by Lisa Jewell
Maya went to bed early that night. She wasn’t tired but she had run out of the particular type of energy required to go the distance with the Wolfes. She couldn’t be bothered with it all. Once upon a time she’d have done whatever it took to prove herself equal to this exclusive group of people, to show them her best side, but now she saw them for what they were and she wanted no part of it. So she said her good nights and nobody said, Oh, Maya, don’t go, stay up! And she took her wash bag through to the tiny shower room around the corner from her room and brushed her teeth in water that tasted of being away from home and then she put on her pajamas and laid herself under the overfilled duvet that a hundred other people had already lain under and she stared at the dusty beams in the ceiling and wondered what she was doing here.
The noise of laughter passed around the twisty corridors of the ground floor and in through the crack of her door. She could hear Susie; she could hear Caroline. Is it one of you two? she wondered. Is it one of you two who hates me so much that you want me to disappear?
The thought filled her with dismay and also with contrition.
And then she heard the sound of Adrian saying good night, his steps along the corridor. She reached for the table lamp and switched it off, pulled the thick duvet over herself, turned onto her side and closed her eyes.
“Are you awake?” she heard him whisper loudly into the darkness.
She made a noise, a moan suggestive of being disturbed in half slumber.
“Are you OK, darling?” She heard his voice closer to her ear and repeated the same noise, this time adding a hint of annoyance.
“You were very quiet tonight.” She felt him lower himself onto the other side of the bed. “We’re all a bit worried about you.”
“I’m fine,” she said groggily, her body wriggling with irritation at the suggestion that they’d all been talking about her.
“Is it . . .” He had his therapist voice on, soothing and mellifluous. She gritted her teeth. “Is it to do with the baby?”
She turned now and opened her eyes. She could just make out the dark outline of him in the gloom. “What baby?”
“You know, the baby we’re trying to have. Were trying to have.”
“What? No!” she snapped. “Of course it’s not about babies. I told you, I’m fine. I’m just really tired. And I was drinking red wine. That always makes me sleepy.”
He reached over and squeezed her shoulder avuncularly. “You would tell me, wouldn’t you?” he said. “If you were worried about anything?”
She stared at him in the dark, her mouth opened but no words coming out. Did he really not remember, she wondered, did he really not remember her saying that she didn’t want to have a baby with him? That she was having second thoughts about their marriage? Maybe he’d put it down to her being so drunk when she said it? Or maybe he was choosing not to recall? Because that’s what Adrian did. He repainted his world only in colors that he found palatable. That way, whatever happened, whatever bad decisions he made, he would always look out upon a perfect world. She needed to break down this wall. She needed to scream into his face in a way that nobody had ever screamed into his face. She needed to paint out his world in different colors and force him to confront it.
But she couldn’t do this now, not here, not surrounded by his family. “Of course I would,” she said, as softly as she could. “Of course I would.” And then she pretended to fall back into the deep sleep she’d been pretending to be in when he arrived.
39
August 2012
Adrian entered the pub, his phone held tightly inside his hand. He’d just spoken to Luke. There was still no sign of Otis. Caroline was hysterical, apparently. He promised he would be at the Islington house as soon as possible, that he wouldn’t spend one more moment with Abby than he needed to. His pulse was fizzing with adrenaline. His heart raced so fast that he’d had to stop for breath at the top of the steps out of the tube station. The thought of it, the thought of something horrible happening to his beautiful boy.
He saw her immediately. She was sitting at a tiny table for two just behind the door, looking every bit as fresh and magnificent as she’d looked earlier in the day. Her sunglasses were folded up and resting on the table in front of her and she was reading a book.
“Hi,” he said, pulling out a small stool and sitting down.
She smiled and folded away her book. “Hi there,” she said.
“Look,” he began. “I’m really sorry but I can’t stay. My son, Otis, he’s gone missing and I need to get back to my family. Is this something we could do really quickly? Or maybe we could do this another night?”
“Oh no,” she said. “Christ. How long has he been missing?”
“Since five o’clock. Two hours.”
“And how old is he?”
“He’s twelve.”
“Oh.” She looked relieved. “So probably just gone off with a friend or something?”
“I don’t know,” said Adrian. “We’ve been in touch with pretty much everyone he knows, but apparently nobody knows where he might be.”
“Well, it only takes one,” she said. “Someone’s probably keeping schtum. And I speak from experience. I was a serial runner-awayer when I was a teenager. I once disappeared for two days. I came home when I needed to do a number two.” She smiled wryly and Adrian would have laughed if he hadn’t been so distracted.
“I don’t think this is just teenage angst though,” said Adrian. “Apparently he had a row with his older brother and sister, said something he shouldn’t have said and thinks he’s going to get into trouble.”
“What did he say?”
“I don’t know,” said Adrian, exhaling loudly. “Nobody will tell me. It’s ‘not important,’ apparently. Which makes me think it’s probably very important but not something that anyone wants me to hear.” He shrugged.
“Well,” said Abby, pushing her blond hair behind her ears. “Why don’t I give you the rough outline of what you want to know and then you can decide if you want to talk now or another time. It’s possible . . . ,” she began, and then paused. “It’s possible that what I have to tell you might have something to do with your son’s disappearance.”
Adrian checked the signal on his phone, as he had done approximately every forty-five seconds for the last hour. Seeing that he had all five bars he turned his attention back to Abby. “Yes,” he said. “Please. But first of all, why did you pretend to want my cat?”
“Because,” she said, “I saw you putting the card up in the post office and I knew it was a way of getting into your flat.”
Adrian blinked at the bizarre notion of Abby watching him pin his card up on the post office wall. “And why did you want to get into my flat?”
“Because I wanted to talk to you.”
“Why couldn’t you talk to me in the post office?”
“Because I wanted to see where you lived.”
“And why did you want to see where I lived?”
“Because I needed to know what damage I might do sharing what I know. I wanted to see family photos, hear you talk about your wife, watch you in an intimate setting. I watched your daughter ice-skating; I watched your son walking home from school. I watched your adult daughter walk your little boy home from school. I was there, for days, just trying to get a feel for you all. Because, you know, when someone tells you about a man who’s had three wives, who’s left two families behind, you know you’re either dealing with a pathetic sociopath or a misguided fool, and I needed to know which one you were.”
“And . . . ?”
“You were neither, really. You were just broken. And I couldn’t be the one to make it any worse.”
“And how could it be worse?” Adrian almost shouted the words.
“Because . . . See that table over there?” Abby pointed at a rectangular table close to the bar.
“Well, I sat at that table with your wife on the night that she died.”
Adrian locked eyes with Abby, his attention finally undiluted. And then, at the tail end of the ponderous silence that followed, he felt the tabletop fizzing under his elbows. He grabbed his phone. It was Luke.
“He’s just called,” said Luke breathlessly. “Reversed charges from a phone box. In Holloway. Caroline’s on her way to get him.”
Adrian felt his torso concertina itself flat with relief. “Is he OK?”
“He’s fine,” Luke continued. “Apparently he was trying to find a friend of his who he sometimes sleeps over with. He was going to hide out with him, but he didn’t have his phone with him so he couldn’t call him and then he tried to remember how to walk there and got massively lost. Some old woman found him sobbing on a bench and showed him how to make a reverse-charge call. She’s waiting with him now.”
“Oh God, oh God. Thank God.”
“I know,” said Luke, his voice holding not a shred of its usual acid sarcasm.
“Right, well, that’s brilliant. Totally brilliant. Tell him I’ll be there in an hour or so. Tell him to stay up and wait for me. Tell him I love him. In fact, get him to call me the moment he gets back so that I can tell him myself.”
“How’s it going with stalker woman?”
“I’ll tell you all about it later,” he said.
“OK, but be quick.”
“I will. I will.”
He turned off his phone and let his face fall heavily into his hands. Then he looked up at Abby. “They’ve found him.”
She smiled. “Thank God.”
“Thank God,” repeated Adrian.
“And he’s OK?”
“He’s fine.”
“Do you want to go?”
He almost laughed. “No,” he said. “No. Of course I don’t. Jesus.” He stood up, put his hand into his trouser pocket and pulled out his wallet. “What can I get you to drink?”
He went to the bar and got Abby a glass of white wine and himself something much stronger. When he came back to the table he started talking before he’d even sat down. “So,” he said, looking behind him at the table where Abby claimed to have talked to Maya on her last night on earth, “tell me. Tell me everything.”
Abby pulled her wineglass towards her by its stem and then turned it in slow circles between her fingertips.
“It was about ten o’clock,” she said. “I was here with an old friend; we’d been drinking for a couple of hours, here and there around town. I don’t really remember how we ended up in here. Not our usual style. Anyway, she had a train to catch so it was going to be one last drink before she had to run and we noticed this girl, this tiny red-haired girl, standing by the bar, drinking vodka by herself and crying. Not, like, sobbing. Just tears rolling down her cheeks. And really, the only reason we noticed her in the first place was because my friend said she looked like me. I couldn’t see it myself.” She shrugged and picked up her wineglass, took a sip. “But anyway. We were quite drunk and feeling sisterly so we asked her if she was OK. Asked her if she’d like to come and sit with us. She said no at first but then I bought her a cup of coffee and kind of forced her to. So she sat down with us and then my friend had to go so I decided that I’d stay with this girl—Maya—until I thought she was sober enough to get home.”
Adrian continued to stare at Abby.
“You mean,” he said, “you were there with her? That night?”
She nodded.
“So, what? What happened? Did you see her get hit by the bus? What did you see?”
“No.” She shook her head forcefully. “No. I spent about an hour with her. She said she was going home. She spoke to you on the phone. She seemed to be sober. She seemed to be feeling much better. So I let her go . . .”
Her face fell. She took another, larger gulp of wine and put down her glass. She looked at Adrian and there were tears in her eyes. “She said she was going home. I thought she was going home. And then I picked up a newspaper two days later and read this terrible story about the night bus and the girl . . . There was no name. But I just knew it was her. The age was right. The location was right. I just knew it was her.”
Abby had started to cry now. Adrian leaned across the table to take her hand in his. She looked into his eyes and said almost silently, “I’m so, so sorry.”
“Oh no,” said Adrian, “no. It’s not your fault. You did what you could.”
“No. I could have done more. I could have brought her home myself. I could have at least put her into a taxi. It took me ages to find you. I used to run Google searches all the time: ‘Maya Night Bus.’ And then finally a story came up. About the coroner’s report. And there was your name. And I found you easily enough. Waited outside your offices from time to time, even followed you home. But I was too scared. Too scared to approach you. Until I saw you in the post office that day.” Her eyes dropped and she pulled her hand from his. “I thought I was ready to talk to you then. But I wasn’t.”
“And you are now?”
“Well, no, not really. But you kind of cornered me.” She smiled tightly.
Adrian smiled back and picked up his gin and tonic. “So,” he said, “you spent an hour with Maya that night. Did she” —he paused, rolling his drink around his glass—“did she give you any idea about . . . I mean, what did you talk about?”
“We talked about you,” she replied simply. “About your children. About your ex-wives. We talked about everything.”
“And did she tell you about the poison-pen e-mails?”
Abby nodded. “Yes, she did.” She sounded surprised. “How did you know about those? She told me she’d never mentioned them to anyone.”
“My son found them, in a hidden file on our network at home. A couple of months ago.”
“So you know who sent them then?”
“No,” he said, his eyes widening. “No. I have no idea. Why?” He stared right into the heart of her odd-colored eyes. “Do you?”
“Yes,” she said. “Yes. I think I do.”
Adrian gulped and waited for her to talk.
PART FOUR
40
April 2011
It was nearly a week before her poison-pen friend got in touch after the Easter holiday in Suffolk. For a while Maya thought maybe she’d got away with it, thought maybe the family sociopath hadn’t found her irksome enough during the week, or hadn’t gathered enough juicy tidbits to pass on to whoever it was on the outside compiling these missives of bile.
She had kept herself very much under the radar in Suffolk, gone to bed early at night, not tried to impress anyone, not attempted to ingratiate herself in any way. She’d been like a ghost, a vague presence on the periphery of things, a shrunken child in the backseat of the car. She had surrendered entirely to the authority of the first two wives and their adult children and just counted down the hours until it was time to come home.
Never again, she’d vowed to herself, staring at the view from the window of the rental car as urbanization reasserted itself. Never again. Next time she would feign alternative commitments. Or contagious unwellness. That’s if, she’d thought to herself, there ever was a next time.
Adrian was back at work and Maya still had a week before school started again. Caroline had asked her if she would sit with the children for a couple of days because her normal babysitter was away and she had back-to-back meetings she couldn’t reschedule. The request, which had come on the last day of the Suffolk holiday, had taken her by surprise, but not unpleasantly so. She had never been given full in loco parentis charge of Adrian’s children before. She’d occasionally taken Beau out for an ice cream or collected Pearl from ice-skating practice. But to be left alone with all three of them in an empty house for a full day was a huge development.
> Just before she left the house that morning she decided to check her e-mail. And there it was.
Dear Bitch
Not quite the golden girl anymore I hear. Apparently you were a shadow of yourself, skulking about like an abused child. Is it finally starting to get to you? The magnitude of what you’ve done? The impossibility of there ever being a proper happy ending for you and Big Daddy? Well, hallelujah, praise the Lord. According to sources on the ground, you’re much more palatable when you’re not sticking your oar in, trying to make everyone happy. Because everyone is sick to the back teeth of you and your pathetic attempts to be one of the gang. You’re not one of the gang and you never will be. So, follow your instincts, Bitch. You know it and I know it. It’s time for you to disappear, to let this family heal without you.
I hope I don’t have to write to you again.
Please don’t make me.
She sighed heavily. Ah, well, there it was. Nothing had changed, after all. She was still under surveillance. She fed the cat, found her travel card and headed for the bus stop.
Caroline was being unnervingly pleasant. As she showed Maya around the house—the dog biscuits, the garden-door key, the things the children were allowed to eat, the things the children weren’t allowed to eat, the remote controls, the password for the PC—she kept turning to Maya and smiling at her, resting her fingers on the sleeve of her jumper, telling her over and over how much she appreciated this. It seemed to Maya that Caroline smiled at her more times during the ten-minute tour of the house than she had in the preceding three years.
The children were scattered about the basement. Beau was on the sofa at the far end of the family room watching TV, Otis was on the laptop at the kitchen counter and Pearl was in the garden combing the dogs. The breakfast things were piled up around the sink.
“Just ignore that,” said Caroline, seeing Maya’s eyes stray to the mess. “I’ll sort it out when I get home. Please do whatever you want today. Totally ignore them if you like. I feel terrible making you look after children during your precious holiday.”