A big delivery came in before lunchtime, Christmas knitwear, and Bridget still hadn’t broached the subject with Laura of leaving early. Every time she thought she saw an opening Laura seemed to change the subject, from nursery colours to what she was making for tea, or waterbirths.
Hauling boxes across the floor while Laura sat, Bridget set to clearing the stockroom to make space, scanning the dusty floor as she did it. Still no phone – but when she pushed the rolling rail aside, she saw a stain.
It was like, one time, she’d found a little lump in her breast: for a moment her mind jumped to, well, no, of course it isn’t – before forcing herself to make a doctor’s appointment at which it had turned out to be something called a breast mouse. She hadn’t told Matt. She knelt, leaned closer, made herself examine the stain. Head down, among the swinging garments in their plastic covers. It was blood. Brownish.
Steadily she crossed the shop floor to the kitchen and got out bleach and disinfectant: from the sofa Laura’s head moved, her mouth opened. ‘No,’ said Bridget, making herself smile. ‘It’s.’ Keeping on walking, reduced to monosyllables and nonsense.
She was kneeling again and scrubbing when she heard the phone go in the shop, and Laura taking an agonising four rings to get to it, across from the sofa. Why did everything have to get her heart racing? And then Laura was talking, she was bright, talking easily. Chatty. It would be an agency, ad sales.
It was Matt.
He wasn’t at work; he had gone home.
Bridget smiled at Laura as she passed over the handset, to make her go away.
He was in the garage.
‘Bridge?’ He sounded bewildered; worried, almost. It was what she had always loved about Matt – one of the things, one of the many things – that he was consistent, reliable, everything in its place. But when things weren’t—
‘Sorry, I came home for a tool, this kid, student, needed a hand with his bike—’
Had Bridget even breathed, since he had begun to speak?
‘Have you seen my needlenose pliers?’ There it was again, that edge of anxiety.
Needlenose, needlenose, the silly word went round in her head. ‘I—’
‘I know they’re here somewhere,’ he went on, not waiting. ‘Have you moved the van?’
Quick. Quick. She knew Matt, thorough to a fault, brilliant at finding things. Methodical doesn’t come near it, and obsessive.
She heard a voice in the background, Matt’s hand over the receiver. Carrie?
In her head it was like a landslip, all tumbling out at once: his face, if he found out. All of it. The ramifications. In a way she was more terrified of saying the words: he raped me. That old man raped me. She was more frightened of that than of him finding the body. Matt made me clean, Matt saved me. She could picture Matt taking a step back from her. That would be all it took.
She made herself breathe. If you faint, we’re all fucked, said Carrie in her head.
‘Hold on,’ said Matt and his hand was over the receiver. But she could hear Carrie’s voice, not the words but the tone. Carrie trying to distract him; but Carrie didn’t know him well enough, she could say the wrong thing. They had to think of something to stop him searching.
‘Matt?’ Raising her voice – across the room Laura, straightening the rails, a dark red party dress under her hand, paused to look over – and he was back, and in the same moment the idea came to her.
‘I’ve got them here,’ Bridget said quickly.
‘What?’ His surprise was more than that, it was on the edge of disbelief, he would push her if she couldn’t think fast.
‘I borrowed them, something got stuck in a light fitting, tweezers would have done, but—’ Bridget stopped herself, babbling. ‘I’ll track them down and bring them over to the university this afternoon.’
He sounded faintly bewildered now. ‘Sure,’ he said. ‘Sure.’
She’d never lied to him before. Or did omission count as lying? Was it all a lie? It occurred to her that she had to find them now, or buy a new pair, and he would know the difference if she did that. ‘See you later, then.’
She hung up and Laura was staring at her, her hand still on the soft dark dress, what was that colour, ruby red?
‘Could you stay this afternoon after all, Laura?’ she said, lightly. Laura shrugged, curious. Bridget had to remain calm: she pulled a face. ‘Men and their tools,’ she said. ‘I lost his precious pliers, brought them here and can’t think for the life of me where I put them.’ Treachery upon treachery, Matt would never have a go at her for such a thing and here she was pretending he was one of those husbands, inviting complicity.
And Laura smiled, absently agreeing, starting on some long, boring story about Nick’s shed and her not being allowed in, but she wasn’t interested in Bridget any more, she was back to gazing down at the rails, dreaming past pregnancy to a day when she would be out to dinner with Nick and dressed in strapless red.
Back on her knees in the stockroom to finish putting away the knitwear, hasty but efficient, it had to be done right or they’d never be able to find anything again – but what if it’s all over? Why do I still care about where the Christmas cashmere is? – Bridget worked out a plan: like she said to Laura. She’d borrowed the pliers, then she lost them.
On the doorstep, standing in the doorway with her arms folded over the bump as Bridget climbed on the bike, Laura said, ‘What if the man comes back, about his wife’s present?’
‘Give him a refund,’ said Bridget, seeing Laura’s eyes widen at the recklessness. ‘I authorise it.’
Laura pulled her plump lower lip between her teeth, unsure. ‘He was very insistent,’ she said, ‘About talking to the manager.’
Bridget remembered only the man’s shoulders, beefy, the way he had moved, a kind of shuffle. He’d made the decision too abruptly, and was going to blame it on them.
Stepping across the bike, itching to get going, she made herself smile. ‘He’ll have to come back tomorrow.’ And she was off, with Laura’s eyes on her back: Bridget was fifty yards away when she heard the ping of the door that meant Laura had gone back inside.
Where were they, though? The pliers. She didn’t want to think of those long minutes she and Carrie had spent kneeling in the dust. They’d wrapped him in the old carpet. Had the pliers got knocked on to the floor?
The bike bumped on the cobbles: Justine from the jeweller’s was on her doorstep, watching her pass. There seemed to be a face in every window, and all of them peering out at her. Traffic roared past at the foot of the lane and Bridget had to brake outside the music shop. She turned her head away so as not to see the window display, the gold flash of brass, sheet music on stands. Would he have been in there? Might he have stopped in there with Isabel on the way to buy that dress – or to pay that last call on Bridget? A bus squeaked to a halt in front of her, blocking her path and she gave in, and turned her head.
It looked down at heel, the sheet music dog-eared, a lot of cheap guitars hanging along the top of the window, a couple of trumpets and a banjo. Not his kind of place: he’d hated folk musicians. Dirt under their fingernails. She tried to block the memory, thinking sideways, upwards, anywhere but there. He wouldn’t have gone in there, and that’s the end of it.
The tool shop was on the way out of town towards Rose Hill, on a busy corner with a trade stationer’s. It was a cheerful place, a smell of rubber and oil and neat rows of tools. A shuffling queue of builders and painter and decorators, chatting easily, taking time off the job: it felt so safe. Another world, a treasure house, a place where all problems could be fixed. She flagged down an old bloke with nostril hair and fingers seamed with black and asked him about needlenose pliers. Looking round the big, dark storeroom as he talked she saw rolls of heavy polythene, saws, zip ties, duct tape. Gallons of paintstripper. And then quite abruptly her head was crowded with images of body disposal, cutting, binding – maybe while she was here she should – she sensed something. Was the old man looking a
t her strangely, drawing bushy eyebrows together? There were news reports about that, too, weren’t there? CCTV images of stocky men leaving hardware stores equipped with knives and saws. No. Don’t.
The needlenose pliers were expensive, and Bridget hesitated with the credit card in her hand, then paid in cash. As she mounted the bike the towers of Rose Hill were far off, beyond their quiet little close, looming misty in the pale blue November light.
When she got home Bridget called up the stairs, but there was no answer, and cautious on the stairs she peered into Carrie’s room to see it empty, the duvet hanging off the bed. She stuck her bike in the garage and got into the van, for speed. She stuck to the limit, though, all the way. Don’t get a ticket, don’t attract anyone’s attention.
As she drove Bridget tried not to think too hard about her story: he would know if it sounded rehearsed. Just be upset that you lost them, and he won’t notice the rest. He hated her to be upset. And it wasn’t hard: just seeing his kind, anxious face at the door to his office (on the ground floor, she’d always been grateful she didn’t have to brave the cramped lifts and never more so than now) almost made her cry.
‘Couldn’t find them,’ she said, on the edge of tears, holding out the paper package from the hardware store. ‘I drove via the hardware shop. I know how much you use them so I—’
The furrows in his forehead deepened and Matt ushered her into his small, tidy office. The last thing she needed: give her an inch and she’d be sobbing, sobbing, she’d say it all. He sighed, took her by the shoulders and sat her down. ‘I’ll make you a coffee,’ he said. ‘You didn’t need to come out, you know.’ Regarding her, then the pliers, perplexed.
‘I think Laura might have chucked them away by accident,’ she said, fiddling with a scrap of tissue in her lap. Treacherous: she didn’t look up until he had turned away.
Matt had an eccentric old coffee machine in the corner, his pride and joy, a thing that bubbled, with a glass balloon and snaking tubes. Bridget sat, obedient, looking out through the big window while he cranked and loaded it. The window, a blessing in the dim hessian-walled room, whose décor was unchanged since the seventies, extended across one wall of the office: Matt washed it himself, because the budget didn’t extend that far and he liked his view. And today Bridget agreed with him: from its circle of scrubby grass the brutalist fountain burbled and sparkled in a shaft of clean light falling between the towers. She couldn’t remember when she had last come out here. It had felt like a place of safety, once upon a time: a modest, quiet English oasis on a hill, just light and water and shelter. The perfect setting for Matt.
He set down the coffee in a Perspex cup and saucer. ‘How long is Carrie planning on staying, d’you think?’ he said, easily.
Bridget sipped. Remembered how surprised she always was that the machine produced nice coffee. ‘A couple of days?’ she said cautiously.
Matt nodded, leaning against the window frame with his cup. ‘Nice for Finn,’ he said. ‘They get along. It can be hard to get through to him these days, you’re right. Is it just his age?’
Even distracted, she heard worry in Matt’s voice and for the first time since she’d sat down, Bridget looked up at him properly. The murmur of their voices at the back door that early, getting ready to get on their bikes, came back to her.
‘He’s online a lot,’ said Matt meditatively. ‘Playing with gamers all over the place.’ Shook his head a little. ‘I mean – I see that here. That stuff. There’s some students – well. Some of them I have to warn over the amount of data they’re using and when they come in, asking for more bandwidth – for some of them it’s an addiction.’
‘Not Finn, though?’ She searched Matt’s face.
He shrugged. ‘I don’t think so, no. No. But – it’s – well, it’s an unknown quantity, isn’t it? How that stuff works on the brain.’
‘Yes,’ said Bridget and nodded, and for a second everything cleared: what else mattered, after all? Finn was what mattered.
‘There’s the girlfriend, though,’ she offered, the cup between her hands and Matt smiled, nodded, and at last sighed and turned to set his cup down.
‘Sure,’ he said. ‘It’s just his age.’
Finn and her and Matt, the steady little tripod of their lives.
In the piazza, striped with light and shade, there was movement. Bridget stood up, slowly, reaching for her cup and took a step close to the window. ‘Pretty out there today,’ she said, her back to Matt. A slight figure, pushing a bicycle, came out of the shadow and into the shaft of light and stopped. A girl, wandering, a girl too young to be on the campus.
It was Isabel.
She looked fragile, lost, her pale spun hair like a halo in the sun. She was staring up at the towers.
In the same moment the question and its answer came into Bridget’s head. What is she doing here? She must have come to find him.
Slowly Bridget made herself turn her back on the window, looking into the room.
Bridget couldn’t say anything about Carmichael, however much she wanted to know. She couldn’t betray any interest, or point to Isabel and say, I know that girl.
She held out the cup. Something was still bothering him: she made herself smile up into his face. ‘Better get back,’ she said. He took the cup and set it down carefully and when he turned back – knowing as she did it that it would puzzle him even more but unable to stop herself – Bridget put her arms around him, just for a second, just to touch him, to breathe him in. She felt him go still inside her embrace: his hand patting her shoulder, helpless.
‘Sorry,’ she said, breaking away, making herself laugh. Stay here, she thought, inside this room, with him. But she walked to the door, instead.
Matt was behind her, but to her relief there was no sign of the bike, or Isabel. ‘Thanks for the coffee,’ she said, but Matt shifted a fraction to look over her shoulder. Then reluctantly – frowning – lifted a hand to greet someone, and she dared turn to look and see, who it was.
No one. A door closing across the piazza, in the base of the tower opposite.
‘I’ll walk you to the van.’
The car park sat a way off from the towers, set into the hill with more levels dug out below. She’d found a space in the open air, though and they were almost there, she was almost home free, the towers above them now and the clean, smooth hill sloping down to the gatehouse, when Matt said his name. Standing with his back to the van and to her, looking down the hill toward the elegant, slate-roofed building behind its neatly trimmed hedging. A Victorian rectory marooned in a seventies landscape.
And then, just as she thought the danger had passed there was his name, on Matt’s lips.
‘He still hasn’t turned up,’ said Matt, without turning, hands in his pockets. ‘Dr Carmichael.’
‘Really?’ Did she have to sound so strangled? ‘What makes you think of him?’
Matt turned round then, and he looked surprised, as though he’d thought he was alone. ‘Oh,’ he said vaguely, ‘the bloke I waved to, across the piazza? That was Alan Timpson. Carmichael’s mate.’
The white van was driving too fast on the single-track road and Gill had to sidestep on to the verge in a hurry. She swivelled with forefinger raised but the van was long gone. White van man, except she was pretty sure it had been a woman.
Half a mile ahead of her the towers sat black against the sky, the nearest of them glinting down one side, light refracted at angles off the glass: Gill had got off the bus too soon. She’d asked the driver if he stopped at Rose Hill and he’d grunted: that should have told her, he couldn’t be arsed one way or the other.
Not very investigative, failing to ask the bus driver where her stop was. Not very hardboiled, mistaking him for someone who could give a toss, out here in the middle of fucking nowhere. But Gill couldn’t afford to take any more taxis: yesterday had been the luxury. There were, she thought wistfully, journalists with expense accounts out there somewhere, and fearless reporters whose editor
s sighed and said, I’ll give you twenty-four hours. Reporters with their own cars, yet. Her arse was in the grinder if Steve even found out she was here.
The sun wasn’t warm but it was bright, bleaching out the expanse of grass ahead of her as she trudged, and the figure just disappearing into the shadow of the towers was a little stick man, a Giacometti. Her phone blipped with an incoming text: she cursed, most of her alerts were turned off, but she looked anyway. It was from a Tinder date from two weeks back who’d just walked away from her on the pavement outside the wine bar he’d chosen when she said, Thanks but no thanks.
He’d been good-looking. The Tinder date. Proper job, a barrister. Not too old. Witty. She couldn’t have identified exactly why she’d turned him down but she’d known she was right then and she certainly knew now. She’d meant to block and delete his number, but her mind had been somewhere else. She deleted the message but not before she’d seen what it said.
Frigid bitch.
It was two, three in the afternoon, so he was unlikely to be pissed. He had drunk one glass of wine in the bar when they met, and only that one so that he could have an erudite conversation with the maître d’ about vineyards in Stellenbosch, or wherever. A man who sat at his privileged little desk in the middle of the day, his leather-topped desk in his panelled chambers, and typed in those words. She sighed. Great.
She liked Giacometti. And Modigliani: something about the way their heads tilted and the long necks. You couldn’t say that to a Tinder date. I’ve got two nieces and I like Modigliani. And actually I like fucking with the lights on and my legs over your shoulders but you’re not going to find that out. Psycho.
The walk was doing her good, though. That’s what she told herself. Gill had been walking a lot since she gave up the gym – to the newspaper from Kensal Rise on the days she went in, a good four miles each way and time to think, watching kids on their way to school, people’s faces on buses. It had suddenly made her feel sick, everything about the gym. The woman with a stringy neck running, running, running on the treadmill beside her at seven in the morning and giving Gill a wild-eyed look when she tried to smile. The men’s eyes ranging round the room, settling on their own reflection in the big mirror, for preference.
What We Did_A gripping, compelling psychological thriller with a nail-biting twist Page 13