Is that what I’ve done?
I tell myself that it’s not. That’s not the sort of person I am, and yet, here it is. I’ve acted clinically, barely thinking at all. Act first, think later.
But there wasn’t a crime scene. Was there? If I hit something, then where’s the damage to the car? Where’s the animal – or person – from which the blood came? I looked, I really did. A person can only tamper with evidence if there’s been a crime – and there hasn’t.
I have to tell myself that.
There’s little point in going to bed now and I don’t feel tired anyway.
I head through the house into the kitchen. Olivia’s energy drinks are in the fridge. The ones that are ninety per cent sugar and called things like ‘Carnage’ and ‘Assault’. She knows I don’t approve – what reasonable parent would? – but it is what it is. She could be using worse things to get that buzz.
I think about having one, but my own addiction is a little more acceptable. I fill the coffee machine with granules and water, setting it to fizz and pop as I curl up on the sofa in the living room.
Unsurprisingly, my phone is on its last legs battery-wise. The modern ones are more addicted to power sockets than Olivia is to her energy drinks. I plug it in and then text her, keeping it straightforward and without accusation.
Hope u had a good night. Let me know if u want picking up from somewhere
There’s only one thing more valuable to teenagers than money – and that’s free lifts. Olivia failed her driving test a month ago and hasn’t rebooked it. Part of that is for financial reasons, but it’s mainly because she hasn’t handled the rejection well. The reason she failed was, of course, because of the examiner. He gave her confusing instructions, he wanted her to fail, he’d hit his quota for the day. Those sorts of things. There was little point in asking for specifics of what happened because it would be taken as implicit criticism that the reason she failed was something she did, as opposed to a crooked tester.
I scroll through our recent texts, hoping a new one will appear. A minute or so passes and there’s no reply, so I switch to the web browser instead and get back to my own predicament. I search for terms like ‘hit-and-run’, checking the Twitter feeds of the local police forces. No matter how many times I tell myself I couldn’t have hit something, someone, there’s that niggling voice at the back of my mind.
There’s nothing of any particular interest to find. A lorry driver was stopped on the motorway for his vehicle being too heavy; someone else arrested for drink-driving. That’s it. An uneventful night in the real world – certainly no reports of anyone found in a ditch. I want reassurance, but it’s early yet.
The problem is that, as I press back onto the sofa, those three words keep spinning around my mind.
Tampering with evidence.
Chapter Four
I jolt awake at the sound of something clanking onto the granite worktop in the kitchen. For a moment, I’m back in that field, confused and unsure where I am. It takes a second for me to realise I’ve fallen asleep on the sofa. My phone is on my lap, light creeping through the blinds from outside.
Dan is in the kitchen, opening and closing the fridge noisily. I wonder if he’s doing it on purpose. He must’ve walked past me sleeping on the sofa and said nothing. The tiredness is blinked away and I stretch high, my shoulders and neck clicking with grim satisfaction.
Most of our ground floor is open-plan and I continue watching as he mixes some powder into a protein mixer bottle. He shakes it up and then peers closely at the greeny-grey gloop, before popping the cap on the top and glugging down a mouthful. He’s in shorts and a tight, athletic T-shirt, with a large holdall bag on the counter.
‘Didn’t wake you, did I?’ he asks.
‘I need to get moving anyway.’
As he takes another mouthful, I check my phone quickly. There’s nothing from Olivia.
‘Did you hear from her?’ I ask.
‘She says she’s fine.’ He speaks with an invisible shrug.
‘Oh.’
The word slips out unguarded. I check my phone once more but there’s definitely no reply. Olivia always was a daddy’s girl and it’s hard not to take it personally that she’s chosen to tell her father she’s fine instead of me.
‘She says she fell asleep and forgot to text,’ Dan adds. ‘No harm done. She’ll be home later this morning.’
‘Right.’
‘I found my gym fob, by the way. I’m off for a quick hour before school.’
‘Right.’
I’m a broken record.
Dan bobs awkwardly from one foot to the other as he loops his bag onto his shoulders. ‘I’ll see you later, then.’
‘Okay.’
Neither of us make an effort to cross the room to say goodbye, let alone exchange a kiss or a hug, so that’s that. It’s been a long time since we did anything other than offer vague wishes of good days and the like. I can’t remember if it was him or me who stopped first. I can’t even remember when it happened. We always used to make sure we said a proper goodbye. It was our thing: regardless of what we had going on in our lives, at home or work, we’d find a minute or two to offer a decent farewell. Then, one day, we stopped. It’s a slippery slope after that – and we’ve been hurtling down that hill at ridiculous speed.
Dan takes another mouthful of his godforsaken vomit in a cup and then heads to the garage, whistling something out of tune.
He has become anything but a typical deputy headteacher. When I was at school a long time ago, the men in charge – for it was always men – were strict grey-haired or balding old-timers. Dan’s in his early forties and the gym is his midlife crisis. For some, it’s motorbikes or cars, travelling or women. With Dan, it’s running, weights, and those protein shakes. It’s measuring out his meals, chronicling every fitness session to see if he’s improving. It’s organised races and crack-of-dawn departures. I thought it might be a phase but that was eighteen months ago and, if anything, he’s more obsessed now. He exercises every day, sometimes twice a day. He did one of those Tough Mudder events the other month, heaving himself over barriers through the sodden earth for no reason other than to prove that he could. He’s done 10ks and the Great North Run; next he’s talking about entering the ballot to run the London Marathon. If he misses out on that, he said he might try Amsterdam or somewhere else.
Jealousy is the wrong word. I’m not jealous of him, but I suppose there is a part of me that admires the changes he’s made. He had a goal and he stuck at it – and that’s something I grudgingly respect. Grudgingly because I’ve been left behind. His previous doughy physique is now taut and lean, not that I go anywhere near it. I’m not sure when we stopped doing that, either. Our waistlines were growing old together, but now he is going backwards, leaving me by myself. I know I shouldn’t, but I resent him for that.
He does all that as well as continue to work his way up through the education system. It’s all cuts this and academy that nowadays. Government targets here, league tables there. Despite all that, he’s thriving in a career he enjoys.
I probably resent that, too.
The garage doors grind open and then closed, leaving me alone in what suddenly feels like a very empty house.
With the room to myself, I check the news websites again. After that, it’s the police feeds – but there’s no mention of a hit-and-run. It’s still early, not long after seven, but would some sort of incident be there by now?
It’s almost as if the garage is calling me and I head through the double doors and down the stairs until I’m staring at my car, hoping it’ll somehow give me answers. There are none, of course. The car is swabbed clean of anything incriminating.
Tampering with evidence.
In the daylight, last night feels like a weird dream. It’s only the fact I’m here instead of a hundred miles away from where I’m supposed to be that’s wrong.
I suppose that’s a good place to start.
I’d never heard
of The Grand Ol’ Royal Hotel before Graham offered to put me up there for the night. My boss is hardly known for his generosity, which was another reason not to turn him down when a meeting with a potential new client was arranged there.
I fiddle around with my phone’s calendar until I find the details – and then I dial.
It’s one of those annoying systems that every business seems to have nowadays. Press one for reservations, press two for the spa, press three to kick the crap out of the person who invented these automated messages. Talking to another person is too much of a chore, even though they apparently ‘value your call’. If you value it so much, try answering the damned phone!
I jab a series of numbers until the line eventually rings again and then there’s the voice of a youngish man who sounds far too sprightly for this time of the morning. He tells me I’m through to the front desk.
I can hear his fingers clacking on a keyboard as I tell him my name, explaining that I had to leave in a hurry.
‘I wanted to make sure everything was all right with the checkout,’ I add.
There’s a pause and I can hear my heart beating. It feels important.
‘Everything’s fine, Ms Denton,’ he replies. ‘I can mark you as checked out on our system.’
‘So I hadn’t checked out before?’
Another pause, a bit longer than the previous one. He must be wondering if I’m a nutter.
‘No, but, as I say, I can mark you as checked out now. Thank you for your call – most guests wouldn’t do so. It’s very highly appreciated.’
I wait for a ‘but’, though there is none, so all I can do is hang up. I suppose it clears up one thing – whenever I left the hotel, I simply left. No fuss about checking out. My overnight bag containing my belongings was in the back of the car, so I must have taken that with me. I don’t think I even unpacked.
If the hotel is a dead end, then I suppose that new client is another place to start. He’s stored in my phone under ‘Luke’, but there’s no answer when I call. There is a lot I don’t recall about last night – but I do remember his final text and it’s still there on my phone anyway.
Sry. Things got out of control and I’m not going to make it. Will hv 2 rearrange 4 another time
After driving a hundred miles and checking into a hotel for an evening meeting, it’s fair to say I wasn’t best pleased. Still, he could turn out to be a client at some point, so there’s little point in being anything other than perfectly polite. My previous reply from last night was:
No worries. These things happen.
That got no reply, so I tap out:
Hope everything is well from last night. When would you like to try again?
It’s professional and to the point. Really, I’d like to tell him what I think of his late notice. I was sitting in the hotel bar when his text arrived. My real concern is my boss, Graham. He said I can claim expenses for the hotel room but he’ll be expecting a sale.
It really has come to something when one of the highlights of my week is being able to claim something on expenses.
I give the car a final once-over and then head back into the house. Another web search for hit-and-runs proves fruitless and the part of me that believes this is all a strange, unexplained misunderstanding is starting to swell.
Graham isn’t expecting me at work until late morning but it can’t do any harm to get in early, especially as I have no sale to show for myself. I retrieve my overnight bag from the back of the car and unpack, then take time checking myself over properly in the mirror in case the blood could have somehow come from me. There’s nothing, of course. No little cuts, no unexplained bruises. I knew there wouldn’t be.
The shower makes everything feel better, the water pummelling and pounding, washing away my indiscretions – the ones I know of, and, hopefully, the ones I don’t.
There are two types of people in the world: those who attack a problem and those who try to ignore it. I’ve often fallen into that second category, hoping things will go away rather than making myself do something about it. I guess that’s why things between Dan and myself have got so bad. Neither of us particularly wanted to address the obvious and now it is probably too late.
I towel myself dry, making one final check that there are no marks or scrapes I could be missing. Still nothing. I blow-dry my hair and then dress for work, before sending one more text to Olivia, saying I’ll see her later.
There’s no reply – and also no response from Luke. I’m a pariah.
It’s only when I’m checking I have everything before I head out that I realise I’m missing my work swipe pass. It’s the shape and size of a credit card – and I usually keep it attached to my keys. Ironically, I detached it because I didn’t want to lose it at the hotel.
Losing it is probably my own fault for that cheeky remark towards Dan when he asked about his missing gym fob. I left it in the kitchen drawer yesterday before leaving for the hotel… or at least I thought I did. It isn’t there now. I even empty the entire drawer onto the countertop.
There’s far more junk inside than even I thought. Long-expired coupons for restaurants, keys for the old shed we got rid of years ago, endless receipts for goods we threw away. There’s a bit of emergency money, old shopping lists. Everything except for my work pass.
As I slide everything back inside, that niggling devil at the back of my mind only has one conclusion. It’s Dan – he’s messing with me.
Chapter Five
Except Dan was missing his fob, too. Is that a coincidence? He said he’d found it but didn’t say where – and I wasn’t bothered enough to ask. I glance towards the back door and then through the house towards the front, as if wondering if we’ve had a break-in. It’s nonsense, of course. If someone broke in, they’d be interested in more than Dan’s gym fob and my work pass. The more obvious conclusion is that I can’t have left the pass in the drawer. I must have put it somewhere else. Ageing is a terrible thing. It starts with that extra half-a-second to remember a name and only gets worse from there. Next, it’s an hour-and-a-half lost trying to remember where a pair of shoes have been left. That or my work pass. Let’s not get into waking up in the middle of a field.
I take a moment to sit on the sofa and try to actually think about where it might be. Those thoughts are distracted by the sound of the front door banging open and clattering into the wall. There’s a gust of wind and then stomping feet.
Olivia.
The mother inside me that definitely isn’t my mother bristles at the slamming door and loud footsteps. I’ve tried to stop myself from making these small digs, from causing these arguments about nothing, but it’s almost automatic. If we’re going to fall out, it should at least be about things that matter, not feet and doors.
Olivia lurches in from the hallway, Doc Martens scuffing across the wooden floor. When she gets into the kitchen, she stops dead, noticing I’m home. She stands straighter, as if challenging me to say something. I wonder if she was waiting for my text about seeing her later before she entered the house. She might have been around the corner anticipating an empty house.
She’s wearing a tight leather jacket with a tartan skirt and ripped tights. We’ve had the ‘you’re-not-going-out-in-that’ arguments years before and I suppose I’m used to it now. Clothes are one thing, but it was the nose piercing that really set us at each other’s throats. She was only sixteen when she had the ring put through her septum. It was perfectly legal, of course, but the first I knew of it was when I saw it. It’s hard to argue back when she says it’s her body and she can do what she wants with it. What is there to say? ‘Yeah, but I kinda made it’?’ Instead, I said she’d struggle to get a job which, it’s fair to say, didn’t particularly appeal to a sixteen-year-old.
‘Good night?’ I ask, forcing a cheerfulness I don’t feel.
‘Salright.’
The words slice together into one and then Olivia scuffs across to the other sofa, dumping her badge-covered backpack on one
cushion and flopping into the other. She digs deep into the bottom of the bag for a tangled phone lead and then, having set the device to charge, begins to thumb away at the screen.
I want to say, ‘Oh, so your phone does work?’ but can only hear those words in my mother’s voice.
Olivia’s fingers flash frenetically across the screen and then she holds a hand to her head, and sighs.
‘Anything I can help with?’ I ask.
She angles her head a tiny amount, just enough so that she can stare crookedly at me. I’ve seen the scowl numerous times in the past few years and it can mean anything from she missed a bus to the world is actually ending. The Four Horseman could be coming down our road as we sit here, or her hair straighteners have stopped working.
I wait, knowing full well that the wrong word now will get me nowhere.
She looks back to her phone before finally speaking. ‘I can’t get hold of Ty,’ she says.
That explains it. Tyler is the boyfriend.
‘He’s not replying to my texts and his dad says he’s not been home since Friday.’
Not replying to texts? Oh, the irony, daughter.
‘Isn’t that normal for him?’ I reply.
Another sideways scowl and so I quickly add: ‘I’m not having a go.’
‘I’ve tried Nicky and Will – but they’ve not seen him. Neither’s Dele or Gadge.’
There was a time when I knew all of Olivia’s friends but that was when she’d happily have birthday parties at the house with party bags and cake for everyone. It was a long time ago but those were happy days. Dan and I were getting along and Olivia was still our little girl. Now, of the four names she’s mentioned, I think I know one – and I’m not even sure about that. I hope to everything that’s holy that ‘Gadge’ is not some lad’s real name.
Last Night Page 3