I took a deep breath and leaned in close. ‘There’s something I need to tell you,’ I started to say. But before I could go any further, she froze. I turned to look at whatever had struck her with such horror. My words stuck in my throat.
‘Hello, beautiful,’ Zac said to me. ‘Hello, Milly,’ he said to Milly.
Milly stood. I made an effort to convert the sadness I was feeling into a cheerful tone, turning the inflection up on the last word. ‘Oh no – no – don’t go yet.’
‘I have to.’
‘I was going to drive you home.’
‘I’ll get a taxi.’ Already she was moving away.
I didn’t take my eyes from her, and when her shining bright head was gone, I felt as if the light in the room had dimmed, and I wanted to cry.
‘You changed your clothes,’ Zac said.
‘Yes.’ I’d been wearing one of the elegant tweed shifts Zac bought for my birthday, along with a silk blouse and cashmere cardigan he’d also stuck in the package.
‘Why?’
‘I felt like it.’
‘I thought you loved the things I chose for you. It pleased me that you did.’
‘I do love them. But I love the things I choose for myself, too.’
To my relief, he let it go. ‘Your friend hates me.’ He sounded hurt.
‘She doesn’t.’
‘Her parents hate me too.’ He jutted out his chin, and I saw again why he wanted me to move into his rented house – why he was so passionately averse to living next door to James and Peggy. It seemed fair, too, when he was only staying in Cornwall for me. He went on. ‘They’re too possessive of you.’ His feet were flat on the floor, his elbows on the table.
Since that failed MI5 interview three and a half years ago, I had tried to shut down every bit of tradecraft I ever learned. But just as my Spanish resurfaced with the name Molinero, Zac finding me in the pub pricked at me too. I weighed it alongside something else I’d repressed. The way he turned back from his journey to London and caught me looking through his old suitcases.
I made myself say the difficult thing. I couldn’t turn away from it. ‘How did you know I was here, Zac?’ I watched him carefully as he answered.
He coloured slightly, and flattened the tone and speed of his speech. ‘I saw your car. I was worried about you being out on a night like this. I wanted to find you and get you home safely.’
‘You were on nights tonight. Milly saw you at the hospital.’
‘What? Is she a private detective now?’ Though his upper body was still, he was vibrating his knees together.
I didn’t understand how he’d got away from the hospital, but all the data was processing through my brain and coming up with one conclusion: he wanted to see what I’d do and where I’d go when I thought he was safely at work.
‘I brought this for you.’ He held out a card. ‘It came to the hospital.’
I studied the envelope. Sent from London, no return address, and obviously opened and then resealed. ‘It’s addressed to me. Why has it been opened?’
He shrugged. ‘Looks like a Christmas card you missed. Hardly top secret.’
‘You chased away my friend, my best friend.’ I swiped at tears, and realised they were made by rage as much as distress.
‘It was her decision to leave.’ He stared hard at me. ‘Are you going to open that?’
‘No.’ I shoved it in my bag but he snatched it out, tore away the envelope’s flap. ‘What is wrong with you? Who are you and what have you done with my boyfriend?’
But he simply displayed the card to me. Mary and Joseph gazing adoringly down at baby Jesus, and the twinkling night sky above. ‘Who’s Martin?’ he said.
I grabbed it from him. Inside, it said, May we all remember those who love us at this special time of year. Martin. I stood. ‘I’m going home.’
‘I asked you who Martin was.’ Each word was through gritted teeth.
I had only known one Martin in my life, and he was Maxine’s boss at MI5. I would strangle her for this if I could. Had she seriously believed this cryptic message was the way to get me to do what she wanted, despite my saying no? But as furious as I was with her, I was even more furious with Zac.
‘A friend,’ I said.
‘What kind of friend?’
‘A friend of my grandmother’s. He’s about ninety. You should trust me. You shouldn’t open my letters.’
‘I didn’t. It was like that when I picked it up. Must have happened in the post.’
‘I’m not an idiot, Zac.’
‘How did Martin know to address a letter to you at the hospital?’
‘He might have visited my grandmother when she was having a lucid moment, or maybe Peggy ran into him and mentioned what I was doing.’ One lie after another. They came easily.
‘Let me take you home.’
‘I can take myself home.’
I rushed into the house ahead of Zac. He had tailed me the whole way, stalking after me on foot as I stomped from the pub to my car, which must have looked absurd, then following close behind as I drove – he had to run a red light to keep up. I slammed the front door without waiting for him. Let him use his own key.
I went straight to the bathroom and struggled to turn the lock. As ever, it stuck and resisted before scraping loudly when it finally moved. I could hear Zac shouting from downstairs, then bounding up, his voice growing closer.
‘Don’t walk away from me, Holly. You know I hate that. It’s cruel. It’s a form of abuse. It’s not the way to treat people.’
‘I’m getting in the shower,’ I said.
‘The fault is always on both sides,’ he said. ‘It isn’t all me.’
‘Yes it is.’ I turned on the water to muffle his voice and began to take off my things, dropping my coat on the floor.
He was banging so hard on the door I jumped with each bash of his fist against the wood.
He was shouting, and rattling the handle to try to break the lock. His face must have been right against the wood. ‘What you’re doing to me is hateful,’ he said.
I took my smartphone from my handbag and examined it. Had he put a tracker on it? Spyware? I couldn’t think of any other way for him to find me. It would explain why the battery had been bleeding out lately – I’d been telling myself it was what happened to phones after a few years, to get you to buy a new model. I decided to reinstall the operating system as soon as I could – that should remove anything.
‘I’m out here waiting for you.’ He had changed tack, using the patient, disappointed voice of a reasonable adult speaking to a toddler in the grip of a tantrum. ‘Still here.’ I pictured him sitting at the edge of the bed, staring at the bathroom door.
I put the phone away and took off the rest of my clothes, adding them to the messy pile on the floor. I used a towel to clear the mist from the looking glass, then stared at myself, fascinated by the vivid blue veins criss-crossing my breasts like roads on a pale map. I pressed one of them lightly, astonished by how tender and swollen it was. My breasts had grown a whole size.
As I stepped into the shower, something caught my eye. My pale pink underclothes, the last things I took off, were at the top of the pile, and they were spotted red with blood.
After I screamed Zac’s name and struggled to get the door unlocked and he crashed into the bathroom to find me completely hysterical. After Zac drove me to the hospital and then used his magic to get them to take me to the closed obstetric clinic to scan me. After we cried to see our baby’s beating heart and perfectly human profile where I expected only a blob. After Zac said that it must be a girl because she was beautiful and looked exactly like me. After they told me that bleeding in pregnancy was common, and the baby’s heartbeat and size meant that we were statistically likely to have a good outcome. After Zac made me promise not to run around again on dark and stormy nights. After I promised not to fight him, and to let him look after me. After I refused to quit my job but agreed to go part-time. After he promis
ed that he wouldn’t let anything happen to our baby, and made me believe him. After all of those things happened, I fell asleep in his arms.
Now The Excursion
Two years and three months later
* * *
Bath, Tuesday, 2 April 2019
I pause in front of the house where Jane died. Maxine has never told me much about anything. She has merely dropped whatever scraps suited her. But I need to know what she is doing for Jane. I have but one thought, or perhaps it is impulse more than thought. It is to see where Maxine goes and what she does next.
Moving, taking action – that is what will stop me from collapsing in a heap of fear and grief. I resume my run, pulling out my mobile phone after I have turned the corner. It takes me less than a minute to order a taxi.
As I run, I search for a cluster of houses that appear empty and quiet, the occupants likely to be out for the working day. I file away the best available vantage point. My intention is to pass the house I’ve earmarked without slowing, but a flash of Jane’s ruined face overcomes me and I realise that I am crying.
I dash into the front garden, concealing myself behind the hedge as I double over, gripping my knees and putting my head as close to the grass as I can while I am being sick, trying to limit the splash and area covered, silently apologising to the people who live here.
Then I hurry away to meet the taxi behind the parade of local shops, wiping my mouth on my sleeve. As the driver zooms me to a row of garages in the alley behind my flat, I see him watching me in his rear-view mirror. Silently, he passes me a handful of tissues, and I manage to thank him in a squeaky voice.
My tears have dried by the time I pull away in a black hatchback with dusty paintwork that I have deliberately not washed. It is the most inconspicuous model I could find, and I have barely driven it, except for occasionally starting the engine to keep the battery from dying.
I re-enter the neighbourhood where Jane died from the other side, passing a big field where the workhouse poor were buried long ago. Sometimes, I think the whole world is nothing but one huge burial ground, and the plague pit is everywhere.
I return to the house whose garden I was sick in twenty minutes earlier. I park in the driveway and keep my eyes on the junction that Maxine’s dark-windowed sedan will have to pass through on its way out of this neighbourhood, though it’s possible she’s left already.
All the while, I am trying to forget about the taste of vomit in my mouth, and accept the fact that I will have to live with it for the rest of what is likely to be a long day. I try to concentrate on that junction, but when I blink my eyes I see Jane’s ankle.
In my early days with Zac, I was jealous of her, my phantom predecessor, my Rebecca. But I should have thought of her as my sister, not my enemy. I squeeze my eyes shut again. When I open them I am astonished to see Maxine’s car flash past, on its way to meet the ring road. I am not too late, after all. I wait a few seconds, then pull out.
Cheltenham, Tuesday, 2 April 2019
I keep as far behind as I can and use lorries to shield me. After nearly an hour on the motorway, Maxine’s driver takes a slip road to Cheltenham. He drops her off at a Georgian terraced house near the town, on a hill that backs on to fields.
I drive slowly, watching in my rear-view mirror as she starts on the path to the front door with keys in her hand. Is this her house? I consider what to do next. I could knock on the door and ask her to let me in, but I’ve already learned as much from her today as she is prepared to tell me. I decide it is better to stay hidden and watch.
So I do a U-turn at the top of the hill and head down to the centre of town. I leave the car in a car park, then move quickly through the stalls of an outdoor market. A day that began with spring sunshine has dissolved into mist and showers. I buy a navy rain hat, a pair of cheap wellies, and some gum. Chewing it helps to get rid of the vomit flavour, and I make my way through the whole pack, discarding each piece as soon as the hit of mint is gone, then popping a new one in my mouth.
A stallholder hands over the grey hoodie I have just paid for. ‘Looks like we’re in for some April showers,’ he says.
‘I think you’re right.’ I don’t want small talk. I want to get back to that house while she is still there. I want to find out if she lives in it, or if she is meeting somebody there.
‘You look – Are you in need of help?’ he says.
‘No. Thank you.’
‘I’m sure I’ve seen you before, your photograph, I mean.’
‘You must be confusing me with someone else.’
‘Look.’ He takes out his phone. ‘This is you, despite the glasses. I’m sure of it. Your hair is different, but I have an eye for faces – I’m a super-recogniser.’
‘Can I look more closely?’
He puts his phone in my hand and I peer at the screen. It’s a Twitter post, and it’s been retweeted thousands of times since it first appeared last summer. When I scroll down, I can see the retweets are from this man’s community – people who interact with the public such as stallholders, owners of roadside cafes, motorway service workers.
The text reads, Help us to find Holly Lawrence. My photograph appears too, with the words MISSING from St Ives, Cornwall, since June 2017, and a confidential telephone number. I remember when Zac took the picture, snapped in his garden in early spring of that year. My hair looks like copper in the sunlight – I’d almost forgotten what it was like before I dyed it, and how long it was. Now, it barely skims my shoulders. Then, it was halfway down my back. The top of my baby bump is visible. I was so happy, knowing she was inside me. So why do I look so sad and haunted in that shot? Nobody else has that image. There is no question that Zac put it on that site.
I smile at the man. ‘It’s not me. I hope I don’t look lost or missing, because I know exactly where I am.’
His response to my feeble joke is a half-hearted smile.
‘You’re good to be concerned. I hope she’s okay and that they find her – if that’s what she wants.’ I thank him and hand him the phone, then turn and walk quickly away, so his view will be of my retreating back. This should make it difficult for him to take a photo of me, if the idea occurs to him while in the throes of his civic-mindedness.
I cut to the side and out of the crowd of stallholders, rather than pushing through it, as confident as I can be that nobody is paying attention to me. This is the best I can do for now, though as soon as I can, I will get Maxine to take that photo down.
I find a public loo in a near-empty park, where I stuff my black-dyed hair beneath the hat, pull the hoodie over my running shirt, and shove my trainers in my backpack after slipping on the wellies. I study a map of the area before returning to the road where Maxine’s driver dropped her. I park one block down the hill from the house she entered.
I watch the rear of the house from the drizzle-damp fields behind it. I’m about to take my binoculars from my backpack and risk a quick look at the windows, but then I work out that they are made of privacy glass. This, more than anything, inclines me to think that she really does live here. Only someone as secretive as Maxine would deliberately blur their view of the Georgian town beyond these fields.
Being still and simply observing is bound to draw attention, so I cut across the fields, wanting to learn more about Maxine’s world. It is working-day, school-day quiet, but for an elderly man out walking a poodle. Whenever I fantasise about having a dog, it is a huge great beast and I have named him Keeper, like Emily Brontë’s dog, and Keeper and I are running along the beach with a small child. This impossible picture still comes to me, even now.
The public footpath winds me to a village, hidden in the valley, where I pass a double-fronted brick farmhouse with a large duck pond. The house’s front garden ends at the base of a steep hill, which is covered in tombstones.
Stone steps twist their way up through the tombstones, towards an octagonal chapel of rest. As I climb them, I hear the laughter and shrieks of children, coming from t
he section of the footpath I have already taken, though they are still behind the farmhouse and out of sight.
What comes next is Maxine’s voice, scolding one child for pushing the other. I freeze for an instant, stabbed by something I cannot understand. Pain. Jealousy. The two mixed together, probably. I make myself move, and manage to slip behind a pair of mildewed gravestones. They are as close as a husband and wife’s pillows, separated by a few centimetres. I crouch on the wet grass and peek through the space between the two stones as Maxine and the children come into view.
Maxine has changed clothes. She is wearing jeans, green wellies, and a navy waterproof jacket. Her hair is in a ponytail. Her face is scrubbed of make-up. She looks a decade younger – late thirties at the most. She looks pretty, which is normally too frivolous a word to apply to Maxine.
Clinging to each hand is a perfect blond child, one boy and one girl, who look about four years old. Are they twins? It appears she was telling the truth when she said she had two children. The little girl is wearing a red raincoat, while the boy’s is olive-green. Their beauty makes my heart squeeze. I am astonished that Maxine managed this. Glinting on her finger, I glimpse a wedding ring. Clearly, she leaves that off when she is working.
A man comes from the other direction, quickly approaching Maxine and the children. He isn’t dressed for the countryside. He looks as if he has rushed from the office, not expecting such an outing in his dark grey suit. At first I don’t recognise him. Then I realise it is Martin, and that I could not have described him if my life depended on it. It is as if he’d been genetically engineered for the job.
Why is he here? Why are they both here, in Cheltenham? Maxine and Martin are MI5, but Cheltenham is the location of Government Communications Headquarters. Could one or both of them have transferred to GCHQ, or been seconded there? GCHQ specialises in communications intelligence and cyber security, but Maxine is all about human intelligence. I am struggling to see how Jane’s death, which was so very domestic – so very Zac – can be of interest to GCHQ.
I Spy Page 9