by Kate Simants
Breathe.
Please, Suzy. Please breathe.
She gets up, races to her bag, then she’s back beside Suzy with her phone wedged between her ear and her shoulder, each pulse of the ring in her ear taking a lifetime.
‘Ambulance,’ she says when it is answered. She gives her address, Suzy’s name. ‘I think she’s fallen down the stairs. She’s pregnant, thirty-eight weeks. Our baby—’
‘All right, we’re already on our way, someone else has called this in as well. You just stay there with her. Is she breathing?’
‘I don’t – I don’t know.’ She puts her hand up to Suzy’s mouth again. She waits. ‘Oh God, oh God,’ she whispers. ‘I don’t think she’s breathing.’
‘OK, you’re doing fine,’ the call handler tells her. ‘If you’ve got something there like a glass or just the screen of your phone, pop that in front of her mouth and nose for me, can you do that?’
Wren does as she is told. She puts the phone right up to Suzy’s mouth.
She waits. The call timer on the display ticks up the seconds. They are the longest, darkest, emptiest seconds of her life.
‘Anything?’ the tinny voice says from the speaker.
She tries to speak. All that comes out is a high, wavering note. A keening, the exact frequency of grief.
Please let her live.
Please let our baby live.
Please.
And then, faintly, the slightest bloom of condensation, there and then gone. Wren crumples back onto her heels, tears blistering in her eyes.
She’s alive.
The crew arrive, two guys, and suddenly her house is full of noise and movement. And in the pause, where Wren can do nothing but watch, she replays in her mind what the call handler said.
Someone else has called this in.
The impossibility of that clatters over itself in her head. How? Who?
Then are more instructions, and Wren does as she is told, stepping back and giving them room to check Suzy. The older one applies an oxygen mask while the other jogs back to the van for a stretcher. They want to know if Suzy has any blood pressure problems, or pregnancy complications. Who is providing her care, the due date. And Wren finds that she knows all the answers.
She stands with her hands cupped around her mouth as they manoeuvre Suzy onto the stretcher, a wide one so they can lie her on her side to avoid compressing her spine. And as these strangers take control, she replays the thing that she compartmentalised for later – whatever it is that is broken on the floor. She glances around. It is the clay dish they bought in Peru. The largest piece, the size of a jagged palm, had been right next to Suzy’s hand – she notices it just as its corner is caught by the heel of one of the ambulance crew’s boots. It pings off towards the wall and spins to a stop. Careful not to get in their way, Wren goes over to it. She bends to touch it, but withdraws her hand.
Across one ragged edge, blood. And as she peers closer, something else, too: threads of hair. Not Suzy’s.
She’d used it as a weapon.
In her mind, the teeth of it suddenly engage. Suzy’s handbag, emptied on the floor.
She hadn’t fallen down the stairs. This is a crime scene.
40
Before
It takes Luke an hour to find his way back to Beech View, and once he’s there, he’s a ghost. He sits at his window from dinnertime to nine, waiting, but she doesn’t come back. There are no calls from Rob or from Paige.
When the house falls silent and the other kids are finally harassed into their beds, he sneaks down and sits in the dining room. Midnight comes. Geraint is on the waking night shift but Luke can hear him in the office watching American soaps. So he gets his coat, goes into the kitchen, turns the key in the rusty lock and shoves the back door open. He closes it behind him and crouches there in the blackness, listening to the not quite silence of the city at night, studded with shouts and sirens and the rise and fall of engines. Through the open window back into the kitchen he can hear the rhythmic beeping of the faulty freezer that’s been trying to get someone’s attention for weeks.
She should be back by now. Something’s gone wrong.
There’s a sweep of headlights up the narrow path beside the house, and a car pulls up, followed seconds later by another. Luke stands. If he goes back in he’ll be seen and sent to his room. He stays where he is.
Car doors are opened and closed. Two low voices speak as the people approach the house. The front door opens, closes softly.
Even from where he is he can hear the stairs creak. He treads soundlessly round the front.
An Audi A6 and a Discovery. Yardley and Polzeath.
When he returns to the kitchen door, the light behind it is on. He slips past the door and crouches right under the kitchen window.
There’s nothing for a minute. Then, through the open window, he hears a kettle click off, a cupboard door opening, closing. Then a voice.
‘She’s not here, James.’
It’s a woman’s voice. It’s Alice Polzeath.
Yardley makes a low growl of frustration. ‘Shit.’
‘Where else can she be?’ Mrs P says, sounding close to tears. ‘We’ve got to find her before she talks to anyone else.’
‘I know.’
‘For Christ’s sake! You promised me you’d stopped all this. You swore to me that this would not happen.’ She sounds close to tears.
‘We all make mistakes.’ There’s the rattle of a teaspoon, a long pause.
‘This is more than a mistake,’ Mrs P whispers at last. ‘I should have reported you the moment I suspected you were behind those bitemarks Melanie saw.’
‘Yeah, well. You got someone else on that committee, have you? Someone else blowing little clouds of money your way?’
Luke breathes out. She knew. She knew, and she did absolutely nothing.
‘Here,’ Yardley says. ‘Take this.’
‘What is it? A bracelet? Oh good God, James, the size of it, I can’t take this!’
‘It’s a smokescreen. Police think that’s what they broke in for. Too suspicious if we say they left without taking anything.’
‘But I don’t want it!’
‘I’m not giving it to you, for fuck’s sake, it’s only for a few weeks. I can’t have it on me right now.’
It sounds like Mrs P is crying. ‘You ought to go.’
‘Go where?’ Yardley hisses. ‘Hmm? The police already told Lucilla they’re going to be all over Ashworth’s place. We’ve got nowhere else to try.’
‘I’ll wait here for Paige. She’ll have to come back for her things, even if she is planning to abscond. Oh, bloody hell,’ she says then, muffled like she’s hiding her face. ‘I’m going to have to report her missing within an hour or so. What a mess. What a bloody awful mess.’
The kitchen light goes off. A few moments later he thinks he hears the front door open again. There’s a hushed exchange Luke can’t make out, and one of the cars starts up again and leaves. A few minutes later he hears Geraint and Mrs P talking inside, and more lights go on downstairs. They’re up, waiting for Paige.
Luke gets his phone out to ring her, to warn her not to come back, but then he thinks about it.
He can’t ring her, doesn’t even know what number she’s on, and Yardley said the police were at Rob’s place, waiting for him, so he can’t ring Rob either. What would he even say to him, if he could?
The cold is making his skin and the muscles beneath hard like he’s growing a shell. He has to go inside. But just as he starts to stand, he hears a crunch of gravel. Someone’s coming up the side path, very slowly, like they’re sneaking up.
He darts left, ducking round the edge of the house, and peers around. The sound has stopped – did they hear him? He stays where he is.
Another footstep. And then out of the darkness, a small figure, eyes flashing like a fox.
It’s Paige.
He steps out from behind the wall and she gasps, hand on her chest, then sof
tens. She opens her mouth to speak but he puts his finger to his lips, motions to her to move back. Then, keeping low, he creeps over.
‘Go,’ he says. He turns her back along the path, and she doesn’t resist.
Just before he follows her out, he has a thought. If he’s going out past curfew, he can’t just walk back in through the front door. Staff think he’s in bed, so he might get away with it, but he’s going to need the key. So he eases the back door open just enough and reaches round for it, working it until it comes free. Then he follows Paige out into the night.
‘They’re waiting for you,’ he hisses, catching her up at the front of the path where it meets the pavement. She quickens her pace. End of the road, cross, keep going. ‘Said they were going to call the police when you got in.’
She bites her lip.
Luke says, ‘What happened?’
She shakes her head, but he catches her sleeve. ‘Tell me.’
‘What do you think? We had to get it back,’ she says. ‘So we got it back.’
‘Did they see you?’
She laughs like she can’t help it, but her face isn’t laughing. ‘Yeah, you could say that.’
‘Where’s the phone now?’
‘Rob’s got it.’
‘Right, but where’s Rob?’
‘I don’t know. We got the phone and got outside but the police were coming and we split up. Yardley’s wife called them, they had this panic thing on their CCTV—’
‘They have CCTV?’
She presses her hands around her face. ‘Yeah.’ She’s been talking mechanically, but now she blinks and looks away, like it’s just sunk in. ‘His wife was… she was really upset… I think – I think I might have hurt her.’
‘What did you do, Paige?’ he says, slowing. But she won’t answer.
After a while they pass the garage where the guy sits behind the glass for night orders, and then there’s a bus stop. They sit down. Luke checks his phone: if anyone notices him gone, he knows the first thing they’ll do is ring him. But there’s nothing, no missed calls, so he’s safe for the time being.
‘What now then?’ Luke asks her.
She shrugs. The narrow bench is too high for her, and her feet dangle. She looks about eight years old. ‘He said I should go back, pretend nothing’s happened.’
Luke laughs out loud because he wants to cry.
‘Don’t,’ she says. Then, quietly, ‘He wants to go ahead with it. Use the photos, I mean. Make Yardley pay us.’
Luke turns to her. ‘Listen.’ He takes her hands, and she doesn’t pull away. ‘If you’re telling me what I think you’re telling me, Rob is going to go to prison.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Rob’s eighteen. Think about it. When it comes down to it, who’s got possession of naked pictures of a kid?’
She looks incredulous. ‘He has, but—’
‘But what? It was only so he could use them to blackmail Yardley? I don’t think that’s going to sound great in court.’
She slumps like someone’s just let the air out of her.
‘Did you steal anything else?’
‘No!’
‘Did he?’
‘No,’ she says again, fast enough for him to be sure it’s the truth.
‘Good. But if you hurt someone, and they’ve got CCTV—’
‘I know! All right? I fucking know.’
A bus rumbles past and whips up the wind and Luke shivers. Paige has only got that thin black jacket, her red-and-black shirt and jeans. The tiny silver star with the gemstones on it hangs on a chain round her neck, catching the light from the streetlamp and glowing like a tiny sun.
He looks away. ‘You didn’t need to lie to me, Paige. What you said, before.’
She doesn’t even ask what he means. ‘You want to know the truth? I’ve never had any sex that I’ve really wanted. Every single time, it’s been because someone’s talked me into it, or because I thought they’d – I don’t know. Care about me. I told you I was a virgin still because I wanted it to be true.’
They just sit there for a moment. Then almost to herself, she says, ‘Pathetic, really. I just wanted someone to love me.’
And Luke leans over and bumps the side of his head gently against hers. He looks her in the eyes, and smiles. He doesn’t need to say it.
‘Yeah, OK,’ she says. ‘But you know what I mean.’
He nods. ‘It wasn’t love though, with him. No one who loves you is going to want that from you.’
‘But that’s the thing. He didn’t, to start with.’ And she tells him how Yardley was good to her, never touched her, not for ages. And then slowly, he got affectionate, and she never told him not to. She never told Leah, or anyone, because he made her promise. Said all the gifts, all the good stuff, would have to stop if she did.
And then Rob saw them together in Yardley’s car. Saw her kissing him. To start with, Rob said he was going to the police. But then he had a different idea.
‘I should never have gone along with it. It was stupid.’
‘He can sweep you up into things. That’s what he’s like.’ Luke tips his head right back and looks at the stars. ‘I thought it was Polzeath.’
‘Yeah,’ she says. ‘I realised that, later.’ ‘I just wanted to stop it happening to you, Paige,’ he says, his teeth chattering and his voice as brittle as ice.
‘It’s not like I was—’ she says, stopping before she can say the word. ‘No one forced me.’
‘OK,’ he says. But even he can see there are different kinds of forcing. ‘Maybe no one pointed a gun at you. But why do you think he chose you?’
She shrugs, miserably. She wants him to say because she’s beautiful, or because she’s perfect. And she is. But it’s not about that.
‘Because you needed a way out. It comes off you like a stink, and don’t—’ he says, holding up a hand, ‘don’t take that personally. It comes off all of us. Because if you’ve got nothing, and someone says do this and I’ll turn that nothing into something, that’s pretty much the same thing as forcing you.’
She sniffs. ‘That’s quite a speech. For you.’
He shrugs.
And then, suddenly she sits up straight, turns to him, slowly. Her eyes have come alive, properly alive.
‘Luke.’ She puts both hands up to her mouth, but it’s not horror in her eyes. It’s something else. Something better.
‘What?’
‘I think I’ve got a way out.’
41
Now
Time stretches out like a universe expanding, and still no news comes. Reluctant to leave her spot beside the closed door, behind which Suzy and the baby are being measured and probed and monitored, Wren waits in the hospital corridor. She is unbearably redundant. A phone rings almost continuously, and men and women in colour-coded uniforms move around ceaselessly, not seeing her.
She buys chocolate from a machine a few paces away, but she can’t eat it. She sits motionless for a time, elbows on her knees, staring at a spot between her feet on the tiled floor for so long that it starts to warp. Catastrophic worst-case scenarios advance in ranks through her mind.
They had lived, she and Suzy, before the prospect of a child. They had thrived and grown and loved and been happy as a complete unit of two. But there is no going back to that. If the baby doesn’t make it, they will be minus one, defined by the absence of something that never even arrived, an impossible loss to overcome.
A pair of shoes stops in her field of vision and she looks up. A doctor, green-rimmed glasses jammed up high on her head atop an inch of afro. A sincere but practised smile.
‘You’re Suzy’s partner?’
Wren makes to stand, but the doctor gestures her to stay where she is, and takes the seat next to her.
‘She’s stable, she’s awake and lucid. We’re going to move her shortly. And the baby, as far as we can tell, is doing OK.’
Wren presses a hand over her mouth. The doctor gives her shoulder a sq
ueeze.
‘Thank you,’ Wren breathes.
‘You are very welcome. There’s some swelling though, which is impacting on the cervix. So we’re going to recommend a C-section.’
‘Yes. OK.’
‘We’re not in panic mode or anything, but I’m going to speak to the surgeon in a minute. It’s looking like a few hours’ time, assuming baby stays happy for now. It might not be what you both really planned for, but—’
Wren waves it away. ‘Whatever we need to do, it doesn’t matter.’ She gets up. ‘Can I see her?’
‘Of course. Just don’t tire her out, all right? She’s got a long night ahead.’
The lights are low in the side room but Suzy is wide awake. She struggles against the pillows to sit up as soon as Wren steps inside.
‘Did they get him yet?’ she asks.
Wren kisses her forehead, then pulls up a chair and sits close, reaching for her hand. She looks oddly flushed, her neck and cheeks flaring patchily against a pallid background, as if her body can’t decide what temperature it should be. Her knees are up, making a tent under the latticed hospital blanket, and her feet are already tapping alternately as if planning their escape.
‘I haven’t heard,’ Wren says, placing what is meant to be a calming hand on a foot.
‘He was local, from his voice, they know that, right?’ Suzy says. ‘So weird though – he kept apologising…’ She drifts off, frowning out of the window.
‘He’ll do more than apologise when I get hold of him,’ Wren says, getting up to let in some air. At home, Suzy always insists on open windows at night, whatever the weather. But as the window reluctantly gives a few inches and the room freshens, Wren turns to see Suzy gathering the blanket higher, her forehead puckered with something that doesn’t suit it, something new.
She is afraid.
Wren slides an arm behind her shoulders in an uncalibrated hug, but Suzy pulls back, meets her eyes.
‘Did you sort it out? Whatever it was you were supposed to be sorting?’
Wren nods. Now isn’t the time.