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

by Christobel Kent

  Beside her his chest rose and fell gently, but she couldn’t see his face.

  They’d got rid of the carpet, too. She’d burned the clothes in the little incinerator, she’d put it back where it belonged. Except Matt saw everything in such detail: if a question occurred to him, he needed it answered. Swiftly Bridget scrambled out of the bed and ran downstairs. She put on the kettle. Why shouldn’t she bring him breakfast in bed, once in a while?

  When she got back up with the tray Matt was sitting up, bleary, frowning at the news on his mobile. He looked up in mild surprise to see her but no question seemed to occur to him, after all. Nothing about last night. He looked pale but otherwise it was Matt. She handed him his tea, apologetic because it was still too weak.

  ‘This is nice,’ he said, frowning down at the cup, looking at her, frowning and smiling at once, rain and sunshine. Every day, even Saturday when he didn’t have to be up, Matt made the tea. If she wanted to show him something was different, this was the way to do it.

  ‘Well, you seemed so worn out last night,’ she said, the words covering the anxiety in her voice.

  Matt nodded, took a sip of the tea. ‘Yeah,’ he said, thoughtful.

  Maybe the sex was something they had dreamed, both of them together. Cautiously, Bridget experimented with that thought. Let it lie.

  ‘The journalist, was that it? So she did come and see you? Did you go to the pub with her?’ Letting herself sound a bit put-out.

  She’d never been that kind of wife – but then she’d never had to be. The worst she could complain of was Matt out on a bike ride on a Sunday when he could have been in bed with her. She felt a warmth at the thought, rising up her neck.

  He eyed her a moment then sighed. ‘Gillian Lawson. Yes, she came.’

  ‘What’s she like?’ Stubborn as a jealous wife.

  Cautiously Matt eyed her over his tea. She heard Finn emerge on to the landing, heard the bathroom door close behind him.

  ‘She’s all right, actually.’ He was pondering. ‘A bit – you know. Pushy. A bit tough. I think she’s on the level, though. And yes—’ He sighed again, rubbing his chin. ‘She persuaded me to go to the pub. Maybe I shouldn’t have gone, but too late now.’ He reached for the toast, crunching it cheerfully.

  ‘Did she tell you anything about – this bloke? Carmichael?’

  Matt set the toast back down, not quite looking at her, and pushed the plate away. He shrugged. ‘She’s got a bee in her bonnet about him, that’s for sure. She’s been following him for ten, fifteen years? Talking to students. She’s got theories – well, I told you. That he grooms girls. Abuses them. But she can’t pin it on him.’ He rubbed his chin, thoughtfully. ‘I really shouldn’t have talked to her, I mean, from the point of view of the university, I’m sure I shouldn’t.’

  ‘They wouldn’t want to know?’ She didn’t need to conceal her outrage. She needed to keep it down, though. Matt lifted the tray off himself and set it on the floor, then sat on the edge of the bed with his elbows on his knees, rubbing his head between his hands.

  ‘Well, it’s complicated,’ he said, straightening, his hair sticking up. ‘I said – I told her if I knew anything at all I’d tell her.’

  ‘But you don’t know anything?’ She couldn’t help it: she needed to understand.

  Matt stood and stretched. Boxers on his hips, a vulnerable strip of belly revealed as the T-shirt lifted and on impulse she leaned forward and put her arms around him quickly, her face against his skin. He took hold of her shoulders and made her look up.

  ‘You were a while in the pub, though,’ she said, obstinate.

  Matt sighed. ‘I went back to the office after,’ he said. ‘I wanted a look at his internet history.’ And then he turned away, out of her reach, he didn’t see her put her hand to her mouth. Looking for his trousers on the chair, tugging them on. Across the landing the shower was running, on and on.

  ‘And?’ she said.

  Matt turned, buttoning the trousers, pulling open a drawer and getting out two of his many identical T-shirts, one short sleeved, one long, the long under the short. Same every day. He put them on carefully and only when he had tugged his sleeves down did he turn to her, nodding. ‘I think she’s right,’ he said.

  She was on her feet in an instant, but in the same moment the drumming of the shower ended and Matt held up a hand to stop her, shaking his head. ‘I’ll do a supermarket shop this morning,’ he said. ‘If you’ll make me a list.’

  When she got down to the kitchen Finn was standing at the kitchen table, spooning cereal into his mouth. He looked cleaner than she’d ever seen him, scrubbed and smelling sweet. Matt was still upstairs, shaving carefully in the steamy bathroom. She sat and tried to write a list. Eggs, milk, pasta.

  ‘Are you off somewhere?’ she asked Finn, looking at the clock. Tomatoes, apples, she wrote. It was only nine still. Looking down at her Finn wiped his milky mouth with the back of his hand. ‘Got to get a present for Phoebe,’ he said happily. ‘It’s her birthday. I’m seeing her tomorrow.’

  ‘Really?’ Bridget was taken aback. Had he mentioned a birthday?

  Finn nodded, looking at her from under his eyebrows. ‘Isabel said she’d help me.’

  ‘Oh, well, well—’ Ridiculously pleased at the thought, the two of them out shopping, nothing safer, nothing more innocent. ‘That’s great, Finn,’ she ended lamely, seeing him begin to shake his head at her.

  ‘Anyway,’ he said cheerfully. ‘She said ten at the shopping centre so I’m off.’

  As Bridget waved him off at the back door – head down, legs pumping – behind her she could hear Matt moving round the kitchen, collecting carrier bags, a backpack, for the supermarket shop, methodical. Alone together, she thought with a qualm, but then she remembered.

  ‘You seen Carrie?’ she asked and he’d only begun to shake his head when she was up and off, on the stairs, with a funny feeling in her legs.

  ‘Carrie?’ she said, on the landing. Remembering the soft click of the front door last night. Leaning in to knock. ‘Caz?’ Pushing the door open

  The bed hadn’t been slept in.

  Matt, at the foot of the stairs, saw her expression. He started up towards her and she stopped, forcing herself back down from frightened to just impatient. Tetchy. Big sister.

  ‘She’s stopped out,’ she said, curt. ‘You know Carrie. She’ll have gone on a bender. A Friday night wild one.’ Below her on the stairs after a second’s hesitation Matt went into reverse, backing into the kitchen. When she got to the door he was head down and busying himself with stuffing carriers into his backpack. Whatever. But he was uneasy too, she could tell from the speed of his movements.

  ‘She’ll roll back in in time for tea. I hope she took a key, is all.’ He said nothing. ‘Matt?’ He looked up and she was next to him, a quick hug. ‘I’ve got to get going,’ she said and in that moment she wished she could stay, safe in his orbit. But she couldn’t. He nodded, head still down. ‘See you later.’

  She sent the text quickly, standing astride her bike in the lee of the garage. Where the hell are you?

  She slowed as she passed the pub but it was closed up and silent. It was a clear morning again, and bitterly cold, the air stung her exposed skin as she descended into town. Carrie wouldn’t have been out in it, she told herself, she’d have ended up at an all-night party or something – but all the same. How long did you leave it? To say someone hadn’t come home.

  Consequences unreeled in her head. What happened with a missing person, go to the police, what did they do next?

  Had anyone reported him missing yet? She came to a halt at the lights, her hands frozen even through her old gloves: of course, she’d burned two pairs now. The town gleamed pale below her after the frost, roofs white with it and the light steely.

  She thought not: she thought there would have been something on the news, or in the papers.

  Matt had been looking at the news on his phone. Behind her someone bipped his horn,
tetchy because the lights were changing, and she moved off, her heart speeding. He would have told her. They’d just been talking about Carmichael – he would have told her.

  If Carrie got drunk. If she talked to anyone.

  Town was still quiet, early morning traffic was light on a Saturday. Bridget rattled up the lane, early for the shop. She’d be in before Laura for the first time in days. She locked up her bike round the back, glancing up at the rear of the shop, the tilted roofs, the grimy windows, the place she’d hunkered down to hide. And now it had turned into the place Carmichael had died. And in that moment there seemed a kind of exhilarating inevitability about it. He had followed her there, maybe not initially, but eventually, he had seen her, he had come back for her. And he had died. Serve him right.

  Carrie, though.

  When had she last been in a pub with Carrie, years ago – ten years? Somewhere in London and Carrie out and proud, drinking steadily. Chatting up girls, saying outrageous things to get their attention. Showing them her piercings. Laughing at Bridget, my straight sister, straight as a die, surprised she hasn’t got her pinny on.

  Kissing a girl Goth for so long the pub started clapping them, and then off they went together and that was the last Bridget had seen of Carrie for a year or more. No goodbye, Bridget left there with her gin and tonic. She’d had to laugh: the pub crowd were friendly to her, sympathising. That’s Carrie, they’d said.

  This wasn’t Soho, though. The bike ride to work had seemed to be saying that to her, all the way down; it said this was a funny old place for anyone to end up. Pale and bleak in the winter light, rolling down to the grey estuary, the houses only scattered, then the town feeling closed up, net curtained.

  More gay-friendly than it had been, she tells herself, things had changed, loosened up. Girls holding hands in the street was OK, she had a few gay customers, and a trans regular that Laura rolled her eyes at, giggling when she’d gone. But underneath had much really changed? Their local was a quiet place, old-fashioned. Carrie wouldn’t have got hurt, would she? Being outrageous.

  As Bridget unlocked on her own in the quiet lane – disabling the alarm, flipping the sign – her mind ran on. Then as she turned from switching on the lights there he was in the window. Just as she’d dreamed, hands cupped, face so close to the glass she could see his breath. Moving towards the door, his hand on the latch.

  And suddenly, vividly, she remembered him. The man Carmichael’s age buying a Christmas present for his wife, side by side with Laura at the jewellery cabinet. Had she known, even then, had he made her uneasy? He had stood a little too close to her, she remembered his heavy breathing.

  He pushed the door open now, squeezed through. His belly overhung brown trousers.

  ‘Hello there,’ he said. And he stood in the middle of the shop, looking around like he owned the place, in his jacket that strained over his shoulders. Craning his neck to look back out through the glass a second, but the jeweller’s opposite was still dark. Supposed to be open at ten thirty but she was always late. ‘Remember me?’

  She nodded stiffly. ‘Mr Timpson,’ she said. ‘Yes, Laura told me.’

  He raised his eyebrows. ‘That your girl? Laura? They do say pregnancy makes women ditsy but there are limits.’ More hair than Carmichael, down to his collar and maybe he thought it made him look younger but it was greasy. He looked at her with arrogance. She hated him violently.

  ‘I do hope Laura didn’t upset you,’ Bridget said with hostility.

  He frowned, considering anger. ‘She doesn’t like the earrings,’ he said, jutting his rolls of chin at her aggressively.

  ‘Your wife?’ Thinking hard, trying not to let it show. Why had Timpson come, before, when he’d bought the earrings? To have a look at her. Get the lie of the land. Carmichael must have said something to him about her. When he disappeared – Timpson thought she must have scared him off. Her? She felt a nervous laugh rise. Did more than that.

  ‘Girlfriend, actually,’ said Timpson, his fingers splayed against the cabinet now, she could see every hair on his knuckles. The trace of a leer on his face. ‘She thought it was an older woman’s choice, is the truth of the matter.’ The leer trying to look like a kind smile.

  ‘I think Laura told you that you could have a refund,’ said Bridget, moving behind the till. ‘We can do that now.’ The earrings had cost less than fifty pounds. Cheapskate. She hated him. ‘I don’t know what else I can do for you,’ she said, smiling blandly.

  Timpson pushed himself off the tall jewellery cabinet and wandered to a rail, flipping the clothes carelessly. A flowered dress, a red ruffled skirt; she loved that skirt. She wanted to shove him. He reached up to a scarf displayed on a higher shelf and pulled it down, examining it with a frown.

  ‘Maybe we could talk about alternatives,’ he said. As if he was a Saudi billionaire or an oligarch. ‘I told the pregnant one, I needed your expertise.’ He smiled. ‘I want to get it right. It’s a new relationship, you see,’ and he put a hand up to his heart, he winked. ‘A much younger woman.’ Bridget had to look away.

  ‘How old is your girlfriend exactly?’ she asked, insolent almost: making herself look, making herself take in every detail of him, every pore. No woman would come near this man, unless she was forced, no man either. There was no girlfriend, no younger woman; he had come to warn her off. To scare her. He thought she had threatened Carmichael with going to the police, and if Tony went down, so would he.

  He looked her up and down openly now. ‘Younger than you,’ he said. Smiling. ‘A lot younger.’ He took a step to the side of the desk and reached a hand to the collar of her blouse, rubbing the silk between finger and thumb as if testing the quality.

  She held very still.

  ‘It is you,’ Timpson said, sneering. ‘After all. I wouldn’t have recognised you.’

  ‘Do I know you?’ She looked into his face, one eyebrow raised then down at his hand and he dropped it but nothing more, no stepping back, apologetic. You don’t scare me. It was bigger than being scared, though. It was as if she was standing at an open door and beyond and below it was nothing, a white roaring emptiness. She stood very still, suddenly certain that she had to pretend absolute ignorance – of all of it. Her own life drifted, like smoke, away from her. The rooms she had been in, the ceiling cornice she had stared up at past a jacketed shoulder, how his fingernails had looked as he fumbled to unbutton his trousers.

  ‘Tony said he thought it was you.’ He looked at her wedding ring. ‘Different name, of course.’

  Bridget informed herself that she didn’t know this man. She had never seen this man before. She made herself smile, uncomprehending, hands flat on the glass top of the desk.

  Alan Timpson shook his head. ‘No,’ he said, ‘I would never have recognised you.’

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ she said. Acting cool, bemused, as though her life depended on it. But she was burning, a white flame that lit this man in her memory, his fat shoulder pressed against her face, his fumbling fingers. I killed him, was the mantra in her head. She said quietly, ‘Get out of my shop, you creep, or I will call the police.’ Her head moved, just slightly, she glimpsed a face peering round the window display. White-faced, dark eyes, desperate. Was it Carrie?

  Suddenly there was sourness in her throat, his smell of mothballs and sweat and bad breath and with a violent movement she stepped away. She couldn’t stand Carrie to see this, for Carrie to know that her sister submitted to the thing she had fought off on her own, little wildcat Carrie. Irrational, in the light of what she’d done: so irrational she almost laughed, wildly, because if he only knew— He turned to see where she was looking but there was only Justine, trudging up the alley in her heavy coat, key already in hand to open up across the street.

  ‘You’ll excuse me while I get on,’ she said, turning her back on him, walking across to the kitchen. Out of sight of the street there, as she knew. Laura would need a cup of tea when she arrived.

  T
impson followed her. ‘I don’t like what you’ve done,’ he said, leaning down, and he was letting anger into his voice now even though he spoke in an undertone, thick and salty as blood. ‘What did you say to him? A man of his standing. With his gifts.’ She took the kettle, filled it, saying nothing.

  He kept talking. ‘Don’t you see, no one would believe anything you said? You know what happens to you. You’ve seen them on the television, sad, middle-aged women wanting the world to believe they were attractive enough once for a famous man to fuck them. Riding on his coat-tails. Or did you want him back?’

  She would have killed him if she could. At that moment she couldn’t see anything wrong with it – except that she would get caught. Laura would walk in – and with that thought a little bright second gave her a glimpse of the three of them, she and Laura and Carrie, battering him to nothing.

  Be rational. Be clever. You couldn’t kill them all. And with that thought something cleared and she saw how the see-saw balanced, the power hesitating, between her and him. It slid her way, fractionally but with certainty. Alan Timpson had no idea that harm might have come to Carmichael – to Tony. All he thought was that she had said something that had scared him off. He thought she could do that: he was the one who was scared.

  Clicking the kettle on Bridget turned and forced him to back out of her way, into the centre of the room. She leaned to straighten the rug and when she was standing again put bewilderment on her face. ‘Honestly?’ she said brightly. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about. This is harassment. I’m going to call the police if you don’t leave right now.’

  The two of them must have talked about her. She didn’t let the thought show.

  ‘We’ll have to get together when Tony reappears, won’t we?’ said Timpson, tipping his head. It was almost eleven. Behind her the kettle was coming to the boil and she turned away from him again. Where did he think Carmichael had gone? Somewhere he couldn’t be found: that would make sense. Alan Timpson was still talking, he followed her, she could smell him. She wished she could block out what he was saying, but she couldn’t.