by Fiona Barton
After the test, we find ourselves outside in the sunshine.
“He didn’t believe me,” I say.
“I believe you,” Paul says.
SEVENTY-THREE
Emma
SUNDAY, APRIL 29, 2012
Kate was waiting for me in the coffee shop across the road. She’d texted me to say she was there, but I’d had to explain her to Paul. He was horrified I wanted to talk to a reporter and wanted to come with me if I insisted on going, but I said I knew what I was doing. That I trusted her. In the end he gave in, telling me to be very careful what I said. He would wait for me, and if I wasn’t back in twenty minutes, he’d come and find me.
As I turned to go, he caught hold of my arm. “Are you absolutely sure you need to do this?”
It had taken another five minutes to convince him and now I’m late. She looks as though she thought I wasn’t going to come and is beginning to put her coat on when I finally walk through the door.
A waitress appears as I sit down, and we have to order before we can even say hello properly.
The young girl writes down Two white coffees with agonizing precision, repeating the three words as she does so. I am willing her to go. And when she turns away, Kate says, “Sorry, Emma. What happened at the police station? Are you okay?”
I’ve picked up a sachet of sugar from the bowl in front of me and am fiddling with it, like a child.
She’s spoken to DI Sinclair. Everyone is talking about me. Too many whispers. I can’t trust her.
I tell her what she probably already knows. And wait.
“DI Sinclair said he showed you the photos, Emma,” she says. “I didn’t know you were among the images. I swear to you. It was only when I was being questioned by Andy Sinclair this afternoon that I spotted you. I was going to call you as soon as I came out, but you turned up at the police station before I could.”
She’s seen me. Seen Emma, I think.
She’s still saying sorry when I tune back in and I don’t know whether to believe her anymore. But I need to know more so I’ll play along.
“It was a terrible shock to see myself,” I say, sugar spilling from the ripped packet in my hand.
“It must have been,” she says.
“DI Sinclair asked if I knew Al Soames. He must think he took them.”
“But how could he?” Kate says, and I tell her about the party.
“It was Jude’s idea,” I say. “She asked Will to take me, to cheer me up. I was so excited. Jude let me wear her favorite Laura Ashley. It was midnight blue with a tiny sprigged pattern. Low at the front and tight in at the waist with a thousand tiny buttons down the back. I remember I twirled like a ballerina to make the skirt stand out and we both laughed.
“The party was like in a film with champagne and famous people and Will was urging the waiters to refill my glass. It felt like the best night of my life.
“Will introduced me simply as ‘my friend Emma,’ and I remember a couple of men winked at him and laughed. I wondered what the joke was.”
I know now, I think.
“Then a man kissed me on the cheek when Will introduced me. I wasn’t expecting it, but he looked familiar. I was about to ask a question when his hand brushed one of my breasts as he let go of me. It was like an electric shock and I must have gone bright red because Will steered me away, apologizing.”
“Al Soames?” Kate says and I nod. I don’t tell her that Will said I was looking very tempting and I got that watery feeling in my stomach again.
“He took me outside for some air,” I say. “And the door beside us suddenly crashed open and the man with the wandering hands came out. It was then I recognized him. I’d only seen him once or twice at the house—and I was shooed out of the room by Jude each time because he wanted to talk about the rent—but I noticed his funny, bumpy skin. I remember turning to Will to say, ‘Look, it’s our landlord,’ but Will was acting as if he hadn’t recognized him.”
“What happened then?” Kate says, insistent now.
I realize that my memories of the party are like one of those home movies, where a jerky camera records slices of the action, then breaks off suddenly before picking up again at another point. There are gaps. Gaping holes.
“I don’t know,” I say. “I can’t remember anything after that, not even getting home. But Will rang the next morning to say I’d done him proud.”
“Oh God,” Kate says. “Do you think it was at that party that Soames drugged you and took the picture?”
“It isn’t Soames in the picture,” I croak and concentrate on drawing a cross in the sugar on the table. “It isn’t his hand on my face.”
Kate nods. “Soames boasted about going looking for girls with a friend.”
“It’s Will,” I say. “The hand in the photograph belongs to Will Burnside. I recognize the ring on his thumb.”
“Christ, Emma,” she says too loudly and heads turn.
I start to cry as the waitress reappears with our order. She stares at me as she puts the steaming cups down and backs away as if my misery is catching. Heads turn again. Must be thrilling for them to have a bit of drama with their coffee.
Kate reaches across and stills my hand, crunching it down on the crystals of sugar.
“Have you told the police this, Emma?”
“Not yet. I wasn’t sure. I’ve told them he had sex with me in his car. That he threatened me if I told anyone.”
Kate is nodding slightly faster. She’s excited, I can see it. I have to remember she’s a reporter, not my priest. She hasn’t taken a vow of silence.
“I think I understand why he did it now. I have spent years trying to work out how I earned his contempt. But I think it was self-preservation. He didn’t want me to tell anyone I’d seen the photograph in his drawer. I thought he wanted me to keep quiet about it so poor lovesick Barbara wouldn’t be humiliated. But of course there were dozens of Barbaras.”
“And you could expose him,” Kate says.
“No one could know about his little hobby so he had to make sure he’d shut me up properly, didn’t he? Had to shame me into silence.”
I sit there and think about Will. I try to recall his face as he looked back then but I can’t. It’s a blur now. I try to remember how he’d treated me after the party, after he and his friend had posed me for the Polaroid photo. Had he been different? Had there been any looks or innuendo the next time he’d come to the house? But he hadn’t changed. Because he’d always been like that. He’d deceived us all. The monster in our midst.
The trust I’d put in him. Clever Will. The master manipulator. How he must have laughed afterwards. At my gullibility. My innocence.
I wondered what he felt when he saw me afterwards. Did he see the naked me, at his mercy?
Did he keep that image in a corner of his head, to be pulled out whenever he wanted it? Did he do that when he was sitting across the table, at Sunday lunch, with my mum there?
I try to stop myself thinking like this. But it rolls over me, crushing me. And I think about the baby. I start to sing a lullaby in my head. A lullaby that Jude used to sing to me.
“I think it’s best if I go home,” I say.
“Will you be all right?” she says.
I think she really cares. “I’ll be fine. Paul is waiting for me up the road.”
She puts a five-pound note on the table and signals to the waitress, safe behind her counter, that we are leaving. I stand on shaking legs and she leads me out by the hand.
SEVENTY-FOUR
Will
MONDAY, APRIL 30, 2012
He’d taken a shower after Emma and her friend left. Soaping away the accusations under hot water. He’d be all right, he thought. He enjoyed sailing close to the edge, always had.
He particularly liked a challenge when it came to women. Noth
ing should be too easy, he told himself as he got dressed again. Jude was too easy. I just had to show up.
It had been like that at university, with women throwing themselves at him—Jude had told him one night that she had “queued” to be with him. He’d laughed.
“I was a spotty undergraduate and you were a goddess. I should have been queuing for you,” he’d said. Smooth. And she’d taken off her dress. Worked every time.
In truth, he’d never been a spotty undergraduate. His skin had survived adolescence largely unscathed and his looks had grown into his gangly frame. His seriousness at school, mocked by his peers, had somehow become an attractive depth at college. He’d suddenly found that he just had to be Will and he was adored. He’d loved being adored.
When he walked into a room, people turned to look at him and moved towards him, twitching with anticipation like iron filings round a magnet. They wanted to be near him. They wanted people to see that they were near him. The Golden Boy. It could have gone to his head—well, it did, obviously—but he didn’t let it show.
But it was frighteningly fragile, this adoration. People were fickle. You couldn’t trust them. So he’d made it seem as if he didn’t realize how brilliant he was. He’d laughed at himself and pointed out his flaws to anyone who would listen—“Made a mess of that last essay. How did you do?”
It made him even more attractive. Tutors and fellow students were charmed by his modesty and tumbled over themselves to reassure the Golden Boy that he was brilliant. Then he tumbled them into bed. Even the tutors succumbed. Indeed, they were sometimes easier to seduce than the undergraduates. Dear old Dr. Foster didn’t wait until I’d closed the door before flinging himself at me. Heady days.
He’d left Cambridge with a double first to become a rising star at a Russell Group university and had reveled in it to begin with. His department won grants and prizes, he published regularly and was feted in his field, and the perks included dalliances with a healthy handful of undergraduates each year.
The fallow years came when he emerged from that man-boy stage and his freshness started to curdle.
He’d discovered, at thirty-nine, that he was not the only wolf in the pack. Academia was full of Wills. He’d kept up his body count of willing girls, but they no longer queued.
Sometimes he had to offer an A grade to clinch the deal. It was a colleague in the sciences who told him about Rohypnol—joking but not joking, he realized. The colleague could get the drugs from a friend in the business, he told Will. They’d come on the scene recently and were proving popular with older men who had to try harder to get laid.
“It’s ten times more effective than Valium,” his colleague had said. “You can’t taste it or see it in a drink, and it makes them act totally plastered in about twenty minutes. Best bit is that they don’t remember a thing in the morning.”
He was nervous the first time he used it, planning how he would explain things if it went wrong, if the girl woke up or remembered what had happened. But he didn’t have to.
It wasn’t as satisfying, obviously, with your conquest semicomatose, but it did the job. And no one was any wiser the next day.
• • •
He’d met Alistair Soames in Howard Street. Al was the landlord of Jude’s house and had come to collect the rent one night. The Barbie doll owed money and was hiding in her room, and Will had been left talking to Al for half an hour while Jude pretended to search. It turned out they had a couple of friends in common and Al had made him laugh with his stories about his array of weird tenants. Will had liked him immediately.
The two men had arranged to meet for a drink the next night in a Chelsea pub. They’d drunk flat beer and then gone back to Al’s nearby flat to talk until midnight about work, sex, the property market, sex, and the future.
“I’ve had a bit of trouble with the ladies,” Al had confessed as the whisky loosened his inhibitions. “And the police. Need to be more careful these days.”
And Will had told him about his little helpers.
“They don’t remember anything?” Al’s eyes had lit up. “Maybe slipping them something to keep them quiet is the way forward,” Al had said. “Look, we should team up. I’ve got the contacts and party invites, you’ve got the know-how, Will. Perfect combination.”
• • •
It had been fun picking targets—they went for a variety of ages and types just to challenge themselves—and dangerous. Thrillingly dangerous. Barbara had been a mistake—she hadn’t drunk enough of her drink for the drug to work properly and they hadn’t noticed in their haste—but she hadn’t told anyone. He’d made sure of that.
And Emma. Well, the risk had been worth it.
He wondered if she’d made up the pregnancy. He’d definitely worn a condom for the photo session—he always did to cover his traces—but he couldn’t remember now if he’d worn one in the car. Or if Emma remembered the photo of Barbara. Didn’t really matter now.
No one will believe her, even if she does go to the police. Not with a history of mental illness. Sad woman, he thought.
He poured himself another cup of Earl Grey and allowed himself a stroll down memory lane. A frisson of nostalgia. Pity he hadn’t kept any of the photos.
SEVENTY-FIVE
Angela
TUESDAY, MAY 1, 2012
The weekend with Louise had started disastrously. Her daughter had booked them both a spa break, telling Angela she could have a massage and they could just relax away from everything. But the place was full of hen parties with shrieking women in the Jacuzzi and drinking games in the lounges.
Louise and Angela had retreated to their overheated twin-bedded room when it all got too much and pretended to read their books while they waited for their treatments. Angela had noticed that her daughter’s bookmark didn’t move over the whole two days they were there. It still stuck out an inch from the cover. But she had been no better, hiding her thoughts behind the beach novel she’d brought with her.
She didn’t tell Louise she’d cried during the massages; the soothing hands of the beauticians had made her feel suddenly defenseless and she’d felt she had to apologize. Everyone was very understanding when she explained—a bit too interested in one case and Angela had found herself telling all the details of Alice’s disappearance as she lay naked on a table.
By Sunday night, both of them had been ready to go home, but they’d paid until Monday morning and so they stayed. Angela was so glad they had because, with the bridal mobs gone, they could sit together and talk.
Louise had told her mother what it had been like growing up in a family tainted by tragedy. She’d held nothing back for the first time, even admitting that she’d hated Alice at times for ruining everyone’s happiness.
“I know she was just a baby, Mum, but I never thought of her like that. I never knew her. There were no pictures. She was just this black cloud hanging over everything. No one could talk about it in case we made you cry. I am glad she’s been found, Mum, but she’s still making you cry.”
Angela had been mortified. She’d been so bound up in her own feelings, and her determination to protect her children from them, that she hadn’t noticed their unhappiness.
“Your dad said I shouldn’t talk about it, after a while, because I was upsetting you and Patrick,” she explained. “I wish I’d known how you felt. I’ll try not to cry anymore, Lou. You’re right. We need to get on with our lives now. We’ll have the funeral for Alice as a family—is that all right?”
Louise had nodded and reached for her mother’s hand. “Of course, Mum.”
“And then I’ll concentrate on the future,” Angela had said. “On you and Patrick and the grandchildren.”
• • •
Angela’s head had been clearer when she came home and she had started talking to the local vicar about a funeral service for Alice and thinking about hymns and reading
s. She felt better than she had for weeks and Nick had stopped fussing over her every move.
“You look well, love,” he’d said that morning. “Do you fancy going out for something to eat tonight? It’s been months since I took you anywhere.”
And she’d smiled at him and said yes.
But an hour later, DC Turner rang. Angela had answered the call and mouthed “Wendy” at Nick. She’d been glad to hear from her—she wanted to ask the officer about when they could have Alice’s service, but DC Turner cut her off.
“Have you heard from anyone from the press today, Angela?”
“No, Wendy. Why, what’s happened?”
“Andy Sinclair is on his way down with me. We’ll be there in half an hour, so sit tight. It’s probably best if you don’t answer the phone until we get there.”
“My God, what’s happened?”
“Let’s talk about it when we arrive, Angela. Is Nick there?”
“Yes.”
“That’s good. See you soon.”
They’d sat and waited in the living room, watching for the car. And when DI Sinclair and DC Turner knocked, Angela was too shaky to stand.
Nick ushered the officers into the room and Wendy went immediately to sit with Angela and took her hand.
DI Sinclair looked tired and depressed. He slumped down on the chair by the window and looked at her and Nick. “I’m sorry to have kept you waiting,” he said, “but it was important to talk to you in person.”
No one spoke and he cleared his throat.
“I’ve got some difficult news. There’s been a significant development in the investigation. A woman came forward yesterday to claim she is the mother of the baby found in Howard Street. I honestly thought she was an attention-seeker, but the initial tests we have run on her DNA show a match.”
“No,” Angela whispered and put her other hand out for Nick, to steady herself.
She watched as the color drained from her husband’s face.