by Paul Clayton
‘I’ve got your number now.’ Cora smiled.
Frankie started to walk out of the shop. They had reached the top of the ramp to the car park where they would part ways when the air was rent with a tearing, metallic sound. Shopper’s heads turned to see what was going on.
Frankie saw the cause straight away. ‘Oh God,’ she said. ‘No. Please. No.’
Chapter Ten
Susan Steadman’s aim was to get around the supermarket as quickly as possible. This wasn’t her shop of choice; if it were down to her, she’d be up the road in Waitrose. But since her husband Damien had lost a well-paid job in media management, she’d had to make cutbacks.
The first time she’d come into this particular supermarket, she’d worn a scarf and a high-collared coat just in case any of her neighbours saw her. She’d picked up a few items and immediately removed all the packaging when she’d returned home. As time went on, she had returned.
The main thing was that everything was cheaper. Damien panicked every time she arrived home with the shopping. ‘How much have you spent?’ he would yell at her across the kitchen island. ‘You’ve got to cut back, Susan. Cut right down. It’s what I’m doing in every department. I’ve reduced the golf club membership to weekends only. Who knows where all this will end?’
It usually ended in another of their violent rows. The result was that, often with sunglasses covering a bruised eye, Susan made much more regular visits here and bought all her fresh produce. She didn’t dare tell Damien she was visiting a bargain supermarket but after she’d spent hours converting ingredients into a vegetable parmigiana or a cauliflower and tofu korma, no one was any the wiser where they had come from. Damien just shovelled it down, belched and retired to the sofa.
She didn’t like to spend long in the supermarket. The worst thing was being spotted by a member of the book club. That would not do. Richenda Michaelson-Smythe ran the book club like a minor branch of the Waffen SS.
Susan always shopped from a list and she worked fast. Making her way past two women who were gossiping at the end of an aisle – something about bottles of Prosecco – she paid for her goods and wheeled her trolley into the car park. The back window of her car was open a tiny crack so that Mercedes, her beloved russet-coloured cockapoo, didn’t suffer while Susan braved the crowds.
Groceries packed into the boot, she pushed the trolley to one side. There were people who came to collect them who needed the work. She climbed into the driving seat. She hated this car; they’d had a nice Lexus, which had been a dream drive, but this second-hand Audi was another of Damien’s economies.
‘I got a wonderful deal on the Lexus. This is a splendid car,’ he told her over a home-made lasagne one night, served with a cheap bottle of wine that Susan had decanted. ‘It’ll do all the shopping runs you need, and my airport trips, and it does mean we’ve got nine grand in the bank from the part exchange.’
Cheap doesn’t necessarily mean good, thought Susan. She threw her bag onto the passenger seat. Mercedes stuck his head through the gap between the seats, anxious for a little affection. Susan was not in the mood. ‘Down please, Mercedes. Not now.’
She pressed the ignition button, pushed her foot to the pedal and engaged gear. Mercedes shot forward through the gap between the seats. The car seemed to be moving backwards. At speed.
Before Susan had time to process the fact that reverse wasn’t the direction she wanted, there was a huge crashing noise. She panicked and, instead of moving her foot to the brake, she caught the edge of the accelerator. The sound of metallic scraping increased as the car made a desperate attempt to pick up speed, crushing the car behind it into a brick wall.
Susan knew that this wasn’t her day.
Chapter Eleven
‘Oh, God,’ said Frankie. ‘No. Please. No.’
Cora watched as she let go of her trolley and started to run across the car park. Cora wasn’t sure what to do with her own small basket. Dumping it into the top of Frankie’s trolley, she pushed it to one side of the shop entrance and followed as fast as she could.
An enormous silver car had reversed and smashed another car into the wall. This was the source of Frankie’s distress. ‘Stop it! Stop it now!’
The car that had caused the damage had come to a halt. The driver’s door on the far side opened.
Frankie stood stock still in amazement, looking at her car that had been shunted into the wall. ‘My car. That’s my fucking car!’
Cora put the language down to how distressed Frankie was. The driver of the other car got out and stood looking at the scene, then she calmly walked to the passenger door. She was a tall woman, thin and elegant in a grey-velour tracksuit, with a silk scarf tied around her neck and blonde hair pulled into a chignon. Cora thought she had the look of a haughty breeding mare.
‘Mercedes. I must get Mercedes out of the car. Mercedes, my baby,’ the woman cried.
Both Cora and Frankie turned their heads on hearing the word ‘baby’.
‘Baby? Where?’ Frankie asked.
‘My baby. My darling,’ screamed the woman, yanking open the passenger door. A large bundle of russet fluff bounded out. The woman grabbed it and held it close. ‘Mercedes. My baby. You poor baby.’
Cora couldn’t believe what she was seeing and Frankie’s jaw had fallen almost to the floor. ‘Your baby? That’s your fucking baby? What about my car?’
‘It might have hurt him.’ The woman glared at Frankie as she lavished her care and attention on the cockapoo. ‘Baby, baby, baby.’ She bent down to let the dog nuzzle her face.
‘I don’t care about your fucking dog,’ said Frankie. ‘That’s my fuckshit car you’ve smashed into a pissing wall, you stupid fuckhead of a dozy bitch.’
Cora was impressed by Frankie’s command of the advanced Anglo-Saxon insult, and she wondered how the woman would deal with the screaming harpy that was now Frankie Baxter. Thirty minutes’ conversation in the café had given Cora no idea of the possibilities of Frankie’s rage and she found it exciting to behold.
A youthful man in a dark-green polyester jacket, and with the beginnings of a moustache arrived more than a little breathless. ‘Now ladies, please.’
‘Who the fuck are you?’ barked Frankie, advancing on the new arrival.
‘I’m Warren Hedgeman …’ He fought to summon the courage to continue. ‘I’m the duty manager.’
Sensing an ally, the tall woman turned her smile on him. ‘I’m so very sorry. There seems to have been a minor accident.’
‘A minor accident? Too fucking right, love.’ Frankie was turning a shade of puce and Cora began to worry for her health.
‘Frankie,’ she said, ‘why don’t we get the shopping and step back into the store with this gentleman to sort things out? Insurance details and the like?’
‘What an excellent idea,’ said Warren, relief pouring off his forehead in the form of sweat. ‘After all, the last thing we want is a fight in the car park.’
At which point, Frankie punched the other woman in the face.
Chapter Twelve
PC Ashley sat at the kitchen table and sipped his tea. ‘She’s not going to press charges.’
Frankie had been pleased when she’d opened the door and seen his familiar face but she hadn’t, as yet, been able to offer a suitable explanation for what had happened. Why had she hit the woman? ‘Let me tell you, constable,’ her inner voice shrieked, ‘it was the cockapoo, that wiry bundle of bum fluff excuse for a dog.’ But she kept her silence.
It wasn’t the first time. At junior school, she’d once punched a girl called Christine Evans in the face. She couldn’t tell anybody why, not the teacher who’d asked her at length during detention nor the headmistress, Miss Nelson, who interrogated her in her office.
‘I don’t know, miss. I just had to,’ was all Frankie could manage.
At secondary schoo
l, she’d been in a gang, not one of the wallflower crowd who’d hung around as part of a gang for their own safety, but an instigator. They broke the rules on school uniform, hiking their skirts above the regulation length, wearing their ties in hot and ingenious ways around the body, and typically sticking two fingers up at the world. There had been some shoplifting – sweets and cigarettes mainly – and a few instances of minor crime, if stealing a neighbour’s bicycle to ride down to the cinema and then dumping it in the canal could be called a minor crime.
Shouldn’t motherhood have knocked away these urges? Frankie knew that if it came to it, she would always defend her children as fiercely as she could, though there was little chance of Shannon ever being involved in any altercation as she hardly left the sofa. But she hadn’t been fighting for her children, she’d been fighting for a battered, well past its best, maroon Fiat 500 that had been turned into an ashtray in front of her eyes in the supermarket car park.
‘As I said, Mrs Steadman is not going to press charges,’ said PC Ashley. ‘But she doesn’t want any contact with you. She has admitted fault in as much as something distracted her. She’s given me her details so that you can get in touch with her insurance company. I understand they took your car to a garage. Yes?’
Frankie nodded. Her exact memory of what had happened after launching the punch at the stupid woman in the tracksuit was hard to recall. Cora seemed to have taken charge and spoken to the necessary people. There had been a quick visit to the police station and she’d had the pleasure of meeting Sergeant Chescoe face to face. She’d recognised him instantly from his voice as the person she’d spoken to on the night Henry had disappeared.
‘Ah, Mrs Baxter. In the soup again, then?’ he said with a chuckle. Neither Frankie nor the constable got the joke and an awkward silence ensued. Chescoe frowned at her; he wasn’t fond of people who didn’t get his sense of humour.
Frankie had returned home to find that Cora had taken charge. Luke, the manny, had been sent home and tea rustled up for the kids. Evidently Cora had told them that ‘Mummy was doing something with the car’.
Frankie could well imagine their reactions to the word ‘Mummy’. Shannon was no doubt punching Cora’s lights out within minutes of her saying it. Even affection-craving Henry never resorted to ‘Mummy’. Yet they didn’t seem to mind Cora being in the house. Everything seemed relaxed as she joined them at the kitchen table for the remains of the meal.
‘I didn’t know what a nugget was,’ said Cora. ‘But Henry’s been such a great help.’
Henry beamed at Cora and Frankie felt herself relaxing. She’d found a new friend, someone she could rely on. Since the years in her teenage gang she’d preferred her independence, but sometimes it was good to have someone around whom you could trust. Someone to get you out of a mess.
Now, the following afternoon, PC ‘You Can Call Me Oliver’ Ashley finished his cup of tea and picked up his cap off the table. He poked his head into the other room to say goodbye to Henry and headed for the door.
‘Thanks, constable,’ said Frankie. ‘Thanks for letting me know what’s going on.’
‘You shouldn’t have any more problems. But stay away from Mrs Steadman and contact her insurers. And you might want to say thank you to Miss Walsh … or is it Mrs Walsh? Warren from the supermarket said she was very impressive. Evidently not someone who takes no for an answer.’
Chapter Thirteen
The little girl didn’t have any friends. Certainly no friends were allowed into her home to play. She played in the garden of the tiny house on her own, inventing her own worlds. At school, the children sat side by side in the classroom, except for her. She sat at the front of the class by the door on her own in a pair of desks of which she was the only occupant. It had not happened deliberately; where possible the teacher had sat the pupils alphabetically, and that was how it fell.
The other children didn’t know how to deal with her. By now they knew she would not come to their birthday parties. On the occasions when they arrived at school with a satchel full of envelopes to hand out, there wouldn’t be one for the little girl who sat by the door.
She no longer expected to receive invitations. She didn’t have a birthday. She couldn’t invite them in return. Her mother and father had always told her that they didn’t celebrate birthdays. Her father thought that birthdays with pink cakes and party games were a waste of time. Her father had wanted a little boy.
One evening, after they had finished their meal, she had gone into the kitchen to wash up the dishes as normal. Looking over her shoulder, she saw her father holding her mother’s hand and giving her a small, prettily wrapped box. She turned away in case they caught her watching but later she noticed that her mother was wearing a new silver locket. A birthday present.
Her parents bought her things – she was not without toys – but there was no celebration of her particular day. At Christmas she got presents like every other child. Yet she noticed that all the packages they gave her had no name on the label. They rarely used her name or any Christmas greetings. It was at Christmas that she began to acquire her dolls.
A visit to the dentist meant walking up the hill past the toyshop. One window was often filled with items designed to attract adolescent girls. Sometimes her mother stopped for a moment to light a cigarette or to attend to her makeup in the glass, and Little Girl would peer into the window and point at the dolls with their exotic names. Barbie, Sindy, Petal, My Little Angel. By now, although she was starting to reach the age when most children would be putting dolls away, she had collected over thirty of them in many shapes and sizes. They were her friends. They were the people to whom she told her secrets. They were the people with whom she shared her grief and her excitement.
Katie-Jane’s birthday party was to be a lavish affair. Held in the gardens of Katie-Jane’s parents’ house, it would have clowns, face painting, makeovers, and a disco. It was taking place on a Saturday afternoon. Katie-Jane had handed invitations out to all the class in blue and pink envelopes, according to gender. She placed an envelope on Little Girl’s desk as she passed. ‘It would be lovely if you could come.’
‘Thank you,’ said Little Girl. She knew she would not be allowed to attend, but at least she could take the invitation home.
‘No, no, no!’ screamed her mother. ‘I thought you understood. We don’t have birthdays in this house.’
Little Girl looked up at her, summoning up the courage to make the request a second time.
‘And Miss Fletcher was told that you were not to receive invitations to people’s parties. It was silly of Katie-Jane to give you this. It’ll only cause trouble. You’re not going.’
At three o’clock on Saturday afternoon, the appointed time for the birthday party to begin, Little Girl sat in the kitchen. She arranged twenty of her dolls around a makeshift table, an upturned cardboard box that she had pulled from the rubbish in the pantry. She made sure that all the dolls looked neat. She pulled their arms forward so they could balance on the box, ready for the birthday feast she imagined would be placed on her party table.
Her father was out and her mother was snoozing in front of something on the television in the front room. Happy that all the dolls looked comfortable and the party was ready to begin, Little Girl went into the kitchen. She pulled out the small stool that her mother used to reach the upper shelves and, from the cupboard at the far end where all the baking ingredients were kept, she found what she wanted.
She climbed down and replaced the stool. She sprayed the liquid over the dolls’ table and along the carpet into the hall. Now the party could begin. She lifted her hand and clicked on the blowtorch. The blue flame oozed out of it. She leant forward until the box was alight and then she sat back on her heels and waited until the dolls were aflame. The fire spread.
Little Girl walked out of the house and down to the end of the garden. She sat on a low wall to watch the ho
use burn.
Chapter Fourteen
After the car park incident, Cora started calling Frankie every other day to check on how she was doing, friendly calls where she let Frankie do most of the talking. She resisted the temptation to offer another invitation for coffee or lunch. She knew that Frankie’s working hours prevented her from spending much time with friends, and she didn’t want to be a distraction. And Cora had other things she could do to fill her days. She often spent time sitting by her window, making notes on her laptop and watching the world.
She had rung Frankie on Thursday night for a quick chat to see how things were going, so she was a little surprised to see Frankie’s name appear on her phone in the middle of Friday morning. ‘Hello, you,’ she said. ‘Everything all right?’
There was a pause.
‘Could we meet up? Something’s come up and I would love your …’ Cora could hear how difficult Frankie was finding it to ask for help.
‘Are you working this afternoon?’
‘No,’ said Frankie. ‘I finish at lunchtime.’
‘Then meet me at Deli Do. Half-past one. Yes?’
There was another pause.
Deli Do was the town’s latest upmarket coffee shop; no change out of a fiver for a turmeric latte. Not, Cora deduced, the sort of place where Frankie would be wanting to spend her hard-earned money. ‘My treat. Latte and a sandwich?’
Cora heard Frankie’s sigh down the line. ‘See you there.’
Being new, Deli Do was packed with people trying it out for lunch. There was an inviting smell of baking. Cora was glad she’d found a table pushed right back against the wall in the furthest corner from the door. She suspected that whatever it was Frankie had to share, she wouldn’t want to do so while brushing shoulders with other people.
The waitress brought the two lattes. Cora was just starting hers and gazing into space when the door opened and Frankie came in. She was wearing blue harem pants with what looked like white horses on them, and an immense plum-coloured sweatshirt under an orange padded gilet. Not so much an outfit as a cry for help, thought Cora. Then, as she approached, Cora saw how apprehension was gripping her.