How many victims of abuse had Gill spoken to, over the years? Many. Almost none of it had been written up: they didn’t want people to know, there were injunctions, court cases, libel threats. They were bullied and intimidated. And they were ashamed. They fought to restore normality to their lives and they didn’t want that fucked up. Everything in the way Bridget Webster conducted herself in her small shop showed Gill that she was one of them: it was in the way she walked, the way she stood, the way she listened. The way she turned round too quickly sometimes.
Gill took her hands away from the table edge and with one finger touched the screen: you’ve done it, she wanted to say. You’ve got away.
And then on the screen the door of the shop opened and a man came in with a child. Not quite a child, somewhere between girl and woman, with light, flossy hair, a child on an adventure. The man was Anthony Carmichael.
He walked towards her and she backed away.
And then Gill found she couldn’t look: on the next table the kid’s head turned as she stood up and turned away. It was almost dark outside, that damp, saturated winter dark, the sun gone south too early, she left the computer open on the table and walked to the opposite corner of the student bar. The place had filled up while she was glued to the screen so now only the kid was watching her. She walked to where she could see down the hill to Alan Timpson’s house.
A light was on in the tall gable window, not bright, and a figure standing there, dimly outlined, very still.
Chapter Thirty-One
Isabel had gabbled. Matt stepped between them almost instantly, taking her by the shoulders, but Bridget had put up a hand to him, gently.
‘Let me,’ she said. Isabel had turned to her gratefully.
‘What’s this about Finn, first?’ she said, searching her face.
‘I was just with him at the country park, I was there with my mum and dad and I saw him.’
‘But you didn’t see Phoebe.’ Bridget spoke flatly, not daring to sound how she felt. Her terror might frighten the girl to speechlessness.
Isabel looked at her. Opened her mouth. Closed it again. She shook her head. ‘He was just – wandering about,’ she said. ‘He’d had a message from – from Phoebe saying her parents had gone away for the weekend so he could come to her house.’
It was as though there was a hum in the room, at a low level, as though some electrical appliance was malfunctioning, as though somewhere things were going wrong. Matt took a step towards the two of them, still standing in the doorway, Isabel still with her red anorak on, pale and tense. Neither had even sat down, a chair Bridget had pulled out sat forlorn and forgotten: Isabel hung her head, hanks of rain-darkened hair obscuring her face.
‘Just because you haven’t met her doesn’t mean—’ But Bridget broke off, hands at her face. Isabel raised her head reluctantly. She glanced quickly at Matt. The hum wouldn’t go away, it crackled and fizzed. Bridget muttered into her hands, ‘You said she was pretty.’
Isabel flushed. ‘I—’ she opened her mouth and Bridget looked from her to Matt and back again, pleading silently with them both, Take this away. Take it away.
‘Isabel?’
Isabel had a hand to her mouth, shaking her head, no, no, and she was pale now, blue-pale as milk. She whispered, ‘No, I just—’ so quietly desperate that Bridget had to lean in, had to restrain the impulse to take hold of her and shake. ‘I didn’t want you to think I wanted to be his girlfriend, so I said, so I pretended—’ Still whispering and despite herself Bridget nodded, understood, and at the same time it was as if a great mass had shifted, engulfing them.
‘You’ve never met this girl,’ she stated.
Isabel shook her head, mute. ‘I was embarrassed, when you mentioned her—’ The flush returned, briefly. ‘I didn’t even know he had a girlfriend then. Until you said.’
And had hated to hear of her existence, had felt despair, did Bridget remember that feeling? The tiniest echo of a long-ago emotion, from the days before Carmichael, a boy, once upon a time, who hadn’t known she existed, how could she have forgotten? That once she had been normal, a normal kid. A different world. And to cover up, Isabel had invented.
‘He told you about her, though?’ She was holding Isabel now, by the upper arms, as Matt paced behind them, barely containing himself. ‘He went out with her last week, he got in late,’ she said, panicking properly now. ‘He did.’ Seeking confirmation in the girl’s face.
‘When we went out yesterday he told me about her,’ Isabel said, haltingly. Anguished. ‘How much they loved each other, how she liked the same movies and computer games, she dresses up as some character, she sends him pictures. But when they were supposed to meet—’ Staring into her face Bridget felt herself nodding, yes – but then Isabel broke off. And Matt was there between them, no longer able to contain himself.
She released Isabel and stepped back, and Matt took her place. Not touching. Careful not to. ‘When they were supposed to meet,’ he said. ‘She didn’t turn up.’
Bridget picked her phone from the table and dialled Finn’s number. It went straight to answerphone. She raised her head, staring. She felt very cold: her fingers as she punched in a message, call home now urgent felt like they didn’t belong to her. Finn.
‘Hold on,’ he said quietly. ‘Isabel?’ She nodded, mesmerised. ‘Hold on. You haven’t met this Phoebe, you haven’t seen her or heard her voice.’ Isabel shook her head, mute. Matt took a deep breath. ‘Has he? Has he actually met her? It’s not – is it just online?
Isabel was trembling now, holding on to her own elbows in an attempt to stop it. ‘She couldn’t come, when she was supposed to,’ she said. ‘Finn said – her dad is very strict. That’s what he told me.’ She looked around the room, desperate for escape.
‘That’s why she didn’t come to eat with us,’ said Bridget, numb. ‘That was what he told us—’ and she was already on the stairs, stumbling halfway up and turning, hanging on to the banister. Matt was on her heels, she heard something ragged in his breathing behind her that was almost a sob.
They both knew where they were going. Finn’s room.
Posters on the walls, a heist movie poster, a car, a man standing arms folded with a gun, and one corner of the poster curling away from the wall. Socks on the floor, a heaped towel.
Bridget stood back in the doorway and let Matt go ahead: he was seated in front of the computer before she could catch her breath, he was bringing up a screen.
‘How are you going to—’ she began but he just raised a hand, intent.
Isabel called, halfway up the stairs and reluctantly Bridget went back. She was holding her phone in her hand, a talisman, waiting for it to come alive with his voice. Nothing.
Tears brimmed in the girl’s big, light eyes, so pale you could see through her. ‘I’m so – I’m so sorry—’
‘Come here,’ said Bridget, and put an arm round her, drew her down to the top step and sat beside her. She held on tight. ‘It’s not your fault,’ she said, a lump in her throat like a stone. Inside her it pounded, hammered, the only thing that mattered. The only thing. ‘Can you tell me anything else? How did they meet?’ Behind them in Finn’s room Matt clattered at the keyboard.
‘They both played an online game,’ Isabel said, desperate. ‘I don’t know too much – I don’t play it. They have avatars. You know, like characters.’ She rubbed her eyes, trying to think. Raised her head, her face clearing a little. ‘Well, I mean,’ and she hesitated, ‘they’re on Facebook, right? They have conversations on Facebook, I mean everyone does. You’d have to get to his page but—’
Bridget jumped up, but Matt had got there ahead of her, she heard a muttered exclamation and as she got to the door he was looking up at her, past the screen.
‘He’s logged out,’ he said. ‘I need to guess his password.’
‘Facebook,’ said Bridget. But he was already there, the screen was up, the Facebook homepage was asking for Finn’s login details.
‘First place I looked,’ said Matt. ‘I didn’t think he’d even have a password, you know Finn, I mean, Christ, it’s my job,’ Matt never talked like this, never swore. ‘I’ve talked to him about security but he’s just a kid, this is his own home, I didn’t – I thought—’
‘They grow up,’ Bridget whispered. ‘They grow up.’ She stood behind him, willing the page to open.
’I thought he’d have the password saved on the computer, I thought he wouldn’t have listened to me about that, either.’
‘He listens to you,’ she said. ‘It’s not you.’ So softly perhaps Matt didn’t hear – and he was staring so hard at the screen, trying to will a word into the little box. ‘Catfish,’ he said.
‘What?’ He looked up at her. ‘A catfish,’ he repeated. ‘Someone online pretending to be something they’re not.’
Isabel was in the doorway. ‘His avatar was called moonshine,’ she said. They both stared.
Matt typed the words, Bridget saw him making himself go slowly. Moonshine. Pressed, return – and the page transformed, it bloomed photographs, messages, emojis, advertisements. Matt went unerringly to the chat icon, clicked. Private messages.
The first one was from Isabel. Sorry, it said.
Isabel spoke. ‘But I know where—’ wonderingly, something occurring to her.
But they were both focused on the screen, she was peripheral: the next chat was with Phoebe. They aren’t back till late, it said. Can’t wait.
Matt’s finger moved across the touchpad, the cursor hovering over her name. Phoebe. Click on that and she’ll show herself.
‘I know where she lives,’ said Isabel distinctly.
A profile had come up on the screen, and a photograph, but in that moment they weren’t looking at the screen any more, although Isabel was. ‘I knew she’d be pretty,’ she said, disconsolate.
‘What did you say?’ said Bridget, stepping away from Matt towards her. ‘You said you knew where she lived?’
‘This girl’s not Finn’s age,’ said Matt, frowning.
‘This girl—’ but Bridget was trying to stop herself taking hold of Isabel and shaking her. The face on the screen still a blur.
‘Where does Phoebe live?’ she said. ‘Did he tell you?’ Isabel flinched, trembling and Bridget made an effort. ‘Please, Isabel,’ she said. And the girl nodded, slowly.
‘Somewhere in the university grounds,’ she said, fumbling her words, frightened, desperate to do the right thing. ‘It’s why he was in the country park. Her dad works there. The strict dad. Finn told me not to – he didn’t want you to know that. He wanted her to be just his thing. Private.’
‘Her father works at the university?’ Matt was bewildered now, twisting in the chair to look at her.
Bridget was cold, cold to her bones. Private. Just our thing, just between us. She stood up, reached for Matt. ‘Stay here, now,’ she said to Isabel, because it seemed the only safe thing to say. ‘You stay right here.’
The girl on the screen was Magdalena.
It was as if Gill saw, but didn’t see, what was happening down there. Her focus was somewhere else: a stage set was being prepared but the main event was going on somewhere off to the side.
Someone on a bicycle with lights made their slow way up the hill. A car left the car park. She saw the shape moving across the foot of the hill; she even moved closer to the glass to identify it in the dark. A boy with a shock of hair, carrying something big and awkward. Soon he would draw level with the house. Upstairs someone drew curtains.
The main event was being replayed in Gill’s head, jerky, fuzzy figures in black and white advancing and receding on a screen. Could she un-see it, now? However much she wanted to.
Could Bridget Webster have pleaded self-defence? Bridget Webster, Bridget O’Neill as once was, when it mattered, when all this began. Could Bridget Webster, upstanding citizen, wife and mother, could she have gone to the police and spilled it all?
A plastic bag over the man’s head. No.
It wasn’t on screen, her doing that. But she had walked away from him sprawled half in, half out of the kitchen, she had walked jerky as a doll, across the floor of her small shop and through a door in the wall opposite the little kitchen. She had come back, with something balled up in her hand. Then she was on her knees: you could see the soles of her shoes as she knelt – and you could see a small spasmodic movement in one of his legs. Once, twice.
Anyone might have come in. Anyone might have paused, hand cupped either side of their head, and looked inside. Gill might have. And what would she have done, if she had?
I wonder what she did with him?
Someone’s head turned, a girl with dreadlocks eyeing her sidelong, and Gill realised she’d said it out loud. She smiled, stiff, but the dreadlocked girl had already lost interest. Gill pondered her conscience. Did it make her a bad person, that she looked at a man dying and felt nothing?
The laptop sat there, humming softly, waiting for her. The kid on the next table would want his charger cable back, and she had to get back to the CCTV stream, to know what happened next. But she didn’t move.
She hadn’t quite felt nothing. She’d felt glad.
Below her the door to Timpson’s house opened, a rectangle of light in the darkness.
Chapter Thirty-Two
They were in the van, the wipers flogging fast in heavy rain. The road ahead was a blur: all Bridget could see was the patchwork of letters and images that was Finn’s computer screen.
She was doing the driving because he was going to call the police. They took a second to agree on that. Less than a second. She was being careful; she was so tense her hands on the wheel felt as though they’d seized up. Beside her Matt was on the phone to the police. She had to make herself breathe: in, out. She couldn’t forget Isabel’s face. They’d left her sitting at their kitchen table, pale with fear.
‘No,’ Matt repeated into the mobile, and under a veneer of patience his voice was hard as iron, and angry. Be careful, Matt. ‘I work with him. I believe him to be a danger,’ he repeated. ‘Don’t you understand?’ Be careful. If he made them angry it would slow things down. ‘My son has been groomed, and has gone missing.’
She’d started to say it as they closed the van doors, as she turned the key in the ignition.
Reversing carefully, she began to say, ‘This is all my—’ He’d stopped her mid-sentence.
They were at the junction now and indicating, because there was no time to stop the car to talk.
‘If you blame yourself – if we start blaming ourselves, or each other—’ Matt said, holding the mobile in his hand so tight his knuckles were white, and making her look at him. ‘It won’t end. It’ll never end. So – don’t. You are not to blame for anything.’
‘I killed him,’ she said. ‘I should have been looking after Finn. You don’t know what I’ve done.’
Matt’s face turned towards her in the dark. ‘Who?’ he said, but she could hear from his voice he knew who.
‘I killed him, the fucking bastard,’ and she heard her voice rise, as though it belonged to someone else; it soared, it rejoiced.
‘You killed him.’ And Matt spoke so quietly she didn’t know, in that suspended instant she had no idea what he was thinking, or what he would do next. I killed him and Carrie and me – we – And then it all crashed down, the high joyful song in her ears, all the rejoicing. ‘I should have been looking after Finn,’ she said, in horror.
This was where it came out, then. In the dark, cramped interior of her van in the smell of diesel, with the windscreen wipers going. This was the confessional, this was the police interview room.
‘You were looking after Finn,’ said Matt, and she could feel him looking at her, she glanced then quickly back. ‘I know you were. Just drive.’ And he began to dial the police.
Just like that, it was done.
Round the ring road, traffic hissing in the rain, the streetlights yellow in puddles, people going about their ordinary li
ves, waiting at pedestrian crossing and bus stops.
A truck pulled out in front of them, long and heavy and slow. It seemed to take whole minutes to engage its gears, as it slowed, accelerated, stopped. It was dirty: someone had scrawled clean me on the rear doors. Clean me? Bridget wanted to blow it up. So fucking slow.
Beside her Matt was grinding his teeth as the police were asking endless questions: she could hear the click of his jaw. He repeated Alan Timpson’s name and address over and over, he told them they were on their way there. They put him on hold, and he hung up.
‘They’ve got Nicholas Barnwell,’ he said, the mobile clasped in both hands, like he wanted to smash it down somewhere. ‘Found him drunk. He’s admitted breaking the window.’
‘Poor Laura,’ she said automatically, then jerked back, to now. To the black terror they were driving through, the rain sideways against the windows and the truck slowing, again on the climb. Almost stationary. Clean me. ‘Why didn’t I look at what was happening, right there at home?’
‘You know why,’ said Matt. ‘Neither of us looked and you had more excuse than me. But it doesn’t matter. What matters is getting Finn back.’
She edged out, to look past the truck. The towers were up there, dead ahead, blinking red in the dark rainswept sky, something coming the other way but far enough off, far enough. Fuck it. She pulled out, the lights flaring, glittering in the rain, her foot down and the tyres screeching for a purchase. And suddenly they were past. The oncoming car blared its horn, a dazzle of lights, a brief glimpse of a pale angry face thrust towards them and after it had gone for a second the van held only stunned silence.
They turned across the base of the towers, bumping down the single-track road, and then Matt spoke.
‘Rehearse it,’ he said. Her head flicked to him, startled, then back to the road. ‘Quick,’ he said, ‘go over what we’ll say happened, because we haven’t got long. The police will be there.’
She was driving as fast as she could on the narrow potholed road, and she didn’t slow down. Matt talked at her in a low voice. ‘We knew nothing until Isabel told us: we had our suspicions about Timpson and Carmichael when the journalist came looking for him but that was all. I – I recognised the picture as Carmichael’s cleaner. I dropped something at his house one time. Keep you out of it. Out of his house.’
What We Did_A gripping, compelling psychological thriller with a nail-biting twist Page 31