Ena Witty smiled shyly and mumbled a hi. She had a very quiet voice. Stan Gibson, on the other hand, beamed at Jennifer. ‘Hi, Jennifer. Gwen’s told me a lot about you. And about your dogs. Are they really as big as she says?’
‘Even bigger,’ replied Jennifer, ‘but as gentle as lambs. I shouldn’t really say this, but I’m afraid they’d probably wag their tail even at a burglar, then lick his hand.’
Stan laughed. ‘I wouldn’t want to try.’
‘I like dogs a lot,’ said Ena.
Jennifer thought that Ena Witty was just the type of person she had expected to find on this course, not so Stan Gibson. He was not a particularly good-looking man, but he had an engaging, friendly bearing and did not seem shy or fearful. What had he been doing on the course these last few months?
As if reading her thoughts, Gwen explained: ‘By the way, Stan wasn’t in our course. In August and September the school was rebuilding some rooms, and Stan works for the company that did the work. He was still here every Wednesday at the time our course started. That’s how he met Ena.’
Ena looked shyly at the floor.
Quite a matchmaking service, the Friarage School, thought Jennifer. Gwen found the man of her life here. Ena Witty found a boyfriend … If it continues like this, the school could turn it into a little money-spinner!
‘Because I’m with Ena, I got to tag along to the leaving party,’ said Stan. ‘And in the last few weeks I’ve talked a lot to Gwen too. What do you think, Ena, shouldn’t we invite Gwen and Jennifer over to our place some time?’
‘To our placet?’ asked Ena, caught unawares.
‘Darling, now don’t look so surprised. Sometime you’ll move to my place, right, and then of course we’ll invite good friends to our place! He laughed long and loud and then turned to the two other women. ‘It’s probably all happening a bit quick for Ena. Tomorrow we set off early for London and stay at my old folks until Sunday. I want them to get to know her.’
Gwen and Jennifer glanced quickly at each other. Both had the impression that Ena was not all that happy with Stan’s plans, but that she did not dare to voice her unease.
Then Ena smiled suddenly. ‘It’s great not to be on my own any more,’ she said, and Jennifer recognised the woman’s loneliness, and realised that was what everyone in the group shared in common, much more than problems with shyness, self-doubt or any phobias. People who met on courses like this one suffered above all from loneliness. They were women like Ena, who remained alone because no one noticed them and they had not learnt to show the world their talents, gifts and qualities. And women like Gwen, who had slipped into roles which then blocked them in, and who at some point realised that the world was zooming past them. They longed to escape their long, quiet, melancholic weekends and their endless evenings with only the television for company.
‘We’ll call again about the invite,’ said Stan.
They said their goodbyes and Jennifer and Gwen started off towards the bus stop. The dog food was heavy, but Gwen did not complain as she helped to carry it. They could have borrowed Chad’s or Colin’s car, but Gwen – although she had a driver’s licence – did not like to drive if she could at all help it.
And Jennifer …
‘What about just trying again?’ Colin had asked at lunch. ‘It might be easier than you think.’
She had shaken her head. ‘No. I can’t. It won’t work. It’s just … I don’t think I can do it any more, anything could happen …’
He had not insisted. She knew that he wished she would be more proactive in building up her old self-confidence, but sometimes she had the feeling that she had waited too long already and now would never pluck up the courage to do so. Anyway, she thought her life was more or less normal. She no longer dared to get behind a steering wheel, and she was a little unsociable and suspicious sometimes, but she was not lonely. She had Colin and her dogs; the holidays at Chad and Gwen’s place; she was content. She had her depression under control. When it did flare up again, she just swallowed a pill, once a week at the most. She was far from being dependent on medication, as they had tried to imply.
But she was not to think about that, or about all the dirt they had dished on her. That was long ago – another time, another life.
She had found a new space for herself.
She just had to manage to leave the old one behind, completely, and to no longer explain it away or think back with longing to that time. This was a slow process, as she had found out, but one day she would be there.
And then everything would be better.
2
‘You’ve a visitor,’ said Mrs Willerton, the landlady, as soon as Dave had opened the front door and stepped into the narrow hall, which was hung with twee animal drawings. ‘Miss Ward, your … well, is she your ex-girlfriend now or not?’
‘I told you not to let anyone in while I was out,’ replied Dave in annoyance, and climbed the steep stairs two at a time before Mrs Willerton could ask any more questions. It was the pits: being a lodger and having to squeeze past his nosy landlady all the time. Mrs Willerton was extremely curious about his love life, probably – he surmised – because her own was many decades in the past. As she had once admitted to him in embarrassment, Mr Willerton had made off twenty years ago with a motorbike bride he had met through a Harley Davidson fan club.
Dave could understand him only too well.
He was tired. He had been giving French lessons for two hours, having to bear a dozen middle-aged North Yorkshire housewives’ ghastly pronunciation of a language he loved for its sound and melody. His longing was becoming stronger and stronger to leave all this behind. His life was far too difficult at the moment – crazily complicated and with the added burden of worrying that he was making an enormous mistake. Karen Ward, the twenty-one-year-old student whom he had been in a relationship with for the last year and a half, was the last person he wanted to see tonight.
He went into his room. As always, he had left it in quite a mess. The bed was not made. A few of his clothes had been thrown over the back of a chair. The remains of his lunch were still on the table at the window: a paper carton with the leftover rice from an Indian takeaway. Next to it stood a half-empty bottle of white wine with a cork quickly jammed in. Karen had always made a thing about his sometimes drinking at lunchtime. At least he would be spared those talks in future.
Karen was sitting on a little stool at the end of the bed. She was wearing a dark-green turtleneck sweater and her beautiful long legs were in tight jeans. Her blond hair fell in a carelessly messy way over her shoulders. Dave had known her long enough to know that she spent ages every morning working on this casual look. There was not a strand that was not exactly where she wanted it. Her make-up too, which you didn’t notice, was the result of hard work.
She had really fascinated him once. But it had never been more than that – an appreciation of her appearance, which was obviously not the basis for a long-term relationship.
Added to that, she was just far too young.
He closed the door behind him. You could bet on Mrs Willerton being downstairs in the hall with her ears pricked.
‘Hi, Karen,’ he said, as casually as possible.
She had stood up, obviously in the expectation that he would go up to her and at least for a moment take her in his arms. But he just stood there at the door. He did not even take his coat off. He did not want to give her any indication that he was prepared to have a long talk with her.
‘Hi, Dave,’ Karen replied after a long silence. ‘Sorry that I just …’ She let her words hang in the air. Dave did not do her the favour of accepting her apology for her unexpected appearance – she did not mean it, anyway, he knew that.
He did not say a word.
Karen looked around the unwelcoming room with a helpless expression.
‘It looks worse here than last time I visited,’ she remarked.
Typical. She always had something to complain about: his drinking too much
wine, not tidying up enough, sleeping in too long, or not showing any ambition, or … or … or.
‘It’s been a while since you were here last,’ he replied, ‘and since then no one else has been tidying up after me.’ Thank God, he added in his thoughts.
His reply was a mistake. He realised as soon as Karen replied tartly, ‘Depends on how you see things, doesn’t it, Dave? As far as I remember, I was last here exactly one week ago.’
What an idiot he was. Last week he had slipped up, although he had resolved not to let that happen with Karen again. He had met her by chance late one night on a pub crawl down at the harbour, in the Newcastle Packet, where she had just started to pull pints some evenings. He had waited until she came off work, had drunk a couple of beers with her, and had then taken her back to his room. Then slept with her. It had been pretty wild and uninhibited, as he vaguely remembered. Since he had broken up with her at the end of July, they had met a couple of times, just because it was always good to chat and have a laugh, and sleep with her, and because sometimes he needed a distraction from the dry times with Gwen. But it was not fair on Karen, and he was annoyed that he had been weak. No wonder that she thought their relationship could be on again.
‘So, why were you waiting for me here?’ he asked, although he knew the answer.
‘Can’t you think why?’
‘Frankly: no.’
She looked really hurt, as if he had slapped her. He pulled himself together. ‘Karen … I’m really sorry about last week. If it … if that’s why you’re here. I’d had a few pints too many. But nothing’s changed. Our relationship is over.’
She flinched a little at his words, but kept calm. ‘When you dumped me in July – out of the blue – I just wanted to know one thing. Do you remember? I wanted to know if there was another woman.’
‘Yes, and?’
‘You said there wasn’t. That it was just about the two of us.’
‘I know what I said. Why do you have to bring it all up?’
‘Because …’ She hesitated. ‘Because I’ve been hearing from various people that there’s someone else in your life after all. In the last few weeks you’ve often been seen with another woman. Apparently she’s not that young and nothing special.’
He hated this kind of conversation. It was like an interrogation.
‘And what if I have?’ he retorted. ‘Did we sign an agreement that I can’t start something with any other woman after our affair?’
‘One and a half years is not an affair.’
‘Call it what you will. In any case—’
‘In any case I don’t believe that you didn’t know this … new acquaintance before. You broke up with me on the 25th July. It’s the 10th October today.’
‘Yup, almost three months have passed.’
She sat there, waiting. He felt cornered and realised how angry he was getting. With everything he already had on his plate; as if his life were not enough of a hassle already.
‘I don’t owe you any explanations,’ he said coolly.
Her lips trembled.
Please, God, don’t let her cry now, he thought, annoyed.
‘After last week—’ she started in a shaking voice, before he immediately interrupted.
‘Forget last week! I was drunk. I said I’m sorry. What else do you want me to say?’
‘Who is she? Apparently she’s quite a bit older than me.’
‘Who said?’
‘People who have seen you together. People studying with me.’
‘So what? So she’s older than you.’
‘She’s almost forty!’
‘And what if she is? Suits me. I’m in my forties, after all.’
‘So there is someone.’
He did not say anything.
‘You’ve always had such young girlfriends,’ said Karen in despair.
Youth. That was all she had to offer.
‘Maybe I’m changing some things in my life,’ he replied.
‘But—’
He slammed his briefcase down on the table. He had been holding it all this time.
‘Listen, Karen. Stop putting yourself down. Tomorrow you’ll be bitterly sorry. It’s over between us. There are any number of men who would walk over hot coals for a girl as beautiful as you are. Just forget me, and don’t dwell on it.’
Her first tears fell and she sank back down onto the stool where she had sat and waited for him. ‘I can’t forget you, Dave. I can’t. And I think … you can’t actually have forgotten me either, otherwise last week you wouldn’t have—’
‘What? Screwed? Bloody hell, Karen, you know how things go!’
‘Your new girlfriend isn’t fit. Maybe you don’t enjoy sleeping with her, like you do with me.’
‘That’s my business,’ he said. He was getting more and more angry, because she had hit upon a sore point. He just could not imagine having sex with Gwen, and he was already fearing the day – or night – when it would be unavoidable. Probably the only thing that would help then would be to get completely plastered and to try to imagine Karen’s beautiful body.
Better for Karen not to hear about this plan.
She was crying hard now. ‘And today Detective Inspector Almond came by again,’ she sobbed. ‘About Amy Mills.’
Dave took his coat off, resigned. It was going to take a while. Now she had got to the topic that would really bring on the waterworks. At least it had nothing to do with him. A little progress. If only he were not so tired, and did not have so many problems.
‘What did she need to see you again for?’ he asked, beaten. And when Karen, instead of replying, just started sobbing more violently, he fetched a bottle of the hard stuff from a cupboard and two more-or-less clean glasses. ‘Here, have a sip.’
She rarely drank alcohol and had always complained when he did, but this time she put the glass to her lips and knocked it back. She let him pass her a second glassful and emptied it as quickly as the first. Then at least her tears subsided.
‘Oh, she basically just asked again about everything we’d already gone over,’ she said. She was just as distraught as in July, when Amy Mills’s murder had shaken the whole of Scarborough. ‘I’m the only person Amy was even a little in contact with, so she wanted to talk once more about all her daily habits and routines with me. But I don’t know all that much about them. I mean …’ she bit her lip, ‘I always found Amy a little … odd. So uptight. I felt sorry for her. But I certainly wasn’t a close friend of hers.’
‘You can’t blame yourself for that now,’ said Dave. ‘You did more than the others. After all, you went for a coffee with her once or twice and listened to her problems. She obviously had real issues with making contact. That’s not your fault.’
‘The police have no idea who did it. There’s not a single lead,’ said Karen. ‘At least, that’s the impression I get.’ She added: ‘Do you know Mrs Gardner well?’
‘You mean …’
‘Mrs Gardner, the woman whose child Amy was looking after that evening.’
‘Linda Gardner. Of course I know her. She teaches languages too, and we’ve always made sure our teaching matched up. But I don’t know her more than that.’
‘She was teaching the evening Amy was murdered.’
The evening he had met Gwen and driven her home. How well, how very well he remembered that evening!
‘Right. That’s why Amy was babysitting.’
‘Detective Inspector Almond is looking for people who knew that. Who knew that Amy babysat for Mrs Gardner. She asked me if I knew. I said I did.’
‘You’re hardly a prime suspect.’
‘She wanted to know if I knew other people who knew too.’ She looked at him, waiting for his reply.
He thought impatiently that she should just say what she was getting at. He hated the way she always beat around the bush.
‘Yes? And?’
‘I didn’t tell her that I thought that you knew.’
‘And why not?’
There was something sly about how she waited; at least he thought he sensed that. ‘I … didn’t want to make life difficult for you, Dave. It was your evening off. And if you remember, a day later we had a massive fight because you had stood me up and didn’t want to tell me what had happened.’
Of course not. Should he have told her of the drive to Stainton-dale? And then be obliged to tell him about everything that had followed on from that?
He forced himself to stay calm, although she was really getting on his nerves. ‘I always had a problem with the way you wanted to control me. Maybe that was a reason why our relationship broke down.’
‘Did you know? That a student used to babysit for Mrs Gardner?’
‘Maybe she did tell me. And? Do you think I was lying in wait for Amy in the park and smashed her head in?’
Karen shook her head. ‘No.’
She looked sad and tired. No doubt this was not primarily because of the fate of a fellow student who had only been a fleeting acquaintance, nor because the police were having obvious difficulties in solving the crime. Rather, because her relationship with Dave had gone wrong. He started to feel traces of guilt, which annoyed him. He did not want to feel guilty.
‘So …’ he said.
She reached for her handbag.
‘So …’ she said too. Her voice sounded hoarse.
He pulled a face. ‘I’m really sorry about how it’s all turned out. Really I am.’
Tears started to well up in her eyes again. ‘But why, Dave? I just don’t understand.’
Because I’m crazy, he thought, because I’m doing something completely crazy. Because it’s finally time for a different life. Because I can only see one way, just this one way, to go.
He knew that she hated it when he answered in clichés, but he did it anyway.
‘Some things you can’t understand. You just have to accept them.’
He held the door open for her. A floorboard creaked down in the hall. The landlady, who had been standing at the foot of the stairs the whole time, quickly made herself scarce.
The Other Child Page 5