“I think you’re overly involved, Rachel,” Vivian says. “I understand why you don’t want to believe that Mrs Dawson lied to you both.”
“She didn’t—”
Vivian puts a hand up to stop me speaking.
“The police will have the facts and we should hear them before we decide what’s bullshit. Maybe you need to step back for a few days.”
I turn to Jacob. He’s crushed. There’s an expression of almost pity on Vivian's face, but I recognise the glint of something in her eyes. Triumph maybe.
What have I done? I’ve poked the bear, that’s what. I have stirred the hornet’s nest. My heart weeps for Mrs Dawson. I close my eyes, I can taste the fear that she must have felt. I know a little about that myself.
Jenny is clearing the plastic glasses. The party’s over.
“Does it say in the note that she’s going to kill herself? Does she specifically say that?” I ask Chris.
“I don’t know, Rachel. The detectives will be here shortly. You can ask them yourself,” he replies.
I stand up. “Here?”
“They want to talk to you. And Jacob. They have questions to ask you.” He shakes his head. “Christ. I’ll be in my office, if you need me. I have some calls to make.”
I can’t have the police take down my details. What if they look me up? I don’t know what they’ll find. I lean over to Jacob. “Can I talk to you for a sec?”
“Of course.”
I bring my chair closer to him. Our knees almost touch. Conspiratorially, I say, “Chris just said that the detectives are going to be here any minute. Do you mind talking to them on your own? It doesn’t need the two of us and it’s just that I have to go and get my daughter, and—”
“You’re sure? I think they’d like to hear from you too. I might overlook something. I think it’d be better if you stayed, if you could.”
“Yeah, I know, look, sorry Jacob, it’s just that I have to go. I can talk to them another time if they want me to.”
“Of course, I understand.”
“Ask them about the receipts, and the signed prescription. She kept them in that box, you should describe it to them. They need to find them.”
“I’m not stupid.”
“Sorry.” I put a hand on his shoulder. “Thanks.”
I walk off without waiting for a reply. I quickly grab my coat from the back of my chair and hoist my bag onto my shoulder.
“Where are you going?” Vivian asks.
I do a quick turn. “Pick up Gracie.”
She flicks her wrist and looks at her watch. It’s only a bit after three, which meant technically I still have a good two hours of work to do.
“Is she all right?” she asks, not unreasonably.
“Yeah, fine. I’ll call you later.” I leave without waiting for a reply from her either.
It’s cold. I tighten the scarf around my neck and zip up my coat. Gracie will still be at the preschool for another two hours. I need some time to think.
It’s all my fault. I’ve endangered Mrs Dawson. I put her straight into the line of fire without thinking about her own safety. I’m so stupid. It never occurred to me that he would go after her. That’s because, as I keep reminding myself, I’ve relaxed too much. Even now, I can’t think straight. I’m not thinking ahead. I may as well put up a flag. Hey I’m here! Come and get me!
I’ve come up the stairs and I’m right outside our flat, but something is wrong. A noise, something that shouldn’t be there. I strain to listen, then I hear it again. Like a scratching. I put my ear right against the door, at the same time pulling at my glove with my teeth. I fish around in my bag, feeling around for my phone when the door swings open and I stumble inside.
“Jesus, Rach!!” Matt is standing over me, one hand on the doorknob. I scramble to get up.
“You scared the shit out of me!” I shout, trembling. I brush myself down. Straighten my clothes.
“What are you doing listening at the door?”
“I’m not doing anything! I thought someone was inside!”
“Yeah! Me!”
“You scared the crap out of me. Why are you home so early?” I hang my coat on the coat rack. Matt goes in the kitchen and I follow him there. He fills up the kettle. The cupboard underneath the sink is ajar. It doesn’t mean anything. So Matt opened the cupboard under the sink, big deal. But it still makes my heart race even faster than it already is.
He pulls two mugs from the drying rack and sets them on the table. “I’ve been let go, Rach.” He says this so quickly that I don’t know if I heard him right. He takes two tea bags from the tin and drops one into each mug. He looks at me.
“Let go?”
He nods. The corners of his mouth droop down, and for a moment I think he’s going to cry. I watch him lift the kettle and fill each mug with steaming water. I grab one and drag it across to me.
“I don’t understand.”
“It’s not just me,” he says quickly, “two other lads got let go as well. The Fusion contract ended, you know, and they didn’t get the tenders they’d gone for. John said he would have liked to keep us on, but there just wasn’t enough work, you know? Last in are the first to go, that’s what John said.”
“Jesus. When did this happen?”
“Two Fridays ago.”
“Two weeks ago?”
“Yes! So what? I’ve been looking for other work, I’ve been applying for jobs, Rach, I was hoping to have one before I had to tell you, okay?”
I look at his thin face. I knew there was something, but I’ve been so preoccupied myself that I just pushed it to the back of my mind, filed it under ‘later’.
“Oh love, I’m sorry.” I stand up and take him in my arms. “It’ll be okay, you’ll see. You should have told me.” I feel him agree. I say words of reassurance, even as it is slowly dawning on me that we barely have any savings, and with the rent and everything else, it’s going to be real tight. If Matt doesn’t get a job soon we’ll be in trouble. But he’s a qualified electrician, and they’re in demand all the time. We’ll be fine, we will.
“Do you think the paper will survive?” he asks. His eyes are filled with anxiety. I can’t bear to think what would happen if we both lost our jobs.
“I hope so, it depends on the podcast I guess.”
“I heard the podcast,” he says softly. I pull out of our embrace and sit back down.
“Did you?”
“Of course!”
“When?” I ask that as a reflex, because I don’t want to talk about it yet, after what’s happened. I don’t have the words.
“Last Friday, when it came out.”
“Really?”
Today is Tuesday, and in all that time, Matt has not mentioned anything to me.
“What did you think?” I ask.
He shakes his head in awe. “It was amazing, Rach, how you got the lady to talk about her son like that, and how it couldn’t have been him, I can’t tell you how proud I am of you. I can see why you’re into this so much. It’s important, right?”
“Thanks, love.” I move my mug around for a bit, then I say, “But something terrible happened.”
“Tell me.”
So I do. As much as I can. I tell him about Emily Dawson, and what we’ve heard from the police so far.
Matt grabs a bottle of wine from the sideboard and two tumblers from the shelf. He pours each of us a glass.
“Was it too much for her? The memory maybe, or the frustration?”
“But that makes no sense. It should have been the opposite, don’t you see? This was her chance to get justice for Dennis.” I bite the side of my thumb in frustration.
“So what do you think happened?”
“You really want to know?”
“Yeah, I do.”
“Well, I think that she was killed.”
He jerks his head. “Wow! Really? But why?”
“Because if it wasn’t Dennis Dawson, then it was someone else. And that someone e
lse probably doesn’t like anyone looking too closely at an alternative to Dennis Dawson.
“When did she die?” he asks.
“I don’t know yet.”
He drains the rest of his glass in one gulp, then immediately pours himself another glass of wine. I’ve barely touched mine.
“I’m sorry about your job, love,” I say. He nods, rubs a finger where a small drop of red wine has spilled onto the table top, then he goes to the sink. I watch the back of him as he rinses a cloth, but as I drop my gaze I notice a small pool of water on the floor beneath the cupboard door. I let out a small, involuntary gasp.
“What’s this water doing there?” I ask.
“We had a leak earlier.”
I stand up quickly.
“What’s wrong?” he asks.
“I’ll clean it up,” I say.
“No, I’ll do it. Sit down.”
I sit back down, watch him bend and mop the water with a sponge.
“When did we get a leak?”
My voice sounds unnatural to my ears, but he doesn’t seem to notice.
“This morning, just before lunch. Lucky I was here.”
“What happened?”
“The joints under the sink, but it’s fixed now. Don’t worry about it.”
I will myself to calm down. I know he would tell me if he’d found the memory book. Wouldn’t he?
“Do you think it’s the same people that detective was talking about? The one who tracked her down to Barcelona?” he asks.
We included a segment of that interview as well. I wasn’t mad about that, I made the argument that at that point it was only guesswork and we should wait for more, but I was overruled.
“I don’t know, maybe?”
He nods. “Did you ever hear about it? When you were there? The guy killed in that car accident? You would have been there around the same time, right?”
I reason with myself that he doesn’t mean anything by this, but still it feels odd, that he should ask me all these questions. I study his face but see nothing other than curiosity.
Maybe I shouldn’t have told Matt about Barcelona. It was early days in our relationship and I wanted to impress him. We’d gone to a Tapas Bar in Soho and like an idiot I decided to order in Spanish, to show off I guess. Oh yeah, I was drunk. So was he. Which was just as well because the waiters didn’t speak a word of Spanish, but he was impressed anyway.
The conversation went a bit like this:
“I was an exchange student, in Barcelona.”
“Oh yeah? That’s amazing, say something in Spanish.”
“Creo que te amo,” I whispered, shoving my tongue somewhere in the vicinity of his earlobe. I don’t remember a whole lot about that night, but unfortunately, it seems Matt does.
“I don’t think I was there at the same time,” I say, a little abruptly.
I feel ill. It’s not the wine, I’ve barely touched it. It’s the fear. It has crept inside my stomach again.
“What time is it?” I ask, even as my phone was right there on the table in front of me. I grab it.
“Shit.” We both stand up at the same time and say, “Gracie.”
“Will you?” I ask. He hesitates for a moment then he nods.
“Sure,” he replies, grabbing his jacket that is dangling off the back of a chair.
I wait five seconds after he gets out the door and dive under the kitchen sink. I can see a bit of moisture still, and a fresh coating of something white around the joint that meets the tap, but the sheeting looks untouched, thank God. I don’t think any water made it down there, from the look of things. I don’t move the memory book. I leave it there, in its hiding place. I don’t have a better spot for it anyway.
Thirty
The mood in the office this morning is no longer jubilant, obviously. I make a beeline for Jacob and the first thing he says is, “It’s official. The police are not treating her death as suspicious. She killed herself.”
“If she killed herself then I’m the queen of England,” I say sharply. That gets a small smile out of him.
“The receipts are gone. The prescription, all of it. The cops found burnt fragments in an ashtray.”
My jaw drops, and I close my eyes for a moment. When I open them again, Jacob is peering at me.
“That should tell the police something, right? Someone burnt them. That’s clear. That dispels the suicide—” But Jacob raises a hand.
“She burnt them, because they were fake. That’s the theory. Even if they were still there, it means nothing. Anyone can imitate a signature on the back of a prescription. It’s not proof. That’s what they said.”
I pull up the nearest chair and sit down heavily. “What are we going to do now?” I ask.
“I don’t know. First, we have to deal with the fallout—”
“What fallout?”
“It’s all over the morning news Rachel, haven’t you heard? The mother of the convicted killer committed suicide because of our podcast.”
“There’s more to this, and you know it.” I drum my fingers on the desk. “We have to act quickly. We’ll say that she had no reason to kill herself. She believed she had proof her son was wrongly accused, so why kill herself now? We’ll say that in the next episode, but we have to start looking for the real killer, Jacob. We don’t have much time—”
“Chris said to hold off on the next episode.”
“What?” I snap around to look at Chris. He’s on the phone. He’s pressing the heel of his hand against his forehead. His eyes are closed.
“But that’s crazy! It’s the last thing we should do. Where’s Vivian? We need to come up with a plan here.”
“She’s not in. She’s been monstered on social media. She’s laying low. Check this out.”
Jacob loads up Vivian's Twitter account. Reading the barrage of abuse makes me gasp. They’re all addressed directly to her username.
.@vivianbrown89 Your a murderer I hope your happy now
.@vivianbrown89 Your podcast is stupid
.@vivianbrown89 What did you do to this old woman
.@vivianbrown89 Your a fucking whore and a slag.
.@vivianbrown89 She’s dead because of you. I hope your proud.
.@vivianbrown89 You need a good shag tell me where you live
“Oh my God. That’s awful.”
“Facebook’s the same, give or take. I didn’t talk to her, but Chris said she’s taking it in her stride. He suggested she lay low and stay home.”
It goes on and on, those messages, but then in the noise one of them stands out to me. It says, Grace Forster was a fucking slag and she deserved to die.
It’s him. He’s watching. I know it.
I’m back at my desk and I give Vivian a call.
“You’re okay?” I ask.
“Yeah,” she says, with a sigh, “I will be.”
“It’s a prank. It’s kids.”
“How would you know?” I wish I was with her. I wish I could put my arm around her shoulders and hold her.
“We thought things like that might happen, remember?” I reply. “We talked about the trolls and the weirdos out there. You need to block this prick and log out of Twitter. And the rest.”
“Done already. That’s what Chris said.”
“There was a message on the hotline. Right after the first episode. It’s the same language. Peppered with ‘you fucking slag’, and ‘Grace Forster got everything she deserved.’ I think it’s the same person. I think it’s just one person. It’ll blow over Viv, you’ll see.”
“A message? You never said anything about that?”
“Waste of everyone’s time.”
She says nothing at first, then finally she replies, “If you say so.”
After I hang up, I take another look at Vivian's Twitter feed, and the podcast Twitter feed. Most of the vile tweets are from someone called @iambeserk123. This person created this account two days ago. I don’t know where to start to find out who this is. But Chris calls
me into his office.
“I’m worried about the direction things are taking. It’s a terrible thing, what happened to this poor woman.”
I nod. “Look, I know the police say she took her own life. But hear me out for a second.”
“Okay.”
I tell him about my theory. I watch his face react when I say that I think she was killed because of the podcast. That whoever heard the episode went to see her to get rid of the receipts. I don’t say who. He doesn’t look convinced anyway.
“We can’t just say something like that, Rachel. We’d need proof.”
I make a show of considering the options. “Assuming she was telling the truth, then he must think we’re getting close to this guy, the person who killed the family. I think we should keep the pressure on. Let him make a mistake, hopefully. Something else could happen.”
“I don’t know. I’ll hear what you have but I can’t make any promises.”
I do my best to keep the eagerness out of my voice. “We should focus our efforts on showing that because of his suicide, and the short amount of time he was in jail after his arrest, there had been very little investigative work. His death had stopped everything in its track and as a result, his guilt had been assumed, but not proven.”
“What about his confession?”
“We covered that in the interview with Mrs Dawson. She says he didn’t understand what he was doing. Who knows what promises, or threats, were made? Maybe the Chief Constable said he’d go free afterwards. And there’s the small detail that Dennis was autistic. Did he understand what he was signing? I doubt it.”
“Okay, put something together and I’ll have a listen. But don’t waste too much time on it. At the very least, we should get back to finding Molly.”
I make promises I have no intention of keeping.
I go to check in on Vivian after work. I miss her. We can find a way to be friends again, surely. Friends have fights, and then they make up. Or so I’m told. I’ve never had many friends.
“Was Gracie okay?” she asks.
“Yes, sure, why?”
“Just that you left in a hurry yesterday, I thought maybe she was ill.”
I shake my head. “She’s fine.”
She grabs two beers from the fridge, which I take as a good sign, and we go into the living room.
Missing Molly Page 14