What We Did_A gripping, compelling psychological thriller with a nail-biting twist

by Christobel Kent

  On the way through the wet, empty streets she’d hardly seemed awake, head leaning back, eyes half closed, light falling in stripes on her pale face.

  In the garage, the big door half down, Carrie stopped, bending her knees to get a better grip. Pausing to shake her head as the hangover kicked in, and it all seemed to come into focus, where she was, what they were doing. Bridget waited, holding her end, blowing the hair out of her face.

  ‘Fuck,’ said Carrie, and abruptly she let her end fall, lurching back so it wouldn’t land on her feet. ‘What’ve you got in there?’ Staring down.

  ‘Well, not china, fortunately,’ said Bridget, marvelling at how she could sound dry, how she could just lower her end to the floor. ‘Just shoes and bags,’ and put a hand on Carrie’s shoulder, gently turning her away and towards the wide garage entrance.

  ‘You staying, then?’ Pulling the door down with a clang. Standing on the grass Carrie looked small and lost suddenly, staring around at the neat little houses in the close like she’d landed on the moon.

  The sound of the garage door had brought Matt to the back door. ‘Hey, bro,’ said Carrie, stumbling towards him and Bridget’s heart gave a lurch as he smiled in the side light.

  Matt had already laid the table and something was in the oven. Shepherd’s pie, she guessed, a meaty, savoury smell and it was his other speciality. Matt liked cooking, he did it slowly and carefully and precisely, always following recipes to the letter, washing everything up afterwards. She glanced into the kitchen and sure enough, it was clean and tidy. A pan for peas on the stove: Matt always made peas with shepherd’s pie. She leaned against him with gratitude, and he patted her on the shoulder, awkwardly. He cleared his throat as if he was about to say something, but then Finn was on the stairs, thundering down, holding the shaggy curtain of his hair to one side to peer, delighted, at Carrie.

  They danced clumsily around each other, Finn like a big bear suddenly since they last hugged, dwarfing Carrie. It was always mysterious to Bridget how a relationship as complicated and prickly as hers with her sister could emerge as something so blithe and sunny when it came to Finn.

  ‘Let’s go to the pub,’ he said, eager. ‘Can we, Mum? Me and Carrie?’ Looking from one adult to another.

  Carrie’s cheeks were pink, spots of colour, and she scowled: Bridget knew to disguise her happiness.

  ‘After tea, maybe,’ said Matt quickly, before Bridget had to, and then they were all shuffling, grateful, into the kitchen.

  At table Carrie had an appetite, wolfing down the pie. She always had had, maybe in reaction to Bridget, refusing to play the same game of pushing food round her plate. ‘How long do you want to stay?’ said Bridget, hungry herself for the first time in what seemed like weeks. Having Carrie at the table seemed to loosen everything up: Matt relaxed, Finn bouncing with happiness. In spite of everything. In spite of the box in the dusty dark of the garage, behind a rolled carpet beyond the van.

  ‘Dunno.’ Carrie forked in more potato, taking a long drink of water.

  ‘You can stay as long as you like, Auntie Carrie,’ said Finn confidently.

  ‘Yes,’ said Bridget, and meant it though in her head it whirred. How. When. ‘How’s Ella?’

  Bridget hadn’t intended to probe, but that was how Carrie heard it, Bridget knew her sister’s body language well enough. ‘All right,’ said Carrie warily, laying her fork and knife carefully side by side, on the defensive straight out of the gate.

  ‘You’ve had a fight.’ Bridget couldn’t help herself.

  ‘Just a little one.’ Carrie pale again but winking at Finn – who had got anxious, instantly, scenting a row. Like Matt, he hated raised voices and drama: they both always managed to forget that that was what Carrie brought with her. Finn looked from Carrie to Bridget and back, uncertain.

  ‘It’ll be all right,’ said Carrie. ‘We need a bit of space.’ Scowling again, this time at the cliché. Carrie fought the idea of any relationship at all, let alone one that was starting to look like a cliché. ‘Couple of days? Week, max.’

  ‘So are we going, Auntie Carrie?’ Finn had cleared his plate and was pushing his chair back. He didn’t wait for an answer. ‘I’ll get my jacket.’

  ‘You know he can’t drink,’ said Bridget to Carrie when he was out of the room.

  ‘Sure, sure,’ she said rolling her eyes. Matt paused, plates in hand and she went on meekly. ‘Yes, Dad. I’ll keep him out of trouble.’ He moved on into the kitchen.

  ‘You all right, then?’ It seemed like a casual question, maybe it was, Carrie leaning back in her seat replete and smiling. ‘You and old dad there?’

  Bridget smiled, widening it, it was easy to let it move on up to her eyes, looking at Carrie. ‘It’s nice to have you,’ she said and that was easy too because it was true. Whatever complications it introduced.

  When they’d gone – kitted out in warm jackets because it was half a mile and freezing out there – Bridget and Matt sat on the sofa, leaning against each other, the news on TV. Nine o’clock: she guessed Carrie and Finn would stay till closing time. Talking about computer games, and Carrie’s exploits. DJing and the dodgy companies she did websites for.

  She felt something, though, at the point where their bodies touched, at the shoulder, a restlessness. Matt was usually calm and still and focused. One knee jiggled and she felt a silence growing that was never there before. Then Matt spoke.

  ‘Oh, something happened at work today.’

  Bridget sensed it coming, a truck the other side of the blind bend.

  ‘That guy that came into your shop?’ Matt wasn’t waiting for her to respond, and she kept still. On the TV there was a march, blue starred flags waving against a grey sky: it blurred as she stared. ‘He was supposed to be giving a big lecture this afternoon and he didn’t show up.’

  Bridget felt the bottom fall out of her stomach. This is how it begins: these are the consequences. ‘Really?’ she said. Mild surprise in her voice.

  Matt took a breath and let it out, a big sigh. Picked up the remote from beside him on the arm of the sofa and turned it in his hands. ‘Fortunately only a handful of students came so no big deal. Lazy, these visiting fellows.’ He sounded exasperated. That was all. Not curious. Not intrigued.

  ‘Maybe he just – forgot,’ she offered. The marchers continued their progress across the screen, waving their banners.

  ‘Maybe he’s losing his marbles,’ said Matt. ‘It happens. Dementia.’

  ‘Really?’ said Bridget, because there was something in the explanation, a spark of hope. And a memory of someone, on a TV report, when charges couldn’t be brought because he had developed Alzheimer’s: the powdery skin of an elderly man, his face distorted in outrage as a camera turned to follow him.

  Carmichael hadn’t had Alzheimer’s. He could remember: she knew he could remember. But that had been long ago. Dementia sufferers could remember the faraway past, couldn’t they? She liked the explanation anyway, even if it wasn’t true: something about it fitted with what she’d done. Erased: he was gone, and all his memories with him.

  Matt was still talking. ‘Academics – actually, some of them get away with dementia for longer than most because they’re smart and they can cover up, I’ve seen it. Remember Nilsson?’ She didn’t. ‘Physicist. He could still lecture but couldn’t tell you what he’d had for breakfast. And as for the disinhibition, people are used to the big brains being anti-social, rude.’

  Quite a long speech from Matt. ‘Was he rude?’ she asked.

  Matt thought a minute. ‘Yes,’ he said, thoughtfully. ‘Yes, he was. Arrogant and rude.’

  Something must have happened between him and Carmichael and with the understanding a pulse set up, a chain of questions. But she had to be careful. She couldn’t ask, not directly, how much he knew about Anthony Carmichael, however much she wanted Matt to be on her side.

  He’d always been on her side, without her telling him anything, because that was how it had to be. Only now i
t was all different, their steady life, it was all tipped and tilted like a sinking ship. One wrong step and he would see. He would see right inside her.

  Matt was weighing the TV remote in his hand, but looking at a point above the screen. The weather had come on, a man with a pointer gesturing at the map and in one corner an inset picture of trees blowing flat. She pointed. ‘Not another storm,’ she said and on cue he turned up the sound.

  She had to get Matt off the subject before Carrie got back. Even pissed, especially when pissed, her little sister was too sharp: she had ears like a bat for trouble. No patience with secrets, Carrie saw it as her duty to expose them.

  And Carrie knew Carmichael.

  Would she remember his name? Of course she would. And a music fellow, gone missing, came into the shop?

  They hadn’t talked about it, ever. Carrie didn’t know what he’d done to her. Or at least that’s what Bridget always told herself. She felt herself go still: beside her, fortunately, Matt had leaned forwards to watch the news. Storm Janet heading their way. If their shoulders had been touching he would have known, just like she had known, that something was up.

  Ninety mile an hour winds.

  And it came into her head, a flash photograph, a fuzzy image on an old screen. Carrie, ten, eleven years old and standing on one leg in the doorway of Bridget’s bedroom, Bridget trying to close the door on her. ‘I know you’ve got one. Does he look like Dean or does he look like Jess?’ Characters on a TV show they watched together.

  Boyfriend.

  What had been in Carrie’s own head, back then? Bridget had been too busy to care. Getting into scraps at school, coming home with her school shirt ripped, defiant. Carrie had always been good at fighting people off, being stroppy. Fighting her corner. Bridget felt a tightness in her chest, a painful hard squeeze at the thought.

  Carrie picking up the violin, setting it on her shoulder, making a soppy, moony face. It would ring bells, all right, if Matt started talking about the new music fellow who’d been into the shop.

  ‘Looks like it won’t get over here for a while,’ he said, leaning back against the sofa. ‘Finn and Carrie should manage to get back from the pub – or at least storm Janet isn’t going to be what stops them.’

  Bridget sighed. ‘She’d already had a few when she turned up at the shop,’ she said.

  After they’d moved Carrie had stuck it out at school for six months before leaving home, aged sixteen. Sleeping rough for a while then shacking up with another girl in a squat. Bridget still didn’t really know what had gone on, how she’d kept body and soul together. She’d gone down to London one time to talk to her, their mother beside herself worrying, to try and make it up. Carrie cold and impervious at the door to the squat, some place in south London, a big, sunlit, scruffy square. ‘What do you want?’

  She’d come out in the end, they’d sat on the mismatched chairs of the square’s cooperative vegan café and raged at each other. Carrie pretending she didn’t care for the longest time before lurching forward and shouting, ‘Where the fuck were you when I needed you? Where the fuck were you? In fucking hospital refusing to eat. Shunting us to the middle of fucking nowhere.’

  And Bridget in despair had blurted out, ‘I was trying to protect you.’ Carrie had got angry then, demanding to know what she meant. And Bridget had found herself unable to say.

  ‘Ah well, Finn’ll keep her on the straight and narrow,’ Matt said, getting to his feet and reluctantly Bridget smiled up at him. Law-abiding Finn, who’d spent the last party he went to kicking out the drunks and helping clean up.

  ‘Cup of tea?’ And cheerfully he was off to the kitchen.

  They would ask, why didn’t you say anything? She didn’t have an answer. Who to tell? Mum, working three jobs by then? Her kid sister? Teachers at school? Bridget had always been little Miss Goody Two Shoes at school, head down, work hard, take the flak from other kids for being a swot.

  And where had it got her? She’d gone back to school after hospitalisation but her grades dropped. The teacher training course had made her feel uneasy and she’d started work instead, among adults, in shops. Among women. Matt had tried to persuade her to stick with it. He had believed in her. But he’d seemed to understand: he’d come up with some money for the initial investment in the shop and the bank had put in some more and against all the odds, slowly, slowly, she’d made it work. Hard graft, careful choosing of stock, second guessing what women wanted, keeping on top of the VAT, dressing windows. Non-stop. But it had worked.

  He came back in with two mugs: she looked up at him. She had always relied on him understanding, without her having to say. Now she wanted to evade him.

  They drank their tea, they watched a bit of a movie, she made up a bed for Carrie in the spare room. It would have been for another child, if she’d dared have one. She’d needed to work.

  It must have lingered in Matt’s mind, though, unsolved: Carmichael. They were in bed and about to turn out the light when he made an impatient sound, and Bridget set down the book about wartime France she had been failing to focus on, again. ‘What?’

  ‘There was a journalist came, though,’ he said, jumping back to the conversation without explanation as if she knew what he was talking about, what he had been thinking about through the news and the movie.

  ‘Journalist,’ she said, blankly. Though she did know, somehow.

  ‘She turned up for the lecture,’ said Matt, tipping his head back against the pillow, thinking. ‘She was a bit pissed off.’

  ‘So you were there?’ Bridget asked. ‘Actually at the lecture?’ The thought of it set up a panicked flutter in her chest.

  Matt snorted. ‘He wanted PowerPoint and slides and he requested me as backup. Just a couple of days ago.’

  So around the time he came to the house. He had known. Carmichael knew Matt was her husband, and he had deliberately involved him, brought him into the circle. She understood why immediately: he had wanted her to be frightened. It occurred to her that somehow she was acting as if Carmichael was still alive, was still threatening her. But her heart didn’t slow, calm at the realisation, it seemed to swell, pumped with brief euphoria. She had to control that too.

  ‘Was she a local journalist?’ She had to ask anything she wanted to know now: if she waited till the morning Matt would look at her oddly, he’d wonder why she was still interested. And this was important: she seized on that.

  He shrugged, pondering. ‘I don’t think so,’ he said. ‘She said she’d followed his career. Gillian something? She’d come specially. Asked how he was settling in, all that, was he part of the community.’

  ‘What did you tell her?’ That Carmichael was fitting in so well he had already visited a local boutique?

  He was frowning, pushed his glasses up his nose. ‘Told her I had no idea.’ Then sighed. ‘I figured I ought to make his excuses so I said I’d heard he hadn’t been well.’

  And suddenly she was angry. ‘Is that your job? To cover up for him? There didn’t seem to be much wrong with him when he came into the shop.’ Shut up, shut up. That was weeks ago, as far as Matt knew, stop talking about him. Too late: Matt had turned his head and was looking at her. She blustered, ‘Well, if I just didn’t turn up to work one day …’ tailing off.

  ‘There’ve been incidents,’ said Matt mildly. ‘You do hear stuff. He hasn’t turned up for tutorials, and said he’d forgotten and gone to London, to take auditions. Left his mobile at home.’ It swirled, shapeless, in her head. All the ramifications, all the loose ends she must tie. Had she really done it? Had she just imagined it? No. The box was in her garage.

  And Matt was still musing. ‘It could be he’s just forgetful. Could be arrogance.’ Still watching her, absently, perplexed. Something was bothering him. It was all bothering him.

  ‘Oh, well—’ she said, wanting to get out from under his eyes, not knowing how.

  And then the door was opening downstairs, the sound of Carrie’s giggling stage whisper, Finn�
��s deeper rumble, and she was off the hook. Rolling her eyes at the noise they were making, Matt smiling, turning away on the pillow. Book down, lights out.

  Chapter Eleven

  Thursday

  At two, or three, in the dark dead of night, it came to her in a dream. Another dream. Matt’s face, his mouth moving, smiling, his kind eyes on her. His mouth opening and closing, talking about Carmichael and she could see that his mouth was black inside, as if it had filled up with tar. Tilting his head as he said it, and Bridget unable to look away from the black inside his mouth. And what was it he had been saying? Carmichael went to London, auditioning, said he’d forgotten. Left his phone at home.

  And she gasped, out loud, jerked up on the pillow and immediately she knew: his mobile phone. Shit, shit, shit. Once they knew he’d disappeared. Isn’t that the first thing they’d do? See where he went. To her shop. And then to her garage. They’d track his phone, in his pocket, or wherever it was, the phone she hadn’t looked for, she’d been so busy winding him around and around, mummified in polythene so she didn’t have to look at him.

  Bridget couldn’t sleep, she couldn’t do anything.

  She had to get the mobile phone from his body. She formulated a plan, an explanation. For when they came and asked.

  He came to the shop, he left his phone behind, she didn’t know who it belonged to, she brought it home and left it in the car.

  It would implicate her. It would link her to the body. She would be the last one to have seen him. They would search the shop, they would swab out her bins.

  She would have to take it to the police station. She would have to retrieve it from the body.

  What choice did she have? She lay and waited, for dawn.

  The hotel room Gill woke up in – in a Premier Inn on the ring road – was purple. Lilac or lavender they might call it, she supposed: curtains, shiny headboard, feature wall. Silver and purple. She half closed her eyes in case that might stop her head hurting. It didn’t.

  The student bar last night. Gill turned in the bed and pressed her face into the pillow, stifling a groan.