‘Just like old times,’ he said. ‘We were looking at some old photographs just the other day.’
In her hand the kettle trembled, a splash of boiling water hit her wrist but the ping of the door covered the sound she made.
Photographs. The world narrowed, to that battered box in a wardrobe somewhere, or gathering dust in an attic. Who would clear his house, when it came to it? Some distant relative? This man? Or the police.
She turned with the kettle in her hand, the scald on her wrist startlingly painful, and looked past him to Laura. She was standing in the doorway and looking at them, her coat half off. She looked pale and tired, and there was a tiny look of puzzlement on her face, as if the scene didn’t quite make sense to her. And then distraction replaced whatever that look had been and Laura dropped her bag on the sofa, moving off painfully to the stockroom to put her coat away.
Timpson glanced at her then back to Bridget and smiled, his fleshy face dividing into rolls. ‘Old times,’ he said, softly. Bridget wished he would talk louder, the timbre of his voice suggested too much, it would get Laura pricking up her ears. ‘Perhaps Tony didn’t tell you about the pictures?’ She heard the rattle of a hanger as Laura hung up her coat. ‘Of course not everything we got up to when we’re young should go on Facebook, should it?’
Bridget had two mugs in her hand now. She could resist the urge to throw the hot liquid in his face: she steered a course past him to the till.
‘Let’s see about that refund,’ she said, setting the mugs down.
‘Credit note will do,’ Timpson said, loud now, cheerful, hoisting his trousers under the overhang of his gut. ‘I’m bound to be back in. These girls, always wanting something new.’ Looking around, his eyes sliding over Laura as she emerged, pale in black knit. ‘Perhaps you’ll have something more appropriate for her age group, when I’m next in.’
And at last he was gone. Laura seemed barely to register the exchange now, gazing at herself in the mirror, tucking a tendril of blonde hair behind an ear, anxious. Bridget pulled herself together.
‘Are you all right, Laura?’ she said. ‘When you came in, you looked—’
Laura turned from the mirror, focusing with difficulty on Bridget. ‘No, no,’ she said vaguely, ‘I’m just not sleeping, it’s so hard at this stage. Nick’s being great. Doesn’t mind me sleeping in the spare room at all. Doing a lot of working late.’
So in twenty-four hours the story had changed. Being great? She thought of the man sitting there motionless on the sofa while Laura knelt over boxes at his feet. Hardly the hardworking type. Still she told herself, this was OK. Was it? Spare room, no confrontation, Nick’s being great. It wasn’t OK.
‘Only two weeks to go,’ she said.
‘Yes,’ said Laura, quietly. ‘I’m just focusing on getting the baby born safely at the moment.’
Bridget searched her face for what she wasn’t saying, she couldn’t help herself. ‘But if you—’
‘It’s all right,’ said Laura sharply. ‘Really. I’ve got it under control.’ She frowned, then said abruptly, ‘There was something weird about him, wasn’t there? Something not very nice. That man Timpson. What was he on about, Facebook?’
This time Bridget couldn’t control her face, and she knew it. And then the door blew inwards and Carrie was inside the shop, breathless, startling them both.
Sandringham was a neat little place, even in November, pretty if you liked that kind of thing. Floral displays and trimmed hedges and old brick: self-important and why not? Not every village got Her Majesty for Christmas. Gill didn’t go near the royal estate, out of republican stroppiness, but it sat there just out of sight, impervious, unassailable. The royal warrant all over the place in case she needed reminding. Grocer’s, garage, railway line.
Gill had liked the drive better, but she had to admit most people would disagree. Most people would call it a nightmare of B roads and blind bends and country drivers with mud flying off their Land Rovers and red faces glaring at her as they passed, little townie in her hire car. It had given her something else to think about. Three days with more or less only Anthony Carmichael in her head had not been good: it felt as if her brain was waterlogged, or gestating something horrible, swelling against her skull.
The hire car had gone on Gill’s own overloaded credit card: she couldn’t charge it as it was her own fault she was in the wrong place, and it was cheaper than the train. She’d stood there behind the plastic counter with its bright signs – a photograph of a young, good-looking couple off on a mini break, cheers for that – a good thirty seconds while the payment was processed, not sure if the card would be rejected. Not only was the train more expensive, but the times were hopeless. And her editor wasn’t just impatient, he was firing her.
She’d been sitting against the shiny headboard cradling a plastic half bottle from the mini-bar when she’d emailed him from the purple hotel bedroom last night.
Listen, Steve.
Had that been her mistake, insufficient respect? Excessive familiarity? Although it had been him made a move on her, back in the day, and she’d been nice about it, hadn’t said, You’re married Steve, you sleaze, just squeezed out a tear about an imaginary previous relationship and that had seen him off. Men didn’t like tears.
I’m not going to get you the Queen’s butcher, I’m going to get you Carmichael. I’m so close, Steve …
He’d called at seven to say that if she didn’t get him the Queen’s butcher she didn’t have a job. Flat and tired and angry. It wasn’t even light: she’d scrambled upright in the bed, feeling sick. The banging head so normal she didn’t even bother to call it a hangover.
And now Gill was parked up next to a church in the nearest village, on the phone, listening to canned music. No word from her admirer the engineer, for which she was grateful. The Queen’s butcher was refusing to talk without permission from the Royal Warrants Office, and that was who she was waiting for. She was fifth in the queue.
The churchyard was also nice if you liked that kind of thing and Gill grudgingly had to admit she did, old lichened stone wall, pollarded limes, gravestones leaning at all angles in long grass. Where will I be buried? she wondered, before telling herself almost with relief, Don’t be daft, it’s all ashes scattered from the Shard these days. Mourners are so last year.
The thought that at barely forty – well, forty-five, all right – she shouldn’t be thinking about her own death with something approaching pleasure, flitted across the back of Gill’s mind, and then someone picked up the phone.
It was tough enough to sound not angry – because where did they get off, the Royals, like the bloody Mafia – and Gill knew something a bit more than non-rage was required. Respect and deference and enthusiasm. You’re in the wrong job. But then she thought about her credit card bill, the wrong job better than no job, and injected just enough of whatever was necessary into her voice. Christ, she even made herself believe it. Can’t be that much fun, anyway, can it, opening daycare centres twice a week, at her age, and not even the most rabid republican could blame her for Anthony Carmichael.
Permission granted. And Gill’s gratitude at least was sincere.
She started the engine and drove away from the old stone wall and the soft grey peaceful shape of the church. There was a grain of truth, of course, in what Steve had said, or else she would have walked, well, somewhere. But this was a job. You didn’t get to do what you want.
The butcher was a decent bloke, in the end, plus he had a female assistant, cheerful, youngish woman in her bloodied white coat and lipstick, so there was a bit of a story there. Gill’s mind almost wiped clean of Anthony Carmichael as she talked to a woman briskly dissecting a pig into joints, leg, loin, spare ribs, and admired the skill. An honest day’s work – well, unless you were the pig, of course.
And she felt almost cheerful herself as she climbed back into the car, at the thought that sometimes her job was just a job, too, a reasonably honest day’s work. A feeling that
lasted all of twenty minutes and the first sign to the A road that would lead her laboriously south to the towers on Rose Hill. To the lit windows where students paced up and down in their tiny rooms, the grey estuary, to the tangle of houses and lanes, shops and houses and families and somewhere in there was a woman who’d once been Bridget O’Neill.
I’m going to get him for you, Steve.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Carrie and Bridget were in a greasy spoon on the main road: elderly clientele, neon lighting and a big pot of tea and two cups in thick china in front of them on the red formica tables. Carrie had looked round the décor and said it’d go down great in Hoxton. She was halfway through two rounds of toast and on her third cup of dark brown tea. ‘Liquids,’ she said, lifting it to her mouth and draining it. ‘Already had a can of Fanta, but it’s tea you want, really.’
She had spent the night with a girl. Of course she had.
Bridget took a triangle of toast. Sliced bread, dripping with salted butter. Salty butter, marmalade sweet and bitter at the same time. She’d forgotten how good it tasted, especially when you were relieved your sister was still alive.
‘You didn’t find her at the Green Man?’ Bridget was confused. Their local pub hosted middle-aged couples holding hands over their ploughman’s, the occasional well-scrubbed teenager. Of course Carrie had already been in there with Finn, but they knew Finn, they’d have tolerated Carrie the wild auntie with her sleeves rolled down to cover her tattoos but not Carrie on the loose. Carrie offering to buy a good-looking girl a drink.
Not just any girl.
‘Nah,’ said Carrie, pushing her empty plate away, replete. ‘One drink there then I hitched down here, into town. I can take care of myself,’ she said, avoiding Bridget’s fierce look.
‘Not necessarily,’ said Bridget, thinking of the truck driver who’d murdered women and left their bodies discarded on a heath, no more than thirty miles away, to the north. Carrie shook her head.
‘Like I’d get in a car with a man,’ she said, patiently. ‘It’s not rocket science. Only get a lift off a woman.’ Their eyes met a moment then glanced off each other, both thinking the same thing. We’d never. A woman wouldn’t. Carrie almost smiling.
She’d met the girl in a gay club. Magdalena, she was called.
‘I didn’t even know there were any gay clubs,’ said Bridget.
‘A lot you don’t know,’ said Carrie merrily.
So Bridget had been here twenty years, with her eyes closed, it felt like. Her little shop, the cobbled lane, the bike ride home. Scared of everything.
‘Magdalena,’ she said blankly. ‘So – who’s Magdalena?’ Because Carrie had said it with meaning, leaning across the table with her little pointed chin on her fists, eyes dancing. And now she sat back.
‘You know Magdalena,’ she said, ‘or you’ve seen her at least. You saw her yesterday standing on Carmichael’s doorstep.’ She smiled. ‘Magdalena from the Ukraine. Very good family, she tells me, very religious.’
‘Oh,’ said Bridget, stupidly, because it felt like a thump to the solar plexus. ‘So she’s – does she—’ Stopped then started again. ‘What does she know? What have you told her?’
Carrie’s eyes roamed the room, restless, a combination of hungover and excited, dangerous, volatile. It occurred to Bridget that she could still be pissed.
‘Carrie,’ she said, taking her by the wrist across the formica. On the next table an old man in a smelly overcoat shook out his paper, clearing his throat. Bridget took her hand away, and tried to sound calm. ‘You haven’t told her?’
‘No,’ said Carrie, rolling her eyes. ‘Course not.’ But Bridget remembered her as a child, lying, secretive. Reckless. And she pushed. ‘Nothing?’
Carrie shook her head. ‘I didn’t even need to mention his name. She said her employer was away and if we wanted to go and have some fun in his super kingsize bed …’
‘You didn’t—’
‘Nope,’ said Carrie, adopting a serious expression. ‘I didn’t think that would be safe.’
Bridget breathed. ‘She thinks he’s gone abroad,’ Carrie went on. ‘She said, that was what had happened last time his friend came round calling for him.’
‘The man.’ She’d told Carrie about Timpson, as they ran through the spitting rain for the café. Spilling it out, the opaque threats. The photographs. He and Carmichael go way back. ‘Him? Timpson?’
‘That would be my guess, she seems to know him, although Christ knows there might—’ Carrie stopped.
‘There might be others?’ And something went, in Bridget’s head, a snowstorm, her brain a room filled with flying feathers and static, like a TV on the blink. A room with others in it, circling while she lay face down on a sofa with her knickers cutting into the backs of her legs.
Carrie stared at her. ‘Sis, you—’ and her hands were held up, fending something off. Her bravado gone.
Bridget shook her head. Her face felt as though it was frozen. ‘She only mentioned one man?’ she said stiffly. ‘Magdalena did.’
Carrie nodded, subdued. ‘Fat man from the university, she said. She didn’t say his name.’
‘And that time, he’d been abroad, and not told this man.’
‘A week in Thailand,’ said Carrie leaning back, arms folded. ‘He came back with pictures on his phone. He showed them to her.’ Her voice was level.
The old man on the next table got up reluctantly, patting his pockets, and shuffled for the door, peering out into the wet street. The waitress was on his tail, clearing the table before he’d even gone.
‘Pictures of what?’ Carrie shrugged, uneasy. But Bridget knew what. Him with girls.
The waitress was loading her tray impossibly slowly, her square backside facing them with its apron tail. Was she listening?
‘Magdalena hates him,’ said Carrie quietly. ‘We could tell her.’
And instantly Bridget was sitting up. ‘No,’ she hissed. ‘You didn’t say anything? You can’t, Carrie. You can’t. No one can know. If anyone knows, the risks – she tells someone, they tell someone else.’ She was shaking her head in disbelief.
‘Keep your hair on.’ Carrie was frowning, rocking on the back legs of the chair. ‘I didn’t tell her. But I did think maybe, with what she knows about him, if she went to the police, it might be a good story. Cover story, paedo on the run. Shame she hates the coppers as much as she hates him.’
At last the waitress turned, eyed their empties, looked at them then decided to move off.
‘And it might just alert them to what’s happened,’ said Bridget, focused now. ‘Is she legal? Here legally, I mean?’
Carrie shrugged. ‘Ish,’ she said. ‘Ukraine isn’t Europe.’
The thought that there was someone else who hated him – who knew him – sat there, a temptation. Bridget hesitated. ‘Can you trust her, do you think?’ she said carefully. ‘In general? I mean, without telling her what we’d done, could you trust her?’ Carrie was saying nothing, thinking. ‘We can’t get pissed and tell strangers,’ Bridget pleaded. ‘You get that? However much we want to.’
Carrie nodded. ‘She could tell I was interested,’ she said. ‘In him. But she doesn’t care.’ Bridget could see she was holding something back. A sudden gust of wind rattled the café’s windows, and a scattershot of rain hit the glass. The old man in his overcoat had gone from the pavement outside: he’d have got wet, thought Bridget, her thoughts veering, wild, away from all this.
‘But what’s she like?’ It was important: it was the most important thing.
Carrie narrowed her eyes, wondering whether to get serious or not. Then leaned forward. ‘She’s had a shit life,’ she said. ‘She doesn’t trust anyone, she looks after herself.’ Shrugged. ‘I guess we have to take that into account.’
‘You got to her, though,’ said Bridget, because she could see it, suddenly, the two of them, tough as nails, in each other’s arms. ‘Didn’t you?’ Carrie pulled back a little and shrugged, surly.
Silence. ‘Carrie?’
‘Maybe,’ she mumbled. Then her hands across the table were moving towards Bridget’s until their fingertips touched. ‘She knows all about him,’ she said.
‘All about him?’ said Bridget.
The gleam in Carrie’s eye told her: there was more.
‘Magdalena told me there were photographs,’ she said. ‘And she knows where he keeps them.’
Had it been there, all along?
Bridget had had her eyes closed, for twenty years. That feather-filled room that was the inside of her head. That memory of the elastic cutting into the backs of her legs as they were tugged down. Of course, it must have been there all that time.
She thought about those people interviewed on TV with their faces blacked out in shadow but you’d see their hands, trembling hands, or a trail of smoke from a cigarette held out of shot. Experts talked about false memories, about PTSD. Someone took them into an interview room and asked them questions. And sometimes they weren’t believed. It was their word against his: it was down to their credibility, as a witness, and their damage might muddy the waters. Sometimes charges were dropped.
The precious thing you carried around, all your life. The dark, precious thing – precious because if you broke it open your life would fall away around it in pieces, if you broke it open the black swarm it released would cover the sun – imagine taking that precious thing to a police interview room only to be told to put it back where it came from except now it is bigger and darker and heavier. Now it is a black hole, so dense it sucks you inside after it, and there is no more you.
They weren’t allowed to name the things he’d done on television. The things that he and the others had done in the feather-filled room, the snowglobe shaken, shaken, the picture obscured. Not before nine o’clock. The acts.
They called them sex acts. There was a watershed, after which the words could be spoken. When children had gone to bed, children in soft pyjamas, their covers turned down, their nightlights on.
What We Did_A gripping, compelling psychological thriller with a nail-biting twist Page 23