‘Auntie Carrie said she went on holiday on her own when she was fifteen,’ looking back up mildly. ‘Just saying.’
Bridget sighed. ‘That’s Auntie Carrie, though,’ she said. Matt gave her a look and she grimaced at him.
After a couple of weeks Carrie had stopped talking about their father completely, but perhaps it was just a matter of not having the words, at barely seven and always more about energy than contemplation, because she kept the teddy he got her for that last Christmas under her pillow until she was a teenager. He might still be there for all Bridget knew, worn smooth, hauled from bedsit to squat to communal living experiment. Carrie wasn’t one to give much of a toss what people thought, of that or much else either.
They were back on terms, her and Carrie, since Mum died, though it had taken a while and the terms were more theoretical than practical. Living in London with her girlfriend and not much time for Mrs Vanilla with her nuclear family, everything neat and proper and conventional, when there were drugs to experiment with and clubbing and sex. Finn talked to her more than Bridget did, via Facebook. He’d been to visit her once or twice, kipping on the floor in her shared house, going along to one of her DJ sets and coming back home grubby and tired.
Carrie was still angry when they did talk, and Bridget could see why: Carrie’s childhood had ended up lonely. When Carrie had been going on holiday alone at fifteen Bridget had been long gone, at college and living with Matt.
‘Auntie Carrie’s different,’ she said.
‘You can always go camping with the lads too,’ said Matt, folding his laptop closed and looking at Finn.
‘Yeah,’ said Finn ruminatively, then. ‘I s’pose.’
Good old Finn, easygoing Finn. ‘Sure, sure. Corsica sounds nice.’
It had sparked panic, though, nothing major but a pattering that ran through her, that she had to damp down quickly.
Things would change, Bridget wasn’t stupid, she knew that. Kids grew up. Went on holidays with their girlfriend instead of their mum.
But she had had none of this when she was a teenager, no boyfriends, no family suppers. Winging it, then, but it could still work, she knew that. As long as you kept trying. In that moment, on the sofa next to Finn not for the first time Bridget wished her mother was alive so she could ask her: how much did you really know? Where did you think it all came from, the starving, the hair coming out, the cutting?
‘When are we going to meet Phoebe, then?’ she said. Finn smiling, ducking his head, shoving his phone down between the cushions then retrieving it.
‘Bridge—’ Matt was going to warn her off. But Finn stayed where he was, trying to control that shy smile. She’ll be besotted, thought Bridget. This Phoebe. My lovely boy.
‘Next week sometime?’ she said bravely.
‘Bridget—’
But Finn’s head was bobbing, up and down. ‘I’ll ask her,’ he said, and then he was scrambling up to his feet. He’d been in the sitting room with them a whole half hour, after all. ‘Maybe – maybe Tuesday? I’ll ask her.’
She and Matt looked at each other as the door closed behind him. ‘All right,’ she said defensively.
‘No,’ said Matt, edging up next to her, his arm going around to her. ‘That was good. Good.’
In the mirrored interior of a lift, with London’s Christmas traffic somehow audible even through concrete and steel and wood, someone had strung green and red lights. You could try and avoid the season of goodwill, thought Gillian Lawson, trapped among the bodies and going down, but it came after you. You could run, but you couldn’t hide.
Gillian – Gill to everyone but her sister Chloe, who insisted on Gilly, still, here’s Auntie Gilly – caught a glimpse of herself over a wool-clad shoulder. The light was fairly unforgiving at the best of times, but then journalists didn’t need to look like supermodels, did they? Gill could picture a row of grinning blokes at their hot desks telling her otherwise, and mentally consigned them, one by one, to Siberia. In their jockey shorts.
Her roots needed doing, Gill could see that much. The lift was slow: she willed it on, down. Steve was somewhere in the building, and she didn’t want to bump into him. He might be on the way home himself, to his wife and kids, he might have taken the stairs because he was trying to keep the beergut in check and he was daft enough to think walking down was as good as walking up. They stopped on the eighth floor and a gang from the newspaper’s ad sales department crowded in, padded in their coats and scarves, and Gill was squeezed to the back out of sight of her reflection, which was just as well. She didn’t need reminding that her suit was four years old or that she could do with getting a white wash on before she left.
The ad sales lot were chattering away to each other. Camaraderie. She remembered what that was like, long ago and far away, when she’d started out on a regional paper.
Chloe’s theory was that all her problems were down to the job: her theory as to why her big sister was single, lonely, friendless, poor – thanks, Gill would interrupt, I’ve got the picture and besides there are – I’ve got friends – but then she’d have to stop because Chloe would just look smugly triumphant and say, Well, there you are then. When Gill had to admit what she had by way of a social life was Steve (who happened to be her editor) a couple of still-single schoolfriends who got increasingly huffy when she called them up for a drink after months of silence, and a bit of casual sex.
And then of course there was him: Anthony Carmichael. Her life’s work, her magnum opus, the bloody millstone round her neck.
Gill pressed herself against the back of the lift. An elderly woman she didn’t know was next to her, holding a plant in a pot with a ribbon round it. Single – yes. But lonely? Gill resisted that. She liked being on her own. She needed it, too, because how did you think straight, when you had to be looking after other people? But sometimes. Maybe, yes, sometimes, maybe when the kids pelted out of Chloe’s front door, Rose and Janie, Gill’s two stocky little dark-haired nieces bellowing her name, maybe then she got a glimpse. Not of loneliness exactly but of its opposite, whatever the word for that was.
Fourth floor: legal department. The doors opened, then closed again because no one got in. No room – and just as well. The legal department weren’t too fond of Gill, though they probably wouldn’t know her to look at. Next to Gill the elderly woman shuffled, darted a glance. She’d retired, or been retired, was that it? A month before Christmas, with a pot plant for her trouble. Gill grimaced back, apologetic, and they both looked away.
Poor – well, yes, that too, or at least not rich. Tiny flat, no car. Newspaper journalism was on the way out, and Gill was on six-month contracts that so far had been renewed on the dot (because she worked like a dog, and because she could write) but the pool of hungry freelances grew bigger and more shark-infested by the week. What she needed was a big story, was what Steve no longer said.
The job. Her sister Chloe thought of newspaper journalism as something for blokes with no homes to go to, men with nicotine-stained fingers and greasy hair who’d do anything for a story, men who lied and spun. Gill’s hair might need doing but she’d never lied. She might have spun, where necessary, though she tried to avoid it. When she got her big story – the one Steve wouldn’t talk about – she wouldn’t need to lie. When she nailed him finally, she wouldn’t need to spin.
Third floor, and the woman with her pot plant began to struggle to get out – maybe she was going to crown someone with it – then there was a tussle between two blokes, one carrying a big wrapped present, over who got to take her place.
Gill would be going to Chloe’s, of course, for what the paper called the festive season. She didn’t need to think about that yet. Presents – yes. She could always manage presents, who didn’t know that Christmas was about presents? It was a while since Gill had been a kid but she could remember that much.
When did you stop being a kid? That depended. Fifteen? Eighteen? First kiss? First time you worked out adults weren’t all they were
cracked up to be, maybe then.
Gill and Chloe had had a good childhood. Uneventful. Parents in love with each other till the day they died, the one always reaching out for the other, and Mum sang around the house. Dead within two weeks of each other, Mum of lung cancer and Dad’s heart gave out just like that. It was from other families Gill had learned not all adults took that kind of care of each other, or their kids. Stacey Jarvis’s stepdad trying to feel her up when she sat next to him at the cinema, Stacey’s thirteenth birthday treat. Routine behaviour. Gill had just sat there like a stone, when she should have stood up and shouted pervert.
The doors closed, then opened, there was a final crush and they stayed shut, sheepish apologetic grins among those squeezed too tight against each other. Gill concentrated on breathing, in and out. She wasn’t great in crowded places, parties, none of that. But she didn’t want to see Steve because she needed him to take the night thinking it over. It was why she’d emailed him her proposal rather than walking into his office and asking him. Kneejerk reaction was not what she wanted. She’d put it so carefully. I’d be up there three, four days at the most. Sandringham, the Royal Christmas, I could put together a nice little feature.
Steve wanted it both ways. He wanted a big story, of course he did – but he didn’t want her within twenty miles of the bloke, not since he’d set the lawyers on the paper last time. Four years back, when she’d doorstepped Anthony Carmichael outside his Oxford college, in full view of the porters. It hadn’t come to court, even though she begged Steve to take it there: the paper had paid Carmichael off, and given him written promises that ‘Ms Lawson’s harassment would cease’.
Not even two months on from the settlement though, they’d been in the pub, a quick one on Steve’s way home that turned into a quick three. ‘Of course I want you to nail him,’ he’d said, before emptying his third glass. Wiping his mouth. Meeting her eye for the first time in what felt like years. ‘It’s what this job’s about. I want the fucking story. But I want it nailed down, watertight, I want it on the record.’ Standing up. ‘Until then, if I find out you’ve gone near him—’ and he was gone.
Gill had gone to college, a degree in English for all the good that did, then ten years on local papers. That was where she’d seen Anthony Carmichael first. How old would he have been? The age she was now, forty-something. Standing between two girls in front of their school on the edge of an estate somewhere, a hand on each of their shoulders, the girls ramrod straight with violins held out in front of them. Thirteen-year-old girls, stiff and scared. Gill had interviewed him, making notes, him droning on about young talent, all so dull and boring, but the hairs had been up on the back of her neck the whole time.
When one of the girls went missing and was found hanging in the wood behind the estate, she knew. Gill knew. Enough of a slacker to still be on the same paper and she hadn’t forgotten him, in all that time. She had alerts on her phone.
And then last week, ping. Dr Anthony Carmichael, inaugural lecture, Wednesday 22 November. The university of the arse end of nowhere: that had piqued her interest. Been sent to the badlands, has he, or what? The university’s address was Rose Hill. Pretty name, Gill had thought: she’d looked up trains. How close it was to Sandringham. Not very close, was the answer to that.
Ground floor. The doors opened and with a collective sigh the lift emptied. Catching sight of herself again in the glass Gill smiled, experimentally. She looked all right. She looked almost human, Christ. Maybe smiling was the answer.
And then she turned to look out at the marble foyer, and there was Steve, and she must have not yet managed to wipe that stupid smile off her face because he looked startled.
‘There you are,’ he said. ‘A quick word?’ Trying out a smile of his own. ‘Before you go?’
Chapter Four
There was something on the television, the late news.
It had been another quiet week at work. Laura moved slower and slower, sat down more and more, and Bridget found herself encouraging it, bringing her glasses of water and leaving her there when a customer did come in. A flurry of Chinese girls – university students – chattering incomprehensibly and then buying a job lot of handbags. The regulars, coming in less and less, women she’d known ten years or more and had seen marry and divorce, have babies, get cancer, survive. Business was shifting; the high street was not what it was. They came in and looked at the stuff, the younger ones, the twenty, thirty-somethings, then bought online. Even Matt had started to suggest she should think about it. She agreed, and did nothing.
There was no sign of Anthony Carmichael or the girl he’d come in with, not even walking past the shop. Isabel. Tuesday, Wednesday. She felt herself subside, slowly. He would stay away. Just visiting. He would go back where he came from.
On Thursday, getting ready for the weekend and December on the horizon, they dismantled the autumn window: red and yellow leaves scattered under a sheet of Perspex and a big piece of mossy log she and Matt had brought home from a walk. It weighed a ton, but he’d carried it uncomplaining. He was used to her window ideas, and he liked helping.
Bridget hauled it out again with difficulty, getting firm with Laura when she tried to help. It sat on the floor, making a mess of the cream rug, Laura’s nose wrinkling at the flaking bits of bark and moss. ‘Chuck it?’ she said eagerly.
It was a prize, though, in Bridget’s eyes: the moss was deep green and velvety, the smooth wood showing under ridged bark, and it smelled of the woods.
‘I’ll – I’ll just—’And before Laura could have another go at her – nest-building, she told herself, even knowing it was irrational to hang on to a bit of wood – Bridget was in the stockroom and hauling out the stepladder from under the garment rails, so she could stash the log out of the way.
She heard the door ping while she was in there, and for a moment she froze on her hands and knees, but looking round the door she saw Laura was talking to the postman.
The postman helped her shift it in the end, looking from one woman heavily pregnant to the other dishevelled and flushed. ‘Go on then,’ he said glumly – with Laura shaking her head disapprovingly from the sidelines as they found a space for it in the kitchen. Not so much a kitchen as a cubby hole at the back of the shop and off to the side, so customers couldn’t peer in while they ate their lunch standing. Not much room for more than a sink and a kettle but even in here, running out of room for stock, she’d had to put shelves up high and it was up here, between two cardboard boxes of T-shirts, that they found a space for it.
On the stepladder Bridget took it from his hands, lifting it over her head as he grimaced. She got a piece of twine and wound it round to secure the thing high up in the tiny space, smelling of the outside. She was pleased with herself for her ingenuity: seeing it made Bridget oddly happy, she couldn’t explain it, though she knew Matt would have frowned at her improvisation. And then as they started on the Christmas window together – a job lot of tinkly chandeliers and spray snow – she was triumphant, exhilarated, although still out of breath with the effort. She felt strong, in her prime. Silly, really.
And now here they sat side by side on the sofa, she and Matt with the late news on, Bridget with a mug of tea set carefully on the table at her elbow. She had found herself being particularly circumspect these last weeks, as if readying herself. As if there had been warnings of an earthquake or high winds or disaster, as if the door might burst open and something rush in. The images on the screen changed. A radio personality she remembered from her childhood had been arrested.
She’d made herself take certain things in her stride, long since, certain images or sounds, or words. Recital. Matt had learned to flick channels if the Proms came on, any of that stuff and probably would have said, if asked why, she doesn’t like classical music, but: this was different, of course. This was new. Old men with their faces sagging with fear, being led through crowds. Historic cases resurrected, as if suddenly the times had changed, a switch had flipped and w
hat had been normal, what had been acceptable, suddenly wasn’t. A light coming on. There was a discussion on the statute of limitations that Matt had been listening to so she couldn’t turn it over casually. How long was too long to wait, before you accused someone of something?
‘Whisky?’ she said, smoothly, getting to her feet. ‘I’m having one.’
‘Mmm,’ said Matt, not really hearing her, she thought as she walked out of the room, not fast but steady.
A music school had come under investigation, twelve, fifteen years ago, not one Bridget had attended and no names had been mentioned, at least not on the news. But it had been a violin teacher they’d referred to and sometimes she thought that had started it all, a rock pushed off a hill. Tell someone. It had got into the television news and she hadn’t been able to escape it, to walk out of the room quickly enough. She had gone to the local police station pushing Finn in the buggy, fast asleep, and she had stood outside. Pushing him back and forward, rhythmically, so he wouldn’t wake. But what would she have said? With the building in front of her, the men moving to and fro behind the windows, her mind had been a blank, wiped by terror, wiped by shame. She hadn’t gone in.
She poured carefully, two small glasses, and then stood a moment to wait for the trembling to pass, leaning back against the counter. Looking around the little kitchen, the row of jars, the bread on the side like she didn’t recognise what it was; food didn’t look like food any more, nothing looked the same. It’s good, she told herself. This investigating, exposing people, it’s good. He wouldn’t dare, would he? Not now.
When she came back in with the tea Matt was watching Die Hard and he looked up at her smiling, innocent of it all.
Chapter Five
It was the Saturday when Carrie phoned. Almost two weeks had gone and Bridget had almost stopped expecting to see him again.
It was busy at last, with a chaotic Saturday mix: a privately educated girl gang, all with long expensive hair, occupying the sofa while the one shopping flicked contemptuously through the rails; a young, pale woman trying to persuade her mute boyfriend to pass an opinion on a succession of party dresses, and a mother of the groom, disapproving of everything.
What We Did_A gripping, compelling psychological thriller with a nail-biting twist Page 3