He does a double-take, as if he can’t believe she’s had the nerve to raise the matter.
‘Corporate jollity, it does my head in.’
‘That explains it then,’ she murmurs blandly. ‘Have you seen Faithie recently then?’ she says.
He looks her straight in the eye.
‘I have no idea who you’re talking about.’
‘I remember now,’ she says. ‘Villars, right?’
And now that it’s clear that last night never happened, that she imagined it all, she wonders why he is here at all. She isn’t left wondering for long. He starts with generalities – never good when a client is unhappy, any lapse in professionalism, lack of attention – so that by the time he has reached the nub of the issue, Jess is relieved to be able to work out the general thrust of his attack, this being the best means etc.
‘The subclause, the one we had to wrench like sticky toffee from Trentino’s hot little hand?’
Now she’s with him.
‘What about it?’
‘How could it not have found its way into the execution copies?’
That is Sarah’s file. Jess did some work on it when Sarah was on sick leave, but only at the early stages. She didn’t even work on the S&P. The obvious course is simply to say it’s nothing to do with her, but somehow she isn’t able to do that, it seems so petty. Somehow she doesn’t seem to be able to say anything at all, so intent is she on holding his gaze.
‘You’d better fix it,’ he says.
‘My pleasure.’
‘Your what?’ He has resorted to sneer mode.
‘Don’t fret. I’ll sort it with the other side.’
As he turns to go, she wonders if Sarah has rebuffed him too. It seems to make him want to put the boot in.
‘Before you go,’ she says. ‘If you ever so much as touch me again.’
His mouth sinks into a grimace.
‘Touch you? I’d rather suck a dick.’
When he’s gone, she looks at the phone. She looks at it for at least a minute and considers whether or not to call someone, whether that someone should be Sarah or her mentor Delia or HR. Whether she should tell Charlie. But in the end, she doesn’t call anyone. It makes her feel superior to Miles Rennie not to lift that phone. She has risen above. She supposes she is almost sorry for him, though she is sorrier still for his wife, because apparently there is one of those.
One of the other partners drops by a little later. ‘Not to worry, Jess,’ he says. ‘That Trentino contract? At least we caught it.’ He flicks the air to say it was nothing, all’s well, and not to give it another thought. But Jess has seen him do that before when it did matter and the comeback was already on its way. She brushes the thought away.
To make up for not having seen Ruby the night before, she slips away early. By six thirty, she is walking home across the Common, the light driving slantways across the grass that is already beginning to yellow, past the stately summer trees. Players circle the torn green carpet of the cricket crease, and there’s music in the puck and cheer of their game. She passes the hordes of fitness fanatics gathered at the low-slung bar that marks the Common’s perimeter as they stretch and flex in strictly marshalled groups. As she weaves through the groups of friends sipping Prosecco on picnic rugs, she gives a moment’s thought to all the other lives she might have chosen, and then she quickens her pace towards her own. Passing the bandstand and the wildflower meadow, through the waft of onion from the twenty-four-hour burger stall, she reaches the cut-through, where cops idle in their squad cars, playing games on their phones. A right turn, another stretch of grass, and the Common shrinks, giving way to a tight matrix of tarmac and red brick.
They bought the house on Riverton Street the year they got married. Nobody else had a place like this – a three-storey house with a filigree balcony, a veranda, a gate that leads directly onto the Common. Most of their friends were struggling to afford a one-bed flat five stops away on the Tube. But this solid permanence meant so much to Jess that she would gladly have alienated the whole world if she could have a house like the one she spent her schooldays in with Auntie Rae, somewhere she would create her own stability, no matter how much they had to scrimp and borrow.
Riverton Street is a place of order and plenty, of plantation shutters and lavender bushes. The waist-high walls that separate the front gardens from the street are topped by occasional hedges – wafts of bamboo or close-cut privet. There are foreshores of gravel, with hip-high pots in zinc or terracotta, and woodwork is painted sludge green, pewter, putty. No clear colours, no shouting. Living on Riverton Street, it would be easy to imagine that all the suffering in the world – the cruelty and starvation, the endless hate and fear – merely exists in the collective imagination, on a screen, on Mars.
Nowadays, Jess tries not to think about what happened on the beach. She has safeguarded herself with walls, inoculations, insurance policies, invested in a decent alarm system. She has acquired a profession, a marriage, a single, much-loved child. She has made a fortress of her beloved house and, although their equity is just a thin screed on an edifice of mortgages and investments, they just about manage to cling on to it. But Jess knows how quickly things can change. She has no blithe confidence in the world, and she no longer really has a brother.
Just as she reaches the end of the street, a message pings in. Hana, asking how much longer she’s going to be. She imagines Hana sitting on the closed loo seat, jabbing at her phone, while Ruby splashes at the bathwater, then covers her face in the foam. She sees the two men sitting in a blue car a few doors down, too, but she’s so anxious to get home now that she doesn’t pay them any heed.
She is just about to put the key in the door when it opens for her. And there is Hana, startlingly blonde, with her frosted lipstick and the two furrows of permanent displeasure on her brow. Ruby is in Hana’s arms, her pearly teeth bared as she strains for Jess.
‘Silly billy,’ Hana says. ‘Let Mama get her jacket off first.’ She moves Ruby out of reach and although the only thing Jess wants is to cuddle her child she does what she is told, takes her jacket off, her bag. But then the doorbell rings and, as Jess moves to answer the door, Hana swings Ruby round to face the garden. ‘Come on Rooby Roo, let’s do swing.’
Ruby’s arms are flapping wildly now, her face contorted with disappointment. Jess has opened the door and is about to greet the men on the doorstep when Ruby grasps her sleeve with her strong little fingers. Torn between her wriggling child and the open door, Jess stands there blankly for a moment. And then Hana expertly unfastens Ruby’s grip and carries her away towards the garden.
The two men on the doorstep are watching her closely. They flip their cards at her and move to enter.
Embarrassed by this glimpse they’ve had of her home life, Jess stands her ground.
‘Mind if I have a closer look?’ She gives them her professional smile.
They don’t smile back, but they hold their badges up anyway. Point made, she gives each ID a cursory glance – Reynolds and Crowe – then stands aside to let them in. This is not the uniformed bobby who came to advise them on home security. This is something else. She watches the backs of their heads as they take in the TV room with Charlie’s mega screen, the gleaming expanse of the drawing room, the succession of ink-blot lithographs that line the staircase until they disappear out of view.
The first officer, Reynolds, is ostentatiously dressed down in scuffed trainers and a pair of sweatpants that still bear the shape of his knees. He is young, perhaps no more than thirty. Crowe looks like he ought to be in retirement. He is going for the golfer look in a diamond-patterned sweater and cords, and is carrying a black daypack, a little incongruously, she thinks, which he eases off his shoulder and rests on one of the stools at the breakfast bar that no one ever uses. She scans her visible life through their eyes. The carousel of exotically named coffee capsules, the huge glass dome on the cake stand, the precisely judged colours. She wonders what ruin they are ab
out to bring on her. Meanwhile, in the garden, Ruby is screaming.
Absent-mindedly, she reaches for the coffee machine, but the golfer says she really doesn’t need to bother about that.
‘We’re all caffeined out,’ says the man in sweatpants. ‘Mind if we sit?’
‘Oh sorry,’ she says. It slips out, this word she’s almost been trained out of using. ‘Yes, of course.’
They sit together at the breakfast bar, which is too uncomfortable to be the informal spot the kitchen designer assured her it would be. The sweatpant man has trouble balancing on the stool so he props himself against it instead, one buttock anchoring him in place. The golfer seems to be the boss, if that’s the word. He looks at the black backpack as if it might explode right there in front of them. Once they are, all three of them, gazing at the bag, he reaches into his inside pocket. He unfolds a piece of paper and pushes it across the table to her. Before she has a chance to read it, he pounces on it with his index finger and draws it back. ‘I should really give you a bit of context first. This is an email from the Irish authorities.’
Nobody elaborates and she doesn’t say anything either, and when the silence has stretched a little thin for comfort, the golfer continues.
‘I’m afraid this might upset you, Mrs Clark, but your mother’s passport has been found.’
They are both looking at her now, as if there is a line she is meant to contribute here. But she doesn’t know that line, and nobody says anything to prompt her. Hana sticks her head through the door and then moves away again. In the hallway, Ruby seems to have calmed down. Her scooter will be getting cold outside, she says. Can Hana put it to bed too?
The other man is getting impatient with the golfer. He butts in and, from the release he seems to gain from talking, she can tell right away that she will get more sense out of him.
‘What you have to understand,’ he says, ‘is that we know very little at this point. The passport was discovered—’
‘But I thought the passports were found right away, back at the hotel.’
It’s one of the few things she does remember from the day itself. She recalls clutching on to the little blue books because they contained the photos of her parents, and not being allowed to keep them, and the rage she felt at that.
They glance at one another and she realises then that there is something she has failed to grasp.
‘Ah,’ the golfer says. ‘I should have explained. This is a different passport. An Irish one she applied for in her maiden name, a matter of months before she left.’
‘Her birth name,’ the other man offers.
‘OK then, her birth name, whatever difference that makes.’ The golfer smiles curtly at Jess, then moves on. ‘What I need to tell you, though, is that the passport was used after she disappeared.’
And then she feels something. She isn’t sure what the emotion is, but it’s complicated and unpredictable.
‘The focus of our investigations will be whether it was used to gain entry to the United Kingdom after your mother disappeared. And if so, when.’
‘And by whom,’ the tracksuit guy adds. In case she hadn’t had that thought already.
He flicks a few images further along on his phone and turns the screen towards her.
‘Looks good as new, don’t it? Only used the once, far as we know. Delhi to Paris. After that, who knows how it got to Ireland? It might have been used again, and it might not. Either way, it was kept inside a leather bag, inside a plastic bag, inside a cardboard box. The Irish found it in a caravan in the middle of nowhere. A place, I believe, you know well. Curramona.’ He scrolls again through the images on his phone until he finds the one he wants. He comes alongside and puts it in front of her, a little too close, so that she has to move her head back to see it properly.
‘It was located in a townland called Drigheen, on a plot of land behind a former shop, latterly the residence of Margaret Madden, a woman in her sixties who lived alone.’ He looks at her as if he’s expecting her to corroborate that.
While she does remember the place – the shop and the caravan, and summer days spent longing for the rain to stop so they could get to the lake where they weren’t meant to swim – Mags Madden is not someone she ever thought she would hear of again. Auntie Rae fell out with Mags years ago and, though maybe she should have got back in touch herself, somehow there never seemed to be the time.
‘The passport was found next to the deceased woman’s body.’
‘Mags is dead?’
She doesn’t feel any particular grief for Mags Madden. But the very fact that these men have come here makes her feel as if she should.
‘I’m afraid so,’ says the golfer. ‘And in suspicious circumstances, too. There’s been a spate of rural crime in that area recently. They think this might have been a robbery that went wrong. On the other hand, the shop has been closed for years, and there’s not likely to have been a lot of cash around the place. No jewellery seems to have been taken, nothing like that. And the woman had drunk a lot – I mean, well over three times the legal limit. She was frail, so it’s possible she tripped and bashed her head. For some reason, the cardboard box in which the passport was found was in the middle of the floor. Not sure what that says. The post-mortem will reveal a bit more.’
There is only one question worth asking. But she is afraid to hear the answer, and so she doesn’t let it pass her lips. Does this make it more or less likely that my mother is still alive?
But that one question breeds others until her head is crammed with them. She calls up that stock picture of her mother she has curated for herself. The one she keeps at the very back of her mind to use when she needs it. Blonde, demure, that long plait slung over one shoulder. Half smiling, half disdainful. Those beautiful eyes she once heard Rae describe as cold. But one sister’s account of another, how reliable is that? Rachel and Sophie. Dark and Blonde. Home and Away. Good and Bad. Those lazy binaries, they’re attractive, but they only tell one side of the story.
And perhaps she doesn’t want to know any more. Perhaps it would be better if her mother simply stayed where she was. As good as dead, as dead as Dad. She barely glimpsed the image of the passport photo page, and now that the officer’s phone is resting face down on the counter she feels bereft.
‘Could I see it again?’ she asks. ‘The photo of my mother?’
The men seem uncomfortable now. Their message delivered, perhaps they just want to get away. They look at one another as if the request is somehow improper, but the man with the phone scrolls back through the images until he reaches the ID page. He focuses on the passport photo, enlarging it, then turns it towards her. She takes the phone from him and gazes at the screen. She would barely have recognised her own mother. Her hair seems darker, though it’s hard to tell, and she is wearing glasses. Glasses? When did her mother ever wear glasses? She starts to tell them that it isn’t who they think it is. But when she looks a little closer, she realises that, while this is an entirely different look, it is still her mother. She doesn’t let herself explore the implications of that. Not yet.
The tracksuit man is saying something now. Jess thinks he might be asking her if she’s OK. But she is ankle-deep in warm seawater, her feet sinking in the gently scouring sand of that Goa beach. Around her calves she can feel the flick of tiny fish. And she is still blissfully unaware of what is about to happen. She is surrounded by her last ever moment of untainted joy. Her eyes prick to think of that. Sparrow is there too, standing at the water’s edge, howling. He has sliced his foot open, a sharp stone perhaps. It’s not a deep cut – no sooner does the blood well to the surface than the sea takes it – but he wants his Mama. Baby shark, he is saying. Hungry shark. Only moments earlier, Jess’s eye had caught the blaze of orange on the sand, that big orange square of cotton Mama used as a picnic rug. It was as if the sun had burnt itself onto the sand. But there is no orange now. There is no Mama now either, and no Pa. Jess feels a hand on her shoulder. And as she turns and looks
into the golfer’s face, she is momentarily confused by his solidity in the here and now until she catches a buttermilk-sourness off his breath.
‘You OK there? You see, this is what you need to understand,’ he says. ‘Your mother applied for that passport in an entirely different name, one we don’t think she used at any other time.’
She wishes they would go now and let her think. The golfer asks for a mobile number, says he’ll be in touch as soon as he has anything else.
‘Oh,’ he says. ‘Just one more thing. Your brother – any idea where he might be?’ He glances down at a piece of paper. ‘Sparrow Considine? Gets about a bit.’
‘Not really,’ she says, immediately on the defensive as she always is about Ro.
Her throat tightens. Guilt, of course, because she came off luckier. Fear, too, in case they’re about to tell her something about Ro that she doesn’t want to hear. Sadness, for the lost boy he still is.
‘Thought he was a bit of a nomad, no?’
‘So what if he is?’
‘Anyway, when you see him, get in touch, yeah?’
They look strangely at her as they leave, as if she hasn’t quite displayed the correct emotions. She wonders what they expected. Elation? Gratitude? Should have sent someone with a speck of empathy about them. Should have sent a woman. Although she stopped feeding Ruby a year ago, her nipples prickle and she is glad that, in her case at least, the instincts do their job.
Upstairs, in the bathroom they decorated with waves and whales and dolphins, Hana is pacing the room like she’s in a cage, while Ruby seems to have forgotten all about earlier. She gives a ‘yay’ as Jess appears, and tries to haul herself up by the side of the bath. Jess is so transfixed by Ruby that she hardly notices Hana leave. Hana has a room here, but you’d never think it. Each evening, she departs as soon as Jess gets home. Jess assumes there’s a boyfriend, but the one time Jess asked, Hana screwed up her nose and said she didn’t like the word. She can’t imagine sharing any of this with Hana, who declared soon after she moved in that people lose what they deserve to lose. Jess found the idea of that astonishing, brutal even. But maybe it was no stranger than the belief she clung to for a long time that her own loss had a prophylactic effect, that it would protect her like a magic charm.
The Orphans Page 4