by Ruth Ware
‘You know there’s not,’ I say. ‘Since when was there a bank machine at the station? We’ll have to go via the post office. Why do you need money, anyway? I can pay for the cab.’
‘I just want some cash for the journey,’ Thea says. ‘Post office please, Rick.’
Rick indicates right, and I cross my arms, suppressing a sigh.
‘We’ve got plenty of time until the train.’ Thea closes her bag, and shoots a sideways look at me. ‘No need to be mardy.’
‘I’m not mardy,’ I say crossly, but I am, and as Rick begins to turn across the bridge towards Salten, I realise why. I don’t want to go back there. Not at all.
‘Going already?’
The voice comes from behind us, making me jump. Thea is bent over the cash machine, typing in her pin, so it falls to me to turn and answer the person behind us in the post office.
It is Mary Wren, come out quite silently from whatever back room she was in when we entered the empty shop.
‘Mary!’ I put my hand to my chest. ‘Gosh, you gave me a shock. Yes. We’re heading back to London today. We – we only came for the dinner, you know, at the school.’
‘So you said …’ she says slowly. She looks me up and down, and for a moment, I have the disquieting impression that she doesn’t believe a word of what I’ve said, that she sees through all of us – through all the lies and deception, and knows exactly what secrets we’ve been hiding. She was one of Ambrose’s closest friends and it occurs to me to wonder, for the first time, what he told her, all those years ago.
I think of what Kate said, the rumours in the village, and I wonder what part Mary played in all this. I have never been in the Salten Arms when she was not seated by the bar, her loud deep laugh ringing out across the drinkers. She knows everything that goes on in Salten. She could have quashed those rumours if she wanted to – defended Kate – told the drinkers to wash their mouths out or get out. But she didn’t. Not even to protect the daughter of a man she once called a friend.
Why not? Is it because part of her thinks Kate is guilty too?
‘Funny time to come down,’ Mary Wren says. She nods her head towards the stack of weekly papers, still blazoned with the photograph.
‘Funny?’ I say, my voice cracking a little with nerves. ‘How do you mean?’
‘Awkward time for the dinner to fall, I mean,’ she says. Her face is unreadable, impassive. ‘With the rumours and all. Must have been hard for Kate, seeing all those people, wondering …’
I swallow. I’m not sure what to say.
‘Wondering?’
‘Well, it’s natural isn’t it? To … speculate. And it never made sense to me.’
‘What didn’t make sense?’ Thea says. She turns round, shoving the wallet back in her jeans pocket. ‘What are you trying to say?’ Her face is belligerent, and I want to tell her to calm down, this is not the way to handle Mary Wren. She needs deference, a show of respect.
‘The notion that Ambrose just … disappeared,’ Mary says. She looks at Thea, at her skintight jeans, and her bare breasts just showing through the sheer vest. ‘Whatever his faults, he loved that girl. He would have walked through hellfire for her. It never made sense that he would just … go, like that, leave her to face all this alone.’
‘Well, we’ve no proof of anything else.’ Thea says. She is as tall as Mary, and she stands, her hands on her hips in an unconscious echo of Mary’s stance, almost as if they are squaring up. ‘And in the absence of any proof, I don’t think speculation is very healthy, do you?’
Mary’s lip curls, and for a minute I can’t read her expression. Is it a kind of suppressed anger? Disgust?
‘Well,’ she says at last. ‘I suppose we won’t need to speculate much longer, will we?’
‘What do you mean?’ I say. My heart is thumping in my chest. I look over my shoulder at the taxi, where Freya is playing peacefully in the borrowed car seat that Rick provided, sucking at her fingers. ‘What do you mean, not much longer?’
‘I probably shouldn’t be telling you this, but Mark, he tells me a body’s been recovered by the police and, well …’ She makes a little beckoning motion with her finger and in spite of myself, I find I’m leaning in, her breath hot on my cheek as she whispers. ‘Let’s just say, if it’s proof you want, I think that body might have a name very soon.’
I CANNOT LOSE Freya. I cannot lose Freya.
These are the words that circle inside my head like a mantra as the train speeds north, back to London.
I cannot lose Freya.
It beats time with the rattle of the wheels on the track.
I cannot lose Freya.
Thea sits opposite me, sunglasses on, head lolling against the window, eyes closed. As we round a particularly sharp curve her head leans away from the glass and then thunks back with an audible sound as the train straightens. She opens her eyes, rubbing the spot on her head.
‘Ow. Was I asleep?’
‘You were,’ I say shortly, not trying very hard to disguise the annoyance in my voice. I’m not sure why I’m irritated, except that I am so very tired myself, and somehow I can’t sleep. We didn’t go to bed last night until two or three, and then this morning I was up at six thirty with Freya. I haven’t had an unbroken night’s sleep in months, and I can’t sleep now, because Freya is slumbering in a sling on my chest, and I can’t relax in case I slump forward and crush her. But it’s not just that – everything feels edgy and heightened, and seeing Thea’s face relaxed feels like an insult to my own tense anxiety. How can she snooze so peacefully when everything is balanced on a knife edge?
‘Sorry,’ she says, pushing her fingers under the sunglasses to rub her eyes. ‘I didn’t sleep last night. Like, at all. I couldn’t stop thinking about …’ She glances over her shoulder at the sparse carriage. ‘Well, you know.’
I feel instantly bad. Somehow, I always misjudge Thea. She’s so much harder to read than either Fatima or Kate, she plays her cards close to her chest, but beneath her fuck-you exterior she’s just as frightened as the rest of us. More, maybe. Why can’t I remember that?
‘Oh,’ I say penitently. ‘Sorry. I haven’t been sleeping properly either. I keep thinking –’
But I can’t say it. I can’t voice my fears aloud. What if I get prosecuted? What if I lose my job? What if they take Freya?
I don’t dare say the words. Just saying them would make the possibility real, and that’s too terrifying to even think of.
‘Even if they find out –’ Thea breaks off, looks over her shoulder again and leans forward, closer to me, her voice barely audible. ‘Even if they find out that it’s him, we’re still OK, right? He could have fallen into a ditch after he OD’d.’
‘But so deep?’ I whisper back. ‘How could he have got so deep?’
‘Those ditches change all the time. You know that. Especially down by the Reach – that whole section has been eroded right back – the dunes are always shifting and changing. We didn’t –’ She glances again and changes what she was going to say. ‘I’m pretty sure it, the place I mean, was a good ten or twenty yards back from the shore, right?’
I think back, trying to remember. Yes … I remember the track was further back then, there were trees and bushes between us and the shore. She’s right.
‘But that tent, it was right on the shoreline. Everything’s moved. They won’t be able to find too much out from the exact placement, I’m sure of it.’
I don’t answer. I feel sick to my stomach.
Because although there’s something comforting about her certainty, although I want to believe her, I’m not so sure she’s right. It’s a long time since I’ve done criminal work, and I know more from watching Cold Case than I can remember from the cases we studied at uni, but I’m pretty sure they have forensic specialists who can tell exactly how an object might have moved and shifted through the sands over the years.
‘Let’s not talk about it here,’ I mutter, and Thea nods, and forces a smile. �
��Tell me about work,’ I say at last. She shrugs.
‘What’s to tell? It’s good, I guess.’
‘You’re back in London?’
She nods.
‘I had a pretty fun stint last year on one of the big cruise ships. And Monte Carlo was excellent. But I wanted …’ She stops, looks out of the window. ‘I don’t know, Isa. I’ve been wandering around for so long, Salten was probably the longest I ever stayed at a school. I felt it was probably time to put down some roots.’
I shake my head, think of my own plodding progression through school, uni, Bar exams, the Civil Service, and life in London with Owen. We are the exact opposite, she and I. I am limpet-like in my tenacity. I found my job, and I stuck to it. I found Owen, and I stuck to him too. Salten House, for me, was this dizzyingly brief interlude. And yet both of us are equally defined by what happened there. We’re just coping with it in very different ways. Thea, restlessly running from the shadow of the past. Me, clinging on to the things that anchor me to safety.
I look at her thinness, at the shadows beneath her cheekbones, and then down at myself, Freya clamped to my body like a human shield, and for the first time I wonder – am I really dealing with this any better than her, or have I simply worked harder to forget?
I am still wondering, when there is a croaking cry at my breast, and a wriggling inside the sling, and I realise that Freya is waking up.
‘Shhh …’ Her cries are getting louder and more cranky as I pull her out of the swathes of material, her fat little cheeks flushed and annoyed as she gears up for a full-on tantrum. ‘Shhh …’
I pull open my top and put her to my breast, and for a minute there is silence, beautiful silence. Then, without warning, we go into a tunnel, and the train plunges into blackness. Freya tips her head back in wonder, her eyes dark and wide at the sudden change, exposing a wet flash of nipple to the carriage before I can grab for a muslin.
‘Sorry,’ I say to Thea, as we pass, blinking, back into the sunshine and I push Freya’s head back into place. ‘I think at this point half of north London has seen my tits, but you’ve had more than your fair share this week.’
‘It doesn’t bother me,’ Thea says with a shrug. ‘God knows, I’ve seen it all before.’
I can’t help but laugh as I lean back, Freya warm and heavy in my arms, and as the train enters another tunnel and emerges again into the searing sunshine, I think back, back to that first time we met, to Thea, rolling her stockings up her long, slim legs, the flash of thighs and me blushing. It seems like a lifetime ago. And yet, as Thea stretches out her legs across the gap between the seats, gives me a lazy wink and closes her eyes, it could be yesterday.
Rule Four
Never Lie to Each Other
‘ISA?’
Owen’s call as he opens the front door is low, cautious, but I don’t reply at first. I’m putting Freya down in her crib in our room, and I don’t want to wake her. It’s right at the tricky stage where she might sleep … or she might go for another hour of crankiness and fussing. She has been hard to get down tonight, unsettled by yet another change of scenery.
‘Isa?’ he says again, appearing at the door of our bedroom and when he sees me his face breaks into a huge grin, and he pulls off his shoes and tiptoes across the boards even as I frantically put my finger to my lips, signalling quiet.
He comes to stand beside me, his arm around my waist, and together we look down at this creature we’ve made.
‘Hello, sweetie,’ he whispers, but not to me, to Freya. ‘Hello, honeybunch. I’ve missed you.’
‘We missed you too,’ I whisper back, and he kisses my cheek and draws me out into the hallway, part shutting the door behind us.
‘I wasn’t expecting you for ages,’ he says as we go downstairs to where baked potatoes are cooking in the oven. ‘You made it sound like you’d be gone for days. It’s only Wednesday – what happened? Did things not work out with Kate?’
‘Things were fine,’ I say. I turn my back, ostensibly taking the potatoes out of the oven, but really so I don’t have to see his face as I lie to him. ‘It was lovely, actually. Fatima and Thea were there too.’
‘Then why are you back so soon? You didn’t have to hurry back for me, you know that. I mean, don’t get me wrong, I missed you. But I didn’t get around to half the stuff I meant to do. The nursery’s still a wreck.’
‘That doesn’t matter,’ I say, straightening up. My cheeks are flushed with the heat from the oven. Baked potatoes is a silly choice for such a hot day, but it was all we had in the fridge. I put them on a board on the countertop and slice the sides open, watching the steam billow out. ‘You know that.’
‘It matters to me.’ He puts his arms around me, his day-old beard rough against my cheek, his lips questing for my ear, the side of my neck. ‘I want you back, all to myself.’
I let him kiss me, but I don’t say what I’m thinking, which is that if that’s what he wants, he will never be happy. Because I will never be his alone. I will always be nine-tenths Freya’s, and what little there is left over, I need for myself, and for Fatima, Thea and Kate.
‘I missed you,’ I say instead. ‘Freya missed you too.’
‘I missed you both,’ he says, his voice muffled in my collarbone. ‘I wanted to call, but I thought you’d be having such a good time …’
I feel a twinge of guilt as he says the words, as I realise that I barely thought about calling him. I texted, to say we’d arrived safely. That was it. Thank God he didn’t ring – I try to imagine my phone going – when? During that long, painful dinner? During the fight with Luc? On that first night as we all gathered, full of fear about what we were about to hear?
It’s impossible.
‘I’m sorry I didn’t phone too,’ I say at last, disengaging myself and turning off the oven. ‘I meant to – it’s just, you know what it’s like with Freya. She’s so whiny in the evenings, especially in a strange place.’
‘So … what was the occasion?’ Owen asks. He begins to get salad out of the drawer, sniffing the limp lettuce and picking off the floppy outer leaves. ‘I mean, it’s a funny time to get together – midweek I mean. I can see it doesn’t make any difference to you and Kate. But doesn’t Fatima work?’
‘Yes. There was a dinner – an alumnae dinner at Salten House. They held it on a Tuesday, I don’t know why. I suppose because the school’s empty then.’
‘You didn’t tell me about that.’ He starts to chop tomatoes, slice by slice, the pale juice bleeding across the plates. I shrug.
‘I didn’t know. Kate bought the tickets. It was a surprise.’
‘Well … I’ve got to say, I’m surprised too,’ Owen says at length.
‘Why?’
‘You always said you’d never go back. To that school, I mean. Why now?’
Why now. Why now. Fuck. Why now?
It’s a perfectly reasonable question. And I can’t think of an answer.
‘I don’t know,’ I say at last, testily. I push his plate towards him. ‘OK? I don’t know. It was Kate’s idea and I went along with it. Can we stop with the third degree? I’m tired, and I didn’t sleep very well last night.’
‘Hey.’ Owen’s eyes open wide, he holds up his hands. He’s trying not to show it, but there is hurt in his face, and I want to bite my own tongue. ‘Sure, blimey, sorry. I was just trying to make conversation.’
And he picks up his plate and goes out into the living room without another word.
I feel something twist inside me, a pain in my gut like a real, physical pain. And for a second I want to run after him and blurt it all out, what has happened, what we did, the weight that is hanging around my neck, threatening to drag me down …
But I can’t. Because it’s not only my secret – it’s theirs too. And I have no right to betray them.
I swallow it down, the confession that is rising inside me. I swallow it down, and I follow Owen into the living room to eat our supper side by side, in silence.
What I learn, in the days that follow, is that time can grind down anything into a kind of new normality. It’s a lesson I should have remembered from last time, as I struggled to come to terms with what had happened, with what we’d done.
Back then, I was too busy to feel constantly afraid – and the whole business began to feel like a kind of vague nightmare, something that had happened to someone else, in another time. My mind was taken up by other things – by the effort of establishing myself at a new school, and by my mother, who was getting progressively sicker. I did not have time to check the papers, and the idea of combing the Internet for information never occurred to me back then.
Now, though, I have time on my hands. When Owen leaves for work, the door closing behind him, I am free to obsess. I don’t dare search Google for the terms I want – Body Salten Reach Identified – even a private window on a browser doesn’t mask your Internet searches completely, I know that.
Instead I search around the edges, terms carefully designed to be explicable, non-incriminating. ‘News Salten Reach.’ ‘Kate Atagon Salten.’ Headlines I hope will bring up what I want, but without a digital trail of bloodstained fingerprints.
Even then I erase my history. Once, I consider going to the Internet cafe at the bottom of our road, but I can’t bring myself to do it. Freya and I would stick out like a sore thumb among the earnest young men in their white robes. No. No matter what, I must not draw attention to myself.
The news is released about a week after I return, and in the event, I don’t need to search for it. It’s there on the Salten Observer website as soon as I log on. It makes the Guardian and the BBC news too, albeit a small paragraph under ‘local interest’.
The body of local artist Ambrose Atagon, celebrated for his studies of coastal landscapes and wildlife, has been discovered, more than fifteen years after his unexplained disappearance, on the banks of Salten Reach, a beauty spot close to his home on the south coast. His daughter, Kate Atagon, did not return calls, but family friend and local resident Mary Wren said that closure would be welcome after so many years looking for answers.