What could the cameras see? Not the tiny kitchen, but they would have seen him follow her in there, they would have seen him fail to emerge. If someone had dragged a body, however quickly, across the shop floor. The thought of replaying that moment in slow motion, over and over, made her feel dizzy.
The cameras would have seen her at the desk when Timpson came close to her, and that thought, that thought propelled her, hot with shame, flushed from the roots of her hair to the backs of her legs, to the stockroom door.
Her phone blipped as she got to the door. It was Carrie. You’re on your way, right?
The stockroom was a mess. Two boxes of shirts in cellophane on the floor and some paperwork sliding off the tiny desk.
Yes five minutes
There was no time to look for it now. Lights off, lock up. The rain had stopped. Bridget had to make herself be careful, Matt’s voice in her head, bike lights on. Then she thought of something and removed the battery from her phone, grateful for once that Matt had made her buy the other kind of smartphone, the cheaper kind, the more modest kind. Whose battery could be removed. Did that mean they couldn’t trace her movements? She had no idea, but it was her only option. Battery in one pocket, phone in the other. But every moment she delayed, leaning over the bike in the dark and the bike frame slippery under her fingers with the wet, the world seemed to tighten and close around her. When she straightened up she thought she heard something, she thought she saw something move beyond the lockups and made herself wait, heart pounding.
She rode fast and fierce in the wet dark, raised in the saddle and her handbag slung across her, bumping the small of her back. Calm down, she told herself, you can wipe it. First you find it, then you wipe the images.
A car turned out of a lane behind her, slow, cautious, refusing to overtake. The rain had begun again, soft and steady and the road gleamed.
The car didn’t pass her all the way, it was there at her back until she was almost at Carmichael’s place. Then it turned off, down the next street.
The house was dark and quiet as she locked her bike.
The street looked so safe. The warm glow of lit windows, the broad speckled trunks of the plane trees. Did these people know? Behind their curtains.
She paused at the entrance to the alley that ran alongside the house, in a pool of shade out of the reach of the streetlights. She heard a murmur of voices and took a step down the alley, listening until she identified Carrie, gravelly from the cigarettes, amused.
‘Hey,’ she hissed.
A face appeared at the side gate: not Carrie. Magdalena. Close to she was strikingly attractive, black hair, blue eyes. And younger than Bridget had thought, closer to twenty than thirty, even when sallow from the night before. A thick Eastern European accent. What had Carrie said? Ukrainian. That was Russia, more or less, wasn’t it? All she knew about Russians from the shop was that they bargained hard.
The garden was dark and wet, shrubs brushing against Bridget as she followed them up on to the back porch, Magdalena ahead of them. She flicked on a light at the back door, getting out a bunch of keys.
‘What makes you think your employer isn’t coming back?’ The pretence seemed suddenly laughable, that they had any reason for interrogating her other than the true one. But she mustn’t admit it. She was after the pictures: he had disappeared and she was after the pictures.
Magdalena paused, the key in the lock, and looked up at her amused. Under the light she could see Magdalena’s skin was not quite flawless, her eyes flat and dark and in that instant Bridget could imagine her in a court room or an interview room, just shrugging, Sure. Yes, she told me he was dead. She told me she killed him.
‘Maybe something happen to him,’ she said, her mouth curving upwards. ‘Maybe the police want him, maybe is all over for him and his friend.’ The key turned and she gave the door a little push. Inside the wide hallway was dark.
‘His friend?’
‘Alan,’ said Magdalena, in her accent that made everything sound a joke. Al-lan.
Then she stepped inside, reaching back to extinguish the light behind them and they were inside, in the dark. ‘Why you want to know? Why you want these photographs?’ Closing the door behind them.
‘If you’ve seen them, you’ll know,’ said Bridget, emboldened by the dark.
‘I told you why, Magdalena,’ said Carrie, and Magdalena let out a harsh little laugh. ‘I told her,’ said Carrie again, but to Bridget now. ‘We’re vigilantes.’ It sounded like bravado, Carrie making up her own Wonder Woman adventure. ‘We want to expose paedophiles.’
Magdalena said nothing. It wasn’t quite dark, after all: the streetlight shone through the etched glass of the front door, where sunlight had streamed in the last time they were here. Magdalena leaned against the wide, sloping staircase and the flat planes of her face gave little away. Tough, hostile – and evasive. How could they trust her? Just because she’d spent a night with Carrie? They couldn’t.
‘We can get money from him,’ she said, languorous. ‘Maybe. We can threaten?’
Bridget felt the situation getting desperate. The girl might be just interested in money. You could hardly blame her. And if no Carmichael to blackmail – who else? The other person who didn’t want anyone to see those pictures was Bridget. But she had no choice.
‘Please,’ she said, and she heard herself: low, broken. Turned to look at Carrie, pleading. Magdalena frowned, looking from one to the other.
‘Sisters, huh,’ she said. ‘I have also a sister. Don’t know where she is.’ She made a sound with the words, half a laugh, but unhappy, and as they went on watching at last she nodded, and pushed herself off the carved wood of the wide staircase.
‘Upstairs,’ she said.
There was a glass cupola in the ceiling above the gallery: Bridget hadn’t noticed that the first time. The cloud must have cleared because there was a moon somewhere, a soft, diffused light that shone on the walkway, the doors dark in shadow all around the gallery. Magdalena led them, all padding quietly. They’d left their shoes at the back door. Her shoulders were narrow and skinny, but Magdalena walked as if she owned the place: she passed one door, then another, then the door to his bedroom and it was the next door she stopped at. Pushed, reached in for the light switch.
It was a dressing room, big-panelled, softly lit. Ties hanging in rows, mahogany drawers, a round polished table and low velvet chair. It might be in a magazine spread. Unhesitating Magdalena crossed the room and pulled open a deep, wide drawer under a pair of heavy brass-inlaid doors.
Bridget was beside her: she wasn’t sure how she’d even got there. Carrie was still at the door: Bridget looked back but Carrie, white-lipped, didn’t move.
The drawer contained shirts. All folded, ironed. ‘You do his ironing?’ she said to Magdalena, not even knowing why except it was what she did for Matt and the thought made her sick. Magdalena shrugged. She leaned forwards and reached past the shirts, fiddled with something, there was a click and the drawer shifted forwards another foot, as if under its own weight.
The box was in a compartment that must have been designed for the purpose of concealing things. Those dark, precious things.
It was the same box she remembered, secured with thick rubber bands, an old cardboard box from an old-fashioned haberdasher’s, a gentleman’s supplier, a place where they sold tweeds and pale brown slacks and rubber boots and collar studs. Magdalena stepped back, and for the first time Bridget felt a chink in her suspicions of the girl, with her flat eyes and thick pale skin. Magdalena didn’t want to watch, she didn’t want to gloat.
‘Can you—’ Bridget’s voice was thick, hoarse. ‘Would you mind—’ But they were gone, anyway, she could hear them pad away around the gallery, down the stairs.
But she didn’t look. She stepped away from the box to the tall, handsome window and looked down, into the back garden, across the thick, dark trees, silvered here and there in the moonlight. The wide navy-blue sky, already speckled with sta
rs. She could stand here all night, or she could pull up the sash and jump.
The little house seemed far away, their safe, bright little house could have been like something she’d dreamed. A husband and son, not hers. She blinked because unbidden she could see more, she could see too much. But they were hers, she thought, almost to her surprise. Matt would be watching the football highlights and Finn would be on his computer. They were waiting for her to come home. She pulled the curtains and went back to the box.
The pictures of her were on the top. As if he had been looking at them.
Her mouth opened and with it, it felt as if her whole body split like a fruit, when you opened a peach and found the kernel black inside. Everything black inside, and spoiled and rotted, the room spinning with a dark, silent whoosh around her as she stared down, at her own face. Her own eyes, her ears flattened against her skull like a frightened dog’s, her eyes black and bottomless. Little Bridge.
She blinked her eyes shut, and felt her mother’s hand, on her cheek, her father’s warm side as she had leaned on him when she was small. The two of them watching TV. A sound escaped her, incomprehensible. She opened her eyes and looked.
There were others. Many others, the box was stuffed, they began to spill out. Other girls. A boy. Two boys. She didn’t know any of them: they were all about the same age, the age she had been, the age just before you grew, when your body was smooth and small. Twelve, thirteen, fourteen. The men’s faces weren’t shown, but she saw things she knew: a mole on a man’s hand. A cufflink. A mantelpiece.
She was on her knees and she didn’t know how she’d got there: on her knees with the box hugged against her. She released it and began to put the photographs back in, carefully, smoothing their corners. She put the lid on, she replaced the rubber bands.
She didn’t touch anything, not the drawer, not the light switch, when she walked back out on to the gallery. Down in the wide hall below her Carrie and Magdalena stood in the moonlight with their arms around each other. With one hand Magdalena was stroking Carrie’s hair: when she heard Bridget on the stairs she looked up, her face a pale oval, her eyes dark, but made no move to disentangle herself.
Carrie’s head was on Magdalena’s shoulder when she got to the bottom of the stairs. How could you be sure you could trust someone? You couldn’t.
‘What about his computer?’ she said, and then Magdalena slipped a little out of Carrie’s arms, and gave a small shrug.
‘I don’t know where it is. Don’t know where he keep it.’
Bridget didn’t know if it was true: she thought it probably wasn’t. If she accused Magdalena of lying, everything would change. Carrie shifted, uncomfortable.
Magdalena could be hanging on to it for reasons of her own.
It occurred to Bridget as Magdalena stared her out in the half-dark that there was a possibility Carmichael had been having sex with her. Not, she imagined, consensually.
‘Magdalena—’ she hesitated.
How old was she? Maybe twenty. Which would have been too old for him, when Bridget knew him, but maybe he had fewer options now, even with the internet. But there was something she wasn’t coming clean about.
‘Did you see any friends of his coming over to the house?’
Magdalena stood alone now, rubbing her arms, skinny and small in the moonlight. ‘Sometimes,’ she said.
‘More than one person?’
She shrugged: ‘Sometimes, like I say. I don’t look. I don’t live here.’ Following Carrie’s head, trying to make her look back. ‘I don’t see everything that happens.’
‘Would you go to the police? About what you know about him.’ She made herself say it. ‘About what he does to girls?’
Magdalena made a contemptuous sound. ‘Other thing I do first,’ she said.
Bridget stepped in front of her, taking her arms, trying to be gentle but to make her understand, too. ‘Don’t do anything,’ she said. ‘For the moment, don’t do anything. As far as you know, he’s gone on holiday like he did before.’
Magdalena pulled away. Obstinately silent. Then at last she cleared her throat. ‘OK,’ she said grudgingly.
Bridget turned to Carrie, standing there looking away from both of them.
‘You coming?’ Bridget said.
Carrie turned back, shook her head. ‘I’ll be back later,’ she said.
The sky was almost completely clear when she emerged, made her way through the wet undergrowth to the gate. It creaked rustily in the dripping quiet: she could hear her own steps in the dark alley. She held the box to her chest, her heart beating against it, until she reached her bike and set it down in the basket.
She had time, she thought, if she was fast she had time to cycle back to the shop and look for the laptop.
She heard the sound as she leaned down to unlock the chain, a footstep then a soft, diffident clearing of the throat, and when she stood and turned under the shifting shadow of the plane tree, there he was.
He stood in front of her. ‘Bridget,’ he said, and his voice fell away in the dark.
Chapter Twenty-Five
Gill was almost there.
The wet night had slowed her down, the unfamiliar roads and this town. This nasty town, with its ring roads and mini-roundabouts and one-way systems and all the time the red lights up on Rose Hill blinking at her from this side then from that side, leading her astray.
Back up somewhere in Cambridgeshire it had almost been all over. She’d finally got on to something resembling a motorway and her foot hard down when a striped barrier appeared, gleaming red and white in her headlights, a lane closed off for flooding. She had veered into the path of a truck behind her, its horn blaring, water hissing out under her tyres and the thing almost bloody aquaplaning. For a moment she’d felt the machine slip her control and thought, not now. Not fucking now after all this time. And wrenched the car back on to solid tarmac, watched the dazzle of the truck’s headlights recede.
That was part of the problem, of course. Her mind on other things, when she should have been watching the road.
There were things Gillian Lawson had done as a journalist of which she was not proud. Could she really stand on the moral high ground? She had lied and stolen and bullied to get to the people she wanted. She wasn’t going to think of that, not right now.
Had it all been worth it? Had she done – did she still do – harm as well as good? Even the butcher had looked anxious as she left his shop, as if she might lose him his job, his female assistant eyeing her over his shoulder. Gill had got a photograph on her phone of her with cleaver raised, one saucy eyebrow up.
Matthew Webster yesterday had been a harder nut to crack. Not necessarily cannier, just immovable. Slight but determined in his all-weather trousers and T-shirt, waiting for her in the office whose modest dinginess had not really struck her before. He didn’t have any fancy furniture, no walnut-topped desk, just a battered filing cabinet and a scuffed desk and a glass contraption for making coffee. And that picture in its frame that she could no longer see because it had been turned face down.
Completely calm, completely unimpressed by journalistic credentials. Matthew Webster had waited until she was close. ‘Look,’ she’d said, leaning across the desk and appealing, without calculation, direct. ‘Look, I know what this man has done, all right? I’ve talked to the people he’s damaged. I know.’ A flicker of something, his broad hands on the table top and his glance just skating towards the photograph face down on the desk. ‘And I think you know, too,’ Gill said then, sitting back in the plastic chair.
And then, with a funny little movement, it was done: he was going to let her in. She still didn’t know why but he had been ready. He hadn’t spilled, though. Nothing hasty: that wasn’t, she had worked out by then, in Matt Webster’s make-up.
He’d given out information, he told her a name. Told her she couldn’t ever quote him but he knew what she was looking for. He knew who.
‘I have to respect the privacy of the teaching
staff. But monitoring internet usage is part of the job, yes.’
‘The job must have grown, since you’ve been doing it, how long, twenty years?’
‘Almost,’ he said, raising his head to meet her eye. ‘You couldn’t use it to stream Lord of the Rings when I started, or for gaming.’
‘Or downloading porn, or accessing dodgy sites.’
‘Nor that.’ He nodded, calm enough but his face was in shadow. ‘So. I have to protect individuals – but my job is also to protect the integrity of the server. So under certain circumstances I have to look.’
‘Am I right in thinking,’ Gill said carefully, ‘that you can tell if someone had accessed the dark web.’ She didn’t need to ask him if he knew what the dark web was: the flip side of the internet, where snuff movies and suicide sites and bomb instructions and child pornography lived, invisible to the ordinary man. A collection of websites that existed on an encrypted network and couldn’t be found using traditional search engines. Matt Webster would know. And he did.
‘There are clues, yes,’ he said. ‘Proxy servers, special search engines that get you in there. You have to download them – there are certain visible sites that lead you there. Yes. I mean …’ and he paused, looking up again, his face clear and untroubled. ‘If you really know what you’re doing you can cover your traces completely. But he doesn’t. They don’t.’
He struck her then and even more forcibly now, as a man who knew what he thought. A man who was certain. They were sometimes dangerous, they very often rubbed Gill up the wrong way, being told things by a man did tend to get her goat automatically – but she had stopped herself, looking at Matt Webster, listening to the way he talked. Quiet. Considered.
The name he gave her was Alan Timpson.
‘I think – well, in Dr Carmichael’s absence, anyway – you could find him useful. They’re very good friends. Go back a long way.’
What We Did_A gripping, compelling psychological thriller with a nail-biting twist Page 25