I lifted a hand to the back of his neck, pressed my fingers into the little hollow at the top, which was as smooth as his scalp. ‘Why would I want to do that?’
He searched my face but said nothing.
‘Is it because Jane did?’
He kissed me so hard I could barely breathe, and I tried to push him away, which he only let me do when he had kept me like that for a few seconds too long.
‘I would never do what she did to you, Zac.’
He knelt beside the chair.
‘Is that why you’re so’ – I was about to say possessive, though the right term was why you’re such a sick porn-making fuck – ‘why you worry so much about me?’
He was gripping the arm of the chair so hard his knuckles were going white. ‘I worry about you because I love you. I loved her too, but differently from you.’
‘Did you used to worry about her working, the way you do with me? It must have exhausted her. Social workers are under so much pressure – she must have been relieved to stop.’ But had she wanted to? Or did fighting him over it become too soul-destroying?
He whispered, ‘I never told you she was a social worker, Holly. Or that she stopped.’
My heart was thumping faster. I knew this because of Maxine. All I could do was use one of Zac’s favourite manoeuvres right back at him. ‘Of course you did. It isn’t a secret. You’ve said we have no secrets.’
He looked confused at this, as if he were questioning himself.
‘You’re home early,’ I said. ‘How did you get away?’
‘Favour for Omar.’ Omar is another cardiologist, and Zac’s closest friend at work.
‘Is Omar okay?’
‘You can’t tell anybody …’
‘Of course not. What?’
‘He and his wife are having IVF. She needs to have her egg retrieval tomorrow morning but he’s supposed to be working. I said I’d cover him, so he’s finishing my shift tonight.’
It was plausible, but I realised that it had got to the point where I didn’t believe Zac even when the truth was more likely than a lie. Zac knew this was too delicate a subject for me to check with Omar, and I couldn’t mention something so private to anyone else.
‘I guess his presence is essential.’
‘Talk about performance anxiety.’ He wiped imaginary sweat from his brow. ‘I’m told the fertility clinic has a great collection of porn.’
‘I hope it works for them.’
‘Yes. We’re so lucky.’
‘I know.’ I pulled his face towards mine. ‘I was missing you so much tonight.’
‘Is that why you’re in my study?’
I nodded.
‘You fall asleep everywhere, these days.’ This was not innocent. It was another opportunity for him to press the point that even part-time work was too much for my feeble pregnant self to handle. His hand had left the chair arm. It was moving lower, over my belly. ‘You’re like a furnace.’
‘Your hands are freezing.’
‘Then we’ll need to think of a way to warm them.’
My smile was real. ‘Did you feel that? She’s started kicking.’
‘Not sure.’ His other hand was below the small of my back, lifting me towards him. ‘But we need to celebrate.’
That would be the best way to get him away from the steamer chest. ‘Shall we go upstairs?’
‘Always. But she’ll need to close her eyes, because I’m going to do things to you that no child should see.’
As he pulled me into the bedroom, I told myself that one more film hardly mattered, and I could thwart him by dragging the quilt on top of us to block the camera. But he was the one who thwarted me, tearing the quilt away and throwing it on the floor.
Now The Robin
Two years and one month later
* * *
Bath, Thursday, 4 April 2019
When I arrive home from work, the black iron stairs that lead from the pavement down to the front door of my flat are slippery from the rain. But I am practised at navigating them quickly, which is what I need to do now, because I’m meeting Eliza and Alice in an hour for the pizza dinner we arranged while we were in the park yesterday morning.
As I approach my front door, my stomach drops the way it does when I skid in the shower and catch myself in the nick of time. There is a robin, lying on his back on the grey stones that pave my basement courtyard. The stones have darkened with water to mirror the grey skies above. He is so vivid against them, with his red chest and splash-of-white lower body. I know he is male, from his size as well as his intensity of colour. Peggy taught me to distinguish.
The robin looks perfect from the front, cradled in his soft brown wings. Tentatively, I roll him, forcing myself past my hesitation to touch him. There is a slash across his back, a gash of inside where only outside should be that makes me queasy. There is another flash of Jane’s face, once beautiful – so distorted by what I saw in that sad rented house.
How did the robin get here? Though a cat probably killed him, it couldn’t have positioned him so neatly, with no feathers or mess or blood anywhere that I can see. It is likely he was brought here by human hands and left for me. It again makes me think of Jane, carefully arranged in the bed despite the clumped and rumpled quilt.
I look up at the bullet-style security camera I had installed opposite the front door. Whoever did this managed to throw some kind of adhesive-backed cloth across the casing, which drapes over the lens too. It’s a low-tech solution but effective. Though I have a faint hope the camera caught him before the lens was covered, the likelihood is that that camera isn’t going to tell me anything.
I turn two keys in two different deadlocks, then step inside. The flat always smells slightly of damp, because it actually is damp. I wash my hands in the kitchen sink, then head for the rickety shelf unit I managed to squeeze into the tiny bathroom. I choose a washcloth from the pile of rainbow-bright towels that lives on it, then I return to the robin. Tenderly, I crouch down and wrap him in soft cotton.
As I stand, something catches my eye in the place where the robin was lying. It is a square of silky grey cloth stamped with a repeat pattern of small stethoscopes, and identical to the one Zac favoured when he needed to clean his glasses. The colour blends with the grey paving stone step, so I didn’t notice it at first. It is Zac’s calling card, and I am not sure if it is this recognition or the sound of a car screeching its brakes on the street above that makes my heart give a painful squeeze. It gives a second squeeze at the recollection that Zac once heard Peggy call me her little robin, because of my red hair. Eliza said he was flying to Edinburgh this afternoon, so he could easily have done this before he left, while I was at work. Later tonight, I will stick the cloth in a ziplock bag for Maxine. Right now, I must look after the poor robin.
There is a way out of the flat at the rear, too, through a door in the sitting room that doubles as my bedroom. I deactivate my wedge-shaped under-door alarm, then walk into the scrubby garden that only I can access. Unlike the other basement flats in this street, where each garden stretches far back and spans the width of the house, mine is the size of a double bed. Years before I moved in, the next-door house managed to increase their own garden by buying most of this one.
But the garden is fine for my needs. It is easy to climb into next door’s, then vault their fence into the alley that runs behind the houses. Late at night, several times, I have practised doing exactly this. Right now, though, all I want is the neglected patch of grass. In the last of the day’s light, I pick up the rusting trowel that the previous occupants left behind, then kneel on the wet ground to dig. By the time I have finished covering the poor creature with earth, my knees and shins are soaked, and my hair and face are dripping with rain.
I remember a cross that I bought from a charity stall for Remembrance Day. I never used it, because I found it too painful to attend the services in Bath – I was haunted by my happy times in St Ives with Milly and Peggy and James. I run ba
ck into the flat and grab the cross from the wicker basket that is filled with the things I have no other place for. I imagine Zac frowning, that seeming concern of his.
Are you sure this is the right thing to do, Holly? Are you sure it isn’t disrespectful? I know how prone you are to feeling guilty. You’ll upset yourself. You’ll agonise about it. You know how fragile you are. That cross was made to remember the soldiers who sacrificed for us. You’re really going to put it on the grave of a bird? Not the kind of thing I lose sleep over, but for you it’s sacrilege. What about your father?
I picture Zac dissolving in a puff of smoke like a cartoon baddy. I push the cross into the ground that I have tilled, above the robin that he brought me. I have another thought, and run inside again to where I display a precious little vase that Milly made for me. I take out the bunch of forget-me-nots I’d put in it, and lay these on the tiny grave, too.
Then Startling Intelligence
Two years and one month earlier
* * *
Cornwall, Early March 2017
Zac’s professed kindness to Omar presented me with a perfect opportunity. After what he’d told me the previous night in his study, I was confident that he wasn’t going to pop out at me – he had to be at the hospital covering Omar’s shift.
So I headed for the local library, feeling grateful for once that I’d given in to Zac’s demand that I reduce my working hours to three afternoons a week, which he still thought was too much. The library was my favourite place for Internet searches that I didn’t want to make on my home laptop or phone. I always chose the desk where the screen was facing the wall and I was facing the room, so nobody could sneak up on me from behind to see what I was doing.
Finding the Blackwater Hotel and Spa where Zac and Jane stayed in Ireland was easy. It was what I expected – super-expensive, with beauty treatments and massages on tap, a gym and swimming pool in the basement, a golf course in the grounds, and the most highly rated restaurant in the region.
I did another search, plugging in the hotel’s name and the date that Zac and Jane stayed there. When I considered the drama of their long weekend being curtailed so abruptly, I added the word police, then hit the return key. There was nothing, but then I remembered that in Ireland they said Garda, not police, so I substituted that. The third result down was practically flashing.
Woman Beaten, Gardaí Called to Hotel in County Cork.
I didn’t want it to be true, but nothing I could do would change those words. They appeared in a headline from a local newspaper that wasn’t putting its articles online four years ago. The paper had gone the way of so many publications and since closed down, so the article wasn’t clickable. There was only one way I could think of to get hold of it. In seconds, I was on the British Library website to pre-register for the reader pass that would allow me to access their newspaper archive. Somehow, I was going to have to get to London to read it.
That was my morning’s task completed, but I continued to stare at the computer screen, still feeling that I should be doing more. I let my mind wander.
Four years earlier, when I’d tried to join MI5, I’d created an email account using the name Helen Graham. I’d also got hold of a photo ID and credit card to match, thinking even then that I might need them some day.
As I sat in the library, looking at its ocean-blue walls, I considered what I might do to plot my escape and be ready to leave quickly. I felt thankful for that alternative identity as I opened a new online bank account in Helen Graham’s name, using an address Maxine had given me to establish residential history.
Then I researched some care homes for my grandmother. The one I liked best was in Bath, which was far enough from Cornwall, and a place where Zac had no known history. Milly and I once took a weekend trip there, and we were so happy, doing all the tourist things like two complete geeks.
I would do everything I could to help Jane, to look for her, as long as I safely could. But if I had to leave quickly, I needed to be able to take care of my baby. I needed to be in a position to act calmly, neatly and completely. I couldn’t act rashly. I realised, though, that to do this effectively, I was going to need Maxine’s help.
Cornwall, Mid-March 2017
Two weeks later, I saw my London chance. It was a Monday morning and Zac came into the bedroom to say goodbye before leaving for work, mentioning a sudden trip to University College Hospital. He needed to be there on Friday, when he had an afternoon meeting. He would set out early, but didn’t want to drive home the same day so he’d stay overnight. That was his usual routine on such occasions.
An hour after Zac left, I phoned Milly. I used a tiny burner phone no bigger than my index and middle finger pressed alongside each other. I’d hidden it in a secret pocket that I sewed into the hem of the curtains I made for the baby’s room.
The hidden phone pocket wasn’t the only special thing about the curtains. I’d had Milly’s drawing of the Mermaid of Zennor digitally printed onto aqua fabric. The figure was stamped in brown ink, because I wanted to honour the original dark wood of the Mermaid Chair. Milly’s primitivist design was beautiful in its simplicity. I couldn’t wait to show her, but she hated to visit the house when Zac was there.
Milly didn’t question me when I asked if she could confirm that Zac was in the building. She said that she’d seen him talking to Sister five minutes earlier, so I headed straight for the local library, leaving my mobile at home to ensure I couldn’t be tracked.
I logged into the British Library’s online system to make the arrangements, relieved that I’d squeaked through before it was too late. It took a minimum of two days to get a newspaper from the Stores to the Newsroom, but you needed to place an advance order at least four days before you required it. The article about the incident in the Irish hotel would be waiting for me on Friday.
I cooked Zac’s favourite dinner. Prime rib so rare the juice ran pink and I could smell iron. It was the smell dirty coins left on your fingers.
When Zac came home, he poured himself a glass of the strong red wine I’d already uncorked. ‘I tried to call you this morning.’
‘I didn’t hear it ring.’ I could taste the wine, from his kiss.
‘The landline and your mobile.’ His colour didn’t change.
‘Oh.’ I licked my lips, wishing I could pour myself a glass too.
‘You haven’t been yourself lately, Holly.’ There wasn’t a drop of sweat. His blinking stayed at the same rate. ‘It’s as if you’ve gone to another planet.’
‘I feel, sometimes, that you’re looking for things that I do wrong.’
‘You’re being paranoid.’ He took several sips, with his eyes closed. ‘I’m worried. I want to take you to see someone. There are drugs that would calm you. Stop the anxiety and depression. Help you to be more clear-headed. There are safe ones for the baby.’
My own skin reddened, and I couldn’t control my rapid blinking, or the feeling that my forehead was suddenly damp.
‘I’m fine. I won’t take any drug, no matter how safe they claim it is.’ And you can fuck off, I added silently. Because I will be so gone if you ever dare to try to make me.
‘You will if it’s needed. It’s not good for her to have a mother who is ill.’ He went into the sitting room, returned with my handbag. ‘Your mobile’s not in here.’
‘I must have forgotten it. It’s probably still on the bedside table.’
‘You shouldn’t be without it – that’s not safe. The forgetfulness is another sign that your mental health is suffering. You don’t need to be afraid to seek help. There’s no shame in it.’ He rummaged some more in my bag, and pulled out a DVD I’d bought that morning. ‘What’s this?’ He held it up. His face was ashen.
‘A present for you. I thought we could watch it together. It’s a film about WikiLeaks – it’s a few years old but I know you’re interested in that stuff. You know, getting the truth to the people despite the personal risk, fighting for justice, stopping the bad guys f
rom keeping dangerous secrets.’ I tried to laugh. ‘The kind of superhero thing you do every day.’
He swallowed hard, but managed a smile. ‘That was thoughtful. You’re right. I’d like that. And I haven’t seen this one. Thank you.’
‘Zac?’ My voice was soft.
‘What?’
‘I don’t need help from anyone else when I have you. I don’t need medicine when I have you. And I want to come with you to London.’
To my surprise, he said, ‘That may actually be a good thing.’
‘For you or me?’ I meant this as a joke.
‘Both.’ This was unexpected, too.
‘I feel better with you around.’ I tried to smile.
‘But …’ He downed the rest of his wine and poured another glass.
‘But?’
‘I’m worried the drive will exhaust you. Especially when you still insist on working those three afternoons.’
‘What if I stop immediately?’
‘And never go back?’
‘Never. Then I’ll have the energy to come with you. I’ll be under less strain.’ Work didn’t matter any more, anyway, when my time there was about to end.
‘You promise you will stop now, if I let you come?’ It was so easy for him to use the word ‘let’, to assume he had the right to decide for me.
‘Yes.’ I tipped some olives into a bowl and pushed it towards him.
‘Then okay.’
‘Great. It’ll be fun.’ I bounced a little to demonstrate my enthusiasm.
He studied me. ‘You usually hate being dragged away from here.’
‘I want to shop. To get some special things for her.’
I Spy Page 14