by Emma Rowley
Because I could feel that it was. Sometimes that is how it is: things fall apart, and even if you can see what is happening, you can’t do anything to stop it, not really.
“You see,” I said, “when I spoke to Nicky’s agent, she didn’t know anything about her being here to write a book. Which seems odd, to say the least.”
I waited for them to react. Yet they didn’t seem to care, or even to be surprised.
“And did that make you angry, Olivia?” said Barnett.
“No,” I said. She was beginning to annoy me. “That’s not what I’m saying. I didn’t know that while Nicky was here. But don’t you think,” I added, my voice soft, concerned, “that gives some indication to what we are dealing with here. That this woman might be a little . . . unpredictable? Unstable?”
“Was that your impression of her?” she replied.
“I really wouldn’t know,” I said, exasperated. “But surely you should look into it. In case she’s, I don’t know, a bit obsessive—even disturbed? That might explain. . .”
“Might explain what?”
“Well. Why she might have—done something stupid. A vulnerable woman like that.”
Moran spoke then. “Why do you think something bad has happened to her, Olivia?”
I couldn’t answer.
“No, that’s understandable,” said Barnett kindly, as if I’d spoken. “No, I can understand that, Olivia. Given the trauma in your past.”
I looked at her, alarmed as to where she might be going.
“Although,” she continued in the same sympathetic tone, “Joe Crompton thinks there might be a bit more to that story. And so did Nicky Wilson.”
She paused then, thoughtfully, as if deciding how to phrase this.
“He thinks that, maybe, before she disappeared, Nicky had found something out about the fire that wasn’t widely known. What would you say to that, Olivia?”
Part of me couldn’t believe this was happening; that she was actually asking me this. Suddenly, I laughed: a harsh sound, without humor. “You cannot be serious. That is ancient history.”
But they just waited, watching me. Even Josh didn’t try to bluster through this for me.
“It was all investigated at the time, you can check that.” I sounded flustered, upset—wrong. All of a sudden, I had to get out of there, I couldn’t bear it any longer . . .
I stood up.
“I’m sorry, I don’t mean to be rude. But I really have no idea where Nicky Wilson could have gone, or why. I don’t think there’s anything else I can help you with. And I need to look after my daughter. Could we leave this for now?”
My question hung in the air. Then . . .
“That’s fine,” Moran said lightly. He got up slowly from the sofa, as if he had all the time in the world.
“Well,” said Josh, attempting some of his former heartiness, “do let us know if there’s any other way we can help.” It rang hollow. “Let me show you out—”
“No, no,” said Barnett, already heading toward the open French windows in the kitchen, “we can go out this way.”
At least it was over now, I told myself, as I followed them across the terrace, but my heart was starting to pound as it started to sink in, what had just happened, how much of a mess . . .
Barnett paused at the top of the steps to hand us each a card with her number on it—“if you think of anything else, don’t hesitate”—and glanced back at the house. “You really have a beautiful home,” she said pleasantly, as if everything was fine. “Georgian, is it?”
“That’s right,” I said shortly. She shot me a look, almost amused; I just wanted them to leave, and she knew it.
But Josh took the social cue, relieved. “The front is, but the rest of it,” he said cheerfully, “is quite a hodgepodge, they never really stopped building in those days.”
Stop talking, I willed him; this is not small talk, she wants you on her side.
“But, of course,” said Barnett, “the more, er, recent renovation must have been an enormous job. How did you manage it all?”
Of course he lapped it up. Thank goodness Moran seemed ready to go, shifting on his feet, looking around abstractedly—then he froze.
I followed the direction of his gaze.
Something small glinted in the late afternoon sunlight, picked out against the dry dark soil of the flower bed where the lawn meets the bricks supporting the terrace. It was sheer bad luck really: another inch to the left or right, and it would have been hidden by Cav’s shrubbery.
The policeman darted down the terrace steps, quick despite his bulk, and knelt down, snapping on a glove. I saw it in his hand as he walked back up, the blue latex taut over his palm as, wordlessly, he showed Barnett what he’d found:
Nicky, the necklace read, in gold writing, on that tacky gold chain.
“Do you recognize this?” said Barnett, looking from me to Josh.
I replied quickly. “I do, yes. That’s Nicky’s.” No point lying about that. “It must have fallen off when we were all out here the other night,” I added.
“It hasn’t been undone at the clasp,” said Moran. “The chain’s broken.”
“It doesn’t look to be very good quality,” I said, and regretted it immediately.
There was a silence, as Moran decanted the chain into a little plastic bag and pocketed it.
Barnett looked back at us, the pleasantries over, her expression utterly serious. “If you can think of anything else you’d like to tell us, anything at all, it might be an idea to tell us now, rather than later. Do you understand what I am saying?”
I smiled brightly—too brightly. “Of course we will. I’m sorry, but I think I can hear my daughter calling. Good-bye.”
And then I turned round to walk into the house, refusing to look back, passing between the French windows and through the kitchen until I reached the main hall. Finally out of sight, I put out a hand to steady myself on the banister, feeling the sweat on my back sticking my T-shirt to my skin.
I had felt relieved Nicky was gone. I had thought I was safe.
I was wrong.
Chapter 51
I needed to talk to Josh. But I couldn’t go back out there, not until I was sure they had left. I waited inside the house, longer than I expected, until I heard car engines starting up and the gravel crunching outside; it sounded like they were all going, at last. It was getting dark now—despite the deceptive warmth of the day, it was September, not high summer—and they had been here for hours.
When I checked out of the window in the hall, to make absolutely sure, I saw Josh’s black Porsche was gone, too. That shocked me, though maybe it shouldn’t have.
So instead of talking to my husband about what we were going to do next, I went to relieve Annie and get Bea into bed.
Annie didn’t take much persuading: she was not in a good mood. “That Nicky,” she said, unprompted, as she left. “No better than she should be, if you ask me.”
I looked after her, surprised. It was unlike her to be so uncharitable, but she seemed to have taken the police presence as a personal affront—maybe she was looking for someone to blame. She bustled away, up to the attic floor, to check that the officers hadn’t left anything of hers out of place.
Bea was out of sorts, too, perhaps picking up on the tension in the house. After she had finally agreed to have her story and the light off, I crept out of her bedroom and pulled the door closed.
I had so much to think about in the wake of that police visit, next steps to plan; but there was something I had to consider first. Something I had been resolutely trying not to think about, until I was ready.
Now I slumped against the landing wall and let myself remember what the woman detective, Barnett, had said about Joe Crompton: “. . . he’s never known her to do this before; that it’s out of character for her to go AWOL.”
In response, I’d said Joe Crompton had known Nicky for a week, if that. The other detective had started to say something then, but
Barnett had talked over him.
At the time, I’d read it as her steamrolling him; and yet that didn’t quite sit with my first impression of them, or—come to think of it—any impression I had of them. Yes, she had talked more, but that was the only time that she’d cut him off.
“Actually . . .” he had started to say, about to . . . what? Because there was only one answer I could think of, that had been batting at the edges of my mind all evening.
He was about to correct my mistake.
Because I had assumed that Nicky had made contact with Joe Crompton while she was here; that the police got that detail wrong.
But what if I was wrong: what if she had got in touch with him long before that? Then all she’d have to do was, say, send a text to nail down a meeting when she arrived in Annersley.
No, I told myself, and I shook my head to clear the thought. That would mean she was already looking into my past well before she arrived. That the whole thing was so much more orchestrated than I ever considered. No.
But Yes, whispered a cold voice in my brain, of course it was all planned from the start. She lied about having her agent involved, didn’t she? Don’t you think she could have manipulated you in other ways, too?
* * *
Suddenly feeling exhausted, I slid down the wall, landing comfortably on the carpeted floor. It was quite all right, I told myself, really it was; it was just a lot to take in.
Because I was remembering something else, from right back at the start, when Nicky Wilson first came to stay. She had missed the e-mail about accommodation, she said, and then Josh—affable, stupid Josh, who loves to be liked—had stepped up and offered her our home.
I knew that she been sent a very detailed attachment explaining the places to stay. After all, I had sent it to her, as my assistant “Julia.”
So, I was annoyed, although I swallowed it. It was just down to her ineptitude, part of the package along with her messy hair and lateness and diffidence and general air of helplessness.
But now everything was starting to be in cast in a different light . . .
What if she wanted to be here, inside the house?
* * *
That was enough, in itself, to contemplate for a moment, to try to take in, as I sat there and breathed, slow and steady, just like I learned in yoga . . .
Sabrina. Did she do something to get rid of Sabrina?
I lifted my head, focusing on this new thought.
Because hadn’t Sabrina insisted that she had not been smoking in her room, when I brought it up? She swore blind that she hadn’t, before she flounced off in a huff. Any sort of naked flame in my house was a non-negotiable. She knew that, which made me all the more irritated—but maybe I let that cloud my judgment.
I knew Sabrina could be rude, territorial. She had been like that since school, envious of me, but equally jealous of anyone getting too close. She was rude to Nicky . . .
Nicky, who had “noticed” the smell of cigarette smoke coming from Sabrina’s room.
Suddenly I saw how it could have unfolded: all Nicky would have had to do was nip into the guest room where Sabrina was staying, a few doors down from her own, and light one of the Camels she always left lying around. Then she told Annie, who went in, found that half-smoked stub floating in the toilet, and told me.
It all fit.
But if that was the case, I thought, feeling my breath come a little faster, tighter, that would make Nicky Wilson a very different person from the woman she seemed to be that first day. Far more determined. Ruthless even, willing to do whatever it took . . .
“No,” I said aloud then. “She wouldn’t . . .” even as I was clambering up, running over to the door to the back stairs. I took them two at a time.
Chapter 52
As I told Nicky, I don’t check the forums. What I didn’t tell her is that they used to fill me with dread when I first started out online. What would I see? What might people see in me? So I stopped looking, long ago.
On the attic floor, the door to Annie’s room was closed; she goes to bed early. I was quiet in my dim study, as I fired up the browser on my laptop, clicking until I had found that thread about me.
When I reached the right page, I read the comment again, the one that had kicked it all off: “This is her, right? So this is why we never hear about her background. Guess who her dad is? Or should I say was . . .”
And there was the marriage announcement, that Josh’s bloody mother had placed in the newspaper after I had expressly said I didn’t want it, brushing aside my concerns with that indomitable certainty that This Was How It Was Done—tying me to my past for anyone to find . . . and then someone had.
It was a bad night, when I first saw the thread. It brought up a lot of things—bad things. Afterward, I had pushed it all to the back of my mind. That was what I always did.
This time I didn’t. This time I was not so focused on the post itself, or any of those that followed it. Instead I looked at the username of the person who had started off the thread: FUNMUMMY99. I clicked on it, to open up the user’s profile.
* * *
There was nothing alarming, at a glance. No streams of bile about me, no horrifying details spilled about my life in other posts. Nothing about any other unfortunate influencer who had found herself in the user’s sights, either.
Nothing at all.
This was this user’s only post. She had never posted on the site before or after. She had just opened an account to drop a bombshell, then disappeared.
It could be just a coincidence, of course.
But I knew not to believe in coincidences. I pulled up Twitter, and found the message that someone had tagged me in, alerting me to the existence of the thread—that the genie was out of the bottle:
@TheOliviaHayes so sry to hear about your dad that is so sad babe can’t believe it x
This was from another nonsense name: Tuttifrutti86, with no photo attached.
I clicked through to the profile and felt coldness move down my spine. I read the words again.
Sorry, that page doesn’t exist!
The account had been deleted.
* * *
I am not one to waste tears. “No use crying over spilt milk,” Annie would say. But I knew. Nicky had done this to me. She had started that discussion in the forum.
I should have realized from the timing: it was so recent, relatively, that the post had gone up. For someone to have found out about my past and shared it online, just before she arrived? Then for a follower to alert me to it the very week Nicky was here, asking me questions that I wouldn’t answer?
I knew how hard it was to just stumble across that information: I had checked, more than once. And I knew I had not been giving Nicky what she wanted; I wasn’t opening up.
And so she had laid my past bare in front of strangers to pore over. To try to pressure me into talking, into telling her my story.
* * *
OK. So maybe Nicky Wilson was far cleverer, more manipulative, than I had given her credit for. Not such a, well, victim, after all.
I had to face the facts. It was crystal clear, however you looked at it. This woman had planned it all for months: setting herself up to get some lurid tug-at-the-heartstrings tell-all, cashing in on my profile. She must have thought she could persuade me in the end—just think of the book sales.
She couldn’t have imagined, as she prepared to come here, what the real story was. For a second I pictured her, hunched in front of a computer in some dingy apartment: going through the old newspaper stories, finding out everything she could about me . . .
I couldn’t believe I had let her get so far, could feel the sick dread swelling in me even as I tried to stay calm: she was in my house, she stayed under my roof, she met my child; the police even asked me about the fire . . .
But she couldn’t hurt me. Not now.
Could she?
* * *
It was hard to breathe; I needed air. I went to the window; Annie ha
d pulled the blinds half down, practiced in all the cozy touches that make even a house like this a home.
The wooden frame was cracked open to the still night, but not a breeze stirred the room. And standing there, I was suddenly very aware of the silence around me.
It works that way sometimes; in an instant you wake in the night and tune in to the far-off drone of hotel machinery, an electric buzz from a strange TV, the high-pitched whine of a mosquito, and know that even if, until then, you were able to ignore the noise quite comfortably, sleep is lost now.
And in the same way, standing at the top of my house, looking into the blackness of the late summer night in the country, I now heard it, all around me: the vast quiet pressing in; the nothingness rising up to meet me. It was implacable, immutable, and yet all too familiar. . . no one is coming to help.
Violently I yanked on the cord to pull up the blinds and threw the window wide open, leaning precariously into the night. I took in a deep heaving breath, and another and another.
Afterward, I went back to the chair at my desk and sat there, until the sickness had subsided a little, the sweat cooling on the back of my neck.
Looking up, my mind almost blank, I saw the flowers in front of me, a vase on the edge of my desk holding lilies, large, white, and scentless. They had been sent to me by a PR person looking for coverage of her brand.
I had often sat in that chair, admiring the latest arrangement in my vase, the frilly china and soft blossoms offering the perfect counterpoint to the solidity of my aged wooden desk.
You wouldn’t have known, from the gentle harmony of the room, that I had thought so very hard about it all, how to draw together the color scheme, how best to display its small but elegant proportions, how to perfectly showcase my taste and judgment and authority, without ever buckling under the weight of tradition, without ever being crushed by the history of this house.
And yet I had managed all that, I had lived with all that, making a success of my life, doing what I was supposed to, making the correct choices. I had got every tiny detail right, down to that delicate vase in front of me. I had searched for a very long time to find one that fitted with my memories.