Laura was making an effort to be rational. ‘I don’t think he knows your address – but he thinks – he said you were causing trouble.’ She sounded strained. ‘I – I told him I didn’t have to have sex if I didn’t want to, there was a number I could call and he knew straight away you would have given it to me, I didn’t tell him. He called you a—’
‘All right,’ said Bridget, looking pleadingly at Matt. ‘I think you should call that helpline. Leave the house in case he comes back. You’re pretty sure he doesn’t know my address, right?’
‘Yes,’ said Laura, subdued now. ‘He’s only ever seen you at the shop.’
‘Right. So come here. If we’re out – it won’t be for long, and Finn’s here until after lunch.’ Matt dropped the tea towel, took a step towards her with his hand out for the phone. But the line went dead. ‘Laura?’
Matt stopped, right in front of her. ‘It’s that nutter of a husband of hers,’ she said. ‘He’s – they’ve had a row.’
‘Is she OK?’ Matt was looking at the phone.
‘I think so,’ said Bridget. She set the phone carefully on the table, face down. ‘I told her – well, you heard. I want to go to the shop right now, have a chance of getting back before she gets here. All right?’
‘I’m coming with you,’ Matt said. Calm.
She hesitated. ‘All right,’ she said.
She ran upstairs after Finn and caught him in the bathroom, in a cloud of aftershave with a towel wrapped round him.
‘Finn,’ she said, ‘You know Laura, pregnant Laura? She—’ then she stopped. Not fair on him. Looked at him, helpless.
‘Mum?’ he said, puzzled. ‘Is everything all right? I don’t have to go and see Phoebe till later. I don’t have to go at all if you need me to help. Mum.’ And for a moment she didn’t have a single word to say to him, her big boy. ‘Mum.’
He knew her so well. He still had the child’s responses under there, when he was small, he used to hold her face on either side and examine her, he always knew when she was sad or anxious. I wished that on him, thought Bridget. Now she only wanted to go back and start again.
What to tell, what to withhold? If her child had been a girl, if she’d had a girl, what would Bridget be telling her? It suddenly seemed important. ‘You be careful, Finn,’ she said abruptly. ‘You need to make sure you end up with the right one.’
He looked startled. ‘Never mind,’ she said quickly, ‘just me being daft. Look – Laura might come over, if she gets here before we’re back can you make her a cup of tea?’
‘Sure,’ he said immediately obedient, happy to be asked.
Matt was waiting in the car, grim-faced. As he drove she felt the fear start up again, shifting like a sea inside her, of the distance between them: of the thought that Matt might ever cease to love her. And as if he couldn’t stand the silence either he turned the radio on, midway through a news report.
They were talking about the missing boy. A body has been found.
The rain had stopped: the world beyond the windscreen wet and grey. Bridget couldn’t talk, she couldn’t open her mouth. Awaiting identification.
Matt turned and said, ‘They called me, you know.’ Indicating to turn across the ring road’s Sunday traffic, he was pale and focused. ‘From the sailing club. About the dinghy. They said you’d been out there, when was it, Tuesday, Wednesday?’
And her terror was complete, it opened like a flower to swallow her up.
‘Thursday,’ she finally managed. ‘I went there on Thursday. It was supposed to be a surprise.’
She could tell him. The cliff edge was there in front of her, the dark water below them.
‘You should have told them that,’ Matt said, calm but still pale. ‘They were calling to arrange collection.’ He leaned down to turn the sound up.
Bridget sat back against the headrest, the world beyond the windows a grey blur and a weird ringing in her ears, and for a moment or two she couldn’t work out what the report was saying. Then she could. Heathland to the north of the town, a wooded area.
The body hadn’t been found at the reservoir, after all. It had been found in woodland. Relatives have been informed.
Relatives. Woodland? Then it dawned on her, in a rush, that the body that had been found was of the missing boy, after all. Not Carmichael. They’d called off the divers at the reservoir. Relief flooded her, quickly followed by shame. A boy was dead. A face in the newspaper.
The dead boy still hadn’t been named but they were talking to the neighbours of the missing child. A foregone conclusion. In a daze Bridget listened to the voices, kind, worried, anxious. A good boy, always on his bike when he was smaller.
She glanced sideways at Matt, unreadable behind the wheel as they turned into the alley behind the shop, and bumped slowly up to the end. Were they safe? Not by a long chalk.
He pulled up and turned the engine off. They sat a second in silence. ‘Aren’t you going to get out?’ he said quietly. His arms were straight out in front of him, his hands resting on the wheel.
‘Will you wait for me here?’ Bridget tried to make it sound bright and normal.
‘If that’s what you want.’
Bridget had her hand on the door handle but she couldn’t make herself take the simple action, press the lever, open the door. Because he knew. Because what he was saying was, Keep me out of it if that’s what you want – but he knew.
‘Actually—’ she hesitated. ‘Can you come in with me?’ Not knowing if it was the right thing to do only that it was the only thing. Without him, without Matt and Finn, there was nothing. ‘I could do with a hand.’
When they got inside Matt just stood in the middle of the shop looking at the blank monitor, raised on its shelf in the corner of the shop. It was the first thing he looked at. Then the cameras, one, two, three, noting their position.
With a small shock as she looked at the clock on the wall Bridget registered that it was after one o’clock. The police would be here any minute. Half an hour at most.
‘The laptop’s gone,’ said Bridget, and it came out breathless. Then, ‘What are you thinking?’
And then he turned and looked at her. ‘Someone just threw a brick through the window and ran away,’ he said. ‘That’s what this looks like. Where should the laptop have been?’
‘Behind the till,’ she said. In the daylight, or what there was of it through the intact window, what she had thought last night was confirmed. The jewellery cabinet hadn’t been touched. Clothes still on the rails, handbags on the shelves.
‘Why would they just take your laptop?’ Matt said, just mild, just curious but there was more, she knew him too well. ‘It was old.’ He hadn’t moved from his position at the centre of the room, watching her. He wasn’t letting her off the hook.
‘Maybe because – because – it would identify them? It records the CCTV.’ The words seemed dangerous, this path was dangerous. And slowly Matt shook his head.
‘If that’s the reason—’ he stopped.
‘When – when did the police say they’d be here?’ she said, trying to divert, to forestall. But Matt didn’t seem to hear.
‘The monitor itself has a hard drive,’ he said. ‘You knew that, right?’ She shook her head slowly.
‘The images are stored there, too,’ he said, carefully. Her face gave her away, she could feel it wobble, dissolve in panic. And then Matt stepped towards her. He took her by the arms.
‘This is what we’re going to do,’ he said.
The Sunday buses were slow and irregular: the one Gill had taken went all around the houses before it made the final climb to Rose Hill, and the town fell away behind them.
It stopped beside a car park at the foot of the hill that was almost empty, but then even if it hadn’t been a bleak November Sunday Rose Hill was hardly a tourist destination. As she got out Gill registered that it was starting to rain again, big drops blown sideways by a steady wind.
Standing at the bus stop she looked uphill.
Did any of them like it here? Some must, there must be fun going on up in those towers because that was what kids were like. Stick them anywhere and they’d find the fun – unless something had gone wrong, of course. They arrived in places like this with the damage already done, invisible. They got off their trains or out of their parents’ cars with their iPod docks and their posters and their baggage, and it was sink or swim.
Perhaps it was just as well, thought Gill gloomily, that I never had any kids. Understatement of the year. I’d only worry.
A bit of movement across the piazza, but most of them in their rooms, where she could see lit windows against the sky. The daylight was going already, even though it was barely two o’clock.
Across the grass under a tree a couple was sheltering from the rain, a gawky boy with a mop of black hair, a girl looking up at him. They seemed to be having some kind of a row: the boy was holding a package, awkwardly shaped, wrapped with ribbon. A cluster of trees beyond the towers showed the slate roof of a gatehouse, the warden’s house. From way back when there’d been a crumbling manor house whose gates it guarded, torn down in the sixties. The gatehouse was where Alan Timpson lived.
Gill had known about Rose Hill before she came, a vague memory that some places left you with, through newspapers or TV reports, Isn’t that where? In this case, where a young woman had killed herself, a long time ago, when Gill was a kid. Long before Timpson or Carmichael came but it had made the university notorious, for a while.
Gill had googled Timpson, of course, once Matt had mentioned his name, and again this morning after Magdalena last night – but nothing had come up on his reputation, no rumour. Only she would have seen something sinister in Alan Timpson standing in a crowd of smiling boys in a third world country. She rubbed her shoulders, cold in the patchy rain. Lucky not to have caught her death last night.
One day, Gill thought as she skirted the foot of the hill, the internet would be turned inside out and it would all become public, all their dirty secrets exposed. All it would take was a logarithm and they wouldn’t need her any more, no one would need investigative journalists because there would be nowhere for them to hide, no encryption too strong.
She already knew what had happened: she’d only needed a look at Bridget Webster’s face for it to be confirmed. Haunted, pale, on her tiptoes to kiss her husband under Rose Hill but still looking over her shoulder for who might be watching.
Gill had seen it. But one look wasn’t all she’d got, this time. This time she might have evidence, too.
What must Bridget O’Neill have thought, after all this time, when he turned up? She knew how they responded, just to photographs of their abusers. She’d seen girls run to the toilet, their guts turned to water. She’d seen them begin to shake, while their mothers tried to comfort them.
The young couple with the teddy bear had disappeared – and then she saw the girl, marching away, on her own up the hill in a red raincoat.
The lights appeared to be off at the warden’s house. She circled it. The curtains were drawn.
She heard someone behind her.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
‘Not much else we can do,’ said the uniformed officer, grimacing as he looked round the shop. He was a bit older than Matt, and stockier, wearing a fluorescent gilet with a radio phone attached to it.
He’d knelt to examine the lump of rock first off. Useless for identification purposes, the surface too rough, but after half an hour or so on hands and knees they’d found a shard of glass with a clear fingerprint on it and levered it into an evidence bag.
‘You’d be surprised how often this happens,’ said the officer, who seemed nice enough but largely indifferent, gesturing at the splintered window. ‘And down here,’ looking up and down the lane, ‘there’s no street cameras. The print, well, could be anyone,’ he said peering down at the plastic bag. ‘Could have been someone leaning up against the window—’
‘I washed them yesterday,’ said Bridget quickly, and then he’d smiled at her briefly. Matt had been standing in the doorway, hands in his pockets, frowning down at the floor. She didn’t know if he’d ever talked to a police officer before, but she thought probably not. Once upon a time she’d have assumed he’d have told her if he had, now she wasn’t so sure. Bridget had, a couple of shoplifting incidents. Both times it had been a woman. Bridget tried as hard as she could just to be the way she’d been on those occasions, upset, but not too upset. Angry.
‘Sure, yes, well,’ said the policeman, mildly encouraging. ‘Like I say, we’ll run it through the system. If it’s someone with a criminal record then it’s a start.’
Not much else we can do. Would Alan Timpson have had a criminal record? If only. She experienced a brief white flash of something she hardly recognised: rage. Violent, passionate: send him down. Put him among the criminals. She just nodded, thoughtful, and smiled back at the policeman.
‘Lads, probably,’ said the officer, zipping up his gilet, nodding to the other one waiting for him on the cobbles, leaning against their patrol car. ‘Even if you had CCTV operational they’d just have had to pull their hoodie over their face.’ Peering back into the shop to where the CCTV monitor should have been. ‘It was only connected to the laptop, you said? Because you can get it to send the images to your mobile?’
She shook her head. ‘It had only just been fixed,’ she said, her voice descending to a mumble.
And then Matt stepped forward, head up and he was doing the talking. Quiet and calm, thanking them for their trouble.
The patrol car moved off, slowly, their officer raising a hand through the passenger window, but Matt was already on the shop phone, calling a glazier. Bridget heard him make arrangements for the man to come tomorrow first thing, she remembered as if from long ago that he’d had to do the same for the student bar. Good old Matt.
She began to sweep up the remaining glass, and when he’d hung up without a word Matt got the dustpan.
‘A good job no stock was taken,’ he said, kneeling, meticulous, picking shards out of the rug. ‘Otherwise they might have suspected you of doing it for the insurance.’ He was cool, level, practical. Bridget felt cold. She felt sick. Matt had always been practical, preferring to get on but this – this was new. Before – he would have been asking her, Are you OK? Stroking her shoulder, telling her what he thought, what he felt. He’d be angry on her behalf, that someone had done this.
This wasn’t accidental. He was refusing to do any of that, just moving things around, sorting things out. Was this what divorce felt like? When you no longer knew each other?
She went to the chimney breast where some glass had flown, the broom in her hand, her head down, and began to sweep it out carefully. All of her life she’d thought she had Carmichael in there, guiding her actions, making her the person she was but it had been Matt all along. Quietly working away to keep the ground level under her feet. It was Matt she was losing.
Three or four times on the drive home Bridget opened her mouth to say something. But she couldn’t identify the right words, not even to begin the conversation.
The house was empty: her first thought was relief, then dread. The rest of their life loomed, the silences. Matt pulled into the garage, and only then did he speak. ‘I’ll unload,’ he said.
There was a note on the kitchen table in Finn’s big untidy scrawl: Laura didn’t come, see you later, Finn. No Finn, no Carrie, just the two of them.
And then Matt was at the back door, holding it in his arms wrapped in a dustsheet. They’d put it in the back of the van before the police turned up. The CCTV monitor.
He set it down carefully. Bridget stood there with the note in her hand. ‘Finn’s gone out,’ she said. ‘Laura didn’t come. Or hasn’t yet. I hope she’s—’
He interrupted her. ‘All right,’ he said, and for what seemed the first time since they sat in bed that morning with her stonewalling, he held her gaze. ‘All right. Before we look at this. We’re going to take it slowly. You think y
ou know who smashed the window already, don’t you?’
Bridget didn’t know what she could say. ‘Yes,’ she said finally.
‘I’m not the police,’ said Matt. And then there was some colour in his face, an emotion she couldn’t identify. ‘I’m your husband.’
At that moment though he only looked to her like a man. Another man. ‘This isn’t to do with you,’ she said. Silently pleading with him, understand. ‘This is about me. About things that happened to me.’ She could feel it trying to come out – while she tried to keep it inside.
She started again. ‘I need to take responsibility for my own life,’ she said and it sounded stupid, like something people said on daytime TV. Matt’s face was stony in their little brightly lit kitchen. The kitchen she’d paced up and down in with Finn as a baby, where she’d sat with him in his high chair, coaxing him to eat. Why couldn’t those days come back? Her life come back. And again, desperate now. ‘I don’t want to involve you.’
‘I am involved,’ said Matt. Not confrontational, just simple fact. Resting the monitor on the table between them.
‘I’m going to ask you some questions,’ he said slowly. ‘And you only have to tell me the truth and it will be all right. We won’t even need to look at the CCTV because I’m going to believe everything you tell me.’
She nodded, but her throat felt constricted.
‘But it has to be true,’ said Matt. ‘You only have to answer what I ask you but it has to be true.’ He paused. ‘This is your story.’
He was ashen, her fit healthy Matt, as if the effort of confrontation was taking something terrible out of him. He spoke carefully. ‘Who do you think broke the window?’
It felt to Bridget as if she was balanced on a knife edge.
‘I think—’ she hesitated, tried to be accurate. ‘I’m frightened it was Alan Timpson.’
Matt nodded. Just once, and he didn’t ask why, nor why Timpson would want the laptop. That would be the next stage, wouldn’t it? Though he could guess. Matt knew Carmichael, and what kind of man he was. And Timpson was his friend. ‘So you think Alan Timpson has your laptop, with the CCTV images on it,’ he said.
What We Did_A gripping, compelling psychological thriller with a nail-biting twist Page 29