The White Shepherd

by Annie Dalton

  That’s why Anna didn’t have friends or lovers. Once she’d spoken the truth out loud, she couldn’t bear the sight of them. But when she finally dared to look into the women’s faces, it came to her that if either of them had told her the story she had just told them, she would have looked every bit as shocked and distressed as they were looking now.

  ‘Now will you help me help Laurie?’ she asked.

  ELEVEN

  ‘I’m just saying, I’m not entirely comfortable that you can find out people’s private information via these sinister kinds of websites,’ said Isadora. Anna shifted her mobile to the crook of her neck while she hunted for her purse. She could hear water thundering into Isadora’s stainless steel sink, followed by the clattering sound of her antiquated electric kettle starting to heat up. Further off, Hero gave a short sharp bark. ‘Shut UP, Hero,’ Isadora bellowed.

  ‘I’m not remotely comfortable with it,’ Anna almost snapped as she paid for her take-out coffee. She had adopted the morally convenient viewpoint that these websites existed; she couldn’t un-invent them, and they might help her turn up the information she craved. But Isadora’s instinctive distaste rattled her more than she liked to admit.

  Isadora’s voice softened. ‘I know, darling. I do understand that we have to live in the world as it is. Is that a police car going past?’

  ‘Ambulance,’ Anna corrected. ‘I’m on my way to work.’

  ‘Think of me later at the dentist.’ Isadora’s tone turned plaintive. ‘Mr Ashtiani is so handsome, and he has the most perfect teeth. God knows what he thinks of my terrible old gnashers. Take my advice, darling, and never get old. All the good stuff is behind you, and there is nothing but utter humiliation ahead.’

  ‘You’re only in your sixties!’ Anna reminded her.

  ‘My late sixties,’ Isadora said in a voice of doom.

  ‘It’s just a number,’ Anna said, gratefully taking a hit of her scalding latte. ‘Seriously, you’ve got plenty of good surprises still to come!’

  ‘It’s very lovely of you to say so,’ Isadora said, unconvinced. ‘Though I must say my life has become considerably less dreary since I met you and Tansy,’ she added, with that characteristic frankness which always took Anna’s breath away.

  Anna ended her call and carried on down the Cornmarket, sipping at her latte. She’d reached the stage of sleep deprivation where she needed a constant input of caffeine just to walk in a straight line. She’d been too wired to sleep last night. She’d taken a huge risk and was still expecting it to blow up in her face. In the end, Anna’s ‘murder board party’, as Tansy kept calling it, had gone on till late. After their meal, they’d gone upstairs with their coffee, and Tansy had seemed to forget all about her need to go home and sleep. She’d tucked herself comfortably into a corner of a sofa, making increasingly off-the-wall suggestions for ways to protect Laurie. Anna couldn’t remember how or when Isadora’s ‘sinister websites’ had entered the conversation. She had been slightly miffed to find out that Tansy not only knew all about the Dark Net, but also how to access it. Between them they had tracked down Eve Bloomfield’s contact details. Tansy had promptly put the address into her phone and said, ‘I’ll get on this tomorrow. I’m off work all day. I’ll ask my mum if I can borrow her car, then I’ll drive over and see what I can sniff out.’

  ‘Are you sure that’s wise?’ Isadora had asked.

  ‘Why not! I’ve always wanted to go on a stake-out.’ Tansy had been aglow with excitement and alcohol, also possibly the sugar-loaded chocolate brownies Anna had offered around as a nod towards dessert.

  ‘It’s just that if Eve really did murder Naomi, it might be wiser not to go alone. I’d come with you, darling, but I’ve got various appointments tomorrow.’

  Tansy had given a scornful snort. ‘I might be a vegan, but I know how to fight nasty if I have to, Isadora, trust me!’

  Remembering this conversation as she turned into the High, Anna flashed back to a traumatized Tansy vomiting into a hedge. She was finding it hard to get a proper fix on Tansy Lavelle, the vegan waitress who understood the intimate workings of the Dark Net and talked about ‘fighting nasty’.

  But then how much did Anna’s new friends really know about Anna? She thought of everything she’d held back last night. Some things were too evil to be told. Her grandfather had told her that after his own father came home from the killing fields of the First World War he never spoke of it again. He was protecting his wife and his two little boys the only way he knew, Anna thought, and refusing to contaminate their home – their futures – with the hellish knowledge he’d brought home. Instead he had elected to keep it all locked inside: his guilt and shame, his fear and shock. That way it stopped with him.

  As usual Anna stopped in at the porters’ lodge. Mr Boswell beckoned her up to his counter. ‘I’ve been looking out for you,’ he said in a low voice. ‘Ms Costello came in as white as a sheet. I don’t know what’s up with her, but she looks like she could use a friend.’ His pallid features had flushed with concern.

  Anna heard her phone ping inside her bag. ‘She’s probably going down with something. But thanks for telling me.’ The poker-faced porter wasn’t normally given to overreacting. On the other hand, Kirsty wasn’t given to having dramas at work. Nadine, on the other hand …

  Postponing the moment when she’d have to encounter Nadine’s latest Post-it explosion, Anna read Jake’s text as she hurried under the ancient arch into the college gardens.

  Looks like I’m coming to Oxford sooner rather than later. Any chance you can meet me for a drink?

  Anna felt the confused churning that started up every time she tried to think about Jake McCaffrey. That churning was surely a warning in itself? Telling her there were just too many complications – and that’s before Anna had factored in the depressing story of the not so ex. She mustn’t let this man breeze in and out of her life like some southern-voiced Romeo. She would say a firm no to drinks, she decided, and after that she’d stop replying to his texts, no matter how entertaining.

  She toiled up the stairs to the admin office. Unusually, the door was closed. She opened it and found Kirsty silently sobbing at her desk.

  ‘Oh, I’m sorry,’ Anna said, hastily backing out. ‘Do you want me to go away again?’

  Kirsty half-raised her head as if to say something, but only let out a defeated wail, like a small furry animal that had got itself caught in a trap.

  ‘I’ll make you some coffee. No, tea!’ Anna corrected quickly. Her grandmother had been a believer in sweet tea for any form of human distress.

  Kirsty made a weak flapping gesture.

  ‘You don’t want tea?’ Anna translated. ‘Why don’t I pop out and get us both some real coffee?’ It would be her fourth this morning, and it was only nine a.m. She’d be lucky to have any functioning kidneys at this rate.

  For the first time Kirsty sat up. She was exactly as white as Mr Boswell had described, except for her eyes which were so red and swollen that she must have been crying all night. ‘I found some pictures on Jason’s phone,’ she said hoarsely. She jumped up from her desk. ‘I’m going to be sick!’ She fled across the landing, and Anna heard vomiting sounds. After a while she came back, watery eyed and trembling. ‘Sorry to be so gross. I was hoping I’d stopped.’

  Anna kept a small bottle of mineral water in her messenger bag. She fished it out, unscrewed the top and set it on Kirsty’s desk. ‘You might just want to take a few sips to start with,’ she suggested. ‘Then tell me about Jason’s pictures.’ Anna was vaguely alarmed at this super-competent version of herself who could go without sleep for nights yet still cope with a vomiting fellow human.

  Kirsty obediently took a couple of sips. ‘I knew something was wrong,’ she said miserably. ‘I’ve known for ages, though he always denied it. I don’t know why I decided to go looking for evidence. I think I just couldn’t stand to let things drag on the way they’ve been.’

  ‘The pictures,’ Anna prompted
her.

  ‘Recent selfies of him naked with his ex girlfriend, also naked,’ Kirsty said miserably. She saw Anna’s expression. ‘I know, really classy.’ She sipped more water. ‘You know Jason isn’t Charlie’s real dad?’

  Anna shook her head. It didn’t seem like the best moment to say that she had often wondered how such a doughy looking young man could father such a sparklingly mischievous little boy.

  ‘He was really lovely to him until we got married. He was lovely to both of us. Then, almost overnight, he started resenting him, you know, like he just couldn’t forgive him for being so little and needing me.’

  ‘He was jealous,’ Anna said.

  Kirsty didn’t hear. ‘If Charlie has a bad dream in the night and needs a cuddle – any time he takes my attention away from Jason, basically – Jason has a total melt down. I keep telling him, he’s just a little boy, Jason, and he just says he’s got to learn! Oh, fuck, Anna, my life is such a mess!’ She started to cry again.

  ‘I’m going to make us both a cup of coffee,’ Anna said. Instant coffee was vile, but she couldn’t leave Kirsty in this state, and today she’d take caffeine in any form she could get. She arrived back with the steaming kettle just before Paul, the senior administrator, came in, wearing his usual mud-brown V-necked sweater over a tired plaid shirt and worn corduroy trousers and generally looking like he’d just teleported back from Comic Con.

  Paul instantly registered Kirsty weeping at her computer. Instead of beating a hasty retreat, as most men would, Anna thought, he said anxiously, ‘Kirsty, what’s wrong? Is Charlie OK?’ Behind his glasses his eyes were wide with concern.

  ‘You tell him, Anna,’ Kirsty choked. She ran out with her hand over her mouth.

  Anna quickly shut the office door, though she doubted that Kirsty really needed to vomit a second time. More likely she couldn’t bear to have to repeat her sorry story to her boss, however sympathetic. ‘She found pictures of her husband with his ex,’ Anna told him, keeping her voice down. ‘Naked pictures,’ she added, to make Kirsty’s predicament crystal clear.

  Paul whipped off his spectacles, as if he was alarmed she might actually make him view the pictures. ‘Good God,’ he said, appalled. ‘She’s not planning to stay with the little shit, is she?’

  She shook her head. ‘I don’t know. I’ve only just got in, and she was too upset to tell me very much.’

  Paul sat down on the corner of Kirsty’s desk. ‘Naked selfies,’ he said in a disgusted voice. ‘Where’s the mystery in that?’

  ‘You’d have to ask Jason.’ Anna couldn’t quite believe she was having this conversation with her boss, a man whose private life she knew nothing about, except that he was into something nerdy like war gaming or historical re-enactments.

  The door opened, and Kirsty came in blowing her nose on a ragged piece of toilet paper.

  ‘I’ll take you home,’ Paul offered.

  ‘I don’t want to go home!’ Kirsty wailed. ‘I can’t be in that flat all by myself. I’ll go bloody mad.’ She sank into her chair and covered her face. ‘Oh fuck, this is all my fault!’

  Paul whipped off his glasses again. ‘How is this your fault?’

  ‘It must be,’ she said pathetically. ‘Or why would he have gone running back to Claire?’

  ‘Because he’s an ungrateful, immature wank—’ Paul saw Anna vehemently shaking her head and clamped his jaws together.

  Anna didn’t have much personal experience of break-ups. You had to make relationships before you could break them up. But she had worked in offices and been party to a lot of break-up conversations, so she knew that while it was OK for Kirsty to criticize Jason, it was too soon for her to permit anyone else to join in.

  Giving Kirsty’s shoulder an awkward squeeze, Paul left the office, discreetly closing the door on the female turmoil inside.

  If she were Kirsty, Anna thought, she’d prefer to be left alone to deal with her misery. If she were Kirsty she wouldn’t have been able to face coming into the office full-stop. Her dread of exposure, of letting anyone see her messy vulnerability, would have outweighed everything else. But Kirsty had opted to come to work, and Anna felt she should say something comforting, however banal. ‘Look, I’m going to send some emails now,’ she said. ‘But I’m here if you need me, OK?’ Yep, that was banal, Anna, she thought and was surprised by Kirsty’s tearful nod.

  ‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘That means a lot.’

  This morning Anna had to fine tune arrangements for a seminar that was going to be given by a controversial female academic from the US who believed that schools should stop teaching children IT and teach them philosophy from primary school onwards. The BBC and also a German TV network were going to be filming, and Nadine had left Anna a more than usually daunting to-do list. With part of her mind on a white-faced Kirsty while she worked, Anna vaguely registered a busy succession of pings before Kirsty said in a depleted voice, ‘Someone seems very keen to get in touch with you.’

  ‘Oh, God, I forgot!’ Anna dived for her phone and found a dozen or more texts from Tansy Lavelle, private investigator, now parked outside Eve Bloomfield’s house in East Oxford and clearly increasingly bored. The most exciting thing she’d witnessed so far was a row in Eve’s next door neighbour’s front garden between the neighbour and her teenage daughter: She started pulling up her daughter’s top to cover her cleavage, & the daughter was pulling it back down, shrieking, ‘Get your hands off me, you jealous cow!’ Pure daytime TV!

  ‘What’s funny?’ Kirsty asked her. ‘I could do with a laugh,’ she added with a watery grin.

  ‘Just a silly text,’ Anna said. ‘Actually, I’ve been wondering if you’d let me take you out for lunch.’ In fact, the idea had just popped into her head. ‘You probably don’t feel like eating,’ she said, over Kirsty’s protests, ‘but it would do us both good to get out of the office for a bit.’ It’s what Tansy or Isadora would have done, she thought. It didn’t feel entirely natural to make the offer, but Anna liked herself slightly better for having made it.

  They went to the Grand Cafe because it was nearest. Supposedly on the site of the first ever coffee house in England, the cafe was popular with tourists. Anna loved it regardless, not so much for its marble pillars and gold leaf, but because it was the first place she had ever ordered a cocktail.

  She shared this with Kirsty in the hope of distracting her with lighter topics.

  ‘What were you, sixteen?’ Kirsty said at once.

  ‘Fifteen,’ Anna corrected. ‘But I looked eighteen easily.’ Eighteen going on thirty, she thought.

  ‘Did you feel impossibly sophisticated, like you should be posing with a cigarette holder?’ Kirsty asked.

  ‘I totally did!’ Anna said. ‘I had a Strawberry Daiquiri, and my friend Nat had a White Russian.’

  ‘And did you feel drunk, like, immediately?’

  ‘From the first sip,’ Anna said, laughing. She had other mem-ories involving Natalie, but this was one of the better ones, and she was glad she’d been able to make Kirsty smile, if only for a moment.

  After Anna had read aloud from the Specials board and mentioned casually that she thought she’d have the soup of the day, Kirsty decided that she might risk a few spoonfuls herself. ‘And the crusty bread,’ she told the waiter. ‘My granny used to break toast into tiny bits for me and dip it in my soup when I was ill,’ she told Anna, when he’d gone away with their order.

  Anna nodded. Her grandmother had done the same. ‘It’s not like proper eating then.’

  Then, when their order came, Kirsty surprised them both by falling on her food as if she was half-starved. ‘I was too churned up to eat last night.’ She immediately pulled a face. ‘Don’t let’s talk about me though, or I’ll start crying again and make an arse of myself. Let’s talk about you. I bet your love life is way more interesting than mine.’

  ‘I suspect it’s a lot less interesting than you think,’ Anna said, ‘though …’ She shook her head. ‘You really don�
��t want to hear about it.’

  ‘No, I really do!’ Kirsty said at once. ‘You’re not in a doomed love triangle are you? Like in those incredibly hot paranormal romances?’

  Anna laughed. ‘No, but I have met these two very different men—’

  ‘Oh my God, and you can’t choose between them!’

  Anna shook her head. ‘It hasn’t got as far as choosing.’

  But you hope it will?’ Kirsty suggested.

  ‘Oh, Kirsty, I don’t know what I hope.’

  ‘Then I’ll help you. I’m brilliant at other people’s love lives. Tell me about these two very different guys, and I’ll tell you which one is the best.’

  Anna set down her soup spoon. She knew this was just a game, a way of taking Kirsty’s mind off her troubles, but she felt the same silly frisson she remembered from teenage conversations with her girlfriends. ‘Well, there’s this American guy who had my dog, Bonnie, before me. He rescued her, actually, in Afghanistan, then sent her back to Oxford to live with his aunt. He’s a Navy SEAL, or he used to be. He’s helping to run some kind of international security business now. He’s funny, good-looking in a rough around the edges way.’

  ‘He rescued your dog and now he’s a potential boyfriend! Anna that is, like, the most romantic “how we met” story ever. Just imagine telling that to your children!’

  ‘Whoa!’ said Anna, laughing. ‘Before you get me married and pregnant, let me tell you the drawbacks.’ She ticked them off on her fingers. ‘He doesn’t actually live in this country.’

  ‘Damn,’ Kirsty said. ‘He still lives in the States. Tricky.’

  ‘Plus he has an ex. Or rather a not so ex.’

  ‘Stay away from him,’ Kirsty said immediately. ‘I mean it, Anna. Unless you have a Teflon-coated heart those kinds of non-committed guys are lethal. I should know.’ Her expression wavered for a moment, then she said brightly, ‘Who’s the other guy?’

  Anna took a breath. ‘Well, he’s English, extremely good-looking.’