She stared down at the book on her lap, open at a page of text now, but it was a blur. ‘I’m going to need the van tomorrow to move some stock,’ she said, quick and matter of fact. ‘Is that all right? I might be back later than usual.’
‘You need a hand with it?’ Vaguely, still preoccupied.
‘Oh, no,’ she said, lightly. ‘No, no. I can manage fine.’
But she had to put the book back on the table then, carefully, she had to lie down on her side, her back to him, for fear he’d hear it, her heart banging away inside her chest.
The light went out and she began to listen for his breathing: it was her old habit, but it didn’t get her to sleep this time. What got her to sleep was remembering standing at the bathroom window in the dark; it was imagining herself dissolving, the flesh off her bones, the gristle and sinew softened, every knobbed joint of her spine loosening to wash out with the tide; sinking to the muddy floor of the sea.
Chapter Ten
Wednesday
Bridget woke at four with a gasp – out of a dream of a man in a box, hammering to be let out. It was perfectly dark, perfectly quiet all around her: Matt didn’t even shift at the sound that escaped from her.
How could she have done it? For a second she couldn’t breathe.
She was going to get caught.
What if there was someone waiting for him – waiting for him to come home? The thing unravelled in the dark, running busily ahead of her: the police alerted, hospitals phoned, CCTV replayed. Someone had seen him come into the shop. The last sighting.
Yesterday – only yesterday – Bridget could have walked away from him and, four, five steps, no more, across the shop floor to the telephone, she could have called an ambulance, she could have gone to the police and told them everything. She still could.
She knew she wouldn’t.
His wife was dead. And somehow she knew, there was no one waiting at home for him. Carmichael had told her his wife was dead himself. Only yesterday, he had been alive and he’d told Bridget that his wife was dead, smiling into her face as if to say, There’s no one to stop me. Bridget thought of him, at her feet, the groan as he rolled over, and in that moment she had seen what it would be like, to leave him alive, to see him sit up, to know that she would never get satisfaction from him, as long as he was breathing. And at the knowledge of what she’d done, she felt something from so long ago she hardly knew what it was. Free.
So plan. Make a plan. Prepare.
Around the window the dark was turning to grey, a misty dawn leaking past the curtains.
Carmichael had been a visiting fellow: two years but that wasn’t long, people wouldn’t bother forming alliances, and not so early, he’d only been there six weeks. Two years had seemed for ever, yesterday.
Easing herself upright on the pillow she dared a glance at Matt, his face relaxed in sleep, unclouded. She’d heard him say in the past, nettled, how little work visiting fellows had to do, how much work they made for him, setting up their connections, troubleshooting their software glitches. Stopping them being high-handed with the secretaries: that seemed to be Matt’s self-appointed task. He hated arrogance: it occurred to her that he already didn’t like Anthony Carmichael, and the thought set up an anxiety – something he’d said? What had he said to her about Carmichael? – and Bridget had to bat it away. Focus.
A visiting fellow, lightweight, temporary.
So no classes, no office hours, a couple of PhD students to monitor and only the occasional one-off lecture, a law unto himself. No one to miss him, for a while at least. And in the meantime …
Isabel? Anxiety pattered, insistent, setting up a hum. Would Isabel miss him? Isabel was a child, who could be fobbed off, no one knew better than Bridget, how easy that was. And she was still a child. In her body language, her innocence, the simple freedom of her movements across the shop floor, peering round the curtain, turning in front of the mirror.
You know what you mean. A voice in her head. Say it. You mean he hadn’t – Carmichael hadn’t. Not yet.
A sound, in her throat. Stop it. Bridget sat very still, feeling herself sweat.
What had she begun to consider, when Isabel broke in on her train of thought? Something. While she worked out what to do next, Bridget needed to look further down the line. She needed a reason for his disappearance. A reason for when people did start to wonder: a reason other than the truth.
Matt rolled over beside her and without opening his eyes brought her into his arms.
There was a slow queue in the station toilets that allowed the women in it a long opportunity to gaze at their grey morning faces, a row of grimy chipboard doors their backdrop, the smell of disinfectant in the air.
Trying to avoid the sight of her own reflection Gill Lawson lugged her battered wheelie suitcase closer: the case, like her, veteran of a hundred horrible provincial railway stations like this one, another train, another city, never been a war correspondent, no foreign travel, not Lebanon or Paris for her. She’d done the rounds. Basingstoke, Taunton, Carlisle, Chelmsford. The places victims washed up.
There’d been talk of Thailand to follow up a lead three, four years back but there’d been no money for the flights, in the end, and questions had begun to be asked about where it was all going so Gill had backed down. Done it by email, which hadn’t really worked out, what with language difficulties and no faces to look into and not enough detail. Not enough detail: it was how you knew truth from lies, the detail. The suburbs of Oxford had been as good as it got for glamour, rows of comfortable semis and a woman pouring Gill a cup of tea while her daughter refused to come out of her room.
In the queue she must have pulled the suitcase carelessly because the woman in front turned sharply and glared, and shifting apologetically Gill did catch a glimpse of herself. Untidy: roots showing and a wisp of speckled hair escaping at the crown; her suit was crumpled, her shirt collar skew-whiff. She’d managed to get make-up on but it didn’t quite disguise the fact that she’d been dragged out of bed too early and had, over the course of a lifetime, drunk too many coffees and too much red wine, spent too many late nights trying to get information out of people or drinking with other sad journalists with no home to go to.
Gill Lawson loved her job.
She needed a coffee.
There was a chain café on the station concourse, busy with the morning rush. Gill ordered a double shot cappuccino and a bacon sandwich: she tried not to think about what she should have had instead, if she valued her health and what was left of her complexion. Maybe a year ago she remembered Steve pausing mid-briefing to give her a perplexed look that said, Where did it all go wrong? He’d hired her because he fancied her, seven years ago, well, that’ll teach you. Sod it.
And last week, as she hesitated on the threshold of the lift, Steve had shaken his head in an echo of that bewilderment. He had led her from the lift, across the foyer and round the corner to a coffee shop: not that it was too early for a drink, ever, but they both knew they had to have a clear head. ‘You can go,’ he said straight off. ‘But you do what you say you’re doing, right? And nothing else.’
He didn’t know what she knew, that Carmichael could at a pinch be en route for Sandringham, but he also knew she didn’t tell him everything. He got from the way she’d phrased the email that there was wiggle room in five days away. Some hacks would use the time to live it up on the mini-bar, but he knew her better than that.
‘Legal won’t stand for any more monkey business,’ Steve said, over his cup of fancy coffee, the pattern in the foam undisturbed as it went cold. ‘If you get evidence, it’s hard evidence. It’s victims prepared to show their faces. Prepared to testify.’ He stared at her with that, to make sure she got it. What he was saying was, you’ve got to break into their lives and smash them up all over again: if you do that, you’ll get awards; if you do that, we’ll halt the tanking sales figures and we’ll all hang on to our jobs.
Not necessarily, Gill wanted to say back. And
if I did, wouldn’t they let me, if it meant dragging him out into the open? If it meant he’d never do it again?
Neither of them had said any of it, not out loud, but seven years was long enough to read each other’s mind. ‘Don’t overdo it on the expenses, then,’ was all Steve did say, pushing his chair back and standing. Looking down at her and their untouched coffees.
Now as the girl behind the café counter wrapped a napkin round the plastic cup and pushed it towards her she smiled, not even pityingly (probably foreign, thought Gill, she’ll learn), and the bacon tasted like it had been cooked in living memory. Small mercies. She kept the receipt.
Settling herself on a high stool in the window Gill felt the sun come out, weakly, behind her. Sipping the coffee, feeling it do the job, synapses coming out of their coma. The world sharpening around her.
A young woman pushed her way through the glass doors, silhouetted against the lemon-pale morning. Short, battered leather jacket, cropped hair, dead white face: you look like I feel, thought Gill. Watched her count out coins, saw her look in the paper cup they had there for tips a long moment before dropping one in carefully. For some reason this made Gill feel better.
The sun was out and Gill was going somewhere called Rose Hill. She had a lecture to attend, on Bach.
The delivery man had been waiting on the doorstep with Justine’s parcel and Bridget, who had forgotten all about it, grabbed it with relief. The last thing she wanted was Justine musing on how weird she’d seemed last night.
She’d got in early and scrubbed the tiny kitchen down with bleach, fishing a shred of moss out from between floorboards. She hadn’t been into the stockroom yet. She would – just not yet.
Bridget had seen Laura wrinkle her nose, coming in to the shop half an hour after she’d finished scrubbing, her hands still raw. But everything seemed to offend Laura’s senses at the moment, Chips, coffee, mayonnaise. Her first baby: had Bridget talked like this when she was expecting Finn, a constant stream of wondering, of contemplating the changes in her body, her relationship, what would happen next, planning, planning, planning, planning names and paint colours and blue eyes or brown, boy or girl? No. Bridget had hardly dared think about it, let alone open her mouth. Bridget had expected the worst. She had expected punishment and cataclysm, fistula and stillbirth and haemorrhage. She had said nothing to anyone. And he’d been born perfect, and she had waited for catastrophe and depression but she’d put him to the breast and something had worked. For once, something had worked: her body. Something was normal.
A self-seal plastic bag of fresh mint had been brought by Laura. Bridget poured hot water on it and the smell filled the little kitchen, sharp and sweet and strange. She stepped into the doorway holding the mug and Laura was opening the jewellery cabinet for a squat middle-aged man, extracting a necklace. She heard him sigh, bad-tempered. ‘She’s got very specific tastes, you see.’
Christmas present buying for the wife. Jewellery was always the safe bet. Carefully she set the tea down for Laura on the counter and left them to it. Laura had set the necklace carefully back and gone for a bracelet. Their two heads close together, a scattering of dandruff on the man’s beefy shoulders. Some men felt safe with a pregnant woman, didn’t they? Nothing expected of them but a bit of opening doors and offering their seat.
Stepping back from them was the closest Bridget had come to the stockroom all morning. Was there a smell? Something. She didn’t turn her head to the doorway. A sweetness. The images were there in her head, she couldn’t keep them out: the box on its side oozing, blood pooling. Him, shrouded stiff in the woollen coat.
Beyond the window two police officers appeared, strolling by in the street. Bridget heard a siren, a long way off.
Something had happened between Laura and the customer, abruptly he had reached his decision and was fumbling for his wallet at the counter: she could hear his heavy breathing, as if getting the money out was hard labour. Laura was behind the till finding a box for the bracelet and he glanced sideways, just a second. Had that been a funny look? Was she behaving strangely? Bridget made herself smile, and his expression cleared, he smiled back.
When he’d gone Laura reached for her mint tea, wincing as the desk pressed into her belly. ‘I saw that girl yesterday,’ she said, thoughtful.
Immediately Bridget knew who she was talking about: she meant Isabel. Laura eyed her over the mug, her eyes clear and blue and Bridget got a glimpse of the old Laura, the pre-pregnancy Laura, the pre-Nick Laura. That Laura had never been dim or unobservant: Bridget had to play it cool. ‘What girl?’ she said mildly.
‘Came in with an old guy?’ Meditative, not meeting Bridget’s eye. ‘Couple of weeks ago.’
‘Right.’ Bridget half turned to busy herself with straightening a rail, checking a sleeve for an imaginary snag. Laura talked to her back.
‘Wearing a school uniform, in town. I hadn’t really worked out how young she was. Fifteen? At most.’ What was Laura wondering?
‘She goes to Finn’s school,’ said Bridget, turning back, shifting the conversation sideways. ‘You didn’t see him, did you?’
Laura looked nonplussed. ‘She wasn’t at school when I saw her,’ she said patiently.
‘Oh, no, it’s just – he’s got a girlfriend, he’s being a bit cagey about her—’
Was he? Not really. Bridget pushed on, though. She needed to know more about Isabel. ‘We bumped into her at the country park. And I did wonder – if it was her. The girlfriend.’
‘She was on her own,’ said Laura. ‘Carrying a violin case.’ And suddenly Bridget knew she had to get off the subject. Her heart was beating too fast, her face felt strange, stiff, hot: mercifully the door pinged and a woman was pushing her way inside.
A violin case? Off for private lessons with Carmichael. She tried to picture the parents, upset on her behalf, that he’d let their daughter down, wasn’t to be contacted. Would they go round to his house, bang on his door? His phone going unanswered. Her heart raced, anxious.
The customer, a big, fussy woman was already talking, loudly, fierce dark eyebrows that made her look angry – she was angry – was having a go at Laura, asking about the fur trim on something in the window. Bridget stepped in, grateful for the diversion, and Laura shifted on the sofa, keeping out of it. Bridget explained that the fur wasn’t real but the woman wasn’t to be placated. She moved around the rails tugging at things. She was talking about wool now, rambling, she couldn’t wear wool, saying something about the process of shearing being cruel to animals.
Following her at a careful distance, Bridget let her talk. There were customers like this, she reminded herself, they just wanted to talk, to rant, to complain, you had to let them. This was people skills, this was retail: she had to deal with the world – but it was hard. The woman’s aggressiveness was having a dangerous effect on her: she could feel herself having to control her responses. She had to stop herself losing her temper.
Carmichael had been a vegetarian: could she have forgotten that until this moment? Finicky. Staying behind the woman Bridget remembered him taking her for a meal, at a vegetarian café somewhere. A plate full of brownish stuff. Panic jumped inside her, at the memory of his face, peering at her, talking to her about battery farms and abattoirs, watching for her reaction. Remembered going home and refusing to eat, mumbling something about being vegetarian and her mother sitting, sobbing at the table, her head low over the plate, the last straw.
The woman’s mouth was opening and closing, her head turning mechanically, from the clothes, to Bridget, and back. Ranting, uninterrupted. Bridget could see Laura staring from the sofa but she wasn’t sure if it was at her or at the madwoman.
She felt a pulse of dislike for her younger self, she couldn’t stop it. Her poor mother, her face looking up from the table, full of despair: poor old Mum. They’d sat either side of her when she died, her and Carrie, holding a hand each, blank with unarticulated grief.
‘Look,’ Bridget cleared her throat
and the big, dark-eyed woman paused, outraged at the interruption. Laura watching.
You were just a kid, Bridget had to remind herself: you didn’t know how to manage any of it. It seemed to her so dangerous, that phase. When you tried to get away from your parents, hide things from them. When you want to be grown up. Isabel – she’s safe now. That’s something to hold on to.
‘Is there something in particular you’re looking for?’ Gently.
And as abruptly as she’d blown in, the woman marched to the door, as if she’d been insulted, and was gone.
Laura made a sound as the door closed then said, something like, Well, walking heavily back to the kitchen with her cup, and though Bridget was ready for the conversation, about some people when she came back Laura said nothing more. She looked suddenly exhausted, as if it was all too much for her. With the shop empty Bridget seized her chance, and told her to go home. Get some rest.
Laura didn’t put up any resistance, though on the doorstep she hesitated, looking round momentarily bewildered as if she knew something was wrong but needed time to put her finger on it. Bridget rested a hand on her shoulder, not quite a warning, and then the moment passed. Laura moved on, out, she was walking slowly away past the jeweller’s, newly slow, newly awkward, newly tentative with the weight suddenly shifted out ahead of her.
Bridget walked straight into the stockroom, before she could think about it. The corner of the box was visible, but the cardboard was still unmarked, as far as she could see. She didn’t know how long – but then she heard the door, and retreated.
A couple: retired but not old, but all the same Bridget’s heart sank. She longed for a couple of girls on their lunch break, or young women at least, noisy and excited, to fill the place up with something that was alive, growing. The man sat down on the sofa, clearing his throat irritably.
What We Did_A gripping, compelling psychological thriller with a nail-biting twist Page 8