‘I think Timpson’s taken the laptop,’ she said, ‘because he thinks it recorded him trying to intimidate me. What if he sees what happened to— What if he sees what I did? To him. The images.’
‘You mean the CCTV was on and you didn’t erase the footage?’ Carrie stared in disbelief.
Bridget just shook her head. ‘It’s been on the blink for more than a year,’ she said. ‘I got used to not looking at it. Laura forgot to tell me. We’re not a high-risk operation at the shop, it’s a little backstreet place.’ The irony of that wasn’t lost on her. It felt pretty high risk now.
Carrie sat beside her. ‘So you think it wasn’t just vandalism? You think it was someone breaking in to find the computer?’
‘That’s what’s worrying me,’ said Bridget. ‘He might have seen himself on the CCTV, or he might have worked it out later. Or he might just want to know what I know.’
‘And made it look like vandalism? Matt said—’ Carrie broke off. She meant the smell of urine. Bridget couldn’t imagine Timpson doing that. She didn’t want to imagine it.
‘Tell me it’s password protected,’ said Carrie.
If he saw it all, on the laptop.
‘The password—’ she said, ‘I never changed it. It’s password.’
Carrie raised her eyes to heaven. ‘Bridge—’ she began, then gave up. ‘I know where he lives,’ she said, instead. ‘I’ll go over there. Not you, me.’
‘You know where Alan Timpson lives?’ Bridget didn’t understand.
‘Pancakes!’ Matt was calling up the stairs. ‘Hey, you two.’ Was he angry? She couldn’t tell any more. Then his footsteps, he was coming up. Bridget grabbed the box of Tampax, thrust them at Carrie and went out to meet him.
Matt stood there with his hand on the banister, looking up at her. ‘All right?’ he said warily. She nodded, and he turned to go back down ahead of her. ‘The police say they’ll come along to the shop this afternoon,’ he said quietly, when they got to the bottom.
‘They called?’ Bridget hadn’t heard the phone. Above them Carrie padded across the landing.
‘I called them,’ said Matt. ‘For the insurance, you need to report it to the police.’ There was something in the way he looked at her that made her feel cold. Was he turning her in? He pushed open the kitchen door and there was the bright kitchen, the table laid and Finn with a pan in his hand.
‘They wanted to come straight away,’ Matt said, easily. ‘But I told them this afternoon would be fine.’
Pacing the mauve room, Gill was on her third cup of black tea: all it was doing was making her feel jittery. It certainly didn’t feel like a detox. She pulled back the curtains to look over the town’s rooftops. Past a block of light-industrial development, past a church spire and the curve of a ring road she could just see a sliver of grey estuary. The big eastern sky was on the same spectrum, watercolour grey smudged with charcoal.
She was trying to guess the password. Hers was the name of her first dog. She’d called him Genius because he was so dim. So Genius72 was her password, the dog plus the year of her birth.
For more than an hour last night she had waited to see if Bridget Webster’s sister was going to leave, sitting on the porch to get out of the rain while the cold garden dripped around her. Thinking time: sometimes you needed pointless waiting to get your head together. Waiting for her to leave not because she didn’t want to talk to the girl – well, Gill calculated the sister would be more than thirty, no more a girl than Gill was – but because she’d learned from long experience that you had to divide to rule. The two of them together would have clammed up.
One or both of them would go, Gill assumed, because after all, this wasn’t their house, was it? The cleaner might live in – and if she did there would be plenty of reasons for Gill to talk to her – but Anthony Carmichael wouldn’t want her having girlfriends over, that was for sure. Gill had been about to give up when she heard the voices in the hall and had scurried round the back to wait. Bloody soaked, by then, so cold she couldn’t feel her feet. She’d waited for five more minutes, to be sure, before knocking. Not ringing, knocking, soft and persistent.
There was something in the cleaner’s face as she opened the door that suggested to Gill she’d almost been expecting her. Magdalena: standing at the grey window looking out over the sea, now Gill knew her name, and plenty more. Magdalena had sighed, taking in her dripping hair, her soaked feet, and let her in. Almost immediately she had hissed sharply at Gill to take off her shoes, her coat and leave them at the door, then led her across pale creamy carpet into a big kitchen.
The kitchen was very clean but it smelled. Cleaning products with something nasty underneath. A bachelor’s kitchen, where butter goes rancid in the fridge. On the table was a bottle of vodka that looked like it had just come out of a freezer, and a tumbler that looked like it had been emptied at least once already. Saying nothing Magdalena had reached for another glass and poured two drinks.
The girl drank like she’d been born drinking: it had been hard to keep up. The bottle was two-thirds full when they sat down, and Gill calculated from the way Magdalena started straight in talking, staring down into her glass, that she’d drunk the other third herself. Quite possibly in the five minutes since she said goodbye to Bridget Webster’s kid sister.
Sitting there with the glass between her hands, she stared at Gill and said, ‘You a journalist, right? Interested in bad things?’ Then didn’t look at her again, just talked.
Not about Anthony Carmichael, although it was in a way all about him.
Gill knew how to listen. If you didn’t know how to do that, you would get nowhere in the job. Plenty of people had never been listened to, and they were just waiting to tell it all, to sound off to another human being. As if it might somehow make sense, that way, what they’d suffered, what they’d had to endure. Some of them never told, they waited and waited for the one who would listen but she – or he – never came along.
And Magdalena had had to endure plenty. Her childhood in the Ukraine, her father casually violent, the boyfriends who had passed her around, the one who’d broken her collar bone and her left arm when he found her with a girl. She reached for another glass of vodka, and drained it. The next boyfriend who’d seemed pretty OK with her being bisexual, or gay: supportive. So enthusiastic, even, that he’d told her about London, how great it was for people who were different, he’d found her a job, all legal. And brought her over as a sex worker. Another glass of vodka. She had escaped from a house on the edge of London wearing dirty bedroom slippers and a shell suit, the only clothes she’d been given, with twenty quid a punter who’d felt sorry for her had given her. Then Magdalena looked up at her with a smile that came nowhere near her eyes.
‘And now I am cleaner for Dr Carmichael.’ Eyes flat.
Looking out over the small, grey town Gill wondered, the vodka still numbing certain bits of her, if everything was relative. To Magdalena the abuse of a child was just on a spectrum, so was it down to what you were used to? To what was – or appeared to be – tolerated in your society? As far as Magdalena was concerned it was tolerated here, on this tight-arsed little island where people were so quick to pull their curtains shut. Was it down to Gill to decide what was right and what was wrong? Someone had to.
Magdalena had begun to tell her about Timpson when there was less than an inch of vodka in the bottle. If this had been a police interview none of it would have counted, but she showed no sign of being drunk. She stood and paced in the bright white kitchen, with its sour smell: she paced as far as the fridge door and pulled it open, searching. Peering past her Gill managed to see something wrapped in cling film in a lower drawer. Meat or fish, and probably the source of the smell. ‘Maybe we go out and get beer?’ said Magdalena thoughtfully. But then she was back at the table sitting down and the last of the vodka was in her glass. Gill hadn’t asked her what Bridget Webster’s little sister had been doing there yet, but this was interesting. This was what she wa
s after.
‘He is the one making the websites,’ she said, her voice flat, her eyes flatter. Looking only at the glass, rolling the liquid from side to side. ‘Mr Timpson. Dr Carmichael thinks he is too good for that, he is the intellectual.’ She turned the word into three syllables, contemptuously. ‘Also he likes something different. The girl in his house, the power, he makes her impressed with him. She is in his room, that room.’ She jerked her head back to the music room.
‘Is there one at the moment? A girl now, he brings here?’ Gill knew she shouldn’t interrupt, first rule of the good listener, but this couldn’t wait. Magdalena had the rim of the glass against her teeth. She nodded. ‘She came looking for him, last week, when he didn’t contact for the next lesson.’
‘She’s a pupil?’
‘I don’t think he fuck her yet,’ said Magdalena. ‘I think he needs long time. He enjoys that, getting her in the right place, so she can’t say no.’
‘It’s called grooming,’ said Gill, unable to sound calm, unable to keep the anger down.
‘I know,’ said Magdalena. And then quick, she darted her head low across the table, resting her chin on her knuckles and staring at the empty glass. Then up at Gill. ‘So?’ she said, her voice light and dangerous, leaning forward.
Tread carefully, thought Gill.
‘So Timpson is the computer man?’ she said. ‘How do you know all this, Magdalena? What have you seen?’ But there was too much accusation in her voice. Magdalena stayed where she was a second, then straightened up. Looked a long moment at Gill’s notebook, that had sat on the table all this time, unopened, then at Gill, tilting her head to examine her. Saying nothing, hostile. Then she spoke.
‘Listen,’ she said, level, but dangerous, rage very near the surface. ‘You. Listen. Try to understand. My father was never not drunk. Ne-ver. From six o’clock in the morning. You learn to keep your head down, this is good English phrase. Keep your head down. You wait, and wait, until it makes you sick to wait more.’ Stared at Gill. ‘I hate this man, Mr Carmichael,’ she said. ‘I hate his fat friend, Mr Al-lan. You want me to talk to the police, tell them about him? Foreigner? Greedy foreigner, how much is she involved. Sure. Sure.’
Gill held her angry gaze a long moment. ‘All right,’ she said, at last. ‘Yes. I get it. But you can talk to me. If you tell me the truth, I am going to believe you. You understand that?’ Magdalena’s eyes narrowed, then she shrugged. ‘Yes.’
‘So where do you think he’s gone?’ said Gill. ‘Mr Carmichael.’
And the dark in Magdalena’s eyes turned softer, deeper, a look of satisfaction. She smiled, stood, swiped her coat off the back of a chair. ‘I don’t think,’ she said. ‘I know.’
Gill was on her feet too, but Magdalena was at the door and speaking first, cheerful. ‘We get the beer, now?’
Now the morning after Gill wondered if it could even be true, any of it. The last fifteen years no more than her own deranged obsession. She’d sat up with a vulnerable girl until midnight feeding her alcohol, encouraging her to dredge up secrets or inventions. And the girl was as crazy as a snake, too, a whole bag of snakes, dangerous, spiky, vicious, funny as well as vulnerable, born to lie just like she was born to drink.
By the time they’d left the bar, Magdalena shouldering a bag and walking off God knew where at long past midnight down gleaming black streets but not, at least, back towards Carmichael’s house, Gill had had enough to drink herself to believe in it all, everything Magdalena had said. But that didn’t mean it hung together, or made any kind of sense, and Magdalena had been drunk, and she was still a kid, under it all.
All Gill knew for sure, as she gazed beyond the town at that little slice of the real world – the old world, the grey-green sea – the single new piece of solid information that had found its way into her notebook, was Alan Timpson’s address. He lived on site, some administrative responsibility in the university. ‘Old house,’ said Magdalena with a sneer, ‘like janitor for the university? That place.’ An old house in the shadow of the towers. That place: Rose Hill.
When housekeeping knocked half an hour later Gill was still there, sitting at the flimsy hotel desk in her knickers and a sweater, frowning over the laptop. She looked up at the woman in the door with her little paper cap and apron and trolley full of cleaning things, saw her but didn’t see her. Mumbled something then was back at the computer.
Try again. Before the battery dies, try one more time.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Carrie had gone. Having bolted her pancakes, muttering about people to see, she’d flung open the back door and gone. Jumped on the bike, hissing through a puddle then out on to the road beyond the close without looking.
And now she wasn’t answering her phone.
Bridget sent a message. Don’t go near bloody Timpson, all right? Just stay away, he mustn’t know any more about us than he does already.
Matt was in the garage and had been since she’d gone. When Bridget went out with a cup of coffee she found him frowning over his own bicycle in the grey morning light, taking it apart, and he took the coffee from her without a word.
Finn needs me, in the kitchen. That was what she’d have said if Matt had started to ask her anything but he didn’t: probably because he knew she’d have an excuse to run.
The kitchen table was covered with green tissue paper and Finn was grappling with the teddy, trying to make the paper’s edges meet around it.
‘I can’t carry it like this,’ he said, sheepish.
‘When are you meeting her, did you say?’ Making him hold the paper in place she nipped off a bit of sellotape and fastened it deftly. Folded, turned. How many birthdays and Christmas eves had she sat up late, surrounded by ribbons and paper, Matt shaking his head and saying, you’ve gone overboard, as usual.
Only so many of those left before Finn left home. The thought upset her. Frightened her. The single present exchanged, her and Matt, then just a normal day. If they were lucky.
Finn set the present down on a chair, it peered over the table and he regarded it helplessly. ‘I’m meeting her at three and we’re going for a walk,’ he said, and she saw him flush at the thought of walking hand in hand with a giant teddy in between them. ‘It was Isabel’s idea,’ he said again, helpless.
‘I like Isabel,’ said Bridget, wondering if the teddy was Isabel’s attempt to sabotage the relationship, or genuine. All so innocent, just kids with toys. It felt like a distraction from the fluttering panic she could feel rising, rising, always there. ‘Did you get along?’
‘She’s good at music,’ said Finn, and she saw him relax at the change of subject, shoulders dropping. ‘But she doesn’t want to do classical, she wants to be in a band, she’s fighting with her parents over it.’
‘Good for her,’ said Bridget, wonderingly: she’d almost forgotten about Isabel’s connection with Carmichael, now she was safe. Forgotten that it had been Isabel, unknowing, who had started all this.
‘She asked about you,’ said Finn and then the fluttering grew faster, harder, it beat against her chest. ‘Did you play the violin once?’
‘A long time ago,’ said Bridget, turning to gather the detritus of present-wrapping from the table, avoiding his eye. She didn’t ask how Isabel knew because there was only one explanation. Carmichael must have said something to her. She felt cold. ‘She should do what she wants,’ she said. ‘Tell her that when you see her next.’
But Finn lost interest: he had his head in the cupboard where they kept plastic bags, had hauled a big crumpled one out and was manhandling the teddy into it. ‘She said it would make Phoebe laugh,’ he said. ‘I mean, I—’ he stopped, uncertain and she felt a rush of warmth, love, at the same time so far distant from these two, so young still, so innocent.
‘She’ll love it,’ she said, hugging him awkwardly with the stuffed bag between them.
Would she save him? His Phoebe? When it all went tits up. Like Matt saved me, thought Bridget. Or not quite. Not qu
ite.
You had to save yourself, didn’t you? In the end. And now she couldn’t afford to panic, or to think that way, in terms of needing saving.
But when she released him there was Matt standing in the kitchen door, watching them, the three of them held in suspension for just a second, two – then Bridget’s phone rang on the table and the spell was broken. Matt went to the sink to wash his hands, Bridget released Finn and picked up the phone.
It was Laura, though she didn’t know if she would have recognised her voice if the phone hadn’t shown the name.
Laura was panicking; she was frightened. ‘Did you read my messages?’
‘Laura—’ Matt heard her alarm and glanced across. ‘Hold on, stay calm, Laura,’ said Bridget, spreading her hands to him, helplessly, the phone under her chin. ‘What – it’s been a bit of a hectic night, I only glanced at the messages.’ Shit, she thought, shit, a combination of guilt and alarm. She’d put Laura to one side; she’d thought, that can wait, but it couldn’t. It was the same, anyway, wasn’t it? Nick abusing Laura, another violent manipulative arsehole wanting his own way. ‘What?’ she said, keeping her voice level, making sure Laura knew, she was listening. ‘Tell me what’s happened.’
Finn was edging out of the kitchen; he was gone. She heard him on the stairs.
‘We had a row. Me and Nick.’ Laura’s breathing was ragged. ‘He went out, in the middle of the night, he hasn’t come back.’
‘Did he hurt you?’ Laura’s breathing was heavy. ‘Laura. Did he hurt you?’
‘No,’ she mumbled. No way of knowing if that was true: Bridget bet it wasn’t. Laura was still talking. ‘He hasn’t come to your house, has he?’
‘My house? Why would he come to my house?’ Matt stood very still at the sink, his hands in a tea towel.
What We Did_A gripping, compelling psychological thriller with a nail-biting twist Page 28