you not, both pieces of news came at the same time. The vet poked her head around the door and said, ‘She’s going to be fine!’ just as I got the email to say How to Disappear had sold 9,000 paperbacks in its first week on sale and was at No. 8 in the UK charts, despite bookshops having only just reopened, despite the pandemic, despite, despite, despite.
I looked up at the white sky, phone in my hand, dog lead in the other, and thought I was so happy I might burst. And so first of all to you, my loyal readers, thank you for buying How to Disappear in your many thousands; thank you for making that hard day turn great.
This novel was written in the strangest of circumstances, set before a pandemic, in one of the worst-hit regions of Italy. I hope you will forgive me for omitting the unpleasant reality in which we currently live, in hope of better times in the future, when we look back on coronavirus and say, ‘Thank God that’s over.’
First, thanks to my agents Felicity Blunt and Lucy Morris, who pushed and pushed this idea into the structure it is today, and for all their hard work on foreign, film and TV rights, and the astute way they guide my career. It is a privilege to work with two absolute experts.
Secondly to the team at Michael Joseph, especially Maxine Hitchcock, Rebecca Hilsdon, Jen Porter, Olivia Thomas, Donna Poppy, sales and marketing. I say this every time, but I can now say that all five of my books have been bestsellers, and there is hardly a day goes by when I don’t think about how lucky I am to call this thing I have done forever my job.
Thanks so much to Becky Hartley for the tour of the vets’, plus reading this draft for inconsistencies, fielding countless questions (both about my dog and my book!), meeting up specifically to discuss ‘what pets vets have’ and ‘things only vets notice’. Thanks too to Imran Mahmood for his kind and swift views on courtroom procedure – as a former lawyer, I feel the need to say any errors are mine (and, of course, deliberate. And, indeed, of course no lawyer would accept disclosure less than two weeks before trial, and no practising defence lawyer would agree to piecemeal weekly meetings, but Jason is no ordinary lawyer …).
Thanks so much, too, to Luigi Bruno, lawyer of the court of Novara, and to Marcella Compagnoni for describing Italian police procedure, and describing trees and smells and coffee for me, too, in lieu of being able to visit myself (all errors, again, my own!).
Thanks too to my father for reading an early draft of this and feeding back (and for the ingenious suggestion that Joe crash the car to cover up the damage!).
Writing primarily in isolation means I have far fewer experts to thank. Usually, my writing year is peppered with interesting chats, visits to cool places, research trips (oh, to go to Verona …). Instead, this is the year I have been most thankful for my friends. Writing is a naturally isolated job anyway, but my friends make it less so. Thanks for the banter, understanding, deep-voice notes, water-cooler gossip and love: Holly Seddon, Lucy Blackburn, Lia Louis, Claire Douglas, Ewa Hiles, The Wades, Becky Hartley and Beth O’Leary. I am my full
self with you guys and that is a complete privilege.
Finally, as always, thanks to David. You are Jack in Everything but the Truth, you are Reuben in Anything You Do Say, you are Marc and Scott in No Further Questions, you are Aidan in How to Disappear and you are Tom in That Night. You are all the heroes.
(He is also Kelly, the male protagonist in my novel that I am writing as we speak, coming 2022. If you did want to preorder that, dear reader, I wouldn’t say no.)
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Prologue
Jen is glad of the clocks going back tonight. A gained hour, extra time, to be spent doing the ironing she should have done earlier. Jen hates the ironing basket. Eighteen years of motherhood, forty-six years on the planet, and she’s not sure she’s ever reached the bottom of it.
Now that it is past midnight, it is officially the thirty-first of October. Halloween. Jen is standing on the landing, bare toes in thick carpet, pretending she isn’t waiting up for Todd. He’s eighteen. He can do whatever he wants. It is pure coincidence that Jen is also awake, here, peering out of the window that sits in the exact centre of their house.
She has spent the evening – and some of the night – catching up on the tedious tasks parenthood seems to demand of her. School-trip forms, ordering textbooks. She has interspersed this with a solid five hours of screen time and some googling of eye floaters – worrying?
Jen has always come to life at night. When everybody else seems to wind down, she opens up like a flower in the heat. She’s even carved a pumpkin, which she sets down now on the windowsill.
She admires its cack-handed smile. Todd won’t care, but the neighbours do. The school mums do. A pumpkin, sitting in that picture window, says excuse me, we have our shit together.
She hears her husband Kelly’s feet on the landing above her and turns to look. It’s unusual for him to be up, he the lark and she the nightingale. He emerges from their bedroom on the top floor. His hair is messy, a blue-black in the dimness. He has on not a single piece of clothing, only a watch.
‘Jesus,’ he says, looking at the pumpkin on the windowsill, but he blows a smile out through the side of his mouth. ‘Well, whatever makes you happy …’ He descends the stairs towards her.
‘The neighbours will see you,’ Jen says, looking at him. A few of his dark chest hairs have turned white over the past year.
‘I don’t care,’ he says with a grin and, as he turns, that perfect, perfect arse that she’s loved for twenty years.
‘Todd’s not back,’ she says.
Kelly checks his watch. ‘It’s early evening, for him,’ he says. ‘Whatever,’ he adds, as he reaches the top stair.
‘His curfew is one.’ Jen looks at him.
Kelly just shrugs, then turns away from her.
‘The neighbours can now see your arse.’
‘They’ll think it’s one of your pumpkins,’ Kelly says, his wit as fast and sharp as the slice of a knife. ‘Come to bed? Can’t believe Merrilocks is done,’ he says with a stretch.
Kelly’s been restoring a Victorian tiled floor at a house on Merrilocks Road all week, sending her photographs of the process, the grimy tiles, the mud dissolving, their eventual clean emergence. Jen and Kelly are big texters, always have been, their iMessages a private, detailed archive of their life. They text all day. They text from the living room to the kitchen. They send photos, videos, voice notes, anything. Earlier, he sent her just a video of the rain, slithering down a window. She keeps every single one.
‘Sure,’ she says. ‘In a bit.’
She goes downstairs to make a herbal tea. She can never understand how people can go to bed when their children are out somewhere. She’ll wait as long as it takes. Both phases of parenthood – the new-born years and the almost-adult ones – bookended by sleep deprivation. Jen drinks two cups of strawberry tea that taste of boiling water. She scrolls idly on her phone, just waiting. Doing nothing except waiting.
Back at the window, at almost two, she stares out into the October mist, wondering how late is so late that she should call.
But there he is, outside on the street, at last. Jen sees him just as Daylight Saving Time kicks in, and her phone switches from 01:59 to 01:00. She can’t hide a smile: thanks to the clocks going back, he is deliberately no longer late. That’s Todd for you; he finds the linguistic and semantic backflipping of arguing a curfew more important than the reason for it.
There he is, her boy so full of intellect that it has left no room for common sense, loping up the street, coming home. He’s skin and bones, doesn’t eat enough, consumes science and maths more than food. His knees poke angles in his jeans as he walks, a praying mantis.
But – wait. He isn’t alone. He’s meeting somebody. Is he? A hooded figure is making its way up the street from the other end. She watches her son and the stranger walking towards each other.
She shouldn’t be looking. The lines of parenthood have become blurred in recent years. Bathroom doors now locked, phone screens shielded from view. This interaction is Todd’s, as an adult. He doesn’t know she can see from up here at her window. She should step back, but she doesn’t. The same instinct that makes her wait up for him keeps her here, tethered to the window with her eyes. She places a hot palm on the cold glass, still waiting.
The mist outside is colourless, the trees and pavement black, the air a translucent white. A world in greyscale. Jen knows the last of the leaves clinging on to the trees are an ochre colour, but she can’t see them. Their street – the backend of Crosby, Merseyside – is unlit. Kelly installed a lamp outside their house, a Narnia lamp, and it clicks on as it detects their movement, illuminating the tops of their heads.
Todd has on black jeans, too-white trainers – huge feet – and a dark jacket with fur around the hood. He’s reaching towards the other person, who, as he approaches the pavement outside Jen’s house, she sees is actually a man; a grown adult, at least forty.
Something about their body language is off. Jen realizes something is about to happen without being able to name what it is; the same way she feels around fireworks and level crossings and cliff edges.
She sets the cup on the windowsill, next to the pumpkin, and takes the stairs two at a time, the striped stair runner rough on her bare feet. She shoves on shoes, then throws on a coat, and pauses for a second with her hand on the front door knob.
What’s that? She shakes her head, confused. A feeling that there is more than one of her, of her having been here before, maybe. A gauzy curtain across her mind. Déjà vu. She hardly ever experiences it. She blinks, and the feeling is gone, as insubstantial as smoke from a distant fire on the breeze. What was it? Her hand on the brass knob? The lamp outside? No, she can’t recall. It’s gone now.
As she hurries out, the autumn cold chills her skin immediately. She hurries towards Todd and the man, hoping Kelly is still awake, that he’s heard her leave and is coming, too. The thoughts rush through her mind like the clicking of a camera, one after the other after the other. She doesn’t act on any of them, doesn’t go back for Kelly. All she does is keep moving forwards, out on to the drive, maternal instincts pulling her towards her son with a force that feels as strong as gravity.
By the time she reaches the end of their U-shaped driveway, the man – taller than Todd, and bulkier, too – is shouting Todd’s name, and suddenly Todd has the front of this stranger’s coat in his grasp, is squaring up to him, his shoulders thrust forwards, their bodies a Yin and Yang sign in the night.
‘What’re you doing?’ she shouts, and that’s when she sees the knife.
She rushes towards them. Adrenaline sharpens Jen’s vision as she sees it happen. A quick, clean stab. And then, afterwards, everything seems to move in slow motion: the arm pulling back, the clothing resisting then releasing the knife. Two white feathers emerge with the blade, drifting aimlessly in the frozen air.
She stares as black blood begins to spurt, huge amounts of it, way more than she would’ve tho
ught possible. She must be kneeling down now, because she becomes aware of the little stones of the path cutting round divots into her knees. She cradling him, parting his jacket, feeling the heat of the blood as it dribbles down her hands, between her fingers, and down her wrists. The warm weight in her arms.
She has gone completely cold. She undoes his shirt and looks. His torso begins to flood; the three coin-slot wounds swim in and out of view, it’s like trying to see the bottom of a red pond.
‘No.’ Her voice is thick and wet as she screams.
She looks around her desperately, wanting someone else to take charge.
She lays him on their driveway and leans over him. She blinks, peering carefully. She hopes she’s wrong, but she’s sure, for just a moment, that he isn’t here anymore. His eyes are open and still, no comprehension in them.
The night is completely silent, and after what must be several minutes, she blinks, then looks up at her son, still holding the knife, just gazing down at her, his expression neutral. He drops the knife. It sings as the metal hits the frozen pavement. He wipes a hand across his face, leaving a smear of blood.
Jen stares at the arrangement of his features. Maybe he is regretful, maybe not. She can’t tell. It must be the shock, but Jen never could read Todd.
Day Zero
Jen must have slept after they got home from the police station, where Todd was detained. She doesn’t feel like she did, but it’s now light outside, and time seemed to become elastic, bending and stretching between the hours.
She rolls on to her side. Say it isn’t true.
She’s alone. Kelly’s side of the bed is empty. He’ll already be up, making calls, she very much hopes. God, he will hate this. Kelly hates any sort of dealing with authority, sat in the reception of the station last night with his hood drawn entirely over his face.
That Night Page 33