I Spy

by Claire Kendal

  ‘We looked for Jacinda Molinero when you gave us the name a couple years ago. We found nothing, then.’

  ‘It wouldn’t hurt to try again now. She may have used it since. She would have felt safe with that name. She would have thought it low risk that anyone would be looking for it.’

  ‘Why would Jacinda – Jane – be in Podgorica?’ He says this like a teacher who already knows the answer, and is trying to find out if I do too.

  To help Zac steal my baby, I think, though I don’t quite understand how, or why they needed to be in Montenegro. ‘It’s just an instinct,’ I say.

  ‘It’s as if I’ve been hit on the head since I met you.’

  ‘If GCHQ ever fires you, you can write comedy.’

  ‘Go get something to eat, Holly. I’ll see what I can find.’

  When Maxine and I come out of the kitchen half an hour later, George is sitting on one side of the sofa. I take the place on the other end, and Maxine wheels his desk chair across.

  ‘Okay,’ he says. ‘I found three more things. First, Holly, your instinct about Jacinda Molinero was right. Somebody checked into a five-star hotel in Podgorica under that name. It was a two-room, two-bath suite, and they stayed for ten weeks. Arrived on the eleventh of March, departed on the twenty-sixth of May.’

  ‘Again, all inside the March-through-June dates when the CCTV was blocked,’ I say.

  ‘Yep. And the second thing is that there’s no CCTV for the hotel for those four months – same as the hospital. And here’s the third thing.’ He takes a piece of paper from the sofa arm beside him, then hands it to me. ‘I printed this for you.’

  I turn it over. ‘Oh.’ It is a photograph. ‘Oh my God.’

  The three of them are so young, so happy looking and beautiful and uncomplicated.

  Zac, before Jane ran away from him.

  Jane, before she ever knew she had a brother.

  Eliza, before Zac broke her heart, then changed his mind and married her.

  ‘It was 1999, the UCL Summer Ball,’ George says. ‘From the university archives.’

  Zac, twenty-four years old, is standing in the middle. One of his arms is around Jane, the other around Eliza. The two women look like film stars, in their shimmering gowns, with their upswept hair.

  ‘We knew all three of them were at UCL at the same time,’ he says. ‘But I thought if I showed you the connection, it might help you to understand why Jane was with Eliza in Podgorica. They were old friends. They met in halls in their first year. Jane must have been supporting Eliza for the birth.’

  ‘That partly makes sense,’ I say, ‘but it’s also weird. Don’t you think? I mean, Jane supporting a woman who’s having her ex-husband’s baby? It’s not exactly the basis for a thriving friendship.’

  ‘Perhaps Eliza didn’t tell her who the father was,’ Maxine says.

  My cheeks lift and my eyes squeeze in doubt. ‘That doesn’t sound right.’

  Maxine stands. ‘Holly, it’s been a difficult day for you.’

  ‘Yes.’ George reaches across and squeezes my hand. ‘I’m so sorry about your grandmother.’

  There is a kind of time delay before I manage to speak. ‘It has.’ Do I sound like a robot to them? ‘Thank you. I think I need to go home now. I need to sleep, and then see my grandmother.’

  I drive away from George’s flat, but I don’t go home. I head for the botanical gardens in the middle of the town. I park under some hydrangeas, where pink and blue flowers are growing from the same bush, as if through some kind of genetic magic. I roll down the car window, in need of fresh air.

  I think back to my nightmare time in hospital, and immediately afterward. They all told me I’d held my baby. That I spent hours with her. But I haven’t even a sliver of a memory of it. I think back to my certainty that she wasn’t dead, that she couldn’t be. They all thought it was my grief, the total mental collapse I was having, then.

  I am trembling at the thought that I was right, and Zac somehow stole my baby, and bullied and blackmailed Eliza and Jane into helping him. Zac knows the medical world. He knows how hospitals work. He knows Frederick, who can manipulate data and documents and records. Is it possible that Zac could have pulled off such a thing? And that he and Jane persuaded her brother to delete any evidence that she was ever there? Given how much they sacrificed and suffered to help Frederick, it was hardly a big ask.

  Even so, I still can’t fully understand why Jane would take such a risk. Love for Zac? Guilt about what she brought upon him? Fear, despite having escaped him? Montenegro isn’t a Category 1 country for extradition, which must have been Jane’s reason for choosing it, but it still would have been extremely dangerous for her to be discovered there.

  I start the engine. I do not return to my grandmother. I whisper a small prayer of apology, a plea for understanding even though I know it won’t reach her. I head up to the motorway, towards Yorkshire.

  Then The Drowning Place

  One year and ten months earlier

  * * *

  Cornwall, June 2017

  My eyes were tightly closed against the grief that hit me like a tsunami and tossed me so far and deep I couldn’t fight it. I opened them to see a shadow figure, sitting by the bed, watching me. She’d arrived in silence, and at first I thought she was a ghost, or part of the bad dream that continued whether I was asleep or awake.

  ‘Holly,’ she said. ‘I didn’t want to wake you. I thought I’d wait.’

  It was like being in a nightmare where you wanted to speak but nothing would come out. I shook my head. I looked at the door. I pointed at it. Go, my body was trying to tell her. Leave at once. Get out of my sight.

  ‘I don’t want to upset you,’ she said.

  I closed my eyes again. When I opened them she was still there.

  ‘I hear you’re being discharged tomorrow. I wanted to talk to you before then.’

  The tears were sliding down my cheeks. I thought they would never stop.

  ‘I wanted to say how sorry I am.’

  I turned onto my side, my back to her.

  ‘Do you still want to get away from him?’ Her voice was very quiet. It was almost gentle. It was not a tone I imagined she was capable of.

  I tented my face with the blanket, so she couldn’t see me.

  ‘We know it will be hard, but it will work best if you let him take you back to his house. My understanding is that they won’t discharge you if you’re alone.’

  ‘No.’ I let the blanket fall, so the air could no longer circulate around my nose.

  She lifted it away. ‘I’m worried you can’t breathe.’

  ‘No,’ I said again. The word was a whisper.

  ‘Holly, if you go to Peggy’s you will find it much more difficult to take the necessary steps. You won’t have to stay with him for long.’

  ‘I can’t be near him. You don’t understand.’

  ‘Tell me. Help me to understand.’

  ‘Just go.’

  ‘Listen to me. We’ll get you out quickly, but it’s important to convince him you’ve really gone, so he won’t look for you.’ Her hand was on my shoulder and I cringed away so violently she gasped.

  ‘He’ll never stop,’ I said.

  ‘The plans we already put in place are good ones. Let us at least do this for you. We’ll have the medical care set up, and the other support you’ll need. Plus a job, when you are stronger. I want to help you,’ she says.

  ‘You? You want to help?’

  ‘Yes. All of us. But me especially.’

  My voice was raspy and low. ‘I don’t want your help.’

  ‘I know you don’t,’ she said, ‘but you need it.’

  I let Zac take me back to his house the next day, numb and dumb as a piece of wood except for when he touched my hand to help me out of the car and I screamed. But in the end, I decided it was better there than Peggy’s. Peggy would want to drag me back to life. Zac wouldn’t dare to try. He was relieved I had gone with him, and grateful. He
kept saying so again and again. He was timid-seeming, perhaps even frightened, though I was certain the old Zac was still in there, ready to strike at any time. I would never let myself forget that.

  The nursery was empty. The Moses basket was gone. I was ambushed by a pang for him, picturing him carrying it from the house, imagining him driving away from the hospital with her empty car seat, which he’d set up in the Range Rover that arrived the day after he returned from Canada. But he did not deserve my compassion.

  He had removed the white-painted cot, and the mobile with brightly coloured birds that I’d attached to it. There were empty spaces where the changing table and rocking chair had been. The Mermaid of Zennor curtains I sewed for her, started before I was certain we would have to flee, were no longer hanging in the windows.

  I’d lovingly furnished that room, even though I’d known that my baby and I would never occupy it. That proved true, but not in the way I’d imagined. The room was empty. The room was like me.

  My nipples tingled and leaked. My body was mocking me. It wanted to remind me again and again of how I’d failed, of what I lacked. My stitches itched and pulled.

  Going up the stairs was like climbing a mountain. I had to sit down halfway up. My breath came in gasps, as if I had been running for hours. My forehead was beaded with sweat from the pain in my lower abdomen, my back soaked.

  Morning, noon, and night, Zac fed me a kaleidoscope of pills to wake me up and keep me calm and put me to bed. He let Milly and Peggy come and sit with me. He even brought them cups of tea. He actually seemed to want them there. I needed them, so he needed them too.

  They said little. They held my hand. They put their arms around me as if they wished the pain could go out of me and into them, as if they wanted to share it. When I winced, they winced too. I saw Zac watching, as if longingly, because they could touch me but he could not.

  Zac spoke quietly to the doctor who visited me at home. Their voices were a hum of babble from far away. There was only one thing in all of it that I could understand, a noise that came like a bomb, but was quickly suppressed. The noise was from Zac. It was a loud, racking sob that he seemed to choke on.

  One morning, when the post came, I caught him swooping it up, panic in his face. But it was not his usual jealousy and control. It was that the catalogues of baby and new mother products were continuing to arrive, and he was trying to clear them away to make sure I didn’t stumble on them.

  He bought me a lined journal covered in Far Away Tree fabric, a Liberty print he knew I loved. He said, ‘You used to love to write. Maybe it will help.’ His voice went quieter when he continued. ‘I will never read it.’ As he put the new one in my lap, I thought of the orange journal he used against me. ‘You have good reason not to believe me, but I won’t. I did read the hospital stories you wrote. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have. But they were beautiful, Holly – I couldn’t tell you that then because it would have meant admitting the scale of what I’d done.’

  For him to say this to me – I couldn’t – I hardly knew how to speak. ‘You found my old journal because you’d installed hidden cameras.’

  ‘Holly—’

  ‘It’s the only explanation. Did you or did you not?’

  ‘I did.’

  ‘Are the cameras gone?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Where were they?’

  He didn’t answer.

  ‘Was there one in our bedroom? Tell me, Zac.’

  ‘No, there wasn’t.’

  ‘You’re lying. I know it.’

  ‘Okay. Yes. There was one there, yes. But not for the reason you think. I was worried they might secretly search the house, because of my ex-wife.’

  ‘Don’t dehumanise her by calling her your ex-wife. Call her by her name. Call her Jane.’

  He looked down. He swallowed hard but said nothing.

  ‘Why would they search the house?’

  ‘They thought I had something to do with Jane’s disappearance. I didn’t.’

  ‘Did you catch anybody – I mean, did you see anyone come in the house?’

  ‘No. I know I shouldn’t have put that camera in the bedroom. I know there’s no excuse for subjecting you to that.’

  ‘So there was film of me. Film of the things you did to me.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Because obviously you needed to capture our bed to guard against potential intruders. Did you watch it?’

  He hesitated. ‘I want to lie and say no, but I don’t want to lie to you any more. They say – I’ve been going – I’ve been getting help. So yes, I did sometimes watch.’

  ‘Did anybody else see it?’

  ‘No! Never! Of course not.’

  ‘You didn’t give the footage to anyone?’

  ‘I promise. The answer’s no. All the footage has been wiped.’

  ‘You wiped it?’

  ‘It’s gone.’

  ‘So filming me was a secondary motive to the primary motive of making sure you weren’t being spied on?’

  ‘Filming you wasn’t a motive at all.’

  ‘More like collateral damage.’

  ‘More like an unexpected benefit.’ I could see he regretted the words as soon as they were out of his mouth. ‘God, Holly. Fuck. I know how wrong that sounded.’

  ‘Why? It’s what you think. There’s no way anything about any of this can sound anything other than wrong. I found your magazines in the garage. And the things you kept in the bag with them.’

  ‘How did you get in the garage, Holly?’

  ‘Why does it matter?’

  ‘How?’

  He had been so compliant, until that moment. So filled with sorrow.

  Since it happened, his remorse had made him quell every flash of his usual anger. It made him quash his normal insistence on getting his way about everything. I’d known those things were still there, though. I had been waiting for them.

  I felt myself tense with the usual fear. ‘Milly broke in when you were in Canada.’ He wouldn’t dream of talking to Milly about this, so I was in no danger of discovery that way. In any case, he would believe that almost anyone we knew was more capable of doing such a thing than I was.

  The colour drained from his face. ‘Did Milly see?’

  ‘No. It was bad enough that I did. She left before I opened the bag. I’m glad she hasn’t had to have those images in her head, too.’

  ‘I’m ashamed of them.’ He was biting his lip. ‘I don’t look at material like that any more.’

  ‘It’s what you wanted to do to me all along.’

  ‘It wasn’t, Holly.’

  ‘It’s what you did do.’ I stood, trying not to wince, because I was secretly weaning myself off the painkillers that dulled me. The Far Away Tree journal fell to the floor. I did not pick it up. ‘I put your bag and its contents out with the rubbish where it belonged. I didn’t want it near me.’

  At bedtime, I found the Far Away Tree journal on my bedside table, beside the pink memory box. I did not touch either of them.

  The next morning, he sat with me at breakfast, but I did not eat the toast he had made me. ‘You took my baby,’ I said. ‘Tell me where she is.’

  ‘Holly, our baby died.’ He looked so sad I would have believed him if I didn’t know him better. He blinked so fast the two colours of his eye blended into one. ‘You saw her,’ he said. ‘You cried over her while you held her.’

  ‘You’re lying.’ The hair on my arms was standing on end. ‘I’d remember. That never happened.’

  ‘It’s called dissociative amnesia. There are a range of symptoms, but in your case, you’ve suppressed your memory of a specific traumatic event.’ He wiped a hand over his head so hard his scalp blanched.

  ‘You’re constantly telling me there’s something wrong with my mental health when what I’m saying isn’t to your liking. If she were really dead, holding her would have been the most precious thing in my whole life. I would want to remember. I’d never let myself forget a single secon
d with her.’

  I got up to leave the room. When I reached the kitchen door and turned to look back at him, his elbows were on the table and his head was in his hands and his whole body was shaking, but he wasn’t making a sound.

  I spent as much time as I could in the garden, lying on the grass beneath the handkerchief tree, which was in flower. Above me, the white petals fluttered like doves. Below me, the skeletons in the plague pit reached out their arms, and I pressed myself into the earth to be closer to them, wanting to be swallowed too. I imagined my hair, twining into the grass, tangling with the roots below, pinning me down and pulling me in, until I was more soil than person and I couldn’t see or be seen.

  I only ate if Zac put a plate in front of me. I only drank if he poured water into a glass and put it in my hand, his fingers careful not to brush mine. I cried all the time. I never seemed not to be crying. The blood seemed not to stop. All I wanted was for it to stop. Every drop reminded me. I thought it would never stop.

  Zac murmured that he loved me, that he would always love me, that I would come back to him in time, that he would look after me, that he would change, he was changing and getting help, that he would do whatever it took to earn my forgiveness, that we would have another baby, there were ways, surrogacy, and Milly had told him she would do that for me, and we could still use my eggs. This was a new and different Zac. This was not the Zac I knew. But my heart was hard, forever hard, to him.

  ‘I don’t want another baby,’ I said. ‘I want my baby.’ My arms were so empty.

  ‘You are too young, and too hurt, to know what you want,’ he said.

  I slept in the guest room. Even with a wall between me and Zac, I tamped the quilt into the mattress around me. I was in a quilt bubble. I was like a pill in a blister pack. It was the best I could do, because they had removed all the locks from the doors, not trusting me. Once, I woke in the night, and caught him kneeling by the side of my bed with his hand in my hair. I screamed and knocked it away and he flew from the room, telling me he was sorry, promising never to do it again.